August 2005 Archives

Malcolm Rogers tells the Boston Globe that his mission is to bring new visitors to the MFA Boston. That's a fancy way of saying he wants to increase attendance. (Related: More today from the Globe's Geoff Edgers on the Koch show. It's a doozy.)

There's an essay I'd like to write about the misguided evangelism that museum-types have about increasing attendance (when I was a kid, my parents had a similar evangelism about making me eat spinach). That will have to wait. For now, let's look at how important attendance isn't to the MFA's bottom line.

In the most recent tax filing I have, MFA took in $4 million in admissions charges in FY 2002 (which ended in June, 2003). MFA's total budget for the year was $99 million. So admissions charges made up only four percent of MFA's budget. Increasing them 25 percent -- which would be a huge spike -- would only bump that to five percent of the MFA's budget. (True: It's likely that some of MFA's grants are tied to attendance numbers. I'll probably look into this in the not-too-distant future. But I doubt that would be more than another one percent or so.)

So Malcolm Rogers' attendance-lust is not about revenue and making ends meet. And it is not about bringing great art to Bostonians who don't get to see it -- as I've noted before, if he cared about that he wouldn't be doing this. Maybe he just likes being the center of attention and hanging out with wealthy yacht owners. And maybe, like Barry Munitz, he's using his museum to do it.

No new posts until Tuesday. Enjoy Labor Day weekend.

In today's Boston Globe, Geoff Edgers writes about MFA Boston director Malcolm Rogers latest absurdity: Rogers has given a vanity show to a local collector and he's put the collector's yachts on the MFA's front lawn (I'm serious -- click on the link and see). The show also features paintings and the gun that killed Jesse James in their galleries. The exhibition is about nothing than pumping an ego, milking a donor. It is a giant slurp job.

Part of the fun of reading Edgers' story was reading Rogers' latest explanations for his behavior. I'm among the people Edgers talked with for the story and we talked for a good long time. I can't help but notice he found no one who was willing to defend Rogers' show.

In an effort to provide a public service, here's a MANalysis of Rogers' quotes:

MANalysis: Rogers is saying that he can do no wrong unless something he does results in the termination of museums. So as long as he's not personally dynamiting the MFA or another museum, he's on firm ground.

Rogers: Rogers says that he came up with the idea for a Koch exhibition, the size of which grew as Koch grew more enthusiastic. The boats were Koch's idea, says Rogers. ''He said, 'Would you like to have boats?' I said, 'You know I would. They're a fabulous promotion for the exhibit.' "

MANalysis: The boats are fabulous promotion for Koch.

Rogers: ''You have to show me why a museum that displays teapots cannot display boats, particularly if they're beautiful," he said.

MANalysis: Ugly boats are not OK, maybe. And I love how Rogers has subtly conflated Koch's self-promotional objects and the MFA's enabling thereof, with objects in the MFA's permanent collection.

RELATED: From the Floor.

I may never catch up on the things I want to post about from the weekend past. I mean, the NYT's flagrant borrowing/catch-up of Ed Sozanski's Barnes Old Masters story is screaming "Me too! Me too!" but I'm going to let that go.

The must-read piece from the weekend is Christopher Knight's geopolitical contextualization of the latest King Tut show. Knight wrote about how Tut I was a Cold War, fight-Communisim-driven extravaganza, while Tut II is a GWOT, bring-the-tourists-back-to-Egypt-and-thanks-for-the-help-AEG extravaganza, a pop culture phenomenon more than a museum exhibit. Don't miss it.

I posted three new sites to the blogroll today. Check 'em out:

• Toastkitten, an LA-based blog (to which I should have linked eons ago) with an expansive footprint;
• DetroitArts, which has a Best Life magazine-inspired Cecily Brown post here.
• Woospace, which has a particular interest in the intersection of Asian pop culture and contemporary art. 

After months of bad press over his personal expenses, his extravagant travel and his $650/hour hired-gun PR firm, Getty Trust boss Barry Munitz has waved the white flag. MAN has learned that Munitz will end the controversy over his largesse with this plan: No longer will Munitz be the only Getty-ite flying first class. All Getty employees -- and maybe you too, Michael Sitrick! -- will be flying up front.

OK, it's true that Munitz and the Getty haven't announced this plan yet. But ya gotta figure that it's coming when Munitz says this to the Times of London:

Munitz himself telephones and brushes aside questions about his pay and perks. "This was all approved by an elaborate process. We have policies and procedures." Had he indulged in a few too many first-class flights? "You have to understand life in LA — people find it embarrassing to travel commercial class."

You wouldn't expect Munitz to embarrass his staff, would you? No, no, no. So ya gotta believe it's gonna be first-class flights for the employees. It stands to reason that Mr. $650/Hour, Michael Sitrick, the man Munitz pays to spin damage control for the Trust, is going first-class too, because Munitz wouldn't want to embarrass him either. (Oh, wait...)

This must be tough news for Jill Murphy, Munitz' chief of staff who will be leaving the Getty at the end of the year. She'll be missing out on lots of first-class seats. (The Murphy story has gotten lots of play, many of them (including the LAT story linked above) referring to Murphy's treatment of her fellow Getty employees. Even LA Observed has picked up on the Murphy meme.)

(Aside: The LAT Murphy story includes one of Munitz' priceless 'everything must be groovy because no one told me it wasn't' quotes: "No one ever said to me, 'I'm leaving, and I'm leaving because of her,' " Munitz said. "But people did say to me, 'You need to know I'm having trouble with her.' ")

So in light of this rush of Getty news, here are the new Things I Want to Know:

• Murphy quit about nine months ago and her departure takes effect by the end of the year. That could be 13 months. Why the lag? Does the lag have anything to do with the IRS' audit of the Getty?
• When will the LAT editorial board next weigh in on Munitz? If it's Munitz' "pattern of behavior that's disturbing," that Times of London quote has to be part of that pattern. It indicates that Munitz just doesn't get it. The Getty Trust is a cultural trust, not an expense account trust.
• Does his board? They gotta be getting a clue by now, eh?
• Regardless of what you think of Murphy, her departure continues a massive senior leadership drain out of the Trust. In the last year the Getty has lost its museum director, the museum's associate (and later interim) director, its publications manager, its top communications officer and others. Why can't the Getty, America's third-largest foundation, keep staff? And why hasn't the board noticed?
• Does this vaunted Getty board actually exist? They've been awfully quiet...
• What will Sen Charles Grassley think of that 'commercial class' quote? Will that be the let-them-eat-cake moment that pushes the Senate Finance Committee into the Getty's affairs?

Just in to MAN: NYPD has closed 53rd Street in front of MoMA due to an investigation. Apparently a mysterious package. No other news...

UPDATE: That was quick. No problems. Street re-opened. Gawker has more.

I'm trying to take summer Fridays off, but I have gotten so much email about this that I'll provide some weekend reading. Barry Munitz' 'chief of staff' is soon-to-be out at the Getty. More on Monday.

UPDATE: Here's another reason to tune in on Monday: I promise you the greatest, bestest Barry Munitz quote ever.

As Caryn Coleman pointed out at abLA, Aqua follows NADA (below) in updating its galleries list. With only a couple exceptions, Aqua is the anti-NYC fair. (Side note: Haven't seen a gallery from my hometown, DC, in either fair.)

Related: Edward Winkleman will be there to sign blog posts for his fans.

Following-up from this morning: I was enjoying a weekend of R&R (more on MAN soon) and just found out about this yesterday afternoon: Patricia Still, Clyfford Still's widow, died over the weekend. She was 85. (If you're a regular MAN reader, you know that I'm working on a magazine piece about Clyfford Still.) I had not talked to Mrs. Still -- I was aware that she was not well.

Here's how her death affects Denver's Clyfford Still Museum project: Still's daughters, Sandra Campbell and Diane Knox, will control the Clyfford Still estate until  the city of Denver satisfies the terms of the existing agreement. That essentially means nothing changes with the eventual transfer of Still's art to Denver: The city still has to raise a certain amount toward an endowment, appoint a board of trustees, build the museum, and such. The control of the estate -- and the monitoring of the process -- simply passes to Still's daughters.

Clyfford Still's archives -- his abundant and often incendiary correspondence, for example -- were not a part of the deal with Denver; they were specifically in Mrs. Still's control. (Many of Clyfford's letters were signed by Mrs. Still, especially the most bombastic ones.) At the time of Mrs. Still's death, she was working with the city of Denver to transfer those archives to the city under the same terms her husband's estate was being given to Denver, and city officials were optimistic that would happen. They still are.

As for the availability of those materials to scholars, etc., nothing changes. They will not be available to researchers until they have been transferred to Denver.

1. Last week a friend forwarded me a press release from the King Tut flacks, Golinn Harris. It was about the celebrities who have visited Tut. I thought that was lame and shallow. I mean, who would give a flying fig what celebrities had visited a museum exhibit. Oh. Nevermind.
2. Jim Sanborn, your idea is calling.
3. On Sunday the LA Times editorial board made the right points about the Getty. Projected Sitrick & Co. response: (Professional) handwringing and, perhaps, some reflected angst. Projected cost to Getty: $1300 (two billable hours). (Seriously, this Sitrick thing is great. Whenever I need a cheap attempted laugh-line, Sitrick/Getty is there. Maybe if I have trouble coming up with my next Getty joke, I can call Sitrick and they'll give me one as a way of removing spotlight from the Getty's misdeeds -- and then bill the Getty for it! Hah! There I go again!)
4. Patricia Still, Clyfford's widow, died on Sunday. She was 85. I think that the Still estate now belongs to the city of Denver in total. More later today.
5. I think this story on SFMOMA and fractional gifts says nothing to substantiate the claim that SFMOMA is a national leader in receiving fractional gifts. (The story calls it 'timesharing.') Given recent gifts (I think) from the Rachofskys, Hoffmans and Roses, the Dallas Museum is likely this year's leader. The story is thinner than gruel, failing to explain the practice or the benefits to museums and collectors. One West Coast museum sends a curator to trustees' houses once a year to walk around, look at the walls, and point out what the museum wants on a fractional basis. Heck, probably more than one.

Someone who writes this blog has repeatedly ripped the St. Louis Art Museum's website. For years. So when they get a new one, I hope the person who writes this blog mentions it. The Art Institute of Chicago has a new site too.

Speaking of my former home, the Pulitemporary blog is giving blog readers first dibs at free Q&A-with-Richard Serra tickets.

MANexcloo: Here are the 79 galleries that will show at NADA. Predicitably stuffed with Gothamites, and there's a nice international mix.

A Gentil Carioca (Rio de Janeiro), The Apartment (Athens), Art:Concept (Paris), ATM Gallery (New York), Catherine Bastide (Brussels),
Bellwether (New York), Josee Bienvenu (New York), Black Dragon Society (Los Angeles), Broadway 1602 (New York) Shane Campbell (Oak Park),
Canada (New York), Chez Valentin (Paris), Clementine (New York), Cohan and Leslie (New York), Comercial (San Juan, Puerto Rico), John Connelly Presents (New York), Sorcha Dallas (Glasgow), Elizabeth Dee (New York) Derek Eller (New York), Zach Feuer (LFL) (New York), Fortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner (London) Foxy Production (New York), Gavlak (West Palm Beach), General Store (Milwaukee), Goff + Rosenthal (New York), Grimm/Rosenfeld (Munich), Guild & Greyshkul (New York), Kavi Gupta (Chicago), Hales (London), The Happy Lion (Los Angeles), Haswellediger (New York), Herald St (London), Hotel (London), IBID PROJECTS (London/Vilnius), Ingalls & Associates (Miami), Iris Kadel (Karlsruhe, Germany), Kaikai Kiki (Brooklyn), Galerie Kamm (Berlin), Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery (New York), Nicole Klagsbrun (New York), Kleindienst (Leipzig), David Kordansky (Los Angeles), Kosak Hall (Vienna), KS Art (New York), Michael Lett (Auckland), Kate MacGarry (London), maze (Turin), Hamish McKay (Wellington, New Zealand), Mogadishni (Copenhagen), Momenta Art (Brooklyn), Murray Guy (New York), Jessica Murray Projects (New York), Nogueras Blanchard (Barcelona), Lizabeth Oliveria (Los Angeles), Participant (New York), Raster (Warsaw), Ratio 3 (San Francisco), Daniel Reich (New York), Rivington Arms (New York), Roebling Hall (New York), Samson Projects (Boston), Schroeder Romero (Brooklyn), Sister, (Los Angeles), Sprüth Magers Projekte (Munich), Nils Staerk Contemporary Art (Copenhagen), Standard (Oslo), Store (London), Suite 106 (New York), Sutton Lane (London), Tal Esther (Tel Aviv), Transmission (Glasgow), Upstream (Amsterdam), Wallspace (New York), White Columns (New York), Christina Wilson (Copenhagen), Jan Winkelmann/Berlin (Berlin), Hiromi Yoshii (Tokyo), Zero... (Milan), ZieherSmith (New York).

Previously: The Aqua lineup.

Apparently the Philly Inky has decided that the Barnes story should return to front-and-center, which is fine with me. Today's paper has an op-ed advocating for a hometown architect for the Barnes, and Sunday's paper has an Ed Sozanski piece on the Barnes' progress in (essentially) cataloguing its collection. Both pieces are worth a read, but you may need BugMeNot.

I can't remember ever reading a major newspaper op-ed advocating for a particular architect for a particular project before. Ya think there's some politics at work behind the Barnes choice? Politics + architecture rarely equals great architecture that serves art, institution and the public.

Back from a weekend away...

• The next thing in photography: Editions of one. MANpal Kathleen Shafer asks why should photography have anything in common with Thomas Kinkade? KS is not the only one in on this meme. (Incidentally, Shafer's new series is viewable here. She did a Q&A about her work with Washington Spark here.)
• Here's looking up Jonathan Borofsky's skirt.
• Anselm Kiefer doesn't do interviews. Apparently when he does, he does them in French. Good thing Ionarts translates.
• The New York Times is funny.
• More silly Tut merchandise. (Lots of other good stuff at M&M too, so scroll around!)
• Seven critical cop-outs. Jeff Jahn goes seven-for-seven.
• Anna L. Conti has the latest look(s) at the new de Young.
• I totally dig the Pulitemporary's blog. Ever wonder how curators/etc. figure out how/where to install art? They build maquettes. Here's how the Pulitzer's look -- along with the actual installation. Scroll around the rest of the blog to see more photos of how Richard Serra's Joe traveled through St. Louis on its way to installation at the Pulitzer.
• Baseball cards for artists, with an assist to Photoshop.

On Wednesday I drove down to Richmond to chat with new Getty Museum director Michael Brand. During our chat he revealed his plans to incorporate Latin American, South American and Asian art into the Getty's program and his intention to bring contemporary art and artists into the museum. I'll do another post from our chat later today.

Green: What role did the controversies at the Trust and the museum play in your decision to take the job?

Brand: Obviously I'm interested in all the things going on there and I’ve been following all the stories, but my ultimate answer is that I’ve taken the job and it didn’t affect my decision. For me as museum director, the main issue is the Marion True trial [in Italy] but I can’t say much or anything about that because there’s a trial going on.

It is a surprising development to have an individual curator [face criminal charges]. That’s something that’s been of interest to everyone in the field, as are cultural heritage laws. We have a number of works in our collection which are being discussed as part of that process by a foreign government so obviously my role is to be part of a resolution.

Green: There has been some discussion since you were hired that the museum will be more interested in Latin American, South American and Asian art. How will that manifest itself?

Brand: I don’t think it’s going to be terrifically different. The collection is Greek and Roman Art, European paintings and decorative art, photography, manuscripts and such, and that will clearly be 85-90 percent of the job. But I want to develop the exhibition program a bit further. I don’t think the exhibition program has to be necessarily tied to the areas we collect in.

Green: So there might be exhibitions from those area, but you won’t be collecting art from Latin and South America and Asia?

Brand: I don’t see any reason to change the collections. Even if you wanted to collect Asian art it would be pointless. I wouldn’t say we’ll never show Asian art. I’d like to do some exhibits that raise links between our collection and what happens in different parts of Asia and Latin America.

I also think you’ve got to be a contemporary museum even if you don’t collection contemporary art. You’ve got to be interested in artists and interested in inspiring artists. The Getty does have some contemporary art even though they don’t have a collection or a curator.

I think the Bill Viola project that the Getty showed in 2003 [a series of video works, "The Passions," that explored the power and complexity of emotions and was inspired by works in the Getty’s collections] was fantastic. He had a residency, spent time there, looked at the collection, thought, made new work, and showed it there. I think that’s a really good way for the Getty to involve people with contemporary art. I’d like to make those sorts of things an ongoing program.

Green: The Getty Trust is the third largest foundation in America and the Getty museum director is inevitably one of America’s premier cultural figures. How do you leverage that position beyond your museum’s walls?

Brand: Absolutely it’s a bully pulpit. If you are the head of any major museum you have an opportunity to do that. People will listen to what you say. As a director of a leading art museum you should be saying things. I can be saying things from here in Richmond also, but people won’t be listening as much. With the Getty as a museum with a kind of global interest, it should be a leader.

Green: How has being a museum director changed in recent years? What will be the major developments in the field going forward?

Brand: What I would hope is that with all the building projects happening,  hopefully in the near future they’ll be built and the capital campaigns run down and people can take a breather. The Getty is already where everyone wants to be: You’ve got a building, an endowment, and all.

What I face, in a way, is what other directors are going to face in three-to-five years. When you got everything you said you wanted, what are you going to do? You think about the goals of your collection. I hope directors can get back to more of the art issues, the cultural heritage issues. You know, being about art: What’s good, and what it does for people and what it might do for people.

Continued in part two.

Related: MAN this week on: How good is the Getty at raising money anyway (uh, not very so far), and reading between the lines when Brand was hired.

Continued from this morning...

Green: During the interview process, were you surprised to find out that the new Getty museum director would be raising money?

Brand: This whole fundraising thing has gone off on a bit of a tanget. What we're really talking about is about, and what Barry [Munitz] is interested in doing, is bringing back this whole development and externa relations [departments] at the Trust back into the museum. Recognizing that the Getty museum is the public face of the Getty Trust.

We're in the first stages of talking about that. What I'm talking about is possible corporate partnerships for certain projects. Even that isn't just getting cash -- it might be also development working with an organization that is L.A.-based that might want to get its staff more involved in museum-going, them offering that as a benefit to their staff.

The Getty is wealthy and there's no doubt that we can't do everything. We can do anything we want to do within reason but we can't do everything that we want to do, so we have to make priorities. If we can partner with other museums or with scholars that allow us to do more on the education side or some extra programming, and we get to tap into a company's staff and have programs with them, that seems worth doing.

Then in terms of the collection, we can't buy everything… so gifts are logical. We've already received the Fleischman gifts, and in the photography collection there are some successes. If I was a collector in the area the Getty collects in, I'd think that if I really wanted to give my works to the public domain, the Getty is the third most-visited museum in the U.S. It has fantastic educational services and installations. It seems like it’s a logical thing to consider.

The other thing with the whole development area, and leading toward gifts, is most museums build some of their strongest links either through trustees who are collectors who then give, and through membership programs. Those seem to work better if you have ticket prices. So free entrance can't be one of our main benefits. The Getty doesn't even charge for exhibits. But you don't want people to think it's a blank, faceless institution on the hill. You want people to feel more a personal link with it somehow.

Green: What about the Getty's photography collection, which is deep but perhaps not broadly seen or even known? Is building some type of satellite museum for that a possibility?

Brand: Clearly it is one of our key strengths. It's incredibly popular, and the nice thing about it is that it takes us right into the 20th century, and you really want to latch on to that because that's one way we can move in [to the contemporary sphere].

It's something I want to give a lot of attention to. It's a great part of the collection. It doesn't seem to be as well-recognized because people don't think of the photo collection in terms of the Getty.

I'm back from Richmond so Getty Week continues. My Q&A with Getty director-to-be Michael Brand posts on Bloomberg tomorrow, so expect links, text, and unused tidbits from that convo on MAN. (Yes, original posts on an August Friday.)

In Wednesday's NYT Getty Trust boss Barry Munitz said that Michael Brand would be a fundraiser: "The fundamental burden should rest with the museum director supported by trust president, not the other way around. That said, we're not going to look like other museums - we're not going to have a capital campaign or build an endowment or offer eight levels of memberships. But we are selectively going to ask people for help."

LATer Christopher Knight responded yesterday: This is a silly mandate.

So today the LA Times looks at whether the Getty is a sleeping giant when it comes to fundraising. The LAT concludes that the Getty will raise money but that no one in LA is terribly worried about the competition.

In case you haven't noticed, MAN isn't the LAT. So we can read between the lines to give you one of the reasons no one in LA seems concerned: They all want money from the Getty. Doh. (And we can use two cliches in four sentences, which LAT editors would never let their writers get away with. Whoops! See, right there! Grammatical mistake! And I can do that! Nyah!!!)

But here's what's not in the LAT story: Maybe no one is worried because the Getty is lousy at raising money. Back in 1998 Munitz said he was going to seek sponsorship and gifts of funds and art. So how's he done?

• In FY 2003 -- the most recent Getty tax filing I have -- the Getty Trust raised under $1 million. Only $315,000 of that was cash. Almost all of the rest was art. By comparison, MOCA raised over $7 million.
• That is not an anomaly. In FY 2002, the Trust raised $1.7 million, $205K in cash. (MOCA: $11 million.)
• And in FY 2001 the Getty raised $3 million, only $41,000 of it in cash from individuals. Some of the rest: $70,000 from a small foundation, $500,000 from Pew, and $300,000 from California State University-Long Beach, and the rest in donations of things such as art and an Hewlett-Packard-donated mass spectrometer. The Pew gift was, it seems, for regranting to the Barnes Foundation. (MOCA: $8.5 million.)
• All my figures exclude some government contributions that MOCA received.

This all makes sense. Why would someone give money to a place that has around $5 billion in cash lying around? Wouldn't that be like giving snow to Alaska?

Much more on Brand and money-raising, from my Q&A with him, tomorrow.

Thanks to senior editor Choire Sicha, the New York Observer is art central today. First, the Transom has an item (scroll down) explaining those "Have you seen This 'Psychopath' Art Collector Recently?" posters in Chelsea. Aha!

Sicha, ex-of Gawker, Debs & Co. and, er, used baseball hats, parrots the MAN line on the NYT's chief art hagiographer and new-book-author Michael Kimmelman. In so doing, he explains what Sprial Jetty has to do with orange street-crossing flags.

The Michael Brand-to-the-Getty posts continue...

First: Notice that Barry Munitz is still afraid to talk with the LA Times. One of the comic subplots of the Brand hire is how the Getty apparently leaked the news to the NYT. The NYT had the story first -- as a 234-word, byline-free afterthought. Why so little? Here's a guess: The Gettyites leaked as late in the day as they could so that the LAT couldn't get anything in on it on Monday. Lame. But if you're Munitz, that's all you can do to get back at the Big Paper in your backyard (that finds dirt on you everywhere it looks).

Second: From the NYT: "To get our strongest candidate with all of the noise out there tells you something about how our situation is viewed by professionals in the field," Mr. Munitz said. He said that the museum staff received Mr. Brand warmly when he introduced him on Monday morning. "There was a very warm applauding reception," Mr. Munitz said. "Nobody stood up and asked us if we were out of our minds."

Hah! That's setting the bar low. I mean, did Munitz actually expect someone to stand up and ask him if he was out of his mind? Maybe Munitz should try holding a similar meeting at which he addresses staff concerns about the ongoing state investigation into his spending.

Third: Also from the NYT: "Mr. Brand said he met with museum staff members yesterday. While he had heard rumors about morale problems, he said, 'it is not my impression that that is exactly the case, though I haven't been here for very long.' " If Brand was reading my email he'd have a different thought on that. Morale at the museum is low. But people there plainly want the Getty to be great and want someone to follow who isn't named Munitz. They want someone that they see as being on their side.

Michael Brand is a good hire for the Getty. At a time when the Getty desperately needs a person of unimpeachable integrity, someone who, oh, I don't know, won't sell Getty land at cut-rate prices to FOBs, they get a serious art-firster.

There are lots of ways to judge hires. The morning papers have focused on Brand's background in Indian art and the like. Well, his job at the Getty won't be to launch Indian shows, it will be to run a museum. So what about Brand's museum, the Virginia MFA?

The VMFA is about a 100-minute drive from my home in Washington. I've been down there a probably four times in the last 18 months. It is not an educational mission, it is not a spectacle-laden funhouse, and it is not a corporate front. The VMFA is an art museum. It has good stuff, it presents it attractively, and it gets out of the way. It launches serious contemporary shows -- not photographs of hands or any such gimmicky dreck -- in the conservative former capital of the South. The Stark sculpture collection would never have made it into the VMFA -- which brings us to the central question about Brand at the Getty: Will Barry Munitz keep his hands off the museum and will he let his museum director do his job? Or will he foist more dubious gifts, etc. upon him?

My second morning thought will follow in an hour or two. In the meantime, here are the morning stories: LAT, NYT, NYT on Brand. Read them as much for what isn't there as what is.

ATTENTION GETTYITES: Email in this afternoon/tonight and let me know how this meeting went, what was said, etc.

From Barry Munitz to the Getty staff at 721 am PT:

Please join me for a Museum All Staff meeting at 10:30 a.m. in the Museum Lecture Hall for an important announcement.

Thank you,
Barry

UPDATE: According to the NYT (you didn't think anyone remotely affiliated with Getty management was going to leak this to the LAT did you?), the Getty is in "final negotiations" to hire Virginia MFA boss Michael Brand to run the Getty Museum.

Things that cost $650/hour:

• Flying an Aero Commander plane over the British Virgin Islands. Sounds scenic.
• The electricity to run the first computer, the Eniac. Sounds brainy.
• Chartering this boat for a wedding. Sounds tacky.
• An hour with a prostitute in NYC -- sex and maybe a good time with the owner of a company who runs a 'no-sex' escort service and sidelines as a gun-catcher for the Puffy Combs entourage. Sounds crazy! And...
• Doing damage-control PR for the Getty, says the LAT. Sounds a lot like that last bullet-point.

The Times' story also details how Getty communications VP Pamela Johnson has left the Getty of her own volition and is headed back to Nashville -- a story-line that's about a script approval away from being filmed by Robert Altman. In the fiscal year that ended in June 2004, Johnson was paid $317,861.

What did Johnson do for $1,282 per day? Was she worth less than two hours of damage-control PR performed by Sitrick & Co.? Uh, yes. Because in the year or two I've been writing about the Getty both on MAN and for Bloomberg (I've reviewed a Cezanne and a David show there), not once has anyone from the Getty's communications office returned one of my calls. Not once. Public information requests -- the fulfillment of which is required by federal law -- went ignored. As did my requests for information about exhibitions, etc.

I guess $1,282 per day wasn't enough.

The other part of the story here -- as abLA pointed out -- is that the Getty is hemorraging even more staff than usual. Rats fleeing the sinking Monopoly board, perhaps...

From July 2004: Last year The Figures released a compilation of Jerry Saltz columns titled Seeing Out Loud. I did a Q&A with Saltz and I thought that with his annual Babylon column just weeks away (right, Jerry?) that now would be a good time to flashback to part one and to part two.

I don't often post about my ongoing projects here. There's no real good reason for that -- I think that when I'm working on a magazine piece or some such thing I'm happy to get a break from it over here on the blog.

I've mentioned a few times here that I'm working on a long piece about the life and legend of Clyfford Still. It's been terrifically challenging and a fantastic learning experience because Still's biography has been sparsely chronicled. A couple months ago I posted about the Piazzoni murals that have been installed at the de Young in San Francisco. Still loved them. Here's something I wrote for the Still story but won't be using. It's missing a lot of context, but oh well:

In June I walked through San Francisco’s new de Young Museum. It was not yet open to the public, so I was accompanied by the de Young’s curator of American art, Timothy Anglin Burgard. The last stop on the tour was a room devoted to 10 paintings by Gottardo Piazzoni, a once-prominent Californian artist. Painted in 1932, Piazzoni's murals have been out of fashion for 40 years.

The five Piazzonis known as The Land are lined up on one wall. They are classic Californiana: The five paintings make up a landscape of creased, golden hills pocked with a few scrub oaks, and a sliver of hazy sky. Piazzoni's hills aren’t the bright gold of, say, a capitol dome. Instead they’re old-gold, the color of dried grass, burnt by the sun, finally faded.

Burgard said that Walter Hopps, the legendary curator of American modern art, had told him a story about the Piazzoni murals. One day Hopps and Still were walking through the library and Still stopped. He told Hopps how much he liked the murals, that they meant something to him.

That was most unlike Still. He did not compliment other artists, particularly recent peers. He told biogrpaher Betty Freeman that he liked Rembrandt, for example, but that he himself had been able to break free from the figure and had, thus, gone beyond Rembrandt. One day Still visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Freeman and pointed out some work he liked. Later he wrote a letter taking it all back. In none of the letters I have read does Still do anything but savage any artist who shared his century.

But Still told Hopps how much he admired Piazzoni's Land. Because that was so rare, so incredibly unlike Still, I took notice. And suddenly I begand to understand the next thing about Clyfford Still's paintings: Those dramatic canyons and forms in his paintings could certainly have their genesis in Piazzoni's gentle hills. And like Piazzoni's colors, Still's blacks, yellows, and reds are old, sun-singed. (That's the A-K's 1957-D No. 1 at left.) 

How very California. In her memoir of California, Where I Was From, Joan Didion writes of her family's fascination with things that looked old. In a land -– the West -– where no one's history went back very far, to own old things was to imply that your family history was tied in with the ancient history of the land. Still's colors are the colors of the West's history. In California, the land does not return light, it holds it and keeps it. It is as if the land has a matte finish. Still's paintings -- and Piazzoni's -- hold onto light.

It's only a matter of months, I'd guess: I'm expecting a group show about the 425-mile long wall separating Israel from the Palestinian territories. Artists that will (ahem) be in the show include: Banksy, Catherine Yass, and Emily Jacir. (I imagine a group show at the Hirshhorn, to which the museum will charge us $100 per artist to attend a panel discussion given by the artists.) Links, with oodles of images:

• Banksy: Bloggy, Edward Winkleman, Wooster Collective.
• Catherine Yass: Art School Palestine, Alison Jacques.
• Emily Jacir: Electronic Intifada, Contemporary Art from the Islamic World.
• One reader: Some website should wiki a group show like this.
• Others, readers?

This takes a little slogging through, but the topic will be familiar to anyone who has read MAN in the last week or so. Neery Melkonian makes some interesting points as she wonders why there are so few American shows featuring artists from the Middle East.

One such show upcoming: Fifteen Ways of Looking, coming to MoMA in February 2006.

In case you haven't noticed, I've got the August art blues. Road-tripping up to Buffalo for Extreme Abstraction helped. (Coming to Bloomberg next week, in fact.) Heading up to Beacon in a week or two will too. 

As I wait for fall I love it when blog posts like this that get me looking forward to fall art trips. San Francisco will be interesting this fall not just because the de Young is re-opening, but because Richard Tuttle is up at SFMOMA until mid-October, Robert Adams will be exhibiting new work there too, and Bay Area Now 4 (one of those regional-ennials I enjoy) is up at Yerba Buena until November 6.

Other fall trips: MAMFW for the Anselm Kiefer show (which is not going to NYC), Ecstasy, dude, at America's favorite stoner museum, MOCA.

Can an auction house take a cold shower? From Bonhams and Butterfields' website: "Bonhams to Sell £1-Million Iconic Henry Moore - A Seminal Work, the Visual Climax of His Early Years."

Charlie Finch has hit a new low. I didn't think he could top this trend, but now he's reviewing a show he hasn't seen. He's only read the catalogue.

(I love the TV show Alias. I've never seen it, of course. I've stayed at the hotel at which they film the program, and I think Jennifer Garner is hot. I have not, however, been to a Yankees game with her. Still, those Garner photos I've seen are enough, right?)

For years I've ranted about how NYC art people love to forget that there's art made and shown west of the Hudson, but this is preposterous. Embarassing. Artnet is better than this.

I saw Extreme Abstraction at the Albright-Knox, the show that Finch was too important to be bothered to go to. It's quite a good show. And I'm not going to go off on a rant about why no one should review a show off of the catalogue because that's as obvious as Finch's obsession with skirted artists. (Here's hoping the A-K doesn't do this.)

Finch: "As with all great curations, 'Extreme Abstraction' compels you to re-examine artists you may dislike or ignore." Big words from a man who hasn't examined the show and who, in fact, has ignored it. 

(Revealing bit of cluelessness: The John McLaughlin in Buffalo is blue, not lavender as Finch writes. The reproduction in the catalogue is atrocious. I guess it doesn't matter what color the painting is.)

"Those unable to find the catalogue will just have to shuffle off to Buffalo for the art," Finch writes. Who needs art when a tiny reproduction is available?

UPDATE: I should not have called Finch 'a joke.' I should have saved that term for this absurdity.

RELATED: Toastkitten.

Miami fairs are beginning to fill up. As we mentioned yesterday, NADA has told galleries they're in, out, or waitlisted. And here's the list and the website for the Aqua Art Miami Fair, to be held about three blocks from Art Basel Miami Beach. This list may grow a bit as some galleries wait-listed for NADA move into Aqua:

Anita Beckers (Frankfurt), Anne Barrault (Paris), Bank (Los Angeles), Carl Berg (Los Angeles), Cirrus (Los Angeles), Davidson (Seattle), Lisa Dent (San Francisco), Gallery Joe (Philadelphia), Jim Harris (Seattle), Howard House (Seattle), Inman (Houston), Rebecca Ibel (Columbus), Greg Kucera (Seattle), Elizabeth Leach (Portland), Lemon Sky (Miami/LA), Other Gallery (Winnipeg), PDX (Portland), Platform (Seattle), Revolution (Detroit), sixspace (Culver City), SOIL (Seattle), Katrina Traywick (San Francisco), Western Project (Culver City), and Winston Wachter (NY/Seattle).

I know my Monday AM posts are usually a little more newsy, but it's August, dammit. (That said, if anyone at the Getty wants to leak me the names of the four American museum director-types who are finalists for the top Getty Museum job, my email is open. I'd love to know about finalists in other places, such as LACMA, Cleveland and Miami. Naturally, if the Hirshhorn is going to reverse its recent misstep, I'd like to hear about that too. It's always fun to see if museums do the right thing or if they shoot themselves in the wallet in the name of short-term gain.)

So... Next time you're at Costco, pick up a case of toilet paper and a Picasso. A 1958 drawing by Picasso can be yours for just $129,999.99. My favorite things:

• The Costco-ization of the price.
• The text is hilarious: Picasso is "most renowned for pioneering the Blue and Pink Period." Really. So who exactly followed him into this Blue and Pink Period?
• "Important, historical and collectible, the art presented here is museum quality fine art created by the greatest masters of the past century." Really. Masters? What 'Masters' helped Picasso with this drawing?
• On Picasso's daughter Maya: "She is the world's utmost authority." Really. So let's ask her where in Iraq the WMD were. And about cold fusion, too.

Every once and a while I poke fun at WP art critic Blake Gopnik. (Uh, like yesterday.) But today Gopnik gets one right.

Gopnik reports that the Hirshhorn -- the national museum of contemporary art, the one funded by the American taxpayers -- will host a Janet Cardiff lecture on Sept. 28. Admission will be open only to students with ID, invited guests (disclosure: press is invited), and donors who give $100 or more to the Hirshhorn. As best anyone can remember, this is the first time the Hirshhorn has held an exclusionary educational event.

The Hirshhorn is not a private museum such as the Phillips Collection or MoMA. It is a public museum, funded by you and me. The U.S. Congress would never charge $100 to allow the public to attend a U.S. Senate debate. The national musuem of contemporary art shouldn't either.

It's fine if the Hirshhorn wants to derive a fundraising benefit from the visits of artists and other distinguished guests. Hold a cocktail party or a dinner with Cardiff and invite only high-dollar folks. But lectures and talks are a critical part of any museum's educational program. At the Hirshhorn these programs have always been free to the museum's funders: the public. They should remain that way.

Olga Viso will become the museum's director on Sept. 1. Here is the first thing she should do on her first day: Announce that Hirshhorn educational events, such as artist's talks and lectures, will always be free and open to the public. That includes the Cardiff talk. We're watching.

I did a short walkabout Manhattan for Bloomberg this week. Here's the couple of paragraphs I wrote about Peter Wegner's installation at Lever House:

While two Gordon Bunshaft museum spaces, an addition to Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Washington, D.C.'s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery are horrible places to look at art, Lever House feels more modern than even the new Museum of Modern Art.

In the lobby, Peter Wegner has installed Lever Labyrinth, a maze constructed from 2.5 million sheets of green, blue, and yellow paper. From the inside, Labyrinth is a twist on British country house mazes. Built in the gardens of the aristocracy, those mazes were accessible only to the wealthy and their friends.

With the modernist spirit of Lever House in mind, Wegner has built a maze that is accessible to anyone who wanders into the building’s lobby -- and pedestrians on Park Ave. are invited to do so. Labyrinth is also visible from the sidewalks that surround the Lever House lobby, where it looks a little bit like stalagmites emerging from the floor.

Related: Curbed, Towleroad.

How often do two art critics find something on which they agree, something on which they are perfectly in sync, something that means so much to them that they just have to tell the whole wide world about it?

Not often. That's why this is, well, special: KCRW's Edward Goldman loves gelato. WPer Blake Gopnik loves gelato. I'm all verklempt.

MANfave Edward Winkleman has an interesting post about the strange surge in news about Islamic art. He pretty much hits the relevant points, but I'll add a couple things.

He mentions Shirin Neshat and Mona Hatoum as Islamic artists of note -- and of course both spend a considerable amount of time in the US. Welcome, a recent show of art from Iran at Kashya Hildebrand in New York, is a recent example of contemporary Islamic art made in an Islamic country.

Farhad Moshiri, who curated the show, lives in Iran but has shown in the West. (He was schooled at CalArts.) Virginia Museum of Fine Arts curator John Ravenal recently purchased a Moshiri for the museum's permanent collection. (That's it, S4M53 from 2004, at left.) It's a fantastic piece, underpainted in vivid hues (think Alma Thomas), and distressed by the artist. The visible surface is covered with black Arabic characters. Arabic is an impure abjad, and Moshiri's 'aged' surface is impure too. The cracked surface hints that traditional Iranian culture is out-of-date too.

From the CBC on a Warhol exhibition going to the AGO next year: "The artist's work continues to earn increasing amounts of money at auction. One painting from [the death and disasters series], 1963's Mustard Rat Race brought nearly $23 million Cdn at Christie's last year."

Uh, that would be Mustard Race Riot.

Jack McCoy is knocking on the door of Rich Uncle Pennybags. 

Today's LAT reports that the California attorney general's office has opened an inquiry into financial practices at the Getty Trust. The investigation revolves around the compensation of, and expenditures made by Barry Munitz (left), as well as a 2002 real estate transaction involving Blake Carrington. (OK, Eli Broad. Why is it all the rich TV dudes are oilmen and not developers? Answer: To foil my lame metaphors.)

Why this matters: The Getty had plainly been hoping that if it ignored the LAT investigations that this story would go away. That's why the Getty eventually hired a PR firm specializing in damage control to deal with the LAT. That's why the Getty has been loathe to comment on the LAT investigations.

But now it has to be obvious -- especially to Munitz' bosses, the Getty trustees -- that the Getty story isn't going away. How much more embarassment do the trustees want to be exposed to? Their Guy has exposed them to national ridicule. They can't enjoy that.

Also, every time something develops on the Getty story, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) pops up with something to say about it. Them Getty trustees can't particularly enjoy that either -- I'd bet that they aren't eager to be investigated by both the California AG's office and the U.S. Senate.

All along I've said that the Getty story isn't over, that more's coming. Well, here's part of that.

Related: At LA Observed, ex-LATer Kevin Roderick hints at the other reason this can't be good for Munitz.

According to the most recent data available from The Foundation Center, the J. Paul Getty Trust is the third-largest foundation in America. When No. 3 gets investigated by the state in which its based, and when the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee (which, of course, has the relevant jurisdiction) drops all kinds of loud hints about an interest in doing the same, that is what we call a Big National News Story.

LA's NPR stations seem to know it: Both are doing/planning Getty segments today on their flagship talk shows.

So: Why isn't every major Getty story (like this one) on the front page of the LAT? And why isn't the East Coast media establishment paying attention? Because someone's A1 editors made a mistake yesterday, and because East Coast types are loathe to pay attention to California.

UPDATE: From Wednesday's NYT.

I don't usually do this on a Monday morning, but there's been some good stuff around lately and my fingers hurt from all the writing I've had to do of late. Therefore...

• Why would anyone trek out to West Chelsea to buy a toaster anyway?
• Just for the record: I had nothing to do with the blogosphere discussing podcaster Lee Siegel (again). But word is that you can't fully appreciate Cy Twombly's carpeting choice unless you understand that he is gay;
• Matthew Barney is back (in Japan, then to Seoul and to SFMOMA) and Ffactory has images, links, allusions, illusions and more. And it's Barneypalooza in Minneapolis. I don't get it -- and you know you don't either;
• Where to find Richard Serras outdoors all over St. Louis (StL 3, SF 1; StL 3, NYC 0?);
• Thinking about Turrell, I'm reminded that in 19thC England, a true sign of wealth was the extent to which you could control illumination at night, how many candles you could afford and how you could magnify their power around your (really, really huge) abode;
• Bob Newhart goes art-blogging?: Ralph Lauren phones the MFA Boston about his car collection;
• This has, uh, nothing to do with blogs, but the Walker has an Q&A with Chuck Close and the curators of his new Walker/SFMOMA show online. (I hear the link is buggy, so try here too.) They recorded it last Sunday and stupid me forgot to link to it. Podcast this! (Uh, I have no idea what that means, but I think the kids are into it.) ; and
• I confess I had something to do with this idea, but I'm sure that Tadao Ando fans can have some fun with it (get the poster here).
• Most art sucks... unless it's made by pretty girls, says Charlie Finch. (See bottom of post.)