“Each year up to 14 million people visit the 12th-century Paris landmark on an island in the Seine river. Building began about 850 years ago, but pollution and the passing of time have chipped off large chunks of stone.” Says the chief fundraiser for the repair project, “If we don’t do these restoration works, we’ll risk seeing parts of the exterior structure begin to fall. This is a very serious risk.”
Category: visual
Utah Museum Of Fine Arts Reopens After 19-Month Renovation And ‘Reimagining’
The physical plant and climate control have been fixed up, the galleries have been reconfigured, and even the labels and wall text have been rethought.
Study: World’s Most-Popular Museums Ranked
A study by the Erasmus University School of Management in Rotterdam surveyed tourists and residents to determine which museums were most popular. Interestingly, the biggest museums were not ranked at the top.
Berkshire Museum Turns Down $1 Million To Delay Selling Off Art
“The anonymous group … pledged to contribute up to $1 million to the Pittsfield museum if its board agrees to pause an auction of 40 works of art at Sotheby’s and to allow outside experts to provide a second opinion on the advisability of the controversial sale. Elizabeth McGraw, president of the museum’s board of trustees, said the offer falls short.”
Houston’s Major Museums Are Holding Up Against Hurricane Harvey
The Menil Collection, Museum of Fine Art Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Houston Center for Photography report no damage to their collections and relatively little to their buildings – so far. The Rockport Center for the Arts in Corpus Christi, alas, hasn’t been so lucky.
Moscow’s Pushkin Museum Tries To Crowdsource Purchase Of A Titian
“Previously thought to be a copy of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, experts at the Pushkin say it is the earliest surviving version of the work and now the Moscow museum wants to buy it through crowdfunding. It does not come cheap though – the painting is reportedly estimated to be worth between $10m-$20m.”
We Barely Pause To Look At Art In Museums. So Why Do We Spend So Much Time On Selfies?
“Mobile technology encourages us to forego the Enlightenment Era experience and its accompanying promise of profound self-knowledge. With the invisible audience of social media always lurking in our mobile phones, we are tempted to permanently affix a scrim of personal narrative over the artwork we see and experience. Do art selfies correlate with lower levels of engagement with the artwork?”
After A Century Of Puzzling, Researchers Have Cracked The Brilliant Code Of A 1000-Year-Old Tablet
“The team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney believe that the four columns and 15 rows of cuneiform – wedge shaped indentations made in the wet clay – represent the world’s oldest and most accurate working trigonometric table, a working tool which could have been used in surveying, and in calculating how to construct temples, palaces and pyramids.”
Man Sold £30,000 In Fake Artworks. Not Very Good Fakes As It Turns Out…
“Richard Pearson, 56, from Sunderland, was jailed in January for selling 14 faked drawings and pictures to a gallery in Northumberland. He admitted fraud and forgery charges and was sentenced to three years and seven months. Suspicions were aroused when a restorer noticed that one of the canvases Pearson used was too new. A price on a receipt he claimed was from the 1960s was also spotted to be in decimal pounds and pence, rather than pounds and shillings, and a telephone number he used was too long.”
Here’s How Museums Use Their Architecture To Court Bigger Crowds
New ideas say it’s time for museums to embrace their exteriors, even out into the sidewalks or streets near them, and certainly their plazas. In one case, in London, “the idea behind the project was to see the museum not just as a cultural project, but as an urban one. It needs to be of the street.”