Looking Around

Let’s conclude that conversation with the soon to retire chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

LACAYO: MoMA is always criticized for not staying hot on the trail of contemporary art. Recently your museum hired Kathy Halbreich, the former director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, to become …

Blogger Tyler Green had a depressing posting today as part of a three part interview he’s been running with Christian Viveros-Faune, the art critic of New York’s erstwhile alternative weekly The Village Voice, now owned by a Phoenix-based chain. The depressing part is that it emerged from the interview that even while serving as a …

After successfully re-claiming scores of Greek and Roman antiquities from American museums, the Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli has made his first agreement to retrieve works from an American private collection. Shelby White, the New York philanthropist, agreed to return ten pieces from the collection that she assembled with …

As a way of drawing tourists out of the absurdly congested center of Florence, Tuscan cultural officials are thinking of moving Michelangelo’s David to a new theater under construction on the outskirts of town. The David has moved before of course. It was originally set up in the …

Let’s continue that conversation I started here two days ago with the soon-to-retire chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

LACAYO: Over the past twenty-five or so years we’ve seen incredible retrospectives, at MoMA and elsewhere, devoted to just about all the big names of the 20th century. Picasso, …

A few bits of aftermath from the decision by Eli Broad not to donate his collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

LACMA Director Michael Govan spoke to the Los Angeles Times yesterday. You can’t blame him for putting the best face on things, but I find myself agreeing with a couple of points made today by blogger Tyler …

The Ghanaian-born artist El Anatsui has been exhibiting outside West Africa since at least 1990, when he first appeared at the Venice Biennale, but it seems to me that over the past year or two he’s everywhere I go. So I wasn’t surprised that one of his magnificent …

Last month the Museum of Modern Art in New York annouced that John Elderfield, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, would be stepping down later this year when he reaches 65, the museum’s compulsory retirement age. But in recognition of the fact that John is someone no museum wants or can afford to lose, he’ll remain with …

Last thought on that Takashi Murakami exhibition in L.A. As mentioned yesterday, the big controversy when it first opened was over the decision to include a Louis Vuitton boutique as a gallery within the show — not just as a gift shop, but as an integral part of the show. (From which, let the record show, the museum would derive no …

Okay, let’s get back to that Takashi Murakami show at the Geffen Contemporary in L.A. In an earlier post I mentioned that it had been better than I expected and sketched out some of the essential background on him and his work.

My Lonesome Cowboy, Murakami, 1998 — Image: Marianne Boesky Gallery

So what did I learn at that show? To …

It’s official. The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will be stepping down at the end of this year. He’s 71 and came to the job 31 years ago.

The museum that de Montebello is leaving is one of the greatest in the world. It already was, of course, when he got there, but it has expanded enormously — to be …

Before I get back to my long post on Murakami, there’s this news about the decision by Eli Broad not to leave his vast collection of modern and contemporary art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. LACMA was the place most likely to get it, or most of it, if he left it to any museum. He’ll be handing it over instead to the Broad Art …