#museum-politics

#museum-politics

The Baltimore Museum of Art landed her highly anticipated exhibition, 'Amy Sherald: American Sublime,' after the painter pulled her show from the National Portrait Gallery due to concerns over censorship. The exhibit has been a significant hit at the BMA: It was completely sold out by late February.

The Louvre accumulated considerable delays in the deployment of its security equipment, in favour of an event-driven policy, a judgment Des Cars said was unfair.

The contemporary technology museum has emerged as a performative participant in the systems it seeks to document. The architecture of these institutions has become increasingly fluid and bold, often mirroring the velocity and complexity of the systems it houses. They operate as mediators between the human, the ecological, and the technological realms, transforming from encyclopedic warehouses into active educational engines.

The significant number of ancestors held in UK museums is extremely distressing and symbolic of the colonial origins of these collections. We hope that the responses gathered by The Guardian will be shared with the relevant communities to support them in bringing their ancestors home.

Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.

Bregman claims, 'Today the whole of Europe risks turning into one big Venice, a beautiful open-air museum. A great destination for Chinese and American tourists. A place to admire what was once the centre of the world.' This statement encapsulates the concern that Europe is losing its cultural significance.

As cultural institutions continue to proliferate worldwide in this digital era, the museum itself appears increasingly in need of redefinition. Rather than offering a single model or solution, Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums, written by architectural historian and curator Béatrice Grenier, argues for a more contextual and plural understanding of what a museum can be: an institution shaped by its environment, its public, and the specific cultural questions it seeks to address.

The new New Museum is many things: contemporary, perhaps, but also a science, history, anthropology, and many other museums in one. It echoes the desire of its patron class to own the world and its affiliated courtier class to deliver it to them on a silver platter, or encased in perforated metal, in this case.

It's impossible to imagine New York City without art, or contemporary art without New York City. This is where you come to see the best of the best, or to take part in making it. This country's international standing is down in the gutter, thanks to Trump, but this city is still a living, rolling dream. Right now, we're waiting to see who's going to be Mayor Mamdani's pick for cultural affairs commissioner. It's an important role that determines where the city's budget priorities will lie and who'll get a seat at the table. Gonzalo Casals, who served as culture commissioner under Mayor de Blasio, and Mauricio Delfín, who co-directs the Culture & Arts Policy Institute with Casals, have some urgent thoughts on the matter. It's a must-read not just for Zohran (send him a link if you're on texting terms), but for everyone who cares about art in this city.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote about the "inalienable" rights of man in the US Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, it's possible he lifted the term from the French. And long before it was ever used as an adjective to describe human rights, it defined royal property. To this day, "inalienability" remains a cornerstone of public collections in France-and many other countries-impacting museums and their ability to deaccession, including for purposes of restitution.

Brooklyn Museum Fills Its Top Contemporary Curator Spot Robert Wiesenberger was named senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, a post that has been vacant since the departure of Eugenie Tsai in 2023. He comes from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he was curator of contemporary projects, and was previously a curatorial fellow at the Harvard Art Museums.