December 2007 Archives

For when you've had enough of other New Year's countdowns, here's CultureGrrl's Top 20 for 2007, in chronological order from the beginning of the year. (The 2006 Year in CultureGrrl is here.) I'm focusing mainly on issue-related posts, rather than reviews of shows or new museum facilities. To get the full flavor of my acerbic offerings, you may also want to click the righthand column of my blog, for my rants and raves in the Wall Street Journal, New York Public Radio, NPR, the LA Times and my BBC-TV abduction in the backseat of a black SUV.

Here's a selective recap of my 2007 blog posts:

The "Gross Clinic" Deaccession Debacle
The New Philly Barnes: Derek Gillman Reveals the Details
Burying Albert Barnes in the Philly MegaBarnes
The Secret Lowry Dowry: What's Wrong with This Picture?
Why Does the Manner of Lowry's Compensation Matter?
Uneasy in Abu Dhabi: Will UAE Eschew Past Construction Worker Abuses in New Museum Projects?
Who Should Succeed Lawrence Small at the Smithsonian?
The Albright-Knox Pox: Will It Be Catching?
Who Should Succeed Philippe at the Met? An Update
Après Philippe: Whither the Met?
Art-Market Fever: The Marginalization of Museums
Alice Walton's Bleeding Heart: A Paean to "Donor's Intent"
Why We Need Tax Deductions for Charitable Donations
Under the Wraps: Is It Christoph Büchel's Compromised Artwork, Or Just MASS MoCA's Stuff?
St. Louis Art Museum's Off-the-Wall Deaccessions
Randolph College Sends its Signature Bellows to Auction
The Broader Significance of the Maier Massacre and the Stieglitz Egress
The "Times Change" Defense for Past Antiquities Transgressions
Metropolitan Museum's Annual Report: Big Operating Surplus, Big Debt Increase, Big Lieberman Bequest
AAMD Issues New Statement on Deaccessioning

See you in 2008, when the Big Story will be: Deaccession Bubble Bursts When All Antiquities Go Home, Sen. Grassley Outlaws Museums and Philippe Succeeds Himself.

Happy New Year!

Music critic and composer Greg Sandow (who blogged here about the NY Philharmonic's trip to North Korea) responds to my NY Philharmonic's Korean Overture: An American in Pyongyang:

I'm on your side, of course: I think they should go. But I don't have any high-minded goals in mind for the visit. I guess I just hope that some of the North Korean elite will have sparks lit in their hearts.

But [Elliot] Carter? [I had suggested in my above-linked post that the Philharmonic should include a difficult contemporary composer, like Carter, on its program.] I couldn't agree with that. I doubt anyone in North Korea is equipped even to begin to understand what Carter is doing, so the performance would seem like a blast of incomprehensible and totally unfamiliar noise.

Besides, Carter doesn't represent current American music. I'd think they should play John Adams or Steve Reich.

Excerpt from W. Richard West Jr.'s $30,000-plus retirement video, posted online by the Washington Post

This makes me sad. But it does suggest another hot-button issue ripe for another position paper from the Association of Art Museum Directors: What constitutes appropriate expenditures for travel, entertainment and other activities of museum officials, and what kinds of reporting and oversight should be instituted?

I think W. Richard West Jr. did a fine job realizing the Smithsonian Institution's dreams for a National Museum of the American Indian on the Washington Mall. (I reviewed the opening for the Wall Street Journal here.)

But a 2,600-word exposé of West's travel and entertainment habits in today's Washington Post indicates that the museum's recently retired director measured his nonprofit compensation against his former expectations as a private-practice attorney. His peregrinations reportedly exceeded those of the high-flying former head of the Smithsonian, Lawrence Small.

West told the Post:

I am grateful for at least the past year to have been the highest-paid director of a museum in the Smithsonian. Even at that status I have yet to earn even two-thirds of what I earned as a private attorney in my last year.

The Post noted that "West's spending continued even after Congress this year stepped up oversight of the Smithsonian" but he and his staff "became increasingly wary about how his spending would be perceived if it was made public."

Now it has been.

It's not clear from the story how reporters James Grimaldi and Jacqueline Trescott obtained their exhaustively detailed information about such delightful interludes as "a 23-day trip costing more than $18,000 [that] began in February and stretched into March and included stops in the American Southwest, Australia, New Zealand and Paris" and "a $286 meal with filmmaker and photographer Gwendolen Cates during which most of the tab went for alcoholic beverages, including a $75 bottle of Italian wine, a 1997 Barbaresco."

Could it be that a certain Senator's office was a helpful source for this story?

Michael Conforti, president designate of AAMD

I really should look at the Association of Art Museum Directors' website more often.

It turns out that last month AAMD quietly adopted a statement on "Art Museums and the Practice of Deaccessioning." (Go to Position Papers and click the first item on the list.)

With the "Gross Clinic" Debacle, the The Albright-Knox Pox, the Maier Massacre and Stieglitz Egress, the St. Louis Blues and the Brandeis Surprise, 2007 will go down as the Year of the Deplorable Deaccession. AAMD's revisiting its 2001 professional guideines for art disposals is an idea whose time has definitely come.

Below is my report and critique of the ways in which the new 3½-page statement goes beyond AAMD's previously published guidelines (set forth in "Professional Practices in Art Museums").

---Transparency: "AAMD believes it is...important that a museum's deaccessioning process be publicly transparent."

But does transparency of "process" translate into public disclosure (preferably in advance) of the identity of works being considered for disposal, the expected method of disposal, and (afterwards) the amount of the proceeds? That's what I think the public has a right to expect of museums considering sales of works held in trust for the public.

---Local importance: "Does the object have special historical or cultural relevance to the city, state, university, or college in which the museum is located?"

Now we're talking about "Kindred Spirits" (New York Public Library), "Gross Clinic" (Thomas Jefferson University), "Artemis and the Stag" (Albright-Knox Gallery), "Men of the Docks" (Randolph College's Maier Museum) and "Radiator Building" (Fisk University). The trouble is that none of the above institutions, with the exception of Buffalo's Albright-Knox, are members of AAMD. Such considerations should nevertheless enter into the decisions of all nonprofits that care about their communities' cultural heritage.

---The Public Domain: "If objects are to be sold, would it be appropriate to explore sale to, or exchange with, another educational or cultural institution to help ensure the object remains in a public collection?"

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Museum-quality works that are in the public domain should stay in the public domain. We have paid for these works, through the tax-exempt status of museums and tax-deductions given to donors. They belong to us and shouldn't be used as trading chips.

---Mission Creep: "In rare instances, the governing body of a museum may decide it is essential to change the mission of the institution. In these cases, existing works in the collection may no longer be consistent with the museum's new collecting goals and may be considered for deaccession. It is not typical for a museum to alter its mission significantly, and such decisions should be made only after thorough and transparent deliberation and consultation with the museum staff and trustees, other local cultural institutions, and the public."

Unfortunately, it has actually become increasingly "typical" for museums to expediently rejigger their missions to justify deaccessions. I discussed some examples in my NY Times Op-Ed, For Sale: Our Permanent Collection. A more recent example is the Albright-Knox's disposals of important pre-20th century works that it had long held and proudly displayed.

While AAMD's new statement raises some important hot-button issues, it doesn't forcefully address them. It merely suggests that members should "weigh" and "consider" them. It's time for this under-performing organization to become more prescriptive and proactive.

I'm looking to Michael Conforti (above), director of the Clark Art Institute and a deep thinker about museums' professional practices, to put some real force behind AAMD's chronically wishy-washy "Position Papers." He becomes the organization's president in June. But why wait? The current president, Gail Andrews of the Birmingham Museum of Art, could start right away.

I knew that when I reacted to the notion of Egypt's copyrighting the pyramids with a snide crack about New York City's copyrighting the Statue of Liberty, someone was probably going to inform me that the the lady with the torch (above) IS copyrighted.

Indeed, so said Richard Lacayo in his Looking Around blog yesterday.

So I decided to check it out, and found this web page from the Library of Congress. Not New York City, but the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi copyrighted the 1886 monument by depositing a photograph with the Copyright Office in 1876. You legal eagles help me out here, but I believe this means that the copyright has by now expired (maximum term: 95 years). I'm getting into New York harbor waters way over my head here.

Mr. Art Law Blog: AU SECOURS! (Glub, glub.)

UPDATE: Donn Zaretsky dives in to rescue me, confirming that I'm probably right about Lady Liberty's now being in the public domain. Finally, people can start manufacturing little replicas to sell to tourists! (Just kidding, of course. Copyright, when it was still in effect, obviously had no effect on the kitsch industry!)

Iris You, who describes herself as "a Korean-American frustrated with South Korea and U.S. policy against North Korea," responds to NY Philharmonic's Korean Overture: An American in Pyongyang:

The general public living in Pyongyang ARE social elites. People elsewhere can't afford food let alone concert tickets and transportation to concert halls. Children are starving but the government is so corrupt that foreign aid does not reach the children, but just makes those corrupt people fatter.

If Philharmonic really wants to reach the general public and bring them joy of music, forget the political agenda by singing the "Star-Spangled Banner." The general public in North Korea does not share the same sentiment as you do about the American national anthem. (They would not understand the lyric anyway. English is not taught as second language.) It will satisfy Americans who will imagine that they got their points across with the North Korean government, but not much else.

Taking the music out of concert hall to a park may be a better idea. I heard from my brother, who is a musician in South Korea, that Yanni is trying again to have concert in Demilitarized Zone [between North and South Korea] in 2008. That should be interesting!

---What's next for Zahi Hawass? Copyrighting the pyramids, of course. Rory McCarthy of the Manchester Guardian has the story. Do you think that New York City can copyright the Statue of Liberty?

---The indefatigable Martin Bailey of The Art Newspaper moves on from the faux "Faun" to a possibly false or incomplete export-license declaration. He reports that a Customs investigation will delay, possibly for years, the acquisition by the Prince of Liechtenstein (for the Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna) of Alonso Sanchez Coello's "Portrait of Don Diego," 1577. London's National Gallery wants a chance to acquire it.

Bailey further reports:

There is no suggestion that the Prince or his museum were aware of any difficulties over the application or did anything improper.

---All you auction-ologists must read Linda Sandler in Bloomberg today: She parses information about 2006 and 2007 sale totals, published on Sotheby's website (scroll down to the last page here and here).

Sandler reports that the auction house "sold about 46 percent more art [by dollar amount] this year." Actually, the totals Sandler cites---$5.33 billion in 2007, compared to $3.66 billion in 2006, are just auction totals and do not include Sotheby's private sales.

Sandler quotes officials from Sotheby's and Christies, financial analysts and, of course, dour dealer Richard Feigen, on the year past and the prospects going forward. The consensus: Market growth will slow.

The unasked question: Will it be growth or correction?

RELATED: Christmas is a slow-news day, and news outlets all over the world were running this bullish Associated Press story about the art market.

"Sabina," formerly from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in a publicity image for Italy's restitution exhibition

In an essay prepared for the recent opening of Nostoi. Recovered Masterpieces, Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli slyly appropriated the rhetoric of "universal museum" proponents to chide them. You can click the "Cartella Stampa" link at the above website to download the entire batch of statements (in Italian) by Italian officials, as well as the list of objects in the exhibition.

Rutelli declared:

One cannot credit as a cultural institution one that proffers stolen and illegally acquired works to the public: It would be paradoxical to invoke culture to justify the retention of stolen works....

Ours is not a nationalistic discourse. On the contrary: universal, because each national patrimony belongs to the world, and circulation cannot be left to illegal organizations.

This trophy show, on view through Mar. 2 at Rome's presidential palace, includes 68 antiquities recently relinquished by four American museums (the Getty, Metropolitan, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Princeton University Museum) and a dealer (Royal Athena Galleries, New York).

To reflect a "broad level of cultural consciousness" (in the words of Stefano De Caro, director general for archaeology at the Italian Culture Ministry), the display includes one sculpture loaned by Greece for the occasion:

Marble Kore, ca. 530 B.C., formerly from the Getty Museum

If you read Italian (or trust Google Language Tools), you can click the link below for Rutelli's complete remarks. But why didn't the Great Repatriator send me a Christmas card this year?

Taking questions at the Dec. 11 press conference: the NY Philharmonic's chairman Paul Guenther, its president Zarin Mehta, North Korea's U.N. ambassador Pak Gil Yon (left to right)

Should the NY Philharmonic travel to North Korea, the erstwhile member of the "axis of evil"? YES.

Does the announced program for the orchestra's controversial foray into cultural diplomacy---"An American in Paris" (Gershwin) and "From the New World" (Dvořák)---carry sufficient heft for this weighty occasion? NO.

I don't buy the opponents' argument (most forcefully expressed by the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout), that a classical music concert can somehow lend "legitimacy" to a despot. Kim Jong-il's future clout may owe much to improving his relationship with George Bush, but nothing to cozying up to Zarin Mehta and Lorin Maazel.

What I DO think is that music and musicians can help foster ties among people and cultures, transcending political and philosophical differences. This wouldn't be the first time that cordial cultural exchanges occurred between countries with cold political relations, on the verge of warming. In the museum field, there is a long history of "détente" exhibitions (as once described by art critic John Russell in the NY Times here).

When cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union were resumed in 1986 for the first time since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the Reagan White House issued a press release saying that such artistic activity ''can help break down barriers, lessen distrust, reduce the levels of secrecy and bring forth a more open world.'' The President himself commented:

Civilized people everywhere have a stake in keeping contacts, communication and creativity as broad, deep and free as possible.

There are some important caveats, however: While a thaw in political relations (thanks to progress in curtailing North Korea's nuclear program) may make cultural exchanges possible, U.S. organizations should have complete artistic freedom in devising their plans and should not allow themselves to become political tools for either their home country or their host country.

In a NY Times Op-Ed piece last October, two informed analysts of this North Korean overture---Richard V. Allen, previously Reagan's national security adviser and currently co-chairman of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, and Chuck Downs, a member of that committee's board---listed "reasonable demands" that the orchestra should make before taking the stage in Pyongyang:

...that the orchestra alone set its program; that the performance be broadcast on state radio for everyone to hear; that the concert hall be open to the public, not just the elite; and that the Western press be allowed to attend. If the regime refuses these conditions, the Philharmonic should, in the name of artistic freedom, decline to perform in North Korea.

Fair enough. In its announcement of the Feb. 26 concert, the Philharmonic indicated that most of these conditions will likely be met. The program will include the "Star-Spangled Banner." The orchestra expects to "welcome students to an open rehearsal, and we are working on arranging for New York Philharmonic musicians to give master classes at the music conservatory in Pyongyang." The orchestra stipulated that it "would be accompanied by an international press corps."

What's more, as quoted in a NY Times' report of the agreement, Christopher Hill, our country's chief negotiator with North Korea, said that the concert would be broadcast nationwide "to ensure that not just a small elite would hear" it.

The piece missing from the "reasonable demands" stipulated by Allen and Downs is that the general public, not just the elite, be granted admission to the concert hall. This too should be a precondition for a performance abroad by one of our country's premier orchestras.

And while the Philharmonic is probably right not to provoke its hosts with overtly political programming, it could endeavor to make more subtle but powerful points about democracy in two ways: Instead of playing only easy-listening favorites for beginners, it should slip in one short but challenging piece by a contemporary American composer (my choice: Elliot Carter), to demonstrate what contemporary creativity can be in a free society.

And they should make the most of that permitted patriotic moment---our national anthem: Get a great American soprano to sing it---someone who can make the penultimate phrase, "o'er the land of the FREE," ring out gloriously. [Long pause] "And the home of the brave."

Play ball!

---There is a certain irony to the exhibition that opened Friday at Italy's Quirinal presidential palace, proudly showing off recently repatriated antiquities as precious museum pieces worthy of admiration as beautiful, isolated objects. Isn't the whole point of Italy's campaign to emphasize that these objects have been robbed of much of their power because they were stripped of their archaeological context? A more powerful presentation that might have helped bolster Italy's case would have examined what we know and can surmise about the objects' histories, and what questions we may never be able to answer because they were looted.

---The New Acropolis Museum in Athens on Saturday publicly opened its entrance which displays, under a glass floor, the remains of cobblestone roads, dwellings, baths and the foundations of workshops that were uncovered during excavation for the museum. Meanwhile, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and UNESCO are organizing an International Conference on The Return of Cultural Objects to their Country of Origin, to be held at the new museum on Mar. 21-22. I've been invited to participate on one of the panels, "Museum and Cultural Context." (Now I've just got to find out what they mean by this.)

---In the never-ending saga of the Barnes Foundation's attempt to move to Philadelphia from Merion, PA, Judge Stanley Ott of Montgomery County Orphans' Court has now granted the Friends of the Barnes' new lawyer, Eric Spade, a 60-day extension to file arguments supporting the Friends' contention that the Barnes should not be allowed to move and that they should be granted legal standing to challenge that move in court. Briefs had been due on Dec. 31. The Philadelphia Inquirer has the story. Maybe if the Friends keep changing lawyers, they can keep the Barnes in legal limbo indefinitely.

---Apparently the National Gallery in Washington hasn't found anything "unconscionable" about the $1-million deal struck by National Geographic Society and the government of Afghanistan for a proposed tour of that country's Bactrian hoard and other antiquities. The U-word appeared last June in a NY Times story detailing outsiders' objections to the compensation for Afghanistan. The tour is set to open at the Washington museum May 25, closing there Sept. 7. According the the museum's press release, "plans are being finalized for the exhibition to travel to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum."

Carol Vogel of the Times reports:

Terry D. Garcia, the executive vice president of the National Geographic Society's mission programs, said: "One million is not a small sum. The price was negotiated by the Afghan government. This is not a commercial exhibition."

Maybe American museums exacting tribute from sister institutions for megabucks rental shows should learn something from the Afghans.

---The on again-off again Russian museums' show, planned for London's Royal Academy, appears to be on again (although the Jan. 26 scheduled opening is still reportedly in doubt). The NY Times reports that Great Britain will "move up, to early January from late February, the effective date of a provision in legislation that bars the seizure of art lent on a government-to-government basis." But what about other international shows, with works loaned by museums or individuals, not governments? Don't they deserve immunity-from-seizure protection too?

---This came in on Friday from the Guggenheim:

Beginning today, a restored segment of the Frank Lloyd Wright Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will be visible to the public from Fifth Avenue and 89th Street, where scaffolding has been removed from the building. In November, the New York Landmarks Commission approved painting the museum light gray matching Tnemec BF72 Platinum color. A custom-coating system, designed specifically for the Guggenheim Museum, has been applied to the section that is now revealed....

The restoration work is projected to be complete and the scaffolding to come down by early summer 2008.

Is another movie being shot then?

As my art-lings already know from previous posts, my mother's broken hip and its aftermath have been keeping me from my appointed blogging rounds. We have much to catch up on together in the coming days and weeks.

Before I try to get back to what this blog is about (what was that again?), let me try to wrap up the healthcare updates by observing, "It's Hip to Be Home." (Don't worry: I won't turn this into another Singing Podcast!)

My faithful readers know that I have been comparing my epic medical journey to Dante's "Divine Comedy": We got through Hospital Hell and Nursing Home Purgatory, and although I never came across anyone named Beatrice, I knew I was on my way to Paradise when I drove to the rehab joint on the morning of what I was hoping would be my last day visiting (non-cultural) institutions. I turned on my car radio to listen to classical music on WQXR (my main cultural solace during this fractured period) and, to my amazement, found myself listening to Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances." Music buffs know that this includes the catchy melody that became a popular song from the 1953 musical "Kismet": "Stranger in Paradise."

Paradise, in this case, is an apartment in Riverdale (the northwest Bronx), where my mother has now rejoined my father. And it has certainly become stranger in this paradise...equipped as it is with two walkers, two wheelchairs and a supporting cast of homecare aides and physical therapists.

The only good thing I can say about this experience is that spending most of my last two weeks within the confines of a hospital and then (for Mom's rehab) a nursing home was an easy way for me to lose all four pounds that I have been hoping to shed, without the inconvenience of doing any exercise whatsoever. (I do not recommend this weight-reduction technique.)

I'm still going to be distracted by parental needs this week, so don't expect me to be posting at full strength quite yet. Of course, most of you are going to be likewise (or hopefully not so likewise) engaged by your families and friends until 2008, so you'll hardly miss me.

Here's hoping for a peaceful holiday season, a Feisty New Year and (giving the last word to Dante's last words): "The love that moves the sun and the other stars."

Martin Gayford's comments yesterday in Bloomberg notwithstanding, the Art Institute of Chicago's acquisition of the faux "Faun", purported to be by Gauguin, was not the biggest museum acquisition gaffe "since the days of the ingenious Dutchman Han van Meegeren," who manufactured "Vermeers" in the 1940s.

At least as high-profile and as embarrassing was the Cleveland Museum's celebrated acquisition of a "Grünewald" depiction of St. Catherine of Alexandria, purchased in 1974 as in important lost work, but three years later revealed to be a 20th-century forgery. The dealer who sold it to Cleveland refunded the price, mostly in cash and partly in art.

Sometimes wanting it to be so makes it so...at least for a while. I like the comment by veteran museum director Samuel Sachs II, who presented a major "Fakes and Forgeries" show many years ago as director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts:

The best forgeries are those that haven't been discovered yet.

In his Art Law Blog, Donn Zaretsky addresses my question of why Janice and Henri Lazarof were willing to bestow upon the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a major fractional and partial gift of modern artworks in the current unfavorable tax climate for this type of donation, which museum officials claim has essentially frozen this form of largesse.

Zaretsky writes:

The answer, it seems, is that technical corrections have at last been introduced in Congress that will fix the problematic estate and gift tax consequences that were created by the enactment of the new law last year. I'm told by a lobbyist close to the negotiations that the corrections have bipartisan support and have already been vetted by the Treasury, so it's assumed by all concerned that they will eventually be enacted, and with an effective date retroactive to the date the original legislation took effect, thus covering the Lazarofs' gift to LACMA.

LACMA probably could tell us if Donn is right about the Lazarofs' thinking, but my two e-mails asking the museum's press office about this have yet to be answered.

In the meantime, there is, even now, one advantage to giving in installments: Donors are only allowed to take charitable donation deductions up to a certain percentage of their adjusted gross income. Giving in installments may allow them to take a larger total deduction, by spreading it over several tax years.

UPDATE: Barbara Pflaumer of LACMA's press office said that the spam filter ate my two e-mails. But she had no further insights to provide on the Lazarofs' reasons for going ahead with their fractional gift despite the unfavorable tax treatment: "This was a decision they made, not LACMA," Pflaumer observed.

Part I is here.

This continues my not-suitable-for-the-Wall Street Journal responses to the Philadelphia Museum's new Perelman Building. (For the sober mainstream media treatment, go to my WSJ article here.)

Below is an awkward junction of the old Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance building (right), the new Richard Gluckman addition (left) and his outdoor café (bottom, with red chairs):

To mitigate neighbors' concerns about the institutional intrusion, Gluckman attempted to embellish the new construction with some greenery. Below (on left, behind the red-and-white sign) is a wall with trellis intended to be covered, top to bottom, by vines. Like the rest of the Perelman, it's still a work in progress:

So was the loading dock, unfinished when I visited:

But let's go inside. Here's the much vaunted "galleria"---more like a glorified corridor, bridging the old (right) and the new (left):

And here's the Ray Perelman-loaned Maillol, in one of the niches for sculpture and other objects. But it's hard to see these pieces in the round (unless you manage to squeeze behind):

The contemporary sculpture installation in the renovated old part of the building was a bit of a jumble:

But the relocated staffers are pleased with their new digs. Here's costumes and textiles conservator Sara Reiter, making friends with her new equipment in her new lab:

There have been lots of conflicting accounts about whether or not Russia has definitely canceled the big museum loan show scheduled to run from Jan. 26 to Apr. 18 at London's Royal Academy. Here's what Johanna Bennett of the Academy's press office stated yesterday:

The Royal Academy of Arts has not received any official notification regarding the status of the exhibition From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St. Petersburg and is seeking clarification with the Russian Ministry of Culture.

At issue, as I posted in October, is the question of whether Great Britain can provide airtight immunity from seizure for any loans that claimants might try to obtain.

Bloomberg reports that the Russian show has been canceled. But the London Times and the International Herald Tribune said the final decision would be made today. And the Manchester Guardian quoted Irina Antonova, the long-time general director of the Pushkin, as saying:

As negotiations on such [immunity from seizure] guarantees have ended unsuccessfully, the decision on returning all the exhibits to Russia has been made.

In addition to the Pushkin, the State Tretyakov Museum, Moscow, and the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum, both in St. Petersburg, were to have lent more than 120 paintings. The show is currently at the Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf.

It seems clear that without guarantees that loaned objects will be returned, major international exhibitions that have been the lifeblood of museums around the world will be seriously compromised. No owner wants to risk losing loaned works or being trapped in "Portrait of Wally" limbo.

Events will likely overtake this post as some point today. I'll update when I can, but I'll be offline for much of the day.

UPDATE: Reuters reports that the Russian decision to back out of the show was finalized today (Thursday).

Well, it's not so new any more, but my Wall Street Journal article on the Philadelphia Museum's new Perelman Building finally hits the stands today (on the "Leisure & Arts" page of the "Personal Journal" section), so I can now show you and comment about what I saw.

No other U.S. museum boasts an entrance quite as embellished as this (from the original 1927 Art Deco building):

...or an elevator as glitzy as this:

...or a real estate office with such an off-putting name, located right across the street:

To get to the Perelman from the Philadelphia Museum's main building, you'll have to dodge some daunting traffic:

...or else arrive from the main building on an old-fashioned tram:

What you see of the flagship museum from the Perelman annex is not too spiffy:

That's two city benches, urgently in need of repair, in front of the rubble from the excavation for a new museum garage (to be topped, eventually, by a sculpture garden), now under construction:

All right, I know: What you really want to see is Richard Gluckman's new architecture and the art installations therein. COMING SOON.

David Redden takes the bid.

The one-lot auction at Sotheby's this evening has just concluded. Ross Perot's copy of the Magna Carta fetched a hammer price of $19 million, below the presale estimate of $20-30 million ($21.32 million with buyer's premium).

No word yet on the buyer, but If any American institution was bidding, this below-estimate result should have helped to make this iconic manifesto of democracy "affordable."

I'll update here, if more information becomes available.

UPDATE: A happy ending to this drama---the document stays at the National Archives in Washington, where it will be on loan from this evening's purchaser (and sole bidder, according to Bloomberg), David Rubenstein, managing director of the Carlyle Group, a global private equity firm.

Bloomberg's Lindsay Pollock has the story.

Sometimes you've just got to take cultural solace wherever you can find it. There's not much of that on the physical therapy floor of the nursing home where my mother is now in temporary residence, to flex her new hip.

But on our first day here, I was reminded of my previous hipster post, where I mentioned that I was looking forward to my mother's ascent "from hospital hell to the purgatory of a nursing facility."

When I left my mother's new transitional digs, I overheard an elderly visitor ask the medication nurse's name.

"Divina," she replied.

"Divina Commedia," he quipped.

I couldn't help quoting the first line of Dante's magnum opus: I had spent a whole college year reading it all (sort of) in Italian. Next thing I knew, Virgil (just kidding) and I were reciting the next two lines together. (His Italian was a whole lot better than mine.)

It was the only time I smiled all day, especially since the lines were so apt for the situation in which I found myself:

In the middle of the journey of our life [middle age?]
I discovered myself within a dark wood ["una selva oscura"]
where the straight way was lost.

The "selva" is getting a little less "oscura" each day, and the way to go forward keeps getting slightly clearer. I've even discovered a computer that I can use here, on which I am composing the current post (and on which I looked over the final version of my latest Wall Street Journal piece, appearing tomorrow).

When I happen upon someone named Beatrice, I'll know I've finally made it to Paradiso.

The Metropolitan Museum's financial operating results improved by more than $5 million in fiscal 2007 from the results of previous fiscal year, thanks largely to lower pension expenses, higher gains on invested pension assets, and (let us not forget) increased revenue from the controversial hike in the recommended admissions fee from $15 to $20.

According to the museum's recently released annual report (which you can access here), the Met's 2007 operating surplus was $2.05 million, compared to the previous year's deficit of $3.15 million. Attendance increased only slightly, from 4.5 million visitors in fiscal year 2006 to 4.6 million in the current year. But admissions revenue grew 18 percent, thanks to the fee hike. The average per capita take at the admissions cash registers of main building (not including the Cloisters) was up 17 percent.

But the museum's liabilities ballooned some 60 percent, due chiefly to the issuance last December of $130 million in tax-exempt bonds for capital projects. Total 2007 indebtedness was $162.83 million, compared to only $34.9 million the previous year.

The Met spent some $27.49 million on art acquisitions in fiscal 2007, compared to $34.83 million the previous year. Deaccessions totaled $2.13 million, compared to $26.83 million the previous year.

One of the report's surprising revelations was the full extent of the voluminous bequest of works on paper---hundreds of diverse prints and drawings---left to the Met by William Lieberman, the chairman of its modern art department, who died more than two years ago. Before coming to the Met in 1979, he had for many years been a curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

His gifts to the Met, accessioned in 2007, included an enormous number of Japanese prints, as well as numerous prints and drawings ranging from old master to contemporary. You can see these listed, in the above-linked annual report, on pages 11-15, 24, 27-31 and 36-37.

With such an active personal-collecting life, how did Lieberman manage to find the time to acquire for MoMA and the Met?

This came in late yesterday from the Friends of the Barnes, the ad hoc group opposing the planned move of the Barnes Foundation from Merion to Philadelphia:

Today we sent our attorney, [Mark] Schwartz, an e-mail in which he was instructed to "discontinue any and all work in behalf of the Friends of the Barnes Foundation and other petitioners." We also informed him that "we are in process of finding another attorney to represent us." We expect to have the secured the services of new counsel in the next few days.

No word yet from the "Friends" about the reasons for this unfriendly falling out. (See UPDATE, below.) Schwartz asserts that "they wanted my work without paying for it." He had reportedly irritated the judge in an October court appearance.

Whatever the explanation for the split, the loss of a lawyer comes at an inopportune moment: Briefs in the case are due Dec. 31, after which Judge Stanley Ott of Montgomery County Orphan's Court is expected to hear oral arguments and then rule on whether the plaintiffs have legal standing to challenge the court's previous decision allowing the move.

Whatever happens to the Friends of the Barnes' case, attorney Carolyn Carluccio is forging ahead with Montgomery County's separate suit to keep the Barnes where founder Albert Barnes installed it.

UPDATE: Friends of the Barnes today would say only that they were "unhappy with our current representation, with whom we are having a fee dispute."

In a letter responding to a query from Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe, reporter Hugh Eakin describes the genesis of his New Yorker story on the Getty Museum's former antiquities curator, Marion True, showing some sympathy for her plight.

Edgers posts Eakin's comments today on the Boston Globe's Exhibitionist blog. Here's how Eakin regards True:

Here is a woman with strong convictions, who believed in what she was doing, who worked extremely hard for her institution. And her reputation, her career, the life she had has been totally destroyed....She has long ago been convicted by the press. And the Italians are saying now that the case isn't really about her anyway, that she was just a convenient way to go after museums. And there are a lot of questions we can ask about this.

Perhaps he can write a follow-up asking (and maybe even answering) a few of those questions.

While I was helping my mother (above, ably supported by fabulous physical therapist Arlo) work out the kinks in her new artificial hip, much was going on in the real world:

---In the Dec. 17 issue of the New Yorker, a writer I have greatly admired, Hugh Eakin, conspicuously omitted some key details from his "Treasure Hunt"---the Getty gospel according to Marion True, the museum's former antiquities curator. (Unfortunately, there is no link to the full text of the article on the Dec. 17 issue's site.)

Among the questions raised by Eakin's selective retelling of the Getty's antiquities controversies:

Why did he mention the information against the Getty that came from Connoisseur magazine, but omitted the name of the moving force behind this, Tom Hoving, the magazine's then editor-in-chief and the Metropolitan Museum's former director, who famously feuded with the Getty?

Why did the account of True's travails fail to mention this shocking episode in her estrangement from her former institution---the much publicized letter in which she took the Getty to task for its "calculated silence....You have chosen to announce the return of objects that are directly related to criminal charges filed against me by a foreign government...without a word of support for me, without any explanation of my role in the institution, and without reference to my innocence,"

Why did Eakin quote the museum's former director, John Walsh, only about the reason why he appointed True as curator, but not on her controversial acquisitions, which occurred on his watch?

Why did Eakin mention that True faced a possible 20 years in prison, but not the fact that no one---not even the Italians and least of all True's lawyers---expected her actually to be required to serve that time? Italian prosecutor Paolo Ferri told the LA Times: "True is an American citizen and will be able to evade my penal sanctions by going to the U.S." Her court battle was part of her crusade to vindicate herself.

And why did Eakin fail to mention that Italian prosecutors indicated in September that True would likely be let off the hook for criminal charges, now that the Getty has agreed to relinquish most of the works that Italy has sought?

I can only guess that this knowledgeable and conscientious reporter had to make some bargains with sources that unduly limited what he could say.

---The Los Angeles County Museum's director, Michael Govan, in the museum's press release about its just-announced major modern art gift from Janice and Henri Lazarof, gave further support to my argument in a Sept. 4 LA Times Op-Ed, Museums Can't Compete. I then noted that "the recent stratospheric rise of art prices has utterly outstripped most acquisitions budgets."

Govan now states:

At a time when the art market has made it nearly impossible for museums to purchase works of this quality, this important acquisition brings to the people of Los Angeles works by key figures that define the modern century.

But how was it that the Lazarofs were willing to make such a major fractional and partial gift in the current unfavorable tax climate for this type of donation, which museum officials claim has essentially frozen this form of largesse?

And how was it that the NY Times made such an egregious error in describing the supposed benefits of fractional gifts?

Here's the correction the Times ran the next day:

Because of an editing error, an article...about a promised gift of 130 artworks from Janice and Henri Lazarof to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art included an outdated reference to tax law governing partial donations....Under the current law, the tax deduction for partial gifts does not rise from year to year if works appreciate in value [as the original article had authoratively asserted]. Thus donors no longer benefit from bigger deductions for such appreciation.

Maybe the Times' arts editors should consult the reporter before inserting substantive changes. My Wall Street Journal editors, I'm pleased to say, ALWAYS allow writers to review all changes, down to the commas.

---Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, in the lead story of yesterday's NY Times "Week in Review" section, took a second occasion to hype the proposed new MoMA Monster tower designed by Jean Nouvel. This time, he extolled it as "the most exquisite tower to rise in Midtown Manhattan since the Chrysler Building"...if it does rise, that is: New York City's onerous approval process will likely cause at least some modifications to the design.

Even more striking were the brickbats Ouroussoff hurled in the same essay at Santiago Calatrava's "overblown design for a transportation hub at ground zero in Lower Manhattan,...as much a monument to the architect's ego as a statement of civic pride." That same project had been praised in a NY Times editorial as an "extraordinary achievement." The 2004 editorial added:

A few years ago, the thought that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey could have grasped the eloquence of Mr. Calatrava's idiom would have seemed almost absurd.

Even more seemingly absurd is Ouroussoff's cavalier dismissal yesterday of that transportation hub, coming less than three years after his own published comments enthusiastically welcoming it as "the single note of optimism [at Ground Zero] in what has mostly been a cesspool of cynicism and politics....With its crystalline form, the building, which was commissioned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is likely to be a more moving tribute to the memory of those who died there than even the ground zero memorial."

Reasonable people can disagree...even with themselves!

George T.M. Shackelford, chair of European art and modern art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, responds to Chicago's Faux "Faun" Inspires Faux Journalism:

There seems to be no question that the Chicago "Faun" formerly attributed to Paul Gauguin is a forgery; but please understand that it is a brilliant forgery. It convinced not only the Chicago curators (who are so very far from having made fools of themselves that I think you might owe them an apology for that witticism).

It also convinced all of the attendees at the two-day scholars' event on the Van Gogh/Gauguin exhibition held at its close in early 2002, which included all of the people that you would expect to know most about the artist. Indeed, I suspect the whole world would have been none the wiser (including every journalist who has written on the subject) had the Greenhalghs' other forgeries not come to light.

Sotheby's November 1994 catalogue entry for the purported Gauguin (on right)

Does one good fake deserve another?

I thought this article by Arifa Akbar of the London Independent was the best I'd seen about the Art Institute of Chicago's Greenhalgh "Gauguin," until I saw this piece by the highly respected art writer Martin Bailey for the Art Newspaper, which contains much of the same information, in much the same language. Bailey's piece, however, is much more detailed than Akbar's. Could the Independent be insufficiently independent?

Here are two sample passages:

Bailey---Writing in Apollo in September 2001, Art Institute sculpture curator Ian Wardropper recorded it as one of the most important acquisitions of the past 20 years. He described The Faun's features, as "bound up with the artist's self-image as a 'savage'." That same month The Faun was displayed in Chicago's definitive "Van Gogh and Gauguin" exhibition, which went on to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Akbar---In 2001, the Institute's sculpture curator, Ian Wardropper, wrote that it was one of the most important acquisitions of the past 20 years and described The Faun's features, as "bound up with the artist's self-image as a 'savage'". In the same year, it was displayed in Chicago's definitive Van Gogh and Gauguin exhibition, which later went on to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

There's much more of the same...and I DO mean the same!

In any event, Bailey and his alter ego Akbar tell us many things that the Art Institute hasn't---that the forgery (concocted by Shaun Greenhalgh of Bolton, England) was purchased by the museum in 1997 for about $125,000 from London dealers Howie and Pillar. They had bought it at Sotheby's, London, on Nov. 30, 1994 for £20,700.

The Art Institute's own statement on "The Faun" is here.

Stick with Bailey for many other interesting details about the sculpture's manufactured provenance and subsequent quotes from publications discussing Chicago's acclaimed acquisition.

If you want to see more about how the experts were fooled and made fools of themselves, you can peruse this list of publications provided to me by the Art Institute:

---Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, "Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South" (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001), pp. 61-63, 68, 155, 404.
---Ian Wardropper, "Collecting European Sculpture at The Art Institute of Chicago," Apollo 154, 475 (September 2001), pp. 11-12.
---Bruce Boucher, "The Faun," Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 29, 2 (2002), pp. 64-65.
---Douglas W. Druick, "La Matinée d'un faune les débuts de Gauguin dans la céramique," Mélanges en hommage à Françoise Cachin (Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), pp. 152-59.
---Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, "A Painter-Sculptor Makes Ceramics," Gauguin and Impressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Kimbell Art Museum and Ordrupgaard, 2005), pp. 290-91.

Bailey reports that "Sotheby's is now expected to reimburse the Art Institute of Chicago." When contacted by me yesterday, the auction house stated only that it was "currently working with the purchaser to resolve this matter."

John Elderfield
Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Apparently, the Museum of Modern Art is going to stick to its put-'em-out-to-pasture policy, allowing one of its most consistently brilliant curators to retire at age 65 (as previously discussed here).

Richard Lacayo reported yesterday in his Looking Around blog:

The Museum of Modern Art just informed its staff that John Elderfield, MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture, will be stepping down in July of next year.

This will be a huge loss. Whatever Elderfield's own wishes in this matter, MoMA should rethink a policy that forces it to pull the plug on one of its brightest lights.

Can you not be 65 and Modern?

The Barnes Foundation has cleared another hurdle to its planned move from Merion, PA, to the current site of a youth detention center on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.

The resistance of Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell to the construction of a replacement detention facility in her West Philadelphia district has magically disappeared, thanks to an agreement to build a $12-million community center in her district, named for her late husband.

Jeff Shields and Dwight Ott of the Philadelphia Inquirer report:

The Barnes is expected to take over the land by May, and has the option to break its 99-year lease with the city if the Youth Study Center isn't gone by then. But the center's temporary move to a site in East Falls was threatened by residents who feared their community would become the center's permanent home.

"I think they will be comforted by the fact that there will be a permanent location," [Mayor] Street said.

So there are still some obstacles---possible community opposition to the temporary relocation of the detention center to another neighborhood until the permanent new facility is built, and a couple of pesky lawsuits filed by Montgomery County opponents to moving the Barnes to Philly away from their neighborhood.

Is it just me?

It seems that ever since my mother took her hip-fracturing spill, I've been coming into contact with all sorts of culture-related tumbles. In yesterday's NY Times, Sarah Lyall, demonstrating a sharp nose for news, described being on location at the treacherous gap in the floor of the Tate Modern at the very moment when the hapless Anne McNicholas, "a 51-year-old medical researcher from New Zealand...caught her foot in the crack and pitched awkwardly forward, ending up sprawled on the floor." We can understand, of course, how this happened, because everything is upside-down in the Southern Hemisphere and Anne was looking in the wrong direction for Doris Salcedo's tricky fissure.

There is nothing at all funny, however, about the second recent cultural tumble: A 17-year-old dancer, Leah Boresow, critically injured herself in a fall from the stage of the Atlanta Ballet.

Speaking of unscripted theatrical falls, Anthony Tommasini's opera review in the NY Times today starts off like this:

The Metropolitan Opera's production of "War and Peace," Prokofiev's epic masterpiece, was a milestone for the company when it was introduced in 2002. [It was great; I saw the then unfamiliar, instantly impressive Russian soprano, Anna Netrebko, as Natasha.]...The production returned to the Met's stage on Monday night, and this time nobody fell off. The stage, that is.

As Met fans may remember, the opening night of this production by Andrei Konchalovsky was marred when, during the last scene, an extra portraying one of Napoleon's retreating soldiers during a snowstorm slipped off the stage, falling into a safety net especially erected for this production, and then tumbled over the net into the orchestra pit.

I starred in my own cultural-fall drama, chronicled here (scroll to #9), on the slippery wood floors of the new Mega-MoMA. I called this "a good bone-density test."

And yesterday, after I got home from visiting my newly hipped mother in the hospital, I bumped into my next door neighbor. After we got up from the floor and checked for fractures (just kidding), she told me her sister had just fallen and broken two bones in her foot. This too qualifies as cultural news: Shortly after I moved into my apartment, I learned that my elderly next-door neighbors happen to be the daughters of legendary former Baltimore Museum director, Adelyn Breeskin.

I will end this precipitous post by thanking all the readers who have extended good wishes for my mother's rapid ascent from hospital hell to the purgatory of a nursing facility (for short-term physical therapy)...maybe by the end of this week. Today happens to be my parents' 64th anniversary. The celebration will be delayed.

CultureGrrl readers being who they are, even your sympathetic notes can be art historical: In an e-mail titled, "Hipsters" (why didn't I think of that?), James Ganz, curator of prints, drawings and photographs at the Clark Art Institute, mused:

I wonder how many great artists were unsteady in later life. Was Leonardo a faller in his 60s? Did Rembrandt ever take a spill? Certainly Renoir...

And, please, let's not forget Boldini.

The immediate impetus for the plan to sell paintings from Randolph College's Maier Museum has ceased to exist: The Lynchburg, VA, institution yesterday announced:

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) will announce today its decision to remove Randolph College from warning....However, SACS will monitor the College in the upcoming year, and we will be required to submit another report on our financial plan in the fall of 2008....The College's plan for financial stability includes...a substantial infusion into the endowment.

Opponents of the paintings' sale interpret the last sentence to mean that the college may still try to sell some of its art to create that "substantial infusion."

Anne Yastremski, executive director of Preserve Educational Choice, the group opposing the sales, yesterday declared:

This decision by SACS indicates that...the sale of irreplaceable educational and cultural resources, like the art in the Maier Museum, [was] completely unnecessary to remove the SACS warning.

Ownership claims have made strange adversaries in Italy; unusual allies in New York.

In Italy, the village of Monteleone just won't give up on its claim for the Etruscan chariot that the Metropolitan Museum has owned for over 100 years. Miffed that the Italian Culture Ministry hasn't taken up its cause, the village, by unanimous vote of its council, has decided to sue not only the current minister, Francesco Rutelli, but also his two immediate predecessors, for "not doing enough to get the artifact back," according a report by ANSA, the Italian news agency.

But here's the ANSA article's kicker:

Italy still has a few more requests pending with the [Metropolitan] museum---but the chariot is not yet one of these.

Are these really "pending requests," or just the give-backs already agreed to, which are scheduled to take place in the future?

Meanwhile in the U.S., the Museum of Modern Art's director, Glenn Lowry, who has previously been outspokenly critical of the Guggenheim Foundation's director, Tom Krens, has now teamed up with his New York colleague to initiate a joint legal action to get the U.S. District Court to issue "a declaration confirming their ownership of two renowned works by Pablo Picasso---'Boy Leading a Horse,' 1906, in MoMA's collection and 'Le Moulin de la Galette,' 1900, in the Guggenheim's collection. This action is in response to a claim by Julius H. Schoeps, a private citizen of Germany."

The museums' joint statement further states:

The museums have taken this step in view of Mr. Schoeps's recent history of litigation regarding a work of art with the same provenance as those in MoMA's and the Guggenheim's collections, and his clear indication that he intended to pursue legal action against them. Today's filing asks the court to affirm the museums' ownership of the works based on the extensive factual information that exists on their provenance....Evidence from our extensive research makes clear the museums' ownership of these works and also makes clear that Mr. Schoeps has no basis for his claim.

According to the museums, Schoeps demanded the paintings from them on Nov. 1, "alleging that because the [Paul] von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family was of Jewish descent and the Nazis rose to power in 1933, there is a presumption that the sales of the paintings to [dealer Justin K.] Thannhauser were made under duress."

Similar legal action to affirm ownership is being initiated in England by Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose Picasso, "Angel Fernández de Soto," has also been sought by the same claimant. NY Supreme Court Judge Rolando Acosta recently decided, on technical grounds, against Schoeps' Nazi-loot claim for Lloyd Webber's painting.

Now that they've started collaborating, maybe Lowry and Krens can work together on something really interesting---a joint exhibition, perhaps?

David Wilkins, professor emeritus of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, joining the Boldini defenders, responds to The Met's New European Galleries: The Good, the Bad and the Dumbed Down:

I'd like to say that I think the Boldini is a good choice to exhibit---an important and respected artist at the time (yes, we need to know what they thought then, not just now, about quality) and an interesting subject as well. Surely a good portrait artist will know something about and perhaps even chose to respond to the character of the individual he/she is representing. When we can know something about that individual as well, it can help us understand what's going on in the portrait.

About labels: Facts are useful in different ways to different viewers and I think their inclusion in labels is appropriate. What I as an art historian don't need are comments about the art (I've made up the following quotes): "these vigorous brushstrokes," "the use of black emphasizes the commemorative morality of the scene," "the lack of perspective communicates a disassociation from the real world." I think these kinds of brief analyses are generally not helpful to most of the general public. What I think might work better are quotes from the period about the art.

Like last year, Art Basel Miami Beach's final post-sale wrap-up report claims much success and provides little hard information.

We do know that 43,000 visitors came "from every continent" (even Antarctica?) compared to last year's 40,000. The number of journalists covering this momentous event also increased: This year 1,600 reporters and critics (all of whom came from Antarctica) hit the beach, compared to last year's 1,400.

Even architect Jacques Herzog showed up for a conversation with museum director Terry Riley, unlike last year, when he was a last-minute no-show.

We also know that the parties must have been wild and crazy, because the Russians were there. Paris Hilton was there. And CultureGrrl was not there. I was having much more fun.

For more substantive reports than I care to provide, see the Art Newspaper's daily Basel Miami editions, Bloomberg Muse and New York Magazine.

Today was depressing enough, thanks to the continuing saga of my mother's hip replacement (the reason why I've been posting with less than my usual compulsiveness). Today was blood-transfusion day. (On a more positive note, it was also sit-up-in-a-chair day.)

While attending to my mother's hospital misadventures, I've also unhappily discovered that my blog is sick: This post is suddenly being accessed, all too frequently, by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. I have therefore decided to take down the Nan Goldin and Richard Prince images that for the last few days have been bringing lots of twisted hits to CultureGrrl. This is not the kind of traffic I want. My little corner of cyberspace is intended to be a haven for art lovers, not pedophiles.

The above image is the only art upon which I've been gazing for the last few days. Are there any artificial-hip fetishists out there?

Black Mold Patches Above the Cow's Horns
Photo, French Ministry of Culture

In my Wall Street Journal article a year and a half ago about the fungi and bacteria problems jeopardizing the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux, France, I quoted Jean-Michel Geneste, the cave's curator, asserting that everything was under control:

There is no damage to the paintings....Now the situation is stable. Now it [the growth of microorganisms] has disappeared naturally from the paintings.

To which I responded, in that June 13, 2006 article:

To put to rest the questions that continue to be raised...these reassurances urgently need to be publicly corroborated through visits by disinterested outsiders who are experts.

Now, according to the NY Times, there's been an "inspection by a team of microbiologists." And their findings are alarming.

Marlise Simons writes:

For the second time in a decade, fungus is threatening France's most celebrated prehistoric paintings, the mysterious animal images that line the Lascaux cave in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, scientists say.

No consensus has emerged among experts over whether the invading patches of gray and black mold are the result of climate change, a defective temperature-control system, the light used by researchers or the carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors....The government has approved a new treatment of the blemishes with a fungicide and ordered that the cave be sealed off for as long as four months so that its delicate environment can be stabilized.

Unmentioned in the article is one of the planned remedies set forth in the French Ministry of Culture's report (click on Nov. 20, if you read French) about the problem---the "replacement of the climate control system" in 2008. As I previously reported, the installation of a new climate control system at the entrance of the cave a few years ago was blamed by the French scientific journal La Recherche as the likely cause of a shockingly virulent invasion of fungi and bacteria in 2001. These appeared both on the cave's floor and on outcroppings below its decorated walls.

Now that a team of microbiologists has provided a scientific update on the problem, we need another team of outside experts to be brought in---one that can craft an effective solution to the urgent problem of preserving one of the world's great cultural treasures. For now, it's off limits to just about everyone except persistent microscopic invaders.

Two readers respond to my recent post, The Met's New European Galleries: The Good, the Bad and the Dumbed Down:

---Veteran art writer Paul Jeromack, whose work has appeared in The Art Newspaper and Art & Auction, among others, writes:

The two walls with the Sorolla, Zorn, Sargent and Boldini portraits are dazzling: Each is a masterpiece of its kind. I like [Metropolitan Museum associate curator Rebecca] Rabinow a lot, but I'm pleased she was overruled here. [She had said that she would not have hung the Boldini.]

[Boldini's] Consuelo Vanderbilt portrait amply demonstrates, in its so-called "slapdash" brushwork, the kinetic frenzy of the Futurists Balla and Boccioni. I'm delighted it is on view. And long may it remain so.

---Rick Currie, a collector who works in international banking, writes:

I usually agree with your commentaries, but on your recent posting about the wall labels on the rehang of the paintings in the Met's new 19th- and early 20th-century galleries, I have to disagree. You said some of the labels were "fatuous and that they say more than what we want to know about the personnages" but not enough about these as works of art. I found your coments somewhat elitist.

I have an art history background and have been an avid museumgoer in this city for 30+ years, but I still get irritated when I view so many paintings and read, "Portrait of a Man...Portrait of a Woman...Lady this...Duchess that." Aside from the art-worthiness and/or historical meaning of the painting, it does help to know who the person was and what he/she did. It is not a dumbing down to include that information. It brings the painting to life and makes it more meaningful.

I am now in the midst of the middle-aged daughter's rite of passage: My mother fell Friday morning and had hip replacement surgery yesterday. I've got no siblings, so it's all me. Which means it's probably less of you. I do, however, have BlogBacks coming up later, disagreeing with my take on the Met's rehang of its 19th- and early 20th-century European paintings and sculpture collection. Let the debate continue.

Happily, after a successful (so far) surgery yesterday afternoon, I still had time to keep my appointment last night here:

Lincoln Center, home of the NY Philharmonic

Normal, culture-filled life seems all the sweeter in times of trouble. Now, back to the hospital.

Gary Tinterow, the Met's curator in charge of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, showing off the new galleries to the press.

The Metropolitan Museum's renovated galleries for 19th- and 20th-century European paintings and sculpture provide 8,000 square feet of additional space (the Henry J. Heinz II Galleries) for more art---always a good thing, but particularly welcome when a collection is as deep as the Met's.

But just how much of a good thing it is depends on how well the project is executed. In this case, the blessing is mixed.

I enjoyed the most obvious crowd-pleaser---the Wisteria Dining Room (with original furnishings and decorations). The Met says it is the only French Art Nouveau interior on display in an American museum. I also enjoyed a more unassuming room, the new gallery given over to picture postcard-like gems---small, plein-air oil sketches by such lesser-knowns as Granet, Bertin and Rémond. Many of these are either from the collection of Wheelock Whitney III (which has recently come to the Met as partial purchases and promised gifts) or works from retired New York dealer Eugene Thaw. The Met's associate curator Rebecca Rabinow told me that Thaw has given or pledged these works, to be shared between the Met and the Morgan Library & Museum.

I had a nice sit-down with Rebecca (who informed me that she reads CultureGrrl..."we all do"). In an unguarded moment, I mentioned to her that I thought some of the works that had been hauled out of storage might better have been left there.

She immediately demanded an example. I unhesitatingly replied:

Detail: Giovanni Boldini, "Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, and Her Son Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill"

Rebecca confided that when she saw this painting listed among those being considered for display, she wrote a big NO next to it, but was "overruled." Rebecca is my middle name. Great Beckys think alike.

That said, there were other works newly hung that I was very glad had surfaced, notably William Blake's "The Angel Gabriel Appearing to Zacharias," which, of course, appealed to the college literature major in me.

But back to Boldini: What made this saccharine, slapdash society portrait, with its strangely cartoonish physiognomies, even MORE irritating was the fatuous label describing the duchess:

In addition to being one of the era's most lavish and ambitious hostesses, she was also active in politics and social causes. In England she campaigned for the rights of women; in France she devoted much of her later life to the care of the sick and underprivileged children.

Unfortunately, far too many of labels, even for much more important works, read like the Boldini balderdash---telling us more than we wanted to know about the personnages portrayed, but not nearly enough about what made these paintings worthy of our attention as works of art, either art historically or aesthetically. Far too often, the text was superficial and anecdotal, rather than engrossing and scholarly.

Many of the labels were adapted from the new coffeetable book, Masterpieces of European Painting, 1800-1920, that the Met has published in conjunction with the reopening of the European galleries. This compendium suffers greatly in comparison with Met curator Walter Liedtke's recently issued erudite two-volume catalogue (intended for a more serious audience) of the Met's collection of Dutch old masters.

The label-writing is still a work in progress: Rabinow told me that only about one-third of the 600 object labels had been redone for the rehang. Maybe the next 400 will get it right.

The above headline is a shameless tease, because I don't know the answer...yet. But I do know CultureGrrl readers are fascinated by the subject, because you've been hitting my previous two posts about the tiny, exquisite limestone carving (here and here) in record numbers today, making me Number Four, at this writing, on the Guennol Google-search hit parade.

Harold Holzer, senior vice president for external affairs at the Metropolitan Museum, assured me that his institution had nothing to do with this purchase. It had seemed reasonable to suppose that the Met might have been interested, because of its previous displays of the object and its recent winning bid on another Elamite object. But the copper figure of a horned hero, sold by the Albright-Knox Gallery, cost a pittance ($3.18 million) compared to the $57.16 million for the 3¼-inch limestone carving, which was in Duccio territory, price-wise. A museum can only stretch so far.

Jerome Eisenberg, director of New York's Royal-Athena Galleries, said that he didn't know the identity of the ultimate buyer, but he did know that the buyer's agent, who had been bidding from the back of the salesroom, was "a minor dealer from London," who was familiar to Eisenberg.

New York ancient art dealer Robert Haber, who had bid on behalf of the Met for its earlier purchase, told me that the identity of the person who bagged the lioness has been the subject of "tremendous, wild speculation" and was the "best-kept secret that has occurred in our area."

Haber added:

It really is an incredible seachange in the world of ancient art. This area is finally getting its due, as a profoundly interesting area to collect in....This is a magnificent piece. It represents an apprecation within the world of ancient art that there are great variations in quality between the ordinary material and exceptional masterpieces.

Not to mention the fact that the market will pay a premium for pieces with known provenances that go back far enough to keep repatriationists at bay.

Meanwhile, Christie's held its own antiquities sale today. That auction made $7.24 million, compared to Sotheby's $64.96 million the day before.

But then Sotheby's sale would have made only $7.8 million, were it not for the star lot.

Eisenberg also observed that prices at both auctions were "absolutely obscene," going for three or four times their estimates. He said that his own sales volume has "doubled in the last year," with collectors entering the antiquities field from Russia and the Middle East, as well as from the worlds of hedge funds and real estate investment.

"In June," he said, "I sold an object for well over $1 million to a real estate investor from California who had never bought an antiquity before."

---This is not exactly a new subject of inquiry but fascinating nonetheless---how the physical infirmities of great artists have affected their art. In Simulations of Ailing Artists' Eyes Yield New Insights on Style, Guy Gugliotta writes in the NY Times that "an ophthalmologist at Stanford, Michael F. Marmor, described in the Archives of Ophthalmology creating computer simulations of Monet's world as his lenses yellowed, blurring vision and turning patterns of color and light into muddy, unfocused, yellow-green inkblots."

Of course, we already knew about that from the wall text at the great "Monet in the 20th Century" show in 1998 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And the final gallery of the current "Renoir Landscapes" show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art includes a surprisingly satisfying painting that he miraculously managed to produce in old age, when his hands were crippled by arthritis. The article should have (but doesn't) taken us up to recent times---the great work created in adversity by Willem de Kooning and Chuck Close.

---NAGPRA in Action: The spirit of Sitting Bull and the letter of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (for which changes have recently been proposed) impelled the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History to find the descendants of the legendary Sioux chief who defeated Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. They will get their ancestor's lock of hair and leggings that were taken by a U.S. Army doctor and donated to the museum. Associated Press has the story.

---My native borough has a new museum (which I haven't seen yet). It's Fordham University's Museum of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art, with works from the collection of financier William Walsh. And already someone is raining on the new Bronx museum's parade.

Robin Pogrebin of the NY Times reports:

Richard Hodges, the director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, said that Fordham's new museum was problematic. "It's a slightly imprudent act on the part of the university, because a lot of it is not provenanced," he said. "The message that it sends is there is nothing wrong with looting and buying illegal objects. Fordham needs to be very careful about this."

Told of Mr. Hodges's comments, Ms. [Jennifer] Udell [Fordham's curator of university art] said she hoped that anyone who had a claim to or concerns about any of the pieces would come forward.

---The NY Times devotes a whole issue of its Sunday style magazine, T, to insidiously conflating art and fashion in a way that makes my skin crawl. Go here, if you really must.

---Speaking of art and fashion, if you insist on having your Art Basel Miami Beach blog fix, here's the Wall Street Journal's art-market blog: "Kelly Crow and Lauren Schuker will be reporting on the sales and the scene."

Here and here are Lindsay Pollock's first dispatches for Bloomberg.

And here's CultureGrrl's kindred spirit, Marion Maneker, providing a curmudgeonly take, "Heading South," for Portfolio.

Maneker begins:

Miami's sixth annual art bacchanal begins. But what's it good for? Not for buying art.

Maneker ends:

Events like Miami Basel have become so important to dealers that artists are intentionally creating works that will stand out in this supercharged atmosphere. Collectors call this wall power--big paintings with strong colors and simple effects that register better at a distance and are easier to understand in the 10 minutes the dealer gives you to decide. But connoisseurs tend to see it as second-rate stuff not worth owning for the long run.

I KNEW there was a reason why I'm not going!

UPDATE: I neglected to mention NY Magazine's personality fixated Basel Blog, as an e-mail from the magazine has just reminded me. How could I?

Harold Holzer, the Metropolitan Museum's senior vice president for external affairs, responds to Gertrude Stein, Modern No More, at the Met's Reopened Galleries:

Gertrude Stein herself left the portrait to the Met specifically so it would NOT be installed with more recent art. In fact, when Alice B. Toklas learned it had been lent to the Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition, she was quite angry and demanded it be returned to the Met. Gary Tinterow [the Met's curator in charge of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art] pointed out that before it was hung here, it shared space in Stein's studio with Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse. Back home where she belongs???

The Guennol Lioness

This just in from Sotheby's: A man from England, standing at the rear of Sotheby's salesroom, battled a phone bidder this afternoon to purchase the 5,000-year-old Guennol Lioness for $57.16 million (with buyer's premium). The miniature feline-on-steroids (above), which had for almost 60 years been displayed at the Brooklyn Museum, had been estimated to bring a mere $14-18 million, compared to the $51-million hammer price.

The famed Mesopotamian limestone carving now holds the world auction record for any sculpture, as well as for any antiquity. And the sale, still in progress in this writing, has already surpassed the previous auction record (also held by Sotheby's) for an antiquities sale, thanks to the 3¼-inch object that garnered the lion's share of the total.

I suspect we may be hearing more later about the buyer. If so, I'll update. Will it be renamed for the new owner? Now THAT'S a naming opportunity!

NY Times theater critic Charles Isherwood had lots of fun, in last Sunday's "Arts & Leisure" section, mocking a common and (to my mind) innocuous method by which arts institutions encourage and acknowledge major donors---ubiquitous naming opportunities.

Isherwood decries the "veritable carnival of nomenclature" and wonders:

What became of those wealthy philanthropists who used to support arts organizations and other not-for-profit and charitable institutions without requiring that their names be slapped somewhere---anywhere, it sometimes seems---on a building?

But in the nine circles of hell that are nonprofit fundraising, surely the mildest sin is allowing benefactors to attach their names to parts of buildings. The Smithsonian recently had a much thornier sponsorship issue to deal with, but even the question of whether to "accept money for a marine science enterprise from a group supported by hundreds of oil companies" (as the Washington Post described it) might have been worth serious thought if it could be convincingly argued that the donor would have absolutely no influence on the show. (In this case, though, it might well be that the appearance of conflict of interest was just too great to go ahead with it.)

As for museum naming opportunities, another recent salvo came from Gawker, which posted a video [via] that mocked the labeling of the New Museum's elevators. It IS a bit silly. But what real harm is done by giving these donors a lift? Acknowledging largesse in a lasting, public manner may help to encourage others who are philanthropically inclined. That's all to the good.

The Brooklyn Museum took the naming concept a step further, some years back, when it allowed members of the public to "adopt" an artwork by providing a donation for it, which would earn them written acknowledgement on the adoptee's wall label. This outside-the-box resourcefulness unleashed a storm of outrage from those who thought this was somehow cheapening the art. But giving members of the public a chance to feel a personal stake in individual artworks while helping the museum sounds like a win-win to me.

I'm much more bothered by Charles Isherwood's own recent crossing of proper boundaries---his personal foray into advertising for the Broadway play whose opening he reviews in today's paper---Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County."

In the ad, which I heard frequently on the radio before the stagehands' strike, Isherwood's own voice is heard extolling the play, which he had favorably reviewed in its original production in Chicago. The ad is largely drawn from what Isherwood said on the NY Times' preview-of-the-season podcast (which can be accessed as an "audio slideshow" on the webpage for today's review). But he clearly re-recorded his comments for the ad, where he eschews the monotonous, dispassionate tone of his Times podcast and pumps up the volume with a more dynamic, ad-friendly delivery.

I was so surprised by this critic's direct pitch to potential ticket buyers that I taped it. Here's a verbatim excerpt:

Isherwood: This is a blisteringly funny play...and the superb Steppenwolf production is being imported whole. So New York audiences can reacquaint themselves with this company's fiery acting style. And that in itself is reason to see this very ambitious and entertaining new American play.

Announcer: When a critic is this excited before a play even opens, the time to get tickets is now. Call or visit Telecharge.com today.

But don't just believe me. You can hear Isherwood for yourself:

Today's review was, expectedly, a rave. But what if Isherwood had found that the New York production was not nearly as praiseworthy as the Chicago original? Could he have been straight with us, after encouraging us to go out and buy those tickets?

Although Picasso's "Gertrude Stein" has been exiled from the Metropolitan Museum's modern art galleries to the new 19th- and early 20th-century European galleries, she's just a few steps away, across the hall, from Jaws, who is temporarily menacing the contemporary art galleries.

So I went to check whether what I have heard is true: That Damien Hirst's visiting shark is no longer being patrolled and upstaged by a large, admonitory sign that was posted on a shiny pole, right beside it. I first reported on the freestanding competing object here, but was not then permitted to photograph it in the gallery (so I used a wall-mounted substitute to give an idea of its appearance).

Sure enough, the annoying object is gone, replaced by two discreet wall-mounted warnings (actual photo):

And I'm also hearing that visitors are digitally harpooning the beast, anyway, so maybe the guards are being less aggressive about enforcement.

It's Vernissage and Media Reception day for Art Basel Miami Beach! And is CultureGrrl on the scene, to report to you on the VIP onslaught?

You know me better than that!

I am not going to see the "20 cutting-edge art galleries presenting projects in shipping containers"; I refuse to attend the opening-night concert with Iggy and the Stooges on the beach; I'm taking a pass on Terry Riley's infomercial, "Work in Progress: Herzog & de Meuron's Miami Art Museum"; and I'm not even going to ogle the "exceptional pieces by both renowned artists and cutting-edge newcomers" displayed by an "exclusive selection of 200 leading art galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and South Africa."

You're going to be doing all that. You don't need me doing it with you.

As for me, I'm staying home and sulking that I was not invited to any of these swell parties.

Could it be that people think CultureGrrl is no fun? Maybe I should attend the Dec. 9 self-flagellation panel, "Art Critics Criticizing Art Criticism."

Picasso, "Gertrude Stein," 1906, Bequest of Gertrude Stein
©1999 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Poor Gertrude Stein, above, must be rolling in her grave.

I'll have much more to say soon about the Metropolitan Museum's renovated and expanded galleries for 19th- and early 20th-century European paintings and sculpture, which reopened to the public today. It's sure good to have all those hard-working, money-raising masterpieces back where they belong.

There have been some changes made, not all of them for the good. Today, I'll start with the biggest shocker: Listed on the museum's website as one of its modern art highlights, Picasso's iconic Stein portrait is no longer in the the Met's modern-art wing, but in the final gallery of the same section of the museum that shows Ingres, Corot and even (gulp) Boldini.

Rebecca Rabinow, the Met's associate curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, justified moving early works of Matisse, Picasso and the Fauves away from their modern brethren (not to mention from later works by the same partly relocated artists) by observing that the previous "cutoffs," separating the post-Impressionists from the moderns, "were artificial and done retroactively."

But more likely, the main reason for reassigning landmark early modern works to the expanded 19th- to early 20th-century galleries, as the curator in charge of Rabinow's department, Gary Tinterow suggested during yesterday's press walk, was to give "more room in the modern wing to show more modern and contemporary art."

This change means that Picasso's oeuvre is now inconveniently split between the first-floor modern-art galleries and the second-floor European galleries, with some famous Blue Period paintings keeping Stein company, along with an even later portrait, the famous "Woman in White" of 1923. Matisse's oeuvre suffers a similarly bifurcated fate.

Wasn't it Gertrude who first informed us that "modern museum" is an oxymoron?

Hot Lot: The Guennol Lioness, Elam, ca. 3000-2800 B.C., estimated at $14-18 million

[NOTE: My follow-up post on the auction result is here.]

In the just published 30,000 Years of Art (Phaidon), the so-called "Lioness Demon" (above), a 5,000-year-old Elamite figure (from what is now Iran), is listed as belonging to the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

It's not surprising that even some experts thought it belonged to that institution: It's been there for almost 60 years. But it was, in fact, on loan from a former chairman of the museum, Alastair Bradley Martin, and his wife. And now it's left the museum, to be sold tomorrow at Sotheby's by a charitable trust established by the Martin family. Sotheby's has called it "one of the last known masterworks from the dawn of civilization remaining in private hands." And this is not just auction-house hype.

In an online video, Sotheby's executive vice president Hugh Hildesley tries to overcome whatever reluctance people may have to spend an estimated $14-18 million for a 3 1/4-inch limestone carving, now called the Guennol Lioness (after the Welsh word for "martin," the bird, given by the Martins to their collection):

I have a theory that extremes in size are very important to the market....If it's small and exquisite, it forces you to focus on that object.

Without mentioning the name of the buyer---the Metropolitan Museum---Hildesley also notes that Sotheby's recently auctioned another small Elamite object---a copper figure of a horned hero, which the Albright-Knox Gallery sold for $3.18 million (presale estimate: only $150,000 to $250,000).

Could the Met be a potential bidder on the much pricier lioness? It exhibited the star lot of tomorrow's antiquities auction in its 2003 exhibition "Art of the First Cities," and also in a 1969 show devoted exclusively to the Guennol Collection.

As for the Brooklyn Museum's chances of keeping the piece, Sally Williams, its public information officer, commented:

Barring an unknown and unexpected angel coming out of the blue, we do not expect it to return to Brooklyn. We are delighted that we were able to present the piece to the public at the Brooklyn Museum and grateful to the owners for that privilege.

Easy come, easy go.

Mark Wallinger, "State Britain," 2006
Photo © Tate 2006

It was brazen enough earlier this year when the Tate Gallery mounted Mark Wallinger's antiwar State Britain exhibition (taking a strong stance against British policy in Iraq) along the full length of its stately Duveen Galleries (above). To see more on that show, go here.

Now the government-subsidized museum has taken its effrontery a step further, bestowing on Wallinger its prestigious (often controversial) annual Turner Prize of £25,000, awarded to "an outstanding exhibition or other presentation by a British artist under 50." (Wallinger, who lost out 12 years ago to Damien Hirst, squeaks in at age 48.)

According to the Tate's announcement:

The jury commended its [State Britain's] immediacy, visceral intensity and historic importance. The work combines a bold political statement with art's ability to articulate fundamental human truths.

I doubt anything analogous to this direct challenge to government policy could happen at our federally funded Smithsonian Institution.

UPDATE: Martin Gayford of Bloomberg offers an enthusiastic appraisal of "State Britain" here.

This just in: The Virginia Supreme Court today effectively extended from today to Feb. 15 the deadline by which opponents to sales of art from Randolph College's Maier Museum, Lynchburg, VA, must raise $1 million to secure the temporary injunction that the court had previously granted against sales.

The court ruled that it would be sufficient for sale opponents to file a surety bond or certified or cashiers check in the amount of $500,000 today, with another $500,000 due Feb. 15 (which would then secure the injunction until May 10). The sale opponents said that they had raised $500,000 and would meet today's deadline. (UPDATE: They have hand-delivered a $500,000 check to the court's clerk in Lynchburg.)

In extending the time for depositing the second $500,000, the court granted a request filed Friday by the sale opponents.

According to the court order (from which one of six judges dissented):

The petitioners [the sale opponents] assert...that a spokeswoman for the respondent [trustees of Randolph College] has recently released a public statement to the effect that the college has no immediate plans to sell any of the four paintings at issue 'before this litigation is concluded.'...Respondent does not deny or disavow this statement by the college spokesperson.

In other words, extending the amount of time for raising the full amount of the bond would probably not cause any delay in possible future sales and would therefore not cause the college any additional hardship. That's because the litigation won't be concluded until the case over the possible sale of the paintings is decided by the court on its merits.

Anne Yastremski of Preserve Educational Choice, the anti-art sales group, gave this update on the $1-million fundraising effort. Museum directors are among those who have stepped up to the plate:

We have received donations from more than 650 people, ranging from spare change collected by students on campus to checks for $100,000. As of today we have raised a little more than $500,000. One student donated $2,500 she saved from work during the past two summers. A group of students went door-to-door in the dormitories and raised more than $2,200 from 213 of their fellow students (approximately one third of the student body).

In addition to this student effort, the Art Defense Fund [use pull-down menu]...has received contributions from more than 450 other individuals---from residents of Lynchburg to alumnae living overseas to museum directors from around the country.

If any of those generous museum directors would like to come forward, I'll be happy to publish their names on CultureGrrl's Maier Rescue Honor Roll!

Meanwhile, Christa Desrets reported last week in the Lynchburg News & Advance:

Randolph College on Thursday withdrew a Lynchburg Circuit Court proceeding that sought to determine whether the college could share or sell certain pieces of art [those bought with funds provided by the bequest of Louise Jordan Smith] in the Maier Museum. Instead, the college will focus on litigation involving the four specific paintings [not bought with Smith funds] it plans to sell.

Maybe they've decided that pursuing a lawsuit that appears to disregard the written instructions in the will of the Maier Museum's art-fund donor, Louise Jordan Smith, is a low-percentage play.

In the same article, Desrets also wrote:

In the meantime, the college may consider pursuing options for sharing the artwork.

Does anyone know who might be interested in sharing? Calling Alice Walton!

(My previous posts on the new New Museum are here, here and here.)

I'm not bothered as much as critic James Russell is that the interior architecture of the New Museum "almost vanishes entirely" (as he states in his Bloomberg review). I think there's something appropriate about a stark industrial loft aesthetic for just-created art.

But I do agree with him that the unlovely battalion of fluorescent bulbs casts an "antiseptic glare." I wasn't expecting Renzo Piano's symphonic orchestration of illumination, but this lighting seemed overly harsh and institutional---more suited to a prison or hospital than a museum. Chief curator Richard Flood believes, however, that traditional museum lighting would have been too "sentimental" and "theatrical." Those adjectives will never be used to describe this:

Also prison-like is the so-called "mesh"---more like a grate---that not only covers the building's exterior, but also blocks the view from some windows. To me this unpleasantly conjured up the gates that have to be lowered to protect the security of neighborhood stores at night:

The view through one of the few unobstructed windows brought to mind Robert Frost's "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." Maybe they can get permission to commission a mural here:

The view from the lounge at the top, the Sky Room with outdoor terrace, was more like it:

Several of the other reviewers got excited by this staircase...I guess because it's one of the few aspects of the unexceptional interior that was offbeat. But the older I get, the less enamored I am of long ascents in tight spaces:

Here's another up-close view of the "mesh" that swathes the exterior:

And here (barely perceptible, on the left) is senior curator Laura Hoptman in the eerie glow of the only work from the New Museum's small permanent collection that is currently on display---the AIDS activist piece, "Neon Sign (Silence=Death)" from "Let the Record Show," 1987, by Act Up (Gran Fury):

It's easy to miss this: It's not on the gallery floors but tucked away on the landing of a stairway going down to the lower level.

All quibbles aside, the new New Museum is, overall, a great success, giving New Yorkers an exhilarating new vantage point from which to view the ever-changing cutting edge.