Visiting the venerable Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City can be a transformative experience for any art lover. And best of all, it's free.

But a lawsuit filed on Tuesday against the museum complains that most museum-goers have no idea that the "recommended" $25 entrance fee is nothing more than a suggestion.

The plaintiffs include a member of the museum, along with two Czech tourists who purchased single-day admissions. They argue the museum employs misleading signs and other techniques to dupe its 6 million annual visitors into believing they must pay to gain access.

The museum, known colloquially as the Met and officially as the MMA, is one of the world's largest and most acclaimed art museums.

The museum's rent-free lease with the city mandates that it open its doors to the public for free on multiple days a week, although it is permitted to ask for a voluntary fee. But the lawsuit says the museum deliberately deceives its visitors into believing that the charge is mandatory.

Signs above the admissions desk that list the entrance fees feature the word "recommended" in small type below the word "admissions" in larger, bold type. The lawsuit also pointed out that visitors are funneled in lines to the admissions desks, where cashiers await to collect the fee.

"MMA has misled, and regularly misleads, members of the general public to believe, on all days of the week during times when the MMA is open, that they are required to pay the Admission Fees in order to enter Museum Exhibition Halls," the lawsuit claimed. Read More...

Image Courtse of Fcb981

How are women represented in museum displays – and workforces? Photograph: Nicholas Eveleigh / Alamy

Do cultural institutions need to pay more attention to gender? Yasmin Khan reports from the Inclusive Museum conference.

Women are still working in a man's world. This was the conclusion I reached at the Inclusive Museum, a global conference that annually brings together hundreds of passionate museum professionals committed to opening up their institutions. A core part of this year's programme focused on the topic of gender mainstreaming, defined by the Council of Europe as "the (re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and at all stages".

Gender mainstreaming emerged as a strategy towards global equity by 1995, after it was addressed at the UN's fourth world conference of the Beijing Platform for Action. The concept was endorsed by the EU via the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997 and back in the UK, the Gender Equality Duty Act subsequently took force in 2007 to ensure public authorities promoted gender equality in all their functions as well as carried out and published gender impact assessments for all new legislation, policies, employment and service delivery changes.

Do you participate? If not, why not? You should get involved, make a contribution, let them know what you think. Be part of something! It’ll be collaborative and democratic. And fun, too!

The demand to participate is now an everyday experience. Television and radio shows endlessly plead, tell us your views, while online articles are trailed by a snaking list of readers’ comments. Politicians affirm their commitment to ‘public consultation’ and test each idea within specially-designed focus groups. Cultural institutions must offer interactive displays, issue evaluation forms and carefully monitor attendance figures. Academic projects are praised for the number of partners involved, the voices heard, the collaborations undertaken. Group work and class discussion have become the foundations of teaching practice. Underpinning these diverse trends is the sense that participation, in and of itself, is a positive thing – regardless of the end result. Taking part is what counts. Participation is both the aim and the justification; passivity must be renounced; to be a spectator is no longer enough.

That a society governed by the imperative to participate, and constantly buzzing with opportunities to socialize, should lead to boredom and isolation was of great concern to David Foster Wallace. In The Pale King, posthumously published in 2011, he wrote: “This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”[1] Characteristically, Wallace offers no straightforward answers as to what this “something else” might be. Yet, in the midst of relentless calls to participate, his emphasis on dullness, on the ways we try to distract ourselves and on the terrors we might be escaping feels radical. Wallace’s suspicion about the ‘information society’ also offers a useful framework when considering the broader desire for participation today: no one really believes that all these activities are about encouraging people to work together, about hearing diverse voices or strengthening social bonds. Why, then, do so many people want to take part? Why do they want so many others to join them? Something else, perhaps way down, is going on here. Read More...

Image Courtsey of David Gomez Fontanilles

News: the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to raze the former American Folk Art Museum next door just 12 years after its completion by US architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

The bronze-clad museum, which opened its doors in December 2001, will be demolished and replaced with a glass-fronted building linking MoMA's existing space on West 53rd Street with a planned 82-storey tower designed by French architect Jean Nouvel.

The American Folk Art Museum, which holds a collection of paintings, sculptures and crafts by self-taught and outsider artists, was sold to MoMA in 2011 to pay off a $32 million loan. It currently exists at a smaller site on Lincoln Square, further north in Manhattan.

While the MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry said the demolition was not a comment on the architectural quality of the building, the news was met with disappointment by Tsien, who told the New York Times she saw the building as a "beloved small child".

"It's a kind of loss for architecture," she said, "because it's a special building, a kind of small building that's crafted, that's particular and thoughtful at a time when so many buildings are about bigness."

The expansion across both the folk art museum site and the Nouvel building will provide MoMA with approximately 4600 square metres of additional floor space. Read More...

Image Courtsey of Dan Nguyen

Despite automatic federal spending cuts scheduled to take effect on Friday, the Smithsonian Institution has promised to keep its 19 museums and the National Zoo in Washington open for their regular hours, The Associated Press reported.

“Right now, it won’t affect the public,” Linda St. Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, said. Ms. St. Thomas added that the scheduled 5 percent cut – some $40 million — would be applied to maintenance, new construction, hiring, research, training and travel. The Smithsonian, which employs about 6,000 people, received $857 million from the federal government this fiscal year. Read More...

CYRUS THE GREAT, king of Persia and conqueror of Babylon in the sixth century BC, has been a personal hero to many people. These include Thomas Jefferson and Iran’s last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and, perhaps more oddly, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first leader.

Xenophon, a Greek historian whose “Cyropaedia” has been read by statesmen down the ages, believed that Cyrus embodied all the qualities of a perfect king. Now the British Museum (BM) is sending an object closely associated with Cyrus on a tour of five American museums, beginning with the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. The curators hope the show will highlight the Persian king’s religious tolerance and his close relations with the Jews in particular, and that this may help improve ties between America and Iran.

The Cyrus cylinder, one of the BM’s most important objects, is made of clay and covered in dense Babylonian cuneiform script. Unearthed in 1879, it is cracked and bits have fallen off it, but enough remains for the writing to have been deciphered.

Under Cyrus the Persian empire became the largest kingdom the world had ever seen, unifying many tribes, languages and cultures, and stretching across vast distances. The cylinder, which had been placed at the base of a building in ancient Babylon (now modern Iraq) proclaimed Cyrus’s ambitions for his rapidly expanding domain: that those people who had been captured and enslaved by his predecessors should be allowed to go back to their homes and the statues of their different gods returned to their original shrines to be freely worshipped. The exiled Jews, who wept by the waters of Babylon when they remembered Zion, the Bible says, could return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. Read More...

Image Courtsey of Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net).

"Are there still Jews in Germany?" `'Are the Jews a chosen people?"

Nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, there is no more sensitive an issue in German life as the role of Jews. With fewer than 200,000 Jews among Germany's 82 million people, few Germans born after World War II know any Jews or much about them.

To help educate postwar generations, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum features a Jewish man or woman seated inside a glass box for two hours a day through August to answer visitors' questions about Jews and Jewish life. The base of the box asks: "Are there still Jews in Germany?"

"A lot of our visitors don't know any Jews and have questions they want to ask," museum official Tina Luedecke said. "With this exhibition we offer an opportunity for those people to know more about Jews and Jewish life." Read More...

But not everybody thinks putting a Jew on display is the best way to build understanding and mutual respect.

Since the exhibit – "The Whole Truth, everything you wanted to know about Jews" – opened this month, the "Jew in the Box," as it is popularly known, has drawn sharp criticism within the Jewish community – especially in the city where the Nazis orchestrated the slaughter of 6 million Jews until Adolf Hitler's defeat in 1945.

"Why don't they give him a banana and a glass of water, turn up the heat and make the Jew feel really cozy in his glass box," prominent Berlin Jewish community figure Stephan Kramer told The Associated Press. "They actually asked me if I wanted to participate. But I told them I'm not available." Read More...

In a chaotic auction repeatedly interrupted by protests, dozens of Native American tribal masks were sold Friday after a French court ignored the objections of the Hopi tribe and the U.S. government.

The total tally was 931,000 euros ($1.2 million), with the most expensive, the "Mother Crow," selling for 160,000 euros ($209,000) — more than three times the pre-sale estimate.

Of the 70 masks up for sale, one was bought by an association to give back to the Hopis, the Drouot auction house said.

Advocates for the Hopi tribe had argued in court the masks have special status and are not art — they represent their dead ancestors' spirits. The Hopis, a Native American tribe whose territory is surrounded by Arizona, nurture the masks as if they are the living dead.

But the auctioneer insisted any move to block the sale could have broad repercussions for the art market in general and potentially force French museums to empty their collections of indigenous works.

The Katsinam, or "friends," masks made up nearly all of the 70 lots that went on display at the auction house, offering a rare public glimpse of such works in Europe. The masks are surreal faces made from wood, leather, horse hair and feathers, and painted in vivid pigments of red, blue, yellow and orange. Read More...

Photo Courtsey of AP Photo/Michel Euler

The family of a prominent Parisian art dealer is demanding that a Norwegian museum return an Henri Matisse painting seized by Matisse in Norwegian museum was once Nazi lootNazis under the direction of Hermann Goering, in the latest dispute over art stolen from Jews during World War II.

The painting at the center of the dispute, Matisse's 1937 "Blue Dress in a Yellow Armchair," depicts a woman sitting in a living room. It has been among the highlights of the Henie Onstad Art Center near Oslo since the museum was established in 1968 through a donation by wealthy art collector Niels Onstad and his wife, Olympic figure-skating champion Sonja Henie.

Museum Director Tone Hansen said it had been unaware the painting was stolen by the Nazis until it was notified in 2012 by the London-based Art Loss Register, which tracks lost and stolen paintings.

She said Onstad bought the painting in "good faith" from the Galerie Henri Benezit in Paris in 1950. The Benezit gallery "has no record of collaborating with the Nazis, as many galleries did," she said in an interview.

Although the war ended almost 70 years ago, disputes over looted art have become increasingly common in recent years, in part because many records were lost, and in part because an international accord on returning such art was only struck in 1998.

But the case of the Matisse is somewhat different in that its former owner, Paul Rosenberg, was one of the most prominent art dealers in Paris before the war, which he survived by fleeing to New York. Art Loss Register Director Chris Marinello said the records in this case are unusually clear.

Photo Coutsey of AP Photo/Oystein Thorvaldsen, Henie-Onstad Art Centre

Some of the most important museums and cultural institutions in Bosnia-Hercegovina face imminent closure due to political wrangling over which government department should finance them.

There are fears that ancient collections and artefacts - which survived the siege of Sarajevo - could be in jeopardy.

The National Museum is one of the key institutions affected.

The building survived the First World War, the Nazi invasion of the Second World War and, most recently, relentless shelling during the siege of Sarajevo.

Workers from the museum dodged sniper bullets and mortar fire to retrieve as many of the precious artefacts as possible.

The building was badly damaged during the four-year onslaught, yet the exhibits were saved and the museum was able to reopen as before.

In spite of its resilience in war-time, Museum Director Adnan Busuladzic fears he could be forced to close the doors within weeks.
Sarajevo building with bullet holes Many of Sarajevo's buildings still bear the scars of the 1992-96 siege

As it is, his staff haven't been paid for six months, many have been forced to take on extra part-time jobs to survive, and he's even struggling to pay the museum's utility bills. To Read More...

Image via BBC.co.uk