Category: visual

“David C. Levy resigned yesterday as president and director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The Corcoran’s board of trustees, meanwhile, suspended the museum’s efforts to build a new wing designed by architect Frank Gehry, for which fundraising largely has stalled.”

The Whitney may have an alternate plan to propose for its extension, as the museum goes into hearings with New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. “The original design would require razing the two brownstones that are closest to the Breuer building. The current entrance would be maintained for school groups; the rest of the public would enter through a new 32-foot entrance that would lead through a passageway into a public piazza.”

Art theft pays less these days. “Changes to legislation, together with police crackdowns,have spelled an end to the days when a stolen work of art could command a high price, a conference in London heard. In response, the black market has itself grown more sophisticated.”

Forget that romantic image of the art thief as a cunning, live-by-his-wits rogue. Other misconceptions: “There is a massive amount of fraud involving art and antiquities. It is perpetrated not by opportunist thieves but by organised criminals. There is nothing ‘gentlemanly’ or ‘white-collar’ about it – these are dangerous individuals.”

Sheikh Saud Al-Thani apparently defrauded the Qatar government for millions of dollars by using “vastly inflated invoices issued by Islamic art dealer Oliver Hoare.”

Embarrassing, really, that the UN agency responsible for preserving world culture should have let its own shoplace headquarters crumble. Now a long-overdue restoration. “In recent years, large mesh nets have been hung from the façade of UNESCO’s main building to catch falling chunks of concrete. Roofs leaked and water damage plagued the basement where archives are stored. The neglected state of the UNESCO complex seems particularly paradoxical given the agency’s role as a guardian of the world’s cultural heritage. Since 2000, UNESCO has embarked on a campaign to add Modernist monuments to its World Heritage List, which obligates U.N. member states to care for sites in their territories.”

“The Corcoran Gallery of Art’s chairman said Thursday that the 136-year-old institution is in such serious financial straits that it should suspend efforts to build its much-heralded new wing, for which architect Frank Gehry has already completed a design, and replace its longtime director.”

Over a difficult three years, the future of the Barnes Collection was debated and hammered out until finally an agreement to move the museum to Philadelphia was worked out. So how did the deal come together? Patricia Horn charts the scene behind the scenes…

King Tut is back, and back with him is a familiar argument about just how much museums should rely on flavor-of-the-month blockbuster exhibitions. “The profit-and-loss potential of blockbuster exhibitions is grounds for increasing debate in a museum world straining to reconcile traditional scholarly ideals with new fiscal realities and populist imperatives.”

18th-century British artist Joshua Reynolds is widely regarded as one of the masters of his era. But in the last several decades, his work has fallen out of favor with the art-buying public. “Now I have come to think that what turns us away from Reynolds is not that he portrayed Britain badly but too well – perhaps we shun him as an ugly man avoids mirrors. We like to look at Stubbs, Wright and Hogarth because they show us a past that was scientific, modernising, creative; Reynolds shows us something else. He portrays a British history we are less eager to own up to. He portrays the rulers of an empire.”