Sylvain Amic, the president of the Établissement public des musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie (the governmental body that oversees both institutions) since April 2024, puts it plainly: “A museum’s mission is to radiate—to make known and to share its collections with the greatest number of people—so there is a contradiction in the idea of needing to limit how many can come.”
Years in the making and 300,000 square feet in scale, the museum has been steadily acquiring top-dollar artworks, including a Frida Kahlo self-portrait, a Robert Colescott painting of George Washington, and archives related to Black cinema and Judith F. Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles.
For a recent show about China’s Bronze Age, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco invited a group of Bay Area content creators who specialise in textile and costume design for a private tour with the exhibition’s curator.
The Brighton pavilion has been a conservation nightmare ever since the early 19th century, when the architect John Nash completed the transformation of a relatively modest classical mansion into a fantasy Oriental palace for the wildly extravagant Prince Regent, the future George IV.
