Category: visual

The LA County Museum of Art will have an open-air entryway rather than the glass box that architect Renzo Piano originally envisioned. “I come from New York, and it would kill me to go into a glass box” instead of enjoying the weather while milling outside the museum, Govan quipped in an interview after announcing the BP donation from a podium set up in front of the entrance’s steel skeleton.

“Ersatz versions of hundreds of artists’ work are sold through chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com, itself one of a constantly ebbing and flowing number of websites that offer knock-off paintings at low, low prices, and volume discounts.”

Frank Gehry will revisit the first American museum he designed, designing “a $10 million addition to the Weisman Art Museum on the University’s east bank Minneapolis campus overlooking the Mississippi River. It will add 11,000 square feet or about 25 percent more space to the existing 47,000 square-foot museum.”

Adobe is developing software that can tell if (and how) photos might have been digitally tampered with. “Photo manipulation is nothing new. During the Stalin era, Soviet officials frequently vanished from official photographs after falling out of favor at the Kremlin. But the advent of Photoshop and its variety of tools has made it easier for photographers to tinker with images after they’re captured.”

This week, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will pack up literally millions of books, documents, and artworks, and carefully move them across the street. The move marks the beginning of “the museum’s looming $500 million expansion that aims to increase public space in the main building by 60 percent.”

The relatively new field of bio-art, in which practitioners “use live tissues, bacteria, living organisms and life processes to create works of art that blur the traditional distinctions between science and art,” is growing in popularity and visibility. But some animal rights activists object strongly to the genre, which they consider exploitation, and at least one bio-artist is being prosecuted by the U.S. government for his use of certain restricted bacteria that could be used to make biological weapons.

“Final design plans for the twisting, 2,000-foot Chicago Spire, designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, will be presented at a public meeting of the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents (SOAR), an influential neighborhood group, March 26… The proposed skyscraper would rise on a site across Lake Shore Drive from Navy Pier. If completed, it would be the nation’s tallest building.”

“A suite of photo-authentication tools under development by Adobe Systems could make it possible to match a digital photo to the camera that shot it, and to detect some improper manipulation of images.” The new software should make it much easier to detect news photos that have been faked or embellished, a problem that has intensified in recent years.

A longtime Seattle art critic is accused of asking artists he writes about for artwork for his own collection. He denies the charges, but numerous artists have come forward to corroborate the stories. So what are the rules for art critics who build personal collections?

“When the winning bidders received their authenticated artwork in the post, they realised that something was not right. Often the expensive artworks were sent uninsured by the dealers. Some of them arrived bent out of shape or with staples through them. Others appeared to be expensive photocopies, executed on ordinary copy paper. And while many of the artworks were signed, as promised by the auctioneers, they were not signed by the artists.”