Not unpredictably, the new Art Gallery of Alberta did not turn out to be a big tourist draw -- despite its great expectations, fostered by the Guggenheim-Bilbao experience. But on some other scores, AGA's inaugural year did turn out well, as we shall see. The AGA opened about a year ago, boasting on its website that "this architectural icon will draw visitors from around the world with twice the former gallery space...." Uh, uh, I said -- don't count on it. Edmonton, its home, is the northernmost metropolis on … [Read more...]

It's hard to tell when developments in Cairo are happening so fast and are so volatile, but it seems that the damage to the Cairo Museum is worse than has been reported in some newspapers. It goes beyond damage to two mummies. Al Jazeera has two videos (here and a long one here) calling it "tragic damage" with the best footage inside the museum that I have seen. MSNBC, meanwhile, consulted Margaret Maitland, an Egyptologist at Oxford, who matched up the damage pictures with artifacts from King Tut's tomb. The report said that "three … [Read more...]

What did you think about seeing the Musee d'Orsay draped with a gigantic banner advertising Chanel No. 5? Or the Doge's Palace in Venice sporting an ad for Bulgari? Both pictures were published in The New York Times on Monday, accompanying an article about the shaky status of some European arts institutions -- and their efforts to create new revenue streams. (Even nastier, though not shown, was the disclosure that a couple of "shiny new Dany electric cars" were placed in the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, which is nasty enough … [Read more...]

Last April, I wrote here about the results of the State of the Sector survey by the Nonprofit Finance Fund, which disclosed worrisome figures about the art sector. For example, the vast majority -- 65% -- of the 417 arts groups that participated in the survey had less than three months' cash on hand. This year, the NFF would like to gain a broader, more accurate picture of the non-profit sector, and though I have never made a request of readers like this, I've agreed to help with the outreach by posting about it. I'm doing it because, as … [Read more...]

It's pretty unusual for a living artist to have his or her own museum. But that honor is going to William Eggleston, known as the father of color photography as an art form. Eggleston, 71, is lucky to be from Memphis, which is home to a museum for Elvis and to Stax, a museum for American soul music. Two years ago, a group of local philanthropists decided that giving Eggleston a museum would be good not only for him but also for the city. Together, members of the group have pledged more than $5 million to … [Read more...]

The American section of the International Association of Art Critics, of which I am a member, is just out with its annual exhibition awards, and here are some of the winners. (Entire list, covering exhibitions from June '09 through June '10) is here, including the runners-up in each category.)  Best Project in a Public Space: "Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms" (left)  -- Organized by the Fabric Workshop and Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Curated by Marion Boulton Stroud, Carlos Basualdo, and … [Read more...]

Art works on the auction block that sail past their pre-sale estimates, fetching multiples of the high end always fascinate me. Does someone know something the rest of us don't? Have the experts made a mistake? The auction houses themselves usually play down the intrigue by saying,"it only takes two bidders." That's right - but two very determined ones. So it was last week, when an 18th Century American mahogany bureau table sold at Christie's for $5.7 million -- against a presale estimate of $700,000 to $900,000. As … [Read more...]

Let's return to the subject of Yup'ik masks, which as you may remember, I posted about here two weeks ago. Canadian dealer Donald Ellis was taking two prize specimens to the Winter Antiques Show in New York, which opened at a party on Thursday evening. Ellis was asking more than $2 million for the both Donati Studio Mask and another mask dubbed the Donati Fifth Avenue mask. Both sold almost immediately. The Fifth Avenue mask was the first to go, purchased by a New York collector of modern and contemporary art -- one who also owns … [Read more...]

It varies from city to city, museum to museum, of course, but at the Seattle Art Museum, Picasso has punched out both van Gogh and Impressionism. You'll recall that the museum has been on shaky grounds in this recession, and era of high finance, and it needed to do well, very well, with its Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris show (which included the luscious 1937 Portrait of Dora Maar at left). It did: the museum reported yesterday (very timely, thank you -- many museums say they can't disclose exhibition … [Read more...]

Should art museums, or any museums, engage in high finance? That's the question I had to ask about the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which you'll recall reached a debt-restructuring agreement a few weeks ago. The deal, in which the city of San Francisco will guarantee bonds that will be floated to replace the troublesome, variable rate bonds that nearly bankrupted AAM, is complicated. And so was the 2005 deal -- involving the variable rate bonds, hedged with an interest rate swap -- which replaced the 2000 deal. If your head hurts or … [Read more...]