CultureGrrl

CultureGrrl Moves to ArtsJournal!

2006-07-25T17:10:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce that, after rigorous hazing rituals, I have been admitted to the blogging roster of ArtsJournal, the distinguished forum for cultural journalism that many of your already bookmark for news and commentary. I look forward to stirring up more contemplation and controversy for a larger audience. This, my original blogsite, will remain up but dormant. It's exactly three months since I began this labor of love. I was born to blog!

Come visit CultureGrrl at her new address!

Bloggers in Concert

2006-07-25T12:19:00.000-04:00

Tyler Green adds his own impressions to the Tinterow tintypes. Sometimes reasonable bloggers CAN agree! (Who says we have a feud?)

Museum Transparency and the Tangled Web

2006-07-25T12:04:00.000-04:00

No, this is not another exposé; it's my commentary on museum websites, inspired by the Terry Teachout Challenge. My fearsomely prolific fellow blogger, who is also the theater critic for the Wall Street Journal (among his many distinctions), recently discussed what he likes and dislikes about the websites of American theater companies. He ended the post with a shoutout to CultureGrrl for her critique of museum websites.

I'm going to turn this around a bit, not bothering with the basics. Most museums do provide the essential information about directions, admission fees (don't get me started), exhibitions, collections, etc.

But most could do more to make navigating their labyrinthine halls less confusing. More importantly, at a time when museums are being asked to display greater transparency in governance and operations, the web represents a missed opportunity for more openness. What follows are things that I'd like to see on more museum websites, with credit to the few who are already doing it:

---Help in navigating galleries: For fans of pre-planning, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, provides clickable gallery maps, like this one of the West Main Floor, Gallery 6, the locus of one of the museum's great treasures, Leonardo da Vinci's "Ginevra de' Benci." Doing a search for that work can get you a gallery map with its location marked in red. Clicking that dot gets you a list of all the works in that room, each of which can be clicked for a wealth of details, including exhibition history, provenance and even bibliography. You can also browse the galleries by clicking on the various rooms.

---What you WON'T see:---Ever go to a museum specifically to view certain iconic works, only to discover that one or more of them is missing? The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., keeps you posted on art that is off view, with an explanation of where it's gone and for how long.

---New on view: On the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website, you can download their annual reports of Recent Acquisitions, including this one from 2004-2005, containing (on page 14) curator Keith Christiansen's discussion of the Duccio "Madonna and Child". The J. Paul Getty Museum also publishes an acquisitions list.

---Annual reports, board minutes: The Getty recently stated that it would publish more detailed financial and governance information on its website. The British Museum already does this: Here are its most recent trustee minutes and its annual report (although the most recent posted report is from fiscal 2004).

---Press release archives: Some museum websites include this; few are as comprehensive as the Guggenheim's, which goes back to 1998.

---Curatorial contacts: Wish you could easily communicate with a curator? The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art posts contact e-mails for its various curatorial departments.

SOON: What museums never post, but should.

BlogBack: My Row with Tinterow

2006-07-25T10:52:00.000-04:00

Responding to my posts here and here about Metropolitan Museum curator Gary Tinterow's views on collection management, Rob Krulak writes:

Beyond claiming the public's stake in the holdings of art museums as a private concern of curators, Gary Tinterow also seems to credit curators with the very creation of great public collections, as if there is an unbroken golden chain of specialist curators that stretches into the prehistory of every art museum.

That's just not how great museum collections are formed, evolve, or even come to be called great. I suppose civic entrepreneurs, private collectors (what would the Met be without Havemeyers?), journalists, academic art historians, the public, the brilliant non-specialists who created our earliest civic collections, and everyone else who contributes to the institutional and aesthetic meaning of museums were just along for the ride.

Museum Collections: Curatorial Privilege and the Public Interest

2006-07-24T10:37:00.000-04:00

This is an overly long post, but a serious subject deserves serious treatment. The following are my promised comments responding to comments made to me last week by Metropolitan Museum curator Gary Tinterow.

One of the prime movers in founding the Association of Art Museum Curators in 2001, Tinterow appears more focused on curator-power than on public accountability, as evidenced by his recent remarks to me on the subject of collection management.

Decisions to sell objects from museum collections must not be subject to the subjective judgments or personal preferences of individual curators, however knowledgeable and well-intentioned they may be. The governing presumption should be: What enters the public domain stays in the public domain, except for works that are clearly inferior in quality or condition. The public has paid for them, after all, through the tax deductions given to the donors of money or of art.

Curatorial prerogatives are not absolute; they must be subordinated to the professional guidelines set by the Association of Art Museum Directors:

Both the deaccessioning and the disposal of a work of art from a museum's collection require exceptional care and should reflect policy rather than reaction to the exigencies of a particular moment. Standards applied to deaccessioning and disposal must be at least as stringent as those applied to the acquisition process and should not be subject to changes in fashion and taste.

Tinterow may have been correct in observing to me that some museum officials have sold objects, only to have their successors (or curators at other museums) subsequently retrieve them for the public domain. But far from justifying incautious deaccessioning, this merely demonstrates the folly of it. There is no justification for disposing of works that tomorrow's curators may deem worthy of study or exhibition, no matter how much today's curators want to fund their own purchases of art through sales of objects that they deem expendable.

How much do today's curators at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, for example, wish that they still had the fine Hudson River School paintings that were sold in the 1950s (as discussed in my recent Wall Street Journal article) by then director Richard Davies, who deemed them not important enough for the collection? Different types of art go in and out of fashion. A museum's collection should be for the ages and not be subject to such vagaries.

The Met's most recent deaccession controversy involved its plan to sell a sculpture by Eduardo Chillida. That plan was abandoned after it was revealed that the donor of the work opposed the sale. Tinterow told me last week that the sculpture would never be exhibited at the Met, because it is too large. But, as Michael Kimmelman reported in the NY Times, it had already been exhibited there three times, making the curator's resolve never to show it again seem questionable.

There are probably a number of art museums that would be very pleased to make room in their galleries or sculpture gardens for an important Chillida. If the Met has no use for a museum-quality work, it should lend or give that object to a sister institution that CAN use it, thereby keeping it in the public domain where it belongs.

The spectre of finite exhibition and storage space, raised by Tinterow in the comments I quoted last Friday, is a real concern. The late Stephen Weil, a noted authority on legal issues involving art museums, once suggested that institutions were going to have to consider "triage" for their collections, because they had accumulated more stuff than they knew what to do with.

But not all museums are overstuffed. Collection-sharing IS an option---one that should be more seriously explored by all museums with a superabundance of riches.

CultureGrrl in the New York Times!

2006-07-22T11:18:00.000-04:00

Welcome to all you NY Times readers, who had to Google "Culture Grrl" [sic] to link to me from Roberta Smith's excellent article today on museum admission fees. Her contribution to the story-that-refuses-to-die was a detailed compendium of the many museums that offer free admission all the time, or at least some of the time.

She was a bit unfair, though, to Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, who (as my post indicates) expressed sympathy for BOTH sides of the argument---for and against admission fees. Roberta only quotes his argument against fees, making MoMA's $20 mandatory tariff appear to be against his own principles.

My thanks go to art blogger Chris "Zeke" Hand for alerting me, all the way from Montreal, that the mention of CultureGrrl was "the first time the New York Times ever published the term 'art blog.'" Is this true?

Things would have been easier for you Times surfers if the online version had linked to my blog. But when I tried to get the newspaper's surfing serfs to put up the link, I got this reply:

We hyperlink to our own topic pages (please notice that all hyperlinks in the story take the reader to internal New York Times pages), and so we can't include the link to your blog.

For those of you who took the trouble to Google me in order to ogle me, you can link to my posts related to the Met's admission-fee hike here, here, here, here, and here. (Do you think I'm overdoing it?)

Y'all come back now!

Gary Tinterow on the Divine Right of Curators

2006-07-21T12:01:00.000-04:00

At a press breakfast before a briefing held at the Metropolitan Museum this week for its upcoming high-rent loan show of French 19th- and early 20th-century masterpieces, I got into a discussion about the Met's deaccessioning practices with Gary Tinterow, curator in charge of 19th century, modern and contemporary art. He made a point of revisiting that subject with me after the briefing. I publish those comments here, but (except for a brief closing salvo) I will reserve until next week my comments on his comments.

Here's what Tinterow told my digital voice recorder:

What journalists have to understand is that curators and administrators make decisions about the formation of the collection every day. We’re the gatekeepers, going in, and we’re the gatekeepers coming out. When something gets here, it’s because a curator has made a decision to admit this work. When something leaves, it’s because the curator has made a decision for it to leave.

So the notion that there is some purity to a collection, that some greater force has brought works of art into a museum and the curators therefore are not the appropriate voice to determine the shape of the collection is to ignore how collections are formed to begin with.

Museums have actually acquired back works that they sold. What you assume is that we have unlimited storage and unlimited money, and neither is the case. Not only do opportunities change, but tastes change. And what didn’t make sense in 1900 might make sense in the year 2000. No one has a crystal ball and you are always making the collection from the perspective of today.

Something can be sold [from the museum], can be bought by a collector and can be regiven [to the same museum] in 50 years. So we don’t have the sense of finite opportunity. The collections are organic.

The most precious thing really is not money. The most precious thing is space. And that is our most severely restricted resource: it’s space, both for exhibitions and for storage. And that’s how we have to manage the collections.

The "most precious thing" is SPACE? I had always thought it was the art.

Met Fee: Reasonable Timesmen Can Disgree

2006-07-21T11:10:00.000-04:00

The NY Times apparently decided it needed to balance its arts reporters' crusade against the coming increase in the Metropolitan Museum's "sugggested" (make that "recommended") adult admission fee. So it brought in someone from the Business Section, David Leonhardt, to bring some economic pragmatism to the discussion.

An interloper in today's "Weekend Arts" section, Leonhardt offers a detailed economic and political argument in the Met's defense.

If you view his article on the Times' website, don't neglect to click on the sidebar, "The Price of Admission," to see what some other U.S. museums are charging. Several other museums rightfully belong to the "$0 Club," including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Next week, we will undoubtedly hear from someone in the Times' Style Section: what to wear on the Met admissions line, so that the cashiers won't think that you're a rich cheapskate and will hand you your button without giving you a dirty look.

Is there no end to this discussion?

Museum Exhibitions: Root for the Home Team

2006-07-20T13:21:00.000-04:00

One thing not mentioned in my WSJ piece on the expanded Minneapolis Institute of Arts was the temporary loan show in the new wing, The Surreal Calder.

Better for the MIA that I didn't mention it.

Organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, this show took a one-stop shopping approach to curating: Almost all its Calders are from a single source, the Calder Foundation (which is run by the artist's family and contains works from his estate). The Surrealist works, all gathered in one introductory gallery, rather than interspersed with the Calders for comparison, are generally not the ideal examples to make a case for that movement's influence on Calder's work.

By importing a show curated by an outsider and regarded as a likely crowdpleaser, Minneapolis perpetuates the self-effacing mistake made by many museums when they open new facilities: They don't show confidence in their own curators' ability to conceive something important and engaging enough to enhance the inaugural hoopla. (I'm also thinking of the Andrew Wyeth show, organized by the High Museum, Atlanta, for its reopening, but guest-curated by an outsider.)

I'm constantly impressed by the intelligence and talents of lesser-known curators whom I meet on the road, and what better time to showcase their unique voices than when their museum is the center of public and media attention? True, the home team is mostly engaged in reinstalling the permanent collection, but surely someone can step up to the plate to bat one out of the park---a homegrown exhibition worthy to be viewed during prime time and later toured to other institutions.

In Minneapolis' case, it appears, from the advance exhibition schedule, that the first upcoming major temporary exhibition to be organized in-house is "San Francisco Psychedelic," Feb. 10-June 10, 2007.

What are they smoking?

Berry-Hill Updates

2006-07-20T11:51:00.000-04:00

More on the Berry-Hill Galleries' bankruptcy situation has been posted online today by The Art Newspaper. Reporter Martha Lufkin indicates that other dealers, who are Berry-Hill creditors, are getting nervous.

James Berry Hill, a director of the gallery, told me on June 26 that the gallery was settling claims against it, "so that nobody is harmed." He also said at that time that the gallery's East 70th Street premises were no longer for sale.

But here they are, still available on Stribling's website for $20 million. The offering is described as "a once in a lifetime opportunity," but no longer characterized as "a court supervised sale."

With this Gehry I Thee Wed

2006-07-20T11:33:00.000-04:00

Pssst, wanna own a Frank Gehry?

Now you can: Tiffany & Co. has just put his new line online.

Doesn't this polymath already have enough building projects to occupy him from now until 2050?

Do you think my 25-year-old son Paul and his gorgeous, intelligent girlfriend Lisa will read this and get ideas? (Oy! Am I in trouble!)

Let's Rumble!

2006-07-20T10:50:00.001-04:00

Geoff Edgers, in today's post on his arts blog for the Boston Globe, thinks he detects "a feud brewing in the arts blogosphere" between me and a certain redhead.

Tyler's been a very kind mentor (and linker) to this blogging newbie, and Lee likes him. But, as my evil alter ego, CultureGrrl, always snarls: Reasonable people can (and frequently should) disagree.

Isn't that what blogs are for?

BlogBacks: Met's Admissions Frissons

2006-07-19T16:51:00.000-04:00

Here are a few readers' responses to my defense of the Metropolitan Museum's new suggested $20 adult admission fee.

CRAIG RANAPIA: I'm not really sure the "suggested admission fee" isn't really a semantic slight of hand. After all, as anyone whose met my mother can tell you, 'suggestions' properly expressed can sound a hell of a lot like an order.

I'm quite aware that cultural institutions don't keep their doors open on moonbeams and good intentions, public and private charity are unreliable sources of income, and I always have the choice to turn on my heels and walk out if I think a clearly posted admission charge is unreasonable or I just don't have enough cash. (While I don't like it any more than you, I can see a rationale for charging admission to special exhibitions while leaving core collections open to the public. Whether these so-called "blockbuster" shows are worth the tab for visitors and institutions is another debate.)

As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to install a turnstile in your entrance be honest about what you're doing and why. Don't try and shame twenty dollar bills out of people.

MARK BARRY: The new Met admission isn't that important, as long as they retain the "suggested" portion. I'm immune to the cashier, no matter the response. Many of them are also artists and could care less. My wife gets embarrassed at times, so to compromise I'll give a quarter, for two.

A PRESS RELEASE FROM THE HOMELESS MUSEUM, which describes itself as "a subversive, multi-disciplinary art project": The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the richest museum in the country, is in dire need of funds. The Homeless Museum (HoMu) invites you to support this great institution on Tuesday, Aug. 1, when the Met's new "suggested" admission fee goes into effect, by paying the entire $20 fee with pennies only. Please present 200 ounces (or 12.5 pounds) of pennies at the cash registrar for admission.

This is HoMu's second Penny Campaign. The first one was conducted in November 2004 at the Museum of Modern Art.

Do you think Randy Kennedy will pony up his pennies?

Schjeldahl on Klimt

2006-07-19T10:34:00.000-04:00

Speaking of critics, I commend to you Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the July 24 New Yorker on Ronald Lauder's purchase of "Adele Block-Bauer I" for the Neue Galerie, New York.

An outtake:

Is she worth the money? Not yet. Paintings this special may not come along for sale often, and the hundred and four million dollars spent for a so-so Picasso, “Boy with a Pipe,” two years ago indicated that irrational exuberance could be the booming art market’s new motto. But Lauder’s outlay predicts a level of cost that must either soon become common or be relegated in history as a bid too far.

And the identity of the artist gives pause. The price paid is four and a half times the previous high (already a stunner, in 2003) for a Klimt; until a few years ago, the artist ranked as a second-tier modern master both at auction and in the estimation of most art critics and historians....The purchase of “Adele” tests the possibility—ever less to be sneezed at, these days—of rewriting art history with a checkbook.

Here's CultureGrrl on the art market's irrational exuberance.

Coming Soon: A further examination of the Neue Galerie and its collection.

Criticizing the Critics

2006-07-19T10:11:00.000-04:00

This post may seem to be what one of my editors disapprovingly calls "inside baseball." It grows out of my post yesterday, responding to a critic who criticized my criticism of a critic. Have I lost you already? Probably. Nevertheless, here goes:

Why do you rarely see strongly negative reviews about new or newly expanded cultural facilities? Cesar Pelli's (pre-Taniguchi) expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, Santiago Calatrava's new wing (with wings) for the Milwaukee Art Museum---all received generally favorable notices when they opened, only to become more controversial with the passage of time. Similar revisionism also seems to occur in reviews of the acoustics of new concert halls---Rafael Viñoly's Kimmel Center in Philadelphia comes to mind.

And now that the initial euphoria over the November 2004 reopening of the Museum of Modern Art has passed, a second wave of assessments has been considerably more critical than the first round of polite plaudits.

As one who has enjoyed her share of hardhat tours and press previews of expensive, ambitious museum construction projects, I can attest to a natural reluctance to rain on these elaborate and expensive parades. So many well-meaning, talented people have spent so much time, intellect, money and effort on these new cultural facilities that it's hard to be unkind, let alone censorious.

And there's another dynamic at work: The most successful architects are also great salesmen. They convince clients to hire them by making their concepts and designs seem like the most appropriate and creative solutions to the problems at hand. They are such powerful advocates for their own work that they (or their enthusiastic museum-clients) also succeed in winning over the critics with the same rhetoric. Too often, these writers see with their ears instead of their eyes.

So we have Taniguchi "making the architecture disappear," with walls that seem to "float." We have "a flotilla of sails" atop Renzo Piano's addition for the High Museum in Atlanta, and "piazzas" (that might otherwise be called merely "lobbies" or, if outdoors, "plazas") at Piano's addition to the Morgan, his planned Whitney expansion and the High. All of these were originally the words of the architects and their clients, which were later appropriated by the critics as their own. Too often, however, the reality is more prosaic than the hyperbole.

The architects and museum officials think about these buildings far longer and more deeply than the critics, who spend a few days at most to arrive at their pithy assessments. It is tempting, while up against a deadline, to adopt the intelligently expressed, well-honed party line. But it's a temptation to be resisted, or at least carefully examined.

As for Michael Kimmelman's initial MoMA appraisal, it seemed like a grudgingly positive review, with a more skeptical assessment struggling to get out. Maybe (if last Friday's swipe is any indication) it soon will.

CultureGrrl Leaps to Her Own Defense!

2006-07-18T13:52:00.000-04:00

Blogger Tyler Green incorrectly claims today that I object to NY Times critic Michael Kimmelman's flipflop on the new MoMA.

"Critics," my blog-colleague wrote, "shouldn't be locked into one viewpoint for life."

Hey, CultureGrrl's been known to change her mind every now and then. That's a woman's (and a critic's) prerogative. What I objected to yesterday was, as I wrote, "the manner in which Kimmelman chose to announce" his apparent about-face: in a discordantly gratuitous aside, buried in an article about something else.

If he's formed a substantially new opinion on something this important, the chief art critic of the cultural paper-of-record should, as I wrote yesterday, craft "a more considered article about what he REALLY thinks," instead of slipping a fast one by us, without explanation or elucidation.

Is "that too bad," Tyler?

More tomorrow on the problems and challenges that writers like me (and Michael?) face in appraising new cultural facilities.

My Minneapolis Article in the WSJ---Part II

2006-07-18T13:38:00.000-04:00

Here's the second part of my article, appearing on the Leisure & Arts page in today's Wall Street Journal. (Here's Part I).

The MIA [Minneapolis Institute of Arts] had not originally planned to engage a "starchitect." But it was essentially shamed into doing so by the ambitions of its institutional peers: For its 2005 expansion the Walker Art Center had used Herzog & de Meuron, the Minneapolis Central Library had hired Cesar Pelli, and Jean Nouvel has designed the new Guthrie Theater, which began regular performances on Saturday.

A relatively conservative establishment in a quiet residential area, the MIA "didn't really see a need to promote cutting-edge architecture, because that isn't who we are in art. That's the Walker," noted curator Jacobsen, who had served as architectural liaison for the contractors, architects and curatorial staff. But after talking to three local architectural firms, Mr. Jacobsen recalled, the MIA ultimately felt "we had to go with a bigger name." Enter Mr. Graves, who had designed the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, as well as the renovation and expansion of the Newark Museum in New Jersey. Also important were what Mr. Jacobsen termed the "well established connections" between the architect and Target, the MIA's biggest corporate donor, for whom Mr. Graves had designed a well-received line of housewares.

Speaking of the architect, Evan Maurer, who was the MIA's director until 2005, recounted during a recent interview that "what he and I talked about was how to be Michael Graves and be contemporary, but to exist between a 1974 minimalist building and a great Beaux Arts building-with materials, with proportions, with references. I think he did that brilliantly."

If not architecturally dazzling, the new wing is respectful of the museum's pre-existing facilities and hospitable to its art. Appealingly clad in richly textured Jura limestone, its box-like structure is relieved by niches and slim columns-deliberate references to the flagship neoclassical building. Its one glaringly false note is the kitschy faux sky, strewn with abundant white clouds, that is painted on the Venetian plaster dome crowning Graves's three-story atrium.

More daring in design, and strikingly dissimilar from each other as they are from the MIA, are Cesar Pelli's library and Jean Nouvel's theater. The former is invitingly open and light-filled, with soaring spaces and frosted images of digitized Minnesota nature photos, silk screened and baked onto its expansive glass walls-an evocation of Minneapolis' famously frozen winters.

The Guthrie Theater, Mr. Nouvel's first completed project in North America, is dark both inside and out. Meant to be mysterious and theatrical, it instead comes across as disorienting and gloomy. It transforms the distinguished regional theater from a 87,000-square-foot, one-stage facility adjoining the Walker Art Center into a 285,000-square-foot complex of three diverse performance spaces, a restaurant and education center-all relocated to the city's old industrial area on the banks of the Mississippi. Once best known for its flour mills, the riverfront is fast becoming the new trendy area for restaurants and residences.

Critics and audiences alike will continue to debate the merits of these recent high-profile additions to this city's thriving cultural scene. But as Mr. Griswold recently observed, one thing is beyond debate: "There could be no more exciting time to be in the Twin Cities."

[But wait! There's more to the story that could fit in the WSJ. Coming in CultureGrrl, later this week, more Minneapolis maunderings!]

My Article on Minneapolis in Today's WSJ---Part I

2006-07-18T07:26:00.000-04:00

As you know, I can't link to the Wall Street Journal's subscribers-only site, but I AM allowed to post the text of my article. I'll do it in two parts, so as not to tax the short attention spans of hyperactive blog readers. (It's on today's Leisure & Arts page (D6), for those of you who still turn pages, instead of clicking hyperlinks.)

Minneapolis

With unflashy simplicity, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has bucked the attention-seeking trend in museum expansions: Its new 113,000-square-foot wing for 20th- and 21st-century art, designed by Post-Modernist Michael Graves, boasts neither eye-popping "destination architecture" nor interior "Wow" space, and wasn't motivated by a desire to supply sumptuous accommodations for megashows circulated by world-famous institutions. What's more, the Midwestern museum's new director and president, William Griswold, seems far more intent on organizing what he calls dossier" exhibitions focused on individual works from the permanent collection.

The new structure joins the museum's original McKim, Mead & White building and its last expansion, designed in the mid-1970s by Kenzo Tange. "It's very much a building about the art," explained Mr. Griswold, who came here in October after having informed the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where he was acting director, that he did not want to be named permanent director.

The MIA's expansion and renovation increase the gallery space for its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions by some 40%. Nearly 1,000 works have emerged from storage-among them, a 1969 wall-sized painting from Frank Stella's "Protractor Series" that was too large for the old galleries. Prominently displayed in the new wing is the museum's sexiest new acquisition---its first car, a sleek, silver-painted 1948 Czechoslovakian Tatra T87, designed in 1936.

For the first time, the museum will have galleries for the permanent display of textiles, 20th- and 21st-century prints and drawings, contemporary crafts, silver, American regionalism, folk art, Chinese export porcelain, Ukiyo-e paintings and postwar color photography. On a recent press tour of the expanded premises, Mr. Griswold paused in the color-photography gallery, candidly describing the museum's collection in that area as weak. "I wanted this gallery to propel us to collect,"
he observed.

The collection's most glaring weakness is in the area of American paintings from the 19th to early 20th century-a gap largely blamed on one of the most infamous art-selling sprees in American museum history: From 1955 to 1958, a former director, Richard Davis, unloaded some 4,500 objects, including at least 350 paintings (among them, important works of the Hudson River School). He believed the museum should stop trying to be encyclopedic and, instead, focus on certain areas that he deemed important. Works he bought with the sale proceeds included a Seurat and a van Dyck.

The MIA's current holdings are strong, however, in decorative arts (including 16 period rooms), Old Master paintings (including highly important works by El Greco, Rembrandt, Poussin and Goya), and Chinese and Japanese art. The number of Japanese galleries has just grown from nine to 15, all newly named for collector Mary Griggs Burke, in appreciation of the recent announcement by the 90-year-old St. Paul native that she will bequeath "a significant portion" of her personal and her foundation's collections to the museum. (Another portion is destined for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.) The MIA recently received a six-month loan of 55 Burke works-from the 12th century to contemporary-to celebrate its expansion.

The museum's Chinese art collection, one of the finest in the country, owes much to a two-person, gallery-filling juggernaut-Bruce Dayton, longtime MIA trustee and former president and chairman of Dayton Hudson Corp. (the original parent of Target Corp.), and his wife, Ruth, a devotee of Chinese culture and philosophy. Some 2,600 objects in every curatorial area came to the MIA thanks to Dayton benefactions. At a recent VIP cocktail reception, Robert Jacobsen, senior curator of Asian art, introduced the Daytons to their latest sight-unseen purchase for the Chinese galleries-a rare, unusually large ding (cauldron) from sixth century B.C., labeled as "a masterpiece of late Chou bronze casting." Other recent high-profile purchases have included a $5 million landscape by Claude Lorrain.

But gaps remain, and to fill them the museum is raising $50 million for its acquisitions endowment, in addition to the $50 million for its renovation and expansion. Some $91.2 million in gifts and pledges has been raised to date, all of it from individuals, foundations and corporate donors, not government allocations. Target, headquartered in Minneapolis, contributed more than $10 million for the expansion, for which it received naming rights to the museum's Target Wing.

[If you just can't stand the suspense of waiting for Part II, invest in a copy of the WSJ!]

You Don't Need a Kimmelman to See Which Way the Wind Blows

2006-07-17T10:39:00.000-04:00

Michael Kimmelman, in last Friday's NY Times, offhandedly demolished the Museum of Modern Art's Yoshio Taniguchi-designed building in a one-sentence putdown:

The sums that places like the Museum of Modern Art squander on mediocre buildings, which become obsolete the moment they open, are scandalous.

Come again? Here's the same art critic, reviewing the same building, at the time of its opening (Nov. 19, 2004):

By and large the redone museum, although more than a trifle like the new corporate headquarters of modernism, is a triumph of formal restraint and practical design---an eloquent reaffirmation, within its galleries, of the enduring beauty of the Modern's historic, albeit tendentious, account of modernism....

Mr. Taniguchi solved the problem of designing an immense museum by trying to make it disappear. Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian and Bonnard, not Mr. Taniguchi, are still the stars here, to Mr. Taniguchi's credit.

What made Friday's decision-reversing jab all the more startling was that it was gratuitously slipped deep into an article about the Neue Galerie's Klimt, to which it had no other connection than the expenditure of large sums. Do Kimmelman's reviews, like MoMA's "obsolete" building, have built-in obsolescence?

Mind you, I'm no fan of MoMA's new building, as CultureGrrl readers well know. But I was surprised by the manner in which Kimmelman chose to announce his new view. (Actually, to be fair, there was a previous, similarly unexplained, aside: On Christmas Day, 2005, Kimmelman opined that the new MoMA had "all the charm of the Cherry Hill mall on Black Friday.")

Maybe its time for a more considered article about what he REALLY thinks! Is it a "triumph," "mediocre" or just a bad day at the mall?

BlogBack: Thomas Hoving on the Met's Duccio

2006-07-17T09:36:00.000-04:00

Right again, art-lings. The answer to yesterday's question is: C) Tom Hoving, author of "False Impressions, the Hunt for Big Time Art Fakes."

Better known as Philippe de Montebello's predecessor as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hoving dukes it out over Duccio in this CultureGrrl BlogBack:

James Beck has apparently not followed the standard methodology of determining a fake in the case of the Duccio at the Met.

For one thing, he doesn't take into consideration that the piece is a private devotional image, a non-"maniera-Greca" icon. So, it is not strictly correct to compare it with larger works by Duccio and his contemporaries. There is nothing with which to compare it.

For another, Beck does not put himself in the mind of his "forger." In the 19th century, Gothic items were invariably prettified. I have seen a dozen or so that are invariably more sinuous and soignée than anything made in the early 14th century.

The Met Duccio is too unpretty to be a 19th century fake. Beck's argument that the anatomy of the Christ is rather ugly is in fact a good argument for its being ca. 1300.

Similarly, the parapet or pedestal (or whichever it is) is exceedingly rare in Gothic art. Forgers virtually never add anything to their fakes that is rare and thus
risky. The foundation of fakery is to be safe.

Thus Beck's argument here, as with the one mentioned above, tends to substantiate the piece as authentic.

CultureGrrl says, let the debate continue. What we really DO need is a Duccio dossier exhibition, organized by the Met, to allow the experts to convene, compare and contrast key examples from the artist's early oeuvre.

Question of the Day

2006-07-16T21:10:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, read a CultureGrrl BlogBack on the Met's Duccio, by an artworld luminary sometimes known as the "showman," who now calls himself a "fakebuster." Who might that be?

A) Zahi Hawass

B) Dale Chihuly

C) Tom Hoving

D) Nigel Spivey

For the answer, art-lings, click me Monday morning!

The Times Shortchanges the Met

2006-07-15T11:07:00.000-04:00

Must be another slow cultural news day at the NY Times: It dispatched reporter Randy Kennedy to "humbly proffer" 50 cents to five different cashiers at the Metropolitan Museum. (The museum had announced this week that it would raise its suggested adult admission fee from $15 to $20, effective Aug. 1.)

Journalism 101 says not to prejudge a story before doing the actual reporting, but Kennedy confessed that he walked up to the unsuspecting set-ups and "waited to measure the level of scorn that would pour down" on him.

Instead, he found "that brand of aggressive disregard particular to New York that is sometimes much more effective in evoking shame and extracting money. The first clerk...never even looked up from his screen [how dare he?]" but handed over the admission button "with the detachment of a Vegas dealer parting with a dollar chip. If he had been trained...in the most effective ways of wounding a conscience, he could have done no better."

Maybe Kennedy's conscience was fragile because he knew that his undeniably strong investigative reporting talents should really be put to better use (and also because his guilty conscience knew he was merely feigning an inability to fork over three fivespots).

What exactly did he want from those workaday cashiers: an effusive, "Oh thank you so very much, sir"? The Times is still trying to turn a non-story into a populist cause. Just pay what you want, Randy, and don't agonize over it.

A Touch of Crass

2006-07-14T12:40:00.000-04:00

Oh my. The minions who put ads on my site (unchosen and unreviewed by me) came up with this. Apologies to Ronald Lauder and Gustav Klimt.

Please go down to this morning's first post, to see that CultureGrrl, despite her tacky moments, deserves to be taken seriously!

Simon Singes Synge

2006-07-14T12:31:00.000-04:00

CultureGrrl occasionally strays to other art forms. (After all, I'm not merely ArtGirl, though I kinda like her site!)

I feel moved to note the complete disconnect between two reviews of the same theatrical event---Lincoln Center Festival's DruidSynge---a marathon 8 1/2 hours of the six-play theatrical oeuvre of Irish playwright John Millington Synge.

Here's the acerbic John Simon, in today's Bloomberg:

The brogue used is so thick it could blunt any knife trying to cut it, and left most of the audience chasing after comprehensible words like sparrows after sparse crumbs. The poor acoustics at John Jay College's theater made things tougher yet. Of the 19 actors, maybe three or four belong on a metropolitan stage....

Garry Hynes, the Druid's artistic director, is not really major league despite her lofty reputation at home and abroad. She gets the job done, but without that inconspicuously convincing extra touch that marks the true master.

Most important, poor, tubercular Synge, dying at age 37, did not grow into a significant dramatist.

And here's the ecstatic Charles Isherwood, two days ago in the NY Times:

Grandly entertaining and powerfully moving, “DruidSynge” is a major achievement for Ms. Hynes, her design collaborators and her superb 19-member acting company. Ranging across wide emotional territory without missing a beat, it brings alive a milieu that feels both intriguingly remote and utterly intimate, exotic in the eccentric syntax and unruly lyricism of its earthy dialogue — God bless the Irish! — but familiar in its consoling knowledge of the loneliness and despair that are the sorrowful scars of all humankind.

Interestingly, Simon (or his editors?) mercifully withdrew a slap at veteran actress Marie Mullen that appeared in an earlier posting of his review (which I saw). Isherwood called her "great and glorious."

In today's Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout comes down somewhere in between. (You'll have to scroll down a couple of items on his blog's July 14 entries to get to Synge.)

Who would you trust, in deciding what to do with 8 1/2 idle hours on a summer's day? (As for me, I'm going to Broadway to see Sarah Jones this weekend!)

The Met Collects the Rent

2006-07-14T11:33:00.000-04:00

Harold Holzer, the Metropolitan Museum's senior vice president for external affairs, thanked me yesterday for my favorable admissions-fee story. It must be time, then, for the curmudgeonly CultureGrrl to bite the hand that stroked her.

So lets dissect a disturbing first for the Met: its upcoming Masterpieces of French Painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1800-1920, touring next year to the the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. As the images on the Houston website show, its 135 paintings include some of the Met's tastiest Impressionist and Post-Impressionist crowd-pleasers.

Sure to attract hordes (as did the Museum of Modern Art's masterpieces compendium in 2004, which also traveled to Houston and Berlin), this show marks the Met's sorry entry into the growing field of museums that use their collections as cash cows, renting out blockbusters for big bucks. The upcoming Met blockbuster, as Holzer told me, is an "opportunistic event," made possible by the need to remove the museum's French 19th-century paintings from the walls while those galleries are expanded. It is, he said, intended to "raise funds for this construction"---the first time that the Met has structured a traveling exhibition as a big moneymaker.

Houston will up its admission fee from $7 to $15 for those wanting to see this show. The Met, as I observed in yesterday's post, doesn't believe in charging extra for special exhibitions on its own premises. But, in this instance, it's apparently happy to let others do it.

Ironically, when the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, was recently asked (at a NY Times-sponsored symposium, Mar. 6) how much other museums pay for borrowing and displaying Met-owned objects, he replied, "The loans are not rentals. They are not paid for." The borrowers, he said, just reimburse the Met for its expenses.

This collegiality used to be the norm all over, and, until now, laudably remained so at the Met. But with its upcoming show, the Met joins the ranks of the Louvre and the Hermitage, which have no qualms about bolstering their own finances at the expense of sister institutions. (For a better role model, see my previous post on Clark Art Institute's loan show of Impressionist masterpieces.)

Whatever happened to building buildings the old-fashioned way, through the generosity of donors? I guess that with the disappearance, some years ago, of financier André Meyer's name from the Met's 19th-century European galleries, naming rights just aren't what they used to be.

Coming Tomorrow: CultureGrrl Bites the Hand that Strokes Her

2006-07-13T17:41:00.000-04:00

Lowry and de Montebello on Admission Fees

2006-07-13T12:39:00.000-04:00

For those of you who just got to this post, thanks to the mention in Roberta Smith's July 22 NY Times article, you can link to my other posts related to the Met's admission-fee hike here, here, here, here and here. (Do you think I'm overdoing it?)

Here's the post you came here for:

Relevant to the current brouhaha over museum admissions fees are these comments by Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, excerpted from a roundtable discussion by major museum directors published in Whose Muse: Art Museums and the Public Trust. (The Met has just announced an increase of its suggested admission fee for non-senior adults to $20, effective Aug. 1. MoMA instituted the same fee, as mandatory, when it reopened in November 2004, after its expansion.)

Glenn Lowry: I think there are different factors that come into play here. On one level it's almost a moral duty that museums should be free. Our collections are part of everyone's cultural heritage. We should make them available in as broad a way as possible. And an admission fee is one of the greater barriers to attendance.

Philippe de Montebello: Wait a minute. Can we be both practical and philosophical? On the matter of barriers, the people who squawk most about the cost of a museum pay huge amounts of money to go to rock concerts, sports events, all of which are very expensive. I don't buy that "barrier" thing. Philosophically, what is it about a work of art that makes it mandatory that it should be available for nothing, whereas the C Sharp Minor Quartet Opus 131 of Beethoven should be paid for, that Aida should be paid for, that Ibsen should be paid for? What is [it] about art that it shouldn't be paid for?

Glenn Lowry (later in the discussion): Part of me wants museums to be free because there is a sense that our collections and visitors' experiences of them belong to the public at large and should be available to anyone regardless of cost. Another part of me, though, says, why should it be free? Why should this treasured experience be free, especially for an entity that gets virtually no government funding? And by making it free, are we inadvertently devaluing it?

Populism or pragmatism? It seems to me that the "suggested fee" concept is still the best compromise. But it also seems to me that free admission, far from devaluing the art, is valuing the public.

The Met: Almost Free If You Want It to Be

2006-07-13T09:43:00.000-04:00

Come Aug. 1, the Metropolitan Museum will cost you $20, but only if you want it to. You got a problem with that?

Carol Vogel, in today's NY Times, implies that the Met tried to sneak one by us by announcing the increase to arts editors "with little fanfare." (Next time, Philippe, please hire the Canadian Brass.)

The Met's enlightened admission policy says that you can pay whatever you want, as long as you pay something. The fact that the fee is "suggested" is posted at the cash register. Children under 12 and members are free; suggested admission for seniors and students is $10. (Full disclosure: Thanks to my press pass, I freeload all over town. Suggested journalists fee: $100?)

If people feel "intimidated" by this suggested fee, as suggested by one Jane Kaplowitz, quoted in the Times, they should get assertiveness training. What you pay is up to you.

When Philippe retires (some time in 2050), I suspect that the Met will begin to follow the standard museum practice of charging substantial extra fees for important special exhibitions. If I'm still blogging then, I'll lament that change: Blockbuster surcharges discourage some people from seeing those exhibitions, and they make loan shows seem more important than the permanent collection.

The Met's operating deficit was $3.4 million in fiscal 2005, an improvement from the $4.8 million in fiscal 2004 but still troubling. The last increase in the suggested admission fee---to the current $15---occurred in January 2005. That did help to reduce the size of the deficit, but more effective solutions (a big boost in the endowment from a stock-market rally, perhaps?) are urgently needed.

Next: Eavesdrop on a past colloquy about admission fees by the two director-members of the "$20 Club."

The Duccio Dialectic

2006-07-12T16:24:00.000-04:00

I love it when art historians get angry! So here's Columbia Professor James Beck's letter, Duccio a dud, published in today's London Times, responding to last Saturday's letter by Metropolitan Museum curator Keith Christiansen, Met's Duccio is no dud.

Here's an excerpt from Christiansen:

If Professor Beck would like to see a fake Duccio, I would be happy to show him one that the Metropolitan was given in order to compare a fake with the genuine masterpiece. It is my fervent hope that Professor Beck’s allegations, which in my opinion are completely unfounded, do not diminish the public’s engagement with this exquisite painting.

And from Beck's rejoinder:

When a mediocre object is classified as a great work by a great artist, that artist is unfairly diminished and the public is misled.

You say Duccio, I say Dud-cio. But there's one thing we all CAN agree on: The Times' letter department needs better headline writers!

Lauder Covets the Four Other Klimts

2006-07-12T12:49:00.000-04:00

To other reporters who asked Ronald Lauder if he wanted to acquire the four other Klimts from the Bloch-Bauer estate (on display July 13-Sept. 18, along with the Neue Galerie's newly acquired Adele Bloch-Bauer I), he said, "No comment."

But to CultureGrrl, he said:

We are contemplating these other paintings. Ideally, I would like to acquire all of them. It depends on what the heirs want to do.

You see, only CultureGrrl could win the confidence of the cosmetics magnate by schmoozing about our old Bronx High School of Science days. (After he heard my embarrassingly uncultured Bronx accent, he had asked me where I grew up. Luckily, Ron tawks the tawk!)

At today's press conference, he noted that the configuration of the five paintings in Adele Bloch-Bauer's Vienna bedroom "resembled very much what we have here today....I believe this is what [she] would have wanted for her art."

The problem with this ensemble is that gazing at the exquisite, iconic portrait is like looking directly at the sun: Your eyes are so dazzled that other perfectly fine paintings in the room look drab. Forget about what you've seen in reproductions, which can never give a sense of the sumptuous textures and patterned complexities of the Neue Galerie's "priceless" acquisition, said to have cost about $135 million. While you're there, don't miss (as many reporters did) the Neue Galerie's six preparatory drawings of Adele, on display in the adjoining room.

By the way Ron, CultureGrrl (née Flasterstein) was valedictorian of our mutual alma mater. Not too shabby for a humanities person in a school known for churning out Nobel Prize winners in science (including one from my own year)!

The Guthrie Herds Them In

2006-07-12T08:37:00.000-04:00

Exterior view of the Guthrie from 2nd Street
Photo Credit: Roland Halbe

The rounded exterior of the new Jean Nouvel-designed facility for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis "echoes the area’s adjacent grain silos," according the theater’s press release. But my local tablemates at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts' pancake breakfast informed me that the theater's shiny midnight-blue skin evokes a particular brand of silo---the high-end “feed storage systems” manufactured by Harvestore and favored by many area farms. Here, in a CultureGrrl exclusive (who else would bring you this?), you can see the Guthrie fronted by the photos of legendary actors and the silos fronted by very photogenic cows.

What does this say about how the Guthrie regards its audience?!?
(Time will tell: Regular performances begin there on Saturday.)

Dubious Duccio?

2006-07-11T10:30:00.000-04:00

(Helpful Hint: For those of you who just journeyed to this post, via the ArtsJournal link, I also discuss the Duccio here and here.)

In his forthcoming book, "Connoisseurship in Crisis: From Duccio to Raphael," James Beck argues that issues of provenance, quality and art history weigh against the attribution to Duccio and the date of ca. 1300, attached to the Metropolitan Museum's most expensive acquisition ever, the tempera-and-gold on wood "Mother and Child" (also discussed in my previous post).

The Met's counter-arguments, offered by curator Keith Christiansen, are presented at length in last weekend's NY Times article on the subject. Interestingly, he had been previously quoted in the Times asserting that the painting contains "the first illusionistic parapet in European art." Now, reacting to Beck's art-historical assault on the parapet (see below), the Times has quoted an observation by Duccio expert Luciano Bellosi that the Met's parapet is, in fact, not unique to its time but similar to a painted cornice in Giotto's fresco series from the 1290s in the Church of St Francis in Assisi.

Here's some of what Beck's book has to say:

PROVENANCE AND DOCUMENTATION

[The attribution to Duccio is confirmed] by no documents or other historical evidence from the artist’s lifetime....What is more, there is no provenance for the picture until ca. 1900, six hundred years after the presumptive date of its creation.

The work was one of many acquired shortly after 1900 by Count [Grigorii] Stroganoff....[Many of those objects] were unknown or at least had not appeared in scholarly monographs, journals, catalogues, or presented in exhibitions, and consequently had not been subjected to evaluation within the discipline. Along with the others, the Metropolitan Duccio was, in effect, a new object to the field, with no previous history....The Stroganoff collection was filled with mediocre works, including possible forgeries and fakes, as well as a handful of more convincing objects.

QUALITY

The treatment of the gold-accented borders of Mary’s garment...proves to be yet another unsettling element which speaks against the attribution to Duccio. These borders or edges are confused, inelegant and hesitant, forming dreary swings which are uncharacteristic of Duccio’s confirmed works, like the Madonna of the Franciscans in Siena’s Pinacoteca. In other words, Duccio’s impeccable control of design is totally absent in the Metropolitan’s painting.

The Child’s raised arm, which appears like that of an amputee, constitutes another disconcerting element. While nobody should expect Duccio to draw with the anatomical precision of a Leonardo da Vinci, one might expect the limbs and hands in the little painting to be consistent with Duccio’s treatment in securely documented works, which is not the case.

ART HISTORY

The parapet or shelf located below and on a plane in front of the image of Mary and the Child...[is] the Achilles heel of the attribution....We are asked to believe the impossible: Duccio at a fairly young age made a breakthrough which he himself totally ignored in his other works, as did his followers. True enough, a similar foreshortened shelf on brackets is found in early wall painting, especially in the circle of Giotto in Assisi, as Bellosi has indicated, but in addition to being vastly different in scale, the element does not operate as a bracket in front of an image but instead serves as a kind of base for the figuration, and therefore can hardly be regarded as the same thing....Whoever produced the Metropolitan Duccio must have been aware of of the depiction of space and planes in Renaissance painting [thus suggesting that it was painted after its putative date of ca. 1300].

None of this proves that the painting is a fake from the 19th century, as Beck somewhat recklessly claims, or even that it's not by Duccio. The Met's conservation lab has done a technical examination of the painting that it says provides additional support for the attribution. It should release those findings in detail (including any attempts to date the painting scientifically), to help clarify these matters.

As for my own response to the painting: Beck himself probably knows (as Bellosi also told me yesterday) that it is not uncommon for early Italian Renaissance paintings to lack a pre-20th century provenance. I acknowledge that the work may be of truly outstanding art-historical importance. As a precursor of the Italian Renaissance, "this is the real thing: painting no longer as an illustration, but something that attempts to evoke a human response from the viewer," curator Christiansen told Calvin Tomkins of the New Yorker.

But for this non-specialist, that attempt is unsuccessful. I'd much rather linger in front of another recent acquisition in the same gallery, the “Crucifixion” by Pietro Lorenzetti, one of Duccio’s pupils and followers.

Luckily, I can. The Met has something for everyone...and then some.

Bend it Like the The Times: Its Flawed Kick at Beck

2006-07-10T15:30:00.000-04:00

Beck is ba-a-a-ack!

Always shoot-from-the-hip controversial, James Beck invariably raises the eyebrows and the ire of the art establishment that he so often inveighs against. He often undercuts his own credibility with hyperbole.

So when Beck challenged the attribution to Duccio of the Metropolitan Museum's recently acquired, very costly Madonna and Child, the NY Times tapped the big man in Duccio scholarship, Luciano Bellosi of the University of Sienna, to debunk the Columbia art history professor's latest screed.

"I have never doubted that it was a masterpiece by Duccio," Bellosi told Robin Pogrebin in a phone interview.

There's only one problem, unmentioned by Pogrebin: Luciano Bellosi has never---not even once---set eyes on that Duccio!

That was the first thing I asked him when I got him on the phone in Italy today. Even Beck had told me that Bellosi was the go-to expert on this subject. And here's what that expert had to say:

No, unfortunately I didn't see it with my own eyes, only by photographs....I know it is a very important question. It is always necessary to see the works of art in reality to be sure what they are....Art historians like Keith Christiansen and Everett Fahy [of the Met] are very capable to judge the works of art with their eyes. I know their capacity. I trust in them for that.

The painting had been hidden away in private collections for many years, only available for public viewing since it was acquired by the Met in 2004 for a reported $45-50 million. But unlike Bellosi, Beck HAS carefully eyeballed the work, and I have enough wary respect for him to think that he needs to be heard, if not unquestionably believed. I thought he was right in bucking a 1996 front-page NY Times article, by deflating the discovery of the so-called Michelangelo of Fifth Avenue (about which I wrote for both the Wall Street Journal and Art in America magazine).

And when I watched a television documentary about the cleaning of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, I cringed as I saw subtle modeling and muscular definition being swabbed away, leaving behind flat, garish patches of color. (Beck waged a long, losing battle against that project.)

So, suspending Met-induced disbelief, I have read with interest an advance copy of the entire chapter from Beck's forthcoming book that questions the attribution of the museum's much praised acquisition.

MORE ON THIS TOMORROW

Gehry Does the Math

2006-07-10T10:31:00.000-04:00

No doubt feeling some remorse about slapping CultureGrrl around (she can take it), Anthony Calnek of the Guggenheim made a friendly phone call yesterday evening to say that AP's cost figures for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi came from none other than Frank Gehry, the architect for the proposed 322,920-square-foot museum.

Still, Calnek says the numbers are wrong: Gehry was just applying a multiplier to the per-square-foot cost in Bilbao, when questioned by a reporter at the Abu Dhabi press briefing.

Calnek had at first e-mailed me that he had seen the confidential construction cost estimates, and the reported $200 million was incorrect. Later, on the phone, he asserted that there can't even be a cost estimate, because the building hasn't been designed yet. Go figure.

In any event, although both sides have agreed to a memorandum of understanding for the project, an actual contract has yet to be signed. And what happens in Abu Dhabi stays in Abu Dhabi: The financials of the project "never have to be made public," Calnek said. Whatever the cost, none will be paid by the Guggenheim, which, if the deal happens, will get an undisclosed fee for its expertise and its "brand."

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Update

2006-07-09T16:54:00.000-04:00

Did the AP get the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi cost figures wrong?

Anthony Calnek, the Guggenheim's deputy director for communications and publishing, writes me following:

I happen to have seen preliminary estimates, and although I can't tell you the right number, I can tell you the AP got it wrong, both in terms of what the museum will cost and what the collection will cost. I'm really disappointed that you would use your blog to in this ridiculously irresponsible way.

Ouch!

Calnek adds that the the Abu Dhabi government "doesn't want any financial details to be revealed." (So did the AP's Jim Krane just make up his numbers? Or did he rely on a faulty source?)

Earlier today, I e-mailed Calnek this question: "What gives you confidence that this project can succeed, where others have not?" Calnek's reply:

It's the Crown Prince [Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan], for one. I was just there, and the entire royal family---i.e., the entire government---is 100% behind this. And believe me, they can afford it. Plus, they're looking over their shoulder at Dubai.

No money problems, no political-approval issues, and a desire to keep up with Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Perfect. Now if only the United Arab Emirates could clean up their act on human rights.

There He Goes Again: Krens in Abu Dhabi

2006-07-09T13:12:00.000-04:00

Now it's the sheiks who crave Guggenheim chic.

The Associated Press story about the planned Frank Gehry-designed Middle Eastern Gugg, filed by Jim Krane yesterday from Abu Dhabi, was far more illuminating and flavorful than today's NY Times report, filed from New York, which didn't even provide cost figures for the project.

According to AP, the 322,920-square-foot building, scheduled to open in 2012, will cost about $200 million; the combined cost of the building and its art acquisitions would be about $400 million. (Does Carol Vogel read the wire services?)

The art acquisitions could pose sticky censorship problems: "One of the first dilemmas facing Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, dubbed GAD [!?!], is whether to exhibit nude works that might offend conservative Muslims," according to AP. Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, "said the topic had yet to be discussed."

Another cultural conundrum set forth by AP is that GAD would bring "a museum named for a powerful Jewish-American family...to the capital of an Arab country [the United Arab Emirates] that refuses diplomatic ties with Israel."

The ARTnewsletter suggested on May 9 that the Guggenheim had likely received from Abu Dhabi some $2 million. That's the usual fee for its "feasibility studies" for projects under consideration.

The "memorandum of understanding," just signed, probably also includes provisions for a whopping "participation fee," to enrich the Guggenheim's coffers. For Bilbao, that amounted to $20 million; for the now-abandoned Guggenheim Rio project, it was to have been $40 million.

One huge advantage of making a deal with the United Arab Emirates is that "they have the resources to do it," in Krens' words. He can ill afford yet another ousted outpost, scuttled by political or financial realities.

According to the U.S. State Department's background paper on the United Arab Emirates, they have "huge proven oil reserves....In 2005, the U.A.E. produced about 2.5 million barrels of oil per day--of which Abu Dhabi produced approximately 94%."

GAD-zooks! With his undeniable diplomatic skills, can Krens get us some oil-for-art?

How Art Made the Mini-Series---Part II

2006-07-07T13:40:00.000-04:00

Like the first installment of the series, this week's episode of PBS's five-part How Art Made the World took the one expert's opinion (this time, about prehistoric art) and elevated it to the status of the most authoritative word on the subject. Real art scholarship is never this simple.

Host Nigel Spivey accepted the explanation by David Lewis-Williams, professor emeritus of archeology at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, that shamans created cave art to record their trance-induced, hallucinatory visions.

But this is only one of many theories regarding something we can never know for certain. The peripatetic Spivey this time transported us to Namibia to witness a "trance dance," but only linked that contemporary shaman's altered state to curative, not cultural, powers. (For some other experts' hypotheses, see my Wall Street Journal article about my recent visit to the caves of southwest France's Dordogne region.)

While no expert, I have trouble accepting the idea that shamans, whose job description involves spiritual (but not necessarily artistic) skills, were such consummate visual communicators as the masters of Lascaux and Altamira. What's more, it is indisputable that the painted forms we see in those caves were shaped and inspired at least as much by the contours of the walls and outcroppings as by the artists' inner vision.

I did take some small comfort in seeing that Spivey, like CultureGrrl, was probably denied access to the original Lascaux. The credits at the end of the episode refer only to "Lascaux II," the replica cave.

The Titian that Moved a Nation

2006-07-07T11:17:00.000-04:00

Titian (c. 1490 - 1576)
Noli Me Tangere, c. 1514, © 2006 The National Gallery, London

While I was in Washington recently for the WSJ, I of course dashed over to the National Gallery to see its glorious exhibition Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting. But the painting that most fascinated me was nowhere mentioned in today's NY Times review by Holland Cotter.

Titian's "Noli Me Tangere" was the artwork that gave spiritual sustenance to the British during the darkest hours of World War II, as recounted by Neil MacGregor, former director of the National Gallery in London (and now of the British Museum), in the 2004 book Whose Muse?

While London was beseiged by bombs, the museum's trustees decided that one picture a month would hang "as the only Old Master picture in the National Gallery," MacGregor recounted. This moving Titian, in which Mary Magdalene is admonished by Christ, after his resurrection, not to touch him, was selected by the public as the one it most wanted to see.

Why? MacGregor opines:

We can only guess, but I think what it meant to the war-torn Londoners must have been close to the central poetic truth that Titian was originally trying to express---the reassurance of a love so strong that it can survive death.

The label for the painting in the current Washington show interprets the meaning of the "spiraling pose" by which Christ evades Mary's touch this way: "She should not cling to his physical self, as he would soon ascend to heaven."

Those were the days---when art had the power to empower a nation.

Architecture vs. Art: When Form Ignores Function

2006-07-06T09:55:00.000-04:00

Is architectural ingenuity enough?

I'm all for designing cultural facilities with as much creativity as the art presented inside them. (I'm a great fan, for example, of the Guggenheim Bilbao.) But the cultural clients of big-name architects must take care that the structure doesn't subvert the substance and that the design concept, while strong, is not oppressive. In the end, it's all about the art and the audience, not the architect's ego.

These thoughts are occasioned by the clash of critical titans in the pages of the NY Times over Jean Nouvel's new Musée Quai Branly for non-Western art in Paris. Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff approvingly opined that Nouvel's "wildly eccentric...kaleidoscopic montage of urban impressions" was "an act of dissent that forces us to feel the world again."

Five days later (couldn't we get these two guys together on the same page?), art critic Michael Kimmelman savaged the place as "briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded." He allowed himself to vent more intemperately in narrating the slide show on the Times' website:

The permanent galleries strike me as being unbelievably ill-conceived and actually rather insulting to the cultures that they're ostensibly meant to honor....[Objects] loom out of the darkness. The only thing missing is people throwing spears at you.

Nouvel has the biggest bag of tricks of any architect now designing cultural facilities, and his out-of-the-box ideas always sound audaciously inventive. But although I haven't lately been to Paris, I did see Nouvel's new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and I have to agree with Ron Carlson, a letter writer to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, who fumed: "It is not necessary or appropriate for the interior of a performance theatre to be stark, plain and neutral so as not to be distracting. The show goes on in the dark! The theater should be beautiful, inviting, warm and comfortable."

Instead of feeling the anticipatory glow of a joyous night at the theater, you prowl the dark lobbies and corridors (with slit-like or oddly tinted windows interfering with your view) feeling like you've been conscripted as an extra in a film noir (emphasis on noir). Adding to this impression are the ghostly, barely perceptible images of past Guthrie performances, imprinted on the surrounding walls. (An appraisal of the three performing spaces themselves will have to await the drama critics. The first regular performances begin July 15.)

Apropos Nouvel, I remember an interview I had with Tom Krens in his office more than three years ago, when he proudly showed me a model of the now abandoned Guggenheim Rio project, also designed by that architect. Like the Guthrie, the Rio design featured a prominent silo-shaped structure. But Krens wasn't satisfied, because its skin was completely opaque: "I have to tell Jean that I need more transparency here," he told me.

In the touchy dance between architect and client, sometimes the client must lead.

Lloyd Webber’s "De Soto" is No Star Vehicle

2006-07-05T10:21:00.000-04:00

In its press release announcing its Nov. 8 sale of Picasso’s 1903 “Angel Fernández de Soto,” Christie’s calls the work “arguably [emphasis added] one of the most important of this period in the artist’s oeuvre.”

So let’s argue!

The painting in question is the artist's distorted depiction of his wild and dissipated close friend. In a drawing of the same notorious libertine, Picasso portrayed him more pornographically: A naked prostitute raises de Soto's penis in one hand and a champagne glass in the other. Cheers!

Before Andrew Lloyd Webber’s purchase of the more decorous portrait at Sotheby’s in 1995, the auction house made sure everyone knew what it had going for it: rarity (one of only a handful of blue-period pictures of any importance not owned by a museum), a colorful subject (complete with absinthe and pipe) and prestigious provenance (star lot from the collection assembled by the late Donald and Jean Stralem---she, the scion of the legendary Robert Lehman art-collecting dynasty).

Not mentioned was the only strike against it, which proved no deterrent to the bidding: It’s not a great picture. That’s not just my own verdict. At the time of that sale, I solicited opinions from world-renowned experts:

In deciding which works to include in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark l980 Picasso retrospective, William Rubin, then the museum’s director of painting and sculpture, and Dominique Bozo, then curator-in-charge of the Musée Picasso, Paris, deemed the painting of insufficient quality to be included in their 1,000-work show. Experts whom I interviewed right after the 1995 sale (before they knew the identity of the famous buyer) called the portrait “just okay,” “not such a great painting,” “too exaggerated” and “caricature-ish.”

Even William Lieberman, then chairman of the department of 20th-century art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, who (as a close friend of the Stralems) had long been intimately familiar with the painting, said that although he admired it, it did not “tell you about the anguish that is in most of Picasso’s paintings of that period.”

Auctioneers, trying to get the best price for consignors, have to try to make buyers believe that their goods are the best things since the “Mona Lisa.” But when collectors, dealers and auction houses blur distinctions of artistic quality, they not only distort the market; they also cloud the public’s understanding of art.

That’s what also happened with the “wish-you-were-Vermeer”---the $30-million "A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals," which was newly authenticated before it was auctioned by Sotheby’s two years ago. Two Vermeer authorities, whom I consulted after the sale but did not wish to be identified, opined that it doesn’t belong in the master’s canon. To my mind, that gawky girl, with her dull eyes, vacuous expression, slumped posture and stiff, clumsily rendered arms and fingers, could only be Vermeer on a bad day. Or not.

As for the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation's Picasso, it owes its stature not to its high quality but to overheated hype and the cachet of its celebrity buyer, whose art collection had previously consisted largely of Victorian pictures---the lush, saccharine productions that moderns like Picasso energetically rebelled against. Thanks to the hit musical composer's $29.1-million purchase of “de Soto” (now estimated by the auction house to bring $40-$60 million), it rocketed up the charts to become one of the artist’s best-known works.

Lloyd Webber recently suggested to Bloomberg that his sale announcement would be "the biggest news in the art market in 30 years." Why does it matter if someone actually falls for such hype? After all, the proceeds will reportedly go to a good cause---the education of young performers. The problem is that feverish prices pose a threat to the longterm health of the art market. The acquisition of lesser works for exorbitant amounts is the art trade’s version of “irrational exuberance.” It can only set the stage for the next correction.

Lee Takes the Third

2006-07-03T10:54:00.000-04:00

This is the first time I've reneged on a promise to my gentle readers: After drafting my post (which I promised you for today) on the upcoming sale of Andrew Lloyd Webber's blue-period Picasso, I realized it might work as a newspaper opinion piece (for which I actually get paid). So please be patient. Like many of you, your conscientious commentator is going to take July 3rd and 4th as a long holiday weekend!

HAPPY JULY 4TH!!!

Awash in Washington

2006-07-01T22:15:00.000-04:00

Right again, art-lings! I was in Washington, D.C., for the openings of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, now collectively known as the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. George Washington himself, fetchingly arrayed in his Landsdowne Portrait ensemble, was there to entertain the kiddies while Martha looked on approvingly.

The day before the July 1 public opening, directors Elizabeth Broun (SAAM) and Marc Pachter (NPG) proudly showed me around their spiffed-up digs, while a few blocks away on the Mall, the National Archives was doing round-the-clock pumping and dehumidifying, trying to dry out from last week's serious flooding, due to the torrential rains. (The documents, they say, were not damaged.) Also closed for part of the week were the Natural History Museum, the American History Museum and the National Gallery of Art. The IRS was particularly hard hit, to the dismay of its many fans.

Can't write here about my secret Washington mission, because I've got to save it for the WSJ. But I can tell you what I WILL be entertaining you with!

COMING MONDAY: ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER'S BLUE PERIOD.

Where in the World is Lee Going?

2006-06-29T09:37:00.000-04:00

Last time it was a museum that named its new wing for a corporation. This time it's two government museums sharing a renovated building that has been renamed for a private foundation.

Heavens to Betsy (Broun), what is this museum-world coming to?

NY Times Department of Corrections

2006-06-28T11:37:00.000-04:00

Still no action by the NY Times' corrections gremlins on the gaffe in Carol Vogel's Friday piece.

Nor has anyone yet corrected Kathryn Shattuck's assertion on Sunday that the second most-expensive artwork ever sold, after Klimt's $135-million "Adele Block-Bauer I," was Picasso's $95.2-million "Dora Maar au Chat."

How quickly we forget Picasso's $104.2-million "Garçon à la Pipe," which sold in 2004. This painting didn't fit conveniently into Shattuck's thesis, because the subject was decidedly not the artist's mistress.

But the more serious, if subtle, Shattuck gaffe is saying that $135 million is "a record price for any painting." We don't know what other paintings may have sold privately for more. The Klimt is a notable exception to the general rule that the only art prices the public knows about are auction prices. For the same reason, we can't even say that Picasso's boy is the second most pricey picture ever sold. We can only talk about "record auction prices," not "record prices."

It seems like nobody corrects obvious Times errors, unless an outsider instructs them to (and sometimes not even then). Guess I'll have to e-mail this item to nytnews@nytimes.com. Let's see if anything happens!

How Art Made the Mini-Series

2006-06-28T10:50:00.000-04:00

PBS's latest art-edutainment series, How Art Made the World, got off to a shaky start Monday by choosing as guest expert someone with little knowledge of art but no reluctance to pontificate about it: A neuroscientist demonstrated his ability to numb our brains with "duh"-inspiring insights, then woke us up by declaring realistic art to be "boring."

V.S. Ramachandran, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, conceded that until 10 years ago, he had "no interest in art" but he nevertheless seemed convinced that he had come up with a brilliant new insight when he hypothesized that prehistoric Venus figures have exaggeratedly large breasts and buttocks because men find those features attractive. An expert in the behavior of baby seagulls (which he analogizes to the behavior of artists), he really should get out more---to museums.

This week's first installment in the five-part series, about representations of the human body, said nothing cogent about "How Art Made the World" (admittedly a catchy title), but instead argued for the joint influence of human "hardwiring" and cultural differences on artistic styles: "Culture," we are told, "is king." (Double-"duh") Too often, the silent eloquence of masterpieces is upstaged by clever, hyperactive video gimmickry, to make the art more "interesting."

The series' peripatetic host, Nigel Spivey, a lecturer on classical art and archaeology at Cambridge University, is engaging and attractive, with a body type more stylistically suited to the svelte images in Egyptian relief (for which he modeled, in a digitally altered pose) than to the buff ancient Greek wannabes in the show's extended live beefcake segment (ludicrously accompanied by the Noel Coward song, "Mad About the Boy").

Heterosexual male viewers must have been disappointed that there was no equal-time cheesecake segment to exhibit living embodiments of the prehistoric Venus ideal. Maybe next week.

For me, the series worked best as a travelogue: It made me long to visit Egypt! And I'm looking forward to revisiting Altamira on the tube next week. They will also be discussing Lascaux. Did they have better luck getting access to the original Lascaux cave than I did?

Tomorrow: Critique of How Art Made the World; or, Why Not Serve Cheesecake With Your Beefcake?

2006-06-27T20:54:00.000-04:00

An Art-Law Blog Worth Citing

2006-06-27T20:41:00.000-04:00

CultureGrrl is no lawyer, but I'm the daughter of one, which perhaps explains my keen interest in art law and court cases. So I was happy to stumble recently upon The Art Law Blog by attorney Donn Zaretsky, which chronicles news in the field.

Credit where credit is due: That's where I first learned of Berry-Hill's real estate listing.

Berry-Hill Updates

2006-06-27T20:26:00.000-04:00

As of tonight, the Berry-Hill Galleries' premises are still listed on the web by Stribling & Associates, with one change: the June 15 deadline for bids has been deleted. If the gallery is not offering its real estate for sale, as James Berry Hill assured me, why hasn't it pulled (instead of merely edited) this listing?

The June 23 Financial Times offers this update on the gallery's financial situation, noting that Aug. 2 is a crucial date in determining its future.

Berry-Hill Premises: On and Off the Market?

2006-06-27T11:32:00.000-04:00

In what it called "a court supervised sale," Stribling & Associates recently offered the East 70th Street premises of Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, for $20 million, with bids due June 15.

Linda Melnick, vice president at Stribling, told me yesterday that the auction had been postponed (with a new date to be set), "to give people more time to do due diligence." The offering price, she said, would remain the same.

But James Berry Hill, one of the gallery's directors, told me a couple of hours later that "we've cancelled the auction. The property is not for sale." Best known for selling blue-chip American art, Berry-Hill intends to continue doing business at its current location, he asserted. But at this writing, the property is still being offered on Stribling's website.

The gallery filed for bankruptcy in December, in the wake of lawsuits from creditors and allegations of biding irregularities at an auction at Christie's on May 19, 2005.

James Berry Hill, in a phone interview, ominously warned me that much that has been written about his gallery is "inaccurate," and that if I repeated such falsehoods, I would "join the group and suffer the consequences. Our counsel will be aggressive in going after those who have mistaken the case....Write whatever you want, at your peril."

He added that his gallery is settling claims against it "so that nobody is harmed," but he refused to discuss the details or to say anything about what he felt were inaccuracies in other published accounts .

CultureGrrl pointed out, towards the end of the interview, that although the dealer was threatening me with a libel suit, he was refusing to discuss what was accurate and what was not.

Where's Floyd Abrams when I need him? Wait a minute: Abrams, Berry Hill and CultureGrrl all went to Cornell University as undergrads. Maybe we should hold a reunion!

Back to the Caves

2006-06-26T16:21:00.000-04:00

Attention all you cave-art fans (and CultureGrrl knows you're out there, because so many of you e-mailed me for travel tips about Dordogne, after I wrote about Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac):

Check your local listings for How Art Made the World, a PBS series airing five consecutive Mondays, starting tonight (10 p.m. on Channel 13 in New York City). Hosted by art historian and University of Cambridge lecturer Nigel Spivey, the series "takes viewers on a quest to comprehend mankind's unique capacity to understand and explain the world through artistic symbols."

Spanning 100,000 years and five continents, it explores prehistoric art in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux, Native-American and African rock paintings, Egyptian and Greek antiquities, and "the pop culture and advertising imagery that bombards us in the digital age."

Today's installment examines "the search for, and obsession with, the body-beautiful." I haven't seen any of the series yet, so we'll watch it together.

Next Monday: the episode eagerly awaited by all you spelunkers!

Munitz: Dicey From the Get-Go

2006-06-26T13:04:00.000-04:00

As I wrote in Art in America magazine, shortly after Barry Munitz was named to the presidency of the J. Paul Getty Trust, his problematic business track record should have raised a bright red flag for the Getty's board, but, surprisingly, didn't. Here's part of what I published, back in May 1998:

Munitz was among those named in charges filed by the Treasury Department's Office of Thrift Supervision in connection with the 1988 failure of the United Savings Association of Texas. It was "one of the largest [savings and loans] collapses in U.S. history," according to the Houston Post....Munitz was also named in a 1991 Maxxam shareholder lawsuit alleging mismanagement of a real-estate development project and improper exchanges of real estate and securities. That suit was settled...with payments totaling about $25 million.

When I interviewed Munitz in 1998, shortly after the opening of the Trust's new Los Angeles campus, he freely admitted that "whatever happened" at United Savings and Maxxam (a Houston-based holding company for corporate raider Charles Hurwitz), "I was in the middle of it." But he denied any wrongdoing.

Now we know what should have been suspected even back then: The Getty should have thought twice about entrusting the Trust to Munitz.

AAMD: A Toothless Watchdog

2006-06-26T09:33:00.000-04:00

The Association of Art Museum Directors has quietly posted a new position position paper on its website: Good Governance and Non-Profit Integrity.

It appears to be a response to widespread concern over problematic practices such as those thought to have led to the Feb. 9 forced resignation of Barry Munitz from the presidency of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Munitz resigned while being investigated by the California attorney general's office for possible improper use of the Getty's funds and for a questionable 2002 real estate deal between the Getty and arts patron-collector Eli Broad, a Munitz friend.

Here are some excerpts from AAMD's embarrassingly lame response to urgent questions about museums' governance and integrity:

Sound judgment and an unwavering commitment to the essential principles of art museums are fundamental characteristics demanded of every board member.

As museums and the contexts in which they operate become increasingly complex, it is ever more imperative that museum leaders on the Board and staff continue to address all...pressing matters of governance and integrity with frankness and transparency.

Every AAMD member institution is encouraged to create and review regularly its policy in such areas as:
• Collections Management;
• Personnel;
• Ethics;
• Finance and Investment.

The mission of all art museums is to serve the public through art and education. Fulfillment of this mission is the primary goal of every AAMD member and the touchstone by which all decisions are made concerning museum programs and operations.

Museum directors are responsible to their trustees, staff, donors and community for ensuring that museums meet the highest standards of professional and ethical integrity.

Who could argue? And who could derive any meaningful guidance from this? Perhaps there should, intead, have been a detailed list of what museums and their boards should NOT do---"worst" practices, instead of best practices. But this membership organization rarely says anything that might tie the hands of its membership.

These three pages of laughably vague pronouncements will do nothing to assure government regulators or the public that museums and their boards can be counted upon to be rigorously self-policing. It's time for AAMD to reexamine its own mission, and decide whether it's going to be more than a purveyor of platitudes.

Coming Next: Why the Getty should have known from the start that Munitz could be trouble.

Coming Monday---AAMD: A Toothless Watchdog...Munitz: Dicey From the Get-Go

2006-06-25T23:34:00.000-04:00

Le Cirque's Quirks

2006-06-24T14:22:00.000-04:00

If you've been reading CultureGrrl for a long time (well, at least since the beginning of this month), you may remember that I dissed the dishes at Sirio Maccioni's latest watering hole in my post, Le Cirque: All Buzz, No Honey, a mournful account of the Getty's press breakfast.

Now veteran foodie Raymond Sokolov, my long-time editor at the Wall Street Journal's "Leisure & Arts" page (before Eric Gibson took over), explains "why New York's newly updated Le Cirque is behind the culinary times."

In today's WSJ (which allows no weblinks because it's subscribers-only), Ray observes: "There are plenty of people who will continue to believe they are in the best restaurant in New York, even though they are really extras at the circus."

In the same review, he offers extensive praise for another new restaurant in New York, Del Posto. But you'd never know it from the headline, which alludes only to the better known, less accomplished establishment.

Speaking of "Posto," I need to stop posting for a few minutes, and start writing a piece for the aforementioned "L & A" page, for the aforementioned Eric.

We All Make Mistakes---Part II

2006-06-24T13:05:00.000-04:00

On to the second Friday NY Times blooper. (Scroll down to Part I, if you missed the first.)

In her Inside Art report on the National Gallery's upcoming Jasper Johns show, Carol Vogel said that curator Jeffrey Weiss "estimated insurance costs for the show at about $1 billion."

The National Gallery must be one rich museum!

Perhaps she (and Weiss) meant that the insured value of the works in the show is about $1 billion, which is astronomical enough. The actual cost of the insurance must be a small fraction of that. At least we hope so.

The problem is that the eyes of arts editors often glaze over when it comes to mundane financial matters. I know this from my own experience in laboring to explain some of my business-related reportage to culture-savvy editors.

And art writers themselves sometimes don't realize that seemingly small nuances (i.e., "insurance costs" vs. "insured value") mean a lot. One of my own biggest bloopers as a newly minted reporter was saying that collectors could deduct the full fair market value of donated art from their "taxes," when it should have been from their "taxable income." A tax credit (deducted from taxes) is worth a whole lot more than a tax deduction (deducted from taxable income).

Have I finally gotten that right?!? Writing a journalistic blog without an editor is like walking a tightrope without a net!

We All Make Mistakes---Part I

2006-06-24T11:40:00.000-04:00

I've made my share of mistakes in preparing articles. My editors almost always catch them. (I've been fortunate to work with highly intelligent, exhaustively knowledgeable taskmasters: Eric Gibson of the Wall Street Journal and Elizabeth Baker of Art in America, foremost among them.)

So where were the New York Times editors when Roberta Smith, an art critic for whom I have the highest admiration, filed the following, excerpted from one uncharacteristically muddled paragraph in yesterday's review of the "Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece":

His [Raphael's] career was short and driven. The Colonna altarpiece, one of the last he painted, is a telling transitional work....Commissioned by the Franciscan convent of St. Anthony of Padua in Perugia, Raphael's birthplace, it was completed when he was barely 21."

"One of the last he painted...when he was barely 21"??? Flag on the play. That certainly stopped me short when I read it. So today, we have this correction in the Times:

It was one of Raphael's earliest altarpieces, not one of his last. The review also misidentified his birthplace in Italy. It was Urbino, not Perugia.

That settles that. But there's still no penalty on the play of another Times art writer, whose blooper yesterday should have aroused the enervated editors.

More on that soon.

Italy Ups the Stakes

2006-06-23T13:07:00.000-04:00

Not mentioned in the NY Times coverage of the tentative accord between the Getty Trust and Italian authorities (but mentioned by the LA Times and by ANSA, the Italian news agency) is the fact that the Italians, during the latest round of negotiations, added 33 more objects to the list of 52 that they were seeking. According to ANSA, these included the "Athlete of Lysippos," presumably the famous 4th-century B.C. "Getty bronze," which the museum catalogues as "perhaps by a pupil of Lysippos."

The ANSA piece was sent to me by the Italian Ministry of Culture, whose press officer, Tiziana Benini, vouched for its accuracy. She also said that she did not expect a final agreement to be reached until September.

As for the fate of Marion True, Benini said this still rests in the hands of the judge, notwithstanding any agreement between the Getty and the Culture Ministry.

By the way, if you wanted to see a photo of the dirt-encrusted Getty Griffins, you didn't have to have been in Italian court; all you have to do is pick up a copy of Peter Watson's book, "The Medici Conspiracy."

No wonder Getty Museum director Michael Brand had told me that the presention of the dirty-griffins photo at the True's trial "did not come as a surprise." It shouldn't have come as a surprise to me, either!

Ouroussoff Uses Bully Pulpit to Bully Riley

2006-06-22T15:31:00.000-04:00

Will someone please pull Nicolai Ouroussoff off Terence Riley? This feud is getting tiresome.

In praising the Museum of Modern Art's appointment of Barry Bergdoll as its new chief curator of architecture and design, the NY Times' architecture critic just couldn't resist using his bully pulpit to pummel Terry one more time.

Saying that MoMA's architecture and design department had become "listless" and "sadly adrift," with "faltering energy" (okay, we get it), Ouroussoff criticized two of the department's most recent shows, "New Architecture in Spain" and "Safe: Design Takes on Risk" (both very favorably reviewed elsewhere), as "largely forgettable." Even this tsk-tsking Timesman had previously found things to praise in reviewing those shows. (And he's too young to be THAT forgetful!)

Riley, meanwhile, is having his moment in the sun as head of the Miami Art Museum. He will "oversee the planning and development of a new state-of-the-art Museum Park facility and sculpture garden on Biscayne Bay," with a little help from a recently passed $100-million bond issue, according to the museum's January announcement of his appointment.

Curator to director---that's a step up...and also far enough down the coast from the Times' hegemony so that Ouroussoff's wild punches can no longer connect.

BlogBack: Walker Tweaks "Art on Call"

2006-06-22T11:08:00.000-04:00

This is a "BlogBack" first! The Walker Art Center has responded to my blog on its blog.

Regarding CultureGrrl's critique of "Art on Call," the Walker's New Media Initiatives blogger, Nate Schroeder, offered these updates:

We’ve just recently installed a nifty cellphone signal repeater in the space deepest in the galleries that previously got terrible reception---right next to the Burnet gallery. It’s possible her [CultureGrrl's] carrier simply doesn’t benefit from the frequencies we’re repeating (it doesn’t cover them all) but I’m hopeful it was just a matter of timing and the repeater hadn’t kicked on.

As for her other comments, I think some of them will be addressed in the near(ish) future as we start incorporating feedback into the menu prompts. For instance, many people don’t realize you can interrupt the initial prompt by typing in the 4-digit code, effectively skipping right to the artwork you’re looking at. Hopefully that will take some of the hassle out of repeated calls if you can just hit redial, wait for the answer, and then just punch in the code. Much faster.

One thing I didn't mention in my previous post: Since I'm habitually audioguide-averse, I'm more apt to do a spur-of-the-moment dial-up on my cell phone than I am to pick up and carry around a museum-provided device.

Outtakes from the Whitney Hearing---Part II

2006-06-22T10:03:00.000-04:00

At Tuesday's public hearing on its expansion plans, the Whitney Museum submitted these supportive comments from Hamilton Smith, who was Marcel Breuer's associate architect for the museum's 1966 building:

[Renzo] Piano's design concept neither engulfs nor overshadows the original Breuer Building. Equally important, the main element of the expansion---five gallery floors set back behind the preserved contributing brownstones---creates an expressive interplay between the three elements: original 1966, now proposed, and the historic.

...Original and new contruction do not have contact, are separated by skylit open space and are connected by glazed bridges at each level. This concept comes across to me as an unusually sensitive solution.

...The exterior finish for the new gallery wing is proposed to be matte-finished, stainless-steel alloy panels, affording a quality of relative lightness, rather than of masonry weight. This too comes across to me as sensitive response, being in contrast to the original Whitney's granite facing and the old brownstone of the rowhouses.

You can count on Piano to be sensitive and tasteful (and, lately, to include a plaza---no, make that "piazza"---as an essential part of any museum expansion). But am I parochial in thinking that a museum known for displaying edgy American art might have sought to engage an edgy American architectural firm? Where are Diller+Scofidio (the subjects of a 2003 Whitney retrospective) when we need them? (at the Boston ICA, actually) Then again, if things got too audaciously inventive on Madison Avenue, imagine what the neighbors would say!

The Getty Strikes a Deal

2006-06-21T19:09:00.000-04:00

This just in from the J. Paul Getty Trust's press office---a joint statement announcing a tentative agreement with the Italian Ministry of Culture, forged today in Rome:

The Italian government will receive from the Getty a number of very significant objects, including several masterpieces. In return, as a sign of fruitful dialogue and collaboration among the parties, Italy will provide loans of objects of comparable visual beauty and historical importance.

The agreement, however, is aimed at far more: the parties acknowledged a shared commitment to the exchange and increase of knowledge, and look forward to extensive future collaboration, including joint exhibitions which will maximize the potential of the newly-renovated Getty Villa, the only art museum in the United States dedicated to the art and culture of ancient Italy and Greece.

The parties expect to conclude a final agreement, which will include mutual collaboration, research and the exchange of important antiquities, in the early summer.

"The final agreement must be developed and it will require the approval of the board of trustees," according to Ron Hartwig, the Getty's vice president for communications, who added that there would be "no further comment at this time."

Can Marion True go home now?

Outtakes from Yesterday's Whitney Hearing---Part I

2006-06-21T12:19:00.000-04:00

As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, when I covered city approval hearings for the Museum of Modern Art's expansion project: "It is impossible to put a spade in the ground here without hitting bedrock resistance from neighbors and various advisory groups seeking to influence those who must approve the project."

So it was yesterday at the Board of Standards and Appeals' hearing on the Whitney Museum's proposed Renzo Piano-designed expansion. Here are some outtakes from the outraged:

Nowhere in this city has an institution put up an equivalent of an 18-story, metal-clad, almost windowless structure with a 32-foot-high permanent crane [an art hoist] in a residential landmarked area.---Coalition of Concerned Whitney Neighbors, which submitted "over 4,000 signatures opposing this oversized extension."

A 37-foot-high "piazza"...equals the height of the first two floors of the [Whitney's exisiting] Breuer building---the entrance floor and the gallery floor above it. If the "piazza's" height were halved, turning it into a normal museum entrance hall, and the windowless areas above were located underground, it might be possible to reduce the height of the addition to that of the historic brownstones.---Defenders of the Historic Upper East Side.

Our primary concern is the combination of the height and bulkiness of the proposed tower. Where the Breuer building is currently at a respectful scale, this new enlargement doubles that height in a very bulky fashion. I do not doubt that the architect is world famous, but no pedigree or awards can disguise what it is---a tall, lifeless rectangle protruding into the skyline,...[which] will be a significant eyesore for residents of the Carlyle.---Hotel Carlyle Owners Corporation.

For its part, the Whitney submitted letters of support from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Hamilton Smith, who was Marcel Breuer's associate architect on the 1966 Whitney building.

Smith's comments to come.

Let Your Fingers Do the Walking at the Walker

2006-06-21T11:38:00.000-04:00

I've been curious (if dubious) about the newfangled museum audioguides that can be accessed through one's own cell phone. On my recent visit to the always interesting and provocative Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, I finally dialed-a-painting from the museum's own version of the Yellow Pages (actually printed on a yellow page), called "Art on Call." You call the main number for the service, enter a four-digit code for your chosen work, then listen to the commentary.

It was a mixed experience: I had recently talked to Ellsworth Kelly in person, at the opening of the expanded High Museum in Atlanta, so I decided to beam up his "Red Yellow Blue III." A Walker curator revealed a little-known aspect of Kelly's oeuvre: "He takes an enormous amount of photographs"---open barn doors, for example. His paintings, often vibrant monochrome panels, are "always informed by something real, something that is seen," such as the photographic images, the curator confided.

Interesting insights, but even though 100 seconds doesn't sound like a long time to stand in front of a painting, I felt itchy to move on before the glitchy narration had finished---glitchy because my cell phone, which usually has good reception, kept cutting out. There's still something to be said for in-house random-access guides that always(?) work. The phone-based information ought, perhaps, to be layered---a short introduction, with the option to access other levels of information about a work, by pressing another number.

Another serious drawback to this wireless wisdom is the necessity to keep dialing up, every time that you want to access another work. Once the frequent use of cell phones is permitted in the galleries, the temptation to make and answer calls to people, not just paintings, becomes harder to resist.

Meanwhile, you too can call upon "Art on Call": Just go to this website, then click on what you want to hear. In many cases, the commentary is by the artists themselves. If you click on the thumbnail of a work, you get a larger image, more detailed information, and thumbnails of related works in the collection.

Cool.

Restitution Resolutions---Cashing in on Artistic Assets

2006-06-20T17:54:00.000-04:00

Nazi victims or their heirs who have been fortunate enough to receive restitution of expropriated artworks get justifiably testy if anyone suggests that they consider anything but their own financial self-interest is determining the disposition of these works. After all, they are the rightful owners; no one else has any right to tell them what to do with privately owned art.

As a practical matter, this has sometimes meant that masterpieces previously in the public domain are sold into the private domain, to the highest bidder.

At least this time, with the sale of Klimt's "Adele Block-Bauer I," reportedly for $135 million, the former Nazi loot will be kept permanently on public view at the Neue Galerie in New York.

But even the lawyer who forged the heirs' legal victory, Randol Schoenberg, has publicly expressed some regret that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (which is currently displaying the iconic Klimt, along with four other works by the same artist that were returned to the same heirs) was unable to swing a deal to buy all five paintings. LACMA, trying to scrape together a serious offer, could not compete with the ready fortune of cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder, president of the Neue Galerie and its chief benefactor.

A private charity, not a public museum like LACMA, the Neue Galerie is also "interested" in acquiring the other four Klimts, according to its director, Renée Price, who would not say more about possible purchase discussions. The four will be displayed at the Neue Galerie, along with its new acquisition, July 13 to Sept 18.

The famous gold-ground portrait will be bear a label saying that it was "made available in part through the generosity of the heirs." Price told me that this did not mean it was a partial purchase and a partial gift to the Neue Galerie, as this language would seem to indicate. In this case, "generosity" merely means that the heirs decided to forego possible higher offers, in order to make sure the work remained on public display, Price explained.

"Generous" to settle for a mere $135 million---far more than any artwork has ever fetched at auction? We should all get the chance to be so altruistic!

Coming Later Today: My Take on the Klimt

2006-06-20T11:42:00.000-04:00

True Liberation?

2006-06-20T11:21:00.000-04:00

In my piece Hot Pots and Potshots, published in the April 2006 "Front Page" section of Art in America magazine, I noted that "a senior Getty official, requesting anonymity, hoped these negotiations [between Italian cultural officials and the Getty, over repatriation of antiquities] would have a 'positive impact' on [former antiquities curator Marion] True's legal woes, in addition to resolving the ownership status of disputed objects."

Today's NY Times seems to indicate that True, on trial for trafficking in looted objects, might just get a break:

On Monday [Italian Culture Minister Francesco] Rutelli seemed to suggest that prosecutors would be willing to take cooperation by the Getty into account in pressing [or not pressing?] their case against Ms. True.

A collective sigh of relief may soon be heard from curators across the land.

From the Mouths of Babes

2006-06-20T10:34:00.000-04:00

Reacting to Lee's Leon-teasing post of yesterday, my 22-year-old daughter Joyce has just one word:

AGE-ISM!!!

Aren't daughters a mother's worst critics?!?

By the way, Neyfakh has followed up with another piece, in today's NY Sun, revealing that in 1995, when Grace Glueck had informed her editors at the NY Times of her appointment to the Clark Art Institute's board of trustees, "the editors at the time...decided the situation did not pose a problem,...as long as Ms. Glueck did not write about the Clark."

Different Times, different standards (as museum officials like to say, when talking about the antiquities mess).

The Getty's Secret Census of Its Antiquities Trove

2006-06-19T18:32:00.000-04:00

I recently suggested that museums should consider undertaking detailed reviews of their antiquities holdings, to identify and publish lists of works with murky provenance. Well, it looks like the Getty took care of the first half---identify---but forgot the second half---publish.

An article in yesterday's LA Times reported that the Getty Trust's "internal review" of its collection "found that 350 Greek, Roman and Etruscan artifacts in its museum's prized antiquities collection were purchased from dealers identified by foreign authorities as being suspected or convicted of dealing in looted artifacts."

But despite Michael Brand's assertions that his ascendancy to the directorship of the museum will be distinguished by a new transparency, the museum has thus far refused to discuss the review, let alone release any of its findings.

Ron Hartwig, vice president for communications, told me today that it would "not help to go into detail" about which works had dicey histories, when the museum is "in sensitive discussions with the Italians."

But those discussions, resuming this week in Rome, just got a lot more sensitive, when Maurizio Fiorilli, lead negotiator for the Italian Ministry of Culture, complained that he had not been told about the new findings, according to the the LA Times' account.

"We want to be open, transparent and communicative about these issues," Hartwig asserted. In that case, the museum had better start telling its own story in a press release, instead of letting the well-connected LA Times do it in an exposé.

"F-111" Flies Again

2006-06-19T11:52:00.000-04:00

Having seen my lament that James Rosenquist's iconic "F-111" disappeared into storage after mega-MoMA's inaugural exhibition, curator Ann Temkin alerted me that the magnum opus is going back on display this week, in a space adjacent to "Artist's Choice: Herzog & de Meuron, Perception Restrained"---a show that has its press preview tomorrow and opens to the public on Wednesday.

Well, that's a start. Now what about Ellsworth Kelly’s “Colors for a Large Wall” and Richard Serra’s “Intersection II”? I know that the latter will be featured in Serra's upcoming retrospective, but I'm talking about long-term, rather than temporary, display for these major (if unwieldy) MoMA-owned masterpieces.

Oh, and I previously forgot to mention---let's not cut out one of Matisse's most celebrated cutouts, the Olympic-sized "Swimming Pool."

NY Sun's Glueck-Raker Is a Harvard Undergrad

2006-06-19T10:09:00.000-04:00

I knew that yesterday was a slow news day at the NY Sun, but apparently they couldn't rustle up enough staff reporters either.

Leon Neyfakh, who wrote today's piece on Grace Glueck's resignation from the board of the Clark Art Institute, is a Harvard undergrad lad---a summer intern at the paper. I figured that most of the Glueck-hounds were not her equals, but this is ridiculous!

"Sorry the article wasn't any more interesting. Few people were around on Sunday, and I didn't have much room." Leon wrote me (turning Crimson, no doubt), after I told him I had discovered his greenhorn status by reading the author ID for his June 19 NY Observer book review. (Those Harvard boys sure do know how to play the field!)

His Glueck piece (for which he had tried to interview me on Fathers Day) was a rehash of what's already been written, except for a quote from Sam Sifton, NY Times culture editor, who would not comment on the Glueck kerfuffle, other than to say he was "happy to work with her."

CultureGrrl stated yesterday that she did not want to mudwrestle with fellow reporters. But she'd love to get down and dirty with a Harvard undergrad!

Glueck Has Legs

2006-06-18T23:09:00.000-04:00

It must be a slow news day at the New York Sun, because their reporter, Leon Neyfakh, e-mailed me today, Fathers Day, at 1:30 p.m., asking to interview me that same afternoon about Grace Glueck's resignation from the Clark Art Institute. He said his story will run tomorrow (Monday).

My family had a blissfully computerless swimming-and-barbecue celebration, and I only just now had the amusement of seeing this reporter-interviews-reporter proposal in my inbox.

Lee could sully Leon's notebook with lots of reportorial conflict-of-interest dirt more mucky than Glueck's much publicized infractions, but I'm not in the habit of mudwrestling with colleagues. I prefer to beat those on my beat the old-fashioned way---through hardhitting, competitive journalism.

As for Glueck, I still feel that her detractors should give credit where credit is due.

The Glueck Muck

2006-06-17T11:26:00.000-04:00

There's been so much misinterpretation, in and out of the blogosphere, of my appreciation of Grace Glueck, that I want to reemphasize what I explicitly stated in my original post: Her joining the Clark Art Institute's board of trustees was, as I have already said, inappropriate. I firmly believe that journalists must eschew even the appearance of conflict of interest, if they are to maintain their credibility.

But I did (and still do) feel that the rakers of muck are leaving out an important part of the story: It appears, in this instance, that Glueck's ill-advised affiliation did not cause any actual slant in NY Times arts coverage. What's more, her distinguished, pioneering career as an investigative art journalist (which some of the bloggers are probably too young to remember) deserves mention in any discussion of her professional track record.

That's not to excuse what she did. It's just to put it in proper perspective.

Private Prehistory, American Style

2006-06-16T13:28:00.000-04:00

A Midwestern preservationist who works in this country to protect historic burial sites, including Native American mounds, e-mailed an interesting response to CultureGrrl's Private Prehistory piece (about prehistoric caves on private property in France), which I posted yesterday:

Your blog regarding landowners who keep the location of archeological sites "under wraps" hits home, since I know there are many sites that should be protected but are under- or not reported [in the U.S.].

Getting people excited about what we call "historic preservation" in the States has always been a hard sell. It's not a problem in Europe, where people actually live and work in old structures.

My correspondent declined to be identified for publication, so has not to jeopardize relations with private landowners.

The Director as Curator

2006-06-16T12:48:00.000-04:00

An article in yesterday's Bloomberg about Tate director Nicholas Serota's curatorial stint at his own museum should be required reading for burned-out directors who signed up for museum work in order to have a close relationship to art, but wound up having a closer relationship to megabucks donors, accountants and architects. After curating a Howard Hodgkin retrospective, Serota told Bloomberg:

For me, the pleasure of curating a show is to get back into the studio and into the galleries -- to be working with physical objects and arranging them in space and trying to make sense out of them.

I think it's essential that people working in museums should do that from time to time. Of course, in doing it, I also begin to understand how difficult it is to make an exhibition at the Tate, and the problems about getting the lighting right, and how to ensure that an institution of this kind works smoothly -- not just for me, but for everyone who works here.

I hereby propose that all museum directors be granted regular sabbaticals to get back in touch with what got them into this business in the first place---their passion for art. As I wrote in my October 2004 Art in America review of the book, "Whose Muse?" (which I therein retitled, "Six [Museum] Directors Kvetching"):

One begins to pity these beset directors, whose thorny administrative duties have so distanced them from their early affinity for scholarly research and hands-on curatorship.

A museum director ought to have a strong art-historical background. But then he or she should also be given the chance to use it.

Art Journalist Grace Glueck Gets Bum Rap

2006-06-16T10:54:00.000-04:00

I am a very strict constructionist when it comes to journalistic ethics: I pick up the tab for covering stories, even when no publication is paying, and I agonize about the few artworks on my walls, because I feel that if I wrote anything about those artists, it would be a conflict of interest.

I knew many years ago about NY Times writer Grace Glueck's membership on the board of the Clark Art Institute, and it did bother me. Ever since I first saw her name on that list, I watched to see if she ever wrote about the Clark. To my knowledge, she didn't. It was a conflict, yes, but a far less serious one than the Times' former publisher being on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for so many years.

The blogger-created public "scandal" over Glueck's lapse, which has just resulted in her resignation from the Clark, doesn't give even a hint of the other side of the story: the fact that her board membership, while inappropriate, caused no discernible slant in Times coverage.

But more importantly, Glueck's record as an art journalist was not merely distinguished, but positively trail-blazing.

Before Glueck, there were art critics, not art journalists. She had the art-reporting beat pretty much to herself when I started out, and she was a brilliant role model. (Speaking of conflicts of interest, I must hasten to add that I admired from afar; I have had absolutely no personal, or even professional, relationship with her.) She was accurate, fair and exhaustive. And I was jealous.

Glueck later turned to art criticism and left the reporting to others. Now the visual-arts beat is teeming with journalists of varying degrees of professionalism. But Grace Glueck, who applied the techniques of political investigative journalism to the little-examined artworld, was mother of us all.

Miss-identification

2006-06-15T16:03:00.000-04:00

My apologies to Dottie Cannon, Griddle Griswold's pancake partner, who has politely informed me that she is not Miss Black Minnesota, as the director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts had identified her at the press preview for the museum's new wing. She is, in fact, Miss Minnesota USA---a contestant in the recent Miss USA pageant.

CultureGrrl deeply regrets the error. I did not do an appropriate job of fact-checking. But having now visited the Miss USA website, I've learned that although Cannon did not place in the top 15, she WAS chosen by her fellow contestants as Miss Congeniality---"the most congenial, charismatic and inspirational participant."

Sandra Bullock, please take note.

I also learned, on Cannon's bio page, that she was a communications specialist at Target Corporation, making her a particularly fitting pancake-flipper at the opening of the MIA's Target Wing.

Meanwhile, the MIA's director, better known as Bill, good-naturedly assured me by e-mail: "YOU can call me 'Griddle Griswold' whenever you like."

It seems to me that everyone in Minnesota is a good sport!

Private Prehistory

2006-06-15T11:02:00.000-04:00

In my WSJ piece, I mentioned in that some 80 percent of the prehistoric caves that have been discovered in France are thought to be privately owned. There's a bit more to this story:

My discussions with experts in the Dordogne region indicated that many of those who discover such sites on their property don't report them to the government, as legally required. So there could, theoretically, be another Lascaux or Chauvet enjoyed only by a French landowner and a close circle of friends. Indeed, Rouffignac Cave, regularly open to the public (who travel into its depths on a small electric train), was purchased by someone who wanted the land and, at first, had no idea of the riches lying beneath. (It is owned by the Plassard family, whose son, Frédéric, was later inspired to become a prehistorian.)

There are several possible reasons for keeping caves hidden: Owners don't want to involve the public sector in their private hectare; they don't want cave-crazed tourists knocking on their doors; they don't want to trigger the law that requires them to report to the government any finds of historical, art historical or archeological interest. After making such discoveries, private property owners not supposed to disturb or degrade the site.

There's another possibility, not mentioned, but easy to imagine, in light of all the disclosures about illicit antiquities activities in other countries: Is there an underground market for France's version of underground art?

From the Eyes of Babes

2006-06-15T10:02:00.000-04:00

It was take-my-daughter-to-work day earlier this week, when Joyce accompanied me to the press preview of MoMA's Dada, which opens to the public (aptly) on Fathers Day.

No frequent museum visitor, despite (or maybe because of) my best efforts, my future acoustics engineer perceived a connection between two exhibited works that even the show's curator, Anne Umland, had missed.

She stood for a while gazing at a work that appealed to her, Jean Arp's "Enak's Tear (Terrestrial Forms)," 1917---a painted wood relief in five colors from MoMA's collection. Then she looked at the other Arp reliefs arrayed on the same wall, noticing that "Untitled (Fish and Vegetal Configuration)," c. 1917, was composed of identically shaped (although smaller) pieces of wood. The concurrence was not easy to discern, because the second piece was rotated 90 degrees from the position of the first, was composed of only black wood, and was mounted on another irregularly shaped slab that had no counterpart in "Enak's Tear."

Umland confirmed my guess that she had been unaware of this connection. Rather than juxtapose these cognates for comparison, she had interposed four pieces between them.

Sometimes it takes close looking by eager eyes to glean fresh insights.

The Prehistoric Art Scene

2006-06-14T07:18:00.000-04:00

In case you missed my piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, I'm posting it here (with the enhancement of added links). The WSJ doesn't allow any linking to its subscribers-only site, but as its author, I'm allowed to reprint my text:

Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, France

For those seeking refuge from an overheated contemporary art scene that seems fixated on the wet canvases of young MFA candidates, the Dordogne region of southwest France (also known as Périgord) offers a bracing alternative -- the prehistoric art scene. Here you can see masterful paintings of bison, woolly mammoths, reindeer and horses, rendered in bas-relief by the cave walls' pre-existing bulges, hollows, ledges and even bear-claw scratches. Cro Magnon man was discovered behind the current site of the Cro Magnon Hotel in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac -- a town that justifiably bills itself as "world capital of prehistory."

With its many nearby prehistoric attractions, Les Eyzies is also home to the recently expanded and modernized National Museum of Prehistory, displaying some 18,000 artifacts (such as stone tools and pierced shells used for personal adornment), as well as replicas and models of prehistoric sites, animals and people. Interspersed with these displays are fascinating video re-enactments of aspects of primitive existence, such as toolmaking.

"There are no holes in our collection," from 400,000 to 10,000 years ago, the museum's director, Jean-Jacques Cleyet-Merle, boasted recently during an interview in his office. That's because the region, with its relatively temperate climate, was continuously occupied during that period by hunter-gatherers, whose art and artifacts were preserved under the soil and in numerous caves, more of which still continue to be discovered. About 80% of the known prehistoric caves in France are thought to be privately owned. Some, like Rouffignac, in the eponymous town, are operated as profitable tourist attractions.

But not even the prehistoric art world, nestled in the idyllic countryside, is immune from trouble and controversy. Mr. Cleyet-Merle ruefully observed that his institution, hampered by funding shortages, is merely 50% finished, two years after the opening of its new facility. Among the refinements to come: audio guides, improved lighting, and computer consoles providing more information and magnified views of the individual small objects that are now arrayed in confusing profusion. For now, the object labels (some of which are still absent) are in French only; English translation of wall text is provided on laminated sheets.

The most high-profile prehistoric controversy involves Lascaux, whose name is affixed both to an overcrowded tourist attraction (the replica cave, Lascaux II) and to the world's most celebrated prehistoric site, now accessible to almost no one. When I interviewed him in his office in Périgueux recently, Jean-Michel Geneste, the curator of Lascaux, was fuming over and article that had just appeared in Time magazine's European edition, suggesting that the stewardship of the cave had been botched and that its 17,000-year-old paintings were in jeopardy.

The alarming deterioration of conditions in the cave had been publicized three years before, in the French scientific journal La Recherche. It reported that the installation of a new climate-control system at the entrance to the cave had disturbed its soil and its delicate climatic and ecological balance -- the likely cause of its being attacked in 2001 by a shockingly virulent invasion of fungi and bacteria. These appeared both on its floor and on outcroppings below its decorated walls.

Time Europe had been invited by the French Ministry of Culture, to report firsthand on the improved conditions in the cave. But the article focused instead on the past problems and continuing concerns about the future.

"There is no damage to the paintings," Mr. Geneste flatly asserted. A previous blight of algae, caused by the climatic changes wrought by the invasion of hordes of tourists, had led to the closure of the cave in 1963 to all but a few specialists and some very persistent tourists. But the more recent rampant spread of microorganisms, however, caused the cave to be closed five years ago to all visitors, even the specialists, so that it could be bombarded with ammonium disinfectant, fungicides, antibiotics and quicklime. "Now the situation is stable," claims Mr. Geneste. If it remains thus "for two or three years," he said, "we can open the cave for research." Mr. Geneste turned down my repeated requests to visit the cave.

The situation "was very dangerous for the paintings," he conceded, but "very few paintings were concerned. Now it [the growth of microorganisms] has disappeared naturally from the paintings," he asserted. To put to rest the questions that continue to be raised, however, these reassurances urgently need to be publicly corroborated through visits by disinterested outsiders who are experts.

Mr. Geneste, custodian of Lascaux for 15 years, still waxes rhapsodic when describing the "beautiful aspect of the paintings in the original," whose colors are more intense and luminous than those on the dry concrete surface of the 23-year-old copy. The natural moisture of the cave and the "very thin calcite crystals" on the paintings' surfaces "change the light and transmit the color," he explained.

As to the enigmatic meaning of Lascaux, Mr. Geneste and his two co-authors suggest in their book, "Lascaux: A Work of Memory," that the cave may have been "a privileged place for individual expressions around the myth indispensable for every social group -- a founding myth, perhaps." It is, they say, "the threshold between the visible and the invisible, the living and divinities, the real and the imaginary. It is symbolically a passage."

Going forward, Lascaux's keepers are continuing their four-year-old "program of molecular biology, in order to study what kinds of fungi and bacteria are on the walls of the cave but invisible," Mr. Geneste said. Also needed, he asserted, is better coordination among the various administrative and scientific entities that share responsibility for the cave's care and study.

For now, those who crave more than the virtual visit to Lascaux provided on its Web site must brave the crowds at the replica (in Montignac, near the original cave), where the visitors, not just the bison, rove in herds. "There must be more than 40 people in here," our guide insisted (erroneously), seeing how tightly we were crammed in one of the two sections of the copy cave (the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery). "Ladies, stop chatting and move to the back of the room," he admonished at another point. In the introductory room, I had asked for more information about a display of powdered pigments, similar to those that were used in the cave. "There's nothing to say about that," he replied brusquely.

My time-traveling companions, an alumni tour group from Columbia and Georgetown universities, seemed uniformly engaged, even enchanted, by this experience. But you cannot realize what you are missing in a copy cave till you've been inside a real one. My husband and I, a few years ago, had admired the real Altamira cave in Spain (as readers of this page may remember).

What's more, the day before enduring the rigors of Lascaux II, we had joined a small group in a leisurely ramble inside the only polychrome-painted cave in France that is still regularly open to the public -- Font-de-Gaume in Les Eyzies. Mr. Cleyet-Merle of the prehistory museum, who also happens to be curator of Font-de-Gaume, obligingly bumped us to the top of a several-months waiting list. The 14,000-year-old paintings, he informed me, had never needed to be off-limits to the public, because the cave had always been open to the outside air. (Lascaux's very narrow opening was significantly widened for visitors after its discovery by four adolescent boys in 1940, altering the interior's atmosphere and initiating its recent history of climatic imbalance.)

Our knowledgeable and contagiously enthusiastic guide at Font-de-Gaume, Jean-Pierre Vanzo, directed a small beam of light to tease out the contours and somewhat faded colors of bison, horses and, most remarkably, one reindeer affectionately licking another with an incised tongue. The significance of the cave to its original visitors, he speculated, must have involved "spirituality, metaphysics, philosophy, religion. They had gone far into the ground to express something important to them." What's more, he told us, "other figures are still sleeping" -- remaining to be discovered under crusts of clay and calcium carbonate deposits.

"We are," he announced to our band of awestruck interlopers, "inside the masterpiece."

The Dreck of Tech

2006-06-13T16:39:00.000-04:00

Back when using technology to enhance museum visits was the next new thing, I wrote a whole series of articles about art CD-ROMs, museum websites, high-tech audio tours and the use of computer stations in galleries. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, under the leadership of its then tech expert, Scott Sayre, was king of the kiosks, installing interactive media throughout the museum. It sounded so intriguingly state-of-the-art that I wanted to go surf for myself. But I couldn't persuade my editors to send me on this specialized mission.

Last week, I finally got my chance. As it turned out, the MIA was probably lucky it took me this long to report on my digital disappointment. I found the museum's "Art Finder," for example, to be a worthy but half-realized idea: Type in what you're looking for (i.e., Matisse) and the computer is supposed to tell you how to find it---a Masterpiece Mapquest.

But all you get is an unlabeled schematic map of the mazelike museum, with the appropriate room marked in red. Nowhere is there an arrow marked, "You are here." Nor can you print out a map that might actually help you navigate to your distant object of desire.

Scattered throughout the museum are "Interactive Learning Stations," some right in the galleries, many secluded in alcoves, but all capable of emitting noises that would disrupt the art-viewing experiences of those preferring peace and quiet. And, as is to often the case with such devices, some proved to be glitchy.

The content loaded onto these computers is deep and rich---so much so that a visitor could be tempted to sacrifice a great deal of art-viewing time in favor of screen-viewing time. This is not necessarily a plus, when great works by Rembrandt, Poussin and Claude are close at hand.

There's a time and a place for this worthy electronic enrichment, and it's before or after the gallery visit---on the Web or perhaps in the museum's library. Let the artworks speak, eloquently, for themselves.

Coming soon: Let Your Fingers Do the Walking at the Walker.

A Bullish Welcome to My WSJ Readers

2006-06-13T09:06:00.000-04:00

A number of you have been inspired to click on my seven-week-old blog for the first time, thanks to the author's ID at the end of my piece in today's Wall Street Journal ("Prehistoric Artistry, Real and Recreated," Page D6). So, to get you up to speed, here's a selective link-list of CultureGrrl's provocative posts, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous:

Black Cloud Over the Met
MoMA Does It Right
De Montebello/Hoving Contretemps
How Hilton Kramer Got Wild
Brits Can't Return Nazi Loot
Rethinking Antiquities
Top 10 List: What's Not to Like About Mega-MoMA---I
Top 10 List: What's Not to Like About Mega-MoMA---II
Hadid: Diva Indeed
Where In the World Is the Guggenheim?
The Art Market Is Not the Stock Market
Meandering in Minneapolis

Please also scroll down to my "Rooting Out Loot" piece, posted yesterday, along with Max Anderson's "BlogBack." Hope you decide to keep returning to the Grrl!

CultureGrrl Goes Primitive

2006-06-12T18:04:00.000-04:00

You are cordially invited to join CultureGrrl tomorrow on the "Leisure & Arts" page of the Wall Street Journal, as she explores and exposes the prehistoric art scene in France, including Lascaux, "where the visitors, not just the bison, rove in herds."

And you thought I wisecracked only on my blog?

BlogBack: Max Anderson on Antiquities

2006-06-12T16:52:00.000-04:00

Maxwell Anderson, director of the the Indianapolis Museum of Art, former director of the Whitney Museum and past president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), responds here to Rooting Out Loot. Keep those e-mails coming!

You’ve raised an important issue facing art museums: retrospective research on works lacking clear provenance. This has to be approached methodically, as you suggest, since there are so many issues triggered by reviewing objects often lacking more than a bill of sale.

But it seems to me that before tackling what might be involved in such a vast inquiry, it’s more urgent to agree on what’s appropriate in future acquisitions—and many directors, including me, have misgivings about the current AAMD guidelines. Because of the "10-year" rule and the blanket exception provided for works of great significance, the Guidelines are out of step with approaches being taken by our colleagues around the world.

Once we’ve agreed on a more disciplined approach to evaluating future purchases, gifts, bequests, and exchanges, we’ll be better equipped to address retrospective research. No less importantly, we’ll be in a better position to advocate two important objectives: 1) a rational federal approach that harmonizes conflicting applications of the CPIA of 1983 and the National Stolen Property Act, and 2) the promulgation of a legal market in antiquities that can reduce looting, deal sensibly with chance finds, and provide revenue to source countries for the protection, research, and care of objects in their possession.

Rooting Out Loot

2006-06-12T14:54:00.000-04:00

Last week, I promised to create some big trouble for myself by making explicit the implicit analogy between museums' handling of the Nazi loot issue and their response to the latest loot contretemps---the antiquities mess.

In both cases, American museums assert they want to do the right thing, by returning improperly expropriated objects to their rightful owners. And in both cases, the museums rightly insist upon documentation or other compelling evidence before turning over the American public's patrimony to private owners (in the case of Nazi loot), or foreign governments (in the case of antiquities).

But there's one big difference: When it comes to Nazi loot, many major museums have undertaken extensive reviews of their own holdings, to identify and publish lists of works with murky provenance during the years around World War II. I have always had mixed feelings about this, because it's arguable whether the time, effort and expense involved in this effort are commensurate with the few cases of restitution that have ensued.

Still, museums have deemed this an appropriate means of helping to right past wrongs, even though (and I believe the museums on this) American institutions were, in most cases, good-faith, innocent purchasers of what later was discovered to be Nazi loot.

Should they do less for unprovenanced antiquities, where purchases, in many cases, were not so innocent? If museums didn't know that something illicit had occurred in unearthing and transporting many of those objects, it wasn't that they were naïve; it was that they didn't want to know.

I must now interrupt this message with a disclaimer: I am raising this question as devil's advocate. If compiling lists of possible Nazi loot was onerous, the task of sifting through hundreds, if not thousands, of ambiguous antiquities is close to impossible. One could limit this to works of a certain level of importance (which are, of course, precisely the works that museums least want to give away). And, for practical reasons, if nothing else, there should probably be a cutoff date: i.e., only works acquired after the effective date of the U.S. Cultural Property Implementation Act, Apr. 12, 1983, could be eligible for inclusion on the list.

This is a very tentative, if provocative, "for-what-it's-worth" proposal. Reasonable people will undoubtedly disagree---including, perhaps, even me!

Museum officials, archeologists, carabinieri---please feel free to BlogBack: culturegrrl@nj.rr.com.

Meandering in Minneapolis

2006-06-12T11:22:00.000-04:00

Right again, art-lings: The answer to the question posed in my last post is, of course, Minneapolis, also known as Target City, home to the retail giant's headquarters.

After the more serious members of the press had flown home to file stories, CultureGrrl brought her appetite for culture to the Sunday-morning public opening's pancake breakfast, so that she could faithfully report to you on the "local celebrity pancake flippers," as promised.

William Griswold, above, good-humoredly complained to me about the heat from the griddle and assured me that his culinary qualifications had not been on the table when he interviewed for the directorship of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which he assumed in October.

Who knows what indignities others have suffered to become museum directors? Did Philippe get his start filling crêpes?

The true master of the spatula, though, was Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, who flipped his flapjacks up in the air so that they plopped onto the diners' plates. This clearly is a guy with experience in dishing it out.

I had been hoping that the celebrity chefs might have included that nationally known Twin Cities raconteur, Garrison Keillor, but I had heard him broadcasting the night before from Austin, Texas ("I got lost in Austin"), so I knew that was a longshot.

The third cooking celebrity was Miss Black Minnesota (pictured above, in her crown and sash, behind Griddle Griswold)---one of the very few people of color at the museum on this celebratory opening day of free music, games, rides and, oh yes, the opening of 113,000 new square feet, including 34 new galleries in the Target Wing, designed by Michael Graves.

The museum's officials keep emphasizing their desire to involve a diverse community, but they clearly have a way to go in attracting groups outside the usual white, educated, relatively monied museum constituency. (In this, Minneapolis is no different from other traditional art museums.)

Minneapolis is more populist than most, though, in its free general admission policy. Griswold got a big round of applause when he declared at the ribbon-cutting ceremony that admission would always remain free.

I'm duty-bound to save for the Wall Street Journal most of my thoughts on the various art and architectural doings around Minneapolis. But later this week, I'll give you my view on the rocky marriage between high art and high tech, informed by my experiences on this trip.

Where in the World is Lee Going?

2006-06-08T08:20:00.000-04:00

A museum wing named for a corporation?

That would be the new Target Wing for 20th-century art, a main attraction at a greatly expanded American museum, opening to the public on Sunday. It's named for the philanthropic mega-retailer. I guess this is not the first wing to bear a corporate moniker (think the London National Gallery's Sainsbury, funded by the supermarket moguls).

This company wing thing suggests many creative marketing opportunities: The Boeing Wing? The Kentucky Fried Chicken Wing?

I am looking forward to meeting “local celebrity pancake flippers,” who, according to the museum's press release, will be plying their spatulas at Sunday's opening bash. Are they celebrities, we wonder, because of their expert pancake flipping, or are they illustrious personnages who flip pancakes for fun on Sundays?

I think I need to stop blogging and do some serious reporting for a few days. Don’t you agree?

Russian Roulette

2006-06-08T07:50:00.000-04:00

Turns out the Russian post with my name in it is not a translation, as I had thought yesterday , but merely a sympathetic reference to my piece, by a blogger with ties to the contemporary art market in Russia. That bilingual scribe, Julia Volfson, has now helpfully (if haltingly) provided an English translation for all of you CultureGrrl link-clickers.

(Speaking of links, there are too many here for one trifling item. Well, I'm still learning!)

As the Turner Turns

2006-06-07T12:28:00.000-04:00

It was an unusual concurrence of stories, all hitting the newspapers at about the same time: The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, relinquished a major J.M.W. Turner painting, discovered to have been Nazi loot; another Turner broke the record for a British watercolor at Christie's, London; Sotheby's announced it will share the database of its Nazi-loot Restitution Department with the Swift-Find Looted Art Project, which will put the auction house's information online for the first time.

The Dallas Morning News described the Kimbell's Glaucus and Scylla, soon to be returned to the heirs of John and Anna Jaffé, as "priceless." But nothing, Janet Kutner, is priceless---just pricey: Turner's "The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise" fetched ₤5.8 million on June 5, having been estimated to fetch "in excess of ₤2 million." Everything's got a price, no matter how astronomical.

The Kimbell did not raise a paddle for that one, even though it knew about the Jaffé heirs' claim since September and it now owns no Turner. The museum's published provenance for the painting reveals that it was sold at the Hall du Savoy, Nice, France, on July 12 or 13, 1943, for 28,000 francs. That sale was a known auction of "Jewish property" that had been seized by the Vichy regime. The Turner went through five more hands before the Kimbell bought it in 1966. The Kimbell agreed that the heirs had strong documentation and did not put up a fight.

What this episode seems to indicate, though, is that museums should not merely compile and publicize lists of objects in their collections that had murky provenances during and after World War II, but should actively check such lists against inventories of known galleries and auctions that dispersed Nazi-appropriated art.

The newly announced Sotheby's collaboration with the Swift-Find database is one of several Nazi-loot registries under various auspices. One of the best known is the Art Loss Register. But the current online list of unresolved Holocaust claims that have been registered with ALR consists of only three cases.

On a lighter note, Mindy Riesenberg, the Kimbell's head of media relations, told me she has a personal connection to the restitution story:

It looks like I may be related to the family we're returning the painting to, but on the "wrong" side to be able to claim a piece of the pie! Oh well, no Turner for me!

Maybe, as often happens, the heirs will ultimately decide to sell the work, and the Kimbell will get another shot at it---but at a price greatly enhanced by the Kimbell's own imprimatur.

Museums' responsiveness to the Nazi-loot issue raises the question as to whether similar procedures should be followed regarding another category of possible loot in their collections---antiquities. This notion is going to get me into so much trouble that I think I'll hold onto it until I return next week from a journalistic journey.

But don't go away: A couple of parting posts tomorrow.

CultureGrrl in Russian???

2006-06-07T12:16:00.000-04:00

This must be my readers' interactive day:

I have just found a link on the web to what appears to be a Russian translation of my art-market post that appeared yesterday. The Russian-language site also includes readers' comments about that post.

Is just another indication that Russians are big art-market players?

So, to all you Russian oligarchs who are fans of CultureGrrl: What does this say? (And if you're the guy who bought Picasso's "Dora Maar With Cat," do let me know who you are!)

Translations or paraphrases gratefully accepted at: culturegrrl@nj.rr.com.

BlogBack: An Admirer of the High

2006-06-07T09:33:00.000-04:00

Announcing a new CultureGrrl feature, BlogBack, inviting thoughtful readers to take issue with my intemperate observations. (Tom, Glenn, wanna blog? My guess is Tom won't; Glenn might.)

First up---Baxter Jones, a lawyer, art collector, member of the board of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and member of the Contemporary Art Society, a support group for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He inaugurates CultureGrrl's BlogBack with a compelling defense of his hometown museum:

I live a few minutes' walk from the High Museum, and I visit it often (and pass by it several times a week). I have to say that your description of Renzo Piano's recent addition as a "flop" struck me as bizarre. (Is "flop" just the sort of overstatement one makes to get attention in the blogosphere?) Well, I love it, and I notice people truly relishing the spaces, from the piazza (especially at night) to the light-filled contemporary art galleries on the top level.

Another favorite area of mine is on the lower level, the serene galleries for works on paper and African art. I haven't fully made up my mind about the galleries for temporary exhibitions; they were designed for maximum flexibility, so they don't have much particular character of their own. But then, one of the complaints about some museum spaces has been that the snazzy architectural touches distract from the art; Piano has made a name for designing spaces which put the art in the foreground, and I think that's what we got.

I'll never lose my affection for Richard Meier's 1983 building - it is a more beautiful sculptural work than Piano's building. However, some curators I know talk about the challenges of installing some work there (in the Meier building). I feel lucky that we have both buildings.

As for the Louvre Atlanta project, your contention that few of the works will come from the Louvre's "A-list" is also odd. First, the Louvre's B-list would be pretty fabulous. Second, some people in France are pretty upset about the high quality of works which will be leaving Paris for an extended time.

I could say more about the Louvre exhibit, but I'm concerned that the media attention for it will obscure the other aspects of the museum's exhibition schedule (such as the Morris Louis show). It's a paradox: the MSM love to scold museums (especially museums outside New York) for "blockbusters," but just try to get the same media to notice, or write about, a smaller, thoughtful, less flashy show!

The High does do some wonderful shows, curated in-house, which are not anyone's idea of a blockbuster. But you're unlikely to hear about them, because, as I say, they're ignored by the media (and blogs) outside Atlanta.

This intelligent, reasoned dissent sets the standard for BlogBack. You may not curse CultureGrrl on her blog, but you can heatedly disagree with her. I may edit, with your approval, for brevity, clarity and civility. Send BlogBacks, not brickbats, to: culturegrrl@nj.rr.com.

The Art Market is Not the Stock Market

2006-06-06T17:29:00.000-04:00

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 a collecting "strategy," there's still no substitute for having art knowledge, lots of viewing experience and a good eye (or at least engaging an adviser who possesses these qualities).

This diatribe is occasioned by Linda Sandler's piece today in Bloomberg:

Art Prices May Falter If Global Economy Slows, Survey Shows

To which CultureGrrl replies: DUH!

Sandler reports on the findings of ArtTactic, Ltd., founded by Anders Petterson, a former JPMorgan Chase bond trader, "who applies stock-market-style analysis to art trends and sells research to art buyers and sellers."

These art-market surveys and indexes---and there have been lots of them---almost always fall apart once you examine their methodology. In this case, we learn that "the views of about 105 collectors, including entrepreneurs and financial people---a few from Petterson's JPMorgan days---plus 45 dealers, auctioneers, advisers and art commentators" provide the basis for ArtTactic's sweeping pronouncements.

In particular, I have no confidence in ArtTactic's survey of "confidence in individual artists." Sandler informs us, without a trace of derision:

Cindy Sherman, Maurizio Cattelan, Takashi Murakami, Marlene Dumas and Elizabeth Peyton have all risen in the ranks since November. Collectors have become less bullish about Franz Ackermann, Kai Althoff, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Rosemarie Trockel and Luc Tuymans.

Quick, call you broker! Short those Chapmans! Peyton's the place!

Where in the World is the Guggenheim?

2006-06-06T10:45:00.000-04:00

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 designing speculative art palaces to fuel the Guggenheim Foundation director's undying global ambitions---most notably, Jean Nouvel in Rio and Zaha Hadid in both Tokyo and Taichung, Taiwan. The Rio and Taichung projects were sunk by political opponents. The Temporary Guggenheim planned for Tokyo lost life-support when its private sponsor pulled the plug, according to Patrik Schumacher, a principal partner in Hadid's firm.

Krens undoubtedly feels some obligation to make it up to his growing stable of disappointed architects by finding something else equally exciting for them to imagine. Hence, Nouvel recently told me he was talking to Krens about a possible project in Abu Dhabi and Hadid revealed at the press conference for her current Guggenheim retrospective that she and Krens were "shopping around" for other collaborative projects. "I don't know if Tom wants to say more."

He didn't. But he did tell me afterwards that the only Guggenheim satellite currently in the works is Enrique Norten's design for Guadalajara, Mexico. Schumacher told me that Hadid and Krens are focusing on a project for a specific locale, which he declined to identify.

So what of all the rumored incipient Guggenheims in Moscow, Singapore, Bucharest, Hong Kong, etc.? Anthony Calnek, the Guggenheim's deputy director for communications and publishing, said that there are only "two live projects [Guadalajara and Hong Kong] for which the Guggenheim Foundation has actually conducted feasibility studies," but rumors of a new branch are sparked whenever Krens visits a foreign country to negotiate "exhibition contracts, loans or other museum business."

As for Hong Kong:

We are still officially part of Dynamic Star's bid package for the West Kowloon Cultural District, but for some time, the bid process itself has been held up by the Hong Kong government. We're hopeful that the project will move forward. But if not, we have a side agreement with the Pompidou Center to pursue other opportunities in Hong Kong together.

Similarly, Guadalajara, Calnek revealed, is far from a done deal:

The Guggenheim Foundation completed the contracted feasibility study for Guadalajara some time ago. The civic leaders there believe strongly in the project, and are actively trying to raise the necessary financial and political support. We hope they'll succeed, but we have no way of really knowing. The financial implications are all laid out in the study. If the city succeeds in raising the money,the Foundation will enter into negotiations with them about going forward with the museum.

Krens still also harbors hopes of a grand new Guggenheim in Manhattan, as he made clear in his appearance Jan. 3 on the Charlie Rose Show (click on the Jan. 3 press release).

I happen to believe that Krens is a brilliant architectural client---finding the perfect practitioner for the job and goading that architect to do his or her best work. These collaborations, whether or not they get off the drawing board, result in such envelope-pushing designs that the architect's prestige and commissions get a healthy boost.

But in vainly trying to repeat his triumph in Bilbao, Krens can't quite get it through his head that the Guggenheim Museum doesn't travel well. It is resisted by some powerful players in foreign countries as an exploitative interloper, trying to get rich by foisting an American brand of cultural enlightenment on the natives. The secret to the Guggenheim's success in establishing a beachhead in Spain is the lowkey, businesslike Juan Ignacio Vidarte, who has been the Guggenheim Bilbao's director from the beginning. A former Basque government bureaucrat with no art background, Vidarte firmly believes in the importance of his museum and is a master of the art of navigating political minefields.

Krens needs an outlet for his undeniable architectural acumen, and I hope he finds it. But he should stop tarnishing the Guggenheim "brand" in a succession of failed foreign forays. Instead of vaunting these follies, in an exhibition soon to open in Bonn, he should learn from them. Under Lisa Dennison's direction, the flagship Guggenheim in New York is getting back to curator-driven, collection-focused basics. Sometimes being a resourceful realist beats being a visionary.

A Retrospective of Guggenheims

2006-06-05T16:13:00.000-04:00

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 architecture and exhibition design as reflected in the Guggenheim's own pioneering past and present."

The all-star line-up of architects includes: Asymptote, Shigeru Ban, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Frank Gehry, Richard Gluckman, Vittorio Gregotti, Charles Gwathmey, Zaha Hadid, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas, Enrique Norten and Jean Nouvel.

Oh yes, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

So many projects, so little built.

Hadid: Diva Indeed

2006-06-05T11:01:00.000-04:00

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 work.

Whereupon, in full view of members of the press, she proceeded to throw a diva's fit.

For starters, some of the work was not hung to her liking. "That has to come down," she insisted. Someone said he'd "see what we can do." "Don't see what you can do. It HAS to be done," she shot back.

The glass top of her table was upside down, she repeatedly complained. This seemed a legitimate gripe, because its irregular shape, as installed, did not fit properly over its base, which jutted out beyond the glass.

She also wanted her furniture moved away from the wall, so that people could circle around and view the backs.

Despite all this, Hadid could not have been too displeased with a show that turned over the entire rotunda to her mostly unrealized plans. Patrik Schumacher, a principal partner in her firm, told me that of some 85 projects in the show, only about 12 had actually been built and a few more were "ongoing."

Hadid also got to mess around with Frank Lloyd Wright, in another of the Guggenheim's provocative "interventions" to reinvent or subvert Wright's notoriously challenging exhibition space. On the upper ramps, she hid Wright's bays behind new curvy walls and jutting display cases.

Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, brashly predicted at the press conference that this show's attendance would top the record-breaking crowd for the Guggenheim's glorious Frank Gehry show. Fat chance. While Gehry's retrospective was substantive, alluring and mostly composed of real buildings, Hadid's seemed padded: Her few built projects kept reappearing---in different forms (models, drawings, photos) at different points up the ramp---in an installation that was billed as chronological but that actually kept jumping back and forth in time.

Even more problematically, the show did not make it clear that the vast majority of the plans have remained just that. This could have been remedied by just one word on each of the relevant labels: "Unbuilt."

This is not to deny the considerable achievements of this first Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning woman, whose Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati has been widely acclaimed. It's just to say that this bloated show seems more a promotional offshoot of Tom Krens' undying dreams of a Global Guggenheim than a fitting measure of Hadid's accomplishment.

More on this tomorrow.

Next Week: Where in the World is the Guggenheim?

2006-06-03T13:21:00.000-04:00

Ivy-League Art--Part II

2006-06-03T12:15:00.000-04:00

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, fakes, influences on other artists.

Both Cornell's art museum and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of its library make a point of encouraging the public to savor close encounters with a wide range of treasures---those on view and those in storage. Last summer, for example, I enjoyed a week of hands-on print perusals led by curator Nancy Green, under the auspices of Cornell Adult University (courses and travel programs open to all, not just alums). Pulling out impressions from Dürer to Kushner, Nancy armed us with magnifiers and sharpened our eyes.

The Johnson will provide even greater public access to its collections in its planned new study center, designed by the firm of I.M. Pei, who designed the original building. The new center will feature an open storage facility, permitting visitors "to gain access to hundreds of pieces of art that previously were inaccessible," Robinson says.

As for the Cornell Library's new Native American trove (discussed in yesterday's post), some 1,300 rare books and 100,000 pages of manuscripts will be digitized and posted on the Web. So, although the scholarly material has now been separated from the panoply of objects held and displayed by the National Museum of the American Indian, it will probably gain wider digital dissemination and more intense, serious scrutiny in its university setting.

Ivy-League Art--Part I

2006-06-02T12:23:00.000-04:00

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 exhibition-hopping: First, I caught the closing days of Vanished Worlds, Enduring People---Olin Library's coming-out party for its recent acquisition of Native American rare books and manuscripts that once had been part of the collection of the Museum of the American Indian, before it was acquired by the Smithsonian.

Owned by the Huntington Free Library in the Bronx and appraised at $8.3 million, the collection was bought by Cornell in 2004 for a mere $2.5 million, after the Huntington's 15-year, devastatingly expensive legal battle to prevent the material from going to the National Museum of the American Indian's new facility in Washington.

The museum had argued, unsuccessfully, that the rare books and manuscripts at the Huntington were inseparable from the artifacts collection. (There was a good scholarly, if not legal, argument for this; the collections do complement each other.) After squandering its assets on its Pyrrhic legal victory, the Huntington, needing cash, sought to find the best custodian within New York State for the collection. Cornell, which already had a collection of related material, prevailed.

The small show that just closed in Ithaca surveyed the collection's broad scope---everything from a 1765 Treaty of Peace with the Delaware Nation to an advertisement for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to books in Native American languages. The library would do well to plan a follow-up show, focusing on the most visually alluring material---George Catlin's album of images drawn from his Indian Gallery; Karl Bodmer's hand-colored aquatint engravings of Plains Indians; Charles Bird King's portraits for the three-volume "History of the Indian Tribes of North America"; Edward S. Curtis' photographs documenting Native American cultures of the west and northwest.

Tomorrow, Part II: Rembrandt at Cornell's Johnson Museum.

CultureGrrl Has Clout!

2006-06-02T09:40:00.000-04:00

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 made as a result of CultureGrrl.

Well done, Lisa!

Now it's time for the Association of Art Museum Curators to issue new guidelines. This would be a job for AAMC's just named third president, George Shackelford, chair of European art and curator of modern art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Russell on WTC Memorial

2006-06-02T09:14:00.000-04:00

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 Lease scream boondoggle....These are Pentagon procurement-scandal numbers."

With all the bickering, delays, redesigns and skyrocketing cost projections, the National Nightmare is becoming a national embarrassment. Freedom Tower may loom as a half-empty national monument to our failure of imagination---the inability to envision anything other than another hulking office tower on that mournful site.

A Touch of Crass

2006-06-01T18:50:00.000-04:00

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 measures!

Tomorrow, I'm off to the Guggenheim for the Zaha Hadid press conference and exhibition preview. Press conference? There must be another planned Hadid Guggenheim somewhere, to make up for the demise of her Guggenheim Taichung.

Hope springs eternal!