Melissa Chiu, who has led the Hirshhorn for more than a decade, is the fourth director of a Smithsonian museum to depart within the last two years, and the most recent to leave amid the Trump administration’s effort to overhaul the organization’s network of 21 museums and other cultural centers. - The New York Times
The reopening of the museum, which draws about 1.3 million visitors each year, is planned for spring 2028, shortly before the Summer Olympics come to Los Angeles. - The New York Times
“One of the world’s most important collections of 20th-century Mexican art, including works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, is set to be exported to Spain under an agreement with Banco Santander, sparking outrage among Mexico’s cultural community.” Everyone involved insists that this is a temporary loan, though many aren’t convinced. - The Guardian
The new LACMA, which opens to members in the coming weeks and to the general public May 4, is momentous not only because of its long and often bumpy road, but because it is seeking to reinvent what an encyclopedic museum means in the modern era. - The New York Times
“Marcel Duchamp is an enigma that art history swallowed and got stuck in its throat. What do we do with him now? I left the Museum of Modern Art’s big new show of Duchamp not sure if I know, or the museum knows, or if the public will know.” - Artnet
For 25 years, people have been arguing about whether that this project was a good idea or a terrible one. Here’s a look at each side, at why the building has cost so much, and why director Michael Govan considers the whole thing so important. - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
Maurizio Cattelan has set up a hotline where folks from anywhere can “confess their sins.” Those the artist/father-confessor considers most in need of repentance will be invited to confess to him in real time during an April 23 live-stream. “In a world of sin, absolution has never been so close,” he says. - Euronews
The Basque government is already familiar with the Reina Sofía’s condition report—which deems the painting too fragile to travel—and that it is instead requesting a feasibility report from independent technicians on how a transfer to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao could be carried out safely. - ARTnews
There is every reason to be wary when a foreign-owned corporation stakes a claim to defending Canada’s cultural sovereignty, but the case of HarperCollins calls for particular skepticism. - The Walrus
No L.A. institution has taken as risky a leap in this century as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With the opening of the $724-million David Geffen Galleries, LACMA has effectively erased and reinvented itself, trading a fragmented campus core for a sinuous, hovering concrete megastructure. - Los Angeles Times
The town whose bombing the painting depicts is in the Basque region, and politicians there want to borrow Picasso’s canvas and display it in the Guggenheim Bilbao to commemorate the atrocity's 90th anniversary. Meanwhile, Madrid's president insists that Guernica remain where it is now, the Reina Sofía Museum. - The Guardian
The annex, being built for Project Domani, the museum’s expansion of its collection into 20th- and 21st-century art (which has traditionally been left to the Tate Galleries), will be designed by Kengo Kuma, architect of the V&A Museum’s branch in Dundee and of Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium. - The Guardian
I think Duchamp got at something vital about Western culture over the previous 400 years: that an object didn’t count as “art” because of its beauty, its subject matter or its greatness, but because of how it asked us to use it. - The New York Times
Titled “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art” and published by October, Kline’s essay is a despairing portrait of the city’s art scene. It functions both as an elegy for a lost New York art world of the 2010s and as a blistering critique of all the privilege required to find success here. - ARTnews
“In a motion filed on Friday, US National Park Service lawyers say that the federal judge’s order to suspend construction of the new facility is ‘threatening grave national-security harms to the White House, the president and his family, and the president’s staff.’” - The Guardian
