What do you suppose the picture here, at right, is? Can you read the writing? If so, you may be as shocked as I was, not to mention the person who sent this to me and the person who took the photo one day last June. The photographer was Linda Crocker Simmons, curator emerita of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. It's the column that recognized the contribution of Armand Hammer to the Corcoran, and apparently it stood near Hammer’s bust in the foyer for a decade. Crocker Simmons, as I learned through an interlocutor, was walking … [Read more...]

I know some of you are all caught up in the goings-on in Detroit and are wondering why I'm not commenting. It's simple, really: while this is serious to the Detroit Institute of Arts, and director Graham Beal must take it seriously, I've always believe that the DIA is simply caught up in a local political dance that, at some point (hopefully soon), will end without a single piece of art being sold. As it should. But the politics has to play out, and hang-wringing won't help. A friend of mine has been sending me links to all the Detroit … [Read more...]

Sometimes, but not all that often, a museum satellite does make sense. Later this week, we'll see the opening of one that does. Friday is opening day for Philbrook Downtown, an industrial space in the Brady Arts District of Tulsa that the museum is turning into a new arts center. The Philbrook itself, a villa built in the 1920s on a 23-acre site, makes for a lovely house museum, with spacious rooms and wide corridors. I visited about seven years ago, and was impressed with the overall feel (though I don't remember any masterpieces). And I … [Read more...]

Iowa is again experiencing spring floods, which reminds us that five years have passed since the devastating 2008 deluge. Coincidentally, yesterday, the Iowa Board of Regents voted to give the University of Iowa permission to plan for a new museum to replace the one inundated in 2008. To recap events: The museum's collection, which includes Jackson Pollock's Mural, was moved ahead of the 2008 floods and now resides at the Figge Art Museum in nearby Davenport. But when the university applied for funds from the Federal Emergency Management … [Read more...]

Memorial Day was last weekend, of course, but I want to catch up on a release that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston put out a few days ago: over that miserable three-day weekend, weatherwise, a record number of people visited the museum -- in part because it was free and an opportunity to show solidarity in the wake of the Patriot's Day Boston Marathon bombing.  MFA staged a "Boston I Love" Community Weekend, which -- while hardly a celebration -- was an opportunity to commune with other Bostonians. It worked. Says the release: Of the … [Read more...]

Thanks to Yale's Center for British Art, which is trumpeting its position, we all get to see which art museums around the world the Times of London thinks outshine all the others. On May 4, it published the world's greatest 50 galleries (by which it means art museums) and on May 11 the world's 50 best museums (by which it means those not about art exclusively). Both lists are behind the Times's pay wall. But the Yale Center (at right), which won the No. 15 slot on the first roster -- incredulously beating out the Tate Modern, the Vatican … [Read more...]