Category: visual

The Association of Art Museum Directors, “which has 217 member museums in North America, announced a few more subtle tweaks to [its] guidelines, including requiring a public explanation on the AAMD’s website if a museum decides to acquire a piece despite gaps in its ownership record going back to the fall of 1970.”

“Despite rising interest in and scholarship about folk art — and even after the wholesale rethinking of several major American wings on the East Coast — the isolation of folk from academic is still the norm.”

“Perhaps because they are less susceptible to fads and fancies, small museums like Yale and the Parrish have the freedom to show art the bigger institutions won’t. These two newly reincarnated museums demonstrate that such institutions are indispensable.”

“A routine check into an antiquity’s history has uncovered its stolen past, prompting a swift return to a French museum by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). The MFA delivered the bronze statuette, which had been in its collection since 1904, to the Musée de la Chartreuse in Douai.”

“The once-grand Knoedler gallery has been accused again of selling a forged painting for $5.5 million that was attributed to an American master, in this case, the artist Mark Rothko.”

“The demolition of the early 19th-century structures took place under the cover of darkness in the early hours of New Year’s Day. The complex on Strastnoy Boulevard was designed by the Neo-classical architect, Joseph Bové, who was commissioned to rebuild Moscow after the city was engulfed by fire following Napoleon’s invasion in 1812.”

“It was a match made in psychedelic Heaven.”

“The report revealed an alarming statistic: Naples has around 200 closed and abandoned churches. Some have been stripped of all their furnishings including works of art, some never received the funds they had been promised, while others received them but never embarked on the agreed conservation projects.”

“Like many marriages, this peculiar union between two men and the (presumably) polyamorous plant wasn’t meant to be. .,. After scathing reviews, acts of vandalism, angry art patrons, and counter-protest art performances (not to mention an art critic who returned to prostitution after the ordeal), the Menil Collection – the Houston museum that had acquired the tree sculpture in 2011 – decided they had had enough.”

“The project, a collaboration that began in 2003 between the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC, aims to record all oil paintings owned by the nation ‘irrespective of perceived quality and condition.’ That means everything from recognized masters in famous London galleries to the work of a councilman in a town in Somerset who painted his colleagues.”