São Paulo Bienal Ruckus
The curator of the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, Alfons Hug has eliminated the historical section of the exhibition, drawing fire from editorialists.
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Art for the Sake of Architecture
Which is more important—the building or the collection it houses? Museums are facing an identity crisis.
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MoMA Moving Out
Less than two months remain before the Museum of Modern Art bows off the Manhattan stage. In the last few weeks, the trucks have begun to roll between Manhattan and Queens, sometimes as many as five a day. The first department to move was the library, with its 180,000 volumes; next is architecture and design, then painting and sculpture, and on down the list, thirty-five departments in all.
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Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award Winner Announced
With its Biennial just three weeks old, the Whitney Museum of American Art is trying to create more buzz by announcing the winner of its second Bucksbaum Award, given to an emerging artist living and working in the United States whose work is in the Biennial. The award carries a $100,000 stipend and residency. This year's winner is Irit Batsry, an Israeli-born video and installation artist whose contribution to this year's Biennial is an eighty-minute film, These Are Not My Images (Neither There Nor Here).
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Inside the Outside
Over the last three decades, the hierarchy of high and low that dominated culture at midcentury has softened. Yet, suggests Roberta Smith, the division between outsider and insider art remains well policed by advocates of both sides.
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Van Gogh “Fake” Real
Art experts have declared genuine a painting by Vincent van Gogh that eminent art expert Geraldine Norman claimed to be a forgery.
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Out of Art
After 300 years of collecting the painting, sculpture, and other art objects of Western culture, we are simply running out of art, suggests Souren Melikian.
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Libeskind and Gehry to Square Off in Toronto
Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry are both headed to Toronto to work on splashy museum structures. The Berlin-based Libeskind, designer of the new Jewish Museum, has created a renovation design for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), while Gehry, the Canadian-born but Los Angeles–based architect, is quietly talking to the Art Gallery of Ontario about designing a new and characteristically showy extension.
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German Painter Most Expensive Living Artist
Gerhard Richter now stands as the world’s most expensive living artist, a status confirmed and consecrated by the current retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Just as his reputation has risen steadily since he arrived in West Germany in 1961, so has the value of his work, which with barely a hiccup has climbed steadily. Today a major work can command over $9 million; the MoMA recently spent some $15 million acquiring the “October” series.
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A New Cool Brittania?
Charles Saumarez Smith, the new director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, is urged by The Guardian's Jonathan Jones to shake Britain's still-polarized aesthetic sensibilities up a little.
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A Museum for Cars
Bangkok governor Samak Sundaravej’s plan to surreptitiously turn a sorely needed arts center into a commercial development has hit some unexpected snags, as artists stage headline-grabbing protests and construction companies refuse to participate in the project.
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Dorothea Tanning, a Surrealist in the Flesh
At ninety-one, Dorothea Tanning is one of three surviving Surrealists from the original generation to be included in the Metropolitan Museum's “Desire Unbound” exhibition.