A very bad omen for the Chinese New Year.
Shepard Fairey strikes back at Associated Press (which says it owns the right to the photo he used for his Obama poster.)
And the strangest — arts-hating Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn has a daughter who just happens to be an opera singer. (Maybe we should check that Senate version of the …
Over the weekend I made it out to St. Ann’s Warehouse, a performance space in Brooklyn, to catch one of the last performances of Disfarmer. This was a sort of bunraku puppet performance of episodes from the life of the seriously eccentric photographer Mike Disfarmer. That’s right, eat your heart out — we have everything in New York, …
Another day, another version of just what it is Brandeis plans to do with its Rose Art Museum. Yesterday I was utterly puzzled by a statement that Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz made to the Boston Globe that the university did not plan to close the museum, merely to “transition” it into an education center with an exhibition space. …
The Board of Overseers at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis has just issued a statement. Predictably it condemns the sale. But it also calls on the Brandeis Trustees to revoke their decision and asks for a meeting with them “to find a solution consistent with the continued existence” of the museum.
Will the Trustees agree to meet? They …
Who knew that Tom Coburn, the Republican Senator from Oklahoma, took an (unwelcome) interest in the arts? Coburn has introduced an amendment to the Senate version of the stimulus package that would prevent any funds from that bill to go to the following laundry list of undeserving recipients:
…any casino or other gambling
…
The website of the Iowa weekly Cityview is reporting that state legislators there are quietly talking about forcing the University of Iowa to sell Mural, the great Jackson Pollock owned by the University’s art museum. (A nod to Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes for pointing up the Cityview item.)
You’ll remember that there was a brief …
It may have been possible for Picasso’s boy to lead that horse without a rein, but it appears that the Museum of Modern Art didn’t have the famous painting on as tight a leash as you might have thought. For more than a year that 1906 picture, one of the high points of MoMA’s collection, has been the focus of a Holocaust restitution …
Late last week Peter French, chief operating officer at Brandeis University, spoke to Judith Dobrzynski at Tina Brown’s website The Daily Beast. In that conversation he offered a more detailed picture of the Brandeis financial predicament than anything we’ve had so far from the school beyond “trust me, it’s bad”.
We’d heard before …
I didn’t want to let the week run out without a farewell to John Updike, the Great American Novelist who died on Tuesday. Updike was also a lucid and lyrical writer about art. As a young man he actually thought he might want to be a painter, or maybe a cartoonist, and after getting his English degree at Harvard he put in a year at …
Things get ever more complicated in the uproar over the decision by Brandeis to shut down its Rose Art Museum and sell — or not sell — the art to raise money to cover a budget shortfall at the school, which has seen its endowment decline by about 25%.
Let’s start from the beginning. On Tuesday the school issued a statement that it …
On Tuesday afternoon I had a phone conversation with Michael Rush, the still shell-shocked director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. He only came to the job in 2005. And it was just Monday he got the news that the school, looking to bridge the kind of budget shortfall that just about every institution everywhere is …
In light of the gruesome news that Brandeis intends to shut down its Rose Art Museum and sell off the entire collection to raise cash, I’m wondering how much of their fire sale mentality is due to the huge hit suffered recently by the Carl & Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, the Boston-area philanthropy that was a major victim of Bernie …
The Boston Globe is reporting that Brandeis University, looking to bridge a budget deficit that may go as high as $10 million, has decided to close its Rose Art Museum and sell off its entire 6000 object collection. I’ve always taken the position that one reason to take the “slippery slope” argument against deaccessioning seriously is …
