Category: visual

Wednesday, a group of some of the world’s most well-known architects will gather in a room across from the World Trade Center to show some ideas for building on the WTC site. “Perhaps not since the United Nations competition has there been such attention placed on internationally prominent architects. This is our chance for transformational thinking, not architecture as commodity.”

Miami is hot off of hosting Art Basel Miami Beach. And the city is trying to flesh out its population of resident museums. The city is in talks with New York’s Whitney Museum to open a branch in South Florida. And “Miami Mayor Manny Diaz hopes to capitalize on the energy created by Art Basel and is looking to museums in Europe, where he’s already written to the president of Madrid’s Museo del Prado.”

Liverpool is building a citry-changing architectural project. “The £225 million project on the Pierhead is the centrepiece of Liverpool’s urban regeneration plans. It’s big, both physically and in its ambitions, and includes half a million square feet of shops, a 20-storey block of flats, bars, a hotel and a museum. Above all, it will be overpoweringly visible. It is one of those skyline busting landmark structures that changes everything around it. If Liverpool needed a Sydney Opera House, this would be it.”

The weakening supply of Old Master paintings on the market has been an issue for several years in the auction business. But “last week the weakest line-up of Old Masters that dealers could remember for years totalled only a paltry £13.8 million at the two auction houses. Faced by scores of dull, substandard paintings, the market either bought cautiously or did not bid at all.”

The Beck’s Futures Awards – Britain’s richest art prize – has chosen its shortlist of artists, and it’s “the most bizarre, outrageous and plain nutty group of young artists and pranksters ever shortlisted for a big award. The eight individuals and one collective in the running for the £65,000 prize include a man who apparently sewed short planks of wood to the soles of his feet, carried a bucket of water around for a week and spent another week avoiding eye contact with anyone.”

Earlier today, we had two items posted from The Art Newspaper about financial difficulties at the Dia Foundation and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park project. The items were posted last night, but this morning editors at The Art Newspaper decided to pull them after important details were disputed by the principles. We’ll post more information when we get it. UPDATE: A spokesperson for Dia emails with a statement concerning the Foundation’s finances. Click the link at the top of this item to read it.

After an extensive cleaning, a painting that had hung in Scotland’s National Galleries for 150 years, has been identified as a Canaletto worth £2 million. “The picture, which shows gondoliers and sailors at work in 18th century Venice, was identified at the time as a Canaletto copy by an imitator or student of the artist, and had been valued at no more than £5,000.”

Critic Paul Goldberger is impressed with architect Tadao Ando’s work on the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. “Many museums these days look their best before any art is installed in them. This is the first great museum building in a generation that gets even better when art is added.”

New York’s Dia Foundation is in a financial crisis. It’s “a major liquidity problem for Dia who if not actually bankrupt are in the midst of the most serious cash-flow crisis they have yet weathered. According to some reports the whole Dia building, (pioneer of the NY art world’s move to Chelsea) will be closed for the next three years or however long it takes to get back to something approaching solvency.”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been trying for years to get approval to mount their ambitious “Gates” project in New York’s Central Park. But a variety of objections, including concern for the health of the park, have blocked the plan. Now Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “always at the forefront of city-wide public art” has okayed the project and “is a major motivator behind the fruition of this work.”