Are American Museums Serious About Ownership Of Their Art?

Not according to a new report. “The survey found 140,000 objects that ‘need provenance research,’ far more than the 18,000 objects posted on the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal maintained by the museum association. Most of the museums actively conducting provenance research have completed work on less than half the relevant items in their collections, only about 33% of the museums have a separate budget for the purpose and only about 10% have employed a full-time researcher, the survey says.”

A Look At Tate Modern’s Expansion Plans

“The addition will make the museum comparable in size to the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The annex, which resembles glass boxes stacked up arbitrarily to form a 220-foot pyramid, has been designed by the Swiss firm Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the same architects who in the late 1990’s turned an abandoned power station on the south bank of the Thames, across from St. Paul’s Cathedral, into Tate Modern.”

Lincoln Center’s New Face

Despite considerable skepticism, redevelopment of Lincoln Center is underway. But that’s not the only thing happening. Lincoln Center is loosening up, becoming more populist. “We’re all very focused on exploiting the potential of 21st-century technology to extend what happens in our halls outside of our halls.”

Why Tate Modern Needs To Be Bigger

Tate Modern is proposing a £165 million extension. Why? “Tate Modern has been a victim of its own extraordinary success. On all too many weekends, it can feel like a surreal cross between some brutalist shopping mall, Piranesian airport lounge and the Seven Circles of Hell. Deadly queues form for its hard-pressed cafes and lavatories. The bookshop can resemble a jumble sale. The galleries are often little more, for all their lofty grandeur, than corridors for crowds to tramp through in search of novelty, rarely stopping to look at the art on display.”