Category: visual

“For the last century, art collections have generally flowed from culturerich Europe to cash-rich America. Now, there are signs of them going the other way. Works from three major American collections of Impressionist and modern art will go on the block next month at Sotheby’s in London — a result, art world insiders said, of the increasingly worldwide art market and also the rise of the pound relative to the dollar.”

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego has expanded to a train station. “Part of the historic building still functions as a train station, but the former baggage facility — a cavernous, light-filled space with soaring ceilings — has been converted to spacious galleries and a studio for an artist-in-residence.”

Architecture critic Robert Campbell is tired of Boston mayor Thomas Menino dropping urban design bombshells every so often. “My problem with the mayor is that his ideas don’t seem to be part of any larger concept about the urban design of the city. They’re just independent brainstorms. They have nothing to do with one another.”

“An artist who hoped to stir debate over global warming with his 175-ton quartzite and bronze sculpture ‘Spaceship Earth’ is instead struggling to solve the mystery of its spectacular crash at Kennesaw State University last week… Questions abound over whether vandals destroyed the sculpture, made by a Finnish-born artist known as Eino, or whether a combination of substandard adhesive and rain caused it to crumble in the middle of the night on Dec. 29 in a collapse the campus police said they felt from their offices around the corner.”

A bizarre legal battle has broken out in high-society Connecticut, pitting two art-collecting homeowners who want to keep a 40-ton concrete sculpture on their lawn against neighbors and the town they live in, who claim that the object should be considered a structure and require a ‘certificate of appropriateness.’ “The fight has not yet become an all-out battle over the First Amendment, since deliberations have not dwelt on the artwork’s content or message so much as its size and manner of installation.”

Minneapolis is one of those cities with a bad habit of bulldozing old buildings every few decades and starting over architecturally. So it was a big deal last year when the city mounted a major overhaul of a long-vacant architectural icon in its urban core. The old Sears/Roebuck store in the city’s Midtown district has been transformed into a global food marketplace and residential tower, and in the process, it has brought Minneapolis into a world where architecture can be used not only to draw oohs and aahs from tourists (as several other recent high-profile projects in the city were clearly intended) but to revitalize a moribund sector of the city and preserve an icon of a bygone era.

New York’s American Museum of Natural History saw nearly 20 percent more visitors over the Holiday season, the result, most likely of the hit “Night at the Museum” movie.

The Art Newspaper reports that “a painting in the National Maritime Museum in London was looted by British troops from the Mürwik Naval Academy, in Germany, and later presented to the Greenwich museum.”

When the UK’s public museums scrapped their admission fees a couple of years back, attendance swelled and the museums thrived. But in the U.S., admission fees continue to rise, and precious few museums are free to all comers. Tyler Green suggests not only that museums gain more than they lose when they go free of charge, but that the money they’re currently making from admission fees is negligible when compared with their overall income and expenditures.

Even as prices in the art world continue to spiral out of control, a new web site is offering art lovers a chance to “adopt” paintings, sculptures, and sketches for the mere price of an e-mail exchange with the artist. “In an art world where money and status loom large, a transaction that revolves around one person’s response to another person’s art is not only unusual, it is potentially subversive.”