Category: visual

In the past few months, at least nine galleries in Montreal have been looted in a rash of smash-and-grab incidents. – CBC

Artist defends his controversial work for Whitney Biennial. “What I’m very upset about is the attempt to dictate to museums what they show, and the statements made by politicians in Washington that have curtailed the freedom of the National Endowment for the Arts. The attention to those issues is deflected by the spin of my supposedly having trivialized the Holocaust.” – New York Times

• FAMILY FEUD: Members of the Whitney family line up against one another over controversial Hans Haacke work for the Whitney Biennial. – BBC

San Francisco art student’s sex-act performance deserved a F for unoriginality. But “what is going on here is part of a long and rich tradition, here recapitulated more as a whimper than as a bang. Shocking the bourgeoisie has been a goal of Western artists for the past 150 years. When Edouard Manet painted a cheeky prostitute who boldly looked back at the presumed male viewer as a decidedly non-classical nude, he helped set off an artistic challenge to shock the viewer that has escalated with every subsequent generation. But after more than a century and a half, virtually everything has been done before.” – San Francisco Examiner

Do your sperm spend more time in museums than you do? DNA maps unlock the self and become fodder for art. – Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The heir of a German industrialist is seeking a 19th-century landscape by Courbet from the Art Institute of Chicago, that she says was stolen from her father by Nazis in WWII. Her successful bid last summer for a van Gogh drawing, L’Olivette, from a Berlin museum has been widely credited with accelerating Germany’s program to return looted art. – Jerusalem Post

— says she’ll cut off her support to the museum in protest. Marylou Whitney said that a work by Hans Haacke, planned for the Whitney’s 2000 Biennial, would belittle the Holocaust, politicize art and violate the principles on which the Whitney was founded by her late mother-in-law, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. – New York Times

• OTHER WHITNEYS DEFEND WORK: As Marylou Whitney withdrew her support of the Whitney Museum two other Whitney heirs lambasted her position. “It is regrettable that so many have chosen to lash out at an artist who has consistently been a voice of social conscience … This country should allow the free and unfettered expression of ideas through art.” – New York Post
  
  
• GIULIANI WON’T BE PUNITIVE, he says, about a work in the Whitney Biennial that compares the New York mayor to the Nazis. – New York Times

Rumors that the famous Van Gogh painting, bought by Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito at auction in 1990 for $82.5 million, would turn up in the new Van Gogh show opening today in Detroit, prove false. Since Saito died four years ago, museums and curators have been searching for the most expensive painting ever sold. – Philadelphia Inquirer

Thirty years into his revolution, conceptual artist Sol LeWitt is still making his audience nervous. He doesn’t do his own work, doesn’t make originals and doesn’t follow his own rules. – Salon

Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center is planning to expand. But more than just a $50 million addition, museum leaders see the the project as an opportunity to “reshape the center as a populist gathering place where myriad art forms intersect in new ways,” have “the potential to alter the art center’s relationship to its neighborhood and downtown Minneapolis, and to become an international model for how contemporary art is housed and valued, integrated and presented.” – The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

London’s Tate Museum is about to split itself up in a long-overdue expansion. The moves bring questions about art and national identity. – The Sunday Times (UK)