December 2006 Archives

Actually, it's been only seven months...but so many memorable moments! The post attracting the most hits was: Who Should Succeed Philippe at the Met? I guess my readers include a multitude of Metropolitan Museumologists.

More surprisingly (and to my chagrin), the post with the longest legs---continuing to be hit by many new readers long after it was published---was the one expounding upon the sexual violation of Minnie Mouse.

That's because those lonely people Googling "Minnie Mouse porn" (and you'd be surprised and alarmed at how many do!) get this as the third item on the first page of results. What have I done?

On a more constructive note, here (in chronological order) is a selective list of CultureGrrl's Memorable Moments, for those of you who haven't been obsessively clicking me all year long:

Rethinking Antiquities
What's Not to Like About Mega-MoMA (Part I and Part II)
Rethinking Antiquities (again)
Where in the World is the Guggenheim?
The Art Market is Not the Stock Market
Rooting Out Loot
Restitution Resolutions---Cashing in on Artistic Assets
AAMD: A Toothless Watchdog
Architecture vs. Art: When Form Ignores Function
Dubious Duccio?
Verklempt Over Klimt
Museum Collections: Curatorial Privilege and the Public Interest
Attracting and Keeping New Audiences (Or Not)
Latest Getty Shockers: Time to Come Clean and Clean House
The Getty Report: Clean Sweep or Whitewash?
What's Missing from the Met? Tinterow Exposes the Gaps
Lamentable 2006 Artworld Developments---Part I: Rent-a-Show
(COMING NEXT WEEK: LAMENTABLE DEVELOPMENTS, PART II: THE HEGEMONY OF MONEY-NO-OBJECT COLLECTORS)

Former J. Paul Getty Trust board member Barbara Fleischman responds to my previous post on Marion True's biting letter to the Getty:

Perhaps, finally, the real story of where the responsibility rests in an institution will come out. Those of us who know how limited a curator's power is in making acquisitions can perhaps take some comfort in hearing the truth at last.

"Felcholino," the LA Times' cultural-news equivalent of the Washington Post's "Woodstein" of Watergate fame, have done it again: Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino have obtained a copy of a Dec. 18 letter written by the J. Paul Getty Museum's former antiquities curator, Marion True, to the Getty Trust's chief executive Deborah Marrow, museum director Michael Brand and spokesman Ron Hartwig.

The Getty has played her false, True feels, by letting her take the fall for the Getty's past antiquities iniquities.

Felcholino reported yesterday:

True, on trial in Rome on charges of trafficking looted objects, wrote Dec. 18 that her superiors at the Getty Museum were "fully aware of the risks" of buying antiquities and had approved the acquisitions.

"You have chosen to announce the return of objects that are directly related to criminal charges filed against me by a foreign government...without a word of support for me, without any explanation of my role in the institution, and without reference to my innocence," True wrote.

The implied threat of similar prosecutions is what has impelled other American museum professionals to take Italy's and Greece's repatriation claims seriously. By virtue of the Getty's riches, and perhaps also because of its desire to build a world class collection quickly, Marion True probably committed indiscretions on a bigger scale than many colleagues of more modest means. With her colleagues reluctant to speak too loudly on her behalf, for fear of attracting more prosecutorial retaliation, she has been left to twist slowly in legal purgatory as the sacrificial curator.

Francesco Rutelli's Mixed-Up Message

Wrapped inside glistening paper that he inscribed with wishes for a Peaceful Christmas ("Sereno Natale"), Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli sent this ingenious card (above), which presented recipients with a a bit of a puzzle: Its four sections have to be taken apart and reassembled to spell "Il Dialogo" (Dialogue).

The flipside (after reassembly) bears two quotations in Italian. The first is from a woman best known for making friends with chimpanzees. (Is that how he regards American museum directors?):

Change happens through listening and then initiating a dialogue with the person who is doing something that you do not believe is just. ---Jane Goodall

The second quotation is from a man best known for getting his way through passive resistance. (Rutelli's resistance has been anything but passive):

In today's reality, the sole way of resolving differences: dialogue and mediation, humane understanding and humility. ---Gandhi

Did Michael Brand get one of these cards? (If so, did he piece it together or tear it apart?)

Equal time: I also received a very attractive card from the patient folks in the J. Paul Getty Trust's communications department, who have graciously put up with my annoying questions throughout 2006.

And this personal holiday note: Having compulsively posted every day this week, I have failed dismally in my feeble attempt at Bloggers' Rehab. And you, my faithful readers, have been my enablers---clicking my posts in large numbers, even though it's a vacation week and you really ought to be out skiing.

Bloggy New Year, art-lings!

Heather Mills called the police last night over the theft of $19.5 million in art, including works by Picasso and Renoir, from the country estate she shared with singer/songwriter Paul McCartney.

Turns out her estranged husband "had taken the paintings and reprogrammed the estate's alarm codes, and informed her Thursday night by text message," according to the Associated Press. Police said it was a civil, not criminal, matter between the warring spouses.

Reprogramming and text messaging---that's divorce, high-tech style. But some things do stay the same: Everyone wants the Picasso.

Nikolai Zavadsky, husband of Larisa Zavadskaya, deceased curator of the State Hermitage Museum, will "stand trial on charges he stole art objects from the Hermitage with his late wife," Reuters reports.

The Russian Prosecutor-General has charged Zavadsky in the "theft of 77 objects from the museum's department of Russian cultural history. Some 221 objects were discovered missing last summer.

A staff member at the National Gallery of Art, who deals with exhibitions and collections, comments on More Thoughts on "Gross Clinic":

I work at the National Gallery of Art and I have to say I am thrilled that our bid for the Eakins was blocked. Here's why:

One final beef with this whole situation (and this is where I think we differ slightly): Having this massive work go to the the NGA and Bentonville would have required much traveling and shifting locations for the painting. In your last column, you mentioned the absurdity of the work having to shuffle back and forth between two locations in Philly, yet try having to shuffle it between DC and Arkansas! In Philly, you have a short distance to go and the professional resources to get it there.

Click me tomorrow for a provocative BlogBack on The Gross Clinic from an employee of the National Gallery in Washington.

Also (what did I do to merit this?): the contents of a cryptic Christmas card from The Grand Repatriator himself, Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli.

(Pssst, Frankie...I'm Jewish!)

Let me now spoil your New Year's revels with my perverse countdown of the two 2006 artworld developments that I will continue to rue in the coming year:

The first is growing international participation in the pernicious spread of museum rental shows---high-priced loan exhibitions that allow the lender, a major museum, to alleviate its money problems at the expense of sister institutions. The art-needy exhibition venues are desperate enough for crowd-pleasing masterpieces to pay big bucks for the privilege of showing them.

No lesser voices than Françoise Cachin, former director of French national museums; Jean Clair, former director of the Picasso Museum, Paris; and French art historian Roland Recht recently railed against "using works of art as currency of exchange" in rental shows, such as Louvre Atlanta. In their Dec. 13 joint article, Museums Are Not for Sale, in the French newspaper Le Monde, they also decried proposals by the Louvre and the Pompidou to create foreign satellite museums in the manner of the Guggenheim, which they hyperbolically decried as "the disastrous pioneer of paid exportation of its collections to the whole world."

Ironically, they also praise Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum, for what they call his "stern warning" in 2003 against the "unrestrained commercialization of the public patrimony, particularly by the system of loan fees for works."

Maybe the news hasn't yet reached France about Masterpieces of French Painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1800-1920, the megabucks rental show touring next year to the the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

At least we still have the positive role model of the generous Clark Art Institute, whose Masterpieces from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is dispatching (for a fee based only on cost) 12 of its most celebrated Impressionist paintings to small museums around the country.

As for the rest of you sorely tempted museum directors...no one ever listens to Polonius' tedious advice, but here it is anyway:

When it comes to Rent-a-Show, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

COMING SOON: Lamentable 2006 Artworld Developments---Part II

Chéri Samba, "I Like Color," 2003, Courtesy of CAAC---The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva
© Chéri Samba

In 1996, back when the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, a ballyhooed home for multimedia art, was just opening, director Tom Krens and I shared a cab, talking about his dreams for that now defunct museum and also about his desire to mount a show of contemporary African art.

The latter dream has just been realized, although not in New York.

What had sparked Krens' interest 10 years ago was the new lavishly illustrated Abrams-published catalogue, "Contemporary Art of Africa." More than half the works in that 192-page tome came from the collection of Jean Pigozzi. One of the contributors of entries about the individual artists was Italian designer Ettore Sottsass. Pigozzi was inspired to collect by the landmark 1989 exhibition, "Magiciens de la Terre," at the Pompidou Center, Paris.

Now the Guggenheim Bilbao is presenting (to Feb. 18) 100% Africa, an exhibition of works by 25 artists from 15 sub-Saharan countries. As described by the museum's press release, it features "the most important works from the Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) owned by collector Jean Pigozzi and considered one of the world's finest private collections of modern art from the African continent. Also included are several artworks created exclusively for display at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao."

And Sottsass is again involved, creating a "very distinctive setting" for the exhibition. A spokesman in Bilbao knew of no travel plans for the show.

Africa (not to mention Antarctica) is a continent for which, to my knowledge, there has not yet been a proposed Guggenheim.

"Guggenheim Ghana" does have a nice ring to it.

(CultureGrrl Disclaimer: My above-linked "Antarctica" piece, from the Wall Street Journal, is just a spoof. Some readers actually did take it seriously!)

The fine arts component of the huge Renzo Piano-designed "Manhattanville" expansion to the north of Columbia University's current campus appears to have been significantly downsized from the initial concept. Piano had sketched in a large new facility for the School of the Arts: It is the structure with the curved-glass front on Page 11 at this link.

That building, however, is no longer envisioned in the revised plan. I learned this when I took one of the many Manhattanville walking tours that Columbia has offered to interested alumni. Fine arts (visual arts, film, theater and writing), now scattered among various Columbia buildings, would be assigned to renovated portions of Prentis Hall, an existing Columbia building on 125th Street, and to a more modest new structure.

The School of the Arts itself has recently experienced considerable turmoil, as this article from the Columbia Spectator indicates. Dean Bruce Ferguson resigned in April; Dan Kleinman of the Film Division is acting dean.

With all the community ferment over the university's far-reaching plans, who knows if and when the expansion will actually happen? As the NY Times said in its Nov. 26 editorial:

The school is facing a real fight over its plans to build new facilities on 17 acres just to the north in West Harlem, where auto shops and light industry predominate. Residents are raising valid questions about what Columbia will take from---and be willing to give to---the neighborhood.

Glenn Lowry has said that when he leaves the directorship of the Museum of Modern Art (some time in 2030), he want to return to scholarship. Now the past and future Islamicist has agreed to teach a course next semester for Columbia University's M.A. Programs in Modern Art and Curatorial Studies, according to the fall newsletter of the department of art history and archeology. The new chairman of the department is Barry Bergdoll, who is also the new chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA. Can he do it all?

The subject of Glenn's pedagogy: Contemporary Islamic Art in the Diaspora. I assume this was partly inspired by the inspiring Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, shown earlier this year at MoMA.

Some criticized that show for not being political enough; I thought that was the point: to transcend those differences.

From Glenn's course description:

In the last decade a number of artists from predominantly Islamic countries have emerged as important figures on the contemporary scene. This course will examine the issues and ideas they address, while exploring the ways in which they deal with questions of modernity and identity, among other topics.

Meanwhile, Bergdoll will be teaching a Columbia class next semester on History of Architectural and Design Exhibitions at MOMA. It will be taught at the museum.

This is getting pretty incestuous! Or should I say, "synergistic"?

The Neue Galerie has just come out with a 96-page book, "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer," in which authors Sophie Lillie and Georg Gaugusch "trace [the] story of 'Modern Mona Lisa'" (as described in the press release). The book's cost: $30. Will the proceeds help defray the painting's purchase?

Now if only the Neue Galerie would also publish, as repeatedly promised, the Nazi-era history of the works in its collection. Still nothing posted on the "Provenance" page (found under "General Information") of its website .

And speaking of Klimt costs, did anyone notice that in her year-end roundup of "memorable moments" last Sunday, NY Times critic Roberta Smith said unequivocally that "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" was "bought for $134 million"? Does she know more than the other scribes who have said that the cost was "reportedly about $135 million"?

There are probably others, but here's a good example of the late wit and wisdom of curator/scholar Robert Rosenblum, quoted in a very interesting, detailed Klimt post mortem by Eileen Kinsella in January's ARTnews (not yet online):

I myself love Klimt up to a point, but it's like going to a Viennese bakery.

Talking to Rosenblum was like Viennese pastry: sinfully delicious.

With the help of ample time to flesh out her late-breaking account, Kinsella gives an incisive rendering of the dance between Adele I purchaser Ronald Lauder ("It took about three seconds") and the attorneys for the Bloch-Bauer heirs ("There were several weeks of discussions"). Attorney Steve Thomas not only exhaustively contradicts Lauder's version of events, but also fills in some of the details about serious competing offers.

This, coupled with Tyler Green's much earlier Fortune magazine account, gives us a good look at the art of the megabucks art deal.

There's a fascinating article by Philadelphia-based Julia Klein in today's Wall Street Journal that's a must-read for anyone desiring an inside view of the successful effort to keep Eakins' "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia. (The link is here for those of you with online WSJ subscriptions; otherwise, pick up a copy.)

But do we really want "the creativity of this arrangement" to "serve as a model for other nonprofits when selling works of singular cultural significance," as proposed by Marc Porter, president of Christie's, which brokered the deal?

The "model" of a megabucks collector, willing to pay a record amount that cash-strapped nonprofits must then frantically scramble to match, in order to enrich another nonprofit, is surely not a prospect that brings joy to any museum director or museumgoer.

Spare us such "creativity"!

Yesterday's NY Times article, N.Y.U. Mines Personal Data to Gain Edge in Money Race (different title online), makes it sound as if New York University, by sifting through personal financial information on online databases (to identify potential big-money donors), is doing something that other charities aren't.

Far from it.

Ten years ago, when I was writing my "Visual Reality" column for Artnet's nascent online magazine, I published an item on Donor Dossiers:

Terri Constant, the Met[ropolitan Museum]'s head of "prospect research," [said that] about 10 percent of the museum's 100,000 members are checked through services like Nexis and Investnet for details about business dealings and insider stockholdings. The purpose: to identify big-bucks donation prospects.

Times reporter Jonathan Glater yesterday revealed this about N.Y.U., as if it were something shockingly novel:

Each day, Lekha Menon, the director of prospect management and research at N.Y.U., and four staff members pore over more than a dozen newspapers and electronic news and data sources, looking for names of alumni, parents of alumni or parents of students. They also look for notable donations to other causes, promotions, appointments to corporate boards and records of securities transactions.

Nowhere does Glater state that this is common practice among many charities. But chances are that if the Met was already doing this 10 years ago, almost everyone's doing it now. Then as now, I wondered whether people who forge connections with nonprofits realize they are potentially subjecting themselves to intrusive scrutiny of their net worth by those very organizations.

The only difference is that now, unlike then, we all know that there's no such thing as personal privacy: Our worth, net and otherwise, can always be assessed online.

This came out on YouTube last summer. Who needs Ben Stiller?

On this Christmas day when you would all be giving your children the final installment of the Harry Potter series, if only you could, CultureGrrl will do her bit for world peace with a personal appeal to author J.K. Rowling:

DON'T KILL HARRY!!!

Rowling has previously stated that she "can completely understand" authors who kill off characters so that no one else could write a sequel. This caused much handwringing among anxious Harry-philes, including my 22-year-old daughter Joyce, who ominously warned that an entire generation would be scarred for life by the untimely demise of their hero. Imagine if some Potter-deranged psycho took revenge on humanity by starting the next World War. No author should have that on her conscience!

Borders bookstore recently sent me an e-mail with the title of Book 7---"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"---and an opportunity to reserve a copy. That made me believe that the book was soon to ship.

Not so, apparently. Rowling revealed in the Dec. 19 diary entry on her website that she's still writing:

I am now writing scenes that have been planned, in some cases, for a dozen years or even more....I am alternately elated and overwrought. I both want, and don't want, to finish this book (but don't worry, I will)

She also revealed that for the first time, just days before, she had dreamed she was in Harry's world. She describes this "epic dream" in detail, in her online diary.

On her website, Rowling also refutes a whole list of rumors. But she does not address the most important one: that Harry will die.

We can only hope that she's seen the recent movie, "Stranger Than Fiction," in which a popular writer changes her planned ending because she ultimately can't bear to kill off her likable main character. A university literature professor, her biggest fan, finds this new resolution less artistically rewarding, but the author is nevertheless satisfied with her decision.

Sometimes human decency just has to trump literary exigency. The fate of the world may depend upon it!

Armando Reverón, "The Woman of the River," 1939, Museum of Modern Art, Fractional and promised gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, in honor of John Elderfield
© 2006 Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

At last: The new year will bring "the first U.S. retrospective of the celebrated Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón" (1889-1954) at the Museum of Modern Art. This 100-work show of paintings, drawings and objects, organized by John Elderfield, MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture, was originally scheduled to appear at MoMA QNS, the museum's temporary home in Queens while its Manhattan facility was renovated and expanded. But the difficult political situation in Venezuela (President Chavez on President Bush: "I smell sulfur") made American access to art and research materials challenging.

Perseverance pays: The show opens Feb. 11. The catalogue will be the first major publication on Reverón in English

But what's going to happen with the "fractional and promised gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros," above, in light of the recent changes in the tax law?

CultureGrrl is addicted to two things: Lindt's dark chocolate and blogging. With the loving support of family and friends who have gathered around during this holiday season, I'm attempting semi-withdrawal from blogging during this week, while so many of your are away. (However, I'm sure to suffer the occasional relapse.)

I know there will be much rending of wrapping paper and garments as you slink away from your holiday revels to click on your bookmarks, only to wail:

But where is CultureGrrl???

Let me season your expectations by saying that I've got some dishy and saucy posts planned.

In the meantime, have a great Holiday Season and a Happy New Year. As for me, I'm hugging my fabulous kids, husband and parents, wassailing with friends and laying in a large stash of dark chocolate!

The fundraising campaign to keep "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia cannot be considered a roaring success, having fallen far short of its goal during the appointed time.

And because of the way yesterday's announcement was handled, coming up with the rest of the money is likely to prove even harder, as Carol Vogel's piece in today's NY Times inadvertently demonstrates:

Yesterday's announcement puts to rest a frenzied and highly publicized fund-raising campaign cast as a battle for civic pride.

It doesn't "put it to rest," as Vogel's own piece elsewhere indicates: The fundraising continues. But the city's emphasis on the fact that the painting has definitedly been "saved," coupled with the public disclosure that bank financing that will insure this, immediately drains the sense of urgency from the campaign.

I'm usually all for public disclosure, but in this case they should have just announced that the fundraising deadline had been extended to Jan. 31, revealed exactly what had been raised to date (providing updated totals from here on out), and told concerned Eakins-lovers that they need to step up their support.

One other quibble: I understand the fundraising reason for this partnership, but it seems absurb, not to mention unnecessarily dangerous to the painting, to keep shuttling it back and forth in perpetuity between two nearby locations in the same city---the Philadelphia Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Hopefully, once things settle down, these peregrinations will be kept to a minimum.

And then, there's this troubling quote from today's report by Stephan Salisbury in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Herbert Riband, vice chairman of the academy's board, said it is possible that some works might be sold from museum collections to help cover the costs of the transaction. But he said that was only a possibility.

Anne d'Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum, had refused to answer the deaccession question, when it was previously posed to her by Vogel.

In one other way, as Salisbury's article indicates, this contretemps may have broad ramifications:

[Mayor] Street said he is sending legislation to City Council that would "establish a registry of all important" objects and works of art in the city. Such a registry, he said, would serve as an alarm system if a work is threatened with sale or removal.

This might also serve as an alarm system for those who believe that an art registry would be an interference with private property rights.

At a press conference this afternoon, Mayor John Street announced that an agreement of sale has been signed that will keep Thomas Eakins' "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia. Nevertheless, the fundraising is far from over: The deadline to come up with the $68 million for the seller, Thomas Jefferson University, has been extended from Dec. 26 to Jan. 31, and Wachovia Bank has agreed to provide any necessary financing.

Round up the usual Philly philanthropists: Major contributors thus far include the Annenberg Foundation ($10 million), Gerry Lenfest, Joseph Neubauer and the Pew Charitable Trusts ($3 million each). They were among the more than 2,000 contributors from more than 25 states who have answered the call so far, according to Joe Grace, Mayor Street's communications director.

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Stephan Salisbury had reported earlier today, before the mayor's announcement, that "firm contributions" to the campaign had totaled only about $30 million of the $68 million needed: "Speculation is running rampant around the whole funding drive, and museum trustees, city officials, cultural leaders and donors are increasingly nervous that the complex effort involving big institutions, tight deadlines and high anxiety could unravel."

The Philadelphia Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will be joint purchasers of the painting, which will shuttle back and forth. It will be shown first at the former, "where it will be seen in context with Eakins and his contemporaries," according to the Philadelphia Museum's press release, just posted. Director Anne d'Harnoncourt, commented:

If the city of Amsterdam were faced with the potential loss of Rembrandt's "The Night Watch," that community too would rally. Like "The Night Watch," "The Gross Clinic" possesses a powerful national significance rooted in its home city.

Although it appears relatively unscathed in this post-recovery photo, Munch's "The Scream," stolen from and then returned to the Munch Museum, Oslo, is stained in one corner. The museum's conservators recently reported that they have not yet determined "whether one will reconstruct the original colors in the stained part of 'The Scream.' One will most probably take a restrained attitude, as it is difficult to foresee what kind of chemical reactions modern pigments and binding agents might bring about in the future."

Also stolen and returned was Munch's "Madonna," which (as you can see in the photo) sustained obvious tears in the canvas. The museum reports:

During the five days in September that the two damaged works were on display in specially built glass cases, 5.500 persons visited the exhibition, at times forming long queues in front of the museum entrance.

But it may be a long time before these works are again on view:

For the time being it is not possible to determine when the paintings will be ready for exhibition, but owing to the tears in the canvas, the conservation of "Madonna" is likely to be even more time consuming than that of "The Scream."

The museum has prepared a 200-page assessment for the Oslo police which, according to an Associated Press report, will be released tomorrow.

For the full recent statement from the Munch Museum about the conservation of the two paintings, click the link below.

Yesterday, Joseph Rago, the Wall Street Journal's assistant editorial features editor, added his voice to the print pundits who see blogs as a symptom of the decline and fall of civility and civilization (for others, go here).

In "The Blog Mob," his essay on the editorial page, Rago opined:

Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought---instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior....And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.

Does this describe CultureGrrl? I hope not. But even the broadminded, veteran culture writer and critic John Rockwell, in his recent ArtsJournal exchange with AJ editor Doug McLennan, talked about "the rise of the feistily independent (or sometimes downright bitchy and mean) voices on the Internet." Hey, Rocks-in-Your-Head Rockwell, are you calling ME "bitchy and mean"? (Just kidding: I LOVE your work, honest!)

For my more considered rejoinder to the blog floggers, hit the second link in the first paragraph of this post, and then go to Part II of "Why I Blog."

And while I'm defending the honor of the "Blog Mob," I must take some credit for a good posting day yesterday: CultureGrrl readers got an early look at two stories (here and here) that NY Times readers only learned about today (here and here). It's not that the Times couldn't have had these up on its website even earlier than I did: They're in Rome and St. Petersburg; I'm not. But the paper-of-record tends to post breaking stories only if they are highly important. For hardcore visual art-lings who want early buzz and pithy commentary, CultureGrrl, I'd like to think, serves a purpose.

Maybe the sluggish Mainstream Media's growing recognition of its need to catch up with nimble bloggers is why David Shipley, my favorite NY Times Op-Ed editor (and I've worked with several) has just taken on the additional assignment of "expanding and enhancing the editorial page's presence online, a new position." What exactly that will mean remains to be seen.

For one thing, he should create readers' comment pages for editorials and Op-Eds by outside contributors. As of now, only the regular NY Times Op-Ed columnists are vouchsafed a comments page. Even more basic: When editorials and opinion pieces refer to specific NY Times articles, those articles ought to be linked.

You don't need a webmaster see which way the wind blows.

The architecture critic of the Wall Street Journal responds to Ada Louise Huxtable Meanders in Minneapolis, saying that CultureGrrl misinterpreted as praise her WSJ review of Jean Nouvel's Guthrie Theater:

Was I too subtle? Too tongue-in-cheek? Too ironic? Please read the piece again! I thought my description made it clear how off-putting and over-the-top I found it. It's not exactly praise to say that a blue glass window upstages nature and turns it into an architectural accessory or that yellow glass gives a relentlessly jaundiced hue inside and out.

My highest praise went to Cesar Pelli's Central Library, not the Guthrie. The point of the piece was the extraordinary range of Minneapolis's new architecture.

Point taken.

Those of you who get your Saturday-afternoon opera fix with the Metropolitan Opera's live radio broadcasts have a new option, beginning Dec. 30: The Metropolitan Opera Goes to the Movies. Theaters around the country will present the live broadcasts on high definition screens with surround sound.

The process of navigating through the various web pages to purchase your tickets is a bit complicated. But isn't it worth a little trouble to be surrounded by the sound of "the dashing young Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez"? Unlike some of the other productions, his "Barber of Seville" (which you may already have previewed on Letterman's Stupid Met Tricks) is at a theater in Manhattan---at Union Square.

What if you live in Topeka? Not to worry: You'll have to drive only 50 miles, to Olathe, Kansas. OLANTHE? Who knew?

Let's see, should I go to Union Square to see Tan Dun's new opera, "The First Emperor," with "legendary tenor Plácido Domingo as Emperor Qin"?

Come to think of it, my closest theater is the Metropolitan Opera House. And I've already got my tickets!

Those of you who have heard far too many iterations of Pachelbel's Canon (and who hasn't?) simply must check out today's top-of-the-list Featured Video on YouTube, viewed (at this writing) by 44,665---Rob Paravonian's hilarious Pachelbel Rant:

This just in from a press conference held today in Rome by Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, who said that he recently received the an opinion from his government's legal authorities backing his position:

We have documented that these works [the Getty-owned antiquities sought by Italy] were stolen, carried off, clandestinely exported and then acquired by the Getty. For months we have negotiated with great patience. Now the end has arrived. The works stolen from Italy must be restituted. An accord that surrenders only a portion of the works [26 of the 46 sought by Italy] would not be an accord; it would be a unilateral decision that the Italian government cannot accept. They can decide to keep them, but they will find themselves confronting a very strong reaction from our ministry.

And this just in from the Getty, responding to Rutelli's comments:

While we look forward to reviewing the documents cited by Minister Rutelli at his news conference, we are saddened that our efforts to resolve our differences have been stalled by a 40-year old claim for a Greek statue found in international waters.

The other objects the Minister spoke about to the media have already been discussed at previous meetings between the Getty and the Ministry, and an approach to dealing with them was included in the October agreement signed by both sides. We continue to look forward to resolving any outstanding issues. That was the goal of the meeting in November which ended abruptly when the Ministry insisted that no agreement could be reached without the return of the Statue of a Victorious Youth, which we have made clear, in documents provided to the Ministry, rightfully belongs to the Getty.

Can someone please get James Wood to postpone his vacation to India? We need to tone down the accusations and ramp up the negotiations.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, "Pool in a Harem," ca. 1876
©2003 State Hermitage Museum

UPDATES: Now the Associated Press has picked up this story, and apparently the recovered painting has now been authenticated. And according to Novosti, the Russian news and information agency, the painting suffered "severe damage."

As CultureGrrl previously reported, a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, "Pool in a Harem," was stolen in 2001 by someone who cut it from its frame at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. The Russian museum's director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, had said at the time that the theft might have been an inside job.

And now, this report from Radio Free Europe:

A painting believed to have been stolen five years ago from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has been handed over to the leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov.

Experts from the Culture Ministry have been called in to verify the authenticity of the painting.

Nothing about this yet on the Hermitage website.

In its Letters to the Editor today, the Philadelphia Inquirer publishes a pithy note by one Michael Donnelly, who says what other Philadelphians are doubtless thinking about the $68-million public fundraising drive to keep the Eakins from leaving town:

Here's an idea: Continue to raise the money. Then, ask homeless advocate Sister Mary Scullion, or city schools CEO Paul Vallas, or even SEPTA board chairman Pasquale Deon how they think such a concerted effort to raise an exorbitant amount of money could otherwise benefit the Philadelphia region.

There's always a tension between culture and society's "more urgent" needs. I'm strongly in favor of arts funding. But in this case, I think the guy's got a point. Unlike Donnelly, though, I would say that this money comes from people who are interested in funding culture, which is also important to the social fabric. The question is whether this impressive philanthropy might be better applied to a less flashy, but more broadly significant, cultural project. It's always easier, but not necessarily better, to raise fast megabucks for a dramatic "rescue" appeal.

See Derek Fincham's Illicit Cultural Property blog for an interesting discussion likening the recent (withdrawn) nomination of "The Gross Clinic" for historic-object designation to foreign governments' export restrictions on art.

Welcome to my blogroll, Derek!

You've read about the controversial organizational changes at the Brooklyn Museum: Traditional subject-area departments were eliminated, in favor of two ''teams''---collections and exhibitions.

Now's your very own chance to be an exhibitions team player! Recently hit by key staff departures (including: Elizabeth Easton, curator of European painting and sculpture; and Marilyn Kushner, curator of prints, drawings and photographs), Brooklyn is advertising (see ArtsJournal's homepage ) for two new staff members---"extraordinary communicator/scholars," to serve as curators in its new "Exhibitions Division":

While strongly competitive applications are anticipated from among those currently holding positions as art museum curators, the Museum also solicits applications from authors, academics, journalists, specialists in electronic and new media communications, and others with strong art history backgrounds.

They want JOURNALISTS? As curators? Now if only I can locate my résumé. The hours are good at 35 per week. But one thing's for sure: Traditionalists need not apply.

Meanwhile, the J. Paul Getty Museum, also hit by staff defections (under the Getty Trust's deposed president, Barry Munitz), has just hired David Bomford as associate director for collections. He comes to Los Angeles in April from his current post as senior restorer of paintings at the National Gallery, London.

Now if only the regrouping Getty Trust, previously famous for financial irregularities, could just find itself a permanent vice president for finance and administration.

Christian Kleinbub, assistant professor of art history at Ohio State University, in his second CultureGrrl BlogBack (the first one is here), responds to: Should the "Getty Bronze" Go Back to Italy?:

Although an outspoken proponent of the opposite viewpoint, I want to compliment you on the thoughtfulness of your long-awaited post considering the ownership of the Getty Bronze.

But if the Getty is said to be arguing for ownership of the Bronze by means of legal technicalities, the Italians have been doing so as well. To my mind, the Italian "moral argument" amounts to little more than an extremely ambitious legal ownership claim made over the failure of Italian citizens to obtain a suitable permit for the export of a piece of private property. It is unclear to me whether this qualifies as a moral offense or an everyday infraction. I think it fair to say that the return of the Bronze would represent little more than the fact that the Getty had succumbed to a failure in a public relations battle with Italy.

I think we ought to keep our eyes focused on the damage that might be done by the restitution of the Bronze over a technicality: Without the Getty Bronze, the Getty Villa would be denuded of its most essential and defining work.

UPDATE: For Huxtable's response, go here.

With Ada Louise Huxtable's astute appraisal of four major recent architectural projects, the Wall Street Journal has now triple-teamed Minneapolis: Joel Henning last year on Herzog & de Meuron's addition for the Walker Art Center; Lee Rosenbaum (aka CultureGrrl) last July (here and here) on Michael Graves' expansion of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (also touching on Jean Nouvel's Guthrie Theater and Cesar Pelli's Central Library), and now the doyenne of architecture criticism, casting her well-practiced eye and polished prose on all four.

She reserves highest praise for what I had liked least---the Nouvel. But who's to argue? She describes it so brilliantly and lovingly that I believe (almost) that she "gets it" and I don't. In CultureGrrl last July, I wrote:

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.

To Ada Louise, all this was just part of the fun:

The building is disco dark from go. Strategic lighting actually lights nothing; this is a netherworld of glowing color and tinted glass. Ghostly scenes of plays and actors from the theater's history, faintly silk-screened on the walls, turn the unrelenting darkness into a magic show. The climactic view at the end of the cantilevered bridge is seen through a blue glass window that upstages nature to make the landscape an architectural accessory. A yellow glass façade gives a relentlessly jaundiced hue to a top floor lobby and the world outside. There is a very large, stygian café....

Of all the hot and cold, promising and disappointing, much praised but consistently troubling Nouvel buildings, this is by far the most skillful and successful design. And since his forte is theatricality, not subtlety, this is the place where he has really got it right.

Well, maybe. But I'm really curious to know what she thinks of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's new Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, for which my review will soon appear in the WSJ. I'll let you know when it's out.

Meanwhile, to read Huxtable, go here if you subscribe to the online WSJ. Otherwise, pick up a copy today, and go to Page D8.

Jeffrey Snyder, major gifts officer of the Philadelphia Museum, told CultureGrrl today that the $68-million fundraising campaign for Eakins' "The Gross Clinic" is "well over 50% there."

That still leaves a lot of cash to raise in one week. So why is Anne d'Harnoncourt, director of the museum, so "optimistic," as quoted in today's Philadelphia Inquirer? She herself has been coy in answering press questions about how much has been raised---a strange posture for someone trying to build up a sense of public urgency about the Dec. 26 deadline.

But Snyder told me her confidence is based on the museum's discussions with "a lot of our nearest and dearest" (translation: "big donors"). The campaign, he said, is in the process of "closing some gifts."

Mayor John Street has withdrawn his nomination of the Eakins for protection under the city's historic preservation ordinance, because "the fundraising is really moving along," according to Street's spokesman, Joe Grace, as quoted in the Inquirer. "We want to allow folks to focus on fundraising."

The larger fundraising issue raised by this campaign is whether the "nearest and dearest," feeling they've done their bit for art with this emergency rescue, may be less generous towards less high-profile but equally urgent cultural needs in the coming year.

Tom Stoppard is the greatest living English-language playwright. Full Stop. I'm sorry, but I will not accept any BlogBacks on this. Not even from Terry.

So when I learned that his trilogy, "The Coast of Utopia," was stopping at Lincoln Center, I immediately Telecharged my tickets.

And good English major that I still am, I went out and bought the text, which I am now very happily reading. A recent NY Times article provided a whole list of volumes that we're supposed to study to prepare for these plays. But for me, the best preparation to see a play is read the play.

There are certain authors whose sensibilities speak directly to one's own. For me, it's Stoppard. Now, if I can just sort out those four Russian sisters. (Of course, he had to go Chekhov one better!)

In a recent post on the NY Times' online Talk to the Newsroom feature, one Jacob Silverman asked the newspaper's book review editor, Sam Tanenhaus, "why the Book Review seems to review a significantly greater amount of nonfiction than fiction."

And here is Tanenhaus' learned answer:

For the simple reason that so much more nonfiction is published.

There must have been particularly slim pickings in the literary world last week: The 17-title contents page fronting yesterday's Sunday Book Review section featured only one novel: Lydie Salvayre's "Everyday Life," tantalizingly described by the Times in this subhead: "A psychodrama unfolds among workers at a Paris advertising agency." Who could resist reading such a potent potboiler (or at least its review)?

In a small concession to disgruntled literature lovers, one of the reviewed nonfiction books was John Sutherland's "How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide."

Now that's helpful. If only they'd also give us some wise guidance on what novels we might actually want to read!

In its December issue, The Art Newspaper published a photo of the "Getty Bronze," along with this stunningly erroneous scoop:

As we went to press, the Getty announced the return to Italy of the remaining antiquities claimed by the country.

In fact, the Getty announced it would return only 26 of the 52 objects that Italy was seeking, and emphatically refused to relinquish its iconic bronze statue of an athlete. The gaffe necessitated this embarrassing online "clarification":

In our December issue, we incorrectly stated that the Getty Museum in Los Angeles was set to return to Italy the remaining antiquities claimed by the country. In fact, the Getty Museum has agreed to return the 26 objects listed below. The museum has announced that it will not return a 2,500 year old bronze statue of a boy found off the coast of Italy.

The Art Newspaper has a deserved reputation for beating the rest of us to important stories. But he who hesitates (and fact-checks) gets it right. We all make mistakes, but this one was a whopper.

UPDATE: More on the fundraising campaign here.

Does anyone still remember what happened when the Boston Athenaeum announced that it was selling its celebrated Gilbert Stuart portraits of George and Martha Washington to the Smithsonian in Washington for $5 million?

Back in 1980, the venerable, cash-strapped Boston library bowed to intense pressure to keep the portraits in Boston: It accepted a $4.875-million joint offer from the National Portrait Gallery and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which allowed the portraits to remain, part-time, in the city where they had long resided.

Which is, of course, the type of solution that should have been devised for Thomas Eakins' "The Gross Clinic," now a mere eight days from its $68-million fundraising deadline. If Philadelphia institutions cannot reach that goal (and if the city is unsuccessful in its attempt to stop the sale), Thomas Jefferson University, the painting's owner, has agreed to accept a joint offer for that amount from Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton's planned Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The latter, of course, is the wrong partner: With the Boston example as the proper role model, it should have been the Philadelphia Museum. But Walton's art advisor, John Wilmerding, a trustee of the National Gallery as well as its former deputy director, helped to engineer the deal, having previously advised Walton on her purchase of Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits," sold last year by the New York Public Library. Walton is now a member of the National Gallery's Trustees' Council.

Philadelphia institutions would have much less difficulty executing a joint purchase than coming up with $68 million in a mere 45 days. "Donations to date total 40% of that goal," according to the campaign's online donation website.

It may be too late for this idea to gain traction. But Earl Powell III, director of the National Gallery, could help get it done. A quasi-federal art museum, the National Gallery describes its donated art as "gifts to the nation." Snapping up cultural treasures from sister cities does not befit its leadership role. It should work with great urgency towards a more satisfying solution---even if that means losing out on a masterpiece.

This is even worse than what just happened to classical music radio in Boston:

Can it really be that our nation's capital, home to the National Endowment for the Arts, Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian, not to mention our federal government, may possibly soon be without any classical music radio station?

Don't at least a few of our nation's leaders need to kick back with Bach at the end of the day?

This latest broadcast broadside is the sixth in what is, sadly, turning out to be a continuing CultureGrrl series about disenfranchised radio listeners (in addition to the first link, other installments are here, here, here, and here).

The good news for the classically challenged is that New York's WQXR, previously streaming only on AOL, can now be heard free on the web, here.

Get someone to give your computer a good set of speakers for the holidays!

As far as I can tell by doing an "Alagna" search on the ArtsJournal music blogs, no one has taken on the latest Temperamental Tantrum in Opera, Roberto Alagna's unceremonious mid-performance departure from the stage of La Scala last Sunday. Now you can see it yourself, as a video on YouTube.

All I can say is that the last few notes (which is all we hear) of "Celeste Aida," the famous opening tenor aria of that opera, sounded fine, and the sight of the street-clothed substitute Radamès, Antonello Palombi, striding onstage, grasping the hands of Amneris and letting it rip, is one of those stirring "the show must go on" moments.

Interestingly, in his report on the first-night performance of the new Franco Zeffirelli production, Alan Riding of the NY Times noted that "while Mr. Alagna seemed nervous in his opening aria,... he steadily gained in confidence, climaxing with his poignant final duet." On Sunday, the audience missed out on that climax.

La Scala's attendees are a famously tough crowd. They were marvelously well behaved the one night I went---better than Met audiences, who often start clapping and cheering before the last notes have faded. But the Met audience is much kinder to singers who get off to a shaky start. I've attended many performances where the tenor seemed to be holding back at first, only to open up gloriously in the final act. The great Plácido Domingo frequently paced himself in this way.

Basta, La Scala. Let's put some civility back into civilization!

If you Google "gifts for the man who has everything," what do you get at the end of the third search page?

CultureGrrl's gold penis shield!

Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

It's my job as a blogger to have strong, informed opinions on the topics within my purview. But there's one crucial issue about which I've written extensively without taking a stand---the question of who should possess the hotly contested ancient Greek bronze statue of an athlete, which caused the breakdown in negotiations between the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Italian Culture Ministry.

This is a tough issue, which is why the two sides are at loggerheads. It's also why I've deliberately ducked the question: I can see strong arguments for both sides of this debate. But now I've come, with very mixed emotions, to a conclusion.

First, a brief summary of the debate (which I've presented in greater detail at the above link): Based on U.S. law, the Getty feels justified keeping the bronze. It has strong basis for its belief that the sculpture was not initially found in Italy (in which case U.S. law would have recognized the Italian claim to ownership) but in international waters.

Francesco Rutelli, Italy's culture minister, told me when he was in New York that he believes the sculpture was found in Italian waters. But even if it wasn't, he said, it was smuggled out of his country without an export license, in violation of Italian law. Therefore, Italy considers it stolen and wants it back.

The Getty says that even if it had been illegally exported, Italy had no legal claim to it once it left the country. "Under Italian law," the Getty asserted in the dossier that it sent to Italy, "any liability for the value of an illegally exported item or fine rests on the exporter, as opposed to the purchaser."

We may never know with certainty all the facts about the tangled history of the bronze from the moment of its discovery to its ultimate arrival at the Getty. From what I've read and heard, I am persuaded by the Getty's argument that it was likely found in international waters. And I find equally convincing Italy's argument that the statue was held for a time in Italy and then illegally smuggled out of the country.

In my view, both sides have compelling arguments, and the resolution ultimately hinges on a moral question:

Is it the "right thing" for the Getty to relinquish the bronze, even if it is not legally required to do so?

Morality matters: Museums don't stand on legal technicalities when it comes to restituting the former possessions of Holocaust victims whose artworks were expropriated or acquired by forced sale.

Here the moral issue is more ambiguous. Unless the bronze was found in Italian waters, the government of Italy never technically "owned" it. But it was likely smuggled out of the country, and questions were raised about its murky past almost from the moment the Getty acquired it.

As an American, I'd like to see this masterpiece stay in the U.S. After all, as the Getty has argued, "the Getty Bronze...has now resided in Los Angeles for a great deal longer than it ever did in Italy" and, as a Greek work, it is not even part of Italy's cultural heritage.

But legal technicalities aside, I wonder if the Getty would acquire such an object today, if it knew or suspected that it had been illegally smuggled out of another country. Given today's heightened standards of due diligence and good faith in the acquisition of antiquities, the answer is probably no.

What's more, even at the time of the Getty's 1977 purchase of the bronze, there were suspicions that something was fishy about the masterpiece fished from the waters. Tom Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum, made this clear in his CultureGrrl BlogBack last month, and again two days ago in discussions with the Getty's lawyers, who belatedly sought his recollections from that period. Hoving, who had been involved in an effort, later abandoned, to jointly acquire the bronze with collector J. Paul Getty, has asserted that Getty, concerned about the bronze's ownership history, had refused to acquire it without written authorization from Italy. The J. Paul Getty Museum, without such written authorization, went ahead with the purchase after Getty's death.

Given this history, and in light of today's heightened consciousness of past antiquities transgressions, I've reluctantly concluded that the Getty should relinquish the contested bronze, even if this is not required under U.S. law. But in that event, I think that the Getty should get something very substantial in exchange for voluntarily "doing the right thing" by ceding something so precious. Important cultural exchanges, the liberation of Marion True, and closure with Italy would be an excellent start towards developing a mutually beneficial relationship.

And James Wood, the Getty Trust's incoming president, who comes to this contretemps with clean hands and no bitterness, is the man who may be able to get this done.

South Carolina artist Tom Durham responds to Why is There No Current American Political Art?:

I do agree that on the surface there is no or very little political art on the scene. Why you should ask? First, galleries today are interested in sales, not art statements, so often they refuse to show or display art with any political or social content for fear of offending a potential client.

I do agree that relatively few artists today are making work that has a content that goes beyond their own self indulged life styles and many again are afraid to offend their potential clients. Artists make many art statements about art and often challenge the boundaries of what is considered art but they refuse to cross the line and make real statements about life and humanity. With all said, there are still artists making real art statements; they just have very few outlets to exhibit their work, which make them hard to find.

The carabinieri's hits just keep on coming. Marta Falconi of the Associated Press reports this afternoon:

They [the Italian police] have uncovered an international art trafficking ring based in Rome and have recovered about 100 artifacts.

Rome Carabinieri police said 35 people, including an architect and an antique dealer, are being investigated in connection with charges ranging from illegal possession to trafficking of archaeological artifacts. They were not arrested.

Again it appears that Italian authorities, once known for ignoring their country's rampant art pillaging and smuggling, are making up for lost time with a vengeance.

While I'm on the subject of the Wall Street Journal, do not miss today's museum-related article on the estimable page for which I write, "Leisure & Arts" (on which there is nary an advertorial or infomercial). It's a piece with possible lessons for other single-collector museums that are chafing against the restrictions imposed long ago by their founders.

Milo Beach, former director of the Freer and Sackler galleries in Washington, has published a thoughtful piece on the evolution of the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery, formed 100 years ago by a single collector, Charles Lang Freer, who imposed tight strictures on the institution's future collecting and exhibition practices. The institution nevertheless managed to "redefine itself for another [era], and for different audiences, without losing its integrity"---a feat achieved by appending a new, less encumbered facility, the Sackler, which opened in 1987:

Major loan exhibitions could come to the Sackler, and Freer objects could finally be seen next door to closely related works from collections world-wide. A legal ruling soon followed allowing Freer objects to be intermixed, for limited periods only, with works presented in the new spaces. The change, while respecting Freer's concerns for access, has enormously revitalized the Freer as an institution.

Taking a page from the Freer's lesson book, maybe the money being raised for the new Barnes in Philadelphia could be used instead to construct and endow an addition to the old Barnes---one that could help bring its programs and practices into the 21st century, without destroying what the cantankous connoisseur so painstakingly created.

Subscribers to the online WSJ can get Beach's article here. The rest of you: Pick up a copy and turn to D6.

Pure coincidence, no doubt. But it was almost as if Peter Kann, the chairman of Dow Jones & Co. (which publishes the Wall Street Journal), had read CultureGrrl's recent critiques of the UBS contemporary-art newspaper supplement that was folded into the WSJ, as well as my dismissal as "essentially an infomercial" of an WSJ online video clip, in which its own reporter interviewed a Christie's specialist about an auction of rock memorabilia.

In Kann's opinion piece, "The Media Is in Need of Some Mending," published Monday on the WSJ's editorial page, he decried "the blending of news and advertising, sponsorships or other commercial relationships":

The resulting porridges may be called "advertorials" or "infomercials"; they may be special sections masquerading as news [shades of UBS], news pages driven by commercial interests, or Web pages [shades of the new WSJ.com videos] where everything somehow is selling something. Without clear distinctions between news and advertising, readers or viewers lose confidence in the veracity of a news medium. And advertisers lose the business benefit of an environment of trust.

What Kann didn't say was whether his comments were intended as criticism of the very newspaper in which he was airing them.

One can only wonder.

Art Basel Miami didn't release any estimates of sale totals for the fair ending Sunday. So figure-happy journalists had to do some improvising.

Among the most enterprising was Bloomberg's Lindsay Pollock, who yesterday informed us that "three top sellers estimated that sales totaled between $200 million and $400 million."

What exactly does this mean? Apparently, three anonymous wheeler-dealers, out of the 200 gallerists with booths at the fair, tallied up their own totals, consulted the gossip grapevine, and came up with separate guesstimates of what the other 197 dealers had done. These three extrapolated totals fell within the $200-400 million range. Not very authoritative, but hey, figures are figures.

Evidently Bloomberg's Basel double-teamer, Linda Yablonsky, found this convincing enough: Following close upon Pollock, she chimed in with her own Miami wrap-up, stating, without qualification, that "sales this year were estimated at $200 million to $400 million."

Unless another reporter steps up soon with more reliable data, these out-of-thin-air figures are destined to be repeated throughout the artworld rumor mill as fact.

Actually, there is: U.S. artists today are still addressing issues of racial, sexual and economic politics. What people really mean when they ask this question, which came up again at a New York panel discussion about the art market that I attended at the Museum of Modern Art last night, is:

Why is there no art engaging our current military misadventures?

That question is implicit in the Museum of Modern Art's current exhibition, "Manet and the Execution of Maximilian." And it's made explicit in the catalogue authored by the show's organizer, MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

In my previous post on this exhibition, I flippantly observed that an Impressionist usually deemed outside MoMA's chronological scope was "there because Elderfield wants him to be."

What I didn't say, although I knew, is why he wanted him to be.

Elderfield makes explicit the timely pertinence of this show at the beginning and end of his catalogue, the body of which is replete with references to other scholars' work, as well as Elderfield's own extensive fresh explorations of Manet's artistic "execution" of Maximilian.

A bit of historical background: The emperor of Mexico, painted at the moment he faced the firing squad, had been appointed by Napoleon III, whose policies Manet opposed. The French ruler withdrew his support for Maximilian, who was tried and executed for treason by his resurgent political opponents. Manet's artistic reponse to this event was a controversial (and for him atypical) political act.

At the end of his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Elderfield makes his ulterior motives clear:

Some readers will wonder whether it is purely accidental that an exhibition and publication appearing in 2006 are devoted to works that depict the baleful consequences of a military intervention and regime change. It is not....

One of the subjects of what follows...is what we might learn from how the pivotal figure in the modern history of painting made original, affective, and political art out of the process of representation.

Elderfield ends the catalogue with photographs of more recent "executions"--- from the Holocaust to the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

At MoMA last night, the market-driven panel, "Selling Out," (which included a dealer, auction specialist, museum curator and director, but no artist) touched on the current paucity of political art.

Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz noted that the "most political" recent show was the "Abu Ghraib" series by the artist whom critics "love to hate," Colombian painter Fernando Botero, displayed earlier this fall at Marlborough, New York.

As to why American artists are less engaged, Saltz commented about the "new disconnect" between what artists read in the newspapers and what they feel in their own studios, where things are "not so bad."

What Saltz didn't discuss was why artists feel this political "disconnect": The compartmentalization of personal and political is easy to to achieve when there's no threat of a military draft hanging over the general population. Volunteers fight and die; the rest of us, artists included, are absorbed in usual pursuits.

So for now, the strongest artworld political statement on the war in Iraq is the exhibition and catalogue of an erudite museum curator.

The big art story in today's NY Times is not in the Arts section; it's the Business section's article by Landon Thomas Jr. about the mutual courtship between the newest art connoisseurs, hedge-fund kings, and donation-seeking art museums:

In the fast-shifting sands of New York's moneyed classes, the explosion of hedge fund wealth has created a new financial pecking order. A century ago, the steel and oil money of Frick and Rockefeller was deemed to be new until it came to endow some of New York's great cultural institutions. In the 1980s and 1990s, the buyout kings Henry R. Kravis and Ronald O. Perelman became billionaires and were furiously courted to join museum boards.

Now institutions like the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum and Lincoln Center are making a push for the newest money on the block as they try to lure hedge fund executives to join their boards. This effort has dovetailed with an emerging tendency by hedge fund moguls to spread their wings a bit in greater New York society.

The article's Exhibit A is former Steve Cohen protégé David Ganek, now running his own Level Global Investors. Ganek "rake[d] in $4 million as co-chairman of...the Guggenheim International dinner last month." Nine other hedge funders are also mentioned for cozying up to culture.

And now comes the scary part: Ganek's "profile is likely to increase after the publication of his wife's book next June, 'Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him,' which Viking is promoting as 'The Devil Wears Prada' for the art world.

Am I really going to be professionally required to read this? I think I'll stick to John Elderfield's catalogue for "Manet and the Execution of Maximilian." (More on political art, or the lack thereof, coming soon.)

Should journalists censor themselves when they perceive security lapses in museums? An e-mail I received from a staffer at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who did not wish to be identified, took me to task for endangering that museum's security by my recent report, BMFA Needs Changing of the Guards. He said I should, instead, have filled out a Visitor Suggestion Form.

And now, as reported by Reuters, we have State Hermitage Museum director Mikhail Piotrovsky upbraiding journalists for contributing to a failed theft attempt last Friday at the St. Petersburg museum:

The more people write about how you can make off with everything in the Hermitage, the more you are going to get unhinged people trying to steal things.

This a case of blaming the messenger. Publicizing evident security problems---like the recent Hermitage theft scandal or the obvious guarding deficiencies that I observed the night I visited the BMFA---is not irresponsibly divulging security secrets; it's exposing glaring lapses, in the hope of spurring needed action to correct them.

My BMFA experience made me think back to a visit I paid to the Louvre some years ago, where I also marveled at the paucity of guards. It wasn't long after that that I read reports of thefts from that Paris museum.

And I wondered if I shouldn't have written something before that happened.

Photo by Ravi Sawhney

No, I'm not talking about Michael Richards' friend-in-need. I'm talking about that little guy, cozying up to that big guy, at a recent New York gallery show opening.

Time Out New York has just ranked (with explanations and comments) the top New York City cultural critics in eight different fields, and Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice came out Number One, not just among art critics but among all critics.

To arrive at these sure-to-be-debated rankings, the magazine "developed a system of grading, on a scale of one to six, using five categories: knowledge, style, taste, accessibility and influence. Next, we enlisted panelists, from publicists to curators and artists---in other words, the people most likely to be directly affected by criticism---to use our system to rate NYC's arbiters of taste and to provide (anonymous) comments."

ArtsJournal blogger Terry Teachout comes in sixth among theater critics; AJ-er and Newsday critic Apollinaire Scherr (who cogently critiques the rankings in her own blog), fifth in dance.

But why isn't Terry listed for his music criticism, for which he is at least as well respected as he is for his theater reviews in the Wall Street Journal? That's probably because newspapers or very high-profile magazines like the New Yorker seem to be privileged over smaller publications like Commentary (or the art magazines).

For the full list of Time Out's rankings for visual art scribes, go here. You will see that Number Two is Jerry's own wife, Roberta Smith of the NY Times.

All Hail the King and Queen!

You've all heard of blooks, but how many blogging auteurs can boast a "blovie"?

This just in: The celebrated art collector and prematurely gray wit, Steve Martin, has just agreed to play the title role in my previously announced Miami-based comedy of manners, "Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Gagosian."

Is this typecasting, or what? Speaking of which...keep an eye out for my casting call for extras. I'll be inviting CultureGrrl readers to wander around on the beach, admiring funny-looking balloons.

(Sorry. You know I have a weakness for running jokes. But I promise to get more serious tomorrow. Maybe.)

In case you haven't had enough of Art Basel Miami yet, here's the organizers' official report on results. No actual dollar volume is given, but you can read lots of self-satisfied quotes from dealers, who assure us that they did very well. Some 40,000 visitors are said to have attended, not to mention 1,400 journalists.

But not CultureGrrl.

Now that you've cleaned out the Miami sand from between your toes and the hype from between your ears, you're undoubtedly asking yourselves, "Now that I've seen the art of the last 10 minutes, what's the latest news about art of the centuries B.C.? CultureGrrl has your answers:

At a press conference today in Athens, Greek culture minister George Voulgarakis and J. Paul Getty Museum director Michael Brand announced they had "reached an agreement in principle" for the Getty's return of a 4th-century B.C. gold funerary wreath and a 6th-century B.C. marble kore (statue of a woman). Nicholas Paphitis of the Associated Press reports it is "unclear if the return would stop a Greek criminal investigation over the alleged theft of the wreath."

The wreath figured in recent charges reportedly brought by Greek police against former Getty curator Marion True. (Reuters' report of the Greek-Getty accord is here. The NY Times report, in today's paper but posted last night, is incomplete and outdated.)

For the complete Getty press release on the Greek agreement, click the link at the bottom of this post.

Meanwhile, another antiquities victor is flaunting its spoils: The Italian Ministry of Culture has announced (click "Archeologia in Festa") that an exhibition of 11 of the 13 objects returned to Italy last September by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will be exhibited this Wednesday through Jan. 28 at the Museum of Antiquity, Turin, before being distributed to Italian museums in the objects' various territories of origin.

And back in the U.S., in a Newsweek web exclusive posted Friday night, James Wood, incoming president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, told reporter Andrew Murr that he needs to see "what productive role I can play" in the negotiations with Italy that have broken down over the contested "Getty Bronze." Wood added:

I think I'm another set of eyes and experience. I am very eager to resolve this in a way that is fair, and that allows us to go ahead. There are so many cooperative ventures that we and the Italians want to take. Getting there may not be easy. But I'm confident.

While noting that he has to "sit down, listen and learn a lot," Wood already served notice that the Getty should "collect aggressively," within the strictures of its new acquisition guidelines, at that "it's a good moment to step back and reevaluate the entire organization."

And here in New York, a Greek-introduced resolution on "The Return or Restitution of Cultural Property to their Countries of Origin" was adopted last week by the U.N. General Assembly. It calls on "all relevant bodies, including agencies, funds and programs of the United Nations system, to work with UNESCO, within their mandates, and in cooperation with Member States, to continue to address the issue of return or restitution of cultural property to the countries of origin and provide appropriate support accordingly."

In addition, it urges countries "to introduce effective national and international measures to prevent and combat illicit trafficking in cultural property, including special training for police, customs and border services."

There is a not-to-miss, detailed article by Stephanie Strom on the front page of tomorrow's NY Times "Arts & Leisure" section, about the fractional gifts controversy.

The good news is that a technical amendment is likely to address the mismatch problem, most clearly elucidated in The Art Law Blog.

The shocker is that Sen. Charles Grassley may be going on a broader fishing expedition against one of the most outspoken opponents of the tax-law changes to fractional giving, the Museum of Modern Art.

For all of you art-fair groupies who are just getting back to your computers and newspapers after flirting with Andy Golub's body-painted girl in the green bikini, here's what you missed:

---Tom Krens, tired of being rebuffed by foreign municipalities, has decided to build his next Guggenheim in Idaho.

---The Whitney is channeling the spirit of Louis Kahn to design its High Line expansion.

---The trustees of the Barnes Foundation have decided to move the collection to Pittsburgh, because that city made a better offer and Albert Barnes didn't detest Pittsburgh as much as he hated Philadelphia.

But the big news is: CultureGrrl, following in the footsteps of her apartment's previous owner, salsa diva Celia Cruz, has just been nominated for her first Grammy for her rap rant, "The Art Basel Hassle."

(I hope all of you realize that the above new flashes are spoofs, but there are always a few literal-minded readers who take everything I write seriously, no matter how outlandish. The only thing that's serious is my Grammy nomination, which has also won me a scriptwriting gig for "Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Gagosian.")

Those of us who are bummed not to be at Art Basel Miami will derive no comfort from this dispatch, from Roberta Smith in today's NY Times: "I had a fabulous time." In her rambling report of her rambles, she reports only one sale price: $160,000 for Urs Fischer's "crushed Camel cigarette pack tripping the light fantastic at Gavin Brown's." Sorry, I don't smoke.

For the money-minded, lots more prices are enumerated in Walter Robinson's report for Artnet, which has signed a deal to "create a new online extension" of future Art Basel fairs both in Basel and Miami.

And for those who just want to vicariously experience the overheated social scene, there's always New York magazine, with Deborah Schoeneman and Alexandra Peers double-teaming for its Basel Blog.

Please pass me some more sour grapes, will you?

UPDATE: The best piece I've seen on the "scene" is Guy Trebay's bemused socio-economic romp in the Sunday "Styles" section of the NY Times:

Little about art collecting as a competitive high stakes game may be new. Yet the broadening of the consumer base is, and so is the inescapable truth that the trade is now substantially driven by marquee auctions and art fairs that come to feel like circuit parties for the ultrarich....

"I'm just making the first round," said Beth Rudin DeWoody, the philanthropist and collector, on Wednesday as she power-walked the aisles of the main fair, scattering in her path the red dots that signify a work has been sold.

Any occasion that occasions good writing like this can't be all bad.

Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum, is going on an all-out public rampage against archaeologists who believe that museums should not collect unprovenanced or incompletely provenanced antiquities. He did it last May, at the Association of Art Museum Directors' symposium on antiquities collecting, and he did it, even more persuasively and exhaustively, last night in his own auditorium, where hoards of would be attendees had to be turned away.

He began by scolding journalists who don't get his point that the public and scholars should not be deprived of viewing and studying important objects with dicey histories. I do---as I've already said in a previous post, but I also think he goes too far in his attacks on source countries. He expressed nothing but respect and praise, though, for "our Italian colleagues," for forging an agreement with the Met to give loans in return for the return of Met-owned objects. No mention last night of the Getty's Italian woes.

Let's hope that the Met schedules another antiquities lecture, delivered by a new arrival to these shores---Donny George. The expatriate and highly respected former director of the National Museum in Baghdad has just signed on (scroll down to second item) to be a visiting professor next semester at Stony Brook University on Long Island, where he will give courses on Mesopotamian archaeology and on Iraq's sadly endangered cultural heritage.

More to come on Philippe's presentation and my reactions.

(Part I is here.)

Art dealers and artists are not the only ones seeking clients at Art Basel Miami Beach. This affluent see-and-be-seen scene is also a potential goldmine for companies that offer financial services to high net worth individuals (i.e., megabuck collectors).

So UBS signed on as the main sponsor of that art fair, is hosting events there for clients and would-be clients and, in advance of the event, cranked out an eight-page newspaper supplement on "Perspectives on Contemporary Art," folded into last weekend's Wall Street Journal. This UBS corporate promotion, disguised as dispassionate analysis of the art market, was labeled a "Special Advertising Section," but its format and areas of coverage were so similar to those of the newspaper's weekend "Pursuits" section that it could have easily been perceived as a WSJ-generated report. Indeed, both "Pursuits" and the UBS insert ran simultaneous items on the hot market for contemporary art from India.

Instead of issuing a specific disclaimer that this fake journalism was not produced by the WSJ's editorial staff, the text at the bottom of each page emphasized a link between the two content-providers: "A Wall Street Journal marketing partnership with UBS."

Highlighting the art-related activities of UBS, the special section illustrated most of its articles (on such topics as "Contemporary Art Milestones," "Building a Collection" and "An Interview with Sean Scully") with art from the company's own collection. The most blatant business-seeking piece was the half-page allotted to "An Interview with Dr. Karl Schweizer, Managing Director, Head of Art Banking and Numismatics, UBS," who plugged the advice that his group gives to art-buying clients. Published at the end of that article was UBS's URL for more information on how to "contact a UBS Art Banking Advisor" and how to "Learn more about art and inheritance."

The UBS contemporary art website gets you the same content published in the print version, along with some additional features and a link at the top right corner of every web page, enabling you to find your very own UBS financial advisor.

The WSJ is far from the only publication to insult its own editorial integrity by running advertising promotions inadequately distinguished from journalistic content. The NY Times has also grappled with this issue, as discussed in a column last year, "Cracks in the Wall Between Advertising and News," by its Public Editor, Byron Calame (formerly of the WSJ):

There are almost always some advertisers interested in buying an ad designed to look like a news page, and their clout increases when demand is slow. The basic idea is to lure readers to an ad that seems at first glance to be just another news article.

The UBS insert masquerades as just another news section, notwithstanding its obligatory designation as a advertising. The WSJ has a strong and deserved reputation for an inviolable wall between journalistic coverage and advertising content. With the problematic "Perspectives on Contemporary Art," the integrity of that wall has been undermined.

See an update appended to my earlier post today, for a link to a tribute to the late Robert Rosenblum by Mariët Westermann, director of NYU's Institute of Fine Arts.

I'm glad to see that I made someone laugh who's bummed about not being in Miami. Maybe we can form a support group!

Don't forget, all you stay-at-homes: I've got another sour-grapes post coming tomorrow!

UPDATE: More CultureGrrl-induced giggles, from another aficionado of the sour grape.

A public conversation scheduled for this morning (as an Art Basel Miami event) between Terence Riley, director of the Miami Art Museum, and Jacques Herzog of Herzog & De Meuron, the architects for MAM's planned new facility, was cancelled. Herzog was said by the museum to be indisposed and unable to travel. Could it be that he disapproved of Riley's new abode, a Mies knock-off that was featured in the "House & Home" section of today's NY Times?

At least we got to hear Herzog expound on museum architecture in his recent lively conversation with Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art---yet another example of the superiority of New York over Miami!

...check out the hometown blog, Critical Miami.

Where are all my faithful CultureGrrl readers? My numbers are down! You mean that all you Miami art browsers are not periodically firing up your web browsers?

For those of you who, like me, are mere cyber-travelers to Art Basel Miami, here are a few links to help you remember why you didn't really want to go there anyway:

Official Art Basel Miami website, which grandly proclaims itself to be "the most important art show on the American continent and a cultural and social highlight of the Americas." Hubris and humbug!

Bloomberg's Linda Yablonsky: "'What happened to photography is now happening to painting,' said Jean-Pierre Lehmann, a Swiss collector and financier based in New York. 'Everything is starting to look the same.'"

Bloomberg's Lindsay Pollock (I guess Bloomberg regards this event as too momentous to be covered by just one reporter): "'As a business experience, fairs are great,' said [Arne] Glimcher [of PaceWildenstein galleries]. 'As an aesthetic experience, it's impoverished.'"

Yesterday's lead headline from the Art Newspaper's special daily Miami edition: "Dealers furious at hotel price hikes." (Today's edition is also clickable at the above link.)

The Debutante's Ball by Meredith Kahn Rollins in last Sunday's NY Times "Arts & Leisure" section: "What, ultimately, does an artist get out of Miami Basel? 'They go because they're curious and it's a big party and it's fun,' Marianne Boesky said. 'But I think that art fairs can be very off-putting for an artist, because their work isn't contextualized in any kind of thoughtful manner. It's just crammed into these booths. So they go and have fun, and then they come back and they're depressed.' Richard Flood, the chief curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, is also skeptical. 'Just to be down there as a social trinket doesn't make a lot of sense. The chance for real dialogue is pretty rare.'"

Miami Herald's guide to Art Basel, providing helpful advice on how to get into the best parties: "It's never a bad idea to be nice to wait staff (especially if you don't like random saliva droplets in your food). But around Art Basel time, it's crucial. Find out where they enter the premises. Carry 20s to slip into various palms."

I'm out of my 20s, and the only part of me that's flying this week is my cholesterol. So instead of going to South Beach, I'm going on the South Beach diet!

(For an antidote to all this trendiness, see Calvin Tomkins' profile, in the Dec. 11 New Yorker, of Jasper Johns, whom Tomkins somewhat surprisingly asserts "has managed...to avoid becoming an art star." No link to this yet on the magazine's website.)

COMING TOMORROW: More Miami sour grapes (which, I am told, are great for reducing cholesterol!)

A serious and wide-ranging art history scholar with a mischievous disregard of artworld orthodoxies, Robert Rosenblum will be greatly missed. I owe directly to him a punning phrase that I used (uncredited) in a recent post. Many years ago, when I interviewed him on a topic I can no longer recall, he ended our discussion with the encouraging exhortation, "Write On!"

His online profile as a professor of NYU's Institute of Fine Arts shows you the breadth of his intellectual curiousity: "Research Interests---Western Art, 1750 to the present."

At the time of his death, he was also curator of 20-century art at the Guggenheim Museum and co-curator of the show "Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760-1830," now at the Grand Palais, Paris, and traveling to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and to the Guggenheim, New York (opening May 18).

For a NY Times article last July about the proliferation of skulls as fashion statements, he provided this quote:

The vanitas includes the skull as a reminder that death is everywhere, as a cutting edge to too much contentment with the here and now.

UPDATE: For a much more eloquent and detailed appreciation of Rosenblum, read this tribute by Mariët Westermann, director of NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, in the Art History Newsletter. (Thanks to Modern Kicks for this link.)

I supposed this could be a continuing series. The latest entrant in far-fetched categories for auction records is the "world record for a dress made for a film"---the "iconic Givenchy gown made for Andrey Hepburn in the 1961 film, 'Breakfast at Tiffany's,'" selling yesterday for $887,680 at Christie's, London.

If we create sufficiently narrow categories (Abstract Expressionist with a blue daub in the upper righthand corner), we could have new auction records every day. The funniest one I remember, from my very early days covering auctions in the 1970s, was the "world record for a chastity belt." (Who knows? That record may still stand.)

Speaking of which, do we yet have a new auction record for a bra---namely, Madonna's conical bra from the 1990 "Blonde Ambition Tour"? For a while, that Jean-Paul Gaultier design seemed to be featured in every other exhibition mounted by the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute. Another example of this iconic undergarment (worn as an outer garment) was to be offered at the four-part sale of the Dick Clark Collection of Rock & Roll, held yesterday and today in New York by Guernsey's auction house.

This seems to be my day to write about bras. Maybe I should glance up at my masthead, to remind myself of what this blog is supposed to be about.

Maybe I'm just bummed because you and Tyler are now ogling the 12 ficus trees "trimmed to...resemble a woman's breast" at Art Basel Miami Beach. And I'm not.

This is another one of those days when CultureGrrl gets herself into trouble---by biting the hand that feeds her. There are two recent developments at the Wall Street Journal that concern me:

First, the new WSJ.com Video feature (clickable on the front page of the subscribers-only online WSJ):

Watch the latest interviews featuring your favorite WSJ editors and reporters. Catch video covering breaking news, analysis, commentary and special reports.

I'm all for transforming reporters into multimedia stars, but not if they stop probing and start hyping. The video closest to my own field of interest was the one that previewed Christie's auction of rock memorabilia. (The auction took place Monday, but the preview is still up on the website, with no update on the actual prices fetched by the featured items.)

WSJ reporter Nick Timaroas, notebook in hand, lofted softball questions at Christie's specialist Helen Hall. The questionable exercise was essentially an infomercial for the auction house's sale, with timorous Timaroas inquiring about why a 1968 Jimi Hendrix Fender Stratocaster guitar was expected to fetch lots of money (it sold Monday for $168,000, with premium) and why record auction prices were being achieved in many fields. Hall's self-serving answers were almost as bland as the questions.

Similarly, the lead video on yesterday's (and also, so far, today's) online WSJ shows Tom Weber, editor of the weekend "Pursuits" section, demonstrating and hyping "one of the most eagerly awaited" video games, "Spore," due for release in late 2007. To me, it looked like a tame, lame game, but what do I know? "Any robot news coming soon?" was one of Weber's questions for game developer Will Wright. "Not yet," was the answer. We can only hope for a "Robot News Update," when something does finally happen.

In a third segment, Victoria's Secret's chief executive and president, Sharen Turney, informed MarketWatch's Tom Middleton that the company's annual televised flesh fest (which aired last night) was an "opportunity for us to showcase our products....This year, for the first time, we actually took the fashion show to make it commercial---to actually talk about our new Secret Embrace bra." They "actually" made it commercial? What a great idea!

Exacerbating the the oppressive smog of puff-piece journalism is the exasperating necessity of watching an advertising clip every time you click on another video. There is just no way to abort it. The weak content of the videos that I viewed, coupled with the print reporters' inadequately coached, wooden delivery, made me nostalgic for the days when all we needed to be properly informed was good old newsprint, whose only interactivity was the black ink rubbing off on your fingers.

Before giving up on this dubious initiative, I clicked the video report on smart phones by the only technological guru I'll ever need, Walt Mossberg. Sure enough, we were back in the familiar WSJ realm of incisive journalism. Maybe the online editors just need to exercise some discriminating quality judgments, like Walt always does when he reviews high-tech gadgetry.

I probably should have surfed to something more in line with the WSJ's traditional strengths: "Bernanke on Inflation." But Ben, I'm just not that into you.

There's a second development at the WSJ that troubled me even more deeply: A recent marketing initiative, pegged to this week's Art Basel Miami Beach, had me rubbing my eyes at the blurry line between print journalism and advertising.

COMING SOON: UBS's corporate promotion, disguised as an eight-page art market report.

You might have noticed this, buried in the long "Letter From the Publisher" (L. Gordon Crovitz) on the Op-Ed page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal: The paper (for which I am writing an assigned piece right now; hence, today's light posting) plans to "double the number of pages devoted to leisure and arts in the Personal Journal section, giving our critics more opportunity as arbiters of taste and upholders of quality."

Drat! I knew I shouldn't have ruined my reputation as an "arbiter of taste," by revealing my lowbrow proclivities yesterday. Do you think there's a place for me in Spin magazine?

My sense of James Wood, from interviewing him, listening to him speak and reading about him over the years---first in his director's post at the St. Louis Art Museum and then during his 24 years at the helm of the Art Institute of Chicago---is that he conceives his artworld role not so much as that of a brilliant scholar, a high-profile spokesman or a social schmoozer, but as a public servant in the best sense.

Without grabbing headlines, Wood has quietly sought to do the right thing, through the conscientious exercise of his institution's civic responsibilities as a good local, national and world citizen. He projects an unflashy but solid integrity and decency.

If I'm right, he's the right man at the right time for the difficult job of reclaiming for the J. Paul Getty Trust the confidence of its own staff, the public, government officials and perhaps even the adversarial foreign culture ministers who are seeking the return of allegedly stolen antiquities. Wood has enjoyed close and amicable dealings with Italy, most notably in preparations for Chicago's 2002 exhibition, "The Medicis, Michelangelo and the Art of the Late Renaissance," which was made possible, in part, by his museum's strong history of reciprocal loans with Italian institutions.

When I heard him speak several years ago on a blue-ribbon panel of museum directors grappling with the Nazi-loot restitution issue, Wood impressed me as the only one who seemed wholeheartedly committed to redressing past wrongs, rather than forced into a provenance-review process as an onerous chore, dictated by the need to quell public controversy. At his own museum, he helped engineer a complicated, innovative compromise in 1998 with the heirs of Holocaust victims who were seeking restitution of a Degas pastel that was privately owned but on loan to the museum. It was, as described by the NY Times, "the first Nazi looting case to be settled in the United States."

In the book "Whose Muse?"---a 2004 compilation of the musings of seven major art museum directors---Wood stood out for such down-to-earth concerns as dropping admission fees to let visitors "drop in to look at a Titian," and privileging the permanent collection over flashy special exhibitions. A few revealing Wood-isms from that book:

We can have all the educational stuff in the world in the galleries, but it comes down to the experience of the individual work of art.

Of particular importance for this country, it is not a local, tribal memory, but a capacious, cosmopolitan one that, thanks in part to the predominantly international nature of the collections in our major museums, encourages the visitor to be an aesthetic citizen of the world rather than of a mere place.

Wood comes to an institution that has sustained turmoil and turnover not unlike that of the Chicago museum when Wood arrived there in 1980: Chicago had been without a director for almost three years, because of the tension and controversy caused by an administrative structure that subordinated the director of the museum to the finance-oriented president. By his own admission (to Stephen West of Bloomberg), Wood is "not a money administrator or a businessman,'' so a pressing priority will be the appointment of a permanent chief financial officer for the Getty Trust. An interim CFO and vice president for finance and administration, Robert Abeles, was appointed just four weeks ago.

Wood's tenure in his new post will probably be relatively short: He is 65. It is a career-capping challenge that this semi-retired museum man just couldn't resist. But Jim, once you arrive on the job in February, will you have any time to tool around on your kayak?

Here are the first artists anointed by the United States Artists program. Each of the 50 artists gets $50,000. (There are 51 photos because Bill Frisell and Jim Woodring applied as a team but are pictured separately.) Among the sponsors of visual artist grants are Agnes Gund, Edythe and Eli Broad and Target Corp.

As one might expect from a program that asks artworld mover-and-shakers to nominate possible grantees, this is not program for emerging artists: Only two winners are under 30. There are 12 visual artists, six in crafts and traditional arts and six in media (the rest in performing arts, including music, theater, dance).

As far as I can tell, no list has yet been released of the peer panelists who chose the winners from the nominees, although simultaneous announcements of the gatekeepers and the winners had been promised when the awards program was announced in September.

Now, here's an inspired choice---a veteran heavyweight in the museum field, who can be expected to restore the administrative focus to the museum---the trust program that ought to be first among "equals," but was shortchanged under deposed president Barry Munitz.

He also has the class and finesse to help deal with those prickly Italians.

Click the link below for the full press release:

I've been inspired to be insipid by music critic Terry Teachout's shocking self-exposure in his recent blog post---his list 15 songs of "dubious artistic merits" that he enjoys. Can we ever feel the same again about his music criticism in Commentary?

CultureGrrl readers already know that my taste in music is eclectic, if not chaotic. I also have a shocking confession to make: I purchased iPods for both my kids (thereby insuring their deafness in middle age), but I myself do not own one, nor do I have satellite radio. However, to further my musical enjoyment, I did get myself an HD2 receiver, for one reason only: The old playlist of the late, lamented oldies station, WCBS-FM, lives on in that format. (You can also stream it here.) Like Terry, I can't help loving the songs of my youth, no matter how highbrow I may have become. But please, Terry, tell me that you didn't really "Boogie Oogie Oogie"!

To prove CultureGrrl's musical taste is far more refined than About Last Night's, I hereby disclose my list of the 15 greatest pop music masterpieces of all times---gems that EVERYONE of my advanced age and discernment can surely agree on:

---"I've Got You Under My Skin," Ol' Blue Eyes
---"One Fine Day," Chiffons
---"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" Shirelles
---"Think," The Queen of Soul
---"Can I Get a Witness?" marvelous Marvin
---"Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Marvin & Tammi (better than Diana)
---"I Heard It Through the Grapevine," Gladys Knight & the Pips (better than Marvin)
---"Soul Man," Sam & Dave
---"River Deep, Mountain High," Tina Turner
---"Mockingbird," Sweet Baby James & Carly (better than Inez & Charlie Foxx)
---"Like a Rolling Stone," Dylan
---"We Can Work It Out," Fab Four
---"You Can't Always Get What You Want," Mick & the Boys
---"Bobby McGee," Janis
---"Don't Ask Me Why," Billy Joel

Have I succeeded in killing my credibility as an arbiter of taste? Joyce and Paul, will you please burn me this CD?

As I've mentioned, I can't blog about the Boston ICA, because the Wall Street Journal wants my first words on the subject. But I CAN link you up with some good photos from the press preview on Artblog.net. Scroll down, and you'll see that Franklin Einspruch caught me in my signature pose, notebook in hand, during the tour given by director Jill Medvedow and architect Ricardo Scofidio. But Frankie, how come you praised another onlooker in your photo as "handsome," but you didn't describe CultureGrrl as "gorgeous"? Have you no eye for beauty? (See update below.)

An even better sneak peak of the facility, which opens to the public on Sunday, is this segment on New England Cable News by Boston Globe reporter and blogger Geoff Edgers, with interviews, views of the interior spaces and the exterior, and some installation shots of the galleries. The big news is that Geoff is telegenic and has a great broadcast voice---from writer to blogger to television star. Next stop, Hollywood?

I wish I could give you my own take, instead of others' links. One day, when blogs are more accepted by the Mainstream Media, it will be okay to blog one's immediate impressions and then do a more considered, in-depth piece for a daily newspaper (just as it is now okay to do a piece for a newspaper and then do a more considered piece for a magazine).

But we're not there yet. The one praiseworthy exception that I've encountered is the LA Times, which (slightly reluctantly) broke the post-then-print taboo, with its recent adaptation of a CultureGrrl post on the J. Paul Getty Trust, which appeared on that newspaper's Op-Ed page.

I feel, strangely, like I'm shirking my duties to my blog-readers. If you feel I've short-shrifted you, my apologies. Posting (and, I hope, reading my posts) has become an addictive habit! But it's also a costly one: Time spent blogging could be spent writing pieces that I actually get paid for. One thing that keeps me blogging (others are here and here) is that, in my travels, I increasingly encounter artworld professionals who are familiar with the Jane-come-lately "CultureGrrl," but don't know the veteran journalist "Lee Rosenbaum."

Is this a GOOD thing? I'll have to ponder that.

UPDATE: In an update of his own, Frankie makes amends for insulting CultureGrrl (scroll down to the 10th photo):

Make that "the gorgeous CultureGrrl." To answer the question [see above]: because the word fails to do you justice. Plus, I was joshing Gamber. One doesn't josh CultureGrrl. One respects her.

Well said, and all is forgiven. But he must have written this before I proved unworthy of such deference, in this post!

When I got back to my Boston hotel room Friday evening, I switched on the radio and heard:

She left the suds in the bucket and the clothes hanging on the line.

As promised, country music had taken over the classical music frequency. So I fled to the new location of WCRB, and, just as Geoff Edgers had indicated, the reception was so poor that I had to reposition my radio to find a place where there was minimum static. And also as predicted, we were in the la-la land of "classics lite": an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's "Serenade," another excerpt from Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," and, of course, Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" (actually, just one of them---Autumn).

But fortunately, help was on the way, in the form of an e-mail from CultureGrrl reader Ben Weiss:

We do still have pretty good classical programming on GBH (89.7) during the day, and the magnificent WHRB (95.3) for the afternoon and evening: "And now, our weekly feature: 'England before the Enlightenment,' to be followed at 8 by our continuing survey of recent chamber works by Elliott Carter." Hope you enjoy your stay!

I did, Ben, and I LOVE Elliott Carter. How did you know?

But actually, I was hoping that Boston had become a classical-music wasteland, so that James Levine would decide he had to stay in New York and spend more time conducting the Metropolitan Opera, instead of the Boston Symphony. No such luck.

Pop trumps country trumps classical: So goes the radio format pecking order, it appears. Remember my previous posts (here and here), where I lambasted the pop-music format change of KZLA-FM, which had billed itself as "America's most listened-to country station"?

Well, when I checked into my Boston hotel yesterday, I tuned my radio to the classical music station, WCRB, whose announcers trumpeted that "at last" they would be moving, at noon today, to 99.5-FM from 102.5.

But Geoff Edgers, writing today in the Boston Globe "Exhibitionist" blog, tells us that this is nothing to celebrate:

[The change means that] classical music can reach fewer people and bad country---sorry, you won't hear the Merle, George Jones or the original Hank on the new 102.5, WKLB---can stretch into the South Shore.

"As for what the new WCRB will play, Mercatanti stresses 'more consistency.' That means a tighter play list with less variety, he acknowledges. 'It's not going to be...Vivaldi's Four Seasons over and over and over again,' he says, 'but listeners like familiarity'"...

...which. CultureGrrl says, breeds contempt. Is that why I heard "Pachelbel's Canon" performed this morning (before the move) by John Williams conducting the Boston Pops?

Yes, art-lings, I'm in Boston, about to walk over to the new Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed facility for the Institute of Contemporary Art. But, alas for faithful CultureGrrl readers, if I blog about the ICA, my WSJ editor will shoot me. So you'll have to wait for my take, to appear on the "Leisure & Arts" page.

I did hit the ground running on arrival yesterday, and I CAN tell you about the shocking lack of guards at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where I caught a marvelous Cecily Brown show, organized by the Des Moines Art Center. (No, I didn't bother with the controversial "Fashion" show.)

Only parts of the museum were open at night, and I hightailed it to one of my favorite rooms--- the one with the iconic Copleys and Stuarts and all that Paul Revere silver. There was nary a guard to protect all those exposed, valuable Colonial paintings and antiques. And that was pretty much the case throughout the museum---long stretches where I wandered at will with no one paying any attention to what I might be doing.

A long distance away from the Colonial art were two guards, deep in discussion about their personal lives, situated in a hallway from which they could see almost no art of any kind. They were later joined by a third who preferred gossiping to guarding.

In another gallery, I could see a guard sitting on a bench, deeply engrossed in his cell phone. At Cecily Brown, the lone guard was intently gazing at a painting---admirable, but not a great way to keep an eye on the three rooms that contained the show.

Parenthetically, the BMFA has the grittiest floors I have ever encountered in a museum. Will someone please buy them a vacuum cleaner?

Okay, gotta run to the ICA, which I'm sure will be clean and pristine.

UPDATE: The ICA was still cleaning up the construction dust, and, above, I meant "Stuart" when I wrote "Sargent" (which I have now corrected). That's what I get for posting hastily!