Now that it's been announced that the British Museum has surpassed the Tate Modern as being the UK's "most popular cultural attraction," Jonathan Jones is telling the massive institution to watch its back and not fall into the troubles shared by the Louvre and the Tate, namely doing too much to stay popular and forgetting what made it a location of memorable experiences in the first place. Jones top suggestion is to keep things smart and not assume you have to dumb everything down, just to please anyone and everyone. It's sound advice, but only time will tell if it winds up being taken. Here's a bit about what went wrong with that other museum in town:

By pandering to its crowds instead of trying to interest them in serious art, Tate Modern has sometimes seemed to be on a slippery slide of mass cultural folly. It has been too easy to go there and come away again without learning anything -- to see it as a bit of a laugh. It is nothing if not serious this year, with exhibitions of Cy Twombly and Mark Rothko. But why does it have to have its current display of street art painted all over it, like something that might decorate a Nike store? Museums don't need to pursue fashion that desperately.

You likely heard about the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee back in early 2006 when the project was announced with Pentagram and architect Jim Biber at its helm. While its 2008 opening seemed like a long way off way back then, the time has arrive to throw open the doors and see what the two have been up to. There are few random photos on the Museum's site, but there are also a couple more, and some additional information, over at Design Week. Here's a bit from them:

It will house a retail space, an annexe and a rally urban space which will enable bikers to ride through the grounds.

Visitors to the museum will see installations designed by Pentagram partner Abbott Miller, such as a parade of bikes at the museum's entrance which showcases the best designs from the Harley collection.

The colour palette inside uses the Harley colours of black, silver and orange, while the museum will use a variety of media including photographs, Harley-branded apparel and documents to engage visitors with the brand.

Also of note, should you want some more to aid your Pentagram fix, we highly recommend reading up on their blog about the new Radar magazine redesign by the firm's Luke Hayman and Kate Elazegui. Well worth seeing their genius at work.

A few days ago, we were back to picking on museums for being robbed and we wound up getting into a really great conversation with an UnBeige reader about the ins and outs of museum thefts (we've since taken that post down after this writer realized that some of the things we were picking on weren't grounded in very much fact). It was an interesting talk we had by e-mail, and so we thought it was fortunate when we ran into this story, "Art Theft Often an Impulse Crime," in the Sun-Sentinel. It goes over a lot of the details we'd spoken about, from the expert art thieves from days gone by now "replaced by strong-armed thugs" to all of the many security difficulties. So if you're like this writer and maybe not so keyed into why museums get got, this piece should serve as a nice primer.

Elsewhere in Europe, the much-anticipated BMW Museum finally reopened yesterday after a two year closure while the company completely overhauled the whole structure and had it redesigned by Atelier Brueckner GmbH and Art+Com AG. The plan is, of course, the same one held by the massive, also-new Mercedes Museum: to both show off the design legacy of the automaker, but also make you think, as you exit the museum's gift shop, "Man, I'm not sure what it is, but I really want to buy a BMW right now." Here's a bit about the building itself:

BMW will showcase its 90-year history in a 5,000-square-meter (53,800-square-foot) space next to its Munich headquarters...

...BMW's new museum combines the original 1973 circular "key" building, designed by Karl Schwanzer, with an adjacent low rectangular building that once housed conference rooms, a cafeteria and a parking garage.

The low building was gutted to create an interior urban landscape including seven independent exhibition houses and an indoor roadway.

As we reported a while back, one of the biggest museum news stories this year was the announcement that Philippe de Montebello had decided to retire as the director of the Met. Later we learned that he was heading to NYU to become the first professor to teach the history and culture of museums. But with all this focus on Philippe, what's been going on over at the Met in trying to replace the longtime director? Fortunately, Lee Rosenbaum has the whole scoop, or rather, predictions on who might land the high profile gig. Will it be former Whitney chief, Maxwell Anderson, who is now at the Indianapolis Museum of Art? Or the mysterious, globe-hopping Timothy Potts coming back from across the pond and his stay at Cambridge? Rosenbaum lays out all the potential players and weighs their pros and cons, making it seem like the kind of thing a person who likes to place wagers might be interested in (meet us in the alley out back if you want to talk more).

Now that Carrie Bradshaw's desk and computer are safely back in the hands of the Smithsonian, the institution will enjoy more film-related buzz with a cameo in the new Get Smart movie, starring Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway as accident-prone Maxwell Smart and his cooing yet skillful sidekick, Agent 99. Opening Friday, the film features updated versions of the duo's favorite gadgets (think dental floss detonator) and of CONTROL, the top secret U.S. government agency that employs them. Would you believe the Smithsonian as a front for spy headquarters? "In the TV series, when Max parked his car in front of that building and went in through that famous series of doors, they never said what the building was," director Peter Segal told the New York Post.

We thought if we put our CONTROL underneath the Smithsonian, then we could have him walk though the displays. We have a museum guide saying, "This is an exhibit of CONTROL, a 1960s spy organization that was disbanded at the end of the Cold War." So in there we put [Smart's] red Sunbeam Tiger and the shoe phone, and the Cone of Silence, and a few of the other things. There's a scene later in the movie where he needs to borrow a couple of items from the display.

Following up on a story from a couple of weeks ago, it looks like some sighs of relief are being had at the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology. After some sort of mysterious thief broke in during the dead of night, somehow outwitting the museum's high-tech security system, they made off with fifteen pieces, most of which were made of gold and created by Bill Reid. Now it's being reported that raids have been conducted somewhere outside of the city and a number of the pieces were recovered and said mysterious thief was put in custody. So we say to you, dear Mounties: Bravo! You've served Vancouver well.

RCMP said yesterday that they had executed search warrants in the Lower Mainland, which led to the recovery of at least some of the $2-million worth of art stolen from the museum.

"For the past four days, they've been working absolutely around the clock on this," RCMP spokesperson Constable Annie Linteau said.

Well here's kind of a funny one. So the Association of Art Museum Directors has assembled a big batch of museum directors from all over the country to put together a new set of guidelines and publish a report called "Acquisition of Archaeological Materials and Ancient Art." (PDF) Basically, it boils down to this message: "We need to stop stealing stuff." Apparently tired of museums getting raided by federal agents with guns, having to return pieces to the foreign countries they belong to, and seeing their names associated with employees who may or may not have been involved in slightly-less-than-legal dealings, the AAMD decided that it was high time to nip this behavior in the bud. This news, of course, came much to the chagrin of tomb robbers and cat burglars, all of whom rely on this market to put food on the table for their hungry tomb robbing, cat burglaring children. Our thoughts are with you during this difficult time, dear thieves. Here's a bit from Newsday:

The guidelines announced Wednesday by the Association of Art Museum Directors say that member museums should normally not acquire an ancient work of art unless research proves that the work was outside the country where it was discovered in 1970 or was legally exported from its country of discovery after 1970.

Objects without documentation going back that far are more likely to have been stolen or illegally dug up and smuggled out of their country of origin.

We love how flexible this all is. "...should not normally acquire..." That's a great line. "...should not normally acquire...unless it's really, really shiny."

Tonight the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., welcomes Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel, who will discuss his work as part of the museum's "Spotlight on Design" lecture series, sponsored by Lafarge. We popped in earlier today to catch a glimpse of the preparations (and the swell Saarinen retrospective, on view through June 23). Nouvel will speak in the museum's Great Hall, where those massive Corinthian columns frame hundreds of golden chairs set up for the occasion. We thought it particularly appropriate that staffers were testing the AV setup, a row of three jumbo screens arranged on a diagonal, with the TV show Heroes (see above photo). While we couldn't stick around Our Nation's Capital for the evening's festivities (word is that a recording of the lecture will soon be available here), we did manage to grab a Nouvel-autographed copy of The Singular Objects of Architecture, in which he spars with the late Jean Baudrillard on such topics as the Bilbao Guggenheim (notes Nouvel, "You can rely on Frank Gehry to surpise you!"), the significance of the World Trade Center, and the power of serendipity. One of our favorite little exchanges:

Nouvel: Do you still have a positive outlook on modernity?

Baudrillard: Did I ever?

Okay, we promised to layoff the Woodstock Museum coverage late last week, but sometimes we lie. We do it because we love you and don't want to offend your delicate nature. But we promise to keep things quick, because we know you're probably as ready to move on as we are. First up comes some interesting coverage by the Globe and Mail of this weekend's opening of the Museum at Bethel Woods, the many-millions-of-dollars new exhibit space built to honor the 1969 music festival. The review: pretty corporate and they decided to completely skip over some of the very minor things involved in that Woodstock weekend: drugs and sex. Our favorite quote: "So what are we to glean from the fact that this official history of the Sixties seems to have been edited by Disney?" Second up comes a look at the opening from the Chicago Tribune, who stuck pretty close to the press release and doesn't offer up much opinion, but does have some interesting bits about building the place. But the best part: true to form, they both prominently feature one Mr. Duke Devlin, which we found pretty funny, as will you too, should you want to go back and review our coverage of the coverage from last week.