Category: visual

The Cleveland Museum is asking local and federal governments to contribute $36 million towards a $225 million expansion project. “The expansion and renovation would enlarge the 389,000-square-foot museum complex by nearly 200,000 square feet, and add 31,000 square feet of new gallery space. The museum hopes to complete its design by January and to break ground in March or April. Construction would take four years.”

Rem Koolhaas’s new Seattle Public Library has been praised to the skies. But David Dillon takes a second look: “As the rhetorical fog begins to lift, it’s clear that some of the praise was justified and some not. This is a dynamic civic building that bumps and grinds its way onto the downtown Seattle skyline with real panache. It reinvents and reinterprets many basic library functions, yet for all its adventurousness still manages to celebrate the book and reading. But it is not as coolly efficient as its boosters claim, and at street level it is a disaster, thumbing its nose at traditional urbanism in favor of gratuitous form making.”

Maurizio Cattelan is “recovering from an attack of ‘art rage’: a Milanese man was so incensed by his ‘installation’ of three children hanging by their necks, eyes open, from a tree that he cut them down. It is not clear whether this was a triumph for Cattelan or a tragedy. He is not suing the attacker but Milan authorities are busy determining whether the installation was really a work of art, in which case the saboteur would face charges.”

“Before they became ubiquitous on credit cards and packets of toothpaste, holograms were the buzz of the avant-garde art world. But as a new holographic portrait of the Queen (right) is unveiled, 3D pictures are sneered at by the art elite.”

The winner of this year’s £25,000 BP portrait award is an Aberdeenshire-based graphic designer and artist, Stephen Shankland.

“The New York Historical Society, with a newly hired president and a conservative financier emerging as a board power, is shifting its focus from the city to more national concerns, stirring the objections of some historians and staff members… This shift in emphasis appears to signal the ascendance on the society’s board of Richard Gilder, a stockbroker and a leading fund-raiser for Republican and conservative causes, who became a trustee a year ago. It also seems to close off all possibility of the society’s merger with the Museum of the City of New York.”

The Cleveland Museum buys an important Greek bronze. The Cleveland Apollo is “the only one out of roughly 20 large Greek bronzes in the world that can be connected directly to any of the greatest ancient Greek masters.The Cleveland Apollo is the only known large bronze version of its subject in the world. Two life- size Roman marble copies exist at the Louvre in Paris and the Vatican in Rome.”

“The Cleveland Museum of Art has bought what it thinks is an ancient bronze sculpture of Apollo the Lizard Slayer by the classical Greek sculptor Praxiteles. If it is authentic, it will be one of the most important ancient bronzes in an American museum.”

The “biggest modern art auction in the UK in a decade” has brought in £61 million in London. “The total included £6.2m paid for the 1918 painting Garcon a la Veste Bleu by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.”

Who was the woman known to the world as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa? “Seventeen years of research, beginning in Germany, have led the Adelaide historian Maike Vogt- Luerssen to believe that the Mona Lisa is the lovesick former Duchess of Milan, Isabella of Aragon, and not the wife of a florentine silk merchant, as has been believed.”