Do Museums Need Their Own Ethics Departments?

Yes, museums do have codes of ethics that cover the professional conducts of their staffs. Erich Hatala Matthes argues that that isn’t anough, as controversies from the fate of looted antiquities in collections to this summer’s outcries over Dana Schutz’s Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial and Sam Durant’s Scaffold at the Walker Art Center to the culture war over Confederate monuments demonstrate.

How A Little Indiana Company Town Became A Mecca Of Modernist Architecture

“Located 50 miles south of Indianapolis, Columbus owns dozens of architectural masterworks by internationally renowned designers from the era. Eliel and Eero Saarinen, and more than a handful of Pritzker Prize Laureates, including I.M. Pei, Richard Meier, and Robert Venturi, began developing projects there with sudden regularity in the mid-1950s.” Why were all these heavyweight architects making buildings there? Because of the owner of this company town’s company.

Janine Charrat, Ballerina And Choreographer Who Survived Burns, Dead At 93

“[She] stood apart from her generation in being both the only female ballet choreographer in France and the only leading French ballet choreographer not to have emerged from the Paris Opera academy. Jean Cocteau called her a ‘solitary wanderer who goes beyond the stars’.” Yet she was best known for the 1961 incident when, during a television taping, her costume caught fire and she was severely burned. She was back at work in four months.