Category: visual

“After a decade in which it doubled both its staff and its operating budget, the American Museum of Natural History is now retrenching. Faced with a drop in visitors and financial support, including a $1.4 million cut in funding from the city, the museum has shed 300 full- and part-time employees since the fall of 2001, bringing its staff down 17 percent, to 1,400. A hiring freeze was put in place after Sept. 11, 2001.”

A public art toilet made of one-way glass is being installed across from Tate Britain. “Sitting on this lavatory you can see everything outside; pedestrians and, across the road, Tate Britain. This has been achieved by surrounding the lavatory with glass that allows you to see out but no one else to see in. This £30,000, not-so private privy was created by Italian artist Monica Bonvicini.”

“The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver has chosen six internationally known architects as finalists to design a $3.6 million to $4 million building in Lower Downtown.” The finalists range from southwestern specialists to New York glitterati, and include London’s David Adjaye, Tucson’s Rick Joy, New York’s Gluckman Mayner Associates, and Mexican modernist group ‘TEN Arquitectos.’

A new $11 million Museum of the African Diaspora is scheduled to open in the summer of 2005. The museum aims to “explore and celebrate the history, culture and contributions of African-descended people around the world.”

A picture of a dove by Damien Hirst looks awfully familiar to one by a street artist. Taalat Elshaabiny is “not resentful that Hirst can knock out what is very nearly the same image and sell it for so much. ‘He’s famous. And of course he has the right to paint the picture. If I were famous I would ask the same price. But I am poor and work on Bayswater Road’.”

This month the Barnes Foundation goes before a court to try to win approval to move to Philadelphia. As part of its case, the Barnes wants to prove that its financial situation is so precarious it is unsustainable in its current home. “Yet while it is clear that many factors that are beyond the current management’s control have put the Barnes in dire straits, the Barnes management failed to control one important thing it has had power over: working within a budget.”

Highway builders have discovered an ancient chariot buried in their path in West Yorkshire. “Buried for 2,500 years, the find is a complete chariot containing the skeleton of a tribal leader, with the remains of at least 250 cattle, probably slaughtered for the funeral feast.”

Art historians used to believe that Italy was the only game in town during the Renaissance. But new understanding has come: “The picture that has emerged is of a Europe in which the courts of the Burgundian, French and German princes were at least the equal of those of northern Italy in their magnificence and political ambition, and of course the patronage and ostentation by which they were expressed. Europe was open, international travel common, and the traffic and exchange between north and south, as much cultural as commercial, flowed in a constant stream.”

By most accounts, management of the Louvre Museum is chaotic and antiquated. But that has recently begun to change, as some long-needed reforms take hold. “It’s not that we are free to do any old thing. We have now reached the right balance between exercising autonomy and complying with national policies. Still, from a strictly management point of view, this is one of the most radical changes at the Louvre since it was founded as the Muséum Central des Arts by France’s first revolutionary regime in 1793. It will now be run as a museum, not as a government department.”

A piece of public art in West London has residents in a mood to pull it down before it’s even been completed. Why? “What people were promised, what everyone who bought flats here wanted, was unobstructed river views, and your sculpture is blocking the view.”