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Week after week may pass without any surprise while I'm dutifully visiting numerous gallery and museum exhibition. So you can understand why last week turned out to be particularly rewarding ? I stumbled upon four good exhibitions, each appealing in its own way...

When I went to New York last December, I rushed to the Metropolitan Museum to see the exquisite small exhibition of 18th century French painter Antoine Watteau. It was the closing day of the show, and I expected it to be packed, but luckily for me, that was not the case. There was another show at the Met that Sunday that drew a big crowd: a sprawling display of American paintings telling stories of everyday life here, in this country of ours, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries...

I probably shouldn't, but simply I couldn't...say 'No.' An invitation to go to Spain for the international contemporary art fair, ARCO Madrid, arrived less than three weeks before the opening, but hey, who's complaining?...

Art news, reviews and commentary...without those nasty side effects.

Please visit our blog at www.artagogo.com/blog for full show notes and links that we discuss during the show.

Thanks for listening!  Please contact us a artagogo (@) gmail.com

If you're not brave enough to deal with the cold, rainy days upon us here in southern California, I want to suggest a lovely alternative: spend a couple of cozy hours perusing the delicious display of drawings by one of the greatest artists of all time. Several dozen drawings by Rembrandt and his students are on display at the Getty Center in an elegant, imaginatively installed exhibition, where visitors have a chance to participate in an ongoing scholarly debate - which drawings were done by the great master himself, and which by his pupils trying to emulate his style?

In Southern California, where most cultural institutions are not more than a few decades old, the upcoming 60th anniversary of the Long Beach Museum of Art is definitely a milestone. Starting on February 5, the museum will present a series of interesting exhibitions drawn from its permanent collection and introducing a new generation of museum-goers to the high points in the Long Beach Museum's history of collecting and exhibitions...

Last week proved to be quite trying for museums here in LA and even further north. While the Getty and MOCA have had their share of unpleasantries in dealing with the coming and going of their directors, the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art & Science literally went belly-up, becoming the victim of a royal miscalculation by its trustees...

Sometimes when museum directors get hired, fired, or choose to resign, it creates a mild controversy -- a storm in a teacup. But not this time. The announcement by trustees of LA's Museum of Contemporary Art that they selected Jeffrey Deitch, a prominent New York art dealer, as MOCA's new director, created nothing short of a perfect storm, generating headlines nationwide...

Once in a while, or, to be more precise, once each year, one can justifiably say about life here in the City of Angels that All's Fair in LA. Usually it happens in the month of January, when not one, but three art fairs roll into town, causing a lot of happy commotion, confusion, and anticipation. Scheduled literally days apart, these art fairs have names which are easily mixed up, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that even art insiders get somewhat confused.

Even if you've been only half awake throughout this past year, you could not hide from the grim reality of the financial woes that made life for so many of us extremely unsettling and worrisome. And definitely the art world was not immune to this dramatic downward spiral. Museums were forced to face the tough economic reality by paring down scheduled exhibitions, cutting back staff, and putting a freeze on new hires. Disappointing sales at art auctions and various art fairs reinforced the sense of doom and gloom on the international art scene, and a number of galleries were forced to close their doors. But, as Mark Twain once said, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated..."