Category: visual

“Few rites of spring are quite as delightful as the opening, each May, of the sculpture garden atop the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year the honor goes to the late Roy Lichtenstein. One of the prime movers of Pop Art, Lichtenstein was not exactly a bad sculptor, but he certainly wasn’t a good one, either. And yet, such is the magic of the sculpture garden that absolutely anything you put up there will look good.”

It’s starting to become clear that estimates of the theft and damage of Iraq’s National Museum were too high. “While many museum officials watched in horror as mobs and perhaps organized gangs rampaged through the museum’s 18 galleries, seized objects on display, tore open steel cases, smashed statues and broke into storage vaults, officials now discount the first reports that the museum’s entire collection of 170,000 objects had been lost. Some valuable objects were placed for safekeeping in the vaults of the Central Bank before the war. Other objects were placed in the museum’s own underground vaults; only when power was restored this week could curators begin assessing what was lost. Even in some of the looted galleries, a few stone statues are intact. Still more encouragingly, several hundred small objects — including a priceless statue of an Assyrian king from the ninth century B.C. — have been returned to the museum.”

After the 1991 Gulf War, a list of artifacts stolen from Iraq museums was compiled – about 2000 objects were missing. “Eleven years later, experts say, no more than half a dozen of the pieces have been tracked down. Many others are presumed to have been traded away through a thriving international market in antiquities. The poor record of returning artifacts lost after the gulf war suggests the daunting obstacles that museum officials and police investigators face as they commit to finding items recently sacked from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad and other sites.”

After a slump after 9/11, museum attendance in New York has returned to normal or increased, according to the Association of Art Museum Directors in New York. The report says that “museums have mostly been able to maintain, or even increase, their pre-9/11 staffing and programs.”

Things haven’t been so good for the Guggenheim lately at home. No matter – director Thomas Krens has always had a global vision. So “yesterday he and Cesar Maia, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, signed an agreement to build a $130 million museum on Mauá Pier in Guanabara Bay. Rio will be the sixth city with Guggenheim museums and exhibition spaces, joining Berlin; Venice; Las Vegas; and Bilbao, Spain, as well as New York.”

Hilton Kramer is cranky about over-ambitious expansion plans of museums chasing glory (and money). “How are we to characterize the narrative of turbulence and disarray that has lately overtaken some of our local institutions? I suggest that we think of it as the Museum Expansion Follies, for it’s in the service of this muddled narrative that a lot of money is spent (and lost) these days without much regard for negative consequences. And not only money…”

“Artist Jeff Koons plans to erect a 360-foot tall sculpture in Hamburg – two cranes with outsize inner tubes dangling down – that he hopes will rival the effect of the Eiffel Tower.”

Who stole three paintings from a Manchester gallery last weekend and left them in the rain? “Police released a picture yesterday of the crude, water-stained note written in dark blue ink, in an effort to find the thieves who stole £4m of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin and Van Gogh from the Whitworth Art Gallery. They also revealed that the thieves had intimate knowledge of the gallery. “

The big art houses must feel as if God himself is against them: a down economy, a nasty little war, and an uncertain national mood are combining to create one of the most dismal auction seasons in years. “When times are tough, however, distress sales are often what bolster the market. It is no wonder, then, that paintings, drawings and sculptures are being sold this year by troubled companies like Vivendi, Enron and Idemitsu Kosan, Japan’s second-largest oil refiner.” Still, catalogs are distinctly thin this spring, and everything in the art world seems to be on hold.

Suing a foreign government is a tricky proposition, with all sorts of legal hurdles to be cleared before a filing can even take place. So Maria Altmann has learned in her battle to get back six Gustav Klimt paintings looted from her family’s collection by Nazis in World War II and currently in the possession of the Austrian government. This week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Altmann’s suit can go forward in a U.S. court, and closed the door on any further stalling tactics by the Austrians. Austria has one appeal still available to it – the U.S. Supreme Court – but no decision has been made on whether such an appeal will be filed.