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Friday
June 30
-
BUYING
FREEDOM ONLINE: At around 6pm EST on June 29th, an
original first printing of The Declaration of Independence
sold for $8.14 million on Sothebys.com. The same copy, which
was last sold for $2.4 million, failed to sell at a regular
auction in 1993. So maybe it was the new technology, which
allows viewers to examine the document, and the fourth of July
holiday that spurred the buyer on. MSNBC
06/29/00
-
JUST
WHAT IS MODERN ART? Arthur Danto ponders the meaning of
modern and modernism. "The date 1880 cannot be defended
as the beginning of modern art, nor is there any consensus as
to when modern art began. Nor can that question be separated
from the deeper question of how Modernism is to be defined.
The Nation 07/17/00
-
NOT
THE USUAL SUSPECTS: The Guggenheim Museum announces the
finalists for this year's Hugo Boss Prize. National
Post (Canada) 06/30/00
-
ONE
OF CEZANNE’S MOST IMPORTANT WORKS, “Still Life with Fruit
and Pot of Ginger,” sold well above its expected price for $18
million at Christie’s in London Thursday night.
The
Age (Melbourne) AP 06/30/00
-
WALL
TEXT FOR THE SMART SET? An interview with Charles Esche,
curator of Tate Britain's upcoming “Intelligence” exhibit of
contemporary British art. “Rather than fixing little wall plaques
next to each exhibit containing the curator's interpretation
of the work, the smart thinking of this exhibition shows in
its lack of reassurance over the works' meaning. "With
a lot of work, you know instantly what it has to say and you
move on, but I think that good art is about a lack of clarity.
The handle that you get on it is the handle that you choose;
it is as much up to you as it is up to the artist."
London
Times 06/30/00
-
RECORD
ART SALES DOWN UNDER:
Three major art auctions in Australia this week have generated
a record $21 million in sales in just four days. Christie’s,
Sotheby’s, and Deutscher-Menzies all saw unprecedented attendance
and fiercely competitive bidding from collectors around the
world. Sydney
Morning Herald 06/30/00
-
MOMA
ON THE MOVE: The Museum of Modern Art will vacate its midtown
Manhattan location in the spring of 2002 and move to a temporary
exhibition space in Queens for the two-year expansion of 53rd
St. MOMA. New
York Times 06/30/00 (one-time
registration required for entry)
Thursday
June 29
-
THE
MEANING OF COLOR: Why do we think of certain colors as possessing
beauty or emotion? "Flamboyant colour has always been associated
with the pursuit of the beautiful, with aestheticism, with hedonist
visual pleasure. Think of Matisse and his painting The Red Studio,
in which every object in the room is choreographed to the rhythm
of an overwhelming red; the boundaries of walls, a table and
a clock are visible only as traces in redness. The very vocabulary
of colour is saturated in ideas of beauty; the word "hue"
comes from the Old English for 'beauty'."
The
Guardian 06/29/00
-
THAMES
BRIDGE TO STAY CLOSED:
London's Millennial footbridge
across the Thames will likely be closed for months while engineers
try to correct a problem with severe swaying whilst people are
on the structure. Engineers "concluded the movement
was caused by 'synchronized footfall,' or hundreds of pedestrians
stepping in unison. "I am disappointed, but not ashamed."
Times of India
(AP) 06/29/00
-
Architect
Norman Foster defends London's "bouncing bridge",
the £18.2 million Millennium Bridge, insisting that its
problem had been diagnosed and the solution would be designed,
although the structure might remain closed for months. The
Guardian 06/29/00
Wednesday
June 28
-
FALLING
OUT OF FASHION: Tate Modern has already seen more than one
million visitors since its opening six weeks ago. Meanwhile,
at Tate Britain (dedicated to national British art) weekly totals
have been plummeting since its April opening. Have audiences
lost interest in anything other than contemporary art? Or are
the curators at fault for putting together stodgy shows?” The
Guardian 06/28/00
-
THE
GOOG DOES LAS VEGAS? The Guggenheim Museum has been negotiating
with Las Vegas' Venetian Hotel to bring the Guggenheim's most
successful show ever to the Vegas Strip. "It's not a display
of Picassos but 'The Art of the Motorcycle.' Featuring more
than 100 motorcycles, the exhibition debuted in New York two
years ago and currently is parked at the Guggenheim's acclaimed
Frank Gehry-designed museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Los Angeles Times 06/28/00
-
WHERE
WOULD HOME BE? Okay, let's say by some remarkable change
of heart, Britain gave up its plunder and did decide to return
the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Just where would they go? The
Art Newspaper 06/00
-
MONUMENTAL
CLEANUP:
Rome spent two years
sprucing up - scrubbed, repaired, or repainted monuments, villas,
churches, and fountains, cleaning its buildings and monuments
for an expected influx of tourists for the millennial year.
All look more glorious than they have in several generations.
Cleansed of soot and painstakingly restored to their 17th-century
visage, the city's baroque architectural masterpieces are at
their best. But so far the expected rush of new visitors hasn't
appeared. Boston
Globe (Washington Post) 06/28/00
-
THE
ENVY OF ITS PEERS: “London isn’t the only European city
to have unveiled something big, dazzling and avant-garde this
summer.” Munich’s Bavarian state gallery now has an astonishing
collection of late-20th-century art, recently donated
by a wealthy German couple. “In Munich, art-lovers are rubbing
their eyes in disbelief. No fewer than 550 astonishing pieces
have just been donated. A year ago Munich had virtually no notable
avant-garde art. Now it has a collection that is the envy of
Berlin, Paris and - yes, let's be honest - even Tate Modern
itself.” London
Times 06/28/00
-
AN
ABORIGINAL ART BOOM has been sweeping the Australian art
market in recent years. On Monday, Sotheby’s in Melbourne set
a new world auction record for an Aboriginal artist when a painting
by Johnny Warangkula sold for nearly $1/2 million. “The rise
of interest in Aboriginal art has been astonishing. In 1990,
a mere $169,000 worth of Aboriginal art was sold at auction.
By 1996, sales amounted to $1.36 million; within two years turnover
exceeded $5 million.” Sydney
Morning Herald 06/28/00
-
BUT
IT’S STILL BUST FOR SOME: Meanwhile, the 68-year-old
artist - who was among those who pioneered the popular “dot
painting” style nearly 30 years ago - was shocked to hear
of the sale (as was his family, when they learned they had
no legal claim to the proceeds). Warangkula sold the painting
to an Alice Springs artist in 1972 for $150. Now the Aboriginal
art group Desart is pressuring Sotheby's and other art dealers
to pass on some of the proceeds of these sales to Aboriginal
artists. Sydney
Morning Herald 06/28/00
Tuesday
June 27
-
MEXICAN
ART TAKES HIT: Last month the Museo de Monterrey - one of
Mexico's leading art museums - closed when the industrial group
FEMSA announced that it was pulling its support. The consensus
in Mexico is that a new generation of corporate leaders is abandoning
its predecessors' commitment to arts and cultural institutions."
San Antonio Express-News 06/26/00
-
MODEL
CITIES: The Venice Biennale's
architecture show is the most expensive and extensive ever mounted.
The exhibts have brought out "thrilling use of film and
photography, accompanied by an astonishing number of superb
models. Never before has it been possible to represent cities
so vividly, sometimes on a scale approaching life-size, as in
the fantastic 1,000ft-long screen in the old Ropery of the Arsenale,
where full-size trains flash down the vista." The
Times (London) 06/27/00
-
BUYING
ART UNSEEN: There has been much
conjecture in traditional gallery circles that collectors were
not likely to buy works of art over the internet without first
seeing them in person. But surprise - that's not proving to
be the case. "'That we would be selling works in the $20,000,
$30,000, and $40,000 range is a surprise,'' says the president
of Sothebys.com, which was launched by its Manhattan auction-house
parent in January" Businessweek.com
06/26/00
-
TAKING
ADVANTAGE: “For far too long many non-indigenous people
have exploited indigenous culture through the production of
Aboriginal art and cultural products not of Aboriginal origin.
Artists whose paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars
have been paid in cans of beer. Ancient taboos have been broken
by companies that reproduce sacred totems on dish towels and
underwear. Allegations of fakery abound." ABCNews.com
06/26/00
-
BEWARE
FAKE ART: An indigenous
arts organization in Australia has warned Australia could be
flooded with fake Aboriginal artwork in the lead-up to the Olympics.
"People have been importing from Indonesia and other places
thousands of didgeridoos already made up and then getting other
people, backpackers, to paint them up here." The
Age 06/27/00
-
TALES
FROM THE ART CRYPT: Richard Feigen is one of the foremost
dealers in Old Master paintings - and a famously difficult personality.
His new book illuminates some of the more shadowy corners of
the art world. "There is, for example, a scathing account
of the shenanigans several years ago at the Barnes Foundation,
the fabled museum outside Philadelphia, when trustees attempted
to sell off holdings in violation of its founder's will - an
attempt Feigen all but single-handedly scotched. Or there's
his comparing the exhibitions policy at New York's Metropolitan
Museum, with its 'random mixture of box-office frivolity with
serious art,' to 'a nice girl of good family who just once in
a while goes out and turns tricks for some pocket change.' "
Boston
Globe 06/27/00
-
SOUTH
AFRICA'S HOMAGE TO WOMEN: Forty-four years ago, 20,000
members of the Federation of South African Women marched on
the headquarters of the prime minister to demand equal
gender laws. The South African government has commissioned a
monument which will attempt to "avoid a sense of the “heroic”
as we have come to expect of bronze and granite monoliths, but
in so doing, not to cheat women of their heroism, and to take
into account the polyphonic and multivalent qualities of [their]
culture." Daily Mail
& Guardian (South Africa) 06/26/00
Monday
June 26
-
EMBARRASSMENT
OF RICHES:
San Francisco art collectors
Vicki and Kent Logan have proposed donating 400 pieces of their
remarkable collection of contemporary art to the Tate Museum.
But the proposed gift is so unusual and so vast, the Tate is
still "thinking it over" as to what to do.
The
Telegraph (London) 06/26/00
-
PRE-FABBED
OBSOLESCENCE: With buildings becoming more and more pre-fabricated,
who's got need of an architect anymore? "And yet Britain
has something like 30,000 architects. What do they do? Few seem
to be involved at any great depth in the design of what really
matters, such as new housing, even though Britain is being smothered
in a feverish rash of the red-brick, three-bedroom stuff."
The
Guardian 06/26/00
-
LEGALIZING
PLUNDER:
The Archeological Institute
of America has told Congress that a potential change in US law
would increase the pillage of archeological artifacts internationally.
The
Art Newspaper 06/26/00
-
WALLED
HISTORY: The history
of Northern Ireland is painted on its walls. "People have
painted murals in Northern Ireland for almost a century. For
most of that time, they were almost entirely unionist. Every
year on 12 July, unionists decorated their streets to celebrate
the victory of the Protestant William III over the Catholic
James II in 1690. When new trolley and electricity lines interrupted
this annual custom, unionists began to paint "King Billy"
on their gable walls instead. For the next 60 years, these portraits
were repainted every summer. Then came the Troubles, which inspired
republican murals, and dramatically transformed loyalist murals,
too."
New
Statesman 06/26/00
-
HOOF
AND MOUTH DISEASE: The fiberglass animal craze is spreading
to cities all over America. Latest to catch it is San Jose,
which proposes to deploy 1,000 fiberglass bulls throughout Silicon
Valley. At least the title of the project acknowledges the idea's
commercial underpinnings: ``Silicon Valley Stampede: Home of
the Bull Market.''
San
Jose Mercury News 06/25/00
-
ART
BUST I:
Egyptian police have
foiled smugglers' attempts to transport $35 million worth of
Egyptian, Roman and Greek artifacts out of Egypt.
CBC 06/26/00
-
ART
BUST II: Police bust thieves in Turkey trying to unload
a stolen 1938 Picasso.
BBC 06/26/00
-
RICHARD
SERRA on art, museums and life: "I think basically
I'm not interested in people following my work or making work
like my work. But what does interest me is the notion that if
you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other
people to understand that a lot of things are possible with
a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is
possible and I think that's all art can be."
Coagula
06/00
Sunday
June 25
-
NOT
EVERYONE CAN BE MICHAEL JORDAN: Critics have always savaged
American Impressionism for being second-rate and sentimental.
But what they're really upset about is that "American painters
failed to measure up to the French genius of Claude Monet. This
is like damning all golfers for not being Tiger Woods."
Hartford
Courant 06/25/00
-
WHEN
SMALL MUSEUMS TRY TO BE BIG: "Art means less to people
than it used to. Hype means so much more. People go to museums
to be entertained, not to be moved. We no longer believe in
putting intellectual effort into our museum experiences. We
demand them on a plate. Prefabricated. Fast. These are conditions
in which grandeur and largeness play better than intimacy and
compactness. In our national museum-going, we have regressed
to the stage where we like things to be written out in capitals."
Sunday
Times (London) 06/25/00
-
ART
ON THE RAILS: Los Angeles opened the last part of its mass
transit rail system this week. "A city that recognizes
the power and value of cosmopolitanism would sanctify the social
spaces in which it's fostered. Alas, L.A. chose not to. Metro
Rail's aesthetic mediocrity was assured at the start, when a
bureaucratic decision was made that an engineering firm, not
an architect, would design the far-flung system. Designing meaningful
civic spaces is an architect's job, not an engineer's."
Los Angeles Times 06/25/00
-
THE
ART OF MIS-DESIGN: LA's subway is best known for its $6.1-billion
price tag, scandalous mismanagement and ineffectiveness as a
transportation network. But the new stations also reveal a profound
misunderstanding of Los Angeles' civic identity. Built at a
cost of $63 million to $82 million each, the stations are essentially
decorated sheds, massive concrete boxes where architecture and
art are used to create a thin veneer of fantasy. Los
Angeles Times 06/25/00
Friday
June 23
-
KEEPING
ART AT HOME: Australian curators are seeking a ban of exports
of aboriginal art from the country. Next week there's an important
auction of about 1000 aboriginal works of art. "Alarmed
by the number of early Aboriginal paintings being sold to overseas
collectors, the curators and other critics were successful last
year in having changes made to the Protection of Movable Cultural
Heritage Act. Now, an export permit must be obtained for Aboriginal
art works more than 20 years old and valued at $10,000 or more."
Sydney
Morning Herald 06/23/00
-
STEALING
HISTORY: A major new study details a brief history of looting
of cultural artifacts and treasures. "Maya ceramics from
the Petén that bring the looter $200 to $500, may ultimately
fetch $100,000. In the case of five big-ticket items (a Song
Dynasty head, Morgantina acroliths, Euphronius krater, Achyris
phiale, and Marsyas statue), where we know the initial payout
and the final price, middlemen received 98% of the money."
Archeology Magazine 06/21/00
-
I
AM CRITIC, I AM MAYOR:
Frank Gehry's proposed
design for a new bridge in Chicago has run head-on into the
city's most prominent architecture critic - Mayor Daley. "I've
designed 10 new ones since I heard he doesn't like it,"
Gehry says. "The bridge flap is the latest example of Daley's
involvement in aesthetic issues that other mayors typically
delegate to aides. Daley personally reviews major building projects,
and his passion for beautification has resulted in a string
of initiatives - fountains, flowers, trees and median planter
boxes - that make both the city and the mayor look good."
Chicago
Tribune 06/23/00
-
SEATTLE'S
ROCK PILE OPENS TODAY: "Paul Allen, 47, is the third
or fourth richest man on the planet, having earned something
close to $30 billion by co-founding Microsoft Corp., and his
zeal for greenbacks is matched only by his affection for the
artifacts and totems of pop history. So when he decides to give
the public a peek at his stash, he's not going to build a shed."
So we get the Experience Music Project.
Washington
Post 06/23/00
Thursday
June 22
-
DOING
BATTLE WITH THE PAST: Over the last 30 years, the Italian
government has been cleaning and restoring some of the most
famous frescoes of the Renaissance. "Apart from carrying
out the essential work of cleaning, repairing structural damage,
and protecting the frescoes from damp, restorers have also used
the latest technology to try to determine the exact nature of
the original painting; and have used that analysis to offer
a definitive image of the work for future generations."
That's where the controversy begins.
The
Independent 06/20/00
-
IT'S
SNOWING IN LONDON: Artist Andy
Goldsworthy brought 13 five-foot-round snowballs to London to
melt in the heat of the longest day of the year. So
how will Londoners confront the balls? Will they choose
to stand back and admire, or stage impromptu summer snowball
fights before a day at school or the office? London
Evening Standard 06/22/00
-
Gehry's
EMP building is startling, but no one will rank it with
his best work. It has been described as the architect's rendering
of one of the guitars Hendrix regularly smashed in performance,
but it looks more like a pile of melted metal. Boston
Herald 06/22/00
Wednesday
June 21
-
DESIGN
BY EXAMPLE:
Roman architect and writer Pino Scaglione has been urging discussion
in Rome about encouraging more contemporary architecture in
the tradition-bound city. To that end, he’s organized an exhibit
in Rome of Berlin’s 20th-century design highlights.
“Scaglione eyes Berlin enviously - unlike Rome, which looks
back, it looks forward.”
Die
Welt (Berlin) 06/21/00
-
THE
GOOG ONLINE: The Guggenheim Museum's most ambitious
architecture may have nothing to do with Frank Gehry. The Goog
has bet the budget equivalent of one of its land galleries on
developing a radical "virtual" museum online. "Though
much has been made of the marriage of computers and architecture,
the computer is still used chiefly as a facilitator—a tool to
help conceptualize or produce a final object. But what of an
autonomous digital architecture—an architecture that is conceived
of, rendered, built, and exists and is experienced solely on
the computer?" Architecture
Magazine 05/00
-
RESTORING
THE PATH OF FAITH: This
month, Coptic Christians in Egypt are celebrating the 2000th
anniversary of the Holy Family's travel through Egypt. In preparation
for the thousands of pious pilgrims that will come to retrace
their path, the Egyptian Heritage Revival Association is pouring
millions of Egyptian Pounds into the restoration of tombs, icons,
altars...and the installation of restrooms. Egypt
Today 06/00
-
WHAT
KIND OF PRIORITY? While museum's on America's East Coast
struggle to track down provenance of their artwork for the time
around World War II, California museums lag far behind.
"It's a high priority, but we don't have the resources
in place," says a spokesperson for the Armand Hammer Museum.
Meanwhile, the Getty Museum, just completing a first phase of
inquiry, "has found that more than half of its paintings
collection has wartime gaps - 248 of its 425 works." Washington
Post 06/21/00
-
FEAR
OF THE NEW?
“The Wallace Collection is a hugely loved, gilded time-warp
set in a magnificent house in the center of London. Its superb
works of art - including the best collection of French 18th-century
artifacts outside France - were collected by one family and
left to the nation. Small wonder that it inspires a rare passion
and woe betide anyone who attempts to alter so much as a strand
of horsehair stuffing.” That’s exactly why so many are nervous
about Wallace’s reopening this week after a thoroughly modernizing
remodel. London
Evening Standard 06/21/00
Tuesday
June 20
-
ART
PACT: The
Guggenheim Foundation and St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum
have inked a deal to share their collections, collaborate on
exhibitions, and help each other develop a worldwide network
of museums. New
York Times 06/20/00
(one-time
registration required for entry)
-
HERE
MOOSIE MOOSIE:
Several North American
cities have been overrun this summer with painted fiberglass
animals. Toronto has 300 moose distributed around its downtown
streets. "The
Toronto moose are clearly about urban boosterism, corporate
publicity, civic high spirits, tourist marketing."
And not about art. Shouldn't the things we put up in our urban
landscape aim for a little more? Toronto
Globe and Mail 06/20/00
-
SEX
AND THE CITY:
The Venice Biennale's International
Architecture Exhibition poses questions about how we live. "It
prompts the myriad architects, landscape architects and urban
designers featured here to say where they stand in the 'disorder
affecting a society in rapid transformation' and 'the turmoil
of globalization.' It asks them to use information and technology
to improve the human condition, and 'make forecasts about the
future once again.' " National
Post (Canada) 06/20/00
-
FROM
THE OUTSIDE IN: The New Republic's art critic Jed Perl has
a new book purporting to sort out the ills of the artworld.
"Perl belongs to that strange tradition of art critics
who are at odds with the art world at large — something for
which there is no precise parallel, certainly not in the worlds
of mass-circulation film or music criticism, for example. In
a way Perl seems to be arguing for a culture and for artists
who are no more accomplished, brilliant, or relevant than Perl
himself. It’s a middlebrow context that makes him look good."
Artforum 06/00
-
THE
BALLOON EFFECT:
After years of design delays and budgetary haggling, Berlin’s
Jewish Museum is finally on schedule to open in September 2001.
Originally conceived as a department within a Berlin history
museum, “the concept ballooned to meet the space available.
With over 4,000 square meters of exhibition space to fill, the
existing Berlin collection was dwarfed: bit by bit the Jewish
Museum took it on itself to document the history of the Jews
in the whole German-speaking world.” Die
Welt (Berlin) 06/20/00
-
RAGS
TO RICHES:
Scottish painter Jack Vettriano’s life story reads like Horatio
Alger: a miner’s son, he only started painting at 21 and was
rejected from art school repeatedly. But now he’s Britain’s
most commercially popular artist, with original work selling
for up to £40,000 and posters of his work outselling those of
Monet. London
Telegraph 06/20/00
-
THE
LINE KING:
Al Hirschfeld turns 97 on Wednesday, and he’s still going strong,
regularly caricaturing the worlds of stage, dance, music, and
film. “I’m enchanted with line, what makes it work, how it communicates
recognition to the viewer,” roars the man they dubbed The Line
King. “That sounds like a ridiculous, insane kind of thing to
devote your life to, but that’s what I’ve done. I find it fascinating,
and I’m closer to a definition of it than when I started.” MSNBC
06/19/00
Monday
June 19
-
GETTY
DIRECTOR RESIGNS: John Walsh announced he will step down
this fall after heading the J. Paul Getty Museum for 17 years,
during which he broadened the Getty’s collections and oversaw
the museum’s transition to its lavish new Brentwood home two
years ago. Getty chief curator Deborah Gribbon will step into
Walsh’s position in September. New
Jersey Online (AP) 06/18/00
-
THE
TATE IS A FRAUD? Jed Perl is down on the new Tate. "People
tell me that they love Tate Modern. When I ask for specifics,
they don't seem to be able to say why. The public has such an
insatiable hunger for the best things in life - which, needless
to say, include museum visits - that they would rather suspend
judgment than go away disappointed. There are no more than four
dozen paintings or sculptures of consequence dribbled through
Tate Modern's nearly endless galleries, yet somehow this does
not matter. The museum has become a funhouse enclosed in a gigantic
site-specific sculpture." The
New Republic 06/19/00
-
CASUALTIES
OF WAR: The art of Chechnya is being destroyed in that republic's
struggle with Russia. “Many of the republic’s archeological
and architectural sites are being destroyed since they are located
at the centre of hostilities. War is war, and art and archeology
are caught in the crossfire.” The
Art Newspaper 06/19/00
-
SURGE
OR SLUMP? The well-publicized
sums paid at auction last week for two Victorian-era paintings
(£6.6 million by Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber for John William Waterhouse’s
“Saint Cecilia” and £2.6 million by Australian collector John
Schaeffer for Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “Pandora”) may not tell
the whole story about what’s really happening in the world of
Victorian art sales. In fact, Sotheby’s failed to sell 40% of
its British art on the block last week, while Phillips’ unsold
lots (of mainly Victorian pictures) totaled 50 percent. London
Telegraph 06/19/00
-
ETHICAL
URBANISM? The theme of the seventh annual Venice Biennale
of Architecture is "cities: less aesthetics, more ethics."
Not a bad goal, but “it’s a particularly tall order in Venice:
the city has been in decline since the 18th century,
and hasn't been a real, workaday place since the great flood
of November 1966, which marked the beginning of a major international
effort to conserve [the city]. From then on Venice was pickled
in aspic, becoming a tourist ghetto and a place known equally
for its aesthetics and its lack of ethics when it came to dealing
with the millions of visitors who flood into St Mark's Square
every year.” The
Guardian 06/19/00
-
FRENCH
WAR MUSEUM OPENS: On Sunday, French President Jacques Chirac
inaugurated France’s first museum dedicated to France’s role
in World War II. The inauguration was held on the 60th
anniversary of de Gaulle’s famous call to resist the occupying
Nazis. CNN
(AP) 06/18/00
-
IMAGEMAKER:
London’s Serpentine Gallery, a “pocket-sized park pavilion”
in Kensington Gardens, celebrates its 30th anniversary
tomorrow. Julia Peyton-Jones, the gallery’s director since 1991,
is widely credited as the force behind Serpentine’s cutting-edge
shows and its growing reputation as Britain’s most successful
small gallery. London
Telegraph 06/19/00
-
GRAFFITI,
ANYONE? : New York fêted graffiti artists with two events
this week: an auction of the work of 100 “night writers” and
two gallery retrospectives. But, opinions still vary widely
over whether graffiti belongs in galleries and museums at all
or should be left alone on the streets. New
York Times 06/19/00 (one-time
registration required for entry)
Sunday
June 18
-
TAKING
BACK THE WALL: The land where the Berlin Wall once stood
has held out both a promise and caution for the future. Now
an important new building opens. "Here, on a chunk of land
where just 10 years ago there was nothing but empty space and
buildings pockmarked with shrapnel, a city is being reborn -one
that is a real place, not just a tourist quarter." Chicago
Tribune 06/18/00
-
THE
MORALITY OF PAINTINGS: You're an art dealer or curator and
you're invited to someone's house and discover an art treasure
that the owner doesn't know he has. Do you tell? The answer
is a lot more complicated than simple yes or no, concludes author
Michael Frayn. The
Telegraph (London) 06/18/00
-
FOSTER'S
WOBBLE: Norman Foster is Britain's most famous working architect,
with a string of successes. But when his Millennium Bridge across
the Thames opened last Saturday, it swayed and wobbled and terrified
the crowds pounding across it. "What an embarrassment,"
he tells Hugh Pearlman.
The
Sunday Times 06/18/00
-
NO
MORE PLOP ART: In the past seven years, Britain has erected
some 7,000 pieces of public art sculptures. The kinds of art
being put up is changing though: "Younger artists,
in particular, prefer to make works that involve people and
real life. They are not interested in parachuting in a big bit
of sculpture."
The
Telegraph (London) 06/18/00
Friday
June 16
-
BETTER
LEFT UNDONE? Art historians have always puzzled over the
large number of paintings
left “unfinished” by Paul Cezanne. Now a major exhibit of his
“unfinished” works are on exhibit at Zurich’s Kunsthaus museum.
As Cezanne wrote home to his mother in 1874: “I have to work
constantly, (but) not in order to arrive at the finish, which
attracts the admiration of imbeciles. I must strive to complete
only for the satisfaction of becoming truer and wiser.” MSNBC
06/16/00
-
THE
ART LISTS:
It's been two months since American
museums put up lists of artwork with questionable provenance
during the Nazi era. "So far, no claimants have come forward
to identify and seek restitution for objects on the Web sites
put up by the Museum of Fine Art, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, the Museum of Modern Art, or the Art Institute of Chicago.
Nor have the sites yielded significant evidence that could lead
to the recovery of stolen objects."
Boston
Globe 06/16/00
-
PRINTS
OF WALES: Thirty of the Prince of Wales’s watercolor paintings
- signed only “C”- went on display today in London, along with
26 oils by Saudi prince Khalid Al-Faisal, in the exhibition
“Painting and Patronage.” Times
of India (AP) 06/16/00
-
FRANCE
COMES CLEAN: It’s been more than five decades since World
War II, and France is just now beginning to look openly, in
history books and art exhibits, at its collaborationist past.
A new museum opens in Paris this week dedicated to shedding
light on just what transpired during the Vichy regime. “The
museum pulls no punches: it shows that collaboration with the
Nazis was a major phenomenon in wartime France and that French
police were as dangerous for resistance fighters and Jews as
the Gestapo.” Times
of India (Reuters) 06/16/00
-
TRACES
OF ROYALTY:
"Researchers
plan to test DNA from a mummy that sat in an oddity museum in
Canada for decades to see if it is the body of an Egyptian pharaoh.
The Niagara Falls Museum in Ontario displayed the mummy for
138 years as part of its collection, which included two-headed
cows, a five-legged pig, Wild Bill Hickok's saddle and a humpback
whale skeleton." Chicago
Sun-Times 06/16/00
-
MR
GEHRY'S ROCK MUSEUM: Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project
opens in Seattle. "Finding a form for a museum devoted
to rock is a difficult task. Rock requires little from architecture,
other than cheap rent, good locks, and isolation from noise-sensitive
neighbors. The architectural forms associated with rock and
roll are garages, basements, industrial buildings; all walls
soundproofed with scraps of carpet and egg cartons."
The Stranger 06/15/00
Thursday
June 15
-
THE
ART OF PATRONAGE: "When it comes to telling the stories
of living patrons—that is, collectors who buy contemporary art
and give it to museums—the most blatant conflicts of interest
make it all but impossible to give the public a candid, disabused
account of the way our system of contemporary art patronage
actually works." So what's actually wrong with this picture?
New
York Observer 06/14/00
-
A
BUILDING ABOUT... Okay, so the Frank Gehry-designed Experience
Music project is a building about music (but it's not a museum).
But what, exactly, is it? "When EMP opens, visitors will
step inside a museum that's also a technological showcase, an
educational institution, a research facility, a brick-and-mortar
(or rather steel-and-plywood) companion to the Web site emplive.com,
and a musical amusement park. Or is it a concert venue, a restaurant
and bar, and a tourist trap?" Seattle
Weekly 06/15/00
-
TURNER
PRIZE SHORTLIST:
Britain's Turner Prize
has somewhat of an infamous reputation, with some saying that
gimmicks are rewarded at the expense of more thoughtful art.
This year's shortlist, revealed Wednesday, is no exception.
Yahoo!
(Reuters) 06/14/00
-
SO
MUCH FOR THE "B" IN YBA: Three of this year's
four Turner Prize finalists were born outside the UK. "
'People not born in the UK can make a tremendous contribution
to life in this country.' Although the Turner Prize is,
in theory, awarded to a British artist, anyone working in
the UK who has mounted an exhibition in the past year qualifies."
Financial
Times 06/15/00
-
THERE'S
A RIGHT AND WRONG WAY TO DO IT: Two museums with different
missions and objectives - fair enough. But the North Carolina
Museum of Art and the North Carolina Museum of History also
exemplify a right and a wrong way to go about being a museum.
The
Idler 06/15/00
-
ETHIOPIAN
CHRISTIAN ART FOR 400: Everything you ever wanted to know
on this subject. Addis
Tribune (Ethiopia) 06/00
-
A
THING FOR PRE-RAPHAEL:
Andrew Lloyd-Webber has
paid £6 million - a record for a piece
of Victorian art - for a Pre-Raphaelite painting of a sleeping
St Cecilia. Lloyd-Webber paid
nearly twice the pre-sale estimates for the auction at Christie's.
The
Independent 06/15/00
-
ARCHITECTURE
ON TV: A new Australian television show proves that architecture
can be done on TV. "In the Mind of an Architect,"
the ABC's first major arts production to be sold overseas, explains
"the vision and content behind modern spaces...and architectural
concepts to the masses." The
Age (Melbourne) 06/15/00
Wednesday
June 14
-
ABRUPT
RETURN:
Russia's Hermitage
Museum loaned Matisse's "La Danse" for an exhibition
in Italy. It was the first time the collection had been seen
outside Russia and after the exhibition finished last weekend
in Rome, the art was scheduled to be put on show in Milan until
August. "But in a surprise legal move the heirs of the
original owner demanded that the Italian courts confiscate the
huge painting. So the painting was quickly transported back
to Russia before it could be enmeshed in legal action."
The
Independent 06/14/00
-
DISPUTED
ART WHISKED BACK TO RUSSIA:" 'La Danse', painted
in 1910, was one of many works of art confiscated from private
collections by Lenin and the Bolsheviks a year after the
Russian Revolution of 1917. It belonged to one of pre-revolutionary
Russia's most eminent art connoisseurs, Sergei Ivanovich
Shukin, who came from a Russian-Jewish family that made
its fortune in textiles." The
Times (London) 06/14/00
-
POLITICS
OF PUBLIC ART:
The University of
Massachusetts thought it was doing a neighborhood-improvement
thing when it tried to organize a sculpture garden of important
work. But now the neighborhood is objecting big time, and someone
even went so far as to smash the base for one of the sculptures.
"The big issue isn't the desirability of a sculpture park
filled with millions of dollars' worth of work that would go
a long way toward improving Boston's current reputation as a
completely dysfunctional city when it comes to public art. The
issue is town-gown friction, a variation on what happens every
time Harvard wants to expand its art museums, world-class institutions
that enrich not just the university community, but the community
at large." Boston
Globe 06/14/00
-
THE
NAKED TRUTH: Spencer Tunick has been arrested five times
for organizing his photo shoots of crowds of naked people. So
he sued the city of New York and last weekend a judge ruled
he could go ahead with a project placing 125 naked volunteers
under a Manhattan bridge. "I like that it brings more attention
to the background of the photograph. There's equal tension.
First you look at the background, and then your eyes are drawn
to the body and the relationship between the vulnerability of
human nakedness and the public space."
National
Post (Canada) 06/14/00
-
A
MATTER OF MANAGEMENT: Australia's National Gallery has money
problems. Why? In part, because the museum "has
paid more than $560,000 in relation to 19 former employees who
have left since the appointment of Dr Brian Kennedy as director
three years ago. The gallery's legal expenses budget has blown
out to more than $200,000 this financial year - more than four
times its $50,000 annual allocation." Sydney
Morning Herald 06/14/00
Tuesday
June 13
-
WHOLE
LOTTA LOOTING GOIN’ ON: An estimated £150 million-£2 billion
worth of art treasures are looted from sites around the world
every year, according to a new Institute for Archaeological
Research report. “Buddhas in Cambodia have been decapitated
with power saws and the illegal trade in fossil hunting stretches
from Nebraska to the Gobi Desert.” The report urges Britain
to sign the 1970 UNESCO Convention prohibiting illegal exports
and imports of artifacts, claiming up to 90% of antiquities
auctioned in London over the past 20 years were sold without
any details of provenance. Yahoo!
News (Reuters) 06/12/00
-
AFFIRMATIVE
EMBRACE: George Segal,
who died at age 75 last Friday, is remembered not only as a
preeminent pop artist, but also as a sculptor whose depiction
of sexual freedom and tolerance of difference were way ahead
of his time. “It’s significant that in 1983 (in his “Gay Liberation”
sculpture commemorating New York’s Stonewall riots) he had already
sought to include gays and lesbians as a part of his vision
of America.” Salon
06/12/00
-
LETTING
IT ALL HANG OUT: For more than 50 years, painter Alice Neel
created provocative, painfully revealing - and often nude and
famously unflattering - portraits of art-world insiders. On
the eve of the Whitney Museum’s Neel retrospective, eleven of
her former subjects reflect on what it was like to sit for “a
genius at detecting her subjects' inner lives and notorious
for exposing - and exaggerating - her subjects' flaws. New
York Magazine
06/19/00
-
STOLEN
PICASSO FOUND: A painting
recovered in Izmir, Turkey, last week is believed to be a 1908
Picasso (“La Fermiere”) stolen from the Kuwaiti royal palace
by an Iraqi army captain during the Gulf War. Times
of India (AP) 06/13/00
-
MAXING
OUT THE GIFTING EXPERIENCE:
Museums have discovered
that online sales of museum merchandise do better than giftshop
sales in the museum. It's a large an untapped market, say online
retailers. "People are giving suboptimal gifts. We want
them to give gifts based on the finest works of art in the world."
New
York Times 06/13/00 (one-time
registration required for entry)
-
NEW
HOME FOR OLD MASTERS: London’s Wallace Collection, a private
museum of 18th-century furniture, ceramics, and Old Master paintings,
has undergone a £10.6 million restoration and a modern facelift
in the hopes of becoming the UK’s hub for the study of the 18th-century
decorative arts. The new galleries open to the public next week.
London
Telegraph 06/13/00
-
JUBILEE
CELEBRATION: “It cost
seven times more than the dome, was finished a year and a half
late, and its teething problems have driven thousands of commuters
round the twist. But all was forgiven yesterday when the sleek
Jubilee Line extension won the title of millennium building
of the year.” The
Guardian 06/13/00
-
BOTCHED
BRIDGE: 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 06/13/00
-
55
YEARS IN THE MAKING:
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 06/13/00
-
INSIDE
THE FBI INVESTIGATION 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 06/13/00
Monday
June 12
-
PROVING
THE FIX:
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 06/12/00 (one-time
registration required for entry)
-
JUST
WHERE DID I PUT THAT PAINTING?
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 06/12/00
-
REMEMBERING
JACOB LAWRENCE: "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 06/12/00
-
TO
PAINT OR NOT TO PAINT... "Why dwell on artists anyway?
What makes them so special compared to 'ordinary' humans? My
considered view is that there is no essential difference, as
the human condition is innately artistic. Everyone is potentially
an artist: all it takes to become one is the self-realisation
that that's what you already are. It is not what you do that
makes you an artist, but your awareness of something within
that constitutes an artistic or aesthetic dimension." *spark-online
06/00
- LOVED
TO DEATH:
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 06/12/00
- 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
06/12/00
- SANITIZING
ROCK?
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
06/12/00
- RIGHT
ANGLE: 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
06/12/00
Sunday
June 11
-
SEGAL
DIES: Pop artist George
Segal dies in New Jersey at age 75. CBC
06/11/00
- SEGAL:
"He had a very sophisticated and deep understanding of
people and expressed that through his sculpture." Newsweek
06/11/00
-
PAINTER
JACOB LAWRENCE dies in Seattle. He was 82. "Lawrence
rose to fame in 1941 after creating one of the most original
and forceful series of narrative works in the history of American
art - the 'Migration of the Negro.' "
Seattle Post-Intelligencer 06/10/00
-
SO
THIS IS DISNEYLAND? Malcolm Rogers has been in charge of
Boston's Museum of Fine Arts for five years. The museum's debt
is down, attendance is up and the institution is reaching into
the community. But the MFA has also been charged with controversy.
No question the museum is being reinvented. Is it for the better?
Boston
Globe 06/11/00
-
RESPONDING
TO THE PAST:
London is besotted by contemporary
art. But the National Gallery, by definition a collector of
things past, has not participated. But now an "inspired"
plan to ask today's art stars to produce works based on the
National's collection. The
Sunday Times (London) 06/11/00
-
"NAKED
SOY SAUCE AND KETCHUP FIRGHT AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE":
They romped all over Tracy Emins bed at the Tate and peed in
Marcel Duchamps' urinal. But two London performance artists
say their actions are serious art - not pranks. So what is the
point?
The Observer 06/11/00
-
ART
THEFT AND INTRIGUE: A former Azerbaijani prosecutor has
been convicted and sentenced for his role in the bizarre theft
of some 200 prints and drawings, including a dozen rare works
by Old Masters Albrecht Dürer , Rembrandt and Jacob van Ruisdail
worth as much as $10 million dollars. MSNBC
06/11/00
-
SMUGGLERS
CAUGHT:
Two English teachers
have been caught at Istanbul's airport trying to smuggle 925
ancient Byzantine and Roman artifacts out of Turkey.
Turkish Daily News 06/11/00
Friday
June 9
-
THE
ART OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: In an attempt for broaden the
appeal of British museums, the British government has given
museums quotas for attracting minorities into the museums. Their
public funding will depend on meeting the quotas. All
Things Considered, NPR 06/08/00
-
AUGMENTED
REALITY: Augmented reality is a way to layer the virtual
world on top of the real world, without replacing reality. Museums
are experimenting - by donning a set of glasses and looking
at an artifact or piece of art, images and information come
to life around them. The
Times of India (Reuters) 06/09/00
-
TO
BE YOUNG, BRITISH AND AN ARTIST is to be glamorous and a
celebrity. But, "is the state of British art or that of
any other country where Damien Hirst’s shark-in-a-tank has been
exhibited the better for it? Absolutely not." So what is
the legacy of the Young British Artists? New
York Press 06/08/00
-
WHITE-COLLAR
WALK-OUT: Museum of Modern
Art workers have been on strike since April, and as the days
go on and workers continue to trickle across the picket line,
things seem to be getting uglier. One thing that distinguishes
this strike is that it involves white-collar workers, many
of whom have had no experience with a union. The
Village Voice 06/12/00
-
GETTING
A GEELONG GUGGENHEIM: On
June 29th Guggenheim Foundation director Thomas Krens meets
with Australian Premier Steve Bracks to discuss the possibility
of putting the next Guggenheim in Geelong. The meeting, they
hope, will help decide who's going to finance what. The
Age (AAP) 06/09/00
-
CHANGING
CHIEFS: Chief curator of the National Gallery of Canada
to take chief curator job at New York's Frick.
CBC 06/09/00
-
THE
VIRTUAL GUGGENHEIM: About the new online Guggenheim, currently
under development: "Why not, in fact, (create) an entirely
new experience given this content that's already emerging and
try to push the content further?"
Wired 06/09/00
-
SAVING
FACE: The Chinese government has protested the showing
of "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" in Australia, saying
the exhibition could damage their "international standing."
A disclaimer note above the entrance to the exhibit reads: "The
National Gallery of Australia wishes to advise that this performance
contains nudity, live animals and Chinese firecrackers."
What on earth are they worried about? South
China Morning Post 06/08/00
-
BLACK
AND WHITE MEMORY: Due to
the political climate of North Korea in the 1950's, there is
very little art or recorded literature to help Koreans remember
that period of history. A newly discovered photographic collection
is helping people fill in the blanks. The
Korean Times 06/08/00
-
SOTHEBY'S
MOVES TO WEB: Sotheby's has decided to move its regular
February auction to the web, given how successful the online
operation has been. New
York Times 06/09/00 (one-time
registration required for entry)
-
BUILDING
PRACTICES:
The Pritzker is often described
as the Nobel Prize of architecture. But does it celebrate and
boost the field of architecture, or pander to the "worst
celebrity aspects of architectural practice?"
Toronto
Globe and Mail 06/09/00
-
QUAKE-PROOF:
San Francisco's de Young
Museum was damaged in the 1989 earthquake. Plans are well along
to rebuild. But "if local community activists have their
way, the design for the ambitious $135 million project will
soon be subjected to a process that many observers believe could
doom it. And although the proposed building, by acclaimed Swiss
architects Herzog & de Meuron Architekten AG, has been hailed
by those culturally-in-the-know as a masterpiece of contemporary
Modernism, it has come in for some blistering criticism from
an unexpected quarter: other architects."
Metropolis
06/00
Thursday
June 8
-
PERFECTION
IN SQUINTING:
"For centuries,
Michelangelo's sculpture David has been held up as the ultimate
in male physical beauty. But now a laser scan of his face has
revealed the truth: he squints."
New
Scientist 06/08/00
-
THE
ART OF WAR:
The Russian government
recovers a stolen Franz Rubeau painting from Chechen rebels
who planned to sell it for $1 million to help finance their
war against the Russians.
The
Art Newspaper 06/08/00
-
SHILL
BIDDING: New York Times arts reporter Judith Dobrzynski
discusses the current FBI investigation of the recent fraudulent
bidding for a purported Diebenkorn painting on E-Bay. NPR
06/07/00 [Real
audio file]
-
ART
DEBS: Now is the time of year when art schools present their
degree shows - “the art world's coming-out parties” - and dealers,
curators, and collectors make the rounds looking for new talent.
Royal College of Art grads in London are already fetching four-figure
sums for their student work. What does this say about the fickle
British art market? “If we have learned one thing from the sensational
success of British art in the past decade, it is that talent
or skill alone has nothing to do with becoming a famous artist.
This is not because art is a con, but because it is an intellectual
game. It's a game of recognition, of constantly stretching the
parameters of what can be defined as art.” The
Guardian 06/08/00
-
BROOKLYN
MUSEUM'S SUNNY SUMMER: The
Brooklyn Museum has had enough controversy for awhile. So this
summer they will present a Maxfield Parrish and William Merritt
Chase exhibition - peaceful perfection filled with blue skies
and still ponds. Fittingly, both artists had their own experience
with giving the public what it wants a hundred year ago. Parrish,
for instance, "knew how to market paradise; he understood
that in America the beautiful, innocence sells." New
York Magazine 06/12/00
Wednesday
June 7
-
THE
FBI is reportedly investigating the troublesome fake (?)
Diebenkorn auction a few weeks ago on the Ebay auction site.
New
Jersey Online (AP) 06/07/00
-
BRITS
HONOR HOLOCAUST: London’s first permanent
Holocaust exhibition opened Tuesday at the Imperial War Museum.
The $27 million exhibition is the largest Holocaust memorial
display outside Israel and the U.S. New
Jersey Online (AP) 06/07/00
-
BRITS
HONOR HOLOCAUST: London’s first permanent
Holocaust exhibition opened Tuesday at the Imperial War Museum.
The $27 million exhibition is the largest Holocaust memorial
display outside Israel and the U.S. BBC
06/06/00
-
UNDERWATER
WORLD: Two ancient Egyptian cities, Herakleion and Canopus
- known only from ancient legends and Greek tragedies - were
discovered off the Egyptian coast last weekend by French and
Egyptian researchers. The 2,500-year-old finds are being heralded
as “the most exciting find in the history of marine archaeology.
They are intact. Frozen in time and totally untouched.” London
Times 06/07/00
-
MASSIVE
MASTERWORKS: The permanent collection at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum
contains an unrivalled range of 17th-century Dutch paintings.
This year the museum celebrates its 200th anniversary
and has acquired additional masterpieces from other Dutch collections
for a massive exhibition showcasing the definitive sweep of
the period. The Telegraph
06/07/00
-
MGM
SELLS BELLAGIO ART:
The MGM sells off eleven of the paintings it inherited
with its purchase of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, taking
in $124 million. Three of the paintings were bought by Steve
Wynn, former Bellagio owner.
DigitalCity 06/06/00
-
MAKING
THE ART-SITE DANCE: Thomas Hoving, art-world showman and
former Met Museum director, has signed on to direct the considerable
editorial content of Artnet.com. He calls himself "just
another Internet hack trying to break some stories."
BusinessWeek
06/06/00
-
COW
CLONES: Last
summer Chicago placed 300 fibreglass art cows on its downtown
streets and the city claims 2 million visitors came to see them,
generating more that $200 million in economic activity. Sniffing
a hit, some 30 North American cities are planning urban animal
installations this summer - among them Toronto, which this week
put up 100 10-foot-tall moose around its downtown.
Chicago Tribune 06/07/00
Tuesday
June 6
-
FLASH
OF INSPIRATION: Architect Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge,
linking Tate Modern with the north bank of the Thames, opens
Saturday. The positive buzz about his design and its potential
to transform London’s waterfront has been mounting. So what
was Foster’s inspiration for the project? “The blade of light
that used to shoot out across the canyon and so save Flash Gordon
from his evil pursuers in the Saturday-morning cinema that was
such a feature of his youth. For Foster, the Millennium Bridge
is that blade of light, leaping across the Thames.” The
Telegraph 06/06/ 00
-
LONDON
LOVES ART: “To be in London these days is to be endlessly
entertained by art, by the museums that show it, the multiplying
galleries that sell it and the masses who have become weirdly
fascinated by it.” Tate Modern and a swell of new galleries
have just opened, and the city is buzzing with exhibits - each
more bizarre than the next. New
York Times 06/05/00 (one-time registration required for entry)
-
A
BUSINESS DECISION, NOT A CURIOSITY: After five months in
operation Sotheby's online auction operation is doing about
$1 million in sales a week. Now the company is selling a copy
of the Declaration of Indepdence online without a "flesh-and-blood
auctioneer drumming up excitement and coaxing bids from collectors."
Los Angeles Times 06/06/00
-
WOMEN’S
WORK: An unprecedented number of women artists, filmmakers,
and writers in Korea have been creating work that directly confronts
gender-identity issues and sexism. Three upcoming exhibits will
feature the work of 489 women artists - the largest number to
ever exhibit in Korea. Korea
Herald 06/06/00
-
FREEZE
FRAME: Eccentric Englishman
Eadweard Muybridge discovered the photographic system that would
revolutionize scientific understanding and the process for naturalist
art. Was this dedicated craftsmen "a mad scientist,
promoting his lab experiments as photographic art? Or was he
an artistic opportunist, using science to gratify his flair
for fantasy?" Civilization
06/00
-
NEENER
NEENER - A LABEL BY ANY OTHER NAME: Deconstructing a new
name for art on the internet. Does it fit?
Feed 06/06/00
Monday
June 5
-
PROSECUTING
MUSEUMS FOR BORROWING:
New York state governor signs a law that gives prosecutors the
power to bring criminal charges against institutions that borrow
stolen work. New York museums have opposed the law, saying it
will hurt their ability to borrow artwork.
The Art
Newspaper 06/05/00
-
ANCIENT
CITY UNCOVERED: Archeologists has put on display some of
the treasures they have uncovered from a nearly complete ancient
city they discovered. "The city, untouched for more than
1000 years, was found less than 10 metres under the waters of
the Mediterranean about six kilometres off the coast near Alexandria,
Egypt."
The Age
(LA Times, Reuters) 06/05/00
-
GANGS
SMUGGLE AFRICA'S ART: Demand for Africa's ancient art is
so high that gangs of thieves are taking advantage smuggling
out artifacts to London in a trade that's said to be worth £500
million a year. Sunday
Times (London) 06/05/00
-
A
"VENDETTA" AGAINST A PICTURE: A self-proclaimed
"fake hunter" insists that a painting in Britain's
National Gallery said to be by Rubens is a fake. Pay no attention
to this man, writes one expert. "An amateur in the worst
sense of the word, he has become a man with an obsession, apparently
deaf and blind to evidence, disingenuous to a menacing degree,
prepared to take words out of context with a knowing and triumphant
Gotcha! and thoughtlessly prepared to traduce all who disagree
with him; in this bitter feud against the National Gallery he
makes an ass of himself."
London
Evening Standard 06/05/00
-
PHOTOGRAPHER
WINS: A day after the Supreme Court declined to stop them,
150 people posed nude under New York's Williamsburg Bridge for
a photographer.
ABCNews.com
06/04/00
-
YOU
BREAK IT... "A patron at the Minneapolis Institute
of Arts on Sunday disregarded a do-not-touch sign, climbed atop
a display platform and sat down on a chair dating to the Ming
Dynasty, breaking it in three places." The chair was worth
"six figures."
St. Paul
Pioneer Press 06/05/00
-
ANOTHER
PLEA FOR RETURNING THE ELGINS: Greece calls again for the
return of the Elgin marbles from the British Museum, but says
it might be interested in sharing ownership of the artwork.
BBC 06/05/00
-
SORTING
OUT OWNERSHIP: Boston's Museum of Fine Art debates the proper
way to list artwork with questionable provenance on the internet.
Boston Herald 06/05/00
Sunday
June 4
-
LOOTED
ART TO STAY IN RALEIGH: After agreeing to give up a painting
by Cranach to heirs of the collector it was stolen by the Nazis
from, The North Carolina Museum of Art gets a surprise. Rather
than selling it on the open market, the heirs sell it back to
the museum for a fraction of its value. Scripps
Howard 06/03/00
-
AN
ARCHITECTURAL LEGACY:
After a decade of high-profile
projects, Norman Foster is the pre-eminent British architect
of the day. But how will history judge his work?
The Telegraph
06/04/00
-
BRIDGES
TO THE FUTURE: A new wave of interesting public architecture
being built in London shows up the embarrassing efforts of the
70s and 80s.
Sunday
Times (London) 06/04/00
-
THE
ONLINE ART-BUYER: So who would buy art online without seeing
it in person? The buyer who is intimidated by the gallery "scene"
and the traditional culture around buying art. "I like
going to galleries, but I've found that if you don't have thousands
of dollars to spend, the attitude is they won't give you the
time of day.''
San Jose
Mercury News 06/04/00
-
A
GLORIOUS MESS: "The show, now at the Guggenheim Museum,
is called '1900 - Art at the Crossroads,' which it isn't, really.
It's more like 'Art on Tumble Dry,' which is to say art as the
usual mess, any year you could pick. The curators have not only
dragged out 1900's frolicking nymphs, adored virgins, symbolist
tombs and gloomy peasants painted and sculpted by people you
never heard of; no, the outrage is that they're hung next to
Cezanne, Picasso, Munch, Sargent, on and on, as if they were
all equals. Washington
Post 06/04/00
-
THE
SISTINE CHAPEL AND HOCKEY: Self-taught artist John Mahnic
has spent some 2,900 hours over eight years recreating paintings
of the Sistine Chapel - but where Michelangelo used Biblical
figures, Mahnic's is an homage to hockey. "The masterpiece
shows 162 recognizable hockey players emerging from temple columns.
Whereas Michelangelo's most famous scene depicts God's forefinger
touching that of the newly created Adam, Mahnic reprises this
image showing hockey hero Bobby Orr falling toward the celestial
digit after scoring the winning goal in the 1970 Stanley Cup
final."
National
Post (Canada) 06/04/00
Friday
June 2
-
CHECKING
OUT THE SYDNEY BIENNALE: "If it seems glib, after a
few hours' lurching about in a media ruck, to give a simple
thumbs up to an exhibition of such scale and diversity as the
Biennale of Sydney 2000, there is nevertheless a point here
worth insisting on: if you choose interesting work by terrific
artists rather than forcefeeding art through a predetermined,
predigested theme, you come up with an exciting show."
The Age
(Melbourne) 06/02/00
-
PAVING
OVER HISTORY: Developers, archeologists, and Greek
government officials are the players in the dramatic story of
the new six-lane Athens-Thessaloniki national highway in Greece.
The new road, which passes over the ancient city of Alos, has
spurred over 25 new excavations and put scholars on the trail
to new discoveries on antiquity. Unfortunately, the Greek Ministry
for the Environment and Public Works, which seems to be calling
all the wrong shots, may end up destroying some of the
precious works they've set out to save. Archaeology
06/00
-
WHAT'S
IN A NAME? What to call web art? Calling it "web art"
is so...well, dull and uninspired. So why wait around for the
art historians to name it? "Names are rock and roll: They
bring friends to the party," says Miltos Manetas, (cool
name Milt) who embarked on a project to find a name for the
art and he approached some professional namers (yes, they do
exist) They came up with... Wired
06/02/00
-
SHILLING
FOR SALES: The budding business of online art auctions is
still trying to work out some of the kinks, as last month's
sham auction of a fake(?) Diebenkorn showed. "A close analysis
of that and other eBay art auctions reveals that the flourishing
cyberauction world faces a deeper, more intransigent problem
than lone self-bidders: the prospect of rings of shill bidders,
acting as partners." New
York Times 06/02/00
(one-time
registration required for entry)
-
COPIES
TO SIZE: Artists
in Vietnam are so good at reproducing international paintings
that the Vietnamese government has asked them to make the copies
three centimeters (1.2 inches) smaller or larger than the originals.
Yahoo
(Reuters) 06/02/00
Thursday
June 1
-
CEMETERY
PLOT FAKES OUT MEDIA: The latest in everlasting bliss:
the Final Curtain cemetery theme park, where you can have a
dance floor installed over your gravesite, or a video camera
in your coffin to show time-lapse display of your corporeal
decay. Too strange to be true? Not to 39 newspapers, 19
radio stations, six TV stations, 10 magazines and 20 Web sites
who fell for the story. Performance artist and media scammer
Joey Skaggs strikes again. Salon
05/31/00
-
PICASSO
IN COLOMBIA: An entrepreneur asks museums and galleries
around the world to loan their Picassos for a symbolic exhibition
of peace in war-torn Bogota, Colombia. Only one in 100 says
yes - but our friend manages to collect 37 paintings. Were loaners
afraid for the safety of their treasures? "Actually, walking
along this street, I'm probably more in danger than the paintings
back at the museum," he says. Then he admitted that one
asked for "war insurance," which doesn't exist. Toronto
Globe and Mail 06/01/00
-
BROKEN
SYNAPSE: Robert Rauschenberg’s latest work, “Synapsis Shuffle,”
is comprised of 52 nine-foot panels adorned with his signature
hand-painted passages and photographic screens. What’s unusual
is that he’s asking a new group of artist- (and celebrity) friends
to re-assemble them every time they’re exhibited. "At first
I thought we should ask the first 12 taxi drivers who passed
the museum to put panels together." New
York Times 06/01/00 (one-time registration required for entry)
-
IN
THE SPIRIT OF ART: Artists and religious groups got
together last week in London to create dialogue between contemporary
art and faith. Twelve places of worship in and around London
are hosting performances and exhibiting the work of contemporary
British artists - including Damien Hirst’s “Last Supper.” “It
consists of 13 unappetising silk screens of text mimicking pharmaceutical
packaging but prescribing food to be taken like medicine.” London
Evening Standard 06/01/00
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