Category: visual

“The Rubin Museum of Art opens on Oct. 2 with kite flying on the West Side piers, a Himalayan dog parade and some 100 fluttering prayer flags by contemporary artists. An infusion of $60 million has transformed a decommissioned temple of haute consumerism into an elegant, multihued jewel of a museum, designed by the architect Richard Blinder of Beyer Blinder Belle. Its 70,000 square feet, decked out in bright red, green, gold and blue, comprise America’s largest, boldest and most significant museum devoted entirely to Tibetan and other Himalayan art.” The whole gaudy enterprise is the brianchild of collector Donald Rubin, who bought the building that became the museum on a whim back in 1998.

Sydney artist Craig Ruddy was awarded Australia’s prestigious Archibald Prize earlier this year. But the award has sparked a vicious court fight and is drawing a lot of attention from the media, after painter Tony Johansen took the Art Gallery of New South Wales Trust to court over a technicality. Specifically, Johansen claims that Ruddy’s winning portrait is a mixed-media drawing, which should make it ineligible for a painting award. Nit-picking? Sure. But Ruddy is garnering a great deal of support from some interesting corners…

A UK program that allows people to pay inheritance taxes in art rather than cash has netted the government art “worth more than £21 million, including paintings by Constable and Turner.

“In the latest in a string of attacks on outdoor artworks in Italy, vandals have smashed a stone bee that adorns a centuries-old fountain by Renaissance master Gian Lorenzo Bernini in central Rome. The attack late on Monday night followed similar assaults in Rome and Venice in which vandals have used hammers and stones to chip away at priceless works of art.”

Among the millions of dollars worth of artwork destroyed in Saatchi fire was the Chapman brothers’ Hell, considered their best work. It consists of 10,000 plastic figures and took two years to make. Now the brothers have decided to rebuild. “We’re going to make a second version, a more extensive, updated `Hell.’ There are a lot of things that didn’t go into the first `Hell.’ This has given us a second opportunity to revisit it.’ Much has changed since 1998, when they began working on Hell. ‘At the time we had just lost our gallery and were unemployed. We had time on our hands’.”

Vancouver is sewer shopping. The city put out a call to artists to design manhole covers and got 643 proposals. “We thought we’d receive maybe 300 submissions. We didn’t know what to expect. At first you might think ‘Who wants art on sewer covers? How mundane.’ But man, it’s going to be great,”

London’s Victoria & Albert Museum has failed to win Lottery funding for its proposed Daniel Libeskind-designed addition, dubbed the Spiral extension. “Plans to build the “crumpled” construction in the museum’s outside courtyard had faced strong criticism,” and museum officials say the Lottery failure puts the project in jeopardy.

“Architect Daniel Libeskind held out ‘approval’ on the Freedom Tower design in an attempted $800,000 shakedown, twin towers leaseholder Larry Silverstein charged in court papers yesterday.” The two are at odds over the designs and Libeskind’s participation.

A rare Claudel-Rodin statue was recovered from the bottom of the Seine in Paris after days of searching. “Stolen from Versailles several weeks ago, the statue – valued at £530,000 – was feared lost after those suspected of the robbery were arrested and confessed to throwing it into the Seine. But a police diving team launched a painstaking search of the river in an area where witnesses reported seeing the suspects dispose of the statue.”

“The Pageant of the Masters, a 70-year-old Laguna Beach California hallmark, reenacts art masterpieces with live models, called tableaux vivants. A 2002 plan by then executive director Steven Brezzo to have the pageant produced in other communities caused an uproar among members.” Now members of the festival are considering whether to prohibit such licensing without approval of the festival members.