Category: visual

The LA County Museum of Art opens its flashy new contermporay art home this week. It’s the most visible indication of a consolidation of direction for Southern California’s largest museum.

“Two Picasso paintings worth millions of pounds have been stolen from an art gallery in Switzerland, police have revealed. The oil paintings were stolen on Wednesday evening after an exhibition of the artist’s work in the town of Pfaeffikon, near Zurich, had closed. Tête de Cheval (Head of Horse) and Verre et Pichet (Glass and Pitcher), were on loan from the Sprengel museum in Germany to the Seedamm-Kulturzentrum.”

“On Wednesday, just a day before its unveiling for media from around the world, (LACMA’s) revamped campus was still a work in progress. Buzzing around its centerpiece, the $56-million Renzo Piano-designed, travertine-covered Broad Contemporary Art Museum, an army of workers fine-tuned metalwork from cherry pickers, dealt with a forest of two-story palms and worked all night on an elevator shaft that frames a Barbara Kruger mural….”

“Reassurance. That’s what motivated so many dealers and collectors from around the world to flock here this week for the big February art auctions. Reassurance that, despite the shaky state of world financial markets, there are still plenty of people willing to spend millions of dollars to put Impressionist, Modern or contemporary art on their walls.”

“English graffiti artist Banksy’s screen print of supermodel Kate Moss sold for $191,000 at a street-art auction in London. The work, inspired by Andy Warhol’s iconic portrait of Marilyn Monroe, was one of 75 pieces of ‘urban art’ on sale.”

The new Broad Museum of Contemporary Art makes it clear. “What a visit to the new LACMA makes clear is the extent to which the western half of its campus has become contested space, straining to hold two very different ideas of how a museum in Los Angeles should look and operate.”

“Mostly the exhibition just looks expensive. Really, really expensive. In deciding what to exhibit, art museums everywhere now strongly favor wealthy collectors over artists and art professionals, and slashed government spending at every level (except defense) keeps contemporary cultural institutions hostage to private interests. Ours is an era of supply-side aesthetics, trickling down on the public. BCAM’s loan-show debut is emblematic of the economic elitism humming loudly this presidential election year.”

“Sometime next week, [Canadian] Heritage Minister Josée Verner will introduce legislation under which the Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg will be a national museum – the first outside Ottawa.” The plan is the culmination of an ambitious plan by the Harper government to bring more museums across Canada under the government umbella. Many questions remain, though…

“On Wednesday the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced that it had acquired the entire series, 252 full-length portraits of workers — waiters, bakers, butchers, rag-and-bone men — that it called [photographer Irving Penn’s] most extensive body of work.”

“Forget the Bilbao Effect. It’s not Frank Gehry who has ridden the U.S. museum-building boom, it’s Renzo Piano.” Piano’s new addition to the LA County Museum of Art opens to the public next week, and James Russell says that the architect’s work is all starting to look the same, and what used to seem innovative now just seems repetitive.