In the news this weekend: Read more about G. Wayne Clough's appointment as new Smithsonian head in the NYT--he won the job over Cristián Samper, who was a favorite within the organization. Samper will now return to his previous post as Director of the Museum of Natural History.

The former president of Georgia Tech is apparently taking a pay cut--from both his previous post and from what his scandalized predecessor, Lawrence Small, was pulling in: Small had a $900,000 salary by the time he stepped down; Clough will be making about half of that. (Clough presumably won't be taking as many vacation days, either.)

Meanwhile, in Sunday's WaPo, Blake Gopnik had a nice profile of Shinique Smith, the Baltimore-born artist who currently has an installation in the National Portrait Gallery's hip-hop-inflected art show, Recognize! If you haven't seen her piece yet, you're missing out--and, unfortunately, if you're going now, this means you've missed your chance to ponder John Alexander's hilariously unnecessary retrospective there (it closed this weekend). It's not often that I find myself nodding in agreement with something Gopnik has written, but his faint praise for Alexander--placing him in the top 5,000 artists--was spot-on.