Asia's superrich build their own art museums

For busy vacationers who want to do it all, it can be hard to pack in tours, museums, landmarks, restaurants, nightlife, and shopping. Sometimes you have to give one up. But why not cut some corners by combining your museums and hotels?

Summer vacation season is right around the corner, but with sequestration cutting hours and reducing services at many national parks, it's getting harder to find a low-cost, educational place to take the kids during the time off. Museums are a good option, but admission costs can be bruising, especially for large families.

NEW YORK (AP) — Before visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art can stroll past the Picassos, Renoirs, Rembrandts and other priceless works, they must first deal with the ticket line, the posted $25 adult admission and the meaning of the word in smaller type just beneath it: "recommended."

I don’t know anything about art, really, but I do enjoy Renée Magritte (memorably described to me by an art critic friend as a “painter for people who don’t like art”) and am always glad when I see his work on the wall of a museum. Meanwhile, it took a trip to Berlin for someone to mention to me that the Museum of Modern Art in New York has taken the excellent step of putting its complete collection, including works that aren’t on display, online in a searchable database.

The exhibition, The Great American Hall of Wonders, examining the 19th-century American belief that the people of the United States shared a special genius for innovation, is now open at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It is a collaborative effort between the museum and Commerce's U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and explores six subjects – three natural resources, three man-made inventions – that helped shape America during this period: the buffalo, Giant Sequoia, Niagara Falls, the gun, the railroad and the clock. The exhibition will focus on the ways these six subjects brought together artistic, scientific and technological ways of seeing the world. In addition to providing creative and technical assistance for development of the exhibition, the USPTO has played a part in the public program development by working with the museum to provide:  speakers for university level courses as well as inventors from the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame for a lecture series.   There will also be a day and a half long inventors symposium held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the USPTO will take the lead in providing experts to address the many challenges facing independent inventors and entrepreneurs.

Serenity prevails in a unique museum in Queens, New York