Category: visual

No one should expect that the Art Gallery of Ontario’s near-constant metamorphosing will come to an end with the realization of Frank Gehry’s vision. “The Toronto gallery has been a work in progress for most of its 104 years, and it likely will continue to be,” says James Adams.

“A horrific photograph of an execution in eastern Europe during the second world war can be seen in Holocaust archives and museums around the world. But who are the killers, who are the victims, who took it – and why?” The date and location given for the photo are misleading, for there were supposedly no Jews left in the identified town at the time, and in fact, no historian has been able to positively identify the victims as Jews, or their tormentors as Nazis. One researcher has devoted years to finding the answers, and all she has discovered is that the Holocaust remains simultaneously one of the most well-documented and murkiest events in human history.

The ivory miniatures stolen from the Art Gallery of Ontario ten days ago are now the subject of an international police alert, and the company which insures them is offering 10% of their considerable value in return for information leading to their recovery. The ivories were on loan to the AGO from UK publishing magnate Lord Thomson, who is one of the wealthiest private art collectors in the world. Investigators now believe that the theft may not have been a professional job, but “a student prank which went too far.”

James Cuno will doubtless take some time to decide how to put his unique stamp on the Art Institute of Chicago, but there’s one improvement he’d like to make right away: minimizing “museum fatigue” by adding more benches and chairs for patrons to take a load off while admiring the collection. It seems like an obvious idea, but many museum directors are opposed to having seating in their galleries, saying it distracts from the art. Nonsense, says Cuno. Museumgoers tend to “rush their way through and they don’t see as much as we’d like them to see. You want people to sit down and feel comfortable and sort of pace themselves.”

When the Tate Modern’s new exhibition of Brancusi sculptures opens this week in London, it will be one major work short of what the museum had planned. “It will have Constantin Brancusi’s The Kiss (1908) and The Kiss (1916). But it will be without its most starry exhibit, The Kiss (1907-1908) because its Romanian owners see a risk that someone in Britain might claim ownership of it.” The Tate says that it doesn’t know of any potential UK claimants, and the statue has been exhibited abroad before, but Romanian officials say that they were concerned that they would not have been able to protect the statue in the event of an ownership claim.

How good are today’s art forgers? So good that some of them make quite a nice living selling their work to collectors who are fully aware that they aren’t buying the original painting. “The pursuit of authenticity can encounter nasty opposition,” as many would-be whistleblowers have discovered, and after all, isn’t the desire to own “the real thing” nothing more than a greedy desire for prestige? “A beautiful artwork does not cease to be beautiful once its authorship is cast in doubt, but it can cease to be precious.”

Frank Gehry will unveil his plans for the Art Gallery of Ontario this week, and the pressure is mounting. “Unlike any of Gehry’s other projects, the Art Gallery of Ontario is a two-headed client: There’s AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum and then there’s the publishing magnate Kenneth Thomson, who has donated not only his massive collection of art but also $70-million in cash to a reinvented art gallery. Added to the froth is a residual expectation that maybe, if everybody tries a little harder, $200-million — the estimated budget for the project — will buy the architectural ecstasy of Bilbao.”

Some days, it seems as if every museum in America is mounting a major expansion, or at least talking about it. But at The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, the desire for more space is tempered by the realities of the marketplace, and the museum’s directors are anxious to do more with less. Rather than attempt a massive new building project, MOCAD is planning a modest expansion with a price tag of less than $4 million, which it hopes will generate buzz without endangering the institution financially, or alienating the public with demands for government subsidies in a notoriously conservative state.

The Whitney Museum is undergoing a dramatic behind-the-scenes makeover, with new director Adam Weinberg restructuring the administration, creating a “council of wise persons” to advise him, and shaking up the curatorial designations put in place by his predecessor, Maxwell Anderson. Weinberg is still interested in looking at expansion options for the Whitney, which famously cancelled a recent planned expansion designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, but his short-term goals lie in the stabilization of an institution which has been perceived as chaotic and directionless for some time.

“An El Greco painting displayed recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was returned Thursday to the Greek museum that owns it after a state judge dismissed a lawsuit claiming it had been stolen by Nazis at the end of World War II… The suit sought to keep the painting in the United States pending further investigation of its provenance. It was rejected under a federal statute that says a lawsuit cannot be used to seize or control a cultural object brought into this country by a nonprofit institution like a museum for temporary exhibition.”