Category: visual

“On Saturday, with the help of the Public Art Fund, the artist Allison Smith and more than 100 other artists commandeered [New York’s] Governors Island to create a kind of conceptual art version of day camp. Or maybe a Dadaist’s dream of a craft fair. Or else a mini-Woodstock in which music was replaced by artists taking the stage in mock-military style to declare that they were fighting for causes like “sequined religious figures,” “the right to sing sentimental songs in full,” “the right to be scared” or more straightforward causes like financial support for AIDS research and ending overfishing of the oceans.”

Important historical buildings are being threatened in Moscow. Preservationists are “concerned about the legacy of the Soviet avant-garde, the buildings designed in the 15 or so years following the 1917 October revolution, perhaps the most fertile period in Russian architectural history. These buildings range from the expressionistic forms of architects like Konstantin Melnikov to the machine-inspired, functionalist structures of the Constructivists. They are stunning for their eclecticism, yet they were united by an unfaltering optimism. The goal was to overthrow centuries of cultural history and to replace that past with an architectural order that would embody the values of a new, modern society.”

Queen Elizabeth has agreed to have her portrait painted by TV painter/entertainer Rolf Harris. “She will have a formal sitting with the Australian entertainer for a Rolf on Art special for BBC One. Harris said he was “thrilled to bits”. When the BBC put the idea to Buckingham Palace, they were told the Queen would be delighted to take part.”

A Scottish parliamentary committee has warned the National Gallery after it was disclosed that the museum had used money allocated for buying art to cover running expenses. “The committee launched hearings this spring after it emerged that in 2002-3 and 2003-4, first £400,000 and then another £1.15 million was diverted from the galleries’ acquisitions fund for buying new art to running costs. Without it, the galleries would have run up a combined deficit of over £1 million.”

The Hermitage is planning a huge expansion that will create the largest galleries for 19th Century art in the world. “In recent years, the world’s greatest museums have been expanding and reinventing themselves in response to mass tourism and a heightened interest in the visual arts. We have seen the creation of the Grand Louvre, the Tate Modern conversion of Bankside power station and a vast new building for MOMA in New York. Now it is the turn of the Hermitage.”

What is Britons’ favorite painting? The National Gallery aims to find out in a poll. “Following on from the BBC’s attempts to celebrate the greatest Briton as well as discover our most beloved book, the gallery is launching a public poll to highlight The Greatest Painting in Britain. And just as with Great Britons and The Big Read, this exercise will end up telling us far more about who we think we are than the quality of our aesthetic sensibility.”

“Even before last week’s sales of contemporary art at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York, the catalogs for those events indicated that art made during the last four decades has become attractive to potential buyers. And the sale results confirm the emergence of a cohort of youngish collectors eager to buy recent art at prices that continue to rise, sometimes to levels that astonish dealers. Concomitantly, interest in art that has yet to prove its historical staying power appears to be driving the market.”

A 1983 work by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold at auction for $1.5 million this week, leading the way to a more than satisfactory $23.6 million night for the newly trendy boutique auction house of Phillips, de Pury & Company. Located in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, Phillips has emerged as one of the city’s art hot spots of the moment, drawing a decidedly image-conscious crowd to bid on the trendiest of contemporary art.

Architect Doug Suisman doesn’t really know much about Mideast politics, and doesn’t pretend to know how Israelis and Palestinians can ever be made to live in peace side by side. But Suisman’s idealistic design for a post-war Palestine, commissioned by the Rand Corporation, is raising eyebrows in geopolitical circles for its breadth of vision and pie-in-the-sky hopes for a thoroughly modern state. “Rand, where the analysis is meant to be astringent, not romantic, has now bet heavily on naïveté. It has presented Mr. Suisman’s idea of Palestine to the White House, the European Union, the World Bank and others, as well as to the Palestinians and Israelis. The idea has captured the attention, and imagination, of at least some Palestinian policymakers.”

“A trove of 32 previously unknown works by abstract art icon Jackson Pollock has been discovered by a family friend, who said Friday he would like them to tour internationally and be studied by art historians. Alex Matter, a filmmaker who knew Pollock from childhood, said the collection was among the possessions of his late parents, who were long associated with Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner. About two years ago Matter stumbled upon the artworks, wrapped in brown paper since 1958 and stored for almost three decades in a warehouse in East Hampton, Long Island.”