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Last weekend, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, celebrated the opening of its new Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, which would seem to represent a major commitment to collecting and exhibiting the art of our time. It should be noted, however, that the new wing is not actually new. It is the old, I. M. Pei-designed wing from 1981, formerly used for rotating exhibitions, now refurbished, repurposed and renamed. And while a lot more contemporary art is now on view, you don't get the feeling that the old, small-city provincialism has been replaced by a new, fiercely ambitious cosmopolitanism. The main attraction is a 12,000-square-foot, oblong gallery, a big-box space occupied by a sprawling, uneven, crowded hodge-podge of about 240 works from the museum's permanent collection, augmented by some blue-chip loans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ON paper it resembles a subplot from David Foster Wallace's deliriously satiric novel ''Infinite Jest'': a billionaire heiress builds a spectacular art museum on family property somewhere in the Deep South and gives it the suspiciously New-Agey name Crystal Bridges. But this is nonfiction. On Nov. 11 Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, will unveil the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the small city of Bentonville, Ark. Ms. Walton will always be remembered by New York's cultural custodians for absconding six years ago with Asher B. Durand's ''Kindred Spirits,'' a key piece of Hudson River School painting. (The New York Public Library let it go for about $35 million.) But Ms. Walton, 61, is no harebrained carpetbagger. A serious, lifelong art collector, she intends to make Crystal Bridges a major comprehensive repository of American art from Colonial to contemporary. In 2005 she hired the distinguished art historian and former National Gallery of Art curator John Wilmerding to advise on acquisitions and went on a buying spree that netted a George Washington portrait by Gilbert Stuart; Norman Rockwell's ''Rosie the Riveter'' (1943); Jasper Johns's ''Alphabets'' (1960-62); and a 2009 portrait of Bill Clinton, a friend of Ms. Walton's, by Chuck Close. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THIS fall the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will open its long-awaited $345 million wing for Art of the Americas. Designed by the English firm Foster & Partners and appended to the museum's east end, the four-story structure extends the original 1907 Beaux Arts building's low profile but dispenses with the neo-Classical columns, capitals, entablatures and whatnot in favor of severe, rectilinear blocks: a central glass atrium -- 12,184 square feet under a 63-foot ceiling -- flanked by granite and glass pavilions containing 53 galleries. The big news however isn't the architecture but the curatorial program, whose goal is to represent not only art of the British Colonies and the Post-Colonial United States but the visual and material cultures of all peoples of North, Central and South America, from ancient times to the late 20th century. It is a huge and philosophically intriguing mandate, one that no other museum has tackled so ambitiously. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Retreat or plunge in? Artists contending with modern life can escape the bewildering tumult into transcendent realms of formal beauty and philosophical contemplation, or they can actively participate, injecting transformational energies into the social flux. This summer at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in this bucolic town, the escapist option is beautifully displayed in two forms: a blissful exhibition of late-19th- and early-20th-century paintings and a serene new building by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]