Category: visual

Guggenheim director Thomas Krens says the rest of the world still wants their own. “In last three years, more than 130 cities have made an initially inquiry into doing something like Bilbao. We are more or less in this business. But 95 percent of inquiries don’t have any substance or they are not in the position to make financial or capital investments for one of top museums in world in terms of exhibition programming and among the best expertise in terms of international development.”

“In a sweeping deal to end years of controversy, the J. Paul Getty Museum agreed today to return to Italy 40 antiquities from its collection, including several masterpieces and its prized 5th century BC statue of Aphrodite, a touchstone of its collection.”

When New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened its new building in 2004, the critics loved it. Two years later, the same critics hated it. Now, with a new Richard Serra retrospective filling the space, some critics are headed back the other way. “The exhibition clarifies and works to justify the Taniguchi design. The interaction between the sculptures and the galleries here is about as effective as can be imagined.”

British architect Will Alsop is likely bringing his design of a floating cloud-like (some would say blob-like) building to Toronto harborfront. “The original Cloud design was chosen in 2002 to grace the Liverpool waterfront, but was blown away in 2004 after the projected cost jumped… Alsop declined to comment on whether his Toronto Cloud will be part of the proposed film-industry megadevelopment called Filmport – although that’s what observers contacted yesterday expect.”

Lisa Dennison has resigned as director of the Guggenheim Museum and will take a job at Sotheby’s. “She is not the first museum director to join Sotheby’s. Over the years it has hired Richard E. Oldenburg, the former director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Charles S. Moffett, a director of the Phillips Collection in Washington, among others. Their connections to rich collectors and knowledge of art can make them highly desirable as business-getters for an auction house.”

The UK has been drowning in floods. “As well as the human tragedies, the floods have been washing away thousands of years of history, across a swath of central and southern England. Silbury has been unmissable for millennia, but in Hereford, rain has been scouring away parts of a mysterious structure uncovered only a few weeks ago: the Rotherwas Ribbon, a serpentine path surfaced with deliberately burned stones, winding up a shallow hill – slap in the path of an unpopular new road plan.”

“Ten months ago, Robert Thwaites was jailed for two years for audacious frauds that stunned and embarrassed the art world. Desperate for money, the jobbing artist created paintings and passed them off as the work of John Anster Fitzgerald (circa 1823-1906), who conjured visions of a fairyland full of menacing spirits. Released on licence but under strict supervision, he is painting once more in the style of Fitzgerald. But, older, thinner and greyer, he said he now hoped to use his skills and the additional notoriety to create a legitimate career.’

No, it’s not the New York Times’ new building. The two-year-old Bloomberg newsroom is, writes Paul Goldberger, “a dazzling work environment tucked inside a refined but conventional skyscraper, designed by Cesar Pelli. Bloomberg, working with Studios Architecture and the design firm Pentagram, has produced a workspace that could not have existed ten years ago.

When a city hires a superstar architect to design a major new urban building in its midst these days, you generally expect to see a structure that stands out from everything around it. So it’s a bit surprising to look at Robert Adam’s new building on London’s Piccadilly Circus, and note that the most remarkable thing about it is just how well it fits into its surroundings.

Phillippe de Montebello has been the director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for 30 years now, and he is a giant among giants in the art world. But he is also 71, and not in the best health, and the question of who might succeed him at the Met looms large in the New York scene.