The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Board of Trustees voted unanimously last night to fire Paul Schimmel, their Chief Curator of over twenty years, ArtINFO reports. The publication received an anonymous email last night informing them of the decision, but have yet to hear from the MoCA. As of the time of this writing MoCA has not returned our request for comment.

According to the email, Schimmel was let go in conjunction with a number of curatorial assistants and other employees. This news comes just four years after wealthy benefactor Eli Broad pledged to donate up to $30 million over five years to the museum with “the expectation that the museum’s board and others join in this effort to solve the institution’s financial problems.” At the time, it was hailed as “the billionaire’s bailout” for the museum, which suffered losses in investments due to the stock market crash. Broad will match contributions to the endowment up to $15 million, and make annual donations of $3 million earmarked for exhibition support.

What do people talk about when they’re not typing? What does Tyler Green’s voice sound like? This week, I listened to a handful of podcasts to find out.

Over the past few days AFC commenters have expressed concerns about e-flux “curating” the .art domain, should the company win the bid. Well, e-flux co-founder Anton Vidokle says that’s not going to happen. The artist and writer responded to AFC commenters this weekend, explaining that art practitioners would simply be given priority over the .art domain should they want it. Vidokle’s comment can be read below or in our comment section.

After 16 years, the online-only publication Artnet Magazine will close today, reports Art in America. Sites in Germany, France and the United States will all cease publication and their three full-time editorial staff members, Walter Robinson, Rachel Corbett, and Emily Nathan, will leave the company. Robinson indicated in a note sent to Art Fag City that all of artnet’s editorial staff are seeking work.

The annual budget dance between the Bloomberg administration and New York City’s publicly-funded art institutions has become something of a sad tradition. “There were several years where things were much easier,” NYC Arts Coalition chairwoman Norma Munn recalls to AFC. But “things have gotten much worse” this year, Munn says, as the mayor’s office has attempted to slash the budget of the Department of Cultural Affairs, the government agency responsible for city support of the 34 Cultural Institution Groups and hundreds of nonprofit arts groups that Munn represents. For many of the arts’ largest supporters, this year’s budget dance is more than just a fight to restore funding to the DCA. The process itself has become the enemy, and its threat to New York’s homegrown art has become all too real.

Video artists are a troubled breed; nobody knows how to sell or collect their work. But heck, even MoMA has a ton of video in their collection, so maybe there’s a model out there that works. I sat down with Dara Birnbaum, the rare video artist who has both a gallery (Marian Goodman Gallery) and a distributor (Electronic Arts Intermix). That double life hasn’t deterred museums and collectors from taking an interest in her work. But, as I gleaned from a lengthy interview with Birnbaum, institutions don’t have a clue about fair compensation—not when MoMA only needs to pay $1,200 for one of her videos.

What follows are parts taken from a longer interview with Birnbaum. She’s grand in her ambitions, which include a steadfast commitment to unlimited editions, sticking with EAI, and stealing images. Oh, and we talk about Hennessy Youngman.

The neighborhood surrounding the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) buzzed last Tuesday as moderate-sized crowds mingled on Fulton Street in front of three newly unveiled public art installations. It was precisely the intended effect of BAMart:Public, an initiative to enliven underutilized public spaces with visual art (a fourth project is on view inside BAM’s Peter J. Sharp building). David Harper, the program’s curator, walked me through the installations and explained the project’s genesis along the way.

If a curator’s job is to conserve and care for what exactly are we doing with all those tumblrs? I’m not entirely sure, but since Rhizome’s Digital Conservator Ben Fino-Radin seems to do what the classic definition of curator does I figured I’d talk to him about it. It’s good preparation for the panel I’ll be on this weekend at the Woodstock Digital Festival titled, Making Art vs. Curating Art: The Peculiar Case of New Media but also this year’s Art & Reality Conference in Moscow, where I’ll be leading the online curating section of the conference. Needless to say, this will be the first of many interviews this summer, in which I talk to New Media art experts and layman alike about what curation means to them.

In Panama the most popular form of transport is, by far, the bus. Newer model, air conditioned coaches are available for longer hauls, but the most ubiquitous means of public transport comprises of a vast fleet of decades old, rankled, former school buses imported from the US. These buses, locally called chivas, are bastions of personality and flavor. The adventure over the bumpy roads comes complete with elaborate painting and decorations that individualize each bus, resembling a traveling circus or an art gallery on wheels.

The Kitchen has had a good couple of months program-wise. We raved about Virginia Overton’s site specific sculptures. We should have raved about their group show Creative Destruction, because it was one of the best shows of the year so far. Everyone raved over Matt Wolf’s screening of I Remember, A Film About Joe Brainard. We like what we’ve seen.

Accordingly, we tracked down The Kitchen’s Executive Director Tim Griffin and asked him a few questions.