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Enough with the Guggenheim! On to the art market: I have no patience for financial-world operators who think they can crank out useful analyses of the art market by relying on their usual habits of number-crunching and indexing. Skills in picking hot stocks are, thankfully, not applicable to picking "hot" artists. Financial analysts should stick to what they know. In developing … [Read more...] about The Art Market is Not the Stock Market

I know how Thomas Krens must feel: Every once in a while, I engage an important person in a long interview for an article that never gets published. I usually tell that person that I will probably find a chance to use the material in some future article. Sometimes that happens. So must it be, on a much grander scale, with the major architects who squandered long hours … [Read more...] about Where in the World is the Guggenheim?

There are now enough Guggenheims, real or imagined, for a full-scale retrospective. And now there will actually be one: Architecture of the Guggenheim, Aug. 25 to Nov. 12 at the Federal Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn, Germany, will display "architectural models and plans of 23 projects and completions [that] illustrate the radical development of international museum … [Read more...] about A Retrospective of Guggenheims

Nicolai Ouroussoff, in his NY Times review of Zaha Hadid's retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, called her "architecture's diva." He doesn't know the half of it. After the unusually elaborate press conference preceding the press preview, she started up the ramp but stopped short almost immediately, at the double-height gallery that displayed her earliest … [Read more...] about Hadid: Diva Indeed

… [Read more...] about Next Week: Where in the World is the Guggenheim?

Dashing across the Arts Quad from the Native American exhibition at Cornell's Olin Library to its Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, I took in Rembrandt at 400, devoted to his etchings. The museum's director, Frank Robinson, is a Rembrandt specialist who can always be counted upon to elucidate issues of connoisseurship---different states, early and late impressions, copies, … [Read more...] about Ivy-League Art–Part II

It's all about access. University museums and libraries may not have the attendance, collections or high profiles of major independent art institutions, but they often do a better job of giving their audiences hands-on, instructive contact with their holdings. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my recent graduation expedition to Cornell University included some nimble … [Read more...] about Ivy-League Art–Part I

This just in from Anthony Calnek, deputy director for communications and publishing at the Guggenheim Museum: I passed along to Lisa Dennison [the museum's director] your suggestion that curators' names should be prominently displayed with introductory wall texts; she completely agrees, and has instructed the staff appropriately! So there you go---a difference has already been … [Read more...] about CultureGrrl Has Clout!

James Russell, writing for Bloomberg, continues to be one of our smartest voices on hot-button architectural issues---previously, on rebuilding post-Katrina New Orleans, today, on rebuilding Ground Zero. He calls for Michael Arad's memorial to be drastically scaled back, and adds that "some of the items tucked into the estimate by the construction management firm Bovis Lend … [Read more...] about Russell on WTC Memorial

What are those ads doing up there at the top of the page? They're my feeble attempt to have my time-consuming bloggery make some cents. After all, writing is supposed to be what I do to for a living. I don't solicit or select the ads: Google does all the heavy-lifting, and gives me a cut. If you click, you drop some coins in my tin cup. Desperate times call for desperate … [Read more...] about A Touch of Crass

Here, drawn from my conversations today with Getty Museum officials, including Michael Brand---its beset from the get-go director---is the list of things he hopes to (or needs to) do, in relatively short order: 1) Move into his new house, a process that was delayed when it was discovered that his first prospective abode was moldy. 2) Settle the antiquities mess, making … [Read more...] about The Getty’s To-Do List

I have a confession to make: CultureGrrl is not the shlepper (Rosten, P. 351) she pretends to be. Thanks (but no thanks) to this morning's Getty Museum press breakfast, she has now eaten at Le Cirque in its three incarnations---more times than she ever chowed down at Dunkin' Donuts. And she has always found the reality of Le Cirque to be less exalted than the hype---this time, … [Read more...] about Le Cirque: All Buzz, No Honey

It's the most anticipated art journalists' eating opportunity since the Maltz Museum at Per Se: Director Michael Brand of the Getty Museum hosts a 9 a.m. press breakfast tomorrow at the hot new Le Cirque. Does Sirio Maccioni get up this early? The ostensible purpose of the repast is to discuss an exhibition opening at the Getty in November, "Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons … [Read more...] about Press Feeding Frenzy

It's the worst-case abuses (think Enron) that often wind up causing reforms that change the rules for everyone, even those who are relatively blameless. This dynamic is at work in the new self-imposed strictures that museums are applying to their acquisitions of unprovenanced antiquities. But a new antiquities-related scandal, reported yesterday in the New York Times, could … [Read more...] about The Tainted Source

I've been pretty low on the High (here and here), so lets give some overdue credit to what the recently expanded museum in Atlanta has done well: reinstalling its permanent collection. As its own director, Michael Shapiro, has conceded, the High Museum of Art will never have a collection comparable to the great American museums that had a head start collecting on a grand scale. … [Read more...] about The High Does It Right