Vancouver

Baudelaire and Vancouver

Vancouver has reason to fear the fast approaching end to summer.  For on September 6th, the Vancouver Art Gallery's exhibition The Modern Woman: Drawings by Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and other Masterpieces from the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, returns home.  Beyond Robson (Blog), August 15, 2010

Former arts official condemns B.C. government

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Danzo cited the failure of the Campbell government to consult with the Council, and said her year as chair was “extremely difficult” and “stressful,” as she and the Council were forced to deal with funding cuts while their recommendations to restore funding to the BCAC were ignored. Globe & Mail, August 18, 2010

Jane Danzo, Chair of BC Arts Council, resigns with damning letter

The text of Jane Danzo’s letter of August 16, 2010 to Kevin Krueger, Minister of Tourism Culture & the Arts for the BC government. Stop BC Arts Cuts, August 17, 2010

Los Angeles

Much Less Than Meets the Eye

Here's a "question of conceptual art and conceptual artists in general: Why do they bother? Why do conceptual artists continue to employ finite resources and materials, not to mention occupy valuable space in museums, when, unlike other artists, the conceptual artist has an infinite amount of perfectly adequate space available to make and exhibit art in his or her head?" Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2010

New York

Picasso packs the house at Met museum

A Metropolitan Museum of Art permanent collection exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso drew more than 700,000 visitors over a 17-week period. That makes it the most highly attended show at the New York museum since an exhibit of Impressionist art in 2001. CBC News, August 17, 2010

App Watch: Museum Takes Mapping to a New Level — Indoors

“An IPhone app from the American Museum of Natural History in New York takes location capabilities even further, mapping a visitor’s spot accurately inside the museum despite its complicated maze of room.” Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2010

Boston

Bashing Architects With Lawsuit, as MIT Did, Kills Innovation

“Risk aversion has become the rule, however, in part because bashing big-name innovators is in style. I.M. Pei and other celebrity architects are frequent whipping boys. America’s prowess in design and construction has eroded.” Bloomberg, August 16, 2010

Detroit

The Museum Is Watching You

“Galleries quietly study what people like, or skip, to decide what hangs where.” Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2010

Vienna

Sunny Scenes, Direct From Pyongyang

WHY?' is the question Peter Noever, the director of the Museum of Applied Arts [in Vienna], says he is constantly asked about a sprawling exhibition of propagandistic North Korean artworks now on view. … This is the first time that secretive totalitarian state has sent a large number of its artworks outside its sealed borders." New York Times, August 15, 2010

Kenya

Bringing art into Kenya’s schools

In January, an Artbound committee will travel to Kenya’s southwestern Maasai Mara region and roll up their sleeves to actually build a school devoted to arts education, to be housed in a separate building on the campus of an all-girls boarding secondary school that Free the Children is currently building. Globe & Mail, August 18, 2010