Roundup: Zaha exits Tokyo bid, USC shuts down art student blog, Matthew Barney’s filthy river

Museum drama in the nation’s capital. USC shuts down art student blog. And an exhibition about excrement. Plus: Zaha Hadid drops her Tokyo stadium bid, Los Angeles goes on a road diet and more Broad, Broad, Broad — because certainly no one is sick of this story already.

— Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has had some tough times. And its new director — Melissa Chiu, who came from New York’s Asia Society — is drawing criticism for some controversial moves. Among them: hosting the institution’s anniversary gala in New York. That’s not all; it appears that Chiu’s husband, Artnet editor Benjamin Genocchio, may have been editing controversies out of her Wikipedia profile.

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— California’s wildfires have destroyed a quirky telephone museum in Mountain Ranch.

— Artist Anish Kapoor had his Versailles installation vandalized twice this summer, the second time with anti-Semitic graffiti. The artist wanted to leave the graffiti on the work — but a judge has ordered him to remove it.

— Politicians: if you’re going to use something to lean on while you write, it’s probably best that it not be a vintage mural by early 20th century regionalist Thomas Hart Benton.

— USC administration has shut down a Tumblr blog started by members of the MFA class at the Roski School of Art and Design who withdrew from the school last year.

— Poop. Norman Mailer. Cow carcasses. Don’t read Randy Kennedy’s profile of Matthew Barney while eating a green chile turkey cheeseburger. If you’re calorie counting, however, and would like to suppress your appetite, the story provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s latest epic project, “River of Fundament,” now on view at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Did I mention that the core of the project involves a six-hour film? Godspeed and good luck.

— As private collectors get richer, publicly financed museums are, by and large, getting poorer.

— Sort of related: the reviews continue to roll in for the new Broad museum. Eric Gibson at the Wall Street Journal describes the collection as “the perfect mirror of the status quo,” while Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post is critical of the clutter, in which “the bad overwhelms the great.” William Poundstone, however, says critics should stop getting their choners in a knot since this first outing is merely an introduction and not some be-all, end-all statement on the nature of American art.

— More interestingly, the Guardian’s architecture critic Oliver Wainwright, in a generally favorable review, looks at one of the building’s missed opportunities: the relationship (or lack thereof) it will have to Metro’s nearby regional connector, scheduled to land nearby in 2020.

— Plus, in other museum-opening news: Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum is back with its refurbished European galleries. Boston Globe critic Sebastian Smee is a fan. (ArtsJournal)

— The western edge of Boyle Heights continues to be colonized by whose-is-bigger behemoth art spaces. Wondering how many of these places hire longtime locals...

— Remembering Colombian photographer Nereo Lopez, who died in August. There are some truly terrific images in this post.

— Hyperallergic is in the process of publishing a five-part series on the history of photography of Japanese internment camps of World War II. (Here are the first and second parts.) Reminds me of that terrific show of color photography by Bill Manbo that was on view at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo last year.

— Plus, Lee Miller’s World War II photographs of women.

— Why Zaha Hadid abandoned her Tokyo Olympic Stadium bid.

— Art Share L.A.’s “Ode to the Bridge” exhibition serves as a send-off for L.A.’s soon-to-be-destroyed Sixth Street Viaduct. You served us well, old friend.

— Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks at L.A.’s mobility plan and how the idea of a car-centric city is actually a relatively new one. Plus: Steve Lopez on how a Silver Lake road diet did and didn’t work.

— Related: How San Francisco got drivers to yield for pedestrians.

— KCRW design host Frances Anderton’s mom filed a report on Banksy’s Dismaland: “There was a lot of good stuff, but we all agreed we were underwhelmed, considering all the hype.” Yassssss to more mom reviews!!!

— The Yale Pit Crit. Artist Zak Smith on the ruthless end-of-term critique.

— And last but not least, giant sushi floating on a river in Osaka. (h/t Kulapat Yantrasast)

Find me on the Twitters @cmonstah.