Ellsworth Kelly

True art collectors are a rare breed. Anyone with money can buy art, but only true collectors can distinguish a great work from a merely good one, or spot emerging talent before the rest of the world notices. True collectors are brave; they trust their instincts rather than the herd. Eleanor Biddle Barnes Lloyd, known to her friends as "Lallie," was one of them. Between the late 1930s, when she first began to collect in earnest, and her death in 1985, she created one of the most distinctive collections of modern and contemporary art in America.

At 10 yesterday morning, hundreds of journalists and people with influence who were able to obtain red preview passes began to stream into the Venice Biennale for the first of three media-preview days. By noon, word had spread throughout the exhibition: The American pavilion was the show to see. Outside the pavilion, people were standing in line, waiting to be admitted to the Jasper Johns exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. By 2 o'clock, Mark Rosenthal, the museum curator who organized the show, was sitting on the pavilion steps trying to catch his breath in the semitropical humidity of a Venetian summer afternoon.

When he was a lawyer, Jay Rolfe measured his professional life in minutes and hours, billable hours. The hands of the clock seemed to move glacially. Evenings and weekends beckoned because they promised relief from the grind. "What people don't tell you is that the law is boring," Rolfe says. The measure of Rolfe's life now is that he never stops working. He works mornings, afternoons and evenings, seven days a week. When he's not working, he's thinking about work - trying to figure out what to create next and how to make it. Time flies because his work is play.

How much would you pay for the Liberty Bell? What would you bid for it at auction? Do not scoff. You never know when a fiscal crisis is just around the corner. "It's unimaginable we would allow it to leave," said J. Randall Cotton, vice president of the Preservation Alliance. "It's owned by the city. But the city has not always been the best steward of its historical patrimony. " No room for a bell? How about a Thomas Eakins painting - say, Jefferson Hospital's Gross Clinic or the University of Pennsylvania's Agnew Clinic - two quintessential Philadelphia works, public images in private hands.

One might have thought that after 30 years on the faculty at the University of the Arts and its previous incarnations, William P. Daley would have been entitled to more of a sendoff than a modest exhibition of his recent work in a side gallery in the school's Haviland Hall. The university thought enough of Daley's contributions as a teacher of ceramics to anoint him last May as its first university distinguished professor of the arts, for demonstrating "extraordinary breadth of achievement and experience.

PHILANDERING LOW ON THE SCALE OF AMERICA'S WOES Why did the media fall for this "dirty laundry" trick again? How does philandering compare to Irangate, where American officials trained and funded the cold-blooded murderers of women, children and clergy? Or, Iraqgate, where taxpayer money paid for the weapons used to kill our own soldiers? Or, our complicity in the massacre of peasants in El Salvador? Where is the media's sense of relative moral outrage? The crime here is not marital infidelity, which is wrong; it is the diversion of government from solving very serious problems.

If ever there was a ready-made audience for "Cezanne and Beyond," the new show opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art today, these people were it. They didn't need the audio tour - each one was an audio tour, with a uniquely informed view. The nearly 50 Cezanne specialists and modern-art scholars who assembled at the Art Museum on Monday morning were part of a "study day" jointly organized by the museum and the Barnes Foundation. Given their overlapping collections, a visit to both was imperative (and will be easier when the Barnes moves from its Lower Merion home to the Ben Franklin Parkway in early 2012)

Her silk taffeta, ultra-mini bubble dress was showcased on billboards from Los Angeles to New York in the fall, worn by Gossip Girls star Taylor Momsen, Jenny Humphrey on the CW drama. American Idol singer and mega country star Carrie Underwood was spotted in the cutesy frock, as was Academy Award winner Hilary Swank. But despite the celebrity hoopla, free publicity, and dozens of inquiries, Manayunk designer Paula Hian sold just five of the $1,500 dresses. "When they heard how much it cost, they were like, 'Thank you,' and click," Hian said.

Unlike painting, which is an indoor creature, sculpture frequently needs to be outdoors. To display sculpture adequately these days, particularly to represent the full range of contemporary expression, a museum needs a space it can use as an alfresco gallery. One of the prime models for such an arrangement is the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, which opened in 1974. The Hirshhorn's design incorporates areas for sculpture in the plaza on which the drum-shaped building sits and in an adjacent garden carved out of the Mall.

On a quiet Monday morning at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, two painters are touching up display cases in the new $35 million Robert O. Anderson Building for 20th-century art, which had opened only two weeks before. One makes a passing reference to the city's new $23 million Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) building, which will open to the public Wednesday. The other workman remarks that he hasn't heard of MOCA, as it's known here. "Yes, sir," the first replies, "we've got two new museums.