Category: visual

An Andy Warhol portrait of Elizabeth Taylor has been sold in New York for $12.6 million. “The painting, which was made from a publicity photo in the year Taylor starred in the Cleopatra, just exceeded its pre-sale estimate of $9-12m. The portrait had been owned by the same person since 1965 and was bought by English diamond mogul Laurence Graff.”

Thanks to computer scanning technology, we’ve now got a pretty good idea what King Tut looked like. “Three teams of scientists have created the first facial reconstructions of King Tutankhamun based on CT scans of his mummy. The images are strikingly similar both to each other and to ancient portraits of the boy pharaoh, including his depiction on the famed golden mask he wore into the crypt.”

Alberta’s provincial music is to get a $150 million update and a new name in honor of the Canadian province’s 100th anniversary. “The money, to be spent over the next five years, will be used to update and renew the museum, which will also be christened with a new name – the Royal Alberta Museum – when the Queen visits Alberta later this month.”

“Every year, in one way or another, museums test the public’s faith in their integrity. Now comes the Met with its current Chanel-sponsored Chanel show, a fawning trifle that resembles a fancy showroom. Sparsely outfitted with white cube display boxes and a bare minimum of meaningful text, this absurdly uncritical exhibition puts Coco’s designs alongside work by the current monarch of the House of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld.”

“Substantially financed by the fashion house, “Chanel” is tainted by the same sort of self-interested sponsorship that brought notoriety to “Armani” at the Guggenheim Museum in 2000 and “Sensation,” the 1999 Brooklyn Museum showcase for Charles Saatchi’s collection. We expect better from the Met, an institution always admired as a guardian of professional standards.”

“François Pinault, a billionaire who is France’s wealthiest art lover, announced Monday that he was abandoning plans to build a $195 million contemporary art museum on the outskirts of Paris and would instead present part of his vast collection in the Palazzo Grassi, an elegant exhibition space on the Grand Canal in Venice that he recently acquired.”

If you could afford to have your portrait painted, wouldn’t you want the artist to “correct” some of your imperfections? “Renaissance artists acted like plastic surgeons by changing the shape of noses, chins and jaws in their portraits, new forensic technology has revealed.”

The forward-thinking Dia Foundation plans to move from its current two spaces to a new location a few blocks north. The new neighborhood is primed to be New York’s next hot location, at the entrance of a new park. “Plans call for possibly demolishing the existing structure, an old meatpacking facility now in disrepair, and building a simple two-story museum with 45,000 square feet of gallery space on two floors.”

Berlin’s new “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman, is the apotheosis of soul-searching. A vast grid of 2,711 concrete pillars whose jostling forms seem to be sinking into the earth, it is able to convey the scope of the Holocaust’s horrors without stooping to sentimentality – showing how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexities of human emotion.”

There was a time when public art in American cities stood out, trying to make a statement. Those days seem long gone. These days public art is so woven into the landscape that you sometimes don’t even realize it’s there.