Category: visual

Santa Fe has a rich cultural life. But while “we have the Museum of Fine Arts, which is a great institution, and it has a little bit of a contemporary end to it, but it’s not really a full-blown contemporary museum. And we’re feeling the need to have that here. Whether such an idea is a pipe dream or has a real chance of becoming reality is open to question. But it can’t hurt that Frank Gehry will be on stage when Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation and its museums, speaks this summer in Santa Fe.”

What did museums choose to collect in 2006? Well, there was a big increase in acquisitions of New Media art…

The nudity of Cosimo Cavallaro’s 6-foot-tall chocolate Jesus provoked the Lenten outrage of some Catholics — but whose tradition is it, anyway? “At least with respect to the nudity of his Christ, Cavallaro is in good company. The marble statue that Michelangelo delivered in 1525 to his patrons in Rome followed the stipulation in the contract, which specified ‘a marble figure of Christ as large as life, naked’.”

In the 1960s, philanthropist and Yale alum Paul Mellon donated “to his alma mater the largest collection of British paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, rare books and manuscripts outside the UK along with funds for a building by Louis Kahn–gifts today worth more than $1 billion.” Little wonder, then, that the resulting museum, the Yale Center for British Art, leads the charge among American and British museums celebrating Mellon’s centennial this year.

“If the US had an organisation like the Venice Biennale–capable of staging a cycle of international festivals of cinema, art, dance and music and with an historic archive which is envied by much richer North American museums–then the European art world would have something to worry about, other than the global spread of the Guggenheim. Fortunately … there is no danger of (U.S. institutions) overshadowing the exhibition’s appeal and its almost mythical status.”

“A satellite TV show host has pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from an investigation into bogus artwork sold through televised auctions that defrauded customers of more than $20 million.”

“Less than four months after Philadelphians thwarted its bid to buy ‘The Gross Clinic,’ an 1875 masterpiece by Thomas Eakins, an Arkansas museum founded by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton has quietly purchased another much-loved Eakins painting from the Philadelphia medical school that sold the first.”

There’s no longer any question that a Chinese art boom is in full swing, and some of the world’s best-known collectors are jumping on the bandwagon. Charles Saatchi, “whose patronage helped to establish the careers of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the 1990s, is now paying increasing attention to the east. This year he launched a Mandarin version of his website, which gets more than 4m hits a day.”

“The art of the portrait is a noble, beautiful enterprise that amazingly, and to this day in the work of Lucian Freud, David Hockney or Gerhard Richter, mediates the down-to-earth, very human desire to record faces with a philosophical enquiry into the nature of the self. The portrait is at the heart of European high culture – but you won’t even glimpse the rudiments of a history of the portrait as art in the NPG. This museum is not about art. It’s about famous Brits down the ages.”

“The election of Tracey Emin to join the Royal Academy of the Arts as a Royal Academician alongside more traditionally academic artists such as David Hockney, Peter Blake, and Anthony Caro” raised a question, unspoken though it was: “Is she enough of an intellectual to join the RA?” Ana Finel Honigman matches it with another: “Why is this even an issue?”