Category: visual

Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have won this year’s Gold Medal for Architecture, a gift of the Queen made on her behalf by the Royal Institute of British Architects. “The award is one of architecture’s most prestigious international accolades, with past recipients including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer, Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, architects either already in, or destined for, the history books.”

“Thursday morning in New York, Sotheby’s auction halls will be the stage for a historic struggle, the final chapter in one of the more fascinating and tortuous negotiations between a private collector and his courting museums. The Dundas Collection of Northwest Coast American Indian Art is up for grabs,” and Canadian museums want to see the works come home. But the collection’s owner has been playing coy with the Canadians and others for the better part of two decades, and no one really knows where the Dundas is likely to end up by week’s end.

Adrian Smith, designer of some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, is leaving the prestigious Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill to start his own company. SOM apparently offered him an extension of his contract, but Smith declined.

A supermarket in Poland has become a rallying cry for preservationists who appreciate its unique charms.

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art isn’t putting a firm date on it yet, but it’s clear that the museum’s new building on the city’s harborfront won’t be ready to open in late October or early November, as hoped. “Events scheduled for October in the ICA were either moved, canceled, or postponed… Museum officials say they don’t want to announce an opening date without being sure they can be ready on time. There are signs, though, that the building is moving closer to completion.”

Mexican churches have suffered a wave of art robberies. “Looters have picked through Latin America’s archaeological sites for centuries. These church robberies are newer, arising as the taste for colonial religious art has grown in the international art market. Every country in the region has experienced thefts, but the scale is larger in Mexico because of the country’s wealth of colonial art.”

“Hopes are fading that the new Portrait Gallery of Canada is going to be built across from Parliament Hill at the site of the former U.S. embassy in Ottawa. Yesterday a spokesperson for Canadian Heritage said funding for a portrait gallery remains ‘available,’ but what’s at stake now is ‘where it is going to reside.’ “

“After months of negotiation, agreement was reached yesterday between the online auction site eBay, the British Museum, and the government’s Museums, Libraries and Archives council, to control the booming trade in British antiquities on the site. Shoals of archaeological objects, an average of 600 a day when volunteers monitored the site, appear on the site: yesterday’s offers included an elegant Roman bronze dress pin reportedly found in Bedfordshire, a small gold medieval ring, and a silver cap badge, once worn by a member of the household of the unfortunate Richard Duke of York….”

“Ever since the movement’s ‘discovery’ in 2003, when Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell went on a shopping spree in the former East German city, the New Leipzig School has been the talk of the art town.” But, Blake Gopnik says, a touring exhibition of the Rubells’ collection proves that it’s “not much of a school. There isn’t any shared agenda among its artists or even much in common other than an education at the conservative Leipzig Art Academy. (One thing they do have in common is their male sex. The only Leipzig women on view at the Katzen are in the paintings. They’re often nude.)”