The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth has been a big hit since it opened in December. “Drawn by rave reviews in the press and by word of mouth, devotees of art and architecture are streaming here. More people turned up in one two-day period after Christmas than came in any entire month of 2001, when the museum was still in its 1954 building nearby. Taxis from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport bring passengers who have arranged layovers so they can spend an hour at the museum.”
Category: visual
Is UK Losing Its Masterpieces?
More and more of Britain’s great art treasures in private ownership are being sold abroad. “Experts fear that many other masterpieces in private hands will emerge on to the market and be sold to overseas collectors because owners are noticing the vast sums being fetched. Museums and galleries with paltry acquisition budgets are unable to compete.”
One Kind Of Art – Why Artists Specialize
“Most contemporary artists remain specialists, and the reasons are plain to see. The intensity that we want from art usually emerges only when an artist knows a medium or a kind of structure or a certain vocabulary inside out. This has certainly been true in the past few months in New York.”
Model Behavior – Building Imagination
Architects spend much time and money on models of projects they propose to build. Richard Meier says his firm spent more than $100,000 on its model for the World Trade Center site. “Drawings are abstract and precise – the medium of proportion and detail – and computer modeling engages the cinematic dimension of time, of fluidity, of movement through space. Only models, however, provide the “God’s eye view,” the luxurious sensation that a complex object like a building, or an entire development like the World Trade Center site, can be comprehended as a whole.”
China’s Fake Art Trade
Enormous finds of art in China over the past decade have flooded the art market. But along with the legitimate finds, fakes of every description and sophistication have also appeared to tempt the gullible. “Most of those fakes come through Hong Kong, China’s wildly capitalistic gateway to the world. Trying to quantify the trade in fakes is like trying to get your hands around an octopus. No one keeps records of the illegal trade.”
Choosing A Plan For Ground Zero
A decision could come this week. Herbert Muschamp casts his vote: “Public officials will be criticized no matter what they decide. People protested the Eiffel Tower, too. If it were up to me, I would pick the pair of latticework towers proposed by the Think group. It is a work of genius, a towering affirmation of humanism in modern times. This is a work of abstraction. It does not impose literal meanings on the viewer. Yet implicitly it embodies the theme of metamorphosis.”
Europe’s Best Contemporary Art Museum?
Here’s a vote for the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, which just reopened after a renovation that took five years. “Thanks to the efforts of curators who followed the founder’s own predilection for visiting studios and hanging out with some of the best and most radical artists, the museum has one of Europe’s key collections of modern and contemporary art – several thousand works – from 1900 to the present day. It contains many familiar international names, from Joseph Beuys to Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter to Bruce Nauman. And it displays their works in particular contexts: Russian suprematism, Dutch plasticism, and among fellow artists that were collected with the individual sensibilities of a succession of curators. This is not a generic collection. It has character, and it is a museum of surprises.”
Britain Stops Export Of Raphael Painting
The British government has ordered a temporary hold on the export of a valuable Raphael painting to allow a “last chance” effort to raise money to keep it in the country. “The National Gallery is campaigning to keep it in the UK after the Duke of Northumberland, one of England’s wealthiest land and art owners, accepted a £32m offer from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.”
A $600,000 Tree Stump?
John Davis saw a giant rootball unearthed in a tornado 27 years ago and decided to dig out the roots and make a sculpture out of it. After 2 1/2 years he was finished revealing the 14 foor-by 16 foot, 3000-pound piece. Then he listed it on Ebay for $2.7 million and got no offers. Now he wants $600,000, but the artworld doesn’t seem interested. “From the photograph, it looks like an incredible object. A question that I’m asked a lot is, ‘What is it really worth?’ And there are different qualifications for intrinsic artistic value and what the art market will bear. … On the art market, it’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it.”
The Forgotten Masterpieces
A new book wonders about the wherabout of great works of art that for one reason or another disappeared and slipped from the pages of history. “Supreme among them is Michelangelo’s bronze version of David, a statue he worked on while carving his celebrated colossus of the same biblical hero.”