Category: visual

“Saskia Olde Wolbers has won the £24,000 Beck’s Futures art prize. The 33-year-old was handed the cheque by Yoko Ono last night at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.”

Norman Foster’s new skyscraper has “slipped so easily into the London skyline that it comes as a shock to discover that it officially opened only yesterday. That is the trouble with a very, very tall building. It takes so long to go up that, by the time it is finished, you feel you’ve known it for ever.”

Some auction watchers are saying (no self-interest there) that Picasso’s “Boy With a Pipe” might set a record sale price. “Dealers and experts are betting that it could fetch as much as $100 million next week, eclipsing the world record set in 1990 when van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” sold at Christie’s in New York for $82.5 million.”

Minnesota’s Spam Museum has become an oddball hit. “Opened in September 2001 on the site of an old Kmart, the Spam Museum has become something of a kitsch icon throughout the Midwest. The folks at the museum have taken out billboards up and down I-90 with quirky messages like: “The Spam Museum: Believe the Hype” and “Find Out What’s Inside.”

“Since it moved into its cavernous new home, the story at [Detroit’s] Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History has been one of managerial blunders, lax oversight and financial calamity,” according to a newspaper investigation. The museum was pushed and cajoled into existence in the late 1990s with little in the way of realistic planning or appropriate funding, and the city has pumped $13 million into the institution since then. Now, with the museum unable to balance its books and in danger of not making each new payroll, a lack of business sense and basic accountability is being blamed for the mess.

Thirty-seven Philadelphia art institutions are collaborating on a massive project focusing on… well, nothing. From paintings that are nothing more than white canvas to tours of empty houses to philosphical explorations of ‘cosmological black holes,’ the collaboration, which has been dubbed “The Big Nothing,” will examine the idea of art as a reflection of space. “So much of the universe – so much of us, for that matter – is empty space. The [project] examines in depth the ramifications of that idea.”

Charles Saatchi has launched an astonishing and unprecedented broadside against the ‘mindless’ critics who savaged his most recent show. ‘I feel I’ve grown into my role as pantomime villain, but it is mindless to dismiss the art I show just because it’s me that is showing it’.”

“In London, we have a simple but serious problem: we don’t have enough room for exhibitions. In view of the scale of the capital’s art establishments – mighty Tate Modern, the grand old Royal Academy – this may seem surprising. But none the less it’s true – or true of some places.”

“There are plenty of painters of real accomplishment working in as modern and abstract a mode as one could wish, who never achieve the support of any public gallery or institution, if they are perhaps a shade too old, their gallery is not quite advanced enough, their work is no longer seen as “cutting edge” or their face don’t fit.”

The Regina (Saskatchewan) city council has approved a controversial new library budget Monday that “delays the closures of three branches, the Dunlop Art Gallery and the Prairie History Room, but the new plan came at a price: the resignation of almost half of the library board.”