Category: visual

“A secret six-year imbroglio that threatened to dismantle the Hammer Museum — established by oil baron Armand Hammer and endowed with art by his foundation — has ended with the museum and the Armand Hammer Foundation agreeing to part company and divide a $305-million collection amassed by Hammer.”

UK metal detector enthusiasts find plenty of old artifacts. “The culture minister, David Lammy, yesterday called metal detectorists ‘the unsung heroes of the UK’s heritage’, a phrase that will cause a sharp intake of breath among some archaeologists who still regard them as little better than legalised looters.”

“Our New York is Robert Moses’s New York. He built 13 bridges, 416 miles of parkways, 658 playgrounds, and 150,000 housing units, spending $150 billion in today’s dollars. If you are riding the waves at Jones Beach or watching the Mets at Shea Stadium or listening to “La Traviata” at Lincoln Center or using the Triborough Bridge to get to the airport, then you are in the New York that Moses built.”

The new Seattle Sculpture Park points up what’s lacking in the Seattle Art Museum. “As SAM got over its provincialism and opened its eyes to the bigger world of contemporary art, it turned its back on the local scene. Now, it’s time for the institution to take the next step in its maturation — and that means once again embracing who we are and what distinguishes the region.”

“Diplomatic bags are being used to smuggle antiquities, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere, according to the Dutch researcher Jos van Beurden. In an unpublished paper, he has gathered anecdotal evidence suggesting that diplomatic privileges are regularly abused.”

“Spanish art historians have renamed one of Italy’s greatest painters. Specialists at the Prado have established that Tintoretto’s family name was Comin. This revelation will be presented at a major retrospective on Tintoretto (1519-94), which opens in Madrid on 29 January.”

“Previously the buyer’s commission was 20 percent on the first $200,000 bid at auction, and 12 percent on the balance of the total bid. Now buyers will be charged 20 percent on the first $500,000, or an additional $24,000, and 12 percent on the balance.”

The $289 million National Art Center is a looker. “If the museum looks like a lavish white elephant — another state building project planned in the dark days of the recession to help revive the economy — don’t be fooled. A savvy exhibition strategy, an innovative facility and enjoyable attractions may delight rather than drain the nation’s taxpayers, creating a new Mecca for Tokyo’s avid museum-goers.”

“It ranges across a great variety of sculptural engagements, providing visitors with a walking tour through milestones in contemporary art history. Overall, the art is spare instead of packed, leaving room to rethink placement, to add and subtract over the years.”

Seattle’s new Olympic Sculpture Park “sits at a thrilling locus of aesthetic, social, and environmental potential, a site formerly used to process the fuel for modern cities, now cleaned up and made into a place for this city to come and process itself. In tension all around the park are the allure of the natural, the promise of the scientific, the call of the commercial, the nagging sense of the ethical, the mixed bag of the philanthropic, and the basic desire for comfort.”