Met May Open Seven Days a Week, Nora Ephron's Art Collection Revealed, and More Must-Read Art News

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art

by ARTINFO

Published: September 12, 2012

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– Met to Open on Mondays?: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is proposing to open its doors on Mondays starting next July, meaning the museum would be open every day for the first time in more than 40 years. The decision — which is not yet final — is driven in part by rising tourism in New York City, rising attendance at the museum, as well as the example of several other museums, including the Prado, that have opted to stay open all week. With revenue from increased ticket sales and cafe receipts, "it seems as though we'll be ahead," director Thomas P. Campbell said. Elsewhere, however, the Met is paring down: It recently nixed a plan to include kiosks for refreshments and museum tickets as part of a $60 million renovation of its plaza after neighbors complained it would turn the block into a Starbucks-like "hangout." [NYT, DNAinfo]

– Nora Ephron's Art Collection Revealed: In addition to being an unlikely art reporter, the late writer and director Nora Ephron was also, it turns out, an art collector. In her will, she left a 1938 drawing by Henri Matisse to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who was the basis for Billy Crystal's character in the hit romantic comedy "When Harry Met Sally." She also left a 1948 watercolor by painter Milton Avery to her sister and collaborator, Delia Ephron. [DNAinfo]

– Berlin's Old Masters Will Stay Put, For Now: A controversial plan to remove the German capital's holdings of Old Masters paintings — among the world's richest, including pieces by Vermeer, Durer, and Caravaggio — from the Gemaeldegalerie to make way for 20th century works recently acquired from collectors Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch has been put on hold while a feasibility study is conducted. The 150-piece, $192-million Pietzsch collection, which boasts works by Pollock, Rothko, Magritte, and Miro, was gifted to the city on the condition that it would be displayed in one of its major museums. [Bloomberg]

– Venice Architecture Biennale Disappoints: Art critic-turned-architecture guru Michael Kimmelman calls the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale "a missed opportunity." "The show mostly just glides over issues like public housing and health ... the environment, informal settlements, economic decline and protest," he writes. "It pays almost no attention to the developing world, to designers from Africa or China, and precious little to female architects." Meanwhile, "a surprising number of the old boldface names" hog the spotlight. [NYT]

– Gagosian by the Numbers: The Art Newspaper pulled out its calculator to estimate the scale of the Gagosian enterprise, and found that the international gallery network's total exhibition space — a staggering 145,313 square feet — is larger than the entire Tate Modern, including its new extension and the Tanks. The entire rental costs of all those spaces could easily exceed $50 million. But when you're a gallery that makes roughly $20 million per week in sales, as TAN estimates, perhaps that's no big deal. [TAN]

– UChicago Makes Push for Art: The University of Chicago's president Robert Zimmer has made it his mission to integrate the arts into the school's curricula in nontraditional ways. (This fall, a course on the aesthetics of light — cross-listed in the departments of visual arts, physics, and performance studies — will be co-taught by physicist Sidney Nagel and architect and glass sculptor James Carpenter.) He's also named artist Theaster Gates as the university's director of the Arts and Public Life Initiative and lured art professor Jessica Stockholder away from Yale. [WSJ]

– Franco Teaching CalArts Course: Actor, artist, and part-time professor James Franco will guide eight students in the California Institute of the Arts's School of Film Video in a year-long graduate project to create a collaborative film version of D.J. Waldie's "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir." "Each section will represent a diverse cinematic approach or modality aesthetically coalesced under the tutelage of James Franco," explains the course description. [Gallerist]

– German Artist Turns Documenta Censorship Into Exhibition: The painter Gregor Schneider, who claimed in June that his exhibition in Kassel set to coincide with Documenta 13 was censored by the quinquennial show's curators, has turned their censorious emails into paintings for his new exhibition at Berlin's Future Gallery titled "Scheiss e-mails" ( or "Shit Emails"). The exhibition press release explains: "The correspondence between the Documenta team and the church — disclosing amongst other things, legal threats and ultimatums made by the Documenta team — was handed over to him." [Guardian]

– Arts Council Creates Fund to Pay Interns: In a tacit acknowledgment of the injustices of the unpaid intern labor force, the Arts Council England has made a £15-million ($24-million) fund to encourage arts organizations to pay their interns. "Our worry is that we’re simply going to lose a generation of talented young people if we don’t support the sector really practically in creating more opportunities," said ACE executive director Andrea Stark. "We want to create fair routes and to do that, frankly, we need to offer a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work." [TheStage]

– Former Barracks Become Singapore Gallery Hub: Friday marks the opening of 13 galleries — including Ota Fine Arts, Sundaram Tagore, and Australia's Future Perfect — in the refurbished Gillman Barracks, a former military facility whose redevelopment the government has funded to the tune of $8-million. It will eventually grow to include 19 galleries, two research facilities, and three restaurants. "There’s a determinedly international mix, which you lack elsewhere in Southeast Asia,” said Future Perfect director David Teh. "That’s vital in the business we’re in, which is typically subject to quite parochial markets." [WSJ]

Video of the Day:

Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal visit the Met in Nora Ephron's "When Harry Met Sally"