The normally pencil-necked Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has mounted an exhibition of fine art in its 211 Gallery, a space where it puts shows that have a cultural relation to aeronautics but not the whiz-bang edutainment draw of, say, a flight simulator. The exhibit consists of selected pieces from the NASM’s 4000+ collection of paintings, sculptures, sketches, and even some textile works related to human aspirations to flight. It features heavy-hitter names, too, like Rauschenberg, Calder, Wyeth, and, uh, Norman Rockwell.

This looks interesting, if you can get past the odd title of the exhibit, “Generous Friends.”

Generous Friends: Building an Art Collection for the National Air and Space Museum

An army of volunteers started dismantling The Gates today. the Christo & Jeanne Claude mega-spectacle that installed 7,500 arches with orange-sienna-saffron-whatever curtains hanging in them throughout Central Park. The New York Times has this curiously unsatisfying interview with Jeanne Claude on the imminent dismantling. The details, though, are really cool—the ripstop nylon fabric panels will be shredded and turned into carpet padding, and the aluminum archways themselves are going to be melted down and turned into pop cans.

Apparently people have taken to cutting swatches of fabric from the gates, which Jeanne Claude describes as (more…)

The India Times’ “Economic Times” section reports that Installation art is gaining popularity in India. The article is vague on the details of this trend but notes several artists—some new, some established—who are experimenting with installation. Satish Gujral, for instance (that’s his work above) , although Gujral’s website (more…)

Sotheby’s announced on Friday that it will be auctioning a chunk of the contents of Easton Neston, an 18th century country house in Northamptonshire (the house was built around 1700, but the Fernor-Hesketh family have been camped out there since 1535ish). Among the assorted dusty trinkets that always litter poncey homesteads like this—Japanese laquerwork, porcelains of various sizes and degrees of floridity, googly silver candlesticks, etc.—the sale will also include several Ol’ Master paintings collected by the Fernor-Heskeths of the 18th and 19th century, like a few Jan van Goyens, Pieter de Bloots, and some portraits by Robert Peak, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.

There’s also some assorted Chinoiserie that Sir Tom Hesketh collected during his flirtation with the orient while on a world tour in 1879.

The sale, which will take three days to work through 1,500 objects (which, incidentally, is about a quarter of the entire collection), begins on May 17, 2005. Pencil it in if you’re in the neighbourhood and have £40,000 burning a hole in your pocket.

SOTHEBY’S TO SELL COLLECTION OF WORKS OF ART FROM EASTON NESTON

Britain’s freakiest public art gallery announced yesterday that it’ll be opening the first major Kahlo exhibition in 20 years in June. Along with the famous self-portraits like The Two Fridas (1939), The Little Deer (1946), shown above, Self-portrait with Monkey (1938), and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (1931), the show will also bring some of Kahlo’s later, groovier work to the public, full of sex and communists and eastern religion.

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