Category: visual

Friday, November 29

Austrian Court Seizes Painting The Austrian court – long criticized for not doing more to ensure the recovery of artwork looted by the Nazis – has taken the remarkable step of seizing an Egon Schiele painting valued between €45,000-60,000 which was to have been sold at auction. “The Vienna seizure is preliminary to possible private action to recover the painting. Although Austrian law favours owners who in ‘good faith’ have acquired stolen objects, a lawsuit nonetheless will apparently take place.” The Art Newspaper 11/29/02

Buy High, Sell Low? Dotcom pioneer Halsey Minor bought millions of dollars worth of paintings at the top of the market. Now he has another venture to fund, and he’s selling off his art. “Mr. Minor stands to lose about $13 million on the Christie’s sale alone, scheduled for Thursday. And experts speculate that he has already lost $10 million on paintings the Gerald Peters Gallery recently sold privately, including works by Hopper and Hartley.” The New York Times 11/29/02

Open Season Art openings aren’t about the art. In the popular imagination, they are glamorous affairs, exclusive soirees where stylish sophisticates rub shoulders with artists from the fringe. In truth, they’re mundane occasions. Imagine a year-end office party held every month and you’ll get the idea.” Los Angeles Times 11/28/02

Hirst In Space When British scientists were designing a small vehicle to land on Mars, they knew they wanted an artist to design a piece of art to go with it. They picked Damien Hirst. He came up with “a spot chart design, scaled down to 26 grams on a background of aluminium, and tinted with copper, cobalt, manganese and molybdenum in the nine colours of Mars, will be bolted to the side of the lander.” The Guardian (UK) 11/29/02

Wednesday, November 27

Contemporary Art – The New Impressionists? This fall’s auction season has confirmed one big shift in the art collecting world. “Whether new fortunes, changing fashion or opportunity are offered as an explanation, Post-War and Contemporary art has become as or even more valuable a profit center for the three houses as Impressionist and Modern art, the traditional motor of their business.” Forbes 11/27/02

The New Americans From where do you get your art history? If you’re a student, probably from a textbook. “Until recent years, few choices existed for textbooks of American art history, still a relatively young field in academia.” But the field has exploded with new choices. “Scholars applying the ‘new art history’ have expanded all boundaries of ‘American’ art in their studies—including media, people, and methods—creating a yearning in the field for new teaching tools that reflect these changes.” American Art 11/02

Tuesday, November 26

Et Tu, Saatchi? Charles Saatchi is probably the biggest collector of contemporary art in Britain. But he’s down on the Turner Prize and its judges (Like a lot of others are these days). He says the real art is going on outside of the Turner world and that he prefers “something that gives real visual pleasure and makes you sit up and think, not the pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap that Turner judges actually believe is cutting-edge art.” The Telegraph (UK) 11/24/02

Going For Greatness The Cleveland Museum unveils plans for a major expansion. “With an estimated construction cost of $225 million, the project already has a price tag more than twice that of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, finished in 1995. Designed by New York architect Rafael Vinoly, the project calls for two large new curving wings on the east and west sides of the museum complex, which will frame the spacious, skylighted ‘Great Court’ in the center. The Great Court will be bigger, museum officials say, than the main lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.” The Plan Dealer (Cleveland) 11/26/02

Filling In The Cracks A small band of philanthropists known as the Friends of Heritage Preservation is trying to save important buildings with targeted funds. The group looks for important buildings in need of help. Members of the 20-member group pay $25,000 in dues every two years and the money is used to take on projects that tend to “fall between the cracks.” Los Angeles Times 11/25/02

Drawn In It wasn’t too long ago that architects’ drawings were typically thrown in the trash after a project was finished. But they’ve become prized by collectors and scholars who want to study the ideas behind buildings. “Given the rise of computer-assisted design (CADS) as the standard tool for designing today’s buildings, it may seem surprising that architectural drawing remains a dynamic art form – and not only for traditionalists.” The Telegraph (UK) 11/25/02

GalleryWalk What is America’s Second City of art (after New York, of course)? “Despite its endemic sprawl and persistent inferiority complex, Los Angeles is the nation’s second city for the visual arts, and commercial galleries are a vital part of the scene. With nearly 100 that present public exhibition programs and keep their doors open during regular hours, Los Angeles is second only to Manhattan and well ahead of Chicago, its closest competitor, which has about 60 comparable galleries.” Los Angeles Times 11/24/02

Artist Offended By Exhibition Name An artist in Newfoundland is protesting the name of a show of his work at a local gallery that used to represent him. But the name is taken from the name of one of the artist’s own paintings. The artist accuses the gallery of being offensive, but the gallery owner maintains “iIt’s my painting. It’s the title of the painting. The artist named the painting. What’s the problem?” It’s hilarious. I didn’t name the painting. He did. It’s not like it’s written on the back of the painting. He named it. Now he’s claiming the painting is defaming himself.” National Post 11/26/02

Art Merger “The Bay Area’s pre-eminent fine arts schools – the California College of Arts and Crafts and the San Francisco Art Institute – are considering merging into a single new institution that would be one of the biggest independent art colleges in the country.” San Francisco Chronicle 11/25/02

Monday, November 25

China In The Recent Past The first Guangzhou Tirennial is a good check of the stew of styles emerging from Chinese art in recent years. It’s been a period of experimentation, and the rest of the world is taking notice. “As evidence of the growing global buzz about China’s art, opening night drew groups of collectors and donors from the Museum of Modern Art and the Asia Society in New York. And in a sign that its museums are also entering the global mainstream, the gift shop at the Guangdong Museum was filled with attractive tie-in products, including T-shirts and watches with images by leading artists.” The New York Times 11/25/02

The Best Job In British Art “Norman Rosenthal is the master of the big production. He occupies a unique and enviable role in British art. While other gallery directors find themselves bogged down in bureaucracy, in running an institution, Rosenthal can devote his time to conjuring up the dreamiest exhibitions. His track record is amazing. When he arrived at the Royal Academy 25 years ago, it was a fusty and largely irrelevant institution. Today, it is one of the world’s great exhibition spaces.” The Guardian (UK) 11/25/02

Why Can’t Public Buildings Be Art? Richard MacCormac’s design for a London Tube station has attracted hrodes of fans. “The station manager enjoys its obvious theatricality and musicians have responded to its magic. There isn’t even any graffiti on the wall. It is a lovely thing, a happy surprise as the jaded tube traveller emerges from the fetid heat of an underground train into the regenerative joys of born-again Southwark.” The station design was inspired by music and theatre, says MacCormac. So why can’t more public buildings be this way? The Guardian (UK) 11/25/02

Sunday, November 24

A Life In Art Since retiring New York collector/dealer Gene Thaw “has made philanthropy something of a second career. The Thaw Charitable Trust, established in 1981, is endowed largely from the sale of a van Gogh painting, The Flowering Garden, a decade ago. A founding member and past president of the Art Dealers Association of America, Mr. Thaw retired from active dealing a decade ago but remains an insider’s insider.” Says the director of the Morgan Library: “Gene’s generosity has been so great that he must be regarded as the single greatest patron of this institution since the death of its founders.” The New York Times 11/24/02

Languishing In The Provinces England’s great regional temples of culture – “mostly built and stocked by Victorian philanthropy, – have become tatty and are withering for want of love, money and inspiration. The municipal museums and galleries of England have for too long been run by local authorities. When money is tight, their museums, like the libraries and parks, are the first to suffer.” The Central government has said it wants to help… but where is that help? The Telegraph (UK) 11/23/02

The Glenn Gould Of Collecting Last summer Canadian art collector Ken Thomson paid $117 million for a Rubens (or maybe it wasn’t a Rubens, depending on who you ask). This month he announced a gift of $300 million to the Arts Gallery of Ontario. The man’s appetite for things art is voracious. “To describe Ken Thomson as a driven collector is like describing Glenn Gould as a gifted pianist; the words cannot quite do it justice.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/23/02

Fort Worth – A New International Player The new Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth opens to the public in two weeks. But this past weeks critics were allowed in to take a look. “In addition to a sublime building designed by award-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando, it now boasts works of a quality one expects of a museum that has suddenly become the country’s second-largest arena for postwar art. The message rings clear: What was once considered a regional museum with modest ambitions has become part of the international mainstream.” Dallas Morning News 11/24/02

Art Of Infamy Courtroom artists don’t generate much excitement in the art world. But collectors are starting to pay attention. “Celebrity criminals tend to garner the most interest… But even white-collar cases can fetch a fat price if the parties have brand-name appeal and the trial is deemed historic. The sale of an original drawing from the Microsoft antitrust trial, for instance, earned courtroom artist Walt Stewart $8,000.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/13/02

Friday, November 22

Art Critics – Underworked, Underpaid So what does you average art critic look like? The National Arts Journalism Program has produced a new report with some answers. “For starters, most art critics make less than half their annual income writing criticism. Only 40 percent of those surveyed are employed as full-time critics, yet 75 percent function as chief art critics for their publications. Furthermore, some of the nation’s largest daily papers do not have full-time art critics. The most notable example is USA Today, Gannett’s national newspaper with a circulation of 2.3 million. Most critics are older than 45 and make less than $25,000 a year from their work as critics.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 11/22/02

Royal Collecting/Royal Inertia The British Royal Collection has 7000 paintings in it. But what has Queen Elizabeth added to it in her 50 years on the throne? Twenty pictures. “Although the scale of acquisitions may be modest, no reigning monarch has done much better since Queen Victoria, and the record under Edward VII, George V and George VI was equally disappointing.” The Art Newspaper 11/22/02

Ken’s Art/Frank’s Building Ken Thomson’s $370 million gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario will help make possible a $178 million rebuild of the museum by Frank Gehry. Gehry grew up in Toronto before leaving for the US in 1947, but up til now hasn’t designed anything for his hometown. “The Thomson-Gehry alliance is a magical one. The men enjoy a relaxed jocularity together and their admiration for each other is easy to read.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/21/02

The Art Of Sinking How fast is Venice sinking? For at least three centuries it’s been going down at a rate of about 8 inches a century. How do scientists know? By looking at the paintings of 18th Century painter Giovanni Antonio Canaletto. The scientists turned to Canaletto because precise measurements of the city’s sea level only date to 1872, while the artist’s works are from the previous century. Canaletto was so true to detail he even painted the dark algae stains on buildings along canal banks, a detail many artists avoided for aesthetic reasons.” MSNBC (AP) 11/21/02

Thursday, November 21

Uffizi Gallery May Shut Florence’s Uffizi Gallery could see its lights turned off because it has been unable to pay its utility bills. “The arts authority owes £165,000 for electricity and other bills have been mounting up. Its financial plight, which caused a stir in the art world when it was reported in the newspaper La Repubblica yesterday, is attributed to recent government moves to make the management of art heritage autonomous.” The Telegraph 11/21/02

A Billionaire’s Gift To A Toronto Museum Ken Thomson is Canada’s premiere art collector. He’s also Canada’s wealthiest person with a fortune worth $23 billion (CDN). Now 79, he says he plans to give “$70-million in cash and $300 million in art to an expanded and renovated Art Gallery of Ontario,” and that the gifts are only “the start of a series of gifts and loans to that institution.” Tuesday he “staggered the Canadian art world by announcing he would donate in trust an estimated 2,000 works to the AGO.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/20/02

• Art Donors – What’s In It For Me? The foundations of some of the world’s great museum collections generally come from private collectors. But what do collectors get out of giving or loaning their artwork? Quite a bit, actually. “If a gallery is seen not to respect the legal wishes of its donors, that may well undermine other peoples’ confidence in making gifts and bequests. And, in the present climate, where galleries have relatively little financial power in art markets, they are increasingly reliant on the kindness of strangers.” The Guardian (UK) 11/21/02

• New Ethics Standards for Museums The American Association of Museums lays down new guidelines “for accepting contributions to ensure the institutions maintain their integrity and donors don’t benefit by giving. A museum’s governing authority and staff must ensure that no individual benefits at the expense of the museum’s mission, reputation or the community it serves.” Nando Times (AP) 11/20/02

Smithsonian Flying High “Smithsonian officials yesterday showed off their next museum, a facility so big it could swallow the Titanic, with space left over. The new building is part of the National Air and Space Museum annex near Dulles International Airport that will give the public a close-up view of more than 200 historic aircraft — from sleek spy planes to World War I biplanes. [The exhibition space is] a cavernous structure 10 stories high and covering the equivalent of three football fields.” Washington Post 11/21/02

Outsider Art – Phenomenal or Fraudulent? “Outsider art — or, to be reductive, folk art made by the unschooled (and frequently unskilled) — is the hottest art phenomenon to sweep galleries and academies since the identity art craze of the eighties and nineties. The poor, alienated, ignorant and mentally marginal are the new ‘ethnics’; their otherness as remote and alluring to privileged art buyers as any African mask… But how innocent can art be when it is so smartly packaged?” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 11/21/02

Bridging the St. Louis Gap Visitors to St. Louis are often surprised to discover that the famous Arch, which defines the city’s downtown skyline, really isn’t all that accessible, at least on foot. Now, the city is considering several plans to establish a downtown connection to the Arch for pedestrians and tourists. Standing in the way are an interstate highway and a major city boulevard. The plans are all architecturally pleasing, and the final decision will likely come down to cost vs. convenience. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 11/21/02

Much More Than A Velvet Elvis (Isn’t It?) Pat Sheil inherits a black velvet painting. So what’s the market? “The first thing we had to do was investigate the state of the black velvet art market. Initial inquiries were less than encouraging. The first valuer simply laughed, but at least he came straight to the point, without saying a word. The second fellow raised one eyebrow and assured us that there was nothing wrong with the frame.” The Age (Melbourne) 11/21/02

Wednesday, November 20

Desperately Seeking Sanders A British art historian claims that she has found records proving the existence of John Sanders, an actor and painter thought to be responsible for the only living portrait of William Shakespeare. Trouble is, the painter Tarnya Cooper has ‘found’ is not the right John Sanders, judging from his age and relative inexperience at the time the portrait in question was painted. Still, historians feel that Cooper’s John Sanders may well lead them to the John Sanders they’re all looking for. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 11/20/02

The Anonymous Postcard Scramble “A host of artists, designers and musicians have put brush to paper to create potential masterpieces for the annual Secret Postcard exhibition at the Royal College of Art… But buyers bid for the postcards without knowing who the artist is because all works are displayed anonymously and are only revealed once sold. The exhibition creates a great deal of interest from the public who have the opportunity to buy cheap art which could one day net them a fortune.” BBC 11/20/02

Tuesday, November 19

Mexican Wall Art Standoff A few years ago the Mexican government hired an artist to paint a mural depicting Latin-American writers on a wall of the new San Francisco main library. The mural was finished and dedicated, but the Mexican government never paid the artist. A change in government swept out the official who commissioned the work and the new government is unwilling “to accept responsibility for decisions of the past.” San Francisco Chronicle 11/18/02

Hey – A Canaletto For Your Home? Britain’s Art Fund is celebrating its 100th anniversary, “during which it claims to have stopped nearly half a million works of art from going abroad.” The fund is arranging exhibitions all over the UK, some of them in unusual locations. None of the plans more unusual, though, than a proposal to put an Old Master painting in a private home. “Obviously there are security and conservation issues, but we seriously intend to allow an Old Master painting to be shown to an ordinary home. We are serious. I can assure you it will happen, the museums love the idea.” The Guardian (UK) 11/19/02

• Art Rescue Project Since 1903 the Art Fund has rescued “almost 500,000 treasures at risk of sale to private or foreign owners” and turned them over to public museums and galleries. The Independent (UK) 11/19/02

Indians Back Out Of Museum Deal The Pechanga Indian Tribe has backed away from a deal with the financially troubled Southwest Museum in Southern California “The proposed deal would have given the Pechangas a chance to borrow thousands of the Southwest Museum’s artifacts, 98% of which are held, unseen by visitors, in the Mount Washington facility’s storage rooms. To display the artifacts, the Pechangas proposed a museum and cultural center of their own, which would rise near the tribe’s hotel and casino on the edge of Temecula. In exchange for the loan of artifacts, the casino-wealthy tribe was to have provided $750,000 yearly to the Southwest Museum for five years, then as much as $1.3 million yearly once the items were on display at the reservation.” Los Angeles Times 11/19/02

• Previously: COURTING IN THE SOUTHWEST: Los Angeles’ Southwest Museum has an important collection of Native American artifacts. But the museum is poor and is contemplating acquiring a wealthy partner. The suitors are a movie cowboy museum or an indian casino. “But a partnership with either the Autry or the Pechanga Band raises new questions. Some Indian groups have criticized the Autry proposal as a none-too-subtle attempt by the cowboys to take over the Indians, culturally speaking, while some in the art world have expressed concern about whether a casino would really be an appropriate overseer for a major collection of Indian artifacts.” The New York Times 08/29/01

Sex Sells – One Museum That Turns A Profit The Museum of Sex in New York has been open six weeks, and at $17, its admission price is high. But already the museum has attracted 15,000 visitors, many more than needed to “make a profit.” The New York Times 11/19/02

Anger Over Street Art In Argentina About 60 artists placed dozens of human-like dolls covered in fake blood and vomit on the streets of Buenos Aires. The controversial art project angered many when “ambulances were called and passers-by distressed after seeing what they believed were dead bodies on the corners of some of the city’s major streets and avenues.” Ananova 11/18/02

Monday, November 18

Guggenheim Visits Down 25 Percent: Is the Guggenheim Museum in danger of going bankrupt, as a New York Sun story suggested in late September? Not at all, say museum officials. Sure the museum is hurting – staff has been cut, and the museum’s Soho gallery was closed – and attendance is down 25 percent this year. For next year? “Staff layoffs, reduced museum hours, and changes in the exhibition programme were all suggested as possibilities, according to a spokesperson for the Guggenheim.” The Art Newspaper 11/15/02

Don’t Box Me In Why is it that some of the most critical people condemning contemporary art seem to have the strongest ideas of exactly what art is? And those ideas usually involve some sort of idea which has been done before. Beware, writes Martin Gaylord, having inflexible definitions of art is a sign of narrow minds… The Spectator 11/02

Sunday, November 17

Nazi-looted Art Seized in Vienna For the first time, Austrian authorities, acting under a court order, have seized a painting thought to have been stolen by occupying Nazi forces during World War II. The seizure was sought by a Vienna-based Jewish advocacy group, and hailed by art experts worldwide as a crucial step in the movement to repatriate the thousands of artworks looted by the Nazis. The New York Times 11/16/02

Thursday October 31

GEORGE W. BUSH, BOOK CRITIC: The President of the United States apparently has a bit more time on his hands than many people think. According to author and Marine Reserve veteran Gabe Hudson, President Bush was anything but pleased to receive a copy of Hudson’s well-reviewed story collection entitled Dear Mr. President, and sent back a note calling the book “unpatriotic and ridiculous and just plain bad writing.” Hudson further claims that FBI agents have been showing up at his most recent book signings. The White House isn’t commenting. Hartford Courant 10/30/02

THINKING BACK: Sure we’re always hearing buzz about the latest books coming out. But it’s a publisher’s backlist that pays the bills. “Though the definition of where frontlist ends and backlist starts is tough to pin down, the idea of books that have stood the test of time inspires rapturous enthusiasm among independent booksellers, several of whom recently shared their thoughts on this vital category. Selling older titles is profitable and basic to the entire book enterprise.” Publishers Weekly 10/28/02

THE WRITER’S VOICE: “When Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell founded Caedmon Records in 1952, they had little idea their upstart label would develop a back catalogue that included recordings by Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and T.S. Eliot. Fifty years later, original Caedmon LPs have become fetish items for collectors, as many of the existing LPs have been destroyed by school children who have played library copies to inaudibility, and club DJs who use the LPs to pepper their dance tracks with snippets of dialogue.” National Post (Canada) 10/31/02

HAPPY NaNoWriMo! You mean you haven’t started your novel yet? Well, you’d better get cracking – November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, to the cognoscenti,) and if you want to participate, you’ll have thirty days, starting tomorrow, to write 50,000 words that no one outside of your household will likely ever read. Oh, and 6,000 people are said to be participating across the country, so your work had better stand out from a crowd. What’s the point, you say? Oh, c’mon: wouldn’t it feel great to put a check mark next to ‘Write a Novel’ on your great cosmic to-do list? Chicago Tribune 10/31/02

Wednesday October 30

“DIFFICULT” WIN: France’s top literary prize is the Prix Goncourt. It has great prestige but only token monetary value. This year’s winner is Pascal Quignard, who won for a book that critics have described as a “difficult” read. “It’s a sequence of beginnings of novels, stories, landscapes, autobiographical fragments. It’s not a novel or an essay.” BBC 10/29/02

LONGING TO TELL YOU… What’s with all these new extra-long books? The number of 500-page books is growing. “Economic reasons, naturally, play a part in this trend. To publish a long book does not cost much more than to publish one of 300 pages or fewer – perhaps about £5. But the market dictates that you can charge about £20 for a massive volume – and less than half of that for a smaller one. For publishers, booksellers and even writers, the margins on short books look very unappealing.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/30/02

Tuesday October 29

TO BE CANADIAN (SAY IT PROUD): Canadians seem to be scooping up all the big international literary prizes these days. Canadians themselves seem a little dazed by all the attention, but there’s no denying that Canadian literature now has cachet. How did Canada grow its crop of prominent writers? MobyLives 10/29/02

POETS LAUREATE – PRACTICING WITH AN EXPIRED LICENSE? Current controversies over American state poets laureate are a bit embarrassing. But hey, poets live messy lives, and besides, ”it has sparked the kind of controversy that allows people to have opinions about something they never knew existed in the first place. Maybe people will even care to have an opinion, and that’s a good thing.” Boston Globe 10/29/02

RESCUING WRITERS: The Australia Council has a program for “eminent” writers to “rescue” them from financial hardship. The program gives $80,000 each to authors who have “published at least four works, regardless of age, and must ‘dazzle’ the board with their literary merit, critical recognition and contribution to Australian literature. Eighty-one writers received grants totalling $1.94 million, out of a record 543 applicants.” Sydney Morning Herald 10/29/02

A GOOD MAD-ON: Mad Magazine is 50 and a cultural icon. Okay, so its circulation peaked in 1974 at 2.8 million and is now averaging about 250,000 each month. But Mad was father (or at least wierd uncle) to a whole generation of ironic, sarcastic humor. Funny, its style is so pervasively reflected throughout modern North American culture it’s difficult to remember pre-Mad times. Toronto Star 10/29/02

Monday October 28

SUING THE PATRIOT ACT: A coalition of free-speech groups have sued the US Justice Department over the Patriot Act. “The Patriot Act, passed in October of 2001, allows the seizing of records from institutions like libraries and bookstores even in situations where criminal activity is not suspected. It also imposes a gag order that prevents those who records have been seized from reporting what happened. The suit seeks certain pieces of what it describes as generic information, such as how many times the act has been used and against what kind of establishments. It does not seek to uncover what was revealed in these seizures.” Publishers Weekly 10/24/02

MARTEL’S ‘OVERNIGHT’ SUCCESS: Last week Yann Martel won the Booker Prize. Not many had heard of him before that. He got only a $20,000 for Canadian rights to Life of Pi, US$75,000 for US rights and was turned down by five UK publishers before getting $36,000 for the UK rights from a struggling publisher. For four years those advances were his only income. “I could only do it because I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t have a car. I have roommates. I wear second-hand clothes. I have no TV. I have no stereo. My only expenses are my notebooks and my computer.” National Post (Canada) 10/28/02

Sunday October 27

THE MAKING OF A COUP: When the wildly unorthodox process that led to the selection of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as winner of this year’s Booker Prize came to light last weekend, the spotlight was thrown onto Professor Lisa Jardine, who may just have transformed the prize forever. “Every coup is part cock-up, part conspiracy. For the suits of Booker, the biggest cock-up was that, in the echo chamber of the British Museum, their proprietory rhetoric was inaudible. No one paid any attention. So when Harvey McGrath of the Man Group delivered the coup de grâce, establishing the Man Group’s control of the prize in a few silkily lethal sentences, Booker’s ancien régime was already mortally wounded.” The Observer (UK) 10/27/02

• THE TRAPPINGS OF FAME: So what will Yann Martel’s Booker win do for his career? Certainly, sales of his prize-winning book will skyrocket, but in the long term, many serious authors have found fame to be as much a hindrance as a help. Norman Mailer once claimed that his celebrity “ripped my former identity from me,” and damaged his ability to work. The Telegraph (UK) 10/26/02

TRIAGE AMONGST THE STACKS: It’s the hardest part of any librarian’s job, and there are many who think it shouldn’t be done at all. But with space at a premium in nearly every library, the process known as ‘weeding’ has become an essential, if painful one. Which books to keep, and which to discard? Should lack of recent readership banish a book from its space, or should decisions be made based on quality, as determined by ‘experts’? The debate goes on. The New York Times 10/26/02

Friday October 25

REJECTING A WINNER: Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi won the Booker Prize this week. But when he was looking for a publisher, five top London firms turned him down. “It is embarrassing for the editors concerned. I understand how they must be feeling today. But you know, this sort of thing happens all the time with serious fiction in particular, where taste and sensibility are what matters. Of course, it is very gratifying when your own judgment and belief in a book’s greatest proves correct.” The Guardian (UK) 10/24/02

Thursday October 24

ARE WRITERS THE NEW POP STARS? “There’s a sense among young people and those who make it that fiction can be central to the culture. There was a conventional wisdom among the older generations that it was a marginalized endeavor. To see it be a central cultural product for kids today, that’s all to the good. The only caveat is the problems that being a rock star or any kind of celebrity sensation presents.” New York Observer 10/23/02

HANDICAPPING THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS: This year’s National Book Award fiction list “lacks not only a clear favorite, but also a controversial anti- favorite—think In America, by Susan Sontag, in 2000—that could provide what contest-watchers live for: a big fat upset. Publicly, publishers say nothing but nice things about the nominated titles. Privately, they bicker and bitch about who’s been excluded. And who came blame them?” New York Observer 10/23/02

THANK GOD FOR THE BOOKER: “With a Canadian author walking away with this year’s prestigious Booker Prize and another two short-listed, the country’s hard hit publishers said on Wednesday they were are only too happy for some deserving international attention… Canada’s publishing industry, which has long been supported by the government, has had a tough year after suffering a bankruptcy of one of its major houses, General Publishing Company.” Yahoo! News (Reuters) 10/23/02

• MARTEL MADNESS: Canadian booksellers are reporting a mad rush on Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which was announced this week as the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize. Sales are particularly brisk in Montreal, where several of the city’s largest bookstores have been unable to keep the title in stock. Montreal Gazette 10/24/02
• PLOT OF PI: So, now that the Booker has been awarded, and the gushing has begun anew over the talent of young Yann Martel, what about the book itself? Where did it come from, and where does it take the reader? According to Martel himself, the genesis of the idea came from a scene in a Brazilian novel of Jews escaping Nazi Germany, and fleshed itself out during the author’s travels in India into “a novel which will make you believe in God’ — or ask yourself why you don’t.” National Post (Canada) 10/24/02

SEBOLD’S SUCCESS: The publishing industry, like most entertainment cultures, does not like surprises. The best-sellers are supposed to be written by brand-name authors and fluffed up by expensive marketing campaigns. But once every few years, a book manages to break through the PR wall and sell like gangbusters simply because, well, it’s a great book. Enter Alice Sebold, and her self-made bestseller The Lovely Bones. Washington Post 10/24/02

Wednesday October 23

MARTEL WINS BOOKER – AGAIN: Canadian writer Yann Martel has won this year’s Booker Prize. He quickly denied that the fact that three Canadian writers made the Booker shortlist consituted a literary movement. “It’s happenstance that there’s three Canadian writers.” This is actually Martel’s second time winning the booker in the past week. Last week the Booker website briefly declared him the winner; that announcement was dismissed as an error by Booker judges. BBC 10/23/02

• THINKING ABOUT CANADIAN WRITING: Martel’s book was greeted with good but not great reviews in Canada, but was an instant hit with British critics. “I hope this award will encourage us to think of Canadian literature in a different light, to respond more positively to adventurous, playful, yet intellectually serious strains of writing.” Toronto Star 10/23/02
• O CANADA: “Canada, a country with no Robert Burns or Robert Louis Stevenson in its young literary history, may be the very model of how a nation can actively create and encourage an outstandingly strong book industry, with all the socio-economic benefits which flow from that, never mind the benefits to the heart, soul and grateful mind. Canadian investment in literature comes from various sources, national and provincial.” The Scotsman 10/23/02

CALIFORNIA POET LAUREATE RESIGNS AFTER LIE: Quincy Troupe, California’s first poet laureate, who was appointed last June, has resigned after it was discovered he had lied on his official resume. “His curriculum vitae says he graduated from college, but he didn’t. Troupe, a professor of creative writing and American and Caribbean literature at the University of California at San Diego, is author of 13 books, including six books of poetry. ‘He was extremely popular. His work was fantastic. He was loved among his students. It’s a shame’.” Yahoo! (AP) 10/19/02

• A LIFE UNRAVELING: The revelation could jeopardize Troupe’s post at UCSD, where he has taught since 1991, because it constitutes a violation of the faculty code of conduct.” San Francisco Chronicle 10/21/02
• THE PERILS OF POET LAUREATES: As the states of New Jersey and California have recently found out, hiring a poet is not a benign act. “Some are prone to confuse the prophetic with extravagant foolishness. Many believe that the ecstatic and the orgiastic are subjects just as suitable as the edifying. Some are sinister fools. Many others are in the process of living the same sort of messy, contradictory lives as everyone else – though usually more poetically.” Los Angeles Times 10/23/02

DISCOVERING HEMMINGWAY: Last March, in a small house in Cuba, “a delegation of four Americans found what they described as a jackpot: file cabinets and boxes filled with thousands of pages of Hemingway’s original manuscripts, rough drafts and outtakes from great works, handwritten letters of love and anger, notes in English and Spanish, and thousands of photographs.” The trove should reveal much about the last third of the writer’s life. San Francisco Chronicle 10/23/02

LISTENING TO THE PRINTED WORD: Why do people flock to author readings? They can, after all, cut out the middleman and simply read the book. The International Festival of Authors in Toronto is stuffed full of author readings. “You come to hear the ur-voice. To hear authors talks about the work, where it comes from, how it was made. That and the chance to actually shake the hand of the person who’s work you’ve admired. One of the things you can do here that you can’t do at a film or music festival is actually shake the hands of the stars.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/23/02

Tuesday October 22

A TRADITIONAL GG: Canada’s Governor General Book Award finalists were announced Monday. There were no first-time authors, no edgy, risky new voices on the fiction list. The shortlist includes The Case of Lena S. by David Bergen (M & S), Exile by Ann Ireland (Simon & Pierre), The Navigator of New York by Giller nominee Wayne Johnston (Knopf), A Song for Nettie Johnson by Gloria Sawai (Coteau) and Unless by Carol Shields (Random House), who is also a finalist for the Booker and the Giller. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/22/02

• SHIELDS’ HAT TRICK: With the Governor General’s nomination, “Carol Shields’ novel Unless, about a family’s agony when a daughter opts to live on the street for no apparent reason, is also a finalist for the $25,000 Giller Prize and for the $120,000 Man Booker prize, to be announced in London tonight.” Toronto Star 10/22/02
• WHAT’S CANADIAN? Three Canadian books made this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. But is there anything that’s distinctly Canadian about them? “Merely posing the question – Is there such a thing as a Canadian style? – betrays the sort of provincialism these Canadian authors and books so forcefully reject. There is no writing that is identifiably Canadian because what is distinct about the literature coming from there is its diversity.” Calgary Herald 10/22/02

AN EIGHTH HARRY POTTER? JK Rowling has always said that there would be seven Harry Potter books. But Warner Brothers has copyrighted not only the next three titles, but a fourth as well. “The new titles are book five (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) plus Harry Potter and the Pyramids of Furmat, Harry Potter and the Chariots of Light and Harry Potter and the Alchemist’s Cell.” The Scotsman 10/21/02

• NO EIGHTH HARRY: JK Rowling’s agent has denied there are any plans for an eighth Harry Potter. “There is absolutely no truth in the story that either there is going to be an eighth book in the series or that these titles are genuine title for the sixth and seventh books.” BBC 10/22/02

SCOTLAND ABANDONS NATIONAL LIT CENTER IDEA: The Scottish government has ditched a £2 million plan for an expansion of the National Library to turn it into a National Literary Center. “The aim was to provide a ‘national information and literary centre’ by giving the library the space it needs to expand, and at the same time bringing in other organisations such as the Edinburgh Book Festival to promote books and internet learning.” The Scotsman 10/15/02

Monday October 21

THE NYer’S NEW FICTION EDITOR: Deborah Treisman, a “32-year-old prodigy little known outside the literary world,” has been named the new fiction editor of the The New Yorker magazine, succeeding Bill Buford in one of the most important fiction editing jobs in the literary world. “I suppose it is not wrong to say that that I am interested in younger, more experimental, edgier voices.” The New York Times 10/21/02

WHOSE BACKLASH IS IT ANYWAY? Is a backlash forming against today’s young trendy literary writers? The signs are all there. But look a little closer – the ” ‘backlash’ being forecast is against a group of writers who started by exploiting a ‘backlash’ of their own devising.” MobyLives 10/21/02

Sunday October 20

DO LIT PRIZES MATTER? They generate lots of publicity. But do literary prizes really make a difference to the world of letters? “Yes, say leading literary professionals, who believe such awards not only carry commercial weight, but also play an increasingly important role in connecting serious writers with readers eager for qualitative road signs in a world awash in books.” Los Angeles Times 10/19/02

BAD WAY TO CHOOSE: Lisa Jardine, the chair of the panel of judges for this year’s Booker Prize says the way novels are chosen for consideration of one of the world’s major literary awards is outdated and she “accused the head of the prize of having an outdated corporate agenda.” She says “that the current crop of 130 books – two submitted by every publisher – was too large” and that “the judges were prevented from making the best decision by the sheer number of books they had to read.” The Observer (UK) 10/20/02

• CHANGING OF THE GUARD: This year’s Booker jury piles into cabs and rides the London Eye to check a plot point. The ascent of Lisa Jardine as jury chair was, “symbolically, the moment a stuffy old literary prize was dragged into the twenty-first century, the moment when old-fashioned literary critical discourse was replaced by publicity-conscious British empiricism. This, far more than the springtime media flap about the opening of the prize to American competition, is the real, rather overlooked, story of the 2002 Booker prize.” The Observer (UK) 10/20/02
• ALL THINGS BOOKER: For some writers, winning the Booker Prize (the winner of which is to be announced Tuesday) is the difference between being able to earn a living as a writer or not. This is the Year of the Canadian, with three of the six finalists coming from the Frozen North. It’s difficult to overstate the Booker’s effect on a career. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/19/02

THE DAVE EGGERS PUZZLE: Dave Eggers’ new book is being self-published and he’s giving away the money earned from it. With the success of his last book he could have done anything he wanted. “He’s so averse to promoting himself that it is the canniest act of self-promotion. He really doesn’t care – really. But that’s hard for anyone in the frenzy business to believe.” Los Angeles Times 10/20/02

Friday October 18

BOOK GLUT WARNING: Each year publishers release many of the biggest books in time for the holiday season; it is, after all, the time when most books are sold. But “this year the stream of titles from the publishing houses has become a flood, provoking booksellers to warn that some high-quality titles are at risk of being drowned.” The Independent (UK) 10/17/02

Thursday October 17

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED: Nominees include “You Are Not a Stranger Here,” a debut story collection by Adam Haslett, “Big If,” by Mark Costello; Julia Glass’ “Three Junes”; Brad Watson’s “The Heaven of Mercury”; and “Gorgeous Lies,” by Martha McPhee, daughter of the award-winning essayist John McPhee.” Nando Times (AP) 10/16/02

• OOPS – MARTEL WINS THIS YEAR’S BOOKER – A WEEK EARLY: This year’s Booker Prize winner will be announced next week. But due to a mixup on the Booker website, a notice announcing that Yann Martel has won was posted. A booker spokesperson rushes to assure one and all that the winner isn’t really known yet. “The judges haven’t met yet. I can guarantee that this isn’t the actual result. There are six draft press releases for each of the shortlisted books and this is one of them.” The Guardian (UK) 10/17/02

REBUILDING THE GREAT LIBRARY: The Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed 1,500 years ago. “The original great library’s collection of some 700,000 papyrus scrolls, including works by Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles represented the first time knowledge was collected and codified by scribes.” Now it’s been rebuilt The £130m project was initiated more than a decade ago, amid high hopes that the Biblioteca Alexandrina would recapture the spirit of the city’s ancient seat of learning.” But “the new library is riven with dispute over what its content should be. Egypt’s fondness for censorship has meant that rows have already erupted over its book collection policy.” The Guardian (UK) 10/16/02

THE CASE FOR N JERSEY’S POET LAUREATE: New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka is almost certain to be removed from the job because of a controversial poem he wrote about 9/11 that is being called anti-Semitic. “The issue is ultimately one of tolerance of diverse opinion. The left gave us political correctness in the early 1990’s, and now those processes of enforcing orthodoxy have been inherited by the right and the mainstream. And the heretics only happen to be talking about the most important international questions of our time.” New York Observer 10/16/02

BOOKS FOR THE BLIND: A new law in Britain allows copies of books to be made for the blind without breaching copyright. “Only five per cent of titles published each year in the UK are currently accessible to Britain’s visually impaired people via Braille or large print.” The Scotsman 10/17/02

PUBLISH YOURSELF: Print-on-demand books are becoming popular with authors who can’t find a traditional publisher. “On-demand books are a new wrinkle in the concept of vanity publishing, in which a vanity press typically prints many copies of the book at once (and generally the author has to pay for them). Since print-on-demand publishers only issue books as needed, costs are lower and the author can even make a little money in royalties.” The New York Times 10/17/02

BUFORD TO LEAVE NYer EDITOR JOB: Bill Buford, who has been The New Yorker’s fiction editor since 1994, is leaving the job to be the magazine’s European correspondent. “In a way, it’s going from the best editing job in town to the best writing job in town-except it’s not in town.” New York Observer 10/16/02

Wednesday October 16

MR BOOKS: Martin Goff runs the Man Booker Prize. He’s also the printed word’s biggest advocate in the UK. “What distinguishes Goff from the other Hooray Henries around St James’s Square is his quixotic quest to get the philistine British to buy good novels. Selling double glazing to Afghans is child’s play by comparison.” Now “there are rumours that Goff is about to retire from masterminding the Man Booker prize. It will be a sad day.” The Guardian (UK) 10/16/02

FRANKFURT REBOUND: “Last year… there was an eerie pall over the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, a gathering of book industry professionals that has been going on since the mid-15th Century, shortly after Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type… But this year, in spite of the rumors of war, the collapse of the economy in important book markets such as Argentina (where 700 bookstores closed in the last three years), and the lingering effects of Europe’s switch to the more expensive Euro, the Frankfurt Book Fair — the largest market for international rights in the world — was bustling.” Chicago Tribune 10/16/02

MORE AMBROSE DEBATE: Some critics felt that obituaries of the historian Stephen Ambrose glossed over reports of his plagiarism, but Tim Rutten detected the opposite bias, singling out the Boston Globe as the most egregious Ambrose-basher, and pointing out that paraphrase (and footnoted paraphrase, at that) is very different from plagiarism. “All synoptic, narrative historians, which is what Ambrose was, paraphrase from other sources. If the standards laid down by his most rabid critics were applied to the four Evangelists, the three Synoptic Gospels would have to be denounced as acts of plagiarism–as would a substantial and revered part of the extant medieval corpus.” Los Angeles Times 10/16/02

Tuesday October 15

LUV ME, YA DUMMY: Who like to be insulted? And yet “publishers continue to appeal to potential book-buyers by labelling them dummies and complete idiots. And they’ve struck paydirt in the process.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/15/02

MAKING SENSE: Is literary criticism in need of some organizing principles? “It may be that much literature makes sense in the light of the current warhorses of critical analysis: Marx, Freud, textualism, postmodernism, ‘queer theory,’ and so forth. But it is equally likely that a good deal of literature (just as life itself) makes more sense in the light of evolution. Accordingly, literary critics might well profit by adding Darwinian analysis to their armamentarium.” Chronicle of Higher Education 10/14/02

THE HISTORICAL RECORD: Where is the intellectual rigor in today’s historical fiction? “That some of today’s historical novelists are talented is obvious, but equally obvious is the fact that they don’t want to aggressively interrogate the historical record in any new ways, or challenge their readers’ assumptions about how we imagine the past.” MobyLives 10/14/02

THE HIDDEN AMBROSE: Why did obituaries of author Stephen Ambrose gloss over his plagiarism? “Ambrose’s pilferage was much more than a slip-up in a ‘couple of books.’ As the Weekly Standard, Forbes.com, and New York Times proved in one damning week last January, Ambrose plagiarized all the time.” Slate 10/14/02

Monday October 14

FIGHTING IN PUBLIC: A public and rancorous debate is being carried out in public among two of England’s better known public intellectuals. “The debate is particularly English because its protagonists — the novelist Martin Amis and the Washington-based writer Christopher Hitchens — are so rooted in late 20th-century London. Both graduated from Oxford University and have carried out their quarrel in learned texts freckled with Latin. Both won renown while working at the leftist New Statesman in the 1970’s. Each had no cross word — in public at least — for the other. Until last month.” The New York Times 10/14/02

THE POISON REVIEW: You spend years researching and writing a scolarly book and then a prominent literary review sends it out to a “demon reviewer whose solitary aim is to make mincemeat of you in public. There is, of course, no row like an academic row… The Guardian (UK) 10/11/02

• Previously: CROSSFIRE: There are bad reviews. And then there are bad reviews. Jason Cowley writes that literary London is wincing at a whomping of “perhaps unprecedented hostility and malice” in the Times Literary Supplement of noted Russian scholar Orlando Figes’ new book, Natasha’s Dance, “a broad, sweeping, multidisciplinary cultural history of Russia.” Moscow-based, British academic Rachel Polonsky’s review “cites among her charges against him factual inaccuracies, misreadings, cavalier appropriation of sources and overall intellectual irresponsibility. There are even suggestions, if not of plagiarism, which remains the cardinal crime in academe, then of careless paraphrase.” The Guardian (UK) 10/03/02

WANTING WOMEN: “Women’s magazines are in a state of flux. Two high profile titles (Elle and She) closed earlier this year, and most of the others are in decline. As a result, most of the mass market major titles including Woman’s Day, New Idea, and marie claire have been changing their formula to save themselves from extinction.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/14/02

ARCHER ESCAPES PUNISHMENT: Writer, former MP (and convicted felon) Jeffrey Archer has escaped punishment for breaking prison rules and publishing a diary he wrote while in his cell. “Archer, 62, had his £12-a-day prison earnings stopped for 14 days and was banned from using the prison canteen for two weeks. The punishment was suspended for six months” if Archer doesn’t break the rules again. The Times (UK) 10/11/02

• ARCHER’S BANAL DIARY: What about Archer’s “literary” impressions of prison life? “Completely worthless from the literary point of view, and relentlessly banal in thought, observation and analysis, they are nonetheless revealing: of Lord Archer’s mind and personality rather than of the prison system. And to be privy to Archer’s mind in full cry is a depressing experience indeed.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/14/02
• Previously: LETTER FROM PRISON: Jeffrey Archer’s diary from prison describing his life there is being published and serialized in the Daily Mail next week. But prison authorities say the diary may break prison rules. “He can’t make money while he is a serving prisoner from publications and I have a duty to protect the privacy of other prisoners and members of staff. He has to respect that.” If he has broken rules, time may be added to his sentence. The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

Sunday October 13

STEPHEN AMBROSE, 66: Stephen Ambrose, the eminent historian whose colloquial style made him a bestselling author as well as a respected researcher, has died at the age of 66 after a long battle with lung cancer. Ambrose had lately been battling charges of plagiarism in several of his works. The New York Times (AP) 10/13/02

PRODUCT PLACEMENT OR HACK-FOR-HIRE? Audiences have long since gotten used to the endless and gratuitous product placements used in movies and television shows to generate extra revenue with very little extra effort. But now, an even more insidious form of message imbedding has come to the world of books: “Two entrepreneurial exiles from Britain’s advertising universe are venturing boldly and unapologetically into this once-forbidden territory. They propose to write fiction for organizations and institutions that want their message communicated. Never mind the niceties of plot, theme and character development; let’s just turn literature into another marketing opportunity, of which the Western world is so clearly bereft.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/12/02

Friday October 11

PORTER COMES FORWARD: Peter Porter has won poetry’s biggest award – the £10,000 Forward Poetry prize. “After the acrimony of many recent poetry prizes, last night’s was a unanimous decision by the judges, for Porter’s latest collection, Max is Missing. William Sieghart, the chairman, described him as one of the most distinguished poets working in Britain – where he has lived since he left Australia 50 years ago.” The Guardian (UK) 10/10/02

Thursday October 10

KERTESZ WINS NOBEL: A Hungarian novelist whose works draw their dark inspiration from the author’s own days in two Nazi death camps has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Imre Kertesz was lauded by the Swedish Academy for “exploring how individuals can survive when subjected to ‘barbaric’ social forces.” BBC 10/10/02

GHOSTWRITTEN NOBEL? One of Spain’s most distinguished writers – Nobel winner Camilo Jose Cela – has been accused of “regularly using ghostwriters for most of his career. The allegations… include not just the recent works of Cela, who died in January at 85 and won his Nobel in 1989, but stretch back to his early classics.” The Guardian 10/09/02

ATWOOD SUES GLOBE: The Toronto Globe & Mail is being sued for libel by famed Canadian author Margaret Atwood, after the newspaper supposedly singled out Atwood as one of the more prominent signers of a strongly worded petition opposing American President George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq. Atwood did sign the petition, along with about 130 other Canadian artists, authors, and celebrities, but she claims that the Globe associated her with comments made at the press conference announcing the petition (notably one referring to the American administration as a group of thugs,) a press conference she did not attend. National Post (Canada) 10/10/02

Wednesday October 9

OUSTING THE POET: The New Jersey State Legislature has been working on a resolution to oust state poet laureate Amiri Baraka after Baraka read a poem suggesting that Israelis might have had something to do with the attack on the World Trade Center. Though he can’t fire Baraka, NJ Gov. James E. McGreevey “stopped payment on the $10,000 state grant Baraka was to have received as the state’s honorary poet laureate.” Newark Star-Ledger 10/08/02

SECOND CHANCES: Today’s publishing climate exerts huge pressure on writers to hit big out of the gate. And even greater pressure to follow up with another success. There’s little patience for stumbles. But “Second-Novel Syndrome has long been an occupational hazard in the world of letters, as authors struggle with writer’s block, intense scrutiny, and the self-consciousness induced by sudden celebrity.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 10/08/02

BOOKS ON WHEELS: The Internet Bookmobile is making its way across America “stopping at schools, museums and libraries, making books for kids and spreading the word about the digital library that is the Net.” It’s a “1992 Ford Aerostar equipped with mobile satellite dish, duplexing color printer, desktop binding machine and paper cutter. A sign on the outside says, “1,000,000 books inside (soon).” The van will end its cross-country trek today, parking outside the US Supreme Court, while the future of copyright law is argued inside. Salon 10/09/02

RISK-FREE: Have poets stopped experimenting with language? “Every age has its risks, innovators, uncontainable oddballs, but the 20th is the century in which experiment became the central fetish of artistic production. It may be that the recent spate of proclamations that modernism’s not dead yet, please, isn’t simply a holding action by the Citizens for Endowed Chairs for Modernists, but a recognition that we haven’t managed to come up with a criterion beyond experimentation (though raw marketability seems to have done well in the fine arts).” Village Voice Literary Supplement 10/08/02

BACK TO TELL ABOUT IT: “Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel laureate from Colombia and the foremost author in Latin America, learned in 1999 that he had lymphatic cancer. He promptly cloistered himself with a single-minded pursuit not seen perhaps since he wrote the 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in a little more than a year, his only vice a steady supply of cigarettes provided by his wife, Mercedes.” Now he’s about to release “what may be his most-awaited book, Vivir Para Contarla, or To Live to Tell It.” The New York Times 10/09/02

CROSSFIRE: There are bad reviews. And then there are bad reviews. Jason Cowley writes that literary London is wincing at a whomping of “perhaps unprecedented hostility and malice” in the Times Literary Supplement of noted Russian scholar Orlando Figes’ new book, Natasha’s Dance, “a broad, sweeping, multidisciplinary cultural history of Russia.” Moscow-based, British academic Rachel Polonsky’s review “cites among her charges against him factual inaccuracies, misreadings, cavalier appropriation of sources and overall intellectual irresponsibility. There are even suggestions, if not of plagiarism, which remains the cardinal crime in academe, then of careless paraphrase.” The Guardian (UK) 10/03/02

• TAKING FIGES APART: Read Polonsky’s dissection of Figes’ book. Times Literary Supplement 10/04/02

Tuesday October 8

ALD – R.I.P: The popular website Arts & Letters Daily has shut down. Editor Denis Dutton has updated the site for the past year after parent company Lingua Franca went out of business. ALD and the rest of Lingua Franca‘s assets will be auctioned off in bankruptcy, but loyal ALD readers aren’t out of luck. Dutton has moved on to Philosophy & Literature, where’s he’s recreated the ALD idea. National Post 10/08/02

PAYBACK: Dave Eggers could have chosen any big publisher to produce his latest book. But he’s self publishing and distributing it through independent bookstores. For Eggers and his magazine McSweeney’s, it’s a way of rewarding those who have helped them. “Almost all small publishers depend on the support of independent bookstores. McSweeney’s books have always been sold primarily in independent bookstores, and not by choice. Typically, the chains do not order many copies of our books, leaving most of the sales to the independent stores. Therefore, we always give independent stores first dibs on our books.” Chicago Tribune 10/08/02

SERIOUS READING: Many American magazines have been struggling as the economy has worsened. But more serious magazines have seen their circulations increase significantly. Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic are newly thriving. “When everyone is feeling that the only important thing in life is the next Lexus and worship CEOs as demigods, there is little appetite for ideas or good writing, which is what our magazines are about. But the fact remains that you can get more out of good writing than you can from a 500-channel television universe that inevitably dissolves into incoherence. Writing involves thought and creates coherence, which is an appealing commodity in this atmosphere of concern.” Los Angeles Times 10/04/02

SEARCHING FOR SUBSTANCE: Writer Jonathan Franzen is back with a new book – a collection of essays that seems to be winning back some of the fans he lost last year in L’affaire Oprah. This is a serious series of writing, in which Franzen “fears that if there ever was an average American reader there no longer is, and, what is worse, that the ranks of serious readers are growing ever thinner.” Chicago Sun-Times 10/06/02

• BACK ON FRANZEN’S SIDE: “To read How to Be Alone is to see how the awkward parting of Franzen and [Oprah] Winfrey dramatized the lopsided war between the idea-mongering minority and the image-peddling majority in American culture. It is also to wish that intelligence were more fashionable.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/07/02

Monday October 7

BOOK WORLD CONVENES IN FRANKFURT: The annual Frankfurt Book Fair begins this week “with more than 6,000 exhibitors representing 110 countries, hosting more than 2,600 events and 800 readings and interviews with authors. Although the number of countries and publishers is 5 percent lower this year than last year, the Frankfurt Book Fair remains the largest fair of its kind in the world. The most notable absentees are from the host country itself, with almost 15 percent fewer German publishers reserving space this year.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/04/02

PUBLISHING’S GOLDEN AGE: Down with the pessimists, writes Toby Mundy. “With its over-educated, overworked, underpaid legions, publishing is an industry bedevilled by pessimism. This pessimism blinds people to the fact that we are living in a golden age of book publishing in which quantity and quality rival anything in the past, in which books have never been so well published and in which they occupy a more boisterously visible place in the general culture than ever before.” Prospect 10/02

• IN PRAISE OF PAPER: Will electronic publishing kill books? “The first steps of electronic publishing have been faltering. The e-book has not – yet – been a bestseller, or even a viable commercial proposition. One day, however, such ventures will succeed and when electronic publishing becomes the norm, the more desirable (and expensive) the traditional book will correspondingly become.” The Observer (UK) 10/06/02

WRITING ABOUT A LAND OF VIOLENCE: Since the 1980s, thousands of Zimbabwe’s writerrs journalists and artists who have criticized Robert Mugabe’s government have been “harassed, arrested and jailed.” And yet, some of the country’s most prominent writers tell the story of Zimbabwe’s political violence. “I wanted to say, This is how it was. Just that. These destructive people were created, and they roamed the land. I cannot pretend to have been unaware of the relevance now. We weren’t past this violence; we have remained in that.” The New York Times 10/07/02

Sunday October 6

IT WAS A DARK! AND STORMY! NIGHT! A Canadian publisher specializes in the early literary efforts of star writers – books they wrote when they 17 or 18. What’s the point? Some of the writing is enough to make you wince. But “look, there are things like bad spelling and lousy punctuation. Those things make you wince. But these books teach us about a writer’s recurring themes, their evolving techniques and skills. They teach us more about the evolution of these great talents.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/05/02

WHY DO WE NEED A RHYMER-IN-CHIEF? Forty US states have poets laureate. Most (none?) have been controvesial in the way that New Jersey’s Amiri Baraka has. The controversy over New Jersey’s poel laureate leads one critic to wonder – why should there even be poets laureate? Philadelphia Inquirer 10/05/02

LETTER FROM PRISON: Jeffrey Archer’s diary from prison describing his life there is being published and serialized in the Daily Mail next week. But prison authorities say the diary may break prison rules. “He can’t make money while he is a serving prisoner from publications and I have a duty to protect the privacy of other prisoners and members of staff. He has to respect that.” If he has broken rules, time may be added to his sentence. The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

Friday October 4

SURPRISING SHORTLIST: “The shortlist of a major prize is notable as much for what is not on it as for what is. So it is this year for the ninth annual Giller Prize for fiction, whose nominees were announced yesterday at a news conference in Toronto. On the 2002 shortlist are authors Carol Shields (Unless), Austin Clarke (The Polished Hoe), Wayne Johnston (The Navigator of New York), Bill Gaston (Mount Appetite) and Lisa Moore (Open). “Surprising” and “controversial” were just some of the adjectives circulating among the crowd at the posh downtown Toronto hotel ballroom after this year’s panel of judges… presented a shortlist of five for the $25,000 prize. The winner of what has been described as both the most prestigious honour and best marketing/promotion tool in English-Canadian literature is to be named at a gala banquet Nov. 5.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/04/02

• GILLER IN PERSPECTIVE: “We in the book chat business must face it. The announcement of the short list for the Giller Prize, and the arguments over which novels should be on that list, are small potatoes compared to the blazing controversy over the proper salary for [Hockey Night in Canada presenter] Ron MacLean.” But like any other contest with national implications, the Giller is a fascinating glimpse into the world of writers and publishers, and the politics of the thing alone are enough to fascinate any observer. Toronto Star 10/04/02

RADICAL CRITIQUE: BR Myers is back with an expanded complaint about the quality of contemporary fiction. He “argues that the typical ‘literary masterpiece’ of today is usually in fact a mediocre work dolled up with trendy writerly gimmicks designed to lend an impression of artsy profundity and to obscure the author’s lack of talent. Myers’s goal, he explains, is to convey to fellow readers that they shouldn’t feel cowed into reading (and pretending to be engaged by) the latest dull and pretentious book just because the literary establishment has pronounced it ‘evocative’ and ‘compelling.’Rather, Myers emphasizes, readers should trust their own instincts, and decide for themselves what books speak to them in meaningful ways.” The Atlantic 10/02

WHERE THE SNOBBERY IS: Maurice Sendak’s illustrations are unmistakable, and his drawings for such children’s classics as Where the Wild Things Are made him a legend to generations of young readers. But like so many popular artists before and after him, Sendak has some trouble being taken as a serious artist. “Snobbery is the biggest obstacle to him being recognized as a fine artist,” says Nichols Clark, director of the new Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. “And it’s not just Sendak. There are many illustrators who are far better artists than those who consider themselves fine artists.” The Christian Science Monitor 10/04/02

Thursday October 3

A NOT-TOO-POETIC DUST-UP: A firestorm has erupted in New Jersey over a poem written by the state’s poet laureate shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Governor Jim McGreevey has called for the resignation of Imamu Amiri Baraka from the laureate post after hearing the poem, which includes the line “Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the twin towers / To stay at home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?” (For the record, there weren’t 4,000 Israelis employed at the World Trade Centers.) The 67-year-old Baraka, who was inducted last year into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, calls his critics “right-wing zealots,” but has yet to directly answer the charges of anti-Semitism stemming from the poem. Washington Post 10/03/02

TEXAS VS. HISTORY: The Texas Board of Education is choosing new textbooks, and various groups are lobbying to modify what’s included in the history books. A group called the Texas Public Policy Foundation “wants texts modified to tell how African chieftains, not Europeans, captured slaves for sale in America. It wants to emphasize the role of white Europeans in ending slavery. It objects to portrayals of President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as civil rights supporters, noting that the brothers refused to support the movement at crucial times. The group also wants texts to say that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to own guns and that the wealthy pay a disproportionate share of income taxes.” The New York Times 10/02/02

• Previously: CLEANING UP DODGE: A Republican party “Leadership Council” in Texas is on a cultural crusade. So far it has succeeded in getting a plaster fig leaf added to a replica of a statue of David, remove some art from an Italian restaurant, “persuaded commissioners to use an Internet filter to screen computers at the library for pornography and to put plaques reading ‘In God We Trust’ in county libraries.” Houston Chronicle 09/24/02

WAITING FOR GILLER: This morning, the shortlist for the Giller Prize, Canada’s answer to the Booker, will be announced at a Toronto hotel. (The shortlist had not been released as of ArtsJournal‘s morning deadline.) “Often thought of as a lifetime achievement award, it does not go to a writer who has published some clever first novel with a small literary press in Saskatchewan, or some avant-garde novelist who is being enthusiastically championed by a professor of literature at Dalhousie… The winning novel is always a more-or-less conventional narrative, suitable for book clubs, and frequently a historical novel.” Toronto Star 10/03/02

GETTING ON THE GRID: The Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, is considering a new way to store its digital collection, which currently contains 7.5 million records. “When you’re (preserving) millions of digital entities you have to use automated processing.” Instead of keeping the data all in one computer system, the library may try grid storage. “All the digital data do not need to reside in the same physical location to be accessible and manageable by an institution charged with the mission of preserving and managing access to that digital data.” Wired 10/02/02

BARENBOIM THE PEACEMAKER: Israeli conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, who has made waves in the Middle East twice in recent months, has co-authored a new book with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said calling for peace in the region. “The book, titled Parallels and Paradoxes, grew out of conversations between the two friends, both prominent cultural figures who first met a decade ago by chance at a London hotel… Last month, [Barenboim] and Said were named the winners of Spain’s Prince of Asturias Concord Prize for their efforts toward bringing peace to the Middle East.” Andante (AP) 10/03/02

Wednesday October 2

POETIC STANDOFF: The governor of New Jersey and the state’s poet laureate are at an impasse. The governor is angry about a poem that poet laureate Amiri Baraka wrote and read that wonders about an assertion that Jews were told in advance about the attack of the World Trade Center. The governor wants to remove Baraka because of the poem, but the poet says he’s entitled to write whatever he wants. “Under the legal technicalities of the appointment, neither [governor] McGreevey nor the five-member committee of poets who appointed him to the two-year post can remove Baraka.” Philadelphia Inquirer 10/02/02

REDISCOVERING BUDDHISM: Researchers are studying what may turn out to be some of the most important Buddhist documents ever found. “The manuscripts dated from the first century AD, and that made them the oldest known Buddhist manuscripts anywhere, and the oldest Indic manuscripts known to have survived.” The new discoveries reveal “a missing link between the birth of Buddhism in India and its later forms in China and elsewhere in Asia. Oral transmission had been the preferred or normal way – memorization, recitation, and so forth. What we’re now finding out is that, in the first and second century AD, the notion of writing things down took off in a big way.” Chronicle of Higher Education 10/04/02

MEDICAL WRITES: New York’s Bellevue Hospital publishes a literary journal and holds writing classes. “Publication of The Bellevue Review is part of a national trend in medical education for schools to use literature to teach doctors how to write better and clearer case histories and to empathize more with patients. Reading and writing literature helps doctors think more subtly, pay attention to the finer details, read between the lines, look for deeper meaning.” The New York Times 10/02/02

Tuesday October 1

WHEN A PUBLISHER FAILS: Sarah Dearing’s new book was published to glowing reviews in April. Unfortunately, it’s been almost impossible to get ahold of copies after her publisher Stoddart Publishing declared bankruptcy. So in the week that she just won the Toronto Book Award, she traveled to the Stoddart warehouse to buy some copies of her book that were being liquidated. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/01/02

LACK OF IMPORTANCE: Does the Booker choose only “safe” books? Writer Will Self says “there were very few Booker winners from the last 25 years that have ‘in any way rocked society’. Authors like Martin Amis and JG Ballard had only been nominated once while winners were not chosen if they were challenging.” BBC 10/01/02

Thursday October 31

ON THE WHOLE, I PREFER HENRY MOORE, WOT? British culture minister Kim Howells took a walk through an exhibition of artwork by those chosen as Turner Prize finalists, and didn’t hold back on his reaction to it. On a message board in the gallery at the Tate, he wrote: “It’s cold, mechanical conceptual bullshit … The attempts at contextualisation are particularly pathetic but symptomatic of a lack of conviction.” The Independent (UK) 10/31/02

A NERVOUS ART MARKET: Whenever the economy goes down, the number of artworks up for auction goes up. “While the monetary total is not unusually high, the sheer number of works for sale this fall has increased. Some is being sold by people in financial distress, but many other sellers think this is the moment to cash in. The question is whether collectors will have the appetite, never mind the means, to buy.” The New York Times 10/31/02

PLAYING KEEP-AWAY WITH RAPHAEL: “An appeal to raise £30m to save a Raphael masterpiece for the [UK] has been launched by London’s National Gallery. The current owner of Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, the Duke of Northumberland, has agreed to sell the painting to a US gallery to prop up his estate’s ailing finances. But he is giving the National Gallery – where the painting has been on loan for the last decade – one last chance to keep it.” BBC 10/31/02

ART OF NEWS: The Newseum unveils plans for a $400 million new home located on a prominent corner of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. It’s a museum dedicated to the art of news and newsgathering… Washington Post 10/29/02

Wednesday October 30

SOTHEBY’S DRAWS BIG FINE: Sotheby’s is fined more than 20 million Euros by the European Union for “operating a price-fixing cartel during the 1990s.” Fellow partner-in-crime Christie’s escaped punishment because the company came forward to provide evidence of price fixing. “The pair handle 90% of the auction market and have been under investigation by the commission for breaking fair trade rules. They were accused of inflating commission fees and defrauding art sellers out of £290 million.” BBC 10/30/02

ANOTHER TURNER CONTROVERSY: This year’s Turner Prize shortlist follows a tradition of nominating controversial art. It includes a work that is a graphic description of a pornographic movie. “The four shortlisted artists – Fiona Banner, Liam Gillick, Keith Tyson and Catherine Yass – will learn who has won the coveted prize, and with it a £20,000 cheque, in December.” BBC 10/30/02

• THROWING UP FOR ART: With Stuckists protesting outside at the absence of traditional painters on the Turner shortlist, inside art glitterati were upchucking after watching a movie by one of the finalists (and it wasn’t the porn project). The Guardian (UK) 10/30/02
• HANDICAPPING THE TURNER: The controversy, the noise, the predictable hype… the Turner is getting a bit boring. “It is all very undignified and divisive. The art itself gets kicked around like a football, in a game in which no one knows the rules. But it doesn’t matter – the game’s the thing!” Here come this year’s entries. The Guardian (UK) 10/30/02
• WHERE’S THE BUZZ? “Truthfully, as balanced and fair and good as the 2002 list is, it is also a tiny bit dull. So that’s another thing then: when it comes to the Turner Prize, the Tate can never win.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/30/02
• DON’T CARE? This year “mention of the Turner seems to have stirred intense apathy. The Britpack caught the imagination. But once they had clicked into cultural place as neatly as the mechanisms of a semi-automatic taking dead aim at the lowest common denominator, they were commonly announced to be ‘over’. And then no one seemed much to care what was upcoming for the Turner.” The Times (UK) 10/30/02

BATTLE FOR THE BARNES: Lincoln University is a small black college with control of an art collectionworth billions of dollars. But the Barnes Collection, claiming poverty and an unworkable relationship with Lincoln has filed a petition for divorce and announced its intention to move to Philadelphia. The plan is a blow to the tiny college, and court battles over the Barnes’ right to self determination figure to drag out a long time. The New York Times 10/30/02

ART ONLINE: Many museums have resisted putting images of their artworks online for fear that they would lose control of the images. A project in California seeks to put museum collections across the state online. “Users can search 150,000 images of artifacts, paintings, manuscripts, photographs and architectural blueprints from 11 public and private museums. But with more than 2,000 museums in the state, that’s just scratching the surface. ‘Our goal is to get every museum, library and archive in California to have their collections digitized and online’.” Wired 10/30/02

SHOOT ME: An art exhibition in Soho is drawing criticism for its violent theme, particularly after the DC-area sniper attacks. “Shoot Me, by the multimedia artist Miyoung Song, features a basement shooting gallery that enables visitors to take potshots with a BB gun at random women, children and porn stars in the throes of sex as they flash by on a video screen equipped with a paper bull’s eye.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/30/02

ART IN KIDDIELAND: “Parents may not be sure about dragging children along to see Art with a capital ‘A’, but the galleries are in no doubt at all. These days, public art galleries and museums have more kids’ courses and activity weeks, more hands-on, child-friendly, interactive workshops, more family trails, more learning centres than … well, Picassos and Matisses. It has got to the point that, for an art-loving adult, no visit to a gallery is free from the vague dread that an entire primary school class may be seated in front of your favourite painting, or gangs of adolescents ostentatiously tittering at the nudes on display.” The Guardian (UK) 10/30/02

Tuesday October 29

PARIS MUSEUMS PREPARE FOR SUPERFLOOD: Paris’ leading museums, including the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay are removing thousands of precious artworks from their basement storage because of fears about a hundred-year super-flood that could happen this winter. “We’re not saying the great centennial flood is coming this winter, we’re just saying we know it will come some time soon and the signs are not encouraging. We have to make sure we can deal with it when it happens.” The Guardian (UK) 10/26/02

SCULPTOR REGRETS REMOVING CONTROVERSIAL ART: Last month sculptor Eric Fischl’s bronze sculpture of a falling body commemorating 9/11 was removed from Rockefeller Center after a few people complained. Now Fischl regrets that he allowed the piece to be taken away so quickly. “I even regret caving in to Rockefeller Center so fast and saying: ‘Yeah, take it away. I don’t want to hurt anybody.’ I’m sorry I didn’t raise a stink over it. I hate this idea that there are some people who have a right to express their suffering and others who don’t, that there are those in this hierarchy of pain who own it more than you do.” New York Times Magazine 10/27/02

MILLION £ SOUP: Andy Warhol’s screenprint of Marilyn Munroe sold for more than $17 million. But the artist’s family is selling Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s soup can for only £1 million. The Guardian (UK) 10/29/02

BRITAIN’S WOEFUL PUBLIC BUILDING RECORD: Why are public building projects in Britain so woefully carried out? “In Britain we have become so used to the idea that any major public building project will be delivered several years late and costing some multiple of the figure originally predicted that initial projections are treated rather like the boasts of an imaginative angler.” The UK has failed to invest in its educational infrastructure. What’s needed is a massive education plan for engineers and architects… The Guardian (UK) 10/29/02

Monday October 28

A RECORD WEEK: “Sixteen auction records were broken in just over two hours at the 20th-century Italian art sales in London last week. But, bullish as this sounds, the reality was more sober…” The Telegraph (UK) 10/28/02

LOOKING FOR A DIGITAL HOME: Seeing how there are museums for just about anything, is there a possibility of a museum devoted to digital art? “Efforts to establish a one-stop shop for the digital arts — a Linkin’ Center, if you will — have been, at best, modestly successful. Donors are tight fisted, especially when there are no tangible objects that they can call their own. As a result, while there are small high-tech art centers scattered around the country and virtual museums sprinkled across the Web, none fulfill the museum functions of organizing, commissioning, exhibiting, collecting, preserving art works and education. But two organizations are moving in the right direction.” The New York Times 10/28/02

INVESTING IN SCOTTISH ART: The Scottish government has come up with a plan to help museums across the country buy contemporary art. Ten musems will share £350,000 to spend on new work. The government “believes the scheme will revolutionise local museums, and also provide an opportunity for award-winning artists such as Douglas Gordon, Calum Colvin, Callum Innes and Roderick Buchanan to be represented in Scottish collections.” Glasgow Herald 10/26/02

MASS APPEAL: Over the next few years some 3.8 million new houses will be built in the UK. So “what might they look like, and what might they be like to live in? After a long sabbatical from the design of mass housing, British architects are making their way back. They are not finding it particularly easy.” The Guardian (UK) 10/28/02

YE OLDE OBELISK TRANSPORT COMPANY: In ancient times hundreds of obelisks lined the Nile. But beginning in Roman times, foreign countries made sport of taking souvenirs, and it became fashionable to remove the giant stone obelisks and bring them back for placement in leading cities. One of the last taken was transported to New York in 1881 to Central Park, where thousands of New Yorkers waited… Archaelogy 11/02

THE MAN BEHIND REM, DANIEL, ANISH… Modern architects like Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind like to dazzle with theatrical structures. But Cecil Balmond is the engineer behind them who helps make the ideas possible. “Balmond’s structures tend to look as if they have no business standing up. Instead of depending on massive walls and simple symmetry for their strength, they rely on what he presents as being a deeper understanding of nature. In his softly-spoken but determined way, Balmond is trying to shift the way that we see engineers, as well as engineering.” The Observer (UK) 10/27/02

Sunday October 27

JESUS IN ONTARIO: “A 2,000-year-old limestone box that some believe provides the first archeological evidence of the existence of Jesus will have its international public premiere next month in Canada… The rectangular ossuary, which dates from about 63 AD, was excavated by an Arab villager about 15 years ago in a cave near Jerusalem, then sold to an antiquities dealer. He in turn sold it to an Israeli collector, who, in March of this year, brought it to the attention of Sorbonne scholar André Lemaire, one of the two experts who vouched for its great age.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/26/02

THE GREATEST ARTS PATRONS OF ALL TIME: It seems safe to say that the world will never again see a family like the Medicis, who held up the financial end of artistic achievement in Europe for more than 500 years. Without the Medici family, there would have been no Michelangelo, very little of Galileo, and the Rennaissance might have been little more than an average movement in the history of art. A new exhibit in Chicago focuses on the last glory days of the Medici, with more than 200 works on display. Chicago Tribune 10/27/02

EVERYTHING (EUROPEAN) MUST GO: As part of its new mission of focusing its collection on American art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is auctioning off 34 works by Europeans artists next week, with the proceeds to be used to beef up the academy’s American collection. “The consigned works… are with several exceptions by relatively obscure and unfashionable artists, and only a few carry estimates of more than $100,000.” Philadelphia Inquirer 10/23/02

HOW MUCH IS THAT AMERICAN NEA BUDGET, AGAIN? In Austria, a country with nowhere near the wealth and resources of the U.S., governmental investment in ‘quality of life’ is a societal mainstay. From subways to buildings to the Vienna Philharmonic, public money is the key component of success. In particular, the city’s architecture, supported by government funding, is stunning, especially given how little of Vienna was left after World War II. Boston Globe 10/27/02

Friday October 25

DEFENDING THE COLLECTOR: “A group of American collectors has formed a new organisation to defend the interests of private and public collecting. They see threats to collecting coming from foreign countries, over-zealous law enforcement and a public debate, which, according to them, has been driven by the ‘retentionist’ bias of many archaeologists.” The Art Newspaper 10/25/02

ART AS GLOBAL IMPULSE: Vicente Todoli takes over this month as the Tate Modern’s new director. He observes that internationalism is an important artistic impulse. “Art has always been moved by individuals. Before businessmen, artists were the precursors in breaking down frontiers. Globalisation is the essential spirit of art. The world is wider today and art has always had an openness of viewpoints because that is its nature. The only problem today is tremendous commercialisation which is killing much creativity and controls the mind of some artists who take decisions dictated by it.” The Art Newspaper 10/25/02

BIG NEW ART PRIZE: Wales has launched the world’s most lucrative prize for visual artists. The £40,000 Artes Mundi biennial competition “will be open to artists from across the globe whose entries will in turn be shown in Cardiff at the National Museum and Gallery. The organisers are hoping the prize will give to the arts the same kind of stature that the hugely-popular Cardiff Singer of the World has given music.” BBC 10/25/02

THE GREAT COVERUP: Two sculptures that Renaissance artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini made for a church almost 350 years ago, have finally been unveiled. “The two sculptures, which represent the virtues of Truth and Charity, were designed by Bernini in the 17th Century for the chapel of a Portuguese aristocrat, Roderigo de Sylva. They have been located in the chapel since they were completed in 1663, but were deemed offensive by religious leaders two centuries later, and covered up.” BBC 10/25/02

THE PAINTING PACHYDERMS: Zookeepers have long observed that elephants like to pick up sticks and doodle in the sand. “Elephants are highly intelligent animals who don’t particularly like to stand around all day.” Now a group of Balinese elephants are painting and earning a following (and cash). “Their work has been exhibited at several museums worldwide. And recently, the handlers of a dozen or so painting pachyderms in Asia formed a website. Within two months, sales broke $100,000. Half of the profits go to elephant-rescue sanctuaries in Southeast Asia.” Christian Science Monitor 10/25/02

Thursday October 24

REVOKING FREE ADMISSION? London’s Natural History Museum saw a 70 percent increase in attendance last year after it dropped entry fees. In return for free admission, the British government promised museums more money. But “museum bosses have told MPs the extra volume of visitors is costing them £500,000 ($773,000) a year more than they receive in return for giving up charging.” So the museum is thinking about reinstating the entry fees… More museums may follow, given the government’s disappointing funding promises earlier this week. BBC 10/24/02

DEALING WITH THE BRITISH MUSEUM: The British Museum is getting a raw deal in the government’s new funding plan, writes former Culture Secretary Chris Smith. But the museum’s present predicament is not entirely a funding issue. “The museum has to put its own house in order too, and run itself more efficiently.” The Guardian (UK) 10/24/02

LOOTING THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION: “Since Iraq’s defeat in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, thieves have been stealing anything they can Because Iraq’s antiquities bureaucracy collapsed after the war and even today only is a fraction of what it once was, the country’s 10,000 known ancient sites – plus many more yet to be documented – have been easy targets for the last decade. The frenzy of looting has panicked experts on ancient Mesopotamia, long seen by scholars as the cradle of the first civilizations.” Detroit News 10/23/02

STATUES DAMAGED BY CLEANERS: Four busts of Great Britons Isaac Newton, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, and John Hunter have stood watch over London’s Leicester Square in central London for almost 130 years. They have survived war, pollution and the elements. But not, apparently, a restoration cleaning in the early 1990s. “It appears the cleaners used a highly corrosive, concentrated solution of hydroflouric acid. If the busts are left outside, they will continue to deteriorate. Within two decades they could be just meaningless lumps of rock.” The Guardian (UK) 10/24/02

• STATUES IN JEOPARDY: Oslo’s famous Vigeland bronze statues are being destroyed by moisture. “At the same time, the original works are covered with a layer of dirt that cannot be removed without destroying the statues.” Aftenpost (Norway)10/16/02

Wednesday October 23

MUSEUMS ATTACK LOW FUNDING PROMISE: UK museum directors fretted yesterday after a government announcement that £70 million in funding would be allocated to the country’s museums. “A government-sponsored report found that, unless £167 million was found, many institutions with world-class exhibits would be pushed into irreversible decline. The response from museums was angry and swift.” The Guardian (UK)10/23/02

• Previously: BRITISH MUSEUM GETS CASH: The British government announces a £70 million funding package for the British Museum and regional museums. The BM’s financial crisis has been so bad it has had to close galleries and reduce hours as it deals with a large deficit. “The BM will receive £36.8m, with an extra £400,000 in 2003 to re-open the Korean Galleries and others currently closed.” BBC 10/22/02

GETTY CAN EXPAND VILLA: After the Getty Museum moved into its new home in 1997, the museum announced plans to add an outdoor theatre to the Getty’s former headquarters in its Malibu villa. Neighbors sued to block the plan. Now a judge has ruled in the Getty’s favor. In addition to the theatre, “the villa complex would grow to 210,000 square feet, including a new restaurant to replace the site’s old tea room, expansion of the bookstore and renovation of museum galleries for display of the Getty antiquities collection.” Los Angeles Times 10/23/02

MEMORIES OF EMPIRE: The British Empire is today referred to but seldom examined very closely. “Is it shame, guilt, post-colonial exhaustion or plain ignorance that has obliterated the memory of an empire that lasted 500 years and changed the face of the world? Probably all of these. But no one in Britain today can understand what has shaped our multiracial society, what links this country to the Commonwealth and what has made English the tongue of more nations than any other unless they understand the Empire.” The Times (UK) 10/23/02

Tuesday October 22

BRITISH MUSEUM GETS CASH: The British government announces a £70 million funding package for the British Museum and regional museums. The BM’s financial crisis has been so bad it has had to close galleries and reduce hours as it deals with a large deficit. “The BM will receive £36.8m, with an extra £400,000 in 2003 to re-open the Korean Galleries and others currently closed.” BBC 10/22/02

AUSSIE ARTS COUNCIL EXPLORES ARTIST TRUST ACCOUNTS: The Australian Arts Council is investigating the idea of setting up trust accounts for artists. Gallery sales would be deposited into the accounts directly for the artists. “There are a whole range of other businesses and services that require that the intermediary – the real estate agent, the travel agent, the lawyer – holds funds in a trust account. The point is, if a work has been sold then the value of that work, less the agent’s fee, is the artist’s money.” Sydney Morning Herald 10/22/02

THE GREAT PAINTING CONTEST: In the 16th Century on of the most extraordinary public art collaborations ever, teamed Michelangelo and Leonardo to paint side by side paintings in the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Art historians call the project “the turning point of the Renaissance.” But Giorgio Vasari, the famous chronicler of Renaissance painters’ lives, had the wall painted over, obliterating the art… The Guardian (UK) 10/22/02

THE VIETNAM WAR IN ART: “Vietnam had no great tradition of visual art before the 20th century, with even its sacred buildings austere compared to those of neighboring China. By the time the Vietnam War erupted, however, local artists had been shaped by two quite different imported traditions: what was known as poetic realism, introduced by French colonial teachers, and Socialist Realism, borrowed from the Communist regimes in Moscow and Beijing.” The New York Times 10/22/02

Monday October 21

WHERE’S THE QUALITY WORK? The number of art and antiques fairs has zoomed in the past decade. But some of the fairs are starting to struggle. There are “too many events and not enough dealers offering the kind of quality material demanded by collectors in the market’s present selective mood.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/21/02

THE PRADO’S INVISIBLE RENOVATIONS: Madrid’s Prado Museum is in the middle of a $45 million renovation. “The Prado will belatedly join a host of other museums, from the Louvre in Paris to the National Gallery in Washington, that have built annexes for art and assorted services. But the Prado is different: it wants its $45 million extension to go largely unnoticed.” The New York Times 10/21/02

IN PRAISE OF THE BILBAO EFFECT – FIVE YEARS ON: Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum is five years old. “The Bilbao effect is viewed by many as a triumph of style over substance, a type of global branding that used to be confined to items such as fashionable shoes and whatnot. And the style itself – especially the ‘signature’ buildings whose complex, odd-looking forms could never have been designed and built without the aid of advanced computer technology – is considered highly suspect.” Washington Post 10/20/02

REMEMBERING LEWIS AND CLARK: Artist Maya Lin is designing a project to mark the voyage of Lewis and Clark across the American West. “Known as the Confluence Project, the $15 million effort scheduled to open in 2005 marks the last stops on Lewis and Clark’s epic, cross-country journey that began on the Missouri River and ended up here, along the Columbia River. There could be as many as eight sites total.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/18/02

BEIJING’S NEW KOOLHAAS: Architect Rem Koolhaas has “just won the international competition to design the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing. The project, costed at about €600m ($585m/£377m), will be the most prestigious the capital has seen for decades. It will be [Koolhaas’s] greatest challenge to date: CCTV, the world’s biggest television network, reaches nearly 300m households, or more than 1bn people, and runs 12 channels of programmes.” Financial Times 10/21/02

Sunday October 10

IS MEXICO THE NEW CUBA? Mexico seems to be the hot place for art these days. At least that’s what it seems like as planeloads of international curators descend. They’re there, they say “because these artists have shown such wit, energy and international perspective – the sort of sophistication that the conventionally wise expect from art capitals like New York and Berlin. But these are artists schooled in skepticism, and some can’t help but wonder: What if it’s really just Mexico City’s turn to be the art world’s flavor of the month? Or worse, what if all this attention isn’t really about art at all?” Los Angeles Times 10/20/02

COWTOWN TAKES THE STAGE: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and its new 53,000 square-foot building will be the second largest museum devoted to art after World War II in the United States. What does it mean “when a place known as Cowtown suddenly takes the stage? After all, contemporary art is supposed to be a big-city sport, and Fort Worth is asking the world to rethink that concept.” Dallas Morning News 10/20/02

ODDS AND ENDS: Is Matthew Barney “the most important artist of his generation? His art can feel like a bizarre conglomeration of everything that has come before, from Celtic myths to the Baroque and on to the most recent movies, novels, conceptual art and sculpture. Barney stuffs it all in, and leaves your head spinning.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/19/02

A NEW LOOK FOR NY BUILDINGS: A big new hotel in Times Square has people thinking ugly. But perhaps it’s just a change of aesthetic coming to a city that has rarely been touted for good-looking architecture. “The city’s shifting demographic is one reason our architecture seems destined to become increasingly Latinized in the years ahead. A more important reason stems from the exhaustion of the northern European version of the Western tradition. That linear, 19th-century view of history has fallen apart as a measure of urban architecture. Post-modernism, a movement that tried to extend that line beyond its natural span, had the opposite effect of running it into the ground.” The New York Times 10/20/02

Friday October 18

POLICE RAID ART: Police in Toronto raid a gallery to investigate photographs by AA Bronson, one of Canada’s outstanding artists. “I asked to talk to an officer and he told me a concerned parent from the neighbourhood voiced a complaint and they had to bring in the sex crimes unit to take pictures of the window to determine whether it was obscene.” Toronto Star 10/18/02

NEW HISTORY MUSEUM CHIEF: Brent D. Glass, head of the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, has been named director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The museum is “home to the original Star-Spangled Banner, Archie Bunker’s chair, Duke Ellington’s music collections and the wooden lap desk on which Thomas Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence. Opened in 1964, the museum is now the third most visited in the world.” Washington Post 10/18/02

JAPANESE SELL OFF ART: In the 1980s Japanese art collectors bought some of the world’s most expensive and high profile art. When the country’s economy tanked in the 90s, much of the high-priced art was quietly sold. “Now the Japanese recession is digging so deep that individuals and even respected museums are being forced to sell pieces acquired well before the Bubble period, including pieces officially listed as Important Art Objects.” The Art Newspaper 10/15/02

TRACKING DOWN THE QUEEN’S WHISTLERS: By the time she died, Queen Victoria owned 157 Whistler prints – more than any British museum. Then they were sold off, and some experts believe that many of the etchings ended up in American collections. So what provoked the sell-off? The Art Newspaper 10/15/02

Thursday October 17

COMMUNAL BUY: There’s a long tradition of museums sharing exhibitions and artwork for exhibitions. Now some are also sharing ownership of artwork. “Aside from economic considerations that lead museums to collaborate, the kind of art being produced today lends itself more readily to group ownership.” The New York Times 10/17/02

MAFIA TURNS TO ARCHAEOLOGY: “Mafia groups in the Ukraine are pursuing a lucrative sideline in archaeology, looting valuable artefacts to be sold on the black market, in addition to their traditional criminal enterprises such as selling drugs, prostitution and protection rackets. Their latest target is Crimea, in the southern Ukraine, which is host to vast quantities of buried treasures from Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Bronze Age settlements.” Scotland on Sunday 10/14/02

Wednesday October 16

POLL SAYS BRITS FAVOR RETURNING MARBLES: Forty per cent British respondants in a poll say that they thought Britain ought to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Only 16 percent said they should stay in the British Museum. “The figures are almost identical to a similar poll conducted in 1988.” BBC 10/16/02

NAZI LOOT ONLINE: How to track down artwork stolen by Nazis in World War II? “American museums now think that the Web can help in their attempt to uncover the Nazi loot that may still be hanging on their walls. In September 2002, the American Association of Museums received a $240,000 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Sciences for the creation of a Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal: a registry of objects in American museums of questionable ownership.” Salon 10/16/02

BLAME IT ON THE COMPUTERS? “The buildings of the public realm in corporate New Britain are the stuff of dreary private finance initiatives, concerned with delivering numerical targets rather than creating beautiful spaces and buildings. When you look back to a time when architects, sculptors and writers got together to mull over the direction and design of new buildings, to challenge architectural orthodoxies and plan ideal solutions for public projects, it all seems so long ago, and so improbable, that it might as well be the stuff of fiction.” The Guardian (UK) 10/14/02

Tuesday October 15

BRITISH MUSEUM CONSIDERS SELLING A BUILDING: The British Museum has a £6 million deficit after a major expansion and a decline in expected income. So the museum is considering trying to sell off one of its Central London buildings. “The building, a former post office just a couple of hundred yards from the museum’s main site, is reportedly worth some £35 million. It has been derelict for some years.” BBC 10/15/02

BUT IS IT ARCHITECTURE? The unorthodox Gateshead Millennium bridge has won this year’s Stirling Prize for Architecture. Judges for the Royal Institute of British Architects’ annual prize said the “simple and incredibly elegant £22 million bridge was not only an innovative and bold engineering challenge, but also the one piece of architecture that would be remembered by people this year.” The Guardian (UK) 10/14/02

NASTY PICTURES: The Brooklyn Museum’s show of Victorian nudes “is yet another chapter in the so-called culture wars,” writes Roger Kimball. “Over the past decade or so, it has become increasingly clear that this war is a battle about everything the Victorians are famous for: the ‘cleanliness, hard work, strict self-discipline,’ etc., that one of the people responsible for this exhibition speaks of with such contempt. Do those values, those virtues, articulate noble human aspirations? Or are they merely the repressive blind for … well, you name it: narrowness, hypocrisy, the expression of a ‘white, patriarchal, capitalist, hegemonic,’ blah, blah, blah?” New Criterion 10/02

EXPANDING MASS MOCA: The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, (MASS MoCA), in North Adams, is expanding. The museum is renovating the complex at the former Sprague Electric Co. Within two years, they expect to add 45,000 square feet of commercial space at the site, and by 2008, 140,000 square feet of new galleries. Since it opened three years ago, Mass MoCA has spent $26 million of state money to open some 180,000 square feet of galleries and commercial space in a rehabilitated mill.” Boston Herald 10/15/02

FRIDA FETISH: Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is “currently the height of radical chic, and is likely to be even more in vogue when Julie Taymor’s movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek, opens next year. But it is hard not to feel that there is something distasteful and unhealthy about the way we like our artists – particularly if they are women – to suffer. Would there be half as much interest in Kahlo’s paintings if her life had been half as colourful and tragic?” The Guardian (UK) 10/14/02

Monday October 14

DEFINING MOMENT: Connecticut arts leaders were surprised when Kate Sellers resigned as director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art earlier this month in the middle of raising $120 million for an expansion. “Sellers’ walking away from what would have been a career-defining moment, at one of the most pivotal periods in the museum’s 160-year history, makes one wonder what was going on…” Hartford Courant 10/14/02

Sunday October 13

ATTACKING ART, LITERALLY: Cultural terrorism – the destruction of public art and artifacts in the name of political gain – has yet to reach American shores, but is a major concern around the world. “The shelling of the Bosnian National Library in Sarejevo in August 1992, by Serbian nationalists dug in the hills surrounding the city… and the fire it caused, destroyed thousands of priceless manuscripts and books, as well as gutting a historic and beautiful building.” And who could forget the Taliban’s destruction of the massive Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan as the world’s cultural leaders pleaded with them to stop? Such acts of wanton destruction are often minimized when placed alongside terrorist attacks on human life, but the cold reality is that the cultural death toll may be more permanent than the human one. Toronto Star 10/12/02

NEW TRENDS AT THE AUCTION BLOCK: The new auction season is officially on, and some interesting broadening of views on old schools of art seems to be occurring in London. A Sotheby’s auction of mainly modern masters this week “projected a new image of German Avant-garde trends in the first half of the 20th century by bringing out the continuity of mood from the Expressionism of 1908 to 1914 to the Abstractionism of the 1920s and 1930s. Most works shared an intensity in the color schemes, a thrust in the brush work, an energy bordering on fierceness and a sternness that was sometimes grim. Lighthearted subjects took on a gravitas at odds with their nature.” International Herald Tribune 10/12/02

WHO SAYS JOURNALISTS ARE NEGATIVE? “Something has clicked in the consciousness of New Yorkers. After lying down in the waters of sorrow, New Yorkers are standing up to speak about the florescence of an idea. Architecture matters. The gaping wound of Lower Manhattan could never be healed by the conventions of real-estate development, in which parcels of land are arranged like slabs of meat on a plate. They see this now with a sanguine clarity even while the grief for their hometown still lingers. What the post-Sept. 11 city needs more than ever is architecture by the world’s most intelligent creators — that is what New Yorkers have demanded and that is exactly what is about to be dished out.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/13/02

GEHRY’S BUSINESS SCHOOL: “Dedicated Wednesday, the $62 million [Frank Gehry-designed] Peter B. Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School of Management at [Cleveland’s] Case Western Reserve University is by no means a triumph like Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But to measure every building by that epoch-defining structure is to set an almost impossibly high standard. Not every design can be a masterpiece. Some turn out to be steps along the journey rather than a final destination. This one certainly takes us on a trip. It marks a decisive break, at once flawed and fabulous, out of the typical B-School box.” Chicago Tribune 10/13/02

A JETTY REEMERGES: “The most famous work of American art that almost nobody has ever seen in the flesh is Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’: 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth in the shape of a gigantic coil, 1,500 feet long, projecting into the remote shallows of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the water is rose red from algae.” The visual effect is stunning, when the coil can be seen, but it has been years since the murky waters of the lake yielded up Smithson’s work to the eyes of visitors. But with drought sweeping the American West, the water level is lower than it has ever been, and the jetty has reappeared, at least for the time being. The New York Times Magazine 10/13/02

Friday October 11

ART SALES DOWN THIS YEAR: The Art Sales Index shows that the value of art sold in the past year declined 13-14 percent. “In the wake of 11 September, collapsing stock exchanges and high international tension, the art market has had a tough season, and while some stellar prices have been achieved, this has tended to obscure a very real weakness in the middle market.” The Art Newspaper 10/11/02

TURNER FAMILY MAY WANT PAINTINGS BACK: William Turner’s descendants are threatening to take back the painter’s work from London museums. “Relatives say the Tate and the National Gallery ignored the artist’s wishes that his collection, now worth an estimated £500million, should be kept in rooms specifically for his work. They are considering legal action to try to force the galleries to return the paintings.” London Evening Standard 10/10/02

TAKE ALL YOU WANT. WE’LL MAKE MORE: “Guests at the Lake Placid Lodge, a longtime wilderness camp turned year-round posh resort on the shore of Lake Placid facing Whiteface Mountain (and the singer Kate Smith’s former lakeside compound), don’t have to confine themselves to taking a towel as a souvenir of their stay. They can take the whole antlered room. It’s fine with the management. As long as they pay for it, of course. That’s because the Lake Placid Lodge — where the 34 rooms and cabins go for $350 to $950 a night with breakfast and afternoon tea — doubles as an art gallery and what the owners call the largest showplace of rustic art furniture in the country.” The New York Times 10/11/02

SCALING BACK IN L.A.: “The Children’s Museum of Los Angeles has put on hold plans to build its $60-million museum in Little Tokyo, one of two new proposed branches, because of the weak economy, the president of the museum’s board of trustees said Thursday… The decision to defer Art Park and focus the museum’s resources on Hansen Dam was made last week after months of debate by the museum’s board of governors.” Los Angeles Times 10/11/02

Thursday October 10

UK MUSEUMS LOOKING FOR PROMISED HELP: UK museums are hurting. A survey last summer uncovered “a litany closures, decaying buildings, collapsing morale and inadequate acquisition funds,” warning that “unless £167 million was found for museums outside London, the ‘brain drain’ from the provinces after years of underfunding would be hastened, driving many museums into irreversible decline.” The government promised help. But months later, that help is not assured, and some are beginning to wonder… The Guardian (UK) 10/10/02

MISSING MORE THAN A RIB: Experts at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art are assessing the damage to a 15th-century statue depicting Adam eating the forbidden fruit, after the statue tumbled off its pedestal and shattered this week. Despite extensive breakage, the museum believes that it has “a good chance of returning the statue to public view with no signs of destruction visible to the untrained eye.” BBC 10/10/02

ART STANDS IN FOR REALITY: Absent a decent picture for its cover a couple weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine hired an artist to transform a blurry photo into a clear portrait. “Times policy, like that of this paper and many others, forbids the manipulation of news photos… So the magazine had one of them turned into a more striking blurry painting, on the principle that fine art can rework reality any way it pleases, without answering to issues of journalistic ethics.” But, wonders art critic Blake Gopnik, does calling it art solve the ethical issues? Washington Post 10/06/02

Wednesday October 9

SCOTLAND BUYS BEUYS: The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has scored a coup. For £605,000 – “hardly enough to buy you the pickled hind quarters of a Damien Hirst” – the gallery has purchased a major collection of the work of Joseph Beuys. “The drawings, lithographs, photographs, books and sculptures amount to a third of the German artist’s multiples, editionalised versions of his works he produced to bring his art to the widest public.” The Guardian (UK) 10/09/02

AUSTRALIA FIRST: There seems to be consensus that this year’s Melbourne Art Fair was a success. Except if you were a European gallery. There was plenty of buying, but sales were mostly by Australian artists, not Europeans. Is it parochialism? “Usually, in Europe, if you like something, you go for it, especially if it’s affordable, because you trust your taste. And then you inquire about the artist. But here (potential buyers) need five people to tell them something is good. Here, collectors have, say, three artists. They know them forever and stick to them. It’s very narrow-minded.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/09/02

THERE ONCE WAS A PAINTING FROM GHENT… In 1934 a panel painted by van Eyck was stolen from in Ghent’s St Bavo Cathedral. In the decades since, the mystery of its disappearance deepened. Was it hidden elsewhere in the church? Was it sold to a collector? Was it destroyed? Last week a taxi driver claimed to have some answers… The Guardian (UK) 10/09/02

MET STATUE CRASHES TO FLOOR: Sunday night a 15th-century marble statue of Adam by the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo at the Metropolitan Museum in New York fell off its pedestal and crashed to the floor. “The museum has now tentatively concluded that the 6-foot-3-inch statue fell to the ground when one side of the 4-inch-high base of its pedestal apparently buckled, tipping over both the pedestal and statue.” The New York Times 10/09/02

RETHINKING PICASSO: Was Picasso a “selfish, miserly old goat who destroyed the lives of those closest to him?” That’s certainly been the picture painted of him. But the artist’s grandson begs to differ. He’s “tired of half-baked theories that misunderstand Picasso’s life and work.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/09/02

Tuesday October 8

FUN…BUT CONFUSING? The Seoul Media Art Biennale is opening, and organizers hope they’ve learned some lessons from the last biennale, which didn’t draw large crowds. “But a general Korean audience, the target of the exhibition, may not be ready for the experimental pieces in the show. While many of the entries use fun, high-tech gadgets – DVD technology, video games, computer monitors and hard drives, digital photography, multiple television screens – and are visually entertaining, many invoke confusion, possibly distancing art further from the general public.” Korea Herald 10/08/02

BIG DEAL: The Tate Modern is unveiling a giant sculpture created by Anish Kapoor for the museum. “The work, which measures almost 150m in length and is 10 storeys high, spans the entire entrance of the art gallery. ‘It’s a big thing because it needs to be a big thing. One hopes that it’s a deep thing’.” BBC 10/08/02

LONG ROAD AHEAD FOR THE BARNES: The Barnes Collection outside Philadelphia is trying to move inside Philadelphia. Though the Barnes has lined up plenty of support from civic leaders, funders and foundations, and though many in Philadelphia are anxious to get the Barnes to come to town, Albert Barnes’ will must be challenged in court. “This is not something that will be decided in the court of public opinion. This is going to be up to the courts, and it could be a very long process.” Washington Post 10/08/02

Monday October 7

ALTERED STATES: Just before the Royal Academy’s new show Galleries opened last month, a work by the artist collective Inventory, an “anti-imperialist tirade, sprayed directly onto the RA’s walls”, was sprayed over to cover up its anti-American references. Wasthe RA being tactful in removing “rude” material, or were the artists being censored? The Art Newspaper 10/04/02

THWARTING KHAN: The Aga Khan has been trying to buy property on the Thames in London to build a museum for his art collection – the largest collection of Islamic art in the English-speaking world. But the National Health Service wants the land (owned by King’s College) so the hospital next door can expand. Though the Aga Khan offers more than twice the money for the property, the sale is likely to be made to the Health Service, prompting some to worry that the Aga Khan might take his collection out of England. The Observer 10/06/02

ANCIENT ASTRONOMERS: Three years ago looters in Germany, “equipped with a metal detector and basic household tools…stumbled upon one of the greatest archaeological finds of this century.” It’s a disc 30 centimeters in diameter weighing approximately 2 kilograms, and thought to be around 3,600 years old. “The disc shows that northern Europeans, probably Celts, made a science of astronomy at roughly the same time as the Stonehenge astronomical cult site was built in Britain.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/04/02

Sunday October 6

THE DRAMATIC GESTURE: Of the seven finalists for this year’s Stirling Prize for architecture, the oddsmaker’s favorite isn’t a building, but a dramatic bridge. “The Gateshead Millennium Bridge makes a great photograph, an elegant structure that perfectly marries engineering and architecture, it represents the epitome of design for the High-Tech generation.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/05/02

ART AS A CONCEPT (FIRST): For 30 years Ronald Feldman’s New York gallery has served up art that wasn’t exactly the obvious sell. “Remaining on the edge for Mr. Feldman has meant staging ambitious installations and group exhibitions that could never recoup their costs. ‘I didn’t start with a concept or a business plan — I just did it. The real challenge was to see art in your time and become an advocate for it’.” The New York Times 10/06/02

Friday October 4

TURIN FIRE WASN’T ARSON: In 1997, fire destroyed the newly-restored Chapel of the Holy Shroud. An investigation has finally conculded the fire wasn’t arson. “Twelve cathedral custodians have been accused of sounding the alarm too late. Contractors undertaking restoration in the chapel stand accused of failing to switch the electricity off at the mains, a terrible oversight which is believed to have caused the fire. Experts say the fire was started by an electrical arc flash which set fire to the restorers’ wooden scaffolding crowding the baroque chapel.” The Art Newspaper 10/04/02

SCULPTURE TO THE FORE: At Washington’s National Gallery, the sculture collection has always taken a back seat to the museum’s impressive displays of painting, possibly because of the physical and aesthetic difficulties of exhibiting large quantities of sculpture. But a suite of new galleries at the National has been carefully designed to showcase 800 three-dimensional works, and Roberta Smith, for one, is impressed. The New York Times 10/04/02

DEEP THINKING AT STANFORD: “After many nervous hours of careful maneuvering onto a pedestal Monday, The Thinker, one of the world’s most recognizable sculptures, was home again at Stanford University’s Cantor arts center after a three-year journey overseas. The contours of its freshly waxed bronze gleamed, heralding a confluence of events this week to honor not only the works of its famous creator, Auguste Rodin, but also the posthumous publication of a catalog of Rodin’s work by one of his greatest advocates, Stanford art Professor Albert Elsen.” San Jose Mercury News 10/01/02

Wednesday October 2

CUTS PLANNED FOR THE GUGGENHEIM: The Guggenheim is facing a budget crisis, even after laying off staff and closing its Soho branch last year. Now the museum is planning further staff cuts and reducing its exhibition hours in New York. “Asked to confirm reports that the museum’s operating budget was cut to $25.9 million in 2002 from $49 million in 2001,” museum officials acknowledged big cuts but were “not comfortable discussing exact numbers.” There are also rumors the Guggenheim’s Las Vegas museum might close in 2003. New York Sun 10/01/02

ITALY RETURNING PIECE OF THE PARTHENON: Italy plans to return a piece of the marble frieze from the Parthenon that it has held since the 1700s. “The fragment, held at a museum in Sicily, consists of a goddess’s foot and part of her tunic and once formed part of the frieze on the east side of the Parthenon.” Italy’s president calls the move a “gesture of friendship.” The Times (UK) 10/01/02

BRITISH MUSEUM SAYS CLAIM IS “COMPELLING”: The British Museum says there is “compelling evidence” that four Old Master drawings it owns were looted by the Nazis. The museum’s trustees described the claim as ‘detailed and compelling’. The artworks – thought to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds – are said to have been stolen between 1935 and 1945 from a collection owned by Dr Arthur Feldmann, of Brno, in the Czech Republic.” BBC 10/02/02

• BRITISH MUSEUM INVESTIGATES DRAWINGS: The British Museum is investigating claims that four Old Master drawings it owns were looted during the Nazi period. The Art Newspaper 09/27/02

WRITING’S ON THE WALL: In Milwaukee, Coca Cola is sponsoring an art contest in which winners designs are painted onto walls. But city officials aren’t happy. Some believe that the art might encourage graffiti artists. “Some businesses may welcome a winning picture as a mural on a wall, but [one official] says the presence of graffiti-style art only inspires others to express themselves on other walls without permission.” The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) 10/01/02

AN AMERICANA (LAWSUIT) STORY: The Saturday Evening Post is suing a Connecticut museum to get back a painting by John Falter that was once used on the cover of the publication. The museum “got the painting as a gift in 1977 from Kenneth Stuart. The lawsuit claims that Stuart, the Post’s art director from 1942 to 1963, took the Falter piece without permission and didn’t legally own the work when he donated it. Stuart died in 1993.” Hartford Courant 10/02/02

Tuesday October 1

LOOKING FOR ART THAT MATTERS: Jed Perl wonders about a cure for the malaise that has long dogged the artworld. “Although gallerygoers are stirred by contemporary art and museumgoers are having extraordinary experiences, there is a widespread belief that nothing really adds up, either for the artists or for the audiences. No matter how eye-filling the experiences that people are having, those experiences can end up feeling disconnected, isolated, stripped of context and implication. The art may not disappoint, but there is so much disappointment and confusion built up around the very idea of art that people find themselves backing away from their own sensations.” So what is the answer? “What we find ourselves craving now is art’s immediacy, art’s particularity. But how do you build an aesthetic out of immediacy and particularity?” The New Republic 09/30/02

EARTHQUAKE DAMAGES SICILIAN MONUMENTS: Officials are toting up damages to monuments and buildings in Sicily after an earthquake September 6. Hundreds of buildings , including the home of the Sicilian parliament, have been declared unsafe. “Of about 40 damaged monuments in the province of Palermo, so far about 10 have been declared unfit for use” and the number could double, say officials. The Art Newspaper 09/27/02

CALL ON QUEEN TO RETURN RARE BRONZE: The former director of the Lagos [Nigeria] National Museum is calling on Queen Elizabeth to return a rare Benin Bronze given to her as a gift in 1973 by Nigerian President Yakubu Gowon. “General Gowon wanted to give something very valuable to The Queen and the fact it had been bought for our museum made it seem even more important. He gave the gift out of love for The Queen, but it was done out of ignorance.” The Art Newspaper 09/27/02

MORE THAN JUST A BATH: The painstaking year-long effort to clean Michelangelo’s David is a sophisticated process. “The year-long campaign will include microclimatic surveillance and gamma-ray testing to reveal the exact nature of the atmospheric deposits, staining and erosion on the statue. Working in tandem with computer-generated models of the statue in a lab in Pisa, the intervention is the largest-scale study ever of what happens to monuments over time – sort of a gerontological study of public art.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/01/02

Monday September 30

GIACOMETTIS SOLD: A controversial auction of Giacometti sculptures was stopped prematurely Saturday night in Paris, after 24 of the 36 pieces were sold for $5.8 million. A Paris court had agreed to a sale of work up to that amount after the “executor of Annette Giacometti’s [the sculptor’s wife] will had persuaded the court that she needed the money to cover legal costs as well as the cost of insuring and storing some 700 sculptures, paintings and drawings.” The New York Times 09/30/02

THIEVES STRIKE – FOR A FOURTH TIME: One of Ireland’s most valuable art collections has been raided again – for the fourth time – by thieves. The five paintings taken include a Rubens, and two paintings that had been stolen before from Russborough House in County Wicklow. Nando Times (AFP) 09/29/02

THE FORCES AGAINST ART CRIME: “Nobody can give you an exact figure, but experts suggest the worldwide value of stolen art amounts to several billion pounds. That covers everything from paintings to candlesticks, etchings to antiques. If you consider paintings alone, you get an idea of the scale of the problem: some 479 Picassos are currently missing, 347 Miros, 290 Chagalls, 225 Dalis, 196 Durers, 190 Renoirs, 168 Rembrandts and 150 Warhols.” To try to get it back, an impressive infrastructure has sprung up armed with databases and detectives. Financial Times 09/27/02

A PROPER MEMORIAL: Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, architect Daniel Libeskind and author Sherwin B. Nuland debate the idea of memorial at Ground Zero. “There is something a little grotesque in the interpretation of ground zero as a lucky break for art,” says Wieseltier. Libeskind argues for a memorable structure, while Nuland declares: “I am offended by the thought that there will be a piece of architecture on that spot because ultimately architecture is about the architect.” The New York Times 09/30/02

Sunday September 29

ART AMONG THE JUNK: “A wistful painting of two young women that came with the furnishings of a dilapidated Canadian farmhouse, has been revealed as a long-lost Victorian masterpiece expected to fetch more than $7-million at auction in London, England.” National Post 09/28/02

BARNES – A SINGULAR COLLECTION: News that the quirky Barnes Collection might move to Philadelphia from the nearby suburbs has in-town folks excited. The Barnes Collection is a collection like no other. “Barnes didn’t collect systematically, as if he were filling in a stamp album. He seemed to be attracted to artists whose work he believed best illustrated his theories about the interaction of line, shape and color. The Barnes is quirky and unpredictable, something like a treasure hunt with a higher purpose. Pleasant surprises lurk beyond every doorway. You will find masterpieces throughout, because even though Barnes was unorthodox in his collecting, he acquired a bushel of them.” Philadelphia Inquirer 09/29/02

INGROWN INTEREST: Why do artists think art about making art is so interesting? It’s not, writes Russell Smith: “The desire to question the gallery experience, to take art outside ‘the white box,’ has been prominent since at least the late 1960s (it was largely behind both performance art and conceptual art). It is still going strong, and I still don’t understand what’s important about it. I don’t understand the hostility toward gallery spaces and gallery viewing.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 09/28/02

PROMOTION THROUGH CRITICISM: Skidmore Owings & Merrill is one of the world’s great architecture firms. But in recent years the company has been overshadowed by other star architects who have offered more imagination. To help turn its reputation around, the firm has produced a series of books about its recent buildings. But this is no ordinary puffery and hype – projects in these books are chosen and critiqued by outside critics – and the criticism can be blunt… The New York Times 09/29/02

Friday September 27

SCRUTINY FOR THE BARNES PROPOSAL: The Pennsylvania attorney general and trustees for the Barnes Foundation are examining the proposal by the Barnes to move to Philadelphia. To make the move, the Barnes will have to go to court to break conditions of the trust set up by founder Albert Barnes. The New York Times 09/26/02

Thursday September 26

MORGAN TO TATE MODERN: “Jessica Morgan, chief curator at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art since 1999, is leaving to take one of the top international jobs in her field: She will be a curator at the Tate Modern in London. Morgan, 33 and a British citizen, leaves Boston in November, after a decade of working in US museums… Her rise in the museum world has been rapid. She trained at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, came to the United States for a fellowship at Yale and another at Harvard, worked as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, then as contemporary curator at the Worcester Art Museum, which she left after a year to take the ICA job.” Boston Globe 09/26/02

SPACE AGE RESTORATION: A Monet painting damaged by a fire in the 1950s might be restored by a beam of oxygen. “Conservators are talking to space chemists at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, after hearing of their success in removing an overzealous art lover’s lipstick from an Andy Warhol painting. Their trick? They vapourise contaminants by blasting them with oxygen. Right now, the painting is almost entirely blackened, but the team managed to transform the blackened paint chips to Monet’s dreamy blues and greens.” New Scientist 09/25/02

THAT’S ONE EXPENSIVE JIGSAW: “A series of restored ceiling and wall fresco paintings are being unveiled at the medieval shrine of St Francis at Assisi in central Italy, five years after an earthquake seriously damaged them. Four people were killed when part of the ceiling of the upper Basilica of St Francis collapsed in the 1997 earthquake, and a memorial service to them is being held as part of the ceremonies marking the restoration… New computer techniques have been used to solve what amounted to a huge jigsaw puzzle – the piecing together of hundreds of boxes of tiny plaster fragments carefully salvaged from the debris inside the basilica.” BBC 09/26/02

FAMILY FEUD: “A nasty quarrel between two of the country’s leading cultural institutions — the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum — has been ended amicably. In the process, one of the capital’s architectural treasures — the Old Patent Office Building — has been rediscovered and is being restored to take its proper place in company with the White House, the U.S. Capitol and the Treasury as one of the great historic public buildings of Washington.” Chicago Tribune 09/26/02

$150 MILLION DOESN’T BUY MUCH, APPARENTLY: As part of a plan to revitalize a blighted stretch of downtown, the city of Minneapolis several years back embarked on a plan to erect ‘Block E,’ a giant entertainment complex, at a taxpayer cost of $150 million. The plan was wildly controversial, and had much to do with the mayor of the city losing her job last year, but Block E is finally up and open for business. Unfortunately, it is arguably one of the ugliest, least original structures ever to rise in the architecturally diverse Twin Cities, possibly because Minneapolis chose to use a design from a Chicago firm known for building suburban strip malls. Says one local architect, “It’s a cartoon version of a mall theme park.” City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul) 09/26/02

Wednesday September 25

BARNES WANTS TO MOVE: The Barnes Collection says it wants to leave its home in the suburbs and move to downtown Philadelphia. “At a news conference, the foundation’s officers said the sudden but long-awaited move was necessary to save one of the world’s greatest art collections, but any move faces considerable legal hurdles. A relocation and other proposed changes would contravene the will of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the eccentric millionaire who established the trove, with an estimated worth of $25 billion, as a quirky, anti-elitist academy that because of local restrictions only 1,200 visitors a month can see. The foundation is projected to run an $800,000 deficit this year and has less than $1 million in cash reserves. The New York Times 09/25/02

• FIRST AID: The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Lenfest and Annenberg Foundationshave have “agreed to provide $3.1 million in operating funds to the Barnes for at least the next two years. More important, they have promised to help the Barnes Foundation raise $100 million to build a museum on or near the Parkway, and to raise $50 million for an endowment.” Philadelphia Inquirer 09/25/02
• CITY OF MUSEUMS: “If the ambitious move succeeds, the Barnes’ collection of 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 60 Matisses, and other art from around the world would be within walking distance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rodin Museum, the proposed Alexander Calder Museum, and the Franklin Institute.” Philadelphia Inquirer 09/25/02

HOME OF THE BRAVE: The art police are at it again. Last week a bronze statue of a falling woman was placed at Rockefeller Center. “Eric Fischl’s Tumbling Woman, which he sculpted during the weeks when he kept thinking of the image of bodies falling from the World Trade Center, was removed after a reactionary tabloid columnist for the New York Post attacked it in her column. Within hours of the column hitting the streets, “Rockefeller Center folded and announced that it would remove the work, which otherwise would have been on display through September 23.” New York Sun 09/19/02

• AFRAID OF A LITTLE ART? Why did Rockefeller Center cave? “If we are to remain true to the repeated assertions that we must never forget, why silence a work like Fischl’s? Displaying the sculpture was no more exploitative than airing those videos of the attacks we’ve all become so familiar with. But perhaps the real, solid presence of “Tumbling Woman” spoke with an urgency that could not be dismissed as easily as a TV news feed.” New York Daily News 09/22/02

TATE ATTENDANCE DOWN: “Attendance figures for the Tate’s four galleries – including the Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London – fell by more than 1.2 million in the 12 months to the end of March 2002. Some 5.25 million visitors went to the gallery in its first year, but that figure fell to 3.6 million in the following 12 months.” Tate director Nicholas Serota says the Tate may face a £1.5 million budget shortfall. BBC 09/25/02

THE KIMBELL AT 30: The Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth is architect Louis Kahn’s masterpiece “and, in the opinion of many critics, the greatest museum building of the 20th century. Simple in its forms, refined in its proportions and details, it speaks to everyone from art historians to bronco riders.” The museum is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the building’s opening. Dallas Morning News 09/25/02

TATE CUT OUT OF BUYING: The Tate Museum has been shut out of buying numerous artworks because its acquisitions budget has declined in real terms over the past 20 years. “Almost on a daily basis major works are offered to us which we cannot begin to contemplate.” The Tate’s budget for acquiring art is just under £2 million, compared with £2.2 million in 1982, and means that the museum doesn’t have the funds to buy major works. The Guardian (UK) 09/25/02

PROTESTING NEW AUSSIE TAX LAW: Prominent Australian artists are withholding promised donations of their artwork to museums because of onerous new tax laws. “Tthe artists are disputing a requirement they believe casts doubt on tax-deduction entitlements when gifting works.” Sydney Morning Herald 09/25/02

Tuesday September 24

RESTORATION MAY HAVE DAMAGED SHROUD: A new “restoration” of the Shroud of Turin may have irreparably damaged it. “Scientists performed a secret restoration of the shroud – which supposedly wrapped the body of Jesus after his crucifixion – during which they cleaned and restored the burial cloth. This may have caused potentially important dust and pollen molecules to be lost forever. It is feared the process could compromise the possibility of ever conclusively carbon-dating the shroud, which believers claim bears the image of Christ after his body was cut down from the cross.” The Herald (Glasgow) 09/22/02

HONEST FAKES: John Myatt is a painter who made a good career as a master forger until he was caught. “When Myatt was freed in June 1999, he had ‘pretty much decided to pack up painting,’ he says. But friends asked for a Monet or another Nicholson. ‘I said no, but if you’re prepared to have something that looks like one … ‘ was his answer. Gradually he built up a collection. Several London galleries apparently eager to cash in on his notoriety offered to show his work.” Now he’s got a show… Los Angeles Times 09/23/02

MUSEUM OF DESTRUCTION: The American military is turning over an old nuclear missile silo in South Dakota to the National Park Service, which will turn the site into a national park where “parents and kids will be able to see how the end of the world could have begun. ‘It will really be kind of stunning to be able to see these things. There’s almost something surreal about it, and this makes it more real. Probably people’s impressions about this, to the extent that they have one, is based on movies’.” New Jersey Online (AP) 09/24/02

Monday September 23

KRUGER WINS COPYRIGHT CASE: Can artists legally appropriate other artists’ images into their work as part of something bigger? The US Appeals Court says they may, ruling in favor of artist Barbara Kruger. “Photographer Thomas Hoepker and his friend Charlotte Dabney, had sought damages stemming from the use and exhibition of an image of Dabney within a work created by Barbara Kruger.” The pair had also sued the Whitney Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art for selling copies of Kruger’s work in their giftshop. The Art Newspaper 09/20/02

UNSOLICITED ADVICE: “Who can forget the booing that erupted spontaneously at the Javits Center two months ago after the presentation of six much-anticipated plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center site? The audience of 5,000 New Yorkers from every walk of life were not just being contrarians; they were expressing a collective demand for urban and architectural greatness, scaled to the magnitude of 9/11.” Accordingly, New York magazine solicited designs from 7 leading architects, and is welcoming reader feedback. The designs range from imposing to subtle, from futurist to surreal. New York 09/23/02

LOOKING FOR THE NEXT BIG THING: Jay Jopling is the man who sold contemporary Britart to the public, introducing Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others. Now, after ten years he’s closing his original gallery and consolidating his four locations into one. Some critics have been saying he’s lost his way in recent years, and the 39-year-old Jopling hopes consolidation of his spaces will help his focus. The Observer (UK) 09/22/02

Sunday September 22

THE TROUBLE WITH AUTHENTICATION: The purchase of a painting thought to be a Rubens for CAN$117 million this summer sparked a raging debate over the authenticity of the work, and brought to the fore the troubling difficulty of decalring a work of art to be genuine. “A tour through the international world of art authentication leaves one reeling with the complexity of a discipline that is in rapid flux. While a half-century ago, the legendary connoisseur Bernard Berenson boldly authenticated works of art by sight alone, authentication today is a painstaking collaborative process, and never more so than when the stakes are high.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 09/21/02

BEST/WORST DOCUMENTA EVER? This year’s installment of the German Documenta festival was savaged by U.S. critics as virulently anti-American, out of touch with reality, and, according to the New York Times “puritanical and devoid of humor.” Regardless, attendance was the highest it has ever been in Kassel, the average age of attendees has stopped escalating, and the bottom line is safe for the first time in years. America, it turns out, may need to grow a thicker skin: “Art has seldom been so insolently criminalized as with the absurd assertion that Documenta Director Okwui Enwezor was pursuing the same objective in the area of aesthetics as the mass murderers of Sept. 11, and that they only differed in the degree of their motivation.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 09/20/02

THE NEW SURREALISTS: “Surrealism is alive and well in Toronto, and not just in the disproportionate number of light-bulb jokes on the Internet. Instead, the wild art has been experiencing a renaissance with a group of artists under the banner of Recordism.” What-ism? Well, according to the web site of the International Bureau of Recordist Information, the movement is about non-standard expression, the blending of sound and art, and the artistic bliss of breaking free from typical constraints of what is pretty, normal, or expected. Sounds plenty surreal to us. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 09/21/02

SELLER’S MARKET IN PARIS: “The suspense may not match the tension in world politics, but for those who sell art the stakes have never been so high. At the 21st Paris Biennale, 96 dealers watch with apprehension the reactions of collectors thronging to the most sophisticated showcase of the art of the past for sale in the world. Their anxiety is matched by that of collectors wondering how much longer they have to find gems as supplies continue to shrink every year.” International Herald Tribune (Paris) 09/21/02

WHERE’S OUR TECH BOOM? Digital art continues to have a tough time getting respect as a serious art form, and France’s new digital art festival Villette Numérique aims to advance the cause with six days of installations, juries, club shows, concerts, and video game marathons. (Could that last one be a source of the public disrespect for the form?) But organizers of the festival lament the lack of understanding of their oeuvre, and gently suggest that they ought to be in line for some government funding, as well. Wired 09/21/02

Friday September 20

ARCHITECT SUES SKIDMORE: An architect who worked on the Bloomberg corporate headquarters in New Jersey is suing Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, alleging the architecture firm of copying hundreds of his drawings, perhaps at the direction of Bloomberg. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg may be called to testify. New York Observer 09/18/02

A CATHEDRAL TO FIT L.A.: Paul Goldberger is impressed with the massiveness of Los Angeles’ new cathedral. It’s the poor man’s Getty, which is not an insignificant achievement. Architect Rafael Moneo plays with the past and is genuinely inventive at the same time. His best touch is both an homage to the traditional Gothic cathedral and a subtle, brilliant inversion of it.” The New Yorker 09/16/02

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM TO EXPAND: The Seattle Art Museum announces a construction plan that will triple its exhibition space. Not only will the expansion not cost the museum, it will make money on the deal, a partnership with a major bank. The bank will build a 40-story tower on property owned by the museum next door. The museum will occupy the bottom of the tower, and in return for the prime downtown real estate, the bank will pay off outstanding construction bonds used to finance the museum’s current home, a Robert Venturi building that opened in 1989. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 09/19/02

BUY AMERICAN: “Since 1986 the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has been quietly selling off its collection of European paintings to create a fund for the acquisition of American art. The decision to sell paintings by masters like Courbet and Boldini is a way of refocusing its mission in the 21st century, its officials say.” The move towards American art will also help distinguish the Academy from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which holds a massive European collection. The New York Times (first item) 09/20/02

Thursday September 19

STOLEN TITIAN RECOVERED: A Titian painting stolen in 1995 is returned – dropped off in a brown wrapper at a London bus stop after its owner pays a $150,000 ransom. The painting was likely stolen by amateurs who didn’t know what they had stolen, and who found it difficult to fence. The New York Times 09/19/02

PUBLIC ART OFF THE RAILS: The Los Angeles subways seems like a good place for art. But the projects designed for it are a disappointment. “In nearly every instance, the scale of the transit system dwarfs the art. The works come off as afterthoughts, decorative flourishes that are meant to add a bit of whimsy and individualism to an otherwise rational operation. Such thinking sells art short. When art is interesting, it embodies a lot more than idiosyncrasy. The biggest problem with this project is that it is based on the idea that art at subway stops is public and that art in museums isn’t. That’s simply wrong.” Los Angeles Times 09/18/02

Wednesday September 18

MUNICH’S NEW MODERN ART PALACE: The Pinakothek der Moderne, one of the world’s biggest modern art museums, has opened after six years of construction in Munich. “This is a great day for Bavaria, a great day for Germany. The museum rivals the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.” Expatica.com (DPA) 09/17/02

DANGEROUS ART: Many of the guests invited to a boarded up gallery in London last week were angry at Santiago Sierra, the artist whose “work” the closed gallery was. But Sierra’s art is usually much more dangerous and unsettling. “He goes beyond the limits of reasonable human interaction. He implicates the viewer and doesn’t account for the effect. I am not sure I can handle it. I certainly don’t approve of it. But here and there, through the shock of it, there is a superb formalist trying to get out.” London Evening Standard 09/17/02

GERMAN ART WE’VE BEEN MISSING: German art of the 20th Century has never been popular in Britain. “The main reason? The high discomfort level of much German painting. The critical reason? The belief of so many critics that the sun shone out of Paris; Expressionism and Abstraction in Germany were of minor import. The emotional reason? Gut anti-Germanism, politics and war.” The Times (UK) 09/18/02

SEE ME, TOUCH ME: A 36-ton marble sculpture of the Roman God Janus that was recently placed in front of a public building in Denver, was designed partly, with blind people in mind. The sculptor wanted the blind to be able to touch the sculpture and trace its relief with their hands. But the piece has run afoul of the Americans With Disabilities Act which “mandates anything that protrudes 4 inches or more above a height of 28 inches requires some kind of warning for blind people using canes.” New Jersey Online (AP) 09/17/02

Tuesday September 17

ART AS EVERYDAY: The second Liverpool Biennial takes the viewer out to the art. To see this biennial you have to be willing to explore the city: “You are in a world where anything can be art, from a ketchup v soy sauce battle (a symbol of East/West antagonism, apparently) to the appearance of Queen Victoria’s head in your hotel room to a fire engine belching eyebrow-singeing flame. It could all be — and often is — bewildering. The viewer quickly succumbs to sensory overload. And yet talent will out.” The Times (UK) 09/17/02

COMPLETING SYDNEY: Joern Utzon designed one of the 20th Century’s most identifiable buildings – the Sydney Opera House. But as it was being built, some three decades ago, he walked off the project after he thought his designs were being tampered with in a way he couldn’t tolerate. Now, at the age of 83 he’s been hired to finally finish the project. In all these years, he’s never seen the building in person. Any plans to? “Oh, I don’t need to do that. I see it every night when I close my eyes.” The Telegraph (UK) 09/17/02

REDISCOVERING KOENIGSBURG: Archeologists are piecing together the ruins of the 800-year-old shattered city of Koenigsberg. It was leveled in the 1950s by the Russians, then built over with an entirely new city, Kaliningrad. “The castle was built in the 13th Century and was the centre of Koenigsberg’s cultural life. It also housed the great wealth of the Museum of Prussia. ‘It was the cultural and spiritual center of Koenigsberg. Here there were very many museums, picture galleries, archives, exhibitions.’ The Soviet authorities claimed it was a centre of fascism.” BBC 09/16/2002

MEMBERSHIP DRIVE: Memberships are the life’s blood of a museum. They build loyalty and are an important source of income. But how good a deal are they for the consumer, wonders Huma Jehan? “Before taking out any gallery membership, be brutally honest. Look at the list of forthcoming exhibitions. Consider how many times you think you’ll visit it, and then divide the number by three to get a more realistic idea.” The Guardian (UK) 09/17/02

Monday September 16

ENDANGERED ART: The Philadelphia Museum of Art basement, an area “more than two acres” big, which stores “paintings, sculptures, books, carpets, furniture, ceramics, china and silver, including works by Monet and Alexander Calder” is a fire hazard, says the city’s fire department. “More than half of the vast basement has no sprinklers or other fire-suppression system – a fire-code violation – according to a fire-inspection. The museum has been in violation of the city fire code since Jan. 2, 1952. In the cultural world, fire experts cannot name other museums that leave most of their art-storage areas unprotected. And it highlights a tension between art curators and firefighters – one group fearful of water, the other of fire.” Philadelphia Inquirer 09/16/02

RICHEST NEW ARTS PRIZE: The Gulbenkian Foundation announces a £100,000 arts prize for museums to “raise the morale and profile of Britain’s museums and galleries.” The unexpected new prize is twice the value of the Booker prize, and more than the Booker, Turner and Stirling prizes put together. It is open to galleries large and small. It is designed to reward ‘the most innovative and inspiring idea – an exhibition, new gallery, public programme or important new initiative – developed during 2002’.” The Guardian (UK) 09/16/02

COLLUSION IN ART BUY? Last year the National Gallery of Australia and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery got together to jointly bid on a painting they wanted. They won the John Glover painting, and at a price of $1.5 million, had to shell out $1 million less than the picture was thought to be worth. But the agreement has run afoul of Australian regulators, who say the deal might have been anti-competitive. If the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission rules against the museums, they could face fines of up to $10 million. The Age (Melbourne) 09/16/02

JUST GIACOMETTI: A controversial sale of work by Giacometti this month in Paris draws attention the legal quagmire into which his estate has fallen. A foundation set up by the artist’s widow has had great difficulty getting authorized by the French government, and some wonder if there is an ulterior (and selfish) reason the bureaucracy has ground to a halt. The Telegraph (UK) 09/16/02

Sunday September 15

HOW BIG IS TOO BIG? “According to C. Northcote Parkinson, the inventor of Parkinson’s Law, the final and terminal decline of an institution is often signalled by a move into a gleaming, towering, purpose-built headquarters. If that is so, then the London contemporary art world is moving into a perilous phase, as more and more of its most notable movers and shakers are currently engaged in vigorous architectural expansion.” The Telegraph (UK) 09/14/02

MORE WTC FALLOUT: New York continues to struggle with the question of what should eventually rise where the World Trade Center once stood. When the official proposals were unveiled a few months back, the New York Times and its lead critics wasted no time in decrying them as unimaginative and antithetical to any truly human response to the attacks which felled the towers. But a series of proposals by those same critics is now appearing at the Venice Biennale, and isn’t garnering a much better response: “The proposals… commissioned failed to address all the complexities of the site, it was argued. Since it is a place of global significance, it was added, why was its future being treated as a parochial New York affair?” Is this project simply a no-win situation for any who undertake it, or is there a hidden solution still eluding the experts? London Evening Standard 09/13/02

HIGH-TECH NOSTALGIA: It’s not exactly modernism, and it certainly couldn’t be considered authentically nostalgic, but the new hot movement in British architecture is a combination of high-tech features and nods to classic styling called High-Tech, and there’s a lot more to it than a first glance might suggest. “High-Tech architecture… is about an image of modernity fashioned a surprisingly long time ago, early in the 20th century, in a very different world dominated by heavy industry. In today’s post-industrial world, there is something increasingly nostalgic about that image of modernity.” The Telegraph (UK) 09/14/02

MORE THAN JUST GROUND ZERO: “This fall’s architecture lineup is one of the most dynamic in recent memory, with signature buildings and high-profile exercises in urban planning dominating the stage… around the nation.” Projects to keep an eye on include a new Gehry-designed business school in Cleveland, a 37-story tower in Chicago by Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, and, of course, the question of what to do with the massive space formerly occupied by the World Trade Center towers in New York. Chicago Tribune 09/15/02

AND NEXT TIME, LOCK THOSE THINGS UP! “Seven paintings and about 20 statuettes stolen from the home of a Spanish billionaire have been recovered, wrapping up one of the biggest art heists in decades, officials said. The seven paintings were among 17 stolen from the Madrid penthouse of construction tycoon Esther Koplowitz while she was on vacation in August, 2001.” The Globe & Mail (AP) 09/14/02

Friday September 13

SAATCHI VS TATE: Super-collector Charles Saatchi fired a shot at the Tate Modern this week by announcing that he’s opening a new gallery across the street from the Tate Modern. And he’ll open next spring with artwork that was denied to the Tate. “Saatchi will curate the shows himself and the Damien Hirst exhibition will pointedly feature the pickled sharks denied to Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, when he sought to honour the artist with a retrospective at Tate Modern.” The Guardian (UK) 09/13/02

COLOR OWNERS: “If color is a language, Pantone is the Oxford English Dictionary — thousands of shades, from almond blossom to walnut, that can be printed, woven, or extruded anywhere in the world. Though Pantone doesn’t sell inks, dyes, or paints, it has come to hold a monopoly on color. Of course, frequencies of light, like naturally occurring sounds, are free for anyone to use. But Pantone owns their names — or, more specifically, their designated numbers and spectro-photometric descriptions.” So how much are you willing to pay? Wired 09/12/02

FALLING APART: Much contemporary art is made from materials that don’t last. So how to preserve them for the future? “Artists today are experimenting with materials that were never intended to be used in art making—from chocolate to excrement, foam rubber and fluorescent tubes, bodily fluids and banana peels—materials that are difficult or impossible to preserve. Such works have compelled curators and conservators to come up with new preservation strategies.” ARTNews 09/02

ENGORGED MISTAKE? China’s giant $24 billion Three Gorges dam is about 70 percent complete. “Almost 650,000 people have been moved, some 140,000 of them to other regions of China.” But there have been widespread reports of corruption on the project, and “environmentalists, scientists and archaeologists call the dam an expensive mistake. They say it will wreck the local environment, destroy cultural relics and be an economic drain.” The project is supposed to begin producing power next year. Yahoo! (AP) 09/10/02

BATH TIME: The last time Michelangelo’s David was cleaned was in 1873. “Next week restorers at Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia will begin wiping away 129 years of dirt and grime from the Renaissance marble statue from Monday. It is the first time the statue has been cleaned since it was moved into the gallery in 1873 to protect it from weather and pollution.” CNN 09/13/02

STAMPING OUT BAD ART: Beijing is sprucing up to get ready to host the Olympic games. To that end, city officials commissioned a study of public art in the capital, and determined that “up to 40% of sculptures in the Chinese capital are substandard.” The “bad” art includes “a fat mermaid” and a “timid” tiger. The statues will be pulled down and replaced by work by “professional sculptors. Ananova 09/13/02

Thursday September 12

SHUT OUT: Guests invited to the opening of a new London gallery arrive to find it shut. Turns out the invitation to a closed gallery is Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s art itself. “The artist had used the stunt to make a political point, aiming to show how frustrating it is to turn up somewhere to find it closed due to economic reasons.” Guests generally weren’t amused. BBC 09/11/02

OVERSIMPLIFYING IN VENICE: The Venice Biennale is underway amidst howls from architects that the event is ignoring real-world context, and treating architecture as an art form in a vacuum. “Biennale curator Deyan Scudjic selected as the focus the word ‘Next,’ dedicating the exhibit to buildings, architecture and places projected for the next decade. A vague theme at best and at worst a curatorial cop-out, it felt as if, in the face of a growing schism in architecture between showcasing design and creating relevant public space, Scudjic decided to cling to the physical security of buildings themselves.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 09/12/02

TOO MUCH BUILDING FOR THE SPACE: Why have proposals for replacement of the World Trade Center (by some of the world’s best architects) been so uninspiring? Martin Filler writes that the reasons are obvious: “Given that the bulk of the space had been contained in the megalithic superstructures, it does not take an architecture expert to understand that if you redistribute the same quantity of volume in considerably shorter, safer buildings – deemed prudent by all concerned – then more ground will have to be covered. And because of the considerable – and to my mind justifiable – public pressure to leave the footprints of the towers vacant (a central demand of the missing victims’ families and a feature of four of the six LMDC schemes), the gross overcrowding of the site is inevitable.” The New Republic 09/08/02

• IMAGINATION RATHER THAN REBUILDING: The New York Times gathers a team of prominent architects and asks them to imagine a redeveloped WTC area. “Some of the West Street projects will appear bizarre or perhaps self-indulgent to those unfamiliar with contemporary architecture. But this is not a lineup of architectural beauty contestants. All are conceptually rooted, in step with the level of architectural ambition in Vienna, Tokyo, Rotterdam and many other cities overseas.” New York Times Magazine 09/08/02

HOW TO SCREW UP A TRAIN STATION: Toronto is ‘revitalizing’ it’s architectural jewel of a rail station, and according to Lisa Rochon, the city could not be doing a worse job. How did the process get to such a disastrous point? Too much secrecy, too many egos on city council, and a complete and baffling ignorance of anything to do with trains, architecture, and public relations. The process may be beyond repair at this point, and many observers are worried that Union Station will never be the same. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 09/12/02

DESIGN MATTERS: Can anyone make a Mondrian? Can anyone tell a real Mondrian from a fake? “A psychologist at University College London, took studies by the giant of post impressionism, altered the balance of composition a little with a computer, and tested them on the public. ‘The short answer is there is a very clear relationship between good design and the way people look at that, and the way people take in information from a painting, and whether they find it pleasing or interesting’.” The Guardian (UK) 09/11/02

Wednesday September 11

MUSEUMS HURTING FOR MONEY: State museums in Europe and the US are being squeezed for money. “From the Louvre to Florence’s Uffizi, the monumental showcases of Europe are getting battered by a huge funding crisis. Cash-strapped governments are refusing to hike grants in line with inflation, causing museums to close galleries, skimp on security staff, and put off much-needed restorations.” BusinessWeek 09/16/02

STOLEN ART RECOVERED: Spanish police have recovered paintings stolen last summer in what was one of the country’s largest-ever art heists. “Goya’s The Donkey’s Fall, valued at £8 million, was found hanging on the wall of the house in the resort town of Playa d’Aro, eastern Spain, together with 20 other stolen artworks.” The art is believed to have been heading to the home of a Colombian drug lord. The Guardian (UK) 09/11/02

HERZOG BEATS UP ON BILBAO AND MOMA: Jacques Herzog, designer of the Tate Modern – Britain’s most successful new museum, blasts two of the modern artworld’s star institutions. “He said that New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the world’s most powerful fount of public art, was driven by a cynical and elitist strategy. And in Bilbao, the Guggenheim Museum, designed by the architecture superstar Frank Gehry, left him totally cold because it was a ‘very bad example for museums in the future’.” The Independent (UK) 09/10/02

LIVING DOWN THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS: “The American art world has been trying to live down abstract expressionism for four decades now. There is no abstract expressionist tourist industry. You won’t find a Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Gorky, Still or Newman cafe, or encounter tour groups on the abstract expressionist trail. Sometimes it’s as if the [New York’s] most significant art movement never existed – indeed it can even be hard to find the paintings. Manhattan museums have their Tate-style rehangs, and curators love to iconoclastically shove those big macho paintings in the cellar to make way for, say, a slide show by Nan Goldin.” The Guardian (UK) 09/11/02

TERMINALLY NICE? Have art critics become too nice? “Much art criticism is adulatory or merely descriptive. Many critics have never seen a show they weren’t enthusiastic about. These days, negative criticism is branded as ‘mean’ or ‘personal.’ Future generations will peruse today’s art magazines and suppose ours was an age where almost everything that was made was universally admired.” Village Voice 09/10/02

SURVIVOR: It’s estimated that $200 million worth of art was lost in the Twin Towers tragedy. Miraculously, one piece survived almost intact: Fritz Koenig’s 27ft, 45,000lb bronze Sphere, commissioned in 1969 for the Trade Center Plaza. For more than three decades it stood as a symbol of world peace, ‘the bellybutton of the complex,’ according to its architect, Yamasaki. Now it’s relocated at the tip of Manhattan in Battery Park as a temporary memorial.” Financial Times 09/11/02

ON THE REYNOLDS TRAIL: A long-missing portrait by Joshua Reynolds has been found after a 70-year search. Soon after it was sold in 1930, Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Margaret Morris, a Welsh heiress who co-founded Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London, went missing. The painting is 250 years old, and a long and dramatic search for it included leads to the mafia, bombed-out buildings and midwestern U.S. hotels… The Guardian (UK) 09/10/02

Tuesday September 10

WHAT AUSTRALIA’S ARTISTS NEED: Australia’s visual arts need help. What kind? About $15 million in government funds, suggests a new report. Also a royalty system for artists so they would earn a percentage of the price every time their work is resold, and generous tax incentives for those who donate artwork to museums. “In a nation that’s pretty good at acknowledging sporting heroes, we might be able to move quite quickly soon to begin to acknowledge our great living artists as heroes of our country, too.” The Age (Melbourne) 09/10/02

A TIME OF VISION: If we learned anything from the official proposals to replace the World Trade Center earlier this summer, it was that New Yorkers expect something grand, something extraordinary. New York Magazine asked six prominent architectural firms to deliver. “New Yorkers need buildings at the World Trade Center site that will make us stop, look, and feel. Buildings that will make us turn our gaze up and understand a larger order of aspiration. This is not the time to settle for real-estate deals dressed up with expensive curtain walls but the moment to prescribe curative doses of the beautiful, the poetic, the sublime.” New York Magazine 09/09/02

Monday September 9

ART TO THE PEOPLE: Mao Zedong’s Long March revolutionized China and inspired generations of Chinese. “Almost seven decades on, Mao’s Long March is providing the inspiration for a new group of ‘revolutionaries’ – not cadres this time, but artists. Since July, The Long March, a travelling exhibition and interactive art show, has been retracing Mao’s journey through China.” The aim is to bring contemporary art to the people. Far Eastern Economic Review 09/12/02

CHINA’S NEW COMMERCIAL ART TRADE: In China, only the state and its wholly owned shops are allowed to deal in the trade of antiques. But a resolution passed by the recent People’s Congress proposes opening up the antiques trade to private companies for the first time since 1949. The new freedom is not without its strictures. “The draft law defines categories of art that cannot be traded; mandates ‘certification’ by the central government of any art business, State-owned or private, and gives the State first refusal on any object.” The Art Newspaper 09/06/02

DIANA MEMORIAL CRITICIZED: The selection of a design for a London memorial to Diana, the Princess of Wales, has been controversial. Now a judge makes his objections public… The Art Newspaper 09/06/02

Sunday September 8

BANNED ART: How to create a work of art which truly reflects, in both a realistic and human sense, the way in which our world has changed since last September? A new exhibit in San Francisco embraces the task in the most literal fashion – a Bay Area artist has assembled a series of collages made up entirely of the wreckage of aircraft and items seized by airport security officers since the new, more stringent restrictions on baggage went into effect. Gimmicky? Sure. But visitors and critics are finding it surprisingly powerful as well. San Francisco Chronicle 09/07/02

ROLE REVERSAL: Being a critic is significantly easier than being a creator, and most critics would tell you as much. But being a critic-turned-creator may be harder still, as the world lines up to see if you can take the heat you’re used to dishing out. Such is the lot of Deyan Sudjic, the architecture critic tapped to head up this year’s Venice Biennale. The government is against him, his plans are thwarted at every turn, and he speaks very little Italian. Somehow, it all comes together. Or so he hopes. The Observer (UK) 09/08/02

SUBTLE SELF-PROMOTION: Philadelphia’s Print Center is trying something new to increase its profile in the city: art that no one notices. The plan is called “Imprint,” and consists of works by six artists placed at various points around the metro area, on billboards, coffee cups, and in magazines, designed to gradually work their way into the minds of the viewer, rather than be analyzed in any one sitting. The images are described as simple but confusing, accessible but startling, and subliminal yet unavoidable. Sounds like art, all right. Philadelphia Inquirer 09/08/02

FOR THE LOVE OF ART: Many rich collectors acquire art for the status symbol, or the investment, or just to have it.George and Maida Abrams collect art because they love it. Not every piece in the Abrams collection is worth great gobs of money (although some, like Rembrandt’s ‘Farm on the Amsteldijk,’ are priceless,) but every painting, every drawing, every sketch has something in it that caught the eye of either husband or wife and made it impossible for them to leave it behind. The Abrams collection is currently touring Europe, its first public display since Maida died of cancer last spring, and is garnering mostly rave reviews for the highly personal nature of the works included. “They constitute a loving, lingering look at everyday life -which accounts for their accessibility to a wide public.” Boston Globe 09/08/02

A HOME FOR THE MACABRE: “Edward Gorey never passed up a chance to give a gift — unless it involved an event where an admiring stranger might thrust the shy author and illustrator into the centre of attention. So he probably would have grumbled aloud about the spotlight on his life at the Edward Gorey House, a tribute to all things Gorey that opened in July in his beloved Cape Cod home, where he had a fatal heart attack in April, 2000. Secretly, however, Gorey might have been pleased by efforts from friends, family and an anonymous foundation to preserve his eccentric legacy.” The Globe & Mail (AP) 09/07/02

Friday September 6

POISONED HERITAGE: “As late as the 1960s, it was common practice for museums and collectors to preserve artifacts – and to ward off bugs and rodents – by applying a variety of toxic pesticides, including mercury, arsenic, and the now-banned DDT. In the wake of a federal repatriation law passed in the early 1990s, Native Americans have realized what was previously known only to museum workers: Virtually every organic artifact collected before the second half of the 20th century has been contaminated. Because the problem is so new, no data exist on the correlation between contaminated artifacts and health defects, especially among the little-studied Native American population.” SF Weekly 09/05/02

LET’S GET SOME ROYALTY ACTION: The real money in art is made in the resale market after the artist is established. Collectors get rich if they pick the right artist to collect. But visual artists in the United States do not earn royalties on their work after it is first sold, meaning their capacity to earn goes to the grave with them. Australian artists – painters, sculptors, photographers and the like – are in exactly the same boat and right now are locked in a tussle with gallery owners and the Federal Government to grab a piece of that rock-star-earning action.” Sydney Morning Herald 09/06/02

MEMORIALIZING AS A CONCEPT: Arthur Danto tries to make sense of the flood of post-9/11 art raining down on us from everywhere as the anniversary approaches. “I somewhat resist the idea of the anniversary, but at the same time acknowledge a deep wisdom in the way an anniversary marks a symbolic ending. The art that belonged to the experience of September 11 now constitutes a body of work that differs from the art that will undertake to memorialize it. The difference in part is this: One need not have shared the experience to memorialize it.” The Nation 09/023/02

PROTESTS OVER HITLER STATUE: A lifelike statue portraying Adolf Hitler kneeling in prayer is being installed in Rotterdam (which was flattened by the Nazis in World War II) this week. The city’s leading cultural critic has complained, but the museum showing the work defends it, saying: “By confronting this loaded theme with irony, the historic and ethical importance of this extremely dark period of our existence becomes clearer. It is particularly important to display this type of work now in a time of fear.” Nando Times (AP) 09/06/02

MUSEUM ACCESS DENIED: Many museums are restricting access to parts of their collections deemed “inappropriate” for public scrutiny. “What’s significant and alarming about this story is not just that researchers and the rest of us may be denied a chance to study objects and their cultural importance. A situation where museum curators are no longer obliged to defer to the idea of research being integral to their employment by the museum is deeply disturbing. Instead they seem to be playing the role of high priests, hiding the ancient saint’s finger as a relic in the basement, only to be seen by the privileged few chosen by birth or background.” The Spectator 09/07/02

RIFFING RESTORATION: The University of Canberra is dropping its art restoration program. “They are losing a huge amount of money because there’s very low demand.” Some warn that the preservation of Australia’s art collections will be endangered without new conservators. Sydney Morning Herald 09/06/02

Thursday September 5

THE BEST NEW BUILDINGS? Here’s a list of new American buildings (opened since the change of the millennium) that one panel of experts picked as buildings pointing to a new age. The list includes “an office building, a courthouse, two museums and even a public transit project. In a sense, the populism of these structures recalls another great era, that of 100 years ago. Back then, great architecture was represented by central rail stations: ornate, Renaissance-styled places that embraced the masses as they caught an eye-opening first impression of the big city. Then modernism came along, and we lost this…” USA Weekend Magazine 09/01/02

HIGH-END HEIST: “Works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo have been stolen from a doctor’s home in Texas. The haul, worth more than $700,000, was taken from the San Antonio house of Dr Richard Garcia while he was asleep upstairs… The most expensive item taken was a painting by Frida Kahlo, valued at $500,000. Dr Garcia, who has not publicly identified the paintings on the advice of his lawyer, said he had not insured the works because the premiums would be too high.” BBC 09/04/02

AIMING HIGH IN BOSTON: Boston’s Institute for Comtemporary Art unveiled its plans for a new museum on the Boston Harbor this week, and reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. But the ICA has a number of significant hurdles to clear before the museum can be built, and the exorbitant cost may be the least of the problems. “Is the section of the Harborwalk bordering the building going to be wide enough? And what about the dramatic, fourth-floor overhang that stretches to the water’s edge? A stunning design, but didn’t it violate the rules of the Municipal Harbor Plan? And would it create a wind tunnel like the one around the John Hancock Tower?” Boston Globe 09/05/02

HOW TO GET YOURSELF DECLARED AN ‘ENEMY COMBATANT’: Hlynur Hallsson probably could have chosen a better time and place to “stimulate discussion.” The Icelandic artist installed an exhibit of his work in a rural Texas gallery with the stated intention of getting people to talk. The townsfolk haven’t stopped shouting since: Mr. Hallsson’s exhibit consists of bilingual graffiti-style sentences scrawled on walls, with the text reading “The real axis of evil are Israel, USA and the UK,” “Ariel Sharon is the top terrorist,” and “George W. Bush is an idiot.” The New York Times 09/05/02

Wednesday September 4

THE DEPRESSING HOMEFRONT: So what if we create civic buildings of aesthetic quality? People can come and visit them. But then they go home to wretched mass-produced, unsustainable, depressing houses in suburbs. Could this be what people want? “But are these people offered, or have they experienced, anything different? How are they so sure when there are so many alternative ways of living? And just who gains from turning lark-sung meadows into acres of breeze-blocks tricked out in doll’s house detailing?” The Guardian (UK) 09/02/02

IT’S HIP TO BE DUMBO: It’s where you want to be in New York – Dumbo – Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass – the latest neighborhood to make a claim for rising hipster status on the New York scene. In its 15 rough-hewn square blocks, about 1,000 artists and performers fill some 700 lofts.” Washington Post 09/04/02

THE BATTERED BARNES: The Barnes Collection outside Philadelphia is one of the world’s great collections of Impressionist art. “The Musee d’Orsay in Paris owns 94 works by Renoir. The Barnes has 181. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has 39 by Cezanne. The Barnes owns 69.” But the Barnes is surely one of the most troubled of art institutions – trapped by the will of an eccentric founder and the wrath of angry neighbors. Can anything be done? Los Angeles Times 09/03/02

NEW BOSTON LANDMARK? Boston’s new waterfront home for the Institute of Contemporary Art may be delayed because of financial dificulties. But that isn’t stopping the ICA from unveiling its dramatic design for the building. “This is one of the city’s great moments. We see this as quite the beacon of light on the waterfront. It will be as luminous outside as the work will be inside.” Boston Herald 09/04/02

AWKWARD OPENING? The first cathedral built in the United States for three decades opened yesterday amid protests from Roman Catholics who say that the $200 million cost of the building should have been spent on the poor. All-night vigils were held by protesters describing the building as a ‘fat cats’ cathedral’ and by others critical of the church’s handling of the sex scandals engulfing it. The dedication of the cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels comes at an awkward moment for the church. Seventy-two current or former priests from the LA diocese alone are under criminal investigation and the church is embroiled in costly settlements with abuse victims.” The Guardian (UK) 09/03/02

• Previously: BREATHTAKING ADDITION: The new Los Angeles Cathedral opened over the weekend. Not the best time in the history of the American Catholic Church to be into an expensive project. Architecturally, the building is impressive, writes Nicolai Ourssouroff. “If it struggles to find its place in the city, its intent is to offer a refuge from it. The relentless flow of Los Angeles’ sprawling landscape is momentarily lessened. In its place is a monument to spiritual communion that certainly ranks among the great architectural achievements in recent American history.” Los Angeles Times 09/02/02

Tuesday September 3

INNOCENTS IS BLISS? Controversy still swirls around the painting bought by a Canadian collector for £49 million at auction this summer. Is Massacre of the Innocents by Rubens (thus justifying its enormous price) or is it not? “The work is not a ‘typical Rubens’, but bears a marked similarity to the National Gallery’s Samson and Delilah, itself an initially controversial purchase. ‘To link this painting so strongly seems disturbing when Samson and Delilah’s attribution has been challenged for all sorts of reasons’.” The Guardian (UK) 09/03/02

BREATHTAKING ADDITION: The new Los Angeles Cathedral opened over the weekend. Not the best time in the history of the American Catholic Church to be into an expensive project. Architecturally, the building is impressive, writes Nicolai Ourssouroff. “If it struggles to find its place in the city, its intent is to offer a refuge from it. The relentless flow of Los Angeles’ sprawling landscape is momentarily lessened. In its place is a monument to spiritual communion that certainly ranks among the great architectural achievements in recent American history.” Los Angeles Times 09/02/02

• EARTHBOUND ART: The art commissioned for the new cathedral doesn’t match the inspiration of the building. “The result is self-defeating. If you already believe, the art is superficial. If you don’t, there isn’t much to see.” Los Angeles Times 09/02/02
  

WORLD’S LARGEST PAINTING? It’s a lifesize painting of a tree. “The picture of an oak tree is 32ft by 22ft. It is going on display in the middle of Golden Square in Soho, central London. Artist Adam Ball used 100 litres of paint and varnish to create the vast work, entitled The Tree. He got through 35 brushes, as well as mops, brooms and builders’ trowels, to cover the canvas. It will hang on a 12 metre (40ft) scaffold and be weighed down by 50 tonnes of concrete to prevent it from blowing over.” The Guardian (UK) 09/02/02

Sunday September 1

COME TO BOSTONLAND! The city of Boston is about to have a big chunk of open land, once the major traffic artery through the city is shifted underground. And this week, a city councilor proposed that a parcel of the land be used to create a sort of colonial theme park, an idea which Robert Campbell calls “stupid… Hey, why not turn the Artery into Venetian canals? How about a bullfight arena? Maybe a giant balloon launcher for tourists? The problem isn’t dreaming up ideas. The problem is that there’s nobody in charge of sifting those ideas and figuring out what will really work, what will really make a better city.” Boston Globe 09/01/02

THERE’S NEVER ENOUGH FREUD: The Lucien Freud exhibit at the Tate Modern has been the hot ticket of the summer in London. And it’s not over yet – the final two works to join the exhibit have only just been completed, and, as previewed in a London broadsheet, they are as eclectic as one would expect from the UK’s painter of the moment. One of the works features a dog lying at a man’s bare feet; the other is a nude of pregnant supermodel Kate Moss. The Telegraph (UK) 08/31/02

OUTSIDER ART FROM THE INSIDE: An exhibition of sketches depicting life in a South African prison will go on display in London this week. The artist, who is an amateur, is hoping to raise money to support a children’s charity in his home country, and actually returned to the prison in which he spent a quarter century incarcerated in order to make the sketches. So why would anyone care? Well, the sketches are reportedly quite good. And the artist’s name is Nelson Mandela. BBC 09/01/02

AS IF TIMES SQUARE NEEDED MORE POP ART: “The Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein liked to parody the modernist styles of his day. So it’s altogether appropriate that five years after his death, he has given the new Times Square, with its sci-fi glass towers and Tomorrowland electronic signs, a monumental mural that harks back to a bygone future — the future as it was evisioned in the machine age… The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which commissioned the piece and will unveil it on Thursday, may rightly see the work as an emblem of a revitalized, forward-looking Times Square. But it’s also a Lichtenstein sendup of modernist visions of the future.” The New York Times 09/01/02

THE OTHER OTHER TATE: “St Ives would like to be the Collioure of Cornwall. It was in Collioure, on the western end of the Côte d’Azur, in the early 20th century that Matisse, Picasso and the French avant garde drank Bandol and reinvented painting. Those days are long gone now. Collioure trades on its artistic heritage, but you have to go a long way to find a few slightly sorry traces of its glory days… The locals are in no doubt about the source of St Ives’s new prosperity: it’s the Tate St Ives.” The Telegraph (UK) 08/31/02

Friday August 30

WHILE DREAMS OF GOOG DANCED IN THEIR HEADS: Evidently oblivious to the Guggenheim’s sagging financial fortunes, the City of Edinburgh is trying to lure the museum into building a branch there. Representatives from Gehry & Associates have already been to town to assess site feasibility “It would add something to a rich landscape if a gallery of contemporary art were to open. That would be a very positive development.” The Scotsman 08/29/02

WILL THERE BE ANY NEED TO LOOK AT THE ACTUAL ART? The Tate Museum is experimenting with giving visitors handheld computers on which they can wirelessly access multimedia guides to the exhibition they are visiting. “If the trial, being offered free to enthusiastic visitors, is a success, the multimedia tours could be offered alongside the existing audio tours.” BBC 08/30/02

ART-AS-COMMODITY REPORT: The art market has been good the past few years. But will the good times continue? “Simply looking at beguiling prices realised and touted by auction houses might lead one to think that the art market has defied gravity and has, and can, continue, oblivious of the wider economic slowdown. While such a scenario would be lovely, the truth is it is impossible to imagine. But the slowdown of 2003 is not going to be a repeat of the crash of 1990. Times have indeed been good, but an economic shakeout is not a collapse: the underlying global economy remains healthy: so too with the art market.” The Art Newspaper 08/30/02

CAMBODIA OFFERS UP ANCIENT SECRETS: A pair of 2000 year old bells is the latest treasure unearthed by a mining operation in Cambodia. “The demining team which discovered them, buried three feet underground, believed at first they were dealing with two bombs – and followed standard procedure: ‘They dug them out very carefully because they were scared of an explosion, but when they got them out of the ground, they realized what they were’.” Public Arts (Reuters) 08/29/2002

• GOLD BUDDHAS IN CAMBODIAN JUNGLE
  New restoration work on Cambodian sites of 1970s Khmer Rouge destruction is unearthing more than political memories. Twenty-seven solid gold Buddha statues, as well as more of silver and bronze were found buried under a ruined pagoda: “The workmen were supposed to be rebuilding the temple which was smashed up by the Khmer Rouge, but then they found these golden Buddhas and the whole construction work has had to stop.” Arizona Republic 08/27/2002
  

THE ‘HOLD-BACK’ ROOM: Starting in the mid-18th Century, museums began holding back items in their collections deemed too…shall we say…startling…for visitors of refinement. “By the 1830s the British Museum, too, had started hiving off items considered potentially too corrupting to be perused by ordinary mortals — particularly women and the lower classes. Such material, it was felt, would lead to moral degeneracy, which in turn would lead to the collapse of social and economic values and — who knows? — the decline and fall of the Empire itself.” The Times (UK) 08/30/02

Thursday August 29

OF SUNFLOWERS AND DONKEYS AND ELEPHANTS (OH MY!): The Animals-on-Parade public art project has been adopted (without incident) by dozens of cities around the world. But Washington DC has found itself in court this summer over that city’s version of the painted animals. First, the Green Party sued to get its party symbol (a sunflower) included alongside the elephants and donkeys. Then “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals convinced another judge that the city violated their 1st Amendment right to protest the treatment of circus animals when it rejected the group’s portrayal of a weeping, shackled elephant.” Chicago Tribune 08/29/02

OUT OF THE BASEMENT: Like most museums, Sacramento’s Crocker Museum is able to display only a tiny fraction of its collection. “At any one time, only 5 percent of the museum’s 10,000-piece collection is available to the public.” Now the museum is embarking on a project to put its entire collection online. Sacramento Bee 08/28/02

Wednesday August 28

WHERE’S THE ART? The amount of quality art for sale has been declining over the past decade. “The sellers have simply fled. The art market gets back to business for the 2002-03 season next week with one auction at Sotheby’s in September and six at Christie’s. September sales, ten years ago, were around 15 in each house; now, the great rooms in Mayfair and St James’s echo with inactivity. You can’t walk the London art suburbs without hearing the choral sadness of the art trade that yes, wallets are bulging, buyers are everywhere, but no, we’ve nothing of quality to sell.” The Times (UK) 08/28/02

ANOTHER ARTIST GENTRIFICATION STORY: Hoxton, in East London, is home to some of the biggest names in contemporary visual art. In the past decade it was the center of all that was hot. But “the artists’ squats have disappeared, turned over to lucrative loft-style living. So, nearly five years after Hoxton was declared London’s art hot spot, is it really still hot? Or has it become a Covent Garden of the East – all gloss and glamour and no grit? As the money rolls into the area, it’s clear that this is the heart of a new art establishment.” London Evening Standard 08/27/02

THE MAN WHO SAVED DRESDEN’S ART: Quick thinking by Dresden’s director of museums helped mobilize an army of workers to haul priceless works of art out of the city’s flooded museums to higher ground. “Two hundred staff and volunteers, assisted by the army and the fire brigade, removed 4,000 paintings from the basement, including 30 top-quality paintings by Cranach and some fine works by Veronese.” The Times (UK) 08/28/02

GIVING NO QUARTER: The U.S. Mint’s state quarters project, which releases a new batch of state-specific coins each year through 2008, has been a hit with the public. But a Missouri artist is furious with what has become of his design for the Show Me State’s two bits, and the dispute has focused some light on the process the Mint is using to select the designs. “The Mint asks state governors to drum up ideas in the forum or contest of their choosing. But in the end, government engravers alter and recompose the concepts pretty much as they please. And they put their own initials on the completed work.” Washington Post 08/28/02

MAJOR GIFT IN SAN FRAN: “The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has been given nearly 1,000 objects by two donors, retired Los Angeles businessman Lloyd E. Cotsen and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The Asian, which reopens in its new quarters on Jan. 23, agreed with both donors not to discuss the monetary value of the acquisitions, but a seven- figure estimate would probably be modest. Cotsen has given more than 800 items from his renowned personal collection of Japanese bamboo baskets and other objects related to the traditional tea ceremony.” San Francisco Chronicle 08/28/02

LISTENING TO ART: “The desire of galleries to make art accessible is subtly altering the way the work itself is presented. Visitors are being invited not just to contemplate, but to engage in a more active experience. Not just to look, but also to learn. Hence the growing popularity of audio guides. Rough estimates from their producers suggest that, whereas five years ago just two per cent of visitors to major exhibitions would use one, now 40 per cent will.” The Telegraph (UK) 08/28/02

IT’S OFFICIALLY FRANK’S HOUSE: “The Mitchell House in Racine, Wis, long believed to have been designed by a Frank Lloyd Wright colleague, was actually conceived by the famed architect, a Wright scholar said yesterday.” The house, which has sometimes been attributed to Cecil Corwin, contains many elements remniescent of other Lloyd Wright buildings, and while documentation firmly establishing him as the architect has yet to be unearthed, the author of the preeminent Frank Lloyd Wright catalog says he is convinced enough to put the house in his register. Toronto Star 08/28/02

Tuesday August 27

GIANT COMMEMORATION: In one of the larger scale commemorations of 9/11, “thousands of volunteers will unfurl a 5-mile-long silk banner with 3,000 American flags under the Golden Gate Bridge and wrap it along San Francisco’s coastline on Sept. 8 in a massive red-white-and-blue commemoration of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The memorial artwork is the product of Chinese American artist Pop Zhao, who stretched the world’s longest artwork on the Great Wall of China last year.” San Francisco Chronicle 08/27/02

ADDING UP ANDY: The recent much-publicized Andy Warhol show which ran for 12 weeks at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, generated $55.8 million into Los Angeles’ economy, says an economic impact study. “My hope is that the proof that this show had tangible economic benefits as well as artistic benefits will help MOCA and other institutions produce important projects of equivalent cost and ambition in the future.” Los Angeles Times 08/27/02

BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE: London’s National Gallery is putting a series of Renaissance paintings on display which were painted over top other paintings. “Any painting is a lesson in chemistry and optics: white reflects all colours, black absorbs all colours; some chemicals absorb everything except red or yellow or blue light and so become natural pigments. Humans have a limited visual range, from red to violet, but paintings are still ‘visible’ at other wavelengths. Owls and foxes can see in the near infra-red. Very weak infrared light shone on a painting can penetrate thin layers of paint, to be stopped by something impenetrable underneath.” The Guardian (UK) 08/26/02

Monday August 26

FURTHER BAMIYAN PERIL: The hollowed-our niches that once protected the Bamiyan Buddhas before they were destroyed by the Taliban last year are in danger of being destroyed themselves. An expert who has examined the site says that “explosions caused by the Taliban have perilously weakened the cliff face. Cracks have appeared, allowing rain water to percolate into the decorated caves. The water then freezes at night, enlarging the cracks.” Unless emergency conservation is undertaken, the niches will “disappear within a decade.” The Art Newspaper 08/23/02

IT’S REAL: Sotheby’s is defending a painting sold last month for $120 million as authentic. The auction house says the painting is an authentic Rubens, with provenance going back to 1699 or 1700. Sotheby’s “consulted the leading Rubens experts for their opinions and not one who saw the painting raised any doubts. On the contrary, they were enthusiastic about the attribution and supported it often publicly. Sotheby’s is unaware of any change in the views of the leading experts who supported the attribution at the time.” Toronto Star 08/24/02

• Previously: A GIFT FOR DAD: Last month David Thomson, the son of Canada’s wealthiest man and biggest collectors, bought his dad a present – a newly discovered painting by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. The $120 million Thomson paid for The Massacre of the Innocents was the third highest amount ever paid for a painting. Now the painting may turn out not to be by Rubens at all, and the gift has provoked a debate… National Post (Canada) 08/23/02

Sunday August 25

WHOLESALE LOOTING AND WASTE: Looting of Afghanistan’s cultural treasures hasn’t stopped with the overthrow of the Taliban – it has excalated. “The theft in the valley of Jam is only the most obvious evidence of a general destruction of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. But the pillaging of Jam is a recent, post-Taliban phenomenon. The chaos that followed the 1989 Soviet withdrawal kept antiquity traders away from the valley, and the Taliban had protected it as an Islamic site. Now, with a measure of order restored but with a lack of control from Kabul, looting is in full season. The demand for these objects and the money for the excavations come primarily from dealers and collectors in Japan, Britain and the United States. But there have also been reports of American servicemen buying antiquities from villagers. Items from Jam are already being offered on the art market in London, described as Seljuk or Persian to conceal their Afghan origin.” The New York Times 08/25/02

THE REAL DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA? In the 1920s, a horde of artifacts was found in the desert outside Tucson. The objects suggest that Europeans had been in the Arizona desert as early as 800 AD, centuries before Columbus was said to have “discovered” America. The objects look real, but many experts believe they’re fake. “There are endless theories about the items, and the facts don’t change the minds of the people who hold those theories.” Arizona Republic 08/24/02

LOWER, SAFER: 9/11 has had an immediate impact on the kinds of buildings being added to cities. “In both Chicago and New York, there is talk in real estate circles that prospective tenants now favor lower office floors instead of high ones. If that turns out to be true, it will mark a sea change in skyscraper psychology: The high floors used to be the ones that commanded the highest prices because of their best views and prestige. Now, it seems, there’s a premium being put on survival.” Chicago Tribune 08/25/02

Friday August 23

GREATER ALEXANDER: Plans have been unveiled to carve a giant likeness of Alexander the Great on a mountain in Northern Greece. “The planned 240 foot image will be comparable to the carved faces of American Presidents on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and cost nearly £200 million. Supporters believe that the sculpture of the general, whose empire stretched from Greece to India, will bring in the tourists and assist the local economy.” The Times (UK) 08/22/02

• ALEXANDER THE MONSTROSITY: Environmental opponents of the plan have “vowed to go to court to stop the 30-million euro project, while the Greek Culture Ministry has warned that it will not allow work to begin as scheduled in November. The plan, from a group of Greek-Americans, would see a rock outcrop on Mount Kerdylio in the northern province of Macedonia changed into a massive monument to the fourth-century BC empire-builder. Environmentalists fear it will spoil the landscape and harm the area, while archaeologists have called the project a ‘monstrosity’ that they say could threaten a nearby ancient theatre and a Byzantine church.” BBC 08/22/02

DRESDEN ADDS UP FLOOD DAMAGES: Dresden art officials are counting up damages in last week’s floods. “Some 20,000 artworks were evacuated during three large operations. Thousands of the figures and castings that were saved now lie strewn around wherever space is available in both the painting section and in the antiquity hall of the gallery. Transportation damages were only minimal. Of the four thousand paintings that were housed in the ‘old masters’ storage area only 25 large-size paintings received moisture damage. But the Zwinger Palace gallery’s restoration workshop completely emerged in water and the entire technical infrastructure has been destroyed.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 08/23/02

STOLEN TITIAN FOUND: Police in London have recovered a stolen 16th-Century painting by Titian worth more than £5 million. The painting was recovered without its frame in a small plastic carrier bag. BBC 08/23/02

A GIFT FOR DAD: Last month David Thomson, the son of Canada’s wealthiest man and biggest collectors, bought his dad a present – a newly discovered painting by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. The $120 million Thomson paid for The Massacre of the Innocents was the third highest amount ever paid for a painting. Now the painting may turn out not to be by Rubens at all, and the gift has provoked a debate… National Post (Canada) 08/23/02

Thursday August 22

CZECH DAMAGE: Prague’s major art collections escaped the recent floods But the water “submerged large swaths of the Czech Republic, leaving broad ribbons of destruction, including hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to the country’s cultural fabric, though a formidable number of artworks were saved during the pandemonium. Much of the damage is hidden: undermined foundations, devastated castle gardens, soaked cellars and damaged heating and alarm systems in castles, museums, galleries and archives. On a smaller scale, there was damage to irreplacable cultural artifacts.” The New York Times 08/22/02

HIDDEN COLLECTION: The British Museum has acquired an important textile collection from Afghanistan, but it may be years before anyone will see it. The British Museum “has one of the finest collections in the world, of more than 18,000 textiles, ranging in size from tiny scraps of embroidery to vast carpets and entire tents, but it has been closed for years, and the plans for a new display and study centre and open store have collapsed in the museum’s dire financial situation. The plight of the collection has been causing concern to international textile experts. Although cataloguing, research and conservation work has continued, it has been impossible to display them – not only to the public but even to visiting scholars.” The Guardian (UK) 08/22/02

CELEBRATION OF INDIAN CULTURE: Santa Fe’s popular annual Indian Market “takes its name from two intense days of selling Indian art at outdoor booths around this city’s plaza, but it has blossomed into a weeklong celebration of Indian culture with museum exhibitions, benefit auctions, gallery openings, music and even a film festival. ‘You can no longer put Indian art off to the side. I think it has just gotten too good’.” The New York Times 08/22/02

JUST PLAYING: “The boisterous artistic career that ended last week with [artist Larry] Rivers’ death at age 78 was to many, including obituary writers, just another set of antics to put next to the much advertised ones involving sex, drugs and (pre-)rock ‘n’ roll. This may not have been how Rivers actually wanted it, but everything he did seemed to insure that the roles of painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet and musician would be subsumed into the larger role of hipster – and so they were.” Chicago Tribune 08/22/02

THE MID-CENTURY MODERNS: When you think of Los Angeles, visions of great architecture don’t spring to mind. “But Los Angeles has perhaps the best collection of mid-century modern architecture in the world, a fact that is now being celebrated in a number of quarters. Many architects working in L.A. at the time were determined that the postwar housing boom should also be a boom for modern design. The buildings they designed are characterized by their minimalism, lack of ornamentation, simplicity in materials and form, flat roofs and emphasis on indoor-outdoor living. These elegant buildings and their contemporary reinterpretations are now very fashionable in a city that cares a great deal about current trends.” Los Angeles Times 08/21/02

Wednesday August 21

NOT FOR ATTRIBUTION: You have your experts, we have ours. They don’t agree – so what to do in the case of the painting Massacre of the Innocents, sold last month as being by Peter Paul Rubens? With Rubens’ name attached, the picture was worth £50 million at auction. Without it – let’s just say the value drops. Experts have come forward to dispute its authenticity. So if experts disagree, will science help? Not necessarily. So maybe the courts? A footnote – isn’t it still the same painting, no matter who painted it? The Telegraph (UK) 08/21/02

WHAT COMPETITION? After last month’s failed proposals, those planning the design for the World Trade Center site have decided to choose five firms to compete for the job. It sends “an important signal about how much our democratic values matter. By limiting the number of participants in the competition to five, the agency is ensuring that the debate about ground zero’s future will remain relatively narrow. And in that sense, the competition falls far short of the kind of open discourse that is the public’s right. To call the development corporation’s process a competition is somewhat misleading. Real competitions are open to anyone – that is, to any designer willing to sacrifice the time, energy and money it takes to produce a viable proposal.” Los Angeles Times 08/21/02

MEMORABLE MEMORIAL: With all the talk of official memorials to 9/11, one homemade shrine – a piece of a storefront near the World Trade Center preserved as it looked the day the towers fell – gets it right. “The homemade shrine, random and homely, brings the event to a human scale, the ugliness of the debris in particular belying the picturesque metaphor of blanketing snow that everyone liked to use last September.” The New York Times 08/18/02

AIN’T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH: Pepsi and Coke are in trouble with the Indian government. It seems that in their zeal to promote the soft drinks as the world’s drinks of choice, the companies’ franchisees in India painted ads for the drinks all over Himalayas. Literally. On the rocks. The Indian court was told “the advertisements had been plastered on an entire mountain side from the village of Kothi to Rallah waterfalls to Beas Kund, a stretch of about 56 kilometres. Coke said it was not sure if it would pay the clean-up cost.” BBC 08/15/02

Tuesday August 20

RISKY PLAN FOR FORBIDDEN CITY: A Chinese magazine has exposed plans by caretakers of Beijing’s Forbidden City to build a three-story museum structure underneath the Forbidden City. The new structure would allow the display of thousands of artifacts currently locked away in storage. But critics charge the plan will endanger the palace. “The palace compound is built on a foundation of crisscrossing bricks and clay originally intended to keep the ‘earth dragon’ at bay (to limit damage from the earthquakes that occasionally strike Beijing) and to allow rainwater to dissipate. Tampering with the foundation would only put the structure at risk – and without good reason, critics say.” The Independent (UK) 08/19/02

THE PERILS OF CROWD PLEASERS: The just-closed Andy Warhol show at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art was a big, money-making success. But are such shows healthy for museums? “Tourist-oriented blockbusters represent a tear in the art museum fabric. While the general public is being seduced, the art public is abandoned. The Andy Warhol Retrospective was pitched toward anyone who’d ever been to the movies. What’s the harm in that? Nothing in the short term. For an art museum, it’s quick cash. The risk is slow-motion suicide. The general public is where the fast action is, but it certainly won’t stick around for the long haul. Lose the art public through attrition, though, and you might as well close up shop.” Los Angeles Times 08/20/02

SLOWING DOWN THE ICA: Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art is supposed to be part of an enormous $1.2 billion waterfront development project, a piece of “a bustling new neighborhood with hotels, restaurants, shops, offices, luxury residences and park land.” But the economy has slowed, and demand for the new hotels and offices to be built with thje project is down. So the project has slowed to a crawl and the ICA, which has done everything it could to get supporters excited about the project, sits and waits. Boston Herald 08/20/02

SIMPLE IS BETTER: What kind of memorial ought to be created for 9/11? A look at the attempts of artists to memorialize previous tragedies is instructive. “If a monument strains for an excess of spurious grandeur, it soon becomes remote. Far better, surely, for visitors to realise that they can respond to the memorial on an intimate level, and truly make it their own.” The Times (UK) 08/20/02

PARTYGOERS BREAK CHIHULY GLASS: Partygoers at Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory smash a $70,000 piece of Dale Chihuly glass art. “The work was a recent addition to the Chihuly in the Park: A Garden of Glass exhibit, which features 30 originals from the Tacoma, Wash.-based artist. The event has attracted more than 450,000 people since opening in November and has been so popular it has been extended twice.” Chicago Tribune 08/19/02

SCIENCE AS ART (EVEN IF IT’S WRONG): “Bioart is becoming a force in the creative world. A glowing bunny made the front page of newspapers across the country two years ago, and installations that require biohazard committee approval are increasingly common at universities and art galleries.” But often artists’ interpretations of the science their work is about, is superficial and just plain wrong. Wired 08/19/02

Monday August 19

PRAGUE FLOODING: Floods have taken a heavy toll on Prague’s historic buildings. “It will take at least seven days before the damage to the medieval Malá Strana neighbourhood can be judged, but it is already clear that the National Theatre, the Rudolfinum concert hall and hundreds of historic houses have been affected, by the backflow of the drains as much as the flood itself.” The Art Newspaper 08/16/02

PAINTER OF BLIGHT: Owners of ten of Thomas Kinkade’s galleries across the country are suing Kinkade’s company, claiming it has “saturated the market with Kinkade’s works and sold them on QVC cable television, undercutting ‘exclusive’ galleries. Once devout followers of ‘the painter of light,’ now are saying that the business end of Kinkade’s empire has a dark side. The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) 08/18/02

FIXING FALLING WATER: Six years ago it was obvious that if something was not done, Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest building – the house Falling Water – would collapse into the stream around it. Now the house is about to be reopened after an extensive makeover. “The structural fix has at once corrected the problems that threatened to destroy Fallingwater and renewed the house that the American Institute of Architects in 1991 voted the best work ever designed by an American architect.” Chicago Tribune 08/18/02

Sunday August 18

DRESDEN FIGHTS TO RESCUE ART: Workers struggle to save Dresden’s valuable art as floodwaters threaten. “Working by the light of candles and torches, 200 museum workers, police officers and soldiers carried some 4,000 paintings to the upper floors of the 19th-century palace as the Elbe rose by the hour. Six paintings too large to move were attached by ropes to pipes in the ceiling in the hope that the floodwater would not reach them. The flooding has proved particularly traumatic for Dresden, an eastern city that since the reunification of Germany in 1991 has been working to rebuild itself around its historic cultural image.” The New York Times 08/16/02

IMPRESSIONISTS SCORE AGAIN: London’s Tate Modern is staying open 36 hours this weekend to help accommodate the crowds that want to get in to see the museum’s Matisse Picasso show. More than “250,000 people have visited the exhibition since it first opened its doors on 11 May to coincide with the second anniversary of the gallery’s opening. It has been the gallery’s most successful exhibition to date, and will be one of the five most popular in the history of the Tate by the time it closes.” BBC 08/17/02

ENOUGH ALREADY: Isn’t it about time that conceptual art was allowed to die? “Consider this: cubism lasted about 20 years because it had a lot of conventions to break down; pop and op art lasted about 10 years (change was becoming more acceptable). At that rate conceptual art should have lasted no longer than five years. The only kind reason that I can think of why conceptual art has lasted so long is that because it possesses virtually no permanent form and thus very little content.” The Age (Melbourne) 08/17/02

CONTROLLING THE MESSAGE: Organizers of Documenta have stopped outside guides from taking visitors through the exhibition. Only “official” guides, trained by Documenta are allowed to give tours, and critics charge that officials are trying to control interpretation of the art. “To what extent are those responsible trying to put a stop to any critical reception? To what extent do the organizers really want to offer visitors an official view of young contemporary art?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 08/16/02

NOT JUST PEANUTS: The Charles M. Schulz Museum opens in California, drawing fans from around the world. “The $8 million museum is an elegantly understated, streamlined two-story building with stucco and slate facades in shades of gray and white that echo the tones of a black and white cartoon. It has more than 7,000 of the 17,897 original Peanuts strips that Schulz drew in an amazing 50-year run that ended when he died of colon cancer in February 2000 at age 77 – the night before his final strip appeared in Sunday newspapers around the world.” San Francisco Chronicle 08/17/02

Friday August 16

FLIGHT OF IMAGINATION: The new Yokohama international airport sets a new standard in airport design. “Like the Pompidou in its era it is the newest big thing, and the calling card of the next generation of architects. It is designed by a young practice which calls itself Foreign Office Architects, or FOA, of which you will hear much more.” London Evening Standard 08/16/02

WORRYING ABOUT STONEHENGE: At last – a plan to fix up the area around Stonehenge. Plans for the site are bound to be controversial, but the architects have been sensitive to the site. “While keeping in line with the current vogue for high design, theirs is a plan which will work extremely well in the surrounding landscape, as it will be set into a hillside with a roof planted with native grass. The centre will include displays which tell the story of Stonehenge and its history. Visitors will still not be allowed to enter the ring of stones itself, though managed access by prior arrangement is anticipated. The destructive potential of 830,000 visitors a year is too great to allow free access to the stone ring.” The Art Newspaper 08/16/02

LARRY RIVERS, 78: The “irreverent proto-Pop painter and sculptor, jazz saxophonist, writer, poet, teacher and sometime actor and filmmaker” died of cancer. “He helped change the course of American art in the 1950’s and 60’s, but his virtues as an artist always seemed inextricably bound up with his vices, the combination producing work that could be by turns exhilarating and appalling.” The New York Times 08/16/02

Thursday August 15

“ART” OF ADOLF? Why are critics reviewing a show about Hitler at Williams College Museum of Art’s as an aesthetic construct? Considering Hitler and his actions as a product of aesthetic choices misses the point entirely, writes Lee Rosenbaum. “Could it be that critics and curators who spend their lives looking at pictures begin to lose sight of the big picture?” OpinionJournal.com 08/15/02

THE 80S – IN FOR THE LONG RUN? Every era has art that helps define it. But though there still seems to be interest in art created in the 1980s, there is some question about how good it is. “What I am suggesting is that much of the work from the 1980s is not holding up very well. With the exceptions of Sean Scully, Robert Gober, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Philip Taaffe, it doesn’t seem as if very much of the work of that era will ultimately matter.” Artnet 08/14/02

TREASURE TROUBLE: Britain’s reformed treasure law has resulted in more found items being offered to British museums. The law gives museums an opportunity to buy the found items, but the finder must be compensated at market price. Cash-strapped museums are having difficulty coming up with the funds for purchases. Some “221 items of treasure were reported in 2000, compared with 24 a year before the medieval law of treasure trove was reformed in 1996.” The Guardian (UK) 08/15/02

Wednesday August 14

DUPING THE ART PUBLIC: “Last week, art students from Leeds Metropolitan University dumped some cardboard boxes on the floor of the Tate Modern. Within moments, a crowd had gathered to admire the new exhibit before security guards cleared them away. The Evening Standard decided to test the credulity of the public once again by exhibiting a mundane object – and seeing how long it took visitors to treat it with the reverence of a tank of Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks.” London Evening Standard 08/13/02

THE MOMA CHALLENGE: Neal Benezra becomes director of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at a challenging time. He “will have to figure out how to continue growing an institution that, at least on paper, seems to have peaked. Museum attendance hit a high in 1990, when 732,000 people visited, and has been trailing off since then, reaching 640,000 last year. Membership has slipped also, down to 40,000 from 43,000 last year.” Los Angeles Times 08/14/02

A NEW PARADIGM (WITH CURVES): We’re done with modernism and post-modernism. So what tag makes sense of the new architecture? “According to the critic Charles Jencks, ‘the new paradigm’ is the next big thing for architecture, a theory to make sense of a wave of buildings that look like blobs of oil, desert landscapes and train crashes. Given that we now understand the nature of the universe differently from 50 years ago, why should we cling to the right angle when we build, when nature has different ways of organising itself?” The Observer (UK) 08/11/02

Tuesday August 13

COMMEMORATING 9/11: “Museums all over the country are developing special events to remember the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Ever since the attacks, museums have organized opportunities for their communities to express their feelings, planned exhibitions to capture the emotions and history of the day, and served as sites for charitable fundraising for families of the victims of the attacks.” Washington Post 08/13/02

PRINCETON RETURNS ROMAN ARTIFACT: The Princeton University Art Museum has returned an ancient Roman statue to Italy after discovering that it had not been granted a license for its export from Italy in 1985. “Under a 1939 Italian law, all antiquities discovered in the soil are claimed by Italy as state property.” The Art Newspaper 08/11/02

Monday August 12

LIVERPOOL’S DISAPPEARING SKYSCRAPERS: “Four years ago there were about 70 tower blocks in Liverpool; it is predicted that in the next couple of years there will be as few as 10. They don’t, in a sense, really need to be saved – they are not architectural classics.” But the office space is no longer needed, and their teardown is seen as civic improvement. In the meantime artists are having fun with the derelict tall buildings. The Observer (UK) 08/11/02

Sunday August 11

BUILDINGS AS INSPIRATION: Does a university owe its community good architecture? MIT president Chuck Vest thinks so. The university has embarked on a major building program. ”I believe that the buildings at this extraordinary university should be as diverse, forward thinking, and audacious as the community they serve. They should stand as a metaphor for the ingenuity at work inside them.” Boston Globe 08/11/02

BUILT-IN CONFLICT? Does architecture play a role in shaping political conflict? Israeli architects are debating the issue. “Some argue that by designing and constructing Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, the architectural profession has, perhaps unwittingly, contributed to escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Others respond that architecture is neither political nor ideological and, as such, has nothing to answer for.” The New York Times 08/10/02

PULLING UP STAKES: What obligation does a museum have toward art created for it? The Dallas Museum of Art is removing a Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen sculpture that dominates one of its prime galleries. The artists are unhappy. But the museum’s circumstances have changed since the work was commissioned and installed. Doesn’t the DMA have the right to change? Dallas Morning News 08/11/02

• Previously: RIGHT TO MOVE: The Dallas Museum of Art is moving a giant Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen sculpture which has towered through the museum’s largest gallery since the museum was built in 1984. The museum wants to use the space for other artswork, but the artists, who believed that the site-specific work was permanently located, are unhappy. Dallas Morning News 08/06/02

ART OF IRAN: To Western eyes, Iran seems like a very closed society. But Anna Somers Cocks reports that present-day Iran is picking up on its long and impressive artistic and intellectual traditions. The Guardian (UK) 08/10/02

Friday August 9

IF YOU MAKE IT FREE, THEY WILL COME: Since British museums did away with admission fees last winter, average attendance is up by 2.7 million – or 62%. Free admission has particularly helped the once-ailing Victoria and Albert Museum which has seen a 157 percent increase in visitors. Some institutions, like the British Museum have failed to make up the income they have lost, and are struggling. The Guardian (UK) 08/09/02

TAKE A LONGER LOOK: New Republic art critic Jed Perl worries that people are forgetting how to look at art. “People seem to have an idea that to look at art in a sophisticated and up-to-date way means not looking at it very long or very hard. What people are no longer prepared for is seeing an experience that takes place in time. They have ceased to believe that a painting or a sculpture is a structure with meaning that unfolds as we look…. The essential aspect of all the art I admire the most, both old and new, is that it makes me want to keep looking.” Spiked-online 08/07/02

APPRECIATING ART W/O SEEING IT: London’s Tate Modern has “launched a new online art resource to help visually impaired people explore key concepts in modern art.” No, blind viewers still won’t be able to see or touch the art, but, “with text, image enhancement, animation and raised images, i-Map will serve partially sighted and blind people with a general interest in art, as well as art teachers and their visually impaired students.” Wired 08/09/02

Thursday August 8

RUBENS RECOVERED: Irish police have recovered a Rubens painting 16 years after it was stolen by Dublin mobster Martin Cahill. “Cahill and his 13-strong gang made international headlines in 1986 when they snatched 18 paintings, worth a total of £24 million in a daring raid.” The Guardian (UK) 08/07/02

OVERVALUED? It was an art deal gone wrong. A couple of art lovers thought they were buying a couple of Robert Ryman paintings. But then the dealer skipped out with the buyers’ money and the buyers sued everyone in the deal. On the stand Ryman said he thought his work was way overpriced – the paintings that had been sold for $90,000 were worth only “a few hundred dollars.” So why sell them for more? “I think the prices are too high, but there is nothing I could do about that.” New York Observer 08/06/02

REM VS. CHARLES: When Harvard University hired renowned architect Rem Koolhaas to design an architectural vision for its newly expanded campus, they expected to be blown away. True, it’s quite a challenge to create a cohesive campus when the Charles River runs through the middle of it, but everyone agreed that the eccentric and brilliant urban planner was up to the challenge. And he was: after much thought, Koolhaas announced the centerpiece of his proposal to bring all of fair Harvard together – the river is just going to have to be moved. Boston Globe 08/08/02

STRUGGLING IN DETROIT: Detroit’s Museum of New Art is barely five years old, and has been in its downtown digs for only one year, but the growing pains are coming fast and furious. The museum’s founder resigned in frustration at a board meeting this week, and a local artist was tapped to replace him. MoNA has never made money, and most of its operating cash has come from artists donating works for auction. On the plus side, the new director’s name is Cash… Detroit News 08/08/02

BETTER TEAR IT DOWN, THEN: It may be the architectural pride of a nation, and an instantly recognizable landmark the world over, but apparently, the Sydney Opera House is a disaster from a feng shui perspective. The outer facade resembles “a set of rice bowls crashing,” which is quite the non-no. Oh, and the structure’s position “on an extension of Bennelong Point means it blocks the natural water flow between two harbours,” also a bad idea. So what? Well, “read the history books on the Opera House… The original designer had a miserable time, walked off the job and left the country… The builders had constant arguments, it was always behind schedule and over budget. At the time, the people of Sydney hated it and campaigned against it.” Sydney Morning Herald 08/08/02

Wednesday August 7

BROKEN WATER: Seattle artist Kathryn Gustafson has only just won the commission for a memorial to Pricess Di. But critics seem determined, she thinks, to misinterpret what she plans. Rather than create something that people come to look at, her oval ring of water is a place to come experience. “The role of a memorial is to offer a place that helps people to remember. It needs to have the essential qualities of that person.” The Telegraph (UK) 08/07/02

TAKING ON THE DOWAGER: Neil McGregor, the British Museum’ new director has a big job ahead. The museum is “all but broke. With a projected budget deficit of more than £6 million it faces drastic cutbacks: 150 staff members have been told they must lose their jobs. A third of the galleries may have to be closed at any one time. How can this Bloomsbury dowager, beset by declining visitor numbers, compete with its debutante granddaughter, Tate Modern, which, on the very day that MacGregor took up his new position, was welcoming its ten-millionth visitor?” The Times 08/07/02

Tuesday August 6

HOLDING TO ACCOUNT: Greece is demanding an explanation from the British Museum for how a 2,500-year-old Greek statue was stolen from the museum last week. “Given the historic and cultural interest Greece has in all Greek antiquities, wherever they may be, we would like an explanation.” The Guardian (UK) 08/06/02

DEFINING THE COOPER-HEWITT: New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum popped up in the spotlight last month when a Michelangelo was discovered in its collection. But mostly the museum has kept a low profile. “Now, because it has a new director who amid controversy has begun to make significant personnel changes and because the Michelangelo discovery has put the museum at least momentarily in the spotlight, the Cooper-Hewitt may have a crucial opportunity to better define itself.” The New York Times 08/06/02

WHY I LEFT THE ROYAL ONTARIO: When Lindsay Sharp became director of the Royal Ontario Museum in 1996, he brought with him the promise of a little flash and excitement. But he resigned before the end of his contract, a controversial figure who upset many of the museum’s supporters. “I did what I was expected to do. But I couldn’t stay there. The politics were too difficult. There was a struggle, in my view, between the forces of open-mindedness and creativity, and the other side was selfishness and conservatism of the wrong sort. I was determined that we make a fair amount of organizational change, but I didn’t manage to do all of the cultural change.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 08/03/02

SHOW US A LITTLE FLESH: There’s a growing trend towards eroticism in recent art. “Today, a kind of openly peddled eroticism has soaked through almost every layer of life. It sells magazines and cars; it has made G-strings standard issue, pornography mainstream and kinkiness straight. Why should art feel the need to swim against the current? The art world now wants you to know that it doesn’t.” The Times (UK) 08/06/02

RIGHT TO MOVE: The Dallas Museum of Art is moving a giant Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen sculpture which has towered through the museum’s largest gallery since the museum was built in 1984. The museum wants to use the space for other artswork, but the artists, who believed that the site-specific work was permanently located, are unhappy. Dallas Morning News 08/06/02

Monday August 5

ROCKY START, BUT OH WELL… Neil McGregor didn’t have a food first week as new director of the British Museum. “The day after he started an ancient Greek marble head was stolen, by a thief who simply pulled it off its plinth and walked away with it.” But we trust this isn’t going to set the tone of his stewardship of Britain’s most-visited museum. Indeed, he says he believes his museum will get the extra money it needs to reverse its recent stretch of hardship. The Guardian (UK) 08/05/02

TOKYO’S NEW SKYLINE: “As any visitor to Japan today can testify, Tokyo in particular, has metamorphosed over the past 20 years into one of the most stunning, often bizarre, skylines in the world. Tension still exists, in the sense that its architecture is an ephemeral commodity. After early mistakes, Japan’s contemporary architecture is the undisputed leader in the aesthetics of style, and an internationally touring photographic exhibition proves how far ahead of the game is the land of Zen.” New Zealand Herald 08/05/02

CYBER-REAL: Internet art is usually an experience between a viewer and a computer – in most cases a fairly private interaction. But a new work bridges the physical world and cyberspace, interacting online but being seen on a large screen in Sao Paulo. The New York Times 08/05/02

COLOUR FIELD: So you think calling red, red or green green is sufficient? Thou cretin! You’re probably the kind of person who’d be surprised to learn there’s a whole field of study in the art of identifying colors. “It is, for me, one of the great pleasures of taking notes at warp factor 10 during fast-moving fashion shows to get down the particular shade of the bugle-beaded, dolman-sleeved, wool-crepe jumpsuit that is sashaying by. To nail the subtle differences between, say, ‘tobacco’ and ‘snuff’, or ‘beige’ and ‘camel’ is deeply satisfying.” Sydney Morning Herald 08/05/02

Sunday August 4

ELEVATING THE WHITNEY: “In what is believed to be the largest donation of postwar American art to any museum, the trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art have joined forces to give it a trove of 86 paintings, sculptures and prints that experts value at $200 million… The joint gift is the culmination of a three-year effort led by the Whitney’s chairman, Leonard A. Lauder. During that time trustees quietly, almost stealthily, scoured artists’ studios, art galleries and auction houses — and even their own living rooms — for the kind of important postwar American work that has been increasingly vanishing from the market as it has been acquired by collectors and institutions.” The New York Times 08/03/02

THE MIND OF AN ART THIEF (AND HIS MOTHER): “Stéphane Breitwieser, 31, a restaurant waiter, is now in custody in Switzerland, where he was finally caught last November after stealing a hunting horn from the Richard Wagner Museum in Lucerne. He is suspected of stealing 239 works of art in 174 thefts in Switzerland, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Austria.” You remember Stéphane – he’s the thief whose mother repsonded to his arrest by hurling some £1 billion of stolen art into the canal behind her house. But this is no ordinary art thief. Breitweiser never sold the items he stole, and in fact, always stole the display card with the item, so that he could memorize it later. What drives such an individual? Philip Broughton has an idea. The Telegraph (UK) 08/03/02

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS: “Like critics trying out adjectives to describe a perplexing canvas, investigators and art experts are looking at the theft this week of two Maxfield Parrish paintings from a West Hollywood gallery and straining to understand. Most find the thief’s work ‘sophisticated.’ But they also label the $4-million disappearance ‘disturbing,’ ‘puzzling’ and ‘weird.'” Los Angeles Times 08/03/02

ARCHITECTURE MEETS MARKET RESEARCH: Princeton University’s recent decree that all new buildings on its campus must be designed in a Gothic Revival style was puzzling to many architecture buffs – after all, the style died out in the early 20th century. But as it turns out, the decision to restrict the school’s visual look was little more than a calculated move to provide students with an architectural “brand” they would respond well to. “The students want the right architectural logo. These are the kids who grew up wearing shirts that said ‘GAP’ or ‘Abercrombie & Fitch,’ who explain their identities to one another by listing their favorite music groups. Who you are is what you consume. And what you consume is brands.” Boston Globe 08/04/02

OUR LADY OF ENDLESS COMPROMISE: Take the combined egos of nine artists, add a church bureaucracy and a cabal of architecture critics both professional and amateur, and you have a recipe for chaos. And yet somehow, the new $200 million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles got finished. The artists involved have compared the frustration and compromise of the experience to that of the folks who collaborated on the Sistine Chapel a few centuries back, but all seem to agree that the end result has been worth all the trouble. Los Angeles Times 08/04/02

Friday August 2

MURAL HEIST: Two murals by Maxfield Parrish, valued at $2 million each, and measuring 5 feet by 6 feet, were stolen from a gallery in West Hollywood Monday. Police believe it was the work of professionals – “This is unprecedented; you would need a moving truck and four people.” Los Angeles Times 08/01/02

• MISSING GREEK: The British Museum has called in Interpol after an art thief stole a 2,500-year-old Greek statue from the British Museum, reported to be worth up to £25,000.” BBC 08/01/02

THE UFFIZI’S NEW GATE OF HELL? The Uffizi is getting a new exit, and it’s been designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. Trouble is – official Florence hates the proposal. “Is the talk of this art-blessed town these muggy midsummer days really an aesthetic disaster-in-the making, as fired-up opponents like film and opera director Franco Zeffirelli would have it – or an unappreciated artistic vision, as frustrated proponents contend? Or, to put it another way, would Dante have assigned architect Arata Isozaki to inferno or to paradise?” Nando Times (AP) 08/02/02

CERTAIN KINDS OF “CHEATING”: Does using technology in creating a painting somehow diminish its accomplishment? Is Thomas Eakins’ work the lesser for his having traced images? The notion challenges “an entire art worldview devoted to celebrating ‘genius,’ long sold as a spiritual quality unsullied by the material world. For some, the use of optical aids compromises genius, and art with it.” Reason 08/01/02

Thursday August 1

SPRUCING UP STONEHENGE: A £57 million plan to dress up the Stonehenge site is unveiled. “Even the critics agree that the design for the visitor centre, or ‘gateway’as English Heritage prefers to term it, is lovely. Australian architects Denton Corker Marshall have almost buried the building in the ground in their anxiety not to eclipse the monument. From the air it will show as silver parallel lines in the earth, and from the ground as pewter-coloured metal slabs roofed with turf. A car park will have trees around it for camouflage.” The Guardian (UK) 08/01/02

DISSING THE DIANA MEMORIAL: Prominent critics and artists are protesting a planned design for a £3m memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales. The winning design was described as “bland and an embarrassment to Britain.” “Kathryn Gustafson, the American landscape artist, and the London architect, Neil Porter, were nominated to create a large, water-filled, stone ring in Hyde Park, ending five years of dithering since the princess’s death.” The Guardian (UK) 08/01/02

DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200: Former Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman, who was convicted on charges of conspiracy and price-fixing this spring, reported to a Midwest prison this week to begin serving his one-year sentence. Taubman, who is 78, was also fined $7.5 million by the court for his part in the price-fixing scheme, which sparked outrage throughout the art world, and led to much scrutiny for the top auction houses in the U.S. and Britain. Nando Times (AP) 07/31/02

Wednesday July 31

GREATER ROLE FOR ART: The Palace Museum in Taiwan holds some of China’s great art treasures. But the museum was also a political statement, created by Chiang Kai-shek after fleeing from the mainland in 1949. But now, “with the Nationalist Party’s fall from power in Taiwan, the museum has begun to change. Paintings and busts of Chiang Kai-shek have been removed. An ambitious construction project will soon begin, creating more space for tour groups and lectures instead of reception halls for diplomats and politicians. ‘I hope to change this museum from political to art,’ says the museum’s new director.” The New York Times 07/31/02

DESIGN THIS: Since the six proposed designs for the World Trade Center site have been pretty much unanimously discarded, officials overseeing the process have decided to solicit designers who may have been excluded before. “Many such groups were excluded from consideration for the first design contract because of their relative lack of experience working on big projects in New York. For instance, the firms were required to have 10 years of urban planning experience and to have worked on at least three $100 million projects.” The New York Times 07/30/02

TRAGEDY THROUGH THE EYES OF ART: As the anniversary of September 11 grows near, New Yorkers are wondering how artists will mark the event. “There’s an obvious desire to see how the city has changed over the past year through its art. After all, New York art was always so responsive to social upheaval. From the mid-Eighties, for example, the art community was profoundly affected by Aids and spoke articulately of the crisis… London Evening Standard 07/30/02

TATE IN SPACE… Think today’s ambitious museums have lost perspective with their expansion plans? The Tate pokes fun at its ambitions. “First there was Tate Britain. Then there was Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives. Next, coming to a galaxy near you: Tate in Space – an extraterrestrial art-exhibition venue for space tourists in search of intergalactic cultural enrichment. ‘In order to fulfill their mission to extend access to British and International contemporary art, the Tate Trustees have been considering for some time how they could find new dimensions to Tate’s work. They have therefore determined that the next Tate site should be in space’.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/31/02

Tuesday July 30

NEW ATTENTION FOR WOMEN ARTISTS: As a group, women artists have not received nearly the attention of their male counterparts. But in Australia, a recent string of big sales of work by women artists has caught the attention of collectors. Sydney Morning Herald 07/30/02

FIXING UP STONEHENGE: Stonehenge is a world heritage site. Yet it shows to very poor advantage. “The monument remains imprisoned within wire fences, and clenched in the fork of two busy roads. It is 13 years since the parliamentary public accounts committee condemned the present arrangements as ‘a national disgrace’.” Now English Heritage has announced some funding to fix up the surrounding site. The Guardian (UK) 07/27/02

Monday July 29

ANOTHER AUCTION SCANDAL? Sotheby’s is facing a crimminal investigation over a £49 million Rubens painting which was sold by an Austrian woman earlier this month. “Public prosecutors in Austria launched an inquiry after they were handed a dossier from an anonymous source claiming the company had conspired with the painting’s owner to conceal the true identity of the Old Master.” The Scotsman 07/28/02

“WHAT IS HAPPENING IS A CRIME”: Greece is building a museum at the base of the Acropolis to house the Parthenon Marbles, if Britain ever returns them. Greece is rushi9ng to get the $100 million museum open before the 2004 Olympics. But “a growing number of critics say the government is damaging other antiquities in a rush to make the museum ready in time. They charge that excavation at the museum’s site at the foot of the great Acropolis citadel has uncovered substantial Roman, Byzantine and Stone Age ruins that provide vivid archaeological snapshots of ancient Athens, and that development should be delayed while the remains are studied.” Washington Post 07/29/02

LOOKING AT DAVID: Michelangelo’s statue of David is one of the most-recognized scultures in the world. Yet the statue has some problems with proportion. “Some of the oddities of the statue come from its curious history – Michelangelo was handed a huge block of marble that another sculptor had made a start on. More complexities are contributed by its contemporary meaning; it has often been thought that it had a specific political meaning for a Florence in the wake of Lorenzo de Medici’s death and Savonarola’s deranged austerity. The more one looks at it, the less familiar and comprehensible it seems.” The Observer (UK) 07/28/02

BBC BUILDS FOR GREATNESS: The BBC may be a world leader in broadcasting, but its sense of visual style has never been great. That changes with the opening of a dramatic new headquarters. “The most dramatic feature of the building will be a vast newsroom – at 5,000 square metres the largest in the world – taking up virtually the whole of the lower ground floor of the main part of the building. It will be a symbol of the importance of the BBC in British, indeed world, culture.” The Telegraph (UK) 07/29/02

REVERSE BEGGING: An artist in Colchester England is given £300 and had 24 hours in which to spend it. He began asking people on the streets if they’d like it. “Instead of asking people for spare change I said, ‘Would you like some spare change, mate?’ When people saw that image they automatically went into their beggar mode, and said, ‘No mate’.” BBC 07/28/02

Sunday July 28

LOOKING TO DIVERSIFY? Planners are trying to jam so much into whatever will replace the World Trade Center that the design proposals so far are a hodgepodge acceptable to no one. “Perhaps the real lesson for the planners of the World Trade Center site is the same lesson as that of the stock market, just a couple of blocks from the WTC site. Instead of putting all their eggs in one basket – instead of betting on all that office space – maybe the developers should look into diversification.” Boston Globe 07/28/02

SFMOMA’S NEW MAN: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has been on an amazing upward trajectory in the past 15 years. Fueled by dotcom money, the museum built a new home and acquired an impressive collection. But Neal Benezra, SFMoMA’s new director comes into the job at a time of newly-imposed austerity. “SFMOMA remains in relatively good financial health – it has an $80 million endowment and continues to draw big crowds to shows such as last year’s Ansel Adams exhibition – but it laid off a dozen staff members in January and faces a $1 million deficit.” San Francisco Chronicle 07/28/02

Friday July 26

OLD TIME FRENZY: The biggest thing in New Hampshire each August? Antiques Week, a series of sales of American collectibles. Participants are a serious lot. “People come by the thousands. Customers line up at 2 a.m. the night before the show opens. These people are fanatics. They are so afraid they are going to miss something.” The New York Times 07/26/02

CHAGALL RETURNS HOME: It was a curious theft – a Chagall stolen in June 2001 from the Jewish Museum in New York, where it had been on loan. “A group calling itself the International Committee for Art and Peace sent a note saying it would not be returned until there was peace in the Middle East.” But it was later found in Kansas City. Now it’s been returned to its home in St. Petersburg, Russia. BBC 07/26/02

PARKING IT IN PHILLY: Philadelphia has arguably one of the most beautiful city skylines in America. Colonial architecture dovetails with sweepingly modern skyscrapers in an unusually successful marriage of old and new styles. But a new threat to the city’s architectural continuity has arisen, and is threatening to take over the city. “Philadelphia is a city where land is cheap but new construction is expensive. Because [parking] lots cost so little, they are a low-risk way to make money on open land until someone comes up with a better idea. Put another way, surface lots are a form of land speculation.” Philadelphia Inquirer 07/26/02

POLITICS ON PARADE: Even to the least cynical observer, the whole “animals-on-parade” concept (which began with cows in Chicago and has spread to nearly every animal in the barnyard in various American cities) has grown a bit tired. But Washington, D.C. may have found the right way to embrace the fad – with tongue firmly planted in cheek. The district’s parade of donkeys and elephants has a decidedly ironic feel – witness the “Florida Hybrid” elephant decorated with butterfly ballots. This being the nation’s capital, however, politics is inevitably involved: the Green Party has sued in an effort to force organizers to include their party emblem as well (it’s a sunflower – seriously) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is outraged that it isn’t being allowed to display one of the elephants with a meathook in its side. Ah, Washington in summertime… Chicago Tribune 07/26/02

Wednesday July 24

APPROPRIATION IS THE GREATEST FORM OF FLATTERY? Artists have always looked to other artists for inspiration. But what about artists who borrow images from others and incorporate them into their work? “Perhaps we are coming close to the computer world’s notion of the image as shareware. No one really owns it, it is constantly available, sometimes useful, sometimes disposable.” London Evening Standard 07/23/02

VANISHING ART: A half hour north of San Francisco there is a cave with paintings inside dating back to 500 AD. But they are deteriorating quickly. “The paintings present California officials with a dilemma as they try to balance the desire for access with the need for preservation. It’s an issue tackled at ancient sites around the world – from the Egyptian pyramids to national parks in the United States.” New Jersey Online (AP) 07/23/02

WHAT THEY COLLECT: “Of the 497 billionaires on the Forbes list of billionaires, 36 singled out by The Art Newspaper are known as major art collectors, although a good number of the others decorate their properties with pictures. When it comes to taste, 22 of the 36 collectors go for Modern and contemporary. Impressionism lags some way behind, with only 8 collectors. Clearly those with ultra financial ambitions opt for the cutting edge.” The Art Newspaper 07/19/02

OASIS AMIDST THE SPRAWL: An hour north of Philadelphia, an endless chain of strip malls and suburban sprawl gives way to a town small enough to be missed, but cultured enough to play host to an astonishing collection of American art. This is Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and from a poured-concrete castle highlighting some of America’s most innovative tile art to a surprisingly high-profile museum housed in an old 19th-century prison (and named after longtime denizen James Michener,) it has managed to maintain a prideful grip on an impressive array of regional art of the type usually only found in cities and private collections. Washington Post 07/24/02

Tuesday July 23

BMA ON A DOWN CYCLE: The British Museum draws 400,000 visitors a month – a success by any standard. “But beneath its familiar exterior, the museum, Britain’s most visited tourist attraction, is in turmoil. Even after several years of steep cuts, its budget deficit, growing steadily, is projected to reach almost $8 million in the next 18 months. A planned $118 million study center, once a cornerstone of the museum’s long-term strategy to engage the public more directly, has been abandoned. At any given time the museum keeps more than a dozen galleries closed to the public, another way of cutting costs. Meanwhile morale there is at rock bottom.” The New York Times 07/23/02

WORLD’S UGLIEST BUILDINGS: The ugliest buildings in the world? Forbes thinks it knows. These are buildings that cost a lot and should have been great – but aren’t. Some are obvious – the Millennium Dome is no one’s idea of great. But SFMoMA? Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project? Forbes 07/23/02

RECIPE FOR BOREDOM (AND MENACE?): Sydney is requiring use of a pattern book to guide designers of the city’s apartment buildings. “The pattern book, naturally enough, standardises detail, material and composition. And there’s the rub, since gains in taste are matched by losses in ingenuity and creative freedom. It yearns to improve design, but really just makes it plain that design is not a recipe game. But for it to be imposed from above, even on a nominally advisory basis, is menacing indeed.” Sydney Morning Herald 07/23/02

THE NEW MEDICIS: Some of today’s richest billionaires have taken a serious interest in art. “Their interest in the international art market is not just that of billionaires who enjoy the thrill of having an Old Master or a modern masterpiece displayed in the living room, however. As well as aesthetics and ostentation they are also encouraged by the continuing unpredictability of the stock markets. When share prices fall and the world’s wealthiest investors stand to lose billions, it is not surprising that they look for other repositories for their spare cash. And, in a bear market, fine art is the place for money to be.” The Independent (UK) 07/22/02

Monday July 22

THE ONE THAT ALMOST GOT AWAY: When a rare Van Dyck painting was recently offered to Tate Britain after the death of its owner, the museum jumped at the chance. Only one problem – the museum’s acquisitions budget has been cut so much (like at most British museums), the painting almost got away… The Telegraph (UK) 07/22/02

IN SEARCH OF A CLIENT: Why do the plans for replacing the World Trade Center seem so flat and uninspired? “New York’s finest skyscrapers have virtually all been the product of this synergy between an architect hitting his stride and a strong-willed client with a clear program and the ambition to make a mark. It’s hard to imagine how such a relationship can arise in downtown New York today. Even as the six draft plans for the trade center site were unveiled last week, it remains difficult to pinpoint who the client is amid the byzantine lines of command. It is not just a question of how the architects were selected, it is the lack of clarity in the program. These are not conditions for creating lasting architecture.” The New York Times 07/21/02

LATERAL MOVE? (AT BEST): Fifteen years ago Neil MacGregor took over the National Gallery in London and made a big success of the job. But apparently he needs a truly impossible job, so he’s taking over the top spot at the troubled British Museum. Why? The Art Newspaper 07/20/02

NATIONAL AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM: Plans are moving ahead for a National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. “One possible location for the museum is the 120-year-old Arts and Industries Building of the Smithsonian Institution, which is used for temporary exhibitions. But a new building is a possibility, despite the limited space on the Mall. The museum will be paid for by contributions from the public, said officials, who added that a preliminary cost estimate will be ready this fall.” The New York Times 07/22/02

WORSHIPPING AT THE ALTAR OF CALVIN KLEIN: When a group of Cistercian Trappist Bohemian monks went looking for an architect to design their new monastery they found themselves admiring a Calvin Klein store in New York. So architect John Pawson got the call. “If ever there were a marriage made in heaven, this was it. What the monks learned, to their delight, is that this was the commission Pawson had been dreaming of for decades.” The Guardian (UK) 07/22/02

Sunday July 21

CLOSING THE PRICE GAP: “For the first time in recent auction history, the huge gap separating Impressionist and Modern paintings from Old Masters was almost bridged last week at a Sotheby’s sale, where a Rubens set a record for the Flemish master at £49.5 million ($76.6 million). In fact, it could be argued that Old Masters are running ahead since the sale.” An isolated anomaly, or a sign of auction reality to come? International Herald Tribune (Paris) 07/20/02

• CROWDING OUT THE FIELD: Blockbuster sales like this week’s record-setting auction of a Rubens at Sotheby’s are exciting, certainly, but “the truth is that, although the price for the Rubens will raise the profile of Old Masters, it does not reflect what is really going on. The total for Sotheby’s main sale was £67.5 million but, subtracting the Rubens, it was £18 million, with a third of the 83 lots failing to sell.” The Telegraph (UK) 07/20/02

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL: The fault for the decidedly substandard proposals for New York’s memorial to the victims of 9/11/01 does not lie with the city’s developers alone, says Joel Budd. “Because of many conflicting pressures, the Development Corporation has not been allowed to make its decisions in peace. The families of those killed on September 11 have formed two pressure groups – September’s Mission, and the Coalition of 9/11 Families – to try to prevent development on the site. They are opposed by three local organisations” which want mixed-use development on the site. In other words, politics has once again overshadowed real progress, but that doesn’t change the basic reality that the six design proposals are just not good enough. The Telegraph (UK) 07/20/02

THE PEEP SHOW: Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre has something of a PR problem on its hands following the gallery’s efforts to shield its more sensitive patrons from a painting it feared would spark controversy for its explicit sexual content. The painting in question (which depicts a sexual act with racial and political overtones) was not removed from the Centre, but placed “on display” in a closed case with a small peephole in it, along with a warning about the content. The artist, surprisingly enough, is not thrilled with the arrangement. Toronto Star 07/21/02

PAINTING ON THE ROPES? “Judging from the two big international shows in Europe this summer, one might almost conclude that painting is no longer a viable art form. There’s barely a canvas to be seen in either Documenta 11, the latest version of the global survey that takes over Kassel, Germany, every five years, or its no-frills, equally earnest doppelgänger, Manifesta 4, a short train ride away in Frankfurt. Instead, video — that sleek, cost-efficient, hypnotizing successor to installation art — and photography rule the international survey circuit. Perhaps quixotically, museums in two other European cities have taken the opposite tack, mounting exhibitions devoted to painting alone.” The New York Times 07/21/02

NOT ALL RICH PEOPLE ARE JERKS: “Eli Broad is one of the richest people in America: His $5.2 billion fortune places him at No. 51 on this year’s Forbes magazine list. He is also one of the nation’s most charitable individuals: The Chronicle of Philanthropy ranked him No. 5 last year, when he gave away more than $387 million. And he’s one of the world’s greatest art collectors: The current Artnews list puts him in the top 10. Another collector might build a Broad Museum. But this entrepreneur, who gives far more to public school causes than he spends on art, has instead created a ”lending library” of the contemporary work that is his focus.” Boston Globe 07/21/02

Friday July 19

CRITIQUING THE WTC MEMORIAL: The reviews are trickling in for the six proposals unveiled in New York this week for how to use the space formerly occupied by the World Trade Center towers. The biggest complaint seems to be the seemingly nonsensical decision to rebuild all the office space the towers contained, despite high existing vacancy rates and the city’s stated desire to turn the area into a thriving residential neighborhood. “As the designs make clear, the money men… holders of the office and retail leases to the 16-acre site — really are in charge. The plot’s owner, the Port Authority, is only too happy to go along with their plans to rebuild all the commercial space contained in the old World Trade Center. Why? Because it would get $120 million a year.” Chicago Tribune 07/19/02

FRAME-UP: David Thomson, the billionaire chairman of the Thomson newspaper group, was the winning bidder for Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents last week. He paid a record £49.5 million, but is said to have been unhappy with the painting’s frame. So he was busy this week putting together another £20,000 to change it. The Guardian (UK) 07/19/02

GERMAN BONANZA ON THE BLOCK: “A $20 million collection of German Expressionist and modern art that has been in the same Stuttgart family for three generations will be auctioned on Oct. 8 and 9 at Sotheby’s in London. The sale includes major German and Austrian paintings by artists including August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei von Jawlensky, along with watercolors and prints by Max Beckmann and Max Pechstein.” The New York Times 07/19/02

ARCHITECTURE OF FEAR: Los Angeles is redesigning LAX, its airport. It’s a long-overdue makeover. And yet it reflects the nation’s apparent paranoia about security after last September 11. The plan “signals a significant shift in how we view the public realm. It sacrifices freedom of mobility for the illusion of invulnerability and the demands of continual surveillance. As such, it represents a new architecture of fear.” Los Angeles Times 07/19/02

VIENNA COMES TO NEW ENGLAND: “Vienna in the Berkshires in the summertime sounds like a publicist’s dream. And in a sense the series of cultural events called the Vienna Project, under way this summer in western Massachusetts, is exactly that. Nearly a dozen local museums, theaters and musical institutions are offering 20th-century Viennese fare, which means Strauss lieder, paintings of alpine landscapes and a “Sound of Music” singalong.” The New York Times 07/19/02

Thursday July 18

GREAT WALL IN PERIL: Experts warned this week that the Great Wall of China is endangered by increased tourism, graffiti, and unauthorized construction. “Peddlers have put up unauthorized ticket booths and ladders and collect money from Chinese and foreign tourists venturing to its wilder sections.” Discovery 07/17/02

THE RAPHAEL BEHIND THE PAINT: A Renaissance painting of a Madonna by a disciple of Raphael was in fact directed by the master himself. Scientists used an infrared device to peer behind the paint and discovered “the outlines of a picture almost identical to a Raphael sketch owned by Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. The original idea for the painting, its conception and the layout of the figures is almost certainly Raphael’s.” BBC 07/18/02

LONG ROAD TO HERMITAGE: A painting by Russian avant-gardist Kasimir Malevitch is now hanging in the Hermitage. The long and tangled story of how it got there begins with some potatoes. “Relatives of Malevich’s wife, the story goes, had hidden the painting from the Soviet authorities in a crate of potatoes. When times changed, a young man from the family wrapped the painting in a blanket, put it in a gym bag and brought it to the bank, hoping to offer it as collateral for a loan…” The New York Times 07/18/02

OUT OF FASHION: Why is the British Museum currently in a funding crisis? Outgoing BMA director Robert Anderson says there’s money for art – just not for traditional BMA functions. “The current financial restrictions are symptomatic of a broader problem: there is waning enthusiasm for the traditional functions of museums. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has plenty of money to give out, but collecting and interpreting the artefacts of human history is just not where it’s at. The museums that get money today are those that play to the new government agenda of social inclusion: running projects to improve self-esteem or reduce prejudice, or using new technologies to increase community participation. There is little support for the idea that objects and knowledge have a value in and of themselves.” Spiked-online 07/17/02

Wednesday July 17

REPLACING THE WTC: Six proposals were unveiled Tuesday for projects on the site of the World Trade Center. Each proposes multiple towers. None imagines any of them taller than 85 stories. Here’s a look at the plans. New York Magazine 07/16/02

• TALLER, BIGGER: With towers, some of the proposals envision structures taller than the old Twin Towers. Each would replace the commercial space of the former buildings. “The plans call for as much as 10 acres to be set aside for a memorial, although only four proposals preserve the tower footprints. Those plans envision taller office buildings and a denser development scheme than the two designs that build over the footprints.” New York Daily News 07/17/02

HARVARD CANCELS MUSEUM PLANS: Harvard has canceled plans to build a new museum which was to have been designed by Renzo Piano.” It’s a body blow to the mood of robust expansion that had prevailed among Boston-area museums – at least until the recent dive in the stock market. It greatly weakens recent signs the Boston area was on the verge of becoming a significant center for contemporary art. It makes the new Harvard administration look like philistines and the community that opposed the museum look parochial and petty.” Boston Globe 07/17/02

FOUR CONNECTICUT MUSEUMS TO CLOSE? Because of huge state budget cuts, four Connecticut historical museums may have to close. “The approximately 44 percent reduction in state aid means either the museums, which employ 12 people, or the Connecticut Historical Commission’s preservation division will have to close. The preservation office works to protect the state’s cultural resources and has 10 staff members.” Hartford Courant 07/17/02

THE NBT’S (NEXT BIG THINGS)? So what is to take the place of the YBA’s since the Young Brit Artists aren’t so young anymore and their ideas are getting a bit too familiar? Richard Dorment thinks the Whitechapel Gallery’s new show is a door to the future. “All five of the artists in the show are terrifically talented, but one in particular, 29-year-old Gary Webb, is the most original young artist I’ve come across in almost 15 years of writing art criticism.” The Telegraph (UK) 07/17/02

UNABLE TO ACQUIRE: Britain’s major museums have slashed their budgets for acquisitions of art. “Twenty years ago the five museums and galleries we examined received £7,897,000 in grant-in-aid specifically for acquisitions. This year they are allocating just £855,000—down nearly ten times. The fall in real terms is even greater, because of inflation. Art prices have probably tripled, which means that government grant in aid for acquisitions was effectively nearly 30 times higher two decades ago than it is today.” The Art Newspaper 07/14/02

STAR ADDITIVE: There’s been no official announcement, but architect Frank Gehry has signed on to design a major $150 million expansion of the Art Gallery of Ontario in his hometown of Toronto. The announcement can be expected later in the summer after details of the deal are finalized and Gehry has a vacation. But now “one of the most intriguing questions at the moment: How will the AGO deal with the feisty neighbours who are steadfastly resistant to any expansion of the museum?” Toronto Star 07/17/02

MORE THAN JUST A PRETTY PICTURE: An astonishing 5.5 million visitors go to the Louvre each year to see the Mona Lisa. It’s a great painting, sure. But its fame is the product of many things… The New Republic 07/15/02

Tuesday July 16

JACKHAMMERING ANTIQUITIES: Greece has been trying for years to get Britain to return the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum. Now the Greeks are building a swank museum at the base of the Parthenon to house the marbles and want to make it “so magnificent that Britain will finally bow to its demand to return” the statues. But to build the museum, authorities are destroying “a unique archaeological site” including “the impressive remains of an ancient Christian city and Roman baths, dating from the late Neolithic era to the post-Byzantine period. At the foot of the Acropolis. As bulldozers continued razing buildings surrounding the site yesterday, some 300 prominent Greek archaeologists and architects, and other leading lights in the arts and sciences, denounced the ‘cultural vandalism’ in a petition.” The Guardian (UK) 07/15/02

A GIANT GLASS… London’s distinctive new City Hall opens this week. “The striking circular structure once dubbed the ‘glass testicle’ by [London mayor] Ken Livingstone was designed by Lord Foster and cost £43m under a private finance deal. It is being hailed as one of the most inspired new buildings in Europe since the unveiling of the Pompidou Centre in Paris 25 years ago.” The Guardian (UK) 07/15/02

THE RIGHT TO CRITICIZE: Earlier this year The Art Newspaper reported on destruction of World Heritage artifacts by the Israeli army in Palestine. “We reminded readers that the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage contravenes the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and that Israel is a signatory to this convention.” The reaction of readers was immediate, and charges of anti-semiticism flew. Yet pointing out and criticizing behavior is not anti-semitic, writes Anna Somers Cocks, the Art Newspaper’s editor. It is a responsibility. New Statesman 07/15/02

SUPPORTING THE STRIKE: Sir Timothy Clifford, director of the Scottish National Galleries, has surprised supporters of the museum by saying he sided with the museum’s workers in their recently threatened strike against the museum. “For far too long, we have not been paying our museum staff enough. They work extremely hard and deserve to be paid properly. They are perfectly correct to stand up for their rights. Speaking from a personal point of view, I know I am the lowest-paid director of a gallery in the UK, so it is no bad thing that these concerns are being looked at.” The Scotsman 07/14/02

Monday July 15

TO OWN A HITLER: Hitler was a painter – but one with modest talent. Nonetheless, “there is a busy and lucrative trade in Hitler’s artwork mostly watercolours, a few oils, lots of hand-painted postcards (some of which were actually sent and include birthday salutations and wish-you-were-here vacation greetings on the flip side), and a few 1-by-2-inch miniatures that reveal an obsession with architectural detail. What does it mean now, half a century later, to own a Hitler, to hang it in a place of honour in your front hall, to want it so badly that you fight the government for decades for the right to call it your own?” The Age (Melbourne) 07/15/02

SEE GLOBAL BUY LOCAL: The world of fashion has been dominated in the past couple decades by global fashion houses – slickly marketed designer chic intended for the streets of Paris to Beijing. But there are signs that is changing, that the global fashionistas are giving up some ground to small distinctive designer houses. The Age (Melbourne) 07/15/02

AESTHETIC PROTECTION: Since the Oklahoma bombing and September 11, Washington DC’s official buildings and monuments have been ringed with ugly barriers. “Walk the grounds of the Capitol and the Mall, as I do every day, and you can only be depressed by the spectacle of places once renowned for their beauty now ringed by fences and barriers and police cars, not to mention the ubiquitous presence of police officers, few of whom seem to have done any time in charm school.” A new report suggests more aesthetic protection – we’re in for the long haul. Washington Post 07/15/02

Sunday July 14

‘TATE MODERN OF THE NORTH’ OPENS: “The doors of the new £46m Baltic contemporary arts centre next to the River Tyne opened to the public at one minute past midnight on Saturday. Five thousand art enthusiasts queued for the opening of the gallery, dubbed the “Tate Modern of the north”, which is housed in an old flour mill… The gallery aims to put the north east of England on the art world’s map after many years of London hogging the limelight with big UK galleries.” BBC 07/13/02

• VERY PRETTY, BUT WHAT IS IT FOR? “Baltic has no permanent collection of art. Nothing ancient or modern, nothing contemporary, nothing famous or cherished or hated. This is one of its founding principles. Another is its avowed to decision to go it alone – no loaned sharks, no touring shows, nothing borrowed in any quantity from London.” A risky strategy, perhaps, but one which the Baltic’s directors hope will result in something more than just another regional museum. The Observer (UK) 07/14/02

THE COLLECTOR’S EYE: Art collecting is a delicate process for the investor who expects to see any return on his purchases. Artists fall in and out of fashion faster than Oscar dresses, and a must-have engraving in 1900 may be all but worthless a few decades later. So what is the trick to finding value in something as undefinable as art? It’s a lot more complicated than “I know what I like,” but one of Canada’s top collectors seems to think that that’s not a bad place to start. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 07/13/02

MORE FLAK FOR DOCUMENTA: This year’s Documenta exhibit in Germany has been catching a fair amount of heat for being elitist, silly, and overly ambitious. Russell Smith is unsure of the worth of a show that requires the viewer to spend an inordinate amount of time reading dense academic explanations of obscure pieces. “Explaining abstract concepts in everyday language is far from a dumb activity; indeed it usually requires more intelligence than speaking in code does. That code is usually more vague than precise. It’s the dialect that’s a dumbing down.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 07/13/02

BRINGING IT ALL HOME: China has spent a good amount of time over the centuries being invaded, attacked, and plundered. One of the upshots of such a beleagured history is that a great many Chinese art pieces have been scattered to the winds, and have wound up, legitimately or not, in museums and private collections far from home. A new generation of collectors is attempting to repatriate many of the artifacts, and in the process, is driving up the cost of Chinese art worldwide. Philadelphia Inquirer (Knight Ridder) 07/14/02

NEW URBANISM AND THE BOSTON HIGH-RISE: New Urbanists are not really all that fond of urban landscapes at all. They tend to prefer small-scale construction to high-density city architecture, and they generally can’t stand high rises. So what was the Congress for New Urbanism thinking when they gave an award to the gigantic Ritz-Carlton Towers in Boston? “What the New Urbanists have figured out is that a place such as the Ritz can be a city version of the tightly clustered, mixed-use, humanly scaled world they cherish.” Boston Globe 07/14/02

LIBESKIND SPEAKS: The architect of the new Jewish Museum in Berlin explains his vision of what makes for good architecture in the modern world. “Buildings provide spaces for living, but are also de facto instruments, giving shape to the sound of the world. Music and architecture are related not only by metaphor, but also through concrete space.” The Guardian (UK) 07/13/02

Friday July 12

MIA EXPANSION UNVEILED: The Twin Cities are packed full of unusual-looking museums, from the Walker Art Center to the Frank Gehry-designed Weisman Museum. But the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts has always been proud to be the museum that looks like a museum – solemn, staid, majestic, and with plenty of columns. Architect Michael Graves is in charge of MIA’s upcoming expansion project, and the plans were unveiled yesterday. “The 117,000-square-foot addition will increase gallery space by 40 percent and add space for offices, art restoration, storage and framemaking. Inside, one of the most dramatic spaces will be a reception hall and a skylit dome that recalls the museum’s main rotunda. Three floors of new galleries will ring the light well under the dome.” The Star Tribune (Minneapolis) 07/12/02

LATINO MUSEUM BACK ON TRACK: Being a niche museum is never easy, especially when the rock-bottom economy is giving even the biggest galleries fits. So it was something of a surprise this week to hear that LA’s beleagured Latino Museum of History, Art, and Culture has managed to dig itself almost completely out of debt, and is readying for a new beginning. The museum had been forced to close in 2000, but reopened earlier this year. Los Angeles Times 07/12/02

Thursday July 11

RECORD PRICE FOR A PAINTING: “A lost masterpiece by Rubens last night became the most expensive picture ever sold, when a rare books dealer paid £49.5 million to acquire it for a private collector at a Sotheby’s auction in London.” The Guardian (UK) 07/12/02

TOP TEN COLLECTORS: ARTNews is out with its annual list of worldwide art collectors. “In any given year, there are at least five people spending at least $100 million a year on art.” ARTNews 07/02

SUPERSIZE IT: Hilton Kramer isn’t impressed with the Museum of Modern Art’s new temporary home in Queens or with MoMA’s expansion plans. “It is with mixed feelings that we face this bigger MoMA and the other overscale expansions now in the works for the Morgan Library, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the High Museum in Atlanta and, of course, the ever-expanding, ever-deflating Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The only thing we know for certain about this mania for perpetual museum expansion is that it has everything to do with money and ambition, and very little to do with the life of art.” New York Observer 07/11/02

Wednesday July 10

FINDING MICHELANGELO: New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum has discovered it owns a Michelangelo drawing. It was discovered in a box of light fixture designs. “The drawing, purchased in 1942, was one of five anonymous Italian Renaissance works for which the museum paid a total of $60.” Its current value is between $10 million and $12 million, art dealers said. Washington Post 07/09/02

MAKE THEM STARS: How to build interest in historic buildings? How about a TV game show? “The BBC2 series, Restoration, is designed to interest viewers in historic treasures around the country and raise money to save the winning entry. Viewers will take part in regional heats over 10 weeks, voting for their favourite endangered buildings. The winner will be restored from cash raised by the programme.” The Guardian (UK) 07/09/02

ART BY DESIGN: We depend do much on design for the modern museum experience. Design can help clarify art, help give it a context, help focus our attentions. But does design also overwhelm the art we care about? London Evening Standard 07/09/02

NEW TAKE ON WAR: Manchester’s new Imperial War Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind “opens a new chapter in the treatment of war as a museum subject. Museums of war can make up for much of the missing context. They allow us to see behind the headlines, to read the full ghastly menu of war – the private notes of soldiers, the mapped strategies of generals, the account sheets of civilian casualties. The tone of such museums has to be handled with great care, however: they can so easily become vehicles of vainglorious nationalism or monuments to human despair.” Financial Times 07/08/02

Tuesday July 9

MURAL FIX: Fifty-one damaged outdoor murals in Los Angeles are awaiting repairs. “Many of the most heavily damaged murals were commissioned just before the 1984 Olympics by the Olympic Organizing Committee and local corporations, with the support of Caltrans. Most of the damage cited by the study was caused by vandalism, deterioration and dirt accumulation.” But the state has allocated enough money – $1.7 million – to repair only about half the murals. Los Angeles Times 07/08/02

ROYAL ACADEMY MAY MAKE CUTS: London’s Royal Academy is hurting for money, what with corporate sponsorships and ticket sales down since last fall. Now rumors that the RA may cut staff to save money. “The academy, which was set up in 1768 by artists for artists and counts David Hockney, Peter Blake and Norman Foster among its members, has become a £20m a year business.” The Guardian (UK) 07/06/02

MOMA – MISSING THE POINT? Critic Jed Perl doesn’t think much of the Museum of Modern Art’s new temporary home in Queens. “In recent years, the Museum of Modern Art has mostly seemed to be aware of experimentation as a p.r. value. At MoMA QNS the gathering of classics suggests a trophy perched on the edge of a dumpster. And the arrangement of contemporary art feels like a twelve-step program designed by somebody who is trying too hard to be hip.” The New Republic 07/08/02

Monday July 8

NEW ART EXAMINER DEAD? Is Chicago’s New Art Examiner, the city’s only visual arts magazine going out of business? The magazine is “said to be $150,000 in debt,” and shut down operations in May. It “canceled the July/August issue, laid off the staff and closed the office. Just a year ago, at a cost of more than $100,000, the Examiner was ‘re-launched’ following another financial crisis. The magazine has survived similar episodes in the past, but never has ceased publishing.” Artnet.com 07/05/02

THE DIMMING LIGHT: Thomas Kinkade is the most-collected painter in America. “More than 350 galleries in the US are dedicated entirely to his work. The income from his painting last year was more than $150 million.” Kinkade has also opened a housing subdivision based on his treacly paintings. But not all is going well for the “Painter of Light.” :Last year, the company posted losses of $16.6 million, having turned in a profit of $16.2 million the year before. Shares that stood at $25.75 in 1998 are now $3.66.” The Guardian (UK) 07/08/02

SAVING HAVANA: Havana’s celebrated architecture is endangered. But how to keep the city working while protecting heritage? “Everyone agrees it’s a city covered in a veil of nostalgia, of beautiful, crumbling decadence. But we’ve always believed it’s also necessary to reveal it as a functional city, not just a museum piece. There’s no validity in creating a theme park. So we desperately need to look for the balance.” Newsweek 07/08/02

Sunday July 7

DOCUMENTA PIGEONHOLES ITSELF: The Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany, may have hit a wall of its own creation with this year’s ultra-political edition. “It isn’t the presence of a political agenda, though, that is the problem with this installment of Documenta, which has been mounted every four or five years since 1955 and, since a landmark presentation in 1972, has earned a reputation as the most significant international survey of contemporary art in the world. It’s the near absence of diversity that grates. Through sheer numbers, Documenta insists that one kind of art–political art–is most significant today.” Los Angeles Times 07/07/02

THE JEWISH EYE: “To be a great photographer, Garry Winogrand liked to claim during the 1970’s, it was first of all necessary to be Jewish… As generalizations go, Winogrand’s semi-serious barroom boast has a lot of evidence to back it up. In no other visual art form except cinema over the last 100 years were Jews such a shaping force. From first decade to last, in fine art, reportage, portraiture, fashion and especially street photography, a staggering number of influential figures have been Jewish.” The New York Times 07/07/02

IT’S OUR BALL, AND WE’RE STAYING HOME: All around Europe, governments have been grappling with the issue of how to protect national artistic treasures obtained in times of war and pillage against the legal assaults of families who, quite legitimately, feel that the works belong to them. An exhibit of Czech works scheduled to be shown in France has been called back by the Czech government amid talk that a claim might be placed on the works by a French family. Calgary Herald 07/06/02

PURGING THE UGLY IN OHIO: “Kenyon is one of those small liberal arts schools that have won reputations far out of proportion to their size. Its curriculum draws applicants from around the country and beyond, and outside the classroom it boasts successes ranging from perennial champion swim teams to a highly regarded literary magazine, the Kenyon Review. But from the time its first permanent building was completed in 1829, Kenyon has taken almost as much pride in the look of its campus as in the quality of its education. The campus is mainly a collection of Gothic buildings, modeled after European churches and colleges. So now there is a campaign to cleanse it of architectural ugliness by tearing down buildings that people here call ‘sixties boxes’ or ‘unfortunate sixties mistakes.'” The New York Times 07/06/02

Friday July 5

SELLOUT: Last month Italy passed a law that would allow the state to sell off its assets to raise money. Does this include museums and architectural heritage? The law’s proponents say no. But there are nagging questions, and a few unsavory loopholes… The Art Newspaper 07/05/02

BLOOD SCULPTURE MELTS? Did workers at collector Charles Saatchi’s house destroy an important frozen artwork by unplugging the freezer in which it was stored? “Rumours spread after suggestions that Saatchi had stored a blood sculpture made by Britart’s enfant terrible, Marc Quinn, among his frozen peas. The work, Self, consists of Quinn’s head cast in nine pints of his own frozen, congealed blood.” The Guardian (UK) 07/04/02

CITY OF GLASS: Like many cities Tacoma is attempting downtown renewal through the arts. The city has opened a new $48 million museum dedicated to glass art. The Northwest is one of the centers of glass art and Dale Chihuly is the hometown boy. Still – the museum is hedging its glass bets by widening the museum’s focus to include other contemporary art. A crisis of confidence in the museum’s concept? Seattle Post-Intelligencer 07/05/02

• BUILDING AS SCULPTURE: “With one grand gesture, architect Arthur Erickson did the $48-million museum a tremendous favor by creating an identifiable image, but he did an even larger service to the community by providing an urban living room for the city.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 07/05/02
• Previously: TALE OF TWO MUSEUMS: A new international museum dedicated to glass art is opening in Tacoma Washington. The museum is a natural for the area, but it’s competing with a new art museum being built just a block away. “Many in the arts community are wondering how the two museums ended up in a neck-and-neck rivalry for patronage and programming. Are they serving the best interests of the public? And how will they avoid the kind of competitive one-upmanship their opening exhibitions signal?” Seattle Times 07/01/02

Thursday July 4

WHAT RIGHT’S RIGHT? Artist Rick Rush painted a picture of Tiger Woods after he won the Masters. Woods sued, claiming that he had not granted the rights for his image to be used. Now the case has become a major test of where the rights of artistic expression and celebrity licensing intersect, with major corporations, news organizations and artists all weighing in. The New York Times 07/04/02

DONOR PULLBACK HURTS MOCA: Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art is having its best year ever attendance-wise, with a popular Andy Warhol show drawing in the crowds. But the museum is facing a financial challenge after a donor who had pledged $10 million notified that $6.9 million of the pledge might not be mae after all due to a downturn in the donor’s business. Los Angeles Times 07/03/02

CRACKED EGG: Norman Foster’s new London City Hall is a huge glass egg that screams importance. “In theory, this building, which will be opened by the Queen on July 23, is the most important to be erected in the capital since County Hall, former seat of the London County Council and Greater London Council. Except that, in this case, the building’s message is sadly at odds with the reality of what is going to go on within it.” The Telegraph (UK) 07/04/02

HARVARD’S LOSS: James Cuno’s departure as director of the Harvard Museums to become director of the Courtauld Institute is “certainly not glad tidings for Harvard, with its famously ambivalent attitude toward art, especially of the contemporary sort that Cuno has championed. There is fear now that the progress Cuno has made will halt or even be reversed, that his agenda – including plans for a new Renzo Piano -designed museum on the banks of the Charles – will unravel.” Boston Globe 07/03/02

Wednesday July 3

TAKE YOUR FIRST PRIZE AND… Last week Randwick, Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Arts building won Australia’s top architecture award for public building. But the building’s neighbors tell a different story, accusing the project of “poor design, aesthetic ignorance and political maneouvring. Randwick Council has denounced the NIDA site on Anzac Parade, Kensington, as an ‘utter disgrace’, claiming that the back of the building was causing problems for thousands of local residents. The height of the building had also created an overshadowing problem for residents whose backyards adjoin the site.” Sydney Morning Herald 07/03/02

A MOVE AT THE RIGHT TIME: The Museum of Modern Art’s temporary move out to Queens is more than a physical dislocation. “With a long-serving chairman of the board stepping down, and two of its curators gone to new jobs, this is a time of profound transition for MoMA in every sense. One of the ironies of its move to Queens is that it is there and in the borough of Brooklyn that the really interesting new art in New York is being made and shown.” The Telegraph (UK) 07/03/02

NO REPATRIATION HERE: “A Swiss art gallery will be allowed to keep a Kandinsky painting looted by Nazis after reaching an out-of-court settlement with the artist’s family. The deal brings to an end the long-running dispute between the Ernst Beyeler Foundation and the heirs of Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers over Wassily Kandinsky’s Improvisation Number 10.” BBC 07/03/02

HARD TO LIKE, EASY TO ADMIRE: Lucien Freud is currently being celebrated at the Tate. “I find Freud’s work hard to like and almost impossible not to admire. It constitutes a superb performance in a socially charged role. What this has to do with its artistic qualities is a question tangential to his prestige in England and among Anglophiles everywhere. One feels rather like a spoilsport—or an American, if that’s not the same thing—for bringing it up.” The New Yorker 07/01/02

• ESTABLISHMENT WOG? “Lucian Freud, a seemingly misanthropic senior citizen who paints unflattering portraits of a chosen few in all their lumpy and lardy nakedness, has been proclaimed by the papers – again – as our ‘greatest living painter’.” But is his position in today’s establishment better secured than his place in history? New Statesman 07/01/02

LACKING VISION IN TORONTO? The design for Toronto’s new opera house is in, and musicians ought to love it. With the spectre of the acoustically miserable Roy Thompson Hall hanging over the city’s music scene, architect Jack Diamond has taken great pains to insure a quality sound mix inside the new facility. But architecture critics claim that Diamond has sacrificed form to function, presenting a design that may be musically compelling, but lacks architectural focus. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 07/03/02

Tuesday July 2

THE RISE OF ZAHA HADID: Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid suddenly has some very big projects coming online. Like a megaproject in Singapore named “one-north – the city lies one degree north of the equator – the vast 200-hectare site will be home to a massive science and technology quarter. Costed at £14 billion, the masterplan will change the face of Singapore, and represents the boldest bid ever made by the sparkling city to plan for the future, to outsmart the awakening dragon of China.” Financial Times 07/02/02

HOME-WRECKERS: Some 1,700 historic English country houses were destroyed during the 20th Century, a shameful carnage visited upon the nation’s heritage. “The 1950s and 1960s were black decades for the country house. Just under 300 houses are recorded as lost during the 1950s, although the total is certainly higher; and the 1960s tells a similar sorry tale. Fire was frequently the cause, but demolition and deliberate abandonment, often by long-established families, was another reason for their demise.” The Times (UK) 07/02/02

WINKING AT THE TAX MAN: Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski is being investigated for tax evasion on purchases of art he bought but for which he didn’t pay sales tax, claiming that the work was being shipped out of New York. What gave him away? “Investigators had obtained a fax which listed some of the paintings that were being shipped to New Hampshire with the words ‘wink wink’ in parentheses, indicating that the objects were not going to New Hampshire but were instead going to Mr Kozlowski’s New York address.” The Art Newspaper 06/30/02

Monday July 1

THE NEED TO BE #1: Why is New York’s Museum of Modern Art going through the pain of relocation and rebuilding itself? “For most of the 20th century, MOMA was the most energetic and ambitious museum around, and was rewarded with many of the best Cezannes, Picassos and Pollocks. Now, the ample spaces of Tate Modern make a powerful pitch for their contemporary equivalents. The new Moma will counter this, by offering its finest and most prominent floor to contemporary art.” London Evening Standard 06/28/02

TALE OF TWO MUSEUMS: A new international museum dedicated to glass art is opening in Tacoma Washington. The museum is a natural for the area, but it’s competing with a new art museum being built just a block away. “Many in the arts community are wondering how the two museums ended up in a neck-and-neck rivalry for patronage and programming. Are they serving the best interests of the public? And how will they avoid the kind of competitive one-upmanship their opening exhibitions signal?” Seattle Times 07/01/02

WHERE WE LIVE: “Given that most of the world’s population lives in cities, we do need to understand the lure and the ways, good and bad, of cities. Most academic studies are inaccessible to the majority of people. Not only is the subject huge, but the language used is all too often as dusty as a summer street in central Cairo. Television has yet to help.” So how about a new museum? The Guardian (UK) 07/01/02

OUT OF AFRICA: Where was the first art made? Archaeologists have long thought it was Europe. But a South African archaeologist is “challenging the theory that artistic culture first developed in Europe about 35,000 years ago, after people had migrated out of Africa. He has dug up evidence which, he claims, shows that such behaviour evolved over 70,000 years ago—and in Africa.” The Economist 06/28/02

ART OF SAFE INVESTMENT: Recent London art sales suggest that investors may be turning to art as a stable investment as the stock market sinks lower. The Telegraph (UK) 07/01/02

Sunday June 30

OVERREACHING AT THE GUGGENHEIM: The Guggenheim, that beacon of expansionist artistic fervor, is in trouble. Staff layoffs, cancelled exhibitions, and general fiscal chaos have combined to tarnish the reputation of director Thomas Krens, who has been considered an essential innovator for years. With some in the arts world calling for Krens’s resignation, where is the Guggenheim going, and how will it get there with no apparent cash flow? The New York Times 06/30/02

LIBESKIND’S LEGACY: “Daniel Libeskind has been a leading light in architecture for 30 years, yet he didn’t build a thing until 1999. But the Jewish Museum in Berlin was both a professional challenge and a personal test: his parents had fled the Nazis. As his Imperial War Musuem North opens in Manchester, he tells [The Guardian] how buildings help us make sense of history.” The Guardian (UK) 06/29/02

• BUDGET CUTS FOR THE BETTER: Libeskind’s new Imperial War Museum almost never made it off the drawing board after the Heritage Fund ordered its budget slashed by an unheard-of 40%. But instead of abandoning the project, Libeskind resdesigned the entire building, and claims that the cheaper version wound up being considerably better than the original. The Telegraph (UK) 06/29/02
• DIVERSIFYING THE PORTFOLIO: Daniel Libeskind’s stature as an architect often overshadows his earlier career – as a young man, he was a widely hailed concert pianist. This summer, Libeskind is returning to his musical roots, conducting a new production of a Messiaen opera in Berlin. The Guardian (UK) 06/28/02

GETTY COMES THROUGH FOR ST. PAUL’S: Philanthropist and art collector Paul Getty has announced a £5 million gift dedicated to the restoration of the famous facade of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The cathedral’s outer face has been crumbling for centuries under the harsh city conditions, and its famous 64,000-ton dome has been slowly crushing the entire building. The Getty gift brings the cathedral halfway towards its fundraising goal for a full restoration. The Guardian (UK) 06/28/02

DOES CNN CAUSE WAR? A new exhibition in the small Belgian community of Ypres focuses on the 20th century’s nearly ceaseless military conflicts from the perspective of the media types who covered it. The exhibit is wide-ranging, but its central focus can be boiled down to one basic question: has media saturation so numbed humanity to the sight of horrible violence that we are no longer able to be put off by the prospect of death and destruction? Financial Times 06/28/02

Friday June 28

A RIVER AWAY: The Museum of Modern Art is opening its new temporary home in Queens this weekend. “The Modern’s galleries are efficient and airless, like the inside of a storage center, which is exactly what this building is. On the other hand, there is something touching and apt about seeing priceless Cézannes, Seurats and Braques in a makeshift, unadorned setting: they look fresh and by contrast seem to pop off the walls even more than usual.” The New York Times 06/28/02

• NEW TALES TO TELL: “The opening of the temporary Modern tomorrow in Long Island City is less significant than the closing of the museum’s old quarters. The space was exhausted, and so was the institution’s underlying premise. Since the Modern’s founding in 1929, it has become increasingly clear that its use of the word modern is historically cavalier. This unpromising commission offers a graceful promenade through the history of modern thought.” The New York Times 06/28/02
  
• KING OF QUEENS: It’s “a museum that engenders a remarkable sense of intimacy between art and viewer and acts as a pointed challenge to the monumental museum projects that have become ubiquitous in the past decade. In its populist spirit, it is closer to Los Angeles projects like Frank Gehry’s Geffen Contemporary – a gaping warehouse space built in the ethnic enclave of Little Tokyo in 1983 – than to the typical, more refined Manhattan museum.” Los Angeles Times 06/28/02
  

TO PLUG THE HOLES: The British Museum needs an extra £10 million a year to fix its budget woes. “We still receive 30% less than we did in 1992 due to government cuts. We’ve had to cut back and slim down over the last decade but now the point has been reached where we simply can’t do that any more.” BBC 06/28/02

AND THERE’S LESS DUST THAN A MILL, TOO: Is it really possible to rebuild a town in decline around the arts? The residents of one old mill town in western Massachusetts would say so: since the MASS MoCA museum opened in North Adams in 1999, tourists have flocked to it, complimentary events have sprung up regularly, and the gallery has become as much a pillar of the community as the old mills used to be. Boston Globe 06/28/02

HOW NOT TO OBSERVE: In trying to decide what kind of memorial should be chosen for the World Trade Center, it’s a good idea to look at the Oklahoma bombing memorial (for an example of what not to do). “There are so many symbols here as to obliterate the poetry of any one of them. There are so many faces on televisions inside the museum describing their pain to you that you feel wrung out like a rag. Worst of all, the memorial has nothing to say about the important historical issues that triggered Timothy McVeigh’s madness. The problem is obvious.” New York Observer 06/26/02

FIRST PHOTO GETS THE ONCE-OVER: The world’s first photograph dates from 1826, depicts an idyllic pastoral scene, and is in remarkably good condition for a 176-year-old image. It sits on a pewter plate covered with bitumin, and took three days of exposure to create. The heliograph, as its creator referred to it, is undergoing its first-ever scientific study at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Chicago Tribune 06/28/02

Thursday June 27

IMPOVERISHING THE BRITISH MUSEUM: There are many reasons for the British Museum’s woeful financial condition. But outgoing director Robert Anderson says it comes down to simple underfunding. “It is easy to say that efficiency must be increased, but it comes to the point that people have extraordinary work loads, and their output is already extraordinarily high. We are a flagship museum, and yet in many ways we are impoverished.” The Guardian (UK) 06/26/02

WANTED – BETTER IDEAS: Australia’s most prestigious architecture awards, presented this week, were a jumble of compromises and unfulfilled expectations. One award – for residential design, wasn’t even awarded. “Too many projects are results of Land and Environment Court rulings … slowly the art of architecture is being whittled toward a more predictable and forecast outcome.” Sydney Morning Herald 06/27/02

IN AMERICA WE’D FINE THE ARTIST: The mayor of Ankara, Turkey, decided that a statue of a nude in one of the city’s parks was obscene and anti-Islamic, and ordered it taken down. That was in 1994. This week, an Ankara court ordered the mayor to pay 4 billion Turkish lira for damage to the statue incurred during its removal, plus other damages, plus interest. BBC 06/27/02

eBAY AS ART CANVAS: With 50 million users, eBay has become fodder for artists. “Recently, a Canadian artist did an eBay search for the word ‘malaria’, bought everything connected with it and put an eclectic array of memorabilia on display in an exhibition in London. And an impoverished Newcastle graduate sold his soul on eBay for £11. The so-called ‘item’was bought by a man from Oklahoma who had lost his own soul in a bet.” The Scotsman 06/26/02

ART THAT MEANS SOMETHING (BUT WHAT?): Bill Drummond and Jim Cauty are “famous for two gestures: presenting Rachel Whiteread with a cheque for £40,000 as ‘worst British artist’ on the night she won the £25,000 Turner Prize, and then, most famously, incinerating what appeared to be £1 million in cash on the Isle of Jura in front of a handful of bemused witnesses. Art prank? Scam? Political statement? Drummond and Cauty made an agreement at the time never to explain themselves, and they never have.” The Telegraph (UK) 06/27/02

ART OUT OF THE LIMELIGHT: Catherine Goodman just won the prestigious BP Portrait Award. She’s also known to be Prince Charles’ art adviser. But her work sells for only a few thousand pounds, and she works slowly and accepts few commissions. “Art can be tough if people want a lot of attention. I’m not sure I do. I want to carry on painting and selling and having people tell me what they think of the pictures, but I don’t want to be a celebrity. I’m not sure it’s very good for artists.” The Telegraph (UK) 06 27/02

Wednesday June 26

STOLEN ART RECOVERED: Nineteen works of art valued at £20 million that were stolen last year have been recovered by police in Madrid. “Among the paintings taken in August last year were two by Spanish artist Francisco de Goya – The Donkey’s Fall and The Swing – and a work by French impressionist Camille Pisarro, called Eragny Landscape.” BBC 06/25/02

OLDEST TOMB: “A 4,600 year-old Egyptian tomb, glued shut and with its original owner still inside, has been discovered by archaeologists working near the Giza Pyramids.” The tomb is thought to be the oldest intact tomb ever discovered. Discovery 06/24/02

ANOTHER BIG-TIME AUCTION: “A ‘sensuous’ portrait by Picasso of his mistress at the height of their passion has been sold at auction for more than £15m. Nu au collier fetched £15,956,650 – almost double the estimate of up to £9m – when it went under the hammer at Christie’s in London.” BBC 06/25/02

MOMA’S ATTENTION-GETTERS: What to do when your museum is forced to move from the middle of Manhattan to an old warehouse in Queens? Hold a parade and shoot off fireworks, of course. New York’s Museum of Modern Art may be in temporary quarters, but its curators are making darned sure that New Yorkers know where to find them, with “a procession over the Queensborough bridge,” a series of galas and opening parties, and a massive fireworks display bridging the two boroughs with a rainbow. The New York Times 06/26/02

FRESH BASEL: The Basel Art Fair has scratched and clawed its way to to become one of the modern art world’s preeminent events, and these days, it has also become something of a gauge for the health of the industry. To judge by this year’s installment, all is well: the pace was chaotic, the displays eclectic, and, most importantly, sales were brisk. Boston Globe 06/26/02

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH: “When it was initiated in 1992, the idea of founding a contemporary art museum in Sarajevo was considered nothing short of crazy, but foundations were laid this week for the museum’s first wing and it already boasts one of the world’s largest exhibitions… Now, the collection includes 120 works of internationally acclaimed artists and its value is estimated at some $7 million.” Nando Times (Agence France-Presse) 06/26/02

THE NEW ALTERNATIVES: “Just when we all assumed that the alternative space movement had met a noble death, laid low by the double-fisted blows of the culture wars and the New York real estate market, a host of new outfits have sprung up, offering an alternative not only to the gallery system, but to our traditional view of an alternative space.” Village Voice 06/26/02

LOSING THE ART OF COLLECTING: Some of Australia’s biggest corporations are getting out of art collecting. Several have put their collections up for auction or donated them recently. “Companies that have opted out of the art market totally or in part include Shell, Rio Tinto, Orica, AXA and BP Australia.” The Age (Melbourne) 06/26/02

WHAT’S WRONG WITH CRAFT? “It is a sad fact that in the art universities of recent years it is the concept constructors – students who produce weird installations or have quirky ideas – who receive the highest marks. Craft creators – those with a natural talent – who want to learn to better their ability, are left unencouraged, often ignored and always poorly marked.” The Guardian (UK) 06/25/02

Tuesday June 25

NOTHING SAYS I LOVE YOU LIKE FLOWERS: A painting of Monet’s Waterlilies that has not been seen in public for more than 75 years sold for just over $20 million on Monday, Sotheby’s auction house said.” Nando Times (AP) 06/24/02

REINVENTING THE MFA: The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is reinventing itself. A decade ago it was deep in debt and on the decline. Now it’s hired star architect Norman Foster to reimagine what one of America’s great museums might become. “To pay for this expansion, and for additions to its endowment and budget, the museum has embarked on a drive to raise a daunting $425 million. Officials here say this is the largest fund-raising effort ever undertaken by an art institution outside New York City. The new building is expected to cost $180 million and be completed in 2007.” The New York Times 06/25/02

REINVENTING THE COOPER-HEWITT: New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum, America’s foremost design museum, ius cutting back. “Over recent months, more than a dozen administrators, curators, researchers and part-time consultants have left the Cooper-Hewitt, fleeing an atmosphere described by a former employee as ‘draining’and by another as ‘total misery’.” The New York Times 06/25/02

BLOWING UP BOLOGNA? Police apparently intercepted a plan by terrorists affiliated with al-Qa ‘eda to blow up Bologna’s “most important church to erase the offence of a 15th-century Gothic fresco showing Mohammed being tormented by devils in hell. The Milan daily Corriere della Sera reported that in a telephone call intercepted by police in February, one of the suspect’s alleged associates discussed plans for an attack on the Church of San Petronio, which has a large fresco by Giovanni da Modena showing the founder of the Islamic religion in hell.” The Guardian (UK) 06/24/02

MUSEUMS AS PARTY ANIMALS: “Over the past 25 years a new balance – seesaw might be a better term – has been established in national museums between public and private money. In many ways, this is a positive change. Museums are far more responsive to their public now than they used to be. Permanent collections are often more interestingly displayed. Temporary exhibitions are more frequent. The fierce, old, military-style warders have been replaced by friendlier staff. Information about the collections is available on-line.” On the other hand, the amount of energy required to court favor with the giving classes threatens to overwhelm the business of seeing to art. London Evening Standard 06/24/02

BRUTALLY BACK: “Over the past few years, something quite extraordinary has happened to the cityscape of Blairite Britain. Contrary to conservative expectations, some of our most despised structures have been restored, revamped – even given coveted listed status. The modern monoliths we once loathed have become our newest national monuments. Against all the odds, brutalism is back in vogue.” New Statesman 06/24/02

TOW-AWAY ART: Artists unhappy with the growing numbers of abandoned cars on Hackney, England streets, stage an art project to do something about it. “The idea was to create a series of designer ‘car covers’ to turn the burnt out cars on Hackney’s street into works of art.” The zealous city council towed away the decorated cars. “The way to get rid of a car is to decorate it and make it pretty and then the council will move it.” The Guardian (UK) 06/24/02

Monday June 24

ON THE TRAIL OF STOLEN TREASURE: “Theft of historic artifacts is massive worldwide. “Interpol, the international police network, says it is impossible to track the volume of trade in stolen antiquities because so much of it is so far underground. Some pieces disappear straight from digs, before anyone can catalogue them, and into the hands of collectors who never risk showing them publicly. But many involved in the study and preservation – and the buying and selling – of ancient art say that although the change is likely to be slow and fitful, it has begun.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/24/02

AT HOME IN QUEENS: The Museum of Modern reopens this week in its new temporary home in Queens. “On the face of it, Queens and the Museum of Modern Art make the quintessential odd couple. But you do not have to spend a whole lot of time in MoMA’s new neighborhood to realize that the pairing actually makes good sense. Long Island City, the specific setting for MoMA’s new venue, is a place apart, even in diverse, sprawling Queens. It’s a fast-changing flatland of working and abandoned factories, auto body shops and industrial miscellany, with a scattering of attached houses and apartment buildings. The area’s future is up for grabs.” Washington Post 06/23/02

THE CONTRARY FREUD: Over the past 30 years Lucien Freud has been mad, bad and dangerous to know. His pictures pitiless, ambiguous, violent and aggressive, he has been a man of twilight lives between the gutter and the Ritz, mixing with the most rich and socially eminent, yet a man of privacy and mystery whose telephone number no one knows, and who inhabits houses without doorbells, flitting like Dracula from one to t’other, to work on sleeping models through the night. He is as bohemian as Puccini, as much a ruffian as Caravaggio (I once witnessed his stealing a girl from Peter Langan without plunging a dagger into that clumsy lecher’s groin), and as much a creature of the ivory tower as Vermeer. All this lends gloss to his pictures and pushes up the price – the truth is probably much less fabulous.” London Evening Standard 06/21/02

THERE ONCE WAS A MUSEUM IN GROZNY: “Before the war between Russia and the would-be breakaway Republic of Chechnya, there were 3,270 works in the Grozny Museum collection, including 950 paintings. But the museum was bombed, with many of its paintings detroyed. Much of what was left was looted to sell for arms. Now an attempt to rebuild the Grozny Museum. The Art Newspaper 06/21/02

ONE MAN’S SURPLUS IS… Britain’s Labour government has a policy of selling off items that are deemed to be surplus. “While few would quarrel with the Ministry of Defence selling off a disused Army base or the Highways Agency disposing of some surplus road maintenance equipment, the flaws in the policy are becoming clear.” As the policy tags items of artistic or historical importance, critics worry about a sell-off of the nation’s important heritage. The Telegraph (UK) 06/24/02

PECKING ORDER: A huge glass-domed biosphere building in Cornwall is being endangered by seagulls. Seems the birds are mistaking their own reflections in the glass for hostile males, and are attacking the glass panels, doing considerable damage… The Guardian (UK) 06/21/02

REMEMBERING J. CARTER BROWN: “Brown epitomised the American impresario art museum director. He was the first to hold a masters degree in business administration. His diplomatic skills pulled foreign loans to Washington by the planeload. Ever the pitch-man for his institution, he urged benefactors to donate art “for the nation.” The pitch worked, and paintings by Cezanne, van Gogh, Picasso and Veronese flowed in.” The Art Newspaper 06/21/02

Sunday June 23

STRIKE ACTION IN SCOTLAND: Scotland’s nationally run galleries are facing a partial work stoppage by their staff to begin June 30. “The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which represents 120 staff, said the decision would mean a ban on all overtime and the closure of all four galleries on Sundays.” The dispute centers on the contention of the PCS that staffers are underpaid and undervalued, with most making less than £5 per hour. BBC 06/21/02

SPEAKING OF STRIKES… What should the museum-going public make of the strike at the British Museum? “The strike and its causes are symptomatic of the disease that has hit cultural life in Britain… This is an artificially engineered crisis. It is as much the duty of a nation to fund its museums as it is to maintain its monuments. Government funding, currently set at £36 million, has been cut in real terms by 30 percent over a 10-year period according to most accounts.” International Herald Tribune (Paris) 06/22/02

MORE FREUDIAN ANALYSIS: Lucien Freud’s nude portraits, on exhibit at the Tate Britain, say a great deal about his perception of the world. “The naked animal, unidealised and depicted with extreme concentration on physical essence and fact, has come to seem like mainstream Freud: his grand contribution to twentieth-century painting. But to see his career at full stretch is to see how much else was achieved long before and how that past seeps into the future.” The Observer (UK) 06/23/02

THE NAKED SENSUALITY OF CLOTHING: An exhibit at the UK’s National Gallery purports to be about the history of clothing and drapery in classical painting, but Andrew Graham-Dixon sees some down-and-dirty subtext. “As well as offering an interesting and informative potted history of western fashion – showing, for example, how the doublet-and-hose peacock finery of male dress during the Renaissance evolved, through the Enlightenment and beyond, into the democratically inspired sartorial restraint of the suit – [the] exhibition also and, more piquantly, explores the invention and development of what we now know as sex appeal.” The Telegraph (UK) 06/22/02

MUSEUM OF ONE MAN’S MIND: There is always a certain quirkiness in museums designed to house personal collections. The tastes of the individual tend to overshadow any larger objective, and England’s Horniman Museum remains a perfect example as it reopens following a massive renovation. “The museum is now a triumphant architectural blend of the present and the past. The white limestone slabs of the new building echo the delicate white wrought-iron tracery of the conservatory, which is to the side of the main structures, and irresistibly remind the onlooker of hothouses at Kew Gardens or even the original Crystal Palace.” The Guardian (UK) 06/22/02

FINALLY, ART AND EXERCISE TOGETHER! Think of it as an extremely high-tech Etch-a-Sketch crossed with a connect-the-dots game. Two British artists and a state-of-the-art Global Positioning System are creating artworks by tracing roads, highways, and bridges in various UK cities, routes they travel on bicycles while the GPS system records their progress. Their efforts are then posted and discussed on their website, which has already begun to spawn copycat efforts worldwide. Wired 06/22/02

Friday June 21

TYRANNY OF THE ACOUSTIGUIDE: Thinking about reaching for one of those handy acoustiguides now so popular at many museums? Think again. “It makes choices for you. It pick winners. Most museums that use the system restrict it to a (growing) menu of ‘masterpieces’, effectively relegating great tracts of their collection into a sort of art-historical Division Three – there to be scanned indulgently if you happen to have some quirky personal attachment, but clearly far beneath general interest. So immediately your choices are curtailed. Then, once the audioguide has imposed its snobbery on you, it sets about telling you, with varying degrees of skill and subtlety, what you ought to think about the art on show, and this is where the real trouble begins.” Electricreview.com 05/26/03

SISTER WENDY’S PRIVATE TOUR: Sister Wendy’s trip through American museums for her recent series didn’t include a stop at LA’s Norton Simon Museum. So the museum made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, and Wendy obliged with a private tour captured on tape. “It’s a little strange that Sister Wendy, known more for her broad telepopulist appeal than for the eloquence or originality of her insights, should be sequestered in the back room of a deluxe suburban vanity museum. But such an improbable arrangement is actually pretty much par for the course in the long, strange trip of the art nun’s career.” LAWeekly 06/20/02

PRINCE OF A MISTAKE: Earlier this week three works by Prince Charles were put up for auction in Birmingham. Interest in the watercolors was high – they were listed at a few hundred pounds, but they eventually fetched £20,000. The day after the sale, though, it was noticed that a mistake had been made – the art wasn’t painted at all – they’re lithographs. “Worth a few hundred pounds, they were excellent copies of the original works, but of interest more for their novelty value than their artistic merit.” The Scotsman 06/20/02

Thursday June 20

WHERE’S THE PUBLIC IN CHICAGO’S PUBLIC ART FUND? Chicago’s Public Art Fund spends millions on public art, financed by the city’s percent for art ordinance. Some of its projects are highly visible, yet critics charge that the program operates in secret and lacks accountability. How much money does it spend? How does it decide what to buy? You’d think public records would be available, and yet… Chicago Tribune 06/20/02

LOST IN THE WTC: “Among the major losses of a historic and archaeological nature was the Five Points archaeological collection, which, excavated in the early 1990s had been stored in the basement of Six World Trade Center, the building that was destroyed when the facade of Tower One fell into it. Only 18 of about one million unique artifacts documenting the lives of nineteenth-century New Yorkers survive.” Archaeology 06/19/02

TALE OF TWO CITIES: Why is Toronto unable to produce artists in the way that Vancouver is? Perhaps it is structural. From weak schools, a sense of insularity and a lack of serious public art program, Toronto doesn’t encourage a mix of artists. “Vancouver provides a vivid contrast. The city’s leading artists have leapfrogged over Toronto to establish connections in New York, Dusseldorf and beyond.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/20/02

Wednesday June 19

FIRST COMMISSION WINS: This year’s £25,000 BP Portrait Award has been won by Catherine Goodman. Her painting of Antony Sutch was her first commissioned portrait, and the first time in many years that the competition has been won by a formal traditional portrait. Despite the art world skirmishing over conceptual conceptual art crowding out figurative painting, the portrait competition, now in its 22nd year, attracted 760. The Guardian (UK) 06/18/02

WEIGHING ANCHOR: Due to security concerns, the Anchorage, a space under the Brooklyn Bridge used for the past 19 summers as a space for art installations and performances, is being closed because of fears of terrorism. “The 50-foot-tall vaulted ceilings, stone floors, windowless brick and overhead traffic hum gave the ambience a tilt toward the introspective and mysterious. The Anchorage could seem all gothic gloom or cool cave. It changed, depending on the art: a cathedral, a dungeon, a fort.” Village Voice 06/18/02

UNDERSTANDING FREUD: This summer’s hottest art show in London is the Lucien Freud retrospective at Tate Britain. At 79, Freud is generally considered Britain’s top living artist. “Let me be clear about this: at every stage in his long career, Freud has painted wonderful pictures. In a show with 156 works, I am talking about no more than a dozen misses or near-misses, but they are enough to show that painting does not come easily to Freud. He’s a thrilling artist because when he performs, he doesn’t have a net to catch him if he falls.” The Telegraph (UK) 06/19/02

• A HISTORY OF LOOKING: “For 60 years, Freud has interrogated reality with a tough, unsatisfied intelligence. Eyes stripped as a snake’s, he has studied the visual evidence of life. He has searched for the truths that his paintings will tell.” The Times (UK) 06/19/02
• ARTIST LAUREATE: “At Freud’s level of artistic dedication he is competing with history. It is a daunting sport for, unlike the athlete, the artist is running against an international field that includes famous contestants who have been dead for centuries.” London Evening Standard 06/18/02
• ABOUT PAINTING: “The viewer who believes he has discerned a truth about a relationship between artist and subject, however, is likely to be mistaken. It is mostly projection. There is some kind of truth somewhere in there, but it is first and foremost a truth about depiction in painting itself.” The Guardian (UK) 06/18/02

POLLING THE MASSES: “A major exercise to decide on the best way of displaying art in Wales has started.” And while asking the public might seem to be a risky method of deciding policy, that is exactly the route Wales is going. Among the proposals on the table are an expansion of the current National Museum and the construction of a new, dedicated gallery. BBC 06/19/02

Tuesday June 18

ANOTHER TAKE ON DOCUMENTA: Michael Kimmelman writes that the show delivers what it promised. But “calm, clear, remarkably orderly considering its size, the show is also puritanical and nearly humorless. It gives the impression of having been conceived by people for whom the messiness and frivolity of art are almost moral failures. Some control over the organization of a show this size is necessary. Too much is alarming.” The New York Times 06/18/02

• OVERLOAD: An exhausted Peter Plagens marvels at the sheer size of the event. And how much explanation the art takes. “Never in the history of contemporary-art shows have so many viewers been asked to read so much while standing on such unforgiving concrete floors.” It’s also difficult to sort out. “Hardly any of the art in Kassel lives up to the huge political burden placed upon it.” With the show’s attempt “to get art to act as a rebuttal to the G8’s style of globalization, Documenta has turned itself into a clever, but only occasionally convincing, Didactamenta.” Newsweek 06/24/02

Monday June 17

STRIKE CLOSES BMA: The British Museum is closed today after 750 museum workers went on strike, protesting government cuts in funding. “Some 100 strikers picketed the museum, handing out leaflets to members of the public. It is the first time the museum has been closed by industrial action in its 250-year history.” BBC 06/17/02

NEW ICA CHAIRMAN: Alan Yentob, the BBC’s director of drama, entertainment and children’s programmes, has been named new chairman of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The ICA’s previous chairman left in a blaze of publicity, declaring that concept art was “pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat that I wouldn’t accept even as a gift”. The Guardian (UK) 06/14/02

• GLAMOUR BOY: As the BBC’s arts and entertainment supremo, Yentob is an avowed populariser and, after years of rubbing shoulders with the corporation’s glitzier talent, he is now as close to being ‘the glamorous face of BBC management’ as licence feepayers are ever likely to get for their money. Those connections are, of course, what appealed to the board of the ICA when they judged his suitability.” The Observer (UK) 06/16/02

FIGHTING FOR SCRAPS: There is so little high-end art available for sale in the UK that when even a minor sale comes up for auction, there’s a feeding frenzy. The Telegraph (UK) 06/17/02

RECORD ANTIQUITY SALE: A heavily restored ancient Roman Venus sculpture sold in London at auction last week for “£7.9 million, more than twice the estimate and a world auction record for an antiquity. There may now be an export bar to allow British museums to try and match the price, but it is very unlikely any could raise such a sum. The Jenkins Venus, also known as the Barberini Venus, was pieced together from fragments over 200 years ago, and became one of the most admired works of classical art of the 18th century. The Guardian (UK) 06/15/02

LOOKING OUT: This edition of Documenta is the most international and outward-looking yet. “The main themes of this Documenta are migration, precarious post-colonial constellations, cultural intermixing and changing perspectives within a new global society. All the sore points, the terrible conflicts which often trigger or prevent these changes, are given center stage: the tortured Balkans; the misery of the underdeveloped and exploited; racism; the genocide in Rwanda; the hell of a South African gold mine; South American military dictatorships; guerrilla wars; Sept. 11, 2001; the refugee ships sunk in the Mediterranean with their unretrieved bodies, searched for by teams of underwater archaeologists. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06/16/02

• Previously: RANT W/O BACKUP: Documenta is the world’s most lavish festival of contemporary art, and it has been staged in Kassel every five years or so since the Marshall Plan came to the bombed-out town. This year its curator advances the idea that America’s domination of world culture is an enervating force, that it is “materializing, hegemonizing and attempting to regulate all forms of social relations and cultural exchanges.” Curiously, there is little art in the show to back up the premise. Washington Post 06/16/02

WHAT’S THE VISION? Rem Koolhaas “may be our greatest contemporary architect, but the nature and volume of his production indicate that he wants to be more than that. He plays the game of cultural critic and theorist, visionary, urbanist, and shaper of cities for the globalized, digitized, commercialized world of the twenty-first century. If we don’t begin thinking critically about what he’s doing, how our cities look and function might greatly reflect his influence – and what we get might not be what we want.” American Prospect 06/17/02

Sunday June 16

FREE ME: When the LA County Museum of Art began charging admission in 1978, attendance slid by 44 percent. Now, nearly 25 years later, despite 3 million more people in LA, the number of people visiting LACMA is roughly the same as it was in pre-admission 1978. As the museum goes out to raise $300 million to makeover its campus, Christopher Knight writes that one of LACMA’s top priorities ought to be eliminating the admission fee. “No one should underestimate the barrier erected by general admission fees. Yet the issue isn’t just a matter of affordability. It also concerns a more fundamental relationship with art.” Los Angeles Times 06/09/02

TEARING DOWN HISTORY: The 20th Century was a bad one for English manors. “More than 1,000 country houses, perhaps one in six, were demolished in the 20th century. The result was an architectural and cultural tragedy that has no parallel in this country since the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. Superb collections of art were broken up, some of the most delightful gardens and landscapes ever created abandoned, and many of this country’s finest buildings razed to the ground. The causes of that destruction have never been spelt out before, perhaps because the event was too painful.” The Telegraph (UK) 06/15/02

RANT W/O BACKUP: Documenta is the world’s most lavish festival of contemporary art, and it has been staged in Kassel every five years or so since the Marshall Plan came to the bombed-out town. This year its curator advances the idea that America’s domination of world culture is an ennervating force, that it is “materializing, hegemonizing and attempting to regulate all forms of social relations and cultural exchanges.” Curiously, there is little art in the show to back up the premise. Washington Post 06/16/02

IS IT CHEATING? When photography was invented many predicted the end of painting. Didn’t happen, of course. But lately there have been fresh debates about the “fairness” of painters using mechanical devices to help in their work. Does it somehow lessen a work if the artist used visual aids? “I’m guessing that psychoanalysts would diagnose this as displaced anxiety.” The New York Times 06/16/02

CUTTING THE EDGE: Is there anything tougher than being a contemporary art center? Constantly defining and redefining “contemporary” is a balancing act that gets tougher as the organization gets older. The Atlanta Contemporay Art Center is about to turn 30. With funding down and the search for a new director, ACAC is facing an identity crisis – does it still matter? Atlanta Journal-Constitution 06/16/02

THE ART OF RESTORATION: Paris’ small Museum of Jewish Art and History tries to keep politics out. That means it’s “not a Holocaust museum, although reportedly one is being planned for Paris. To museum organizer Laurence Sigal-Klagsbald, ‘restoring Jewish culture is an answer in itself to the annihilation planned by the Nazis’.” Toronto Star 06/16/02

Friday June 14

THOROUGHLY MODERN BIDDING: With Impressionist works too expensive for most collectors, contemporary art has caught the interest of investors. Prices for 20th Century work has been setting records of late. “The stock market is not currently offering many opportunities for people to get involved so when they find something that gives them pleasure, like art, they say ‘let’s do it.’ “. Financial Times 06/14/02

ART FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY: “There’s a transformation taking place in art museums. These temples of contemplation that once catered mostly to adults now offer a full menu of programs aimed at families — not to mention school groups, singles, teenagers, seniors or any other demographic group willing to walk through the front door. At the venerable National Gallery of Art and the exclusive Kreeger Museum, even preschoolers now have their own programming.” Washington Post 06/14/02

BRITAIN’S BEST NEW BUILDINGS: The Royal Institute of British Architects has made a list of the 58 best new buildings in the UK. “The buildings, which range in size from a tolbooth and a private residence to big industrial centres and the Gateshead millennium bridge, have all been selected to receive a RIBA award for their high architectural standards and their contribution to the local environment.” The Guardian (UK) 06/13/02

SCOTTISH GALLERY WORKERS THINK STRIKE: While staff at the National Galleries of Scotland ponder a strike, the museum director is on a paid six-month sabbatical in Italy. And the museum is proposing to increase his salary by almost a quarter. That doesn’t sit well with junior staff. “Here we have a director on a six-month sabbatical, travelling the world, while the lowest-paid members of staff can barely afford to get themselves to work.” The Scotsman 06/13/02

Thursday June 13

MORATORIUM ON COLLECTING: The Denver Museum is building a $62 million addition. To help focus on getting ready for the expansion, the museum has declared a moratorium on acquistions. “The museum will not make purchases or accept any gifts of artworks except those to be exhibited in the new wing, and it will not grant loans of pieces to other institutions or borrow from them.” Denver Post 06/13/02

CLEVELAND EXPANSION: The Cleveland Museum of Art has approved plans for a $170 million-plus expansion. Architect Rafael Vinoly presented plans for the addition this week. The museum hopes to start construction in 2004. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 06/13/02

FOR THE SOUL OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY: London’s Royal Academy has had a very successful few years. But now director David Gordon is leaving, and the RA is at a crossroads. “At issue is whether artists or administrators should run the public side of the organisation, now that it has been transformed into a £20 million-a-year business, putting on world-class exhibitions. With the RA about to embark on a £50 million project to take over 6 Burlington Gardens, the former Museum of Mankind building, the debate has added urgency.” The Art Newspaper 06/10/02

DRAW ME A PICTURE: Is there any place for drawing in art? “If art can be bought ready-made, or if it can be made in some way that has nothing to do with manual dexterity, with a video camera or a computer program, then drawing, this essential act of making, has definitely been marginalized, turned into a sideline, a caprice. A sea change has occurred, one of the fundamental ones in the history of art, or so we are told. But what of those artists who still believe that art is not so much in the conceptualization as in the realization?” The New Republic 06/10/02

Wednesday June 12

BRITISH MUSEUM STRIKE: The British Museum won’t open next Monday because of a 24-hour strike by its workers. They are protesting cuts and management of the museum. “It is believed to be the first time the museum will have closed because of industrial action in its 250-year history.” The Guardian (UK) 06/12/02

FOOD FIGHT: A show of Italian Masters sponsored by the Italian government and sent to Australia has provoked a fierce review that has insulted the Italians. “Attacks on the show feed fears that Australia is regarded by the rest of the world as the back of beyond, a place where nobody would care to send too many masterpieces, and also that Australians are taken for bumpkins, too unsophisticated to realise when they are being fobbed off.” The Times (UK) 06/12/02

DESIGN-CHALLENGED: Wonder why people don’t grow up with an appreciation for good architecture? Start with school buildings. The province of Ontario is building new schools, but the amount spent on design is pitiful. “On their own and strapped for money, some of the region’s school boards are replicating school designs over two or three different sites. Sadly, the new schools in Toronto can’t achieve the robust detailing of the public schools that emerged in the city in the early 20th century.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/12/02

THE COWS COME TO LONDON: The arts cows invade London. “The organisers claim it as the world’s largest public art event. And with more than 150 bovines on display, and another six cities around the world lining up for more cow action, they might not be far wrong.” They’ve earned respect in other cities, even in cities where you wouldn’t expect it. In New York “their cumulative effect on the viewer was to disrupt the flow of thought. What struck me was the extent to which people noticed them and began to treat them in a way that public sculptors hardly dare to dream of – with respect. No one vandalised the New York cows.” London Evening Standard 06/12/02

SETTING UP FOR ART: Howard Hodgkin makes set designs for the theatre. They’re distinctive and drawings of them have been collected up for an exhibition this summer. But don’t call them art. Hodgkin will get angry if you do. “They exist only as part of a performance, on stage, with performers, audience, lighting. Otherwise they’re no more real than those discarded costume sketches people hang on their walls and expect you to admire. Completely ridiculous.” The Telegraph (UK) 06/12/02

DEALER SENTENCED FOR ART SALES: New York art dealer Frederick Schultz has been sentenced to 33 months in prison for trying to sell stolen Egyptian artifacts. “The stiff sentence, coming after Mr. Schultz’s conviction on Feb. 12, is seen as a sign of the federal government’s determination to crack down on the trade in ancient objects that have been illegally taken out of their countries of origin.” The New York Times 06/12/02

Tuesday June 11

A PLAN TO SAVE VENICE: Venice has decided to build a controversial “Thames barrier-type structure with 79 gates, each weighing 300 tonnes” to help control flooding of the city’s lagoon. “But there are fears about how this might affect the Venice lagoon, particularly the possibility that it could further restrict the flushing of the city’s waterways by the tide, making the famous stinking canals more stagnant.” So British scientists have been brought in to “suggest ways to prevent the city becoming the first high-profile victim of global warming anda rise in sea levels.” The Guardian (UK) 06/10/02

THE ANNUAL: Each summer, London’s Royal Academy stages its Summer Exhibition. It’s in its 234th year, and it is the “largest open-submission exhibition of contemporary art anywhere in the world. Any such antiquity will naturally gather some myths, and the most pernicious and unfair myth, unthinkingly retailed, is that the summer show is the repository of the amateur and Sunday painting, boardroom portrait and worthy landscape.” Financial Times 06/11/02

• HOUSE OF THE ALREADY-DONES: “At this year’s show one is frequently waylaid across a crowded room by some familiar-seeming image, only to realise on closer inspection that it is not actually a Lucian Freud, or a Cy Twombly, or a Richard Artschwager, as one might suppose, but in fact some sedulous substitute.” The Times (UK) 06/11/02

HARVARD MUSEUM CHIEF TO COURTAULD: James Cuno, the director of the Harvard University Art Museums since 1991, has been named director of the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. The appointment is seen as a sideways move for the highly-regarded Cuno, who is also president of the Association of Art Museum Directors in the US. His departure from Harvard is “the latest in a number of high-profile departures from the university since the arrival last year of president Lawrence H. Summers.” Boston Globe 06/11/02

Monday June 10

DOCUMENTING CONTEMPORARY ART: The 11th Documenta opens in Kassel. “Despite contemporary techniques – video, installation, photography – this Documenta 11 fails to match the work of much of the 1990s in loudness, velocity or the frequency of its shock effects. There are fewer illustrations of political theses than feared, and instead more truly classical art than many might have anticipated. In order to avoid making a loss, Documenta 11 must attract 630,000 visitors to Kassel and earn over euro 6.9 million ($6.5 million) by Sept. 15.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06/09/02

A CONSERVATION SCANDAL: How was the ancient Villa of the Papyri – one of the richest and largest of the ancient Roman villas ever discovered, “allowed to degenerate into a massive dumping site for rubbish while weeds ravaged the ancient mosaic floor, holes in the plastic roof left it exposed to rain, and rising water levels blocked access to the site?” It’s a sad case of bungled bureaucracy… The Art Newspaper 06/07/02

IS THIS ANY WAY TO BUILD A CITY? So Los Angeles might get a new football stadium, and it might not cost taxpayers money. Okay – but potential developers of the project are so far shy about revealing details of the project – like where exactly it might be built. Should Angelinos trust them? The “plans for downtown have yet to show such ambition. They are safe, formulaic, somewhat soulless. They embody an age of corporate gigantism in which decisions are made by committee, and the only real concern is the bottom line.” Is this any way to plan urban landscapes? Los Angeles Times 06/10/02

PAUL GOTTLIEB, 67: “In his 20 years as publisher and editor in chief of the country’s most notable publisher of art books he exercised vast influence, not merely on how such books are published but also on how art is presented and promoted at museums around the world. Gottlieb knew just about everybody connected in one way or another to publishing and art.” Washington Post 06/10/02

Sunday June 9

BRITISH MUSEUM STRIKE PROTEST: Staff at the British Museum have voted to strike to protest plans by the museum to cut 150 workers. The financially-challenged museum is trying to close a £5m budget shortfall. “National treasures will be hidden away from the public, galleries will be closed off and less school children will be educated in the British Museum if the government does not accept that world-class museums cannot be funded by gift shops and cafes alone.” The Guardian (UK) 06/08/02

WHOSE HISTORY? Britain has always had a reverence for its history, and the country is full of historic markers. But “is today’s historic environment – the stately homes, museums, religious edifices, tourist attractions, heritage centres, preservation areas – adequately serving the complex intellectual requirements of a multi-cultural, multi-layered Britain? Not according to a recent report by the Historic Environment Steering Group. This commission of great and good heritage experts worryingly concluded that, ‘People are interested in the historic environment.But many people feel powerless and excluded’.” The Guardian (UK) 06/07/02

Friday June 7

THE FRIDA FAD: “Never has a woman with a mustache been so revered – or so marketed – as Frida Kahlo. Like a female Che Guevara, she has become a cottage industry. In the past year, Volvo has used her self-portraits to sell cars to Hispanics, the U.S. Postal Service put her on a stamp, and Time magazine put her on its cover. There have been Frida look-alike contests, Frida operas, plays, documentaries, novels, a cookbook, and now, an English-language movie. But, like a game of telephone, the more Kahlo’s story has been told, the more it has been distorted, omitting uncomfortable details that show her to be a far more complex and flawed figure than the movies and cookbooks suggest.” Washington Monthly 06/02

RETURN TO REALISM (DID IT EVER GO AWAY?): Painters and sculptors who have eschewed abstraction in rendering their particular take on the visible world have proliferated and thrived, occasionally even generating a movement—photorealism, for example. Now, emerging from the last decade’s polymorphous stew of postmodernism, realist artists are moving back into the foreground. But there’s just one puzzle: no one seems able to define what realism actually is.” ArtNews 06/02

Thursday June 6

THE NEW WTC – A TOWERING CONCEPT? Word is that the architects working on plans for a replacement for the World Trade Center are contemplating a building of about the same height as the Twin Towers. “The tower also could be shorter, perhaps 1,300 feet or 1,350 feet, but it clearly would be no ordinary office building. It would contain about 65 to 70 stories of office floors, with the highest of those floors reaching 900 feet or more. Above them would be an empty vertical space, enclosed in a skeletal extension of the building’s superstructure, making it visible to passersby. This chamber of air, which would be 300 to 400 feet tall, would soar ethereally toward the clouds.” Chicago Tribune 06/06/02

CUBAN CLAIMS FOR ART: Many Cuban refugees fleeing Cuba had to leave artwork behind. “Over the last decade, a growing number of these works have surfaced outside Cuba and been put up for sale. Some left the island via diplomatic channels, others were exported privately and illegally, and some, particularly in the early 1990’s, were put on the international market by Cuba itself as it sought hard currency.” Increasingly, the original owners are making claims for the art. The New York Times 06/06/02

A LITTLE ART SCANDAL: A British internet firm offers exclusive reproductions of “never before published” Old Master drawings from the British Museum. But of course this isn’t right. “The talk of unpublished, rarely seen material is nonsense. But the most misleading thing of all is the omission, in this quasi-official joint-venture parasitic commercial- wheeze website, of the fact that any member of the public, at any time during opening hours, can ask to see any drawing or print in the museum’s collection, and that this access is free.” The Guardian (UK) 06/06/02

TAKES ONE TO CATCH ONE: A British art security expert is defending his use of an art thief to track down two stolen works of art – including a Titian. “The ex-prisoner has been using his former criminal contacts to make inquiries about the paintings, and has claimed that recently he came close to the art thieves.” BBC 06/06/02

QUEEN’S GALLERY USED ENDANGERED WOOD: Queen Elizabeth’s new Queen’s Gallery is under attack because endangered rare tropical woods were used in its construction. “The use of this timber not only goes against the palace’s sustainable forest purchasing policy, but is a snub to the Duke of Edinburgh, president emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund, who said in 1998 that all ‘forests subject to commercial exploitation should be certified under the Forest Stewardship Council certification scheme’.” The Guardian (UK) 06/05/02

Wednesday June 5

MISSING IN ACTION: A more complete list of valuable art items lost in the World Trade Center collapse is being put together. Among them: “first editions of Helen Keller’s books. Sculptures by Auguste Rodin. Artifacts from the African Burial Ground, a centuries-old Manhattan cemetery. Thousands of photographs of Broadway, off-Broadway and even off-off-Broadway shows.” Los Angeles Times (AP) 06/05/02

GOING THREE-DIMENSIONAL: Forget painting – sculpture is the hot artform of choice right now. “Sculpture is no longer the poor cousin of painting. A lot of established painting collectors have turned their backs and started buying sculptures. They’ve filled their walls with pictures and now are looking for objects to put outside in their gardens or in their beach houses.” Sydney Morning Herald 06/05/02

GROVELING TO BE LIKED? The newly reopened Manchester Art Gallery is doubled in size. It’s a handsome new building. But “the displays are presented with a frantically jovial emphasis on accessibility. The room containing the most recent items, for example, is labelled ‘Modern Art – You Cannot Be Serious’, which is more suitable for a tabloid headline on the Turner Prize than a serious museum.” The Telegraph (UK) 06/05/02

WHAT’S IT TAKE? The new Turner Prize short list is up, but one critic is still thinking about last year’s winner. “You have to make suitable contemporary art, and smack suitably of controversy, to stand a chance of winning the Turner Prize; and actually winning it bestows both fame and a heroic aspect. In one sense the winner can be seen to represent all struggling and misunderstood artists whose work may be a darn sight less controversial in international art world terms, but which can be just as misunderstood, if not more so, in one’s own local context. Making art and the way it’s perceived is all relative to the time and place you happen to be in. Fame also means that a lot more people will misunderstand and denigrate your work than before, so it’s a mixed blessing.” *spark-online 06/02

IN PRAISE OF GLASS: Glass is the latest hot material in buildings. “New kinds of glass – for ceilings, floors, walls – are helping define the latest architectural look at home and at work, according to a survey of some 500 exhibitors at the recent American Institute of Architects’ national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Instead of hanging art on the walls, designers can manipulate building materials so that color, texture and mood are integrated into the walls themselves.” Wired 06/05/02

Tuesday June 4

MET DOWN: The Metropolitan Museum in New York has seen a big dip in visitors this year. “The museum has lost about 1 million visitors this year, down from about 5 million in each of the two years before.” That translates to a drop of 20-25 percent. Museum officials say the biggest decline is visitors from Asia and Europe. New York Post 06/04/02

TASTE TEST: New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, art historian Linda Nochlin and writer George Plimpton get together to talk about approaching art. “Taste is the residue of our previous experience, and if we are presented with something that doesn’t fit we immediately try to reject it. I think that’s good. Taste keeps us from being wowed by absolutely everything all the time; without it, we wouldn’t get to work in the morning. Out of a spirit of economy, we try to reject things, or to put them aside, or to think they’re understood. I think that’s healthy, in a way. I think that if you’re a critic you’re supposed to stick with it till you feel sure, and when a work of art defeats all my best efforts to dismiss it, that’s when I go down on my knees and want to shout about it to everyone.” The New Yorker 06/03/02

STOLEN GIACOMETTI: A Giacometti sculpture was stolen from the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. “Thieves had used the crowd of about 16,000 visitors on the center’s extra ‘Long Night’ with opening hours extended until 3:00 a.m. to swap the original bronze for a painted wooden figure.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06/03/02

Monday June 3

THE BRITISH MUSEUM’S LITTLE PROBLEM: “The British Museum has the collections to make it, with the Met in New York and the Louvre in Paris, one of the three great museums in the world. It is also visited by three million tourists a year, a quarter of all visitors to London, which makes it a showpiece for the capital and for the country. If it is dim and dusty and closed for business, it makes the whole nation look bad.” So how, with all the lottery money put aside for culture in the past decade, does the BM find itself in such precarious financial condition? London Evening Standard 05/031/02

THE QUEEN’S NEW MESS: Critics are piling on Queen Elizabeth’s new gallery to mark her jubilee. “To give it its due, what will be the most enduring physical reminder of the Queen’s golden jubilee does give confused visitors unclear about which parts of the palace are off-limits an unmistakable signal of where they will be welcome. But it looks more like a collection of giant milk bottles, left at the backdoor of the palace, rather than a descendant of the sublime Greek temples of Paestum that [architect John] Simpson fondly imagines them to be.” The Observer (UK) 06/02/02

Sunday June 2

PRICELESS? IT’S JUST A WORD: Recent high prices for paintings gets one reporter thinking about how the value for great works of art is set. “If ‘priceless’ is a real concept to a museum curator, it’s just a word – and a false one at that – in the calculating marketplace, where everything has a price.” What would be the real-world price of some of the Art Institute of Chicago’s most famous pictures? Chicago Sun-Times 06/02/02

NO SMALL MATTER: Smithsonian chief Lawrence Small has roiled the institution like none before him. “Since Small’s arrival, markers of an institution in turmoil have popped up almost monthly: Directors of six museums submitted their resignations. Congress had to step in to save pioneering scientific research. A benefactor withdrew $38 million after her ideas were ridiculed by staffers. And more than 200 academics protested the “commercialization” of the Smithsonian–even faulting its decision to award the cafeteria contract at the National Air and Space Museum to McDonald’s.” Los Angeles Times 06/02/02

ART OF THE MEETING: Documenta is the once-every-five-years assemblage of contemporary art. “Documenta is not this year’s only group show, but Kassel is definitely Rendezvous 2002 for museum directors, curators, dealers, gallery owners and collectors. They will be there because everyone will be there.” The New York Times 06/02/02

Friday May 31

HOOD WINS ARCHIBALD: Cherry Hood’s portrait Simon Tedeschi Unplugged has won this year’s Archibald Prize. The $35,000 Archibald Prize, in its 81st year, is Australia’s pre-eminent portrait competition. This year 751 artists entered the competition. Sydney Morning Herald 05/31/02

THIS YEAR’S LOW-OCTANE TURNER: The Tate’s Turner Prize is calculated to be controversial – how better to draw attention to contemporary art? “This year, however, the judges have selected four rather cerebral, unflashy artists who are unlikely to create tabloid headlines. Of course, they are quite unknown to anyone outside the small world of contemporary art, and not one is a painter: once again, in a nation that celebrates Hockney and Freud among working artists, the judges have somehow been unable to uncover in the past year one decent show by a painter under the age of 50.” Financial Times 05/31/02

• THE BARBIE BOOBY PRIZE: “Leading arts figures, who delight in mocking the Turner by suggesting four-year-olds could do a lot better, are backing a new children’s art prize – which, offering £20,000, boasts the same prize money as the famous Tate Britain award.” The competition would be for children ages 4-11. The Guardian (UK) 05/30/02
• Previously: TURNER SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED: The list of four finalists for Britain’s controversial Turner Prize has been released. Last year, the £20,000 prize was won by Martin Creed for an empty gallery space with a flickering light. The Turner is designed to spark interest in and conversation about contemporary art, and it always manages to do so, even if much of the talk is criticism of the winning work. A sampling of the nominees’ work can be found here. BBC 05/30/02

TATE MODERN’S OVERDUE ANNOUNCEMENT: Vicente Todoli’s appointment as the new director of Tate Modern this week caught many by surprise. Not that Todoli’s not up for the job. It’s just that “the job has been open so long, since founding director Lars Nittve left a year ago to head the national museum in his native Sweden, that there was some speculation that the Tate might even manage without a director.” The Guardian (UK) 05/30/02

• Previously: TATE MODERN’S NEW BOSS: “Spanish museum boss Vicente Todoli is to be the new director of London’s Tate Modern art gallery, taking over early next year [and succeeding Lars Nittve.] Mr Todoli, 43, studied art history at Yale University in the US after getting a degree at the University of Valencia. He was chief curator and artistic director of Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno before joining the Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal, as its founding director in 1996.” BBC 05/29/02

MONUMENT OR MAUSOLEUM? The new Dresden Library is more a monument to the past than the future. “Its architectonic profile seems to prefigure the fate of all the libraries in the Internet age to become wondrously brooding mausoleums, tombs for the books that may even occasionally be taken in hand, if only out of sentimentality or piety. Viewed thus, the hermetic Book Museum, its precious volumes displayed under gently reduced artificial light, would no longer be a tabernacle of the art of Gutenberg, but instead the exquisite sepulchral chapel of literature as we knew it.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 05/30/02

FRAUGHT WITH FREUD: Lucien Freud is widely considered Britain’s best living painter. Next month he’ll get a major retrospective of his work in London. “As many of his sitters have found, having Lucian Freud recreate you in paint is not an unrelieved joy. Jerry Hall’s portrait turned her into an amorphous lump of pregnant fleshy blubber. The Queen’s portrait, unveiled last December, provoked a tirade of abuse for its unflattering delineation of a blue-chinned nightclub bouncer in a fright wig and a filthy temper.” The Independent (UK) 05/30/02

Thursday May 30

TURNER SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED: The list of four finalists for Britain’s controversial Turner Prize has been released. Last year, the £20,000 prize was won by Martin Creed for an empty gallery space with a flickering light. The Turner is designed to spark interest in and conversation about contemporary art, and it always manages to do so, even if much of the talk is criticism of the winning work. A sampling of the nominees’ work can be found here. BBC 05/30/02

LIGHTNING DAMAGES OBELISK: Lightning damaged a 3,000-year-old obelisk in Rome this week. “A two metre chunk of granite toppled from the 24-metre obelisk during a thunderstorm in Rome late on Monday.” The obelisk was stolen from Ethiopia by Mussolini in 1937, and the African nation has been trying to get it back ever since. The Guardian (UK) 05/29/02

DON’T LET MUSEUMS OFF THE HOOK: In Britain, artists are protesting the way the government values art. But at least one critic believes museums and galleries are complicit in the problem. “In my view, the main problem facing these valuable national institutions is not so much their lack of money as their distorted priorities. At present these collections are not giving the pleasure and inspiration that they could. This is because their traditional functions of presenting and interpreting great works of art are undervalued in today’s cultural policy circles.” The Independent (UK) 05/28/02

ART INSTITUTE GETS GAUGUIN: The Chicago Art Institute has landed a gift of 41 watercolors and other works on paper. “The Art Institute is known for its works on paper from the 18th to the 20th century. This expected new influx of old master drawings would place it in the top rank of museums in this category as well. No other museum holds a group of Gauguin’s works on paper comparable to that being donated, curators here said. Most depict scenes from Tahiti.” The New York Times 05/30/02

SMITHSONIAN TO MEMORIALIZE 9/11: A new exhibit set to open at the Smithsonian on the one-year anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington “will include photographs, video footage, personal accounts and at least 50 objects selected to tell the story of that day. Visitors also will be allowed to share their own Sept. 11 stories through written responses or audio recording.” Minneapolis Star Tribune (Newhouse) 05/30/02

Wednesday May 29

TATE MODERN’S NEW BOSS: “Spanish museum boss Vicente Todoli is to be the new director of London’s Tate Modern art gallery, taking over early next year [and succeeding Lars Nittve.] Mr Todoli, 43, studied art history at Yale University in the US after getting a degree at the University of Valencia. He was chief curator and artistic director of Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno before joining the Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal, as its founding director in 1996.” BBC 05/29/02

SECURITY HOLE: What does the theft of hundreds of works of art from small European museums by a lone thief say about the museums’ security measures? Most museums protect themselves against gangs and sophisticated thieves, not lone visitors who walk in and steal. “In a way, small museums are better protected at night than in the day. The buildings are usually well secured, but the objects themselves are often very poorly secured, or not at all.” The New York Times 05/29/02

POLITICS OVERSHADOWS ART: A London curator was asked last year to put together a show on human rights during the Israel Festival in Jerusalem. “I chose to focus on those artists whose work had addressed identity, place and issues of displacement in other parts of the world. They, I thought, could provide models that might resonate here.” He chose international artists – no Israelis, no Palestinians. But by the time the show was ready to open recently, one by one the artists had withdrawn. “Each artist offered one excuse or another. For some it was simply fear of suicide bombers. Most of the excuses were rooted in politics, or possibly ideology covering for anxiety. It is hard to argue a defence when feelings run so deep.” London Evening Standard 05/28/02

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FUNCTIONAL ARCHITECTURE? As the number of new, high-profile buildings in North American cities continues to grow, some critics are becoming concerned over what they see as a lack of respect for the people who will have to use the buildings on a daily basis. Form is no longer following function if function interferes with the architect’s ego. “These kinds of oversights have become frequent since architects were encouraged to think of themselves as artists rather than master builders. And when sculptural buildings are placed in a dense urban setting such as Toronto, the problems are harder to fix.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 05/29/02

FEEL THE PAIN: A number of artists make art around inflicting gruesome pain on themselves. Viewers recoil in horror, and the artists claim to be exploring a fundamental side of human existance. But does an artist need to feel the pain to express it? And do viewers gain anything from such displays? The Times (UK) 05/29/02

POPPING INTO ART: In the UK “much of the pop culture of the Sixties came directly out of the art colleges, which were then the principal hotbed of student dissent and a ferment of creative activity far outside the traditional disciplines of fine art courses.” Now, it seems pop culture figures are the ones producing visual art, and we’re still paying attention… The Times (UK) 05/29/02

Tuesday May 28

POST-BIENNIAL: Manifesta is a European biennial for contemporary art that is a “project” rather than an “exhibition.” “This Manifesta is a nontrivial relationship machine. Many give it input, but nobody knows what the output will be. The machine produces an open, networked field of art, a terrain of rapprochement and examination. Video, performance, photography, assemblage, installation: What is shown here is art after the disintegration of all genres and borders. Art products from the present day’s conveyor belt – medial, networked, young.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 05/27/02

DRESSING UP: The exhibition of Jaqueline Kennedy’s dresses was such a hit in New York, that the competition to host the show when it comes to Chicago was intense. Three of the city’s most prestigious museums found themselves competing with one another – not because the art component was so compelling, but because the show figures to make so much money for whichever museum landed it. Says one director: “I view the competition among our museums as a good thing – it helps us achieve our best. The results ensure a continuous lineup of great exhibits for Chicago and the growing tourism industry.” Chicago Tribune 05/28/02

ROME AWAKES: After decades of architectural slumber in which contemporary architects bypassed the city of Rome, the Italian capital has finally begun building again, and with first-class international architects. “Not all Romans welcome this new renaissance. Some decry what they call the “Los Angelization of Rome”. Wired 05/27/02

WHAT BECOMES A DEALER? Madonna is currently playing an art dealer in the play Up for Grabs in London’s West End. The play “reinforces the common perception of art dealing as a manipulative, seedy, morally corrupt business in which you certainly wouldn’t want your daughter involved. It isn’t, of course. But art dealing is one of the last unregulated businesses, and from the outside the fixing of prices can seem random and open to manipulation.” The Guardian (UK) 05/27/02

Monday May 27

SAO PAULO – ART OF DISCORD: Physically, the São Paulo Biennial is “the largest celebration of art in the world, exceeding even its better-known counterpart in Venice. But organizing such a show has always been a process fraught with controversy and adversity, and the 25th biennial has proven no exception.” The controversy began long before this year’s edition opened, and only intensified after the exhibitions went up. The New York Times 05/27/02

TURNER’S OPENING ACT? The Tate has opened a show of 74 paintings by Paul McCartney in galleries adjacent to a Turner show. Guess which one’s getting more attention? The museum hopes that a few of those tramping through the McCartney show will find their way to Turner. The Guardian (UK) 05/24/02

SEOUL’S NEW MUSEUMS: In the past few weeks two new major museums have opened in Seoul. “Last week, the Seoul Metropolitan Government opened the Seoul Museum of Art (SMA) after relocating it into a modern historic building next to Deoksu Palace in downtown Seoul. Another new arrival on Seoul’s cultural map is the Seoul Historical Museum, after seven years of construction. Covering two different subjects, contemporary art and the city’s historical heritage, the two institutions are expected to emerge as hot attractions in the downtown Seoul area.” Korea Herald 05/23/02

Sunday May 26

PRETTY PICTURES: There are 730 entries in this year’s Archibald Prize, Australia’s most notorious painting prize. It’s “that moment of the year when the country’s attention turns to canvas and assorted surfaces, and the arrangement upon them of pigment approximating portraiture. There are other prizes, there are richer prizes, but there’s only one Archibald, and there are more artists than ever who are eager to make the most of it.” The Age (Melbourne) 05/25/02

SENSE OF PLACE: Artists from Chicago used to call themselves “Chicago artists.” But beginning in the 1980s, they began referring to themselves as “Chicago-based” artists. “The implication was that they had become an elevated kind of nomad circling the globe, making and showing art anywhere. Chicago was just the place they had chosen to bed down. That attitude now is widespread. The most contemporary visual artists in London or Paris or Rio de Janeiro or Kabul seldom want to be known as being of those cities.” Yes, it’s just words – but what does the change mean to how artists perceive their relationships with the places they live? Chicago Tribune 05/26/02

ROYAL MESS: The art inside might be magnificent, but the the new Queen’s Gallery is a mess. “Welcome to the toy-sized magnificence of our latest Royal architecture, where friezes, flaccid as putty, portray Homeric allegories of our dear Queen’s reign, and where you expect chocolate soldiers to pop out from behind each dwarfish column, or out of each stunted niche. It is a commission calling for subtlety and quiet dignity, but it has received shrivelled pomposity.” London Evening Standard 05/24/02

Friday May 24

THIEF – I DID IT FOR THE LOVE OF ART: “In the latest twist to a case that has left the art world reeling, Stephane Breitwieser, who was arrested in the Swiss city of Lucerne last November after stealing a bugle from a museum, told police his six-year spree was driven by a love of art rather than a desire to make money. Many of the 60-odd 16th, 17th and 18th century canvases stolen, including works by Boucher, Watteau and Breughel, are thought to have been destroyed by his mother Mireille, who told French police that soon after her son was arrested she cut them up into small pieces and threw them out with the rubbish ‘because the house absolutely had to be wiped clean’.” The Guardian (UK) 05/23/02

SELLING OFF NATIONAL HERITAGE: As old German families sell off their collections to raise money, German governments at various levels attempt to buy them so the artwork stays in Germany. Trouble is, cash-strapped German governments can barely afford essential services, let alone art… Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 05/23/02

Thursday May 23

SECOND-RATE MASTERS? In Australia an exhibition of Italian master paintings, called by the Italian culture minister “the most important exhibition ever to leave Italy,” has been blasted in a front page review in a national paper. “Benjamin Genocchio, a Sydney-based critic and art historian who is a citizen of both Australia and Italy, called the show ‘a resoundingly average exhibition of minor pictures by second- and third-division artists’. His review on the front page of The Australian, a national daily broadsheet, also charged that The Italians, as the show is popularly billed, was marred by restoration errors and attribution questions.” The New York Times 05/23/02

EARNING ITS KEEP: For many arts organizations, fundraising is a constant balancing act between selling the notion that the arts are something worth paying for, and trying not to sound like a charity case. Boston’s Museum of the Fine Arts, however, has gone the traditional route one better, commissioning a study which indicates that the MFA is a cash cow for the region, creating new jobs and new businesses, and pumping hundreds of millions into the local economy every year. Why bother with the study? Well, MFA is expanding, and needs something in the neighborhood of $425 million to accomplish it. Boston Globe 05/23/02

MINIMAL SUCCESS: “Scottish artist Callum Innes has won the £30,000 Jerwood painting prize. The Edinburgh-born painter, who has been compared with Mark Rothko, creates large-scale minimalist and monochromatic paintings. Innes, who has been nominated for the Jerwood and Turner prizes in the past, fought off competition from well-established artists Graham Crowley and Lisa Milroy and the recognised talent of Paul Morrison, Nicky Hoberman and Pamela Golden. The Jerwood remains the most valuable single prize awarded to an artist in the UK and attracts submissions from many leading British painters.” BBC 05/22/02

MEIER WAY NOT THE HIGH WAY: When Atlanta’s High Museum decided to double in size with a $130 million addition, officials didn’t even consider asking Richard Meier, the High’s original architect, for a plan. Instead, without a competition, it hired Renzo Piano. “It seems very strange not to have consulted or hired the original architect. It’s the best building in Atlanta and Meier’s first big commission. It would have been interesting to see what he would have done now that he’s done a lot of other museums.” The New York Times 05/23/02

GENUINE FAKE MASTERPIECES FOR SALE: The Supreme Court in Australia has cleared the way for the sale of a massive collection of fake artwork owned by a deceased art dealer, who appears to have been passing them off to her clients as works by real masters. The dealer’s husband had been seeking to have the sale blocked, but the executor of the estate won the right to go ahead with it. Oh, and one more twist: the executor just happens to be the same man who executed the fakes in the first place. Sydney Morning Herald 05/23/02

Wednesday May 22

VIRTUAL BUDDHAS: “It was an act of cultural desecration that shocked the world. The age-old Buddhas at Bamiyan in northern Afghanistan, which had withstood the ravages of Genghis Khan and centuries of invasions and wars, proved powerless against the destructive zealotry of the Taliban regime. Now the Buddhas are making a comeback of sorts, thanks to the efforts of a Swiss entrepreneur and a team of researchers at a Swiss university.” The twist is that the comeback is of the digital variety, and employs the very latest in 3D imaging technology. Wired 05/22/02

WE DON’T CARE WHO BUILDS ‘EM: Here’s a blow to architects’ egos. A new poll by an architecture organization reports that “81% of respondents claimed that they were interested in the look and feel of the buildings they use” Good news, yes. But only 16% could name a living architect. Oddly, asked to name a living architect, five percent identified 17th-Century master Christopher Wren. The Guardian (UK) 05/20/02

WHERE ELSE WOULD YOU DITCH IT? When the mother of the thief who stole a billion-plus dollars worth of art decided to dump the art, she drove to a small French town and threw it into a canal. Not a good place. In November the shallow canal is clear, and it wasn’t long before the valuable art was spotted. The New York Times 05/22/02

GOING BEYOND ‘WASH ME’: The winner of a £10,000 contemporary drawing prize in the U.K. may have won the cash, but another finalist appears to have captured the hearts and minds of both public and press. Ben Long creates incredibly intricate drawings in the dust and grime caked to the side of vans and cars, and was named a finalist after submitting videos of himself creating the works. He didn’t win, but the publicity being heaped upon him is a pretty good consolation prize. BBC 05/22/02

Tuesday May 21

THE PROBLEM WITH SPIFFING UP: The new Manchester Art Gallery reopens after a major project to double its size and dress it up with all sorts of new enhancements. “Why are museums convinced that the art itself, well presented and well explained, isn’t magical or marvellous or interesting enough? Why does art have to be tarted-up and given all this spin? Unless it is done as well as an arcade or console game, the family are going to be convinced that the stuff in the rest of the gallery is second-rate too. They will expect entertainment on every level, and generally they are not going to find it. I believe this kind of thing actually reaffirms the notion that art is dull, dry, dusty and dead. This isn’t dumbing down – it is just patronising, and no substitute for good teaching elsewhere.” The Guardian (UK) 05/21/02

DIGITAL DIFFICULTY: Why does the artworld seem to have difficulty accepting digital art? “Computers have been seen for the past 50 years as tools of business and science, and more recently, expensive typewriters. Because much of the digital art out there is native to the computer, that’s where it is best displayed. People are unaccustomed to writing emails on a platform of artistic expression. Perhaps they are in denial.” *spark-online 05/02

Monday May 20

HOOSIER HISTORY: The new $105 million Indiana State Museum opens this week in Indianapolis. “The struggle to create a permanent home to honor the state’s past consumed more than a half-century of empty legislative promises.” Indianapolis Star-Tribune 05/19/02

ONLINE GALLERY GOES BUST: They were going to change the way people bought art. They were going to put traditional galleries out of business. Actually no. The online artsellers have been going out of business, and Eyestorm, one of the most prominent, is being liquidated. “Art lovers are reluctant to buy works they have not experienced first-hand. To compensate, Eyestorm opened galleries in London and New York — a seeming contradiction to its original premise of allowing buyers to avoid the gallery scene.” The New York Times 05/20/02

Sunday May 19

STOLEN BERLIN ART RECOVERED: “Nine expressionist paintings worth an estimated $3.3m that were stolen from a Berlin museum last month have been recovered. The paintings were found rolled up together in a holdall at an apartment in Berlin, said police… Six of the paintings were by Erich Heckel, and one each by Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein. Most were painted between 1908 and 1920. Eight of them were undamaged, but the Pechstein painting – Young Girl, painted in 1908 – had been slashed.” BBC 05/18/02

500 YEARS OF ROYAL ART: “The cream of [Queen Elizabeth’s] collection of art and royal artefacts was unveiled on Friday, before going on public show in Buckingham Palace’s gallery… It features 450 pieces that have been acquired by the Royal Family over the last 500 years. Sketches by Da Vinci as well as works by Rubens, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Monet are among the masterpieces on show.” Also included in the show is Lucian Freud’s controversial (and fairly unflattering) portrait of Her Majesty. BBC 05/17/02

• PLENTY TO SEE: The royal exhibition contains some real gems, according to one critic. “Two small treasure chambers are crammed with priceless objects, including a belt given to Queen Victoria, two of the huge flawless Cullinan diamonds, and a display case full of Fabergé toys including animals modelled on farm pets at Sandringham… The drawings gallery is an unbroken parade of master-pieces – just one wall has two Holbeins, a Raphael, a Michaelangelo and a Leonardo da Vinci.” The Guardian (UK) 05/18/02

HONORING CONTEXT AS WELL AS EXTRAVAGANCE: One of the most frequent criticisms levelled at architects of high-profile projects is that they tend to ignore the larger context of the area in which their building is being placed. Too often, a dramatic new skyscraper overshadows everything around it, or clashes with other prominent towers nearby. So it was perhaps understandable that this year’s Governor-General awards in Canada seem to be making a special effort to honor architects who respect the landscape around their projects. The awards, which went to a dozen wildly disparate buildings across the country, are not concerned with scope and scale, but with the idea “that architecture should reveal the surrounding landscape.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 05/18/02

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS SELF-ABSORBED: Artist Tracy Emin’s career has always been more or less an exercise in voyeurism, with high-profile pieces ranging from an unmade bed (which was shortlisted for the Turner Prize,) to “a tent embroidered with the names of every man she ever slept with.” Emin is at Cannes this month, raising money for the ultimate peep show into her life – a feature film detailing her childhood in Margate, England. BBC 05/19/02

IT’S A DIRTY JOB, BUT… Okay, so it’s not exactly curator at the Guggenheim, but Mierle Ukeles likes her job just fine. She is the artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, and has been described by one critic as ‘the art world’s preeminent garbage girl.’ She creates art from trash, art celebrating trash (and the folks who get rid of it for us,) and would prefer to hang out at Staten Island’s famous Fresh Kills Landfill than at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But judging from the critical reaction to her work, the garbage theme is no gimmick. For Ukeles, it’s a passion. A darned weird passion, but a passion, nonetheless. New York Times 05/19/02

Friday May 17

MOM DESTROYS STOLEN ART: The French art thief spent years traveling Europe stealing art. After his mother heard he had been arrested she destroyed the art he had stolen – about $1.4 billion worth of it. “The case has stunned art experts because the 60 paintings and 112 objects that the police say Mr. Breitwieser has admitted stealing were estimated to be worth at least $1.4 billion. Among the paintings destroyed were works by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Corneille de Lyon and Watteau.” The New York Times 05/17/02

• Previously: SHE DID SEND HIM TO HIS ROOM, THOUGH: An art thief made his way across Europe for much of the last decade, stealing a violin here, a painting there, specializing in taking advantage of low security at small, regional collections, and storing everything he stole at his mother’s house in France. Then he was busted taking a bugle in Luzerne. “When his mother heard about the arrest she dumped many of the stolen artefacts in the canal – and later destroyed the paintings, forcing some of them into her waste disposal unit at home.” Total monetary loss: $1.4 billion. BBC 05/16/02

SYDNEY’S PEOPLE’S BIENNIAL: The Sydney Biennial isn’t a critic-pleaser. But it’s sure hooked the tourists. “It is so full of holes, many of them wondrously elaborate and large, that the critic can’t get a bead on anything. If the truth is out there (X-Files soundtrack, please) it’s impossible to pin down with certainty in all the curatorial Swiss cheese. While critics might have trouble locking onto a target, however, it’s clear that Grayson has a palpable hit on his hands. He’s got Sydney, if not the show, sewn up.” Sydney Morning Herald 05/17/02

SAVE AN ANCIENT LIBRARY: Classicists are calling for renewed excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, one of the great ancient libraries, found in southern Italy. They say that “flooding now poses a grave danger to the site and its precious library of ancient manuscripts. Among the authors whose works could lie buried beneath the volcanic debris are Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, Virgil, Horace and Livy. A full excavation might cost several million pounds, but this, the classicists argue, would be a small price to recover unknown writings by these intellectual giants.” The Art Newspaper 05/11/02

THE 9-11 SHOW: The Smithsonian is planning an exhibition commemorating the attacks of last September 11 on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Actually, the museum’s been planning it for awhile now – the first planning meeting was held last September 13. “The horrific events of Sept. 11 was probably the most widely watched tragedy in history, presenting special challenges for curators more comfortable dealing with events much further in the past.” Washington Post 05/17/02

HOW TO BE A GALLERY OWNER: You’re schlepping in a gallery, working as a faceless lowly assistant in the thrall of a gallery owner. How to make the leap to running you’re own gallery? There are essentially three ways. Our favorite? The Miss Brazil route: “The art world will embrace you because you have won a beauty contest, or worked as model, or recently got engaged to someone with the name Rockefeller. You already know how to pose for photographs, and you probably own a collection of pointy-toed shoes, which men love because, most of them, deep down, are attracted to girls who can grind egos to salt with the step of a stiletto heel.” Slate 05/16/02

INDIVIDUALITY AIN’T EVERYTHING: “It has been said that if we were to line a street with all the great houses of the past century, the result would be a very bad street with great houses. If architects do not speak for communities, we risk becoming obsolete. In order to concentrate on abstract design, we have already relinquished many services to developers, builders, and other economically driven forces. Given the rising need for responsive and humane environments, architects’ tendency for self-expression could result in the disintegration of the profession altogether, unless we rethink our role.” Metropolis 05/02

Thursday May 16

SHE DID SEND HIM TO HIS ROOM, THOUGH: An art thief made his way across Europe for much of the last decade, stealing a violin here, a painting there, specializing in taking advantage of low security at small, regional collections, and storing everything he stole at his mother’s house in France. Then he was busted taking a bugle in Luzerne. “When his mother heard about the arrest she dumped many of the stolen artefacts in the canal – and later destroyed the paintings, forcing some of them into her waste disposal unit at home.” Total monetary loss: $1.4 billion. BBC 05/16/02

RECORD PRICES: Buyers are enthusiastic at this week’s New York art sales, with record prices set for the work of 15 contemporary artists. Records were set for “established, blue-chip names as well as emerging artists. Last night, paintings by Gerhard Richter, whose retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art has drawn more than 300,000 visitors since it opened in February, brought the two highest prices.” The New York Times 05/16/02

FIRST LADY MAKES A GESTURE: Republican administrations are not known for their enthusiastic support of the arts, but First Lady Laura Bush is hoping that her husband will help Afghanistan rebuild its shattered artistic heritage in the wake of last fall’s military action. Mrs. Bush announced that she will be soliciting donations towards the restoration of the Bamiyan Buddhas from rich friends in Texas, and called on the U.S. government to help salvage other lost and damaged Afghan art. The Plain Dealer (AP) 05/16/02

TALL DREAMS: “Just as the brick towers of New York and Chicago once symbolized America’s aspirations to overtake the gable-roofed countinghouses of Europe, today’s glass and metal obelisks make a similar assertion about China and its East Asian neighbors—like Malaysia, which put its capital of Kuala Lumpur on the business map with the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers. ‘It’s an ego issue and a status thing. High-rises are the Pyramids of our time’.” Newsweek 05/15/02

DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK: You know a school is serious about good architecture when it hires world-renowned architect Rem Koolhaas to build a train noise muffler. Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology has done just that, and the gleaming steel tube which runs the length of a city block is just the latest in a new line of buildings, structures, and, um, mufflers, which are putting the school and its South Side neighborhood on the architectural map, after years of being derided as ‘America’s ugliest campus.’ Chicago Tribune 05/16/02

GOVERNOR-GENERAL AWARDS HANDED OUT: “A Nova Scotia house that glows like a lantern, a Montreal pavilion lining its outer glass wall with logs and a Richmond, B.C., municipal building are among those honoured with the 2002 Governor-General’s Medals in Architecture, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada announced yesterday.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 05/16/02

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: “The least-known great architect who ever worked in the [U.S.] capital — or, for that matter, in the nation — may be Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Representatives from nine preservation and cultural groups — including five from Washington — yesterday announced a five-year, $50 million attempt to make the name more famous… Latrobe was the architect of the most memorable rooms in the U.S. Capitol, including Statuary Hall and the old Senate and Supreme Court chambers. He designed both the north and south porticoes of the White House.” And that’s just the beginning… Washington Post 05/16/02

Wednesday May 15

FASCINATED BY FRIDA: Almost half a century after she died, painter Frida Kahlo is hot. “Kahlo, who died in 1954, was a crippled, bisexual Communist who painted visceral images of miscarriage and menstruation and was overshadowed by her more famous husband, Diego Rivera. Yet in the last 20 years, she’s joined the rarefied ranks of artists like Picasso, whose work is as ubiquitous as wallpaper. More than just a poster girl for artsy adolescents or a Latina role model, Kahlo is now a coffee mug, a key chain, and a postage stamp. Suddenly a fierce new wave of Fridamania is upon us that is conjuring up a new Kahlo, customized to suit 21st-century desires.” Village Voice 05/14/02

Tuesday May 14

RECORD AUSSIE SALE: The sale of a 1968 bronze Henry Moore sculpture for $490,000 has set a record price for work of art sold at auction in Australia. The Age (Melbourne) 05/14/02

BOTCHED ITALIAN RESTORATION: “Restoration projects in Italy are nearly always dogged by bitter controversy. The current restoration of the 14th- and 15th-century frescos in the Camposanto in Pisa has, however, raised controversy to a new level. The destruction of the frescos through a bungled attempt to clean them is not just a major scandal, it is an irreparable loss to the world of art.” The Telegraph (UK) 05/14/02

MISGUIDED HOBBY: No question Houston’s new Hobby Center for the Performing Arts is a big addition to the city’s cultural landscape. But “architecturally, the Hobby Center is a dud. The sure command of materials and details evident in Robert A.M. Stern’s earlier country houses and public buildings has deserted him here. The exterior looks slapdash and a bit tacky. Budget probably played a part – astonishing as it sounds, $92 million is cheap for a performing arts center these days – but a more fundamental problem may have been Mr. Stern’s trying to be a modernist when his heart, and his hand, were not really in it.” Dallas Morning News 05/13/02

Monday May 13

THE TROUBLE WITH MODIGLIANI: The highly-anticipated catologue raisonne on Modigliani has been delayed for a year and experts are upset. Modigliani research is hampered by fakes and a lack of scholarly order. “So highly charged is the subject that some researchers claim they have received death threats, and two have abandoned work on monographs. Things are not helped by a plethora of fakes on the market and bitter quarrels between the experts. Why is Modigliani so particularly targeted?” The Art Newspaper 05/10/02

THE MUSEUM THAT REMAKES A CITY: The Manchester Art Gallery has reopened in significantly larger and grander form. “From the moment visitors to the city step out from Piccadilly station, currently being rebuilt, it is clear that Manchester is well on its way to becoming a European city with real verve and style. The great achievement here has been to bring together two of Manchester’s finest Victorian buildings – the former Royal Manchester Institution and what was the Athenaeum Club – with a handsome new gallery on the site of what had long been a car park.” The Guardian (UK) 05/13/02

RENOVATION IN DETROIT: A museum renovation is never as simple as it seems like it should be. In Detroit, a proposed $91 million construction project for the Detroit Institute for the Arts has resulted in a $330 million capital drive, multiple architectural schemes that may or may not work together, and all the general chaos that seems to come with updating a classic building. Detroit News 05/13/02

RUNNING FROM COOPERATION: Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ontario College of Art & Design both want to expand with new buildings. Architect Will Alsop has come  up with a plan to “enhance their separate projects and achieve much more working together than either could on their own.” So why does everyone associated with the projects seem to be trying hard to ignore the idea? Toronto Star 05/12/02

Sunday May 12

IS THE ART MARKET HEADED FOR A FALL? Recent auction sales have been going through the roof, thanks in large part to a few greatly sought after works. But some observers are concerned that the world of art sales could be headed for territory all too familiar to anyone who spent the last few years digging out from the NASDAQ collapse. Still, for the moment, times are good for sellers, and though they may regret it later, no one seems too concerned about the bubble market at the moment. International Herald Tribune (Paris) 05/11/02

MILWAUKEE’S TRIUMPH: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is one of those charming but unfortunate cities seemingly doomed to exist in the shadow of another, larger, metropolis (Chicago,in this case.) But a new addition to the city’s art museum has critics raving nationwide, and some even believe that Milwaukee may be on its way to becoming an important regional arts center, with the Quadracci Pavilion as the centerpiece. Boston Globe 05/12/02

PLAYING DETECTIVE: “In a quixotic bid to help crack the most costly art heist on record, [filmmaker Albert] Maysles… is volunteering his time to solicit clues in a case that has stymied the FBI, Boston police detectives and museum investigators for 12 years.” The case involves a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and a tantalizing $5 million reward. International Herald Tribune (New York Times) 05/11/02

REBELLION IN TORONTO: “A new generation of Toronto painters is reacting to their elders’ relentless emphasis on clean, clinical presentation by creating works that are unabashedly luminous, lush and willfully garish. Mixing fresh paints and bold textures as freely and loudly as their predecessors mixed French semiotic theories and factory-made packaging, these adventurous darlings (or brats, depending on your generational bias) are bent on giving Toronto’s academic image a frothy, girly makeover. Pretty is the new smart.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 05/11/02

1,000 YEARS OF ISLAM – ONE ART COLLECTOR: What may be the most impressive assemblage of Islamic art in America exists thanks to the efforts of a Syrian-born political science professor at a New York university. The collection, much of which is now on permanent display in Los Angeles, is made up of some 800 pieces of ceramic, textile, and tilework spanning a thousand year period, and is valued at $15 million. New York Times 05/12/02

MORBIDLY PURPOSEFUL: A new exhibition in Paris purports to examine the history of the death mask. This is a difficult proposition, because, as any observer will tell you, death masks do not tend to be particularly full of meaning, which is, of course, the point. They reflect death, and are therefore mostly devoid of any of the sort of life-affiriming value we look for in most art. On an aesthetic level, they can be creepy, or just flat and affectless. Still, the human fascination with death, and our attempts to understand and preserve life and its tragic ends makes the exhibition work. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 05/10/02

ART WITHOUT A HOME: “Much has been said recently about the rights and wrongs of art being removed during wars from one owner or country to another. Yet the long history of such appropriations is rarely mentioned. It may be that Rome’s pillage of Corinth in 146 B.C., or Venice’s of Constantinople in 1204, now seem irrelevant because the spoils cannot be identified or because they have come to be associated with their new home. (The four horses of St. Mark’s is a case in point). But even when we know the fate of the booty, we accept the outcome after enough time has passed: in the long run, art has no permanent home.” New York Times 05/12/02

Friday May 10

RIGHT WAY ART: A Los Angeles artist tired of getting lost on a downtown freeway decided to alter the official sign, adding directions. He “designed, built and installed an addition to an overhead freeway sign – to exact state specifications – to help guide motorists.” The alteration stayed up for 9 months until it was discovered by highway workers tipped off by a local newspaper column. “The point of the project was to show that art has a place in modern society – even on a busy, impersonal freeway. He also wanted to prove that one highly disciplined individual can make a difference.” Los Angeles Times 05/09/02

SO WOULD THIS BE FUNCTION OVER FORM? “One of the most famous of all works of conceptual art, an enamel urinal entitled The Fountain, could fetch up to $2.5m at auction on Monday. The urinal, one of the “readymade” works of French artist Marcel Duchamp, is part of a complete set of his works being sold at the New York auction house Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg.” BBC 05/10/02

ART EVERY TWO YEARS: This year’s Biennale of Sydney features 57 artists from 21 countries. The Biennale is “an international modern art smorgasbord that evokes reactions ranging from pure excitement to bewilderment and the occasional ‘Hey! My grandmother could do better with a wooden stick and a pile of gravy’.” Sydney Morning Herald 05/10/02

JERWOOD ON DISPLAY: “An exhibition of work by the six-strong shortlist for the prestigious Jerwood Painting Prize has opened in London. Graham Crowley, Lisa Milroy, Callum Innes, Nicky Hoberman, Paul Morrison and Pamela Golden will find out on 22 May who has won the £30,000 prize. The Jerwood remains the most valuable single prize awarded to an artist in the UK and attracts submissions from many leading British painters.” BBC 05/10/02

Thursday May 9

RECORD PRICE FOR SCULPTURE: “Constantin Brancusi’s 1913 gold leaf portrait “Danaide” set a world record for a sculpture sold at auction tonight, fetching $18.2 million at Christie’s in the first of the major auction houses’ annual spring sales.” Washington Post (Reuters) 05/09/02

IN PRAISE OF MESS: So the authors of a report on the state of the Smithsonian Museum of American History think it ought to be tidied up and reorganized. No, no, no. “It may be that we moderns want to learn from the objects in our museums – we probably can’t help but learn from them – but that doesn’t mean that we need to be taught about them, or have them set out in some tidy order like the illustrations in a high school textbook. The marvelous objects in our museums – whether works of art or artifacts of history – aren’t the illustrations for the nation’s story. They are actual chunks of the past, the substance of it, the stuff that scholars analyze to figure out the way the world once was. By leaving in some of the mess and leaving out some of the annotations, museums can give visitors the chance to come to grips with olden times, instead of being fed with someone else’s vision of them.” Washington Post 05/09/02

THERE ARE NO TEMPORARY MOVES: New York’s Museum of Modern Art is moving to Queens while its building is being rebuilt. “Inevitably, the move will change MoMA, just as it will change the perception of the institution. The reality is that we will be a different institution. We will have benefited from working in a different community. … I hope it will make us better and more interesting.” Nando Times (AP) 05/09/02

HIPPER THAN THOU: Scottish artist Toby Paterson has won the Beck’s Futures Prize. “The prize has been described by the Face magazine as ‘a whole lot hipper’ than its much-derided competitor, the Turner Prize, and is seen by some critics as the best yardstick for gauging the merits of emerging contemporary artists. A self-confessed lover of the urban environment, all of the artist’s work relates to architecture, particularly the modernist era of the 1950s.” The Scotsman 05/08/02

• Previously: PATERSON WINS BECK’S: Toby Paterson has won this year’s Beck’s Futures Prize in London. Beck’s Futures is the UK’s largest award for contemporary art. “Paterson, 28, collected his cheque for £24,000 from BJÖRK at a gala event at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall this evening.” ICA Press Release 07/08/02

Wednesday May 8

PATERSON WINS BECK’S: Toby Paterson has won this year’s Beck’s Futures Prize in London. Beck’s Futures is the UK’s largest award for contemporary art. “Paterson, 28, collected his cheque for £24,000 from BJÖRK at a gala event at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall this evening.” ICA Press Release 07/08/02

BRITISH MUSEUM CRISIS: “Annual visits to the British Museum have dropped alarmingly, it seems. For years they hovered at around 5.6 million, making the museum second in popularity only to Blackpool Pleasure Beach among free attractions. And with the completion of Foster’s Great Court, and the opening of the hallowed Reading Room to yobs like me, the figure was expected to rise to six million in time for the 250th anniversary next year. Instead it has slumped to 4.6 million. Seventy years after Ira Gershwin penned his great line, the British Museum really does seem to have lost its charm.” The Times (UK) 05/08/02

CLUTTERED ATTIC: The Smithsonian National Museum of American History is the third most-visited museum in the world. But a new report says the museum is so cluttered and disorganized it needs a a complete reorganization. “As it is now, the museum does not seem to meet any obvious test of comprehensibility or coherence. Indeed, in the most basic physical sense, visitors frequently have difficulty orienting themselves. Even some curators who have spent their entire professional lives in the NMAH building get lost.” Washington Post 05/08/02

TWO 20TH CENTURY GIANTS: If Tate Modern’s new Matisse Picasso show seems familiar before you see it, just wait. The show is the hit of the London art season. Richard Dorment: “I can’t remember an exhibition in which I become so engaged with the artists’ creative process, or one in which I learned so much about how to look at a work of art.” The Telegraph (UK) 05/08/02

• COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP: The Matisse/Picasso relationship was one of the great artistic rivalries. “Their rivalry lasted throughout their lives. Picasso continued it even after Matisse was dead. And this is the debate — variously compared to a chess match, an arm-wrestling contest and a prize fight — that Tate Modern now restages in a show which brings together some 30 different groupings of their pieces and offers a ringside view of Modernism’s most dazzling match.” The Times (UK) 05/08/02

Tuesday May 7

MUM’S ART: With the death of Britain’s Queen Mother, what will happen to her extensive art collection? She was a serious collector, and while no one’s talking yet, indications are that most of it will pass to the Queen’s Royal Collection. “This would transform the collection, adding masterpieces by Monet, Sisley, Sickert and Nash.” The Art Newspaper 05/03/02

Monday May 6

SURREAL JUDGMENT: Fifty years ago the director of the Glasgow Art Gallery spent the museum’s entire annual acquisition bufdget – £8,200 – on just one painting – Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross. “It was, said everyone with a voice, a ‘waste of money’. The press foamed at the mouth in condemnatory headlines. Rate-payers were incensed by the action of the GP turned art expert. Students at Glasgow School of Art petitioned for his sacking, and the eminent Augustus John derided the cost of the acquisition of a work by a living artist as ‘wilfully extravagant’.” Fifty years later the painting is the most-reproduced religious-themed work of the 20th Century and worth £25 million to £100 million… The Scotsman 05/05/02

A RELATIONSHIP WITH ART: “Art is glamourous, but how good a time do we really have when we are actually standing in front of a picture looking at it? If we dutifully try to look at all the pictures we are probably going to get rather bored. This is not because the pictures have nothing to offer us, but because the timing is wrong. We tend to be too polite with pictures. To have a good time looking at them we need to be a bit more imaginative in the questions we ask, we need – as with other people – to take a bit of a risk if we are going to become more intimate.” The Age (Melbourne) 05/06/02

IRAQ TO REBUILD ANCIENT LIBRARY: Iraq plans to rebuild the Ashurbanipal, the earliest known library of the ancient world, and has asked the British Museum to help by making casts of tablets the museum owns. “The proposed reconstructed library at Nineveh would hold copies of all of the BM’s tablets, and it is planned as both a scholarly centre and tourist attraction. Alongside the library, the Saddam [Hussein] Institute for Cuneiform Studies will be set up as part of the University of Mosul. Plans are also being made to excavate one of the wings of King Ashurbanipal’s palace, in Kuyunjik Mound, where it is hoped that thousands of other tablets lie buried.” The Art Newspaper 05/03/02

BUILDING PROTECTION: The National Park Service has a plan to protect the Washington Monument from the “evildoers.” “Under the pretext of protecting the monument against truck bombs and other forms of vehicular assault (jet airplanes don’t seem to have crossed its radar screen), the service has come up with a bizarre plan that could end up presenting the Mall with an unexpected new treasure, the Leaning Monument of Washington, or perhaps – even better! – with 81,120 tons of New England granite spattered all over the Mall. The service wants to replace the Jersey barriers that now surround the base of the monument with two sunken walkways, 12 feet wide and walled in stone.” Washington Post 05/06/02

Sunday May 5

PRICE OF GREATNESS: The new Matisse Picasso show which opens at Tate Modern this week is probably a once-in-a-lifetime affair. “‘To bring it off at all we had to share with the Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and I think the cost alone will make it out of the question in future. With more than 150 works by the two giants of modern art, valued at well in excess of £1 billion, it has been a mammoth undertaking.” The Telegraph(UK) 05/04/02

LINCOLN CENTER – GROUP GROPE: Lincoln Center is holding a competition to redesign Avery Fisher Hall, and it’s attracted the usual big names – Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, Richard Meier, Arata Isozaki and Skidmore Owings & Merrill. But the project has a troubled start. “Architecture competitions can focus energy or they can be a terrible drain on civic spirit. It helps if the clients have a clear idea of what they want and, more important, a firm sense of who they are. Judged on these terms, I’d say the competition to design a new concert hall for Lincoln Center now stands less than a 50-50 chance of producing architecture.” The New York Times 05/05/02

LONDON’S NEW CITY HALL: London’s new city hall is under construction. “The grey blob next to Tower Bridge designed by Norman Foster and his partner Ken Shuttleworth is already the most visible and instantly recognisable building in Britain since the London Eye, even though it’s just 10 floors high. Instant recognition, of course, is not necessarily an architectural virtue. Try too hard to create a landmark and all too often the result is an embarrassing failure. And that is certainly how it looked that City Hall would turn out.” The Observer (UK) 05/05/02

Friday May 3

DOCUMENTA 11 ARTISTS NAMED: Nigeria-born Okwui Enwezor is the first non-European curator of Documenta. The list of artists for one of the world’s premiere art gatherings has just been released and his impact on selections is clear: “In previous Documentas, 80 to 90 percent of the artists were natives of NATO countries; this time the percentage is about half that.” Artforum 05/01/02

• DIRECTOR OF FEW WORDS: All media and genres will receive attention, said the director, the entire range of contemporary art forms represented: Painting, drawing and sculpture as well as photography, film, video, net art and architecture. According to Enwezor, 118 artists and artists’ groups have been invited to Kassel, and 79 projects in all developed especially for D11, including some intended for outdoor sites. Basically, Enwezor is attempting to set in motion what he promised – more or less explicitly – from the start, namely to mirror, via art, alternative forms of knowledge-production that are underrepresented in public perception. That sounds rather uninspiring, and to some extent, it is. Everything will depend on how the works are presented, and here, too, Enwezor is resolutely silent.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 05/02/02

NAVIGATING THE ROYAL: London’s Royal Academy is a unique institution. Run by its artist/members, its shows are not like those found in museums. For example, the RA’s exhibitions secretary says, there is at least one fake work in every show. “We don’t set out to have fakes, of course. Sometimes you only know by comparison, when it goes on the wall. If a fake is discovered, that’s good, whereas reviewers tend to think it’s a catastrophe. But these are tiny things. We should sing the big picture – that these fabulous paintings are in London at all. During the Caravaggio show the RA was transformed into an amazing basilica. I was here every night having Catholic orgasms.” London Evening Standard 05/02/02

FORGOTTEN GRAND: Why has London’s Westminster Hall fallen into such disuse? “For much of its near-1,000-year history Westminster Hall, thronged and bustling, was the centre of first English and then British public life. That it is not better-known today is a tragedy, for it is a remarkable building. At 240ft long and 67ft wide, its scale is a reminder of the wealth and ambition of the Norman kings. When the walls were built in 1097 by William Rufus, son of William the Conqueror, it was among the largest halls in Europe.” The Telegraph (UK) 05/03/02

Thursday May 2

RECONSIDERING CLASSIC ARCHITECTURE: “Three-dimensional modeling is turning some of archaeology’s once-established truths on their heads. Because 3-D software can take into account the building materials and the laws of physics, it enables scholars to address construction techniques in ways sometimes overlooked when they are working with two-dimensional drawings.” Take the Colosseum, for example: “researchers have discovered that in some sections the building may have had all the efficiency of a railroad-style apartment on the Bowery. The model reveals dark, narrow upper hallways that probably hemmed in spectators, slowing their movement to a crawl.” The New York Times 05/02/02

STUCK ON THE NEXT BIG THING? Could it be Stuckism? “Stuckism stands as much for what it opposes—postmodern conceptual and installation art, etc.—as for what it champions: a spiritual renewal in art, particularly painting, following the lead of its prime exemplar Van Gogh. Stuckism’s objective is to bring about the death of Post Modernism, to undermine the inflated price structure of Brit Art and instigate a spiritual renaissance in art and society in general.” And yet, as a movement it’s a bit unstuck itself… *spark-online 05/02

CHANGING FORTUNES AT AUCTION: As the spring New York auctions begin, the auction house landscape looks radically different from a year ago. Then, No. 3 Phillips was making a big run to assert its place. Still mired in scandals, Christie’s and Sotheby’s laid low. This year Phillips has had to cancel its spring sales, while Sotheby’s and Christie’s have pulled out all the stops in an attempt to revive their fortunes. The New York Times 05/02/02

Wednesday May 1

ANOTHER SOTHEBY’S SENTENCE: “Diana D. Brooks, the former chief executive of Sotheby’s, was spared prison yesterday and sentenced to three years of probation, including six months of house arrest, for her admitted role in fixing commission rates with the rival Christie’s auction house.” The New York Times 05/01/02

FREE ART PACKS ‘EM IN: “Attendance at museums and galleries in the UK has risen by 75% since entrance fees were scrapped… The rises equate to an extra 1.4 million visitors pouring through the doors of the capital’s museums and galleries. Another sign that the initiative is working is the 10% increase in the number of children who have taken the opportunity to visit a museum in the past year.” BBC 05/01/02

ENGLAND’S GIANT ART: The Chesterfield Borough Council in England has signed off on a plan to build an enormous 40-metre high Solar Pyramid sundial that will be the UK’s largest artwork. “Designer Richard Swain described the structure, which will give accurate astronomical data, as ‘art meets science. It will be like a giant sundial, but it will also give details of the earth’s rotation. We have always wanted to do things which are fairly monumental and are part of the landscape.” BBC 04/30/02

HIS FRIENDS JUST CALLED HIM ‘DOUBLE H’: “Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who died Saturday at age 81 at his home on the northern Mediterranean coast of Spain, was the greatest art collector of the second half of the 20th century.” His massive collection of European and American art has been given a permanent home in Madrid. Los Angeles Times 05/01/02