Always a mainstay of the art world, private collectors have been especially active of late, and engaged in a riveting game of one-upmanship, subconscious though it may be.
The husband-and-wife founders of Gap recently revealed plans to open a museum in San Francisco for their modern art collection.
The French mogul François Pinault continues to steamroll his way toward turning Venice’s Punta della Dogana (the city’s old customs house) into a contemporary museum all his own. He plans to open the museum in time to complement, or more likely compete with, the 2009 Venice Biennale. (more…)
When I was a child, I found a pre-World War II atlas and thumbed through it, marveling at the strange flags printed on yellowed paper. The flag for Germany was emblazoned with a swastika, menacing in my eyes yet matter-of-fact on the atlas. But of all the strange European flags, one stopped me, refreshingly powder-blue: Estonia. What’s that? The very word seemed reminiscent of some C.S. Lewis fable.
What happened to Estonia? Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union covered much of Eastern Europe in a swath of red and gold, sickle and hammer. Little Estonia became another Soviet Republic, closed off from the West. (more…)
Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of the estimated $16 billion-per-year retail giant the Gap, announced last week a proposal to fund the design and construction of a contemporary art museum in San Francisco to house their extensive collection of 20th and 21st century art.
The Fishers, who have made ARTnews’s top ten list of world art collectors in 1993 and 2003, have a collection of more than 1,000 works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder, Cy Twombly and other greats, with enough pieces by some artists to show changes over the course of their careers. (more…)
Like all works of art, cities can seem at once beautiful and ugly. I’m in the Baltic States of Eastern Europe right now, having just left Vilnius, Lithuania for Riga, Latvia. These diminutive countries seem to have recovered remarkably well from their common imperial oppression: invaded by black-booted Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east.
Both cities are Unesco World Heritage Sites, known for their charming, ornate buildings, which seem to spite nearby Soviet experiments in bleak, monolithic architecture. (more…)
Hotels and motels run the gamut from high-class to downright seedy. Some have ice machines, others have four-star restaurants, but to my knowledge such establishments are rarely the site of artistic inspiration.
A new video exhibition currently on view at three of Connecticut’s contemporary art hotspots—the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Artspace in New Haven, and Real Art Ways in Hartford—has me rethinking that position. (more…)
