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

Thank you again, Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters:

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.

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

From the LA Times Culture Monsters:

Which one is the Rembrandt?

That’s the question at “Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference.” Opening Dec. 8 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the exhibition will pair the 17th century Dutch master’s works with drawings of the same or similar subjects by 15 other artists — and point out ways to tell them apart.

The goal, says Lee Hendrix, the Getty’s senior curator of drawings who organized the show with an international team of colleagues, is to condense 30 years of scholarship into an illuminating exhibition. “We are demystifying the process, saying this is the way it was done and you can do it too,” he said.

Take two pen and brown ink drawings called “Christ as a Gardener Appearing to Mary Magdalene,” one by Rembrandt (right), the other by Ferdinand Bol (below). Both works, based on the story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the recently risen Christ, were once thought to be by Rembrandt.

“But the treatments are very different,” Hendrix says. “Rembrandt makes Christ look magisterial. He lifts a finger and says, ‘Do not touch me, for I am not yet ascended to my father’ and Mary collapses in emotion. In Bol’s drawing, Christ is very nonchalant and speaks to her rather casually…..

Read the rest at the Los Angeles Times.

Note from the LA Times Culture Monsters:

Just over a year ago, New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum completed a three-year restoration project for its great landmark building by Frank Lloyd Wright. Among much else, the beautifully done project put a grayish white skin on the original corkscrew building, visually separating it from the undistinguished annex added in the rear in 1992.

The renovation was done in time for the Guggenheim's 50th anniversary celebration — and, happily, in time for the celebratory Vasily Kandinsky retrospective, on view now. Kandinsky (1866-1944) was among the small handful of authentic revolutionaries in Modern art. The big retrospective draws heavily on the incomparable Kandinsky collections at museums in Munich, Paris and New York, but the relationships between his achievements and Wright's remarkable building are one of the unique pleasures of seeing the show at the Guggenheim.

I'll have a full review of the Kandinsky retrospective in Sunday's paper.

– Christopher Knight

Photo: Vasily Kandinsky, “Impression III (Concert)” 1911. Credit: Guggenheim Museum

Originally posted here:
Art review: ‘Kandinsky’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum