News and Links | October 27th
The Getty Research Institute has bought the ‘less controversial’ material from the archive of the Knoedler & Company art gallery in New York, which closed abruptly last year after charges that it was selling fakes. Thomas Gaehtgens, the director of the GRI, says “This archive can give us the basis for telling the story about how the museums in America have been built or developed.” The archive includes details of the sale of hundreds of paintings from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in the 1930s by the Soviet government.
Tom Flynn on the Rotterdam art theft, disputing the idea that art thieves are stupid and won’t find buyers for their loot.
The National Museum of Australia is holding a new exhibition where the public can talk to the museum’s conservators and watch them at work. The exhibition is apparently a response to the Museum’s open days where that chance for people to discover more about the conservation and care of objects in the collections has been very popular.
‘The liberal arts and sciences have no economic value… Taught in the right spirit, they are useless from an economic point of view.’ Johann Neem argues that defending the liberal arts solely on their perceived economic value could be their downfall.
Beth Harris and Steve Zucker on why museums need to join the conversations taking place about the future of education. ‘Curators, educators, and administrators should be conversant with the debates and new models that are emerging.’
Also on the future of learning and academic life – Ernesto Priego argues that rather being ‘narcisstic echo chambers’ blogs used in an academic context are ‘synonymous with collegiality – the cooperative relationship between colleagues.’
While Bednor Grosvenor has some interesting thoughts on why Art History needs to change and why art historians should be embracing the digital world to help them reach a wider audience.
Artful Science on the problem of ‘weeping paintings’ – a conservation issue that affects recent oil paintings from the past couple fo decades.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has begun to make its out-of-print exhibition catalogues available online and you can download the full text free of charge.
How did a self-described German hippie pull off one of the biggest, most lucrative cons in art-world history? Vanity Fair on the Beltracchi case.
David Walsh has reportedly settled his case with the ATO and has declared that MONA is now safe, which is good as the museum has helped Hobart to get on a list of the top 10 cities to visit by Lonely Planet.
An interesting case of a scientist who has used ancient Roman mosaics to track changes in the size and distribution of the dusky grouper fish.