Category: visual

“The National Trust says 2009 looks likely to be its commercial arm’s ‘biggest ever year’ as perfumed drawer liners and lemon curd prove to be the season’s must-haves. Its flagship stores at properties such as Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland and the Sackville-Wests’ ancestral home at Sissinghurst, Kent are proving to be the culture sector’s equivalent of Harrods and Selfridges this year…. Other leading institutions, from the Victoria & Albert Museum to the Natural History Museum, are also chalking up strong sales.”

“David Gilbert, chairman of the Contemporary Arts Society finance committee, has set up an initiative that aims to generate up to 30% extra revenue for UK museums and galleries–a welcome move at a time of major funding and sponsorship worries. Culture Label (www.culturelabel.com) is an online venture that unites the retail outlets of 60 British arts institutions, allowing worldwide access to their products.”

The National Geographic Society’s archive encompasses “more than 11 million images richly documenting the life of the 20th century, from Uganda to the Mississippi Delta to remote lamaseries near the Mongolian border,” a collection it is opening “to the fine-art market for the first time. National Geographic’s goal is to find private and institutional collectors for the vintage black-and-white prints and later color images.”

“When cryptic posters portraying President Obama as the Joker from Batman began popping up around Los Angeles and other cities, the question many asked was, Who is behind the image? Was it an ultra-conservative grassroots group or a disgruntled street artist going against the grain? Nope, it turns out, just a 20-year-old college student from Chicago.” (The question of who added the word “socialism” and spread the image around remains unanswered.)

Painter and installation artist Subodh Kerkar is about to open an exhibition in a beach resort town in Goa featuring images of the elephant-headed god Ganesh in various guises: as Rodin’s Thinker, performing a Maori war dance, as an Oscar statuette, and so on. Several militant Hindu groups are threatening demonstrations and violence against the show and the artist; Kerkar protests that he is himself a devotee of Ganesh.

Michael Govan receives a per diem of “$1,000 a night to stay in his own New York condominium, while there on museum business,” to a maximum of $36,000 a year. Says Christopher Knight: “It’s about time, not money. Do the math: The payment means that out of 1,095 days total, the director was paid for working 103 days in New York. On a six- or even seven-day work week, that’s 10% of his time.”

While there are a few showplace mosques, many houses of worship for British Muslims are drab little storefronts or repurposed churches with a dome or minaret tacked on. Sometimes, immigrants from simple South Asian villages are recreating the modest spaces they knew at home; other times, grander plans for mosques encounter fierce local opposition. Might the neighbors be won over by genuinely beautiful architecture?

None other than “Michelangelo built a road up to the mountain [near Pietrasanta], which he named Altissima (the highest). His reward was a marble of unsurpassed whiteness, ideal for sculpture. Artists – from Giambologna and Vasari to Joan Miró, Henry Moore and more recently Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn – have been flocking to Pietrasanta ever since.”

“After-hours at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin,” a scene unfolds “that has already taken or soon will be taking place at 49 other museums, one in each state: the opening of a gift of 50 works of art sent by Herb and Dorothy Vogel. … Unlike some donors, the Vogels imposed only two minimal conditions to their gift: that the entire gift be exhibited together once within five years, and that it be deaccessioned only as a whole.”

“The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., today announced that it has hired Don Bacigalpi, current director of the Toledo Museum of Art, to be its new director. The announcement means that the Toledo Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art will be looking for new directors simultaneously this fall.”