Flavin
Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art has a spectacular retrospective on Dan Flavin, an artist who worked almost exclusively with off-the-shelf fluorescent lighting fixtures.
This is not generally my cup of tea, but the impact of this large show (presented in a wonderfully large spaced) is terrific. These are sculptures about light, and the light suffuses the atmosphere wonderfully. Well worth the time.
A rite of passage at the Art Institute: the unexpected discovery that the family Lifetime Membership we've had for longer than I can remember expired when my dad died. It's a strange feeling: we've just always been members, and yesterday we weren't. (Linda and I are, again, at least for now.)
The whole question of reciprocal membership needs to be woked out more thoroughly by the big art museums. Back in the day, even if you were a frequent museum-goer, a membership in your local museum was probably the only one you'd need; you can put up with the line at the Louvre if it's a once-a-decade thing. The world's gotten smaller, and we're not less busy, and the lines at museums only get longer. It seems to me that one of the things that Boston or Chicago could offer its members might be a convenient way to get a temporary membership at the Met or the Musee d'Orsay.