When the new $60 million Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth opens this weekend, it will be the second-largest modern art museum in the US. “This museum has changed identities, names and directors more times than most people can count. Its meteoric rise of late is all the more remarkable given its checkered history and inauspicious beginnings. A museum that started as an adjunct to the public library, with volunteers footing the bills and guiding its fate, now stands poised to be one of the most influential institutions of its type.”
Tag: 12.07.02
Rothko Returns
In the 1950s, Mark Rothko won the “most prestigious public commission that had ever been awarded to an abstract expressionist painter” to produce “600 square feet of paintings for the most exclusive room in the new Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York.” But in 1959 he “suddenly and unexpectedly repudiated his agreement” and in the 1960s sent nine of the paintings to the Tate in London. Why?
Basel In Miami
For the first time, Art Basel, which is one of the world’s top contemporary art fairs, is putting on a show outside its hometown. Where? Miami. And it’s being called America’s hottest art fair of the season. “While the most cutting-edge art raised some eyebrows, connoisseurs were keenly eyeing the more mainstream offerings, which include some of the best-known artists from the 20th and 21st centuries, including Keith Haring, Fernand Leger, René Magritte, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.”
High Ambitions
“Years in the making, Art Basel Miami Beach was scheduled to debut last year, but it was postponed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. ‘We want this to be the most important art show on the American continent, a cultural and social highlight of the Americas’.”
Canada’s Record Austion Year
It was a record year for the art auction business in Canada, with new highs set for individual artists plus the business as a whole.
Enlisting America’s Writers For Propaganda
The Bush administration has recruited prominent American writers to “write about what it means to be an American writer” for a State Department anthology to promote America culturally around the world. “Although the State Department plans to distribute the 60-page booklet of 15 essays free at American embassies worldwide in the next few weeks, one country has already banned the anthology: the United States. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, renewed when the United States Information Agency became part of the State Department three years ago, bars the domestic dissemination of official American information aimed at foreign audiences.”