Where is CultureGrrl? Still in Limbo (but back soon)

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.