Category: visual

The curator who died as a theft scandal was coming to light at the Hermitage Museum sold art to buy insulin, says her husband. “The husband admitted he and his wife had taken 53 objects since the early 1990s. Another person was arrested a few days later. Zavadskaya’s husband said they needed the cash to buy insulin for his wife, whose meager salary of $125 a month could not cover her medical needs. The family lived in a dilapidated apartment in the historic centre of the city.”

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is well on the way to raising the money it needs for an ambitious expansion and renovation, and museum officials have spent the last several years selling local residents and civic leaders on the necessity of such a project. There’s just one problem: “The architect selection process, which the museum hopes to complete by Oct. 31, doesn’t match the sophistication of the institution itself.”

“Russian police have detained a man they believe may have organized the theft of artifacts from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, according to news reports on Friday. The suspect is the fourth person detained since Russia’s famous museum announced on July 31 the theft of 221 items worth over $5 million.”

The chief financial officer at the beleaguered J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has stepped down without explanation. “His departure, effective Aug. 23, follows several other resignations among top officials, including Getty Trust President Barry Munitz in February and board Chairman John Biggs earlier this month. The Getty has been the focus of a state attorney general’s investigation since last summer, with results expected in coming weeks.”

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has unveiled a series of intentionally provocative billboards designed to reposition the institution as an edgy, sensational “place where art lives” — not some oppressively quiet, stodgy museum space.” And before anyone gets snarky, no, none of the billboards make mention of crooked executives or indicted curators.

“For the past quarter-century, Ron English has been waging a quixotic guerilla war against corporate America by hijacking some of its most visually arresting billboards… These sabotage operations can be carried out in about seven minutes flat if all goes well, and even though the hijacked billboards generally get de-hijacked within a matter of days, the raids usually generate enough publicity to get his message across.” English is the subject of a new documentary examining the impact of his guerrilla art on a frequently indifferent society.

The Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, has some big expansion plans, and is chomping at the bit to get started. “Two years ago, the city-owned gallery marked 40 years as the anchor in Saskatoon’s cultural life by unveiling plans to renovate its building on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River… Alas, the bulldozers are on hold until next year at least, possibly later — the result of a lack of financial assistance from [provincial and federal government sources.]”

When an Irish developer stepped in to buy a large plot of land in Chicago recently, it started a whirlwind of rumors as to whether the developer intended to use the land to build something other than the 2000-foot Santiago Calatrava-designed skyscraper that had long been intended for the spot. The developer is reassuring the city that he plans to begin negotiations with Calatrava shortly on what would be the world’s tallest tower. Some skeptics “contend that the $1.2 billion project is economically unfeasible.”

When the Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League set out to build their new stadium, they went outside the usual parameters, hiring former “bad boy” architect Peter Eisenmann to take charge of the design and create a modern structure unlike anything else in the NFL. But somewhere between concept and execution, much of Eisenmann’s personality got lost amid the budget constraints. “The typical stadium designer today is a corporate servant who churns out formulaic structures, either crudely serviceable or slathered in nostalgic references to the Roman Colosseum. By contrast, Eisenman is an architect who sometimes gets trapped in his own head: he is known for conceptual references that, while playful, can border on the impenetrable.”

To look at them, the pictures wouldn’t seem to be worth much. “But next month the salesroom at Jefferys, a modest auction house in Lostwithiel in Cornwall, is expected to be buzzing with collectors from all over the world bidding for the sketches. They will be interested not in the aesthetic value of the pictures but in the signature, sometimes AH, sometimes A Hitler. The watercolours are – probably – the work of the young Adolf Hitler, painted while he served on the border of France and Belgium as a corporal during the first world war.”