Displaying items by tag: Museums

The vibrant, visionary landscapes of Charles Burchfield (1893-1976), one of the leading American artists of the 20th century, are featured in a major exhibition of more than 50 paintings on view at the Brandywine River Museum of Art from Saturday, Aug. 23 through Nov. 16.

Co-organized by the Brandywine River Museum of Art and the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, the exhibition features works borrowed from museums and private collections across the United States, including the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the largest repository of the artist’s work.

Maybe you have faded memories from many years or decades ago, of visiting an old house preserved as a museum — a stuffy, drab kind of place both physically and mentally. It felt like a place somewhat lost to time, stuck in a kind of historical coffin of its own design.

Fortunately, most historical house museums today, at least those of any renown, don’t fit that characterization. Even relic-filled places like Colonial Williamsburg have evolved with the times and especially the great strides made in historical preservation over the past couple decades, says Karen Daly, executive director of the Dumbarton House.

Culture officials in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine have ordered museums to put their most valuable pieces into storage, and some institutions have closed to the public, as fighting continues between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces.

Ukraine’s culture ministry has also asked that the media refrain from “emphasising objects of cultural heritage” to avoid their being targeted, according to an 8 August statement on the ministry’s website. This comes after reports that two of the city’s museums have been damaged by artillery fire.

Sometimes museums get in trouble. Deep trouble. Not because they damage art, or let it get stolen ... but because they sell it. The Delaware Art Museum is the latest target of the art world's ire — for selling one painting from its collection to try and tackle a debt, and for revelations in the past few days that two more paintings are up for sale.

The controversy relates to a serious museum practice with an unfriendly name: "deaccessioning," or the permanent removal of an object from the collection. There are rules around when and how deaccessioning can take place. Break those rules and there are some unpleasant consequences.

Like vodka and fun-house mirrors and trips to Japan, the Internet can make you feel bigger than you are.

It persuades vitamin D-starved shut-ins to try their hand as webcam stars. It tempts the rude to imagine their impertinence catching global fire through that perfectly worded comment. It seduces the artisanal cheese maker with visions of a worldwide market beyond the alley boutique.

And it can make even the oldest-school art museum wonder: Could our collection reach the villages of China and the universities of Peru and perhaps a prison or two? Could it touch those who have no chance of entering our physical doors? Could it spread to the whole world?

New industry figures have revealed that the international art market has grown by 17% to $7 billion in the first six months of 2014. The French company Artprice stated that art sold at the major auction houses have totalled $7.15 billion ($5.22 billion euros). This has increased from the $6.11 billion figures crunched in the first half of 2013.

Thierry Ehrmann, from Artprice stated, "We have gone from 500,000 collectors in the post-war period to nearly 70 million 'art consumers' art lovers and collectors -- worldwide," he added; 2013 was a record year for art with sales worth $12.17 billion following a drop in 2012 linked to a contraction in the Chinese market. Ehrmann said museums and art centres, both public and private, were springing up all over the world, in particular in the Asia Pacific region and to a lesser extent in South America and the Middle East.

The Brooklyn Museum’s suggested general admission fees for adults will increase to $16 from $12, and entry for visitors 19 and under will be free starting Sept. 3, the museum announced on Wednesday.

“This younger audience segment represents the future of all museums, and we must do everything possible to make it easier for them to visit,” said Arnold L. Lehman, the museum’s director. “At the same time, economic realities make necessary this modest increase in our suggested admission fees for other audience segments.”

The internationally regarded Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) opens tomorrow with an exciting month-long calendar of more than 40 exhibitions, special events, performances and tours across 30 of the city’s museums, galleries and institutions, as well as artist-run, temporary and pop-up spaces. In its 11th year, the festival brings together over 100 leading and emerging Scottish and international artists and features the return of its annual, city-wide commissions programme, including a major presentation by leading Indian artist Nalini Malani as part of 14-18 NOW’s LIGHTS OUT and WWI Centenary Art Commissions. As part of the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme, and during the year of Homecoming Scotland, the 2014 programme also sees the presentation of a major international group exhibition Where do I end and you begin programmed by Edinburgh Art Festival in collaboration with City Art Centre.
 
Edinburgh Art Festival also features a daily programme of events for all ages, featuring one-off artist performances, live musical events, film screenings and festival tours, as well as talks by some of the world’s leading artists and curators.

One cloudy afternoon this month, the line to enter the Louvre stretched around the entrance pyramid, across one long courtyard and into the next. Inside the museum, a crowd more than a dozen deep faced the Mona Lisa, most taking cellphone pictures and selfies. Near the “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” Jean-Michel Borda, visiting from Madrid, paused amid the crush. “It’s like the Métro early in the morning,” he said.

It is the height of summer, and millions of visitors are flocking to the Louvre — the busiest art museum in the world, with 9.3 million visitors last year — and to other great museums across Europe. Every year the numbers grow as new middle classes emerge, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe. Last summer the British Museum had record attendance, and for 2013 as a whole it had 6.7 million visitors, making it the world’s second-most-visited art museum, according to The Art Newspaper. Attendance at the Uffizi in Florence for the first half of the year is up almost 5 percent over last year.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new initiative in New York City this month, proposing a municipal identification card that could be available to all city inhabitants next year. The card would be beneficial to New Yorkers who don't have a driver's license or other form of official ID. In particular, undocumented individuals.

Well, according to The New York Times, another subset of the population may find the municipal IDs appealing: the art world. The Times reports that the card may come with free membership and discounted tickets to cultural institutions in NYC, namely the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center and other well known culture havens.