Lee Rosenbaum's cultural commentary

It's just getting underway on these shores, but across the pond, Ask A Curator, today's Twitter-based conversation with museums around the world, is in full swing. Here's a clickable list of U.S. museums that will cheerfully entertain your inquiries. The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney are on board, but not the Metropolitan Museum or the Guggenheim. [CORRECTION: The … [Read more...] about “Ask A Curator” Is Live on Twitter: Join the International Conversation! CORRECTED and UPDATED

Video-blogger at workPhoto © by Jill KrementzMy blog posts are strictly the result of my own news sense (or lack thereof). As you know, I choose to write about (and point my cameras at) only a select group of exhibitions, events and publications. I have enough enthusiastic feedback and visitor traffic to know that what I'm interested in, you're interested in.While my coverage … [Read more...] about How to Get Yourself on CultureGrrl UPDATED

Edvard Munch, "The Scream," 1895 © 2012 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York The short answer to the tantalizing question in the above headline is: "I don't know." But the Museum of Modern Art's announcement to Carol Vogel of the NY Times yesterday (and to the rest of us scribes today) raises the obvious question as to whether … [Read more...] about What’s Next for “The Scream” After MoMA’s Exhibition?

Andy Warhol regards Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Campbell at "Regarding Warhol" All photos by Lee Rosenbaum Arriving with high anticipation, I have rarely felt as big a letdown at a major exhibition as I did at Monday's press preview for the Metropolitan Museum's Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, opening next Tuesday to what is likely to be an admiring … [Read more...] about Campbell’s Soup: Warholian Banality at Met’s Misconceived “Regarding Warhol”

Leonardo da Vinci, "Mona Lisa," 1503-06, the Louvre By making a wacky claim for Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" to be "returned" to the Uffizi in Florence, Italy's National Committee for Historical, Cultural and Environmental Heritage and the Province of Florence may have done a favor for museum officials who argue for the retention in their institutions of many of the … [Read more...] about Mona Lisa and Other Extreme Claims: When Do Cultural-Property Demands Go Too Far?

By pure chance, my husband didn't commute to Lower Manhattan that day. We were both safe at home, across the river and further north, when it happened.Tonight's views from my terrace: One of the George Washington Bridge towers, both of which are lit in commemorationTower of LIght memorial, faintly seen in this photo over the in-construction 1 World Trade Center (on right), lit … [Read more...] about Views from My Terrace: On 9/11, We Remember…

William Garle Browne, "Zachary Taylor at Walnut Springs," 1847, National Portrait Gallery, WashingtonAccording to the Fenimore Art Museum's take on William Matthew Prior, about whom I recently wrote for the Wall Street Journal, that 19th-century American folk portraitist had invented the business strategy of sliding-scale prices, based on the amount of time and detail that he … [Read more...] about BlogBack on William Garle Browne: A Prior-Like Portraitist Working in the South

I don't know where the NY Times' art-market reporter Carol Vogel went for her summer vacation, but judging from her first fall column, she isn't quite back yet.In an item in yesterday's Inside Art, titled "Pollock Painting..." (scroll down), she wrote:Top among the group [of consignments by Sidney and Dorothy Kohl to Sotheby's] is Jackson Pollock's "Number 4, 1951," created … [Read more...] about Pollock Bollix: NY Times’s Carol Vogel is Back (but not quite)

Kimerly Rorschach, incoming director of Seattle Art MuseumI don't know about you, but I've been compulsively checking the LA Times' Culture Monster to see if its ace arts-reporting team has uncovered anything about what happened at LA MOCA's special board meeting on Tuesday. (Okay, so you're probably not compulsively checking that site. That's what you've got CultureGrrl … [Read more...] about Rorschach Blot: AAMD President’s Implicit Endorsement of MOCA’s Jeffrey Deitch UPDATED

Ford BellPhoto by Lee RosenbaumFord Bell, president of the American Alliance (formerly "Association") of Museums, responds to AAM's New Name: Marketing Gambit Disguised as "Coming Together: The questions posed in your post on the newly re-named American Alliance of Museums deserve a response. The change in our name and the programmatic changes that we have announced represent … [Read more...] about BlogBack: AAM’s President, Ford Bell, Defends the New “Alliance”

Anne-Imelda Radice with Michael Conforti, director of the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, at the Clark's inclement 2008 ribbon-cutting ceremony for its Stone Hill Center Photo by Lee Rosenbaum A crucial missing ingredient for the American Folk Art Museum's recovery was a new permanent director. Now, more than a year after Maria Ann Conelli left the building and … [Read more...] about American Folk Art Museum Names Anne-Imelda Radice As Director

Toddler's safety gate? No, it's the rebranded AAM's new logo.From the information released today, it appears that last week's mysterious morphing of the American Association of Museums into the American Alliance of Museums is a membership drive and marketing campaign dressed up in new clothing (topped off with a jazzy new logo).AAM's webpage that explains the change is titled: … [Read more...] about AAM’s New Name: Marketing Gambit Disguised as “Coming Together”

I already outed the former American Association of Museums' "stealth name change" in a CultureGrrl post last week. Now Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) has published some coy hints about the substance behind this rebranding, which AAM will formally announce tomorrow. Merritt's foreshadowing today of tomorrow's AAM announcement … [Read more...] about AAM’s Stealth Reinvention: Herding the Cats

I don't think that even the most ardent art-lings would regard arts support as the litmus test for supporting a Presidential candidate. Still, when it comes to the Culture Test, the Republican Party platform (which I discussed last week) flunks and its standard-bearer has repeatedly announced his intention to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and PBS. By … [Read more...] about Cultural Politics: Democratic Platform Commits to Continuing Arts Support

"We Believe in America"...but not in the artsMaybe Kevin Gover (whose name, after all, forms the first half of "Gover-nment') has gotten the Republican Party's ear. (As you may remember, his director's office at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington overlooks the Capitol.)My recent text search on the Republican Party Platform came up with no mention of "art" … [Read more...] about Powwow Power: Republican Party Platform Is Art-less (except for Native American culture)