I've covered some pretty amusing political stances in my life -- I did work as a reporter in Washington many years ago and later supervised political coverage at Business Week -- but as anyone in New York knows, it's Albany that looks like a joke nowadays. New evidence for that comes in an article in today's Wall Street Journal. It says that a bill is likely to be passed this week that will allow non-profits to tap their endowments without obtaining approval from the NY Attorney General's office or the courts. Under current … [Read more...]

Reynold Levy, president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, has an interesting take on the current climate for arts philanthropy: he thinks arts groups are enjoying a renaissance with donors. That's what he told Crain's New York Business, anyway, which just published an article saying that arts philanthropy in the Big Apple is doing just fine, thank you, because it gets better press coverage than giving to social causes. The last part, anecdotally, is true -- but the first, the renaissance bit, clashes with what I've been hearing. True, … [Read more...]

You never know what you're going to find when you set off to interview someone, especially someone of achievement who has a public persona. I have to say I was not pleasantly surprised, but pleasantly gratified when I met last week with playwright A.R. "Pete" Gurney. The sheer volume of his output -- 42 plays, three novels, a libretto and a half-dozen one-act curtain-raisers -- is impressive. I admire anyone who can churn out that much and keep on going.  As I write in a Cultural Conversation with Gurney, published … [Read more...]

National Endowment for the Arts chief Rocco Landesman keeps saying he'd like to restore NEA awards to individual artists -- and he, of course, is not alone. Guess what? The NEA does give awards to individual artists -- and I'm not sure it should. Maybe the hot, humid weather in NYC has made me cranky, but the NEA press release that arrived late Thursday, announcing lifetime achievement awards in jazz, heritage and opera, has stuck in my craw like gum on a shoe. The awards were seemingly well-deserved: they went to the Marsalis … [Read more...]

People love mysteries -- just look at book sales -- and I always think that the art world should take more advantage of that thirst (see here and here, for example). That's why I'm highlighting an exhibition that just started at the Yale Center for British Art. "Seeing Double" is built around a 1829 painting called "Interior of the British Institution" by John Scarlett Davis. YCBA says Davis "sought to make a splash on the London art scene" with it. He made not only a visual puzzle but … [Read more...]

It looks as if I have nature on the brain this week. First, my review of the new art and nature park in Indianapolis was published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday (see here), and now comes another article, about public gardens. Yes, my annual trip to area gardens, for the Weekend section of The New York Times, is in Friday's paper: A Garden Crawl For Through the Garden State. But this was not planned; it's simply an accident of timing.  And -- alas -- unlike "100 Acres - The Virginia B. Fairbanks … [Read more...]

How did we all miss this? It's about museum food, which in patrons' eyes is often as important as the parking lot. On Monday, according to Tuesday's Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Museum of Art booted out Restaurant Associates as operator of its restaurants and chose instead to hire Stephen Starr, a hometown restaurateur. What's interesting is that Starr said his food would reflect the museum's exhibitions. He has not chosen an overall theme for the restaurants, one in the main museum and one in the Perelman building across … [Read more...]

The Indianapolis Museum of Art sits a good couple of miles from downtown, and while that may often work against it, not now: As you may know, the IMA opened its version of a sculpture park on Sunday -- and I think the IMA is lucky to have such a large, wonderful site adjacent to the museum. I was there last week, when the final touches were being made, after days and days of rain -- well, that part wasn't lucky. It was very muddy in parts, making the final days tricky. I reviewed the park -- officially known as "100 Acres … [Read more...]

It was just about a year ago that I wrote here about an vandalism incident at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome: a protestor threw paint and left toilet-paper rolls at Richard Meier's travesty of a building, which does not suit its cultural surroundings. (If, as I was saying yesterday, Charles Birnbaum and his colleagues at The Cultural Landscape Foundation are worried about the lost of great landscapes, I'd hope they'd oppose Meier's building, too.) With help from the New York office of Corriere della Serra, I've … [Read more...]

Here's another reason to question the explosion in museum expansions over the last few decades: Along with the sins they've committed in building architecture that isn't well-suited to the display of art and the high costs they forgot to account for, etc., museums have shown a distinct lack of sensitivity to the landscape.  Charles Birnbaum, who founded The Cultural Landscape Foundation about a dozen years ago, levels the charges -- citing, in particular, the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis, the Denver Art … [Read more...]