Category: visual

“The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is launching a $40-million expansion incorporating the 103-year-old Erskine and America Church. The church, which hasn’t had a religious service since 2004, contains 20 of the finest Tiffany stained-glass windows in North America. These will be incorporated into the new museum project.”

“We have more fractional gifts than any museum in the country, something like 800. That change has had an unbelievably negative impact on our acquisition program, a profoundly negative impact. The difference in the number of gifts from one year to the next has dropped off by 80% or something.”

“New York art dealer Lawrence Salander canceled the opening of his last exhibition yesterday after his London-based collaborator removed about half of the artworks planned for the show.”

“If only in the name of scholarship, it is clear that these pieces should be reunited. And the Greeks are willing to go to any length to collaborate with the British Museum (in negotiations that have become increasingly amicable they have, for example, proposed exchanging any number of other antiquities in return). By the time the new Acropolis Museum opens next autumn, it is their hope their actions (and, in this case, the stones) will speak louder than any legal argument over the ownership of the objects. And the tide appears to be turning in their favour.”

“One reason the complex [in San Francisco] has attracted so much attention is that it embraces two architectural values that often are at odds: sustainability and pure aesthetics. Mayne boasts of how the tower should consume just one-third the energy of a typical California office building, saving enough electricity to power 600 homes per year. But the perforated steel panels that are supposed to filter the sun and glare don’t hang straight against the slab. They careen up and over the tower: ‘I’m interested in skin as a sculptural idea’.”

“The large number of recent, relatively young hires at the Museum of Modern Art, including four new chief curators in the last two years, and the looming retirement of three major curators — chief curator for paintings and sculpture John Elderfield, chief curator-at-large Kynaston McShine, and deputy director (and director of P.S. 1) Alanna Heiss — suggest that the museum is in the midst of a significant directional and generational shift.”

“With the phasing out by April, 2008, of the federal government’s Exhibition Transport Services, Canadian museums and art galleries predict that the price of shipping art across this country is about to triple.”

“Former Seattle art dealer Kurt Lidtke, who was convicted of stealing artworks and still owes victims more than $400,000, left a tangle of deception in his wake that may never fully be unraveled. The scale and duration of his misdeeds are unprecedented in the Northwest art trade and have rattled a community accustomed to doing business on trust and a handshake.”

“An African-American museum on this scale — cost estimates range from $300 million to $500 million — is beyond hyphenation. Though it will of course tell the history of slavery, its perversions and its legacy, along with the much-hyphenated explorations of identity and culture that ensued, the museum’s tale of interactions may be more profound than any other hyphenated account. American history and black American history cannot be split apart.”

“The traditional role of the artist has changed beyond all recognition – and we feel that change on the institutional side of the art world as well.”