Modern Art

Serge, recently taken with modern art, stands bursting with pride by his new acquisition - a canvas that is all white. Well, he sees color in it, sort of. "It's not white!" he protests. "It has a white background!" This essentially blank canvas is Serge's treasure, literally. It cost him 200,000 francs. That's the plot of Art, being given a fresh, animated and thoroughly funny revival by the Delaware Theatre Company. Like Yasmina Reza's play, which won the Tony 10 years ago, the production is a tight, and tightly wound, piece of theater.

TORONTO - The fascinating documentary "My Kid Could Paint That" (opening tomorrow at the Ritz Bourse) uses 4-year-old Marla Olmstead as a focal point to explore questions about "What is art?" and, even if you can figure that out, "What the heck is modern art?" Marla is the Binghamton, N.Y., girl who made a splash and soon became a gallery favorite with her colorful, Pollock-esque paintings, which sell for thousands of dollars. A suspicious "60 Minutes" piece, however, raised questions about whether the work was really Marla's or whether she was getting substantial help from her father, Mark , portrayed as an artist wannabe.

If you're interested in collecting artwork from master painters such as Picasso or Chagall and think there's no way to own an original piece of their work - think again. An exhibit at Ocean Galleries in Stone Harbor will allow you to do just that. "The Masters of Modern Art" features 90 works by Chagall, Dal?, Matisse, Mir? and Picasso, including two pieces from Dal?'s personal notebook. "We have some extremely significant and important pieces of the five most influential painters of the modern art movement," said Josh Miller, who co-owns the gallery with his wife, Kim Miller.

The camera can either reproduce reality by freezing an instant in time - the purist definition - or it can create it through manipulation and artifice. Although photographers began to invent and imagine at least a century ago, this approach has proliferated during the postmodern period. Since the mid-1970s, Canadian artist Jeff Wall has been one of the most prominent "stage-managing" photographers. Like Cindy Sherman, Wall has invested his scenarios with the look and sensibility of film stills.

Art is vital to our communities, both culturally and economically. In its report, "Portfolio," the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance stated that the average ticket price for paid attendance is $20, "a figure that is significantly more affordable than tickets to most professional sporting or commercial entertainment events. " Half of all visits to cultural organizations here, the report noted, are free. Some debate whether we should pay to enjoy the arts. In a 2002 panel discussion at Harvard University, Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, said "it's almost a moral duty that museums should be free.

Freeman's has been around for so long, selling antiques and estates for more than 200 years, that it's hard to think of it as a place for the avant-garde. But on Nov. 5, it will offer more than 220 lots of modern and contemporary art, ranging from Picasso and late 20th-century icon Andy Warhol to a new generation of avant-gardists including the not-yet-50-year-old Iranian painter Shirin Neshat. Surprising, too, are some of the works' provenances, many of which are local. Among the more affordable pieces in the sale, which will begin at 2 p.m. at 1808 Chestnut St., is an abstract by the contemporary painter Bill Scott titled Lantern 1994.

Anne d'Harnoncourt is fond of telling people that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is full up. Not with visitors, but with art. In fact, its director says, the museum filled the last of its 200 galleries in 1977, and now must stow excess art in a South Philadelphia warehouse. At any given time, only a small portion of the museum's 225,000-plus objects are on display in its building at the end of the Parkway. And yet, in the last several years, the Art Museum has consciously sought to increase its holdings.

Even in an art world peppered with twosomes and collectives such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude or the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, the Philadelphia-based artists who have collaborated as Kocot and Hatton for nearly four decades stand out. For the last seven years, this wife-and-husband team has been painting and drawing in the dark in a semi-awake state, rising separately during the night to attend to their various pieces. As with their earlier efforts, Marcia Kocot and Tom Hatton's recent abstract paintings and drawings do not necessarily reveal their process.

When the Andrew Wyeth exhibition opens today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, no one should expect it to be a C?zanne. C?zanne, as in the 1996 show that became the biggest special-exhibition attendance generator in the museum's history. C?zanne, as in the event that awakened the city's tourism industry to the potential of arts and culture as economic stimulus. C?zanne, which had "a wonderful transforming effect on the city's image of itself," as Art Museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt puts it. Not that anyone at the museum would complain if "Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic" ended up also being a blockbuster.

Robert Storr, distinguished critic and cutting-edge curator, will join the Philadelphia Museum of Art as one in a troika of curators of modern and contemporary art. Museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt is expected to announce his appointment today. An artist who during the 1990s served as curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art - where his retrospectives of Chuck Close and Elizabeth Murray (currently on view) met with international acclaim - Storr also organized The Devil on the Stairs, a landmark 1991 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Storr's title, consulting curator of modern and contemporary art, means that he will share responsibilities with Carlos Basualdo, contemporary art curator, and Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern art. (To decode museumspeak: "modern" refers to the 20th century and "contemporary" to the most recent decades.