Category: visual

The Museum of Fine Arts has reached its $500 million fund-raising goal, the largest sum for a campaign by an arts institution in Boston history.

“A Frenchman living in Florida was charged with attempting to sell a Claude Monet painting and three other artworks stolen at gunpoint last year from the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice, France.”

“Francisco de Goya’s arresting image of a brooding giant rising above a stampede of terrified people and animals has held pride of place for decades in Madrid’s Prado museum. But in an announcement set to raise a storm in the art world, the museum said yesterday that the celebrated El Coloso was not by the Spanish master after all, and was probably painted by a pupil in his studio.”

“Steve McQueen has been chosen as the artist who will represent Britain at the 2009 Venice Biennale. He is the first artist working primarily in film selected to represent Britain for the event. McQueen last month won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes for his debut feature, Hunger, about the death of Bobby Sands – the first prisoner to die in the Maze prison as a result of hunger strikes in 1981.”

“No PR firm would have dreamt up the word “brutalism”. The term was derived from Le Corbusier’s “Béton brut”- French for “raw concrete”, the movement’s preferred material – rather than anything to do with brutality, with which it has sadly become better associated. Maybe, sometime in the near future, we’ll realize that brutalism wasn’t so bad after all. Perhaps it just needs a new name.”

“The list of the top 200 collectors includes developer Aby Rosen, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and brokerage executive Charles Schwab. Schwab was knocked out of the top 10. Although art-loving billionaires are sprouting up around the world, the U.S. hasn’t lost its dominance. Six of the top 10 collectors live primarily in the U.S. That’s true of 107 of the top 200 collectors.”

“Can nuclear explosions advance art history? A former curator from the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg believes they can. She has developed a new method for dating paintings in collaboration with Russian scientists which, she says, provides “indisputable” evidence of whether a painting was made before or after 1945.”

“It reveals that a relatively small number of works will be lent, with a “reasonable number” coming from the Louvre’s collections. At the launch of the new museum in 2012, it will be 300 works; four years later, 250 works, seven years later, 200. After ten years, the loans will cease. All works loaned to the museum will be indemnified from seizure within the UAE.”

“Will the Dynamic Tower ever happen? Is David Fisher’s animated design all spin and no substance? With enough money, there’s no reason why it can’t work. Whether it will make residents and people looking up at it dizzy is another matter, as is the question of who will look after this mechanical wonder when it falls from fashion and no one can be bothered to keep it turning.”