Category: visual

One of the British Museum’s most important ancient Roman treasures may have been made in the Renaissance. “The vase is described by the museum as ‘the most famous cameo-glass vessel from antiquity’ and was a widely accepted to have been made circa 30-20 BC. “

Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous house – Fallingwater – is being repaired. But “several of the other approximately 300 remaining single-family Wright houses in this country are far more endangered than Fallingwater: Commissioned by now-octogenarians in desirable areas, their sites, but not their modest-sized rooms, are attractive to affluent buyers who want to replace them with megamansions. Since 2000, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy has acquired, repaired and resold these Wrights-at-risk.”

The Denver Art Museum is hoping that its new building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, will become an icon of the city, represent it visually the way the Guggenheim does Bilbao. “But what if the wing is just plain ugly? A number of average citizens and schooled architects wonder if the jarring style represented by Daniel Libeskind’s design is more imposition than institution, more trend than truth, more spectacle than service to the community.”

“Boston Corporate Art, established in 1987, sold primarily large-scale works to corporations and nonprofit organizations.” But the company suddenly went bankrupt earlier this year owing artists thousands of dollars in commissions, and holding hundreds of works of art, which it proposed selling to pay off creditors. This week, artists prowled through the company’s art looking to recover their own work…

Hilton Kramer writes that the Whitney Museum was founded with high ideals but has sunk to “parlous condition.” Kramer wishes new director Adam Weinberg good luck – “he returns to a museum that many artists now despise—for the right reasons, too—and the public has every reason to distrust. I wish him luck. He will certainly need it, if the recent track record of the Whitney’s board of trustees is any guide.”

Picasso, on visiting Lascaux, reportedly remarked that “we have discovered nothing new in art in 17,000 years.” NYU professor Randall White writes in a new book that, “all of the major representational techniques were known at least by the Magdalenian [Period, beginning about 18,000 years ago]; oil- and water-based polychrome painting, engraving, bas-relief sculpture, sculpture in the round, charcoal and manganese crayon drawing, molded clay, fired ceramic figurines, shading, perspective drawing, false relief, brush painting, stamping and stenciling.”

England’s Prince Harry is under fire for some aboriginal images he included in his paintings. “Some of Australia’s best-known Aboriginal artists have recently become aware of the prince’s paintings of lizard motifs and claim he has stolen their culture. That the artworks have been valued at £15,000 each has compounded the insult to poor desert communities.”

“In a farcical way, the row over Prince Harry’s art embodies a fundamental worldwide conflict between modernity and religion, the secular and the spiritual. It’s a struggle in which the devil – modernity – could do with some better tunes. The case against Harry is not simply that his pictures are a pastiche, in their banally decorative way, of Aboriginal art, but that he has appropriated symbols with specific cultural meanings.”

A burglar breaks into a man’s house and steals his electronic equipment. But he flees in terror when he discovers what he thinks is a human head floating in a jar. When later speaking to the police, the thief tells of his gruesome discovery. When police go to the scene of the crime they discover… an art project.

Taiwan’s premier has pledged to cover half the cost of a proposed new Guggenheim Museum in Taichung City, and is considering whether to fund another third of the cost.