Category: issues

So if artwork is unfinished it’s not really by the artist? “A visit to any gallery will throw up plenty of examples of unfinished art. Last year’s Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery featured several pictures that the painter had not completed; they had great lacunae or only one level of paint. There is also a roaring interest in sketches, which are by definition not the finished work; the queues at the Victoria and Albert museum for the Da Vinci exhibition bore this out.”

Kaywin Feldman, 41, is “currently director of the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis. She’ll be the first female MIA director in a history that stretches back to the founding of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts in 1883. She replaces William Griswold, who is moving to New York to head the Morgan Library & Museum.”

“Americans have always been skeptical of government support for the arts, with one shining exception. When it comes to publicity driven congressional investigations into comic book reading, risque dancing, dirty songwriting and the many other threats to the commonweal that crazy kids throughout the ages have considered ‘dope,’ this nation has been happy to devote its tax base to the enrichment of world culture. So props to Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.), who today will be getting to the bottom of this whole gangsta rap business.”

“Criticism means never saying you are sorry. It means shrugging off mistakes and freely acknowledging you got it wrong that other time. Most of all it means attaining a greater level of honesty and clarity than you ever achieve in everyday conversation. This brings me to what is wrong with the art criticism that appears in magazines. It’s too much like conversation.”

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz made the argument this week at Yale. As a libertarian, Boaz argued for the protection of individual freedoms, and he asserted that when the government funds the arts, they are in danger of being limited by specific guidelines.

“Leading artists and fashion designers are appealing to the Prime Minister not to cut arts funding in England. Arts Council England has said it will need to find an extra £12 million in funding to save some institutions from facing closure.”

“Four statues of Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu deity revered as the remover of obstacles, are to be removed in the next few days from outside Edmonton’s Shaw Conference Centre after adamant objections from Alberta Hindus… Ryan McCourt’s sculptures, which have been on display for 10 months, were placed at the centre under Edmonton’s Art and Design in Public Places Program, a corporate-municipal-non-profit partnership seeking to show large-scale sculptures produced by many artists in the region.”

“A group of trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian have complained to the Smithsonian Institution that they were excluded from the selection of Kevin Gover as the new director of the museum.” The museum is standing by its search process, and the Gover appointment.

“Politicians worry, I suppose, that an enjoyment of the arts will mark them out as elitist. And yet, statistics tell us, far more of us are attending live performances than are going to football matches.”

“Next week the local authority will consider Oxford University’s solution, a £29m new store to hold 7.8m books, which the Bodleian estimates would not only solve the current crisis but also give it shelving space for the next 20 years. However, many in Oxford regard it as the wrong building in the wrong place and claim it could pose a threat to cherished views. They also point out that it will be sited on a flood plain.”