seeing & being seen

In a not-encouraging-sign, Brandeis is to sell their art collection and close their museum:

Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik. …

“Clearly, what’s happening with Brandeis now is that they decided the easiest way is to look around the campus and find things that can be capitalized,” said David Robertson, a Northwestern University professor who is president of the Association of College and Univertsity Museums and Galleries. “It’s always art that goes first.”

But there is no precedent for selling an art collection of the Rose’s stature. Internationally recognized, the collection is strong in American art of the 1960s and 1970s and includes works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler.

I’ve posted several times about the sad demise of the Polaroid, and we have all mourned appropriately.

21 Feb 1947. Edwin H. Land showing positive and negative print taken from a new camera that produces finished pictures. Bettmann/CORBIS.

BUT!… This just in: apparently a group of past employees and fellow visionaries have acquired a former Polaroid factory in the Netherlands and are hoping to return instant pack film to our photographic options. They are calling it the Impossible Project. In Edwin Land’s own words:

Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.