Category: visual

The German government wants to tear down the old East German parliament building and replace it with a castle. The government hopes to start construction by 2007 on the new building, which the study says could cost $650 million to $950 million. But a vocal group of artists and architects oppose the idea. “Arguing that the building should be preserved as a reminder of postwar history, about 160 artists and architects from around the world banded together this month to create a mountain inside the Palace of the Republic.”

The Smithsonian is falling apart. And building maintenance is so bad that some of the institutions areb being damaged. “While Congress and Smithsonian officials debate who is responsible for what, some treasures have been lost for good. Among them is the collection of snapping lids and tools developed in the 1940’s by Earl Tupper as the earliest prototypes of the now ubiquitous Tupperware.”

A new Rand study on the visual arts, suggests that all is not as rosy as burgeoning museum attendance figures suggest. “At the same time that prices have reached headline-grabbing heights, the arts market has become increasingly like other asset markets. The value of an artist’s work is determined not, as was traditionally the case, by the consensus of experts, but increasingly by a small number of affluent buyers who are drawn to purchase works for their potential investment value.”

Not ready to give that expensive painting to a museum but need the tax break? Give away part of it and collect your writeoff. “Museums ask donors to pledge the remainder of the work as a promised gift, though that can be done years or even decades into the future. A donor who gives 25 percent of a $1 million painting to a museum is entitled to a $250,000 tax deduction, and the museum has the right to show the work three months a year. Should a donor wish to give another quarter of a painting three years after an original gift, it will be re-appraised and the tax deduction will reflect the current fair market value of the work, which may have appreciated.”

Who should design the Barnes’ new home in Philadelphia? It requires a special understanding of both the collection and the city. Fortunately there’s a homegrown solution. “The Venturis, principal architects of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, know and love Philadelphia as no outsider ever can. And they would create a building for the Barnes of incomparable quality that people would flock to from around the world.”

Artist Steve Kurtz is still fighting off the FBI, which wanted to charge him with bioterrorism. “Kurtz used the analogy of a coffee grinder purchase to explain why the stakes in his case are so much weightier than artistic censorship. ‘Let’s say you go out and by a coffee grinder. And it says on it that you can’t grind spices in it, only coffee. And you say, to hell with that, I’m going to grind coffee and spices in it. If you do that and you send in your warranty — mail fraud. If they pull off that argument in court, it’ll make almost anyone vulnerable’.”

Ruins on Peru’s desert coast are 4,700 years old and suggest civilization in the Americas is far older than previously thought. “The site of Caral, in the Supe Valley north of Lima, covers 66 hectares (165 acres) and includes pyramids 21m (70ft) high arranged around a large plaza. Whether it can truly be seen as a civilisation comparable in attainment with contemporary Egypt and Mesopotamia is doubtful, but it demonstrates that the tradition culminating in the Inca Empire had deeper roots than anyone imagined.”

“I suppose this happens to all art after a while, but now that Pop Art has been going for more than 30 years — Peter Blake keeps the flag flying for Britain, but it’s an increasingly lonely task — I’ve grown tired of its blandishments, its exhortation of the temporary, the cheaply made, the gleeful interest in extreme fame or utter ordinariness. The bigger problem is that while Pop Art originally turned the tables on high art, making the banal significant and the ugly sort of beautiful, the rest of the world has not only since caught up but left it far behind.”

A British man has been arrested in Egypt trying to smuggle 66 ancient manuscriots out of the country. “The texts, identified by experts as being from the Islamic era, are said to have been subject to an export ban. They were found in the man’s luggage after an X-ray at Cairo airport as he headed for a flight to Paris.”

Norwegian police are looking for eight suspects in the theft last year of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”. “The painting was stolen from Oslo’s Munch Museum a year ago, when thieves held up staff with a gun and stole the artwork from the wall. Five others have already been arrested, with three remaining in custody.”