Looking Around

The main thing that took me out to San Francisco recently was the William Kentridge show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which will be traveling to no fewer than seven cities over the next two years, three in the U.S. and four abroad. This is what I said about it in the new issue of Time.

Yesterday I mentioned that in May, when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opens its new rooftop sculpture garden, it will also increase its admission fee by 20%, from $12.50 to $15. I think I’m seeing a trend here. Pending approval by the city, the Philadelphia Museum of Art also plans to increase admission fees, which range right …

I was out in San Francisco last week to catch an advance look at the William Kentridge show that opened March 14 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — more on that later — and to check in on the nearly complete rooftop sculpture garden that SFMOMA is building on top of its adjacent parking garage. (Opens May 10.) While I was …

In the continuing drama of the attempt by Brandeis University to — choose your term — transform/shut down/trash — its Rose Museum of Art, more than 50 members of the Rose family rose up on Monday. It was the Roses who contributed the original $1 million endowment that paid for construction of the museum in 1961. At a Brandeis …

When the economic house of cards started falling last year, I wondered how long it would take for museums to start cutting staff and programing. We all know the answer to that one by now . But I also wondered if the two behemoths of the museum world might be able to resist. In any discussion of museum endowments, the Getty Trust in …

I’ve taken an interest lately in The Photographs of Homer Page, the catalogue of a show that just opened at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. It amounts to a rediscovery, almost a disinterment, of a photographer who was prominent enough in the late 1940s to get featured treatment a few times by the Museum of Modern Art. But …

It looks like the National Academy in New York has started the long process of mending fences with the Association of Art Museum Directors, which clobbered the Academy last year for selling two paintings from its collection to raise cash to cover general expenses. (As you probably know if you follow this blog, that’s forbidden by AAMD …

I’ve been on the road again (again!) for the past few days. (More about that later.) My state of the art blogging software was supposed to put up a blogpost to that effect automatically on the day I took off. Somehow that failed to happen. (Note to self — look into new state-of-the-art blogging software.) This was an oversight I …

A few weeks ago I stopped by the New York outpost of Renzo Piano — his main office is in Genoa — to talk with him about the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, another one of his multitude of commissions. When it’s finished — the scheduled completion date is 2015 — the Center will provide a home for both the National …

In connection with that ingenious new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art about Cézanne and his enduring influence, we cooked up a little compare-and-contrast slide show for Time.com

I’m still sick, but couldn’t hold off on this interesting bit of news. It appears that the $36 million bid for the pair of Chinese bronze animal heads sold last week in Christie’s big Saint Laurent auction in Paris was a ruse. The Associated Press is reporting that the anonymous telephone bidder was a Chinese auction house owner, Cai …

Ugh. Back tomorrow.

Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, announced on Thursday that the Pentagon will be lifting the ban on media images of soldiers’ coffins as they return from Iraq and Afghanistan, so long as the affected families agree to the pictures. A Pentagon working group still has to settle details of how permission will be granted. I would …