Posts tagged Wien
Vienna's Mumok (Museum of Modern Art) online resources
Vienna’s Museum Moderne Kunst (MUMOK)
The link above is to the English page featuring videos, podcasts and library search. For those who can handle German, the German page has back issues of the museum’s magazine and newsletters. I’m adding it to the list I’m compiling of ‘Museum Multimedia’. Any other illustrious examples I should add?
amyjanebexplainsall:wordsandeggs:
Historic typography in Vienna, an alphabet called Lost Voices. By Phospho on Flickr, via WeLoveTypography.
Die Kultur braucht Zuwanderung!
For those of you with a dappling of German, Wolfgang Kos (Director of the Vienna City Museum) talks about the chances and positives brought about by migration and demographic changes:
Wolfgang Kos, Direktor des Wien Museums, über die Bilder und Images, die an der “alten” Kulturstadt Wien haften, wie mit ihnen umgegangen werden soll und wo Wien seine Stärken hat. Die internationale Wahrnehmung von Wien sei differenzierter und weniger von Tradition geprägt. Große Chancen sieht Wolfgang Kos in den demografischen Veränderungen durch Zuwanderung, die die Kultur in Wien seit jeher positiv verändern.
New Director at Jewish Museum, Vienna
A couple of newspaper articles have sprung up this week in response to the new director of the Jewish Museum, Vienna being due to take up her position tomorrow. For those who can read German, they is Der Standard and Die Presse.
What is so interesting about the appointment is that Dr. Spera hasn’t worked her way up through the museum ranks in the traditional way. In fact, she is already a well known face in Vienna having been a newsreader on one of the main channels. This isn’t controversial or even so unusual from what I understand, and has the potential to generate some interesting “outside the box” initiatives and cooperations. But, it has led to some disquiet within the museum itself it seems. If you look at the comments on Der Standard’s article, one comment entitled “Is this the new leadership style?” from Max Deisson reads:
“Museum employees are only learning through the media the details of Mrs. Spera’s plans. The Gallery Assistants are unsettled by the new mention of future building works and renovations.”
Also causing a feeling of unrest is the fact that Dr. Spera has been visiting various Jewish Museums and Holocaust institutions around the world and word is filtering back (again via the Austrian media) about object loans which have been arranged, without any consultation of the curatorial staff.
If the media reports are accurate, some of the ideas Dr. Spera has mentioned sound like the museum will be taken into new and challenging areas. In Die Presse she talks about links which can be made to the current events in Gaza and a ‘recontextualisation’ of the Max Berger Collection of ritual objects. Other ideas which have been mentioned is the redevelopment of the homepage, an expansion in the targeted audience from school and youth groups to more tourists and increased emphasis to be place on the Judenplatz site (where a Medieval synagogue foundations are on display) with a new permanent exhibition and bi-annual temporary exhibitions.
Temporary exhibitions at the Jewish Museum are often people led, investigating personal and situated aspects of Jewish identity and the Jewish Community. If new temporary exhibitions are to be held at the Judenplatz venue, it might be interesting to see them take a more historical, object based direction to complement the archaeological site. It would be great to see the museum do more work in the wider community and really broaden the audience within Vienna itself, rather than competing with other larger institutions for the the limited time of tourists and the tourist euro. With the possibility of so many temporary institutions, how about a year card?
In any case, the next few months could prove exciting for the JMW, and I for one am looking forward to seeing which direction the museum will take.
ecm-diskurs 10: Transforming the Museum
This is what I am doing this evening:
Charles Esche, Direktor Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven
Moderation: Nora Sternfeld, ecm / Univ. für angewandte Kunst Wien25. Juni 2010, 19.30 Uhr
Wien Museum
Karlsplatz, 1040 WienMuseums are in general defined by their collections, yet in the recent past the (consumerist) desire for the new has led to much more attention being given to temporary exhibitions and spectacular installations. The lecture will seek to describe aspects of museum history that might define a museum’s possibility in the near future - a time when most public institutions are likely to be less well funded and rich collectors retreat behind the walls of their own vanity institutions. How can the collections, understood as material distillations of cultural memory and experience, be animated politically and aesthetically. Projects and programmes carried out over the past five years of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven will be used to illustrate and assess how concrete projects might address the demands of artists, theorists and imagined publics.
Eintritt frei, Informationen und Anmeldung unter: ecm@uni-ak.ac.at
Orchid and coffee shop- This scene was in the coffee shop area of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna last week.
Exhibitions NYC. Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Curated Object
Just go and look at the pictures on the entry if nothing else.
Eighteenth-century Viennese silver design was a product of the period’s unique social and political environment. The degrees of separation between the symbolic weight of monarchical power and the literal weight of the silver-wrought wine vessels were few. Silver sea serpents, sparring lions, Imperial crests and crustaceans, thick ropes of silver and more delicate, French-inspired embellishment are all components of Wurths spectacular vision and elegant execution. However close the world was to war, discussion of civil unrest and social obligation had no place at the Imperial table. At Schoonenburg, as in Imperial courts throughout the world, 18th century life was based upon the Parisian principles of opulence, decadence and ostentatious displays of wealth.
The Wien Museum Director gives his “personal take” on the city he’s spent his life interpreting
In a recent interview with Director Wolfgang Kos in the Wien Museum – the museum of the history of the City of Vienna – one couldn’t help being curious about his personal take on the city he spends his life trying to interpret. A man who knows the city so well must have some favourite Vienna things.
