Thank you again, Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters:

Here's the latest installment in the courtship of Eli Broad — and the art museum he aims to plunk somewhere in the Los Angeles Basin, complete with big-name architecture, a spiffy $200 million endowment and the 2,000 works of contemporary art held by his Broad Art Foundation.

Downtown L.A. is officially making a play, courtesy of the Grand Avenue Authority, which today authorized negotiations with Broad toward a possible deal that would wrest the museum from Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, which are also in the running.

After a closed session today of the Grand Avenue Authority, L.A. City Councilwoman Jan Perry, a member of the joint city-county authority that's overseeing development of vacant land and parking lots in the heart of downtown's arts district, said it will deploy a negotiating team “to proceed with discussions with the Broad Foundation to consider his proposal and reach a mutual agreement.”

The Grand Avenue project, of which Broad himself has been a leading advocate, is considered the centerpiece of downtown's revitalization. Designed by Frank Gehry, it includes two towers, condos, hotel rooms and a shopping center….

This happened two days ago, but its worth a mention given the circumstances and the quick response of the art community to do something of immediate benefit– nice work, LA! (Thanks again, Los Angeles Times) Culture Monsters:

Eleven Los Angeles art galleries are coming together tonight to hold an auction intended to help victims of the Jan. 12 Haiti earthquake.

The silent auction will take place at the Mandrake, located near Culver City, starting at 7 p.m. Promoters of the event said all funds raised will go directly to the Red Cross and are 100% tax-deductible. Bidding on items will start as low as $100.

Participating galleries will auction off work by emerging and mid-career artists from around the U.S. The galleries include: Zach Feuer Gallery, Kim Light/LightBox, Honor Fraser Gallery, Patrick Painter Inc, Ooga Booga, Kinkead Contemporary, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, Robert Berman Gallery, Marc Richards Gallery, Kopeikin Gallery and Cherry and Martin Gallery.

Thank you again, Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters:

Several museums and art institutions, including the Orange County Museum of Art, are saying that the Judith Rothschild Foundation has failed to make good on 17 grants awarded for 2009.

The total amount of money in question reportedly amounts to more than $100,000. Some of the arts organizations have filed a formal complaint to the New York attorney general’s office.

A spokeswoman for OCMA said today that it has received a letter from the foundation stating that the grant money will be paid. The museum added that its grant from the foundation was for $4,000 and is intended to go toward costs associated with the works of Florence Miller Pierce in an exhibition titled “Illumination”…..

Read the rest online at LA times Culture Monsters

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L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art is poised to name its new director Monday morning, and one of the names circulating through the art world is Jeffrey Deitch, a high-flying New York art dealer who, if chosen, would be a radical break from the usual museum-world pattern.

MOCA’s key financial backer, Eli Broad, will present the new director along with the museum’s co-chairs, Maria Bell and David Johnson, and city Councilwoman Jan Perry, the museum announced today.

American museum directors typically come from within the curatorial, academic or other nonprofit ranks. No major art museum in the United States is directed by a former owner of a commercial art gallery…..

Read the complete article at the Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters blog.

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Los Angeles likes to call itself the “creative capital of the world” — a boast that is certain to raise eyebrows in cities like New York, San Francisco, London or Paris.

But could the claim actually be true? A recent study titled the 2009 Otis Report on the Creative Economy says one in every six people in the L.A. region is employed in a creative field….

Read the rest on the LA Times online.

Thank you again, Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters:

Orchestras and choirs used to reach out to children with concerts that were basically junior versions of the adult experience. A grandfatherly conductor would address a sea of little faces and then turn away to lead his ensemble in a variety of classics. The experience was meant to be edifying and educational. For many in the audience, however, it proved to be pretty boring.

Times have changed.

Scrooge type news from Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters on Christmas Eve:

Bowing to continued financial pressure and a lack of donations, the Claremont Museum of Art said today that it would close its doors to the public on Dec. 27 and move its permanent collection to a warehouse.

Officials said its board members would weigh options as to what form the museum could take in the future.

The museum, which currently rents space in a former citrus packing plant, is scheduled to move out by Dec. 31, according to leaders.

A fledgling museum with a permanent collection estimated at about 100 items, the Claremont Museum of Art billed itself as regional institution with “international significance and breadth.” During its less than three-year history, the museum featured exhibitions by artists such as Karl Benjamin and James Hueter.

The museum's financial problems came to light in October, when leaders announced that three expected donations had failed to come through. The museum subsequently laid off its entire full-time staff of five individuals but continued to operate with volunteers.

In November, the Claremont City Council donated $18,879 to the museum to keep its doors open through the end of 2009….

Thank you again, Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters:

Thomas P.F. Hoving, the controversial former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art who died this month, is widely attributed (for good or ill) as the “Father of the Modern Blockbuster Exhibition,” thanks to undertakings like the first King Tut show in 1976. Big extravaganzas with jaw-dropping loans can be a revelation, and at least one from the past year made it onto my list. But so did small, quirky or unexpected presentations, proving once again that it isn't always the manufactured crowd-pleasers that end up pleasing the most. Click on the photo gallery for the 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions I saw this year.

– Christopher Knight

Also:

Architecture 2009: Christopher Hawthorne's Top 10

Music 2009: Mark Swed's Top 10

Theater 2009: Charles McNulty's Top 10

Follow this link:
Art 2009: Christopher Knight’s Top 10

Seriously, though. (Thanks again, Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters)

Grants to art writers from New York's Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation were recently announced. Twenty-six mostly N.Y. scribblers were the happy recipients of anywhere between $5,000 and $50,000, designed to help them ply their typically underpaid trade.

The grant program, according to its website, “aims to support the broad spectrum of writing on contemporary visual art, from general-audience criticism to academic scholarship.” The list of 2009 recipients reflects that goal.

Still, one aspect of the announcement took me by surprise. As writers on art, bloggers just don't seem to measure up.

Although the Internet has gobbled up the globe, just one blogger made the cut: Greg Cook, whose estimable New England Journal of Aesthetic Research is produced in the greater Boston suburb of Malden, Mass. The remaining 25 grantees mostly proposed projects for print, including books, magazines, newspapers and other dead-tree media.

In fact, in the four years that Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grants have been awarded, only three have gone to writers who produce blogs. (You can find the others here and here.) Given a total of 87 grants since 2006, bloggers have racked up less than 4%.That's not a very good ratio.

In fact, it's dismal. While it isn't possible to know which blogs and bloggers applied for grants (or how many of those got tossed out as ineligible because they didn't fit entry criteria), a Creative Capital spokesman tells me that, for 2009, the blog category had 153 applicants. Yikes. Maybe art blogs are generally a waste or only really bad bloggers submit applications or the jury doesn't like the form.

The bad news doesn't stop there. Two successful applicants this year got grants to start blogs. That's a nice vote of confidence in those established writers' abilities, but it also suggests the jury's rather sizable degree of dismay with existing bloggers who applied for assistance.

Is art blogging really that bad?

–Christopher Knight

Logo: Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program

See more here:
Art bloggers get no love

I’ve put up other posts about this show, and have seen original write-ups from both our usual heroes like ArtDaily.org and more all-encompassing publications like the Wall Street Journal.
 
Thank you again, always reliable Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters for this version.
 
This is a once in a lifetime masterpiece show of work essential to the foundations of all Western art in our own backyard, San Diego, be sure to check it out through January 2010 at the Getty in Los Angeles.
 
For artists, drawing is thinking made visible. Pencil, crayon, chalk or ink put to paper is a way for the brain to connect to the hand through the eye. As artistic thought evolves, so does the image on the sheet. And the more that thought deepens and matures, transforming the general into the specific and lifelessness into dynamism, whether subtle or bold, the more profound and moving a drawing gets.

Seventeenth-century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn is famous for many things, one of which is establishing a popular taste for paintings that depict old men and women. The work pictures people who personify a condition of seasoned thought. Is it any wonder Rembrandt developed that for himself through the lifelong practice of drawing?

An exceptional show at the J. Paul Getty Museum puts Rembrandt's drawings under a magnifying glass — literally, in fact, in galleries equipped with those hand-held lenses for close study of the artist's renderings. (Not for nothing was the microscope perfected in 17th century Holland, where seeing closely and intimately became an obsession.) The aim is to compare Rembrandt's