Weekend roundup, Detroit dials for dollars edition

In the wake of the WSJ's recent unfortunate, under-informed, and unclear-on-the-concept story on museums and the economy, MAN will be evaluating whether doom-and-gloom museum stories are legitimate or if they're manufactured.

By my count, there are three prominent art museums that face real financial issues: MOCA, which has spent down its endowment in recent years; the Corcoran, which has struggled for a decade and which lurches from 19th-century landscapes to splash/glitz/celebrity with all the smoothness of Sarah Palin's elocution; and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

So this one's legit: The troubles at the DIA are coming into clearer focus in Mark Stryker's must-read story in the Detroit Free Press. Stryker outlines the DIA's troubles and reveals that the museum has already opened talks with cities and related bodies in the Far East and in the Middle East about renting the DIA's art out for cash. (The Freep's page design makes it impossible for me to link to the sidebar that lays out the DIA's dial-for-cash efforts. It's on the right-hand side, under a photo of Alfred Taubman.)

• The LAT's Diane Haithman runs through Southland museums and possible recession-related issues. Nothing too dramatic for art museums. LACMA: A hiring freeze. OCMA: A 10 percent budget cut. (Prudence does not equal crisis.) MOCA: Some first-stage cutbacks -- and stay tuned.
  
• Kenneth Baker is not a fan of SFMOMA's Art of Participation show. In a related story, SFMOMA has a new website. The front page needs Ritalin. Someone tell it to hold the heck still. (More on the new SFMOMA site later today.)
  
• Baker also reviews Martin Puryear at SFMOMA.
• SF Chron architecture critic John King says that a number of Ess Eff architecture types aren't thrilled with the idea of Donald Fisher putting his museum in the Presidio and have created/suggested some alternatives. 
• David Bonetti loves the Pulitzer Foundation's installation of Old Masters in Tadao Ando's spaces. The Pulitzer has some cool videos about the installation, especially this one about using only natural light.
• In Philadelphia Weekly, Tara Murtha profiles Zoe Strauss. Strauss has been chronicling the melancholia of the Bush years.
• The Harvard Art Museum or the Harvard Art Museums, or HAM, or The HAMs, or whatever that place is called just scored a trove of German modern and contemporary art. Geoff Edgers has images here and here.
• Ugo Rondinone goes up in Boston and in San Francisco. The Globe's Sebastian Smee is OK with his ICA Boston installation -- but only barely.
• Apparently the MFA Boston has a bleak future: "In my eyes, [director Malcolm Rogers] can do no wrong," trustee Frederic A. Sharf says. "From the beginning, I fell in love with his vision. . . . He's a genius." That's from a Geoff Edgers profile of one of America's most, er, questionable museum directors.