Looking Around

It’s been a non-stop rainy week in London, the kind where you might as well run for cover into the galleries and museums. So for the last four days that’s what I’ve been doing. I got to spend a solid hour again with the Elgin Marbles, deciphering that bumper-to-bumper Panathenaic procession, the world’s longest traffic jam until that …

In London this week to look in on a few things happening here. I’ll be reporting back throughout the week.

A few months ago I came across this quote on the photography blog of Eric Ethridge, which I pass along as part of today’s July Fourth celebrations. It’s from the great American historian C. Vann Woodward. Ethridge tells us that it appears in Woodward’s 1953 essay “The Irony of Southern History”, which is collected in his book The …

When I was up at the Clark a few weeks ago to check out their new Tadao Ando-designed building, I stopped in to talk with the Clark’s director Michael Conforti, who is also the new president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. In a big step to defuse the antiquities wars, the AAMD recently adopted new guidelines to govern the …

You could see this coming for a while. Delays and cost overruns at the World Trade Center site in New York have meant a continuing process of chipping away at the design proposals for Ground Zero. Earlier ths week the Port Authority of New …

When I interviewed him in London last fall, Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, told me off the record that he didn’t want to succeed Philippe de Montebello as director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York because he much preferred to stay on where he was. Over the past few months I’ve been told the same thing, always …

Thanks to a new show that just opened at the Whitney Museum in New York, there’s a bit of Buckminster Fuller revival going on. I wrote about it in this week’s Time.

They opened the faucets yesterday for The New York City Waterfalls, the industrial strength art project by Olafur Eliasson at four locations along the city’s eastern waterfront. Each of them consists of a steel scaffolding between 90 and 120 …

Last year the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art decided that its Takashi Murakami exhibition, now at the Brooklyn Museum, required a Louis Vuitton boutique within the show as an actual gallery, not just as a gift shop. This was supposed to illustrate the way that Murakami straddled the world of art and merchandising. Why they …

Earlier this week the Brits announced the choices for the next two projects to fill what they call The Fourth Plinth. That’s the pedestal in Trafalgar Square that’s given over to a different work of public sculpture every year or so. The next work to go there will be what you might call a bit of performance art, with the public as the …

There’s one less American art world job open today. Dia Art Foundation announced yesterday that Philippe Vergne, the deputy director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, will come on board as director on September 15. He replaces Jeffrey Weiss, the former National Gallery curator who left the Dia job after just nine months, saying …

I was interested to see that the New York Times on Sunday ran a feature about prominent architects flocking to work for not-quite-democratic states, meaning China, Russia, the various emirates, etc. My own, somewhat more polemical take on that question appeared a few weeks ago in the May/June issue of Foreign Policy. On their website …

I was up in Williamstown, Ma. last week to catch an early look at the Stone Hill Center, another splendid little exercise in High Modernism, 21st-century Japanese style, by Tadao Ando, this one on the campus of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. It uses gestures and …