January 2009 Archives

So now art museums do Friday afternoon news-dumps? MOCA announces the lay-offs first reported here this morning.

LACMA apparently still owns a Cranach. UPDATE: A LACMA spokesperson says that the painting will not be going back on view.

Expect more later today: AAMD's winter meeting is over and I hear that the Denver Art Museum single-donor-benefitting deaccessioning has been resolved. Expect MOCA to make and possibly announce job cuts and trustee changes as soon as today. And who knows what Brandeis' Jehuda Reinharz will come up with today -- he's been on a one-bizarro-a-day rate all week, so... In the meantime:

• How Brandeis' attempt to close the Rose Art Museum is affecting artist Josh Azzarella;
• A modest proposal for Reinharz and Brandeis;
• Several Brandeis students have come up with a clever way of putting the Rose's art 'in front of' the Brandeis community;
  
• The Globe's Lisa Kocian on the student protest;
  
• I hope that LACMA's Art of Two Germanys sparks all kinds of clever-cool-weird blog posts such as this one;
• Hunter Drohojowska-Philp talks with Mark Bradford;
• Ex-MOCA director Jeremy Strick lands in Dallas, at the Nasher;
  
• Van Dongen curator Anne Grace talks with Leah Sandals about the show, complete with women wrestling and prostitutes; and
  
• Christopher Knight somehow wrote this two remarkably different reviews in one week: (Underrated) California landscapist William Wendt at the Laguna Art Museum and Art of Two Germanys at LACMA. Writers will understand.
  

After the jump is an email the office of Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz is sending to people who have emailed the university in opposition to Reinharz's misguided, unethical and possibly illegal cash-grab. The email alternates between the insulting and the shocking. In summary: The University offers up the media hates us and isn't telling the whole story, waaah! and then it apparently thinks people are stupid enough to believe this: "Brandeis is not lessening its commitment to the creative and visual arts." Seriously.

Is the pressure that comes from widespread condemnation getting to Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz? Or is he backtracking from his original position of selling the Rose Art Museum's art collection? Or has he just realized that he's made a major mistake and that he's in over his head? [Image: Philip Guston's Heir, from the collection of the Rose Art Museum.]

Since announcing that Brandeis was going to monetize its art museum's art collection because it wanted to spare itself the burden of raising money, Reinharz has lurched form interview to new position in a manner that mostly recalls a teenager who is in trouble with his parents and who is making up a story on the fly. To recap:

On Monday, via a university statement: "Today's decision will set in motion a long-term plan to sell the art collection and convert the professional art facility to a teaching, studio, and gallery space for undergraduate and graduate students and faculty."

On Wednesday, via Boston NPR affiliate WBUR: "Reinharz says Brandeis does not intend to sell the entire art collection, just some of the works."

On Wednesday, to the Boston Globe: "We have no particular mandate from the board of trustees as to when to sell, how to sell. If in fact there is a miracle tomorrow morning and the economy turns around and the stock market is up by 45 percent, nothing impels me, nothing impels us, to do anything."

On Wednesday, on NPR's All Things Considered, Reinharz was asked if he planned to sell the entire collection: "Absolutely not. "The decision of the board of trustees did not mandate... how much to sell, when to sell. If we decide to sell, if the economy god help us changes quickly we will need to sell much less or perhaps none of the art."

(Of course, Brandeis "needs" to do nothing. If every non-profit institution in America that had suffered a 25 percent drop in its endowment started selling buildings, and who-knows-what-else, the United States would be one big garage sale. There are ways to be fiscally responsible in a time of market-generated pressure. The cowardly, stupid decision to sell a museum's art collection is not being forced by anything except the idiocy of Brandeis' leadership.)

So Reinharz is feeling the heat -- and, strangely enough, he's let his board off the hook and has assumed total responsibility for the fate of the Rose Art Museum: Reinharz told the Globe that the decision going forward is his, not the board's. (Reinharz also told NPR: "That's the other problem. Many students have parents who lost their jobs or who are unable to pay their tuition." Great, so Reinharz has shifted the burden of responsibility for the university's financial situation and its choice to sell its art collection to the newly jobless. That's somewhere between callous and despicable.) The Massachusetts attorney general and the university's donors should turn up the heat on Reinharz even more.

UPDATE: Time magazine's Richard Lacayo is picking up the same vibes.

In a separate story, Rose Art Museum director Michael Rush knows that there will be problems even if the Rose "wins." The Rose won't be safe until Reinharz is removed from the scene and until the next leadership of the university repudiates Reinharz's scheme. After all, if the university can sell off the art museum's art collection, it can also sell off anything else. Reinharz has put university department, building and monetizable asset in play. (Watch out biology professors. You could be next...)

MAN's Brandeis/Rose Art Museum coverage: A Q&A with Rose director Michael Rush, the myth of the must-sell, five Rose-related questions, artist David Maisel on the Rose.

If you're looking for MAN's Brandeis/Rose Art Museum coverage: A Q&A with Rose director Michael Rush, the myth of the must-sell, five Rose-related questions, artist David Maisel on the Rose. I'll have more on the Rose later today.

Four or five years ago, when seeing Giorgio Morandis in an American museum was rare and a special treat, the Hirshhorn installed all of its Morandis together in one room. There was one painting on each of three walls. The fourth wall was empty. That's all there was.

It was a special room, a place to spend a few minutes with Morandi, his objects, his remarkable sense of composition, and nothing else. (Or at least it was until the Hirshhorn mucked it up with splashy wall graphics a few months later.) Even the typically loud children of tourists were hushed by the presentation. [This is an  Hirshhorn Morandi from 1953.]

Three Morandis is a fair number with which to consider the painter's acuity at building a painting, to absorb the way he abstracted objects into solids of color and then had the objects, the colors and the space in his paintings play with each other. The best Morandis make my eyes move -- involuntarily -- around the canvas the same way the best Barnett Newmans do. Morandi and Newman couldn't be less alike, but I am powerless to tell my eyes where to go when I am in front of their paintings.

So it was a surprise to me that as I walked through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent Morandi retrospective that I found myself paying less attention to Morandi's assemblages than I did to how he put those assemblages onto canvas. The exhibition was gripping and exciting, but perhaps not quite the thorough blow-out Morandi for which Morandi groupies had hoped. Rarely have Morandi landscapes been on view in the United States, and the 81-14 dominance of still-life paintings over landscapes in the Met show left me hoping for an American 'Morandi landscapes' exhibition. (Conversely, it's quite common to see Morandi landscapes in Italian museums. If there's a Morandi landscape in an American museum collection, I've been unable to find it.)

In short, the revelation about Giorgio Morandi that emerged from the Met show was that Morandi was a strikingly assured, certain, assertive painter. Never again will I think of him as the awkward bachelor who lived with his sisters and who made small paintings. Instead I'll think of him as an artist ardently committed to not just his subject matter, but details, such as how he made color and how he put color on canvas. [This is a Yale University Art Gallery painting from 1956.]

Steven Shore once said that the lesson he learned from hanging around the Warhol Factory as a teenager was that making art was about making decisions. Morandi was comfortable with making decisions and with the consequences of those decisions. Go back to 1913, when Morandi graduated from college. Cubism dominated progressive European art. In time, Futurism, dada, expressionism, surrealism and abstraction all became fashionable before Morandi died. Nothing in his art indicates he was much tempted by any of them. Rejecting the French-dominated, European avant-garde was Morandi's first big decision and there is no sign that he ever reconsidered it. (Instead, he leapfrogged backward, to Cezanne.)

In fact, if there is a surprise in the Met's show, it's how little Morandi felt the need to re-examine the decisions he made in the early 1930s before his death in 1964. Morandi was as certain a decision-maker as picked up a brush in the 20th-century, and its that confident certainty that helped make him an artist's artist. (News-willing) tomorrow I'll discuss how Morandi's confidence and sureness manifests in those paintings.

To be clear, selling some of the Rose Art Museum's art collection is not an improvement. It is not less-luddite. It is not less dumb. I effectively covered this earlier today.

By almost any standard, the Rose Art Museum is a model university art museum. It has a fine collection. It exhibits it regularly and creatively. It provides a place for the vanguard to emerge. Administratively, the museum draws about half of its operating budget from endowment funds -- a stunningly high percentage. So when I talked with Michael Rush, the Rose's director this morning, he was eager to point out that what's happening at the Rose has nothing to do with the Rose and everything to do with Brandeis. To read more about the history of the Rose, click here. [Image: Marsden Hartley's Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony), 1913, from the collection of the Rose Art Museum, dammit.]

MAN: Are you encouraging your trustees to explore legal options?

Michael Rush: I'm encouraging everybody to take every step they want to take. There are any number of things going on right now. There are Facebook groups, a 'Save the Rose' website. And we have several lawyers on the board who are absolutely looking into legal issues.

One thing that is not coming out -- clearly -- is this: Some of these really well-meaning young alums are doing the Obama routine of having people send small amounts of money. As darling as that is, it's misguided. The Rose is not in financial trouble. We're secure. I can't say that strongly enough. We're meeting our fundraising goals. We're doing fine. We have a tight managerial structure. We're utterly responsible. There's no trouble for the Rose.

This is all about selling the artwork. If the university gives any indication that they're selling the Rose to save money, that's untrue. They're just selling the artwork. The university doesn't give us a penny. We are financially autonomous within the university. They don't pay our salaries or anything, just below-the-line costs like the heat and the lights. That's not going to change if they get rid of us - they're going to use the building for something else, and they'll have those same costs.

So this does not change their equation economically at all. In fact it hurts them: Not only do they not give us any cash, all of our income is 'taxed' at 15 percent. We actually pay them. So they're losing the 15 percent that we raise that they take off the top of our hard-earned money. And believe me, it's hard-earned.

MAN: Just judging from the outrage I read in Geoff Edgers' Globe story this morning, you have some absolutely irate board members.

MR: Yes. Lois Foster [who is prominently quoted in the Globe story] has been more involved with [the Rose] than anyone has ever been. She's been on the board and she has been writing 'thank-you' notes in her own hand for 40 years. She's been the glue of this place. Many of our members are members because of both her and her recently deceased husband. He was president of the university board. If Henry had been there, this would not have happened. [Image: Jasper Johns' Drawer, 1957. Collection of the Rose Art Museum, dammit.]

MAN: Given that she's a significant donor, is she exploring legal options?

MR: She's not going there. She's an 80-year-old woman. She's coming up to Boston for an operation. She's not walking very well. She's clearly expressed her opinion to the president, but she's not a rabble-rouser that way. But she is angry. Her comments are very unusual. It shows the degree of anger and feelings of betrayal. We all feel so betrayed. Terribly betrayed. I've been here three years. Ironically for me, my tenure here has been totally identified with this collection: Bringing it out, raising money for storage, tripling the insurance for it. It's been all about our collection.

MAN: So there are trustees that are engaged with the attorney general, that are examining their standing to take legal action and so on?

MR: Yes. I haven't [talked with the attorney general's office]. I was with my board chair [Jonathan Lee] last night and a few other people. He's going to be talking with the attorney general and the governor too.

MAN: You mentioned earlier in our conversation that the Rose had an endowment that, at its peak was at $20 million and that it's down about 25 percent because of the recent market drop. The Rose's donors gave that money to the Rose, not to Brandeis. So if Brandeis closes the Rose, does Brandeis essentially 'steal' that money?

MR: I don't know what to say about that. If the Rose is closed, yeah, the university would take it over.

Their due diligence will involve examination of all the endowments and the intentions of the endowment, the ones that are restricted. Many of our endowments are restricted. One is restricted to the director's salary, that one is from from the Fosters. There's another that is restricted to the maintenance of the Foster Wing. Our biggest endowments are restricted to acquisitions, that can only be used for the purchase of art.

MAN: Ah, so when you deaccessioned the Hassam a few years back because your collection and mission is modern and contemporary art, you put that money into a restricted endowment?

MR: Yes.

MAN: It seems to me that one of the ironic absurdities in all of this is that the major collection catalogue that the Rose is about to publish could essentially be turned into a sales prospectus.

MR: That's another huge story. I heard yesterday that at some other meeting about the future of all things Rose -- to which we were not invited -- there was support for continuing the publication of the catalogue! [Image: Roy Lichtenstein, Forget It, Forget Me, 1962. Collection of the Rose Art Museum, dammit.]

As for its being a sales prospectus, I hope not. I'm not privy to any discussions in this regard. We've just been cut out of all discussions here. When I heard they were having a big pow-wow with university officials and none of us were invited, not staff, not the director, not the board, not even the people we know so well who are our friends... well, I'll tell you, I know the catalogue intimately. They will have to change several sentences because they're all geared toward the greatness of the Rose and the history of the Rose. The president has a 'thank-you' in it and an acknowledgment of how great the Rose was. September is the publication date. It is in production. It's being edited. It's being designed and printed.

MAN: You've also done a superb job of making the collection accessible, and not just through the catalogue.

MR: Our Johns is going to Philly for their Cezanne show. Our Hartley is opening tonight at the Guggenheim. Another is about to go to the Reina Sofia.

You know, you can talk about our relatively low foot-traffic for a museum. The point of the greatness of this place is not the hundreds of thousands of people who come here in one day. But there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world who see Rose artworks, clearly marked form as being from here, at the Louvre, the Tate, the Art Institute of Chicago, and so on. At any given time, hundreds of thousands of people are seeing work from Brandeis, from the Rose Art Museum.

And this is really important too: We gave the first museum exhibitions to -- off the top of my head -- Kiki Smith, Louise Nevelson, Dana Schutz, Roxy Paine, Alexis Rockman... the list goes on and on. It's not about audience. So much great and significant and influential work was performed in front of three people. Merce Cunningham, John Cage, The Wooster Group... people who eventually drew large crowds. That's never, ever the point. That's the great freedom of an institution like ours: That never has to be a primary impulse. We never have to say, 'What's going to bring them in the door?'

MAN: It seems likely to me that legal machinations will likely extend beyond June. So what happens to all of you then?

MR: Our jobs are guaranteed until June 30. We're very much on the job market. My staff is the greatest group of people in the world. I can't communicate how stunning this is to all of us.

Today's key Brandeis-Rose stories: Geoff Edgers gets great quotes out of angry museum supporters. Globe art critic Sebastian Smee is outraged.

Yesterday, while perusing the website of a particularly well-respected newspaper, I saw that it said Brandeis was "forced" to sell its art museum's art collection because of a financial crisis. (The newspaper quickly came to its senses and changed its reference.)

It reminded me that loose phraseology and blurry explanations of what's going on at Brandeis are effectively part of the problem. So to be clear: Brandeis is not forced to do anything. So far as we know, the university is not on the cusp of failure, insolvency or closing. It is not in danger of lacking the resources to care for the art in the Rose Art Museum. (As, say, Fisk University plainly was.)

Part of the problem with the word and the conceit behind it is that it accepts this as natural and sensible: If the university is facing a declining endowment and a surfeit of donations, well then of course it would close its art museum and sell the art. Hogwash. It is no more logical that a university sell off the art in its art museum than it is logical that a university would sell the trees off this quad, the books out of its library, or the science labs in its engineering buildings.

Next step: The Massachusetts attorney general (617.727.2200) can move to block Brandeis' rash and possibly illegal action. And she should. [Image: Juan Gris, The Siphon, 1913. Collection of the Rose Art Museum, dammit.]

This morning on MAN: Don't miss part two of MAN's Q&A with Detroit Institute of Arts director Graham Beal, artist David Maisel on the Rose.

1.) Why isn't Brandeis University selling off books out of its library or one of its science buildings? I mean, if the university is looking to liquify assets, selling off university buildings makes just as much sense.

2.) Will donors of art (or their heirs) sue the university?

3.) Will Rose director Michael Rush's peers speak out, loudly and publicly, or will the code-of-silence prevail? (I'm looking at you, Harvard's Tom Lentz and MFA Boston's Malcolm Rogers.) I hope museum directors remember that this isn't meddling in another museum's/director's business, this is about reminding a university what the role of the humanities should be at an institution of higher learning. They should also remind the university that art is more than a monetize-able asset.

4.) According to the Boston Globe, the Massachusetts attorney general is on board with the Brandeis 'plan.' Uh, why? Can pressure be put on the AG to re-evaluate the case? I mean, this is precisely the sort of thing that office is suppose to prevent. If the AG won't sue, who else might have standing? UPDATE, 130pm EST: Greg Cook reports that the AG's office is saying that it has not signed off on the proposed sale. UPDATE, 10:15pm EST: The Globe corrects the item as well.

5.) By my reading of what Brandeis officials are saying, the cost of operating the Rose wasn't too much for the university... they just want to 'raise' money without having to do any work. That's completely pathetic. (Again: This rationale is the sort of rationale that the AG should be fighting, not endorsing.)

Just after the news about Brandeis' plans to close the Rose Art Museum and sell off its collection hit, artist David Maisel posted this as a comment on my Facebook profile: "Stunning. Can I get my photographs back please?"

Maisel said I could use that here and added, "The Rose Art Museum, then under the direction of Carl Belz and the curator Susan Stoops, welcomed me into their collection when I was a kid in my early twenties, teaching photography at a private high school a few miles away. It was an incredibly affirming experience. It seems antithetical to the mission of the University to close the museum and divest their art, no matter what the financial troubles they may be having."

The image is Max Beckmann's Still Life with Fallen Candles (1929), from the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The painting was purchased by the city of Detroit, also in 1929. Continuing from yesterday with DIA director Graham Beal...

MAN: Are you still talking with foreign cities and/or governments about sending the DIA's art on the road?

Graham Beal: First of all, we haven't got very far. It's still one of the things on our agenda. We are looking at putting together special exhibitions drawn from our permanent collection that can be made available. When we sent our American collection -- because that part of the museum was closed -- we sent that to Europe. We are looking at making some of our collection available on a very limited basis. And doing so for reasons of getting the collection in front of the public, but also as a source of potential revenue. A few years ago some people would have frowned on that activity, and some still will.

MAN: Another possible source of a substantial chunk of cash might be the federal government. As you and I discussed earlier, there are ten, maybe a dozen nationally important art museums in America, and the DIA is certainly one of them. There is a point at which I think it is in the nation's interest to see that the DIA not fail. Have you asked your congresspersons or senators for DIA-specific earmarks for federal fiscal year 2009 or 2010?

GB: We have started that process, but we have gotten nothing specific yet.

I was at a Michigan meeting at the Library of Congress the day before the inauguration and I bumped into a senior member from our delegation. Unprompted, he said, 'We very much have you in mind.' For someone to volunteer that, it has a certain significance.

One reason the DIA is going through a more acute time right now is we just lost $7 million a year from the state. I [came to the DIA] in 1999 and every year [our state appropriation] has come down another chunk until it hit $950,000 -- and we still don't know whether that's it. But in the meantime we've been raising all that money to fill that in. We have to be realistic. We started this process before the downturn became absolutely obvious. We still have generous people and quite a few areas of patronage. We've just got to be realistic and make ourselves as lean as we can.

MAN: We're talking just before AAMD's winter meetings start. [Ed: They start today.] Do you think you and your peers will begin to talk about whether cultural institutions should be included when the federal government talks about economic stimulus packages?

GB:  I honestly have no idea whether that will be -- I don't see anything that would go in that direction on the agenda. We are hearing that foundations are saying that we are going to be giving the nut of our giving, most of our giving, for social services. So art museums, we love you, but we're sorry. I would thing that government is going to have a similar quandary

Ultimately, we in southeast Michigan, in 2000 and 2002, we failed to get a cultural tax passed. The zoo got one passed for itself later because it could say -- without seeming to cry wolf, no pun intended -- that it really was going to go out of business if it didn't get money very soon. It passed with over 60 percent. [Image: Paul Cezanne's Madame Cezanne, from 1866ish. From the DIA's collection.]

MAN: How has your dwindling endowment weathered the financial downturn?

GB: It's as much by judgment as luck: We 'only' lost 15 percent. I sit through endowment committee meetings and I sort of understand maybe 80 percent of it, which is enough. We have extraordinary people on our endowment committee. A while back someone said, 'This is a time to stay out of equities,' and so we went into cash. That was over a year ago, when the first big drop happened. We have roughly $70 or $75 million in undresticted operating endowment, and that throws off about 10 percent of our annual $33 million operating budget. The reductions that we're going to be making are going to be very unpleasant, but that will help.

Geoff Edgers and Peter Schworm have the stunner in the Boston Globe. (And just before the museum was set to publish a new catalogue of its 20thC collection.) More from Greg Cook.

Also on MAN: Artist David Maisel (whose work is in the Rose collection) on the news. Five Rose-related questions worth considering now.

It's Janet Landay, ex- of the Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers. Prior to her work there she was with AFA, MFAH, Brooklyn and the DIA.

This week the Association of Art Museum Directors will hold its winter meeting in San Diego. Amidst portending of gloom-and-doom for cultural institutions lies the under-reported truth: The overwhelming majority of major and mid-sized American art museums are on solid financial footing.

In fact, as previously noted here, only one major American art museum faces anything approaching serious difficulty: the Detroit Institute of Arts. The DIA's troubles are substantially a result of years worth of strained economic financial conditions in its home state and in its metropolitan area. The state of Michigan has reduced its financial support to the DIA by about 85 percent in recent years. The Michigan economy is probably the worst in the nation: Metro Detroit has the nation's highest foreclosure rate, and the statewide unemployment rate is 10.6 percent.

The DIA is in a special position: The museum isn't at immediate risk of shuttering, but it is more significantly strained than any of its peer institutions -- and I can't think of who'd be in second place. With the DIA's condition likely to be an active off-the-agenda topic in San Diego this week, I talked with DIA director Graham Beal about the state of his museum. Beal spoke at length about the challenges facing his museum in the months ahead, and about some of the potential solutions that the DIA is examining. I'll split this into two parts: Part one is here. I'll post part two tomorrow morning.

MAN: As I've talked to museum directors in the last few weeks, they've nearly uniformly said that they're eager to hear the latest about the DIA when they arrive in San Diego. There seems to be a widespread expectation that you'll be making further cuts.

Graham Beal: We're doing everything we can to keep the DIA as we hope the public has come to expect and love, but we're definitely going to put reductions in place and reduce our annual budget in a fairly significant way. Right now we're still working on the details. I have an executive committee meeting coming up after the AAMD meeting, so I can't really say very much. One, I'm worried about staff morale, and two, I can't be seen to be preempting the governing body.

However, for example, we are in talks with other cultural institutions, in particular with one in Detroit -- if there are operational things that we can share, such as engineers and the like, we might be able to do that. Detroit is a union city of course, but there might be functions where we can all reduce our costs.

It's my intention that however we make these cuts, we will still give the public a recognizable DIA, the one we've just re-opened 14 or 15 months ago. [Image: An 1893ish Gauguin self-portrait from the DIA's collection.]

MAN: Over the last few weeks I've noticed that you've been quoted repeatedly in stories about the evils of deaccessioning art to pay for operating costs. Are you merely being a good trooper, or are you effectively speaking to a certain constituency on your board?

GB: No, not really the latter. There are board members at every institution but one that I've worked at where when something looked tricky there would be the voices that would say, 'Why don't you sell some art?' Oddly enough, there's a certain voice that goes to that right away. To me that's not a significant component [of my board here].

To me if I've had any sort of rhetorical agenda, it is the fact that the DIA is, as you say, known for its ongoing structural, financial problems and if the director of such an institution is saying, 'We're not going to do this!', it's something that's taken very seriously in our profession. I normally hate the 'slippery-slope' argument, but I know from my experience that I'm not being a scaremonger. There would be widespread cannibalization of collections if this was seen as being acceptable.

I see some voices that the DIA can't be the only one in trouble, and I say, 'Who? Tell me who they are?' I asked at the last meeting of [an AAMD] committee. If you know anyone who is in similar to the DIA's situation, let me know and we can talk.

MAN: So you're not getting an untoward amount of 'Sell, sell sell!' pressure from your trustees?

GB: No. And that's not unusual, not from this board or those I've been close to.

Still, we're being careful. We just backed out of an exhibition that was coming form the Victoria & Albert, and the headline was we did so because of costs. That's true -- but the fact of the matter is that we had restricted funds we could have used for it. But when the other North American institution backed out because they realized they couldn't afford it, then the only way to get the show to the DIA was to absorb all of those shared costs: $400,000, $500,000, $600,000 at that point. I decided that in our current situation spending a large amount of restricted funds on one show wasn't a responsible thing to do.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is committing an unnecessary error with the exhibition "Raphael to Renoir: Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna." The show is pure fluff-job, an irresponsible glorification of a private collector. (I've written about these fluffings before, so I won't re-count all my objections here.)

Somehow this detail escaped Holland Cotter. Even more remarkable is this goofy paragraph from Cotter's review: "In a catalog interview Mr. Bonna tells Mr. Goldner [a Met curator] that this Parmigianino is one of his collection favorites, though on the whole he appears to favor more a resolved, paintinglike solidity of form." Uh, who cares what Bonna thinks? Art museums exist to study and collect art, not to promote (or discuss the taste of) private individuals who just happen to possess it.

In a related story, the Association of Art Museum Directors should prohibit these kinds of private-collector-glorifying exhibitions. In case AAMD needs another reminder of why,  Christopher Knight recently submitted evidence worth considering.

• I dig Mel Ramos. Ken Johnson does too.
• John Divola is underappreciated -- except by Knight.
• This show seems to have left out Joan Brown for no obvious reason. Kenneth Baker didn't note the omission. 
• Alice Thorson outlines how Kansas City's Kemper Museum will deal with a ~nine percent budget cut. 
• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch's David Bonetti outlines a new exhibition on the Gateway Arch at Washington University. It's timed to coincide with the St. Louis-arrival of an Eero Saarinen retrospective.
• The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego just jumped into bed with a casino, the San Diego U-T's Robert L. Pincus reports a little too dryly. (OK, a lot too dryly.) Here's hoping MCASD director Hugh Davies' peers move to examine the arrangement this week at the AAMD winter meeting, which will be held in... San Diego.
  
• On the occasion of an ICA Boston survey show, Geoff Edgers profiles Shepard Fairey.
  
• In both the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Gaile Robinson examines a George Segal exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center. (The two papers now share cultural content.)
  
• This is just plain weird: On Kawara's One Million Years was recently acquired by the Hirshhorn and was on view at the museum for 10 weeks, through Jan. 11. Washington Post critic Blake Gopnik didn't write about the acquisition show in which it was featured, or about the work itself. So for Sunday's Post, he travels to NYC... and reviews the work there, at Zwirner. He never mentions that until two weeks ago it was on view down the street from his house, and that it just entered a Washington museum collection.
  

• Exciting! For years I've complained that there's never been a proper Kees Van Dongen show in the USA. This weekend, a full Van Dongen retrospective opens in Montreal. When the catalogue arrives, I'll will have more.
  
• If the arts received federal stimulus dollars in proportion to how the arts feed the economy, we'd get...
• Hrag Vartanian examines his Flickr feed to see what people view.
• With Vancouver '10 around the corner (bring on the hockey!), Jen Graves (and friends) remember how art was once a part of the Games themselves.
• WH Auden, Cai, Cranach and Eckberg (from Regina Hackett).
• Also from Hackett, the extent of the Seattle Art Museum's Waashington Mutual-derived financial hole.
• Big week on MAN upcoming: Detroit Institute of Arts director Graham Beal joins me to preview next week's AAMD meeting, Morandi at the Met and lots more.
  

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which recently acquired Emily Jacir's Where We Come From, attached an unusual wall-text to the work when it first exhibited it this winter.

Where We Come From (2001-2003) was the breakthrough work for Jacir, a Palestinian-born artist who splits her time between Ramallah, Rome and New York City. Jacir made the work by using her U.S. passport to gain entrance to Palestinian lands normally difficult or impossible to reach with a Palestinian passport. Once in Palestine, she fulfilled the wishes of Palestinians who had sent her requests, acting as a kind of DJ of geopolitical wanderlust. Jacir then photo-documented her performance of achingly simple requests: "Go to Haifa and play soccer with the first Palestinian boy you see on the street," and so on. The finished work features Jacir's disposable camera-style snapshots along with the text of the requests she received, printed in both English and Arabic. A detail is at left and below.

The 'extra' SFMOMA wall-text, printed in subscript beneath a more traditional museum-style text read:

SFMOMA is committed to exhibiting and acquiring works by local, national and international artists that represent a diversity of viewpoints and positions. Works of art can engender valuable discussion about a range of topics including those that are difficult and contested, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Additional information about Emily Jacir's Where We Come From, including a list of frequently asked questions, is available at the information desk in the Haas Atrium.

It is common for museum wall-text to provide art-historical context for a work of art or an explanation of how the work came to be made. (SFMOMA's primary wall text does just that.) But while museums regularly show work that addresses complicated topics, it's extremely unusual for a museum to install a wall-text directly excusing a work's geo- or socio-political roots. There is no such text attached to SFMOMA's online collection record of the work.

While Where We Come From specifically references the Palestinian diaspora and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it also touches on familiar art historical themes of the journey and the emotional pain of diaspora and separation. The 'extra' wall-text seems to reduce the Jacir to a work of art about one political situation.

SFMOMA's inclusion of the text raises troubling questions about when a museum should insert text between a work of art and its audience.

For example: In a gallery adjacent to Jacir's Where We Come From, SFMOMA installed Robert Gober's Newspaper (1992, detail at right), in which Gober juxtaposes the way the media gives prime coverage and placement to athletes and heterosexual families against the way the media marginalizes gays and lesbians, including gays who have been the victims of violence. The work also questions the way conservatives and the media define and present so-called family values. SFMOMA did not place a content note to the Gober explaining that that a subject of the work -- the place of gays and lesbians in American society -- is "difficult and contested."

Another work in 'Passageworks,' a Luc Tuymans painting that suggests George W. Bush and Laura Bush dancing on the seal of Texas at an inaugural ball, was also without such a label. I can recall no similar SFMOMA-authored label on a range of works that address or portray potentially "difficult and contested" topics, such as Mitch Epstein's Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia, 2004, which addresses the use of coal for power generation within a body of work that addresses energy and climate change or William Kentridge's Tide Table, which examines the trade-offs inherent in capitalist systems.

Jacir declined to comment on SFMOMA's 'additional' text. Where We Come From has been on view at many museums and galleries, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Jacir confirmed that never has an institution added a text 'explaining' it the way SFMOMA has. Jacir confirmed that SFMOMA did not tell her that it would be adding the text to her work and that it did not tell her that it would be distributing an FAQ about her, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and what the museum's acquisition of the work might say about the museum itself.

In a series of emails museum spokesperson Libby Garrison said, "The decision [to add the text] was made by the curators and the director, the trustees were not involved. It was made because when the work was on view (without wall text) during the acquisition process, we received numerous letters of concern from visitors who saw it on the wall. In response and for the exhibition, we felt we should contextualize the piece acknowledging the sensitivities that surround it. We deeply believe in the merits of her work but of course, are not taking political sides."

Despite repeated requests, the museum refused to make any of those decision-makers available for comment. The museum also refused to release or detail visitor "concerns." 

The museum refused to explain whether it had a policy for determining when it believes a text such as the one added to Where We Come From is appropriate. When asked whether the museum had put a "similar note" on a work of art, Garrison said that the museum had done so.

"We have provided statements for other sensitive exhibitions/works. For the Regan Louie exhibition we stated the following: 'Please note: This exhibition contains sexually explicit images that may not be appropriate for all viewers. SFMOMA recommends that adults preview the exhibition before sharing it with children.' Here are a few others: 'The images projected in Anthony Discenza's November create a strobe-like effect. Viewers with light sensitivities please be advised.' And 'Pierre Huyghe's The Third Memory includes graphic language that may not be appropriate for all viewers.' "

The collection exhibition in which the Jacir (and the Gober) were installed, Passageworks, closed on Monday, Jan. 19. I first noticed the wall-text on Dec. 22, but I delayed publication in an attempt to give SFMOMA the fullest possible opportunity to address the issue.

Related: Primary text after the jump. Dan Phiffer uploaded SFMOMA's Jacir FAQ to Flickr. The second page is here.

• No surprise: The best arts-smart coverage of the inaugural came from the LAT. Christopher Hawthorne wrote several pieces about architectural planning and The Big Day, including three fantastic 'Scenes from the Mall' posts (one, two, three), a scene from a tunnel under the Mall, and an essay on how important open public space was this past weekend. Must-reads all. Christopher Knight explains the poignancy of the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol. And Mark Swed offers thoughts on the inaugural musical selections.
• Jen Graves on the art selected for Congress' inaugural lunches.
• If you missed it in the drama of the early-week, there's a terrific, important George Grosz gallery up now at the Hirshhorn.
  

When it comes to the coordination of scientific research between the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department, or the impact of stem cell research on American policy and state and federal budgeting, there's an obvious home office: The White House science adviser. When it comes to coordinating, say, state-level arts education goals with federal education mandates, there isn't. That should change: The White House needs an arts adviser.

Some background: The White House science adviser advises the President and executive agencies on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. Its portfolio and activities reflect the cross-agency manner in which science touches American policy, including education, climate change, energy, diplomacy and more. The American science community has embraced the adviser's office, officially known as the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and has generally found it to be an important advocate.

Similarly, the arts are not one thing, they are a part of many things. Furthermore, the arts have long suffered at the federal level because of a lack of prioritization and coordination. The nation would benefit if Congress and the White House created a new office for a White House arts adviser, a humanities-driven sister-office to the White House science adviser. Increasingly policy is made in the White House and not at cabinet-level agencies, which generally administer policy. Putting a federal arts adviser in the West Wing would ensure that the arts is a part of many White House policy, not a frivolous, forgettable island unto itself.

Federal engagement with the arts and the integration of national arts policy is not just a fuzzy, feel-good issue. Our government's failure to understand the importance of the arts and the symbolism of cultural heritage has hurt America in the eyes of the world. For example, Muslims recoiled when the U.S. allowed Baghdad's National Museum of Iraq to be looted in the wake of the U.S. invasion. And there's broad bipartisan agreement that America's ineptitude at engaging in cultural diplomacy that reaches beyond despotic governments to communicate directly with the citizenry of nations such as Syria, Iran or China has restrained American priorities in important parts of the world.

When it comes to domestic policy, the way in which the federal government approaches the arts is incoherent, a reflection of the lack of any central responsibility for arts-related issues. Just as science has an impact on most Cabinet-level departments and other agencies, many executive branch entities have cultural issues within their purview. (This is a reason why an arts-specific cabinet department is the wrong solution.)

For example, in the wake of the No Child Left Behind law, arts education in America's public schools has become a federal issue. There are internationally important arts treasures on government land, including Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Utah and Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota. Both face conservation issues. American museum directors increasingly run into thorny diplomatic issues while negotiating the potential return of antiquities to their countries of origin, but they have no place in the federal government with which to consult even though there are diplomatic implications to their decisions.

How can philanthropists and artists best be incentivized under our tax code to support cultural organizations? Given that the federal government spreads arts-related monies amongst at least a dozen entities, how can those funds best be coordinated? What about issues that seem simple but haven't been: Ever since 9/11 artists of all kinds have had difficulties procuring visas to enter the United States. It's deleterious to the cultural life of both source and host countries when artists are kept out.

In the space of four paragraphs I've covered at least five Cabinet departments - and I haven't even touched on agency-level issues. Consider the unfortunate increasing development of the National Mall in Washington, the role of the humanities in the Peace Corps, the way in which the Corporation for National & Community Service impacts cultural volunteerism, and the importance of encouraging progressive architecture in federal buildings. Think architecture isn't an important factor in housing policy? Consider the disastrous housing projects the federal government built in the 1960s and 1970s.

And those are just issues at extant programs or agencies. The lack of a White House arts adviser makes it especially difficult for developing or emerging arts-related issues to gain traction in Washington.

This is a particularly critical issue now, when a prolonged economic downturn may have a significant impact on cultural institutions. At a time when the federal government is spending around $1 trillion to prop up the economy and to bail out failed businesses (with more dollars apparently on the way), it's shameful that there is yet no federal effort to ensure that financially troubled but nationally important, programmatically successful cultural institutions (many of which are also economically important to their regions) receive economic assistance too.

In fact, this is another example of a domestic issue with repercussions that can impact our standing in the world: One museum-on-the-brink, the Detroit Institute of Arts, has one of America's half-dozen-greatest art collections. Its solution to its budget problems may be to rent out its collection abroad. The failure of so great a cultural institution would be a national embarrassment.

Traditionally, the National Endowment for the Arts has been seen as our government's point agency on the arts. That paradigm is outdated: Already the combined federal appropriations of just two Washington arts facilities, the National Gallery of Art and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, are larger than the NEA's measly $147 million outlay. The NEA runs nice little programs and its leader has a nice bully pulpit. But over the last 10 or 15 years it has actively shied away from having a transformative effect on the nation's cultural life.

The institution of a White House arts adviser could - and should - have just that impact.

The Hirshhorn's newly-installed George Grosz gallery is relentless.

First, there is a 1936 drawing of a World War I veteran sitting in a wheelchair, alone. He's missing one eye, maybe two. His cheeks, neck and lips are all scarred. He appears to be toothless. He's broken, but still he wears his war medals on his chest with pride. The ribbons are colorful -- but the medals are the same color as the buttons on his coat. And worth about as much, we can hear Grosz thinking. Lot of good that war did. It's still with us.

A couple images later is another drawing, Liquidation, in simple black-and-white. In the lower third of the drawing is a soldier wearing a jaunty cap and a fitted coat with epaulets. In the near ground, on the right-hand side of the drawing the soldier's hand, in which he holds his gun. Directly above the gun is a pile of bodies, all of which lay splayed beneath a barred window. We've just -- just -- walked in on an atrocity.

This is likely the most important single gallery of art on view anywhere in America. It features only Groszes, a couple paintings and many works on paper, most made between the two World Wars. In nearly every image Grosz condemns the horrors of the Great War, warns of the emergent Nazi menace, or eviscerates the quiet complicity of Germans who are shopping or dining or whoring while the war machine whirred and while the Nazis grew in power. You may not have committed any atrocities yourself, Grosz says, but if you had been a greater citizen, you might have stopped what happened in the teens. You didn't. You can still stop the men in brown shirts if you care to. But do you? Remember, you are responsible for what your leaders do in your name and what they do will forever be a part of your history...

Hirshhorn curator Kristen Hileman has installed this gallery. It is a curatorial achievement of unusual crispness and clarity. It is plainly intended as a gut-punch-of-a-reminder that no matter how much America wants to turn from 43 to 44 as a way of ridding our conscience of the torturing, killing and extra-legal depravity that was enabled by the Bush Administration, we'll be living with it for the rest of our lives. Hileman is effectively joining her voice to Grosz's: They were our leaders. An entire nation stood by. Look at how the horrors and the horrible to which Grosz objected are still with his country. Now think about what America will have to live with. 

In a way, these Groszes are nothing new. Many recall Goya's great print portfolio about the French occupation of Spain, Disasters of War. The works here demonstrate that artists can aim high -- and that they can connect.

Liquidation, the aforementioned 1918-19 drawing of the soldier with the gun and his pile of bodies, is an updating of any one of several Goya Disasters prints, with one difference: Goya often shows us the moment before death or rape is inflicted. Grosz shows us the moment after.

We don't see only the 'Liquidator' after he has killed; in The Murder (1923) we see an apparently wealthy gentleman who has just rushed into a room and knocked over a chair. In his hand is a smoking gun. On the right-hand-side of the drawing is a pulled-back curtain, Grosz's way of emphasizing -- again -- that we just walked in on something. We may not know exactly what that something is, but we've got a pretty good idea -- and it's plain enough that the man with the smoking gun is responsible for it.

'Yo lo vi,' I saw it, Goya wrote on one of the Disasters. In Liquidation and The Murder Grosz goes a step further: You saw it, he says (and he emphasizes our voyeurism with that curtain, with our proximity to the soldier's back). Now, what are you going to do about it? Grosz knew the answer, too: Nothing. As if to drive home that point, in 1915 he drew The Attack, at top: A beating is administered under a full moon and under a street light. A dog runs away and a man on a balcony looks on, passively.

Grosz never stopped trying to impel viewers to responsibility and to action. In 1928, just after the Nazis' first Nuremberg rally, just after Goebbels took over the Nazi propaganda apparatus and as "Mein Kampf" was being published for the second time, Grosz painted Thunderbeard, A Man with Opinion (above). The Nazi brownshirt is surrounded by a bather, a shopper and a businessman busy reading the paper while in some kind of seaside cabana. All are happily ignoring the menace in their midst, Grosz's message is clear: You may be ignorant, but you're still responsible for he whom you are ignoring.

Four years later, in 1932, the year the Nazis won 230 seats in the Reichstag and became Germany's most powerful political party, Grosz hit the same theme more forcefully in A Little Child Shall Lead Them (Family). A comfortable bourgeois smokes a cigar and drinks tea, and a housefrau happily knits while (cluelessly) reading Spengler's "The Decline of the West." In front of them, facing us, is their son. He's shooting a machine gun and smiling. You're ignoring the evil in your midst, Grosz says. You are responsible for what happens under your nose. 

The last painting in the gallery is one of Grosz's masterpieces, The Painter of the Hole I (1948, at right). It shows a painter working so intently re-painting the same hole over and over and over again that he has managed to ignore the total devastation around him. A rat has climbed up on his canvas, and two others are sifting through discarded paintings. The painter sees none of it. I tried to use my art to make you pay attention, Grosz says. Fat lot of good it did. You ignored me. A second World War destroyed much of Europe -- and, well, me too. Hileman's hanging of The Painter of the Hole I as the conclusion to this gallery is worse than haunting. It's predictive, and it hurts.

I've seen a certain bumper-sticker on Washington-area cars for a while now: "1.20.09, Bush's Last Day," it promises. Well, sort of. Hileman has put together a horrible reminder that lo vimos: We did not stop it. Just as Germany had to live with the the absurdities and the horrors of World War I and just as Germany has to live with the legacy of its Nazi past, so must Americans now live with what was done in the name of our country by the the outgoing regime. Getting past the Bush atrocities is not as simple as swearing in a new guy.

With the world turning its attention to Washington this long weekend, I find myself thinking of two galleries in two Washington museums. One is a reminder of our nation's tradition of democratic succession, the other is a reminder of national responsibility (and I'll talk about that one on Monday).

According to its website, the National Gallery owns 43 Gilbert Stuart portraits. Fifteen of them are now on view in a single West Building gallery, newly installed just in time for the transition of power.

It's an astonishing gallery, the kind of space that makes the argument for a national gallery of art. Among these Stuarts are the Gibbs-Coolidge Set of the first five presidents (four of whom owned slaves), a key member of the Continental Congress, a member of the 1787 Constitutional convention, a first lady and more. (Blessedly put away in storage for the occasion are uh, fine examples of the portraits the perpetually indebted Stuart made so he could pay off his ever-lengthy bar tab.)

Given Stuart's propensity for slacking off unless he was painting someone truly important, it's the five presidential portraits that are the most astonishing. (The only other show-stopper in the gallery is this painting of Abigail Adams.) Not one of them shows a leader crossing the Alps or wearing a continental-style red pin in an effort to remind the viewer of the sitter's import. Four of the men wear unadorned black coats, while the fifth wears a plain red jacket. None are surrounded by any of accouterments or other reminders of power, position or status. All are presented against neutral washes. Each president looks out at the viewer, quietly.

There are no European galleries with such plain presentations of late-18th- or early-19th-century leaders. There couldn't be: More than a quarter-century after James Monroe gave way to John Quincy Adams, European leaders were still eager to be painted as stuffily as Franz Winterhalter painted Napoleon III or with all the ostentatious pomp in Sir Thomas Lawrence's presentation George IV. (This portrait, at right and in the collection of the Vatican, was painted in 1816, four years before the then-Prince Regent would ascend to the throne.)

Two hundred years after they were made, Stuart's portraits are still an effective reminder that Americans were never impressed with monarchical Orders named after frilly garments. Our earliest presidents were all born into privilege, but none were born with a birthright. These Stuarts give notice that Americans do things differently than those Europeans. Let these paintings also help us recall the humility we need to rediscover in order to further the national and intellectual legacy left to us by the men they portray.

Reminder: The National Gallery of Art will be closed on Jan. 20 due to parade assembly areas and Inaugural-related security.

It's a big weekend here in Washington, so I wanted to start the four-day weekend by sharing some reading about the intersection of the arts and the inaugural. Then later today I'll start a two-post mini-series on two DC galleries that deserve special attention this weekend. First up: Gilbert Stuart at the National Gallery of Art.

• Christopher Knight on the shameful condition of our National Mall; and
  
• The White House Historical Association is effectively in charge of (most of) the art in the White House. Take a tour of the collection here.

Continued from this morning...

MAN: I haven't run numbers on every museum, but MoMA has a pretty enormous social media footprint: Sixty thousand followers on Facebook, a YouTube channel, Twitter...

Victor Samra: Actually the first time 'we' were on Facebook it was an unofficial site. It was a student who is now a freshman at Northwestern. He started it literally a month before we did. I reached out to him at the end of the summer... and said I love what you're doing and can I send you some content - information about our exhibits and such. He said, 'Can I make you an admin because I'm a freshman in college now.' That's baout 100,000 people combined.

MAN: So how does all of your broadcasting play with all of your other broadcasting?

VS: The YouTube channel inter-meshes with all of them. On our Facebook page we host our YouTube videos. We also put YouTubes up on our site, moma.org. I tweet about them now and then. We are working on a redesigned site (to launch at the end of February) and I think there's potential to bringing it all together there.

MoMA communications director Kim Mitchell: Actually, through Victor's work we've initiated little changes in how we communicate, like in the emails we send out to people. We put functions at the bottom where people can share the email to Facebook and spread information virally. For projects we don't have a lot of money [to promote], we rely on the viral stuff. It's becoming more and more integrated into our campaigns.

MAN: This is a ridiculously simplistic question, but how do you decide what to Tweet? I mean, there's so much you could post but obviously you don't want to overwhelm people.

VS: I keep a list of things I find that would be interesting, that I think people would find interesting whether they're real patrons of MoMA or not. I don't try to promote or talk about MoMA too much because I think people can sniff out blatant marketing and Twitter's not a tool with which that works.

I just try to talk about general things that pertain to modern and contemporary art that I find or that someone has told me about, and to serve as a resource in that way. I'm trying to get more insight into getting quotes from visitor services and behind-the-scenes scoop on installations and the challenges behind that. Behind-the-scenes stuff is real interesting when it comes to museums.

MAN: Which museums do you think do the best job on Twitter?

VS: Brooklyn. The Getty. LACMA. The Heard in Arizona. The Honolulu Academy of Arts. 

Along with the Getty and the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art has been an early, aggressive user of Twitter, the micro-semi-blogging service that enables fast, easy, often smart conversation between, well, anyone. (For more on what Twitter is, click here.) Given that Twitter seems made for people who want to communicate with audiences, be they museums or journalists, I've been exploring ways of using the thing.

My three favorite museum feeds are the Getty's (1,380 followers), Brooklyn's (2,246) and MoMA's (2,453). The Getty does the best job of tweeting art, Brooklyn does the best job of being the friendly museum you want to watch the game with, and MoMA does a nice job of understanding that art doesn't begin and end on West 53rd Street. There are lots of other good museum feeds, including from the Heard, the Tacoma Art Museum and more. (And no one tweets better than NHL teams and staff. The best source for hockey news/etc. is Twitter.)

The human behind the Museum of Modern Art's popular Twitter feed is Victor Samra, MoMA's digital media marketing manager. Last week he and I talked about why the heck... (I'll post part two this afternoon.)

MAN: Why tweet? Why use Twitter? What does the museum get out of it?

Victor Samra: One thing we really wanted to do was reach directly out to our audience, to people who love the MoMA, to people in New York City who know we're here but may not think about coming in too regularly, to not depend on other media outlets. And to just be available, to have the door open and to be able to foster real discussion and conversation between us and our audience. You'll read this a lot in a lot of the discussions about museums, but it's really about putting a face on the institution. And I think that putting just a human touch behind the place, especially online where it is all electronic is useful. You know, just give it a personality.

MAN: What do you want it to be, or to become?

VS: We just started in early November, so it's still new. We're watching it grow every day. One thing is the idea of being a direct link to the museum where anyone can ask a question or contact us more directly than calling the information desk. I think one of the most important uses for it is listening, listening to what people are saying. It may not be people who are following our Twitter account, but through searches I can see what people are tweeting about about the museum, if they're waiting in line or if they love certain exhibitions. One guy tweeted about our Café 2 and how much he loved it and he took pictures and put them up on Flickr. Same guy, he had a little stuffed monkey and he put the monkey in different positions around the museum and showed this monkey's trip to the museum. People loved it. Half of it is getting instant feedback. I'm not stalking anybody but you can listen in on what people are saying. I think corporations are really using Twitter for that too.

MAN: So what corporations do you follow? Do you learn from them? It's such a new tool -- or at least it is to me -- that I check out a bunch of different feeds to see how all kinds of people use it. So far journos, uh, well, uh...

VS: I pay attention somewhat to certain corporations really just to see what's being done out there. I've been paying attention to a lot of digital media strategists, Steve Rubel, who I think is at Edelman... I've just been learning a lot about him. He has a lot of great insight about what works. He doesn't focus on non-profits -- his clients are usually corporations. The CEO from Zappos was one of the first CEOs on Twitter. When it comes to nonprofits I pay more attention to museums, theaters and foundations, orchestras too. Sometimes artists themselves, photographers, painters. There are a lot of literary Twitterers out there.

Click here for part two.

The LAT reports that LACMA isn't only attempting to deaccession the two paintings first noted here on Saturday and on Tuesday: The museum is also offering up over 100 pieces from its costumes and textiles collection. Strangely, neither of the two senior LACMA officials with whom I spoke on Tuesday mentioned the 'additional' deaccessioning.

One reason museums earn skeptical attention when they deaccession is that they often try to slip sales past the public. It would help LACMA -- and other museums -- if all deaccessioning and attempted/planned deaccessioning was accompanied by a museum-distributed public notice and an explanation.

UPDATE: Richard Lacayo agrees.

Typically I try to post about/review shows while they're still up. But sometimes, mostly during the Christmas/New Year's season, write-ups get delayed and I get to exhibitions later than I'd like. (I, er, exacerbated the back-up by posting at great length about the otherwise under-discussed Franz West retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art.)

This year it works out OK: Each of the following shows have unusually terrific catalogues. In fact, in the seven-plus years I've done MAN, I can't remember a season of such terrific catalogues. So coming up soon on MAN (and must-owns all catalogue-wise):

• Giorgio Morandi at the Met (coming tomorrow, depending on breaking news);
• Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim;
• Oranges and Sardines at the Hammer;
  
• Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900 at SFMOMA; and
  
• Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937 at MoMA.

In several cases -- Opie for sure, and arguably Morandi and Miro -- the catalogues are better than the shows. (Also: A fifth show has a super, small catalogue, but I haven't seen the corresponding exhibition (yet): Jasper Johns: Light Bulb, produced by MCASD.)

Update: A reader notes that this list would almost certainly be longer if the Getty/curator Weston Naef had bothered to produce a substantial catalogue to accompany what might have been the Show of the Year: Carleton Watkins vs. All Others. True. It was a pure slobberknocker. As strong an argument as the show made for Watkins' primacy among other other photographers of his era, it's an argument that will eventually be somewhat lost because the show wasn't documented or 'essayed.'

• WTF M-I-C, K-E-Y...
• Google + Prado = teh awesome. [via]
• Yes, I saw Jeff Koons in 'Milk.'
• The Washington Post's most interesting thinker, Philip Kennicott, thinks about Shepard Fairey's Obama poster.
• I'm fascinated by (temporarily) forgotten art histories. Douglas Britt at the Houston Chronicle is too. He reviews and discusses these shows at the Blanton.
  
• The Walker's Off Center visits Act/React in Milwaukee. (Note: Reviewer of show is not a newspaper/magazine/etc., but museum-generated media...)
  

I have long failed to understand why the New York Times runs business news in the arts section. (You know: business news like the auctioning of paintings, the appointment of auction-house personnel, and so on.) Today the NYT agrees with me: A story about woes at Christie's is where it belongs: in the business section. 

I've complained about how LACMA hides paintings behind cases of medals, an installation that made it hard to see a Tintoretto from more than eight inches away.

That gallery is currently home to Francis Alys' Fabiola show. LACMA director Michael Govan told me the medals + paintings install would not be reconstructed after LACMA remodels its European galleries late this year.

These days all deaccessioning conversations start with the National Academy: Museum directors who sell things in the industry-approved manner race to point out that they're selling 'cleanly,' that is, to build funds for art purchases.

That's about how it was when LACMA boss Michael Govan and I spoke about LACMA's attempted/likely deaccessioning of a Joshua Reynolds (right) and its only Lucas Cranach the Elder painting. With the National Academy reference over and done with -- LACMA also effectively answered that question in Sotheby's catalogue by listing the paintings as "SOLD BY THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART TO BENEFIT FUTURE ACQUISITIONS" -- Govan and I moved on to LACMA-relevant specifics. I asked Govan if LACMA had an acquisition in the pipeline, something specific to which the sale of these paintings would be contributing.

"LACMA doesn't usually trade one thing for another," Govan said. "So no, we're not deaccessioning because we have to pay some bill on another painting. The bottom line is: If you've noticed what we've been buying, we've been buying very aggressively. We've been planning to re-do our European collection galleries and we're slated at the end of this year to do that. For the last two years we've been acquiring quite aggressively and specifically. This is part of the overall eff to clean-up and strengthen the collection as part of a larger initiative... There's not one painting or a specific thing that these are being 'traded' for, that's for sure."

And indeed, in the last several years LACMA has been on a European paintings acquisitions spree. Govan said he's especially proud of the museum's purchase of a Pietro da Cortona, a triptych by Jan Boeckhorst that the museum snapped up at Maastricht, a Jacques-Louis David portrait, and this Cima da Conegliano Madonna and Child.

But selling the museum's only Cranach the Elder? Of course, the Norton Simon has two first-rate Cranachs and the Getty has a nice one, but does that matter when LACMA considers selling its only example of an artist?

"There's a public expectation of a painter given a name," Govan said. "We do have some big names, but what [our curators] have really built is a collection of the finest of the artist they select, and they'd rather have a first-rate painting of someone who's not Rubens than a token Rubens. Especially if there is a better one at the Getty or some place else."

Given that LACMA has two paintings in a Jan. 29 auction, Govan didn't want to bad-mouth either the Cranach or the Reynolds. But it's hard not to notice that the Reynolds hasn't been on view in some time and despite being a gift from William Randolph Hearst, it wasn't included in LACMA's ongoing Hearst show. Furthermore, Sotheby's doesn't provide a condition report for either painting.

With the use of deaccessioned funds being a hot-button topic, I asked Govan how LACMA treats deaccessioning-derived funds, whether the funds from selling an 18thC British painting generally go back into British painting, and so on.

"Where people draw those lines are important," he said. "They usually get drawn at museum around the department structure, and are here, too. When you get to the 1950s and '60s and '70s there's a lot of swapping going on between modern and proto-contemporary, but generally it's around department structure. When funds are around at LACMA there's a lot of collegiality, to where a lot of curators will 'lend' funds to close a gap. And there's a pretty much perfect track record of that, of them getting paid back."

Unrelated: This comic Cranach, offered by Sotheby's right after the LACMA Cranach, is a hoot.

Regarding this attempted/likely LACMA deaccessioning, two notes:

• Los Angeles-area museums own three Cranachs. Adam and Eve are at the Norton Simon and A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion is at the Getty.
• There are 13 Joshua Reynoldses at the Huntington.

Apparently even U.S. Senators have their problems with wall-text (at the National Portrait Gallery). UPDATE: Christopher Knight says change is coming. To the label. And here it is.

• See the post below this one for some Saturday, first-on-MAN news about a LACMA deaccessioning-by-Sotheby's scheduled for Jan. 29.
  
• Jen Graves fires back at essayist Emily White over arts journalism (especially, but not only, in Seattle).
• Those 'rhymes' I love doing here on MAN? Kenneth Baker writes about something similar.
• In the Washington Post, Paul Richard argues that there ought to be more Mickey Mouse in art museums.
  
• Stephan Salisbury of the Philly Inky has the tale of his city's reappearing (!) Calder murals.
  
• The weirdest essay of the weekend comes from Holland Cotter in Sunday's NYT. The good news: The NYT finally found the Detroit Institute of Arts financial problems worthy of mention. The bad news is that Cotter glossed over The Real Issue; instead he regurgitated his review of the museum's post-expansion re-opening. (And he put the DIA in a peer group with Newark.) Then this:

[Brooklyn] rented expensive imported shows like "Sensation," in 1999, and last season's Takashi Murakami survey, fare almost guaranteed to lure traffic across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Such shows put the museum, for better or worse (often worse), in the news. They also ratcheted up its youth presence, as, in different ways, did two other exhibitions, one of commercial hip-hop artifacts and another of "Star Wars" paraphernalia.

Both of these shows were panned, but what was the significant difference between them and the Guggenheim's much-praised motorcycle extravaganza, or the average design showcase at the Museum of Modern Art? The main distinction, I'd say, was class: high class (Guggenheim, MoMA) versus lower class (Brooklyn).

First, to equate Star Wars, an unserious display of kitschy memorabilia, with Murakami, a scholarship-driven show of a major contemporary art figure produced by a reputable museum and curator, is critical malpractice. On the other hand... Cotter proves his own thesis by failing to compare 'Star Wars' to MoMA's Pixar 'show.'

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has entered Lucas Cranach the Elder's Portrait of a Bearded Young Man (1518) in Sotheby's Jan. 29 Old Masters sale in New York. Sotheby's has listed the painting with a note that it is being "sold by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to benefit future acquisitions." Sotheby's has estimated the painting at $600,000-800,000.

According to the LACMA website, the 16.5-inch-by-11-inch work is museum's only painting by the elder Cranach.

From the Sotheby's write-up: "Here [Cranach] has lavished his full attention on this striking young sitter, with his penetrating blue eyes and prominent cheek bones, and carefully delineates the delicate hairs in his fair, curly beard... While we do not know the name of the sitter in The Portrait of a Bearded Young Man, Cranach has created a distinct and clearly recognizable personality."

The painting was a 1991 gift to LACMA from Mr. and Mrs. R. Stanton Avery. Stan Avery died in 1997. (Two wives preceded him in death.) The Averys were regular LACMA supporters, donating Ribera's A Philosopher, as well as funds to help purchase Winslow Homer's The Cotton Pickers.

Also entered in the sale is another LACMA painting: Sir Joshua Reynolds' Saint Cecilia (1775). The painting was given to the museum by William Randolph Hearst in 1949. At 110-inches-by-63-inches, it is the larger of two LACMA Reynoldses. Sotheby's has estimated the painting at $700,000-900,000.

I found out about the attempted sale on Saturday morning, and I have asked the museum for more information. I'll post more as it becomes available.

Yesterday I posted on SFMOMA's acquisition of a terrific Emily Jacir, a work of art that may be the most important work about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. (Readers: Nominations? Via email or Twitter...)

I've written about Jacir a good bit over the years, including in a New York Observer story about MoMA's Without Boundary exhibition. I included some extra material from Jacir (who had her issues with the show -- and she was in it) here. Paul Schmelzer has written about Jacir for Adbusters. Jacir's former dealer, Choire Sicha, discusses an example of his engagement with her. Finally, Jacir's Wikipedia page is really, really thorough.

I'd bet that no American city has more financially troubled arts institutions than Detroit. Yesterday the GM Foundation announced it is cutting back on grants to a number of arts groups.

This is not a disaster for the financially troubled Detroit Institute of Arts. In 2006, the last year for which the GM Foundation's tax return is publicly available, the GM Foundation gave the DIA just $50,000. (It gave the Cleveland Museum of Art $70,000 that year.)

Instead it's a reminder: There's only one truly major American art museum that's in trouble, the DIA. We'll probably know more about how much trouble at the end of the month, after AAMD's next meeting in San Diego. Word is that the DIA's condition will be a major behind-the-scenes topic.

UPDATE: SFMOMA installs unusual wall-text in Jacir gallery.

Conceptualism is the Tin Man of contemporary art. It's got lots of plenty of muscular credibility, but usually it's got no heart. 

Enter Emily Jacir's Where We Come From (2001-03), which was acquired in 2008 by SFMOMA. It is is the first American museum to add Where We Come From to its collection -- and it's a great example of conceptual art can make you feel.
 
Jacir's installation is small, it's specific, it's heartbreaking. It brings one of the world's longest-running geopolitical conflicts down to size and presents it in a way that emphasizes humanity over fears about humans and what they might do, or who they might bomb, shell or torture.

It's a pointedly simple work: Jacir used her U.S. passport to gain entrance to Palestinian lands normally difficult or impossible to reach with a Palestinian passport. Once in Palestine, she fulfilled the wishes of Palestinians who had sent her requests, acting as a kind of DJ of geopolitical wanderlust. Jacir then documented her performance of achingly simple requests: "Go to Haifa and play soccer with the first Palestinian boy you see on the street," and so on. The work features Jacir's disposable camera-style snapshots (above) along with the requests she received, printed in both English and Arabic (below).

It's contemporary art that recalls one of the grandaddies of history art: The story of the journey and the exciting experiences that it engenders has plenty of precedents. Usually they're big, dramatic paintings, such as versions of the conversion of Paul as painted by Caravaggio or Tintoretto. More recent media work by Shirin Neshat, such as Passage (2001) or Tooba (2002) is similarly big.

Jacir's piece is about two journeys: It's specifically about her on-request trips to Palestine. But because she's fulfilling the requests of people who traveled away from Palestine for one reason or another, it's about their journeys too, especially the journeys that they can't make.

Related: I'll have much more on the installation of this piece @ SFMOMA soon.

Shepherd Fairey Obama poster donated to National Portrait Gallery by... Heather and Tony Podesta. Tony is the brother of Obama transition boss John Podesta.

See update below. Time's Richard Lacayo and I are having a grand old time discussing deaccesioning at failed institutions. For the purposes of this post, he started it here, I responded, and he's back. The only thing we're missing is Christopher Knight as a referee. (Absent: Team NYT. But none of them, Berlin-based or otherwise, are big on topical, hot-button engagement.)

Read Lacayo's entire post; here's the nut:

...when push comes to shove no institution is going to let itself go down if it has any alternative, I think this is a position that fails to take seriously that there's a public interest in preserving institutions, not just the art they hold.

I don't consider selling off an institution to be an alternative. (Neither does AAMD.) You know it's over when that's an option; just close and move on.

I think Lacyao's second point is more interesting: Is there a public interest in preserving failed institutions, an interest so intense that it would merit selling off the institution's mission-based assets?

Well, no. The art can be the art anywhere. It can be seen anywhere. So long as there is somewhere for the art to go -- and there is -- art is more important than institutions. (Plus, a failed institution would be drastically unlikely to have programming as engaging as the show Lacayo sites.)

Furthermore, somewhere such as the High or Seattle would be delighted to beef up their American paintings collections, and if/when they do so (and if the dispersal was properly managed), they'd likely beef up their curatorial focus on such work.

(And no, it doesn't matter much to me that the work stay in NYC. The art is more important than the geography.)

UPDATE: In case you've been perusing the intellectual dishonesty here, let me reiterate: I believe that a failed institution's collection should be dispersed to other (non-profit) art museums so that the failed institution's art continues to be held in public trust. Healthy art museums should not deaccession to pay for operating expenses. Don't let a couple of lamely put together out-of-context quotes twist you. Zaretsky's argument is analogous to: 'I like soccer and basketball. In soccer they kick the ball. Therefore, the Lakers should kick the basketball.' Second update: In an email, Zaretsky admits that he took what I said "out-of-context" in order to present his case. (As I note above, context is critical here. It's everything. It matters.) However as of this posting, he has not edited his post. Third update: Now he has, with this: "[i]n this debate people say one thing in one context and other, often inconsistent things in another context." That's essentially Zaretsky admitting he doesn't understand the specifics of the issues. If your argument is 'ignore the context' -- and Zaretsky says that's what his argument is -- then you're admitting that you don't really understand the differences between why what certain museums do is probelmatic and why what others do is OK.

Four or five years ago I visited Betty Freeman's Beverly Hills home. In the entrance hall I saw a Dan Flavin, possibly the first Flavin bought on the West Coast. This wasn't one of those 'new' old Flavins -- it was old, old, with a badly frayed electrical cord and everything. I said something about the Flavin and Freeman said something back in a 'talking with a visiting stranger' mode.

In the next room I saw a terrific Sam Francis. I said something and Freeman was again politely professional. I turned around and saw a Doug Wheeler, at which point I practically jumped out of my shoes and exclaimed how great it was to see a Wheeler and that I wished Wheeler was better appreciated and so on. Freeman blinked at me and asked if I knew Wheeler's work. Oh yes, I replied, and went on even more.

Clearly, quickly, I had passed a kind of test. Reading Mark Swed's remembrance of Freeman in the LAT yesterday, I understood a bit of what the test was: Freeman was all about living artists, and not many collectors had taken the Wheeler leap. She had, and she'd been right about him. From that point on we were old friends. Over the weekend Freeman died from cancer. She was 87.

After we talked about Wheeler a bit, Freeman led me into a room off to the side of her kitchen, a room with a big glass wall of a window. I looked out at her back yard. I turned around and there was David Hockney's legendary 1966 Beverly Hills Housewife (above). The housewife, of course, was Freeman. The day I was visiting she was wearing something strikingly similar to what she had worn in the Hockney, 40 years before.

It was a revelatory moment: All of a sudden I saw early Hockney as a realist, not as a kind of post-fauvist who stayed within the lines and used hyper-real, arcadian colors. The scene was exactly as he'd painted it. The lines were as strong and as distinct as he'd presented them. I felt like I was in a diorama. (Heck, I was.)

For the next couple of hours, Freeman and I chatted mostly about Clyfford Still. She had been an early collector of his work, and had become about as friendly with him as anyone ever had. She had kept their correspondence in a series of shoebox-like boxes, and we flipped through dozens, probably scores of letters. It was apparent that she hadn't looked through the stuff in years, but the memories and stories came rushing right back.

As usual, Still hadn't made anything easy on a potential collector: After Freeman and her husband expressed interest in buying a painting (a pretty big deal for them -- he was a dentist, I believe, and they were hardly rich), Still spent the next several months 'interviewing' Betty. He took her to Yankees games, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and to concerts at Carnegie Hall. At Yankee Stadium, Still and Freeman sat in the upper deck. Once, in the middle of the game, Still broke off their conversation and pointed down at the white chalk lines that marked the end of fair territory and the begin of foul territory. "That is my line of force," he seriously and coldly told Freeman, and then quickly resumed the previous conversation about who-knows-what. Freeman was stunned, but understood something new about Still's art. They never again discussed his work, just other stuff.

In the months to come Still went on to make sure that Freeman disliked his self-declared rivals, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Finally he sold her a painting -- and hypocritically raised his price from $5,000 to $15,000 to match what Rothko was getting. Freeman told me that it wasn't easy to come up with the money -- $15,000 meant something back then -- but they did. They moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter and hung it in their house... and were terrified years later when Still called out of the blue and announced that he was in town and would be dropping by to see it. Freeman knew that if Still didn't like how collectors had hung his painting that he would take them back -- or worse. (He liked it.)

Freeman's faith in Still never wavered. She wrote a biography of him, but she told too much truth and in a nasty series of letters he forbade her to publish it. (Still was particularly upset that Freeman had written about how they had visited the Rembrandts at the Met, and that Still had spoken approvingly of the Dutch master. Still liked to cloak his influences.) Freeman's Still eventually ended up at the Los Angeles County Museum. The biography has remained unpublished.

After Freeman and I talked Still for a while, we started in on Hockney. I suspect everyone who visited Freeman ended up talking about Hockney. At some point in our conversation Freeman excused herself, walked back into her laundry room and emerged with several more shoeboxes. They were full of decades of letters with Hockney, plus tons of Polaroids of paintings-in-progress that Hockney had sent Freeman. The most recent letter and Polaroids were only a couple weeks old. We had a blast.

Betty Freeman never would have made the ArtNews 100, or whatever. She was not a wealthy person who accumulated. She was an old-fashioned collector, a connoisseur of mid-century modern art. Today's Gagosian-following flunkies would do well to learn all they can about her. I'm grateful for that afternoon I spent with her. There are few afternoons I remember better.

Good news while we were off on holiday: The Phillips Collection announced it has raised $23.5 million in endowment funds over the last nine months of 2008. That's an important fundraising success for new Phillips director Dorothy Kosinski. [Image: Detail from Pierre Bonnard's Open Window.]

Bad news while we were off on holiday: "This signals a new phase in Phillips history," Phillips board chair George Vradenburg told the Washington Post. Writer Jackie Trescott continued: "The Phillips of the future, he said, will be more involved in 'the living art of today,' will explore younger artists and hopefully increase the numbers of younger patrons, and will develop more international partnerships. 'We understand the integrity of our collection and will become more active in collecting,' he said."

Glad to hear it about the collecting, but... I continue to be concerned about the signs the Phillips is giving off about its interest in chasing contemporary art. The Phillips is one of the country's best collections of modern art. Its collection and its history is primarily about 1880ish-1940ish. For almost its entire life, the Phillips has been about early modernism and about the artists who formed a relationship with the museum and who found the Phillips experience instrumental in their own development. (See Diebenkorn, Richard.) It is a very special place.

Ergo, the Phillips is not the Hammer. It is not a museum about "the living art of today." It is a wonderful thing to have museums dedicated to certain parts of art history. It's especially wonderful to go to the Phillips and to think about how the museum and its founder contributed to that history.

But something seems to be changing. When Phillips director Dorothy Kosinski took the top job a year ago, she talked with me for a Q&A here on MAN. She discussed how much she respected the museum's history and how she thought the museum's history was important to its future. Here's an excerpt:

MAN: In the last couple years several Washington museums have worked to differentiate themselves and to establish themselves as filling certain niches. What is your Phillips going to be?

Kosinski: Honestly, that's something that I really want to do some serious examining about. Talking about what is our mission with our staff and our trustees. I would venture to say that it seems to me the key is that the Phillips touts itself as the first public museum of modern art in America, and I think there's the key. That and the fact that they've now galvanized around the Center for the Study of Modern Art. It's a museum of the classic era of late 19th, early 20thC. What do we mean by modern art? What was modernism? It's such a rich art historical moment and it is such a compelling historical epic. Duncan Phillips thought internationally. And I just think that to really dig in and, as I was saying before, not allow ourselves to not go for the obvious but have thoughtful exciting maybe a little bit against the grain examinations of what does that mean? What is modernism? Let's think seriously and look deeply at modern art. That might be a clue or a key to sort of galvanizing the meaning of the collection within that broader Washington community of cultural institutions.

The Phillips Collection was America's first modern art museum. It doesn't need to be the latest contemporary hotspot.

• Greg Allen has had some superb content lately, especially a series on Fischli & Weiss's one-hit wonder The Way Things Go. (It's been on view at the Hirshhorn for a long time, and it opens Vik Muniz's brilliant Rebus at MoMA.) Check out: How they did that and how is it both $15 on Amazon and $900,000? Vik Muniz on F&W. And a last thought on editing in The Way Things Go.
• Nina Simon on how museums could/should be using Twitter. FWIW, Twitter seems much more museo-ideal than, say, Facebook.
• Artist Robyn O'Neil has a new website. My multi-part Q&A with O'Neil last year was one of my personal MAN highlights. (Parts one, two, three, four.)
• Yesterday I devoted a post to some of what Richard Lacayo recently said about deaccessioning. Later in the day Lacayo posted some smart thoughts from ex-Whitney and ex-SFMOMA director David Ross. 
• Los Angeles-based art collector and patron Betty Freeman has died. More later today.
• David Hockney, Gus Van Sant and Milk.
• Chris Burden's Urban Light (@ LACMA) was on my 2008 top ten list, in part of the Flickration it inspired. LACMA's impressed too, and is launching a project.
• Robert Adams being chatty on Art:21.
  

OK, I'm resigned to MOCA's trustees out-raising MAN readers. But y'all still donated $2,887 to 16 public school arts education projects, helping to provide arts education to at least 1,255 kids. That's almost double what you gave last year. (And there's just $156 left on our last project...)

Thanks to: Anonymous (6), Anonymous in honor of Mrs. Sheila Bisenius, Greg Albers, Roberta Bloom, Kathryn Cornelius, Franklin Einspruch, Anne Farrell, Tony Fitzpatrick, Suzanne Fredericq, Samuel Freeman, Heather Goss, Lou Haney, Michael Hoeh, Sam Hunter, Michael Jenkins, Maggie Lineback, Kiki MacInnis, Mickie McGrath, Carolina Miranda, William Neisel, Jane Newbold, Dr. Elizabeth Pergam, Brian Piana, Daniel Pink, Terence Pitts, Bruce Price, Steven Roden, Gloria Sutton, Melissa Thompson, Mel Trittin, Hrag Vartanian, Samantha Wallace, and Nicholas Wilson.

See update below. Over at Looking Around, Time's Richard Lacayo endorses the idea that it is sometimes OK for arts institutions to sell off art in order to keep the doors open.

I couldn't disagree more. If an institution, such as the National Academy or someone else, can't operate effectively enough to stay open, it should close. Then it should disperse its collection to non-profit institutions --  to other museums. This way art collections held in a public trust remain held in a public trust.

There is no reason that failed institutions should have nine lives. When they've failed, they've failed. I can't think of a single reason that it would be better for the National Academy to sell a few paintings a year, putting off its (inevitable) death, when work in its collections could be dispersed to related museums at which the public and scholars would continue to have access to them.

The perpetuation of a failed institution isn't what's important: The art is. It's imperative that organizations do what is best for the art, for the public, and for the legacy of the artists whose work is in the collection. Sometimes that means closing.

UPDATE: In case you've been perusing the intellectual dishonesty here, let me reiterate: I believe that a failed institution's collection should be dispersed to other (non-profit) art museums so that the failed institution's art continues to be held in public trust. Healthy art museums should not deaccession to pay for operating expenses. Don't let a couple of lamely put together out-of-context quotes twist you. Zaretsky's argument is analogous to: 'I like soccer and basketball. In soccer they kick the ball. Therefore, the Lakers should kick the basketball.' Second update: In an email, Zaretsky admits that he took what I said "out-of-context" in order to present his case. (As I note above, context is critical here. It's everything. It matters.) However as of this posting, he has not edited his post. Third update: Now he has, with this: "[i]n this debate people say one thing in one context and other, often inconsistent things in another context." That's essentially Zaretsky admitting he doesn't understand the specifics of the issues. If your argument is 'ignore the context' -- and Zaretsky says that's what his argument is -- then you're admitting that you don't really understand the differences between why what certain museums do is probelmatic and why what others do is OK.

• In the LAT, David Pagel reviews the Hammer's Oranges and Sardines. He loved it -- and loved it in ways I didn't.
• A key British archaeologist weighs in on the Met's antiquities policy via LATer Mike Boehm. Part two.
• Lost amid the ruckus of LACMA's failed bid to take over MOCA is how acquisitive the museum has been in the last year or two. The latest, says LATer Suzanne Muchnic, is a key clothing acquisition.
• New MOCA boss Charles Young speaks to the LAT's Diane Haithman.
  
• The SF Chron's Kenneth Baker has a fun year-end list. It includes this interesting-sounding book, which I didn't even know about. (Well done, Phaidon...) 
• King Tut flopping in Dallas: AEG offers discounted tickets. 
• Robert L. Pincus notes the relative financial health of San Diego's visual arts institutions.
• In Minneapolis' City Pages, Paul Schmelzer explains why Trevor Paglen (whose 2008 show at the Berkeley Art Museum was superb) is his artist of the year. NOYFB -- except it is.
• Emily White in City Arts Seattle on the art journalism drain -- and what it means for non-NYC cities.
  
• Technology note: That Twitter applet on the right loads fine for me, but I haven't tested it on multiple platforms. If it's a mess and causes disaster to your system, please let me know.