Category: visual

More and more sellers of art at this fall’s auctions are asking for (and getting) guarantees. “Some 48 of the 168 works being offered at Sotheby’s two evening sales have guarantees. Christie’s has granted guarantees for 49 of the 168 works in its two evening sales.”

A former truck driver buys what she later comes to decide is a Jackson Pollock painting from a California thrift store. It cost $5. Is it really worth millions? An auction this week will tell the tale.

“In New York City, glass has long been considered a workplace material – honest, transparent and spare, as befits containers of capitalism. There’s rarely much to see: Accounts Payable in one skyscraper looks pretty much like Accounts Payable in another. But in the past few years, as the home and office have merged thanks to portable gadgetry, apartment buildings have come to look like corporate headquarters, with their floor-to-ceiling, column-to-column windows.”

“Thanks in part to the surging popularity of Google Earth and other Web-based programs, which give the public a bracingly new, if detached, way to interact with the built environment, rooftops are shedding their reputation as forgotten, wind-swept corners of the urban landscape and moving toward the center of architectural practice.”

The Museum of the American West (formerly the Autry Museum of Western Heritage) has reinvented the way it presents history of the West. “In the next few years it has the potential to map out a new form of historical museum in the United States, one that is neither an intoxicated celebration of Western fantasy — turning itself into another stage set in a fictionalized drama.”

The director of Boston’s DeCordova Museum is leaving his post after 22 years, and while rumors persist that he was pushed, Paul Master-Karnik insists that he made the decision to depart on his own. “During his 22 years at the DeCordova, he led a transformation of the once- sleepy institution. The DeCordova’s current $5.2 million annual operating budget is more than five times larger than when Master-Karnik arrived. The museum’s endowment has more than doubled, to $10 million. In 1998, the DeCordova finished an $8 million campaign that included the construction of a new, 20,000-square-foot exhibition wing.”

A conservative think-tank in the UK is proposing a controversial plan to revitalize the country’s cities: invite the public to submit lists of hated buildings that deserve the opposite of historic preservation. In other words, decide which old structures are really worth keeping, and knock the others down.

New technology is allowing art experts to examine long-held beliefs about centuries-old works as never before. “Probing the surface with X-rays or infrared light or dating the work by dendrochronology — counting the rings in the wooden panel on which the image was painted — can reveal much about how a work was actually made… Such analysis can also uncover many twists and turns in the long trip from the artist’s studio to the museum wall.”

Auction season is an exciting time in the art world, but it can also be a confusing and expensive place for the inexperienced. “Within the already rarefied subculture of the art world, auction houses are a preserve all their own, with distinct practices, jargon and rites… How collectors comport themselves is nearly as important as what they’re willing to spend.”

Architects have been producing flashier and flasier pojects in the past decade. But there are starting to be signs, writes Blair Kamin, that the most interesting architecture on the horizon speaks in a quieter voice.