Category: visual

There was a time when museums were viewed as institutions of contemplative learning. No more. “Contemporary museums can often seem more like attention- grabbing playgrounds and amusement parks than the glass-cased, heavily labeled temples of old. Now, if a child or reasonably game adult doesn’t get his senses bombarded, his hands and/or feet soaked and clothing streaked with some foreign substance at a museum, he might as well have stayed home and surfed the information-crammed Internet.”

Amidst all the brouhaha over the UK Heritage Lottery Fund’s decision to spend £11.5 million to keep a 9-inch Raphael painting in the country is a debate over what constitutes “national heritage.” To Charles Smith, the Lottery’s attempt to keep a foreign work of art in London is a promising sign that Britons are finally beginning to get past the notion that a work of art must be thoroughly British to be important. Still, with budget cuts running rampant in the UK, such programs of national preservation are under threat, and Smith says that the nation would do well to remember the reasons for their creation.

Back in the early 1990s, truck driver Teri Horton purchased a drip painting for $5. Now, she wants to sell it: for $20 million. “This is the estimated value of what one forensic art expert has pronounced a Jackson Pollock. However, the prestigious International Foundation for Art Research does not think it genuine… Ms Horton, who is 70 and lives in Costa Mesa, southern California, thinks it is ugly. She kept it only because it would not fit through the front door of the friend for whom she bought it from a thrift shop.”

“Venerated as the first modern artist, Francisco Goya produced nothing more abrasively modern than the series of 14 images known as the Black Paintings, which a half-century after his death were cut from the walls of his country house on the outskirts of Madrid.” But when art historian Juan Jose Junquera tried to write a history of the set, he discovered a number of holes in the story of their creation, and, upon deeper examination, came to the conclusion that Goya could not actually have painted the works at all.

“Frank Gehry, the architect who created the stupendous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, has been given the go ahead to build the most outrageous set of tower blocks ever conceived for [the UK] on Brighton seafront.” [Editor’s Note for American readers: ‘Tower block’ is English for ‘high-rise apartment complex.’] The buildings are said to look like “four giant transvestites caught in a gale,” and will be built in the city of Hove, which has something of a history with cutting-edge architecture.

“The private museum that helped transform a gritty Denver street into a cutting-edge spot for art galleries is in a deep financial and management funk. Museo de las Americas, an 11-year-old institution that two years ago had plans for a $10 million expansion, now finds itself running a bare-bones operation… The institution’s executive director – who was working for free – resigned in June after less than six months on the job. Twelve of its 15 directors have left in the past year, and past-due bills are piling up. Salaries run about $21,000 per month and expenses run $15,000, but the Museo has only about $60,000 banked.”

You can find pretty much anything for sale on eBay, of course, so it probably shouldn’t be a big surprise that you can find an empty tube of toothpaste with a $41 asking price. Or a worn-out hairbrush. Or a human soul, won in a video game contest and now being resold. But there’s a twist to these bizarre aucton items. “Meet Neal Livingston of Mabou, N.S., a 58-year-old maker of independent films, electricity and maple syrup who is currently using the world’s largest on-line flea market as an incidental gallery for a new media project titled, appropriately enough, Junky Old Stuff.”

The UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has been mostly finished for a decade. When the building opened in 1990, a design for a theater was incorporated and roughed out, but never fully built. The Hammer Museum has now received a $5 million gift from the widow of director Billy Wilder, with the money to be used to complete the theater project. “The Wilder donation gives a much-needed boost to the museum’s fund-raising campaign for its planned $26.5-million renovation.”

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection is absurdly dedicated to a tiny circle of seven specific artists, thanks to its stubborn founder, and yet it still receives an inordinate amount of backing from the provincial government of Ontario, says Sarah Milroy. “Attempts to gracefully loosen the grand vizier’s grip of steel have come to naught, with the province appointing successive waves of like-minded souls to the board to defend the rough-hewn ramparts from the encroachments of contemporaneity. No sticky incursions of race will be welcomed in this Mighty Whitey chapel of Canadiana, thank you very much.”

“In 2001, during the renovation of the council chamber at Minneapolis City Hall, staff members found five large oil paintings in a vault, amid a jumble of antique furniture. The paintings were not well-preserved; two of them were damaged, and all five were covered in grime accumulated over many years.” Moreover, it is still unclear who some of the subjects and painters are, or how the paintings came to be stashed in a basement. Four of the works appear to be portraits of Minneapolis city officials, but the fifth is a classical painting of a pastoral scene by Italian painter Domenico Pennachini.