Category: visual

15 years ago, Manhattan’s Chelsea was an urban blight. Now “by one count, made by the Web site chelseaartgalleries.com, there are now 318 galleries in the neighborhood, many more than SoHo had at its peak. Along with the garment district and the diamond district in Midtown, Chelsea has emerged as one of the largest collections of like businesses in the city’s history.”

“The Whitney could at this moment electrify everyone by changing the game entirely. It should take a page from London’s enormous, and enormously fantastic-for-art, Tate Modern. Rather than continuing its uphill battle of trying to build an uptown addition that will be outdated the day it opens, the Whitney should rethink its paradigm and reinvent itself.”

Forty years ago Florence suffered a catastrophic flood. But all these many years later “a number of major strategic measures had still to be built and that it was only in 2005 that local and central government and his authority got together to work out a strategic plan.”

A major new art fair featuring 120 galleries will be held in Shanghai next year. “The new art fair, ‘ShContemporary 2007’, is being organised by the Geneva gallerist and collector, Pierre Huber with Lorenzo Rudolf, former director of Art Basel, and Bolognafiere, an Italian fair organiser which already has offices in Shanghai.”

German police are investigating how the Tate recovered two Turner paintings. “The gallery announced two years ago that it had recovered Shade and Darkness — the Evening of the Deluge, and Light and Colour (Goethe’s theory), which were stolen in 1994. The Times learnt yesterday that German police are investigating whether the Tate had broken German federal law.”

“A recent change in federal tax law that was intended to curb abuses by the wealthy has museum officials grumbling that priceless art gifts could dry up… The old law allowed a collector to donate a percentage of an art object, take a tax write-off for the gift, and yet retain physical possession of the piece, often for many years. The new law caps the value of the donation, the time span of the gift and how the museum and private owner will share it. Museums say the original law enriched public art collections, cemented relationships with donors and cost taxpayers little compared with its benefits.”

Hollywood mogul David Geffen has sold a Jackson Pollock painting for a reported $140 million. The price, if accurate, is the highest ever paid for a painting, outstripping last year’s $135 million acquisition of Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I.”

“Just when it seemed as if art auctions could not get bigger or prices go higher, along come the catalogs for this fall’s important sales of Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art. [The] evening sales have the highest estimates in auction history; they also carry the biggest risk. The auction houses have become so competitive for business that this season they have promised sellers larger and larger guarantees, undisclosed minimum sums that are paid regardless of a sale’s outcome.”

Once again, New York’s Whitney Museum is changing course, considering a complete abandonment of the Renzo Piano addition to its Manhattan home in favor of a new downtown outpost. “The Whitney’s latest about-face points to an underlying malady. Architects are only as good as their clients. They can give conceptual form to an institution’s identity, but they can’t invent it. The Whitney’s endless false starts are a symptom of self-doubt and internal confusion.”

Iraq’s archaeological treasures are being looted. “But does this matter, in a country where a baker beside his oven, or a barber by his chair, can be gunned down as valid targets for sectarian hatred?”