Above: The Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, where Rachel Whiteread’s new sculpture lands in October.

The Tate announced today that it has commissioned a new work from sculptor Rachel Whiteread to be installed in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The press release notes that the sponsor of the commission, Unilever, has decided to keep the cheques coming for another three years, so the Turbine Hall installations will keep going until 2008 at least.

The Tate already has 21 of Whiteread’s works in its collection, mostly her plaster/polymer casts of the negative space of everyday objects. The last piece the British taxpayers purchased from the 1993 Turner Prize winner was Untitled (Stairs), in 2001, so it was about time.

The new commission will move in next October and puzzle the philistines until March 2006.

LINK: Rachel Whiteread to undertake next commission in The Unilever Series

ABOVE: Orange (1923), by Vasily Kandinsky, one of the thousands of images newly available through the New York Public Library’s online collection.

As of March 3, the New York Public Library is making its digital online collection of photographs, prints, maps, and assorted other biblio-ephemera available free to the general public—until today you would have had to be using a NYPL computer terminal to get access.

As this New York Times article points out, the collection is not the easiest to search effectively, but with a few swings at the interface you can boogie down with your boolean self. Every image is available free for personal use, so you can take what you like as long as you’re using it for your private edification.

The site was moving a little sluggishly this morning from all us cyber-tourists crowding in, but New Yorkers are no strangers to gawking provincials, right?

NYPL Digital Library