– Cooper Union Trustees Approve Tuition: The board of trustees of Cooper Union, the art, architecture, and engineering university in New York's East Village where every student has received a full scholarship since 1859, voted to reject a set of alternative proposals to remain and will begin charging students $20,000 in the fall. "The Working Group plan puts forward a number of recommendations that are worth pursuing under any financial model," the board of trustees said in a statement. "However, we believe that the contingencies and risks inherent in the proposals are too great to supplant the need for new revenue sources. Regrettably, tuition remains the only realistic source of new revenue in the near future." [Gothamist, Reuters]
– The Met Goes for a Touchdown: The Metropolitan Museum is tapping into Superbowl fever: Just in time for the big game on February 2, it is opening a pop-up exhibition tracking the history of football through the vast collection of roughly 300,000 vintage trading cards it received from late collector Jefferson Burdick. "Commercially printed lithographs are part of our printed visual culture," said Freyda Spira, assistant curator in the Met's department of drawings and prints. "It's viewed within the spectrum of what art is." The exhibition, "Gridiron Greats," runs January 24-February 10. [AP]
– Pope’s Motorcycle For Sale: Pope Francis is putting his Harley Davidson motorcycle up for auction in Paris to benefit Roman Catholic charity Caritas Roma. The 1,585cc Dyna Super Glide (the make popular with the Hell’s Angels) was a gift to the Pope on Harley Davidson’s 110th anniversary and the 77-year-old Pope "is not thought to have ridden the Harley." Pope Francis did however sign the gas tank and the bike is expected to bring between $16,400 and $20,500. [AFP]
– Israeli Curators Join Nazi Loot Task Force: In what the Times of Israel is calling an "unprecedented step," Yad Vashem senior curator Yehudit Shendar and Israel Museum European art curator Shlomit Steinberg have been appointed to join the task force that will deal with Cornelius Gurlitt’s Nazi loot trove. [Times of Israel]
– Marcos Aide Gets Jail Time: Imelda Marcos’s former assistant, 75-year-old Vilma Bautista, has been sentenced to two to six years of jail time for the attempted sale of the Philippine government’s Impressionist masterpieces. [NYT]
– De Blasio Yet to Name Culture Commissioner: New Mayor Bill de Blasio has yet to appoint a new New York City commissioner for cultural affairs, leaving people to speculate that it could be actress Cynthia Nixon, Queens Museum director Tom Finkelpearl, or executive director of New York's Design Trust for Public Space, Susan Chin. [AiA]
– MoMA Backlash Continues: "The Museum With a Bulldozer’s Heart"; "MoMA: A Museum That Has Lost Its Way"; "New York's Museum of Modern Art: a case study in how to ruin an institution."
– City officials in Helsinki, where plans for a Guggenheim Museum outpost were voted down in 2012, have voted to set aside a parcel of land in the South Harbor area that could eventually house the Guggenheim Helsinki. [NYT]
– Former chief curator of El Museo del BarrioChus Martinez has been appointed as the head of the Institute of Art at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. [Artforum]
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