Roberta Smith
Kudos to the NY Times‘ indispensable art critic, Roberta Smith, for hitting the road and bringing us her on-location elucidation of why the endangered Rose Art Museum is important and deserves to live.
She got the 19-year-old-sophomore sound bite and even enlisted a photographer, Erik Jacobs, to shoot the protest signs papering the museum’s entrance. There’s no interview with Brandeis University’s president or the museum’s director, but then we’ve heard quite enough from them already.
Roberta writes:
It is hard to know how anyone could destroy this museum, but that’s
what Brandeis announced it would do last Monday. It’s hard to think of
a comparably destructive—and self-destructive—move in the art world
today.
What I don’t understand is why no NY Times pundit ever penned a similar opinion piece (as distinguished from three objective news reports) deploring the done-deal disposals that recently occured in their own backyard—the stealth deaccessions (first disclosed in CultureGrrl) by the National Academy Museum, New York.
The silence of the scribes almost made me long for the return from Europe of Michael Kimmelman.