Category: visual

The Whitney’s big celebratory 75th birthday show is a dud, writes Christopher Kinght. “Fittingly, apathy is pretty much what the show deserves. Why? Call it an eye for an eye. The myopia is breathtaking. We might be living in a new millennium, but this exhibition still thinks the only 20th century American artists of note are New Yorkers. This boring, repetitious lack of discernment might also help explain a rising tide of inchoate critical restlessness with Manhattan’s art museum culture.”

Hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen “bought the 1952-53 oil on canvas, ‘Woman III,’ directly from the entertainment magnate and megacollector David Geffen, who in the last two months has emerged as equally prolific in selling his contemporary masterpieces. It is the last painting in de Kooning’s ‘Women’ series still in private hands.”

The painting was stolen as it was being driven from Toledo to the Guggenheim in New York. “The likelihood that the thief or thieves knew that a valuable painting was on the truck and were aware of its location led the authorities to conclude that whoever stole the painting had obtained precise information about the contents and route of the truck, even though such details are closely held at the two museums involved — the Toledo Museum of Art and the Guggenheim — and among employees at the art shipper. Law enforcement authorities did not identify the shipper.”

A man paints a giant cartoon of pinup icon Bettie Page on the side of his house in Seattle. Th city knocks on his door calling it graffiti and demanding he take it down…

Politically tinged social/relational art shows” are on the rise in Los Angeles. “Characterized by a kind of shaggy-dog rhetoric, a hands-on DIY workshop aesthetic, and a post-Seattle sense of political theater married to a post-9/11 sense of urgency, these groups have taken on the unthinkable task of forging a crazy-quilt sense of community from the disparate and physically isolated pockets of disenfranchised creative types that riddle L.A.’s cultural infrastructure.”

Museums are complaining about changes in the tax code about gifts. They’re also selling pieces of their collections. “Museums are trying to have it both ways: benefiting from tax subventions because they supposedly can’t survive in the marketplace yet stepping into the marketplace when they deem it appropriate. Some are actually renting out parts of their collections. What’s so disturbing about collection rentals and sales is that they violate the reason that museums are treated differently from businesses.”

“Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.), who narrowly won re-election last week, on Wednesday followed through on a pledge to introduce legislation that would prevent the Barnes Foundation from being relocated to Philadelphia from suburban Merion, Pa. The bill would penalize any charitable institution that solicits donations contrary to the original benefactor’s wishes.”

The fashion exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is surprisingly substantial, but the expected question remains: Are such exhibitions a sign of the coming apocalypse? “I want people to ask questions while they are walking through the gallery,” MFA curator Pamela Parmal explained. “Is this reflective of the time? Is this art? Is this marketing? Are these people crazy?”

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a $3.2 million deficit for fiscal 2006, the museum’s fifth straight year in the red. In a clear effort to bring its budget under control, the Met hiked its admission fee to $20, and made good strides in boosting its endowment. The museum also sold off nearly $27 million worth of the art in its collection this year (compared to just over half a million the year before,) and spent only $34 million on new art (a third of what it spent in fiscal ’05.)

New York’s Museum of Modern Art has finally completed its $850 million expansion, and is now hoping to maintain the public interest that has been stirred up by its dramatic new digs and perceived upgrade in status. In a new interview, MoMA director Glenn Lowry responds to criticism of his supposed top-down management style, and insists that he has no intention of following other museums like the Tate and the Pompidou in creating branch museums in other cities and countries.