Category: visual

London’s National Gallery revealed yesterday that it owns a previously unknown work by Leonardo da Vinci but will never be able to exhibit it. Why? Because it’s underneath another painting…

As the contemporary art market heats up, “several dealers of contemporary art are placing a right of first refusal in their sales documents, requiring buyers to offer the art back to the dealer before selling to anyone else. Some, including dealers, maintain that these restrictions protect artists, the market, and even collectors. However critics of these contracts disagree. While the use of such restrictions is not standard practice in the market, it is also not entirely new.”

Berlin’s State Museums are undergoing yet another major reorganization on Museum Island…

“Paul Bessire, a key figure in the [Boston-based] Institute of Contemporary Art’s new waterfront building project, will leave the museum in early August to take a senior position at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Bessire, 43, has been the ICA’s director of external relations since 2000, overseeing the $62 million fund-raising campaign now underway to pay for a new museum under construction on Fan Pier… Bessire becomes the National Gallery’s chief development officer in September.”

The Guggenheim has chosen a conceptual design by Mexican architect Enrique Norten as its choice for a new outpost the museum hopes to build in Guadalajara, Mexico. Norten, a rising star in New York’s architectural scene, conceived of a “largely transparent rectilinear tower consisting of a series of steel boxes of various shapes for flexible exhibition spaces.” Of course, this is the Guggenheim, which means that there’s no guarantee that the Guadalajara museum will ever be built at all, and the next step is a feasability study which should at least answer the question of whether the $180 million project is realistic.

The Freedom Tower has become a parody of its own name, says Nicolai Ouroussoff, and we should have seen it coming. “Somber, oppressive and clumsily conceived, the project suggests a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness. It is exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world… If this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer’s architectural nightmares were fascinating: as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear.”

Don’t like the latest Freedom Tower redesign? Don’t fret, says Michael Goodwin: another redo is likely just around the corner. “The big reason why more changes are coming has little to do with the Freedom Tower. The issue is the growing recognition that almost every element planned for the site is a problem waiting to be discovered.”

The newly redesigned “Freedom Tower” is a mess, writes James Russell. “It’s a monument to bureaucratic bungling and political gutlessness. [Daniel] Libeskind stood up today to endorse the design, even though the scheme ashcans everything he did that touched people. His willingness to defend the continued gutting of his plan is beginning to look pathetic.”

The new version of the “Freedom Tower” at the World Trade Center site is not nearly good enough after all the compromises. Instead of proclaiming “Here is what we are capable of,” the new tower mutters “It’s the best we could do, under the circumstances.”

The man in charge of watching over England’s historic buildings says the country’s significant buildings are in danger. It is, he says, “one of the biggest historic buildings crises since the Reformation”.