This past spring, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts rented out 21 Monets to a commercial art gallery operating inside a Las Vegas casino. On April 13, the casino lost power for three days, and the paintings may have been left baking in the desert heat while the juice was restored. Tough luck? You bet, and according to many in the museum world, a serious ethical lapse by the MFA as well. There are codes to which accredited museums and their directors must supposedly adhere, but according to AJ Blogger Tyler Green, those codes are frequently flouted, and rarely enforced. “Critics [have] warned about what might happen when a museum considered money-making to be more important than caring for and conserving art. When the electricity died at Bellagio, an academic debate was transformed into a real-life disaster.”
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Searching For A Scream
Authorities in Norway still say they have no solid leads in the theft of Munch’s The Scream from an Oslo gallery, but police have reportedly raided several addresses in the city over the last month, in the hope that the paintings will turn up in the abodes of known criminals. Drug warrants have been used as a pretext for the raids, which have so far yielded nothing of value.
A Connecticut Copyright Conundrum, On Canvas
A provocative painting by Damien Loeb has been removed from an exhibit in Connecticut after copyright issues were raised. The painting, like much of Loeb’s work, contains photographic images appropriated from other artists’ work, and worked into Loeb’s canvas. The artist has faced legal challenges to his appropriation before, and has vehemently defended his right to employ the technique.
Staying Afloat By Selling Off The Stock
Times are tough for art institutions and foundations across North America. And one of the dirty little secrets of the business is that such organizations frequently keep themselves afloat fiscally by selling off bits of their collections. But is it ethical to do so? The answer depends on whom you ask, and there doesn’t seem to be any general agreement. But for foundations which refuse to give up any piece of their collections, (such as Philadelphia’s notoriously strapped Barnes Foundation,) the alternative can be serious financial hardship and even insolvency.
Apple Ignores Indies
Apple’s wildly successful iTunes service, from which consumers can download music cheaply and legally, is still the industry standard, despite ever-increasing competition. But Apple has yet to make available the music of a raft of independent record labels based in Europe, despite having signed licensing agreements with them. Since much of the most popular music in Europe and the UK is property of such labels, this is a major problem for music fans, but Apple seems to feel little sense of urgency about making the tracks avalable.
An Artist So Popular, He Can’t Be Any Good
“François Boucher was surely the most beguiling painter who ever lived, capable of giving the most pleasure to the client – and presumably the sitter too.” And yet, Boucher’s reputation lies at the bottom of a pile of more “high-minded” painters, a victim of the popularity he enjoyed in life. And while it’s true that Boucher was perhaps a bit too infatuated with small, unimportant work (designing Easter eggs for a king, for example,) he was also an undeniably brilliant artist who was forever being plastered with labels he did not deserve. In the end, his greatest crime in the eyes of today’s elitist art audience may have been making too many people happy.
COC Opens With Atwood
The Canadian Opera Company has never before opened its season with a contemporary work, but that changes this week, with the Canadian premiere of Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the darkly horrifying novel by Margaret Atwood. Canadians love seeing art made by other Canadians, of course, but Handmaid, full of violence, rape, and the unceasing degradation of an entire nation of women, is quite a gamble. The production won raves in Copenhagen, but was roundly panned in London. The COC has gone out of its way to insure that Toronto audiences will embrace the show.
From Page To Stage
“When an opera company produces something by Verdi or Puccini, there isn’t quite the excitement of staging something based on the work of your own most celebrated living novelist. Subscriptions are on the rise, and single tickets are hard to come by. This could mean Atwood is the greatest marketing opportunity Bradshaw and the COC have ever had.” Still, the story, which sees the U.S. replaced by a brutal theocracy, is hard to take in print, let alone on stage, and Atwood has always had reservations about allowing her work to be adapted in any way.
America’s Most Secure Opera Company (No, It’s Not The Met)
By current classical music standards, the Lyric Opera of Chicago is a wildly successful operation, selling 98% of its seats and projecting a surplus of $700,000 for the current season. The enviable culture of philanthropy in Chicago helps, as does the city’s huge population and the willingness of certain patrons to pony up $12,500 for a ticket to this weekend’s season-opening gala. In an era when serious opera is becoming a luxury unavailable to denizens of most U.S. cities, the Lyric is the shining example of how to build a serious company outside of New York.
DIA Struggles For Solvency
The Detroit Institute of the Arts is midway through a decade-long fundraising campaign intended to put the museum on firm fiscal ground for the foreseeable future, and many in the community had assumed that the DIA was well on its way to success. But last week, executives announced that its original goal of $331 million was not nearly enough to cope with structural issues and unforeseen costs (such as $40 million for asbestos removal.) The new goal is $410 million, to be raised within the next ten years.