Just a quickie: The Brooklyn Museum said today that it has added three new board members, including artist Fred Tomaselli. He is the first artist to sit on the board "in recent times," the museum said in a press release. That's good news. I don't know Tomaselli personally, so I have no idea how effective a voice he will be. But it's never bad to have an artist's view of what goes on at a museum. And the Brooklyn Museum has said that it wants to forge tighter relationships with the borough's many working artists. And that is a good thing, which … [Read more...]

Doling out news just before holiday weekends is usually a tactic of institutions that want to hide bad news. But today Brandeis University put out good news: it has settled the lawsuit filed by supporters of the Rose Art Museum there, ending any plans to sell the collection. I just filed an article with details to The Art Newspaper, which has posted it on its website. For background, here are previous posts: More on the renovation (here), on artists' support for the Rose lawsuit (here), and on the university's improved financial … [Read more...]

The art world's show of the fall season promises to be in London, at the National Gallery: Leonardo da Vinci, The Painter at the Court of Milan. (Extra points from me for choosing, as its poster picture, one of my all-time favorite paintings, Lady With an Ermine.) But while the exhibit -- seven or eight paintings, plus about 50 drawings -- doesn't even open until November 9, it is already causing problems. Yesterday, things got worse. The NG knows that Leonardo will be popular, so popular that tickets -- costing £16.00 (or about … [Read more...]

Most of us stick a lot of things in storage closets or rooms or basements, and then forget about them -- for years sometimes. So do museums, as the many finds, like the Velazquez at Yale that I wrote about last year, attest. A new initiative by the BBC and Britain's public art collections scratches the itch many people have to find out what's in those museum store rooms -- as well as the galleries themselves. It's called Your Paintings, a website just launched and still in beta. On it, the BBC, together with the Public Catalogue … [Read more...]

I really don't want to write this post. But I have to. Several days ago, before it cancelled its Art in the Streets exhibition, the Brooklyn Museum was forced to do something that reversed a move I had celebrated: it dialed back its Friday nights hours, so that the galleries now must empty out by 6 p.m.  Last August, agreeing with my pleas for evening hours -- most people, after all, work during the day, and are able to do leisure activities only at night -- the BM's director Arnold Lehman announced that … [Read more...]

Quite by accident the other day, I found an experiment on the Museum of Modern Art's website, which initially seemed so very disappointing. But looking further, it turned out to be an interesting, and maybe promising, exercise. It might even strengthen bonds between visitors and MoMA. And that would be a mighty accomplishment. The feature is called "I went to MoMA and..." In it, the museum asked visitors to complete that sentence; MoMA then posted the responses on the web. Most of the ones I clicked on initially … [Read more...]

Psssst: want to get a art work by Rirkrit Tiravanija completely free? This is not a con. All you have to do is buy the June/July copy of Art in America. When I opened mine -- call me old-fashioned, but as a writer I actually look at magazines from front to back, page by page -- the first word of this gift came in the Editor's Letter by my friend Lindsay Pollock. She explained that she was harking back to a 41-year-old project, when her predecessors commissioned artists to create removable original graphics that were bound … [Read more...]

I was happy to hear that Ai Weiwei has been released in China, and though he's out "on bail" some experts I've heard say that is a face-saving and that he is actually free, for now at least. I have nothing enlightening to say about it, though (other than an earlier post) -- except that it's a good segue to what this post is about: cultural diplomacy in a different situation. Did any of you read the article in today's Wall Street Journal about the infamous Mexican drug gang Los Zetas? It says that the "bloodthirsty" cartel … [Read more...]

Today's Wall Street Journal carries my review of Breaking Ground: The Whitney's Founding Collection, which is on view now through Sept. 18 at the Whitney. As a window on one part of the art world between 1902 and 1935, roughly, it's a fascinating display -- and not because all the works, even "many" of the works are good. Inadvertently, the show makes two points. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the museum's founder, bought "democratically," supporting many artists, and it's no wonder to me that in 1929 the Metropolitan Museum of Art turned downed … [Read more...]

Just breaking now: The Brookyn Museum has cancelled its Art in the Streets exhibition, set for next spring. It's the show of grafitti and street the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles organized. It's on view there til Aug. 8. The Brooklyn blames its financial situation in the press release. Said director Arnold Lehman: "This is an exhibition about which we were tremendously enthusiastic, and which would follow appropriately in the path of our Basquiat and graffiti exhibitions in 2005 and 2006, respectively. It is with regret, therefore, … [Read more...]