Category: visual

The Getty Museum agrees to return two disputed artifacts to Greece. “Under the deal signed Sunday, the Getty is returning a Boetian stele that dates to the 4th century BC and a Thasian relief that is about 100 years older. The Getty bought the stele through a New York dealer in 1993, museum director Michael Brand said, and the relief was bought by J. Paul Getty himself in 1955.”

The Toledo Museum of Art has a “remarkable new Glass Pavilion, the first American project by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa and their Tokyo firm, SANAA… Whenever the design veers in the direction of severity or humorlessness, it’s saved by its interest in shifting, shimmering visual effects — in exploring the full architectural spectrum from a transparent wall to one that’s fully opaque. When you stand outside the pavilion and spot trees or people on the other side, you are looking through more than a dozen layers of glass, each of them reflecting the sunlight or the interior of the building or the trees in a different way.”

A thief who had stolen art from a museum was caught when he was heard boadting about it in a pub. “He took the canvas, called Brighton, when it was in storage in 1999 during redevelopment of the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Norwich. But he was heard in a Norwich pub discussing how he could get rid of the piece and the eavesdropper reported him to police.”

“Whether it’s people of color, young children, people of faith, or other affinity groups, they usually come once for the exhibition that speaks directly to them and then they leave. This experience suggests that the concept of the encyclopedic mega-museum as the best repository for all masterpieces of all cultures is, at best, debatable. The lesson of the Musée Quai Branly in Paris is that we also need smaller “niche” museums that appeal to particular cultural constituencies—those who often feel marginalized in, or intimidated by, the grand art palaces where the great masterpieces of Western European and/or American art usually have pride of place.”

“The small staff of the World Trade Center Memorial Museum faces a few challenges as it prepares to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The museum has no gallery space and little storage area. It has barely even started collecting. Still, it has a public mission to help Americans remember. ‘We have this conundrum — we are not a museum yet, but we have to start acting like one,’ the chief curator, Jan Ramirez, said.” So, “this week, the museum will open its first exhibition: a series of largescale photographs that will be installed on the chain-link fence on east side of the World Trade Center site.”

“To appreciate how America has changed since 9/11, walk slowly through any major city. What you’ll see dotting the landscape is the physical embodiment of fear. Security installations put up after the attacks continue to block public access and wrangle pedestrian traffic. … It’s not just the barriers, it’s also the buildings. Since 9/11, risk consultants working for police departments, federal agencies and insurance companies have wrested control over many new construction plans. ‘There’s a sense that security experts are acting as the associate architects on every project built today,’ says Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of the New Yorker.”

The Smithsonian Institution is willing to lend smaller museums its objects, and its prestige, for a price. “In exchange for a $2,500 annual fee, museums may become Smithsonian ‘affiliates’ and borrow artifacts. Some are less important items. Some are icons. Some go out on a short-term basis. Some, long-term. Now 146 museums and cultural organizations are part of the program, called Smithsonian Affiliations. The latest is the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Ky., which has its eye on a famous stuffed steed from the Civil War.”

“The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Russian capital’s premier repository of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works, has opened the Gallery of Art of the Countries of Europe and America of the 19th-20th Centuries, devoted to the best of its collections from those periods. The expansion nearly doubles the display space for 19th- and 20th-century art, said Irina Antonova, the museum’s director. Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso all have separate halls…. It is all part of a goal to create a ‘museum town’ in the heart of Moscow….”

In Italy, a former tomb robber, jailed briefly long ago for selling his own authentic-seeming copies of Etruscan art as originals, “has transformed a mushroom farm that was once an ancient quarry into Etruscopolis, a quirky museum celebrating the art of a civilization that flourished in roughly the eighth to second centuries B.C.”

Last May a mystery buyer bought Picasso’s Dora Maar for $95 million. The buyer is still a mystery. “Why did the Sotheby’s buyer want his Dora Maar so badly? Perhaps connoisseurship. Perhaps to impress his friends. But it could also have been an investment, even at such a high price.”