Category: visual

“The National Gallery of Art has been promised a major collection of Renaissance bronze sculptures, a significant addition to its collection of bronzes from the 16th and 17th centuries. The gift, which will be formally announced next week, is from builder-developer Robert H. Smith, the gallery’s president emeritus and a major financial supporter. It will be turned over to the gallery when Smith, 79, dies.”

Australian collector John Kaldor is donating his entire AUS$35m art stash to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. “It is the most valuable single gift of artworks given to an Australian gallery and the country’s most important private collection of contemporary art.”

A controversial sculpture depicting an upside-down cathedral, which has held a prominent place in a Vancouver park for the last 2-1/2 years, is to be dismantled after complaints from neighbors. The decision “has rekindled debate on the role of public art in a city that yearns for world-class status but often succumbs, in the eyes of critics, to small-town thinking.”

France’s culture minister “unveiled a plan yesterday that includes zero-interest loans for art buyers, more tax breaks for corporate art buyers, and measures to free up strict regulations on the auction business. While France’s museums pull in millions of art viewers, French auctioneers and gallery owners have long struggled to attract art buyers.”

” ‘Educational’ is a wan, dry word to describe what exhibitions — and art — should do. Art should entertain as well as amaze, enthrall, move, and possibly terrify us. And, yes, educate us too. But there is a depressing — rather Gordon Brownian — implication in Nicholas Penny’s stance that we should only go to the National Gallery because it’s good for us.”

“This is the place where we go to see brilliant antiquities – Greek, Roman, Egyptian, for example. The very idea seems to go hand in hand with notions of precious, untouchable, awestruck remoteness. Is all this true of the British Museum in 2008? Not any more, 40 years on. It is now an institution capable of marvellous surprises, near acrobatic flexibilities.”

Currently in its third edition and with a prize of £40,000, Artes Mundi is Britain’s biggest international art prize. Artes Mundi aims to “celebrate artists who in their work discuss the human condition and add to our understanding of humanity,” writes the prize’s co-founder Tessa Jackson. This could mean almost anything…

“As American museums deal with the fallout from more scandals over stolen and looted art, it’s not clear if others are as willing to drastically shake up how they do things.”

“Police allege that what had been labelled as the most significant, if bumbling, Aboriginal art heist in Australia’s history was carried out by drunken itinerants who smashed a window of the art gallery and, dripping blood, carried off six Papunya Tula board paintings from the Western Desert and a Central Australian watercolour.”

“The Pritzker Prize promotes the fiction that buildings spring from the imagination of an individual architect–the master builder. This wasn’t true in the Middle Ages, when there were real master builders, and it isn’t true today.”