Category: visual

The Cleveland Museum, trying to balance its budget, is laying off 37 full- and part-time employees, freezing salaries and reducing pay for senior administrators. In addition, “the museum is reducing loans of artworks to other museums, stretching the duration of special exhibitions, cutting its film program in half, closing its retail store at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and reducing other expenses, from staff travel to photocopying.”

The Bush administration is considering offloading National Park Service archaeologists who oversee and protect America’s historical and cultural heritage. “The administration says turning over the archaeology jobs to private contractors could save money, but critics charge that contractors are ill-equipped to cope with an array of endemic challenges, including influential outsiders trying to dictate Park policy, chronic congressional underfunding and serious personnel shortages that Park Service archaeologists mitigate by using thousands of volunteers – an option not open to a private company.”

It was inevitable, of course, that the cleaning of Michelangelo’s 500-year-old David should spark controversy… “Should the marble colossus be restored to its original perfection or simply cleaned of grime? Or should it learn to live with the inevitable streaks and blotches of venerable old age?”

Two dozen photography shows in London right now make this a summer of photography. “The London shows leave you with no specific definition of what photography is now, except that it is, fruitfully, many things at once, which is a functionally vague description of the medium. You can nevertheless get a fairly clear idea of the differences between a good photograph and a bad one.”

The Tate Museum has put an enormous collection of JMW Turner images online. “The vast Internet resource includes color images and descriptions of more than 2,000 works by Turner, held in private and public collections in countries including Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan and Greece. The catalog also has 30,000 works bequeathed to the British nation on the artist’s death in 1851.”

Artists have long borrowed trademarked imagery from corporations, holding them up in an effort to critique consumer culture. But today artists say that such commentary has been increasingly hard to pursue as corporations are quick to sue for infringements of their copyrights…

Artist Tracey Emin is tired of critics slagging off on her. “If you don’t like me, leave me alone. I get completely slagged off by people whose mortgage I’m paying. They write 500 words about me, they pay their mortgage that week. Someone on The Independent called me a ‘retard’ which really wound me up. I responded. I’m not saying how, but I totally responded.”

Chris Burden has spent a career pushing at the boundaries of art. “Throughout a 30-year career marked by international fame and notoriety, each new artwork he has made has provoked new and ever more challenging answers to this simple question. But his own response, like so much of what he does, is unexpected. ‘It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, ‘Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful. That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing activity’.”

A report on Australia’s National Museum of Art gives the museum low marks. “The NMA is short on compelling narratives, engagingly presented dramatic realisations of important events and themes in the Australian story. And there are too few focal objects, radiant and numinous enough to generate memorable vignettes, or to be drawn out into fundamental moments. The report warned the museum may be failing in its role to inspire and educate its visitors because of a problem of translating narrative into museum practice, particularly in areas dealing with post-European arrivals to Australia.”