Category: visual

In Kansas City, Mo., “the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art unveiled in November a new suite of ‘wow’ galleries in its original building: More than 6,000 square feet of completely redesigned space for what has suddenly emerged as one of our most important museum collections of American Indian art.”

“The museum appears to be the latest cultural victim of the current economic downturn. It joins a growing list of about 20 U.S. museums of various types and sizes that have folded in the last year,” and its demise leaves a void in a city that doesn’t have a wealth of other cultural options.

Christopher Downey, a Northern California architect, “said he and Lisbon’s Carlos Mourão Pereira joke that their meeting three months ago was the ‘first-ever International Blind Architects Conference.’ But the questions that engage the men are deeply serious: What makes a building beautiful if you can’t see it, and how can you create beautiful structures if you’re blind?”

In one week, both the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York named new leaders from outside the museum world. Together the appointments “represent a kind of wake-up call for museums in general. They point to a return to basics in American museum culture.”

“With financial windfalls no longer papering over systemic problems, museums are considering moves that were unthinkable, or just unnecessary, in frothier years. Behaviour modification may be the silver lining of this crisis. The result may be museums better equipped to confront 21st-century realities.”

“Having sold them art, he’ll try to sell them on giving large sums of money to MOCA, in hopes of delivering the museum from what he describes as an ‘austerity budget’ that can’t support a program of exhibitions commensurate with its reputation….”

“On Jan. 5, inscriptions similar to the Cylinder’s were found on two pieces of cuneiform tablets from Babylonia in the museum’s collections. The pieces will be studied to shed light on the Cylinder’s ‘missing’ or ‘obscure’ passages, the museum said, and presented at a London workshop involving Iranian colleagues.”

A court battle is raging in Mexico over a batch of “new” works discovered in 2004. Now a second trove has turned up in Mexico City.

“American museum directors typically come from within the curatorial, academic or other nonprofit ranks. No major art museum in the United States is directed by a former owner of a commercial art gallery. Deitch, who began working in a SoHo art gallery in the mid-1970s, opened Deitch Projects, a commercial space, in 1996. He also serves as corporate art consultant to the international law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and several other corporations.”

“The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art appears ready to name New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch its new director, according to multiple art world sources. An official announcement will be made on Monday morning; reached via email, Deitch admitted he was in “discussion” with MOCA.”