Category: visual

Can museums based on one person’s vision really survive effectively once that one person is no longer around? The Barnes Museum’s pending move is only the latest in a long line of single-collector museums struggles to stay relevant (and solvent), and one could question whether total reinvention is really an effective tool. “Every museum doesn’t have to be a major tourist attraction, and people who really want to see the Barnes usually can, with some planning. Some museums — the Miho outside Kyoto for one — are valued in part because of the sheer challenge of reaching them, which becomes a sort of pilgrimage.”

An LA man has been arrested for selling fake art attributed to artists such as Mary Cassatt, Marc Chagall and Roy Lichtenstein.” A 66-year-old Mission Viejo doctor managed to generate interest among potential buyers in his collection, primarily of modern masters — a collection that turned out to be bogus.”

Museum visits in the UK have soared since ticket charges were dropped. “The figures show that three years after the turnstiles were removed, visitors to galleries that used to charge have soared. There were nearly six million more visits this year than in the year before entry charges were scrapped. In London, visits to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) are up by 113 per cent over the past three years, the Natural History Museum is up by nearly 96 per cent and the Science Museum by nearly 71 per cent.” But who’s to pay for keeping the doors open?

John Ruskin famously said he had made a bonfire of a pile of JMW Turner’s paintings. But a researchers now says it never happened. “It looks as if the notoriously prudish Ruskin, who worshipped Turner to the point of idolatry, could not bring himself to destroy his work. Instead he buried them in paper, interring them in a tortuous numbering system he devised himself, or in the case of some detailed anatomical details of women’s genitals, folding over the page to conceal them, undoubtedly with a shudder of revulsion.”

Visits to UK museums were up again last year, and the government attributes increases to its policy of making museums free to the public. “Curiously, visits to museums that used to charge went up by only 1.7% while visits to those that had never charged shot up by 11.4%. Among the successes of the “always free” museums is the National Gallery in London, which increased visitors (after a couple of poor years) by 14% last year to 4.96m. It has moved ahead of the British Museum (4.8m) to become Britain’s most popular museum.”

Norwegian police have made an arrest in the theft of two Munch paintings last summer from Oslo’s Munch Museum. “An unnamed 37-year-old man has been charged with the robbery, after being taken in for questioning last week. He denies any involvement and claims to have an alibi.”

“Like all buildings, a parking garage can either bring vitality to a city or suck the energy right out of it. There is, of course, the eyesore garage we all know and despise, the three-dimensional cash station for the garage owner that assaults passersby with crumbling concrete and stark fluorescent lights. Yet there also are parking garages with ground-floor shops that enliven sidewalks, and facades that acknowledge that people look at garages as well as drive into them.”

A new video game that combines PacMan with a Mondrian painting has caught the attention of the art world. “Why is Pac-Mondrian attracting more art types than gaming types? Maybe it’s because Pac-Mondrian has more to say about Mondrian’s painting than about Pac-Man. In fact, it qualifies as a coherent interpretation of “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” The inventors don’t say so, but if you play the game you’ll probably discover some features of the painting that you never knew were there, and some that aren’t there at all.”

Members of the Swiss parliament are furious over an art exhibit at the Swiss Cultural Center in Paris that criticizes democracy in Switzerland and attacks the country’s minister of justice and police. “Last week, after 10 days of furious debate, the Swiss Parliament slashed $1.1 million from the $38.9 million annual budget of Pro Helvetia, the government-financed cultural foundation that owns the Swiss Cultural Center. Legislators on the right also demanded the resignation of Michel Ritter, the center’s director, who invited Mr. Hirschhorn to show his work here.”

“The Israel Museum has discovered that the most important item in its priceless collection of biblical antiquities is a fake. An ivory pomegranate originally thought to have adorned a sceptre carried by the high priest in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem is to be withdrawn from public exhibition. The withdrawal of the pomegranate, which was on display during an exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization last year, is the latest in a series of embarrassing scandals which have rocked the quiet but high-spending world of antiquities collectors.”