In most exhibitions, especially in mainstream museums, the curator is an elusive and scholarly figure, applying his or her knowledge and ever refined tastes to meticulously craft a show that will engage and enlighten. #SocialMedium does things a bit differently.

For this hyper-contemporary exhibition, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle invited an unusual guest curator to organize the show -- the entire internet. Over a two week period in August, the Frye shared 232 of their collection's paintings on various social media sites including Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram. Internet enthusiasts from around the globe transformed into "citizen curators" simply by "liking" an image.

Christie’s announced it has been entrusted with the sale of the Collection of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, the distinguished American scholar, dealer and collector of Asian Art who passed away in August 2014. Widely recognized throughout Asia and the Americas for his ground-breaking role in the study and appreciation of Asian Art, Mr. Ellsworth was a distinguished connoisseur who opened new arenas of collecting to Western audiences and built a successful business purveying the very finest works of art to his generation’s foremost collectors. His personal collection of over 2,000 items was assembled over a lifetime and widely recognized as the most important grouping of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian sculpture, paintings, furniture and works of art. To celebrate this exceptional collection and the generous and benevolent man behind it, Christie's is organizing free public exhibitions and a special five-day series of auctions and online-only sales to be held during Asian Art Week at Christie's New York in March 2015. A global tour of highlights from the collection kicks off November 21 in Hong Kong, and will continue to stops throughout Asia and Europe prior to the New York sales.

From the Fabulous '40s through the Swinging '60s to now, Pop Art's style has endured.

Earlier this year, the Allentown Art Museum explored the beginning of Pop Art's story in "British Pop Art Prints," which revealed how American Pop Art grew from a movement that started in London in the late '40s and early '50s by British artists such as Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi.

Then came the Americans — Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg — who rose from relative obscurity in New York to become some of the world's best-known artists, and had an influence on everything from design to fashion and film.

The museum explores that story in "American Pop: The Prints," an exhibit of works from the museum collection and Muhlenberg College that serves as a companion exhibit to "Robert Indiana from A to Z," a retrospective of work by one of the Pop movement's founding fathers.

On Sunday, November 16, the Harvard Art Museums -- comprising the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum -- reopened to the public under one state-of-the-art roof. The extensive renovation and expansion, which began in 2008, was helmed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. According to Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums, “We [wanted] to create a new kind of laboratory for the fine arts that would support our mission of teaching across disciplines, conducting research, and training museum professionals. We also wanted to strengthen the museums’ role as an integral part of Cambridge and Boston’s cultural ecosystem.”

The renovation involved transforming the landmark Georgian revival building at 32 Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which housed the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger Museum, into an arts-centric hub for students, scholars, Harvard faculty, and the public.

A familiar face in the Southern California museum world will soon be returning to the area.

Elizabeth Armstrong has been named the new executive director of the Palm Springs Art Museum, leaders announced on Friday. Armstrong, who will begin her new job in January, comes from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which she joined in 2008 and where she held the title of founding curator of contemporary art.

Before that, Armstrong was the acting director and chief curator at the Orange County Museum of Art, where she initiated the California Biennial, and organized such popular shows as "Birth of the Cool: California Art."

She was also a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and put in 14 years as a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Yet, Italian art experts have become so worried about the state of the 15th-century fresco dubbed “the greatest picture in the world”, that they have embarked on a major restoration project.

The work was only made possible with a hefty donation from a private citizen.

Piero della Francesca’s "The Resurrection," on display in Sansepolcro in north-east Tuscany, is widely hailed as one of the masterpieces of late 15th-century Italian art.

If Pablo Picasso was famous for anything outside his ground-breaking artwork, it was for his insatiable appetite for the opposite sex.

Picasso loved women. His wives, his mistresses, his girlfriends and random liaisons inspired not only his libido, but also his art — and led to one of the largest bodies of work of any artist in history.

The Norton Museum of Art is celebrating the women who inspired the master artist.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Delacroix’s "Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi," featuring the monumental painting, on view for the first time in Los Angeles. Painted in 1826 by Eugène Delacroix, the leading French Romantic painter of the day, "Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi" is one of the most celebrated French paintings of the 19th century. The work is held in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, France, and has seldom traveled.

“This exhibition is an extremely rare opportunity to showcase a masterwork by one of the 19th century’s most important painters,” said Leah Lehmbeck, curator of European Painting and Sculpture at LACMA. “The picture itself is profoundly rich with political, cultural, and artistic detail, and therefore speaks to a range of issues through its engaging dramatic context.”

“Drei, zwei, eins!” With a rousing countdown in German, Stephanie Stebich, the executive director of the Tacoma Art Museum, led a group ribbon cutting Saturday morning that officially opened the museum’s new wing, showcasing art of the American West and doubling the museum’s gallery space.

Erivan Haub, the German grocery store magnate who donated his family’s Western art collection to TAM and paid for the new wing with a $20 million gift, beamed from a wheelchair pushed by his wife, Helga, during the celebration.

New leadership is on the way at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

John B. Ravenal, currently the curator for modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, will take the helm as new executive director in mid-January. Interim director Katy Kline has been in place since the departure of Dennis Kois at the end of April. The Lincoln museum, which has an annual budget of about $5 million, was set to announce Ravenal’s appointment on Monday.

Kois left after a six-year tenure that was seen as a time of growth for the deCordova, overseeing enhanced fund-raising efforts and a sharper curatorial focus on sculpture, as well as a five-year strategic plan that went into effect in 2011.

The Denver Art Museum's "Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century" is a boon for local museum goers who are getting a rare chance to see a sparkling array of jewelry, unsurpassed in craftsmanship and historical significance, and undoubtedly worth tens of millions of dollars.

But, make no mistake, there's a bonus in it for Cartier, too, which stars in the kind of commercial money can't buy. The exhibit focuses on Cartier's success in years past, but the company is still very much in business and happy to sell today's wealthy clients the same sort of shimmering necklaces, rings and watches lit to perfection in DAM's glass boxes.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known for daring installations that can stretch as long as a football field, will announce Monday a group of long-term projects with some of the country’s most prominent living artists, including Laurie Anderson, James Turrell and Jenny Holzer, as well as a partnership with the foundation of the late post-abstract expressionist Robert Rauschenberg.

When the roughly $55 million project is completed in 2017, Mass MoCA will be the largest contemporary art museum in the country, with more than 250,000 square feet of gallery space. It will also be one of the most eclectic, with a campus that features everything from rock and bluegrass festivals to dance premieres and a 27,000-square-foot building devoted to the drawings of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s trademark bicorne hat sold at auction near Paris on Sunday for roughly $2.4 million, according to news reports.

A South Korean collector, whose name was not released, paid nearly five times more than the minimum price set for the two-cornered, black felt hat that was apparently worn by the French emperor during the Battle of Marengo in 1800, the BBC reported.

Jean-Pierre Osenat of the Osenat auction house in Fontainebleau, France said the hat, now weathered from its age, is part of a collection belonging to the Prince of Monaco, whose family is distantly related to Napoleon.

The Salon Art + Design Fair, the sister fair of the esteemed Paris Biennale, opened to the public on Friday, November 14, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Produced in collaboration with France’s Syndicat National des Antiquaires, the Salon hosted a collector’s preview for VIP guests on the evening of November 13.

Launched in 2012 by Sanford L. Smith + Associates, the Salon welcomes over fifty leading galleries offering fine and decorative arts and design from 1890 to the present.

The lines that recently snaked around the Whitney Museum of American Art are gone. So is the hulking sculpture of Popeye that could be spied in the courtyard. Since the Jeff Koons retrospective closed there on Oct. 19, the only signs of life have been moving trucks and cranes as the Whitney prepares to exchange its Madison Avenue home, designed by Marcel Breuer, for its new place in the meatpacking district this spring. The Breuer won’t stay empty for long, however: In March 2016, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will take over, at least for eight years.

Although the arrangement was announced three years ago, the Met has been tight-lipped about what it will actually show in the Whitney’s old home. But loan requests went out in September to museums, collectors and dealers detailing the first show there.

The Phillips Collection wants to share its vast collection of scholarship, photographs and interviews with preeminent African-American artist Jacob Lawrence by creating a special website devoted to his life and work. But it needs the public to chip in to pay for it.

Phillips’ officials have raised $80,000 of the $125,000 required for what they are calling a “robust microsite” featuring images of all 60 panels of Lawrence’s masterwork, “The Migration Series,” as well as unpublished interviews conducted by Phillips curators in 1992 and 2000, just before his death.

The first thing you see in “Sturtevant: Double Trouble,” the Museum of Modern Art’s taut and feisty retrospective of the American artist Elaine Sturtevant, is work by artists far better known than Ms. Sturtevant herself.

Right at the start is the familiar 1972 photographic portrait of the German Conceptualist Joseph Beuys, in his porkpie hat and flak jacket, striding toward the camera. A bit farther on you’ll find Jasper Johns’s 1955 “Target With Four Faces,” a combination of painting, collage and sculpture and a MoMA treasure. Near it is Eliot Elisofon’s classic 1952 time-lapse photograph of Marcel Duchamp descending a staircase.

Berlin's art scene continues to grow. After over two years of controversy and political wrangling, the Bundestag's budget committee has approved €200 million for the construction of a new museum for modern art in Berlin, the DPA reports. The plan was confirmed by the SPD political party's budget expert Swen Schulz on Thursday. The new building is expected to open in 2021.

The confirmation brings an end to years of uncertainty first about whether Berlin would get approval to create its new museum at all, and later regarding who would pay for the creation of the institution (see "Will Private Sector Fund German MoMA?").

The long-running dispute between the former board of North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the city that housed it is over.

Attorneys for both sides met this week after months of mediation to work out the final settlement, emerging with a plan Wednesday that will split the museum’s assets between the city and departed board members, who have since founded a new institution, and close the lawsuit that was filed earlier this year.

According to a joint statement released Wednesday, North Miami will keep the majority of the 600-work permanent collection, some of which was donated by board members who left MOCA, that was a major sticking point in the mediation talks.