Category: visual

One historic site, the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Coconut Grove, did sustain some serious flooding to its basement, café and stores, although the main building and its collections remained safe. A truck arrived on Tuesday to begin pumping out the water from the lower levels. “The good news is there are no art collections stored [there].”

“Discovered at the Dra Abul Naga necropolis on the west bank of the Nile [near Luxor], the newly opened tomb holds statuettes, mummies, pottery, and other artifacts … One of the statues depicts a goldsmith named Amenemhat sitting beside his wife. A figure of one of their sons stands beneath them. The archaeologists say the family lived during Egypt’s 18th Dynasty.” (includes video)

“The world’s top collectors in 2017 – among whose recent acquisitions are a record-breaking Basquiat and Anicka Yi’s video from the Whitney Biennial – include newcomers like Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, the founder of Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and her husband, Silicon Valley VC Marc Andreessen, comedian and Chicano art aficionado Cheech Marin, and Iranian financier Mohammed Afkhami. And media mogul David Geffen is back!”

“Overall, the society’s museums appear to be okay and intact. Minimal damages to the buildings with the exception of some damaged windows.… Power is out so climate control is an issue.”

Yes, museums do have codes of ethics that cover the professional conducts of their staffs. Erich Hatala Matthes argues that that isn’t anough, as controversies from the fate of looted antiquities in collections to this summer’s outcries over Dana Schutz’s Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial and Sam Durant’s Scaffold at the Walker Art Center to the culture war over Confederate monuments demonstrate.

“A small fire on Friday at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg raised alarms about the fate of one of its greatest treasures: the beloved Hermitage cats that protect its Old Masters from mice and have become museum mascots.”

The 102,000-square-foot Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa is in a set of old grain silos on the city’s waterfront that have been cnverted by designer Thomas Heatherwick. Its art comes from Jochen Zeitz, a major collector of new work from the continent.

“Thanks to a percolating economy and the technological revolution that swept through architecture while most of these designers were building their practices, many of them are producing work at speeds and scales that were not possible even a decade ago.”

“Sotheby’s announced the price estimates for the works. The Berkshire Museum holdings will be offered at auction starting November, and will continue through 2018. The museum has said it hopes to raise some $50 million from the sale. Leading the sale is a work by Norman Rockwell that has attracted the most ire of those protesting the move.”

Described by founder Elsa Longhauser as a kunsthalle, the ICA LA is a small, non-collecting museum, whose origins lie in the now defunct Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA). After a lengthy rent dispute with its landlord, the SMMoA closed in 2015, and Longhauser, the museum’s executive director, took time to regroup before rebranding the museum as the ICA LA. “We’re not really changing the model,” Longhauser told Hyperallergic at a press preview yesterday, “we’ve just expanded. Moving from Santa Monica to Downtown gave us the opportunity to rethink, revise, and contemplate what we want to do.”