International News Digest
NEW DIRECTOR FOR QUAI BRANLY MUSEUM
Karim Mouttalib has been named the new general director for Paris’s ethnographic museum on the Seine, Le Musée des Arts Premiers du Quai Branly (the Museum of First Arts at the Branly Quay). As Agence France-Presse reports, the thirty-nine-year-old Mouttalib—a referendary counselor at the French Court of Auditors—has been acting as an adjunct delegated general director at the museum since April 2008. He replaces Pierre Hanotaux, who was recently selected by the new French minister of culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, to be the cabinet director at the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
FONTAINEBLEAU TO BECOME HISTORICAL MUSEUM
Soon after being named to the post, Mitterrand already seems to have big plans in the works. As Agence France-Presse reports, he may have his eye on the Fontainebleau castle as a possible site for the Musée d’Histoire de France (Museum of French History). In a general proposal, Mitterand has suggested both a site and a name to President Sarkozy, who has expressed his wish to create such a museum and who will make the ultimate decision. Citing a source “close to the dossier,” AFP claims that Mitterrand has even proposed a possible director—Jean-François Hébert—who was the cabinet director during Christine Albanel’s tenure as minister of culture. The current director of the Fontainebleau castle, Bernard Notari, could be asked to leave to make way for Hébert, should the plan come to fruition. The castle was recently named a public institution, which lends the site greater autonomy. But Mitterand’s plan may not be that novel. AFP suggests that Albanel, his predecessor, already proposed both Fontainebleau and the Invalides as sites for the national historical museum.
NEW ART ACADEMIES?
The City of Cologne seems to be warming up to a wider vision of art education. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, the municipal council has accepted a proposal for the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World). The concept was proposed by an initiative committee including members Navid Kermani, Hans Orywal, Manos Tsangaris, Hans Nieswandt, Andreas Freudenberg, Matthias Hamann, and Mark Terkessidis.
The same article reveals that the path to Istanbul has just become easier for German artists. The German Federal Budget Committee authorized the eight million dollars needed to open the Villa Tarabya in the Turkish metropolis. While dubbed a German art academy in Istanbul, Villa Tarabya is as an artist-residency program modeled on the Villa Massimo in Rome, which hosts ten select German grant recipients per year. No word on the details of the Istanbul program.
MORE ART FAIRS RESCHEDULED
This year’s ArtParis: Abu Dhabi has been canceled. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, the third edition of the fair was due to take place in November but has now been postponed until 2010. A sign of changing times and fortunes: The young fair’s announcements regarding the second edition state that almost twice as many galleries wanted to participate in 2008 as in the first edition. The International Art + Design fair, which was due to take place in New York in October, has also been postponed to 2010. The fair’s organizers, Brian and Anna Haughton, were already forced to cancel the International Asian Art Fair earlier this year.
PAMUK DOES THE BIENNALE
In his reports on Venice for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk finally reaches the Giardini and the national pavilions. While taking in the art, Pamuk is also on the lookout for ideas for his own Museum of Innocence being created in Istanbul. Pamuk approaches the exhibitions with a childlike excitement, “perhaps because contemporary art always has something playful about it, despite its moralistic and political demands.” To Pamuk, Haegue Yang’s fragrant installation in the South Korean pavilion stands out, along with the presence of sound installations. “Perhaps since I come from an Islamic country, where painting is not held so dearly, I find a reconfirmation that museums should appeal not just to the eyes but to all of the senses.”
Pamuk is less impressed with the many texts that one must read about the artists in order to understand their installations. “These mostly rather long tracts often have the character of bad novels,” writes Pamuk. “[The authors] are not satisfied to instruct regarding the meaning and aim of the work along with its artistic context but rather effectively stipulate what one should feel in front of the artwork. Since I don’t have time to read all that—or I am not capable of developing the expected feelings—I often have the frustrating feeling, like many Biennale visitors, of simply not understanding.” Pamuk finds some consolation in the work of the Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein, which reminds him of William Blake, and the video artist Fiona Tan at the Dutch pavilion. “What would it be like if she constructed something for my museum?” he wonders. Inside the dark corridor of the Arsenale, Pamuk is overcome with fatigue and simply lies down in a quiet corner for a quick nap, “my head filled with metaphysical thoughts.”