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.
News
Posted inNews
An Ancient Symbol of Tolerance Goes on Its First American Tour
Back in the ancient world, whole clusters of ceremonial objects would be buried at a specific points in temple foundations, with a theorized reason being that these ritualistic items were believed to keep the buildings from ruin. While this didn’t quite work in the longterm, as temples are as structurally fragile as everything else over the centuries, they did turn into inadvertent time capsules. One particular foundation deposit in Babylon contained an artifact that has become as significant symbolically as it is as a relic of the ancient world. And it’s now on its first American tour.
Posted inNews
Did Chicago Public Schools Ban a Classic Graphic Novel?
In a strange and troubling move that looks suspiciously like censorship, Chicago Public Schools have removed Persepolis, a classic graphic novel that tells the story of author Marjane Satrapi’s coming-of-age in Iran, from all seventh-grade classrooms.
Posted inNews
BIG Architects to Design LEGO Museum and Smithsonian Master Plan
Bjarke Ingels Group (or BIG), the Danish architecture firm helmed by its namesake, is getting even bigger. New plans to create a LEGO museum and develop the master plan for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., signal that the buzzed-about firm is on the cusp of becoming the world’s next big starchitecture outlet.
Posted inNews
The Met Will Open 7 Days a Week Starting July 1
The Metropolitan Museum director Thomas P. Campbell announced today that starting this summer on July 1, the museum will stay open every day of the week.
Posted inNews
Presenting the First Ever George W. Bush Painting Retrospective [UPDATED]
Now that former US President George W. Bush has been painting his retirement away, and his email is being hacked for a glimpse of the art he is producing, we thought it was time to give him a retrospective of sorts.
Posted inNews
Guggenheim Expands Chinese Art Engagement With New Curator and Commissions
The Guggenheim just announced that with the help of the Robert H. N. Ho Foundation, the museum will greatly expand its engagement with Chinese art and artists.
Posted inNews
$3 Chinese Bowl Sells for $2 Million
From the sheer amount of amazing Chinese pottery discovered at random tag sales, you’d think front yards were just crawling with thousand-year-old vases. Sotheby’s just sold a Chinese bowl from the Northern Song Dynasty for $2.2 million. It was originally bought for a meager $3.
Posted inNews
The Vatican Will Mount a Pavilion Exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale
[This post has been corrected, see below for details]
Just as Pope Francis begins his tenure at the head of the Catholic Church, the announcement comes that the Vatican will finally have its own pavilion at the Venice Biennale, themed around the Book of Genesis.
Posted inNews
FBI Amps Up Efforts for 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Art Theft
Today, the FBI announced that they have identified possible suspects in the shocking 1990 Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum heist of $500m worth of art, including three works by Rembrant, Vermeer’s “The Concert” (1658–1660), Govaert Flinck’s “Landscape with an Obelisk” (1638), five works by Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet’s “Chez Tortoni” (1878–1880), and a historic Chinese beaker (1200–1100 BCE).
Posted inNews
The Coney Island History Project Reopens Post-Sandy
After sustaining significant damage in Hurricane Sandy, the Coney Island History Project is reopening their reconstructed space on March 24, Coney Island’s Opening Day, and are already looking at ways to capture the story of the storm as part of their mission to chronicle the area’s history.
Posted inNews
CalArts Joins the Free Online Course Experiment
A high profile arts institution recently joined the spiking number of free online classes, with the California Institute of the Arts teaming up with Coursera. The rapidly expanding offerer of MOOCs, or “massive open online courses,” is only a year old, but since it started in 2012 it’s grown from partnering with three higher education institutions to now over 60.
