Category: visual

The Barnes Foundation has hit its $150 million fundraising target, and now has enough money to complete its controversial move to Center City Philadelphia. But the foundation isn’t stopping there, announcing an extension of the campaign, and a new target of $200 million, to be raised from “national and international” donors. The extended campaign may be due in part to rising construction costs – the Barnes’s proposed $100 million facility is likely to end up with cost overruns, and the museum wants to be prepared.

“The Tate has been unhappy about the tabloid hostility the prize encounters, not thinking that all publicity is good publicity, though it was vicious attacks that made the Turner an institution.”

“Adding to doubts about his institution’s direction, Leonard Riggio, the [New York-based] Dia Art Foundation’s biggest benefactor, has decided to step down as chairman of its board… The decision comes as the institution is reeling from the loss of Michael Govan, its director for 12 years, who resigned in February to run the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And six weeks ago, Dia lost its vice chairman, Ann Tenenbaum. She resigned after 12 years on the board, saying she was stretched too thin by family responsibilities and board commitments at other arts institutions.”

They may not have million-dollar endowments or prestigious boards, but across the country, history is quietly accumulating in thousands of unheralded neighborhood museums. “A local museum is a community’s autobiography, a way of saying: This is who we are, and this is how we got here. For researchers, the museums are invaluable archives, whether housed in multimillion-dollar, state-of-the art facilities or inside the stately rooms of storied mansions.”

The Turner Prize is famously provocative. Not this year. “None of the artists shortlisted this year were setting out to be controversial. ‘They are trying to deal with the issues around them in the 21st century’.”

Paul Werner has a particularly harsh take on the role of American museums. “The role of the American art museum is to launder the money of its trustees and sponsors, not, as you may think, by turning one asset (‘cocaine,’ for instance) into another asset (say, ‘Rembrandts’), but by turning artworks into objects of authority and trust – objects that mediate and are mediated by the worth of money. The American art museum turns art into buzz the way its owners turn pork bellies into pork-belly futures.”

“The Harvard University Art Museums will announce today the selection of a California firm to design the Allston-Brighton structure that will be a temporary home for thousands of artworks when Harvard’s two primary art museums close in 2008.”

The shortlist for the always-controversial Turner Prize has been announced in the UK. Sculptor Rebecca Warren (known for using twigs and bits of fluff in her work,) photographer Phil Collins, mixed-media artist Mark Titchner, and painter Tomma Abts will vie for the £40,000 prize, which will be announced in December, following public viewings of the work of all four finalists.

View a gallery of the work of the Turner finalists here.

As Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie prepared to reopen following a 6-year, $36 million renovation, one of the biggest questions was how the Claude Monet masterpieces mounted to the walls had survived the trauma of construction. (These eight paintings cannot be removed, and an elaborate system of alarmed and reinforced boxes had to be devised to protect them from the dust and vibration.) As it turned out, the Monets are fine, and the Orangerie itself, while looking very much the same on the outside, has undergone a radical transformation inside.