Category: visual

What happens when you blindfold old statues? The audience tend to look at them in a different way.

Gaston Nogues and Benjamin Ball have one this year’s “Young Architects Program competition, held annually by P.S. 1 in Queens and the Museum of Modern Art. The seven-year-old program, in which architects submit proposals to transform the P.S. 1 courtyard into an outdoor musical performance and party space, goes a long way toward advancing a budding reputation.”

“For the 10th consecutive year, Picasso has been named the top-selling artist of the past year by Artprice, an international agency that monitors art sales and auctions around the world. The Cubist master remained on top in 2006, with sales of his work totalling $339.2 million US. The Spanish artist’s 1941 portrait Dora Maar au chat also achieved the year’s top price at auction: $85 million US.”

“Officials of the Albright-Knox may have won the battle, but the community outrage triggered by their brazen disregard for the museum’s riches ought to serve as a warning to museum directors and trustees across the country: They can’t have it both ways–expecting public support while arrogantly asserting that the public be damned. This storm in Buffalo might be just the beginning of a revolution in which the public begins to reclaim its rights to public institutions and demands an accountability that museum directors and trustees will ignore at their peril.”

“At least 14 big U.S. museums are grappling over war-related art claims, in court or in quiet negotiations. The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, among others, are locked in a stalemate with Ukrainian and Polish institutions claiming ownership to their Albrecht Dürer drawings. An heir to a German banker has laid claim to a 1500 landscape by Old Master Henri Met de Bles now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which the heir says the banker was forced to sell by Nazis. These cases may be the tip of the iceberg.”

Angered by reports of problems at the Smithsonian, the US Senate votes to freeze the institutions budget. “The budget bill amendment sponsored by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) would keep the freeze in effect until the Smithsonian reforms how business is done in the secretary’s office. The measure, which passed on a voice vote, specifically caps salaries for any executive at the Smithsonian at $400,000, the current pay for the U.S. president. Small’s compensation this year is $915,698.”

Robert Moses remade New York City and “claimed the new infrastructure would keep New York competitive in the modern world. So it is especially tragic that too many of his projects left its neighborhoods worse off than before.”

“A century ago, Modernism with a capital M was the movement that gripped the public imagination. It promised a machine-made utopia of freestanding high-rises surrounded by green parks and wide-open parkways, where drivers could tool speedily along. But the towers soon became slums; the highways backed up, and Modernism became the house style for corporate America. The same folks who promised to free us from domestic drudgery instead applied their talents to designing cubicles for wage slaves. So much for utopia. Now, Modernism is again having its moment, and the revisionists are out in force.”

“In May 1961, some brash young figurative painters threw down the gauntlet to the modern art establishment. Today, several of those artists are still friends and still painting together, teaching a once-a-week figure painting class that has been going in some form since the late 1950s. And now, after years out in the cold, the Painting Group, as they call themselves, is having a modest comeback.”

Frank Gehry’s first New York building promises to add “a much-needed touch of lightness to the Manhattan skyline just as the city finally emerges from a period of mourning,” says Nicolai Ouroussoff. “The results — almost pristine by Mr. Gehry’s standards — suggest the casual confidence of an aging virtuoso rather than the brash innovation of a rowdy outsider.”