COURTESY CLARK ART INSTITUTE/VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
MUSEUMS
Dallas Museum of Art curator Olivier Meslay will be the Clark Art Institute’s new director. He replaces Michael Conforti, who led the museum for more than two decades. [The New York Times]
The Smithsonian confirmed rumors yesterday that, with the Victoria & Albert Museum, it will open a new permanent space in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The new building will be called V&A East. [Artforum]
Charlotte Feng Ford has given $2.5 million to the Smith College Museum of Art. The gift will endow a curatorship of contemporary art. [The Boston Globe]
Norwegian shipping heir Petter Olsen will open a private museum in Ramme, Norway, next year. Olsen is best known for selling Edvard Munch’s The Scream. [The Art Newspaper]
REVIEWS
Peter Schjeldahl on the Whitney Museum’s Stuart Davis show: “If the works had a smell, it would be like that of a factory-fresh car—an echt American aura, from the country’s post-Second World War epoch of dazzling manufacture and soaring optimism.” [The New Yorker]
Jason Farago panned this year’s DIS-curated Berlin Biennale, writing, “These artists seem to want to have their fun and still get credit for topicality, but let’s get real: I have seen spambots with greater sensitivity.” [The Guardian]
And though she felt less dispassionate toward the art in the biennial, Karen Archey didn’t care for it much either. “ ‘The Present in Drag’ errs by so uniformly investing in the corporate gaze that any radical vision of emancipation it projects comes off as puritanical,” she wrote. [Frieze]
PHOTOGRAPHY
Clément Chéroux was named a senior curator of photography at SFMOMA. [Artforum]
Photographer Ryan McGinley shares his five favorite art books. [GQ Magazine]
EXTRAS
Tomma Abts at Greengrassi in London. [Contemporary Art Daily]