THE ARTS

Meet the Candidate: Michael Shapiro, chief curator of the St. Louis Art Museum and apparently the leading candidate for the directorship of the County Museum of Art, arrived in Los Angeles Monday afternoon for two days of interviews and dinners with museum staff and trustees. An announcement of Shapiro’s appointment is said to be imminent by sources close to the search, but LACMA President Robert F. Maguire dismissed that notion as “pure nonsense.” Hiring a successor to former director Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III is a lengthy process requiring approval of the museum’s full board of trustees and the County Board of Supervisors, and that won’t happen in the next few days, he said.