Category: visual

The museum, which is expected to open in 2010, will be Ms. Hadid’s first university building and only her second project in the United States, after the 2003 Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati.

“An individual occupying both sides of the critical/commercial divide is not the same as either a magazine carrying gallery advertisements alongside its reviews, or a publication such as Frieze also organising an art fair.”

“Sotheby’s now lags behind the Standard & Poor’s 500 index after enriching investors for five straight years. It slipped as much as 8.8 percent today, compared with a 3.1 percent fall in the S&P 500, before both rebounded. For the year, Sotheby’s is down 22.4 percent, or more than twice as much as the S&P, which has lost 9.1 percent.”

“Nine months after taking over as acting director at the National Museum of Natural History, biologist Paul G. Risser has announced he is returning to an academic post in Oklahoma… Risser said he had planned to spend only six months in the job.”

“It’s a public cultural asset highlighting a rich public national history, and it should be a public building because it’s the responsibility of the state to safeguard our history and culture. This is totally embarrassing for Canada. I’m appalled.”

“We are living through an exciting time for political art. The central figure in this group is Banksy, but although he attracts most of the press coverage, he is surrounded by a growing band of talented, politically committed artists.”

“The heirs of the greatest czarist-era collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov, called for compensation from the Russian government to redress the 1918 confiscation of their ancestors’ artworks.”

“A new book suggests that many of the Royal Ontario Museum’s most precious treasures were smuggled illegally out of China in the 1930s in violation of a national ban on cultural exports. The antiquities were secretly spirited out of China by a Canadian missionary, an Anglican bishop named William Charles White, who sometimes packed them in the luggage of other missionaries to avoid detection.”

Last month revelations about travel spending by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian outgoing director Richard West, rocked the museum. This month new director Kevin Grover takes over. “This isn’t my first rodeo,” he said last week. “I took a few poundings in the past.”

“Now that American museums have acceded to demands for restitution, it’s time to ask not only what ‘universal museums’ can do for antiquities’ countries of origin, but also what the source countries can do for the world’s encyclopedic museums.”