Museum Minutes

• Thomas Krens is out at the Gugg, exiled to the desert of Abu Dhabi, where he'll oversee the completion of the museum's latest brand extension. Longtime Krens critic Jerry Saltz writes that "Over the last two decades Krens changed museum culture in the West. He made museums corporate and ran the Guggenheim like a business – even if that business often careened like an out-of-control savings and loan." Linda Yablonsky writes for Bloomberg that "the museum is now in a position to shake off its reputation as a schizoid institution that can be filled with art by Kandinsky one minute and the next pretend to be an Armani showroom or a nightclub in Brazil." Carol Vogel notes that "the move comes three years after Mr. Krens triumphed in a him-or-me showdown with the foundation’s biggest benefactor, the Cleveland philanthropist Peter B. Lewis." Richard Lacayo: "Krens, who had an M.B.A. from Yale ... pushed the Guggenheim into the world of brand name spinoffs, talking all the while about 'brand awareness.' Except for the huge success of the Guggenheim Bilbao, an indisputable achievement and one of the greatest buildings in the world, most of them didn't spin off the way he hoped. Las Vegas — tanked. Mexico — didn't happen. Brazil — ditto." We learn from Paul Lieberman in the L.A. Times that Krens, age 61, is 6' 5" and rides a motorcycle.

• Also out is Dia's Jeffrey Weiss. With the exclusive scoop is MAN, who notes that "three New York museums/foundations are seeking leaders: Dia, the Guggenheim, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

• Good news for the Tate and the National Gallery. Gallerist Anthony d'Offay is donating his collection for the discounted price of £28m, the price he originally paid for the art. The mother lode of 725 works by 25 artists will plug up what's said to be the museums' major holes in contemporary art with art by notables like Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus, Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joseph Beuys, Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha. The Guardian's Jonathan Jones wonders, is the MoMA jealous? Lee Rosenbaum compares d'Offay's approach to that of Eli Broad, finding the former preferable for a number of reasons, including that "private stewardship is often not as professionally responsible as public stewardship."

• Christopher Knight says let's combine the L.A. MOCA and the BCAM like chocolate and peanut butter. The MOCA's chock full of art, and the BCAM has plenty of room. Carol Vogel has more.
  

• The 74th Whitney Biennial opens this week with art overflow in the Armory on 67th Street. Lots of ephemeral, site-specific and "choose your own adventure" performative works this go-round, including a dance marathon, therapy sessions, a bar and a zoo. Thirty-seven artists are represented, including Spike Lee. More from Carol Vogel. New York Magazine's Carly Berwick hails it the "Facebook Biennial" -- a clannish group whose "connections and conversations have become the art itself" in an update on 90s relational aesthetics. According to co-curator Henriette Huldisch, this crop of creatives favor "smaller, more localized gestures, a modesty of material in approach and scale." If the '06 Biennial "felt unremittingly dark," this one "has a wryly self-aware neo-hippie outlook." The magazine offers a guide to the Armory installations. The Whitney goes Web 2.0 with a Flickr pool.
  

• More on the still-bitter feelings following last year's Christopher Büchel/MassMOCA imbroglio by Randy Kennedy in the New York Times. The irony is that the mess has been a financial boon for both museum and artist.

• The Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts is showing an exhibit called "Cover Me" that calls on the media to up their coverage of Western Mass artists. The Boston Globe answers their challenge.
  

• The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) has responded to a story in the Daily News calling work in their Dread Scott retrospective "cop-bashing" on the grounds of free speech. Some of the art deals with police brutality. Not mentioned by the Daily News are other works dealing with Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and this country's prison problem.

• An expanded Brooklyn Children's Museum is set to reopen in May. Located in Crown Heights, the Times' Robin Pogrebin says the building resembles "a yellow submarine surfacing from a slate-gray sea."

• The Guardian's Andrew Dickson and Jonathan Jones ponder blockbuster fatigue with the National Gallery's decision to substitute splash for more scholarly shows.

• The British Museum and the British armed forces are teaming up to salvage cultural artifacts at major archaeological sites in Iraq. The hope is to " leave a positive 'legacy' after the withdrawal of British troops."
  

• The renovation of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, home to some of the greatest works by Rembrandt and other Dutch masters, has been delayed again and is not likely to be completed before 2013.

• Finally, Greg Allen tells us about the secret museum on the Moon, installed during the 1969 Apollo 12 mission. Work by Warhol (a penis drawing), Rauschenberg, Oldenburg and others were purposely and semi-secretly left behind on the lunar surface. NASA denies.