CultureGrrl

Judith Dolkart

I told you last month that the Barnes Foundation had chosen a chief curator. Now the name has been announced. Nothing is up on the Barnes' website at this writing, but Stephan Salisbury of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the designee is Judith Dolkart, associate curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum. You can read more about her here, while her bio is still up on Brooklyn's website.

You can also watch a video of  Dolkart having a Caillebotte chat with the ever-effusive Tom Hoving, here.

Will Judith be at the Barnes' groundbreaking next Friday?

Jim Bondelid, a CultureGrrl reader from Oreland, PA (a Philadelphia suburb), who volunteers at the Curtis Institute of Music, responds to my Cultural Conversation with Rocco Landesman that appeared in the Wall Street Journal:

As a fanatical lover of classical music, a sometime lover of modern dance, and a middle-brow theater consumer, I doubt that I would prefer Rocco Landesman's Jujamcyn to the Roundabout. Thanks for the warning. But having him in charge of spending my tax dollars is more worrisome.

I have an idea: let's institute a voucher system for the arts. Distribute vouchers to taxpayers in proportion to their taxes which they can spend at approved art institutions. The idea is to stimulate demand rather than support supply. The vouchers could be donated to middle schools and high schools for a tax deduction, too.

This would also help stimulate demand in the long run, as kids would receive an arts education. People would choose the winners instead of an advisory body. The NEA could decide which broad categories of art are eligible. But the NEA does not need to give money to commercially successful artists like rappers and country singers (whom I also love).

I'm still traveling and time-pressed, but I had to share with you this press release (not online at this writing) about the Dia Art Foundation's plans to build a new facility in New York City, where it surely belongs:

DIA ART FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES PLAN TO OPEN A NEW SPACE IN CHELSEA

New building will house artists' commissions and installations and serve as site for innovative scholarship and public programs

For Immediate Release, November 6, 2009, New York

Philippe Vergne, director, Dia Art Foundation, today announced that Dia will construct a new building in West Chelsea for a reinvigorated New York City program. It will be located at 545 West 22nd Street, on the footprint of a building that Dia currently owns. In keeping with the organization's historical commitment to in-depth support of ambitious projects, the space will provide a New York City location for commissioned artworks. It will also house exhibitions; long-term installations; public programs including readings, lectures, and symposia; and performances.

The decision to open a new site in West Chelsea follows Dia's 2004 closing of its former New York City space, which was in need of substantial renovation and was found to be inadequate for Dia's programming needs. Dia subsequently explored other locations throughout Manhattan and, given the shift in the cultural landscape that has taken place since 2004, it determined that it would reestablish a presence in Chelsea. With the new site, Dia will again serve as an institutional anchor for the contemporary-art neighborhood that it pioneered in the late 1980s and that is now home to a rich mix of art galleries, theaters, public spaces, and diverse nonprofit organizations.

In addition, West 22nd Street is identified with three major Dia installations: Joseph Beuys' 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), along West 22nd Street between and including 10th and 11th Avenues (1988); Dan Graham's Rooftop Urban Park Project (1991), originally located on the roof of 548 West 22nd Street and to be reinstalled on the roof of Dia's new building; and Dan Flavin's untitled (1996), sited in the stairwells of 548 West 22nd Street.

Early planning for the building has begun, and the architecture and scale of the edifice--which will provide a utilitarian space designed for the experience of art--are being determined. The project represents the first time in its 35-year history that Dia has elected to construct a new building, rather than to re-use an existing one.

 Mr. Vergne, working in collaboration with Dia's staff and in dialogue with its board, is conceptualizing the artistic and architectural program for the new space, which will provide flexible conditions in which artists across generations, disciplines, and cultures can experiment and produce new works.

And the money will come from...?

Where am I going? Where have I been? (This is a clue.)

I'm taking my own advice, for the time being, shifting my attention towards remunerated mainstream media work. Having rocked with Rocco, I'm headed out tomorrow on a week-long trip, the first part of which involves another paid assignment. And I've got another one lined up after that.

Therefore, I won't be covering for you this month's round of Impressionist, modern and contemporary auctions in New York, which, judging from the lack of excitement they seem to be generating, may be just as well.

By tomorrow afternoon, I'll be approximately 1,200 miles from Sotheby's and Christie's. (No, I am NOT going to Peoria, where Landesman will do penance on Friday!)

That's not to say, art-lings, that I'll be away from the computer. I may (or may not) blog and/or tweet sporadically. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, if you want to encourage me to resume posting when I return, you know what to do. After the brief spurt (scroll down) of support elicited by yet another of my tin-cup rattlings, there's been but one new click on my "Donate" button. My warm thanks do go out to CultureGrrl Donor 84 from the borough that I just reported from, Brooklyn.

I'm also thankful for that ad in my righthand column. There's room for more. (They rotate vertically, so that each one gets a chance to be on top.)

A viable business model still eludes me, but that doesn't stop me from trying!

Portrait of Rocco Landesman from my Wall Street Journal article, by Ken Fallin

My Cultural Conversation with the National Endowment for the Arts' new chairman, Rocco Landesman, ran long today (the whole above-the-fold space on P. D7 of the Personal Journal section), but still not long enough to encompass our entire conversation, which lasted only about 25 minutes but was rapid-fire and illuminating.

In the course of our discussion, I didn't just ask what programs Landesman might want to initiate; I also asked what he might want to do away with. In particular, I raised questions about two programs that I had targeted in a previous post: The Big Read and Shakespeare in American Communities.

"We're working on all that," he told me. "Some of these programs consumed massive resources and I think we have to take a hard look and see what's the best use of our limited funds."

"What specific programs do you have in mind?" I inquired.

"You mentioned some," he said, referring to the aforementioned two, in which the NEA prescribed programs from above, rather than being responsive to requests from its constituents. "We're right at the beginning of this process of looking at what we have where, so I don't want to get too definitive. But, as with any new chair, you've got to make some changes. I think you will be pleased with them."

Landesman is getting a reputation for foot-in-mouth disease (with his latest toe-gnawing in this backpedaling post, from NEA's "Art Works" blog). But even veteran journalists are not immune from getting off on the wrong foot: I began my questions about what kinds of people he might appoint to the National Council on the Arts by questioning one of President Bush's last two appointments---country music singer Lee Greenwood, best know for his crossover hit, "God Bless the USA." I already knew that Landesman was a country music fan, so I should have realized what I was getting myself into:

"Lee Greenwood!" he exclaimed. "I love country music! Anybody who writes a song that has a title, "Ring on Her Finger and Time on Her Hands," can't be all bad!

It was clear, from Landesman's online account (in the above-linked "backpedaling post") of his first National Council on the Arts meeting last week, that the chairman who, as I reported, wants to appoint celebrities to the NEA is himself a little starstruck. He singled out Greenwood as the member "with whom I spent a nice amount of time":

Lee told me about some great artists who come out of Paducah [KY]---Jerry Crutchfield, Lee's longtime producer; Jerry's brother Jan, who is the songwriter responsible for three of Lee's early hits; Eric Horner, who used to be Lee's guitarist, but who is now a touring gospel performer; and Doug Carter, Lee's current keyboardist, bandleader, arranger, and all around good guy. Impressive [at least to Greenwood's publicist].

Rocco Landesman with country singer Lee Greenwood
Photo by Kathy Plowitz-Worden

Speaking of celebrities, most of the journalists reporting on President Obama's 25 appointees to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities focused exclusively on the boldface names. Thanks to Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune for giving us the entire list.

Rocco Landesman, speaking last month in Brooklyn, NY

When Rocco Landesman, the new chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, was in New York on Oct. 21, I didn't merely attend his speech. I also interviewed him.

On the "Leisure & Arts" page of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal, you'll see that Landesman has in no way curbed his tongue since the infamous Peoria incident. I like him. I enjoy his candor. I agree with at least some of his objectives. But I do worry that he's going to get himself (and his agency) in trouble if he doesn't start watching his words and considering how they'll play in Peoria.

When my piece is online, I'll be updating this post with the link. You can judge for yourself.

UPDATE: Here's the piece---Landesman Produces Controversy.

The putative Michelangelo of Fifth Avenue, as it appeared in June in the entrance rotunda of the French Cultural Services headquarters, New York

If all goes according to plan, I'll be going later today to the Metropolitan Museum's press preview for the putative "Michelangelo of Fifth Avenue," as it became known from a 1996 NY Times article by the late John Russell. It will be on public view for 10 years at the Met, beginning tomorrow, on loan from the French State. For many years before it made the front page of the Times, it had quietly adorned the French Embassy's Cultural Services building, diagonally across the street from the Met.

Its museum display will surely reignite the debate over the ambitious attribution of an unremarkable work. Now dubbed "The Young Archer," it is labeled by the Met as "attributed to Michelangelo," acknowledging the scholarly controversy over its authorship. The museum's curator, James Draper, believes that it evinces Michelangelo's "daring promise as a 15- or 16-year old."

I've written extensively for several publications about the debate over this statue, but never reported one telling comment made to me back in 1996 by a highly distinguished art historian (whom I had contacted to draw upon his Michelangelo expertise). He had asked me not to connect him with this insight and I never published it. He discussed, among other things, a part of the subject's anatomy that never made it onto the front page of the Times. (The family newspaper had cropped the photo, so that only the top half of the boy was pictured.)

CultureGrrl is not so squeamish. Let's move in for a closer look at a detail from the photo at the top of this post:


The lad's gonads

My anonymous scholar noted a mistake in the representation of this (somewhat damaged) body part, which he opined would not have been committed by the anatomically attuned master, even in his youth: The testicles hang at the same level, instead of one below the other. This fine point of connoisseurship had certainly eluded me when I viewed the sculpture and may be too indelicate for the mainstream media.

New York magazine, however, did last week point out several problematic areas of the sculpture, above the waist.

In an interview for my 1996 article in the Wall Street Journal about the Michelangelo "discovery" (initially made by New York University's Professor Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt), James Beck, the late Columbia University professor, dryly observed that the absence of bravura modeling in this sculpture "is an aspect of Michelangelo that I'm unfamiliar with. She [Brandt] may have discovered a new period." (It should be noted that Beck was not my anonymous source.)

I suppose I should suspend disbelief until I see the case Draper makes in the wall text for Michelangelo as creator of "The Young Archer."

It's too bad that the Met couldn't manage to show this sculpture concurrently with a more compelling work that Michelangelo is thought to have created when he was even younger---only 12 or 13. The earliest known of the artist's paintings, "The Torment of Saint Anthony," was recently acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum. But it was first shown last summer at the Met, which had authenticated it. (You can see a much larger and better image of it here.)

Chief curator Ann Temkin, flanked by Peter Reed, MoMA's senior deputy director for curatorial affairs, left, and director Glenn Lowry, at the museum's recent press breakfast

The expected has now happened: The NY City Council yesterday afternoon voted overwhelmingly (only three dissenters) to approve the Jean Nouvel-designed MoMA Monster, now reduced in height to a "mere" 1,050 feet. If and when this tower actually gets built (after economic conditions improve, according to Hines, the developer), the new space will expand the displays of MoMA's permanent collection.

We can only hope that somewhere within the 40,000 square feet of additional gallery space they will find a permanent home for important, rarely seen monumental works in the collection, including those by Richard Serra and Martin Puryear, which were specifically mentioned by director Glenn Lowry in his testimony to a City Council subcommittee. We also need to see more of James Rosenquist's "F-111," Ellsworth Kelly's "Colors for a Large Wall" and Claude Monet's "Water Lilies" triptych.

The Monet mural, now temporarily back on display, had been accorded its own permanent space for peaceful contemplation in the more homey MoMA of fond memory. Finding a place to show off its megaworks-in-storage had been one of the selling points for the recent Taniguchi-designed addition. Having failed to realize that supposed goal, MoMA's expansionists have trotted it out yet again. Maybe this time they really mean it.

Speaking of installation ideas for the permanent collection, Ted Loos wrote an excellent piece for last Sunday's NY Times about Ann Temkin's provocative plan for continually rehanging MoMA's trove of modern and contemporary masterpieces.

But wait! There's more to the story: Late last month, when MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture took a group of us on a tour of her work-in-constant-progress (after a recent press breakfast, where Lowry's discussion of the new permanent-collection philosophy was captured in this CultureGrrl Video), Ann informed us that about a quarter of the painting-and-sculpture galleries (which have now become more hospitable to related works in other media) will be rehung every 18 months or so. A full rotation of the galleries, she said, would take about five years. (Actually, an 18-month schedule would take six years to cycle through the entire space, but these are all approximations.)

Here's the shocker: She said that only about 10 works---TEN WORKS!---would be considered inviolable: so important and iconic that they would always remain on view.

Okay, I'll bite: I asked Ann to intone the names of the Sacred 10. Prudently declining to divulge the entire list, she did offer a few obvious examples---van Gogh's "Starry Night," Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror," Dalí's "Persistence of Memory." Those of us who know and love the collection could probably come up with a lot more than seven additional works that we need to see, whenever we want.

For that reason, I'm ambivalent about Ann's plan. On the one hand, if any museum's collection is rich enough to support a constant reshuffling of the deck, it's MoMA's. It will be exciting to be constantly challenged---exposed to different works in creatively rethought relationships. Ann was justifiably proud of her "little experiment," juxtaposing German Expressionist portraits with related photographs.

But when I was a young D train-riding museum brat from da Bronx, I was comforted and edified by my repeated contact, over many years, with paintings that I loved and knew would always be there for me (the Monet triptych, among them). Art-savvy tourists are also likely be distraught if works they expect to see on their rare visits to New York are nowhere to be found.

I was therefore pleased to learn from Loos (notwithstanding Temkin's Rule of Ten) that "Room 2 on Floor 5, with Cubist works by Picasso and Braque, won't be morphing radically." I'm not sure why they ditched the original plan for the Taniguchi expansion, which had called for suites of fixed galleries, surrounded by related changing galleries. That had sounded like a good idea to me.

Why not the best of both worlds?

Timothy Rub, speaking to the press outside the entrance of the Philadelphia Museum's Gorky retrospective

I was grateful that Timothy Rub, director of the Philadelphia Museum, was willing to talk to me at all, given my harsh criticism of the Cleveland Museum's decision (made during his directorship there) to funnel to its expansion project up to $75 million in income from funds that donors had designated for acquisitions, not for bricks and mortar.

I began safely, by chatting about his plans for Philadelphia---increasing its operating budget to be on a par with outlays at comparable institutions, such as the major institutions in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles; and getting his museum ready, in terms of both architectural plans and financial resources, for its own coming expansion, designed by Frank Gehry.

Through his own comments, Rub managed to give me the perfect opening for the question that I'd been afraid to ask and that I suspected he wouldn't answer. As you will see, he pleasantly surprised me, responding cautiously but substantively.

In discussing Philadelphia's expansion plans, Rub rhetorically asked:

How do you get an institution ready for that [a major building project], at a time when the future of the American economy is still uncertain and the capacity of any community to make capital gifts that in aggregate will support a project of this size is something that you have to look at very carefully?

With that, the following Q&A about Cleveland's complicated financial situation was off and running. (I'm the "Q"; Rub is the "A"):

Q: Philadelphia is in a fortunate position, compared to the institution that you just left, which was in the middle of the project when the economic crisis hit. Here, at least, you have the luxury of waiting for the right moment.

A: Yes, but these are long-term projects, and no matter how carefully you plot the course, it's going to cross times when the economy is good and when the economy is bad, and you have to figure out ways of sustaining it across time. There's no doubt about that.

Q: I understand that what happened to the economy was almost unprecedented and no one could have foreseen it. But to get that far along [in Cleveland's capital project] and to have that much of a shortfall---is that something that should have been guarded against, in some way?

A: I think if you look at the way Cleveland has dealt with its campaign and the capital budget, it proceeded in a very prudent way. I talked with our president and board chair before I left [and said]: "I'm going to another institution, and I'm reluctant to really speak about Cleveland unless you would want me to do so." These are questions that I think you need to address to Cleveland at this point....

I'm in an odd position. I could map out the whole scenario for you, but I'm not sure that I should speak for Cleveland at this point. But it's a much bigger and more interesting and complex picture than I think has been described thus far.

Q: Did you approve the decision to use the income from acquisition funds for the building project?

A: I concurred with that. This was a decision that we made together. We looked at the options for being able to continue to move the project forward at a very difficult time economically and came to the conclusion together that this needed to be done as a short-term measure....

My point to you is it's a really interesting and very complex calculation that has to do with things as varied as bond ratings and cash flow from pledges that we currently have or that we might anticipate in the future. It has to do with bonding capacity and with calculating the cost of capital. It has to do with the institution's willingness to take on risk in terms of future obligations. It has to do with whether you resolve to pay for something now as opposed to having the institution pay for it much later.

Q: Was slowing the project down an option, and why was that not done?

A: The museum is basically half complete. If you slow a project like that down, several things happen: You push the completion date out far in the future and until you complete the project, you will not have sufficient room to show your collection or do your work....

Cleveland took on a grand and comprehensive project and the trustees felt, when that decision was made in the earlier part of this decade [before Rub arrived] that it was important to renovate and expand the museum comprehensively. I think when it is done, it will have been worth the wait, because it will allow for Cleveland to completely rethink and re-present its collection, which before was not a possibility. How many big art museums can actually do that?

Q: What about the museum ethics question: Do you feel comfortable with taking money that was designated by donors for acquisitions?

A: There are legal means that have been in place for a long time to ask courts to determine whether or not funds that have been contributed for one purpose can be utilized on a permanent or temporary basis for another purpose. There are legal mechanisms and a significant body of law that leads to this.

Secondly, I should say that the board of the Cleveland Museum of Art is a tremendously responsible and resourceful group of people who are fiduciaries for the institution. And it's their responsibility to make thoughtful and prudent fiscal decisions on behalf of the institution. I think the trustees discharged their responsibilities extremely well. I really do.

Q: But what about the ethics question? Is it proper to take funds that were designated for a specific purpose and apply them to a different purpose?

A: I don't think that in normal circumstances you would want to do that, to be sure. But these are exceptional circumstances.

You already know how I feel about Cleveland's actions. I don't need to belabor it. Acknowledging Timothy's forthcomingness and candor, let's move on: In case you haven't had enough of him yet, below is a CultureGrrl Video of Rub addressing the assembled journalists at the luncheon celebrating the opening of the current Gorky show.

It's standard museum-director boilerplate---high praise for the exhibition and for those who organized it. But I do make it interesting near the end, by turning the camera on my tablemates---Maro Gorky, the artist's daughter, and her pal, Lisa de Kooning, the daughter of you-know-who.

Rub begins here by talking about the show's companion exhibition, which puts Gorky's work in the context of European, Russian and American modernism, by drawing on works from Philadelphia's own rich collection:

Timothy Rub, left, former director of the Cleveland Museum, and Terence Riley, right, former director of the Miami Art Museum

Museum directors know that an important part of their job description is raising big bucks from culturally-minded and civic-minded donors. But few (none that I know of) become directors because soliciting money is their passion. It's a means to an end, but it often ends up taking much (if not most) of their time and energy.

When major capital campaigns are in progress, fundraising exigencies sharply escalate. And when those demands coincide with a major economic recession, this difficult assignment gets much harder.

Such was the case at both the Cleveland Museum and the Miami Art Museum, where the directors, Timothy Rub and Terence Riley, precipitously and surprisingly announced plans to jump ship immediately on the heels of celebrating milestones in their institutions' development---the completion of the first phase of Cleveland's expansion and the unveiling of the design for Miami's new building.

Neither of the congruently initialed TRs said anything about wanting to flee their institutions' financial situations. Rub professed his lifelong, undying love for the Philadelphia Museum, which he now directs; Riley averred that his first love is architecture, to which he will now return.

But the subtext to the departures of the two directors is hard to miss: Riley appears to have been experiencing increased frustration in coping with cuts in government funding and in securing the financial support of Miami's collecting community: In his follow-up article today in the Miami Herald (linked directly above), David Chang quotes major Miami collector Martin Margulies on the subject of Riley's quandaries:

He comes from a New York institution [the Museum of Modern Art, where he was architecture curator], and he's used to seeing big money. And there's no such thing in this community. [No rich Miamians?] And that's why the big collectors are not involved with that institution.

As for Rub, there was the much publicized shortfall of funds (potentially $75 million) for the second phase of Cleveland's expansion, which prompted a decision by the trustees to seek court permission (now granted) to raid the income of four funds that the donors had designated for acquisitions, not bricks and mortar. Rub had participated in and concurred with that decision.

But wait, there's more! I was in Philadelphia just a short time ago, as you may remember. Do you think I set foot in the Philadelphia Museum without requesting some one-on-one time with its director? My art-lings know me better than that!

COMING SOON: Philly's TR speaks softly...and very carefully,