Category: visual

It looks like the Acropolis Museum in Greece is much behind schedule. “Athens had initially planned to have the 94-million-euro museum in place for the Olympics, hoping to shame the British Museum into complying with Greece’s demand for the return of the Parthenon, or Elgin, Marbles. However, some 20 months after the foundations were supposed to have been laid under the Acropolis, nothing has materialized.”

Many critics don’t want to see the Barnes Collection close its current location and move to Philadelphia. But what if the Barnes could do both? “What if the promised money from the foundations indeed went toward a new Barnes facility in Philadelphia but the original estate remained open and intact? Imagine, instead of a replica installation of the whole collection in an incongruously modern edifice downtown, a new urban Barnes Center that would connect visitors first to the idea of the Barnes and then to the strange jewel of a museum itself.”

The US Mint has rejected depicting snow on the quarter to represent Minnesota. “According to the Mint, federal law bars ‘any frivolous or inappropriate design.’ It said that lawyers for the Treasury Department, where the Mint resides, decided in 2000 that a single snowflake didn’t pass the frivolity test. But not until after the Mint had come up with its own large lacy snowflake” and proposed the idea to Vermont.

The first exhition of British art to show in Iran in 25 years is opening. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition includes works by many big names of UK art including Damien Hirst, Henry Moore and Gilbert and George. “They’re very familiar to all this work – but in a second-hand way all from photographs and even from the internet.”

A new $2.5 million website puts a “virtual Egypt” online. “By going to the website – http://www.eternalegypt.org – a person sitting at a computer will be able to do such things as visit the Temple of Luxor or watch how the seated statue of Ramses II has changed over historical periods (once it was sheltered at the front of a temple, now it sits naked to the elements).”

Los Angeles’ Disney Hall is a big success, but some of its neighbors aren’t so happy. It seems that at certain times of the day sun reflects off the metal-clad building and into nearby apartments, thereby blinding occupants and heating up their homes by as much as 15 degrees. “You would have to literally close the drapes and you’d still feel warmth in the house. You would have the air conditioning on all the time.”

The Metropolitan Museum is embarking on a $155 million project that will expand the museum’s exhibition space. “The project, along the south end of the building, will expose the windows facing Central Park for the first time in 50 years. The remodeling is part of a 10-year-old plan aimed at using every inch of the museum’s existing space in Central Park.”

The Getty has “pulled off one of the most spectacular Old Master painting purchases in history. Titian’s magnificent Portrait of Alfonso d’Avalos is now hanging in the Californian museum. Yet until recently the portrait was on show at the Louvre in Paris, which had hoped to add it to its permanent collection. The French museum, not renowned for letting important pictures slip through its fingers, had the opportunity to buy the Titian at a preferential rate but decided not to do so.” The Getty paid $70 million, making the Titian the second-most expensive Old Master in history.

Is a photograph from 1886 really a portait of Vincent van Gogh, or is it “a simple case of mistaken identity?” Van Gogh painted more than 40 self-portraits but there are only two photographs in existence that are widely believed to be the artist – at the ages of 13 and 19. The latest discovery, bought for just $1 in the early 1990s in an antique dealer’s shop, is the subject of a new exhibition that attempts to make the case for its authenticity.”

Some 3000 art historians, students, artists and critics converge on Seattle for the annual meeting of the College Art Association. The Guerrilla Girls get an award, and people stand in line for hours in hopes of getting interviewed for jobs.