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OCTOBER 1999

  • NORMAN ROCKWELL RECONSIDERED: The artist critics loved to disparage is getting a new tour through some blue-chip museums. Rockwell in the Guggenheim? Crazy! Christian Science Monitor 10/30/99
         AND: Debut in Atlanta. Atlanta Journal-Constitution 11/1/99

  • AT WHAT COST? Controversial show Brooklyn Museum show was largely financed by those who stood to gain from promoting artists in the show. New York Times 10/31/99 (registration required for access)

  • PORTRAYING PITTSBURGH: Installation artists from around the world converge on downtown Pittsburgh for the Carnegie International. 
    Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/29/99 
         AND: Some historical perspective Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/31/99

  • HAVE A COW: Chicago's outdoor art cows have attracted more attention to the city's downtown than the 1996 Democratic National Convention, and pumped $200 million into the economy. Atlanta Journal Constitution 10/29/99

  • CROSSING AMERICA: For the past six months Greg Zanis has traveled around the country in his truck making crosses wherever he goes - so far 3,400 of them. Washington Post 10/28/99

  • CRITICAL DISCONNECT: An artist puts up a show consisting of 25 decorated decomposing rabbits hanging from trees. The city has a lively debate about the work and then it's vandalized in the middle of the night. Now the curator of the rabbit show talks about art that seeks to confront. CBC 10/28/99 (note: links to complete story coverage at the end)

  • OF TOURISTS, AUTOMOBILES AND STARBUCKS: A conversation about the art of cities with Richard Rogers, architect of the Centre Pompidou and the Lloyd's building. Feed 10/26/99

  • MUSEUMING OUTSIDE NEW YORK & PARIS: Regional museums in France and America join forces to raise their profiles and "prove cultural life lives outside the big cities." New York Times 10/26/99 (registration required for access)

  • WHY HAS THE TURNER PRIZE, originally created to celebrate the best of British art, abandoned traditional painting and sculpture in favor of installation art? Financial Times 10/26/99
         ALSO: "TWO NAKED MEN JUMP INTO TRACY'S BED": Two art students did exactly that Sunday at the controversial Turner Prize exhibit at the London's Tate Gallery. They called their actions art - "We wanted to push her work to further limits, make it more sensational, interesting and significant." they say. One of them tried to scare the guards by pretending to be a kung fu artist. BBC 10/26/99
        
    PREVIOUSLY: PROTEST: The Turner Prize gallery in London's Tate Gallery was shut for the day Sunday after two men staged a pillow fight in the Turner Prize exhibition. They jumped onto a bed which was part of a controversial exhibition by young British artist Tracey Emin. BBC 10/24/99

  • UPLIFTING OR DISGUSTING: Sorting out the values of art in a time when controversy draws more attention than beauty. Chicago Tribune 10/26/99 

  • QUICK - NAME FIVE CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN VISUAL ARTISTS: Can't do it? That's why Canada needs an award like Britain's Turner Prize to create some buzz. 
    Toronto Globe and Mail 10/25/99

  • PROTEST: London's Tate Gallery was shut for the day Sunday after two men staged a pillow fight in the Turner Prize exhibition. They jumped onto a bed which was part of a controversial exhibition by young British artist Tracey Emin. BBC 10/24/99

  • A DECADENT SNOB: John Fry was Britain's most influential critic of the 20th Century. He invented modernism for the British public and championed the post-Impressionists - but his aesthetic is totally out of step with contemporary notions of aesthetic taste in the UK. London Sunday Times 10/24/99

  • SIZING UP "SENSATION": Rarely has an art show had so many reluctant champions. New York Times 10/24/99

  • MONUMENT OF ANGELS: A proposed $3.6 billion mega-project in downtown LA seeks to give the city a statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Disney Land all in one. What an ill-conceived project, cry the critics. 
         AND: THE ELABORATE 750-foot-tall Gothic style column will be topped with statue of a female angel twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Planned as the centerpiece to an 88-acre theme park, the privately funded City of Angels Monument is being billed as a memorial honoring the arts and entertainment. What it really is, writes critic Christopher Knight, is junk.

     Los Angeles Times 10/23/99

  • IN PURSUIT OF BOTICELLI: Fort Worth's Kimbell Museum has an agreement to buy a Boticelli for $24 million. Now the problem is getting an export license to get it out of England. 
    New York Times 10/22/99 (registration required to access)

  • WHEN IS A $60 MILLION CEZANNE NOT? The painting fetched a record price at Sotheby's last spring. When it quietly went up at Steve Wynn's Los Vegas hotel months later, it was a sign of a high-priced sale gone wrong. 
    New York Observer 10/22/99

  • GENDER GAP: Why no women artists in the Museum of Modern Art's first segment of its "radical rethinking" survey of modern art? Village Voice 10/21/99 

  • NATIONAL GALLERY gets new curator of modern and contemporary art. 
    Washington Post 10/21/99

  • ENHANCING THE MUSEUM EXPERIENCE: Intel and the Whitney Museum team up with an interactive computer tablet to make looking at art in a museum an interactive multimedia experience. 
    New York Times 10/21/99
    (registration required to access)

  • FREE FOR ALL: Incensed at a sale of his work at a British auction last week, David Hockney makes an offer to readers of a London newspaper - "I'll send you free art if you ask." CBC 10/20/99

  • MILLENNIAL FEVER: Twice as large as Atlanta's Georgia Dome,  wide enough to fit the Eiffel Tower laid on its side and big enough to contain 1,100 Olympic-sized swimming pools. It's London's new Millennial Dome, racing toward completion before the calendar changes. 
    Baltimore Sun 10/20/99
         AND: London: spectacular venue for the Millennium (Reuters) Philadelphia Daliy News 10/20/99

  • THE MEN BEHIND THE MAN: Canadian magazine says Haida artist Bill Reid didn't make much of his work. The protests - the issue - is about art as money, writes one critic. Toronto Star 10/19/99

  • ITALY EXPECTS A FLOOD OF VISITORS next year to mark the millennium. So it's cleaning up its monuments and buildings and finding some surprises underneath. ARTnewspaper.com 10/18/99

  • STONE HENGE, VIETNAM MEMORIAL and a sundial all rolled up into one: Baltimore's proposed public sculpture to mark the millennium rips off the hits. Baltimore Sun 10/17/99

  • WORDS-WORKING: Barbara Kruger has her first major retrospective at the LA County Museum of Art. I'm accessible but cool, she says. LA Times 10/17/99

  • VIRTUAL TOWER: A Dutch town decides to commemorate the millennium by building a tower. Not just any tower, though. London Telegraph 10/15/99 

  • JUDGE RULES SEATTLE ART MUSEUM can't sue New York art dealer for selling Matisse painting stolen by Nazis. Ruling could have implications for other museums. 
    Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/15/99

  • CEZANNE'S GREATEST FAN: By the time he died in 1929, French industrialist Auguste Pellerin had collected one-sixth of the artist's total output. This winter Pellerin's heirs are selling off ten paintings as well as a Rodin and a Manet. 
    New York Times 10/15/99

  • NEW CHIEF CURATOR for the Corcoran. Washington Post 10/14/99

  • TAKING AIM AT AN ICON: Haida artist Bill Reid was a Canadian national hero, revered for championing a dying art form. But this article, a year after he died, claims the artist relied so heavily on assistants that much of his work wasn't his own. Maclean's Magazine (Canada) 10/18/99
         ALSO: Art community defends Reid
    CBC 10/14/99
         AND: Irresponsible article seems more at home "in the art-ignorant" National Inquirer." Toronto Globe and Mail 10/15/99

  • NEO-CONCEPTUALISTS WHO SHOCK: The Young British Artists have been going for the jugular for years. Every movement needs a history. New York Times 10/14/99

  • JIG-SAW GIOTTO: The earthquake in Assisi shattered Giotto and Cimabue frescoes. Computer programmers wrote a program that scans all the fragments and matches the hundreds of thousands of pieces to reassemble them. Wired 10/13/99

  • BECAUSE REMBRANDT WENT BANKRUPT in 1656, his apartment in Amsterdam has now been faithfully recreated down to some interesting details. London Times 10/13/99

  • THE QUIET COLLECTOR: Washington's Hirschhorn Museum turns 25. This excellent profile reveals how museum director Jim Demetrion has deftly steered his museum of contemporary art through the politics of Washington and the art world. Washington Post 10/13/99 

  • GET ON A PLANE: IF you care about architecture at all, then book your flight to Turin today says a London Telegraph critic. Only three weeks left before what is perhaps the "most staggering architectural exhibition ever mounted" closes, on November 7. PS: a stripped down version travels to Montreal and Washington DC (but it won't be the same). London Telegraph 10/13/99

  • BOOTH HOUSE (AS IN JOHN WILKES...) faces the wrecking ball. Preservationists are trying to save the thespian family's decaying Tudor mansion in Baltimore suburbs from being torn down. Chicago Tribune 10/13/99

  • GEHRY DOES NORTON: LA's Norton Simon Museum gets  a $6.5 million inside redo by the architect of the day. 
    LA Weekly 10/14/99

  • FOOD FIGHT: Art Critics in Los Angeles get into a feud between conceptual-irony and anti-irony camps in the L.A. art world. Artnet.com 10/8/99

  • A "NATION OF BACKYARD WEEKEND DABBLERS?" Australian artists need to engage with the political process or be marginalized, writes a critic. 
    Sydney Morning Herald 10/11/99

  • RENAISSANCE FANTASY: What if the word had never existed? The myths of rebirth in British art. London Sunday Times 10/10/99

  • ANNALS OF ARCHITECTURE: The new American embassy in Ottawa looks like a battleship. Or a fortress. President Clinton dedicates it today. CBC 10/8/99

  • New York's Museum of Modern Art looks back (and forward) with the chestnutian and the unfamiliar. An impressionistic view back with hints of the future. New York Times 10/8/99

  • DESIGN ON $15 A MONTH: That's what Havana's architects earn. And that, plus shoddy materials and workmanship has resulted in three decades of uninspired utilitarian architecture. But the winds of renewal have begun to waft. New York Times 10/7/99

  • McARCHITECTURE: A city that once knew how to build buildings with style has lost its way. A critic takes aim at plans for San Francisco's proposed new DeYoung Museum SF Weekly 10/6/99

  • WHERE ARE WE GOING? The New York art scene has radically changed. Is it possible to have fun any more? - Anthony Haden-Guest observes the new realities. Feed Magazine
         AND: A critic, art historian and two artists talk about the act of making art and criticizing it.
    Feed

  • ON THE ROAD: The National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American Art are closing in early January for a $110 million renovation project of the building they share. Their treasures will travel to 23 cities over the next three years while the work is done. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel 10/5/99

  • FRENCH PAINTER BERNARD BUFFET commits suicide - he suffered from Parkinson's. CBC 10/6/99

  • AMIDST THE RUINS: All over Istanbul there are signs of damage after last summer's earthquake - not the least of which all the people camped out in the streets. Even with helping out with rescue work, curators got the Sixth Istanbul Biennial opened on time.
    Financial Times 10/6/99 

  • A WALL OF ICE: 64 tons of it. Artist Dale Chihuly brings a wall of Alaskan ice to Jerusalem to melt in the sun. 
    AP (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) 10/4/99
       
      AND: Hear an interview with Chihuly about the project NPR 10/4/99

  • OUTTA HERE: Rising rents and gentrification push Bay Area artists out of town. SF Bay Guardian 10/5/99

  • HIGH ANXIETY: Will there ever be such a thing as another vanguard art movement? The art world wonders and worries. New York Press 10/5/99

  • EARLY MORNING FIRE AT THE LOUVRE: Museum had to be closed for awhile on Sunday. CBC 10/4/99

  • ENPIXELATED: The Whitney Museum teams up with Intel to explore how artists might use computers and the web. Wired 10/4/99

  • UNTOUCHABLE: Coming soon to New York's 5th Ave - and immune from mayoral sanction - the Museum of Sex. Philadelphia Inquirer 10/4/99

  • OVER THE TOP: New York's Radio City Music Hall has always been a fantasy palace. It'll be even more so after reopening after a seven-month, $70 million restoration. New York Times 10/4/99

  • PRICELESS OR OVERPRICED: Edvard Munch's Madonna will be on the auction block Thursday. Most major Munches are owned by museums, so this is an unusual opportunity But who could afford it? London Times 10/4/99

  • BRITAIN'S LARGEST-EVER EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY ART: The Liverpool Biennial - Britain's first - is a shambles. But it's a start. 
    London Sunday Times 10/3/99

  • THE POLITICS OF VALUE: Museum shows make the art in them more valuable. The tangled relationship between collectors, dealers and museums. New York Times 10/1/99

  • NY Dealer speaks out about her arrest: Mary Boone, "Queen of the Art World" says it was an attack on the First Amendment. New York Times 10/1/99
        
    PREVIOUSLY: Mary Boone, a prominent New York art dealer is arrested for "distributing live ammunition" and having unlicensed guns in her gallery as part of a Tom Sachs show. Also resisting arrest. Gallery visitors were encouraged to take 9 MM cartridges home as souvenirs. 
    New York Times 9/30/99

  • BRITAIN'S FIRST ART BIENNIAL: Where? In Liverpool of all places. Does the world need another biennial? The Irish Times sizes up the landscape. 
    Irish Times 10/1/99


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