Hasta La Ideas

A quick follow-up to our post the other day about the new plans being released for the Presidio Contemporary Art Museum. In that post, we told you about the project’s revisions, but we didn’t have any images just yet. Fortunately, a poster at the Examiner tracked down a handful of renderings for the new concept, which you’ll find here. It looks nearly invisible, which a grass covered roof much like Renzo Piano‘s California Academy of Sciences building, so these new revisions certainly took note of all the complaints about it not blending in. Though the Examiner writer also provides some opinion about the project and ends on a prediction that doesn’t sound very optimistic at all about this thing ever reaching an end:

Here’s my prediction. Over vociferous opposition, the Trust will approve this design scheme or something very similar to it. Shortly thereafter, the various opposition groups will file suit in federal court, contending that the design violates federal law and guidelines for development within a historic district. And the museum, which at its heart should be a wonderful addition to San Francisco, will languish a few more years while the legal battle rages.

Related, and certainly worth your while if you’ve been following all these developments about the museum and its troubles, is all the new info released by the Presidio Trust. A bunch of PDFs with every detail about the park — we particularly enjoyed “Draft Geoarchaeological Investigations for the Proposed Presidio Contemporary Art Museum”

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Elsewhere in the world of troubled museum finances, the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s chairman, James R. Houghton, has announced that the institution will be closing seven more of their retail outlets across the country, adding to the number they closed several months ago. Citing the now very familiar financial crunch all museums are in, the Met has decided that it needs to make additional cuts, thus leaving just a handful remaining open in the US. They’ve also decided to take a look at their current budget and see what can be trimmed here and there to keep safely solvent, starting with two major decisions and a quote all current Met employees probably weren’t eager to read:

Citing the global financial crisis, Mr. Houghton said the museum had imposed a hiring freeze and is curtailing staff travel and entertainment as well as the use of temporary employees. He also said the Met was in the process of a museum-wide assessment of expenses to see how it can further reduce costs. Emily Rafferty, the Met’s president, said Monday that “we cannot eliminate the possibility of a head-count reduction.”

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Another quick follow-up and this one’s a little bizarre. On Friday, we reported that Long Island’s Vanderbilt Museum was suffering the fate of many museums of late, finding themselves with little operating cash as their endowments have dried up. And as things have become dire for this, they are considering selling their prized Jurrasic Park fiberglass dinosaurs. But over the weekend, the museum’s staff discovered, hidden behind a wall in their basement of all places, what they believe is a 15th or 16th-century sculpture by the della Robbia family, famous for their work during the Italian Renaissance of that area. That’s great news in and of itself, but even better for the museum’s coffers is that the work could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. How’s that for good luck? The only trick now is that they just have to figure out if they want to sell the piece and if they can get away with cashing in on something they didn’t know they even had until a few days ago. Alternately, displaying it also might be a big enough draw, helping to land them more visitors and therefore a few more dollars in their currently-empty pockets.

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Staying with museums for a minute more, the LA Times recently spent some time with the Smithsonian‘s new man in charge, Wayne Clough, talking to him about how he’s planning to keep the storied institution afloat in these rocky economic times. In trying to distance himself from his spend-happy predicessor, Lawrence Small, Clough tells the paper that he’s now intent on focusing the Smithsonian’s efforts to help figure out what they do best and doing more of that, instead of wasting away resources at a time when “nobody has enough money.” What’s more, he’s interested in pushing for digitizing collections in an effort to get all the research performed throughout the institution out and into the public’s hands. Here’s a bit of that:

“The Smithsonian at heart is an educational institution, but it’s been doing all this with one arm behind its back,” Clough says. “It had to have somebody show up or deliver a traveling exhibition and hope that somebody would show up. If we enable our curators to take part in the process, we can digitize our collection of 137 million objects [including artworks, artifacts and scientific specimens] in an informative way that people can use.”

The key, he thinks, is to use the collections to tell stories about important issues. “The story of American ingenuity, for example, cuts across disciplines,” he says. “Telling that story is something we can do that nobody else can.”

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Lots of news out of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, but first things first: you have only a scant four days left to see the enduringly fascinating “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,” our pick for Best Museum Exhibition of 2008. The show also happens to be one of the first to feature the museum’s refreshed identity, masterminded by Pentagram’s Paula Scher and and further developed and applied by Julia Hoffmann, MoMA’s Creative Director for graphics and advertising. “The new system…employs prominent use of the MoMA logo as a graphic device, dramatic cropping and juxtapositions of artwork, and a brighter color palette to create a bold, contemporary image,” notes Pentagram’s blog. “The identity also underscores the museum’s leadership role in the field of design.” And can you name that typeface? That’s right, it’s Matthew Carter‘s MoMA Gothic.

As if the new identity wasn’t excitement enough, today MoMA announced its acquisition of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, widely considered the largest and most important of its kind in the world (and oh, how we hope it’s all carefully tucked into old-fashioned suitcases!). Assembled over three decades by the Silvermans, the collection cosnsists of approximately 3,000 works “in mediums ranging from printed ephemera, multiples, drawings, and sculptural objects, to photographs and film.” There are also thousands of files packed with artists’ correspondence, notebooks and scrapbooks, and documents and photographs related to Fluxus performances and events. Capping things off is a reference library of more than 1,500 related books and catalogues. Among the 150 artists represented in the collection are George Maciunas (the artist, art historian, and graphic designer who coined the term “Fluxus”), George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, and Nam June Paik.

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