Monday, Monday

  • Share
  • Read Later

Seems like a good day for Looking Around to do some looking around.

1. Fisk has decided to appeal the judge’s decision that required it to display the Alfred Stieglitz Collection that has been in storage since November 2005. Last month a Nashville judge said that Fisk could keep the collection. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which administers O’Keeffe’s estate, was suing to take back the collection, which O’Keeffe had given to Fisk in 1949. Now Fisk says that it can’t accept the judge’s ruling because it also orders the school to put the collection on “permanent” display by October, while good curatorial practice requires that artworks should be removed from display periodically. “In short,” Fisk said in a press release about its decision to appeal, “the court’s order results in the inevitable deterioration of the Collection.”

But does the appeal mean that Fisk is also seeking to overturn that part of the judge’s ruling that bars it from selling any of the collection, as it hoped to do in a sharing arrangement with Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark? That press release pointedly, almost wistfully, mentions the Crystal Bridges deal as “the most discussed, and most well financed opportunity for Fisk and Nashville to date.” Could the real purpose of the appeal be to re-open the argument that Fisk should be allowed to sell an interest in the collection to Walton?

2. The Boston Globe‘s Geoff Edgers profiles Antonio Lopez Garcia, the meticulous Spanish realist who is getting his first American museum exhibition this month at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (And don’t miss the slide show.)

3. Blogger Catherine Spaeth describes my post about bad art writing as a “call for censorship”. Actually, I thought it was a call for editing, something nearly all published texts are subjected to, especially the ones directed to a general public, and usually for something called “clarity.”

4. Michelangelo: R.I.P.