This happened last week, but it still hasn’t had much notice — and it’s Friday, time for a little lightness: The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts has commissioned Claes Oldenburg to create a sculpture for its “Lenfest Plaza.” Oldenburg has come back with a plan to erect a huge paintbrush that will certainly brighten the spot.

The picture says it all, but here’s the description anyway:

The design consists of a 53 foot high sculpture in the form of a paintbrush, raised at a 60 degree angle as if in the act of painting, with a dollop of paint on the ground below. The sculpture is positioned between PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building and the Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building. Oldenburg’s monumental paintbrush points to the growth and vitality of American art, while celebrating a milestone in the history of the Academy.

And, quoting PAFA curator of Modern art Robert Cozzolino:

His motif of a paintbrush metamorphosing into a torch shows his sensitivity to site – not only to its presence at PAFA but in Philadelphia. Making the paintbrush into a glowing torch makes it a symbol of liberty – artistic and political – which is at the core of an art school, a vibrant art museum, and our city. Oldenburg’s thoughtful design has these meanings already, and as it lives its life in Philadelphia it will undoubtedly build on them in ways future generations will come to know.

PAFA says Oldenburg has created 45 such large-scale works around the world. You can read more here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Claes Oldenburg

Maybe the National Endowment for the Arts is getting better: A new round of grants looks somewhat promising to me.

Except for my last post, which praised NEA chief Rocco Landesman’s attempts to get more money for the arts via HUD and DOT programs, I’ve been fairly critical about the NEA in the Obama Administration. But the grants announced by Landesman this morning through the NEA Mayors’ Institute on City Design 25th Anniversary Initiative (MICD 25) — a new program billed here as “Neighborhood transformation through the arts is the goal of 21 selected projects” — may make a difference.

I’m still not completely on-board with the MICD 25 program: I think it places too much of a burden on arts to create economic activity, and verges too much toward what commercial developers could/should so. Equally troubling, some grants go to the continuation of existing projects — which means that the cities probably would have found other funding for them without the NEA.

For example, the Horace Bushnell Memorial Corporation in Hartford won $250,00 to “support phase two of the iQuilt project, which will focus primarily on design. Expected activities include landscape design of the GreenWalk intended to connect Bushnell Park and the revitalized Connecticut River waterfront and urban design and enhancement of the existing pedestrian network…” 

Still, some winning projects look good.

And, in contrast to so many NEA grants, these are larger — a few are $25,000, but others go up to $250,000. I like that: in general, I favor larger grants that make a difference rather than tiny amounts that supposedly provide a stamp of approval.  

Let’s back up and state the program goal:

Each of the MICD25 projects takes a problem such as isolated neighborhoods or a neglected waterfront and uses the arts to solve that problem. The aesthetic and communal qualities of art make them excellent construction materials for transforming physical spaces. Although the arts are at the center of each of the projects, the grantees are extending beyond the arts world to collaborate with local entities such as chambers of commerce, downtown redevelopment councils, departments of transportation, urban planning offices, and park and recreation offices.

So who won? Some cities, like Milwaukee, basically got necessary but ho-hum planning grants. But here are a few I like:

• Rochester, NY: $250,000: “…to enhance the [ARTWalk] trail (pictured, top), commissioning additional public art pieces…including creating Centennial Sculpture Park, a two-acre park at the University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery…[and] Poet’s Walk, which will identify historically significant poets with local ties, and Story Walk, a sidewalk that will wind through Centennial Sculpture Park and involve multimedia interaction, such as embedded audio performances.”
• Indianapolis Museum of Art: $250,000 to “…work with artist Mary Miss and other partners…to create FLOW (Can You See the River?), [a] series of collaborative public art installations — or “Stopping Points” — along a stretch of the White River and Central Canal…intended to reveal significant aspects of the river system, thereby enhancing the community’s awareness of the White River, river-related issues, and efforts around maintaining the health of the city’s water supply.”
• Paterson, N.J. (Development Corp.): $100,000 “for its Great Falls Arts and Creative Revitalization Initiative, which will engage the city’s artistic community in a collaborative process to create artistic events, works of art, and programs to both inaugurate the new national park and establish a permanent presence for the arts in ongoing revitalization efforts.”
• Arts Council for Long Beach: $25,000 to “commission the design of a portable, flexible festival stage/set/performance space [concept rendering, above right] [see comment below] that will be used by arts presenting organizations throughout the city for special events and community festivals.”
• Shreveport Regional Arts Council: $200,000 to “develop Shreveport Commons over a seven-block area along Common Street that will house visual and performance venues side by side with existing community service institutions, religious institutions, and new businesses.”   

The entire list is here. 

If I recall correctly, the NEA has $5 million to spend on this program this year:   See comment below.

Landesman has spent $3 million on 21 projects. Too early to say it’s a good start — but it’s not a bad one if arts infrastructure is the goal.

Make what you will of surveys of the “best” — they may be predictable, or tainted by politics and friendships among peers and rivals, but they are still interesting. Vanity Fair‘s August issue is out with a list of the best buildings erected since 1980, chosen by 52 architects. Among the voters were Zaha Hadid, Hugh Hardy, Ricardo Scofidio, Cesar Pelli, and David Chipperfield.

The No. 1 building is no surprise: Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao with 28 votes (at left). As critic Paul Goldberger says in the article, the museum was a “rare moment” when critics, academics and the public agreed on a building’s merit.

But considering all the museum-building that has taken place the world over since 1980, and the talk that museums are the cathedrals of today, it’s notable that three other museum made the top 10, but with not all that many votes: the Menil Collection in Houston, by Renzo Piano, at No. 2 (10 votes); the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, by Sir James Stirling (6 votes), tied with three others at No. 5, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, by Daniel Libeskind (4 votes), tied with two others at No. 10.

It’s also notable that the extended list — of all 21 buildings receiving more than two votes — extends the honor to Steven Holl’s addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (3 votes). (I liked that building, too.)

So, five buildings out of 21 for visual arts structures. I’d say several highly-touted buildings are missing. And, just maybe, that several architects have been coasting for the last decade or so.  

And don’t think that’s because the architects want to spread the honors, with few repeats. Three buildings by Rem Koolhas make the list — he’s the only one with more than one building on the main list. The entire roster, with pictures, of the vote-getters is here. The pictures are really worth a look. 

VF’s other list, of the top 21st century structures, includes Hadid’s MAXXI museum in Rome — it also received 2 votes. 

ArtTactic, the London-based market research and advice company, has added the world of Contemporary Design to its portfolio. This week, it published a report reviewing the market, including a list of “its important players and the most important Contemporary Designers of today.” It also launched the “ArtTactic Contemporary Design Index, which will track the performance in the Contemporary Design market going forward.”

Most of this is behind a paywall. The report, just 13 pages, costs £75.00.

But I’ve procured some highlights for RCA readers that go beyond the press release, which itself had some interesting items (quoting):

• The ArtTactic Contemporary Design Market Price Index has experienced a recovery of 17.6% in 2010.
• Total value of Contemporary Design is down 18% for the first half of 2010, compared to the same period last year. This is largely a result of Christie’s focus on early 20th century design, with no significant contemporary design material sold in 2010.
• Phillips de Pury becomes the leading house for Contemporary Design, with 68% market share for the first half of 2010.
• The top 10 designers account for 67.6% of the total auction turnover of contemporary design. The rest is shared among approximately 270 designers that have come to auction since 2006.
• Marc Newson defines the top end of the Contemporary Design auction market, with a 24% share of the total contemporary design value. One of his ‘Lockheed Lounge’ chairs sold for a record $1.8 million in May 2010.

Now for the exclusive part: Totalling auction sales by Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury between 2006-10 (to date), the top ten designers and their market share, with the dollar value of their sales, are: 

1) Marc Newson: $7,652,490 (23.9% market share)
2) George Nakashima: $3,321,721 (10.4% market share) (that’s his bench, below)
3) Ron Arad: $3,148,899  (9.8% market share)
4) Claude Lalanne: $2,119,493 (6.6% market share)
5) Francois-Xavier Lalanne: $1,433,157  (4.5% market share)
6) Campana Brothers: $1,182,940 (3.7% market share)
7) Zaha Hadid: $789,181 (2.5% market share)
8) Shiro Kuramata: $660,507 (2.1% market share)

9) Shigeru Ban: $500,000 (1.6% market share)
10) Gaetano Pesce: %336,930 (1.1% market share)

These numbers are limited, obviously — they can’t tell what’s happening in galleries, the same way we can’t know what’s happening in the gallery sector of the art markets. But they’re interesting as a guideline.

And for other reasons.

Contemporary design, I’m told, is of growing interest to museums — partly because they can afford it, while much contemporary art is out of their reach, price-wise. If so few designers are truly in demand, it suggests that the big collectors are behaving in a herd manner — just as they are in contemporary art. Only a few artists dominate the market, creating a virtuous circle for their work and ever-higher prices.

That’s not usually good in contemporary works, where to borrow from Mao, we should let a hundred — or more — designers bloom. Then, over time, history can settle its judgment.    

1760 wasn’t all that great a year for art, at least according to Wikipedia. Thomas Lawrence and Hokusai were the most prominent painters born that year, and Guardi and Shen Quan were among those artists who died. Wikipedia’s Year in Art doesn’t list any art works created in 1760.

But in Paris, a man named Giovanni Battista Torre established a shop called “Cabinet de Physique Experimentale,” which sold scientific instruments, books and prints. He set up another shop, in London, in 1767.

From this enterprise, which depended on print sales for its first 150 years, came Colnaghi, the great Old Master dealer. Colnaghi now claims to be “the world’s oldest commercial art gallery,” and since mid-June and through July, it has been celebrating with an exhibition about its fascinating history — pulling out manuscripts, drawings, prints, photos and account books from its archives. I wish I were in London — the shop is now located at 15 Old Bond Street (not far from where I once worked, for four years, in London, but I was too intimidated by its presence to enter) — to see it.

Paul Colnaghi went to work for Torre’s son Anthony in 1783 (against the advice of Benjamin Franklin, who told him to move to America), and took control of the business by 1788.  

Colnaghi moved into Old Master paintings in the last quarter of the 19th century, and says it sold many masterpieces to the Berlin Museum and many great paintings bought by Henry Frick, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Andrew Mellon — works that “form the backbone of some of the greatest American museum collections.”

Artists wrote many of the documents on view:

• John Constable wrote to Dominic Colnaghi asking if he could help arrange shipment of a painting (not identified in the letter but known to be The Cornfield, now in the National Gallery in London) to the Paris Salon.
• Delacroix asked Colnaghi for help getting a painting accepted at the British Institution.
• Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun wants help finding sales of engravings of one of her potraits (top).
• George Bernard Shaw writes to ask where a portrait bust he lent to an exhibition is (bottom).

Colnaghi has also put on view the letters, photos, account books that trace the sale of one of his most transactions to Americans: Titian’s Europa, bought by Gardner, which some view as the most important Italian Renaissance painting on these shores.

There’s much more to the gallery’s history — though not all is there, either (including its one-time branch on New York — if anyone remembers why it close, please comment below). It would probably take a book.

Colnaghi held a study day about its history and art during the period on July 2, too, and all I can say is, congratulations.

A few more images are below:

[Read more…] about 250 Years Of Art-Dealing: Colnaghi Celebrates Big Sales, Big Buyers, Long History