I was recommended a new book about museums called Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum. It’s a deep dive – a very deep dive – into the workings of the Museum of Modern Art, written by a sociologist, Fernando Domínguez Rubio, at the University of California, San Diego, working under Chandra Mukerji, who has herself, very unusually for a sociologist, written about the gardens of Versailles. What is impressive about the book is that he treats everything about the internal workings of the museum, the nature of works of art, how and why they are acquired, the processes of their care and conservation, the ways they are displayed, with the same, deeply scrupulous care and attention, trying to understand the processes involved with intelligence and sympathy as well as critical detachment, which marks it out from much museological writing where the critique is paramount, rather than the empathetic understanding. I found it strange and very fascinating, because it makes it clear the extent to which museums are strange places, following their own rules of engagement, judgment and obsession.

The retreat back indoors, with only the sound of constant sirens outside in the Mile End Road, means that my photography is back indoors.

I notice that in the streets, everyone avoids one another, fearful of infection, and the London Hospital is full up. It’s as it was in March. But worse, because now the government has lost all credibility, the acolytes of Trump, whose populism they subscribed to and followed until this week, when they are making frantic and faintly pathetic attempts to distance themselves:-

There is an aspect of the history of Dunelm House, Durham’s former Students’ Union building, which may by now have been forgotten. In about 2000, the National Portrait Gallery was offered it as a possible site to display part of its twentieth-century collection through the agency of Northern Arts, Durham City Council and the University of Durham. It is an astonishing and fine building in a wonderful location on the River Wear. But it turned out that it was going to cost a gigantic amount to repair and adapt, so the project came to nothing. So, it is not just a question of listing, but finding the funds for imaginative re-use. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jan/05/work-to-preserve-the-beauty-of-brutalism?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Given that Romilly’s exhibition in Bruton is now closed of necessity because of the lockdown, we were both rather cheered to receive such a beautiful photograph of one of the works:-

Following the piece about the effect of Brexit on the art market yesterday, I see that there is an addendum today : we are not going to follow Europe’s very strict regulation of the antiquities market. I presume this is a harbinger of what is to come: whenever Europe tightens rules to prevent illegal trafficking, we will liberate them to retain or develop our competitive advantage. I can see that some people may regard this as a benefit, but I’m not convinced we want to become an offshore, gangster state.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/britain-abandons-eu-regulations-cultural-heritage-1935331?utm_content=from_artnetnews&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EU%20Jan%207%20AM&utm_term=EUR%20Daily%20Newsletter%20%5BMORNING%5D

My daily exercise was acting as a courier of a birthday present to Clapham – an unexpectedly long way even by the fastest route and curious because of the whole of London now being so quiet, although that was partly because I came back through the back streets of Vauxhall, past street names redolent of its rural past, but no longer so – large swathes of social housing, intermingled with pockets of gentrification. I ended up at Borough Market – very quiet – and Leadenhall Market – totally deserted. I was struck by the juxtapositions between new and old behind the Lloyd’s building:-

There is a good analysis of some of the immediate effects of Brexit on the art market, as attached. Of course, it is possible that things will settle down and we will all get used to filling out all the necessary new forms, but at the moment it feels like a huge added set of problems and burdens on top of COVID, not getting rid of red tape, but adding it:-

https://news.artnet.com/market/implications-of-brexit-1934921

The return of my copy of David Brownlee’s excellent book about the Philadelphia Museum of Art, published in 1997, has made me pay more attention to the identity of the person who took the remarkable early photographs of the Museum, first when it was under construction for publication in the Architectural Record in 1926 and then when it opened in 1928, although even then many of the surroundings seems yet to have been completed. It was Sigurd Fischer. They are unusually powerful, taken presumably with a plate camera, so shows up the amazing quality of the detailing in the polychromatic sculpture and stone carving. Fischer was himself an architect, as well as an architectural photographer, and came from a family of Danish painters. Modern photographs don’t seem to have quite the same quality, and I can’t figure out whether this is just the aura of time or the eye of a photographic artist in their composition:-

More scenes from my walk back from the local Baker.

I have always liked the fact that the mariners – decay’d Masters & Commanders of Ships’ – who were housed so comfortably in almshouses paid for by a legacy of Captain Henry Mudd, should have been consoled by stone models of ships on entry:-

And I like also the detailing of the stone carving on the side buildings facing out onto the street:-

Here is the Art Newspaper’s list of forthcoming books with – I’m pleased to see – a more accurate description of what my book is about than the FT’s and a photograph of Richard F. Brown, who is one of the minor heroes of the book, who left the Los Angeles County Museum because he was not allowed to hire Mies van der Rohe as architect for the new museum – they got William L. Pereira instead – and arrived at the Kimbell with a list of potential architects, including Mies, Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi and Louis Kahn, with whom he worked both critically, in a good way, and creatively, as the photograph, a late addition, suggests.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/preview/book-club-our-pick-of-this-year-s-new-art-publications-from-a-joseph-beuys-survey-to-musa-mayer-s-take-on-her-father-philip-guston