A major New York art collector is poised to donate his trove of some 2,500 pieces of contemporary drawing to the city’s Museum of Modern Art. Harvey S. Shipley Miller, who until recently collected mainly Russian avant-garde books, has served on the MoMA board since 2001, and spent only a year amassing his impressive collection of drawings, which is insured for $75 million. “The collection’s focus is on artists who have emerged in the last two decades, but there are also contemporary works by artists who became prominent in the 1960’s and 70’s.”
Tag: 09.21.04
And Musicians Get What Percentage, Again?
So much for the recording industry’s claims that the culture of digital music would be the end of its profit margins. “Apple Computer, the dominant legal download business in Europe and the US, retains just 4 cents from each 99-cent track sale while ‘mechanical copyright’ holders – generally the record labels, who own copyright in the song’s recording – take 62 cents or more. Music publishers take the rest – about 8 cents. With the sites, the copyright owners have doubled their share of royalties, even though the marginal cost of manufacturing has fallen to almost zero.”
Where Is AAMD In The Great Barnes Debate?
This week, a judge will finally rule on whether or not the Barnes Foundation may break the rules laid down by its founder, and move the famed collection to Philadelphia in an attempt to stabilize its financial situation. But isn’t a key voice missing from the discussion? “[T]he move has generated a good deal of commentary. Except from the one corner of the art world that, given the issues at stake, you would have most expected to hear from: the Association of Art Museum Directors… By sitting on the sidelines in the Barnes debate, AAMD is gravely damaging its moral authority.”
Too Much Hedging, Not Enough Scholarship
“The Museum of the American Indian has much to boast of… But the ambition of creating a ‘museum different’ – the goal of making that museum answer to the needs, tastes and traditions of perhaps 600 diverse tribes, ranging from the Tapirape of the Brazilian jungles to the Yupik of Alaska – results in so many constituencies that the museum often ends up filtering away detail rather than displaying it, and minimizing difference even while it claims to be discovering it.”