Lee Rosenbaum's cultural commentary

UPDATE: This just in---"President Biden announced his intent to nominate Shelly Lowe as the 12th Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)." A citizen of the Navajo Nation and currently a member of the National Council on the Humanities, she would replace acting chairman Adam Wolfson (pictured and quoted below). The Toledo Museum of Art is one of the 292 … [Read more...] about Hidden Agenda? NEH Privileges “DEIA” Support in Awarding Grants Under Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” UPDATED

Just as Donald Trump was (thankfully) denied his repeatedly expressed wish to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, will President Biden be thwarted in his own plans for the NEA---a proposed record allocation of $201 million for that agency? Budget numbers are in play as our fractious Congress operates under its short-term spending bill, which provides … [Read more...] about Budget or Fudge It? Will NEA & NEH Actually Get Their “Historic Increase” in Federal Arts & Humanities Funds?

Perhaps "good riddance" would be an appropriate bicoastal response to the slaps in the face that culture-lovers in New York and Los Angeles suffered this month at the hands of fickle artistic leaders. Amsterdam-born Jaap van Zweden's unexpected announcement on Sept. 15 that he would terminate his relatively brief tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic at the end … [Read more...] about Jaap & Klaus to Flee to Their European Homelands, Terminating Tenuous Tenures at NY Phil & LA MOCA

My personal reflections on The Two-Decade Anniversary of 9/11, in which I took issue with the harsh critique of the 9/11 Memorial Museum by Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott, struck a chord with the president and founding director of that museum, which opened in 2014 at the site of the 2001 attack on the twin towers at the World Trade Center: Alice Greenwald … [Read more...] about BlogBack: Alice Greenwald, 9/11 Museum’s Head, Responds to My Post on the Attack’s 20th Anniversary

Everyone who resided in the NYC metropolitan area on 9/11/01 has his or her own personal story related to their experiences on that cataclysmic day. Mine is recounted here, in my CultureGrrl post for the one-decade anniversary of that terrifying, terrible occasion. My husband is enrolled in the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund and the World Trade Center Health Program, by … [Read more...] about The Two-Decade Anniversary of 9/11: My Own Reminiscence & Reflections

Soon after posting on Thursday about the National Gallery of Art's cancelation of its A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa, 1600–1750, I myself got canceled---laid low by a bad reaction to my Covid booster shot, from which I have now recovered. Before I became nonfunctional, I managed to shoot off a series of questions to the NGA's press office, regarding what had seemed to me an … [Read more...] about “Superb Baroque” Debacle: A Blow-by-Blow on the National Gallery’s No-Show Show

Having just gotten my Pfizer booster shot (thank you, Walgreens), I returned home to the temperature-raising news that the National Gallery of Art, Washington, had canceled its long-planned (already postponed) A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa, 1600–1750---an astonishing turn of events that the NGA attributed to "the worsening COVID-19 crisis." As explained in the NGA's … [Read more...] about Covid Casualties: National Gallery Pulls Out of Major Show of Genoese Baroque Art UPDATED

Yesterday I had the sad task of deleting the late Michael Thomas (who died on Aug. 7) from my list of devoted monthly donors to this blog. An "acerbic columnist and novelist, who wrote chiefly about money and how people got it, what they did with it and what it did to them" (as described by Katharine Seelye in her NY Times obit for him), he had once been an assistant curator of … [Read more...] about The Late Michael Thomas, 85, Cultural Curmudgeon (& Loyal CultureGrrl Donor)

Do today's museums need to pander to the short attention spans and trendy rhetoric of the social-media crowd, sabotaging serious curatorial scholarship with language adopted from the digital ditherings that we mindlessly scroll through on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp? The Metropolitan Museum, a previously staunch defender of probity, now seems to think so, as exemplified by … [Read more...] about The Medici as “Influencers,” The Metropolitan Museum as Clickbait

Who wants to be an art museum director? The list of major museums searching for new heads is growing, with the news that one of the leaders whom I've most admired over the years---Timothy Rub of the Philadelphia Museum of Art---is packing it in, effective "early 2022," according to the museum's press release. He's 69 and it's a self-styled "retirement," but I wonder if he … [Read more...] about Departing Philly: Timothy Rub Joins the Exodus of Major Museum Officials UPDATED

Part I is here. For many museum visitors, the "Medici" cited in the title of the Metropolitan Museum's current show (subtitled: "Portraits & Politics, 1512-1570") will evoke the names of artists from the golden age of Renaissance painting in Florence, when Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli and Verrocchio flourished under the aegis of Lorenzo the Magnificent. But none of … [Read more...] about Meddling with Medici (Part II): “Unattainable Perfection,” Viewer Disaffection

The Metropolitan Museum held off announcing its new designee to oversee its resplendent European Paintings Department until after Keith Christiansen had left the building (officially, June 30, although he is said to still have a desk there), with 43 years of superlative service. After a respectful week-long pause, the Met dispatched this announcement to my inbox on Thursday … [Read more...] about “Wolo” Who? Stephan Wolohojian Succeeds Keith Christiansen as Metropolitan Museum’s Head of European Paintings

Where's Frederic Remington? His "Bronco Buster," arguably the most famous bronze sculpture by this popular "cowboys-and-Indians" artist, was chosen to energize the offices of a bipartisan roster of Presidents---Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. You can see it repeatedly whipped into a frenzy in the NY Times' The Art in … [Read more...] about Bronco Bust: NY Times Censors the “Story Told by Art in the Oval Office”

NOTE: Part II is here. The Medici: Portraits and Politics, at the Metropolitan Museum to Oct. 11, is a curatorial tour de force that only a veteran scholar with the deep knowledge and extensive contacts of Keith Christiansen could pull off. With his retirement today today after 43 years at the Met, this show is his swansong at the museum, where he is Chairman of European … [Read more...] about Meddling With Medici at the Met: Provocations & Proclamations (Part I)

I like to pay special tribute on CultureGrrl to art professionals who took time from their busy lives to deepen my limited understanding of art and the artworld, back when I was beginning my own professional journey. One always reliable, unfailingly gracious source of help and knowledge was Martha Baer, the founding head of contemporary art at Christie's, New York, which … [Read more...] about Martha Baer, 82, Dies: Contemporary-Art Rainmaker in Christie’s Early Days in New York