Free Republic

Guggenheim's Scott Minerd made frequent media appearances and commentary on markets ... Guggenheim managing partner and global CIO Scott Minerd has passed away unexpectedly, the financial services company announced Thursday. Minerd died Wednesday afternoon from a heart attack during a regular workout routine, the company said. He was 63 years old. ... Minerd enjoyed notoriety outside his company through media appearances and commentary on market forces for news outlets, including FOX Business Network.

A group of current and former employees working to denounce racism and sexism at the Guggenheim Museum is led by “disgruntled” white women who are “intimidating” employees of color to join their cause, sources told The Post. The group, A Better Guggenheim, claims it is holding the museum “accountable for systemic racism and a toxic work environment.” Members, including a leader who was furloughed and was not hired back, want to force the resignation of the institution’s top executives.

Amid protests across the country in the wake of George Floyd's death, a University of Alabama at Birmingham professor provided a step-by-step guide along with a figure drawing explaining how protesters can "topple" Confederate monuments. Sarah Parcak, a well-known archaeologist who received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2020, shared on Sunday "handy" information about how to destroy public property she considered "racist." "PSA For ANYONE who might be interested in how to pull down an obelisk* safely from an Egyptologist who never ever in a million years thought this advice might come in handy," Parcak tweeted. "*might be masquerading as a...

New York's Guggenheim museum has turned down a request from President Donald Trump to borrow Van Gogh's work for the White House - instead offering him a gold toilet, media reports say. But the Guggenheim suggested a "solid, 18-karat toilet" could be offered as an alternative. The White House has made no comment.

The Guggenheim Museum offered President Trump a solid gold toilet from its collection as a "long-term loan" for the White House. Trump and first lady Melania had asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting from the museum, but the Guggenheim responded that it could not accommodate the request and offered the toilet instead, according to The Washington Post. “We are sorry not to be able to accommodate your original request, but remain hopeful that this special offer may be of interest," curator Nancy Spector wrote in an email to the White House, according to the Post.

The Guggenheim Museum has reportedly turned down a White House request to borrow a Van Gogh painting, and has instead offered the Trump administration the use of a golden toilet. The White House had asked the Guggenheim, based in New York, to borrow Landscape With Snow, Van Gogh’s 1888 work depicting a man and a dog walking through a field. But the Guggenheim’s chief curator, Nancy Spector, turned down the request, the Washington Post reported on Thursday. Instead she said the White House could loan an 18-carat toilet – an installation by artist Maurizio Cattelan. The fully functioning toilet, titled...

Obama gave taxpayer money to jarring ‘dog-fighting pitbulls’ art exhibit and even libs are horrifiedAmerican taxpayers are often shocked to discover the strange places their money goes. One of the inevitable issues with big government is that public money is spent on the pet causes of whoever is in power–and citizens rarely find out about it. In a jarring case of wasteful Obama-era spending that even liberals are criticizing, the federal government gave $300,000 to a “modern art” exhibit in New York’s Guggenheim museum that features eight aggressive pit bulls strapped down to wooden tread mills facing each other....

When DCs’ Legends of Tomorrow returns for a third season on The CW later this year, a new superhero will enter the fold in the form of a Muslim computer hacker from the future: Zari Adrianna Tomaz, who will be played by Tala Ashe.... Legends executive producer Marc Guggenheim spoke about the casting and referenced the 2016 Presidential election, Donald Trump’s presidency and the policies that ultimately established restrictions on travel to the United States from six predominantly Muslim countries. “You might have heard there was this election,” Guggenheim explained. “Not to get political, but something that we all gravitated...

t’s a Guggen-crime. The Upper East Side museum banned a Brooklyn high school for life after its students were deemed too rowdy on a recent visit — a move that some call discipline and others discrimination. A group of about 80 kids from Downtown Brooklyn’s Science Skills Center HS were kicked out after just 20 minutes after a student allegedly spat off the museum’s swirling rotunda lobby and another threw a penny off its winding walkway. The coin was rumored to have hit a security guard. It was only a handful of troublemakers, but the whole group of ninth- and...

RUSH: We're gonna start in Dallas. This is Neil. Neil, it's great to have you on the program, sir. Hello. CALLER: Rush? RUSH: Yeah. CALLER: It's so obvious of what's going on here with Sterling. It was construed. It was set up. Somebody infiltrated him through his girlfriend -- RUSH: Oh, no. Wait a minute now. CALLER: -- and told her what to do, told her how to do it. RUSH: Don't do this to me, Neil. (laughing) CALLER: They want his team, Rush! RUSH: Neil, don't do this to me. CALLER: They want his team. RUSH: Do you realize...

Over the past few years, I have often complained about a hidebound culture that prevents many newspapers from responding to the challenges of new technology. There is, however, another hidebound American institution that is also finding it difficult to respond to new challenges: our big-city schools. Today, for example, the United States is home to more than 2,000 dysfunctional high schools. They represent less than 15% of American high schools yet account for about half of our dropouts. When you break this down, you find that these institutions produce 81% of all Native American dropouts, 73% of all African-American dropouts,...

After nearly seven years on the Strip, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the Venetian will close its doors May 11. Guggenheim officials made the announcement Wednesday and said the museum will continue to partner with the Venetian on “a number of projects,” but wouldn’t elaborate. The museum will offer free admission beginning Friday until it closes in May. With the closure — and Steve Wynn’s dismantling of his own fine arts gallery — the only remaining Strip art gallery is at the Bellagio, where the effort to bring fine art to the Las Vegas masses began in 1998. The Guggenheim...

Fred Thompson drew on his Senate intelligence experience to help a $3 billion investment group protect its wealthy investors’ cash from market fluctuations caused by international dust-ups and security threats. Guggenheim Advisors, which invests a small group of ultra-rich clients’ cash in hedge funds, was good for Thompson, too. It paid him a healthy stipend to serve on an advisory board and boosted his presidential campaign by giving him a platform to explore a candidacy and an early infusion of campaign cash when he jumped into the race. Thompson’s affiliation with Guggenheim in some ways bucks his efforts to cast...

Fred Thompson is, of course, very well known for his career in Hollywood and for his tenure in the U.S. Senate. More opaque, though, have been Thompson's other ventures. Yesterday, with the release of Thompson's personal financial disclosure, comes the revelation that in addition to lobbying work he has done for a British firm and some dabbling in Tennessee real estate, he has also been serving on the board of Guggenheim Advisors a New York-based financial management firm that serves a select group of the nation's well-to-do elite. Thompson is paid between $100,000 and $1 million a year by Guggenheim....

Performance artist Marina Abramovic really wanted to present, during a week of appearing at the New York Guggenheim Museum, her most radical work, called “Rhythm 0.” Performed only once in Naples in 1974, its premise was terrifyingly simple: She agreed to stand in a gallery for six hours while anyone who came in could choose any of 72 objects around her - including knives, scissors, a needle, a loaded gun - and do anything they wanted to her with the objects. It was her only work in which she essentially ceded control over her body, and over the pain to...

The finest collection of 20th-century western art outside Europe and America has been gathering dust in storage. Why? Because it's owned by the Islamic Republic of Iran. But now, Christopher de Bellaigue reports, these spectacular works are finally being displayed in Tehran An Iranian woman stands in front of a huge Picasso, Painter and his Model, on show at Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art. Standing in his studio, illuminated by subdued pools of coloured light, the artist is depicted as an extension of the inanimate objects around him. He has been reduced to a series of mostly straight lines; his...

He's Departing At Last, but It May Be Too Late: Guggenheim Museum Director Thomas Krens is out So the high-wire act is finally over. Seventeen years after becoming director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Thomas Krens is out, effective Oct. 1. His replacement is chief curator and longtime deputy director Lisa Dennison. Mr. Krens will keep his titles of chief executive and "chief artistic officer" of the eponymous foundation, but he has been bumped upstairs, stripped of day-to-day control of the museums that are the foundation's raison d'etre and main focus. This departure is a genuine art world event,...

Receive FREE updates by email: Who is Peter Lewis? By Arne Steinberg December 3, 2003 Billionaires Peter Lewis and George Soros have each pledged $10 million to America Coming Together, a newly formed political organization designed to defeat President Bush in the next presidential election. But who is Peter Lewis, the less well known of these two money men? A billionaire, Lewis is the chairman and chief executive officer of Progressive Corporation, the fourth-largest U.S. personal auto insurer, which insures high-risk motorists who can’t get insurance anywhere else. Stories in the media depict Lewis as a philanthropist who has...

NEW YORK (AP) - A plan to build another Guggenheim Museum in the city has been scrapped because of economic constraints, the foundation in charge of the museum announced Monday. In an e-mail, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced that it, the city and the state's Economic Development Corp. had pulled out of the $950 million project because the economy made it "not realistic at this time." Unveiled in April 2000, the 40- to 45-story structure on three piers would have overlooked the East River in lower Manhattan. The design, by Frank Gehry, would have included 575,000 square feet of...

The Guggenheim museum recently announced the finalists for the Hugo Boss prize, which is worth $50,000 and given every two years to an artist whose work “represents a significant development in contemporary art.” The finalists represent contemporary art, all right, and not only in the sense that their works are mostly silly. As Aldous Huxley knew, they are also works of artistic cowardice. Here are a few of the Guggenheim finalists, as described by the New York Times: Francis Alÿs, “who deals with the absurdity of urban life through his collaborations with local artists and craftsmen in a variety of...