from Bloomberg.com:

Tate Modern reopened a Richard Prince room that was temporarily closed on Sept. 30 for showing “Spiritual America” (1983), an image of Brooke Shields as an undressed child. The work has been replaced.

Henri Matisse, L'Escargot, 1953

Alma Thomas, Watusi (Hard Edge), 1963

The Republican hate machine and the mobs they incite have hardly been reticent on any "issue" which they manufacture or exaggerate in an attempt to bring Obama down. Witness the "Birthers", the "Deathers", the "Tea Party-ers", the "Great White Hopers", and the acolytes of Glenn Beck who embrace his charges of racism against the president.

As reported in Media Matters:

Given the gleeful mocking of President Obama over Chicago's failed effort to host the 2016 Olympics, and shameless smears of his unexpected Nobel Peace Prize, let's pause and ask: Is there anything conservatives won't turn into a cudgel to bludgeon the president? Take, for example, the art hanging on the White House walls.

The particular issue that Conservative websites have latched onto is the similarity between Watusi (Hard Edge), a 1963 Alma Thomas canvas selected for display in the White House, and L'Escargot (The Snail), a late (1953) cutout by Henri Matisse, which Thomas viewed at MoMA.

from Carol Vogel in the NY Times:

Three years after reaching a tentative agreement with the city, the Whitney Museum of American Art is forging ahead with plans to build a second museum at the entrance to the High Line, the abandoned elevated railway line that has recently been transformed into a public park.

Theatrum Anatomicum (and other Performance Lectures), Pablo Helguera, published by Jorge Pinto Books

BOOK LAUNCH: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 8PM
THE BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION UNIVERSITY
225 West Broadway
(as part of Edifying, a series of performative lectures curated by Beatrice Gross)

“If you have ever felt trapped amidst a boring lecture, this book has been made for you”.

Over the last few years, from the bars in Brooklyn to the stages of highbrow European museums, a now ubiquitous mode of lecturing is proliferating. It is known as “performance lecture”, referring to an academic presentation delivered by an artist that often turns into a spectacle and is usually accompanied by satire and irreverence. Despite the fact that this entertaining and experimental practice is now a familiar part of the life of artists communities around the world, few are recorded or survive beyond their presentation. Fortunately, Pablo Helguera, one of its most assiduous practitioners, has reunited a group of his performance texts to create what may well be the first anthology ever made of this genre.

WILLOUGHBY SHARP MEMORIAL

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC
1071 Fifth Avenue

Thursday, October 15, 2009
6:30pm - 9:30pm

Service begins at 6:30 p.m in the Peter B. Lewis Theater. (Enter museum at the Fifth Avenue entrance.) Reception to follow in the Rotunda.
http://sharpville.ning.com/events/willoughby-sharp-memorial-1

Here are snippets I posted on the New York Magazine site re: the art borrowed for display in the Obama White House.

Alma Thomas, Watusi (Hard Edge)

Comment on: Obama’s Startling White House Art

Deitch did not foist a Kehinde Wiley on the Obamas, as previously speculated on these pages. There's also no Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, Gary Simmons, Mark Bradford, Jacob Lawrence and countless other black American artists (including Kara Walker). Ligon, while "prickly" and "challenging", still deals with identity from a politely subversive text-based perspective.