From Bob Dylan to Zaha Hadid: how new artistic director Shai Baitel is shaking up the Modern Art Museum Shanghai
From our UK edition
Lockdown affects us all in different ways. During New York’s first lockdown renowned art creative Shai Baitel, recently appointed artistic director of Modern Art Museum Shanghai (MAM), felt so starved of creative inspiration that he begged anyone he knew with access to an art gallery near his New York City home to let him visit – just him, socially distanced – just so he could get his artistic fillip. ‘Everything was shut down from mid-March and by mid-May I started calling friends of mine who were owners and directors of galleries, asking them just to open for me so I could go and see the art,’ he says. ‘No-one else was there and I would walk between the artwork and actually sniff the frames. I was so art-deprived I couldn’t believe it.
