The Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid has lost a 38-tonne steel sculpture by American artist Richard Serra, the museum said in a statement Wednesday.

The museum, one of the city's largest and most popular, commissioned the work - four stark, steel slabs - in 1986 and acquired it a year later for the equivalent of about $220,000 US.

After being exhibited, it was placed in a warehouse in 1990 with a company that specialized in storing large-scale artworks.

But that company was dissolved in 1998, said daily newspaper ABC. When the museum's director, Ana Martinez de Aguilar, decided a few months ago to display the sculpture again, no one could find it, the museum said.

I've updated my painting page. I'm not putting up a ton of work but It's faily recent. If you feel like it check out the link called "painting" on the right hand column.

Douglas Witmer's blog lately? He is making an honest attempt to make it more visual - and it looks great (especially if you like the work).

www.douglaswitmer.com

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, (LAMOCA) has added three new trustees to its board, among them artist Ed Ruscha, whose work has been included in eight exhibitions at the museum over the years.

I think it's great to see artists actually getting on the boards of cultural institutions.

Damien Hirst’s plans for a large gallery, restaurant and shop in his studio space in Newport Street in the south London area are a step closer to completion. The UK artist says that he has planning permission for his new complex, scheduled to open in “two years time probably”, according to a spokesperson for the artist. The Britart ringleader is also hoping to add a chapel to the Gothic mansion, Toddington Manor, in Cheltenham, the Gothic mansion which he bought for £3 million last year. London-based architect Michael Rundell has been commissioned to design the holy site which was conceived for the house, but never realised, by the original owner Charles Hanbury-Tracy in 1820. However, the chapel inauguration is “years away” according to the spokesperson.

From the Art Newspaper

November 2005, oil/canvas, 36"x36", 2005/2006


Suburbia, oil/canvas, 32"x32", 2006


Barrier, oil/canvas, 20"x20", 2006

Environmentalists have begun a campaign to save a church worked on by Michelangelo from ruin after the use of explosives on the underlying Tuscan hillside raised fears that the 1000-year-old building could collapse.

A large crack has already ripped through the marble pavement, ancient tombs, altar and baptismal font of the Romanesque Pieve della Cappella in Fabiana, near Lucca. The church nestles midway up the Altissimo hill, at the foot of which Michelangelo Buonarroti arrived in 1517 in search of the area's distinctive marble that he intended to use for the façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence.

Broken down into its visual components, David Shapiro's art is the kind I like. Simple shapes, some grids, A handful of basic shapes appear over and over again in his paintings and works on paper. Shapiro combines these simple elements in a painting or a print, with a tension that brings the colors alive, high-lighting the surface and sub-surface textures.

The artworks are richly textured and warm - almost like tapestries. Rich textures sit on top, underneath, and side by side each other holding the viewer - allowing the viewer time to see connection and dissonance between the different sections of the artwork.

I highly recommend this show, if you can, go to the opening friday evening.

The San Francisco Chronicle writes that the South of Market Child Care Center in San Francisco, is moving to a new location, and selling a giant mural by the Keith Haring that was painted on the wall of their gym. The mural was appraised at between one and two million dollars by Christie's, and the center plans to use money to pay off the new facility. At the same time, Agence France-Presse reports on tougher rules or laws on graffiti in New York, including a higher age limit for possessing "graffiti instruments" and harsher penalties for those with an "intent to make graffiti."

What exactly are/is "graffiti instruments" and "intent to make graffiti." Fuck you. I know the New York of the late seventies/early eighties is gone but why dont they just put a bubble on the city, build a big parking lot somewhere, and call it a mall and be done with it.

BBC News reports that a seventy-seven-year-old Frenchman has spent a night in custody in Paris after attacking Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, 1917, on display at the Pompidou Centre as part of a wider exhibition on Dada. Police said the man, who claimed that Duchamp would have appreciated the gesture, had urinated on the same piece at an exhibition in Nimes, southern France, in 1993.

Elvis Costello - Trust
James White and the Blacks - Off White
Lydia Lunch - Queen of Siam
Ian Dury - Do-It-Yourself
Various - No New York
Suicide - Suicide
Tom Waits - Blue Valentine
Velvet Underground - etc.

If you can't tell, my turntable is hooked up again.

I watched this amazing documentary of the rise and fall of Channel Z on friday night. I wont claim to have known anything about it before before watching it, but it's amazing how singular ego driven ideas can explode and become beloved and at the same time dismissed when the driving force is gone. This is a sad but true tale of someone who loved his job and at the same time was the only one really able to do it as well as he did, and towards the end when the money got tight - he's dead.

Leaving behind a wake of crappy channels like HBO and Showtime to give us a pale imitation of what we could have had.

I got my version from Netflix, you might have heard of them.

BTW why are people buying whole seasons of mediocre television show's and how much more of this crap do we need to see again?

The city of Bucharest has announced its plans to begin a contemporary art biennial. Beginning on the May 25 and lasting a little over a month, the first edition is entitled “Chaos: Flat Images in the Age of Confusion” and will be curated by Zsolt Petranyi, the director of the Kunsthalle in Budapest.

From Flash Art

'CARAVAGGIO: UNA MOSTRA IMPOSSIBILE!' Saturday through Feb. 11; Loyola University Museum of Art. This is what I've been worried about for the last few years as digital images have become more and more mainstream.

I'm talking about replacing experience with simulated experience.

Admittedly, you will never get all of Caravaggio's work under one roof - and I wonder if you really should, thats not the point. The point is you are going to replace the idea of seeing authentic (or real artwork) with digital prints. To me it is entirely the absence of the "authentic" that kills this show for me. Suddenly the criticism of Jean Baudrillard seems entirely correct:

"The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction... The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: That is, the hyper-real... which is entirely in simulation"

I'm not going to turn this into a JB symposium, however I really do think that we as members of the art community should vigorously avoid this project. It poses a series of bad questions and even worse decisions for artists and galleries. I'm sure there are going to be a number of post this AM about this - I'll update links as I am able.

Links
Edward Winkleman
Alexandra Silverthorne
Modern Kicks