Word: cuno
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...critics call him too conservative. He says he’s “radical” and “polemical.” Since James Cuno left his post as director of the Harvard University Art Museums in 2002 to run the prestigious Courtauld Institute in London, he hasn’t left the art world’s radar screen for a moment...
...year into his role at the Courtauld, Cuno announced that he was leaving London and crossing the Atlantic again to take the helm of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the top U.S. museums. Meanwhile, he edited a controversial book, Whose Muse, concerning the role and fate of art museums. Cuno has defended his book on tour and on the radio—debating Malcolm Rogers, director of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), on National Public Radio, and appearing at a Harvard Book Store talk at the Sackler Museum last week...
...museum directors based on lectures they gave at Harvard during Cuno’s last year—responds to what he describes as the “hyped activity” of museums in the 1990s, with increasingly glitzy, popular temporary exhibitions and commercial partnerships. These exhibitions, Cuno says, are often “not serendipitous” the way a museum should...
...Cuno says that Harvard’s museums, with their intimate gallery size, minimal gift shop and well-staffed study rooms, provided the recipe that inspired the essay’s description of an ideal museum. By contrast, he worries that blockbuster exhibitions at other museums—which often have less of a focus on permanent collections than Harvard—can be too “discursive,” resulting in the curator constructing wall-text and catalogs for the show that obstruct looking at the actual pieces...
...radio address as well as at his Sackler talk, Cuno questioned the MFA’s recent controversial decision to rent 21 Monets from its collection to a Las Vegas casino gallery. Cuno, who says he would have been wary of renting the valuable paintings, describes the MFA’s argument that they are bringing art to a wider audience as a “disingenuous remark.” Had that really been their primary goal, he says, there were far more effective strategies—like mounting an exhibition in Boston’s poorer neighborhoods...