Yinka Shonibare is the London-based artist of Nigerian descent best known for those headless mannequins dressed in 18th and 19th century costumes made from very neo-colonial cloth. "Neo-colonial" is this instance means that what we tend to think of as "traditional" African textiles turn out to be manufactured by the Dutch, who borrowed them from the Batik patterns of Indonesia — from Java, to be precise — when it was their colony. Then the Dutch marketed these Javanese textiles to Africans, who adopted them as "their own", more or less. Got that?

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It's often the case that when a museum director sees a big expansion to completion he or she steps down within a year or so after the project is completed. That's what Mimi Gates did at the Seattle Art Museum and Marc Wilson at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City. But things have happened a little differently at the Cleveland Museum of Art. On Saturday the Cleveland opened the first of three new wings that are part of a still incomplete multi-stage renovation and expansion designed by Rafael Viñoly. And on Sunday the news was out that after just three years on the job, the Cleveland's director, Timothy Rub, would be leaving in the fall to succeed the late Anne d'Harnoncourt as director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is well known in the museum world for his fund raising skills. He seems to have scored a coup this week by attracting some very affluent names to the LACMA board of directors. One is Gabriel Brener, CEO of Brener Interenational Group. The other two are higher profile names — Brian Grazer, who produces all of Ron Howard's films — and a man who has always seemed to me to have gotten all his hairstyling ideas from Edward Scissorhands — and Dasha Zhukova, the Russian fashion designer and founder of a contemporary art center in Moscow who also just happens to be the girlfriend of Russian zillionaire and collector Roman Abramovich — thus giving Govan a pipeline to a man who may actually have more money even than Govan's go-his-own-way board member Eli Broad.

Last year Abramovich casually set two auction house records when he paid $33.6 million for Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping — the record for a living artist — and $86.3 million for Francis Bacon's Triptych, the record for a work of postwar art. Zhukova has longtime connections to southern California, where she grew up and graduated from UC at Santa Barbara.

LACMA also announced today that it was naming as board co-chairman Terry Semel, the lavishly compensated former CEO of Yahoo and before that the longtime — and lavishly compensated — co-CEO of Warner Brothers, the film studio owned by Time-Warner, which of course also owns Time and therefore in some mysterious way owns this blog too.

Let's finish up that conversation with Maya Lin about her new earthwork project, Storm King Wavefield.

LACAYO: The Wavefield is a succession of enormous grassy mounds. It's made of planted earth, it's outdoors and exposed to the elements. So do you expect that this piece will eventually decay?

LIN: It'll erode, it'll soften. In the design and construction process I think I actually increased the steepness of the slope because I knew that in time it would soften. People have asked me, "How do you deal with a living work and how it changes?" Well, you're kind of welcoming the changes.

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Storm King Wavefield, Maya Lin, 2007-2008/photo: Jerry L. Thompson

Let's continue that conversation with Maya Lin about Storm King Wavefield, the large earthwork she just unveiled at a sculpture park in upstate New York.

LACAYO: For a long time people have understood that your Vietnam Veteran's Memorial is in some ways a Minimalist work or post-Minimalist work. What the Wavefield makes you realize is that the Memorial is also an earthwork. It's embedded in the soil and some of its power comes from the way it calls on our feelings about nature.

LIN: Yes, right.

LACAYO: I think we're also more aware now of affinities between the Memorial and some of Richard Serra's work, those enormous undulating steel works that aren't so much objects as pathways and structures and even journeys.

LIN: Richard has been a great inspiration for me. Richard, James Turrell and early Robert Irwin. Also a book by Lawrence Weschler, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which was so formative for me. It's all about the Minimalist view of space, about putting people into a place where they have to react to that place without bringing in specific references to things outside. The Memorials I've done of course do have those outside reference points, because they connect to historical events. My other works embrace a pure formalism, but at the same time they're embedded in the landscape, so they're tapping into a very different psychology within us than artworks that you experience within the confines of a gallery.

LACAYO: You've also talked about the influence on your work of the Native American ceremonial mounds found around southern Ohio where you grew up, like the Serpent Mound, which is about 1300 feet long but only three feet high, a gentle snaking undulation in the ground that's nonetheless manmade.

LIN: Yeah, they're from the Hopewell and the Adena tribes. They're just all over where I grew up.

LACAYO: But Wavefield also reminds me a bit of a classic English park, one of those parks that are completely manmade, but designed to look completely natural, so that the whole idea of what's "natural" is undermined.

LIN: There was a small piece I did at Yale that played with that idea. I installed it in a stream outside of New Haven. I found these thin zinc reeds at a scrap yard that were 18 feet long. I just painted them green and black, waded out into the stream and placed them in a line. But there was only one viewing point, at the bend in the stream from the opposite shore, where you could tell this was a manmade intervention because that was the only point where they all lined up. From any other angle it looked like they were just part of the reeds along the bank. I went back a week later and I was standing there looking at them from across the stream, and these two fishermen were there. They were talking to one another and saying “What do you think it is? Is it alive? Is it natural?” And they turned to me and said: "What do you think it is?" And I said: “Oh, I don't know!”

But there are times when nature itself doesn't feel natural. I was working in the Northwest, and the landscape driving south from Spokane, I had never seen anything like it. The glacial loam it's so beautiful, but surreal. It just doesn't quite look natural.

LACAYO: Did you plot the curves for Wavefield with a mathematical model, or with a device, like an oscilloscope?

LIN: I didn't. I use photographs or images from water. I use my eye. I think maybe it's because my dad is a ceramicist, and so I grew up with clay, that I just shape them, and I keep shaping them until it feels about right. And you never, ever finish it until you're out there with the crew, with the bulldozer operator and you're shaping it again. This is one big difference between architecture and art. With architecture, when you have to change something on the site you do what's called a change order, and you wanna do as few of those as possible. But with art, if it doesn't change and morph a lot, especially when you bring it to that scale, then it might end up being too static. So I'm constantly out there at the end, fiddling with it.

It was 20 years ago this month that the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. decided to cancel a show of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe rather than risk a confrontation with culture war conservatives who were gunning to take down the National Endowment for the Arts. They came close to taking it down anyway and we're still crawling out of the rubble. In Time this week I took a look back at the whole nasty episode and the semi-comic criminal trial that followed when the show moved on to Cincinnati.

In April I posted a few times about the latest royal architectural dust-up in Britain, where Prince Charles stepped in at the last minute to object to the design of a London apartment project being developed by a company headed by members of the royal family of Qatar. The Qataris had chosen as their architects the firm of Richard Rogers. That would be Baron Rogers. I should mention here that everyone in this post but me will be either a royal or a member of the aristocracy.

Charles, a sworn enemy of modern architecture but someone who doesn't actually have a lawful role in the nearly completed public approvals process related to the apartment project, objected to the Rogers design, especially because the apartments are planned for a site near Christopher Wren's 17th-century Chelsea Hospital. (That of course would be Sir Christopher Wren. I promised that there would be no commoners in this post and I meant it.) In one of those just-one-royal-to-another letters that the modern world provides so few opportunities to send anymore, Charles reportedly wrote personally to Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, who, of course, is also a member of their royal family, to lay out his objections.

By last week Rogers was off the job, the third time the Pritzker Prize-winning architect has been pushed off a project thanks to opposition from Charles. The Qataris, who appear to be quick studies, have now selected a charity headed by Charles, the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, to help develop a new plan for the site. Smart thinking — you don't have to worry about objections from the Prince if you're hiring his boys. Tony Soprano could take lessons from this guy.

But this time Rogers decided not to take it laying down. This morning the British paper The Guardian reported that Rogers is calling for "a national inquiry" by a "committee of independent constitutional experts" into Charles' interference in the decision making process and more broadly into the role Charles has attempted to play in other issues like medicine, agriculture and the environment. Can Rogers seriously hope to get this idea rolling? It will take more than an angry interview in one newspaper. But meanwhile he has moral support from a former UK planning minister, who has been on BBC radio calling Charles' last minute intervention in the nearly complete project approvals process "almost feudal".

To which I would only add — almost?

Storm King Wavefield, Maya Lin, 2007-2008/photo: Jerry L. Thompson

The other day I stopped by the New York studio of Maya Lin, the artist-architect-memorial designer, to talk with her about current projects, but mostly about Storm King Wavefield, the large new earthwork she just unveiled at Storm King Art Center, the mountainside sculpture park about an hour north of Manhattan, which I was on my way up to see.

As usual I'll split this conversation into parts.

LACAYO: In the late 1960s and '70s you studied architecture as an undergraduate at Yale. While you were there you became abruptly famous as winner of the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, which became the model that every memorial would answer to for decades to come, including the 9/11 memorial, whenever it happens, which is plainly indebted to you. You returned to Yale to do graduate study in architecture, but while you've continued to do memorials and architectural projects, you quickly branched out to art. Did you think of yourself all along as an artist?

LIN: After the Vietnam Veterans Memorial I went right back to Yale to study architecture because I didn't want the Memorial to sidetrack me from my other interests. But during the three years I was in grad school I started to spend an equal amount of time in the art department My dad was dean of fine arts at Ohio University. I was casting bronzes by the time I was in high school. But my mom was more academic, with a stress on "Go get your doctorate." So even though I was always making art, there was a side of me always striving towards the academic, and architecture was a combination of the two sides.

I had a hard time in grad school. I think my professors were always trying to guide me — I had just gotten the coup of the century with the Memorial, so why wasn't I behaving more like an architect? But I had started to think more like an artist. As much as I love architecture my processes and my premises are much more those of an artist. I'm very committed to buildings but I won't give up the art.

After I finished the Civil Rights Memorial [in Montgomery, Alabama in 1989] I said "Okay, that will be it for me, two pieces that focus on funereal issues, on death." But as it turns out I've taken on other historical projects. Now I'm doing a very complex project called "Confluence" with the Native American tribes along the Lewis and Clark Trail. They asked me if I would get involved as the 200th anniversary of the expedition was approaching. When I realized who was asking, I couldn't turn it down.

LACAYO: You're also working now on "What Is Missing?", a "memorial" for endangered species and habitats in formats and platforms all around the world — sound art installations, an e-book, electronic billboards, the Internet.

LIN: It will launch in September at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco as a sculpture installation. At the same time it will launch as a traveling exhibit up at Storm King and also on the MTV billboard in Times Square as a five-minute video piece. It's my first foray into video work.

LACAYO: And now there's also the Wavefields at Storm King Mountain.

LIN: That's the third and last of three works in the ground that have been inspired by wave formations. The first one, at the University of Michigan in 1995, was 10,000 sq. ft. It was based on a naturally repeating water wave called a Stokes Wave and it was human scale. You could sit in it. The waves were three to five feet high and scaled to you.

The next one, near the federal courthouse in Miami, was 30,000 sq. ft. That one took as a model when water goes over sand and creates a ripple. Storm King started being 90,000 sq. ft. but ended up being about 240,000 sq. ft., set in an 11-acre reclamation of an old gravel pit. At Storm King I'm working with the idea of what happens when those waves go above your head, when you lose scale and become part of the trough system and your views are occluded.

The New Acropolis Museum/Image: New Acropolis Museum

I wasn't surprised this morning to see that the government of Greece has turned down an offer from the British Museum to lend the Elgin Marbles for three months to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, which will be having its much delayed official opening on June 20. In October of 2007, when the museum was largely complete and the works of art were just beginning to come in, I went over to take an early look and to talk with Dimitrios Pandermalis, president of what was then called the New Acropolis Museum Project.

Here's the pertinent part of that conversation.

LACAYO: Earlier this year Greece suggested to the British Museum that the Museum might lend the Elgin Marbles to Greece for the opening of the new museum. The British response then was what it has been for some time -- that it was not possible even to consider such a thing until Greece formally recognizes that the Elgin Marbles are the lawful property of the Trustees of the British Museum. Why not just agree to that as a first step?

PANDERMALIS: On that particular question only the minister of culture is authorized to give answer. But I can tell you it's a part of a complicated dialogue.

LACAYO: Have you proposed a loan show again to the British Museum?

PANDERMALIS: I have had informal talks with the British Museum. I think there is a possibility for cooperation, and on the basis of that cooperation we can also talk about the marbles.

A few days later I stopped in to visit Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, and asked him about the loan idea. In April, 2007 he had said for the first time that such a thing might be possible — so long as Greece first recognized ownership of the marbles by the Trustees of the British Museum. When we spoke in October, he didn't budge at all on that pre-condition.

LACAYO: Your museum has repeatedly taken the position that it will not discuss even the possibility of a temporary loan of some of the marbles unless the Greek authorities will acknowledge that the Trustees of the British Museum are their lawful owners. What if the Greeks were suddenly to surprise you and do just that? Would the museum then agree to enter into some kind of talks?

MacGREGOR: No Trustees in the Anglo-Saxon legal system could lend to people who didn't recognize their title. This is the duty of Trustees. The Trustees have always made it clear that they regard the collection as being a resource from which they like to lend and they want to lend. There are interesting examples in just the last year of loans of major parts of the collection — of Assyrian art in Shanghai, an exhibition now going to Boston, and then "Treasures of the World's Cultures" in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

But there has never been a request [from Greece] for a time limited loan for part of the Parthenon sculptures. The Trustees have said they would not consider the removal of all the marbles at one time, just as they would not consider the removal of all the Assyrian sculptures at one time. But their position is absolutely coherent. They would consider a request, and it would then be a question of how long the request was for, whether the objects were fit to travel, all those things.

LACAYO: If the Greeks do not budge on that central question — acknowledging ownership by the Trustees, then presumably there can't be any movement forward.

MacGREGOR: Trustees are obliged to behave in a certain way. The conversation cannot even begin until that has happened.

LACAYO: Other than conversations with Dimitrios Pandermalis, who heads the New Acropolis Museum project, have you had contacts with the Greek side on this question?

MacGREGOR: Some years ago Dr. Venizelos, who was then culture minister of Greece, came to the museum to speak to the then-chairman of the Trustees and myself. We raised the point that a precondition for a temporary loan of some objects would have to be the recognition of title. We put that to him and he then formally published a letter in the Sunday Times saying that the Greek government does not recognize that the Trustees are the legal owners. We were trying to find a middle ground on which some kind of discussion could be had, but we can't, at the moment.

And now today we learn that the Greek Culture minister Antonis Samaras has said in an e-mail to Bloomberg.com that to accept the British pre-condition would be "tantamount to legitimizing the snatching of the marbles and the carving up of the monument 207 years ago."

Meaning, no go.

I have to assume that MacGregor is relieved.

If you're inclined you can find the full version of that conversation with MacGregor here, here and here. My talk with Pandermalis is here and here.