Category: visual

“Last year’s crash may have halted a mighty transformation of the New York skyline, though [the renovated Alice Tully Hall] is among the welcome fruits of the boom that New York will enjoy in 2009 and beyond.” What to do for the present? “New York has a storied history of erecting great public works when times were hard — from the Triboro Bridge to Riverside Park. Now we should prove we can still do it.”

“Scientist Dusan Stulik, researcher Art Kaplan and photographic conservator Tram Vo have developed a new way to authenticate historic photographs. Instead of relying on human eyes and microscopes to date photographic images, as in the past, the Getty specialists devised a scientific method that can determine the age of many photographs made in the 20th century.”

“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has written to the Smithsonian raising questions about the caption that sits beneath its new portrait of George W. Bush. The current wording of the caption states that Bush’s term was marked by ‘the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.’ Sanders, bless his heart, points out that the 9/11 attacks — all together, now — had nothing to do with the Iraq war.”

Director Lewis Sharp said the cuts will be achieved primarily through belt-tightening and will not involve layoffs or significant changes to the museum’s operations. The museum has about 200 employees.

“Architecture and design, the practical arts, are much more closely related to the economy than music or novels. You don’t need wealth to write a novel; history shows that poverty is a positive stimulus to literature. Yet the architecture and design of the last century can only be properly understood as the economy made visible.”

“It is unfortunate that it has dragged along to this unhelpful time economically. I honestly don’t know why it has dragged along. From the valuations and things being bandied about, I don’t know if I’m doing that well. I think the nation is probably doing pretty well. I’m sure the figure is a good deal lower than it would have been.”

“Several of our veteran museums are doing by undoing: loosening up the rigid values and temple-of-art models that shaped them, and replacing these with a new ‘people’s museum’ model, unsacred in atmosphere, fluid in values, with complicated answers to the question of what museums are. The results of this thinking range from great to work-in-progress gauche to soul-selling bad.”

“What could be more self-evident than the rightness of returning works of art stolen by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s to the heirs of their Jewish owners? Yet nothing in today’s art world is more absurd and insidiously destructive.”

“What is absolutely certain is that this recession has come in the nick of time, and that we should welcome it with open arms. The art world has spent a decade and a half metamorphosing into something ugly and worthless. That process has been halted. There is hope.”

“Museum directors tend to voice only hedged opinions about art. Their positions put them at risk of offending too many people. Katherine French, by contrast, is unusually forthright. She has opinions, she has passions, and she is excited to share them.”