Let it go Bob, let it go

“For that matter, the New Zealand official exhibit a few years ago at a European sculpture contest of a musical corrugated-iron farm toilet shed was certainly cause for national embarrassment.”

Bob Jones goes for the record number of factual errors in a single sentence (10) in attempting to describe et al.’s installation at the Venice Biennale in the NZH.

Onward my brave Hawkmen

It’s not everyday that the people running our cultural institutions let their guard down and reveal what they're thinking - particularly about the future and how it might affect their audiences. In the weekend a long piece in the DominionPost got Te Papa CEO Michael Houlihan to open up on the ways Te Papa intends to implement its radical new plan to split into a museum of living culture and a museum for the future. They are:

Create a display of a Gallipoli trench

Display more of the fine art collection

Continue showing art on the fifth floor

Collect furniture

Collect video games

Change the Treaty of Waitangi exhibit

Exhibit more photography

Record plays and performances

Tour Te Papa exhibitions

Not be the home of the usual museum-going crowd

Let the magic begin

Image: Red stave chair by Humphrey Ikin purchased for the Te Papa collection in 1997

Cultural Capital (sic)

"We already have WOW and the Sevens and now Wellington City Council is looking to add another major event to Wellington's schedule."

The Dominion Post reporting under its header "new attraction sought for ‘arts capital’"

LOL

MODERNARTINIZATION has been nominated by a few OTN readers as art word of the year. OK it's only just February but MODERNARTINIZATION, the name of a Russian art conference held last month is going to be hard to beat. Still we're offering OTN badges for any superior entries.

LOL Redux

"I think curators are ill advised and usually wrong."
British art critic Brian Sewell's response to MoMA curators putting Tim Burton up with Warhol. 

LOL

“I’m always challenging the role of the curator itself.”

“I have a preoccupation in my work with loss and absence.”

“I was planning to bring over Pipilotti Rist and now you tell me we don’t have the funds to stay open Saturdays?!”

Things curators say. From Art Women: A Guide to Museum Women by Polly Frost in identity theory

LOL

The Wellington City Gallery has emailed interested punters explaining what will keep them busy over the next year while the gallery is closed.

• Replacing the images in seven light boxes on Courtenay Place in the project known as "Give us a sign".

• Changing the videos showing on the monitors inside the main entrance of the closed Gallery each month.

• Conducting tours of public art in Wellington for secondary school students.

And not to forget the senior curator who will be writing an essay on Francis Upritchard for her Venice exhibition in June 2009.

LOL

This from a reader who titled the picture "recent developments in
local council cut backs."

LOL

Further to item 5 on our recession list.

Two days ago one of Antony Gormley's maquettes for his Angel of the North sculpture became the first £1 million ($NZ2.7 million) object to be valued on BBC One's Antiques Roadshow.

Roadshow fine art expert Philip Mould said: "It's a great thrill to me that something produced in the last 15 years has broken the record for the most valuable item to ever have been on the show."

Series editor Simon Shaw said: "This was one of the most exciting moments that we've ever had."

LOL

“I spent both my wages and my weekends driving to more interesting places, desperate to be distracted after another week spent in dun-coloured sweaty suburbia...During what I now refer to as my period of missionary service in the heartland.”

Ex curator Waikato Art Museum.