ArtsWatch

Looks like the Pew-Rendell-compelled march of the Barnes Foundation downtown will continue. Judge Stanley Ott has declined to reconsider his 2004 decision approving the move, AP reports. A group of activists and Montgomery County pressed for keeping the foundation in Lower Merion, but Ott said the county and the Friends of the Barnes did not have the legal standing in the case.
(Image: Giorgio de Chirico's Dr. Albert C. Barnes)

Measuring art in money for a moment, we're startled to pass on word that Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping has set a new record price for a work by a living artist. The 1995 portrait sold for $33.6 million at Christie's in New York, the BBC reports.
"When we were painting it we didn't sit there going: 'I bet this'll be the biggest selling painting in the world'. It was just like one of his other pictures," Sue Tilley, the painting's ample subject, told the BBC.

Yes, this is Philadelphia. Downtown. Urban. Can't you tell?
If this is not the Philadelphia you see on that burning-rowhome, courthouse-drama, traffic-jammed TV news show you're always watching, you might want to get out and see the real city. Sylvan City. Sparkling, bird-call-filled, grass-cut-smell city.
It's here. Waiting for you.
Tuesday morning this is what downtown's Dock Creek looked like. It's not a creek today, of course, but it is the site of the now-dry waterway that once wended its way through this patch near Walnut and 4th Streets. Local artist Winifred Lutz has taken it upon herself, with the help of the American Philosophical Society, to map out where the creek once flowed.

Lutz, you can see, has shown in chalk Dock Creek's path where it is now covered by brick or concrete.

Where the former creek path veers onto what is now lawn, Lutz has marked out the area so the grass within the markings isn't cut. Recent rains have helped the grass grow higher. But chalk gets washed away, so Lutz refreshes her work from time to time.
She's planning something involving bright blue plastic wrap late in the summer. Christo may be invoked.
Here's more about the installation.

Robert Rauschenberg, 82, the American artist whose philosophy had an enormous impact on his generation and every one that succeeded him, died Monday night, the New York Times reports.
Here is what Inquirer art critic Edward Sozanski has to say about the artist.

Pennsylvania Ballet steps south to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts June 10 and 11 as part of the center's Ballet Across America series. Nine companies will perform in three mixed repertory programs. PA Ballet, in D.C. for the first time since 2000, brings In the Night, the Jerome Robbins (pictured) work set to a score of Chopin. Pennsylvania Ballet is joined by Salt Lake City’s Ballet West with Balanchine’s Serenade and Houston Ballet with Artistic Director Stanton Welch’s Velocity.
In you want your Pennsylvanians locally, see Christopher Wheeldon's Carnival of the Animals June 6-14 at the Academy of Music. Be careful about the dates if you want to hear John Lithgow in the narration. He's only gracing us with his presence for three performances on June 6 and 7.

You have a little more time to see Song (pictured), Jennifer Bartlett's series of enameled metal plates, at the Locks Gallery on Washington Square. It's an enormous work - 97 feet long - using "a basic black dot as a springboard to explore various compositional themes, employing the dot like notes in a melody." On view through May 24.
Bartlett is represented at an exhibition closing after this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art, "Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today."
Also closing soon: The Frida Kahlo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which runs through May 18.

Critics in New York didn't hear Tuesday night's Philadelphia Orchestra Mahler 8 at Carnegie Hall quite the same way.
One loved it, the other didn't.
Those critics are such a confounding lot. Why can't they just be like the rest of us and agree about everything?
(The graffiti comes from Toronto.)

Riccardo Muti in 1989 standing in front of a newly unveiled billboard for the Venturi-designed Philadelphia Orchestra concert hall at Broad and Spruce that was never built. (Gerald S. Williams/Inquirer)

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A few days ago in this space I wrote that "for Muti, having his name on the schedule and actually showing up to conduct are independent concepts."
Unfair? Riccardo Muti has now agreed to have his name on the schedule at the Chicago Symphony 10 weeks a year, plus tours. To read the coverage you'd think he's turned over a new leaf and will be where he says he'll be.
Regarding Chicago, Muti is speaking of getting out into the community, has apparently agreed to do fund-raising, and seems generally agreeable to the playing the part of the American music director - a scope of services he never exactly embraced when he was music director in Philadelphia (1980-1992).
Turning to music for a moment, one might reasonable expect great things from this partnership. Muti has an almost peerless stick technique - exacting, evocative and sophisticated. He likes a lean sound, which suits Chicago better than it did Philadelphia. He has a talent for choosing charismatic soloists.
Two things to look for in the Muti-Chicago relationship. First, he's not been there much. He led the orchestra for two weeks at home in September, and on one tour. That leaves a lot of composers unexplored. How does the Chicago Symphony feel about Martucci? How many times is it willing to program Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy and Ravel's Bolero?
But the other red flag in Muti's past behavior is this. He canceled in Philadelphia a lot after he stepped down as music director. He never fulfilled his laureate title here.
And even in his new relationships, he can be a no-show. After much trumpeting that they were creating an older-man-younger-man model of leadership, the New York Philharmonic now finds itself short an older man. Muti was to lead the Philharmonic for multiple weeks a year plus tours - close to his number of weeks in Chicago. But now, Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic’s president, said Muti "would not be back as a guest conductor once he took over the Chicago job," the Times reports.
The Times puts this aspect the Muti saga pretty far down in the article that started online Monday morning before evolving into Tuesday's piece:
Mr. Muti turned down the music director’s job at the New York Philharmonic in 2000. Last year he agreed to take on the position of principal guest conductor, in which he was expected to spend six to eight weeks a season with the orchestra and lead it on tours, beginning in 2009 (although he now says that he did not agree to a specific number of weeks).
Is the reversal Muti's doing? Mehta's? Or do both just understand implicitly that when a new podium presence in being established in one big city, to guest conduct in another is to blur the public message?
Mehta on Tuesday told me that Muti was never given a title with the Philharmonic.
"He was never principal guest. What we had agreed on was that he would appear multiple weeks in each season and the occasional international tour. That's the way we've been working. Now of course there is a change, and we'll have to sit down together and decide what the future is."
Will Muti in fact not conduct the Philharmonic once he becomes music director in Chicago?
Mehta continued: "This is a decision that he and the Chicago Symphony and we have to make. It's too early to tell how that will work out."
And what about Muti's four weeks already scheduled with the Philharmonic for next season?
Mehta says he does not "see any reason why not. Until I sit down and talk to him about what his obligations we have no reason to make any change for next season."
In any case, it appears Muti will not have a big Philharmonic presence - even before he's had a chance to start the job, title or no. That last appearance with the Philharmonic? He canceled.

The latest round of grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts will help fund a James Castle Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a Peter Saul show at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
This package of grants from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative totals $1,166,231 —the largest amount awarded in the program’s 11-year history - and will support eight groups and two teams of independent curators.
Peter Saul (whose Dali Advises the President is pictured) will be represented at PAFA in October with 60 works, including a new parody of Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic.
The Castle show, the Art Museum says, is "the first major scholarly consideration by a leading museum of Castle’s work." It also opens in fall.
The Mural Arts Program and ICA came away with substantial Pew money.

Alec Baldwin apparently approves of Charles Dutoit at the helm of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In a recent interview in which the actor bemoans his lack of leisure time, he has this to say:
"...You're sitting in your trailer and you get your mail shipped to you from New York. I open it and I learn that Charles Dutoit and the Philadelphia Orchestra are performing at the Carnegie Hall and I'm not there. I don't want to miss that anymore. I want to go and do what I want to do.
"I'll never forget one day. There was an Andrew Wyeth exhibition in Philadelphia and the last day was a Saturday or a Sunday. I was working in LA and the only way I could go was to take a red eye that night to Philly, and in the morning, go to a Starbucks, sit for two hours reading the New York Times and wait for the museum to open. I did it only to prove a point to myself that I was so sick of missing everything as a result of this business. They don't pay me to act. They pay me to help alleviate the pain of missing on all the other things when I'm on the set all day."
I've had this feeling a lot, too, and have decided to turn down some lucrative movie roles so I can be closer to Philadelphia culture.