China has overtaken the US as the world’s biggest market for art and antiques, according to The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF).
Category: visual
Deteriorating Brutalist Landmark In Upstate New York May Be Razed
“Beefy piers hold up three stories of long boxcar shapes that look as if they had been frozen in the process of chugging past one another. Massive plate-glass windows fill the staggered, sliced-off ends. … The Orange County Government Center, by the once-famed architect Paul Rudolph,” is now so leaky it can’t be used; the county executive finds it a troublesome money pit and wants to replace it completely.
Sydney’s Museum Of Contemporary Art, Reborn
“Since August 2010, the MCA has been undergoing a makeover worth 53 million Australian dollars, or about $56 million, and has gained 50 percent more space. It will reopen March 29 as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia – a name that reflects its status as the only contemporary art museum in the country with a permanent collection.”
Recession? Not In Art. Sotheby’s London 2011 Sales Nearly Hit £1 Billion
“Sotheby’s in London’s upmarket New Bond Street sold nearly £1bn of fine art in its sales during 2011, according to results filed at Companies House. And with global sales of fine art estimated to have hit £35.8bn last year, it appears Britain is taking a significant chunk.”
Cindy Sherman At MoMA – A “Wake” Rather Than A Coronation
“What pop culture giveth pop culture also taketh away. Having insinuated herself into the museums by dressing herself in a shopping mall’s worth of middlebrow iconography–she’s the whore, the housewife, the waif, the clown, the porn star, the prom queen, the wallflower, the romance-novel princess–Cindy Sherman has become a victim of the very clichés she embraced.”
Two Of France’s Finest Families Fight Over Missing Monet
“More than 70 years after it was plundered by the Nazis, a missing painting by Monet that depicts the shimmering blue rapids of the Creuse River has pitted two of the wealthiest and most prominent families in France against each other.”
What Does It Mean To Be A Modern Museum?
“In the United States, there were 46 art museums in 1905, 60 in 1910, and 387 in 1938. Today there are 3,500 art museums, more than half of them founded after 1970, and 17,000 museums of all types in total, including science museums, children’s museums, and historical houses. Attendance at American art museums is booming, rising from 22 million a year in 1962 to over 100 million in 2000, with 850 million Americans visiting museums of all varieties each year. Yet if today’s museums are successful cultural caterers with wide-ranging menus, no matter where we find them, their fare manages to taste more and more the same.”
Berlin Museum Must Return Nazi-Looted Posters To Family Heir
After a 7-year legal battle, the German Historical Museum has accepted a ruling that it must return thousands of rare posters to the collector’s son. “Peter Sachs said, ‘It feels like vindication for my father, a final recognition of the life he lost and never got back.'”
Yarn-Bombing As Public Art
Yarn-bomber Bryan: “”I see public art as a form of positive vandalism. It’s something that is out there in your everyday life, something that you don’t have to pay money to see and that you can’t avoid seeing.”
Young Architects Stop Waiting And Head To China For Jobs
“This is the expected global economic formula flipped on its head: instead of American workers losing out to the Chinese, China is providing jobs for foreign architects. Even more surprising is the degree of imaginative license that China offers, even demands of, its foreign building designers. With new cities materializing seemingly overnight, international architects are free to think big, to experiment with cutting-edge designs, to introduce green technologies.”