Category: visual

“The Whitney Museum’s new chief financial officer is conducting “a vigorous review of all financial controls to ensure that the highest standards of accountability are met”. Bridget Elias was appointed in June, and her audit follows the arrest of two Whitney employees in late July, charged with embezzling nearly $1 million since January 2002.”

“A study of the vibrant red, pink, orange, purple and yellow bands in the rocks of the Valley of Fire State Park in southern Nevada has revealed that the hues in the rocks were probably put there by a complex ebb and flow of groundwaters, faulting and raising of mountains and even the presence of now absent hydrocarbons over the last 150 to 200 million years.”

“Nowadays, different art worlds work differently. Glasgow, Leipzig, and Los Angeles are laboratories run by skeleton crews. London is the same, only crossed with a private club, a sparkler, and a sideshow. The New York art world has swallowed up all these paradigms and mutated into a kind of nebulous Super Paradigm. Think of it as a giant sponge: Bland on the outside, intricate within, it is extremely porous and permeable, takes advantage of any current, absorbs everything, and is capable of enormous engorgement. The Super Paradigm may be pluralism gone wild, or a giant oil spill—sprawling but not evolving. Whatever, there’s no avant-garde within it because there’s nothing to react against.”

Is a statue that the Cleveland Museum recently bought stolen? “The museum proudly announced the purchase in June, saying the statue might be the only one among about 20 large bronzes in the world that can be linked to the ancient Greek masters. Now some prominent archaeologists and other critics say the museum should not have bought the work because of the questionable history.”

Outside of the Guggenheim’s Thomas Krens, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts director Malcom Rogers is probably the most controversial museum director in America. When Rogers took the job, he inherited an institution in considerable distress. He’s made changes, big changes. “There’s something so fundamentally annoying to the museum profession about the efforts to break the academy walls down and kind of rethink the role of great art museums in America. They’re so concerned about these fake, institutional standards that I don’t think these people ever look at Malcolm clearly. They immediately have glasses on that blind them to the end product, which I think is a healthy MFA.”

“There have been great shows during the Rogers reign. The Gaugin and Rembrandt shows of this past season are perfect examples. You couldn’t ask for more excellent exhibitions anywhere in the world. But there have also been some that seem the result of not wanting to spend the time or money to do right by the subject.”

Is the continuing spread of blockbuster traveling exhibitions distracting museums from what should be their primary focus? Art Institute of Chicago president James Cuno thinks so, and he’s raising eyebrows by saying so in public at a time when many museums view high-profile exhibits and big, fancy in-house gift shops and restaurants as the only things keeping them afloat. In his years at Harvard, Cuno “came to espouse what has been called an ‘essentialist’ view. It’s a view that seeks to refocus attention on the acquisition, preservation and presentation of research of museums’ permanent collections.” The theory works in academia, but can it fly in the open market?

Hartford’s Atheneum has seen a 27 percent drop in attendance in three years. It’s dropped an expensive building expansion and is embarking on an alternative plan. Changes in the museum’s focus are underway. “The idea that the Atheneum can do an important blockbuster show year in and year out is simply not true anymore. Those shows were, in my judgment, the product of an economy which no longer exists, and they are a product of a certain way of thinking about museums that I’m not so sure that in the end was productive.”

Twelve years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his Holocaust-themed comic book, Maus, artist Art Spiegelman has again put ink to paper to memorialize a great human tragedy. This time, the tragedy is 9/11, and the work is autobiographical. “In content and theme, Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers share some ground. Each of the books deals with a relatively ordinary man, a Spiegelman of one time and place, confronting mass murder (on vastly different scale and a wholly distinct nature, of course) and an arrogant, power-hungry regime (again, on a far different level). Both focus on the primacy of family and tribe to their protagonists, and both evoke the incoherence, the gruesomeness and the vainglory of war.”