Category: visual

“The Italian branch of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has just produced a paper denouncing the practice of charging money to lend a work. This is not about wide-ranging projects such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi, where the Gulf state is paying e1bn over 30 years into an endowment fund for French museums not just to lend works of art but effectively create a whole museum culture.”

“Its collection of late Egyptian sculpture was, until now, the second largest in North America. Brooklyn curator Dr Edna Russmann, who is concluding a study of the works, warns that other museums which acquired Coptic sculptures in the past 50 years are likely to face similar problems.”

“An international team of archaeologists which made an unpublicised visit to southern Iraq last month found no evidence of recent looting–contrary to long-expressed claims about sustained illegal digging at major sites.”

“Four tenacious bidders vied for his “Three Studies for Self-Portrait” from 1975 in what became the evening’s longest bidding war, with two would-be buyers on the phone still running up the price, even as it passed $30 million. The final tally was $34.4 million.”

“In 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation identified 100 communities in 20 states where teardowns were taking place in architecturally significant neighborhoods. By 2008 the list had grown to around 500 communities in 40 states — with about a third of those in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.”

“If extreme scarcity makes it easier to exaggerate the merit of the remaining works by artists whose truly great pictures rarely come up at auction, it also leads to some real gems being overlooked. As art supplies shrink, so does connoisseurship – the most gifted connoisseurs are only as good as the sum total of what they have trained their eyes on.”

“The most cogent argument for not hijacking the Barnes to Philadelphia wasn’t that it shouldn’t be changed at all, that Dr. Barnes wouldn’t approve. He has been dead for 57 years. It was that the foundation represented a rare historical artifact, whose distinctive genius loci, like that of Bartram’s Garden in Southwest Philadelphia, described a precious and irreplaceable historical context for novel innovations in art education.”

“The reopening will mark completion of the first part of a $350 million expansion and renovation aimed at transforming the museum. By 2012, two new wings will rise to bracket the 1916 building and the 1971 education facility, joined by a huge glass atrium. The museum sees it as a project that will lift the city’s fortunes along with its own.”

“In a global city where architecture is a constantly evolving art form on an ever grander scale, the Tiffany dome is more of a cherished family heirloom, one that nearly got tossed in the rubbish, but luckily escaped.”

“The idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United States as culturally barbaric. Powell’s insight was that competing with the Bolshoi would be futile and in any case unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets couldn’t match — and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late ’50s, when segregation in the South was tarnishing the American image.”