Category: visual

New York’s Metropolitan Museum has long prized its 2,600-year-old Etruscan chariot, acquired in 1903 after an Italian farmer unearthed it. But in recent years, scholars began to suspect that the chariot had been assembled incorrectly. Now, after a five-year restoration project, the chariot has been put together the right way, thanks to an Italian archaeologist who spotted the problem on a 1989 trip to New York.

“Because of a dispute between Mass MoCA and Swiss artist Christoph Büchel — over money and the installation of the work — the public may never see what has been touted as Büchel’s first major American museum show. The December opening was postponed, and just before Christmas the artist walked out after being told the museum had spent its $250,000 project budget. So far, Mass MoCA has been unable to lure Büchel back.”

A big expansion of the Tate Modern by architects Herzog & De Meuron has been approved.

British architect Richard Rogers wins the Pritzker. “The choice, announced today, brings overdue attention to a visionary who made a huge impact on the field more than two decades ago, with designs that seemed to turn architecture inside out, flamboyantly exposing what other builders usually hide — girders, pipes and ducts.”

Renzo Piano’s design for the newly expanded LA County Museum of Art are “resistant to quick analysis,” says Christopher Hawthorne, and that’s not a bad thing. The plans “are likely to make the experience of visiting LACMA richer even as they embrace a pop sensibility and veer close to some New York cliches about California culture. And in bringing art and corporate identity to the foreground, they dim the spotlight on pricey, name-brand architecture.”

“A rare painting that until late 2001 hung in a dilapidated Ontario farmhouse is scheduled to be sold next month by Sotheby’s in New York where it could fetch as much as $3-million. The auction of Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May by British artist John William Waterhouse marks the second time in the last five years that the acknowledged masterpiece has been put on the block.” Last time, the sellers withdrew the painting from sale when bidding stalled short of expectations, and “the hype this time around is decidedly more subdued.”

Suppose you’re a wealthy collector who wants to insure that your collection stays intact long after your demise. Building your own mini-museum might seem like an easy solution (and a newly popular one,) but maintaining such private institutions once the original collector is gone is proving to be a major challenge.

Since he arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a year ago, director Michael Govan has been striving to create a distinctive identity for the museum, and he isn’t afraid to discard conventional ideas of what the backbone of an art collection should be. “Maybe our museum frames the encyclopedia, or the general museum, on one side by contemporary art, which is usually not a focus of an encyclopedic museum, and on the other end, the historical side, by pre-Columbian art. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to show Egypt, Greece and Rome. But the bookends — the frame, if you will for our museum — are different.”

New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, which is in the midst of an ambitious $50 million building project, is a small institution by the city’s outsized standards. “But beyond the concrete and steel, the New Museum shows how a lesser-known institution can attract attention by taking chances. It hired an adventurous team of architects. It has diversified its board of trustees. It is doubling its staff, bolstering its exhibition schedule and greatly expanding its education activities. Combine that with the museum’s re-energized mission — to showcase the newest art — and the result is an institution that poses a bold challenge to established museums.”

“Charles Saumarez Smith, 52, has run London’s National Gallery since 2002 and previously was head of the National Portrait Gallery. The announcement of his departure comes just over a week after the Sunday Times reported that Saumarez Smith was engaged in a power struggle with the chairman of the gallery’s board of trustees, Peter Scott, who was calling for his departure.”