July 2007 Archives

How about this strange blog post from NYTer Sharon Waxman?

Background: Waxman is writing a book about "the world of museums and antiquities and where those antiquities belong." It will be published in about 18 months by Times Books, a partnership between Henry Holt and the NYT. From time to time Waxman has been blogging about the book-writing process.

Last week Waxman blogged about Marion True, the former Getty antiquities curator on trial in Italy on charges that she conspired with dealers who were trafficking in looted antiquities. Waxman's post is a surprising, strange woe-is-True lament, full of treacly passages such as:

It is a tragic tale, however you slice it: either the insidious corruption of a Harvard-educated, lover of history by the prevailing norms of a see-no-evil antiquities trade. Or the public crucifixion of a competent curator who played by the rules -- and the rules lived in a grey zone -- and then found herself in the cross-hairs when the rules changed to black and white.

Except that's not true. True played outside the rules, as the LA Times Pulitzer-finalist tag-team of Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino reported on Oct. 3, 2005:

The curator of antiquities for the J. Paul Getty Museum bought a vacation home in the Greek islands after one of the museum's main suppliers of ancient art introduced her to a lawyer who arranged a nearly $400,000 loan.

The Getty said in a statement Saturday evening that the curator, Marion True, had resigned after museum officials confronted her about the loan, which she obtained in 1995.

The statement, released in response to questions from The Times, said the loan breached museum policy, which requires employees to report even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

And that wasn't all: On Nov. 17, 2005 the F&F boys reported that True had received a second ethically problematic loan: $400K from Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman just after the Getty had paid $20 million for part of the Fleischmans' collection in 1996. (The Fleischmans donated the rest of their collection to the Getty. Barbara Fleischman joined the Getty's board four years later.):

By repaying the first loan with money borrowed from the Fleischmans around the time of the Getty's transaction with the collectors, True created an even greater conflict, members of the Getty Trust Board of Trustees and outside ethics experts said Wednesday.

The Getty's conflict-of-interest rules bar employees from borrowing money from any "individual or firm with whom the trust does business of any kind."

"Of course we think it's a conflict," said John Biggs, chairman of the Getty board. "I think everybody's uncomfortable with it, but we're not sure where to go from here." ...

Neither Fleischman nor True disclosed the loan in annual conflict-of-interest statements, according to Getty trustee Ray Cortines, who as chairman of the board's audit committee checked the disclosure forms after learning of the loan.

Waxman may feel True's pain all she likes, but she's factually incorrect. True broke the rules. Repeatedly. No "grey zone" there.

Related: Felch and Frammolino are also writing a book about antiquities and museums. (Guess which one I'll read first?)

Waxman is one of a handful of NYTers who blogs away from nytimes.com. Others include Jennifer 8. Lee, David F. Gallagher, and Joyce Cohen.

The headline of this post refers to this NYT headline mistake.

NYTer Carol Vogel has the scoop: Guggenheim Museum director Lisa Dennison is quitting the Gugg for Sotheby's. And, in the story's last paragraph, Vogel cleverly hints at more tumult at the Gugg.

Your cocktail party topic: Is Dennison's resignation a symptom of the art market? Or is Dennison's departure a symptom of Krens-on-down problems at the Guggenheim? I can't speak to whether Krens was stepping on toes at the museum, but from my conversations with Guggers other than Dennison in the last year or so it's been abundantly clear that everything Guggenheim goes through Krens. (Or, to be fair, maybe just everything that comes from me.)

One personal note on Dennison's departure: I don't know Dennison well, but we've talked on the phone a good bit over the last couple of years. Each time she had anticipated what I wanted to talk about, had thought about the topic, and made superb observations about modern and contemporary museums. Dennison wasn't at the top of the ramp long enough to build a Cuno-ian rep as a thinker about the role of museums in our society -- but she was on her way to Cuno-of-the-contemporaries status.

In the LAT, from the Pulitzer-finalist tag-team of Felch & Frammolino: Italy and the Getty resume negotiations. In the last paragraph: A hint of what a settlement deal would include?

In the Boston Globe, from Geoff Edgers: If Barry Munitz and Lawrence Small want to form a boy band, they should dial up Citi Performing Arts Center CEO Josiah Spaulding, Jr., whose questionable pay package seems likely to attract the attention of the Massachusetts attorney general.

A pleasant surprise: Walter Hopps' essay on Anne Truitt (referenced below), is now online, included on an entire website devoted to Truitt.

Last year, after returning from a visit to Maryland's Eastern Shore, I posted about how my first trip to the region started me seeing Anne Truitt's work in new ways. Having just returned again (and having thought more new thoughts on Truitt) I thought I'd re-publish last year's post. The Hirshhorn is planning a Truitt retrospective for 2008. Look for catalogue essays from heavyweights James Meyer and Leah Dickerman.

As I walked through the Corcoran's new permanent collection installation, I bumped into an old friend. Up on the second floor I found Anne Truitt, twice. One was magnificent: 1962's Insurrection, a vertical plank, painted red on one vertical half and pink on the other.

Like all the best Truitts its beauty was a product of its subtlety. When Truitt entered her mature period in the 1960s, such subtlety was out and had been for a while. Abstract expressionism? (Glug glug.) Pop art? (Bam!)

That's part of the genius of Truitt. She is the slow food of art; you have to stand in front of her painted sculptures, for a minute, maybe two, to feel what there is to see. At the Corcoran I noticed that the Truitt was just taller than a person. And just wider too. I was thicker than each painted half, but barely. And to see the whole sculpture I had to walk around it, making me all the more aware of my own body and presence in front of Truitt's work.

Before pursuing art Truitt was a psychologist, working as a kind of diagnostician at Massachusetts General Hospital. I thought of that as I stood at the Corc. Truitt's sculpture was as much about my experience in front of it as it was about the object itself. Truitt's psychology background influenced her art.

The day after I took in Truitt at the Corcoran, I left Washington for a weekend on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Truitt grew up in Easton, Maryland, and she visited it regularly later in life. I took with me Truitt's great artist's chronicle Daybook and re-read it from a bayside hammock. I learned two things about Anne Truitt while I was there, from Daybook and from the land.

Throughout, Truitt frequently describes her surroundings in terms of color and not much else. (Japan, as viewed from a plane, is "wrinkled-prune land, purple in an apricot-violet mist of evening light.") Truitt was a great colorist because she saw color so intensely. "Color occasionally just takes charge," she wrote. "The more I work with it, the less I seem to know about it and the more I trust it." 

(Famously, Donald Judd hated Truitt's colors: "[They] are dark reds, browns and grays, very much like Ad Reinhardt's color," Judd famously wrote in 1963. "The work looks serious without being so. The partitioning of the colors on the boxes is merely that, and the arrangement of the boxes is as thoughtless as the tombstones which they resemble." Just as with Picasso when he discussed Bonnard, Judd was jealous. When Judd wrote those words he was struggling mightily to figure out color himself -- especially how to make two colors work well together. Truitt had that nailed by 1963, while Judd wouldn't master it for years more, until late in that decade.)

I also learned something about Truitt by going to where she was from. I've lived in Washington since 1997, but this was my first trip to the Eastern Shore. Much of eastern Maryland is flat, low-lying farmland, riven with rivers like the Nanticoke and the Choptank. All of the land seems to be within sight of the Chesapeake Bay. One of the middle counties, Talbot, is a fingery mass of a dozen or more peninsulas. Just south of Talbot, Dorchester County features abundant marshes and islands. 

I stayed on Hoopers' Island, a long, narrow island  that never makes it more than about five feet above sea level. The island's color, in the summer at least, was 15 shades of green: pine, bay grasses, corn stalks, marsh reeds. The bay's color was just as variable. One afternoon the Chesapeake started blue, then turned pewter, ashen as a thunderstorm arrived, smoky, and finally a cloudy night turned it black. I realized that it was on the Eastern Shore that Truitt learned the richness and the variation in color.

Truitt learned something else about subtlety here too. As I sat in a hammock with Daybook, I looked out about 15 miles across the Chesapeake, toward where Washington and its suburbs are. I could see St. Mary's County on the other side of the bay -- but just barely. St. Mary's seemed to rise no more from the bay than it had to to stay dry. Anyone living on Maryland's Eastern Shore cut off from the region's two dominant cities, say Anne Truitt, would notice how Washington and Baltimore were on a land mass that was barely perceptible.

Back on Hoopers' Island, I noticed how tiny detail was important here, too. Earlier in the day I had driven by the highest point on the island, a faint rise that no more than a foot or two above the surrounding land. At some point during the several hundred years that people have lived on the island, locals had identified its highest point and, logically enough, put their cemetery there. In St. Mary's County and on Hoopers' Island the difference between being in the water and being above it was subtle, but worth noticing. Like Truitts.

Related: Walter Hopps, who curated Truitt's Corcoran/Whitney mid-career survey, wrote about the relationship between Truitt, her work, and the Eastern Shore but it's not online. Curator Jane Livingston has noted the Judd-Truitt 'relationship' too, and it's not online either. (Livingston's musing was in a catalogue for a 1991 Andre Emmerich show.) Quality Truitt images on the web are few and far between -- I nominate Truitt as an excellent candidate for the first online catalogue raisonne. Poppin'-fresh photograph from Hoopers' Island (above) by my girlfriend and Hoopers' Island tour guide, Kathleen Shafer. 

Back on Monday. Don't miss this Alexandra Zavis story in the LAT about how art and artists are fleeing Iraq.

The LA Times reports that a body found near Sea Girt, NJ may be Jeremy Blake. The Asbury Park Press' Nick Clunn reports it too.

Jeremy Blake is from Washington, DC. He took his first art classes at the Corcoran. And the Corc has a major Blake exhibition scheduled for October. So: Why hasn't the Post said one word about his apparent suicide?

Inspired by Christopher Knight's essay on the Getty and Italian politics, three U.S. politicians and the works of art to which I'd like to see them chained:

Perusing Emma Gray's LA Confidential missive on Artnet yesterday, I ran across this passage:

Precursors to Khan's themes of digital identity are explored at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in a show titled "Identity Theft," May 19-Aug. 11, 2007, which is organized by art journalist Jori Finkel, who freelances for the New York Times, among other outlets. A reporter who time and again manages to trump the Los Angeles Times in its own backyard...

Say what? Nothing aginst Finkel -- I'm friendly with her and this piece in particular is plenty interesting -- but what on earth is Gray talking about -- and how did this line get published? Finkel hasn't 'trumped' the LAT on anything. (Which is not a criticism of Finkel -- that's not her job.)

(In a related story, I'm disappointed in Artnet lately. This Charlie Finch piece on the apparent double suicide of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake is pathetically Finch-centric.)

This is worth mentioning for two reasons: It perpetuates the myth that the NYT's arts coverage is something great. As I've noted here for years: It's not. Sometimes it's good: the byline "Roberta Smith is the best tip-off that quality will follow. Often it's clueless. (It bows at the feet of NYC institutions, is riddled with errors, only acknowledges that West-of-the-Hudson America exists when it has to sell ads for its museums advertorials, thinks that Anthony Caro has arrived only when he has a show in Chelsea, and I could keep going.)

(In another related story: A journalist quoting an artist's dealer fawning about the artist's work is exactly the same thing as a journalist quoting a used car salesman talking about the glories of a 1987 Peugeot that he just happens to have available for the low, low price of $1,295. As lazy as Vogel's Mitchell-Innes quote is, this is the all-time classic of the genre.)

But mostly I'm amazed by Gray's timing. Her strange phrase comes after this thoroughly discredited story about the Hammer, a piece made more incorrect by its remarkably bad headline. That the Hammer got the NYT to buy into any of its Codex-related blather (any editors there? hello?) speaks to how bamboozle-able the NYT is.

Update on the Corcoran's Jeremy Blake show here.

Yesterday I posted about how the architect of the Nelson-Atkins' new Bloch Building, Steven Holl, delights in showing us the guts of his building. And that he shows it off straight-up, right at the main entrance, and right where the building meets the road that runs by the front of the museum.

That JPEG above is the big window that looks out on that street. (That's director Marc Wilson's office on the left.) Whereas Wight & Wight, the Beaux-Artsy firm that built the 1933 building uses Indiana limestone to cover-up the structure of their building, Holl creates a window where he can show off a structural element in his building. (Take that neo-classicism!)

(These photos aren't as good as some of the others I've posted in the last week or so: Surprisingly, the front of the building seems not to be a favorite angle of the Flickr set.)

Related: Overview. Parts one, two, three, four.

Here's a good summary of the state of the Barnes Foundation controversy, from Deborah Leavy on the op-ed page of the Philadelphia Daily News.

Expect this fall's Jeremy Blake show, Wild Choir: Cinematic Portraits of Jeremy Blake, to continue more or less as planned at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art. That's the word from the museum and from the show's curator, Jonathan Binstock (who recently left the Corc for Citi but who is moving forward with the show). This will be Binstock's second Blake show: He curated "Jeremy Blake: Digital Projections" at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. Blake is missing off the coast of New York City.

The show is scheduled to open on Oct. 27. Blake was to have been an artist-in-residence at the Corcoran this fall. (The museum says that Blake, who grew up in Washington, took his first art classes at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.)

It is not clear how the show will differ from the original concept: The presentation of three of Blake's 'cinematic portraits' and many of his chromogenic prints. It is possible, even likely, that Blake did not complete one of the works scheduled for the show, a 'portrait' of Malcolm McLaren titled Glitterbest. (Two other 'portraits, Reading Ossie Clark, sequence at left, and Sodium Fox are complete.) People involved with the show stressed to me that it is too early to know what happens next in regards to their expected future communications with the Blake family and so on.

I'm told that Blake finished work on the show's catalogue several weeks ago. It includes a Q&A between Blake and Binstock, an essay by Glenn O'Brien, a poem by David Berman, and many images from Blake's Glitterbest project. The Corc's releases ends by saying: "Further details of this project are pending."

The corners of the Nelson-Atkins' 1933 Beaux-Arts building are straight and square. They do what Beaux-Arts architecture was supposed to do: Connote strength and permanence. They emphasize their building materials, in this case Indiana limestone.

Steven Holl was having none of that. At the very front of his new Bloch Building, in the wall of the building that face's the Nelson-Atkins' main street-level entrance, he built this detail. It is neither straight nor square -- it is rounded. It emphasizes Holl's material: glass. (As you can see, Holl's glass is sometimes transparent, about which I've written here before.)

And here Holl uses one other little trick: He shows us some of the structural guts of the building, the exact kind of thing that all that limestone covers up in the Wight & Wight building. More on that tomorrow...

Related: Overview. Parts one, two, three, four.

First off: I'm not going to link to the weekend's Jeremy Blake/Theresa Duncan newspaper stories. Too many conflicting 'facts.' I'll likely have a Blake item later today, but don't expect to find any on-the-blogs and in-print speculation here on MAN. (Update, 1:10pm: The Corcoran says it will issue a statement later today about its scheduled-for-October Jeremy Blake exhibition.)

Last week I started writing and JPEGging about how Steven Holl's new addition to the Nelson-Atkins museum was an elegantly confrontational building, a near-perfect counterpoint to Wight & Wight's 1933 Beaux-Arts main building. Links at the end of the post.

Holl's building is strikingly vertical. Its glass 'lenses' (as Holl calls them) are constructed with dramatic vertical 'seams' that make the four-part stepped Bloch Building seem taller than it is. When I was in Kansas City, I remember thinking that the Holl was taller than the 1933 building. Looking at pics online, I'm not so sure. And nowhere in my notes did I write that the Holl was higher.

If it's an illusion, it's a clever one. One reason Beaux-Arts buildings -- the Wight & Wight in particular -- seem like squat piles is that they're intensely horizontal. Here that effect is enhanced with flatly-laid limestone, horizontal row after horizontal row after horizontal row of it.

So of course Holl emphasizes precisely the opposite.

Related: Overview. Parts one, two, three.

Artist Jeremy Blake is missing off New York's Rockaway Beach. The news initially comes via this unconfirmed report on LA Observed. The NYPD confirmed to me that as of this morning, they consider Blake to be missing.

The details at LAO are correct: This past Tuesday, a week after Theresa Duncan, Blake's longtime girlfriend, committed suicide, a man called 911 to report that he saw someone swimming out to sea. Blake's clothes and wallet were found nearby on Rockaway Beach. Blake has not been heard from since. Duncan's funeral will be held in Detroit tomorrow.

Blake is known for photographs and DVDs that mix visual narrative with abstract forms. He had a 2005 solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, created an abstract sequence for the film Punch Drunk Love, and he worked with Beck on the CD Sea Change. This fall Blake is scheduled to have shows at his New York City gallery Kinz, Tillou and Feigen, and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

UPDATE, 7.23.07: Corcoran to go forward with Blake show.

It's Friday, it's hot, but a quick note: One, for years I've been delighted by Greg Allen's thoughts on Scott Sforza ("Mission Accomplished"). Greg has now written about Sforza for Cabinet magazine.

My email is full of eye-rolling at the Met's shameful donor-chasing (and the media's willingness to go along for a ride). A reader suggests that Hirst's shark would be better contextualized in DC.

With the blog-weekend mere hours away, some blogs I've been reading of late:

Why is Damien Hirst's shark, aka The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, going to be at the Met? Does anyone actually believe it has anything to do with the shark fitting into the Met's galleries in a thought-provoking way? That it will provide new context to anything in the Met's collection?

Naturally, Carol Vogel led the coverage. She fawned all over the thing, raising not a single question about the Met's motive -- or Cohen's.

"For a museum like the Met, whose taste in contemporary art is known to be conservative, showing a work as provocative as the shark is an adventurous step," Vogel claimed. No, it's not. It's a calculated step: Methinks the Met is more interested in the donor than in the art. But to court the donor, they've got to show the art.

"When Steve Cohen acquired it, I sent him an e-mail asking if we could show it," Gary Tinterow, the Met's curator for 19th-21st century art told Vogel. He did? Why? I mean, how on earth did showing the shark make sense to Tinterow? Did the Met's potential relationship with a potential donor enter into his thinking at all? Vogel apparently didn't ask and she definitely didn't raise the issue.

As bad as Vogel and the NYT were, Bloomberg's Martin Gayford was worse. He too struggled to explain why the heck the Hirst was at the Met, but failed to tackle the obvious reason head on. So he came up with this: The Met "also will be able to marvel at the spectacle of a contemporary artist, still in early middle age, whose works now command higher prices than those of Raphael and Velazquez."

Great. So the Met is showing the Cohen to enable us to ponder the state of the market?! Why don't they show some hedge fund ledgers while they're at it?

But the best line of the week came from Philippe de Montebello, who had so much trouble understanding what the heck his CCCurator was doing that he coughed up this: "It should be especially revealing and stimulating to confront this work in the context of the entire history of art,'' he said in a statement. (If I were de Montebello I'd be afraid of having to come up with a cogent explanation too -- but I'd probably come up with better gobbledygook than that.)

Heck, maybe Gayford put it best: "At any rate, visitors to the Met will have the opportunity to inspect a fresh fish."

This doesn't have jack-squat to do with art: For as long as I've lived in DC, Dave Fay has been the best hockey writer in town. He died yesterday after a long bout with cancer. Mike Vogel, who works for the Caps, has posted some thoughts on Fay and I can't recommend Vogel's post highly enough. We all know writers such as Fay. The art world could use a few more of them -- and we should value the ones we have more highly.

This morning I wrote about Holl and the lighting of his Bloch Building. Expanding on that a little bit...

I want to extend that point to how light works inside the Holl building and in the Wight & Wight building. The 1933 building is symmetrically ringed with windows, complete with all the typical Beaux-Arts accoutrements framing them. And because the windows are essentially decorative, they're all covered with blinds, shades, and so on. Light is not allowed in. The light inside the Wight & Wight galleries is stale through and through. (The building seems to be saying: Shouldn't the drama of light and art come together in a Caravaggio, and instead of from the architecture?)

Steven Holl was having none of that. His building is laced with windows that provide views out, views in, views through. You want windows?, he seems to be saying, I'll give you windows... The paintings/sculpture galleries are filled with light. (The photography galleries, obviously, are not.)

Here are a few of Holl's windows. The photo at the top of this post was taken inside the Bloch Building's Noguchi Court, which looks out toward the lawn behind the Wight & Wight building. The second photo is taken from Rockhill Road, looking into the museum.

The thing I like about that last photo is that it shows how Holl incorporated windows into seemingly every possible part of his design, even when that window would face a four-lane thoroughfare (and, as it turned out, a Calder).

Yesterday afternoon I told you about the Walker Art Center's purchase of a Trisha Donnelly sculpture. An eagle-eyed reader pointed out this Sarah Douglas item from Artinfo's 2007 Armory Show coverage:

Curator Peter Eleey, who just left Creative Time to join the Walker Art Center, raved about Trisha Donnelly's mixed media work (two inflated black balloons placed inside a vitrine and mounted above a door) in Casey Kaplan's booth.

Oh did he. Yes Virginia, museums and curators love and use fairs just about as much as collectors do. So remember, if your friendly neighborhood curator puts on a big show about hating fairs, it's probably just an act.

Continued: Steven Holl's confrontational approach to the Nelson-Atkins. Part one.

Those of us who live in Washington, DC are probably more acutely aware of what it's like to live with Beaux-Arts architecture than anyone else in the U.S. Most prominent is the Federal Triangle, the massive downtown semi-complex of suffocating piles of masonry. (The project was designed as an inside job between Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon and the half-dozen or so leading Beaux-Arts architects of the day. Federally appointed to a commission to determine what to build there, the architects each helped themselves to a building.)

By day the Federal Triangle is dull enough, but at night it's positively depressing: It's dark. It's depressing. Its buildings loom. But that's just the way Beaux-Arts piles are: They're made of stone. The only way to light them is to light them from outside, to send wattage onto the stone. Where it inevitably kind of dies.

The 1933 Wight & Wight Nelson-Atkins building is like that too. Sure, it's lit, but it's still pretty solemn-looking. So Holl decided to confront that bit of typical Beaux-Arts neo-classicism too. His Bloch Building doesn't have to be lit from outside because it is lit form within. And not just some of it, all of it.

The result -- as captured in a zillion Flickr photographs -- is nothing short of astonishing. (One note: The building tends to look white-hot in the JPEGs I've seen. In person it's much more gentle.) Holl shakes his head at the stolidity of neo-classicism, the backward look to a darker, more primitive time and answers with light, a timeless metaphor for optimism. More on Holl and light later today...

Related: My first post on the N-A. Another picture.

Three years ago Jerry Saltz wrote one of my favorite Saltz reviews, a critical essay in which he managed to bury a gallery show and elevate an artist. I'm not sure I agree with a single word in the review -- which is great. I'm not even sure I know what he was talking about, which was even greater because Saltz made me think in new ways. All of that is why the review had to be about Trisha Donnelly, an artist perpetually on the verge of doing something interesting, something that makes sense. But, of course, she never does.

So Saltz's review was perfect. Donnelly's work is Donnelly's work, and I don't know that I have a firm grasp on either. I still read that Saltz review over and over and I still look at Donnelly over and over. So there we are.

Apparently the Walker is less muddled than I am, because it just purchased this untitled 2004-07 Donnelly. It's an acrylic box, latex balloons and a balloon pump. It's about two feet by a foot-and-a-half. And it's stuck in my head like a bad pop song. Which is a good thing. I'd better email Jerry and ask him to explain...

If you work at an art museum, you won't want to miss this excellent accounting of who uses the Walker Art Center's websites and how much they use them. Even if you don't, it's pretty interesting stuff. (Among the tidbits: Walker blogs are taking off.)

The thousands of Nelson-Atkins photos on Flickr are evidence enough that people find the museum's new Steven Holl-designed addition beautiful. (And, notes the N-A's blog, a growing collection of YouTube vids does too.)

That's fine and all, but I love the new building because it's so daringly confrontational. Virtually every critic who has visited the new building has commented on how well the Holl fits with the N-A's 1933 Beaux-Arts pile. Fine. Agreed. But the two buildings work together not because they're harmonious, but because Holl apparently decided to answer the '33 building at every (square) corner.

Actually, that's too polite: What Holl really did was challenge the Wight & Wight building to a fight.

Because this is the web and because we can have more fun with images here, over the course of a dozen or so posts I'll show pictures that make my point. The first example is the simplest, the most obvious confrontation between the two buildings: Solidity.

The Wight & Wight is a typical Beaux-Arts building, a big, heavy stone-dump, built on a broad, flattened area. Holl's building is a single building, but he has made it appear to be four separate buildings by allowing the building to 'run down' a hill. The Wight & Wight building is made out of weighty Indiana limestone. Holl picked the material that is almost the opposite of quarried rock: Glass. More on that later today...

Evidence that the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco is acting as the marketing arm of a commercial gallery continues to pile up. A source sends along a letter that FAMSF sent out on museum letterhead on or around July 2 (that's it at right) :

Dear XXX,

I am extending an invitation on behalf of Howard Weinstein and the staff of the Weinstein Gallery to a private dinner honoring special guest Enrico Donati in celebration of his de Young Museum exhibition The Surreal World of Enrico Donati and the concurrent exhibition at the Weinstein Gallery...

The invitation asks that RSVPs for the Weinstein Gallery's dinner be made to a staffer at FAMSF. I wonder what AAM and AAMD think of this...

Related: On July 9 I told you about how the FAMSF press office is promoting a commercial gallery show in one of the museum's own press releases.

The question that matters isn't 'Is Steven Holl's Bloch Building at Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum any good?' it's 'How great is it?'

The answer comes easily: Pretty great. If there has been a better American museum building built since Renzo Piano's Menil Collection 20 years ago, I haven't been there. (And this is probably better then the Piano.) Over the course of this week I'll post photos of the building and I'll use them to try to explain why I think the Bloch Building is such a triumph.

My plan for seeing the Bloch Building was twofold: Spend a day at the museum, spend the evening before outside it. (NYTer Nicolai Ouroussoff did this too.) So about 45 minutes before sunset, I parked in front of a Henry Moore and began to walk. In front of the Nelson-Atkins' flagship 1933 Beaux-Arts building, a dozen yuppies were playing flag football. Just about no one else was around. I wandered through the Kansas City Sculpture Park, enjoying a dozen Moores, a couple of Craggs, an out-of-place Nelson, the Oldenbruggen Shuttlecocks, and so on. All lovely, but mostly I was there to check out the Bloch Building.

In the last few minutes of full daylight Holl's building seemed to be as much a glass pile as museum's main building is an Indiana limestone pile, only whiter and cleverer. But as the sun began to set, a couple things happened: The building lit up. It lost weight. It gave away a second set of secrets (more on that as the week goes on).

The young men playing flag football stopped and stared. Out of nowhere about half a dozen photographers materialized, tripods at the ready. A taxi drove up, stopped, and out ran a man with a digital camera. He ran around snapping snapping, and then jogged back to his cab. Kids rolled through on bikes -- not privileged kids from the ritzy neighborhoods to the east of the museum, but city kids. The photographers and the yuppie football players treated the new building with reverence, but these kids rode their bikes right up to it. They touched it, tapped it, yelled , "Hey, it's glass!" They parked their bikes and ran around the exceptional Mark Di Suvero that sits in front of the Bloch Building -- which seems just right because Rumi reminds me of a whirling dervish.

I walked away from the front of the building, down along it's length, north-to-south. The Sculpture Park's lawn, which had been pretty quiet except for the footballers, was suddenly full of couples enjoying an evening stroll. (In most cities couples stroll at sunset, I think. Well not here, not anymore.) Everyone was looking at the Bloch Building, talking about it. Even before I had been inside the new Nelson-Atkins, I was sold.

More on the building all week, starting here.

Is the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco backing out of previously announced plans to exhibit the Philip Anschutz/AEG King Tut show? Since confirming to MAN back in February that the museum was taking the show, no contract has been signed. Sources have told MAN that FAMSF is considering backing out of the show, but museum spokesperson Susannah Stringam said today that negotiations with AEG are still underway -- and then insisted that the museum had never said that it would take the show.

That part's not true: Another de Young spokesperson, Barbara Traisman, confirmed to me in February that the museum was taking the show in 2009. "I don't know what she told you," Stringam told me today. Stringam is new to the FAMSF (she had been at the San Diego Museum of Art), so I filled her in on what Traisman told me. "Then she misspoke," Stringam said.

The de Young would be only the second art museum in the world to allow AEG to profit from their visitors and from their space. The exhibition is also controversial because it would allow a right-wing billionaire to earn millions of dollars in profit from galleries owned by the City and County of San Francisco. (About a third of FAMSF's budget comes from the City.)

The museum, whose de Young opened to record crowds and strong reviews in 2005, has struggled since Buchanan replaced Harry S. Parker III, who retired after the opening of the de Young. Board turnover has been unusually high. The museum's communications office is promoting a local commercial gallery. And the museum's exhibition program has been a confused mish-mash that rarely includes major shows curated by FAMSF curators, prompting San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker to despair over FAMSF's programming.

I returned from Kansas City this morning at 2:30. Next week I'll have lots of posts on the new Nelson-Atkins, Phantasmania at the Kemper, and more...

Meanwhile: Finally the Philly Inky begins to pay real attention to the Barnes story: Tom Infield on why the Barnes' neighbors have found their voice.

MAN will be quiet today because I'll be on planes. (Lotsa good stuff planned for tomorrow though.) And there may be some breaking news later, so it wouldn't hurt to check in from time to time...

The Hirshhorn/Mori Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective is now at the de Young. SF Chron critic Kenneth Baker reviewed the show on Saturday and his closing paragraph is a doozy:

Probably the de Young has never seen an exhibition of gravity and elegance to compare with "Hiroshi Sugimoto" and a look around the institution suggests that the next one like it will be a long time coming.

Related: FAMSF as PR firm.

Puzzling passage in Jori Finkel's story in Sunday's NYT, which was headlined "A Museum That Lives Within Its Means" -- and then went on to describe how the Hammer goes well outside AAMD-mandated industry norms. Or, to put it another way, the Hammer has been living beyond its means for years. Here's the key passage:

The Hammer can thank Bill Gates for its annual acquisition budget, which was about $600,000 last year and is expected to be closer to $800,000 going forward. In 1994, a few years after Mr. Hammer's death, the museum put up for auction a gem from his collection: a 72-page scientific manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci covered with musings and drawings. It was called the Codex Leicester after one of its earliest owners, Thomas Coke, the first Earl of Leicester. Mr. Hammer renamed it the Hammer Codex. Now Mr. Gates presumably has naming rights: he bought it at Christie's for $30.8 million.

Since then the yearly interest on that money has been split. Half has supported Hammer exhibitions and collections. The other half was initially used to pay off a bank loan. When that loan was repaid last year, the money was freed up for acquisitions. In the future, [director Annie] Philbin hopes to use all of the interest for acquisitions, in keeping with industry guidelines on deaccessioning.

By contrast, the Los Angeles Times' Christopher Reynolds and Hugh Hart got the story right back in January when they wrote that the Hammer's Codex-related expenditures constitute "a move that, at first glance, conflicts with the code of ethics that major U.S. museums have endorsed for decades."

At second glance too. (Why aren't the two organizations sanctioning the Hammer/its director Annie Philbin instead of making excuses for it? I mean what's the point of having an industry association when...)

I can't link to the LAT story, so I'll quote big chunks of it:

... Philbin said, when she arrived, the institution was spending some or all of the codex interest revenue every year on exhibitions and programs and other expenses -- and none of it on buying art. Philbin and the board kept that strategy in place, she said, and in 2001, with the release of the principal coming up and no legal challenges imminent, Philbin put the situation before the leaders of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors.

"I went to them and said, 'Look, here's this money. We are totally dependent on it.' The museum had absolutely no donor base at the time," she said. "When I first got here, we solely used that money for our exhibitions and programs."

Association Executive Director Millicent Gaudieri said the board decided that Hammer's unique circumstances did exempt it from the usual restrictions on de-accession spending. This was in part because of the institution's chaotic first years, Gaudieri said, and in part because the codex, for all its value as an artifact of science and history, "wasn't a Renoir."

There are lots of museums and kunsthalles that managed to live within their means. If Philbin's Hammer couldn't they should have intensified fundraising or made cuts. Next, as I've noted here as recently as a few paragraphs ago, just because the world's most spineless industry association has given the Hammer a pass doesn't make what it's done right. (AAMD gives everyone a pass -- just ask Jay Gates and Malcolm Rogers.) Just because the Hammer has wanted to live beyond its means doesn't mean that it should be dipping into deaccessioning-related funds to do it. Ever. Back to the LAT:

[I]n April 2006, Philbin said... she and the museum's directors agreed to start spending half of the codex interest for acquisitions -- about $650,000 yearly -- and half or less on exhibitions and programs. The first purchase was a set of drawings by Raymond Pettibon.

The art-world discussion of the Hammer's strategy has been conducted mostly in whispers until now, but [a] new exhibition puts the museum's collection and acquisitions-policy center stage.
If the Hammer had been spending the codex interest on acquisitions all along, Philbin acknowledged, its collection would be far richer -- but "we would have been severely limited" and many of the museum's well-regarded exhibitions might never have been mounted.

There's the crux of the matter: The ambitions of the Hammer's director and her board outpaced their ability to pay for the museum they wanted to run. So they broke the rules and raided their future. (I'm not inventing the wheel here: Christopher Knight and, later, Lee Rosenbaum have been writing about this since 1994.)

Yet somehow the NYT gives the Hammer a free pass on a 13-year long ethical screw-up. And a headline writer there even thinks that the Hammer has lived within its means.

In a related story: NYT culture editor Sam Sifton, who presumably approved all of this boosterism, is doing the NYT's ask-an-editor gig this week. Last time Sifton sat for Qs his As were smartly entertaining, so I suspect he will be this week as well. Especially if he's called to account for this story. Or for why the NYT's chief art critic is going to Berlin and not to Seattle or Kansas City. Or about why the NYT has done almost as many stories (including one with a lazy error) on Hirst's skull as on the iPhone, or if the paper's critics understand what the issues are at the Smithsonian. I could keep going (and in the archives I do).

I receive lots of press releases, dozens a day. Many are from museums. Many more are from galleries. They're never from both -- until now.

The strange release (which is not online) was from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the folks who bring you the de Young and the Legion of Honor. It announced an upcoming de Young exhibition of surrealist Enrico Donati and included this paragraph:

Concurrent with The Surreal World of Enrico Donati at the de Young is a retrospective of Donati's work at Weinstein Gallery through August 30, 2007. The retrospective includes paintings from the artist's entire oeuvre, spanning seven decades from the 1940s through the present. "I can honestly say that working so closely with the de Young Museum to give Enrico dual exhibitions that he will attend - at age 98 - is the honor of a lifetime," says Rowland Weinstein, president of Weinstein Gallery. Weinstein Gallery is located at 301 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94102; 415.362.XXXX open seven days a week from 10:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.

Why is San Francisco's most distinguished museum shilling for a commercial gallery show?! I guess if director John Buchanan doesn't mind turning over the City of San Francisco's galleries to a commercial, for-profit, scholarship-free, making-a-mockery-of-art-museum-integrity exhibition such as Philip Anschutz's King Tut, why not turn your museum's communications operation into the marketing department for a commercial enterprises too?

I'm off for the semi-holiday, sorta-long-weekend. See you Monday.

As soon as Felix Gonzalez-Torres was named the U.S. rep to this year's Venice Biennale, I started posting about two elements of his selection: His, er, deadness, and whether a curator should be creating one of FG-T's unrealized works. In the LA Times, Christopher Knight takes on these two questions more directly than anyone else I've seen. (It's been clear for some time now that these are two significant issues, but NYTer Michael Kimmelman didn't even mention them.)

From MAN: Last year I talked with pavilion curator Nancy Spector, Hirshhorn director Olga Viso (part two here) and Andrea Rosen's FG-T guru Michelle Reyes about curators and the unrealized work of deceased artists. Spector and I also talked about the politics of FG-T in early 2006.

1.) I talked with half a dozen very senior/high-ranking Smithsonian types late last week and all of them said the same thing: If members of the board of regents don't take personal responsibility for the mess that has accumulated on their watch (read: if there are not substantial resignations), the Smithsonian will not reform, it will not improve, and Congress and private funders will lose even more interest. I thought that I was the only one thinking about this. I'm not. Oh by the way: Here's a list of the regents.

2.) I remain disappointed in the Washington Post's coverage of the story. Is there no critic there that wants to use his/her bully pulpit to pontificate about the biggest science and humanities institution in town? Philip Kennicott? Blake Gopnik?

3.) The best critical feud in America right now is in Seattle, where The Stranger's Jen Graves and the P-I's Regina Hackett are going at it on the internets. First Graves mentions Hackett in a review. Hackett fires back, comparing Graves to Jasper Johns' The Critic Sees. Graves, via Slog, replies, referencing a GOP POTUS candidate and a certain museum show. Why is all the spirit in cultural criticism out West? I mean, who wouldn't like to see Jerry Saltz and Michael Kimmelman duke it out? (It'd probably be good for contemporary art too. I volunteer to moderate.)

4.) Last week I noted that the NYT had run five rapid-fire stories on Damien Hirst's skull. Slate noticed that the only story more popular at the NYT is the iPhone, with six.

5.) This summer's best road-trip?: Agnes Martin's late paintings at Dia: Beacon, Spencer Finch at MASS MoCA, the Murphys at the Williams College Museum of Art.