A topic in art conservation that’s often overlooked is: when do we stop preserving an object?
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For more than six months, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have been in the news nonstop. Robert Flynn Johnson, the museums’ curator emeritus, summed it up pretty well when he called the museums’ situation “a state of Orwellian dysfunction.” And that’s just the news that’s been reported.
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LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — Long before Reverend Al Shands bought his first contemporary artwork, he founded an Episcopal church that met weekly at a Washington, D.C. seafood restaurant. “I find the wholesome, institutional nature of the church rather boring. But I do not find religion boring. To pray, I do not find boring,” he said. For six years during the 1960s, Shands was able to maintain this unusual congregation. “The only place we could afford to start meeting was in the restaurant. We used the mixing bowl as the baptismal font, the wine came from the bar, our bread was the rolls they served and our altar was the table.” For Shands, “The religious encounter is like a dinner party.”
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The Art Newspaper’s annual museum attendance figures for 2012 were recently released and there were no real surprises, except that the Tate Modern has overtaken the National Gallery in the fourth spot, DC’s National Gallery of Art slipped to 8th, and Seoul’s National Museum of Korean fell out of the top 10 to 12, while the Vatican Museums (which was not included on the 2011 list) entered the list in the 6th spot.
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Though news stories have been swirling over the past week with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest plans to survive — a possible dalliance with the National Gallery of Art here, a tryst with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art there — all the rumors have come to naught. Members of MOCA’s board of trustees have committed funding to the museum that will raise its endowment to over $60 million.
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There’s only so much the brain can absorb in a museum, and for the 2012 Brains: The Mind as Matter exhibition at Wellcome Collection in London, the museum created an online game to keep their visitors’ brains thinking about the anatomy of their own skulls. Called AXON, it’s a surprisingly fast-pace neuron-creation game, mixed in with visually interesting science information. It’s just one of the many games that Wellcome Collection has created, and recently they addressed why exactly they are so interested in involving gaming in their programming.
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Two of the biggest art museums in California may soon become one. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has made a proposal to acquire the Museum of Contemporary Art, a smaller institution that has lately been unstable with mounting budget problems and controversy over Jeffrey Deitch’s tenure as director.
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If 2012 saw museums like the Walker and the New Museum embrace the medium of the internet with redesigned websites and social media presences, 2013 might signal a renaissance for museums and multimedia. Both the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum have just launched new photo and video initiatives.
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The Athens-based architecture practice Oiio Architecture Office has offered up a riff on an icon — they’ve taken Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim museum and mutated it, adding 13 more floors onto the structure’s famous spiral.
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Downton Abbey is downsizing — or at least it was, for a hot second. If you’ve been following the post-Edwardian miniseries, you’ll know that the Crawley family, who lives in the show’s eponymous grand estate house, was in danger of losing their lavish lifestyle. The show’s patriarch Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham, had made a bad investment in Canadian railway, and now, at the dawn of the 1920s, the family would have to sell the colossal Yorkshire manor and be forced to move into (gasp!) a house staffed by only eight servants. The story line was all-too-neatly wrapped up when Matthew, the newest member of the family, finally agreed to hand over a fortune that came in a recent inheritance to save Downton.
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