Art.view: A cabinet of wonder

A museum that takes handbags seriouslyAmsterdam's Museum of Handbags and Purses is a rare place. It offers an historical survey of Western bags and related accessories from pill boxes to luggage. On view are some 400 objects from a collection almost ten times that size. Most of the material was acquired by Hendrijke and Heinz Ivo, a married couple who began collecting in earnest 25 years ago, after he retired at 51 (he was president of the food division at Mars).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is one of the premier art institutions in the world.

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.

An intimate display of masterworksIN A city bursting with free museums, a gallery must provide something special to merit an entry fee. The Phillips Collection, a modest art museum in a leafy neighbourhood of Washington, DC, does so. It affords viewers a rare opportunity to marvel at Impressionist, modern and contemporary masterworks in the intimacy of a once-private home.

Alexander McQueen, the fashion house created by the late designer and built upon a reputation for staging subversive fashion extravaganzas, held its menswear show in London for the first time on Tuesday evening.

A feast of drawings in New York

A museum with a history even more rococo than its collectionHertford House, an imposing red brick house on a leafy London square was one of several impressive properties inherited by the fourth Marquess of Hertford (1800-1870; he is also called Lord Hertford). In 1900, having been bought by the government, it became the Wallace Collection, a national museum. With its many treasures and its domestic setting, it has been a haven for connoisseurs and dreamers ever since.

Los Angeles is the city of dreams, Hollywood, and the paparazzi. It also has some really terrible rooms for rent.