The sizzling art market only gets hotter. “Sotheby’s, which opened an office in Moscow a few weeks ago, has notched up, in the first six months of this year, sales of just under £60 million. This is an enormous amount considering that the company’s sales of Russian art for the whole of 2000 reached just £4 million.”
Category: visual
Why Architecture Counts On Sunny Days
“In Britain this summer, the weather could hardly have been more restlessly alive; a parched and blazing July has been followed by a brooding and tempestuous August. Most of us believe our climate is likely to take even more ominous turns in the future. Why, then, the increasing architectural pretence that weather is all but irrelevant, and, by implication, undesirable?”
Controversial Paris Museum A Hit With The Public
Paris’ new Musee Branly has been much-maligned by critics, but it’s a hit with the public. “Even as debate continues over the museum’s novel architecture and exhibition design, word is getting out in immigrant communities throughout France that the space celebrates the patrimonies of their cultures as art. And so far, people who typically might not set foot in a museum are coming in unexpectedly large numbers.”
Claim: Australian Museum’s Painting Might Have Been Nazi Loot
“A Chilean man has claimed a 17th century art work on display at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) may have been looted from his grandfather by Nazis.”
Rembrandt Reconsidered (400 Years Later)
“As Rembrandt’s 400th birthday is celebrated this year with blockbuster exhibitions, symposia, festivals, tours, and performances, and as museums the world over lucky enough to own his works set them forth with pride, it seems unthinkable that the man we consider one of the supreme geniuses of world art was dismissed so contemptuously in his own time. But Breughel was only repeating what critics and theorists had been saying about Rembrandt’s art for years.”
Rumors Of A Long Lost Leonardo
“The Battle of Anghiari is the real Holy Grail of Leonardo studies: a wonderful lost object for which the search continues today. Its rediscovery would be an art-historical sensation. War was the stuff of everyday life in early 16th-century Italy, and Leonardo had plenty of opportunity to observe it: he described armed conflict as ‘the most beastly madness’.”
Tijuana Builds An Art Culture
“While a flourishing of the visual arts has brought Tijuana a growing reputation in recent years, many of these artists struggle financially. Commercial art galleries have stepped in to fill the void, working to sell their work at home and abroad.”
That’ll Buy A Lot Of Shrubs
You know your museum project is going well when you haul in a $5 million gift just for landscaping. “A trustee of the Denver Art Museum [has] donated $5 million for landscaping around the institution’s soon-to-open $90.5 million addition… The new civic and cultural space, which, like the addition, was designed by architect Daniel Libeskind, links the Golden Triangle and Civic Center and provides a gathering point for visitors to the cultural complex.”
Beirut Peace Garden Delayed
A garden being constructed in Beirut and meant to symbolize peace has been put on hold because of the war. “The 3.5-acre pit zigzags between three churches and three mosques in central Beirut. It had been in the process of becoming Hadiqat As-Samah: the Garden of Forgiveness. It might now be seen as the landscape of a shattered ideal.”
New Leadership For Chicago Museum
Chicago’s oft-overlooked Jane Addams Hull-House Museum has a new director. “[Lisa Yun] Lee, a native of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is known to many Chicagoans for her philanthropy… and for founding, with two friends, The Public Square. That organization sponsors debates and dialogues on cultural and political issues, especially social justice.”