Henry T Hopkins

It was Judy Chicago at the other end of the line. "Thirteen women? Oh, my God! That's the karma of 'The Dinner Party.' " She'd just been told that 13 of those who'd helped create "The Dinner Party," her controversial feminist art statement of almost two decades ago, had come together to reinstall it--this time, for the first time, in its hometown.

Ending a 2 1/2-year search for a director, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will announce today the appointment of Graham W. J. Beal, a contemporary art specialist who has directed the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha since 1989. Beal, 48, who completes a new LACMA leadership team, will oversee artistic programs at the Wilshire Boulevard institution. But unlike past directors, he will be second in command, reporting to Andrea L.

In 1998, Ann Philbin, director of the Drawing Center in New York, received a couple of letters from UCLA inviting her to apply for the top position at a fledgling museum near the university's campus. "I threw the letters in the garbage," she says. "I had never heard of UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center." But at the urging of artist Lari Pittman, she agreed to check it out on her next trip to Los Angeles. "When I walked in, I had one of those eureka moments where I thought, 'Uh-oh, I know exactly what this should be,' " Philbin says.

Henry T. Hopkins has an answer for people who ask how he could abandon the security of directing the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for the turbulence of orchestrating Frederick R. Weisman's art enterprises in Los Angeles. "I know what I'm getting into," said the distinguished museum director during a brief trip to Los Angeles. "Some people who have worked with Fred don't see his peripatetic nature in the best light, but I chose this for myself.

When we last heard of the MTA's art rocks, they were upside down. And getting them right side up was gonna push the price tag to $1 million. Those were the rocks, you may recall, that were supposed to hang from the ceiling of the subway station at Vermont and Beverly. They were "art" rocks because they had been designed by artist George Stone, no pun intended, and placed in the station as part of the art-in-the-subways program. Do we really want art in the subways?

After just two minutes and 40 seconds of bidding, a scientific manuscript handwritten and illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci was sold Friday at Christie's auction house for $30.8 million--a world record--by the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. The buyer was an anonymous private collector. Armand Hammer, the late chairman of the board of Occidental Petroleum Corp., purchased the work in 1980 for $5.62 million at a London auction, a record price at the time.

A grotesque troupe of prostitutes--Five Dollar Billy, Miss Cherry Delight, Cockeyed Jenny, a Lady Named Zoa and Dianna Poole, Miss Universal--has moved into the Museum of Contemporary Art. Fashioned of everything from dolls, mannequins and women's underwear to a bedpan and a trash can, these sculptural figures inhabit "Roxys," a brothel-like installation in "Kienholz: A Retrospective," which opens today at the museum's California Plaza building.

Not long ago, a veteran art museum director had an epiphany about the state of his profession. Arriving at a meeting of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, he spotted his colleagues from a distance. He was looking at some of America's most highly revered and well-seasoned cultural leaders, but what he saw was a group of overweight, out-of-shape, gray-haired men in rumpled business suits. Ann Philbin, the director of the Drawing Center in New York, who on Jan. 11 will succeed Henry T.

Multiculturalism, the newest conceptual play toy of the intellectual avant-garde, seems to have rattled more than a few nerves. Far from a simple topic of collegial debate among artists and cocktail party liberals, the whole notion of a more integrated American aesthetic is fast becoming the catalyst for action among money moguls and neoconservative thinkers throughout this country.

When Zhao Mengfu's "Orchids and Southern Grasses" brought down the gavel at $363,000 last December at Christie's in New York, the early 14th-Century handscroll not only set a world record for a Chinese painting sold at auction, it announced the rebirth of a forgotten competitor. People in the trade assumed that the agent who called in the winning bid from Hong Kong was representing a high-profile institution, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.