Tag: 12.15.99

So why, in the land of the birth of the skyscraper, are the latest tall buildings so dreadful?  Chicago Tribune

Guggenheim Museum will do an Armani show – but museum failed to reveal the designer had pledged a $15 million gift to the museum. New York Times

– stolen by the Nazis.  Toronto Globe and Mail

Ambitious new African gallery opens at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. “What we were trying to show is that what Africa is, what Africa has been, and what it can become, can be told through the creative skills of the people. What Africa is has often been lost in crisis,” said C. Payne Lucas, the president of Africare, a nonprofit aid organization and one of the advisers to the show.  Washington Post

New York Times account

• PREVIOUSLY: OUT OF AFRICA: Smithsonian, undergoing $100 million renovation, has difficulty finding funds for large new gallery on African culture, set to open next month. Washington Post 11/17/99

Curatorial workers, librarians, secretaries, archivists and bookstore clerks at the Museum of Modern Art go on strike for a living wage.   New York Times

A dozen experts meet in New York to determine whether a large painting at the Metropolitan is a rare 10th century Chinese masterpiece or a forgery cooked up just a few decades ago. “You take any great classical [Chinese] painting and call up twenty different art historians and you’d probably get twenty different opinions,” says one expert, who finds the lack of consensus “embarrassing.”  ArtsJournal.com

Artists tackle the problem of what to do with a giant mountain of garbage in Israel. A pond? Homes? A photovoltaic garden?  Financial Times