Category: visual

An electronic kiosk promises art on demand. “At a touch-screen terminal called a Totem, you’d browse for a painting by its name, the artist’s name, or the museum in which it is housed. Works are available from institutions like the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the National Gallery in London. Then you’d choose how many copies you’d like to print, at what size and on which medium (choose between 25 types of paper, including canvas and photographic paper). Then go pay the cashier. The Mona Lisa on canvas costs about $30, but larger prints run up to $150.”

Auction prices for contemporary art are shooting up fast. “It’s unhealthy. People don’t know what they’re buying.” Some dealers say they have not seen “indiscriminate buying like this in ages. It’s scaring people.”

A combination of budget constraints and public outcry have made the Art Gallery of Ontario’s expansion a shadow of what it was intended to be, says Frank Gehry, and though he’s committed to seeing the project through, he’s disgusted with what he sees as a Canadian unwillingness to take chances. “The thought of walking off the job at the AGO has crossed his mind. As somebody with profound childhood memories of Toronto, who first experienced art at the AGO, Gehry wants the building to be spectacular. But he shakes his head at his architectural ambition for Toronto.”

Is there anything that Frank Gehry isn’t designing? Hot on the heels of his newest eye-catching building on the MIT campus, the über-architect of the moment has designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey, to be held late this summer in Minnesota. “The trophy is essentially a thin metal cup, made from copper and nickel, contained within a thicker, outer column of subtly swirling, clear plastic. It has the effect of a vase chilled inside a column of carved ice.”

A challenge has been filed against the winner of this year’s Archibald Prize for portraiture. The striking portrait done in graphite and charcoal of actor David Gulpilil that won the competition “has proven a crowd pleaser at the Art Gallery of NSW, also taking out the $2,500 People’s Choice Award last week. The Archibald bequest, however, states the prize had to be awarded to a painting.”

A couple of years ago, art looted by the Nazis was one of the biggest stories of the art world. “Yet, despite all the headlines, relatively little of this looted art has so far been restituted. True, it represents only a small proportion of what the Nazis stole from Jews. After World War II, hundreds of thousands of works were recovered by Allied forces and duly returned to their owners or their heirs.The issue today relates to art that was recovered but was not restituted and art that was resold during the war and ended up in museums and private collections. In theory, a structure is in place to address the problem.” But the reality…

The Museum of Modern Art has sold more than $100 million of artwork from its collection “during the past five years, more than eight times the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s proceeds of $9.23 million in the past five years. Unlike the Met, which typically sells second-tier works, MoMA, throughout its history, has unloaded important objects that would have been treasured icons at almost any other museum, and that collectors have eagerly acquired. Alfred Barr Jr., the founding director, believed that the collection should “metabolically” shed older works as it acquired new ones.”

Frank Gehry’s new Stata Center at MIT “occupies historic, even mystical ground. It sits on the site of the former Building 20, a boxy wooden structure that was thrown up in 1943 and became known as the Magical Incubator for the breakthroughs that took place inside, including the invention of radar and Mr. Chomsky’s pioneering work in linguistics. This building is on the precise site of one of the major flourishings of innovation in the 20th century.”

Robert Hughes is unimpressed by Wilem deKooning’s reputation. “De Kooning has been written about, mainly by Americans, in terms that might seem over-the-top for Rubens. More tempests than Lear and Moby-Dick put together. Hysterical weather reports from some outer galactic fringe, accessible only to Hubble telescopes and art historians – such as John Mekert, who wrote the catalogue for the 1984 retrospective: ‘The creative force of eros has merged with the flux of a shapeless magma of light and unbound matter drifting towards congealment into form.’ Yikes!”

“The troubled and besieged Art Gallery of Ontario is about to get some major help fixing its tarnished image. To mastermind a turnaround, the AGO has hired Susan Bloch-Nevitte — one of the behind-the-scenes stars of the University of Toronto’s [$1 billion fundraising] success story. During the past year, the AGO has endured every plague a museum could have: falling attendance; budget-slashing; labour strife; a security problem that surfaced with the theft of Ken Thomson’s miniature ivories; a public uproar over the closing of the Group of Seven galleries; conflict with residents of its neighbourhood, and, most sensationally, the defection of major benefactor and board member Joey Tanenbaum over Frank Gehry’s makeover design.”