It's been a busy month for NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. After tackling Jean Nouvel's skyscraper, Renzo Piano's Times building and the West Side Rail Yards designs, today he turns to the feverishly celebrated New Museum, previewed yesterday by Gothamist. Designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Japan-based SANAA, the highly refined seven-story, 174-foot building succeeds, says Ouroussoff, on a "spectacular range of levels: as a hypnotic urban object, as a subtle......

This week NY Mag has a scathing analysis of Thomas Krens' tenure at the Guggenheim, calling the air around the museum during his 17-year reign "distorted and toxic." Writer Jerry Saltz says the museum is beginning to recover only now, two years after Lisa Dennison, who is now leaving to become executive vice president for Sotheby's North America, replaced him when he left to run the Guggenheim Foundation. Krens gets blasted for bungling what......

New Yorkers rate their critics in this weeks Time Out New York issue. The somewhat figure skating like rating system was based on "K=Knowledge S=Style T=Taste A=Accessibility I=Influence AVG=Average score". Some of the winners: • Sasha Frere-Jones took first place in music criticism for his work in the The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Village Voice and others. We like his blog, too. • Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice took the gold......

Attention hordes of tourists queing up outside MoMA: DO NOT GO IN! The Village Voice has laid down its pronouncement-- and it's bad bad bad. Apparently, the renovation has created a monster, and the Voice's Jerry Saltz says "we should think about not going to MOMA" until the various problems have been fixed: It kills me to write this because I love the Museum of Modern Art. Aesthetically speaking it's where we all come......