An Online Art Collection Grows Out of Infancy

Published on May 12, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The expanded second iteration of the Google Art Project was unveiled last week. Photo by: Google Art Project/Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

By Roberta Smith from The New York Times

I don’t know how many wonders of the world there are by now, but it is possible that the Google Art Project will someday join the list.

The greatly expanded second iteration of this online compilation of self-selected art museums and artworks was unveiled last week. It makes available images of more than 32,000 works in 31 mediums and materials, from the collections of 151 museums and arts organizations worldwide, forming a broad, deep river of shared information, something like a lavishly illustrated art book fused with high-end open storage.

But world-wonder status will not happen tomorrow. The project has plenty of limitations and some bugs to work out. Numerous important museums have remained aloof, for one thing, including the Louvre, the Prado, the Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and every Swiss museum of note.

To Read More…

Manual of Museum Planning; Sustainable Space, Facilities, and Operations

Published on May 7, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Manual of Museum Planning
Sustainable Space, Facilities, and Operations
Third Edition

As museums have taken on more complex roles in their communities and the number of museum stakeholders has increased to include a greater array of people, effective museum planning is more important than ever. The Manual of Museum Planning has become the definitive text for museum professionals, trustees, architects, and others who are concerned with the planning, design, construction, renovation, or expansion of a gallery or museum. Rewritten and reorganized, the third edition features revised sections on planning for visitors, collections, and the building itself, and new sections on operations and implementation, which have become an essential part of the planning process. This new edition of the Manual of Museum Planning has been updated to meet the needs of professional museum practice in the 21st century and includes contributions by leading museum professionals.

Order your copy of the Manual until May 15, 2012 using promo code BS12MSBKS to get a special discount offer of 30% off from the publisher, AltaMira Press.

Visit www.museumplanning.ca for more information.

Contributors:
Samual Anderson, Joy Bailey, Sarah Brophy, Victoria Cabanos, James Cocks, Melody Kanschat, Amy Kaufman, Brad King, Steven LeBlanc, Barry Lord, Gail Dexter Lord, Chris Lorway , Vincent D. Mogorrian, Lindsay Martin, Heather Maximea, Ashley Mohr, Breck Perkins, Maria Piacente, Ronald M. Ronacher Jr., Tom Seiler, Ted Silberberg, Catharine Tanner, Brenda Taylor, Craig Thompson, Phillip Thompson, Steven Weintraub, Peter Wilson, Elizabeth Wylie

Museum Torches Artwork in Austerity Protest

Published on May 2, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Antonio Manfredi looks at an artwork by French artist Severine Bourguignon burning during a protest. Photo from ABC

From Yahoo News

An Italian museum has begun burning its collection of contemporary artworks to protest against harsh budget cuts that have left many cultural institutions out of pocket.

The Casoria Contemporary Art Museum near Naples held a bonfire in its grounds for the first torching of a painting by French artist Severine Bourguignon, who was in favour of the protest and followed it on Skype.

Museum director Antonio Manfredi said: “Our 1,000 artworks are headed for destruction anyway because of the indifference of the government.”

He plans to burn three art works a week in an initiative dubbed “Art War”.

Mr Manfredi last year announced he had written a letter to German chancellor Angela Merkel asking for asylum, saying he was fed up with mafia threats and the government’s failure to protect Italy’s rich cultural heritage.

He said he would take his entire museum with him if the asylum was granted.

To Read More…

No Indian Museum Among World’s Top 100

Published on April 29, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Merinews

Louvre of Paris, which houses “Mona Lisa”, tops the list with about 8.9 million visitors last year. Other nine top museums of the world listed are: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Washington DC), British Museum (London), National Gallery (London), Tate Modern (London), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), National Palace Museum (Taipei), Centre Pompidou (Paris), National Museum of Korea (Seoul) and Musee D’ Orsay (Paris).

Founded in 1793, Musee du Louvre, also sometimes referred as “museum among museums”, besides “Mona Lisa”, also contains universally admired works like “Venus de Milo” and the “Victory of Samothrace”.  Henri Loyrette and Herve Barbaret are President and Managing Director respectively. Launched in 1990, The Art Newspaper is published from London with Jane Morris as editor.

Indo-American statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement from the US said that it did not go well with India, which was on track to become a global power and which had rich art heritage to share with the world, not to have at least one popular world class museum.

To Read More…

Alésia Museum Visitor’s Centre by Bernard Tschumi Architects

Published on April 23, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Dezeen

a visitor’s centre with an ornate herringbone facade by Bernard Tschumi Architects opens this weekend on an archaeological site in central France.

The cylindrical centre occupies the same position held by the Roman army during a historic battle against the Gauls over 2000 years ago and its wooden exterior references the timber fortifications that would have been constructed nearby.

A second museum building, contrastingly clad in stone, is also being constructed a kilometre away across the battlefield and the pair will together comprise the Alésia Museum complex.

To Read More…

Announcing Book Launches at the 2012 Inclusive Museum Conference

Published on April 16, 2012 in Conference, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

We are delighted to announce the launching of 5 books in the Onmuseums Book Series!

1. Deborah Tranter, Museums and Communities: Changing Dynamics. An analysis of the Cobb+Co Museum in Toowoomba, Queensland 1987–2010, Chicago & Melbourne: Onmuseums Series, Common Ground Publishing, 2012.

2. Rae Sheridan, International Heritage Instruments and Climate Change. A Comparative Study of the UNESCO 1972 World Heritage Convention and the UNESCO 2003 Convention on Safeguarding Intangible Heritage , Chicago & Melbourne: Onmuseums Series, Common Ground Publishing,  2012.

3. Alissandra Cummins, Kevin Farmer and Rosalyn Russell (eds.) Plantation to Nation: Caribbean Museums and National Identity, Chicago & Melbourne: Onmuseums Series, Common Ground Publishing, 2012.

4. Rick West Jr., Shifting the Paradigm: The Making of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Chicago & Melbourne: Onmuseums Series, Common Ground Publishing, 2012.

5. David A. Bailey, Alissandra Cummins, Axel Lapp, and Allison Thompson (eds.), Curating in the Caribbean, Berlin, Germany: The Green Box, 2012. (With generous support from the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development)

To read more about the conference and conference activities please visit the website here.

 

World Reacts to Jerusalem Antiquities Forgery Trial Verdict

Published on April 12, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Popular Archaeology

Despite the recent verdict of Judge Aharon Farkash of the Jerusalem District Court acquitting accused Israeli forgers Oded Golan and Robert Deutsch, the jury is still very much out on the actual authenticity of the subject antiquities they were accused of forging. After a seven-year trial with 120 sessions where the judge heard 126 witnesses and dozens of experts, producing 12,000 pages of testimony with a final 475-page verdict, the world seems to be no closer than before to determining the truth about the antiquities in question. Among them, the James Ossuary inscription, the Jehoash Tablet inscription, and the diminutive Ivory Pomegranate inscription, await further research and testing before most or all experts can agree that they are, in fact, what they have been purported to be.

On the criminal side of things, witnesses in the trial revealed a dark portrait of the Holy Land antiquities trade, including the looting of burials and under-the-table West Bank exchanges of large amounts of cash. Aside from the acquittal on forgery, the judge’s decision still found Golan guilty of three counts of violating the Antiquities Law and possession of suspected stolen property.

To Read More…

Future tense, VII: What’s a museum?

Published on April 2, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By James Panero from The New Criterion

What’s a museum? Lately, it seems, the answer is whatever we want. Today’s museums can be tourist attractions, department stores, civic centers, town squares, catalysts of urban renewal, food courts, licensing brands, showcases for contemporary architecture, social clubs, LEED-certified environmentally conscious facilities, and franchise opportunities. A “well-run museum is eerily like an upscale suburban shopping mall,” says an article in The New York Times. A cafe with “art on the side,”?advertises London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. “We are in the entertainment business, and competing against other forms of entertainment out there,” says a one-time spokesman for the Guggenheim museum. “Inclusive places that welcome diverse audiences” and “reflect our society’s pluralism in every aspect of their operations and programs,” suggests the American Association of Museums. “We live in a more global, multicultural society that cares about diversity and inclusivity,”?so “service to the community” is now among the museum’s à la carte options, says Kaywin Feldman, the latest head of the Association of Art Museum Directors. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, museums are even about “bringing art to those with Alzheimer’s or post-traumatic stress disorder, and farming crops for donation to local food banks,” initiatives that have been promoted through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

To Read More…

Holocaust Museum Tries to Keep Major Exhibition

Published on March 30, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

These shoes were confiscated from the concentration camp prisoners in Majdanek and are part of the Holocaust museum’s exhibit. Another major piece of the exhibit may have to be sent back to Poland.

From the Daily Herald

In the late 1980s, when organizers of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum were searching for Nazi-era artifacts, they sought to tell a story that was industrial in its magnitude and horrifying in its detail.

The results, a widely acclaimed permanent exhibition that broke new ground in museum design, may be in jeopardy as the museum deals with demands to return one of its most powerful and haunting objects.

Little known outside the Holocaust Museum is that many of the objects borrowed from Poland almost a quarter-century ago were on 20-year loans, and over the past few years, those loans have expired. In some cases, the museum has returned objects, renegotiated loans or exchanged existing materials, such as shoes, suitcases and prayer shawls, for equivalent pieces.

Several members of the team that built the exhibition, one of the most visited in Washington, are concerned that the drab wooden barracks from Auschwitz that gives visitors a chilling sense of the daily brutality of life under the Nazis, may have to be returned to Poland, leaving a prominent hole in what they call the exhibition’s basic narrative.

To Read More…

Antiquities Issue Rears Head With Getty Leaders Potts, Cuno in Place

Published on March 24, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Timothy Potts will start as director of the Getty Museum in September.

By Jason Felch from the Los Angeles Times
Over the last five years, the J. Paul Getty Museum has earned a reputation as a leading reformer on a topic that has embroiled American museums in scandal for the past decade: the acquisition of recently looted antiquities.

After evidence of the museum’s longtime participation in the illicit trade was uncovered by Italian and Greek investigators, the Getty agreed to return 49 of its most prized pieces of ancient art, cultivated collaborative relationships with those countries and adopted a strict acquisition policy, setting a standard that has been adopted by museums across the country.

But come September, when Timothy Potts starts as director of the Getty Museum with Getty Trust CEO James Cuno as his boss, the institution will be led by two men who opposed the adoption of some of those reforms.