Hasta La Ideas

Former Metropolitan Museum of Art head honcho Philippe de Montebello showed up in an usual place this week, in a New York courtroom testifying as part of the ongoing legal battle surrounding the fortune of deceased socialite Brooke Astor. If you haven’t been following the tabloids, the basic gist of the fight is over whether or not Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, swindled every dime he could from his mother before her passing in 2007, the question being whether or not she had her full mental capacities at the time he was having her change her will and hand him bundles of money. de Montebello was called to talk about an instance in 2004 when he had lunch with Astor to prove that she had already begun losing her facilities, saying that she did not recognize him at all, despite having constantly donated to the Met in the decades prior:

“She was basically looking at me and saying, ‘Who are you?'” de Montebello testified.

Also introduced into evidence was a thank-you letter Astor sent to de Montebello in January 2001. She signed it, in a very shaky hand, “As always, your very devoted Brooke.”

Below that, Astor scribbled, “My hand is awful — hardly can hold a pen!!”

The note is potentially important evidence against [possible accomplice Francis Morrissey], who is charged with forging Astor’s signature on a March 2004 will update that benefited Marshall.

Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive took a couple of swipes at both the ease designers now have in building prototypes thanks to improved technology, as well as at his former homeland, the UK (albeit far more gently with the latter, going the “no comment” route). Talking to Design Week outside of the Objectified premiere in London, he said that the field of product design has become too simple and has distanced people from having to get their hands muddied up in the process of building something. And about England:

He declined to comment on the state of the UK’s digital product design industry, and said he ‘didn’t know’ if he’d ever come back to work here.

We’re just going to take that as a “No, he won’t be.” Though don’t you think he’s probably friends with James Dyson? At least he could have said “I don’t know, but I like what Dyson’s being doing around here lately.”

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If you need a little pick me up after browsing the depressing timeline in that last post, but would prefer to keep talking about the recession, we recommend a dose of Daniel Libeskind, whose kindly nature and wisdom will ease your worried mind in this interview he had recently with BusinessWeek. In it, he dips his toes into the Michael Cannell/Murray Moss battle over whether a recession is good or bad for design and architecture:

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Because it’s Frank Gehry‘s 80th year on this planet, we expect no slow down in story volume and that we’ll continue to hear talk about him for the rest of the year. Just giving you fair warning is all. And even if it weren’t such a milestone birth year for him, with the recent news that he’d landed the commission to work down the street from David Adjaye on the new Eisenhower Memorial, he’d likely be all over the place anyway. So following some of the initial “why’d you hire a flashy starchitect to design a memorial to a non-flashy guy?” talk when the commission was announced, the local paper, the Washington Post, has put together some commentary on the project saying that perhaps Gehry’s unconventional designs are just what Washington D.C. desperately needs to make everyone start rethinking how our “important and historical stuff” should look like:

If he can reinvent memorialization in this city of tombs and museums and memory gardens, his career and legacy will have taken another spin on the wheel, this time in the right direction. He deserves the freedom to try.

Also of note in this Wide World of Gehry, the LA Times presented both an excerpt of Barbara Isenberg‘s new book of interviews Conversations With Frank Gehry as well as a review of it by Christopher Hawthorne who was surprised that the book was “rich and even, at times, revelatory” despite his initial reservations.

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Another follow-up story we promise to be brief about. As his ongoing battle with the Associated Press continues, Shepard Fairey, as a man of the people, has decided to go to the most “of the people”-esque outlet, The Huffington Post, to file this lengthy essay, pleading his case. Along the way, he described his process, his problems with the AP’s complaints over his Obama poster, and describes his battle as a fight “to protect the rights of all artists.” There’s not a lot new here, nor does he make a particularly strong case for himself at points (the part about his not wanting to feel forced to collaborate with photographers when he’s using their work feels like fairly murky logic), it’s very interesting to hear the whole thing straight from the source. And we particularly enjoyed his calling out all of the other pieces of art floating around out there that were clearly referenced from photographs, but haven’t caught the ire of anyone in particular like his Obama print has.

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