Category: visual

Staff at London’s Natural History Museum are charging that a “culture of fear” has taken over the museum. “Twenty-five keepers, professors and managers have written to museum trustees reporting a ‘breakdown of trust at all levels’ caused by the suspension and reinstatement of three maintenance staff. They were suspended in December, six months after an internal audit was unable to account for £1.8 million alleged to have disappeared from the museum’s budget.”

“The graffiti artist Banksy has managed to smuggle in his latest work, a dead rat in a glass-fronted box, into the Natural History Museum where it was exhibited on a wall for several hours. Staff did not notice that the rat was out of place amid the museum’s usual fare of dinosaur bones and artefact from the animal kingdom.”

“Has the British Museum gone a cafe or two too far? Ever since the V&A found itself at the centre of a storm in a teacup with its Saatchi-devised ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’ campaign of 1988, museums have taken over where the 18th-century coffee house left off. More than mere icing on the cake, they have become the bread and butter (or perhaps that should be ciabatta and olive oil) of many visits.”

Archaeologists are upset over a TV documentary that claims the Shroud of Turin might be authentic. “Experts have widely considered the 14-foot-long linen sheet, which has been kept since 1578 in a cathedral in Turin, Italy, a forgery since carbon-dating tests were performed in 1988. Those tests placed its origin at A.D.1300.”

The Library of Congress will announce today that it is to be the beneficiary of a major gift from Florida real estate mogul Jay Kislak, which includes a $4 million map of the New World dating from the 16th century, as well as 4,000 other early American artifacts. The map, known as the Carta Marina, is a matching piece to another similar map purchased by the library last year. “Items in the collection date back as far as 1200 B.C. and primarily involve what is now the southeastern United States, the Caribbean and Mesoamerica.” No official monetary estimate of the value of the donation has been released, but Kislak’s complete personal collection has been assessed at over $100 million.

“One of the art world’s most significant — and expensive — trials… concluded yesterday at the High Court in London with the judge reserving decision until later this month. The trial, which began March 10, pitted Taylor Thomson, 45, (née Lynne Lesley Thomson), the only daughter of Toronto businessman Kenneth Thomson, who is one of the world’s 15 wealthiest men, against venerable Christie’s auction house and the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, 43. The British media estimates legal costs of the trial exceeded $4.5-million. The dispute has revolved around a pair of allegedly 18th-century urns, each about 5 centimetres tall.”

The Museum of Modern Art will reopen November 20 after its $858 million makeover. “The new museum encompasses about 630,000 square feet of new and renovated space on six floors. The total exhibition space will increase to 125,000 square feet from 85,000 square feet, with galleries nestled around a 110-foot-tall atrium, which has views of the city from each floor.”

Women artists are badly represented in British museum collections. And they don’t fare much better in the contemporary art markets either. “Only eight women are responsible for 12 paintings in the National Gallery: they are outnumbered by around 400 male artists responsible for more than 2,300 works. And while women artists may appear, at first glance, to be a strong presence in Tate galleries – a survey of the entire collection undermines this view. In 2000, Tate owned work by 316 women, and nearly 2,600 men. A total of just under 11% of Tate artists are women, and their works make up approximately 7% of the collection (leaving out the 30,000 Turners).”

Robert Hughes declares Lucien Freud is Britain’s greatest living artist. “There is a lot more humour and sweetness in Freud than he is credited with – it’s just that his unsparing wit and pitiless judgment, which allow the sentimental no room, tend to crowd them out of his never very accommodating public image. He finds many people banal, often unbearably so. He has, in abundance, the sheer mercilessness that Baudelaire attributed to the dandy as a type. People looking for art that will appease their expectations of warmth and unearned self-esteem do well to steer clear of him.”