* The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott with an article: "After an Age of Rage, Museums Have Mastered the Display of Commotional Restraint." A section:
Over the past decade, small controversies occasionally unsettled the museum world, but they went away quickly, and few gained enough traction to become national issues. After almost a half a century of polarizing and contentious debate -- dating back at least 40 years to a show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art called "Harlem on My Mind," which ignited the modern era of museum conflict -- a strange quiet has settled over the museum world.
Nothing in Washington has risen to the level of angst felt by the Corcoran Gallery in 1989, when it canceled an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. And old wounds seemed have healed: The Enola Gay, the center of a bitter 1995 controversy about the atomic bomb, went on display permanently at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center in 2003 with very little protest. Even the National Endowment for the Arts, which had its budget slashed during the late 1990s, slowly began to reconstitute itself and stayed out the limelight of controversy.
* Lee Rosenbaum in The Wall Street Journal on the new wing at the Art Institute of Chicago: "A Modern Wing Takes Flight." A segment:
In the midst of the overcrowded free-admission festivities on opening day, I couldn't help but notice the dazed, glum looks on the faces of those who dutifully filed through the galleries, barely pausing to look at the art -- a sharp contrast to the joy radiated by Millennium Park denizens.
* The San Francisco Chronicle on the SFMOMA version of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's traveling exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities:
The irony is that Adams emerges from the two-person survey looking like the greater artist, the one who understood his tools and opportunities more profoundly.
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