Category: visual

As New York’s Museum of Arts and Design prepares to move into its opulent new home at 2 Columbus Circle in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, it needs to put a bitter battle over the historic preservation of the building behind it, and focus on revitalizing an institution that has struggled often throughout its history. “Big challenges lie ahead, for example meeting an operating budget that will jump to $6.9 million, an endowment goal of $20 million, and attendance and membership goals of 450,000 and 3,200, respectively.”

New proposed taxes will making buying art at auction more expensive in the UK. “The U.K. will tax the commission at the standard VAT rate of 17.5 percent, following a recent European Court of Justice ruling. Previously, businesses and individuals could use temporary import arrangements to defer the tax, which totaled 5 percent under the prior U.K. interpretation of European VAT law.”

Moscow’s mayor has endorsed plans to build a 600-meter tower designed by Norman Foster. “City authorities are understood to have wanted a distinctive skyscraper that could become a landmark similar to Lord Foster’s “Gherkin” — the headquarters of Swiss Re — in the City of London. The development includes the 430m high Federation Tower, due to be completed in 2008.”

Pictures of naked people participating in one of Spencer Tunick’s photos of mass nudes have shown up for sale. The pictures are from security surveillance cameras. “We’ve spoken to a number of officers and police staff and as a result two members of police staff are in the process of being suspended.”

The European Fine Art Fair is still the gold standard for art fairs. “With seven- and eight-figure prices quoted wherever I inquired, I tried to make a mantra of John Russell’s deathless line ‘No amount of money is worth a great work of art.’ But the big artistic thrills often came in modest — though not modestly priced — form, such as the Fragonard drawings shown by Agnew’s of London and New York, two rare Charles Rennie Mackintosh watercolors offered by London’s Fine Art Society…”

The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Toledo Museum are in court to settle ownership issues surrounding a van Gogh and a Gauguin. “At stake is whether the pictures will remain in the museums’ collections or whether the museums must return the works to the heirs or pay restitution. The paintings are worth an estimated $10 million to $15 million apiece in today’s art market, based on auction records.”

The British Museum has a big new Michelangelo show. But only three of the drawings in the show are universally accepted as his. This forces the viewer to see the show in an entirely different way. “Why has the museum accepted 50-year-old attributions, asks Richard Dorment.”

“Rembrandt would be remembered as an extraordinary self-portraitist if he had died young at, say, forty-five. But he lived much longer and it is the work of his old age that one most admires: that intimate, unflinching scrutiny of his own sagging, lined, and bloated features, with the light shining from the potato nose and the thick paint: the face of a master, the face of a failure and a bankrupt. Life, and his own mismanagement of life, has bashed him but no one could say it has beaten him.”

“Modernism is something old that we look back on, not without nostalgia. Its ashtrays and dinner sets, the chrome-tube-and-leather-strap Marcel Breuer chairs, get revived and recirculated without comment. The idea of modernism connotes some kind of ideal and even quasi-official mindset. Seen in one light, it even suggests too much solidity: think of how the innumerable descendants and clones of Mies van der Rohe created, in their high, bland cliffs of steel and glass, the face of American corporate capitalism. That certainly wasn’t the modernité Charles Baudelaire was thinking of in 1863.”

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum will reopen in 2009, a year behind schedule so added environmental checks can be done. “Work at Holland’s biggest museum is due to start in 2007, including plans for a cycling route under the building. It shut in 2003 after an asbestos scare forced its indefinite closure.”