March 2010 Archives

I'm flushing the matzo out of my brain cells with strong coffee and have returned to posting, thanks to those of you who met the CultureGrrl Challenge (more on that below).

So here's the moment you've all been waiting for---CultureGrrl in Swedish! As I mentioned last week (scroll to bottom), I was interviewed by Mårten Arndtzén, art critic/reporter for Sveriges Radio (Swedish public radio) about the controversies over the New Museum's Joannou show and LA MOCA's Deitch directorship.

My Swedish is a little rusty, so I used my fluent English for this interview (which yielded two soundbites), preceded by more expansive comments (also in English) from Noah Kupferman, a private client manager for U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management, who teaches a course on art as a financial asset at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies. (Noah had previously been interviewed for the NY Times' front-page story about issues raised by the Joannou show.) He described the relationship between the New Museum and its collector/trustee as "incestuous"---a word that Arndtzén appreciatively savored in Swedish.

If it starts working again, you can hear us here, by clicking the blue text after the first paragraph. The audio had worked for me yesterday, but didn't this morning. (UPDATE: The audio seems to work better if you click here. The first voice you'll hear is Noah's. My comments start at slightly before the 2:00 mark.)

Mårten did translate for me some of his commentary for the piece, as well as its sensationalistic headline: "American Museums Sell Out Their Integrity." Judging by that, it appears that my relatively temperate remarks didn't translate well into Swedish. What I said in the comments they used was that in the current financial crisis, museums' dependence on private donors has grown and, with that, donor influence. I added that we've seen a change in what's deemed acceptable museum practice over the past 10 years, and that we need to get back to basic principles.

At least I now know their word for "blogg"!

Speaking of "bloggs," New Museum chief curator Richard Flood, taking a shot at online pests, played Whack-A-Mole (or, more accurately, whack-a-prairie dog) in his lecture on Saturday at the Portland Art Museum. As quoted by Lisa Radon on the Hyperallergic blog, Flood hammered cyberpundits who keep popping up to annoy his institution. He unconvincingly claimed to have "just found out about blogs" three months ago. I suspect he meant that he just found out about the power of blogs three or four months ago, when they took his institution to task for awarding a single-collector show to its own trustee.

Here's what Flood said in Portland, according to one "prairie dog's" (Radon's) report:

Blogs are like being out on a prairie and one prairie dog pops up; none of the others can see it, but they can feel the movement in the earth. So another pops up. And another. They are not communicating with each other. They have no idea. History means nothing to them. Truth means nothing to them. They have no mechanism in place for checking [facts].

My art-lings know better. Four CultureGrrl readers heard my plea for clicks on my neglected "Donate" button. My warm thanks go out to Repeat CultureGrrl Donor 120 from Boston and new CultureGrrl Donors 121 and 122 from Villanova, PA, and Beverly Hills. With Donor 119 (previously thanked), that makes four who answered my call.

Wait a minute! I said I needed FIVE: I'm also counting the return on Monday of the PADA classified ad in my middle column (which yields more remuneration than most individual donations).

Every bit of encouragement helps! Please don't wait for me to beg again for support. If you like a post, please let me know with a tangible sign of appreciation. Otherwise, the next time I get whacked, I might not have the strength to pop up again!

I have lashed myself to the mast and plugged my ears so that I cannot be tempted by the booting-up siren song of the computer this week. As I mentioned at the end of this post, I'm taking off today and tomorrow for the first two nights of Passover, and then intend to resist blogging for the rest of this holiday week, unless five readers let me know, by clicking my "Donate" button before Wednesday, that they want me back.

Here, I'll make it easy for you. This works:

So far, my warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Donor 119 from Atlanta. That's One.

To make up for my absence, I posted twice yesterday. Breaking news (Pritzker Prize; two museum-director deaths) caused me to break my usual practice of taking off for the weekend. Barring a benefactors' miracle, though, I will not brake for breaking news this week.

You can pass a little time while I chew the matzos by viewing the archived webcast, now online, from last Friday's meeting of the National Council on the Arts. Don't miss the comment by ArtsJournal blogger Terry Teachout about what artists are going to need to do more of, going forward.

We can only hope that the spelling, beneath the video screen, of "Rocco Landman," the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, will be corrected by the time you view that webcast. (Two letters, as of this writing, are missing.)

If you're really desperate for things to do online while I'm munching macaroons, you can watch Marina staring down her acolytes at MoMA. (It's pretty clear from watching this drama that the ban on photography is being honored in the breach.) Or you can refresh the Barnes construction webcam every 15 minutes. True CultureGrrl devotees can revisit the Top Two CultureGrrl Videos (or even all 26 of them).

That's all, she wrote.

Edmund Pillsbury, left; Charles Ryskamp, right

Edmund (Ted) Pillsbury and Charles Ryskamp, both of whom died late last week, were members of a dying breed---the museum director/connoisseur.

Pillsbury, who from 1980-98 served as the Kimbell Art Museum's second leader, may have been the last of the buccaneering museum directors. Armed with a connoisseur's sharp eye and his institution's substantial financial resources, he repeatedly bagged the big game on the art market. His acquisitions greatly enhanced the Fort Worth museum's world-class reputation for presenting a select, beautifully installed array of some of the world's great masterpieces in a Louis Kahn-designed facility considered one of the world's finest examples of museum architecture. Among Pillsbury's trophies---paintings by Caravaggio, Velázquez, Cézanne, Matisse. He also brought a succession of top-quality exhibitions to the Kimbell.

Less praiseworthy was his decision to auction virtually the entire collection of old master drawings and prints (briefly mentioned here), claiming that the museum could not properly preserve and display them. His Romaldo Giurgola-designed expansion plans for the Kimbell were scotched in 1990. (A Renzo Piano-designed expansion is now planned.) In 1998 Pillsbury precipitously resigned his directorship. At the time of his death at age 66, he was chairman of fine arts at Dallas' Heritage Auction Galleries. Before arriving at the Kimbell, he had directed the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and afterwards, the Meadows Museum, Dallas.

The Kimbell has posted a brief tribute on its website.

Ryskamp, 81, was former director of the Frick Collection (1987-97) and of the Morgan Library (1969-86), keeping both institutions on an even keel during his tenures. He actively acquired drawings for his extensive personal collection during the time that he was serving at those institutions. The Morgan Library mounted an exhibition of selections from his private holdings in 2001---"The World Observed: Five Centuries of Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp." (William Griswold, currect director of the Morgan, co-edited that catalogue.)

An exhibition of some 200 works from Ryskamp's collection (about one-third of his total trove) is now on view (to Apr. 25) at the Yale Center for British Art. Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp has now become a fitting memorial to his connoisseurship.

The NY Times published a profile of Ryskamp and his collecting activities in 2004. Writer William Hamilton included this feisty comment from the director/connoisseur:

''I don't want this to be an obituary,'' he said sharply, after a few questions about the past.

With his passing, it has become one.

Are we about to see the end of visual arts scholarship as we know it?

As reported on several art history-related websites (but not, as far as I've seen, in the mainstream media), one of the most lamentable results of the J. Paul Getty Trust's budgetary cutbacks is the Getty Research Institute's withdrawal of financial support for what it had previously called "one of the most powerful tools at the art historian's disposal"---the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), which in 2008 was renamed the International Bibliography of Art (IBA). This research database, indexing art historical records and abstracts and maintained by the Getty, was successor to the International Repertory of the Literature of Art (RILA) and the Répertoire d'Art et d'Archéologie (RAA).

The College Art Association's account of this scholarly emergency, posted yesterday by Christopher Howard, reports:

With the closing, hundreds of thousands of records and abstracts in the database will soon be unavailable to scholars worldwide--indefinitely. Subscribers to BHA, which include many academic libraries and research institutions, received notice about the shutdown from the Getty earlier this month.

While there are some alternatives--among them Art Index, Avery Index, and ARTbibliographies Modern--the loss of this invaluable resource is immense and will be deeply felt throughout the international art-history community....

Since June CAA has made numerous communiqués by phone and email to the Getty regarding the demise of BHA, receiving only one inconclusive response.

In response to my query yesterday, Ron Hartwig, the Getty Trust's vice president for communications, said this:

What is currently on our website about the BHA stands. We can't say at this time what the disposition of BHA will be after Mar. 31. But as soon as we know anything, we will make sure that an announcement is broadly distributed.

The Getty's website statement says nothing about Mar. 31. It states: "Beginning Jan. 1, 2010, the Getty will no longer support the ongoing IBA." But Cornell University's library website states [via]: "We received notification that our licensed access to the BHA will continue through Mar. 31, 2010."

According to the Getty:

With the GRI facing severe budget challenges and without strong and committed partners to share the work, it has become impossible for the Getty to maintain the IBA on its own. Nevertheless, the GRI continues to be interested in seeing the IBA continue its service to the art historical field.

The Getty hopes the database "will be transferred to an organization that can provide continuing support for this valuable resource."

If there were ever a project crying out for a timely rescue by a foundation, university, or other defender of art scholarship, this is it.

Speaking of timely rescues, CultureGrrl intends to cease posting and sulk for a week, beginning this Monday, unless five benefactors see fit to click my "Donate" button (in which case I intend to take off only Monday and Tuesday, the first two nights of Passover).

I can't go on bloggin' for nothin'.

Warren Olney

A very late-breaking development: I'll be speaking on Which Way, L.A.?, Warren Olney's news interview show on KCRW (89.9 FM), Southern California Public Radio, later today. I'll be commenting on the Getty and LA MOCA directorship controversies. CultureGrrl readers already have some advance knowledge of what I'm going to say (which has already been taped).

Warren, according to his show's website, is "considered the dean of Southern California broadcast journalists," I consider myself to be the doyenne of New York art journalists. So we two got along just fine.

My segment is expected to be broadcast during the second half of the show (not the part about "legalizing marijuana"), which means about 7:30-8 p.m., West Coast time (10:30-11 p.m., my time).

Wait a minute! No one's going to be listening (certainly not me). Who wants to hear some blogger expound on art museums when they can watch the basketball genuises from my alma mater, Cornell, throw Kentucky in the mucky?

Luckily, my words will be archived on the program's website (linked at the top of this post), where you can listen live if you really can't stand college basketball.

What is this? A sports blog?

Okay, the century is still young (and Cornell undoubtedly has a lot of great hockey games in its future). But my alma mater has captured the imagination of the whole country (except for certain parts of Kentucky) with its good-guy basketball team's glorious, improbable ascent to the NCAA's Sweet Sixteen. You can watch us continue our winning streak (no snide remarks, please) on CBS-TV at 9:57 p.m. I'll be heading out to a Cornellian bash for this occasion, in full Big Red regalia. (No photos!)

Here are a few fun articles to get you stoked. The first is heart-warming; the second, hilarious; the third, a straightfoward report.

Oh wait. You just wanted to know about the first-ever webcast of a Washington meeting of the National Council on the Arts (advisory body of the National Endowment for the Arts)? While you're nursing your Cornell victory hangover, you can watch the teamwork of NEA's elite players, beginning at 9 a.m. tomorrow, by logging on here and then selecting the Art Works blog. The schedule for that scimmage is posted in NEA's announcement of the webcast. It kicks off with the swearing in of a new member of the council, New Orleans jazz musician Irvin Mayfield.

I do like this transparency! Maybe museum board meetings will be next. (Alas, no sunshine laws apply.)

The National Council's public meeting at 5 p.m. today, to consider grant applications and guidelines, is not being webcast, however. (Maybe next time?) For those of you who don't want to break the mood so soon after Cornell's victory, tomorrow's webcast will be archived and available on NEA's website during the following week.

Images from the Getty Museum's two campuses: Los Angeles (left), Malibu (right)

Want to apply for the vacant directorship of the J. Paul Getty Museum?

Now you can!

Two weeks ago, the online application (who needs a search firm?) for the director of the two-campus Los Angeles/Malibu museum was posted on the Getty's website. As CultureGrrl readers may remember, the position was precipitously vacated by Michael Brand at the end of January. (Soon after he departed, Michael discussed with CultureGrrl some of the circumstances surrounding his decision to leave.) David Bomford, former associate director for collections, is serving as the Getty's interim director.

I don't know whether the Getty Trust has engaged a search firm. I've got a query pending and if I learn more, I'll update.

I guess it took the Getty this long to compose the job description:

This individual will be critical to the success of the organization, reporting directly to the President, with responsibility for all Museum activities including budget, acquisition strategy, and personnel decisions. The position oversees six curatorial departments---paintings, drawings, photographs, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture and decorative arts and antiquities---educational, and interpretive activities, conservation functions linked to each collection area, and wide ranging exhibitions, public programs and publications. The Director has both the opportunity and responsibility to advance the goals of the Museum in collaboration with other Trust programs.

 

The Getty is recruiting a Director who desires a very visible position, with significant influence, stature, and authority. The Director will work aggressively to continue the strengthening of our collections through both purchase and gift, drawing on the scholarly expertise within the Museum's established collection areas. We seek a Director with a commitment to leadership and innovation in the visual arts and a dedication to diverse local audiences. The ideal candidate for this position will have, above all, a vision for guiding this museum within the framework of the Trust, as well as fostering collaboration with the three other programs, and the ability to implement that vision for its employees, colleagues and visitors.

 

We are seeking an inspiring leader, with an outstanding record, who has the skill to recruit, strengthen, and retain a staff of professionals while generating positive morale [emphasis added] throughout the organization. We need a strong colleague, with great passion for the visual arts who can build relationships and represent the institution in the international art world. It will be crucial to have someone who demands extraordinary achievement, who can make tough decisions while accepting responsibility for them, who maintains an empathetic perspective with integrity and good humor and communicates openly with elegance and effectiveness.

"Generating a positive morale"? That would be a nice change after the employee discontent recently aired in the now defunct Silence Dogetty blog.

Compare the Getty's ideal candidate, if you will, with the job description for Philippe de Montebello's successor at the Metropolitan Museum. Applicants for that directorship needed to have "excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to motivate, direct and hold accountable a highly skilled staff in a notably collegial environment." It seems that "positive morale" at the Met was a given, not something needing to be "generated."

The Met was also looking for someone with serious art knowledge---"passionate connoisseurship with a broad, informed appreciation of art or the facility to acquire it beyond an area of specialization. [emphasis added]....A doctorate is desirable but not required." The Getty seeks someone with "great passion for the visual arts."

While the search continues, the Getty Trust has just announced a new board chairman, Mark Siegel. He's a lawyer and founder and president of ReMY Investors and Consultants, as well as board chairman of Patterson-UTI Energy, an energy services company.

And in other Los Angeles museum governance news: LA MOCA has just announced the election of four new board members, joining eight other recent additions (also listed in the above-linked press release).

Architect Jean Nouvel at press lunch for planned National Museum of Qatar, held yesterday at Museum of Modern Art

Although I was preempted by the NY Time's Nicolai Ouroussoff from reporting on the plans for the National Museum of Qatar, I did elicit some new information from the architect, Jean Nouvel, about his project just next door to the Museum of Modern Art, where the Qatar press lunch was held.

Nouvel told me that he's still working on his redesign of the MoMA/Hines tower, necessitated by the city's requirement that he lop off 200 feet (making it, at 1,050 feet, Chrysler Building-height, down from the Empire State Building height of the original design). He reconfirmed what I've previously reported---that only the height will shrink, not the square footage:

We have to stay with the same volume. But the proportions will not be the same. It will be shorter. It will not be like a spire. It will be more like a skyscraper.

In other words, the City Council's action did nothing to ramp down the building's excessive density in this midblock, partly residential location. It only reined in the excessive height and (along with it) the architectural interest.

At the City Planning Commission's hearings on the project, the architect had proudly described the tapering at the top of the tower in his original design and stated that "it's very important to have this needle at the end and this immateriality at the end." At one point, Nouvel had even suggested to me that he might drop out of the project if the city insisted on the 200-foot height reduction.

Yesterday he told me that he didn't know how long his redesign would take, nor when the tower's construction would begin. He noted that the latter would depend, in part, upon financial conditions (also, presumably, upon resolving the new court challenge by neighborhood residents). When I asked if it would be months or years before groundbreaking took place, he replied, "Not months."

Seeing him seated with Nouvel at yesterday's lunch, I also asked David Penick, the managing partner of this project for the developer, Hines, about the current status of the 53rd Street glass-and-steel, mixed-use tower (which would contain space for MoMA's next expansion). Penick declined to comment.

And in other Nouvel news, Business Intelligence Middle East yesterday reported:

Abu Dhabi's Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC) said on Tuesday it has launched the main tender competition [a request for contractors' bids, I presume] for building a branch of the Louvre museum on its flagship development Saadiyat Island.

"The main contract works, the dome, mechanical, electrical, is tendered today," Felix Reinberg, director of projects delivery at TDIC's museum division, told reporters on the sidelines of a tour of the island.

Reinberg said the tendering process would close in June.

Nouvel is the architect for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which, he said, is now under construction. It is scheduled to open in September 2013.

Fabulous fare at press lunch for the National Museum of Qatar, served today at the Museum of Modern Art

What, no ketchup? French fries but no ketchup?!?

After having been miffed that the NY Times had already been served a full-course meal of publicity before the rest of us scribes had even unfolded our napkins at today's press lunch for the planned National Museum of Qatar, I promised to bring you CultureGrrl's first (and presumably last) foray into "ketchup journalism" (as distinguished from "catch-up journalism," in which I declined to partake).

Little did I know that the menu would actually include something compatible with the tomato-based condiment (which I never use). The Glorious Food-catered, perfectly seared salmon, the al dente string beans and crisp (ketchup-less) french fries made this one of the most satisfying press lunches (from a culinary standpoint) that I have ever attended. (Believe me, I've chewed quite a few.)

I wasn't treated to a sour grapes compote, as I had predicted. Still, I got my just desserts for whining about the privileged access granted to the Times: The heavenly-scented chocolate mousse was laced with nuts, to which I am violently allergic. This was pure torture, because I'm a choco-holic. I received raspberries instead (appropriate, right?).

Let me now digest this meal with a little bile: One reporter made a point of catching up with me outside afterwards, to tell me that he felt exactly as I did about our second-class news status. A very distinguished critic sent me an e-mail stating that he although he didn't want to be identified, he did want me to use this comment:

With limited resources and space, one significant news organization [trust me, VERY significant] lets the PR enablers know that it will often choose not to cover such events when favoritism is offered to one outlet.

I suppose the "PR enablers" may be able to guess which news organization this may be. Or maybe there are several.

I will lift my gaze from my plate to make one substantive comment about the proceedings: It's ironic that the Qataris, who say that they want to build their new museums to take control of the way in which their own culture and heritage are presented to the world, have delegated so much of that task to foreigners: Peggy Loar is director of the National Museum of Qatar (formerly director of the Smithsonian Institution's Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) and of the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami); Roger Mandle is executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority (formerly deputy director of the National Gallery in Washington and president of the Rhode Island School of Design); Paris-based Jean Nouvel is the architect.

I should also mention that although the event was held at the Museum of Modern Art, I was informed by several MoMA-ites that the museum has no connection with the Qatar museum project (notwithstanding the membership of MoMA's board president, Marie-Josée Kravis, on the board of the Qatar Museums Authority). Loar, Mandle, Nouvel and Kravis all addressed us at the press lunch. MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry, was not in evidence, but the Guggenheim Museum's director, Richard Armstrong (involved in his own Middle East project in Abu Dhabi), was among the many American museum officials and art-market luminaries (both dealers and auction-house officials) in attendance.

Invitation to cover old news

The press lunch that I'll be attending today will be at the Museum of Modern Art. That means that at least the food should be good.

But, really, how do Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani and Marie-Josée Kravis expect journalists like me to feel about our invitation to cover a story that was spoonfed to the NY Times' architecture critic in advance, so that he could scoop all of us in this morning's newspaper (and on the web before 8:45 last night, when I saw his admiring appraisal of Jean Nouvel's design for the planned National Museum of Qatar)?

The issuers of the above invitation are, respectively: the chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority; and a "member of the Qatar Museums Authority Board of Trustees" (better known as MoMA's president and the wife of American financier Henry Kravis).

Nicolai Ouroussoff repaid the favor that they and Nouvel uniquely bestowed on him with this glowing account:

Mr. Nouvel's design for the National Museum of Qatar, scheduled to be unveiled on Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York [go ahead, Nicolai, rub it in], may be that French architect's most overtly poetic act of cultural synthesis yet.

The Columbia Journalism Review, in this month's article critiquing NY Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin's coverage of fallen financial titans, gave me an apt descriptive epithet for the sympathetic coverage that results from a privileged journalist's insider status---"Access Journalism."

The rest of the scribe tribe, picking at whatever informational crumbs are left for us at today's lunch, will have to opt for Catch-Up Journalism. Or perhaps we'll focus on our plates and practice ketchup journalism.

I suppose I should be served a compote of sour grapes.

UPDATE: For a much more astute and productive use of one-on-one time with Nouvel, see today's report by Bloomberg's indispensable architecture critic, James Russell.

The Triumph of the Underdogs

The Gothamist blog network (which has linked to many a CultureGrrl story) has reportedly been bought by Cablevision-owned Rainbow Media for "between $5 million to $6 million."

Hey, Dolans! CultureGrrl can be bought---fast and cheap.

Or maybe there are some (very venturesome) venture capitalists out there, who want to help me with the business side of blogging, enabling me to actually hire some staff for advertising sales and expanded editorial content.

Wait a minute! I think the combination of tallying my paltry 2009 taxable blog-income and talking to Swedish public radio (scroll to bottom), all in the same day, has befuddled my brain.

Back to blog-slogger reality. All I can earnestly say is: "Tack igen!" to CultureGrrl Repeat Donor 118, who informed me that she "started learning Swedish a week ago" and "couldn't let today's Sweden-endorsed plea pass unheeded." I'm not joking, art-lings. This is a direct quote.

Wait another minute! If my alma mater, Cornell University, can make it to the NCAA's Sweet 16, no dream is impossible!

Selling art from one's current gallery inventory after becoming a museum director? That's fine and dandy with LA MOCA's trustees.

Mike Boehm today posted an update on his LA Times story, which followed up on CultureGrrl's Wednesday post. I had revealed that Jeffrey Deitch intends to continue selling works that are currently in his gallery's inventory after he assumes the museum's directorship in June. Planning to recategorize those works from "inventory" to "private collection" once he closes his gallery, he argues that such "private-collection" sales would not constitute dealing---a practice explicitly prohibited by professional guidelines.

Boehm reports (scroll to bottom) that David Johnson, the board's co-chair, issued this written statement in response to the Times' query:

The trustees understand that Jeffrey is a collector and that he may occasionally sell works from his private collection from time to time in compliance with his employment contract, and the museum's and the AAM [American Association of Museums] and AAMD [Association of Art Museum Directors] guidelines.

The trustees are either missing the point or playing dumb. These are not merely "works from his private collection." These are works from his current gallery inventory that he intends to transfer temporarily into the so-called "private collection," in anticipation of selling them to defray business-related expenses. Is this "compliance" or is it misrepresentation? Whatever it is, it doesn't pass the smell test.

It's also time for MOCA to stop using its very strained interpretation of AAM and AAMD professional standards as a figleaf to cover dubious actions. There is nothing in the guidelines of either organization that specifically countenances this type of transaction.

To my mind, the prohibition against "dealing" does or should preclude such sales. At the very least, MOCA and Deitch need touch base with the organizations it cites, seeking specific guidance from them before invoking their names to justify such questionable dealings.

William Kentridge's banner for the façade of the Metropolitan Opera House. The black silhouette of the renegade Nose is at the top, astride a horse.

I love those rare moments when New York's preeminent cultural institutions work together in scintillating synergy. Sometimes it occurs through sheer serendipity. But in the case of the William Kentridge retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and his production of Shostakovich's "The Nose" at the Metropolitan Opera, it was all gloriously intended. MoMA's show includes a whole section related to "The Nose," including samples of Kentridge's fanciful animations that appear in the opera.

Music critic David Patrick Stearns said this about the simultaneity of the opera and the museum exhibition in his Philadelphia Inquirer review on Wednesday:

As one who has loved the opera for decades, I find this convergence almost too good to be true.

The synergy is cemented with this tie-in:

Ticket holders to "The Nose" receive 50% off tickets to the career retrospective "William Kentridge: Five Themes" at the Museum of Modern Art. This large-scale exhibition surveys nearly three decades of work by the artist, including works related to his staging and design of "The Nose." Present your ticket to The Nose at MoMA through May 17, 2010 to receive 50% off admission.

Below is the only photo that I snapped at the Met, taken while I was settling into my seat for last Saturday's matinee performance. (The Met's publicity photos did not include this pre-performance shot.)

Jeffrey Deitch

Mike Boehm of the LA Times expertly moves the reportorial ball down the field today in his interview with Jeffrey Deitch regarding yesterday's revelations in CultureGrrl.

LA MOCA's incoming director told Boehm one aspect of Deitch's plans that I hadn't learned about during my brief conversation with him after Jeffrey had addresssed an audience at the Guggenheim Museum. (Deitch's stated plan to sell works from his gallery's inventory after becoming the museum's director, as I indicated yesterday, would appear to run smack into the Association of Art Museum Director's strict strictures [P. 20, second paragraph] against dealing.)

According to Boehm, Deitch "expects to fold them [the works from his gallery's inventory] into his personal collection" before he liquidates them. "He said he planned to go on selling some of those---under protocols previously worked out with MOCA's board that apply when he sells pieces from his personal art holdings," Boehm writes.

That sounds like a kind of inventory-laundering to me: Get it out of the commercial gallery into the personal collection. Then go ahead and monetize it.

Jeffrey also explained to Boehm why he believes that selling these works from his gallery's inventory (through his personal collection) doesn't constitute dealing. Deitch stated:

Art dealing is when you're doing it as a business.

Jeffrey Deitch in front of LA MOCA's Giacomettis

Just when New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch might have thought that the blow-up had subsided regarding his controversial appointment as the incoming director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, more negative news was reported yesterday by the LA Times. What's more, CultureGrrl is about to break even more startling news today.

Art critic Christopher Knight yesterday reported:

On March 25, the Museum of Contemporary Art will hold a fundraising event at Blum & Poe, an important art gallery in Culver City. The commercial entanglement makes one blanch, especially given the controversial appointment in January of New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch as MOCA's new director. Appearances matter....MOCA is stumbling into troublesome territory.

If that commercial entanglement "makes one blanch," this one will make one faint:

After my initial post criticizing the appointment of Deitch as director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, I promised you a follow-up, composed with thought and care and giving Jeffrey sufficient time to reconsider his decision not to speak to me. (After his anointment was officially consecrated at January's LA press conference, Deitch had precipitously canceled our appointment for a 20-minute phone interview that had been arranged by LA MOCA's press office.)

I have now managed to have a brief but telling chat with Jeffrey Deitch in New York. My conviction that he is wrong for the job has been reinforced by his new revelation to me about what he intends to do after becoming the director of the previously embattled, financially challenged museum:

Jeffrey Deitch explicitly stated to me that he intends to continue selling some of his gallery's inventory AFTER he assumes the directorship of LA MOCA on June 1.

I spoke with Deitch on Mar. 3, after he and Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions secretary at London's Royal Academy, shared the stage for the Guggenheim Museum's first annual Robert Rosenblum Lecture---a series created in the memory of the late art historian and Guggenheim curator of 20th-century art.

Seeing Deitch standing at the back of the Guggenheim's auditorium after he was warmly greeted by a succession of friends and well-wishers, I approached him and asked if we could set up a meeting to discuss his MOCA appointment. He declined, saying that he hadn't spoken to me when he was in Los Angeles because he didn't wish to say any more about himself than he had in all the previous interviews. (He did grant Ann Landi a two-hour audience for her friendly ARTnews profile in this month's issue.)

I inquired whether he'd allow me to ask him a couple of questions right there. He agreed.

I first asked whether his gallery would continue carrying on its activities in any way after he left. (He had previously told Mike Boehm of the LA Times that he might transfer some of the business to current gallery staffers.) He assured me that Deitch Projects would cease all operations as of May 31 and (in response to my follow-up question) he added that he would not profit in any way from his staffers' subsequent activities.

So far, so good.

Then I asked about statements he had made to the press that he might occasionally sell art objects while serving as LA MOCA's director. What I had in mind (although I didn't say so) was his plan, as described by Deitch in an interview with Southern California Public Radio, to possibly unload some pieces from his personal collection "to supplement a museum director's salary."

But instead of talking to me about his personal collection, he discussed his gallery's "enormous" unsold inventory. He couldn't possibly liquidate his entire stock in the next three months, he told me, so he expected occasionally to put some of those pieces up for auction.

"Isn't that 'dealing'?" I blurted out, thrown off-guard by this astonishing admission.

He then backpedaled: He would sell only lesser works at minor auctions "like Christie's Open." (Works in Christie's most recent First Open sale went for as much as $842,500.) The more important pieces would be transferred from his gallery's inventory to his private collection (from which he had previously stated that he might occasionally sell works).

He then reverted to Jeffrey-as-victim, complaining about being subjected to this importunate line of questioning when he was sacrificing "millions of dollars in opportunity costs" (i.e., money that he would otherwise have made), by giving up future gallery earnings for a nonprofit museum director's salary.

My own view (which I kept to myself) is this: If he feels so put-upon, he shouldn't give up his business. He should give up the directorship. If he's as excited about directing LA MOCA as he says he is, then he should stop bemoaning "lost opportunity costs" and find a way to live within his (presumably) not inconsiderable means.

But let's go back to conduct even more unbecoming a museum director---his plan to possibly auction off gallery inventory (whether important works or lesser ones) after he assumes his new post. My question to him about whether that constitutes "dealing" grew out of my knowledge of the following commandment, enunciated in the "Code of Ethics for Art Museum Directors" that is published in the Association of Art Museum Directors' Professional Practices in Art Museums (second paragraph, P. 20):

A director shall not deal in works of art.

I had already conducted an exasperatingly inconclusive interview with Bill Eiland, AAMD's professional issues chairman and director of the Georgia Museum of Art, on the question of how "dealing" is defined in AAMD's lexicon. Before I had learned that Deitch was contemplating selling gallery inventory while serving as LA MOCA's director, I had believed that Deitch's avowed plan to possibly liquidate some of his private collection for cash was problematic enough to raise serious ethical issues.

LA MOCA's board co-chair, David Johnson, had told the LA Times that any sales by Deitch would be done in conformance with AAMD guidelines, and that the museum would be given right of first refusal if Deitch sold anything. But that seemed only to dig the museum deeper into the conflict-of-interest hole: Should a director be hawking works to his own museum because he needs cash? If AAMD's guidelines contemplate that, I've yet to discover the relevant passage. And if selling gallery inventory doesn't constitute "dealing" in the eyes of AAMD, I don't know what does.

Eiland conceded to me that the association's code of ethics fails to define what specific activities and circumstances are encompassed by the thou-shalt-not-deal edict. The code does allow for directors' collecting works for their own enjoyment, with "extraordinary discretion," but says nothing about whether or under what circumstances directors can sell. "That's something we need to work on," Eiland agreed. He declined to make any comments directly addressing the Deitch/MOCA situation.

At the rate he's going, Jeffrey Deitch could become the first art museum director to incur a warning from AAMD before even assuming his post. At the very least, the museum elders should transmit some initiation wisdom to this new member of the tribe. He needs to know that the freewheeling, anything-goes ethos of the contemporary gallery world has no place in the nonprofit museum world, where public accountability, conflict-of-interest prohibitions and administrative transparency are not just niceties. They're imperatives.

In yesterday's report, Knight said MOCA was "stumbling into troublesome territory." I'd say that it's jumped into quicksand with both feet.

Screenshot from the Museum of Modern Art's live video feed of Marina Abramović's endurance performance in the atrium, "The Artist is Present" (Color-coordinated with her visitor, Abramović is on the right.)

As an arts writer who (almost) always obeys the rules, I confronted a reportorial quandary at the recently concluded Tino Sehgal performance pieces at the Guggenheim and the recently commenced Marina Abramović gig at the Museum of Modern Art.

I really wanted to bring back some photos for you, art-lings. But that would have been against the rules at both exhibitions. Nevertheless, lots of civilians all around me were openly wielding weapons of mass documentation, especially at MoMA, where, during most of the time that I was watching, the guards made no effort to discourage digital incursions.

Not wanting to suffer a retaliatory blow from the museums' press officers (and not wishing to violate the edicts of the artists), I held my Canon-fire. No such scruples restrained the NY Times, which published (along with Holland Cotter's review) an uncredited iPhone photo of Sehgal's "The Kiss," performed in the Guggenheim's rotunda. The Gugg guards did a good job of disarming photographers in the lobby, but they could hardly be expected to catch all the snipers taking shots from the ramps above.

Yesterday I discovered that MoMA itself is not only posting its own live video feed of Abramović's performance (accessible at the link atop this post, directly under the photo). On its own Twitter page, the museum has posted a link to a blurry (and, presumably, illicit) photo of Marina-and-visitor that first appeared on the Museum Nerd website.

Now I feel like a chump for being compliantly law-abiding.

Museum Nerd said (on Mar. 14) that the tablemate of Abramović who is pictured in the posted snapshot "was inspired to sit facing her for seven hours." I think if you're that dedicated, you really should mirror Marina by wearing this:

 
Royal blue Snuggy

Since I'm only a little younger than the artist, I think I'd also bring along a nice foam backrest like hers and maybe a cushion like hers to improve upon the hard wooden seat. I'm not sure whether those props are allowed, but I did see one young woman bring a sketchpad, draw a portrait of the artist while sitting opposite her, turn the finished product towards its subject (eliciting no response) and then take her leave.

As you probably know, Marina is ostensibly "present," but outwardly impassive. As she sits facing you, motionless and expressionless, you're supposed to feel the force-field of her trance-like intensity. After each visitor departs, she curls inward, closes her eyes, and then gradually uncurls her body and unfurls her lids to receive her next acolyte.

I'm a native New Yorker. I've had enough waiting in line to last a lifetime, and I'm not about to wait seven hours (or even one) for Marina (maybe for George Clooney). The time of parting is left completely up to each visitor, until the minute when the museum closes. (As far as I've been able to determine from conversations with the guards, the artist takes no bathroom breaks.) I fear that MoMA may have encouraged copycat squatters by outing the seven-hour sitter on Twitter.

For me, a professional outside observer, a lot of the fun of these performances is standing apart and watching the actions and reactions of the non-professional participants. Had I cocked my camera, I would have shown you not only the ingratiating sketch artist, but also:

---a charmingly smiley young lady, who used her entire time in the center of the atrium to engage the artist in a one-sided conversation, after which she bowed, Japanese-style, while rising to leave

---a young man who sat silently but contentedly, departing after a short stay with a sweet "Thank you!"

---a serious young man who looked like he was determined to beat Marina at her own game, sitting absolutely motionless and expressionless and reminding me of those staring games we used to play as kids, in which we'd compete to see who would break down by moving or giggling first.

After I stared in fascination for a long time at the last encounter's trance-dance, the first person to lose concentration was me: I left the atrium to revisit MoMA's William Kentridge show (where I ran into ARTnews editor/publisher Milton Esterow and Artworld Salon blogger András Szántó).

A couple of weeks before, at the Guggenheim (where no queuing was necessary), I overcame my born-and-bred New Yorker's reluctance to respond to strangers and warily ascended the ramp under the guidance and somewhat clueless questioning of Tino Seghal's emissaries. The experience was largely vexing but ultimately rewarding. I'll have more on that later, as well as a report on the images I would have captured for you photographically in that art-deprived rotunda. I'll have to paint them with words instead.

But first, I must prepare myself for my own endurance performance---several hours sitting across from my very good friend tomorrow in Memorial Sloan-Kettering's "chemo suite." I'll be in the visitor's chair---one of a succession of friends attending her 16-week exhibition of stoicism and courage.

I've learned from accompanying her to several doctors' visits that every variety of cancer has its own color-coded bracelet:

"At last, he's got to mention it!" I thought excitedly as I began reading Nicolai Ouroussoff's hot-blooded embrace in today's NY Times of architect Jean Nouvel's almost finished 100 Eleventh Avenue. As I perused the detailed appraisal of the building and its environs, I felt confident that the Knox Notch---the gap in Nouvel's building that permits barely a glimpse of a fragment from Knox Martin's 1970 "Venus" mural---would at last get its moment of mainstream-media acknowledgement, if not sympathetic homage.

Nouvel's luxury apartment building, "unveiled at an event this month," has a "rough-edged sex appeal" with a "glittering facade" that's "wrapped around the curved front of a black brick tower like a tight-fitting sequined dress," Nicolai adoringly informs us. But he kinkily prefers the undressed part in the rear, "evoking the backsides of prewar tenements." The building's "eroticism," he declares, "is mixed with a certain urban toughness."

"Rough-edged sex appeal"? "Urban toughness"? I'm having traumatic flashbacks to what this neighborhood used to be best known for---its S&M bars.

Our intrepid critic works his way around the entire exterior, mentioning for the first time that it is "abutting a somber brick women's prison" and even noting that some apartments overlook "a caged recreational area on the roof of the prison."

But he never deigns to glance at the now blocked artwork that Nouvel's crazy-quilt creation, dubbed a "vision machine" by the architect, also abuts:

Think of it as analogous to The Doors' two versions of "Light My Fire": There's the short version, suitable for top-40 radio play, and then there's the mind-blowing longer version.

If you were up at about 8:30 this morning and tuned in to WQXR, New York's public classical radio station, you heard the drive-time cut of my conversation with Kerry Nolan about the hot-button "Skin Fruit" show of Dakis Joannou's collection at the New Museum.

Now take a trip with me through the mesmerizing unexpurgated version---the station's online podcast (which I've also embedded at the end of this post)---where you will hear me expounding on "body parts doing things that I can't discuss without running afoul of WQXR broadcast standards." (I guess I can't say THAT on the radio either!)

This is one of the reasons why I advised, "Don't bring the children":


Kiki Smith, "Mother/Child," 1993

On the seven-minute podcast, I express in greater detail my concerns about the show (which, as I say in the broadcast, I do regard as worth seeing), including the museum's "very grudging and slow transparency" about its funding sources.

I speculate:

Either they tried to get other funding and failed, because people are reluctant to fund a private-collection show, or maybe they had something else in mind and decided they'd better not do that: They'd better just take it out of their own funds, to avoid any problems with the show.

I also discuss the symposium tomorrow, which I regard as the New Museum's misguided attempt to position the three-month loan of a small portion of a private collector/trustee's trove in the grand tradition of Gilded Age museum patronage by megacollectors.

But the kicker at the end of the broadcast version isn't heard on the podcast and came as a complete surprise to me when I listened this morning. Kerry thanked me for my comments and then added:

We asked the New Museum to comment on this story, but they declined our request.

Turning down the chance for air time to talk up their show? I guess they don't want to fan any flames. Or maybe they didn't want to dignify my critique with a reply.

Speaking of "Light My Fire," there's no more "time to wallow in the mire." I need to cozy up to Kentridge today, in preparation for my opera excursion tomorrow!

In the meantime, you can hear me lighting some fires here:

If all goes according to plan, you'll be able to hear me tomorrow morning in an "Arts File" segment on WQXR, New York's public classical music station. I'll be commenting on the New Museum's Skin Fruit exhibition and the controversy surrounding it. The news peg is this Saturday's symposium on the relationship between private collectors and museums.

Preparing for my three minutes of broadcast fame prompted me to ponder, once again, the complicated issues surrounding this show. One of the many things that I didn't manage to express in my allotted time is my belief that the attempt by the New Museum's officials to position their private-collector exhibition in the grand tradition of "public/private partnerships" (as they call it) is a distortion and misuse of that term as I have always understood it.

The "partners" in public/private partnerships have traditionally been governments, government arts agencies and public foundations, on the one hand, and individuals, corporations and private foundations, on the other. These funders are in partnership with each other, to benefit the museum, its exhibitions and its programs.

Now we're being asked to entertain the notion that private individuals and public institutions can themselves be "partners." That, to my mind, is a dangerous concept. It suggests that the institutions and their benefactors are jointly in charge of the museum enterprise, or some aspect of it. There's a big difference between "supporters" and "partners." That distinction must not be blurred.

I'm not saying that the New Museum disagrees with me on this or has violated that distinction. What I AM saying is that in attempting to position its current show within the tradition of "public/private partnership," it's imbuing "Skin Fruit" with more consequence than it deserves and using slippery semantics to elevate Dakis Joannou to the status of latter-day J.P. Morgan. The "skin" on this "fruit" is a treacherous banana peel.

The megabucks moguls who helped establish our nation's major museums during the Gilded Age were motivated by civic-mindedness---a mission to build communities and enrich the lives of local citizens through these new institutions (and perhaps expiate some guilt by so doing). They were building museum collections for the long haul, not for three-month exhibitions. NewMu/Joannou is a different animal.

You can hear me discussing the symposium and the exhibition at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow on 105.9 FM or by clicking the "Listen" button on the right side of WQXR's website. I hope that before Kerry Nolan and I begin our conversation, my favorite WQXR host, Jeff Spurgeon, will once again intone, "CultureGrrrrrl." Nobody rolls 'em like he does!

The podcast will be posted later on the station's website. I will, of course, give you the link, once it's up.

But art-lings, I will not be bringing you a report from the New Museum's Saturday matinee. Instead of "sympos-ing" I'll be "Nose-ing." Given the choice between seeing art (in this case, William Kentridge's set designs) and hearing people talk about it, you can guess which one wins:

Michael Sillerman, attorney for the planned MoMA/Hines tower (pictured behind him), speaking on its behalf at a NY City Planning Commission hearing

More bad news for MoMA: In a Feb. 24 petition filed in New York State Supreme Court, the West 54-55th Street Block Association, long-time opponents of the planned 1,050-foot-tall, Jean Nouvel-designed mixed-use tower in their neighborhood, has asked the court to stop the project. The building would include space for the next expansion of the Museum of Modern Art.

The petition cites alleged deficiencies in developer Hines' environmental impact statement, which, the opponents say, does not adequately assess the tower's impact on nearby buildings, including the landmark 490-foot-high CBS Building, designed by Eero Saarinen, as well as other historic structures.

The court filing also challenges the proponents' assertion, in the petition's words, "that this expansion will not result in one additional visitor to the Museum and will have no impact on pedestrian and vehicle congestions. This is unsupportable." In testimony during the approval process, MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry, unconvincingly argued that MoMA has already maxed out its attendance with its previous expansion.

The petition also alleges that development rights were illegally transferred to the project:

The transfer of unused development right [from St. Thomas Church] to a receiving location nearly 500 feet distant from the landmark was neither contemplated nor authorized by the Zoning Ordinance....The provisions allowing zoning lot mergers were never intended to permit, and the language of the Zoning Resolution does not allow, the combination of lots for the purpose of moving large amounts of bulk long distances, so that the underlying zoning is stood on its head---here represented by an FAR [floor-area ratio] of 33 [a very high density, even in New York City].

You can read the entire 34-page petition here. The respondents named in the petition are New York City, the City Planning Commission and the developer, Hines. (MoMA is not named as a respondent.)

My requests for comment---sent at 12:35 p.m. today to both MoMA's press office and Michael Sillerman, attorney for the MoMA/Hines project---have not been answered at this writing. I will update if I receive a reply.

If I were a betting woman, I'd wager that the project's proponents will eventually declare that the opponents' legal arguments lack merit. Whatever the legalities, I agree with the objectors' objectives. Why does MoMA have to get involved with a major commercial development project every time that it wants more gallery space?

UPDATE---This just in from MoMA's press office:

We are aware of the petition but are not going to comment at this time.

Jennifer Russell

You can tell the quality of a museum director in large measure by the quality of the appointments that he or she makes. Tom Campbell has just made a first-rate, seasoned choice in his appointment of the second of his two associate directors.

This just in from the Metropolitan Museum:

Jennifer Russell will return to the [Metropolitan] Museum as associate director for exhibitions. She is currently senior deputy director of exhibitions, collections, and programs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She had worked at the Metropolitan Museum as associate director for administration from 1993 to 1996, and will rejoin the museum in her new role effective Apr. 26.

Before working at the Met and MoMA, Jennifer held several top posts, including deputy director and acting director, at the Whitney Museum, where she organized several major exhibitions. The press release announcing her appointment and detailing her previous accomplishments is here.

Russell joins the Met's other new associate director (for collections and administration), Carrie Rebora Barratt, who, among her many distinctions, appears in the most-watched video on the CultureGrrl Channel. Michael Taylor's video discussing his Arshile Gorky show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a very close second to Carrie's star turn. (Clicks on videos directly from their CultureGrrl embeds don't count towards their YouTube count.) Jennifer has always been an under-the-radar (and off-camera) but highly important member of MoMA's managerial team.

While we're counting, welcome back to the returning classified ad in my middle column. I hope some readers with a message to convey will also take action to decorate my display-ad space in the righthand column which, at this writing, looks noticeably bare.

I don't know about you, but I think I'm going to pre-order these.

This Thursday, the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, will host the first-day-of-issue ceremony for the U.S. Postal Service's new commemorative stamps---Abstract Expressionists (above).

Here's the USPS description of action postage:

In celebration of the Abstract Expressionist artists of the 20th Century, [USPS] art director Ethel Kessler and noted art historian Jonathan Fineberg (Gutgsell Professor Art History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) selected 10 paintings to feature on this colorful pane of self-adhesive stamps. Kessler used elements from Barnett Newman's "Achilles" (1952) to frame the stamps.

The arrangement of the stamps suggests paintings hanging on a gallery wall [salon-style, I suppose]. For design purposes, the sizes of the stamp are not in relative proportion to the paintings. The pane also features selvage text and a quotation by Robert Motherwell. ["The function of the artist is to express reality as felt."] Each stamp includes the artist's name and verso text that identifies the painting and briefly tells something about the artist.

And here are the 10 large canvases that will be reduced to postage-stamp size. Four of them (the Gorky, Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell) are from the Albright-Knox's collection:

Jean Metzinger, "Tea Time," 1911

In the course of my posts on the Whitney Museum's current survey of new, I promised to take you to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's evocation of a past exhibition of the new---the 1912 Salon d'Automne in Paris. That installation is the centerpiece of the museum's current permanent-collection show, Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris (to Apr. 25).

But there is no Picasso to be found in the spacious, densely hung salon gallery that has been granted pride-of-place in this show. That's because (as you will hear curator Michael Taylor explain in the CultureGrrl Video below) Picasso's and Braque's dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, forbade them to show at the salons. He correctly believed that the critics would take great delight in mocking Cubism, and he wanted his artists to steer clear of that. (Should today's artists similarly eschew getting chewed up in Whitney Biennials?)

The faux salon is yet another demonstration of Taylor's interest in giving visitors a you-are-there feeling through his displays from earlier eras. The idiosyncratically stylized room that was at the heart of his recent Arshile Gorky exhibition was also meant to evoke the manner in which those paintings---the most celebrated of that artist's oeuvre---were originally shown.

Now, in Philly's "Picasso..." show, we have this richly-hued room, mixing some leading works (most notably, Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," which you will hear Taylor discuss) with lots of also-rans. "Salon Cubism" (typified by the wacky portrait at the top of this post, famous in its day as "the Mona Lisa of Cubism") was more colorful and visually accessible than the more abstruse, subtle, pioneering compositions of Picasso and Braque:



One of Taylor's favorite objects in this room is the circular pouf in the middle, titled "Sigmund," commissioned for this installation from Virgil Marti. Despite the up-and-down quality of the art, the curator suggested that he'd like his salon to remain as a permanent installation, even after the rest of the show comes down.

During our brief conversation after the press tour, I learned that he really meant it:

Rosenbaum: You weren't serious about that keeping that Salon, were you?

Taylor: I am! I think it's amazing.

Rosenbaum: Can you do that?

Taylor: I have to talk to the director.

All of this brings to mind a fascinating historical study of landmark art exhibitions published in 2008 by Bruce Altshuler, director of New York University's graduate program in museum studies: Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that Made Art History, Volume I: 1863-1959 (eventually to be followed by Volume II). This voluminous compendium of photos, exhibition descriptions and contemporary reviews (the last of special interest to me) from 24 definitive displays ranges from the 1863 "Salon des Refusés" in Paris to Dorothy Miller's 1959 "New American Painting" show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It includes a section on Paris' 1912 "Salon de la Section d'Or."

Several of the 1912 "Section d'Or" works are gathered in the current Philadelphia salon installation. Below is Michael Taylor describing the controversies over the 1912 salons. (Early in the clip, you'll see him performing an excellent imitation of a tail-swishing donkey.)

© Michael Crichton, photographed by Jonathan Exley

After I put CultureGrrl to bed for the weekend, I received the answers to questions that I had sent to Christie's regarding its upcoming sales of works from the estate of the late author Michael Crichton (discussed here: Christie's Beats Sotheby's in the Market-Share Game for 2009).

I had speculated in Friday's post about whether that consignment was part of what Christie's chief executive Ed Dolman was referring to when he recently told Bloomberg's Scott Reyburn that guarantees of prices to consignors would be "coming back" this year.

Sung-Hee Park, a Christie's spokesperson, said this to me about the Crichton consignment:

There are no guarantees on the [individual] works or the [entire] collection.

According to Park, the Crichton consignment consists of about 97 works---approximately 30 in the May evening contemporary sale; 48 grouped in their own section of the May day sale for less important contemporary works; 14 in the Apr. 26 prints sale; 5 in the Apr. 15 photographs sale.

The presale estimate for the entire collection is yet to be announced. In its Feb. 5 press release (no longer on the auction house's website) in which it announced the May sale of four works from the collection (prior to the more expansive press release about the Crichton consignment, dated Mar. 2), Christie's had put the estimates for those four highlights (by Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and Picasso) at about $30 million.

Bloomberg's Philip Boroff, who wrote here about Sotheby's recent financial filings and its conference call with stock analysts, has another story today about the discussion during the conference call about the restoration of chief executive Bill Ruprecht's salary to its level prior to a voluntary pay cut that he took last year.

Speaking of executive compensation, this blog's CEO extends her warm thanks to CultureGrrl Repeat Donor 117 from Beacon, NY, who sent his contribution specifically in appreciation of this post on the legal battle over Barnes Foundation. (The donor has no connection with the Barnes, nor with the opponents who have legally challenged the move.)

If any of my recent (or future) posts resonate with you, a good way to show it would be by clicking that underused yellow button in my middle column. The classified ad below the "Donate" button has now run its course and will vanish today. Another good way to show your support would be to advertise those gallery shows that you keep telling me about in your e-mails.

Julián Zugazagoitia, current director of El Museo del Barrio, New York

Repeat after me: "HOO-lian SZU-ga-sa-GOY-tee-ah."

Julián Zugazagoitia, 46, will succeed Marc Wilson (much easier to pronounce), the venerable veteran director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, on Sept. 1. That leaves a three-month interregnum: Marc announced June 1 as his retirement date.

Another Tom Krens Guggenheim protégé who made good, Julián is a consummate museum professional---lowkey and unassuming but intelligent, congenial, effective. And he speaks six languages. A native of Mexico City and current director of New York's El Museo del Barrio, Zugazagoitia oversaw that institution's recent major renovation and expansion, as well as its $44-million capital campaign,

The announcement on the Nelson-Atkins' website is here. Its more detailed press release is here.

El Museo del Barrio, an institution dedicated to Latino culture, now has big shoes to fill. This is yet another move in the great directorial tradition of "oversee a big capital project; leave the museum."

UPDATE: You can see a video of Zugazagoitia at his new institution on the Kansas City Star's website, here. He really needs to slow down for Midwesterners when he enunciates his name!

Sotheby's two-year stock chart (stock price on top; trading volume on bottom)

For those who like to keep score in the epic battle between the Big Two auction houses, the results are now in.

With publicly traded Sotheby's having issued its 2009 annual report on Monday, we can at last do an apples-to-apples comparison with privately held Christie's to determine market share for total sales (auction, post-auction and private sales) in 2009.

Christie's wins.

Last month, Christie's had misleadingly claimed a 56.4% auction market share over its arch-rival. As I reported here, that claim to supremacy was based on a an apples-to-oranges statistical comparison: Christie's compared its 2009 auction total including post-auction private sales with Sotheby's total that excluded such sales, thereby beefing up Christie's figure.

At the same time, Christie's had reported that its total sales (including both auction and private) amounted to $3.3 billion. On that figure, we can now go apples-to-apples: Sotheby's total for all sales, public and private, as reported in its annual report and its press release (buried on p. 2), was $2.8 billion. That means that Christie's scored a 54% market share.

Although proclaiming to stock analysts during a Mar. 1 conference call that Sotheby's goal was "not to be the biggest but to be the best," Bill Ruprecht, the auction house's chief executive, was himself not averse to playing the market-share game:

We now have, to date, market share in 2010 of over 60% versus our principle competitor, who has consistently defined itself by market-share leadership.

This vaunted two-month lead is owed in large measure to one monster lot---Giacometti's "L'Homme Qui Marche I," which sold in London on Feb. 3 for a staggering $104.32 million---the highest auction price ever achieved by any artwork. (Bloomberg later reported, based comments by two anonymous sources, that the buyer was Lily Safra, London-based widow of Lebanese banker Edmond Safra.)

Sales volume is not the same as profitability. As a private company, Christie's does not disclose its net income, but publicly traded Sotheby's is required to do so. Sotheby's emphasized that its $73.6 million net income for the last three months of 2009 made that the company's "second best fourth quarter ever."

The full year, however, was a loser: The net loss for 2009 was $6.53 million, compared to a net gain of $26.46 million in 2008. (The recession hit the art market, like the rest of the economy, in September 2008.)

In discussing the prospects going forward, Ruprecht tried to make the most of the anomalous Giacometti price, which was the highlight of an Impressionist/modern sale that achieved $235.7 million, the highest total ever for a London sale. The hope is that discretionary sellers, who have been waiting out the market slump, may now come out of the woodwork.

Ruprecht told the analysts:

These results provide us the clearest example we can give that worst of the recent market appears [to be] behind us and there is enormous demand for works of art of great quality.

In response to a question, he added that when works are "fresh to the market and presented so the audience can get excited about them, rather than overpricing or overreaching with those objects, the sky's the limit."

That analysis might itself be over-hyping and overreaching.

The key, as Ruprecht acknowledged, is getting stellar consignments: "When you get great things, there is demand for them, whether it's an ebullient time or not." But in his comments on future sales, Sotheby's chief was not yet able to publicize any information on property committed for the big May sales in New York of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art, saying only that negotiations were in progress.

Christie's, on the other hand, has recently announced a big consignment coup for its May evening contemporary sale---works from the collection of the late author Michael Crichton.

We don't know what deals Christie's may have cut to snag this consignment. Only four Crichton offerings were announced on Feb. 5, but last week, a presale exhibition of "50 highlights" from the collection was announced.

Was a guarantee offered to the seller? I have not yet heard back from Christie's on my query about this. (I will update here if I do.) But significantly, Ed Dolman, Christie's chief executive, recently told Bloomberg's Scott Reyburn:

You will see guarantees coming back. But it won't be like the height of the market in 2007. We'll be looking to share the risk much more. The contemporary market will recover.

By contrast, Ruprecht said this to the stock analysts:

We expect to continue to significantly limit the use of auction guarantees going forward.

Both houses had been burned by guarantees gone bad when the market went south. Sotheby's reported that it had suffered a net loss in 2008 of some $60.2 million "related to property offered or sold under auction guarantees." (Guarantees are prices that the auction house agrees to pay to consignors, whether or not the bidding reaches the level guaranteed.)

As of Dec. 31, according to its annual report, Sotheby's had one outstanding guarantee of $4.5 million, "fully hedged as a result of an irrevocable bid of $4.5 million from an unaffiliated counterparty."

LEFT PHOTO: Lisa Phillips, the New Museum's director, at Joannou press preview. (In background, a rear view of Andro Wekua, "Wait to Wait," 2006)
RIGHT PHOTO: Massimiliano Gioni, right, director of special exhibitions, discussing the show

Guest curator Jeff Koons and featured collector Dakis Joannou were, as expected, notably absent from Tuesday's press preview for the New Museum's controversial "Skin Fruit" exhibition (although they cheerfully showed up for conversation and photo opportunities at that evening's opening festivities).

But the New Museum's director, Lisa Phillips, and director of special exhibitions, Massimiliano Gioni, were present, accessible and responsive to pesky questions at the press preview for the exhibition of museum trustee Joannou's private holding.

So I finally got an opportunity to get a complete response to my repeated questions about the organization and funding of the show.

I heard all the right answers: Phillips assured me that the selection of the show and the curator were entirely initiated by the museum, not by the collector. She declared that absolutely no funds for the show or for anything related to it (specifically: shipping, insurance, catalogue) had come from Joannou, who is a trustee of the museum. I also directly asked if Dakis had recently upped his contribution to the endowment (shades of Guggenheim/Armani) and, again, the answer was, "No."

"Doing the right things for the right reasons is key," Phillips told me. "We make our decisions based on our mission and this show speaks to our mission." The collection, she noted, includes artists who are "unknown, to mid-career, to senior figures. That's what we do."

She stated that the museum had received firm assurances from the collector/trustee that the works on display would not be sold and added that this collector sells very rarely (although here's one highly publicized recent occasion where he did and here's another work, by Koons, that had once been in Joannou's collection and was sold at Sotheby's in 2007).

All well and good. But these answers should have been forthcoming in mid-October, the first of several times when I contacted the press office, in vain, for clarification about these arrangements. The fact that my repeated queries were ignored, as well as Phillips' noticeable hesitation before answering "no" to my question about whether Joannou had helped fund the exhibition's catalogue, made me wonder why the museum hadn't candidly said all the right things in the first place.

If there's one lesson that museums took away from the dust-up over the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" show of Charles Saatchi's collection, it was that complete, immediate, ungrudging transparency in such matters is the cornerstone of responsible museum stewardship.

Koons did a creditable job as curator, but giving over the entire museum to a neophyte is, to my mind, a mistake (notwithstanding his recently publicized experience in hanging "The Koons Collection"). I would have preferred this job to have gone to Gioni, who has helped organize previous shows from Joannou's collection, and whose deeply perceptive, deftly written catalogue essay is in sharp contrast to Koons' confusing musings in an interview with Phillips (also published in the catalogue).

At the press preview, Gioni described to me his friendship with Joannou this way:

He's so passionate about art and I am too, so we would speak all the time. Every week we'd talk about things we'd seen and we discussed works. I have installed his collection a couple of times in Athens---first sometimes with other people and sometimes alone. It's a friendship based on the fact that we both love art a little too much! He's been very helpful with things I've done.

Gioni wanted to emphasize that he is not currently paid by Joannou or the other collectors with whom he consults:

I work for free. Remind people that I work for free because I believe in the art and because he [Joannou] can be very generous in other ways. That's the great thing about Dakis. Many artists also feel that way. He's a really generous person, so that when you deal with him it's about play, it's not about work. I'm not on payroll with him. Many other friends and collectors I work with know that's the way I operate.

Phillips reiterated to me her museum's expressed intention to mount more shows drawn from individual private collections (a series called "The Imaginary Museum"), although none has yet been announced. I believe that the museum, in the future, should avoid privileging the holdings of yet another New Museum trustee: The perception of conflict of interest (i.e., flattering a trustee on whom the museum depends upon for support; potentially enhancing the market value of the trustee's collection) is too great.

I also believe that any artist-organized exhibitions, in the future, should be limited to dossier displays. Sweeping multi-artist projects that occupy the entire museum should be left to museum professionals---either the New Museum's own very capable curators or experienced guest curators.

In her catalogue preface, Phillips notes that the idea of "The Imaginary Museum" series grew out of discussions about whether the New Museum should form its own collection. (It owns neighboring property to house such a trove, if and when it begins acquiring works.) This succession of private-collection shows is seen as a way to test the idea of sharing or borrowing collections, rather than owning works.

In support of this, Lisa invoked the ghost of Marcia Tucker, the founder of the New Museum, who (according to Phillips, in a footnote to her preface) contemplated the possibility of developing "a collection of shared or borrowed works."

I'm not sure that it's appropriate to speculate, "What would Marcia do?" But I suspect that the organizer of the 1994 Bad Girls show would have smiled at seeing one of the works in the current show, by an artist who was her friend and who edited (and wrote the afterword for) Tucker's posthumously published biography, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World:

Portrait of the mega-collector: Robert Cuoghi, "Megas Dakis," 2007

"There's a darkness in our zeitgeist today," a theatrical producer is quoted saying on the front page of today's NY Times "Arts" section, in an article that surveys the dour landscape of today's new musicals.

That's as good a description as any for the mood of the New Museum's Skin Fruit (to June 6)---a disturbing display of works from Greek mega-collector Dakis Joannou's collection. There's a lots of skin (a veritable penis convention) but the fruit within, more often than not, is rotten and tainted. "Creepy"---Francesco Bonami's adjective for a portion of his current Whitney Biennial (which has Charles Ray and Tauba Auerbach in common with "Skin Fruit")---seemed an even more appropriate post-mortem for the New Museum's body count.

That's not to criticize the exhibition, just to describe it. Putting aside the controversy generated by "Skin Fruit" for the moment, this was an enterprise worth doing and worth viewing---as eye-boggling (often monumental) in scale and substance as the similarly controversial "Sensation" show of collector Charles Saatchi's holdings. But this year's hot-button private collection display was not, for me, nearly as riveting and exhilarating as the Brooklyn-British provocation.

As curator for this show, artist Jeff Koons has a predilection for works with a strong, look-at-me presence. Here's one of those attention-grabbers:


David Altmejd, "The Giant," 2006

It was fun to welcome back (for another star turn in a controversial private collection show) the sensation of "Sensation"---Chris Ofili, in fine dung-fertilized form. His two works from the 1990s provided a rare upbeat (and visually sumptuous) respite from the gloom:


Chris Ofili, "Rodin...The Thinker," 1997


Chris Ofili, "Inner Visions," 1998

Here's a detail from the above:



While the exhibition consisted of mostly familiar names, it sometimes presented them in less familiar aspects, as was the case with Ofili...


Chris Ofili, "Blue Damascus," 2004

...and Kara Walker (in sepia gouache instead of black cutouts):


Kara Walker, "John Brown," 1996

But do New York audiences really need to see more of the following, already amply exposed in recent outings at the Brooklyn Museum (foreground) and the Guggenheim (background)?


Takashi  Murakami, "Inochi," 2004, in front of Richard Prince's joke painting (with collaged personal checks), "I'm in a Limousine (Following a Hearse), 2005-6

I don't know if the themes of grotesquery, decay and morbidity are a reflection of the collection or the selection. Deftly orchestrating and installing the show, Koons (who has some 48 works among the Greek magnate's voluminous holdings) positioned his own signature (and signed) basketball-suspended-in-a-tank directly opposite the elevators on the first floor of the show (if you start from the bottom). It announces that you'll be viewing what lies beyond through a Koons-ian lens:


Jeff Koons, "One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank," 1985

But unlike most of the objects he has chosen, Koons' own pieces (not otherwise present in this show) are luscious to look at. He had told the assembled scribes at press preview for the 2008 installation of his sculptures on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum that those works were about "joy."

There's no joy in Joannou:


Detail from Maurizio Cattelan, "Now," 2004, a full-length sculpture of President Kennedy in an open casket, installed in a darkened room

But what about the media-fed controversy about relinquishing public museum space to a private collection (and, in this case, making matters even more problematic by ceding curatorial control to a friend of the collector)?

For now, I'll just say that if what the New Museum's director, Lisa Phillips, and its director of special exhibitions, Massimiliano Gioni, told me yesterday is true, I withdraw my most serious objections (although, as I will later explain, some uneasiness persists).

Private-collection shows, unless the works are promised to the museum (which these are not) are never entirely clear of ethical minefields. But I'm not an ultra-purist who argues that a group of important privately owned works should never be displayed in a public museum. I'm glad I got the opportunity to see Joannou's (and, previously, Saatchi's) acquisitions, and I believe that the public would be the poorer if there were only one way to experience a major collector's personal vision---in a museum of the owner's own.

COMING SOON: The New Museum's tentative transparency.

Andro Wekua, "Sneakers 1," 2008, Dakis Joannou Collection (at the New Museum)

The New Museum isn't merely pushing the envelope by mounting its Dakis Joannou exhibition, drawn from the private collection of its trustee and curated by the collector/trustee's friend, artist Jeff Koons (who told me that Joannou owns more of his works than any other collector).

It is now also trying to place this problematic exercise in the context of enlightened museum patronage---something we got a hint of when director Lisa Phillips described as a public/private partnership what looks more like an abdication curatorial responsibility to private interests

In connection with its Skin Fruit show, opening tomorrow (Wednesday), the New Museum has announced a two-part symposium, Mar. 13, "on the past, present, and future of the cooperation between private collectors and public institutions."

According to the press release:

The first session will focus on the importance of public/private partnerships to the rise and development of the American art museum. It will look at the history of patronage in America, the proliferation of institutions during America's first Gilded Age, and how this set the stage for cultural dynamics in this century.

The second session will focus on new models of public/private partnerships currently being implemented or considered. It will look at changing conditions in the cultural landscape and the need for museums to find innovative solutions to meet the challenges of a new century.

Is "innovative solutions" a euphemism for "expedient compromises"? As you can see from the list of panelists, no major American art museum director (other than Phillips) is lending his or her luster to this colloquy about "the challenges of a new century." I guess they may be too mired in old-fashioned ethical considerations.

When I asked yesterday if I could set up brief interviews with the principals at today's press preview for the show, I was informed by museum spokesperson Gabriel Einsohn that neither Koons nor Joannou would be in attendance. The preview, she said, will be "very open-house format. So no speaking program, just art." (And no pesky questions either, I suppose.)

There has been no other New York art museum exhibition press preview in my (very long) memory where the responsible curator failed to show up.

Wait a minute! This just hit my inbox from the Armory Show, New York City's premier modern/contemporary commercial art fair (which runs this Thursday to Sunday):

Shuttle buses sponsored by the New Museum [emphasis added] will...ferry visitors to and from the museum and the Armory Show, Friday through Sunday, from noon to 7 pm, allowing access to the fair and to "Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection," curated by Jeff Koons.

"Public/private" is apparently a gambit that keeps on giving. The Museum of Modern Art is no slouch at partnering with this commercial art fair either: It will not only benefit (as it has previously) from ticket proceeds for Wednesday's Armory preview; it will also (as it did last year) host an after-party for the preview on museum's own premises.

UPDATE: You can hear my WQXR (New York Public Radio) commentary on "Skin Fruit" here.

Montgomery County Courthouse, Norristown, PA

In Part I of my review of "The Art of the Steal," the new anti-move movie about the Barnes Foundation, I detailed some of the unfortunate gaffes and omissions that compromised the film's credibility.

But I left out the most important thing that Don Argott's film left out.

The documentary placed undue emphasis on a late and relatively minor legal byway in the saga---the failed attempt by Montgomery County and the Friends of the Barnes (a save-the-Merion Barnes advocacy group) to reopen the County Orphans' Court proceedings that had green-lighted the move. I rightly believed that this last-ditch effort, while laudable in intent, was doomed to fail.

But "The Art of the Steal" paid scant attention to the pivotal decision itself---the December 2004 ruling by Judge Stanley Ott of Montgomery County Orphans' Court that deemed the complicated, expensive task of moving the Barnes to Philadelphia to be the least drastic deviation from the trust indenture of Dr. Albert Barnes that could solve the foundation's serious financial problems. The institution's nearly empty coffers were endangering the very survival of the masterpiece-rich galleries that Dr. Barnes had devoted his life to creating and maintaining. In his trust indenture, he had stipulated that his collection always remain exactly where he had left it.

Any argument that the Barnes shouldn't move needs to explain how and why Judge Ott arrived at his fateful, wrongful decision. It's a task that Argott has unaccountably side-stepped.

In agreeing that the Barnes could move in order to survive, Judge Ott said (in his decision) that he:

...credited the opinions of the Foundation's witnesses that maintaining the status quo will neither generate excitement among potential benefactors nor attract the all-crucial 'alpha donors' to the cause. In the earlier hearings, it was made clear that [the] Pew, Lenfest and Annenberg [Foundations] (all three unquestionably alpha donors) have deemed the current situation to be unsalvageable; and Dr. [Bernard] Watson [the Barnes' chairman] has testified that the [Barnes] Foundation's Board has approached all other potential saviors and been rebuffed.

But the "alpha donors" from the Philadelphia area could undoubtedly have "salvaged" the "current situation" had they given to the Barnes in Merion even a fraction of what the were willing to give to the Philly Barnes. Their opinions on the salvageability of the Merion Barnes were colored by their patent desire to remove the Barnes to Philly. In crediting Watson's testimony that no other potential saviors could be found, Judge Ott was relying on a biased witness---someone clearly determined to cooperate with the high-powered forces who were pushing for the move.

But the most egregious miscarriage of justice in this case occurred because the only person in the courtroom charged with defending the interests of the public and of the deceased benefactor was in league with the proponents of the move. You don't have to take my word for this. Listen to Judge Ott, who wrote the following in his Jan. 2004 interim ruling on the Barnes case:

We find nothing...to commend the Office of Attorney General's actions in this regard. The Attorney General...had an absolute duty to probe, challenge and question every aspect of the monumental changes now under consideration....

The Attorney General was the only party with the authority to demand, via discovery or otherwise, information about other options. However, the Attorney General did not proceed on its authority and even indicated its full support for the petition before the hearings took place.

In court in December, the Attorney General's Office merely sat as second chair to counsel for the Foundation, cheering on its witnesses and undermining the [Barnes] students' attempts to establish their issues. The course of action chosen by the Office of the Attorney General prevented the court from seeing a balanced, objective presentation of the situation, and constituted an abdication of that office's responsibility.

I was in that courtroom during one of the days of the Barnes hearings and watched in amazement as Lawrence Barth, the senior deputy attorney general handling the case, fraternized with and kowtowed to the high-powered lawyers representing the the Barnes Foundation in its attempt to relocate. Notwithstanding his strong admonition of Barth for mishandling the case, Judge Ott went ahead and granted permission for the move.

I have always believed that the strongest argument for overturning Judge Ott's decision resided in this demonstrably deficient representation of the public's and the deceased's interests in those court proceedings. Nevertheless, Montgomery County did not seek to discredit the performance of the Attorney General's office when the county belatedly tried to reopen the case, because it did not feel it could properly attack another government entity.

What's more, in denying standing to the County and to the Friends of the Barnes when they requested reconsideration, Judge Ott ruled that only the Attorney General was empowered to "protect the general public, and there is no authority for a second sovereign [i.e., Montgomery County] to participate on behalf of a subset of the general public."

In other words, the only party with legal standing to represent the public in the Barnes proceedings was the same party whom Judge Ott had scathingly criticized for doing an inadequate job. The proponents of the Merion Barnes were mired in a courtroom Catch 22.

A documentary purporting to chronicle how the Merion Barnes was sabotaged ought to have focused significant attention on this miscarriage of justice.

Still, we do owe Argott and his crew a debt of gratitude for one important reportorial coup that exposed with shocking clarity another way in which public officials sabotaged the Merion Barnes: While most of the proponents of the move refused to talk to the documentary makers, they did get the former State Attorney General and the current Governor to provide direct testimony, on camera, on exactly how they had strong-armed Lincoln University, a historically black institution, into relinquishing the control of the Barnes board that had been bestowed upon the school by Dr. Barnes.

In a classic "did-they-really-say-that" moment, former Attorney General D. Michael Fisher and current Governor Edward Rendell brazenly admitted, on camera, to behavior that, if not impermissible, was surely unethical. Using rhetoric more appropriate to thugs than public officials, they discussed how they made Lincoln an offer it couldn't refuse.

Here's what former Attorney General Fisher told Argott's interviewer:

I don't know that we were directly saying [to Lincoln University], "We can take this away from you," because it would take a court to do that. But I had to explain to them that maybe the Attorney General's office would have to take some action involving them that might have to change the complexion [!?!] of the [Barnes] board. And whether I said that directly or I implied it, I think they finally got the message.

It was portrayed that I was the bad cop and the Governor was the good cop. The Governor had the money he was willing to add onto it, so that automatically made him good cop.

And here's what Governor Rendell said:

There was money proposed for Lincoln to offset some of the perceived losses that they might have. As I recall, it was about $40 million and I said, "You tell us what you want to spend the $40 million on." They weren't blackmailed into agreeing with this at all. I made it abundantly clear...that they were getting this money regardless.

That doen't jibe with how the "bad cop" described the deal. If this wasn't quite blackmail, it smacked of bribery.

It also doesn't completely jibe with the May 22, 2005 report by Patricia Horn of the Philadelphia Inquirer (reproduced here by the Friends of the Barnes), which indicates (on P. 7) that the amount proffered by the Governor may have been much higher---"$50 million for two new academic buildings at Lincoln, $30 million for 10 other Lincoln projects." Horn goes into great detail about the pressure put on Lincoln to cut a deal.

Lincoln University may not have been the ideal steward for the Barnes. The mismanagement that allowed the foundation's endowment to dwindle to next-to-nothing occurred on its watch. Still, it stood in the way of those who wanted to move the Barnes to Philadelphia and wanted to take control of its governance to make that happen. The movie makes it clear that Lincoln was bought off.

I'm not a lawyer and I don't know how, or in what court, you could bring this case. But it seems to me that the best last-minute, desperate gambit to stop the in-progress construction of the Philly Barnes would be to attack the validity of a court decision that was was tainted by what even the judge himself acknowledged was inadequate representation of the public's and the deceased's interests. A legal challenge should also attack the legitimacy of the new regime at the Barnes that (as we now know, thanks to direct evidence in Argott's movie) resulted from inappropriate actions by public officials.

Meanwhile, what does the new kid on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Timothy Rub, who recently became director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, think about the Barnes' plans to move into his neighborhood?

Here's the last part of my Q&A with Rub from last October, which I have waited until now to publish:

Rosenbaum: What do you think of the Barnes move?

Rub: I think it's a settled matter.

Rosenbaum: That's not what I was asking.

Rub: I think it will be good for Philadelphia and good for the Barnes.

Rosenbaum: And good for the Philadelphia Museum?

Rub: Yes, it's nice to have neighbors like the Barnes, to bring people to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It's the cultural core of the city.

What this "settled matter" is not "good for" is art lovers from around the world for whom visiting the Merion Barnes is a pilgrimage to a unique, tranquil refuge sheltering a world-class art trove, assembled by a passionate, informed collector in the mansion that he had personally conceived for his treasures. It's a special, unconventional place for encountering great art in serene surroundings, where Dr. Barnes had expected his life's work always to remain. And so it should.