June 28 – August 27, 2022

July 14 – August 19, 2022

After a year-long controversy, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has approved a new definition for what makes a museum today, marking the first time in 15 years that the group has done so.

The new definition describes a museum as “a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets, and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage,” adding that it is “open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally, and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing.”

While the new standard mimics the definition’s previous structure, it includes mention of progressive concepts like “diversity,” “sustainability,” and “accessible”—terms that are meant to reflect recent debates around the civic role of museums.

In a press statement on Wednesday, ICOM president Alberto Garlandi called the revised phrasing a “great step forward” for the museum world at large, while also acknowledging the update is “not perfect.”

The revision passed with 92 percent vote of approval on the final day of ICOM’s General Conference held in Prague this week.

The New York Attorney General’s Office said it found evidence that at least a dozen clients were involved in an alleged tax fraud scheme led by Sotheby’s.

The investigation, which began in 2020, initially centered around a private collector who obtained a false resale certificate. Now, the AGO claims that that collector’s case was not an outlier.

The false resale certificate allowed the anonymous individual from the initial investigation to fraudulently pose as an art dealer. Doing so may have allowed the collector to avoid paying millions of dollars in tax revenue on the sale.

The new allegations were made public in a Manhattan court on Wednesday by an attorney working for the government agency, according to a report from Law360.

That complaint is related to a 2018 lawsuit in which Sotheby’s was accused of defrauding the state out of taxes on $27 million of art purchased by an offshore account Porsal Equities. The original complaint alleged that the auction house’s staffers knew the client was a private collector purchasing art for his personal holdings. Under New York City law, only dealers planning to resell art qualify for exemptions to city and state sales tax.

Art and architecture maintain a self-evident, though largely unarticulated, relationship. Paraphrasing and inverting Ad Reinhardt’s maxim applies: “architecture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a sculpture.” Yet the art world pays scant attention to buildings, at least when the conversation ventures beyond a new museum.

But unlike art—much of which lives in storage or on private walls—architecture is there for the seeing. And the world of architecture, like the world of art, is rife with untold stories and unknown work that unlike most under-recognized art, lies hiding in plain sight.

In March 2020, when the pandemic began and galleries closed, my wife Dyanne and I got into our car and went traveling to see architecture in the field. These trips started when the gallery’s Instagram account was created in 2015. Now they became the daily diary of our pandemic life. Since traffic was nonexistent in the disease’s early days, we ranged far and fast. Destinations were identified and corroborated using Google Street View. Could the building be photographed without trespassing?

Like art, architecture reveals itself in myriad ways. Since nothing comes from nowhere, and little is less nowhere than the built environment, anecdotal webs began to be woven, with the local emerging as an intricate historical document.

Below, a look at how 10 buildings and their architects can reveal the exigency of  the personal relationships, inclusive memory, and community recognition that lives in the architecture and art that surround us.

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From Stoner by John Williams:

And so he had his love affair.

And:

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.