This is a pie chart (NBC)

1. The Office will be getting yet another season.

2. The network has ordered a Dane Cook comedy, Man Time.

3. Whitney is getting a second season.

4. Renewed: Parks & Recreation, Up All Night, and Community.

5. Canceled: BFF, Bent, and Are You There, Chelsea.

Answer: #2. Dane Cook IS getting a show, but it's name is The Caller, not Man Time. Sorry to bum everyone out with this horrible news; we were all rooting for #3 to be false, too.

Whitney Cummings (Getty Images)

The Lana Del Rey/SNL imbroglio, ensuing after the neophyte singer bombed live has some pretty muddled gender dynamics--the spectacle of Brian Williams, face of the establishment, berating Nick Denton for not taking out the long knives on a 25-year-old rising artist was rather unseemly.

Now Whitney Cummings, a comedian who herself has been at the center of some gender-centered arguments--is she not perceived as funny because she's an attractive young woman (sigh), or because she is not, empirically speaking, funny?--has chosen to muddy those waters further, writing a blog-post defense of Ms. Del Rey.

Therein, she writes: "It’s a little troubling that when a young girl fails at something that we keep kicking her why she is down. I get very protective of girls, especially young performers, because they live a hard, emotionally challenging, often physically challenge life where you are constantly given reasons to be insecure and have panic attacks."

While, as stated, Ms. Del Rey is younger and less established than some of her vocal critics, is Lana Del Rey a "young girl"? Must she be spared criticism of a bad performance that some might say was at least partly intentionally trolling the audience with purposeful awfulness? (Ms. Cummings admitted Ms. Del Rey thoroughly entertained her with her "very drunk-at-a-wedding-and-gonna-regret-it-in-the-morning-type way"--and the pilot of her sitcom began with drinking at a wedding. Others' mileage may vary!)

"I think we should be encouraging and patient," wrote Ms. Cummings. "Other peoples success doesn’t fuck up our lives and other people failures should not brighten them." When Ms. Cummings's show was moved off of Thursday night's vaunted NBC comedy block, an indicative blog post at WNYC said that Ms. Cummings had been dropped "like a bad date."

The Ladies of 'Broad City'

Congrats to Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, the Upright Citizen Brigade alums whose web show Broad City is now in development talks for an FX pilot. This is no small part due to both the girl's hilarity and its major endorsement by UCB founder Amy Poehler.

Now, if only there was a way to talk about this show without immediately pigeonholing it as part of the new "Women are funny too!" push on the part of cable programers--The New Girl, Whitney, and 2 Broke Girls all come to mind-- while still recognizing these comedians as the growing contingent of recognizable, hilarious female comedians.

...Nope. Too difficult. How about we just watch the trailer instead, which features Ms. Poehler along with NYC comediennes like Andrea Rosen, Adira Amram, and Kristen Schaal?

From The Huffington Post:

The series, which chronicles the lives of two 20-somethings living in New York, has managed to fly slightly under the radar despite pulling big guest stars like Kristen Schaal because Glazer and Jacobson have gained their following largely via sites like YouTube and Tumblr. But the announcement may not come as a surprise to fans who remember Poehler's cameo in the series' season finale back in May, and the move to TV will certainly introduce their absurd vidchats and frank point of view to a much broader audience.

Yikes. 20-somethings in New York? Vidchats? Tumblr? It's a fine line between hip humor and another twee Zooey Deschanel project.We are glad FX is finally jumping on the "edgy" train of lady-humor, now that it has moved off the web and has been tested on such other risque networks as NBC, ABC, CBS, E!, and Comedy Central. Good luck, ladies! Don't let FX Whitney this up!

Whitney Cummings in her new show about lady stuff.

Ouch. Here we thought were in the post-Bridesmaid era of empowering female comedy, what with TV's new fall lineup revolving around such quirky leading ladies as Zooey Deschanel (Fox's New Girl), Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs (CBS' 2 Broke Girls) and Whitney Cummings (NBC's Whitney). But maybe America just isn't ready to have a sitcom where boys aren't the main focus, since despite not airing until September there is already an online petition to get Whitney canceled.

In an open letter to NBC titled "Cancel NBC's "Whitney" Before It Cancels Us," (which...what?), the argument reads:

This is a petition asking NBC to cancel "Whitney" before it airs, and to make a big spectacle about how they were only just kidding and that they'll keep looking for good programs to put in that time-slot.

Reasons "Whitney" Already Sucks:

1. It's multi-cam and filmed in front of an audience encouraged to laugh.
2. She considers herself one of those "edgy" comics.
3. It might as well have Paul Reiser in it.

Please, let's get rid of this show before we have to live knowing that something like this happened on television, forcing us to give up on having and raising our children because it's all gone to shit, it's all shit anyway man... I can't even do this anymore... Somebody put money behind this shit.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

So far there are only nine signatures to cancel Ms. Cummings debut program, which deals with a character named Whitney (d'uh) and her boyfriend who aren't married but live together. Okay, so that concept seems pretty thin, but so is the argument that a multi-cam sitcom with canned laughter is by itself a reason to nix a program. (How I Met Your Mother and Two and a Half Men are still doing pretty well, right?) And yikes...using the word edgy as an insult for a female comedian is the equivalent of saying Barack Obama is articulate.

And yes, the previews for Whitney are pretty cringe-worthy, mostly because Ms. Cummings is an observational stand-up comedian, not a comedy actress. Though the show's scenarios are based on bits from her act, watching the premiere one gets the sense that at any point Whitney may just turn to the camera and mug, "Am I right, ladies?"

We're willing to give Whitney the benefit of the doubt...it's certainly doesn't look worse than the twee-tastic New Girl, in which we're supposed to believe that Zooey Deschanel is too awkward to land herself a boyfriend. Because hey, when we're not crying about periods or boys, there is nothing us ladies like to do more than make jokes about them. Alex Borstein know what I'm talking about!

As elegant and succinct as a Robert Ryman painting: the affogato at Mr. Meyer's Cafe 2, in the Museum of Modern Art. (Photo: Hinako S. / Yelp)

Danny Meyer, the enterprising restauranteur who operates establishments at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, as well as New York mainstays like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, will be in charge of two restaurants at the Whitney's new downtown location, next to the High Line, when it opens in 2015.

According to Eater New York, Mr. Meyer, who was recently the subject of a superb, glowing profile in The New York Times, will have a ground-foor restaurant and a top-floor cafe in the new museum, which has been designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano.

It's far too early for a menu to surface, of course, but Eater NY reports that the main restaurant will be similar in style to Untitled, which Mr. Meyer opened at the Whitney's current home earlier this year, which features a three-course prix fixe dinner each weekend, a bounty of comfort food during the day, and swoon-inducing desserts from Brooklyn outfits like Blue Marble Ice Cream and pie makers Four & Twenty Blackbirds.

There is no word on whether Untitled's "hand-crafted chocolate egg cream," which earned its own New Yorker Talk of the Town article--featuring art collector and Whitney patron Leonard Lauder, no less--will be available downtown. Here's hoping.

Holland Cotter tells the Met to keep the "management types, bookkeepers, strategic planners, etc." out of the Breuer building.

With most New York commercial galleries getting ready to close for August, New York art critics published some of their last reviews of summer shows this week and began opining on broader, more controversial topics. Below, five highlights from the week in criticism:

5. Cotter Questions the Met's Plans for the Whitney's Breuer Building
In today's New York Times, critic Holland Cotter comes out against the Met's plan to use the Whitney's Breuer building for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, once the Whitney moves downtown. Mr. Cotter notes that contemporary art is everywhere in New York these days. "Now the new doesn’t need a champion; the old does," he writes. His proposal? Let the Met curators each organize one of their dream shows. And he has some fighting words: "The Breuer building ... should be a strictly curator-run space, with management types, bookkeepers, strategic planners, etc. staying up at 82nd and Fifth, or wherever they keep themselves."

4. Maccarone's "Medicine Bag"
Mr. Cotter also files a short review of Maccarone's wonderful summer show, "The Medicine Bag," writing, "In this group show of tough little delicacies, differences among self-taught art, outsider art and well-schooled-insider art are pretty much indistinguishable, and artists of different generations look like contemporaries." The show runs through Aug. 12.

3. Double Polke
Leo Koenig, Inc.'s current show of Sigmar Polke photography--the first-ever New York survey of that work--earns largely favorable reviews from both Roberta Smith in The New York Times and Megan Heuer on Artforum.com. "Rather than constructing an image, Polke destroys it, undermines its credibility," Ms. Heuer writes, flashing The Observer back to our Rosalind Krauss days. "The photograph becomes a palimpsest rather than an index." Says Ms. Smith, "There is much ... evidence here of the peculiar magic, made from almost nothing, that was Polke’s signal specialty." The show runs through Sept. 3.

2. "For the Kids"
In Time Out New York, Anne Doran lauds Salon 94's unusual, under-discussed show of sports posters by the Costacos brothers (and three works by Jeff Koons) as "smart and fascinating," and points out that the "Reagan-era aesthetics" foreshadow the work of artists like "Richard Prince, Seth Price and Josephine Meckseper." The show, titled "For the Kids," closes Aug. 5.

1. A Fight for Freud?
This is not so much art criticism as it is speculation and name-calling, but Charlie Finch's latest column on Artnet feels worth mentioning, if only for its sheer ridiculousness. Noting that Acquavella has purchased five days of paid obituaries for Lucian Freud in the The New York Times, Mr. Finch surmises that a battle is underway to represent the late artist's estate: also in the hunt, he imagines, are Jay Jopling of White Cube, the Glimchers of the Pace Gallery, and Larry Gagosian.

Mr. Finch also offers that Marc Glimcher, with his "grizzled beard and graying hair [is] suddenly the spitting image of his dad in gravitas." Gagosian, he says, is "childless and heirless," and is "in danger of becoming the art world's Hugh Hefner." Classy. And Ai Weiwei? (A favorite cause for Mr. Finch.) He is "a tiny, if irritating, pebble in [the] diamond encrusted shoe" that is the art world. Which actually sounds about right.

When Blondie's right, she's right--many of the museum's supporters, arrayed in front of her at tables that cost some $25,000 apiece, were indeed uptown people, Upper East Side people, neighbors of the museum's current location at 75th and Madison. But they were gathered downtown, in a tent surrounded by chain-link fencing and construction paraphernalia on the corner of Washington and Gansevoort--future site of the museum's Renzo Piano building, planned to open in 2015. It was different!

"It might be the most groundbreaking groundbreaking you've ever seen," said Mayor Bloomberg at the dirt ceremony Tuesday. Dancers from the Elizabeth Streb company threw themselves through plate-glass windows as Ms. Streb stood under a cylinder that sprayed sand at her head. In the audience, Renzo Piano wore safety goggles.

The mayor and various trustees then crowded around Ms. Streb to dig at her feet, for photos.

Downtown wasn't the Whitney's first choice. A previous expansion plan had the museum building off its current building at 75th, but it fell through after the Landmarks Commission wanted a change that Mr. Piano said he'd jump in a lake before making.

"I prefer here," Mr. Piano told The Observer after the ceremony Tuesday. "It's more vibrant."

The space at the base of the High Line had been considered by at least one other art institution--the Dia Foundation. For a while, the Whitney's plan was unclear--would it build a downtown annex, or make a wholesale move? After some trustee disagreement, it became clear it would be the latter--it would bet the house on downtown--and now the writing is on the wall in the meatpacking district. Or on the streetlights, anyhow, which have been embellished with fluttering banners announcing, with the mute drama of haiku, the museum's imminent arrival: "The Whitney/Ground Breaking/ The Future." 

If ground breaking is in the streets, at the gala it was also in the air--and on the table. Above the diners, and the stage where Blondie performed, hung lines of teal-color shovels. Centerpieces were composed of orange construction tape.

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" Whitney director Adam Weinberg said at the gala. "I still think we'll bring in a lot of people from our East Side base. We're not even way downtown, at the bottom, we're not at the tip of Manhattan. Fourteenth Street is semi-midtown, even."

Translation: downtown, but not too downtown. Close enough that, if you build it, they'll come, even if that means--egads!--public transportation. "Sure I take the subway!" enthused Amy Phelan, Dallas Cowboys cheerleader-turned-contemporary art collector and Whitney donor, at the gala. When in New York, she lives on the U.E.S.  

The Whitney has some $212 million to raise on its $720 million building project--the gala made a $2 million dent, and they nabbed $100 million by selling the uptown townhouses bought for the aborted expansion--but this is not bad news. "They've got four years to show potential donors the building site and, as the building goes up, to show them the cavernous hall that could be named after them," said David Gordon, a former museum director and now consultant to cultural institutions. "There's something to be said for starting construction. The most important thing is to convince the doubters who said, 'It's never going to happen.'"

The cash will come from wealthy benefactors--"I hope they have a Russian oligarch hidden in a closet," one art world source joked--but where will visitors come from downtown? Shoppers at the Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney boutiques? Diners from Spice Market and Pastis? Artsy swells lodging at the Gansevoort, Soho House and Andre Balazs's Standard Hotel, which has launched its own culture program?

The High Line Park would seem to be one major attraction--it had three million visitors in its first year, and its second section opens in June. The other source is the 300-plus art galleries lining the blocks of far west Chelsea.

Downtown is, after all, at least titular home to New York's avant-garde. The Whitney is aligning itself with the edgy, the authentic, with 18,000 square feet of column-free space for contemporary art in the new building, and a free-admission ground floor. "I always joke that Museum Mile is where the temples of art are, and downtown is where art is," said New Museum associate director Massimiliano Gioni at the Whitney gala. (He should know; his museum is also in a downtown gallery district, the considerably edgier Lower East Side.)

But it's hard to keep up with Chelsea's galleries! The Whitney is currently one of the few places uptown where you can see young art, Chelsea gallerist Stefania Bortolami pointed out. But adjacent to Chelsea's rich contemporary offerings, the ground-floor space in the Breuer Building, where the museum tends to show youngsters, "kind of doesn't make sense."

"It would look like just another gallery," she said. "They might change a bit. They might become a bit more Edward Hopper, a bit less Banks Violette."

In fact, the museum says a full half of the new building's 50,000 square feet of exhibition space will be dedicated to displays from its 19,000-piece collection. Curator Scott Rothkopf cited the popularity of Chelsea's more historical offerings, like Gagosian's series of Picasso blockbusters (now up: 90 works from the Marie Therese period) as proof that the downtown audience is hungry for this kind of thing.

But then isn't there still a competition problem? Paula Cooper had a whopping 7,000 visitors shivering for hours in the cold a few months ago to see Christian Marclay's film The Clock. And art galleries are entirely free.

"We will be distinguished from the galleries because the way that we think about and present art in a museum is still quite different," Mr. Rothkopf said. "I don't mean to disparage galleries at all but [our exhibits are] usually the culmination of years of research. We have things framed very clearly from a pedagogical perspective in terms of the way we provide audio guides, texts on walls and the way that we try to construct a narrative out of an artist's work or a thematic topic."

(To be fair, minus the audio guide, all of this holds for Gagosian's Picasso show.)

The track record of uptown institutions opening up downtown isn't stellar. The Guggenheim, gravitating toward what was then Soho's bustling gallery scene, gave it a shot with a branch on Broadway and Prince. But attendance was lackluster, especially for shows of a more historical nature. The Gugg Soho shuttered in 2002 and was replaced by the current tenant, a Prada store. And yet: that was merely a branch, at 27,000 square feet not so much bigger than a sizable art gallery. "I think the Whitney will overcome that by being much larger," says former Gugg deputy director, and now Sotheby's vice president (and Whitney supporter) Lisa Dennison.

Look at the Dia Foundation--the more galleries moved in, the less attendance it got, as Roberta Smith pointed out in the Times last year. Then again, the Dia didn't always show household names. Picture, by contrast, the name "Ed Ruscha" writ large on a giant billboard above the Apple store, as the promotional video shown before the groundbreaking imagined.

The Whitney really can use the extra space; much of today's art comes in size XXL. "It used to be that if you were just going around and picking works to show, you picked ones that fit in your space," said Bruce Altshuler, a museum studies professor at N.Y.U. "The works that museums commission today are from artists who are making bigger things."  

And as a Marina Abramovic show at MoMA recently proved, contemporary art is where it's at. "I think they just needed more space for contemporary," said venerable art historian Linda Nochlin. "Contemporary is blowing the roof off. My students are so hot for this stuff."

John McEnroe is hot for it! Buttonholed outside the gala, the former tennis great admitted, "I like a lot of the old stuff, but I collect more of the contemporary, because I find it more interesting, being amongst the living." 

What of the living artist? Imagine that a successful midcareer artist could have his retrospective at any New York institution. The Met, which, like many encyclopedic institutions worldwide, has ramped up its contemporary offerings (and will take over the Whitney's Marcel Breuer Building) says, I'm up there with the Egyptians. The Guggenheim, with its worldwide network, I'm global. MoMA announces, I'm enthroned alongside Picasso in the Modern pantheon. The NuMu? I may be old, but I hang with the kids. What does the Whitney say? I'm American? Not anymore, or not only. Soon it will whisper two of the art world's favorite words: New building. 

"You can't help but think of the newest possible context," said painter Richard Phillips, hunting for his seat at the gala, of his ideal survey. "And the Whitney's making their claim for it."

dduray@observer.com

Correction 5/25, 4:25 p.m.

An earlier version of this story referred to the video shown at the groundbreaking as having been made by Ogilvy & Mather. There was a video made by that ad agency shown before the groundbreaking, but the one referenced in that sentence was in fact made by the Brooklyn-based firm Labour.