Category: visual

Once a year the Collectors Committee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art gather for a weekend gala and ponder tough choices of artwork to buy, offered by curators. “Over more than two decades, the committee has donated about $14 million to purchase 150 works of art for the museum. Curators’ selections are based on the availability of appropriate works in the right price range.”

“Yesterday, having been identified as the missing pieces of the San Marco altarpiece by the Renaissance master Fra Angelico, the pieces were sold for £1.7m, a record for a sale outside London. In a former egg-sorting shed at Dorchester cattle market, telephone bidders pushed the price up. The Italian ministry of art and culture led the charge, attempting to get back paintings that probably vanished from Florence during Napoleon’s occupation of Italy.”

“For $5.7 million, the Kimbell Art Museum of Fort Worth has reacquired a J.M.W. Turner painting it surrendered last summer to the heirs of the John and Anna Jaffé family of France, after it was proved that the painting had been unlawfully seized by the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in 1943.”

“Like partners in any other architecture firm, married couples design together, make business decisions together, meet with developers as a team and travel to building sites in tandem. Interviews with some couples suggest that it can be tricky… But on the whole, married architects suggested, the married relationship is a plus for the architecture, allowing for an unsparing candor that takes the work to a higher level.”

“The government had previously committed $100 million toward the $265 million capital cost of the museum, which will take four years to build, and will likely open in 2011 at the historic forks where Winnipeg’s two great rivers meet. What’s revolutionary about yesterday’s move is that the Harper government is not merely contributing to the cost of building the museum but is assuming full responsibility for operating costs – possibly $20 million a year – once it opens.”

Feminist art is the most important art movement since World War II, writes Blake Gopnik. “More than any other 20th-century movement, feminism pushed back against the art-for-art’s-sake attitudes of modernist abstraction. It pushed instead for work that talked about crucial issues in the world outside. Ever since feminism, in all areas of artmaking, the message has mattered as much as the medium.” WaPo produces a section of stories…

After years or work, the Metropolitan Museum reopens its Greek and Roman galleries. “Fulfilling a plan initiated by his predecessor, Thomas Hoving, Mr. de Montebello has done the Met and the city — and everybody — incalculable good by pushing through this project, which in so many ways goes against the grain. It’s not about celebrity architecture. It’s not politically correct. The timing is awful, since so much attention is focused on looting. But it is about reiterating an ideal for art and for the museum, about extolling the collection, which is the public’s heritage, seen by millions, and about doing the hard thing because it is right.”

Australia’s controversial award-winning postmodern national museum was “opened only six years ago, at a cost of $155 million. But now Craddock Morton, the director of the National Museum of Australia, has admitted what many visitors have already concluded: it may be a striking piece of contemporary architecture, but it doesn’t really work as a museum.”

“When completed in 2010, a glass ziggurat by prize-winning American architect Antoine Predock will open doors into galleries and installations dealing with slavery, suffrage and civil rights. ‘It’s great news for the country and a real centrepiece for Winnipeg. My understanding is that it’s going to be like a world university’.”

A new show at New York’s is made up of “only art that can’t be bought. Thus, the exhibition is composed of work that artists either kept or, in a couple of weird cases, sold then bought back. By this curatorial criterion, nearly every artist on earth could be included. Curator Alanna Heiss compounds the problem by haughtily stating that the show evinces her ‘unfortunate allergy’ to the marketplace. But for the director or curator of an institution that relies on the largesse of artists and dealers–who in turn depend on commerce–to claim an ‘allergy’ to the marketplace is not only smug, it’s deluded and hypocritical.”