Category: visual

The Australian government is launching a review of the activities of the embattled National Museum of Australia. “While some see it as a necessary process for any new cultural institution, others fear the agenda is primarily political.” Particularly as it looks like the museum director’s contract will be cut short.

The Getty Center is celebrating its fifth anniversary atop its hillside overlooking Los Angeles. The $1.3 billion complex has attracted 7 million visitors since opening, and the complaints that chased its unveiling seem to have quieted down. “On days like this it may appear that people go to the Getty to do anything but look at art. But no, every gallery is crowded, and for each person who strolls through, there’s someone engaged with an artwork.”

The merger between Southern California’s Southwest Museum and the Autry Museum pairs a great collection with (finally) the resources to build on it. But it will take more than money to turn around the Southwest. “Inadequate display and storage facilities, employee theft from the collection, shoddy record-keeping, daunting conservation needs, a chronic lack of funding and an incompetent board were among the Himalayan-size hurdles faced by L.A.’s oldest museum.”

“Not much has gone wrong at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Japanese architect Tadao Ando’s $65 million addition to the city’s Cultural District that opens Saturday. For a major work by an international superstar, it is a surprisingly discreet building. No swirling titanium walls like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, no fluttering butterfly sunscreens as in the Milwaukee Art Museum. It sits politely, almost corporately on its site, five gleaming rectangles of aluminum and glass enclosing the second-largest postwar art museum in the United States.”

Tadao Ando’s design for the new Fort Worth Modern Art Museum should establish him once and for all as one of the world’s architectural masters, says Benjamin Forgey. “There is no mystery or ceremony in approaching the high, off-center entryway of the Ando building. You just go in. And then, right away, you begin to experience the magic, generosity, subtlety and self-confidence of Ando’s art.”

“Debt-ridden media giant Vivendi is to sell a celebrated family art collection, including a 22-foot (6.7-metre) curtain painted by Picasso… The collection, valued at around £15m, also includes major works by Joan Miro and Mark Rothko and was put together over 30 years by the Bronfman family.”

Given the current belt-tightening climate, director of the UK’s National Gallery is hardly the plum position it ought to be. And Charles Saumarez Smith is under tremendous pressure not only to preserve the institution itself, but to match the success of his predecessor, the legendary Neil MacGregor. On top of that, the Getty Museum in L.A. recently swiped a priceless Raphael right out from under the National’s nose. What’s a director to do?

And you thought only the malls were crass and commercial enough to blitz you with Christmas sales! As it happens, lots of galleries and art dealers are looking to cash in on the holiday buying spirit as well, and there may be no better time to pick up some smaller pieces for your collection. “Smart art shoppers have come to rely on the annual discounts to stuff stockings or fill out their own collections, and little guilt is expressed over taking home art by the famous or the nearly-famous at garage-sale prices.”

A Frank Lloyd Wright lamp sold at auction this week for nearly $2 million after less than a minute of furious bidding. One of the four losing bidders was an anonymous collector who planned to buy the lamp in order to return it to the Illinois home (now a museum) for which it was specifically designed. To some observers of the auction world, the lamp is just one more example of an art treasure being sacrificed on the altar of the free market at the expense of the public interest.

A US court has ruled that an elderly Los Angeles woman can sue Austria to recover six Gustav Klimt paintings worth $150 million seized by the Nazis in 1939. The contested paintings by the Austrian artist are now displayed in the government-run Austrian Gallery in Vienna. The “decision marked the first time in Holocaust reparations litigation that a federal appeals court has ruled that a foreign government can be held accountable in a U.S. court.”