Category: visual

“A rare Picasso canvas from the painter’s Rose period could set an art-world sales record with a hammer price of as much as $100-million when it goes up for auction on Wednesday evening at a blockbuster single-owner sale at Sotheby’s in New York. The event kicks off the spring season of Impressionist and modern-art sales.”

“Four months after spending $7.5 million to buy the Farnsworth House and keep the icon of 20th Century modernism in Illinois, preservationists will open the house for tours Saturday, hoping the public will warm to the cool, steel-and-glass masterwork by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The 53-year-old house, 58 miles southwest of Chicago, appeared to be in jeopardy until a last-minute surge of donations gave preservation groups the war chest they needed to purchase it on Dec. 12 at a Sotheby’s auction in New York. The groups had feared that a wealthy bidder might move the house out of state.”

“A stealthy proposal to privatize a popular public museum as a solution to San Francisco’s short-term budget shortfalls has raised the hackles of museum users, who are demanding a full public airing of the agreement. The Randall Museum, home to children’s art and science programs in the city since 1951, would have its operations turned over to the Randall Museum Friends, a private, nonprofit organization with about 20 members whose stated mission is to ‘support the Randall Museum by providing strategic private-sector leadership, raising funds, and advocating for the museum.'”

“Virtually nothing compares with the scale and ambition of the museums planned for Qatar’s capital Doha.” The capital is being remade, and five museums, designed by architectural heavyweights, are in the planning.

The Museum of Modern Art is selling nine paintings and could raise $27 million from the sale. At the same time, “a London source close to the contemporary art market told The Art Newspaper that the museum is considering the purchase of the 13 Damien Hirsts now on show at Tate Britain in the exhibition “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” (until 31 May). Could MoMA be trading its Picassos, Légers, and Pollocks for a flock of butterfly paintings and vitrines by Mr Hirst?”

How do you rebuild the Oklahoma Federal Building that was blown up? It’s not easy to make a statement. “With elegant curving walls of glass and brute masses of concrete, the three-story, $42.7 million structure is both anti-fortress and fortress, a self-consciouslessly masculine building that doesn’t shy from a show of strength — and sometimes goes too far.”

There was a time when some artists, rejecting the whole art “scene”, strove to make art that couldn’t be captured, couldn’t be collected, couldn’t be bought and sold. That was then. “We do live in more conservative times, not just politically but culturally; hence the impulse toward conservation. More poignantly, artists want to be remembered when they’re gone. It’s easy if you’re Rembrandt, even though all things must eventually fade. But it’s not so easy if you’re a creator of youthfully defiant ephemeral art.”

British museums that previously charged entrance fees have seen a 72% increase in attendancesince December 2001. That’s 11 million extra visitors. “But the organisation behind May’s Museum and Galleries Month says many of England’s 1,500 museums and galleries have not reaped the benefit.”

“The projected expansion of [Boston’s] Museum of Fine Arts moved forward this week when the Boston Redevelopment Authority unanimously approved the museum’s site plan during a key hearing. The approval gives the museum permission to start work on a plan that will nearly double its size, as well as reestablish entrances on the south… The museum is a year away from breaking ground on the first phase of the expansion, which is expected to be completed by 2009. It will add galleries, new courtyards and — its most architecturally significant feature — a crystal spine running through and over the existing building. A planned $425 million capital campaign will pay for the project.”

“Derrick R. Cartwright, director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, has been named the executive director of the San Diego Museum of Art.”