Category: visual

“[M]any schools have eliminated or cut back on museum trips, partly because of tight budgets that make it hard to pay for a bus and museum admission, and partly because of the growing emphasis on ‘seat time’ to cover all the material on state tests. To make up for the decline in visits, many museums are taking their lessons to the classroom….”

“[W]hen Dr. Campbell took over in 2000, the institution’s finances were precarious. The college had been running multimillion dollar deficits for years, and its endowment had sunk to a low of $100 million after Sept. 11. Dr. Campbell took advantage of the college’s real estate holdings, including the Chrysler Building, which it owns, to generate new revenue.”

The shop, currently in the lobby, will be relocated to the basement, so Aitken has called “for a broad shaft to be pierced through the museum’s Independence Avenue forecourt…. Aitken hopes his light-filled basement space will function as ‘a personal sanctuary, where you can get lost.’ This is hardly the model most museums use when considering their shops.”

“The Web site, the result of eight years of research by art historians at [Berlin’s Free University], includes works by Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It gives details of the museums they were seized from and their current location, in cases where it is known and where the work wasn’t destroyed.”

A trio of Australian architects proposes “to sheath the conveniently plug-ugly 1960s Broadway Tower at Sydney’s University of Technology with a kind of high-tech negligée that glows in the dark – ‘a transparent cocoonthat acts as a high-performance micro-climate, generates energy with photovoltaic cells, collects rain water, improves day lighting’ [and more …]”

“It’s virtually impossible to tell that on a January afternoon a woman taking an adult education class accidentally fell into the canvas, causing a six-inch vertical tear along the lower right-hand corner.” Now, however, “The Actor” is protected behind plexiglass.

“Marc Mayer, director of National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, called the funding ‘a huge relief’ and an example of the Conservative government being ‘responsive to our needs in the short term.'” But what of the long term?

Frequently the Pritzker has gone “either to stars with overinflated reputations” or to “lesser-known architects whose reputations could not be inflated by any accolade…. This year’s selection of Sejima and Nishizawa, however, marks a significant departure from past Pritzker practices–including those that adversely affected the prize’s credibility.”

The museum “already traveled this path – in 2006, when it selected Toyo Ito to design a new home. The Japanese architect’s response was seductive – an abstract egg crate with thin steel walls – but also prohibitively expensive. Ito and Cal parted ways last fall, and the institution” now intends to “move to the old University of California printing plant.”

The Getty Research Institute recently withdrew “financial support for one of its programs, the Bibliography of the History of Art,” a “searchable database” that “is the most trusted and second most used (slightly behind JSTOR) resource of its kind.” Now “an international conclave of art scholars, librarians and art-history devotees is gathering” to brainstorm.