Category: visual

A new 100-foot sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky is prompting controversy at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, not for what it is, but for where it’s going. “Where and even if it should be installed has been widely debated on campus, ever since the university announced its intention to plant it at the intersection of the Hornbostel Mall and the Cut, the campus’s two rectangular green spaces, by building a concrete pad there.” The controversy has led CMU to create a new public art committee which includes student input and will create and monitor the school’s new public art policy.

Picasso and Warhol were the most actively traded artists last year. “Picasso collectors raised $153.2 million last year from 1,409 works sold at auction, Artprice said. Owners of Warhols realized $86.7 million from 660 images, while 22 Monets took $61.5 million and 18 Canalettos $55.5 million, it said. Auction volumes are a guide to which works are becoming more liquid or expensive and which may be harder to buy and sell over time.”

“With the rise and rise of the blockbuster exhibition, curatorial history seems to be marked less by new discovery, re-evaluation and changing interpretation, than by visitor numbers. History is being made, on these grounds at least, in Japan, where last autumn’s Hokusai exhibition in Tokyo has broken all records for visitor attendance.”

Maastricht’s art fair of Old Masters is modernizing. “In an effort to capitalize on the tremendous growth of the modern-art market, the show’s organizers are out to carve a niche that they hope will make the European Fine Art Fair a new destination for lovers of modern and contemporary art. This year, in addition to the usual world-class collection of old-master paintings there are prime examples of works by Picasso, Magritte, Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. They are being shown by blue-chip galleries, all newcomers to the show this year.”

Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino proposes a skyscraper in a place Robert Campbell calls the worst possible place for it. “The question we ought to be debating, perhaps, is whether we want to be America’s Florence or its Milan — a cultural and educational capital, or a business one. Or both? Exactly how much do we want to grow, anyway? And with what kind of growth cells? That’s a debate that should be public and vociferous.”

“On Nov. 18, 2005, “Winter in Springs,” a 40-by-32-inch drip painting attributed to Jackson Pollock, was stolen from the Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science and Art in Scranton, Pa. But “Winter in Springs” was never authenticated and is not in the the four-volume catalogue raisonné, or complete listing, of Pollock’s work, regarded as the definitive word on authenticity. Nor was it insured. Authenticated Pollock works of similar size sell for about $10 million.”

“The saga of the $1.5-million abstract Helen Frankenthaler painting defaced two weeks ago at the Detroit Institute of Arts by a 12-year-old boy who stuck gum on it during a school outing is heading for a happy ending. After intensive research, experimentation and surgical work with high-performance tweezers, hand-rolled Q-tips and a fast-evaporating solvent — plus some purposeful fooling around with gum — the quarter-sized residue on Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘The Bay’ is gone.”

The giant Jonathan Borofsky sculpture has had its swinging arm stilled. “Some ball bearings fell out of the arm’s mechanism Saturday and it was making ‘different noises.’ So a contractor turned off the motor that moves the arm in a hammering motion.”

“In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin spent nine weeks living together in Arles. It was a time of astonishing creativity, culminating in a catastrophic falling-out.” A new book gets into the nitty-gritty of the relationship between the two masters and finds a collaboration that was far more than the sum of its parts.

“Probably nothing so alienates us from the high art of the European past as its most prestigious subject – the male nude. Visit any old European museum, from Naples to Bloomsbury, and they have more marble statues of disrobed gods and heroes than they can reasonably display. Once these nudes were considered the apex of European culture. Today we don’t really know what to do with them.”