Art World Figures Remember Late Patron Agnes Gund: ‘A Legend and Icon’

Anges Gund, an avid art collector and patron of towering importance to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday in Manhattan. She was 87. The New York Times reported her death on Friday, but did not provide a cause.

Following the announcement of Gund’s death, artists and cultural workers took to social media to honor her memory. “My heart just broke. Rest in peace dear Aggie. They broke the mold with you,” Roxana Marcoci, chief curator of photography at MoMA, wrote alongside a photograph of Gund at the opening of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity” with Frazier, playwright Lynn Nottage, and labor leader and feminist activist Dolores Huerta.

Via ARTnews

Image: Roxana Marcoci, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Agnes Gund, and Dolores Huerta attend MoMA's "LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2024.Photo Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Museum of Modern Art

New York Is Not America: Thoughts on the City’s Art Market

The collector scene in many parts of the United States is struggling with economic uncertainty, while dwindling attendance and layoffs have been seen at institutions like SFMOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. Then there’s the rising political hostility which has buffeted the museum sector with funding cuts and censorship pressures in states such as Florida and Texas.

But, through all of that, New York continues to be bolstered by a unique blend of global collectors, institutional heft and financial gravity. As a result, the city continues to behave like an outlier.

Via Ocula

New York’s Art Stars of the ’80s, Curated by One of Their Own

In “Downtown 81,” Edo Bertoglio and Glenn O’Brien’s no-budget New York film made in the early 1980s, a teenage Jean-Michel Basquiat roams a desolate Lower Manhattan, hauling a painting he’s trying to sell to make rent. “There was a diamond-brick road there and I could see it,” Basquiat’s only-lightly fictionalized character says with uncanny prescience. “I was off to be the wizard.”

This is the moment of creative florescence that the uptown gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan revisits with its exhibition, “Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties,” a blockbuster opening Thursday that surveys the decade’s art stars: Basquiat and Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel and David Salle, Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons, among others. 

Via NYT

Is This the Breaking Point for Museums?

It would be hard to exaggerate the seismic shift museums across the West are facing.

As governments slash funding and threaten further cutbacks in public support, American museums, long facing dwindling backing from central bodies like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), have typically looked to corporations, individual donors, private foundations, and earned income to prop up their budgets. British and especially German museums have long been able to rely on public largesse to a greater degree, but now even they, and museums in other European countries, are facing politicians who say they cannot justify cultural funding in times of strained budgets.

Via Artnet