COURTESY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Museums and Patronage
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki, will give $25 million to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which will help fund “a transformation project” of the building budgeted at $90 million. [The New York Times]
Agnes Gund has donated five contemporary works to the Cleveland Museum of Art, including a Claes Oldenburg sculpture and a Robert Colescott painting. [The Cleveland Plain Dealer]
Yayoi Kusama’s museum has opened in Tokyo. [The New York Times]
Design
Guy Trebay takes a look behind the scenes of the Museum of Modern Art’s new fashion show, “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” [The New York Times]
Athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick’s old 49ers jersey is also included in the show. [Quartz]
A look at David Chipperfield’s work restoring Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in Berlin. [The New York Times]
Kyle Chayka pays a visit to the former home of Four Seasons in New York, and reports that at the new establishment there, “a martini comes from a crystal decanter; it was premixed some time in the past week, the bartender informs me, as if this routine added to the drink instead of killing it.” [Even]
The Guggenheim
Ai Weiwei on the Guggenheim’s decision to remove three artworks that feature or depict animals from an upcoming show: “When an art institution cannot exercise its right for freedom of speech, that is tragic for a modern society. Pressuring museums to pull down artwork shows a narrow understanding about not only animal rights but also human rights.” [The New York Times]
Artists, Writers, and More
Manuel Arturo Abreu interviews artist Winslow Laroche as part of “a series of interviews with artists who have a significant body of work that makes use of or responds to network culture and digital technologies.” [Rhizome]
John Ruskin shows are on tap in the United Kingdom. [The Art Newspaper]
That time that Andy Warhol and Truman Capote appeared together on the cover of High Times holding large lollipops. [Andy’s Diary/Twitter]
Last But Not Least
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its acquisition of an ancient ancient Egyptian faience hippopotamus—William the Hippo. [The Met]
Twitter is experimenting with doubling its character limit for a single tweet from 140 to 240 characters. [Techcrunch]
Please enjoy these photographs of Ulrich Wulff’s show at Freddy in Harris, New York. [Contemporary Art Daily]