Category: visual

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art says it has to delay next month’s opening of its new $51 million home on the Boston waterfront. “The decision has the ICA scrambling to reschedule programs, exhibitions, and parties once set to kick off Sept. 10. ICA officials would not give a new date for the opening, but said the delay would last weeks, not months.”

Earlier this week the Hermitage Museum released a list of 221 works it said were stolen from storage. Thursday, an anonymous caller told police where one of the items was – a religious icon was stashed in a trash bin, according to local police.

“Ron Mueck is supposedly having an exhibition at this year’s Edinburgh festival. I say supposedly because I’m not convinced the artist actually exists. Perhaps a clever novelist made up Mueck just to expose the tastelessness and stupidity of our time?”

“When Barney met Mabel, there was an instant – and fatal – chemical reaction. On Tuesday night the doberman pinscher guard dog, after six years’ blameless service, went berserk: within minutes Mabel, a 1909 German-made Steiff teddy bear once owned by Elvis Presley, more recently the pride and joy of an English aristocrat, lay mortally wounded. Barney went on to rampage through hundreds of rare teddies, all on loan to Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset, and so valuable that the insurers had insisted on a guard dog to protect the premises at night.”

It looked like Rocky was on his way back to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but that may have been a pipe dream. Recently, “the half-ton bronze Rocky Balboa – a prop made for Sylvester Stallone’s 1982 movie ‘Rocky III'” made it partway through the approval process. “A dedication of the new site was tentatively scheduled for Sept. 8. Stallone … was ecstatic. But the city Art Commission yesterday threw a bucket of cold water in the face of the whole giddy affair.”

“The world-renowned Pompidou Center of Paris, which set out in March to celebrate the work of Los Angeles artists, has accidentally destroyed two of their works — which fell from museum walls. A third piece was slightly damaged. The incidents, all of which occurred during the March-to-July run of ‘Los Angeles 1955-1985,’ have experts wondering whether a major museum has ever done so much damage in the course of a single show.”

One of Seattle’s great urban projects was to flatten one of its many hills to create an urban landscape. Now an artist wants to recreate a portion of the hill in a city park. How high would the replacement hill be? About 60 feet…

“The last thing the fledgling prefab movement needs at this point is aggressive marketing or more hype. What it needs is a reality check,” Christopher Hawthorne argues. New, high-design, supposedly accessibly priced prefab housing is wildly popular in theory, but in reality it’s been little tested beyond homes built for architects. “That’s allowed the houses’ creators to remain coy about cost overruns and other obstacles they’ve encountered as they try to work out the kinks of prefab construction. Meanwhile, the prices prefab architects quote to buyers have been climbing.”

“After decades of fits and starts in the bid to preserve a politically provocative Siqueiros mural on an Olvera Street building, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and leaders at the J. Paul Getty Trust say they’ve made a $7.8-million deal to split the cost of making the 1932 work accessible to the public at last.” Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “America Tropical,” depicting “a crucified Indian peasant under an American eagle,” was covered in the 1930s.

The precious trinkets lifted from St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum sometime this summer may have been purloined by staff members, museum officials say. “The items had not been insured because they were in storage; only exhibited artworks at the Hermitage are insured. Prosecutors have opened a criminal case but police say there remains a possibility the items, dating from the 15th to 18th centuries, had gone missing internally as a result of the museum’s chaotic catologuing, and might yet be recovered.”