Word: artful
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...Fund raisers may be standard practice at American museums, but no American museum has a history as storied as that of the Louvre. It started life in the 12th century as an imposing fortress, then became a royal palace that was home for centuries to kings and their burgeoning art collections. In 1793, shortly after the French Revolution, it was turned into a museum that is now easily the most popular in the world; last year it drew in 8.3 million visitors, including more than 1 million Americans. That's 2 million more than the British Museum and almost twice...
...art historian by training, Loyrette comes from a family of well-known French lawyers and spent more than two decades at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, including seven years as its director. Some of what he's doing at the Louvre is experimental, he acknowledges - including the Abu Dhabi project, which he calls "a leap into the unknown." People often ask if he's planning to brand museums elsewhere, but Loyrette says he won't even contemplate other such projects until it's clear how well this one goes. (The Louvre Abu Dhabi is scheduled to open...
There are still limits. The Louvre takes its public-service and scientific missions very seriously. A section of the basement hums with activity from workshops that keep alive esoteric skills such as the art of working with gold leaf, and curators say the increased number of exhibitions of Louvre works abroad keeps them on their toes, since they need to produce catalogues and other research for them. The lending policy isn't limitless, either: earlier this year the Louvre pulled out of a show that a private promoter was mounting in Verona, Italy. The Louvre would have received $6.4 million...
...other French museums participating in the government-backed project will share the rest of the proceeds.) When the deal was struck last year, an Internet petition declaring "our museums are not for sale" quickly drew several thousand signatures, including those of well-known curators and others in the French art world. The Louvre responded with its own statement, signed by Loyrette and all his department heads, promising that the accord didn't mark "the commercialization of culture, which all of us oppose." It's a tricky issue, Fumaroli concedes: "Some people are not in agreement [with Loyrette...
...other big complaint is about the introduction of contemporary art. Fumaroli wrote an indignant piece in the French magazine Beaux-Arts about the biggest show to date, an exhibition by Belgian artist Jan Fabre that was held earlier this summer in galleries containing Dutch and Flemish masterpieces. Among the highlights: a table strewn with feathered sculptures depicting the severed heads of seven owls in the same room as Van Dyck portraits, and a gigantic earthworm wriggling on upended gravestones sharing a space with 21 Rubens depictions of Marie de Medicis. The show was part of a series called "Counterpoints," designed...