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It's too soon to "review" the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, because it's still a work-in-progress: Construction continues and few objects have been installed, except on the ground floor, where relatively minor but instructive archaeological finds unearthed during excavation for the museum are ingeniously and attractively arrayed in an educational gallery targeted to children.

Still, Bernard Tschumi's architecture is almost ready for its close-up, so a CultureGrrl photo essay is in order.

My impressions, like those of several commentators who made a previous press trip, were mostly favorable. But I was conducted on a quick, crowded tour, without much time to experience and contemplate the interiors, so these are first takes. A museum without its objects is just a shell. How the impressively monumental spaces will work as exhibition galleries is still an open question. How the bathrooms work as plumbing spaces is, however, already known. Let's just say: They'd better be a work-in-progress!

Speaking of the installation of objects---I received a cryptic note from someone intimately involved in creating the new museum, thanking me for my "thoughtful" criticism of the plan to install faithful copies of the missing Parthenon marbles alongside authentic slabs and suggesting that a change might still be possible: "We are working on it!"

What a relief! (Pun intended...of course.)

Here's what I saw:

Asher B. Durand, "Kindred Spirits," Crystal Bridges Museum, sold by NY Public Library

We all remember when the NY Public Library justified its 2005 sales of important paintings, including Asher B. Durand's iconic "Kindred Spirits" (above), on the grounds that exhibiting art was not part of its core mission as a library.

Now it has discovered a pursuit more closely tied to its mission---being a video-game parlor.

In a NY Times article on Saturday, we learned that the grand lobby of the library's venerable main headquarters on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street was given over on Friday afternoon to "three big screens and throngs of exuberant players." Local library branches are also hosting video game events, and the NYPL has been acquiring these games for its collections. Let's just hope this is not where the art-sale proceeds are going.

Mission-driven library officials feel obligated to try to justify the "Game On" initiative on more grounds than merely luring kids into the building. According to the NYPL's press release:

In the game world, players make their own discoveries and apply what they learn to new contexts.

Games are a mode of active engagement. They encourage experimentation and risk-taking, and they view the process of solving a problem as important as finding the answer.

Maybe so. But my experiece as the mother of an earlier-generation video-game enthusiast, who cut his teeth on "Super Mario" and graduated to "Doom," is that these addictive entertainments suck time from pursuits that libraries formerly regarded as their raisons d''être---scholarship and intellectual growth.

Or, to put it more simply---Paul, enough "Doom." Go do your homework!

"Super Smash Bros. Brawl" may lure boys into the library (no girls graced the NY Times photo of last Friday's event), but as the gamers' comments to the Times' Seth Schiesel indicate, it's unlikely to promote a love of the values and pursuits that the institution has traditionally stood for. To pander is not to edify. Using populist programming to draw new audiences to a library (or to a museum, for that matter) does not mean that those visitors will sample the greater riches that the institution has to offer.

I've got nothing against these diversions as a way to blow off steam. Come to think of it, the library could be performing a useful service: Parents could try to limit their kids' gaming to the library, designating the home as a book-filled, video game-free zone.

Good luck with that.

As expected, Judge Stanley Ott of Montgomery County Orphans' Court did not rule from the bench today on whether the Friends of the Barnes and/or Montgomery County would be granted standing to seek a reconsideration of the judge's decision that gave permission for the Barnes Foundation to move to Philadelphia.

This just in from Carolyn Carluccio, the attorney for the county who argued for reconsideration at today's hearing:

I thought it went extremely well for the County. We were able to present our arguments without being silenced by the [Barnes] Trustees on standing grounds. Our arguments were strong and well received. The Judge was contemplative and attentive during the argument. He appeared to have taken in every word. He promised that he will render a written decision in an expeditious manner.

So he listened. Let's hope he heard.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has posted a short report on the hearing. Derrick Nunnally quotes Ralph Wellington, an attorney for the Barnes:

These offers [by the county, to help keep the Barnes in Merion] may make good press, and they may make good politics, but granting either of their petitions would make very bad law.

Catalogue for the © MURAKAMI exhibition

When I contacted the always helpful Sally Williams of the Brooklyn Museum's press office about a month ago, she informed me that no decision had yet been made as to whether Brooklyn's version of the Murakami show (organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, opening Apr. 5 in Brooklyn) would include a boutique for products designed by the artist in collaboration with Louis Vuitton.

Today, this press release hit my inbox:

The Brooklyn Museum announced today the exhibition of a fully operational Louis Vuitton store within and as part of © MURAKAMI....Takashi Murakami states, "The shop project is not a part of the exhibition; rather it is the heart of the exhibition itself. It holds at once the aspects that fuse, reunite, and then recombine the concept of the readymade. The Louis Vuitton project brings to life a wonderful new world."

Is he putting us on? I wouldn't be surprised if Brooklyn has another Saatchi problem on its hands---the problematic involvement, in too many aspects of the show, of a financially self-interested source of objects (Vuitton). The product-hyping language of today's press release is already disturbing, taking the synergy of art and commerce too far:

Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman comments, "We are delighted that Louis Vuitton will participate in the exhibition. The groundbreaking inclusion of its store within the context of the retrospective has created a new paradigm [calling Eli Broad?] in its exemplification of Takashi Murakami's artistic process that includes low-cost unlimited-edition consumer products, as well as luxury goods designed for Louis Vuitton."

....Takashi Murakami gave color and mischief to the Louis Vuitton Monogram by re-creating it in 33 colors on a black or white background. The collaboration between the two creative talents also spawned the Monogram Cherry Blossom line later that year, and the Monogram Cerise pattern in 2005.

"Our collaboration has produced a lot of works, and has been a huge influence and inspiration to many It has been and continues to be a monumental marriage of art & commerce. The ultimate cross-over, one for both the fashion and art history books" comments Marc Jacobs, Artistic Director of Louis Vuitton.

In addition to the operation of the Louis Vuitton store within the exhibition, Louis Vuitton will also generously host the Brooklyn Ball on April 3, 2008. Special creations by Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton will be auctioned during the gala dinner.

Proceeds from that Vuitton auction will benefit the Brooklyn Museum. However, revenues from the on site boutique will not benefit the museum. (Likewise, LA MOCA did not benefit from shop sales.)

As it happens, I just went on yet another fact-finding (not shopping) mission last weekend to the land of outlandishly priced plasticized canvas in my nearby mall. Here's what I discovered this time:

Mock-up of copies (left) of the Parthenon Marbles in the New Acropolis Museum

The planners of the New Acropolis Museum had a brilliant idea for display of the Parthenon Marbles. Then they improved upon it. Now they've ruined it.

What still remains of the original plan is the installation of the sculptural slabs around the outside of a rectangular structure of the same dimensions as the Parthenon, to simulate their original display on the monument. This is truer to their ancient installation than displaying them inside the walls of a traditional museum gallery, as their British-owned counterparts are now arrayed at the British Museum. In the first version of this idea, admonitory voids were to have been left in all the spaces where the British-owned slabs belonged---a startlingly stark demonstration of the disruption that their removal caused to the continuous procession depicted in the fabled frieze.

By last July, when I attended a press lunch in New York about the museum's plans and progress, this concept had evolved into something even more interesting: Dimitris Pandermalis, president of the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, told us that copies of the British-owned marbles would be installed in their proper places, but veiled over with scrims, to insure that there would be no confusion between the originals and the copies. Each veiled slab would appear as "a ghost," as he put it.

As of last October, when some journalists were invited to tour the museum-in-progress, that was still the plan (as described by Nicolai Ouroussoff in the NY Times, here, and Richard Lacayo in his Looking Around blog, here). This would have been a powerful visual polemic for the marbles' return, made all the more forceful by the dramatic view of the Parthenon itself through the gallery's glass wall.

But attendees at last week's "Return of Cultural Objects" conference (where I was an invited speaker), held in the auditorium of the impressively monumental Bernard Tschumi-designed New Acropolis Museum, were shown something very different and, to my mind, most disturbing.

The original Acropolis objects are now on the premises but still, for the most part, not yet unpacked. However, copies of all the marbles now residing in London and Athens have been installed in their correct sequence in the expansive top-floor Parthenon gallery (above). Before the museum opens, according to Pandermalis, they will be replaced by the original Athens marbles and by casts of the British-owned marbles that were given to Greece by Great Britain in the 19th century. There will be no voids (except for marbles that have been irretrievably lost) and no scrims.

By installing the real and the fake on equal footing, the Greek have dropped not only the reproachful veils but also the moral force of their installation.

Pandermalis gave me several reasons for the change, during two visits to the gallery on successive days. The first time, he said the advantage of the more homogeneous installation would be to "give the impression of the rhythm of the frieze." He also observed that some of the original slabs now exist only as fragments, which, he said, would look odd behind scrims.

On the second visit, he told me that the contrast between the flatness of the scrim and the sculptural quality of the authentic marbles would create a disjointed experience for the viewer.

So unless the Greeks change their minds again (as I hope they will), the visitor will see the celebrated icons of world civilization chockablock with plaster blocks. Pandermalis avers that visitors will be able to distinguish between the real and the fake, because the recreations will be whiter and have a different texture. (In the above photo, the whiter marbles in the foreground represent London-owned slabs; the browner ones, further down the wall, represent those retained in Athens.)

I'm not so sure that the average tourist will make these crucial distinctions. What's more, the authentic British marbles are themselves whiter than those in Athens and have a different texture, because the Greek contingent was darkened by overexposure to Athens pollution and the British counterparts were whitened by an infamously harsh scrubbing in the late 1930's.

Even if visitors understand the difference between the real and the fake in the Parthenon gallery, this compromised display subverts the mission of museums as uncompromising champions of the authentic. Forcing the true marbles to fraternize as equals with the false insults their integrity and their majesty.

At the New York press lunch last July, architect Tschumi told us that the goal of the (now abandoned) plan to substitute veiled copies for the missing marbles was to "create a public understanding of the necessity of completing the narrative." To the extent that visitors to the new museum may be satisfied by the display now in play, the Greeks' case that they need the to replace the fake with the real will be seriously undermined.

That is surely not the result they intended.

An early model of Frank Gehry's planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

A kinder, gentler assessment of Tom Krens' reign at the Guggenheim is provided today by James Russell of Bloomberg. Russell has approving words for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (and the rest of the proposed development in the Saadiyat Island Cultural District) and also praises what Krens did in New York:

Before Krens, the New York building was regarded as a curatorial black hole. He and savvy curators have shown that a wide variety of works not only can be displayed well in the space, they can thrive....Krens' view is not for everyone. Yet, at its best, it's amazing how alive his approach to art can be. Returning to the sleepy pre-Krens past is not an option for the Guggenheim. His high-wire act will be an extremely hard one to follow.

It figures that this would come from an architecture critic. Krens was not only adept at convincing others to buy into his out-of-the-box, ultimately unrealized schemes. He was also the perfect creative client, working closely with a variety of architects to coax from them some of their best work. As I wrote here, Krens once proudly showed me a breathtaking model of the now abandoned Guggenheim Rio project, designed by Jean Nouvel, and confided that he wasn't yet satisfied with a tall, silo-shaped structure that was part of the design: Its skin was completely opaque. "I have to tell Jean that I need more transparency here," he then told me.

Somehow the international reputations of architects who worked with Krens, like Nouvel and Zaha Hadid, were significantly burnished, not burned, by the association, even if (as usually happened) the designs remained unbuilt. What other museum director can boast not one but two museum shows displaying models of his (mostly failed) architectural ventures? The second link is to a subsection of the Guggenheim's own current Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective, which includes "designs that have been developed by Thomas Krens [not developed by the architects?] for Guggenheim museums."

As I said yesterday on New York Public Radio, Krens also daringly pushed the envelope in engaging Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda as a breathtaking venue for site-specific installations. These worked brilliantly when overseen by an artist installing a one-person show (as in the current Cai exhibition); not so well when the "intervention" was designed for a broad-ranging exhibition (think Jean Nouvel's paint-it-black concept for "Brazil").

UPDATE: Kate Taylor in today's NY Sun mentions no less than 12 imagined candidates for the Guggenheim directorship. I make it so much easier for search firm Phillips Oppenheim by choosing only one---Michael Govan. But Krens' former protegé is not an "outside of the box" choice, as the Guggenheim Foundation's president, Jennifer Stockman, indicated that she may prefer.

Still, we can all take some comfort from this passage in the Sun's article:

Ms. Stockman said that the board is not looking for someone to expand the museum's global network further. "We want to get back to our mission of being first and foremost an art museum," she said.

Broad-ly Speaking at LACMA

More Eli Broad criticism occurs in Martin Filler's brilliantly titled piece for the latest New York Review of Books (Mar. 20), Broad-Minded Museum. (Why didn't my editors think of that?) A key passage:

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art receives substantial public funds and many of its staff members are civil service employees of Los Angeles County. Thus the parties who acceded to Broad's de facto privatization of a big chunk of LACMA--the cultural equivalent of a leveraged buyout, or taking a public company private--have done a grave disservice to the taxpayers of the county, who, whether they like it or not, will be footing the bill for much of Broad's monument to himself.

Broad's insistence on naming LACMA's new contemporary art facility for himself while withholding gifts from his collection, his initial reluctance (eventually reversed) to allow other donors' names on individual galleries, and the presence of large plaques (above) with color photos of him and his wife at the top-floor and ground-floor entrances of LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum are in stark contrast to the situation at London's Tate Modern, involving its own recently announced major contemporary art benefaction. The galleries containing these gifts are not to be called the Anthony d'Offay Rooms. They are "Artists Rooms."

I do believe that major patrons should be allowed naming opportunities if they want them. But that's it. No further self-aggrandizement, as occurs in the above-pictured plaque extolling Eli's business success and endorsing his "lending library" paradigm for big private collections. Here's the last sentence from this memorial:

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum will ensure that the Broads' vision of making great works of art accessible to a broad [pun intended?] public is institutionalized in one of the country's leading encyclopedic museums.

My hope is that Broad's new "vision"---holding works privately in perpetuity and doling them out in temporary, rotating loans to museums---is institutionalized nowhere else.

Look familiar? Here are two works from Anthony d'Offay's collection, which have twins in Eli Broad's collection:

Damien Hirst, "Away from the Flock," 1995
© Damien Hirst

Robert Therrien, "No Title (Table and Four Chairs)," 2003
© Robert Therrien / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2008

Their collections may have similarities, but you can't have much more of a contrast between art donors' approaches to museums than those embodied by Los Angeles collector Eli Broad and retired London dealer Anthony d'Offay.

Broad wants to lend works from his 1,900-piece collection to public institutions, while retaining control and ownership, personally or through his private foundation. What's more, he wants his "lending library" concept to become a "paradigm" for other mega-collectors who might otherwise donate their works outright to existing institutions or create publicly accessible museums for their own collections.

D'Offay yesterday announced that he will give some 725 contemporary works (including the two above) to the Tate Modern and the National Galleries of Scotland. For this he will be paid £26.5 million, reportedly his cost in purchasing the works, which are now said to be conservatively valued at £125 million.

According to the above-linked London Times article, the British government is also "understood to have written off £14 million in tax as part of the deal."

According to the Tate:

The guiding principle for the creation of Artist Rooms [as d'Offay's gift has been named] is the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists. The collection of 725 works comprises 50 rooms by 25 artists and includes major bodies of work by seminal figures such as Diane Arbus, Joseph Beuys, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol. These are accompanied by an additional ten works by seven artists. Many of the rooms were conceived as specific installations by the artists themselves and have been assembled so that the work of important post-war artists can be seen and appreciated in depth.

You can go here on the Tate's website and click on artists' names to see what those rooms may contain. The press release is here.

"Now," writes Bloomberg's Martin Gayford, "we begin to understand why Tate Modern needs its extension."

Broad would undoubtedly argue that his approach is a better financial deal for museums, which don't have to pay to acquire the works or to store them when they're not on display. He is also justifiably disturbed by many museums' focus on temporary exhibitions, which consume so much gallery space that major works from permanent collections are usually off view.

Having recently marveled at the current Collecting Collections exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, I can well understand how Broad, the founding chairman of that museum, feels. At LA MoCA's lively, eclectic show (which out-dueled the Broad-centric display at the Los Angeles County Museum's new Broad Museum of Contemporary Art), I gazed appreciatively at major Rothkos, Klines and Rauschenbergs that came to LA MoCA from the Panza Collection, as well as a top-notch Pollock from the Schreiber Collection. Most of the time, though, those works are preempted by a robust temporary exhibition program.

This understandably rankles Broad, who negotiated with the Panzas in the early 1980s, nabbing the collection "very inexpensively---$11 million over seven years, without interest. It's probably worth $1 billion today."

The solution to the problem of hidden masterworks should be a nationwide cooperative effort among museums for collegial collection sharing. That Pollock should never be off view. If Los Angeles can't show it, Minneapolis should get it on loan.

What we don't need is major collectors' keeping their troves under private control in perpetuity. Anyone who believes in museums, as benefactor Broad undoubtedly does, knows the importance of a permanent collection that visitors, curators and scholars can get to know and understand over time, because it is readily and consistently accessible to the public and to the experts.

In addition, private stewardship is often not as professionally responsible as public stewardship. Broad himself revealed to me that he needs to do something about the climate control for some of his collection, which is not up to museum standards.

And let's not forget the serious concern that if a museum gives over its space to a large number of works from a single collector, that art may later be sent to market, its prices significantly enhanced by the museum's imprimatur.

Broad reiterated to me, during our conversation, his oft-stated promise that he, his foundation and the future officials of his foundation after his death would never sell. But as Christopher Knight points out in his article on the Broad Collection in yesterday's LA Times, "'Always' is a long time."

Broad did concede that, theoretically, the works could be sold. We just have to trust his pledge. Then again, isn't he the one who once stated that he would donate much of his collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art?

Who knows what the future may bring?

Thomas Krens

Here's what I said today on WNYC, as well as a few additional comments:

I have no idea if he wants it, but, as I said on the radio, I think Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art would be the ideal next director of the Guggenheim. True, he's been at his current post for less than two years, but job-hopping is not unheard of in the museum world.

My guess is that Govan's heart is in New York and in the contemporary artworld. Maybe he can forge a Guggenheim relationship with a new Dia "satellite" in Manhattan. This could be a win-win.

And if he leaves Los Angeles, he can stop taking a crash course on antiquities issues at the knee of the Getty Museum's director, Michael Brand. Govan's been picking Brand's brains ever since LACMA was raided by the feds, looking for information about Ban Chiang artifacts from Thailand.

But back to the Guggenheim: I believe, or at least hope, that there will be a return to sanity---core mission, core collection, core curatorial expertise. And I think that with the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (if it actually happens) we will have seen the last of the Global Guggenheim satellites. There also needs to be a return to financial sanity, relying for economic support on a core base of stable friends of the museum, rather than the next new rich guy on the block, looking for a quick fix of cultural and social cachet.

You can read the Guggenheim's press release about Krens' imminent departure here. Here's my previous CultureGrrl critique of Krens' globe-trotting ways. And here's my 2002 Wall Street Journal critique of the Guggenheim's then shaky finances.

UPDATE: Why did they make me get up SO EARLY? Now I'm scheduled to be on at about 8:35 a.m....subject, of course, to change. By then I should be completely caffeinated.

Late notice to you, because it was late notice to me:

If all goes according to plan, I'll be on New York Public Radio (WNYC) today (Thursday) after 7 a.m., commenting on the imminent departure of Thomas Krens from the directorship of the Guggenheim Foundation. You can hear me at 93.9 FM. Or you can listen online here. I will, as usual, post the podcast on CultureGrrl, when it's available.

I should sound very sleepy, because I'm up way too late.