Category: visual

Frustrations among some board members of the Kansas African American Museum are building amid reports of a stalled capital campaign, poor attendance at board meetings and a high travel budget.

For the frst time in 24 years, the Turner Prize will be staged outside of London. “The 2007 show is likely to open at Tate Liverpool, rather than at its traditional home at Tate Britain – a huge coup for Liverpool, which takes up its role as European Capital of Culture in 2008.”

Thrilled by its success at getting the Getty to return artworks, Geece plans to “reclaim hundreds of looted art works and antiquities from museums and private collections around the world, the government said yesterday. ‘Whatever is Greek, wherever in the world, we want back’.”

Video art has been around for a while. Much of it is stored away. But now there’s a question about how to store and preserve it, and two California institutions are working on solutions…

The Getty Museum has agreed to return two artifacts to Greece. “The compromise accord, which was initially hammered out in May at a meeting in Athens between the museum’s director, Michael Brand, and the Greek culture minister, Georgios A. Voulgarakis, provides for the return to Greece of a large stele, or grave marker, acquired by the museum in 1993 and an archaic votive relief bought by the museum’s founder, the oil magnate J. Paul Getty, in 1955. It also includes a provision for heightened collaboration between the museum and the Greek government.”

Frank Gehry will design a new Guggenheim outpost in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. Gehry, who also designed the Guggenheim’s much-vaunted museum in Bilbao, Spain, expects ground to be broken shortly in the city’s new cultural district, with completion slated for 2011.

The UAE Guggenheim “could present a headache for curators – how to balance artistic expression and Islamic cultural sensitivities?” For instance, nudes would likely be forbidden, as would any other depictions that might offend ultra-conservative Islamic sensibilities. And with that kind of self-censorship a necessity, the new Guggenheim might be dooming itself to irrelevance before it even opens.

The tiny country of Luxembourg opened its spectacular new I.M. Pei-designed modern art museum this month, an enterprise nearly twenty years in the making. “Still, this striking symbol of modernity is not quite what its name implies. Because Luxembourg owned virtually no Modern art, and the museum could hardly afford to start building a collection of works by, say, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Dalí, Miró and the like, this is really a museum of contemporary art… The size and sober grandeur of Mr. Pei’s building still suggests a museum awaiting a collection. But at least the museum exists, something that at times seemed less than certain.”

“A Columbia University professor known for challenging the art historical establishment asserts that a painting purchased in 2004 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an estimated $45 million is not the work of the early-Renaissance master Duccio di Buoninsegna, to whom it has long been attributed. The Met’s scholars have dismissed his argument, citing detailed scientific testing and scholarly study of the work.”

“Salvador Dali never set foot in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the dominant art form is the watercolor beachscape. But in a strange twist worthy of one of the Spanish Surrealist master’s paintings, St. Petersburg will soon be home to a $30-million museum to house the world’s most comprehensive collection of Dali’s work… Groundbreaking is set for early next year. The new facility will open in 2010.”