An exterior shot of the author's apartment in Bushwick. Courtesy MetMuseum.org.
-With the sizable fraction of their budget that’s subsidized by the Dept of Cultural Affairs, paying the $25 “suggested donation” to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art tends to make one wonder: What has the Met done for me lately? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Out-of-towners, visiting the Met’s summer exhibitions, spent money on food, lodging, transportation, and museum admissions that brought in a total of $908 million in city revenue, according to a recent visitor survey. Try to think about that the next time your path on the sidewalk is obstructed by slow-moving schlemiels with travel books under their arms and cameras hung from their necks that dwarf the Hubble.
-Considering the amount of time AFC’s Will Brand has been spending in the DC area lately, it’s something of a surprise that the city hasn’t heeded his call to give Warhol a rest. In his column on the exhibitions of the Pop artist’s at The National Gallery and the Hirschorn Museum (both of which open September 25th), Philip Kennicott describe an admittedly thin work with the language of a fan letter, referring to it as “born of pop, bathed in conceptualism and articulated in the language of abstraction.” Mr. Kennicott, if we want witless, adoring art criticism, we have MuseumNerd’s Twitter feed. Thanks very much.
-If only everyone could be as enlightened as the Walters Art Museum, LACMA, and Yale–or Tyler Green. These institutions, as the blogger writes, are starting to “tear down the copyright laws” by making high-res images of works of art from their catalogues accessible to the public, online, with no terms of use. Green eagerly points out how much educators and researchers could benefit from having this kind of work available for free. We’ll try not to be rude when pointing out that his own column in Modern Painters, as of this writing, isn’t.
-Reports from Sweden have echoed concerns that a suspected terror attack that led to the evacuation of a Roda Sten art exhibition at the Gothenburg Museum were indeed directed at the West coast city’s arts center–sort of. Having arrested four suspects in connection with the plot, three of whom are Swedish nationals, the police, according to NPR, have not confirmed whether the museum, which lies directly below the city’s jostling Alvsborgsbron bridge, was an intended target of the plot.
-Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has brought together a consortium of foundations, corporations and federal agencies called ArtPlace in an initiative to vitalize an array of art related projects around the country. Developed with an ardent faith in the power of art programs to spur economic recovery, funds anchored in Artspace will go supporting arts projects along a new light-rail line in St Paul, building a music center in Detroit, and giving a Batman coloring book to anyone living in Springfield, Massachusettes who asks very nicely.
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