Do we have another Bernini? His Ecstasy of Saint Theresa in Rome is unquestionably a masterpiece in white marble. This week, the MacArthur Foundation bestowed one of its $500,000 no-strings-attached grants on another sculptor in marble, Elizabeth Turk, 48, from Atlanta, noting that "she transforms her signature medium of marble into intricate, seemingly weightless works of art." And: Employing a variety of electric grinders, files, and small dental tools with a dexterous touch, her technical virtuosity is on full display in The … [Read more...]

Target has a new philanthropy strategy, and it may not be good news for museums and performing arts centers. In recent years, the company, through "Target First Saturdays" or "First Fridays" or whatever the name, has provided free or reduced admissions at more than 120 museums and theaters on more than 2,200 days annually. But this week, the company announced that it was redoubling its efforts to invest in education. It committed to donating $500 million by 2015, making its total commitment to education reach $1 … [Read more...]

The reviews are starting to come in, and it's pretty clear that most of the critics think Robert Lepage's new production of Das Rheingold at the Metropolitan Opera is good, very good, despite the big mechanical glitch in the finale of last night's premier. Here's the Daily Telegraph: Lepage treated the audience to a mesmerising display of virtual magic, giving them plenty to feast their eyes on in the intimate scenes between the coups de théâtre. Images projected on to the set evoke the depths of the Rhine, the mountaintops of the … [Read more...]

"Until now, no serious art exhibition has coupled the histories of wine and art in a cross-disciplinary fashion." That line comes from the lede of a press release issued recently by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and my response is "indeed." In years past -- even recent years past -- that theme would probably have been considered unacademic, lacking in scholarship value, and therefore unlikely to enhance the career of the curator. At many art history departments, it would be better to study some narrow aspect of a … [Read more...]

Officially, the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens on Oct.2, with a free weekend for the community. But it's tiptoeing out this weekend and over the next few days for those closest to LACMA. The big gala honoring the Resnicks -- called "The Unmasking" -- is tonight. And, from afar, LACMA has much to celebrate. The museum says "the single-story, 45,000 square foot structure is the largest purpose-built, naturally lit, open-plan museum space in the world." It was … [Read more...]

Some people, and museums, stoop to gain attention, but a consortium of art centers around Buffalo today went in the other direction: they hired French tightrope walker Didier Pasquette to perform a high-wire walk between two statues atop the city's landmark Liberty Building. It takes place at 6:30 this evening, and Pasquette will walk again at noon on Sunday in Niagara Falls. The point, I guess, is to kick off Beyond/In Western New York 2010: Alternating Currents, an extragavanza of art at more than two dozen venues in Erie and … [Read more...]

Now here's an idea: Have a government team audit the country's public art collections to see just how many women are included, how often their work is exhibited, and why there isn't a greater proportion of art by women in museums. OK, maybe not, not in the U.S. But that's what's happening in Sweden, where seven researchers are assessing the collections of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Goteborgs Konstmuseum, and the regional museums in Malmo and Norrkoping. Jeff Werner, research director at the Goteborg museum, is leading the … [Read more...]

How do artists work? As much as the creative process is a mystery, really, that's what people often want to know. Even when artists don't know themselves. But they leave traces, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe has been mining the photographs, drawings, rocks, bones, artifacts, paints, brushes and other materials O'Keeffe left behind when she died in 1986. Its new O'Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials, which opens on Friday, aims to shed light on both her technical and creative processes -- a great idea, except for one … [Read more...]

Now it can be told: Bloomberg LP will be giving more than $1 million to Richard Koshalek's "Seasonal Inflatable Structure," the blue bubble designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that he announced last December, without providing many "why" details. It's a naming gift, and thus won't be official until the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution meet to approve it this fall. But it's real, and it comes on top of $1.5 million Koshalek has raised for another part of his $15 million project to put the Hirshhorn Museum on the world's cultural map -- a … [Read more...]

"Times are changing for the traditional exhibition catalogue," I write in the September issue of The Art Newspaper. It's a subject I've pondered before, but for the recently published feature, I dug much deeper, prying some rule-of-thumb numbers from sources and discovering  several worthy experiments. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for example, is offering a print-on-demand anthology of articles for its Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins exhibition, rather than a … [Read more...]