Looking Around

Even this early in 2009 it’s safe to say that the deeply entertaining new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of the best shows of the year. It goes beyond the standard connections between Cezanne and Matisse or Cezanne and Cubism — though it does very nicely by those, too — to demonstrate how Cezanne’s DNA flows …

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., has been operating with an interim director for a year and a half, since its former director Olga Viso decamped to become head of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. But this afternoon it announced that Richard Koshalek would be its next director.

Koshalek is best known …

As part of the giant Yves Saint Laurent auction that Christie’s has just wrapped up in Paris, that pair of Qing Dynasty bronze animal heads sold for a combined $40 million. Those are the heads that were looted by French and British troops who ransacked the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860. Before the sale, the Chinese government …

Lots of cutback news from museums this week. Yesterday it was the Met in New York. Much more seriously, on Monday the beleaguered Detroit Institute of the Arts announced that it’s laying off 20% of its staff — 63 people — in an attempt to cut $6 million from its $34 million operating budget. It doesn’t help that the new state …

Well it looks like we know the answer now to the question of whether the Yves Saint Laurent name would convey enough glamor on his former belongings to pump up their prices when they were auctioned off in Paris this week. But I doubt that many people will mistake last night’s record setting sale — the first of three nights — for a …

I made it over on Sunday to the re-opening night concert at Alice Tully Hall, the 1960s-era chamber music auditorium at Lincoln Center in New York that’s been greatly refashioned in all senses of the word by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. I won’t pretend to be any judge of acoustics. I’ll leave that to people who know what they’re talking …

Alice Tully Hall, the chamber music auditorium at Lincoln Center in New York, re-opens this weekend in a building that’s been ingeniously opened out and reconfigured by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. In this week’s Time I wrote about it in the context of performing arts centers in a few places around the U.S. that have found themselves to …

Again. Back Friday.

This weekend Lincoln Center — which the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera all call home — will debut the wonderfully reconfigured building that houses its chamber music auditorium, Alice Tully Hall, plus the Julliard School of Music and the American School of Ballet. That premiere is the …

I was glad to see in the Wall Street Journal this morning a piece by the critic and historian Barbara Rose insisting that plenty of knowledgeable people still believe that it was Goya who painted that strange masterpiece The Colossus, which has been in the permanent collection of the Prado since 1931. The painting, which shows a …

That screw-the-arts amendment attached to the Senate version of the stimulus package last week by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, which would have barred museums and other arts institutions from getting stimulus money, has been revised in the House-Senate compromise version of the bill to remove any mention of museums, theaters or arts …

And also a rabbit. On Feb 23, Christie’s International in Paris will begin a much-hyped three-day auction of furniture and art from the various homes of Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge. To give potential American bidders a close look, last year Christie’s shipped some of the choicer items for a brief display at its New …

Last week, in a story I put up on the Time.com home page about the attempt by Brandeis to do whatever it’s trying to do to the Rose Art Museum, I mentioned that one reason why trashing the Rose was a terrible idea is that Brandeis has a significant art history program and the Rose is a major teaching resource for that program. What I …