September 12, 2008 5:15

On the Road Again

Again. I'll check back on Monday from an undisclosed (for now) location.

September 11, 2008 4:17

First They Lose a Leger

Woman and Child, Leger, 1921/DAVIS MUSEUM

Then they lose their director. David Mickenberg, for seven years head of Wellesley College's Davis Museum and Cultural Center, resigned yesterday, two weeks after it became public that his museum appears to have lost a Leger, Woman and Child, that had been donated to the museum in 1954. Geoff Edgers at the Boston Globe reported earlier that the AWOL Leger wasn't mentioned in the announcement yesterday by Wellesley President H. Kim Bottomly that Mickenberg was leaving, but it's fair to suppose the two developments might be connected.

The painting was discovered missing last November, several months after it had returned from a loan show at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art that had ended the previous April. After coming back to the Davis it reportedly sat in a crate for months before disappearing. There's speculation that it was accidentally thrown out. The Globe reports that investigators are still looking for the picture, but that the museum's insurance company has already paid out about $3 million to the Davis.

For now you can still find the lost Leger on the Davis Museum web site. And if you happen to find the real thing, there's a $100,000 reward.

September 10, 2008 1:29

More on the Met

I'm beginning to think of Thomas Campbell, the new director-designate of the Metropolitan Museum, as the Sarah Palin of the museum world — the out-of-left field choice that, after an initial moment of head scratching, suddenly makes sense to everybody. With my own episode of head scratching now safely behind me, I'm also entering into my own "makes sense" moment. Tentatively, of course — because everything will depend on how Campbell actually performs in the job.

Plainly his scholarly background makes him a reassuring choice for anyone — that would include me — looking for signs that the Met will remain commited to its core project: elucidating the history of art in a serious way. And at a time when Western museums are trying to take a global view of that history, Campbell's specialty in a relatively marginalized field — tapestries — could actually have been an advantage. With the two smashing tapestry shows that he organized for the Met, he proved that he could re-order art history and show why neglected chapters were essential ones. (And not so incidentally, crowd pleasing ones, too — without playing to the peanut gallery those shows were a draw.)

Since three of the final four candidates for the Met job turned out to be — no surprise — Met curators, I'm wondering how much use was actually made of the head hunting firm the Met employed. In his memoir Making the Mummies Dance the former Met director Tom Hoving recalls that when he was tapped for the job in 1967 a curator acting as go-between for a group of trustees told him that the worldwide candidate search was a smoke screen for a decision that would actually be made by then-Met Board Chairman Arthur Houghton and his inner circle. Has anything changed? I'm just wondering.

September 9, 2008 5:38

The Next Director of the Metropolitan Museum Is....

....a Met insider, but not the one most people were expecting. The Met announced today that Thomas P. Campbell, a curator at the museum since 1995, would fill the big shoes of Philippe de Montebello, who pronounced himself delighted by the choice. Campbell is a curator in the department of European sculpture and decorative arts who's best known as the organizer of the Met's two big tapestry shows, "Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence" in 2002 and last year's "Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor" —  two shows that were grand, especially the first, but on topics that most people would consider fairly specialized.

Many people assumed that if the Met went with one of its own to replace de Montebelllo the choice would be Gary Tinterow, the curator of 19th century, modern and contemporary art, a hybrid title he took on a few years ago that gave him a very wide ranging portfolio within the museum. If nothing else, the choice of Campbell is a way of saying that the Met's first commitment is to pre-Modern art. There's another museum just down Fifth Avenue that can handle the 20th century.

He takes the job January 1. More to come, no doubt.

September 9, 2008 1:16

Hirst vs. Hughes

It's battle of the artworld heavyweights. Robert Hughes, the titanic art critic and my esteemed predecessor at Time, has weighed in on Damien Hirst. ("Absurd", "tacky commodities") And Hirst has hit back. (Hughes is a "Luddite", says Damien. "He probably cried when Queen Victoria died.")

Hughes' dismissive comments wouldn't be his first swipe at Hirst. In the introduction to his 2003 biography of Goya, Hughes refers to Hirst as "merely fashionable". But while reading Hughes' remarks today I found myself wondering how to reconcile them with something he wrote in a 2004 article for The Guardian. In the piece Hughes reflects on how the art world had changed in the 25 years since he first produced his tv series The Shock of the New, a program he updated in 2004 to survey artists who had come along since 1980. At one point Hughes describes how Hirst turned down his request to appear on camera in the new show or to allow his work to be photographed. And in the midst of that paragraph Hughes says:

I had not actually written about Hirst's work (though I consider him a much more real artist than some of the lesser geniuses of our time)

Which leaves one to wonder which are the works by Hirst that made him "real" in Hughes' estimation. You can find the complete Guardian article here.

Meanwhile, I have my own reservations about Hirst, lots of them, some of which I summarized in my profile of him in this week's Time. I'll try laying them out in more detail in a later post.