Category: visual

“The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, the £46 million complex hailed as the North’s answer to Tate Modern at its opening five years ago, is in turmoil with its director facing a motion of no confidence from his staff.”

The museum says it needs the space to show the biggest exhibitions. “It has already had to turn down the chance to show 130 spectacular treasures – the largest collection of Tutankhamun artefacts assembled in the West, which will instead be exhibited in the O2 , formerly the Dome, in Greenwich, southeast London. It is now drawing up ambitious plans to construct a centre at the back of its historic building.”

The Art Institute of Chicago is getting a new wing. But more than a just a building, the addition represents a philosophy. “Museums are places where people need to feel they can discover things. What is important to you is a thing you discover. The balance to that is the scholar relationship — the curator, who wants you to look at a painting with a view to the fact that there is an artistic development that should be noted.”

Belgian art collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens will open a non-profit museum in Beijing next November to showcase Chinese contemporary art. Three exhibitions are already planned for the new center. The first is ’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art,” which covers the period when artists ‘moved away from socialist realism and started to express themselves’.”

“If a bubble, or bubbles, exist in the fine arts–as opposed to the decorative arts–it is in the highly-touted trendy contemporary market; in the late 19th and 20th centuries; and in markets that appeal to Russia and the newly super-rich Asian countries. The 16th and 17th century Italian, French and Flemings; the 18th and 19th-century British; and the pre-Impressionist French have been forgotten in this inundation of liquidity into the art market.”

“Politics and art don’t always mix well, but the combination has yielded a rare chance for Hong Kong residents and visitors to see what is arguably China’s most famous painting. … (T)he Chinese government has sent 32 artworks here for an exhibition to mark the 10th anniversary of Britain’s return of Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997. Among them is Zhang Zeduan’s ‘Along the River During the Qingming Festival,’ a scroll painted in the early 12th century.”

“For many years Hadid was sidelined as an architect of dreams, a paper architect, whose buildings simply could not be realised. But in the past five years she has proved she can build successfully, on a big scale, and that there’s no stopping her. In Britain, it has taken us a while to catch on to Hadid. Many avant-garde designers and artists have suffered similar delays of response.”

“There is a tendency among world cities desperate for international status to look no further than the back list of Pritzker laureates when picking the designers of their star buildings. Thus, Abu Dhabi is getting itself not only a Gehry Guggenheim, but a Nouvel Louvre, a Hadid performing-arts centre, a Tadao Ando maritime museum and a recreation of Venice’s Biennale gardens, among much else. It is telescoping the usual centuries of cultural development into a decade. It’s when architects get to the point where you can’t keep track of all their work any more that the alarm bells start to ring.”

In 1968 Ira Spanierman bought a painting for $325. “Three years later, leading Renaissance scholars identified the work as a lost 15″8 portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici by Raphael. Spanierman was thrilled. Almost four decades after his purchase and discovery, Spanierman has placed the Raphael with Christie’s International to be auctioned on July 5 — during London’s old master sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s tomorrow through July 6. The work has a top estimate of 15 million pounds ($30 million).”

The World Monuments Fund, a New York- based nonprofit group that safeguards architectural and cultural sites, named former Brown-Forman Corp. Chief Executive Officer W.L. Lyons Brown as its chairman.