Today's Wall Street Journal carried a review of the renovated Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which reopens to the public on Saturday. It's pretty much a rave, and I recommend it. But I found one passage extremely interesting and worthy of singling out and commenting on. First, here's the setup passage: The museum's director of collections, Taco Dibbits, and his curatorial staff have completely restructured the installation of the museum's holdings for the renovated building, arranging 8,000 objects from the museum's permanent collection (an … [Read more...]

The Tacoma Art Museum has resolved its dispute with the Young family. They are the descendants of the couple who had donated a collection of Qing dynasty items to the museum, which -- because the museum had changed its mission -- no longer fit in the collection. I wrote about the case the other day, and I did not believe the museum had handled it well. I still don't; moreover, the press release from Tacoma that was just sent to me about the resolution does not make clear exactly what happened. It says, in part: The Young family has … [Read more...]

I am late to this episode of the Colbert Report, but it's quite good, so I'm sharing it anyway: it's Paola Antonelli (below), senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, brought on at the start of her show, Applied Design, which started on Mar. 2. The show got a lot of notice because it includes the display of 14 video games, but Stephen Colbert is -- as ever -- more resourceful than that. He doesn't ask her about video games. He explores more important points of her thesis, such as where we are on the modern, … [Read more...]

What precisely did the Metropolitan Museum of Art* deaccession the other day? Apparently, a painting far more valuable than the museum had expected -- and perhaps one with incorrect attribition. The Met had decided to sell sixteen Old Masters paintings to benefit its acquisitions fund, and sent them to Sotheby's, which put them in last Wednesday's Old Master paintings auction. At the end, as Sotheby's wrote in its press release, the Met had "achieved strong results, totalling $2.4 million." Everyone's eyes were on one lot in … [Read more...]