Lee Rosenbaum's cultural commentary

A mystifying missive hit my inbox last week, announcing that the Metropolitan Museum had recently acquired "more than 700 works from the [Leslie and Johanna] Garfield collection, [which] establishes the museum as a leading institution for early to mid-20th century British modernist prints and drawings" (dating from 1913 to 1939). Being a "leading institution" in a narrow … [Read more...] about The Metropolitan Museum’s Fugitive Works on Paper: Easy Come, Easy Go CORRECTED

As an art critic, I frequently attend press previews (or I did, pre-pandemic), which grant journalist/critics the privilege of touring museum exhibitions with highly knowledgeable curators as guides. As such, my reaction was complicated regarding the current controversy over whether to eliminate the use of volunteer docents as tour guides for the average visitor. (The links are … [Read more...] about Should Docents Be Canceled? My Contrarian Take on the Controversy

An occupational hazard of my advanced age has been a sense of sad obligation to post appreciative obits of associates with whom I've enjoyed warm professional relationships. In the interests of journalistic distance, I tend to keep my contacts at arms length, rather than befriending them. But I still take personally the loss of those who have worked with me and helped me gain … [Read more...] about A Morbid Month of Artworld Losses: Kenneth Baker, David Finn, Michael Sillerman

When an object at auction fetches many multiples of its expected price, as happened with the Newark Museum's recent sale of a Dan Peoples mask for $15,000---a whopping 50 times its estimate of $300---either the owner and the auction house are clueless about what they are offering, or at least two competing buyers believe it's something that's much more valuable than the seller … [Read more...] about Newark Museum’s Dan Mask Fetches 50 Xs Its High Estimate; Banksy’s “Balloon”/”Bin” Wafts to $25.4m

Chris Crosman, founding chief curator of Crystal Bridges Museum, tipped me off this week to the Newark Museum of Art's 217-lot deaccession binge, in progress at this writing at Millea Bros., a self-described "boutique auction company" previously unknown to me, even though its home base---Boonton, NJ---is a mere 33 miles west of my own home (and 21 miles northwest of the Newark … [Read more...] about Newark Museum’s Latest Deaccession Misdirection: Offloading African Objects (& other dubious disposals)

UPDATE: This just in---"President Biden announced his intent to nominate Shelly Lowe as the 12th Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)." A citizen of the Navajo Nation and currently a member of the National Council on the Humanities, she would replace acting chairman Adam Wolfson (pictured and quoted below). The Toledo Museum of Art is one of the 292 … [Read more...] about Hidden Agenda? NEH Privileges “DEIA” Support in Awarding Grants Under Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” UPDATED

Just as Donald Trump was (thankfully) denied his repeatedly expressed wish to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, will President Biden be thwarted in his own plans for the NEA---a proposed record allocation of $201 million for that agency? Budget numbers are in play as our fractious Congress operates under its short-term spending bill, which provides … [Read more...] about Budget or Fudge It? Will NEA & NEH Actually Get Their “Historic Increase” in Federal Arts & Humanities Funds?

Perhaps "good riddance" would be an appropriate bicoastal response to the slaps in the face that culture-lovers in New York and Los Angeles suffered this month at the hands of fickle artistic leaders. Amsterdam-born Jaap van Zweden's unexpected announcement on Sept. 15 that he would terminate his relatively brief tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic at the end … [Read more...] about Jaap & Klaus to Flee to Their European Homelands, Terminating Tenuous Tenures at NY Phil & LA MOCA

My personal reflections on The Two-Decade Anniversary of 9/11, in which I took issue with the harsh critique of the 9/11 Memorial Museum by Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott, struck a chord with the president and founding director of that museum, which opened in 2014 at the site of the 2001 attack on the twin towers at the World Trade Center: Alice Greenwald … [Read more...] about BlogBack: Alice Greenwald, 9/11 Museum’s Head, Responds to My Post on the Attack’s 20th Anniversary

Everyone who resided in the NYC metropolitan area on 9/11/01 has his or her own personal story related to their experiences on that cataclysmic day. Mine is recounted here, in my CultureGrrl post for the one-decade anniversary of that terrifying, terrible occasion. My husband is enrolled in the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund and the World Trade Center Health Program, by … [Read more...] about The Two-Decade Anniversary of 9/11: My Own Reminiscence & Reflections

Soon after posting on Thursday about the National Gallery of Art's cancelation of its A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa, 1600–1750, I myself got canceled---laid low by a bad reaction to my Covid booster shot, from which I have now recovered. Before I became nonfunctional, I managed to shoot off a series of questions to the NGA's press office, regarding what had seemed to me an … [Read more...] about “Superb Baroque” Debacle: A Blow-by-Blow on the National Gallery’s No-Show Show

Having just gotten my Pfizer booster shot (thank you, Walgreens), I returned home to the temperature-raising news that the National Gallery of Art, Washington, had canceled its long-planned (already postponed) A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa, 1600–1750---an astonishing turn of events that the NGA attributed to "the worsening COVID-19 crisis." As explained in the NGA's … [Read more...] about Covid Casualties: National Gallery Pulls Out of Major Show of Genoese Baroque Art UPDATED

Yesterday I had the sad task of deleting the late Michael Thomas (who died on Aug. 7) from my list of devoted monthly donors to this blog. An "acerbic columnist and novelist, who wrote chiefly about money and how people got it, what they did with it and what it did to them" (as described by Katharine Seelye in her NY Times obit for him), he had once been an assistant curator of … [Read more...] about The Late Michael Thomas, 85, Cultural Curmudgeon (& Loyal CultureGrrl Donor)

Do today's museums need to pander to the short attention spans and trendy rhetoric of the social-media crowd, sabotaging serious curatorial scholarship with language adopted from the digital ditherings that we mindlessly scroll through on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp? The Metropolitan Museum, a previously staunch defender of probity, now seems to think so, as exemplified by … [Read more...] about The Medici as “Influencers,” The Metropolitan Museum as Clickbait

Who wants to be an art museum director? The list of major museums searching for new heads is growing, with the news that one of the leaders whom I've most admired over the years---Timothy Rub of the Philadelphia Museum of Art---is packing it in, effective "early 2022," according to the museum's press release. He's 69 and it's a self-styled "retirement," but I wonder if he … [Read more...] about Departing Philly: Timothy Rub Joins the Exodus of Major Museum Officials UPDATED