Category: visual

Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center is laying off 5% of its staff in an effort to cut costs without jeopardizing a major expansion of the museum, which focuses on contemporary art. Among the casualties is the Walker’s director of New Media Initiatives, a groundbreaking curatorial position which had won the museum acclaim when it was created. A Walker spokesman said that the major reason for the layoffs was the dismal performance of the museum’s endowment, which has fallen from $200 million to $145 million in the last few years.

“A day after successfully selling three significant artworks at Sotheby’s auction house in New York, officials from the Museum of Fine Arts said they didn’t anticipate any delay in closing the deal to buy a coveted Degas painting said to be worth as much as $40 million. But the museum wouldn’t offer details about how it will make up the difference between the $16,264,000 it earned at auction Tuesday night and the price of [the Degas] which has been part of a private collection in France. Experts said it was possible that the MFA would turn to a trustee or donor with a particular interest in Degas.”

American agents report that they have recovered “about 40,000 manuscripts and 700 other artefacts” that had been stolen from Iraq’s National Museum.”

The bankrupt Belgian airline Sabena has auctioned off a Magritte painting it owned to help pay laid-off staff. “The picture, appropriately of a sky bird – L’Oiseau de Ciel – has sold at auction for €3.4m (£2.4m) to help the staff that the line was forced to pay off when it went into bankruptcy in November 2001.”

There has been a campaign to erect a statue of Nelson Mandela in London’s Trafalgar Square, “close to South Africa House, the scene of 40 years of anti-apartheid demonstrations and 28 years of protests against Mr Mandela’s imprisonment.” But the government’s public art commission has rejected the statue on aesthetic grounds. London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone disagrees with the decision. “I am appalled that an all-white committee sitting in Westminster can dismiss the idea of putting a great international statesman in this prominent place.”

Artist Anish Kapoor’s work has grown so large in recent years it could be mistaken for architecture. Now he’s been asked to produce some architecture. The city of Naples has asked Kapoor to “design a new underground station – a complex piece of infrastructure that is usually the preserve of architects and engineers. ‘They’re mad,’ he says. ‘It’s folly. They don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for. But it’s wonderful; I can’t imagine anything better than doing a tube station’.”

Museums squeezed by tough financial circumstances are trying to cope by shaving budgets. This is okay for the short term, But Adrian Ellis writes that “the risks creating a sort of ‘living dead’ institution, in which variable costs (programmes, exhibitions etc.) have been squeezed disproportionately because fixed costs are just that — fixed. Many museums in the sector are therefore going to need to take more radical steps if they are to thrive rather than simply survive in some semi-inert limbo, the usual non-profit alternative to actually closing the doors. The question is, of course, what sorts of steps?”

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts took a major step yesterday towards fulfilling its goal of purchasing an 1876 Degas masterpiece entitled Duchessa di Montejasi With Her Daughters Elena and Camilla. The painting is expected to cost between $20 million and $40 million. To raise the money for the purchase, MFA auctioned off three valuable paintings from its permanent collection. “It took just five minutes for the works – two Degas pastels and a Renoir painting – to go, with the pieces approaching Sotheby’s top estimate of $17 million.”

The director of Iraq’s National Museum sits down with The Art Newspaper to talk about what happened to his museum. Donny George says the museum’s staff managed to hide away most of the museum’s collection for safekeeping before the war. “Presumably the vast majority of the 170,000 items in the collection were therefore in the vaults. How much was lost from the vaults?” George: “We have only looked through a hole and shone a torchlight into the vaults. We don’t yet know what is missing, but a lot of the objects are still there.”