Canadian museums have not done a good job including indigenous culture in their collections or on their walls. Now a new federal government initiative aims to make a review of museum policies across the country to “ensure they line up with the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) and to make recommendations for best practices going forward.” – CBC
Category: visual
Police Identify Suspected Cause Of Notre-Dame Fire
“Paris police investigators think an electrical short-circuit most likely caused the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, … [though they] don’t have a green light to search Notre Dame’s charred interior because of ongoing safety hazards.” – Yahoo! (AP)
Guggenheim’s Hilma Af Klint Show Is Most Popular In Museum’s History
“The solo show for the Swedish artist, which has been widely praised by critics, has drawn in over 600,000 visitors. That influx of foot traffic has been accompanied by a 34 percent increase in membership to the museum.” – ARTnews
Former Volunteer Docent Leaves Surprise $8 Million To Philadelphia Museum
Estelle Rubens, who died in January of 2018, was a popular guide at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for about 15 years, and she had told officials there that she’d leave the museum and school “a little something.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Canadian Court Rules That Art By Foreign Artists Can Be Deemed Of National Importance And Prevented From Being Sold Outside Canada
On Tuesday, the appeals court restored a decision by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board preventing a Canadian auction house from shipping a painting by French artist Gustave Caillebotte to a buyer in London, England. – CBC
Rebuild Notre-Dame? No, Let’s Keep It As A Ruin (A #SlatePitch)
What’s a #SlatePitch? In keeping with the site’s original ambition to be anti-conventional wisdom, Slate has published an essay by writer and translator Bérengère Viennot (she’s the one who gets to translate Donald Trump’s speeches into French) arguing that the burned-out ruins of Notre-Dame should be preserved as “a memento mori of the 21st century.” – Slate
It Took Two Days To Raise €1 Billion To Rebuild Notre-Dame
Huge pledges from superrich individuals and multinational corporations such as LVMH, L’Oreal, and (subsequent to this story’s publication) Disney have been pouring in since news of the conflagration hit on April 15. – London Evening Standard
It Took 23 Minutes After The First Alarm To Find The Notre-Dame Fire
“A fire alarm first wailed inside the Notre Dame Cathedral at 6:20 p.m. Monday, but for 23 critical minutes cathedral staff searched for a blaze, unable to find the cause. It wasn’t until a second alarm went off at 6:43 p.m. that a fire was detected in the attic of the centuries-old religious landmark.” – BuzzFeed
While Notre-Dame Burned, There Was Also A Fire At Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque
Yes, it’s a strange bit of synchronicity. Thank heaven (as it were), the damage at Al-Aqsa is minor and the fire was put out in seven minutes. – ArchDaily
When Russia Dealt With Its Own Version Of The Notre-Dame Fire
On a frigid December day in 1857, the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (now the site of the Hermitage museum) caught fire; in less than two days, the building was completely gutted. As with Notre-Dame, a renovation project helped the fire’s spread, and as with Notre-Dame, the nation’s leader (Tsar Nicholas I) vowed that the great monument would be rebuilt in an impractically short time. Historian Paul Werth recounts how the Russians pulled it off. – The Conversation