Category: visual

Andrea L. Rich, president and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for nearly 10 years, will retire in November. “During her decade at the museum, Ms. Rich has beefed up the institution’s public programming and more than doubled its endowment, to more than $100 million from $49 million. She has also added to the museum’s collections.”

“The $258 million expansion and renovation of the Cleveland Museum of Art, approved by trustees in March, ought to improve the museum vastly in six years. But in the near term, it means losing access to one of the greatest permanent collections in the country. By the end of this month, nearly 20 of the museum’s 70 galleries are scheduled to be closed for renovation. By June, the museum’s entire permanent collection will be out of sight for at least three years. Large portions of the collection will remain off-limits for another three years. Special exhibitions will continue through early January 2006, after which the museum will close completely for six months.”

Damien Hirst has moved on from the days when he exhibited dead sharks and giant ashtrays, but has he really advanced his thinking at all? A new exhibit of Hirst’s photorealist paintings seem like just so much rehashed rebellion, says Michael Kimmelman, “blithely lacking finesse, [ignoring] photorealism’s first goals and [aspiring] only to be passingly ghoulish. And absent invention, they hang there like corpses… The era of the giant strutting ego as the amusing subject of art at this moment seems wincingly passé, supplanted by all those insouciant 20-somethings proffering their monkish, shuffling sort of virtuosity.”

“Over the last few years, museums large and small have started awarding their own prizes, usually named after the institution and sponsored by a corporate donor, to capitalize on the glamour associated with contemporary art. To burnish their appeal, many of the new awards are modeled on the Tate Modern’s venerable Turner Prize, which has evolved into a nationally televised event that attracts celebrity presenters like Madonna and habitually polarizes the British press… Indeed, the new art prize circuit has a circular quality, with many of the same artists nominated again and again, and many of the same jurors serving on multiple committees.”

Plans are afoot to renovate and restore the Pittsburgh home inhabited by a young Andy Warhol and his family. The house is in “terrible shape,” and no one seems even to know who, if anyone, owns it. Even restored, it would likely not fetch much of a price. Still, Warhol’s brother and his partners are hoping that the artist’s name will be enough to spark interest in preserving the structure.

A plan to spend £100 million on museums across the UK should make a major impact on regional museums say officials. “The money from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) – under the Renaissance banner – is intended to transform regional museums. he government created hubs in each of the nine English regions, consisting of a leading museum and up to three partner museums. The plan is that they would work together to provide leadership in museum practice and improve standards in the museums sector.”

Architect Robert Venturi has had a major career. So the question is: “why does an architect who helped break the harsh grip of authoritarian modernism provoke such extreme reactions in Philadelphians?” The city is his home town, and yet it’s been ten years since Venturi’s had a major commission there.

An important exhition of some of Iraq’s most precious art will tour Europe beginning in October. “The Nimrud Gold, a cache of ancient jewellery which was rescued from a Baghdad bank vault, is to open on 23 October, at a venue in Europe to be announced next month. The show will then tour to 11 other cities in Europe, North America and the Far East, raising over $10 million for Iraq’s National Museum. The five-year tour is being organised by United Exhibits Group, a Copenhagen-based company.”

“Chinese officials have asked the State Department to impose the restrictions, on a wide range of artifacts from the prehistoric period through the early 20th century, because they believe that demand in the United States for Chinese antiquities has helped fuel a sharp increase in looting of archaeological sites and even thefts from museums over the last several years. The request has sparked an impassioned debate in the Asian-art world, in which many prominent archaeologists, preservationists and scholars have lined up to support the Chinese government, while many antiquities dealers and museum officials argue that the changes would be unfair, ineffective in stopping looting and devastating for the art market and for museums.”

The Delaware Art Museum has chosen a new director – Danielle Rice, who is currently an associate director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She’ll have a challenge: staff layoffs and construction problems on a new $24.5 million expansion project have made the Delaware Museum a troubled place in recent months.