Category: visual

“The roughly 17,500 museums in the United States receive 850 million visitors annually.” But “major museums have frozen recruitment and salaries, laid off receptionists and café staff, slowed acquisitions, and postponed or cancelled expansion projects. Curatorial staff in charge of preserving and showcasing museum collections and overseeing exhibitions may also face layoffs – though that is likely to be a last resort.”

The imaginative makeover of Alice Tully Hall bodes well for the refurbishment of New York’s Lincoln Center.

“In the past decade, there has been no art too sorry to be sold at auction, no art too brainless, slapdash, repetitive, obnoxious or devoid of originality. Whatever you had, some dealer or auctioneer could probably sell it; the ravening maws were always eager to be stuffed.”

The economic downturn squeezes more museums…

“The new project would become the permanent home for the Broad Collections, with over 2,000 artworks, and would also house a research and study center, as well as the Broad Art Foundation’s administrative headquarters.”

“The travelling exhibition, announced at Tate Modern yesterday, will include many of the 725 cutting-edge artworks given by… Anthony D’Offay to Tate and National Galleries of Scotland last year, on proviso that [they]… be displayed across the nation rather than hidden away in the vaults… and occasionally wheeled out for an urbane London audience.”

“French photographer Patrick Cariou has launched a lawsuit against Richard Prince, claiming that the artist improperly lifted images from Cariou’s photographic survey of Rastafarian culture for a recent series of paintings. The suit, filed in New York, also names as defendants Larry Gagosian, Prince’s dealer who displayed the series in a recent show titled ‘Canal Zone’, and publishing house Rizzoli, which co-produced the catalogue.”

“Street painters are part of the romantic lure of Montmartre. … Today, some 300 officially licensed artists work here. Almost all of their customers are tourists. They may not produce great art but they are skilled painters. And now they say their livelihoods are at risk because many of the souvenir shops in the area are selling cheap, mass-produced paintings from China and Eastern Europe.”

“A portrait of actor Colin Firth as Mr Darcy has fetched £12,000 at Bonhams in London, double its estimated price. The oil painting, a prop from the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, received a number of advance bids. The painting was accompanied by a signed letter from Firth, in which the 48-year-old star claimed Mr Darcy ‘has weathered better than most of us’.”

“Nothing about [the new Bergen-Belsen Memorial] dramatizes information for visitors the way, say, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington apparently feels it needs to. Divorced as it is from the sites of persecution, it turns relics of genocide like a Zyklon B canister and a cattle car that transported Jews to Auschwitz into props. Bergen-Belsen has the camp as evidence, or what’s left of it.”