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May 19, 2005
At ten to midnight, the Donald strikes back! What a dramatic week in medieval New York politics! Pataki, already half-drowned by insisting on building a 1,776-foot-high terrorist target in lower Manhattan, withdrew his threat on Tuesday to hold an up-or-down vote on Wednesday about the West Side Stadium when he realized he'd be underwater if he lost on that too. And now Trump, just emerged from second bankruptcy and recently remarried in a corporate-giveaway wedding, says he wants to build two towers in the lower Manhattan crater. That must have greedy ol' Larry Silverstein quaking in his boots; greedy Larry only has one tenant lined up for the new 7 World Trade Center--himself. Larry dreams at night of being on teevee, yelling "You're fired!" to his wife, just to test out his camera charms. And tomorrow we learn the history of Annakin Skywalker...will the young Annakin from a galaxy far, far away turn out to have been separated at birth from The Donald? Stay tuned!
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empire strikes back, larry silverstein, the donald, trump, wtc
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Posted on 5/19/2005
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May 18, 2005
Kimmelmann writes today:
In the early 1970's the Metropolitan Museum privately sold off works by van Gogh and Henri Rousseau, among others. It caused a scandal. The New York attorney general stepped in. Twenty years later, the Guggenheim, which had been selling off Kandinskys by the dozens, caused a ruckus when it disposed of a Chagall, a Modigliani and a Kandinsky at an auction that finally caught the public's attention.
Lately, without nearly enough public accountability, the Museum of Modern Art has become a regular Kwik-E-Mart of art sales. It has turned over, among much else, an early Francis Bacon to a London dealer and a Cubist view by Picasso of the Spanish town of Horta de Ebro, a rare picture that originally belonged to Gertrude Stein. The newly expanded Modern said it no longer needed it because it was getting another, better view of Horta de Ebro from David Rockefeller.
It sold the work to another dealer. So much for public custody.
The last straw is my own new hobbyhorse, the New York Public Library's sale of Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits," one of the great Hudson River School landscapes, a civic treasure. The work was bought last week for $35 million by Alice Walton, a Wal-Mart heir, in a closed auction at Sotheby's.
It's time for transparency. Increasingly, we demand it from government, the media and Wall Street, in response to dwindling public faith. The same should apply to libraries and museums, which also regularly test our trust. They have many excuses for selling art (to raise money for better works, to prune overcrowded storage) and most of what's sold shouldn't raise eyebrows. But it's the exceptions that count.
And the Durand auction - a hasty and secretive process that virtually ensured that the work, integral to the city's heritage, would not end up in a New York museum - suggests that the people in charge of the sale knew perfectly well that this was one was different.
Sotheby's strategy gained a nest egg for the library but squandered the public's good will, a priceless commodity. Who knows how much the sale may cost the library in terms of prospective donors who will be deterred by the prospect that their own gifts could someday end up in some secretive auction.
So in the future, I suggest new rules: besides giving local museums a reasonable period of time to match the price of any art sold by any public- which is to say any nonprofit - institution, there should be more open procedures and time for public scrutiny. Total transparency. The closed bid Sotheby's swiftly organized favored a private buyer who was free to dispense piles of her own cash. It also raised red flags. Sotheby's has been an occasional adviser to Ms. Walton. So is John Wilmerding, an art historian whom she is reported to have enlisted to help put together her collection for her prospective museum in Arkansas, where the Durand is said to be going.
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asher durand, henri rousseau, kimmelmann, kindred spirits, public library
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Posted on 5/18/2005
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May 17, 2005
Fresh has seen the famous UFO truck in Manhattan and photographed it...note the GRUNTS on the side...
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grunts, truck, ufo
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Posted on 5/17/2005
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May 16, 2005
It was a sad day last week when New Yorkers lost one of the city's cultural treasures, Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits." The 1849 painting of the artist Thomas Cole with the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant standing on a ledge overlooking the Catskills is a landmark of the Hudson River School, and probably Durand's best picture. Sotheby's auctioned it off for the New York Public Library, which owned it for decades.
The library sold it along with other American paintings to raise money for endowment and books. It had every right to do so, and responsibility to get a good return. But it was lamentable that a city museum like the Metropolitan didn't have a better shot at buying it, for which we can partly fault an auction that provided little time or opportunity for a public institution to compete with deep-pocket private collectors. A widespread popular indifference to our cultural heritage is also to blame, but that's hardly news. The question now is what to do next time. And there is an answer.
The buyer was Alice Walton, a Wal-Mart heir and an American art collector, who reportedly paid more than $35 million for "Kindred Spirits" to become part of what is advertised to be a Walton Family Foundation museum arising some years from now in Bentonville, Ark., where Wal-Mart has its headquarters. It was rumored that Bill Gates, who also buys American art, was interested in the picture. This guaranteed a rich payday for the library and for Sotheby's.
The Met teamed with the National Gallery in Washington on a losing bid. Aware that a New York museum didn't get "Kindred Spirits," the Walton foundation issued a statement after the sale about wanting "to work with museums in New York City to ensure that it continues to be shown there in the future." We'll see. That would be good. So far there isn't even a Walton museum for the picture to go to.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/arts/design/16kimm.html
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asher durand, henri rousseau, kimmelmann, kindred spirits, public library
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Posted on 5/16/2005
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