Category: visual

“The Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, named for the dedicated Nazi hunter, commissioned Gehry for the $150 million Jerusalem Center of Human Dignity and Museum of Tolerance. The SWC opened its education arm, a Museum of Tolerance, in 1993 in Los Angeles. Last spring, it opened another such museum in New York.”

Thomas Krens cut the figure of museum director as all big ideas and fearlessness – redefining the modern museum in an age of global branding. But he’s also a polarizing figure, an easy target for those who lament his big-business approach to art. With a pursestrings-attached gift to Krens’s Guggenheim Museum, the era of the Guggenheim as lavish spender and worldwide art brand seems to be at an end. “Global culture sounded inevitable a few years ago — all those plane-hopping travelers and multinational collaborations. But Sept. 11 put an end to that. The world became more divided, people less willing to travel, the American public poorer, more attuned to protecting itself and what it has.”

As the American economy continues to tank mightily, art auction houses are finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of putting masterpieces on the block for far less than they are worth, at least according to the inflated price scales of the 1990s. Case in point: a mature Rubens painting set to be auctioned soon for $4-$6 million, down from its original asking price of $25 million. In other tough news for the industry, Sotheby’s New York is facing another round of layoffs, less than a year after the company let go 375 employees.

The American Institute of Architects has chosen not to award it’s annual Gold Medal for the 36th time in the 95-year history of the prize. The decision doesn’t necessarily mean that no new building was deserving of the honor, merely that 3/4 of the judges could not agree on a single winner. And since the list of nominees is kept confidential, we can all do our own speculation on whether 2001 architecture was a disappointment, or whether two or more worthy finalists managed to split the vote.

“A Canadian grocery magnate handed out a $50,000 contemporary art award yesterday to Vancouver artist Brian Jungen… The jury of curators from across Canada limited their selection to artists who were under 40 years old. The Sobey Art Award will be handed out every two years and is among the richest in the Canadian art world.”

A visit to this year’s exhibition of Turner Prize finalists shows that visitors aren’t much interested in the art there. “Is it just that this year’s shortlist is lacklustre? Or is this year just part of a larger problem? The answer is the latter. If there is a big message in the Turner prize exhibition, it is that there is a huge public demand for the arts, but it is not being met by the artists. Admittedly, this is a charge which has often been made in all the arts in the past, and has been made in many different societies, and by some very unsavoury figures. But it continues to be made, and it seems to be a particular problem for the visual arts.”

Is a senior member of England’s royal family selling off art masterpieces and replacing them with fakes? A report claims that “the female royal, who was not named, is said to have sold two watercolours by Thomas Gainsborough to an antique dealer for £100,000. The paintings were said to have been replaced in their original frames by photographs of the watercolours, specially aged to look like old masterpieces.”

The Hermitage Museum “reportedly has three-million paintings, sculptures, drawings and decorative objects on its six-block site. But it’s not entirely sure of that number or precisely where among its 400-plus rooms all that stuff is located, since it’s never done a complete inventory in its 250-year history.” Now a consortium of foundations is helping the museum to audit its holdings and bring the Hermitage into the modern age, more or less, and on a footing equal, more or less, to that of the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum.”

There are curators. And then there are “Curators of Interpretation” who in the UK are “increasingly important people in the world of art, under a government that makes its grants to public galleries conditional upon the ‘accessibility’ of the works they display. It is their job to make the exhibits accessible to the masses, by helping Joe Public to see the point of what he is being shown. They also have an expanding role in deciding how exhibitions should be mounted, so as to make them welcoming and instructive to philistines like me.”