THEY SHOOK ON IT. Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York’s City Council have approved $323.8 million in funding for culture, reports Hyperallergic. That’s a record amount of yearly funding. Specifically, the $323.8 million will go to the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), representing a seven percent increase over last year’s $299.6 million and more than $100 million more than the City Council initially proposed. In a statement, Mamdani said the budget was part of his mission to make life more affordable for New York artists. “A crushing affordability crisis has threatened to drive out the very artists who have long defined life in this city,” he said. The budget also established a $10 million “Cultural Stability Fund” to support struggling cultural organizations.
KAST ASIDE. A retrospective dedicated to the late Argentine artist León Ferrari was canceled at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) in Santiago due to budget cuts by Chile’s newly installed far-right government led by José Antonio Kast, reports The Art Newspaper. The major exhibition was scheduled to open in June, after three years of prep, conceived as an adaptation of the 2023 exhibit Recurrencias in Buenos Aires. However, lack of funding amid budget cuts to the arts, spearheaded by Antonio Kast’s government, has brought the project to a screeching halt. The government told Andrés Duprat, a curator organizing the exhibit and the director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Argentina, that “unfortunately, they could not afford to put on the exhibition.” He added that “it is a great shame. Everything was already in place: the list of works, the transport and insurance budgets, and the exhibition layout.” Chile’s Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage budget was slashed by nearly 10 percent by the new government. Importantly, Ferrari’s work, which condemns state violence and authoritarianism, is in conflict with Antonio Kast’s ultra conservative politics, which have been connected to the memory of Chile’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet.
The Digest
A photograph by Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov, from his 1993 series, AT Dusk, was stolen from the Radvila Palace Museum of Art, a part of the Lithuanian National Art. [Ocula]
A painting was picked up on the street by a resident of Murcia, Spain, because he liked its elegant golden frame; later, he learned that he had a valuable Joaquín Sorolla painting in his hands. [The Guardian]
The discovery of toxic levels of lead in Paris’ monumental Palais Garnier Opera will delay its planned renovation. [Le Figaro]
Archaeologists are defending their mid-20th-century colleague, Juan Cabré, against accusations that he placed 90 gold coins in the church of the Gothic city of Recópolis, in Guadalajara, to back a claim that it was built by King Leovigild. [El País]
The Kicker
DWINDLING ATTENDANCE. Many Jewish museums in Europe have experienced a noticeable drop in attendance since the October 7th, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel, reports the New York Times. Some museum leaders even say their far emptier halls are akin to what they experienced during the COVID pandemic. They attribute this state of affairs to the public’s association of Jewish institutions with Israel, which, they said, is unwarranted. “People chose to stay away because they felt that visiting would be a support for Israel, and they associate all Jewish life with Israel,” said Janus Moller Jensen, director of Copenhagen’s Danish Jewish Museum. He, like other Jewish museum leaders interviewed, said that this has corresponded with an “anti-Jewish sentiment, if not outright antisemitic attacks.” His institution tries to explain that its programming focuses on 400 years of Jewish life in Denmark, to no avail. “They make a connection between us and Israel that isn’t there,” he said.