Category: visual

Where are the rest of the some 13,000 artifacts stolen from the Iraq Museum at the start of the war? US Colonel Matthew Bogdanos – a Greek-American classics scholar and a New York prosecutor, whose toughness and tenacity had earned him the nickname “pit bull” has been on the trail for two years…

Italy says the collection of New York’s Metroplitan Museum (and that of one of its trustees)has more than 30 objects stolen from Italy. Phillipe de Montebello “faces a careful balancing act as he fields questions from Mr. Fiorilli on those Greek and other ancient artifacts. While Italy’s culture minister, Rocco Buttiglione, has emphasized that his government is not out to ‘destroy the cultural potential of American museums,’ the ministry has threatened to deny loans to museums that refuse to cooperate. And in a powerful reminder of the Italians’ determination, a former curator from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles went on trial in Rome last week on criminal charges of conspiring to import looted antiquities for that museum’s collection.”

“New architecture—variously bright, shiny, brittle, show-offy, and slightly crazed but a lot of it significant and some of it even thrilling — is now happening in New York as it hasn’t since the Lever House–Seagram Building–Guggenheim Museum fifties.”

That’s what a London report suggests. “Offering the public more varied night-time entertainment, not geared solely towards young drinkers, is the key to avoiding a surge of antisocial behaviour in the wake of this week’s extension of pub opening hours, according to the London Assembly.”

Architect Renzo Piano says cities have ignored suburbs at their peril. “The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians . . . They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be.”

So says one of Florence’s top researchers, who has studied more than 100 people who have been rushed to hosptital after collapsing. “The artistic intoxication is caused by a combination of several things, including the stress of the trip, an ‘overdose’ of beautiful art and the degree of sensitivity of the person. We should not forget that a work of art is a very powerful stimulus and can stimulate memories in our unconscious, sometimes triggering a crisis.”

“Two pieces – Andy Warhol’s silk-screen print ‘Le Grande Passion’ and a painting by abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock titled ‘Springs Winter’ – were taken from the Everhart Museum’s main gallery at about 2:30 a.m., a museum spokesman said. Scranton police were notified minutes after the thieves tripped the museum’s motion sensors. The thieves appeared to have been aided by a large tent covering the museum’s back entrance for an event.”

Benjamin Forgey says that Renzo Piano’s expansion of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art is a resounding architectural success largely because Piano resisted the urge to make the project all about him. Instead, Piano’s expansion built methodically on what the High’s original architect, Richard Meier, had done, and the result was “the complex equivalent of a friendly handshake — not awfully exciting, but satisfying in myriad ways. A sensible, sensitive, low-key sort of triumph, then.”

San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Fine Arts Museum has plucked the director of the Portland Art Museum to be its next director. John E. Buchanan, Jr. is credited with increasing attendance in Portland, and with expanding the museum’s collection of modern art. He also led a $125 million campaign in Portland. He will replace de Young’s longtime director, Harry Parker, who retires in December.

The Getty Villa’s makeover is complete. “The addition operates like an anti-icon. As a means of disguising its bulk, it burrows into the canyon walls that rise on the edge of the site. The carefully choreographed and richly textured pathways that lead, rather indirectly, from a new parking garage to the galleries are lined by high walls faced in horizontal layers of concrete, red porphyry stone, travertine and bronze. They are meant to suggest the striated walls of a huge archeological dig that has unearthed, of all things, the 1974 villa. The overall effect is one of tasteful refinement and restraint — so much so that the architecture, at times, brings to mind a Calvin Klein boutique al fresco.”