January 2007 Archives

On Dec. 22, I said that "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."

On Jan. 31, I'm saying that the Eakins acquisition is not just a hollow victory; it's a debacle.

There is nothing to celebrate in selling one masterpiece (or maybe more) to acquire another one. There is no glory for art museums in winning the Pyrrhic victory of outmaneuvering a big-money collector like Alice Walton on this one work. Deep-pocketed collectors will keep going after other available trophies, and financially strapped museums can't go on playing that prohibitively expensive game. The Philadelphia Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts claimed to have won that game, but the cost in dollars and in institutional integrity was far too high.

As I said in my recent post on The Hegemony of the Money-No-Object Collector:

It's not the fault of money-no-object collectors that connoisseurship, museum ethics and artistic integrity are under assault. They are entitled to do what they want with their megamillions. But the effect of their extravagant outlays, intended or not, may be to compromise culture, not enrich it.

With PAFA's willingness to sacrifice one of its signature paintings by Eakins, "The Cello Player," for the sake of acquiring another Eakins that had become a community cause célèbre, we have turned a corner from responsible stewardship of collections to reckless endangerment.

The professional guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors say that "deaccessioning must be governed by the museum's written policy rather than by exigencies of the moment....No work of art in the collection may be considered for deaccessioning without the recommendation of the director to the board."

The secret sale of "The Cello Player" for an undisclosed amount to an undisclosed purchaser is surely a deaccession that was governed by "exigencies of the moment"---that moment being today's fundraising deadline for "The Gross Clinic's" $68-million bounty. With director Derek Gillman long gone to the Barnes Foundation, PAFA doesn't even have a permanent director to give proper professional consideration before deciding whether to recommend this major disposal to the board.

We had been led to believe that when the clock struck 12 tonight, PAFA and the Philadelphia Museum, joint purchasers of "The Gross Clinic," would be able to draw upon a loan offered by Wachovia Bank for whatever they hadn't yet raised of the $68 million. One of the unanswered questions about this irregular affair is why it was considered preferable to deaccession a masterpiece than to assume the debt.

Museums hold their works in trust of the public. PAFA has now failed the public trust. What's worse, Stephan Salisbury writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer (linked above) that there may be more disposals to come:

Anne d'Harnoncourt, director and chief executive of the [Philadelphia] Art Museum, said her institution would likely sell some art to defray its share of the debt, as well.

"We are looking very seriously at deaccessioning," she said, adding that no works had been selected for the marketplace so far.

It's time for the toothless Association of Art Museum Directors to get some dentures and issue some censures.

UPDATE: I just checked the list of AAMD members, and PAFA, which is an art school, as well as a collecting and exhibiting institution, is not in the art museums' organization. That should not exempt it, however, from responsible stewardship of its collection. The Philadelphia Museum does belong to AAMD.

Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker (who has his own lively blog), responds to my pick of Riccardo Muti as next music director of the NY Philharmonic:

I strongly disagree! Muti is yet another virtuoso conductor who would fly in for 12 weeks, conduct 12 reasonably brilliant concerts, and fly away, making no visible mark on the wider musical life of the city, advancing no substantial ideas about new music, and furnishing no direction for the orchestra as a cultural organism. The Philadelphia Orchestra experienced this same regimen with Muti some years ago. Essentially the NY Phil has the same deal currently with Maazel, though Muti is certainly a warmer musician.

I would nominate Robert Spano.

Let the nominations continue. After all, how many Democrats are vying for the Presidential nod?

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to scratch my posts and smooth my ruffled fur with the other herded cats. Alex, will I see you tonight at the Bloggers Summit?

I don't usually publish press releases, but this one (linked below) is too meaty merely to summarize. It gives details on four ambitious cultural facilities commissioned by Abu Dhabi's Tourism Development & Investment Company from Frank Gehry (Guggenheim Abu Dhabi), Jean Nouvel (Classical Museum), Tadao Ando (Maritime Museum) and Zaha Hadid (Performing Arts Centre).

If, with the possible exception of Ando, this sounds a lot like the Thomas Krens' Guggenheim Gang, that's probably because the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was retained by the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority to develop the cultural district master plan, which Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed.

The occasion for this announcement was a special exhibition that opened today at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi, displaying the building models for the planned Saadiyat Island Cultural District.

The tourist authority also plans to hold an international competition to choose an architect for the Sheikh Zayed National Museum, with displays devoted to its eponymous first president of the United Arab Emirates and to the history and traditions of Abu Dhabi.

This could either be the spectacular realization of Krens' fondest global dreams, or the grandest of his many follies. So far, this one appears to have in its favor the advantages of fabulous monetary wealth and ironclad government support.

And the Louvre Abu Dhabi is...where?

Click the link below for the full press release.

Ben Sanderson, press officer at the British Library, responds to my previous post criticizing the Library for allowing itself and its Leonardo codex to be used for Bill Gates' promotion of Microsoft's new Vista operating system:

As a publicly funded institution, the Library has to supplement the money it receives from the government with sponsorship and support in kind from a variety of sources. In practice, this means that all digitization work has to be paid for out of fundraising/sponsorship/external support.

The Library has a beneficial relationship with Microsoft in a variety of spheres of activity: from the project to digitize 25 million pages of historic collections to the tools and technical support they have offered in work to build a national digital library.

In response to your charge that the Library "has been commercially co-opted" I would object that it is rather unfair to lift two quotes from the context of the "Notes to Editors" boiler-plate text attached to each of the linked releases. As you will know, such potted descriptions are part of the apparatus of press releases and, as such, typically supplied by the institution they describe.

"Potted descriptions," I like that. I think we call that "boilerplate" across the pond.

Does anyone besides me feel queasy about the willingness of the British Library---the U.K.'s national library---to serve as Bill Gates' promotional platform for yesterday's launch of Microsoft's new Vista operating system?

No doubt the British Library has benefited mightily from its longterm "strategic partnership" with Microsoft to digitize material from its collections, and the Vista launch showed off the new operating system's potential through the digital reunion of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Arundel (owned by the Library) and Codex Leicester (owned by Gates).

But as part of the bargain, the library has been commercially co-opted, allowing its 2005 press release to double as an advertisement for Microsoft's MSN Internet portal---"a world leader in delivering Web services to consumers and online advertising opportunities to businesses worldwide. The most useful and innovative online service today, MSN brings consumers everything they need from the Web to make the most of their time online."

And the Library's new press release, announcing the new digital version of the codices, touts Microsoft as "the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential."

The NY Times coverage of the European launch details the dicey aspects of the Library's allowing its codex to be coupled not only with Gates' codex, but also with his Vista promotional campaign.

Thomas Crampton writes:

While Mr. Gates and Microsoft emphasized the project as opening knowledge and education to the world, only users of Vista will be able to access the 35 pages owned by Mr. Gates, who is making the digital version available to British Library for six months. Mr. Gates paid $30 million [actually $30,8 million] for the manuscript in 1994.

Over the course of the codex project, the British Library has received software development assistance worth some $200,000 from Microsoft in addition to technical assistance for more than year, said Lawrence Christensen, a library spokesman.

In other word, the Codex Leicester, formerly owned for the public's benefit by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is now being exploited as a commercial asset. And it's taking the British Library's Codex Arundel along for this reckless ride.

Brandes Residence, Sammamish, Wa.
Photo by Alan Weintraub/arcaid.co.uk

I want this house! Where the heck is the Sammamish Plateau, anyway?

I found out how easy it is to find Frank Lloyd Wright houses that are up for sale when I did my article about the restoration of Fallingwater for the Wall Street Journal. If you go to the site for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and click "Wright on the Market," you will, at this writing, see 17 tempting possibilities, from Manchester, N.H. to Sammamish, Wa.

Detailed information (including prices) and photos are posted for each residence. The Wright Conservancy protects the architectural integrity of these houses by establishing and monitoring legally enforceable preservation easements.

As I wrote back on Aug. 20, 2003 (here if you're a WSJ online subscriber), a number of Wright houses are at risk because they were "commissioned by now-octogenarians in desirable areas. Their sites, but not their modest-sized rooms, are attractive to affluent buyers who want to replace them with megamansions."

The FLW Building Conservancy has been acquiring, repairing and reselling Wrights-at-risk since 2003. And they list privately held homes whose owners want to find preservation-minded buyers. Every so often, I go back to the website and imagine myself in one of these gems. Who needs high ceilings that don't leak, spacious modern kitchens or big master bedrooms, anyway?

The matter of the Matter "Pollocks" gets curiouser and curiouser:

The Harvard-based conservation experts who conducted an independent, pro-bono scientific examination of three paintings from the group of 32 works found among the possessions of Jackson Pollock's friend, the late Herbert Matter, yesterday issued a 13-page analysis (with images), which reported:

Some pigments raised questions about the proposed date of creation of the three works the research team analyzed (1946-49). The team found red paint on MBJP29 that has only been marketed for a few decades. They found dark orange paint on MBJP14 and red paint on MBJP29 that was not industrially produced before 1953. MBJP14 contained a pigment in the orange paint that was not available until 1971. The brown paint found on MBJP29 was developed in the early 1980s and came onto the market in 1986.

Some media raised similar questions. MBJP09 and MBJP14 contained media that were most likely not available until 1962 or 1963. The binding medium used to create the silver paint on MBJP29 in all likelihood was not commercially available until the 1970s.

In his NY Times article today, Randy Kennedy opined:

The examination of the chemical makeup of the paintings...does not conclusively end the debate over whether Pollock had a hand in the works. But the findings cast doubt on that possibility. And they suggest that at the very least, the paintings...may have been substantially added to or altered after Pollock's death.

But the report itself casts doubt on the notion that all of the anachronistic materials could have been added to Pollock's work by a later hand:

Conservation treatment can account for the presence of the clear coating and adhesives found on painting MBJP29, but not the terpolymer medium that binds the pigment to form the paint, or the very modern pigments, which were found in untreated areas. [Emphasis added.]

None of this, according to Geoff Edgers in today's Boston Globe, has altered Boston College's plans to mount its "Pollock Matters" show, exhibiting 25 of the disputed works. According to a statement by Nancy Netzer, director of BC's McMullen Museum:

Our exhibition's focus is on 'the state of the question,' not on the authenticity of the paintings; one of the aims of the exhibition will be to bring together and present to the public all the known (possibly conflicting) evidence concerning the attribution of the newly discovered paintings. We hope that the high-profile discovery of these works generates public interest in this exhibition and encourages further research by other scholars who have not yet seen the works.

"High-profile" is the operative word. Few low-profile museums can resist the temptation of attracting this kind of public attention, least of all the director of Syracuse's Everson Museum, Sandra Trop, who must have caused Edgers to do a big a doubletake when she gave him one of those priceless quotes that journalists live for. She said her museum would probably sue if its planned "Pollock Matters" exhibition, June 16 to Sept. 2, were scrapped in favor of Boston's, Sept. 1 to Dec. 9. And then, the clincher: She explained that if her show were canceled, "There'd be a lot of damage for the museum. And they're not even authentic Pollocks."

At which point, Edgers must have said to himself:

Did she really just say that?

The official word from the Everson on the purported Pollocks is more even-handed:

There is some difference of opinion among Pollock scholars as to whether or not the works comprising the show were done by Pollock. Regardless of scholars decision on this matter, the show is an excellent educational opportunity to look carefully and compare the works of the show with the authentic Pollock works in the Everson Museum's permanent collection.

"Educational" or sensational?

UPDATE: Geoff Edgers' most recent post on his Exhibitionist blog includes this link to the statements from the proponents of the Pollock attribution, addressing the doubts raised by the Harvard report.

If Jed Perl isn't careful, he may inherit the Hilton Kramer honorary mantle for critical stodginess. His cover story for the Feb. 5 issue of The New Republic strains to coin a new catch-phrase, "laissez-faire aesthetics," while positioning Perl squarely in the dubious tradition of critics who are so stuck in the past that they can't see the art of the present.

Today's big-money "laissez-faire aesthetes," in Perl's view, "believe that any experience that anyone can have with a work of art is equal to any other." Is there ANYONE who really believes this? Or is it just that today's aesthetic predilections don't conform with Perl's predispositions?

There's nothing wrong with undying devotion to the art you admired in your youth, unless your job description happens to involve trying to assess today's creative output, with a receptive eye and a flexible mind. Most of the artists Perl admires in his article (David Smith, Picasso, Morandi, Lucian Freud, Ellsworth Kelly) are dead or elderly; he has little good to say about more recent art stars and he especially savages Yuskavage and Currin. You don't have to like them, but that doesn't make utter morons of those who do. Poor Currin can console himself with the sight of one of his own paintings prominently featured on the magazine's cover, sporting a red "sold" sticker. You just can't buy this kind of publicity!

Perl defiantly flaunts his intolerance, and particularly denigrates collectors who "believe that it is their privilege to respond to anything at any time in any way they choose." Is that privilege only reserved for certain rightminded critics? One consequence of people's forming their own opinions is to marginalize critics as artworld tastemakers---a circumstance that Perl must surely regret.

What Perl means by "laissez-fair aesthetics" is a disregard of what he feels are the appropriate standards of quality: "There is no struggle with distinctions because there is no recognition of distinctions." But what his labored label really signifies is that art and art institutions have changed with the times, while Perl hasn't:

The essential problem in the art world today is that in almost every area, from the buying and selling of contemporary art to the programs of our greatest museums, there is an obsession with appealing to the largest imaginable audience.

He would, it seems, like to return to the glory days when art was the province of a small group of elite aesthetes, who could commune in solitude with a roomful of certified masterpieces in a nearly deserted museum.

I enjoyed that too. But that was so 40 years ago.

It's been a long time since I stood in front of a class of young students, so when I recently initiated a sixth-grade class into the sacred mysteries of the journalistic fraternity, I had forgotten about the final pedagogic handshake---the arrival in the mail of a packet of thank-you letters, penned by each member of the class.

Here's the one that stood out:

Thank you, Mrs. Rosenbaum, for coming to our class and telling us the steps that will make us better writers. You changed my life because now I am thinking of being a journalist. I think from your work I am going to be a better writer.
---Christopher Yu

Dear Christopher,
I'm so glad that I interested you in a journalistic career, but I forget to tell you about reporters' meager pay and about how many of them are currently being laid off by newspapers and magazines around the country. That said, I really love what I do, and I genuinely enjoy speaking with and learning from most of the people I meet in the course of reporting---even the ones I don't agree with. Most of all, I love writing. If you still have a yen for the pad and pen in a few years, here are some more instructive letters from a more distinguished journalist: Letters to a Young Journalist by Samuel Freedman, author, NY Times columnist and professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism.

Come to think of it, maybe Mrs. Rosenbaum needs to read this book:

Beware when you find yourself falling into chic misanthropy, ascribing the basest motives to any public official as your starting point. Being adversarial sounds righteous except when it is a mere reflex, just one more way of imposing black-or-white absolutism on a world washed in grays.

"Chic misanthropy"...hmmmm.

Maybe the Metropolitan Museum was jealous of the Metropolitan Opera and wanted to go to the movies too!

How else to explain the spring offerings of learned(?) discussions and full-length multiple moving screenings devoted to Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, and that newcomer, Woody Allen? Two lectures devoted to Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, with film clips and recordings, are also on the bill.

Classic films are a time-honored part of the Museum of Modern Art's curatorial purview, but have no art-historical home at the Met, except as part of the upcoming lecture series, which was advertised in the "Arts & Leisure" section of yesterday's NY Times (but is not yet, at this writing, up on the Met's website).

If movie nostalgia doesn't suit your fancy, maybe old Broadway musicals will:

Spring is here and love is in the air, when June LeBell and special guest stars sing and talk about all your favorite love songs from Broadway's great shows in two informal programs devoted to Broadway in Love.

The second of those is called, "Swooning and Spooning."

What is the Met saying here about the age demographics of its target audience? Does anyone still "spoon"? If so, you'll surely want to spoon with June.

I knew that major orchestras, including the NY Philharmonic, are offering downloads of live concerts on iTunes. But this morning was the first time I heard such a download played on a classical music radio station. Maybe this is old news, but it's the first time I've noticed it, and I listen a lot.

This morning, New York's WQXR played the Beethoven Seventh, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the LA Philharmonic. There are those (I'm one of them) who think that CDs represent a loss of sound quality from vinyl. What about digital downloads?

Clicking the "Buy CD" link on WQXR's website playlist (see 10:05 a.m.) takes you to a long list of recordings of the Beethoven Seventh, but none by Salonen and none by the LA Philharmonic. That's because there IS no CD of this performance; it exists only on iTunes. Shouldn't WQXR's website provide THAT link?

The classical music audience skews old. Soon everything is going to be download-only. Does anyone see a problem here?

The good news is that iTunes can possibly help change those demographics, so that maybe the classical music era won't come to an end, as Greg Sandow fears. My daughter, more Nickelback than Bach, does have Mozart on her iPod. Maybe I should find out the rest of her picks and publish Joyce's Classical Playlist!

It's a tough job to cover two days of feminist art symposia, but somebody (not CultureGrrl) had to do it .

Holland Cotter, early in his dutiful account for today's NY Times, makes this startling assertion:

Curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it.

He supports this sweeping statement with one example: Matthew Barney.

The fact is that most of today's artists whose works most resonate with me are women. Much of their work certainly owes something to their female-ness; their confident self-assertion as artists probably owes a debt to feminism (as does my combative blog-ism). But labeling it "feminist art," or even "feminist-influenced" would be a stretch.

For those of you who missed it but want to hear some or all of it, the Museum of Modern Art will post audio and video of "The Feminist Future" here within two weeks.

For a good rundown of the various recent and upcoming feminist- (or female-) related art exhibitions and critiques, go to Phoebe Hoban's piece in the February issue of ARTnews.

I've already picked Philippe de Montebello's successor at the Metropolitan Museum. So why not Lorin Maazel's successor as music director of the New York Philharmonic?

I heard him conduct last night, and he is (drumroll)...Riccardo Muti.

Of course, we all know that Maazel has already named the conductor he wants to succeed him---Daniel Barenboim who, at 64, is a year younger than Muti. There's no Beethoven Ninth recording I'd rather hear than Barenboim's. I don't know Muti's Beethoven (and I've disliked Maazel's quirkily mannered performance of his symphonies).

Interestingly Barenboim isn't even conducting the Philharmonic this season. Muti, on the other hand, has been assigned four different programs, including an upcoming Beethoven "Emperor" Concerto. We'll be able to assess his Beethoven chops, and also whether he works better with pianist Lang Lang than he did last night with the virtuosic but colorless Gerhard Oppitz in the Martucci Piano Concerto No. 2. There were moments when Oppitz was fiendishly pounding the keyboard but was entirely drowned out by the orchestra. (I was sitting in the orchestra, not the third tier.)

Last night's all-Italian program played to Muti's great strength. The Verdi ballet music from "Macbeth" was exhilarating; the Respighi "Feste Romane" was jaw-dropping. In Muti's hands, the Maazel-honed Philharmonic made this pleasantly atmospheric composer, best known for his tone poems, seem almost Ives-ian in complexity and intensity. The Philharmonic's program notes got it right:

No holds are barred in the concluding "Epiphany"....By the end, Respighi piles up sonority upon sonority to achieve one of the most tumultuous rainsings of the roof you will ever here.

This "Epiphany" inspired a corresponding epiphany in everyone who heard it (perhaps including Philharmonic president Zarin Mehta, whom I spotted in the same box where some trumpet players were installed for the Respighi). I've never seen a Philharmonic audience this energized. The orchestra showed its respect by initially declining Muti's invitation to stand for one of the curtain calls, leaving all the glory to him.

While departing, strangers were exclaiming to one another about what they had just heard. Even the usher posted next to the escalator announced to everyone in earshot that she wanted the Philharmonic to choose Muti as director. And of course, while he's here, we need him to take over the Italian repertoire at the Metropolitan Opera.

What clinches this appointment is the undeniable importance of the music director's last name beginning with "M": Mehta, Masur, Maazel...and let us not forget, Mahler!

CORRECTION: After writing the above, I thought of the time I heard Bernstein conduct Mahler. Maybe I should have said, I've RARELY (rather than "never") seen a Philharmonic audience this energized!

After searching in vain for an online version of the press release or a description of the Neue Galerie's upcoming van Gogh show, I perused the museum's website and discovered that at least one artworld luminary took my suggested New Year's resolution seriously:

The Neue Galerie has finally gotten around to posting the provenance of works in its collection.

But you decide whether the long wait---not to mention the paucity of information and number of steps you must perform to access just one artwork's listing---was worth it:

The Provenance page (accessed from the Neue Galerie's website after clicking "General Information" in the lefthand column and then "Provenance" in the lower right corner) includes this passage in its introduction:

The vast majority of works in the Neue Galerie collection have sufficiently complete provenance records to rule out the possibility of [Nazi-era] misappropriation; those records are posted here. Research on individual works with incomplete provenance is ongoing, with current information also posted here; updates will be posted on this website as they become available.

You must then scroll down past a list of non-clickable addresses for seven external provenance-research websites. At the bottom of this, if your patience has not yet been exhausted, you will arrive at a "click here" link for the Neue Galerie's provenance postings. These include only those works that are owned by the museum, not the many works on loan to the museum from Ronald Lauder's personal collection. Clicking that link transports you to a "Collection Overview" page. At the bottom of that are clickable boxes---"Search Now" and "Browse By"---for provenance. Now we're getting somewhere! (Maybe)

Scrolling over the "Browse By" button generates a pop-up button for "Artist." That turns out to be your only browsing option. I clicked on "Artist," then on "Schiele." This brought up merely two choices: a painting and a drawing from the museum's extensive array of works by that artist.

So I chose the painting, "Town among Greenery (The Old City III)." Here, after this extensive workout for my righthand index finger, is what I finally came up with:

Egon Schiele, Vienna
Galerie Arnot, Vienna
Johannes Graf zu Löwenstein
Würthle & Sohn, Vienna
Otto and Marguerite Manley, Vienna; Scarsdale, New York
Neue Galerie New York

In other words---no dates and no way of knowing if there are Nazi-era gaps in the work's ownership history. What's more, it appears that you can't search by provenance keywords: I went back and hit the "Search" button after typing in "Würthle" and then "Würthle & Sohn." This elicited no results, even though that Vienna dealer is listed in the Schiele's provenance, above. Searchable ownership is important for Nazi victims and heirs trying to locate works from their families' collections and also for finding the names of certain key dealers who were known to have collaborated with the Nazis in expropriating Jewish-owned collections.

No further comment necessary. Been there. Done that.

This is beating a dead horse.

It was the one story I felt sorry I wrote after I wrote it: In March 2000, I published an article in the Wall Street Journal (linked at the bottom of this article), in which I suggested that Austrian-born investment fund manager Wolfgang Flöttl might have become the owner of the elusive "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" by van Gogh, which had set an auction record in 1990 when it sold to the Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito for $82.5 million. After Saito died in 1996, the work changed hands and it became a favorite artworld parlor game to speculate, "Who owns 'Dr. Gachet'?"

Nobody who actually knew the owner would tell me, and the people who named him didn't know for sure and wouldn't go on the record. His own art-investment adviser said, "If we did own 'Gachet,' we wouldn't have any comment."

But my extensive sleuthing told me Flöttl was a good educated guess, and I rashly printed his name, without giving any convincing support for it in the article.

Luckily (or maybe through good contacts and a dash of reportorial instinct), it turns out I was right: A front-page article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (here, for WSJ online subscribers) described in great detail Flöttl's current financial and legal woes, and, deep in the article, on Page 16, included these passages:

Mr. Flöttl began accumulating expensive art. During the 1990s, he purchased at least 79 paintings, including works by French masters Cézanne, Degas and Renoir. He bought Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" and Picasso's "Le Rêve." Sotheby's Holdings Inc. of New York helped him finance the purchases with a $244 million line of credit, according to an audit last year by the Austrian National Bank. Sotheby's said in a statement that it made a loan of about $240 million in 1998 to a borrower it declined to identify, and that it was repaid that same year....

Mr. Flöttl sold Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" for $100 million to pay down part of what he owed Sotheby's. In an effort to repay his Bawag loans, Mr. Flöttl transferred to the bank the title to tens of millions of dollars of art, including works by Cézanne, Renoir and Manet, and helped the bank sell the work.

So yes, he did own it, and now he doesn't.

That means we can go on playing the same parlor game. But now, as a blogger, I've got lots of tipsters. So, readers, YOU tell me:

Who owns "Dr. Gachet"?

This is important for more than mere gossip value, as I said in my WSJ article:

The most important reason for outing the angst-ridden doctor is his iconic status -- not on the art market, but in art history. This late masterpiece, which van Gogh said embodied "the heartbroken expression of our time," is the culmination of the artist's work as the progenitor of modern portraiture, the aspect of his oeuvre that meant most to him. Fortunate owners of such precious nuggets of world culture should feel some responsibility to share them with the rest of us, at least "once in a century," as van Gogh scholar Ronald Pickvance recently put it.

But wait a minute, I also wrote this:

New Yorker Ronald Lauder, chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, ...had hoped to acquire "Dr. Gachet" for his own collection.

I must emphasize that I have no knowledge that Lauder is the current owner. Then again, the next exhibition to be mounted at his Neue Galerie is a bit of a stretch for a museum of Austrian and German Expressionism:

On March 22, 2007, Neue Galerie New York will open "Van Gogh and Expressionism," an exhibition that will explore the crucial influence of Vincent van Gogh on German an Austrian Expressionism. More than 80 paintings and drawings wil be on view, including several major canvases by van Gogh.

Time will tell (maybe). Meanwhile, click the link below to read the text of my March 2000 WSJ article, with more background on the tangled fortunes and misfortunes of "Dr. Gachet."

As expected, Columbia University Professor James Beck's just published book, "From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis" (European Press Academic Publishing) takes issue with several high-profile attributions, including, of course, the Metropolitan Museum's Duccio.

What I didn't expect was my being cited in the book---Page 169.

There, Beck mentions the use in a NY Times article of a statement of enthusiastic support for the Met's Duccio attribution by expert Luciano Bellosi. Beck calls Bellosi's published comments "a well orchestrated inclusion whose purpose it was to give authority to the Met's purchase and to cripple my assertions."

Then he brings me into it:

Undetected by the Times, Bellosi has never seen the painting, a fact he confirmed to the journalist Lee Rosenbaum, a day or two after the publication of the Times article in reponse to her question:

"No, unfortunately I didn't see it with my own eyes, only by photographs....I know it is a very important question. It is always necessary to see the works of art in reality to be sure what they are....Art historians like Keith Christiansen and Everett Fahy [of the Met] are very capable to judge the works of art with their eyes. I know their capacity. I trust in them for that."

Beck goes on to say that (unbeknownst to me) he submitted the above quote to the Times, but "it was never used." Unlike Beck, though, I don't see this as part of some vast conspiracy "to protect the Metropolitan Museum at all costs"---just a reluctance by the newspaper to use an outside journalist's discovery (published in a blog, no less) to undermine the work of its own reporter. Beck makes many serious points in his book, but he does tend to sensationalize.

The debate, if there is one, will have to be joined by art historians more expert than I. But more likely, the scholarly and curatorial establishment will again dismiss this contentious contrarian as a crank.

So let the name-calling begin. Just leave me out of it!

I know that newspapers are going through hard times, but this is ridiculous: The NY Times is hawking sports memorabilia on its website, including a Phil Simms Signed Football ($400), Lawrence Taylor Autographed Mini Replica Helmet ($300), Mark Messier Signed Puck ($200).

These are not ads for some outside retailer; these are being sold by the Times itself, through its New York Times Store, which is "is part of the News Services Division of The New York Times." News Services? Do sports reporters have to bring along some balls for athletes to sign during postgame interviews?

And let's not even mention (oops, I already have) the wide assortment of Fine Art---all reproductions.

These pricey "limited editions" of modern copies of older works must make the Times' art critics cringe. Let's just hope they don't advertise their faux Audubon prints next to a review about the real ones.

Martin Bailey today reports in The Art Newspaper that the Rijksmuseum is negotiating to buy "one of Britain's greatest privately-owned Rembrandts"---"Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet." The price was expected to be about £40 million ($78.8 million), he said. The painting, from from Penrhyn Castle in North Wales, is currently on loan to the Amsterdam museum.

If the sale goes through, this would be yet another cliffhanger episode in the continuing series of museums desperately trying to buy expensive masterpieces with money they don't have and will have great difficulty raising.

According to The Art Newspaper:

The Penrhyn Rembrandt would...be the most expensive work of art ever acquired by a Dutch museum. The Rijksmuseum is only likely to be able to proceed if it receives a special government grant, and this will need cabinet approval, with a decision expected next month. Such a grant would have to cover well over half the cost. Applications would be made to the state lottery and other donors. The museum would also have to make a substantial contribution from its own funds.

Bailey says that the $78.8 million price would "more than double" the auction record for the artist. CultureGrrl readers know that the auction record for Rembrandt (including the buyer's premium paid to the auction house) is $28.69 million. This could change in about two minutes from this posting, when Sotheby's will have taken bids on "Saint James the Greater," estimated to bring $18-25 million (plus premium). Come back here for the update (see below).

An export permit delay by the British government, to give public institutions a chance to match the price, would be inevitable. Would someone now like to revise to 26 the recently released list of the 25 most important privately owned paintings in Great Britain? It's got three Rembrandts, but not this one.

UPDATE: Saint James The Greater just sold at Sotheby's for $23 million (with buyer's premium: $25.8 million), within its presale estimate. No word yet from Sotheby's about the buyer. The above-mentioned previous auction record, for Portrait of a Lady in Black Costume and a Cap and Collar (sold Dec. 13, 2000 at Christie's, London) still stands.

I've always felt uneasy about publishing people's salaries and I've generally refrained from doing so: It feels to me like an invasion of privacy, even though this information is publicly available, as it should be, on the annual 990 tax returns of nonprofits.

But every time a journalist gets hold of information about the salaries of the top officials of major cultural institutions, the resulting story makes these public servants seem overpaid.

The most recent example of this was the NY Times piece last November about the compensation for Paul LeClerc, president and chief executive officer of the New York Public Library. No one who has read this (my investigative piece on the NYPL in the Wall Street Journal) can accuse me of being soft on LeClerc. But I feel that major cultural institutions do well to pay their top officials well. Otherwise the best people will be lost to private industry, leaving culture in the hands of mediocrities.

That said, disclosure of the compensation of officials at the J. Paul Getty Trust is newsworthy, thanks to the much publicized governance and financial irregularities under the regime of deposed president Barry Munitz.

The Getty has now quietly posted on its own website an updated list of salaries of its top officials, including Michael Brand, the new director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and James Wood, the incoming replacement for Munitz.

I'll let you click the salary link yourself. The most recent information is on Pages 7-9. (Previous pages give salary information for fiscal 1995---also interesting if you haven't already seen it.)

My only comment on these generous figures: We can clearly see why Wood came out of retirement, but if he solves the Getty's antiquities mess and other pressing issues, he's worth every penny.

Penny? Did I say PENNY???

Yet another major city has just been rescued from the buffoonery of the Broadcast Bozos: One Washington, D.C. radio station (WETA) took on Bach and Beethoven on Monday, the same day that another (WGMS) dropped them in favor of Sheryl Crow.

At least the new classical music outpost, in comparison to the old, has a stronger signal---the strongest in Washington. The recent frequency switch in Boston had left classical WCRB with annoyingly erratic reception.

I LIKE Sheryl Crow. But isn't sound quality more important to a symphony than a ditty? Or is this just another manifestation of my clueless elitism?

If you've finished donating to Philadelphia's Eakins campaign and are looking to save another artwork for its homeland, London's Tate Gallery has just the thing: For a mere £5 you can buy a brushstroke of Turner's "The Blue Rigi," as part of the campaign to keep it from going to the private, non-British collector who offered £5.8 million for it at auction last June. The British government imposed a temporary export ban to allow a public institution to raise the £4.95 million (a lower amount than the auction price, because of tax benefits to be granted the seller).

The Tate has already kicked in an unprecedented £2 million and The Art Fund, an independent British charity spearheading the public campaign, added £500,000. They hope to raise at least £300,000 through the brushstroke gambit and other public donations, but the total donated so far is a mere £21,054. (To be fair, the public campaign was launched just two days ago.) The deadline for preventing the export is Mar. 20.

Why does a museum even richer in Turners than Philadelphia is in Eakinses need this watercolor, which would be its most expensive purchase? The Art Fund explains:

There's no question that this country is already rich in its holding of works by Turner. But the great majority of watercolours in the Turner bequest are sketches and preliminary studies, vital for the study by artists and art historians but not in the same league as "The Blue Rigi." The Rigi Watercolours exhibition [opened Jan. 22] will for the first time show the work alongside both its companions ["The Red Rigi" and "The Dark Rigi"] and the preparatory material: visit the exhibition and judge for yourself.

To lend a little celebrity caché to this campaign, artists David Hockney, Peter Blake, Michael Craig-Martin, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, Antony Gormley, Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor, Fiona Rae, Bridget Riley, Mark Wallinger and Rachel Whiteread all bought a brushstroke.

Gee, can some of these art stars spare more than a five-spot? And is a bank loan, like the one secured in Philadelphia, an option if the fund drive falls short?

And the most important question: How long can museums go on trying to mount emergency fundraising appeals to match the record prices set by money-no-object collectors?

I'll be offline for a couple of hours, while I reveal the sacred rites of arts journalism to a class of middle schoolers. I'll be talking about the process of producing my Wall Street Journal article about the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston---from conception to publication.

Although this may be of dubious educational value, my classroom stint will allow me to tell the Columbia School of Journalism, where I recently applied for a job as a professor of arts journalism, that I have teaching experience! (Does student teaching when I was in college count?)

Meanwhile, if any of my faithful fans have pull at the J-School, now's the time to put it to excellent use. But if you do, please don't tell me: I might feel obligated to write good things about you for the rest of my journalistic career, and you know how hard it is for CultureGrrl to be nice!

Here's a panel discussion, to be held on Feb. 24, 10 a.m. to noon, that I'm sure my NYC-area readers will find interesting:

ADAA [the Art Dealers Association of America] will present a Collectors' Forum panel discussion entitled "The Museum as Collector." This historic gathering of museum directors will discuss one of the most critical issues affecting the art world today---the building of collections at major institutions. With prices at astronomical levels, the atmosphere has never been more heated and challenging. How will museums compete with collectors for the world's great works of art? What strategies are institutions using to survive and thrive?

The discussion, at the Museum of Modern Art, features MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry; Nicholas Serota, director, Tate, London; Kathy Halbreich, director, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Emily Rauh Pulitzer, founder and chairman, Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis. Its moderator is Tom Eccles, executive director, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. It is being held in conjunction with the annual fair held by ADAA members, The Art Show, Feb. 22-26 at the Park Avenue Armory.

I'd call it a must-see, if it weren't for the fact that tickets cost $35 in advance. (That makes MoMA's infamous $20 admission fee seem like a bargain!) If the price doesn't daunt you, e-mail adaa@artdealers.org.

Better yet, I hereby deputize you as CultureGrrl's special correspondents. Now you can all get in for free, as press! (Don't actually try this.)

A list of works said to be Great Britain's 25 most important paintings in private hands has been published by today's Daily Telegraph of London. This masterpiece roster has been compiled in connection with a campaign by Lord Howarth, a former arts minister, to get the British government "to revive its secret Paramount List--a list of works of art so important the Government would step in to buy them for public collections if they ever came on the market."

Owned, for the most part, by dukes, earls and lords, the 25 works include Rembrandts, Van Dycks, Poussins and Canalettos, among others. One painting, Leonardo's "Madonna of the Yarnwinder," was stolen and is still missing.

Nigel Reynolds reports:

Lord Howarth told The Daily Telegraph he wanted to protect objects of "supreme importance" as a matter of urgency. Experts should prepare a small national inventory of no more than 15 paintings and a small handful of sculptures and pieces of furniture that the Treasury would guarantee to buy for the nation at market prices.

In parallel, the latest edition of Apollo, the specialist art history magazine, will publish a list tomorrow of what it considers the 25 most important Old Masters in private ownership in the country.

When it comes to patrimony patriotism, what's good for the Greeks and Romans is good for the Anglo-Saxons, it seems.

In the latest development related to one of the sorriest episodes in museum history, Nikolai Zavadsky, husband of deceased State Hermitage Museum curator Larisa Zavadskaya, admitted in court today that he and his wife stole 77 objects from the museum's collection. More than 200 objects from the Department of Russian Culture were discovered missing last summer. Some have since been returned.

Luke Harding reports in today's Guardian of London that, according to prosecutors, the curator had simply "walked out of the staff exit, apparently unchallenged by security guards." Mr. Zavadsky's lawyer said that the objects were sold to buy insulin for the curator, who was diabetic.

The Hermitage's website provide information about the missing object here (a written list of 226 objects) and here (photographs of 46 objects) but does not identify which ones have been recovered.

Forget Nazi-loot databases. Marei von Saher, the daughter-in-law of the Dutch dealer Jacques Goudstikker, is giving her claim a higher profile: She has compiled a catalogue of the works he was forced to sell to Hermann Göring and Göring's dealer in 1940. Goudstikker, who was Jewish, died on a ship while fleeing Amsterdam for Great Britain during World War II.

This volume, to be published next month, will be sent to museums, "to see if they have any of the works of art," according to a report in Ynetnews, an Israeli website, which referenced a Dutch-language article in the newspaper NRC Next.

As reported in the NY Times last February, the Dutch government agreed to return 202 old-master paintings to von Saher of Greenwich, Conn., after her eight-year legal struggle. Some 1,000 works from the Goudstikker collection are still missing, von Saher's attorney, Lawrence Kaye of New York, told the Times.

The Times also published an an image of entries in the notebook that Goudstikker possessed when he died: "It lists 1,113 of the paintings he left behind, with titles, sizes and, in code, prices paid."

Righteous indignation breeds persistence: "It's about a historical injustice put right," von Saher's daughter Charlène told Alan Riding of the Times.

UPDATE from Bloomberg: Christie's says the sale will go on.

Greek Culture Minister George Voulgarakis sent a letter yesteday to Christie's, London, asking the auction house to halt a planned sale tomorrow and Thursday of 850 lots formerly from the collection of King George I of Greece, according to a report in today's Bloomberg.

This is not another Greek antiquities claim: The sale is comprised of silver, Fabergé, furniture, paintings, objets d'art and Chinese jade and porcelain.

Bloomberg quotes Voulgarakis as saying: "The items to be auctioned are an indivisible part of the history of the modern Greek state and our cultural heritage and raises the question of the illegal export of cultural goods from the Greek state.''

The only problem, Maria Petrakis reports from Athens, is that Christie's didn't get this message:

"The Greek authorities haven't been in touch,'' Alexandra Kindermann, a Christie's spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview today. "Nothing has arrived here so at the moment. The sale is going ahead.'' She declined to identify the sellers, citing client confidentiality.

According to Christie's New York press office (and its website), the sale is still going forward, at this writing.

Haven't the Greeks heard of faxes, e-mail or even the telephone? And doesn't Christie's think it prudent to check with Voulgarakis, before giving its clients possible provenance problems?

Imagine the Moustache

Sure, I can see that! They've both got a talent for over-the-top flamboyance. "Dalí & I: The Surreal Story" (let's hope they change the title) starts filming in June in New York and Spain, Variety reports. Andrew Niccol directs.

But Al, can you do the accent? If not, please don't dilly-Dalí: Just fuhgeddaboudit!

Meanwhile, you can start getting into character by studying this video (below), to the tune of "Tristan und Isolde":

Let's get out of Philly and go to Paris.

The answer to the question posed in the headline above appears to be the Louvre, which just reported that its total attendance for 2006 was a record 8.3 million, compared to 7.5 million the previous year. If another museum can boast higher numbers, please brag in an e-mail to CultureGrrl.

If 8.3 million isn't enough, just think how many more visitors will be reached by the planned Global Louvre.

And the Louvre is also going more "global" at home, with plans to open a permanent gallery for British art in 2008.

To give credit where credit is due, the Louvre is not all about rent-a-show: Along with the Musée d'Orsay and 40 other museums throughout France, it is giving support to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans through a loan show, Femme, Femme, Femme: Paintings of Women in French Society from Daumier to Picasso, opening Mar. 3 at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Artists also include Manet, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. (Unsurprisingly, the show will close June 3, before the start of the next hurricane season.)

How does the High Museum in Atlanta feel about another Southern museum spoiling its expensive Louvre "exclusive"?

Rendell Bashing Powell at the Eakins Bash

Saturday's "Gross Clinic" festivities at the Philadelphia Museum drew political heavy hitters U.S. Senator Arlen Specter and Governor Ed Rendell, but Mayor John Street was not on hand, nor was the museum told why his plans had changed.

No matter. The burly Governor made matters sufficiently interesting with his impolitic remarks about the Eakins campaign: First he conceded that he hadn't set eyes on "The Gross Clinic" until he was enlisted to help with the rescue effort. Then he recounted for the assembled throng of Eakins acolytes his private conversation with Earl (Rusty) Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, which (in league Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton) with had offered to buy the painting from Thomas Jefferson University for $68 million:

I was so irate that they would take this painting out of town that I called the head of the National Gallery and said, 'How can the National Gallery be party to the hijacking of something that is so uniquely Philadelphian?' I made a mistake. The head of the National Gallery couldn't care less about a governor. I should have asked Senator Specter to call.

As CultureGrrl more temperately observed a month ago, "snapping up cultural treasures from sister cities does not befit [the National Gallery's] leadership role" as a "quasi-federal art museum."

Maybe this bit of Philadelphia-Washington bad blood helps explain why the National Gallery and Crystal Bridges (Walton's planned Arkansas museum) made their snippy joint statement expressing pique that "the nation's capital" and "America's heartland'' would now be deprived of this major acquisition.

What's Philadelphia---cheesesteak?

Once the Philadelphia Museum finishes raising the remaining $31 million still needed to pay for the Eakins, it will have to come up with $500 million more---for its planned Frank Gehry-designed expansion and renovation. "A total of 80,000 square feet of new public space--a 60% increase--is anticipated," according to the museum's announcement. The project is expected to take some 10 to 12 years to complete.

And in September, it opens the Perelman Building, across the street from the museum's main building. Renovated by Gluckman Mayner Architects, it will include galleries for prints, drawings, photographs, costumes, textiles and modern and contemporary design, as well as a library and café. The cost (already raised): $90 million.

In its inaugural display of its new stellar acquisition, Thomas Eakins' "The Gross Clinic," the Philadelphia Museum makes it the centerpiece in a room that also displays one of the artist's oil studies for the painting, as well as his boxing picture, "Between Rounds," his luminous Schuylkill River scene, "The Pair-Oared Shell" and a portrait of him by his wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins. Surprisingly, The Agnew Clinic, another major Eakins that, like "The Gross Clinic," depicts a teacher demonstrating surgery to his students, is not included.

Maybe that's a good thing.

As important as "The Gross Clinic" is, the other medically themed tour de force, on longterm loan to the museum from the University of Pennsylvania, is bigger and at least as ambitious and powerful as the $68-million Eakins. It was painted in 1889, 14 years after "The Gross Clinic." When I viewed "Agnew" during Saturday night's party for "Gross" donors, I heard one visitor immediately exclaim, "This one's better!"

Juxtaposing the two might raise unwelcome questions about whether the Philadelphia Museum really needs to make heroic efforts (along with the joint acquirer, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) to match a high, if not exorbitant, price for another similarly themed painting by the same artist. You can never have too many masterpieces, but the public might begin to have some doubts.

A wall label in the room displaying "The Gross Clinic" encourages visitors to make the trek to the other side of the museum to see the related work. But the good news is that they will eventually be shown together: Norman Keyes, director of media relations for the museum, told me on Saturday that when "The Gross Clinic" returns to his institution after a stint, beginning in March, in the galleries of joint-purchaser PAFA, the Philadelphia Museum will pair the two closely related works, possibly adding with a third spectacular medical masterpiece that he said Philadelphia is hoping to get on temporary loan: Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp from the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

In the meantime, if you'd like to experience the current exhibition vicariously, go here or dial 408-794-0888 and at the prompt, add 100#. You will hear the comments by curator Kathleen Foster that on-site visitors are encouraged to access on their cell phones. "The Gross Clinic," she contends, represents "our very best artist at his very best." (I guess when you still need to raise $31 million from the public, a little hyperbole is understandable.)

But wait! I also promised you some gubernatorial gossip, didn't I?

COMING NEXT: Rendell rends Powell.

Why is This Tall Woman Clapping?

Because she's Anne d'Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, congratulating a joyous crowd of donors to the fundraising campaign to keep the $68-million Thomas Eakins masterpiece, "The Gross Clinic," in Philadelphia. The museum invited some 3,000 Eakins contributors to a celebratory reception in its grand lobby Saturday evening. About 1,800 said they'd be coming. From the looks of the packed reception (which I attended) it appears that most did.

Some $37 million has now been raised (including $7 million, announced last week, from Athena and Nicholas Karabots of Fort Washington, Pa.). D'Harnoncourt announced that contributions have come from almost every state in the nation: "We are now waiting for Idaho, Nebraska and North Dakota." The fundraising deadline is Jan. 31, after which the Philadelphia Museum and its joint purchaser, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, will draw upon a loan offered by Wachovia Bank for the rest.

COMING TOMORROW: Future plans for "Gross Clinic." Plus, a little gossip from Governor Rendell, shared among 1,800 friends.

Also this week: More important art news from the City of Brotherly Love (and a certain suburb).

To a place that rhymes with "Silly" and has something "Gross" about it. A place whose mayor has the perfect name for the denizen of a city. If you don't know where this is, then you haven't been paying attention!

I'm going to try to lay off the laptop till I come back at the end of the weekend. But I've said that before, and you know me all too well.

We journalists should read nonprofits' publicly available tax returns more often. Had I done so, I'd already know that the net proceeds received by the New York Public Library from Alice Walton's purchases of Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits" amounted to $33.81 million, as reported on last year's Form 990.

I found this out today from Anthony Calnek, the library's new vice president for communications and marketing, who was replying to my request of last November for information on what has happened to the works that the library had consigned in 2005 to Sotheby's but that failed to sell.

We found out earlier this month what had happened to Gilbert Stuart's Munro-Lenox portrait of George Washington. Calnek filled in the rest, including the take from the Durand, in today's e-mail:

Shortly after the auction, Sotheby's sold John W. Alexander's "Anna Palmer Draper" in a private sale. John Singleton Copley's "Hannah White Cowell Hooper" remains unsold. One theory I heard is that although the Copley is a fine painting, the subject is a rather unattractive person, resulting in no takers.

All proceeds have gone into an endowment strictly for acquisitions by the Research Libraries.

The Durand had reportedly sold for about $35 million (from which Sotheby's may have taken a commission). The Alexander had been estimated at $400,000 to $600,000.

Can we put the homely Mrs. Hooper back on display at the library now? She might look good next to the portrait of Truman Capote!

I have NEVER let anyone publish a CultureGrrl BlogBack at this length, and I probably never will again. But this is too important to cut or edit.

I had solicited the response of Michael Brand, the J. Paul Getty Museum's director, to Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli's Op-Ed piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. I got much more than I bargained for---an extremely detailed, revealing and insightful reponse:

Thank you for the chance to clarify some statements in Minister Rutelli's Wall Street Journal op-ed piece yesterday.

The Getty wants to resolve these issues with Italy. We remain prepared to make reasonable compromises in order to reach such an agreement.

Paul Benjamin Rosenbaum, aka Son of CultureGrrl, is on Page A9 of today's Wall Street Journal, along with 2,015 other newly minted Chartered Financial Analysts who have undertaken an intensive, self-taught course of study for investment professionals and passed the rigorous three-test battery. According to the two-page ad of the CFA Institute in today's WSJ:

You'll need a magnifying glass to read their names. And a telescope to track their careers.

My bylined name in the WSJ is a lot larger than Paul's. But you'll need a microscope to track my so-called career! And Paul will probably turn into one of those money-no-object collectors whom I gripe about. (If only!)

Maybe I need my own CFA: Chronicler of Fine Arts?

If you're not ready for the feminist art summit, how about a summit for Pajama Journalists, otherwise known as bloggers? (What do you think CultureGrrl was wearing when she posted on Rutelli and True today at 2 a.m.? Wouldn't you like to know!)

Those of you who have been following CultureGrrl from the very beginning (and that's nobody, because I did it secretly for two weeks, to see if I could stand it) know that the person you have to blame for all this blather is Sreenath Sreenivasan, associate professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, who got me started when he conducted a brief how-to-blog seminar last April at Alumni Weekend.

Now Sree, who has begun "a tech-reporting gig" at WNBC NewsChannel 4 in New York (online and on TV), has e-mailed an invitation to his disciples and our friends (that means you) to the WNBC Blogger Summit, which he will moderate.

Here are the details:

Join other bloggers who cover news, politics, entertainment, arts, culture, sports and more from the New York area for an evening of discussion and networking.

E-mail Erin.Monteiro@nbcuni.com with the blogger's name, name of the blog, web address and a brief description of your blog.

And here's the clincher, for those of us who make no money from our maunderings:

Food will be served!

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Photograph by Donald Woodman

Art Radio WPS1.org, the Internet radio station of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, will streamcast a live audio feed of The Feminist Future, Jan. 26-27, organized by The Museum of Modern Art. The sold-out symposium features such speakers as Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Anne Wagner, Marina Abramovic, Griselda Pollock, Martha Rosler, and, of course, the Guerrilla Girls.

If that whets your appetite for visual sisterhood, you can visit the Brooklyn Museum's new Center for Feminist Art, opening Mar. 23. Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (above), acquired by the museum in 2002, is the centerpiece of the new 8,300-square-foot facility. Maura Reilly is its curator.

Now can we please get the Gloria Steinem quote off the walls of the museum's Egyptian art galleries and emblazon it, instead, somewhere in Pharaohs, Queens and Goddesses, one of the three inaugural exhibitions at the new center?

Buchwald's Last Book

"Hi! I'm Art Buchwald and I just died."

With that mischievous quip begins the video obit on today's NY Times home page for the consummate humorist and satirist. He died Wednesday night in Washington of kidney failure at the age of 81.

He made death the ultimate absurdity: "I was put on earth to make people laugh," he tells Times reporter Tim Weiner during his postmortem video closeup. His ashes, he decrees, should be "dropped over every cocktail party at Martha's Vineyard."

For the print version of the Times obit, by Richard Severo, go here.

Yesterday was the ultimate bad-news day for the J. Paul Getty Trust: Its nemesis, Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, scored an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, to which the editors obligingly appended the headline "Rogue Gallery," along with a photo of the Getty Villa. WSJ subscribers can find it here. The rest of you can get the text, in English, from the Italian Culture Ministry's website, here. (Click on the link above the Wall Street Journal logo.)

Also yesterday, at her continuing trial in Rome on charges of antiquities trafficking, Marion True, the Getty Museum's former antiquities curator, introduced as evidence her indignant letter to Getty officials that had been leaked last month to the LA Times. Details of yesterday's court proceedings are reported in today's NY Times.

After the LA Times leak, True's lawyer, Harry Stang, had asserted that the letter had been intended to be kept private. What message is True sending now, by airing it in open court? Quite possibly this: "If I'm going down, you higher-ups (and former higher-ups), who knew full well what I was doing, are going down with me."

As for Rutelli's published punditry, it indicates that this ambitious and savvy politician is going to keep playing the patrimony-patriot card for all it's worth. When it comes to strategic maneuvering, the art historians at the Getty and their legal advisors are simply out of their league. Michael Brand, the Getty Museum's director, got his Op-Ed piece in the LA Times. Rutelli contrived to get his in an internationally respected forum.

His piece displays a politician's talent for manipulating, if not distorting, the facts: He twice mentions "the 46 works we are waiting for," despite the fact that the Getty has agreed to return 25 of them and added a 26th that the Italians hadn't even sought. What's more, it is still studying Italy's request for the highly important Cult Statue of a Goddess (called the Morgantina Venus by the Italians), with an eye to possible return.

Rutelli claims that the Getty "received exhaustive and reliable documentation months ago from our technicians, archaeologists, legal experts and investigators," regarding Italy's claims. But is there really "exhaustive documentation" for every one of the contested works? No matter, because in Rutelli's opinion, it's not just a question of airtight evidence:

This is not a legal question, but a question of ethics. It is a matter of transparency in relations with the public and correct behavior in the antiquities market.

The only "correct behavior," from the source countries' standpoint, is to accede with alacrity to repatriation demands. But each case (and each object) needs to be considered on its own merits. Sometimes that takes study and time...and a measure of goodwill, which now seems to be in short supply.

...it's over at the Tate Britain, London. Maev Kennedy reports in the Guardian about that museum's current "State Britain" exhibition:

Lawyers for the Tate pored over the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act before artist Mark Wallinger recreated a spectacular anti-war protest from Parliament Square, filling the stately Duveen galleries which mostly lie within the exclusion zone banning such demonstrations.

Another shows the prime minister, chancellor Gordon Brown and former foreign secretary Jack Straw about to wash their hands in basins of blood.

And so on...

Director Stephen Deuchar said this was probably most overtly political piece ever displayed at his institution. For images, go here and here.

Can you imagine such an exhibition being mounted today by a major museum in the U.S.? I can't. Here, museums address the war in Iraq, if at all, by indirection. Is it fear of offending major donors and government grantmakers that makes them apolitical? Or are they simply reflecting the lack of political consciousness among American artists?

On Monday, the NY Times sardonically reported that, because of planned staff cuts, People magazine might have to make do with just one reporter covering Britney Spears, instead of the seven who supposedly composed a five-paragraph story on the tabloid queen and "her 'new guy,' model Isaac Cohen."

On Tuesday, the august paper of record devoted almost two full pages and 16 photographs to three articles on the Golden Globe awards, written by four reporters.

And as if that weren't enough, on Wednesday (today), the celeb-besotted newspaper ran a "News Analysis" (oh, please!) about the deeper meaning of the Golden Globes as a stepping stone for the Academy Awards:

The 84 or so members of the [Hollywood Foreign Press] association are, first and foremost, cheerleaders for the movie industry and the stars that give it light.

And so, it seems, is the Times. At least now we know where all those pink-slipped People staffers should send their résumés.

Model for new Uffizi entrance by Arata Isozaki

A $39-million construction project to expand the Uffizi Gallery in Florence by 60% gets underway this week, but not without controversy. The museum will grow to occupy the entire first floor of its palazzo, according to the scant information provided on its website.

Wanda Lattes reports in Corriere della Sera that Arata Isozaki's design for the new entrance canopy (above) has met opposition. But even more controversial is the planned demolition of historic structures:

The new east-sector staircase will have its base in the much-loved ancient church of San Pier Scheraggio, where since the eleventh century worshippers have included Dante and Boccaccio, and the west wing's descent and ascent block actually encroaches on the base of the Loggia dei Lanzi, the most famous open-air museum in the world.Construction will involve attacking hallowed, untouchable, stonework....

Another contested point is the restructuring of the Botticelli and Leonardo rooms, which attract large numbers of visitors and are poorly lit. The project includes plans to insert glazing under the trusses to enable the millions of visitors to admire Botticelli's "Allegory of Spring" or Leonardo's "Annunciation" in direct natural light.This idea has provoked concern and opposition,as has the plan for celebrated spaces like the Botticelli room no longer to sport their classic white plaster. In all probability, they will become pale blue.

One of the most prominent critics is the Uffizi's former director, Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, who had told me 11 years ago, when I interviewed her in her office, of the need to expand the second-floor museum to the first floor, as will now be done. According to the Times of London, she has now urged Florentines to "mobilize themselves and wake up to how a major monument is being altered."

Will this project at least provide a solution to those long lines?

The eminent Maastricht-based old masters, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist dealer, Robert Noortman, died of a heart attack at the age of 60, the ANP news agency reported on Sunday. He had been suffering from cancer.

On June 8, Sotheby's had released this announcement of its acquisition of Noortman's gallery:

Through the transaction, Sotheby's will acquire all the assets of Noortman Master Paintings, which consist principally of art inventory, receivables and the gallery premises.

Sotheby's will acquire 100% of Noortman's outstanding shares in exchange for Sotheby's shares with an initial consideration worth approximately $56.5 million (EUR44 million) or 1.95 million shares at a price of $29.01 per share, as well as the assumption [by Sotheby's] of approximately $26 million in [Noortman Master Paintings'] debt....With this transaction, Mr. Noortman has become a significant shareholder in Sotheby's with approximately 3.2% of Sotheby's shares. He will also join Sotheby's International Advisory Board.

At that time, Noortman commented:

This is an extraordinary opportunity to develop and expand my business at a time when I am ready for new challenges. I have been thinking about the long term future of my company for some time, and believe in Sotheby's both as the premier international art auction house and also in their transparency as a public company.

No word yet on what Noortman's death may mean for his gallery or for Sotheby's.

(Part I is here.)

You know some of the names: Ronald Lauder, Alice Walton, Steven Cohen---collectors who don't mind spending whatever it takes to buy a work that they covet, even if it means negotiating privately and paying a price well beyond what the market might bear if the object of their obsession were sold at auction.

It used to be that most megacollectors came by their fortunes through hard work in fields that had an underlying intrinsic value to society: They were industrialists, bankers, corporate executives. By virtue of their professions, they knew the value of a dollar, even though they were enormously wealthy. They were willing to stretch for objects they wanted, but they still, for the most part, used their business-honed understanding of value and negotiating skills to avoid wildly overpaying.

Now the ranks of megacollectors are increasingly swelled by the offspring and heirs of wealthy families, and the new breed of financial-industry alchemists, whose metier is to take investors' wealth and multiply it. Money in those hands has a different meaning than it did in the hands of old-style collectors: When deciding how much they are willing to pay for a trophy artwork they crave, they look at previous prices and then triple or quadruple them. Trampling previous records makes them feel powerful, not preposterous.

Take Lauder, as depicted in last week's New Yorker profile. Rebecca Mead reported that when an errant elbow caused the $139-million Picasso deal between Steve Wynn and Steven Cohen to fall through, "Lauder could barely conceal his satisfaction at having his record for immoderation unbroken....Lauder prides himself on buying only the best, and on doing so at any price"---witness the $135-million Klimt.

Lauder's "satisfaction" with his preeminent profligacy was shortlived, however: Cohen bought de Kooning's "Woman III" from David Geffen this fall for a price variously reported as $137.5 million (NY Times) and $142.5 million (Wall Street Journal). And Geffen is said to have recently sold his drip Pollock for about $140 million.

What has this heedless one-upsmanship meant to the artworld? Some laudable philanthropic benefactions, to be sure. But also a sea change in the nature of the art market, the museum world and possibly the nature of art itself. Blowing the lid off the top of the market has caused participants at all levels to flip their lids, as visions of profit plums dance in their heads.

More and more business is done in art-fair booths and auction salerooms, where quick looks and snap judgments have replaced careful study and solitary scrutiny. At a recent New York panel discussion on the art market, Amy Capellazzo, Christie's co-head of contemporary art, observed that she no longer has any "fuzzy moments" when standing before an artwork with a potential buyer:

I used to talk about what was special about an artist's work and what its merits were. Now I'm just fulfilling some larger banking function...It's about how to make the deal.

When the market rules, the old rules of collecting and connoisseurship are overturned: Quality judgments seem out-of-whack in a wacky world where Rembrandt's auction record of $28.69 million is eclipsed by Klimt's auction record of $87.9 million. Art investors formerly expected to hold onto works for five years or more to turn a profit; now big bucks are made on quick flips. Young artists, still wet behind the ears, sell still-wet canvases and become instant (if ephemeral) art stars.

Museums can't begin to compete at this stratospheric level, and new tax-law changes, restricting fractional gifts, are making even donations of major works harder to come by. What's more, collectors like Lauder and Walton, who once might have donated the bulk of their collections to existing museums, are now establishing museums of their own.

Artists, not insensitive to the allure of a big payout for a show that's a sellout, are tempted to create for the market, avoiding content (such as political comment) that might be more a sore point than a selling point. This has always been an issue, but it's more so now, because the stakes are so much higher and the sought-after artists are so much younger. If art is now being traded like securities, the output of younger artists is the speculative investment---low cost, high risk, big potential returns.

I don't demonize the money-no-object collectors. They are in the happy position of having more money than they know what to do with. It's unfair to accuse Alice Walton, as Michael Kimmelman recently did in the NY Times, of "raiding the New York Public Library in 2005 for a civic landmark, Asher B. Durand's 'Kindred Spirits.'"

She didn't "raid" the library; the work was put on the market and she bought it. The library, not Walton, was to blame, and more financially strapped institutions are likely to do the same. The emergence of money-no-object collectors means that public institutions are going to have a harder time sticking to their mission of preserving, not selling, the public's patrimony.

It's not the fault of money-no-object collectors that connoisseurship, museum ethics and artistic integrity are under assault. They are entitled to do what they want with their megamillions. But the effect of their extravagant outlays, intended or not, may be to compromise culture, not enrich it.

American museum directors are always complaining that source countries uniquely target the United States in their antiquities repatriation efforts. (Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, another favorite target of source countries, might beg to differ.)

Now, a report in today's Yomiuri Shimbun indicates that the Miho Museum in Japan may soon be targeted by Italy's patrimony patriots, thanks to Polaroid photographs of alleged loot that were found by investigators in a Basel warehouse owned by Gianfranco Becchina. He is an Italian art dealer suspected of "buying items from looters and selling them to dealers around the world," writes reporter Kazuki Matsuura.

During investigations into smuggling charges against convicted Italian antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici, "photos showing items that were displayed at the Miho Museum also were found," according to Matsuura's sources.

Misery loves company. Are American museum directors happy now?

Related: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, may be asked to relinquish a large number of works, including 476 paintings, that were allegedly Nazi loot, according to Zvi Zinger, writing for Ynetnews, an Israeli news service. It seems that no museums are immune from such claims.

In today's LA Times, Christopher Reynolds and Hugh Hart reveal that the financial windfall from the Hammer Museum's ethically problematic sale in November 1994 of the glory of founder Armand Hammer's collection, his Leonardo Codex, is the gift that keeps on giving:

To help bankroll the institution's exhibitions and programs, the Hammer...[has] been relying on interest income from the sale of Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Leicester to Microsoft founder Bill Gates for $30.8 million..., a move that, at first glance, conflicts with the code of ethics that major U.S. museums have endorsed for decades.

The "first glance" actually came from a certain blogger-to-be, who witnessed the sale at Christie's and then lambasted it as "a new high for manuscript-auction prices...[and] a new low for museum ethics," in a Nov. 26, 1994 Op-Ed piece for the NY Times. Here's a bit of historical background for Reynolds and Hart of the LA Times, from Rosenbaum in the NY Times:

It is shocking that when the Hammer Museum treated its founder's most valued trophy as a disposable asset, no cry was raised....The silence may...stem from the [art museum] directors' association's botched investigation of the proposed sale.

Mr. Neubert told me that the Hammer Museum's actions would have been condemned by the association as "absolutely inappropriate" if he had been certain that the museum had owned the manuscript. But he said Mr. Hopkins claimed that the manuscript was actually owned by UCLA, so he let the museum off on a technicality and didn't investigate further. The auction catalogue unequivocally identifies the codex as "property of the Armand Hammer Museum."

Now, the LA Times reports, the Hammer has finally decided to "start spending half of the codex interest for acquisitions---about $650,000 yearly---and half or less on exhibitions and programs." AAMD guidelines state that deaccession proceeds should go SOLELY for acquisitions.

Henry Hopkins' letter responding to my piece seemed to indicate that if proceeds from the manuscript were not needed to defray possible litigation costs in connection with the Hammer estate (which had been the rationale for the sale), the money would be used for acquisitions. This, as the LA Times tells us, is not what happpened.

Strangely, Hopkins' letter is on the Times website, but the Op-Ed piece itself appears to be missing. If you can find the missing link, do let me know!

Meanwhile, there's always microfilm.

UPDATE: I should have figured that Christopher Knight of the LA Times had beaten me to the punch back in 1994: The Hammer Falls on the Public's Trust, Nov. 15, 1994. It's another case of "great minds think alike" (but some are quicker than others)!

California art museums are seeing exhibition-threatening surges in insurance premiums, according to the Jan. 12 San Francisco Business Times.

Sarah Duxbury reports:

Post-Katrina, California is considered a catastrophic zone, and its fine art museums are seeing insurance increases between 40 percent and 300 percent owing to the need to insure against earthquakes. The wide range reflects the value of the special exhibits and loans a museum has at a given time. Such increases will affect California museums' abilities to borrow works from other U.S. museums and collectors....

Recognizing the threat of surging insurance costs, [Neal] Benezra [director of SFMOMA], [John] Buchanan [director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco] and [Emily] Sano [director of Asian Art Museum in San Francisco] have joined colleagues from the Getty, L.A. County Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to plead their case at the annual meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors at the end of this month.

Insurance is supposed to protect people in disasters. Then, after a specific disaster occurs, future coverage becomes much more costly and elusive for everyone. Museums saw this after the terrorist attacks of 9/11; they're seeing it again now. The result may be that museums will have to rely more on exhibitions from their permanent collections---not because they want to, but because they have to.

Johns Hopkins University.

Or at least so says a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has published the results of a new "Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index" that based its rankings on "faculty members' scholarly output [number of publications, awards, honors, and grants received] at nearly 7,300 doctoral programs around the country," according to the Art History Newsletter.

In other words, it's a publish-or-perish world; the quantity of articles counts; teaching doesn't.

To access the full article, A New Standard for Measuring Doctoral Programs, you need to be a Chronicle subscriber. But the Art History Newsletter has published the complete list.

Here it is:

1. Johns Hopkins
2. New York University
3. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
4. Yale University
5. University of California, Berkeley
6. University of Chicago
7. UCLA
8. University of Maryland at College Park
9. CUNY Graduate Center
9. Stanford University

Reasonable professors may disagree (and undoubtedly will).

Anyone who attended the Metropolitan Museum's extraordinary Leonardo da Vinci drawings exhibition four years ago was painfully aware of the elephant not in the room: Although a section of the exhibition was devoted to Leonardo's lost masterpiece, the "Battle of Anghiari," only small fragmentary sketches, preparatory to this fabled fresco, were displayed. "No complete copy of the Anghiari composition is extant," according to the Met's catalogue.

Now comes word that the indefatigable Italian Culture Minister, Francesco Rutelli, "has greenlighted a dig behind a 'secret' wall in [Florence's] Palazzo Vecchio that may hide the fresco of the Battle of Anghiari." ANSA, the Italian news agency, reported on Thursday:

The search will be led by art sleuth Maurizio Seracini, the one real-life character in Dan Brown's bestselling thriller, "The Da Vinci Code," and the man who uncovered the wall two years ago.

As in any good mystery, the Anghiari anglers have a tantalizing clue. Ariel David of the Associated Press reported yesterday that Seracini had long ago noticed a "cryptic message" written on a tiny green flag painted on a fresco by Giorgio Vasari." It says:

Cerca, trova. (Seek and you shall find.)

Go to the above-linked AP article to see an image of the flag and its inscription.

It is in the cavity behind the Vasari fresco, "Battle of Marciano in the Chiana Valley," located in the in the Hall of the 500, that some experts (most notably Leonardo scholar Carlo Pedretti), believe the lost Anghiari fresco may possibly be hidden.

Quick, I need a literary agent!

You already heard (here and here) of GAD (Guggenheim Abu Dhabi). But nothing the Global Guggenheim has done up till now prepares us for the emormous artistic and financial scope of LAD---the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

On Thursday, Jacques Follorou reported in Le Monde that he had been given "access to the confidential clauses of the contract" for Abu Dhabi Louvre, and he reported the financial arrangements in detail.

Here are the essentials, from Alan Riding's report in today's NY Times, which is based on Thursday's French newspaper report:

After months of rumors and a week of protests, the French government has finally confirmed that in exchange for a sum said to be $800 million to $1 billion, it will rent the name, art treasures and expertise of the Louvre to a new museum to be built in Abu Dhabi....

Over the next 10 years, Le Monde noted, this agency is to provide management expertise for a fee of $91 million; four temporary shows a year, worth a total of $195 million; and up to 300 artworks on "permanent" display in exchange for $260 million. Abu Dhabi authorities will, in turn, commit to spending $52 million a year to build their museum's own collection. After 20 years, the Abu Dhabi Louvre will adopt its own name.

I got alarmed when I saw Riding's comment that 300 works from French museums would be on "permanent" display in Abu Dhabi. But the Le Monde report makes clear that these works will be deposited in Abu Dhabi on longterm loan, for up to 10 years, not permanently.

People always said that Tom Krens was a "visionary." But I suspect that even he did not envision how far this would go. And you already know how I feel about it.

CLARIFICATION: According to the details published in Le Monde, French museums will loan works to the new museum in Abu Dhabi, on a rotating basis, over a 10-year period. But loans of individual works will last for a period of three months to two years.

Yikes! Everyone is misconstruing the figures in Christie's press release recapping its 2006 sales totals. I won't name names, but U.S. auction scribes are heedlessly scrambling U.S. dollars and British pounds.

In its press release, Christie's, which is a London-based company, gives all its figures in both dollars and pounds. But all the percentage increases apply only to the totals in the British currency; the percentage increases would be different if calculated in dollars (which Christie's doesn't), because of exchange-rate changes between 2005 and 2006.

So reporters who say: "Christie's sold $1.2 billion of Impressionist and modern art last year, up 81% from the year earlier," really ought to be saying "Christie's sold £664 million of Impressionist and modern art last year, up 81% from the year earlier." Or else, they need to get the dollar totals for Impressionist/modern in 2005 and 2006, and calculate the percentage increases in dollars.

The confusion continues.

Remember when Steve Wynn told his assembled guests at the elbowing of his Picasso that "this has nothing to do with money. The money means nothing to me"?

Now Wynn has apparently suppressed these noble sentiments sufficiently to instigate a lawsuit against Lloyd's of London, seeking $54 million for the damage he accidently inflicted on "Le Rêve." He was to have received $139 million for the painting from hedge fund king Steven Cohen before the accident; now he says the painting is worth a mere $85 million.

He made the hole; now he wants to be made whole.

Memo to NY Times photo editors:

Isn't it time to retire Marion True's 2005 Italian perp walk photo? You used it again (how many times has it now been?) to illustrate yesterday's story about her bail hearing in Greece in connection with her acquisition, when she was antiquities curator for the Getty, of the funerary wreath that the museum has now agreed to return.

Okay, it's a powerful image---this middle-aged woman, hiding behind dark glasses and looking distraught as she greets the photographers' reception line outside court in Rome, where she is facing charges of illegal trafficking in antiquities. But it's getting very old, don't you think? If you don't have another shot in your files, I'm willing to bet that the Getty could provide you with one.

Okay Christie's, stop being such a big bully. PLAY NICE!

It wasn't not enough for you that your 2006 total art sales, at $4.67 billion, were "the highest [annual auction-house] results in art market history." You also had to send out a press release today, boasting that the $87.9 million fetched in November by "Adele Bloch-Bauer II" was "the highest price paid for any work of art at auction" last year. Really? It wasn't THAT long ago---only last May, in fact---that Picasso's "Dora Maar au Chat'' achieved last year's highest auction price, $95.2 million, at your competitor, Sotheby's. Remember?

Your $4.67 billion total-sales figure is in itself confusing. Linda Sandler reported today in Bloomberg that "Christie's didn't provide year-earlier figures for comparison, only percentage changes."

But Sandler herself had reported last year for Bloomberg that Christie's "sold $3.2 billion of art and collectibles at 633 sales" in 2005. Why didn't you remind her?

The problem, I surmise, is that the 2005 total she (and you) reported is not comparable to the 2006 total, because this year, unlike last year, you decided to beef up your reported total with more than $256 million in private art sales that your auction house had brokered. Last year, Christie's sold $184 million privately, but this was not included in the 2005 reported total.

Comparing apples to apples, Sotheby's had a 2006 auction total of $3.66 billion, equaling 83% of Christie's auction total (without private sales) of about $4.41 billion. Christie's auction sales (in dollars) increased 38%, compared to a 36% increase at Sotheby's.

The big bonanza for Christie's was the stunning $1.23 billion in Impressionist/Modern sales. Leading the way was the $491.47-million New York sale on Nov. 8, by far the highest grossing art auction in history. New York sales at Christie's totaled $2.11 billion, compared to $1.83 billion at Sotheby's.

What privately held Christie's didn't report was profits, although CEO Edward Dolman declared that "2006 was a phenomenal year for Christie's in terms of...profitability." Publicly traded Sotheby's will announce earnings no later than Mar. 1.

In reporting its 2006 auction highlights, Christie's press release gave undue prominence (right after Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer II" and de Kooning's "XXV") to what CultureGrrl called "an auction record [that's] not an auction record---the the Qing porcelain bowl that Alice Cheng bought at auction in Hong Kong, which had been consigned for sale by her own brother, 80-year-old Hong Kong art dealer Robert Chang.

Doesn't this at least rate an asterisk, with explanation?

Derek Gillman, the new executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation, which intends to uproot Albert Barnes' celebrated collection from Merion to Philadelphia, will give the luncheon address on Mar. 14 at the three-day conference on Legal Issues in Museum Administration, organized by the American Law Institute of the American Bar Association.

Gillman's topic: "The Integrity of Collections."

The Friends of the Barnes Foundation should have a field day with that one.

I promise never to be insufferably snobbish about Broadway musicals again. "Wicked," which I saw yesterday just to humor my daughter on winter break, was brilliant on every level: book, songs, set, performances. And, with my unerring nose for news, I happened to see it with a new cast, just announced yesterday on the Playbill site: Julia Murney as Elphaba, Kendra Kassebaum as Glinda, Sebastian Arcelus as Fiyero. Jayne Houdyshell as Madame Morrible (not listed in the Playbill announcement but another recent addition) was also a standout.

In his re-review of the 2003 musicial on July 15, 2005 in the NY Times, Jason Zinoman dismissed what was then a "mostly new cast" as lacking "the one element that won over even the musical's detractors: personality." No such problem with the current lively contingent.

But Jason dismissively describes the musical as "perfectly pitched to teenagers"---specfically, teenaged girls. Maybe I'm still a teenager at heart (unlikely), but I was enchanted from beginning to end. That's because this play belongs to that distinguished but exceedingly rare genre---the tale in which the smart woman is the central character and even gets her man at the end. (Okay, so he was transformed from a hunk to a scarecrow. Nothing's perfect.) Maybe it's a sign of the times (or my naïveté), but I found the political satire clever and pointed, not "self-serious," as Jason called it.

Ticket Buyer's Tip: The $55 seats on the side of the orchestra are such a deal! You miss out on a little of what's happening at the rear of the stage, but you're close to the action, instead of in the rear balcony. And (by buying two single tickets) I was able to get them just a couple of days in advance.

But what's this e-mail to NY Philharmonic subscribers, which arrived in my inbox today? They've cast Kelsey "Grammar" (sic) as Henry Higgins in the orchestra's upcoming (Mar. 7-10) fully costumed, semi-staged concert production of "My Fair Lady." Can Grammer really fill the slippers of Rex Harrison? They must have read this review by Neil Genzlinger of the estimable Michael Cumpstey's 2004 stint as Higgins at Princeton's McCarter Theater:

It helps that Mr. Cumpsty makes no effort to imitate Rex Harrison, who created the role of Henry Higgins on Broadway in 1956 and put it on film in 1964. He seems more ornery, more fusty, calling to mind not Harrison but Kelsey Grammer's television character, Frasier Crane.

Why have an imitation Grammer when you can have the real thing? What difference does it make if Cumpstey is a far better stage actor? The Philharmonic's e-mail cites Grammer's status as a "multi-Emmy and Golden Globe winner for 'Frasier,'" but mercifully ignores his brief but ignominious stint as Macbeth on Broadway: 8 previews and 13 performances.

One nice touch: They've cast Marni Nixon, the singing voice of Audrey Hepburn in the movie version of the musical, as Higgins' mother.

Guess I just blew my resolution not to be insufferably snobbish about Broadway musicals!

Ronald Lauder scores a hagiographic 10-page profile in the current (Jan. 15) New Yorker (no link yet), which manages to avoid delving into any problematic areas, such as the possible conflicts among his roles as a Museum of Modern Art trustee, founder and president of the Neue Galerie, Nazi loot restitution advocate, and major purchaser of restituted art (most notably the $135-million Klimt).

But Rebecca Mead did tell me one fact about Lauder that I didn't already know: This former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations "is the kind of Jew who has celebrated Christmas throughout his life, even once impersonating Santa when his children were small."

She also tells me something about Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" that I didn't know, because it isn't true: The article gives the painting's date as 1903; it's actually 1907.

Where are the New Yorker's fact-checkers when we really need them?

This just in from Deutsche Welle, the German broadcasting news service:

Initially, around 600,000 visitors had been expected to view "The Guggenheim Collection" at the National Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn, which opened in July 21, yet in the end over 800,000 came to see the show.

"We're extremely pleased," a museum spokesperson told reporters, not least because the 12-million euro ($15.6 million) exhibit broke even with the 600,000th guest and started making a profit after that.

A Guggenheim spokesperson, who did not want to be identified by name, told CultureGrrl that attendance was 811,022, to be exact. The spokesperson had no information about a "break-even point" and did not answer questions about how much the show had enriched the Guggenheim's coffers. The spokesperson added:

The Guggenheim...did not share in revenue streams, such as admissions revenue. The Guggenheim doesn't benefit financially from increased attendance levels. The real windfall for the Guggenheim is in the good press and great public reception of the exhibition which furthers our overall educational mission and strengthens our relationships with other institutions.

...not to mention the munificent rental fee that Bonn's Kunst-und Austellungshalle paid for past shows from the Museum of Modern Art and the State Hermitage Museum and now for the show that was "the most comprehensive exhibition to date from the Guggenheim's extended collection"---some 200 works, Impressionist to contemporary.

Meanwhile, back in Paris, the controversy over Rent-a-Louvre continues, with Henri Loyrette, that museum's director, defending himself yesterday in the pages of Le Monde. The latest developments are contained in Farah Nayeri's report in today's Bloomberg.

As of this writing, there are 2057 signatories to the petition posted by La Tribune de l'Art, supporting the opinion piece by three artworld luminaries in Le Monde, decrying the use of "works of art as currency of exchange."

UPDATE: Why didn't I think of this before? It's not Rent-a-Louvre; it's "Louez le Louvre." I need to extend my wordplay to foreign languages!

Speaking of post-Katrina New Orleans, Stevenson Swanson recently published a comprehensive update on the cultural impact of Katrina in the Chicago Tribune. From Swanson's piece:

"There's no quick fix for a disaster like this," said John Bullard, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, which suffered an estimated $6 million in damage to its building and adjacent sculpture garden. "It's going to be 5 to 10 years before the city comes back, but it won't look the same"....

Seepage through the basement floor left as much as 4 inches of standing water in storage areas and offices. Most of the art stored in the basement was spared because works are kept in raised storage racks, but one Japanese screen was damaged....Conservators at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art repaired the damage.

Here in New York, the gallery Wildenstein & Co. is currently hosting in a benefit exhibition, to Feb. 9, for the New Orleans Museum, comprised of 86 works from its European and American collections (14th-21st century), plus 9 additional pieces from private New Orleans collections. (More on the Wildenstein show here.) That show will travel to the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, June 9-Oct. 11, with a portion of the proceeds to benefit NOMA.

And on the web, NOMA has a "Make a Donation" button on the home page of its website.

As you may have noticed, CultureGrrl has a new fellow ArtsJournal blogger, CultureGulf, about post-Katrina New Orleans.

I hear this is soon to be followed by CultureGulch (the art scene in Chelsea), CultureGolf (landscape architecture on the links) and everyone's favorite, CultureGrit (archaeological digs). Will MAN (Modern Art Notes) soon be going toe-to-toe with WOMAN (Wonders of Museum Art News)?

All kidding aside, it will be good to receive regular dispatches on New Orleans' cultural recovery. More on that from CultureGrrl (not a misprint), COMING NEXT.

"Suicide Artist," who says that "anonymity is fundamental to my work," responds to Political Art at Harvard: Wake-Up Call for Artists?:

Artists are responding to the war. The problem is that curators and galleries refuse to exhibit the work. Since 2004, when I began making "detonations" in response to the war in Iraq, only two curators have had the nerve to handle my work:

Political art is a tough sell, regardless of the merits of the cause. However, my experience is that fear of content, not concern for profits, is what keeps work that responds to current events out of sight, out of mind.

I occasionally attend cultural events that I might not otherwise choose, in order to have some quality(?) time with Paul, 26, and Joyce, 22: A couple of weeks ago, our family (plus Lisa, Paul's fabulous girlfriend) belatedly saw "Spamalot," which was fine, except that I was way too "CultureGrrl" about it: I conscientiously prepared for it by renting the DVD of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," which I watched with Joyce. This meant that we heard a nearly verbatim replay, the next evening, of all the jokes that we had just heard at home. Unlike preparing for Shaw's "Heartbreak House" by reading it, this did not enhance my Broadway experience. Even Joyce often stayed silent while those around us laughed.

Tomorrow afternoon I go to "Wicked" with Joyce, who has always wanted to see it. My friends have warned me that their daughters loved it but I may be disappointed. Don't worry, though: I promise not to re-read "The Wizard of Oz" or watch Judy Garland.

I may be even more disappointed at an event that my husband and I had freely chosen to attend: Tan Dun's new work, "The First Emperor," which I'm seeing on Saturday at the Metropolitan Opera. Tan was panned---proving once again that It's always risky to buy tickets before the reviews are in.

But I'm not the only one: The performance is sold out and will be the third offering of The Metropolitan Opera Goes to the Movies. I'll get to see what it's like to be in the opera house when the HD cameras are rolling. (Any different from the brightly lit television tapings of yore?)

The first movie-house offering, which was an abbreviated, child-friendly version of "The Magic Flute" in English, was reportedly a success, but David Patrick Stearns, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, criticized last Saturday's "I Puritani" as "less-than-screenworthy," because of its "dramatic stasis."

The experiment continues. At least the Met is not itself in "stasis."

My art-and-politics posts (here, here and here) have struck a chord, eliciting an unusual number of hits, e-mails and now, reverberations in the blogosphere. Click today's thought-provoking post on Artblog.net, in which Franklin Einspruch observes:

Only artists whose talents lie in that arena, and mobilize to full effect given a political topic to chew on (Kathe Kollwitz and Ben Shahn come to mind), ought to comment on current events in their work. Everybody else, by doing likewise, is all but guaranteed to make art that falls below the rest of their output.

Another limitation of politically engaged art was identified by Ricardo Fernández, a Cuban-born architect in Miami, in this BlogBack to CultureGrrl:

The more relevant issue regarding Botero in this instance, it seems to me, is whether he is exhibiting any hypocrisy or intellectual dishonesty by engaging in the selective indignation of a response through painting to Abu Ghraib, while not responding to, say, the beheading of Daniel Pearl (and so many others), the deliberate blowing up by Muslim terrorists of children in Baghdad receiving candy from US soldiers, the bodies falling from the top floors of the WTC, the crashing of the planes on 9/11, etc.

In questions of politics, when the art entails explicit denunciation, and it is always--or almost always--in one direction even while much greater crimes deserving of condemnation go unremarked, then the result is propaganda and cant.

Related: Where is the new Guernica? in today's London Telegraph. Writer Serena Davies elicited this comment from Matthew Slotover, co-founder of Frieze magazine and the eponymous art fair:

You can look at what art gets made in times of economic boom and bust, and there's a difference. The art does get more political when the art market is not as strong. After the art recession of 1991-92, for instance, the Whitney Biennial of 1993 was known as the PC Biennial because it was so political.

"I think, partly, if you are making beautiful paintings then when they're selling well that gives them their own kind of logic. But, when they're not selling well, artists and galleries look to bigger issues."

So we need the art-market bubble to burst, in order for artists to transmute their personal woes into a global critique? What am I missing?

Here's a novel approach: Dispose of cultural patrimony claims through event planning.

Tito Mazzetta, the Atlanta attorney who has been pursuing the claim made by the Italian village of Monteleone di Spoleto for return of the Metropolitan Museum's Etruscan chariot, sent me a copy of the letter he received two years ago from Sharon Cott, vice president secretary and counsel of the Met, responding to his repatriation demand on behalf of the village.

In her letter, dated Dec. 17, 2004, Cott expressed "surprise" at the demand for an object that had been owned by the museum for more than 100 years, "respectfully decline[d]" to relinquish it, and then added this sweetener:

We would be pleased to discuss our plans [for the new Roman galleries] with the Mayor of Monteleone di Spoleto, and perhaps could highlight the contributions of the Umbrian region to Etruscan art through an event planned to coincide with the opening. Should your client be intent on pursuing what we respectfully submit is a futile legal claim..., we could not engage in such a dialogue.

The chariot or a swell party (or a scholarly symposium, perhaps)? We'll take the chariot.

When I spoke to Mazzetta yesterday, he conceded that the Italian Culture Ministry had yet to throw its weight behind the little village's quest. While conceding that "the statute of limitations has run" on the alleged smuggling of the chariot, he argued that "the new principle" is to repatriate objects of unique cultural and historical importance to their places of origin.

While this concept has not reached the status of "principle," countries of origin are increasingly arguing that even when legal remedies fail, ethical and moral imperatives should prevail. There is some merit to that argument in theory, but in practice it is an ambiguous and highly subjective standard, fraught with potential confusion and conflict. The rules of engagement on this are still being written.

Richard Lacayo

Time magazine's new art and architecture blog, by critic Richard Lacayo, has just launched, and while "Looking Around," he ogled CultureGrrl: He discussed me and linked to me at the beginning of his second post. Back at you, Richard! You're now on my blogroll.

He had this to say about the comparison I made between the new Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and another recently built structure nearby:

Rosenbaum draws a connection between the ICA's cantilevered upper story, which has a room descending at an angle from its underside, and the not so different silhouette of Rafael Vinoly's Boston Convention Center a few blocks away....

Now that it's been pointed out, the family resemblance between the ICA and Viñoly's building, at least in that one area, is unmistakable.

My comments caused him to ruminate about other times when he had "experienced a kind of architectural déjà vu." He provided one illustrated pairing (another Viñoly and a Pelli) and promised future riffs on the theme of "great minds thinking alike."

Yes they do. See what I've started?

Mark Steele in Columbia Magazine, Fall 2006

Another Met-sensitive book, also due out from an Italian publisher this month (after several delays), is James Beck's From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis, which elucidates his doubts about the attributions to Duccio of the Metropolitan Museum's "Madonna and Child" and to Raphael of the London National Gallery's "Madonna of the Pinks."

Some preemptive damage control was exercised by the Met's curator of European paintings, Keith Christensen, in a Columbia University publication that might have been expected to be more sympathetic to Beck, an art history professor at that university: The most recent issue of Columbia Magazine granted Christensen a forum for calling Beck "a lunatic":

"Frankly," Christiansen says, "Jim is out of his depth. It's not enough to walk into a room, stand in front of something, and say, 'Gee, I don't like that. It must be a fake.' You have to deal with the fact that there is a very considerable body of highly expertise scholarship [supporting a Duccio attribution]; and I'm not talking about us at the Met, I'm talking about the cumulative bibliography of this picture, people who really do know the material. No one's had the remotest thought that this was a forgery."

Christiansen, who has been with the Met since 1977 and has known Beck nearly as long, speaks with the passionate, civilized diction of an affronted connoisseur. "An institution can't be in the position of defending a picture -- for which there is no credible reason to have any doubts -- against a lunatic who is not going to be satisfied with anything because he's made up his mind.

Beck, also quoted in the article, slugs back:

"De Montebello has no expertise at all in anything," Beck heartily rasps. "He's a manager. He thinks he has expertise, and that's what did him in." As for the trustees, Beck sees a case of the blind leading the blind: "None of the trustees are experts at all, so they really have to believe in their experts." And of Christiansen, whom Beck once hired to teach at Columbia, Beck says, "He is a very devoted lover of art, but [in approving the deal] I think he made a tragic mistake -- probably the mistake of his career"....

"My task is impossible," he says, "but somebody has to do it."

Don't you just love it when art historians get angry?

Due in Italian bookstores later this month, a new book, "La Biga Rapita" (The Stolen Chariot), above, investigates the allegedly clandestine removal from Italy more than 100 years ago of the Metropolitan Museum's celebrated 6th century B.C. Etruscan chariot. The book's author, journalist Mario La Ferla, writes that the chariot was "dismantled, hidden in barrels of grain, [and] brought first to Paris and then to New York without the necessary export authorization," according to a report by the Italian information agency IGN. The chariot was acquired by the Met in 1903 and is a centerpiece of its new Greek and Roman galleries, to open in April.

According to the IGN report, La Ferla said that he had provided the evidence from his investigation to Tito Mazzetta, an Atlanta, Ga., lawyer who has been pursuing the claim made by the Italian town of Monteleone di Spoleto for return of the chariot. The Met lists the chariot's provenance as "found near Monteleone di Spoleto in 1902."

A detailed discussion of this controversy appeared almost two years ago in the Telegraph of London. Bruce Johnston then reported:

The...bronze and ivory chariot...was originally sold to two Frenchmen by a farmer who dug it up in a field at Monteleone di Spoleto, near Perugia, in 1902. According to family lore, the farmer received two cows in exchange.

Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the museum, said that Monteleone's claim was "like Italy saying it now wants France to give back the Mona Lisa. It's too late to discuss."

When contacted by me this morning, Holzer said that he would give me more details on the contretemps later today, after gathering more information. So CultureGrrl may have an update.

It seems to me that unless there are unusually compelling arguments (as in the case of the sundered Parthenon marbles) for honoring a claim based on events occurring more than a century ago, the legal principle of "repose" should govern: Owners should not be indefinitely subject to stale claims. Otherwise, there is little to prevent attempts to empty our museums of everything that ever arrived under murky circumstances.

The major exception to the general absence from U.S. art shows of works addressing the morass in Iraq is the Abu Ghraib series by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, shown last fall at Marlborough Gallery in New York.

Yesterday the San Francisco Chronicle reported that this series will be shown, beginning Jan. 29, at the Doe Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

According the Marlborough, the series was "first exhibited as part of a larger exhibition at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome in 2005. It then traveled to the Würth Museum in Künzelsau, Germany and to the Pinacoteca in Athens, Greece." But Berkeley is the first venue, outside of the artist's own gallery, to exhibit these paintings and drawings in this country.

At the time of the New York show, Marlborough stated:

These works, which come from the artist's own collection and are not for sale, are strongly personal statements of his reaction and feelings stemming from his reading of news media accounts of the events taking place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003.

Can it be that U.S. artists are less interested in creating works that are intensely felt but, due to their sensitive subject matter, "not for sale"? Or are they too isolated in their studios to deeply engage in disturbing, politically charged subject matter?

Rob Krulak, a development officer at the Brooklyn Museum, replies to New York Public Library Sells Its Washington:

Regardless of how the Steinhardts ultimately dispose of the portrait of Washington that they purchased from the New York Public Library, New Yorkers should remember that there is an equally lovely, and nearly identical painting by the same artist accessible to all in the esteemed permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

The Brooklyn picture shows George as an orator, with his hand outstretched; the NYPL shows him in a nearly identical pose and setting, but with his hand resting on some documents on the table.

Another curatorial nudge (like John Elderfield's Manet show) that seems to be calling attention to the dearth of political art in our politically unsettled times: "DISSENT!," to Feb. 25, at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum. Organized by the museum's print curator, Susan Dackerman, the show is described in its press release as:

...an exhibition of 62 prints, books, postcards, posters, magazines, t-shirts, and playing cards, presents an historical survey of printed images that express resistance to oppressive religious, political, and social systems....[It] demonstrates the role of artists in the dissemination of opinions and the cultivation of public debate and dialogue, and showcases how important these works were during a number of significant historical periods, many times leading to social or political change.

The show includes everything from Goya to Picasso to Ben Shahn to Andy Warhol to Richard Serra (his "STOP B S," 2004, appropriating the infamous image of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner and deleting two letters from President Bush's name).

In case there was any question about whether the curator intended this as a wake-up call for today's artists, Dackerman provides this comment in the press release:

It is important to exhibit and explicate works such as these within the setting of a museum, especially a teaching museum where we encourage the unsettling of settled opinions. Through the course of history, artists have played an important role in the promulgation of dissonant opinions through printmaking.

I hope this exhibition will provide the opportunity to examine that role by turning the gallery into a place of public discourse and initiating a critical dialogue about the work, its history, and most importantly, its implications for the future.

At a time when commercial careerism seems to be the driving force for so many young artists, a few concerned curators are pointing the way towards a different path.

First the Louvre, now the American Museum of Natural History: Museums that star in movies see a boost in their own box-office numbers, as AMNH has now discovered, thanks to the popular success of "Night at the Museum."

Is this why the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay have decided to "underwrite screenplays by seven critically acclaimed international filmmakers for films to be shot---at least partly---inside their walls"?

The Louvre concocted "Da Vinci Code" tours to capitalize on the public fascination with bad fiction. Will AMNH now animate its display cases at night?

Maybe so: AMNH recently launched a new sleepover program for children ages 8 to 12:

You and your family or group will head out with flashlights in search of adventure. Find yourselves in the Hall of North American Mammals, staring down a herd of wild buffalo.

And I'll bet you'll never guess what this new program is called!

WNYC got me at least one new fan. (Actually, a lot of people liked my sound bites.) Derek Fordjour is "a 32-year-old African-American painter, living and working in New York":

Congratulations on your interview with WNYC. I have not heard about you until now. I visited your blog and checked out some of your archives. It's great to know that someone like you exists. Your writing is fresh and entertaining and I have not traditionally been a fan of blogs.

P.S. Love your hair!

Oh, Derek. Flattery will get you everywhere!

On Nov. 20, I e-mailed the New York Public Library's incoming vice president for communications and marketing, Anthony Calnek (erstwhile of the Guggenheim), asking him to get me the answers to two questions:

What happened to the works that [the Library] consigned to Sotheby's but that failed to sell?

To what use have they actually put the proceeds of the art sales?

Yesterday, Anthony e-mailed me the answer to the second question. Today, Carol Vogel in the NY Times partially answered the first.

The resolution---the purchase by Michael and Judy Steinhardt of Gilbert Stuart's Munro-Lenox portrait of our first President, appears to be as good as could be hoped, since the Steinhardts have indicated that they may either lend it or give it to an American museum.

I had asked Anthony for an update, because I felt remiss in not following up on my big NYPL story that appeared more than a year ago in the Wall Street Journal: A Betrayal of Trust: At the New York Public Library, It's Sell Now, Raise Money Later. Here's a previously untold part of that story: It was only by initiating and pursuing a formal freedom-of-information request for documents filed by Library with the New York Attorney General's office that I finally got access to sensitive documents about these sales. Both the Library and the AG had initially argued that this material was "confidential."

But it's a new day, with a new PR person who declares that he has a "policy of transparency." Here's Anthony's reply to my question about the use of the proceeds:

All proceeds from the art sales (almost $53 million in total) have been placed in an endowment strictly for the purpose of acquisitions for the Research Libraries. Although the Library isn't bound by the standards of the AAMD in the use of the deaccessioning proceeds, it has nonetheless adopted them.

The fund has already been put to great use, allowing us to purchase two significant archives (William Burroughs and Meredith Monk), with another major archive acquisition to be finalized and announced in January.

In case you were wondering, Gripe #2 on my infamous list of 10 Things I Don't Like About Art-PR People is, "The NY Times Gets It First, Other Reporters Second." Anthony says that he had lost all his e-mails en route between the two institutions, and had forgotten about my first question. Whatever. I'm resigned to the fact that I shall always be chopped liver to Carol's paté.

By the way, Carol, in your first paragraph, you need to change the date of the NYPL sale at Sotheby's (or at least do so in the online version): It took place in November 2005, not November 2004.

Looks like Time magazine is planning a new art and architecture blog by critic Richard Lacayo. Lots of ArtsJournal-ites, including CultureGrrl, are on the blogroll (of course). Right now the test entries are all in Latin, but I'm sure he'll learn English soon.

Here's part of his blog description:

What I won't be reporting on is parties, gallery openings or gossip. If you like to look at drunken strangers on line---and hey, who doesn't?---you already know where to find them.

Oh please tell me: Where can I find all those drunken strangers? And do they really like to line up? Who knew? I spend all my time in front of this computer!

Approach with caution: Like everything else from Wikipedia, there may be some errors here. But listed all in one place is a voluminous compilation of known big-money painting sales, both public and private, naming prices, sellers and buyers.

Apparently the Wikipedians know that David Martinez bought the $140-million Jackson Pollock. Thank goodness we've finally got THAT conundrum solved!

And who knew that the Getty bought both Picasso's "Garçon à la Pipe" and his "Dora Maar au Chat"? Not even the Getty knew that. What a surprise! And the Frick will be similarly surprised to learn that it sold the Getty its Pontormo. I always thought the Pontormo portrait had been on loan to the Frick, not owned by it.

On second thought, maybe you shouldn't click the above link. That entry really does need some work.

Having just spent four early-morning minutes talking on the radio about the "money-no-object" collector (a topic about which I still plan to blog), I experienced as a welcome tonic an article in today's Christian Science Monitor about a new plan to get art into the hands of the "no money for objects" collector---the art lover who wants to enjoy quality work at home, but can't afford it.

Lee Lawrence reports about the Fine Art Adoption Network, an organization that matches artists with admirers who send e-mails "stating who they are and why they want to adopt. An exchange ensues, and if the artist decides this adopter will provide a good home, they discuss logistics."

This initiative was begun by artist Adam Simon, with support from Art in General, a New York nonprofit organization that promotes new work. Among the adoptees is the well known New York artist Amy Sillman, who describes her participation this way:

These pieces I am putting up for adoption are small and modest gouaches. They are slightly older works on paper. My ideal adoptee is not an artist and is someone who wouldn't otherwise have a lot of access to art, though they want to.

Simon describes the genesis of his brainchild this way:

I began thinking about how most artists create far more artwork in their lifetimes than they can exhibit or sell. At the same time, a lot of people with a real interest in art don't own any original art. The system that we have for disseminating contemporary art, known as the art market, doesn't manage to get a lot of art into a lot of homes.

There is no direct correlation between appreciating art and having the money to possess it. At last---a new method of distribution to address this condition.

Have I mastered the art of the sound bite? Click below for my lightning-quick take on the state of the art market, aired early this morning (too early!) on New York Public Radio (WNYC).

I'm not responsible for my host's comment about Sotheby's sales "doubling." Actually, North American sales were up 52 percent last year; worldwide sales up 36 percent. But never contradict your host.

Today, Public Radio, tomorrow Hollywood. At least they spelled my blog "handle" right!

UPDATE: The techies at WNYC just gave me a better way than before (click below) to let you listen to my pearls of wisdom. Also, a family member said he heard me not once but three times on Morning Edition---just in case people were still sleeping (as I should have been) at 7:30 a.m.

As described yesterday by the "Felcholino" duo of the LA Times, the procedure by which the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1988 acquired the 5th century B.C. "Cult Statue of a Goddess" (possibly Aphrodite), now claimed by Italy, may seem ethically deficient by today's standards. But it was standard practice at the time: American museums would customarily contact possible source countries to solicit possible claims on the antiquities being considered for acquisition. Hearing none (as was usually the case), they would proceed with the purchase.

As recounted by Ralph Frammolino and Jason Felch:

In August 1987, the Getty had an Italian law firm send photos of the Aphrodite to the Italian Ministry of Culture, saying "an important foreign institution" was interested in buying the statue and requesting information about its authenticity....That November, Italy notified the Getty's Italian attorneys that it had no information about the Aphrodite.

According to the LA Times account, the Getty's policy at the time was "to continue buying suspect antiquities and put the burden of proving that an object was illicit on foreign governments." Because Italy and other source countries were not nearly as vigilant in protecting their cultural heritage then as they are today, this policy opened the door to acquisitions of objects that some of the museums' own experts suspected of possibly tainted provenance.

In another case of great sleuthing, the Felcholino team came up with a key former Getty employee who was willing to talk, on the record, about his strong, informed misgivings over acquiring the 7-foot limestone and marble goddess:

Luis Monreal, [then] director of the Getty Conservation Institute, saw signs that the object had been looted. There was dirt in the folds of the gown, and the torso had what appeared to be new fractures, suggesting that the statue had been recently unearthed and broken apart for easy smuggling.

He said he warned the museum's director not to buy the statue.

Like the "Getty Bronze," this appears to be an object that would not likely have been acquired under today's stricter standards for seeking proof of clean provenance. And like the bronze, stone goddess raised substantial doubts about its origins not just in recent years, but at the time that it was acquired.

If all goes according to plan, you can hear CultureGrrl's alter ego, Lee Rosenbaum, in a brief live phone interview on New York Public Radio (WNYC)'s "Morning Edition," tomorrow at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m. Am I allowed to wear my bathrobe for this?

If you're a night owl like me, please don't bother to get up: If I sound reasonably coherent, I'll post the link to my sleep-talking after I awake from my second snooze!

UPDATE: I just got a call saying my sleep may be interrupted on Friday, not tomorrow. Stay tuned to this space for late-breaking developments on this earthshaking story. ZZZzzzz....

UPDATE 2: I will indeed be on air tomorrow (Thursday) morning. But it's not for National Public Radio, as I originally thought. It's New York Public Radio, 93.9 FM in the New York City area and online at http://www.wnyc.org.

(Part I is here.)

It could be that the husband-wife duo of Ms. Diller and Ricardo Scofidio were chastened by being chosen: "We're intensely interested in the museum as an institution -- what it means," Ms. Diller noted. "As artists, we intervened in that system, sometimes aggressively. All of a sudden, we're asked to define that wall entirely. This is a time when someone like Jill [Medvedow, the ICA's director] gets a chance to select people like us, who are normally thought of as dissidents in architecture. So times have changed."

The question is whether famously tradition-bound Boston has changed enough for the ICA to attract its projected 200,000 annual visitors. When Bostonians encounter cutting-edge art, their "perennial" reaction, according to Ms. Medvedow, is: "I don't get it." Similarly, Ms. Diller noted: "It remains to be seen how a museum like this will take in Boston....I think that on both Jill's part and our part, we feel an equal weight of raising consciousness -- her about contemporary art, us about contemporary space." She noted that although her firm eschewed Boston's favorite building material, "we did want to use one 'courtesy brick' someplace. I feel very naughty saying that!"

Some of the "naughty" in the architects' original conception got lost in construction: The planned feature I had most eagerly anticipated was a long corridor along the entire width of the cantilever, where art was to be hung on its currently bare wall and lenticular glass was to be installed along the side facing the harbor. "The glass permits vision out when viewed from a perpendicular direction, but blocks vision when viewed from an angle," an earlier press release explained. The view of the harbor would follow beside you as you traversed the long corridor, but would be obscured if you looked ahead or behind.

The architects hope that eventually the film creating this novel optical effect will be installed. It was vetoed, Mr. Scofidio explained, by VIPs (including Mayor Thomas Menino) who visited the space during construction and favored "keeping the big panoramic view."

The ICA's most audacious space, and Mr. Scofidio's favorite, is the vertiginously sloped Mediatheque, arrayed with rows of computer stations that were preloaded with educational and interpretive materials and digital artworks. Suspended from the underside of the cantilevered gallery, this room descends to the downward-tilting window framing a mesmerizing, horizonless view of the water below. Virtual surfers will need to peer around their computer monitors to monitor the real surf.

Two other areas are disorienting in unintended ways: In the soaring lobby, the mid-afternoon sun's fierce glare, admitted through the enormous picture window and reflected off the polished wood floor, renders vision nearly impossible. This poses big problems for the clerk behind the counter of the museum shop, struggling to serve customers while blinded by direct sunlight.

Even worse, while I was seated in the café, a loud thud was heard as someone smacked full force into a glass wall beside the confusingly designed exit. While the victim iced his forehead outside, Mr. Renfro assured me that this fault would be corrected by affixing stickers.

The ICA's strong suit, as it should be, is the intelligently interpreted display of recent art in well-proportioned, well-lit spaces. The resourceful creative team, led by Chief Curator Nicholas Baume, has a strong track record of discovering and showcasing new talent. Now they can better exercise their own talents -- including the acquisition of works for the ICA's nascent permanent collection, drawn from its own exhibitions -- in a more commodious, flexible environment. The inaugural show, "Super Vision," which explores myriad contemporary ways of seeing and being seen, highlights a timely topic, elucidated by labels and wall text with great clarity.

What's not yet clear is whether the ICA's finances will be able to sustain its vision. For now, it is counting on earned income and contributions to balance its expanded $11 million budget. But Deputy Director Paul Bessire acknowledges that the current endowment of only $3 million is inadequate for long-term needs: "We need $20 million for sustainability."

Also needed: the additional buzz and attendance that the stalled development of hotels, offices, residences and stores in the scruffy area around the ICA's isolated site would bring.

"Hopefully architects who are building around us will be a little more responsive, now that we're here," said Mr. Scofidio. "I think we've set the bar."

Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs on culture at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.

As you know, I can't link to the Wall Street Journal's subscribers-only site, but I AM allowed to post the text of my article. I'll again do it in two parts, so as not to tax the short attention spans of hyperactive blog readers. (It's on today's "Leisure & Arts" page, D10, for those of you who still turn pages, instead of clicking hyperlinks. Online WSJ subscribers can find it here. )

Now that my WSJ gag order has been lifted, I will also be writing more about the ICA for CultureGrrl---particularly about the excellent inaugural shows.

Here's the first half of the piece:

Boston
Given their reputation as the mischievously subversive renegades of the art and architecture worlds, Diller Scofidio + Renfro have created a surprisingly decorous building for the new waterfront site of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which opened last month. At first sight, its effect is less "Wow!" than "Huh?" Pedestrians approach the new 65,000-square-foot ICA from its pedestrian-looking delivery side.

The flat wall is an immediate letdown from the expectations raised by the prospect of the first completed building in the U.S. by these maverick Americans, previously best known for their work as artists and theorists. At its most alluring when strikingly lit at night, the museum turns its best face -- a dramatic 80-foot top-floor cantilever, overhanging an outdoor expanse of mahogany bleachers -- away from the city, toward the harbor.

Although the spaces for exhibitions, education, eating and shopping are, for the most part, serviceably ordinary, the architects do defy convention by turning standard museum topography upside down and backward: The formal staircase at the front entrance of many traditional museums morphs here into grandstand seating out back. The ICA's ground-level main entrance, however, is a bit of a challenge to find -- a small, heavy glass door, tucked away in a corner, under an overhanging outdoor staircase.

To get to the art, you must ascend to the top, which houses the museum's concrete-floored, sky-lit, white-walled galleries. The ICA wanted all its exhibition space on one level, for a continuous experience, and the 17,000-square-foot cantilevered loft-in-the-sky was the architects' resourceful solution to the problem of the small allowable footprint below.

The two levels below the galleries are principally occupied by an attractive, steeply raked 325-seat auditorium, with a dancer-friendly wood floor and an ever-changing backdrop of harbor views through floor-to-ceiling glass. Artists producing works of theater, dance or music for this space may want to figure in the delightful distraction of boats plying the water and seagulls flying in the air. If not, pushing one button will lower translucent fabric panels to block the view; another button activates the descent of blackout panels.

Still, in a world of convention-busting recent museum architecture -- in Denver, Milwaukee and Bilbao, Spain, for example -- the exterior of the new ICA bears a surprising resemblance to a utilitarian building nearby: Visible from the museum and a short walk away looms Rafael Viñoly's 1.7-million-square-foot Boston Convention & Exhibition Center (2004), also sporting an exaggeratedly protuberant canopy, which, like the ICA's, has a downward-tilting rectangular window jutting out beneath.

When I asked Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Elizabeth Diller if this resonance with Mr. Viñoly's building was intended, she looked genuinely horrified and declared: "You're the first person who's mentioned that to me. I'll have to go to look at it!"

Such mainstream comparisons must be jarring to provocateurs known for their biting institutional critiques, fully displayed in a 2003 retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Their most famous built structure was the Blur Building, a pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002, whose "skin" consisted of mist pumped through high-pressure nozzles.

Diller + Scofidio (joined more recently in their practice by Charles Renfro) are also known for an unrealized 2002 design commissioned for Eyebeam, a New York museum for art and technology, which resembles the ICA with its ribbon-like slab, folding back and forth to form floors, walls and ceilings. The wood from the ICA's rear harbor walk rises up the public grandstand, inside the building to the stage floor, ascending the auditorium's stairs to its rear wall and its ceiling, then outside again to clad the underside of the cantilever.

COMING NEXT: Part II

CultureGrrl told you more than a month ago that MoMA was talking to real estate developers who wanted to buy MoMA-owned land adjacent to the museum. They were discussing "the possibility of constructing a mixed-use building that would combine private commercial functions with more space for MoMA, probably to be used as galleries," I reported then.

Now the deal's been done.

Carol Vogel reports in today's NY Times:

The Museum of Modern Art is selling its last vacant parcel of land in Midtown for $125 million to Hines, an international real estate developer based in Houston, the museum's director said yesterday.

As part of the deal Hines is to construct a mixed-use building on West 54th Street that will connect to the museum's second- , fourth- and fifth-floor galleries, said the director, Glenn D. Lowry. He said the project would afford about 50,000 square feet of additional exhibition space for the Modern's painting and sculpture collections.

Now that he's got that done, what's Glenn going to do with the property he bought next to the former MoMA QNS in Queens?

Linda Sandler of Bloomberg today reported Sotheby's year-end auction totals. Worldwide sales in 2006 totaled $3.66 billion, compared to $2.69 billion in 2005; Sales in North America were $1.84 billion and $1.21 billion, respectively.

Go to Sotheby's website for more detailed breakdowns---by month and by geographical area, as well as totals for individual sales. You can find these by going here and clicking on "2006 YTD Sales" and "2005 YTD Sales."

On Friday the Wall Street Journal published six examples from what must have been an outpouring of letters from blog defenders, responding to the Dec. 20 anti-blog screed by Joseph Rago, the WSJ's assistant editorial features editor (discussed by CultureGrrl here).

The WSJ's Letters editor captured the spirit of the exasperated correspondents with this headline:

Print This: Your Blast Into the Blogosphere Insults Your Readers

I particularly liked the letter from Marilyn A. Turnbow, the one woman whose letter was chosen:

Does Mr. Rago suppose that the public is not sophisticated enough to separate the wheat from the chaff in the blogosphere?...Yes, there are low-quality blogs out there. Even the high-quality blogs occasionally get things wrong. But so does The Wall Street Journal. Please give the readers of the blogosphere some credit for critical thinking.

For those of you with WSJ online subscriptions, the six letters are here.

This heated dialogue between proponents of new and old media will cool in the years to come, as the MSM traditionalists realize that, like it or not, more and more information-seekers are being caught in the web.

Having said that, don't forget to pick up your copy of the WSJ tomorrow, and look for my Boston ICA article on the "Leisure & Arts" page (or, if you're allergic to paper, you'll find it on CultureGrrl).

CultureGrrl didn't make Tyler's list of Top Ten Art Blogs this year. Guess I'll just have to try harder. And I thought I was a contender!

Walker Off Center (where Tyler's list was published): Please have a look at this rookie. Do you have any designations for Best New Art Blogger?

I looked at my blog last night and saw that the font gremlins had somehow transformed all the type of every post (except for my most recent one) into boldface. This is a real problem, because the only way I distinguish long quotes is by rendering them in boldface (rather than in quotations).

This already caused some confusion for Regina Hackett, art critic of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who e-mailed to ask why she couldn't find Barbara Fleischman's response to Marion True's letter in this post. (It's the second paragraph.)

For now, let the colons before the quotes be your guide. Meanwhile, I'll do my best to wrest my blog from the gremlins!

My numbers are soaring today, so I assume that you're all catching up with my two big year-end items (posted while you were carousing): The Year in CultureGrrl and Artworld Luminaries' 2007 Resolutions.

Now please excuse me while I do a little work on my piece about the Boston ICA, which (as of now) is scheduled to appear in the new, reduced (in page size) Wall Street Journal. The good news is that "Leisure & Arts" today has two pages, instead of just one: Don't miss Karen Wilkin's excellent review of the Metropolitan Museum's Americans in Paris, even if the piece does misspell my new fave, Cecilia Baux (sic) and call her "cautious to the point of reactionary"!

If you're an online subscriber, you can get Wilkin's piece here. I'll post my Boston piece, when it's up (hopefully) tomorrow.

UPDATE: I've now vanquished those pesky gremlins and liberated those boldface names and quotes (with a little help from our trusty techie).

I made a list and checked it twice: art stories that raised questions in 2006, which need to be answered in 2007. Here's a mischievous list of hypothetical New Year's resolutions by 10 artworld players who have been naughty or insufficiently nice:

Malcolm Rogers: I will hire more guards for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and see to it that they are better trained.

Ronald Lauder: I will make sure that that the Neue Galerie promptly posts the Nazi-era provenance of the works in its collection, as repeatedly promised.

Michael Govan: All right, already! I WILL agree to talk to Tyler Green.

Neil MacGregor: Now that CultureGrrl has designated me as her number-one pick for next director of the Metropolitan Museum, maybe I WILL grant her a brief interview whilst I meet with the Met's trustees. Might I spare a half-hour in 2013?

Stephen Siegel, spokesperson for the FBI, Newark: Because of the legitimate public interest in this information, I will announce the name of the shipping company on whose watch (or lack thereof) Goya's "Children With a Cart" was carted off, en route to the Guggenheim.

Francesco Rutelli: Instead of merely depleting the antiquities collections of U.S. museums and "rewarding" them with temporary loans, I will work to create a framework for a more open market, whereby international museums can legally acquire types of material that Italian institutions already possess in superabundance.

Lisa Dennison: I will belatedly make good on my pledge to credit Guggenheim curators for their work, by including their names in introductory wall texts for their exhibitions.

Steve Wynn: I will wear elbow pads when I'm around valuable paintings.

Alice Walton: I will drop my generous offer to buy the Statue of Liberty for the sculpture garden of my new museum in Bentonville. John Wilmerding tells me that it's not by an American artist.

Mayor John Street: I will extend to the Greater Philadelphia Area my proposed registry of important works that may need protection if threatened by possible sale or removal from their locality. What's good for Philadelphia is good for Merion, where the Barnes Foundation is a local cultural treasure.

Such resolutions have about as much probability of being kept as CultureGrrl's New Year's intention to blog less and devote more time to serious long-form writing.

Better luck keeping yours!