Just breaking now: The Brookyn Museum has cancelled its Art in the Streets exhibition, set for next spring. It’s the show of grafitti and street the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles organized. It’s on view there til Aug. 8.

The Brooklyn blames its financial situation in the press release.

Said director Arnold Lehman:

“This is an exhibition about which we were tremendously enthusiastic, and which would follow appropriately in the path of our Basquiat and graffiti exhibitions in 2005 and 2006, respectively. It is with regret, therefore, that the cancellation became necessary due to the current financial climate. As with most arts organizations throughout the country, we have had to make several difficult choices since the beginning of the economic downturn three years ago.”

This is bad.

Unlike other countries, Japan in particular, America is not known for respecting the aged. But I can’t resist writing about an exhibition that opened on Sunday at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton: a retrospective of the work of Dorothea Rockburne. Though she was born in 1932, it’s her first career retrospective.

Good for the Parrish; congratulations to her.

Works by Rockburne are part of many permanent collections, including those of MoMA, the Whitney, the Met and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she has won many awards. But though she studied at the famous Black Mountain College with Rauschenberg, Chamberlain, and Twombly, palled around with them and others later in New York, and has produced work consistently for decades, her art has never caught the attention theirs did.

Discrimination against women of her era, or a true difference on the merits of the work? I don’t know.

But I think the Parrish’s title is perfect: Dorothea Rockburne: In My Mind’s Eye, for like another woman of her time, Alice Neel (also not recognized during many of her years), Rockburne has gone her own way. During more than 40 years of working, she’s been influenced by “such wide-ranging sources as mathematics, Renaissance art, astronomy, archeology, and philosophy,” says the press release — and “mathematics has been an especially persistent component of her work.”

Was that a barrier? Did it seem too high-falutin’? Scholar David Anfam, in his essay “The Harmony of the World” in the exhibition catalogue, said:

Underpinning Rockburne’s early maneuvers and continuing as a leitmotif through her output to the present is a fixation, sparked by Max Dehn at Black Mountain, on an array of mathematical systems and theories, ranging from topology and set theory to the golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers and other, more esoteric scientific fields of inquiry. Although these suggest a daunting obstacle to the non-specialist viewer, Rockburne stresses that scientific expertise is unnecessary to appreciate what she attains: ‘The work is a visual experience. You don’t have to know the composition of water to swim in water.'”

In any case, she has hewed to her vision, come what may, and for that she deserves credit, appreciation, and probably criticism as well. I’d bet she can take it.

I met Rockburne a couple of times in the late ’90s, at parties, where art was not necessarily the topic of conversation. She was full of life, charming, and definitely not one to shrink into the background. Maybe the Parrish’s show will push her more into the art foreground.

It runs on Long Island until Aug. 14, after which it will travel to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in  Montréal, where it will be on view from September 20, 2011 through January 15, 2012. 

Photo Credits:Capernaum Gate (top); Geometry of Stardust: 2.5 Ratio / Jupiter and Saturn (bottom), Courtesy of the Parrish Art Museum

About ten days ago, the Art Institute of Chicago announced the creation of a “shop in shop” at its museum store (below) for Taschen, the German illustrated book publisher. The Art Institute agreed to devote 25% of the space in its books areas exclusively to Taschen, a German publisher eager to expand in the United States.

It didn’t give me pause at first, but now it does: Is Taschen, which has a questionable reputation, the kind of company the Art Institute should privilege?

David Thurm, the AIC’s chief operating officer said:

Books from Taschen have been some of the best selling books in our Museum Shop. It certainly made sense for us to pursue an arrangement that allowed us to prominently feature their titles and make clearly visible to customers the place where they can find the extremely popular Taschen titles within our Shop. We are very excited to be the first American museum to partner with Taschen in this innovative way, and we look forward to Taschen flourishing even further in our retail spaces.

The release — not posted on its website, along with other releases, btw — also said that  the Art Institute may soon give Taschen a similar deal in its “Modern Shop” in the two-year-old Modern Wing.

Reading the release, I recalled how department stores used that same concept dating back 20 or so years, and decided not to write. The museum will, after all, still stock titles from other publishers. And, as I’ve written, museums have to raise money somehow — I am assuming that Taschen is giving AIC something, probably a better cut of profits. It is not paying rent to AIC.

But a reader of Real Clear Arts changed my mind. Greg Albers, the publisher of Hol Art Books, wrote about it on his blog, and sent me the link. Here’s part of what he said:

While I have no problem with these kind of cooperative agreements for mini-stores or other kinds of marketing between museums and publishers, I have a HUGE problem with what such a partnership with Taschen in particular says about the Art Institute and about its attitude toward its art and its visitors.

I’ll just say it, Taschen produces schlock. Beautiful, sexy, inexpensive fast-selling schlock at a great margin yes, but still schlock.

Albers goes on to point out that museums should be stressing more serious books that let people learn about art, not just one with pretty pictures.

After hearing from him, I took a longer look at Taschen, which describes itself as “a worldwide art publisher specializing in books on art, architecture, design, fashion, film, travel, and the odd sexy book thrown in for good measure.” Among the recent titles are Illustration Now! Portraits and 50 Photo Icons: The Story Behind the Pictures. But its definition of sexy book borders on soft porn. For example, there’s The Big Butt Book, The Big Book of Breasts 3B, The Big Penis Book 3D, and so on.

Is this the kind of association the AIC wants to have?

It looks like it does. A Chicago Tribune article on the deal last week had this passage:

Taschen has a cult-like following for its wide array of fashion, photography, architecture, pop culture and erotic titles, a fact that isn’t lost on Brent Riley, director of divisional merchandising for books at the Art Institute store.

“With Taschen comes publicity,” Riley said. “They are constantly promoting their own products and own stores on a worldwide basis. We’ve tapped into that.”

But what kind of publicity does Taschen get, and is that truly the kind the AIC wants?

Surprised by those “sexy’ books, I emailed Albers again, who raised other questions:

• Should museum stores be profit centers at any cost?
•  What kind of relationship do we expect museum visitors to have with art when they
  see the museum treating it as merchandise and coffee table decor?
• Can we start to see art books as an extension of the education and enrichment that starts in the galleries, instead of only as souvenirs?
• Does a museum’s curatorial and cultural responsibility end at the gallery door?

I don’t have a problem with stores as profit centers, though they usually break even at best and are considered to be about branding. The other questions, though, are worth pondering.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

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Well, it’s raining today in New York City — about a half hour ago, it was coming in my open windows at a slant, so hard that I had a little flood on the kitchen floor.

Which means it may not be a great weekend, to visit the gardens in western Connecticut that are the subject of my annual garden tour for The New York Times, published in today’s paper: “Public Gardens Turn on the Charm.”

Bad timing… but as I say in my lede:

IF you are still bummed by the endless 2011 winter and sunless spring, here’s a way to put your blues away: Get out into a public garden. They weathered many tough months too…”

This year’s selection included an example designed by Gertrude Jekyll, the famed English garden designer, who “approached gardens as a painter might, striving for an overall effect. She favored drifts of color, a lush mix of flowers, leaves of many shapes and a variety of textures.” Jekyll, who over a lifetime, created some 400 gardens, had only three jobs in the U.S., and this one — at Glebe House — is the only survivor.

My article also includes the garden at Hill-Stead designed by Beatrix Farrand, Wickham Park, the Bellamy-Ferriday House and Garden, and Elizabeth Park, whose rose garden is pictured here.

And if Connecticut doesn’t catch your fancy, last year I did “A Garden Crawl through the Garden State,” which was preceded in 2009 by “Philadelphia’s Gardens of Earthy Delights,” and in 2007 by “The Hudson Valley’s Fields of Joy.”