ideas + images

curated by sierra gonzalez 

Economy & Culture: Museums taking a hit

Regardless of whether big-name donors like Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch make good on their pledges, many cultural institutions are already facing tough decisions to cope with big losses in their endowment funds or other financial losses.

  • While the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has become the poster boy of troubled museums, it seems like the economic downturn merely exacerbated that institution's management problems. Lee "CultureGrrrl" Rosenbaum has an excellent play-by-play, including her take on separate offers by philanthropist Eli Broad and local museum LACMA to "bail out" MOCA.
  • Rosenbaum's blog also looks at questionable deaccessions at the National Gallery (the LA Times arts blog also has a look at how the deaccession took place).  The American Association of Museums, Association of Art Museum Directors, and the New York State Regents' Cultural Education Committee all quickly responded by denouncing the practice of selling artworks to cover operating costs.
  • Closer to home, SF Supervisor Aaron Peskin caused quite a stir by proposing 50% funding cuts to the San Francisco Opera, Ballet, and Symphony.  The city fund that dispenses the money, Grants for the Arts, also supports other educational and cultural programs.  The SF Board of Supervisors will vote on Peskin's proposal in January.
  • Lastly, the New York Times looks at a few museums who recently expanded and how they're coping with the economic downturn. The article puts some numbers to the situation, which helps give a sense of the scale of these museums' losses.


So, what can you do? Become a member of a museum, or pick up last-minute gifts at museum stores, where revenue often goes directly to support educational programs, exhibition development, and other operating costs.

Filed under  //   art   culture   economy   museum  

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How to manufacture an Eames fiberglass chair

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Helvetica minisite

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Thonet then and now

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Above: Gamper, Martino for The Conran Shop, The Chair of the Rings. Bent wood, 2008. [conranusa.com]

Gamper’s three chair designs were commissioned to reflect Terence Conran’s interest in Thonet products and are part of his store’s Inspiration collection.

Below: Gebrüder Thonet, Vienna Café Chair (no. 18). Bent beech wood, 1876. [moma.org]

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Filed under  //   chair   furniture   iconic design  

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We probably wouldn’t have a basic toaster in our collection, but if we did, we’d have the prototypes and the drawings, and perhaps a film of the artist talking about how it came to be and what forces at the time moved the piece in that direction—whereas MOMA’s design department would put it on a pedestal and declare, ‘this is an important toaster.’

Holly Hotchner, director, Museum of Arts and Design [Manhattan’s New Museum of Modern Design | Travel + Leisure]

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SFMoMA ArtScope, launched with the recent redesign of the museum’s website, lets web visitors browse through over 3,500 objects and artworks in the SFMoMA collection. ArtScope, implemented by Bay Area group Stamen, is part of the museum’s fantastic collection of interactive media online.

Filed under  //   art history   museum   museum website   sfmoma   website  

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Mad Men, Mad Props

http://www.marksimonson.com/article/236/mad-men-mad-props

Early reviews of Mad Men seemed to uninformely praise the show’s recreation of 1960s New York, so I was surprised to see Lucida Handwriting—a font of the 1990s—sneak its way into the opening credits.  Graphic designer Mark Simonson called out the show’s anachronistic typographic choices in this October article. [Mad Men, Mad Props]

Filed under  //   1960s   design   television  

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Searching for an algorithm for taste

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?pagewanted=all

This week’s New York Times Sunday magazine checks in with a few competitors in the Netflix competition. One of the contestants estimates that an accurate predition of whether someone would like the movie Napoleon Dynamite—a film that viewers seem to either love or hate—would put him 15% closer to the algorithm that would earn a $1 million prize.

When Bertoni runs his algorithms on regular hits like “Lethal Weapon” or “Miss Congeniality” and tries to predict how any given Netflix user will rate them, he’s usually within eight-tenths of a star. But with films like “Napoleon Dynamite,” he’s off by an average of 1.2 stars.

According to the article, the “Napoleon Dynamite problem” exposes the “a serious weakness of computers”: their inability to anticipate all of the factors in a person’s decision-making process.  Someone could decide to watch a movie after a Blockbuster clerk’s passionate recommendation, or to understand a cultural reference point, or simply to try something different.

Another critic of computer recommendations is, oddly enough, Pattie Maes, the M.I.T. professor. She notes that there’s something slightly antisocial—“narrow-minded”—about hyperpersonalized recommendation systems. Sure, it’s good to have a computer find more of what you already like. But culture isn’t experienced in solitude. We also consume shows and movies and music as a way of participating in society. That social need can override the question of whether or not we’ll like the movie.

An interesting read. [If You Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That | NYTimes]

Filed under  //   algorithm   math   museum website   taste  

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Okamoto, Kouichi, Liquid series for Kyouei design, including bookmark, desk lamp, and wall lamp. 2008 [designboom]

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Pieke Bergmans’ Light Blub crystal lamp, “a light bulb that has gone way out of line. Infected by the dreaded Design Virus, these Blubs have taken on all kinds of forms and sizes you wouldn’t expect from such well behaving and reliable little products.” See the designer’s website for more: Pieke Bergmans: Design Virus.

I enjoy the whimsy of work like Bergmans—she reminds me of Maarten Baas, who also approaches iconic and classic product designs and forms with new manufacturing processes and attempts to create a sense of “personalized mass production” (as Bergmans puts it).  Is this a part of the Eindhoven curriculum?

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[via AT:NY]

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