ABOVE: the interior of the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

The New York Times is featuring an interview with Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Museum, in which he discusses the museum’s future expansion plans—Moscow, Hong Kong, Lower Manhattan—and some of the museum’s bizarre stumbles, such as The Art of the Motorcycle exhibit and its entire SoHo branch. Krens, the article notes, has just returned from Russia, in preparation for the massive show that the museum is mounting in September, which has the unfortunate name Russia!. (see The Tall Guy in which Jeff Goldblum plays an actor auditioning for Elephant!, a musical take on The Elephant Man.)

What is astonishing about the piece is the lowdown on Guggenheim finances. For instance, the cities in which the Guggenheim outlets are built pay hundreds of millions in construction costs and more every year to build the collection. The Guggenheim Foundation itself has a reported endowment of around $70 million, which seems a strikingly low figure with which to run five international museums. But Krens says the place makes money, and that the Frank Lloyd Wright corkscrew in New York will be restored soon. It needs it.

LINK: New York Times: A Museum Visionary Envisions More

ABOVE: Artist’s crude and very literal representation of British performance artist Mark McGowan kissing a photo of PM Tony Blair 100,000 times.

Mark McGowan, who was in the news last week for photographing himself keying 47 cars in Glasgow and London as a piece of performance art, has now announced that he will kiss a photograph of Mr. Blair 100,000 times outside 10 Downing Street on election day, May 5.

McGowan’s art is clearly bad, but he does have a knack for publicity. His previous dubious projects include soaking in a tub of baked beans and nailing his feet to the floor of a gallery. In short, he is the Reuters Oddly Enough editor’s dream. Glasgow police are still mulling criminal charges against him for the car-vandalizing spree, and the Scottish Arts Council has taken the odd step of announcing that they will never, ever fund his work.

Reuters: Artist Offers Thousands of Kisses

>>> Look for Friday’s second post around 1 PM.

ABOVE: Nobuhisa Ishizuka’s piece Heaven’s Eye (2004) allows the viewer to push the video screen around on the floor to feel like ’someone like god.’

Just a small post today, sorry. We don’t often single out individual artists or works here at ADD, but this little item popped up on the gadget-and-gobot blog Gizmodo yesterday and we couldn’t resist.

Nobuhisa Ishizuka’s Heaven’s Eye is a video monitor that sits in its gallery facing up, so that you stand and look down into it. It displays a recorded video of a streetscape shot from above, but if you move the monitor around the floor, the video moves with it, so that it seems like a little mobile porthole looking down into the imaginary streetscape below the floor. Ishizuka has also done a piece (delaydelay) that sort of simulates riding the Shinkansen bullet train with five screens. The elliptical, slightly off-kilter Japanese-to-English translation alone is worth a clickthrough.

LINK: Nobuhisa Ishizuka: Heaven’s Eye

ABOVE: Detail from Hilla Rebay’s Untitled (1930). Rebay, who was instrumental in the formation of the Guggenheim museum and a fierce advocate of non-objective art, will be the focus of a show there starting May 20.

The New York cog of the Guggenheim machine announced yesterday that it is opening what it says is the first show dedicated entirely to works by Hilla Rebay, who talked Solomon Guggenheim into starting his collection of non-objective art in the late 1920s when she was working on his portrait. She suggested purchases—Moholy-Nagy, Léger, 150 Kandinskys, among many others—and he did the hard part with the chequebook.

The show will display notebooks, sketches, posters, and other ephemera of Rebay’s career, along with complementary works by Kandinsky, Picasso, and Schwitters. About 140 of Rebay’s works will be on display, including some non-objective watercolors, large-scale paintings, and collages. It’s hardly her fault, but many of her works bear an unfortunate resemblance to soft jazz album covers of the mid-1980s. But they were ripping her off, not the other way around. Keep that in mind. The show runs May 20 to August 10 before hopping over to Munich and Berlin for the remainder of the year.

LINK: Guggenheim Museum: Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim

ABOVE: The “Flower Portrait” of William Shakespeare, named for the family that donated it to Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, is a fake, scientists declared.

One of the most famous portraits of William Shakespeare—the Andrew Lloyd Webber of Elizabethan Europe—is a fraud, British scientists and art historians announced last week. The Flower Portrait, they noted, already adorns the covers of many modern publications of Shakespeare’s plays, which will presumably need revision on the next go-round.

After scratching, soaking, lasering, and poking at the portrait for four months, the scientists found some chrome yellow paint in the mix, paint that betrayed the portrait’s 19th-century origins—not 1609 as the canvas says. Some art historians have always found the portrait a little dodgy, saying that it was executed in a suspiciously modern style, but now they have some hard evidence. Next up: the Grafton and Chandos portraits, another two iconic paintings of Shakespeare, will be examined using the same methods. They might not stand up to scrutiny either.

Ironically, all the investigation into these portraits is being done in preparation for an NPG show called Searching for Shakespeare, to celebrate the gallery’s sesquicentennial—150 years for non-latin-speakers. Looks like they’ll have to keep searching.

LINK: BBC News: Shakespeare portrait ‘is a fake’

ABOVE: detail from Marc Quinn’s Self (1991). Charles Saatchi announced that he is selling the iconic Britart work to an American for £1.5 million.

Charles Saatchi, the Mediciesque British art collector, continued his spring cleaning this week by selling one of the most (in)famous and influential works in his collection for £1.5 million, a cool 10,000 per cent appreciation in 14 years. Self, a self portrait by Mark Quinn, sculpted out of 9 pints of the artist’s own frozen blood, was undeniably the exclamation mark in the 1997 “Sensation!” show at the Royal Academy in Britain.

Saatchi’s liquidation of his more sensation!al works over the last months (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (aka “The Shark“); Dead Dad) is causing some hand-wringing among Britons who are watching a decade’s worth of contemporary art get sucked across the Atlantic by rich New Yorkers; others regard it as rubbish and good riddance. This Guardian article notes that Saatchi has played this game before, purging his vaults of Warhols and Koons in the 80s, again with a savvy investor’s eye and a mercenary, predatory thirst for something new to sink his profits into. At the moment, Chuck is scooping up oil paintings and, the Guardian says, Chinese art.

LINK: Saatchi sells Britart classic for £1.5m

ABOVE: James Houston brought inuit art like these pieces to the world, discovering scores of artists in Northern Canada and promoting them worldwide. Left to right: Manumie Shaqu’s Bear (no date); Axanguyak Shaa’s Walrus (2000); Elijah Michael’s Muskox (2001). All three can be seen at the Houston North Gallery in Nova Scotia

James Houston, who was instrumental in bringing Inuit art to the world, died on Sunday at 83; the Canadian media, apparently pope-drunk, didn’t do anything about it until yesterday. This CBC obituary is a little thin, but it gives an adequate overview of Houston’s work and his importance.

There is some very beautiful Inuit art, and a lot more that is banal and hackneyed; Houston is pretty much responsible for both. After meeting the Inuit on a northwards trek in search of artistic inspiration, the young Houston was amazed by their traditional carved stone sculptures of dancing walruses and polar bears and fishermen. In return he taught them printmaking, and works by contemporary Inuit artists now sell for thousands of dollars.

Houston lived in the North for over a decade before moving back to New York to be a glassblower-slash-novelist-slash-documentary filmmaker. His son opened the Houston North Gallery in Nova Scotia in the early 80s, which ensures a steady supply of dancing arctic megafauna statuary for us all. Tavvauvutit, James.

Houston introduced print-making to Inuit

ABOVE: Detail from Giotto di Bondone’s Bust of an Angel (circa 1310-1313), touring North America this year. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, right, greeted the faithful yesterday in his new identity as Pope Benedict XVI.

In honour of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s election as Pope Benedict XVI, we here at Art Digest Daily thought it only fitting to point out the touring show of over 300 priceless works of art from the Vatican’s collection that is currently making the rounds in North America. “Saint Peter and the Vatican: The Legacy of the Popes” is opening June 4 at the Montréal Basilica and will be moving to San Antonio in October and Milwaukee in February 2006. If you care to brave the flocking multitudes and the goofy George-Lucas-Revenge-of-the-Sith title, there are some nice pieces to see, and they’ll likely go back to the catacombs after the exhibit is over, so see them while you can.

Pat Rodgers, speaking for the Archdiocese of San Antonio, told the San Antonio Express-News that “Right now we’re so blessed because the interest in the pope and the church are so high.” Surely John Paul II would be happy to know that his timely death has proved such a PR boon for Clear Channel Communications, the San Antonio-based radio/infotainment giant which is organizing the exhibit.

Clear Channel Exhibitions: Saint Peter and the Vatican: The Legacy of the Popes

ABOVE: detail from Asher Brown Durand’s Kindred Spirits (1849). The painting and 18 other works are being auctioned off by the New York Public Library to prop up its flagging endowment.

The NYPL is selling off 19 works from its collection in order to patch up its tattered finances, the library announced. This Poughkeepsie-centric article, from the Poughkeepsie-centric Poughkeepsie Journal, interviews various local library officials who speculate about the NYPL’s move. James Mundy, director of The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College—in Poughkeepsie!—clucks that this amounts to “heating the house by burning the furniture.”

Library Journal adds that the library is giving preference in the bidding to New York-based public institutions, to try to keep the art in the country and on display. But in the end they need the cash: the auction, which includes not one but two Gilbert Stuart portraits of George Washington, is expected to fetch more than $75 million. Discover™ cards out, everyone.

Poughkeepsie Journal: Art on way out at library

ABOVE: climbing ropes manufactured by Edelrid, on display at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum until October.

So perhaps this exhibit of “extreme textiles” at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum isn’t, strictly speaking, the fine, fine art that you have come to expect to see in the pages of ADD. These materials—like the wire mesh to lay in the ground to prevent soil erosion, or the nanofiber gloves to protect your hands while handling razor wire—are a little too geeky and mass-produced to be ahht, dahling. But this is an important show from a technical and aesthetic perspective, and some of these textiles are already being used by multimedia artists, like Maggie Orth, who contributes a piece called “Leaping Lines,” made of conductive synthetic yarns that use heat and electricity to produce different colors.

The Cooper-Hewitt has put together an excellent online exhibit of the show, including video and perhaps the most pointless online Flash™ game in the history of pointless online Flash™ games. But the materials on show are worth a look. And if you’re in New York, there are some public talks and demos to go to, so you can see the various super-polyesters in action.

Cooper-Hewitt — Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance [Click on exhibit title]

ABOVE: detail from Ed Ruscha’s Flash, L.A. Times (1963). Ruscha will represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in June; the U.S. State Department and the NEA recently announced changes to the way artists will be chosen for international exhibits.

The U.S. State Department and the National Endowment for the Arts are striking a committee to choose artists to represent America And Her Interests at international biennales, The Art Newspaper reports. These decisions used to be made by a panel of NEA wonks funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefellers—there’s that name again—but both private funders decided in 2003 to send their oversize novelty cheques elsewhere. The selection process was thrown into chaos. Rending of clothes, fire falling from the sky, etc.

Well, no more. No one, according to this article, has any idea how the process will work, who will be on the committee, or how they will pay for the sandwiches and kool-aid at their meetings. But one State Dept. boffin said that they hope to have the whole process working in time to choose an artist to represent America And Her Interests at the Istanbul biennial in September, so they obviously intend to get cracking. Like all things at the State Department, the whole scheme is rationalized by saying it’ll improve relations with The Muslim World. Sorry kids, but a few Ed Ruscha paintings probably aren’t going to distract anyone in Baghdad from that whole invasion thing.

New panel to select U.S. artists for biennales

ABOVE: The Littlest Rockefeller, David, has written a big, $100 million cheque—symbolized here by gold coins—to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Heir to the Rockefeller fortune and keen—or at least shrewd—collector David Rockefeller has announced that he is leaving a Dr. Evil-sized bequest to the Museum of Modern Art when he dies, in the amount of $100 million. But until he shuffles off this mortal coil, as the New York Times reports, the museum will keep on truckin’ with his annual $5 million donations, plus a few Gauguins or Picassos he throws in.

MoMA, of course, is kind of David Rockefeller’s sibling, since the original project was his mother’s initiative. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and some friends scraped together enough money to start the collection—Abby’s husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was inexplicably cheap about giving her any money to acquire modern art. That David inherited his taste in art from his mother and not his father, and is now spending the family fortune—he is the last of his generation of Rockefellers—on modern rubbish that dad would have hated strikes us as a wee bit Freudian. But who can argue with all those zeroes?

The article also takes a bit of a tangent on MoMA’s new $20 entry fee. Davey’s in favour of it, but then, he—the 243rd-richest man in the world—can clearly afford it. Also, the MoMA website? Nada. Not even on the press release page. If someone gave us a hundred million clams, we’d, you know, write a press release or something. Geez.

New York Times > MoMA to Receive Its Largest Cash Gift

ABOVE: Detail from Al Brandtner’s Patriot Act, which depicts President George W. Bush with a gun to his head on a mock stamp.

So, it turns out the government really does care about art, even the present U.S. administration, as evidenced by the presence of some friendly secret service agents at a gallery opening in Chicago this week. “Axis of Evil: The Secret History of Sin,” currently showing at the Windy City’s Columbia College, includes a piece with the pun-title Patriot Act, and depicts postage stamps with an image of George W. Bush with a gun to his head. “We need to ensure…that this is nothing more than artwork with a political statement,” deadpanned Secret Service PR wonk Tom Mazur.

Apparently a Chicago area Republican with no sense of irony narced on the seditious painting and called in the spooks. The agents took some pictures and asked for names and numbers of some of the artists participating in the show, but didn’t take anything. Curator Michael Hernandez de Luna said “It starts questioning all rights…questioning the rights of any artist who creates.”

“It seems like we’re being watched,” Hernandez concludes, seemingly forgetting why one puts on a public art show in the first place. Sweet goofiness all around, but with a chocolatey ripple of alarm, as well. Several blogs—this one and this one, for instance—have jumped all over this story, however, so democracy seems to be safe for today at least.

Art Daily: Secret Service Investigates Bush Stamp Art

ABOVE: the new Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, opening April 17.

The Minneappolis Star-Trib, among others, is getting in some preëmptive gush about the new additions to the Walker Art Center, which has received a $130 million facelift from Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron (H & dM won the Pritzker prize in 2001). In this article about the renovations, Nazie Eftekhari, the museum board’s vice-chairman, says the additions are “very human in scale,” as opposed to “the Museum of Modern Art where you feel you’re in a gigantic temple of art.”

The Walker Art Center is one among many projects around North America and Europe that’s building things like parks and lounges, theaters and restaurants, gift shops and event facilities—pretty much anything to make them seem more like malls than “temples of art.” Decades of government abuse have left them desperate for revenue, including, in the Walker’s case, a Wolfgang Puck restaurant called—ouch, feel that out-of-date millennial burn—”20.21″. We can hardly fault museums for finding new ways of keeping their doors open, but the Walker is a sign of things to come, and the future has a big, fat gift-shop attached. We’ll just have to wait for April 17 to see the full picture, though. In the meantime, the Walker has provided a cool jargon-filled online gallery of Herzog & de Meuron work, so you can see what their past work has looked like.

Minneapolis Star Tribune: Walker’s shiny new addition is built for art and people [requires registration - we recommend BugMeNot]

ABOVE: Audience members at the Tate Modern last week for a panel discussion on new art history book Art Since 1900. Panelists, from left to right: Hal Foster, Mark Godfrey, Benjamin H.D. Buchloch, and Briony Fer.

Artforum over the weekend blogged about a recent panel-discussion-cum-advertising-plug that took place at the Tate Modern last week featuring the authors of the new art history textbook Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. The book, by all accounts (including ours) is rattling the cheese tables of the art world with its “kaleidoscopic” approach and unapologetic partisanship.

Claire Bishop’s account of the five-hour gab-a-thon is similarly opinionated and entertainingly mean-spirited, carefully picking several instances of Rosalind Krauss’s casual arrogance and enjoying the “fireworks” introduced by several outspoken audience members. The article concludes by saying that the very fact that the book is being marketed as a “landmark” work means that “oppositional art history” is here to stay, and therefore can’t wait to see the backlash. It’s begun, obviously—the only question is how big and how bad.

Artforum Diary: “Selective Memories”
The Guardian: Lost in a Labyrinth of Theory