Wednesday, July 20, 2005
How to Shift the Focus
There has been plenty of justified speculation today that the White House rushed its selection of a Supreme Court nominee to shift the media’s attention away from Karl and Scooter’s alleged leaking of confidential information.
This has gotten me wondering about what kind of art world story would need to break during this ultra-quiet summer season (how painfully right number 3 is) to shift the focus away from the MFA’s Malcolm Rogers and his Las Vegas shows. Here’s a list of potential stories that I’ve come up with that could do it:
This has gotten me wondering about what kind of art world story would need to break during this ultra-quiet summer season (how painfully right number 3 is) to shift the focus away from the MFA’s Malcolm Rogers and his Las Vegas shows. Here’s a list of potential stories that I’ve come up with that could do it:
MoMA’s Glenn Lowry (at right), tired of spending winters in New York, decides to take the open director’s position at the Getty. There’s one condition to his acceptance of the offer, though. Since this is LA and he can’t take the subway to work, the board needs to provide him with a Porsche Cayenne just like the one his new boss Barry Munitz drives. The board president asks Lowry what color he prefers.- Afraid that a dangerous precedent has been set with the Tut-stravaganza, Eli Broad decides to pull a Peter Lewis and walks away from LACMA—taking his money, his new building, the promise of his collection, and his new deputy director with him. He announces that he never really needed LACMA anyway. He is going to open his own vanity museum instead.
- All 32 works in the recently discovered cache of Jackson Pollock paintings are definitively attributed, but not to Pollock himself. Scholars determine that these works were made by a member of “the school of Pollock.” Experts now believe that the paintings were actually done by then-six-year-old Alex Matter in his father’s Tudor City studio under Pollock’s supervision. The relationship between these two was confirmed by a newly discovered letter detailing how Pollock agreed to babysit the young Matter in the studio three afternoons a week while the child was on summer vacation from school. Covering the story on Artnet, Walter Robinson writes that if Matter would have gotten his deal with Pollock in writing he would have been able to make some serious cash from the eventual sale of the paintings.
- A slim majority of members on Thomas Krens’s hand-picked Guggenheim board decides that Vicky Ward’s recent Vanity Fair article is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. They toss Krens out of his position. All additional Guggenheim expansion plans are put on hold. To allow him to save face, the board gives Krens a sinecure with the Guggenheim Foundation. When asked if the Krens ouster will lure him back to the Guggenheim board’s, former board president Peter Lewis responds that he does not think so. Instead, he is going to open his own vanity museum in LA (using his corporate collection as the basis for the museum’s holdings) to go head-to-head with Eli Broad.
The Keith Haring Foundation realizes that although the Pop Shop (at right) may not be able to make it in SoHo anymore there’s always Las Vegas! At the last minute, the board decides to move the store’s inventory and murals west to Sin City. After a woman wearing a radiant baby t-shirt wins a slot jackpot of $1M on the day the store opens, Vegas visitors buy with abandon. Sales exceed the foundation’s optimistic projections by 130% during the store’s first week of business in the mall at Caesar’s Palace. - Artforum is rocked by its own Jayson Blair-like scandal. It is revealed that several of their Diary contributors never actually attended the events they covered for the on-line publication, instead filing their reports from their homes and illustrating them with photos collected using Google Images and doctored with Photoshop. Jerry Saltz’s nausea begins to subside when he realizes that the Artforum writers didn’t actually have invitations to all those cool events either.
- The Walton Family Foundation announces Alice Walton’s most recent acquisition for Crystal Bridges—all the paintings by John Singleton Copley currently owned by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The private deal, brokered by Sotheby’s in New York, is rumored to have been completed for $235M and leases the works to Walton for 99 years with the option to renew for another 99. Two weeks after Carol Vogel breaks the news in the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman publishes a hand-wringing piece saying that he was right afterall—Boston’s renting of works from its collection to the Bellagio is what made this much more dastardly deed possible. MFA director Malcolm Rogers refers to the deal as “something like a long-term loan that just happens to provide Crystal Bridges with the appearance of ownership and the MFA with reduced insurance costs for the next two centuries.”
