I see that the first American site specific commission for the British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster is Toxic Schizophrenia/Hyper Version, the largest yet variation on their signature heart and dagger motif. It recently went up in front of the new Museum of …
With the Metropolitan Museum preparing to choose a successor to Philippe de Montebello, I’ve been re-reading Making the Mummies Dance, the jaunty — make that very jaunty — 1994 memoir by former Met director Thomas Hoving. Given that the Met recently formed a search committee, which has now picked a head hunting firm, I laughed when …
A couple of developments in the world of big bad buildings.
Prince Charles, heir to the throne of Britain and sometime architecture commentator, is complaining again about the way London is shaping up. Charles’ taste runs to the traditional, the nostalgic and anything by Leon Krier. The last time he got seriously involved in an …
After my recent conversation with Jim Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, I thought I would get in touch with a prominent archaeologist to see what he thought of Cuno’s proposal for a return to partage, the practice whereby source nations used to share some of the finds from archaeological digs with the foreign museums or …
When I was wishing yesterday that we had something in the U.S. that would create a little media excitement about art on a regular basis, this isn’t what I meant.
But hey, if Sarah Jessica Parker is going to do a reality show about art, at least she’s doing it with “Magical Elves”.
The Brits are getting up a full head of steam again over a proposal for a major public art project. I’ve already mentioned a few times my case of U.K. envy on this. It’s not that we don’t have the occasional outburst of public art here and there in the U.S. And there are …
There’s a proposal to drill for oil in the Great Salt Lake in the vicinity of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, one of the definitive works of 20th century American art. The drilling will be underwater, but will require the construction of industrial infrastructure all around. …
It appears that it wasn’t just California museums gaining from the work of Robert Olson, the alleged smuggler of Asian and Native American art who got five of them into hot water recently. In this morning’s Los Angeles Times, Jason Felch is reporting that it appears Olson also did significant business with Barry McLean, a major …
Let’s wrap up that conversation with Jim Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, who’s forthcoming book is Who Owns Antiquities? In the part I posted yesterday Cuno explained that he’d like to see a return to the system of partage, which was once the rule for archeological digs. Under that system, source nations — meaning …
James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, was in New York last week. He arrived with the architect Renzo Piano for a press luncheon about the new wing for modern art that Piano has designed for the Institute. Before lunch I sat down with him to talk about a different topic, …
To coincide with this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, TIME’s International edition asked me to write a brief essay/feature piece on the exceptionally large arts-related base of the New York City economy. I spend a fair amount of it talking about the chief threat to that economy, the phenomenally high real estate …
They got a rude awakening Thursday morning at four museums in southern California — federal agents on their doorsteps with search warrants. The agents who swarmed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego were looking for …
Since it opened last November I’ve been paying visits every so often to the Damien Hirst installation that occupies much of the glass enclosed lobby of Lever House. When it was completed in …
