February 2008 Archives

An early model of Frank Gehry's planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

A kinder, gentler assessment of Tom Krens' reign at the Guggenheim is provided today by James Russell of Bloomberg. Russell has approving words for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (and the rest of the proposed development in the Saadiyat Island Cultural District) and also praises what Krens did in New York:

Before Krens, the New York building was regarded as a curatorial black hole. He and savvy curators have shown that a wide variety of works not only can be displayed well in the space, they can thrive....Krens' view is not for everyone. Yet, at its best, it's amazing how alive his approach to art can be. Returning to the sleepy pre-Krens past is not an option for the Guggenheim. His high-wire act will be an extremely hard one to follow.

It figures that this would come from an architecture critic. Krens was not only adept at convincing others to buy into his out-of-the-box, ultimately unrealized schemes. He was also the perfect creative client, working closely with a variety of architects to coax from them some of their best work. As I wrote here, Krens once proudly showed me a breathtaking model of the now abandoned Guggenheim Rio project, designed by Jean Nouvel, and confided that he wasn't yet satisfied with a tall, silo-shaped structure that was part of the design: Its skin was completely opaque. "I have to tell Jean that I need more transparency here," he then told me.

Somehow the international reputations of architects who worked with Krens, like Nouvel and Zaha Hadid, were significantly burnished, not burned, by the association, even if (as usually happened) the designs remained unbuilt. What other museum director can boast not one but two museum shows displaying models of his (mostly failed) architectural ventures? The second link is to a subsection of the Guggenheim's own current Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective, which includes "designs that have been developed by Thomas Krens [not developed by the architects?] for Guggenheim museums."

As I said yesterday on New York Public Radio, Krens also daringly pushed the envelope in engaging Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda as a breathtaking venue for site-specific installations. These worked brilliantly when overseen by an artist installing a one-person show (as in the current Cai exhibition); not so well when the "intervention" was designed for a broad-ranging exhibition (think Jean Nouvel's paint-it-black concept for "Brazil").

UPDATE: Kate Taylor in today's NY Sun mentions no less than 12 imagined candidates for the Guggenheim directorship. I make it so much easier for search firm Phillips Oppenheim by choosing only one---Michael Govan. But Krens' former protegé is not an "outside of the box" choice, as the Guggenheim Foundation's president, Jennifer Stockman, indicated that she may prefer.

Still, we can all take some comfort from this passage in the Sun's article:

Ms. Stockman said that the board is not looking for someone to expand the museum's global network further. "We want to get back to our mission of being first and foremost an art museum," she said.

Broad-ly Speaking at LACMA

More Eli Broad criticism occurs in Martin Filler's brilliantly titled piece for the latest New York Review of Books (Mar. 20), Broad-Minded Museum. (Why didn't my editors think of that?) A key passage:

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art receives substantial public funds and many of its staff members are civil service employees of Los Angeles County. Thus the parties who acceded to Broad's de facto privatization of a big chunk of LACMA--the cultural equivalent of a leveraged buyout, or taking a public company private--have done a grave disservice to the taxpayers of the county, who, whether they like it or not, will be footing the bill for much of Broad's monument to himself.

Broad's insistence on naming LACMA's new contemporary art facility for himself while withholding gifts from his collection, his initial reluctance (eventually reversed) to allow other donors' names on individual galleries, and the presence of large plaques (above) with color photos of him and his wife at the top-floor and ground-floor entrances of LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum are in stark contrast to the situation at London's Tate Modern, involving its own recently announced major contemporary art benefaction. The galleries containing these gifts are not to be called the Anthony d'Offay Rooms. They are "Artists Rooms."

I do believe that major patrons should be allowed naming opportunities if they want them. But that's it. No further self-aggrandizement, as occurs in the above-pictured plaque extolling Eli's business success and endorsing his "lending library" paradigm for big private collections. Here's the last sentence from this memorial:

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum will ensure that the Broads' vision of making great works of art accessible to a broad [pun intended?] public is institutionalized in one of the country's leading encyclopedic museums.

My hope is that Broad's new "vision"---holding works privately in perpetuity and doling them out in temporary, rotating loans to museums---is institutionalized nowhere else.

Look familiar? Here are two works from Anthony d'Offay's collection, which have twins in Eli Broad's collection:

Damien Hirst, "Away from the Flock," 1995
© Damien Hirst

Robert Therrien, "No Title (Table and Four Chairs)," 2003
© Robert Therrien / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2008

Their collections may have similarities, but you can't have much more of a contrast between art donors' approaches to museums than those embodied by Los Angeles collector Eli Broad and retired London dealer Anthony d'Offay.

Broad wants to lend works from his 1,900-piece collection to public institutions, while retaining control and ownership, personally or through his private foundation. What's more, he wants his "lending library" concept to become a "paradigm" for other mega-collectors who might otherwise donate their works outright to existing institutions or create publicly accessible museums for their own collections.

D'Offay yesterday announced that he will give some 725 contemporary works (including the two above) to the Tate Modern and the National Galleries of Scotland. For this he will be paid £26.5 million, reportedly his cost in purchasing the works, which are now said to be conservatively valued at £125 million.

According to the above-linked London Times article, the British government is also "understood to have written off £14 million in tax as part of the deal."

According to the Tate:

The guiding principle for the creation of Artist Rooms [as d'Offay's gift has been named] is the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists. The collection of 725 works comprises 50 rooms by 25 artists and includes major bodies of work by seminal figures such as Diane Arbus, Joseph Beuys, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol. These are accompanied by an additional ten works by seven artists. Many of the rooms were conceived as specific installations by the artists themselves and have been assembled so that the work of important post-war artists can be seen and appreciated in depth.

You can go here on the Tate's website and click on artists' names to see what those rooms may contain. The press release is here.

"Now," writes Bloomberg's Martin Gayford, "we begin to understand why Tate Modern needs its extension."

Broad would undoubtedly argue that his approach is a better financial deal for museums, which don't have to pay to acquire the works or to store them when they're not on display. He is also justifiably disturbed by many museums' focus on temporary exhibitions, which consume so much gallery space that major works from permanent collections are usually off view.

Having recently marveled at the current Collecting Collections exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, I can well understand how Broad, the founding chairman of that museum, feels. At LA MoCA's lively, eclectic show (which out-dueled the Broad-centric display at the Los Angeles County Museum's new Broad Museum of Contemporary Art), I gazed appreciatively at major Rothkos, Klines and Rauschenbergs that came to LA MoCA from the Panza Collection, as well as a top-notch Pollock from the Schreiber Collection. Most of the time, though, those works are preempted by a robust temporary exhibition program.

This understandably rankles Broad, who negotiated with the Panzas in the early 1980s, nabbing the collection "very inexpensively---$11 million over seven years, without interest. It's probably worth $1 billion today."

The solution to the problem of hidden masterworks should be a nationwide cooperative effort among museums for collegial collection sharing. That Pollock should never be off view. If Los Angeles can't show it, Minneapolis should get it on loan.

What we don't need is major collectors' keeping their troves under private control in perpetuity. Anyone who believes in museums, as benefactor Broad undoubtedly does, knows the importance of a permanent collection that visitors, curators and scholars can get to know and understand over time, because it is readily and consistently accessible to the public and to the experts.

In addition, private stewardship is often not as professionally responsible as public stewardship. Broad himself revealed to me that he needs to do something about the climate control for some of his collection, which is not up to museum standards.

And let's not forget the serious concern that if a museum gives over its space to a large number of works from a single collector, that art may later be sent to market, its prices significantly enhanced by the museum's imprimatur.

Broad reiterated to me, during our conversation, his oft-stated promise that he, his foundation and the future officials of his foundation after his death would never sell. But as Christopher Knight points out in his article on the Broad Collection in yesterday's LA Times, "'Always' is a long time."

Broad did concede that, theoretically, the works could be sold. We just have to trust his pledge. Then again, isn't he the one who once stated that he would donate much of his collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art?

Who knows what the future may bring?

Thomas Krens

Here's what I said today on WNYC, as well as a few additional comments:

I have no idea if he wants it, but, as I said on the radio, I think Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art would be the ideal next director of the Guggenheim. True, he's been at his current post for less than two years, but job-hopping is not unheard of in the museum world.

My guess is that Govan's heart is in New York and in the contemporary artworld. Maybe he can forge a Guggenheim relationship with a new Dia "satellite" in Manhattan. This could be a win-win.

And if he leaves Los Angeles, he can stop taking a crash course on antiquities issues at the knee of the Getty Museum's director, Michael Brand. Govan's been picking Brand's brains ever since LACMA was raided by the feds, looking for information about Ban Chiang artifacts from Thailand.

But back to the Guggenheim: I believe, or at least hope, that there will be a return to sanity---core mission, core collection, core curatorial expertise. And I think that with the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (if it actually happens) we will have seen the last of the Global Guggenheim satellites. There also needs to be a return to financial sanity, relying for economic support on a core base of stable friends of the museum, rather than the next new rich guy on the block, looking for a quick fix of cultural and social cachet.

You can read the Guggenheim's press release about Krens' imminent departure here. Here's my previous CultureGrrl critique of Krens' globe-trotting ways. And here's my 2002 Wall Street Journal critique of the Guggenheim's then shaky finances.

UPDATE: Why did they make me get up SO EARLY? Now I'm scheduled to be on at about 8:35 a.m....subject, of course, to change. By then I should be completely caffeinated.

Late notice to you, because it was late notice to me:

If all goes according to plan, I'll be on New York Public Radio (WNYC) today (Thursday) after 7 a.m., commenting on the imminent departure of Thomas Krens from the directorship of the Guggenheim Foundation. You can hear me at 93.9 FM. Or you can listen online here. I will, as usual, post the podcast on CultureGrrl, when it's available.

I should sound very sleepy, because I'm up way too late.

I'll have more to say on the announcement of Tom Krens' imminent departure from the Guggenheim later. For the details, see Carol Vogel's piece for tomorrow's NY Times, online now.

For now, just this: You might think Krens was a bit of a con artist, who tried to realize his improbable schemes by latching on to a succession of moguls and foreign government officials with more money and ambition than cultural acumen. But I always thought he truly believed his own hype and I know, from several conversations that we had, how convincing he could be in communicating his convictions to others.

Now I think the Guggenheim needs not only a new director, but also a new direction. And I know the man to do it.

Francis Bacon, "Study of a Nude with Figure in a Mirror," 1969

Sotheby's had a lot riding on today's London evening sale of contemporary art, which its president and CEO, Bill Ruprecht, said yesterday would be an important art-market indicator.

I don't yet have all the official press-released information, but it seems clear that the "indicator" is upbeat. Estimated to fetch a total hammer price "in excess of" $144 million, the sale brought (WITH buyer's premium) $189.42 million. Here are the online results (in British pounds).

Top lot, as expected, was Bacon's "Study of Nude with Figure in a Mirror" (above), $39.78 million (with buyer's premium) against an estimate "in excess" of $36 million (hammer price). A number of contemporary Chinese artworks were unsold. We'll know more about that market after this sale.

Meanwhile, the company's 10-K Annual Report to the SEC, always a riveting read, went online today. Among its implications: You auction sellers who were issued coupons, now redeemable for cash, in connection with Sotheby's and Christie's 2001 antitrust settlement, had better stop procrastinating. Some $45.4 million in coupons ($22.7 million at each auction house) are still outstanding, and they will become worthless pieces of paper on May 15. Some of you did take action, however, after my above-linked Wall Street Journal appeared. When I wrote about the coupons last May, about $92-million worth had not been redeemed.

Here's more detailed information about what to do with those pieces of paper if you find them. If you don't cash them in, the auction houses get a windfall: Sotheby's reported that its $22.7 million in unredeemed coupons was "reflected as a current liability in the Consolidated Balance Sheets." Anything unredeemed by the deadline will result in a "reversal of any remaining liability."

There's also a lot more detail in the 10-K about the nature and size of the auction house's guarantees to consignors. (If prices exceed the guarantee, the auction house and any third-party guarantors get a large percentage of the upside; if guaranteed amount is not reached, the auction house and any third-party guarantors pay the guaranteed amount to the consignor and may take possession of the work.)

The 10-K reveals how guarantees have escalated over the past three years:

For the years ended December 31, 2007, 2006 and 2005, the total amount of auction guarantees issued by the Company, net of the impact of risk sharing arrangements with partners, was approximately $902 million, $450 million and $131 million, respectively....

As of February 19, 2008, the Company had outstanding auction guarantees totaling $185.2 million, the property relating to which had a mid-estimate sales price of $195.5 million. The Company's financial exposure under these auction guarantees is reduced by $36.6 million as a result of risk sharing arrangements with unaffiliated partners.

A few tidbits on some stories that we've been following:

---A Save the Mount emergency campaign has been launched to try to undo the financial damage caused by wishful thinking about fundraising for the admirable (and still unfinished) restoration and library acquisition at author Edith Wharton's former mansion and gardens in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains. They say they need $3 million before Mar. 24 to prevent foreclosure.

I think Stephanie Copeland, The Mount's president and executive director, has made this site a joy to visit. But now emergency-campaign donors need a level of confidence that their largess will not be in vain: A management shake-up, or at least a convincing long-term financial plan, seems essential.

---Curtis Wong has provided a few more clues about the new technology project he's been working on, which will be announced tomorrow. It turns out that it's not directly visual-arts related, as have been some of his previous projects that I've admired. Wong writes:

This project...has some elements of what could be a medium for storytelling, expression, or informing. If there is any art to it, it will come from the work of others who use it.

---I so agree with NY Times music critic Anthony Tommasini's comments today about the NY Philharmonic's performance in North Korea, which I watched on New York's WNET last night.

PBS will broadcast the concert nationally tomorrow. But you can see it online right now, here.

Tommasini wrote:

If only he [conductor and music director Lorin Maazel] had chosen to include even one short work by a living American composer, perhaps an Asian-American composer. Because the orchestra stuck to staples, the classical music art form came off as unthreatening. New music, by definition, is destabilizing. To have a composer taking part in the program would have been a reminder that the heritage is living, breathing and unpredictable.

As you may remember, I made a similar observation in December, here, when I argued for the grand old man of American music, Elliot Carter, "to demonstrate what contemporary creativity can be in a free society." Imagine if the still working, 99-year-old composer, who continues to take his bows at performances, had been able to make that historic trip!

As for the broadcast itself, I was struck by the rigid lack of responsiveness on the faces of the North Korean audience and I couldn't wait to see the reportedly intense emotional reactions of both players and listeners at the end.

But PBS perversely cut away and rolled the credits. Why?

Is this really possible?

What Elisabetta Povoledo reported yesterday in the NY Times, regarding the odyssey of rare sixth-century B.C. marble sculptures previously owned by Maurice Tempelsman, former swain of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, sure sounds to me like a dubious application of the fractional gift technique, which allows collectors to spread tax deductions over several years when donating works to nonprofits.

Povoledo wrote:

In 2002 Mr. [Mario] Bondioli Osio [former head of an Italian commission on cultural property], Mr. Tempelsman and the University of Virginia worked out a deal under which Mr. Tempelsman would give the university partial ownership of the statues for five years and then cede them entirely. On Jan. 1 the acroliths---their wooden bodies long ago lost, leaving two heads, three hands and three feet---became the property of the university, which promptly returned them to Italy.

It's a nice gesture, but the IRS might not appreciate it. Donations, fractional or otherwise, are tax deductible if an institution intends to use the property for its exempt purpose. In the university's case, that would be education, not repatriation. A tax deduction for possibly looted antiquities, acquired by the university and then promptly returned to Italy sounds to me like fodder for the grazing Grassley.

In prepared remarks for quarterly conference calls with stock analysts, Sotheby's usually closely tracks the language of its earnings press release and then fields questions.

But today, while discussing the 2007 totals, which it called "the best financial results...in its 264-year history," Sotheby's digressed from its earnings press release to tackle the elephant in the auction room---the guaranteed prices that auction houses offer to some consignors, which can become risky in a softening market:

Bill Sheridan, the company's chief financial officer, stated that Sotheby's had sustained $19.1 million in losses on guaranteed property sold in 2007, which were "more than offset" by the $77 million in total auction commission revenues from guaranteed works. "As a result, we earned $58 million in revenues from our guaranteed portfolio," he declared of the 2007 results.

Bill Ruprecht, Sotheby's president and CEO added that he did not believe this year would see "the same kind of acceleration in guarantees as there was over the last couple of years." The total value of current guarantees, he said, is $149 million (compared to guarantees totaling $458.5 million on Sept. 30, before the big fall sales in New York).

The officials revealed that the auction house is still trying to sell guaranteed property for which bidding fell short at the lackluster November Impressionist/Modern sale.

And now for some bullish news:

Sotheby's today reported net income for 2007 totaling $213.1 million, about double last year's $107 million. Total revenues were $917.7 million---38% more than the previous year---largely because of higher auction-commission revenues. Total auction sales (including buyer's premium) for 2007 were $5.39 billion, compared to $3.75 billion in 2006. Private sales those two years totaled $730 million and $327.88 million, respectively.

Ruprecht indicated that the big art-market players are those with commodity-based wealth (i.e., oil). Contrary to speculation in the media, hedge fund moguls, he said, "never dominated our business. They are a visible but small component of the demand side."

According to Sotheby's press release:

For the first time, contemporary art became Sotheby's largest category with auction sales of $1.34 billion, an increase of 107% from the prior year. Sales of Impressionist and modern art rose by 24% to $1.16 billion. Emerging markets performed strongly as well. Russian paintings and works of art brought $190.9 million, a 25% increase from the prior year. Sales in Asia totaled $400.7 million, a 41% increase from the prior year and worldwide sales of contemporary Asian art brought $140 million, 99% above the prior year.

Ruprecht also remarked that tomorrow's big evening contemporary sale in London will be an important market indicator.

Allan Gerson

(Part I is here.)

Reasonable people can disagree about whether London's Royal Academy should exhibit works confiscated by the state after the Russian Revolution from private collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. To me, it's a no-brainer: We want these great masterpieces to be seen by a wide public. Others, however, feel this makes the Royal Academy complicit with the seizure from the original owners.

But reasonable people---especially the pundit writing on this topic last Saturday for the NY Times Op-Ed page---should have a reasonable grasp of the facts of the situation before sounding off.

In his Saturday Op-Ed, Plunder Goes on Tour, lawyer Allan Gerson (above) gets so many facts mixed up regarding the current show of works loaned from Russian museums to the Royal Academy that his brief would never hold up in court.

First, he suggests that legislation providing immunity from seizure for works in loaned to museum exhibitions is an "unusual condition." In fact, we have on the books, right here in Gerson's own country, an immunity-from-seizure law designed to facilitate loans of culturally significant objects to exhibitions at American museums---Public Law 89-259.

Gerson goes on to surmise that visitors to the show at the Royal Academy will be "delighted to see artworks long held in secret in Russia."

Here's one of those supposedly secret works:

Henri Matisse, "The Dance," 1910. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Photo Archives Matisse, Paris. © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 2008

Gerson repeatedly confuses the "hidden" war booty that was taken by the Russians from Germany after World War II with the commonly displayed and occasionally loaned works that were seized by the Bolsheviks, such as the above painting from Shchukin's collection, also loaned to the Museum of Modern Art's 1992 Matisse retrospective. A selection of works removed from Germany (which are not the works at issue in the Royal Academy show) was first displayed in the State Hermitage Museum's landmark 1995 "Hidden Treasures Revealed" exhibition.

Although works confiscated from the pioneering Russian collectors of modern art have been loaned before, the issue has now come to a head because heirs of those collectors have expressed a desire to be compensated, if not by the art itself, then by proceeds from the London show.

I am of the opinion, as already expressed here, that without ironclad guarantees that loaned objects will be returned, major international exhibitions that have been the lifeblood of museums around the world will be seriously compromised.

If they succeed in sabotaging the principle of immunity from seizure, claimants will not further their cause. But they will insure that many great works of art will never be shipped to international loan shows, for the benefit of a wider public. Lenders won't lend if they fear their works won't come back.

As I scurried yesterday through the empty halls of the closed-on-Monday Metropolitan Museum to get to the press preview of the extraordinary Courbet show (opening tomorrow), I was stopped short by an unusually prominent red object label:

"Four Major Loans From the Republic of Italy"

When the Met received three objects from Italy last month (including the Greek terracotta drinking cup, above), to compensate for the loss of the Euphronios krater and other works relinquished to Italy, the consolation loans were discreetly dispersed among pieces from Met's own permanent collection. This unheralded installation suggested that the Met found little to celebrate in their arrival.

The objects are still dispersed, but now even the Laconian drinking cup that has been sitting modestly in a Met case since November, sports a new look-at-me label:

Did this happen because the guards got tired of having to direct inquiring visitors to the scattered in-the-news objects? Or did the Met decide that a prominent acknowledgement of the Italian loans was diplomatically desirable?

Machu Picchu

Whenever I've written Op-Ed pieces for the NY Times, the editors have always been annoyingly meticulous about double-checking to make sure that all my facts were, in fact, factual. Such caution is not only justified but essential when running strongly opinionated essays by outside contributors who have axes to grind.

So how did not one but two pieces on hot-button cultural-property issues manage to appear on Saturday's Op-Ed page with so many holes in them?

First, there was Eliane Karp-Toledo's piece, blasting last September's tentative but not yet finalized accord between Peru and Yale University, regarding return to Peru of archaeological materials excavated by Yale scholar Hiram Bingham III from Machu Picchu in the early 1900s.

This author certainly had an ax to grind: The wife of Peru's first indigenous president, Alejandro Toledo, she had participated in preliminary negotiations with Yale. But the tentative deal was struck after her husband was succeeded as president by Alan García, who Karp-Toledo charged is "frankly hostile to indigenous matters."

According to her piece, "Peru's sovereign right to the entire collection is not acknowledged, and it is clear that Yale would keep a significant proportion of the materials."

That's not how the Yale Bulletin described the accord last September:

Most of the museum-quality, whole artifacts currently at Yale will be installed in a new museum and research center in Cuzco, Peru, which will be built by the Peruvian government to meet security and technical specifications provided by Yale....Yale will also transfer to the museum and research center a portion of archaeological materials from among the several thousand pottery and stone fragments, bones and other objects not of museum quality. These will include those materials, such as certain bones, which have already been well studied and for which Yale has no future research plans.

The agreement, once finalized, will acknowledge Peru's title to all of the archaeological artifacts excavated at Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham now at the University.

The Yale Daily News yesterday detailed the university's strong reaction to the Times Op-Ed piece. Paul Needham reports:

Sunday, University officials struck back at Karp-Toledo in interviews, questioning the validity of her claims and the nature of her motives....Richard Burger, an archaeology professor at Yale who co-curated an exhibit of the artifacts at the Peabody Museum of Natural History in 2003, said Karp-Toledo's piece in the Times was an example of "sour grapes."

Burger said he is disappointed that the Times would publish Karp-Toledo's article. University spokeswoman Helaine Klasky is currently drafting a response to The Times, he said.

We'll keep an eye out for that.

On the same Saturday Op-Ed page, there was also this piece, "Plunder Goes on Tour," about the controversy over the current show at London's Royal Academy of French and Russian paintings, 1870 and 1925, from Russian museums. One prominent American museum curator, with no involvement in that show, said this to me about the opinion piece by Allan Gerson, identified in the Times as a "former professor of international law and senior State and Justice Department official":

It's one of the most misguided and muddled things I've read in a long time.

More on this later.

Curtis Wong

Here's an example of something I can do on a blog that's too irresponsible to do in a mainstream media piece----plug a project that I know absolutely nothing about. Arguably, I shouldn't do that on a blog either, but the pedigree of this venture, whatever it is, has rendered me reckless.

Curtis Wong (above), who manages the Next Media Research group at Microsoft, is my Tech Hero. I've been following his creative uses of computer technology in service of art and art history ever since he masterminded the pioneering "A Passion for Art," an early CD-ROM about the Barnes Foundation's collection.

So when I caught up with him recently at the Seattle Art Museum (where he had devised a state-of-the-art digital presentation of one of the museum's great treasures, a 17th-century Japanese scroll), I was interested to learn what his next art-related exploration would be. It was, he said, a secret project.

Now the secret is almost out. Here's what one commentator, who saw it but (sort of) observed a news embargo, had to say about it...which doesn't reveal much, except that it's powerful.

Here's what Curtis wrote me:

The question is---Is it art? What is the definition of art? Something that evokes emotion and inspires? It remains to be seen. Regardless of whether it is art or not, It is another important piece of work in my career, which I hope will inform, inspire and change how people feel and think.

Or is it false pride and empty hype? As Wong says, "It remains to be seen"...hopefully soon.

Edith Wharton's library at The Mount

CultureGrrl readers may remember the above photo from my visit to Edith Wharton's Berkshire home, The Mount, where she penned her first popular success, "The House of Mirth."

In my Oct. 3, 2006 Wall Street Journal article about the restoration of The Mount and its acquisition of 2,600 books from Wharton's own library, I discussed the difficulties faced by its president and executive director, Stephanie Copeland, in raising $2.6 million for the acquisition of the volumes from British rare book dealer George Ramsden, as well as for the restoration and maintenance of the author's house and gardens, one of the few National Historic Landmarks devoted to a woman.

I then wrote:

An acquaintance of hers [Copeland's], Lord Christopher Tugendhat---owner of the largest private collection of Wharton first editions in England---helped broker a deal last year whereby two benefactors, Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers, would lend the purchase price [for the books] to the Mount, which would launch an "adopt-a-book" fund-raising campaign to repay the loan. The campaign, totaling $35 million, will also endow the library and benefit the continuing care of the Mount.

Wishful thinking, as it turns out. Charles McGrath of the NY Times now writes:

The Mount...has been covering its operating expenses by borrowing from the Berkshire Bank in nearby Pittsfield. It now owes the bank some $4.3 million, and in mid-February, when it failed to meet a scheduled monthly payment of $30,000, the bank sent a notice that it intended to start foreclosing unless the default was remedied promptly, Ms. Copeland said.

McGrath also indicated that the loan from the Wilmerses (whom he identifies only as a "private lender") for the purchase of the books is still outstanding, and the Mount recently defaulted on a payment to Ramsden towards an additional $885,000 owed him.

This appears to be another case disproving the notion, "If you build it, they will fund." Capital campaigns needs to keep pace with capital (and operating) expenses. Trying to play catch-up is a dicey business plan, as The Mount has now discovered.

Saul Levmore (above), dean of the University of Chicago's Law School, gets down and dirty into the criminal mind on his school's blog, offering his theory about why the Bührle collection thieves might have returned two of the four stolen paintings, but retained the two most valuable works.

Levmore, who experienced a "strange sense of intellectual delight" upon learning about recent developments in the Zurich case, writes:

The essential problem facing the kidnapper or extortionist, whether of persons or property, is how to take payment without being traced and apprehended.....I have long wondered whether the "solution" is in "double threats." The kidnapper might take A and B, and then contact the parent or owner and say "transfer $X to me in the following manner, and then (or before then) I will return A to you; if I am not followed and see that I am safe for Y days, I will then return B to you."

This kidnapper is no less credible than the conventional one, because B is otherwise useless to him, and there is the fact that his "reputation" and ability to repeat the crime depends on his freeing B as promised. And the taking, and serial returning, of A and B raises the chance that payment will be made on A.

I had previously speculated that the thieves might be leaving a "calling card for a ransom demand." Levmore, whose imagination is obviously more sordid than mine, has given us the details on how just how such a call might be answered.

"Intellectual delight," indeed.

Installation view of © MURAKAMI at The Geffen Contemporary at LA MOCA, 2007, photo by Brian Forrest, artwork ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.

It's always interesting to see how exhibitions morph from one venue to another, and it's hard to imagine a more perfect installation of the Murakami show than the one (above) that recently closed at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Arts' Geffen Contemporary...except for one thing:

Having finally seen (too briefly) and loved the show, I remain convinced that a Louis Vuitton boutique has no place in an art museum's exhibition, no matter what arguments you might make (as LA MOCA did) that it's consistent with the artist's philosophy.

There are few sights more bizarre than that of two separate elementary school classes of young Latino children being trooped through the land of outlandishly priced plasticized canvas, brightly adorned with corporate logos. Then again, the sight of young children, brought in great numbers to this show of childlike imagery and ogling the very unchildlike subject matter of some of those pieces, was also disconcerting.

Also strange to me was my fact-finding (not shopping) visit to the land of outlandishly priced plasticized canvas in my nearby mall:

The white-hued bags at this Vuitton boutique in Hackensack, NJ, are Murakami's, but there's no mention of the artist anywhere in the store, nor in the informational material supplied with the handbags. They're just mixed in anonymously with the rest of the stuff. When you go to Tiffany, you do know which goods are by Frank Gehry, which by Paloma Picasso.

So it was with some cautious optimism that I received this response from my query about Murakami plans at the show's next venue, the Brooklyn Museum, where it opens Apr. 5. Sally Williams, public relations head, wrote me:

We don't know yet if we will have a Vuitton shop. The Oval Buddha won't be in Brooklyn because he is too big to bring into the building. Other than that, the exhibition will be much the same.

The 18½-foot-high "Oval Buddha" (below) will be a great loss. Vuitton, not.

Takashi Murakami, "Oval Buddha," 2007, Courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

Oh no! This just in: Richard Prince for Louis Vuitton, in the spring/summer 2008 collection!?! Couldn't he stick to cowboy garb and nurses' uniforms?

Sorry, LACMA, you didn't make the list. But then neither did the Museum of Modern Art, the Hermitage or the British Museum.

TripAdvisor, the travel website, has compiled a list of the world's 10 most popular art museums (as travel destinations), which it compiled based on the amount of traffic on its site.

The top three were the Louvre (of course), the Vatican Museums and the Metropolitan Museum, in that order. The sleeper was the Art Institute of Chicago, which beat out the Tate Modern for seventh spot. I'm guessing that its adjoining Gehry-, Plensa- and Kapoor-enhanced Millenium Park has burnished its status as a tourist magnet.

Maybe Chicago will even move up in the rankings, after the opening of its Renzo Piano-designed modern wing, which includes a bridge to the park.

The rankings may say more about the people who rely on TripAdvisor for museum information than they do about the museums themselves.

Believe me, even though I'm pretty intrepid, I was a little worried walking into the Guggenheim's Cai Guo-Qiang press preview this morning. Hadn't I previously written about Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, with the notoriously misconstructed cantilever that would have fallen into the water, had it not been recently shored up? Had he designed the aging Guggenheim's rotunda to withstand the force of six real cars (engines removed), suspended from the ceiling?

There are nine cars in all: Two are at the bottom of the rotunda---the starting point of a levitating backwards somersault. And the procession ends at the museum's uppermost ramp:

Luckily at today's press preview I ran into designer/carpenter Pablo Maine (below), who was involved in the installation of the Guggenheim's "exhibition copy" of "Inopportune: Stage One" (originally commissioned by MASS MoCA and now owned by the Seattle Art Museum).

He improved my level of confidence, but I was a little queasy when I learned that despite the engineers' assurances, the cars were suspended just a couple of feet off the ground at first, and then mounted in their proper places one by one...just in case.

Tom Krens, in remarks to the press today, was in a generous mood, not only crediting MASS MoCA's 2004 exhibition as the progenitor of this show, but also tipping his hat to the Guggenheim Foundation's previous director, Tom Messer, for the Joseph Beuys show that Krens said he regarded as a prototype for the current retrospective---cementing an important artist's reputation.

Here's a close-up of the wires that hold the cars (and our fates) in the balance:

Maybe we should add this little white car to the exhibition.

There's another performative aspect to the show, but only for its first week or so: Craftsmen are still putting the finishing touches on the clay figures in Cai's epic "New York's Rent Collection Courtyard":

Some of the figures are going to be left as bare armatures, uncovered by clay, even though photos depicting the finished sculptures are taped on them. I didn't (but should have) asked if this was the original plan or a pragmatic last-minute decision, as time ran out:

The "Rent" piece struck me as Kara Walker-like: an emotionally and politically charged piece, in a traditional medium, depicting the oppressors...

...and the oppressed:

But Cai's work has a more ambiguous vibe, because of its association with the peasants-vs.-landlords social realism under Mao's Communist regime. It was appropriated by Cai, for the 1999 Venice Biennale, from a 1965 sculptural ensemble, "Rent Collection Courtyard," that had been created by members of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. (They sued for plagiarism but lost.) The New York version is expected to physically disintegrate during the course of the show.

Some people see all the airborn tigers and wolves as superficial gimmicks. I found the displays both frightening and exhilarating. At the press preview, Cai evoked the temporal dimension of the show by likening the viewer's experience to the unrolling of a Chinese scroll. Never have the Guggenheim ramps and rotunda been put to such compelling use.

I've now seen all three versions of Cai's car stunt, and I believe that the Guggenheim---because of its good architectural fortune, its risk-taking director and, we hope, its savvy engineers and installers---got the best highwire act of all.

UPDATE: Gregory Scheckler blogs (with photos) about helping to fabricate at MASS MoCA some of the works now in the Guggenheim's show.

More from the Guggenheim's Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective spectacular later. But first, CultureGrrl's video debut: Your intrepid reporter (with the help of two Guggenheim guards) gingerly stepped into a model of a Tibetan boat to "ride the serpentine river" through Cai's "self-made retrospective"---a gallery installation called, "An Arbitrary History: River," featuring artifacts from his own past (as well as some very contemporary live birds and snakes). It brought to mind an episode from my own history---"It's a Small World After All."

The ride is self-powered, though: You pull yourself along by the railings. (The guards did help me do the U-turn, and also manned my camera---probably a press perk.) Maybe the slightly giddy, dizzy feeling I experienced when I disembarked at the wood-planked dock was what Cai had in mind when he said that the gallery creates a "beneficial energy field" which is supposed to subject us to "a potential for vitalization." The wall text said I was supposed to spend 20 minutes on this journey to get its full effect, but don't try that if there are lots of children (or courageous reporters) waiting for their turn.

One thing's for sure---I've never done this in a museum before:

I guess Fisk University agreed with my suggestion that "if it doesn't want to the collection to be removed from Nashville to [the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum] in Santa Fe," it needed to demonstrate at this week's trial in Davidson Chancery Court that it is able "to properly care for and display the [Stieglitz] collection" that was given to it by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Yesterday, the second day of the trial to determine whether the collection should be relinquished to the O'Keeffe museum as successor-in-interest ot the artist's estate, Fisk President Hazel O'Leary suddenly stopped pleading poverty---the argument she had used in her campaign to market individual works or to sell a half-share in the entire collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum.

Jonathan Marx of the Tennessean reports:

Fisk University President Hazel O'Leary told a judge Wednesday that the school is ready and able to fund renovations to its Carl Van Vechten Gallery, which has housed the school's Alfred Stieglitz Collection of modern art....

"We have invested time, energy and resources into developing our advancement staff ... and Fisk's position is that it is receiving an extraordinary infusion of cash." Some of those funds, she said, would be used to complete renovations on the Van Vechten Gallery.

Finally, they're raising money the old-fashioned way. That should have been the first resort, not the last resort. Fisk had previously argued that conditions in its gallery were inappropriate for proper care of the art. The works are currently in storage at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville---which I believe might ultimately be the best partner to work out a Nashville-based solution for the collection and its care.

Randolph College, do you copy?

Recreating the Amber Room

Now that Russian craftsmen (above) have spent 25 years laboriously reconstructing the fabled Amber Room, lost from the Catherine Palace, outside of St. Petersburg, during World War II, along comes a story in Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, suggesting that the original, thought likely to have been destroyed, may at last have been found.

Still, the announcement of the "discovery" seems, for now, a bit premature.

David Crossland reports:

Treasure hunters in Germany claim they have found hidden gold in an underground cavern that they are almost certain contains the Amber Room treasure, believed by some to have been stashed away by the Nazis in a secret mission in the dying days of World War II.

"I'm well over 90 percent sure we have found the Amber Room," the mayor of Deutschneudorf, Heinz-Peter Haustein, who led the search, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Haustein added that he hoped Germany "could hand it over to the Russians without preconditions and...the Russians could then hand over the art they looted from Germany. That would be a sign of national reconciliation. That's my goal."

Given the deep-seated mutual hard feelings over this particularly thorny repatriation controversy, that goal may prove elusive.

When I visited the Catherine Palace in 1997, I saw the first recreated mosaic panel for the room, shown to me by master craftsman Alexander Krylov, who was cited in this NY Times article about the restoration. Ironically, the original of that very panel was recovered by German police in Bremen, soon after the reproduction was completed. Then, except for a lacquered wooden chest, nothing more surfaced...until (possibly) now.

Still, one must bear in mind what amber expert and NYU Conservation Center adjunct professor Alexander Shedrinsky (who had arranged my meeting with Krylov) told John Varoli of the NY Times eight years ago:

If the Amber Room lies hidden somewhere, it is most probably in some damp mine, which means it is almost certainly in a state of ruin.

If, by some miracle, the original could return to its rightful place, what would happen to the reconstructed Amber Room, which opened to the public in 2003? (Some images of that are on Der Spiegel's online slideshow.)

Do I sense a megabucks touring blockbuster in our future?

This continues my photo essay on the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Part I is here.)

Why is this man talking to a lobster?

Left to right: Architect Renzo Piano, collector/patron Eli Broad, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, LACMA director Michael Govan, at opening remarks for BCAM's press preview

Ah, now I get it:

LACMA's podium adornment mimicked Koons' "Quad Elvis" (above), a gift of Jane and Marc Nathanson, who also gave $10 million for naming rights to the gallery where their painting appeared.

If you're really smitten by the lobster fetish, you can buy some at LACMA's gift shop:

Were these shipped fresh for the BCAM opening? Nope. Turns out they're just leftovers from the recent Dalí show. (You know, that crustacean-ed telephone.)

Here's Broad, on the left, amidst a surfeit of Koonses (with Warhol in the background):

Koons, like Hirst, seemed somehow diminished by the overblown display of his work. Not so, Kelly, Twombly, Sherman and Basquiat, whose total impact seemed even greater than the sum of the parts, thanks to the resonating energy of their oeuvre.

But for me, the knockout room was the disturbing convergence of five powerful Leon Golubs (three shown below), in part because it subverted expectations:

And this was the knockout artwork. No photograph (especially not mine) can do justice to the bravura beauty (especially at night) of this commissioned piece that lures you into BCAM's entrance plaza:

Chris Burden's "Urban Light," 202 restored cast iron antique street lamps

Less successful were two other commissioned outdoor works---"BCAM Born" banners by John Baldessari, addressed to the traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. They struck me as billboards pretending to be art, rather than the other way around:

The palm trees are part of a commissioned work-in-progress by Robert Irwin, who discovered he was a landscape artist when he was commissioned to create the 10-year-old Getty Trust garden.

Here is Tony Smith's much discussed 24-foot-high walk-through sculpture, "Smoke," seen from the top of the old Ahmanson building's new grand stairway:

It's an endearingly unruly squatter, occupying nearly the entire cavernous lobby (renovated by Piano), where it mischievously mitigates the space's slick, corporate feel.

When you get to the top of those stairs, you are also rewarded by this piece, by the museum world's latest must-have artist (scroll to bottom of the linked post):

El Anatsui, "Fading Scroll," 2007
It was recently purchased by Eli Broad, as he told me during our conversation, but it was labeled, "anonymous loan"---probably the only evidence of Broad self-effacingness that I encountered during my visit. (He wasn't aware that it had already been put on display.)

I'll be interspersing additional Los Angeles posts, including more from my interview with Broad, during the next week or so.

Here's the Wall Street Journal piece on the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which I've been promising you. It's in tomorrow's newspaper but online now: LA Story With Broad and Piano (Page D7 in the "Personal Journal" section).

Now that it's out, I'm liberated from the confines of the phone booth and ready to fly around in my CultureGrrl cape. Here's another of my irreverent photo essays. But you must promise to read the newspaper article first, to prepare for what follows. This time, I'll do my photojournalism two parts. First, let's grapple with the architecture; later, the people and the galleries.

Above is what you see when you first approach the west side of LACMA's campus---the canopied pavilion that looked to me like a carport, perhaps a fitting image for vehicle-obsessed LA. Nicolai Ouroussoff of the NY Times called it "a gas station." That works for me. But what are those shower curtains on the right, behind the woman in the white shirt? Let's take a closer look:

Hmmm. Not very lovely. They're mounted on a track that permits enclosure of the open-air entry plaza when wind or rain threaten. LACMA's director, Michael Govan, who has never seen anything that could not be improved by an artist, assures me that he will commission someone to create more aesthetically pleasing drapery.

Here's a full view of BCAM, accented in Charles Ray fire-engine red. (Eli Broad told me he bought Ray's "Firetruck" (on the left, parked near the carport) from that other contemporary mega-collector, Charles Saatchi.)

Below is the much discussed escalator to the third floor of BCAM. Reports say that it broke down for a while during the public opening last weekend.

Also breaking down was BCAM's giant Barbara Kruger-surrounded, glass-enclosed elevator---out of service for almost the entire press preview. I happened to be the first to inform Govan of this glitch, right before we sat down together for lunch. "Was anyone in it?" he inquired anxiously. I never did get to ride in it and see the entire Kruger piece, appropriately titled, "Shafted." Here's what I did manage to see, peering through the glass door:

Here's a view of Piano's signature skylight apparatus. Each time it's a bit different, depending on the needs of the project and the quality of local light...or maybe depending on cost and the architect's latest theories. This one, I've been told, has computerized shades instead of louvers and sunlight bounces back and forth between the fins so that it is indirect when it ultimately descends into the gallery:

Looking up from the third-floor gallery, you can see strips of sky through fritted glass, and other parts appear opaque---a perplexing unevenness:

All those red girders lining the long concourse connecting buildings on the lower-level west campus seemed to me more obtrusive than attractive:

Here's a view from the new BCAM towards the former May department store, now dubbed LACMA West:

But here's another view of the same building, from Wilshire Boulevard. You can see why I called it "dilapidated":

The interior of LACMA West, currently used as a children's space, looks like this:

And finally, here's what that Piano-designed stairway-to-the-stars (actually, to the rest of LACMA's campus) looks like. It's part of the architect's reconfiguration of the atrium of the old Ahmanson building. I actually did climb that mountain, but I think I'm getting too old for this. That's artist Ellsworth Kelly standing at the base, chatting with modern art curator Stephanie Barron. (Kelly opted for the elevator.)

Part II is here.

Soon the WSJ gag rule expires, the gloves come off, and I'll be hitting you with all the news and views that couldn't fit into 1,350 words---not just about the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but also about Eli Broad, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and, let us not forget, the Getty.

I'll link you up when it appears online, probably late tonight.

Photo of the give-away car, an Opel, released today by Zurich police

We now have police-confirmed details on yesterday's recovery, from the above abandoned white car, of paintings stolen Feb. 10 from the Bührle Collection, Zurich.

Why did the thieves release only two of the four paintings stolen? Is this their calling card for a ransom demand? It's not likely that the masked men decided that their taste ran more to Cézanne and Degas than van Gogh and Monet. In fact, the two works still at large are the most valuable of the four, according to this account from Swissinfo, the website of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation.

Swissinfo also quoted Lukas Gloor, director of the Bührle Collection, saying: "Both paintings are still in perfect condition, and still look the way they were painted."

That's a relief, but what about the other two? In a CNN report the day after the theft, Robert Reid, a fine arts underwriter for Hiscox, postulated that owning a museum work gives criminals "some credibility" with their peers. When the reporter asked what he meant by that, Reid replied:

If you were a drug dealer and you wanted something that would prove your credibility and you turned up with one of these Picassos, it would certainly have an effect.

Maybe a comic effect. How might that conversation go?

---Come on, Louie, how do I know your heroin is pure?

---Hey, I've got this genuine Picasso, don't I?

Unmentioned in the talk between CNN and the insurer was the very real possibility of a ransom demand. Maybe these crooks, still at large, ain't so dumb after all.

It's a good thing the art pundits had a week to expound on all the possible reasons why thieves might target art museums. And it now looks like Randy Kennedy was more on target than he knew when he quipped in yesterday's NY Times that "many art thieves are simply not the sharpest grappling hooks in the toolbag."

The Associated Press reports:

Swiss media reported Monday that paintings stolen in one of Europe's largest art thefts may have been discovered in a parking lot in front of a Zurich mental hospital....The local TV station TeleZuri quoted an unidentified witness as saying that the car [found in front of the Psychiatric University Clinic] contained three paintings bearing the name of the museum. Among the pictures was Claude Monet's "Poppy Field at Vétheuil," the witness was quoted as saying....Local radio station Radio 24, also citing an unidentified witness, reported that the building supervisor at the hospital found paintings in an unlocked car. The clinic is only a few hundred yards from the museum.

No official word from the police at this writing. But only three paintings? That's not good. Four were stolen.

Meanwhile, art insurance specialists AXA Art responded to the artworld's anxiety over what the Swiss miss by announcing that "effective immediately, the company is offering to conduct security protocol assessments of museums in its key markets. The goal is to identify weaknesses and to provide feedback on measures that can be quickly implemented to deter theft....The service is free to AXA Art clients internationally. A moderate flat fee will be charged for non-AXA Art clients."

I suppose this can be seen as self interest, rightly understood---a cost-effective way to drum up some business and head off possible future ransom demands.

Cai Guo-Qiang, "Inopportune: Stage One," 2004, at MASS MoCA

The Guggenheim's Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe retrospective doesn't open until Friday, but already the big guns of art journalism have jumped the gun with major profiles of the gunpowder king---Arthur Lubow in yesterday's NY Times Magazine and Peter Schjeldahl in next week's New Yorker (online now).

But there seems to be a news blackout on the fact that the original version of the much discussed centerpiece for the show---a succession of identical automobiles, emanating sparks as they hurtle through the Guggenheim's rotunda---was created for a wide-ranging 2004-05 exhibition, Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune at MASS MoCA, North Adams. That first version of the car-bomb piece (above) was later acquired by the Seattle Art Museum for the entrance lobby of its new building.

Even the website of the exhibition's lead sponsor, the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation (where Cai is an "honorary advisor"), snubs MASS MoCA's pioneering show, while citing the artist's projects at the Metropolitan Museum and the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.

The upcoming New York show was "designed," according to the Guggenheim's press release "as a site-specific installation."

So was its uncredited precursor at MASS MoCA.

The Bührle-inspired speculation on why thieves steal art from museums continues today, with an article by Randy Kennedy in the NY Times "Week in Review" section that is informed by some real reporting.

But before we discuss Kennedy's Profiles in (Criminal) Courage, let's get to what's really entertaining about this article---the decision of the Times' photo editors, once again, to illustrate a story with someone not mentioned in the article itself. This time, they dug into the newspaper's archives for Myles J. Connor Jr.

Now where have I seen that familiar image before? Let's go to the CultureGrrl archives.

Ah, here it is:

It accompanies this Jan. 13, 1998 article that called Connor an "erudite burglar...and the likeliest key" to the return of the paintings taken in 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. That heist (but not Connor's possible connection) was mentioned today by Kennedy as "the biggest art theft in American history, with a value estimated as high as $300 million."

The caption for Connor's mug today says nothing about Gardner but describes his having said that "he arranged the theft---and return---of Rembrandt's 'Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed Cloak' to avoid prison time in another art theft."

That would be the painting below, now on long-term loan to the Getty Museum from a New York private collection:

Rembrandt, "Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed Cloak," 1632, private collection, New York

The Getty's press release, of course, makes no mention of this Rembrandt's colorful past---stolen in a 1975 armed robbery from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which had it on loan from the descendants of Robert Treat Paine II, a signer of the Declaration of Independence (described last November in another story by Kennedy, here). That painting was recovered in 1976.

But back to today's "Week in Review" article: After interviewing law enforcement officials and art crime experts, Kennedy arrived at this analysis of art thievery:

Most art theft experts say that the idea of such an evil connoisseurs' black market is largely a myth, and that many art thefts are committed with insurance company shakedowns in mind....The mundane reality is that many art thieves are simply not the sharpest grappling hooks in the toolbag; the smart ones choose to steal things that can be much more easily converted into money---or just money itself.

He also makes mentions of a blogger (a rare event in NY Times arts reporting): Derek Fincham of the Illicit Cultural Property blog is quoted on the "Dr. No" theory of theft-to-order.

As for the question of possible "insurance company shakedowns," paying ransom for stolen art is a very controversial practice in the museum world, because of the obvious incentive it can create for future art thievery.

Opponents to the proposed sale of four paintings from Randolph College's Maier Museum failed to meet today's deadline to add $500,000 to the $500,000 already posted to secure until May 10 a temporary injunction against the sale.

The Virginia Supreme Court rejected the opponents' request that it accept $500,000 as the full amount for the temporary injunction. This means that the injunction will be lifted and Randolph could, theoretically, sell the paintings. But a trial is still scheduled for May 27-29, at this writing, on the merits of the opponents' challenge to the sale. That impending trial would likely have a chilling effect on any possible buyers

In the college's Feb. 13 court filing, it said:

When the temporary injunction is dissolved,...the College plans to sell the Four Paintings at its earliest and most financially advantageous opportunity. Although the College has no immediate plans to sell the Four Paintings until after the circuit court trial, the College cannot represent that it would not sell if the temporary injunction were dissolved and a willing buyer made an offer acceptable to the College's Board of Trustees.

What's more, Randolph indicated that it may seek damages from the opponents for delaying the sale:

The College intends to file a motion in the Circuit Court of the City of Lynchburg asking that court---in which the $500,000 was posted---to hold the bond as security for the College's claim for damages that it is entitled to recover in a separate action on the bond once the injunction dissolves.

I admit it: I've been neglecting you, art-lings, while focusing on my mainstream-media work this week. So here's a quick rundown of some recent news:

---Let's start with today. I know you all read the NY Times arts pages, but did you miss the lead sentence in a story for today's Business Section, "Municipalities Feel Pinch as Another Debt Market Falters"?

Julie Creswell and Vikas Bajaj report:

The credit crisis paining Wall Street is reaching out across the nation, afflicting municipalities, hospitals and cultural touchstones like the Metropolitan Museum of Art....Alarmed by the running turmoil in the debt markets, investors have refused to buy certain securities that not long ago many regarded as equivalent to cash....The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now paying 15 percent on auction securities. It is unclear how long such high rates will persist, or when the market for these instruments will revive, if at all.

As I mentioned here, the Met's liabilities ballooned some 60 percent in fiscal 2007, due chiefly to the issuance in December 2006 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. (I don't know how much of that consists of the "auction securities" that are the subject of the NY Times piece.)

---The Museum of Modern Art keeps one, loses one: Carol Vogel gets the scoop (of course) that MoMA's board this week approved a new five-year contract for director Glenn Lowry. I wonder if it has a Philippe de Montebello clause, giving a big lump payout if he stays for a certain number of years? Who can say? According to Vogel, the trustees refused to release any details about Glenn's future compensation. Since they haven't learned the transparency-is-the-best-policy lesson, despite last February's disturbing revelations, we'll just have to keep an eye out for future Form 990 tax returns, which are public documents.

Also at MoMA, one of the country's most respected art museum lawyers, Stephen Clark, is headed to Southern California, from whence I have just returned: MoMA's deputy general counsel steps up to become vice president and general counsel of the J. Paul Getty Trust, effective Apr. 21. Will he be shifting his focus from Nazi-loot claimants to source-country claimants?

---Speaking of which, New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, controversially bankrolled by collector, benefactor and now repatriator Shelby White, has announced its first exhibition, Wine, Worship and Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani. The show is organized in partnership with the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries. The lenders of most of the more than 130 objects are the Georgian National Museums at Tbilisi and Vani. The pieces come from excavations of four graves at Vani in the Republic of Georgia, which was the setting for the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece

Meanwhile, the new institute, strongly criticized by some archaeologists for accepting White's $200-million gift, has only one faculty member, Roger S. Bagnall, formerly of Columbia University, and has advertised for five to 10 more.

---Is this one of the country's toughest art museum directorships to fill? The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, has just named Susan Lubowsky Talbott, currently director of Smithsonian Arts under Ned Rifkin, the undersecretary of art at the Smithsonian Institution. Her target audience, reports Matt Eagen in the Hartford Courant, will be cabbies. I heartily endorse this plan, having just come from Los Angeles where most cab drivers seem to have no idea of the whereabouts of many art museums (or hotels, for that matter).

The Wadsworth's press release seems to be an attempt to dispel the Hartford museum's aura of hard times:

Coleman H. Casey, president of the board of trustees and since August 2007 the museum's acting director, noted, "In less than a year the Wadsworth Atheneum has become a re-energized, strategically driven, and fiscally sound institution, which enabled us to attract a broad and highly qualified field of candidates.

---With all the theories I've read recently about why thieves steal art from museums, I've never seen this one before. Eric Gibson speculates in today's Wall Street Journal:

Perhaps art thievery persists for reasons that have less to do with personal prestige or monetary gain than with a vague sense of cultural longing....Art theft...is a kind of veneration, albeit of a decidedly sinister sort, a backhanded salute to art's powerful grip on the collective imagination. In spite of its inherent difficulties and risks, art theft may be driven primarily by art's easy availability and its high social profile.

---I know you all want to hear what I think about the new Broad Museum of Contemporary art in LA. But if I tell you, the above-mentioned editor of the Wall Street Journal's "Leisure & Arts" page will shoot me.

Patience, art-lings: You know I'll have lots more to say once the piece (which I've just finished) is published.

---In the wake of the theft of four paintings from the Bührle Collection in Zurich, we've had a lot of random speculation about whether it was calculated theft-to-order, clueless amateurs who didn't know they can't sell these paintings, etc., etc.

Now comes a useful follow-up: a recap of 14 major art heists during the past 22 years. What's interesting is that in seven of the nine heists that occurred earlier than 2006, works were ultimately recovered. Crime doesn't pay (except in Boston and Amsterdam).

---Be careful whom you partner with: Linda Sandler of Bloomberg reports that Edemar Cid Ferreira, the founder of both Banco Santos SA and the exhibition-sponsoring organization, BrasilConnects, who was lionized by the Guggenheim when it mounted its 2001 Brazil Body & Soul exhibition and then unsuccessfully sought to launch a satellite in Rio de Janeiro, has been accused by the U.S. Attorney's Office of having bought an $8-million Basquiat painting, "Hannibal,'' with "unlawfully obtained funds'' and sending it to the U.S. in August 2007 "disguised as a $100 work." ("Disguised" or just "declared"?)

Sandler writes:

"Hannibal,'' along with as much as $30 million of other artworks, couldn't be found when Brazilian authorities seized Ferreira's assets in 2005 and 2006 after he was charged with money laundering and bank fraud. The painting was seized by U.S. authorities from a New York City gallery last November.

Ferreira was sentenced in December 2006 to 21 years in prison for crimes against the financial system and money laundering. A Sao Paulo court ordered forfeiture of all his assets, including the missing art.

---Be careful that your art is safe.

Remember Christo's Umbrellas? Now Maurice Agis, a veteran creator of public art, whose inflatable, walk-in "Dreamscape" had toured Europe for 10 years, was charged with manslaughter in the deaths of two who were inside it in July 2006, when it came loose from its moorings in Chester-le-Street, Great Britain, levitated and flipped over. The project's tour had been funded by the British Arts Council. Ben Hoyle of the London Times has the story.

Hilary Ballon

First Mariët Westermann. Now Hilary Ballon [via].

An architectural historian who taught for 20 years at Columbia University (where she was professor of art history and archaeology), and who was also curator of last year's well received three-part exhibition, Robert Moses and the Modern City, Ballon is now associate vice chancellor for academic programs and campus planning for NYU Abu Dhabi, scheduled to open in 2010.

She co-authored with Westermann the recent report, Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age. Westermann, the vice chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi, was formerly director of the university's Institute of Fine Arts, New York. She is now working out of NYU's Washington Square campus.

Classes will be co-educational and will (according to the press release) be conducted according to "practices consistent with the prevailing standards at NYU's Washington Square campus, including adherence to its standards of academic freedom." That's a relief. But will construction of the campus accord with human rights standards?

The sweetener is that Abu Dhabi is not only funding the whole project but "has also made a commitment to NYU that will enhance the University's investment in faculty and programming." (Translation: Big Bucks).

While I raided the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's website, the indispensable Jori Finkel was engaged in a far more sweeping raid, excavating Ban Chiang objects from websites of museums around the country. Although they likely didn't acquire these pieces through the particular sources who are now subject to federal investigation, major museums around the country appear to have a Ban Chiang problem.

In an article (accompanied by a 11-object slideshow) for next Sunday's NY Times "Arts & Leisure" section, online now, Finkel writes:

In essence, the paperwork [for recent federal raids on four California museums] states, antiquities that left Thailand after 1961, when the country enacted its antiquities law, could be considered stolen under American law. And since Ban Chiang material was not excavated until well after that date, practically all Ban Chiang material in the United States could qualify.

McGill also commented that "it's not as easy as you would think to be up to date and conversant with different countries' laws and to know which foreign laws the U.S. is committed to enforcing and which not."

Now here's a project where the Association of Art Museum Directors could have a timely and beneficial influence: Commission an updated edition of Bonnie Burnham's out-of-print The Protection of Cultural Property: Handbook of National Legislations (1974), which included the relevant Thai laws. Then ignorance of foreign laws will be no excuse.

I think the Ban Chiang can of worms my have an impact far more significant than the relatively unimportant objects themselves. It shows that repatriation has legs: The problem won't go away with the return of a few stellar objects to Western European countries.

The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver's new David Adjaye-designed building, which opened Oct. 28, bills itself on its website as "a fiscally responsible project. The construction cost for the new building is $16.3 million."

But fiscal responsibility appears to have declined into fiscal difficulty: Paula Moore of the Denver Business Journal reports:

Several contractors who worked on the new, $16-million Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver say they are still are trying to get paid for their work....

Museum spokeswoman Daniele Robson said Tuesday morning she had no information about any alleged nonpayment of contractors.

The project's general contractor, the Denver branch of Minneapolis-based M.A. Mortenson Co., "has not filed a lien against the museum for what it's owed on the project, and is working with the museum regarding its fee," according to Moore's report.

Other components of Denver's art museum building boom are the somewhat beleaguered recent Daniel Libeskind-designed addition to the Denver Art Museum and the planned Brad Cloepfil-designed Clyfford Still Museum, scheduled to open in 2010. That project has raised $17 million towards its $33-million capital campaign and will unveil final schematic designs next month.

Philippe de Montebello at last year's press preview for the Met's new Greek and Roman galleries

Critic Peter Schjeldahl, in his current New Yorker piece---"European Tour: New galleries demonstrate Philippe de Montebello's method"---perpetuates a common misconception about the Metropolitan Museum director's modus operandi.

Favorably (but somewhat belatedly) describing the museum's recently expanded and reconfigured installation of 19th- and early 20th-century European paintings, Schjeldahl writes:

The result [of the curators' reinstallation] displays the director's touch to a degree that is common among feats of his regime--which is not at all.

Not at all.

It is certainly true, as I observed when Philippe announced his decision to retire from the Met, that de Montebello has been a curators' director, supporting and facilitating their initiatives. But suggesting that he's hands-off couldn't be farther from the truth.

Several times I've heard curators comment with affectionate exasperation on Philippe's propensity for tinkering with their displays---his prerogative as director, which he never hesitates to exercise. The most recent time I heard about Philippe's customary finishing touches was from Carlos Picón, curator in charge of Greek and Roman art, at the press preview last spring for the new Greek and Roman galleries. Since the director was also in attendance for this event, I asked him whether he had done a little rearranging. Here's what he told me:

I always do: I'm the director....What I did, overall, is basically remove objects. Curators have a tendency to put in too much, so I created a little space here and there---mostly in the vitrines. I redirected some of the pieces, made certain areas a little more dynamic. But I didn't make that many changes. I'm always fussing. It's always collaborative.

I can't do just budgets, right?

Right.

I've now had a chance to peruse Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle's Feb. 8 "Memorandum and Order" in the Fisk University Stieglitz Collection case, in which she barred any sales from the collection. It's clear that the judge based her decision on the very principle---donor intent---that Alice Walton unconvincingly tried to appropriate in her campaign to purchase a half-share in the collection for her planned Crystal Bridges Museum.

The judge relied on various communications between Fisk and the donor, Georgia O'Keeffe (which I discussed here, in my Wall Street Journal article on Walton) to reach her conclusion that the artist had been opposed to any sales.

A document that particularly seemed to influence Chancellor Lyle was a 1951 letter from O'Keeffe to Charles Johnson, then Fisk's president, which said the following:

Would you consider letting me withdraw the Collection? You do not seem to have anyone to take care of it or utilize it and you have written me nothing about air conditioning or controlling dust and humidity. I saw the amount of dirt that settles down on a tabletop in the rooms overnight, and with your humidity and changes of temperature it will soon be the ruination of the pictures. May I hear from you about this?...

If you find the Collection too much of a problem and wish to consider giving it up, let me know so that I can plan what to do with it next.

From this, Chancellor Lyle concluded that "O'Keeffe did not intend to give Fisk the right to dispose of the Stieglitz Collection," but would have handled any disposition herself. This would appear to bolster the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's argument that as the successor-in-interest to O'Keeffe's estate, it should gain control of the collection if Fisk were unable to care for it properly. That's the issue to be considered at the upcoming trial, Feb. 19.

My suggestion to Fisk, if it doesn't want to the collection to be removed from Nashville to Santa Fe, is that it abandon any thought of mounting a futile appeal of Friday's ruling against sales and focus instead on demonstrating its ability to properly care for and display the collection.

If that means partnering with another local institution, so be it. But I suggest a good choice for this might be the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, rather than the proposed new institution---the Museum of African American Music, Art and Culture---that recently made an amorphous bid for partnership.

As for the monetization of the collection to help keep the financially shaky university afloat, the judge was unequivocally opposed:

[O'Keeffe] wanted the Collection to reside and be displayed at Fisk to make a social statement [about African-American identity]. She had no personal connection to Fisk from which one could conclude that she had an intent to have the Collection used to keep Fisk in operation. Joint ownership with Crystal Bridges 'unlawfully dilutes' these predominate intentions that motivated the gift to Fisk.

A CultureGrrl reader of Greek heritage, with a passion for Greek art (and for anonymity), correctly urged me to point out another crucial difference, in addition to size and subject matter, between the Euphronios ceramic that is still in the Getty Museum's collection and the one recently relinquished by the Metropolitan Museum to Italy:

For the Getty's, as I previously stated, the potter was thought to be Euphronios and the painter, Onesimos. For the Met's, Euphronios was the painter and the potter was Euxitheos.

"In the latter part of his career," my correspondent tells me, "Euphronios did not paint but made pots for other painters such as Onesimos."

Have you seen these paintings lately?

"The Boy in the Red Vest," Cézanne

"Poppies Near Vétheuil," Monet

"Count Lepic and his Daughters," Degas

"Blossoming Chestnut Branches," van Gogh

Swissinfo, a site of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, has the most detailed account I've found so far of the deeply disturbing armed theft, during public hours yesterday, of four paintings (above) from the Emil George Bührle Collection, Zurich, a museum that houses important Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works collected by the Zurich industialist. The website for the museum itself, which was functioning earlier this morning, is now down: "You do not have permission to access this document."

UPDATE: The website is now working, and you can access information about the four works here, here, here and here.

Among the issues raised in the Swissinfo account are the theft-for-hire possibilities (as in the recent theft of two paintings from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art).

Matthew Allen of Swissinfo quotes this from Zurich police spokeman Mario Cortesi:

I think they knew exactly what they wanted to steal because it was over in three minutes. They came in and went directly to the right room and took the four most highly valued pictures....

It is one possibility that they were stolen to order, but what do you want to do with these pictures at home? Everybody now knows these pictures have been stolen.

Also from Swissinfo's report:

Museum director Lukas Gloor told journalists that he had not ruled out that a ransom demand would be made, but until now no such communication has been received.

But Gloor's comments, as reported by James Sturcke in the British Guardian, appear to contradict the police assertion that the thieves took the priciest paintings:

He [Gloor] added that they appeared to have taken the first four [paintings] they came to, leaving even more valuable paintings hanging in the same room.

Sturcke also reported that Gloor told the press conference that "the stolen paintings were hung behind glass, and a security alarm went off as soon as they were touched."

CultureGrrl readers may remember that 85 works from the Bührle Collection were shown in the National Gallery's controversial 1990 exhibition, The Passionate Eye: Impressionist and Other Master Paintings From the E.G. Bührle Collection.

The Washington museum was taken to task by Michael Kimmelman in the NY Times for glorifying a collector with a questionable past: "Nowhere mentioned in the catalogue is that Bührle-made arms were distributed to the Nazis as well as to the Allies." It was, he declared, "an exhibition that the National Gallery should never have undertaken. The astonishing thing is that this public institution evinces no embarrassment."

In a ruling late Friday, Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle rejected Fisk University's plan to sell a half-share of its Stieglitz Collection to Alice Walton for $30 million.

I don't yet have a copy of the ruling, but Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, has the story. Reginald Stuart writes:

In a major setback for Fisk University, a Tennessee judge has barred the school from selling any or all of its priceless 101 piece Stieglitz Collection of art to raise money to support the financially troubled school.

"The record establishes that Ms. O'Keeffe's intent was specific," Judge Lyle said, in a ruling she said she issued with "great reluctance..."She [O'Keeffe] did not intend for Fisk to be able to dispose of the collection in whole or in part," Judge Lyle wrote, basing her decision on correspondence between the school and O'Keeffe and New York law, which governs the gift since it was made by O'Keeffe while a resident of New York.

A trial is still set for Feb. 19, but is now expected to focus on the question of whether the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, as successor-in-interest to the artist's estate, should receive the collection. The museum has argued for this on the grounds that Fisk cannot properly preserve and care for the collection as O'Keeffe had intended when she gave it to the university.

The Tennessean has a less detailed version of the story here.

"Wine Cup with a Drunk Man Vomiting," Greek, ca. 490 B.C., attributed to Euphronios as potter, Onesimos as painter, J. Paul Getty Museum

The Metropolitan Museum has relinquished to Italy its famed Euphronios krater, but you can still see a work by that celebrated potter at the Getty Museum (above). Granted it's considerably less grand than the ex-Met's masterpiece in size and subject matter, but how often do you get a chance to see ancient Greeks barfing?

This cup is so under-the-radar at the Getty that its associate curator of antiquities, Janet Grossman, couldn't think of which object I was referring to when I asked her about it on Wednesday.

Its installation is another example, though, of my pet peeve about museum installations of such objects: You can only see the painting on its interior, but not on its exterior, which is blocked by a partition in the case. I also couldn't find the "Euphronios made me" inscription that the label says is on the upper border of the cup.

I'll have more substantive comments on my LA ramblings in future posts. But right now I've got to prepare for another art-full day.

Someone who knows more about how headhunters work than I do (and that's just about everyone) informed me that far from having an inside track for the Metropolitan Museum's directorship (as I suggested he might), Max Anderson might be disadvantaged by the fact that the Met's search firm, Phillips Oppenheim, was involved in his landing the directorship of the Indianapolis Museum. All of this speculation is merely hypothetical, mind you: I have no idea if Max is under consideration or if he wants to be.

But Sarah James of the search firm confirmed that headhunters do not displace their prior placements without the permission of the candidate's current employer. She also expressed chagrin that Phillips Oppenheim's website had, as I reported, misspelled the name of one of her company's clients, the Hirshhorn Museum. That gaffe has now been corrected.

But why isn't the Met yet included on the lists of her firm's clients or current searches?

Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle yesterday rejected Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper's request for a four-month postponement of the Feb. 19 trial involving Fisk University's plans to monetize its Stieglitz Collection. Fisk wants court approval to finalize its $30-million deal to sell a half-share of the collection (a gift to the university from Georgia O'Keeffe) to Alice Walton's planned Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas. The AG requested the delay to allow consideration of a new but amorphous bid for the collection by the proposed Museum of African American Music, Art and Culture in Nashville.

Chancellor Lyle ruled:

Fisk has made it clear that it will not participate in leasing the Collection to MAAMAC. Fisk's reason is that the MAAMAC proposal does not solve Fisk's financial crisis. Fisk needs immediate funds in the millions of dollars to stay open....

Fisk's indication to the court yesterday is that it will seek to maintain custody of the Collection rather than lease it to MAAMAC....The court does not have the authority to force Fisk to do something with the gift, such as lease it to another institution.

The trial date for consideration of the Walton arrrangement remains Feb. 19.

But right now, Tennessee has more important things to worry about.

Right again, art-lings: I'm in Los Angeles for the press preview for the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,, but I can't tell you about that for while: The Wall Street Journal has first call on my time and thoughts. But I'll also be going to the Getty and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

I don't think Jason Felch is going to ask me to tag along on any of those fun federal flings he gets invited to, so I decided to raid LACMA's website to look at some of those Ban Chiang artifacts that federal investigators have found so fascinating. LACMA's 48 Ban Chiang objects are here.

If all goes according to plan (and it seldom does) this will be my first of three trips on three continents in the space of three months. Can I handle it?

On this first journey, Broad-ly speaking, I'll have far too many opportunities to indulge my bad habit of punning. I'll also go on a swoopy Gehry Disney ride, accompanied by my husband and Mahler.

I'll blog when I can, but I've got a packed schedule this week, so have patience, art-lings. I'll do what I can.

Michael and Michael: I'm headed your way. Are you ready?

I'm a stickler for spelling.

So when I visited the website for Phillips Oppenheim, the New York search firm that the Metropolitan Museum has just retained "to help organize and staff the international search for the institution's next director," I did not get a good feeling when I saw that the chosen headhunters had spelled the name of one of their cultural clients as "Hirschhorn." They will probably have corrected their gaffe by the time many of you read this, so you'll have to trust me.

If you're not deterred by misspellings, and you think you're the one for this job, the Met's press release helpfully supplies the names of Laurie Nash and Sarah James, who have been assigned "to staff the search," along with their phone number and e-mail address.

Does Max Anderson have an inside track here? Phillips Oppenheim helped him land his current position as director of the Indianapolis Museum.

I think I ought to expedite the search firm's task by telling them whom they should pick. I need to revisit this subject some time soon. I'm still thinking about it, though, so you can e-mail your résumés to CultureGrrl. (Just kidding!)

Detail from a Morgan exhibition label, showing Bronzino's "Crossing of the Red Sea and Moses Appointing Joshua," Chapel of Eleonora of Toledo, Palazzo Vecchio

The illustration, above, on a label in the Morgan Library and Museum's engrossing new show, Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi, shows the Bronzino fresco for which the artist's drawing, below---one of the highlights of the exhibition---serves as a preparatory study (for the figure in the fresco's left foreground):

Bronzino, "Male Nude from Behind," Uffizi Gallery

This drawing occupied almost the entire front page of the NY Times' Friday "Weekend Arts" section, accompanying Holland Cotter's admiring review. He singled out this "buff male nude" but didn't mention the fresco to which it is connected.

Unfortunately, such opportunities to see not only preparatory drawings, but also images of the related finished works (which are mentioned in the labels for the drawings) are frustratingly rare in this otherwise extremely rewarding show.

It's not for lack of trying.

Rhoda Eitel-Porter, the Morgan's curator for the exhibition, answered my question about the absent images by observing that the cost for the rights to use all the reproductions she wanted for the labels was just too high. She added that her entreaties for permission to use an image that she particularly coveted---Jan Rost's tapestry, "Joseph Takes Benjamin at His Servant," related to a Pontormo study of a nude that appears in the show, were rebuffed by Italy on the grounds that the quality of the reproduction was deficient. This baffled her, since the Morgan WAS allowed to publish that image in the show's catalogue.

As it happens, the Rost tapestry is located in Rome's presidential palace, the Quirinale, where Italy has mounted its trophy exhibition of objects recently relinquished by American museums. Couldn't we get a tapestry photograph in exchange?

This casts some doubt on Elisabetta Povoledo's assertion in a NY Times article on Saturday (about Italian loans of sculpture to the Getty Museum for an upcoming Bernini show). Povoledo suggested that "Italian cultural officials are ready to turn over a new leaf" when it comes to cooperating with American museums. Maybe some leaves are still unturned.

Speaking of the Getty, why haven't we yet heard what antiquities Italy will send to it on long-term loan, in exchange for the objects relinquished by the California museum?

And why haven't we yet seen a full list of 10 objects Shelby White is relinquishing to Italy? So many questions...

As an aside, I do have one confession to make: I plagiarized the first two words of the above headline from my new blogging buddy, classics professor Mary Beard.

In yet another case of art-related investigatory mayhem, the feds on Thursday swooped down upon Kass/Meridian, a Chicago contemporary gallery, as part of what the Chicago Sun-Times reported was "an investigation into an alleged scam involving galleries in Chicago and other cities." For more details, read the above-linked article.

But also take a look at this photo, accompanying an earlier story about this incident in Friday's Chicago Tribune. You simply must see this for yourself: I'll just say that it involves snow and the trunk of a car. It may or may not involve fakes, which the Sun-Times indicates may be the target of these exertions. Still, if even only one of these artworks is the real deal, the photo is very unsettling.

Will someone please give federal investigators a crash course in art handling? Or better yet, can they please enlist professionals to do that part of the job? They might also want to consider whether they really want to invite the press to record such bumbling.

Another day, another art raid. Wait a minute...who's that knocking on my door?

Okay, now that we've just viewed the greatest football game ever played---by my New Jersey Giants---we'll view another kind of offense after I finish jumping up and down. (I admit that I haven't watched that many games, but still...)

Tackle that artwork! (COMING SOON)

WHD Koerner, "A Charge to Keep," 1916

Being admired by President Bush, apparently..

Jonathan Jones in the British Guardian today enlists a variety of experts to debunk W's enthusiasm for WHD Koerner's 1916 cowboy action painting, "A Charge to Keep."

The painting itself is knocked for its "exhausted cliché of masculinity" and for its being "fairly dull." But the experts have the most fun with Bush's misinterpretation of the work as depiction of determined heroism.

Jones writes that Jacob Weisberg uncovered this fact about the painting, during his research for the new book, "The Bush Tragedy":

It was first used in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916 to illustrate a story about a horse thief, and captioned as a picture of his flight from the law.

Speaking of things presidential, my main computer got fried during a power surge that occurred in my building while I was watching the Democratic debate. My blogging is hobbled.

Is this a sign that I should vote Republican? Or is it a negative comment on that other surge?

Everything is subject to diverse interpretation.

Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper Jr. has given support---in the form of a memorandum filed this week in Davidson County Chancery Court---for serious consideration of an improbable plan to put some of Fisk University's Stieglitz Collection under the care of the as yet nonexistent Museum of African American Music, Art and Culture in Nashville, where Fisk is located.

To allow further exploration of this proposed arrangement, Cooper has asked Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle to postpone, from mid-February to late June, the trial involving Fisk's attempt to finalize a $30-million deal to sell a half-share of the collection (which was given to it by Georgia O'Keeffe) to Alice Walton's planned Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, opposes the deal and has tried to claim the collection for itself.

The parties are due in court today.

According to its proposal, the new museum would pay Fisk for use of the collection. In his memorandum, Cooper asserts:

Such an arrangement would not only provide Fisk with a reliable and substantial source of annual income; it would also relieve Fisk of ongoing preservation and maintenance costs [for the collection].

The AG likes the possibility of keeping the Stieglitz Collection "intact, in Nashvillle, and under Fisk's ownership."

So do I. But on this one, as I suggested in my above-linked post, I reluctantly agree with Fisk's president, Hazel O'Leary. In comments reported yesterday by the Tennessean, she "questioned the finances of the proposed museum....'We have no idea who the African-American museum will have as an expert,' O'Leary said. 'The (proposal) on its face, not thought out, is so nebulous as to almost be insulting.'"

UPDATE: Here's Cooper's memorandum asking for a trial delay (from the Tennessean's website).