Fort Worth’s Kimbell Museum has been damaged with revelations that two members of its board of directors take a combined salary of $1.5 million per year. “I just hope this doesn’t set a precedent, because if highly qualified people will only serve on nonprofit boards if they are paid then it changes the American system of governance for nonprofits and impacts it negatively.” – Dallas Morning News
Tag: 08.13.00
ROBERT WILSON HAS A NEW THEATRE PROJECT
“Mr. Wilson is probably the most prolific theater artist in the world. An astonishingly tireless man who presents premieres of 8 to 12 new projects each year in an array of far-flung countries, he directs, designs the sets, co-designs the lighting and usually choreographs them all. He also organizes an army of loyal acolytes in the presentation of twice as many touring productions of older shows throughout the world. He estimates that he spends 10 days a year at his apartment in New York.” – New York Times
TOFFING UP THE V&A
Is London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in trouble? “Ever since Elizabeth Esteve-Coll offered us that memorable marketing pitch of ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’ – and told us via the BBC World Service that the problem with her museum was that it dealt in historical artefacts – we have been left with the impression that, for the powers-that-be at the V&A the contents of this great, amorphous, impossible, wonderful institution are, somehow, faintly embarrassing.” – London Evening Standard
CITYSCAPE
- “Shaping a city is typically a matter of striking a balance between competing priorities – cars versus people on foot, privately owned buildings versus public space. And so it is just east of Lake Shore Drive, where the Adler Planetarium finished a major expansion last year, the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium have big additions of their own in the works, and the Chicago Bears want to renovate Soldier Field, which sits just south of the campus.” – Chicago Tribune
LEAVING THE GETTY
Getty Museum director John Walsh says goodbye after 17 years. “Walsh arrived a year after the Getty Trust received its fortune. As the endowment has grown from $1.2 billion to $5 billion, the Getty Museum has not only spent huge sums on its collections, but also beefed up educational programs, developed what Walsh says is now the best publishing program of any museum in the world and built the new facility at the Getty Center.” – Los Angeles Times
SELLING CONTEMPORARY ART
A year ago the Huntington Beach Art Center was a mess – fiscally as well as creatively. After closing for a breather, the center is back – sort of. What does it take to pitch contemporary art today? – Orange County Register
IN SEARCH OF FAKES
Van Gogh is wildly popular these days, but what about the fakes? “Serious research is still at a fairly young age, and early research was colored too much with the myth of the mad genius.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ACCESSIBILITY AFOOT?
“Conceptual art, performance art and hard abstraction still often dominate the art magazines. But in New York, there is a feast of representational art this summer. I decided to check it out to see if there was anything in these exhibits that would give me a clue as to what is afoot.” – Washington Post
WHERE’S THE AMERICAN?
“Most orchestras in this country do not know and do not care about American music, and they are convinced that you and I don’t care or want to know about it either. They see their mandate as one of protecting culture, in this case, a culture produced in Europe 100 or 200 years ago. They therefore make it their business to protect us from ourselves.” – Los Angeles Times
MINIMAL FUSS
A dispute about the authorship of music boils up again. “That music is at the heart of an acrimonious 35-year-old dispute pitting Lamont Young against John Cale and Tony Conrad. In a nutshell, the debate centers on differing philosophical notions of authorship – for which there may be no right or wrong answer.” – New York Times