Category: visual

The Los Angeles School District is in the midst of an enormous building campaign – spending more than $17 billion on schools. “Certainly the district deserves praise for confronting, after years of official neglect, the twin problems of overcrowding and aging facilities. The building campaign’s central goals — to move every student back to a traditional two-semester calendar and into a neighborhood school — are finally within sight. But as the district has become more aggressive about asking for money and tackling new lists of educational problems, on the design front it has shrunk into caution and insularity.”

“Russia and its nascent art market is the new Eldorado for art dealers. Moscow accounts for at least 85% of the country’s wealth and soaring oil prices are further boosting revenues. The city is plastered with billboards advertising luxury brands, new buildings are being hastily erected everywhere and out in the Western suburbs, a $60 million shopping mall is rising amid the birch forests: it is surrounded by $20 million homes. Dealers and decorators are scrambling to furnish these empty homes, as well as properties in the South of France and London, both obligatory for Russia’s super-rich.”

“A monumental example of Pop Art whose whereabouts were unknown to scholars and art historians for 30 years has been given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The New Adam, a nine-panel painting 8 feet high and nearly 40 feet long by the Oklahoma-born artist Harold Stevenson, has long been considered one of the great American nudes.” The painting was originally created for the Guggenheim in 1962, but was rejected for exhibition due to its content.

The Walt Disney Company is donating its considerable collection of West African art to the Smithsonian Institution. 525 pieces of traditional African art and craft, which were originally gathered by a New York real estate tycoon, will go to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, which has been struggling financially. The collection is difficult to appraise, but experts place its monetary value somewhere between $20 million and $50 million.

The mayor of London is taking sides in a debate over whether a new sculpture of Nelson Mandela by artist Ian Walters should be placed in Trafalgar Square. The Westminster City Council decided on the advice of renowned sculptor Glynn Williams to reject the statue, saying it doesn’t fit the area. Mayor Ken Livingstone took expection, and took a highly personal shot at Williams in the process, holding up a photo of a Williams sculpture design and declaring that “The only sense in which that looks like [former UK Prime Minister] Harold Wilson is if he has been dead for several days, has started to decompose, and is emerging through a pile of dog mess.” Livingstone also pointed out that Williams’s design for that particular sculpture was rejected in favor of one by the very same Ian Walters.

Five years after its opening, London’s Tate Modern museum is rehanging its entire collection, changing the order in which patrons will view the works and replacing groupings organized by subject matter with a system of categories such as cubism, minimalism, and surrealism. “When the new look is unveiled in May 2006 about 40% of the works will not have been seen at the gallery before.”

“When the National Portrait Gallery reopens next July after a six-year, $216-million renovation, the new space will represent a triumph for preservationists, for artists, for historians — and for Robert Mills. Mills, the original architect, was taken off the project after a rival designer convinced Congress that Mills’ plan in 1836 for a fireproof building — a major preoccupation for a city in which the British had burned the White House 22 years earlier — would not work… Now restorers have peeled away 169 years of history and found that Mills was right.”

“A previously unseen LS Lowry painting is expected to fetch around £500,000 when it is sold in November. The Footbridge will be seen in public for the first time before it goes up for auction at Christie’s in London. The painting shows an industrial scene with Lowry’s trademark matchstick figures rushing through the snow. It was sold to a private collector 60 years ago and has not changed hands since. Lowry, who died in 1976, was known for depicting northern England.”

New York governor George Pataki has canceled plans for a “freedom center” as part of the World Trade Center site redevelopment. “Pataki initially said the state would help the International Freedom Center find another home, but center officials said they weren’t interested and considered the project dead. The decision followed months of acrimony, with some Sept. 11 families and politicians saying that such a museum would overshadow and take space from a separate memorial devoted to the 2,749 World Trade Center dead and would dishonor them by fostering debate about the attacks and other world events.”

Charles Saatchi has dominated the British art scene for more than a decade, his taste influencing the art of a country. Now that he’s moving his gallery out of its prestigious address, does this mean his influence is waning?