The new $66 million Art Museum of Western Virginia, designed by Randall Stout and shown above, and scheduled to open in November in the American city of Roanoke, Virginia. (Photo: Randall Stout Architects) 

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, along the Nervión River in downtown Bilbao, Spain.

Accross the US, several mid-size cities, including Milwaukee, Louisville, Biloxi and Roanoke. hope that bold new museums will revitalize their downtowns. They are replicating the success of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. “Bilbao really opened people’s eye because it was visible on the worldwide stage,” said Jim Hackney, an Atlanta fund-raiser for new museums.

The Roanoke art museum’s zinc, glass and steel spires rise like an abstract sculpture and clearly resemble (or simply mimic) Frank Gehry’s curvy, titanium-clad design for the Bilbao branch of the Guggenheim.

But can the Guggenheim strategy, to commission famous and/or fashionable architects to build museums, help struggling cities in realising a post-industrial future on the carcass of an industrial past?

According to the Art Newspaper, a new scientific study suggests that the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao will not return a profit on the public funds paid to establish the institution until 2010 at the earliest, more than a decade after it opened in 1997, despite reports from the museum that this investment has already been paid off.

The Milwaukee Museum of Art gained attention after a new pavilion designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava opened in May 2001. Attendance surged initially, to nearly 540,000 in 2002 from 165,000 in 2000, before dropping to about 300,000 annually in recent years. Russell Bowman, the museum’s former director, said he was not sure a building alone could transform a city into a tourist destination. In Roanoke, it is believed that the museum’s capital campaign has drained Roanoke’s art patrons, leaving little money for the building’s operations and other costs.

Landscape architect Martha Schwartz has anticipated on an eventual bankruptcy of iconic museums and their possible re-use, by depicting the Guggenheim as a shopping mall in the middle of an endless parking lot. Just a cynical joke or a realistic perspective?

 © Martha Schwartz, Inc. (2007)

Read article With Bold Museum, a Virginia City Aims for Visibility (New York Times, December 29, 2007)
Read article A franchise model for the few-very few (Art Newspaper, October 1, 2007)

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987 © Thomas Ammam Fine Art AG, Zurich

Museums and galleries are busier than ever this holiday season. But is anyone actually looking at the art? National museums and art galleries are under greater pressure than ever from the government to generate their own income, and the need to focus on retail has produced some imaginative ideas. Over the past few years, museum shops have transformed themselves beyond recognition. Products are often created in collaboration with artists; at their best (or worst, depending on your point of view), they blur the line between the shop and the gallery it serves.

Read more (The Guardian, December 18, 2007)

Artist Damien Hirst pauses during an interview near his 2007 artwork entitled ”Love’s Paradox (Surrender or Autonomy, Separateness as a Precondition for Connection)” at the White Cube Gallery in London on June 1, 2007. (Photographer: Suzanne Plunkett/Bloomberg News)

Damien Hirst, the second-most- expensive living artist at auction, gave London’s Tate museum four of his trademark artworks, including pickled cows and a canvas of dead flies, the Tate said in a statement today. Museums are struggling to buy works by top contemporary artists like Damien Hirst after prices quadrupled over the last 11 years. “With such a limited budget for acquisitions, and when art market prices are high, Tate is indebted to international contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst for working with us on building the collection,” Tate Director Nicholas Serota said in the statement.

It is not the first time that artists come to the rescue of an art institution in London. In 2006, Whitechapel Gallery in London’s East End auctioned works donated by leading painters, sculptors and photographers from across the world, all of whom have shown at the gallery. The sale raised £2.78m to fund the 100-year-old gallery’s expansion into the now-empty Whitechapel Library. An exhibition of the works was held in the former library building in the days before the auction, which was carrierd out by Sotheby’s. The auctioneer also contributed to the gallery’s investment fund, by donating the usual commissions, and the government charged no value-added tax.

Read more (Bloomberg, December 13, 2007)

Museums and the Web is an annual conference that deals with “the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line.” It is an inspiring four day event held in North America. This time it will take place in Montreal, from 9-12 April 2008.

Next year’s programme has just been published online. Amongst its participants are delegates from museums worldwide, such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Tate Modern in London, and MoMA in New York. MuseumLab editor Juha van ´t Zelfde will also be present, for a second consecutive year. He is scheduled to give a presentation in the Technology - Mobile Computing session, on the findings and results of the Amsterdam Museum Night.

Museums and the Web is organized by Archimuse. See who attended the conference in 2007.

Photo: Courtesy New Acropolis Museum

The New Acropolis Museum has been covered here before, but this new article in the Guardian might be of your interest.

Related articles:
Washington Post (October 7, 2007)
Time (October 28, 2007)
New York Times Slide Show
Wikipedia

Le Laboratoire, a new laboratory that promotes the links between art and science, has opened in Paris. Le Monde’s Nathaniel Herzberg spoke with Le Laboratoire’s director David Edwards, who is also a biology professor at Harvard University. The idea for the laboratory began at Harvard, which hopes to become more open to the arts and is one of the funders for the project.

While similar to MIT’s Media Lab and the Wellcome Trust in London, Le Laboratoire is “a scientific structure that accepts doubt about scientific progress” while also providing “a place for experimentation.” Practically, the project involves collaborations. As examples, Edwards cites James Nachtwey’s photographs of infectious diseases, and Mathieu Lehanneur’s air purifier, the latter being the result of a collaboration with Edwards himself. “In all of these cases,” explains Edwards, “it’s the encounter of two worlds that has allowed for innovation. That’s the reason for the Laboratoire.”

Taken from Artforum (December 4, 2007)

“Water Lilies” is the second-most-popular cellphone wallpaper sold by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which opened a new digital-images shop in September. This so-called ‘On the Go’-service is only the latest future-shock innovation at the museum, a civilized institution that has nonetheless adopted what one tech reporter scarily described as a policy of “aggressive digital-capture.”

Having taken high-resolution photos of 350,000 works in its collection, and having magnanimously made almost all of them all searchable on its Web site, the M.F.A. now has one of the biggest image databases of any art museum in the world.

Read article (New York Times, December 2, 2007)

Since October, The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, the most famous, probably the most discussed and most controversial work of the Italian master, declared a World Heritage work of art and registered at the UNESCO worldwide sites, can be seen by all, in all its details, on the website of HAL9000, an organization providing tools for works of art restoration and viewing.

The online visualisation system of the highest definition photograph ever in the world (16 billion pixels) in fact lets viewers enlarge and observe any portion of the painting, giving them a clear view of sections down to as little as one millimetre square.

Go to the website of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, which houses The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci.

The Dutch State Mines are about to open up their archives. In collaboration with its former patron DSM the collection will be preserved in digital form for future generations. Thousands of pictures and editions of its historical newspapers will be made available online.According to the press release this is a result of a growing demand for information about the regional history in the province of Limburg. More information on this project on www.demijnen.nl (only in Dutch).

A view of Herzog & de Meuron’s design for the Miami Art Museum, scheduled to open in 2011. (photo: Herzog & De Meuron)

Museums planning a new building typically present the design as a done deal, with every detail resolved and the architects ready to break ground. But the Miami Art Museum decided to do it differently. In unveiling a design today by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the museum plans to portray the concept as an interim stage in the development of its $220 million project overlooking Biscayne Bay.

The architects and Terence Riley, the museum’s director, say they want to include the public in the project. To underscore this point, the museum will put the design on view tomorrow at its current site nearby, in an exhibition which will also include about 20 models showing how the design has evolved. “A lot of museum directors are terrified about this,” Mr. Riley said of the open discussion. “Because they don’t understand the process, they try to keep everything secret.” And, referring to the exhibition, he added “It makes you realize that nothing is a fait accompli,” Mr. Riley said. “Nothing arrives out of the head of the architect like Athena out of Zeus’ head. Architecture doesn’t just come out that way.”

The museum will overlook Biscayne Bay and feature a wide canopy designed to connect with the tropical surroundings of a park. (photo: Herzog & De Meuron)

Go to website Miami Art Museum
Read article (New York Times, November 30, 2007)