Category: visual

“Paul G. Risser, a biologist and former chancellor of the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education, was named acting director of the National Museum of Natural History yesterday by the Smithsonian Institution. Risser, a member of the museum’s advisory board, will run the facility in place of Director Cristián Samper, who was appointed acting secretary of the Smithsonian this week.”

“A small new museum devoted to Jewish heritage has been thrust into the art world spotlight with loaned works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Rubens and others while the Cleveland Museum of Art undergoes renovation… For the Cleveland museum located about seven miles away, the loan represents a chance for fans to stay in touch with a world-renowned collection that for the most part has been locked away in storage since 2005 for a $258 million, six-year expansion and renovation.”

The competition has heated up between the Guggenheim and French billionaire Francois Pinault to build a nw museum in Venice. Proposals from the two have been judged about equal, but then it depends on what you’re looking for in a museum…

“Damien Hirst, who is completing a $100 million sculpture for a June show, is filling the coffers of dealers Gagosian, White Cube and Paul Stolper as fast as his art factory can turn out masterpieces.”

The Philadelphia area school just got through one controversy over selling Eakins. “The collection’s artistic capital took a big hit with the $68 million sale of The Gross Clinic, and [president Robert] Barchi says that the school intends to deaccession two other pieces in the multimillion-dollar collection: Its remaining Eakins works, Portrait of Benjamin H. Rand and Portrait of William S. Forbes.”

The director of the National Gallery, Charles Saumarez Smith quits to run the Royal Academy. “Saumarez Smith is reported to have clashed bitterly with the chairman of the National Gallery, Peter Scott, recently over the future policy of the gallery: the odds had been on Mr Scott leaving rather than Mr Saumarez Smith.”

Norman Foster has designed a super yacht. “Foster & Partners has designed objects as diverse as airport seating, bathroom fixtures, wind turbines, and an office desk that looks as if a drafting table had mated with a moon-landing module. The originality of these products is a result of the way they address practical problems: minimizing materials, optimizing energy use, reducing weight. So, too, the 131-foot luxury yacht.”

“Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it’s called.”

Cleveland lawmakers are set to approve the demolition of a 29-story office tower designed by Modernist architect Marcel Breuer in the city’s downtown. Steven Litt says the plan, which includes replacing the tower with a new building, would be a major architectural loss, and overly costly besides.

“The Portuguese billionaire José Berardo has bought eight modern and contemporary sculptures by international artists which he plans to put on show in front of the Portuguese parliament in Lisbon next month.”