A number of artists – led by Salzburg Festival director Gerard Mortier – have resigned cultural positions in Austria or say they will boycott in protest over Haider’s rise. Should artists boycott or quit to protest politics? Norman Lebrecht thinks not. – The Telegraph (UK)
Tag: 02.10.00
EXHAUSTED RESOURCES
Rudy Giuliani didn’t cotton much to the idea of a field of naked people in Times Square posing for a photographer. So now the concept travels – maybe to Dublin? – Irish Times
A NEW TEMPORARY CONTEMP…ER MODERN —
- — museum for Queens. MOMA picks LA architect Michael Maltzan to design the space in Long Island City. – New York Times
- Maltzan worked as an architect in Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica office during the late ’80s and early ’90s, where he was project designer for LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. Since leaving Gehry in 1995, Maltzan has done a series of major projects in Los Angeles, establishing a reputation as a designer of remarkable rigor and maturity. – Los Angeles Times
TURNING TABLES
A German court has issued an injunction to bar the return of a painting with questionable provenance to its American owner: the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The painting is “Bauhaus Staircase” by Oskar Schlemmer, painted in 1932, considered an icon of the Modern’s collection and usually on view in the permanent-collection galleries. The painting had been on loan for an exhibition at the National Gallery in Berlin that closed on Jan. 9. Ironically the Modern has been in a similar dispute of its own over ownership of an Egon Schiele painting that had been lent to MOMA. – New York Times
TRUST-BUSTERS
- While the US Department of Justice investigates Sotheby’s and Christie’s for commission fixing, Christie’s quickly changes its commission structure to “show its good intentions.” – The Art Newspaper
ANTI-DEFAMATION
- Two Canadian artists created a monument to women killed by men. Now the murder conviction of the husband of one of the women named on the memorial is overturned, and the man’s attorney threatens a defamation suit against the artists. – CBC
A GRANDER VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE
The great accomplishment of New York’s newly-rebuilt Hayden Planetarium is “to make the unimaginable understandable.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
- Previously: PLANETARY ADVENTURE: After six years of work, the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s Museum of Natural History is set to open its ambitious addition. “Designed by James Stewart Polshek and Todd H. Schliemann, the $210 million space is glass enclosed and luminous, a bright contrast to the heavy neo-classicism of the rest of the museum. – Newsweek
NEW VENICE GUGGENHEIM — –
– in 18th-Century customs house will concentrate on contemporary art, leaving 20th Century to current Venice Guggenheim. – Chicago Tribune (Reuters)
OBJECTION AUSTRIA
Washington DC’s Austrian Embassy is “essentially a concert hall with offices wrapped around it, a fitting architectural metaphor for a country whose primary exports in the past century have been intellectual and artistic.” Pianist Andras Schiff was supposed to have played a concert at the embassy last night, but canceled in protest over right-wing extremist Jörg Haider’s rise in the Austrian government. – Washington Post
CULTURAL POLITICS
The London Symphony Orchestra played in Vienna this week. How odd, writes one of the orchestra’s cellists, to think of oneself as a national export from somewhere. But a new climate of nationalism was in the air and in the concert hall. With a French conductor, Argentinian-Jewish soloist, playing French and Russian and Austrian music, the LSO has been asking itself many questions on this tour. – The Scotsman