Category: visual

“The environmental damage is largely the result of heating in the abbey, which reduces relative humidity. This is now thought to vary from around 30% to 80% throughout the year, a very high range.”

It’s been five years. “The two galleries which are set to reopen, with Assyrian and Islamic antiquities, contain large and almost immovable objects. This means that the security risks are lower than with smaller items in glass cases.”

The Denver Art Museum has an eye-catching new building, and the attention of the public. So what now? DAM’s director says that the museum is now focused on building its permanent collection, and displaying as much of it as possible.

“Fairies and other spirits have long haunted the words and images of English literature,” and the illustrators whose drawings fill the pages of classic English tales created a fantasy world that endures to this day. But is there something sinister, even inhuman, lurking beneath the pen strokes?

The highly profitable sale of a collection of Chinese jade pieces recently displayed at a Boston museum is raising eyebrows in the art world. Ethicists have concerns “about a nonprofit museum giving its imprimatur to works owned by wealthy collectors who are generous donors to the institution.”

“A number of major French cultural projects–including a proposed public art centre on the Ile Seguin and the expansion of the Palais de Tokyo contemporary art centre, both in Paris–are under threat following the unveiling of France’s Culture budget for 2008, the first drawn up by President Sarkozy’s centre-right government.”

“For years before the shutdown, the financially strained museum was operating at reduced strength, with curtailed hours and closed galleries. The rethought collection is an experiment in progress.”

“All this international attention is inevitably transforming what has, until relatively recently, been an edgy, underground scene. The rapid commercialisation of the art scene has, however, prompted soul-searching.”

“As in the stock market, winners seek out the unknown and buy low. Smart Asian collectors who are getting into the Japanese market like it now because, compared with China, it is undervalued.”

“The VAG has long outgrown its current home on Robson Street, a former provincial courthouse that was built in 1906 and reconfigured in the early 1980s by Vancouver architect Arthur Erickson to house the gallery.”