Category: visual

It’s been more than five decades since World War II, and France is just now beginning to look openly, in history books and art exhibits, at its collaborationist past. A new museum opens in Paris this week dedicated to shedding light on just what transpired during the Vichy regime. “The museum pulls no punches: it shows that collaboration with the Nazis was a major phenomenon in wartime France and that French police were as dangerous for resistance fighters and Jews as the Gestapo.” – Times of India (Reuters)

“Researchers plan to test DNA from a mummy that sat in an oddity museum in Canada for decades to see if it is the body of an Egyptian pharaoh. The Niagara Falls Museum in Ontario displayed the mummy for 138 years as part of its collection, which included two-headed cows, a five-legged pig, Wild Bill Hickok’s saddle and a humpback whale skeleton.” – Chicago Sun-Times

Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project opens in Seattle. “Finding a form for a museum devoted to rock is a difficult task. Rock requires little from architecture, other than cheap rent, good locks, and isolation from noise-sensitive neighbors. The architectural forms associated with rock and roll are garages, basements, industrial buildings; all walls soundproofed with scraps of carpet and egg cartons.”  – The Stranger (Seattle)

Okay, so the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music project is a building about music (but it’s not a museum). But what, exactly, is it? “When EMP opens, visitors will step inside a museum that’s also a technological showcase, an educational institution, a research facility, a brick-and-mortar (or rather steel-and-plywood) companion to the Web site emplive.com, and a musical amusement park. Or is it a concert venue, a restaurant and bar, and a tourist trap?” – Seattle Weekly

Three of this year’s four Turner Prize finalists were born outside the UK. ” ‘People not born in the UK can make a tremendous contribution to life in this country.’ Although the Turner Prize is, in theory, awarded to a British artist, anyone working in the UK who has mounted an exhibition in the past year qualifies.” – Financial Times

Two museums with different missions and objectives – fair enough. But the North Carolina Museum of Art and the North Carolina Museum of History also exemplify a right and a wrong way to go about being a museum. – The Idler

Andrew Lloyd-Webber has paid £6 million – a record for a piece of Victorian art – for a Pre-Raphaelite painting of a sleeping St Cecilia. Lloyd-Webber paid nearly twice the pre-sale estimates for the auction at Christie’s. – The Independent (UK)

A new Australian television show proves that architecture can be done on TV. “In the Mind of an Architect,” the ABC’s first major arts production to be sold overseas, explains “the vision and content behind modern spaces…and architectural concepts to the masses.” – The Age (Melbourne)

“When it comes to telling the stories of living patrons—that is, collectors who buy contemporary art and give it to museums—the most blatant conflicts of interest make it all but impossible to give the public a candid, disabused account of the way our system of contemporary art patronage actually works.” So what’s actually wrong with this picture? – New York Observer