Category: visual

A new museum built to show 90 percent of the output of painter Clyfford Still will be built next to the Denver Art Museum. “This particular four-block area, which is called the Civic Center Cultural Complex, is really Denver’s cultural mecca, so the fact that the Clyfford Still Museum can join those existing august institutions establishes us also as a leading cultural amenity,”

Peru says it will sue Yale University for the return of artifacts from Machu Picchu. “Yale, which has displayed the antiquities at its Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut, offered to set up parallel collections at Yale and at a new museum to be built in Peru, which the government rejected.”

Italy and China are teaming up to fight the illicit artifacts trade. “The agreement sets out a programme of co-operation that will see a task force of Chinese agents travel to Italy to receive specialist training from the unit of Carabinieri, Italy’s military police, devoted to the preservation of cultural heritage.”

Vancouver hosts the next winter Olympics. So what will its Olympic architecture be? “Turin served the world divine chocolate and a legacy of architecture by geniuses: a university complex by Norman Foster, the redeveloped Lingotto factory complex by Renzo Piano, the Palasport stadium by Arata Isozaki. For its part, Vancouver will host some fine moments in city building, such as the Olympic Village, but the city is inviting the world to “come play with us” in buildings beaten up by the rising cost demands of an overheated construction industry. Expect a lot of metal cladding and concrete block.”

The Cincinnati Art Museum is embarking on a huge expansion. “It will cost at least $125 million and add 110,000 square feet, underground parking, new and renovated galleries and an outdoor sculpture park. And it will eclipse the city’s most recent art museum projects: construction of the $35 million Contemporary Arts Center in 2002-03 and the $22.8 million renovation and expansion of the Taft Museum of Art in 2003-04.”

“The Biennial embodies the Whitney’s eternal identity crisis. The museum cannot abandon its American focus, but today there’s every reason to emphasize global rather than national perspectives. (Besides, art fairs churn out surveys constantly.) What’s the Whitney to do with the Biennial? Its predicament is serious but also funny.”

Three of the top ten most-visited exhibitions worldwide last year were in Japan. The Art Newspaper publishes its annual list…

William S. Rubin, the longtime curator of the Museum of Modern Art died at the age of 78 in January. Before he died he wrote a memoir. “The 198-page typescript chronicles Rubin’s professional life, with particular focus on the museum’s complex relationships with dealers, trustees, collectors and artists. Few if any published accounts lay out these usually covert matters in such frank detail.”

Art prices have been skyrocketing in recent years, and not only in the case of works by the old masters. “Boosted by an influx of Asian buyers keen to hoover up the classics of the modernist canon, the recent sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London broke many records,” and the new high water marks likely won’t last long. But commerce aside, assigning value to art is a tricky business, especially in the long term, because “by far the most important factor in making art works valuable is what experts say and write about them.”

“One of the great contradictions of the art market is that it simultaneously has a thirst for publicity and an obsession with secrecy… Once a work of art has been sold, a veil begins to descend. Auction houses often trumpet big prices, yet they rarely reveal details about buyers. Meanwhile, dealers at fairs often refuse to confirm that a sale has taken place, let alone identify their clients. Artworks suddenly move out of sight into the discreet world of anonymous collectors, sometimes vanishing for generations.” So a new book devoted entirely to some of the world’s more reclusive collectors is bound to make a big splash.