The New Yorker's Big Art Week: Greeks, Romans and Feminists

While I abandon you for the rest of the day, here are a couple of links to keep you busy, both from the just arrived Apr. 9 issue of The New Yorker:

---Slide show illustrating Rebecca Mead's "Den of Antiquity: The Met Defends Its Treasures," which (despite its title) is very Metropolitan Museum-friendly and Shelby White-friendly. Regarding the ownership controversy over the collection assembled by White and her late husband, Leon Levy (whose names are affixed to the central space of the Met's new Greek and Roman galleries, opening Apr. 20), Mead unilluminatingly reports that "the negotiations with the Italians over her collection...were underway and she hoped that their claims would soon be resolved." What else is new?

The slide show features the celebrated Euphronios krater, once owned by the Met but now bearing the credit line, "Lent by the Republic of Italy." And it includes an image of the object that is prominently featured in Mead's lead as an important acquisition, re-identified as the "Hope Dionysos" by curator Carlos Picón, who bought it for the Met as soon as he became its curator of Greek and Roman art in 1990. That sculpture is unaccountably not illustrated in the piece itself. (At this writing, there's no link to the article.)

---Peter Schjeldahl's take on the Brooklyn Museum's Global Feminisms: "a big, high-minded, intermittently enjoyable show."

That's what I call: "Damning with faint praise."