Category: visual

A UK car company gives Arts Council England an “undisclosed” amount of money and in return gets to borrow 25 pieces of art for the company’s headquarters. “But isn’t there something uncomfortable about a private individual borrowing state-owned artworks?”

The Seattle Art Museum expansion is the product of an innovative deal with a bank. “Aside from the architecture, will there be any substantive consequences to SAM’s close financial affiliation with an international banking concern, or does the alignment just have an uncomfortable veneer? After all, many corporations with strong R&D departments do what artists do: They experiment, they push. And the boards of museums are packed with businesspeople.”

“A steel chair designed by Daniel Libeskind for the ground floor of his new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum will go into production by Nienkamper this year, making it the first piece of furniture the globetrotting architect has designed for commercial sale… The museum will take orders for the chair, priced at $10,000 to $12,000, at its gift shops, but will not share in the revenue.”

Is art school merely supposed to broaden your horizons and mold your skill as an artist, or should it also prepare you to make a decent living in your chosen field? The question is more than academic at the Ontario College of Art & Design, which is being accused by some of its current and former students of becoming more a job factory than an art school.

“Egypt is calling for the temporary return of the Rosetta Stone, a bust of Nefertiti and three other valuable Egyptian artifacts currently held in museums abroad. This week, the country’s Foreign Ministry is to send letters to the British Museum, the Louvre in Paris, two German museums and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts seeking temporary loans of the ancient artifacts.”

“As of this writing, a momentous question stands before the Landmarks Preservation Commission: Should it give its blessing and its protection to Manhattan House, the white-brick monolith that occupies an entire city block between Second and Third avenues and 65th and 66th streets? … (T)he case could be made, for better or worse, that it is the single most influential structure ever conceived in New York.”

“Bay Area residents love new cuisines, edgy politics — and architecture that’s as familiar as an old shoe. That’s the unofficial but emphatic message that links the responses to my recent column on the ‘top 25’ buildings in San Francisco as defined by the Board of Directors of the city’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects. When I asked readers to send their own favorites my way, it was as though they were channeling Herb Caen.”

“Yesterday’s horrendous damage to the 1873 Eastern Market building on Capitol Hill is a dynamic loss — a loss to the flow of space, the habits of people, the patterns of community. It is also an architectural loss, though there is hope that Adolf Cluss’s gravely eloquent brick building … can be returned to something like its former self. The sense among the people who gathered yesterday across the street from the building, gutted so badly that birds can now fly in through the front windows and out the back ones, was a profound concern that while the building may come back, its dynamic qualities may not.”

“Egypt plans to seek the temporary return of some of its most precious artifacts from museums abroad, including the Rosetta Stone and a bust of Nefertiti. The country’s chief archeologist, Zahi Hawass, said the Foreign Ministry would send letters this week requesting that the ancient artifacts be loaned to Egypt. Hawass has previously demanded the permanent return of many of the artifacts, claiming some of them were taken illegally.”

Spaniards aren’t happy with Rafael Moneo’s extension to the beloved Prado Museum. “People have taken to the streets. Placards have been painted, voices raised, passions stirred. Questions have been asked in parliament, petitions heard in the supreme court.” But “get real. Rafael Moneo’s newly completed extension is as far from tacky as it’s possible to get. It’s like accusing Cary Grant of slovenliness.”