But in this case Mr. Koons has transformed them into a kind of three-dimensional clich d celebrity photograph. Like celebrities, you can't get too close to it. One is in a foundation in Athens, another at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. While Sotheby's isn't identifying the seller, contemporary-art experts say it is Lew Manilow, the Chicago collector. The Tate Gallery's library and archives in London, specializing in British fine art since the Renaissance and known as the pre-eminent collection of contemporary art material in Britain, has been restricted in both its space and its availability to scholars.
Scholarship is the bedrock of any institution, but it frequently takes a back seat to other things.
The new quarters are to open by June 2002. Gleaming in the Sun Like Alexander Liberman, the Cond Nast editorial director who died two years ago and had a second career as a sculptor, Arthur Carter, owner of The New York Observer, has been quietly making art in his studio in Connecticut for more than nine years. Now six sculptures from that show can be seen for three months on the newly renovated plaza in front of the General Motors building, on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets. The works, of gleaming metal in a variety of styles, all seem indebted to David Smith, although Liberman's work may also have been an inspiration. And that's what these sculptures are about.