September 2006 Archives

A lot of Wall Street Journal readers are flocking to CultureGrrl today, thanks to the mention in Eric Gibson's "Taste" page article yesterday. Please go here to see the full post that he refers to.

Like all interviewees who bristle at soundbites, I don't feel that Eric's one-sentence quote quite captures the brilliantly insightful nuances of my thoughtful discourse on the disposition of restituted Nazi loot. Before you get angry with me, please read the whole thing! (Do I have one more thing to atone for on Monday?)

...in 1961. One of the most fascinating artifacts in the Bob Dylan show that opened today at the Morgan Library and Museum was this article from the NY Times, which exactly 45 years ago today reviewed the little-known 20-year-old's set at Gerde's Folk City and essentially launched Dylan's career. The article caught the attention of John Hammond of Columbia Records. The rest is history.

Dylan's unsung hero, Times writer Robert Shelton, called him "a bright new face" and captured a good likeness of the singer/songwriter we all came to know:

Mr. Dylan's voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern fieldhand musing in melody on the porch. All the "husk and bark" are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs....

Mr. Dylan's highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge....If not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth.

COMING SOON: More on Dylan at the Morgan.

The former director of the Whitney Museum got snubbed in the "Acknowledgements" section of the catalogue for that museum's current Picasso show, which gives credit to Adam Weinberg, in his capacities as former curator of the permanent collection and current director; David Ross, another former director; Leonard Lauder, chairman; and even Willard Holmes, Anderson's deputy director.

But here Anderson is, interviewed by S.L. Berry for last Tuesday's Indianapolis Star, in his latest incarnation as director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. (I came across this article via the excellent Indianapolis art blog, On the Cusp.)

So what's Max up to? He's about to commission works for the museum's planned Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. And always the irrepressible techie, he's thinking of introducing "cell phone tours" (like the Walker Art Center's Art on Call, which CultureGrrl recently experienced and which is now again being upgraded).

I have always felt that Anderson, during his New York sojourn, had smart ideas about museum management, but lacked the patience, humility and consensus-building skills to realize them without making enemies. Soon after the Oct. 23, 2002 publication of my laudatory WSJ profile of Anderson, "Hip Is Out as Director Transforms a Museum," Max was out.

So I'm glad that he now has another shot at museum directing, giving him a platform from which he can issue salutary calls-to-action like this pithy quote in Tuesday's Star, regarding the need for greater transparency in the governance of museums (including his own):

We're not making weapons here. It's not like we've got that much to hide.

What a letdown: The Whitney Museum invests 10 years, big bucks and high hopes on its "Picasso and American Art" exhibition, and it doesn't only get thumbs down from CultureGrrl. Michael Kimmelman, in today's NY Times, dismisses it in much the same terms.

On Thursday morning, CultureGrrl said:

A show with such a large lackluster component takes a big gamble that its academic interest will be enough to keep the visitor engaged. For me, that gamble did not pay off.

Guest curated by Picasso scholar Michael FitzGerald, the enterprise's doggedly slogging research, unearthing every conceivable link between selected American artists and the 20th-century artworld's most demanding and confounding father figure, would make a better scholarly thesis than a riveting exhibition or a stimulating exhibition catalogue.

Today, Kimmelman said:

[The show is] one of those dull affairs incubated in the world of academe: a walk-through textbook that goes to extraordinary lengths to state the obvious. It has the numbing feel of a compare-and-contrast slide lecture, the scholastic consequence of art forced to service information.

And then, wouldn't you know it, the Times site provided, as a companion feature for Kimmelman's piece, a "compare-and-contrast" slide show! But the real shocker in Kimmelman's review was his dropping the loaded word "constipated" into his prose---to characterize the entire oeuvre of Jasper Johns. That word demands some explanation...or a laxative.

Whatever its weaknesses, the Whitney show boasts many great Picassos, gathered from disparate sources. Masterpieces by that formidable Spaniard who resided in France are always worth seeing...even in a museum ostensibly dedicated to the best in American art.

How cool is this? The New Museum, getting ever newer, has a webcam trained on the active construction site for its new building designed by the Tokyo-based firm of Sejima and Nishizawa/SANAA.

With the director of the Metropolitan Museum explicitly stating that he's reluctant to acquire the art of the current generation, and with the Museum of Modern Art acting clueless on contemporary, doesn't New York need this place more than ever?

Watch it grow!

CultureGrrl and Modern Art Notes both get mentions for our blogged Klimt observations, in Eric Gibson's article on the "Taste" page of today's Wall Street Journal.

I'm a bit concerned that Eric's article seems to suggest that I don't believe that the recipients of restituted art have the right to do with it what they want. As I stated in the post that he alludes to, I certainly do. But nuances get lost when one is quoted out of context.

I guess I just got a taste of my own journalistic medicine!

There is one passage in Ada Louise Huxtable's bravura performance in today's WSJ (which I highly praised yesterday) that particularly arrested me, because it comes very close to mentioning an unmentionable truth:

An earlier skyline, dominated by earlier icons, the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, had a richness and variety not yet diminished by the brutal breaking of scale and loss of architectural detail when the Port Authority built not one, but two of the tallest buildings in the world....The Twin Towers could be built only by using the authority's independent powers to override all of New York's height, building and zoning codes and restrictions. The same excessive bulk is being reproduced today.

Her words imply what I have always believed. It borders on heresy to say that it might, in fact, be better NOT to replace what the terrorists so wantonly destroyed. The initial impulse is to show resilience by coming back even bigger and, hopefully, better than ever.

But I agree with Ada Louise's suggestion that Manhattan would both look better and be better off without those new hulking goliaths---buildings that may one day reproach us as half-empty monuments to our shortsighted obstinacy. How much better to reinvent Ground Zero as a peaceful oasis for memory, culture, contemplation and community.

It'll never happen.

Tyler Green's Fortune article, which CultureGrrl critiqued here, is now posted online here.

...because he's signing an accord to turn over to Italy 13 antiquities from his museum's collection---objects that Italy says were illicitly removed from their country of origin.

The agreement, signed today in Rome by Malcolm Rogers (above), director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, not only includes provisions for cooperation on exhibitions, conservation, archeology and scholarship, but also "establishes a process by which the MFA and Italy will exchange information with respect to the museum's acquisitions of Italian antiquities," according to the statement jointly released by the museum and the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Kudos to the BMFA for publishing here the images and complete descriptions (including provenance) of the objects returned.

What the joint statement doesn't discuss is whether Italy may make future demands for other objects, and what guidelines, other than exchanging information, will affect the museum's antiquities acquisitions in the future.

UPDATE: Francesco Rutelli, the Italian Minister of Culture, will visit the BMFA in November, bearing objects (not yet publicly identified) to be loaned to the museum under the terms of the cooperative agreement.

Aspiring artists sometimes attempt to copy a painting that is on display in a museum's gallery: It's a useful, hands-on approach to learning about the masters and their techniques. But the knock-off is never a great work in its own right: It's a step on the path to developing one's own style and vision.

I thought of this as I wondered about the many derivative, lesser works that litter the Whitney Museum's show of "Picasso and American Art," which opens to the public today. A show with such a large lackluster component takes a big gamble that its academic interest will be enough to keep the visitor engaged. For me, that gamble did not pay off.

Guest curated by Picasso scholar Michael FitzGerald, the enterprise's doggedly slogging research, unearthing every conceivable link between selected American artists and the 20th-century artworld's most demanding and confounding father figure, would make a better scholarly thesis than a riveting exhibition or a stimulating exhibition catalogue. FitzGerald is an associate professor at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., with scant prior experience at the helm of major museum shows.

My first reaction, in the initial galleries, was that this exhibition could have been subtitled, "Picasso Eats His Young." Killer works by Picasso (themselves compelling enough reason to attend this show) devour the neighboring works by lesser American contenders whom he had in thrall. It seemed as though Picasso, who never actually set foot in this country, had nevertheless squashed every American artist in his path.

Then, as I continued through the show, I realized that the contest was rigged: Like the artists who copy paintings in museum galleries, the more illustrious creators of these Picasso knock-offs were on a journey towards developing their own unique, mature styles. Those styles had little to do with their atypical oeuvre in this Picasso-centric show.

Another problem was the choice of artists: Max Weber (important for introducing Picasso's work to America) and John Graham don't stand up as worthy heirs to Picasso's genius. And I think FitzGerald picked the wrong Pop artists to point up Picasso's enduring influence. While Rauschenberg may not have consciously "copied" Picasso, as did FitzGerald's Pop picks, I think he embodies more of the master's spirit: his use of collages, intriguing textures and broken-up forms, as well as in his voracious absorption and reinvention of disparate media and materials.

The only artist in the show who really holds his ground against Picasso, while playing the master's own game, is David Smith. In the show's heavyweight match-up between large sculptures by the two masters (Picasso's "Head of a Woman" and Smith's "The Hero"), Smith scores a knock-out.

In his catalogue forward, Whitney director Adam Weinberg states:

"Picasso and American Art" is indeed one of the most ambitious and long-term [ten years in the making] undertakings in the Whitney's history; it is also one of the most costly.

Would that such resources had been better spent.

James Russell is, as I have said, one of my favorite writers on architecture. Ada Louise Huxtable IS my favorite writer on architecture. And when it comes to Ground Zero, these two exemplary voices are in harmony.

Ada Louise's piece in tomorrow's (Thursday's) Wall Street Journal is the most passionately persuasive piece of activist architectural criticism that I have ever seen.

She seems to think, though, that her words come too late. May events prove her wrong.

Mona Lisa is pregnant?

Calling Dan Brown!

Today's NY Times article about "the first major scientific analysis of the 'Mona Lisa' in 50 years," coupled with the Guardian article that I discussed earlier today, leads to the inescapable conclusion that Leonardo's iconic masterpiece desperately needs a good cleaning.

But it's probably the one painting that can never be cleaned. Imagine the controversy and uproar that would ensue...and not just from James Beck!

Now Tyler, please don't reach for your blogroll eraser, but your story in the current Fortune magazine about Ronald Lauder's purchase of the Klimt is so important that it demands some reaction from CultureGrrl.

The story is a must-read for giving us the first detailed look at how the Klimt deal went down. I was particularly struck by this passage, which indicates that I might have had good reason for being Verklempt Over Klimt---worried about whether poor Adele Bloch-Bauer had finally found a safe, permanent haven:

Finally [Steven] Thomas [the Bloch-Bauer heirs' lawyer] said that the museum to which "Adele" was sold would have to have a secure, long-term future. (Lauder says that never came up, but Thomas mentioned it to me in two separate conversations.)

That condition had the potential to be thorny. The Neue Galerie [the museum co-founded by Lauder] is a mere toddler; its fifth birthday isn't until November.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I agree with Tyler's repeatedly stated premise that Lauder's purchase of the Klimt was a "grand gamble" or a "strategy," calculated to "turn an obscure museum into a must-see destination." While I'm sure he hopes for a permanent upsurge in Neue Galerie visitors, I believe that Lauder acquired Adele for the usual reason that impels object-besotted collectors to make extravagant purchases: He adored the work and had to have it.

More importantly, I also believe that Tyler may have partly misread the legal background of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts. I'll quote a passage from his piece in Fortune, followed by verbatim excerpts from the U.S. Court of Appeals decision (affirmed by the Supreme Court). You be the judge.

From Fortune:

Austria's strangest reason for not returning "Adele" and five other paintings was this: It claimed that Adele herself wanted the paintings to be given to Austria upon Ferdinand's death. In the late 1990s,...a journalist named Hubertus Czernin learned otherwise....He found that neither Ferdinand nor Adele had specified that any Klimts go to the Austrian state.

In the Court of Appeals decision (which did not itself rule on ownership, but merely said that the Bloch-Bauer heirs' case against Austria could be tried in U.S. courts), Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw gave this more nuanced account:

Before Adele's untimely passing in 1925,...obviously oblivious to the terror to come, which would dramatically affect Austria generally and her husband Ferdinand intimately, Adele left a will "kindly" requesting that Ferdinand donate the paintings to the Austrian Gallery upon his death....Ferdinand died in Switzerland in November 1945. He left a will, revoking all prior wills, and leaving his entire estate to one nephew and two nieces, including Maria Altmann....

Altmann contends that under both Austrian and and American law, precatory language such as that set forth in Adele's last will and testament, kindly asking another to bequeath his property, is unenforceable and ineffective to dispose of that property. To be effective, the will must contain a command or order as to the disposition of property.

It appears that Adele DID want the paintings eventually to be given to Austria. Then, after her death, times horrifically changed. Luckily, she acted the well-mannered lady, and used in her will the "precatory" word, "kindly."

The rest is history.

Fascinating story in Saturday's Guardian of London, about the Mona Lisa copy belonging to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, to be displayed there Oct. 10 to Feb. 11. Scholars believe this skillful copy may provide some indication of Leonardo's original hues.

But the web version of the story is accompanied by a cut-down illustration, particularly unfortunate since the article discusses whether the original in the Louvre might have been cut down. Go to the Dulwich's future exhibitions site (scroll down) to see the full image. Now if only they would make that thumbnail clickable for enlargement! Side-by-side reproductions of the original and the copy would also be a help.

Here's my brief piece for the "Front Page" section of the October Art in America magazine, about the long overdue efforts by the recently reopened Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery to beef up their contemporary art collections.

For my previous piece in the WSJ about the expensive and protracted renovation of the Patent Office Building that houses both museums, go here for Part I and here for Part II.

Another WSJ piece, which takes me back to my English major days, is coming soon. I'll keep you (and it) posted.

If you simply must see a report on the results of today's auction sale of art controversially attributed to Hitler, go here.

And if you want to see images of the dubious daubs, so appealing to some that they more than doubled their presale estimates, go here. (I don't know how much longer the auction house will keep links to those images on its homepage).

If you ask me, Aaron Barschak (whose disruptive antics were chronicled in the above-linked Reuters article) had the right idea. Isn't there some way we can just quarantine these things?

Where's Christian Griepenkerl when we really need him?

Tomorrow through Sunday, Munch's stolen and recovered "The Scream" and "Madonna" will be publicly displayed at the Munch Museum, before repairs of theft-related damage are performed,

For those of you who are curious to see how they weathered their ordeal, but who can't make the trip to Oslo, here are the photos of the two paintings, in their current damaged state.

Apparently Jen Graves still can't get anything she wants at Mimi Gates' Restaurant. Graves, a writer for The Stranger, Seattle's alternative weekly, triumphantly reported last week that the director of the Seattle Art Museum had acceded to her CultureGrrl-inspired request to "make public the artworks it plans to sell before they go to auction."

But now, Graves reports, that is not to be:

SAM director Gates will not, in fact, allow the works waiting to be shipped to auction houses to become public knowledge. Only works that have already been sold can be reported publicly.

Jen, you don't have to take this, nor must you necessarily peruse the catalogues of every upcoming auction to get presale information: Last week, I did a search for works recently sold or about to be sold by the Metropolitan Museum in auction databases available free to the public at the Frick Art Reference Library. A cheerful librarian directed me to the databases that had the most user-friendly search results for identities of sellers.

The Met, unlike most museums, does annually publish a list of works (but not their individual prices) sold for more than $50,000, but its press office would not provide me an update on works sold since the most recent annual report, covering fiscal 2005 .

Here are three of the higher-priced recently sold items that I found through my database search. The last was sold by the Met just a week ago. Prices include the buyer's commission:

Benjamin West, "Portrait of Peter Beckford," Sotheby's London, Nov. 24, 2005: $76,364

Benjamin West and John Trumbull, "The Battle of La Hogue," Sotheby's New York, Jan. 26, 2006: $632,000

A pair of 18th or 19th-century Chinese square-corner cabinets and hat chests, Christie's New York, Sept. 19, 2006: $36,000

In his public discussion with the Museum of Modern Art's director, Glenn Lowry, last Tuesday at the museum, architect Jacques Herzog insisted that Artist's Choice: Herzog & de Meuron, Perception Restrained, the MoMA exhibition (closed yesterday) that he organized with his partner, Pierre de Meuron, was not intended as a critique of the museum that had hosted it, as has been widely assumed. Still, he did offer Lowry some pointed MoMA critiques (which resonated with Item 6 and Item 5 from CultureGrrl's recent diatribe).

Although his firm had competed in the charette that was part of the architect-selection process for MoMA's latest expansion, Herzog now says:

I'm actually happy not to have been the architect [in part because he had so many other museum projects to work on]....I remember, when we did the charette, [you said that] in the future you wanted to have more parallel presentation of photography together with painting and sculpture and architecture---that they would not be split or segregated. Maybe now this is less being realized than what you intended to do.

On the subject of displaying the permanent collection, he advocated creating "anchor spaces"---presentations of certain key parts of a collection in a manner that "has in itself a certain permanence." He seemed to regret (as does CultureGrrl) the lack of that kind of anchor for MoMA's succession of temporary displays for contemporary art:

I wish there was a permanent space for the Richter piece [his 15-painting Baader-Meinhof series, "October 18, 1977," now on view as part of the latest contemporary installation]....When you create three or four really very strong anchors, the rest can be more generic or more temporary in the way it is installed.

On the subject of the endlessly expanding museum (and indeed, Lowry's ambitions do extend to other properties on MoMA's street), Herzog noted that "there is no good answer" to how big a museum should be, but he also observed that once you start thinking about "a third or fourth phase, I don't say it's not possible, but...how do you experience it as one thing, and shouldn't you split it, once you reach a certain size?"

When CultureGrrl asked Herzog how he regarded Yoshio Taniguchi's built solution to the problems posed by MoMA's expansion, the audience chuckled at Herzog's deadpan reply:

I think it perfectly is what MoMA wanted [general laughter]...the idea of the modern translated into our own time. We would have done it differently.

We have yet to see the completion of the current expansion phase: The education wing, originally intended to open concurrently with the rest of the project, is finally due to debut on Nov. 28, two years after the inauguration of the new gallery wing. This will undoubtedly engender yet another round of appraisals of mega-MoMA.

Speaking of snubs from the NY Times, how is it that the city's paper-of-record has still failed to publish an article or review mentioning that Anish Kapoor's dazzling Sky Mirror has been conspicuously in our midst since last Tuesday?

RENDERING OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY'S LIFE SCIENCES TECHNOLOGY BUILDING, NOW UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Richard Meier don't get no respect. First, the High Museum in Atlanta snubs him, choosing Renzo Piano to do the add-on to Meier's masterpiece. The result was a big, bland structure that CultureGrrl called "an architectural flop".

Now, in today's NY Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff calls Meier's new Ara Pacis Museum in Rome "a flop":

Mr. Meier's building is a contemporary expression of what can happen when an architect fetishizes his own style out of a sense of self-aggrandizement. Absurdly overscale, it seems indifferent to the naked beauty of the dense and richly textured city around it.

That kind of insensitivity tends to reinforce the cliché that all contemporary architecture is an expression of an architect's self-importance.

And that review reinforces the cliché that Meier is a self-aggrandizing, self-important individual. It seems as much a reflection of how people feel about this man as of how Ouroussoff feels about his work. (Alan Riding of the Times gives a more detailed history of the controversial project here.)

Ever since he did the J. Paul Getty Trust's campus in 1997---an ambitious project marred by public tension between architect and client, as well as by huge cost overruns---Meier has not been able to get the museum assignments that he loves. He has become pegged, instead, as a designer of extravagantly expensive apartment buildings. This Times review is not going to help him attract museum clients.

The Times also snubbed Meier in Robin Pogrebin's article last Tuesday, announcing the selection of Rem Koolhaas to design an addition for the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at my alma mater, Cornell University. Not only did the Times neglect to mention that another "starchitect," Meier, had a much bigger project (image above) already under construction on the same campus, but Meier was not even included in the article's two-architect list (Peter Eisenman and Arthur Gensler) of others who had attended Cornell's College of Architecture. (Meier graduated from the school; Koolhaas studied there.)

Meier's 250,000-square-foot facility was, at its groundbreaking ceremony a year and a half ago, projected to cost $140 million. But now, Charles Phlegar, the university's vice president for alumni affairs and development (whose job it is to help raise money for the project) says the cost will be $200 million. It is due for completion in late 2007 or early 2008.

Koolhaas's 43,000-square-foot facility is due to begin construction at the end of next year and to be completed in 2009, at a cost of $40 million.

Lucky Cornell architecture students: They get free front-row seats to a great architectural show.

Here's a radical idea from the blog of the conservative New Criterion: Just get rid of the Met's entire 20th-century collection and acquire nothing made in the last 100 years.

James Panero, you were just kidding, right?

[UPDATE: Panero answers CultureGrrl in this afternoon's post, same website as above.]

While the Museum of Modern Art and other museums diligently compile dubious statistics that "prove" the enormous economic value of their activities to their cities, the Village Voice's indispensable art critic, Jerry Saltz, has been busy gathering more telling statistics:

The percentage of women exhibiting in New York galleries and museums is grievously low. According to the fall exhibition schedules for 125 well-known New York galleries--42 percent of which are owned or co-owned by women--of 297 one-person shows by living artists taking place between now and December 31, just 23 percent are solos by women....

Meanwhile, since 2000 only 14 percent of the Guggenheim's solo shows of living artists have been devoted to women. After cringing at that, consider "Full House," the Whitney's recent installation of its permanent collection. The show was challenging but familiar in one troubling area: Only 19 percent of its participants were women.

Jerry, want to do a study of women bloggers? (On that subject, here is CultureGrrl's very first post!)

I like this quote from one of my favorite writers on architecture, James Russell of Bloomberg, who gives another early review (more favorable than that of The New Yorker's Paul Goldberger), of Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum, opening to the public on Oct. 7:

In Denver, it's tragically clear just what New York has given up in trashing just about every life-enhancing element of Libeskind's master plan at Ground Zero.

At a time when our wounds from the terrorist attack were still raw, Libeskind's engaging plans and his inspirational elucidation of them lifted our spirits and gave us courage to build. All you had to do was look at the rapt faces watching the video of his explanation of the project---the biggest attention-getter in the public display at the World Financial Center of the various architectural proposals---to appreciate how he converted despair to optimism. The momentum has been lost, the optimism has been replaced by cynicism, and Libeskind, still smiling through his frustration and disappointment, has been reduced to almost zero at Ground Zero.

Maybe someone should get Larry Silverstein a (one-way?) ticket to Denver!

CultureGrrl to Tyler:

MWAH!

(I once had to translate that for my WSJ editor, who must never have watched Dinah Shore on TV in the '50s or heard that great '60s trashy girl-groups song, "Give Him a Great Big Kiss.")

Uh-oh. Now I'm in trouble with Eric!

Tyler Green in mad at CultureGrrl, and she's been banished from his blogroll. I assume it's because of his pique over this. The formidable Michael Kimmelman certainly had no need for Little Lee to defend him against Tyrannical Tyler, so I'm sorry I ever started this. Although we saw many issues differently, Tyler was (and still is) a valued colleague.

If you used to link to me through Modern Art Notes, you will now have to do so through the main ArtsJournal site. (Scroll down the righthand column to the visual arts blogs.) Or just put me in your bookmarks: www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.

Or, better yet: TAKE ME BACK, TYLER!

[Update: He did! But now I'm "Lee Rosenbaum" on his blogroll, not the incorrigible "CultureGrrl."]

No fair! Chicago gets to keep its bean, but New York can't keep its "Sky Mirror"? Where's Mike Bloomberg, the art collector-mayor, when we really need him?

Anish Kapoor's literally and metaphysically dazzling 35-foot heaven-and-earth mirrored microcosm is up for grabs when it leaves Rockefeller Center on Oct. 28. A cool $5 million, more or less, will buy it, according to the artist's dealer, Barbara Gladstone, who has been contacted by several interested parties, including one municipality (but no one, so far, from New York City). Money's not enough: You must also give this polished stainless steel orb a good home---a site with "a good vantage point and optimum conditions," Gladstone said.

This piece certainly has the "wow" factor, but it also radiates a profound spirituality. Its convex side, tilted down to reflect Fifth Avenue's pedestrian hoards, show humanity in all its vanity. People raise their arms so that they can be easily spotted in photographs of the piece taken by their companions. CultureGrrl, ever the egoist, positioned herself dead-center in this mirrored world.

The flip side of the terrestrial is the celestial: The mirror's reverse side, concave, tilts up to the sky, reflecting a dazzling blue expanse with intensely white clouds that emerge on one side and slide away on the other. The press release from the Public Art Fund, which organized the installation, says that "'Sky Mirror' literally brings the sky down to the ground." But to me it represents a heavenly spirituality that we vain mortals cannot yet attain. (Maybe it seems different on a stormy day!)

However your regard it, the piece is visually and interpretively rich. New York would be much the poorer without it.

I knew immediately that there was a big error in Tyler Green's list of errors in Michael Kimmelman's NY Times piece on the restitution and sale of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts. But I wanted to focus on more substantive issues regarding the disposition of restituted Nazi loot, rather than quibble over the fine points.

But now, Tyler's done it again, so attention should be paid: The estimable Art Law Blog untangles Tyler's legal confusion (over whether the Bloch-Bauer heirs could have gotten tax deductions for donating the Klimts) better than I could. Scroll down to the last paragraph in attorney Donn Zaretsky's Sept. 19 entry.

Not too many fresh insights from Calvin Tomkins about the reasons for the general malaise felt by many long-time Museum of Modern Art visitors at the new mega-MoMA. But his Sept. 25 article, "I Remember MoMA" in The New Yorker, does break new journalistic ground in detailing at least some of the story behind the obvious (but never fully explained) rifts between director Glenn Lowry and two of MoMA's most prominent curators, Robert Storr and the late Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom left their posts. (At this writing, The New Yorker has not posted a link to Tomkins' article.)

But for me, the most interesting excerpt was a quote from Lowry, indicating that a rethinking of how best to tame the expanded space is now is progress:

I want to have time with the curatorial staff and the senior support staff to step back now and say, "What have we achieved, and what do we need to do over the next five years?" We've got fifty thousand more square feet of exhibition space, and we're far from understanding how to use that space well, or to what degree some galleries work and others don't.

Quite an admission, but also a sign that even Lowry recognizes that they haven't gotten it right yet. To a significant extent, though, they will be limited by the shortcomings of the building itself, as Tomkins discusses (and as I have previously discussed here and here).

Also weighing in on mega-MoMA this week was architect Jacques Herzog, whose firm, Herzog & de Meuron, had competed for the chance to design the new facility, and (by his own admission) was "devastated" when it lost. After attending Herzog's public dialogue with Lowry at MoMA Tuesday evening. I came away convinced that Glenn could have a great career as an interviewer, if he ever decides to retire from museum work (and this from CultureGrrl herself, a master of the pointed question!).

Come to think of it...I have so many ideas on how museums should be run that maybe I could have a great career as a museum director once I retire from cultural journalism. (You know I'm just kidding, right?)

COMING SOON: Jacques Herzog's take on mega-MoMA.

The J. Paul Getty Museum has always struggled against the fact that, aside from photography, it does not collect contemporary art. So now, as discussed at yesterday's NYC press lunch, it has inaugurated "a new program of exhibitions focused on contemporary art and its relevance to the museum's collection and mission."

First up is Tim Hawkinson, Mar. 6-Sept. 9. Whether his work is in dire need of additional West Coast exposure, having been the subject of a major survey just a year ago at the neighboring Los Angeles County Museum of Art (after opening at the Whitney Museum, New York), is open to debate. Hawkinson's "relevance to the [Getty's] collection and mission" also remains to be seen.

The artist has been commissioned by the Getty to create four interrelated works, and the bladders of his grand-scale Rube Goldberg contraption, "Überorgan," will flatulate in the Getty's main entrance hall. (My unabridged dictionary says there's no such word, so I had to invent it.)

The museum's last big contemporary fling was "The Passions" in 2003---a 13-work show (including one Getty commission) devoted to video artist Bill Viola. A departure from the Getty's usual territory, "The Passions" indulged the passion for that artist of the show's curator, Getty director emeritus John Walsh. That show was tenuously connected to the museum's focus on old masters, through the inspiration that Viola drew from a 15th-century fresco in creating his Getty-commissioned piece, "Emergence."

Maybe instead of having to justify its forays into the present with the strained argument that they "make explicit the links between historical and current artistic practice," the Getty should just say it wants to be contemporary and get on with it.

Then it would have to hire someone with much needed expertise in that field. Only a lack of curatorial enterprise and imagination can explain why, for its upcoming show, From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden (Oct. 5-Apr. 29), 12 of the 13 Richters, all from 2005, are gifts or promised gifts from two private collections to the Museum of Modern Art.

Nothing new was announced on the Getty governance front, although the museum's director, Michael Brand, did say that, on his flight to New York, he edited a draft of new policy guidelines for museum acquisitions, to be released soon. And he still hopes to get some much needed art expertise on the Getty Trust's board.

I also checked back with the California Attorney General's office: The AG still anticipates releasing a report of the investigation into alleged Getty governance transgressions later this month.

NY Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman trod on delicate ground yesterday, when he suggested that Nazi victims or their heirs might do well to consider a more public-spirited response to restitution of their family treasures than immediately cashing them in at auction, as is about to happen with the four Klimts owned by the Bloch-Bauer heirs. For this, he got a blogging flogging yesterday from Modern Art Notes, re-posted today on ArtsJournal's main page.

CultureGrrl thinks that Kimmelman has a legitimate, if controversial, point. On June 21, I addressed this sensitive issue this way:

Nazi victims or their heirs who have been fortunate enough to receive restitution of expropriated artworks get justifiably testy if anyone suggests that they consider anything but their own financial self-interest is determining the disposition of these works. After all, they are the rightful owners; no one else has any right to tell them what to do with privately owned art.

As a practical matter, this has sometimes meant that masterpieces previously in the public domain are sold into the private domain, to the highest bidder....Even the lawyer who forged the heirs' legal victory, Randol Schoenberg, has publicly expressed some regret that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (which is currently displaying the iconic Klimt, along with four other works by the same artist that were returned to the same heirs) was unable to swing a deal to buy all five paintings.

MAN's Tyler Green is right that the Bloch-Bauer heirs "are the aggrieved party" and "are under no obligation to do any particular anything [sic] with the paintings." Kimmelman and Rosenbaum recognize this. But we also feel that a public-spirited disposition of such art would underscore the point that righting the wrongs of the Holocaust is, above all, an issue of principle, not personal gain.

I'll get myself in even more trouble than Kimmelman by taking this one step further: Rushing to auction rather than cherishing objects that were once important to lost loved ones reinforces the pernicious stereotype that we Jews are always up against---that we are enamored of money. Nazi victims' heirs are under absolutely no obligation to worry about, let alone mitigate, this stereotype. I recognize this. But I'd feel better if some beneficiaries of restitution would create living memorials to their family members---in public institutions, perhaps located in the cities that gave some of their family members refuge and a good life.

When I wrote my two-part screed about art-PR people (here and here), I knew that my broad brush might appear to tar the many professionals---two above all---who have been close to impeccable in their dealings with me over many years.

My top two are: Philippa Polskin of Ruder Finn Arts & Communications, and Betsy Ennis of the Guggenheim Museum.

At the Getty press lunch in NYC today (more on that tomorrow), I discovered that Philippa, always a model of discretion, was furious with me. So let me first reemphasize what I said before: My work would be much harder without those art-PR professionals who tirelessly track down the answers to all my niggling questions, often on tight deadline. And even when they are impediments rather than helps, it's often not their fault: They're agents for their higher-ups, who occasionally favor secrecy over transparency.

As for Philippa and Betsy---they are unfailingly tactful, helpful and non-intrusive. And they are superhumanly prompt and patient in tracking down answers to my every question and fulfilling my every request. I can think of other near-paragons, but these two and I go back a long way.

There will always be a love-hate relationship between PR people and journalists, and it works both ways: I'm sure that many communications people regard CultureGrrl as relentless, pushy, irritating, impatient, hypercritical and boorishly blunt.

And that's on a good day.

but sculptor Josiah McElheny, painter Shahzia Sikander and "commemorative artist" Anna Schuleit are, according to the MacArthur Foundation.

Oh well, is there a Pulitzer for bloggers?

The elephant in the salesroom (or, more likely, on the phone) on Nov. 8, when Christie's sells four Klimts for the Bloch-Bauer heirs, will be the $135-million-dollar man, Ronald Lauder. The deep-pocketed collector recently predicted to television interviewer Charlie Rose that the four companion works to "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," his stellar acquisition for the Neue Galerie, would collectively fetch "even more" that what he paid for that painting.

And Lauder could certainly help make that happen. During our recent conversation at Adele's coming-out party in New York, he expressed interest to me in all four unattached Klimts. His participation in any of the bidding would likely help set a new auction record for the artist. If the Lauder Factor skews the results, it won't be the first time:

I can remember, when I covered major auctions regularly many years ago, watching in astonishment as the late dealer Serge Sabarsky regularly defied auctioneers' estimates to snap up what seemed to be every high-quality Expressionist work in sight, at record prices. When I asked him about this, he told me he was buying for a new museum that he intended to establish in Manhattan.

At that time, he didn't mention that he had a partner in creating what is now the Neue Galerie. But we now can surmise that Lauder's money helped back that giddy buying spree. When there's something he really wants, money's no object, as he himself admitted in describing to Charlie Rose his pursuit of "Adele Bloch-Bauer I":

ROSE: But how did you determine the price?
LAUDER: I did not determine it. That was the price they asked.
CHARLIE ROSE: Oh, I see. They said, "We want this, and you said, "Okay, fine." No negotiations, no bargaining, nothing.
LAUDER: Nothing. Zero. Took two seconds.
ROSE: Two seconds.
LAUDER: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: In other words, within the moment that it came out of their mouth that we want whatever it was, over $100 million...
RONALD LAUDER: I said yes.

Make that "the 2-second, $135-million man."

Although I believe (along with Tate Gallery director Nicholas Serota) that transparency is the best policy for most museum expenditures, I not only disagree with requiring museums to publicize the appraised value of donated art (as I explain here), but I'm still pondering how far museums ought to go in disclosing what they pay for works that they purchase from collectors or dealers. Many sellers might find such financial publicity so distasteful as to inhibit their dealings with museums. The loss would be the public's.

But one lesson drawn from the Tate's controversial recent purchase of "The Upper Room" for $1.13 million from its own board member, artist Chris Ofili, is that full disclosure is essential for any purchase or gift that could give the appearance of conflict-of-interest or self-dealing. Ofili retired from the Tate's board last November and was replaced by Anish Kapoor, whose "Ishi's Light" was another of the Tate's highest-priced recent purchases, at $908,666. (I am using today's conversion rate of 1.88 pounds to the dollar.)

Here's another potential conflict-of-interest problem---purely hypothetical: What if the Metropolitan Museum purchased an artwork from its director's son, Marc de Montebello, a private New York dealer in blue-chip art? (I emphasize that I have no knowledge that such a transaction has ever actually taken place.) This type of purchase should immediately be disclosed, along with the purchase price. A famous example of a museum official with a dealer/relative was the late William Rubin, former director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, whose brother was Lawrence Rubin, a major modern and contemporary art dealer. (A passion for art runs in families.)

I also believe there should be full disclosure, including appraised value, for any works donated to a museum by members of its own staff---a fairly common practice that benefits the museum but also benefits its curators or other officials, through personal tax deductions. Museum officials may argue that they recuse themselves from decisions on acquisitions for which they could have a conflict of interest. But given their close relationships to the decision-makers, that's not enough.

Would anyone care to comment?

You have to work really hard to find the Tate Gallery's list of art purchase prices and gift valuations online (see my previous post), but I've done the deep-clicking for you:

Here are the prices of recent acquisitions.

Here are the valuations of donated art.

These are in the online version only of the Tate's biennial report for 2004-6, just published. The Tate doesn't include the lists in the report's hardcopy. (Remember: The prices you will see are in British pounds.)

I haven't even perused the lists yet. I wanted to get them to you as soon as possible. But I'll have more to say later on the topic of acquisition disclosures..

Bloomberg reports that the Tate Gallery, London, released at its annual press conference today "prices paid for recent art purchases, moving to boost transparency after criticism that the London museum bought from an artist on its board---Chris Ofili---without seeking regulatory permission."

There are museums in this country that have previously disclosed prices of privately purchased works---regularly (Smithsonian purchases with government money) or sporadically (the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts). But here's the shocker, again quoted from Bloomberg:

The Tate also published the names and values of works handed to it as gifts.

I'm all for transparency, especially in the expenditure of museum funds. But disclosing the appraised value of art donated to museums could chill or kill such munificence, without creating any public benefit. Museums in this country, quite properly and legally, have a hands-off stance towards appraisals of donated works. The donor must, for tax-deduction purposes, obtain such appraisals independently and report them to the IRS, which has an Art Advisory Panel of outside art experts to review and, if necessary, challenge, valuations of high-ticket items. Since the taxman already has access to this information, no abuses are being curbed by making it public. The only thing that would be curbed is the largesse of donors who prefer to keep the value of their gifts private.

and again and again and again and again.

It's not up on the web yet [see update, below], but in tomorrow's NY Times magazine (which subscribers get today) you can read the latest installment in the paper's exhaustive coverage of that earthshaking story, the Lee Siegel follies.

For Siegel, now revealed to the world looking slightly shlumpy in a page-length color photograph, this is surely a publicity coup: It doesn't matter what you say about Seagull, as long as you spell his name right (with a photo, no less!).

The magazine's quirky Q&A-er, Deborah Solomon, who once toiled as the Wall Street Journal's chief art critic, even plugs his new book as "nuanced and witty." What more could "sprezzatura" possibly ask?

A movie treatment, perhaps? (Is Ben Stiller available?)

UPDATE: Now the Solomon Q&A link is up.

Here's a "Did he really say that?" shocker from Philippe de Montebello, the Metropolitan Museum's director, taken from Hilton Kramer's Q&A in the September issue of The New Criterion:

There's a critical framework in place to approach older art. When you're looking at very recent art, it's much more difficult. There are no rules. It's simply much more intuitive, much more individual. We strongly believe in the continuity of art, that it doesn't stop at any point in time, so we have Cai Guo-Qiang on the roof, we have Kara Walker, we have Santiago Calatrava, lots of living artists. But we have pretty much made the decision not to buy very much of this generation. There is plenty of time, if someone emerges as a major artist, to buy that artist fifty years from now.

I can vividly remember an interchange some years ago, during a museum directors' panel discussion, between de Montebello and the Whitney Museum's then director Tom Armstrong. It was at the time when the Met was poised for a major foray into modern and contemporary art, thanks to its new Lila Acheson Wallace Wing.

"It's not your territory!" Armstrong strongly admonished de Montebello, objecting to the Met's encroachment on the Whitney's contemporary turf. De Montebello logically responded that his encyclopedic museum had a responsibility to be involved in the art of its own time, and many major supporters of museums are contemporary art collectors.

But now, maybe the Met needs to update its own website's description of its Department of Modern Art (which, in any event, no longer exists as such, having been merged into a department that lumps together 19th-century, modern and contemporary art):

The Metropolitan Museum has been concerned with the art of its own time, as well as that of the past, since its founding in 1870. Many of the objects acquired as contemporary in the early decades of the Museum's existence are now in the collections of other departments....Those works that entered the collection before the turn of the century and still qualify as "modern" join many, many more acquired over the past hundred years.

What de Montebello is missing, by his 50-year rule, is that many of the best museum acquisitions of contemporary art (the holdings of the Whitney and the Walker Art Center, for example) are made by sharp-eyed curators who are inveterate gallery-goers and studio-goers and can take their pick of the best things from those sources, before they get snapped up by others and before their prices rise on the secondary market.

Maybe Armstrong was right: It just wasn't their territory.

No museum officials have sent me comments on my call for advance public notice of planned deaccessions by museums, but George Keyes, chief curator of the Detroit Institute of Arts, did tell me yesterday (at a DIA press lunch in New York) that he supports this idea.

Weighing in on the other side, David Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gave these thoughts today in the "Comments" section of Jen Graves' post yesterday on the blog page of The Stranger:

As a former museum director, I would agree with Mimi Gates [director of the Seattle Art Museum] that transparency is always a good policy, whether in for profit or nonprofit educational institutions. The idea of announcing prospective deaccessions (and the curatorial rationale) is on the surface a good idea. But it is not that simple. We should not forget that there is a mechanism for community oversight of all museum activities---including acquisitions and deaccessioning---and that is its board of trustees. Trustees are accountable to the public for everything from a museum's financial health to its program and acquisition policies.

If a pattern of negligence appears, then it is the community's responsibility to challenge the trustees, but unless such a pattern is perceived, the community should take comfort (and be grateful) that a group of unpaid men and women are working hard to represent their collective interests on their behalf.

But David, there's are two problems with this "trust the trustees" philosophy: First, how is the public to discern "a pattern of negligence," if deaccession decisions are kept secret (especially in cases where works are sold privately, rather than at public auction)? And there are enough well documented instances where museum boards have not exercised "responsible oversight" to necessitate the additional checks and balances that would be provided through public disclosure.

At its "first-ever art auction and gala dinner," The New Criterion magazine on Sept. 21 will sell "rare and unique work by many of our favorite artists." So who are these anointed "favorites"? Here's the list, heavy on the traditional and the figurative, as befits a conservative bastion:

William Bailey, Max Beckmann, Oscar Bluemner, Jacob Collins, Viviano Codazzi, Adrienne Farb, Ian Hamilton Finlay With Gary Hincks, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Kinney Frelinghuysen, Tom Goldenberg, Cristina Grassi, Al Held, Robert Henri, Alex Katz, Marcia Gygli King, James Little, Alice Neel, Graham Nickson, Jules Olitski, Philip Pearlstein, Sally Pettus, Richard Pousette-Dart, Paul Resika, Morgan Russell, John Walker, Thornton Willis, Christopher Wilmarth

Next spring, this self-styled "staunch defender of the values of high culture," will publish an anthology of its articles over the past 25 years. Do you think they'll include my favorite---the one in which magazine co-founder Hilton Kramer channels CultureGrrl?

Full disclosure, in advance, of proposed art sales from museum collections is an issue ripe for a united art journalists' front. I am happy to see that my radically conservative proposal, previously propounded in CultureGrrl, has gained a bit of traction on the West Coast.

On July 26, I wrote:

Museums should identify on their websites any works that they have targeted for disposal, several months in advance of their sale. This gives notice to the public and to the state attorney general's office that part of the public patrimony may go private. The posting should include a description of the work and the reasons why it is deemed expendable.

Citing this post as her inspiration, Jen Graves, a writer for The Stranger, Seattle's alternative weekly, asked the Seattle Art Museum for a list of recent deaccessions. She reported on Aug. 24 that she "was told SAM doesn't publish" such information. Graves added that her attempts to get lists from Christie's and Sotheby's of works they had auctioned for the museum were also unavailing. (In July, I had made similar requests of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Christie's and Sotheby's, with similar results.)

Graves has just posted an update:

Yesterday, SAM director Mimi Gates told me that SAM has decided to change its policy, and to start publishing a list of deaccessions in its annual report every year.

Score one for crusading journalism!

But although that's a good beginning, it falls short of what I feel is needed: advance public disclosure of proposed sales, with an explanation of why the works are expendable. Jen agrees, and includes a long quote from CultureGrrl on the subject.

I'll bet a lot of other journalists agree, too. If one reporter asks, it's an ignorable annoyance. Two, a dismissible coincidence. But imagine if reporters all over the country decided to ask at the same time for the same thing. Now that would be a Movement!

So everyone tickle your keyboards and sing along with me...in three-part harmony:

You can get any info you want
At Mimi's Restaurant.

(Note to Readers Under 40: If don't know what song I'm referencing above, please download Arlo Guthrie's civil-disobedience anthem, "Alice's Restaurant," to your iPod immediately!)

Would any museum directors care to join The Movement? Walk right in (it's around the back), and sign up with a BlogBack right here: culturegrrl@nj.rr.com.

"Sock Puppet Bites Man"? I had to rub my tired eyes at midnight when I came upon that lame headline on the last of yesterday's editorials in the NY Times. Was the overblown Lee Siegel contretemps really weighty enough for the august editorial board to weigh in on?

Then I got to this sentence, which really woke me up:

Sock puppetry may be rampant online, but journalists writing for their employer's Web site have a greater responsibility to be honest than run-of-the-mill posters.

"Run-of-the-mill posters," unite! This Lee has the same "responsibility to be honest" as that Lee. The Mainstream Media still look down on bloggers as the great unwashed. But the Times has had its dicey moments too. Who was that fellow Jayson Blair again?

Here's one from the "What will they think of next?" files:

I'm an art lover and a dark-chocolate addict, so I must be the target audience for Art Bar, a product from Ithaca, N.Y., that I came across last week at the Cornell Campus Store. At least 10% of the chocolate profits are used to sweeten the pot for arts education. I'm a Lindt fan myself, but this was pretty good!

The inside of the wrapper informs us that "a reproduction from a diverse range of contemporary adult or child artists is featured on a collectible card in each Art Bar." If you want to contact an artist or purchase some art, you can e-mail Ithaca Fine Chocolates. (It's not clear whether the works on the cards are the ones available for sale.)

Mmmm! Yum! Carrie Mae Weems!

Can it really be five years? Make a wish for healthy traffic and blog out the candles.

Mark Ledbury, associate director of the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., replies to Clark Bars the Barnes?:

We here at the Clark always read your blog with great interest. However, in respect of your Sept. 11 post, "Clark Bars the Barnes," I feel that a short response might be in order.

Thus they aren't quite in the same category as the Gardner or the Wallace or the Clark, even though the Barnes Collection is clearly one of the most important of its type anywhere in the world and in many respects it is utterly unique as an institution. We hope that by inviting curators from two of the most famous collector's museums (the Wallace and the Gardner) and the director of a "new model" of collector's museum (Schaulager) to provide enough concrete examples to anchor a wider discussion of the genre and its variants.

The NY Times today finally gets around to reporting on the fractional gifts fracas that is roiling the museum world. (CultureGrrl readers learned about it here on Monday.)

But the Times fails to acknowledge possible compromise solutions, discussed in CultureGrrl and originally proposed by Donn Zaretsky on Sept. 8 in The Art Law Blog. Lawmakers could require museums to take actual possession, for a fraction of the year, of fractionally donated art, and they could also require that the entire gift be perfected within a certain number of years. This would seem to address the lawmakers' two chief concerns. Such changes could have a discouraging effect on some gifts, but not eliminate them.

Meanwhile, still no mention of this important issue on the Association of Art Museum Directors' website, even though they are said to be mounting a lobbying campaign.

The belated answer to last week's Where in the World is Lee Going? is, of course, my alma mater, Cornell University, whose dairy bar has just invented a new ice cream flavor, "Banana Berry Skorton," named for its newly inaugurated cardiologist-president (first name, David). Directly after this very untraditional and unstuffy investiture, to-die-for samples of the new dessert were distributed to all. But Dr. Skorton, your eponymous frozen concoction is killing my heart-healthy diet!

What's all this got to do with antiquities, you rightly ask.

Just this: The next day I wandered over to the Johnson Museum of Art, picked up its latest newsletter, and read the director's forward. Instead of discussing current museum news and offerings, Frank Robinson offered his strong views on the antiquities wars. He noted that the theft of the Lydian Hoard, soon after those objects were repatriated to Turkey by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided "a powerful argument against repatriation of ancient objects to their countries of origin." Nevertheless, he asserted his continued belief that "repatriation is the only moral, ethical and legal thing to do":

The most precious "asset" of any museum, and of the museum profession as a whole, is our integrity---the perception, and reality, that we stand for certain principles....If we traffic in things that we know are stolen or smuggled, where their history has been deliberately suppressed, we risk compromising our mission---the very point of why we collect in the first place---and we risk being perceived as no better than the thieves and smugglers themselves. Repatriation is the thorniest and most complex issue facing museums today, and probably no one has the moral high ground. That is all the more reason for museums, and those who support us and believe we should be models of behavior, to try, once again, to do the right thing.

The Met's director, Philippe de Montebello will again express his more nuanced views on this subject, in two sold-out public lectures at the Met, Nov. 16 and Dec. 7.

This article in yesterday's NY Times, identifying Walt Whitman as a pioneering sock puppeteer, has prompted me to shout out to all you CultureGrrl fans who want to do my self-aggrandizing for me. (After all, wasn't it Whitman who wrote: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself/And what I assume you shall assume"?)

Just think what this bloviating blogger would say about herself in "BlogBacks," if only she could get away with it, without changing her name to Whitman or Siegel. Here are some helpful suggestions: incisively insightful; winsomely witty; electrically eloquent, master of punning punditry...you get the idea.

Here's an even better example, from an e-mail I recently received, labeled "Uninvited Praise," from someone who won't let me use his name because his partner is a major artworld player:

A quick note to say that I really like your coverage of the art world---and other overlapping fields. I receive a daily e-mail with a range of arts-related blogs and have switched to reading yours on a daily basis....You really manage to stay on top of breaking arts-related news.

And I didn't even have to write that one myself. (Or did I?)

The Munch Museum in Oslo will publicly display the recently recovered "The Scream'' and "Madonna'' before repairs of any theft-related damage are performed. This from Bloomberg reporter Beate Evensen:

The museum, the city and the police decided to display the paintings because of "the great interest in the paintings and their condition after the robbery, and the fact that it will take some time before they can be displayed again after conservation,'' the museum said in the statement.

Reuters describes the damage in more detail. It also claims that a photo of the damage is on the Munch Museum's website, but I could not find it. The museum has not yet said exactly when the paintings will be back on its walls.

The museum's action departs from standard practice of not showing works with unrepaired damage. Especially given the extraordinary public interest in what happened to these iconic paintings, this is a laudably open approach. The Munch Museum would do well to accompany the display with an explanation of the nature of the damage and how it will be repaired.

The ad hoc local group, Friends of the Barnes, just sent a letter to its constituents plotting its next desperation move to keep the Barnes Foundation in Merion. The letter states:

We feel that we are being locked out of the [Philadelphia] Inquirer's coverage of the Barnes Foundation and that the newspaper is biased in favor of the move [to Philadelphia]. There was no mention of the standing-room only Forum at the Merion Tribute House and no mention of the resolution passed by the Lower Merion Board of Commissioners. Members of the Steering Committee have submitted letters and articles to the Inquirer which have not been printed.

We need your help. If you have sent a letter, commentary piece, or other communication to the Inquirer that has not been printed, please send a copy back to us along with the date of submission. We plan to follow up with the Inquirer about this matter.

Art critic Edward Sozanski might be surprised to hear that "the newspaper is biased in favor of the move." On the editorial page, yes. But news coverage and critical opinion have told a different story.

The Clark Art Institute this Friday and Saturday will host a lecture and symposium in Williamstown, Mass., on the topic of private-collector museums---a subject I have explored in some depth for both the Wall Street Journal and NY Times.

My articles discussed the special aura of such "jewel box" museums and lamented the now successful campaign to get court approval for transplanting the Barnes Foundation to Philadelphia. Similarly, the Clark's press release extols the "special influence and fascination connected to 'collector's museums'" and the "powerful attraction that collections like the Wallace, the Gardner, the Frick, and the Clark still exert over the gallery-going public."

Notably absent from this list, though, is the soon-to-be-disassembled creation of Albert Barnes. We can only hope that the participants or some questioners from the audience will discuss the elephant in the room.

It's a bit like closing the museum door after the donors have already escaped: The Association of Art Museum Directors is now lobbying for a change in a law that Congress has already passed---Section 1218 of the 2006 Pension Protection Act, a provision that radically alters the rules for giving fractional gifts of art to nonprofit institutions. Museum officials say this change could be a deal-killer for many donors.

[Note: Links to legislation on the federal government's "Thomas" legislative website expire, so if you want to read the text of Section 1218, you must do your own search: Go here, type in "2006 Pension Protection Act," click the tab for "Enrolled Bills" and hit the "Search" button. Then scroll down to Section 1218. Just more bureaucratic red tape from Washington!]

What museum professionals object to most is a new rule that prevents donors who give a fraction of a work's value from taking advantage of that work's increased value when they subsequently donate an additional portion. In the case of a work given in 25% installments, the second tax deduction would previously have equaled 25% of the value of the work at the time of the second donation. But under the new rule, that second tax deduction will be limited to 25% of the work's original value (its appraised value at the time of the first fractional donation), or its value at the time of the second donation, whichever is LESS. The chance to take fractional-gift deductions based on a work's appreciation in value is lost.

For the best explanation of all the complications and ramifications of this new law, consult my favorite blogging attorney: Donn Zaretsky of The Art Law Blog. Start with his Sept. 6 entry and then go to Sept. 8. Mainstream Media articles on this subject are here and here.

Zaretsky suggests a compromise solution: Instead of imposing conditions that will decimate donors' incentives to make fractional gifts, Congress could make smaller modifications to curb possible abuses. It could require that museums take physical possession of fractionally given art for the portion of the year that they are legally entitled to do so. (If a donor gives a fractional gift of 25% of an artwork's value, the museum is entitled to take possession of it for 25% of each year. But museums have not always exercised that right.)

Zaretsky further observes:

If you didn't think that went far enough, then something like the new rule [in Section 1218] requiring that the entire interest [in a partly given work] be donated to the museum within 10 years (or at the donor's death if sooner) might make sense....

The Association of Art Museum Directors has been very active in pushing for a restoration of the income tax deduction for charitable contributions by artists of their own work---without much success. By contrast, here's a change, with a potentially catastrophic impact on gift-giving to museums, that seems to have flown in completely under the radar.

Nothing about this issue appears, at this writing, in the Advocacy section of AAMD's website, which details its lobbying on artists' charitable deductions and other legal issues.

Who is keeping an eye on this ball?

The J. Paul Getty Trust has now posted the press release about governance reforms that its communications head, Ron Hartwig, had told me was on its website, but wasn't.

Thanks to CultureGrrl, you can now read it here.

But I am still of the opinion, as expressed in a previous post, that these measures do not go far enough. As I have stated, the Getty should immediately make public a report on the findings of its own internal investigation of its past governance gaffes, and it should purge itself of every administrator and board member who had the responsibility to blow the whistle but didn't. Going forward, it needs administrators, trustees and a president possessed of the highest administrative, fiscal and artistic acumen, along with spotless reputations for probity.

We'll just have to wait and see whether the California Attorney General's office, now wrapping up its own investigation of the Getty, agrees with me. And we'll also have to see if these public servants believe that the results of the Getty's internal investigation, submitted to this government enforcement agency, can now properly remain confidential or are required to be open to public examination under Freedom of Information laws. The enterprising LA Times is probably already working on that one.

Why have Michael Kimmelman's inane observations about the U.S. Open (i.e., "Gonzalez gently caressing Ljubicic's shaved head, for some reason") been given almost a full page today in the NY Times' Weekend Arts section?

Maybe because they're not fit to print in the Sports section.

COMING NEXT WEEK: CultureGrrl opines on The Beauty of Boxing. (Just kidding.)

Ron Hartwig, vice president for communications at the J. Paul Getty Trust, replies to CultureGrrl's The Latest Getty Shockers: Time to Come Clean and Clean House:

I know blogs often rely on shock value, and lively rhetoric, but given the serious issues we've had to deal with these past two years, and the equally serious and thoughtful way in which we have been dealing with them, I'd like to hope you would rely on what we've done to move forward and not fall prey to those who are focused on the past. The past is over, it can't be undone, but actions can and have been taken to resolve issues moving forward.

Maybe if you'd been here last night, for example, to see the opening of "Hippolytos at the Getty Villa," the first dramatic offering in the Villa's new theater, played to a packed house; walked through the "Rubens & Brueghel" exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum or "A Tumultuous Assembly: Visual Poems of the Italian Futurists" at the Getty Research Institute; or knew about the $2 million grant program by the Getty Foundation to support the rebuilding of arts in New Orleans post Katrina; or the Getty Conservation Institute's work on the "China Principals," you'd know what I mean by perspective.

[NOTE TO CULTUREGRRL READERS: The Apr. 17 release, referred to in item "2," is not posted on the Getty's press website. But you CAN view its new Staff Handbook, effective June 26, 2006, which includes provisions on conflicts of interest and whistleblowing. Also on the website are conflict of interest policies, dated 2006, for staff and trustees.]

To a major university that is inaugurating its new president today. CultureGrrl may or may not be posting before Monday. You have not risen to the "HELP LEE BUY A LAPTOP!" challenge. (See righthand column to contribute.)

I have not forgotten my promise to provide more posts from my recent Berkshires trip. (Better late than never.) Meanwhile, please scroll down: I've provided a couple of early-morning musings.

While mostly a paean to Adele, Charlie Rose's television interview of Ronald Lauder on PBS Monday had a few provocative moments.

Charlie asked the $135-million-dollar question, but never pressed for a full, coherent answer:

ROSE: You have been involved in restitution, this whole effort to bring [Nazi-looted] art back. You also were chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern Art. You created this museum [the Neue Galerie]. I mean, you are a collector. Does any of this collide? Is there any conflict here?
LAUDER: Well, there could be a conflict of interest between restitution. I call these paintings, all the paintings that were stolen and not yet returned, the last prisoners of World War II. There are still hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars worth of art out there that was stolen from Jewish homes and are now throughout the world in collections and museums and places like that. I have been involved in restitution since the 1980s. And to me, I put no connection between my own collecting. As a matter of course, any piece that I`m ever involved in, I will never myself be buying directly.

What he meant by "never buying directly" or "no connection between my own collecting" was never clarified. Lauder later spoke further, although again unclearly, about Nazi-era provenance of works in the Neue Galerie, many of which are from his personal collection:

LAUDER: Before we even opened, we did an entire provenance check on all the art here. And any of the pieces that we had questions about, we looked deeper into. We found what was there and what was not.

Yet, despite assurances to me from the Neue Galerie's deputy director, Scott Gutterman, that the Nazi-era provenance of works owned by the Neue Galerie would be posted on its website by Sept. 1, the website's provenance section (under "General Information") still says only that "the museum is currently in the process of compiling all relevant provenance information and posting it on this website."

That still awaited provenance-posting was to include only works owned by the Neue Galerie itself, not the works from the Serge Sabarsky Collection or from Lauder's personal collection, which together constitute approximately 90 percent of the works at the Neue Galerie.

As for his question of whether Lauder's multiple roles---collector, MoMA trustee, Neue Galerie president---create a "conflict," Rose got an indirect answer later in the show, as he stood with Lauder before Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I":

ROSE: If you had not had the Neue Galerie, you would not have been able to get that painting. They [the Bloch-Bauer heirs] would not have sold it into a private collection.
LAUDER: No, but I think that had I not had the Neue Galerie, I probably would have ...
ROSE: Created it.
LAUDER: No, no, I probably would have had this a shared piece with the Museum of Modern Art or something like that....
ROSE: You would use MoMA as your vehicle to get that piece.
LAUDER: Yes, exactly.

And MoMA then would have had had that celebrated Klimt painting in its galleries, thanks to the generosity of its longtime trustee.

I'm an avid buyer of art-related postage stamps, but there have been slim pickings lately. (I've had to resort to buying motorcycles, a quasi-art form thanks to the Guggenheim Museum's controversial bikers' retrospective.)

But those of us who use snail mail can now blanket our missives with Gee's Bend Quilts. Here is where you can view and purchase the colorful new issues.

Thanks to the blogging quilter (and CultureGrrl reader) Lisa Call for this heads-up!

I'm all for artists' grants: I started my career in cultural journalism at an artists-rights rag, The Art Workers News (where one of my even younger co-workers was a cheerful student who grew up to be an art museum director, the Whitney's Adam Weinberg). I'm in favor of any program that provides financial support to help artists do their work and I thought it was a dark day when the National Endowment for the Arts' grants for individual artists were terminated.

But let's not confuse the newly announced United States Artists grant program with the late, lamented NEA largesse. Anyone could apply for an NEA fellowship, and many established artists later credited those early dispensations with giving them the funds and notice they needed to launch their careers when they were nobodies.

By contrast, the United States Artists program perpetuates the Catch-22 of the artworld: To begin to establish a viable career as a serious artist, you need to know at least one mover-and-shaker, but it's hard to network with those players unless you've begun to establish a viable career.

To be considered for a $50,000 United States Artists grant, artists must first be nominated by one of the more than 150 anonymous "arts leaders, critics, scholars and artists" tapped for this task. (Filmmaker John Waters outted himself, in a NY Times interview, as one of the nominators.) Finalists are chosen from the nominees by a discipline-specific, peer-review panel (shades of the NEA).

This year there are 362 nominated artists; at least 50 will get the money. Ranging in age from 21 to 100, they include everyone from basketmakers to fashion designers to folk-music composers to poets. Some 109 are vying for awards in the visual arts (including performance).

The names of the peer panelists (but not the nominators) will be announced on Dec. 4, along with the names of the grantees. It will be interesting to learn who the gatekeepers are.

The above heading is my spin on The Art of Tennis, a title already taken by art writer-turned-tennis blogger, Michael Kimmelman (better known as the NY Times' chief art critic). As I previously noted, my potshots at art-PR people (here and here) might necessitate a career switch to tennis reporting, so here's a dispatch from my new beat!

The rapid and predictable departure of Kimmelman's athlete-of-choice, Martina Hingis, from the U.S. Open evokes painful memories of last year's early exit of Andy Roddick, whose face, during the entire run of the tournament, was ignominiously plastered all over the National Tennis Center's grounds, in giant American Express ads vaunting the "mojo" that had utterly deserted him.

Just before the current Open opened, Hingis' return to the court was ballyhooed in another NY Times article as "one of the greatest comebacks of all time in sports"---not by a tennis expert, but by the head of global sports marketing for Adidas, the company with which Hingis has an endorsement deal. Clearly, an objective source.

And last Friday, American Express took another losing stance in the tennis ad court with a full-page, color newspaper spread for the U.S. Open that included two action photos of Roddick and one of Venus Williams. Someone must have neglected to tell Amex that the injured Venus is not even playing this year.

All of which leads to my evidence-based conclusion that vainglorious advertising hype is a tennis menace. Will the sport's latest minx succumb to this jinx?

And, while we're on this subject: Will someone please pay adequate homage to the real-deal Martina, the great Navratilova, who may now be in her last U.S. Open?

This continues the therapeutic venting that I began here. Once I get this off my chest, art-PR people are invited to pelt me with publishable Blogbacks, listing all the things that frustrate them in dealing with whining journalists like me, or responding directly to my gripes.

Without further ado, here are the Top Five things I don't like about art-PR people, from least to most important:

5) Out of the Loop: Press officers should have in their heads or at their fingertips most of the answers to questions that journalists can be expected to ask. From my standpoint, the best art-PR people are the ones with the most comprehensive knowledge of the people and places for whom and for which they speak. Too many times, they have to get back to me with basics that they should already know. Museum officials should make sure they keep press spokespersons in the loop about important news and issues.

4) Reporter, Get Lost: Rarely, but more than once, press officers have steered me away from a person I was talking to---even at press events designed to give us access to information. This is rude to the journalist and condescending to the source, who is capable of deciding for himself whether he wishes to talk.

3) I'll Get Back to You...after you call me five more times, maybe.

2) The NY Times Gets It First, Other Reporters Second: Here is a recent example of this. Some years ago, I was told of an instance where a Times reporter chewed out a museum communications staffer for letting me have something first. Didn't the PR person know the protocol?

And now (drumroll), the Number One thing I don't like about art-PR people:

1) Misinformation: If you don't know the answer, just make one up---not good professional practice. Too many times, "facts" from press officers have not held up to closer scrutiny. I don't just want an answer; I care enough about accuracy to want the right one.

Okay, deep breath...I feel much better now. But next time I go to a press event, maybe I'd better duck!

Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, the Woodward-Bernstein of the art world (who is their Deep Throat?) have come up with this thoroughly depressing update in the LA Times on the J. Paul Getty Trust scandals. The new exposé details more instances of how an institution that should be using its tremendous wealth to enhance the field appears to have also misused its money to tarnish the reputation of nonprofits.

For me to spell out possible inferences from Saturday's LA Times article would be to risk a libel suit---not a prudent course for a lone blogger not backed by the legal department of a big publication.

The California Attorney General's office, due to come out this month with the report of its investigation into the Getty's finances and governance, will probably dot the "i's" and cross the "t's." And bloggers will then be free to quote from that report, without risk of legal retribution.

But the Getty shouldn't wait until then to come clean and clean house. It should be proactive, rather than reactive, showing that it doesn't need to be forced by government regulators to do the right thing:

---First, it should immediately make public a report on the findings of its own internal investigation of past governance gaffes.

---Concurrently, the Getty should issue a detailed statement of how it will reform its administrative procedures to make sure that, going forward, it operates according to the highest standards of integrity and good governance.

---And, more painfully but most essentially, it should purge itself of every administrator and board member who had the responsibility to blow the whistle but didn't. The megabucks Getty doesn't need a fundraising board of movers and shakers. It needs trustees and a president possessed of the highest administrative, fiscal and artistic acumen, along with spotless reputations for probity.

After that, it can move forward to do great things.

This post, inspired by the recent enigmatic reply by a museum's communications officer to my query about Matisse's "The Swimming Pool," is the distillation of many moments of frustration in dealing with the people whose function is, in part, to help me get my job done.

Most of the time, they do: My work would be much harder without those art-PR professionals who tirelessly track down the answers to all my niggling questions, often on tight deadline. And even when they are impediments rather than helps, it's often not their fault: They're agents for their higher-ups, who occasionally favor secrecy over transparency.

These spokespersons come in two varieties: communications officers employed by specific institutions and those employed by art-PR firms that serve a variety of clients. My own preference is for the homegrown species, who have a much more intimate knowledge of the people and places for whom and for which they speak.

So, more in sorrow than in anger (because I do like many of these people), and with the knowledge that many art-PR people really do read this blog, here's my Letterman-style list of gripes, from least important to most important:

10) The Non-Responsive "Answer": It's condescending to pretend to answer a reporter's question with a blandly worded statement that is meaningless at best and misleading at worst (as in the aforementioned "enigmatic reply"). I wish I had a dollar for every time this has happened to me. Maybe it puts some reporters off the scent. It only makes me work harder to get the real answer.

9) Interlopers on Interviews: Press officers often seem to feel that they must babysit their superiors, who must not be left alone with reporters. Often when I start speaking to a museum official at some gathering, the designated press minder rushes over to monitor our every word and sometimes to steer the conversation away from sensitive topics. It's also very common for press officers to sit in on interviews; the worst variant of this is the squawking conversation on the glitchy speakerphone, with the press officer occasionally cutting in. Press officers may say their presence is needed so they can help follow up on any questions requiring further clarification. I'd rather keep that list myself and call the PR person later with my queries.

8) "Please Leave a Message": When I call urgently for information, I want a live person to answer immediately. Deadlines are deadlines.

7) Off the Record: as in, "everything that my boss told you yesterday was off the record." Those ground rules have to be established (or, better yet, not) before the conversation takes place, not after I've spent precious time getting information that I expect to be able to print. I almost never grant "off the record" retroactively.

6) Quote Approval: as in, "you have to get my boss' approval for any direct quotes that you plan to publish from yesterday's interview." (This is a corollary to "Off the Record," above).

COMING TOMORROW: The Top Five Things I Don't Like About Art-PR People. Can you stand the suspense?

Just so there's no confusion: Lee Rosenbaum is NOT the flogged blogger Lee Siegel, who also opined on art. His recently outted alter ego was said to be sprezzatura, not CultureGrrl. I can be a tough critic (as in my first post tomorrow) but, I hope, not a nasty one!

Look, I grew up in the Bronx, and no clown disses my borough! You got that?

So what's up with Benjamin Genocchio's rundown of fall art shows in the suburbs and other outlying regions (those foreign countries called New Jersey and Connecticut), in yesterday's NY Times? His first listing under "Westchester" is an upcoming Brazilian art show at the newly expanded Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Ben, listen up: I'm glad someone noticed that the Bronx has culture, but Westchester is a county and the Bronx is a different county---one that also just happens to be one of the five boroughs of the City of New York, which is home to the NY Times.

Now I can understand why an art critic who hangs out in Manhattan and never goes to a Yankees game might not have heard of the Bronx. But where are the copy editors when we really need them?

Probably lounging poolside at home in Bronxville...a suburban enclave that IS in Westchester! And they're still there on this Labor Day: No correction ran in today's paper. Maybe they're just too embarrassed and hope no one noticed.

A while back, I alerted CultureGrrl readers to a PBS documentary, scheduled for 10 p.m. tonight, on "Frank Lloyd Wright's Buffalo." Here's the program description, which made me feel it was worth watching:

David Ogden Stiers narrates this look at the friendship between architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Buffalo businessman Darwin D. Martin and how it benefited Buffalo. Included: insights from Harvard professor of architecture Neil Levine; New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger; Wright biographer Meryle Secrest; Wright's grandson Eric Lloyd Wright; and Martin's grandchildren.

Only problem is...this documentary, with all the right Wright experts, is not on regular PBS stations; it's on the network's digital channel. There's not even a listing for it in my local newspaper, and I don't think it will air on my low-tech tube.

Oh well, we'll just have to settle for Ronald Lauder (whom I also discuss here, here and here), tonight on Charlie Rose.

Every once in a while, CultureGrrl can't restrain herself, and says something that's bound to get her into hot water. This is one of those times. When you belatedly start your work week on Tuesday, hit the Grrl and she'll hit you back with:

Ten Things I Don't Like About Art-PR People

After this, I may have to switch to tennis reporting. (Actually, in a later post, I will!)

But while you East Coast culture editors are stuck indoors, sitting out the last gasp of Tropical Storm Ernesto, do remember to act on this!

The American media have largely abandoned the State Hermitage Museum's theft saga, moving on to the latest museum-theft news, but the much more extensive Russian heist is still an actively developing story in its own country.

The St. Petersburg Times has reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the establishment of a commission, due to start work today, that would "revise and audit the collections of Russia's museums." That commission was to include "representatives of the Interior Ministry, the Culture Ministry, the security services and other state organizations."

The Hermitage has now posted on its website photos of some of the 221 objects stolen from its Department of Russian Culture.

Also recently posted: the Declaration of the Presidium of the Union of Russian Museums, which takes a hard line against museums' critics. The joint statement lambasts the following as "utterly unacceptable":

For anyone, whether agencies of the executive branch of government, the press, the domestic lobby of antiques dealers, business associations, to use the situation that has developed around the State Hermitage to lobby the President, the Parliament and the Government for the privatization of museums in some overt or hidden form through transfers to autonomous institutions, self-regulating organizations, transfer on the basis of concession or otherwise.

The declaration, dated Aug. 15, also decries "the witch hunt against the country's museums," which, it says, "can only have one goal: to sweep away the last obstacles on the path to privatizing the country's cultural heritage and dividing up the national legacy....We are ready to do everything we can to oppose such intentions. We believe that Russia's citizens will support us in this matter."

The St. Petersburg Times also reported this reaction from the Hermitage's embattled director:

Mikhail Piotrovsky...speculated that the scandal around the theft is being artificially inflated in the interests of antique dealers who nurture plans to privatize Russia's finest art galleries.

"Museums and galleries are the only spheres of Russian culture that are still off-limits for the ravenous business elites," he said. "So, the interested sides apparently felt that they must use our plight to seize the moment, take over the last bastion and push privatization plans ahead."

From all this, it appears that the aftermath of the Hermitage theft will be characterized by acrimony and power struggles, rather than by the spirit of cooperation needed to solve Russia's serious museum-security crisis.

Lots of congruences between Roberta Smith's "Out of Time" review in today's NY Times and my lament on Tuesday about the sad state of contemporary-art affairs at the Museum of Modern Art.

I guess that's what makes Roberta my favorite Times art critic: She often has similar reactions to mine, but expresses them with considerably more depth, grace and erudition!

this happens. Crank up the lawyers!

Funny, when I called Jan Rothschild, the Whitney Museum's communications chief, on another matter late yesterday afternoon, she didn't mention this late-breaking development (although she knows, from this and this, that I'm very interested in the building plans).

Today Rothschild told me that the Whitney's lawyers had just received their copy of the lawsuit filed by the Coalition of Concerned Whitney Neighbors, Defenders of the Historic Upper Eastside and the Hotel Carlyle Owners Corp. The plaintiffs object to the appearance of the Renzo Piano-designed expansion and to the zoning variances granted by New York City's Board of Standards and Appeals.

I had called Rothschild yesterday to ask this:

Why, when I finally caught up with the museum's wonderful "Full House" exhibition yesterday, were only two picture hooks and a small card on the wall where Pollock's "Number 27, 1950" was supposed to be?

Turns out it was taken down yesterday for relining, and was to be rehung today. Just my luck. And it's being taken down again Sept. 18, four weeks before the rest of the works on that floor, to go into the museum's "Picasso and American Art" show, opening Sept. 28

More on the conservation of Pollock---including recent work at the Williamstown Art Consevation Center---next week, when CultureGrrl takes you back to the Berkshires.

It was CultureGrrl who told you first, on May 18, that "in a red-flag division of labor, the museum decided to assign its own designer, Dan Kohl, to lay out the interior walls for the galleries, finessing [Daniel] Libeskind's challenging, quirky angles with some traditionally shaped spaces.

Paul Goldberger got around to this in his Aug. 28 piece for The New Yorker:

The task of making surfaces that you can actually hang paintings on has gone...to Daniel Kohl, the museum's installation designer....To the extent that Libeskind's building is workable as a museum, it is Kohl who has made it so.

But Goldberger did manage to leapfrog the entire cultural press corps by publishing his lukewarm assessment of
the new facility a full month before the media preview. However, in observing that Denver took "a risk" by "giving Libeskind the freedom denied to him in New York," Goldberger has created chronological confusion: The architect got his Denver assignment in July 2000, long before he won the master-plan competition for the World Trade Center site in 2003.