“The vice president of the Museum of Modern Art, is the wife of Richard Fuld, the chairman of Lehman Brothers“.
Die Welt’s Hannes Stein takes a look at the possible repercussions of the financial crisis on arts funding. “The bank crash in the United States will have a wide-reaching impact,” writes Stein, who is writing principally on the arts in New York. In New York, the crisis could not have come at a worse time, since the city recently made cuts across the board to arts funding, from theaters to museums. “It’s an absolute storm,” says Jeffrey Peek, a curator at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York City Ballet.
Digging below the surface, Stein demonstrates the close links between the art world and the financial world. Consider “the following detail: Kathleen Fuld, the vice president of the Museum of Modern Art, is the wife of Richard Fuld, the chairman of (the now bankrupt) Lehman Brothers.” While the bank kept shares for MoMA, the Fulds privately donated not only money but also artworks to the museum. “No one knows how that’s supposed to continue now,” writes Stein. Lehman Brothers also supported the National Gallery and Tate Modern in London the Städel in Frankfurt and the Louvre in Paris.
An excellent recap of the Open Museum marathon is in the making at Seb Chan’s blog.
Openness is a way for museums to be seen to be ‘creating new value’ from the old - and to assert their relevance in stimulating new creativity, economic and cultural production. Museums can collaborate with the community to improve findability through tagging of various kinds; and make discoveries, create communities of interest around their collections and in so doing improve their research and collection data.
With each other and other sorts of knowledge providers, museum openness can create richer value for researchers, scholars and even general browsers by connecting collections and research with broader context and richer resources elsewhere - moving from being a singular ‘destination’ to simply a high value node in a knowledge network/web (I equated this to the function of a reference librarian).
All in all the Open Museums part of Picnic was one of the most successful ‘Picnic Specials’ along with Surprising Africa. The attendance was solid and the ideas discussed traversed the different interpretations and permutations of ‘openness’ - from reaching out to non-traditional museum audiences, to inter-institutional data sharing and co-creative visitor interactions.
There are more reviews here (in English), here (Dutch), here, here, here and a preview here by PICNIC programme director Monique van Dusseldorp.
The programme of the Open Museum marathon is online. Readers of this blog can get special discount tickets for the marathon. Simply send me a message and I will get you the link and code.
On Tuesday 23 September, Sebastian Chan from the Powerhouse museum in Sydney will lead a masterclass on the application of social media in museums. The masterclass will explore the strategic opportunities afforded by social media; its transformative effects; and ways of evaluating and learning from the results. The masterclass will use examples of user generated content, social tagging, and collaborative research; as well as looking at future directions for museums online.
On the day the global financial markets are rocking in the turmoil of a Wall Street meltdown, Damien Hirst rewrote the rules of art world economics with his auction of Beautiful Inside My Head Forever , a ‘greatest hits sale’ at Sotheby’s. According to the Guardian, the first night sale brought in a staggering £70.5 million.
It’s tough running a museum in the 21stst century, competing with all the flashy distractions of the digital age. The Museum, a two-part TV documentary about the controversial and much-delayed construction of the Royal Ontario Museum’s new addition, shows the rising tension between the museum’s mundane demands and the outlandish ideas of its architect, Daniel Libeskind. Read the rest of this entry »
“Anatomy of an Angel” (foreground) by Damien Hirst on display at Sotheby’s in London. (Click to watch a video on the website of Sotheby’s)
One thing about the hyped auction of new works by Damien Hirst next week at Sotheby’s in London is immediately impressive: its sheer scale. It would be wrong to compare this to a private gallery show held in an auction house. The size of it, 10 large rooms and more than 200 works, is more like a major career retrospective at Tate Modern.
It feels about the same dimension as the Cy Twombly exhibition at the Tate this summer. But that contained the work of a long lifetime while this is all signed and dated 2008. Nonetheless, joining Rembrandt and Michelangelo in the Pantheon seems to be the final goal.
Interestingly enough, Sotheby’s stock fell 8.4 percent yesterday amid concern that the global art market can absorb only so many dead animals in formaldehyde.
Luckily, museums and their collections are not (yet) publicly traded.
On the day the global financial markets are rocking in the turmoil of a Wall Street meltdown, Damien Hirst is rewriting the economic rules of the art world with his auction of Beautiful Inside My Head Forever , a ‘greatest hits sale’ at Sotheby’s. According to the Guardian, the first night sale brought in a staggering £70.5 million.
Würsa (à 18000 km de la terre) by Daniel Firman, 2006-2008,
installation view, Château de Tokyo/Palais de Fontainebleau
The Palais de Tokyo in Paris has occupied the Château de Fontainebleau, once the royal residence of King François I, with an exhibition of contemporary art works. The exhibition is dubbed “Château de Tokyo/Palais de Fontainebleau” and features fifteen artist interventions, including a swing by Roman Signer and an elephant that is hanging from the ceiling by Daniel Firman.
Instead of a “confrontation” with the castle, the exhibition creates a resonance with the castle’s architecture, painting collection, and furniture. “Château de Tokyo/Palais de Fontainebleau” is the second chapter of an ongoing collaboration between the castle and art institutions. Initiated last year by Bernard Notari, the director of the castle, the project began with the exhibition “Picasso at Fontainebleau.” The current show will run until November 17.
America’s worst terrorist attack is fading in many memories as its seventh anniversary approaches. However, the latest design of the official 9/11 memorial and museum aims to keep the memory alive.
The new design for the memorial plaza at the World Trade Center site, with the entry pavilion to the museum at top left.
Two trident columns from the original twin towers are to be incorporated into the atrium to convey fortitude, designers say.
“The vice president of the Museum of Modern Art, is the wife of Richard Fuld, the chairman of Lehman Brothers“.
Lehman Brothers also supported the National Gallery and Tate Modern in London the Städel in Frankfurt and the Louvre in Paris.
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Posted by Michiel van Iersel
