Category: visual

• Much like the fiberglass cow craze that swept other cities earlier this year, downtown St. Paul, Minnesota has been overrun by 101 statues of Snoopy which were commissioned to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of St. Paul native Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts” strip. – NPR [Real audio file]

The world’s first John Lennon Museum opens this week, and it’s not in Liverpool, London, or New York. It’s in a Japanese town 30 km north of Tokyo. Why there? “Could have something to do with money. Construction company Taisei Corp. reached an agreement with Yoko Ono last year to build the museum on two floors of the spanking-new Saitama Super Arena.” – Daily Yomiuri (Japan)

The San Jose Museum of Art has named Daniel T. Keegan as its new director. “Keegan, 51, comes to the San Jose museum from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo., after three years as director there.” – San Francisco Chronicle

The final installment of the Museum of Modern Art’s reimagining art of the 20th Century has opened. “It brings to completion a project very dear to the hearts and minds of the museum’s current curatorial cadre: the de-aestheticization of the museum’s policies and programs. Aesthetic judgments have now been abandoned in favor of sociological classification at MoMA, and to assist in this transformation the museum has established a department of Writing Services, which may or may not account for the unfortunate Open Ends title itself, already a subject of much ribald humor.” – New York Observer

The U.S. and Russia reached a breakthrough agreement Wednesday at an international conference on the restitution of Holocaust-era art to open their archives to help recover Nazi-looted treasures. Access to Russian archives has been of crucial concern to Jewish groups pressing for restitution. – Yahoo! News (Reuters)

Children’s museums are on the increase. “The Association of Youth Museums (AYM) reports that 100 new children’s museums are in the planning phase, eager to join the approximately 200 that attracted more than 32 million visitors last year.” – Christian Science Monitor

The opening of Tate Modern has coincided with a sudden fever in the art world for colossal work. Damien Hirst, Mona Hatoum, Jeff Koons, and now Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz all work in a size and distorted scale that dwarfs everything around them. “One day this museum will have to face the implications of its own architecture. Bigness is an aesthetic value, and as the popularity of Tate Modern demonstrates, we all like to feel small sometimes.” – The Guardian

Canberra’s National Gallery has had a mixed year. First, it canceled the tour stop of the controversial “Sensation” show when it got too hot in Brooklyn. Then the museum’s controversial curator of Australian art resigned after less than a year on the job. On the other hand, attendance is up 50 percent, and the museum’s director is upbeat. – The Age (Melbourne)

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is in disarray. Attendance is down, raising money is tough, and the museum’s leadership is feuding amongst themselves. “There is a feeling among some of the trustees that the V&A doesn’t know where it is going. Having a director and chairman at odds only adds to the problems, and decisions on many key issues are now being postponed.” – The Art Newspaper

In August, supporters of Dallas’s Kimbell Museum were surprised to find out that two of the museum’s directors were receiving salaries of $500,000 a year for services that were traditionally considered voluntary. Now the salaries will be discontinued. “After careful consideration, we have decided that it is no longer in the best interest of the Kimbell Art Foundation and the Kimbell Art Museum for Ben and me to receive compensation for the work we perform for the foundation and the museum.” – Dallas Morning News