Looking Around

I spent a few days in Los Angeles last week to catch up on shows there. My favorite: the restrospective of drawings by Vija Celmins at the Hammer Museum. You see her work everywhere, I’m always running into one or two, but this was the first show to pull it together for me and lead me all the way into her complicated intentions, a trip …

I got an interesting comment to my recent post about museums and galleries policing their artists as part of their deals with governments that don’t share Western views about free expression. Here’s the most pertinent part:

The rulers of Abu Dhabi are not “unenlightened,” as you put it;…. rather, they recognize that this is an

…

Send appreciative e-mails to Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who is thinking out loud about the possibility that LACMA might acquire a few architecturally important modernist homes in the LA area, including — possibly — Frank Gehry’s own famously deconstructed bungalow in Santa Monica.

Gehry …

I see from last Sunday’s New York Times that Charles Saatchi has started up a Chinese version of Stuart, the sort of MySpace for art students that’s a heavily visited subdivision of the Saatchi gallery website. If you don’t already know it, it’s a place where students can chat, show examples of their work, and post comments and links to …

On the road for a few days on art-biz. Back to the blog on Wednesday. Where am
I? Well, you might say that’s for me to know and you to figure out.

I thought it was pretty funny to read earlier this week that The Los Angelese County Museum of Art, which is in the midst of a three part expansion designed by the inevitable Renzo Piano, was going to name the entryway of the newly expanded museum “the BP Grand Entrance”. This in gratitude for a $25 million contribution from the British …

Photo-bloggers like the indispensable Alec Soth have been having a field day with Jeff Wall lately — for instance, here and here and here.

All of this comes in response to Wall’s coronation by way of a traveling MoMA retrospective that just opened in Manhattan and an adoring cover story in the New York Times Sunday magazine. (To say …

I see in today’s New York Times that Boston is thinking of demolishing a 13 story building by Paul Rudolph to make way for an 80 story skyscraper by Renzo Piano.

PHOTO:The New York Times/Jodi Hilton

Rudolph, who died ten years ago, wasn’t always the easiest architect to love. (What can you expect when you make your name in a style …

Just last week the county commissioners of Montgomery County, Pa., where the Barnes Foundation is located, voted unanimously to go in search of outside legal assistance to explore ways to keep the Barnes collection from being relocated to an as yet unbuilt facility in downtown Philadelphia. The commissioners also voted to have their …

I spoke earlier today with John Elderfield, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, who wanted to elaborate on an episode that I mentioned in an earlier blogpost about the very imaginative compensation arrangements devised some years ago for MoMA Director Glenn Lowry, which came to light recently in the New York …