March 2008 Archives

• LACMA has a nice podcast of Picasso biographer John Richardson's recent appearance there. Also: Watch LACMA install Tony Smith's Smoke in time-lapse video. Fun note: People had to climb inside the sculpture to be able to install it.
• Anne Howard of the Chronicle of Philanthropy finds that a charity that included a comic strip in a fundraising email dramatically increased its response rate. I wonder if there are art-world parallels...
• The Nelson-Atkins is making some changes in their contemporary galleries. Check MAN tomorrow for a new N-A acquisition that will soon debut in KC.

For several years now, modern and contemporary art museums of a certain age have rushed to the museo-Botox clinic in an effort to become a little younger. Contemporary art rules the moment.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is now mostly interested in being a museum of New York contemporary art. Under ex-director Olga Viso, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden focused intensely on contemporary art. The Walker, the Guggenheim and other museums have emphasized their contemporary programs and collections at the expense of art from before 1960.

One result of this trend is that museums spend an increasing amount of time chasing the Now with shows that could have been lifted out of any number of Chelsea or Culver City galleries. Many curators are engaged in a frantic rush to immediately academicize fresh-from-the-studio art with 'scholarly' catalogues or essays that treat the present as an historical era. Curatorial write-ups for these shows tend to use words such as 'semiotic' and 'syntactic' at every available opportunity -- and at some opportunities that don't seem to be available too. Other curatorial efforts substitute short explanatory essay-pamphlets for critical examination of work or art historical context. Too often jargon substitutes for depth, urgency overwhelms consideration.

So I was thrilled to discover and enjoy Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s, an attractive, occasionally revelatory show at the Amon Carter Museum. Prior to seeing it I was familiar only with a handful of Fort Worth Circle artists, thanks entirely to their regular inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth's collection galleries. The Amon Carter show, curated by Jane Myers, flushes out a much more complete picture of post-war Texas modernism that while rarely inventive, was fascinatingly rich and vibrant. I'll be talking about the show throughout the week. [Image: Cynthia Brants' The Cocktail Party (1947)]

• Doug Harvey reviews California Video at the Getty: You have to read it because who else uses a phrase such as "phenomenological lasagna," or "As spectacular entertainers go, Caligula was right up there?"
• Two Regina Hackett posts with fascinating images: Artist Brian Tolle's clever stump and Frank Gehry's Abu Dhabi design looks like...
• The Chicago Trib's Alan Artner is delighted that Mario Merz is finally getting some play in Chicago.
• The Cleveland Plain-Dealer's website doesn't make linking to this easy (you'll have to hit 'cancel' on a print command), but Steven Litt examines how the Cleveland Museum of Art's expansion is coming along. Starter facts: It's over-budget and behind schedule, but no one seems to be complaining.
• I'm a big Philip Kennicott fan, but when an architectural firm presents a rendering of a proposed DC development that shows only white people in a proposed DC 'neighborhood,' the exclusion of people of color deserves more than a passing mention: It is the story. It is a defining characteristic, one that reveals unpleasant truths about how a developer wants to take a predominately African-American neighborhood in a people-of-color dominated city and whitewash it in an effort to create a place that middle-class, apparently presumably white suburbanites will feel "comfortable." That's pretty unpleasant. (Not to mention an inaccurate portrayal of the Washington area's middle class.)
  
• In a related story, newspapers that run cultural criticism such as the above only on Sundays really diminish the impact their critics can have. Socio-cultural issues aren't just Sunday pleasantries; they should be part of the daily discourse.
  

The Barnes Foundation is rightly known for its iconoclastic installations. Selected by Albert C. Barnes himself, they're undeniably quirky: For example, the best painting in a gallery is frequently tucked into a corner, instead of in the center of a wall. Cases of antiquities or other objects frequently prevent a viewer from getting a good look at a canvas. And so on.

I've never fetishized Barnes' hangings. The installation now at the Barnes is the one Barnes left behind when he died. Barnes regularly changed the hang while he was alive, and so far as I know there's no particular reason to believe that this was The One he wanted to leave behind. Most of the installations are spectacularly uninteresting and sub-ordinary.

Except for one Cezanne hanging, which I think is extraordinarily smart. This week I've been talking about Cezanne's male Bathers and how much I think they're about balance. Yesterday I wrote about the Barnes' Bathers at Rest, pointing out the ways it is a dreamy painting with a tremendous equilibrium.

I think Barnes thought so too, and here's why: Directly across the gallery from Cezanne's Bathers he installed a fantastic still life from 1892-94. As you can see above, the surface on which the still-life sits is dramatically tilted, falling off to the left. But because this is a still-life the objects on the table remain in stasis, in a rather unlikely state of balance. It's still-life as stop-motion, as magical suspension in both place and time. It's the antithesis of Bathers at Rest.

(There are lots of Cezanne still-lifes, at the Barnes and elsewhere, in which Cezanne plays similar tricks. Usually he's up-tilting plates or objects toward the picture plane, flattening space. That's not what he's doing here.)

So why did Barnes place these two remarkable paintings across a gallery from each other? I think that he was trying to make a point about balance in Cezanne's art.

Related: Barnes and his curator Violette de Mazia wrote a book about Cezanne, but I don't own a copy and it's not searchable on Google Books.

If Cezanne's Bathers at Rest (1875-76) was in any collection in America except the Barnes', it would be more broadly known as the greatest Cezanne in the US, maybe anywhere. It is the painting that birthed Cezanne's solitary male bathers, about which I posted yesterday.

There's so much I love about this painting: There's the way each of the four figures in the painting are self-contained, but still relate to each other and to the landscape in which they've been dropped. There are the kinds of echoes that Matisse would later love to emphasize in his work: The tree to the right of the woman in the background echoes the way her left elbow points to the sky, the tree at the far-right of the painting echoes the cloud behind it, the collarbone of the monumental bather in the foreground echoes the horizontal peak of Mont Saint-Victoire behind him, the triangle on the grass that echoes the position of the three left-hand figures, and so on.

But most of all there is remarkable balance throughout the painting. The stolidity of the foreground male bather balances the mountain in the background. The triangle of light to the left of him balances the darkness of the painting's foreground. Man and nature, earth and sky.

All of which brings me back to yesterday's post and the way scholars have tried to 'solve' Cezanne's male bathers. To me, the male bathers are all about balance -- and the rest of that pop-Freudianism is superlatively unnecessary bunk. I think that the Barnes' painting shows that Cezanne had balance in mind right from the outset. And I think Albert Barnes thought so too... which is where I'll pick up tomorrow.

• Thirty-eight days after the NYT editorialized against drilling near Spiral Jetty, the NYT's national pages send a writer to cover the story the culture newsdesk didn't. (And better yet, the national types get the headline right.)
• Last week I said that the Indy Museum had a fine idea: It encouraged its community to start Wikipedia entries about outdoor sculptures in its collection. I also said that the museum should offer gratitude greater than a mere link. Well, now it is: The first five Wikipedia-entrants will enjoy lunch with IMA director Max Anderson at Wolfgang Puck's museum restaurant. The first entry oughta be a gimme. Sounds like a perfect bit of fun for some high school (or college) art class.
• Speaking of which, this Peter Dobrin piece in the Philly Inky is this morning's must-read: Why aren't big arts organizations prioritizing getting arts education back in schools? Hey non-profits: Mobilize your members and your visitors. Plus you can use up to 10 percent of your annual expenses lobbying legislators...
• Earlier this month I told you that the Albright-Knox had acquired a Tom LaDuke painting. PORT says that the Portland Art Museum has too.

There are three great Cezanne Bathers, and one of them is at the Barnes Foundation. Spending time at the Barnes on Sunday got me thinking about not just Cezanne's Bathers, but about Barnes' oft-eccentric hangings. But before we get to Barnes' installations, some Bathers background...

Cezanne's paintings of solitary male bathers have that quality the separates great art from legendary art: They are richly mysterious. We can discuss them for decades and never agree on what they 'mean' or why Cezanne painted them. [This is Bather with Outstretched Arms, which is in a private collection.]

The Philadelphia Museum of Art's indispensable 1996 Cezanne catalogue naturally includes a summary of Bathers scholarship. It cites Theodore Reff writing that the figure above might be "a projection of Cezanne himself, an image of his own solitary condition." Reff wrote that maybe it was "possible to link [this painting] with a specific theme in [Cezanne's] own fantasy life." Joseph J. Rishel, the PMA's catalogue essayist, posits that Reff could be referring to Cezanne's

"...sexual anxiety, fueled by unresolved conflicts with his authoritarian father, from whom he kept his liaison with Hortense Fiquet a secret as long as possible. The theme is essentially a projection of the artist onto his youth as a means of sexually liberating himself from the oppression of his father and his own marital conflicts... a consensus has emerged that the picture's dominant theme is the longing for individual release, a breaking away, an act of liberation that would literally come to rest with the lowering of the arms and the squaring of the figure's shoulders, as in [MoMA's version of the bather]."

I'm the first to agree that biography can be useful when considering an artist's work, but if that isn't pop pseudo-Freudianism worthy of an eye-roll, I don't know what is. Instead of playing psycho-babble guessing games I like to look at the art and see where it leads me. The Barnes' installation of its Bathers painting provides such an opportunity.

But first, let's get all the Bathers JPEGs in pixels: The second great Cezanne of a solitary male bather is the famous Bather (c. 1885) at the Museum of Modern Art, shown at right. It dates to 7-8 years after Bather with Outstretched Arms... which means that Cezanne's first great painting featuring a male bather was the Barnes' Bathers at Rest. I'll bring it into the discussion tomorrow...

If you haven't read Ed Schad's post on El Anatsui and Barbara Pollack, don't miss it. (Schad's post responded to what I wrote here yesterday.) A couple things: I like Schad's argument, but Pollack didn't make it in her piece. She rested on a stereotype without providing explanation or context, and that's still problematic. 

I think Schad's point on Arman is well-taken. I disagree with him that Rauschenberg's incorporation of previously-used objects into his work -- especially his Combines -- isn't "culturally specific." I think they often recall the migration of the rural semi-poor to urban centers in the immediate post-war years. Sure, the Combines are often intensely autobiographical, but I think part of the reason those works are so great is because they speak to a shared experience. And still: The Rural Studio comparison, which is probably the closest match...

The Corcoran is welcoming spring with a grab-bag collection show called The American Evolution: A History Through Art. I haven't figured out the show's title, but it was nice to see the Corcoran's excellent 1975 Diebenkorn, its 1973 yellow-and-red Ellsworth Kelly, and a terrificly fierce Lee Bontecou.

Also on view was Anne Truitt's Insurrection, complete with 'cell phone audio tour' snippet provided by Project Runway maestro Tim Gunn, Corcoran class of 1976. (Gunn majored in sculpture. The Walter Hopps-curated Truitt retro was at the museum in 1974, when Gunn was a student.) You can hear Gunn on Truitt by calling (202) 747-3462 and entering '152#' at the prompt.

• In case you missed it this AM, I'm on the LAT's op-ed page today, writing about MOCA, development in its neighborhood, and the museum's need for space.
• Sam Hunter talks about how curators acquire with their regions in mind;
• Courtroom sketch-art by Holbein?
• From the 'someone-explain-please?' file: Daniel Libeskind builds a terrifically ugly building across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and his Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco features a giant cross.
• Also: Philly blogs are up in the blogroll.
  

In a Washington Post review/feature on the El Anatsui exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art (this is essentially the same El Anatsui show that's been traveling in the US and Europe since 2004), Barbara Pollack opened with a paragraph that included this unfortunate passage:

"The art of El Anatsui... demonstrates the creativity at the heart of African resourcefulness."

Pollack was referring to El Anatsui's use of discarded objects as the materials from which he makes his art. (At right is 1999's Peak Project and 2007's Many Moons.) Among the problems with Pollack's line is that non-African artists have bee doing the same thing for 90 years; that is there is nothing particularly African about El Anatsui's resourcefulness.

After all: Did Arman's use of used objects in his sculptures demonstrate the creativity at the heart of French resourcefulness? Did Robert Rauschenberg's use of his used bed sheets or other objects demonstrate the creativity at the heart of Texan resourcefulness? Does the Rural Studio demonstrate the creativity at the heart of being an architecture graduate student? Does George Herms' or Joel Morrison's (at left) use of garbage in their art demonstrate the creativity at the heart of California-based resourcefulness? (I could keep going...)

Of course not. Pollack took a colonial-era stereotype and lazily squeezed an artist and his oeuvre into it. Pollack's line never should have made it into print.

UPDATE: Ed Schad makes excellent points in disagreeing with me. I discuss Schad's post here.

Related: Doug Harvey, America's most underrated art critic, had a thoughtful take on El Anatsui in the LA Weekly last year. [Photo from same.] The Nelson-Atkins has a new El Anatsui and 'opens' it for the first time. The Passage Project takes in the Met's El Anatsui.

Either or both: I wrote an op-ed for this morning's Los Angeles Times... or today's first blog post is on the Los Angeles Times' opinion page. In it I urge the re-developers of Grand Avenue -- the city, the county, the Related Cos., and the Grand Avenue Committee -- to more fully include MOCA in their plans for the multi-billion-dollar neighborhood they're building.

Here's the background for readers who aren't in Los Angeles: Thanks to a $100 million infusion from an investment fund controlled by the royal family of Dubai, the long-anticipated re-development of MOCA's neighborhood is set to begin next month. The developers are happy to tout MOCA as a key reason to live in or to visit the neighborhood... and I don't think that's enough. From the op-ed:

The redevelopment of downtown L.A.'s Grand Avenue is finally set to begin next month, but so far no one has brought up one of the project's glaring flaws: The developers mention the Museum of Contemporary Art in their marketing materials, but they don't treat it as an asset to be maximized. Any plan for redeveloping Grand Avenue should include expanding MOCA. No American contemporary art museum is more in need of additional gallery space, and none is better positioned to benefit from the kindness of strangers. And there are reasons why the Grand Avenue team should be interested in MOCA too.

A friend of MAN who was at the Barnes Foundation hearing in Montgomery County today says that Judge Ott made no decision, but promised that he would move expeditiously toward a ruling.

It was not a surprise that Hymie's Merion Deli was the only eatery near the Main Line that was open yesterday. I was on my way to the Barnes Foundation and needed a big lunch, so I ordered the pastrami. "Nope, not available today," my waitress said.

"Why?" I asked.

"It's Easter Sunday!" she replied.

And so even before I was within sight of the Barnes I was reminded that everything's a little different in Lower Merion, Pa. I can never quite decide if the Barnes is lovable or maddening: The El Grecos are quaintly listed as "previously attributed to," a polite way of acknowledging that they're fakes without out-and-out saying so. The Renoirs are, er, distracting at best. The temperature in the galleries yesterday was a crisp 59 degrees, a longshot from the 70-and-50 (degrees and humidity percentage) preferred by conservators. And last and best: I saw a couple of middle-aged lovebirds wearing not-quite-matching Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers sweatshirts. They weren't speaking South Side-ese or Brooklyn-ese -- they were speaking French. That tipped me over the edge; the Barnes is lovable. [Photo]

Over the course of my five hours at the Barnes I heard lots of conversations, but this is the one I heard most often: What's going to happen on Monday? Today Judge Stanley Ott of the Montgomery County Orphans' Court will hear arguments from the Friends of the Barnes Foundation and from Montgomery County, both of whom are asking Ott to re-open his decision to allow the Barnes to move. (After ignoring this story for months, the Philly Inky finally deigns to publish a small preview of the hearing. For more thorough looks, see Jim McCaffrey in The Bulletin or Cheryl Allison in the Main Line Times. Both ran earlier this month.) On one hand decisions such as this are rarely re-considered. On the other hand... well, read those two stories. There is cause for mild optimism.

Look for much more on the Barnes -- including about actual art! -- throughout the week here on MAN...

• Greg Allen notices that the NYT can't get its story straight on the Whitney's expansion. As Allen points out, sometimes the Times has published unsourced, NYT-acknowledged "rumors," and sometimes it seems to be just plain sloppy. When is the paper going to finally fix that section?!
• LATer Mike Boehm says that the mortgage crisis is having an unexpected impact on many cultural institutions.
• The LAT gets together the leaders of five major LA cultural institutions and asks them about culture's place in LA. New York's/LACMA's Michael Govan starts it off with this groaner: "L.A. has emerged very recently as one of the major centers of art production..." Uh, maybe Govan has noticed recently, but... (Fair: I suppose in the context of, say, Amsterdam or Venice, LA's 40-years-ago emergence is "recent.")
  
• Speaking of the LAT, Christopher Knight reviews the Getty's California Video;
• This happened last week but I couldn't find a functional link until now: San Diego Union-Trib art critic Robert Pincus is now overseeing the paper's books coverage.
• Speaking of Pincus, he considers how artists as different as Kara Walker and Brian Dick  engage their social environments.
• On Richard Lacayo's blog, Carolina Miranda guests... and goes to therapy?
• Art lovers who saw the recent Flavin retro already saw this... but if you live in NYC it's either new (or "recent") to you.
• In LA Weekly, Holly Myers looks at Kara Walker's art and sees bitterness.

Art museums are often dour, scholarly, serious places that tend to think of populist initiatives as fun to be avoided. So good for the Amon Carter for having a blast: The museum is running a project called Decision 2008 by which the museum's public is encouraged to vote for its favorite painting in the Amon Carter's collection. (Click on the link to vote.)

Here's the latest tally board: Frederic Remington's A Dash for the Timber is the current leader. No surprise there: Fort Worth is where the midwest and the South end and where the West begins.

My favorite Carter painting is a truly Western painting: Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Patio Door from 1955. (It's well down in the voting, perhaps in part because the Amon Carter doesn't list it on its collection website.) It's one of many 'patio door' paintings O'Keeffe made in northern New Mexico, and one of the most abstract. (No surprise there: O'Keeffe was America's first great abstract painter.)

• This should be a good idea: MFA Boston's MFA Mobile. It seems like a good way for the museum to engage visitors and potential visitors... but then I read that the museum charges $2 per wallpaper... and offers the likes of Harnett (right) and Eakins. Seems like an opportunity missed: Does the likely audience for Harnett and Eakins care about its cell phone 'wallpaper?' And does the likely audience for cell phone 'wallpaper' want to pay $2 for Harnett and Eakins?
• This makes sense within the context of Sandow Birk's work. But does it make sense within the context of the neighborhood in which Birk made it? Here's the Diego Rivera on which Birk says he based his mural.
• Creative Time's 59th Minute project brings William Kentridge to Times Square.
• Saying it again: The Indianapolis Museum of Art's blog is the best museo-blog out there. Who else is encouraging their community to create Wikipedia entries about works in the museum's collection? (The museum ought offer more than a link to wiki-ers. What about a t-shirt? Or a membership?)
  

I love to refer readers to good, new books about art. Unfortunately, there aren't very many. Most contemporary museum catalogues are written by people who spent too much time at Bard. Too many essays are simply impenetrable. (I think this Chip Kidd quote says it well.) And then there are the catalogues that are little but flimsy faux-scholarship dressed up in an appealing package. 

So it's a particular joy to page through a catalogue that is engaging, smart, thorough and visually rich: MCASD's publication for its recent Robert Irwin collection-driven semi-retrospective. The catalogue was just published, which means it's chock-full of installation shots from MCASD's Irwin presentation (which will be discussed on MAN soon, I promise). It also includes several of Irwin's own writings and a fine Q&A between Irwin and MCASD director Hugh Davies. The book also comes with a DVD that features a 20-minute documentary on Irwin. (If you're on your way to an art school this fall I suspect you'll see it sooner rather than later.)

Also, for those of us who are particularly excited about the project Irwin has created for the Chinati Foundation, so far as I know this is also the first publication of Irwin's Chinati plans. Many of the Chinati drawings are a promised gift to the MCASD.

Question: What is it about Irwin that inspires such good writing/publications? Seriously. I don't know.

Related: It's 40% off, too.

I don't know about you, but if I see one more Renzo Piano museum I'm going to silently protest by taking the stairs. So it's with happiness and relief that Curbed SF brings us a preliminary sketch for the Berkeley Art Museum's new Toyo Ito building. The museum is targeting a 2013 opening for what would be Ito's first U.S. building.

Sure, Ito has a ways to go to really fully understand Berkeley: In his sketch there's a woman wearing Uggs pushing a stroller; Birkenstocks would be the better fit.

(Speaking of Piano, his new California Academy of Sciences opens in Golden Gate Park in September. Here's what it looks like now.)

Related: BAM/PFA's page on Ito.

(OK, I lied.)

If you read MAN, you've read about the NYT culture desk's tendency to meander from the paper's own reporting and ethics guidelines. I've scolded the NYT for all kinds of offenses including allowing the trustee of an art museum to review art exhibitions. Well, get this: It isn't just a visual arts problem. Check out this Fishbowl NY post [via] and wonder how this keeps happening at the NYT while the leaders of the section remain the leaders of the section.

It's been a while since I took a day off from MAN... so I'm taking the day off.

Meanwhile, you can peruse Carol Vogel's story about Leonard Lauder's $131 million gift to the Whitney, which leaves the museum with $419 million to go. (You may recall -- even if Vogel doesn't -- that the Whitney is telling potential staff that it's targeting $550 million for its capital campaign.)

Have a favorite Philadelphia-based art blog? Tell me in the comments. (Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's artblog is already on the lead list.)

For reasons too labyrinthine to get into here, last night I found myself looking up early American modernist Manierre Dawson. (Short version of the story: I'm on an American modernism kick.) The Joslyn owns this particularly nice 1914 Dawson titled Equation and provides this strange and endearing background text:

A painter, engineer, and architect, Dawson enjoyed a brief but distinguished career in the artistic avant-garde. His wholly abstract paintings were first completed in 1910 when few, if any, American artists were experimenting in this vein. Equation of 1914 is one of Dawson's best and most important Cubist works, demonstrating his interest in dissolved perspective, opaque and nearly monochromatic color, and the division of the three-dimensional human form into a series of flat, colored planes and lines. Dawson's career ended later this same year when he abruptly, and somewhat inexplicably, took up farming in Ludington, Michigan.

For more Dawson see here and here.

Earlier this month I talked with Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos about the A-K's expansion hopes. Grachos was clear that state government money would have to be a significant component of any A-K capital campaign. He even sounded optimistic:

There's so much more emphasis with [the Spitzer] administration on economic growth in this part of the state and a recognition that cultural institutions and cultural tourism plays a role in economic growth in western New York.

Well, the Spitzer administration is no more. How will the rise of Gov. David A. Paterson impact the Albright? Sounds like a Buffalo News story...

Last year the Whitney gave up on a $200 million Renzo Piano-designed Upper East Side expansion. Instead of expanding, the museum decided to look downtown, to the Meatpacking District. In December, Whitney director Adam Weinberg told the NYT that the downtown project would cost about $200M to build (maybe a "bit higher") and that the museum was in the 'quiet phase' of a fundraising campaign.

That campaign is becoming a lot less quiet: The museum is hiring relevant staff and is telling anyone who will listen that it's hoping to raise $550 million.

• Artinfo's Robert Ayres invites MoMA's John Elderfield to provide a retrospective of the Elderfield years; and
• In the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Georgetown's Pablo Eisenberg identifies the challenges G. Wayne Clough will face at the Smithsonian.

• In the Dallas Morning News, Michael Granberry tells us about David Bates' Katrina paintings. Your must-read of the week. Bates is not one of the artists in Dan Cameron's Prospect New Orleans, which is both shocking and, sadly, not.
  
• Showing decades of video art is a challenge, even for the Getty says LATer Suzanne Muchnic. 'California Video' website is here.
• Holly Myers discusses the show with curator Glenn Phillips in LA Weekly.
• The Cleveland Plain-Dealer's Steven Litt says that Pae White has been selected for a major GSA-funded sculptural commission in Cleveland. Is it a post-Tilted Arc Tilted Arc?
• As museums rush to embrace hip, popular contemporary art, they too often leave modern art in store rooms. (The Whitney, Hirshhorn, and the Walker are but three...) The Denver Post's Kyle MacMillan says it's happening at the Denver Art Museum too.
• A paean to Polaroid from the Boston Globe's Mark Feeney. Bet we see more of these.
  
• Artnet says that Emperor's Club isn't just an escort service, it sells contemporary art. No word on whether you can buy an Andrea Fraser...
  

This would have to qualify as... a surprise: Georgia Tech President G. Wayne Clough, 66, is the new Smithsonian Secretary. Press release here. Robin Pogrebin's NYT story has more details on Clough's career.

You can practically see LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne throw up his hands as he considers why LACMA just bought a parcel of land, as he tries to figure out what it's doing on land it already owns, and whether, well, anything about its campus makes sense. It's hard to write exasperation and not sound petulant, but Hawthorne does it beautifully.

In a related story, part of the reason everyone's perpetually exasperated with LACMA is because the museum's leadership poorly communicates with its audience. In the past I've detailed how LACMA boss Michael Govan seems to mysteriously be unavailable to talk with the LA Times at key moments -- including this week -- which doesn't help. (Worth understanding, Easterners: The LAT is, if anything, more dominant as an LA news source than the NYT is as a NYC source.) Simple solution: Govan should blog. (Ha.)

Spring is fast approaching, so I thought I'd check in with Storm King Art Center to see what they have coming up this year. Storm King, located (sort of) opposite Beacon, NY along the Hudson River, opens on April 1. (Picture.)

This year's featured show will be an exhibition of Sol LeWitt sculptures. It opens on May 14. (This LeWitt, from Storm King's collection, is being re-sited.) In addition, a new-to-the-collection Maya Lin earthwork is being prepared for unveiling in 2009 (and for sodding this spring).

• Anne Appleby's paintings don't JPEG well, but this one that Jen Graves spotlighted is gorgeous and Dangerous Chunky has more;
• Speaking of green, Frank O'Hara-obsessed I call it ORANGES blogger Ed Schad gives us new James Welling;
  
• Paul Schmelzer and Brian Ulrich talk through an audio slideshow of Ulrich's work; and
  
• Lost in the hub-bub about some new building or something: LACMA has re-installed its German Expressionist galleries. Awesome pix.

Tom LaDuke makes paintings of how we see, paintings that take our synapses through the process of seeing. Yesterday I talked about how LaDuke paints the light of LA.

The painting shown here is LaDuke's 4 PM, 1980 (2007). It's 45-by-60 inches. The Albright-Knox purchased it late last year.

In his new work LaDuke gives up the outdoors for artificial light. 4 PM, like other paintings LaDuke made in 2007, is apparently lit with fluorescent light. (In this LaDuke follows Robert Olsen, a young Los Angeles-based painter who who fetishizes fluorescents and rejects LA's natural light -- and the art history associated with it. An untitled 2005 Olsen is below.)

It's hard to tell whether we're looking at the reflection of a winter landscape in a window or if we're looking through a window into some type of fantastical scene. (The fluorescent bulbs at the top of the painting seem to argue for the former.) Maybe it's less important to us what we are seeing than it is how our eyes and brain work together to try to solve the visual riddle in front of us: Is it real or is it a reflected facsimile? (And are those cleaning-material bottles in the lower right? Because if they are, it would suggest that the window needs cleaning in order to...)

Maybe we're looking at neither: Maybe LaDuke is painting a photograph. After all, the painting's title is a kind of time-stamp, a clear reference to the past.

In LA Weekly, Peter Frank raised the prospect that LaDuke's 2007 works are references to Gerhard Richter's gray paintings. I think of those paintings as being about memory and the ways in which memories do and do not remain clear. (Eric Fischl, too.) Maybe that's here in LaDuke too. But to me they're first about looking, seeing, and how.

Related: Robert Olsen blogs, too.

Yesterday the NYT published its Museums advertorial, the one day a year the paper acknowledges that museums exist west of the Hudson. (Or, more to the point, the NYT realizes that there are museo-advertising dollars west of the Hudson...) The lead story, apparently the most important thing going on in the world of art and science and history museums was that... museums do visitor surveys. (Really?!)

There were a couple good pieces relevant to what we talk about here: Jori Finkel wrote about how the state of New Mexico is exploring the history of its New Deal-era artists (a past MANtopic, too), and Geraldine Fabrikant told us about how seriously museums take their period rooms. I have a secret museo-crush on period rooms.

In addition, I wanted to quickly spotlight a couple of paragraphs from Carol Vogel's story on visitor surveys:

"[A]t the Detroit Institute of Arts, officials recently discovered that the average visitor spends only four or five minutes in any gallery, rather than the 20 minutes the officials had expected. Only 7 percent bothered to read the wall plaques."

The DIA knows this is good, right? I'm pretty sure that if you're a museum you want people looking at the art, not the wall text. And:

At the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn D. Lowry, the director, said that it was just as important to know who is not coming to the museum as it is to know who is.

"It's what you're missing," he said. While entry information and other data showed that a healthy number of college students visited the Modern, "we were not drawing as many of the 20- to 30-years-olds that we hoped," Mr. Lowry said. "So we went out to determine how to better communicate with them."

Because I'm the magnanimous sort, I'm happy to tell MoMA why it isn't drawing as many visitors in their 20s as they'd like: Because MoMA charges $20 for admission. When you set an admissions fee that high, one of the visitor groups you're almost certainly going to impact is young people.

For years I've argued that by charging $20 for entry, museums are cannibalizing their future audiences. According to Vogel's story, MoMA has discovered that process may be underway.

Consider this morning's post something of an introduction.

The reason Californians think about light is because it changes so often.

We notice light the way someone from the suburbs notices the traffic on the way into work. In the morning, the fog comes on little cat feet, and the light in Malibu or Brisbane is gray, muted, and leaden. By noon it burns off, impacting the light all the way back out to the Pacific Ocean. Maybe a little bit of fog sits in the inland valleys, muting the sun's effects, dampening color like a partial eclipse. (The California impressionists loved this light. See best-I-could-find examples here, here, or here.)

In Los Angeles they get a different kind of mid-day light, the kind that Richard Diebenkorn painted from Main Street in Santa Monica, or the kind off of which Larry Bell riffed in his boxes. As I posted this morning, there's the way Robert Irwin has played with LA light in work he's been making since the late 1960s, light that he reproduces with his discs or with scrims. And, of course, what Carl Sandburg was to fog, Lawrence Weschler is to LA's light.

So finally to Tom LaDuke, whose take on LA's light is as perceptive as any contemporary painter of whom I can think. In LaDuke's paintings LA's light has the consistency of drizzling cream, of something that occludes and holds onto light. There are days when I'm in Southern California when I feel like the light is so tactile, so physically present that it forms a womb around me. That's the light that LaDuke paints with suffused brilliance.

Sure, LaDuke paints the other stuff that makes up the Southern California landscape. At the bottom of many of his paintings you see buildings. They remind me how relentlessly horizontal Southern California can be, especially compared to older cities such as New York or Chicago. Sometimes, through the bisquey mist of LaDuke's paintings, a mountain is visible off in the distance. (Or maybe it's quite near.) But regardless of what's around the margins, Bonnard-style, LaDuke's paintings are about what he sees around him. And what he sees first and most is light.

LaDuke is not a hip painter. He's in a few museum collections -- the Guggenheim, MOCA, MCASD and the Orange County Museum of Art, whose Ice Age (2002) is above. He's rarely included in group shows, in part because painters don't fit the profile for what curators want to do with splashy exhibitions these days. He's never shown in New York, which says more about the endlessly provincial NYC scene than anything else. But his paintings are terrific. I'll feature another one tomorrow.

Related: More LaDuke at Angles Gallery.

MANscoop: Former Hirshhorn director and Smithsonian undersecretary for art Ned Rifkin is leaving the Smithsonian effective April 11. Update: The SI has now sent out a press release. It's not yet online. Here it is.

Update2: From the SI's press release: "The Acting Secretary [Christian Samper] has announced that he will not replace Rifkin. Instead, the art museums and organizations that Rifkin oversaw will now report to the Smithsonian's Acting Under Secretary for History and Culture Richard Kurin."

There sure are a lot of actors doing a lot of acting over there. But seriously folks, take my management structure... please. Is this a mere bureaucratic tinkering that means nothing? Maybe. But maybe not: The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery are in the same building. They do not play well together. The new structure merits watching...

Remember how we were 'staying tuned' for a major Getty acquisition? Here's the best story on the Getty's new Gauguin.

From Lawrence Weschler's "The Light of L.A.," in the indispensable Vermeer in Bosnia: Robert Irwin on the unique light of Los Angeles:

The thing is, it's so radically different from day to day, and then so incredibly specific on any given day.

"One of its most common features, however, is the haze that fractures the light, scattering it in such a way that on many days the world almost has no shadows. Broad daylight -- and, in fact, lots and lots of light -- and no shadows. Really peculiar, almost dreamlike.

"It's a high light, as opposed to the kind of deep light you might get, say, in the Swiss Alps, where your eye keeps getting drawn to the object -- say, to that snow-capped peak on the far end of the valley. Here, instead, you're likely to find your eye becoming suspended somewhere in the middle distance, and it can almost get to be as if the world were made up of energy rather than matter.

"I love walking down the street when the light gets all reverberant, bouncing around like that, and everything's just humming in your face."

Related: The MCASD's Irwin disc is from here. I love this picture too. Another good photo of an Irwin disc is from the Hirshhorn.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with some friends about some something-or-other and I referred to a certain painter as "a great colorist." My friends looked at me as if I'd said something straight out of Hawaii Five-O. Reading Peter Plagens in Newsweek on MoMA's show on color, I realized that I kind of had.

From the website of a certain exhibition that should just roll over and die (or be radically re-invented):

The 2008 Biennial... presents eighty-one artists working at a time when art production is above all characterized by heterogeneity and dispersal. However, within the enormously differentiated field that we (perhaps absurdly) continue to yoke under the term "contemporary art," certain prevalent modes of working and thematic concerns are particularly germane to the moment.

And it gets worse from there. (Yes, it's possible.)

For years museum people have been asking me about how to make blogs work at their institutions. For years I have failed to come up with a good answer. The best I've been able to offer is: Hand the blog over to some people who believe in the institution's mission, who want to mess around and try new things, and then get out of the way and let them make mistakes. (Doesn't sound very institutional, does it?)

I can't help but notice that none of the museums with good blogs asked me anything. Here are some favorite recent posts:

At the Nelson-Atkins, on Security Appreciation Day the museum staff switches places with the security staff for a spell. And here's what happened...

The Brooklyn Museum's blog is always terrific. A series of posts on the museum's current Egyptian dig (with lots and lots of cool pictures) is just gee-whiz cool. The BM is also using its blog to promote the show that turns all New York into curators, American Idol-style. Yes, really.

A new Roxy Paine arrives at MAMFW, and the museum's blog shows it being installed in the midst of an ice storm. (Which seems just right, given the piece.)

The Pulitzer and the Contemporary in St. Louis share a consistently engaging blog. When a snowstorm hit St. Louis last week, the Pulitzer team had a blast photographing Joe in the snow. (Wow.)

This is such a simple, smart idea: The Amon Carter's blog tells us which works from its collection are traveling to shows around the world. With a few clicks a reader can think about familiar works in new ways.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art might be the web-smartest museum in America, and its blog is one of my favorite daily reads. The posts are all over the place, from moaning about the city's lack of an art critic to Julian Opie dancing in snow.

The Walker's Off Center blog is at its best when it's being quirky and at its most annoying when it's numbly glorifying its institution. We love it when museums poke fun at themselves.

(One thing I notice about a lot of the good museo-blogs: They're mostly produced by museums that don't take their audiences for granted...)

Update: Shift, one of Richard Serra's earliest and most important earthworks, is still not protected, says Anneleen Naudts in the King Township Sentinel.

Last week the paper reported that two town councillors will serve as an ad-hoc committee that will approach developers in an effort to make sure Shift is saved. Shift is located in King City, Ontario, in exurban Toronto. (That's the only reason I can think of why the south-of-the-border art world has yet to take much note of the preservation battle around Shift.)

Previously: Some background on the piece.

This is the best thing Christopher Knight has written since I-don't-know-when.

Short version: Kara Walker is a "queer artist," says Knight. Walker is deeply indebted to Lari Pittman, who was using silhouettes in a similar way -- both formally and with similar content -- long before Walker did. Plus, Knight says, the New York-centric curators who put the Walker show together fail to write Walker's debt to Pittman into the scholarship in the exhibition's catalogue. It's just another example of California being shunted aside. (The show is at the Hammer.)

Pictured here: Pittman's magnificent This Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless (1989-90). It's been in LACMA's collection since 1995. There's a detail in the jump.

Hassel Smith is one of the most under-appreciated American painters of the post-war era. A nice Ana Davis story recounts how the San Jose Museum of Art is remembering Smith's life and work. (He died late last year at age 91.) The SJMA has installed a memorial show and it has just acquired Bird Lover (1957).

Smith's paintings are in the collections of lots of museums you know and love, but they rarely make it out of storage. The Hirshhorn's No. 14 (1960) is a primo example.

Sadly Smith's legacy has foundered. Museums that should champion him, notably SFMOMA, haven't. (Stunner, eh?) Heck, you can't even view Smith's work in the collections portion of their website (or on LACMA's). That's too bad. Smith deserves better.

If Holland Cotter is going to write about the art market every time he writes about contemporary art, shouldn't he at least try to draw some link between his market-based ravings and the art on view? Or is he so market-obsessed that writing about contemporary art merely provides him an opportunity to grouse about money? (Is art with a "complicated back story" necessarily commercial, and therefore evil? Who knows.)

By contrast, Roberta Smith on color field art is smart, engaging and thoughtful.

In the Voice, RC Baker writes superbly about Jasper Johns at the Met. For fun, contrast Baker's take with Roberta Smith's.

Jen Graves of The Stranger says that a flurry of Seattle shows provide the opportunity to consider video art and its relation to painting, sculpture, etc.

The KC Star's Alice Thorson makes the Deb Sokolow presentation at the Kemper sound like fun. You can see all kinds of images/etc. of the narrative of Sokolow's installation at her website. (Think Mark Lombardi-meets-childhood.)

Sources tell MAN to expect a major Getty acquisition to be announced soon. When asked if the Getty was sitting on a big purchase, Getty Trust spokesman Ron Hartwig laughed and said: "Stay tuned."

***UPDATED at 11:10am EST.***

MANscoop: J. Paul Getty Trust CEO James Wood sent out a one-page memo to Getty staff yesterday acknowledging that a reduction of Getty staff is "likely." The Getty Trust is the largest arts philanthropy in the U.S. and the third-largest foundation overall, according to Foundation Center.

Getty Trust spokesman Ron Hartwig told MAN that expected staff reductions are a result of Wood, who has been with the Getty for just over a year, bringing the Getty in line with his priorities and are unrelated to turmoil in world financial markets. The Getty's most recent annual report indicates that the Trust's endowment grew from $4.3 billion in 2003 to $5.6 billion in 2006.

"This is more about long-term planning," Hartwig said, adding that the planning process began last July, five months after Wood started as CEO. "We've looked at everything: Is our structure right? Is the management team right? Are the programs we're doing correct? Is our presence in LA correct? We've examined all the things one might consider when you go through a strategic planning process, including how do we ensure the long-term success of the Getty knowing that expenses continue to increase. While we experience increases in the endowment, [we] still need to plan."

MAN acquired a copy of Wood's memo, which includes this passage:

"Everyone should assume that we will find things that need to change. It is premature to say right now what those changes might be, and what impact they might have on our current levels of funding and staffing, but there will be an impact. Indeed, there will likely be some reduction in our staffing levels [emphasis added], and some initiatives may be cancelled or changed as we work to prioritize the Getty's many activities. We will be a stronger institution in the future by making decisions now to do a bit less even better."

Wood acknowledges that the memo is his response to a swirl of rumors that have enveloped the Getty for the last week or so as the Trust and its board go through the budgeting process. In the memo Wood promises to announce the "results" of that process by the end of June. The memo does not say whether staff reductions will be limited to the elimination of unfilled positions or whether the Getty is considering layoffs.

The full memo is after the jump. More to come...

On Wednesday I expressed my displeasure with Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos for saying that the A-K's goal was to find "a world-renowned architect to design an extraordinary building that will attract visitors from all over the world." I said that museum directors should stop pointing to tourism as a rationale for whatever they do. A museum's most important audience is is its hometown crowd.

I asked Grachos about that. "I totally hear you and I understand what you're saying," he said. "But look at the legacy of architecture in Buffalo. It's a phenomenal city. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about the Darwin Martin House as his opus. The Louis Sullivan building is a phenomenally important late 19thC building and the Saarinens' building for the Buffalo Philharmonic is personally my favorite building. The concert hall is -- you just want to be in the building it's so beautifully done. The H. H. Richardson tower is certainly an icon in Buffalo, so there's a real legacy of important architects who have done important buildings in Buffalo. And so I think our collection is a very important modern and contemporary collection. And I think that warrants an important architect. We hope there is an architectural legacy in Buffalo and we want people to realize that."

Grachos never said this directly to me, but the sense I got was this: The path to state and possibly other government money for a new Albright building is through regional cultural promotion, and so that's how he's going to talk about the A-K's need.

More with Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos tomorrow morning. Meantime:

Is a walkthrough of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA with LACMA boss Michael Govan worth $2,500!?

Someone in Buffalo really loves the A-K's Ocean Park painting.

For $15 you can learn to be Pauline Kael?

Continuing from this morning: Don't assume that Richard Gluckman and the Albright-Knox will be working together in the future. I asked A-K director Louis Grachos about the drawings on Gluckman Mayner's website and what they mean for the future of the A-K:

"About two years ago we did a board retreat and started talking about these ideas," Grachos said. "In order to advance them, we asked Richard Gluckman to come up with -- and I stress this -- conceptual drawings of what a 50,000-square-foot addition would look like on our campus and in a few other places around Buffalo.

"We looked at older buildings in the community and looked at buildings to see if we could identify a satellite experience. So we identified a building a second story the terminal of the Lackawanna [railroad] line. It was about 75,000 square feet on a second-floor that was empty. The lower floor is run by the transportation agency in western New York. Richard did a rendition for that space. At the end of the days the trustees decided that running two facilities would be a burden that we could not take on. We looked at it, thought about the realities of operating two campuses and everyone thought we should focus on our campus."

Which is the right decision. I enjoy being in the Albright a lot more than I would enjoy driving around Buffalo to the Albright, Jr. Besides, once you're Olmsted-ed, it makes sense to stay Olmsted-ed.

So assuming the Albright can find the money for an expansion, who would be a good fit? Easy: Steven Holl. His new addition for the Nelson-Atkins is a perfect example of how a new building can compliment and challenge a neo-classical structure. While Grachos emphasized to me that he's thinking more about process right now than he is about picking The Architect, he's interested in Holl.

The question was a pretty obvious one: How could a collection-focused art museum have so little money for collecting -- and so few hopes for being able to raise money -- but still think it might be able to raise money for a 50,000-square-foot expansion? That was the puzzlement about the Albright-Knox's late-February announcement that it was exploring expansion possibilities. Yesterday I called Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos and asked him to explain all this. Had he suddenly found an angel donor or something similarly unlikely? [Picture]

"Not at all," he said. "There were a number of important initiatives [in our strategic plan] that the board thought had to be activated. The last piece of that puzzle was the hope that they would at the very least break ground by 2012 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the art gallery with a much-needed expansion and a rehabilitation of our buildings.

"Our hope is that the big step we took with the deaccessioning has now empowered this museum to continue. The Albright will always be an collection-focused museum, not an exhibition or programming-focused museum. People who know the collection will travel to see it. Keeping that in mind, a building was a very important component. It's a collection that deserves more space."

No question, I said. I've been to the Albright enough to have a pretty good idea how strong the collection is. The reason I keep writing about the Albright here is because the museum has one of the ten best modern/contemporary collections of any American museum -- and it may rank even higher than that. The A-K's buildings -- the newest of which is 46 years old -- are inadequate.

But what about the money, I asked Grachos. A year ago Grachos told us that the Albright wanted to remain a museum that collected art of the present, and that unless the A-K sold-off art that didn't precisely fit the mission or the history of the museum then it wouldn't have the money to be that. Grachos said that there were no six-figure gifts to be had from his community. I accepted that argument at the time, but now... I mean, has something dramatically, radically, unexpectedly changed?

"We are doing a feasibility study to really understand what we think we can raise in our community," Grachos said. "And also to see what kind of appetite there would be for national foundations and possibly for state funding to help with a capital campaign."

Aha. Now we were getting somewhere. I asked Grachos if it was fair to say that he expected government funding to be a bigger part of a potential Albright capital campaign than we'd seen in recent years. After all, most other recent museum campaigns haven't exactly counted on government funding to be big enough to push the project through.

"Well, let's say I would hope that that were possible, yes," Grachos said. "I know MoMA received substantial funds from New York City in terms of its expansion. I would say most museums can't rely on state or federal funding, but we hope we can excite New York state and some national foundations to support the museums. We certainly feel the collection warrants a better facility. So to answer your question, we would hope, yes. And that would be part of the mix in terms of our feasibility study to see if that's possible. There's so much more emphasis with [the Spitzer] administration on economic growth in this part of the state and a recognition that cultural institutions and cultural tourism plays a role in economic growth in western New York.

"Remember that the 1962 Bunshaft expansion was heavily supported by the state when Nelson Rockefeller was governor. So the feasibility study will determine how ambitious we can be."

I asked Grachos if the museum was in the 'quiet phase' (that's non-profitese for 'we've started raising money for a project but we haven't told anyone with a net worth of under $50 million') of a fundraising campaign. He said no.

I was beginning to understand, but I was still skeptical. Two years ago Erie County took away $500,000 of the Albright's county-sourced operating funding. If the Albright wasn't worth $500,000 to the county a couple of years ago, what local officials were going to go to Albany to argue that the Albright should be a priority for state capital funds?

"It has been restored," Grachos said. "I'm happy to say we were able to restore the amount that we have received over time back to that level. So we took a big hit that first year and then we were lucky. And of course the kind of funding I'd hope we'd look at are the monies available for capital projects at the state level."

Later: Those Gluckman drawings and Grachos on tourism vs. community.

Related: The A-K gently corrects Lee Rosenbaum.

UPDATE, Thursday on MAN: Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos discusses the A-K's ambitions.

Obviously I don't read the Buffalo News every day (and when I do it's to read this), so imagine my surprise to discover that the Albright-Knox had reasonably firm expansion plans. And imagine my further surprise to discover a design. [both via]

First, there's no question that the 5.) Albright-Knox is long, long overdue for expansion. The angular tumor that is the museum's Gordon Bunshaft-designed addition opened in 1962. The A-K's superb collection has grown substantially since then.

But... where are they going to get the money for the potential Gluckman? Remember: The A-K pleaded poverty last year when it sold off art. Last March, A-K director Louis Grachos told me that there was no prospect of six-figure gifts in the foreseeable future, that the museum's mission was to be a modern and contemporary art museum, and that to fulfill its mission it had to sell. The crux of the A-K's deaccessioning argument was that its fundraising environment was so uniquely, brutally bad that it had no other choice.

I reluctantly went along... and pointed out how thoroughly the museum mismanaged its deaccessioning.

Today I'm feeling pretty good about that post. Either all of us were sold a bill of goods, something has radically, unexpectedly changed in Buffalo -- or this is all dreaming of a most extreme sort.

Steam-pouring-out-my-ears aside: Grachos' reason for expansion is irksome. He told the News that the museum's goal was to find "a world-renowned architect to design an extraordinary building that will attract visitors from all over the world." Museum directors should stop pointing to tourism as a rationale for whatever they do. Buffalo's most important audience isn't people who fly in from downstate or who drive over from Syracuse. The A-K's most important audience is people who live in Buffalo.

It's been a long, long time since I did a frivolous, means-nothing list. So here are five museums that are long, long overdue for expansion:

1.) MOCA, whose lack of space has been a regular topic on this blog since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. MOCA's need is a prime topic in Los Angeles where Christopher Knight agitated for a solution last week. Last building: 1986

2.) SFMOMA. Donald Fisher delivered the wake-up call. If SFMOMA hopes to score the collections of the Schwabs, Andersons, etc. it will have to show it's serious about finding room for the art. Of the five on this list, I'd bet that SFMOMA will be the first to start a capital campaign. Last building: 1995.

3.) Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden. As the post-Olga Viso Hirshhorn decides if it's going to be Viso's contemporary museum or if the museum will reflect it's 1890ish-forward collection, space limitations will keep it from fully being, well, either. Likeliest solution: Some type of building project that makes the sculpture garden more a part of the museum, and a separate project that turns the museums fourth-floor offices into galleries. Or it could just take this building of the District government's hands and really go to town (literally). Last building: 1974.

4.) Baltimore Museum of Art. I've been going to the BMA for over a decade and I still see works from the Cone Collection and the museum's contemporary collection that I never knew they had. (See the jump for the most homoerotic Rauschenberg I've ever seen. It's That's a pink, fleshy pillow attached to the front, ahem...) Last building: 1994. (Sort of. The museum remodeled the Cone galleries in 2001.)

5.) You'll just have to wait for today's second post for this one...

All of a sudden the conservation of contemporary art is a big topic. There's the New Art Trust, a project spearheaded by SFMOMA, MoMA and the Tate with the backing of San Francisco-based private collectors Pam & Dick Kramlich. More immediately there are recent efforts by the Getty Conservation Institute, which recently convened an all-star roster of experts in LA and which is sharing those sessions with non-LAers via the internets. Click here for the Getty's main conference page, here for videos from day one and here for videos from day two.

SF Chronicle scribe Kenneth Baker trekked down to LA for the fun. His two reports are fine reads. They're here and here.

A big Sunday story by LAT Pulitzer finalist Jason Felch and Doug Smith finds that the tax-deduction-overvaluation of art donated to museums may be rampant. More importantly, this issue is Sen. Charles Grassley's (R-Iowa) latest focus. You may remember Grassley from "The Lawrence Small-Smithsonian Scandal" and "Are American Universities Using Their Endowments Wisely?" In other words, this is a story worth taking seriously.

But is Grassley really on to something? Maybe the better question is: What percentage of all charitable donations of objects are overstated? I'm thinking about non-cultural objects such as people who donate beat-up, old used cars to NPR stations and such.

I asked Felch that and he said that in previous legislation Grassley & Co. had recently tightened up tax laws in areas such as lemons, and that art was effectively next in line for Senate examination.

That said, I still cringed when I read this quote from class warrior Robert Reich in the LAT piece:

Reich, an economist and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, recently argued that charitable donations that do not directly benefit the poor, such as art, should be eligible for only half their value in tax benefits.

"We've created a giant loophole right now through which the rich reduce their taxes by supporting culture palaces frequented primarily by themselves," Reich said in an interview. "This is not the way the tax code was intended to be used."

Hogwash. First, Reich's answer suggests that only foodbanks have value to a society, and that only foodbanks should be the beneficiaries of a nation's support.

Furthermore, if there is data to suggest that museums are primarily visited by their wealthy donors, I sure haven't seen it. (Museums such as the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Nelson-Atkins are free to everyone, which has significantly changed their demographics. And many contemporary museums are free.) For thousands of years human cultures have made, supported and preserved cultural objects of importance to them. Apparently Reich thinks we should be different.

Aside: Museums do a great job of leaving themselves open to this argument when they charge $15-20 for admission, start charging groups of school children for admission, and then market themselves as tourist destinations and as being primarily in competition with Major League Baseball for 'entertainment' dollars. As I've written here before (and here), contemporary art museums especially must do a better job of building their audiences and establishing their broader relevance.

Son of Lightning Field, with a post-industrial twist. [via]

Clyfford Still Museum unveils its Brad Cloepfil design.

Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books on LACMA, Renzo Piano, and Eli Broad.

Not only is this a darn fine post about arts education as discussed by a certain political campaign, but Edward Winkleman has re-named his blog. Temporarily. It will make you laugh.