Curator & Collector

Image of Lawren Harris’s “Bylot Island I” taken with permission from Heffel.com “Bylot I,” an Arctic themed painting by my favourite Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris just sold for $2.8 million at Heffel’s recent May 2010 auction in Vancouver. I enjoyed watching the auction, and hope to keep up with future ones.

Screenshot of live auction taken from Heffel.com I’ve just discovered that Heffel Auctions has a live link to their current auction at Heffel.com. The artwork shown above is lot 171, Emily Carr’s Emily and Lizzie, which sold for $400,000 plus a buyer’s premium. The Bill Reid sculpture I mentioned a few days ago sold for [...]

Some days ago, I read a rather long article by Eva Schulz entitled “Notes on the history of collecting and of museums in the light of selected literature of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century” (Journal of the History of Collections, 1990, vol. 2. no. 2). The article was quite interesting, but one part stood [...]

Writing in the New York Times back in 2001, Michael Kimmelman issues a helpful reminder that museums need to remember their values. It is not enough to get large government grants and build huge buildings without regards for the artworks or artefacts contained therein. No, museums operate in a realm of “rational entertainment,” and seek [...]

…the politics of museums displays. In “Dealing with the Past,” (Museums Journal Jan. 1992), David Jones discusses the politics of museum displays. He offers a welcome reminder that while not “every display should be a political statement,… many older displays were just that, and … it is necessary to be aware of their hidden messages [...]

…on a museum article. In “Developing a Working Definition for the Museum Collection,” (Inside Line, Fall 2002) Emily G. Nicholson and Stephen L. Williams discuss the differences between “non-collection assemblages” (e.g. shirts in a store), private collections, and museum collections. They note that “a major difference between assemblages of merchandise and collections is that the [...]

In “Collecting Reconsidered,” (Museum Languages: Objects and Texts, ed. G. Kavanagh), Susan Pearce categorizes collections into three general categories: souvenirs, fetishistic collecting, and systematic collections. Pearce uses the first term in a peculiar way: “souvenirs are samples of events which can be remembered, but not relived…. Souvenirs discredit the present by vaunting the past…Souvenirs, then, [...]

For various reasons, I am now reading a number of different readings on museums. I’ve created a new category, “Museum Literature,” to give me a place to put my thoughts on these readings. My purpose in writing responses here is not to produce exhaustive critiques; it’s simply to allow me the chance to try to [...]

Tomahawk restaurant with First Nations artworks; image originally posted by the CBC Twenty years ago, the Tomahawk Restaurant in North Vancouver suffered the theft of twenty artworks created by First Nations artists and acquired by the family that owned the restaurant. According to this CBC story, two days ago, a person came into the restaurant [...]

Image of Bill Reid’s “Killer Whale (Chief of the Undersea World)” large version at Stanely Park taken from www.theravenscall.ca Via Google alerts, I just found the following fascinating suggestion for what to do with the historic building that currently houses the Vancouver Art Gallery (originally found in context at this forum): My favorite idea for [...]