Looking Around

Or at least not yet. That’s the impression I take away from an interesting passage in Robin Pogrebin’s piece in today’s New York Times about the things that arts groups hope the new administration will do for them. Bill Ivey, the former head of the National Endowment for the Arts who is Barack Obama’s transition leader on arts issues, …

That conversation I had on Tuesday with the Japanese architect Toyo Ito gave me a better grasp of the thinking behind his undulating design for a new Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. (“My basic approach was to use the grid system but ask, what happens if we deform it, manipulate it?”) The museum is expected to open in 2013 …

As my TIME colleague Michael Scherer noted yesterday over at Swampland, we now know what photograph served as the source of Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous Barack Obama campaign poster. It was one taken in April 2006 at the National Press Club in Washington, where Obama had appeared with George Clooney to discuss genocide in Darfur. The …

You could call it the last word in multi-tasking. Yesterday morning, while part of my brain was casting forward to the imminent inauguration of Barack Obama, the other part sat down with Larry Rinder, director of the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, and Toyo Ito, the Japanese architect of a new BAM/PFA that’s scheduled to …

Looking Around is off today for Martin Luther King’s birthday, and tomorrow until Obama-mania subsides a bit and we can get back to other business. See you Wednesday.

The famous American realist painter has died. Wyeth was of course one of those beloved artists the artworld never quite knew what to do with. I’ll have more to say later today on Time.com.

UPDATE: You can find my appreciation here.

The Czech-born architect Jan Kaplicky has died suddenly in Prague, where he was struggling to overcome opposition to his typically unconventional design for the still-unbuilt Czech national library. Kaplicky was completely an original. I profiled him for Time a few years ago in London, where he had fled after the Soviet tanks rolled …

The Los Angeles Times is reporting today on its Culture Monster website that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is planning to sell at auction next month more than 100 items from its costume and textiles collection. This news comes not long after Tyler Green reported on his Modern Art Notes blog that LACMA was also planing to sell two …

Over the weekend Coosje van Bruggen, Claes Oldenburg’s wife and collaborator, died at their home in L.A. Van Bruggen was a Dutch born art historian and a curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam when she met Oldenburg in 1970. At the time Oldenburg was just beginning his transition from his oversize soft sculptures of the 60s to …

People have been sending me e-mails lately that urge me to sign an online petition calling for Barack Obama to create a cabinet level Secretary of the Arts. It’s an idea that was floated a few weeks ago in an interview by the musical plenipotentiary Quincy Jones. At first glance the notion of a high profile champion of the arts has …

Two kinds of economies bring art collections to market. Good times, like the one that just ended. And bad times…

And now for something completely different — a post that’s not about deaccessioning, which I think I’m going to take a pledge not to write about for a while. Instead I’ll write about something else everybody keeps talking about, the diaries of Susan Sontag.

The other day on his blog Modern Art Notes Tyler Green suggested that museums that suffer severe financial meltdowns should close their doors rather than rescue themselves by selling work from their collections. Their collections should be redistributed among other, more solvent museums that could continue to show the work.

Aside …