nErD aLeRt!

“Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum,” which opened Friday, features 193 schemes for Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Fifth Avenue rotunda, that corkscrew structure that has delighted many (and also maddened quite a few) since it was built in 1959.

The exhibition is part of the museum’s continuing 50th anniversary celebration, and most of the designs will be auctioned off at an event in March, with proceeds going to future programming. (via)

[Doris] Salcedo’s mash-up submission combines a downward view of the rotunda with a photograph of a New York tenement by the German-born artist Hans Haacke. The tenement photograph, part of his series documenting the holdings of a local real-estate baron, was scheduled to be featured in the 1971 Haacke show at the Guggenheim that was canceled for what were widely believed at the time to be political concerns by the museum’s director.

[Anish] Kapoor, the sculptor, who currently has a huge steel installation on view at the museum, proposed what he called a “smoke event,” a bright red plume that would be released from a smoke machine at the bottom of the rotunda and travel upward.