Category: visual

When LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art hired a new director last year, many were skeptical. High on art-world credentials, Jeremy Strick lacked administrative and fund-raising experience. Eight months into the job, Strick has placated the skeptics. – Los Angeles Times

— famous reproduction of Canadian Confederation painting. – CBC

In Hanoi an exhibition of photographs from 135 photojournalists – from both sides – who died in Vietnam during the war. – Detroit Free Press (AP)

A number of American museums are now checking to see if any of the artwork they own might have been stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War. Suspected works include a Rembrandt and a Courbet. – CNN

• MADONNA SUSPECT: The LA County Museum of Art says it is investigating whether a Madonna and Child tempura panel painted around 1425 went through the hands of one of the most important art dealers the Nazis used in their wholesale plundering of Jewish assets, Hans Wendland. – Times of India (AP)
  
  
• Painting uncovered on check of the museum’s collection for items of questionable provenance. – Los Angeles Times

Last summer the new $22 million Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art opened with fanfare. It’s not been a hit with visitors. “How empty is it? On winter weekdays, MOCA gets about 100 visitors, including school groups. Saturday and Sunday daily attendance at least doubles that number. On some days, there are more children scampering around the newly opened (and free) Kidspace than there are black-turtlenecked cognoscenti ogling the art.” – Boston Globe

New York’s Museum of Modern Art makes a deal to be “artistic advisor” to Japanese billionaire Minoru Mori, to create an art museum atop a 54-story office tower in Tokyo. – Los Angeles Times

NY mayor Rudy Giuliani says that he can’t touch the Whitney Museum because it’s privately funded. But “as a private citizen,” he said he felt that artwork attacking him was “exaggerated political demagoguery” that does “a grave injustice to people who suffered in the Holocaust.” – New York Post

• Will Giuliani go to see this year’s Whitney Biennial? “Gee, I’ll put it on my schedule. Get my Palm Pilot,” he said sarcastically. – MSNBC
  
  
• Previously: COME AND GET US MR. MAYOR: The Whitney Biennial is about to open. You just had to know someone was going to take a poke at NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani after his pronouncements on art during last fall’s “Sensation” show at the Brooklyn Museum. ” ‘Sanitation,’ an installation by Hans Haacke, a well-known German-born New York artist, puts Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in the company of the Nazis, with quotations by him written in the Fraktur script favored by the Third Reich and the sound of jackboots marching in the background.”- New York Times

Between record numbers for the Norman Rockwell, show, a Science and Industry Museum “Titanic” exhibit, a “Dead Sea Scrolls” show, and a “Monet to Moore” exhibition, this year looks to be a record year for Chicago museums. – Chicago Tribune

Consider the things around us – graphics, fashion, industrial products, architecture, interiors, furniture, toys, stage and movie sets, and computer animation… all these things are the products of someone’s imagination. New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum pulls together a national design triennial – projects by 83 designers and firms, all produced in the last three years. “We expect survey shows to be irritating, and this one does not disappoint.” – New York Times

“Unlike earlier artists – Dadists in the 1910s and twenties, feminists in the seventies – who have thrown grenades at the establishment from the hypothetical outside, these artists are relatively calm about their complicity with the ‘system’: museums, galleries, funding institutions, advertising. Call it ‘new genre public art’ as one 1995 book does; call it a return to the streets.” – Feed