Category: visual

“A 27-year-old man who died this month is believed to be one of three masked gunmen who snatched the Edvard Munch paintings The Scream and Madonna from an Oslo museum in August 2004. The same man is reported to have led police to believe the daring daylight heist was linked to an earlier robbery in which a police officer was shot… The man is reported to have confessed his role in the Munch heist on tape while in conversation with an undercover officer.”

“A beloved Norman Rockwell painting that was discovered behind a false wall in a Vermont home last spring sold yesterday at Sotheby’s for $15.4 million, a record price for the artist at auction… It was not the only record of the day. ‘Hotel Window,’ a 1955 painting by Edward Hopper owned by the actor Steve Martin, which depicts a woman sitting in an empty hotel lobby, brought $26.8 million.”

It’s not easy promoting high culture in a city like Detroit, where urban blight is a far more common sight than public art. So for the architecture of the new Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, organizers decided that they needed to embrace the city they hoped would be embracing it. “Housed in an abandoned car dealership on a barren strip of Woodward Avenue, it fits loosely into a decades-long effort to restore energy to an area that was abandoned during the white flight of the 1970s. But the design springs from a profound rethinking of what constitutes urban revitalization.”

“Banksy, the anarchic graffiti artist, has poked fun at Michael Jackson, the pop star who faced child abuse charges, by featuring him in a drawing inspired by Hansel and Gretel… Jackson is seen trying to coax a little girl and a boy with a sweet in one of four works displayed in Santa’s Ghetto, an amusement arcade that opens in Central London today.”

The Corcoran Gallery of Art has agreed to pay $6.2 million to buy the Randall School from the District of Columbia. “But gaining the site wasn’t easy. A holdover from the early 20th century, the building was last used as a school in 1978. The city installed a men’s shelter in part of the building, and artists leased other parts for studios. When the Corcoran’s plans were announced two years ago, advocates for the homeless protested, as did the artists, who complained about the lack of affordable studio space in Washington.”

At a time when cities are making themselves ever more sterile in order not to spook skittish suburbanites, the architecture of the new Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit takes a different tack. Its “design springs from a profound rethinking of what constitutes urban revitalization. Designed by Andrew Zago, its intentionally raw aesthetic is conceived as an act of guerrilla architecture, one that accepts decay as fact rather than attempt to create a false vision of urban density. By embracing reality, it could succeed where large-scale development has so far failed.”

The architect of a major Berlin railway station has won an unusual lawsuit against the station’s owner, in which it was alleged that cost-cutting measures by the railway authority (which resulted in a partial redesign) amounted to a “defacement” of the building. The presiding judge ruled that the station was indeed a work of art, and that the railway’s decision to change it without the architect’s permission caused significant harm to the design. The railway is appealing, but if appeals fail, the station will have to be rebuilt at a cost of €40m or more.

New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art has made official what had been rumored for several days, that it will build a new branch at a site in Greenwich Village that was abandoned last week by the Dia Foundation. “Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art, which you would think would leave well enough alone after raising $825 million to overhaul and endow its Midtown mega-complex, is also talking about another addition. This churning has to do with three trends that are forcing museums to make extraordinary, difficult bets on the future: spiraling construction costs, dizzy real-estate prices and an art market that’s gone bonkers.”

Los Angeles’s J. Paul Getty Museum has been taking plenty of heat over its battle with the Italian government concerning antiquities that may have once been illegally looted. But the Getty’s director says that he isn’t the one standing in the way of a settlement, and accuses the Italians of moving the goalposts after a tentative agreement had been reached.

A new museum show in Los Angeles is drawing some unexpected parallels between the worlds of architecture and high fashion. The exhibit “starts with the unexceptional premise that fashion and architecture are, if not equals, cognates—related languages with a common root. They both translate a two-dimensional pattern of abstract shapes into a seamed, three-dimensional volume.”