Category: visual

“The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is getting a new coat of paint, but this is no ordinary decorating dilemma. Not when the appearancee of one of America’s most distinctive structures and the legacy of one of its most esteemed architects is at stake.”

London’s Frieze has only been around for five years, but it has rapidly become the UK’s largest and most influential art fair. “Some 151 galleries from 28 countries were chosen to take part this year, drawn from 450 applicants; each has a booth displaying its best pieces — or at least pieces it hoped would sell or provoke… To the extent there is a buzz at Frieze this year, it has centered on the booth run by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a New York gallery, which has been turned into a flea market organized by the artist Rob Pruitt.”

“Since Rudolf Stingel’s sleek midcareer survey opened at the Whitney Museum of American art in June, hundreds of visitors have been allowed to depart radically from traditional museum protocol (hands off) and have a go at the walls in the exhibition’s first gallery, using anything they happen to have with them: pens, money, credit cards, cellphones… Over the intervening months New York’s art-viewing public rose to the occasion: The room’s lower half is now equally dense with a kind of populist, manic, talking-in-tongues wallpaper.”

A Benedictine monk whose ceramics sell for more than $60,000 apiece is being memorialized through a new foundation in Boston. “The Newbury Street gallery that owns the largest collection of [Brother Thomas Bezanson’s] work – $15 million worth – is joining with the Boston Foundation, which distributes millions of dollars in grants each year, to use proceeds from the sale of his ceramics to create a fund that would support struggling artists in Boston.”

Picasso’s Guernica is on display in Spain, where the painting’s anti-war message stands in stark contrast to the terrorist attacks endured regularly by Spaniards. Guernicaitself has been the target of violence over the years, to the extent that it used to be displayed only under heavy glass. These days, it hangs unprotected, and Michael Kimmelman says that public trust is what makes art, and the museums that house it, so uniquely human.

Though London’s October auctions of contemporary art were once minor affairs, these fall sales — which begin Friday at Sotheby’s — are now significant bellwether events. Both houses are expected to gross more than $100 million.

The donor, Altria (formerly Philip Morris) is leaving New York. The company “has spent an estimated $12.5 million running the branch museum, according to officials at both the Whitney and Altria.” The Whitney has had a number of branches over the years, all of which are now closed. “It has been fabulous, but the branch museums are a thing of the past. They’ve pretty much run their course.”

A long-planned multi-billion-dollar development of a new Penn Station in New York seems to be moving along… and growing. So “what should the public demand from this deal? First of all, it should get a gorgeous landmark gateway. The players must hire top-drawer architectural talent — and then demand their best, not something that looks like an imitator’s work, as happened at Ground Zero.”

“The painting will be one of the highlights of Christie’s post-war and contemporary evening sale on 14 October.Bacon rented a studio from the college for eight months in 1969 after a fire destroyed his own work space. He gave the work to the college in lieu of rent nearly 40 years ago.”

What is it that makes a landscape by JMW Turner so unmistakable, so recognizable? Most scholars would say that it was Turner’s “devotion to the idea of the central light source at the heart of the canvas, often shining over water, an idea he is thought to have originally derived from the 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain.”