Lee Rosenbaum's cultural commentary

The Guggenheim Foundation ought to cut its losses and pull out of its Abu Dhabi misadventure. There's no point in trying to analyze the salvos in the latest hostilities and breakdown of talks between the Guggenheim and the Gulf Labor Coalition (GLC). In a statement on its website yesterday, the foundation blasted GLC for "shift[ing] its demands on the Guggenheim beyond the … [Read more...] about Guggenheim Quicksand: Why Are We in Abu Dhabi?

Like the Frick Collection's Van Dyck show (discussed here), the Museum of Modern Art's Degas: A Strange New Beauty (to July 24) is informed by the discerning eye of a prints-and-drawings curator who provides new insights into a celebrated painter's sensibility and working methods through close examination of his more experimental works on paper. Both shows are visually … [Read more...] about Degas Digs Deep: MoMA Mines His Monotype Monomania–Part I

Notwithstanding the fact that its founding donor was British, the Smithsonian Institution's proposed London outpost, conceived before the institution's current head, David Skorton, came on board, is not necessarily a marriage made in museum heaven. During their meeting today, Skorton and the Smithsonian's Board of Regents, its governing body, again delayed greenlighting … [Read more...] about Smithsonian London? “Not So Fast!” Says Secretary Skorton

As you my have surmised from Sunday's tweet, this week I'm doting, not blogging! … [Read more...] about Welcome CultureGranddaughter!

It takes not only brains but also curatorial brawn (which powerful institutions are in the best position to exert) to wrest seldom loaned choice works from discerning, possessive lenders. One of the many joys of two recently opened curatorial triumphs in New York---Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture (to June 5) at the Frick Collection and Degas: A Strange New Beauty (to July … [Read more...] about Perfect Pairings: Frick Draws on Van Dyck’s Drawings to Illuminate His Portrait Paintings

Win some, lose some: While adding five new galleries and increasing floor space by 50%, the much delayed $50-million expansion and renovation of Dartmouth College's Hood Museum will be less ambitious than originally planned in 2012. And for the next three years, students will be largely deprived of access to an important educational resource that may have attracted them to … [Read more...] about Darts for Dartmouth: Hood Museum Has Less Moore in Tod Williams Billie Tsien’s Makeover (with video)

When I interviewed him more than a year ago over lunch in New York, Frankfurt museum director Max Hollein and I were obsessed with technology. I was then working on this Wall Street Journal article about how museums use technology to improve the gallery experience (or not). He was promoting the new Digital Extension initiative at the Städel Museum, one of the three Frankfurt … [Read more...] about Max Facts: How Hollein Straddles the Divides Between Contemporary/Historic, Tech/Traditional

Horrified, as we all were, by the news from Brussels, I surfed yesterday to the website of a museum there that I'd always wanted to visit---the Musical Instruments Museum. My jaw dropped when I saw this intro on MIM's visitor information page: Everything you need to know to avoid unpleasant surprises. Tuesday's supremely "unpleasant surprise," which forced the closure of … [Read more...] about Nuzzling Brussels: The Musical Instruments Museum Tweets Through the Tears

The last time I interviewed Max Hollein, 46, who has just been named to become the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's new director (effective June 1), he was in New York for the November 2014 annual meeting of the Bizot Group (aka the International Group of Organizers of Large Scale Exhibitions), for which he then was (and still is) chairman. Bizot consists of the heads of … [Read more...] about Fine with Hollein: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Snare an International Standout as Director

I've already awarded myself the Hilton Kramer Award for Old Fogey-ism. Lately, I've been feeling more and more like the Helen Thomas of art journalism. Thomas, UPI's (and later, Hearst Newspapers') veteran White House correspondent, was a persistent gadfly, notorious for asking the first or second questions at Presidential news conferences. (Hopefully, my career won't meet a … [Read more...] about MoMA’s Degas Monotypes Press Conference: My Cantankerous Cameo (with video)

Randy Kennedy of the NY Times beat me to this story, which I sat on for almost two weeks, because of my Met Breuer obsession. In a story posted online last night, Kennedy reported that the Academy plans "to sell two Beaux-Arts buildings on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street that have been its home since 1942." On Mar. 5, one of my confidential sources had emailed this to … [Read more...] about Another “Stealth Deaccession”: National Academy to Sell Its Buildings UPDATED

It's been exhaustively covered---on CultureGrrl (here, here and here) and in virtually all art-interested American publications. But at 10 a.m. today, the general public can at last get to see what we've been writing about---the new Met Breuer: I don't know whether director Thomas Campbell intends to greet the first visitors, as Adam Weinberg did last May at the opening … [Read more...] about Introducing the Met Breuer on Opening Day: Two Videos

Part I is here. The last of the Metropolitan Museum’s “Five-Year Strategic Goals,” listed in the Mission Statement of its latest annual report, is to “to enable greater transparency, efficiency, collaboration and communication” (emphases added): Judging from my inability to gain some basic information about the costs and provisions of the Met Breuer deal with the Whitney, … [Read more...] about Buoyant about Met Breuer: My Q&A with Metropolitan Museum President Daniel Weiss–Part II

Part II is here. After many months of trying to extract detailed information from the Metropolitan Museum's press office about its operations at the Met Breuer (opening Mar. 18), my dogged persistence was rewarded last week with a brief but informative interview with its president, Daniel Weiss. One of the things I learned is that the Met has projected a worrisome operating … [Read more...] about Buoyant about Met Breuer: My Q&A with Metropolitan Museum President Daniel Weiss–Part I

While the Met Breuer's inaugural show, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, may prove to be a popular success, given the interest in the Metropolitan Museum's new Madison Avenue initiatives, it got mostly tepid to negative verdicts from the critics (five review links), with two major exceptions---Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker, who exclaimed that "pretty nearly everything on … [Read more...] about Mad Met: More on the Met Breuer’s Misfire on Madison