Category: visual

earlier this year Nottingham’s Galleries of Justice won the first £100,000 Gulbenkian Prize for Museums. Judges called the museum’s outreach programme “astonishing and thrilling and frighteningly good”. Now the museum is facing closure because it can’t pay its bills. “Without core funding, the future of the best museum in the country is in doubt and it is contemplating having to break up the teams of experts it has built.”

Theft from European museums is becoming a bigger problem. “Harried police investigators and heartbroken museum curators blame lackluster security guards, insufficient budgets and lenient laws for the rise in thefts. Problems have plagued not only grand institutions like the Louvre in Paris, but also lesser-known regional museums, churches and stately private homes. Thieves have increasingly targeted displays of diamonds, antique clocks, sculptures and rare furniture that can sometimes be sold more easily than well-recognized paintings by master artists. The trade is lucrative – some pieces of rare furniture are valued at $1 million or more.”

The Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff was facing a $1 million deficit this spring, so its director and board decided to sell artifacts to finance operations. That has led to the forced resignation of the museum’s board and director. “The museum’s leadership came under fire after 21 of the museum’s artifacts were sold to raise operating money, its geology department was closed and paleontologist David Gillette and his research staff were fired. Director Robert Baughman told members in June that the sale was necessary because the museum was so broke it had funds for only three weeks of operation.”

The success of Charles Saatchi’s new gallery in London has spurred others, including Sir Elton John, to build and open their own public galleries. “Opinion is divided in the art world over the reasons for this sudden wave of philanthropy. While there are few who do not welcome the thought of these eclectic collections being made public, sceptics sense that the scale of investment being bestowed on the new galleries owes as much to vanity as it does to charity.”

In 1902 James McNeill Whistler collapsed from a heart attack and hung on to life for a week before recovering. But a local Dutch paper printed a premature obituary, promting a letter from Whistler: “May I therefore acknowledge the tender glow of health induced by reading, as I sat here in the morning sun, the flattering attention paid me by your gentleman of ready wreath and quick biography!” He recovered enough to go on to Amsterdam to see one of his paintings in the Rijksmuseum before returning home to London. And while never entirely well again, the world-famous artist lived another year, finally expiring 100 years ago this week, on July 17, 1903.

Philanthropist and art collector Eli Broad has given the Los Angeles County Museum of Art $60 million to build a new wing for art since 1945. “The cash gift, the largest in the museum’s history, will cover ‘every penny’ of a $50-million wing that will be named after Mr Broad and designed by an architect of his choosing, subject to board approval. Details are yet to be ironed out, but the rough outlines call for a 70,000-square-foot structure facing Wilshire Boulevard and bridging the gap between LACMA’s main campus and its under-developed annexe known as LACMA West.”

“Nearly 1200 sites of historical and archaeological importance along the Yangtze River are now underwater as the first stage of China’s massively ambitious Three Gorges Dam hydro-electric project reached completion on schedule. On 1 June the waters began rising in the huge 375 miles long reservoir created by the 185 metre high and two kilometre wide dam. The archaeological findings have established that the Three Gorges region was one of the main meeting places between East and West in ancient China…”

Even as Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario works on an ambitious expansion with architect Frank Gehry, the museum is cutting staff and programming. The museum’s workers are protesting. “Last week, the AGO announced the impending layoff of 29 workers, along with cuts to several programs including the cancellation of guided tours for school groups. The moves were a result of a 25% reduction in admission revenue projections for the current fiscal year due to larger economic woes, the AGO said. In particular, a SARS-related tourism decline has hurt the gallery.”

U.S. forces in Iraq say they have seized 5,000-year-old artifacts from a suspected smuggler and recovered 12 pieces stolen from a Baghdad museum.