Polaroid Goes to Auction, UN Building Reno, US Archives Joins The Commons

Bloomberg reports that Sotheby’s will be selling off the world-renowned Polaroid photo collection during an auction that is slated to take place June 21 and 22 at the company’s Manhattan offices. More than 1,200 works, including art by Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Harry Callahan, Imogen Cunningham, Chuck Close, Robert Frank, David Hockney, Dorothea Lange, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Edward Weston, will go on sale. Many people are opposed to the sale but no buyer or institution has come forward to save the historic corporate collection.

Worldfocus gives us an update on the renovation of New York’s United Nations headquarters, which will be completed in 2013. What’s interesting is that instead of updating the design the supervising architect is going to do his utmost to make sure everything adheres to the original vision:

“We are going back to the old coloring of the glass that has the film on there that was done for blast protection several years ago,” he said…“Basically the UN will look exactly as it did when the ribbon was originally cut,” said Adlerstein.

The US National Archives has joined The Commons on Flickr and they have already made 3,000 photos available to the public, including Mathew Brady’s historic Civil War photos:

The U.S. National Archives has digitized over 6,000 images from the seriesMathew Brady Photographs of Civil War-Era Personalities and Scenes (National Archives’s Local Identifier 111-B) and included them in our online catalog. We plan to upload all of the ones available in the online catalog to Flickr gradually over a few months.

Also available are 220 images by Ansel Adams.

The New York Times reports that a new cargo regulation is creating jitters in the art world. The U.S. government has announced that starting August, 1, 2010, art will not be exempt from TSA search regulations:

But those responsible for safeguarding art will soon have a new category of anxiety, the stuff of real nightmares: the possibility that airline employees could open carefully crated works of art to search them the way checked baggage is sometimes searched now, poking around Picassos instead of sweaters and socks.

The absurd (and possibly crazy) media-attention monster that is Jerry Saltz is spiraling out of control and the New York Observer gives Jerry Saltz a very public blowjob in its fluff piece titled, “The Many Friends of Jerry Saltz.” Thankfully, the Observer gets a smack down by C-Monster’s Carolina Miranda, who asks some basic questions that is part of Journalism 101:

I gotta admit, that as much as I relish El Saltzino’s ranting in the same trashy way I love domestic beer and a good diving elbow drop, it’s kinda weird that this story didn’t include a single critical reaction — or reactions from people mentioned in the story (um, like Klaus Biesenbach or Tyler Green). And it doesn’t even mention John Yau. A real missed opportunity for some interesting reading.

Three newspapers were named World’s Best Designed:

• der Freitag (Berlin, Germany, circulation 12,400),
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (Germany, circulation: 347,000),  and
• The New York Times (New York City; circulation: 800,000).