Lee Rosenbaum's cultural commentary

When museum trustees set out to hire a new director, they tend to seek someone very different from the current one, a prominent art museum director once told me. They want change. That certainly seems to be the case with the National Gallery of Art's (NGA's) choice of Kaywin Feldman, director since 2008 of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), to lead the most prominent art museum in our nation's capital. As announced today, she will on Mar. 11 succeed Earl "Rusty" Powell III, the NGA's director for 25 years. Kaywin Feldman, National … [Read more...]

Having provocatively displayed an anti-MoMA poster in its last Biennial, the Whitney Museum probably had this coming: A protest demonstration at the museum is being planned by Decolonize This Place [DTP], an ad hoc political action group, for noon tomorrow (Sunday). It will target Whitney vice president Warren Kanders, who (as reported on Nov. 27 by Jasmine Weber in Hyperallergic) leads a company that manufactures the tear gas recently used against migrants at the Mexican border. Here's the scene outside the Whitney on a busy but peaceful … [Read more...]

Closing the barn door after its finest steeds have vanished, the Berkshire Museum today announced that "there will be no further sales" from its collection beyond the 22 works already sold through Sotheby's: In his Berkshire Eagle report, Larry Parnass today suggested that the museum's woefully belated decision to curtail its widely condemned deaccessioning spree was influenced by advice from Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's office. The AGO, according to Parnass, recently opined that the beleaguered museum should now … [Read more...]

The big fall evening auctions of Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary works at Sotheby's and Christie's were a mixed bag, yielding generally solid but unspectacular results. The sweet spot for the typical offering fell slightly short of or just grazed the low estimate, with some very notable exceptions on both the upside and the downside. In other words, the auction houses' presale estimates of the prices that their offerings would fetch were often aspirational, but the reserves (prearranged, confidential prices below which works … [Read more...]

In my Wall Street Journal review of the 2007 opening of the expanded Seattle Art Museum, I noted that SAM's campaign to "augment its permanent collection, in time for its 75th anniversary next year," had been "successful beyond the wildest curatorial dreams, adding nearly 1,000 owned, pledged and promised works to the collection"... ...or maybe not. Billed as a major catch from that cache were 65 works promised from the collection of Barney Ebsworth (who died last April). Ebsworth selections had been highlights of SAM's inaugural … [Read more...]

Auctioneer Harry Dalmeny (new to me) at Sotheby's Impressionist/Modern sale tonight had a strange way of trying to entice bidders by pelting them with barbed wisecracks: ---I'll have to hurry you: I've got a late flight. ---The next bid is going to have to be a bit more than nothing. And this honest self-assessment, in the midst of bidding for the record-breaking Magritte: ---I'm an equal-opportunity insult-er. In England, he's known as Lord Harry Dalmeny, whose propensity for provocations reportedly got him into a ton of trouble a … [Read more...]

Tonight's Impressionist/Modern sale at Christie's was brisk, thanks to the no-nonsense auctioneer, Adrien Meyer, but bidding-war fireworks came only once, for a snowstorm (Monet's). Below is my Twitter recap. Pro Tip: You'll need to click each image twice to view the full picture. Monet Water Lilies disappointed at $28m hammer ($30m low est.) Biggest failure: a van Gogh garden scene (without people), unsold at $30m vs est. "in region of $40m" pic.twitter.com/uyUriwNxOw — Lee Rosenbaum (@CultureGrrl) November 12, 2018 The recent … [Read more...]

Dianne Dwyer Modestini, who painstakingly restored Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi," is exasperated by the questions that have been raised about the condition and attribution of the rediscovered painting that was to have been unveiled on Sept. 18 at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. It has not yet resurfaced since it was sold at Christie's on Nov. 15, 2017: Joining the many reporters who have tried to learn about the painting's current status, I recently made my own series of inquiries---to Dianne and several others who I thought might know … [Read more...]

Luke Syson, who in 2012 came to the Metropolitan Museum from the National Gallery, London, becoming the Met's chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts in 2014, is now poised to join the wave of high-level departures from our country's preeminent museum. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, recently announced that Syson, who most recently co-curated the Met's provocative "Like Life" exhibition, will step up to its directorship on Feb. 4. (It had previously lured away Timothy Potts, then director of the Kimbell Art Museum, for a short … [Read more...]

My first reaction when this press release from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco hit my inbox today at 6:51 p.m. was: This has gotta be a hoax! Reading the first sentence of FAMSF's announcement made me even more incredulous: The Board of Trustees of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) and the Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums (COFAM) today appointed Thomas P. Campbell as the new director and CEO of the largest public arts institution in Northern California, effective November 1, 2018 [emphasis added]. A two-day … [Read more...]

I recently sat disconsolately through a screener of director Nathaniel Kahn's new artworld documentary, "The Price of Everything." Its dyspeptic take on the artworld turned my stomach. The film miscarries by not delivering what's promised in its own synopsis: While holding a funhouse mirror up to our consumerist culture, the film ultimately reaffirms the transcendent power of art itself [emphasis added] and the deep need we have for it in our lives. Instead of being elevated by a sense of art's "transcendent power," we mostly wallow … [Read more...]

In the process of ‘destroying’ the artwork, a new one was created. So said Sotheby's after the infamous Banksy shredding, trying to ennoble the egg on its face as Eggs Benedict. But the last benedict-ion belonged to the artist himself, in the form of his "Director's Cut" video posted last week on YouTube (and embedded in my post, below), wherein he punctures the red balloon of auction-house pretentiousness. Banksy's stealth video of the bidding on the above work at Sotheby's and the sales job that preceded it adds yet another layer of … [Read more...]

Parts I & II are here and here. I really wanted to put the Banksy Prank behind me, moving to more substantive matters (like recently opened exhibitions that have engaged or vexed me), but the Sotheby's plot thickened on Friday with a revelation by Jan Dalley, arts editor of the Financial Times (FT), that suggests the likely identity of the seller of "Girl with Balloon" (aka "Love is in the Bin"). Milking the publicity cow for all it's worth, Sotheby's, London, gave the mangled minorpiece the masterpiece-treatment (à la "Salvator … [Read more...]

Part I is here. In case you thought that Sotheby's BalloonGate couldn't get any crazier, this just in from Sotheby's London: The winning bidder on Banksy’s "Girl with Balloon" offered at Sotheby’s last Friday has confirmed their decision to acquire the new work that was created that night, as part of the canvas passed through a hidden shredder seconds after the hammer fell. The new work has been granted a certificate by Pest Control, Banksy’s authentication body, and has been given a new title, "Love is in the Bin" [Huh?!?] The buyer, a female … [Read more...]

The Metropolitan Museum had just announced that its next Costume Institute extravaganza will be Camp: Notes on Fashion, May 9-Sept. 8, 2019. (Rest in Peace, Susan Sontag.) The good news is that the show won't usurp the museum's permanent-collection galleries, upstaging the Met's own treasures (as the just closed "Heavenly Bodies" annoyingly did). "Camp" will vamp in the museum's second-floor Cantor Exhibition Hall, which is dedicated to special exhibitions. The bad news is that while camp's reigning 21st-century diva, Lady Gaga, will be … [Read more...]

Parts II, III and IV are here, here and here. Banksy's elaborately orchestrated send-up of the auction market---contriving to have his $1.4-million "Girl with Balloon" self-mutilate at the fall of the hammer on Friday at Sotheby's London---is the subversive gift that keeps on giving. Here's Sotheby's image of the painting (which might have been more appropriately titled, "Girl without Balloon") in its intact state: The absurdity of this outlandish incident was amplified in the aftermath, as commentators strained to make sense of the … [Read more...]

In my August 2015 CultureGrrl post that recounted my encounter with Donald Trump (whom I interviewed in 1974 for this article in the NY Times Sunday Real Estate section), I expressed my astonishment at the puff piece about the young mogul-to-be, written by Times reporter Judy Klemesrud and published two years after my piece had appeared. To my even greater astonishment (and gratification), the Times itself on Wednesday admitted how off-base Klemesrud's piece had been. That very belated 300-word corrective (which didn't name the reporter but … [Read more...]

While Congress and President Trump continue to kick the budgetary can down the road, federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities remains temporarily intact, with its future in doubt. With the federal government's 2019 fiscal year having begun Monday, NEA and NEH are among the many federal programs operating under a continuing resolution, signed by the President to avoid shutdowns. This "minibus" package, as it's called, maintains last year's funding levels until the legislature and chief … [Read more...]

As an admirer of the late Jack Whitten's paintings, I welcomed the chance to see his little-known, previously unexhibited wood sculptures and mixed-media assemblages now on view in the Met Breuer's Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017. But the considerable pleasures to be derived from this admirable show were partly undermined by its subtle but substantive commercial overtones. My previous happy encounters with Whitten's work included this Richter-esque painting, acquired by the Whitney Museum in 2015, in time for the opening of its … [Read more...]

My 2011 Museum Musical Chairs post now has an unexpected sequel---the "Frick Breuer." As foreshadowed in my recent interviews with Ian Wardropper and Max Hollein, their respective directors, the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum have just announced (here and here) that the Met hopes to decamp from the Whitney Museum's former flagship building in 2020. The Frick would become the new temporary tenant to 2023), using the space to store and show some of the art that will be evicted from its building when it begins its planned … [Read more...]