— Cooper Hewitt Reopens: This Friday, following a massive renovation that took $91 million and three years to complete, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum will reopen with 60 percent more gallery space and a series of high-tech interactive programs. “My days have been bifurcated between an ambitious renovation of a 19th-century building and a complete rethinking of who we want to be as the only historic and contemporary design museum in the US,” said Cooper Hewitt director Caroline Baumann. Among the innovations set to debut is “the Pen,” a technology designed by Local Projects with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which visitors can take through the museum, controlling projections on new wall-sized screens and scanning works to create their own virtual collection that they can access later online. [TAN, ARTnews]
— Ferguson Museums Preserve Protest Art: Artists in Ferguson, Missouri have been painting uplifting murals on the plywood that covers damage done to local businesses in the wake of the grand jury’s failure to indict Darren Wilson — and now, the Missouri History Museum and Regional Art Commission are trying to preserve some of that art, possibly for a future exhibition. Still, not everyone in Ferguson is thrilled with the idea: “It’s not the history you’d want to remember,” said local business owner Varun Madaksira, whose restaurant burned in the post-verdict protests, while activist Tony Rice asserted, “It’s an attempt to whitewash the pain the community has suffered.” [Columbia Missourian]
— Helly Nahmad Leaves Jail Early: Though the art dealer was sentenced to a year in prison for running an illegal gambling operation from his apartment in Trump Tower, he was released to a Bronx halfway house after only five months in jail. [Observer]
— National Gallery Names First Female Chair: Documentarian Hannah Rothschild will take over the British institution when Mark Getty ends his term next August. [Guardian]
— Detroit Case Raises Lasting Questions: The fraught decision over the Detroit Institute of Art’s collection in light of the city’s bankruptcy introduces some precedent for considering “whether the value of artwork is excepted from cold-calculated monetization of assets for the benefit of creditors and whether the value of an asset can be entwined with issues larger than money, such as pride, history, and culture,” writes Above the Law’s Madeleine Giansanti Cag. Meanwhile, the museum is doing its best to raise the steep $350 million contribution asked of it by the court. [Above the Law, Bloomberg]
— Art is Basically Like Chipotle: Marion Maneker draws a parallel between the current path of the high-end art market and the recent popularizing of high-end fast food (e.g., the rise of Chipotle over McDonalds), asserting that art should follow food’s path in “taking once abstruse and artisanal products and making them common fare.” [Quartz]
— Eighteen Italian artists — including Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino, Giuseppe Penone, and Gaetano Pesce — will help design a soup kitchen that will open alongside the Milan Expo in 2015. [TAN]
— The MFA Boston has awarded its 2015 Maud Morgan Prize to Marilyn Arsem, marking the first time the $10,000 award has ever been given to a performance artist. [Press release]
— In the wake of No-Shave November, London’s Somerset House is hosting a photo exhibition dedicated to beards. [Guardian]
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