Category: visual

“Johannes Vermeer’s Young woman seated at the virginals, was sold for £16.2 million ($30 million) to an unnamed bidder at Sotheby’s in London on 7 July. Now it has quietly appeared on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (until 30 March 2005)… A spokesman for the institution would not answer questions concerning the ownership of the painting, nor would he say whether the Philadelphia Museum expects to receive more works of art on loan from the same source.”

Russia’s State Kremlin Museum will be getting a major face lift over the next two years, with the federal government picking up the lion’s share of the tab. “The buildings to be restored include part of the 17th-century Patriarch’s Palace which is to open as a new exhibition hall, as well as the early 16th-century Belfry of Ivan the Great that is to get a new hall for a permanent exhibition on the history of the Kremlin’s architecture. The early 16th-century Archangel Cathedral, which currently functions as a royal crypt housing the remains of Muscovite leaders from the early 1300s until the end of the 1600s, will also be renovated.”

“Sensing that a heated market may soon reach its peak, collectors have consigned hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of artworks for the November sales at New York’s auction houses. Sotheby’s and Christie’s say the estimated sales totals are the highest in nearly 15 years. Usually it is the so-called 3-D’s – death, divorce and debt – that motivate people to sell at auction. But this fall, in addition to the many millions of dollars that the auction houses are estimating people will pay to get what some in the business call ‘wall power,’ many collectors have simply decided that now is the moment to cash in.”

“The surrealist architecture of Gaudi may have helped Barcelona turn itself into a magnet for tourists and one of Europe’s most admired cities. But the emergence of a shop-front in north London in the anarchic style the Catalan pioneered has divided locals and led officials to order its removal. This may be a battle about architecture and commerce in one north London area, but it also reflects a concern that shopping streets across Britain are increasingly looking the same. It is also a test of how adventurous English taste has become. While Antonio Gaudi’s buildings, such as the Sagrada Familia church and his other multi-coloured offerings, perk up Barcelona’s streets, some say they are too radical for Britain.”

Sales have been unexpectedly brisk at this fall’s Art Forum Berlin, suggesting that the German collecting world may be coming out of a 3-year malaise touched off by the brutal recession that hit the country in 2001. The controversy surrounding the Frick collection and the decision of many vendors at the Art Forum to showcase a new generation of younger artists may also be contributing to the uptick in sales.

Michigan’s Henry Ford Museum, which specializes in U.S. history, has announced a major partnership with America Online which will give the museum access to AOL’s 30 million subscribers. “[The deal] comes a week after Walt Disney Imagineering of Glendale, Calif., agreed to give the Henry Ford unlimited access to artifacts from its theme parks to design a first-ever museum exhibit that examines the invention and legacy of Disneyland as a U.S. pop-cultural phenomenon.” It may all sound fairly, um, corporate, but the museum is hoping that its willingness to aggressively market itself through synergy will pay off in long-term financial security.

“Frei Otto, the 79-year-old German architect and structural engineer whose work continues to inspire leading British architects such as Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, has won this year’s Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. Presented by the Royal Institute of British Architects, it is the world’s most prestigious architectural award. Born in Siegmar, Saxony, in 1925, Otto made his mark with a number of impressive ultra-modern and super-light tent-like structures using new materials, beginning with the West German pavilion, designed with Rolf Gutbrod, for the 1967 Montreal Expo.”

In 1992, a group of investors paid a modest sum for the Jelle de Boer art collection, which consisted of works the Dutch collector had judged to be lost creations of van Gogh, Matisse, and Renoir. The sale didn’t exactly set the art world ablaze, since de Boer’s stack of paintings had long since been judged to be fakes. But now, the current owners are asking experts to reexamine the collection, saying that they believe there may be a few authentic diamonds amidst the mass of imitations.

The dispute between resigned Design Museum chairman James Dyson and the trustees bent on updating its mission had been running continuously for years, and contrary to the noise being made by both sides, it isn’t business: this argument is strictly personal. “The problem is not so much a question of whether the Design Museum exhibits engineering triumphs or Manolo Blahnik; it’s a battle between three exceptionally strong-minded people for the future of an institution that they all care about deeply: Dyson, Alice Rawsthorn, the director, and Terence Conran, who established the museum 20 years ago.”

As New York’s Museum of Modern Art looks towards the November opening of its new $858 million Manhattan home, it faces a defining moment in its history, and a moment in which it hopes to abandon the linear way in which its collection has always been strictly organized. “Defined for so long as the arbiter and guardian of progressive art, MOMA reopens… at a time when even its own curators no longer believe that art progresses like science. Narratives overlap and intertwine; instead of one big story, there are many competing stories… But complexity too often leads to incoherence. Can MOMA, the most influential voice in the modern-art establishment, still tell the story of 20th-century art in a convincing way?”