Archives for August 2007

Edward Hopper, "Mrs. Scott's House," 1932, 26" by 50½" Maier Museum, Louise Jordan Smith Fund Ginger Worden, outgoing interim president of financially strapped Randolph College (formerly Randolph-Macon Woman's College), Lynchburg, VA, announced yesterday in her final letter to faculty, staff, alumnae and trustees that the institution was filing a "request for a court opinion … [Read more...] about Court Opinion Sought to Permit Maier Museum Art Sales

Met Store at JFK Terminal 8, New York The market for the art of India may be weakening, according to Delhi dealers quoted recently in the Hindustan Times. But the market for faux art offered at the Metropolitan Museum's new store in Delhi is apparently booming. The Indo-Asian News Service reports: The stream of visitors has come as a pleasant surprise to the museum authorities, … [Read more...] about Monsoon Merchandising: Metropolitan Museum Hawks Reproductions in India

John Merryman, Stanford Law Professor Emeritus For all you antiquities-collecting controversialists, a conference on The Future of the Past: Ethical Implications of Collecting Antiquities in the 21st Century, organized by Southern Methodist University, Dallas, should keep you agonizing for two days (Oct. 18-19) over thorny questions of due diligence, ambiguous provenance, … [Read more...] about Antiquities Agonistes: Dallas Conference Parses Patrimony

From all of the fascinating, voluminous documentation of Joseph Cornell's multi-faceted oeuvre at the engrossing retrospective of his work that I caught on its final day, Sunday, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, one crucial piece of documentation was conspicuously missing: The show's catalogue. In addition (or should I say, subtraction), the well received 1997 … [Read more...] about Cornelliana: When Is an Exhibition Catalogue Exasperatingly Unhelpful? UPDATED

Don't worry. I'm not going to bore you with an account of my hapless golf game (to which I alluded at the end of my last post). But I will tell you that the golf resort that my family and I just returned from put me in easy driving distance to two major museum shows, each of which closed Sunday. The two 20th-century artists who were the subjects of these two exhibitions were … [Read more...] about Where in the World Was Lee?

Lucy's Bones on a Slab Is this 3.2 million-year-old woman fit to travel? The fossilized remains of Lucy, the oldest and most complete (40% intact) human ancestor fully retrieved from African soil, makes her first appearance outside of Ethiopia in an exhibition opening Aug. 31 at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, prompting outcries from famed paleontologist Richard Leakey. … [Read more...] about Lick These Links: Lucy’s Skeleton in Houston, Dissing Dennison, Beware the Bears, McQueen’s Ferrari, Prince’s Burned House Photos

Donald Fisher Donald Fisher, founder of the Gap and now its chairman emeritus, got the public-relations jump with his announcement last week of plans to build his own 100,000-square-foot facility for his vast contemporary art collection on the national park land of San Francisco's Presidio, a former military post, which was immediately embraced with enthusiasm by the San … [Read more...] about Credibility Gap: Dubious Approval Process for the Gap Founder’s Contemporary Museum

"The Informed Reader: Insights and Items of Interest from Other Sources" today disseminates my thoughts to Wall Street Journal readers on the how "Big Money in the Art Market Costs Museums Their Edge," as their headline reads. You saw it first here as "Art-Market Fever: The Marginalization of Museums." Today's synopsis is in the WSJ online here and in today's paper on Page … [Read more...] about CultureGrrl in WSJ’s “The Informed Reader” (Somewhat Misinformed)

You can now link here (on WNYC's website) or simply click below to hear the audio of my art-market commentary today on New York Public Radio. (It is not on their "Arts" page, as I had told you yesterday; it's in "Newsroom.") You can also go here for my more expansive take today on the art market. My prior posts on Sotheby's half-year financial report and how its results compare … [Read more...] about Audio Link to My Art-Market Commentary on NY Public Radio

In my comments today on New York Public Radio's Morning Edition, I briefly touch on what most concerns me about the super-heated art market---the growing marginalization of museums. There is much more to say: The inability of art institutions to compete with big-money collectors in acquiring art is an old problem that has only gotten worse. I recently spoke to one major museum … [Read more...] about Art-Market Fever: The Marginalization of Museums

The best I can tell you about what time I'll be on New York Public Radio tomorrow is that it should be either at 6:36 and 8:36 a.m. or else at 6:50 and 8:50 a.m., on WNYC, 93.9 FM and 820 AM. In any event, I'll post the audio link when it's up on the station's website, and I'll also post, here on CultureGrrl tomorrow morning, an amplification of my thoughts about the … [Read more...] about Breakfast with Lee on the Radio, More Art-Market Musings on CultureGrrl

A few tasty tidbits from the 10-Q financial report filed yesterday by publicly traded Sotheby's: As of Aug. 7, Sotheby's had outstanding guarantees totaling $274.9 million. (Guarantees are the amounts promised by the auction house to consignors, whether or not the bidding actually achieves those amounts.) During a conference call Wednesday with securities analysts, William … [Read more...] about Sotheby’s Half-Year Financial Report: Higher Guarantees, Antitrust Coupon Redemption

---Dr. Johnson gets hammered at the National Portrait Gallery, London. NOW they've decided to check visitors' bags. ---The LA Museum of Contemporary Art decides to allow the SALE of bags---big-ticket designer handbags---by a commercial boutique setting up shop within the museum, in connection with its upcoming Takashi Murakami retrospective. Diane Haithman of the LA Times … [Read more...] about Summer Dog Days: Reynolds Hammer-Vandal at NPG, LA MOCA Goes to Hell in a Handbag

My Celia Cruz Shrine This just in from Associated Press: Playing the Queen of Salsa on stage is a dream come true for Xiomara Laugart, the star of the musical "Celia: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz"....Through 30 songs once performed by the legendary singer, the musical covers Cruz's birth in Santo Suarez, Cuba, in 1925, to her death in 2003 in New Jersey. ...in what is … [Read more...] about Celia Cruz, the Musical (and My Apartment)