CultureGrrl awaiting remarks at the Metropolitan Museum’s Prada/Schiaparelli preview
Photo © Jill Krementz
I admit it. I love it when roving photographer Jill Krementz takes my photo. (She is also responsible for my blog logo-photo at the upper right, taken at the Museum of Modern’s Art’s de Kooning retrospective.)
This time, I’m in her New York Social Diary piece on the Met’s press preview for its Prada/Schiaparelli show. You can see me (detail of that photo, above) just after the introductory images of some of the attending luminaries and just before some very biting commentary from Jill about her frustrations in dealing with the Met’s press officers. I was the beneficiary of this: She settled on me after getting thwarted from taking the shots she really wanted. (Next time, I hope I remember to fix my collar!)
If you want to get a good sense of what’s in the Met’s show, Krementz’s attractive photo essay is a comprehensive guide. Like me, though, she kept walking into herself in the vexing house-of-mirrors installation.
Speaking of which, today I again encountered the hapless star of my video that demonstrated the perils of that baffling layout. The woman whom I now know as Louise Weiss of Access Editorial Services was at today’s Philadelphia Museum of Art press lunch, held at the trendy Standard Hotel on the High Line in New York.
We got a good rundown of Philly’s upcoming shows (including this seductive Joe Rishel production) and museum director Timothy Rub indicated to me in conversation that the Frank Gehry-designed masterplan for the museum’s renovation and expansion might not be completed within our professional lifetimes (not to mention Gehry’s). At least the new loading dock is making good progress!
I also learned from Rub that the Christie’s contemporary auction catalogue had partly erred (causing me to err, here) in indicating that the Philadelphia Museum had exhibited on long-term loan the Pincus Collection’s $86.88-million record Rothko, as well as paintings by Newman and Still. The $23.04-million Pollock, but not the Still, had been long displayed at the PMA, Rub told me. Other works from the collection of the late Philadelphia menswear executive have or will come to the museum, as lifetime donations or bequests. But the three highly desirable auctioned lots came off the museum’s walls just two or three months before they went on the block.
Speaking of unpromised gifts, I’ve always wondered whether the numerous Jasper Johns loans of his own work, long on display Philadelphia’s permanent-collection galleries, were destined to remain at the museum. Contemporary curator Carlos Basualdo (who was multitasking at three different electronic devices between courses) told me that Johns has made no such commitment.
As the last living protagonist of Basualdo’s upcoming show—Dancing around the Bride: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Marcel Duchamp (Oct. 30-Jan. 21), Johns is actively collaborating on exhibition planning.