Saatchi axes Ukraine exhibition
Plus: Manchester's Lowry facing million-pound energy bill this winter
Hello lovely reader. Hope you’ve had a good week.
I’ve got one bit of very exciting news to bring you. Next week I’ll be sending you another interview edition of this newsletter, and it follows the story I featured last week about the British Museum’s apparent softening of its position on the contested Parthenon Sculptures. (You’ll remember talk of a ‘positive Parthenon partnership’ with Greece came out of an extensive and somewhat explosive interview in the Sunday Times.)
I’m delighted to say that my interviewee next week will be Sarah Baxter, the journalist and former Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times who conducted that headline-grabbing interview with the British Museum. She tells me how the interview came about, what the reaction has been, and what she thought when she realised she had a big global news story on her hands. You won’t want to miss it, trust me.
Lookout for the interview in your inboxes early next week. And if you know someone who would also benefit from reading it as soon as it lands, then use the button below to share maxwell museums with them and tell them to subscribe.
Now onto this week’s news!
Maxwell
This week’s news
London’s Saatchi Gallery has cancelled an upcoming exhibition of Ukrainian art and artists after it was revealed the organisers were Russian bankers and collectors. The Gallery released a statement saying that they were not the “organiser or curator” of the show, and that it had no direct communication with the artists or collectors involved. Many of the Ukrainian artists said their work was being included without their consent. CNN
Want to own some celebrity artwork (is there any other kind)? Now’s your chance as the original pieces which were made for Channel 4’s Grayson’s Art Club are being raffled off. Work by famous faces such as Harry Hill and Sue Perkins could be yours for just a fiver, and all money raised goes towards the Bristol Museums Development Trust. And if you’re not one of the 200,000 people who have already visited the Grayson’s Art Club exhibition in the city, then you have just two more weeks to put that right. Bristol 24/7
Pints have been pulled in a pub, 21 years after it was demolished. The Black Country Living Museum has faithfully rebuilt the Edwardian Elephant and Castle pub - which originally stood in Wolverhampton - on its west Midlands site. It’s set the pub in the 1960s and its reopening to visitors this week was a "very emotional day" as previous landlords and punters came back to toast the recreation. A lovely story. BBC News
Defaced and vandalised money is the subject of an exciting new exhibition opening at the Fitzwilliam this autumn. The Cambridge museum will present a world history of protest “through currencies that have been mutilated as cries of anger, injustice, mockery or despair." Covering 250 years, it will feature fake £10 banknotes where Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, replace HM the Queen alongside. Cambridgeshire Live
As if the ongoing legacy of the covid pandemic wasn’t damaging enough to the UK’s cultural venues, along comes the cost of living crisis which is looking more and more scary as the days tick by. Not only has inflation hit 10% in Britain, but energy prices are skyrocketing so high that they are becoming a genuine threat to the survival of many institutions. This week the Lowry arts complex revealed it could cost almost a million pounds to keep the lights on this winter, as bills at the Greater Manchester theatre and gallery venue are set to triple. Energy costs for just one season look like being far greater than its entire annual grant from the Arts Council. Expect more stories like this as we move towards the end of the year. The Guardian
Last week I featured the news that visitors were flocking to the American and European minimalist masterpieces on display for the very first time at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran. The problem, it turns out, is that so were a swarm of artwork-eating pests. A video has gone viral of two silver fish squirming under the glass of a photograph by the 20th-century German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, and on display in the landmark exhibition. It resulted in the Tehran museum announcing it was closing in order to fumigate the galleries to try and rid them of the infestation. The Independent
A New York City museum that told the story of the 9/11 attacks from the perspectives of the people affected has been forced to close for good. The 16-year-old 9/11 Tribute Museum focussed on the first-hand stories of those impacted by the 2001 terror attack, and it had 300,000 visitors prior to the pandemic. But the covid recovery was slow and just 26,000 visited in 2021. It closed its doors for the last time on Wednesday. Reuters
And finally
If you’ve never visited Venice (guilty), the city that’s basically a floating museum, then here’s an insider’s guide to getting the most out of a weekend.
Manchester Museum has released the first look inside its £15m transformation. Watch the sneak peak below. Warning: contains lots of stepladders and dust sheets.
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Thank you Maxwell