Category: visual

Christopher Knight: “What MOCA needed right now in the director’s office was a seasoned museum administrator, something it hasn’t had since Jimmy Carter was president. The fundamental lapse has been caused by the board of trustees’ faulty selection criteria, which are at the heart of the institution’s long-standing travails. Instead, the director’s job lately has been held by a series of ambitious curators, whose administrative record has been secondary at best. Naming Biesenbach to the top post repeats that error yet one more time.”

“A federal appeals court has confirmed a lower court’s ruling that two contested 16th-century oil-on-panel paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder will not be returned to the heir of the legendary Dutch Jewish dealer Jacques Goudstikker … The July 30th ruling seems to put an end to an 11-year court battle over the Nazi-looted artworks, and means that they will stay in California at the Norton Simon Museum, on view to the public.”

“After months of turmoil, including the firing of its chief curator and the announced departure of its current director, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has chosen its next director: Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator at large at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and director of its experimental satellite space, MoMA PS1.” (Biesenbach’s career at MOMA has not been without controversy of its own.)

Two thieves entered the cathedral in Strängnäs, west of Stockholm, around midday on Monday, broke into a glass display case, grabbed two crowns, an orb, and a cross, ran to a waiting motorboat in a lake, and fled. The jewels were part of the funeral regalia of the early 17th-century monarch Karl IX (son of Gustav Vasa) and his wife, Kristina.

“I bring better news from the campaign to abolish fees for images of works in British public collections. Birmingham Museums Trust has decided to go for “open access”, the first major British museum to do so. In a pioneering move, the trust will make images of copyright-expired works of art freely available to use under a CCO Creative Commons licence.”

“Legions of museum staff at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are racing to meet deadlines as the New York City institution undergoes a $450 million renovation and expansion, its second major overhaul in two decades. But due to stalled union negotiations over issues such as raises for longtime employees, healthcare costs, and job security for entry-level curators, more than 250 of them have been working without a contract since May 20th and are inching closer to going on strike for the first time since 2000, when the museum was about to close for its previous expansion project and significantly reduce its workforce with little guarantee that past employees would be hired back.”

“On Friday evening, the New York chapter of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, more commonly known by its acronym, ACT UP, staged a protest-cum-performance at the Whitney Museum, alleging that the Manhattan institution’s current career retrospective of the late artist and writer David Wojnarowicz fails to connect his legacy of rageful AIDS activism to the ongoing battle against the epidemic.”

Professor Ahmed Elgammal, of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., has spent five years teaching his artificial intelligence program to create original artwork. Elgammal fed the software 80,000 pieces of art from the last 500 years. After pressing the Enter key, the software creates new, original works.