Category: visual

The Victoria & Albert Museum is considering renting out paintings it doesn’t have room to show. “The V&A has 2,000 oil paintings, which makes it the country’s third largest collection. The difficulty, however, is that there is only space to show 170 oil paintings in its refurbished picture galleries, which were opened three years ago. A further 180 are on show in other galleries.”

A Vienna-based restitution organization has unveiled a massive database listing thousands of art objects which may have been looted from Austria by marauding Nazi soldiers during World War II. “The items are now in museums and collections owned by the Austrian government or the city of Vienna. The origin of most are still in question, and it remains to be determined if they were in fact looted… The fund is required by law to auction off items for which no owners or heirs are found and distribute the proceeds to Nazi victims. No deadline has yet been set for processing claims.”

“With no director and a board in flux, the Dia Art Foundation has scrapped its plans to open a museum at the entrance to the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway line in Manhattan.” The Dia’s exit from the project leaves the door open for other New York museums to move in, and there is already speculation that the Whitney is interested.

“Hirst has not had a good idea for 13 years. In 1993 he created Mother and Child Divided, the most poetic of his animal works. After that, he started to flail… Hirst’s waning originality gives this accusation of plagiarism more resonance. With each new show, the paucity and repetition of Hirst’s art is more blatant.”

“The French government is determined to help Paris regain its status as an art market. They’re giving tax breaks and making it easy for French 21st century creations to be exhibited worldwide.” Thus Paris’ FIAC art fair.

The Canadian parliament has been debating museum funding. “Members of Parliament debated the plight of Canadian museums for more than three hours in the House of Commons Monday. On Tuesday, they adopted a motion calling for funding for the Museum Assistance Program to be restored to $12 million annually, reversing the reduction of $2.3 million scheduled for this year.”

Just how valuable were the paintings Lord Beaverbrook gave to a Canadian gallery back in the 1950s? Testifying at an arbitration hearing in Fredericton on Tuesday, Sir Maxwell Aitken “suggested that the original Lord Beaverbrook might have bent the truth about giving a series of valuable paintings to the gallery to persuade his rich friends to make similar donations to his pet cause.”

Mount Vernon has just spent $110 million on a face-lift that includes two new buildings, and visitors are going to be herded through the whole, highly choreographed museum experience, like it or not. “People are channeled with the same linear certainty as cars in a car wash. The goal of the visit, Mount Vernon, becomes a surreal glimpse of the real, framed by dizzying bits of entertainment.”

After decades as a drab, new-brutalist monstrosity, London’s Brunswick Centre has morphed into an appealing place to be. “The building has always had its admirers, but for decades this corner of Bloomsbury has been one of the most miserable places in London – a rain-streaked, litter-strewn concrete bunker of empty shop units, whose ambitious, space-age design only accentuated its sense of failure.” The reason for the Brunswick’s belated success? Someone finally honored the architect’s original, very non-brutalist desire that the building be painted.

“Curators at top museums in Europe and the United States have long reached for the instruments of nuclear science to hit treasures of art with invisible rays. The resulting clues have helped answer vexing questions of provenance, age and authenticity. Now such insights are going global. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations unit best known for fighting the spread of nuclear arms, is working hard to foster such methods in the developing world, letting scientists and conservators in places like Peru, Ghana and Kazakhstan act as better custodians of their cultural heritage.”