Category: visual

How do you get a community to embrace the construction of a water treatment plant in its backyard? Hire a really good architect, and build the coolest-looking water treatment plant ever. “From New Haven to Hiroshima, architects best known for signature museums and concert halls are now designing buildings filled with tanks and filters… Why shout ‘Not in my backyard!’ if your backyard can be made to resemble a sculpture garden?”

Where is the hot art scene in Manhattan these days? Okay, Soho has gentrified itself out of art. But the new art hotspots are compelling…

These days it takes more than money to buy art from the hottest artists. “The contemporary-art market hasn’t been this overheated since Soho circa 1989. Nowadays, hedge-fund billionaires who stroll into Chelsea galleries seeking work by Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, or Cecily Brown quickly discover that money alone won’t help them get it. There is, more than ever, a waiting list, and more to the point, a pecking order within the list, which vaults some collectors above others.”

Are “David’s” physical proportions correct? Michelangelo’s “towering sculpture acclaimed for its depiction of male physical perfection, has always been the subject of jokes among Florentines and tourists for the modest dimensions of his “pisello.” But according to a study to be published at the end of this month by the Dutch Institute for Art History, in Florence, David’s genitals are anatomically correct for a male body in a “pre-fight tension.”

Artist Steven Kurtz faces 20 years in jail, accused of charges related to bio-terrorism. “Most scientists considered the accusations nonsense. It is common practice to exchange material on a casual basis. Vials and test-tubes are carried in pockets and briefcases and swapped at conferences or in pubs. Kurtz believes he is a victim of a political persecution. ‘I have been vocal about the way the state is using research in germ warfare. That is why they want to get me’.”

“Little daring architecture was born of the fortune that was spent on rebuilding Berlin in the 1990’s – which was just how the city fathers wanted it.” But in the years since reunification, the challenge of embracing bold new architecture in Berlin has been enthusiastically taken up – not by the Germans, but by the architects of the foreign embassies that dot the city. “In an unusual communal experiment, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland have built a hamlet of embassies behind a glowing green copper fence in the traditional diplomatic district of Tiergarten in the former West Berlin. Across town, deep inside the former East Berlin, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has designed his country’s ultramodern embassy overlooking the Spree River.

New York entrepreneur and art collector John Friede has announced that he will donate his entire 3,000-piece collection of New Guinean art to the soon-to-reopen de Young Museum in San Francisco. The collection is valued at over $100 million, and 300 pieces will be immediately exhibited in the de Young’s new building when it opens in October.

One year after abandoning the practice of using an expert advisory committee to select American participants for international art exhibitions, the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. State Department are reconstituting the panel. The new committee will be made up of nine diverse curators, museum directors, and artists from across the U.S., and is expected to be in place within months.

New York City’s seemingly Quixotic quest to build a major new train station in midtown Manhattan has finally become a reality, and three developers are competing for the right to design it. “The design proposals all incorporate what has playfully become known as the potato chip – a shapely glass and steel canopy that will encompass the new station’s entry lobby. That canopy, designed by David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, would envelop a series of concourses that slip under the post office building, letting light flow onto the train platforms below ground.” The new station would replace New York’s dilapidated and congested Penn Station.

“After being delayed more than a year by litigation, the plan to reclad and recreate 2 Columbus Circle as the new home of the Museum of Arts and Design is poised to proceed after a court decision in its favor yesterday. A five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court unanimously upheld the earlier dismissal by Justice Walter B. Tolub of a lawsuit against the reconstruction project by three preservation groups – Landmark West, Historic Districts Council and Docomomo.”