Category: visual

Years of preparation — conservation, research and catalog writing, loan negotiations, insurance, shipping arrangements, and more — went into the big Van Eyck show that opened in February in Ghent. And that city’s famous altarpiece, newly restored, was at the heart of the event, the largest-ever assemblage of the artist’s work. The pandemic shut the exhibit down, and journalist Sophie Haigney explains why there’s no hope of postponing or rescheduling it. – The New York Times

Before the shutdown, the museum had around 960 staff members, director Glenn Lowry said. Through a combination of voluntary retirement packages and general attrition, the new staff count will be about 800. “We will learn to be a much smaller institution,” he said. The museum administration also took what Lowry described as a “chainsaw” to its exhibition budget, cutting it from $18 million to $10 million for the fiscal year that begins July 1 and runs through June 30, 2021.  It also cut its publications budget by about half. Overall, the museum will have slashed its annual budget to about $135 million, from close to $180 million. – Bloomberg

“I thought it was really bad that they called for an international competition,” says another heritage architect, Charlotte Langlois. “The message it sends is we need international architects to have good ideas on how to restore our heritage and in particular our emblematic cathedral. And it’s very demagogical, to let people think that having well-known architects is the only way not to rebuild in the same way. It’s not true.” – Apollo

Two international operations culminated last fall in the arrest of 101 suspects and seizure of trafficked objects in Spain, Argentina, Latvia, and Afghanistan. Among the items were ancient ceramics, coins, and weapons as well as a Roman limestone sculpture, three Roman columns, and hundreds of rare pre-Columbian items, including a gold Tumaco mask. – The Guardian

To date, the company’s outstanding debt stands at $467 million (plus interest), according to the latest documents. It has to pay more than one quarter of that—$119 million—in interest and principle this year, and around $84 million for each of the next four years. That debt burden, coupled with an extended period when Sotheby’s isn’t generating the kind of revenue it would in a non-pandemic year, resulted in the release of Deloitte’s “emphasis of a matter” related to Sotheby’s own focus on the business as a “going concern.” – Artnet

When at last the chamber was empty, the team was surprised to discover that it wasn’t a tomb. The room had a raised, table-like area and shallow channels cut into the bedrock along the base of one wall. In one corner, a barrel-sized bowl was filled with charcoal, ash, and dark sand. An older tunnel—part of a network of passages that honeycomb the rock beneath Saqqara—moved cool air through the space. The clues suggested that the chamber had been a mummification workshop, complete with an industrial-strength incense burner, drainage channels to funnel blood, and a natural ventilation system. – National Geographic

Plague columns haven’t been much in fashion for nearly 300 years. But as the horrendous toll of death and suffering from today’s modern coronavirus plague continues to climb, the time may have come to consider reviving this once common genre of public art. – Los Angeles Times

“A leading Russian avant-garde expert says he has identified dozens of works by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova languishing in [the Yaransk Museum of Local Lore], 800km away from Moscow.” – The Art Newspaper

The art world we return to—if there is one to return to at all—will be formed in this moment. This is the time to build our own institutions. Our shelter-in-place orders and the masses of workers, including art workers, who were fired when the economy came to an abrupt stop constitute a general strike, leaving us only to declare it. For the art world this could be a massive moment of reorientation. – Artnet

For those governing and supporting museums, the old standards about the use and disposal of collections and endowments are rapidly risking obsolescence. Museums are, of course, property-rich in a manner unlike any individual, or a company with a profit motive. Works of art and endowment funds (typically cash and investments held to generate income, not to be spent) are both, in the eyes of the law, the property of museums, but there are critical distinctions. Art collections generally do not appear on balance sheets but endowments do. The basic organisational question of which property is an asset that can be legally used to cover liabilities is unique to cultural institutions. Museums on either side of the Atlantic come at this challenge from slightly different starting points. – Apollo