Category: visual

The famed Bamiyan cliff Buddhas may be rubble, but what about the legendary lost giant Bamiyan Buddha? “It’s hard to believe that the sculpture ever went missing. According to the writings of a Chinese pilgrim who reported seeing the reclining Buddha in AD 629, it stretched 1,000 feet. Today, the pilgrim’s brief, 1,375-year-old account remains the most detailed description of the sleeping Buddha. Probably constructed in the late 6th century, the statue hasn’t been seen in hundreds of years. And even experts who believe the sculpture exists doubt it is — or was — more than three football fields long.”

The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts closed this week, owing a lot of money. “According to a federal tax return filed by the nonprofit, the center took in $1.9 million in revenue in 2002 but spent $2.8 million. Local artists, who founded the center in 1945, were dismayed to learn of its closing and frustrated because many of them have been trying for months to obtain payment for their work.”

Why should the Parthenon Marbles stay in the British Museum? They’re an essential part of the story of art. “Here in these rooms is the fundamental vocabulary of Western sculpture, the beginnings of Giovanni Pisano, Donatello and Michelangelo, the visual and practical storehouse of the Italian Renaissance. To destroy such a treasury of beautiful solutions by removing its heart would to my mind represent as much an act of vandalism as any ever perpetrated upon art.”

Hundreds of works presented in a Finnish show marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Salvador Dali have been declared fake. “360 works supposedly by Dali were forgeries or tampered copies. A further 150 works purportedly by artists including Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, were also thought to be forged. Police were tipped off by “dozens” of collectors who bought suspected fakes.”

The Leaning Tower of Pisa isn’t motionless, but its tilt at last has been stabilized. “Reporting on the present conditions of the monument at the 32nd World Geological Conference in Florence, Italy, Turin University’s Michele Jamiolkowski, president of the committee for the protection of the tower, said that the famous tilt has been finally halted.”

“A director at the Royal Academy of Arts has denied the arts institution is in crisis over the discovery of an unauthorised £80,000 bank account set up by Professor Brendan Neiland, the keeper of the Royal Academy Schools who resigned three weeks ago.”

A sculpture based on Michelangelo’s “Pieta” was the target of the thieves, but it was the 100-mile-per-hour winds that triggered the alarm system. “Looters stole a Vatican-commissioned bronze bust of the Virgin Mary from a gallery in Florida during the height of Hurricane Charley.”

It’s been a busy month for art thieves. “The bronze statue ‘Resting Hermes,’ a remnant of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition that was stolen in the 1970s and quickly returned, disappeared in the dead of night from its base outside the University Club on California Street in San Francisco.”

The city of Denver is getting more than 2,100 artworks by the late abstract expressionist Clyfford Still, to go on display in a planned museum devoted to him. The artist’s archives, however, are not part of the deal. “While the absence of the archives would have little effect on the general public’s enjoyment of the museum, it would almost certainly prevent it from becoming a world-class research facility along the lines of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.”

With $1 million in debt, the 59-year-old nonprofit has closed its doors and laid off its 13 staffers.