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  • May 12, 2020 4:12 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Artnet News

    Last week, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney revealed his revised budget proposal for fiscal year 2021, which, if approved, would implement drastic cuts to the arts in an attempt to counteract losses incurred by the pandemic.

    Among those cuts would be the elimination of the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, a government branch that provides grants to hundreds of cultural organizations in the area, and which cost the city $4.4 million last year. Kenney’s budget would also do away with the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, a 25-year-old program that distributed $3 million through nearly 350 grants to creative institutions last year. 

    Mural Arts, which promotes and funds public works of art in the city, would have its budget reduced from $2.45 million to $2 million, and the funding provided to the Philadelphia Museum of Art—the city’s biggest institution—would be slashed from $2.55 million to just over $2 million.

    For the city’s cultural leaders, the news came as a sign that the city devalues their work.

    “The mayor taking this kind of action during a pandemic just underscores the notion that the arts are disposable, that they are something that we don’t need during this moment of crisis,” says Christina Vassallo, director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. “It sets up this false dichotomy that pits culture against the livelihood and the economy.”

    Like many major institutions in the city, the Fabric Workshop and Museum receives only a fraction of its budget from city grants. (It was awarded $10,000 in operational support last year from the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.) But to smaller organizations, such money is critical. 

    “That’s a small part of our budget, but it means the world to many smaller organizations that receive this funding,” says Vassallo, explaining that the mayor’s decision could “completely decimate the grassroots cultural scene in this city.” 

    Symbolically, she adds, the loss is much greater. “It further supports the notion that those of us who work in a non-profit arts field should just get used to doing more with less,” says Vassallo. “We’re constantly expected to do more with less. It’s an affront to humankind, really!” 

    “The sweeping reductions to arts and culture in the revised budget sends a message to these organizations—and their dedicated employees—that their work isn’t valued,” says Maud Lyon, president of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, which counts more than 450 arts organizations across the five-county Philadelphia region as members.” 

    Lyon notes that the arts and culture sector is a significant economic force in the region, generating an estimated $4.1 billion annually and more than 55,000 jobs, according to a 2017 economic impact report conducted by the Cultural Alliance.

    “Ultimately,” she says, “our audiences are hurt the most by these proposed cuts as we risk eliminating the performing arts, community arts programs, and diverse creative expression, which have defined Philadelphia for decades and even centuries.”

    The 2021 fiscal year begins June 1. Prior to that date, the mayor’s budget proposal will be reviewed by the city council before it’s formally adopted.

    “Potential elimination of the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy would be a difficult loss because it would limit the city’s ability to work collaboratively with one of the region’s great economic drivers, the arts and culture sector comprised of many organizations small and large,” says Timothy Rub, the director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in a statement.

    “I hope that the city can continue to recognize that this public-private partnership will be an important part in helping Philadelphia recover from the pandemic and prosper in the future.”

    For many cultural organizations in Philadelphia, the news from the mayor’s office came at the end of a particularly hard week. In an effort to reduce his own budget, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf directed the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to retract grant money already awarded to certain arts organizations across the state, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer

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  • May 12, 2020 4:03 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from The Art Newspaper

    “If I saw a disaster film in which a city is struck by an earthquake during a global pandemic, I’d stop watching such a nonsense”, says Miroslav Gašparović, the director of Zagreb’s Museum of Decorative Arts, while working in a face mask and helmet with his curators to evacuate parts of his seriously damaged museum. 

    This is the forgotten earthquake. On 22 March, a 5.4-magnitude convulsion struck Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and because of the coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown, the full extent of the damage is still unknown. It was the worst convulsion for more than a century and it has caused damage to 26,197 buildings, of which 4,228 are classified as unsafe or dangerous, among them numerous palaces, churches, university buildings, hospitals and museums.

    The Museum of Decorative Arts, modelled on the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, was about to celebrate its 140th anniversary, but now it is partially open to the sky. Religious sculptures, clocks, glass and modern design have been damaged, in some cases destroyed, and the roof’s collapse is a serious threat. The museum has been classified as unsafe for use, but the director and curators have found a way to take the most fragile objects to safety even as 150 aftershocks have continued to shake the building.

    Over 80% of Zagreb’s museums are in buildings that date from before the Second World War and most of them have reported serious damage, but the aftershocks and lockdown have stopped detailed inventories of the destruction being made. More than a third of them are identified as unsafe or dangerous; the Croatian History Museum, housed in a palace built in 1764, is “unsafe for both staff and the entire museum collection”, according to its director Matea Brstilo Rešetar, and she is preparing to evacuate and relocate once the ground stops shaking.

    A large number of objects have been destroyed or damaged in the Archaeological Museum. This is not the first time its rich collections have been hit by earthquake; the one of 1880 shattered the most valuable assemblage of Greek vases in Croatia, and now 20% of the rebuilt collection are in pieces.  

    The minister of culture Nina Obuljen does not want to speculate about the extent of the damage while it remains uncertain, but there is no doubt that the seismic protection measures for buildings, collections and museum staff need to be upgraded, since all hazard assessment studies clearly point to earthquakes as one of the biggest risks in Croatia.

    See Original Post

  • May 12, 2020 3:55 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from The New York Times

    An employee with a pickup order at a Subway that is testing PopID, a facial recognition system that checks workers for fevers.

    Bob Grewal recently began testing a new health-screening setup for workers at a Subway restaurant he owns in Los Angeles near the University of Southern California.

    When he stepped inside the employee food prep area, a fever-detection and facial recognition camera service, PopID, quickly identified him by name and gauged his temperature. Then a small tablet screen underneath the camera posted a message that cleared him to enter.

    “Thank you Bob, you have a healthy Temp. of 98.06,” the screen said. “PopID aims to create a safe environment and stop the spread of Covid-19.”

    Mr. Grewal is one of many business leaders racing to deploy new employee health-tracking technologies in an effort to reopen the economy and make it safer for tens of millions of Americans to return to their jobs in factories, offices and stores. Some employers are requiring workers to fill out virus-screening questionnaires or asking them to try out social-distancing wristbands that vibrate if they get too close to each other. Some even hope to soon issue digital “immunity” badges to employees who have developed coronavirus antibodies, marking them as safe to return to work.

    But as intensified workplace surveillance becomes the new normal, it comes with a hitch: The technology may not do much to keep people safer.

    Public health experts and bioethicists said it was important for employers to find ways to protect their workers during the pandemic. But they cautioned there was little evidence to suggest that the new tools could accurately determine employees’ health status or contain virus outbreaks, even as they enabled companies to amass private health details on their workers.

    “I think employers need to look carefully before they jump into any of this,” said Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “Some companies are embarking upon things that are not going to help and may actually set us back.”

    Over the past month, companies have started marketing a slew of employee-tracking tools to combat the virus.

    PwC, the financial services firm, has developed a contact-tracing app to help employers “provide a lower-risk workplace for employees.” It will automatically log proximity between employees and can be used to help identify people who may have been exposed to the virus at work.

    Salesforce, the giant software company, is offering a new tool, Work.com, to help employers “safely reopen.” Among other things, it will enable companies to create online employee health surveys and map the workplace locations visited by employees with coronavirus infections.

    Clear, a security company that uses biometric technology to verify people’s identities at airports and elsewhere, plans this week to start marketing a health-screening service that can be used to vet and clear employees to enter workplaces. The service will take employees’ temperatures with a thermal camera, as well as verify the results of their medical tests for the virus, sharing the results with employers as color-coded scores like green or red.

    Caryn Seidman-Becker, the chief executive of Clear, compared her company’s multilevel health-screening approach to airport security checks where a person who sets off a metal detector gets a pat-down.

    “Nothing is foolproof,” Ms. Seidman-Becker said. “It’s putting them together that allows you to buy down risk and increase confidence.”

    Companies are adopting new employee-tracking technologies partly in response to White House guidelines asking employers to monitor their “work force for indicative symptoms” and prohibit employees with symptoms from returning to workplaces unless a health provider has cleared them.

    Yet many of the tools — including certain infrared thermometers and antibody tests that would be needed for employee “immunity” certificates — can be wildly inaccurate. Public health experts said the tools could create a false sense of security, leading workers to spread the virus inadvertently.

    Fever-screening devices, for example, could miss many of the up to one-quarter or more people infected with the virus who do not exhibit symptoms. Or they could inadvertently expose employees who are running higher temperatures because they are under stress or have other health conditions, issues the workers may have preferred to keep private.

    Some law professors and bioethicists also warned that the idea of immunity certificates threatened to create a new class system for employment — one that could unfairly prevent certain people from working just because they had never contracted the virus.

    “Do we really want a world where some people can go to work and others can’t based on their immunity status?” said Hank Greely, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies the social implications of new health technologies. “The people who can’t will say, ‘This is unfair,’ and they’ll be right.”

    He and other experts said companies would be better off investing in a proven health intervention — lab testing for coronavirus — for their employees rather than shiny, new surveillance technologies.

    Gabrielle Rejouis, a workers’ rights advocate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, said employers should be “providing free testing for their workers if they’re expecting them to come into work, and also making sure that they are paying sick leave and appropriate health benefits to make sure that workers aren’t coming to work sick and infecting their co-workers.”

    Many of the worker-screening tools are being introduced with minimal government oversight — and with few details for employees about how companies are using and safeguarding their health data, or how long they plan to keep it.

    To support emergency responses to the pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration is temporarily allowing companies to market infrared thermal camera systems that have not been vetted by health regulators for temperature checks in places like warehouses and factories. Similarly, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces antidiscrimination rules that generally prohibit employers from requiring employees to undergo medical exams, said in March that, given the coronavirus threat, employers may measure employees’ temperatures.

    The federal law on patient privacy, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA, also puts few restrictions on employers. Although the law protects employee health information collected by an employer for company-sponsored group health plans, it generally does not protect employee health data collected for other purposes, legal experts said.

    As a result, companies are forging their own approaches to health-screening accuracy and privacy.

    Some restaurants and warehouses, for instance, are using hand-held infrared devices to assess workers’ temperatures. PopID, the restaurant technology company behind the temperature-scanning system that Mr. Grewal is trying at his Subway franchises, uses wall-mounted thermal-imaging cameras that employees stop in front of for temperature checks.

    The system records the date, time, employee name and temperature, creating a historical log for employers who want to check on worker compliance. Employers can choose to keep or delete that data.

    “The decision to test temperature at a lot of these places has already been made,” said John Miller, the chief executive of the Cali Group, the parent company of PopID. “We’re just providing a better way to do it.”

    PopID is also being used by some Taco Bell franchises, assisted living facilities and Lemonade, a California restaurant chain.

    Mr. Grewal, whose family owns more than 50 Subway franchises, said he did not expect the temperature-scanning system to be a panacea. He simply views it as a tool to help employers better protect their workers and make consumers feel safer — much like the plexiglass he has installed to separate customers placing takeout orders from employees filling them, he said.

    As part of the pilot test, he has asked employees to scan their temperatures four times a day — at the beginning and end of their work shifts, and before and after their break. The employee data is deleted every 30 days.

    “People are going to adjust,” Mr. Grewal said. “They’re going to have to understand all the safety precautions that chains have taken.”

    Even so, civil liberties experts said it was important for any virus-tracking of employees to be voluntary. Otherwise, by linking identification technologies like facial recognition to employees’ health status, employers could usher in an authoritarian, China-like system of surveillance and social control at workplaces.

    “We are accepting encroachments on privacy here that we would not normally accept,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “We need to be vigilant to make sure that they don’t outlast this crisis.”

    Four Republican senators recently said they would introduce a Covid-19 privacy bill to hold businesses accountable when they use people’s heath information to fight the pandemic.

    As least for now, increased tracking and screening seem poised to become a fact of daily life not just for workers but also for consumers.

    Clear, the biometric security company, already operates at sports arenas where fans can use their digital identities and faces to speed through fast-lane security checks. Now, said Ms. Seidman-Becker, Clear’s chief executive, restaurant groups, big-box retailers, sports teams, airlines and cruise ships are considering using Clear Health Pass, the company’s new identity verification and health-screening system, for both employees and customers.

    “I really do think that this is ubiquitous,” she said.

    Up-to-date information on coronavirus is available for free.

    See Original Post

  • May 12, 2020 3:39 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Interpol

    More than 19,000 archaeological artefacts and other artworks have been recovered as part of a global operation spanning 103 countries and focusing on the dismantlement of international networks of art and antiquities traffickers.

    101 suspects have been arrested, and 300 investigations opened as part of this coordinated crackdown. The criminal networks handled archaeological goods and artwork looted from war-stricken countries, as well as works stolen from museums and archaeological sites.

    These results were achieved during the global Operation Athena II, led by the World Customs Organization (WCO) and INTERPOL, which was carried out in synchronization with the Europe-focused Operation Pandora IV coordinated by the Spanish Civil Guard (Guardia Civil) and Europol in the framework of EMPACT. Details of both Operations, which ran in the autumn of 2019, can only be released now due to operational reasons.

    Online illicit markets

    Law enforcement officers paid particular attention to the monitoring of online market places and sales sites, as the Internet is an important part of the illicit trade of cultural goods.

    During what was called a ‘cyber patrol week’ and under the leadership of the Italian Carabinieri (Arma dei Carabinieri), police and customs experts along with Europol, INTERPOL and the WCO mapped active targets and developed intelligence packages. As a result, 8,670 cultural objects for online sale were seized. This represents 28% of the total number of artefacts recovered during this international crackdown.

    Operational highlights

    • Afghan Customs seized 971 cultural objects at Kabul airport just as the objects were about to depart for Istanbul, Turkey.
    • The Spanish National Police (Policia Nacional), working together with the Colombian Police (Policia Nacional de Colombia), recovered at Barajas airport in Madrid some very rare pre-Columbian objects illegally acquired through looting in Colombia, including a unique Tumaco gold mask and several gold figurines and items of ancient jewellery. Three traffickers were arrested in Spain, and the Colombian authorities carried out house searches in Bogota, resulting in the seizure of a further 242 pre-Columbian objects, the largest ever seizure in the country’s history.
    • The investigation of a single case of online sale led to the seizure of 2,500 ancient coins by the Argentinian Federal Police Force (Policia Federal Argentina), the largest seizure for this category of items, while the second largest seizure was made by Latvian State Police (Latvijas Valsts Policija) for a total of 1,375 coins.
    • Six European Police forces reported the seizure of a hundred and eight metal detectors, demonstrating that looting in Europe is still an ongoing business.

    Protecting our cultural heritage

    This is the second time that Europol, INTERPOL and the WCO have joined forces to tackle the illicit trade in cultural heritage. Given the global nature of this crackdown, a 24-hour Operational Coordination Unit (OCU) was run jointly by the WCO, INTERPOL and Europol. In addition to assisting with information exchanges and issuing alerts, the OCU also carried out checks against various international and national databases, such as INTERPOL’s database on Stolen Works of Art and Europol’s European Information System.

    “The number of arrests and objects show the scale and global reach of the illicit trade in cultural artefacts, where every country with a rich heritage is a potential target,” said INTERPOL Secretary General Jürgen Stock. “If you then take the significant amounts of money involved and the secrecy of the transactions, this also presents opportunities for money laundering and fraud as well as financing organized crime networks,” added the INTERPOL Chief.

    “Organized crime has many faces. The trafficking of cultural goods is one of them: it is not a glamorous business run by flamboyant gentlemen forgers, but by international criminal networks. You cannot look at it separately from combating trafficking in drugs and weapons: we know that the same groups are engaged, because it generate big money. Given that this is a global phenomenon affecting every country on the planet – either as a source, transit or destination, it is crucial that Law Enforcement all work together to combat it. Europol, in its role as the European Law Enforcement Agency, supported the EU countries involved in this global crackdown by using its intelligence capabilities to identify the pan-European networks behind these thefts,” said Catherine de Bolle, Europol’s Executive Director.

     “The operational success of Customs and its law enforcement partners offers tangible proof that international trafficking of cultural objects is thriving and touches upon all continents. In particular, we keep receiving evidence that online illicit markets are one of the major vehicles for this crime. However, online transactions always leave a trace and Customs, Police and other partners have established effective mechanisms to work together to prevent cross border illicit trade”, said Dr Kunio Mikuriya, WCO Secretary General.

    Background

    Many activities carried out during the Operation were decided on and conducted jointly between customs and police at national level, with the support and participation of experts from the Ministries of Culture as well as from other relevant institutions and law enforcement agencies.

    See Original Post

  • May 05, 2020 3:22 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from The Art Newspaper

    One of the first German art museums to reopen after the coronavirus lockdown is giving visitors a chance to practice social distancing in the foyer.

    At the Brandenburg State Museum for Modern Art in Cottbus, around 100km southeast of Berlin, visitors in pairs can each take one end of a selection of poles and ribbons exactly 1.5m long, the minimum distance the German government proscribes for contact between people from different households. The distance is also marked out on the foyer floor. (It instantly becomes worryingly clear that it is considerably further than the space between shoppers in a Berlin supermarket on a Saturday.)

    “A museum is a free space designed to open new horizons of thought, but we don’t function independently of the reality out there,” says Ulrike Kremeier, the director of the Cottbus museum, which reopened on 1 May.

    The reopening of the museums is unfolding gradually, with variations in the guidelines issued by different states. In Berlin, museums can open this week, but only a few have announced plans to do so. “It’s not a trivial thing to reopen a museum,” Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, said in an interview with Monopol magazine. One of the main concerns is the length of time visitors tend to stay in one room, which raises the risk of infection, he said.

    At the Cottbus museum, a video in the foyer presented by Kremeier examines solutions devised by artists and architects of the past for personal protection in public. One work she discusses is a photograph by Weegee, Boy Meets Girl—From Mars, a couple embracing in spherical transparent helmets. Another is the Austrian architect Walter Pichler’s Big Room (1966), a pneumatic, bubble-like mobile office.

    Kremeier is planning to integrate other pandemic-themed displays into the museum’s space. “Handshaking, for example, is now impolite,” she says. “How do we replace this ancient gesture, which was originally a gesture of peace—a way of showing you are unarmed?”

    Home to the biggest collection of East German art in Germany, the Brandenburg State Museum for Modern Art is located in a former diesel power plant built in 1927. Its main current exhibition is a show of photography from 1990, the year of German reunification, including works by Barbara Klemm and Gerhard Gäbler. It was on view for just two weeks before the museum was forced to close in March.

    The museum has introduced precautions: a plexiglass shield at the counter and hand disinfectant for visitors that “cost a fortune,” Kremeier says. “Someone is getting very rich out of this.”

    Staff have calculated how many people to allow into each room to ensure 20 square metres per person, and say the museum’s full capacity is no more than 100 at a time. “Our visitors are sensible people,” Kremeier says. “I don’t anticipate problems.”

    In normal times, many of the museum’s visitors are group tours, which probably will not start again until the autumn, she says. Instead, up to two visitors at a time can book a 20-minute tour for the symbolic cost of €2. Masks are not obligatory but recommended.

    The museum has lost revenue. “Usually, we generate income and that’s not happening,” Kremeier says. “I don’t want to save money on artists. That would be the wrong decision.”

    The German government is negotiating a “culture infrastructure fund” to help institutions struggling with a loss of revenue from the pandemic lockdown. The Kulturrat, the association of cultural institutions and creative industries, has called for a fund of €500m.

    On April 30, the government announced funds of €10m to finance precautionary measures in small and medium-sized museums as they reopen after the lockdown. The national museums’ association has suggested special time-slots for vulnerable visitors, extended opening hours, increased cleaning, and masks on request for visitors.

    “We have to make sure that the visitor flow is evenly distributed,” Parzinger told Monopol magazine. He did not want to give opening dates for Berlin’s state museums yet, but said only a few will open initially, with online tickets for specific time slots and a requirement to wear masks.

    Among the Berlin museums reopening are the Bröhan Museum of applied arts on 12 May, with an exhibition of the painter Hans Baluschek (1870-1935), and the new wing of Schloss Charlottenburg, which opens the same day. The main palace area remains closed.

    The German Historical Museum opens its exhibition about Hannah Arendt, located in the modern extension, on 11 May, but the main museum is also staying closed for now. The Barberini Museum in Potsdam opens 6 May with a Monet exhibition that is extended until 19 July.

    And while Christo’s planned wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe has been pushed back to 2021, Deutsche Bank’s Palais Populaire will from 6 May open a retrospective titled Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Projects 1963-2020, Ingrid & Thomas Jochheim Collection. The show features the duo’s veiling of the Reichstag 25 years ago.

    From tomorrow, Dresden's newly renovated Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister will begin welcoming a limited number of visitors (no more than 200 at a time.) Visitors to the Gemäldegalerie can register their contact details online. Should it later emerge that someone infected with coronavirus has entered the museum, they will be notified. The Schirn contemporary art museum in Frankfurt is opening on 6 May, followed by the Städel on 9 May.

    See Original Post

  • May 05, 2020 3:17 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from The Art Newspaper

    Officials at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels have issued strict safety measures that visitors must follow when the Old Masters Museum, part of the Royal Museums group, reopens on 19 May. The move could set a possible precedent for museums hoping to open their doors in the near future after closing for prolonged periods in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. 

    Safety measures planned for the Brussels museums include following a one-way circuit. A quota of admissions per hour will spread the number of visitors throughout the day and audio guides will not be offered “in order to reduce the risk of contamination”. The safety measures posted online also state: “Depending on the size of the rooms, more or less people will be admitted simultaneously. The allowed number will always be indicated at the entrance of each room.” The Belgian collector Alain Servais tweeted however: "But who will bear costs on lower revenues?"

    The art historian Bendor Grosvenor, tweeted that “[it is] interesting to see the rules here [re: Brussels] for possible museum reopening”. In response, Tony Butler, the executive director of Derby Museums, UK, said: “Through a range of UK museum networks, we are already planning how museums can open and operate with distancing measures in place. We want to open up and share our treasures as soon as it is safe to do so.”

    Meanwhile, the international museum ethics body Cimam (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) has issued a set of Precautions for Museums during Covid-19 Pandemic, encompassing safety measures for re-opening and resuming activity at museums.

    The recommendations were prepared by three Cimam board members: Eugene Tan, the director of National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum; Suhanya Raffel, the director of M+ Hong Kong; and Mami Kataoka, the president of Cimam and director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. “The [precautions document] is based on the examples of these three museums in response to the outbreak of Covid-19,” says a Cimam statement.

    The document comprises 20 points under headings such as “visitor safety” and “public communication”. These include: “Implement temperature screening of all visitors as well as keeping an eye out for individuals who appear unwell. These visitors must be turned away and encouraged to seek medical attention.” 

    All visitors and participants must wear a mask and all guided tours must be suspended, according to Cimam's experts. Another suggestion is suspending programmes and events “targeted at senior citizens and other vulnerable groups”. To ensure staff safety, it proposes “implement[ing] daily temperature checking twice daily for all staff, once on arrival and a second time at 2pm, the results of which should be recorded”.

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  • May 05, 2020 3:12 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Artnet News

    The Pérez Art Museum Miami is planning to stay closed until September and, as a result, will take a substantial financial hit.

    The museum forecasts that it will lose between $3 million and $5 million in revenue this year (about 20 to 30 percent of its annual total).

    To curtail the financial hemorrhaging it has made significant staff cuts. In April, 15 of the museum’s 120 full- and part-time employees were terminated and another 54 were furloughed. The layoffs hit every department, including its curatorial team, and the museum’s 49 remaining staff members are taking five to 15 percent salary cuts.

    The decision to extend the closure, which began March 16, through the summer months comes as parts of the country are beginning to resume normal activities for non-essential businesses. The governor of Texas gave museums the green light to resume operations at 25 percent capacity as of May 1, but museums across the state are choosing to remain closed rather than risk endangering public health.

    But by deciding in April to stay closed through September, the Pérez Museum is signaling that social distancing constraints will prevent normal museum operations longer than many had hoped. Even New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artone of the first institutions in the country to shut down, is targeting a July reopening.

    Keeping the doors shut also means that the Miami museum is canceling its spring show “Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection” and postponing “Allied With Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection.” Summer exhibitions will also be delayed.

    A spokesperson for the museum says it cannot rely solely on donors such as Jorge Pérez, a prominent real estate developer and art collector, to bail out the museum financially. (The museum renamed itself after Pérez when he donated $40 million to the institution in 2011).

    “This unprecedented event demanded immediate fiscally responsible actions in addition to donor support in order to address shortfalls in the annual budget for 2020,” the spokesperson told Artnet News. “Each and every board member contributes to [the museum] in meaningful ways on an ongoing basis. That said, the museum is preparing a fundraising plan that involves the board of trustees.”

    “We feel horrible that we had to do this,” museum director Franklin Sirmans told the Miami Herald, “but we will move forward, being deliberate about what we can do.”

    Those currently furloughed will be brought back on September 1. The museum spokesperson said there were “no plans” for additional layoffs “in the immediate future.”

    UPDATE: A PAMM spokesperson has allowed for the possibility the museum will move up its planned reopening date, saying “the museum stated a September 1 reopening to be conservative and thoughtful… taking the county directives and public safety into mind. But if Florida institutions were to begin opening in June or July, they’d of course like to reopen sooner.”

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  • May 05, 2020 3:06 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from The Art Newspaper

    As countries edge slowly out of lockdown in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, more public and private galleries are tentatively reopening though visitors will be subject to strict rules on hygiene and social distancing. 

    The Uffizi Galleries in Florence are due to open mid-May, after closing 8 March, according to Italian government guidelines. Its director Eike Schmidt told Apollo magazine that measures will be taken to combat overcrowding. “We will be implementing additional measures and will also have to lower the number of people who can be in the gallery at any given time—it will probably be half our normal limit of 900 people, so 450 people. The details will all depend on further government rules that we’re expecting to be communicated in the coming days and weeks,” he said.

    He also added that the galleries have lost around €10m in revenue so far. “That’s certainly something that we’ll have to work with by pushing some of our building projects into 2021, by slowing some of them down,” Schmidt said, revealing also to Apollo that the Uffizi has launched its own TikTok account in order to engage with a younger demographic.

    Following the Swiss governmental Federal Council’s decision to ease coronavirus measures, museums in Switzerland are permitted to re-open from 11 May. Kunsthaus Zurich’s exhibition programme has subsequently been re-scheduled: the exhibitions Ottilia Giacometti. A Portrait and The Poetry of Line—Masterpieces of Italian Drawing are extended until 19 July while Smoke and Mirrors-The Roaring Twenties now begins on 3 July and ends on 11 October.

    On the commercial front, Perrotin gallery in Paris has launched an initiative called Restons Unis whereby 26 French galleries will present works at Perrotin’s gallery located in Impasse Saint Claude from mid May. “Although it may not rectify the larger systemic issues of our industry, it does underline the importance of what we accomplish on a daily basis. Online viewing rooms will never replace exhibitions,” says a gallery statement. 

    The show will comprise four consecutive two-week-long presentations, with each iteration due to include up to seven galleries. Frank Elbaz and Crèvecoeur will, for instance, show works from 23 May to 6 June; Air de Paris and Jocelyn Wolff will take the slot from 4 to 18 July. 

    “Doors will remain open in order to reduce the use of handles, all countertops will be fitted with a plexiglass screen, documentation will be accessible via QR code, we will carefully manage the flow of gallery visitors, all entrants will be asked to wear a mask, and we will forego opening events,” the gallery adds. Meanwhile, Paris Gallery Weekend, which includes 50 gallery participants, is also due to take place from 2 to 5 July.

    Sprüth Magers gallery in Berlin reopened 1 May; visitors are required to book online appointments to view exhibitions dedicated to Kara Walker and Richard Artschwager. “With the health and safety of our visitors and staff in mind, the gallery will limit appointments to 30 minutes,” says a gallery statement; facemasks must be worn.

    UPDATE (4 May): Hauser & Wirth is due to reopen its Zurich space 11 May. "The two featured exhibitions are Gunter Forg and Luchita Hurtado which were only open to the public for two days before they had to close," a spokeswoman says. Hauser & Wirth's gallery in Hong Kong will be open by appointment this Friday. "In both instances we're following guidelines for staff and visitors including social distancing measures such as limiting the number of people in the gallery at any one time," the spokeswoman adds.

    The Giacometti Foundation in Paris has announced it will reopen 15 May. The exhibition Searching for Lost Works will be extended until 21 June. The Douglas Gordon exhibition, which should have taken place this month, has been postponed till 2021.

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  • May 05, 2020 2:59 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from ArtSentry

    Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, cultural properties are dealing with an unprecedented number of security, safety and financial issues.  Government-mandated closures have created severe security challenges for all nationwide institutions.  In response, many are attempting to develop strategies to safely reopen and enhance ongoing operational safety.  Art Sentry is pleased to announce it has developed technological solutions to assist with these challenges.

    Art Sentry has developed the Elevated Temperature Monitoring system (ETM) to assist in safely reopening, and as a tool for ongoing operational safety.  The Art Sentry elevated temperature monitoring (ETM) system will utilize FDA-approved thermal imaging technology, combined with the Art Sentry system, to scan and record thermal statistics of individuals entering your facility.   Each employee, vendor, and patron entering the facility will pass through an area where the ETM system will collect facial temperature data and compare it to a predefined threshold.  When an out of conformance temperature is detected, personnel will be immediately notified, and the actual temperature of the party can be taken with a medical grade thermometer.  All monitoring is automatically recorded to provide an audit trail of each and every activity.  Employees/patrons/vendors with an elevated temperature over a pre-defined threshold can then be prohibited from entering the facility in accordance with the institution’s policy.

    The ETM system consists of two monitors, an FDA-approved thermal imaging camera kit, and an Art Sentry monitoring system with temperature detection software.  A second camera captures and records the temperature scanning process and an image of the individual being screened.  The system interfaces with the Art Sentry system to record the screening result, oversee the process, and provide an audit trail.

    A people counting option is also available to ensure COVID-19 government-mandated capacity thresholds are not exceeded.  This will provide the space required to maintain social-distancing guidelines.  To accomplish this, optional camera(s) can be mounted above the scanning areas and exits, enabling the system to provide people counting functionality and thus monitoring the number of people in the facility.

    As America reopens, many cultural properties are planning to promote the ETM as a safety measure and they believe it will ease the concerns employees and visitors may have with entering the facility.  The improvements in visitor safety may lead to additional visitors, positively impacting the financial outlook of cultural properties moving forward as well as have a positive impact on public relations.

    The Art Sentry system can also help maintain or enhance the security of your entire facility.  Currently, stay-at-home orders, social-distancing mandates, and financial constraints have greatly impacted the ability to deploy the optimal number of security personnel within the cultural property facility. The Art Sentry product utilizes surveillance cameras and advanced software to work together with your human guard force.  The software watches the entire collection simultaneously and immediately notifies the security officers when a breach of any collection piece occurs.  The officers can then utilize their training and instantly react to the threat.  Visit our website for more information, including case-studies and articles that describe actual results and experiences of our customers.

    The future remains uncertain and it has been reported that the COVID-19 virus will likely reoccur in the Fall of 2020.  It is possible that another mandatory shutdown of cultural properties will occur, and it is likely that a virus threat will be with us for years to come.  Now is the time to plan for these scenarios.  The Art Sentry Artwork Protection and ETM systems are designed to help cultural properties meet these challenges now and in the future.

    Art Sentry, America’s leading artwork protection system, has been providing products to assist with the protection of cultural properties for over 15 years.   Visit our website at artsentry.com for more information. 

  • April 28, 2020 3:17 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Artnet News

    As Italy and Belgium ease their lockdown restrictions, many of the nations’ museums will reopen in May.

    Italy, the hardest-hit country in Europe, enacted a complete nationwide shutdown on March 10. Now, it is reintroducing normal activities in stages, starting with low-traffic business such as bookstores and dry cleaners, which were allowed to reopen on April 14.

    The next phase is set to start on May 4, with museums slated to welcome visitors again on May 18. They must follow safety guidelines drawn up by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, which requires that all tickets be purchased online and visitors must practice social distancing in the galleries.

    In Belgium, a national commission formed to develop a reopening plan earlier this month announced that there would be three phases for reducing restrictions on businesses and public gatherings there. Museums are included in phase two, which is scheduled to begin May 18, so long that social-distancing measures are followed, reports the Brussels Times.

    As countries around the world look to the end of lockdown, world leaders must strike a careful balance, making sure to maintain some safety measures while easing into normal activity. If mass gatherings resume too quickly, countries run the risk of triggering a new wave of infections and once again overwhelming hospitals and medical resources.

    “If we do not respect the precautions the curve will go up, the deaths will increase, and we will have irreversible damage to our economy,” warned Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte in a press conference on Sunday. “If you love Italy, keep your distance.”

    Ahead of Italy and Belgium, Berlin is reopening its museums on May 4, with precautions including plexiglass dividers at ticket booths, self-scanning tickets, reduced visitor capacity, and more frequent cleanings. Should early attempts to reopen museums be successful, other countries around the world will likely follow suit as soon as it is deemed safe to do so.

    “Museums are like parks; spaces in which the individual experience can intertwine with the public space of being together. In the coming months, as a society, we face the challenge to find a new, positive balance between personal freedom and care for our relationship with others,” Bart De Baere, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, told the Art Newspaper, adding that the institution was “ready to serve as a test room for that post-lock down experience.”

    The Antwerp museum will open on May 19, as will the Old Masters Museum, one of six institutions that make up the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. Belgian guidelines mandate that face masks must be worn in public for all people over the age of 12; the government is providing one free mask per citizen.

    Museums also face a delicate juggling act when it comes to temporary exhibitions, often dependent on short-term loans of valuable artwork. The Galleria Borghese in Rome has delayed its planned April 29 opening of “Caravaggio: The Lute Player,” pairing six of its Caravaggio works with loans of two of his The Lute Player compositions, including one from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, where the show is set to travel. The two museums are working to adjust the dates of the tour, according to a representative of the Borghese.

    It remains to be seen whether Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale will extend its highly anticipated blockbuster “Raphael: 1520–1483,” for which it pre-sold 60,000 tickets. The show was only open for three days before the country went into lockdown and it is scheduled to close June 2. The museum did not respond to inquiries regarding the possibility of extending the exhibition’s run to meet visitor demand.

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