PARIS—Frédéric Mitterrand, nephew of the late socialist president François Mitterrand, has been named France’s culture minister by President Nicolas Sarkozy, the Guardian reports. Mitterand, 61, is known as a sort of Renaissance arts man: He has been as an author, film director, creator of several arts and history television shows, and the host of Pink TV, a show on France’s first gay cable channel. Previous to the appointment, Mitterand spent the past eight months as the head of the Villa Médicis French cultural academy, based in Rome. The Guardian calls his appointment by the right-wing Sarkozy a “high symbolic move” and says Mitterand’s first assignment will be to attempt to curtail illegal downloading of music and movies in France.

LOS ANGELES—Terry Semel has been elected co-chairman of the board of trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and three new trustees have been added to the board, the museum announced. Semel, who is currently chairman and CEO of Windsor Media and previously held the same title at Yahoo!, will share the chairman position with Andrew Gordon, who began his tenure in 2007. The three new trustees are Gabriel Brener, chairman and CEO of investment company Brener International Group; Brian Grazer, an Academy Award–winning film and television producer and co-founder of Imagine Entertainment; and Dasha Zhukova, founder of the Moscow nonprofit art space the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture.

LONDON—Stephen Deuchar has been appointed the next director of the Art Fund, the U.K.’s largest independent art charity, according to Bloomberg. Deuchar, who is currently the director of Tate Britain and was also chairman of the 2009 Turner Prize jury, will begin his tenure at the Art Fund on January 4, 2010. Deuchar started at the Tate in 1998, going on to oversee the creation of Tate Britain in Millbank in 2000. He also led last year's campaign to raise £5.7 million to keep a Rubens sketch in the country. Before his work at Tate he served as a curator and exhibitions director for 12 years at London’s National Maritime Museum. At the Art Fund, Deuchar follows David Barrie, who resigned in May after serving as director for 17 years.

PITTSBURGH—The Silver Eye Center for Photography has chosen Ellen Fleurov as its next executive director, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. Fleurov, a scholar and curator, founded an arts consulting firm in 2002. Before that she was director of the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, from 1998 to 2001 and founding curator of the department of photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, from 1993 to 1997. She succeeds Linda Benedict-Jones, who left Silver Eye last December to become head of the new department of photography at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

SCARBOROUGH, England—Jan Bee Brown will be the new curator of exhibitions for the Scarborough Museums Trust, which encompasses the Scarborough Collections, Scarborough Art Gallery, and Rotunda – The William Smith Museum of Geology, the Scarborough Evening News reports. Brown has been a theater designer for 22 years in Britain, working with playwright and theater director Alan Ayckbourn since 1993. She is also an external assessor at the Edinburgh College of Art. She will be responsible for managing all of the exhibitions for the three arms of the trust.

Farewells
NEW YORK—Michael Martin, better known as the graffiti artist Iz the Wiz, died on June 17 at the age of 49, reports the Telegraph. Martin grew up in Queens, eventually becoming one of the most prominent graffiti artists of the 1970s and '80s. He started out primarily tagging and writing on subway cars but eventually moved to freight trains and walls when city authorities began cracking down on subway graffiti by the mid-1980s. He also helped establish the Phun factory, an area in which graffiti artists could paint legally, and appeared in the documentary film Style Wars. His work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the world. Martin suffered from prolonged kidney problems, which some speculate were caused by years of inhaling toxic spray-paint fumes and subway dust. He died from a heart attack at his brother’s home in Florida.