Steve Holmes, via Bass Museum

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views, Contributor

Steven Holmes has been appointed adjunct curator at Miami’s Bass Museum of Art. The independent curator began working with the museum two years ago, spearheading the three-part exhibition series,The Endless Renaissance, which pairs Renaissance and Baroque works with contemporary artworks.

Holmes will continue to live in West Hartford, Connecticut, and serve as head curator of the Cartin Collection. The Cartin Collection, a 4,000 sq. foot storefront in downtown Hartford, features the private holdings of Connecticut electric supply mogul Mickey Cartin. Since 2006, Holmes has overseen Cartin’s collection, curating shows for the Hartford space and organizing exhibitions from the collection in museums and galleries across the country.

Prior to his position at Cartin, Holmes was director of visual arts at Real Art Ways in Hartford; and founder of the Khyber Arts Society in Halifax Nova Scotia. He has curated projects for Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunste-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Museo del Arte de Puerto Rico.

Located on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, the Bass Museum of Art was founded in 1963 when John and Johanna…

Jackson Pollock 1948 "Square Pouring," promised gift of Helen and Charles Schwab

In a windfall for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a group of nine collectors, including investment mogul and board chairman Charles Schwab and wife Helen, have joined up and promised the museum 195 postwar and contemporary artworks.

This gift enriches the collection on the heels of a 2009 gift by Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher of 1,100 works. A major museum expansion, by the Norwegian firm Snohetta, is slated for completion in 2016 (more on that here).

The Bay Area group seem to have taken a page from the playbook of a trifecta of who pledged a gift 800 works to the Dallas Museum of Art in 2005. (Those donors included Howard and Cindy Rachofsky, Deedie and Rusty Rose and Robert and Marguerite Hoffman).

Museum patrons Helen Schwab and Robin Wright chaired the gift committee. Other donors include trustees Carla Emil, Bob Fisher, Mimi Haas, David Mahoney, Norman Stone and Pat Wilson.

The Schwabs promised some of the biggest trophies including a pair of Jackson Pollocks: the 1948 dripped tour de force Square Pouring and 1951 Black and White (Number 6). Other Schwab pledges…

Screen shot of MoMA's "Starry Night" on Google's Art Project

Google has unveiled its latest culture grab: Art Project, a website with 1,061 high resolution artworks from a star studded cast of cooperating museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, London’s National Gallery, the Uffizi  and the Hermitage.

The world’s premier cultural custodians evidently put up less of a fuss than the book crowd, who protested Google’s widespread digitization of books with lawsuits (see here and here).

The art site offers 6,000 so-called “street view panoramas” akin to the visuals on Google maps and real estate websites. Over the past 18 months, the Google elves scanned high resolution images of museum masterpieces, plus 360-degree tours of individual galleries. One can only hope the museums requested a large fee in exchange for the rights to these images.

Each institution selected one work for “gigapixelation” a sort of mega magnification on the order of 7 billion pixels apiece. This allows for close-ups of brushstrokes and the like, superior to the human eye, according to Google. MoMA offered up The Starry Night for mega-pixelization.

Google’s website has a “Create an Artwork Collection” function, permitting users to…

Japanese postcard donated to MFA, Boston by Leonard Lauder, circa 1877-1910

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston has named Benjamin Weiss as the first Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Visual Culture. The position falls under the department of prints, drawings and photographs.

Lauder endowed the position in connection with a gift of 100,000 postcards. One of Weiss’ first tasks will be to mount a 2012 exhibition featuring the Lauder postcard archive.

Weiss will oversee the museum’s postcards, posters, artist archives and illustrated books.

He is a man unafraid of harnessing large quantities of material.  Weiss was responsible for 5,000 wall labels and texts in the museum’s new American Wing, and was featured here in a Boston Globe story. His previous title was head of interpretation.

Weiss was previously curator of rare books at MIT’s Burndy Library.

According to a 2002 article in the New York Times, Lauder owned around 200,000 postcards that he began collecting as a child. He told the Times, “Postcard are the best history lesson.”

Zhang Lichen张立辰 (b. 1939). Orchid, 1986. Ink and color on paper. 19 ¼ x 31 ½ inches. Signed with 5 artist seals. Courtesy China 2000 Fine Art.

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views, Contributor

Ever since the New York International Asian Art Fair was mothballed in 2009, dealers and auctioneers have jockeyed to keep the spirit of Asia Week alive.

This year’s bid takes place around Manhattan from March 18-26, as Asian art dealers, auction houses and museums join forces to present week-long events highlighting the continent’s flourishing arts and buoyant market.

Thirty-four dealers will take part, hailing from the US, England, France, Italy and Japan.

Festivities begin on March 18 with a private cocktail reception and panel discussion at Asia Society.

The big money Asian art auctions take place at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. The houses grossed $82 million in sales last March, and upped the ante to $98.4 million last fall.

Japan Society’s offerings include a group show, Bye Bye Kitty!!!, featuring young Japanese artists, the majority of whom are based in Japan and have never exhibited in New York.

More info is available here.

Jonathan Wahl, "Eye of Mordor," 2008. Charcoal, 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy of the artist

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views contributor

Before fame struck, Andy Warhol paid the rent as a magazine illustrator, Edward Hopper toiled in advertising and Jeff Koons suited up as a Wall Street broker.

Along these lines the Drawing Center has mounted Day Job, to illuminate the connection between an artist’s paying gig and his or her passion. The premise of the show suggests some artists are able to use their jobs to help spur the creative process.

Day Job features 23 artists. They include landscape architect Mary Lydecker, jeweler Jonathan Wahl, pilot Raul J. Mendez, as well as several art teachers, an attorney, an electrician and a set designer for the soap opera One Life to Live.

Works were selected in an open call format to artists enrolled in The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program, a bi-annual series that provides exposure for emerging artists in the Center’s Artist Registry. The show was curated by Nina Katchadourian.

Day Job runs until Feb 3, 2011. The Drawing Center is located at 35 Wooster Street.

Nonie Gadsden, left, and John Axelrod, right, at MFA, Boston © Photo: Lindsay Pollock

One of the most significant cultural developments of 2010 was certainly the unveiling of the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s new American art wing.

I went up for a visit and chat with collector John Axelrod, whose collecting tastes range from American design between WWI and WWII, to painting and sculpture by African-American artists.

Axelrod has donated and lent a number of works to the Boston museum, some of which are displayed in the new John Axelrod gallery. Decorative arts curator Nonie Gadsden, who helped install many of the marvelous new galleries, joined the conversation.

Click here to watch video.

Whitney Museum lobby lighting, via Silva on Flickr

The 2012 Whitney Biennial will be orchestrated by Whitney photography curator Elisabeth Sussman and former art dealer Jay Sanders, who previously worked at Greene Naftali and Marianne Boesky gallery.

The exhibit will be presented in March 2012. The list of artists will be made public at the end of 2011 or early 2012.

Here is info on the curators, taken directly from the museum’s press release:

“Elisabeth Sussman is Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art where her exhibition Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective, co-curated with Lynn Zelevansky, is currently on view through January 9, 2011. Most recently, she co-curated (with Thomas Weski) William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008, which was on a four-venue international tour beginning at the Whitney, and is now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sussman’s Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” was awarded the AICA award for best monographic show in New York (2007-08). She has organized many other Whitney exhibitions including Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing

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Kensington Garden's Magazine Building, via Flickr

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

London’s Serpentine Gallery is expanding, thanks to U.S. pharma bucks.

The Serpentine is opening a new gallery in Kensington Gardens park, renovating a 19th century former munitions depot. The new venue will be named the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, thanks to a donation from The Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation.

The building will be renovated by architect Zaha Hadid. Plans include an adjacent pavilion for a restaurant and “social space.” It will include over 880 square meters of gallery and lounge, around the same size as the current location nearby in Hyde Park.

Though the amount of the Sackler donation was not revealed, Serpentine officials describe the gift as the largest donation in its 40-year history. Dr. Sackler, an arts patron, made his fortune in pharmaceuticals. He passed away in April of this year at the age of 93.

Serpentine directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist will oversee the extension. The space will display work by lesser-known artists and architects, commissioned to create annual large-scale light installations inside the building and play spaces for children and families outside of it.…

Rochelle Slovin on right, at museum's 2007 gala honoring Tom Cruise. Photo: via Wireimage

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Museum of the Moving Image director Rochelle Slovin will retire in February 2011, after 30 years at the helm.

Slovin began her career in the 1960s as an off-Broadway theater performer, and later served in the city government for nearly a decade. In 1981, she was named executive director of the not-for-profit agency, the Astoria Motion Picture and Television Foundation. Upon her hiring, she proposed the plan for constructing the Queens Museum of the Moving Image in an adjacent building. She has served as its director since its opening in September 1988.

The Moving Image is the only museum in the United States, and the first museum in the world, devoted entirely to film, television and digital media. Ms. Slovin and the museum were awarded the State of New York Governor’s Arts Award in 2002.

The museum has been under a $67 million renovation project since 2008. Designed by architect Thomas Lesser, the new 97,700 space feet space is nearly double the size of the former building. The redesigned venue will open to the public on January 15, 2011.

Carl Goodman, Senior Deputy…