Category: visual

A new museum in lower Manhattan that will house the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center is desitgned by the Norwegian firm Snohetta. The design is “strangely seductive: with some fine-tuning, it could even become a fascinating work. It is already closer to the standard set by Santiago Calatrava’s soaring glass-and-steel transportation hub than that of the site’s troubled Freedom Tower, for example. But ultimately, the museum is more about politics than architecture – a theme-park view of American ideals in an alluring wrapper.”

“Relying on varied exhibits and multimedia presentations, the Freedom Center will foster “conversations on freedom” in a building to be shared in an odd-couple arrangement with the Drawing Center, an ostensibly more hip organization in SoHo devoted to contemporary works on paper.”

A few decades back, a museum that sold off some of its more valuable artworks to raise cash would find itself thrust into a firestorm of criticism, and most museums actually found it necessary to be accountable to the public that streamed through their doors. No more. Today, museums and libraries seem to feel free to divest themselves of whatever treasures are necessary to fund their latest flights of fancy, and Michael Kimmelman is tired of it. “It’s time for transparency. Increasingly, we demand it from government, the media and Wall Street, in response to dwindling public faith. The same should apply to libraries and museums, which also regularly test our trust.”

The Seattle Art Museum lost its chief curator last week (Lisa Corrin leaves in October to be director at Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass). With SAM working on major expansion with a space-doubling addition and a big new sculpture park, the timing isn’t great…

Three dozen paintings by esteemed surrealist Remedios Varo are in legal limbo in Mexico. “The dispute centers on who owns 39 paintings first lent and then given to Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1999 by Walter Gruen, an Austrian and also a World War II refugee who was Varo’s supporter and lover the last 11 years of the artist’s life. Varo’s niece Beatriz Varo Jimenez of Valencia, Spain, has contended in a Mexico City family court that she is Varo’s rightful heir and that Gruen had no right to give the works to the museum. The niece won a crucial judicial round in March. But Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts is claiming that the works are state patrimony and is appealing the verdict.”

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has received a gift of $100 million in art and cash from collectors James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin. “The McGlothlin assembly includes works by American artists from the 19th and 20th century: George Bellows, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Childe Hassam and Martin Johnson Heade. The art ranges from oil paintings, pastels and watercolors to sculptures, and it forms “one of the most important American art collections still in private hands,” Brand said. The art is valued at $70 million.”

A California developer wants to build a 29-story office tower in Sacramento. “The building would be topped by a replica of the Parthenon, the temple of Athena — the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom — set atop the Acropolis in Athens.”

Ed Ruscha is representing the United States at this year’s Venice Biennale. “One thing this Venice Biennale thing has done is to make me focus on being an American. You can’t help it. They make the rules and they have these nationalistic entries from each country. That does focus you on your origins. So I am feeling the fact that I am an American in Venice. I feel good about that. I take it from a particularly American perspective.”

“Collectors and museums are investing in Dan Flavin’s work like never before. So where exactly do they go when the bulbs in his installations blow? US companies such as General Electric and Mercury stopped producing the bulbs Flavin himself used for his works shortly after his death in 1996.”

“Since May 2003, combined sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips doubled from $109 million (about £60 million) to $220 million last November. But last week they rose to just $225 million. Like a giant pot-bellied pig, the market is lying on its back, enjoying its excesses, but with little room left to expand.”