Category: visual

Australia’s federal cabinet has approved a AUS$20 million increase in the budget for the soon-to-be-built National Portrait Gallery, bringing the total budget for the project to AUS$74 million (US$54 million) just as the shortlist of architects vying to design the gallery is announced.

One of the leading candidates to replace Katherine Reid as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art has withdrawn his candidacy. Charles Venable, deputy director for collections and programs at the museum, apparently withdrew from consideration last week, though he hasn’t said why. Venable is the second potential director to duck out of the search – in September, the director of Atlanta’s High Museum also said he would no longer be a candidate.

Italy’s aggressive push to make claims on art it says was looted has American museums anxious. “The bad old days of Indiana Jones-style museum acquisition no longer fly. Countries have laws regarding the exportation of artwork, and what’s legal in one country may not be in another. And even if it’s legal, it may not be ethical. Many in the art world say the media blitz surrounding the Italian charges makes this a defining moment.”

“The $275-million Getty Villa project stands as Machado and Silvetti’s most significant design, centering on the 64-acre property just above Pacific Coast Highway where oil billionaire J. Paul Getty built a loose replica of a Roman country house. The mock villa by the architecture firm Langdon & Wilson was dismissed by some critics as a gaudy concoction when it opened to the public in 1974. ‘This folly of Getty, how do you take that building? We could have taken it with irony; we could have taken it with aggression. A lot of architect friends of ours recommended both. We took it very seriously, and I think we made it a better building’.”

There has been much discussion lately about the trend of museums selling off their art to balance the budget. But museums aren’t the only ones divesting themselves of great works: Alan Artner points out that private collectors do it all the time, and the effect on a city’s artistic reputation can be drastically changed by such actions. “In the past it was thought that artworks collected in a city should stay in the city, for in a sense, they belonged to it. People rich enough to have significant collections made their money in particular cities and leaving art to them was a way of giving something back.” But beginning in the 1980s, when art really became a financial investment as well as an aesthetic one, this view began to change.

Illuminated manuscripts – those ornately decorated pages of calligraphic words that are meant more to be admired than read – were more than just a way to honor profound texts with high art. In fact, “[they] functioned a little the way today’s society pages do: they advertised the status of movers and shakers while at the same time they made them seem noble and generous. The manuscripts followed a basic formula: the more dazzling the word and image, the more prominent the church patron. Not content to be anonymous donors, people who commissioned such manuscripts even had their own likenesses incorporated into scenes along with their coats of arms.”

Days after Italian prosecutors announced to the world that they have clear and unimpeachable evidence that Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is in possession of stolen art, the museum is reaching out to Italian authorities in an effort to head off serious legal trouble. Originally, the MFA had planned to wait for officials to come to them in the controversy surrounding dealer Robert Hecht and Getty Museum curator Marian True, but when press coverage intensified at week’s end, the museum decided that it could not afford to wait. MFA officials also issued a statement promising to return any objects which could be proven to have been stolen.

“Today the Getty Museum is under siege. Its former antiquities curator faces an indictment in Italy, and allegations of lavish travel by [museum president Barry] Munitz have led to a wide-ranging investigation by the California attorney general into the trust’s finances. Overlooked in these controversies, some of Mr. Munitz’s critics say, is the harm suffered by the museum itself, including acquisitions, curatorial choices and departures by talented staff members who bridled at Mr. Munitz’s decisions and style.” In fact, some observers believe that the Getty’s problems can be traced all the way back to 1982, when it received the bulk of oilman J. Paul Getty’s fortune and became a major player on the international art scene.

City officials in Edmonton, Canada, have ordered a prominent aboriginal artist to take down art in a park. “The sculpture by Jane Ash Poitras included artificial severed moose legs and four bison skulls, along with boulders, stones, flowers and an eagle feather. A City spokesman said there were several calls of complaint and about two-thirds of residents in the area who responded to a letter asking their opinion on the sculpture opposed it.”

Italian prosecutors detail significant thefts of antiquities. “The global scale of the alleged ring’s trade — worth tens of millions of dollars and involving museums from Tokyo to Toledo, Ohio — is outlined in a series of cases that Italian prosecutors are bringing, in part to keep looted archaeological artifacts from auction houses and museums, the papers obtained by Bloomberg News show. ‘A critical point has been reached, where the laxness, and sometimes the complicity of some museums in the U.S., and elsewhere, has been exposed’.”