It’s the end of the year. Time for ten best-ness, meaning Time‘s great end of the year tradition — I think this is the second year I’ve done it — of naming the ten best American museum shows of 2008.
But first some explanation about how I arrived at the Big Ten. The most obvious rule — it had to be a show I actually saw. If …
Yale that is. Yale Daily News reporter Paul Needham, who has been following the story, posted the news today on his paper’s website that last Friday, lawyers representing the government of Peru filed suit in Washington, D.C. district court to demand that Yale return all of the artifacts it holds from the Inca settlement of Macchu …
A last minute addition to the long list of top museum people who left their jobs in 2008 — the J. Paul Getty Museum just announced that Weston Naef, their longtime photography curator, is stepping down. Naef was the lucky man who got to build the Getty’s great photo collection almost from the ground up. In 1984, when he came to the …
I’m back from vacation, though while the blog was on hold for a week the crisis of everything, everywhere continued. Over the weekend Tim Rutten at the Los Angeles Times and then Roberta Smith at the New York Times offered ideas on what needs to be done to save the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Rutten says that as a first …
Even critics deserve a vacation. (Some people wish we took them more often.) So Looking Around is not only taking off the Thanksgiving weekend, but all of the following week. Back Monday, Dec. 8.
Last week I posted about how economic downturns effect architecture. The not-so-surprising conclusion — during bad times there’s a lot less of it. And here we go again. A few weeks ago the spiraling Santiago Calatrava tower in Chicago ground to a halt. Last month the U2 tower in Dublin, designed by the firm of Norman Foster, was …
Apologies to Maureen McGovern for that headline, but over the weekend the businessman/philanthropist Eli Broad made an incredible proposal to save the S.S. Poseidon the floundering L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art. In an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, Broad, who was the founding chairman of MOCA in 1979, said that his Broad Art …
In Boston a few weeks ago I looked in on the splendid little Tara Donovan retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art. You could say that Donovan’s art is an ingenious hybrid of rigorous post-Minimalism and traditional handcraft. The architect Louis Kanh used to famously ask “What does a brick want to be?” Donovan seems to …
Will the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art go the way of Lehman Brothers? The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the perenially cash-strapped MOCA is in even worse shape than people thought. Much worse. It has an annual budget, “in excess of $20 million”, that equals or exceeds its $20.4 million investment portfolio. Did …
We all know what will happen to construction in the Big Recession. There’ll be a lot less of it. But what will happen to architecture? A few weeks ago the British architect David Chipperfield told an interviewer that he expected a prolonged recession would mean less flamboyant design, fewer buildings that rely on extravagant departures …
Let’s finish up that conversation with MASS MoCA Director Joe Thompson about the 25-year installation of Sol LeWitt wall drawings that just opened at MASS MoCA.
LACAYO: Sol did his first wall drawing at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in 1968. And he drew that one himself, right?
THOMPSON: He did. That first work and …
The Abstract Expressionist painter Grace Hartigan died over the weekend in Baltimore. I hadn’t given her much thought in recent years until last summer, when a couple of her canvases turned up in “Action/Abstraction”, the excellent show organized by the Jewish Museum in New York that’s now at the St. Louis Art Museum. (And which heads …
Let’s continue that talk with MASS MoCA Director Joe Thompson about how the giant Sol LeWitt installation was accomplished. Yesterday we talked about how LeWitt had come up to MASS MoCA in 2004 and picked out an empty building on the museum campus that he thought would be suitable for the show, which is going to remain on the walls for …
