“At the end of last year, Foster and Partners celebrated its 40th anniversary. During that period, Norman Foster‘s architectural practice has grown to be the fifth largest in the world and has designed buildings of pretty much every type. However, this month they finished a project that is unlike anything they have undertaken before. It is their first building for animals…”
Foster’s elephant enclosure: A house for happy pachyderms, The Telegraph UK.
“Revolution is in the air at the palace of Versailles – and, this time, it has nothing to do with an unpopular leader and his fashion-conscious wife… Delighting contemporary art fans and dismaying some of France’s most august historians, Jeff Koons is flying in this September to exhibit some of his most famous works in the chateau and gardens of the country’s most illustrious national treasure. Rabbit, Koons’s chrome steel sculpture from 1986, will take pride of place on a marble pedestal in the Salon d’Abondance. The kitsch classic Balloon Dog (Magenta) will sit alongside a Veronese masterpiece in the Salon d’Hercule.[…]Incongruous? Anachronistic? A betrayal of French culture?”
Koons brings kitsch to Versailles, The Guardian.
“The interior of the rambling Victorian house is dark. The sparse furnishings in the front rooms are covered by a patina of cigarette ash, gobs of dried paint and coffee cans filled with paintbrushes. Hundreds of paintings lean against walls and are piled against the porch windows.
Chuck Connelly’s Ausburg, a painting from his first New York show that was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984. Source: The New York Times
“Lounging comfortably amid the detritus is their creator, Chuck Connelly, 53, a tall, graying man whose easy laugh belies his careworn face, occasional rants and long career slide.
“Mr. Connelly’s professional fortunes, chronicled in a documentary that will be shown on Monday on HBO, have gone from selling “Ausburg,” a painting from his first New York show, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984 to compensating his accountant with a painting in recent years. Yet the HBO film, “The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not For Sale,” does not entirely blame a fickle art world for his setbacks. As the documentary recounts, Mr. Connelly alienated many dealers, patrons and buyers with his hot temper, insulting remarks and wild ways.
“Mr. Connelly has mixed feelings about the film. “They only had the worst shots of me, they only shot when I was drunk,” he said. He added that he was “not a failure like the movie says.”
For an Artist at Full Speed, Everything Else Just Takes a Back Seat, The New York Times.
