Category: visual

Several Cleveland-area colleges and universities are holding meetings in an effort to design a first-of-its-kind joint graduate program for art and design studies. “The program would pool the resources of half a dozen public and private universities to provide new doctoral-level degrees in industrial design, digital media, studio practice, museum studies, management design, architecture, urban design and other fields.”

The newly reopened Greek and Roman galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art are playing to rave reviews both in and out of the city. “In the reinstallation, the museum also sought to present the collection in an arrangement that would evoke the way the pieces would have been used in everyday life, rather than displaying numerous examples of the same type of object.” Of course, displaying antiquities so prominently inevitably rekindles the debate over provenance and rightful place…

“As architect Santiago Calatrava’s plan for the Chicago Spire heads to likely approval at the City Council’s zoning committee Thursday, readers are sharing their thoughts, questions and criticisms about the twisting, 150-story condominium tower, which would be the nation’s tallest building. Several readers pejoratively liken the supertall tower to a part of the male anatomy. Others, usually more positive about the design, favor the metaphor of a drill bit or a screw. Still others are asking fresh questions about the proposed skyscraper.”

A motley collection of items discarded by the artist Francis Bacon has sold at auction for a whopping £965,490, nearly twice its pre-sale estimate. “Most of the lots could be described as ephemera at best. Among them were various diaries, some entirely blank.” The auctioneer, a small outfit in Surrey, UK, had its biggest night ever, and was nearly overwhelmed by the level of interest.

“Few of the standard materials of art or architecture would seem more retrograde to the interests and the appetites of contemporary New York than mosaics. But the convergence of no fewer than four events suggests that the fortunes of this ancient craft may be changing for the better.” Of those, “the phenomenon that will make most people sit up and pay heed is the splendid implementation of the material in the new Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

Steven Holl’s design for an extension of Kansas City’s Nelson Atkins Museum “initially seems to pay scant attention to the old building, and to be the opposite of everything that the classical vocabulary represents. But Holl has avoided the trap of honoring an older structure by closely echoing its architectural cues, a choice that would surely have resulted in a mass of masonry overwhelming a beautiful setting. Instead, the lightness and softness of his buildings, and their asymmetry, bestow on the classical museum a kind of perpetual gravitas, as well as ceding it pride of place.”

“Efforts to restore Afghanistan’s legendary Bamiyan Buddhas are moving forward at a snail’s pace, a far cry from the few days it took the Taliban to destroy the 1,500-year-old statues.”

They stole Munch’s iconic painting from an Oslo museum. “The prison sentences range from five-and-a-half to nine-and-a-half years. The men were also told to pay $263,000 (£131,000) in damages. The gang’s driver, Petter Tharaldsen, received the longest sentence for his role in the theft and another unrelated robbery. Bjoern Hoen, who planned the theft, was sentenced to nine years. Stian Skjold, one of the two masked gunmen who actually entered the museum, was sentenced to five-and-a-half years after being acquitted of the crime last year.”

“For the second time in just over five years, the London gallery is searching for a director. Setting aside who might get the post, what might the job description look like? ‘Wanted: Capable administrator and art world diplomat, able to conjure tens of millions of pounds out of thin air, time and time again.’ To some extent, fundraising is the function of every modern museum manager.”

“Emmanuel Javogue, a US-based dealer who has opposed Renoir’s great-grandson Emmanuel in a long-running dispute over copyright to Renoir bronzes in the US, has now changed his position. He now claims that many pieces he believed were authentic may actually be unauthorised fakes.”