upcoming explorations in convergence: eileen quinlan at whitney at altria

In a case of either actual curatorial independence or too-good-to-be-true “synergy”, The Whitney Museum of Art at Altria (née Phillip Morris) has announced their upcoming exhibition Undone: Tom Holmes, Tony Matelli, Eileen Quinlan, and Heather Rowe, opening September…

Tut v. Franklin

It’s the dog days of summer and things have clearly slowed down around here, with SD’ers in various foreign places enjoying themselves. Nothing jolts us up out of our slumber faster, though, than learning about the protest of the…

tenement museum taps tenants in imminent eminent domain dispute

Tenants online has the scoop on the latest in eminent domain boondoggles, blithely reported here :

Perhaps the most bizarre instance of Eminent Domain is where the Lower East Side Tenement Museum seeks to acquire a

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getty images licenses 100 workers for unemployment stints

Not exactly Suggested Donation’s turf, but it’s still interesting what’s happening over in the dollar-signs-for-eyeballs, market-driven world of privatized, for-profit, collections. These guys are getting paid AND getting fired.

fra-gi-le. must be italian!

LA’s best museum-on-top-of-a-3-mile-trolley-ride just got pwn3d, agreeing to hand over 40 antiquities to Italy. The Eye-talians claim the historic artworks, including a sculpture from the 5th century BC depicting Aphrodite, were plundered from their soil by the evil Getty. …

curate my rack

Boring and historically de-contextualized wall labels be no more! Museum 2.0 is here, synergistically harvesting public insight in a folksonomical moblog of tag clouds for museum objects and artificacts. It’s steve.museum, “the first experiment in social tagging for museum…

your glossy pamphlet supports terr’ism

What happens to a catalogue when its museum is blown to bits? It becomes a price guide for thieves! Now you too can own your own rare edition of this necessary black market guide, the 1974 Afghanistan National Museum…

the museum that keeps on giving…us things to write about

Our old friends at the Smithsonian are up to it again, this time “toning down” an exhibit on global warming in the arctic to interject some good ol’ fashioned “both sides of the story” “objectivity.”

Among other things, the

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if it ain’t burke, don’t fix it: get your chubby little fingers out of there

More from Potomac swamp country–Lawrence “I’m really not *that*” Small joins the aforementioned Sheila Burke in the conflict of interest scandal at the Smithsonian. Small and Burke both sat on the board of directors at Chubb Insurance Group during…

MoDo on Cheney v. Natty Archives

In between making fun of Barack Obama for crimes against masculinity, Maureen Dowd takes a sec to expand her ever-irrelevant definition of a manly man (while weighing in on the outrageous Dick Cheney/National Archives scandal):

I

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it’s hard out there for a creation museum

As if it isn’t tough enough to run a museum which flies in the face of all scientific fact, now Kentucky’s Creation Museum must contend with a challenge far more spurious than science: a sex scandal. Seems the…

The Smithpwnian: Burke ‘n’ stocks are comfortable

Burke’s resignation came on the eve of an independent report that sources said would criticize her extensive outside activities, including highly compensated corporate board seats, academic appointments, a federal commission that oversees Medicare, and numerous nonprofit organizations.