Category: visual

“The Minneapolis Institute of Arts ended a multiyear capital campaign Wednesday with $103.2 million in contributions. The money… exceeded the museum’s original $100 million goal, enabling it to pay for a $50 million addition and renovation project that opened in June and to set up 78 endowments to buy art for each department.”

Seattle’s got a new sculpture park. And it may or it may not be swell. But Joel Connelly is awfully tired of art critics who mke like the park is ging to “transform” the city. “Can we just stop with this horse pucky and quietly appreciate the park, our town’s thriving, creative art scene and the setting in which we live?”

An Italian antiquities thief says his work saves important antiquities. “I saved hundreds and hundreds of works that otherwise would have ended up buried under cement. I found thousands of pieces of art that are considered part of Western civilization’s heritage.”

A new exhibit at a Massachusetts gallery purports to show that Monet was not “the anti-draftsman he led the public to believe, and that he relied on drawing both to prepare for his paintings and as an independent form of expression… Although Monet helped perpetrate the myth that he did not, and maybe even could not, draw, nearly 500 of more than 2,500 works mentioned in his catalogue raisonné are sketchbooks, drawings and pastels. Yet, until now, few scholars have paid much attention to them.”

The Baltimore Museum of Art has received a $10 million pledge from a 94-year-old local philanthropist. The gift, which will be the largest in the institution’s history, will be used to expand the museum’s “American collection of furniture and decorative arts into the present day.”

“The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission resoundingly rejected a proposal yesterday to build a 30-story glass tower designed by Norman Foster atop a 1949 building on Madison Avenue. The decision was a major victory for a coalition of Upper East Side residents who argued that the tower would rend the fabric of their historic neighborhood.”

Italy’s culture minister says the Italian government is going after the Clevland Museum for return of artifacts. But “he said three e-mails to the museum have gone unanswered, although he acknowledged that the e-mails may not have been addressed properly and may be missing.”

“When the market rules, the old rules of collecting and connoisseurship are overturned: Quality judgments seem out-of-whack in a wacky world where Rembrandt’s auction record of $28.69 million is eclipsed by Klimt’s auction record of $87.9 million. Art investors formerly expected to hold onto works for five years or more to turn a profit; now big bucks are made on quick flips. Young artists, still wet behind the ears, sell still-wet canvases and become instant (if ephemeral) art stars.”

“The Pasadena-based Flintridge Foundation has dropped its 10-year-old visual artists’ grant program, blaming ‘severe investment losses’ from 2002 to 2004. The foundation, founded in 1985 by the estates of Francis and Louisa Moseley, has awarded 10 to 12 grants of $25,000 every other year, distributing $1.4 million among 56 artists since 1997. In addition to ending the artist grants, foundation officials say they will stop making grants to theater organizations and conservation efforts in 2008.”