Category: visual

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is expanding for the first time in 80 years. “The museum’s first expansion since it opened nearly 80 years ago, the project aims to free up cramped collections, pieces of which now are relegated to storage because there’s no more room on the walls.”

“Ron Chew, a self-taught curator who turned a rundown museum into a nationally acclaimed institution for Asian history and culture, will retire at the end of the year. With the Wing Luke Asian Museum scheduled to complete its $23 million capital campaign and relocate into a historic, three-story building in the Chinatown-International District by early next year, executive director Chew said he has achieved all his goals.”

“Kate Moss, who is nothing more than a commercial model, is turning into one of the great subjects of modern British art, what Lizzie Siddall was to the pre-Raphaelites. She has been depicted by Lucian Freud, Alex Katz, Gary Hume, Julian Opie, Stella Vine, Jürgen Teller and many others…. And now she has been put into the park at Chatsworth, three metres high and in painted bronze, in an extraordinary sculpture by Marc Quinn.”

“The news that investors are seeking to speculate on the art market following the creation of a new art hedge fund, betting on an art movement or an individual artist’s rise in value without actually buying a painting, certainly appears to be an ominous idea. What exactly would it be they are planning to speculate on?”

“An anonymous donor has given the Phillips Collection a $1 million gift to cover repairs needed at its original building, which houses the work of some of the world’s best-known artists. … The most pressing problems are roof replacement, upgrading heating and air-conditioning systems and repairing the exterior red brick. Few private museums have extra money to cover such maintenance expenses, and donors usually are reluctant to underwrite the nuts-and-bolts repairs.”

“The Orange County Performing Arts Center sued star architect Cesar Pelli and construction giant Fluor Corp., blaming them and subcontractors for more than $30 million in cost overruns and irremediable design flaws in the new Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa.” Filed Friday, the suit “questions costs that ballooned from a planned $200 million to an estimated $240 million, and design flaws that resulted in obstructed sight lines, cramped quarters and a lack of legroom in certain seats.”

“(I)n a strange booklet of sheet music that was mailed out last week to more than 1,000 people by the Daniel Reich Gallery in Chelsea,” Dionne Warwick and Philip K. Dick “take the stage together in a kind of forced virtual duet, somewhere in the ether between a real and an imagined past,” with the sci-fi writer’s words set to a Warwick hit. The gallery called artist Sean Dack’s project “a ‘non event’ or a mail exhibition.”

A six-year battle over the fate of a mural on a 19th-century townhouse in a Philadelphia historic district has been decided in favor of the artist. “The Board of Licenses and Inspection Review took just eight minutes to decide that Dee Chhin’s The Death of Venus could remain on the wall where she painted it.” The mural was commissioned “in part to dissuade graffitists from tagging the building’s north wall.”

“The former coal-mining village of Newbiggin-by-the Sea has been watching its prime asset ebbing away over the past few years. The village’s beach has been rapidly eroding…. Now, the village is putting itself back on track by erecting a mighty, 5m tall bronze couple 350m out at sea, to create Britain’s first piece of off-shore public art.”

“Paintings and drawings by Sylvia Plath, many of which have never been seen before, are to be published in October to mark the 75th anniversary of the birth of the American poet and novelist. … The works were all completed by the time Plath was 20, at which point she decided to concentrate on her writing.”