Looking Around

It wasn’t bad enough that guerilla marketers ripped off street art ideas to panic the whole innocent city of Boston. Now the New York Times is reporting about another development that’s had street art people buzzing in New York for a while. Somebody is going around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan and trashing their work with paint …

Three weeks after the American Institute of Architects published its survey of America’s best loved buildings, monuments and bridges, the website gridskipper has come up with its own rundown of the ugliest buildings in New York. There are some choices, like Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower, that I disagree with completely. But most of the …

Over the weekend I made it to Rose Hall at the Time Warner Center, home of the Wynton Marsalis fiefdom known as Jazz at Lincoln Center, in search of an answer to the musical question — what’s the connection, if any, between art and music? The occasion was the premiere of Portrait in Seven Shades, a jazz composition by Ted Nash that was …

Lee Rosenbaum, who blogs under the name Culturegrrl, has an interesting post about her experience last weekend at a symposium of museum professionals. During a question period she asked MoMA Director Glenn Lowry about the fund financed by a few MoMA trustees that quietly paid him several million dollars in addition to his salary over a …

Or is it hookie? Either way, I have today off — my magazine has some strange ideas about when to celebrate President’s Day weekend. I had thought of doing a brief blogpost anyway about my visit yesterday to preview the Armory Show at Pier 94 on the West Side of Manhattan, one of seven — count ’em, seven — art fairs going on …

It was twenty years ago today — apologies to the Beatles — that Andy Warhol died in his sleep of a heart attack following gall bladder surgery. Taking his cues from the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, Warhol’s chief intuition was that art could do more than merely describe and satirize the banality of the 20th century. It could embody …

Eve Sussman’s 80-minute video The Rape of the Sabine Women has its New York premiere tonight. Three years ago Sussman had everybody’s favorite piece at an otherwise negligible Whitney Biennial, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, a kind of “making of” video for the Velazquez canvas Las Meninas. For 12 murmurous minutes, we spy on members of the …

The Dia Art Foundation has finally chosen a new director. He’s Jeffrey Weiss, head of the department of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The appointment comes not a moment too soon. The Dia, which operates the immense Dia:Beacon museum on the Hudson River north of New York City and …

A couple of oddments on a holiday weekend.

The British paper The Guardian has a piece about the 1994 theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream from the Munch Museum in Oslo. It’s somewhat overlong but fascinating all the same for it’s two main points.

To begin with, the painting may have been stolen not for its own sake, but to draw off …

The New York Times has a front page story today that’s going to rock New York’s Museum of Modern Art for some time to come. It appears that MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry, who is already one of the best paid museum officials in the U.S., was even better paid than we knew. For more than eight years he was also getting compensation from a …

Tyler Green’s blog has a posting this morning about the impending (and depressing) sale by Fisk University of two important canvases from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which Stieglitz’s widow Georgia O’Keeffe donated to the school in 1949, three years after his death. You can also read more about the complicated case here.

One of …

Over the last few weeks it was possible — just possible — to hope that the misbegotten Freedom Tower going up on the site of the World Trade Center might be put on hold. When he came to office in January New York’s new governor Eliot Spitzer had put the project “under review” because he suspected it was going to be unrentable. …

Only kidding. All the same, don’t look for big headlines from this week’s impressionist and modern art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Last November’s impressionist/modern sale at Christie’s was the richest art auction in history, bringing in $491 million. At the pre-sale viewing the galleries were thick with major canvases by …