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  • May 24, 2002 at 5:25pm

    Manifesta 4 Opens This Weekend

    While Documenta11 is coming up in Kassel, nearby Frankfurt is hosting the roving Manifesta, an event that is younger and possibly even more interdisciplinary than its older brother. Curated by Iara Boubnova, founder and director of the Institute of Contemporary art in Sofia, Núria Enguita Mayo, curator and head of the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona, and Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley, a freelance curator who helped found the BDV (Bureau de Vidéo) in Paris, Manifesta 4 plans “to use Frankfurt as a kind of playground by playing with its geography.”

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  • May 24, 2002 at 1:00am

    Koolhaas Nation

    The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas may seem an unlikely choice for the overhaul of the European Union's image. So when it came to creating a new flag for the European Union some asked, How would an architect handle the tricky task of reinventing a brand? Critics and columnists throughout Europe are still asking that, now that Koolhaas has unveiled his creation, a bar-code flag that will, or will not—the debate continues—replace the circle of twelve gold stars against regal blue that was adopted in 1986 as a symbol of the emerging union.

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  • May 23, 2002 at 11:35am

    MFA in Boston Economic Juggernaut, Study Says

    With a rich collection of paintings and antiquities, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has long been considered one of the country's most impressive cultural institutions. But an economic-impact study to be released today reveals that the museum is not just a place for pretty pictures. It's also a moneymaking machine.

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  • May 23, 2002 at 11:01am

    High Museum to Get a “Village”

    Last week, the director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta announced a $130 million expansion plan that would include adding what the director calls a “village” of three new buildings to the pristine white museum designed to much acclaim by Richard Meier in 1983. Meier, however, was not considered for the commission to more than double the museum's space and add a central piazza, restaurant, shop, and expanded arts campus. Instead, in a departure from the usual protocol of lengthy deliberations followed by an elaborate competition, the High Museum simply selected Renzo Piano, the Italian

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  • May 23, 2002 at 10:58am

    Niki de Saint Phalle, 71, Dies

    Niki de Saint Phalle, a Franco-American artist internationally known for her colorful, monumental, cartoonlike sculptures and environments, died on Tuesday in San Diego, California. She was 71.

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  • May 23, 2002 at 8:09am

    Rockwell's Rosie Sells for $4.9 Million

    In all her 78 years, Mary Doyle Keefe had burly arms just once: when Norman Rockwell transformed her into Rosie the Riveter in 1943. The enduring image appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, giving an iconic face to the millions of American women who powered the U.S. economy during World War II. On Wednesday the work was auctioned off at Sotheby's for $4.9 million, the highest price ever paid at public auction for a Rockwell painting, according to Linda Pero, a curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.

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  • May 23, 2002 at 7:38am

    Scottish Artist Callum Innes Takes Jerwood

    Scottish artist Callum Innes has won the £30,000 Jerwood painting prize. The Edinburgh-born painter, who has been compared with Mark Rothko, creates large-scale minimalist and monochromatic paintings. The shortlist included Graham Crowley, Lisa Milroy, Nicky Hoberman, Paul Morrison, and Pamela Golden.

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  • May 22, 2002 at 12:51pm

    Niki de Saint Phalle, 71

    Artist and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle has died in a hospital in San Diego at the age of 71. Her death, after a long illness, was announced by the German city of Hanover, which commissioned some of her most famous sculptures.

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  • May 21, 2002 at 1:10pm

    California Arts Budget Gets the Ax

    Echoing budget cuts across the country, California announced a proposal this week that would cut more than half the budget of the state's Arts Council. Several longtime staffers may get the sack, and several programs will end.

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  • May 21, 2002 at 1:05pm

    Manchester Art Gallery Reopens

    The Manchester Art Gallery reopens to the public on Saturday after more than four years of building work. The gallery has been almost doubled in size, with the addition of a new extension, and there's a swanky glass atrium connecting the old art gallery to the new. The Guardian's Adrian Searle wonders, though, What lies behind the contemporary obsession with remaking galleries into architectural baubles?

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  • May 21, 2002 at 9:15am

    World Violence on Screen at Cannes Film Fest

    At this year's Cannes International Film Festival, the fifty-fifth, the violence and confusion that afflicts societies from Asia to the Americas have found their way onto the screen. Filmmakers from different backgrounds, working in wildly eclectic styles, use the medium to explore, with varying degrees of success, histories of poverty, war, communal hatred, and the way these histories continue to shadow contemporary daily life.

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