Posted to MAN yesterday afternoon: Do museums that go free lose members? The answer will probably surprise you.- Discovered this yesterday while looking for images of Lewis Baltz’s Prototypes series for part two of MAN’s review of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (part one is here): It’s former LAT critic William Wilson on a Baltz show at LACMA in 1992, one in which Wilson coins the phrase “galvanically boring.” I’d give my left pinky to have thought of that first. (Wilson must have been proud of it too: He used the same phrase in his Andy Warhol obituary.)
- Unrelated story: If I was the Getty Research Institute, two books for which I’d be hiring editors right now would be the collected criticism of William Wilson and the collected criticism of Christopher Knight, volume two (to cover 1994-2010). (Volume one has already been published.)
- Looks like I’m not the only one who digs small paintings!
- An irresistable sub-hed on which I cannot improve: “In an age where kings would make marriage decisions based on the beauty of a portrait, artists had real political power.” [Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, Anne of Cleves (1539), collection of the Louvre.]
- At Art21’s blog, Ben Street considers how Ai Weiwei’s art has changed now that the Chinese government has arrested him.
- The LA Times Magazine has published an excerpt from Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino’s “Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum,” the book that came out of the LAT’s Getty Pulitzer Prize-finalist series exposing major problems at the Getty. It’s juicy.
May 3, 2011, 8:45 am
