Category: visual

Less than a month after its opening, London’s £18.2 million Millennium Bridge has closed to the public for engineering tests, due to reports by the crowds that the aluminum and steel bridge bounced and swayed dramatically. – The Guardian

The Art Institute of Chicago has announced the settlement of a claim to one of its sculptures by heirs of a prominent Jewish art collector in France whose holdings were auctioned by the French government during World War II. – Chicago Tribune

— of the 1990 $200 million art heist from Boston’s Gardner Museum. Newly-released documents identify FBI targets and strategies for solving the dramatic crime. – Boston Globe

Prosecutors are racing to ready their case of collusion against Christie’s and Sotheby’s. “If the Justice Department is successful in establishing that the price-fixing dates back nine years, civil awards could cripple both companies. One lawyer suing the auction houses said that the damages could run well into the hundreds of millions of dollars, which, when tripled under provisions in such cases, could mean combined losses to Sotheby’s and Christie’s of close to $1.5 billion.” – New York Times

The Austrian government accuses Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie Belvedere of financial mismanagement and of having “mislaid” 3,200 of its 10,000 works. The Belvedere museum collects Austrian art from the Middle Ages to the present. – The Art Newspaper

“His body of work tapped great social and philosophical themes, captured the economic and racial ruptures and shifts that have defined our culture and, amazingly enough, found beauty in struggle.” – Washington Post

About 35 million people visit the Smithsonian museums in Washington every year, making them the most heavily-trafficked museums in the world. But the buildings are crumbling, and the Smithsonian is asking Congress for $500 million to fix them. – CNN

 A DANGER TO ITSELF: “I’m amazed that you could have the greatest portrait in the United States, of George Washington; you could have the Declaration of Independence desk, the desk on which it was written; you could have the hat that Abraham Lincoln had on the day he died, in buildings that really not only possibly endanger them, but the American people coming to look at them.” – CNN

Frank Gehry’s latest project opens next week – the Experience Music Project in Seattle. “Gehry—who admits he prefers Haydn to Hendrix—bought a bunch of electric guitars in Seattle, took them back to L.A., chopped them up and reassembled the pieces into architectural shapes. That didn’t quite work, although the building—a lot rounder—stayed largely Stratocaster-colored. From a distance—say, a high hotel room about a mile away—the 140,000-square-foot EMP looks like a peculiar dessert: purple, red, silver, gold and baby-blue Jell-O with a garnish of green trees. Up close, it’s a trademark Gehry design, a mix of metals cladding ‘swoopy’ shells covering a careful floor plan.” – Newsweek

• Work to correct some of the tilt of the leaning tower of Pisa has been so successful, limited access to the building will resume next week. The tower had been closed because of concerns for safety. [First item] – CBC