Monday news and notes

Hirshhorn curator Kerry Brougher is a busy guy. (You know him most recently as the organizer of Open City.) Brougher is now working on two shows: the Gwangju Biennial, of which he is co-curator, and a museum exhibit that will examine the relationship between art and music. Titled "Visual Music," it will travel to MOCA LA in February, 2005. The Hirshhorn isn’t sharing any details (!?), so we don't know who's in the show or when it will be up in DC.

Regarding today's item about The Art Newspaper's attendance list: Writer Emma Beatty plays up (and so does ArtForum) this detail: "[O]ur survey of exhibition attendance in 2003 reveals a decline in the number of visitors to museum shows on both sides of the Atlantic." Actually, no, it doesn't. What about institutions that didn't reply? Did the same insitutions that replied last year reply this year? (If not, you can't compare the two lists and make the statement they made.) Were there fewer total visitors or just fewer visitors to the blockbusters and special exhibits traced by The Art Newspaper? How did their survey take into account the recent run of permanent collection shows at major museums? It's a fun list, but it's hardly a scientific or statistically significant report. TAN (and other publications that link to them) should be a little more upfront about the limitations of TAN's method and what their list doesn't reveal.

Would you believe that there hasn’t been a Jasper Johns show in Los Angeles in 20 years? A show of Johns’ works with numbers is up at LACMA and the LAT’s Christopher Knight takes a good look here (with jump here). My favorites are 5 (which reminds me of Demuth’s portrait of William Carlos Williams) and 8, with its visually punny reference to figure 8’s.

NYT chief critic Michael Kimmelman is usually one of the clearest, most direct critics around. Sometimes this manifests itself in hyper-gushy reviews. Sometimes, as on Sunday, it results in a fine essay. Read his piece comparing the process that gave us Santiago Calatrava’s PATH station and the process that resulted in the WTC memorial design selection.

AJ'er Terry Teachout on why the web is the place where so much of the interesting writing about art is happening. He's right. Related proof: This month's five featured blogs up in the blogroll on the right.

Special exhibitions are "retail opportunities." Chicago Tribune art critic Alan Artner talks with the new head of the Art Institute of Chicago, James Cuno. (Username: ajreader; Password: access) It's long but Cuno is an excellent counterpoint to the Thomas Krenses of the world. Print it out and read the whole thing.