August 2007 Archives

I'm plenty used to the Philly Inky's sloppy arts reporting. (They've substantially ignored the Barnes story for years, and they've pinched stories from MAN without giving credit.) But how is it that no one at the major metro paper in Philadelphia has read the Friends of the Barnes court filing and then written a story about it? There's significant stuff in there. (Start here and link-surf.)

Having spent months watching FAMSF director John Buchanan find new ways to sully the reputation of one of America's most reputable museums (don't miss this from late yesterday), it's a delight to share with you what his successor at the Portland Art Museum told DK Row in yesterday's Portland Oregonian.

The new director in Portland is Brian Ferriso, who happens to be a dead-ringer for the "My Two Dads"-era Paul Reiser, only younger. Yesterday Ferriso announced his exhibition lineup through 2010 and the Oregonian -- and obviously relieved local arts leaders -- note that it's a marked departure from Buchanan's lineup of Big Name Baubles, the same kind of mistakes he's programmed in San Francisco. So here's our beer-swilling lad Ferriso on whether Portland needs Buchanan-style buffoonery-as-exhibitions:

Ferriso concedes that the big-top Asian and European shows of the past boosted the museum's profile and produced excitement. Will they be missed?

"If there aren't enough people visiting the museum to satisfy the board and others, then maybe I'm the wrong guy," he says of his leadership.

Either he won't last the month or I'm ready to deify him now. Every museum director in America who programs splashy, big-dollar shows in an effort to bring in the crowds needs to have lunch with Ferriso. As I've documented on MAN before, big-dollar, low-quality shows are not worth the financial risks (ask the Corcoran).

But Ferriso isn't done. This is as much an indictment of Buchanan as it is praise of Ferriso:

The contract of Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, the museum's consulting curator of European art, will not be renewed when it runs out in February 2008, but she will continue to consult on a project basis until a full-time curator is hired. Hunter-Stiebel, who was hired by Buchanan and lives and works in New York for the Portland museum, has been consulting for the museum since the late '90s. Ferriso said he wanted a full-time curator who would be based in Portland.

Hunter-Stiebel's husband runs a New York art gallery that specializes in Hunter-Stiebel's specialty, Old Master and European paintings. That's a relationship that Ferriso regards as problematic for the museum.

"It's a conflict of interest," he says.

FAMSF hired Buchanan knowing that?! (With a hint of things to come) maybe that's part of why so many board members have fled Buchanan's FAMSF...

Overheard: Expect the Ess Eff Chronicle to run a substantial story about the evolving train wreck that is John Buchanan's Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Perhaps as soon as this Sunday.

I don't have the foggiest idea why this is in the NYT arts section. That is a business story. The headline makes clear it's a business story: "Volatile Markets? Art World Takes Stock" (If only the headline had been: "Art market beginning to live within its means.") The NYT does not run stories about the sales of major mid-century modern houses, to name one example, in its arts section.

In a related story, the only writer I enjoy reading about the business of art is Edward Winkleman. Portfolio mag should have hired him to blog instead of unleashing this upon us. And the best piece on the art market I've read in the last week or so is on Gawker, yes Gawker: Elizabeth Currid on the conflicts between street artists who do and don't have market success.

(In an unrelated story, I'm loving the NYT's US Open blog again this year, even sans Kimmelman who I hear will next be blogging on the WTA Tour's German Open, in Berlin. Why can't the NYT visual arts people come up with something equally good?! Heck, if Time can do it...)

The Friends of the Barnes petition cites the August, 2007 Bulletin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a rather damning passage that demonstrates this item isn't mere paranoia: Private tours of the Barnes will be available this fall for members and guests of the PMA on a day when the Barnes Foundation is usually closed to the public.

Related: Parts one, two, three.

The Tennessean's Jonathan Marx has the story.

Continued (scroll down for previous posts)...

The Friends of the Barnes petition notes that the Barnes movers are behind on their own timeline for moving the Barnes -- and that there is no end to delays in sight. In 2004 the Barnes' moving crew received permission to expand the Barnes' board to 15 members as a way of professionalizing it and expanding its fundraising capability. Today the Barnes does not have 15 board members. Nearly five years after the initial agreement between the movers and the Barnes and nearly three years after Judge Ott OK'd the move: The Barnes has no Benjamin Franklin Parkway land, no architect, no nothing. (In fact the city is now planning to merely lease land to the Barnes.)

The petition suggests that the movers' ultimate Barnes "endgame" may include housing the Barnes Foundation collection in a place of last resort, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (The petition notes that this is similar to how the PMA acquired the John E. Johnson collection 65 years ago.)

"My feeling was that the petitioners then told the court whatever it wanted to hear so they'd get out and get the release," Bryn Mawr-based FoB attorney Mark D. Schwartz told me. "Here we are years later and they went to great ends to say we need a modern board and they don't have a modern board yet."

Continuing from this morning's perusal of the Friend of the Barnes' court filing...

The Friends of the Barnes petition's biggest bombshell is its suggestion that Pew president & CEO Rebecca Rimel may have given misleading testimony before Montgomery County Orphans' Court Judge Stanley Ott. It is one of several claims that Pew and its allies played fast-and-loose with the court.

In December, 2003 Rimel testified before Ott that Pew's application to the IRS for a change from a private to public charity status was "not based on anything that may or may not happen with the Barnes... It has no implications whatsoever."

However, according to the petition, Pew's application to the IRS for public charity status, filed in December, 2002, suggests quite a different story. The petition quotes from Pew's IRS submission:

"If [Pew] receives recognition of its public charity status, it will assume the Pew Charitable Trust Division's role in the Barnes Foundation project. As a public charity, [Pew] will be in a position not only to continue the Pew Charitable Trust Division's role in planning and coordinating the project, but also to receive grants and contributions from the Trusts and from other donors, and to hold and administer those funds until the Barnes project is completed. Putting [Pew] in this position presents a significant advantage because it allows [Pew] not only to develop a plan and a vision for the project, but also to raise the funds and then administer the project to ensure that the plan and the shared vision are realized."

Pew did not immediately respond to a request for comment. UPDATE, Wednesday, 9am: Still no response from Pew.

Jim McCaffrey of The Evening Bulletin got his hands on the filing and has written about it. (Note: I've been having some trouble with their website, so that link might not work...)

Yesterday a group hoping to keep the Barnes in Montgomery County filed a petition before the Orphans' Court arguing why Judge Stanley Ott should revisit the case. MAN is the first news outlet to report on the petition. The filing makes a strong argument that the case should be re-examined and that the Philly foundations who want to move the Barnes are behind their self-mandated schedule to move the Barnes, suggest a reason why, and note that Pew in particular may not have been completely honest with the public -- or the court.

Throughout the day I'll post about four of the key portions of the filing. First:

The petition points out that subsequent to the 2004 hearings before Judge Ott it was revealed that Pennsylvania allocated $107 million in state aid in 2002 for use to build a new Barnes facility in Philadelphia. (The bill was introduced in 2001.) Remarkably, that was just about the exact amount that the Philly foundations said it would take to build a new Barnes.

The petition argues that if any of the parties to the Barnes move knew of the $107 million state appropriation that it may have an issue with the court. "The question was raised whether anyone associated with the Barnes or the foundations knew about that information and if they did, if any party had that information and didn't come forward, it would have grave implications," Barnes Friends attorney Mark D. Schwartz told me today. The petition suggests that the court should specifically examine this point.

As Friends of the Barnes noted earlier this year, Pew chief Rebecca Rimel has been asked if she knew about the appropriation and failed to respond.

Related: The Philly Inky's story and AP's version. Apparently neither had the filing.

Expect some Barnes-related bombshells on MAN later today, but first...

I believe that the best art criticism is socioculturally relevant. It isn't built around the same few tired art-world-on-the-art-world cliches (one part Krauss, one part Marx, two parts Fried or Greenberg, toss in a pinch of Baudelaire, add gallery ads and serve) but places art within the broader social context in which it is made and in which it is viewed.

There are two fine examples this morning in the two big papers: In the LAT, Christopher Knight looks at LACMA's SoCal show and opens his review with an abortion and an artists response to it. Squeaky-clean NYTer Nicolai Ouroussoff updates us on architectural visions for America's Thunderdome: New Orleans.

Related: LACMA has an better-than-excellent online feature on Ed Kienholz's Backseat Dodge '38, which is included in the show.

At a time when stories about the business of art end up in the art section of newspapers instead of where they belong (that would be the business section -- the pricing and sale of an object most often has nothing to do with its creation nor cultural import), here is your August anecdote: A four-minute wedding proposal in an art gallery. It's sweet, it's romantic -- and you'll see lots of white wine in plastic cups.

1.) If I hear one more museum podcast feature visitors to the museum and what they think of ______, I'm going to delete them from my feeds. Museums all employ armies of people who do interesting things: conservation, research, building, installing, curating, and so on. Podcasting was made for telling us what cool things those people are up to. Instead we too oft get Joe Schmoe saying that the comb in a Magritte looks soooo reallllll.

2.) While Gerald Murphy & Co. is getting all the Williams College Museum of Art-related pub this season, WCMA is also showing Critical Encounters: Collecting Contemporary Photography. The exhibition features 48 works promised to WCMA by critic (and MANpal) Phyllis Tuchman. Also: Consider the show proof that the critic and WCMA understand ethics better than, say, the NGA or the Hammer.

3.) One new measure of an art museum's crossover popularity is its Flickr profile. The new Nelson-Atkins is a FlickrFave (3,400+), as are the de Young (15,000+), and Marfa's mega-photogenic Chinati Foundation (3,200+). I could keep going... but instead will note that BoingBoing is predicting that the next FlickrFave will be Gerhard Richter's new installation at the Cologne Cathedral. Spiegel has the news on the unveiling.

4.) If you're a museum searching for a director, the Walker has made it easy for you to know who is willing to serve as a reference for outgoing chief Kathy Halbreich: They've been publishing a series of 'Memories of/Thoughts on Kathy' for a week now. Total number of hat-tips: Eighteen.

5.) The Barnes battle is heating up. Today the Friends of the Barnes are asking the Montgomery County Orphans' Court to re-consider its the-Barnes-may-move decision. It has the world's favorite plotline: The little guys versus the biggest money and most prominent players in the city. The group has a blog, too.

If you haven't checked out Todd Gibson's Q&A with Pulitzer director Matthias Waschek, you're missing out.

The post brought two thoughts to mind: How rare is it that a collector builds such a relatively modest, non-monument-to-self as this? Compare the Pulitzer to Don Fisher's bigger-than-SFMOMA proposed museum, for example. (FishMu: 55,000 square feet of galleries; SFMOMA: 50,000.)

Also, the Pulitzer and the Contemporary St. Louis have long published a joint blog. A little while ago they rolled out a new design and presentation and it's well-worth checking out. It's a model for how other neighboring (or near-neighboring) museums might present themselves.

Related: David Bonetti's review of the Pulitzer's current show.

From knocking one LA institution to praising another: For years I've complained that California museums aren't as provincial as their New York peers. For years you'd be lucky to see a second Richard Diebenkorn on view at LACMA or a Thiebaud at SFMOMA. So I'm happy to see that this show went up at LACMA last week.

In an unrelated story, LACMA made a noteworthy change to its website a wee bit ago. You no longer have to be an iTunes user to download LACMA podcasts. (If you haven't checked out the Dan Flavin-related riches on that page, you're missing darn good stuff.)

Just before my vacation I posted about an extremely questionable exhibition at the National Gallery of Art: The Fluffing of Robert E. Jackson. I see that the Hammer Museum is the latest fluffer, with a show of objects owned by magician Ricky Jay. Nowhere in the museum's press release does the Hammer indicate that Jay is donating the objects in the show to the museum.

This is just like the Jackson show: A private collector will be glorified and have his collection's prestige (and likely its value) enhanced by receiving the public approval of an important art museum. (And in the case of Jay, his 'brand' will receive a PR boost too.) If the museum feels like an entire exhibition of broadsides has merit, great, it should do an exhibition about broadsides. Instead it's doing an exhibition about Jay. Apparently the Hammer was more interested in cozying up to the collector than in doing a scholarly show.

There's no question that director Annie Philbin has made the Hammer an interesting place to visit. In recent years its exhibition program has been top-notch. (I've loved Thing, Stephen Shore, and many, many other shows there.) But the museum's flagrantly unethical expenditure of Codex-related funds is an increasing embarrassment, and now there's this. The Hammer had been one of the contemporary art world's star museums. But lately the museum is busy tarnishing that star.

I'm back. More on where I've been and what I've seen some other time. I've been pretty completely out of touch for the last week, so I have lots of catch-up-on-Todd-Gibson reading to do.

I notice that the SF Chronicle editorial board is skeptical of the Donald Fisher-to-the-Presidio museum plan, although its reason: "For the museum to have stature, the building itself must be a destination" is goofy. Down the street from me, the Phillips Collection hit the jackpot (ooh -- bad phrase), Richard Lacayo discovers a gem of a writing-on-photography archive, Roger Kimball should really read the book I read on vacation to understand how his beloved non-modern, non-contemporary art exists in its own time, and it seems that more and more people are frustrated by John Buchanan's FAMSF.

I'm going to start replying to a week's worth of email. I'll be back later today.

The time has come (and none too soon) for me to hand MAN back to Tyler. I haven't heard from him since he left, so I'm hoping that he's returned and is ready to take over. If not, I'm going to have to find a guest blogger to spell me from this guest blogging gig.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to write to me at the email address I posted here last week. I've been swamped with all sorts of interesting business propositions, notices that I've won sweepstakes, offers of discounted prices on little blue pills, and requests to confirm my account information with banks that I don't even use. The response has been so overwhelming that I've fallen a bit behind in responding. But I'll get back to all of you soon. Real soon. Just be patient.

So back to you, Tyler. Tyler? Are you there? We agreed on a week, remember? The week's up now....

--Todd Gibson

Matthias Waschek is Director of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in Saint Louis. Prior to joining the Pulitzer in 2004, he spent 12 years as head of academic programs at the Louvre in Paris where he oversaw the museum's lecture series and symposia--a position that, he says, involved "curating people."

I spent some time on the phone yesterday with Waschek, discussing how he goes about putting together the theme based exhibitions for which the Pulitzer is becoming known.

A small, theme based exhibition is an interesting thing. It would seem to be an easy type of show to curate, but it's rare that I see one that really works well. A good show, I'm imagining, has to begin with a robust theme. How do you start the process of defining a theme for yourself?

That's a difficult question to answer because in our case there's not a specific "method." The thought process is highly associative and framed, in the true sense of the word, by the existing architecture. Temporary exhibition spaces tend to be more neutral, allowing for an ever changing scenography. Our scenography is Tadao Ando's design, which has a strong contemplative aspect.

Interestingly enough, the very first exhibition I was involved in at the Pulitzer was a thematic one, working on this contemplative aspect. The title of this exhibition was Exploring Ando's Space, Art and the Spiritual.

I began by asking what makes the visitor perceive a work as spiritual and a space as contemplative. We gathered work from different periods and cultures, drawing strongly from the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum and working closely with our colleagues there. Our choice of work was not determined only by the thematic context. Specific spaces and possibilities of juxtaposition led to thinking about specific (and available) artworks.

By taking the space into account, we were able to avoid the pitfall where artworks illustrate a thematic point to the detriment of their aesthetic magic. In our space, we're able to give each of the works the breathing space it needs. By allowing them to offer other dimensions, they enrich the theme.

So space plays an important part in any show you put together, but how do you germinate the original idea?

As I said before, it's a very organic process. It's not that you have a hypothesis originally. The work and the space generate the ideas, not the other way around.

Let me give you another example. One of the starting points for our recent Portrait/Homage/Embodiment exhibition was Richard Serra's Joe which was commissioned for the courtyard.

This torqued spiral is clearly not a portrait, but you feel its physical presence just as you do when you interact with a person. So that raised the nature of the portrait as a shorthand for referencing people. We have another work by Serra, Joplin, which in some circumstances is mute but in the context of portraiture takes on a different set of associations. And from there we began thinking about a work by Doris Salcedo we have, and then a great Chuck Close in the Saint Louis Art Museum was available. One work opens up to another, and you start making the exhibition.

The theme is both a pretext to show wonderful artworks and a framework for them. It's not an aim in itself, yet it turns into a serious aim. It's a very ambivalent thing. And that's the problem. Theme based shows where works turn into illustrations are a problem. The sum of rich and multilayered artworks confirms and enriches the theme. The theme is a pretext, but then it turns out to be a focus.

Since your process isn't formulaic, there's always a risk that a show won't come together as well as you would like. Does that ever happen?

Fortunately, this has not happened so far--possibly because the building has always disciplined us.

But it's not only the importance of the architecture that sets Pulitzer exhibitions apart. Our mission is to allow visitors a personal experience with artworks. Our mission statement contains the key notions of a "sanctuary" for the arts and a "laboratory," so we can allow ourselves the luxury of different thought processes.

For the time being, this allows us to explore more associative ways of thinking. So far, colleagues from other institutions have been very encouraging to us. I hope that our exceptionally idiosyncratic existence here will allow others to think outside the box.

That said, there's always a risk that we face. With Water, our current exhibition, if we hadn't gotten it right we would have seemed like children playing with very expensive objects. There's a risk to requesting loans of works by Matisse, Twombly, Beckmann, and others. But if you can get it right by contextualizing them in a new way, you can help people see the works with new eyes--to free the works from preconceived ideas about them that you think you are supposed to have.

The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts' current exhibition, Water, runs through January 5, 2008.

--Todd Gibson

Coming later today, a Q&A with Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts Director Matthias Waschek on the topic of theme based exhibitions.

--Todd Gibson

Every so often a movie includes a piece of dialogue that becomes an epigram for its age. I saw Oliver Stone's Wall Street again recently and was reminded of the line that came to summarize the financial world before the 1987 crash. "Greed, for lack of a better word," Gordon Gekko asserts, "is good."

There's another line in the movie, though, that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. In the closing scene, Martin Sheen's character says by way of advice to his disgraced, stockbroker son, "Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others."

Telling someone to live the creative life is one thing. Actually living as an artist is quite another. Philip Glass's latest work, Book of Longing, contains a lyric by Leonard Cohen that perfectly maps the psychic terrain that all artists have to navigate:

I followed the course
From chaos to art
Desire the horse
Depression the cart

Over the last few weeks I've had these two quotes battling in my mind: an exhortation to live the creative life and a warning about the difficulties of doing so. Why, I've been asking, do some people choose to do it?

There's nothing harder, to paraphrase Cohen, than turning chaos into art. There are people, though, who can't seem to help but create. They're a certain type. They always have multiple projects going, and they have absolutely no fear of failure. If one project doesn't work out, there's always another half dozen in progress. Kiki Smith is this kind of artist--prolific, diverse, innovative, producing work that is somewhat uneven, but never pausing or freezing. The hands are always working.

What really intrigues me, though, are those rare individuals who balance a successful career outside the arts with a deeply productive creative life. They fully live the life of an artist, but they do it on the side of another life.

The poets William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens come to mind here. Williams made his living as a physician in New Jersey while Stevens spent most of his career in Connecticut working as an executive for an insurance company. But in their off hours--while walking to the office in the morning, after arriving home late at night from delivering a baby--these two wrote, and in the process changed the direction of American poetry.

Another, perhaps more interesting, case study of the artist who wasn't only an artist is Gerald Murphy. Murphy's story, though, has a different twist. Murphy and his wife Sara did what any cultivated couple with an artistic bent and an inheritance would have done in the 1920s--they left Prohibition behind and relocated to Paris where they plugged themselves into a community of writers, artists, and dancers. They became, in the process, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender Is the Night.

After happening upon a gallery show in Paris containing works by Gris, Braque, and Picasso, Murphy decided he wanted to paint. And paint he did, but his career as a painter lasted only seven years. As quickly and impulsively as he started, Murphy quit painting. "I was not going to be first rate," he told Calvin Tomkins for a 1962 New Yorker profile, "and I couldn't stand second-rate painting." He and his wife ended up returning to the States, and Murphy spent the rest of his career running his family's business. He never painted again.

Murphy left behind a handful of canvases, less than 10, many of which are stunning. The first time I saw his Watch from 1925 (above) at the Dallas Museum of Art, I literally stopped in my tracks and gaped. The public has a chance, now, to decide whether Murphy was a second-rate talent or not. An exhibition of seven of his extant paintings is at the Williams College Museum of Art until November, after which it will travel to New Haven and Dallas.

How did Stevens and Williams find the strategies they needed to feed and sustain their craft in the midst of their demanding professional lives? Why did Murphy, as innovative as he was, give in to the demons of self-doubt? How could Murphy, a man who clearly had talent, simply choose to stop painting and not complete another work in the three more decades that he lived?

No answers today, only questions. But the answers, I think, would provide a set of interesting insights into the nature of the creative mind.

--Todd Gibson

Thank goodness Tyler is letting me continue MAN summer Fridays. Having to write something every day is seriously cutting into the after work cocktail hour.

But, apropos of yesterday's post, here's something to ponder over the weekend. There's been plenty of grousing lately about the direction that the initially promising Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant Program has gone. So think on this: if Andy Warhol were alive today, and if he were personally giving his foundation's money to arts writers, who would he bankroll?

Back on Monday with more whining and navel gazing.

--Todd Gibson

I've been getting a good deal of drinks-and-dinner conversation out of an interesting topic lately. What's the gut's role in criticism? And what should that role be?

Anyone is capable of having a strong reaction to a piece of art. Last Sunday I was giving a talk on the Rudolf Stingel exhibition at the Whitney. As I was discussing one particular piece in the show--an untitled work that's nothing more than a few carved Styrofoam panels--I was interrupted by one of the group, an elderly woman wearing sensible shoes. She had asked me a few questions earlier that made it clear that she didn't spend much time with contemporary art.

"I really don't like this," she started. "It makes me upset." "OK," I thought to myself, "I know where this is going." But she surprised me.

"I mean, what would the Old Masters think?" she continued. "They made paintings that were supposed to last for hundreds of years. This stuff. It's Styrofoam. It's not going to last. And he's even screwed it right onto the wall. Why is he making something that's not going to last? I just don't like that." It was the perfect question--or rant, or whatever it was.

"Stingel's got you," I said. "He's making you question your assumptions about what makes a painting a painting. And that's what the work is about."

After the group split up, we talked for a while. She had become enthusiastic about the exhibition. Her gut reaction to seeing an inherently unstable material being used to create an object that usually carries with it the assumption of permanence led her to see something in a new way. And that insight excited her.

The same experience happens to those of us who spend much more time looking at art. I took an unexpected sucker punch to the gut a couple weeks ago when I found myself in Tokyo for the day job. Jetlagged and harried because of meetings, I hadn't planned on seeing any art. But a colleague talked me into sneaking out one afternoon to pay a quick visit the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography which is in the same complex as the building where we were working.

The museum is currently hosting a show of Martin Parr's photography. I'm horribly conflicted about Parr's work. I love it. And I hate it. And I love it. And I hate it that I love it because I hate it. But I still hate it. Or love it. Or something. You get the picture.

A couple pieces in the show stunned me, but one piece really knocked the wind out of me. It was a snapshot of nothing, really--people shopping at a supermarket. But at the same time it was the perfect portrait of a place, a time, and a whole way of life. This one moment (captured so artlessly--ugly, repugnant in its rejection of anything aesthetic) tells everything anyone will ever need to know about what it was like to live in the West at the end of the twentieth century. And the fact that Parr is able to say so much so economically and with such banal material put a knot in my stomach and made me pause to catch my breath.

It's rare that art is able to cause that sort of reaction for a viewer. When it does, it pays to savor, and then to dissect, the moment of discomfort.

But what I want to know--and what none of my dinner companions has really been able to tell me--is why it's even more rare to read a piece of criticism that describes that sort of immediate and visceral reaction to a piece of art but that goes on to explain, contextualize, and critique what caused the moment to occur without draining away the passion of the experience. Gut on its own is never enough to make a good piece of criticism, but it seems that most critics either don't trust their instincts or they feel the need to explain them away when they write for an audience.

And that's a shame. Because engaged, informed, passionate writing about art is what most people who care about art really want to read. But they so rarely get to.

--Todd Gibson

Even though the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics doesn't agree with me on this one, for my money there's no better art content broadcast in any medium than Art21.

Back in June, Tyler announced the artist list for this year's series. This week I'm happy to report that PBS has given Art21 pride of place in its fall lineup. The series will run at 10PM ET on four consecutive Sunday nights--one of the plum timeslots in the PBS broadcast schedule. Segment themes and broadcast dates (subject to local scheduling, of course) are as follows:

October 28, Romance: Pierre Huyghe, Judy Pfaff, Lari Pittman, Laurie Simmons
November 4, Protest: Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, An-My Lê, Nancy Spero
November 11, Ecology: Robert Adams, Mark Dion, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Ursula von Rydingsvard
November 18, Paradox: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Mark Bradford, Robert Ryman, Catherine Sullivan

In conjunction with the series, Art21 will be hosting Access '07, a preview screening initiative co-presented with Americans for the Arts during October's National Arts and Humanities Month. The current schedule lists special screenings at 245 sites in all 50 states and 20 countries spread across six continents (including Antarctica).

Related: Watch the Art21 season 4 trailer and follow the countdown to the season premier on the new Art21 blog.

--Todd Gibson

I went on record a couple years ago when I wrote that the art market had to correct and that it was only a matter of time until it did. During the first two weeks of August, while everyone in the art world was away doing what art world people do during the summer, this long-awaited correction may have started.

Over the last half decade, the multiplication of wealth among the already wealthy has pushed art prices (especially at the top end on the secondary market) well beyond the range of reasonableness. The money being funneled into art at this level hasn't been created in ordinary stocks, bonds, and mutual funds--the general investment vehicles used to secure retirement incomes, among other things, for the broad public. It's been created by limited partnerships like private equity firms and hedge funds that have masterfully exploited the artificially low interest rates that the Fed has maintained since 2001.

With the rising cost of capital having passed some sort of tipping point this year, and with the recent meltdown in the subprime mortgage market beginning to poison all debt markets, the richest of the rich--the biggest of the big collectors--have been hit incredibly hard. To give just one example, it was reported this week that the $8BB formerly high flying Goldman Sachs Global Alpha hedge fund has lost 26% of its value this year and 40% since July 31, 2006. As a point of comparison, during the last year the S&P 500 has gained over 10%.

As this credit and liquidity crisis continues to develop into the fall, we'll see more reports of the loss of staggering amounts of wealth among the super rich. Clustered within this group of individuals, of course, is the small subset of the NetJets-set who do the art fair and contemporary auction circuit with checkbooks in hand.

The law of pricing in the secondary art market is that it takes only two people with money to push the value of Peter Doig's work to $11.2MM. Or the value of a Rothko painting to $72.8MM. Or a Picasso to $104MM. If only one of the two doesn't have that extra $10MM or $70MM or $100MM anymore, the work is no longer worth that amount. How much is it worth? Who knows. But I'm guessing we'll find out soon.

A little (or even a lot) of cooling down in the market isn't such a bad thing. There's just too much obscene stuff going on there these days that simply screams that it's time for a correction. How much and how quickly we see the air drain from the bubble is anyone's guess. But I think the leak has started.

Related: Charlie Finch uses his bully pulpit to slag his usual hedge fund bogeymen/straw men, but he thinks roughly the same thing I do. Wait a minute. I agree with Charlie Finch on something? Whoa. Things really have gone all topsy-turvy in the last two weeks, haven't they?

--Todd Gibson

What is about Jenny Holzer's work that makes it lend itself so well to Web 2.0 shenanigans?

Back in February there was that judo throw piece of institutional critique that MoMA ended up hosting on its own e-card server for all of about 10 minutes. (I suppose journalistic ethics, as much as they exist in the blogosphere, would probably call for some sort of disclosure here. Then again, I'm not a real journalist.)

Now someone (Holzer herself? Maybe. Maybe not.) has created a Twitter page that is being updated with Truisms on a semi-frequent basis. One of my favorites--and one every critic ought to take to heart: Being sure of yourself means you're a fool.

--Todd Gibson

Thanks to Tyler for luring me out of retirement and for handing over his password to the ArtsJournal server. I've promised him that I'll do my best to get him sued while he's away on vacation.

While I have the reins here, posting on MAN may be a little lighter than usual. I figure that's fine, though, because in late August there's nothing much going on in the art world--except for MOCA donating gallery space to a stinking rich luxury goods firm and then equivocating its way through the announcement of what it has decided to do. (What I want to know: who's the summer intern MOCA had negotiate that deal for them?)

Over the next week I also plan to mix things up around here a bit. I'll be doing less news and commentary than Tyler usually does and more solipsistic think pieces that pretty much just help me figure out what's been rattling around inside my head lately. I'm going to try to slip in a Q&A as well.

But that doesn't mean I'm not interested in breaking a news story or two. So if you've got tips to share this week, shoot them off to me at ManForTheWeek@gmail.com. I'll also happily accept any kudos you want to send my way. If you've got a complaint or the threat of a libel suit, though, just hold onto it for a few days. Tyler will be back to deal with that stuff next week.

--Todd Gibson

In late June, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) strangely suggested that the Smithsonian not conduct a search for a new Secretary and that it just hire someone, anyone fast fast fast.

Today University of California president Robert C. Dynes resigned. Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum, is the UC chairman, the man in charge of replacing Dynes. I wonder if Mrs. Blum has given Mr. Blum any advice on the hiring process...

Starting tomorrow, I'm going on vacation. I'll be back on Aug. 22.

I'm delighted to report that I've lined up a superb guest-blogger: Todd Gibson, whose From the Floor blog was one of the smartest, most insightful, and often funniest art blogs around before Todd 'retired' in August, 2006. Look for him starting tomorrow.

The National Gallery has earned every bit of its reputation for presenting important, scholar-driven shows and for installing them better than any museum in the United States. In just the last few years: Dada was the most important exhibition to be shown in the United States during the Iraq War. Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits arrived with echoes of contemporary Palestinian martyrdom portraits. Cezanne in Provence was a visual treat. Clearly the NGA doesn't lack for exhibitions budget, the ability to get loans -- or for anything else. With expenditures of $151 million and an operating surplus of $14 million in its last reported tax year, the NGA is a powerhouse.

So then why is the NGA fluffing a private collector with an upcoming photography show? This fall the NGA will present The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888-1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson. An NGA spokesperson told me that the museum will receive about half of the exhibition's works as a gift from Jackson. The rest goes back to Jackson, who is described by the museum as an "analyst for a large global asset management company" in Seattle.)

There are two problems with the show. First, it goes without saying that museums should not present vanity exhibitions. Museums shouldn't do it even when there's a coherent focus to the show. There's no question that the profile and financial value of Mr. Jackson's collection will increase after the NGA's curatorial, communications and exhibition-related staffs work to glorify him. A non-profit organization's resources should not be used in that manner. (And just because the NGA is getting half of the works on view there's no reason to believe they'll get the other half. The NGA should know this better than anyone: After fluffing the Ebsworths with a show in 2000, the Ebsworths' collection landed in Seattle.)

The NGA should be doubly ashamed because of its exhibition record. If the NGA wants to do a show about 100 years of the 'American Snapshot' it should do so. The museum certainly has the resources to do whatever it wants, to set its own curatorial agenda instead of letting private collectors do the job. Even more specifically: It would be preferable to have the NGA's curators define the show's title term, scope, etc. Jackson is not an NGA curator -- but the museum has just turned him into one.

Related: Also guilty: the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is showing works from the collection of the same Blochs after whom the museum's new building is named. The works on view are not pledged to the museum.

The MOCA-related blowback continues. The Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers notes MOCA's bungling and Marshall Astor looks forward to the LVMH store but notes that MOCA "seems to have misstepped."

Meanwhile, at The Expanded Field, Andrew Berardini finds some of the many flaws with the Warhol Foundation's art-writers grant program, including cronyism and a lack of younger grantees. He's right. (Though specific examples -- they're there -- would make his case even stronger.) Last year the foundation asked me to encourage writers who blog to apply. This year? I'd say don't bother. After seeing who the grantees (and the panelists) were last year, I'm not.

The latest on the MOCA/LVMH controversy:

If you want to know what's on page A1 of the Los Angeles Times today you can visit a newsstand... or you could have just read MAN last week. The LAT's Diane Haithman picks up a story I posted last Thursday: MOCA is planning to have a Louis Vuitton boutique as part of its upcoming Takashi Murakami retrospective.

But wait, you say, didn't a MOCA spokesperson tell MAN that the LVMH boutique was a no-go? Here's the recap: A week ago I asked MOCA spokesperson Lyn Winter if an unsourced report of an LVMH boutique at MOCA was accurate. "It is not," Winter said via email. When I asked her to be more specific about how the report was inaccurate, Winter added: "I cannot comment until we make official announcements."

Oops.

Last week last week I addressed the questionable museo-ethics of the boutique, leaving the museum some wiggle-room because of Winter's denial. But now? Was the museum so ashamed of the ethical shakiness of the idea that it felt like it had to lead me astray? (And that's about as kindly as I can characterize Winter's responses.) It's hard to give a museum any benefit of the doubt here when its spokesperson grossly misleads the press.

Previously: Shop at the museum, see art at the store?
Subsequently: MOCA tries to explain.

The embarrassments keep on coming. Question: How many regents (SI parlance for trustees) are known to have resigned? Answer: None. Question: Why not...

So: Another art museum in another San Francisco park. Does this make sense?

For those of you keeping score at home, Ess Eff has two park-bound art museums: One in Lincoln Park (the Legion of Honor), and one in Golden Gate Park (the de Young). SFMOMA is across the street from Yerba Buena Gardens but in the middle of one of Ess Eff's most dynamic urban areas, and the Asian is in the Civic Center, across an urban square from what might be the most under-appreciated building in America.

So when San Francisco is the most urban city in the West, why put an art museum -- especially a contemporary art museum -- in an out-of-the-way place more frequented by tourists than by locals?

"If you're interested in those artists, you'll have to come to San Francisco," SFMOMA director Neal Benezra told the NYT. It's not for San Francisco? It's for the tourists?

I hope that's not the Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio's approach. I hope that Fisher and the museum find creative ways to connect the city to the museum, and the museum to the city. I especially hope that the museum works to build bonds with its neighbors in the Richmond and in the Sunset, Richard Serra's home neighborhood.

Thanks to a reader for tipping me off to three stories in yesterday's SF Chronicle: Gap founder Donald Fisher plans to build and open a museum for his modern and contemporary art collection in San Francisco's Presidio. The museum would be designed by Fisher and Richard Gluckman. Local political leaders seem to be on board.

Here's the Cecelia M. Vega lead story, some information about Fisher from Julian Guthrie and Erin McCormick, and Chron critic Kenneth Baker's take on it all. (Message to the Chron: Why have an art page if you routinely don't put art stories on it?!)

I'm not sure what the best visual arts website on the internets is, but The Guardian's art and architecture webzine ranks right up there. (They call it a blog. I don't.) The Guardian folks do a great job mixing content with medium, of using the web as a place to explore ideas, not just breaking news. Someone -- possibly through some kind of private/philanthropic partnership -- should do something like this here.

Example of excellence: This Martin Kemp piece headlined, "Can children's drawings be used as evidence of war crimes?" It's a further exploration of what's in this news story. Don't miss it.

The Tennessean's Jonathan Marx has the news: Fisk University and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum have reached a deal. I don't think I've ever seen a weirder agreement -- each bullet point in Marx's story slowed me down and made me think: Wha?!

In short, the GO'KM will buy Radiator Building for $7.5 million and loan it to Fisk four months out of every four years. And if the GO'KM ever sells the painting, Fisk gets half of the sale price. (If that isn't inviting a bid...) Then there's this, from Marx's story:

The museum will lend Radiator Building to Fisk for four months every four years. When the painting is not at Fisk, the museum will provide a high-quality reproduction to be displayed with the rest of the Stieglitz Collection.

And, obviously, that Radiator Building sale provision wouldn't be in the contract unless...

Keep this in mind when Chelsea, Chinatown, Culver City, and Geary Street heat up this September: Make sure you have a big enough bag in which to take your haul home.

I've written about Marilyn Minter's recent work a good bit here over the last couple years. I'm seduced by its decadence, a dirty flashiness which seems just about right for W's America.

So I've enjoyed perusing a new monograph about Minter from Gregory R. Miller & Co. Most interesting by far are the plates of Minter's work and a couple of different kinds of interviews with the artist. (Least interesting -- also by far -- is an essay by Johanna Burton, a meandering, look-at-me bit of blather that wouldn't have made it past my freshman English teaching assistant. It opens: "Marilyn Minter is hard-core. At least that's what I've decided today." Or this bizarre footnote on the next page: "As a female critic writing about a female artist, I like the way it sounds to use the artist's initials, instead of her full name. It sounds like something a hard-core male critic would do for a hard-core male artist." That's being a critic? That's scholarship?)

The best part of the monograph is watching Minter go from being a Rosenquistian in the late 1960s, to a Celminsian in the 1970s to a Polkeian in the 1980s, to a Salleian in the 1990s and then to emerge into making paintings that are immediately recognizable as Marilyn Minters in the early 2000s. It's the kind of journey that the who just finished what at Columbia? art world seldom stops to appreciate and consider, a reminder that an artist's best work can take 30 years to happen.

Or, to put it another way, to make paintings that brilliantly capture the early 21st-century American zeitgeist, maybe you have to first synthesize 30 years of the zeitgeist as interpreted by others. (In Minter's case the path was unusually clear: commercialism, realism, pop, the subconscious.) If I taught at an art school I'd make sure my students spent some time with this book. It would help them realize that artists aren't made at a graduation ceremony.

Related: Amp Power on Madison Ave. borrowing from Minter.

Earlier this week I posted about how strange it was for NYT reporter and author Sharon Waxman to claim that Marion True "played by the rules." True didn't: She took unethical loans and the Getty accepted her resignation as a result. That's as not 'playing by the rules' as it gets. But Waxman writes:

[I]t is Green, in fact, who is factually inaccurate, as he cites the loan for her house on Paros as proof that she broke the rules. Her public ordeal - her criminal trial in Italy and the pending charges against her in Greece -- do not involve the loan for her house in Paros.

Of course, I never said that the loans were a part of the criminal trial. Waxman clings to a strange dichotomy: True may have broken the rules when it comes to the loans, but she is clean in so far as antiquities dealings go. Therefore True "played by the rules." Really? Then why did the Getty just return to Italy $23.2 million in antiquities that True was involved in bringing into the Getty's collection? (Plus another $1.6 million in antiquities that were donated to the Getty while True was the curator-of-record.)

Which brings me to Waxman's next bizarre point (or excuse, I suppose). She claims that she's only writing about True's "public ordeal." Well, if having your career-ending resignation reported prominently in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and in newspapers on at least two continents isn't a public ordeal, I don't know what is.

As befits a newsy week, here's some weekend reading: The LAT ran a superb graphic showing what antiquities are leaving Malibu -- and how much they co$t. Also in the LAT: Christopher Knight on what the deal means for the Getty and for art lovers, and Chris Lee writes about the swirl around Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan. If a possible Louis Vuitton something at MOCA ends up making sense (although like I said yesterday: MOCA's inelegance doesn't inspire confidence), Marshall Astor writes about how it might, possibly, however unlikely, work. And the decline of FAMSF is inspires a smart post from Miami's The Next Few Hours.

A reader tips me off to two stories that indicate Louis Vuitton will be opening some kind of store at MOCA in conjunction with the museum's Takashi Murakami retrospective. The 20,000 square-foot show opens at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary on Oct. 29. Murakami has designed purses and more for Louis Vuitton.

The first unsourced item is from Fashion News Daily, the second was also unsourced, buried in an item published yesterday on the London-based Guardian's website.

MOCA spokesperson Lyn Winter says that the reports are inaccurate -- but refused to answer when I asked exactly what in the two stories is wrong. "I cannot comment until we make official announcements," Winter told me via email. (I hope the reports are incorrect, but as it hardly takes an 'official announcement' to explain what a news story has wrong...)

This has been a sticky area for museums in the last few years. The Met was the last museum to step over the line between exhibit and commerce. I wrote about it in 2005, in a New York Observer piece about ex-Gugg director Tom Krens' influence, pointing out that many who had criticized him later copied him:

[Met director Philippe] de Montebello is also guilty of criticizing Mr. Krens only to copy him. This spring, the Met showed a retrospective of fashions from Chanel. The exhibit was sponsored by Chanel. The Met's annual Costume Institute Benefit Gala was co-chaired by designer Karl Lagerfeld of -- yup -- Chanel. The Met's Web page, under a tab marked "educational programs," directed visitors to a special Web site for the exhibition. That site was hosted on Chanel.com. Within four clicks of visiting, a visitor was instructed on how to purchase Chanel products. In a rebuke on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, art critic Lee Rosenbaum wrote: "[The Met] should be far stricter in drawing the line between scholarly presentation and commercial promotion."

So would it be worse if a museum decides to eliminate the dot-com and to bring the corporation's retail outlet inside the museum? Uh, yes. We're watching, MOCA.

Related: The art world is small: Louis Vuitton's senior VP for public relations and communications is Katherine Ross, aka Mrs. Michael Govan. Govan is the director of a museum just down Wilshire...

Subsequently: Don't believe everything you hear, MOCA edition; MOCA tries to explain.

Remember this ending to SF Chron art critic Kenneth Baker's Hiroshi Sugimoto-at-the-de Young review?

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.

Now we know what Baker was expecting: FAMSF released its 2007-2009 exhibition schedule yesterday. It reveals that FAMSF is well on its way to becoming the worst-programmed major museum in America. Heck, considering its programming and ethics problems, by the end of 2009 FAMSF might not be a major museum.

The schedule is not online. (UPDATE: It is now.) So I'll hit some, er, highlights:

This Richard Pells piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education is one of the best essays I've read in a while. [via] Pells makes the case for cultural history being an important part of national and international history, a point-of-view with which I agree. (In fact, that sentence sums up a lot of my approach to contemporary art, my writing, and to this blog.) Then he discusses how cultural history is under-emphasized in academia. I'd add ditto goes for journalism. Writers, editors, academics, curators, museum directors... don't miss this one.

UPDATE: It's up. Here's a direct link.

The results of investigations into Lawrence Small's Smithsonian are continuing to trickle in. Today's, "The Inspector General's Review of the Expenses of the Chief Executive Officer of Smithsonian Business Ventures," will be posted to that link sometime today. (It was delivered to Congress yesterday.)

Let's go inside.

The Nelson-Atkins' 1933 Wight & Wight building has many galleries with one way in and one way out. The visitor enters from a hallway, looks around, turns around, and exits. Squares and rectangles dominate. From paintings gallery to paintings gallery the light -- artificial, of course -- seems constant. Some of them seem full of just the right kind of authority -- the Caravaggio gallery, for example. There are a lot of stairs.

Steven Holl wanted the galleries in his Bloch Building to be anything but constant. Sure, a visitor can enter the galleries just after World War II and stay in them to walk through the ensuing decades, then through African art and photography. But a gallery-goer can also slip out into a long hallway to catch her breath or to enjoy the hallway's effective end at a Noguchi installation, a LeWitt gallery , or in a small ceramics gallery. There are few stairs. The galleries are flexible without seeming gimmicky. There is no center-spine approach, the kind of gallery design that can turn art-going at SFMOMA or in the Philly Museum's modern-and-contemporary galleries into a walk-by.

Throughout the Bloch Building the ceiling height varies from space to space. Gallery dimensions, too. Natural light flows in from above. Speaking of above, there aren't a whole lot of square corners here. Instead Holl designed curved, floating wedges which soften the light that enters through Holl's glass 'lenses.' A flex gallery, installed at the 'end' of the Nelson-Atkins' post-war and contemporary art collection is just the right size for temporary contemporary installations.

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