Category: visual

“This campaign would keep the shoes’ color from deteriorating, and the money will go toward a technologically advanced display case to preserve them for future generations. Even though the Smithsonian’s museums are federally funded, the institution still solicits private and corporate contributions for major projects if it isn’t covered by their budget. In fact, this is the Smithsonian’s second Kickstarter campaign; in 2015, the National Air and Space Museum raised $700,000 to preserve the spacesuit that Neil Armstrong wore when he walked on the moon.”

Sonnet Stanfill, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum: “In 2015, the world’s top 12 art museums as based on attendance – what I call the ‘directors’ dozen’ – were all led by men. When Frances Morris became the director of the Tate Modern in April, she became the first woman to join the club. This gender gap extends from Europe to North America, where only five of the 33 directors of the most prominent museums (those with operating budgets of more than $20 million) are women.”

According to an investigation by the newspaper La Stampa, “the ‘ndrangheta and Camorra mafia groups in southern Italy … are reportedly handing over to [ISIS] weapons smuggled out of Moldova and Ukraine by Russian criminal groups in exchange for Roman and Greek artefacts illegally excavated from ancient sites including Leptis Magna, Cyrene and Sabratha in Libya – all UNESCO World Heritage Sites.”

“When [Andrew J.] Hall set out last year to stage an exhibition of [Leon] Golub’s art at the private rural museum he operates in [a Vermont] village, he found out to his surprise that more than a third of the Golubs he had bought were forgeries, according to a lawsuit he filed last month. And the people he says hoodwinked him … seem to have disappeared.”

“Look, art doesn’t have to be daunting. It’s helpful to think of works of art in ways similar to how we think about other people in our lives. Some people are harder to get to know. Some are more open and accessible and we feel we know them straight off. Other people, we feel as though their essence is more guarded.”

“The work of the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson is all about the quest for beauty and the ways in which that quest is doomed to failure, bogging down in mediocrity or kitsch, or, in these works, the trappings of Las Vegas. But the work radiates so much theatricality and glitz and humor that it feels like a big party. For a show about failure, it sure is having a good time.”

“Before Lygia Clark was getting major museum retrospectives; before Adriana Varejão was represented by leading galleries; before Beatriz Milhazes was achieving high prices at auction, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros was collecting Latin American art … Over the last 16 years, Ms. Cisneros and her husband, Gustavo A. Cisneros, have donated 40 of these pieces to the Museum of Modern Art, where she has served on the board since 1992. Now, they are giving 102 more and establishing a research institute at the museum for the study of Latin American art.”

“One artist always seems to have been methodical and technically gifted, the other impulsive and instinctive; one artist tends to have been socially adept, the other rather reticent; one artist seems to have been senior while the other played catch-up… before the rubbing off on (and up against) each other began in earnest.”