Category: visual

Late Thursday, Jehuda Reinharz told alumni in an email: “The Rose is NOT going to close.” Instead, he said the university’s board had voted to keep it as a “teaching and exhibition gallery.” But others at the museum dispute Reinharz’s claim.

“Richard Koshalek says it still smarts that he got dumped as president of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, and that he intends to remain a networker par excellence in his new job as director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.”

For the past 10 years, Koshalek has been president of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. Last year, Koshalek was released from the final year of his contract by the school’s board of trustees after protests by student, faculty and alumni over tuition increases and Koshalek’s plan to have a Frank Gehry-designed, $50 million library and research center.

“It’s all too easy to suggest that the cloudy alliances between museums and commercial galleries are fundamentally about money. Money, of course, especially now, plays into everything, but museums and curators needn’t abandon their independence and critical distance because of some fatuous notion of being soiled by money if they cooperate with commercial galleries.”

“The organizers of the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair have invited the South American country to showcase its artistic heritage. But the custodians of Argentina’s national art collection are unable to comply with the German curator’s request because of the country’s ban on overseas art loans aimed at preventing litigant creditors from seizing government-owned assets.”

Richard Armstrong’s vision for the Guggenheim is a return to its mandate after it opened in 1959. “We’ll be assertive,” he says. “We need to expand on the original optimism and taste for the utopian that guided the museum in its beginnings.”

After a search of more than a year, the Smithsonian has chosen Richard Koshalek to be the next director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Koshalek presided over extraordinary growth in his 17 years (1983-99) at MOCA in Los Angeles; last year he was forced out as president of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design in a conflict over tuition and a $50 million library designed by Frank Gehry.

Many Chinese saw the blaze – which happened on the last day of Lunar New Year celebrations – that destroyed part of the enormous Rem Koolhaas/OMA complex as a bad omen. That towering inferno “might also have been a funeral pyre of sorts, a symbolic end of the architectural excess that has hallmarked China’s post-Mao binge-building boom.”

“The High Museum of Art will cut salaries, enforce furloughs and trim 7 percent of its workforce,” a move that, combined with previous reductions, “will bring $1.4 million in savings and shrink its operating budget for fiscal year 2009 to $23.7 million, the museum said. … Director Michael Shapiro will take a 7 percent pay cut and other director-level employees will take a 6 percent pay cut. All other employees will take a 5 percent pay cut. “

“Faced with a 27 percent drop in the value of its endowment funds and expected cuts in state and local government grants, the Walters Art Museum announced yesterday a restructuring plan that includes laying off seven of its 150 employees, imposing a salary and limited hiring freeze and staff furloughs, and canceling an exhibition that was to have had the museum collaborating with the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Getty in Los Angeles.”