Category: visual

As the cost of the World Trade Center memorial escalate, the question has to be asked whether it’s time to scrp the project. “As the memorial has leapt in cost, its commemorative possibilities have shrunk… The very officials who are shocked at the price tag bear considerable responsibility for it. A steep cost became inevitable when politicians acceded to the early clamor to define the entire footprints of both towers as sacred ground.”

“For a long time their architects and artists, their stone-carvers and bronze-founders got better and better. For a long time their elevated style got nobler and nobler. Then, suddenly, it died. It died a poignant death — at the peak of its accomplishment, just when it got great. We know the date exactly. Memorial sculpture’s greatness left Washington forever on the 30th of May, Memorial Day, 1922.”

“There was a time when government took an interest in big urban planning projects.” Increasingly, though, government plays only a marginal role. “Bigger social concerns, like housing for mixed incomes, equal access to parks and transit, and vibrant communal spaces, which were once the public’s purview, now increasingly fall to developers to address or not, as they see fit.”

“In the past eight weeks he is believed to have spent at least £30m at auction: a world record £5.5m for a 14th century Ming vase in Hong Kong on Tuesday night, and almost certainly the world record for a Turner in April, more than £19m for a sparkling view of the Grand Canal in Venice.”

The LA County Museum of Art’s new director has a lot of balancing to do. “Inside LACMA, board members and staffers say they’re counting on Michael Govan to lead growth and to build the reputation of an institution that hasn’t had an art specialist at its helm in a decade. Outside the museum, arts leaders say the biggest challenge will be winning and keeping donors — the formidable Broad, for instance — without handing them the keys to the museum.”

Michael Brand is making his mark as director of the Getty Museum. “He’s haggling with Greeks. He’s dickering with Italians. He’s looking to fill a couple of big jobs while waiting to see who his new boss will be. And most of all, he’s trying to nudge the institution toward equilibrium after the most scandal-marred, morale-sapping year since the late J.P. Getty started showing off his art collection three decades ago.”

“Accounts of art forgers tend to talk up their subject as “the greatest” swindler of all time: the most efficient, the most reckless or the one who got away with it most frequently. The forgers themselves seem to nurse a certain fatal egotism too. Some claim an almost supernatural affinity with the artist they copy.”

Austin’s new 100,000 square foot Blanton Museum is officially a hit, and it may be setting a new standard for university museums nationwide. “The sheer size of the completed building, with a huge atrium, allows the museum to show off its extensive 17,000-piece collection, including works by Durer, Rubens, Manet and Picasso… considering the small, dark gallery where its collection of Renaissance, Baroque, American and Latin American art used to hang, the new museum is a Texas-sized upgrade.”

The Russian art market is officially white-hot, and the latest evidence is the $52.1 million take from this week’s Russian art auction at Sotheby’s in London. “The sale set 25 record prices, and more than half were for contemporary Russian artists.”

Glass artist Dale Chihuly is “in the midst of a hard-edged legal fight in federal court here over the distinctiveness of his creations and, more fundamentally, who owns artistic expression in the glass art world.”