August 2006 Archives

to cover the fall openings of the new Boston ICA and the new addition to the Denver Art Museum---the first completed buildings in the U.S. designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Daniel Libeskind, respectively.

The most recent of my many Mainstream Media articles on museum openings (in two parts) is here and here. (Yes, I'm still cheerfully writing for the Wall Street Journal, but these plums, alas, went to distinguished colleagues.)

SOMEONE must need the brilliant insights that only CultureGrrl can provide! If this shameless plea actually elicits an editor, it could be a blogging first. You can contact me here.

COMING NEXT: CultureGrrl begs for a book contract. (Just kidding.)

The Museum of Modern Art decided that transparency was the best policy during its recent conservation of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", one of its most iconic works. MoMA provided continuing updates about the progress of that restoration on its website.

But the museum has been more discreet about its facelifts for other aging modern masterpieces. When I had asked her in early July about why Matisse's "The Swimming Pool" had been off view for so long, Ruth Kaplan, MoMA's communications head, e-mailed this enigmatic reply:

Our response to your question is: With more than 150,000 works in the collection, not all can be on view continuously. There are a number of factors that determine what is on view at any given time.

MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, who on Tuesday candidly described to me the reasons why the Matisse had vanished, also provided details about important restorations already underway:

I've been talking to conservation about a program of dealing with major works. We have a Matisse list. We've almost finished The Piano Lesson, which is why that's not on view. The discolored varnish has been taken off. We've been getting off some of the wax that came through in the reline, and all the old inpainting has come off. What's left to do is to make some decisions about any restoration, because there were some losses. Some of them have to be filled in.

We took the Beckmann triptych down, and that's very much changed. It's much brighter. So that's going to come back. And the Ensor "Tribulations of Saint Anthony" has been redone. The reason these things were never done before is that they've never come off the walls. And I think you have to make some choices here. It seems to me one has to accept the fact that it's important to do this and when they come back, they're going to be much better than when they left.

Or, at least, different.

In a previous post, I lamented the long-time disappearance from the Museum of Modern Art's galleries of Matisse's late masterpiece, The Swimming Pool, a nine-panel mural in two parts (each 7 1/2 feet long), consisting of gouache-on-paper cutouts, pasted on white painted paper mounted on burlap.

Yesterday I caught up with my favorite MoMA curator, Matisse expert John Elderfield, at the contemporary-art press preview. Here's what he told me about the Matisse:

The burlap on which it's done has darkened very significantly. It's a complicated issue because when you look at photographs of what it was like in his [Matisse's] apartment, it's clear that the burlap which it's on isn't the burlap that was on the wall of the apartment. I think what happened is that when the apartment was dismantled, they took the elements off the wall and put them on separate panels of burlap. They gave it a new background from the one it was before....

Sometimes these big things are ones which you tend to keep pushing away a little bit. I'm grateful to you for reminding me that this is something I've got to deal with this year.

is not by selling it, if the piece is of museum quality. If a museum can't use a work that a sister institution would be pleased to exhibit, what ought to happen is this.

In a previous post, reacting to comments made to me by curator Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan Museum, CultureGrrl opined:

Collection-sharing IS an option---one that should be more seriously explored by all museums with a superabundance of riches.

Now, as my fellow ArtsJournal blogger Tyler Green reports, the Met has loaned to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas an Eduardo Chillida that Tinterow had originally hoped to sell from the collection. Let's hope that this happy outcome serves as a model solution for over-stuffed storage space.

The sight of pioneering modern dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, wheeled into today's MoMA press preview by the museum's president emerita, Agnes Gund, to see himself dance in Nam June Paik's 1993 untitled 15-television piece, with player piano. Cunningham and his frequent co-conspirator, composer John Cage, also featured in the videos, "shared with Paik an interest in chance, accident and humor," as the wall label reminded us.

"Merce was over the moon to rediscover this piece," the show's curator, Joachim Pissarro, told the assembled art writers. Cunningham is the last surviving member of this legendary trio.

Now that I've returned, disgruntled, from the press preview for the Museum of Modern Art's latest reinstallation of its sprawling second-floor contemporary-art space (tellingly entitled, "Out of Time"), it's high time to add an 11th item to my "Top 10 List" of things I dislike about the new MoMA (posted here and here):

The concept behind MoMA's contemporary galleries urgently needs to be rethought.

The less said about this particular contemporary installation, the better. Although nominally about "some of the tensions embedded in recent experiences of time," "Out of Time" is actually a Seinfeldian show-about-nothing. "Time" is interpreted in so many different ways as to become a meaningless governing concept for disparate works that huddle together in various small groups that have little to say to one another---"Passing Time," "Time's Impact on the Creative Process," "Irrational Models of Time," "Time as a Repository of History and Memory" (this, the strongest section, for its political punch).

For the life of me, I could not fathom what Sarah Morris' and Frank Stella's hard-edged geometric paintings had to do with time, other than showing that the same concerns have occupied different artists working at different times. Not that there's anything wrong with that (as Seinfeld might say). MoMA did a better job on the subject of time not that long ago---its 2002 "Tempo" show, organized by then adjunct curator Paulo Herkenhoff, at MoMA QNS.

But there's a bigger problem, which is alluded to at the end of the new installation's introductory wall text:

The history of contemporary art is in the process of being written, updated, and revised, and for this reason the presentation in the Contemporary Galleries changes at least once a year.

Because MoMA refuses to go out on a limb and say that certain works in its contemporary collection are so important that they deserve to be on (more or less) permanent view, we are at the mercy of the whims of different curators possessed of varying degrees of expertise and insight about contemporary art. This contemporary cop-out seems to say that the art of of the last few decades is more transient and less for-the-ages than the masterpieces upstairs. Judgments of quality, however controversial, can be revised but need to be made.

That's not to say that there should not also be changing displays; there's enough room on the second floor for both. Nor must the "permanent" contemporary works always remain on view; there may be times when the entire space is needed for an important temporary contemporary show.

But what we must NOT have is the situation we had this summer: No contemporary art was on display in those galleries for a period of seven weeks, while the previous installation was dismantled and the current one installed. Think of all those tourists who come to MoMA for a definitive account of contemporary art, get almost nothing, and can't come back.

Meanwhile, we're stuck with the current lackluster show for seven months---enough time to come up with a better plan. Actually, this is the second-floor show we can look forward to next summer. And, I must say, it's about time!

Is this tacky, or what? I'm not even going to try to satirize it. I'll leave that to my blogging betters.

Here's the second part of my article, appearing on the Leisure & Arts page in today's Wall Street Journal. (Here's Part I.)

The most grandiose extravagance [in the renovation of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery], marred by some of the biggest cost overruns and delays, is still a work-in-progress: Now estimated to cost some $62 million, all privately funded, is the new Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard, an enclosed plaza with an undulating glass canopy designed by British architect Norman Foster. The new gala-friendly indoor atrium was supposed to open simultaneously with the museums, but instead is just a jumble of scaffolding. Now expected to be completed in late 2007, its construction was set back by a long delay in getting necessary government approvals. This rescheduling also affected other aspects of the project, including roof construction, costing some 18 months and an additional $8 million to $10 million in construction costs, according to Ms. Broun. Much of the added expense came from the rise in the price of steel during the delay and from the cost of keeping large cranes on site, but idle, until the project was finally allowed to proceed.

All this was happening, she noted, at a time when "there were fairly serious cuts across all the Smithsonian staff. We've maintained strong support for the building and for increased security needs, especially in the wake of 9/11. But the tradeoff has been very large cuts across the programmatic side of the institution... We've lost over 20% of the federal support that we enjoyed when we closed."

While the structure was shored up, the SAAM's professional core was shattered: Half of its staff at the time of its closure has permanently left the building. "I think that for some people," Ms. Broun observed, "it was a long time to be without a museum." The only upside of this exodus was that it allowed the museum to make budget-dictated staff cuts through attrition, rather than layoffs.

Ms. Broun admits that she found the delays exasperating and says that the defection of staff caused her "a period of grieving." But she now consoles herself with the belief that "the project is better because we took more time to get it right." She is justifiably proud of the new Lunder Conservation Center, where visitors can watch conservators at work behind glass walls, and the new Luce Foundation Center for American Art, which provides open storage for about 3,300 works that would otherwise be unseen by the public. But the display capacity of the SAAM's permanent-collection galleries -- some 940 objects -- is little changed: Although most office areas have now been converted to gallery space, wall space in other areas has been reduced by uncovering windows and removing interior walls. "We are showing many more sculptures but probably the same number of paintings as before," Ms. Broun said.

Both museums have expanded their displays devoted to the pre-Colonial era -- the first chapter of their roughly chronological narratives. The SAAM shows more decorative arts than before; the NPG has dropped its rule that the personages on its walls had to be dead 10 years before they could be admitted to the pantheon. The SAAM's folk art collection and the NPG's "America's Presidents" gallery retain their special popular appeal. But despite their best efforts to coexist, the two museums remain uneasy bedfellows, due to conflicting curatorial standards: The SAAM leans toward works of artistic merit that help to illuminate the American experience. The NPG's primary criterion for works on display is the importance of the sitter, not the quality of the art.

"I personally don't do brushstrokes," declared Marc Pachter, a cultural historian who assumed the directorship of the NPG in July 2000, after it had already closed to the public.

Nevertheless, the Portrait Gallery has its fair share of great art, and the American Art Museum its fair share of great portraits. Together they provide their tourist-heavy audiences with a sometimes disparate, often complementary historical sweep. It's good to welcome America's art back on display in America's capital.

As you know, I can't link to the Wall Street Journal's subscribers-only site, but I AM allowed to post the text of my article. I'll again do it in two parts, so as not to tax the short attention spans of hyperactive blog readers. (It's on today's Leisure & Arts page, Page D5, for those of you who still turn pages, instead of clicking hyperlinks.)

Washington
The recent top-to-bottom reinvention of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery was not a mere renovation, as it's been called, but a meticulous stripping and rebuilding of the interiors and infrastructure of the Patent Office Building -- a 19th-century Greek Revival structure, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 -- that has housed both museums since 1968. While the results of the remodeling are impressive, the costs, in terms of time, staff losses and financial outlay, are problematic, especially at a time when the museums' umbrella organization, the Smithsonian Institution, is seriously strapped for operating funds. The protracted project caused the national capital's two quintessentially American museums to shut down for more than six years.

No effort or expense has been spared to replicate the original materials and designs of what was the third public building constructed in Washington, after the White House and the Capitol. Originally designed in the 1830s by Robert Mills, the structure was partially rebuilt once before, after a devastating fire in 1877. That construction cost $246,000. This time, the cost was some $266 million. By way of comparison, the construction cost for the last completely new Smithsonian museum erected on the Mall, the less than two-year-old, 250,000-square-foot National Museum of the American Indian, was $199 million.

The rebuilding of the SAAM and NPG was backed by $166 million in federal money. The rest came from private donors, including a $45 million, zero-hour financial dispensation by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, secured a mere nine months before the opening. This timely intervention was repaid by affixing a private name to both federal museums, now jointly called "the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture."

Ironically, Mr. Reynolds, a media mogul who died in 1993, had no connection at all with the project, nor with the museums that now bear his name. The Smithsonian donation was engineered by the foundation's chairman, Fred W. Smith, Mr. Reynolds's professional colleague for more than 42 years. In 2001, after learning from a Wall Street Journal article about the possible sale of Gilbert Stuart's "Landsdowne" portrait of George Washington, which had been on long-term loan to the NPG, Mr. Smith had arranged for the Reynolds Foundation to donate $30 million to the museum for the purchase, multicity tour and reinstallation of the iconic full-length likeness of the first president.

On Jan. 3, 2000, when the SAAM and NPG closed their doors to the public and opened them to construction workers, the ambitions were relatively modest: to replace deteriorated and outmoded systems of heating, air conditioning, plumbing and wiring, at a cost of about $60 million, and to reopen at least part of the facility to the public within three years.

All that changed, according to Elizabeth Broun, the SAAM's longtime director, soon after the appointment of Lawrence Small as the Smithsonian's secretary, its chief administrative post. In early 2000, Ms. Broun recounted, he toured the premises and said: "This is a great landmark building for all America... It should be a dazzling showcase." The museums soon found themselves engaging an international array of skilled artisans: English craftsmen turned out thousands of handmade encaustic tiles, reproducing the patterns on the floor of the building's Great Hall. Hungarian workers were hired to perform the delicate task of laying these tiles along the majestic two-block-long corridor.

Windows and skylights were uncovered, and for the replacement of some 588 windows, the museums ordered hand-blown glass from Poland, "to simulate the slight irregularities of old panes," as described in the "Grand Opening" brochure. The brochure also states that "a new two-acre copper roof was installed, duplicating the 19th-century design and materials as closely as possible." Additionally, "more than 12,000 square feet of original marble floor pavers were restored in the museum's hallways."

In this new, improved art palace, even the plaster is "a masterpiece," in the words of Ms. Broun. "We had a team of people from Bolivia who oversaw some of the training."

[If you just can't stand the suspense of waiting for Part II, invest in a copy of the WSJ. As for me, I'm off to the press preview of MoMA's latest contemporary-galleries reinstallation!]

Sotheby's has just concluded another chapter in the continuing saga of former price-fixing collusion with Christie's auction house. This Canada-based story will hit the newspapers (including the WSJ) tomorrow, but the most complete account I've seen on the web so far comes from CBC News. According to that report:

The probe turned up no evidence that the price-fixing conspiracy affected sales held in Canada, according to the [Canadian Competition] Bureau. However, investigators believe Sotheby's may have induced Canadian sellers to put their property on the block in the U.S. or in other locations where the fixed commission rates had been in effect.

No penalties for that, apparently, except defraying the $722,000 ($800,000 Canadian) investigative costs of Federal Court's bureau. In 2001, Sotheby's and Christie's agreed to a $512-million settlement in the class-action antitrust lawsuit that alleged collusion on commissions in the U.S. They later agreed to pay and additional $20 million each to settle a lawsuit that charged them with conspiring to fix commissions at auctions conducted outside the U.S.

Okay, enough frivolity. Let's get serious: Catch my piece about the prodigal Smithsonian on the "Leisure & Arts" page of tomorrow's WSJ. (Or read it, for free, in tomorrow's next exciting installment of CultureGrrl.)

As usual, Joyce beats her mom to the cultural punch.

She just got word that Bob Dylan, the ex-Wilbury I missed in Williamstown, will be playing in State College, the town in the middle of nowhere in which Joyce has just settled in for an extended grad-school stint in acoustics engineering.

She's getting herself a ticket.

But Bob, did you know that my brilliant and talented daughter, now at Penn State, has had four years' experience in setting up for famous bands, as a member of the Cornell Concert Commission? Don't you need an acoustics ace for that soundcheck?

The director of MASS MoCA, Joseph Thompson, gives his tongue-in-cheek retort in the tortured-tree controversy:

As you might imagine, we had that debate! In this case---one in a hundred, I assure you---the curators lost and I won, and instead of replacing the trees with a new work (as Nato [Thompson] and Susan [Cross] argued we should, taking your side), we rejuvenated. We renewed.

And besides, they are not being tortured, they are being liberated: How can you not realize that all trees aspire to have their roots freed from the cloying, smothering earth?

The experiment has ended. Long live the experiment.

Those of us who infrequently visit MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., might never notice the "reinstallation" of Natalie Jeremijenko's Tree Logic---the six maples, hung upside down in the entry courtyard ever since the museum opened in 1999. (At that time, I wrote in my June 1 WSJ review, "I have seen the future, and it's MASS MoCA.")

But thanks to a piece by Timothy Cahill in the September 2006 issue of Berkshire Living magazine (articles available in hotel rooms, but not online), I learned that the five surviving, stressed-out trees were removed last spring and replanted on the hillside behind the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. The ones I pitied at MASS MoCA yesterday were Jeremijenko's new victims.

Some other artist should have been given a chance to perpetrate creative mayhem in the courtyard. The original experiment, described on the museum's website (which does not mention the latest development), has been completed and the results are in. Here's the project's description:

When inverted, the six trees in this experiment still grow away from earth and towards the sun---so the natural predisposition of trees might well produce the most unnatural shapes over time, raising questions about what the nature of the natural is.

Now those questions have been answered. Here's Cahill's description of the old trees sent out to pasture (corroborated by a photo that accompanies the article):

They stand in a row as straight as a fence, threadbare and lanky, like speciments from a mutant arboretum. Their branches droop forlornly downward, like the ribs of a naked umbrella....They grew very little in height while hanging by their feet....All their energy went into bending towards the light, a poetic metaphor of the human condition if there ever was one.

As I saw yesterday, some of the branches of the healthy-looking new trees are already yearning towards towards the sun. Poor things don't know what they're in for.

Will someone please call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants?

The Grrl is Back...with tidbits from MASS MoCA, Williams College Museum of Art, the Clark Art Institute and Bob Dylan

DYLAN? If only. He was at my Williamstown hotel, prior to playing a gig in Pittsfield. I saw his motorcycle and two giant tour buses, but I was checking in; he was biking out. As the song goes, I knew something was happening, but I didn't know what it was (until it was too late). Why is that old guy still riding those dangerous things? Guess I'll just have to content myself with buying his new album, due out tomorrow.

I also had a Glenn Dicterow sighting in Lenox (not quite as exciting). Glenn is the NY Philharmonic's concertmaster.

Just give me some time to unpack my bags before I unpack my stories.

Speaking of Martina Navratilova, do you think I ought to acquire one of her paintings? Who knew?

And how do you play tennis "on a court covered with the painted canvas," with "balls dipped in paint"? Do you think this might improve my game? I'll try anything!

To the Berkshires, to work on another article for the WSJ. (It's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it.)

But first, you can find me today in traffic court in lower Manhattan, where I'll explain to the judge that I did NOT make an unsafe lane change on my way to the the Whitney expansion hearing on June 20. (Now you know why I seemed so grouchy that day, Adam!)

Maybe instead of HELP LEE BUY A LAPTOP! (see below right), I should say, HELP LEE PAY HER TRAFFIC FINE!

I'll be back to you on Tuesday (or maybe Monday, if I really miss you).

UPDATE: I did not have to explain anything to the judge. After listening to the police officer, he found me "not guilty," without my having to open my mouth.

Do you think he's a fan of CultureGrrl?

Did anyone notice the astonishing omission in the September issue (published last Sunday) of the NY Times' sports magazine, Play?

All of the athletes celebrated in it 90 pages are male.

No, wait a minute...there IS one exception: On Page 22, you can read about tennis' "reformed diva," Martina Hingis, in a one-page Q&A with that ace sports reporter, Michael Kimmelman. Now, we all know that the Times' chief art critic often moonlights as a knowledgeable music writer. But this was a stretch.

(I must now digress: CultureGrrl is not only an operaphile and an oldies aficionado; she's also a tennis enthusiast. On my bedroom dresser, in a special case, is enshrined the ball that Martina Navratilova obligingly hit into my lap at the last U.S. Open.)

Given Hingis' checkered career and her history of spotty sportsmanship, I'm not sure that the Swiss Miss (who is now trying for a comeback, after having retired three years ago) was the best choice as the sole women to get some play in "Play." Kimmelman allows her yet another chance to disparage the number-one player, Amelie Mauresmo. The two other top players, Kim Clijsters (2) and Justine Henin-Hardenne (3), referred to as "the Belgian girls," are not otherwise identified.

But at least Hingis gives due credit to Mozart: "He was amazing. I saw the movie."

Museums keep searching for ways to broaden the demographics of their audiences. And every so often, they mount a show that draws a whole new crowd. Curators then hope that those people will come back for the more traditional fare.

Most of them don't.

Past examples of such new-audience magnets include "Black Male" at the Whitney, "Star Wars" at the Brooklyn Museum and "The Glory of Byzantium" at the Metropolitan Museum. Whether it's people of color, young children, people of faith, or other affinity groups, they usually come once for the exhibition that speaks directly to them and then they leave. (If museums have audience surveys indicating otherwise, I'd be glad to be contradicted.)

This experience suggests that the concept of the encyclopedic mega-museum as the best repository for all masterpieces of all cultures is, at best, debatable. The lesson of the Musée Quai Branly in Paris (which I discussed in yesterday's post) is that we also need smaller "niche" museums that appeal to particular cultural constituencies---those who often feel marginalized in, or intimidated by, the grand art palaces where the great masterpieces of Western European and/or American art usually have pride of place.

Also needed, to help reach new audiences, is a systematic plan for encyclopedic museums to regularly share parts of the world's patrimony with the countries or societies of origin where these objects have the deepest significance. This can be done through large-scale loan shows, organized jointly with experts from the countries or societies to which the objects closely relate.

This is precisely the motivation behind the British Museum's exhibition, "Hazina: Traditions, Trade and Transitions in East Africa," which opened in late March in Nairobi, Kenya. The museum's director, Neil MacGregor, explained the genesis of that exhibition in the March 2006 issue of Museums Journal, the magazine of Great Britain's Museums Association:

Curated and conceived by colleagues from the National Museums of Kenya, it consists of objects selected by them from the British Museum to tell a story for Kenyan audiences about the East African context of Kenya's cultures. This, we expect, will provide a new model for partnerships elsewhere in the world as the collection fulfills its purpose to be a library of the world's material cultures, available for the world's citizens to consult and make of them what they will.

This "new model for partnerships" should be adopted not only by the British Museum, but also by the world's other major museums. It's not just good cultural policy. It's also a good way to de-escalate the antiquities wars, by favoring collegiality over confrontation.

Obviously trying to make amends for the plastic Dannon yogurt containers at the culinarily dreary press breakfast it hosted June 1 at Le Cirque, the Getty is following up, in short order next month, with a press lunch at the four-star Restaurant Daniel. This is clearly a more responsible expenditure of Getty Trust funds than Barry Munitz's alleged extravagances.

Should I, on principle, boycott this event, which will be attended by five Getty luminaries? How can I, when the invitation comes with this teaser:

There is no question that the past year has been an eventful one for the Getty Trust. There is also no question that the institution is currently on a new path and the year ahead will be especially exciting.

There is also no question that I will have lots of questions.

And there's another reason why I have to RSVP "yes": After all, what did I say one of my two favorite NYC restaurants was?

Today's NY Times article (reprinting Friday's International Herald Tribune article), about the enraptured non-traditional museum audiences flocking to Paris' Musée Quai Branly of non-Western art, is another illustration of a point brought home to me when I reviewed the Smithsonian's new Museum of the American Indian: Press previews, during which only critics prowl the premises, may not always be the best time to evaluate exhibitions and installations.

What you miss is a big part of the museum experience: its impact on real people, not jaded "experts." When I visited the Museum of the American Indian, after it had opened to the public, I was struck by the "stirrings of Indian spirit" that seemed to transport visitors "as soon as they enter the museum's majestic 120-foot-high rotunda," as I reported in the Nov. 18, 2004 WSJ.

Holland Cotter, who recently revisited the Museum of the American Indian for the NY Times, now seems to have come closer to my view:

Many critics had complaints about the inaugural installations. I did. I was looking for an art museum, and what I found was something different. In its permanent home on the Mall, where it opened last year, the museum has sustained its rethought identity. And I have become more comfortable with that identity. I still have gripes, but my expectations have changed. For one thing, I've seen that when the revised model works, it really works, as it does in the Pacific Coast show.

A similar revisionism is already buoying Quai Branly, which was savaged earlier this summer, at the time of its opening, by the NY Times' chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman. He called it "brow-slappingly wrongheaded" and "rather insulting to the cultures that they're ostensibly meant to honor."

But the diverse visitors interviewed for Friday's IHT article by Caroline Brothers did not feel insulted. They felt empowered:

Strolling through its winding walkways, people may find the museum stirs a quiet pride in their origins, an impulse to communicate a sense of identity to a new generation, and amazement that such fragile, handmade objects have managed to survive at all.

Even more revelatory than Brothers' article is the accompanying slide show, posted on the Tribune's website only. Here we see the rapt faces of visitors of all ages and ethnicities, accompanied by their appreciative comments.

After my contrarian review of the Museum of the American Indian, Richard West, its director, wrote me an appreciative note, observing that "these spaces are meant to be 'peopled.'"

Maybe we coddled critics need to mingle more with the common folk.

COMING SOON: MORE THOUGHTS ON NON-TRADITIONAL MUSEUM AUDIENCES

This quote says it all. It's from stealthy Jimmy Steal, vice president of programming for Emmis Communications, published in yesterday's LA Times article about the demise of KZLA-FM, which until Thursday billed itself as "America's most listened-to country station":

We just saw an opportunity that was a business decision to go after a group of folks who were underserved and disenfranchised with the radio choices available. Our research definitely pointed out a target audience that has the potential for a much bigger payoff than we could target with KZLA.

So now they've created another "underserved and disenfranchised" group. But thank goodness LA finally has a place to hear Beyoncé.

Today's NY Times article on this subject reports that "the Country Music Association released a statement saying it was 'deeply concerned' about the switch, and expressed hope that another radio company might turn an existing station to the format."

Maybe my fellow New York City baby boomers need an Oldies Music Association!

Los Angeles country fans---I don't share your music preferences, but I do feel your pain.

The Associated Press reported today that Los Angeles' only country music station, KZLA-FM, owned by Emmis Communications, abruptly changed its format to pop on Thursday. Not even the DJs were given an advance heads-up, let alone the bereft listeners.

As my fellow-sufferers who mourned the sudden demise last year of WCBS (New York City's only FM oldies station) know from bitter experience, the broadcasting bozos use these stealth tactics so as not to give loyal listeners a chance to interfere with the national conspiracy to make every radio station sound the same.

The worst radio format change I've endured was the insulting choice of "Roll Over Beethoven" to "celebrate" the 1974 demise of New York City's greatest classical music station, WNCN. (Irate classical music lovers engineered a temporary return to the former format, but the station ultimately succumbed.)

David Dubal's bracingly idiosyncratic "Reflections from the Keyboard," Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. on WQXR, is our last link to those glory days of New York classical radio.

Today's article on the front page of the WSJ's "Weekend Journal" section, about homesellers who rent art from museums and galleries to give their abodes more appeal, gave me traumatic flashbacks to my own recent empty-nest move from a house to a co-op. No, I did not rent any Calders or Dalis to enhance my spacious picture-windowed, cathedral-ceilinged living room. None of that would have mattered anyway: The people who bought our beautiful Wright-ish redwood ranch from the '60s knocked it down to construct their cookie-cutter mega-mansion.

But the article did bring back painful memories of the suburban schlock-art retrospective that affronted my husband and me as we toured the various condos and co-ops on the market in northern Jersey. I don't think that good art would have made me more receptive to buying, but the unrelieved dreck definitely did make me wonder if living in those apartments was somehow inconsistent with good taste.

We ultimately wound up buying the last abode of the beloved salsa queen, Celia Cruz, subject of a recent posthumous Smithsonian retrospective. While it's not my taste, I can't bring myself to change her deep red, gold-flecked wallpaper, which still adorns our long entrance hallway. It's all about provenance.

Thanks to his prominent mention in the second paragraph of the WSJ article, Seattle artist Drake Deknatel, who died last year in the arms of the waiter at his favorite local cafe (newspaper obit here), has now received national exposure as the quintessential "staging" artist, with his paintings used as marketing tools in "some 200 homes." (Here are some images of his work.)

For me, "staging" my home consisted largely of trying to tidy up the gargantuan piles of files and publications adorning much of the floor space in my office. It's amazing how quickly those piles have now replicated themselves in the den where Celia once displayed her Grammys.

Roberta, I feel your frustration.

One of my reasons for starting this blog (as discussed in my "LEE ROSENBAUM" profile, right) is that it gives me a place where I can put all my thoughts, insights and bad puns that the mainstream media can't use. I have often felt I had things worth saying and no place to say them.

So must it have been with my favorite NY Times art critic, Roberta Smith, when she viewed Renzo Piano's expansion of the Morgan Library and Museum but had no assignment to write about it. Nicolai Ourousoff, Carol Vogel, Holland Cotter, Verlyn Klinkenborg and Anthony Tomassini all weighed in, leaving Roberta out. Obviously, six articles (but not five!) on the same subject within less than four weeks would have been just too much.

Finally, today, Roberta gets her chance, with her review of the Morgan's Rembrandt show, which is as much of an appraisal of Piano's addition as of Rembrandt's prints:

Widely hailed as a triumph, Mr. Piano's design may ultimately qualify as a classic itself....A box of glass and steel set on an expansive plane of oak, it centers the Morgan's three existing buildings on a setting that feels, for all its crisp urban geometry, as natural as a forest clearing. This structure's affirmation of light, space and solid ground is a bracing prelude to almost any kind of art, but especially to the brave new world of Rembrandt's etchings. As with Mr. Piano's cube, so with the prints: you look through them as much as at them....Even at their darkest, Rembrandt's etchings, like Renzo Piano's great glass cube, celebrate the ideal of transparency.

CultureGrrl readers know I have mixed feelings about The Atrium that Ate the Morgan. I'm also not sure I agree that Rembrandt's dense, complicated, brooding etchings have anything to do with transparency. I think that assessment was a stretch, contrived to justify Roberta's architectural digression by tenuously connecting it to the exhibition she was assigned to review.

Happily, blogs are just one big digression. Speaking of which: Wouldn't it have been nice if during Rembrandt's 400 birthday year, the Metropolitan Museum (which has also mounted a Rembrandt birthday-celebrating print show) could have managed to reunite all its paintings by that artist in the same room? It did so, a while back, when construction necessitated removing the Rembrandts from their usual haunts. The power of that concentrated display in the Lehman Wing bowled me over.

It must be midlife-crisis time on the NY Times Culture Desk. On Sunday, the Las Vegas rhinestone showgirl; yesterday, the bikini-bedecked "Laguna Beach" hotties; and today, a huge blow-up of the lingerie-clad "Still Dirrty" girl, Christina Aguilera (she, at least, has talent)---all adorning the front pages of this week's arts sections.

In case you didn't perceive the new editorial focus, you can enjoy a mini-retrospective of all three photos, zoom-able for closer perusal, on today's Times arts page on the web.

Who needs Hugh Hefner when you've got Sam Sifton?

Readers of the original NY Times article about the Association of Art Museum Directors' new report on The Acquisition and Stewardship of Sacred Objects may have been surprised to see a large photograph of the Tibetan Buddhist altar at the Newark Museum, which is nowhere mentioned in the article itself.

Although neither the article nor the caption says so, the photo illustrates the last of several examples cited in AAMD's report of "special care" that American museums have given to sacred objects:

Museums can also work directly with artists as well as religious leaders of indigenous cultures. In one example, a Tibetan artist was provided an artist-in-residency in order to replace a Buddhist altar originally constructed by an American artist. The Tibetan artist worked with museum staff and Tibetan consultants in the design and creation of the new altar, which was consecrated by the 14th Dalai Lama after its completion.

Strangely, AAMD's report does not identify the Newark Museum as its "one example" of a museum that altered its altar. The museum's original altar had also been consecrated by the Dalai Lama. The new altar was created in 1988-1990 and painted by Tibetan artist Phuntsok Dorje, who had trained at a Tibetan monastery. The consecration ceremony, as described by the museum, was elaborately religious:

His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama first made three prostrations and presented a white kata, a silk scarf, which is the traditional Tibetan greeting symbolizing purity. Next, prayers were chanted, with grain tossed between chants to make the prayers "true" and "solid." The potent emblems of tantric Buddhism, the dorje and bell (power and wisdom) were held in special positions. The central moment of the ceremony was an invocation to the Buddhas who have promised to stay in this world to teach enlightenment to all and not to enter final Nirvana until this task is completed.

Some, including Tiffany Jenkins, the author of the provocative New Statesman article that I cited in a previous post, might consider such religious rites inappropriate to a museum. Jenkins wrote:

Museum directors must not act as priests, nor must they treat the public as their flock. Idolatry has no place in museum policy. Those with faith already have churches and other places to venerate religious icons. If museums continue to be confused with places of worship, we will all suffer, as the pursuit of truth is sacrificed on the altar of veneration.

It seems to me that respecting and celebrating cultural differences is part of the job description of museum officials and is not the same thing as "idolatry." Given the fact that many ceremonially significant objects may have been illicitly or improperly expropriated from their original societies, it seems clear that the best resolution of custodial issues is, whenever possible, a negotiated compromise that balances the interests of public access and sacred strictures.

But when the function of honoring an object's original meaning and context conflicts with museums' equally important missions of making objects publicly accessible and valuing them for their intrinsic beauty, something's got to give. The criteria for resolution should be similar to those for returning or retaining antiquities: If an object was improperly acquired and is of high significance to its society of origin, there is a strong argument for giving it back or at least honoring the wishes of the society of origin regarding care and display.

CultureGrrl readers know I have a special interest (and sometimes even a direct involvement) in safeguarding the condition of artworks in museums.

So I commend to your attention today a comprehensive and revelatory article on this subject, by M.P. McQueen on the front page of today's Personal Journal section of the Wall Street Journal.

I can't link to WSJ's subscribers-only site. But I can give you a couple of outtakes:

Fund raising has turned museums and galleries into entertainment venues, with sometimes perilous consequences for delicate artworks and collectibles, insurance experts say. And, they add, budget cuts have left some museums with inadequate security to handle bigger crowds and protect the art. The upshot, these experts say, is that they are seeing more claims for artwork damaged at museums....

In February, a 12-year-old boy visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts with his sixth-grade class plucked a wad of gum from his mouth and deposited it on a 1963 canvas by Helen Frankenthaler, "The Bay," a painting estimated to be worth $1.5 million or more. The work had to be removed for restoration. The child "picked the worst piece of art he could have picked" -- an unprimed painting, says the museum's director, Graham W.J. Beal.

The latter incident, of course, reminded me of how I saved a Cézanne.

Museums in the U.S. are feeling the same pressure as British museums (discussed in my recent post) to remove "sacred objects" from public view, or from their collections entirely.

I remember, about two years ago, hearing a docent at the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, tell visitors that some masks from its extensive North American Indian collection (which was given to the museum by retired art dealer Eugene Thaw), had to be taken off view because the Iroquois said the museum "should not be showing these masks. The spirits are still alive, and we have no right to have these spirits." The objects, the docent explained, were considered sacred to the tribe, "not for the public."

Although the Association of Art Museum Directors, in its new report on "Acquisition and Stewardship of Sacred Objects," is notably silent on issues involving removal of objects from view or from the collection, its accompanying press release does acknowledge that there are "works of art that may require special care because of their meaning, significance, and function as sacred objects."

AAMD gives these specific examples of "special care" already practiced by American museums:

Some sacred objects of the native peoples of the western United States should be stored with sage to ensure their spiritual well-being. Museum conservators faced with the issue that fresh sage could cause conservation problems, such as the introduction of pests. The problem was addressed by placing freeze-dried sage with these objects, thereby meeting both conservation and cultural needs.

Other solutions include storing objects such as sacred stone lamps of the Alutiiq people upside down, to keep their spirits from departing, or not housing certain sacred objects in proximity to other works.

AAMD's press release provides one last example, involving the Newark Museum in New Jersey (unidentified by AAMD).

In my next post on sacred objects, I'll discuss Newark's altered altar, and give my own thoughts on safeguarding the sacred.

Speaking of architecture tours, the ceremony celebrating completion of the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's five-structure Darwin D. Martin House Complex, Buffalo, NY, is scheduled for Oct. 4. Martin House is one of Wright's best known Prairie House designs.

A PBS documentary on "Frank Lloyd Wright's Buffalo" will air nationwide Sept. 4 at 10 p.m. EST and tours of the Martin Complex can be reserved by e-mailing: tours@darwinmartinhouse.org

But the Wright tourists really I feel for are the many who flock to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, only to find it stripped skinless and bedecked in netting, due to the much needed exterior repairs now ensuing and not expected to be completed until the end of 2007.

My daughter and I recently took a photo for a rueful-looking young Asian tourist standing in front of the ugly hulk. The Guggenheim, now hosting a retrospective of architect Zaha Hadid (to Oct. 25), should mount a show about its own architecture, explaining in detail to Wright's disappointed devotees what's happening to its celebrated premises, and why.

Want to get on a list for information about advance ticketing for Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, opening to the public in Spring 2007?

Send an e-mail to: glasshouse@nthp.org.
(Thanks to the excellent architecture blog, Tropolism, for this heads-up.)

My thanks to CultureGrrl reader Sara Patel (who identifies herself as "a lecturer in museum studies in Greenwich London") for sending this link to a thought-provoking article criticizing British museums for overzealousness in their care of sacred objects. Tiffany Jenkins, the author of the article (which appeared in the July 11, 2005 issue of the London-based magazine New Statesman), observed:

Soon no showcase or object will be safe from scrutiny. Already, the code of ethics issued by the UK's Museums Association argues that this practice should operate across the board. It commands professionals to "consider restricting access to certain specified items, particularly those of ceremonial or religious importance, where unrestricted access may cause offence or distress to actual or cultural descendants."

These are terrible guidelines for anyone working in museums. The very point of these institutions is to open up other worlds to people, not to lock the ones inside or shut the others out....We cannot find meaning and community through censorship and restriction, or when people are perceived as determined by some nebulous notion of different and separate cultures.

As I have previously observed, the Association of Art Museum Directors' new "Sacred Objects" report is silent on whether museums should return objects demanded by their societies of origin. It also avoids the question of whether public access to certain museum-owned objects should be restricted, due to religious or ceremonial strictures.

MORE ON THIS TOMORROW.

The name's Brand. Michael Brand.

The suave Australian, with his rugged good looks and daring international exploits in Italy and Greece, has until now been neither shaken nor stirred by the press. We were giving him time to figure out how to clean up the messes left behind by others at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where he was named director last August.

But now that Brand has tried to brand the Getty, the honeymoon is over.

We can't blame the new director for the Munitz munificence (benefiting himself and associates) or the antiquities antics. But Michael, the rampaging pig was let loose on your watch.

I refer, of course, to the already infamous ad campaign announced last week, wherein the masterminds at the M&C Saatchi ad agency devised what its press release terms a "breathless tagline" to showcase the Getty's recent Rubens acquisition, "The Calydonian Boar Hunt":

Rampaging Pig Tramples Man as Caped Hero Delivers Death Blow!

This is not the first time that a museum has toyed with philistine ad slogans: The late curator Kirk Varnedoe once publicly recounted that "See it before we pull the plug!" was briefly under consideration as tagline for the Museum of Modern Art's Bonnard retrospective (referring to the artist's several late works depicting his ailing wife in bathtub). Happily, good taste prevailed.

The wits at the LA Times came up with their own breathless taglines for important works in other local museums. The spoofing possibilities are endless. (I'll refrain, finding myself unable to come up with anything that surpasses the Saatchi absurdity.)

On its website, the ad agency proudly describes its approach to branding as "Brutal Simplicity":

The strongest brands are the simplest.
The most valuable can be described in one word.
We provide our clients with the global ownership of one word.
One word equity requires Brutal Simplicity of Thought.
Once we have found and tested the word, we spread the word.

We can only wonder what brutally simple word the California Attorney General's Office may choose to describe administrative irregularities at the J. Paul Getty Trust, when it finally issues its long-awaited report on its investigation. The report was anticipated this week, but is now set for release some time next month.

The State Hermitage Museum has just published on its website a defense of director Mikhail Piotrovsky. It is so ramblingly incoherent that its clumsy translation from Russian can only partly explain its muddled logic.

Originally published Aug. 10 in Rossiiskaya Gazeta (Russian Newspaper), "The Case of Piotrovsky" does make one thing clear---that the director will not leave his position voluntarily, in the wake of the scandal over thefts from the museum's collection:

Resigning from the Hermitage after all that has happened would mean washing one's hands of it, making a gesture to save face, while at the same time forever losing the right to respond to the vital questions honorably. What this means is that the question of Piotrovsky's voluntarily resigning is strictly rhetorical.

But weirdly defensive passages like the following do more to hurt Piotrovsky's professional image than to help it:

Piotrovsky speaks a dozen foreign languages fluently. This arouses jealousy, or to put it more directly, it arouses envy among those who suffer from hidden inferiority complexes. Piotrovsky has a flawed past: he comes from the nobility. He keeps his distance, and this is a reason for distrust. Finally, he has entree into the Kremlin offices and, so they say, is friendly with the authorities: this can be a pretext for reproaching him for being servile or venal. Piotrovsky is in fact no malcontent and takes no stands on issues outside professional principles.

The disordered diatribe, which never addresses the substantive issues raised by the Hermitage thefts, was authored by Julia Kantor, identified as "Advisor to the Director of the State Hermitage [Piotrovsky] and senior staff member of the museum." One has to assume it represents the official party line of the museum and its director.

And that's cause for serious concern.

Berry-Hill Galleries, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December, last Friday closed on a $21-million loan, allowing it to stay in business, rather than liquidate under Chapter 7, according to the chief restructuring officer for the bankruptcy. That officer, Alan Jacobs of AMJ Advisors, said that the new loan (technically called "debtor-in-possession financing") comes from American Capital Strategies Limited. It has allowed Berry-Hill to pay off its $17.5-million debt to ACG Credit Company, he said.

Jacobs added that Berry-Hill will use the excess $3.5 million from the new loan as "working capital," and will devise a plan to satisfy other creditors with funds from its assets and operations. The gallery hopes to be out of Chapter 11 "by the end of the year," Jacobs said.

American Capital Strategies now has a security interest in the New York gallery's E. 70th Street townhouse. Jacobs indicated that while Berry-Hill is "open to all options" for raising capital, the townhouse, which is still on Stribling's real-estate website, it not being "marketed fully."

It remains to be seen how well this bluechip gallery will be able to operate under a financial cloud.

I promised to "dissect" this conversation, but there's not much to sink my scalpel into. Derek Gillman, recently named to lead the Barnes Foundation, does (sort of) pledge not to sell any of the art. Strangely, he gives more weight to Albert Barnes' first thoughts about his collection than his explicitly delineated last written words on the subject---that nothing be moved. When it comes to bequests, it's usually the last words that count (unless overturned by a court ruling, as was the unfortunate case here).

We'll just have to wait and post after Gillman assumes his post, on Oct. 16.

The latest twist in the Hermitage theft saga, involving an alleged private deaccessioning spree by a trusted, highly placed curator who tried to market the wares herself, raises the urgent question of whether other museums have sufficient safeguards in place to protect their own hoards from marauding employees.

The unthinkable has now become thinkable, and whether it's security cameras, tagged objects that trigger alarms, searches of people leaving storerooms, or some other strategem that only security experts can devise, something must be done to make certain that it doesn't happen here.

Museum officials, rightly, never discuss this issue in detail, because the more information is divulged about security systems, the easier it is for wily thieves to circumvent them.

As for making sure that other curators aren't similarly tempted, I'm not convinced that raising their salaries, as has been recommended, will help turn potential thieves into paragons of virtue. That's not to say that I'm not aghast at the historically low level of compensation for Hermitage employees. In my February 1998 article on St. Petersburg museums for Art in America magazine, I noted:

Russian prices have soared to Western levels, but...state-funded museum staff salaries still average a mere $850 a year (supplemented by the museum with money earned from such other sources as sales of tickets and image rights). Performance rewards, annual bonuses and subsidies for transportation and food from the staff cafeteria last year provided "the equivalent of two additional salaries to our staff," according to [Mikhail] Piotrovsky [the Hermitage's director].

An article in Friday's St. Petersburg Times indicated that Piotrovsky is not going to lose his job because of the theft scandal. It also provided a comprehensive rundown of the arrests and recoveries to date.

It doesn't quite sink to the depths of the NY Times' Oct. 6,2002 Page-One article that solemnly chronicled Britney Spears' "process of refashioning herself for a new career," but it must surely rank as the all-time apogee of tackiness for the paper's "Arts & Leisure" section.

I am, of course, referring to what must be the largest, sorriest photo ever run on that section's front page---the above-the-fold full-color display in yesterday's paper of a pudgy, unattractive Las Vegas showgirl in full plumage, for an article featuring such trenchant quotes as, "I don't want to hip-hop topless. I want my tatas to stay where they are."

The Times thought so much of this story that it also used the cheesecake shot as a Page One teaser. Strangely, the photo caption failed to identify the rhinestone showgirl who got such prominent play.

I know that the "Arts & Leisure" section has been devoting more space to the lowbrow---a beneath-contempt attempt to appeal to its many readers who have no use for high culture. But a 1943-word, six-photo spread devoted to the demise of the showgirl is just too much of a bad thing. Fittingly, another headline on the same page queries, "How Do You Say 'Desperate' in Spanish?" That article chronicles another topic of burning cultural interest---the Latin American incarnation of "Desperate Housewives."

The infamous Page-One article and photo devoted to Britney Spears appeared during Howell Raines' reign as executive editor. Perhaps the editors of the "Arts & Leisure" section will have to defend their news judgment in similar terms to those offered by the now deposed Raines: The Spears article, he said, elucidated "the fame machine, the economic engine that's behind it, Our readers are interested in reading a sophisticated exegesis of a sociological phenomenon like that."

We can only wonder whether the audience-hungry "Arts & Leisure" editors will next week give equal time and full-frontal coverage to the Las Vegas phenomenon said by yesterday's article to be supplanting showgirls: sexually explicit female revues. After all, we must all stay current with the latest "sociological phenomenon."

I think the NY Times needs to get its "tatas" in place.

More shocking news about the Hermitage thefts: The Associated Press reports that Larisa Zavadskaya, the deceased curator who had been in charge of the Department of Russian Culture, had allegedly tried to sell the stolen objects herself, according to an antiques dealer who told investigators about the curator's dealings with him.

The Hermitage has done a poor job of updating information about the thefts on its website. Some 17 of the 221 stolen items have reportedly been recovered, but there is not a word of this on the website's list of missing works.

Tyler Green, my ArtsJournal blogging colleague, promises a Q&A with the Barnes Foundation's new executive director and president, Derek Gillman, this Monday. Unlike CultureGrrl, Mr. Modern Art Notes is grudgingly in favor of the Barnes' planned move from Lower Merion to Philadelphia.

It will be interesting to see just how much Green can draw out of Gillman, concerning the Barnes' specific plans for the design of its new facility, its future exhibition program and its display of the permanent collection. My guess is he'll say he's too new on the project to make detailed comments, and it's too soon to get into specifics that are still being worked out.

Inquiring minds want to know what they will do about the great site-specific Matisse "La Danse" mural. During court proceedings, then Barnes director Kimberly Camp suggested they might reproduce "La Danse" in the new facility. This would surely cause Albert Barnes some "rotating in his grave"---Gillman's previous description of how Barnes would have reacted to the planned Philly move.

I'm looking forward to dissecting this dialogue!

Do people still actually believe the Hitler-was-a-frustrated-artist theory of why the world suffered through a World War and the Holocaust?

Four years ago, the Williams College Museum of Art suggested as much, in an exhibition that I reviewed for the WSJ on Hitler's early years in Vienna. The fate of the world, as seen by the show's curator, Deborah Rothschild, may have rested in the hands of one Christian Griepenkerl. He was director of painting at the art academy that denied Hitler admission.

"Perhaps if Griepenkerl had been a less rigid judge of exams, the entire history of the 20th century might have been different," an exhibition label fatuously hypothesized. Never mind that Hitler was already showing signs of irrational fanaticism and anti-Semitism during those formative years.

Flash forward to the story in yesterday's Guardian of London, which quotes Ian Morris, auctions manager for Jefferys, a British firm that in September will offer 21 mediocre watercolors, possibly from the hand of the nascent tyrant:

Perhaps if his art had been better received and he had developed a successful career as an artist rather than being rejected by the art establishment, he would not have become the man he did, ultimately responsible for the death of millions of people.

Perhaps Morris should restrict his critical faculties to his firm's other merchandise, some of which he probably understands better than art or geopolitics: also coming in September at Jefferys, the much anticipated "Rare Breed Poultry and Collective Machinery Sale."

UPDATE ON AUCTION RESULTS: Here.

Here's that little tale I promised you in my previous post:

Once upon a time, many years ago, before Lee became that celebrated artworld superhero, CultureGrrl, she was visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art just for pleasure, wandering dreamily among the Cézannes.

Suddenly, a school group trooped in, accompanied by a teacher who could not possibly keep an eye on everyone. The only guard in the vicinity was standing watch in an adjoining gallery.

Along came an enterprising young lad, who discovered an ideal surface against which to rest his worksheet while filling in its blanks: Portrait of Madame Cézanne, which, at 24 3/8 x 20 1/8 inches, was the perfect size to double as a clipboard.

Only one person observed his raising paper and pencil towards the paint.

"NO-O-O-O-O-O!!!" Lee cried out in horror.

So today, if you visit Gallery 164, you can still gaze at the post-Impressionist's contemplative muse, unblemished. I always visit her. And she always thanks me.

By a remarkable coincidence, the 1864 Mathew Brady albumen silver print of Abraham Lincoln and the 1865 wood engraving of Lincoln's second inaugural ball, which I had caught basking in the sun at the recent reopening of the renovated Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, were removed yesterday, just a day after I exposed their exposure.

Bethany Morookian Bentley, press officer of the NPG, at first told me that they had been replaced by facsimiles. She later called back with a revised story: The originals were off view, but the copies would not be up until next week. She also assured me that this shuffle had been previously planned and had nothing to do with my item in CultureGrrl.

Bentley added:

We are always cognizant of light levels when we place works on paper on view. In order to determine how long the object will remain on display, we take into account how much light exposure it receives.

Maybe they should have taken into account the fact that these light-sensitive works should never have been exposed to direct sun in the first place.

One day, I'll tell you the story of how I saved for posterity a Cézanne hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Or maybe I'll tell you later today!)

The Association of Art Museum Directors has done it again: In its just-released report on The Acquisition and Stewardship of Sacred Objects, AAMD suggests that a hot-button issue be addressed with "special consideration" and "sensitivity," but asserts, as always, that museums should ultimately do as they see fit:

In the absence of applicable legal requirements, these decisions ultimately rest entirely with the [individual] museum....