Artists, civic leaders, celebrities pay tribute to Robert Graham

A hushed throng of artists, arts patrons and civic leaders joined friends and family of the late sculptor Robert Graham at a funeral Mass on Wednesday morning at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Filing through the cathedral’s “Great Bronze Doors,” which Graham considered his greatest public commission, the crowd came to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of a creative force who died at 70 on Dec. 27 after a long illness.

Los Angeles’ leading public artist, Graham is probably best known for sculptural monuments in prominent locations across the country, including tributes to Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, Joe Louis in Detroit, Duke Ellington in New York and Charlie “Bird” Parker in Kansas City, Mo. But his most enduring subject was the female nude, which he explored in hundreds of works, large and small, throughout his long career.

The funeral, conducted by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, lauded both aspects of his artistic achievement as well as his endearing personal qualities. Recounting his experiences with Graham during the design process for the cathedral doors, Mahony noted that the artist insisted on making the doors open inward as a welcoming gesture to all who entered, thus breaking the city code requiring doors of public buildings to open outward.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mayor,” Mahony said with a nod to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who later delivered a eulogy to the artist. “Please don’t tell the building department. It’s too late.”

Steven Graham, the artist’s son; Jack Quinn, a close friend; and actor Danny Huston, half brother of Graham’s widow, actress Anjelica Huston, gave readings during the service. After Communion, Anjelica Huston read a poem, “He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace” by William Butler Yeats, and family friends provided personal remembrances.

L.A.'s trippy underground art tour

The folks over at the always-informative and ever-so-hip real estate/architecture blog Curbed LA found this fun video of the docent-led art tours offered by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

We sent a reporter out on the tour last year, but maybe seeing what happens will further pique your interest in viewing the diverse Metro-commissioned works. And, hey, why not get out of your car for a couple hours to check out the subway (admit it -- you've never ridden the rail) and explore new neighborhoods? It’s all free.

Information about the tours can be found here.

-- Lisa Fung

Around the art blogs

David Hockney, "Beverly Hills Housewife," 1966

• LACMA's Unframed is pondering wallpaper in an upcoming show.
• Culturegrrl is campaigning against museums selling art from the collections to pay the light bill.
• Lawyer Donn Zaretsky at the Art Law blog is campaigning in favor of museums selling art from their collections to pay the light bill.
• At Looking Around, Time's Richard Lacayo is charting a middle way on the issue of museums selling art from their collections to pay the light bill.
• Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes joins the chorus of fond remembrances of the late L.A. music patron Betty Freeman, but with a twist--considering the art she collected, including the David Hockney masterpiece featuring Freeman, above.
• C-Monster falls under the hypnotic aesthetic spell of the Porno Burrito.
• TryHarder brings a camera to an opening and performance at 533 in downtown L.A.
• Greg.org looks forward to a particular work in the Martin Kippenberger retrospective, which just closed at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, arriving in New York at the Museum of Modern Art.
• Exhibitionist notes an emerging push for President-elect Obama to consider naming a secretary of the Arts.
• The Indianapolis Museum of Art is surveying its blog-readers on how they use IMAblog.

--Christopher Knight

Image credit: David Hockney

Monster Mash: Breaking news and headlines

--Funeral services are planned this morning at 9:30 at Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral for artist Robert Graham, who died Dec. 27 at age 70.

--Some producers of Broadway's "Speed-the-Plow" reportedly seek an investigation and consider a suit against the play's sushi-tainted former star Jeremy Piven.

--Mayor Villaraigosa launches LA Arts Month to draw attention to the arts, which generates "$100 billion in revenue for the area each year."

--On Thursday, PBS will air "Cyrano de Bergerac," starring Kevin Kline and Jennifer Garner and staged by David Leveaux.

--Arts patron Betty Freeman dies at 87. Mark Swed recalls her support of young composers. Tyler Green shares memories of a tour of her art collection.

-- Conductor Daniel Barenboim calls off two concerts in Qatar and Egypt.

--Adam Shankman, who directed the film version of "Hairspray," is tapped to take on a film version of "Bye Bye Birdie." 

--The World Monuments Fund joins with Iraq's State Board of Antiquities to launch a management and conservation plan for Babylon.

--Lisa Fung

Photo: Robert Graham. Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

New Orleans' Katrina-damaged Mahalia Jackson Theater reopens

While other theaters and arts organizations around the country are downsizing or closing due to the stormy economy,  New Orleans'  storm-damaged Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts will reopen this week after a $22 million renovation, the first local theater to reopen since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

A week-long festival of events surrounding the theater's debut kicks off Thursday with a program featuring New Orleans-based performers; throughout the week, visiting stars include violinist Itzhak Perlman, gospel singer Yolanda Adams and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra.

Tenor Placido Domingo, who serves as general manager of Los Angeles Opera, will perform with the Louisiana Philharmonic, the New Orleans Opera Chorus and others on Jan. 17 on the Placido Domingo Stage, named in his honor. Domingo appeared along with Denyce Graves and other opera luminaries in New Orleans in 2006 in a benefit concert to raise money for the city's arts community. LA Opera also employed displaced New Orleans musicians post-Katrina.

"The reopening of the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts is central to the recovery and growth of the arts in New Orleans," New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin told The Times via e-mail. "Even in an environment in which we must make tough decisions about where to focus our resources, New Orleans is using federal and state resources as well as significant local dollars to invest in the arts and our city's heritage by transforming this critical community asset." 

-- Diane Haithman

Photo: New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin with a construction crew on the Mahalia Jackson Theater stage in November 2008. Credit: Julie Plonk/City of New Orleans

Getty 'Interjects' Freud

If you collect contemporary paintings, the J. Paul Getty Museum just might want to show them.

At least, that's the odd conclusion drawn from the Getty's puzzling announcement today that it has borrowed for three months Lucian Freud's small 1949-50 "Still Life With Aloe" (right) from local collector Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, for the third installment of the museum's "Interjections" series. The Freud went on view in the South Pavilion today, juxtaposed with a Jean-Simeon Chardin still life from about 1759 and one by Giovanna Garzoni from the late 1640s. The only thing I can't figure out is, why?

"Interjections" was launched as a series of loan exchanges between the Getty and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The second installment went up in late 2005, when MOCA's 1939 Mondrian abstraction was installed at the Getty next to its 1450-55 "Annunciation" by Dieric Bouts. In exchange, the Getty lent its Caspar David Friedrich to MOCA, where it was installed with a MOCA painting by Scottish artist Christopher Orr.

When sharply selected, pictures from different cultures and different eras are always interesting to compare. And museums perform a real service when they cooperate with such exchanges from their permanent collections. But a painting by a living artist (Freud is 86) owned by a private collector is a different, frankly more speculative matter. It's not as if we were getting any insight into the holdings of local institutions, which is a good reason for "Interjections" to take place.

Beyond random voyeuristic appeal, why, exactly, is the public supposed to care about what's hanging in someone's Westside living room? L.A.'s got lots of art collectors, so by what criteria does the museum choose? And I wonder what the Getty's Chardin and Garzoni would look like flanking, say, Meyer Vaisman's 1987 "Still Life" or Robert Rauschenberg's 1958 "Coca Cola Plan," both owned by MOCA.

It's doubtful the Getty will be sending any paintings over to the Lynton family's house or Sony's Culver City offices, because the reciprocity built into the earlier "Interjections" does not now apply. But maybe they could do it virtually: The Sony Pictures Entertainment Museum does exist online as a cool website.

(You can see the Getty's two still life paintings after the jump.)

--Christopher Knight

Beefcake goes baritone and tenor too

At 38, Nathan Gunn has established himself as a sought-after baritone, an intelligent actor with a luscious voice. Part of a generation of singers determined to banish the “park and bark” style of operatic performance, he likes to push the edges of storytelling, especially by exploring new works.

Thanks to a well-chiseled body and rugged good looks, Gunn is something else as well: a favorite on the pop-culture circuit. Last year, People magazine named him one of its “Sexiest Men Alive,” and Stephen Colbert dubbed him a “super-sexy opera star.”

Tall, strapping Joseph Kaiser, 31, also is handsome enough for Hollywood — in fact, he played the questing hero Tamino in a 2006 Kenneth Branagh film of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”

The Canadian tenor has been touted as a rising star since his Metropolitan Opera  debut in 2007, when Plácido Domingo — who was conducting Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet” — asked him to sub for an ailing Rolando Villazón.

Now, these two hunks of the operatic world have come to the movie capital, where they will be featured in alternating casts of Los Angeles Opera’s revival of its “Magic Flute,” opening Saturday with Gunn.

Mayor Villaraigosa launches LA Arts Month

Little did you know when you raised your glass of champagne or organic pomegranate juice or whatever at 12 a.m. on Jan. 1 that you were not only ringing in the New Year, but also the first annual LA Arts Month.

You've already missed a few precious days to commit yourself to art -- but Mayor Antonio Villairagosa, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs manager Olga Garay, art collector Cheech Marin and a host of other arts leaders chose Tuesday morning to announce that January is LA Arts Month, a regional campaign to encourage Angelenos to take advantage of the myriad arts and cultural programs the city has to offer.

Calling L.A. "the Venice of the 21st century," the mayor called Los Angeles the "creative capital of America" with some 900,000 employed in creative jobs. He said the creative arts generate "$100 billion in revenue for the area each year."

On Tuesday it seemed that every arts leader or arts-friendly politico in town was either on the platform or milling about in the lobby of the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo to either announce or listen to details of the campaign. Led by the city's Cultural Affairs Department and the Cultural Affairs Commission, LA Arts Month is described as "a collaboration between artists, arts leaders, private partners and local arts organizations."

Among the other organizers of the event are LA Inc., The Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, the LA Art Show, LA Stage Alliance, Arts for LA, the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Participants include Aquarium of the Pacific, East West Players, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Sponsors of the arts month are offering not just nifty new logos and promotional materials, but also some financial incentive for the public to explore the city's arts options:    

Appreciation: arts patron Betty Freeman

As far as I could tell, Betty Freeman did not have a sentimental bone in her body.  An arts patron like no other, she supported an extraordinary contingent of important composers -– commissioning new work, underwriting recordings and performances, helping out with living expenses, even on occasion bailing a recalcitrant artist out of jail –- but she immediately lost interest in them after they died.  She cared about the living, about new work, about the future, not the past.  Once someone was gone, she moved on.

Now she’s gone.  Betty Freeman died on Saturday of cancer at 87.  But my job is different than was hers.  I deal in the past as well as the present and the future.  Plus I do have a sentimental streak, and Betty was far too remarkable to simply let slip away.

It wasn’t difficult to become acquainted with Betty.  She opened her Beverly Hills house, bursting with modern art, to most anyone with a passion for new music.  Between the mid-'80s and mid-'90s, she hosted musicales for around a hundred guests at a time.  Composers -- Luciano Berio, John Cage, Steve Reich, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Terry Riley, Morton Feldman, Esa-Pekka Salonen and many, many more -- spoke and presented new work.  Often she paired a famous composer with an emerging artist few among the listeners had heard of.

A vibrant cross section of Los Angeles artists and intelligentsia attended.  Betty did her best to keep the discussion always on music.  She also encouraged, and at times insisted, that others support these composers as well.  If starving artists were selling their CDs, you had better buy them if you wanted to be invited back.

Monster Mash: Breaking news and headlines

-- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art wants your best shot of Chris Burden's "Urban Lights."

-- Thinking about going to theater in NoHo? Start collecting quarters if you're planning to drive there.

-- Economic concerns stall ambitious plans for an arts building boom in Cincinnati.

-- Broadway grosses were nearly $1 billion in 2008, while attendance was 12.32 million, just above the 12.29 million logged in 2007.

-- A Los Angeles muralist campaigns to save his "Resurrection."

-- "Memphis," the rock 'n' roll musical that had its start at the La Jolla Playhouse, moves on to Seattle. Next stop -- Broadway?

-- A bronze version of Edward Degas' sculpture "Little Dancer" will go up for auction in February at Sotheby's in London.

-- L.A. director and playwright Nancy Keystone to bring "Apollo," her epic about space flight, to Portland for its first complete staging.

-- Here's a casting call for only the most secure of those who are insecure about body image.

-- The cover of the Fleet Foxes' self-titled album, which features Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1559 painting "Netherlandish Proverbs," wins the Vinyl Art prize.

-- The Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was buried may have to close because of safety fears.

--  The Westport County Playhouse names new leaders.

-- Lisa Fung

Caption: Chris Burden's "Urban Lights" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Credit: Stefano Paltera / For The Times.

L.A.-spawned spaceflight saga is launched in Portland

If anyone doubts the difficulty of creating a play with beyond-stratospheric ambitions, consider that it took the United States' space program a bit more than eight years to send a crew to the moon after President Kennedy's initial 1961 challenge to achieve that feat -- and it has taken nearly as long for L.A. director and playwright Nancy Keystone to bring "Apollo," her epic about spaceflight, to the launching pad for its first complete staging.

The countdown ends Jan. 16 at Portland Center Stage in Oregon, when the fully realized "Apollo" will have its premiere. The play's first two sections, then dubbed "Apollo [Part 1] -- Lebensraum," premiered in 2005, as part of the inaugural season of the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. By then, Keystone already had started pushing the work's envelope, expanding it under a grant secured by the Portland theater, where she has directed four other plays since 2000, including her own adaptation of Sophocles' "Antigone."

The result will be a 3-1/2 hour, three-act evening encompassing "Lebensraum," "Gravity" (a new title for what in L.A. was the second act of "Lebensraum"), and the brand-new "Liberation."

The 12-member cast embodies dozens of roles, including escaped 1850s slave Dred Scott, Jules Verne, Mickey Mouse, Adolf Hitler and George Wallace; four of the actors are holdovers from the L.A. production.

The show at the Douglas dealt with the wonder of advances in rocket science -- and the moral rot beneath the surface due to key roles played by German refugees who helped drive the American space effort -- having previously learned their craft on the V2 rockets that the Nazis built with slave labor and that rained on Britain during World War II.

L.A. muralist campaigns for his 'Resurrection'

A small woman selling sizzling gorditas passed Ernesto de la Loza as he dabbed Liquid Shield on the cracked wall where his mural “Resurrection of the Green Planet” stretched out like a jeweled bird. Even with the aroma of fresh food wafting by, his gaze never left the injured surface.

For a quarter of a century, De la Loza, 59, has created murals in Los Angeles — 40 in all. But this one, which adorns a convenience store on the corner of César E. Chávez Avenue and Breed Street in Boyle Heights, is among only eight that still exist. The others were painted over or simply ravaged by neglect.

Now “Resurrection” faces a similar fate. In November, the owner of the building received a notice from the city informing him that he had 90 days to remove the graffiti defacing the 1991 mural or face a $450 fine.

Full restoration would cost between $40,000 and $50,000, a sum that neither De la Loza nor owner Raymond Ahn could afford. So while awaiting possible assistance from the Getty and Annenberg foundations, De la Loza spent the last several weeks cleaning the mural himself, at a cost to Ahn of at least $5,000.

Controversial embassy architecture, in Baghdad and London

Lots of news all of a sudden related to embassy architecture: The U.S. government today officially opened its controversial new embassy inside Baghdad's Green Zone. Almost simultaneously, word broke of a nine-firm shortlist for a new American diplomatic HQ in London, where Eero Saarinen's 1960 original is at the center of a growing preservation battle.

According to Architects' Journal, the architects vying for the London job include Santa Monica's Thom Mayne, Richard Meier and Partners and a number of other heavyweights. (Only American firms were eligible.) One minor but happy surprise on the list is KieranTimberlake, a Philadelphia firm known for its research into prefab architecture and its very green work on the campus of the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., where soon-to-be First Daughters Sasha and Malia Obama enrolled this morning. (UPDATE: Sasha attends the Sidwell campus in Bethesda, Md., while her older sister, Malia, will go to the D.C. campus, where KieranTimberlake's middle school is located.)

Here's Hugh Pearman's plea for saving Saarinen's embassy, shown above. ("No question in my mind: this building must not be wrecked," he writes.)

And here's a piece I wrote in 2007 after plans for our Baghdad embassy turned up online.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Photo: American Embassy, London, by Flickr user tickety-boo

Desperate Housewives at the Getty

In Counter-Reformation Italy, the primary purpose of painting was to provide moral instruction. (If you think that's old-fashioned, you haven't been looking at all the contemporary art meant to edify today's audience about virtuous behavior -- like, say, recycling.) The Getty Museum's new gem of a show, "Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575-1725" concludes with a trio of pictures that demonstrate how moral guidance can also be a good excuse for a bit of painterly cheesecake.

The subject of all three canvases is the biblical tale of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. Joseph, a Hebrew sold into slavery by his brothers (nice!), is made household overseer by his new master, Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh. Potiphar's wife, whose name is unrecorded (a telling bit of period sexism), has the hots for Joe, widely regarded as a hunk. One day, when her husband is at the office, she makes her move -- only to be rebuffed. It isn't because she's not something of a babe herself, but because Joseph refuses to cuckold the boss, "a wicked thing and sin against God." (Genesis 39:1-20)

Mrs. Potiphar, aghast (not to mention unfulfilled), plots her revenge. She grabs Joseph's cloak and gives it to her husband when he gets home, as evidence that she successfully resisted Joseph's attempt to rape her. For his virtuous behavior toward Potiphar, Joseph is rewarded by being sent directly to prison.

The End.

If that sounds vaguely like the "Desperate Housewives" episode when the gardener's sock is found under the bathtub by Eva Longoria's husband -- well, the Getty apparently thinks so, too. The TV show makes it into a gallery wall text next to the three Baroque paintings. What's interesting, though, is not the question of whether ABC-TV is the new Council of Trent, but how the three paintings differ from one another.

The version above by Carlo Cignani (1628-1719) is the lustiest of the bunch -- you can see the other two after the jump -- with Potiphar's wife a fleshy, half-naked cream puff who has latched onto innocent Joseph and won't let go. Her left arm, which reaches around behind him to grasp his shoulder and draw him near, is apparently the length of an octopus tentacle (maybe that's why the painting is an octagon). Call me crazy...

Amy Freed says comedy isn't hard -- it's really hard

The script of Amy Freed's new play calls for, as she puts it, "leopards, sea battles, gladiatorial contests and the burning of Rome." Naturally, it's a comedy.

In fact, "You, Nero," opening this week at South Coast Repertory, finds the Pulitzer-finalist Freed once again journeying back in time to make hay. You may recall her 2001 "The Beard of Avon," commissioned by SCR: a farcical imagining of how Shakespeare's plays were actually dreamed up. This time she takes on the fiddling Roman ruler, who commissions a play about himself.

But as Freed writes in this week's Arts & Books section, nailing the laughs in her latest effort was no picnic. When things misfired, she says, sometimes it was the actors' fault, sometimes it was the director's and, quite frequently, it was hers. Getting all the elements in a comedy to click is "practically science."

Freed also confides that the solution to a failed joke is occasionally risibly simple, as when it involves merely making sure the audience can see both eyes of an actor with a funny line. "For some reason, it's hard to land a laugh in profile."

Who knew?

-- Craig Fisher

Photo credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

Is Portland's Hindu statue a looted antiquity?

The often abstract debate over how strict museums should be about shunning ancient artworks of questionable origins -- lest they wind up owning pieces that have been looted and illegally smuggled -- now wears the familiar face of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesha. 

A 1,000-year-old stone stele of the god is scheduled to be unveiled at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon on Valentine's Day. Having already drawn criticism from the anti-looting advocacy group SAFE --Saving Antiquities for Everyone -- the Ganesha could soon be exhibit A in the back-and-forth between those who favor a hard line against collecting ancient works whose paths since before 1970 are murky, and those who think it makes more sense to give museums some leeway when hard proof is lacking.

Guidelines adopted in June by the Assn. of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) call for museums to research carefully whether an object they want left its country of origin before November 1970. That's when the United Nations adopted rules to stem cultural looting.

But when the facts nevertheless remain hazy, the AAMD permits museums to make a judgment call on whether to acquire a piece.

When a work is acquired despite doubts, it's expected to be publicized via an Object Registry on the AAMD website. An image is to be posted, along with what's known about the object's past ownership. The idea is to solicit missing information, and to give individuals or nations-of-origin a chance to claim an object as looted goods. The Ganesha stele is the first, and so far only, artifact to be posted on the registry.

The Portland Art Museum bought the piece at auction from Christie's in September; eight years earlier, it had been sold by Sotheby's. "I can't trace its provenance prior to ... the year 2000," admits Maribeth Graybill, curator of Asian art. But leaders of the Portland museum, which follows the AAMD policy, decided to make the purchase.

Here's how their thinking went:

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Portraits face off at the Hammer Museum

Audiences have always been fascinated with the art of portraiture, whether it's Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" or Andy Warhol's turquoise painting of Marilyn Monroe.  It's a staple in most museums' exhibition schedules.

The Hammer Museum has dug into its own collections for an interesting view of the art in "Other People," 75 works drawn from the historical collections of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and the Hammer Contemporary Collection.

"We saw this as an opportunity to showcase the depth of our collections," said Cynthia Burlingham, director of the Grunwald Center and deputy director of collections for the Hammer. When Burlingham sat down with Gary Garrels, former chief curator at the Hammer, specific themes emerged as they combed through the collections. Unlikely pairings arose, such as a 1971 Ray Johnson mixed medium portrait of boxer Gene Tunney next to a charcoal sketching of 16th century scholar Erasmus by Dürer. They are in a section of occupational portraits such as day workers by John Sonsini and subway workers by photographer Neil Slavin.

In a spiritual section, a Claude Mellan 17th century engraving, "The Sudarium of St. Veronica," can be found along with contemporary portrayals by Matthew Monahan and a Hellen van Meene photo of a young girl.

Other works that portray a certain grittiness are juxtaposed, such as Catherine Opie's "Jerome Caja" and woodcuts from 20th century artist Conrad Felixmüller.

By placing these pieces together, Burlingham hopes to create spirited conversations. "When I'm in there by myself, I feel like I'm in a crowd," said Burlingham. "It's a very active experience."

The exhibition is on display through March 15.

-- Liesl Bradner

Photo: David Dupuis' "Portrait of the Artist in the Forest of Death" (2007), part of the "Other People" exhibition. Credit: Hammer Museum

Behind the scenes at the Colburn School

At the Colburn Conservatory of Music downtown, a visitor can observe the pleasures and frustrations of musical learning at the highest level, watch a world-class violinist lead a master class and soak in the energy of young people expressing their artistic feelings. Soon these students will deal with careers and adult responsibilities — never an easy transition for any college graduate, especially in hard times. For now, those concerns are over the horizon. This is the time to hone their skills and live inside the music.

The conservatory and its 105 students occupy a cloister-style campus across the street from Disney Hall. This year, its class of 43 was selected from more than 400 applicants from around the world. Also located here is the Colburn School of Performing Arts, a community school where more than 1,500 preschoolers to adults study music, dance and drama.

At one-tenth the size of Juilliard School in New York, Colburn deliberately focuses its curriculum. It does not, for example, offer jazz, opera and voice programs. "We are strictly performance-oriented," says one instructor.

Writer and librettist Charles Koppelman documents the atmosphere and follows a handful of students through their paces in a story in Sunday's Arts & Books section.

Photo: Indira Rahmatulla, left, Elicia Silverstein and Francesco Camuglia at the Colburn School. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Lord Renfrew vs. the Met, Round 2

It turns out that the Metropolitan Museum of Art's policy for acquiring antiquities is more stringent than Lord Colin Renfrew had thought. Even so, the British archaeologist said Friday that New York's flagship art museum still compares unfavorably with L.A.'s Getty Museum when it comes to closing loopholes that can allow looted artifacts to find their way into museum collections.

Renfrew long has called for museums to just say no to collecting ancient works in the absence of firm evidence that their ownership history is in order and they were not dug up illegally and smuggled out of their homeland. To recognize his contributions, the advocacy group SAFE -- Saving Antiquities for Everyone -- is giving Renfrew its Beacon Award for lifetime service Jan. 10 in Philadelphia, and with it a platform to deliver a lecture titled "Combating the Illicit Antiquities Trade: The 1970 Rule as a Turning Point (or How the Metropolitan Museum Lags Behind the Getty)."

The description of Renfrew's talk on the SAFE website says he will "underline the significance" of last June's decision by the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, or AAMD, to endorse using 1970 as a benchmark. The point is to have proof that a piece was not dug up after November 1970, when the United Nations adopted rules aimed at quelling the looting and illegal sale of nations' cultural heritage. The AAMD guidelines urge museums to "thoroughly research the ownership history" of ancient artifacts they want to acquire, "including making a rigorous effort to obtain accurate written documentation."

On Friday, after being unavailable on Wednesday to respond to a Culture Monster inquiry, Met spokesman Harold Holzer said the New York museum had in fact adopted the AAMD's new guidelines last June as its own antiquities policy -- replacing a more lenient previous policy in which the Met could acquire antiquities whose ownership record was clear for just the previous 10 years, rather than since 1970.

"It seems to me that Mr. Renfrew has confused everybody here" by assuming the Met was still operating under its old rules, Holzer said, adding that the museum has not acquired any ancient artifacts since adopting the stricter policy.

But in an e-mail Friday, Renfrew said there was no confusion as to whether the thesis of his lecture still stands: While welcome, he said, the AAMD/Metropolitan policy "leaves much room for manoeuvre" compared with the Getty's approach. "I shall be pointing out in my lecture that [Met leaders] still have a way to go before they have the clear and transparent guidance which the Getty now follows. The Getty has taken the lead and retains the lead!"

*A haunting memorial in 'Library of Dust'

Photographer David Maisel is known for a career chronicling the tensions between nature and culture in large-scaled photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes. His weirdly beautiful and troubling projects have included "Black Maps," "Terminal Mirage," "The Lake Project," "The Mining Project," "Asylum" and "Oblivion" (which include overhead shots of L.A.'s freeway interchanges). Because many of these sites are hard to reach, they are frequently shot from the air. Educated at  Princeton and Cal Arts, he was a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute and in the Bay Area. *CORRECTION: Maisel studied at California College of the Arts, not Cal Art.

His most recent project, "Library of Dust" is something of a departure and is elucidated by Leah Ollman in Sunday's Arts & Books section.

The images, she writes, "trace the artist’s fascination with secrets, transformation and loss, his confrontation with the sublime and his unexpected political advocacy."

"The first photograph in his new book presents a view into a storeroom that clearly doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic. An old wooden desk with no chair is parked in the corner. Bits of debris have gathered on the stained linoleum floor. The walls are what give this room, and Maisel’s book, its name: 'Library of Dust.'

"Shelves packed with corroded copper cans stretch from floor to ceiling, like the back room of a post-apocalyptic grocery store. The room is actually a warehouse of sorts. It’s part of an abandoned ward at the Oregon State Hospital, and the canisters contain the unclaimed cremated remains of former psychiatric patients there."

Image from "Library of Dust."  Credit: David Maisel / Chronicle Books