LACMA has bet everything on reinvention. The $724-million David Geffen Galleries open this week, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has essentially demolished and rebuilt itself — trading a fragmented campus for a single hovering megastructure (Los Angeles Times). Across the Atlantic, London’s National Gallery has tapped Kengo Kuma to design a $464-million wing that will push the collection into 20th- and 21st-century art — territory the Tate has long considered its own (The Guardian).
Not every institution is building. Salzburg’s festival board, having fired its artistic director two weeks ago, has already installed an interim replacement (Moto Perpetuo). Meanwhile, Spain’s culture minister is refusing to let Picasso’s Guernica travel to the Basque region for the 90th anniversary of the bombing it depicts — a fight less about conservation than about which city gets to claim the painting’s meaning (The Guardian). And the market for reported nonfiction books is contracting, squeezing the kind of deep journalism that doesn’t come with a celebrity name attached (The New Republic).
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