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.

James Kalm has been watching the work of Frank Stella since his days as a student in the Far West. This icon of New York Modernism presents “Polychrome Reliefs” as his statement of where painting is today. Though not properly reliefs, nor paintings, these extravagant works employ the latest in high tech composites, stainless steel and lustrous lacquers. These works juxtapose curving organic forms with pierced and engineered struts and ribbing, contrasting the mechanical with the romantic and continuing Stella’s theoretical investigations of color and form. With appearances by Kenny Scharf, Irving Sandler, Adam Weinberg, Mark Kostabi and of course Stella.

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.