Thank you, Centre Pompidou, for making my job impossible

Here we were all set to share some of the rare images from a rare exhibition of an American and a female (American or non) artist, Gerogia O’Keefe, at the Centre Pompidou, when, being a responsible publisher, I took a look at the Paris museum’s usage conditions. (This was after realizing that were I even to try opening half the images, they’d crash my computer, these images being in the pre-historic ‘TIF’ format, which any arts publicist worth their salt should realize by now, 25 years into Web publishing, are too big for Web usage.) And discovered that among the numerous prohibitions was displaying the images on the ‘social’ networks. Which effectively means that I would be unable to promote our free publication of the images on The Paris Tribune and the Dance Insider & Arts Voyager in the usual places, and by consequence prohibited from giving the museum and its exhibition and this amazing legendary artist free advertising. This reminds me of the time I was working as an editor at Dance Magazine in New York and I and my fellow editor, the erstwhile Caitlin Sims, shocked to find that there were no copies of the current issue, featuring a major profile on New York City Ballet ballerina Maria Kowroski (by moi), in the kiosk of the company’s Lincoln Center lobby (where thousands of fans of the dancer would be able to buy it during performance intermissions). After we took the initiative to grab a few copies from the office and simply give them to the kiosk manager to sell, only to be chastised by the magazine’s office manager (or maybe it was the owner-publisher), all that was left to us was to utter the employees’ oft-repeated refrain: “Dance magazine: The best-kept secret in dance publishing.” Which I am now obliged to remix as “Georgia O’Keefe: The best-kept secret in Paris museum curating.” — Paul Ben-Itzak