The Guggenheim’s financial fortunes are reeling. It “ran a $6.7 million operating deficit last year on a $57.71 million budget. Its endowment should reach about $42 million by the end of the year, still far short of the $100 million level,” and many of director Thomas Krens’ initiatives are on the rocks. “Perhaps the only good thing to emerge from the Guggenheim’s financial woes is its shift in exhibitions from superficial eye-poppers such as motorcycles and haute couture toward an increased reliance on treasures from its permanent collection.” And yet, is the empire crumbling?
Category: visual
Burrowing Under Stonehenge
The British government proposes to bore a 1.3 tunnel for cars under Stonehenge. “The costly u-turn, with a bill shared for the first time between the highways agency and the Department for Culture, is intended to end the embarrassment over the world’s most famous prehistoric monument, still clenched in the fork of two roads 13 years after a parliamentary committee described Stonehenge as ‘a national disgrace’.
Policy Against Fire Fails In Norway
A devastating fire destroyed a block of historic buildings in Trondheim, Norway last week. Critics charge the government hasn’t done enough to protect the country’s historic structures. “Fires leading to the loss of irreplaceable national cultural treasures shall not occur,” reads a state declaration from last year. “The fire in Trondheim shows that this goal hasn’t been adequately followed up.”
Merger of collections and Money
On-again-off-again plans for a merger between the rich Autry Museum for Western Heritage and the impoverished Southwest Museum is on again. “The merger rescues Los Angeles’ oldest museum from a life-threatening financial crisis and brings the Southwest’s 350,000-item inventory, one of the world’s leading collections of Native American art and artifacts, under the same umbrella as the Autry’s $100-million endowment.”
End of Abstraction?
Abstract art is so imprinted on our conciousness that it seems odd to question its ongoing viability. Yet Hilton Kramer believes there are important reasons that “the place occupied by abstract art is now so radically diminished not only on the contemporary art scene but in cultural life generally… I mean its power to set the kind of agenda that commands the attention of new and ambitious talents—and at times, indeed, even the emulation of established talents.” Can that even happen anymore?
Why The New York Times Needs Another Architecture Critic
Architecture is one of the most important arts. Unfortunately it doesn’t get a lot of thoughtful attention in the world’s daily press. The New York Times’ Herbert Muschamp is a vigorous and effective critic. But he’s only one voice – and one with a very specific point of view. “Another talent could write in parallel with Muschamp, counterbalancing aggression with desire, particles with waves—someone to cover the subject when he cannot or isn’t interested, one who will reach outside Muschamp’s territory and complete a column when he does not. The time is right; the subject of design, on everyone’s lips, deserves the commitment.”
A Culture Minister With A Critical Streak
UK culture minister Kim Howells made headlines a few weeks ago by trash-talking the art chosen for this year’s Turner Prize shortlist. Now that a winner has been chosen, he renewed his attack this describing Turner judges as “black-wearing elites who talk in psychobabble. He said that the competition, which was won by Keith Tyson on Sunday, had been overrun by self-serving colonists of the ‘incomprehensible classes’.”
New York’s New Museums
The economy may be dragging, but a handful of new museums is in the works in New York. They include a museum devoted primarily to Himalayan and Tibetan painting. Also, “the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo, the quarter-century-old bastion of cutting-edge art, is planning to build a new $35-million, 60,000-square-foot home along a motley stretch of the Bowery.”
We’re Keeping The Loot
How did the directors of 18 of the world’s major museums come to sign a declaration against returning long-held antiquities in their collections to countries of origin? Evidently it was instigated by the British museum, even though the museum is not listed as a signatory. “Today museums would not condone what people did 200 years ago. But you cannot rewrite history. Those were different times, with different ethics and different mores.”
Revolt Of The Volunteers
Members of the Junior Associates of the Art Gallery of Ontario wanted to “run their events their way, they say – events that generated as much as $90,000 for buying art” and they wanted to say how the money they raised was spent on contemporary art. When the Toronto museum refused (who’s running the place anyway?) the volunteers left the museum en masse to start their own organization. “In the world of volunteer management, the AGO power struggle is a classic, if somewhat extreme, cautionary tale of our times – the ramped-up needs and expectations of the female baby boomers pitted against the institution in financial and administrative extremity.”