Category: visual

“Maggie’s, a cancer care centre designed for free by the renowned US architect Frank Gehry, was yesterday declared British building of the year. It came top in the Royal Fine Art Commission’s annual awards. Gehry has called the design – which seeks to welcome the centre’s patients with light gently reflected from an undulating steel roof – ‘about my best yet’.”

With widescreen TV making sporting events ever more enticing to view from your couch or your barstool rather than in person, the people who market soccer in Europe are turning to stadium architects to help draw the cheering crowds and create a unique sense of place. “The aim has been to maximise roof spans and minimise obstructed views and the basic problem is that there are only so many solutions for big roofs, most of which have been used.”

Two Silicon Valley art galleries were suddenly and unexpectedly raided by California law enforcement officials last week for illegally serving alcohol on the premises, with an official charge of misdemeanor sale/furnishing of alcohol without a permit being leveled against the owners and executives. The crime carries a possible penalty of six months in jail and a $1000 fine. The raid occurred during Palo Alto’s monthly Art Walk event, and gallery officials are complaining about the timing and tone of the raid. The state contends that it warned the galleries in April that they needed a license to serve alcohol, and that the warning was ignored.

“With a feuding management, a major exhibition cancelled and a former head who claims that the institution needs fundamental reforms, the Royal Academy of Arts appears to be foundering.”

A nationwide manhunt is underway for someone who hung paintings of presidents Bush and Clinton in the Metropolitan Museum, Guggenheim, National Gallery in Washington DC, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The paintings — 15 inches by 9 inches — portray the commanders-in-chief on a background of ground-up dollar bills. The wacky spree has prompted a sweeping investigation by the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI, as well as local police in three cities.”

The Guggenheim Museum is to undergo a $25 million 2-year facelift. “Like many Wright buildings, the New York landmark is plagued with cracks, leaks and corroding surfaces.

“The authors and publishers of the Edouard Vuillard catalogue raisonné and of the exhibition catalogue of the recently touring Vuillard retrospective are being sued in French and US courts by two art historians who claim the books plagiarise their work.”

The Berlin government is dropping plans for a museum documenting the Gestapo. The federal German government will now take up the project and is announcing a new architectural competition to design the building.

Curators at the Museum of Modern Art struggles to retell the story of their collection in the new spaces of their new home. “It is a daunting task: to use the museum’s vast collection to tell the history of modern art in new and unfamiliar galleries. Not only has the museum’s collection grown and changed enormously since the institution’s founding in 1929, but so has the way that people look at art. We’re talking to a younger and in many ways better-educated audience but one that is not necessarily more sophisticated”

“There isn’t a major gallery in the world that doesn’t house – and in most cases proudly display – works that “aren’t what they seem”. There is a joke among art dealers and forgery specialists that of the 324 canvases (or whatever the precise figure) painted by Corot, 562 are hanging in museums and private houses in America. The former Met director Thomas Hoving reckoned 40 per cent of the works offered to the museum were either phonies or so hypocritically restored they were no better than forgeries.”