December 2011 Archives

Left to right: De Kooning, "Clam Digger," 1972, private collection
Degas, "Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot," modeled between 1896-1911, cast between 1921-31, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Donatello, "Reliquary Bust of Saint Rossore," c. 1425, Museo Nationale di San Matteo, Pisa

The Big D's---De Kooning, Degas, Donatello (et al.)---bucked the museum trend this year towards permanent-collection agglomerations, small dossier displays and single-lender shows. The "D" trio, to me, were welcome throwbacks to the extravagant blockbusters of fond memory---sprawling affairs where distinguished curators got free rein to identify, gather, study and explicate great masterpieces drawn from international sources.

I had the highest of expectations for all three---John Elderfield's "De Kooning: A Retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art (to Jan. 9); George Shackelford's and (from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) Xavier Rey's Degas and the Nude at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (to Feb. 5) and the latest entrant into the megashow sweepstakes, Keith Christiansen's and (from the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) Stefan Weppelmann's The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (to Mar. 18). The first met my expectations; the second exceeded them; the third, for me, was something of a letdown.

I'll focus today on the last, since piles of deservedly high praise have already been heaped upon  MoMA's and the BMFA's curatorial tours de force (which I hope to discuss in "Part II," next week).

The Metropolitan Museum's exploration of the origins of portraiture in 15th-century and very early 16th-century Italy is an impressive feat of masterpiece wrangling---an absorbing array of some 160 works, including key examples, roped in from a wide variety of international sources and informed by the Met's high level of scholarship.

For example, two meant-for-each-other busts---separately owned by European museums---were reunited for this occasion. The far more expressive, realistically rendered terracotta served as model for the formal marble portrait:














Benedetto da Maiano, "Filippo Strozzi,"1475: Left, terracotta, Staatliche Museum, Berlin; right, marble, the Louvre

But notwithstanding the high points, I found the cumulative effect of the show's refined but often stolid countenances to be numbing, with occasional jolts of flesh-and-blood energy. Mine is an admittedly minority view among the reviewers who have weighed in so far. Others apparently arrived with the same high anticipation (scroll to bottom) that I had, but left feeling that their expectations had been fulfilled.

When I visited the show for a second time (the first being the press preview), on the Friday before Christmas, the galleries (happily for me) were far from packed, perhaps because most people were engaged in gift wrapping and family-feast preparations:



No blockbuster buzz had been jumpstarted by the favorable NY Times review published that same morning by Ken Johnson, who approvingly noted that "there is hardly a person pictured in the show whom you could not pick out of a police lineup." To me, though, the show brought to mind not so much a police lineup as the composite sketches disseminated by police of unapprehended perps, whose physiognomies aren't precisely known. The broad characteristics are there, but the facial particularities and psychological depth aren't.

From the evidence of this show, 15th-century Italian painters were just beginning to explore the potential of a genre that was later brought to glorious fruition by the likes of Titian and Raphael. At the press preview, Christiansen told us that "you will find over and over again that it's sculptors who are the innovators, painters who respond and follow." Perhaps that's because it is more natural to model lifelike flesh-and-blood in three dimensions than to evoke it with pigments on a flat surface.

Even the relief portraits on the medals that abundantly punctuate the show outshine most of the paintings when it comes to depicting facial furrows and sagging flesh. Below is a medal of the same person depicted in the terracotta and marble busts above:


Style of Nicolo Fiorentino, "Filippo Strozzi," 1489, National Gallery, Washington

In one important way, this show could have been greatly enlivened. There's an elephant not in the room, whom I haven't yet seen the other reviewers mention---Leonardo da Vinci, whose spirit haunts the show, thanks to the introductory quote that greets visitors as they enter:



Leonardo's words of wisdom sound like a recipe for a police sketch. But for him, coming up with the right nose was just the beginning. There is undoubtedly good reason for the near absence of his sublime achievement in the New York show---his generous representation in the acclaimed show that is now drawing ecstatic crowds to the National Gallery, London---Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (to Feb. 5).

The Met does, however, display one tiny, rapidly executed sketch:


Leonardo da Vinci, "Lorenzo de' Medici," c. 1480, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

Leonardo had what many of the artists in the Met's show seem to have lacked---the ability to animate his subjects with compelling individuality and magnetic allure. His name is invoked, to the detriment of the Met's show, in a couple of labels, most notably one for Lorenzo di Credi's "Portrait of a Young Woman," which is thought to portray Ginevra de' Benci, the wealthy Florentine merchant's daughter who was much more famously depicted by Leonardo:




Left: Lorenzo di Credi, "Portrait of a Young Woman," c. 1490-1500, Metropolitan Museum; Right: Leonardo da Vinci, "Ginevra de' Benci," c. 1474/1478, Natonal Gallery, Washington (the latter not in the Met's show)

By the Met's own admission (on its label), "Credi was clearly inspired by Leonardo but could not match the subtlety of his imagination or the enigmatic beauty of his paintings."

The other elephants barely in the room are the Netherlandish painters from the same period. A wild-card Memling from the Met's collection is included in the exhibition to show the Netherlandish influence on Italian portraiture (which might in itself make a rewarding comparative exhibition).

According to the Met's label for its "Portrait of a Young Man," Memling's work "was admired for its verisimilitude as well as the air of serenity he invariably gave his sitters."

Aside from the 15th-century garb and coiffure, this looks like someone you might greet on the street:


Hans Memling, "Portrait of a Young Man," c. 1472-75, Metropolitan Museum

For me, the long, sometimes wearying trek through the galleries was amply rewarded near the end, when I came upon this distillation of pure spirituality. I took a deep breath, stopped flitting, and just gaped:


Jacopo Bellini, "Saint Bernardino of Siena," c. 1450-55, private collection

Bellini, we are told, "may have heard him [Saint Bernardino] preach in Ferrara, Venice, or in one of the cities of the Venetian territory. Of all the known paintings of Saint Bernardino, this one has the quality of a firsthand encounter."

It's that immediacy, coupled with a profound view into the soul, that defines painted subjects who stay with us long after we have parted company.

For the more informed, official view of the show (and a look at more of its works), let's now peruse the first five galleries in the company of Christiansen and his curatorial colleague at the Met, Andrea Bayer.

Janet Robinson, exiting NY Times Co. CEO and president

The rebellious spirit of the times has just hit the Times, in the form of a Dec. 23 Open Letter to Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (the newspaper's publisher).

NY Times culture reporters Carol Vogel, Randy Kennedy, Robin Pogrebin, Daniel Wakin, Patrick Healy and Larry Rohter, as well as co-chief art critic Roberta Smith, chief theater critic Ben Brantley, co-chief film critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, music critic Allan Kozinn, assistant culture desk head Laurel Graeber and culture news assistant Alton Rourk, were on the rapidly growing list of 383 signatories (at this writing) who expressed "profound dismay at several recent developments" in the Times contract talks:

Your negotiators have demanded a freeze of our pension plan and an end to our independent health insurance.

We ask you to withdraw these demands so that negotiations on a new contract can proceed fruitfully and expeditiously. We also urge you to reconsider the decision to eliminate the pensions of the foreign employees.

We have worked long and hard for this company and have given up pay to keep it solvent. Some of us have risked our lives for it. You have eloquently recognized and paid moving tribute to our work and devotion. The deep disconnect between those words and the demands of your negotiators have given rise to a sense of betrayal.

Adding fuel to this fire was the recent news (as reported by Peter Lauria of Reuters) that "Janet Robinson, who will step down as chief executive of the New York Times Co. on Dec. 31, will receive an exit package in excess of $15 million, according to people familiar with the situation. In addition to a $4.5 million consulting fee, the Times Co. will pay Robinson $10.9 million in pension benefits that she accrued over 28 years of service, they said."

Robinson was alluded to, although not specifically named, in this passage from the employees' "Open Letter":

One of our colleagues in senior management recently announced her retirement from the paper, which is reported to include a very generous severance and retirement package, including full pension benefits.

All of us who work at the Times deserve to have a secured retirement; this should not be a privilege cynically reserved to senior management.

And in other NY Times "sense of betrayal" news: I'm one of the newspapers' many home-delivery subscribers who just received a bogus e-mail (now reported as spam by JimRomenesko.com), which falsely claimed that we had "recently requested to cancel" the paper. Since I cannot live without my daily Times fix (and since I had just mailed my renewal check yesterday, on time), I panicked and immediately called the phone number provided.

I was not alone: A recording (which I hope was from the Times), informed me that the call volume was too great for them to take my call. Has a hacker with Caller ID now gotten hold of my number? The official explanation now up on the Times' website doesn't address whether or not our phone numbers, e-mail addresses and/or payment information have been compromised. [See UPDATE, below.]

Here's the purported "Important information regarding your subscription." (DO NOT CALL the phone number.)
_________________________________________________________________________

Installation view: "Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades at Knoedler & Company," 2008

In finding commonalities between two recently deceased artists whose work couldn't have been more different---Helen Frankenthaler and John Chamberlain---Roberta Smith in today's NY Times appraisal, demonstrates her knack for synergistic thinking.

Roberta writes:

They occupy such similar positions within the history of American art. Both emerged in the 1950s and provided crucial links between art styles, specifically helping to forge the transition from Abstract Expressionism to what lay beyond.

Both brought a new, unfettered approach to materials that pushed their respective mediums toward greater expressive freedom, unabashed physicality and a rough-edged, aggressively color-based beauty.

And in today's Wall Street Journal, Eric Gibson reminds us how sorely we miss his intellectually and stylistically satisfying art criticism (sharply curtailed, due to his time-consuming responsibilities as editor of the paper's "Leisure & Arts" page). In the concluding paragraph of his informed, insightful postmortem appraisal of Frankenthaler's work, Eric writes:

Her legacy already seems in peril. There hasn't been a full-dress retrospective in more than 20 years, and her gallery, Knoedler & Co., suddenly closed last month, leaving no forum for the regular exposure of her work. She deserves better. Greatness abhors a vacuum.

Chamberlain, as chance would have it, is getting a memorial retrospective: The next big exhibition to open at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, is the long-planned John Chamberlain: Choices, consisting of "nearly 100 works, from his earliest monochromatic welded iron-rod sculptures to the large-scale foil creations of recent years. This presentation encompasses Chamberlain's shifts in scale, materials, and methods, informed by the assemblage aesthetic that has been central to his artistic practice," according to the museum's description.

What's particularly sad about Knoedler's demise is that the rich information on its website has died along with it, including webpages for the important exhibitions it had mounted over the years.

Clicking the links to Frankenthaler's Knoedler shows that appear in various online reviews (such as those for her 2008 "Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades at Knoedler & Company" and her 2011 "East and Beyond") redirects you to the gallery's current homepage, which tersely announces its "closing, effective Nov. 30, 2011." There should be some way to preserve and make publicly available online the important record of the gallery's exhibitions and archival material.

One of the collateral stories connected with Knoedler's closure concerns the future representation of its artists. Lisbeth Mark of Jeanne Collins & Associates, which yesterday issued the press release announcing Frankenthaler's passing, today told me this, in response to my query:

Helen Frankenthaler's gallery was Knoedler until the gallery closed on Nov. 30, 2011. The family and studio are not commenting on anything related to representation or her estate at this time, but will at an appropriate time in the future.

[NOTE: Another worthy tribute to Frankenthaler, to which I linked in an update to yesterday's post, was Jerry Saltz's, appearing late yesterday on New York Magazine's website.]

Recently installed in the rotunda of the reopened National Academy, New York: John Chamberlain, "Tasteylingus," 2010, courtesy of the late artist and Gagosian Gallery

While we're on the subject of recently deceased famous artists, we also take note of the passing last Wednesday of sculptor John Chamberlain, 84. His demise occasioned an unseemly classified-obit war in the NY Times between the two prominent dealers who represented the mangled-metal artist.

First, the backstory: Earlier this year, the voracious Gagosian Gallery lured Chamberlain away from his long-time dealer, Pace Gallery, in what the NY Post described as a "gallery battle." (The circumstances of the artist's shift in gallery allegiance were recounted in Kelly Crow's recent profile of Larry Gagosian for the Wall Street Journal.)

In two dueling, continguous (on Dec. 25) paid obits, Gagosian and Pace vied to attach themselves to the artist's memory. In the tribute signed personally by Gagosian (not by his gallery), he self-importantly quoted himself:

Larry Gagosian said: "John Chamberlain made an indelible mark on the history of art in the twentieth century. He was a spectacular, roaring figure who embodied the fierceness of mid-century American art and who was unparalleled in his adaptation of unlikely materials for his sculptures. His influence will be long reaching, and his death is a great loss."

Pace Gallery and its principals (led by Milly and Arne Glimcher) in their tribute pointedly emphasized that "we were privileged to represent him for over 20 years and were honored to have worked with him when the gallery was first established in Boston over 50 years ago."

Could a battle to represent the artist's estate be in the offing?

Helen Frankenthaler
Photo © Chris Felver

Helen Frankenthaler, 83, who died today after a long illness, was never a comfortable artworld fit. Her unabashed commitment to subtle beauty and ethereal lyricism set her apart from the rough-and-tumble Abstract Expressionist circles in which she gracefully moved. She stayed her artistic course throughout, with steadfast disregard of new fashions and movements.

In today's NY Times obit, veteran art journalist Grace Glueck writes that this second-generation Abstract Expressionist "departed from the first generation's romantic search for the 'sublime' to pursue her own path....[She] brought a new open airiness to the painted surface and was credited with releasing color from the gestural approach and romantic rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism."

Frankenthaler's breakthrough painting, "Mountains and Sea," in which she first experimented with the staining technique that made her famous and deeply influenced her colleagues, remains the work most closely associated with her in the public imagination. I last saw it in the landmark 2008 Action/Abstraction exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, and it still has the power to enthrall:


Frankenthaler, "Mountains and Sea," 1952, on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art

I interviewed Frankenthaler for a Mar. 7, 1993 article I did for the NY Times' "Arts & Leisure" section (unaccountably not online). Its subjects (also including Jane Freilicher, Frank Stella and Mark di Suvero, among others) were well known, respected artists who had somehow become unfashionable and/or fallen into obscurity.

Helen opened up to me after I mentioned that her father, New York State Supreme Court Justice Alfred Frankenthaler, had once issued a ruling making it possible for my immigrant grandfather, Morris Flasterstein, to hold onto his property during the Great Depression. (My grandfather had begun his life in this country as a house painter, and went on to become a developer/landlord of buildings in the Bronx, including the apartment house in which I grew up.)

"I love hearing those stories about my father!" this native New Yorker responded warmly.

Here's what else she told me:

Fashion and money, fame and power politics have played a part in all art worlds. You've just got to plug away....I see a revival of the meaning of the word "quality"---a search for truth and beauty in lieu of stock certificates. People are most interested in what's real, what endures."

May her work do so.

UPDATE: I particularly liked Jerry Saltz's tribute, just posted by New York Magazine.

[My warm thanks to photographer Chris Felver for permission to use his evocative image of the artist.]

Crystal's Chris Crossed? The Bentonville museum's soon-to-depart founding curator, Chris Crosman

Now that we've all dutifully returned to our computers after quaffing eggnog and eating latkes (not a good pairing) during the concurrent Christian and Jewish seasonal celebrations, it's time for us to stop opening presents and start opening the saved tabs on our web browsers. Let's begin catching up on all that art news we've missed.

We'll start with this: At long last, the NY Times has found its way to Alice's Palace in the Ozarks, with an insightful and favorable review by Roberta Smith (online today, hardcopy tomorrow).

The money quote, from Crystal Bridges' point of view, is this:

Crystal Bridges is poised to make a genuine cultural contribution, and possibly to become a place of pilgrimage for art lovers from around the world.

"Around the world"? My guess is that "around the country" is more realistic (with a smattering of international visitors). Still, the founder and staff of the Bentonville, AR, museum could not have asked for a better endorsement.

But wait a minute! what's happened to the site's manmade ponds---architect Moshe Safdie's distinctive water feature? Roberta writes that they "unfortunately were empty and still being worked on when I visited this month."

Really? When I visited last month, the lower pond was full:



And the upper pond looked like this:



I had then been assured (by facilities manager David Burghart) that both would be up and flowing within about a week after my Nov. 16 visit.

Instead, there seems to have been negative progress. Chris Crosman, the museum's founding curator, told me in an e-mail today (responding to my query) that he had been "told that the lower pond developed a 'leak.'  In order to find and fix that problem, they needed to drain that pond. The lower pond is now being re-filled and the upper pond will follow in due course (mid-January is the current estimate)."

A pond that laps right up against art galleries inevitably makes art lovers a bit nervous. Even the museum's director, Don Bacigalupi, admitted to an interviewer that the close proximity of art and water had initially worried him, until he felt more confident about the engineering. A leaking pond that laps up against galleries can only reactivate such qualms.

Also having maintenance issues (not mentioned by Roberta) was James Turrell's Skyspace. It was completely closed for a time due to malfunctions in the timing of its lighting system and it is now open only on a limited basis, rather than continuously as originally planned. David Houston, the museum's curatorial director, had told me that some visitors who entered during off hours (when there were no changing colored lights to enliven the space) reacted angrily when they sat there and nothing happened. They needed to be given more context for understanding this meditative, atmospheric piece, he said.

On the two occasions when I passed "Skyspace" during the daytime last month, it was gated:



What's more, the underside of its entrance canopy looked much the worse for wear, less than two weeks after the museum's opening:



Another thing that's changed at Crystal Bridges (not mentioned by Roberta, understandably) is Crosman's professional status. Not publicly announced is that after six years working for the museum, he will depart as of Dec. 31. His title last January changed from chief curator to founding curator, shortly before an expanded curatorial team was brought on board.

"I am looking forward to getting back to family and friends in Maine, and will also miss many new ones here," said Chris, who was previously director of the Farnsworth Museum, Rockford, ME. He felt he could not discuss his leavetaking in more detail. I do know that when I had asked for time to speak with him during my visit (because he has the longest institutional memory of anyone there, aside from founder Alice Walton), I was told that he wasn't around. A short time later, I spotted him in the cafeteria, where we sat down together (at the table in the top photo) for a cordial chat.

But back to Roberta: While mostly impressed by the museum's "running start," she also identified what struck her as two major failings: One was omission of folk art (although there was one folk-like painting in the galleries, as shown in my CultureGrrl Video at the end of this post).

Roberta's other complaint concerned "a major failure of the museum's design"---its neglecting to "exploit the site's abundant natural light inside the galleries. This is an amazing shortcoming in an institution so clearly devoted to both painting and the natural world."

Actually, this wasn't a "failure of the museum's design." It was the result of the staff's alteration of architect Moshe Safdie's design for the museum. As I reported in my review of the architecture:

Safdie [whom I interviewed] expressed some dissatisfaction with the decision by museum officials to scotch his initial plans, as publicized in a previous Crystal Bridges press release, to include skylights in every gallery. After Don Bacigalupi became the museum's director (October 2009), "there were different views," Safdie told me, "and the skylights were removed" before they were ever built. Eschewing skylights permitted the curators to install light-sensitive works-on-paper in close proximity to the paintings.

Roberta was also ambivalent about other aspects of the architecture, which to her "seems slightly confused" and "rather coarsely detailed." evoking "aspects of the Getty's hilltop campus in Los Angeles, of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania and a fancy theme park, albeit one minus the rides."

We still await an Arkansas journey by the paper's chief architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman. When last heard from, he was perusing a park in Madrid.

As for Roberta's customary area of expertise---the museum's collection---she judges it to be "substantial enough to merit the use of the word "masterworks" in the title of its opening exhibition."

In other words, Alice's $445.44-million art budget (pre-2011) was well spent.

Ivan Puopolo, reportier for the "Strada" program of Finnish Broadcast Company's YLE TV1, standing on the presumed site of the proposed Guggenheim Helsinki

The City of Helsinki yesterday reported that the feasibility study for the proposed Guggenheim Helsinki will be completed by Dec. 30, as scheduled. But it will not be publicly released until Jan. 10.

So what kind of museum will it be? My new Finnish television friend, Axa Sorjanen of the Strada program on the Finnish Broadcast Company's YLE TV1, told me that a "reliable source" had informed him that "the essence of Guggenheim's feasibility study is a plan to melt the Finnish Design Museum and Finnish Museum of Architecture into the new Helsinki Guggenheim. So the new museum would be strongly oriented towards design and architecture."

I floated this balloon past Eleanor Goldhar, the Guggenheim's deputy director and chief of global communications, who swatted it away as "speculation, and we don't comment on speculation. The report will be available when the mayor releases it. Until then we have no comments."

You can read the full text of Helsinki's announcement regarding the upcoming release of the feasibility study here. For those of you who need to brush up on your Finnish, below is an approximate translation (via Google Translate, edited by CultureGrrl for better English syntax and fuller identification of those named below):

Study commissioned from the Guggenheim Museum on the possible establishment of Guggenheim Helsinki to be released by Mayor Jussi Pajuselle on Tuesday morning, Jan. 10

Publication of the results of the study will be transmitted live on the same day [Jan. 10] from 10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. at the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, as well as on the cable channel StadiTV Journal. It can also be seen later in a Helsinki-channel recording.

The report will present the results of the work led by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's deputy director responsible for global strategies, Juan Ignacio Vidarte, its deputy director Ari Wiseman, Helsinki Mayor Jussi Pajunen, Helsinski Deputy Mayor for Education, Culture and Human Resources Tuula Haatainen, and Helsinki Art Museum Director Janne Gallen-Siren. The discussion will be chaired by Pekka Timonen, director of Finland's WDC [World Design Capital] 2012 Foundation.

The City of Helsinki last January commissioned from the Guggenheim Foundation a concept-and-development report, which examines the feasibility of establishing a Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki. The report's mandate is to identify multi-disciplinary art museum functions and structures, and to understand what a museum of the 2000s could be. The report 's completion date is Dec. 30. Due to the year-end holiday period, the City of Helsinki decided to release a report on Jan. 10.

As announced in October on the Guggenheim's website, the steering committee for the project met in New York on Dec. 9 for its fourth and final meeting, to review the draft of the feasibility study. Otso Kantokorpi, a Helsinki-based journalist, art critic and curator, informed me (and Goldhar confirmed) that the cost of the feasibility study was $2.5 million. Otso says half that amount was paid by the City of Helsinki, with the rest contributed by two private foundations. Goldhar told me that the fee was not designed to be cash-generating, but to defray the study's costs.

A Oct. 28 segment on TV1's "Strada" floated some more balloons, with this on-screen list of purported costs (in Euros; two with question marks) for the project (feasibility study, licensing fee [for the Guggenheim's name] and construction cost, respectively):

In that same segment, reported by Sanna Stellan (an actress working largely from a script, not a professional journalist), you can see her mostly unproductive chat (in English) with Ari Wiseman, the Guggenheim's deputy director. He embarrassingly stumbled over the pronunciation of the name of the man you see above, Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén, director of the Helsinki Art Museum and a crucial player in the Guggenheim project (thought to be possibly in line to be named as its director).

At the beginning of last Friday's "Strada" segment (in which I get the last word, speaking English in midtown Manhattan), Ivan Puopolo is standing on what is said to be the site of the proposed new Guggenheim (shown at the top of this post). It is located in the Katajanokka district, adjacent to the center of Helsinki. (City Hall and the Presidential Palace can be seen behind Ivan.)

Ivan interviews (in Finnish) Juulia Kauste, director of National Museum of Architecture; Jukka Savolainen, assistant director of Finnish Design Museum; and Pirkko Siitari, director of Kiasma, the National Museum of Modern Arts. None would or could give details on the proposed plans, but Savolainen did say that Guggenheim is interested in design.

The part of my conversation with Ivan that didn't make in onto the program was what I said directly after the comments they used: From what I knew about Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong, I thought he would be sensitive to the need for close cooperation with the existing arts community in Helsinki.

I won't embed the clip (almost entirely in Finnish) on CultureGrrl, but you can see it here and hear me near the end, at about 4:20. I misspoke though, when I suggested that the costs of previous feasibility studies were higher than than that for the Helsinki study. (I mistakenly had in mind the much higher licensing fees for past proposed projects.) For example, the cost of the 2002 feasibility study for the never-realized Guggenheim Rio de Janeiro (to have been designed by Jean Nouvel) was $2 million.

In other Global Guggenheim news: Guggenheim Collection: The American Avant-Garde 1945-1980 goes on view Feb. 7-May 6 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome.

Miniature replica of a Wal-Mart shopping cart (left) and Sam Walton's 1979 Ford pickup truck---part of a display on life in Northwest Arkansas at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Far be it for me to become a champion of Alice Walton (on whom I've been notably hard in the past) or of Wal-Mart (where I don't shop). But Bloomberg View's Jeffrey Goldberg has gone off the deep end is his two-part rant condemning as a "moral tragedy" Walton's worthy Arkansas project, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

[I've exhaustively reviewed the museum and analyzed its finances, here (NPR commentary), here (collection), here (scholarship), here (more collection), here (finances), here (more finances), here (critical reception) and here (Moshe Safdie's architecture).]

In his investigation of the "perverse values of Sam Walton's heirs," Bloomberg's intrepid opinionator went so far as to accost workers at Wal-Mart's Springdale, AR, store. (How many, he didn't say.) Goldberg "couldn't find a single employee who had visited the museum, or was contemplating visiting it."

That's their choice and their loss: Admission to the museum (by timed ticket) is free (thanks to a $20-million Wal-Mart grant) and everyone who arrives gets an exceedingly friendly welcome. Whatever Wal-Mart workers' cultural interests (or lack thereof), chances are that many of the children of the company's Northwest Arkansas employees will eventually enjoy a visit, thanks to a $10-million grant from the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation, Springdale, AR. It will bankroll visits by up to 14,000 area schoolchildren during the museum's inaugural year. If the kids enjoy their stay, they'll make their parents come.

While it's true that Alice's enormous wealth comes from Wal-Mart, which has frequently come under attack for its treatment of workers, she's not part of the company's management. Two Waltons do sit on the corporate board of directors---Jim and S. Robson (board chairman).

Goldberg argues that even without a formal role in the corporation's governance, "Sam Walton's daughter could get herself a respectful hearing with current management. But I've never heard even the faintest suggestion that she has taken an interest in the lives of the people who work at her father's stores. If she sponsored an art museum as well as a network of day-care centers for Wal-Mart employees, or a fleet of mobile dental clinics, well, I don't think my complaints would have quite as much salience."

I don't know about "mobile dental clinics," but a large array of substantial grants---benefiting education and social welfare in general, and the Northwest Arkansas region in particular---are listed on the websites of the Walmart Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. (Alice is a board member for the latter, which was also the chief underwriter of Crystal Bridges.)

Goldberg appears to believe that private funding for cultural institutions and activities should be put on hold until pressing social and economic inequities are redressed: He decries Alice's use of her Wal-Mart-derived riches "to build a billion-dollar art museum during a terrifying recession."

He also sees Crystal Bridges' inclusion of works depicting social injustice as an "eloquent rebuke to the values of the company that has made the Waltons so very wealthy." I saw those works differently---as laudable (and somewhat surprising) evidence that, whatever the political views of the Waltons, this museum will be open to all kinds of art, without political prejudice.

Goldberg blasts Crystal Bridges as "a compelling symbol of the chasm between the richest Americans and everyone else." I see it, instead, as "a compelling symbol" of the benefits of making our nation's cultural riches available to all...including Wal-Mart's workers, should they ever choose to make a visit.

I suspect that, eventually, many of them will.

Pat Steir, "Lovely Day Waterfall," 2009

[Part I is here.]

I try to enjoy art wherever I find it, and I did get a welcome aesthetic charge yesterday from gazing at Pat Steir's lyrical "Lovely Day Waterfall."

But it wasn't such a "lovely day" for me, because of where I was situated for a good part of the afternoon---the waiting room of an outpatient facility (above) for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where my close friend, who recently had brain surgery, was getting an MRI before meeting at another outpatient facility with her less than encouraging neuro-oncologist.

I'm still recovering from a long, difficult day (much tougher, of course, for my friend, who lives alone). So forgive my postponing normal posting until tomorrow. What I need to write right now is a detailed summary of all the information and instructions that were thrown at my understandably confused and dismayed friend. I'm her designated notetaker.

Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit, about a literature professor with metastatic cancer, which deeply moved me many years ago during its Off Broadway run (especially because I had been a college English major with a particularly fondness for the poetry of John Donne), has never seemed as relevant (except that the doctors' formulaic pleasantry at MSK is not "How are you feeling today?" but "You look great!"). Don't get me wrong, though: MSK's doctors provided effective and compassionate care for both of my late parents, whose early-stage cancers were successfully treated there.

Fortunately, my spirits were lightened this morning by a follow-up phone call from the venue that's the frontrunner for CultureDaughter's and fabulous future CultureSon-in-Law's wedding. I do have lots to be happy about.

Also bringing cheer is the initial response to CultureGrrl's Last Gasp Fund Drive (although there's been a complete lull today, after an encouraging five-day flurry of clicks on my "Donate" button). The majority of responders were recidivists, having previously supported the blog. I hope that those of you who last gave long ago but have not yet responded to my current appeal will consider renewing your voluntary "subscriptions."

I've been particularly gratified to see a significant number of new inductees to the Cult of CultureGrrl. Welcome, fledgling art-lings!

Even more important than the financial support, though, have been the statements of appreciation I've received along with some subventions. At a time when I've started doubting the value of what I do, I needed these votes of confidence.

Here's a sampling:

You perform an invaluable service precisely because you are a thorn in the side of the artworld. [I had written that those who "view me as a thorn in the side of the artworld" should not contribute.]

I'm an art historian and teach at [name of college]. I read CultureGrrl every day and often use info you share in my classes. [The CultureGrrl Curriculum lives!]

After a long day, reading your blog is as enjoyable as a guilty pleasure. [I'm a big fan of hedonism-in-moderation.]

And perhaps my favorite:

Your coverage of Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges has been better than anything I have read in the regular press. [That's been my objective---on that story and many others.]

You're a classy group of givers---art history professors, students, museum professionals, lawyers, dealers and (perhaps my favorite) a famous art writer with whom I've sometimes disagreed on the blog.

Does this mean I have to start playing nice? Maybe until this fund drive reaches its goal (if, in fact, it does so).

On second thought, I think I'll go sharpen my thorns!

Congressman Jerrold Nadler

I'm all for artists' resale royalties---a cause I've been espousing since the '70s. But it's not a good plan to redress one perceived inequity by creating another.

That's what the newly introduced Equity for Visual Artists Act of 2011 appears to do, by singling out large auction houses as the only sellers required under the proposed law to collect a 7% royalty on works resold for more than $10,000. The bill's full text is not yet, at this writing, on the Library of Congress' website. I obtained a copy from the bill's sponsor, Congressman Jerrold Nadler, D-NY. (My link to that document is at the top of this paragraph.) It's not clear to me, from the language of the bill, whether the "price" used for the purpose of calculating the 7% royalty includes the buyer's premium that auction houses add to the hammer price.

H.R. 3688 would "apply only to resales in excess of $10,000 occurring at public auction houses [emphasis added] with more than $25 million in sales in the prior year. Resales at auction houses operating only online [i.e., eBay] would be excluded," according to Nadler's summary, published on his website. Also exempt would be sales by galleries and individuals.

The 7% resale royalty would be funneled to a "visual artists' collecting society" (such as VAGA or the Artists Rights Society), which could skim off a commission of up to 18%. Half of the remaining amount would be conveyed to the creators of the sold works or their successors as copyright owners. The other half of the net resale royalty proceeds would go into a new fund to bankroll museum purchases of works by artists living in the U.S. This 50-50 split and the collecting society's commission of up to 18% could effectively reduce the artists' cut to a mere 2.87% of the resale price.

In other words, once you exempt non-auction sales and split the 7% of the remaining pie three ways (artists, collecting societies, museums), there's not much equity for secondary-market artists in this "artists equity bill." Encouraging museums to buy new art is a worthy goal, but I don't think the secondary-market artists should be legally required to subsidize that with royalties that would otherwise be theirs.

Mike Boehm of the LA Times received this explanation as to why the bill targets only the major auction houses:

Bruce Lehman, who played a key role in drafting it as counsel for the Visual Artists Rights Coalition, ...said that focusing only on the big auction houses will capture most of the resale market [will it?] while simplifying enforcement and avoiding what would otherwise be a likely outcry from the far more numerous ranks of art dealers....

Allowing museums to share in art royalties serves a double purpose, proponents of the federal bill said: As a matter of practical politics, it figures to put a potentially powerful constituency in their corner---just as excusing art dealers and individual collectors from paying royalties stands to preempt a good deal of potential opposition.

Sounds to me like "divide and conquer."

All of this is lightened by a bit of unintended humor in Boehm's above-linked LA Times piece, which at this writing still muddles "droit de suite" (another term for "resale royalties") with a very different sort of "droit."

Boehm wrote:

It has long been different in Europe, where laws commonly recognized a "droit du seigneur"---the right of a creator to take a cut whenever a work is resold.

"Different in Europe," indeed! Boehm's howler prompted the Dallas Museum of Art's incoming (on Jan. 9) director, Max Anderson, to tweet this "LOL" quip:

New bill: Love how droit de suite became droit du seigneur! Do artists get to sleep w successor collectors?

Noblesse oblige. I suspect that many art dealers and online sites, which are responsible for a sizable portion of the secondary market, may respond graciously to a bill that uniquely disadvantages their rivals, the auction houses, in contemporary-art transactions. Then again, they may still object, knowing that the obligation to kick back some profits to artists may eventually be extended to all contemporary-art sellers.

What do the auction houses themselves have to say about this droit plot? Boehm's and my requests for comment from Sotheby's and Christie's, have not, at this writing, been answered. (Perhaps they're still trying to figure out how to phrase their responses without resorting to profanity.)

Construction webcam shot of the newly named Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County

I've been pondering the controversy surrounding the Miami Art Museum's infelicitous renaming as the [take long breath] Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County. The balancing act between private fundraising and public purpose is a difficult one, fraught with sensitive issues. But upon reflection, I come down on the side of those who think that the name change, although endorsed by the museum's director, Thom Collins (who succeeded Terence Riley), is a bad idea.

My reasons differ somewhat, however, from those advanced by my art-critic colleagues.

Aside from swapping the snappy "MAM" acronym for a name almost as cumbersome as the Metropolitan Museum's new Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, this recognition, in perpetuity, of Pérez's donation of $20 million in cash and more than $15 million in art has the downside of ruffling some supporters' feathers by stamping a single collector/benefactor's imprimatur on the institution. (The new name also recognizes the contribution of Miami-Dade County, which, with voter approval, contributed a $100-million bond towards the project.)

The anointment of one philanthropist has jeopardized fundraising from piqued potential donors whose goodwill is necessary for the successful completion of the museum's $220-million capital campaign for its new Herzog & de Meuron-designed building, to be completed in 2013. As of the Dec. 1 announcement of the naming gift by the chairman and CEO of the Related Group (developer of multi-family residences), some $53 million still remained to be raised.

In general, I'm not bothered by the use of naming opportunities as a fundraising tool. As I wrote four years ago, when critics were faulting the New Museum for selling naming rights to even the elevators of its new SANAA-designed Bowery facility: "In the nine circles of hell that are nonprofit fundraising, surely the mildest sin is allowing benefactors to attach their names to parts of buildings."

While appropriate due diligence should be undertaken to decrease the likelihood of a dreaded reputational disaster---donors in handcuffs---I think that a litmus test for naming opportunities that was recently proposed by Real Clear Arts blogger Judith Dobrzynski is inappropriate, with the potential for furthering controversy, rather than forestalling it.

Dobrzynski's suggested guidelines for institutional naming rights include an assessment of whether a lead donor is "liked in the community"---an especially puzzling opinion coming from a journalist gainfully employed as a consultant (along with former Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello) for the Leon Levy Foundation, a major contributor to museums.

The names of Levy and his widow---Levy Foundation trustee Shelby White---are anathema to certain members of the archaeological community, who decry the couple's former antiquities-collecting practices (although those were common at the time they occurred). But that didn't stop the Met from naming its monumental classical-antiquities hall, inaugurated in April 2007, as the "Leon Levy and Shelby White Court." The awarding of such recognition is not (and never has been) a popularity contest.

Dobrzynski objected to naming Miami's museum for Pérez in perpetuity, as is planned, observing that "50 years should be the limit in most situations, especially one like this where Pérez has not given that much." (Actually, $20 million in cash is not chump change, even by New York art-museum standards.) My guess is that reselling the Miami museum's name every 50 years would make its identity crisis even more acute than it already is. (The Met wouldn't tell me whether the Levy/White designation for its antiquities court is permanent or temporary.)

Also puzzling was Dobrzynski's failure to disclose her close relationship to one of the Met's most prominent antiquities benefactors in her post about that museum's recent acquisition of a Roman Imperial marble head of Zeus Ammon, hailed by the Levy Foundation's consultant as "a nice addition to the collection," with an "uncontroversial provenance."

But back to Miami: As many observers have noted, it is common practice to name cultural facilities for lead donors. But almost all the cited precedents are performing arts facilities. There are, of course, numerous art museums named for individuals---Frick, Barnes, Menil, Getty, to name four---but they were almost always founded by those individuals, whose personal holdings typically formed a large share, if not the entirety, of the inaugural collection. That's a non-controversial form of naming, for good reason.

Why would a Rockefeller Museum of Modern Art or a Bloomberg Metropolitan Museum of Art cause us, unanimously, to cringe, whereas Carnegie Hall doesn't sound off-key? I think part of the difference between art museums and theaters is that the benefactors who are most likely to "name" an art museum could (and most likely would) be not only art lovers but also art owners, with not only an emotional but also an economic interest in the contents and activities of the institution. They would also likely have other conflict-of-interest issues, due to their close relationships with certain other players in the art market---dealers, artists, other collectors.

Perhaps more importantly, because art museums are repositories for the public's patrimony (whereas theaters are venues for fleeting performances of composers', choreographers' and playwrights' creations), they have the aura of important, stable civic institutions, central to a communty's continuity and collective self-image, which shouldn't be usurped by any one citizen.

For now, even the Miami museum seems loath to relinquish its simpler, familiar name. At this writing, it still calls itself the Miami Art Museum on its own website. If Pérez knows what's best for his institution and wants to be hailed as a truly generous patron, he'll let the old name stay on the new entrance, and find a major chunk of the interior on which to permanently inscribe his moniker.

For other musings on the Miami Tsunami, see Linda Yablonsky on ArtNet, Lance Esplund on Bloomberg and Michael Putney in the Miami Herald.

Meanwhile, if any readers want to respond to my Last-Gasp Fund Drive by acquiring CultureGrrl's naming rights, I can be bought real cheap for the next 50 years---a mere $50,000. (Just kidding.)

This is it, art-lings.

Notwithstanding the dubious ego boost of being featured on Finnish television (with Part II, on the proposed Helsinki Guggenheim, airing today), I've come to an obvious, long overdue conclusion: There's not enough financial support out there from you---CultureGrrl's devoted readers---to justify continuing this five-and-a-half-year experiment in trying to build something journalistically worthwhile and financially viable. But I'm willing to wait three more weeks for you to prove me wrong.

One of the parts of my edited Finnish interview that didn't make it onto the program concerned the unremunerative nature of this solo enterprise. I have just totaled my dismal take for 2011. I'll share it with you---slightly less than $1,400 (including donations and ads), for a year out of my finite professional life. What am I thinking?

Blogging has been a labor of love and it's in my blood. I believe (as I told the Finns) that it's important, and I'd like to think that CultureGrrl has been regarded as such by its devoted, sophisticated niche audience.

So here's the Grrl's last gurgle:

If 100 readers are willing to donate $20 each within the next three weeks to express appreciation for last year's edition of CultureGrrl (or if a different combination of readers and benefactions achieves the same monetary goal), I'll continue. Given the size of my audience, that's a relatively modest goal. But it seems unlikely to be realized, in light of the record so far.

If I don't get this vote of confidence, I'm going to take off at least a month, beginning Jan. 9, to undergo blogging-addiction withdrawal and seek other opportunities. I don't know yet whether I'll relapse in February. But my month's hiatus isn't an empty threat; it's a promise.

If you value CultureGrrl, there's an easy way to encourage me to continue. For those who may view me as a thorn in the side of the artworld: Don't give.

I doubt I'll withdraw from all online activity: You may occasionally find me on Twitter or, if there's something I feel I absolutely must expound upon, there's always the equally unremunerative (but much more widely read) Huffington Post. I will continue, for a time, to link to any mainstream-media work in the middle column of CultureGrrl (labeled "NEW!", to help you find it).

I'll announce the results of CultureGrrl's Last-Gasp Fund Drive on Jan. 9. Whatever happens, it's been rewarding and fun. I thank you, readers, for your interest, insights, news tips and many words of appreciation.

In an event, we still have three more weeks together. So much to tell you, so little time!

Felcholino and their Getty tell-all, "Chasing Aphrodite"

[UPDATE: David Bomford, in response to my direct query, said that he is not in talks with the Courtauld, as suggested by Felcholino's source.]

Felcholino (Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino), of Chasing Aphrodite fame, apparently still have their "Deep Throat(s)" at the J. Paul Getty Trust, ready and eager to spill the beans on confidential goings-on in LA's art acropolis. Getty officials haven't released any details from yesterday morning's museum staff meeting with trust president James Cuno, where he planned to discuss "the transition and moving forward," two days after the announcement of the imminent, unexpected departure of museum director David Bomford.

So we'll have to rely on Felcholino's Getty fly-on-the-wall, who gave them a running account of the meeting, posted on their Chasing Aphrodite Facebook page.

Here, off the "Wall," is a screenshot of the relevant, revelatory passages (which should be read bottom-to-top for proper chronology):

Michael Brand

James Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is scheduled to meet with the Getty Museum's staff this morning to discuss "the transition and moving forward," as Getty spokesperson Julie Jaskol confirmed this morning, responding to my query (which was prompted by this Chasing Aphrodite tweet).

Yesterday, the Getty's press office stonewalled my efforts to get more information regarding the circumstances leading to Tuesday's bombshell---the cryptic announcement that the museum's acting director, David Bomford, would leave his post in February, returning to London, with unspecified "plans to pursue research, scholarship and writing."

Jori Finkel of the LA Times did get James Cuno to comment briefly about the ongoing director's search, but not on the undisclosed circumstances behind Bomford's departure. Finkel also reported that "Bomford was not available to speak today, according to a Getty spokesperson."

I contacted Bomford, who did e-mail me this:

Thank you for your message and your kind wishes for the future. I would have thought everything was covered in the release [my link, not his] issued yesterday. [This was the party line from the press office, as well.]

But am very happy to add that I have had a wonderful nearly five years at the Getty and am proud to have led and worked alongside some of the best museum professionals in the world. I will miss them.

I suspect they will miss him, as well.

One of the many questions to which I could not get an answer from the Getty is whether this career transition was a resignation, a forced resignation or a firing.

This situation has undoubtedly given everyone at the Getty traumatic flashbacks to the icy parting of the ways between former Getty Museum director Michael Brand (under whom Bomford served) and late Getty president James Wood. Who, then, could be better than Brand to provide some informed perspective on this latest Getty upheaval?

Brand himself has productively moved on: He is now consulting director for the new Fumihiko Maki-designed Aga Khan Museum, scheduled to open in Toronto in late 2013. I reached Brand in Paris by e-mail yesterday.

Here are Michael Brand's candid answers to my questions:

Rosenbaum: What do you make of this development and why do you find it, as you said [in his initial e-mail to me], "very disturbing"?

Brand: I find it disturbing because it seems out of character for David Bomford to leave the Getty Museum right now in this manner. If he did not leave voluntarily, then you really have to wonder what on earth is happening there, for David is one of the most principled and highly respected colleagues in our field.

Rosenbaum: Do you think Bomford would have made a good director?

Brand: David was an extraordinary colleague to all of us at the Getty Museum, a true gentleman with an impeccable understanding of European art based on both a deep knowledge of art history and his own extensive experience as a paintings conservator. He was also greatly admired by colleagues in other Getty programs such as the Getty Research Institute, where he helped break down barriers between the two sister institutions. But it would not be good form for me to speculate on who should be the next director of the Getty Museum.

Rosenbaum: Why do you think he is leaving?

Brand: If David is not speaking to the media, then you would need to ask Jim Cuno that question directly. [I did, to no avail, put that question to the Getty's press office.]

Rosenbaum: What does this development say about the administrative and structural problems at the Getty that you and I have previously spoken about?

Brand: For me, like almost everyone else, it further confirms that there is indeed a major structural problem at the Getty that transcends any individual personalities. The Getty Museum is one of the America's greatest culture assets: I think the public and the museum's hard-working staff deserve better than this.

Rosenbaum: Do you think that part of the problem in the director search is that top candidates for this post would not want to be Cuno's subordinates?

Brand: I don't think it's so much a matter of Jim personally but, again, the structure that the new director would have to work within, not to mention the recent track record. And it's not at all clear whether they really want a strong director to lead the museum. No major art museum director has total autonomy, but to be a successful leader, you do need an appropriate level of authority and an ability to engender discussion on important issues without fear of reprisal.

Rosenbaum: Is this an unusually long time for a director's search? I suppose it may have been stalled by Wood's death and the understandable feeling that the president's post should be filled first.

Brand: Two years is rather a long and awkward time for an interim director. But you're right: Even though a vacancy had been created first at the museum, it did make sense for them to deal with the presidency first.

Rosenbaum: Since you worked so hard to improve relations with source countries, I'd also be curious about your reaction to the Getty's having appointed someone with a repatriation-hostile reputation.

Brand: I'm just glad that, based on his recent comments [scroll to bottom; my link, not Brand's], Jim has come around to the position that I had charted for the Getty Museum and that the AAMD had also adopted.

Rosenbaum: Have you been approached about returning to the Getty? Is this something you would ever consider?

Brand: I certainly do retain a deep love for the Getty Museum and its potential for extraordinary innovation in collaboration with its Getty partners. But to answer your question: No. (And I'm not sitting by the phone holding my breath, either.)

Stanford's Big Catch: Jackson Pollock, "Lucifer," 1947, Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson Collection

Stanford is on a major arts binge.

The university's previously amorphous plans have now been somewhat fleshed out for its new facility to house 121 works from the legendary 20th-century American art collection of Harry W. ("Hunk") and Mary Margaret ("Moo") Anderson. As announced into today's press release, the project will be designed by Ennead, the same architectural firm that designed Stanford's new Bing Concert Hall, opening in January 2013.

At the same meeting where the university's trustees this week approved the site for the Anderson Collection, they also gave site approval for the new $85-million McMurtry Building for the Department of Art & Art History (completion: fall 2015), to be designed by Diller Scofidio+Renfro and situated near the Cantor Arts Center.

The Anderson facility is projected to cost some $30.5 million. Its design will be submitted for the university trustees' approval in April, with construction to begin next fall. (Completion: early 2014.)

No word yet on how the Anderson facility will be funded, other than what I was told by a university spokesperson at the time of my previous post (linked at the top): "University funds from various sources, including philanthropy, are expected to be used for the construction and operations of the Anderson Gallery."

[UPDATES: Stanford spokesperson Lisa Lapin, responding to my query, told me that "the funding for the building is coming from the university. There is not an endowment." Betsy Ennis, spokesperson for the Guggenheim Museum, proudly informed me that her husband, Richard Olcott, "is the design partner at Ennead who is designing the Anderson building, as well as the Bing concert hall."]

In nearby San Francisco, fundraising appears to be proceeding with great success for the ambitious capital project of a more prominent showcase for 20th- and 21st-century art---the 235,000-square-foot expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which will accommodate (among other things) another local collector's trove---the Fisher Collection.

According to SFMOMA's recent announcement providing more detailed information about its Snøhetta-designed expansion, the museum "raised the capital campaign goal to $555 million from $480 million," thanks, in part, to the great success of the "quiet phase" of the campaign, which has already netted some $437 million. This news, coupled with the Peabody Essex's recent announcement that it had raised some $550 million towards its $650-million capital campaign for an expansion opening in 2016 (as well as for other projects) suggests that art philanthropy for bricks-and-mortar is alive and extremely robust, even in these economically uncertain times.

David Bomford

More instability has hit the J. Paul Getty Museum.

A bombshell from its press office exploded in my inbox this afternoon: David Bomford, the museum's acting director for almost two years (and associate director before that), is leaving on Feb. 1, to "return to London where he plans to pursue research, scholarship and writing," according to the Getty's press release. In another unexpected development, James Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, announced that he will assume the acting directorship, while the executive search drags on...

...or maybe doesn't. One possible scenario could be that, after a decent interval, Cuno permanently assumes both the trust president's and museum director's post---something that LA Times art critic Christopher Knight has previously recommended. My guess is that Bomford may have decided to jump ship because he saw that he was not getting the permanent top spot. All will become clearer in the fullness of time.

The prolonged search suggests that it may be hard to find a distinguished museum director who is willing to subordinate himself to the commanding Cuno, who arrived in LA with strong ideas from his own extensive experience of how a museum should be run.

As CultureGrrl readers may remember, the Getty Museum's previous permanent director, Michael Brand, who precipitously stepped down in January 2010, suggested in a candid conversation with me shortly after his departure that differences related to the division of power between him and the trust's then president, the late James Wood, contributed to the unraveling of their working relationship.

For now, the LA Times has run only a very short announcement about this latest Getty turmoil.

Ironically, in an interview published in the LA Times just 10 days ago, Cuno told Patt Morrison:

It's been an unstable time, and the challenge is to bring stability while advancing its [the Getty's] mission.

That challenge just got a little bigger.

Paddy Johnson

We learned this in our libel-law course at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism:

If you repeat someone else's libel, you too can be sued for libel.

That doesn't mean the libel suit has merit or that the person bringing the suit will win. There are lots of legal defenses against the charge that you have damaged someone's reputation or livelihood. Truth is the best defense, if you can prove it. But even if your report is completely fair and accurate, you may have to spend lots of money on lawyers' fees to win your case in court (unless you have libel insurance or your publication's lawyers are ready to back you up).

This is why CultureGrrl has timidly shied away from touching certain hot-button stories, including the New Yorker's July 2010 investigaton of Canadian art authenticator Peter Paul Biro, written by David Grann. Grann was sued for libel last June by Biro, along with Condé Nast, which publishes the New Yorker. Biro's controversial forensic authentication process involves the examination of fingerprints on paintings.

Quoting from Grann's story and commenting on it has now gotten Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson into deep water, along with Gawker, Louise Blouin Media (publisher of ArtInfo) and even the International Council of Museums and Georgia Museum of Art, among those named on Dec. 5 in Biro's scattershot libel suit (as reported today by Adam Klasfeld of Courthouse News Service).

You can see the part about Johnson on P. 40 of the supplemental complaint filed this month by Biro against her and the other new defendants in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. I hope Paddy emerges from this unscathed. Art Fag City is one of the most popular sites in the art blogosphere. Presumably the deep-pocketed Condé Nast is defending this vigorously. A New Yorker victory could float all boats.

Another thing that we learned in libel-law class: You're safe if you quote from court documents or court proceedings. Biro has now put the entire New Yorker story into the court record, attached to the complaint. You can read it, beginning on P. 45 of the above-linked PDF.

Scene of my Blogger-on-the-Street interview: Between me, Ivan and the lamppost

I've gotten the chance to do a lot of radio work (thanks to my five and a half years of blog-slogging), but ever since my 2007 BBC television debut, I've been waiting in vain for TV stations to clamor for my commentary.

At last, it's finally happened!

Okay, so it wasn't an American TV station. I had to brush up on my Finnish (what Finnish?) for this two-minute broadcast cameo (below). A week and a half ago, I got the call from Axa Sorjanen of the Strada program on the Finnish Broadcast Company's YLE TV1, asking me to meet him in midtown Manhattan for an interview (in English, thankfully) on art blogging. But knowing reporters' wiles firsthand, I had a sneaking suspicion that what Axa really wanted me to talk about was the proposed Guggenheim Helsinki.

No matter. Whatever it was, this was television! I rushed to touch up my makeup and hair, carefully selected my clothes, and breathlessly arrived, hot tea in hand (to burnish my vocal cords), just in time for our 3 p.m. appointment.

Alas, all that primping and grooming (but not the hot tea) turned out to be wasted. Axa and his sidekick, Ivan Puopolo (whom you'll see in the video), wanted this to be a Blogger-on-the-Street encounter, giving the Scandinavians back home some Big Apple ambiance. So I there I stood next to a lamppost (above), shivering slightly in the chill autumn breeze, hair flying and nondescript raincoat securely fastened over my telegenic clothes.

Although they interspersed my commentary with shots of bicycles, taxis and a police car, the visiting cultural journalists didn't take a shot of the banner at the top of their chosen lampost:



That's the NY Philharmonic's music director, Alan Gilbert, getting a mild scolding from his mother, Yoko Takebe, who is a veteran violinist with the orchestra.

Still, it all turned out to be great fun. For one thing, they really did want to know about CultureGrrl and how it and other blogs challenge the mainstream media. The clip below, exclusively about my online life, drove a large number of fascinated Finns to my site (as I could tell from my blog stats).

That's not to say that Axa and Ivan didn't also want to know about the Guggenheim. Next Friday, if all goes according to plan, TV1 will air CultureGrrl, Part II---a Global Guggenheim segment. I'll post it on the blog the following week, if it does indeed get airtime.

What I didn't mention to Axa and Ivan was my growing doubt about continuing the blog, given how unremunerative it is and how limited (compared to the mainstream media) its audience is. What's more, I have lately found myself writing many unblogger-ly posts---longer, more complex essays, rather than the short, punchy takes that are the ideal format for this screen-sized genre.

Still, CultureGrrl Repeat Donor 183 from San Jose, CA, did lift my spirits today with a very generous contribution and an even more encouraging note---"You rock, Lee!" (Rock? Could it be time for my next Singing Podcast?) Perhaps a few of my new Finn-fans will click my "Donate" button after clicking "CultureGrrl."

But let's get to the moment you've undoubtedly been waiting for---CultureGrrl with Finnish subtitles. The narration is foreign, but Axa helpfully provided me with English translations, enabling me to add subtitles for those of you whose Finnish is a bit rusty:

James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera's music director, plagued with back injuries (the painful effect of which I witnessed while attending his nonetheless powerful performance of Wagner's "Die Walküre" last April), has come to terms with the obvious: He needs an extended rehabilitation period before he can commit to the rigors of conducting at the Met.

In a statement accompanying the Met's press release, he noted that he is only just about to leave the hospital, after a three-month stay for physical rehab.

Still, while Fabio Luisi has assumed the principal conductor's post, it is anticipated that Levine will "gradually resume his other music director duties, including coaching and planning, and artistic leadership of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program," according to the Met's announcement.

In his personal statement, Levine reported that his "prognosis is excellent." But he added:

I am now in the position of having to predict when I will again be ready to conduct....We have come to the conclusion that it would be profoundly unfair to the public and the Met company to announce a conducting schedule for me that may have to be altered at a later date. I do not want to risk having to withdraw from performances after the season has been announced and tickets sold.

I am one of those disappointed ticket holders. I greatly missed Levine in this fall's "Siegfried" and will miss him again this January in "Götterdämmerung."

I'm in as much denial as is Levine: I still eagerly await his return to the podium where he belongs. Hope springs eternal. To so many of us, the Divine Levine is the Met.

Marble head of Zeus Ammon, Roman Imperial, c. 120-160 A.D., bought yesterday at Sotheby's by Metropolitan Museum for $3.55 million (presale estimate: $800,000-$1.2 million)

Through prior display in its own galleries, the Metropolitan Museum may have increased the price it had to pay last night at Sotheby's for the Roman Imperial head (above) from the collection of Dodie Rosekrans, the San Francisco-area socialite and arts patron who died a year ago.

The evening auction of antiquities also occasioned a bizarre turn of events, when the astonishing $3.72 million that Sotheby's last night said had been paid for an Egyptian basalt head of a king, Early Ptolemaic Period, c. 304-200 B.C. (also from the Rosekrans Collection), turned out to be too good to be true. In an e-mail from its press department last night, Sotheby's exulted that the Egyptian head, estimated at only $100,000-150,000, had "sold to an online bidder," making it "the highest price paid by an online bidder in a live auction at Sotheby's"...

...or maybe not. Today Sotheby's amended its pricelist, downsizing the final price for the Egyptian head from $3.72 million to a mere $392,500. Spokesperson Lauren Gioia told me this was "merely a sale-system error. The lot was purchased by the online bidder for $392,500" (who may have been astounded to learn about his megabucks "purchase" in the post-sale announcement). At this writing, the realized price has not yet been corrected in Sotheby's online catalogue entry for the piece.

But back to the Met: According to Sotheby's catalogue entry for the 19-inch high marble head of Zeus Ammon, it was exhibited by the Met from March 2007 to April 2008. The Met's imprimatur might help to account for its more than doubling the auction house's $800,000-$1.2 million presale estimate of hammer price. It was knocked down to the Met for $3.1 million, for a final total of $3.55 million with buyer's premium.

In June 2007 the Met stretched even more above Sotheby's estimate for an antiquity, when it paid $3.18 million for one of many Albright-Knox Gallery deaccessions---the Elamite (southeastern Iran) copper figure of a horned hero, ca. 3000-2800 B.C., estimated at a mere $150,000 to $250,000.

There are no worries about the Zeus head's running afoul of the UNESCO Convention restricting the importation of cultural property leaving its country of origin after 1970. That's because, according to Sotheby's catalogue entry: "The head was recorded as being on the art market in Rome in 1931" and was donated in 1954 by a subsequent owner to the Art League of Daytona Beach (which later sold it).

But the Metropolitan Museum has in the last few years acquired some nine objects, posted on the object registry of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which since 2008 has listed museum acquisitions for which information is lacking as to whether ownership history conforms to the 1970 rule. The most recent of these Met acquisitions is a head of Antinoos, Roman, c. 130-138 A.D., received by gift in 2010.

Perhaps the most striking of the works posted by the Met on AAMD's registry for antiquities with murky pre-1970 provenance is a rare, over life-size Greek bronze statue of a man, c. mid-2nd to 1st century B.C. It was a partial gift in 2001 from Robert and Renée Belfer, who gave the remainder in 2010. They bought it from the controversial Phoenix Ancient Art in the same year that they partially donated it to the Met.

Here's my photo of this beautifully modeled Greek bronze, installed just inside the entrance to the museum's Leon Levy and Shelby White Court:

Dan Monroe, President of the Association of Art Museum Directors

At the end of my recent report on the Tennessee Court of Appeals' regrettable approval of Fisk University's proposed $30-million sale of a half-share of its Stieglitz Collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum, I called upon the Association of Art Museum Directors to "strongly exert its influence" on the Arkansas museum, "which has repeatedly professed a desire to be embraced by the professional art museum community."

What I didn't say is that I didn't believe that AAMD would actually do this. That's because when I had a wide-ranging phone conversation with the association's president, Dan Monroe, last July, I had asked whether he thought that the association should take a position against using the courts to circumvent art donors' gift restrictions (as Fisk has done in seeking to circumvent donor Georgia O'Keeffe's no-sale restriction for the Stieglitz Collection).

Here's how Monroe responded:

The position that AAMD has adopted is that it is a well established legal process [to seek court permission to deviate from donor restrictions], and whether or not one likes the outcome of specific cases one way or the other, the fact is that to try to establish policy that would in any way be in conflict with that established legal process just doesn't make a great deal of sense....From the standpoint of good policy making, putting yourself in a position that would in any way be acting in opposition to the legal system is very risky.

Yesterday AAMD commendably elected to take that risk. Here is the full text of its Stieglitz Collection pronouncement:

In response to the ruling on Nov. 29, 2011 by the Tennessee Appeals Court regarding the Stieglitz Collection of Fisk University, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) released the following statement:

AAMD is extremely concerned by the ruling of the Appellate Court of Tennessee that allows Fisk University to pursue an agreement to sell a half share of its Stieglitz collection to fund operations. As AAMD has stated consistently, such an action would violate a core professional standard of AAMD and of the museum field, which prohibit the use of funds from the sale of works of art for purposes other than building an institution's collection. Using funds from the sale of works of art for general expenses undermines the institution's public trust, service to its community, and the relationship between museums and their supporters.

AAMD believes that art collections owned by colleges and universities are an irreplaceable component of academic and community life and that they should not be treated as disposable financial assets. Art museums and galleries---standing alone or operated as part of a college or university--fundamentally compromise the field's core principles and negatively impact the entire art museum community when they sell art to support operations.

If this case had merely involved deviating from donor Georgia O'Keeffe's conditions, but did not also involve a violation of AAMD's policy against use of art-sale proceeds to defray debts and operating costs, we might not have heard a peep from AAMD. But now that it's shown a willingness to speak out against court decisions that run contrary to responsible professional practice, it should take a more activist stance against other violations of donor intent, whether or not they run afoul of AAMD's deaccession policies and whether or not they run contrary to court decisions. Just because judges rule that something is "legal" doesn't make it ethical.

What AAMD still needs to do (and perhaps is doing, behind the scenes) is to exert pressure on the art museum that instigated, through its megabucks offer, this "compromise of the field's core principles," undermining "the relationship between museums and their supporters." That, of course, is Crystal Bridges.

If AAMD doesn't do more to proactively defend the interests of benefactors, museums will have no one but themselves to blame for a loss of confidence among future potential donors that art institutions can be trusted.

Museums should take care not to accede to unreasonable donor demands. But once a deal is struck, it needs to be honored.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's signature on the Memorandum of Understanding with Greece

The wheels of diplomacy grind very slowly.

The U.S.State Department has finally gotten around to releasing the full details of its Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Greece, which for the next five years (renewable) will restrict imports into the U.S. of Greece's cultural property. As I reported here, that agreement was signed in July by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs Stavros Lambrinidis.

The MOU, which went into effect Dec. 1, "restrict[s] the importation into the United States of archaeological material representing the Upper Paleolithic Period (beginning approximately 20,000 B.C.) through the 15th century A.D., and of ecclesiastical ethnological material representing the Byzantine culture from approximately the 4th century through the 15th century A.D., ...unless the Government of the Hellenic Republic issues a license or other documentation which certifies that such exportation was not in violation of its laws."

On July 21, I had commented:

The detailed provisions of the new MOU are not currently on the State Department's webpage for cultural-property import restrictions. Its spokesperson, Elizabeth Gosselin, could not provide me with any details, beyond the fact sheet....

I think that under American law, any agreement that we have officially signed ought to be public information. There is already too much secrecy in how CPAC, a federal government advisory body, operates. Once a State Department decision regarding foreign cultural-property requests is finalized, the full extent of what has been agreed to should be promptly disclosed to the American public.

Yesterday, spokesperson Gosselin lobbed this into my inbox, along with a link to further details that are now posted on the State Department's website:

With an exchange of diplomatic notes on November 21, 2011, the agreement to protect Greece's cultural heritage...entered into force.

This new MOU contains some good news for American museums: It appears to incorporate some of the concessions that museum directors have been seeking, which Dan Monroe, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, described to me in an interview last July (quoted in my previous post on this MOU, linked at the top of this one).

Specifically, the MOU not only requires Greece to take specific steps to safeguard its cultural heritage within its own borders, and also calls for that country's "consideration, as appropriate, of accommodating requests for extended loans [of cultural objects] beyond a five-year period to United States museums for cultural, educational, and scientific purposes through the existing renewal process, with assurances that a requesl for renewal will be given highest consideration."

What's more, the MOU calls upon the U.S. Government to "establish an appropriate webpage with links to the websites of Greek museums, for the purpose off fostering interchange among peer institutions and other interested parties." This seems in line with the "reciprocity" that Monroe and other museum directors have been seeking.

It remains to be seen whether this is truly the start of productive future collaborations, or merely lip service.

The State Department's summary of the agreement, on its website, is here. The full text of the new Memorandum of Understanding is here. A very detailed list of the types of objects covered under the new agreement, published Dec. 1 in the Federal Register, is here.

Wall text about Moshe Safdie at the inaugural installation of Crystal Bridges

As I mentioned in my previous post, Moshe Safdie, the Haifa-born, Montreal-bred architect (now based in Boston and Jerusalem) is on a roll in this country, having recently completed not only the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, but also the widely admired Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Kansas City, and the United States Institute of Peace. The latter, on the Mall in Washington, DC, was panned (unjustifiably, in my view) by Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott (who later penned both ambivalent and positive assessments of Crystal Bridges, on two successive days more than two months ago, when the project was still incomplete).

I haven't yet made it to the Kauffman Center, but I did recently visit and photograph the USIP in Washington, finding it engagingly airy and uplifting. Safdie has stated that he wants his buildings, in general, to be "aspirational"---a quality particularly fitting for the headquarters of an organization devoted to peaceful resolution of international conflict.

Here is a view of the USIP's striking exterior, embodying both solidity and transparency, as well as a look at the interior of its soaring atrium (with offices at the right in that photo):


United States Institute of Peace


United States Institute of Peace

Like the two other recent additions to Safdie's American oeuvre, Crystal Bridges is a "wow" building from the outside. But it is something of a problematic puzzle on the inside. I have already discussed (in previous video commentary), my strong misgivings about the most vexing space---the glass-walled suspension-bridge pavilion for early 20th-century art.

Here's another look at one of the two unlovely gallery boxes that are incongruously plunked down in the center of that pavilion, shielding the art from the potentially damaging sunlight that enters through long expanses of glass. The exterior created a serious problem for which the architect contrived an inelegant solution:



Whatever its shortcomings as a home for art, this pavilion undeniably casts a magical spell at night:



When I initially set foot inside the museum, I felt entranced by the mesmerizing aura created by Safdie's awe-inspiring spaces, with their dramatic wood-beamed ceilings and off-kilter angles. But these cavernous volumes are chopped up by a maze of walls---a not entirely successful attempt to tame the architectural beast by subdividing the space with some art-friendly right angles:


The first gallery in Celebrating the American Spirit---Crystal Bridges' chronological installation of its permanent collection

As I immersed myself in the galleries and their contents over the course of two days, I began to appreciate how much work the curators had cut out for them during the installation. Their task (complicated by the fact that they didn't have the art on premises until a couple of months prior to the opening) was to adapt a collection of predominantly small-to-medium sized pictures to pavilions that will never be described as "well-proportioned"---critical shorthand for art-friendly spaces.

"I initially felt that I was going to have the fight the architecture," admitted American art curator Kevin Murphy (featured in this CultureGrrl post and video). "I thought that whoever was going to be the curator here was going to have trouble with the curved walls [such as the one on the right side of the above photo]. But we all cracked the code....Once I felt I had figured it out, I liked having different types of spaces to work with."

"What originally seemed to be challenges turned out to be opportunities," agreed Matt Dawson, the museum's deputy director for art and education....It turned out to be no problem to put a flat painting on a curved wall. But the bigger problem, conceptually, was, 'What do you do with a curved wall?' The long views that you get on those curved walls are unique opportunities that you do not normally experience in museums....You get to see long adjacencies of 40 works on one wall, so you get to tell those long stories."

While they allow for grand vistas, those long, curved walls also impel you to march along their full arc, then double back to take in the works that you had initially passed by, in the squared-off interior spaces. This is a sometimes disjointed, confusing journey. But, for the most part, the curators made it work, by gathering pieces that resonate with each other, stylistically or thematically, within the walled-off sections.

The interior walls should have been temporary, to allow flexibility for different configurations in future installations. But most of these walls won't move: They permanently house elements of the building's climate-control system, as evidenced by the vents at the base:



The long wall on one side of the pavilion is not only curved, but also considerably taller than the flat wall on the opposite side. The curators finessed this by having the top of the tall wall painted a darker shade, to visually "reduce" its height to the level of the interior walls. You can see this attempted illusion on the blue wall below:



In a long phone conversation I had with Moshe Safdie shortly after my visit last May to Crystal Bridges' construction site, he told me this: "I'm not at peace with the dark [painted] bands. I would have done it differently. That's a curatorial decision. If there was an issue of the scale of the paintings, I would have introduced some kind of a molding on the wall that zoned it, rather than changing the color."

Here's how he did it (with both molding and color) in the more classic spaces of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (which I visited last summer):



The sloping ceilings and the resulting different-height walls in Crystal Bridges' galleries made it difficult to light the artworks appropriately and evenly. As Murphy noted, "Some lights have a throw of 40 feet and some have a throw of 12 feet....What lenses and what intensity of bulbs to use varies." These complications, he said, weren't entirely resolved "until very late. We had a lot of options. And we didn't have a lighting designer."

Safdie expressed some dissatisfaction with the decision by museum officials to scotch his initial plans, as publicized in a previous Crystal Bridges press release, to include skylights in every gallery. After Don Bacigalupi became the museum's director (October 2009), "there were different views," Safdie told me, "and the skylights were removed" before they were ever built. Eschewing skylights permitted the curators to install light-sensitive works-on-paper in close proximity to the paintings.

Skylights did, however, survive (very heavily scrimmed) in the suspension-bridge gallery for early 20th-century art:



Perhaps things might have gone more smoothly (and turned out somewhat differently) had the current curatorial team been involved during the design phase, providing informed input and monitoring the progress. But with the exception of founding curator Chris Crosman, today's curatorial team came on board less than a year ago. Bacigalupi replaced longtime director Bob Workman as director after construction was already well underway.

Another late change, Safdie said, was relocating the planned special exhibition space from the pavilion now devoted to the permanent collection's 20th- and 21st-century art to the space below, marred by two bulky columns. (The second pillar is further down the gallery, directly behind the one shown.) This space now houses Wonder World, a quirky, sometimes gimmicky assortment of works from the museum's contemporary collection:


.
Here's one gimmick that the organizers could not have anticipated---a visitor who appears to be scrutinizing his double!


Evan Penny (b. 1953), "Old Self: Portrait of the Artist as He Will (Not) Be. Variation #2," 2010

Visitors to Crystal Bridges will have an opportunity to appreciate the full range of its architect's oeuvre when the traveling exhibition, Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie, arrives at the museum (dates to be determined---possibly fall 2012 or the following year).

Given Safdie's long, extensive experience with projects of enormous size and scope (not to mention my complete lack of engineering expertise), I'll have to take on faith the architect's unequivocal assertions to me that the project's weir system can handle any amount of torrential rains, and that the idiosyncratically designed suspension bridges (hung from their roofs, not, as is customary, from their bases) will withstand even the tornados that sometimes afflict the region.

And this just in:

Crystal Bridges has announced a planned four-year exhibition collaboration with the High Museum, the Louvre and the Terra Foundation for American Art. The first resulting installation, "American Encounters: Thomas Cole and the Narrative Landscape," will be on view May 12-Aug. 13 at Crystal Bridges, after which it travels east to the High in Atlanta (Sept. 22-Jan. 3). This display (with a different title) premieres at the Louvre on Jan. 14, when the Paris museum will host a symposium of experts from the four cooperating organizations.

This dossier show consists of only four Coles, as well as an Asher B. Durand (not Crystal Bridges' iconic "Kindred Spirits," which depicts Cole). The Louvre will contribute a work by Pierre-Antoine Patel the Younger.

[NOTE: I had previously stated that I would publish a two-part post on Crystal Bridges' architecture, but decided, instead, to do this as a single post.]

All photos by Lee Rosenbaum

The friendly driver who took me to Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport.
Do major national art and architecture critics know the way to XNA?

In a form of reverse snobbery, some commentators (including the author of the BlogBack below) from the region surrounding the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas have periodically charged big-city art critics with condescending to their communities' cultural achievements or, even worse, regarding their locale as unworthy of great art.

I was once directly accused of "talking down" to Arkansans.

But as CultureGrrl readers know, I'm an equal-opportunity debunker: I spare no region of the country, least of all the big cultural centers. My criticisms of (as well as my considerable admiration for) Crystal Bridges have nothing to do with geographical considerations, except for my observation that Alice Walton's museum is a great new resource for an under-served area.

That said, I do believe that big-city parochialism is at play in the relative paucity of in-depth commentary by top critics about the completed museum. Crystal Bridges is this country's most ambitious campus for the visual arts to be established since the Getty Trust opened its Los Angeles complex some 14 years ago. If this project had appeared in New York or another major metropolis, all of the top art and architecture critics would have been swarming all over it.

Particularly surprising to me is the failure of Michael Kimmelman, the NY Times' recently appointed architecture critic (and for many years its chief art critic), to find his way in a timely fashion to the Ozarks. Thus far, he seems much more interested in urbanism than in architecture, spending much of the time reacquainting himself with his native city (after an extended sojourn in Europe), with companionable New York city-planning experts as his guides---first Amanda Burden; and now (in Sunday's "Arts & Leisure" section) Alexander Garvin.

But wait a minute! Has Michael already had enough of New York? He is now off to Paris. (I guess writing not one but two articles about my native borough, the Bronx, finally got to him.)

I applaud Kimmelman for broadening the Times' architectural purview beyond starchitecture. But someone in his position cannot properly ignore major new U.S. projects by big names. The architect of Crystal Bridges, Moshe Safdie, has not been a critics' darling. But he's currently on a roll in this country, and attention needs to be paid.

Why did Safdie's widely admired Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City rate only a music critic's review in the Times? When the Diller Scofidio + Renfro re-do of Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall opened in New York in 2009, Kimmelman's predecessor, Nicolai Ouroussoff, wasn't content to cede the field to the music specialists.

I assume that Michael and other major art and architecture critics will find their way to Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport eventually. But I'm surprised at the general lack of alacrity in covering such a major architectural and cultural event. So far there have been many previews; very few thoughtful reviews.

My fellow scribes still have a last chance to scoop me, at least in part: Although I've got my architecture review of Alice's Palace ready to post, I'll content myself today with publishing a BlogBack by a Floridian CultureGrrl reader (who requested anonymity). A retired reporter and government worker, she has "no artworld connection, just a background of art history and museum-going."

To encourage me to share my architectural musings (perhaps tomorrow), I hope you'll join CultureGrrl Repeat Donor 182 from New York, a retroactive enabler of my Bender in Bentonville. (I now need only $100 in additional donations to defray last month's hotel and car expenses.)

In the meantime, here's that anonymous BlogBack:

I'm enjoying your analysis of the costs [my links, not hers] of the new museum in Arkansas. But I'm wondering also why this museum has been the target of so much sneering and snide commenting by establishment writers---and your blog carries a thinly veiled disapproval as well, possibly inspired by your review of tax returns.

From the announced beginning of this project it's been damned with faint praise (or praised with faint damns) by so many critics, causing me to conclude that what they really mean is that all meaningful art collections should be housed only on either coast, preferably in New York City, or maybe in Chicago.

No one has come out and said this exactly, but if you skim the newspaper and magazine articles and blogs like yours over the last few years, perhaps you will note this supercilious tone. Stifled sneers. Or am I being thin-skinned?

Sixth Annual Art Basel Miami Sour Grapes Soufflé

I failed this year to reprise my annual cynical Art Basel Miami Sour Grapes Soufflé, reserving my curdled commentary for the serious art-market mess back home.

But critic Lance Esplund, who actually did make it to last week's fair, today more than made up for my delinquency with his pungent report for Bloomberg that could not be more scathing (or more titilating). It included a novel (or navel) market indicator, which Esplund probably could not have published in a family newspaper. Bloomberg, on the other hand, loves inserting sex into its online cultural headlines, as evidenced by today's Miami dispatch. Web surfers, after all, notoriously hit on sex-related language (i.e., "hookers").

Here's Lance's seductive art-market signal:

Perhaps in Miami, sex sells better than art; or maybe they're somehow related. Rumor has it that the success of ABMB [Art Basel Miami Beach]  is in direct proportion to the number of prostitutes that decorate certain hotel lobbies.

We trust that Lance kept his reportorial distance at all times. On a more serious note, Esplund reports:

You would have to be completely blasted not to sense the air of unease tormenting the place as dark little Euro bulletins [my link, not Lance's] burst through the sunshine...Word on the street...was that most six- and seven-figure works idled on dealers' floors....

The overall tone of the fair---where European visitors were fewer than last year and sales were weaker---was that the end [...of the fair? ...of the art-market recovery?] might not be far off.

Notwithstanding Lance's deflating commentary, the fair's organizers, in their press release wrap-up (which gave no sales figures), maintained that "many galleries report[ed] strong sales" and "high-quality work remains in strong demand, with steady sales throughout the week."

A roster of dealers contributed upbeat comments to the post-fair press release, including Lucy Mitchell-Innes, president of the Art Dealers Association of America and director of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, who marveled that "many more women collectors [are] making their own independent collecting decisions."

Women making decisions about art purchases? This doesn't strike me as 21st-century news, let alone something to get excited about.

Patricia Cohen

I was more than a little surprised by Patricia Cohen's NY Times scoop in Thursday's paper (online Wednesday) about the precipitous, unceremonious shuttering of the venerable Knoedler & Co. gallery, New York, which terminated its 165-year run with this terse notice.

On Saturday, we learned how Cohen most likely got her scoop: She was working on a lengthy, far more astonishing report about an investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York into "whether a parade of paintings and drawings, sold for years by some of New York's most elite art dealers as the work of Modernist masters like Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, actually consists of expert forgeries." Most of the pictures at issue, according to Cohen's article, "came to market though a little-known art dealer from Long Island, Glafira Rosales."

"The Knoedler gallery," Cohen wrote, "has not been implicated in the investigation. But on Friday a London collector, Pierre Lagrange, who bought one of the works, "Untitled 1950" by Pollock, for $17 million in 2007, sued the gallery and Ms. [Ann] Freedman [Knoedler's former president], contending that it is a forgery. His forensic analysis found that two paints in the work had not been invented until after Pollock's death, the suit said."

Cohen had previously written about a monetary settlement to an Irish gallery, Killala Fine Art, which had bought another of the suspect paintings from Julian Weissman, a dealer who had previously worked for Knoedler. Killala sued to get back what it had spent for a purported Robert Motherwell that the Dedalus Foundation now deems to be a forgery. Established by Motherwell in 1981, that foundation owns the copyright on his works and is the sponsor of a forthcoming Motherwell catalogue raisonné.

What are the object lessons to be learned from this cautionary, still unfolding tale of art transactions gone bad? First and foremost, it's a warning to dealers that they must insist on receiving verifiable, convincing information about provenance for works that otherwise lack clear, detailed documentation (i.e., a credible history of exhibitions and/or publications).

Collectors can't always get complete provenance information, because sellers sometimes insist on anonymity. But a dealer, who must stand behind what he sells to collectors and other non-merchants, should require proof from those who sell or consign to the gallery that a work said to be by a particular artist really is by that artist. Under New York State's Arts & Cultural Affairs Law, an art merchant's statement to non-merchants (i.e., collectors) about authorship "creates an express warranty" of authorship.

If the seller or consignor claims to have a cache of previously unrecorded works that has mysteriously surfaced (as appears to have been the case with the Rosales trove), the dealer should, at the very least, seek the opinions of other top experts (which Knoedler apparently did with the Motherwells) and, if relevant, obtain results from scientific testing (as Lagrange said he had done before filing his lawsuit against Knoedler).

In his Saturday report on Lagrange's lawsuit, Philip Boroff of Bloomberg got this comment on the suit from Kathleen Blomquist, a Knoedler spokeswoman: "The allegations of misrepresentation are completely baseless." Blomquist also "said the gallery is still reviewing the complaint, and it isn't related to the closing [of Knoedler]," Boroff reported.

Nevertheless, the closing was so unexpected and sudden that two days later, the NY Times carried an ad that had been placed by Knoedler (as part of the full-page spread devoted to members of the Art Dealers Association of America), promoting its Charles Simonds exhibition "thru [sic] January 14. Catalogue with essay by Arthur C. Danto."

The full text of the settlement agreement regarding the purported Motherwell bought by Killala Fine Art is here. I'll update this post with a link to the complaint filed by Lagrange, once it appears on the U.S. District Court's website.

Gary Tinterow, incoming director, Houston Museum of Fine Arts

The center of gravity for consummate U.S. art museum professionals is shifting towards Texas: Max Anderson to to the directorship of the Dallas Museum of Art; George Shackelford to the senior deputy directorship of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; and now the just announced appointment of Gary Tinterow, 58, to the directorship of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, effective early next year. He succeeds long-time director Peter Marzio, who died a year ago.
 
In 2004, Tinterow stepped up from his 20-year European paintings curatorship at the Met to become curator in charge of the new department of 19th-Century, Modern and Contemporary Art. He became that department's chairman in 2008. He's a curator's curator, having been one of the prime movers in founding the Association of Art Museum Curators, becoming its first president in 2001.

It's worth noting that Philippe de Montebello went from the Metropolitan Museum to the directorship of the Houston MFA, before returning to the Met and (soon after) becoming its director. But that's an unlikely trajectory for Tinterow: Tom Campbell, who bested Gary for the Met's top post, is likely destined for a long, fruitful tenure. Tom now has very big shoes to fill in finding Gary's replacement (perhaps splitting the job to give a separate porfolio for modern and contemporary art, which many---myself included---believe should be under separate jurisdictions).

Here's what I said on CultureGrrl about Gary, when he became an also-ran for the Met's directorship (as did Ian Wardropper, now director at the Frick):

The museum's de facto curatorial leader is second to none in what he does best---organizing superb shows of 19th-century European painting. In the past year, he has outdone himself, with back-to-back bravura outings devoted to Courbet and Turner (organized, in both cases, in concert with colleagues from two other museums). These were were brilliantly elucidated, beautifully installed revelations of the depth and breadth of these major artists' oeuvre---so perfectly conceived and executed that I felt privileged to experience them...

When I think of the shows at the Met that have most strongly engaged me, Tinterow's, time and again, rise to the top.

As Carol Vogel wrote in her comprehensive NY Times article on the appointment and the Houston MFA's expansion plans, moving to Houston will be a homecoming for Tinterow, who "grew up there before graduating from Brandeis University and then going to Harvard for a graduate degree in fine art."  Tinterow once told me that one of his Texas relatives was the late Ann Richards, the feisty former Governor of that state.

Gary is quite feisty himself, as you'll see in the CultureGrrl Video, below, from the press preview for the Met's current Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe, an exhibition (to Jan. 2) devoted to the portion of Alfred Stieglitz's collection of American and European modernists that was donated to the Met by his widow, the artist Georgia O'Keeffe. (At Tinterow's right is Lisa Messinger, the show's curator.)

The Picasso charcoal that you'll hear Gary describe as "probably the greatest Cubist drawing that exists" is here:


Picasso, "Standing Female Nude," 1910

The show and its accompanying catalogue (which Gary humorously refers to in the video) should serve as object lessons to Fisk University on why it should fully retain, not partially monetize, O'Keeffe's important benefaction. If it's important to the Met, it should be important to Fisk.

Among the many works promised to Crystal Bridges by Alice Walton, but not yet given: John Singer Sargent, "Under the Willows," 1887

In my previous post about the megabucks finances of Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art---gleaned from the information provided in the 990-PF tax returns of 2005-2010, (the last of which is not yet online)---I mentioned that expenses totaling $277.64 million for "art acquisitions" were reported for 2005-2008. But in the subsequent two years, instead of a category for "art acquisitions," there was a cryptic new listing---"museum procurement," totaling $167.8 million.

When I asked this week whether that money had been spent to "procure" art, Laura Jacobs, new to her role as Crystal Bridges' director of communications, initially stonewalled:

We're choosing not to address this more specifically.

I then deployed my most useful, least ingratiating journalistic tactic---persistence. It elicited this:

To help you understand our choice for not addressing your questions more specifically, as a matter of policy, we do not disclose the purchase price or fair market value of artwork [emphasis added].

Today, this hit my inbox:

The line item for procurement is the total amount for gifts and purchases [emphasis added] of art for the year.

Gifts??? This item is clearly labeled, "Museum Procurement Expense," and it falls under the broader rubric of "Other Expenses." If Crystal Bridges' tax return has indeed classified "gifts" under "expenses" (which I strongly doubt), it's done so in error. Seeking further clarification, I'll update here.

Assuming (as seems likely) that "museum procurement" does indeed mean "outlays for art," Crystal Bridges' pre-2011 art purchases would total $445.44 million. Notwithstanding the msueum's reticence, it is, in fact, common practice for museums to list in their annual reports the total annual amount spent on art acquisitions. The Metropolitan Museum, for example, reports (P. 57) that it spent $36.56 million to purchase art during the 2010-11 fiscal year (ending June 30).

When Crystal Bridges' 2010 tax return finally goes online, you'll be able to see that the museum did (notwithstanding what Jacobs told me about "policy") report the fair market value of two artworks---a Theodoros Stamos and an Alfred Maurer---that were given to it by non-Walton donors (identified on the return by name). Museums, for good reason, do not customarily get involved in valuations of donated works, let alone report those values on their tax returns. These valuations (and the validity thereof) are between the donor and the IRS.

The nearly half-billion dollars in art expenditures by Crystal Bridges do not include 2011 purchases, nor do they include acquisitions made privately by Alice Walton, who still owns (as "promised gifts") about 30% of the 1,000-plus works that are counted as part of the museum's collection.

David Houston, the museum's curatorial director, told me that the works still owned by Walton are not coming as fractional gifts. There is as yet no schedule for their transfer, he said, but they are likely to come as both gifts and bequests.

Houston added:

The analysis of the collection, the growth of the collection with our endowment funds, and relationship to bequest is something that we really need to analyze. There's no answer that they'll come in this year or that they'll come all together at a certain point. I think what we'll see is that this will evolve over time, as we develop a collection strategy. There are documents but they're fluid things that will change over time.

How sure is the museum that Walton's "promised gifts" (not identified as such on gallery labels) will eventually become part of the museum's permanent holdings? Houston told me this:

With promised gifts, you're always relying on an element of trust and verbal agreement. A promised gift is always a complex thing, because you have the needs and concerns of the donor; you have institutional issues.

In the case where the donor is a founder, it's much more clear and easy and simple, with mutual interest being shared. I've worked with a whole variety of gifts in the past, and sometimes, if you're dealng with heirs [Walton has no children] and you don't have that direct link, it gets to be dicey. The question is a legitimate one but, first of all, there's a strong relationship with a single founder and the founder is the chair of the board.

Crystal Bridges' outlays for art acquisitions may soon include the $30 million that the museum hopes to spend for a half-share in Fisk University's Stieglitz Collection. As I reported yesterday, Fisk has just received a favorable court ruling (pending possible appeal) regarding its proposed violation of donor Georgia O'Keeffe's written no-sale stipulation for the collection.

However one feels about this collection-sharing gambit, it's clear that some works in O'Keeffe's 101-object benefaction have no business at Crystal Bridges: As far as I can tell, no one has discussed the fact that these holdings includes numerous pieces of African and European art that fall completely outside the scope of Crystal Bridges' American-art focus.

Here's the statement released today by Crystal Bridges, regarding the Tennessee Court of Appeals' Tuesday ruling green-lighting the Fisk deal:

We are pleased that the Court's decision has made it possible for Fisk University and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to share ownership of the Stieglitz Collection. As the details of the ruling are being finalized in Tennessee, we welcome the opportunity to work with both the Tennessee Attorney General and the Chancery Court.

"Sharing this resource allows diverse audiences in Tennessee and Arkansas and the nation to engage with remarkable works of art and ensures that the collection will remain intact for generations to come," said Don Bacigalupi, executive director, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

While you await my two-part analysis (coming next week) of Crystal Bridges' architecture (Where is Michael Kimmelman when the NY Times really needs him?), I'd like to remind you that my "Bender in Bentonville" challenge is still $140 short of my goal to defray hotel and taxi expenses for my recent visit.

Now that you've visited Arkansas with me, please take a moment to visit my middle column. You won't need a GPS to find the "DONATE" button. A few fractional gifts will (retroactively) get me there.