Hasta La Ideas

TATE THE CAKE. The guy with the glasses schemes for a prime piece of turbine hall.

We’re not sure if Wenlock and Mandeville were on hand for the festivities, but London’s Tate Modern recently celebrated its tenth birthday. A gala celebration at the museum included the above giant sheet cake, a frosted tribute to the Herzog and de Meuron-led conversion of the former Bankside Power Station. More than 45 million people have visited Tate Modern since it opened in May 2000, and the museum recently announced the expansion of its collection to areas outside Europe and North America. Recent acquisitions include 13 contemporary works of art by artists (all new to the collection) from the Middle East and North Africa, including Kader Attia and Mahmoud Bakhshi Moakhar. Tate Modern also recently acquired 28 works from South Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific region. These include Do Ho Suh‘s “Staircase III” (2009), Subodh Gupta‘s “Everyday” (2009), and Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘s “Untitled (Double Portrait)” (1991). Many of the recent acquisitions were gifts or purchased through Tate’s regionally focused acquisitions committees. “Tate Modern has provided the spur for a vigorous policy at Tate of collecting more widely internationally which has deepened the collection for future generations,” said Tate director Nicholas Serota in a press release, while Frances Morris, Tate’s head of collections, described the expansion efforts as “a response to the emergence of interesting and dymamic art centers across the world and an ever more complex and interconnected international art scene.”

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On a more positive note, we turn to the MIT Museum, who have just sent out notice that they’ve received a large collection of archival Polaroid material from the former company’s new owner, PLR IP Holdings (the ones that brought Lady Gaga on as Creative Director). Edwin Land, who launched what would become the instant photo company in the late 1930s, had been connected to MIT in the early days of its founding, not only living in Cambridge, but also serving as a visiting scholar, so it makes sense that these collection of materials should go to the university’s museum. Following some auctions of the Polaroid archives earlier this year, we’re glad to see that the remainder of the collection is finding a good home outside of personal vaults. Here’s a bit about what’s in the collection and what they have planned for it:

The archive of Polaroid history and artifacts contains some of the most fascinating inventions and innovations from the 20th century. Rare Polarized glasses dating from the 1939 World’s Fair, original newsprint sketches by Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land, a historic bellows camera the size of a filing cabinet, as well as examples of Land-designed camera prototypes, and SX-70 cameras that defined the instant photography era, are just some of the original items that the MIT Museum acquired. In June, the museum plans to display a few artifacts from this new acquisition.

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With Beverly Hills now out of the way and the competition down to just two, most everyone in the know thinks all the arrows are pointing in the direction of Los Angeles getting Eli Broad‘s proposed new art museum. The city, you might recall, was the last to put in a bid for the museum, but had the unique benefit of being able to offer Broad a chance to return to an enterprise he’d once been involved with before it fell apart financially: the Grand Avenue Project. Now that it seems like a given that the billionaire art collector has made his choice, the LA Times‘ Christopher Hawthorne has a number of suggestions that the city and Broad should take note of before they begin their negotiation dances. Even if none of this pans out and Broad pulls a fast one and skips both LA and Santa Monica and goes to, say, Pomona, Hawthorne offers up some good perspective on the back and forth required to build a museum.

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We’re not entirely sure how we feel about this editorial, but it’s worth reading, so we’ll let you decide. (think of it as a little “free will” break from us telling you what to think). In part responding to the current battle going on at the Whitney, expansion vs. moving, the Atlantic‘s Kyle Chayka has penned the piece “Are Fine Art Museums the Next Starbucks?” The quick synopsis of his argument is that expansion and constant focus on real estate land grabs (see: the Guggenheim, the MoMA‘s new tower, etc.) can run museums dangerously close to becoming nothing more than a watered down brand, or worse: glorified gift shops that just happen to have a couple of pieces of art hanging on the walls. On one hand, we certainly see his point. On the other, it might go a bit far, given that outgrowing a space and moving isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and even the most expansion-friendly, the Guggenheim, still only has less than 10 locations. But again, it’s well worth the read.

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At last we left it, following their announcement that they couldn’t afford the flashy new building Toyo Ito had designed for them, the Berkeley Art Museum said they were still planning to make a big move, instead heading to a former printing plant, which they were going to have fully restored. The momentum seems to be continuing along that path, at the San Francisco Chronicle‘s resident critic, John King, reports that the museum has drawn up a shortlist of 10 architecture firms to help them rebuild their new old home. Fortunately, for cost-saving’s sake, there isn’t a Gehry or a Foster among the names (at least among those firms King has confirmed):

[museum director Larry Rinder] won’t say who’s in the running except that all 10 are North American firms, but three firms confirmed to us they’ve been invited to take part: Bernard Tschumi Architects of New York, whose acclaimed Acropolis Museum in Athens opened last year; Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the designers of Cal’s sublime C.V. Starr East Asian Library; and Will Bruder + Partners of Phoenix, the design architect for our very own award-winning Hercules Public Library.

These aren’t the favorites, simply the ones I’ve heard. Whoever gets the nod is expected to pair with EHDD Architecture, the local firm that worked with Ito and would remain as executive architect.

In that same story, King also has some brief info on SFMoMA‘s much-publicized hunt for someone to build them a new Donald Fisher wing.

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