Just some notes after the webcast by the AAM about Gaming AND museums. I’ll make some more detailed posts when the chat logs are available. Here’s just some fallout from the “Brain Grenades”.
Firstly, I find this topic exciting. There’s a lot to be thought about as this isn’t a fully fleshed out idea.
Have to applaud [...]
The Arts Council announced that they will not be providing any more funding for The Public’s ever increasing budget.
“That is why we supported this project and why, at every stage, we have worked with our partners and carefully weighed the level of risk involved against the potential public benefit.
“But the fact is that, although the [...]
Vladimir Putin’s painting that he did for an alphabet project (He got U, for Uzor, meaning pattern) has sold for 37 million roubles ($1.14million, about £765,000).
Putin’s CV now includes artist on top of being a former KGB head, President and Prime Minister of Russia and 6th dan in Judo.
The 200,000 oil paintings in public ownership are going to be accessable via the BBC’s website.
No news about what format this will take, but with the deadline being 2012 I suppose that it is early days in development. Also, newcurator.com’s hero Neil MacGregor will be doing a 100 part radio series on Radio 4 called [...]
Sad to see that this has already past, but over the weekend of Burns Day, a twitter account called @ayrshirebard was created to post lines of Robert Burns’ poetry whenever someone donated and you got a dedication.
This is a really neat idea. From the looks of it, about 560 followed the twitter and there were about 580 [...]
There’s been a lot of financial problems in museums lately. In the UK, many smaller local authority museums have been threatened with becoming a budget cut. In the US, there’s a lot of talk of job layoffs.
Brandeis University in Massachusetts will not only close its Rose Art Museum, but also sell off the entire 6,000 [...]
Dear Lord.
“I am looking forward to the prospect of finding undiscovered British talent. Anyone with a fresh creative approach should enter, because nobody knows where the next art star will emerge from.”
I thought the X-Factor for Artists was the Turner Prize.
(For our international readers: X-Factor is another TV show just like Pop Idol/American Idol; The [...]
Despite describing it as the world’s most recognisable brand, one would think that naming something after the Titantic wouldn’t inspire much confidence.
But the Titanic Quarter, a regeneration and property development based around the slipway where the ship was built, is going ahead despite the financial climate.
Culture is often used as a regeneration catalyst. This is [...]
If it is not clear by now, Neil MacGregor is considered a hero here at New Curator. It must be the time that his particular brand of globalisation, international diplomacy, “international museums” and repatriation policy be recognised with its own name and definition as a museum theory.
How about MacGregorism? Or maybe MacGregorisation, the process of directing [...]
What kind of museum residencies are there? What do they do?
There does not appear to be strict rules or guidelines to what one may expect a residency to achieve or how a residency is structured. They appear to take the form of consultants, short term or long term, temporary or permanent contracts, leader on a [...]
Yesterday, I said the third thing for museums to do during a recession is to DO SOMETHING. I wish I could have expanded on this and given some more insight/suggestions. Words failed me in trying to describe that economic changes meant “everything else” changes and that the creative and innovative will shine, or something like [...]
The video from the Museum Association sparked a huge response, partly as the Museum of Modern Art in New York asked it to their 3000 followers.
Here are the ones I’ve managed to collect.
Mine: To provide meaning.
Beth Dunn of Small Dots: To tell us our own stories, and the stories of others.
tahlib: The single most important function [...]
A little while ago, I spoke about the concept of “museum teknomagi“, the idea of technology made invisible to improve a museum’s curatorial mise-en-scene.
Daniel Winfree Papuga, over on his blog on the ning.com social network Museum 3.0, speaks about his experience with the Paris Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’ Immigration, and their “cutting edge” infra-red audio guides [...]
The Museum Association put this video up a while ago. Several people were asked “What is the single most important function of museums?”
I would have said “To provide meaning”.
There are not enough people talking about the positives of a global recession. There is almost a daily report of a museum facing closure or how nobody is buying art anymore. Things are being shaken up and this may be a time where the situations have changed so people need to be a bit more [...]
Trowbridge is a town in Wiltshire, which boasts a heritage in the wool and furniture industries. Yet they have only had a museum since the seventies that started out as room in a civic building for illustrations. In 1990, The Shires shopping centre opened and they gave a large room to the museum, rent free [...]
BBC iPlayer has BBC Radio 3’s programme A Tale of Two Skulls with artist Jane Wildgoose available until Sunday 25th January.
I’ve met Jane Wildgoose and she’s as fascinating and intriguing as she is in this show. She mixes the artist’s ability to tell stories and create emotional levels into the curatorial process, making her so [...]
The British Press is good at “controversy”. It can manufacture indignation against something with biased reporting, misleading quotes and terrible editing. Like a noisy bore in a pub, the sensible reaction is to give a wide berth to these stories.
The Public, a large new art gallery and cultural institution in the UK’s Midlands, is “controversial”, [...]
Two restitution stories in quick succession appear: American Peter Sachs hopes his day in court will get his father’s poster collection back;
“I think that any disposition of the posters would be preferable to their languishing in a museum for 70 years without ever seeing the light of day”
Osen said the idea was that if the [...]
There was a time in the late 80s that every boy wanted a giant floor piano, only for parents to ruin those dreams with piano lessons. That piano is now going to the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, where children will play chopsticks with their feet, or adults in their mid-twenties to thirties can pretend to [...]
