Category: visual

German officials are defending the exhibition in Berlin of an art collection owned by the family of a major arms supplier to the Nazis by arguing the exhibit would “help heal the scars of Adolf Hitler’s crusade against modern art.” An official explains: “This altruistic gesture should not be overloaded with politics. It’s a gesture toward a city particularly marked by the history of the last century.” She was referring to the Nazis’ hatred of modern art, which saw many works destroyed and others by the likes of van Gogh and Picasso displayed in infamous ‘Degenerate Art’ shows.

Jan Herman reports that while a memorial to murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has been decided on, access to it it will be in the WSJ headquarters, where the general public doesn’t have access to it…

London’s Design Museum is censoring one of the shortlisted finalists for its top design award. A violent video game was shortlisted, but the museum does not want to show it in its galleries. “A spokeswoman for the Design Museum said yesterday that visitors to the competition exhibition, opening in March, would see an explanation of the Grand Theft Auto design ethos, and be able to play other games designed by the Rockstars team, but not Vice City.”

Hilton Kramer is in a huff about a new study of visual arts criticism published by Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program. He’s pleased to see that in a name-recognition poll, he rates highly among fellow critics – an 80! But a few sentences later he reveals that he only earns a 12 – can you believe it? – among other critics for his influence on the field. In conclusion? “The Visual Art Critic is in every respect a perfectly useless enterprise—perfect, above all, in its flawless incomprehension of the subject it addresses…” So there.

The Forbes family has amassed a major collection of Victorian art. But “next month, the bulk of that collection, which rivals the Tate’s and the Victoria and Albert’s collections—not to mention composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s—will become the latest chunk of the Forbes’ art and antiquities holdings to be sold off as the publishers of Forbes magazine struggle against a brutal economic downturn.”

A special commission has issued a report complaining that the Smithsonian has let its research efforts become “unfocused and underfunded,” and calling on the organization to “concentrate its scientific work in specific areas and make a major effort to raise more money.”

“People who make, teach and exhibit film in Pittsburgh were stunned yesterday by the Carnegie Museum of Art’s announcement that it was eliminating its venerated film and video department as a way to save money.” Even an organization which some viewed as a competitor to the Carnegie series was shocked by the move, insisting that the two series had the same mission – to bring top-quality international film to the Steel City.

English Heritage has released a report that concludes that the country’s “historic environment is ‘a massively underexploited asset, which is under attack from all sides.’ Threats include ‘a skills crisis, incongruous development, half a century of unsympathetic agricultural policy, inappropriate tax regimes, climate change and natural erosion, and of course, a lack of funds’.”

“During the 1990s stock market bubble, every major arts institution planned to build or renovate. Some projects were completed (Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art), some started long ago remain on track (Museum of Modern Art in NY, Nelson Atkins in Kansas City), while others have scaled back (the Metropolitan), and still others appear to have stalled (Art Institute of Chicago, Boston Museum of Fine Art, Whitney Museum, Jewish Museum in San Francisco).”