Category: visual

Renovation “could take until 2013 to complete, could cost well over $100 million, and is considered long overdue. Designed by architect Renzo Piano, the renovation will force the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums to close their doors for about five years, starting next June.”

“Who has not wondered, when confronting some oddity of modern art, how the artist decided that it was finished?”

The face of King Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh whose tomb was discovered 85 years ago, was unveiled in public for the first time today, the Associated Press reported.

“Over the past two decades, contemporary artists have moved from beyond the pale and on to centre-stage. It seemed to happen overnight: artists were inducted into the establishment. International recognition – equalling money and fame – has been crucial.”

The Tutankhamun blockbuster is attracting record crowds. But “the spirit of the theme park – queues, noise, spooky music – is upon me and, however hard I concentrate, I just can’t shake it off.”

“A Tennessee county court has scheduled a three-day trial to begin 19 February 2008 to determine whether Fisk University in Nashville may accept a $30m offer from Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton for a 50% share in the university’s Stieglitz Collection of modern American art and photography.”

The city is undergoing a makeover, and everything’s a construction site. Here’s a gallery of images…

“Fernando Botero, whose Abu Ghraib pictures will be on view at American University starting this week, read about the torturers of Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker, and made his own record of the horrors. He did not invent anything that was not described, but because he is an artist, we feel the terror of the tortured rather than the gloating of the torturers — so present in the photographs they took of themselves at play in the blood of others.”

“After three years of speculation about a bust, will this be the moment when the art market finally crumbles? Auction house experts who have spent the last six months mapping out the sales say the business-getting season fell into two distinct chapters: before the subprime mortgage crisis struck in August, and after.”

Chicago’s Art Institute is renovating galleries. But instead of packing away some of its most important paintings, it will loan them to Fort Worth’s Kimbell Museum. “All the pieces — which range from 26 Claude Monets and 12 Renoirs to seven Paul Gauguins, seven Paul Cezannes and six works by Edgar Degas — previously had been loaned to other institutions. But never before have so many works central to the museum’s most famous collection (several from the institute’s earliest and largest bequests) left the museum at once.”