Again. Back Monday, Sept. 14
Looking Around
Glenn Beck: Crack(ed) Symbologist
Glenn Beck, the conservative commentator and self-proclaimed “rodeo clown”, found a new hobby horse the other night — secretly “communist” and “fascist” art buried into the exterior design program of Rockefeller Center. In Beck’s rant he also managed to imply that “Rockefeller”, it’s not clear which Rockefeller he meant, was also …
The Popcorn Summit
As planned, on Tuesday Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, met with members of Save Film at LACMA, the group attempting to preserve the museum’s 40-year-old weekend film program. What came of it? Hard to say. According to this morning’s LA Times, Govan is going forward with his recently announced …
Is Rem’s CCTV Building X-Rated?
Okay, I know it’s only September but I’m pretty sure that this morning I ran across the strangest architecture story of the year. Rem Koolhaas has found it necessary to respond to a rumor sweeping China’s webspace that his CCTV headquarters in Beijing was designed to suggest female genitalia. (Until now many Chinese had been content …
Was 1959 the Year the ’60s Started?
I spent some of the weekend reading 1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan, a columnist at Slate who covers politics as well as cultural topics. (I’ve been known to multi-task myself sometimes, so I know such things are possible.) I’m always a little wary of books that make grand claims in their subtitles, which seems to be …
Prince Charles vs. the Architects, Again
All this year Prince Charles has been stepping up his war on modern architecture, a scuffle that started 25 years ago when he forced through changes on the planned addition to the National Gallery in London. This year he managed to squash a modern apartment development from the office of Richard Rogers by writing a letter to the royal …
The Show Must Go On
Last week I posted about the prospect that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art might end its more than 40-year-old weekend film program and why that would be a bad idea. LACMA Director Michael Govan has said that he planned to “suspend” the program in October because it had suffered a budget shortfall of about $1 million over the …
It’s Come to This
Barter was big during the Great Depression, when cash was in short supply. Some communities even started to issue their own scrip, which you could say is a form of barter formalized. Lately the Great Recession seems to be easing up — whew! — and some of the clouds are parting. Stock market up, housing prices leveling off. But …
Splendor in the Grass
One other event that took place while I was away in August, the death of the architect Charles Gwathmey. It was just last fall that I had lunch with Gwathmey and Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of architecture at Yale, to talk about the beautifully refurbished Art and Architecture building on the Yale campus, a Paul Rudolph masterpiece …
The Great Mona Lisa Heist
This morning marks an oddball anniversary. It was 98 years ago today that Mona Lisa disappeared from the walls of its gallery in the Louvre. Early on the morning of Aug. 21, 1911, someone made off with what was even then the world’s most famous painting. It stayed missing for more than two years and for much of that time it was …
What I Read on My Summer Vacation
I’m detouring today into Thomas Pynchon-land.
The Lost Weekend?
Here’s another of those stories that got started while I was on vacation but has many twists and turns to come. A few weeks ago the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that starting in October it would be “suspending” its longtime weekend film program, in order to “rethink” it, which sounded like an euphemism for sweeping it …
A Talk With: The New Head of Crystal Bridges
If you follow the arts you already know that the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton has a museum-in-progress in Bentonville, Ark., where her father, Sam Walton, opened his first retail store in 1951. On Monday her Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which is still under construction, announced a new director. Don Bacigalupi, presently …