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Artnet News
4/11/00		  
     
  BEECROFT CAPTURES AIRCRAFT CARRIER
Did you know that the Whitney Biennial 2000 has an off-site component? Well, it does -- the Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum, the aircraft carrier museum anchored in the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, which is the site for Vanessa Beecroft's Biennial entry. Her performance-art work, titled VB42 Intrepid, features 30 sailors in service dress blues, standing in ceremonial formation on the flight deck from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Apr. 21. Beecroft's Intrepid installation also includes a scaled-down inflatable reproduction of the UDT-SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Fla., decked out with films and photos of objects from the museum's collection, including Beecroft's own US Navy SEAL project photograph. The Intrepid Museum is located on Pier 86 at West 46th St. and 12th Ave. Call (212) 980-4575 for more info.

MOMA ART TO MORI ART CENTER
Minoru Mori, president of the Mori Building Company, the largest development company in Japan, has revolutionized Japanese real estate development -- and now plans to do the same with the art museum business. The huge new Mori Art Center in Tokyo, scheduled to open in 2003, will have its own facility but rent art works from other institutions, beginning with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mori's 255,000-square-foot art center is to occupy the top five floors of a new 54-story office tower, making it the world's tallest museum. What's in it for MoMA? Millions and millions, to be sure. The museum isn't saying -- scandalously, since it's a public institution and its financial dealings should be transparent. Astute Artnet Magazine readers might remember that Mori was among 24 patrons who donated $5 million or more for 1998's capital campaign to help pay for its new expansion and increase MoMA's endowment, and is also uncle to popular New York-based video vixen Mariko Mori.

VANCOUVER MUSEUM OUSTS DIRECTOR AFTER ROCK-STAR STEW
The Vancouver art scene is in an uproar after beloved Vancouver Art Gallery director Alf Bogusky stepped down following a series of clashes with his trustees. The last straw, according to today's edition of Toronto's Globe and Mail, came when Bogusky was pressured to mount a show of photographs by rock star Bryan Adams as part of a fundraising gala. More than 100 British Columbia artists, curators and writers have signed a petition calling for the resignation of the museum's executive trustee committee as well as of acting museum director Joe McHugh, who was appointed Mar. 31. Stay tuned.

ELTON JOHN, PHOTO COLLECTOR
Superstar musician and AIDS activist Elton John is adding a new brief to his public portfolio -- that of photography collector. "Chorus of Light: Photographs from the Sir Elton John Collection," a selection of 310 of the singer's 2,500 photos, goes on view at Atlanta's High Museum of Art, Nov. 4, 2000-Jan. 28, 2001. At the same time, a selection of 70 celebrity photos owned by John is to be exhibited at the High's downtown photo gallery. John makes his U.S. home in Atlanta, where he is a High Museum patron and client of Atlanta photo dealer Jane Jackson. His holdings include substantial numbers of works by Man Ray and Robert Mapplethorpe, and range from early moderns like Jacques Lartique and Dorothea Lange to the very contemporary -- Gregory Crewdson, Reneke Dijkstra, Adam Fuss and Hiroshi Sugimoto are some of the names familiar to art-world cognoscenti. (At the press conference at New York's St. Regis Hotel, John averred a recent purchase of Nan Goldin's entire show at Jay Jopling in London.)

But perhaps more importantly, Sir Elton is obviously unafraid of showing what might be called a taste for racy subjects in his forthcoming museum exhibition in Atlanta. Among the works slated to be on view are a David Bailey portrait of a young, shirtless Sting, erotic male nudes by John Dugdale, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Lucas Samaras, Bruce Weber and Joe Ziolkowski, foot fetish pix by fashion photog Horst P. Horst, a 1933 portrait of Jean Harlow in a sleek negligé and several Andy Warhol self-portraits in drag. The works are to be hung salon style, as they are in John's Atlanta abode.

STEINBERG COLLECTION ESCAPES AUCTION HOUSES
It looks like friendship snatched some choice pieces from the maw of the consignment-hungry auction houses. Harried financier Saul Steinberg, whose Reliance Group has been battered by business losses, has opted to sell his celebrated collection of Old Masters through his friend, the dean of Old Master dealers, Richard Feigen, rather than going with his usual choice of Sotheby's, reports sometime Artnet Magazine writer Paul Jeromack in another art newspaper. The list has not been made final, but it's expected that Feigen will handle 60 pictures, including works by Jan Breughel the Elder, Bernardo Cavallino, Gerard Honthorst, Jacob Jordaens, Titian and Joachim Wtewael. Steinberg and Feigen have been associated for over 35 years, with the dealer not only helping Steinberg build his collections, but introducing him to his wife Gayfrid.

$1 MILLION FOR L.A. ARTS INTERNSHIPS
The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission have come up with $1 million for visual, performing and literary arts internships throughout Los Angeles County this summer. The funds go to 150 organizations to support 301 positions. Los Angeles host organizations receiving support include ARTS, Inc., the Catalina Island Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach and the Pacific Asia Museum. Additional information about visual arts internships positions is available at the Getty site at http://www.getty.edu/grant/internships.

NEW WEBSITE IDENTIFIES NAZI LOOT
The Lost Art Internet Database, a site featuring searchable listings in German, English and Russian of Germany's vast repository or artworks known or suspected to have been stolen from Jewish victims of the Nazis, has been inaugurated at http://www.lostart.de. The site focuses on Hitler's so-called Linzer Collection, art collected for a never-realized "Führer Museum" in the Austrian city of Linz, reports Berlin's newspaper Die Welt. Among the works plundered by the Nazis listed in the site are paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Tintoretto and Vermeer.

CHANGES AT CHRISTIE'S
Richard J.B. Madley has been appointed president of Christie's East. He comes from Phillips, where he was executive vice president of their New York branch, making him the third veteran from that house to get high positions in other auction houses, after Deborah Seidel was appointed president at Sloans in Wash. D.C. and Paul Roberts became president at Freeman's in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Henry P. Davidson, II, the son of Christie's former chairman Danny Davidson, has been named senior vice president and department head of estates and appraisals for Christie's Americas. He comes to Christie's from J.P. Morgan.

FIRST CLASS NEVELSON
The U.S. Postal Service has issued a set of commemorative 33-cent stamps honoring 20th-century sculptor Louise Nevelson. Each of the five designs depicts a detail of a Nevelson sculpture. For more info go to www.usps.com.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
The Islip Art Museum is seeking proposals for installations and site-specific work for the museum's Carriage House Project Space, a 10,000-square-foot landmark in Long Island, for an exhibition on view July 29-Oct. 1, 2000. Projects will be reviewed by a panel of artists and art and museum professionals, and selected proposals will receive an artist's fee of at least $500 plus support services and some technical assistance to create works in the space. Artists are invited to submit proposals by the postmark deadline of Apr. 15. Visit the museum's site at http://www.islipartmuseum.org or call (631) 224-5402 for more info.

GARDEN PARTY FOR THE HENRY
The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington celebrates its third anniversary on Apr. 22 with a one-night exhibition called "East of Eden," featuring 200 garden-themed artworks priced at the relative bargain level of $200 each. The show will be hung without identifying name tags, and includes works by Doug Kinney, Deborah Lawrence, Brad Miller and Alice Wheeler. The gala event also includes "Splendor in the Bash," a party featuring a silent auction. Tickets are $50, and champagne preview tickets are available for $100 and $250 for sponsors. To order, call (206) 616-9894 or buy online at the gallery's website; tickets are limited and will not be available at the door.

NATIONAL EXHIBITION PROGRAM FOR THE ESTATE PROJECT
The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS has launched a national exhibition program set to open at Parsons School of Design's Manhattan galleries Dec. 2001. The exhibition is to be asembled by Parsons' curators from the project's Virtual Collection, a digital archive of more than 3,300 artworks of high quality images representing the works of artists who have been lost to AIDS or who are now living with HIV. Additionally, the Virtual Collection has upgraded its technology and significantly expanded its site, introducing Artery, an online interactive journal and forum.

-- compiled by Giovanni Garcia-Fenech