Legal Tidbits: Barnes, Fractional Gifts, Salander O'Reilly

---I guess my guess was right: My legal eagles tell me that the Pennsylvania Attorney General and lawyers for the Barnes Foundation "are filing preliminary objections on the issue of standing" against the petitioners who are trying to get Judge Stanley Ott to reconsider his decision to allow the museum to move to Philadelphia.

I suspect that the AG will also argue, as I predicted on Wednesday, that neither the Friends of the Barnes nor Montgomery County can reopen a case that has already been decided. That was the view expressed to me several months ago in Philadelphia by Lawrence Barth, the senior deputy attorney general who had handled the Barnes case. We'll know more later today, when the lawyers and the filings are due in Montgomery County Orphans' Court.

---We now have a bill number for the Promotion of Artistic Giving Act of 2007, which addresses the fractional gifts mess created by Section 1218 of the 2006 Pension Protection Act. The legislation you may want to urge your Congressman to support is H.R. 3881.

---Here's the press release for Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture, the major selling exhibition of blue-chip artists that was to have opened Wednesday at the legally beleaguered Salander-O'Reilly Galleries...until it didn't. John Goodrich of the NY Sun attended a preview of the now scuttled exhibition, which he said was "ravishing" [via].