Hasta La Ideas

Continuing with Frank Gehry‘s worst start to a month in the last little bit, what with the Beekman Tower getting chopped in half and finding new leaks in Ontario, in a section of this interview with The Architects Newspaper, it looks like Gehry has finally come to terms with the “on hold” Atlantic Yards project never being finished:

The Corcoran Gallery in DC, the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn — I don’t think it’s going to happen. There are projects underway that are being threatened, and may not be completed. That would be devastating to me. Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles is also on hold.

Though while he sounds pretty bummed about it, he did quickly mention thereafter that he is looking forward to this:

…now we’re working on the Louis Vuitton Foundation Museum in Paris, and that’s exciting. It’s a pretty big building, bigger than Disney Hall.

Let’s see that that one gets built, okay everyone? Don’t we already all feel bad enough for the guy?

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First Shepard Fairey was arrested in Boston while he was also receiving news that the Associated Press was suing him for copyright infringement for his now-iconic Obama poster. Then Fairey countersued, saying he was well within his legal right as an artist to borrow an AP photo. Now, in what appears to be the beginnings of a battle over who can outlast the other, the AP has countersued Fairey’s countersuing. Their claim is that they made the effort to get the artist to comply with usage rights for the original photo, but he ignored them and now they’re seeking additional “damages and injunctive relief on claims of copyright infringement.” And as if that weren’t enough, the city of Boston is now saying that they’d like to add a few more charges to Fairey’s rap sheet, saying that he illegally hung several of the aforementioned Obama images up around the city without permission. We’re guessing the artist is probably wishing he’d just voted for McCain right now.

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(Illustration: Charlie Powell for The New York Times)

The New York Times Sunday Business Section knocked one out of the park again yesterday with an above-the-fold graphic that had them chuckling in the waning hours of the Armory Show. Following in the footsteps of Lacie Argyle/Jennifer Daniel‘s swell Si Newhouse photo-montage portrait, illustrator Charlie Powell depicts art dealer Larry Gagosian as a magician pulling one of Cy Twombly‘s glorious 2007 peony paintings and a flutter of cash out of his hat. The graphic accompanied David Segal‘s profile of the press-shy Gagosian, who Segal described as “dogged, unreadable, and enamored with risk.”

Gagosian did not return Segal’s callls for an interview, but Powell delivers. His Larry the Magnificent sports an enigmatic expression—we detect a certain Koonsian exuberance—while behind him floats a row of illustrated masterpieces familiar to any regular visitor to the Gagosian empire: Warhol‘s “Turquoise Marilyn” (purchased by hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen from collector Stefan Edlis in a 2007 private deal brokered by Gagosian), a 1963 spray enamel work by David Smith, and a painting from Twombly’s 2005 Bacchus series, one of which is owned by Aby Rosen and until recently hung in the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel.

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“I think it’s ‘fair use’ in the way that I’ve interpreted it,” artist Shepard Fairey told CBS Sunday Morning of the appropriated Obama image that has him in a legal scuffle with the Associated Press and incurring the wrath of Milton Glaser. “And if you look at pop art over the last 50 years, I think that reinforces that assertion.” Get the full story tomorrow, when Fairey appears on NPR’s Fresh Air. We hear that host Terry Gross will also be talking with AP photographer Mannie Garcia and Rutgers law professor Greg Lastowa. If you miss the radio broadcast, listen at NPR’s website beginning tomorrow afternoon. While you do that, Fairey will be preparing to take the stage for “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy,” a sold-out event hosted by Wired and the New York Public Library. He’ll join the one, the only Lawrence Lessig and moderator Steven Johnson for “a spirited discussion of the emerging remix culture.” Suggest a question by e-mailing LIVEfromtheNYPL@nypl.org (subject: REMIX) by 2pm tomorrow.

In the meantime, enjoy last Sunday’s CBS segment on Fairey in the below video clip. We dare you not to smile when the avuncular Charles Osgood says “guerrilla street artist.”

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Short stories, novels, art criticism, book reviews, an odd little roman à clef written from the perspective of Lee Krasner: the writerly talents of John Updike knew no bounds. Architectural Digest is remembering the literary legend, who died on Tuesday at the age of 76, through a series of articles that he contributed to the magazine over the years. Now featured on the AD website are four of Updike’s “Guest Speaker” pieces, in which he remembers the towns and houses in which he—and the characters he created—lived. “Architecture confines and defines us,” wrote Updike in “Fictional Houses,” published in the January 1985 issue of AD. “Our human world speaks to us, most massively, in its buildings, and a fiction writer cannot make his characters move until he has some imaginative grasp of their environment.”

Nearly 30 years later I can still feel the thrill of power with which, in my first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, I set characters roaming the corridors of an immense imaginary mansion I had based upon an institutional building for the poor and homeless, which had stood at the end of the street where my family had lived in Pennsylvania, but that I had never once, as a child, dared enter. Now, as an author, I climbed even to the cupola, and chased a parakeet down long halls, “channels of wood and plaster” where a crossing made “four staring corners sharp as knives.”

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