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PBS's latest art-edutainment series, How Art Made the World, got off to a shaky start Monday by choosing as guest expert someone with little knowledge of art but no reluctance to pontificate about it: A neuroscientist demonstrated his ability to numb our brains with "duh"-inspiring insights, then woke us up by declaring realistic art to be "boring." V.S. Ramachandran, a … [Read more...] about How Art Made the Mini-Series

… [Read more...] about Tomorrow: Critique of How Art Made the World;

CultureGrrl is no lawyer, but I'm the daughter of one, which perhaps explains my keen interest in art law and court cases. So I was happy to stumble recently upon The Art Law Blog by attorney Donn Zaretsky, which chronicles news in the field. Credit where credit is due: That's where I first learned of Berry-Hill's real estate listing. … [Read more...] about An Art-Law Blog Worth Citing

In what it called "a court supervised sale," Stribling & Associates recently offered the East 70th Street premises of Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, for $20 million, with bids due June 15. Linda Melnick, vice president at Stribling, told me yesterday that the auction had been postponed (with a new date to be set), "to give people more time to do due diligence." The … [Read more...] about Berry-Hill Premises: On and Off the Market?

Attention all you cave-art fans (and CultureGrrl knows you're out there, because so many of you e-mailed me for travel tips about Dordogne, after I wrote about Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac): Check your local listings for How Art Made the World, a PBS series airing five consecutive Mondays, starting tonight (10 p.m. on Channel 13 in New York City). Hosted by art … [Read more...] about Back to the Caves

As I wrote in Art in America magazine, shortly after Barry Munitz was named to the presidency of the J. Paul Getty Trust, his problematic business track record should have raised a bright red flag for the Getty's board, but, surprisingly, didn't. Here's part of what I published, back in May 1998: Munitz was among those named in charges filed by the Treasury Department's Office … [Read more...] about Munitz: Dicey From the Get-Go

The Association of Art Museum Directors has quietly posted a new position position paper on its website: Good Governance and Non-Profit Integrity. It appears to be a response to widespread concern over problematic practices such as those thought to have led to the Feb. 9 forced resignation of Barry Munitz from the presidency of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Munitz resigned while … [Read more...] about AAMD: A Toothless Watchdog

… [Read more...] about Coming Monday—AAMD: A Toothless Watchdog…Munitz: Dicey From the Get-Go

If you've been reading CultureGrrl for a long time (well, at least since the beginning of this month), you may remember that I dissed the dishes at Sirio Maccioni's latest watering hole in my post, Le Cirque: All Buzz, No Honey, a mournful account of the Getty's press breakfast. Now veteran foodie Raymond Sokolov, my long-time editor at the Wall Street Journal's "Leisure & … [Read more...] about Le Cirque’s Quirks

On to the second Friday NY Times blooper. (Scroll down to Part I, if you missed the first.) In her Inside Art report on the National Gallery's upcoming Jasper Johns show, Carol Vogel said that curator Jeffrey Weiss "estimated insurance costs for the show at about $1 billion." The National Gallery must be one rich museum! Perhaps she (and Weiss) meant that the insured value of … [Read more...] about We All Make Mistakes—Part II

I've made my share of mistakes in preparing articles. My editors almost always catch them. (I've been fortunate to work with highly intelligent, exhaustively knowledgeable taskmasters: Eric Gibson of the Wall Street Journal and Elizabeth Baker of Art in America, foremost among them.) So where were the New York Times editors when Roberta Smith, an art critic for whom I have the … [Read more...] about We All Make Mistakes—Part I

Not mentioned in the NY Times coverage of the tentative accord between the Getty Trust and Italian authorities (but mentioned by the LA Times and by ANSA, the Italian news agency) is the fact that the Italians, during the latest round of negotiations, added 33 more objects to the list of 52 that they were seeking. According to ANSA, these included the "Athlete of Lysippos," … [Read more...] about Italy Ups the Stakes

Will someone please pull Nicolai Ouroussoff off Terence Riley? This feud is getting tiresome. In praising the Museum of Modern Art's appointment of Barry Bergdoll as its new chief curator of architecture and design, the NY Times' architecture critic just couldn't resist using his bully pulpit to pummel Terry one more time. Saying that MoMA's architecture and design department … [Read more...] about Ouroussoff Uses Bully Pulpit to Bully Riley

This is a "BlogBack" first! The Walker Art Center has responded to my blog on its blog. Regarding CultureGrrl's critique of "Art on Call," the Walker's New Media Initiatives blogger, Nate Schroeder, offered these updates: We've just recently installed a nifty cellphone signal repeater in the space deepest in the galleries that previously got terrible reception---right next to … [Read more...] about BlogBack: Walker Tweaks “Art on Call”

At Tuesday's public hearing on its expansion plans, the Whitney Museum submitted these supportive comments from Hamilton Smith, who was Marcel Breuer's associate architect for the museum's 1966 building: [Renzo] Piano's design concept neither engulfs nor overshadows the original Breuer Building. Equally important, the main element of the expansion---five gallery floors set back … [Read more...] about Outtakes from the Whitney Hearing—Part II