Weekend roundup

I’m back home, so posting will return to normal. MAN will feature several significant stories this week, so be sure to check back often.

• In the LAT, Holly Myers explains why Steve Roden is an artist’s artist. Roden at Vielmetter was the best show of new work I saw in LA last week. That’s the same sun spinning and fading… (2008) at right.
• This is a little bit out of date because I was traveling, but this story from the Chicago Tribune is troubling for about umpteen reasons. In short, an art exhibition at Chicago’s only Jewish museum was closed because some donors thought it was anti-Israel. The story then goes on to describe a couple works… but names no artists and provides no context for their work. Lameness of the story aside, I’m kind of amazed it took me 10 days to hear about this. (The Chicago Tribune’s website is a typical Tribune Co. disaster, so I’m not surprised didn’t see the story.) Here’s the show’s website. It makes no mention of the unexpected closure of the show. Artists in the show included Michal Rovner, Shirley Shor and Mona Hatoum. The show’s catalogue was published by the museum, and is ‘temporarily unavailable’ from Amazon.
• Walker Art Center director Olga Viso takes an apparent shot at the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s coverage of the museum and (to its credit) the paper runs it: ” ‘This is a wider issue that museums have been grappling with for
  several years,’ said the Walker’s Olga Viso. ‘As institutions, we’ve
  been looked at in limited ways — finances, attendance — rather than
  at the qualitative things.’ “
• All I’m going to tell you about this Doug Harvey LA Weekly review is that it features this sentence about Robert Rauschenberg: “[H]e was a dyslexic homosexual drunkard –all top-shelf people in my chest of drawers.” It’s Doug Harvey. He doesn’t write nearly often enough. So when he does (about a big photo show at the Huntington, yes the Huntington), you shouldn’t miss it.
• Jen Graves kicks it with an 83-year-old man wearing a US Marines ‘Fort Badass’ hat at an Oliver Herring ‘Task’ event. 
• Geoff Edgers says that the MFA Boston has reached its $500M fundraising goal.
• Steven Litt and the Cleveland Plain Dealer have a story-stuffed section on the re-opening of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s reopening its original 1916 galleries after a three-year renovation. Even in a Flash player the light in the galleries looks tremendous.
• Ed Sozanksi takes to the Philly Inquirer to praise the Friends of the Barnes.