We are delighted that charges have (finally!) been dropped in the Steve Kurtz case. The case started in May of 2004. While Kurtz was preparing for Critical Art Ensemble’s piece Free Range Grain part of The Interventionists at MASS MoCA, his wife of twenty years, Hope, died in her sleep. When police responded to his 911 call, they noticed a small food-testing lab and petri dishes containing bacteria cultures (part of the scheduled installation, which would have allowed museum visitors to see if their store bought food contained genetically modified (GM) organisms). The FBI was called in, they and cordoned off the house and investigated Kurtz for terrorism. The film Strange Culture was made about the case. Learn more about the case and Critical Art Ensemble here.

Taschen is only producing 1500 of their exhaustive monograph on Jeff Koons. These coffee table books are numbered and signed by Koons. MASS MoCA has six of these very special books available for sale, Amazon.com only has two, Barnes & Noble has none. North Adams is the best place to get yours!

Koons’s exploitation of the banal, in the aggrandizement and/or embodiment of kitsch and pop imagery, has become his trademark; detractors may delight in their naysaying, but Koons’s work commands millions at auction and his position at the forefront of contemporary art is indisputable.This exhaustive monograph begins with a biographical essay by Interview magazine editor-in-chief Ingrid Sischy that puts his work into context and tells his personal story, as well as a text by Eckhard Schneider’s analyzing Koons from a European perspective. Arranged in chronological chapters by work groups, the main body of the book features art historian and critic Katy Siegel’s detailed analyses alongside hundreds of large-format images tracing Koons’s career from 1979 to today. Rounding off the book are an extended bibliography and a lavishly illustrated biography. Fans of Jeff Koons’s work will find in this publication not only a sumptuous book-object, but also the most comprehensive study of the artist’s work ever published.

Check out Lisa Foderaro’s piece in today’s NYT Escapes section about MASS MoCA and North Adams and our friends at Porches and Norman Rockwell Museum.  We are proud to be a “place of serious whimsy, where unusual artistic ideas are allowed to flourish.”