Category: visual

“After a yearlong search, trustees of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History have chosen Fentress Bradburn Architects of Denver, a firm known for its highly memorable airports and museums, to design its expansion and renovation.” No timetable has yet been set for construction, but the museum has asked the firm to present a proposal within six months.

“The husband of a late curator at Russia’s most famous museum was convicted Thursday in the theft of dozens of art objects and sentenced to five years in prison. Nikolai Zavadsky also was ordered by Dzerzhinsky District Court to pay $283,000 (U.S.) in damages to the Hermitage… [The] museum announced last July that 221 items, including jewellery, religious icons, silverware and richly enameled objects worth about $5-million had been stolen.”

“The project will replace one of the most notorious buildings of the Soviet period, the gargantuan 1960s-era Rossiya Hotel, on a critical site overlooking St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin. A sleek complex of buildings with classical overtones, it will include 470,000 square feet of retail space, four hotels and a 2,500-seat performance hall, making it the largest single development in the historic core of Moscow since the Soviet empire collapsed 15 years ago.”

“Given the current market conditions and the way the artworld has evolved, the traditional model of the gallery building its position through close control of its artists’ markets seems shakier than ever. There are too many variables – collectors flipping works at auction, artists defecting to other galleries, sudden market shifts. A lot depends on the artists.”

“As historical revisionism goes, this reassessment is probably overdue, but the rehabilitation of Robert Moses is not an easy walk down memory lane. Revisionist scholarship questions received opinions and reassesses accepted points of view. The acknowledged purpose here is to add balance to a story in which the brilliant restructuring of the public realm has been obscured by projects that rode roughshod over history and neighborhoods with an unfeeling arrogance of epic proportions that lingers in the collective mind.”

“Since the decision was announced last November, the anger among a dedicated group of critics has stunned even the museum’s officials, who had not expected the move to be popular. The county legislature and the city council have both held hearings on the sale, which a committee of the council voted to oppose. The action was symbolic, since the museum board has broad authority to manage the collection.”

“Two weeks from disclosing their final plan for the nation’s tallest building, the project’s developer and architect offered fresh details Monday night, trying to calm fears about traffic and presenting their own plan for a nearby park to honor Chicago’s founding father. ‘We have given a lot of importance to the relationship to the city,’ said the skyscraper’s architect, Zurich-based Santiago Calatrava….”

A number of institutions have recently tried to sell (or – politely – deaccession) art treasures to raise money. But “institutional selling, or deaccessioning, can generate controversy and raise hosts of questions about cultural identity and how nonprofit institutions safeguard and manage their holdings, according to museum professionals, concerned citizens and public officials.”

Women artist are under-represented in the gallery world. “What is striking about critical writing on the topic to date, however, is the lack of curiosity about why this is. It’s depicted as a freakish anomaly, with very little curiosity voiced as to the material basis for sexism in the visual arts, or the mechanisms by which it functions. Connected to this is the fact that the problem is addressed as a matter of internal politics, as if the art world were literally a world floating off in space separate from Earth.”