Category: visual

London’s Tate Modern is hosting a sleepover for 150 teenagers next week, “the start of a stupendous exercise in bringing together the behemoths of contemporary Britain, mass consultation and youth culture. It will be followed by simultaneous conferences this autumn, at the Tates Modern, Britain, Liverpool and St Ives, which they swear will be organised by the young ‘uns, with adults admitted only by invitation.”

“The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is pushing to display Swiss artist Christoph Büchel’s massive unfinished installation — which brings indoors an oil tanker, a smashed police car, and a two-story home –against his wishes. After failing to coax Büchel to complete ‘Training Ground for Democracy,’ Mass MoCA filed a civil suit Monday to allow the public to see the work.”

“A rare drawing of Winnie The Pooh and Tigger has sold for £21,600 at auction in London. The crayon picture by Ernest H Shepard, Tiggers Don’t Like Honey, was drawn for the 1958 edition of AA Milne’s The World of Pooh, but never published. It had been expected to raise up to £30,000 at Bonhams in London.”

“Everyone knew that David Rockefeller’s Rothko would fetch a very high price. Sotheby’s, our eBay for billionaires, had guaranteed a figure of $46 million to keep the painting away from its archrival auction house, Christie’s. … The gaudy winning bid of $72.8 million, the highest ever paid for a work of contemporary art at auction, confirmed Sotheby’s confidence that a Rockefeller Rothko is now the ultimate luxury object.”

“While there are some major European exceptions … (art) consulting and advising remains a ­distinctly American phenomenon. ‘Americans take great pride in seeing psychoanalysts, and they likewise have no problem having someone else find their art for them,’ explains Manhattan ­gallerist Sean Kelly, an Englishman based in New York.” But are art consultants necessarily a bad thing?

“Just before 3 p.m. Sunday, (an) average-looking couple walked into the Hilligoss Galleries on the Magnificent Mile. Employees believe they walked out less than five minutes later with a $60,000 Rembrandt etching. …The etching, a 370-year-old piece called ‘Adam and Eve,’ was hanging in a preview room just off the main receptionist’s desk on the first floor of the gallery….”

“Tate Modern in London announced its largest individual donation, with a commitment of 5 million pounds ($9.55 million), from John Studzinski, of Blackstone Group LLP. The money will go toward the expansion of the Tate Modern with a new building on the south side. The London Development Agency has already committed 7 million pounds to fast track the building, so that it is ready for London’s hosting of the Summer Olympic Games in 2012.”

There’s movement in the standoff between the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, who left his war-themed installation there unfinished last December after relations with the museum soured badly. “On Saturday it will open the doors to the show anyway, without Mr. Büchel’s permission or cooperation. But there is a catch…. Because of concerns about legal action by Mr. Büchel, the museum will shield all the huge objects in the warehouse from view with tall plastic tarps, as if Christo and Jeanne-Claude had intervened at the last minute.”

Museums are constantly criticized for dumbing down their content, but there are still plenty of staid, musty old institutions out there presenting their collections in a manner that suggests that none but serious scholars are welcome. But maybe the main problem is that so few museums even try to find a middle road…