Archives for June 2006

Turns out the Russian post with my name in it is not a translation, as I had thought yesterday , but merely a sympathetic reference to my piece, by a blogger with ties to the contemporary art market in Russia. That bilingual scribe, Julia Volfson, has now helpfully (if haltingly) provided an English translation for all of you CultureGrrl link-clickers. (Speaking of links, there … [Read more...] about Russian Roulette

It was an unusual concurrence of stories, all hitting the newspapers at about the same time: The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, relinquished a major J.M.W. Turner painting, discovered to have been Nazi loot; another Turner broke the record for a British watercolor at Christie's, London; Sotheby's announced it will share the database of its Nazi-loot Restitution Department with … [Read more...] about As the Turner Turns

This must be my readers' interactive day: I have just found a link on the web to what appears to be a Russian translation of my art-market post that appeared yesterday. The Russian-language site also includes readers' comments about that post. Is just another indication that Russians are big art-market players? So, to all you Russian oligarchs who are fans of CultureGrrl: What … [Read more...] about CultureGrrl in Russian???

Announcing a new CultureGrrl feature, BlogBack, inviting thoughtful readers to take issue with my intemperate observations. (Tom, Glenn, wanna blog? My guess is Tom won't; Glenn might.) First up---Baxter Jones, a lawyer, art collector, member of the board of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and member of the Contemporary Art Society, a support group for the High Museum of … [Read more...] about BlogBack: An Admirer of the High

Enough with the Guggenheim! On to the art market: I have no patience for financial-world operators who think they can crank out useful analyses of the art market by relying on their usual habits of number-crunching and indexing. Skills in picking hot stocks are, thankfully, not applicable to picking "hot" artists. Financial analysts should stick to what they know. In developing … [Read more...] about The Art Market is Not the Stock Market

I know how Thomas Krens must feel: Every once in a while, I engage an important person in a long interview for an article that never gets published. I usually tell that person that I will probably find a chance to use the material in some future article. Sometimes that happens. So must it be, on a much grander scale, with the major architects who squandered long hours … [Read more...] about Where in the World is the Guggenheim?

There are now enough Guggenheims, real or imagined, for a full-scale retrospective. And now there will actually be one: Architecture of the Guggenheim, Aug. 25 to Nov. 12 at the Federal Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn, Germany, will display "architectural models and plans of 23 projects and completions [that] illustrate the radical development of international museum … [Read more...] about A Retrospective of Guggenheims

Nicolai Ouroussoff, in his NY Times review of Zaha Hadid's retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, called her "architecture's diva." He doesn't know the half of it. After the unusually elaborate press conference preceding the press preview, she started up the ramp but stopped short almost immediately, at the double-height gallery that displayed her earliest … [Read more...] about Hadid: Diva Indeed

… [Read more...] about Next Week: Where in the World is the Guggenheim?

Dashing across the Arts Quad from the Native American exhibition at Cornell's Olin Library to its Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, I took in Rembrandt at 400, devoted to his etchings. The museum's director, Frank Robinson, is a Rembrandt specialist who can always be counted upon to elucidate issues of connoisseurship---different states, early and late impressions, copies, … [Read more...] about Ivy-League Art–Part II

It's all about access. University museums and libraries may not have the attendance, collections or high profiles of major independent art institutions, but they often do a better job of giving their audiences hands-on, instructive contact with their holdings. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my recent graduation expedition to Cornell University included some nimble … [Read more...] about Ivy-League Art–Part I

This just in from Anthony Calnek, deputy director for communications and publishing at the Guggenheim Museum: I passed along to Lisa Dennison [the museum's director] your suggestion that curators' names should be prominently displayed with introductory wall texts; she completely agrees, and has instructed the staff appropriately! So there you go---a difference has already been … [Read more...] about CultureGrrl Has Clout!

James Russell, writing for Bloomberg, continues to be one of our smartest voices on hot-button architectural issues---previously, on rebuilding post-Katrina New Orleans, today, on rebuilding Ground Zero. He calls for Michael Arad's memorial to be drastically scaled back, and adds that "some of the items tucked into the estimate by the construction management firm Bovis Lend … [Read more...] about Russell on WTC Memorial

What are those ads doing up there at the top of the page? They're my feeble attempt to have my time-consuming bloggery make some cents. After all, writing is supposed to be what I do to for a living. I don't solicit or select the ads: Google does all the heavy-lifting, and gives me a cut. If you click, you drop some coins in my tin cup. Desperate times call for desperate … [Read more...] about A Touch of Crass

Here, drawn from my conversations today with Getty Museum officials, including Michael Brand---its beset from the get-go director---is the list of things he hopes to (or needs to) do, in relatively short order: 1) Move into his new house, a process that was delayed when it was discovered that his first prospective abode was moldy. 2) Settle the antiquities mess, making … [Read more...] about The Getty’s To-Do List