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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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$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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Cy Twombly’s Estate Accused of Overvaluation and Mismanagement
Artists’ estates have their jobs cut out for them. The organizations have to manage artists’ legacies, watching out for forgeries, validating works, and preserving their reputation while organizing the physical detritus artists inevitably leave behind — collections, unfinished works, studios, and homes. As the New York Times reports, painter Cy Twombly’s estate has run into some financial troubles as its board members have been accused of misappropriating funds.
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NYC Cultural Institutions Have Pension Payments Withheld While City Examines “Anomalies”
The New York Times reported yesterday that New York City is withholding payments this fiscal year into a pension system for many cultural centers with city contracts, such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Basically, the city is asking if the amount they have to pay into the retirement system has been overstated in the bookkeeping of these places.
