Jerry Saltz's Top Ten NY 2010 Art Shows

The Year in Art

By Jerry Saltz



1. “Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936”
At the Guggenheim Museum through January 9, 2011
It’s not often that a show pulls back the curtain on conventional wisdom or revises art history outright. But guest curator Kenneth Silver has done that with panache. Thanks to his show, we have a clearer, less formalist idea of what was going on across Europe between the wars. As we’ve long suspected, art didn’t simply march forward from Cubism in the teens through Dada and Surrealism in the twenties and thirties; it made some strange pit stops along the way, into an often disturbing realism. At the grand, terrifying end to this show—just yards from Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s ode to Teutonic superiority—is the work of one of Hitler’s favorite painters, Adolf Ziegler. That his triptych of four sinewy female nudes looks uncannily like the work of John Currin left me gasping about the present.

2. Tino Sehgal’s ‘This Progress’
Guggenheim Museum
You began the walk up the Guggenheim’s ramp—the walls stripped of art—accompanied by a child actor. At different stages, you were handed off to an older actor. As you progressed to the top, the talk was of progress; with each guide, the conversation would deepen or die, become more or less personal. What I loved? That Sehgal’s creation—as real as the Mona Lisa—offered such an expansive and moving (emotionally and physically) definition of art.

3. Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield”
Whitney Museum of American Art; curated by Robert Gober
It was a tremendous treat to rediscover the near-forgotten American visionary Burchfield, who turned ordinary things into eerie (ectoplasmic hills!), utterly original, even magical art. I much prefer the haunting, unknowable Burchfield to the Whitney’s main man of constant solitude, Edward Hopper.



4. Sarah Sze
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Sze went all out in this two-story-high gallery show, inhabiting the area with a madly replicating architecture of multiple parts (fans, lights, pieces of bicycles). Space was explored, expanded, slowed down, woven back together, and transformed into the abstract machine it may be.

5. Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Derek Eller Gallery and Laurel Gitlen
Hutchins is leading art into some fantastically promising places. With these two shows—“Kitchen Table Allegory” and “Over Come Over”—she turned abstraction and sculpture into imaginary fictions that are at once archaic, architectonic, filled with longing, and enchantingly awkward.



6. Joanna Malinowska, “Time of Guerrilla Metaphysics”
Canada
Her show opened at the end of 2009, but the physical presence, imaginative audacity, and sheer psychic power of Malinowska’s massive Boli figure—placed at the center of her excellent show—haunted me all year. The traditional tribal sculpture is made partially of excrement; the artist fabricated hers with wood, plaster, clay, and scraps of Spinoza’s Ethics.

7. Huma Bhabha, “Sculptures”
Salon 94 Bowery, through December 19
Bhabha’s formally inventive and rough sculptures of faces, bodies, fetishistic figures, and war machines conjure Roman antiquity and urban renewal, proving that serious high-mindedness doesn’t have to be freighted with bombast or bathos.



8. Mike and Doug Starn, “Big Bambú”
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The brothers took the roof of the Met and spun it into a gigantic, evolving nest crawling with viewers. Thrillingly participatory and experientially awesome, it never stopped growing—much like the museum itself.

9. Arlene Shechet, “The Sound of It”
Jack Shainman Gallery
It’s exciting to see artists using materials that, until recently, were ridiculed by the art world for being decorative or crafty. And somehow Shechet turned a variety of gnarly, curling, enigmatic (and oddly sexy!) objects into a convincing language of sculptural form.

10. “#class”
Winkleman Gallery
Just when we needed it, the spirit of activism, anarchy, and making it up as you go surfaced in this exhibition—a kind of think tank meets tribal gathering. Organized by artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, “#class” was open to anyone who wanted to see performances, or talk about the market, careerism, and bad critics. Consciousness and hackles were raised; energy was generated.

 

This article is from: http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2010/69899/

Charles Fazzino, Pop Artist: Official FTL Centennial Artist and Unofficial Visual Historian

By Leslie Minora,

The city of Fort Lauderdale and 3-D pop artist Charles Fazzino have a mutual love for each other that began with his post-college art-peddling and partying days in the '80s and has ballooned into his role as the city's Official Centennial Artist and Official Artist of the Winterfest Boat Parade. But Fazzino, whose work is well-known globally, is significant to the city in more than name alone. He was commissioned to create Fort Lauderdale's official centennial poster in his signature bold, playful, 3-D style. It serves as a visual documentation of the city's culture with a nod and wink at its past and present (think: Indians and Elbo Room). Fazzino also created the official 3-D poster for Winterfest 2010 (think: glittery Santa with a blonde, bikini-clad "Miss Clause" around his arm).

Fazzino's work is fun. There's really no better way to describe it. In addition to his posters for Winterfest and Fort Lauderdale's 100th, he will open his exhibit, "Faces of Fort Lauderdale," showcasing invented characters representative of historical SoFla types in his largest exhibit ever at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. His 100th anniversary poster and museum exhibit will both be unveiled on Thursday. The Juice caught up with Fazzino, who is known for his collage-style commemorative pop-art works, to learn more about his vibrant Fort Lauderdale art extravaganza.

Click here for more information on his museum exhibit.
...and here to see more of Fazzino's work

Your work is consistent and very distinctive. How did you find this niche within the art world?

On Broward Boulevard, there used to be an arts and crafts store. I don't know if it's still around, this was in the '80s. I was doing the same artwork, but flat. I went into this arts and crafts store, and there was this large table set up, and it said "Class in Paper Toiling Today," and you had all of these little old ladies, and they were cutting with scissors, and they were taking wrapping paper of Raggedy Ann and Andy, Mickey Mouse. They were stacking them in 3D with glue, and they were layering each one. I said, "This is so interesting, this 3-D thing."

So, I took the class for $10, bought one of their little kits, and I made it. I took one of my paintings and I took it to a local printer -- color copies. I cut them out. I made them 3D and had an outdoor art show in New York...I had sold all 20 of them. You think back that you'd be doing this 30 years later, and what it did for my career because I was the first one to do something different.

How do you make the 3-D posters?

First it starts as an original painting, and from the original painting, we make handmade prints. I have a staff of artists that work with me in my studio in New York. We cut them out with an Exacto knife, layer them with gobs of silicone glue and hot glue, and then build it up into layers.

The big ones I do -- they're one of a kind and they're also done the same way but they have a different sculptural look. Some are on canvas, some are on paper, and then part of the museum exhibit are vision-o-graphs.

These are actually plexiglass boxes, each one is lit up with either special lighting or other embellishments like fiberoptics. If you notice, all of the eyes are gone, and so you look through the eyes, and inside are layers of plexiglass and on each layer tells a story of the person who lived in that decade in Florida.

Each one is a portrait that you can look through their eyes to their soul...This one [Shane McDonald] is really cool. This one has a disco ball inside moving with strobe lights hitting it, so when you look into it, you see a hot party going on and it shows you layers of plexi glass inside and all the research I did on the club scene here in the '80s, which I knew some about because I used to come down here in the '80s. Fort Lauderdale has been about partying. 1980s was a big time.

How did you choose characters for this exhibit?

Each one is made up. They're based on historical events that happened in one of those decades, but they're made up stories for each person.

Where does your work fall in the spectrum between commercial art and fine art?

I think for anybody who does anything commercial like I do, there's always a fine line that you're walking. But I think I've managed to do it well. I try to keep everything that I do -- the three-dimensional ones -- limited edition and make them really beautiful looking and hand made. I don't use anything that is stamped or commercially done.

How is Fort Lauderdale different than other places you've been commissioned to depict in your work?

Fort Lauderdale was perfect that I was commissioned to do it because I used to come down here. I went to the School of Visual Arts in New York, and I drove down here [right after college] in my van, filled with my art work, and I used to display my work at the Las Olas Art Show, the Coconut Grove art show in the early 1980s.  So it's kind of nice that I've spent all this time here...I actually watched them building the [museum]. I remember saying to myself, "God I wish I'd have a show there someday." That's what's so nice about it -- 25 years came full circle.

This article is from: http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/juice/2010/12/charles_fazzino_fort_lauderdale.php

Museums Dip Their Digital Toes

Time to lose control

Museums have made great strides in adapting to the digital age but they need to go much further

By András Szántó



Numbers scroll on a screen. Ethereal music fills the air. Cityscapes flash by. New York. Hong Kong. Venice. San Francisco. Streets and skylines are dipped in golden sunlight. But something is different. From the heart of each metropolis arises the same futuristic skyscraper. Its three shimmering towers are locked in a helical embrace. Its milky, undulating forms sprang from the imagination of Italian architect Filippo Innocenti, a Zaha Hadid associate.

Welcome to the Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM). Located nowhere and everywhere, it opened in October on the web (adobemuseum.com). It has a curator, Tom Eccles, and an inaugural exhibition by Tony Oursler. It even has a “personal viewing pod”, a one-eyed fish in a soap bubble that flaps about like a Pixar character. “For the artist’s biography, click the museum directory,” she says, in a vaguely French accent that invokes Simon de Pury’s mellifluous auction chant.

Is this the digital future of the museum? Don’t count on it. The AMDM is a mesmerising virtual ride but it bears little resemblance to how museums are using digital tools, or to what lies ahead once they fully embrace new media.

1.0.

With few exceptions, museums came late to the digital party. Until quite recently, most have used their websites as extended online brochures, limited to practical information and collection highlights. Digitising and sharing the breadth of a museum’s collection is a costly, time-consuming and complicated endeavour (especially for contemporary art, where copyright restrictions are in effect). As for videos, apps, social media and all things wiki—such bells and whistles have only just started popping up on museum sites.

But in fairness, museums are further along on their new-media projects than other kinds of fine-art institutions. And they are more digitally dexterous than most commercial galleries. “The art world is constitutionally reluctant to commit to a real digital presence, whatever the platform,” says Kevin Conley, a former New Yorker writer who created The Exhibitionist mobile app for gallery-goers, “because so much of the value in the art business is based on the control of information.” Meagre budgets and a vogue for minimalist design contribute to a dull uniformity in the promotion of art online.

There are glimpses of promising innovation around the art world, of course. Lehmann Maupin Gallery’s website features elegant videos showcasing artists and exhibitions (lehmannmaupin.com). Jen Bekman’s 20x200 project (20x200.com) has shown that online gallery sales can be successful. Pace Gallery, in addition to its content-rich website and archive, is publishing digital catalogues raisonnés through its Artifex Press (artifexpress.com). Intrepid dealers like Ed Winkleman are well known as bloggers (edwardwinkleman.com). Auction houses are uploading catalogues, videos and viewing tools that help clients examine and bid—some are even tweeting their sales. Art Basel’s 3D smartphone app, launched last June, has solved the vexing problem of finding a gallery booth or a midday sandwich (artbasel.com/go/id/lre). There’s even an online art fair (vipartfair.com), coming in January to a device near you.

Museums are watching these developments closely. They know that they too must conquer new media and respond to the changing habits of their audiences, or risk losing their relevancy. But art museums are, by design, conservative. They are understandably anxious about investing in technology that could become obsolete. And they don’t want to be seen jumping on bandwagons. Mastering the digital future takes time, resources and a willingness to test comfort zones, even for the most open-minded institutions.

2.0.

Despite these obstacles, the most widely recognised museum innovators—MoMA, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Tate, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to name a few—have been steadily expanding their digital footprints. Dramatic changes have happened in the past 18 months. Major upgrades are in the works at the Metropolitan Museum and other bellwether institutions. Progress is accelerating.

First, technology is changing the relationship between objects, curators and visitors. The linchpin is collection searching, which has improved by an order of magnitude in recent years. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s jam-packed site (collections.vam.ac.uk), which can search a million objects with the help of an intuitive user interface, is a prime example. (Advances in so-called semantic data, which analyse the kind of complex queries that arise in humanities research, mean that even more sophisticated searches may be around the corner.) Digital tools are letting visitors experience objects in new ways. On the Louvre’s site, visitors can zoom in on masterpieces and tour virtual galleries (louvre.fr). Some museums, including MoMA, now invite visitors to curate their own art selections with an “add to my collection” button. As for that time-honoured delivery mechanism for curatorial research, the catalogue, experts predict a wholesale shift to electronic publishing within five years.

Second, much of this innovation is being spurred by an explosion in usage of mobile media. Museums are developing mobile versions of their websites for smartphones and tablets. They are migrating from Acoustigides to cheaper, more flexible cellphone technology, which they can customise in clever ways. At the Brooklyn Museum visitors can play “gallery tag”, finding works with certain attributes and entering their accession numbers via cellphone to earn points and prizes (brooklynmuseum.org). Not a week passes, of course, without a fanfare about a newly launched museum app. These are still a work in progress. Some have less information than wall labels. But progress and economics are on their side.

Third, museums are venturing beyond traditional curatorial material. Their homepages are beginning to look like magazine sites, with channels for news, streaming content and audience dialogue. Blogs, written by staffers or professionals, routinely attract the most traffic on museum websites. Some institutions are experimenting with user-generated content. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum is collecting pictures and videos from witnesses and victims’ family members (makehistory. national911memorial.org). The V&A is asking for public input on how to crop 140,000 digitised photographs (collections.vam.ac.uk/ crowdsourcing). New distribution platforms, such as ArtBabble, a kind of YouTube for art videos from a consortium of institutions (artbabble.org), are putting museums in the communications business.

Fourth, technology is revitalising museum education. Digital media open up new pathways for exchange between experts and visitors, and are making it possible for members of the public to learn from each other. Digital initiatives can make learning fun. The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s multimedia scavenger hunt, “Ghost of a Chance”, in which players used text messages, email and the web to find hidden objects in the museum, drew 3,000 participants. A few museums are even dipping their toes into online education. MoMA’s education portal lists 20 courses aimed at the general audience, starting at $220, with titles like “The 1960s: Art and Life” (www.moma.org/learn/courses/courses).

Fifth, the web is, of course, a marketing tool par excellence. Social media initiatives are blending education and marketing. An international web event last September called “Ask a Curator” made available experts from 340 museums for online questions (askacurator.com). It generated a lot of new visitors. The Guggenheim Museum’s creative video biennial, “YouTube Play”, a collaboration with YouTube, HP and Intel, attracted a staggering 23,000 submissions this autumn (youtube.com/play). From the Prado’s Google Earth tool, which zooms in from space on the collection’s most iconic paintings (google.com/intl/en/landing/prado), to Jeffrey Deitch’s personal tour of his Los Feliz home (moca.org/audio/blog/?p=988), museums are discovering ingenious ways to build audiences.

Last but not least, technology is transforming professional museum practice. The Museum Dashboard, developed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, takes transparency to a new level by providing real-time information on everything from the size of the endowment to objects slated for deaccessioning (dashboard.imamuseum.org). Some of the least sexy but most significant improvements are happening behind the scenes, where digital tools are helping museums gather data about visitors, manage collections, and keep a handle on budgets and human resources.

3.0.

As they feel their way toward a digital future, museums need to think deeply about what they stand for: what are they willing to sacrifice for the sake of evolution, and where will they draw the line against technological disruption? There are crunchy practical dilemmas to solve: can museums recover the costs of their digital operations? How will they deal with copyright restrictions? What to do about privacy protections or unwanted commercial intrusion?

And there are the intangibles: what is the ideal balance between physical objects and virtual experience? Is the function of technology to turn the museum into more of a community space, or to facilitate encounters of a deeply personal kind? Should museum websites aspire to the frenzied hyper-realism of video games, or should they leave that kind of thing to purveyors of popular entertainment?

Privately, some directors and curators are anxious about unintended consequences. Many older visitors like their museums just as they are. There is something to be said, after all, about the museum as a gadget-free zone—a last bulwark against computerisation. A smartphone is a cool and quick way to find the great blue whale or The Garden of Earthly Delights, but what’s wrong with getting lost in a museum?

In any event, technological change hasn’t seeped yet all the way into museums’ innermost structures and attitudes. When it does, museums will look very different. Digital innovation doesn’t just enable institutions to do old things in new ways. It forces fundamental and often painful realignments. Just look at the news.

For art institutions of all stripes, embracing new media will mean “not just a lot of whiz-bang technology, but a rethinking of the relationship with the audience,” says Artsjournal.com founder Douglas McLennan. It means adopting a new approach to information across all departments. A decade ago, a museum’s IT department was a backwater. Today, it belongs next to the director’s office. The notion that technology is less of a tool and more of mindset doesn’t come naturally to experts steeped in object-oriented practice.

The hardest part may be letting go.

Museums have a long history of exercising total command over their content. That’s over. “Museums in the future will still be reliable sources of information, and a curator will continue to be the authority on a particular work of art,” says Rob Stein, chief information officer of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. “But we won’t control the information channels.”

 

This article is from: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Time+to+lose+control/22092

Long-Missing Degas Painting Will Return to France

Stolen Degas painting to be sent home to France: US

NEW YORK (AFP) – An Edgar Degas painting stolen nearly 30 years ago from a museum in France will be returned by the US government, which recovered the rare artwork shortly before it was to be sold at auction, officials said Thursday.

The painting, "Blanchisseuses souffrant des dents," was stolen from a French museum in 1973 and resurfaced recently when investigators discovered that it was set for auction at Sothesby's in New York.

Degas' Impressionist portrait of a laundrywoman holding her face in pain from an aching tooth was stolen in December 1973 from the Malraux Museum in Le Havre, Normandy.

The artwork, painted by Degas between 1870-72, had been on loan from the Paris government to the museum, which was destroyed in World War II, in honor of its reconstruction.

The Sothesby catalogue for the November 3, 2010 auction had estimated the painting's sale price to be between 350,000 dollars and 450,000 dollars.

"The return of this masterpiece to the French government reflects our commitment to ensure the return of stolen artwork and cultural patrimony," said Loretta Lynch, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in a statement.

Lynch said Sothesby's promptly cooperated with law enforcement and pulled the piece from the auction block once it learned that it had a purloined artwork in its possession.

US customs officials and authorities from INTERPOL were also involved in the recovery of the painting, officials said.

This article is from: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101202/ennew_afp/entertainmentusfranceartcrime_20101202171620

Guggenheim Struggles With Its Finances

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Tax Filings Show Struggles for Guggenheim

By KATE TAYLOR

The last two years haven’t been easy on New York museums, but they’ve been particularly challenging for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In a disastrous 2008, the museum’s net assets declined by 25 percent.

The latest tax filings show that 2009 was not nearly as bad, though the numbers still offer cause for concern. Despite a round of layoffs (completed midyear), expenses exceeded revenue by more than $12 million. Contributions were down from the previous year, to $20 million. The foundation’s endowment decreased slightly, to $62.5 million from $64.4 million.

A Guggenheim spokeswoman, Betsy Ennis, said that the foundation expected the endowment to finish 2010 slightly higher. (The foundation includes the museum on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street and its satellites abroad.)

Richard Armstrong, the new director of the Guggenheim, made $612,550 in 2009 — roughly comparable to the pay for his colleagues at other major New York museums. The exception was Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, who took home twice that amount between July 1, 2008, and June 30, 2009 (the period that that museum uses as its fiscal year).

Mr. Armstrong’s salary was lower than the $1 million the Guggenheim paid its former director, Thomas Krens, last year, as the second installment of a $2 million severance package. The Guggenheim also paid $816,295 in fees to the company that Mr. Krens started after leaving the Guggenheim, Global Cultural Asset Management, which was consulting on the planned new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi.

The tax filings show that the Guggenheim received $715,000 in 2009 for doing a feasibility study, jointly with the State Hermitage Museum, for a possible museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. Because of the economic crisis and turnover in the local government, that museum has not gone forward.

 

This article is from: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/tax-filings-show-struggles-for-guggenheim/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Dutch Museums Getting Big Makeovers

Museums' Changing Face

In the Netherlands, the Mauritshuis is the latest to renovate

By JOEL WEICKGENANT

The Hague's Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery enjoys all the benefits of being housed in a mansion, with its reddish brown-brick exterior and Greek columns that instantly draw the eye away from the opulence of the adjacent Binnenhof government complex in the Hague's downtown.

Despite its curbside appeal, every house occasionally needs to be brought up to date. Nowadays, if you want to draw visitors indoors to see, say, Vermeer's "Girl With A Pearl Earring," among the most famous of the museum's holdings, you need to open up the small rooms that are constraints of the original building.



The Mauritshuis will be the latest in a line of landmark museums in the Netherlands to undertake major renovations. The museum will essentially turn into a complex, with an underground extension that will connect the old house to Plein 26, an Art Deco building across the street that will now house spaces for cafes, conferences and exhibitions. The €22 million project will almost double the space of the museum, to 6,400 square meters.



Aryan Sikkema:A computer-generated image of the futuristic, glass-encased, new annex of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

 

"You can think of a cross between the Apple store in New York and the Louvre," is how Mauritshuis Director Emilie Gordenker describes the museum's hopes for the extension and renovation. "We're going to open up the gates. Then you come in and you end up in a very large, spacious and light-filled foyer."



A survey of some of the most important cultural institutions in the Hague and Amsterdam paints a dramatically shifting landscape. Some are slowly re-emerging after long closures, while restoration and bureaucratic hiccups keep other galleries in mothballs long past projected deadlines. Some are building new headquarters in unfamiliar neighborhoods, while others are redrawing the parameters of their old ones. Many works in the country's best collections lie in depots or travel to museums in smaller cities or abroad.



Far from being of interest only to museumgoers, many projects are changing the look and function of Dutch cityscapes. The Stedelijk Museum and Rijksmuseum, along with the Van Gogh Museum, sit along the grass-covered Museumplein (Museum Square). The futuristic, glass-encased new annex of the Stedelijk will bring libraries, a restaurant and an auditorium directly into the square, while the reopening of the bike passage that runs through the Rijksmuseum building will once again connect the city's core to the Museum District.



In the meantime, the skeleton of the Eye Film Institute's gleaming new headquarters across from Centraal Station offers a promise of what's to come when the new institute, which incorporates the former Filmmuseum, opens on the waterfront in Amsterdam Noord, the city's largest and quirkiest district. Last year's opening of Hermitage Amsterdam, in a 17th-century monument on the Amstel, has added a new dimension to Amsterdam's museum landscape: the museum draws its exhibitions from the collections of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The museum drew 630,000 visitors in its first half-year of operation, and on Oct. 23 won a countrywide design award. Amsterdam's National Maritime Museum, which began renovations in 2007, is on schedule to reopen in 2011. And around the corner from the Mauritshuis in the Hague, a pair of museums, the Prince William V Gallery and the Prison Gate Museum, staged a joint opening in September after a two-year renovation.



"We're a small museum, so in the end what we're looking to do is create a setting for the final event, which is the Mauritshuis with the fabulous collection," Ms. Gordenker says. Changes include a new entrance at the front, which is currently blocked off by an iron gate and fence. The entrance will lead visitors to the most prominent feature of the new design: the underground foyer, meant to flood with natural light, which will connect the Mauritshuis to Plein 26 on the other side.



"Using a building project like this is not only an expansion of your facilities," says Ms. Gordenker, "but also a complete rethink of who you are and where you want to go."



Amsterdam's Stedelijk returned to the core of its identity when a massive, ongoing renovation and expansion project began in 2004. The museum, dedicated to contemporary art, reopened its monumental building for a series of temporary exhibitions in August to show the public the work that has been completed so far.



Renovators of the Stedelijk sought to embody two key periods in the building's history: the original design by city architect Adriaan Weissman, and the interior design of Willem Sandberg, the curator-turned-director who radically implemented the "white cube" aesthetic that became the iconic backdrop for modern art around the world.



As part of the renovation, workers cleansed the building of "all the later changes and additions which were made because of a lack of space: little offices and small and low gallery spaces," says Patrick Van Mil, Stedelijk's business director. "This means that all of the historical building is going to be gallery space now, leaving more room to show the breadth and depth of the collection."



The Stedelijk maintained a shifting public presence after closing its doors six years ago. Until 2008, it hosted shows from a temporary space in a building near Centraal Station. Through a program called "Stedelijk in the City," the museum crafted partnerships resulting in shows such as the exhibition on religion and art, held in 2008 and 2009, in the Nieuwe Kerk on Dam Square. But the museum itself stayed closed until the partial reopening in August.



"The thing is the new annex took longer than expected" to build, Stedlijk spokeswoman Marie Jose Raven says, adding that since the museum belongs to the city and relies on government support, managing the project can be painstaking.



Managers at the Rijksmuseum understand the frustration. Delays in construction and fights with the neighborhood district that has to approve the design of the project have led to a five-year lag in the expected re-opening of the museum.



The Rijksmuseum is scheduled to fully reopen in 2013, and while the branch of the museum that remains open draws almost a million visitors a year, according to spokesman Boris De Munnick, most of its treasures remain locked in depots.



Back in the Hague, the Mauritshuis still has time before the doors close—the final design will be revealed next month and construction begins early 2012. Ms. Gordenker says she hopes the final result will be an open, inviting layout that appeals to a contemporary public; and a construction process that will avoid the pitfalls and delays that have plagued some other projects. "The Mauritshuis itself will really be able to sparkle," she says.

 

This article is from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703805704575594590066431152.html?mod=rss_Arts_and_Entertainment

Commission Proposes Admission Fee For Smithsonian

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Proposal Recommends Charging Admission at the Smithsonian

By KATE TAYLOR

In New York, a visit to the Museum of Modern Art will set you back $20, but down in Washington, the Smithsonian Institution, which is 70 percent federally funded, has long been free. That would change under a proposal by the national commission charged with reducing the deficit. In a draft report Wednesday, it recommended that the Smithsonian’s federal appropriation be cut by $225 million, or roughly 30 percent, and that the institution make up the loss by charging a $7.50 admission fee.

The Smithsonian’s spokeswoman, Linda St. Thomas, said by phone that the Smithsonian had studied the idea of charging admission several times in recent decades, and at each point rejected it.

“The Regents have said repeatedly we don’t want to charge admission because it then makes it difficult for all people to come and visit the collections, which in theory are held in trust for the American people,” Ms. St. Thomas said.

She pointed out that, because the Smithsonian is federally funded, Americans are in a sense already paying to visit, through their tax dollars.

Various folks in Washington have been trying to throw an admission fee at the Smithsonian for years, without success. The most recent time the issue was raised was in 2006, when Representative James P. Moran, a Democrat of Virginia, suggested that the Smithsonian pay for building repairs by charging a $1 admission fee.

This article is from Arts Beat