Category: visual

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts announces a schedule for its $500 million expansion. And how is the project being paid for? “Galleries are going fast,” museum director Malcom Rogers said. “But I do know, for instance, that the galleries of pre-Columbian art are still available. We also have the major American paintings galleries, where one or two of those are open at the moment. And also, people like to name endowment funds, funds supporting exhibitions, lectures, concerts.”

“Brock Enright is notorious in the US as the man who performs ‘bespoke executive kidnappings’ for $1,500 a time. He’s persona non grata with the NYPD, fantasy salesman to the stars, and now he’s opened his first London exhibition with a performance-art extravaganza starring his own mother and the Easter bunny. ‘In what I do there is a lot of smoke and mirrors.’ He works at the edge of truth and fiction.”

An Italian researcher has discovered an ancient villa by looking at satellite maps doenloaded from Google. “Luca Mori was looking at Google Earth images of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a shaded oval area more than 500 metres (1,640ft) long, which marked the path of an ancient river.”

Russian police are searching for more than 48,000 stolen works of art. “The missing pieces of artwork include pictures, icons, sculptures, metalwork, gems, military decorations, vintage armor, and rare books. Some of them were stolen from museums and churches, but most from private houses. The biggest challenge is to track down pieces that have been smuggled out of the country, investigators said.”

“Once-eminent Milwaukee art dealer Michael H. Lord has been charged with stealing about $180,000 from an old friend by buying artwork on the friend’s behalf and then selling it to Major League Baseball commissioner Allan H. “Bud” Selig and his wife, and keeping the proceeds.”

Maurizio Seracini is what Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown calls an “art diagnostician”, which is “not a bad description for someone who probes paintings with state-of-the-art-technology, often to advise museums, dealers and collectors on their restoration. One question raised by Mr Seracini’s painstaking investigation is why Da Vinci wanted to include such a bloody scene in a nativity painting, and why he – or someone else – thought better of it. But another question, and the one that will fascinate the Dan Brown fans, is what Da Vinci was up to on the other side of the painting in the last area of the panel to be fully rendered by Mr Seracini’s technicians.

London’s National Gallery has a new artist-in-residence – Chris Ofili. “It is a surprising step for the National Gallery, an unshakable bastion of traditional high culture, to be employing the services of an artist who symbolises, perhaps more than any other, Britart cool. ‘Some people will no doubt regard it as a sell-out. But it’s about engaging with contemporary culture rather than adopting an aloof view’.”

Washington DC’s Phillips Collection is heading into expansion in the fast lane. “The Phillips has raised $29 million in its first-ever capital campaign — $2 million more than the goal and two years ahead of schedule. In December, the museum receives the keys to its new building, next door to its intimate Dupont Circle home, which will add 3,000 square feet of gallery space and an auditorium.”

The New Orleans Museum survived Katrina intact. It “opened in 1911 and is one of the central cultural institutions of New Orleans, and is an oasis of calm and beauty in a city of despair and ruin. But it is an empty oasis. Wind and water have driven away its 150,000 annual visitors, its 10,000 members, and many members of its staff and board of trustees. ‘My first priority to the staff and trustees is to ensure that the museum opens up as soon as possible. I wouldn’t want to have our best pictures leave the museum right now’.”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is selling off 42 works, including paintings by Amedeo Modigliani, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Max Beckmann, sculptures by Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore, and works on paper by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas. “The idea, said LACMA Deputy Director Nancy Thomas, is to prune redundant and unrepresentative items and spend the income on works that will fill in gaps — especially modern works that could shine when the museum expands, reorganizes and rehangs its collection in 2007.”