Category: visual

With Earl Powell’s 26-year tenure coming to an end, the museum has the opportunity to revitalize its programs and modernize its operation, according to interviews with 22 current and former employees and industry experts. The selection of its next leader — expected to be made next month — could determine whether it continues to hew to the past or emerges at the forefront of a quickly evolving museum industry.

“The search for the next director of the National Gallery of Art has revealed deep divisions within the federally funded institution, a palace of high art that is dogged by old-fashioned ideas about museum operations and staff claims of widespread mismanagement. … With [Rusty] Powell’s 26-year tenure coming to an end, the museum has the opportunity to revitalize its programs and modernize its operation, according to interviews with 22 current and former employees and industry experts.”

Artist Sean Matthews opened his show “Recycled Play” at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pa. on August 17; the installation’s centerpiece was “Fair and Square,” a repurposed swing set with the chains rewelded so that the seats were extended and suspended like the Scales of Justice. Alas, two of the exhibit’s first visitors evidently looked at “Fair and Square” and saw a swing set.

“At a time of mounting protests over sponsorship by fossil fuel companies, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and the Mauritshuis in The Hague both terminated arrangements with the country’s largest oil and gas firm this summer.”

“I can’t think of anything else but that bridge. I have an idea of what the [new] bridge should look like but this is just the start… there is a moral commitment. The bridge must reflect the tragedy and how it has played out.”

Edward P. Bass, a Yale alumnus, businessman and philanthropist, said his gift was motivated by a belief in institutions. “I see institutions as having the power to transmit and perpetuate a set of fundamental values, and to do so generation to generation,” he said in a phone interview. Yale, he added, is a particularly strong institution with a long history: “It’s been more than 300 years, so I have some faith.”

“Pending final approval from Berlin city authorities, which organisers said was ‘in the works’, staff plan to erect 900 concrete wall slabs, each 3.60 metres (about 12 feet) tall, for the 6.6 million euro ($7.7 million) event. Visitors to the parallel world will have to apply online for entrance ‘visas’ … Set on a city block on Unter den Linden boulevard, the time-capsule project is due to launch on October 12 and end with a ritualistic tearing down of the wall on November 9, the day of the historic event in 1989.”

The shortlist for this year’s edition of British architecture’s booby prize includes a “Vegas heads to Plymouth by way of New York” student housing complex, an “absolutely terrifying” redesign of a traffic gateway, and the “grotesque” rooftop extension added to a historic hotel.