Category: visual

Thieves broke in to a hotel that has 12 Edvard Munches in its collection. “Two unarmed men burst into Oslo’s Hotel Continental, threatened staff and removed three pictures from the walls. But the hotel had swapped the originals with duplicates after two real Munch works were stolen from the Munch Museum in the city almost a year ago.”

An Italian quarry wants to lop 300 feet off the top of a mountain. But it’s been said Michelangelo quarried marble from the place and so a dispute has ensued. The historical record, including Michelangelo’s own abundant correspondence, shows clearly that he never took any marble from Monte Altissimo. He did open two quarries farther down the Serra gorge and nearly lost his life extracting enormous columns and blocks. But he never got to use any of them; the project for which they were intended, an overambitious façade for Florence’s San Lorenzo Church, was aborted and his hard-won marble scattered and purloined.

A new exhibit at the London Portrait Gallery sheds a great deal of light on the shady world of celebrity image-making. “The show takes 10 of the most familiar faces from the photographic age, from Queen Victoria to Gandhi to Greta Garbo and Adolf Hitler, and shows how they manipulated their images in order to further their aims, whether political or artistic or megalomaniacal.” The show also points up the media’s complicity in such makeovers, noting that many celebrity photos meant to look candid were, in fact, entirely staged.

Conservators are working to save one of the largest paintings in the world – a 45 feet-by-195 100-year-old religious work in California. “Using 4-foot-long brushes, Polish artist Jan Styka completed the painting in 1897 after working on it 12 hours a day for five years. Styka originally had hoped to show the painting at the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 but there was no room so Styka displayed other works instead.”

A few years ago the internet was full of companies trying to sell art online. “These days, with New York-based e-commerce firm JupiterResearch projecting that 2005 Internet spending will top $79 billion in the U.S. alone and Web sales will continue to post double-digit growth until at least 2009, the wrangling over art’s future on the Internet has been reignited. Critics still insist that unlike books, clothing, and other consumer goods, art really has to be experienced in person before deciding whether or not it’s the right fit. But with some 126 million Americans already buying an increasing number of goods electronically, a new batch of entrepreneurs is banking on a bright future in online art.”

To save money, Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria will begin closing one day a week. “The decision by the gallery’s board of trustees comes months after the Victorian Government granted it an extra $1.2 million a year for three years. But the costs of running the two new complexes meant the gallery recorded losses of $1.9 million last financial year and $6.8 million in 2003-04.”

The Pompidou is planning a new satellite museum in the shape of a Chinese peasant hat. “The Pompidou Centre Metz in eastern France, due to open in 2008, will show rotating exhibitions from the museum’s 56,000-strong collection. Only about 1,300 works can be shown at one time in the Paris museum.”

A new high-tech paint roller allows images to be transfered in the paint. “The Pixel Roller picks up paint from a tray, like any other paint roller, but is controlled electronically by a computer to transfer pixilated images onto any surface — floors, walls, ceilings, brick, concrete and glass — and at just about any scale.”

Giant highrise buildings threaten to transform London’s skyline. “So far only the Swiss Re tower has been built, but a dozen or more are in the pipeline. They reveal that London’s problem is not that it is turning itself into a Dallas or a Houston, as we used to worry. To judge by the wave of new developments on the way, London is going to be the nearest Europe comes to Shanghai. Footloose international finance, a mayor intoxicated by high-rise architecture, and a developer-friendly planning system have unleashed a wave of developments that are bigger, and brasher, than anything the city has yet seen.”

Austria’s Leopold Museum made an offer to art lovers Saturday: Show up naked and you get in free. “Scores of naked or scantily clad people wandered the museum, lured by an offer of free entry to The Naked Truth, an exhibition of early 1900s erotic art, if they showed up wearing just a swimsuit – or nothing at all. With a midsummer heatwave sweeping Vienna, the normally reserved museum decided to make the most of its cool, climate-controlled space.”