Lou Reed and Zorn. (Courtesy PMC)

The Met has released some highlights of its 2013–14 "Met Museum Presents" program, and there are quite a few gems. Among the concerts and talks are shows in a variety of galleries with new works by downtown avant-garde composer John Zorn (it's his 60th birthday this year and has a lot going on around down), the complete Bartók String Quartet Cycle with guest appearances from the Dirty Projectors' David Longstretch and vocalist Iva Bittová, and conversations hosted by writer Adam Gopnik called "1913: The World Implodes." The full release, rich with the museum's offerings, follows below.

The release:

A poster for an exhibition about 'Harlem on My Mind' at South Carolina State University. (Courtesy SCSU)

Providing a happy reminder that good things can sometimes come out of bad exhibitions, Gwenda Blair has a nice profile in The New York Times today of Queens-raised artist Dawoud Bey, whose "Harlem USA" series is being shown at the Art Institute of Chicago this summer.

It turns out that Mr. Bey visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art's notorious “Harlem on My Mind" exhibition in 1969, after hearing about the uproar it was causing, and it had quite an effect on him. Here's Ms. Blair:

"To his disappointment, no protesters were outside the museum, which was under fire for excluding work by black artists in its portrayal of Harlem. But inside he saw something that left an indelible mark: walls plastered with blown-up photographs of ordinary black people that museumgoers seemed to find compelling enough to stand before and examine.

"Ten years later, having changed his name to Dawoud Bey and studied photography at the School of Visual Arts, he made his debut with a solo show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Called “Harlem USA,” it consisted of 25 black-and-white photographs of neighborhood residents, like military veterans in a marching band and older women on their way to church."

Mr. Bey was also the subject of a major retrospective at the Renaissance Society in Chicago this summer, which will travel. Here's hoping it makes a stop in his hometown.

The Met.

A total of 6.28 million people visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, the museum announced today. This is the highest attendance since the museum started keeping count 40 years ago and is up by 600,000 from 2011.

Some of the reasons for this record are: the new Islamic galleries, the new American wing, the popular "Steins Collect" show and "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty," which drew 662,000 visitors alone after being extended several times. It was the museum's eighth-most-popular exhibition ever. The Met also raised admission fee to $25, though the price is still "suggested."

(Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Dorothea Arnold, an archaeologist and curator who has been the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's department of Egyptian art for 21 years, will retire June 30, according to a statement from the museum's director Thomas P. Campbell. Ms. Arnold has been on the curatorial staff at the museum for 27 years. Starting July 1, she will become curator emeritus.

"Her contributions to her field have been enormous—as a long-time archaeologist, noted scholar and author, curator of important exhibitions, and leader of an impressive team of experts in the Department of Egyptian Art," Mr. Campbell said in an announcement yesterday. She has also overseen the reinstallation of many of her department’s galleries, where almost all of the Museum’s vast Egyptian art holdings, numbering around 30,000 works of art, are on display. These galleries are among the Met’s most studied and most visited by our millions of visitors from around the world each year.”

Tomas Saraceno's 'Cloud City.' (Courtesy Rozalia Jovanovic)

We did everything wrong. We were on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art this morning wearing a skirt and heels and carrying a big bag. Before us was Tomás Saraceno’s sculpture, Cloud City, a 54-foot tall architectural structure of interconnected modules of reflective surfaces that looks at once like bubbles and bacteria, and reflects the cityscape in an Escher-like collage of trees, buildings and sky.

“Only flat rubber-soled shoes,” said a guard before the sculpture. Luckily, the artist came to our rescue.

“Shall we?” asked Mr. Saraceno. He was boyish in sneakers, with blue eyes and brown fluffy hair. “Come on.”

Walking up the stairs, there was an onslaught of images from the various slanted surfaces of the structure. We walked carefully. From one panel, we saw a reflection of the Gothic towers of the Dakota on the west side of Central Park. In another, we saw a few black steps—upside down. In yet another, we saw pure white sky.

Mr. Saraceno, who was born in 1973, in Tucamán, Argentina, is known for building “habitable networks,” interconnected geometric structures that meld art with architecture and science. Through his project “Cloud Cities/Air Port City,” of which the Met sculpture is a part, Mr. Saraceno continues to explore the ways we live in and connect with our environment while building on principles of architecture, engineering, physics, chemistry and aeronautics.

“I like that there are people,” Mr. Saraceno said, looking through a window at a lower reflective panel that showed the top half of a man in a suit. “You see this person? Where he is?” We couldn't see anyone.

It reminded us of  Buckminster Fuller, we told the artist.

“There’s a project of his, which is called Cloud Nine—watch your head,” he said. He bent down, stepped through an opening and walked down the stairs.

“It might establish a network with the near surroundings,” he said, sitting on a bench. He pointed to a building across the park and looked out thoughtfully. “The person that lives in that apartment may get spots of sunshine at three o’clock.”

Mr. Saraceno also hopes to make a “cosmic connection,” and have the piece be visible from an international space station. “You’ll see it only for 18 seconds,” he said. “But it’s not visible all the time, because you know the orbit is not all the time on top of New York.”

A longtime member of the illustrious Castelli Gallery roster, he's back there, on East 77th Street, with a show of early work (including a wild Formica piece that looks like a piano), but he's also showing downtown in a three-person show at the fledgling Golden gallery in Chinatown. Gagosian, where he has shown recently, has Artschwager on offer too, in a charming little group show in its annex gallery at 980 Madison Avenue, which combines art and furniture--perfect for an artist who began his career studying with a cabinetmaker and transitioning into art only after his studio burned, destroying much of his handiwork. And MoMA and the Met have Artschwagers of their own.

By our count there are no less than five six places to see the artist's work at the moment. (In the comments section, Owen helpfully noted that Mr. Artschwager's work is also on view at Brooke Alexander right now.)  A brief guide follows in the slide show above.

The Nadezhda, via http://www.odin.tc

On Friday, Russia ordered one of its ships used for military training purposes, the Nadezhda, not to make a scheduled landing in San Francisco, citing Russia’s ongoing dispute with the Brooklyn-based Jewish sect Chabad, which has led to an embargo on objects loaned between Russian and U.S. museums. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Russian Consul General Vladimir Vinokurov attributed the change in orders in the landing, which had been scheduled as part of a good will tour, to "a long problem" involving Chabad’s claims.

Ironically, the incident comes close on the heels of Chabad’s latest tactic: attempting to start negotiations. After seven years of hard-fought litigation in the federal courts that resulted in a default judgment in its favor and a Russian embargo on lending art to U.S. museums, the sect now says it wants to try talks with the Russian government.

The default judgment, issued in July 2010, ordered Russia to turn over to Chabad a library and archive of religious books and manuscripts that the group claims Russia wrongfully took from it. Russia had abandoned the case, stating U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over it, and it termed the judgment illegal.  Soon after the judgment was issued, Russia imposed its art embargo, saying it feared Chabad would seize any art on loan in the U.S. to enforce the judgment.

The embargo has affected U.S. museums nationwide, and in July the Metropolitan Museum cancelled a planned loan to the Kremlin Museum in response.

Chabad’s motion to begin enforcement proceedings was granted in July with the express proviso–added at the request of the U.S. government–that Chabad would not attempt to attach any art that was protected from seizure by federal statute. Last April Chabad also requested that monetary sanctions be imposed against Russia, and that motion has not yet been decided.

Earlier this month, the group’s approach changed. In an Oct. 19 filing in District Court in Washington, D.C., Chabad did what seemed to be an about-face.  The filing states that Chabad wants to try “to commence negotiations with the Russian Government.”  Chabad therefore requested that the court hold its motion for sanctions in abeyance for 60 days and it also stated that it would not seek to attach any Russian property during that period.

What has caused Chabad’s 180-degree turn?

Authorities agree that Chabad’s judgment is unenforceable in Russia, and it’s questionable whether it’s enforceable in the U.S. either.

On the other hand, there is a procedure by which, under Russian law, Chabad could pay Russia for some of the property it seeks–the archive that was taken from the Germans during World War II but not the library that was nationalized after the Russian Revolution, the latter being sacrosanct patrimony in Russia–if it goes through U.S. government channels.

Chabad had decided not to take that route because, it has been suggested, it didn’t want to give up its claim to the library. Is Chabad now willing to settle for less than all of what it wants, given the difficulty of enforcing its judgment?

The sect’s latest move and Russia's cancellation of the docking of the Nadezhda comes at a time when the U.S. and Russia are again butting heads diplomatically–they recently exchanged blacklists of officials who will not be issued visas because of the death of a whistle-blower in a Russian prison.

Calls to Chabad’s lawyers were met with a “no comment.”