Department of Broken Promises: Neue Galerie's AWOL Provenance Posting; NY Times' Flatlining "ArtsBeat"

Ronald Lauder, standing left, Maria Altmann, seated right, and You-Know-Who, center

From the serious to the ridiculous:

---You may remember when I reported on the Neue Galerie's much delayed, technologically exasperating and frustratingly fragmentary posting of the provenance for its collection on its website.

Now, if you persevere through the seven-step, provenance-finding procedure that I previously outlined, to get to a list of artists in the collection, you will discover that clicking on the "links" for those artists' names brings you to a dead end. I tried it with two different web browsers.

On Firefox I got:

The requested URL /browse/results/body.html was not found on this server.

On Internet Explorer, I never got past the screen that says "Loading."

In other words, what little provenance information was there is no longer there.

Considering that the Neue Galerie's founder, collector Ronald Lauder, conspicuously styles himself as an advocate for freeing "the last prisoners of World War II"---artworks misappropriated by the Nazis---this is a particularly disturbing result.

---On a lighter note (a VERY lite note), ArtsBeat, the NY Times feeble attempt at a culture blog, has become totally inane. In fact, it's not a blog at all---just a fatuous attempt at interactivity without substance.

The last substantive post bearing a culture writer's byline was Ben Brantley's Aug. 7 "London Theater Journal." Since then, there have been only five entries, all unsigned and structured along these lines:

Do you agree with Howard P. Chudacoff, who suggests in his new book, "Children at Play: An American History," that organized activities, overscheduling and excessive amounts of homework are crowding out free time and constricting children's imaginations and social skills? Share your thoughts.

Here's my thought: The Times should do its homework and learn what a blog is.