Category: visual

Guy Damman says that “when Pollock is pushed out in favour of Stingel, it’s time for galleries to stop sacrificing their permanent collections for crowd-pulling temporary shows.” Specifically, Damann questions why the Whitney would push aside so much high-quality art for temporary exhibits that don’t approach the quality of its in-house collection.

San Francisco may be getting a new contemporary art museum, courtesy of the billionaire couple who founded The Gap. “The museum would be built from scratch on one of the city’s most recognizable pieces of property: the Presidio, the scenic former military base turned national park,” and would house “an impressive collection that includes pieces from the likes of Chuck Close, Richard Serra and Alexander Calder.”

How important could San Francisco’s new contemporary art museum become? Well, consider the collection it’s being built to house. “Containing more than a thousand works, the Fisher collection ranks among the finest of its kind in the world. In today’s overheated art economy, its value at auction might break the billion-dollar mark… But the money tells the less significant half of the story. The Fisher collection contains numerous things – early works by Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Agnes Martin, for example – unobtainable at any price because comparable pieces reside only in museums.”

“The billionaire collector Francois Pinault is showing off his wealth in Venice,” in the form of a new museum under construction on the Grand Canal, which will house Pinault’s vast contemporary art collection. But Michael Glover says that the quality of Pinault’s holdings is up for debate.

Two art festivals of very different levels of national fame are underway in Scotland at the moment, and Ruth Wishart says that each is proving that it is possible to draw diverse and intelligent crowds to see high art without dumbing down the product.

“Three competing proposals for what would be the tallest building on the West Coast were unveiled Monday in San Francisco amid architectural fanfare and political buzz. There’s no guarantee that any of the towers will be built, or that the design to be selected next month by public officials will reach the heights envisioned by the development teams. But the audacity of the designs – and the favorable response from elected officials – showed that the recent startling changes to the city’s skyline are only a prelude to what could lie ahead.”

“San Francisco’s architecture isn’t defined by specific heights, or a checklist of specific design elements, such as bay windows or Victorian frill. Our brand of urbanity is rooted in some ineffable sense of place and state of grace – subjective yardsticks indeed. But this I do know: The buildings and districts and landscapes we’ve inherited are strong enough to withstand the shock of the new.”

Drawings by Darfuri refugee children, submitted as evidence in court, demand skepticism, however counterintuitive that is. “20th century art has attuned us to the communicative power of children’s drawings, a power we attribute to their uncontrived innocence. … But, like all representations, including photographs, they require careful scrutiny before they can be used as evidence.”

“Masked raiders have stolen four paintings in a daylight raid on an art gallery in Nice in the south of France. Police said five men made off with two works by Flemish artist Brueghel and two paintings by the impressionists Sisley and Monet on Sunday. Officials at the Musee des Beaux-Arts said the works were ‘invaluable’.”

“‘Our challenge was to reinvent the campus,’ architect Renzo Piano says of Columbia University’s proposed $7 billion expansion. Actually, the plan now making its way through New York City’s arduous approval process looks more like a dumbed-down real estate deal than a vision for the future.” In Harlem, “Columbia has not closed off streets to make a gated, intimidating superblock, as its old campus does. Yet the size and bulk of the proposed buildings make the streets anything but inviting to the surrounding neighborhood….”