Ice Hotel Quebec Canada

Discover the amazing 3000 m² complex made entirely of snow and ice. Located inside you will find the popular Ice Bar, the magnificent ice chapel, 36 rooms and theme suites (one special suite does have a fire place and a private spa), a Grand Hall with an ice candelabra illuminated fibre optically, a huge N'Ice Club with a capacity of 400 people, three outdoor hot tubs and a sauna.

Enjoy a full array of winter activities: cross country skiing, skating, snowshoeing, sliding, dog sledding, snowmobiling, and ice fishing (equipment rentals offered on site). Hold your own special event (happy hour, receptions, corporate events, and weddings) and even spend a magical night (many packages available, capacity of 86 people).

Located at the Station touristique Duchesnay (25 minutes west of Québec City).

Ice Hotel Sweden

Sweden's Ice Hotel is built from scratch every year. A new design, new suites, a brand new reception - in fact everything in it is crisp and new. The Ice Hotel is situated on the shores of the Torne River, in the old village of Jukkasjärvi in Swedish Lapland.

10 000 tons of crystal clear ice from the ‘ice manufacturing plant’, the Torne River, and 30 000 tons of pure snow generously supplied by Mother Nature are needed to build the Ice Hotel every year. The hotel sleeps over 100 guests, and every bedroom is unique.

Covering more than 30,000 square feet, the Ice Hotel includes an Ice Chapel, the hotel itself, an ice art exhibition hall, a cinema and last but not least, the world famous ‘Absolute Ice Bar.'

Virtual Museum of Political Art

A work of art is always intertwined with its society’s social and political environment. It is a mirror reflecting our time with the medium of a teacher showing us the essence of our lives. The manipulation of an object in contemporary artworks typically function either as critical commentaries or as expressions of personal psychology and experience. Art is about the power to take ordinary things and arranging them to produce a transcendence of their standard appearances. The originality is what one chooses and how it is presented.

Political art is a significant form of political communication - artistically produced messages challenging status quo and thinking on politics, consumption, economics, and culture.

HILLBILLY

Essay by Mark Vallen at art-for-a-change.com

History provides abundant examples of how social relations impact art. Traditionally the church, state, and wealthy patrons have funded the arts in order to increase their political power and prestige. Clearly that paradigm is overloaded with political relationships. But today it is largely market forces that determine the success or failure of art, and who among us will declare capitalism is not free of politics. Since labor and commerce are realms understood to be political spheres, then art, which is inextricably bound to those fields, is automatically part of a political process.

Content or message notwithstanding, artists manipulate and transform raw materials into art. The fact that those supplies are created from the toil of others makes for a political construct. Who makes your art materials, how much are they paid, and under what conditions do they work? Seen in such a context, can any work of art truly be above politics?

Artists do not create in a vacuum, they are indisputably coupled to the society and times in which they work. It may well be that an artist can realize aesthetic triumphs while ignoring society, but willful unconcern regarding social matters is also a political position.

But what about the transcendent qualities of art, doesn't that universality place the arts soaring above the corrupt world of politics and the vulgar materialism of society? Doesn't the spirituality of art keep it free from the constraints of avarice? Doesn't the mystical aspect of art place it above earthly and mundane concerns? Yes and no. Art will always strive to be free of society's manacles, and it will forever serve as a conduit to humanity's higher self, but the questions posed here imply an intrinsic relationship between art and material reality. It is an ironclad fact that an artist must eat and pay rent, and so it is also an irreducible fact that we are bound to political arrangements.

The Line Up series by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese depicts people from the Bush administration in fake mugshots.

BUSH DOESN'T SHOW

From Art News Blog by Dion Archibald

Art prints at the New York Public Library have created a mild stir. The NY Times has reported that a number of library patrons have protested because of a series of 8 digital prints in the "Multiple Interpretations" exhibition called "Line Up."

The Line Up series by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese depicts people from the Bush administration in fake mugshots. The slates that they hold have the dates of lies or exaggerations about Iraq spoken by the holder. For example, President George W Bush in his State of the Union address on January 28 (my birthday!), 2003, reported, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa…. He clearly has much to hide."

"It is at first mildly shocking to come upon such bluntly partisan artwork on a New York Public Library wall. Biting political satire is deeply a part of printmaking history — see Goya, James Gillray and Daumier — but handmade prints are no longer a significant form of political communication, and we don’t expect anything so brazenly tendentious in the public library context." New York Times

My opinion on the situation is that politics and art don't happily mix, but I do love a good political cartoonist. I think artists should have the right to say things that are political though, without it costing them their freedom. Most political art has a very short shelf life, just like the politicians they depict. The best way to make political art live a little longer is to hire a bunch of protestors to march at the exhibition or to have the artist put in prison.

The Art Market - An Article by Nicholas Forrest

Contrary to the media’s portrayal of the art market, you don’t have to have a seven figure budget to invest in art so don’t bother trying to find reports on the sale of $5000 artworks in the mass media because you will be wasting your time.

There is no doubt that an analysis of the high-end of the art market would produce far from positive results because the increase in the sale price of high-end works is being fueled by new, mega wealthy individuals from countries such as Russia and China who are spending as much money as it takes to purchase entry into the elite cultural circles of wealthy art collectors. It is this ferocious demand for expensive, iconic artworks that has resulted in a scenario where the market value of these works is rapidly increasing at a rate considerably faster than the rest of the art market. In order for balance to be restored one of two events would need to take place, the first option being the rest of the art market catching up to the higher-end which is extremely unlikely. The second, more likely option is a correction of the high-end prices bringing market growth in this sector into alignment with the rest of the art market. It is hard to say exactly when this correction will take place but at some point even the mega wealthy will have to consider cost versus value even if they are more interested in social and cultural status than financial return.

Many of you may be aware of the downturn of the art market in the early nineties which followed the art market boom of the late eighties, so what makes the current market so much less vulnerable?? Well, here’s why:

Globalization - The recent globalization of the art market has meant that the art market is bigger than ever thus increasing its stability and long term viability.

Greater Transparency - The popularity and acceptance of art investment has meant that more and more data is available which gives people peace of mind, confidence and allows them to assess the art market based on hard evidence.

Contemporary Focus - The current art market is very much focused on contemporary art which means that there is a constant flow of new work to feed the market and fuel people’s interest. In the past the art market has been more focused on works by old masters and other “historical” artists which has caused the market to rely on the re-circulation of a limited supply of works.

Although the art market is stronger than ever it is important not to become complacent and ignore the primary rules of art investment which are:

1. Art is a long term investment which means that you should be looking at holding your investment for a period of 7-10 years but you also should be prepared to sell at any time if the market presents a favorable opportunity.
2. Art is a good form of diversification and should form part of a balanced investment portfolio.
3. Diversification of your art portfolio is important to spread the risk
4. Research artist, artwork and dealer thoroughly and get several opinions

In conclusion, there is considerable evidence to suggest the art market will continue to increase in strength and popularity but as long as the media continues to present an analysis of the art market based on a narrow sector (high-end) of the market there will continue to be conflicting reports about the status and long term viability of art as an investment. I would therefore suggest that you approach art investment as you would any other investment by analyzing the suitability of art as part of your investment strategy and considering art as a form of diversification that can provide balance and stability to your portfolio with the added bonus of being a pleasure to own.

Jody Barton

Jody Barton studied illustration and graphic design at Camberwell College of Arts and then The Royal College of Arts. He quickly went on to establish himself as one of the UK's best known - and least employable - graphic artists. A talent for words as well as visuals gives his pieces an often polemic and confrontational tone. With wide ranging interests including the production of self published and distributed 'crazy pamphlets', electronic media work for major clients such as MTV and a continuing interest in subculture arts from around the world.

His work often features parades of distorted and comedic grotesques - a rich and dark world of both humor and paranoia. Jody Barton is increasingly interested in working in the cross-over area between commercial art and the gallery show. His contributions to live painting projects such as the Matsuri series and Graffiti Meets Windows show this commitment.

The Hunt for the Red Collector - By Marc Spiegler

He bought one of the most expensive paintings ever sold at an auction - a $95 million Picasso. But no one knows who he is.

On the evening of May 3, a rough-hewn man in a dark sport coat walked into the Sotheby’s auction room on York Avenue. He picked up a bidding paddle at the registration desk and was seated by the staff near the back of the room, in the faraway seats treated as Siberia in the art world’s hierarchy. In the gala atmosphere that now pervades the major evening auctions, the man seemed an odd figure. “He looked more like a KGB agent than a collector,” recalls art dealer Laszlo von Vertes, who sat ­directly behind him. “His nose looked broken, like a boxer’s. He had dyed hair and cheap shoes, like a bodyguard. If he walked into my gallery, I wouldn’t have sold him a painting.”

The crowd seemed buoyant that evening, reflecting the hot art market and the major paintings on offer. But things started slowly. Sotheby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer launched the sale with a Vuillard still life, which failed to break its low estimate. The next, a floral Monet, did better. Then the rough-hewn man started making vigorous use of his paddle. First he won a Monet landscape for $5 million, a cool $2 million above the high estimate. But that was merely prelude.

The star work that evening was Pablo Picasso’s 1941 Dora Maar au Chat, one of the largest portraits he painted of his Parisian lover, Dora Maar. Its high estimate stood at $50 million, but the bidding quickly soared to $60 million, then $65 million—and the man at the back of the room was coming on strong. Typically, bidders are subtle with their signals to the auctioneer: an eyebrow twitch, a nod, a removal of the glasses. But for the Dora Maar, says Von Vertes, the unknown man was “waving his paddle so hard he was fanning my face.” Such intimidation tactics are not unheard of, but deploying them at these prices was extraordinary. “Usually, whenever the bidding goes above $5 million, it becomes more temperate in its rhythm,” says Meyer. “But he always came right back with the next bid.”

Warhol Collection - Article by Olivia Cole of The Sunday Times

The world's largest private art collection in the world, by Andy Warhol’s is owned by Jose Mugrabi from Bogota, Colombia, the largest Warhol collection warehouse in Newark, New Jersey.

Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola in 1928, is considered to be one of the principle founders of the Pop Art movement during the 1960s. An author, filmmaker and music producer, he is most known for his silk screens depicting commercial objects and celebrities.

Last month Alberto Mugrabi described Warhol as a blue chip investment equivalent to owning shares in Microsoft. This week a 1963 Warhol silkscreen, Green Car Crash, will be auctioned at Christie’s in New York. The estimate is £17.5m.

Among the Warhol works owned by the Mugrabis are silkscreens of Chairman Mao — in fuchsia pink — Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, Sylvester Stallone and Michael Jackson.

Shot Blue Marilyn

Jackie

Art Artifacts by Elisabetta Povoledo of NY Times

Looted Art effects by Italian dealer Giacomo Medici, will return to Italy. The Italian dealer convicted in 2004 of trafficking in illegal antiquities was arrested in 1995.

Italian culture minister Francesco Rutelli, confirmed this week a rare fifth-century B.C. Greek vessel will go back to Italy in 2010.

Ms. White, the wife of Leon Levy, who died in 2003, was given back the artifacts bought in good faith by Mr. Leon Levy had no knowledge of the artifacts looted or where they may have been clandestinely excavated.

Mr. Levy, a Wall Street financier gave $20 million to finance the MET’s expanded wing of Greek and Roman art, which reopened last spring; the Leon Levy Foundation, for which Ms. White is the lead trustee made a $200 million gift of cash and real estate to New York University that will finance a new Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.

The 10 items include some of the finest showpieces in any private collection of classical antiquities in the world.

Until recently, some were on view at the MET in an extended loan, including a red-figured vessel depicting Herakles slaying Kyknos, signed by the celebrated fifth-century B.C. painter Euphronios, and a pot with scenes of Zeus and Herakles attributed to the fifth-century B.C. painter Eucharides.

Chinese Artist Cai Guo-Qiang

There's some really interesting painters working in China at the moment. Here's a popular art gallery in China that exhibits emerging and established Chinese artists. I love the figurative painters. Especially the quirky ones. He is one of a number of contemporary Chinese artists that are hot at the moment. A set of drawings by Cai Guo-Qiang sold at auction recently for about 19 million. Until now, Chinese artists created works criticizing the Chinese government. Such works easily interested and appealed to Western audiences. But now that the Chinese government is no longer their enemy, Chinese artists cannot continue criticizing the government just to make art.

Eva M. Paar, Austria

She represents humans or abstracted figures by a play of parallel and differently broad lines. Eva M. Paar primary uses earth-colors, in order to give a warm and pleasant character to the oil paintings, which stands in contrast to the often coolly selected motives. Represented humans and scenes do not only dissolve by differently broad lines, but close together lying color gradations support the realistic effect from the distance. They let more exact outlines as well as shade develop.

Laurent La Gamba

Laurent La Gamba (b. 1967) is an artist, photographer, and video artist interested in pro-crypsis (camouflage). La Gamba’s projects span a variety of in situ installations, performances and photographic installations to look at Procrypsis in relationship to the world of urban space and technology. His work aims at creating a kind of urban camouflage (“homochromie”in French) that mimics what is naturally found in nature with Procrypsis, using painting, photography and video as a tool. This background explains the term for his work: Pro-cryptic Photography.

La Gamba's work is based on this utilization of the urban space as a reflection on the self and explores through identification processes the chromatic response of the human body to the urban environment. He is known for his public supermarket camouflage photographs (Pet food, 2002) and for his peculiar use of consumer appliance objects extracted from their original environment and camouflaged into a natural setting (Open fridge, 2002). He carried out several works-in-progress based on audiovisual performances conducted under the action of camera circling (Full open fridges, 2003).

Previously, La Gamba studied literature at the Sorbonne/Paris, specializing in the clinical aspects of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s work. He began his work with photo-realistic self-portraits (One hundred Self-portraits, 1999). He received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and since 2002 holds an artist-in-residence position at the La Napoule Art Foundation.

Masks - Article by Roberta Smith of the New York Times

The mask is one of the most basic and recognizable of all forms, and for good reason. One way early humans made sense of the universe was to personify its forces, and the most visible form of personification was the face. Masks have long been central to religious rituals, serving as tools of transformation and bridges to the spirit world. They have figured in ceremonies intended to ensure fertility and raise the dead, make crops grow and rain fall, kill enemies, ward off evil and cure sickness. They have been used by soldiers and celebrators of Lent, astronauts and action heroes, hockey players and fencers, firefighters and welders.

The ubiquity of the mask, regardless of time, place or purpose, is the impetus behind “Mask,” a sprawling show at the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea. Subtitled “an exhibition of historic masks and contemporary works curated in collaboration with Joseph G. Gerena Fine Art,” this gathering of more than 40 masks and hoods, and more than 30 works in sculpture, video and photography, is a mishmash of cultures and functions in which old and older tend to dominate. This can mean an American firefighter’s goofy-looking smoke hood from around 1900; a carved and painted wood exorcism mask from 19th-century Sri Lanka; or a terra-cotta jaguar/man mask from Ecuador (700-300 B.C).

These and about 40 other masks from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, premodern Europe, turn-of-the-century America and several parts of Asia do most of the showstopping here. All were provided by Mr. Gerena, a private dealer who seems to have an excellent eye and, along with Mr. Cohan and his staff, has orchestrated an installation full of interesting cross-references and juxtapositions.

The show is also commendable for not being loaded with the gallery’s artists; only 4 of the 32 contemporary works here are from Team Cohan. This includes the opening salvo, a riveting video by Yinka Shonibare that may be one of the best things he has ever done. It shows a highly stylized masked ball in which the guests wear 18th-century garments made from Mr. Shonibare’s distinctive Euro-African fabrics, which is not new for him. But in this case he has used a combination of sound and movement to strip a minuetlike dance down to a tribal, almost animalistic ritual while still leaving its mannered veneer intact.

Beside the door to the video gallery there is an Oddfellows hoodwink from early-20th-century America. A small, neat variation on the masks seen in Mr. Shonibare’s video, it combines a leather eye mask and eyeglasses. It looks like something Amelia Earhart might have worn, except that the eyeglass lenses have little hinged covers that were raised and lowered as the Freemasons’ initiation rites progressed.

In the main gallery there is a lively interchange among historic masks from different cultures, with intermittent input from contemporary works. First, a row of seven masks confounds expectations. An 18th- to 19th-century skull mask from the Tibetan Sherdukpen people of northern India seems made to order for a Mexican Day of the Dead festival, while what looks like an African monkey mask is actually from Nepal.

The show emphasizes these transcultural twists and turns. A 19th-century Italian carnival mask made of painted papier-m‚chÈ has much in common with a demonic mask of a Tibetan king used in ceremonial dances in 18th- or 19th-century Bhutan. (It’s made of the same material.) A pale, moonlike mask with a woebegone expression and a pale, angular, grinning visage next to it — both in carved, painted wood — might almost belong to the same comedic drama. Yet the moon mask is Korean, for satiric dances; the angular one is Swiss, a witch’s mask for winter festivals.

Many of the masks in this part of the exhibition are feats of construction and conjuring. Consider a spirit mask from Papua New Guinea used in male initiation rites; it is made mostly of tapa cloth, reeds, grasses and seed pods, with its conical hat, wide ears and long, wolflike snout toothed with sharp nails. Or an Eskimo shaman’s mask made of wood, wire and feathers. Its stern face, with the black goatee and curled mustache of a dime-novel villain, is encircled by two rings of twig from which tiny hands and feet sprout. It seems to orbit toward us, getting bigger every second.

Euphronios Krater - Article by Elisabetta Povoledo

As the restless crowd applauded, and flashbulbs popped, the Euphronios krater, at the heart of a three-decade tug of war between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Italian government, received a hero’s welcome here on Friday.

The Euphronios krater, returned to Italy by the Metropolitan Museum, was unveiled on Friday.

When the krater, a 2,500-year-old vase, first appeared at the Met in 1972, seemingly out of nowhere, it was hailed as the acquisition of a lifetime. But the Italian government, suspecting that it had been plundered from Italian soil, soon began pressing the museum for information on its provenance.

This week the krater was finally packed up and shipped to Rome, one of 21 treasures turned over by the Met under the terms of a pathbreaking 2006 accord.

As workers whipped a white sheet off the bowl in a ceremony at the state attorney’s office, Italy’s culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, began reciting a passage from Homer’s “Iliad” illustrated on the vase’s main panel. The Lycian champion Sarpedon perishes from the wounds he has received in the Trojan war; the twin winged gods Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death) bear him home.

The event was held at the attorney’s office to underscore the persistence of the Italian lawyers who have lobbied for the return of antiquities from American museums, dealers and private collectors over the last three years.

“In these gloomy days, it gives me great pleasure to celebrate something positive,” said Italy’s attorney general, Oscar Fiumara. (The Italian news media has been feasting on grim news this week: the justice minister resigned; protests prompted the pope to cancel an appearance at Rome’s main university; and Naples is submerged in trash.)

In the last two years Italy has also struck deals with museums in Los Angeles, Boston and Princeton, N.J., and with the private collector Shelby White, a New York philanthropist who this week transferred title to 10 antiquities. Negotiations are under way with other institutions in the United States, Europe and the Far East, Mr. Rutelli said on Friday.

But in the minds of Italians, the Euphronios krater holds a special place, symbolizing the war against clandestine tomb-robbing and illicit trafficking of the nation’s cultural patrimony. So the general mood was victorious.

“The Italian state has won,” said Rocco Buttiglione, the former culture minister who initiated the talks with the Met just over two years ago and took part in the ceremony. “This is a success story.”

Knock Offs - Article by Robert Genn of Bored Arts

Among many emails we all recive every day are emails with titles like "Cheap China Wholesale Paintings" and "Oil Paintings from China."

Many contemporary artists are wanting to expose Chinese art factories for ripping off their art and profiting from it.

They are doing such excellent knock-offs that they present a real threat to our artists. The phenomenon, they point out, may eventually destroy hard-won lifestyles in the Western world. "Free trade be damned," they say. "We need tariffs."

The Painter's Keys has been active in preventing offshore shops from cloning some of our works (e.g., in 2006 we removed the work of some 800 Western painters from Chinese clone sites and closed down two of them completely). Copyright laws and tariffs won't work on those guys. While cheap art in parking lots has always been with us, the Western artist who wants to stay the course has to realize that a name is also an asset. Art is not like shirts, for example, where buyers may not care about name or brand as much as quality and price. Art is not like accountancy either, which is now delivered over long distances by anonymous accountants in India. In art, the name is the name of the game.

Artists and the art they make are personalities within communities. These communities may be the whole world, or The Trail Riders of Podunk County. It's a fact of life that one competently painted horse doesn't sell for the same amount as another competently painted horse. Reasonably decent prices are all about context and perception. Anonymous and "in the style of" work has little context and consequently low valuation.

As an outsourcing candidate, art suffers from Baumol's Disease, named for the economist who first described the condition. Some goods and services, he found, resist outsourcing because of their individualistic nature. Further, works by personalities, when they meet certain criteria, are condemned to grow ever more expensive. No matter the idealism or the art maker's joy, investment is part of our game. Just as common stocks are no fun when they don't go up, art needs to at least pretend. Pitching art down to a price fills only college dorms.

Professional artists who put their DNA into their work need not fear the offshore cloners. Even if the Chinese wizards succeed handily, a fake is still a fake. Art is not just art, it's a life, lived by an individualist with a personality, verve, and a deep respect for human relationships.

Chinese Artist Yue Minjun - Article by Jim Supangkat

The Paintings, sculptures and installations of Yue Minjun always feature uniform laughing faces. And if these laughing faces are observed carefully, it will be noticed that these faces are the face of Yue Minjun.

With these formations of self portraits, Yue Minjun presents various realities that emerge as the background behind the laughing visages. These realities emerge through various easy to recognize symbols, metaphors and signs, or through depictions of daily life. The laughing faces and the representations of reality in Yue Minjun's works are closely related. And this relationship shows Yue Minjun's fairly easy to read cynicism in confrontation with reality.

Concerning this cynisism, Yue Minjun has commented that he has commented that he senses an unrecognized power whose center is unknown, but which can engineer/manipulate the behavior of human being through intimidation and terror. This power constitutes a kind of violence that can make human behavior change progressively Can the works of Yue Minjun be said to be self-portraits? Doesm his artwork present any insight into the conflict between individuality And collectivism? Does his work indicate self-identification that represents the pressing of the self-identity into a collective existence?

Of the many questions that arise, this is The mose basic: Can the meaning of Yue Minjun's self-portraits be categorized as auratic or post-auratic Within the development of modern art, the search for reality through representation has been fully deter-mined by the relationship between the individual absolute and reality. As being in a set position, concepts within this definition is fully determined by the correspondence of the concept with the object, and is not influenced by any force outside of the correspondence.

The search for reality within contemporary art exhibits a contrary tendency. The individual no longer develops a concept of reality because the position of the individual is no longer set and central, but rather without a center (ex-centric) or without a fixed central point. At the same time, the field/plain of interpretation or definition within the search for the meaning of reality continuously experiences reconfiguration.

Because of that, the individual becomes unimportant in contemporary art. The question, "who are you?" within a contemporary work of art is a polyphonous enquiry, or a question that looks both inwardly and outwardly.

David Jon Kassan

As an expression of his own calculated observation and visual consumption of surrounding environment, introspective glimpses of reality imbue the art of David Jon Kassan. By immersing himself into his subject matter, Kassan is able to infuse his painting with life and realism. Kassan’s direction of realism follows the philosophies employed by the Ashcan School of American Realists. Kassan’s influences are varied; citing Robert Henri and John Sloan as his primary influences on philosophy and subject matter. As for style and technique he cites Antonio Lopez Garcia, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Clyfford Still as influences as well. -http://davidkassan.com/

Line Up Mugshots

Controversy has flared up from the sleepy third-floor hallway galleries at the New York Public Library, where a modest exhibition of contemporary prints called Multiple Interpretations is on view. The work that has prompted protests from some library patrons is called Line Up, a series of politically inflammatory prints by the team of Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese. Each black-and-white digital print is a mug shot-style print in which a member of the Bush administration appears in profile and face forward, holding a police identification sign and the date on which he or she made a statement of questionable veracity relating to Iraq.

Drawing Connections

“Drawing Connections,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in which four contemporary artists Georg Baselitz, Ellsworth Kelly, Giuseppe Penone and Dorothea Rockburne display their own works alongside pieces they’ve selected from the museum’s impressive drawing collection.

Morgan’s curator Isabelle Dervaux, invites viewers to seek more essential or less predictable connections between new and old than those of technical virtuosity.

By George Baselitz


By Ellsworth Kelly

Museum Plans to Buy Muhammad Cartoons

The Art Newspaper has reported that the Museum of Danish Cartoon Art in Copenhagen is currently in talks to acquire the 12 controversial Muhammad cartoons that caused probably the largest and most insane reaction to a cartoon that I have ever seen. More than one hundred people were killed in protests around the world (according to wikipedia).

After seeing the reaction that the cartoons have already created, I think the Danish museum would be putting the public at risk if they were to buy them. Security would have to be tighter than any airport in the world as they are taunting a lot of angry bulls with a giant red rag. By having the Muhammad cartoons in one place they are making themselves a big fat target.

As much as I like freedom of speech, I like my life more, so I wouldn't go anywhere near the museum. We just have to accept that we live in an insane world and move on.

- From Art News Blog

Munch Museum Reopens

The Munch Museum in Norway is about to reopen, 10 months after it lost "The Scream" painting to masked thieves during a daylight robbery. The painting has still not been recovered, which is a pity, but the museums says it still has another thousand Edvard Munch works to keep the visitors busy.

Triptych Sells for 51.5 million at Christie's

Article by Scott Reyburn from Bloomberg News

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- A Francis Bacon triptych sold for 26.3 million pounds ($51.5 million) including fees today at Christie's International in London.

`Triptych 1974-77'' had been estimated to fetch at least 25 million pounds. It sold for a hammer price of 23.5 million pounds to an anonymous buyer in the room on a single bid.

The price was below the $52.7 million paid in May 2007 at Sotheby's New York for Bacon's 1962 painting ``Study from Innocent X,'' the record for the artist.

The trio of pictures, which, unusually for the artist, show figures on anopen beach, was the last in a series of tributes to the artist's lover George Dyer. The work was exhibited at a Bacon retrospective at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974. Christie's said ``Triptych 1974-77'' had been entered by an anonymous collector, and had never been offered at auction before.

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Favored Museum Designer Wears Out His Welcome

Article by James S. Russell from Bloomberg News

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Forget the Bilbao Effect. It's not Frank Gehry who has ridden the U.S. museum-building boom, it's Renzo Piano.

When a new addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens next week, you won't see Gehry's fluttering sheets of titanium, though his office is less than 10 miles away. You'll see Piano's signature buff travertine walls and floating glass and metal roofs. He manages his museum-design empire from offices in Genoa, Italy, and Paris.

Consider this roll call: the Morgan Library and Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York; Harvard's museums and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Boston area; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Nasher Sculpture Center and Kimbell Art Museum in Texas; the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. He's got (or had) them all.

No architect has ever dominated the design of great civic institutions as Piano now does, not even in the ``City Beautiful'' museum-building frenzy of a century ago.

The American Institute of Architects just gave its gold medal to -- who else? He's wrapped up a tower for the New York Times and has just started sketching an arts complex for Columbia University. It's time for timid trustees to give Renzo a rest.

Why does everybody love Renzo? Start with his 1986 Menil Collection in Houston. S-shaped light scoops flood high, dark- wood-floored galleries with gorgeous light. Lush glass-walled gardens gently interrupt the visitor flow. Its refreshing informality reflects the taste and acumen of its benefactor, Dominique de Menil.

Buried by Bilbao

With Piano's 1995 Twombly Gallery, the Menil is an ensemble found on most museum directors' 10 Best lists. The same executives flock to Piano's serenely elegant Beyeler Foundation Museum outside Basel, Switzerland. It opened the same month in 1997 as Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain but got buried by the ballyhoo.

In these buildings, Piano expertly choreographed materials into a ballet of tension and repose, texture and weight, solidity and transparency in stone, metal and glass. The art looks great because of a judicious melding of daylight and gallery lighting.

Yet too many risk-averse boards run to Renzo asking him to recycle these masterpieces for them. They are shortchanging themselves and their collections.

As the 70-year-old Piano takes on more projects, what once seemed special now looks rote in Atlanta's High Museum and the thankfully canceled addition to New York's Whitney Museum. (Piano will reveal designs this spring for a downtown Whitney branch in Manhattan's gallery-crammed meatpacking district.)

In another example, should the Morgan Library have spent $102 million on an addition that puts a cafe, rather than the art collection, at center stage?

Chicago Addition

In design drawings, the modern art wing that Piano designed for the Art Institute of Chicago resembles three Beyelers stacked atop each other. Will the aloof, elegant structure transcend its model to reveal the Art Institute anew and engage an urban setting that's got everything -- skyline, park, lake? We'll find out in May 2009, when the wing opens.

Piano has benefited from a trend away from sculpturally expressive museums to bland designs that are invariably described as ``architecture serving art.'' It's true that spectacular atriums and strangely shaped galleries can make displaying art more difficult. Yet the best of them freshen our vision.

Not a Household Name

The Bloch Building at Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum, with its dreamlike wandering path periodically splashed with limpid pools of light, takes direct aim at the tyranny of the white-box gallery. It gorgeously enhances the museum-viewing experience. Its architect, Steven Holl of New York, hasn't won the Pritzker Prize or become a household name.

Too few museums undertake a deep inquiry that combines an insightful designer with museum leadership that knows what it wants. Whether a design is subdued or extroverted will emerge from an open-minded consideration of growth that teases out what's unique about the collections, setting and city.

A kind of false prudence these days pushes trustees toward predictable designers and dull boxes that wrap cheerless white rooms. Too often the result saps art and visitors of vitality. With look-alike museums displaying the same parade of modern and contemporary hit makers, you can quickly lose track of whether you are in Bonn or Boston.

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg's U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)