Category: visual

Stakeholders in the process to build on the site of the World Trade Center are already starting to pick apart the Daniel Libeskind design that had been chosen for the site. The owner of a retail mall that had been in the base of the World Trade Center doesn’t like the design: ‘We don’t think [the Libeskind plan] works. So why don’t we sit down and fix it? Why not have a meeting? It’s not that difficult. We think we can help and make it better.’ Westfield’s unhappiness is significant because the company and the Port Authority will have to renegotiate Westfield’s lease at the site.”

An Egon Schiele painting that spent half a century in an museum in Austria before being returned to the heirs of the Jewish collectors from whom it was stolen by the Nazis is expected to bring in £7 million at Sotheby’s in London in June.

“Greece is rushing to build the $100 million New Acropolis Museum to house the Marbles for the 2004 Summer Olympics, locating it next to the rocky citadel in the heart of ancient Athens. The three-level museum will be topped with a glass-walled Parthenon Gallery to display the carvings in brilliant sunlight, just 800 feet from, and slightly below, the temple they once adorned. Innovative and earthquake-proof, the museum aims to rebut longtime British objections to the Elgin Marbles’ return – that Greece lacked first-rate display space to assure the safety of the 480-foot-long section of the Parthenon frieze. British officials are also worried that a repatriation of the Marbles, even on loan, could set a precedent for other claims on antiquities removed from original sites.”

The South Florida artists known as the Highwaymen, who originally took up painting as a way to pick up a few extra dollars and perhaps find a way out of their poverty-stricken lives in the orange groves, are enjoying an unexpected renaissance. The artists, who focused almost exclusively on Florida landscapes as their subject matter, began painting in the late 1950s, and have turned out an astonishing volume of work over the years. Initially sold for $25-$30 apiece, a painting by one of the original Highwaymen can now sell for upwards of $10,000.

Until now, people donating art to cultural institutions in the UK didn’t get tax incentives. But the government has indicated it is rethinking the policy and might extend tax breaks to art. “Until now, philanthropists have been able to get tax relief on cash and share donations, but there was no incentive to give art or artefacts to museums.”

Daniel Libeskind has been refining his design for the Royal Ontario Museum, and Lisa Rochon likes what she sees of the changes. “Only last month, the Berlin-based Studio Libeskind presented to its client the museum’s northern façade rendered like a warrior’s mask with eyes slashed into its steel face armour. It looked like an angry work of autonomous architecture. Now, however, the ROM is being unmasked to reveal a beguiling human face.”

The Detroit Institute of the Arts, facing an uncertain financial future in the wake of a proposed 72% cut to Michigan arts funding, has released a study designed to hammer home the point that the arts give back more to the community than they take out in tax dollars. The study claims that the recent DIA exhibit “Degas and the Dance” brought $15 million into the local economy, but some economists are already saying that the study uses a flawed formula. Such arguments are commonplace among arts organizations facing governmental cuts, but few seem to think the economic-stimulus argument will cut much ice at the state legislature.

The Sydney Opera House is so perfect for its site, so right as a national symbol, it seems like it was inevitable. But before architect Joern Utzon’s masterpiece was built, the design was the subject of national controversy. Certainly the opera house was the compelling reason Utzon won this year’s Pritzker Prize, but the judges noted that Utzon’s career demonstrates a succession of buildings infused with “a sense of architecture as art, and natural instinct for organic structures related to site conditions.”

In New York, record crowds are turning out at blockbuster art exhibits, but not for the usual reasons. “The popularity of shows here ranging from Da Vinci to Manet – an unusual confluence of big-name artists even for New York – is partly a commentary on New Yorkers’ magnetic attraction to anything with buzz. But in a city beset by budget cuts, rising homelessness, and a steady stream of war news, it’s also about something more. To the crowds waiting in lines that spill out onto the streets here, these timeless masters offer timely beauty and insight to a world desperately in need of it.”