April 2010 Archives

So what's going on with the ArtsJournal site and, by extension, CultureGrrl, which is still sending you scary messages instead of my smiling face if you try to access me on Firefox or Safari? (It's fine on Internet Explorer, minus the righthand column.)

All I can tell you is that the head of ArtsJournal, Doug McLennan, has posted (on a non-AJ site) a very detailed explanation of our technological woes, which may be interesting to some but definitely TMI to others. In a nutshell, he says that we, our computers and our site are clean and safe, but that Google has been taking its time in unblocking us. The problem did have to do with the righthand ad column, but there's no problem with my CultureGrrl classified ads in my middle column, so feel free to send some for next week! (I do already have one coming.)

I don't pretend to understand any of this week's tech trouble. I just want my devoted art-lings back! But to tell the truth, the bogging down of the blog has fit my plans perfectly, because I've been away on assignment and will not return until tomorrow evening. If my luck holds, CultureGrrl will resume functioning on my browser of choice, Firefox, when I'm ready to resume normal posting.

In the meantime, do check out Getty president Jim Wood's response to Christopher Knight's LA Times column that called for a restructuring of the Getty Trust, to which I recently awarded next year's Pulitzer Prize. (Who needs a jury?) In a memo to Getty staff, obtained by the LA Times, Wood characterized the competition among the Trust's programs as a "healthy tension...stimulating new thinking and creativity that would be less likely to occur if all the Getty's activities were consolidated under the Museum director." Somehow, I doubt that's how the museum's recently departed director would have described it.

And in other breaking news---I got a kick out of Holland Cotter's review of the Metropolitan Museum's Picasso show for today's NY Times, in which he essentially echoed my critique. I'm not at all suggesting that he copied me. It's just another case of "great minds think alike." (And one of those great minds---not mine, obviously---DID recently win the Pulitzer prize!)

It should be noted that notwithstanding Holland's any my suggestion that this was a relatively inexpensive show to do, one of the points emphasized by curator Gary Tinterow at the show's press preview was that Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art was actually less of a recession exhibition than one might think, because of the extensive technical analysis, remounting and reframing that was done to prepare the works for this permanent-collection extravaganza.

Some museums, including the one that I've been visiting this week, claim that big loan shows are actually revenue drivers, not drainers, because of all the attendance and earned income that they generate. I guess it all depends on how much you can limit the expense side.

There have been some kind of dastardly doings on the ArtsJournal website, which have caused AJ and all its blogs (including this one) to go down and to send you a very scary-looking message instead of my smiling photo.

AJ and CultureGrrl seem to be back up and running on Internet Explorer (although I didn't see my middle or righthand columns, when I last looked). But it's still not working on my browser-of-choice, Firefox. As it happened, the site crashed as I was about to take to the skies for an out-of-town assignment. I'm still away, so it's a convenient time for me to take a short break from posting.

I went from what may have been my blog's highest traffic day ever, last Monday (thanks to this link on the Romenesko media news site), to next to nothing on Tuesday and today, for obvious reasons.

As they say where I'm located at present: "Y'all come back soon!"

We all make mistakes. (Hey, I made one yesterday.)

But the NY Times salary survey article that I criticized in yesterday's post has a three-paragraph correction in today's paper, detailing five different flubs. Arts reporters need to be careful with those figures! [UPDATE: That link goes to the current day's corrections, but if you go to the original article, you'll see the three corrective paragraphs by scrolling to the bottom.]

Note to my art-lings: I'll be traveling on assignment for the next few days, which means my posting may be spotty. When I return, though, I hope you'll show that you missed me by decorating my bare ad space and activating my dormant "Donate" button!

Is nastiness a sign of desperation?

The Wall Street Journal today launched its scoop-filled Greater New York section, covering the metropolitan area (including culture). The NY Times has struck back with a snarky memo from Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., its publisher, and Janet Robinson, its CEO.

Here are some excerpts:

In the spirit of journalistic camaraderie, we welcome the Journal's new local section. The New York Times has been the paper of record in New York for nearly 160 years, and we know just how difficult it can be for start-ups to develop a following....

As our welcome gift to New York, we pass on a few helpful hints to our Journal colleagues: the Dodgers now play in Los Angeles, Soho is the acronym for South of Houston, Fashion Week has moved to Lincoln Center, Idlewild is now JFK and Cats is no longer playing on Broadway.

If you happen to know anyone who works for the Journal's new section and he or she wants any additional information about the greater New York region, tell them to check out NYTimes.com's always very helpful archive.

Gee, Arthur and Janet, you and I may be old enough to remember such metropolitan trivial-pursuit questions as the long-ago name of our international airport and the Dodgers' former stadium, Ebbets Field, but I daresay the savvy staffers recruited for the WSJ's New York initiative by a former NY Sun editor, John Seeley, are too focused on breaking stories before they're in the Times to take a backward look.

The rest of the memo is a paean to the Times' longtime "position of strength in the New York marketplace"---most notably the advertising marketplace (which, judging from the memo, is what most concerns the "paper of record").

Today's NYC arts coverage in the WSJ scoops the competition here (a piece on Christie's new art-storage business in Brooklyn, by veteran WSJ writer Kelly Crow) [NOTE: Correction below] and here (a piece on the new midtown location for Phillips auction house, by Crow and WSJ's new hire, Erica Orden). My ArtsJournal blogging colleague Terry Teachout will provide a theater review once a week, in addition to his usual Friday review. I wish they would have spared us the inane details of the Brooklyn Museum's and New Museum's fundraising galas, but I'm not the target audience for that type of frippery. Maybe the advertisers of luxury goods are.

So what's the Big Story on the Times' culture pages today? It's yet another "hefty salaries" survey, leaving the impression that even though executives of leading cultural institutions have taken a compensation hit, they're still getting too much. The piece, by NY Times veteran Robin Pogrebin and new hire Kate Taylor, is national in scope, but the photos of five cultural luminaries that illustrate the article are all from the Big Apple, with MoMA's Glenn Lowry once again chosen as poster boy for high pay in the visual arts.

You already know how I feel about that type of coverage:

Every time a journalist gets hold of information about the salaries of the top officials of major cultural institutions, the resulting story makes these public servants seem overpaid....But I feel that major cultural institutions do well to pay their top officials well. Otherwise the best people will be lost to private industry, leaving culture in the hands of mediocrities.

Today's Times piece does acknowledge those who share my point of view, noting that "several board chairmen said that if someone can be found" who can do a good job juggling the myriad responsibilities of directing a major cultural institution, "it pays to retain that person, especially in tough times." But the mug shots of the highly compensated are worth a thousand words in terms of the negative impression that they leave upon readers.

Meanwhile, the inaugural edition of Greater New York lives up to the first word in its title. That said, its writers and editors had a long lead time to make sure that they made a strong the first impression.

The test of time lies ahead.

UPDATE: Kelly Crow informs me that she shares the byline for the Phillips story, as well as for the Christie's story. Her name was inadvertently omitted from the hardcopy version but has been added online.

CORRECTION: This just in from Mike Hale, a NY Times television and film critic, formerly deputy editor of its "Weekend Arts" and the Friday "Arts and Entertainment" sections:

It's probably worth noting that the first of the two scoops you mention in the "scoop-filled" WSJ section was actually the subject of a lengthy story in the Times in, um, August.

That story, by Diane Cardwell, was in the ("um") "N.Y./Region" section, not on the arts pages, which may be why I missed it. Mea culpa.

Screenshot from trailer of film on Barnes Foundation, The Art of the Steal

[CORRECTION: My original link to Knight's piece mistakenly led to non Pulitzer-worthy CultureGrrl post instead (now fixed).]

In a highly important and perspicacious opinion piece, dated Apr. 25 but online now, the LA Times' art critic, Christopher Knight, ponders the Getty Museum's revolving-door directorship, again vacant, rethinks the J. Paul Getty Trust's problematic administrative structure and recommends rewriting the organizational chart.

Knight writes:

The museum is still by far the Getty Trust's largest program. But it needs maximum flexibility, not leadership conflict. So, what should happen now is obvious: Combine the Trust presidency and the museum directorship into a single job. That would solidify the museum as the primary endeavor---which is also what the late benefactor envisioned.

And wait a year to fill the newly combined post. Current Trust President James Wood retires in 2012.

The Trust's three other programs [Foundation, Research Institute, Conservation Institute] should be consolidated under the museum's direction. The existing program heads might not be thrilled with that, but any structural tensions would dissipate over time. Besides, deputies reporting to the museum director wouldn't be much different from program directors reporting to the Trust president now....

Full responsibility without full authority is a prescription for museum failure. And that's what has happened---repeatedly.

I hope that the Christopher Critique starts the ball rolling towards an overdue overhaul of the Getty Trust. And I hope that by providing the initial impetus, he gets named to receive next year's Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

He'd richly deserve it.

The western end of the site for the planned Downtown Whitney

Do the NY Times' art writers really want to kill the planned Downtown Whitney? If so, they're doing a really great job.

I was astonished last week when the Times' new arts reporter Kate Taylor (formerly of the NY Sun and very briefly with the Wall Street Journal), old hand Carol Vogel and veteran art critic Roberta Smith triple-teamed the project---first with a Taylor/Vogel joint report alleging dissension on its board about whether the expansion plan should go forward, followed up the next day with Smith's heated diatribe against both Marcel Breuer's design for the current uptown building and the choice of architect and location for the proposed downtown facility.

The Whitney desperately needs to succeed with its Renzo Piano-designed project, and I ardently hope that it does. If it fails in its fourth attempt, good luck trying to launch a fifth. They would need at least a decade and a new director to regain credibility with donors and architects. Two other architects previously created unrealized Whitney designs---Michael Graves and Rem Koolhaas. This is Piano's second try, after his expansion plan for the uptown site was scrapped.

The Whitney's "silent phase" of fundraising, which has dragged on way too long and too publicly, was finally ended not by the museum, as part of a well-orchestrated capital campaign, but in a leak to the NY Times, which buried the news on the p. 3 continuation of its front-page story of Apr. 12.

This unorthodox stealth announcement was one symptom of the Whitney's management malaise. Another is director Adam Weinberg's strong assertion to the Times that the expansion of the uptown building, for which the museum had worked long and fought hard under his leadership, was a bad idea from the start. Piano's plans for that expansion were dropped only after the Whitney had made vigorous efforts to defend its merits against opposition from hostile neighbors.

Nevertheless, Adam told the Times:

It became apparent that to try to expand uptown meant building vertically or ruin the integrity of the Breuer building. And vertical museums don't work because in order to show the kind of art being made today, we need large open spaces.

Doing the museum's work of announcing the end of the capital campaign's silent phase, Taylor and Vogel informed us:

Whitney officials [names, please?] say they have promises and signed pledges totaling $371 million [towards the $680-million goal] and expect to have $105 million more from the sale of adjacent brownstones and its annex building uptown.

The Whitney refused to confirm this or any other facts published in the Times story when I several times attempted to fact-check. (There was one foolishly false statement that I knew would require correction---now in italics at the bottom of the online version of the article.) The $371-million figure is now confirmed on the museum's website. But its spokesperson would not answer my questions about the current size of the endowment, nor about the amount of the operating budget in fiscal 2009. (The Times said the endowment is $190 million and the expenses for fiscal 2008, not 2009, totaled $36 million.)

Many museums, for transparency's sake, post their annual reports on their websites. Not the Whitney. (At the bottom of its FAQs page, the Whitney says you can get its annual report by clicking a link to the GuideStar website. However, no annual report is posted there. If you register with GuideStar, you can peruse the museum's IRS returns, which are public documents. (The most recent posting is for the 2007 tax year.) You have to subscribe to "GuideStar Premium" (I didn't) to see a Whitney balance sheet.

Perhaps the most potentially damaging unsourced assertion in the Times story is that the Whitney's most generous patron, Leonard Lauder, who in 2008 promised the museum $131 million (mostly for endowment), is against the Downtown Whitney:

A handful of longtime [board] members, including Mr. Lauder, the chairman emeritus...view the plan as a vanity project [!?!] the Whitney can ill afford....Although Mr. Lauder declined to be interviewed, people close to him [which people? how close?] have described his opposition.

Lauder's munificent gift came with very restrictive strings attached---that no matter what its expansion plans, the Whitney could not sell its Breuer building for an (undisclosed) extended period. Kate and Carol may well know that they're 100% correct about Lauder's negative views on the Downtown Whitney. But the reader needs better evidence than anonymous assertions of "people close to him."

At the very least, I hope the Timeswomen contacted Lauder's spokesperson, informing him of what they intended to publish and saying that they they wanted to make sure they weren't mischaracterizing his views. In my experience, such a good-faith attempt at fairness---"Please stop me if I'm about to say something wrong"---elicits a substantive response.

The day after her colleagues got the Downtown Whitney on the ropes, Roberta unleashed a flurry of aggressive jabs.

More on that---COMING SOON.

Christopher Knight, art critic for the LA Times, responds to Online Now: My WSJ Piece on the Future of Art Bibliography:

The Getty announced in April 2009 that its role as sole funder of the BHA would end in a year and began to search for help. Thomas Gaehtgens, the director of the Getty Research Institute, recently told the Los Angeles Times that attempts to find assistance to continue the project have been unsuccessful, in part because no one else has wants to commit the resources required by the traditional process of having editors summarize mountains of material.

Grasshopper, meet ant.

Commenters often append adjectives, as you did, in your article for the Wall Street Journal, like "superabundant" to statements of the Getty's $4.5-billion endowment. But together the endowments at just the Metropolitan Museum and MOMA in New York exceed $2 billion. I daresay both, with their own celebrated art libraries, are engaged in research in the history of art. "Superabundant" and its kin are typically trotted out just before asking (insisting?) that the Getty fork over the cash, while others sit on their hands.

RT: Get over it.

To you non-Twitterers, "RT" means "re-tweet."

An Italian court yesterday turned down an appeal by the Getty Museum of a lower court ruling that called for the so-called Getty Bronze be immediately relinquished to Italy. But a report [via] by ANSA, the Italian news agency, indicates that the Italians may be open to another of their object-swapping deals to help settle the matter.

That makes this a good time to take a look at the most recent instance of this---a recently excavated ancient Roman dining set consisting of 20 silver objects sent in January in exchange for the Metropolitan Museum's return of 16 pieces of Hellenistic silver (pursuant to its agreement with Italy that allowed those pieces to linger for a time in New York at the Met's reconfigured Greek and Roman galleries, which reopened in 2007).

Here's what the Met formerly had:

[NOTE: This post was written in a rush, earlier today. I've since fleshed it out a bit, with a few more images, links and one correction.]

I've seen a number of profound landmark Picasso shows in my lifetime. Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a recession exhibition opening next Tuesday, which exposes most of the Met's works by that artist, is not one of them.

Put together with undue haste (first conceived after Thomas Campbell had been named the Met's director-designate in September 2008), this show---large in size if not in ambition---is limited by limitations of the museum's holdings, which can't hold a candle to what can be seen in the permanent-collection galleries of a certain modern art museum situated a mile downtown.

As the Met acknowledges in a wall label, the Met came late to the Picasso-collecting game: Its first acquisition was the famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, bequeathed by the sitter in 1946:


"Gertrude Stein," 1905-6

In his catalogue essay, Met curator Gary Tinterow mentions "three extraordinary, transformative gifts" that finally brought the Picasso collection a measure of comprehensiveness---the 1995 Florene Schoenborn bequest, the Klaus and Dolly Perls gift of the late 1990s, and the 1998 Jacques and Natasha Gelman bequest. All of these collecting coups were the work of the museum's former head of 20th-century art, the late William Lieberman, who came to the Met from the Museum of Modern Art and knew where the collectors were and how to woo them. Also important was the 1982 bequest of Scofield Thayer. [I had previously, in error, attributed Thayer's benefaction to Lieberman's influence. Thayer's will had been drafted earlier.]

When Campbell greeted me at the press preview, I mentioned the near-dearth of great Analytical Cubist paintings. "You're right," he agreed. "We're working on it. See us in 15 years' time." (I should live so long!) Asked if it's still possible to acquire great Cubist works, and he assured me it was. (Let me guess: Leonard Lauder's collection?)

In the meantime, here's the Met's prime example from this pivotal moment in modern art, part of the Gelman Collection:


"Still Live with a Bottle of Rum," 1911

The strength of "Picasso" was its enormous display of linoleum cuts and the raunchy "374 Suite" of etchings---both of which provided a somewhat anticlimatic coda to the show. But for all that wall space, the representation of drop-dead paintings was disappointingly thin.

Happily, as Carol Vogel reported today in the NY Times, one of the stars of the show was restored in time for the press preview after its too-close encounter with a clumsy visitor:



Below is the repaired lower right corner. There is no visible sign that it recently suffered a six-inch vertical tear:



The only Big Idea in the show came out of the conservation lab: The technical analysis of some paintings revealed evidence of completely unrelated paintings beneath the surface, as well as Picasso's reworking of his compositions. A particularly interesting example is this painting:


"La Coiffure," 1906

As Tinterow said at Monday's press preview, "La Coiffure" has "at least three full, finished paintings underneath it, and the beginnings of three or four other pictures. The fascinating findings of the forensic work, performed by the Met's conservators with infrared relectography and X-rays, are shown in the catalogue and on video screens in a side room of the show.

Here's Gary:

Do we really need the Bibliography of the History of Art? Or is it a dinosaur?

Below are some some more thoughts on that question, taken from interview excerpts that didn't make it into my article about the Getty Research Institute's (GRI's) withdrawal of support for the BHA, which appears on the "Leisure & Arts" page of today's Wall Street Journal (p. D7).

The chief argument against BHA (touched upon in my article by Michael Conforti, director of the Clark Art Institute) is that the 38-year-old art research database has outlived its usefulness. Today's scholars are relying on different sources for information, whether it's other databases like JSTOR (arguably the biggest competitor), or everyone's first stop for research, Google. "This is not about loss," Conforti told me. "It's about change."

Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute, said he had been "the strongest defender of the BHA in the GRI. I said it's really still useful. I was positive to reform it and continue it." But he added that there are now many alternatives to the BHA.

Gaehtgens told me:

If somebody only used BHA as a reference, you would think he is not really well-informed....Every tool in a discipline like art history has to be evaluated some time. We have ARTstor, JSTOR, Art Index, arthistoricum.net, Google.

But Paul Jaskot, the president of the College Art Association and art history professor at DePaul University, argues that BHA is superior to the competition in several respects. He criticized Google-based research as "scattershot," driven by technological imperatives, "rather than by intellectual questions that are making connections with at least some of the scholarship in the field." Google Books, he said, "is a phenomenal resource, but it is less effective for the researcher than it is for the undergraduate student." Jaskot described JSTOR as a "standardized index."

By contrast, the deeply knowledgeable art historians who worked on BHA's editorial team, according to Jaskot, supplied "more information about the focus of the article and the subject index---the links to that---are really quite phenomenon." BHA was informed by staff members who were "thinking about scholarly questions," he approvingly observed.

Likewise, Michael Rinehart, who was founding co-editor of BHA, called JSTOR's contents "a very small list for art history, so far." As for the idea behind today's conference---the possible formation of a mega-index that complies the databases of international libraries and research institutes, Rinehart says he doesn't see existing databases or any proposed new network of existing art research databases as alternatives to BHA, because its "core purpose was to provide a qualitatively reliable bibliography of record for the discipline, including abstracts and detailed indexing. And it should be cumulative and continuous. I don't see anything taking the place of that that exists on the scene today."

It also should be noted that BHA is not the only bibliographical index from which the GRI withdrew its financial support. For 26 years, the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals had been a joint project between the Getty and Columbia University. Informed that the Getty was pulling out, Columbia last July reclaimed the Avery.

Following up on today's meeting on the future of art bibliography at the Metropolitan Museum, further discussions will be held at the annual conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS), opening Friday in Boston. Gaehtgens told me that he may convene another follow-up discussion later in Los Angeles.

Before I head out to the Met meeting, I should note that the Comments section for my Wall Street Journal article is as bare as the ad space in CultureGrrl's righthand column. Care to post a comment? Care to place and ad?

You can read me now: A Biblio-File Brouhaha---my piece that will appear on the "Leisure & Arts" page of tomorrow's (Tuesday's) Wall Street Journal.

But the early word on my analysis is not good: "Outside LA, art folks commonly (& mistakenly) assume the Getty can & should pick up the tab for everything. Get over it," tweets Christopher Knight, the LA Times' art critic.

I don't care what he says about me (okay, I really do), as long as he links to my article (which he does). I'm planning to attend the meeting on the future of art bibliography at the Metropolitan Museum tomorrow. But given the controversial nature of my article, I should probably show up in disguise:


Christopher Knight's image logo on his Twitter page (apologies to Dürer)

Have my CultureGrrl posts seemed a little light lately?

That's because I was struggling with a tight deadline for a recondite piece that only my Wall Street Journal editor could have loved. (That's why he and I click!)

Everyone whom I called for an interview: a) marveled that a mainstream-media publication was actually interested in a serious exploration of this esoteric topic; b) expressed gratitude for the interest.

Actually, there was also a "c" for "CultureGrrl": I was phoning up a number of people whom I've never previously contacted, and most of them volunteered that they're devoted readers of the blog. These are serious people who really ought to be spending their time reading more intellectually nourishing material. But who am I to argue?

The assignment grew out of my CultureGrrl posts on the Getty Research Institute's withdrawal of funds from the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA)---here, here and here. It's pegged to the meeting on the future of art bibliography that will take place at the Metropolitan Museum tomorrow.

If all goes according to plan, the piece will be on the "Leisure & Arts" page of tomorrow's WSJ. I will post the link after it goes online tonight.

NYU Professor Philippe de Montebello, left; Mariët Westermann, provost, NYU Abu Dhabi, at podium
Edited photo: Max Anderson's TwitPic page

NYU Abu Dhabi, which is inaugurating its academic course offerings this September, is emphasizing its connections to the museum world with a two-day conference, yesterday and today, on Art Museums Here and Now. Capitalizing on NYU Professor Philippe de Montebello's cachet, the conference has a line-up that includes such leading museum directors as: Neil MacGregor, British Museum; Mikhail Piotrovsky, State Hermitage Museum; Max Anderson, Indianapolis Museum; Emilie Gordenker, The Mauritshuis. Videos of the proceedings may later be available here.

Philippe moderated yesterday's kick-off discussion,"The Birth and Transformation of Museums." His own announced topic was: "The Metropolitan Museum of Art---A Case of Parthenogenesis." Does that have something to do with the birth of the Parthenon, we non-scientists wonder? I urgently consulted the "p" words on p. 614 of my dictionary: "reproduction by development of an unfertilized gamete that occurs esp. among lower plants and invertebrate animals."

Is he referring to the curators or trustees?

A Rafael Viñoly-designed NYU campus on Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island, future home of four new museums, is expected to open in 2014. But I couldn't figure out from NYU Abu Dhabi's website where this fall's classes will be housed.

Then again, my investigative reporting skills have, at this writing, turned to mush. I've been working too feverishly on a mainstream-media project, and I'm starting to feel like one of those "unfertilized gametes" ("a mature germ cell possessing a haploid [in my case, hapless] chromosome set and capable of initiating formation of a new indiviual by fusion with another gamete").

Rocco Landesman, the NEA's chairman, addressing U.S. mayors and New York's cultural and governmental officials yesterday

The Rocco Show, fresh from its Congressional gig and its Idaho run, arrived at New York's Five Angels Theater yesterday for the 46th national session of the Mayors' Institute on City Design (MICD). The National Endowment for the Arts' chairman addressed the mayors about his Our Town intiative and the just announced appointment of Jason Schupbach as director of the NEA's design program.

As Jacqueline Trescott reports in today's Washington Post, Rocco and the other arts luminaries (including the National Gallery's director, Earl Powell III) who appeared this week before a House Appropriation Subcommittee were well received by the inquiring Congressmen. Everyone, in Trescott's words, told the legisators "what they wanted to hear," which in Landesman's case included his agency's continued support for The Big Read.

But in less formal circumstances, speaking to me yesterday right before he addressed the MICD, Landesman demonstrated that despite his much vaunted efforts to be more careful about what he says, he remains refreshingly (if imprudently) outspoken.

"You attacked me again today!" was how he greeted me, referring to this post in which I criticized the urban-development purpose (rather than arts-centered emphasis) of Our Town. It appears to me that this planned new initiative has the same economic-engine focus as does a separate set of grants discussed at yesterdays meeting, which the NEA plans to dole out to up to 15 communities participating in the MICD. Jamie Bennett, the NEA's director of communications, later told me that the MICD grants are expected to total some $440,000, in addition to the $5 million for Our Town. [CORRECTED---See bottom of post.]

I dodged Rocco's preliminary punch by observing that I agreed with him on some things; disagreed on others.

"You disagree on the important ones!" he jabbed. Having me on the ropes, he then asked whether I favored The Big Read. I assured him I didn't, which pacified him a bit. "It's PR. It doesn't belong here [in the NEA]," he commented. (So much for the lip service he gave to this politically popular program in his Congressional testimony.)

I'm as self-sabotagingly blunt as Rocco is, so I shot back that I didn't think Our Town belonged there either. He said we should talk further. (Fine. Bring it on!)

Would you like to see, in rapid successsion, every painting from the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection now on display on the fourth and fifth floors? Now you can, in a two-minute tour posted to YouTube, which MoMA itself recognizes (on its Twitter page) as a complete record of its current installation. (This is a test: How many of the artists can you name?):

Rediscovered Michelangelo? "Saint John the Baptist Bearing Witness," oil and gold on wood, 29 3/4 x 82 1/2 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

Having recently mounted Velázquez Rediscovered, a show that convincingly proposed that a painting by that master had been hiding for years in plain sight in the permanent collection, will the Metropolitan Museum soon be presenting "Michelangelo Rediscovered"?

Milton Esterow's article for for the June issue of ARTnews (online now), Why It's a Michelangelo, details the reasons why Everett Fahy, the Met's recently retired chairman of European paintings, believes that the painting above, in the Met's collection since 1970 and catalogued as "Saint John the Baptist Bearing Witness," Workshop of Francesco Granacci, ca. 1510, was actually painted by Michelangelo in 1506.

The Met has been on a Michelangelo roll, having put on two other attribution exhibitions last year---Michelangelo's First Painting and The Young Archer (the latter still on display, on loan from the French government; the former now at the Kimbell Museum, which purchased it).

While the article by ARTnews' editor and publisher describes many of the stylistic and technical reasons why Fahy feels confident about his attribution upgrade, it doesn't name any of the experts whom Fahy said agreed with him, other than the late Edmund Pillsbury, former director of the Kimbell. Nor does it cite any written sources from Michelangelo's time that mention his working on such a painting. The case for Michelangelo's first painting, "The Torment of Saint Anthony," was supported by mentions of the young artist's having painted that subject by both of his 16th-century biographers, Vasari and Condivi.

As Michelangelo expert and Yale professor Creighton Gilbert once told me (back in 1996, when I was writing about the "discovery" of the "Young Archer"), Michelangelo was famous in his own lifetime. "The likelihood that one [of his works] would go unnoticed is very peculiar and would need to be explained," Gilbert said.

Perhaps these missing pages from Fahy's detective story will be found in his 65-page article, to be published by the Italian journal Nuovi Studi---"An Overlooked Michelangelo?" According to the brief description of the article in the Met's bibliography for "Saint John" (click "References" on the left), Fahy posits that the painting is part of a series that "was commissioned to decorate the bedchamber of Giovanni di Lorenzo Tornabuoni upon the occasion of his marriage to Caterina di Alamanno Salviati in January 1507."

Is the Met going to build an exhibition around Fahy's findings, which were bolstered by technical analysis performed by the museum's own conservation department? I have a query pending with the museum. I'll update here if I learn more.

UPDATE: The Met informs me that no dossier exhibition about the maybe-Michelangelo is planned for now. The Met's attribution for the work, in the online catalogue and on the label for the painting in the permanent collection galleries, remains, "Workshop of Francesco Granacci." The next step, according to Elyse Topalian, the Met's spokesperson, "will be discussion among scholars."

Rocco Landesman, NEA's chairman, speaking in Boise, Idaho
Photo: NEA staff

Want to make a charitable donation to the federal government? You can! Long a part of the National Endowment for the Arts' website, the Donate page solicits various forms of personal and corporate largesse to this federal agency---from one-shot benefactions to annual giving to post-mortem support:

You may want to include a bequest in your will or a deferred gift in your estate planning. And, if you like, you can specify how your gift will be used, in a particular discipline or a national initiative that is especially meaningful to you.

What, you thought your tax dollars constituted your contribution to the NEA? Well yes, but the President's proposed fiscal 2011 appropriation for the agency is only $161.315 million---the same amount he proposed for fiscal 2010, but less than the $167.5 million that Congress ultimately allocated for fiscal 2010.

That doesn't leave much room for creativity by the agency's Obama-appointed chairman, Rocco Landesman, who wants to launch a new (and to my mind, misconceived) "Our Town" initiative (apologies to Thornton Wilder), which would provide "$5 million in up to 35 communities to support planning and design projects, and arts engagement strategies."

Since he wants to do more with less funding, the NEA plans to eliminate the $10-million American Masterpieces program, which supports "performances, exhibitions, tours, and educational programs across different art forms that reach large and small communities in all 50 states." (Click the link to see specific programs it has funded.) Landesman says the American Masterpieces projects were "largely redundant" with what's funded under the individual program disciplines (visual arts, theater, music etc.).

He announced all this today in his first formal address to members of Congress (specifically, the House Appropriation Subcommitee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies). The NEA's 77-page Appropriations Request for 2011, about which he testified, is here.

The initiative that I like is Rocco's effort to promote coordination among federal agencies to meet arts-related needs. (This was supposed to be one of the mandates of Kalpen Modi, who recently decided to leave his position as the White Houses' associate director of public engagement to resume his former identity as actor Kal Penn, star of the "Harold and Kumar" movies.)

The part of Landesman's agenda that I don't like is telling artists and cultural institutions what they need government funds for, instead of the other way around. New initiatives and programs should grow out of the needs of the cultural community, not be imposed on them based on a bureaucratic notion of what towns and cities need in the way of cultural enhancement.

Here's the description of Our Town in Landesman's prepared Congressional testimony:

The funded projects might include the mapping of a cultural district along with its development potential; the integration of public art into civic spaces; a community waterfront festival; affordable housing for low-income artists; rehearsal spaces to serve as research and development space for our performing arts companies; outdoor exhibitions and performances to enliven civic spaces and engage citizens; and on and on.

The emphasis here appears to be more on urban development than on art. This may be a good way to appeal to politicians, but it's not the best way to serve culture. As I've previously stated, artists' housing is not an appropriate project for the under-financed NEA.

Unlike American Masterpieces, its counterpart in literature, The Big Read, "will continue as the agency's largest national initiative," Landesman told the Congressmen. But its proposed funding is $1.5 million, less than half the $3.72 million in grants for the current fiscal year. And at $5 million, Our Town would be much larger.

In previous conversation with me, Rocco had suggested he was eyeing The Big Read for possible elimination. It promotes community-based programs centering around your favorite high school classics. Congress effectively put an end to ending The Big Read, with specific language in the federal appropriations bill for the NEA that directed the agency to prepare a "detailed funding plan for the continuation of this popular and and successful program."

I'd like the NEA to go back to basics, finding out how best to support the creative and intellectual output of artists, arts organizations and cultural institutions, by taking its cues from them, the NEA's true constituents. The Department of Education would be a great source of funding for The Big Read. The Department of Housing and Urban Development should address the need for artists' housing. The NEA should stick closely to its core mandate---supporting the arts. The idea of the new chairman that I like best, which he has not yet dared to push for, is restoring grants to individual artists.

By the way, I'd hesitate, if I were you, about making a bequest to the NEA to support "a national initiative that is especially meaningful to you." Those initiatives, such as American Masterpieces, tend to come and go with each passing Administration.

Painting the Golden Theatre "Red"

In John Logan's play Red, which I saw a little over a week ago, Mark Rothko (played by Alfred Molina, who formerly channeled Diego Rivera) comes across as an intensely committed, brilliant artist, but one given to verbiage that's frequently tendentious and pretentious. This makes for a night of theater that is sometimes exhilarating but often a slog.

The problem is not Logan's ability to write good lines. The utterances of "Ken," Rothko's fictional studio assistant, are utterly convincing and emotionally involving, especially as delivered by Eddie Redmayne, whose performance in the play's inaugural production at London's Donmar Warehouse won him the Olivier award for best supporting actor (a fact unmentioned in the theater program for New York production, which does include an essay on Rothko by Simon Schama). Redmayne acts as if he's making up his lines as he goes along, grappling for words to describe his raw responses to the paintings, to the painter and to a horrific trauma from his own past.

Logan has asserted (scroll down, click "Transcript") that his play is "not reportage. It's not biography." But it sticks quite closely to Rothko's actual words and ideas, as detailed in James E.B. Breslin's 1993 biography of the artist, which I had thumbed through (reading the entire chapter on the "The Seagram Murals," the focus of the play) before taking my seat in the theater.

Most of Rothko's pronouncements about art and life may make good art history, but they're not the stuff of great dramatic art. He did, however, occasionally get off some pointed zingers. From Breslin we learn, for example, that Rothko really did utter the following sentiment, which elicits a chuckle from the audience:

I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.

"That room" is Philip Johnson's posh Four Seasons restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's then new Seagram building, where Rothko's commissioned murals, produced and pondered over the course of the play, were intended to hang.

A two-hander and one-setter (the artist's studio), this hermetic evening tells us about (rather than showing us) Rothko's most dramatic moments: his experience of a gallery show of the Pop artists who are destined to kick Rothko's generation upstairs; and, most notably, the fateful evening when Rothko dined (with his wife who, like his daughter, is ignored by the play) at the newly opened Four Seasons. He felt such intense revulsion at the snobby scene that he pulled out of the whole project in disgust.

The play's most entrancing passage, admired by most reviewers (even those with otherwise strong reservations), was the wordless, deftly choreographed coating of a canvas with red ground---Rothko slathering the top half; Ken dodging and weaving to get access to the lower half, getting himself splattered blood-red in the process.

In real life, there was no "Ken." But there was, indeed, an assistant who (like Ken) was also a painter---Dan Rice. According to Breslin's biography, the Rothko-Rice choreography included a crucial prop that the play prudently omitted---a ladder:

Rice...assisted Rothko in applying the ground color, a mixture of rabbit-skin glue and colored pigment. "Glue would just cool too fast on a big painting," said Rice, "so often he would work on a ladder and I would work underneath until I was dripping with the stuff," then they would trade places and Rothko would be covered with the glue.

For those who know Rothko's biographical basics, this play is full of portentous foreshadowing of tragedies to come. In characterizing Jackson Pollock's fatal car accident as a suicide, Rothko lets slip that "when" (not "if") he killed himself, there would be no such ambiguity about his intentions. He mentions his fears that the black (despair) in his paintings may eventually overtake the red (life force). This did, in fact, happen in his powerful late work. Every so often in the play, the artist, who later (along with his wife Mell) had big issues with alcohol, abruptly plies his assistant with drink.

Despite some tedious and ponderous passages, I suspect that this play will drive some theater buffs not well versed in the visual arts to seek out the real Rothko---his paintings.

That could well be the best thing that can be said about "Red."

For much more on the Seagram Murals (including images), go to the Tate Modern's website. Rothko donated nine of the murals to the Tate in 1969. Seven others, according to Breslin's book, are at the Kawamura Museum of Modern Art, Japan; 13 at the National Gallery, Washington; others in the collection of Rothko's children---Kate, who was alive when the murals were being painted; Christopher, born later.

SFMOMA trustee Bob Fisher, son of Doris and Donald Fisher, who are pictured on screen behind him

After Neal Benezra, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the second happiest person about the relocation of the 1,100-work Donald and Doris Fisher Collection to SFMOMA may be one of the Fishers' sons, Bob.

That's because the creation of a trust to lend the blue-chip contemporary collection to SFMOMA for at least 100 years relieves Bob, his brothers and, ultimately, their children of the heavy responsibility for maintaining the single-collector museum that was Donald Fisher's dream but his heirs' possible nightmare.

When I chatted with him at SFMOMA's New York press lunch yesterday, Bob made it clear to me that getting saddled with being the future caretaker of a museum that his father had unsuccessfully sought to establish for his collection on the national park land of San Francisco's Presidio had not been a prospect that either he or his brothers had relished.

The museum is planning to expand to the site it has just acquired, which is currently occupied by a firehouse (which will be moved). It has winnowed down to eight a list of about 25-30 architects, and expects to announce a shorter shortlist very soon, director Neal Benezra told me yesterday. Priorities, he said, will be "beautiful galleries" and a more welcoming aspect than the formidable façade of the current Mario Botta building.

Another generation of Fishers will have to decide whether the collection will remain at SFMOMA after the 100 years of the agreement. The works could not be sold for personal gain, Bob Fisher said, but could theoretically be liquidated to fund other purposes of the trust. Showing he was well aware of the possible pitfalls, he cited the Barnes Foundation as an example of the future problems that trusts can experience.

The problem of sustainability of single-collector museums after their founders' death is an issue that I discussed in my 2004 Wall Street Journal piece, Endangered Species. The administrative crises (discussed in that article) that roiled the Barnes Foundation (now relocating from Merion to Philadelphia), the now defunct Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, and the Menil Foundation in Houston (now on a more even keel) are all cautionary tales.

That's not to disparage single-collector museums. Where would we be without the Frick, the Morgan, the Getty---all of which became much more than mere mausoleums for their founders' troves? But the financial underpinning and the administrative foundation must be solid, and the planning sufficiently foresighted to give the institution a chance to thrive in the post-founder era.

Speaking of sustainability, my warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Donor 126 from Rome, GA.

Carol Vogel, in tomorrow's  NY Times "Inside Art" column (online tonight), finally got around to reporting about the very X-rated Picasso painting soon to be shown at the Metropolitan Museum (which owns it). Candace Jackson of the Wall Street Journal reported on it last January, followed by CultureGrrl. The Met's getting a lot of publicity mileage out of this very minor (if lurid) picture.

Gary Tinterow, the Met's curator in charge of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, told Carol that the work hadn't previously been shown "not because of its subject matter or because of questions of its authenticity, but because it's not very good." But 13 years ago, another Met curator (who requested anonymity) had told me (scroll down) that the painting was in storage because the 20th-century galleries were populated "by so many schoolchildren." Times change.

In any event, although the WSJ and NY Times are family newspapers, CultureGrrl is not for les enfants. So I'm the only one able to show you the painting that the more constrained scribes can only coyly allude to:



Carol got the last laugh, though: In the same column catching up with the Picasso-fellatio story, she scooped us all with the news that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "has just acquired a group of 25 works of American and European Conceptual art from the collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo," including "five early works by Bruce Nauman---a painting and four sculptures from the 1960s when the artist was living and working in the San Francisco area---as well as works by Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry and Hanne Darboven."

I was just at SFMOMA's press lunch in New York today, where we learned many things about the museum: its history, its collection, its planned expansion (for which it has just acquired the land) and its upcoming exhibitions, including a display of some 160 of the 1,100 works from the celebrated Fisher Collection, all of which SFMOMA will conserve and display for at least 100 years. The works are being loaned by a trust created by the Fisher family. Donald Fisher, founder of the Gap, died shortly after the deal was arranged.

But we New York art writers heard nothing from director Neal Benezra at today's lunch about the Panza acquisition that was reported online tonight by Vogel. Nor have I found any mention of it on either the museum's website or in the online version of the hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle. SFMOMA apparently adheres to the Times First policy.

So what else is new?

Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum

Megan Stack of the LA Times has reported that an audit of Russian museums, ordered by then President Vladimir Putin after the 2006 discovery of the theft (which was an inside job) of about 226 objects from the State Hermitage Museum, revealed that "at least 87,000 pieces have vanished. Hundreds of those belonged to the Hermitage."

Only 87,000 objects? That's a big improvement! (But "hundreds" from the Hermitage is worse than the 226 that had been deemed missing after the discovery of the theft that prompted the audit.)

As CultureGrrl reported back in July 2007:

Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev [now Putin's successor as Russia's President] announced yesterday the results of an inventory of Russian museum collections: More than 160,000 artifacts [emphasis added] are said to be missing. 

Perhaps many of those were misplaced and later located. According to the Times' Stack: "The Russian government is eager to downplay the findings. Many of the missing items were of minor interest, officials insist."

Here's the list of the initially reported group of 226 objects stolen from the Hermitage, some of which were later returned.

Not mentioned in the Times piece: Nikolai Zavadsky was tried and sentenced for stealing 77 of the Hermitage works in cahoots with his late wife, curator Larisa Zavadskaya, who had been in charge of the museum's Department of Russian Culture.

Are there signs of life in the frozen Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA)?

The Getty Research Institute, which on Apr. 1 withdrew financial support from this essential tool for scholars (but made the existing database, without further updates, available free online), has received a grant from the Kress Foundation to help organize an Apr. 20 meeting at the Metropolitan Museum to discuss the future of art bibliography. Art librarians, scholars, and information specialists from the U.S. and Europe are expected to attend.

Christopher Howard of CAA [College Art Association] News reports:

Recent events, including discussions of art-library closures, scant funding resources for ongoing support of art libraries and projects internationally, and the cessation of the Getty's support for the continuation of the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), provide the catalyst to review current practices, take stock of changes, and seriously consider developing more sustainable and collaborative ways of supporting the bibliography of art history in the future [emphasis added].

There will be presentations by two panels, followed by an open discussion of this art-historical emergency. Kathleen Salomon, the Getty Research Institute's head of library services, is among those spearheading this effort. The announcement of the meeting was distributed through the Princeton-based listserv of the Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians.

I know that the J. Paul Getty Trust has serious funding issues, but how can you call yourself a "research institute" and pull the rug out from under the premier resource for art-historical research?

But don't just listen to me. The Art History Newsletter writes:

It's hard to imagine what could be more important to the scholarly community than a healthy Bibliography of the History of Art.

Halsey Minor

Halsey Minor's lawyer never got back to me with an answer to my question as to whether the founder of CNET would appeal the $6.64-million court judgment against him in the U.S. District Court case of Sotheby's v. Minor.

Minor himself did, in an e-mail that hit my inbox at 9:14 tonight:

Lee, I will be appealing. This is not a financial issue. I will put up my money as required. It's an issue I feel very strongly about. It's an issue about disclosure and the integrity of the auction process.

Judge Barbara Jones clearly didn't agree. On to the Court of Appeals!

Edward Hicks, "The Peaceable Kingdom with the Leopard of Serenity," 1846-48
Photo: Sotheby's


Childe Hassam, "Paris, Winter Day" (aka "Carriage in Winter"), 1887
Photo: Sotheby's

[See UPDATE here.]

I love perusing art-related court decisions, because they sometimes impart a rare look into convoluted dealings that are otherwise kept secret.

CultureGrrl readers may remember the tangled tale of an Edward Hicks "Peaceable Kingdom" (top), owned by the financially beleaguered jeweler Ralph Esmerian, that Sotheby's first tried to sell privately and then offered at auction. Thanks to last week's decision in a lawsuit regarding that painting, we now have a courtside look at the inside story.

As reported [via] on the Law 360 website for business-law aficionados, Judge Barbara Jones of U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, last week ruled in favor of Sotheby's in the auction house's suit [08-cv-7694] seeking payment for three artworks for which CNET's founder, Halsey Minor, had been the successful bidder---the Hicks, a Hassam (above) and a less pricey work on paper by Warhol (below).

While Law 360's headline states that Minor owes Sotheby's $4.4 million under the judgment, Hilary Russ' article correctly states that interest, late charges and legal fees would be added to that. The court's Mar. 31 Amended Judgment puts the grand total at $6.64 million.

The judge rejected Minor's legal arguments, including his assertion that the auction house's collateral interest in the Hicks and Hassam was equivalent to an "ownership interest," which the auction house customarily discloses in the catalogue with a triangular symbol. According to the court decision, the Hicks was one of 300 items that Esmerian had pledged as collateral for a $11.57-million loan from Sotheby's; the Hassam was one of 50 works pledged as collateral for the auction house's $5.85-miillion loan to the Gilbert A. Harrison Trust. In both cases, the loans were not repaid, leading to those two works' being offered for sale by Sotheby's.

The court's 43-page Judgment provides a fascinating look at the arrangements between Sotheby's and the consignors for these two paintings---particularly the Hicks, which Esmerian had previously promised to the American Folk Art Museum, New York. (The painting was included in the museum's 2001 catalogue, "American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum.")

The Hicks was first offered privately (not at auction) through Sotheby's. Although Sotheby's had previously refused to disclose the minimum bid, Judge Jones' decision now reveals it---a whopping $10 million, arrived at in an agreement negotiated among Sotheby's, Esmerian and the American Folk Art Museum. There were no takers at that price, whereupon, pursuant to the negotiated agreement, the painting was offered for auction on May 22, 2008, with a presale estimate of $6-8 million. Minor's winning bid was $8.6 million (for a total of $9.67 million, with the buyer's premium).

The Hassam was estimated to bring a hammer price of $2.5-3.5 million and was knocked down to Minor at $3.5 million ($3.96 million with premium). That painting was called "Paris, Winter Day" in the catalogue entry, but Dara Mitchell, Sotheby's director of American paintings, drawings and sculpture, confirmed to me that this was the same painting identified in the lawsuit as "Carriage in Winter." (The higher total price reported on the online catalogue entry is in error; the list of postsale highlights reports the same $3.96-million price that appears in the court decision.)

The Warhol (over which there was no court dispute about Minor's obligation to pay) went for $301,000, including premium (estimate: $100,000-150,000):


Andy Warhol, "Diamond Dust Shoes," 1980
Photo: Sotheby's

After Minor reneged, Sotheby's sold the Hicks privately for $7 million in February of this year, the court decision reveals. It auctioned the Hassam on May 21, 2009 for $2.32 million, and the Warhol on May 15, 2009 for $218,500---all substantially less than Minor's bids-plus-premium of $9.67 million, $3.96 million and $301,000, respectively. These lower prices may reflect the decline of the art market between May 2008 and the times of the later sales, as well as the fact that these works may have been "burned" by their dicey market history.

The $6.64 million that the court awarded to Sotheby's equals the difference between what Minor should have paid and the lesser amounts that the works ultimately sold for, plus late charges and interest. Additional interest will accrue until the date of actual payment.

Minor can appeal the decision. I have a query pending with his lawyers, asking whether he intends to do so. (I'll update here if and when I receive an answer.)

The above-linked Law 360 post also mentions another lawsuit (still pending) between Minor and Christie's; Lindsay Pollock of Bloomberg reports on a yet another Minor lawsuit between him and another creditor---ML Private Finance, an affiliate of Merrill Lynch. According to Pollock, that case resulted in a "court judgment [against Minor] for $21.6 million."

Speaking of payments owed, my warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Donor 125 from Forest Hills, NY, who said he hit my "Donate" button in appreciation of yesterday's Cleveland post. If you found today's report (or some other one) interesting, please tell me with a click.

For you late night art-lings, below is some evening entertainment. In case your art history's a little rusty, there's an illustrated guide to many of the parodied paintings here. (Scroll down to the comments at that link, for a more complete list.)

This has apparently been around since late February, so you may have already viewed it. In that case, watch it again!

Fisk University President Hazel O'Leary, center

Today seems to be CultureGrrl's follow-up day.

This just in: Still tirelessly seeking court approval for its $30-million collection-sharing deal with Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR, Fisk University has now filed a motion in Davidson County Chancery Court seeking a trial to determine whether it can legally deviate from artist Georgia O'Keeffe's written instructions that Fisk "will not at any time sell or exchange any of the objects" from the Stieglitz Collection. The collection was donated to the university by O'Keeffe.

In late February, the Tennessee Supreme Court left standing a Court of Appeals decision that removed the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum from the case. The Santa Fe museum had claimed that it should receive the collection, as successor-in-interest to artist Georgia O'Keeffe, if the university could no longer adequately care for the collection.

To be determined by the Chancery Court is whether complying with O'Keeffe's conditions for her gift has (due to Fisk's serious financial difficulties) become impracticable or impossible.

Robert Cooper, Tennessee's Attorney General (who has been actively involved in the case), had this to say about that:

Given Fisk's recent reaccreditation [my link, not his] by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), the university can no longer argue that the sale of the collection is necessary to its financial survival.  As a result, it seems increasingly unlikely that Fisk will be able to justify to the court proceeding with its proposed sale of [a half-share in] the world-renowned art collection."

What's more, on Feb. 28, Jennifer Brooks and Kevin Heim of the Tennessean reported [paywall for full article]:

An odd thing happened to Fisk during the half-decade it spent in court, fighting for the right to sell a share in the art collection left to the university by painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Fisk's finances may have started to improve on their own....Fundraising has improved and the university's assets have doubled in recent years. In that case, some on campus and in the community are wondering whether Fisk still needs to sell its art.

If the deal with Fisk doesn't happen, at least Crystal Bridges is in discussion with the High Museum, Atlanta, for another collection-sharing arrangement.

While we're talking about follow-ups, Judith Dobrzynski's Real Clear Arts blog today covers the continuing saga of Brandeis University's beleaguered Rose Art Museum, which, in a sense, echoes Fisk's story---finances improved; still thinking about selling art.

Deborah Gribbon, Cleveland Museum of Art's interim director

It's about time we followed up on the Cleveland Museum of Art's Bricks-and-Mortar Morass:

Although it sought and in early October received court permission to do so, the CMA has not yet tapped any money intended for art purchases to help bankroll its major expansion project. The museum obtained the legal go-ahead to divert up to $75 million of the income from four acquisition funds to defray building costs for its partially completed Rafael Viñoly-designed expansion. Such use would be contrary to the stated wishes of the funds' deceased donors. But the judge bought the argument that times have changed and that the donors would have looked favorably upon this expansion.

In response to my recent queries, Christa Skiles, Cleveland's assistant director of communications, confirmed that the acquisition funds have not yet been applied to the project, adding:

We continue to move forward with the renovation and expansion of the Cleveland Museum of Art,with the option to use income generated from four art funds should we feel it necessary to do so for financing the project. There is no specific timetable established for making that decision....As we look ahead to the financing of this final phase of construction, we will evaluate all of our options and, at that point, consider what role income from the art funds may play within the mix.

Skiles also told me that the scheduled completion date for the entire project is 2013 (previously, 2012). New galleries for prints and drawings, as well as several reimagined antiquities galleries, will open this summer in the museum's original 1916 building, which has been renovated. She added that the museum "has raised approximately $217 million to date" towards its "campaign goal of $350 million, all of which is for construction and renovation."

Wait a minute! They've raised about $217 million? As of September, the museum had raised "more than $213 million." This means that less than $4 million has been raised over the last seven months. I guess it still is, as Cleveland's former director, Timothy Rub (now the Philadelphia Museum's director) previously told me, a "very difficult time economically" to raise capital contributions for this project.

As reported in December by Steven Litt of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the museum's president, Al Rankin, has stated that "it's likely the museum will either sell bonds or take other steps to raise cash in anticipation of future donations." Litt reported that the museum's board voted unanimously on Dec. 14 to authorize "only the first half of the remaining work, called 'Step C,' which includes completing exterior facades and the raw interior structure of a new West Wing and central atrium. Trustees will vote in June on whether to proceed with the final stages, including completion of interior floors, walls and ceilings, and the installation of art in galleries devoted to textiles, pre-Columbian and Asian art."

Asian art is one of the supreme strengths of Cleveland's collection. It seems to me those galleries (now closed) should have been among the first priorities, not the last. Failing that, there should have been some way to put a substantial portion of the Asian collection on temporary display in the completed parts of the project. Long-term storage of those masterpieces was not a good option.

Rankin expressed cautious optimism that the entire project would reach completion, but told Litt:

We see no reason to commit ourselves to each phase any sooner than is required to carry them through in a logical manner.

The museum's current interim director, Deborah Gribbon, was not on board at the time when the decision was made to seek court permission to divert the income from acquisition funds to the capital project. Even though last year, in response to my query, Gribbon had expressed the view that such reapplication was "a reasonable financing strategy, given the extraordinary circumstances we currently face," it's good to see that she and the board are in no rush to tap that resource.

Meanwhile, the search for a permanent director continues. Like the Getty, Cleveland has posted the job description, but (unlike the Getty) not the application itself. For that (as Cleveland's website informs us), you must contact Sarah James or Becky Klein at the Phillips Oppenheim search firm.

And my search for blog benefactors also continues: My warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Donors 123 from Snoqualmie, WA, and 124 from Cincinnati.

John Leighton, director general, National Galleries of Scotland

The High Museum's exhibition program leans heavily towards crowd-pleasers---currently The Allure of the Automobile, to be followed in August by Dalí: The Late Work. Largely as a result of the revenue generated by such blockbusters, the Atlanta museum's earned income accounts for a bigger percentage of its operating support than at many other art museums, according to Philip Verre, the High's chief operating officer, who was seated next to me at the Atlanta museum's New York press lunch yesterday. The scribe tribe was invited there to whet our appetites for a working vacation down south.

While we two broke matzo together, Philip revealed to me that his museum is currently in talks about collection-sharing arrangements with Alice Walton's in-construction Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville. AR---a megabucks connection that can only help to enhance the High's financial underpinnings. Being less dependent on endowment income, thanks to its earned income stream, the High was less vulnerable than most during the recent economic downturn, Verre averred.

Strangely, the upcoming exhibition that interested me the most is not expected to be a big crowd magnet in Atlanta, Verre said. Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting, a loan exhibition from the National Galleries of Scotland, includes 12 paintings and 13 drawings, the highlights of which are Titian's monumental dramas, "Diana and Actaeon" and "Diana and Callisto." Was Philip implying that Atlantans would prefer to see rare luxury cars and Dalis from a period dismissed by many as rich in kitsch? I guess he knows his audience.

The Italian Renaissance show (which also includes works by Lotto, Tintoretto, Bassano and Veronese) was co-organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where it will later appear. This marks the start of a four-year collaboration on exhibitions by the Atlanta and Edinburgh museums. Similar exhibition series were previously arranged by the High with the Louvre and with the Museum of Modern Art. In this case (unlike the Louvre's) the shows do not involve payment of big fees to raise major support for the lending institution, Verre told me.

John Leighton, director general of the National Galleries of Scotland, narrated a slideshow preview of the exhibition and updated us on the current status of the museum's efforts to purchase jointly with London's National Gallery the two very expensive Titian "Diana" masterworks that were loaned to his museum by the Duke of Sutherland, beginning in 1945.

The strikingly transparent acquisition process is described in a Q&A on the Edinburgh museum's website, It details the amounts contributed by all the sources that funded the £50-million "Actaeon" purchase in 2008. Leighton's museum, along with the National Gallery, London, is now working on what he called "a strategy" to come up with another £50 million to jointly acquire the "Callisto" painting by the end of 2012. I cannot imagine any American museums doing anything comparable in these financially challenged times.

No doubt, the Britons are hoping to attract some foreign donors during the paintings' three-museum, ten-month American tour. According to the NGS's news announcement (Feb. 26), the museum, through its loans, "wants to attract attention to the world-class quality of its holdings and to broaden its international base of support [emphasis added]."

In the CultureGrrl Video below, Leighton discusses the two Dianas, which, he said, clearly demonstrate that the goddess has "been skipping those anger-management classes":

Breaking news: The Getty has just sent me its press release detailing what it yesterday called its "very good news" that it had "worked hard to make...possible," regarding the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), a premier art-history resource.

The "solution" to the problem posed by its withdrawal of financial support for maintaining and updating the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) is to post the existing research database on its website, to be made available at no charge to the public. You can find it here.

But the main problem for scholars has not been solved. The press release informs us:

The Getty has been searching for partners to continue the production and distribution of BHA. This process has been complicated, and with no suitable arrangement immediately available, the Getty decided to act on its commitment to the scholarly community by providing access to BHA directly from its own Web site.

So this is, in a sense, "the end of art history," as I called it: The bucks and updates stop here.

Max Anderson (above), director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), is the rare art museum director who is willing to speak out forcefully against misguided practices of professional colleagues. His outspokenness in defense of core principles endears him to me and other journalists, but perhaps not to some fellow museum directors.

His latest salvo appeared Monday on the Art 21 Blog---strong, forcefully expressed views on museum deaccessioning, which he believes is too often practiced "not in service of preserving and protecting collections, but in service of monetizing them." He starts off describing what he says may have been (in 1775) "the first documented 'deaccessioning'"---remains from a dodo bird, now extinct, then held by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. (Fortunately for science, some of the remains were retained.)

He goes on to outline some modern-day "dodo deaccessioning" (my term, not his), taking issue with what he calls the "inadvisable motives" behind them

Specifically, he decries a practice commonly employed and openly embraced by other institutions---"selling one or more fine objects to acquire a work that is considered to be a yet finer work by another artist--or trading up [his emphasis], not from a lesser work, but from one avowedly fine work or works to acquire another." Such decisions, he says, are based "on the conviction that today's taste and preference trumps yesterday's."

On this, Anderson has a view that I share:

It is IMA's opinion that "trading up" runs the very real risk of being proven wrong by our successors and, if carried to an extreme, would lead to an indefensible use of the permanent collection as an impermanent resource to satisfy the shifting tastes of curators and directors from one generation to the next.

He then alludes to his institution's online deaccession database, which CultureGrrl heaped praise on a year ago, when it was newly launched. At that time, he had offered to share the technology behind that database with any other interested institutions. It appears, from his "Art 21" comments, that no one has taken him up on this:

To date, I know of no other art museum planning to present a complete, illustrated, and searchable database of the works on their way out the door. I would hope that as a field we could agree that this is a collective obligation before lawmakers [my link, not his] decide that it is and arrive at approaches that are at odds with our non-profit, educational mandate.

And in other Max news, I look forward to the planned posting on the IMA's ArtBabble video website, a few weeks hence, of his public conversation today at the IMA with Rusty Powell, director of the National Gallery, Washington. They'll be discussing "issues facing art museums internationally, from ownership claims to exhibition exchanges to global partnerships." No live webcast, alas.

As CultureGrrl readers know, the Getty reported on its website that, due to financial constraints, it would discontinue paying for and maintaining the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), which in 2008 was renamed the International Bibliography of Art (IBA). The Getty's support for that premier art-history research database was to end Jan. 1 (later extended to today, Mar. 31).

But there's a new (as yet unannounced) development. This just in from Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute, in response to my query yesterday about the BHA's fate:

The Getty will send out a press release tomorrow [Thursday] with very good news. The GRI has worked hard to make this possible.