Category: visual

“Decisions to sell objects from museum collections must not be subject to the subjective judgments or personal preferences of individual curators, however knowledgeable and well-intentioned they may be. The governing presumption should be: What enters the public domain stays in the public domain, except for works that are clearly inferior in quality or condition. The public has paid for them, after all, through the tax deductions given to the donors of money or of art.”

Jackson “Pollock at his peak burned his past conditioning and present turmoil, his very identity and character as a man, and he burned them clean. There’s nobody to recognize. That’s why it can be hard at first sight to tell a true Pollock from a fake. He prepared us to believe that absolutely anything was possible for him. What determines authenticity for me is a hardly scientific, no doubt fallible intuition of a raging need that found respite only in art.”

“English Heritage is particularly worried because Unesco, the United Nations education and cultural body, has warned it may remove the monument’s World Heritage status unless Britain tackles the serious problem of traffic passing right beside Stonehenge, which is one of the world’s richest reservoirs of Stone Age circles, henges and alignments.”

“Adventurous plans to build a new huge extension – described as a cut-glass ziggurat – at the Tate Modern gallery in London will be unveiled this week to warm applause from large parts of the architectural world and some criticism from design experts. The Twentieth Century Society, which was consulted on the plans, said the stepped pyramid extension – to be shown for the first time on Tuesday – detracts from the architectural importance of the existing gallery and warns that it has ‘serious issues’ with the plan.”

“The Denver Art Museum’s collections and exhibitions are not the only thing in transition as the institution prepares for one of the monumental events in its history – the Oct. 7 opening of its $90.5 million addition. At least two major staff changes are expected to coincide with the Hamilton Building’s inauguration, none more significant than the recently delayed retirement of director Lewis Sharp, one of Denver’s most prominent arts leaders… Dianne Vanderlip, curator of modern and contemporary art, [also] revealed she is leaving her position in January.”

“The gulf between what Hadid sees, and enables others to see in her beautifully crafted but highly distorted drawings and paintings, and the realized architecture that results from these two-dimensional fantasias, is vast. The buildings, the few that have been built, seem to exist in a slower, duller universe. Someone has turned the lights on, and the music off, and suddenly the world no longer twinkles, and Hadid’s buildings no longer feel quite so much like spaceships rocketing to galaxies unknown.”

“Museum attendance continues to set records in America and Europe, yet probably fewer people now than 50 years ago could give an informed response to a Rembrandt painting… But enter into a Rembrandt drawing, almost irrespective of its subject, and for an instant its very fluency makes it feel doable: a soothing sensation of deliverance from incapacity comes forward.”

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art has hired decorative arts curator Jason Busch away from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “He was formerly assistant curator of American decorative arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut… The [Carnegie’s] assistant curator of decorative arts, Elizabeth Agro, will be leaving soon for a position at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.”

The admission hikes at various New York museums have sparked a great deal of debate over what, if anything, museums should charge the public to see their treasures. “A museum’s admission policy is charged with meaning. It encodes the institution’s core values — its sense of itself, its mission and its public — and broadcasts them to that public. It’s like a thumbprint, a tiny yet accurate key to a whole identity.”

When Tate Modern decided to rearrange its collection around a series of vaguely defined “hubs,” many in the art world were skeptical. But the rehanging has been a major hit with visitors, and other contemporary art museums around the world are beginning to experiment with ways to make their permanent collections seem less, well, permanent. “With contemporary art, where history is still fluid and museums have yet to become pantheons of unchallenged masters, flexibility seems advisable.”