Some artists know right from the beginning that they want to make art. For others it takes a little longer – after establishing themselves in other ways, some take to art as a second career. Is it any less of one? – National Post (Canada)
Category: visual
A CRUSHING BLOW
Porters at Sotheby’s London mistakenly put a crate containing a £100,000 Lucien Freud painting arriving for a sale into the trash, where it was hauled away and crushed in a machine. The mistake was not, Sotheby’s officials hasten to explain, a comment by the porters on the artwork. – The Independent (UK)
IDENTITY CRISIS
Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project, soon to open in Seattle is one of a new generation of experiential museums “characterized by a sometimes brash and loopy mix of commercialism and high-tech exhibition space. These facilities often “celebrate not the past but the present of American popular culture: from Virginia’s Newseum to the Grateful Dead’s prospective Terrapin Station in San Francisco, from numerous science museums such as the Museum of Innovation in San Jose to the various halls of fame. The new museums are sometimes more akin to dazzling amusement arcades or electronic playgrounds than to the somber and solidly physical dignities of the Met. Visitors are called upon to play, participate, and buy, rather than contemplate. Some curators, indeed, question whether they are really museums at all and not entertainment complexes with a loose educational veneer. – Metropolis
STILL TOO HOT TO HANDLE
After reducing the time some of Robert Mapplethorpe’s more explicit photographs are shown in its documentary about the 1990 obscenity trial over the work, Showtime’s “Dirty Pictures” gets an “R” rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. As originally edited, the film would have been tagged with an NC-17 which would mean the network couldn’t have shown it in prime time. – Variety
YO PICASSO
Heirs of a French collector come forward to lay claim to Picasso work owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. – New York Times
A LITTLE DISTANCE PLEASE
Okay, so Sotheby’s chairman has resigned in the midst of the auction house investigations. But if his people still control the board of directors, how will the company make a clean break from possible misdeeds of the past? – Financial Times
TARNISHED TALE: Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman rebuilt Sotheby’s and helped make it successful – it was all a kind of fairy tale. But sometimes fairy tales write their own dark endings… – New York Times
HANDICAPPING THE GUGGENHEIM
What are the chances the Guggenheim’s proposed Gehry building for lower Manhattan will ever get built? Not entirely solid. On the other hand, “these days the Guggenheim name is as much a prestige brand as BMW, Bollinger or Armani and not one that is lightly dismissed especially in its home town. [Guggenheim director Thomas] Krens says ‘more than 50’ cities and towns around the world have invited the Guggenheim to set up shop. – Sydney Morning Herald
BOLD STROKE: No museum has been so defined by its architecture as the Guggenheim. That helps explain the grand scale of what the proposed lower Manhattan Guggenheim would be. – New York Magazine
MUTUAL RETURN
This weekend Germany and Russia meet to exchange some of the art they stole from one another in World War II. – New York Times
BUILDING LOBBIES
Architects on big public projects often have to deal with the petty political concerns of their politician/clients. They usually keep their disputes quiet. But the architects working on Melbourne’s landmark Federation Square have gone public with their complaints, mounting a campaign throughout Australia to lobby on their behalf. – Sydney Morning Herald
A MILLION POUNDS OF ART
Charles Saatchi just paid a million pounds for Damien Hirst’s latest: a 20-foot-high plastic model of the human body. Hirst makes a lot of junk, says one critic. But when he’s on… ” ‘Hymn’ is the first key work of British art for the new century. To risk an overused term, it is a masterpiece.” – The Telegraph (UK)