Let’s get back again to Don Argott’s The Art of the Steal, the new documentary about the sad fate of the Barnes collection.
The beginning of the end for the Barnes can probably be dated to the arrival of Richard H. Glanton, a big personality with big ambitions for the Barnes and himself, not necessarily in that order.
Okay, back to Don Argott’s new documentary, The Art of the Steal, which has its New York premiere Tuesday night at the New York Film festival.
By the 1920s Barnes was spending much of his time writing about art. His theories, with their almost exclusive focus on formal relations within and among pictures, weren’t taken very seriously …
The surprise hit of the Toronto Film Festival a few weeks ago was The Art of the Steal, a documentary about the still-in-progress hijacking of the phenomenal Barnes Foundation art collection, one of the greatest in the world, by the powers-that-be in Philadelphia. The film has its New York debut Tuesday night at a sold out …
This just in – Jehuda Reinharz, who has been president of Brandeis University since 1994, has announced his intention to resign. In an e-mail today to the Brandeis community he said he plans to remain in the job through the current academic year and as late as June 30, 2011, depending on how long it takes to choose a successor. …
The state of California may be going bust, but things are looking up for two big museums there. In Los Angeles, the beleaguered Museum of Contemporary Art, which seemed on the verge of collapse last year, has picked itself up off the floor, and faster than anyone would have predicted. And further north, the San Francisco Museum of …
The little René Magritte Museum in the Brussels suburb of Jette was robbed at gunpoint this morning by two men who ran off with Olympia, a 1948 portrait of Magritte’s wife Georgette in the nude with a conch shell on her belly. (It was originally a toad, but Magritte had second thoughts and painted it over.)
According to the British …
Okay, I’m back. While I was on the road there was a new development in the ongoing struggle over the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. To recap: earlier this year, in the depths of the Wall Street meltdown, Brandeis announced that to help cover a huge shortfall in the school’s budget it planned to shut down its art museum and …
Again! Back Wednesday.
I was out in Dallas last week to take a look at the new Cowboys Stadium, a $1.2 billion extravaganza that’s as much the creation of Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones as it is of the architects who designed it. It doesn’t represent the kind of radical rethinking of stadium design that you get from, say, Herzog & deMueron. But at a time when …
I didn’t want to let the week run out without throwing in something about blockbusters, all those giant loan shows of the past few decades, which have been getting spanked lately by critics and museum professionals insisting that museums must get back to focusing on their permanent collections. (A re-focus the recession has done a lot to …
A few days ago I mentioned here that Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, had noticed the odd fact that the logo for last weekend’s anti-Obama march on Washington makes use of a symbol with a long pedigree on the militant left, a raised fist.
It turns out that the Rolling Stone website has more details. They …
Over the weekend the Austrian culture ministry announced that the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna is facing an attempt to reclaim one of its most important works, Vermeer’s The Art of Painting — or as it’s also known, The Allegory of Painting — which has been at the museum since 1946.
It’s already a picture with a fraught history.
The Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight has a hilarious (and perfectly valid) follow-up today on Glenn Beck’s recent attempt to draw sinister inferences of fascist and communist content in the 30s-era artwork around Rockefeller Center. I posted about Beck’s tirade just before I disappeared last week on a long work trip. …
