Category: visual

The $28,000 Schweppes photographic portraiture prize has been awarded to German photographer Jens Lucking for his stark and engaging shot of three young Japanese women. The picture, which was posed, stood out for the way in which its subjects stared defiantly into the camera, and the jury also praised Lucking’s use of classical arrangement techniques.

“Those attending the first of the society soirées, on Tuesday, will be rubbing shoulders with probably the largest assortment of famous and almost-famous living artists ever to sip cocktails under one roof.”

An American archaeologist says he’s found the long lost city of Atlantis. “Robert Sarmast said sonar scanning of the seabed between east Cyprus and Syria revealed man-made walls, one as long as 3 kilometers (2 miles), and trenches at a depth of 1,500 meters (1,640 yards). ‘It is a miracle we found these walls as their location, and lengths match exactly the description of the acropolis of Atlantis provided by Plato in his writings’.”

Washington DC’s historic Old Patent Office building gets a $25 million gift to help transform it into a new museum complex. “The Kogod money will enable the museum to proceed with a dramatic glass enclosure over the courtyard of the building, which will reopen in 2006 as the restored home of both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.”

MoMA’s sparkling new Manhattan home is getting mainly rave reviews from press and public. But what does Yoshio Taniguchi, the architect who designed the $855 million building, think about how his vision has taken shape? “I think I’m quite satisfied,” he said.

England’s Arts Council is proposing a new program of interest-free loans to encourage aspiring art collectors to invest in works which they might otherwise consider beyond their price range. “The scheme, called Own Art, works through a network of 250 participating galleries, all of which have been vetted for quality, so punters cannot spend the loan on doing up the kitchen or going on a cruise. All that buyers have to do is possess a bank account which can handle direct debit, have proof of identity and address, and be over 18. The loan – between £100 and £2,000 – is paid back in 10 monthly instalments.”

“Within less than a month thieves have stolen Chinese antiquities from two London museums. The Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum both suffered apparently professional thefts of small portable decorative objects from cabinets on public display. It is likely that both thefts took place during museum opening hours.”

For two decades, Richard Gluckman, now 57, has been known as the artists’ architect, designing luminous gallery spaces in Chelsea for clients like Larry Gagosian and Mary Boone and larger projects like the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Museo Picasso in Málaga, Spain. But now, in a case of career following title, he actually has become an architect for artists, designing the personal work spaces for some of the most prominent figures in contemporary art.”

Here is a new building for the Museum of Modern Art that respects history. “The building, which reopens on Saturday, may disappoint those who believe the museum’s role should be as much about propelling the culture forward as about preserving our collective memory. Its focus, instead, is a conservative view of the past: the building’s clean lines and delicately floating planes are shaped by the assumption that Modernity remains our central cultural experience.”

China’s newly wealthy are buying up entire collections of art, sending prices soaring. “Awakening at last to their own cultural heritage, which was sold off to the West at knock-down prices at the turn of the century, the new rich are reversing that trend and are bringing the art works home. Former peasant farmers, who now wear diamond-studded gold watches, are investing in private museums to put their new-found works on display.”