October 2006 Archives

Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror, in the process of being dismantled today at Rockefeller Center.

I overheard a Rockefeller Center employee tell a tourist today that "Sky Mirror" was being removed to allow unobstructed views from Fifth Avenue of the soon-to-arrive Christmas tree. But he added that it might go back up after the tree comes down. Let's hope this is more than hearsay! No official word yet from Barbara Gladstone, Kapoor's dealer, who had told me that she was trying to sell the piece for around $5 million.

I keep going back to the Minnie Mouse sex tapes on YouTube---not because I'm an costumed-character pervert, but because I keep wondering if Disney's going to protect Minnie's trademark, if not her honor, by shutting this down.

Sure enough, the first copies of the video did come down, but were replaced by a shortened version, with a Spanish-language description. And this one was not even behind the 18-or-over firewall.

A legal analysis was posted Thursday in the online magazine Slate, which explains how YouTube gets away with this and other seeming violations of copyright and trademark. According to Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and co-author of "Who Controls the Internet?", Section 512 of the Copyright Code protects YouTube and other sites that provide user-posted content, by virtue of the law's "notice and take down" provision:

That means that if Jon Stewart notices an infringing copy of "The Daily Show" on YouTube, Comedy Central can write a letter to YouTube and demand it be taken down. Then, so long as YouTube acts "expeditiously" and so long as YouTube wasn't already aware that the material was there, YouTube is in the clear. In legal jargon, YouTube is in a "safe harbor."

That's why, Wu suggests, Google's recent purchase of YouTube might not turn out to be what the NY Times has termed a "litigation-laden landmine."

Actually, Jon Stewart (or his network, Comedy Central) did notice infringing clips (as how could they not?) and on Friday, the network's owner, Viacom, sent a letter to YouTube demanding that it take down clips from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,'' and "The Colbert Report,'' according to an anonymous Viacom source quoted today by Reuters. The purging has begun.

CultureGrrl is no lawyer, but I have a feeling there's another side to Wu's legal argument: How long can YouTube/Google manage to pull off this see-no-evil act, knowing full well that people are posting things without legally proper permission (shades of Napster)? Like many other things about content on the Internet, the blurry lines drawn by YouTube and its users will need clarification.

The California Attorney General's office, fresh from its Getty follies, has just announced that "the Weinstein Company [run by ex-Miramaxers Bob and Harvey Weinstein] will be the first motion picture firm to embed anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) in DVD versions of movies that depict smoking."

I hate smoking as much as the next concerned parent, but if you're going to start tacking on wholesome anti-vice messages at the end of raunchy flicks, where does it all end? Having just seen (and admired) the latest Martin Scorsese meditation on depravity, "The Departed," I can envision as many PSAs "embedded" in that DVD as there were product advertisements inserted before the start of the movie: alcohol, drugs, handguns, unprotected sex---this movie has it all, including a prosthetic penis. But no nicotine, as far as I can recall.

I think the proper practitioners of parenting are parents---not movie moguls. Let's just say that "no animals were harmed," and leave it at that.

So you thought Ronald Lauder was dipping into his own fortune to pay the entire purchase price of Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I"?

Think again.

Did the Neue Galerie's board know in advance that Lauder's megabucks purchase commitment would result in the sale of three Schieles that had been displayed at the museum earlier this year? And why was the board's approval needed for the sale, if the works are all privately owned by Lauder?

Those are just two of the questions raised by this surprising development, reported by Bloomberg's Lindsay Pollock. Assuming her report is accurate, the exact nature of the public/private partnership between the Neue Galerie and its chief benefactor urgently needs public clarification.

I'm getting "Verklempt Over Klimt" all over again: Just three months ago, CultureGrrl reported that Lauder told me "he had no intention of selling the works [that he owned] at the Neue Galerie [which constitute some 80 percent of its holdings] and that the foundation was backed by 'enough money for the next 200 years.'"

How quickly intentions change.

Meanwhile, Ronald's brother Leonard, chairman of the Whitney Museum, "declined to be interviewed" for Robin Pogrebin's article in tomorrow's NY Times, which states that the museum "has all but decided that moving its expansion to another site [the High Line, downtown] would make more sense" than building the long-planned Renzo Piano-designed expansion, which would have been added onto the museum's existing facility.

And all this confusion of purpose on Halloween eve. Trick or treat?

CultureGrrl hopes that the upcoming Cecilia Beaux show is the beginning of the High Museum's intention to rely more on its own collection (which includes two Beauxs) and on its own curatorial talent, rather than shelling out big bucks for the fundraising campaigns of other institutions. High-rent shows, which even the Met is now organizing, perniciously up the ante for museum loans everywhere. These days, loan shows increasingly come not only with reasonable costs but also with kickbacks.

Since it opened its Renzo Piano-designed expansion last November, the High of Atlanta has already raised the stakes twice: first, by agreeing to bestow $6.4 million on the Louvre for the renovation of its decorative arts wing, in exchange for a series of three exhibitions. The total cost, including the renovation donation, will be a hefty $18 million.

This munificence doesn't even get the High an exclusive: The Denver Art Museum recently announced that a modified version of the first Louvre show, which is now at the High, will travel to Denver's even more recently expanded facility. A Denver spokesperson, Andrea Kalivas Fulton, said that future Louvre exhibitions were also being discussed, but added that disclosing financial arrangements for shows "is not something we've ever done." She said that her museum had no idea whether the fee it would be paying for the first show, arranged through the High, included a tithe for Louvre renovations.

The second exhibition in the Louvre's Atlanta trilogy will be mostly antiquities, with some Houdon thrown in. The website preview for the third episode shows no images of artworks---only postcard-worthy photos of the Louvre itself. And its description sounds like one big promo for the French museum:

"Louvre Atlanta" will explore the Louvre of today and tomorrow. Exhibitions under development for this year will highlight the development of the present-day Louvre and its new relations with society and the world.

And now the High has announced that it is "developing an exhibition of three newly restored panels from Lorenzo Ghiberti's celebrated 'Gates of Paradise,'" the famous gilded bronze doors, adorned with sculptural reliefs, from the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo, Florence. The exhibition is "tentatively scheduled" to travel to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum. The High is again (according to a NY Times report) digging into its pockets, this time to come up with funds for the restoration of a 14th-century silver altar in the Museum dell'Opera del Duomo.

Meanwhile, Michael Shapiro, director of the High, plans to deliver a talk Nov. 7 on "The Pleasures and Challenges of the Entrepreneurial Art Museum" at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. He will explore the "relatively new and widening gulf that has developed between the practices and values of larger, collection-rich art museums [i.e., the Louvre] and those of a more nimble, aspirational breed of museums [i.e., the High]."

"The Entrepreneurial Art Museum"? That sounds more like the lecture that the Louvre's director, Henri Loyrette, should be giving. After all, entrepreneurs are the people who devise new schemes to make money, not questionable ways to spend it.

CultureGrrl thanks another Cecilia Beaux enthusiast, Christine Giviskos, assistant drawings curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, for pointing out that the High Museum's upcoming Beaux exhibition is not, as the Atlanta museum claims, "the first critical examination of [her work] in more than 30 years."

"Cecilia Beaux and the Art of Portraiture" was, in fact, mounted at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, a bit more than a decade ago: Oct. 6, 1995 - Jan. 26, 1996.

Didn't the High's research, if not its curators' memories, manage to come up with this?

CultureGrrl readers know I've been hard on the High (here and here). Atlanta's recently expanded High Museum of Art has been in the forefront of a problematically proliferating phenomenon: the willingness of certain institutions to buy a higher profile by spending huge rental fees for shows from sister institutions that should treat them as colleagues, not cash cows.

But now the High has a different sort of show in the works---one that is high on CultureGrrl's wishlist: The museum's own curator of American art, Sylvia Yount, will mount the first exhibition in 30 years devoted to American painter Cecilia Beaux. I had just mused about such a show (albeit one that would also include comparisons to Cassatt and Morisot) in my review of the Metropolitan Museum's "Americans in Paris" exhibition.

Now, I know I'm powerful, but I can't claim that the High suddenly dreamed up this idea in response to my designating Beaux as "the discovery of the [Met's] show." Nevertheless, from the description in the press release, it sounds pretty close to what I had wished for:

"Cecilia Beaux, American Figure Painter" will illuminate Beaux's work by exploring issues of gender, class and the importance of place in relation to Beaux's identity and reputation as the leading female artist working in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. The exhibition features approximately 85 works, including oils, works on paper and decorative objects, and will be on view in Atlanta from May 12 through September 9, 2007, before traveling to the Tacoma Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

COMING NEXT: The high stakes of high-rent exhibitions.

Will van Gogh's famous but elusive "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" soon return to the art market?

Reader discretion is hereby advised: This is a speculative item, following up on another speculative item---an article that I published on Mar. 7, 2000 in the Wall Street Journal. In that piece, I tried to do for the iconic van Gogh (which had fetched $82.5 million in 1990 at Christie's) what Marc Spiegler, a writer for New York Magazine, recently tried to do for Picasso's $95-million "Dora Maar au Chat"---figure out who might own it.

My interviews then with artworld sources led me to one likely candidate:

One possessor of "Gachet"-level paintings, Austrian-born investment fund manager Wolfgang Flöttl, "has an extensive collection, never comments on what he owns or sells and hardly ever lends," according to William Poppe, managing director of Normandy Asset Management in New York, which advises Mr. Flöttl on his fine-arts transactions. "If we did own 'Gachet,'" declared Mr. Poppe, "we wouldn't have any comment." Mr. Flöttl...received unaccustomed publicity late last year when he sold a major Cézanne to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for a price that Scott Schaefer, the museum's curator of paintings, indicated was more than $50 million.

Flöttl received some unaccustomed and considerably more unwelcome publicity this week in the Wall Street Journal (to which I can't link), Bloomberg News and today's Royal Gazette (the daily newspaper in Bermuda). In the words of the WSJ's report, Flöttl and eight others have been named by Austrian prosecutors "on charges ranging from embezzlement to fraud" as the result of an investigation into links between Refco, a U.S. commodity brokerage firm, and Bawag PSK, a Vienna bank for which Flöttl traded from New York. "Refco investors and U.S. prosecutors allege [that Bawag] sought to hide its own bad debt that largely was a result of Wolfgang Flöttl's trading losses," according to yesterday's WSJ. Bloomberg reported that Flöttl was charged with "involvement in the improper use of funds."

Flöttl has previously denied involvement in the Refco scandal, and his lawyer, Martin Goldenberg, told the Royal Gazette this week that Flöttl "feels strongly that no crimes have been committed."

Whether or not he owns, let alone plans to unload, "Gachet," Flöttl has already in the last few years sold several works for less than he paid for them, according to reports by Carol Vogel in the NY Times. One of those was Picasso's again-famous "Le Rêve," which he bought at Christie's for $48.4 million in 1997 and later sold to Steve Wynn (of errant elbow fame), for a reported $42 million.

In her coverage of the 2001 antitrust court proceedings against Sotheby's, Vogel reported that the auction house in 1998 had given a $240 million loan to Flöttl, "who had been a major buyer and seller at auction for years."

When I wrote my WSJ article, curator Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had unsuccessfully tried to borrow "Gachet" for an exhibition, told me that he knew who the owner was---a major collector of "all sorts of distinguished European pictures---old masters as well as Impressionist and post-Impressionist" and "someone who doesn't lend."

Whether or not the van Gogh is (or ever was) in Flöttl's possession, his current predicament may have significant art-market ripples. As for "Gachet," the comment made to me more than six years ago by John Leighton, then director of the Van Gogh Museum, still holds: Noting wistfully that his institution badly needed a good portrait by the artist, he expressed confidence that the painting "at some stage will appear again."

(For a photo of the Flöttl with his wife, Anne Eisenhower, granddaughter of the former President, go here and scroll down to the 11th row of couples' photos.)

Judging from Ben Brantley's NY Times review today of the Dylan/Tharp "The Times They Are A-Changin'," I think CultureGrrl has found a new calling: reviewing Broadway musicals on the basis of their advance radio ads. (For an excerpt from Terry Teachout's similarly dismissive Wall Street Journal review, go here.)

It looks like the best Dylan show in New York is still at the Morgan. And, running through Jan. 6, it should still be open after the Broadway show folds.

Meanwhile, when it comes to my recent appraisal of the Museum of Modern Art's Brice Marden show, Roberta Smith, in today's NY Times, agrees with Lauren Hutton, not CultureGrrl. She calls the show "a quietly magnificent retrospective." But she never mentions anything about the drawings, other than to say that they are "a medium integral to Mr. Marden's development." The extensive drawings display was a major (and to me, superior) part of the show. Did Roberta not find her way down to the drawing galleries on the third floor?

And if not, does that not say something about MoMA's post-expansion penchant for inconveniently dividing up major shows between distant parts of the building? What happened to the museum's previously stated intention to integrate media in the new facility, so that works on paper would not seem quite so marginalized?

It was gutsy of Gary Tinterow, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's catch-all curator of 19th-century through contemporary, to deliver a public lecture Tuesday on the hot-button topic of "the history of the Metropolitan's involvement with contemporary art---its strengths and weaknesses---as well as the creation of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary Art."

This merger of two chronologically sequential departments under the auspices of a 19th-century specialist raised fears that contemporary art would be marginalized---an impression strengthened by these recent comments by the Met's traditionalist director, Philippe de Montebello. Tinterow's talk did little to dispel those fears.

He began his discourse (the lead-off event in this year's "ArtTalks" series sponsored by the American Federation of Arts) with a recital of the various bequests that had enriched the Met's 19th- and 20th-century collections.

Then he jolted his listeners awake with a startling littany of the gaps in the collection of our nation's premier "encyclopedic" art museum. The Met may have its Duccio, but its missing-in-action roster of modern and contemporary art includes:

---Matisse: "We have his early works and his Nice works, but few of the heroic years so well represented at MoMA---his work from the 'teens."
---Mondrian: "One small work from his high abstract period."
---Surrealism: "We lack quite a bit in having a representive selection."
---Duchamp: None.
---German Expressionism: A small number, including Dix and Beckmann.
---Russian Constructivism: "None at all."
---Postwar European: "Very little."
---Pop Art: "Weak, except for Warhol....Last year we made our first acquisition of a work by Rauschenberg, from David Geffen's collection."
---20th-Century Women Artists: "Insufficient....I wish we had a great early Frankenthaler to put with the big boys."
---Important Contemporary Artists: Nothing by Beuys, Andre, Ruscha, Richter, Marden, Hesse, Serra.
---Art of the Last 20 Years: "Very thin."

Tinterow then conceded the obvious: "There's a lot of work to be done." He added, however, that "we can't possibly represent every artist of interest to us in the permanent collection."

So what ARE they going to do about it?

COMING SOON: How the Met is trying to fill its contemporary generation gap.

The big Getty news of the day is the new antiquities acquisitions policy but let's also give the J. Paul Getty Museum credit for getting back to basics with Tuesday's opening of its new 7,000-square-foot space for photography. What's the point of having a world-class permanent collection of photographs, if you don't set aside adequate space to display it? Now they have.

The Getty's photography trove, which is the museum's only collecting area that ventures into contemporary territory, began opportunistically in 1984: Two important collections became available---those assembled by collectors Samuel Wagstaff and Arnold Crane. Now the museum has some 31,000 photographic works and is inaugurating its new galleries with a show of 160 gifts, promised gifts, and loans from Los Angeles collectors Bruce and Nancy Berman.

Christopher Knight offered glowing praise praise for the show and the new galleries in yesterday's LA Times. But he also had harsh words for the "banal" modern outdoor sculpture that has sprouted up around the Getty's campus, acquired last year from the collection of late movie producer Ray Stark.

At least the conversation about the Getty is starting to focus on artistic interest, not conflicts of interest.

This just in: Michael Brand, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, makes good on his pledge to develop a new set of acquisitions guidelines, to help prevent the Getty from getting embroiled in future antiquities controversies.

The Getty guidelines (reproduced in full here) require that the following be provided in connection with future Getty antiquities acquisitions:

---Documentation or substantial evidence that the item was in the United States by November 17, 1970 (the date of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property) and that there is no reason to suspect it was illegally exported from its country of origin, OR
---Documentation or substantial evidence that the item was out of its country of origin before November 17, 1970 and that it has been or will be legally imported into the United States, OR
---Documentation or substantial evidence that the item was legally exported from its country of origin after November 17, 1970 and that it has been or will be legally imported into the United States.

It is notable that the Getty chose 1970 as its cutoff year, not 1983, which is when the U.S. adopted legislation to implement the UNESCO Convention. And this is a much more stringent standard than the one that was announced in February by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which stated that it will consider acquisitions of antiquities known to have been out of their countries of origin for merely 10 years.

The Getty's previous policy required objects to be from "established, well-documented collections" and published before 1995.

The Getty guidelines further state that all provenance information "shall be made available to the public upon written request," with one major loophole: Provenance information can be withheld if, "in the opinion of the Museum Director and the Getty Trust's Office of General Counsel, specific circumstances dictate otherwise." (Would such "specific circumstances" include a seller's requirement of confidentiality?)

Also, an acquisition "will be published no later than in the annual report for the year in which it was acquired."

What about an object with problematic provenance that is already in the museum's collection? The Getty's actions "may, in the appropriate circumstances, include a return of the object to its country of origin or restitution of an object to an earlier owner, provided such a return or restitution is consistent with the Trustees' legal and fiduciary duties as stewards of a charitable trust."

Now if only the Getty could just settle its little tiff with Italy.

Now that Sotheby's has posted its promising sales results for the first three weeks of October, it has also put back up on its website the results for the previous nine months. CultureGrrl had previously flagged the mysterious disappearance of its 2006 monthly sales figures, which occurred after September 2006 showed a slight decline from September of the previous year.

This month, with $325.35 million in sales during the first three weeks, should easily surpass the $328.93 million in sales for October 2005 (scroll down). Nineteen additional auctions were scheduled for this week.

Today is the diamond annversary of CultureGrrl's link to the capital of the artworld. I'm looking forward to gazing out my window while I lie in bed tonight and seeing both towers finally lit at the same time. What took them so long?

The world's only 14-lane suspension bridge, the GWB was designed by Othmar H. Ammann. Its total traffic last year was 107,224,000.

And it's always a beautiful sight!

I'm sure that when my Brice Marden appraisal appeared earlier today, CultureGrrl readers around the country were asking themselves, "But what does Lauren Hutton think?"

Now we know!

I can understand why, as reported in today's NY Times, the Whitney Museum might want to consider ditching its on-site expansion plans for the trendy environs of downtown. Its Renzo Piano-designed proposal for Madison Avenue suffered significant modification in response to neighbors' critiques and government reviews, and there is still an unresolved lawsuit from local opponents. The High Line, in a comparatively undeveloped area, will probably pose fewer restrictions and attract younger crowds.

Whitney press spokesperson Jan Rothschild confirmed to CultureGrrl that dropping Piano's plan is one of the possibilities now under consideration. The museum, she said, is in discussions with New York officials about use of the city-owned High Line property (which was to have been the site of the now scrapped new facility for the Dia Art Foundation). Other possible sites, Rothschild said, are also being considered.

But when a museum gets a deserved reputation as a revolving door for directors and architects, who will want to work there? Will Piano join the ranks of Michael Graves and Rem Koolhaas as distinguished architects who spent considerable time and creative energy on aborted Whitney expansions?

And will the current Whitney director, Adam Weinberg, join the Guggenheim's Thomas Krens in mounting a mini-retrospective of his institution's unbuilt facilities?

Will someone please use some Bounty paper towels (preferably soaked in cleaning solution) on Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror?

Nearing this Friday's announced end of its five-week display at New York's Rockefeller Center, its "polished stainless steel" urgently needs polishing: Its cloudiness is not just a reflection of the sky, and it also bears numerous vertical stains that seem to be issuing from the seams between its steel segments.

This no longer clear surface negates the publicity description from the Public Art Fund, which calls the piece a "non-object"---"a sculpture that, despite its monumentality, suggests a window or void and often seems to vanish into its surroundings."

Also worse for wear is another Public Art Fund project still up yesterday at the southeast entrance to Central Park, two days past its announced closing date: Sarah Sze's Corner Plot (below).

Described in the publicity as "in pristine condition," it has now suffered some deterioration of its bricks. What's worse, the substantial condensation now obscuring its windows all but obliterates the view of Sze's intricate constructions inside.

It's amazing how many jaded New Yorkers pass this odd fragment of an apparently sunken apartment building without giving it a single glance. Curious children, however, invariably peer into the windows and climb the walls.

MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass., is about to announce its plan to transform a three-story, 27,000-square-foot building on its campus into a "quasi-permanent living archive" for 50 of Sol LeWitt's intricately engrossing but far too ephemeral wall drawings. The galleries, designed by the artist himself, are to open in Fall 2008.

The $9-million cost ($6 million raised to date) will also fund a three-volume LeWitt catalogue raisonné and an endowment to support the installation for 25 years. The project will increase MASS MoCA's gallery space by 30 percent.

Organized in partnership with the Yale University Art Gallery, this is the first realization of director Joseph Thompson's longstanding dream to complement MASS MoCA's temporary exhibitions with a "core collection" of works and projects too large to be permanently displayed in conventional facilities.

The man has vision, lots of raw space in empty factory buildings, and the persistence and patience needed to carry out unconventional ideas.

The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Third Version, (photographed unfinished in May 2006), 2000-2006, oil on linen, six panels, overall 72 x 288 inches, collection the artist. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, © 2006 Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

How I wish I had never read this article about Brice Marden's intimate relationship with Bounty paper towels! I don't know if my feelings about the over-thought, overworked quality of his "loopy doopy" paintings (to borrow Sol LeWitt's phrase for his own squiggly phase) were excessively influenced by what I had learned about Marden's mop-ups. His squiggly phase (more conventionally described as calligraphic) was preceded by his Kelly-like colored-panel phase and his Ryman-like monochrome phase.

In his catalogue, Gary Garrels, curator of the Marden retrospective that opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, acknowledges the artist's propensity for obsessive reworking:

Marden, in examining paintings he has already released to the world, has occasionally decided that he wants to continue to work on them. The continuing evolution of a single painting can often parallel the challenge Marden has set himself throughout his career. For the conclusion offered by "finishing" is only temporary.

To my mind, the best works in the show, which I viewed yesterday, are the drawings---fluent, flowing and lyrical, in contrast with paintings besmudged by second guesses and doubt.

Like MoMA's recent Elizabeth Murray retrospective, this one ends with work on which the paint has barely dried: two sprawling six-panel versions of "The Propitious Garden of Plane Image." In the catalogue and again at the press preview, Garrels felt he needed to define the word "propitious" for the vocabulary-challenged. Maybe we're not great judges of art, but at least give us credit for SAT words!

Maybe I should Bounty this review.

Former J. Paul Getty Trust board member Barbara Fleischman replies to my report about her "new cultural philanthropy":

I was interested to read your comments regarding my support of arts and cultural reporting at Columbia University.

What propelled my decision to be part of this initiative was the irresponsible and scurrilous reporting of Marion True's case and where it seeped over into untrue, manufactured stories about my husband and me. This has been a most unpleasant and sobering experience.

Thus, I am encouraged at Columbia University's project to educate journalists on the need for ethical, truthful, and responsible reporting and am delighted to be of help.

Apparently, when I quipped that it looked as though she had "no hard feelings" about the LA Times' coverage, I couldn't have been more wrong.

(Part I is here.)

The mandarins of the Mainstream Media like to debunk blogs as superficial at best, trashy at worst. But properly deployed, a blogger's cards can trump the more traditional players at their own game. Here are a few tricks that nimble CultureGrrl of the Blogosphere can execute but that plodding Rosenbaum of the Mainstream Media can't:

---Link to primary source documents: Reporters can briefly summarize reports and allude to the contents of documents or statements that may be available in full on websites. With a click on my links, visitors to my site can read the whole thing. Even newspapers' websites frequently fail to provide their readers with such resources.

---Relentless follow-up: If someone says he intends to do something by a certain date, I can keep him honest. Traditional reporters, who need more substantial rationales for follow-up articles, often drop the ball. I can run a small item to update a story.

---Provide early-warning signals: Newspapers usually report trends that have already happened. I can spot early indicators and flag them.

---Scoop the slowpokes: Sometimes reporters do get things into the paper (or at least onto its website) right away; often they don't. My speed of publication is limited by how fast I can type.

---Guide the debate: Because my opinion is prompt, pointed and (I hope) respected, I can influence the deliberations of slower, more widely read opinionmakers.

---Hone my own voice: I believe my writing has improved since I started blogging---first, because I'm constantly writing; second, because I'm free to be more inventive and colorful (and occasionally off-color), without worrying about the tone-it-down sensibilities of editors. I have a penchant (if not a talent) for wordplay. Now I can indulge it.

What I can't do, alas, is make money: Nobody pays me to blog. While some established practitioners do profit handsomely, newcomers need to build audience before they can build ad sales or other forms of support. Although I enjoy knowing that an elite group of artworld movers and shakers, as well as members of the general art audience, read me regularly, my labor-intensive blog is, financially, a slog.

As for Linda Greenhouse (mentioned in my previous post), I hope she keeps writing for the NY Times, despite the fact that she has now outted her own political views. A new assignment as an Op-Ed columnist would be the appropriate form of discipline for the crime of opinion-mongering. After all, Maureen Dowd could definitely use some female companionship!

Today marks my six-month blogging anniversary---a fitting moment to reconsider what lured me into this demanding pursuit---a somewhat unconventional and inconvenient genre for a tradition-bound journalist.

What started me thinking about this was not my anniversary, but this recent NY Times piece by Byron Calame, the paper's public editor.

In roundhousing Linda Greenhouse, who is the Times' veteran Supreme Court correspondent, Calame added this snide aside about blogging: "Postings of personal opinions on blogs beyond the Times, unrestrained by self-discipline, are easy for critics to find and fashion into a dossier attacking the credibility of the reporter."

In flogging blogs, Calame joined the ranks of other distinguished media critics: Nicholas Lehmann, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, in The New Yorker; and Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, who on Apr. 21 wrote an anti-blog screed for that page (to which I'm not permitted to link).

Greenhouse got reprimanded by Calame for public punditry after pummeling the Bush administration's policies and practices in a speech delivered to fellow Harvard/Radcliffe alums. Who can blame seasoned writers like Greenhouse, who have seen and understood so much, for longing to express long-suppressed views, informed by their accumulated wisdom?

Which is why, almost six months ago, I started this blog. But now that I've shed my self-effacing cultural journalist's persona for my feisty alter ego, CultureGrrl, there's no going back: I can never again pretend to be a dispassionate observer when I interview sources on topics about which I've expressed strong views (and neither can Greenhouse). It doesn't matter that I've held opinions all my life and that I am still capable of straightforward reportage. What matters is that I am now perceived by both sources and readers as biased on hot-button topics. That may compromise my credibility as a fair and accurate reporter.

That's okay with me. I feel ripe to mature from chronicler to interpreter. I still exercise strong journalistic chops, but now I apply them to buttressing my opinions and to influencing the opinions of others.

COMING NEXT: What CultureGrrl can do that Rosenbaum can't.

I haven't acquired these tomes yet, let alone absorbed them. (What I'm reading now is George Bernard Shaw's "Heartbreak House." I've got tickets!)

But on the assumption that CultureGrrl's readers share some of her interests, here's what I plan to peruse in the near future:

Collecting Contemporary by Adam Lindemann (Taschen)---From the publisher's description, it sounds like this includes tasty tidbits from some major artworld players: "The main body of the book brings together tell-all interviews with the biggest players in the global art market: the Critic (Rimanelli), the Dealer (Boesky, Brunnet/Hackert, Coles, Deitch, Fortes, Gagosian, Gladstone, Glimcher, Hetzler, Lybke, Perrotin, Rosen, Shave, Wirth), the Consultant (Cortez, Fletcher, Heller, Segalot, Westreich), the Collector (Brant, Broad, Habsburg, Joannou, Lambert, Lehmann, Lopez, Paz, Pinault, Rothschild Foundation, Saatchi), the Auction House Expert (Cappellazzo, de Pury, Meyer), and the Museum Curator/Director (Dennison, Eccles, Heiss, Lowry, Peyton-Jones)."

Building the Frick Collection: An Introduction to the House and Its Collections by the Frick's chief curator, Colin Bailey (Scala)---CultureGrrl readers know about my fondness for single-collector "jewel box" museums. The Frick is the gold standard. From the description in the Frick's press release: "Bailey not only carefully documents the construction of the Gilded Age mansion that today houses the museum but examines how its creation influenced Frick's taste during the final years of his life. Bailey's work draws from several biographies of Frick as well as from recent studies of domestic architecture and interior decoration during the Gilded Age, setting the house's construction--Frick's last great achievement--in context."

The Girl with the Gallery by Lindsay Pollock (Perseus)---I'm interested in this book for its subject matter (dealer Edith Halpert) and also as a possible role model for a project that I'm considering for myself: a biography of another important female artworld trailblazer---not a dealer, but a museum pioneer. Here's the publisher's description: "In 1926, Edith Gregor Halpert, just twenty-six years old, opened one of the first art galleries in Greenwich Village and set about turning the art world upside down. Her Downtown Gallery, which she ran for forty-four years, laid the groundwork for the art market's modern era, and its aggressive promotion and sales tactics." (Available Oct. 30)

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock by Kirk Varnedoe (Princeton University Press)---This is an edited version of Varnedoe's last hurrah before his untimely death in 2003: his series of lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, in which he presented "a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction" (according to the publisher's description). "He frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the last five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value." I was moved to tears by the video of the poignant conclusion of these lectures, which was shown at a memorial gathering held at the Metropolitan Museum. With his brilliantly audacious insights and frighteningly fluent articulateness, Varnedoe was one of those blazing lights of whom it can truthfully be said: We shall not see his likes again. A talk commemorating the publication of Varnedoe's book will be given at the National Gallery on Dec. 16 by Varnedoe's successor as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, John Elderfield. (Available in November)

This article in today's NY Times about the self-portraits of an artist with Alzheimer's struck a chord with me. That's because I got my 92-year-old father to strike a chord for me yesterday. He had joyously played jazz standards all his life, but now usually declines when I ask him to entertain me. One of my favorite photos of him, a copy of which sits atop my own piano, shows him at the center of a crowd of beer-swilling, cigarette-smoking World War II soldiers in uniform, who sing lustily while he thumps the ivories.

Yesterday, Dad treated my mother and me to all his old arrangements, which I've know by heart from childhood. A little rusty, a little scrambled, but they were still in his fingers---an extraordinary feat, considering his memory's general disarray.

Unmentioned in Denise Grady's Times article (in the Health section, not the Arts pages) is the more famous case of an artist who continued to paint while descending into dementia---Willem de Kooning. Grady quotes a neurologist, Dr. Bruce Miller, about the characteristics of Alzheimer's-influenced art. It's a description that could be be applied to de Kooning's late work:

The art becomes more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic. Sometimes there's use of beautiful, subtle color.

I was also struck by the similarity between William Utermohlen's last self-portrait (reproduced with the Times piece), and a late skull-like self-portrait of Picasso---the final, harrowing work in the Museum of Modern Art's 1996 "Picasso and Portraiture" show, so brilliantly curated by William Rubin.

Here's the response to CultureGrrl from Michael Brand, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, on the recent negative comments by Italy's Culture Minister regarding antiquities discussions with the Getty:

We do not intend to comment on the continuing negotiations until we're ready to announce a final agreement.

Apparently, the Italian negotiators do not share this reticence.

Having left the board of the J. Paul Getty Trust, Barbara Fleischman has found a new cultural cause to support. This just in from the newsletter of my alma mater, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism:

The Barbara Fleischman Fellowship has been established for students committed to arts and cultural reporting.

I guess that means no hard feelings about the hard knocks from the investigative reporters at the LA Times!

Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli on Friday took the occasion of the signing of an antiquities agreement with Switzerland to issue a highly negative assessment of ongoing discussions with the J. Paul Getty Museum over 52 Getty-owned antiquities that Italy claims were illicitly removed from its territory.

According to an Italian-language report by the ANSA news agency (supplied to me by the Culture Ministry), Rutelli indicated that negotiations with the Getty, while "still open," were on the verge of "rupture." The Getty, according to the report, is willing to return only "about 20" works, and "does not want to return the two most important masterpieces," identified as "the famous Morgantina Venus and the Athlete of Lysippos." ANSA reported that without those two sculptures, Italy will not sign an agreement.

Under the accord with Switzerland, which has been a major center for marketing antiquities of dubious provenance, sellers and buyers of Italian archeological objects will now be required to convincingly document their origins.

Italy is also thinking of the possibility of extending the collaboration between the two countries to more recent objects, such as Renaissance art, Rutelli added.

Italy has already signed antiquities agreements with the Metropolitan Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Back in June, Italy and the Getty said they had reached a tentative agreement that would be formalized by the end of the summer. Meanwhile, the trial in Rome of former Getty antiquities curator Marion True resumed last week.

UPDATE: Reaction from Michael Brand, director of the Getty Museum, here.

You know how you can sometimes tell just from listening to a radio ad whether an upcoming musical theater production is likely to be worth seeing? If the selections chosen for the promotion irk you, what are the chances that you'll feel differently about the rest of the music in the show?

I loved "Movin' Out," the Billy Joel/Twyla Tharp musical. And you could already tell from the promos for "Jersey Boys" that it would do justice to The Four Seasons. But I'm already dubious about "The Times They Are A-Changin'," choreographer Tharp's take on another singer/songwriter I esteem, Bob Dylan. (It opens on Broadway this Thursday.)

Many people have successfully covered Dylan songs: The current Morgan Library and Museum show provides recordings of many covers in its listening booths, so that people put off by Dylan's grating vocals can still appreciate his oeuvre.

The vocals in the radio ads indicate that Tharp's treatment has given Dylan's rough-edged music a slick Broadway gloss---essentially killing it. According to the show's website, "Dylan has contributed to the orchestrations" and has deemed show "the best presentation of my songs I have ever seen or heard on any stage." I guess he hasn't seen himself.

Tharp's Billy Joel adaptation worked because it was true to his spirit and his music, thanks to its Vietnam-era story line and, especially, the perfectly keyed performance of lead vocalist and keyboardist Michael Cavanaugh (who now, according to his website, is reduced to doing corporate gigs).

The story line of the Dylan show is phantasmagorical and, perhaps, allegorical. An article in yesterday's NY Times Sunday Magazine (which was as much about Alex Witchel's difficulties in interviewing Tharp as it was about the show's gestation), says the play depicts "a traveling circus run by an abusive father at odds with his artistic son; complicating things further is the woman who comes between them."

According to the Times, it was Dylan who approached Tharp, after the success of '"Movin' Out," to give him similar treatment. If this enterprise tarnishes his legacy, he can't say, "It ain't me, babe."

Yesterday, the NY Times ran this appreciative obit by Roberta Smith of Marcia Tucker, the doughty founder of the New Museum.

And today, the New Museum's website has...nothing.

Cecilia Beaux, "Ernesta (Child with Nurse)," 1894, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Curator Barbara Weinberg says she wants visitors to the Met's upcoming show, Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 (opens Tuesday) to ask themselves:

Where have Charles Sprague Pearce and Dennis Miller Bunker been all my life?

Trust me, Barbara, that's not going to happen. But along with the ho-hum journeymen, there are many pleasant discoveries and rediscoveries to be made at this sprawling show---enough to carry you over the dull spots that are necessary to a comprehensive survey of the French sway over late 19th-century American artists.

In fact, this show could be seen as a lesser sequel to one of the greatest shows mounted at the Met in recent times---2003's "Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting." It's a bit of a shock to come to the "power wall" of the current show---a stunning line-up of huge canvases by Whistler and Sargent---and realize that two of the Sargents ("Madame X" and "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit") were also in the final gallery---devoted to the Spanish influence on American painting---that the Met appended to the Spanish/French show. We can infer from this that the Spanish influenced the French who influenced the Americans.

But unlike the previous show, this one displays no oeuvre by the influencers, only works by those influenced. Maybe that's just as well: The great French Impressionists and post-Impressionists were, for the most part, in a different league from their imitators, who would suffer by comparison.

Still, the generous helping of Cassatts, plus fine works by Eakins, Sargent, Whistler and Hassam, make the show a steady source of delight. (However, notwithstanding its label, Hassam's "Allies Day, May 1917" is no longer the artist's "most famous of 30 views of New York's flag-draped Fifth Avenue." For all the wrong reasons, the version formerly owned by Brooke Astor now is.)

For me the discovery of the show was not Pearce or Bunker but Cecilia Beaux, whose work I had sporadically seen but not previously focused on. The three charming, accomplished depictions of women, children and a cat in this exhibition caught my eye and started me mentally curating an all-woman show juxtaposing Cassatt, Morisot and Beaux.

One of the paintings by Beaux, "The Last Days of Childhood," and a Chase picture that CultureGrrl previously reproduced both reference an iconic work that was at the previous two venues for the show---London's National Gallery and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts---but, unfortunately, is not at the Met: Whistler's "Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1," popularly known as "Whistler's Mother." New York did get one less famous but still iconic work that didn't appear in the other two versions of the show: Cassatt's "Mother about to Wash her Sleepy Child" (1880), considered to be her first major painting on the mother-child theme that was so central to her oeuvre.

So what exactly WAS the nature of the French influence, and how did our nation's artists Americanize it? The wall text and object labels don't provide deep insight into this central question. Rather, they document the various points of contact between the Americans and the French, and describe details about the subject matter of the paintings that you can easily see for yourself.

Perhaps the best clue to what the curators (Kathleen Adler from London, Erica Hirshler from Boston and Weinberg) are getting at is provided in a label for a painting towards the end of the show, Edmund Tarbell's "Three Sisters---A Study in June Sunlight" (1890). With its densely painted, light-dappled figures, and its more loosely brushed, verdant background, it "epitomizes the artist's typically American combination of academic fundamentals and Impressionist fluency."

So there you have it.

Holland Cotter jumped the gun today, reviewing the Met's Americans in Paris show in the NY Times before it opens to the public next Tuesday. That's okay: Sometimes you want to be the first to weigh in. What's not okay is the visitors' information, provided along with the review:

"Americans in Paris: 1860-1900" continues through Jan. 28 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It doesn't "continue"; it hasn't opened yet (except for members' previews). So if you go to see it this weekend and the Met won't let you in, just say, "Cotter sent me." If they admit you, you'll know that the Times is even more powerful than we thought!

(CultureGrrl had planned to weigh in on the show next week, but give me a few minutes. I'm on it!)

This just in from the Harvard Crimson (via Andrew Ross Sorkin's NY Times blog):

Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers will join a New York-based global investment group as a part-time managing director.

The D. E. Shaw Group announced today that Summers "will be involved on a part-time basis in various strategic initiatives and high-level portfolio management activities."

Summers, on year-long sabbatical from the Harvard Business School and Kennedy School of Government, told the Crimson that "this is entirely within the context of the normal outside activities of a Harvard professor."

But how many profs have a little sideline at "one of the nation's largest hedge funds"? Sorkin reports that "D.E. Shaw, based in New York, had $20 billion in assets under management at the end of last year."

CultureGrrl trusts that one of Summers' "strategic initiatives" will be analyzing startups by female scientists.

(Okay, I know: This has nothing to do with culture. But CultureGrrl's daughter is a female scientist!)

Should every pre-1911 Chinese cultural object that's still in China stay in China?

That's essentially what the People's Republic of China is requesting, in its two-year-old call for the United States to impose import restrictions far more sweeping that any prior agreement forged by the U.S. under Article 9 of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.

Museum officials, dealers and collectors of Chinese material breathed a sigh of temporary relief at the news that the State Department had "agreed to delay a decision on [China's] controversial request" as reported in yesterday's NY Times

China's request would encompass virtually all types of cultural objects from prehistoric times through 1911. According to the State Department's summary of the request:

The People's Republic of China seeks import restrictions on categories of pillaged archaeological material from the Paleolithic Period to Qing Dynasty [ending in 1911] including, but not limited to:

---Metals: bronze, gold, and silver vessels, sculpture, utensils, jewelry, coins, weapons, and armor
---Ceramic: stoneware and porcelain vessels, sculpture, jewelry and architectural elements
---Stone: vessels, sculpture, weapons, utensils, jewelry, architectural elements
---Painting and calligraphy on wood, paper, silk, stone, fresco
---Textiles: silk clothing, hangings, furnishings
---Lacquer, bone, ivory and horn objects, including inscribed materials
---Wood and bamboo objects, including inscribed objects

By contrast, prior emergency actions and bilateral agreements that the U.S. government has forged under the UNESCO Convention have targeted very specific categories of archeological or ethnographical material.

Opponents of China's request point out that little has been done in that country to police the movement of its cultural property to Hong Kong, which, as described by New York dealer James Lally, is "an unrestricted exit point" for objects going abroad. They further note that the U.S. market for Chinese objects is dwarfed by the market in China itself and in other Asian countries. Why, they ask, is the U.S. being uniquely singled out for these restrictions?

In testimony last year before the State Department's Cultural Property Advisory Committee, James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, observed that the broad range of cultural property subject to restriction under China's request would include "material...often made for the market and...circulated in the trade since at Han Dynasty more than 2000 years ago." Cuno concluded with this recommendation:

I propose that rather than requesting sweeping import restrictions, the Chinese government request protection only for those objects in danger of pillage and only on the condition that it establish and show evidence of encouraging collaborative excavations and the sharing of finds with U.S. teams and museums.

Such partage---"the sharing of finds"---can probably only be expressed as a wish, not a requirement. But the State Department's decision to give more time to this issue encourages hope that a compromise solution, such as Cuno's, is being seriously considered.

CultureGrrl got herself in hot water with the Friends of the Barnes Foundation and Christopher Knight of the LA Times for suggesting yesterday that the $100-million authorization in Pennsylvania's fiscal 2002 capital budget for design and construction of a new Barnes Foundation facility was being blown out of proportion. I took this position because (to my knowledge) no state money was actually given to the project at that time; the budget item merely indicated that Pennsylvania's political powerhouses favored the move.

I still believe that, but let me make amends to the people who share my views on the larger issue by getting to the crux of it: The Barnes belongs in Merion, where its founder put it and stipulated (in his trust indenture) that it should perpetually remain. I believe that the majority of the art lovers and art professionals who have visited the Barnes from outside the Philadelphia area agree with this premise. (Do we need an audience survey?)

There is only one reason why Judge Stanley Ott of Montgomery County Orphans' Court ruled that the Barnes could move to Philadelphia, despite Dr. Albert Barnes' clearly stated desire that it remain exactly as he left it: The judge bought the argument that moving it was the only way to save it.

In my NY Times Op-Ed piece, published before Judge Ott issued his ruling, I made several concrete suggestions as to how to raise "the $50 million that [Barnes] officials say is needed to maintain the galleries and programs in Merion. If these more modest proposals were adopted, the famously irascible founder might merely squirm, rather than roll over, in his grave."

But now, desperate times call for desperate measures: While I may disagree with the Barnes' hometown partisans on some details, I agree with their conviction that the Barnes needs an angel---a major donor (or group of benefactors) willing to fund the rescue.

With all the fundraising and planning that have already gone into the Philly Barnes, It may be too late to effectuate any change in course. But the legal and moral justification for violating Dr. Barnes' vision evaporates if it can be saved in situ.

Admittedly, it would take much money and moral persuasion to get this done at this late date. But big-money collectors ought to be sympathetic to the concept of honoring the memory and intentions of one of their own. And, after all, didn't we just learn that Steven Cohen has $139 million in spare change?

No one (as far as I know) has pointed up this irony about Steve Wynn's elbow-jab to his own Picasso:

Back in 2002, Wynn refused to lend "Le Rêve" to the landmark "Matisse Picasso" show that appeared at the Tate Modern, the Grand Palais and the Museum of Modern Art. He believed that the proposed insurance coverage for the painting was inadequate.

It turns out that it would have been safer at the museum show than it was in his own office.

In 2003, Carol Vogel of the NY Times interviewed Wynn about his decision not to lend:

''I was too afraid,'' Mr. Wynn said. ''There are still too many gaps in the insurance coverage. I can't replace this picture. There's not another painting like it.''

''It's not like it's in my living room; it's on public view,'' Mr. Wynn said, referring to his art gallery in the lobby of what was the Desert Inn. So precious is this painting to Mr. Wynn that he is naming his new casino Le Rêve.

Vogel also noted that no one else had withdrawn work selected for the show, despite the terrorism fears that were then making everyone nervous. "The Modern was so hopeful" that Wynn would relent, Vogel wrote, that it reproduced his painting on catalog's cover. Then it had to revisit the printer to re-do the cover, featuring a different Picasso. (CultureGrrl owns a copy of the first printing. Is this a collector's item?)

Wynn's wife Elaine chose to regard Marie-Thérèse Walter's wound as "a sign" that they should hold onto the painting, rather than sell it, as had been planned.

Maybe it was really a sign that they should have lent it.

The Boston ICA has at last announced a firm(?) opening date for its new waterfront facility, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Dec. 10. As the Boston Globe notes, that puts it smack into a scheduling conflict with Art Basel Miami Beach, the hot artworld destination to which many luminaries already have travel plans. Let's see...where would you rather travel in the winter?

Still, a three-month construction delay isn't so bad. Next month, two years after its new gallery building opened, the Museum of Modern Art finally unveils its new Taniguchi-designed education wing at the other end of the sculpture garden.

So fine! There's another art blogger out there (already on my blogroll) who loves the great trashy girl group songs of the early '60s. Check out the audio clip of "I Never Dreamed" by The Cookies, courtesy of Modern Kicks.

Where's Murray the K when we really need him?

First, we learned that the Denver Art Museum's revelers get a little too celebratory, to the detriment of a William Wiley.

Now, Steve Wynn's "Le Rêve" turns into his nightmare: He had planned to sell that Picasso for $139 million to the the unstoppable Steven Cohen, AP reports today. Then Wynn accidentally punched a hole in it. The ebullient eyewitness Nora Ephron, posted her firsthand account yesterday on her blog. And The New Yorker, also yesterday, posted a Picasso post mortem, which ended like this:

Last Friday, when Wynn's alarm went off, at 7 A.M., his wife turned to him in bed and said, "I consider this whole thing to be a sign of fate. Please don't sell the picture." Later that morning, Wynn called Cohen and told him he wanted to keep the painting, after all.

I guess that leaves Cohen with more money for the fall art auctions...not that he needed it.

Scott Gutterman, deputy director of the Neue Galerie, soothes my two worries---over why the image of the museum's star acquisition, Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," has vanished from its website, and why the Nazi-era provenance for Neue Galerie's collection has still not been posted:

"Adele I" is off of our homepage so that we can post information about our next exhibition, "Josef Hoffmann: Interiors, 1902-1913." The piece is on permanent display and has been formally acquired.

As for the provenance information posting, we have had further technical issues, but are planning what we hope will be a final review of the revised website this Thursday, and will post thereafter.

Can someone please find them a good webmaster? A review of the financial ups and downs of Ronald Lauder, whose money bought "Adele" for the Neue Galerie, appeared here, in yesterday's NY Times.

While I deplore the planned move of the Barnes Foundation as much as Christopher Knight does, I find a bit misleading his LA Times report yesterday that in fiscal 2002, long before the Barnes' relocation to Philadelphia received court approval, the Pennsylvania legislature had "set aside" some $100 million for the design and construction of a new Barnes facility.

CultureGrrl had gotten word about this issue at the end of last month, but deemed it a tempest in a teapot: That's because this was merely an authorization, not, as Knight terms it, an "appropriation." Authorizations are not money in the bank, as is made clear in the section on the Capital Budget in the state's explanation of "The Budget Process in Pennsylvania":

Passage of a Capital Budget Itemization Act does not mean that all projects authorized in the act will be implemented....Upon passage of a Capital Budget Itemization Act, Commonwealth agencies are responsible for reevaluating the need for requested capital projects, taking into consideration program changes or other changing conditions. As a result of this review, some projects may be canceled and others deferred.

What the budget item does show is that political powers in the state have long favored the move. But we (and Judge Stanley Ott, who later ruled in favor of the move) already knew that...whether or not we knew about the legislature's premature action.

In the current faltering economy, what are the prospects for the staggering amount of high-priced art about to change hands (or not) at the November sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art at Sotheby's and Christie's in New York?

One factor that stock analysts scrutinize in evaluating publicly-traded Sotheby's is its monthly sales totals, posted on its website. For September, the numbers are down: $78.57 million last month, compared to $79.72 million for September 2005.

But wait. STOP THE PRESSES! Here's a bizarre news flash: I just went back to the Sotheby's website to give you the link for the monthly results (which I had previously copied off the website), and found that Sotheby's has mysteriously removed the pages reporting monthly results for January to September 2006, leaving only the figures for the first two weeks in October (for which there are no comparables in the 2005 figures, which are monthly, not weekly). Did someone decide that no news is better than bad news?

Privately held Christie's doesn't report monthly totals, but does post individual sale results on its website. Since those figures are in the currencies of the different countries where the sales take place, I'll let someone else crunch those numbers. (Christie's press office declined to give me the September totals in dollars.) I did, however, add up the New York sales results for September 2005 and 2006, and this year was the clear winner: $65.82 million for 14 auctions last month, compared to $51.07 million for 11 auctions in September 2005.

As for the series of contemporary art auctions concluding today in London, Linda Sandler of Bloomberg reported yesterday that "prices...may be stalling," based on weekend results at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips. But Sotheby's noted that the £31.4 million total for its London contemporary sales was "significantly over" the £20.6-28.8 million presale estimate. (It should also be noted, however, that the sold total is beefed up by the amount of auction-house commissions, while presale estimates are not.)

And how did London's recently concluded Frieze Art Fair fare? The end-of-fair press release trumpeted a "record success." But the only sales it quantified were those of the fair's yearbook and magazine. And the only "record" cited was attendance.

By contrast, last year's end-of-fair release stated: "Sales figures are predicted to exceed last year's £26 million." This year---no prediction. The final release about last year's sales, issued last November, boasted £33 million in contemporary art sales.

In today's Bloomberg, Sandler reported that Frieze co-director Matthew Slotover blamed the lack of financial data on the fact that "big galleries won't tell us their sales." If they did tell last year, what does that indicate about this year---another case of "no news is better than bad news"?

UPDATE: Here's a more recent (and more bullish) report from Sandler on the London contemporary auctions.

William Merritt Chase, "Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler" (1883), Cleveland Museum of Art

I saw the above painting today at the press preview of a soon-to-open show at the Metropolitan Museum. (More on that later.)

Does anyone else think this prefigures Klimt's 1907 "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (below)?

And while we're on that subject, why is there no longer any image of "Adele I" on the Neue Galerie's website? You can see the images of the other four recently shown Klimts in the section on "Past Exhibitions," but the $135-million "Adele," described in the show's press release as the Neue Galerie's "forthcoming acquisition," is strangely absent. Also still absent from the website is the Neue Galerie's public disclosure of its Nazi-era provenance research, which was supposed to have been posted by Sept. 1.

The article in the Oct. 7 issue of The Economist on the planned LMVH building in Paris, designed by Frank Gehry to house Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton's corporate art collection and temporary exhibitions, brought to mind a paradigm-shifting architectural moment, more than a decade ago in New York. Perhaps its very first built manifestation was the critically acclaimed LVMH Tower, completed in 1999 on 57th Street, commissioned by the same luxury-goods firm.

The reinvigoration of New York architecture was preceded, if not prompted, by a landmark article published in the NY Times on Sept. 24, 1995 by its then architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, in which he noted that New York was "a place where almost any cultural appetite can be satisfied." Then came the kicker:

But if your appetite is for contemporary architecture, you're out of luck. If you go to Paris, London, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Tokyo and many other cities, there's usually a new building that you have to see, or you will die. You may hate it, but your life depends on it. But when visitors from abroad come here, what do you show them? There's the skyline, of course, and the street gridiron, two of the greatest architectural spectacles of all time. But when it comes to recent buildings of stature, where do you look?

...It should be a source of civic pride that some of the world's most celebrated architects live and work in Manhattan and a matter of shame that many of the most gifted seldom build here.

It took a while to gather steam, but the starchitect invasion of the New York streetscape began in earnest after Muschamp issued this request for proposals. Now we've got (or will soon get): Calatrava, Diller Scofidio+Refro, Foster, Gehry, Meier, Piano and Taniguchi, among others.

Sheer coincidence? Or is this a case where the Times bully pulpit had a strong, beneficial and lasting influence?

When it's the NY Philharmonic on Saturday night: It gave a dazzlingly spunky performance of Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" overture, sans baton, followed by monotonously decorous renditions of two works each by Stravinsky and Mozart, conducted by David Robertson.

I can only assume that music director Lorin Maazel (or perhaps the ghost of Lenny) prepared the Bernstein, played by the leaderless orchestra in commemoration of the 16th anniversary of its laureate conductor's death. How else to explain the sharp difference in spirit and execution between this and the subsequent pieces?

Robertson, whose performances I have greatly admired in the past, lowered the podium a couple of notches, both literally and figuratively, and managed to smooth the rough edges off Stravinsky and bleach the colors and contrasts out of Mozart. Violinist Gil Shaham, whose subtle, refined interpretive skills I have also greatly admired in previous live performance, seemed to have adopted the blandness of his conductor (who also happens to be his brother-in-law).

This was one of those (relatively rare) times when I wondered whether the NY Times reviewer and I had attended the same event. Actually, we didn't: Bernard Holland had reviewed a prior performance of the same program, which did not include the "Candide." According to Holland:

Mozart's "Linz" Symphony at the end was a delight. Swiftly paced, soulfully accented and elegantly colored, it summed up Mr. Robertson's good influence on this orchestra and its good influence on him.

I've heard the "Linz" umpteen times, and I can't think of a run-through less riveting than Robertson's. Holland also commended "the Philharmonic's seeming happiness to work with" this conductor. Were they smiling more than usual? The subtext of such talk involves the big question hanging over the Philharmonic: Who should be named music director once Maazel steps down?

I thought I was experiencing another disconnect between the experience of a Times critic and my own as I read, on Friday, Grace Glueck's long, mostly descriptive review of the Guggenheim's Lucio Fontana show, which I had panned the day before.

Then, I got to the zinger in the last sentence, where Glueck dismissed Fontana as "an innovative theatrical decorator," not "the spirit of the future that his postwar admirers---young avant-garde artists like Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni---considered him to be."

Exactly.

UPDATE: Linda Yablonsky saves a similar zinger for the end of her Fontana review in today's Bloomberg.

I somehow managed to post the "Sky Mirror" story (below) twice, and I can't seem to get the second one deleted. Maybe it's a sign that my running "Ben" gag is wearing thin. (If it wasn't before, it sure is now!) Or maybe it's a sign that I shouldn't be posting on midnight on Friday.

Anyway, here's a slight correction and an update: "Sky Mirror" was, as I correctly said, the lead item under "Museum and Gallery Listings" in the online version of the NY Times. But it was featured in its own box, accompanied by a photo, on the first page (E24) of "The Listings" compendium in the Friday "Weekend Arts" section of the actual newspaper.

The Barbara Gladstone Gallery, which I called today, reported that "nothing is confirmed yet" about the future of Anish Kapoor's cosmic microcosm, but several possibilities are under consideration. The gallery spokesman, who did not wish to be identified, wouldn't say if one of those options would keep the piece in New York, where CultureGrrl says it belongs.

UPDATE: I finally managed to delete BOTH versions of my double-post, and then replaced one, below. I thought I knew how to do this blogging thing. Maybe not!

I've given Benjamin Genocchio of the NY Times some hard ribbing (here, here and here).

But although he never found the Bronx, he did (three weeks late) manage to find Anish Kapoor's sublime Sky Mirror. And there are still two weeks remaining to see it!

True, it's not a stand-alone review---only the lead item under Museum and Gallery Listings. But CultureGrrl nevertheless applauds his appraisal:

It is ravishingly beautiful in design, breathtaking in conception and one of the more successful artistic interventions in this narrow fissure of a space [the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center], a popular stage for public art. It is definitely worth a visit.

Now if only we could manage to keep it somewhere in New York, after it gets supplanted by the Big Tree.

What's this world coming to?

Is this what Minnie and the gang do after hours? (Yes, it's on YouTube, but I'll let you find it, if you must. When I first viewed it, anyone could access it. Now, mercifully, it's behind the 18-or-over firewall.)

We can only wonder what constituted the "appropriate action" that the Walt Disney Co. took against Goofy, Chip or Dale, the giant snowman and the obliging Minnie at the behind-the-scenes simulated gangbang by character-costumed employees at Euro Disney in France.

For the record: Meek Mickey did not come to Minnie's defense. And this video is not among those posted by the Museum of Modern Art on YouTube's website (in conjunction with MoMA's survey featuring musical videos and films of The Residents, Oct. 19-23).

Does Google know what it's getting itself into? Where are the decency police when we really need them?

Here's the report from today's Philadelphia Daily News on Rep. Jim Gerlach's Barnes-storming press conference, previewed by CultureGrrl yesterday.

Kudos to Wildenstein & Co., the bluechip New York gallery, for mounting a benefit exhibition for the hurricane-ravaged New Orleans Museum of Art. Comprised of 86 works from NOMA's European and American collections (14th-21st century), plus 9 additional pieces from private New Orleans collections, the show runs from Nov. 17 to Feb. 9. The admission fee ($10 adults, $5 seniors and students) and the proceeds from opening-night events will go towards the museum's $15-million Katrina Recovery campaign. No art is for sale.

Wildenstein's press release provides an additional public service by giving this disturbing update on NOMA's plight:

According to recent assessments, the flooding following the storm inflicted more than $6,000,000 in damage on NOMA's physical plant and its adjacent five-acre sculpture garden. The museum's director, E. John Bullard, its deputy director, Jacqueline Sullivan, and their board of trustees now have to cope with an absolute catastrophe in terms of the financing of their daily operations. Indeed, every day they are faced with the question of their museum's very survival.

Since March 3 of this year, it has been opening its doors to the public free of charge, first for three days a week, more recently for five days. However, attendance so far is only 20% of pre-Katrina levels. For 2005 alone, NOMA incurred a deficit of $700,000, and that type of loss is expected to continue.

Wildenstein deserves thanks both for its own public spiritedness and for keeping the cultural dimension of this disaster before the New York artworld's consciousness and conscience.

The Getty Foundation as also stepped up to the plate, announcing yesterday more than $1 million in grants to eight New Orleans arts institutions for "conservation and transition planning to assist them as they recover" from Katrina. This first round of the Getty's planned $2-million New Orleans grant program did not directly benefit NOMA, but included $250,000 to the city's Contemporary Art Center for "collaborative transition planning" with six other cultural institutions, including NOMA.

Remember when Lisa Dennison, director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, vowed to adopt CultureGrrl's suggestion that curators get credit, by name, on the introductory wall text of exhibitions they organize?

Well, no such credit was given to Luca Massimo Barbero, associate curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, for the just-opened Lucio Fontana show.

Then again, given what I've just said about that exhibition, maybe it's just as well.

If you're going to mount a show revisiting an artist who has fallen off the artworld's radar screen, the viewer had better come away convinced that the obscurity was undeserved.

This was emphatically not the case with Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, which opened Tuesday at the Guggenheim, New York.

The idea must have sounded good on paper: an array of works created by the avant-garde theoretician in two cities that are home to Guggenheim museums. I had looked forward to it as the institution's return to prior form as a bastion for modern and contemporary European art---its unique New York niche under former director Tom Messer. Indeed, the last major Fontana exhibition was the Guggenheim's 1977 retrospective.

But my favorable anticipation quickly retreated under the visual assault of gaudy, gawky works, more meretricious than meritorious. The experience was more rewarding in the introductory gallery (which, for those climbing up the museum's ramp, will unfortunately be the last room visited, not the first). Here we are on more familiar Fontana ground, with two iconic Guggenheim-owned matte monochrome paintings, bearing the artist's signature slashes that brashly violate the surfaces. (But why is the otherwise pristine white canvas unaccountably violated by someone's black fingerprints along the right edge? Calling conservation!)

The introductory gallery also contains some of Fontana's interesting, early experimental oeuvre, and provides some background on the theoretical basis for his work. We can read astute commentary by critic Lawrence Alloway, who noted that rather than accepting the flat surface as "implacably given,...Fontana puts things on the surface...; he opens up the surface by punched holes and, more recently, by slashes. The flatness of the picture is not an area into which the world must be sandwiched."

Fair enough, but what Fontana does with those surfaces, in the Venice/New York oeuvre, is glitzy, clumsy and visually unalluring: Clunky chunks of colored Murano glass are artlessly affixed to the Venetian canvases. In the superficially flashy New Yorkers, large slabs of shiny copper are awkwardly and perfunctorily gashed and dramatically lit by the museum to project auburn reflections on the floor.

Notably absent are the works for which Fontana is perhaps best known: the notched metal orbs that were once so favored as public sculpture. One of their claims to fame is that they occasioned one of the first of Philippe de Montebello's several impolitic public comments evincing possible insensitivity to contemporary art: The day he arrived at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (which he directed before becoming director of the Metropolitan Museum), Philippe told the Houston Chronicle that the Fontana orbs at the museum's entrance "make good receptacles for chewing gum wrappers."

Maybe the guy was onto something.

I can't judge Nicolai Ouroussoff's very mixed review to appear in tomorrow's (Thursday's) NY Times, of Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum, because I last saw the building more than a year ago, while it was under construction. But I can comment on his negative personal appraisal of Libeskind in the lead paragraph:

He has suffered humiliation in his role as master planner at ground zero, not so much for his design as his consistent refusal to stand up for it.

Maybe Ouroussoff feels that Libeskind should feel mortified by his situation and should inveigh against those who put him in it. But I have heard both he and his wife speak on the subject of Ground Zero, and both seem intent on putting the best face on the situation, staying in the picture as much as they still can, and not griping about something over which, through no fault of their own, they have no control.

Maybe Ouroussoff calls that humiliation. I call it taking your lumps, making the best of a bad situation, and getting on with your life's work.

For CultureGrrl's reports on (and links to) Denver appraisals by other big-name critics, go here and here.

This just in from the office of U.S. Congressman Jim Gerlach:

Congressman Gerlach will be joined by members of the Friends of the Barnes Foundation tomorrow, Thursday, Oct. 12, 2:00 pm., at 275 North Latch Lane, [across the street from the Barnes] in Merion, to discuss what he plans to do to help block the efforts by the Barnes Foundation trustees to move the museum to Philadelphia.

Specifically, he plans to introduce a bill (when Congress reconvenes in November) that "would impose a penalty on any tax-exempt organization, and in this case the Barnes Foundation, for accepting a donation that would be used to move the organization contrary to the intent of the donor. The penalty will be equal to the value of the donation, and prevent any organization from raising money for the purpose of relocating, against the terms and wishes of the original donor, in this case Dr. Albert Barnes."

According to a statement by Rep. Gerlach, whose district includes the Barnes:

Gov. Rendell's proposal to spend $25 million in taxpayer monies to facilitate the move of the Barnes Foundation collection from its rightful home in Merion, Pennsylvania to the Ben Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia is a shortsighted and ill-advised decision. This $25 million would be enough to keep the Barnes Foundation solvent in Merion, making the move to Philadelphia unnecessary. This fact underscores the truth that the Foundation Board's decision to move the priceless collection of artwork was a poor one. The decision was based on false assumptions, questionable motives, and inaccurate financial projections. But using precious taxpayer dollars to facilitate this move is adding insult to injury. Using public money to purloin an invaluable treasure from Lower Merion would be a travesty of artistic, economic, and legal justice.

CultureGrrl agrees that the Barnes should stay where its founder wanted it. I've said why in the Mainstream Media, both here and here. But my guess is that since the "intent of the donor" has been interpreted by the courts to allow "saving" the Barnes through its relocation, the bill may turn out to be more symbolic than productive.

For those of you who can't make the trip across the pond to experience Carsten Höller's enormous slide in the the Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall in London, there's still time to see MASS MoCA's comparably huge Höller installation, Amusement Park (scroll down), to Oct. 30.

This one has more rides but is strictly non-participatory: You can look but not touch. I found the whole thing a bit ghostly and dispiriting. But at least it's not, as CBS news called the Tate's thrill ride, "a lawsuit waiting to happen"!

Do crones like CultureGrrl need to submit their bone-density tests before being allowed to land "with a thump" at the bottom of the Tate's 182-foot slide?

Maybe contemporary collector and art-museum philanthropist Eli Broad thought he was sufficiently out of earshot from his neighbors in Los Angeles when he chatted in London with Bloomberg's Linda Sandler:

Asked whether his collection would wind up in a museum, Broad said it would be divided and doled out to institutions that needed the specific works. The risk of donating an entire collection to a single museum was that much of it might wind up in storage, he said.

"Where it goes will depend on who needs what. We don't want them in storage.'' Giving a clue as to possible beneficiaries, Broad reeled off a number of boards he sits on, including MOCA [the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art]. LACMA [the Los Angeles Museum of Art] would be loaned more than 100 works, he said.

But a "loan" is neither a gift nor bequest. In a controversial move under its former director, Andrea Rich, LACMA gave Broad substantial sway over a new contemporary wing to be built with his money and with his name on it. "The gamble is that someday the museum will inherit the art," as Michael Kimmelman wrote in the NY Times.

It would appear that Michael Govan, LACMA's new director, has some work to do.

A report yesterday by the CBC says that the $182-million Acropolis Museum, under construction in Athens to house the Parthenon marbles, "will be ready 'in the first half of 2007,'" according to Greek prime minister Kostas Karamanlis, who visited the site on Monday.

Don't bet on it.

The Athens News Agency puts it a little differently: It says that construction is "slated for completion in the first half of 2007."

We've heard all that before: When I wrote in 2002 for Art in America magazine about this project, then estimated to cost only $78 million, the deadline for completion was 2004, in time for the Olympics. Architect Bernard Tschumi had told me that the 2004 deadline imposed a "mad schedule," but was, nevertheless, "entirely feasible."

Here's another thing not to bet on: that the new state-of-the-art facility will, as the Greeks hope, inspire the British to return to Greece the so-called Elgin marbles, reuniting what remains of the Parthenon frieze. As I've written on the NY Times Op-Ed page, I hope that will happen. But I doubt it.

Do we know where Tony Blair's heir apparent, finance minister Gordon Brown, stands on this issue?

Back in July, CultureGrrl complained about the unwelcoming character of Jean Nouvel's new facility for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis:

Instead of feeling the anticipatory glow of a joyous night at the theater, you prowl the dark lobbies and corridors (with slit-like or oddly tinted windows interfering with your view) feeling like you've been conscripted as an extra in a film noir (emphasis on noir). Adding to this impression are the ghostly, barely perceptible images of past Guthrie performances, imprinted on the surrounding walls.

When I wrote that dark critique, the theater had not yet opened to the public, and I noted that "an appraisal of the three performing spaces themselves will have to await the drama critics."

Last Friday, my blogging colleague, Terry Teachout, weighed in with his WSJ review of a production at the Guthrie. He liked the play, but panned the building:

I'm not an architecture critic, but I do spend a lot of time in theater lobbies, and this one didn't do a thing for me: The low-ceilinged public areas are dark, oppressive and laid out with irksome illogic. Rarely can there have been a theater whose interior was less well suited to the purpose of making its occupants feel festive and expectant. The process of getting from the street to the Wurtele Thrust Stage, the largest of the three performance spaces, is so protracted -- not to mention confusing -- that I briefly had trouble focusing on the revival of Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers" that had lured me to town.

Unfortunately, he didn't comment on how he regarded the performance space itself, once he had finally groped his way from the lobby to his seat. That's what I was most interested in hearing from a theater buff who, unlike CultureGrrl, had the opportunity to see the Guthrie in action.

So, here's a shoutout to the blogging Teachout: Do tell about the Wurtele!

Yesterday, my husband, son and I were appropriately observing the holiday by driving home on the Christopher Columbus Highway (aka Route 80), after visiting daughter Joyce at Penn State. She is the only woman among 15 newly initiated graduate students in that university's highly regarded acoustics engineering department. (Calling Lawrence Summers!)

CultureGrrl being CultureGrrl, she fled the family golf outing after 11 holes to hightail it to the Palmer Museum of Art for a quick look-see before closing time. The director there (whom I did not meet on this rushed visit) is Jan Muhlert (below), about whom I knew I had previously written. But at first I couldn't quite place her.

Then, it came back to me: I had seen her younger self in a photo illustrating one of my own articles---an in-depth piece on museum deaccessioning, published in the May 1990 issue of ARTnews. At that time she was director of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. Her current position, like her former one, is consistent with her specialty in early 20th-century American art: The Palmer's collection is particularly strong in American modernism.

She rated a headshot in my article, because she was at that time chairman of the Professional Practices Revision Committee of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which had drafted a statement to significantly strengthen and clarify the vague deaccessioning guidelines of the AAMD. As a result of the committee's work, AAMD stipulated that deaccession proceeds should be used only for acquisitions.

But Muhlert's committee had intended the guidelines to go even further. In our 1990 phone interview, she had told me that the draft made it clear that deaccessions should "not be made because the market is healthy. They should be made based on a policy decision that the museum no longer projects any need for that object."

But the actual guidelines, while prohibiting disposal decisions based on "fashion or taste," fell short of requiring that a museum sell only objects that it would never need. More and more, decisions are predicated on so-called "redundancy." It's not: What objects will we never need? It's: What objects can we manage to do without, so that we can further our collecting goals of the moment?

Okay, it's time to set the record straight, once and for all.

If you've ever Googled CultureGrrl, you know that the first thing you see is the highly insulting insinuation that you really wanted to ditch the seasoned Grrl for some 26-year-old grrrl:

Did you mean: ultragrrl

Well, we all know that half the time Google doesn't know what it's doing. After all, it just agreed to buy YouTube for stock valued at $1.65 billion! (I must be doing the wrong kind of blog.)

But why would Google think you actually meant Sarah "Ultragrrrl" Lewitinn [who uses three "rrr's," not two]---the gamine who grew up right across the street from us and dug holes in our backyard when coming over for playdates with our son? Now almost-famous as a DJ, producer of alternative rock recordings and, yes, a blogger with lots more traffic than CultureGrrl, Sarah, it seems, will be featured (with photo) on the Fanfair page of the November Vanity Fair. (You can see an enlargeable image of the VF page on Sarah's blog if you scroll down to Oct. 4; I'm afraid of violating publishing protocol if I link to this.)

I have to confess that I had read and admired Sarah's breezy, blotto blog and that I, in fact, had her alter ego in mind when I chose CultureGrrl as mine. (I was particularly amused to read the post in which she said she was glad that her mother never read her explicit entries. I was tempted to get on the phone to Ondine, but managed, just in time, to restrain myself. Why do kids think their parents know nothing about cyber-snooping?)

Anyway, I'm eagerly awaiting the time when you Google "Ultragrrrl" and get:

Did you mean: CultureGrrl!

Columbus Day is a holiday for emerging-market bond traders (like my son, with whom we're visiting our daughter at grad school) and emerging-blogger barb traders (like CultureGrrl).

Back at you tomorrow!

Okay, okay. I take this back. Great review (in both size and content) about the expanded Bronx Museum of the Arts by Nicolai Ourossoff in today's NY Times.

But things get a bit dicey when he says that the Arquitectonica-designed addition helps "to shore up the Bronx's dicey image as well as...reassert its former identity as a haven for the middle class." First of all, the Bronx has always been at least as much a haven for immigrants (like my own grandfather), fleeing bad times for a better life. The immediate area around the museum is now heavily populated by relatively recent arrivals from Ghana.

And second, some parts of the Bronx---think Riverdale, for example---have never lost their status as so-called "havens" of the middle-class.

As long as Ouroussoff sticks to architecture, rather than sociology, he'll do just fine.

Speaking of "the building's low-budget construction"----how do you raise money for a new wing and neglect to raise ANY money for the museum's currently nonexistent operating endowment? About one-third of the $2.6-million operating budget comes from government funds. The rest has to be raised from scratch each year. Not a great financial plan.

Who ever would have thought that the staid Morgan Library and Museum would become Experience Music Project East? That's what happened with the opening of Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966, an exhibition that premiered at Seattle's EMP, which organized it and is touring it to two other venues after the Morgan (to Jan. 6).

This show (where CultureGrrl tripped in hazy nostalgia through the land of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and that chimerical chameleon, Robert Zimmerman) is not as much of a stretch for the Morgan as it seems: The library's own manuscript holdings include the George Hecksher Collection of Dylan manuscripts and typescripts---a trove that includes his working drafts or early fair copies for more than ninety songs. And the Morgan's curator of literary & historical manuscripts, Robert Parks, makes the case that Dylan is a poet who belongs in the pantheon that includes "Thoreau, Steinbeck and Mark Twain---writers who had a real social impact."

I must confess that I checked my critical faculties at the coatroom while I gawked at iconic guitars and manuscripts, and listened on headphones to that rare piece of Dylaniana, the hilarious "Talkin' Bear Mountain Massacre Blues," one of several songs from a never broadcast nor commercially released 25-minute recording from his first concert---Carnegie Chapter Hall, Nov. 4, 1961. This was an occasion where "52 people showed up, and probably 1,000 people said they'd been there," quipped the EMP's Jasen Emmons, who organized the show. (The Morgan really must at least supply more than one set of headphones for this...preferably, a large listening booth!)

Also occasionally hilarious was the tour that Emmons gave, right after the press preview, to Morgan staff and docents, some of whom were clearly more familiar with burin than Dylan. Inquiring Morganites wanted to know:

What's the difference when you're saying 'acoustic' or 'electric'?
What if people ask us what happened since [after 1966]?
Positively WHAT Street?

I should add that CultureGrrl was more accurate than she knew when, in a previous post, she called NY Times writer Robert Shelton "Dylan's unsung hero": After the press preview, I found myself in a Borders bookstore, where I discovered Dylan's autobiographical "Chronicles: Volume One" on sale for an irresistible $5.99. On Page 278, he mentions the "rave review in the folk and jazz section of the New York Times" that essentially launched his career. But do you think he credits that prescient writer by name?

Like a complete unknown...

Ever dream of renting a Renzo Piano facility in New York for a wedding or a birthday bash? Well, now you can!

The NY Times announced that its new Piano-designed facility on W. 41st Street will feature a hall that "can accommodate 400 people for banquets and as many as 700 for receptions. It is also appropriate for trade shows, exhibitions, lectures and meetings. The hall includes a caterer's staging/warming area....The hall [is] available for rent beginning in September 2007 and [is] currently accepting reservations."

We all know that times are tough in the newspaper business, but a sideline in canapés and chafing dishes? Do we get to consult restaurant critic Frank Bruni on menu planning? Will the open bar be crashed by ink-stained wretches?

More importantly: Has the LA Times considered this?

You saw it here first: my musings on the Yom Kippur sermon delivered by the California Attorney General to the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Today you can see this piece, slightly tweaked, in it's new home on the Op-Ed page of the LA Times.

The newsroom was in considerable turmoil during the editing process, because of this. My editor managed to finish the job before the 4 p.m. general meeting with David Hiller, who became the paper's new publisher after the forced resignation of Jeffrey Johnson. Johnson had refused to comply with the Tribune Company's call for draconian staff cuts.

Surprisingly, the editor was very interested in my blogging experience. She assured me that newspapers do have a future. But do you think she's pondering ArtsJournal blogs as her next move if she gets the ax? (Ummm, no.)

Hey, NY Times, you got a problem with the Bronx? Well, gray lady, we're tawkin' about my native borough, so I got a problem with YOU!

First this. And now, the Bronx Museum of the Arts just held a big press preview, complete with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for its shiny new wing on the Grand Concourse, and you're writing about...QUEENS? I mean, if the Bronx is in Westchester, then the Queens is in England, right?

Okay, I know: You bestowed 207 words on the Bronx Museum yesterday---the lead tidbit in the "Arts, Briefly" section. (Gee, thank you very much.) But you gave the Queens Museum of Art an impressive 805 words on its new wing today, plus two photos---and they haven't even started building it yet! What are you thinking?

We can only hope that you're planning to peg some expansive Bronx coverage to the museum's public opening this Saturday. And...

(But wait. We interrupt to bring you this special report on the current whereabouts of the Times' intrepid art scribe, Benjamin Genocchio, still determined to get to the press preview of the Bronx Museum. He was just spotted at a diner in New Rochelle, having coffee with arts editor Sam Sifton, who handed him a brand new GPS device to aid in his quest. Go get 'em, Ben!)

CultureGrrl did make it to the press preview (without a detour to Westchester) and left wondering whether the museum's officials know they're in the Bronx. The entire permanent collection (which includes works by "artists who have lived and/or worked in the Bronx and for whom the Bronx has been critical to their artistic development") was off view. Instead, the galleries were entirely occupied by "Tropicália," a show about contemporary art from (or influenced by)...BRAZIL? Look, I know there's no melting pot like the Bronx, but the Brazilian influx had been previously unknown to me.

I figured that the inaugural show had to have been chosen to appeal to the local community that the museum most immediately serves, so I buttonholed Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr. after the ribbon-cutting, to ask what percentage of the borough's population was Brazilian.

"Very small," he replied. "Miniscule." Then he shot me a significant glance and tapped his finger to his head, to signal that CultureGrrl was using hers. And then he was out the door.

One person who does know that this museum is in the Bronx is its education director Sergio Bessa, who runs a variety of innovative programs for local students, some of which involve traditional artmaking or the production and editing of videos and podcasts. I particularly liked the concept behind the student docent program, which informs teenagers about art and about museum operations, while imparting knowhow on discussing art. The program ends with participants leading museum tours for their peers.

It will be interesting to see community's response to the museum's open house, Oct. 29.

Hey, Ben, do you read me?

Towards the end of my interview on Tuesday with Tom Dresslar, spokeman for the California Attorney General's office, I asked a simple question and expected to get a simple answer. Instead, I got this shocker, which could have serious implications for other American museums that return antiquities of dubious provenance to their countries of origin.

Here's our conversation:

CultureGrrl: Is this investigation entirely closed, aside from the fact that there's a now monitor who will be making sure that procedures are followed?
Dresslar: Depending on what happens in Italy with the antiquities, we may have something to review after that process has run its course.
C: What would be the issues that you would be reviewing? What would come under your purview?
D: Whether any loss of art by the Getty was caused at the outset by negligence on the part of the trustees.
C: I didn't know you would be getting into all that. Well, there IS going to be a loss of objects. Are you then opening an investigation?
D: That's an issue we'll be looking at depending on what happens. We won't be necessarily scrutinizing whatever deal the Getty makes to return art. It would be whether at the outset their negligence allowed employees to run amok.
C: Are you looking into that now?
D: No, we've got to wait for the Italian authorities to do their job.
C: Once that is totally resolved...
D: Then we'll make a determination at that time whether we want to review that issue.
C: Has that ever been done before in any of these cases?
D: I don't know. The Getty is not exactly your normal situation.
C: As far as the kind of governance issues that were the subject of this report---is your investigation of that done?
D: Yeah, we're done.

It seems, then, that the Getty's reward for doing the right thing in Italy could be yet another investigative morass at home.

(IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please see the Oct. 5 post on the Getty, for a new CultureGrrl shocker from the California Attorney General's office.)

Why is the California Attorney General's report on the J. Paul Getty Trust's violations of the public's trust such a profoundly unsatisfying denouement for the sordid saga of its board's and president's misjudgments and misdeeds?

It's not just that the Getty appears to have gotten a mere slap on the wrist, having prudently preempted more serious punishment by instituting needed governance reforms before the Attorney General could force it to do so. The buzz about the Attorney General's light touch on this weighty matter has been so great that when I called the office's press spokesperson, Tom Dresslar, he felt impelled to rebut "the notion that the Trust got off easy," even though I hadn't yet raised any question about the disconnect between the Attorney General's mild rebuke and the Getty's wrongful actions:

They paid a price. They were the subject of a critical report issued by the Attorney General to the public. They will be subject for the first time in California history to continued oversight by an independent monitor [former Attorney General John Van de Kamp], to make sure that they follow through on their reform commitment. They took some hits. The Trust was made whole for improper expenditures.

But was it?

The problem with the 12-page public summary of the Attorney General's findings is that there is no way of knowing. Dresslar declined to release the facts and figures on which the report's conclusions are based, asserting that information acquired during his office's investigations is "exempt from public disclosure under the Public Records Act of California."

Similarly, the Getty's vice president for communications, Ron Hartwig, told me today:

The Getty will not be making public the reports the Trustees' special committee received from counsel, the Getty's responses to the Attorney General's requests for information and documents, or the confidential letter [containing more details than the public report] we have received from the Attorney General. Their confidentiality is protected by California law.

So we have to take on faith the Attorney General report's conclusion that "the Trust has been compensated for the losses" from improper expenditures, thanks to the settlement it made with Barry Munitz, the Getty's former president. Munitz resigned in February, amidst a firestorm, stoked by relentless investigative reporting and analysis by the LA Times, over his misuse of funds. He agreed to pay $250,000 to the Trust and forfeited a severance package of more than $2 million that he might otherwise have received.

But we have no way of doing the math to calculate whether the payment by Munitz did in fact provide adequate compensation, because the report gives no figures for the specific expenses that he wrongfully incurred. Among those listed in the report: travel expenses for his wife, excessive travel expenses for himself, using employees to run personal errands, paying fees to a graduate student/consultant who "did insufficient work...to legitimately earn those fees." (The Attorney General did, however, choose to make public the improper expense of $21,561.16 for artworks bestowed upon four retiring trustees.)

Even worse, the report supplies no back-up data to support its conclusion that more serious alleged irregularities, potentially far more costly, were undeserving of censure: It asserts that information provided by compensation consultants retained by the Getty indicates that Munitz's generous compensation for his services was "reasonably based on data of the average compensation paid to chief executives of other, comparable nonprofit charitable organizations." But the report provides no actual comparables to support this conclusion. Indeed, a recent survey by the Chronicle of Philanthropy found that Munitz's $962,526 compensation in 2005 made him the second-highest paid executive of any cultural nonprofit in the country, exceeded only by that of Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

Similarly, the report supplies no comparables to support its conclusion that the Getty's $2-million sale in 2002 of a vacant residential lot in Brentwood to prominent businessman and collector Eli Broad was reasonable. It only quotes one "independent real estate appraisal expert," unnamed in the report, who "concluded the fair market value of the property at the time was $1.8 million." As the report notes, Broad is "allegedly a close friend and professional associate of Dr. Munitz."

But by far the biggest expense that Munitz may have caused the Trust is the $3 million paid to Deborah Gribbon, who resigned as director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2004, in return for this monetary settlement.

"At the time she resigned, Dr. Gribbon had a claim against the Trust for unlawful 'constructive discharge,' as well as other potential employment-related claims," according to the Attorney General's report. The exact nature of those claims has never been disclosed. But when I asked Dresslar if, as has been widely assumed, Munitz's actions had led to Gribbon's claim, the spokesman replied (inaccurately but revealingly), "I think we pretty much came out and said that in the report." He added that Munitz had not been asked to compensate the Trust for the Gribbon settlement, because this expenditure was deemed a "proper" expense of the Trust: Without it, the Getty might have been subject to even greater expenses and damages, stemming from litigation.

The much publicized personal friendship between Munitz and Bill Lockyer, California's Attorney General, made it all the more essential for Lockyer's report to provide sufficient detail to instill confidence that the investigation was thoroughgoing and that its conclusions were supported by well documented evidence. With this report, and with the refusal by all parties to provide further details on its findings, it's not just the Getty Trust that has shown disregard for its public trust; it's also the California Attorney General's office.

The damage that this sorry episode inflicted on public confidence in the Getty and, by extension, on all nonprofits, is perhaps the biggest cost of the inadequate oversight by the Getty's board of Munitz's actions---a loss for which there can never be adequate compensation.

Here's something we've got to see: Gary Tinterow speaks on Oct. 24 about his curatorial activities, as part of the ArtTalks lecture series of the American Federation of Arts in New York. Billed as "the Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art" (a title long enough to exhaust half the time allotted for the lecture), Tinterow will discuss "the history of the Metropolitan's involvement with contemporary art---its strengths and weaknesses---as well as the creation of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art" (another mouthful).

Although I got a press release announcing this event, there does not (at this writing) appear to be any information on AFA's website. But I got my ticket (and you can get yours) by calling: 212-988-7700, ext. 10. (Alert: There are only 80 seats in this venue.)

What CultureGrrl urgently wants to know is: Has Gary adopted Philippe's 50-year gestation rule for contemporary acquisitions, and is he going to deaccession everything created since 1956, because, after all, curators have the right to do such things?

Come to think of it, since I've already antagonized him, I think I'll come in disguise. Where's Cindy Sherman when I really need her?

Imagine my surprise when I caught my first online glimpse of my WSJ article about Edith Wharton on Monday night: The caption on the accompanying photo indicated that it was an image of Wharton's library as it appears today, with her own books returned to its shelves. But I knew that it was the library as it appeared more than a year ago, with random volumes that had been installed to make the room look appropriately book-filled. (The furnishings have since been changed as well, which made it easy to spot the difference.)

A variation on an old proverb: One picture can spoil 1,300 words!

Just to set the record straight, here's a picture of the famous novelist's actual books, fronted by Wharton, reincarnated as CultureGrrl:

As you can see, the old English major was really happy here!

When last seen, Benjamin Genocchio, still trying to get to today's press preview of the expanded Bronx Museum of the Arts, was headed north on the Saw Mill River Parkway near Dobbs Ferry, desperately seeking the Bronx in Westchester. Will the NY Times please get around to running that correction, so the poor guy can figure out where he's going?

No this is not the Getty post you've been breathlessly awaiting---my fulminations about yesterday's report by the California Attorney General office on its lengthy investigation. CultureGrrl will let loose on that subject tomorrow. That deficient report, e-mailed on Yom Kippur when I couldn't read it, was certainly consistent with the forgiving spirit of the Jewish holiday on which it was issued.

No, this is a good-natured debate on another matter. The Getty Museum's blameless new director, Michael Brand, focused (as he should be) on the real work of the institution going forward, has just blogged back on my recent post about the Getty's contemporary art plans:

I feel obliged to respond to your comments about works by Tim Hawkinson and Gerhard Richter coming soon to the J. Paul Getty Museum.

First of all, I believe Tim Hawkinson (along with many others in the art world) would be legitimately surprised to hear that neither his "Überorgan" (not previously displayed on the West Coast) nor four newly commissioned works warrant West Coast exposure.

With respect to the exhibition "From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden," rather than being the result of what you call "a lack of curatorial enterprise and imagination," the selection of the 12 Richter paintings you refer to was actually made at the suggestion of Mr. Richter himself---examples of his recent work that he feels are the most interesting in comparison to paintings by Friedrich. In addition, he renamed them "Wald" in light of this connection to Friedrich. They were included in our exhibition before they were purchased by or promised to MoMA.

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

Touting the Mount's importance as one of this country's few National Historic Landmarks devoted to a woman, Stephanie Copeland in 1998 persuaded First Lady Hillary Clinton to walk in Wharton's footsteps. Ms. Copeland believes this visit directly resulted in what became "a big turning point for us" -- a $2.9 million matching grant from Save America's Treasures. And last April, First Lady-librarian Laura Bush spoke as guest of honor at an event celebrating the inauguration of the reinstalled library.

But the real hero in this latest chapter was George Ramsden, who reaped an undeniably enormous profit over the $80,000 he paid for most of the books in 1984. He arguably earned this reward, though, by devoting 20 years to doggedly assembling, preserving and cataloging the volumes (with detailed information about inscriptions, notations and significance to Wharton's life and work). Most important, he resisted pressures to break up the collection and sell it piecemeal. In a recent phone interview, he decried as "cultural vandalism" the dispersal of formerly intact libraries of such celebrated authors as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and Henry James.

Mr. Ramsden writes in his catalog, published in 1999, that Wharton's library at the time of her death consisted of some 4,000 volumes. She willed the majority of them to the distinguished art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, in trust for his young son Colin, Wharton's godson. Approximately 1,400 other volumes, bequeathed elsewhere, were destroyed in the London blitz during World War II. Among these: books on art and archaeology.

After purchasing most of Colin Clark's trove in 1984 from Maggs Bros., a London book dealer, Mr. Ramsden continued searching for and acquiring other stray volumes -- about 550 that were still on the shelves of the Clarks' Saltwood Castle, and about 50 more from other sources. When I spoke to him recently, this Wharton sleuth was about to ship eight newly discovered volumes to Lenox.

Mr. Ramsden, who discusses in his catalog the central importance of libraries to Wharton, as reflected in her autobiography and novels, always wanted his hoard to go to the Mount. But he stuck firmly to his price, which Ms. Copeland could not meet. Then an acquaintance of hers, Lord Christopher Tugendhat---owner of the largest private collection of Wharton first editions in England---helped broker a deal last year whereby two benefactors, Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers, would lend the purchase price to the Mount, which would launch an "adopt-a-book" fund-raising campaign to repay the loan. The campaign, totaling $35 million, will also endow the library and benefit the continuing care of the Mount.

Meanwhile, restoration and refurnishing proceed apace, along with literary readings and horticultural happenings. Last year, Wharton's elaborately composed gardens were restored to their appearance in photographs from the time of her occupancy. Photographs also guide restoration of Wharton's personal living quarters---her bedroom and the adjoining boudoir where she received friends, conducted household business and perhaps pored over manuscripts.

No original furnishings, wall coverings or draperies remain in the house (although some wallpaper fragments do exist), so Ms. Copeland plans to use reproductions, as well as some period antiques, that mimic the decor in the photographs. Among recent purchases in France: a Louis XVI painted chaise longue and a Louis XV writing desk.

Several other rooms, restored down to their ornamental plaster rosettes and garlands, have been reimagined as temporary showcases for select American interior designers. Their charge was to furnish the rooms in accordance with principles set forth by Wharton and her co-author, architect Ogden Codman, in "The Decoration of Houses": proportion, harmony, simplicity and suitability. Wharton's writings on this subject helped to establish the profession of interior design. Next summer, a group of distinguished French designers will be invited to reimagine those rooms and others, to be followed, at two-year intervals, by English and Italian designers.

But if you really want to go back to the Gilded Age, journey to the Mount at noon on Columbus Day, Oct. 9, when a cavalcade of historic horse-drawn carriages (bearing members of the public who have paid $250 for a day-long ride to benefit the Mount) will arrive at Wharton's lush grounds, driven and attended by costumed coaching enthusiasts from around the country. It will, Ms. Copeland promises, suffuse you with the Wharton aura.

I had the pleasure of going back to my English-major roots with this article, appearing in today's Wall Street Journal, on the return of Edith Wharton's own books to the library at the Mount, her former Berkshires mansion.

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

Lenox, Mass.
For the first time in 95 years, Edith Wharton's wide-ranging collection of books has returned to the shelves of her own library at the Mount---the bucolic country estate in the Berkshires that she meticulously designed for her own use, beginning in 1902. Now open to visitors each year from early May to late October, the author's house and gardens are in the midst of major restoration and repurposing, after years of deterioration and neglect. Wharton (1862-1937) penned her first successful novels, including "The House of Mirth" and "Ethan Frome," in its bedroom, facing the morning sun and dropping the manuscript pages, one by one, from her bed to the floor. The novelist Henry James, Wharton's good friend, occupied an upstairs bedroom during his three visits.

But the celebrated author fled the place she loved and the husband she didn't in 1911. Teddy Wharton, mentally ill and maritally unfaithful, then proceeded to sell the Mount without his wife's permission. She lived the rest of her days in France, which was more hospitable to divorced women than the conservative New York high society to which she had belonged as Edith Newbold Jones, a scion of the family that reputedly inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses."

Last year, a highlight for visitors to the Mount was a temporary exhibition, in the unrestored upstairs bedrooms, of tableaux from "The House of Mirth." Gilded Age fashions were borrowed for this engaging enterprise from the Museum of the City of New York.

This year, the many literary pilgrims wishing to channel Wharton's spirit can finally see, although from a frustrating distance, the vast array of books from which the celebrated author drew inspiration, pleasure and personal solace. Included are 22 first editions of her own work. Purchased by the Mount last December, they were arranged on its shelves in April.

"We now have the very soul of Edith Wharton," exulted Stephanie Copeland, president and executive director of the Mount, who had tried for many years to raise the $2.6 million needed to buy the 2,600 books from George Ramsden, the British rare book dealer whose labor of love it was to assemble and painstakingly catalog them, beginning in 1984. Scholars will soon be welcome to peruse the tomes for clues about Wharton's taste and influences, as well as her intellectual and emotional life.

On a recent summer afternoon, I had the treat of pre-empting those scholars: In Ms. Copeland's office, I turned pages of an absorbing assortment of volumes from the 17th to the 20th centuries, musing over emotion-charged passages that Wharton had marked in John Donne's poetry, Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" (one of her two favorite novels, along with Eliot's "Middlemarch") and Robert Browning's letter to Elizabeth Barrett: "It is hard to make these sacrifices," was one passage from Browning that resonated with Wharton. After regular visiting hours, I circumnavigated the library itself -- scanning the titles written in the several languages Wharton commanded, and arranged by Mr. Ramsden according to subject: literature, history, philosophy, religion, science.

But other visiting bibliophiles will be disappointed to discover that the library is just a momentary stop on the house tour. They can enter a few feet into one corner of the wood-paneled room, briefly peek in, then move on to the drawing room. A closer look at a few important books is possible, though, in display cases installed in Teddy Wharton's adjoining study. Among the highlights when I visited: "America and the World War" inscribed to Wharton by its author and her friend, Theodore Roosevelt.

COMING NEXT: Wharton, Part II.

CultureGrrl is SO behind the news on the Getty! Of course, the California Attorney General's office just had to release his report on Yom Kippur. I'll belatedly throw you some links, for starters, then give you more extended commentary, probably on Wednesday. Today I'm diverting you with my latest Wall Street Journal article, and I'm temporarily abandoning my keyboard to join New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (along with lots of other cultural journalists) in my native borough, the Bronx.

The California AG has declined to take civil or criminal action against the Getty or its officials, but has appointed an independent monitor, or what Christopher Knight of the LA Times cheekily characterizes as "a chaperon to accompany the J. Paul Getty Trust for two fiscal years. The Getty...apparently requires some adult supervision." This, according to Tom Dresslar, the AG's press spokesman, "marks the first time ever [that] a California Attorney General has imposed such a requirement in a charitable trust enforcement action."

Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino of the LA Times note that "the attorney general's probe focused narrowly on issues identified in the Times articles---investigators identified no new issues in their 13-page report, which provided little detail about the expenditures it criticized." The relentless investigative reporting of Felch and Frammolino played a large role in spurring the AG's investigation and the Getty's soul-searching,

Christopher Knight, also in the LA Times, calls it a "big mistake" that the Getty "has declined to issue a report of findings in its own internal investigation, claiming that strict confidentiality precludes it."

The NY Times comes up with a self-serving comment on the AG's report by the Getty's deposed president, Barry Munitz.

Here's the Getty's press release issued in response to the AG's report.

And here's the AG's report.

Art-law blogger Donn Zaretsky gives his analysis (scroll down to his second item under Oct. 2) of the former legal quarrel between Austria and the Bloch-Bauer heirs over whether Austria was entitled to claim the Klimts under the provisions of Adele Bloch-Bauer's will:

From my reading of the [U.S.] Supreme Court's 2004 decision in the case, it's probably more accurate to say the Austrian position was that Adele had already given it the work prior to its seizure by the Nazis. The Bloch-Bauer heirs conceded that Adele's will (she died in 1925) "asked" her husband "after his death" to bequeath the paintings to Austria. Their [the heirs'] complaint in the U.S. action added that the attorney for her estate then advised the Austrian Gallery that the husband "intended to comply" with the request, but that he wasn't legally obligated to do so because he, not his wife, owned [the Klimts].

CultureGrrl's previous analysis of the competing claims of Austria and the heirs is here.

No posts till Tuesday, in observance of Yom Kippur.