April 2008 Archives

Thomas Eakins, two sketches for the 1888 painting "Cowboys in the Badlands"

Maybe it's time for the Association of Art Museum Directors to trash its "Criteria for Deaccessioning and Disposal." These published guidelines are being conspicuously and repeatedly ignored by institutions eager to acquire works that they believe they can't pay for without selling other works important enough to have been displayed in their galleries.

So it is with Eakins' "Cowboy Singing" (image here) and the artist's two sketches (above) for "Cowboys in the Badlands" that the Philadelphia Museum has sold to help pay for the same artist's "The Gross Clinic." These do not fit the AAMD disposal criterion of "poor quality." That they are of museum quality is evidenced not only by their current display at the Denver Art Museum, but also by their exhibition history at Philadelphia before that museum cashed them in. Norman Keyes, the Philadelphia Museum's director of media relations, informed me:

"Cowboy Singing" has been on view fairly frequently in our galleries, generally in rotation with "Home Ranch," and last in 2007. The two sketches were on display in gallery 118 over the last several years at least, on a wall containing a large number of studies by Eakins.

Despite their similarities in size and subject matter, "Cowboy Singing" and "Home Ranch" are different in composition and painting style and cannot be considered works that meet AAMD's disposal criteria for being "redundant or duplicate [with] no value as part of a series." Their differences in composition and execution make side-by-side comparison enlightening. The same can be said for the museum's five "Badlands" sketches, of which two have now been dispatched to Denver. To my mind, multiples can sometimes be considered duplicates; unique works, not.

What's more, the public's former patrimony has now, thanks to these disposals, gone semi-private: The private Anschutz Collection (which has no public exhibition galleries) has acquired half ownership of "Cowboy Singing." According to Denver's press release:

Cowboy Singing will be shared equally between the Denver Art Museum and the Anschutz Collection, which has donated funds to help support the DAM's portion of the acquisition.

And this transaction has involved half-privatization of another formerly public work, according to an earlier version of Denver's press release that is no longer online:

Through the agreement, the Anschutz Collection will receive joint ownership of "Long Jakes (The Rocky Mountain Man)" by Charles Deas, acquired by the [Denver] museum in 1999.

It's not like "The Gross Clinic" was in danger of being removed from the public domain. If the joint purchase by the National Gallery, Washington, and Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, had been allowed to go through, Eakins' masterpiece would have been lost to Philadelphians (who had largely ignored it until Thomas Jefferson University decided to sell it), but not to the greater American public.

It's interesting to note that the Philadelphia Museum has still not chosen to exhibit "The Gross Clinic" together with the work in its galleries that it most resembles: Eakins' "The Agnew Clinic" (image here), on long term loan from the University of Pennsylvania. This juxtaposition might have diminished the sense of urgency surrounding the rescue of "The Gross Clinic," by making it seem as much of a "duplicate" as "Cowboy Singing" is to "Home Ranch." Perhaps the museum does not want to encourage its visitors to draw that conclusion.

Instead, when the $68-million Eakins returns to the Philadelphia Museum from the other local institution, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, that also sold an Eakins (to an anonymous buyer) to pay for its half-share, the painting will, beginning on Aug. 2, be shown together with the sculpture below, with which it would seem to have little in common:


Augustus Saint-Gaudens, "The Angel of Purity (Maria Mitchell Memorial)," 1902, Philadelphia Museum of Art

According to Keyes: "The exhibition is still in the works but it will show a work by the great American sculptor of the time [actually,"Gross" was completed 27 years earlier than "Angel"], along with the work of the great American painter."

Mary Beard

I was once enshrined on the "Worst of the Web" list of another art blogger (who shall remain nameless). So just at the moment when I've decided to slow down (have I done that yet?), it was nice to make the "excellent blog" list of a colleague I greatly admire, Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge, classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and the "wickedly subversive commentator" of A Don's Life---a wide-ranging blog with a fixation on ancient Greeks and Romans.

Mary had generously singled me out previously on BBC radio. Her feisty posts always attract a long string of comments, including this one reponding to Sunday's "excellent blog" post by another erudite blogger, the anonymous "Heresiarch" at Heresy Corner:

Interesting list. By a strange sort of circularity, something I wrote was picked up by Lee Rosenbaum's CultureGrrl several months ago, thus leading to my first moderate "hit". The blogosphere is smaller than you think.

But Mary, did you catch that other comment, repeating the "too much blogging can kill you" theory? Keep your vitriol up, cholesterol down, or else "blog slog" could turn into blog clog.

Meanwhile, we can enjoy surfing Mary's picks, which is what brought me to the hilarious "20 Things to Do With Matzah" video (below), courtesy of Dorothy King's PhDiva, another of Mary's "excellent blogs." Those of you (like me) who have just gotten back to eating bread again will appreciate this, whether you have Ph.D.s or not. Who needs Adam Sandler? We've now got Michelle Citrin and William Levin (or is it William un-Leaven)?
 

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

E. Randol Schoenberg, the lawyer who obtained restitution from Austria to the heirs of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer of five works by Gustav Klimt (including the famed "Adele Bloch-Bauer I"), informs me that the Austrian Supreme Court last week rejected the heirs' appeal of a 2006 arbitration decision against the return of a sixth Klimt, "Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl" (above).

Aside from disappointing his clients, the court opinion, Schoenberg asserts, runs counter to Austria's own laws and marks a "disconcerting" shift in that country's legal posture concerning restitutions to Nazi victims and their heirs. Austria's Third Restitution Law, he said, had explicitly "recognized that the Jewish victims (having fled or been deported) would ordinarily not have the evidence to prove what had happened to their property, so...it became the burden of the person receiving the property to prove that the transaction was fair and untainted by Nazi persecution."

But now, according to Schoenberg's analysis:

The Court held that the arbitrators made a plausible decision to interpret the 1998 art restitution law in a way that abandoned the decades-old rule shifting the burden of proof [to the person receiving the property]....The Court wasted not a word on the unfairness to the victims of the Nazis in shifting the burden onto them after so long a time....No longer will transactions undertaken with Jewish property during the war be presumed to be part of the Nazi plan of total expropriation and annihilation....

Rather than afford itself the power to return artworks that would be presumed under long-standing Austrian restitution laws to have been confiscated during the war, under the Court's interpretation, the government is now PROHIBITED [emphasis Schoenberg's] from returning paintings with dubious provenance.

The unfortunate effect of the Bloch-Bauer heirs' suit for the sixth Klimt appears, then, to be a significant hardening of Austria's stance towards restitutions. Schoenberg had previously told me that he didn't think he would win this case. But I doubt he expected to lose it this badly.

Architect's rendering of 80 South Street, Santiago Calatrava

George Howe's and William Lescaze's model of unexecuted proposal for the new Museum of Modern Art, 1930, on recent display at MoMA

By Guest Blogger Martin Filler

For superstar architect Santiago Calatrava, the cruelest month has indeed been April, which witnessed the demise of one of his headline-making New York City projects and announcement of likely cutbacks to another. Readers of the New York Review of Books know I'm no fan of his work, which I find irredeemably corny, ostentatiously over-engineered, and mind-numbingly repetitive.

Literal-minded architects have always enjoyed a suggestible audience for designs like Calatrava's big birds, which pander to sentimental notions of representational symbolism---think of all those "praying hands" churches after World War II. Calatrava, who has wrung much publicity from poultry, revealed that the inspiration for his World Trade Center Transportation Hub came to him in a vision of a peace dove flying heavenward.

What's bugged me most about Calatrava's kitsch is not his popular following, but the degree to which he has been embraced by institutions that ought to know better, particularly the Metropolitan Museum, whose 2005 Calatrava retrospective was one of the few embarrassments of Philippe de Montebello's impeccably tasteful tenure. Now, however, the inexorable corrective of a tanking economy is interceding on behalf of those of us who wondered how on earth this Spanish Schlockmeister could have bamboozled so many in the art world.

On Apr. 16, Lois Weiss of the New York Post reported that developer Frank Sciame was pulling the plug on his Calatrava-designed 80 South St. condominium tower (top) in Lower Manhattan. Comprising 12 quadruplex apartments---each occupying its own glass-walled cube suspended outward from an 835-foot-tall concrete core---it received ecstatic praise from establishment eminences including the NY Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff and City Planning doyenne Amanda Burden.

I'm surprised that no one has yet pointed out the Calatrava scheme's suspiciously close resemblance to George Howe's and William Lescaze's unexecuted 1930 proposal for New York's fledgling Museum of Modern Art, a model for which (also above), included in the recent "75 Years of Architecture at MoMA" exhibition, featured similar glass-walled cubic units hung from an interior mast. Dwellings at 80 South St. were priced at about $30-million a pop, irrational exuberance even in the palmy financial climate of 2004. Now the property is on the market for $115 million.

The day before that story broke, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced that likely cost overruns of almost $1 billion on initial estimates of $2.2 billion would compel serious modification of Calatrava's much-ballyhooed PATH terminal at the World Trade Center site, planned for completion a year ago but now unlikely to open before 2013. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the hardnosed businessman, noted that "the realities are that we only have so much money...We may have to find something else." But Port Authority chief Anthony Shorris insisted that Calatrava's signature winglike retractable roofs remain non-negotiable: "We're committed to that as an important part of that downtown Manhattan landscape."

Calatrava won this commission following the Ground Zero master-plan debacle, but even cursory due diligence should have forewarned the Port Authority about his history of ballooning cost overruns, especially on jobs with mechanized elements (like the hub's pointless convertible roofs), including the ruinously expensive Milwaukee Art Museum addition and Athens Olympic Stadium.

In an Apr. 18 editorial, the Times listed the hub among six New York City planning initiatives imperiled by the recession, along with the Javits Center, Pier 40, Penn Station, Hudson Yards, and Atlantic Yards. Predictably, the Times again remained silent about its business dealings with Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner, which made its call for a government bailout of that sweetheart deal all the more problematic.

"A strong state hand," the Gray Lady advised in its editorial, "could ensure that the [Atlantic Yards] project---with adequate low-income housing---survives hard times." Given the Times' own dwindling bottom line, which has fueled persistent takeover rumors, surviving hard times is a preoccupation that hits close to home. 

As if the U.S. News & World Report college rankings weren't bad enough, now we've got the Chronicle of Higher Education's 2007 Art History and Criticism Productivity Index [via Art History Newsletter]. The index "compiles overall institutional rankings on 375 universities that offer the Ph.D. degree." (I'll give you one guess as to which school is Number One.)

Yardsticks for "faculty productivity" include: number of books published; journal publications; citations of journal articles; federal grant dollars awarded; honors and awards. Quality of teaching and student outcome apparently don't count.

The University of Pennsylvania should get a special citation, though, for appearing in the top 10 twice (at 3 and 10), because "the [art history and criticism] discipline is related to more than one department."

The wonks at the Chronicle really ought to correct their link to "Academic Analytics" in the next-to-last paragraph, which supposedly gives us a closer look at their number-crunching proclivities. The website with the saucy-looking young lady and the link to "Need Cash? Click Here for Fast Cash" can't possibly be where the high-minded Chroniclers intended us to venture. They should have linked to academicanalytics.com (but didn't). [UPDATE: They have now fixed their link.]

By the time you read this, they may have rectified this error. If not, I'm NOT recommending that you click on the .org link, as I did, since that site looks very dicey (and has incorporated a link calculated to entice those muddled scholars who arrive there for statistical enlightment). Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I felt like my computer was slowing down until I closed down that phishy-looking site. Let's hope my antivirus and firewall were working.

Kinda sours you on this whole rank enterprise, doesn't it? Veritas Shmeritas. (Oh wait, my Dad went there.)

As much as I appreciate them, I don't usually post the many "love your blog" comments that hit my inbox, since my egotistical vanity is already amply in evidence in this space. But my semi-valedictory Middle-Aged Blog Slog post evoked such an outpouring of warm responses that I felt I should gratefully acknowledge them by adding a few (with permission) to the end of that essay, which ran on Apr. 23.

I particularly liked the left-handed compliment (I'm a lefty) from Ron Hartwig, the J. Paul Getty Trust's vice president for communications, who seems to find me irritating but irresistible. That's pretty much what I'm going for (as CultureSpouse can also confirm).

Thanks for all of your kind words. Don't dare delete CultureGrrl from your daily "Quick Tabs," though. Among the posts you can expect this week: My dissection of the latest deaccession news (Eakinses from the Philadelphia Museum; Tamayo from the Maier Museum). And you've got to be salivating when Filler fillets yet another architect---also COMING THIS WEEK. I'll give you a hint: It's not fish; it's fowl.

You can hear my Philadelphia Public Radio soundbite on the disposal of three Eakinses by the Philadelphia Museum here. They did use my comment that I thought the sale was inappropriate but executed in the most responsible way possible, under the circumstances. This was followed by museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt's observation that "you don't part with anything by Eakins eagerly."

What you don't hear in this very fleeting WHYY radio segment is what I said about WHY this sale was inappropriate.

More on that, COMING SOON.

Sold by Philadelphia Museum:

Thomas Eakins, "Cowboy Singing," 1892

Kept by Philadelphia Museum:

Thomas Eakins, "Home Ranch," 1892

Just when I had decided I wasn't going to rush to comment about the Philadelphia Museum's Eakins disposals that have raised the last of the funds needed to help defray its $34-million half-share of the purchase price for "The Gross Clinic," WHYY, Philadelphia Public Radio, called me up for analysis.

I guess they couldn't find anyone locally to speak out against what seems, on the face of it, to be a good "exchange" for the artist's masterpiece: the sale to the Denver Art Museum and the Anschutz Collection of three quasi-duplicates from Philadelphia's Eakins collection---"Cowboy, Singing," above, which is similar in subject matter and identical in size and date to the museum's "Home Ranch" (also above); and two of five Philadelphia-owned sketches for another painting, "Cowboys in the Badlands."

The audio link isn't up yet, and I don't yet know which of my comments they used for yesterday's segment. I began the interview by saying that the museum had done something that I deemed inappropriate, but in the most responsible way possible under the circumstances. Nevertheless, regular CultureGrrl readers have probably already surmised that I have strong misgivings about what's been done, which I will detail later, after I can give you the audio link.

Meanwhile, here are the links to the Denver Art Museum's press release about its Eakins half-acquisition; the Denver Post's article; and the estimable Edward Sozanski's detailed post mortem for today's Philadelphia Inquirer. (I gave you the link for the Philadelphia Museum's press release yesterday, but here it is again.)

Carol Vogel tells us in today's NY Times that Marc Porter, president of Christie's, "advised the Philadelphia Museum about public institutions looking for an Eakins." What she didn't mention was that Porter had also been Thomas Jefferson University's advisor in tentatively arranging the sale of "The Gross Clinic" to the National Gallery in Washington and Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville. That deal allowed the Philadelphia buyers  (which also included the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) to preempt the sale.

Tatami Whammy: Me and My Tea

What's this? Blogging can be hazardous to your health?

Matt Richtel's recent story about dropped-dead middle-aged bloggers, published in the NY Times on the day that I left for my (non-working) vacation in Japan, struck a chord. So did a comment by a Buddhist monk who spoke to my tour group before a CliffsNotes version of a Japanese tea ceremony (above) in which I participated with CultureDaughter. The monk's metaphor: You have to empty a glass to be able to fill it again.

Today, Apr. 23, marks my second anniversary as CultureGrrl. My first post was a fiction: I pretended to have an audience, even though, for the first two weeks, I told absolutely no one (except my husband) that I was starting this. I then e-mailed my URL to several prominent people in the artworld whose opinions I trusted. Their consensus: Continue. I'm glad I did. But now I need to shift gears.

Don't worry, art-lings. I'm in fine health and I have no plans to convert to Buddhism or even to stop blogging. But the edgy, jittery sensation I've been experiencing from constantly staring at a computer screen, not to mention the tension of trying to break news or at least stay on top of it, does not feel cardiovascularly correct. I can't help identifying with my contemporaries who have blogged their last.

I still enjoy the challenge of blogging and, especially, the sense that for a growing audience, I've been providing content and commentary that's well received and at times useful or even influential. But I always knew there would be a limit to how long I wanted to focus nearly all my time and energy on this quick-take medium, for no money (other than from assignments and speaking engagements that came my way because of the blogging). My limit has now been reached.

After imbibing the words of Buddhist wisdom, my initial decision was to empty the blog. But I'm no monk, and I can't turn my back on what I've built. The idea of pulling the plug made me feel like I was abandoning a calling and an audience: I really do appreciate those of you who appreciate me.

What I can and will do is stop trying always to be the first to bring you news that I think will engage you. Constantly prowling the World Wide Web in an effort to be a one-woman artworld news agency is not tenable, long term. And it's not a healthy lifestyle: I really do need to get out more!

Jeff Koons in yesterday's press scrum at the Metropolitan Museum's roof garden

Memo to the Metropolitan Museum: Does the artworld really need another high-profile showcase for Jeff Koons' faux inflatables? Is it particularly desirable to borrow two of them from the coveted private collection of Steve Cohen, whose loans have recently been seen enriching just about every New York art museum? If you throw in one more piece, owned by Louis Vuitton's foundation, does that make it just about perfect? (Speaking of which, I mercifully neglected to mention previously that there's a gallery of Cohen-owned Murakamis at the end of that artist's Vuitton-selling retropective at the Brooklyn Museum. The museum's shop even offers an $800 print reproducing one of Cohen's paintings, so you too can feel like a munificent hedge-fund king!)

But back to Koons: Below is a photo of the Metropolitan Museum's lightweight 15,600-pound roof garden installation (associate curator Anne Strauss weighed in with that hefty figure), consisting of two familiar-looking puffed-up pieces (although these particular Cohen-ies have never been previously exhibited) and the Vuitton-loaned "Coloring Book"---a silvery, stainless steel Piglet (of Winnie-the-Pooh fame), exuberantly colored outside the lines to the point of unrecognizability. I enjoyed that piece, in spite of the Met's inflated assertion that it's about "childhood---as well as adult---dreams and fantasies about candy and luxury goods, intermixed with religious imagery." I just don't see the profundity that museum curators like to ascribe to these baubles. I'd sooner rely on Koons, who told reporters that his works are about "joy."

At least there were no gleaming bunnies on the roof. Here's the entire three-piece ensemble:


Left to right: "Balloon Dog (Yellow)," 1994-2000, Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection; "Coloring Book," 1997-2005, Foundation Louis Vuitton pour la création; "Sacred Heart (Red/Gold)," 1994-2007, Cohen Collection

Here's the piglet:


Another view of "Coloring Book"

There had been some thought of including Koons' "Tulips" at the Met, but Strauss told me that the piece "took too much space." I should have asked if this was the same bouquet, owned by mega-collector Eli Broad's foundation, which was recently removed from the plaza outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new Broad Contemporary Art Museum because it had been damaged by over-enthusiastic visitors. (Probably not: Suzanne Muchnic of the LA Times reported on Apr. 12 that the Broad version was about to be "shipped to Germany for repair in the factory that fabricated it. The undisclosed---but certainly steep---cost will be paid by the museum's insurance.")

I never miss the chance to photograph an image of myself reflected in an artwork (especially with the Manhattan skyline as backdrop), so here I am. Color me purple and perplexed:

Brett Campbell, a Portland-based arts writer, responds to Martin Filler's guest blog post, MAD's Striptease: Cloepfil Shows New York What He's Got:

Brad Cloepfil has done some magnificent work around the country and is on his way to becoming one of America's leading museum architects. This project [the new Museum of Arts & Design] was fraught with challenges from the get-go; I wonder what he could have done if offered the freedom to really give the building the total overhaul---or replacement---it needed.

Life is short for Italian culture ministers (as you can see on this list of past officeholders). The Great Repatriator, Francesco Rutelli (above), is no exception: With the recent election of Silvio Berlusconi as Italy's new (and former) prime minister, a new culture minister will be named, according to Louis Godart, advisor on culture to Italy's president, responding to my e-mailed query. (I neglected to ask Godart if he also gives up his post.)

Rutelli has been culture minister only since May 2006, but has accomplished much (to the detriment of the collections of several American art museums) during his brief tenure. He was a media-savvy, sophisticated and tough negotiator who practiced what he preached, returning some objects long held by Italy to their countries of origin. Under his watch, Italy became a role model for other countries seeking to be players in the repatriation game. It will be interesting to see where things go from here.

Architect's rendering of 53 W. 53rd Street---the "Tour Verre"
Photo: Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Why am I not surprised? While I was away in Japan (where I marveled at I.M. Pei's awe-inspiring Miho Museum and the "wow"-worthy Kansai International Airport Terminal on a manmade island in Osaka, which I later discovered had been designed by Renzo Piano), Jean Nouvel's MoMA Monster was getting beaten up at New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Colin Moynihan of the NY Times reports:

Neighbors, public officials and preservationists were among the people who spoke out on Tuesday night [Apr. 8] against a proposal to build a skyscraper in Midtown that, at 1,155 feet, would be about 100 feet taller than the Chrysler Building.

At a hearing held by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, some opponents said the height and composition of the building would prevent it from harmoniously fitting into its surroundings. Others said they feared that the tower would reduce the access to light and air in the neighborhood and contribute to street and sidewalk congestion....

About 100 people attended the hearing, held at the preservation commission's downtown offices, and about 50 signed up to speak. By the time that half of them had spoken, the tally was leaning heavily against the project.

As I wrote here last November:

The neighbors and, hopefully, the City Planning Commission are not going to stand for a 75-story look-at-me skyscraper on this cross street.

The neighborhood's Community Planning Board has already given the project, which would include new galleries for the Museum of Modern Art (previous owner of the land), a thumbs-down.

This hasn't stopped Justin Davidson in New York Magazine from dismissing the strong opposition as "the opinions of a few malcontents with afternoon sunlight to protect."

The project's biggest booster, Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, conspicuously failed to mention the above photo in his rundown yesterday of deceptive architectural renderings for proposed projects in New York. In November, I described it as "a manipulative photo making it appear that the new tower will be less tall that one next to it. Don't believe it."

Another conspicuous Nouvel-related journalistic omission was Arthur Lubow's failure to mention the French architect's plans for the Louvre Abu Dhabi in the Pritzker-pegged hagiographic profile Lubow published on Apr. 6 in the NY Times Magazine. Was that a mere oversight, or is this desert project on quicksand?

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

First, another hearty thanks to my fabulous, recidivist guest blogger, Martin Filler, who has upstaged me in my own production: Thanks to his delicious posts on the best and worst new museums of 2007, visitors flocked to CultureGrrl in record numbers this week. And the hits just keep on coming.

The very good news is that Martin threatens to do it again: If all goes according to plan, he will be popping in on CultureGrrl whenever the spirit moves him, even when I'm not globetrotting. This is particularly good news because, as I plan to share with you next week, I had a Blogger's Identity Crisis while away on my Japanese vacation, and some major changes will occur in my own posting habits.

But not quite yet. Now that the Grrl is back, let's get up-to-speed on various contretemps and controversies we've been following:

---Is Randolph College now going ahead with auctioning its Maier Museum Four at Christie's? Carol Vogel, in today's NY Times, indicates yes (scroll down to her second item). Christie's spokesperson Rik Pike says, "At this point we have no news to share on any of the pictures." Christa Desrets of the Lynchburg News & Advance has the story on attempts by both the college and the opponents to the sale to claim the $500,000 from a bond that had been posted by the opponents during their aborted legal challenge,which had caused the paintings to be pulled from Christie's Nov. 29 American sale.

---In her above-linked "Inside Art," column, Vogel also has more details on the Esmerian sales that I reported on here, here and here. Sotheby's on Mar. 25 wouldn't tell me the amount of the unattained minimum bid in its unsuccessful "private auction" of Hicks' "The Peaceable Kingdom with the Leopard of Serenity" (above), but Vogel's got it---$10 million. And Bloomberg's Philip Boroff has the story on the Esmerian jewelry auction, scheduled and then cancelled (due to a legal challenge) at Christie's.

---The "seven-year residency" of the Guggenheim Hermitage Las Vegas at the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino will end on May 11? Not to worry: The two museums have now set their sights on a new site that thinks it needs their services---Vilnius, Lithuania. Guggenheim fave Zaha Hadid has been chosen to be the architect, if Krens' latest museum-in-the-sky ever gets past the feasibility-study stage. And I had thought that Krens' imminent departure signaled a grounding of the Global Guggenheim. The dreams and schemes just keep on coming.

---I recently opined that the trustees of the Barnes Foundation had not taken sufficiently vigorous steps to improve the foundation's financial viability in Merion, PA, because they were so keen to move to Philadelphia. Now that a challenge to the Philly move is back in Montgomery County Orphans Court, awaiting an imminent ruling from Judge Stanley Ott, the foundation has very belatedly taken a few steps to improve its fortunes, which it should have jumped on as soon as they were legally permissible.

I can only think that it is taking these steps now because Judge Ott might justifiably take a dim view of the Barnes' inexcusable neglect of its current circumstances, while focusing its energies on grandiose plans for the future:

The Barnes recently announced that it will at last take advantage of Lower Merion Township's permission to increase its visitation. Admission fees will also rise. In July 2007, the Barnes had acknowledged the township commissioners' permission to take these steps, but failed to do so, asserting that the increased revenue would "not be sufficient to alter in a substantial way the adverse economic situation that caused our board of trustees to seek permission to move the gallery art collection. It will not come close to providing the additional revenue sources that are essential to the financial health of this and all not-for-profit educational institutions."

Two new board members have also recently been named: Brenda Thompson, a psychologist and collector of African-American art, and Bruce Gordon, former telecommunications executive and former president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This brings the total number of board members to 12, still shy of the board expansion from five to 15 that Judge Ott, years ago, had allowed as an important step towards improving its donor base.

---Eric Gibson, in today's Wall Street Journal, adds his voice to the many critics of Whitney Biennial-Speak, citing a bevy of other bloggers who also groused about the museum's impenetrable curatorial prose. But let us not forget that the uncited CultureGrrl fulminated first, before the show had opened.

---If Peter Schjeldahl and Roberta Smith both find the Vuitton shop the most alluring part of the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum, they really need to get out to the mall more.

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

Here I am just back from Japan, bringing you news from the south of France.

This just in from the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux:

The International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux (ICPL) challenges the French National Television (TF1) announcement last Friday claiming the crisis in Lascaux is resolved.

The report asserts that the black spots, which have attacked the cave and its prehistoric paintings since 2006, are now disappearing and gave the impression that cave is cured. Nothing could be further from the truth. While the latest biocide treatments have killed the bacteria on some of the black spots, new areas have been contaminated. Melanin, a black pigment produced by the bacteria, stain the walls and remain a permanent, visual, alteration to the cave's 17,000 year old paintings and to the overall integrity of Lascaux, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Lascaux's administrators are currently implementing an aggressive method they call "decolorization" to remove the melanin by physically scraping the affected areas. The scraping not only removes the melanin but also layers of the walls' surface, whether painted or unpainted, thus irrevocably altering one of mankind's most famous works of art.

According to the TF1 report, French officials assert the cave is close to reaching a microbiological equilibrium. This claim is strongly disputed by scientists within the state's own scientific committee who say just the opposite is happening. While the biocide spray used to treat the black spots kills some of the bacteria, it also contains nutrients which further disrupt the existing microbial ecology within the treated cave. In addition, the scientists explain, after any type of biocide treatment in the cave a new microbial equilibrium will naturally form. No one can predict if this new equilibrium will be more or less favorable to the prehistoric paintings.

Along with the ICPL, a worldwide concern for the health and survival of Lascaux is growing. Hundreds of people, private citizen and professionals in the field of prehistory, have signed petitions urging UNESCO to place Lascaux on its 2008 list of World Heritage Sites in Danger at its annual meeting in July.

There is nothing about this yet on ICPL's website. The May/June issue of the magazine Archaeology includes a five-page article, "Killing Lascaux," by contributing editor Paul Bahn (abstracted, but not reproduced in full, on the magazine's website). I've previously reported and commented on condition problems in the famed prehistoric cave, whose curator I interviewed in his office in Périgueux---here in the Wall Street Journal and here in CultureGrrl. Lascaux's official website is here.

The Dance of the MAD Veils, as observed last July

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

I smiled when I read the juicy NY Times obituary of Sherry Britton, the burlesque queen of prewar renown, who died on April 1 at age 89. After her stripping days were done, she became a summer stock trouper during the 1950s, when I saw her perform at New Jersey's Camden County Music Circus in some musical or other--perhaps "Guys and Dolls," in which she toured nationally as the golden-hearted floozy Miss Adelaide--though all I really remember is Miss Britton's, um, commanding stage presence.

She was famed for her provocatively slow striptease, the architectural equivalent of which has been happening lately on New York's Columbus Circle, where Edward Durell Stone's Gallery of Modern Art of 1962-1964 (familiarly but incorrectly known as the Huntington Hartford Museum) is being transformed by Brad Cloepfil of Portland's Allied Works Architecture into the new home of the Museum of Arts & Design (formerly known as the American Craft Museum.)

Bit by tantalizing bit, the gauzy black protective tarps that have shrouded the ten-story structure during its lengthy remodeling are dropping away, revealing what all the fuss was about. While architectural crimes of all sorts were being perpetrated all over the city, an inordinate amount of sound and fury surrounded the burning issue of whether or not Stone's silly little building ought to be preserved for future generations. (My opinion was just to let it crumble away into a romantic urban ruin.) As architect, scholar and critic Michael Sorkin correctly noted at the time, why was no one getting that worked up over the simultaneous emergence of the horrific behemoth that now looms over the comparatively tiny museum-- the Time Warner Building of 2000-2004 by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill?

I'll have to wait until I see the inside of Cloepfil's remodeling to weigh in with my opinion, even though his skin treatment-- which replaces Stone's lacy white marble veneer with stone, glass, and steel cladding worked into a meandering rectilinear pattern--has turned out much as I expected, confirming my longstanding belief that surface reworkings of existing structures are a waste of time and money.

Although Cloepfil has expanded the original volume of the building to the north as much as the minuscule site would allow, retaining the steel skeleton--a necessary economic decision--makes it unlikely that the new museum's interiors will be any better than those of the first incarnation, which means not very good at all.

A small footprint is no insurmountable obstacle, as brilliantly demonstrated by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa's New Museum of Contemporary Art, which works wonders with a handkerchief-sized plot. But as any architect will tell you, it's much easier to build from scratch than to remodel.

The Museum of Arts & Design's new home, atop one of New York's busiest subway nodes, has location, location, location. But it remains to be seen if this controversy-ridden fixer-upper was a stroke of recycling genius or merely a case of throwing good money after bad.  

Arkon Art Museum

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

After yesterday's accolades, here are my selections (by no means comprehensive) of the worst new museum architecture completed last year. Consider these as stand-ins for similar examples that share the same basic problem epitomized by each of these three.

---John S. and James L. Knight Building, Akron Art Museum, by Coop Himmelb(l)au (above): Just as there are fashion victims whose gullible trendiness blinds them to how ridiculous they appear, so there are architecture victims. Among the latest is the Akron Art Museum, now saddled with an architectural dud of the decade: the formally confused, haphazardly detailed, instantly dated-looking wing by Wolf Prix, of the annoyingly named Vienna firm Coop Himmelb(l)au. A leading exponent of Deconstructivist design, Prix gave these misguided clients the gee-willikers conversation piece they wanted. But far from it being the next Bilbao, this provincial embarrassment offers graphic evidence of the museum world's badly inverted priorities. The Akron addition's strenuously flamboyant yet oddly inhospitable public spaces lead to some of the dullest, least imaginative exhibition galleries I've seen in a long time, making this my suggested first stop on a how-not-to-do-it tour for museum building committees.

---Kogod Courtyard, Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, by Foster + Partners: There's no denying the technical expertise and faultless execution guaranteed by the London-based firm of Norman Foster. But one of the most pointless fads in recent museum architecture was started by Foster's glass-roofed Queen Elizabeth II Great Court of 1999-2000 at London's British Museum. There's something deeply weird about that space, bathed in a surreal glow that makes everything and everyone beneath the diamond-latticed canopy seem fake. Sure, London was the site of the seminal Crystal Palace, granddaddy of all shopping malls, but the growing compulsion to glaze over museum courtyards everywhere smacks of suburban commercialization. The DC variation on the London theme features graceful undulations, but one's ultimate response is "So what?" Given the financial and organizational problems that have plagued the embattled Smithsonian system lately, it's too bad that the generosity of patriotic donors wasn't applied to something more urgent than a vapid display of engineering skill, which adds nothing meaningful to these two underappreciated institutions.

---Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky, by A.M. Kinney Associates: At a time when museums are accused of turning into theme parks, along comes a bizarre new institution that makes Walt Disney World seem like the Albertina. This is hardly surprising, since the displays at the Creation Museum were dreamed up by a former Universal Studios designer, Patrick Marsh. I use the term "institution" in both the museological and the psychiatric sense, because this only-in-America looney bin is no more a museum than I am Napoleon. Even more unsettling than the Creation Museum's mission to enlist impressionable children in the Christian fundamentalist crusade against scientific reason is the fact that there are already two dozen such creationist museums in this country, though few approach this level of presentation. In its flat-out rejection of the Enlightenment rationalism that made the United States possible in the first place, the Creation Museum is more frightening than Disney's Haunted Mansion. Let us pray.

Top of the Heap: The New Museum on the Block

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

Last year marked both the 10th anniversary of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the 30th of Renzo Piano's and Richard Rogers' Centre Georges Pompidou--the two most influential cultural buildings of our time. As the worldwide construction boom spurred by those watershed projects continued unabated, 2007 witnessed the inauguration of still more museum buildings and additions. Here are my highly opinionated personal picks for the best new museum architecture of the year just past, to be followed tomorrow by my list of the worst.

New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, by SANAA. My choice for 2007's Museum of the Year. Okay, it's not perfect, but despite the industrial-strength fluorescent lighting, narrow stairways, and a few other lapses, no new museum in recent memory has exhilarated me anywhere as much. Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa's astonishing triumph over a tight budget and even more restricted site is an urbanistic tour-de-force. This Miracle on the Bowery, as I've called it, delivers spaces ideal for contemporary art of all kinds, as well as a stunning refutation of the grow-or-die philosophy epitomized by MoMA's soul-killing metamorphosis from artworld clubhouse to global corporate headquarters. The brilliant New Museum cost $50 million; the bloated new MoMA, more than $500 million. Museum boards take note: You sometimes get what you don't pay for.

Perelman Building, Philadelphia Museum of Art, by Gluckman Mayner Architects. Because Richard Gluckman earned his bones converting gritty industrial relics into peerless exhibition spaces, I had qualms about his turning a fancy Classical-Deco office building into a contemporary art annex. Not to worry. The Perelman feels absolutely right from start to finish, providing protective internalized rooms for light-sensitive photography, costume, and design, but also an airy, loftlike gallery that makes sculpture and installation pieces look terrific. Without being unduly deferential or disrespectful toward the landmark original, Gluckman and David Mayner again prove how their inspired retrofits trump many of today's start-from-scratch museum schemes.

Museo del Prado addition, Madrid, by Jose Rafael Moneo Arquitecto. An almost audible sigh of relief wafted through the artworld when Rafael Moneo's Prado wing debuted late last year. Although Moneo designed the imposing National Museum of Roman Art of 1980-86 in Mérida, Spain, for the Prado he rejected any hint of grandiosity and crafted an appropriately dignified amplificacion that neither plays dead nor pleads for attention. This stolid brick treasure chest pays subtle homage to the foursquare masonry of traditional Spanish architecture, and graciously focuses attention on the 19th-century art inside With consummate self-assurance, this modern master elevates himself high above the fray of today's sensation-seeking museum mongers.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, by Adjaye Associates. The London-based David Adjaye, 42, has swiftly become a fixture on the hippest architectural shortlists, including the New York commission won by SANAA (above.) His invigorating design for the New Museum's Denver counterpart confirms him as an international leader among the profession's mid-career generation. After Daniel Libeskind's sculpturally overwrought, functionally troubled, titanium sheathed Denver Art Museum addition of 2000-06, Adjaye's elegant minimalist box (go here and click: "New Building"), sheathed in smoky tinted glass, seems the antithesis of such dated post-Bilbao "destination" architecture. Although this flexible series of display spaces has struck some as insufficiently defined, I'll take Adjaye's adaptable amorphousness over Libeskind's Cinderella-slipper formalism any time.

Greek and Roman Galleries, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, by Jeffrey L. Daly after a plan by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates. Although not a freestanding addition or autonomous wing, the Met's spectacular new Greek and Roman Galleries merit a high place among 2007's museum successes. The idea for converting the Met's erstwhile cafeteria (dubbed the "Dorotheum" after its chi-chi 1940s makeover by decorator Dorothy Draper) into gallery space grew from the master plan of architect Kevin Roche, but design credit belongs to the museum's Jeffrey L. Daly, with considerable help from Greek and Roman curator Carlos Picón and colleagues. Machado and Silvetti's unironic recasting of the Roman replica Getty Villa in Malibu, completed in 2006, took the high-style curse off historical revivalism and indirectly legitimized the unapologetic traditionalism of the Met's latest museum-within-a-museum--the final triumph of Philippe de Montebello's long, glorious, and lamentably concluding directorship.

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

Every spring I vow to remain silent about the new winner of the Pritzker Prize, having dismissed the so-called Nobel of Architecture in a 1999 New Republic piece as no more than a redundant, self-regarding publicity stunt that promotes architects already rich and famous.

Try telling that to an architect, though. I've yet to meet one who doesn't crave the honor (or the $100,000 honorarium), and have repeatedly seen my words fall on deaf ears when I try to console dejected also-rans with my opinion that the Pritzker is a dubious, even bogus, accolade.

Still, I always wonder which of three inevitable reactions I will have to the annual news: "Who's he?" (Gottfried Böhm, 1986; Sverre Fehn, 1997; and Paulo Mendez da Rocha, 2006.) "Why?" (Kevin Roche, 1982; Hans Hollein, 1985; and Christian de Portzamparc, 1994). Or "Didn't he already win?" (Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer, both 1988). To that last category I can now add the name of the 2008 "laureate," Jean Nouvel, who I could have sworn had been picked years ago.

Inasmuch as the Pritzker is not going out of business because of my anomalous disdain, Nouvel is an excellent, indeed commendable, choice. He's not too soon (like Zaha Hadid, 2004), not too late (Jorn Utzon, 2003), undeniably gifted (if less so than Rem Koolhaas, 2000 and Tom Mayne, 2005), somewhat uneven (like Renzo Piano, 1998), but a major talent by any measure. That's been clear since 1987, when Nouvel's masterful Institute du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris---one of François Mitterrand's grands projets---opened to international acclaim.

After one of those odd mid-career slumps, Nouvel hit a second peak in 2006 with the near-simultaneous completion of his Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Though I admire the Branly's intelligent site planning and imaginative exterior, museologically it's a scandale. The Guthrie is well-nigh perfect, but without the fussiness that term usually implies, or the perfectionism Nouvel happily abandoned after his manically detailed IMA.

But much as I try to refrain from judging architecture before it is built, I'm not enthralled by  Nouvel's proposed Tour de Verre---the stalagmite-like 75-story residential tower he's designed for Hines, the real-estate development firm, for the midtown Manhattan lot adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art, which as part of the sale to Hines will get several levels of new exhibition spaces on lower floors of the highrise. Leaving aside the design's aesthetic merits, I'm dismayed by a skyscraper that tall being erected on a mid-block site in such an overbuilt part of the city. I wish Nouvel all the luck that eluded his non-Pritzker-winning predecessor at MoMA, Yoshio Taniguchi.

John Richardson

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

A few night ago, I was one of several speakers at a tribute to John Richardson given by the National Arts Club, which awarded the art historian its Gold Medal, several months after publication of A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, volume three of his acclaimed biography. I followed a daunting roster of golden-tongued praise-givers, including Fabrice Gabriel, literary attaché to the French Embassy (whose éloge quoted lyrically and appropriately from Apollinaire, adored by the subject of the honoree's masterpiece); the cultural diseuse Rosamond Bernier (who at 90 recently took her final bow at the Metropolitan Museum as the Cornelia Otis Skinner of art history); and Mark Stevens (the former New York Magazine art critic, now at work on a biography of Francis Bacon, another good friend from Richardson's louche London days.

In a dialogue with Bernier, Richardson shared a few of his typically rollicking but insightful anecdotes about his quarter-century friendship with Picasso, which gave the dinner's mesmerized guests a vivid sense of why Richardson is so incomparably qualified to write the definitive account of the complex and contradictory titan whose art was his biography made visual. As I said in my remarks, Richardson (whom I've known for 25 years, since we were contributing editors at Condé Nast's House & Garden and Vanity Fair) is the opposite of his characterization of Picasso as a creative vampire who sucked the psychic energy out of everyone around him to feed his demonic appetites (artistic no less than erotic).

Unlike that ultimate monster sacré, John has been the most generous colleague imaginable, sharing with me and countless other fellow writers his encyclopedic knowledge of art, Society with a capital S, and the intersection of those overlapping worlds. Though more often than not I've complied with his insistence that his unsparing but spot-on observations remain unattributed in print, despite cynics' assumptions that this outrageous raconteur is a modern Baron von Munchhausen, research assistants and attorneys who vet my articles for accuracy and potential lawsuits inevitably find everything that Richardson says checks out.

When John was finally presented his National Arts Club medal, he lamented that it lacked a ribbon so he could wear it, for although his father---a British Army general and Knight of the Bath---boasted "gongs" galore, he had none. Who knew? John remains a British subject (he works in the U.S. on a Green Card) and thus should long ago have been dubbed Sir John, or given one---or better yet, both---of the loftier royal accolades bestowed on yet another of his close artist friends, Lucian Freud: the Order of Merit and the Companionship of Honor.

All right, John's been an expatriate for decades, but he's more British than his old pal Princess Margaret. And what about France? Where's his Legion d'Honneur? Vite, vite! Although Richardson, now 84, remains prodigiously hearty, both Britain and France must make haste to honor his epic contribution to both cultures, while he's still here to savor such belated recognition.

Leonard Lauder at the Whitney
Photo by Christopher London, ©Manhattan Society.com 2007

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

It's long been assumed that the donor of a new museum building or addition will play a central role in selecting its architect (as Paul Mellon did with I.M. Pei's East Building at the National Gallery of Art), or will reserve that right for himself (as Eli Broad did with his new Renzo Piano addition at LACMA).
 

In an unusual twist on the architectural implications of philanthropic leverage, Leonard Lauder, the Whitney's longtime chairman and mega-benefactor, stipulated that his $131-million gift to the museum, announced on Mar. 19, was conditional on its not selling the landmark Marcel Breuer building of 1963-66. (He wouldn't publicly reveal how long his caveat will remain in effect.) Given the disastrous results of some recent museum building programs, it's easy to understand Lauder's wanting the Whitney to avoid the kind of personality transplant lately suffered by MoMA, to name the most conspicuous local example of how architecture can profoundly change a museum's essential character.

Breuer's obdurate concrete monolith, a squared-off variant on the inverted-ziggurat Guggenheim, fourteen blocks uptown, differs internally from Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral gallery configuration. The rap on both buildings is that they're display spaces from hell. Yet the Guggenheim can make certain kinds of art look great--sculpture in particular, but also certain single-artist surveys, such as the 1978 Rothko retrospective I can still see in my mind's eye. And Whitney curator Donna de Salvo's inspired 2006 installation of Ed Ruscha's "Course of Empire" series tapped into Breuer's powerful surround in a way that enhanced the architectural subject matter of the artist's paired paintings.

Explaining his decision, Lauder told the NY Times' Carol Vogel, "Like so many architecture lovers, I believe the Whitney and the Breuer building are one." That's hard to dispute after one big-name architect after another--Michael Graves, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano--tried and failed to expand the Whitney over the past 25 years. Graves's ponderous Postmodern proposal and Koolhaas's antic Deconstructivist scheme were unsuitable in antithetical ways, whereas Piano's successive reworkings (in a futile effort to overcome implacable community opposition) became more and more boring,

One retired museum director told me he thought Lauder was making a terrible mistake by trying to control the Whitney's architectural destiny for years, perhaps decades, to come. "You can't create the future by clinging to the past," he warned. But that was easy for him to say, as someone who commissioned a museum building that everyone in the art world still loves. Only time will tell if Lauder has done the right thing, but his enforced moratorium at a moment of notable architectural disarray could turn out to be one of his most valuable gifts to the Whitney.

Model of "Flower House," Suiza, Switzerland (2006 - ), Courtesy SANAA

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

The trouble with most architecture exhibitions is that, unlike shows on other, readily transportable art forms, it's almost impossible to display actual examples of this immovable medium within a conventional gallery context. Models, photographs, videos, drawings, plans, and even mock-ups of architectural details can only approximate the real thing somewhere else.

One brilliant solution was pioneered by the Museum of Modern Art during the 1940s and 1950s, when it erected full-scale model houses in the garden of its midtown Manhattan premises. (That long-dormant practice is about to revived with MoMA's Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling show, which opens in July and features five full-scale structures on the vacant lot west of museum, future site of a 75-story residential highrise--with 40,000 sq. ft. of new MoMA galleries in its lower portion-- by the 2008 Pritzker Prize winner, Jean Nouvel.)

A refreshing exception to the museological problem of conveying the essence of architecture is SANAA: Works 1998-2008, now on view at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art through June 15. To be sure, a show housed in a major work by the same designers it highlights has built-in advantages, but it's no guarantee of success. For example, the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, mounted a 2002 retrospective on the 30th anniversary of its revered Louis Kahn building, but the architecture so overwhelmed Kahn's' unprepossessing drawings and models that they seemed superfluous.

Wisely, the current SANAA show avoids the self-congratulatory air of the Guggenheim's hugely popular 2001 Frank Gehry survey, with its thinly disguised premise of promoting the architect's then-pending Lower Manhattan branch for that museum. The modesty of the New Museum's ten-year overview of work by SANAA's principals, Kazuo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (whose initials form the acronym for their Tokyo-based firm, Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates) befits the pair's delicate aesthetic. Models of their buildings bear no resemblance to typically slick presentation mock-ups by commercial architects. Instead, the humble materials and rudimentary facture of these three-dimensional renderings capture the spirit of SANAA's minimalist approach to perfection. 

Sejima and Nishizawa both pursue individual commissions in addition to joint projects, but this show demonstrates that neither collaborator holds a monopoly on design talent. In a rare reversal of their profession's still entrenched gender bias, the 52-year-old Sejima has been more lionized then her decade-younger colleague, with whom she began working in 1995. But Nishizawa's strong solo efforts prove he is her equal in understanding how fine calibrations of proportion and choice of materials affect the expressive power of form.

Although Sejima and Nishizawa remain unapologetic purists they are no joyless puritans, as is evident in the playful design objects--including their Flower and Rabbit chairs, Hanahana flower stand and other home furnishings--that give the New Museum's already welcoming ground floor an even more engaging aura this spring.

Nicolai Ouroussoff

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

Among the root causes of the mess America now finds itself in, one of the least discussed is the seemingly extinct notion of conflict of interest. Not so long ago, even the appearance of impropriety was enough to prevent the double-dealing now commonplace in every sector of public life. In 2004, when Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia was condemned for not recusing himself from a pending case that involved his hunting buddy Dick Cheney, he huffed, "If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court Justice can be bought so cheap [sic], the Nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined."

A large part of the blame for the electorate's cynicism about this and other related issues lies squarely with the establishment press, which is not immune to the corruptions of cronyism. Although there are worse things to worry about now, The NY Times' coverage--or non-coverage--of the controversial redevelopment of Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards is symptomatic of how conflicts of interest have undermined once-respected institutions.

On Mar. 21, the Times ran two pieces about cutbacks to the Atlantic Yards scheme due to the weakening economy, by architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, and by Metropolitan Desk reporter Charles V. Bagli. Ouroussoff's critique made no mention of the somewhat pertinent fact that the project's prime mover, Bruce Ratner, was also developer of the new New York Times Building. To learn that, you needed to read Bagli, who, in a classic example of "bury the lede," got around to that disclosure only near the end of his 1,400-word piece.

Since he succeeded Herbert Muschamp in 2003, nothing Ouroussoff has written (with the possible exception of his calling Yoshio Taniguchi's MoMA expansion "exquisite") has incensed me more than his claim that anticipated contraction of the monstrously overloaded Atlantic Yards complex "feels like a betrayal of the public trust." I could hardly stop sputtering "Betrayal!...Public Trust!"

Let's talk for a moment about public trust and the Times, forgetting Judith Miller's compromised WMD reportage and a few other postmillennial lapses. Ratner's ties to the Times's majority shareholders, the Sulzberger dynasty, long predate their recent collaboration. In 1996 Ratner was made a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the behest of its then board chairman, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, father of the current Times publisher. Can it be mere coincidence that the Newspaper of Record has done its best to ignore the considerable public resistance to Ratner's Atlantic Yards?

For those of us who oppose that boondoggle because it would destroy one of the city's few remaining economically and racially diverse neighborhoods, this unexpected turn of events seems no less than a deus ex machina. Although Ouroussoff hailed Gehry's ensemble as "an urban Gesamtkunstwerk" it is among his worst designs, a throwback to the steamroller urbanism one thought had died with Robert Moses.

What a difference six days make. In a Mar. 27 column gallingly headlined, "Profit and Public Good Clash in Grand Plans," Ouroussoff denounced the Metropolitan Transit Authority's granting development rights for its Hudson Yards site in Manhattan to Tishman Speyer, whose design proposal, by Murphy/Jahn, was as bad as any of the other contenders'. Like former Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger (aka the Great Equivocator), Ouroussoff morphs into high indignation mode only when it's safe. He's entitled to like or dislike whatever he chooses. But for the sadly compromised Times to deliver lectures on the ethics of urban redevelopment is hypocrisy pure and simple.

Wait! Hold that airplane!

This just in: Fisk University yesterday filed its expected appeal of Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle's decision regarding its Stieglitz Collection. Unmentioned in the press release but previously mentioned to me by C. Michael Norton, Fisk's lawyer, is the prime reason for the appeal---the university's continuing desire to accept Alice Walton's $30 million for a half-share of the collection.

Now, please stop me before I blog again!

Attentive readers will remember that I mentioned I was going to be visiting three continents within three months: first it was Los Angeles, to cover the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum; then, Athens, to speak at the International Conference on Return of Cultural Property.

Now, having redefined CultureGrrl as "all-Murakami, all the time," I've decided to go see for myself where he came from.

Back to you on Apr. 17 or 18, art-lings (or maybe once or twice before that, if I just can't keep my hands off the keyboard). How do I say, "I'm allergic to nuts" in Japanese? CultureGrrl readers: Help me with my essential travel phrase, before I take off on United!

Wait, what's this? My airline recently cancelled certain flights (including some to Japan, according to its website) due to maintenance issues. I hope they've now got things sorted out.

Good news for you, when (or if) I depart: You-know-who is once again going to be doing such a good job as my guest blogger that you'll wish me to become fluent in Japanese before I return.

Martin, Fill 'er up!

"Tongari-kun" (aka "Mr. Pointy), installation in progress at the Brooklyn Museum. Murakami-esque suspended black balloons were decor for the benefit gala.

Viewing the Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum after having first encountered it at its original (and originating) venue, the Geffen Contemporary facility of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, was like seeing two different shows. The works, for the most part, were the same. The impact, completely different.

In the LA's sprawling, warehouse-like setting, the show functioned as one giant installation. It felt like a perverse version of Disney World. But in Murakami World, the theme song would be: "It's a weird world, after all." The experience was powerful and immersive.

In Brooklyn, it's fragmented, due to the linear series of separate rooms, typical of traditional museum installations, and the necessity of splitting up the show among three different floors (counting the ground-floor lobby installation of Mr. Pointy, above) and between two different venues: The centerpiece in LA---the totemic but monstrous Oval Buddha (scroll down)---didn't quite have enough height clearance for installation in Brooklyn's fifth-floor atrium. It's been exiled to Manhattan, where it will hold court in the atrium of 590 Madison Avenue.

As I previously noted (and inadequately photographed), Brooklyn has one terrific site-specific moment, where Murakami created a series of large murals---skulls, flowers, abstract patterns, that confront each other in a sun-filled space. And on the fourth floor (which is the continuation of the fifth-floor installation), the compactness of the museum's separate rooms heightens the intensity of the most disturbingly profound works in the show.

For me, the power center is the gallery in which these two large complex, explosive, apocalyptic paintings face off against each other:

"Tan Tan Bo," 2001, Collection of John A. Smith and Victoria Hughes, courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.

"Tan Tan Bo Puking," 2002, Collection of Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann, courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.

I hate to get all misty-eyed about the "Universal Museum," but the one great advantage that Brooklyn has over LA MOCA is the revelatory presence within the same building of Murakami's Japanese progenitors. On my way out, I stopped at the temporary ground-floor exhibition of Japanese 19th-century Utagawa prints. Their serene landscapes, beautiful women who are actually prostitutes, and clashes between humans and monstrous demons resonated with what I had just experienced upstairs.

I recommend your doing it the other way around: See the tradition from which Murakami came; then see where it led.

I'll get serious about the installation transformations of the LA-to-Brooklyn Murakami show in a bit. But first, art-lings, this report from last night's Kanye West Fest.

From today's Gothamist blog comes the following news flash: "Murakami Gala at Brooklyn Museum Eclipsed by [Bruce] Ratner Protest." The real estate developer, now faltering in his attempt to install a collection of Frank Gehry buildings at Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards, was the gala's honoree. (Vuitton's artistic director, Marc Jacobs, had assumed that role at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's gala for its show.) The protesters are opposed to the plans for Atlantic Yards, as well as to the "residential development proposed for a 22-acre site just a stone's throw from the museum," according to Gothamist.

But enough politics. Let's go to the photos at the bottom of Gothamist's post. Don't miss the shot of the wacky "Louis Vuitton 'anti-counterfeit' installation outside the Brooklyn Museum, featuring authentic Vuitton goods."

Talk about high/low! Memo to my anonymous curatorial correspondent, who quipped that the museum "should organize all the counterfeiters from Canal Street to set up just outside the show"---You (almost) got it right!

And in very tenuously related news---Murakami has been called (not by me) the Japanese Warhol. But why settle for the copy when you can have the real thing? If you want to live in one of two former New York homes of the real Warhol, now you can. (Just bring mega-millions to the closing.)

My WNYC podcast on Murakami is now online here, or you can click it below. I never know for sure how it will be edited, so I'm glad they kept my comment that I have no objection to Brooklyn's displaying the Vuitton products (or even, for that matter, replicating a store).

I only object to its being a FUNCTIONAL store---an external commercial enterprise inappropriately introduced into a nonprofit museum. What happens when the next artist insists that part of HIS art is allowing his own dealer to set up shop in the middle of the retrospective, selling objects just like those in the show (or even some that are IN the show)? That would be a smart commercial move, lousy museum policy.

Here's the podcast, to be followed by another post, comparing the effect of the exhibition in Brooklyn with that in its organizing venue, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art:

 

If all goes according to plan, you can hear me tomorrow commenting about the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum on New York Public Radio's Morning Edition, WNYC: 93.9 FM or 820 AM.  Or you can listen live here.

They tell me it should be aired at one or more of the following times: 6:35, 7:35, 8:35 a.m.

I will, of course, post the podcast on CultureGrrl, when available.

Leonardo da Vinci, "La Belle Ferronière," Musée du Louvre

Didier Rykner, whose La Tribune de l'Art had spearheaded the unsuccessful petition against the Louvre's deal to create a satellite museum in Abu Dhabi, now reports (in English) that the Paris museum intends to send to Verona, Italy, an exhibition of some 140 works, including such masterpieces as Leonardo's "La Belle Ferronière" (above). He lists several other major paintings, and has provided me with the link to the Italian announcement of the exhibition by Studio ESSECI, which states that it will be held at Verona's Palazzo della Gran Guardia, Sept. 19 to Feb. 15.

Rykner makes the unsourced claim that "the Louvre is renting out its masterpieces for 4 million euros, a figure that is not stated explicitly in the [Italian] press release, to a private firm." He further asserts:

Everything pertaining to this exhibition is cause for scandal and reveals the extent of the policies that we have consistently denounced. How far will this perversion of a museum's mission go?"

The Studio ESSECI press release, linked above, says that the exhibition is under the auspices of the Louvre, Verona and Linea d'ombra---a firm which, according to its website, was "devised and founded in late 1996 by its General Director Marco Goldin [said to be one of those who conceived the show]....Its services consist mainly of the global management of art exhibitions, from the planning stage through to their conclusion."

I publish all this with some hesitation, because, like Rykner, I have not been able to get the Louvre to confirm or deny the details (although not from lack of trying).

Louis Godart, advisor on culture to Italy's President, has now made good on his promise to send me the list of works relinquished to his country by Shelby White and now on display at the Palazzo Poli in Rome. I already published the list here, but now I've also got the images. All are catalogued as having come from "clandestine excavations" in Italy, except for the last fresco, which is said to have been "stolen on May 31, 1975 from excavations in Pompei":


Attic black figure panathenaic amphora with runners, attributed to the painter of the Louvre F6, ca. 540 B.C.


Attic black figure amphora with Dionysos and Ariadne banqueting, attributed to the painter of the Medea Group, ca. 520 B.C.


Red figure calyx krater with Zeus and Ganymede, attributed to the Eucharides painter, ca. 490-480 B.C.


Amphora from Chalkidiki with young riders, ca. 550-540 B.C.


Hydria from Cerveteri with panther and lioness attacking a mule, attributed to the Busiride painter, ca. 530-500 B.C.


Hydria from Cerveteri with the flight of Ulysses from Polyphemus' cavern, attributed to the workshop of the Aquila painter and associates, ca. 530-500 B.C.


Small bronze statue of Kouros, ca. 480-470 B.C.


Fragment of a wall fresco decoration: architecture prospective and theater mask, Pompeiian style, ca. 50-30 B.C.


Fragment of a wall fresco decoration: a lying Maenad, Pompeiian style, ca. 50-79 A.D.

Takashi Murakami, speaking at the Brooklyn Museum's press preview today. Director Arnold Lehman listens.

Sorry I've been away all day, art-lings, but I've been prowling the Murakami press preview at the Brooklyn Museum, on which I'll be commenting soon (if all goes according to plan) on New York Public Radio (WNYC). I think I'll save my first (mostly favorable) takes on the art and the installation for my audio analysis. (As always, I'll post that on CultureGrrl, when available.)

I do have a somewhat broader (if not broadminded) perspective on the show, since I saw the very different installation at the organizing venue---the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's Geffen Contemporary. Let me just say, for now, that one of my favorite aspects of the Brooklyn version is the site-specific part---the murals that Murakami created expressly for the stairway joining the two parts of the show, on the fourth and fifth floor:



But in my continuing Vuitton vendetta, let me quote, without comment (because I think none is necessary) remarks made today to justify the museum presence of the for-profit, externally run boutique.

Murakami (talking to reporters in the galleries): I cannot understand it. We can enjoy the MoMA store, so why not this [the Louis Vuitton boutique]?

Lehman (at the press conference): The permanent collection galleries of our museum are filled with objects that you could buy in retail stores---such as Herman Miller furniture and Tiffany silver---which represent the highest aesthetic achievements of their particular historic periods. [Their status as retail products] does not diminish their aesthetic power....The same is true of Takashi's designs.

But Arnold, why did you avoid calling on me at the beginning of the question period, even though mine was the only hand raised and your trustee, sitting onstage, even pointed me out to you?

Could it have been because of this? Or maybe Lehman knew I would inquire whether he saw any distinction between works from the museum's permanent collection and works for sale, in a privately run store at a nonprofit institution, from the inventory of a commercial luxury goods conglomerate.

Speaking of fashion, today I witnessed a press-preview first---two "celebrity stylists" who kept shadowing the artist, spraying and smoothing his coif:


"Hairspray," the exhibition

Do you think George Clooney will have groomers at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute benefit? (Harold, I still haven't gotten my invitation!) Why didn't I engage one of these people for my bad-hair day at the Athens International Conference last month? Good thing I asked for their card.

The Mount, Edith Wharton's Bershires Mansion

Upon hearing in February of the impending bank foreclosure of The Mount, Edith Wharton's idyllic estate in the Massachusetts Berkshires that I had visited in 2006, I wrote:

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

I don't know about the long-term financial plan, but the management shake-up has now, a bit belatedly, happened. Mark Pratt of the Associated Press reports:

The president and chief executive of the financially troubled estate of author Edith Wharton has stepped down rather than assume a different position in a restructured management hierarchy, trustees announced Sunday.

The board had asked Stephanie Copeland, who oversaw the restoration and programatic reinvigoration of The Mount, to give up the financial and administrative side of her responsibilities, continuing to oversee the creative aspects. She declined. Ellen Lahr of the Berkshire Eagle yesterday reported that The Mount is now "saddled with more than $8.7 million in debt, $4.3 million of which is owed to Berkshire Bank."

It appears, though, The Mount was granted an extra month to come up with the $3 million it says it needs to avoid foreclosure: The deadline for this is now Apr. 24. But as of Sunday, only about $570,000 had been raised, AP reported.

One possibility discussed at a Lenox Town Hall meeting on Monday night was the return of performances by Shakespeare & Company, the respected Berkshires theater group, which had originally moved into the former Wharton mansion in 1981.

But my hope is that the new regime will keep the focus on the mansion's illustrious literary history, well served by Copeland, who accomplished the acquisition for its library of the books from Wharton's own wide-ranging collection. Part of The Mount's current debt is money still owed for that purchase.

UPDATE: Yikes! They took it down. If you click the video, below, it now says: "We're sorry, this video is no longer available." Does that mean it was done by a Banksy hoax-ster? Or was it created under professional auspices and not intended for free sharing?

Here's what I wrote right after I viewed the video:

There are lots of YouTube videos about Banksy, but now there's one on which the stealth artist himself appears to have collaborated, providing his own voiceover narration as the camera captures him in the act. As described by today's Daily Mail (which still has screenshots from the video):

The clip features an interview with a man who, in a thick West Country accent, claims to be the anonymous guerrilla artist, and follows him around London as he creates several works.

In keeping with the Bristol-born artist's desire to keep his identity secret, the face of the man in the film is never seen, and he wears a large hat throughout.

He ends by stating that he's "in the entertainment business and also in the start-a-revolution business. And a bit of both is probably ideal."

I like this chap, who seems to be the real deal. But you'll have to decide for yourself (UPDATE: Now you can't. Maybe Banksy decided for us.):


UPDATE CONTINUED: The video, which seemed professionally produced, had been posted a week ago by "dog666fighter," a 25-year-old from Great Britain, and had logged 1,007 views.

Red figure calyx krater with Zeus and Ganymede, attributed to the Eucharides painter

The Italian Culture Ministry has at last published on its website a list of the objects relinquished by Shelby White and now on display at the Palazzo Poli in Rome. (Go here, click on "Cartella Stampa" and then on "oggetti in mostra." The White objects are interspersed among the others in this exhibition of repatriated works.)

The ex-Shelby White works are:

Attic black figure panathenaic amphora with runners, attributed to the painter of the Louvre F6, ca. 540 B.C.

Attic black figure amphora with Dionysos and Ariadne banqueting, attributed to the painter of the Medea Group, ca. 520 B.C.

Red figure calyx krater with Zeus and Ganymede (above), attributed to the Eucharides painter, ca. 490-480 B.C.

Amphora from Chalkidiki with young riders, ca. 550-540 B.C.

Hydria from Cerveteri with panther and lioness attacking a mule, attributed to the Busiride painter, ca. 530-500 B.C.

Hydria from Cerveteri with the flight of Ulysses from Polyphemus' cavern, attributed to the workshop of the Aquila painter and associates, ca. 530-500 B.C.

Small bronze statue of Kouros, ca. 480-470 B.C.

Fragment of a wall fresco decoration: a lying Maenad, Pompeiian style, ca. 50-79 A.D.

Fragment of a wall fresco decoration: architecture prospective and theater mask, Pompeiian style, ca. 50-30 B.C.

David Gill, in his Looting Matters blog yesterday, also posted a Shelby list (without giving its source), which provides more details about the objects. But some of the works on his list appear to vary from the list posted by Italy.

What I don't understand is that the Italian Ministry lists all these works not only as from White's collection but also as "formerly" from the Metropolitan Museum. Is that because they previously appeared in Glories of the Past, the Met's 1990 exhibition of works loaned from the private collection of White and her late husband, Leon Levy?