Category: visual

“Former Asheville mayor and city manager Ken Michalove, who has been dogging the footsteps of the Asheville Art Museum for nearly two years, now says it is headed for bankruptcy unless it ramps up its own fundraising, sticks to its original goals and stops trying to adjust its game plan and financial reports so as to qualify for city and county money.”

An official with the local Tourism Development Authority says the museum is “strong financially” and that an independent auditor confirms that fundraising pledges will be made good. The committee then voted unanimously to extend a grant of $1.5 million for the museum’s expansion.

“The challenge of developing and executing a coherent artistic agenda—a show that succeeds on its own terms—in the rickety, transitory, financially and organisationally opaque world of biennials is the default theme of the hardy breed of curators whose line of work this is.”

Maybe Yves Klein was an attention whore. (There was that time he took an empty gallery and called it an exhibition, and the time he had naked models covered in paint roll around on canvas.) But he created (and patented) an ultramarine pigment that countless artists before him had tried without success to stabilize.

“Another body of artwork out there — produced by Native American artists and entrepreneurs — asserts ownership over the images associated with their culture.”

“I didn’t invent London. It has dominated British culture since the 18th century and has never exerted more global cultural power than today. Tourists from all over the world are flocking, right now, to London for its renowned galleries. It is a stage on which artists are made and ruined.”

“Veterans of Nashville’s commercial recording industry complain that a city that has branded itself over the last 50-plus years as ‘Music City’ is in danger of turning into a landscape of luxury apartments, mixed-use retail and other amenities.”

“After five years of financial and managerial turmoil, the museum finally is poised on the brink of a bright new era, and community anticipation and goodwill are high.”

“The Venezuelan museum, which had bought the Henri Matisse painting for about $500,000 from a New York gallery in 1981, reported that it had been stolen in December 2002 — apparently swapped for a forgery after it was lent to an exhibit in Spain. But a Miami FBI agent who has led the investigation to recover the work confirmed Wednesday that it was actually stolen sometime before September 2000, and spotted in Paris a year later.”

“There’s no rescuing the institution known as the Corcoran from this final crisis. And neither the National Gallery nor George Washington is obligated to try, truthfully. But under the new dispensation, leaders at the college and gallery can restore and even improve upon the things that the old Corc got right. Here are six suggestions for ways that the National Gallery and GW can build stronger institutions for the District.”