by Jon Lackman | 27 March 2007 | Uncategorized
Various stories of interest to art historians get little play here, because they’re already well covered elsewhere. We particularly recommend the ArtsJournal visual-arts newswire and ArtsJournal blogger CultureGrrl.
To summarize some recent developments:
The Met has gone forward with its plans (similar to the V&A’s) to make previously expensive images more available to professionals (via ARTstor), and apparently the National Gallery has plans to do likewise. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Chicago Press executive editor Susan M. Bielstein lauds the Met, but notes that the “new program does not remove barriers for all scholars. ‘Many small organizations and schools cannot afford to subscribe to ARTstor, even though fees are calculated on a sliding scale … Nor does the program appear to address the very real needs of independent scholars and researchers.’” The Met says it plans to expand accessibility at a later date.
Museums continue to sell off permanent collection holdings, for reasons of varying quality. Most recently, in The New York Times (among other places) one reads that the “The first in a series of sales of antiquities from the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo made more than $18 million … for a museum whose mission has mostly focused on Modern and contemporary art, they said, keeping the antiquities was a luxury it could no longer afford. The museum plans to use the money to expand the $58 million endowment that it uses for buying new work, at a time when the competition for contemporary art is fiercer than ever.”
The recent decisions by the Metropolitan Museum and the Getty Museum to return antiquities of contested provenance seems to have only stoked the fires. Many more claims are now in the works, and the integrity of curators, dealers and collectors are increasingly under fire.
