For an architect to build a museum of moving pictures is a bit like a vintner bottling mountain air. They’re everywhere, those squirmy apparitions. They cling to the side of a building, the back of an airplane seat, or the face of a wristwatch, yet remain essentially unchanged. How do you build a home for a rectangle of flickering light? read more at New York Magazine >>
With moving images now as close at hand as the nearest cellphone or iPad, it seems especially important to consider where they come from and how they may be transforming our reality. It's hard to think of a better place to address such questions than the Museum of the Moving Image, the only institution in the U.S. devoted to all forms of screen culture: film, television and digital media. It occupies a site cherished by cinéastes, the former Astoria Studio, which was once populated by glittering stars. Now an ambitious $67 million redesign and expansion, opening to the public Saturday, aims to rekindle some of that long-lost glamour while ushering the museum into the future...read more at Wall Street Journal >>
On Tuesday the Museum of the Moving Image invited members of the press to Astoria to survey its transformed environs in advance of a public unveiling on Saturday. The museum's renovation and expansion—under the leadership of founding director Rochelle Slovin and trustee board chairman Herbert S. Schlosser, and with the design acumen of architect Thomas Leeser—has added some 47,000 square feet of space to the city-owned building that has housed the museum since 1988...read more at Wall Street Journal >>
For anyone inclined to think of moving images as something reeling out of a projector catching dust motes in a beam of light, a trip to this Queens neighborhood to see the newly expanded and transformed Museum of the Moving Image, which opens on Saturday, will be an eye-opener...read more at Wall Street Journal >>
For arts organizations, progress at the World Trade Center site has so far resembled a Beckett play: waiting and disappointment, followed by more waiting and disappointment. Opposition from victims’ relatives and political fighting have meant that none of the dreamed-of cultural projects has broken ground. And now that the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has been disbanded, arts groups are more worried than ever that the planned performing arts center and $7 million worth of federal arts grants will remain on paper...read more at New York Times >>