Category: visual

“Nearly every art museum in New York is now enlarging its building or constructing a new one in a museum boom, the total cost of which will exceed $2 billion. The past three decades have witnessed steady growth of the city’s museum facilities, but the present increase appears to be unprecedented in its scope and breadth. These projects are funded nearly entirely with private money, most of it from the institutions’ long-serving trustees.”

Libya wants a second-century statue of Venus currently on display in the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome returned to it. But the Italian conservation group Italia Nostra is resisting…

Architect Richard Rogers has been commissioned to design a £50 million expansion of the British Museum. “The newly planned exhibition space in the northwest part of the site should have an area of 1,000 sq. m, or double each of the two existing galleries. It may also be possible to provide direct access to Montague Place, enabling shows to remain open for longer hours than the main museum.”

“For the day-tripper, what remains is a lovely shell, the modernist analogue to all those Vanderbilt mansions and chateaux belonging to the kooky and rich. It’s hard to imagine how anyone actually lived in such exposed circumstances. The décor is even more unforgiving than the New England weather: This is the sort of room where a tossed magazine or an unclean dish is an architectural blemish, even a betrayal of minimalist purity.”

JPMorgan will build a $2 billion tower at the World Trade Center site. But “it is utterly mystifying that a sophisticated bank with $1.35 trillion in assets would house its valuable traders in the kind of spec box that companies dump call centers into. WTC 5 could have expressed the entrepreneurial energy of the bank by making an evocative statement of those trading floors or by highlighting the gutsy engineering that will be needed to hang them in the air. The bank could have thrillingly engaged the cityscape that has nurtured its success.”

“With wealthy art aficionados and community pride on its side, SAM has the potential, over time, to move up in the museum ranks as it scales the heights of its new building. For now, it has come a long way in a short time.”

“The estimate on the picture was £300-£500. When its turn came last Tuesday at Gilding’s – a small, family-run auction house that holds about 45 sales per year – something truly extraordinary happened. The final hammer price was £205,000. And, enormous as the figure may seem, that’s just the start of it. The London fine art trade is now abuzz: this painting is very probably a Titian, painted in Venice between about 1510 and 1520. And as such, its real market value is likely to be upwards of £5m.”

“Pietro da Cortona’s ‘St. Martina,’ a luminous image of a martyred young woman by an artist best known for his vast allegorical fresco on the ceiling of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, was a gift of the Ahmanson Foundation. J. Patrice Marandel, the museum’s curator of European paintings and sculpture, said the gift fulfills his wish to add ‘some heavy hitters, some big, big names’ to LACMA’s substantial holding of Baroque paintings.”

“Damien Hirst, whose London show closed this month without a sale of his diamond skull, has found buyers for 130 million pounds ($265 million) of art at the White Cube galleries, said exhibitions director Tim Marlow. A split shark fetched 10 million pounds, three ‘crucified’ sheep sold for 6 million pounds, and talks to sell the skull were ‘ongoing,’ Marlow said in a telephone interview yesterday.”