Looking Around

Nicholas Penny, the recently appointed director of the National Gallery in London, said last week that he wants his museum to move away from blockbuster exhibitions that bring in crowds, but at the cost of going back again and again to names we already know. He wants to focus on shows that bring to light neglected figures like the …

In today’s New York Sun, Kate Taylor has a round up of the most-mentioned candidates to succeed Tom Krens at the Guggenheim. As I mentioned yesterday, LACMA’s Michael Govan is much mentioned among the mentioners. And Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer In L.A., who I thought I was being original in suggesting for “the short list”, …

Tom Krens, the man behind the McGuggenheim, the museum as global franchise, is moving on. The Guggenheim board announced yesterday that Krens would retire later this year as director of the Guggenheim Foundation, a title he took on three years ago after he stepped aside as director of the museum. That job then went to Lisa Dennison, …

Recently I finished Swimming in a Sea of Death, David Rieff’s memoir about the final illness of his mother, the writer Susan Sontag. She was 73 when she died late in 2004 of a virulent form of leukemia. Towards the end of his book Rieff wonders whether, instead of suffering …

Over the months that I was working on Time‘s story this week about the antiquities wars, one thing that struck me was that last September’s “memo of understanding” between Yale University and Peru to return the Machu Picchu artifacts, which was supposed to be finalized within 60 days, never was. Now we’re getting a glimpse of how messy …

I caught an advance look at The Gates, a documentary about the 2005 Christo and Jeanne-Claude project in New York’s Central Park. It has its television premiere on HBO on Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 10 p.m. Then it’s repeated on various dates and times through March.

The …

The disputed Greek boy up there seems to be puzzling over where he’s headed next. With the return of scores of antiquities from U.S. museums, the Italian campaign to retrieve smuggled artifacts may have reached, to use an Italian word, its crescendo. But the wider struggle …

A lot of the art news this week is in courtrooms.

The slow motion trial of former Getty antiquities curator Marion True and dealer Robert Hecht trundles on in Rome.

And Fisk University is back in Davidson County Chancery Court. Having failed to sell part of its Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which was a gift to the school from …

One other thing that happened while I was away last week. The people who run the London Underground — that’s subway in American — reversed themselves and decided to lift a ban they had imposed earlier on an ad for an upcoming exhibition of work by Lucas Cranach the Elder at London’s Royal Academy. The ad caused problems because it …

A few things happened while I was away for a week. I’ll comment on two.

First — I don’t think I’ll need to read another word for a while about the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum in L.A., which debuted to middling reviews for both the opening exhibition and for the Renzo Piano building. All the same, one related controversy stayed …

The Gray Fort, Jim Dine — Karolyn Sherwood Gallery

As I mentioned just before heading out on vacation, I’ll only be posting once this week, today, to repeat a Valentine’s Day post from last year about the color red. I figured it would be a post that wasn’t really on the news, but as it turns out the religious authorities of Saudi …

I’m on vacation next week, visiting family. During that time I’ll only post once, on Valentine’s Day, to re-run my long post from last year on the color red. When you’ve got your own blog, you can do things like that.

Meanwhile I want to recommend Christopher Knight’s review in yesterday’s L.A. Times of BCAM, the new Broad …

The news that the Getty has purchased a complete master set of Irving Penn’s series The Small Trades — 252 portraits of working people that he made in the 1950s — reminded me of one of the pictures in the show of Penn portraits of artists and writers that’s currently at the …