Category: visual

“An art gallery director says she was fired for talking on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week about a sexually explicit caricature of President Bush, a sheik and a barrel of oil.” The Florida gallery says the two events were unrelated.

“The Venice Biennale is the world’s oldest and most important survey of contemporary art. When artists have been chosen for the Biennale, you know they’ve truly arrived. This year, two native North Americans had prominent spots in the exhibition. Does this mean that native art in general has reached a new level of art-world recognition? Or is it a fluke, or even the kind of tokenism that could disappear again?”

At San Francisco’s Lost Art, the experience of buying art is deliberately “anti-gallery”: unintimidating and — gasp — affordable. “There are no pristine white walls or fancy track lighting. Instead, framed paintings by unknown artists and others on the cusp of stardom occupy nearly every inch of available wall space in the cozy salon, which is dolled up with midcentury furnishings to feel more like some cool bohemian aunt’s living room than a place of business.”

“Much of the public discussion surrounding an upcoming expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s mid-Wilshire campus has been about money. So far, not much has been said about fossils. In March, the museum announced it had raised $156 million, enough for a first phase of construction — a turning point for LACMA, which had to abandon an earlier, more sweeping plan as too expensive. But now, as the campus readies for new construction, the issue is pre-history: The 23-acre Hancock Park property, which includes LACMA and the county-owned Page Museum at La Brea Tar Pits, contains one of the richest Ice Age fossil sites in North America.”

Things are both changing and staying (mostly) the same at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, where several new spaces are transforming visitors’ experience of the institution. “I am extremely keen that people shouldn’t think the Huntington has only two paintings, (Lawrence’s) ‘Pinkie’ and (Gainsborough’s) ‘The Blue Boy,'” said John Murdoch, director of art collections at the Huntington. “There is a terrible danger if you’ve got world-famous paintings that people will say, ‘I’ve seen that. I don’t need to go there again.'”

Since the American federal tax law changed in 1969, arts institutions can benefit enormously from fractional giving. “And donors like it because they can spread their tax write-offs over a longer period of time while also continuing to enjoy the artwork. The museum and donor sign an agreement called a deed of gift.” The donor reaps write-offs while gradually giving small percentages of paintings and other art objects to a museum, which eventually takes ownership of the artwork.”

Those who see design subtleties where the rest of us see only letters and numbers headed to New York this week to luxuriate in the company of their own kind. “These pilgrims were among about 500 people, some from as far away as Brazil and Finland, who have converged on the city for TypeCon, a yearly gathering of typographers, printers, designers, calligraphers and assorted, self-described font freaks and type nerds who can argue about kerning into the wee hours.”

Replacing a legend is no easy task, but as William Griswold prepares to take over the small but prestigious Minneapolis Institute of Arts from longtime director Evan Maurer, he will face immediate questions about how he plans to build on Maurer’s considerably legacy. “Griswold will inherit many of Maurer’s ambitions, the most significant of which is a current $100 million capital and endowment campaign. The physical centerpiece of that campaign is a 117,000-square-foot addition scheduled to open next spring that will add 40 percent more gallery space and upgrade the existing museum building. The expansion wasn’t Griswold’s idea. But figuring out how best to make the expanded facility work will be his job.”

“We’ve entered an era in which ambitious developers are not just open to the notion of working with architecture’s boldest talents but, in certain high-profile cases, are desperate to avoid working without them. So-called ‘starchitects’ have become too valuable now, as urban alchemists and as marketing vehicles, for developers to ignore.” It’s merely an extension of the overpowering star quality architects like Frank Gehry have brought to bear on the world of urban planning, but the embrace of the starchitects’ often-unusual visions by the general public has served to change the entire face of building design in the U.S.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is winding up four years of renovation with a painstaking restoration of its intricate four-block-long facade. “Section by section, architects, engineers and craftsmen have been slowly and carefully repointing portions of the stone facade, cleaning and filling in cracks and repairing water damage.”