EIGHT PLUS ONE

Today the Philadelphia Museum of Art will unveil eight paintings that have been donated by two pioneer American art collectors. The gift, which consists of eight paintings by the artist group known as “The Eight,” and one work by an artist outside the group will substantially strengthen the museum’s 20th century collection.  Five of The Eight painters were known as Ashcan realists – artists who “took their subject matter from street life, which more academically inclined artists and critics found too coarse for fine art.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

IN LIEU OF

Britain’s museums don’t have the acquisition resources of their American counterparts. So the government set up a plan that allows estates faced with paying large sums of inheritance tax to settle part of these bills by handing over works of art in lieu of money to the Government. These are passed to institutions such as the Tate Gallery or the National Gallery. It’s been a boon to museums. The Telegraph (UK)

CONFLICT? WHAT CONFLICT?

As NEA money for the arts has dried up in America, should we be surprised that private financing interests have moved in and that charges of conflict of interest are being leveled at museums and theaters?  Robert Brustein writes that: “the high arts have become an endangered species in this country, being picked off by a variety of sharpshooters, including commercial producers, populists, politicians, multi-culturalists, middlebrow critics and, not least of all, the foundations. At the event celebrating thirty-five years of the NEA, I imagined that I saw the heads of many of those extinct animals mounted on the walls, under a plaque designated ‘Art with a capital `A.” – New Republic

SHIFTING PERSPECTIVE

In the second part of MOMA2000, in which the New York Museum of Modern Art has dismantled and rearranged their permanent collection, “Making Choices” examines the years between 1920 – 1960. “Iconic works are plucked from their usual place in Art 101 and placed in a new context; lesser-known works, rarely seen, emerge from museum storage; all the different arts are mixed together.” In this fashion, “the shows together ask not only that you, the viewer, encompass contradiction and paradox but that you acknowledge that good and evil sometimes draw from the same fires in the heart. Which is not a bad way to know the twentieth century.” – New York Magazine