And again.
I just arrived in Dallas for The Future of the Past, a conference at Southern Methodist University about the continuing controversies over cultural property and just who owns it. Given the developments of the last year or so — the successful claims by Italy for the return of antiquities in American museums, the decision by …
Let’s finish up that talk with SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra.
LACAYO: Are there trends in the museum world that you fear? What keeps you up at night?
BENEZRA: One of the things I think a lot about is that there was a time when the values that museums held and the established patterns of behavior that museums acted upon were pretty …
Brad Cloepfil, whose firm Allied Works Architecture is designing the new Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) in Manhattan, took me on a tour yesterday of the still unfinished building, which is expected to open its doors next September.
This is the same project that set off a huge preservation battle in New York a few years ago because it …
Indigo Blue, Ann Hamilton, 1991/2007 — Photo: SFMOMA
Here’s a bit more of my conversation a few weeks ago with SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra.
LACAYO: The art market, of course, has been going off the charts. What’s been the impact on your ability to collect? Museums get most of their art by way of gifts and bequests. But they also …
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
When I was in San Francisco recently to see the Olafur Eliasson show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) I sat down for a conversation with SFMOMA’s Director Neal Benezra. We talked about museum expansion, acquisitions, deaccessioning and how it feels to have one of your own board …
Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight/Turner, 1835 — The National Gallery of Art
I made it down to Washington a few weeks ago to catch an early look at the phenomenal Turner show that has since opened at the National Gallery of Art. I’m still rubbing my eyes. It’s very large, the largest Turner exhibition to be seen in the U.S. in …
Alexandra Boulat
Earlier this week, the French photojournalist Alexandra Boulat died in Paris. Boulat was one of the founders of the photo agency VII and her pictures often found their way into the pages of Time. Around the end of every year I collaborate with Time‘s photo editors on the special issue devoted to Images of the Year. …
“There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
The line is Leonard Cohen’s. It came to mind yesterday when I noticed that for her new installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London, the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has produced a lengthy and widening crack in the Tate’s concrete floor.
…
Darkytown Rebellion, Kara Walker, 2001 — Collection Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg
I made it over to the Whitney Museum this morning to preview Kara Walker’s mid-career retrospective. You might say that Walker has just one subject, but it’s one of the big ones, the endless predicament of race in America.
The …
First that Monet gets punched and ripped in Paris. Now this. The attack actually took place last week, but only made it into the New York Times today.
Wasn’t it the Europeans who were supposed to be the guardians of culture?
Eliasson, the artist behind The weather project, the hugely popular installation at Tate Modern in London four years ago, is having his first major U.S. survey show. I went out to San Francisco a few weeks ago to see it. Here’s a fraction of my reaction in this week’s Time. Over the next week or two I’ll post more about what I saw and …
Le Pont d’Argenteuil, Monet — Musee d’Orsay
In fact, a bad year. Just a few months after a Monet was stolen from a museum in Nice, some drunken intruders broke into the Musee d’Orsay in Paris over the weekend and punched a four-inch hole in a major Monet, Le Pont d’Argenteuil.
It was just last August that thieves broke into the …
Madonna with the Yarnwinder, Leonardo, ca. 1501 — Collection: the Duke of Buccleuch
Scottish police scored a big victory late last week. They retrieved Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna with the Yarnwinder. A small oil on panel from about 1501 — that’s the date assigned by the scholar Martin Kemp; others put it as late as 1510 — it …
