Lee Rosenbaum's cultural commentary

Perhaps because the job of managing museums has been complicated by the complexities of "woke-ness," there's recently been a head-spinning turnover in the Director's Office, with DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) as an overriding imperative. Max Hollein, the straight white male who in 2018 assumed the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum, got in just under the wire before … [Read more...] about Changing the Chains of Command: The Turbulent Turnover in Museum Management

Sometimes it can be fun to wander around an unfamiliar art museum with no clear plan, relying on aimless serendipity to lead you to unexpected visual delights. But more often, if you're an art aficionado and regular visitor, you crave some structure for your visual encounters, and you'd like to know that your can still find your favorites where you had previously savored … [Read more...] about Creel’s Reel: Travelin’ Like Gavin in the Met’s Reinstalled European Paintings Galleries (& my take on that rehang)

Last month, the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles were evacuated due to bomb threats (that were later downplayed as "no real threats"), and pro-Palestinian demonstrations in France were banned as "likely to generate disturbances to the public order." In a post at that time on "X" (the late, lamented Twitter), I wondered if NYC museums might be experiencing similar jitters in … [Read more...] about Security Insecurity: Metropolitan Museum Seeks an “Incident Response Manager” (Pistol Permit Required)

Sotheby's managed to snatch a victory (Pyrrhic?) from the jaws of defeat by prearranging successful sales of all 31 works offered Wednesday night from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection of modern, postwar and contemporary art. Auctioneer Oliver Barker was able to announce at the end of that very uneven evening that 100% of the offerings had found buyers (aka: "a White-Glove … [Read more...] about “White Glove” Treatment: Sotheby’s Fishy Fisher Landau Claim (plus: Fond Farewell to Christie’s Jussi Pylkkänen)

Is the bronze statue that was seized-in-place by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg really from Bubon (the ancient city in what is now Turkey), as claimed by the DA in support of his effort to dislodge it from its longtime home at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), relocating it to Turkey, its supposed country of origin? Notwithstanding the unequivocal claims made by … [Read more...] about Bubon(ic) Plague: Serious Doubts About the Supposed Ancient Home of Cleveland’s Contested Statue

I did a double-take when I saw this image (below) of a bronze statue that the museum-raiding Manhattan District Attorney's office is attempting to wrest from a museum far outside its home territory---the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA): That ancient dignitary immediately brought to my mind another statue, on conspicuous view in the Greek and Roman galleries of New York's … [Read more...] about Statues & Statutes: Feisty Cleveland Museum Fights Back in Dispute with Manhattan DA (CORRECTED)

I did a double-take last week upon seeing the Wall Street Journal's belated rave for what the newspaper's art writer, Lance Esplund, described as an "enchanting, community-curated show" of Pueblo pottery (Grounded in Clay, to June 4, 2024). It had opened at the Metropolitan Museum some three months before the WSJ's review appeared. As CultureGrrl readers know, I had serious … [Read more...] about Metropolitan Museum’s Curators are Grounded by Its Uneven “Grounded in Clay” Display

UPDATE: I have reluctantly taken down the video that I had originally included in this blog post, in response to the request that I received from the scholar whose comments I had taped at Monday's "Rosh Hashana Pop-Up"---a public talk about two important manuscripts that were displayed at the Met. Two "Renaissance Masterpieces of Judaica," as described in the Metropolitan … [Read more...] about Jewish Scribes & Christian Artists: High-Holiday Torah Study at the Metropolitan Museum (UPDATED)

With the Jewish Museum's imminent change of leadership, I can soon revisit its landmarked 1908 Warburg mansion on 5th Avenue in New York (which I've largely avoided under the 11-year directorship of Claudia Gould), feeling much more confident that it is under auspicious auspices. James Snyder, who had directed the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, for 22 years, has been named to assume … [Read more...] about Jerusalem Musings: My Hour in Israel with James Snyder, Now Director-Designate of NYC’s Jewish Museum

I guess it was just a matter of time before the Barnes Foundation, once an intimate, inviting setting for enjoying art and nature in bucolic surroundings, took the (once unthinkable) step of making temporary art loans to other institutions---a deviation from the late Albert Barnes' trust indenture, which set forth specific strictures governing the operation of his eclectic, … [Read more...] about Albert Barnes’ Shaken Foundation: Deviating from Founder’s Strict Dictate That His Trove Remain Intact

I know that I risk annoying CultureGrandson and his 10-year-old peers by casting doubt on the Metropolitan Museum's latest technological venture. But does New York's premier art museum, usually an arbiter of taste and artistic excellence, really want to reduce the disparate elements of artworks to adornments for awkward avatars? Here's my own smirking surrogate, sporting a … [Read more...] about Hard-Knocks Roblox: Metropolitan Museum’s Child-Oriented Tech Venture (plus: Its No-Go Van Gogh)

Get it fast, but get it wrong? I did a double take at the New York Times' front-page report this morning of the Metropolitan Museum's acquisition of “Bélizaire and the Frey Children,” attributed to Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans, "a French portraitist of Louisiana’s elite." The purchase was described by the museum as part of the Met's "larger effort to reframe how it tells … [Read more...] about Black Lives Matter (but so does accuracy): Botched NY Times Report of the Met’s Landmark Acquisition

In what surely must be a record length for a magazine profile of an art dealer, The New Yorker's 17,000-word How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World---more evocatively (and provocatively) titled, "Money on the Wall" in the July 31 print edition---focuses with hardcore voyeurism on the sometimes unsavory but usually successful tactics of a masterful masterpiece-merchant. … [Read more...] about Tarrying with Larry: Gagosian Gets the Full “New Yorker” Treatment (minus the careful fact-checking)

In another case of museums' declining cash donations because of the money's problematic source, Christie's had attempted "to donate a significant portion of its commission" from the sales from Heidi Horton's jewelry collection "to organizations that contribute to vitally important Holocaust research and education. It will be up to these organizations, if they so wish, to … [Read more...] about Christie’s Auction of the Horten Hoard—Tainted by Nazi Expropriation? (Plus: a “Mishneh Torah” Update)

I've written often over the years about museums' givebacks of antiquities to countries of origin. But the Metropolitan Museum's eyebrow-raising announcement (via this court document) that it is returning monetary contributions it received from the indicted Sam Bankman-Fried (aka: SBF), founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, is a reversal that rarely (if ever) happens in … [Read more...] about FTX Hex at the Met: Givebacks of Bankman-Fried’s Problematic Benefactions