Category: visual

This week the Seattle Art Museum closes its main building for 16 months to construct an expansion. “Downtown, the museum will have 300,000 square feet, tripling the exhibition space and providing a free-admission, wrap-around public corridor full of art and art events. Besides that, there’s plenty of room for further expansion. The building is 16 stories high, and initially the museum will occupy only the bottom four floors and rent out the rest to Washington Mutual. When SAM needs more room, it can hand the bank its walking papers for eight more floors. (The top four belong to the bank.)”

Two Seattle Art Museum guards were fired Wednesday for threatening to walk out, which the museum perceived as a security breach.

“Now that we have become such meticulous conservators of the past, museums and galleries have become overloaded with objects they lack the space to display and which have apparently minimal significance. Major national institutions are constitutionally forbidden to sell items, and laws relating to charitable bequests exert further restrictions. But elsewhere, if the trustees see fit, there is nothing to prevent the disposal of such stock – euphemistically described as ‘deaccession’.”

“A feud between Upper East Side gallery owners whose clients include some of New York’s wealthiest collectors has resulted in both admitting to tax violations.”

Terrence O’Tiley, chief curator of architecture and design for the Museum of Modern Art, has been named director of the Miami Art Museum. “He inherits a museum about to embark on its biggest mission to date: building a new home in Bicentennial Park and expanding the museum to fulfill the prominent cultural role voters and civic leaders envision. In 2004, Miami-Dade voters approved $275 million in county bond money to fund two museums — MAM and the Museum of Science — at Bicentennial Park.”

The Art Loss Register lists 160,000 stolen works of art. “Art theft is big business. Interpol reckons that it ranks fourth among the highest-value criminal activities, after drugs, arms smuggling and money laundering. The FBI puts its value at $5 billion a year.”

The Louvre saw a record 7.3 million visitors in 2005. The previous record of 6.7 million visitors was set in 2004. Officials attribute the increased numbers in part to the popularity of The Da Vinci Code, and expect the forthcoming movie will result in even more visitors.

“The Advertising Icon Museum, to open in the fall of 2007, will feature hundreds of toys, dolls, display figurines, cereal bowls, coffee mugs and ashtrays depicting almost a century’s worth of fictional characters hawking everything from food and beer to household appliances and financial services. Electronic and printed displays will walk visitors through the evolution of commercial advertising in the United States and the importance icons have had in reaching customers, first in printed ads and later from the television screen.”

“The laws governing the antiquities trade are now so complicated that no one can be sure of them, and the chain of ownership for any given object–even when it is traceable–may be so tangled that nobody knows who officially owns what. But there is more at stake today than the fate of an antique vase or even a curator’s freedom. What hangs in the balance is the very future of museums. Or to put it another way, “Whither the Elgin Marbles?”

Italian restorers are working to try to repair a priceless ancient Greek statue, and the results of their work will have diplomatic consequences. “In an incident that went almost unnoticed at the time, the authorities in Athens last year suspended all further digs by Italian archaeologists in Greece and slapped a five-year ban on an Italian lecturer. The sanctions were imposed after officials learned that the 4th century BC statue, found in an Italian dig on Crete, had fallen and been smashed in transit.”