Lisa Freiman came from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (where she was the top curator for contemporary work) 4½ years ago as the first director of the museum at the city’s Virginia Commonwealth University. She gave no reason for her departure other than wanting to return to her scholarly work (she’s staying on at the university as a faculty member).
Category: visual
Museum Values V. Trump Values
Adrian Ellis: “Whatever the longer-term causes and effects, the current reality is that his agenda—and the values he is modelling, encouraging and appealing to in his electoral base—are starkly at odds with the values that most museums hold at their core. This is an unusual and increasingly uncomfortable experience for a museum community whose priorities and rhetoric have been—throughout my professional life, at least—broadly congruent with the prevailing values of society and echoed routinely, albeit sometimes too faintly, by our political leaders.”
Are Trump’s Border Wall Prototypes Art? One Artist Is Running Sold-Out Tours
Tours depart from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, stopping at the Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura in Tijuana before continuing on to the border wall prototypes. Büchel’s reasoning behind the project? “[The prototypes] need to be preserved because they can signify and change meaning through time.
France’s New Collection Of Camille Claudel Sculptures Are Now At Musée D’Orsay
“Eleven sculptures by the artist Camille Claudel, who was also Rodin’s muse and mistress, have gone on show at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris after six major French museums stepped in and acquired the works at auction last November. … Twelve items were acquired under French law, whereby the state is entitled to ‘pre-empt’ the sale of an object of national importance by matching the sale price (with buyer’s premium).”
Twenty Modiglianis Seized From Exhibition In Italy Are Definitely Fake
“[The] paintings seized by Italian police last summer from an exhibition of works by Amedeo Modigliani held in Genoa are forgeries, according to Isabella Quattrocchi, an independent expert appointed by Italian prosecutors to assess the images. The show at the Palazzo Ducale closed three days early last July after the Genoa state prosecutor ordered the seizure of 21 alleged fakes.”
Art Exports Have Actually Reduced Britain’s Trade Deficit
“Exported works of art were among the UK’s main commodity contributors, rising by 43.3% (£0.5bn). Car exports, by comparison the second largest category, increased by 3.8% (£0.3bn).”
A “Right” Way To Look At Art?
Time and time again, the author argues that background knowledge is not only unnecessary, but even hurtful, to truly appreciating a work of art — hence the advice to ignore wall labels and audio guides. Michael Findlay accurately points out that many people are intimidated by art, because they feel they don’t know enough to understand it, so if they could just look at it for what it is, they’d appreciate it more than if they’d known the whole artist’s biography.
LA County Museum And Autry Museum Join Their Collections Together
“The idea is to treat our collections as one and for our curators to work together accordingly,” LACMA director Michael Govan said in the announcement. “This exchange of works and ideas will allow both museums to bolster exhibition content especially in the areas of the historical and contemporary American West and the exploration of indigenous cultures across the Americas.”
Study: The Value Of Work By Artists Who Are Depressed Goes Down
By looking at sale and auction price between 1972 to 2014, the authors of the study found that paintings created in the year following the death of a friend or relative saw a decrease in value of about 35% compared to the rest of the artist’s catalog.
Scanner And New Software Looks Inside An Ancient Charred Bible That Is Too Fragile To Open
Dr. Brent Seales has spent 14 years developing a technique for reading ancient scrolls that are too fragile to unwrap. Fine-detail CT scanners can visualize the ink of letters inside such scrolls, but the alphabet soup is unreadable unless each letter can be assigned to its correct position on a surface. Dr. Seales has developed software that can model the surface of a contorted piece of papyrus or parchment from X-ray data and then derive a legible text by assigning letters to their proper surface.