March 2008 Archives

Gustav Klimt, "Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl," 1918 (unfinished)

In 2006, the Bloch-Bauer heirs famously received five Klimts (including the celebrated "Adele Bloch-Bauer I") that were restituted by Austria in response to their claim that they paintings were wrongfully expropriated during the Nazi era.

But the heirs were actually seeking six.

The same lawyer who improbably succeeded in winning back the other five, E. Randol Schoenberg, is still working doggedly on behalf of the heirs to reclaim "Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl" (above). He told CultureGrrl that he is expecting within days a decision by the Austrian Supreme Court on whether it will hear an appeal to set aside the unfavorable 2006 arbitration decision on returning Amalie, which was rendered by the same panel granting the return of the other five.

Schoenberg recounted:

It ["Amalie"] has a separate legal history, because it is not mentioned in Adele's will and it was not recovered after the war. The decision by the arbitrators in this case was a travesty. I think [?!?] they were upset that Maria [Altmann] and the other heirs decided to take the other paintings out of Austria. Also, the family of the the woman in the painting, Amalie Zuckerkandl, who was murdered by the Nazis, also sought recovery and that muddied the water and allowed the arbitrators to claim confusion. But the painting was owned in 1938 by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and must be returned to his heirs.

Nonetheless, Schoenberg is a realist:

I don't expect that we will win.

Randy, did you expect you would win the others?

In other Austrian restitution news: That country's culture minister, Claudia Schmied, announced last week that she intends to push for an independent examination, by two researchers paid by the Austrian government, of the Nazi-era history of the Rudolf Leopold Collection (of "Portrait of Wally" fame).

And the April issue of ARTnews magazine includes a detailed (unlinked) article by William Cohan, questioning whether the Leopold Collection's "Dead City III" by Schiele should have been sent back to Austria from New York. Like that artist's "Wally," which is still stuck in legal limbo here, it had initially been withheld from return to Austria after a 1997 show at the Museum of Modern Art, but was soon sent back, in light of a different set of historical circumstances.

Anthony Calnek, vice president for communications and marketing for the NY Public Library, responds to Kindred Gamers: NY Public Library as Video Parlor:

I won't comment on your parenting observations, but when it comes to your speculation about the use of "Kindred Spirits" funds ("Let's just hope this is not where the art-sale proceeds are going."), I think you could take your advice to Paul---"Go do your homework"---and apply it to yourself!

You don't have to go to the library, in this case, since the answer to the question of how "Kindred Spirits" proceeds have been used can be found by searching your own archive; in January 2007, you quoted me saying, "All proceeds have gone into an endowment strictly for acquisitions by the Research Libraries." Not a penny has, or will, go for anything other than research materials.

Your homework assignment must also include a look at our press release about Game On @ The Library, which makes clear that this is a branch library initiative; it even includes a funding credit: "The March 21 Game On! program at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library is generously funded through the Cultural After School Adventure Program by New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and The City of New York." Speaker Quinn, a great champion of New York City's libraries, is the true kindred spirit who deserves credit here.

Jean Nouvel, 2008 Pritzker Winner

As occurred last year, the media-embargoed announcement of the winner of architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, was leaked a day early (here and here). Prescient (or well informed at an early date), Arthur Lubow has a long profile of Nouvel slated for NEXT Sunday's NY Times Magazine, already available online here. That piece includes the line: "Last week, Nouvel was named the winner of his profession's highest honor, the Pritzker Architecture Prize." A seven-day advance posting is a VERY early leak of a Times Magazine piece!

In any event, the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the $100,000 prize, really can't expect journalists to keep secret something that's already publicly posted. Should our readers be the last to know? (UPDATE: A fellow journalist today informed me that the Chicago-based Pritzker Prize "permitted online release yesterday, to coincide with release of info in Europe.")

The thumbnails of Nouvel's projects, also online, show some 42 designs designated as "in progress." One of those is New York's MoMA Monster, gallicized as the "Tour Verre" (glass tower).

As you know, Bloomberg architecture critic James Russell and I haven't been big fans of that megalith. In today's appraisal, however, Russell observed that "the best work of...Ateliers Jean Nouvel is magical, charming and utterly appropriate all at once." Of the excessive height of the proposed Eiffel of New York, he had previously fulminated: "Someday such abuse may become illegal."

I haven't seen the buildings for which Nouvel is most celebrated, such as his breakout Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, so my unfavorable impression is based on insufficient information. But like the Wall Street Journal's drama critic, Terry Teachout, I was not wild about the dark blue, silo-like Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis:



Terry wrote: "The low-ceilinged public areas are dark, oppressive and laid out with irksome illogic. Rarely can there have been a theater whose interior was less well suited to the purpose of making its occupants feel festive and expectant."

Its exterior reminded me of this:

It's too soon to "review" the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, because it's still a work-in-progress: Construction continues and few objects have been installed, except on the ground floor, where relatively minor but instructive archaeological finds unearthed during excavation for the museum are ingeniously and attractively arrayed in an educational gallery targeted to children.

Still, Bernard Tschumi's architecture is almost ready for its close-up, so a CultureGrrl photo essay is in order.

My impressions, like those of several commentators who made a previous press trip, were mostly favorable. But I was conducted on a quick, crowded tour, without much time to experience and contemplate the interiors, so these are first takes. A museum without its objects is just a shell. How the impressively monumental spaces will work as exhibition galleries is still an open question. How the bathrooms work as plumbing spaces is, however, already known. Let's just say: They'd better be a work-in-progress!

Speaking of the installation of objects---I received a cryptic note from someone intimately involved in creating the new museum, thanking me for my "thoughtful" criticism of the plan to install faithful copies of the missing Parthenon marbles alongside authentic slabs and suggesting that a change might still be possible: "We are working on it!"

What a relief! (Pun intended...of course.)

Here's what I saw:

Shelby White
They were not in the recently closed Nostoi exhibition of repatriated works, but the nine objects recently relinquished to Italy by American collector Shelby White will go on display at Rome's Palazzo Poli beginning this Saturday, according to Louis Godart, advisor on culture to Italy's President. Chatting with me at the recent "Return of Cultural Objects" conference in Athens, where we were both invited speakers, he said he would send me the list of those objects. (I have not yet received it.)

Another conference participant, Malcolm Bell, professor of classical archaeology at the University of Virginia, told me that the White objects had flown to Italy on the same plane that had transported his institution's two sixth-century B.C. marble sculptures, also repatriated, which had been donated to the university by the late Maurice Tempelsman.

I could not find anything about the imminent exhibition of Shelby White's former holdings on the website of the Italian Culture Ministry (nor on other websites I consulted), but I did find a long rundown by Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli of 20 Months of Culture in Italy (in Italian), which included this portentous sentence:

I expect that over the next few years hundreds of other works stolen from our national patrimony and taken abroad will return to Italy: the agreement that I have made with the British Minister of Culture to shed light on the [Robin] Symes collection housed in London has opened new, considerable opportunities.

Did we know about this agreement? What does it entail? It now sounds like far from abating, the Italian quest for foreign-held objects may be just beginning.

"Floodgates," anyone?

Rendering of the planned new museums on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi:
Gehry's Gargantuan Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (left) dwarfs the rest.

People tend to be more controversially candid in interviews published abroad than in those that they do for domestic consumption. This was true of Philippe de Montebello in Le Monde, blasting the Louvre Abu Dhabi (and, by implication, the Guggenheim's deal there).

Now along comes this astonishing interview by Tom Krens with Der Spiegel, in which he describes the planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi as "pharaonic" (calling to mind another immodest cultural figure who two years ago declared, "I am Pharaoh!"). And his fevered imagination hasn't stopped envisioning new schemes, including unspecified "plans" in Asia and Russia, as well as yet another in his series of attempts at a new museum facility in New York: This one would be a "department store concept" with "inexpensive construction, a lot of space, and not just for the Guggenheim's art, but also for private collections. Now a lot of people are urging me to make it happen."

Those people probably do not include members of the Guggenheim's board of trustees. Of them, Krens had this to say:

KRENS: The Guggenheim is not going through an easy time at the moment. Years ago, we chose a strategy geared toward achieving a worldwide presence---in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America. There is a document to this effect, which everyone enthusiastically agreed to at one point. The Guggenheim consists of our museums in New York, Venice, perhaps Bilbao and two smaller museums in Las Vegas and Berlin...

SPIEGEL:...and that's enough for many within the museum?

KRENS: For some, perhaps. But I believe that we must further strengthen our presence and that Abu Dhabi, in particular, is tremendously important for the Guggenheim.

Addressing the question about how "strict Islamic culture" would jibe with contemporary art, he said:

Why should we challenge a local culture? Perhaps to provoke political confrontation? That's unnecessary. And if an increasingly small portion of our collection is in fact not exhibited, this does not diminish the entire presentation.

He noted that the desert Guggenheim would have a $781 million budget to acquire contemporary work. And in true Krensian fashion, he appeared to take some credit for the concept behind the popular Tate Modern in London:

After Bilbao, everyone recognized that we need museums that are architecturally unique---but that also offer content that appeals to people. London, for example, followed suit with the Tate Modern Museum.

"Followed suit"? By repurposing an old power station rather than commissioning something "architecturally unique"?

James Russell of Bloomberg had more on Krens' vision for a new Manhattan facility a couple of weeks ago, where Krens indicated interest in participating in the development of the West Side railyards. But now that sprawling piece of real estate has just been awarded to a development team led by Tishman Speyer. No word about any cultural facility in Nicolai Ouroussoff's NY Times article critiquing the developers' plans yesterday.

And since Jerry Speyer is chairman of both the developers and of the Museum of Modern Art, what are the chances that the Guggenheim's Krens will get his shot?

Peter Schjeldahl lecturing last night in New York

With too much art to see at the Armory Show of contemporary art that opens today at Pier 94 in New York, how can you hone your must-see list to something manageable?

One way could be cross-referencing the list of the art fair's exhibiting artists with those with work in the current Whitney Biennial.

When I last I covered the Biennial for the mainstream media, in 2004 for the Wall Street Journal, I observed, tongue-in-cheek, that because the museum show had opened "concurrently with the Armory Show for the first time, this became the inaugural Whitney Buy-ennial: Art lovers could pick their favorites at the museum, then hop a free shuttle bus to the fair, where works by 64 of the 108 Biennial artists were up for sale."

In its publicity material this year, the Armory Show made it easy for collectors to draw such connections between the museum and the market. It helpfully listed exhibitors who were displaying artists anointed by the Whitney:

David Kordansky Gallery is devoting their entire booth to William E. Jones, CANADA is featuring a solo exhibition by Joe Bradley; and Susanne Vielmetter is featuring five 2008 Biennial artists: Edgar Arceneaux, Jed Caesar, Alice Koenitz, Rodney McMillian and Ruben Ochoa. Other galleries featuring Biennial artists include Ratio 3 with Mitzi Pederson; Galerie Dennis Kimmerich with Carol Bove; Zach Feuer Gallery with Phoebe Washburn; Arndt & Partner with William Cordova; Cherry and Martin with Amanda Ross-Ho; Wallspace with Walead Beshty; Stella Lohaus Gallery with Corey McCorkle; Praz-Delavallade with Edgar Arceneaux; Harris Lieberman with Michael Queenland; and Tracy Williams, Ltd. with Matt Mullican.

They might also have mentioned that Whitney pick Mary Heilmann was one of two artists (along with John Waters) who were tapped for special Armory Show commissions.

In case you need another Biennial cross-referenced list, Columbia University has trumpeted the names of its alumni who made the Biennial cut: Matthew Brannon, Coco Fusco, Olivier Mosset, Mika Rottenberg, Heather Rowe, Gretchen Skogerson, Mika Tajima.

No matter how much people like to second-guess the choices of the Whitney curators, it seems that everyone wants to ride the Biennial coattails. More validation came during a somewhat rambling lecture last night in New York for the American Federation of Arts' "ArtTalks" series, in which New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl seemed to come down more squarely in favor of the show than in his recently published review.

Last night, Peter answered an audience member's question about the Biennial this way:

I liked it. It was mild. It didn't seem strange. It seemed kind of sad and lost in a way that was touching and true to the moment. There's a new generation coming that I'm hopeful about.

Ingrid Sischy and Sandra Brant---uprooted by the ownership change at Brant Publications, where Sandy was publisher for 23 years and Ingrid was longtime editor at Interview magazine---are job-changing together, to become international editors of the European editions of Vanity Fair magazine.

According to Condé Nast's press release:

In her new position, [Sischy] will continue writing for Vanity Fair in the U.S., where she is a contributing editor....European editions of Vanity Fair are editorially independent of the American magazine, each having its own content.

One of my contacts at Art in America magazine (above), which is owned by Brant Publications, recently informed me that life remains status quo, at least for now, at A.i.A.

Alas, part of what's unchanged is the magazine's archaic, almost linkless website, which I thought might get an overdue overhaul thanks to Peter Brant's stated interest in providing a richer online presence.

Maybe eventually.

Rembrandt, "Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet," 1657, Penrhyn Castle, Bangor, Wales

More than a year ago, the Rijksmuseum revealed that it hoped to buy one of the finest Rembrandt portraits in private hands, "Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet" (above), then on loan to the museum from Penrhyn Castle, North Wales. According to Martin Bailey's story last year in The Art Newspaper, the price was expected to be about £40 million.

Now, according to today's story in Expatica Netherlands, the museum has only managed to raise almost £26.4 million (about EUR 34 million or $52.3 million) and the sale is off:

A spokesperson for the museum in Amsterdam reported this Wednesday [that] after more than six months of negotiations, the museum has decided against the purchase because "the expectations of the selling party continue to be too high, according to the experts."

The Rijksmuseum had already secured financial support from the Ministry of Education, Culture & Science, several funds, companies and private individuals to purchase the Rembrandt.

I found nothing about this development on the museum's website, but I did learn about two imminent changes in admininstration there: Taco Dibbits becomes the Rijksmuseum's director of collections on May 31, succeeding Peter Sigmond; Wim Pijbes becomes its director general on July 1, succeeding Ronald de Leeuw.

In the meantime...anyone wanna buy a great Rembrandt? Of course, you'll probably have to deal with that pesky British export permit delay, which will give U.K. institutions the chance to match your price.

Leaving Athens for Africa, for the moment---nothing I heard at the two-day "Return of Cultural Objects" conference last week in Athens articulated as comprehensively, intelligently and passionately the arguments for return of objects to their countries of origin as the long article by Kwame Opoku appearing in Monday's Modern Ghana.

Opoku details and decries the various ways in which objects historically made their way from Africa to international museums, and he debunks in detail the arguments for leaving those objects where they are now. I don't believe that everything should go back, as he appears to argue. (He previously took issue with my own views, as expressed in my LA Times Op-Ed on cultural-property issues.) But I do believe that source countries' attachment to and passion for their heritage should be treated not dismissively (i.e., there are no Etruscans in modern Italy; more people can see more objects in Universal Museums than in the source countries), but with the utmost respect and seriousness.

A few excerpts from Opoku:

---The fact that the 1970 [UNESCO] convention does not apply retroactively does not mean that the convention approves of all acquisitions made before 1970. Before the convention, there were rules of law in every legal system which prohibited illegal handling of the property of others....But it should also be added that the African States have not, to put it mildly, been active enough to make use of the possibilities offered by the Conventions. Many African countries have not even bothered to ratify or accede to these instruments.

---The functions of the museums directors are primarily to preserve evidence of history in the form of objects or documents. Here we have these scholars telling the people of Benin (and by implication all Africans) to forget history. They should forget the past and accept the present situation whereby their most precious cultural objects, taken by violence or stealth, are kept by western museums and private persons in the West. This is surely another confirmation of my theory that when it comes to discussing Africa, some western intellectuals and their governments often request us to suspend our common sense and our ability to think.

---What this argument [on behalf of the Universal Museum] states is that, no matter the initial mode of acquisition, because of the stay of these stolen objects in Europe, they have become better known and have gained universal reputation as work of art. They have also acquired another value in that they are not only a manifestation of a religious and political power of a civilization but are now admired for their own aesthetic value and craftsmanship. What an insulting argument. On this line of reasoning, one could also argue that how ever bad slavery may have been, it has enabled the rich variety and wealth of African culture to be known all over the world.

---The argument...that Africans are unable to look after their cultural objects...always comes up when the question of restitution is raised....Would any court accept the argument of a thief that the owner of the property cannot look after it properly and therefore he is not going to return it?

---It has been argued in all seriousness that in view of the possibilities of digitalization, there is no longer any real need for physical repatriation....What is meant by "virtual and visual return which is offered as alternative to physical repatriation"? That we can see these objects via internet and also in the form of photos? What about the cultural objects we require for religious and ritual practices? Is the British Museum seriously suggesting that we introduce internet into our cultural and religious practices, including our dances and masquerades, instead of the physical objects?...Can someone tell me how we can dance with a digitally repatriated mask?

There's a lot more provocative commentary where that came from. To view it, go to the article of origin (linked above).

Edward Hicks, "The Peaceable Kingdom with the Leopard of Serenity"
Photo: Sotheby's

I was surprised to get today's press release that Sotheby's will sell Edward Hicks' "The Peaceable Kingdom with the Leopard of Serenity" at its May 22 American paintings sale. As I reported here (scroll down to last item in the linked post), the auction house had intended to sell that painting privately for its owner, Ralph Esmerian, the American Folk Art Museum's financially embattled benefactor,

Sotheby's press spokesperson Courtney King confirmed that the consignor to the upcoming sale, unidentified in the press release, is Esmerian. She also revealed that Sotheby's had indeed held a private auction for the painting, but "offers didn't meet the minimum bid" (an amount she would not disclose). The estimate for the work, which had been promised but not yet given to the New York museum (where it was on loan), is now $6-8 million.

The provenance and quality should help the price. The distress-sale aura won't.

Asher B. Durand, "Kindred Spirits," Crystal Bridges Museum, sold by NY Public Library

We all remember when the NY Public Library justified its 2005 sales of important paintings, including Asher B. Durand's iconic "Kindred Spirits" (above), on the grounds that exhibiting art was not part of its core mission as a library.

Now it has discovered a pursuit more closely tied to its mission---being a video-game parlor.

In a NY Times article on Saturday, we learned that the grand lobby of the library's venerable main headquarters on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street was given over on Friday afternoon to "three big screens and throngs of exuberant players." Local library branches are also hosting video game events, and the NYPL has been acquiring these games for its collections. Let's just hope this is not where the art-sale proceeds are going.

Mission-driven library officials feel obligated to try to justify the "Game On" initiative on more grounds than merely luring kids into the building. According to the NYPL's press release:

In the game world, players make their own discoveries and apply what they learn to new contexts.

Games are a mode of active engagement. They encourage experimentation and risk-taking, and they view the process of solving a problem as important as finding the answer.

Maybe so. But my experiece as the mother of an earlier-generation video-game enthusiast, who cut his teeth on "Super Mario" and graduated to "Doom," is that these addictive entertainments suck time from pursuits that libraries formerly regarded as their raisons d''être---scholarship and intellectual growth.

Or, to put it more simply---Paul, enough "Doom." Go do your homework!

"Super Smash Bros. Brawl" may lure boys into the library (no girls graced the NY Times photo of last Friday's event), but as the gamers' comments to the Times' Seth Schiesel indicate, it's unlikely to promote a love of the values and pursuits that the institution has traditionally stood for. To pander is not to edify. Using populist programming to draw new audiences to a library (or to a museum, for that matter) does not mean that those visitors will sample the greater riches that the institution has to offer.

I've got nothing against these diversions as a way to blow off steam. Come to think of it, the library could be performing a useful service: Parents could try to limit their kids' gaming to the library, designating the home as a book-filled, video game-free zone.

Good luck with that.

Rendering of proposed Guggenheim Guadalajara, designed by Enrique Norten

I had somehow assumed that the Guggenheim Guadalajara, designed by Enrique Norten/TEN Arquitectos, was one of those figments of Tom Krens' imagination that had been permanently installed in his Museum of the Unbuilt. But a story in today's Guadalajara Reporter indicates that in the Mexicans' minds, this project may be moribund but is not yet dead.

Alex Gesheva reports:

Guadalajara's Guggenheim hopes may be stymied by the February 27 resignation of one of the project's greatest supporters, Thomas Krens, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation....

The beleaguered Guadalajara Guggenheim project has moved in costly fits and starts over the last six years, with two million dollars spent on feasibility studies alone. When Krens originally rained praise on the chosen location in Guadalajara, he said the museum would be inaugurated in 2007.

Just last year, Guadalajara City Hall approved the donation of 2.8 hectares of the Mirador Independencia public park on the rim of the Huentitan Canyon and officials optimistically announced that the project could be completed by the 2011 Pan-American Games....

Mexico's government expended a great deal of energy courting Krens, even somewhat obsequiously awarding him the Order of the Aztec Eagle in 2006. The country's highest honor for a foreign national is generally granted for outstanding service to the nation and its people....

The director of the private consortium managing the project in Guadalajara, Fernando Fernandez, has remained optimistic but recognizes that a meeting between the Guadalajara Capital Cultural group and New York foundation management must be scheduled within the next few months.

Some observers have commented that a simple lack of funds is more of a problem for a Guggenheim Guadalajara than Krens' resignation. The museum itself is expected to cost around 170 million dollars, but total investment, including ancillary infrastructure, could soar to 300 million dollars. At this time last year, private donations in the fund totaled around four million dollars.

Hope springs eternal, it seems, in locales seeking to become the next Bilbao.

Oh no! I may have started something. Here's an excerpt from the latest entry from the Walker Art Center's "Off Center" blog:

A quick answer to Rosenbaum's query [about whether a boutique selling Richard Prince's Vuitton handbags might open at the Walker] comes with a stroll to the Walker shop, where a table of products timed to the Prince exhibition is stocked with dozens of posters, postcards, DVDs of films Prince selected as personally inspiring, and stacks of handsome, shrink-wrapped exhibition catalogues. Alas, no handbags. [ALAS?!?]

"It's a very high-end line and a very specific distribution. It's not something (Vuitton) would just sell to anyone, anywhere," says Nancy Gross, director of merchandising and facility rental at the Walker. "Will I look into it? Maybe."

Please don't! I will feel personally responsible. What have I wrought?

They have even posted my photo of the Prince display at my nearby Vuitton store in Hackensack. I've really got to stop taking these mall photos.

As expected, Judge Stanley Ott of Montgomery County Orphans' Court did not rule from the bench today on whether the Friends of the Barnes and/or Montgomery County would be granted standing to seek a reconsideration of the judge's decision that gave permission for the Barnes Foundation to move to Philadelphia.

This just in from Carolyn Carluccio, the attorney for the county who argued for reconsideration at today's hearing:

I thought it went extremely well for the County. We were able to present our arguments without being silenced by the [Barnes] Trustees on standing grounds. Our arguments were strong and well received. The Judge was contemplative and attentive during the argument. He appeared to have taken in every word. He promised that he will render a written decision in an expeditious manner.

So he listened. Let's hope he heard.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has posted a short report on the hearing. Derrick Nunnally quotes Ralph Wellington, an attorney for the Barnes:

These offers [by the county, to help keep the Barnes in Merion] may make good press, and they may make good politics, but granting either of their petitions would make very bad law.

Catalogue for the © MURAKAMI exhibition

When I contacted the always helpful Sally Williams of the Brooklyn Museum's press office about a month ago, she informed me that no decision had yet been made as to whether Brooklyn's version of the Murakami show (organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, opening Apr. 5 in Brooklyn) would include a boutique for products designed by the artist in collaboration with Louis Vuitton.

Today, this press release hit my inbox:

The Brooklyn Museum announced today the exhibition of a fully operational Louis Vuitton store within and as part of © MURAKAMI....Takashi Murakami states, "The shop project is not a part of the exhibition; rather it is the heart of the exhibition itself. It holds at once the aspects that fuse, reunite, and then recombine the concept of the readymade. The Louis Vuitton project brings to life a wonderful new world."

Is he putting us on? I wouldn't be surprised if Brooklyn has another Saatchi problem on its hands---the problematic involvement, in too many aspects of the show, of a financially self-interested source of objects (Vuitton). The product-hyping language of today's press release is already disturbing, taking the synergy of art and commerce too far:

Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman comments, "We are delighted that Louis Vuitton will participate in the exhibition. The groundbreaking inclusion of its store within the context of the retrospective has created a new paradigm [calling Eli Broad?] in its exemplification of Takashi Murakami's artistic process that includes low-cost unlimited-edition consumer products, as well as luxury goods designed for Louis Vuitton."

....Takashi Murakami gave color and mischief to the Louis Vuitton Monogram by re-creating it in 33 colors on a black or white background. The collaboration between the two creative talents also spawned the Monogram Cherry Blossom line later that year, and the Monogram Cerise pattern in 2005.

"Our collaboration has produced a lot of works, and has been a huge influence and inspiration to many It has been and continues to be a monumental marriage of art & commerce. The ultimate cross-over, one for both the fashion and art history books" comments Marc Jacobs, Artistic Director of Louis Vuitton.

In addition to the operation of the Louis Vuitton store within the exhibition, Louis Vuitton will also generously host the Brooklyn Ball on April 3, 2008. Special creations by Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton will be auctioned during the gala dinner.

Proceeds from that Vuitton auction will benefit the Brooklyn Museum. However, revenues from the on site boutique will not benefit the museum. (Likewise, LA MOCA did not benefit from shop sales.)

As it happens, I just went on yet another fact-finding (not shopping) mission last weekend to the land of outlandishly priced plasticized canvas in my nearby mall. Here's what I discovered this time:

Mock-up of copies (left) of the Parthenon Marbles in the New Acropolis Museum

The planners of the New Acropolis Museum had a brilliant idea for display of the Parthenon Marbles. Then they improved upon it. Now they've ruined it.

What still remains of the original plan is the installation of the sculptural slabs around the outside of a rectangular structure of the same dimensions as the Parthenon, to simulate their original display on the monument. This is truer to their ancient installation than displaying them inside the walls of a traditional museum gallery, as their British-owned counterparts are now arrayed at the British Museum. In the first version of this idea, admonitory voids were to have been left in all the spaces where the British-owned slabs belonged---a startlingly stark demonstration of the disruption that their removal caused to the continuous procession depicted in the fabled frieze.

By last July, when I attended a press lunch in New York about the museum's plans and progress, this concept had evolved into something even more interesting: Dimitris Pandermalis, president of the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, told us that copies of the British-owned marbles would be installed in their proper places, but veiled over with scrims, to insure that there would be no confusion between the originals and the copies. Each veiled slab would appear as "a ghost," as he put it.

As of last October, when some journalists were invited to tour the museum-in-progress, that was still the plan (as described by Nicolai Ouroussoff in the NY Times, here, and Richard Lacayo in his Looking Around blog, here). This would have been a powerful visual polemic for the marbles' return, made all the more forceful by the dramatic view of the Parthenon itself through the gallery's glass wall.

But attendees at last week's "Return of Cultural Objects" conference (where I was an invited speaker), held in the auditorium of the impressively monumental Bernard Tschumi-designed New Acropolis Museum, were shown something very different and, to my mind, most disturbing.

The original Acropolis objects are now on the premises but still, for the most part, not yet unpacked. However, copies of all the marbles now residing in London and Athens have been installed in their correct sequence in the expansive top-floor Parthenon gallery (above). Before the museum opens, according to Pandermalis, they will be replaced by the original Athens marbles and by casts of the British-owned marbles that were given to Greece by Great Britain in the 19th century. There will be no voids (except for marbles that have been irretrievably lost) and no scrims.

By installing the real and the fake on equal footing, the Greek have dropped not only the reproachful veils but also the moral force of their installation.

Pandermalis gave me several reasons for the change, during two visits to the gallery on successive days. The first time, he said the advantage of the more homogeneous installation would be to "give the impression of the rhythm of the frieze." He also observed that some of the original slabs now exist only as fragments, which, he said, would look odd behind scrims.

On the second visit, he told me that the contrast between the flatness of the scrim and the sculptural quality of the authentic marbles would create a disjointed experience for the viewer.

So unless the Greeks change their minds again (as I hope they will), the visitor will see the celebrated icons of world civilization chockablock with plaster blocks. Pandermalis avers that visitors will be able to distinguish between the real and the fake, because the recreations will be whiter and have a different texture. (In the above photo, the whiter marbles in the foreground represent London-owned slabs; the browner ones, further down the wall, represent those retained in Athens.)

I'm not so sure that the average tourist will make these crucial distinctions. What's more, the authentic British marbles are themselves whiter than those in Athens and have a different texture, because the Greek contingent was darkened by overexposure to Athens pollution and the British counterparts were whitened by an infamously harsh scrubbing in the late 1930's.

Even if visitors understand the difference between the real and the fake in the Parthenon gallery, this compromised display subverts the mission of museums as uncompromising champions of the authentic. Forcing the true marbles to fraternize as equals with the false insults their integrity and their majesty.

At the New York press lunch last July, architect Tschumi told us that the goal of the (now abandoned) plan to substitute veiled copies for the missing marbles was to "create a public understanding of the necessity of completing the narrative." To the extent that visitors to the new museum may be satisfied by the display now in play, the Greeks' case that they need the to replace the fake with the real will be seriously undermined.

That is surely not the result they intended.

Germano Celant: Fashion phobic?

Tomorrow's NY Times Magazine is The Art Issue.

Yeah, right.

Except for one serious piece by the estimable Arthur Lubow about Latin American art in U.S. museums (focusing chiefly on curator Mari Carmen Ramirez of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts), it's all about art-and-catering ("Affairs of the Art World," complete with recipes) and art-and-fashion (including not one but two spreads foisting designer clothes on non-major artworld figures, the second of which seems to suggest that artsy women have a thing about black lipstick).

I particularly had to laugh at one line from Michael Kimmelman's piece on Miuccia Prada's artworld peregrinations. Writing about how the director of the Prada Foundation, Italian curator Germano Celant, first got involved with that art-commissioning and art-presenting entity, the Times' expatriate art critic quotes Celant saying:

They were suspicious of me, and I was suspicious of fashion.

Come again? Wasn't Celant the co-curator of the Guggenheim's infamous Armani show? I guess he must have been suspicious about that one too.

A class at the Barnes

On Monday morning, Judge Stanley Ott of Montgomery County Orphans' Court will hear arguments from lawyers for two opponents to the Barnes Foundations' planned move to Philadelphia---Montgomery County and the Friends of the Barnes (an ad hoc citizens' group). These two entities want Judge Ott to grant them standing to argue in court for a reconsideration of his decision allowing the move. Their argument for a new round of arguments is based on recent developments that the petitioners say would make it economically feasible for the foundation to remain in Merion, PA, where collector Albert Barnes stipulated it should remain.

I wish them luck. I think they'll need it.

Having read the briefs, including the one filed yesterday by lawyers for the Barnes Foundation, I very reluctantly find the foundation's "too little, too late" argument against reopening the case to be legally (but not ethically) persuasive. As for the dicey ethics---I believe that the trustees of the foundation did not take sufficiently vigorous steps to improve the Barnes' financial viability in Merion, because they were keen to move to Philadelphia. For example, after Judge Ott ruled that they could immediately expand the board to help bring some fresh funding to the table, they inexplicably failed to do so.

I also believe that the trustees, had they wanted to, could have raised the money needed for the foundation to remain viable in situ. I detailed how this might have been done in my Jan. 10, 2004 NY Times Op-Ed piece. I believe that Judge Ott made the wrong decision when he allowed the Barnes to move, and I believe that decision was inconsistent with his own previously stated opinion that to be approved, the move would have to be the least drastic modification to Barnes' trust indenture needed to insure the foundation's survival.

That said, I agree that the county's $50-million offer to the Barnes is (as the foundation's lawyers assert) more akin to a loan than a purchase, because it must eventually be repaid. The Barnes' lawyers, in their just-filed brief, punch holes in the county's argument that paying back the $50 million won't present problems, and they argue that it's too late now to advance proposals to save the Barnes that should have been made during the first rounds of the legal proceeding, not three years after the decision.

For me the strongest argument for throwing out the Philly-friendly decision is that the lawyer who was charged with being the watchdog for donor intent---Lawrence Barth from the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office---was so clearly on the move-to-Philly bandwagon that he was strongly admonished for his mishandling of the case by Judge Ott himself. But despite this, Judge Ott ruled for the move.

We need a do-over. I doubt we'll get one. I hope I'm wrong.

A pile of uncollected garbage a couple of blocks from the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, due to a strike in progress while I was there, which widened yesterday.

There was already a garbage workers' strike, a brief museum workers' strike and a Metro shutdown while I was still in Athens. Luckily, my Continental flight took off at 11 a.m. yesterday, as scheduled, but other attendees at the Athens conference, who were booked on afternoon flights, had to scramble to reschedule (with the help of the ever resourceful Eleftheria Maggana, who took care of all our travel arrangements).

Yesterday, the strike became widespread, encompassing hotel workers, among many others, and causing power blackouts (including the traffic lights). There was some rioting---all occasioned by proposed pension changes, which the strikers say will hurt their benefits. Renee Maltezou of Reuters has the story

My stay was delightful and culture-filled, but I'm glad to have gotten back home in time to have missed the turmoil. My biggest complaint about Athens is the seeming lack of a full-time classical music station on the radio!

But did Glenn Lowry get out okay? It turns out that the Museum of Modern Art's director was in Greece at the same time I was (but not for the same conference). If I only knew, I could have caught his lecture on "Making the Modern: A Disruptive Theory of the Museum of Modern Art."

"Disruptive." How apt!

My panel on "Museums, Sites and Cultural Context," preparing to do battle.
Left to right: CultureGrrl; Ricardo Elia, chair, archaeology department, Boston University; Elena Korka, head of Directorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, Hellenic Ministry of Culture; Μoira Simpson, senior lecturer in arts education, University of South Australia; Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association, U.K.

As an invited speaker at the recently concluded two-day "Return of Cultural Objects" conference, the first event held in the still unfinished New Acropolis Museum in Athens, I was a bit of a misfit and a Trojan Horse.

I was an anomaly because all the other speakers were cultural and/or government officials, archaeologists or cultural-property lawyers. Attending journalists were covering the event, not participating in it. And I was a Trojan Horse because I was welcomed inside the gates for my strong advocacy of reuniting the Parthenon marbles (although I have somewhat impractically suggested that they be ferried back and forth, for very long-term display, between the two venues where the sundered marbles now reside---Athens and London).

But I don't embrace the prevailing view of source countries that major American and British museums are the Evil Empire. What's worse, I eventually dared to say so.

My initial presentation was safe enough: I played to the audience by extending the CultureGrrl genre of irreverent photo essay to a different medium---PowerPoint. For this occasion, I lampooned (and occasionally praised) strategies used in labeling and installing antiquities by American museums, which often have scant information about the archaeological context of objects in their collections. I was struck by the contrast between American labels and those at Athens' National Archaeological Museum, where almost every object is accompanied by information on where it was found.

I ended by championing the view that I share in common with my hosts, singling out two examples from U.S. museums that fit the Parthenon marbles theme---ancient objects that had been fragmented and should be reassembled through the amicable cooperation of the different owners.

But then they opened it up to the audience for questions, and that's when I got myself in trouble.

I had gritted my teeth when my co-panelist, Ricardo Elia, had commented during his presentation on American museums' current attitude towards antiquities collecting: "I don't think it's a real change." About recent rapprochements between those museums and source countries, he asserted, "I'm skeptical it will lead to real change."

So when an audience member directed a question to the two of us about the "orphaned object" (lacking any known provenance), I outlined the complexity of the problem, threw in my recent Michael Brand quote, and then said that, contrary to Elia, I felt there had been substantial recent changes in American museums' antiquities-collecting policies, which had been implemented to varying degrees. This earned me a applause from one person, who, as I later learned, was Annie Caubet, honorary keeper of the ancient Near East art at the Louvre. (She was there to discuss with her counterpart at the Metropolitan Museum, Joan Aruz, the 1974 reunification of the head and torso of a Neo-Sumerian alabaster figure.)

[UPDATE: The diplomatic Derek Fincham, in his Illicit Cultural Property blog, considers Elia's and my comments and decides we're both partially right!]

The only other representative of a "universal museum" on the speakers list was Jonathan C. H. King, keeper of the British Museum's department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, invited to discuss his museum's long-term loan of a ceremonial mask of the Kwakwa'wakw First Nations to the U'mista Cultural Centre, Alert Bay, British Columbia.

When I exited at the end of the conference, a man followed me out, cordially identified himself as an artist who admired Art in America (where I'm contributing editor), and then started berating me for my cluelessness in saying something positive about American museums. I suppose my lack of discretion probably WAS somewhat clueless.

In any event, I have to tip my hat to Elia for the quote of the conference. This was his take on the "orphaned object":

First they kill the parents and then they kidnap the child.

While we're on the subject of my hapless participation on panels, here's what Columbia Law School's press office published about the views expressed by members of the deaccessioning panel on which I recently appeared. I must alert you, though, that I never used the words "slush fund" to describe deaccession proceeds, nor would I, since that term is generally used to imply corruption. [UPDATE: They've taken out the offending phrase online.]

You were maybe hoping to hear more about the New Acropolis Museum? COMING SOON.

Finds from the Athens Metro dig

Attention Art-lings: She's ba-a-a-a-ck!

While in Athens, I made it over to the impressive National Archaeological Museum (which I'd previously seen) and the marvelous Museum of Cycladic Art (which I hadn't), not to mention the Acropolis and, of course, the New Acropolis Museum, where I was invited to speak at the the still unopened museum's inaugural event, the Athens International Conference for the Return of Cultural Objects to Their Countries of Origin.

Having written a Wall Street Journal article back in August 1996 about the artifacts being dug up during the excavation for the Athens Metro, I was also fascinated to admire the finds, now attractively arrayed in vitrines at several Metro stations (above). And I was delighted to discover, serendipitously, the Roman baths (below) exposed on a street near my hotel, where the engineers had expected to sink a ventilation shaft for the subway system, only to be archaeologically detoured to another spot down the block.


What Athens found when it tried to dig a ventilation shaft for its Metro system

As you probably already know, something similar happened during excavation for the New Acropolis Museum, and the ingenious solution resulted in enhancing architecture through archaeology. More on this later.

Before launching my Athens posts tomorrow, I must express my grateful admiration for guest blogger Martin Filler, who skillfully wielded the CultureGrrl rapier while I encountered my international fan base (who knew?), some of which I probably alienated by my politically incorrect comments in a forum where "universal museums" were regarded with almost universal scorn. More on that later, too.

Martin, you kept my blog hits up and my blogging compulsion down. Many thanks!

It's now after 4:00 a.m., Athens time, and that's my body's time. So I'm off to dream about the view of ancient ruins from my former hotel room.

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger:

One of the more eye-catching new books to come my way this season is Between Heaven and Earth: The Architecture of John Lautner (above), the publication for an eponymous retrospective that opens at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, on July 13. This book and forthcoming exhibition are latest evidence of a gathering campaign to elevate the posthumous reputation of Lautner (1911-1994), a curious figure in late 20th-century American architecture.

Marginal among his fellow modernists, he was best known for spaceship-like residential schemes set amidst dramatic, isolated Western landscapes. Commissioned by clients who included Bob Hope and Miles Davis, Lautner's freeform concrete structures---flamboyant, scaleless and inevitably cantilevered---evoke the sculptural extravagance of his celebrated older contemporary, the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (who turned 100 late last year), though Lautner never enjoyed the international following commanded by that more humanely attuned form-giver.

I've long suspected that many hip Lautner enthusiasts see him as a latter-day Morris Lapidus, the diamond-in-the-rough Miami Beach Modernist patronized by Postmodernists as a pet primitive, much as Picasso, Apollinaire, and company treated their mascot, the douanier Rousseau, with a sardonic (if not insincere) mixture of admiration and condescension for believing he exemplified their theories avant le lettre. The burgeoning Lautner league cannot mean us to take his bombastic expressionism with complete seriousness, can they?

Although Lautner studied for five years during the 1930s with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Taliesin Fellowship, the pupil's later approach to designing in concert with nature was quite different from that of the master. Granted, Wright's geriatric output often departed from the organic integration of manmade and natural that epitomized his best earlier work, from the Prairie Houses to Fallingwater. But the triumphalist engineering arrogance that became Lautner's hallmark was the very opposite of Wright's essential naturalist credo.

I will give due consideration to the new book's principal essay, by the eminent architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, whose opinions I always respect. However, I'm likely to always regard Lautner with the same contempt that I reserve for that risibly tasteless magazine, Architectural Digest, which most often published his mondo bizarro houses, landmarks of an America I want nothing to do with.

Oscar Bluemner's Bronx Borough Courthouse

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

The rediscovery of a major work by an esteemed artist is rare, but rarer still if in a medium not associated with the maker. In fact, when Timothy Williams of the NY Times wrote on Mar. 6 that the long-derelict Bronx Borough Courthouse---a 1906 Beaux-Arts gem in the gritty Morrisania section---will be restored and recycled for the Bronx Academy of Promise Charter School, its architect, Oscar Bluemner, wasn't identified as a pioneering American modernist painter.

Bluemner's vibrant Expressionist landscapes, heavily influenced by his German contemporaries and now coveted by cult collectors, were the subject of an underappreciated 2005 Whitney Museum retrospective. In the exhibition catalog, veteran Whitney curator Barbara Haskell retraced the scandalous saga of the Bronx Borough Courthouse, decisive in Bluemner's abandoning architecture---a profession he found (with good reason) irredeemably corrupt---for painting. The trouble was that although Bluemner was a far better artist than architect, self-destructive tendencies sabotaged his success in that new calling.

Bluemner (1867-1938) was born in Prussia and studied architecture in Berlin before immigrating to the US at the onset of an economic depression, typical of the bad luck that dogged him. Trained in the conventional Classical manner, he lacked the flair of America's preeminent turn-of-the-century architect, Stanford White, and turned out competent if forgettable designs, save one Meisterwerk, his Bronx Borough Courthouse. Triumphing over an ungrateful wedge-shaped site, Bluemner's suave but imposing scheme---clad in Tennessee marble and fronted by a pair of monumental columns flanking an allegorical statue of Justice---outdid the concurrent last-gasp Classicism of Washington, DC.

The big catch: Bluemner was forced to ghost for Michael Garvin, a hack architect backed by Tammany Hall, New York's corrupt Democratic machine. Garvin hogged credit for the courthouse, an incensed Bluemner sued, but after a protracted Pyrrhic victory he gave up architecture in disgust and turned to painting full time. Alas, his knack for alienating even avid proponents (especially his influential dealer, Alfred Stieglitz) sabotaged a blazing talent. Architects still need upfront patronage in a way artists haven't since the rise of the bourgeois art market four centuries ago. The sad tale of Bluemner (who committed suicide after a Job-like pile-up of personal and professional blows) reminds us that art in any medium is never easy.

Rendering of 200 Eleventh Avenue

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

It was bound to happen sooner or later---the first bad dispute to arise from the celebrity architect-designed apartment buildings rising all over New York. The case in point is Annabelle Selldorf's 200 Eleventh Avenue in the city's hotter-than-hot Chelsea district, a 19-story tower with 16 condominiums costing from $6 million to $17.5 million.

Best known for her exquisite recycling of Fifth Avenue's old Vanderbilt mansion into the Neue Galerie, Selldorf isn't the starriest architect co-opted by status-savvy residential developers as a luxury marketing tool. She may not yet be a marquee name like others who have recently designed luxury residences in New York---Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Bernard Tschumi---but the tsuris she's been facing is big-time by any measure.

The NY Daily News recently reported that the New York City Buildings Department had suspended construction of the Selldorf project, because, as an agency spokeswoman said, "the pillars forming the exterior are misaligned. This could be characterized as a structural deficiency." If true, this could be a deal-breaker for the building's major selling point---huge elevator shafts that would allow residents to drive straight in and be lifted up to their apartments in their cars, which would be parked there in a personal garage. If the structure's verticals are out of whack, fuhggedaboudit.

Had the tower been by Peter Eisenman---who designed a small building in Japan with lines so deliberately off-kilter that it looked like it had been through an earthquake--no one would have thought anything amiss.

For its "The I-Team: Special Investigation" series, the Daily News dispatched an independent engineer to weigh in, and he declared the building structurally intact. It's possible, then, that the criticisms are unfair. On the other hand, when execution problems plague even top-of-the-line local schemes like Yoshio Taniguchi's Museum of Modern Art expansion---which before completion looked more expressionist than its rectilinear-minded architect could have intended---you're reminded that building on the square is a challenge for anyone who braves the ordeal of New York construction.

Covered silver tureen and platter designed by Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, made by Henri-Guillaume Adnet and François Bonnestrenne
Photo: © Cleveland Museum of Art

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

One symptom of getting older is an increase of the been-there-done-that syndrome, with its odious and sometimes unfair comparisons. Just as I've "retired" certain operas after definitive performances, some exhibitions inevitably prompt unsurpassable memories of earlier shows on the same subject.

I'm afraid that's the case with the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's recently opened and typically haphazard stylistic survey, Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008, which remains on view through July 6. One of my all-time-favorite decorative arts shows was "The Rococo in England" 1986, at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, an impeccable overview all the more instructive because it focused on a country not usually associated with that strenuously frivolous Continental aesthetic.

As has been true of several Cooper-Hewitt efforts in recent years---big, unfocused catch-alls akin to the Guggenheim's under-curated, overstuffed blockbusters---this round-up of 370 objects contains more than enough wonderful things to justify a visit. But "Rococo's" ridiculously overreaching timeline, presumably intended to make an antiquarian taste "relevant," negates any notion of serious scholarship. By including so many works that have nothing to do with the subject (forgetting strict chronology, which I don't demand), the Cooper-Hewitt flouts scrupulous standards upheld down the street at the Metropolitan Museum.

"Rococo" is vaut le detour for one artifact alone: the drop-dead Meissioner silver tureen (above) that opens the show with such a bang that everything thereafter is a letdown. Swarming with life-size life-like crustaceans, this dizzying maelstrom is as sublime yet inherently architectural as the Bavarian pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen or Amalienburg pavilion.

But what does Alvar Aalto's 1931-32 bent plywood Paimio chair have to do with the capricious spirit of the Rococo, beyond an ingenious use of S-curves? Nor should the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau or today's blobby post-Bilbao biomorphism be presented to a credulous public as Rococo revivals, implicitly or not. This kind of superficial thinking has fed intellectual disrespect for the decorative arts, and it's sad to see a prominent museum perpetuating the problem.

G. Wayne Clough

The new secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, whose appointment was surprisingly announced on a Saturday (to downplay it?), has excellent civil engineering experience. Here are his cultural credentials, as set forth in the Smithsonian's press release:

While improving Georgia Tech's reputation for science, [G. Wayne] Clough has emphasized the importance of humanities education. He established two endowed chairs in poetry....He was the subject of a chapter in Thomas L. Friedman's book, "The World is Flat, A Brief History of the 21st Century," in which Friedman credits Clough as a visionary leader who had to rethink an entire university strategy, beginning with an admissions policy that focused too much on engineering and not enough on such creative activities as music, poetry and team sports.

And art is...where? Who cares if the man has neither art nor museum experience. If Friedman likes him, he's gotta be good.

Clough is known as a fine fundraiser. His business connections include: serving on the board of directors of  TSYS (Total System Services, Inc.), which "makes it possible for millions of people to make paperless payments safely and securely"; and serving on the board of advisors for Noro-Moseley Partners, one of the southeast's largest venture capital funds.

All I can say is: They'd better appoint an undersecretary for art, replacing the one who just left, really fast.

I know. I'm in Athens and I'm not supposed to be thinking about Nashville.

But I left you without letting you know the one bit of news that came out of the Columbia Law School deaccessioning panel on which I partcipated on Tuesday: C. Michael Norton, whose Nashville law firm has represented Fisk University in its attempt to get court approval to monetize its Stieglitz Collection, told the assembled law students that Fisk intends to appeal the decision by Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle that had barred Fisk from selling a half-share of the collection for $30 million to Alice Walton's planned Crystal Bridges Museum.

So it now appears that the university's representations that new fundraising successes would now allow Fisk to maintain and display the collection was just a legal expedient to prevent the O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, from taking control of the works donated to Fisk by O'Keeffe. This would have been a true deaccession debacle: losing the collection that the university had hoped to monetize, without anything to show for it.

In her most recent decision, Chancellor Lyle had stated:

The court credits the testimony at trial of Fisk President Hazel O'Leary that with this turnaround in finances, Fisk intends to take care of and display the collection, and that Fisk no longer plans to sell a portion of the collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum.

Maybe that was giving Fisk too much credit: An appeal to sell to Crystal Bridges will soon be filed, Norton told me, in the Tennessee Court of Appeals. I suspect that the O'Keeffe Museum is now likely to reverse its announced intention to withdraw from the case. The supposed realization of its objective to insure that O'Keeffe's conditions for her gift were honored, with the collection on permanent display at Fisk, now seems again in doubt.

All rise. The court's back in session. How much of Fisk's scarce funds are going towards these lawsuits, we all wonder.

Rem Koolhaas' urban design plan for Dubai
Photo: Office for Metropolitan Architecture

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

After I lectured on architecture criticism at New York's City College recently, someone asked if I ever write about projects prior to construction. I replied that I try not to, given unpleasant surprises that can occur between the drafting table (or computer screen) and the ribbon cutting. Furthermore, while real estate developers shamelessly exploit celebrity architects as marketing shills, advance publicity can make a critic an accomplice to this commercial scam. I was proud to be a rare no-show among my peers at a glitzy promotional lunch thrown last year by a pioneer of high style design as luxury "branding" tool.

I understand why daily newspapers feel compelled to comment on schemes that promise (or threaten) to have a major impact on their communities. In most cases, though, I prefer to wait for the real thing, although I honor the venerable tradition of "paper architecture"---visionary fantasies never intended to be built. However, my unease about premature evaluation spiked when I read New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff's Mar. 3 preview of a grandiose urban design plan for Dubai by Rem Koolhaas, the aging Peck's Bad Boy of architectural globalization.

I admit to having written a few pieces about pending projects, but they concerned individual buildings, and I believe the likelihood of critical error increases exponentially with the size of an unexecuted scheme. Dubious though I was about Ouroussoff's February 2007 Times paean to Thomas Krens' latest Bilbao knockoff--four museums for Abu Dhabi by Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, and of course Frank Gehry--this latest Emirates flackery left me breathless.

What struck me most was that in an article of over 1,100 words, not one syllable was squandered on any mention of political conditions in the Middle East present or future, which could instantly render this 1.5-billion-square-foot mirage deader than the Dead Sea. Whatever perverse allure the ever provocative Koolhaas might confer on this grotesque concept, one at least would expect the Newspaper of Record's architecture critic to consult its front page every now and then.

Michael Govan

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

Just after the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced the departure of its controversial longtime director, Thomas Krens, on Feb. 27, this blog's presiding sibyl, Lee Rosenbaum, was interviewed on New York Public Radio and suggested that a good choice for Krens' successor might be none other than his former protégé, Michael Govan (above), now director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Three weeks earlier, during LACMA's Broad Museum of Contemporary Art press trip, Lee and I witnessed Govan's Oscar-worthy performance as he glided gracefully through a series of public appearances following Eli Broad's scene-stealing announcement that he wouldn't actually be giving his collection to the museum after all.

Although Govan has been at LACMA for less than two years, were he to return to New York (and who could blame him, after the recent Broad debacle?), he would be just the latest in a long line of museum directors who have left their institutions soon after major architectural schemes were completed. In yesterday's NY Times Museums section, Dorothy Spears listed several museum directors who decided to leave their posts soon after surviving major capital projects---Russell Bowman (Milwaukee), Anthony Hirschel (Indianapolis), Kathy Halbreich (the Walker, Minneapolis), Jay Gates (soon to leave the Phillips, Washington), Diane Douglas (Bellevue, near Seattle).

Unnamed (but alluded to, through the names of their institutions) were several whose departure after a big capital project was a retirement after a long museum career---Charles Pierce (the Morgan, New York), Harry Parker (the de Young, San Francisco) and, of course, Philippe de Montebello, who will leave the Metropolitan Museum once his successor is in place. Govan himself was also named in the article, as one who had built the Dia:Beacon, only to leave left for another major building project-in-progress at the Los Angeles County Museum.

There doesn't seem to be a single cause for this curious but common phenomenon. In some cases, tensions that typically erupt during a construction campaign cause such bad blood that a museum director's political position vis-à-vis his board of trustees becomes untenable. That was believed to be a big factor in Jack Lane's exit from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, not long after its disappointing Mario Botta building was finished in 1995.

Sometimes it's simply a case of burnout, which can affect not only museum directors, but also architecture curators, who often become in-house point men for such projects. Both Paolo Polledri, architecture curator of SFMoMA, and Terence Riley, his counterpart at New York's Museum of Modern Art, were gone in short order after their job captain duties were done. Polledri, suitably chastened, returned to teaching. Riley, however, used his construction management credentials to land the directorship of the Miami Art Museum, where he will oversee creation of a glamorous new Herzog & de Meuron building-- his central role in Yoshio Taniguchi's increasingly disparaged MoMA expansion conveniently forgotten.

Like Riley, Govan seems to relish these challenges. He seemed to suggest to Spears, for the Times piece, that he may forever be a nomad, journeying from one capital project to the next:

It's no secret I've spent my entire career in building and expanding museums.

Ned Rifkin

The Smithsonian Institution's undersecretary for art, Ned Rifkin, has resigned effective Apr. 11. One can assume that he's not going to be named to the Smithsonian's top spot, which was expected to be filled later this month.

The part of Jacqueline Trescott's report in the Washington Post that most interested me was this:

Under Rifkin's leadership, a group of U.S. museum directors analyzed the Smithsonian's eight art facilities and last year issued a report that said they hadn't lived up to their potential as national collections...."The review was somewhat controversial because it made certain people uncomfortable. It was tabled, but it still exists and the new secretary will have a chance to review it," Rifkin said.

I for one am glad to hear it was tabled, because it made ME uncomfortable---particularly the part that gave the Smithsonian American Art Museum's accomplished director, Elizabeth Broun, a bum rap.

The press release says:

The Acting Secretary [Cristián Samper] has announced that he will not replace Rifkin. Instead, the art museums and organizations that Rifkin oversaw will now report to the Smithsonian's Acting Under Secretary for History and Culture Richard Kurin.

I'm hoping that there WILL eventually be a new art undersecretary, once the top spot gets filled.

Dorothy Spears' article in today's large NY Times Museums section, When the Final Touch is the Exit Door, lists 11 museum directors---by name or by the name of their institutions---who announced they were leaving their posts shortly after the completion of major capital projects. But two of those 11 might be surprised to learn that they're leaving.

According to the article:

Mr. [Marc] Wilson and Mr. [Graham] Beal are both cresting on the momentum that followed their unveilings, but they are among the many directors who cite exhaustion as the main reason for their departures.

While they do sound somewhat exhausted, those two have not announced, as far as I know, that they are stepping down from the top spots at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, respectively. And I doubt that Spears, who quoted them at length in her insightful article, is trying to push them out. I suspect this may be a case of the editorial gremlins-at-work, mistakenly lumping those two names with the many directors cited by her who DID throw in the towel.

Guest blogger Martin Filler will have more to say on the substantive issues raised by Spears' article, COMING TOMORROW.

Herzog & de Meuron's design for the new Parrish Art Museum

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

I confess a personal prejudice when it comes to Studio as Muse: Herzog & de Meuron's Design for the New Parrish Art Museum, a revealing exhibition opening today at the Architectural League of New York. On view through May 2, the show displays more than 130 drawings, models, material samples and videos, and offers a detailed look at this relatively small but highly visible commission in Southampton, playground of New York art world movers, shakers, and makers. (The Parrish's new director, Terrie Sultan---sister of artist Donald Sultan---assumes her post Apr. 1, succeeding Trudy Kramer, who retired in December after heading the museum for 26 years.)

As I write in Debunking a Myth about Museums that Pay for Themselves in the March issue of Architectural Record, I served on the search committee for the new Parrish, along with art and architecture veterans who included Terence Riley, then the Museum of Modern Art's curator of architecture; art critic and curator Klaus Kertess; architectural historian Alastair Gordon; and Dorothy Lichtenstein, philanthropist and widow of Roy. We provided a shortlist of international candidates long on talent if not name recognition (to avoid the trap of overextended celebrity firms), including Portuguese cult-figure Alvaro Siza, gallery wizard Richard Gluckman, transatlantic low-techies Munkenbeck and Marshall, Swiss minimalists Gigon/Guyer, and Spanish stars-in-waiting Abalos and Herreros. But the Parrish board, bent on glamour that would attract donors, set aside our recommendations and hired Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, then soaring on raves for their de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Here, Herzog & de Meuron proposed a cluster of small-scale pavilions (above), inspired by the artists' studios on Long Island's East End. Nice idea, but multiple walls and roofs are far more expensive than one larger, simpler structure---so much, in this case, that the Parrish now plans to build the scheme *which came in at double the original budget) in three phases, raising fears that the plan may never be executed in its entirety. Thrifty architectural successes like Diller Scofidio + Renfro's $40-million Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and SANAA's $50-million New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York cost much less than the $63 million estimated for part one of the Herzog & de Meuron design. But will the Hamptons summer art crowd, tapped out by big city museums, want to foot the bill?

For those of you looking forward to seeing me get pummeled by four lawyers at this evening's deaccessioning panel at Columbia Law School, here are my articles that I sent (as requested) for students to read in advance of the event:

For Sale: Our Permanent Collection, NY Times Op-Ed, Nov. 2, 2005
The Walton Effect: Art World is Roiled by Wal-Mart Heiress, Wall Street Journal Leisure & Arts page, Oct. 10, 2007
The Lost Museum: Why Is MoMA Selling Off Its Masterpieces? Wall Street Journal Leisure & Arts page, May 13, 2004
A Betrayal of Trust: At the New York Public Library, It's Sell Now, Raise Money Later, Wall Street Journal Leisure & Arts page, Nov. 1, 2005

That last one is particularly timely today, given Robin Pogrebin's announcement in the NY Times of a $1-billion "expansion of the library system," with a pledged $100-million lead gift from the $3-million birthday boy, Wall Street financier Stephen Schwarzman.

What worried me was Pogrebin's report that "the costs of the $1 billion library project are to be covered through the sale of some existing buildings and a $500 million capital campaign."

"Existing buildings"? Local branch libraries like the one in the Bronx where CultureGrrl acquired her lifelong love of reading?

The press release was silent this, so I asked Anthony Calnek, NYPL's vice president for communications and marketing, for amplification. Calnek wrote back:

No branches will be sold other than decrepit old Mid-Manhattan Library, since the new circulating library within the landmark building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street will replace it. After the project is complete, we'll likely sell a warehouse facility on the West Side. The plan includes more than $100 million to refurbish branches in disrepair.

That's a relief!

As for the panel: I'll walk these soon-to-be lawyers through some case studies. As CultureGrrl readers know, 2007 provided quite a few textbook examples of how not to manage the "permanent" collection.

And I've even learned how to use PowerPoint for this occasion!

I ran the above headline (without the last word) once before, but maybe this time, they really mean it:

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, has announced that it is dropping its quest to wrest the Stieglitz Collection from Fisk University. The museum might have appealed Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle's decision, arguing that Fisk had already amply demonstrated its inability to fulfill the conditions of O'Keeffe's 1949 gift of the collection, no matter what the university might now say. But like Chancellor Lyle, it's giving the university a second chance.

Reginald Stuart, in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, has the story. The O'Keeffe Museum's chairman, Saul Cohen, told Stuart:

You don't appeal when you have won. Our goal was not to get the collection back and taken away from Fisk. Our goal was to establish that Fisk was legally bound to follow the conditions [of the gift]. And that has been done. As far as we are concerned, it's a complete victory.

So maybe the O'Keeffe Museum wasn't just being self-serving, after all. Or maybe it just felt that an appeal, at this time, would be a loser. I would bet, though, that they'll be back in court if Fisk doesn't meet the court's tight Oct. 6 deadline for renovating the university's art gallery and putting the collection back on display.

Stuart reports:

Cohen said the museum "will remain concerned that Fisk do what the court has ordered Fisk to do. If they violate the rule now, they'd be in contempt of court," he said, leaving the door open for the museum to move quickly to take possession of the collection.

The pressure is on.

Michael Brand

While I was in Los Angeles last month for the opening of the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art, I also spent an entire day at the Getty Museum's two campuses (the Center and the Villa), and got to sit down for a candid chat with the museum's director, Michael Brand, about the new phase in relations between American museums and source countries: What happens next, now that claimed objects have been relinquished?

Rosenbaum: Now that the agreements have been made with Italy and Greece, and objects have gone back, do you have any sense as to whether you will now have closure, or is this just the beginning of claims by source countries?

Brand: It seems much more on the side of closure than not. We've been talking for two years, and now we're talking about loans coming from Italy. But we've always said that if any further information should turn up about something from anywhere, we would review it and discuss it. We had a meeting at the American Academy in Rome at the end of November. [Italian Culture Minister Francesco] Rutelli spoke. That was all about this [givebacks] being in the past.

Rosenbaum: Your acquisition policy states that "no object will be acquired that, to the knowledge of the Museum, has been...illegally exported from its country of origin or the country where it was last legally owned." Why does that not apply in the case of the Getty Bronze? Was there no reason to suspect that the bronze was, according to Italian law, illegally exported?

Brand: That wording is for NEW acquisitions. You can't apply an acquisitions policy retrospectively. The reasons why we have it in our policy is that, while we use 1970 as the bright line, we are still concerned with the provenance of the objects. If you can prove something was out of country before 1970, but there are some giant question marks out there and there are rumors and suspicions, that would also be taken into account.

Rosenbaum: Is it fair to say, though, that had the Getty Bronze come up for acquisition today, it would fail that criterion?

Brand: I wouldn't comment on that.

Rosenbaum: How do you answer the questions about the "orphaned object" [an object lacking any provenance information] and AAMD's rolling 10-year rule for antiquities acquisitions?

Brand: Our policy does not solve the problem of the orphan. There IS a problem with the orphaned object. But there are all sorts of orphans. What we're trying to do in our discussion at AAMD [the Association of Art Museum Directors] is either deal with the orphan problem or get to the point where we can have a more productive discussion about the orphaned object. Our acquisiton policy doesn't deal with this.

You can look at it in two ways. For a particular orphaned object, you could argue that one acquisition is not by itself going to encourage illegal excavation. But if you were to acquire every single so-called orphaned object, that WOULD have an effect. You've got to somehow find a way of fulfilling two desires---one is to not encourage illegal excavation and illegal trafficking; but, on the other side, recognizing that it is good if objects come into public collections.

I don't think any of us know what the perfect answer is. For me to contribute to that debate, I had to sort out things at the Getty first. Then I'm in a much better position to talk about orphaned objects and to talk about the benefits of some sort of a licit market for antiquities.

Rosenbaum: How would this work?

Brand: I'd prefer not to talk more about that. AAMD is in the midst of that very sort of discussion, so to give a personal opinion would be counterproductive.

Rosenbaum: What have you been discussing with Italy, in relation to loans of objects to the Getty?

Brand: We are talking of a situation where, for the moment, the maximum is four years. Four years is not quite long enough to work really well....Ultimately I think it would be nice if you could have a category where things could be on almost permanent loan, but whenever the Italians wanted to get them back, they could. You could then build educational programs around them. You could build exhibitions around them....Sending them backwards and forwards every four years has some good points---you get other objects---but there's wear and tear.

I think the point you want to get to is where some of the objects could be on so-called permanent loan. Those would be objects that may be of lesser importance but could serve our purposes brilliantly---perhaps a lesser vase with a particularly interesting image that might relate to some particular drama...Thematically, it's useful to us but it's not one of the most important vases in the world.

You would also want to be able to ask, "Would you consider lending for two years this fabulous object that it would be great to have at the Getty Villa for this symposium? We recognize that you couldn't part with it for four years, but a loan for longer than the usual 10 weeks for an exhibition would be fantastic."

Rosenbaum: What do the Italians and the Greeks say about this?

Brand: The discussions are further down the path with the Italians, because they're already doing it at the Met. We're at the beginning stages in talking about objects. There are bright people on both sides. But on the Italian side, they have to work within their current laws. If they're going to lend for more than four years, someone's got to change the law.

Rosenbaum: Have you started those discussions with them?

Brand: Yes. When Jim Wood [the Getty Trust's president] and I were in Rome in late November for the American Academy conference, part of that trip was starting this new relationship and introducing the Getty's staff to Italian colleagues....We are talking about one particular loan as the first loan, which would be fantastic. The better the loan, the more disucssion it requires.

Rosenbaum: Does it have to be one-for-one [one loan from Italy corresponding to each of the 40 Getty objects being relinquished]?

Brand: One thing you had to consider: If you went out and got [a list of] one-for-one [exchanged objects] when the agreement was signed, would you get the best ones, or would it be better to have a bit of a breather and to think about what you might ask for?

Rosenbaum: How far along are you in identifying specific objects?

Brand: We're just starting the process. We have to consider the impact on our displays of the objects going back. I thought the last calendar year was the one where you nailed down the really contentious issues and learned who the players are....This is the year when we start pursuing things. There are some really interesting ideas.

Rosenbaum: Such as?

Brand: There's the one particular object we're looking at as a potential first loan. You can do the loans in various ways. You can have object-for-object. You can have all for four years. You can have some for a shorter amount of time, some from a longer amount of time. You can have loans from all over the place or you can build up a link with one or more particular institutions, where maybe 10 objects come, as part of building a relationship with an institution.

Rosenbaum: Can you say anything about the specific objects or institutions?

Brand: Not yet. But you know you'll be the first person I'll tell. We're trying to make it a really intelligent, interesting process. If we can have an ongoing relationship with certain individuals, we know that something good is going to come out of it. By having a little patience, I think we'll get an even better result.

This year, we expect to see some objects here. We have some really good partnerships. I want to get this out of my office, so it's a curatorial matter---for a particular project, for a particular display. That's the way it should happen.

Michael, can I hold you to the "You'll be the first person I'll tell" part?

"Docks" on the Block? George Bellows, "Men of the Docks," 1912, Maier Museum

The four-month-old legal battle to stop the auction sale at Christie's of four works from the Maier Museum of Randolph College has ended with the decision by sale opponents to withdraw their legal action that was pending in Lynchburg, VA, Circuit Court. They had been seeking a court order prohibiting the disposals. Christa Desrets of the Lynchburg News & Advance has the story.

Money was clearly a major factor in the withdrawal of the opponents' suit. Preserve Educational Choice (PEC), the group organizing the legal effort, writes:

Counsel has advised us and the plaintiffs that even if our financial and human resources were unlimited, a nonsuit of the art lawsuit and a focus on the charitable trust appeal [described below] is the best way to protect the art. Of course our resources are not unlimited....More than a quarter of a million dollars has been spent on plaintiffs' legal fees alone and the ongoing art legal fees are running at close to $100,000 per month.

What PEC didn't mention in its latest statement is that the college's attorney, Gilbert Schill, on Jan. 25 sent the plaintiffs' attorney, Anthony Troy, a letter that played hardball and apparently achieved its objective. The letter stated:

If the case goes to trial, there is no permanent injunction, and a later sale yields less than the expected price ["probably in excess of $50 million," according to the letter], your clients will be liable for at least $1 million [the amount of the bond they were ordered by the court to post for a sales injunction], half of which would come from the $500,000 already posted, and the rest of which will come out of their pockets

All plaintiffs, as well as PEC, should understand...that they have already caused the College to incur damages that we believe substantially exceed the $1 million acknowledged by the Supreme Court. The College reserves the right to take appropriate action to seek recovery of all such damages.

The letter gave the plaintiffs until Feb. 1 to agree to abandon all attempts to stop the art sales, in exchange for an commitment from the college not to pursue financial relief beyond the $500,000 bond already posted by the plaintiffs.

PEC's announcement of the suit's withdrawal said nothing about whether that deadline was extended and the deal proposed by the college has now been made. It did assert that "a focus on the charitable trust appeal is the best way to protect the art." That case, now pending in Virginia Supreme Court, seeks to reverse Randolph's recent conversion from an all-women's to a coeducational college.

Unlike the Randolph sales, opponents of the proposed Fisk sales had a state attorney general on their side, defending in court the public's interest in important artworks held by Fisk in trust for the public.

Here's what Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper said Friday about the latest decision in the case over the fate of Fisk's Stieglitz Collection:

We are pleased that Chancellor has ruled that Fisk University can keep the Stieglitz Collection and has recognized the public's interest in this unique cultural resource. We are confident that Fisk can meet the requirements that the Court has set.

We can only hope.

Hermetic? Uningratiating?

That's what Holland Cotter of the NY Times today called the 2008 edition of the Whitney Biennial. In my WNYC commentary, airing yesterday, I called it "fun." And in my initial CultureGrrl quick take, I called it "endearing." I do agree with Holland that this is art for hard times. Just like the art in the Unmonumental show at the recently reopened New Museum, it's about making beauty, or at least something strangely compelling, out of dross and detritus.

Therein lies the core of the show's "wit," as I've called it. Maybe the best way to make this case is to take you on a quick tour of a few works that engaged me and made me smile. (For photos from the underwhelming off-site installations at the Park Avenue Armory, to which I've mercifully given short shrift, go here.)

Everybody's talkin' 'bout Phoebe Washburn's "While Enhancing a Diminishing Deep Down Thirst, the Juice Broke Loose (the Birth of a Soda Shop)." (After you say all that, what more can you say?) It was accorded the power spot for installations at the Whitney---the light-filled space near the off-kilter window:

Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle ruled this afternoon that Fisk University, Nashville, could hold onto its Stieglitz Collection, rather than turn it over to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, as that Santa Fe institution had sought. The eponymous museum, as successor-in-interest to Georgia O'Keeffe's estate, had argued that it should be awarded the collection by the court, because Fisk had breached conditions imposed by the artist when she gave the works to the university.

Chancellor Lyle essentially gave Fisk a second chance to comply with O'Keeffe's written stipulations, going forward. To make sure that happens, though, she ordered the following:

The court imposes a permanent mandatory injunction that prevents Fisk from selling the Collection, sets a deadline [Oct. 6, 2008] for Fisk to remove the collection from storage and return it to display, and imposes notice requirements on Fisk concerning loans of the Collection and Fisk's ability to care for it. Noncompliance with the injunction carries a threat of finding of contempt punishable by fines, payment of damages and attorneys fees, and forfeiture of the Collection.

Sounds good to me. But here's the part of the decision that I REALLY like:

It is not just the interests of Fisk which the Court must consider. In the case of a charitable gift, the law requires the Court to take into account the public interest....By allowing the Collection to remain displayed at an educational institution in this part of the country where it can be viewed by students, residents of the area and visitors, the public interest is served.

The Tennessean's Jonathan Marx reports on the decision here.

Appeals, anyone?

Ricardo Elia

As I briefly mentioned some time ago, I will be speaking on Mar. 18 at the Athens International Conference for the Return of Cultural Objects to Their Countries of Origin. Go to p. 12 to see my panel---"Museums, Sites and Cultural Context." What exactly do they mean by this? No guidance given.

So I interpreted my assignment in inimitable CultureGrrl fashion, with an irreverent PowerPoint photo essay illustrating and critiquing how American museums display, interpret and suggest a context for antiquities about which they have varying degrees of information (some having been professionally excavated, some not). I'm not sure that's what they had in mind, but perhaps I'll provide some relief from all those earnest legal and archaeological dissertations.

How do I manage to get myself mixed up in these groups where I don't really fit in? Perhaps, for the Athens event, it relates to my status as professional archaeologist of museums, digging for best and worst practices and investigating the arcane rituals of that endangered tribe, American museum professionals.

Actually, I think I have a pretty good idea of why the Hellenic Ministry of Culture decided to invite me---my NY Times Op-Ed piece advocating the reunification of the Parthenon marbles could not have hurt my cause.

The only fellow American on my panel is Ricardo Elia (above), Boston University's associate professor and chairman of the archaeology department. I already knew a little about him from David Gill's Looting Matters blog, but I hit the web to find out more.

There he was, on BU's very public Rate My Professor site. Happily for the Athens attendees, he's rated high for "clarity." The students appreciated his sense of humor and enjoyed his class. But wait, what's this? His "hotness" score was zero! Looks pretty hot to me. Maybe you just gotta be over 40.

The speakers on other panels whom I'm really hot to see include Americans Malcolm Bell and Joan Aruz; Italians Paolo Ferri and Louis Godart; and, of course, my aforementioned blogging buddy, David Gill of the U.K.

I'll look forward to giving you my impressions of the site where the conference will be held---the New Acropolis Museum, expected to open to the public in September.

You won't even miss me, art-lings: Although I'll be posting little, if at all, while in Greece, I'll be leaving you in excellent hands---a very distinguished guest blogger, famous and widely read for his brilliant insights and lively writing. His name is oddly appropriate for his task of filling in.

More on the surrogate CultureGrrl (can a guy be a Grrl?), next week.

My WNYC podcast on the Whitney Biennial is now online here, or you can click it below. My short take on a big show is introduced on this podcast by a feature on the logistics of putting the extravaganza together, skillfully done by WNYC's Allison Lichter; you won't hear my voice until a little more than five minutes into this segment:



Since I spoke about many more works than made it onto the edited tape, let's also have a CultureGrrl photo essay on the Biennial, shall we? COMING SOON.

Yesterday afternoon, Louis Grachos, director of the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, sent me these reactions to Is Richard Gluckman the Albright-Knox Expansion's "World-Renowned Architect"?:

We took a first step in a long thorough process by commissioning Richard Gluckman about 1½ years ago to give us some conceptual drawings as to what a 50,000-square-foot facility to house our growing collection might look like on our current campus. We asked him to look at the feasibility of a specific off-site location, as well.  The Gluckman commission was meant to get our board and staff thinking about the possibilities of an expansion, not as a final plan.

Now a committee has been formed to begin the architect search, but we are at least one year away from selecting an architect.  Parallel to the architect search will be a feasibility study for a capital campaign to fund the project.

The expansion project had nothing to do with the funds raised from deaccessioning which are in a restricted endowment for the purchase of art.  Under the best circumstances, this project is at least six to eight years away from completion.

As you may know, our last successful expansion took place in 1962 and as our collection continues to grow the Gallery could benefit from a substantial increase in space.

Grachos also attached his museum's Feb. 22 press release (still not posted on its Newsroom website, at this writing), which indicates that in addition to more gallery space, the expansion will likely include "a more functional entrance, improved parking, and a gift shop and restaurant that can be accessed even when the Gallery is closed. The staff, currently spread over three buildings, would be centralized for increased efficiencies."

I'm back again with SoJo (Soterios Johnson to you) on New York Public Radio, 93.9 FM and 820 AM, to impart some further Whitney Wisdom at precisely 7:51 a.m. tomorrow morning.

Right! If I were you, I wouldn't bet on those numbers. Let's just say it should be aired some time or other tomorrow during Morning Edition, to which you can listen live here.

Of course, I'll provide a CultureGrrl link to the audio, after it's linked on the station's website.

Claes Oldenburg, "Soft Drainpipe---Red (Hot) Version," 1967
Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, National Gallery of Art

It's a far cry from when Baltimore Museum director Adelyn Breeskin, through deft wooing, snatched the modern art collection of the local Cone sisters out from under the nose of the Museum of Modern Art's Alfred Barr, who had haughtily declared that the hometown museum simply wasn't good enough for such world-class holdings.

A very different scenario played out in 1987, when the National Gallery, Washington, announced that it been promised the important contemporary collection of Robert Meyerhoff (who had once been president of the Baltimore Museum's board) and his wife Jane. According to a NY Times article at that time by Grace Glueck, "Baltimore, which had held negotiations with the Meyerhoffs, was stung." Glueck quoted Baltimore's then director Arnold Lehman (now of the Brooklyn Museum) saying:

We made it very clear to the Meyerhoffs that we were prepared to do everything possible to serve their collection, even to the point of building a new wing.

Maybe he should have offered to maintain a portion of their collection, after their deaths, in their own home. That's what the National Gallery now says it is planning to do. Jacqueline Trescott of the Washington Post reports:

The Baltimore County Council voted on Monday to allow the home to be used as a gallery....The National Gallery has agreed to maintain the collection and provide public programming. The annual budget will be provided by the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Modern Art Foundation, whose board has members from both the family and the gallery. The foundation will own the property, where the couple built several interconnected galleries for the large canvases.

It was bad enough when Robert Lehman persuaded the Metropolitan Museum to replicate rooms from his New York townhouse on its own premises to house his donated collection. Are we now going to see major collectors, emboldened by the Meyerhoffs' example, try to get their own homes adopted by major museums as monuments to themselves? With this joint-management structure (foundation owns and funds the facility; museum owns the art and runs the programs), what happens if the foundation and the museum disagree on future directions for art programs or capital needs?

This hybrid, the National Gallery's first satellite facility, will open to the public upon Robert Meyerhoff's death. (His wife died in 2004.) But because of local concerns about traffic near this Phoenix, MD, estate, visitation will be limited to only 125 at a time, the Post reported. Will this be any more economically viable than such restrictions proved to be for the Barnes Foundation?

Richard Gluckman's concept design for an addition (left) to the Albright-Knox Gallery

The website of Gluckman Mayner Architects, Richard Gluckman's firm, indicates that the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, may already be further along than has been publicly disclosed in engaging what the museum's director recently said would be a "world-renowned architect" to design an expansion.

The above rendering, on the architects' website (click "Projects" and "Museums"), shows a 42,000-square-foot addition (on left side of the above photo) to the existing museum. As described by the architects, it "reorients the institution towards Delaware Park, expands public spaces, reorganizes circulation in the 1905 Beaux Arts building and provides additional top-lit exhibition space at the upper level. This design covers the entry courtyard and features a rectangular volume partially wrapped in a glass enclosure, connecting the south side of the Beaux Arts building with a café and event space overlooking Hoyt Lake to the east."

An alternative Albright-Knox scenario would put the addition off site, involving "the adaptive re-use of the 62,000-square-foot elevated train sides of the Lackawanna Terminal on the Buffalo River. The design features a glass "bar" inserted into the western bay of the shed, creating a clear path of circulation along the river with access to some 42,000 square feet of exhibition space in the adjoining bays."

Gluckman discusses these plans in a video on the Architecture for Art website.

Robert Bechtle, "Six Houses on Mound Street," 2006, private collection, courtesy Gladstone Gallery


Heather Rowe, "Something Crossed the Mind (embellished three times)," 2008, Collection of the artist, courtesy D'Amelio Terras (with CultureGrrl in the mirror)

Let's get this out of the way immediately: The pretentious, off-putting introductory wall text for the soon-to-open Whitney Biennial bears no relation whatsoever to the quality of the show (or even of the other labels, for that matter).

There's a whole lot to like, and little to shock or cause offense (although, I must admit, I didn't have time to view the videos). It's a low-key but often wackily witty sampling of the new, which seems closer in spirit to the New Museum's equally appealing Unmonumental show than to Biennials we have known (and not always loved).

There's a scrappy aesthetic afoot---made from scraps. Anything with a high degree of finish and polished technique, particularly Robert Bechtle's traditional photorealist paintings (above), makes you wonder why the curators put it there. In Bechtle's case, I think one saw his Hopper-esque renderings of buildings in residential neighborhoods in a different light after viewing the more skeletal constructions (like Heather Rowe's above) arrayed nearby. They made you peer at Bechtle's streetscapes with x-ray eyes, envisioning what lay beneath the surfaces of those comfortingly solid structures.

All is well, then, at the Whitney, until you get to the show's second venue, the Park Avenue Armory. Then you're back, alas, in the dreary Biennial realm of "What were they thinking?" We'll have to give the Armory a chance, though: It may yet become interesting, with a series of performances and events. The best use of the space, given what's currently there, may be DJ Olive's "Slumber Party": "Visitors are encouraged to bring blankets, pillows and snacks."

Several weary journalists were already taking advantage of DJ Olive's "Triage"---a white tent with cots amidst soothing ambient sounds---at the end of today's exhausting two-venue, 81-artist press opening.

To hear more from me on Biennial 2008, you'll have to wait till Thursday, when, if all goes according to plan, I'll be back again on WNYC, New York Public Radio. More on this soon.

I'm off to the press preview of the Whitney Biennial, but I leave you with the introductory wall text, below, which will take you the rest of the day to decipher. To whom exactly is this jargon addressed? Surely not the general museum-going public.

This show doesn't actually open to the public until Thursday. There's still time for a rewrite!

Otherwise, abandon all hope, ye who enter here:

The 2008 Biennial, the seventy-fourth in the series of Whitney Annual and Biennial exhibitions held since 1932, presents eighty-one artists working at a time when art production is above all characterized by heterogeneity and dispersal. However, within the enormously differentiated field that we (perhaps absurdly) continue to yoke under the term "contemporary art," certain prevalent modes of working and thematic concerns are particularly germane to the moment.

Many of the projects presented in the exhibition explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange that index larger social, political, and economic contexts, often aiming to invert the more object-oriented operations of the art market. Recurring concerns involve a nuanced investigation of social, domestic, and public space and its translation into form--primarily sculptural, but also photographic and cinematic. Many artists reconcile rigorous formal and conceptual underpinnings with personal narratives or historical references. While numerous works demonstrate an explicit or implicit engagement with art history, particularly the legacy of modernism, as well as a pronounced interest in questioning the staging and display of art, others chart the topography and architecture of the decentralized American city and take inspiration from postindustrial landscapes and urban decay. Using humble or austere materials or employing calculated messiness or modes of deconstruction, they present works distinguished by their poetic sensibility as they discover pockets of beauty in sometimes unexpected places.

There is an evident trend toward creating work of an ephemeral, event-based character, in the form of music and other performance, movement workshops, radio broadcasts, publishing projects, community-based activities, film screenings, culinary gatherings, or lectures. Such projects do not stand in opposition to institutions; rather, considering each of these multiple platforms equally important, artists show objects in the museum or gallery even as they seek ways to complicate and transcend its parameters. In this spirit, from March 6-23 the 2008 Biennial continues at Park Avenue Armory with an extensive program of events and performances.

Across media, much work in this year's Biennial concerns politics although its mode of address is often oblique or allegorical. Persistence, belief, and a desire to locate meaning threads through these many modes and activities rooted in what feels like a transitional moment of history. Rather than positing a definitive answer or approach, these artists exhibit instead a passion for the search, positioned in the immediate reality of our uncertain sociopolitical times.

I'm going to position myself right now in the immediate reality of my uncertain critical faculties. We can only hope that the art will be more engaging than the rhetoric.

"Artemis and the Stag," sold from the collection of the Albright-Knox Gallery, now on loan (as "Artemis and the Deer") at the Metropolitan Museum (above)

We thought that the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, was in pretty dire economic straits. After all, it had claimed that it needed to sell major artworks, long proudly displayed and admired by the public, because local philanthropy was inadequate to support purchases of contemporary art.

As Randy Kennedy of the NY Times wrote last March:

The museum's director and board of trustees said that the decision to sell the pieces had not been easy, but that for a museum whose mission has long focused on modern and contemporary art, the antiquities were a luxury---especially in a city with few deep pockets---it could no longer afford.

Now, however, we discover that Buffalo's pockets might not be so shallow, after all: Irene Liguori of the Buffalo News reports that the museum plans to launch a capital campaign to fund a major expansion. Director Louis Grachos told Liguori that his institution would commission "a world-renowned architect to design an extraordinary building that will attract visitors from all over the world."

Now where have I heard that exact same language before? Ah, I remember: It's in the Strategic Plan (p. 8) that the museum produced in 2001---the same one that redefined the museum's mission to focus almost exclusively on modern and contemporary art.

Charles Banta, the museum's board president, said this about the expansion plans:

After 45 years, the gallery is in dire need of additional exhibition space to display its growing permanent collection.

I thought the permanent collection was shrinking.

The Buffalo News also reports:

The gallery cannot use [for the capital project] the $90 million it raised for its restricted endowment last year from the sale of antiquities. That money can only be used to buy new art for the gallery's permanent collection.

Or so we hope.

Incidentally, I just caught up with a Jan. 28 Albright-Knox press release, defending the authencity of Artemis and Whoever against recent detractors.

Susan Flamm, PR director of the American Folk Art Museum, today responded to my questions about how reversals and lawsuits involving the museum's major benefactor, Ralph Esmerian, may affect the museum and its collection.

Flamm wrote:

Ralph Esmerian has been a generous benefactor of the American Folk Art Museum for more than 30 years. Through the museum's exhibitions, publications and scholarship, the public has had access to the more than 400 outstanding works of American folk art that constitute the collection Ralph assembled and promised in 2001 to give to the museum.

In 2005, Ralph transferred ownership of 50% of his collection to the museum; he retains full ownership of the remainder of the collection, including "The Peaceable Kingdom."

Since the arrival of Maria Ann Conelli as the museum's director in 2005, we have established written collections management policies and other guidelines to further professionalize our own museum practice and to bring greater clarity to the museum's relationship with collectors and donors.

Clarity is evidently needed, since Hicks' "The Peaceable Kingdom," promised to the museum, was recently sent by the legally beleaguered Esmerian to Sotheby's for private sale. Flamm noted that "promised gifts are just that---a reflection of a donor's intention, not a legally binding contract. We rely on our donors to fulfill their pledges to the museum."

It now looks like the museum's catalogue, "American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum" (above) should have been titled, "The Ralph Esmerian Promised but Not-Necessarily-Perfected Gift."

Flamm added:
 

To our knowledge, no other works promised to the museum by Ralph have been pledged as collateral. Of the ten works listed as collateral by the Maine Antique Digest, eight are owned outright by the museum and therefore cannot be collateralized. They were deeded to the museum in 2005.

Erastus Salisbury Field's "Portrait of a Young Man," which David Hewett of MAD reported was listed in court papers as having been "delivered to and received by Christie's as collateral," has in fact, according to Flamm, "been deeded to the museum." (UPDATE: After this was posted, Hewitt pointed out that MAD had not itself listed the 10 works as collateral, as Flamm's quote suggests; they were listed in the court papers, which were quoted by Hewitt in his article.)

Christie's would not comment on this tangled situation.

Conservator Gry Landro, studying damaged corner of "The Scream" through a microscope. Munch Museum, Oslo

The Munch Museum, Olso, announced today that the stolen, damaged and returned "Scream" and "Madonna" will go back on view this summer. Restoration is nearly complete. They were seized by armed robbers in August 2004 and returned two years later.

According to the press release:

The restored paintings will be on display in this year's summer exhibition, from May 23 to Sept. 26. They will be presented together with relevant artworks from the collection and documentation of the main features of the conservation process.

More details about the conservation of the paintings are here. In connection with the exhibition, the museum will produce two publications (in Norwegian, English and Japanese) that provide details on the conservation work and report findings of art-historical and conservation-related research on the paintings.

CultureGrrl has just switched over to a new, improved format (as will the rest of the ArtsJournal blogs).

ATTENTION: Do all of you notice that new third column on the right?

That's where you can (finally) PLACE YOUR ADS on the blog that has become required daily reading for the most important museum directors and curators, art dealers and auctioneers, collectors, art scholars, art critics and journalists, and just plain art lovers throughout the U.S. and in Canada, Europe and Asia. If you have any questions about advertising, you can send them here.

To all of you museums, art galleries, auctioneers, art-related educational programs, art books and publications (both online and mainstream media) and, of course, fine jewelry, luxury cars and other coveted objects of conspicuous consumption:

Welcome (I hope) to my third column.

As I previously mentioned, I'll be hands-off the blog's commercial aspects. ArtsJournal's ad department handles the arrangements, and you can expect from me the same hard-hitting commentary---targeting advertisers and non-advertisers alike---that you've come to know and (maybe) love.

People who can't stand CultureGrrl and want to enjoy some schadenfreude should come see me get pummeled at a Columbia University Law School panel discussion in New York about museum deaccessioning. The scene of the bout, scheduled for Mar. 11 at 6 p.m., is the school's Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Jerome Greene Hall (corner of 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue), Room 103.

I'm the only non-lawyer in what I believe (from the brief conference call we had) to be an otherwise deaccession-friendly group. If you don't know how I feel about museums' selling museum-quality works from their collections, this must be your first visit to CultureGrrl. Every panel needs a contrarian: I'm it.

The only thing that could possibly save me is that the panelists' bios (at the "panel discussion" link on top) seem to indicate that the lawyers, with one exception, haven't specialized in this particular type of case. That one exception should make the conversation interesting---C. Michael Norton, whose Nashville law firm has represented Fisk University in its attempt to get court approval to monetize its Stieglitz Collection. If you don't know how I feel about THAT situation, you definitely have not been paying attention.

Norton helpfully e-mailed me this Fisk-related article by Jack Siegel, whom I've previously cited as an authority on nonprofit governance here.

Titling the panel "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" was a big mistake, though. It might tempt me to do another singing podcast:

Don't send Bellows to Christie's maw,
Don't you send O'Keeffe to Arkansas,
Think what Albright-Knox went through,
And Eakins sales are hard to do.

No, I WON'T do this. Please stop me before I warble again!

What did Tom Krens do the day after he announced his imminent departure from the directorship of the Guggenheim Foundation?

He lectured at the TED2008 conference in Monterey, CA., about his vision of what museums should be. The annual conference gathers thinkers in a wide variety of fields and bills itself as "a chance to mentally recharge. A chance to step back and consider the really big stuff that's happening. A chance to understand life in a richer way."

Those all sound like good things to do when you're about to leave the job you had for 20 years.

Krens participated Thursday on the "Is Beauty Truth" panel, which also included Target's favorite fashion designer, Isaac Mizrahi. What, no Armani?

Boing Boing live-blogged Krens' talk here. Among Tom's Boing-ed comments:

Museums should be agents of agitation, social information and cultural change.

Is THAT what the Krensian Guggenheim was all about?

Also at TED, Curtis Wong unveiled his latest project, the WorldWide Telescope, to be available from Microsoft this spring. It failed to wow the TED crowd, though, if the comments published beneath the above-linked promotional video are any indication.

In haste, some important links:

---Jeffrey Weiss calls it a day at Dia, discovering that he's a curator, not an administrator. Carol Vogel of the NY Times has the story. The board chairwoman, astonishingly, tells Vogel that they're in no hurry to find a replacement.

This boat seems to be drifting further out to sea. The "win-win" scenario that I posited here seems ever more desirable. Could a relationship with the Dia become the Guggenheim's version of the MoMA-P.S. 1 nexus? I must emphasize, however, that this is pure CultureGrrl speculation: I just like the idea of that synergy.

---He's ba-a-a-ack! Relive the Büchel debacle all over again in Randy Kennedy's piece for tomorrow's NY Times "Arts & Leisure" section (online today).

And here's a Jan. 29 letter from Büchel's dealer, Michele Maccarone, published by The Exhibitionist blog, in which she urged the artworld to shun LA25, an aid program for emerging Southern California artists. The program was sponsored by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the law firm that successfully represented MASS MoCA in its legal dispute with Büchel.

It appears that Kennedy interviewed Joe Thompson, MASS MoCA's director, via e-mail, but sat down with Büchel at Maccarone's gallery for a "four-hour, off-the-record discussion" in December. Off the record? In the next paragraph he describes the substance of that discussion, which doubtless informed the rest of the piece as well. Donn Zaretsky, the Art Law blogger and Büchel's attorney, gets a mention in the piece, but there's no reference to any of this on Donn's blog, at this writing.

Whatever happened to Büchel's plans to appeal the court decision ruling that MASS MoCA had the right to to display the material assembled for the abandoned "Training Ground for Democracy" project? It opted not to display, but to dismantle. But it the piece is partly displayed now---in the slide show accompanying Kennedy's piece.

UPDATE: Donn Zaretsky now weighs in here.

---This is so hot I can barely touch it, only link to it: Major Folk Art Pledged as Collateral; Hicks Peaceable Kingdom Up for Private Auction in the Maine Antique Digest. I'll give you a couple of excerpts:

Ralph Esmerian, the Paris-born king of the American colored gemstone market, jeweler extraordinaire, and American folk art collector, who almost single-handedly provided the impetus for the American Folk Art Museum as it exists today with his gifts and promised gifts, is facing two lawsuits regarding loans....

In early February, Esmerian gave notice that his <strong>Edward Hicks</strong> masterpiece, "The Peaceable Kingdom" (shown on pages 88 and 89 of American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum) was to be removed from the museum and offered at Sotheby's in a private auction (see article below).

That fact shocked folk art aficionados, and in a follow-up, Maine Antique Digest discovered that a minimum of 30, and possibly more, Esmerian-given or -promised folk art objects at the museum were named as collateral for loans from Christie's. All are shown in American Radiance, the 2001 collaborative work by the museum and Esmerian.

I contacted Christie's, which would not comment. Sotheby's, through spokesperson Lauren Gioia, told me:

Mr. Esmerian engaged us to offer "The Peaceable Kingdom" privately. As it is a private sale, all details are confidential. We expect to be providing information about the painting within the next couple of weeks and will let you know at that time.

My e-mail yesterday to the museum has thus far gone unanswered.