If the owner is explicitly saying the business itself won’t survive, keeping the building around as a cultural monument raises additional questions about what culture, exactly, is being preserved. - Curbed
The V&A partnered with the Factum Foundation to create the high-resolution color, infrared and 3-D scans in 2019. And last year, in honor of the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, the museum refurbished the cartoons’ gallery, known as the Raphael Court, by repainting the walls, replacing light fixtures and taking other steps to make the cartoons “more visible and...
"Leading stock photography company Shutterstock announced today that it has acquired TurboSquid, a digital media company that sells 3D assets, for $75 million. The move is both a talent and an IP acquisition, and it will give Shutterstock's two million customers … access to raw materials for making images from scratch." - Fast Company
"The Antiquarium, a museum located on the ruins of the ancient city of Pompeii, fully reopened this week for the first time in more than 40 years. Home to some of the razed settlement's best-preserved artifacts, including protective amulets and plaster casts of Mount Vesuvius's victims, the museum will host a permanent display narrating Pompeii's history. - Smithsonian Magazine
After reporting in the Kansas City Star turned up evidence that William Rockhill Nelson, the Nelson in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art was a segregationist, the museum is reassessing being named after the real estate and newspaper magnate who helped found the museum. - Artnet
"On closer inspection, there is an asymmetric battle between a grassroots struggle to redistribute power, and those who place institutional preservation at the center. Ironically, Trump, by dint of his very nastiness, gave the upper hand to institutional preservationists, and not just by threats to defund sanctuary cities, which cast institutions as victims." - Hyperallergic
"The world's most visited museum — a record 10 million in 2019, mostly from overseas — is grappling with its longest closure since World War II, as pandemic restrictions keep its treasures under lock and key. But without crowds that can swell to as many as 40,000 people a day, museum officials are seizing a golden opportunity to finesse...
"'We no longer have a choice, the building is in distress,' Centre Pompidou president Serge Lasvignes told Le Figaro of the extensive upkeep needed for its Renzo Piano- and Richard Rogers-designed exterior of steel piping that was constructed in the 1970s." The museum will close for the €200 million project at the end of 2023 and should reopen in...
"The pandemic will have caused frustration to students everywhere and it must have been difficult for university authorities to react to the ever-shifting situation. However, this last year has highlighted the extent to which universities are now dependent upon the money generated by the numbers of students they have, and the willingness of those students to go into debt,...
"I would like to officially state that I’m thrilled that the museum has collected art by women, in 2020 and in any other year, and the selections named in the press release are fantastic additions. However, I am confused about how the museum defines “diversifying a collection,” why they didn’t collect a lot more art by women at lower...
The artists of the Place du Tetre are feeling squeezed out by restaurants, and then there's the emptiness. One of the artists: "It’s a hard time for everyone, but it’s especially depressing here. ... Usually, this place is better than a studio because you are in contact with people from all over the place and that’s the pleasure. But...
The designer of the exhibit: "Duke Kahanamoku, on a wooden board with no fins, surfed a wave that was over 25 feet tall on its face. And he surfed it for over a mile. And we wanted to have the audience experience that moment. So we built a 27-foot tall wave and put a replica of Duke's board in...
Online drawing classes are, for many people in lockdown in Britain, a lifeline to the outside world. And there's a plus: "Individual sessions can attract hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people, and moving everything online has made life drawing more accessible to a diverse crowd." - The Observer (UK)
Because we can't trust the art world to the elites. For instance, in recent years, "Major art collectors (mostly white) were benefitting from the Trump deregulation and tax cuts, while investing some of their surplus wealth into the rebranding opportunity offered by the anti-Trump resistance. They could literally turn a profit on fulfilling the activist demand." - Hyperallergic
The chair, Pam Rorke Levy, says that despite controversy over the attempted sale of a Diego Rivera mural, among other things, "she has acted to save the school and that she was taking necessary steps in keeping one of the last remaining colleges on the West Coast exclusively dedicated to contemporary art in operation." - The New York Times
