Category: visual

Two English churches are demanding the return of three priceless tomb brasses stolen from the churches’ flagstone floors in the 19th century. The brasses were discovered in the vaults of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “The churches remain scarred by the holes left in the floor where they were prised out” and officials want them restored. But a spokesman for the churches says the museums have denied the request.

A Clinton commission investigating Nazi-looted art, did not do an adequate job, and overlooked solid leads, says some scholars. “Objections to the panel’s work were so strong that some staff members said they contemplated writing a minority report. Their comments, and similar ones from leading experts in the field, were not publicly expressed when the commission reported its findings. Now critics say the commission was a lost opportunity to determine how much Nazi looted art flowed through America.

The San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland have called off a previously announced merger. “The merger would have produced one of the nation’s largest fully accredited, independent school of visual arts outside of New York City. Currently, the Art Institute has about 650 students and 137 faculty members; California College of Arts and Crafts has about 1,300 students and 370 teachers.” The schools said that after much negotiation, “at the end of the day, out of respect for the two institutions, we concluded it just couldn’t be done.”

“The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings warns that churches and historic houses have never been at so much risk as crooks target decorative fixtures and fittings to feed the home renovation boom. Such thefts have reached ‘epidemic’ proportions, according to the society, Britain’s oldest heritage conservation group. Last year there were 3,600 thefts from churches alone, with statues, fonts and even whole altars vanishing.”

A report says that free admission to British museums has resulted in hordes of new visitors, but that the policy had failed to attract lower-income visitors. “Its figures show the Natural History Museum in London attracted 72% more visitors last year compared with 2001, the Science Museum had 101.4% more visitors and the Victoria & Albert Museum had 111% more. However, numbers visiting the British Museum fell 4.14% last year.”

A Salvador Dali drawing that hung in New York’s Riker’s Island jail in the presence of round-the-clock guards, was stolen this weekend. “The audacious thief was apparently not only brazen enough to confiscate Dali’s sketchy rendering of Christ on the cross from a locked display case in the lobby of the men’s jail, but he or she also managed to leave behind a schlocky, B-rate copy that at least three correction officers were puzzled to find upon reporting to work yesterday morning.”

How did A Salvador Dali come to be hanging in a jail? “As the story goes, Dali was due to appear at Rikers for a talk with the prisoners, but he took ill. With reporters waiting in the lobby of his hotel, Dali, famously reluctant to disappoint the press, took India ink to paper and created a gestural evocation of the Crucifixion.”

Amsterdam’s Stedelijk is the city’s modern art museum and once was considered “one of the most dynamic museums” in Europe. But its director left the museum in January and the general director is also leaving. Closure for building work scheduled for this year has been put off for a year, and the city council has decided to privatize the museum. And there are proposals to move the Stedelijk to a new site on the outskirts of Amsterdam…

“Part of the moat wall of the Tower of London has collapsed, and hundreds of feet of Georgian cast-iron railings have been removed, during contentious building works intended to improve the setting of one of the most popular tourist attractions in Britain.”

“Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the former World Trade Center site, selected Wednesday, is a new noble, logical diagram – one that is sure to need a shield if real estate interests try to torture it with death by a thousand ‘gnat bites,’ as Robert Ivy, the editor of Architectural Record, so trenchantly put it. It inevitably will be changed, as all master plans are, as the economy rises and falls, as interest groups like the victims’ families make their voices heard, and as political actors enter and exit from the stage. The questions are: Will the change be for good or ill?”