Category: visual

“Almost everyone would agree that the art world has become a kind of spectacle. Much of the work is repetitive and derivative in a way that starts to resemble planned cultural obsolescence. A strange cycle has set in, whereby the most valuable attribute an artist can have is ‘promise.’ With a lot of big bets being placed, the artist has to be both young and verifiable. In other words, marketable. But almost none of our superstar artists have delivered on their promise.”

“A plan to demolish a 1960 office tower by the influential architect Paul Rudolph threatens to pit a prominent developer backed by [Boston] Mayor Thomas M. Menino against preservationists who see the building as a seminal example of midcentury Modernism.”

Frank Gehry is working on a new Guggenheim branch in Abu Dhabi: “Abu Dhabi’s going to be very different – a take on a traditional, spread out, organic Arab village or town. Not literally, but it’ll have the equivalent of streets and alleys, souk-like spaces and plazas, some shaded and others covered. It’ll be the biggest Guggenheim yet.”

The paintings had belonged to art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, a gallery owner who fled the advancing Nazis. “Goudstikker abandoned 1,400 artworks when he escaped the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. He took with him a black notebook recording over 1,000 of the pictures. Hermann Goering looted the gallery weeks later. The paintings were recovered from Germany after the war and incorporated into the Dutch National Art Collection.

“The oil-rich emirate will pay 400 million euros ($524m; £272m) just for the Louvre name. The first payment, 150m euros, will be made within a month, according to the French news agency AFP. This, according to critics, amounts to using France’s artistic heritage for basely commercial ends. ‘Our museums are not for sale’, proclaims an online petition signed by 4,700 people – including many curators, art historians, and archaeologists.”

France has signed its deal with Abu Dhabi to put the Louvre name on a new museum. “Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the French culture minister, said France would receive financial benefits worth about €1bn over a 30-year period. The licensing of the Louvre name would bring in €400m.”

“A $25-million donation from BP has capped phase one of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s three-part expansion and renovation campaign. Solar panels atop a new entry pavilion named for the British oil company will signal BP’s wish to be seen as an environmental innovator. LACMA plans to announce today that the glass-encased structure will be called the BP Grand Entrance.”

“The National Gallery of Art is planning to become a destination for the study of iconic painter Jasper Johns. The gallery is set to announce today that it will be adding 1,700 proofs of Johns’s lithographs, etchings, relief prints and screen prints to its collection by the end of 2008. The works’ estimated value is in the millions of dollars and, if the fundraising is successful, the gallery will have the largest repository of Johns’s work in the country, the gallery said.”

“A La Cañada Flintridge couple who ran televised art and jewelry auctions have admitted to running a scam that bilked buyers out of more than $20 million by selling bogus artworks and forging the signatures of such notables as Picasso, Chagall and Dali. … The couple admitted their operation involved the television show ‘Fine Arts Treasures Gallery,’ shown Friday and Saturday nights on channels broadcast by Direct TV and the Dish Network.”

“After 9/11, a craving for the solidity of walls reasserted itself. … Four years after the American invasion of Iraq, this state of siege is beginning to look more and more like a permanent reality, exhibited in an architectural style we might refer to as 21st-century medievalism. Like their 13th- to 15th-century counterparts, contemporary architects are being enlisted to create not only major civic landmarks but lines of civic defense….”