Largesse for SFMOMA

Bucking the downward trend that has plagued the boardrooms of most museums during the recession, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced Thursday that it has raised $250 million over the last several months, allowing it to double the size of its endowment and put $150 million toward an ambitious expansion.

The expansion is necessary partly because the museum is to be the home of the extensive art collection of Don and Doris Fisher, co-founders of the Gap clothing chain, who announced in September, shortly before Mr. Fisher’s death, that they would lend their works to the museum instead of placing them in a museum of their own they had planned to build in San Francisco’s Presidio park.

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Randy Kennedy
New York Times

Czar Broad

(Photo: Monica Almeida/New York Times)

Every American city has its power brokers, but only Los Angeles has an Eli Broad.

Mr. Broad dominates the arts here with a force that has no parallel in any major city. Los Angeles would literally not look the same had Mr. Broad not chosen it as his home 40 years ago, and his business-focused method of managing his giving has earned him a reputation as both a genius and a despot.

Now, as his preferred pick, Jeffrey Deitch, prepares to take the helm of another cultural pillar of Los Angeles — the Museum of Contemporary Art, which Mr. Broad helped found three decades ago and recently bailed out with a $30 million grant — Mr. Broad’s grip on the city and its arts has never been tighter.

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Jennifer Steinhauer
New York Times

Stonehenge Redux

Its footpaths are “tortuous”, the roof likely to “channel wind and rain” and its myriad columns – meant to evoke a forest – are incongruous with the vast landscape surrounding it.

So says the government’s design ­watchdog over plans for a controversial £20m visitor centre at Stonehenge, the megalithic jewel in England’s cultural crown. CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, has criticised the design of the proposed centre, claiming the futuristic building by Denton Corker Marshall does little to enhance the 5,000-year-old standing stones which attract more than 800,000 visitors each year.

Its concerns are the latest chapter in the long saga surrounding the English Heritage-backed project, and follow a ­government decision two years ago to scrap on cost grounds a highly ambitious £65m scheme to build a tunnel to reroute traffic to protect the World Heritage site.

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Caroline Davies
Guardian

Museums Online: Tracking the Winners

Who’s got the most popular museum website in the world?

According to a website called Kunstpedia, which describes itself as “curators of art knowledge,” The Museum of Modern Art takes the blue ribbon, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art not far behind.

Kunstpedia analyzed more than 680 museum websites worldwide, and ranked them.

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Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts

Funding the Arts in Europe

The Apollo Gallery at the Louvre in Paris was renovated with money from Total, the oil company. (Photo: Remy de la Mauviniere/Associated Press)

Last week the shadow culture secretary for Britain’s Conservative Party, Jeremy Hunt, promised to introduce “a U.S.-style culture of philanthropy” if the Tories come to power in the coming election. Speaking before the State of the Arts conference in London, Mr. Hunt foresaw a “golden age” of tax breaks to encourage private donations and help cut back on government spending.

“I do believe in state funding,” he reassured his no doubt partly skeptical audience, “but we are committed to a mixed-economy funding model for the arts.” He added that the party’s shadow chancellor, George Osborne, agreed with him.

And in Paris last month the Pompidou museum was shut down by a strike for more than two weeks, and other museums for several days, because France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, also wants to reduce arts support. He has proposed making cuts in the whole state workforce, with its jobs for life and generous pensions, including at cultural institutions like the Louvre, the palace of Versailles and the National Library. The plan is for only one worker to replace every two who retire. The Pompidou Center’s labor union estimates that the museum would lose some 200 jobs in the next decade as a result.

French museums are supposed to raise money if they want more workers. In short, to Americanize the system, as Mr. Hunt is proposing in Britain.

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Michael Kimmelman
New York Times

Adrian Searle on Eggleston

Strange and familiar … detail from Untitled (bathroom with pink curtain, Cuba), 2007 Photograph: William Eggleston

William Eggleston’s photographs are filled with light; he calibrates its ­differences and qualities. The shadow of a palm tree on a sun-smitten wall; light filtering into an empty shower stall through a faded curtain. Grim, hellish light inside a freezer, the rust-pigmented frost caked to the freezer wall, plastic bags of ice ­snuggled neatly in the lower gloom. Who else would think to photograph this dreary beauty?

Eggleston’s new exhibition 21st ­Century, selected from work made over the last decade, opens this week at the ­Victoria Miro gallery in London. (The same exhibition also runs concurrently at Cheim and Read in New York, where I saw it a few days ago.) Increasingly the subject of major retrospectives, where individual works are often ­subsumed in the arc of a career that has spanned more than 40 years, the Memphis-born photographer’s work is both familiar and strange.

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Adrian Searle
Guardian

Beauty Matters

In Britain, the state, in the form either of local or central government, will tell you whether you can or cannot build on land that you own. And if it permits you to build, it will stipulate not only the purposes for which you may use the building, but also how it should look, and what materials should be used to construct it. Americans are used to building regulations that enforce utilitarian standards: insulation, smoke alarms, electrical safety, the size and situation of bathrooms, and so on. But they are not used to being told what aesthetic principles to follow, or what the neighborhood requires of materials and architectural details. I suspect that many Americans would regard such stipulations as a radical violation of property rights, and further evidence of the state’s illegitimate expansion.

This American attitude has something healthy about it, but it tends to go with two quite erroneous assumptions about beauty and the aesthetic. The first assumption is that beauty is an entirely subjective matter, about which there can be no reasoned argument and concerning which it is futile to search for a consensus. The second assumption, congenial to those who adopt the first, is that beauty doesn’t matter, that it is a value without economic reality, which cannot be allowed to place any independent constraint on the workings of the market.

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Roger Scruton
The American

Art Squatting

James Balmforth, 29, is a sculptor. He lives in a squat in a South London suburb and is represented by Hannah Barry, who runs a gallery in a Peckham car park

There is probably an empty building on your street, you may have walked past it a thousand times and not noticed its slow and mossy decay, or maybe you don’t know it’s even vacant because, theoretically, it’s not: someone has taken it over, fixed it up a bit and is putting it to good use, using it as a theatre, a gallery, a shop, a community space or a home. The chances are that they are not even doing it illegally.

With the number of our empty buildings officially stated to be 943,000 last year and that figure expected to rise to more than a million this year, councils and communities are becoming more and more open to the idea that empty space is not necessarily dead space. One such venture is the Brixton Village, currently hosting its inaugural festival. A stone’s throw from the Tube station, behind the main drag of JD Sports and Marks & Spencer, 20 empty shops in a run-down arcade have been filled with community-driven businesses, design collectives and workshops. A joint initiative between Lambeth Borough Council, Space Makers Agency and London & Associated Properties, the building’s owners, it’s the largest example yet of a growing nationwide trend.

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Hana Hanra
London Times

New Acropolis Museum

Archaic Gallery in the new museum (Photo: Nikos Daniilidis)

For advocates of the repatriation of marble sculptures removed from the Parthenon in the early 19th century and long housed at the British Museum in London, the new Acropolis Museum is proof — at last — that Greece has a safe place to display the hotly contested artworks.

For Athenians who live and work near the Acropolis, the looming modern structure at the southeastern base of the hill is a mixed blessing. The $200-million, 226,000-square-foot museum has transformed the area of Makrygianni, boosting property values while dwarfing other buildings in the neighborhood.

Dimitrios Pandermalis, a classical archaeologist who presided over the building’s construction and is now president of the museum, is acutely aware of all this. But for him, the gleaming edifice is a dream come true or at least partly so.

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Suzanne Muchnic
Los Angeles Times

Don McLean’s Eco-Credentials

The facade of the house in Bearsden (Photo: Stuart Wallace)

With his house amassing accolades for its eco-credentials, owner and architect Don McLean is phlegmatic about his new role as a poster-boy for green crusaders: “I’m just somebody who wanted to build a sustainable house using the best technology and best systems available.”

“Sustainability is a buzzword at the moment, but for me it’s not something that’s separate, it’s not an add-on. It’s part of the whole process. It’s just a sensible approach to building.”

McLean may have eschewed the evangelical approach, but the new Bearsden home that he shares with wife Lorna, a clinical nurse specialist, and their three children — Ruth, 17, Mark, 20, and Adam, 23 — is an ambitious and handsome take on environmentally savvy and energy-efficient building principles. McLean, managing director of Glasgow-based McLean Architects, also claims it “won’t need to be rebuilt in 30 years’ time, like many new houses. The solid construction will last for a long, long time”.

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Caroline Ednie
London Times