Guggenheim Museum added to UNESCO World Heritage List

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Guggenheim Museum added to UNESCO World Heritage List | The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has been named a UNESCO World Heritage site, along with seven other buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Other additions to the World Heritage List include Iceland’s glacial Vatnajökull National Park and the ancient city of Babylon, located in modern-day Iraq. The UNESCO meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, concludes on 10 July.

Douglas Crimp, 1944–2019 | American critic, curator, and art historian Douglas Crimp has died at the age of 74. The influential theorist of postmodern and queer art is perhaps known for curating the seminal Pictures exhibition in 1977: which gave rise to term, the Pictures Generation, a group that includes photographers Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, and Louise Lawler. Crimp worked at October magazine from the early 1970s until 1990, first as managing editor, then as co-editor. In 1987 he edited a special edition of the magazine on AIDS activism.

British Museum defends relationship with BP amid controversy | The Art Newspaper reports that British Museum director Hartwig Fischer endorsed BP as a sponsor at a press conference today. Fischer’s statement comes a week after the publication of an open letter , signed by 78 British artists including Rachel Whiteread and Antony Gormley, calling for the National Portrait Gallery to cut ties with the petroleum company due to the contribution of fossil fuels to climate change. Fischer announced that BP would not sponsor an upcoming exhibition about the people of the Arctic but would continue to fund programming in the future. ‘This sort of support is vital to [the museum’s] mission,’ he said.

Recommended reading | In the New York Times, Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang call for more critics of colour in art. ‘Think of cultural criticism as a public utility, civic infrastructure that needs to be valued not based just on its monetary impact but also on its capacity to expand the collective conversation at a time when it is dangerously contracting,’ they write.