ART

When artist Robert Smithson assembled a massive spiral unfurling into the Great Salt Lake 38 years ago, there was no indication that this remote spot would be altered again by humans any time soon. Smithson's work, called "Spiral Jetty," became a world-renowned piece of art, its striking man-made pattern created amid isolation. Now art lovers fear it is threatened by plans to explore for oil a few miles offshore.

Denis Cosgrove, 59, a cultural geographer who held the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Geography at UCLA and encouraged the study of his discipline within the humanities, died March 21 of stomach cancer at his home in Los Angeles, UCLA announced on its website. Cosgrove studied the connection between art and its representation of geography. Landscape and how it is viewed through the lens of art history, architecture and design formed the basis of much of his writing. His 2001 book "Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination" collected images and maps from classical antiquity through the 21st century and reflected on the continuing need humans have to represent the world they live in. Born in Liverpool, England, on May 3, 1948, Cosgrove earned a bachelor's degree in geography at St. Catherine's College at Oxford in 1969.

"Video is a fugitive medium," said Getty Research Institute's Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for "California Video," running at the Getty through June 8, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the '60s, '70s and '80s. The challenge: Most of the tapes, recorded in obsolete formats, were crusted with oxidized crud that made the work unwatchable and threatened to ruin any playback deck hardy enough to play them.

It's A quiet Sunday morning in this city of cacophonous ambition. Construction has yet to hit a deafening pitch, and traffic is still moving. But, as the temperature rises, all sorts of art activity bubbles up in the historic Bastakiya district, a low-lying island of traditional Arabian houses in a sea of modern high-rises.

As part of an effort to raise funds to restore and return a vintage trolley car to the streets of Angeleno Heights, the neighborhood is honoring Leo Politi, the late author and artist who documented the changing vistas of early-to-mid-20th century Los Angeles. Politi's work will be on display in the Craftsman-style home where he lived, a stop on the Angeleno Heights Trolley Line Open House Tour on May 17 and 18. Guests can visit seven of the area's magnificent private Victorian residences.

IT COULD very well be a mirage: A trick of the glaring morning sun or something misread in the pre-caffeinated early morning haze. But no. Upon closer inspection, that brown-and-white sign, hanging just beneath the red slash of the "No Left/U-Turn" symbol on a sparsely landscaped traffic island, proclaims exactly what you first thought: "The Islands of LA Nat'l Park."

Ex-Talking Heads frontman David Byrne plans to turn a landmark building in Manhattan into a giant musical instrument. State officials say Byrne will create a temporary installation this month in the Great Hall of the Battery Maritime Building, which is next to the Whitehall Ferry Terminal. The "Playing the Building" installation will include devices attached to ceiling beams, plumbing, electrical conduits and other parts of the structure. Sound will be produced through vibration, making the building function as an instrument.

LAS VEGAS -- Like a lot of Las Vegas marriages, the one between the Venetian Hotel and the Guggenheim Museum was born of some seriously misplaced optimism. Presided over by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, with St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum standing by as a comically out-of-place bridesmaid, the union was planned in the late 1990s, when the Guggenheim brand and the transformative power of high-design architecture both seemed unassailable. But it was fragile from the start: Though Steve Wynn had opened a small gallery at the Bellagio a couple of years before, there little evidence to back up the notion that large numbers of visitors would abandon the card tables and slot machines to look at art in a museum setting.

In a move signaling its return to collecting Mediterranean antiquities -- with tight restrictions -- the J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired a late 3rd century Roman sarcophagus that depicts a wine-making festival. One of only six similarly decorated ancient funerary monuments known to exist, the elaborately carved marble work will go on display at the Getty Villa on June 12. The sarcophagus -- which portrays a panorama of curly-haired cupids harvesting and stomping grapes, bordered by a pair of lion heads -- is the first major piece to be added to the antiquities collection since the Getty and other museums became embroiled in an international controversy about ancient artworks thought to have been illegally exported, said Karol Wight, the Getty's senior curator of antiquities.