For the fifth year in a row, the New York City Council has spared the arts from massive spending cuts. In the finalized budget for the new Fiscal Year that passed last week, New York City has committed to spending $156 million on supporting the arts through its thirty-four cultural institutions and hundreds of smaller not-for-profit artists groups throughout its new fiscal year, which began on Sunday. This is a $4 million increase from last year’s budget and, it should go without saying, a very good thing.

The Corcoran is hiring. According to an internal listing, the museum is soliciting proposals from real estate firms with previous experience in the “disposition of large commercial buildings” to help the “Corcoran with the possible sale of its historic headquarters facility.” It sure looks like the Corcoran is seriously considering selling off its museum, which currently sits on the west side of the White House lawn. In public, the museum denies making a decision one way or the other.

This summer just got a whole lot more fun more fun thanks to Bravo. The company announced last week that their new reality show “docu-drama”, Gallery Girls, will premiere August 13th, and it’s looks like it’s going to be hi-larious!

This Paul Schimmel news just keeps getting worse. News broke Wednesday night that L.A. MoCA had fired Schimmel, its chief curator, but no additional details were made public. Now ArtINFO is reporting that they won’t be replacing him. “[MOCA's] curatorial vision will be implemented by director Jeffrey Deitch, the curatorial team, and guest curators,” a museum representative told ArtINFO.

This week in Cheslea, we saw shows at Aysa Geisberg, I-20, Leo Koenig, Andrea Rosen, Gagosian, Mary Boone, Foxy Production, Wallspace, and James Cohan. This marks week one on our crusade to cover different galleries each trip.

“A portable climate.” That’s what Ralph Waldo Emerson called coal. “Every basket is power and civilization,” he wrote in 1860. Coal is not only a portable climate but “it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted,” Emerson added, noting “a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta.”

Writing 100 years later, Thomas McGrath contrasts coal fire to wood fire in his poem “A Coal Fire in Winter.” With a coal fire, there is “[s]omething old and tyrannical burning there.” This is “heat / From the time before there was fire.” Coal, compressed plant matter accumulated over 100,000 years, is the legacy of a “sunken kingdom” and its flames are “carbon serpents of bituminous gardens.”

Coal—as fuel, as fossil, as material, as metaphor, as “black gold,” as historical force—is the starting point of Manifesta 9, situated in the main building of the former Waterschei mining facility in Genk, Belgium.

I made up my entire review of Christian Jankowski’s piece “Review.” Thankfully, no one will read it: it’s sealed in a bottle for display, along with the handwritten responses of more than 80 other critics. The piece is, itself, the reviews. Currently, they’re arranged in groupings that resemble small islands on the floor of Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

What a fucking mess. MoCA fired their Chief Curator Paul Schimmel Wednesday, and the outcry amongst critics has been loud and nearly universal. Art blogger Tyler Green says the museum’s decision is a loss for everyone, not just MoCA. He cites the Museum’s decision to postpone their exhibition “Ends of The Earth,” while privileging the Mercedes-Benz marketing opportunity, as evidence that they don’t value “historicizing exhibitions.” We had similar sentiments yesterday when we noted the museum’s transparent attempts at capitalizing on Hollywood; MoCA scrapped a Jack Goldstein exhibition in favor of a show by the late actor Dennis Hopper in 2010.