Category: visual

“With its endowment down nearly 30 percent since late 2007, with several of its departments planning 10 percent budget cuts and with 27 positions eliminated at its business unit in 2009, the Smithsonian Institution still sees some silver linings in the stormy economic skies.” Among them: “Visitor attendance is up compared with the first three months of last year, with 5.3 million people passing through its museums thus far in 2009.”

“The choice of design for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture may well be the highest-profile architectural decision that will be made in Washington for years to come.” The six competing designs offer a choice: “to go forward and break with the punishing conventions that have stymied our architectural creativity, or to build yet another blandly institutional building, a fading echo of something that was never very good to begin with.” One design stands out.

“A mural by urban artist Banksy in Bristol has been daubed with red paint. A group called Appropriate Media said it painted over the picture, entitled The Mild Mild West, as a protest over the Stokes Croft area being gentrified. … In a statement on its website, Appropriate Media said: ‘Graffiti artists are the performing spray-can monkeys for gentrification.'”

In Los Angeles, “a city long derided for haphazard planning, a lack of appreciation for its own history and occasional dead-of-night demolitions,” a comprehensive survey of structures, now in the pilot phase, “aims to understand what remains on the ground, what has been lost and what might be worth saving from the wrecking ball.”

“For old television shows, there’s Hulu. For college lectures, there’s iTunes U. And now, for videos about art, there’s ArtBabble, a Web site created by the Indianapolis Museum of Art that offers videos from sources including the Museum of Modern Art and the PBS series ‘Art:21.'”

“Field Museum officials rushed to work before dawn Friday to frantically remove nearly 200 historical artifacts from a storage room, where a leaking roof had caused many of the objects to get wet, said Lance Grande, a senior vice president of the museum who oversees collections and research.” Masks, textiles and baskets were among the objects.

“For more than 50 years conservators around the world have sought to prevent damage to the varied objects in their collections by observing a uniform climate-control mantra… But as museum budgets shrink, energy costs spiral, and gradual climate changes make the traditional HVAC system more costly to maintain, conservators and other museum experts are rethinking this model.”

“To approach the old part of the city by means of the Via Roma is like walking through a ghost town. There are no cars, no noise. A lonesome bird cries out above, and the diesel engines of a bulldozer rumble in the distance. All of a sudden, there is another aftershock — it feels like a giant has stomped his foot down.”

“Sotheby’s biannual Asian sales in Hong Kong, often seen as a barometer for Chinese art market sentiment, were noticeably smaller this time round given the weak market conditions. Yet some experts said a combination of cheaper, more realistic valuations and a condensed offering lacking in major blockbuster works, had drawn an unexpectedly robust showing.”

“SFMOMA has no building plan on the drawing board but wants to add to its footprint on the north, east and south sides of its site on Third Street, where the institution has purchased land. The changes envisioned would not alter the street facade of the building. Offices now scattered at several locations would be consolidated.”