ABOVE: detail from Ed Ruscha’s Flash, L.A. Times (1963). Ruscha will represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in June; the U.S. State Department and the NEA recently announced changes to the way artists will be chosen for international exhibits.

The U.S. State Department and the National Endowment for the Arts are striking a committee to choose artists to represent America And Her Interests at international biennales, The Art Newspaper reports. These decisions used to be made by a panel of NEA wonks funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefellers—there’s that name again—but both private funders decided in 2003 to send their oversize novelty cheques elsewhere. The selection process was thrown into chaos. Rending of clothes, fire falling from the sky, etc.

Well, no more. No one, according to this article, has any idea how the process will work, who will be on the committee, or how they will pay for the sandwiches and kool-aid at their meetings. But one State Dept. boffin said that they hope to have the whole process working in time to choose an artist to represent America And Her Interests at the Istanbul biennial in September, so they obviously intend to get cracking. Like all things at the State Department, the whole scheme is rationalized by saying it’ll improve relations with The Muslim World. Sorry kids, but a few Ed Ruscha paintings probably aren’t going to distract anyone in Baghdad from that whole invasion thing.

New panel to select U.S. artists for biennales

ABOVE: The Littlest Rockefeller, David, has written a big, $100 million cheque—symbolized here by gold coins—to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Heir to the Rockefeller fortune and keen—or at least shrewd—collector David Rockefeller has announced that he is leaving a Dr. Evil-sized bequest to the Museum of Modern Art when he dies, in the amount of $100 million. But until he shuffles off this mortal coil, as the New York Times reports, the museum will keep on truckin’ with his annual $5 million donations, plus a few Gauguins or Picassos he throws in.

MoMA, of course, is kind of David Rockefeller’s sibling, since the original project was his mother’s initiative. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and some friends scraped together enough money to start the collection—Abby’s husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was inexplicably cheap about giving her any money to acquire modern art. That David inherited his taste in art from his mother and not his father, and is now spending the family fortune—he is the last of his generation of Rockefellers—on modern rubbish that dad would have hated strikes us as a wee bit Freudian. But who can argue with all those zeroes?

The article also takes a bit of a tangent on MoMA’s new $20 entry fee. Davey’s in favour of it, but then, he—the 243rd-richest man in the world—can clearly afford it. Also, the MoMA website? Nada. Not even on the press release page. If someone gave us a hundred million clams, we’d, you know, write a press release or something. Geez.

New York Times > MoMA to Receive Its Largest Cash Gift