Category: visual

Several Prague museums charge foreigners between two and five times more for admission than they do local Czechs. The practice is against rules of the European Union and officially discouraged. But special signs written only in Czech signal that discounts are available. – Prague Post

Improbably, the 300-plus decorated cows that spent last summer on display throughout downtown Chicago raised some $3.5 million when they were auctioned off for charity. So much money was raised, the decorated fibreglass animals-on-parade thing has swept dozens of other cities this summer. Just what became of the Chicago art-cows that were sold last summer? – Chicago Tribune

The Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts had record attendance this year. Shows of Andy Warhol drawings and Man Ray photos ranked “in the top 10 in all-time attendance” at the Walker. – The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

In a victory for all museums hoping to borrow works of art from foreign museums, a federal judge has ruled that the U.S. government cannot force Austria’s Leopold Museum to forfeit an Egon Schiele painting that’s been proven to have been stolen from a Jewish family by the Nazis. On loan to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the painting had been seized in September under a new state law allowing prosecutors to seize artwork on display while its provenance is under investigation. – MSNBC

Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello sits down with Anna Somers Cocks to talk about the changing roles of curators, museums and collecting art. “We have a pretty good sense what people want in the museum.” – The Art Newspaper

In his 24 years in Congress, Patrick Moynihan helped allocate billions of dollars to important building projects. He helped create the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Corporation, save Walt Whitman’s Long Island birthplace, and restore New York City’s Grand Central Station. But his crowning project is getting underway just as he is retiring from the US Senate – the conversion of New York’s Central Post Office building to the new Pennsylvania Station. – Architecture Magazine

The export of art – any art – out of St. Petersburg, Russia has stopped because customs officials at the airport there say the value of artwork leaving is too difficult to determine and therefore too tough to figure the taxes owed. – St. Petersburg Times (Russia)

Experts believe they have discovered a long-lost Leonardo fresco on a wall in in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Problem is, there may be another wall in front of it with a Vasari fresco on it. Scientists are using thermographics to pinpoint the Leonardo, but if it’s really there and in good shape do you remove the Vasari in front of it? – The Age (Melbourne) (The Telegraph)

Britain has rebuilt its embassy in Berlin now that the capital has moved back there. But Hans Stimmann, Berlin’s chief architect laid down very conservative architectural rules (no wonder Norman Foster dropped out of considering the project). The structure that has emerged, however, ” pays formal lip-service to Stimmann’s concerns but then deliberately subverts them by cutting a great hole in the centre of the façade and projecting through it an angular glass box and purple drum.” – The Telegraph (UK)

The Spanish city of Valencia is building Europe’s most ambitious millennium project. “At an all-in cost of £2 billion the project eclipses the Dome in Greenwich and even the Getty in Los Angeles. The prodigious investment provides Valencia with a spectacular new Science Museum, an IMAX cinema, a music school, a magnificent new 1,800-seat opera house, seven kilometres of promenades and two streamlined road bridges.” – The Times (UK)