Lauder Selling Schieles To Cover Klimt Cost "Apparently, even a tycoon like Ronald Lauder has to make choices sometimes. Four months ago, Mr. Lauder paid a reported $135 million to bring Gustav Klimt's 'Adele Bloch-Bauer I' (1907) to the Neue Galerie, the museum of German and Austrian art he founded. Now, the museum is selling three works by Egon Schiele at Christie's on November 8 to help defray the cost." New York Sun 10/31/06

Picasso's Bullring May Be Built At Last "A bullring that was the only building ever designed by Pablo Picasso may be built in the artist's home town, a close friend of the Spanish artist said last week. ... Malaga-born Picasso had wanted the bullring built in Madrid, but that idea was vetoed by military dictator Francisco Franco, who was in power at the time. Picasso died in 1973; Franco, in 1975." Washington Post (AP) 10/31/06

Whitney To Move Downtown? "The museum won its struggle to have the city approve a tower designed by the architect Renzo Piano. But after weighing the pros and cons, those familiar with the process say, the Whitney has determined that the Piano project may not get the museum sufficient additional space for the money. The museum has instead set its sights on a location downtown at the entrance to the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway that is to become a landscaped esplanade." The New York Times 10/31/06

Looking At A New Pompidou "Next Tuesday, construction work begins on the new Centre Pompidou-Metz, designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Situated around 200 miles east of Paris and close to the borders of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, the city of Metz will be graced with the Pompidou's first outpost and another extraordinary architectural emblem." The Telegraph (UK) 10/30/06

The Art-For-Rent Circuit "High-rent shows, which even the Met is now organizing, perniciously up the ante for museum loans everywhere. These days, loan shows increasingly come not only with reasonable costs but also with kickbacks." CultureGrrl (AJBlogs) 10/30/06

Hi, I'm Charles Saatchi And I'm Interested In Your Work "Saatchi, who helped make international stars of British artists Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, e-mailed Catriona Millar several months ago after viewing her website. He asked permission to upload images of eight paintings to his own website, which led to six of them being sold within weeks." Scotsman on Sunday 10/29/06

Creating Identity, Or Taking It Away? As architecture gets more and more creative, and buildings spring up in shapes and configurations never before thought possible, the "wow" factor frequently gives way to more practical reactions. "Are the new skyscrapers giving us a new poetic language -- or are they the architectural equivalent of profanity, strictly designed to grab attention and make a buck? Do the towers create vibrant urban places -- or are they simply drop-dead objects that could be shifted from one look-at-me boomtown to another without anyone noticing?" Chicago Tribune 10/29/06

Iraq In Watercolor Sketch artists are no longer a regular sight on the battlefield, having been long since replaced by omnipresent reporters and photojournalists. But following the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Iraq, one New York artist decided that the most important thing he could do was to report to Baghdad and serve as the art world's eye on the war. "With press credentials provided by the online artnet Magazine, Mumford made four trips to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, and he created hundreds of ink and watercolor drawings documenting many different experiences of the war." Boston Globe 10/29/06

Trumping The Public Good? A week or so ago, Chicago architecture critic Blair Kamin publicly blasted a ten-foot kiosk erected in the city's downtown loop by developer Donald Trump to advertise his planned new 92-story hotel/condo building. As it turns out, The Donald doesn't take criticism particularly well. "Trump argued that the kiosk is justified because he spent $18 million to rebuild the superstructure of Wabash Avenue next to his tower... [But] the significance of this battle transcends the tiny stretch of North Michigan Avenue sidewalk where Trump's kiosk was planted. Cities around the country are struggling with similar conflicts..." Chicago Tribune 10/27/06

Good Times For Fundraising In Phoenix The Phoenix Art Museum's capital campaign (initiated to pay for a major expansion) has been so successful that museum officials have doubled their final goal. "It started with about $18.2 million in bond money approved by Phoenix voters in 2001. The initial goal was to raise another $12.5 million, but the museum so far has been able to raise about $30 million." Arizona Republic 10/28/06

American Indian Museum Director Leaving Richard West is leaving his post as director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. West spent 17 years working on the project. "West, a Harvard-trained historian, Stanford-educated lawyer and member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, left a lucrative legal career to help make the museum a reality." Washington Post 10/27/06

Painter Buys Pollock (Or Not) A painter and long time admirer of Jackson Pollock buys a painting that may be a Pollock (but then again may not be). The price was $61,000. "The 15-minute auction opened at $25,000 Wednesday evening but dropped to $10,000 when no one bid and then to $5,000 before the bidding heated up. 'I've been looking at them for 40 years. My gut tells me this is real'." Los Angeles Times (AP) 10/27/06

Getty Has A New Antiquities Policy Rocked by claims it had purchased looted antiquities, the Getty establishes new rules for acquisitions. "The Getty's new rules allow for buying pieces that were exported from their home country after Nov. 17, 1970. As long as they are accompanied by documentation, the export is legal. The November 1970 cutoff date was originally adopted by a United Nations convention to prevent the illegal trafficking of archaeological material." Bloomberg 10/26/06

What's Missing At The Met? Curator Gary Tinterow makes a list of gaps in 20th Century art in the Metropolitan Museum's "encyclopedic" collection. CultureGrrl (AJBlogs) 10/26/06

Breaking Up Iraq's National Museum? Leading archaeologists are worried that Baghdad's National Museum collection might be broken up. "The initiative follows reports in Baghdad that the government is considering the possibility of “regionalising” the National Museum’s holding. In particular, there is some pressure to send antiquities excavated in the south to Basra or one of the main sites, such as Nasariyah." The Art Newspaper 10/25/06

A Sell-off Of German Museum Art? "Cultural life in Germany would almost certainly be more vital with a smaller, better capitalised arts sector, but the path to it is unclear. So it is not surprising that in the combination of acute financial need and firmly local and regional political oversight, the issue of deaccessioning is cropping up in fairly primitive forms." The Art Newspaper 10/26/06

Victoria And Albert Considers Rentals The Victoria & Albert Museum is considering renting out paintings it doesn't have room to show. "The V&A has 2,000 oil paintings, which makes it the country’s third largest collection. The difficulty, however, is that there is only space to show 170 oil paintings in its refurbished picture galleries, which were opened three years ago. A further 180 are on show in other galleries." The Art Newspaper 10/26/06

What Happened To Damien Hirst? "Hirst has not had a good idea for 13 years. In 1993 he created Mother and Child Divided, the most poetic of his animal works. After that, he started to flail... Hirst's waning originality gives this accusation of plagiarism more resonance. With each new show, the paucity and repetition of Hirst's art is more blatant." The Guardian (UK) 10/25/06

Paris' Big Art Fair Bid "The French government is determined to help Paris regain its status as an art market. They're giving tax breaks and making it easy for French 21st century creations to be exhibited worldwide." Thus Paris' FIAC art fair. Bloomberg 10/25/06

Canadian Parliament Fights Proposed Museum Funding Cut The Canadian parliament has been debating museum funding. "Members of Parliament debated the plight of Canadian museums for more than three hours in the House of Commons Monday. On Tuesday, they adopted a motion calling for funding for the Museum Assistance Program to be restored to $12 million annually, reversing the reduction of $2.3 million scheduled for this year." CBC 10/25/06

New Tool In The Fight To Return Looted Art A Vienna-based restitution organization has unveiled a massive database listing thousands of art objects which may have been looted from Austria by marauding Nazi soldiers during World War II. "The items are now in museums and collections owned by the Austrian government or the city of Vienna. The origin of most are still in question, and it remains to be determined if they were in fact looted... The fund is required by law to auction off items for which no owners or heirs are found and distribute the proceeds to Nazi victims. No deadline has yet been set for processing claims." Los Angeles Times (AP) 10/25/06

Dia Abandons High Line Project "With no director and a board in flux, the Dia Art Foundation has scrapped its plans to open a museum at the entrance to the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway line in Manhattan." The Dia's exit from the project leaves the door open for other New York museums to move in, and there is already speculation that the Whitney is interested. The New York Times 10/25/06

Did Beaverbrook Inflate The Value Of His Art Gifts? Just how valuable were the paintings Lord Beaverbrook gave to a Canadian gallery back in the 1950s? Testifying at an arbitration hearing in Fredericton on Tuesday, Sir Maxwell Aitken "suggested that the original Lord Beaverbrook might have bent the truth about giving a series of valuable paintings to the gallery to persuade his rich friends to make similar donations to his pet cause." CBC 10/24/06

At Washington's House, A Determinedly Mediated Experience Mount Vernon has just spent $110 million on a face-lift that includes two new buildings, and visitors are going to be herded through the whole, highly choreographed museum experience, like it or not. "People are channeled with the same linear certainty as cars in a car wash. The goal of the visit, Mount Vernon, becomes a surreal glimpse of the real, framed by dizzying bits of entertainment." Washington Post 10/24/06

A Coat Of Paint, And Brutalism Disappears After decades as a drab, new-brutalist monstrosity, London's Brunswick Centre has morphed into an appealing place to be. "The building has always had its admirers, but for decades this corner of Bloomsbury has been one of the most miserable places in London - a rain-streaked, litter-strewn concrete bunker of empty shop units, whose ambitious, space-age design only accentuated its sense of failure." The reason for the Brunswick's belated success? Someone finally honored the architect's original, very non-brutalist desire that the building be painted. The Guardian (UK) 10/23/06

To Safeguard Cultural Heritage, U.N. Spreads Nuclear Technology "Curators at top museums in Europe and the United States have long reached for the instruments of nuclear science to hit treasures of art with invisible rays. The resulting clues have helped answer vexing questions of provenance, age and authenticity. Now such insights are going global. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations unit best known for fighting the spread of nuclear arms, is working hard to foster such methods in the developing world, letting scientists and conservators in places like Peru, Ghana and Kazakhstan act as better custodians of their cultural heritage." The New York Times 10/24/06

Artist With Alzheimer's Paints His Eroding Self "When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen, an American artist in London, responded in characteristic fashion. 'From that moment on, he began to try to understand it by painting himself,' said his wife, Patricia Utermohlen, a professor of art history. ... The paintings starkly reveal the artist’s descent into dementia, as his world began to tilt, perspectives flattened and details melted away. His wife and his doctors said he seemed aware at times that technical flaws had crept into his work, but he could not figure out how to correct them." The New York Times 10/24/06

Russian Gallery Attacked "A group of men burst into a Moscow art gallery, destroying work by an ethnic Georgian artist and beating up the owner, it was claimed yesterday. The attack follows the seizure by officials of political art the same gallery had displayed." The Guardian (UK) 10/23/06

Inconceivable (What Art Is) "Perhaps conceptualism, minimalism, whatever we're going to call it (even the philistine term 'modern art' is still, unbelievably, current) has lasted so long because the public is still baffled by what is going on. The achievement of the high renaissance was obvious, and it was over in a moment; Mannerism lasted a bare 50 years. Eighty years on, we are still gazing uncomprehending at replicas of Duchamp's readymades." The Guardian (UK) 10/23/06

Tomb Robbers Lead Police To Ancient Egyptian Tombs Thieves trying to rob ancient Egyptian tombs were captured by police. "That led archaeologists to the three tombs, one of which included an inscription warning that anyone who violated the sanctity of the grave would be eaten by a crocodile and a snake." Discovery 10/23/06

Help For UK Museum Collections The UK's Heritage Lottery Fund is establishing a £3m fund to help museums whose acquisitions budgets have been slashed. "Museums have felt that in the flood of lottery money spent on new or remodelled buildings, the importance of the collections they hold has been forgotten. The situation has been predicted to become more acute, with the Heritage Lottery Fund squeezed by declining lottery ticket sales, and by the new lottery good cause, the 2012 Olympics." The Guardian (UK) 10/23/06

More And More Museums Reach For Global Profile "As the economies rise in Asia, the Middle East—and soon South America and perhaps one day Africa—leaders will want to found new museums. With the dwindling supply of quality art necessary to fill them, an attractive shortcut is to partner with a museum that already has the art, as well as the personnel and expertise." Art & Antiques 10/02/06

The Museum Of Light And Beauty Paris's newly restored Musée des Arts is a far cry from the dark, dingy place it used to be. "Radical decisions were made, bold steps were taken. While architects worked out how to open up the space, bringing in light and air, a team of curators settled down to choose the best 6,000 objects to put on permanent display... The result is a collection that positively shines with its own good fortune." The Telegraph (UK) 10/21/06

Who Will Prop Up Canada's Homegrown Art Market? When Canadian über-collector Kenneth Thomson died last spring, it marked the end of an era for Canada. Now, many are wondering who will step in to fill Thomson's considerable void. "Buyers and dealers speculate about what will happen to the structure of the market with the removal of one of its pillars... No dealer is going to risk offending clients by naming them or telling them more is demanded of them. But while big fish prefer to move under the water, they cannot help but leave ripples in their wake." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/21/06

Decorating The City Public art is suddenly the hottest thing on Toronto's cultural scene. "Long forgotten are the political battles of the '60s that confronted the installation of Henry Moore's The Archer in Nathan Phillips Square. In such a media-intense city as we are now, a public display of significant contemporary art is seen as an innovative and necessary way to ornament existing urban space. And unlike the oversized bronze statues of a century ago, you don't necessarily need space on the ground, either." Toronto Star 10/21/06

Returned Art A First For Canada "In what experts say is a first in recent memory, art confiscated during the Nazi regime has found its way back to its rightful owners in Canada." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/20/06

Acropolis Museum Ready To Open Greece is close to completing its new Acropolis museum. "After more than 30 years of preparation, procrastination and acrimonious debate, the building, which once seemed like a far-fetched dream, a last resort of the romantically inclined, is finally nearing completion." New Statesman 10/19/06

South African Museums Build The Future A new generation of museums in South Africa not only tells the past, but tries to influence the future. "We want these museums to have a deep impact: to move people intensely, to inspire them to go out and build a better future. We want people to come out feeling compelled to work for a better society." New Statesman 10/19/06

English Town Evicts Beach Art "Another Place, the sculptor Antony Gormley's collection of 100 cast iron naked men installed on a Merseyside beach, will have to head for another city. Though they have attracted more than 600,000 visitors, and a likely government grant of £1m, councillors in Sefton have decided the figures need to be removed." The Guardian (UK) 10/20/06

Canadian University Gets Back Nazi Loot "Concordia University has recovered what it hopes will be the first of many paintings that belonged to a prominent Jewish art collector who fled Germany and moved to Canada." CBC 10/19/06

Black Culture Center Underway In Pittsburgh Ten years after planning began, Pittsburgh has broken ground on the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in the city's downtown district. "Actual construction begins next month and the center is supposed to open in early 2008... The center will contain a cafe, 500-seat theater, 4,000-square-foot exhibition space and additional education spaces." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/19/06

Could The Barnes Still Change Its Mind? Lee Rosenbaum says that the revelation that Pennsylvania lawmakers may have allocated money to move the Barnes collection to Philadelphia may be disappointing, but that it doesn't change the basic reality of the situation. "With all the fundraising and planning that have already gone into the Philly Barnes, It may be too late to effectuate any change in course... But big-money collectors ought to be sympathetic to the concept of honoring the memory and intentions of one of their own." Culturegrrl (AJ Blogs) 10/18/06

SF Civic Art Collection Slipping Through The Bureaucratic Cracks The city of San Francisco is a major art collector, but you'd never know it by the way many of the pieces in the collection get treated. " San Francisco owns more than 3,000 pieces of art, acquired mainly through commissions and gifts and valued at about $30 million. But decades of poor record keeping and other factors have landed work by noted artists" in a dirty, wet basement room of a city hospital. Chicago Tribune (AP) 10/19/06

Gehry Goes Underground In Philly Frank Gehry has signed on to design an expansion for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It will be entirely underground. "There is a kind of modesty thing. Most of us, we don’t set out to do the Bilbao effect, as it’s being called. It’d be a real challenge to do something that’s virtually hidden, that could become spectacular." The New York Times 10/19/06

NYCity Opera - What Might Have Been Plans for a new home for New York City Opera are done, even though the company probably won't get a chance to use them. Too bad, writes James Russell. "City Opera says it's still discussing a new home, but the task looks ever more formidable. The de Portzamparc effort makes it all too clear just what New York City is missing, and why the self-proclaimed world capital of culture has so much trouble nurturing it." Bloomberg 10/18/06

Will Bad Reviews Mute Success Of Denver's New Art Museum? Denverites hoped that the Denver Art Museum's new Libeskind expansion would become a national landmark. But the reviews haven't been positive in the nationa press. "The bad buzz as a place to show art certainly isn't going to help. The negative or even middling reviews work against the Bilbao-effect phenomenon that you get, at least potentially, from a rave." Denver Post 10/18/06

The Architecture Of Decay (They All Do, You Know) "It can be hard to walk into a freshly decorated house without feeling preemptively sad at the decay impatiently waiting to begin: how soon the walls will crack, the white cupboards will yellow, and the carpets stain. The ruins of the Ancient World offer a mocking lesson for anyone waiting for builders to finish their work." New York Sun 10/18/06

Why Is San Francisco So Ugly? San Francisco is a beautiful city. And yet, it has more than its share of ugly buildings. "Architecturally speaking, San Francisco has been like a beautiful, rich woman who has never developed an interest in cooking and serves TV dinners to her family, then occasionally—somewhat frantically—hires caterers whenever she has company for dinner. OK, it's an imperfect analogy, but you get the idea." Slate 10/18/06

Boston's First New Museum In 100 Years To Open Dec. 10 Boston's new Institute of Contemporary Art will open Dec. 10, three months later than planned. "The museum postponed the slated Sept. 17 public opening with only weeks to go, citing small but significant construction problems. The $51 million building will be the first new art museum in Boston in nearly a hundred years." Boston Globe 10/18/06

Tracing Lichtenstein Back To The Source An art teacher has found and catalogued "almost every comic book panel later blown up and sold for megabucks by 1960s Op Art icon Roy Lichtenstein. So far, David Barsalou has about 140." So what about the original artists? Are they owed anything? Boston Globe 10/18/06

US To Delay Decision On Chinese Art Imports "In a move that has cheered museum directors and art dealers and dismayed archaeologists, the State Department has agreed to delay a decision on a controversial request from China that the United States strictly limit imports of Chinese art and antiquities." The New York Times 10/18/06

Reading The Art Market Is the sizzling hot art market cooling? CultureGrrl reads the tea leaves... CultureGrrl (AJBlogs) 10/17/06

Wynn Punches Hole In $139 Million Picasso Steve Wynn was showing a group Picasso's "Le Reve" when... "He raised his hand to show us something about the painting -- and at that moment, his elbow crashed backwards right through the canvas. There was a terrible noise. Wynn stepped away from the painting, and there, smack in the middle of Marie-Therese Walter's plump and allegedly-erotic forearm, was a black hole the size of a silver dollar - or, to be more exactly, the size of the tip of Steve Wynn's elbow - with two three-inch long rips coming off it in either direction." Huffington Post 10/17/06

• Wynn To Keep Picasso, Fix It "Casino mogul Steve Wynn will keep and restore a Pablo Picasso painting that he accidentally damaged shortly after he had agreed to sell it for a record $139 million." Washington Post (AP) 10/18/06

The "Project Runway" Fan Support Group Will Meet Wednesday Night ... "Wednesday night is buddy-up time in the art world. Artists who have cable make room on their couches for those who don't. Unless held early in the evening, art openings aren't happening on Wednesday nights. Nobody would come. The reason is 'Project Runway,' now in its third season on Bravo and the hands-down, coast-to-coast favorite of artists, curators, critics, dealers and collections. Ever since blogger Tyler Green (Modern Art Notes at on www.ArtsJournal.com) admitted his addiction to the show in September, everybody's been coming out of the closet with his or her 'Runway' obsession." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/17/06

Berlin's Bode Museum Reopens "Berlin's famed Museum Island complex moves a big step closer to recovering its former glory this week when the Bode Museum, home to the city's sculpture collection, reopens after six years of restoration. The domed building, which juts out into the Spree River in the heart of former East Berlin, is the second of the five Neoclassical museums to get a full makeover as part of a government-funded $1.5-billion overhaul." Los Angeles Times (AP) 10/17/06

Painting Abu Ghraib "Naked figures writhe in an eerie darkness. Vicious beasts bare their teeth and snarl. The faces of lost souls cry out in unimaginable agony, forced into strange and contorted positions reminiscent of crucifixion. Such a vision evokes a scene of the apocalypse typical of 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But no, these paintings by Colombian artist Fernando Botero are depictions of real events. Despite their hellish subject matter, they are all meticulously based on photographs and press accounts of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003." Having made their way from Europe, they're now on view in New York. New York Sun 10/17/06

Duomo's Ghiberti Doors To Vist US "Their 10 panels depict scenes from the Old Testament, intricately illustrated in high and low relief. When the three-ton, 20-foot-tall doors were completed, in 1452, Michelangelo pronounced them grand enough to adorn the entrance to paradise, and so they became known as 'The Gates of Paradise.' They have for centuries been considered one of the masterpieces of Western art." The New York Times 10/16/06

Archaeologists Alarmed - Roman Treasure Goes On Display "One of the most beautiful and infamous treasure hoards of the 20th century, 14 pieces of Roman-era silver of staggering quality, will resurface today on display in London, to the consternation of leading archaeologists who regard it as archaeological loot." The Guardian (UK) 10/16/06

Libeskind's Denver Museum - Great, But How About The Art? "Inspired by a glimpse of the Rocky Mountains gained as he first flew into Denver, Libeskind's new building for the Denver Art Museum sits like an alien craft amid the civic grandeur of the mile-high city's downtown. Docked at an angle on a vacant plot of land, its hull shimmers in the sun, the titanium surface reflecting the colours around it, silver and ochre fading into a brackish brown. The stern of the ship is a jumble of metal boxes, stacked any which way. Its prow looms over the adjoining road, jutting out toward the museum's existing building, a grey crenellated mausoleum of a place." The Guardian (UK) 10/16/06

Richard Rogers Wins Stirling Prize For Spanish Airport "As he received the £20,000 prize to a standing ovation, Lord Rogers described his £1.2 billion building at Madrid’s Barajas airport, with its mile-long wavy roof designed to look like billowing clouds tethered to the ground, as “the greatest experience I’ve had in architecture since the Pompidou Centre (his 1970s building in Paris)." Sunday Times 10/15/06

Did Pennsylvania Fund A New Barnes Before It Got Permission To Move? "Buried deep inside Pennsylvania's voluminous, multibillion-dollar capital budget for fiscal year 2001-02 was $7 million for 'restoration, stabilization and site enhancements for the Barnes Foundation.' Fifteen pages later, the budget set aside another $100 million for 'design and construction of a museum facility' to house the Barnes collection." Los Angeles Times 10/16/06

Hi, I'm Julie, I'll Be Your Museum Shadow A growing number of museums are spying on their patrons, trying to better understand how visitors interact with the museum. "Known collectively as 'visitor studies,' the movement has its own experts, its own literature, its own conferences. Spying is only part of the equation." San Diego Union-Tribune 10/15/06

Denver Mobs Its New Museum Thirty-five thousand people showed up for the opening weekend of the new Denver Art Museum. "The large weekend crowds resulted in the museum running out of free tickets to enter the new $110 million wing less than 24 hours into the event." Rocky Mountain News 10/15/06

Steven Holl Busts On Denver Project (But The Reasons Are Instructive) When architect Steven Holl was selected to design a new Denver courthouse in December, "it was a celebratory moment for a city anticipating a building with his signature way with light. But in August and September the terrain

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Home > VISUAL ARTS  AJ ARTS  Arts Issues  Dance  Ideas  Media  Music  People  Publishing  Theatre  Visual Arts     Issue Tracks    AJ EXTRA  AJ Blogs  Threads  ArtsWatch  AJ Radio  Letters  AJ Site News    Publications Links    SUBSCRIBE  Newsletters    • Free    • Premium    • Archive    ABOUT  About Us  Search  Contact  Testimonials    CLASSIFIEDS  AJ Classifieds  About AJClassifieds  Place an Ad    SYNDICATION  Overview  Packages    • Headlines    • Summaries  Testimonials  Licensing	Tuesday, October 31 Lauder Selling Schieles To Cover Klimt Cost "Apparently, even a tycoon like Ronald Lauder has to make choices sometimes. between city and architect turned from tension to termination." Rocky Mountain News 10/15/06 Sunday, October 15 A Museum That Makes You Doubt Star Buildings Paris' new Branly Museum is a disaster, writes Robert Campbell. "Everywhere in the Branly, the architecture crowds out the treasures it contains. It's the mud-like interior you remember, not the displays. This is one of many museums now being built that have been conceived as tourist destinations. The architecture is supposed to be part of the tourist magnet." Boston Globe 10/15/06 Doubling Children In Houston Houston's Children's Museum is doubling in size. "Designed by Robert Venturi, one of the United States' best-known architects, the museum's current home opened in 1992 and was designed to accommodate 350,000 visitors a year. Annual attendance runs at about 600,000." Houston Chronicle 10/15/06 Art's 100 Most Powerful "ArtReview magazine's annual list of the 100 most powerful people in the contemporary art scene was published yesterday, prompting predictable modest coughs from those who found themselves near the top, and sniffy dismissals from those who had been bumped down the list or, worse, banished altogether." The Guardian (UK) 10/14/06 Stirling Prize - Out Of Touch With Reality? The Stirling Prize is the UK's top honor for architecture. Yet "many of the other buildings to scoop the prize have failed to live up to the praise heaped on them. Critics say architects have become detached from everyday life and are calling for a rethink of the prize so that buildings are judged on how well they stand up to use." The Guardian (UK) 10/14/06 Coveted: The Art Advisor With Access The art market has become so hot that collectors are jockeying for an edge in buying. "The most important thing an art adviser can provide is access. It’s become much more difficult to buy art these days, especially in the primary market, which is highly imperfect because, unlike auction buying, it’s a closed system based largely on relationships of trust." The New York Times 10/15/06 Friday, October 13 That YouTube That You Do So Well (Museums Give It A Try) Museums are experimenting with technologies such as YouTube. "Much the same way that MoMA and other contemporary museums added photography and film as artists began working with them, the Internet is becoming an increasingly important creative medium." Wall Street Journal 10/13/06 Thursday, October 12 Russian Collectors Move In "Buyers for contemporary Russian art were overwhelmingly non-Russian until around five years ago. But no longer. A new class of collectors has appeared, while contemporary galleries are springing up fast in Moscow." The Art Newspaper 10/13/06 Two Postwar Masterpieces Change Hands Two paintings by Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning have been sold for $143.5 million in a private transaction. Media mogul David Geffen was the seller, and the buyers are a pair of hedge fund billionaires looking to up the profile of their own collections. The New York Times 10/12/06 Libeskind's Self-Portrait? Nicolai Ouroussoff says that Daniel Libeskind's new addition to the Denver Art Museum is a mighty piece of work, but also one which embodies "all of the contradictions within Mr. Libeskind’s oeuvre. Its bold, often mesmerizing forms reaffirm the originality of his talent, yet its tortured geometries make it a daunting place to install or view art — hardly a minor drawback. And for all its emotional power, the building seems eerily out of date, and its flaws readily apparent." The New York Times 10/12/06 It Looks Like Denver (And That's Quite An Accomplishment) Inga Saffron loves the new Libeskind addition. "When the prow of the museum's new Hamilton Building cruises into view, it is a staggering sight. Its slashing, titanium-sheathed planes thrust up from Denver's wide-open city grid like a newborn Rocky Mountain... In contrast with its ponderous, earthbound neighbors, his museum looks ready for a springy takeoff." Philadelphia Inquirer 10/12/06 This Is What Happens When You Hand Out Champagne In A Museum An installation piece by San Francisco artist William T. Wiley was damaged over the weekend during the opening celebrations of the newly expanded Denver Art Museum. Parts of the installation were knocked to the floor when a visitor tripped into them. Museum officials aren't saying how severe the damage is. Denver Post 10/12/06 Pollock Paintings To Get Viewing, Whether Real Or Not "The director of the only museum that has agreed to show a group of recently discovered paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock said today she'll show them even if laboratory tests show that the works are fake... Harvard University has said it soon will release the first physical analysis of the works, which include two dozen paintings and a dozen sketches and studies on paper. The analysis likely will show whether the materials u Four months ago, Mr. Lauder paid a reported $135 million to bring Gustav Klimt's 'Adele Bloch-Bauer I' (1907) to the Neue Galerie, the museum of German and Austrian art he founded. Now, the museum is selling three works by Egon Schiele at Christie's on November 8 to help defray the cost." New York Sun 10/31/06 Picasso's Bullring May Be Built At Last "A bullring that was the only building ever designed by Pablo Picasso may be built in the artist's home town, a close friend of the Spanish artist said last week. ... Malaga-born Picasso had wanted the bullring built in Madrid, but that idea was vetoed by military dictator Francisco Franco, who was in power at the time. Picasso died in 1973; Franco, in 1975." Washington Post (AP) 10/31/06 Monday, October 30 Whitney To Move Downtown? "The museum won its struggle to have the city approve a tower designed by the architect Renzo Piano. But after weighing the pros and cons, those familiar with the process say, the Whitney has determined that the Piano project may not get the museum sufficient additional space for the money. The museum has instead set its sights on a location downtown at the entrance to the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway that is to become a landscaped esplanade." The New York Times 10/31/06 Looking At A New Pompidou "Next Tuesday, construction work begins on the new Centre Pompidou-Metz, designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Situated around 200 miles east of Paris and close to the borders of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, the city of Metz will be graced with the Pompidou's first outpost and another extraordinary architectural emblem." The Telegraph (UK) 10/30/06 The Art-For-Rent Circuit "High-rent shows, which even the Met is now organizing, perniciously up the ante for museum loans everywhere. These days, loan shows increasingly come not only with reasonable costs but also with kickbacks." CultureGrrl (AJBlogs) 10/30/06 Hi, I'm Charles Saatchi And I'm Interested In Your Work "Saatchi, who helped make international stars of British artists Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, e-mailed Catriona Millar several months ago after viewing her website. He asked permission to upload images of eight paintings to his own website, which led to six of them being sold within weeks." Scotsman on Sunday 10/29/06 Sunday, October 29 Creating Identity, Or Taking It Away? As architecture gets more and more creative, and buildings spring up in shapes and configurations never before thought possible, the "wow" factor frequently gives way to more practical reactions. "Are the new skyscrapers giving us a new poetic language -- or are they the architectural equivalent of profanity, strictly designed to grab attention and make a buck? Do the towers create vibrant urban places -- or are they simply drop-dead objects that could be shifted from one look-at-me boomtown to another without anyone noticing?" Chicago Tribune 10/29/06 Iraq In Watercolor Sketch artists are no longer a regular sight on the battlefield, having been long since replaced by omnipresent reporters and photojournalists. But following the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Iraq, one New York artist decided that the most important thing he could do was to report to Baghdad and serve as the art world's sed to make them existed during Pollock's lifetime." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/12/06 Wednesday, October 11 Van Gogh Controversy Close To Resolution The controversy over the authenticity of a painting attributed to Van Gogh in Australia's National Gallery of Victoria hasn't swayed the confidence of the gallery's director. "The portrait, estimated to be worth $20 million, is included in all catalogues listing the artist's works, and was part of a US exhibition in 2000 that was seen by more than 1 million people without complaint. But its authenticity was questioned by some British critics when it went on show in August at Scotland's Dean Gallery as part of the Edinburgh Festival." The painting is now being carefully scrutinized by experts to determine the truth. Sydney Morning Herald 10/12/06 The Artist's Fingerprint A new piece of software developed by researchers at the University of Maastricht may be able to significantly cut the time it takes for art experts to authenticate a painting or spot a forgery. "Using high-resolution scans of paintings, the Authentic software builds up a library of characteristics, such as brushstrokes, colours and type of canvas used, that form a 'fingerprint' for a particular artist. A painting can then be compared against this fingerprint to help experts decide whether it is a fake." The Guardian (UK) 10/12/06 The Frieze Descends On London "If Tate Modern, with its new Carsten Höller helter-skelters, has been accused of resembling an old-fashioned fairground, it has nothing on Frieze art fair. In the vast, chaotic encampment that has suddenly sprung up in Regent's Park you wouldn't be too surprised to encounter a coconut shy and a bearded lady... Frieze represents the moment in London's calendar when commerce and art become most nakedly and shamelessly entwined. Four hundred and seventy galleries from Europe, the US, Russia, Japan, Lebanon and Eygpt have competed for the chance to have a pitch at this, the fourth Frieze art fair. Only 152 have been accepted." The Guardian (UK) 10/12/06 London's Golden Age of Art The Frieze Art Fair may be the best encapsulation available of the artistic explosion London has undergone over the past few decades. "People complain of party fatigue and all the work blurring into each other but there has never been a better time to be involved in art in London." The Times (UK) 10/12/06 Congressman Steps Into Barnes Battle The fight over the Barnes Foundation's intended move to Center City Philadelphia has taken yet another unexpected turn, as a local congressman announces his plans to introduce a bill on the floor of the U.S. House which would block the move. The congressman claims that Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell's commitment of $25 million in state money to facilitate the move was the last straw in spurring him to act against the relocation. Culturegrrl (AJ Blogs) 10/11/06 Dundas Artifacts Headed Home To B.C. "More than 140 years after they were given up for God, the most prized items from the world-famous Dundas Collection of rare northwest native art are returning to their ancestral home in British Columbia. The 19 sacred artifacts of Tsimshian origin purchased at auction last week by two members of the Thomson family will be publicly exhibited at an undisclosed B.C. museum late this year or early next year. The collection's permanent home is still undecided." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/11/06 Tuesday, October 10 Art Theft Gang Caught UK police have busted a gang of major art thieves. "For four years the audacious burglaries at some of Britain's best-known stately homes in Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Worcestershire have embarrassed police and left leading insurers in the art world smarting from multimillion-pound payouts for antiques, curios and paintings from leading collections. More than 100 police officers from five forces were involved in the raids and 14 people seized." The Guardian (UK) 10/10/06 Good Gehry, Bad Gehry Two new Frank Gehry buildings in New York show the good and bad sides of the star architect. The New Yorker 10/09/06 Seattle's New Curator Cadre Seattle has plenty of good curators. Trouble is, there aren't nearly enough curator jobs to keep them busy, So freelance curators have turned to alternative spaces and in the process building a new art scene. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/10/06 Acropolis Museum To Open In 2007 The Greek government says its museum built to house the Parthenon Marbles will be opened next year. "Once the museum is completed, Greece will have a very strong argument for the return of the Parthenon sculptures," Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis said Monday. CBC 10/10/06 Tate Modern's Sci-Fi Fantasy Slides: Serious Fun? "When you launch yourself from the top of one of Carsten Höller's slides in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall - the largest is 56 metres long and with a stomach-churning 27-metre drop - you leave a lot behind you. Principally, your dignity. And any sense of being an adult. And all control. ... But is this crowd-pleasing work any more profound than a funfair helter-skelter? 'The funfair experience is completely underrated,' said Höller. 'I don't know why we don't take it more seriously peye on the war. "With press credentials provided by the online artnet Magazine, Mumford made four trips to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, and he created hundreds of ink and watercolor drawings documenting many different experiences of the war." Boston Globe 10/29/06 Trumping The Public Good? A week or so ago, Chicago architecture critic Blair Kamin publicly blasted a ten-foot kiosk erected in the city's downtown loop by developer Donald Trump to advertise his planned new 92-story hotel/condo building. As it turns out, The Donald doesn't take criticism particularly well. "Trump argued that the kiosk is justified because he spent $18 million to rebuild the superstructure of Wabash Avenue next to his tower... [But] the significance of this battle transcends the tiny stretch of North Michigan Avenue sidewalk where Trump's kiosk was planted. Cities around the country are struggling with similar conflicts..." Chicago Tribune 10/27/06 Good Times For Fundraising In Phoenix The Phoenix Art Museum's capital campaign (initiated to pay for a major expansion) has been so successful that museum officials have doubled their final goal. "It started with about $18.2 million in bond money approved by Phoenix voters in 2001. The initial goal was to raise another $12.5 million, but the museum so far has been able to raise about $30 million." Arizona Republic 10/28/06 Friday, October 27 American Indian Museum Director Leaving Richard West is leaving his post as director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. West spent 17 years working on the project. "West, a Harvard-trained historian, Stanford-educated lawyer and member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, left a lucrative legal career to help make the museum a reality." Washington Post 10/27/06 Painter Buys Pollock (Or Not) A painter and long time admirer of Jackson Pollock buys a painting that may be a Pollock (but then again may not be). The price was $61,000. "The 15-minute auction opened at $25,000 Wednesday evening but dropped to $10,000 when no one bid and then to $5,000 before the bidding heated up. 'I've been looking at them for 40 years. My gut tells me this is real'." Los Angeles Times (AP) 10/27/06 Thursday, October 26 Getty Has A New Antiquities Policy Rocked by claims it had purchased looted antiquities, the Getty establishes new rules for acquisitions. "The Getty's new rules allow for buying pieces that were exported from their home country after Nov. 17, 1970. As long as they are accompanied by documentation, the export is legal. The November 1970 cutoff date was originally adopted by a United Nations convention to prevent the illegal trafficking of archaeological material." Bloomberg 10/26/06 What's Missing At The Met? Curator Gary Tinterow makes a list of gaps in 20th Century art in the Metropolitan Museum's "encyclopedic" collection. CultureGrrl (AJBlogs) 10/26/06 Breaking Up Iraq's National Museum? Leading archaeologists are worried that Baghdad's National Museum collection might be broken up. "The initiative follows reports in Baghdad that the government is considering the possibility of “regionalising” the National Museum’s holding. In particular, there is some pressure to send antiquities excavated in the south to Basra or one of the main sites, such as Nasariyah." The Art Newspaper 10/25/06 A Sell-off Of German Museum Art? "Cultural life in Germany would almost certainly be more vital with a smaller, better capitalised arts sector, but the path to it is unclear. So it is not surprising that in the combination of acute financial need and firmly local and regional political oversight, the issue of deaccessioning is cropping up in fairly primitive forms." The Art Newspaper 10/26/06 Victoria And Albert Considers Rentals The Victoria & Albert Museum is considering renting out paintings it doesn't have room to show. "The V&A has 2,000 oil paintings, which makes it the country’s third largest collection. The difficulty, however, is that there is only space to show 170 oil paintings in its refurbished picture galleries, which were opened three years ago. A further 180 are on show in other galleries." The Art Newspaper 10/26/06 Wednesday, October 25 What Happened To Damien Hirst? "Hirst has not had a good idea for 13 years. In 1993 he created Mother and Child Divided, the most poetic of his animal works. After that, he started to flail... Hirst's waning originality gives this accusation of plagiarism more resonance. With each new show, the paucity and repetition of Hirst's art is more blatant." The Guardian (UK) 10/25/06 Paris' Big Art Fair Bid "The French government is determined to help Paris regain its status as an art market. They're giving tax breaks and making it easy for French 21st century creations to be exhibited worldwide." Thus Paris' FIAC art fair. Bloomberg 10/25/06 Canadian Parliament Fights Proposed Museum Funding Cut hilosophically and artistically.' " The Guardian (UK) 10/10/06 Elegantly, Foster Challenges The Upper East Side "I expect Norman Foster’s design for a new residential tower at 980 Madison Avenue to infuriate people. Rising out of the old Parke-Bernet Gallery building, a spare 1950 office building between 76th and 77th Streets, its interlocking elliptical forms throw down a challenge to a neighborhood known for an aversion to bold contemporary architecture. The tower’s height, roughly 30 stories, hardly helps its cause.... With a little trimming, though, this could be the most handsome building to rise along Madison Avenue since the Whitney Museum of American Art was completed 40 years ago." The New York Times 10/10/06 Monday, October 9 So What Was The UK's Best Building This Year? The Stirling is the UK's top prize for architecture. "The official line says that the Stirling goes to the British-designed building 'which has been the most significant for the evolution of architecture in the past year', a sentence packed with assumptions. Does it go to the prettiest? The most thrilling? To the architect most deserving? Or, old-fashioned notion this, to the building that best fulfils its brief, be it a bicycle shed or a cathedral?" The Times (UK) 10/10/06 The Pompidou Takes On Shanghai The Centre Pompidou in France is planning to open a branch in Shanghai, China by the end of 2007. CBC 10/09/06 Hirst Fakes Withdrawn From Sale Two pictures have been withdrawn from a Sotheby's auction of the work of Damien Hirst. "The genuine limited edition prints are worth up to £10,000 and have drawn attention from forgers who use the latest technology to copy works of art. Sotheby's confirmed the images had been withdrawn and questions over their authenticity were being investigated." BBC 10/09/06 Walking To Stone Henge After years of looking for a solution to the traffic strangling Britain's Stone Henge, a radical solution has bee proposed: do nothing. Instead of building expensive tunnels and the like, why not, asks a expert, find ways to encourage walkers and cyclists rather than cars? The Guardian (UK) 10/07/06 The History Of Architecture On Denver Streets With the opening of its new Daniel Libeskind-designed art museum, Denver has amassed an impressive array of public buildings. "There's an unbelievable assembly with the library and the DAM buildings and the residences. Within a block, you almost can trace the development of architecture since the Second World War." Denver Post 10/08/06 Sunday, October 8 Harvard Masterpiece Gone Wrong Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room is a masterpiece. But "the Woodberry, along with the rest of Lamont Library, re-opened this fall after a renovation. You can walk into the room today and you'll see what appears to be a perfectly nice place, pleasant and forgettable. Harvard has carefully preserved a lot of what was here before. Nothing is gone except, well, everything." Boston Globe 10/08/06 London's Unimaginable Art Boom Keeps On Booming "A 2004 study estimated that there were more than 400 galleries in London - probably the tip of the iceberg, as temporary spaces come and go and artists open their studios to sell direct. An Arts Council England report has estimated the contemporary art market as worth £500m - unimaginable even a decade ago. The London art boom will be seen at its most intense next week, when Frieze art fair flings wide its doors... And, just when you think London cannot take any more, still more commercial galleries appear." The Guardian (UK) 10/07/06 It's Official: Trekkies Have Too Much Money Auctioneers at Christie's New York were stunned this week when a 78-inch model of the Starship Enterprise that had been expected to sell for around $30,000 instead went for $576,000. There appears to be no truth to the rumor that the winning bidder attempted to pay for his new acquisition with his mom's credit card. BBC 10/08/06 Sure, The Art's Nice, But How's The Traffic? The Denver Art Museum unveils its $62.5 million renovation this week, and museum officials are readying for a deluge of curious visitors. In fact, regulating human traffic flow is one of the major ongoing concerns for museums looking to upgrade their digs. Denver Post 10/07/06 Libeskind's Denver Work Bodes Well For SF Officials at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum have been keeping a close eye on architect Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum, since Libeskind is also designing the Jewish Museum's new digs. "His Denver building shows that what seems outrageous on paper can be bracing in real life." San Francisco Chronicle 10/07/06 Great Shell, But The Inside Could Use Work Blair Kamen says there's no question that Daniel Libeskind has designed a gem of a building in Denver. But how does the new wing do as a showcase for the art it was built to house? Well... "It is a startling, sometimes over-the-top piece of architectural sculpture, a surprisingly sensitive shaper of The Canadian parliament has been debating museum funding. "Members of Parliament debated the plight of Canadian museums for more than three hours in the House of Commons Monday. On Tuesday, they adopted a motion calling for funding for the Museum Assistance Program to be restored to $12 million annually, reversing the reduction of $2.3 million scheduled for this year." CBC 10/25/06 New Tool In The Fight To Return Looted Art A Vienna-based restitution organization has unveiled a massive database listing thousands of art objects which may have been looted from Austria by marauding Nazi soldiers during World War II. "The items are now in museums and collections owned by the Austrian government or the city of Vienna. The origin of most are still in question, and it remains to be determined if they were in fact looted... The fund is required by law to auction off items for which no owners or heirs are found and distribute the proceeds to Nazi victims. No deadline has yet been set for processing claims." Los Angeles Times (AP) 10/25/06 Dia Abandons High Line Project "With no director and a board in flux, the Dia Art Foundation has scrapped its plans to open a museum at the entrance to the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway line in Manhattan." The Dia's exit from the project leaves the door open for other New York museums to move in, and there is already speculation that the Whitney is interested. The New York Times 10/25/06 Tuesday, October 24 Did Beaverbrook Inflate The Value Of His Art Gifts? Just how valuable were the paintings Lord Beaverbrook gave to a Canadian gallery back in the 1950s? Testifying at an arbitration hearing in Fredericton on Tuesday, Sir Maxwell Aitken "suggested that the original Lord Beaverbrook might have bent the truth about giving a series of valuable paintings to the gallery to persuade his rich friends to make similar donations to his pet cause." CBC 10/24/06 At Washington's House, A Determinedly Mediated Experience Mount Vernon has just spent $110 million on a face-lift that includes two new buildings, and visitors are going to be herded through the whole, highly choreographed museum experience, like it or not. "People are channeled with the same linear certainty as cars in a car wash. The goal of the visit, Mount Vernon, becomes a surreal glimpse of the real, framed by dizzying bits of entertainment." Washington Post 10/24/06 A Coat Of Paint, And Brutalism Disappears After decades as a drab, new-brutalist monstrosity, London's Brunswick Centre has morphed into an appealing place to be. "The building has always had its admirers, but for decades this corner of Bloomsbury has been one of the most miserable places in London - a rain-streaked, litter-strewn concrete bunker of empty shop units, whose ambitious, space-age design only accentuated its sense of failure." The reason for the Brunswick's belated success? Someone finally honored the architect's original, very non-brutalist desire that the building be painted. The Guardian (UK) 10/23/06 To Safeguard Cultural Heritage, U.N. Spreads Nuclear Technology "Curators at top museums in Europe and the United States have long reached for the instruments of nuclear science to hit treasures of art with invisible rays. The resulting clues have helped answer vexing questions of provenance, age and authenticity. Now such insights are going global. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations unit best known for fighting the spread of nuclear arms, is working hard to foster such methods in the developing world, letting scientists and conservators in places like Peru, Ghana and Kazakhstan act as better custodians of their cultural heritage." The New York Times 10/24/06 Artist With Alzheimer's Paints His Eroding Self "When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen, an American artist in London, responded in characteristic fashion. 'From that moment on, he began to try to understand it by painting himself,' said his wife, Patricia Utermohlen, a professor of art history. ... The paintings starkly reveal the artist’s descent into dementia, as his world began to tilt, perspectives flattened and details melted away. His wife and his doctors said he seemed aware at times that technical flaws had crept into his work, but he could not figure out how to correct them." The New York Times 10/24/06 Monday, October 23 Russian Gallery Attacked "A group of men burst into a Moscow art gallery, destroying work by an ethnic Georgian artist and beating up the owner, it was claimed yesterday. The attack follows the seizure by officials of political art the same gallery had displayed." The Guardian (UK) 10/23/06 Inconceivable (What Art Is) "Perhaps conceptualism, minimalism, whatever we're going to call it (even the philistine term 'modern art' is still, unbelievably, current) has lasted so long because the public is still baffled by what is going on. The achievement of the high renaissance was obvious, and it was over in a moment; Mannerism lasted a bare 50 years. Eighty years on, we are still gazing uncomprehending at replicas of Duchamp's readymades." The Guardian (UK) 10/23/06 Tomb Robbers Lead Police To Ancient Egyptian Tombs Thieves trying to rob ancient Egyptian tombs were captured by police. "That led archaeologists to the three tombs, one of which included an inscription warning that anyone who violated the sanctity of thurban spaces and a disappointingly spotty art museum in which basic functional problems have not been adequately solved, like how visitors, especially those who are blind, will move around without conking their heads on the architect's insistently tilting walls." Chicago Tribune 10/08/06 From Here? No One's From Here! The California Biennial seems awfully un-Californian this year, to judge from the diverse array of states from which the featured artists hail. Of course, that in itself could be said to be fairly Californian... Los Angeles Times 10/07/06 Thursday, October 5 Lauder Raising Money For Klimts? Ronald Lauder has raised $190 million. Could he be thinking of trying to buy more Klimts for his Neue Gallerie when they come up for auction? "Each one would have something to add to the Neue Galerie’s collection, but if the buyer is not the Neue Galerie, I hope they will end up in other museums." The Art Newspaper 10/05/06 Star Focus - Where Are They? The century is still young, but Richard Cork wonders where the new art stars are. "Looking around, I can find no equivalents to the precocious titans who, precisely 100 years ago, overturned all existing ideas about the future direction of art." New Statesman 10/08/06 Mexico To Churches: Make Records The Mexican government is asking churches to catalogue their artwork. "Mexico has a wealth of colonial art, including paintings, sculptures, stained glass and sacred objects, spread among its churches. But a demand for such works among collectors has made the contents of rural parishes a tempting target for thieves." CBC 10/05/06 Well, You Could Always Move It To Manhattan "Some people strolling past the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park [New York] assume that the building is closed. And many motorists speed by it on the Grand Central Parkway without realizing that the museum even exists. The building itself has an eclectic history cluttered with the contributions of earlier architects." So how do you remake a museum in such a way as to encourage people to take note of its very existence? The New York Times 10/05/06 Wednesday, October 4 Change Roils Brooklyn Museum Major changes at the Brooklyn Museum have the institution in turmoil. "Curators see the changes as a way of diminishing their traditional power to conceive, propose and organize exhibitions. As many as eight curators have retired or resigned over the last two years." The New York Times 10/05/06 Swiss Architects Win Queen's Prize Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have won this year's Gold Medal for Architecture, a gift of the Queen made on her behalf by the Royal Institute of British Architects. "The award is one of architecture's most prestigious international accolades, with past recipients including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer, Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, architects either already in, or destined for, the history books." The Guardian (UK) 10/05/06 The Polish Supermarket Fights The Wrecker A supermarket in Poland has become a rallying cry for preservationists who appreciate its unique charms. OpinionJournal 10/04/06 Native Art Fight Comes To A Head "Thursday morning in New York, Sotheby's auction halls will be the stage for a historic struggle, the final chapter in one of the more fascinating and tortuous negotiations between a private collector and his courting museums. The Dundas Collection of Northwest Coast American Indian Art is up for grabs," and Canadian museums want to see the works come home. But the collection's owner has been playing coy with the Canadians and others for the better part of two decades, and no one really knows where the Dundas is likely to end up by week's end. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/04/06 Prominent Chicago Architect Steps Out On His Own Adrian Smith, designer of some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, is leaving the prestigious Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill to start his own company. SOM apparently offered him an extension of his contract, but Smith declined. Chicago Sun-Times 10/04/06 Boston's ICA Almost Done, But Not On Time Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art isn't putting a firm date on it yet, but it's clear that the museum's new building on the city's harborfront won't be ready to open in late October or early November, as hoped. "Events scheduled for October in the ICA were either moved, canceled, or postponed... Museum officials say they don't want to announce an opening date without being sure they can be ready on time. There are signs, though, that the building is moving closer to completion." Boston Globe 10/04/06 Tuesday, October 3 Stealing Mexico Blind Mexican churches have suffered a wave of art robberies. "Looters have picked through Latin America’s archaeological sites for centuries. These church robberies are newer, arising as the taste for colonial relige grave would be eaten by a crocodile and a snake." Discovery 10/23/06 Help For UK Museum Collections The UK's Heritage Lottery Fund is establishing a £3m fund to help museums whose acquisitions budgets have been slashed. "Museums have felt that in the flood of lottery money spent on new or remodelled buildings, the importance of the collections they hold has been forgotten. The situation has been predicted to become more acute, with the Heritage Lottery Fund squeezed by declining lottery ticket sales, and by the new lottery good cause, the 2012 Olympics." The Guardian (UK) 10/23/06 Sunday, October 22 More And More Museums Reach For Global Profile "As the economies rise in Asia, the Middle East—and soon South America and perhaps one day Africa—leaders will want to found new museums. With the dwindling supply of quality art necessary to fill them, an attractive shortcut is to partner with a museum that already has the art, as well as the personnel and expertise." Art & Antiques 10/02/06 The Museum Of Light And Beauty Paris's newly restored Musée des Arts is a far cry from the dark, dingy place it used to be. "Radical decisions were made, bold steps were taken. While architects worked out how to open up the space, bringing in light and air, a team of curators settled down to choose the best 6,000 objects to put on permanent display... The result is a collection that positively shines with its own good fortune." The Telegraph (UK) 10/21/06 Who Will Prop Up Canada's Homegrown Art Market? When Canadian über-collector Kenneth Thomson died last spring, it marked the end of an era for Canada. Now, many are wondering who will step in to fill Thomson's considerable void. "Buyers and dealers speculate about what will happen to the structure of the market with the removal of one of its pillars... No dealer is going to risk offending clients by naming them or telling them more is demanded of them. But while big fish prefer to move under the water, they cannot help but leave ripples in their wake." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/21/06 Decorating The City Public art is suddenly the hottest thing on Toronto's cultural scene. "Long forgotten are the political battles of the '60s that confronted the installation of Henry Moore's The Archer in Nathan Phillips Square. In such a media-intense city as we are now, a public display of significant contemporary art is seen as an innovative and necessary way to ornament existing urban space. And unlike the oversized bronze statues of a century ago, you don't necessarily need space on the ground, either." Toronto Star 10/21/06 Friday, October 20 Returned Art A First For Canada "In what experts say is a first in recent memory, art confiscated during the Nazi regime has found its way back to its rightful owners in Canada." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/20/06 Thursday, October 19 Acropolis Museum Ready To Open Greece is close to completing its new Acropolis museum. "After more than 30 years of preparation, procrastination and acrimonious debate, the building, which once seemed like a far-fetched dream, a last resort of the romantically inclined, is finally nearing completion." New Statesman 10/19/06 South African Museums Build The Future A new generation of museums in South Africa not only tells the past, but tries to influence the future. "We want these museums to have a deep impact: to move people intensely, to inspire them to go out and build a better future. We want people to come out feeling compelled to work for a better society." New Statesman 10/19/06 English Town Evicts Beach Art "Another Place, the sculptor Antony Gormley's collection of 100 cast iron naked men installed on a Merseyside beach, will have to head for another city. Though they have attracted more than 600,000 visitors, and a likely government grant of £1m, councillors in Sefton have decided the figures need to be removed." The Guardian (UK) 10/20/06 Canadian University Gets Back Nazi Loot "Concordia University has recovered what it hopes will be the first of many paintings that belonged to a prominent Jewish art collector who fled Germany and moved to Canada." CBC 10/19/06 Black Culture Center Underway In Pittsburgh Ten years after planning began, Pittsburgh has broken ground on the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in the city's downtown district. "Actual construction begins next month and the center is supposed to open in early 2008... The center will contain a cafe, 500-seat theater, 4,000-square-foot exhibition space and additional education spaces." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/19/06 Could The Barnes Still Change Its Mind? Lee Rosenbaum says that the revelation that Pennsylvania lawmakers may have allocated money to move the Barnes collection to Philadelphia may be disappointing, but that it doesn't change the basic reality of the situation. "With all the funious art has grown in the international art market. Every country in the region has experienced thefts, but the scale is larger in Mexico because of the country’s wealth of colonial art." The New York Times 10/03/06 Hermitage Art Thefts Roil Russia Thefts from the Hermitage Museum have rocked the Russian art world. "The fallout from the heist includes public outrage, long-winded tirades in the media deploring the deteriorating moral fabric of the country, and a museum community in turmoil. No longer are curators trusted absolutely. At a recent emergency session of Russia’s museum union at the Hermitage, the fallout was called the Chernobyl Effect." ARTnews 10/06 Planned Canadian Portrait Gallery In Limbo "Hopes are fading that the new Portrait Gallery of Canada is going to be built across from Parliament Hill at the site of the former U.S. embassy in Ottawa. Yesterday a spokesperson for Canadian Heritage said funding for a portrait gallery remains 'available,' but what's at stake now is 'where it is going to reside.' " The Globe and Mail (Toronto) 10/03/06 British Antiquities Sales To Be Monitored on eBay "After months of negotiation, agreement was reached yesterday between the online auction site eBay, the British Museum, and the government's Museums, Libraries and Archives council, to control the booming trade in British antiquities on the site. Shoals of archaeological objects, an average of 600 a day when volunteers monitored the site, appear on the site: yesterday's offers included an elegant Roman bronze dress pin reportedly found in Bedfordshire, a small gold medieval ring, and a silver cap badge, once worn by a member of the household of the unfortunate Richard Duke of York...." The Guardian (UK) 10/03/06 The New Leipzig School? What School? "Ever since the movement's 'discovery' in 2003, when Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell went on a shopping spree in the former East German city, the New Leipzig School has been the talk of the art town." But, Blake Gopnik says, a touring exhibition of the Rubells' collection proves that it's "not much of a school. There isn't any shared agenda among its artists or even much in common other than an education at the conservative Leipzig Art Academy. (One thing they do have in common is their male sex. The only Leipzig women on view at the Katzen are in the paintings. They're often nude.)" Washington Post 10/03/06 At MoMA, A New Department For "Media" "New media. Digital art. Interactive installation. No matter what ungainly term you choose, the field of artists whose work falls outside the traditional realms of photography, film, and video is growing. In recognition of that fact, the Museum of Modern Art announced yesterday the creation of a new Department of Media, to be run by a curator from the department formerly known as Film and Media, Klaus Biesenbach." New York Sun 10/03/06 The Turner Prize Has Lost Its Way So this is the notorious Turner Prize, asks Rachel Campbell-Johnston? "It is supposed to showcase all that is most exciting on the forthcoming scene. But this year’s show looks set to stir little but intense public apathy." The Times (UK) 10/03/06 Sorting Out This Year's Turner Crop This year's Turner Prize finalists are up. So "who should win anyway? Who is making the best art, and what does that mean nowadays?" The Guardian (UK)` 10/03/06 Monday, October 2 In Chelsea: Supersize Me! A new generation of supersized galleries is changing New York's Chelsea. "The model of the old garage warehouse is over. There's a real pressure on the galleries to update their space. Museums are on a building boom, so both they and collectors expect more from gallery architecture. Galleries have to stay current because their clients are moving ahead. It's less about program and more about the character of the space." New York Sun 10/02/06 Art In A Million Pieces "Art, wherever it is made, no longer subscribes to a single dominant trend with a few rambunctious alternatives jostling for supremacy. Art is eclectic — and today we take that eclecticism for granted. Look around. The extreme breadth of artistic diversity is so familiar and so routine as to border on invisibility." Los Angeles Times 10/01/06 Charles Saatchi, Omnivore Saatchi, one of the world's most ostentatious art collectors, says he looks at more art than anyone else. "If you look enough – and I've been doing it for a long, long time – you get a sense of what suits you. That doesn't mean that I don't make tremendous mistakes all the time, walking straight past something that I discover a year or two later is terrific." The Telegraph (UK)` 10/01/06 This Year's Turner Prize Show It's up, and you can see picture here. "Tomma Abts, Phil Collins, Mark Titchner and Rebecca Warren are competing for the accolade, given to outstanding projects by UK artists aged under 50." BBC 10/02/06 Sunday, October 1 Is LA The New American Art Capital? "New venues have been springing up draising and planning that have already gone into the Philly Barnes, It may be too late to effectuate any change in course... But big-money collectors ought to be sympathetic to the concept of honoring the memory and intentions of one of their own." Culturegrrl (AJ Blogs) 10/18/06 SF Civic Art Collection Slipping Through The Bureaucratic Cracks The city of San Francisco is a major art collector, but you'd never know it by the way many of the pieces in the collection get treated. " San Francisco owns more than 3,000 pieces of art, acquired mainly through commissions and gifts and valued at about $30 million. But decades of poor record keeping and other factors have landed work by noted artists" in a dirty, wet basement room of a city hospital. Chicago Tribune (AP) 10/19/06 Wednesday, October 18 Gehry Goes Underground In Philly Frank Gehry has signed on to design an expansion for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It will be entirely underground. "There is a kind of modesty thing. Most of us, we don’t set out to do the Bilbao effect, as it’s being called. It’d be a real challenge to do something that’s virtually hidden, that could become spectacular." The New York Times 10/19/06 NYCity Opera - What Might Have Been Plans for a new home for New York City Opera are done, even though the company probably won't get a chance to use them. Too bad, writes James Russell. "City Opera says it's still discussing a new home, but the task looks ever more formidable. The de Portzamparc effort makes it all too clear just what New York City is missing, and why the self-proclaimed world capital of culture has so much trouble nurturing it." Bloomberg 10/18/06 Will Bad Reviews Mute Success Of Denver's New Art Museum? Denverites hoped that the Denver Art Museum's new Libeskind expansion would become a national landmark. But the reviews haven't been positive in the nationa press. "The bad buzz as a place to show art certainly isn't going to help. The negative or even middling reviews work against the Bilbao-effect phenomenon that you get, at least potentially, from a rave." Denver Post 10/18/06 The Architecture Of Decay (They All Do, You Know) "It can be hard to walk into a freshly decorated house without feeling preemptively sad at the decay impatiently waiting to begin: how soon the walls will crack, the white cupboards will yellow, and the carpets stain. The ruins of the Ancient World offer a mocking lesson for anyone waiting for builders to finish their work." New York Sun 10/18/06 Why Is San Francisco So Ugly? San Francisco is a beautiful city. And yet, it has more than its share of ugly buildings. "Architecturally speaking, San Francisco has been like a beautiful, rich woman who has never developed an interest in cooking and serves TV dinners to her family, then occasionally—somewhat frantically—hires caterers whenever she has company for dinner. OK, it's an imperfect analogy, but you get the idea." Slate 10/18/06 Boston's First New Museum In 100 Years To Open Dec. 10 Boston's new Institute of Contemporary Art will open Dec. 10, three months later than planned. "The museum postponed the slated Sept. 17 public opening with only weeks to go, citing small but significant construction problems. The $51 million building will be the first new art museum in Boston in nearly a hundred years." Boston Globe 10/18/06 Tracing Lichtenstein Back To The Source An art teacher has found and catalogued "almost every comic book panel later blown up and sold for megabucks by 1960s Op Art icon Roy Lichtenstein. So far, David Barsalou has about 140." So what about the original artists? Are they owed anything? Boston Globe 10/18/06 Tuesday, October 17 US To Delay Decision On Chinese Art Imports "In a move that has cheered museum directors and art dealers and dismayed archaeologists, the State Department has agreed to delay a decision on a controversial request from China that the United States strictly limit imports of Chinese art and antiquities." The New York Times 10/18/06 Reading The Art Market Is the sizzling hot art market cooling? CultureGrrl reads the tea leaves... CultureGrrl (AJBlogs) 10/17/06 Wynn Punches Hole In $139 Million Picasso Steve Wynn was showing a group Picasso's "Le Reve" when... "He raised his hand to show us something about the painting -- and at that moment, his elbow crashed backwards right through the canvas. There was a terrible noise. Wynn stepped away from the painting, and there, smack in the middle of Marie-Therese Walter's plump and allegedly-erotic forearm, was a black hole the size of a silver dollar - or, to be more exactly, the size of the tip of Steve Wynn's elbow - with two three-inch long rips coming off it in either direction." Huffington Post 10/17/06 Wynn To Keep Picasso, Fix It "Casino mogul Steve Wynn will keep and restore a Pablo Picasso painting that he accidentally damaged shortly after he had agreed to sell it for a recorlike some genetically altered mushroom able to thrive in full sunshine. The already decentralized metropolis can now boast of galleries in neighborhoods from Culver City (the current center of buzz, if not always daring cerebration) to Chinatown and Santa Monica." New York Times Magazine 10/01/06 Are We Living In A Golden Age Of Art? "Of contemporary art today, two things, and maybe only two things, can be said for sure. First, there is more of it — made in more styles and materials, by more artists who live, work and have exhibitions in more places — than ever before. Second, it doesn't fit into neat categories or hierarchies." Los Angeles Times 10/01/06 A Year Of Bad Art You would think that it would be a great honor to be selected as a judge in Britain's notorious Turner Prize competition. But for Lynn Barber, who has spent the last year viewing submissions for the Turner, the experience has been terribly depressing. "There is so much bad work around, so much that is derivative, half-baked or banal, you can't believe that galleries would show it. I think what happened is that the huge success of the YBAs in the Nineties has created a peculiar post-boom glut whereby there are now more galleries looking for young artists than worthwhile artists to fill them." The Observer (UK) 10/01/06 Baltimore Museums Scrap Admission Charge "Beginning tomorrow, after charging guests for 24 years - currently, it's $10 for adults - the Baltimore Museum of Art and Walters Art Museum go free, and both have blowouts planned to celebrate the move..." Washington Post 09/30/06 Libeskind Builds His Brand In Denver Daniel Libeskind is such a prominent presence in the architecture world that it's easy to forget that he hasn't completed a single building in the US. Until now: "The architect's new wing for the Denver Art Museum... appears at first to be primarily an example of aggressive form-making — a branding exercise for designer and client alike... For all its iconic power — and for all the evidence it presents that Libeskind is still fully in thrall to the colliding, fragmented forms of deconstructivist architecture — this is a project that a New Urbanist could happily endorse." Los Angeles Times 09/30/06			VISUAL ARTS ARCHIVES November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 October September August July June May April March February January 2001 December November October September August July June May April March February January 2000 December November October September August July June May April March February January 1999 December November October September

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d $139 million." Washington Post (AP) 10/18/06

The "Project Runway" Fan Support Group Will Meet Wednesday Night ... "Wednesday night is buddy-up time in the art world. Artists who have cable make room on their couches for those who don't. Unless held early in the evening, art openings aren't happening on Wednesday nights. Nobody would come. The reason is 'Project Runway,' now in its third season on Bravo and the hands-down, coast-to-coast favorite of artists, curators, critics, dealers and collections. Ever since blogger Tyler Green (Modern Art Notes at on www.ArtsJournal.com) admitted his addiction to the show in September, everybody's been coming out of the closet with his or her 'Runway' obsession." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/17/06

Berlin's Bode Museum Reopens "Berlin's famed Museum Island complex moves a big step closer to recovering its former glory this week when the Bode Museum, home to the city's sculpture collection, reopens after six years of restoration. The domed building, which juts out into the Spree River in the heart of former East Berlin, is the second of the five Neoclassical museums to get a full makeover as part of a government-funded $1.5-billion overhaul." Los Angeles Times (AP) 10/17/06

Painting Abu Ghraib "Naked figures writhe in an eerie darkness. Vicious beasts bare their teeth and snarl. The faces of lost souls cry out in unimaginable agony, forced into strange and contorted positions reminiscent of crucifixion. Such a vision evokes a scene of the apocalypse typical of 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But no, these paintings by Colombian artist Fernando Botero are depictions of real events. Despite their hellish subject matter, they are all meticulously based on photographs and press accounts of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003." Having made their way from Europe, they're now on view in New York. New York Sun 10/17/06

Duomo's Ghiberti Doors To Vist US "Their 10 panels depict scenes from the Old Testament, intricately illustrated in high and low relief. When the three-ton, 20-foot-tall doors were completed, in 1452, Michelangelo pronounced them grand enough to adorn the entrance to paradise, and so they became known as 'The Gates of Paradise.' They have for centuries been considered one of the masterpieces of Western art." The New York Times 10/16/06

Archaeologists Alarmed - Roman Treasure Goes On Display "One of the most beautiful and infamous treasure hoards of the 20th century, 14 pieces of Roman-era silver of staggering quality, will resurface today on display in London, to the consternation of leading archaeologists who regard it as archaeological loot." The Guardian (UK) 10/16/06

Libeskind's Denver Museum - Great, But How About The Art? "Inspired by a glimpse of the Rocky Mountains gained as he first flew into Denver, Libeskind's new building for the Denver Art Museum sits like an alien craft amid the civic grandeur of the mile-high city's downtown. Docked at an angle on a vacant plot of land, its hull shimmers in the sun, the titanium surface reflecting the colours around it, silver and ochre fading into a brackish brown. The stern of the ship is a jumble of metal boxes, stacked any which way. Its prow looms over the adjoining road, jutting out toward the museum's existing building, a grey crenellated mausoleum of a place." The Guardian (UK) 10/16/06

Richard Rogers Wins Stirling Prize For Spanish Airport "As he received the £20,000 prize to a standing ovation, Lord Rogers described his £1.2 billion building at Madrid’s Barajas airport, with its mile-long wavy roof designed to look like billowing clouds tethered to the ground, as “the greatest experience I’ve had in architecture since the Pompidou Centre (his 1970s building in Paris)." Sunday Times 10/15/06

Did Pennsylvania Fund A New Barnes Before It Got Permission To Move? "Buried deep inside Pennsylvania's voluminous, multibillion-dollar capital budget for fiscal year 2001-02 was $7 million for 'restoration, stabilization and site enhancements for the Barnes Foundation.' Fifteen pages later, the budget set aside another $100 million for 'design and construction of a museum facility' to house the Barnes collection." Los Angeles Times 10/16/06

Hi, I'm Julie, I'll Be Your Museum Shadow A growing number of museums are spying on their patrons, trying to better understand how visitors interact with the museum. "Known collectively as 'visitor studies,' the movement has its own experts, its own literature, its own conferences. Spying is only part of the equation." San Diego Union-Tribune 10/15/06

Denver Mobs Its New Museum Thirty-five thousand people showed up for the opening weekend of the new Denver Art Museum. "The large weekend crowds resulted in the museum running out of free tickets to enter the new $110 million wing less than 24 hours into the event." Rocky Mountain News 10/15/06

Steven Holl Busts On Denver Project (But The Reasons Are Instructive) When architect Steven Holl was selected to design a new Denver courthouse in December, "it was a celebratory moment for a city anticipating a building with his signature way with light. But in August and September the terrain between city and architect turned from tension to termination." Rocky Mountain News 10/15/06

A Museum That Makes You Doubt Star Buildings Paris' new Branly Museum is a disaster, writes Robert Campbell. "Everywhere in the Branly, the architecture crowds out the treasures it contains. It's the mud-like interior you remember, not the displays. This is one of many museums now being built that have been conceived as tourist destinations. The architecture is supposed to be part of the tourist magnet." Boston Globe 10/15/06

Doubling Children In Houston Houston's Children's Museum is doubling in size. "Designed by Robert Venturi, one of the United States' best-known architects, the museum's current home opened in 1992 and was designed to accommodate 350,000 visitors a year. Annual attendance runs at about 600,000." Houston Chronicle 10/15/06

Art's 100 Most Powerful "ArtReview magazine's annual list of the 100 most powerful people in the contemporary art scene was published yesterday, prompting predictable modest coughs from those who found themselves near the top, and sniffy dismissals from those who had been bumped down the list or, worse, banished altogether." The Guardian (UK) 10/14/06

Stirling Prize - Out Of Touch With Reality? The Stirling Prize is the UK's top honor for architecture. Yet "many of the other buildings to scoop the prize have failed to live up to the praise heaped on them. Critics say architects have become detached from everyday life and are calling for a rethink of the prize so that buildings are judged on how well they stand up to use." The Guardian (UK) 10/14/06

Coveted: The Art Advisor With Access The art market has become so hot that collectors are jockeying for an edge in buying. "The most important thing an art adviser can provide is access. It’s become much more difficult to buy art these days, especially in the primary market, which is highly imperfect because, unlike auction buying, it’s a closed system based largely on relationships of trust." The New York Times 10/15/06

That YouTube That You Do So Well (Museums Give It A Try) Museums are experimenting with technologies such as YouTube. "Much the same way that MoMA and other contemporary museums added photography and film as artists began working with them, the Internet is becoming an increasingly important creative medium." Wall Street Journal 10/13/06

Russian Collectors Move In "Buyers for contemporary Russian art were overwhelmingly non-Russian until around five years ago. But no longer. A new class of collectors has appeared, while contemporary galleries are springing up fast in Moscow." The Art Newspaper 10/13/06

Two Postwar Masterpieces Change Hands Two paintings by Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning have been sold for $143.5 million in a private transaction. Media mogul David Geffen was the seller, and the buyers are a pair of hedge fund billionaires looking to up the profile of their own collections. The New York Times 10/12/06

Libeskind's Self-Portrait? Nicolai Ouroussoff says that Daniel Libeskind's new addition to the Denver Art Museum is a mighty piece of work, but also one which embodies "all of the contradictions within Mr. Libeskind’s oeuvre. Its bold, often mesmerizing forms reaffirm the originality of his talent, yet its tortured geometries make it a daunting place to install or view art — hardly a minor drawback. And for all its emotional power, the building seems eerily out of date, and its flaws readily apparent." The New York Times 10/12/06

• It Looks Like Denver (And That's Quite An Accomplishment) Inga Saffron loves the new Libeskind addition. "When the prow of the museum's new Hamilton Building cruises into view, it is a staggering sight. Its slashing, titanium-sheathed planes thrust up from Denver's wide-open city grid like a newborn Rocky Mountain... In contrast with its ponderous, earthbound neighbors, his museum looks ready for a springy takeoff." Philadelphia Inquirer 10/12/06

• This Is What Happens When You Hand Out Champagne In A Museum An installation piece by San Francisco artist William T. Wiley was damaged over the weekend during the opening celebrations of the newly expanded Denver Art Museum. Parts of the installation were knocked to the floor when a visitor tripped into them. Museum officials aren't saying how severe the damage is. Denver Post 10/12/06

Pollock Paintings To Get Viewing, Whether Real Or Not "The director of the only museum that has agreed to show a group of recently discovered paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock said today she'll show them even if laboratory tests show that the works are fake... Harvard University has said it soon will release the first physical analysis of the works, which include two dozen paintings and a dozen sketches and studies on paper. The analysis likely will show whether the materials used to make them existed during Pollock's lifetime." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/12/06

Van Gogh Controversy Close To Resolution The controversy over the authenticity of a painting attributed to Van Gogh in Australia's National Gallery of Victoria hasn't swayed the confidence of the gallery's director. "The portrait, estimated to be worth $20 million, is included in all catalogues listing the artist's works, and was part of a US exhibition in 2000 that was seen by more than 1 million people without complaint. But its authenticity was questioned by some British critics when it went on show in August at Scotland's Dean Gallery as part of the Edinburgh Festival." The painting is now being carefully scrutinized by experts to determine the truth. Sydney Morning Herald 10/12/06

The Artist's Fingerprint A new piece of software developed by researchers at the University of Maastricht may be able to significantly cut the time it takes for art experts to authenticate a painting or spot a forgery. "Using high-resolution scans of paintings, the Authentic software builds up a library of characteristics, such as brushstrokes, colours and type of canvas used, that form a 'fingerprint' for a particular artist. A painting can then be compared against this fingerprint to help experts decide whether it is a fake." The Guardian (UK) 10/12/06

The Frieze Descends On London "If Tate Modern, with its new Carsten Höller helter-skelters, has been accused of resembling an old-fashioned fairground, it has nothing on Frieze art fair. In the vast, chaotic encampment that has suddenly sprung up in Regent's Park you wouldn't be too surprised to encounter a coconut shy and a bearded lady... Frieze represents the moment in London's calendar when commerce and art become most nakedly and shamelessly entwined. Four hundred and seventy galleries from Europe, the US, Russia, Japan, Lebanon and Eygpt have competed for the chance to have a pitch at this, the fourth Frieze art fair. Only 152 have been accepted." The Guardian (UK) 10/12/06

• London's Golden Age of Art The Frieze Art Fair may be the best encapsulation available of the artistic explosion London has undergone over the past few decades. "People complain of party fatigue and all the work blurring into each other but there has never been a better time to be involved in art in London." The Times (UK) 10/12/06

Congressman Steps Into Barnes Battle The fight over the Barnes Foundation's intended move to Center City Philadelphia has taken yet another unexpected turn, as a local congressman announces his plans to introduce a bill on the floor of the U.S. House which would block the move. The congressman claims that Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell's commitment of $25 million in state money to facilitate the move was the last straw in spurring him to act against the relocation. Culturegrrl (AJ Blogs) 10/11/06

Dundas Artifacts Headed Home To B.C. "More than 140 years after they were given up for God, the most prized items from the world-famous Dundas Collection of rare northwest native art are returning to their ancestral home in British Columbia. The 19 sacred artifacts of Tsimshian origin purchased at auction last week by two members of the Thomson family will be publicly exhibited at an undisclosed B.C. museum late this year or early next year. The collection's permanent home is still undecided." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/11/06

Art Theft Gang Caught UK police have busted a gang of major art thieves. "For four years the audacious burglaries at some of Britain's best-known stately homes in Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Worcestershire have embarrassed police and left leading insurers in the art world smarting from multimillion-pound payouts for antiques, curios and paintings from leading collections. More than 100 police officers from five forces were involved in the raids and 14 people seized." The Guardian (UK) 10/10/06

Good Gehry, Bad Gehry Two new Frank Gehry buildings in New York show the good and bad sides of the star architect. The New Yorker 10/09/06

Seattle's New Curator Cadre Seattle has plenty of good curators. Trouble is, there aren't nearly enough curator jobs to keep them busy, So freelance curators have turned to alternative spaces and in the process building a new art scene. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/10/06

Acropolis Museum To Open In 2007 The Greek government says its museum built to house the Parthenon Marbles will be opened next year. "Once the museum is completed, Greece will have a very strong argument for the return of the Parthenon sculptures," Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis said Monday. CBC 10/10/06

Tate Modern's Sci-Fi Fantasy Slides: Serious Fun? "When you launch yourself from the top of one of Carsten Höller's slides in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall - the largest is 56 metres long and with a stomach-churning 27-metre drop - you leave a lot behind you. Principally, your dignity. And any sense of being an adult. And all control. ... But is this crowd-pleasing work any more profound than a funfair helter-skelter? 'The funfair experience is completely underrated,' said Höller. 'I don't know why we don't take it more seriously philosophically and artistically.' " The Guardian (UK) 10/10/06

Elegantly, Foster Challenges The Upper East Side "I expect Norman Foster’s design for a new residential tower at 980 Madison Avenue to infuriate people. Rising out of the old Parke-Bernet Gallery building, a spare 1950 office building between 76th and 77th Streets, its interlocking elliptical forms throw down a challenge to a neighborhood known for an aversion to bold contemporary architecture. The tower’s height, roughly 30 stories, hardly helps its cause.... With a little trimming, though, this could be the most handsome building to rise along Madison Avenue since the Whitney Museum of American Art was completed 40 years ago." The New York Times 10/10/06

So What Was The UK's Best Building This Year? The Stirling is the UK's top prize for architecture. "The official line says that the Stirling goes to the British-designed building 'which has been the most significant for the evolution of architecture in the past year', a sentence packed with assumptions. Does it go to the prettiest? The most thrilling? To the architect most deserving? Or, old-fashioned notion this, to the building that best fulfils its brief, be it a bicycle shed or a cathedral?" The Times (UK) 10/10/06

The Pompidou Takes On Shanghai The Centre Pompidou in France is planning to open a branch in Shanghai, China by the end of 2007. CBC 10/09/06

Hirst Fakes Withdrawn From Sale Two pictures have been withdrawn from a Sotheby's auction of the work of Damien Hirst. "The genuine limited edition prints are worth up to £10,000 and have drawn attention from forgers who use the latest technology to copy works of art. Sotheby's confirmed the images had been withdrawn and questions over their authenticity were being investigated." BBC 10/09/06

Walking To Stone Henge After years of looking for a solution to the traffic strangling Britain's Stone Henge, a radical solution has bee proposed: do nothing. Instead of building expensive tunnels and the like, why not, asks a expert, find ways to encourage walkers and cyclists rather than cars? The Guardian (UK) 10/07/06

The History Of Architecture On Denver Streets With the opening of its new Daniel Libeskind-designed art museum, Denver has amassed an impressive array of public buildings. "There's an unbelievable assembly with the library and the DAM buildings and the residences. Within a block, you almost can trace the development of architecture since the Second World War." Denver Post 10/08/06

Harvard Masterpiece Gone Wrong Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room is a masterpiece. But "the Woodberry, along with the rest of Lamont Library, re-opened this fall after a renovation. You can walk into the room today and you'll see what appears to be a perfectly nice place, pleasant and forgettable. Harvard has carefully preserved a lot of what was here before. Nothing is gone except, well, everything." Boston Globe 10/08/06

London's Unimaginable Art Boom Keeps On Booming "A 2004 study estimated that there were more than 400 galleries in London - probably the tip of the iceberg, as temporary spaces come and go and artists open their studios to sell direct. An Arts Council England report has estimated the contemporary art market as worth £500m - unimaginable even a decade ago. The London art boom will be seen at its most intense next week, when Frieze art fair flings wide its doors... And, just when you think London cannot take any more, still more commercial galleries appear." The Guardian (UK) 10/07/06

It's Official: Trekkies Have Too Much Money Auctioneers at Christie's New York were stunned this week when a 78-inch model of the Starship Enterprise that had been expected to sell for around $30,000 instead went for $576,000. There appears to be no truth to the rumor that the winning bidder attempted to pay for his new acquisition with his mom's credit card. BBC 10/08/06

Sure, The Art's Nice, But How's The Traffic? The Denver Art Museum unveils its $62.5 million renovation this week, and museum officials are readying for a deluge of curious visitors. In fact, regulating human traffic flow is one of the major ongoing concerns for museums looking to upgrade their digs. Denver Post 10/07/06

• Libeskind's Denver Work Bodes Well For SF Officials at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum have been keeping a close eye on architect Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum, since Libeskind is also designing the Jewish Museum's new digs. "His Denver building shows that what seems outrageous on paper can be bracing in real life." San Francisco Chronicle 10/07/06

• Great Shell, But The Inside Could Use Work Blair Kamen says there's no question that Daniel Libeskind has designed a gem of a building in Denver. But how does the new wing do as a showcase for the art it was built to house? Well... "It is a startling, sometimes over-the-top piece of architectural sculpture, a surprisingly sensitive shaper of urban spaces and a disappointingly spotty art museum in which basic functional problems have not been adequately solved, like how visitors, especially those who are blind, will move around without conking their heads on the architect's insistently tilting walls." Chicago Tribune 10/08/06

From Here? No One's From Here! The California Biennial seems awfully un-Californian this year, to judge from the diverse array of states from which the featured artists hail. Of course, that in itself could be said to be fairly Californian... Los Angeles Times 10/07/06

Lauder Raising Money For Klimts? Ronald Lauder has raised $190 million. Could he be thinking of trying to buy more Klimts for his Neue Gallerie when they come up for auction? "Each one would have something to add to the Neue Galerie’s collection, but if the buyer is not the Neue Galerie, I hope they will end up in other museums." The Art Newspaper 10/05/06

Star Focus - Where Are They? The century is still young, but Richard Cork wonders where the new art stars are. "Looking around, I can find no equivalents to the precocious titans who, precisely 100 years ago, overturned all existing ideas about the future direction of art." New Statesman 10/08/06

Mexico To Churches: Make Records The Mexican government is asking churches to catalogue their artwork. "Mexico has a wealth of colonial art, including paintings, sculptures, stained glass and sacred objects, spread among its churches. But a demand for such works among collectors has made the contents of rural parishes a tempting target for thieves." CBC 10/05/06

Well, You Could Always Move It To Manhattan "Some people strolling past the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park [New York] assume that the building is closed. And many motorists speed by it on the Grand Central Parkway without realizing that the museum even exists. The building itself has an eclectic history cluttered with the contributions of earlier architects." So how do you remake a museum in such a way as to encourage people to take note of its very existence? The New York Times 10/05/06

Change Roils Brooklyn Museum Major changes at the Brooklyn Museum have the institution in turmoil. "Curators see the changes as a way of diminishing their traditional power to conceive, propose and organize exhibitions. As many as eight curators have retired or resigned over the last two years." The New York Times 10/05/06

Swiss Architects Win Queen's Prize Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have won this year's Gold Medal for Architecture, a gift of the Queen made on her behalf by the Royal Institute of British Architects. "The award is one of architecture's most prestigious international accolades, with past recipients including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer, Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, architects either already in, or destined for, the history books." The Guardian (UK) 10/05/06

The Polish Supermarket Fights The Wrecker A supermarket in Poland has become a rallying cry for preservationists who appreciate its unique charms. OpinionJournal 10/04/06

Native Art Fight Comes To A Head "Thursday morning in New York, Sotheby's auction halls will be the stage for a historic struggle, the final chapter in one of the more fascinating and tortuous negotiations between a private collector and his courting museums. The Dundas Collection of Northwest Coast American Indian Art is up for grabs," and Canadian museums want to see the works come home. But the collection's owner has been playing coy with the Canadians and others for the better part of two decades, and no one really knows where the Dundas is likely to end up by week's end. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/04/06

Prominent Chicago Architect Steps Out On His Own Adrian Smith, designer of some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, is leaving the prestigious Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill to start his own company. SOM apparently offered him an extension of his contract, but Smith declined. Chicago Sun-Times 10/04/06

Boston's ICA Almost Done, But Not On Time Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art isn't putting a firm date on it yet, but it's clear that the museum's new building on the city's harborfront won't be ready to open in late October or early November, as hoped. "Events scheduled for October in the ICA were either moved, canceled, or postponed... Museum officials say they don't want to announce an opening date without being sure they can be ready on time. There are signs, though, that the building is moving closer to completion." Boston Globe 10/04/06

Stealing Mexico Blind Mexican churches have suffered a wave of art robberies. "Looters have picked through Latin America’s archaeological sites for centuries. These church robberies are newer, arising as the taste for colonial religious art has grown in the international art market. Every country in the region has experienced thefts, but the scale is larger in Mexico because of the country’s wealth of colonial art." The New York Times 10/03/06

Hermitage Art Thefts Roil Russia Thefts from the Hermitage Museum have rocked the Russian art world. "The fallout from the heist includes public outrage, long-winded tirades in the media deploring the deteriorating moral fabric of the country, and a museum community in turmoil. No longer are curators trusted absolutely. At a recent emergency session of Russia’s museum union at the Hermitage, the fallout was called the Chernobyl Effect." ARTnews 10/06

Planned Canadian Portrait Gallery In Limbo "Hopes are fading that the new Portrait Gallery of Canada is going to be built across from Parliament Hill at the site of the former U.S. embassy in Ottawa. Yesterday a spokesperson for Canadian Heritage said funding for a portrait gallery remains 'available,' but what's at stake now is 'where it is going to reside.' " The Globe and Mail (Toronto) 10/03/06

British Antiquities Sales To Be Monitored on eBay "After months of negotiation, agreement was reached yesterday between the online auction site eBay, the British Museum, and the government's Museums, Libraries and Archives council, to control the booming trade in British antiquities on the site. Shoals of archaeological objects, an average of 600 a day when volunteers monitored the site, appear on the site: yesterday's offers included an elegant Roman bronze dress pin reportedly found in Bedfordshire, a small gold medieval ring, and a silver cap badge, once worn by a member of the household of the unfortunate Richard Duke of York...." The Guardian (UK) 10/03/06

The New Leipzig School? What School? "Ever since the movement's 'discovery' in 2003, when Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell went on a shopping spree in the former East German city, the New Leipzig School has been the talk of the art town." But, Blake Gopnik says, a touring exhibition of the Rubells' collection proves that it's "not much of a school. There isn't any shared agenda among its artists or even much in common other than an education at the conservative Leipzig Art Academy. (One thing they do have in common is their male sex. The only Leipzig women on view at the Katzen are in the paintings. They're often nude.)" Washington Post 10/03/06

At MoMA, A New Department For "Media" "New media. Digital art. Interactive installation. No matter what ungainly term you choose, the field of artists whose work falls outside the traditional realms of photography, film, and video is growing. In recognition of that fact, the Museum of Modern Art announced yesterday the creation of a new Department of Media, to be run by a curator from the department formerly known as Film and Media, Klaus Biesenbach." New York Sun 10/03/06

The Turner Prize Has Lost Its Way So this is the notorious Turner Prize, asks Rachel Campbell-Johnston? "It is supposed to showcase all that is most exciting on the forthcoming scene. But this year’s show looks set to stir little but intense public apathy." The Times (UK) 10/03/06

Sorting Out This Year's Turner Crop This year's Turner Prize finalists are up. So "who should win anyway? Who is making the best art, and what does that mean nowadays?" The Guardian (UK)` 10/03/06

In Chelsea: Supersize Me! A new generation of supersized galleries is changing New York's Chelsea. "The model of the old garage warehouse is over. There's a real pressure on the galleries to update their space. Museums are on a building boom, so both they and collectors expect more from gallery architecture. Galleries have to stay current because their clients are moving ahead. It's less about program and more about the character of the space." New York Sun 10/02/06

Art In A Million Pieces "Art, wherever it is made, no longer subscribes to a single dominant trend with a few rambunctious alternatives jostling for supremacy. Art is eclectic — and today we take that eclecticism for granted. Look around. The extreme breadth of artistic diversity is so familiar and so routine as to border on invisibility." Los Angeles Times 10/01/06

Charles Saatchi, Omnivore Saatchi, one of the world's most ostentatious art collectors, says he looks at more art than anyone else. "If you look enough – and I've been doing it for a long, long time – you get a sense of what suits you. That doesn't mean that I don't make tremendous mistakes all the time, walking straight past something that I discover a year or two later is terrific." The Telegraph (UK)` 10/01/06

This Year's Turner Prize Show It's up, and you can see picture here. "Tomma Abts, Phil Collins, Mark Titchner and Rebecca Warren are competing for the accolade, given to outstanding projects by UK artists aged under 50." BBC 10/02/06

Is LA The New American Art Capital? "New venues have been springing up like some genetically altered mushroom able to thrive in full sunshine. The already decentralized metropolis can now boast of galleries in neighborhoods from Culver City (the current center of buzz, if not always daring cerebration) to Chinatown and Santa Monica." New York Times Magazine 10/01/06

Are We Living In A Golden Age Of Art? "Of contemporary art today, two things, and maybe only two things, can be said for sure. First, there is more of it — made in more styles and materials, by more artists who live, work and have exhibitions in more places — than ever before. Second, it doesn't fit into neat categories or hierarchies." Los Angeles Times 10/01/06

A Year Of Bad Art You would think that it would be a great honor to be selected as a judge in Britain's notorious Turner Prize competition. But for Lynn Barber, who has spent the last year viewing submissions for the Turner, the experience has been terribly depressing. "There is so much bad work around, so much that is derivative, half-baked or banal, you can't believe that galleries would show it. I think what happened is that the huge success of the YBAs in the Nineties has created a peculiar post-boom glut whereby there are now more galleries looking for young artists than worthwhile artists to fill them." The Observer (UK) 10/01/06

Baltimore Museums Scrap Admission Charge "Beginning tomorrow, after charging guests for 24 years - currently, it's $10 for adults - the Baltimore Museum of Art and Walters Art Museum go free, and both have blowouts planned to celebrate the move..." Washington Post 09/30/06

Libeskind Builds His Brand In Denver Daniel Libeskind is such a prominent presence in the architecture world that it's easy to forget that he hasn't completed a single building in the US. Until now: "The architect's new wing for the Denver Art Museum... appears at first to be primarily an example of aggressive form-making — a branding exercise for designer and client alike... For all its iconic power — and for all the evidence it presents that Libeskind is still fully in thrall to the colliding, fragmented forms of deconstructivist architecture — this is a project that a New Urbanist could happily endorse." Los Angeles Times 09/30/06