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All Talk..........

29 September, 2006

There is a lot of coverage of the Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum on the the world wide web. Most is concerned with the events as they unfolded and commentary on those events rather than on any detailed analysis of the central role of public museums and the enormous challenges they face in the 21st century.
As they actually 'blew the whistle’ on the funding issues and the involvement of Saatchi in the Sensation show at the BMA, the New York Times took hold of this story and ran with it for months. Many of these articles especially by arts editor Michael Kimmleman and arts journalist David Barstow are quoted in later discussion papers and books such as Mark Rectanus ‘Culture Incorporated'
The website of Chicago School of Cultural Policy reports on the conference following the Sensation show and makes available a series of links, however all the links to papers other than the Times, such as, the San Fransisco Examiner, the Boston Globe or Sydney Morning Herald are now defunct. The same thing happens in Arts Journal .com where there is an entire page of links covering the Sensation show called Giuliani v the Brooklyn Museum.Links are organised under headings of News, Reviews, Issues,Background Analysis and Related Stories. Most of the links except to the Times have expired or you need to register to a paper's archive.

http://www.artsjournal.com/issues/Brooklyn.htm

Articles found through Look Smart Find Articles reflect a variety of views and are by knowledgeable authors writing for well respected journals. Lee Rosenbaum’s articles in Art in America are often quoted in papers given at the Chicago conference and Andre Szanto who writes for American Prospect delivered a paper at the same conference
There are no dedicated websites on the Sensation show although there are many dedicated web pages and there was no mention of the show on the Brooklyn Museum’s website.
I could not find many responses from the directors of other museums nor was there much quoted by Arnold Lehman except in an interview from the John’s Hopkins Magazine. This interview does give you a sense of where Lehman was coming from in terms of bringing a show like Sensation to the BMA. He wanted to ’democratise’ Museum attendance and make it more accessible for those who are not white, middle aged and middle class.

http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0601web/museum.html

Images from the show are very rarely included on any website which demonstrates how the art took a back seat in this controversy.

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