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