Word: museumize
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...process that started, slowly, under Loyrette's predecessor, Pierre Rosenberg, in the 1990s, when the government changed the Louvre's official status and gave it some limited autonomy. Loyrette and Selles have taken that opening and gone further, wresting management of the museum's finances and staff from government bureaucrats and, in exchange, signing a deal with the Culture Ministry that commits it to meet certain performance targets. In the past, the Louvre didn't even get the receipts of its ticket sales - instead, the money was put in a pot and divided up among all French museums. "We used...
...style endowment fund - the first in France - using the money from the Abu Dhabi deal to ensure it can finance a bevy of ambitious projects in the future, including one that would revamp the entrance under the pyramid to make it easier for visitors to access the museum and get their bearings...
...busy construction site. Most of the work is taking place on a new wing dedicated to Islamic art, set to open in 2010 and partly funded by Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud and French oil giant Total. The Louvre is also building a branch museum in Lens, a depressed former coal-mining town in the north, as part of Loyrette's attempt to broaden its reach within France...
Nouveau Riche If you ask Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, the crusty chief curator of the Louvre's sculpture department, what has changed in the Loyrette era, she'll grumble a bit about the heavier load of administration that comes the way of the museum's seven departments. She's also not convinced that appointing department heads for just three years at a time is a smart move. Until Loyrette came along, they were appointed for life. "Five years would be better. You can't get anything done in three," says Bresc-Bautier, who was appointed by Loyrette after...
Which raises the question: Why should anyone give money to a French museum that already receives a hefty slug of government funding, while so many museums around the world are starved of cash? A few days after Cason Thrash's party, one of the attendees, Max Blumberg, a wealthy Floridian who made his money in lighting, sits in his exquisitely decorated Paris pied-à-terre opposite the Tuileries gardens, with a view of I.M. Pei's pyramid, and provides the answer. "The name of the Louvre has magical powers in the world of art," he says. "We don't look...