Category: visual

Thom Mayne has won this year’s Pritzker Prize for architecture. “In its citation the Pritzker jury acknowledged Mr. Mayne’s countercultural roots, calling him a product of the turbulent 60’s who has carried that rebellious attitude and fervent desire for change into his practice, the fruits of which are only now becoming visible in a group of large-scale projects.”

Can the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation (based in Scottsdale, Arizona) be saved? “The foundation has been beset with financial woes, revolving-door management, turmoil on its board of directors and faculty and student turnover in its famed architecture school.” One solution being proposed to to try to work with the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy…

“People still debate the relative value of art made to be used (crafts and design), and art made to be contemplated (painting, drawing and sculpture). It’s the utilitarian versus the high art tradition. But why must high mean better? Why can’t it just describe a certain history of techniques and practices? Given the adulation and money poured into the high art world by collectors and corporations, the notion of art for art’s sake seems pretty passé.”

“Cities used to be planned by professional city planners. But the planning profession as we know it arose, to a large extent, as a response to the urban renewal legislation of the 1950s and ’60s, when federal funds poured into cities. Now federal money has dried up. Planning agencies in most cities are underfunded and weak. They react to proposals, rather than initiating anything themselves… So who’s doing serious planning? Look around. Harvard is planning a whole new neighborhood in Allston. Columbia, already the third-largest landowner in New York, has hired noted architect Renzo Piano to help mastermind its expansion into an area called Manhattanville. The University of Pennsylvania, the largest employer and largest landowner in Philadelphia, is reaching out to revitalize the city.”

When Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center opens its striking new addition to the public next month, it will likely be a big deal in the Twin Cities. But anyone looking for the locally popular Walker to capitalize on the attention by hosting huge touring shows shows and trying to draw massive crowds would be missing the point. “Welcome to the contrarian world of the Walker, a place that prefers artful provocation to blockbuster entertainment, privileges the obscure and experimental over the tried-and-true, and cultivates a willful insouciance about the forces that govern most big museum establishment… [The museum’s] insistence on creative independence has meant turning down a chance at tens of millions of dollars in state support, despite a financial crisis that has crippled the Walker’s endowment and led to painful staff cuts.”

Speaking of the Walker Art Center, its renovation is considerably over budget, even with $5 million in unforeseen costs deferred to future years…

More than 30 years ago, New York’s Guggenheim Museum acquiesced to the complaints of a number of artists involved in the museum’s sixth International exhibition, and removed a massive piece of installation art, which was supposedly blocking views of other works, from its center well. “An acrimonious debate about the work’s removal continued long after the event had passed, leaving lasting antipathies between artists and leading to the departure of a curator, Douglas Crimp.” This week, Daniel Buren, the artist responsible for the offending work, returns to the Guggenheim with his own show, and the centerpiece is a massive tower of mirrors that dwarf the piece the museum once felt compelled to reject.

“Scheduled to open Oct. 15, the beautiful $202 million M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, is about 98 percent finished. The interior of the 144-foot-tall twisting tower, which will contain classrooms and a library, still needs work. And the exterior landscaping has yet to begin. But the main building of the 300,000-square-foot city-owned museum is all but done.”

The Getty is beginning its search for a new director of the Getty Museum. A ten-member search committee has been formed, and a timetable set…

“The group was aided by the sale in May of Picasso’s 1905 work Garcon a la Pipe for $104m, making it the most expensive artwork auctioned. The company posted profits of $88m for 2004 on sales of $497m. That compares with a loss of $21m for the previous period.”