Category: visual

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are working on their next project. “After more than 40 years of supersized artworks, one last mega-art project remains on the couple’s drawing board. They propose draping nearly seven miles of reflective translucent fabric at periodic intervals above a winding, 40-mile stretch of the Arkansas River in south central Colorado.

“Certain sorts of building have always been doomed: specifically, private houses (too self-indulgent) and (other than one exceptional case) commercial buildings. Architects are still shot through with a certain moralism and remain uncomfortable with buildings celebrating capitalism. The ideal winner is still a public building. But moralism goes only so far. Architects are also seduced by glamour. Worthy buildings never win the Stirling. If you want worthy, follow the Prime Minister’s Better Buildings Award.”

In what may be the most bizarre copyright lawsuit of the year, a Colombian painter is being sued by two marketing firms for interfering with their efforts to sell reproductions of his work. The fracas started when artist Fernando Botero donated a number of his works to a Colombian museum, which turned around and sold the right to produce and market posters of several of the works. Angered by the move, Botero told several media outlets in Miami that the posters were “unauthorized and illegitimate,” which the company producing the posters viewed as a deliberate effort to suppress sales.

Police in Norway have arrested a woman and charged her with being an accomplice in the theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream last year. “She was charged with handling stolen goods after allegedly being found to have banknotes from a bank robbery in which a policeman was shot dead. A police lawyer said the woman was suspected of being an accomplice to the Munch theft but gave no more details.”

So the legendary Thomas Krens is stepping aside at the Guggenheim. “This departure is a genuine art world event, because of Mr. Krens’s influence and buccaneering style. He has done more to redefine museum practice than anyone since Thomas Hoving was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1960s and 1970s. Still, as with Mr. Hoving, the surprise isn’t that his departure took place, but that it didn’t happen sooner.”

New York’s Guggenheim Museum has found its next director within its own ranks: Lisa Dennison, a 27-year veteran of the Guggenheim organization, will take over running the New York museum on October 1, succeeding Thomas Krens. Dennison will also continue in her current capacity as chief curator for all the various Guggenheim museums spread across the world.

Art investment funds are struggling. “The fact is that, while a host of funds are currently jostling to find investors, few are succeeding. Most have scaled back their initial optimistic targets, and only one is actually up and running. It is a struggle to make the concept fit with financial institutions.”

If the art and artifacts business doesn’t work out, the Smithsonian ought to consider the real estate business. The Smithsonian has flipped a building it bought and rehabbed, making a huge profit. “The museum bought the property and refurbished it in 1999 for $114 million and had used the nine-story building for office space. It sold for $157.5 million.”

Robert Smithson once dreamed of a floating island that would circle Manhattan. “Thirty-five years after the now-deceased Smithson drew it, his island artwork has become reality: a 150-ton flat-bottom boat full of dirt planted with trees, shrubs and grass. Through Sept. 25, tugboat captain Bob Henry will spend at least 12 hours a day pulling ‘Floating Island’ up and down the East and Hudson rivers around Manhattan.”

Three Seattle-area artists build and float their own island in the middle of Lake Washington, sranrling traffic on a nearby bridge. “The 15-by-15-foot artwork titled, not surprisingly, ‘The Island,’ consists of a palm tree and granite-colored foam rocks on sand-colored canvas, as well as crabs, starfish, coconuts and other tropical props. “The only thing missing is Wilson, the volleyball from ‘Cast Away’.”