Category: visual

The line between subjective truth and propaganda is as old as war, politics and religion, but what’s disquieting today is the velocity at which it moves, and how impossible it is to shove the genie back into the bottle. What are we to believe? Social media have given a populist, liberating edge to what we see, but how do we discern fiction from truth? And will images resonate in the eye long enough to meaningfully shape a generation with an insatiable fascination for the next swipe and click.

In concert with news of Ellen Salpeter’s departure, which will occur in June, the museum announced a change in its leadership structure through which deputy director and chief curator Alex Gartenfeld will now work as artistic director and associate director Tommy Ralph Pace will now be deputy director. Citing their shared status as members of ICA’s founding leadership team, the museum’s announcement said, “Gartenfeld has spearheaded the museum’s curatorial voice in particular and Pace has been responsible for special initiatives, daily operations, and public affairs.”

“Is Museum of Contemporary Art Director Philippe Vergne on his way out? That’s the question swirling in the art-world air following his surprise firing of MOCA’s chief curator one month ago, the sudden cancellation of the museum’s annual gala fundraiser and, perhaps most important, the pending expiration of Vergne’s contract. … Vergne has placed his $4-million Hollywood Hills mansion on the market, and on Tuesday, real estate websites showed a sale pending.”

“The painting, titled Othello and Desdemona, belonged to retired jeweler and art collector Ernest ‘Pick’ Heller and his wife Rose ‘Red’ Heller, and was stolen from their New York apartment back in 1988, along with numerous other paintings, sculptures, and art objects including jewelry, carpets, silverware, and Steuben china.”

When Max Hollein joins the Met he will share responsibility for running the institution with Weiss in a new power-sharing arrangement which may prove difficult to manage. Similar arrangements have proved dysfunctional at the Getty and at the Guggenheim, leading to premature departures by high-profile directors who felt interfered with or undermined. The leadership-by-committee model is in stark contrast to the Met’s hierarchy under Campbell and especially his predecessor, Philippe de Montebello, who ran the Met like a semi-divine sovereign.

“In February, when the embattled Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, announced it had reached an agreement with the state’s attorney general to sell as many as 40 works from its collection, the juiciest detail was that an undisclosed institution had agreed to purchase and exhibit the lot’s most valuable work: a Norman Rockwell masterpiece titled Shuffleton’s Barbership (1950).” That institution has now been disclosed: it’s the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by Star Wars and Indiana Jones creator George Lucas and now under construction in Los Angeles.

“The history and archaeology of Mongolia, most famously the sites associated with the largest land empire in the history of the world under Genghis Khan, are of global importance. But they’re facing unprecedented threats as climate change and looting impact ancient sites and collections. Climate change and looting may seem to be unrelated issues. But deteriorating climate and environmental conditions result in decreased grazing potential and loss of profits for the region’s many nomadic herders.”

“As VR technology has gotten better and cheaper, more artists and curators are experimenting with it as a new medium for expression.” Reporter Andrea Shea checks out two new virtual-reality works at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary of Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams.

The fundraising goal is gutsy for an organization of the Holocaust Museum’s size and relative youth. Its operating expenses were $116 million in 2016, according to tax filings that reported a federal grant of $53 million. In comparison, the Smithsonian Institution, which completed a $1.5 billion fundraising campaign last year, reported its annual budget at about $1.3 billion, or 13 times that of the Holocaust Museum.

One of the biggest stories in the art world in the past two or three years has been the rapidly growing number of female artists who are getting solo shows, career surveys and retrospectives at well-known museums. But at America’s biggest and most prestigious museums, the pace of change can seem dismayingly slow.