“From underpaintings that reveal new insights about an artist’s true feelings, to hidden details and even in-jokes, technology is rapidly changing the way we see art. Here, The Creators Project collects seven fascinating and ground-breaking discoveries that were once shrouded from both art history and the visible world.”
Image via BBC News
Posting for Museum Studies students—I found At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Preserving a Site and a Ghastly Inventory, in the New York Times today. This article presents an additional—and powerful—lens through which we may engage in discussions about the ethics of preserving and conserving culturally significant objects.
Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. From the NY Times online by James Hill.
If you are interested in hearing what the directors of the Met, the Getty Trust, and the MFA Boston think about the future of museums, you’ll want to check this out:
State of The Arts: Museum Heads Discuss the Future
from http://wgbhnews.org/post/state-arts-museum-heads-discuss-future
It is becoming more and more common to hear about works of art (and sometimes entire collections) in university museums being sold off to raise money to pay for university operating expenses and endowments. For a plethora of reasons, this is universally regarded in the museum field as short-sighted, irresponsible, and unethical—after all, institutions that accept gifts of works of art for university art collections have agreed to do so under the auspices of access, scholarship, and conservation for current and future generations. This article by pop culture critic Jon Weiner of the Nation reveals his thoughts on the fallacies of selling such works by detailing the fate of a particular Rembrandt painting, Portrait of A Man with Arms Akimbo, sold by Columbia University all the way back in 1975.
Read the article here: http://www.thenation.com/blog/172342/when-universities-sell-art-case-columbias-rembrandt#