Category: visual

“Last month, Thomas C. Bennigson, heir of the Holocaust survivor who lost control of a Picasso painting during World War II, sued Marilynn Alsdorf for $10 million, after negotiations between the parties broke down. The case has sparked claims and counterclaims regarding the painting’s history, the nature of property law and the moral obligation of art collectors and dealers. And it has pitted Alsdorf against one of the most prominent art recovery organizations in the world, the London-based Art Loss Register, which first reported that the Picasso had been looted.”

Washington DC’s Phillips Collection is about to begin a $25 million, 30,000-square-foot expansion that will increase the cramped museum’s space by nearly 50 percent. It will also create quarters for a new Center for Studies in Modern Art.”

There are similarities between all the proposals for replacing the World Trade Center. “Surprisingly, the appetite for gigantism that inspired the original WTC – impractical, inefficient, and ultimately hubristic – still runs strong. Of course this partly reflects a popular sentiment that yearns for restoration. ‘Rebuild the towers exactly as they were to show the terrorists they haven’t won,’ was a frequent person-on-the-street response in the months after the attack.”

San Jose realtors trying to fill vacant storefronts in downtown were tired of looking at empty windows. So they came up with the idea of getting artists to show their work there. “People walk by and some of them like something and some of them hate it, but at least they’re talking about art.”

“Here’s a good cause for the New Year: a design by Enríque Norten/TEN Arquitectos for the proposed Brooklyn Library for the Visual and Performing Arts. Sleek, curvaceous, colorful and alive, this is New York’s first full-fledged masterwork for the information age. More than any other recent New York project, Norten’s design captures the spirit of the contemporary city.”

Art made by teams is popular again. “The collective impulse has never died out in American art; and now it is surfacing again, for the most part outside New York. In cities like Milwaukee, Providence, R. I., St. Louis and Philadelphia, as well as several in Canada, an old countercultural model, often much changed, is being revived, in some cases by artists barely out of their teens. Many of the new art collectives are virtual: they reside on the Internet, that intrinsically collective medium. They are fluid in size, and members may not even know the identity of other members.”

The Royal Ontario Museum is undergoing a massive reinvention. But “move inside and dig around for a couple of weeks and you discover an institution at a dramatic point of transformation, teetering on the brink of either spectacular triumph or spectacular failure. Curators decry their inability to fend off embarrassing professional gaffes, and tensions are running high as they contemplate the implications of the museum’s dramatic building program.”

The French government is putting together a plan to encourage arts sponsorship and the creation of foundations. The government released figures showing that “France has few private donors and a pitiful number of foundations (only about 1,000, compared with 2,000 in Germany, 3,000 in England and 12,000 in the USA).” France spent $1.3 billion in 2001, or 0.09 per cent of GDP, compared with $230 billion (£142 billion) on the other side of the Atlantic, i.e. more than 2% of GDP.

For 103 years, the Art Gallery of Ontario has been a middling player on the global art scene. It has built a respectable international reputation and a loyal local audience by mounting innovative shows, such as a Yoko Ono exhibit, and by specializing in such areas as Canadian art. Its Canadian paintings include windswept pines, moody lakes, and rugged mountains by the Group of Seven, the landscape pioneers whose works are now Canadian icons. The museum has a solid collection of European art, and its grouping of sculptures by Britain’s Henry Moore is considered one of the world’s best.” Now it’s been given a major collection and is into planning for a new Frank Gehry building.

“As more artists work collaboratively or in art collectives, the stereotype of the lone artist in a garret is fading. In place of the romantic ideal of the figure sweating in front of an easel is a growing teamwork ethos, particularly among young artists. As a result of a greater focus on the process than the product, ‘do-it-ourselves’ now seems more hip than do-it-yourself.”