Category: visual

Kimberly Camp, the embattled president and CEO of the Barnes Foundation since 1998, has resigned. Camp had joined the Barnes after heading the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit.

UK museums are under pressure in a new report to show off their collections or get rid of the art they can’t display. “Collections are potentially museums’ most precious asset – but what business would allow up to 80% of its assets to go unused, while continuing to consume significant resources?” the report’s authors ask.

Was the theft of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” from an Oslo museum last year merely a diversion for a gang of criminals on a crime spree? “The theft of The Scream was supposed to take the heat off them – and it worked. They successfully raided several banks in the weeks following the theft.”

The Venice Biennale opens, this year a confirmation of what’s hot in contemporary art rather than breaking new ground. “More tightly edited than in years past, this Biennale, the 51st, was organized by María de Corral and Rosa Martínez, who reduced the number of artists from some 300 two years ago to about 90.” Some 300,000 people are expected to attend this summer.

Wold’s fairs were important in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for sharing information. “The Venice Biennale remains the first, the biggest, the best. More important is who goes there. And everybody goes there. Documenta may be more influential; it is certainly more coherent. But nothing brings out the art world like Venice. It’s a spectacular place to go. The national pavilions are part of it, but so are the other exhibitions.”

Time was, artists honed their craft in school and by learning from the skills of masters of the day. No more, writes Laurie Fendrich. “Art education (by which I mean the education of artists for the professional contemporary art world, as opposed to the education of high-school art teachers, which is an entirely separate matter) has become a hodgepodge of attitudes, self-expression, news bulletins from hot galleries, and an almost random selection of technical skills that cannot help but leave most art students confused about their ultimate purpose as artists. This mishmash approach has been going on for so long that it amounts to an orthodoxy…”

“There has always been a close relationship between music and architecture, experimental or otherwise, in terms of structure, pattern and aesthetics, even though sound ultimately describes immaterial space. Plainchant, for example, somehow belongs to Romanesque abbeys, even though its origins are much older, just as Bach is all but synonymous with baroque churches. For better or worse, Wagner conjures images of the fairy-tale, alpine fantasmagoria of Neuschwanstein, the Sleeping Beauty castle built by Wagner’s indulgent patron, Ludwig II. The avant-garde music of the 20th century has its architectural counterparts, too>”

The Wildenstein family has one of the world’s biggest art collections, “worth an estimated €10 billion, and connections that have allowed them to broker some of the Louvre’s biggest purchases.” Now “Alec and Guy Wildenstein, whose father Daniel died four years ago, will challenge a French court ruling in favour of their 71-year-old stepmother Sylvia to break up the huge private collection, believed to include Renoirs, Monets and Manets.”

The Tate Modern has been a huge success, currently drawing about 4 million visitors a year. With the neighborhood around it growing up, the Tate looks at expansion. But how does the museum stay ahead with its collections?