ARTNET NEWS

The Whitney Museum of American Art is done playing second fiddle to all those museums with grand, 21st-century spaces like the Museum of Modern Art and (strangely) the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With its new Meatpacking building, we’re talking big bucks and big spaces -- $720 million and 200,000 square feet, to be precise. And as if to prove its muscle, the Whit has already got more than $500 million of its capital campaign in hand.

Architect for Art: Max Gordon (Marquand Books, $40) is a new book highlighting the art-world legacy of Max Gordon (1931-1990), an architect much admired among art-world insiders for his mastery of the design of fine-art exhibition spaces.

Artists’ magazines, those ephemeral containers for fleeting impressions and experimental thought, now have their own scholarly study. Art history professor Gwen Allen, who teaches at San Francisco State University, has published Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (MIT Press, $34.95), an impressive 300-page survey of artist-run art magazinesin their heyday, which, according to the flap copy, has already passed: the 1960s through the 1980s.

As part of its 40th anniversary season, New York’s veteran nonprofit performance space The Kitchen is slated to present “The View from a Volcano: The Kitchen’s SoHo Years, 1971-85,” June 30-Aug. 27, 2011. The exhibition of video, audio and prints detailing its programming during those early years -- when it was housed on the second floor of a SoHo loft building at Wooster and Broome Streets -- is bound to bring back sweet memories of the art world’s older set.

Artist Vik Muniz is the curator of this year’s art Unframed 2011, the two-day-long art sale and benefit for ACRIA (Artists Respond to AIDS), which is now 18 years old. The event, which is presented by Architectural Digest and BNY Mellon Wealth Management, takes place at 123 Third Avenue at 14th Street in New York.

Did someone say criticism is in crisis? Not so at the School of Visual Arts, which still has a few spots left in its “design criticism” department this fall. To entice prospective students, the two-year-old MFA program is dropping some bold-faced names: Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art and New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook.

Famed Playboy magazine "Femlin" artist and all-around splashy expressionist painter LeRoy Neiman, along with his wife, Janet Byrne Neiman, have gifted the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) -- where they both studied -- with a sweet donation of $5 million to fund a new student center.

Now that Anna Wintour is a newly minted trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- where she has significantly raised the profile of its annual Costume Institute gala, raking in a record $10.4 million this year -- her caped colleague, André Leon Talley, is following suit.