Friday's Art Notes

_-- Every 20 minutes, Anish Kapoor's "Shooting into the Corner" fires red wax at a wall in the "Royal Academy of Arts":http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/anish-kapoor/about/ in London. The exhibition, which closes Friday, is the most successful by a living artist to be held at the Royal Academy and the most popular sculpture exhibition ever held in London. You can watch video of the canon firing "here":http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/anish-kapoor/about/. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images.)_ * The "Whitney":http://www.whitney.org/ announced "the lineup of artists":http://www.artforum.com/archive/id=24390 appearing in its 2010 Biennial on Thursday. The show will be smaller than recent years -- 55 artists instead of 81 from 2008 -- and there is no special theme (curator Francesco Bonami says the theme is simply '2010'). The show is meant to be more consciously reflective of the state of art and of the world at the moment (that moment being February 25 - May 30). * The son of famous fantasy artist Frank Franzetta (best known for Conan the Barbarian comics) "allegedly tried to steal paintings worth $20 million":http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jAMuxHRJYwT0G6zdqHW4GDR231eQD9CGOHVO0 when he broke into the artist's own museum with a backhoe. Alfonso Frank Frazetta has been charged with theft, burgalry and trespassing. * Thomas Hoving, the man who transformed the Metropolitan Museum of Art into its modern incarnation, "died at age 78 at his home in Manhattan":http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/arts/design/11hoving.html?hpw. The Met's youngest director at age 35 when he started in 1967, Hoving helped start collections that were more contemporary and culturally diverse, but also built a reputation as a "shark."