July 2006 Archives
Tonight, viewers of PBS stations can finally get to see the documentary "Cézanne in Provence," inspired by the eponymous exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington. But if the television show whets your appetite to see the museum show, you're probably out of luck: It closed in Washington on May 7. If money's no object, though, you can still catch it at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, where it closes Sept. 17.
Washingtonians did get to see the TV treatment in a more timely fashion, on the PBS station that produced it, WETA. Other PBS stations around the country (including WNET in New York) are just premiering it tonight. (Check local listings.)
Filmed on location in Washington and Provence, this high-definition documentary, exploring "the indelible link between French painter Cézanne and his beloved home," is narrated by French actress Jacqueline Bisset.
Oh yes, the exhibition's co-curator, Philip Conisbee, also gets a chance to speak, although WETA's capsule description fails to mention this. Why give credit to a scholar, when you can play the celebrity card? The PBS description does mention that insights are provided by "the National Gallery's senior curator for European paintings and curator of French paintings," but fails to reveal his name. Maybe they're just taking their cue from the National Gallery's own information sheet, which also fails to credit Conisbee.
This seems a ripe target for CultureGrrl's Curators of the World Unite! campaign, to which the Guggenheim has already responded favorably. More than sponsors, museum directors or celebrity narrators, the people who actually create an exhibition merit some acknowledgment.
ArtsJournal readers who are new to CultureGrrl will have to excuse to my penchant for occasionally dishing in Yiddish. ("Overcome with emotion" is a rough translation of the "V" word, above.)
What I'm "verklempt" about is my worry over whether poor Adele has finally found safe haven. (CultureGrrl has already klopped the Klimt here, here and here.)
Maria Altmann, one of the heirs of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, to whom five Klimts, including the Golden Girl, were restituted by the Austrian government, has said that her family is gratified that the famous painting of her aunt "will remain on permanent view in such a worthy museum."
But how permanent is that museum?
Merely five years old, the Neue Galerie, New York, lacks the wide support-base of visitors, lenders and donors enjoyed by long established public museums. A private operating foundation established for display of early 20th-century German and Austrian art, it owes almost everything---most of the art it displays and the funds that support its existence---to one man, its co-founder and president, cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder. (Its other co-founder, New York dealer Serge Sabarsky, died in 1996.)
On the day when "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" met the press in New York, I was informed that only about 10 percent of the institution's art belongs to the Neue Galerie itself (including the newly acquired Golden Girl); about 10 percent belongs to the Sabarsky Collection; and about 80 percent comes from Lauder's own holdings. He is, of course, free to do whatever he wishes with what he owns.
So I asked Lauder, over a slice of Linzertorte in the Neue Galerie's Café Sabarsky, how sure we could be that his young institution would, in fact, endure and thrive. He informed me that he had no intention of selling the works at the Neue Galerie and that the foundation was backed by "enough money for the next 200 years."
He also vowed that "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" would remain on permanent view in a room that would always be devoted solely to the work of Gustav Klimt. If Lauder is frustrated in his desire to acquire the four other Bloch-Bauer Klimts, Adele will not lack for suitable companionship: The Neue Galerie has on hand eight other works by that artist, he said.
COMING SOON: The Neue Galerie Lags in Posting Its Nazi-Era Research
A big welcome to CultureGrrl's first subscriber, Jim of Chadds Ford (no relation to the Wyeth clan, as far as I can tell).
As promised, Jim gets a free autographed copy of my book, The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf), And Jim, you didn't know this, but as my Number One supporter, you also get a free kiss from Lee of Fort Lee, next time you're in the area. (You KNOW the Boston Globe called me "fast"!)
As for the rest of you CultureGrrl fans, please scroll down my righthand column to see how you too can demonstrate your love. (No more kisses. Maybe a cyber-hug.) Four more of you can still get a free autographed copy of my juvenilia. And the rest of you can have the satisfaction of contributing to the "Buy Lee a Laptop" fund, so that I can never use traveling as an excuse for not blogging!
Many of you have helpfully suggested that I use PayPal to exact this tribute online. But I've been there, done that and immediately started getting phishing e-mails (the first purporting to be from PayPal itself). This could be a complete coincidence, but it spooked me enough to decide to try to do this the old-fashioned way. Somewhere, gathering dust, you techies must still have a checkbook and a pen. Remember how to use those? (Sorry, I should have asked nicely!)
Museums generally decline to be showcases for privately owned artworks that are known to be headed to market. Auction houses, not museums, are the appropriate venue for presale exhibitions.
But one of the works featured in the National Gallery of London's current exhibition, Rebels and Martyrs, is none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber's Picasso, "Angel Fernández de Soto," 1903, the upcoming sale of which, according to the hit-musical composer in an interview with Bloomberg, will be "the biggest news in the art market in 30 years." He said that the sale proceeds would be devoted to the education of young performers.
CultureGrrl readers already know what I think about the hype over this work.
On June 30, two days after the exhibition opened, the National Gallery issued this statement to explain the unseemly commercial nexus:
The National Gallery has a long and happy relationship with Lord Lloyd Webber. He has lent "Angel Fernández de Soto" by Picasso (1903) to the National Gallery for 3 months annually for more than 10 years, where it has been enjoyed by countless visitors.
We are delighted he has allowed the painting to be included in the current Sainsbury Wing exhibition---"Rebels and Martyrs: The Artist in the Nineteenth Century"---where it plays a significant role.
The National Gallery weighs up the advantages of continuing to include "Angel Fernández de Soto" in "Rebels and Martyrs" with the benefit to the public in seeing the work and the benefit to the argument and scholarship of the exhibition as a whole.
The National Gallery currently has no plans to remove the painting from the exhibition.
"Rebels and Martyrs" closes Aug. 28 and painting will be auctioned at Christie's, New York, on Nov. 8. When I asked if the museum had any rules about such things, Tracy Jones, a spokesperson for the National Gallery, told me that future possible displays of art bound for market "would be looked at on a case by case basis." So much for policy guidelines.
Regarding the antiquities agreement between Italy and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the article that the Boston Globe has posted on its website today provides many more details than the Globe article I linked to last night. (ArtsJournal posted the shorter version.)
My contribution to this story will be to translate for you (and raise some questions about) the brief text of the accord, posted on the Italian Cultural Ministry's website:
In a statement dated yesterday, the ministry reported that the two sides had "made significant progress on an agreement for cultural collaboration. The agreement includes: the transfer to Italy of objects in the museum's collection that are of Italian provenance; the loan from Italy to the museum of works significant to the programs of the museum; and the institution of a procedure on the basis of which Italy and the museum will collaborate to assure the correctness of future acquisitions of art objects by the museum."
The accord also envisions "future collaboration in scientific areas, conservation, archeological studies and exhibitions."
No specific objects are listed. What's more, according to the Associated Press, "the Italian Culture Ministry said both sides had agreed not to reveal the objects to be returned to Rome."
We can only hope that the public will soon be appropriately informed of which objects will leave the museum's collection. Inquiring minds also want to know what procedures Italy has in mind to assure "the correctness of future acquisitions."
Check out Geoff Edger's post on the website of the Boston Globe! Do you think I should dye my hair before the modeling agencies call?
But, more seriously, check out his big news on the antiquities front, to be published in tomorrow's paper.
The Tate Modern has announced many uses for its planned new $397-million Herzog & de Meuron expansion, but the chief raison d'être seems to be the overcrowding of the original facility, built for 1.8 million annual visitors but now thronged by 4 million.
Why hasn't the Uffizi thought of this solution? My daughter Joyce, who rarely sets foot in an art museum at home (where did I go wrong?), just came back from the Grand Tour of the major cultural institutions in Europe---part of her celebratory summer after college graduation, which also included (gulp) skydiving. She complained that by the time she stood on the long lines to enter the art venues, especially in Italy, she was hot, tired and not in the best mood to enjoy what she had waited so long to see. Luckily, her traveling companion knew that they could pay a small surcharge to buy advance tickets to the Uffizi, allowing them to stroll right in. Would all those people be languishing on line, if information about this policy were widely disseminated?
Getting back to the Tate Modern (which Joyce enjoyed and did not find too crowded), I had reported on its possible plans for future expansion, back at the time when its original facility was under construction (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 19, 1999) :
The Tate hopes eventually to retool additional portions of the power plant's space, both beneath and adjoining Herzog & de Meuron's makeover. It would also like to install elevators and a viewing platform in the building's 325-foot-tall chimney, creating a sure-fire tourist attraction. The Tate needs maximum audience appeal if it is to reach its ambitious goal of attracting two million visitors a year to its new digs, while maintaining its current two-million level in the original [Tate Britain] building.
So much for CultureGrrl's powers of prognostication. (Well, at least I got the expansion part right!)
An art blogger has questioned my failure to identify Rob Krulak, a CultureGrrl reader who contributed a BlogBack about my Gary Tinterow posts.
Krulak didn't identify himself in his e-mail, but now freely permits me to say that he is, indeed, senior development officer for campaign and institutional gifts at the Brooklyn Museum. Until he got outted in the blogosphere, I myself hadn't know of Krulak's museum creds. I just knew that his views were intelligently expressed and worth sharing. And that was enough.
My general policy has been not to ask for the professional affiliations of my BlogBack readers, unless they choose to identify themselves in their e-mails to me. (Museum luminaries who blogback, such as Max Anderson and Tom Hoving, obviously must be identified.) Perhaps I do need to rethink this. But I don't want to discourage readers from leaping into the fray, by adding new hurdles. I need some more time to ponder this! (Perhaps IDs should be optional, at the contributor's discretion.)
COMING NEXT: A Take on the Tate (and other European hot spots).
Having just criticized the Getty for antiquities secrecy, I should hasten to add that is has now posted on its website a whole section on Governance , including its 199-page tax return, names and biographies of its trustees and top staff, compensation of its highest-paid employees, policies (including conflict of interest), and its annual report.
Other museums, please copy.
Here is one more suggestion for the websites of museums that want to give more than lip-service to the idea of operating with greater transparency. (My other suggestions for museum websites are here and here):
Museums should consider researching the provenance of antiquities in their collections and posting works with dubious histories on their websites. The rationale (as I discussed in a previous post) is the same as that for identifying possible Nazi loot: to facilitate legitimate claims by rightful owners.
The downside to this is that such research is extremely time-consuming and costly. American museums' Nazi-loot research has only in rare instances resulted in restitutions. This imbalance between costs and benefits may help to explain why some museums may have slacked off in their Nazi-loot research, as charged in the recent report of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
If researching possible Nazi loot is onerous, the task of sifting through hundreds, if not thousands, of ambiguous antiquities is close to impossible. As I have previously stated, it might be more feasible to limit such an examination to important objects (which are, of course, precisely the works that museums least want to give away). There should also be a cutoff date: i.e., only works acquired after Apr. 12, 1983, the effective date of the U.S. Cultural Property Implementation Act, would be eligible for inclusion on the list.
One thing is certain: If a museum has already performed antiquities provenance research, the findings should be disclosed. The Getty Museum was reported by the Los Angeles Times to have recently conducted an review of its holdings, which revealed "that 350 Greek, Roman and Etruscan artifacts in its museum's prized antiquities collection were purchased from dealers identified by foreign authorities as being suspected or convicted of dealing in looted artifacts."
But when I asked Ron Hartwig, the Getty's vice president for communications, for a list of those objects, he replied, "We certainly are not going to conduct our negotiations in or through the media." If the Getty is sincere in its stated commitment to operate with more transparency, this is where it should start.
Reader John Heghinian responds to Museums' Tangled Web---Part II:
It's been interesting to read your opinions of deaccessioning, even though I don't quite agree. Would you consider amending your "radically conservative proposal" to have institutions include the amount of money they believe they could gain by a given sale? If you wanted to demand they also describe what they might do with the money, that would be fair too.
I ask because I wonder if visitors to the Metropolitan Museum might sympathize with a deaccession, if a judicious sale or two might help offset the purchase of an iconic but dearly expensive early Renaissance painting, or help reduce the now-famous $20 admission fee.
Frankly I think the lack of deaccessioning is the main reason for skyrocketing art prices and fees. We all know about the laws of supply and demand. If demand for art always increases but supply always decreases, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the cost of buying, maintaining and viewing art should increase geometrically.
If you're an ArtsJournal reader new to CultureGrrl, please start here. Then jump right into my current provocative post:
Every once in a while, CultureGrrl goes out on a limb, expressing views that will get her into trouble. This is one of those times.
Yesterday, in my response to the Terry Teachout Challenge, I posted a list of "best practices" of museum websites. I promised to follow up with "what museums never post, but should." So here goes:
CultureGrrl's faithful fans from her old "blogspot" days (which ended only yesterday) know about my strong belief that museums hold their art collections in trust for the public and should act accordingly. On the subject of deaccessioning, I am what attorney Donn Zaretsky called in his Art Law Blog yesterday an "absolutist."
So my radically conservative proposal is this: Museums should identify on their websites any works that they have targeted for disposal, several months in advance of their sale. This gives notice to the public and to the state attorney general's office that part of the public patrimony may go private. The posting should include a description of the work and the reasons why it is deemed expendable.
This is not to say that museums should never dispose of objects. It's just that the process should be completely transparent. If that makes it harder for museums to deaccession, so be it.
But wait, there's more!
COMING SOON: More on what museums should post but don't.
And I hope the feeling is mutual. I'm pleased to be joining this distinguished forum for cultural journalism and look forward to stirring up more contemplation and controversy. My faithful followers are moving here from my former blogsite, which will remain up, but dormant. It's exactly three months since I began this labor of love. I was born to blog!
For those of you just joining the Cult of CultureGrrl, below are links to some of my juicier posts, to give you a sense of what to expect. For those who already know and love me, please consider the "suggested admission fee" for my new site, as explained in the righthand sidebar. (Scroll down to : HELP LEE BUY A LAPTOP!)
I hope you will agree that writers should be paid to write.
Here are some of CultureGrrl's Greatest Hits, to get you in the mood for what's to come:
Museum Collections: Curatorial Privilege and the Public Interest
Lowry and de Montebello on Admission Fees
Lauder Covets Four Other Klimts
Dubious Duccio?
Private Prehistory
Rooting Out Loot
Where In the World Is the Guggenheim?
Now at the Guggenheim: MoMA's Dumped Pollock
Rethinking Antiquities
Top 10 List: What's Not to Like About Mega-MoMA
Readers should also know that I welcome BlogBacks---comments, appreciations and respectfully submitted diatribes, for publication in CultureGrrl.
Keep those e-mails coming!
Tyler Green adds his own impressions to the Tinterow tintypes. Sometimes reasonable bloggers CAN agree! (Who says we have a feud?)
No, this is not another exposé; it's my commentary on museum websites, inspired by the Terry Teachout Challenge. My fearsomely prolific fellow blogger, who is also the theater critic for the Wall Street Journal (among his many distinctions), recently discussed what he likes and dislikes about the websites of American theater companies. He ended the post with a shoutout to CultureGrrl for her critique of museum websites.
I'm going to turn this around a bit, not bothering with the basics. Most museums do provide the essential information about directions, admission fees (don't get me started), exhibitions, collections, etc.
But most could do more to make navigating their labyrinthine halls less confusing. More importantly, at a time when museums are being asked to display greater transparency in governance and operations, the web represents a missed opportunity for more openness. What follows are things that I'd like to see on more museum websites, with credit to the few who are already doing it:
---Help in navigating galleries: For fans of pre-planning, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, provides clickable gallery maps, like this one of the West Main Floor, Gallery 6, the locus of one of the museum's great treasures, Leonardo da Vinci's "Ginevra de' Benci." Doing a search for that work can get you a gallery map with its location marked in red. Clicking that dot gets you a list of all the works in that room, each of which can be clicked for a wealth of details, including exhibition history, provenance and even bibliography. You can also browse the galleries by clicking on the various rooms.
---What you WON'T see:---Ever go to a museum specifically to view certain iconic works, only to discover that one or more of them is missing? The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., keeps you posted on art that is off view, with an explanation of where it's gone and for how long.
---New on view: On the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website, you can download their annual reports of Recent Acquisitions, including this one from 2004-2005, containing (on page 14) curator Keith Christiansen's discussion of the Duccio "Madonna and Child". The J. Paul Getty Museum also publishes an acquisitions list.
---Annual reports, board minutes: The Getty recently stated that it would publish more detailed financial and governance information on its website. The British Museum already does this: Here are its most recent trustee minutes and its annual report (although the most recent posted report is from fiscal 2004).
---Press release archives: Some museum websites include this; few are as comprehensive as the Guggenheim's, which goes back to 1998.
---Curatorial contacts: Wish you could easily communicate with a curator? The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art posts contact e-mails for its various curatorial departments.
SOON: What museums never post, but should.
Responding to my posts here and here about Metropolitan Museum curator Gary Tinterow's views on collection management, Rob Krulak writes:
Beyond claiming the public's stake in the holdings of art museums as a private concern of curators, Gary Tinterow also seems to credit curators with the very creation of great public collections, as if there is an unbroken golden chain of specialist curators that stretches into the prehistory of every art museum.That's just not how great museum collections are formed, evolve, or even come to be called great. I suppose civic entrepreneurs, private collectors (what would the Met be without Havemeyers?), journalists, academic art historians, the public, the brilliant non-specialists who created our earliest civic collections, and everyone else who contributes to the institutional and aesthetic meaning of museums were just along for the ride.
This is an overly long post, but a serious subject deserves serious treatment. The following are my promised comments responding to comments made to me last week by Metropolitan Museum curator Gary Tinterow.
One of the prime movers in founding the Association of Art Museum Curators in 2001, Tinterow appears more focused on curator-power than on public accountability, as evidenced by his recent remarks to me on the subject of collection management.
Decisions to sell objects from museum collections must not be subject to the subjective judgments or personal preferences of individual curators, however knowledgeable and well-intentioned they may be. The governing presumption should be: What enters the public domain stays in the public domain, except for works that are clearly inferior in quality or condition. The public has paid for them, after all, through the tax deductions given to the donors of money or of art.
Curatorial prerogatives are not absolute; they must be subordinated to the professional guidelines set by the Association of Art Museum Directors:
Both the deaccessioning and the disposal of a work of art from a museum's collection require exceptional care and should reflect policy rather than reaction to the exigencies of a particular moment. Standards applied to deaccessioning and disposal must be at least as stringent as those applied to the acquisition process and should not be subject to changes in fashion and taste.Tinterow may have been correct in observing to me that some museum officials have sold objects, only to have their successors (or curators at other museums) subsequently retrieve them for the public domain. But far from justifying incautious deaccessioning, this merely demonstrates the folly of it. There is no justification for disposing of works that tomorrow's curators may deem worthy of study or exhibition, no matter how much today's curators want to fund their own purchases of art through sales of objects that they deem expendable.
How much do today's curators at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, for example, wish that they still had the fine Hudson River School paintings that were sold in the 1950s (as discussed in my recent Wall Street Journal article) by then director Richard Davies, who deemed them not important enough for the collection? Different types of art go in and out of fashion. A museum's collection should be for the ages and not be subject to such vagaries.
The Met's most recent deaccession controversy involved its plan to sell a sculpture by Eduardo Chillida. That plan was abandoned after it was revealed that the donor of the work opposed the sale. Tinterow told me last week that the sculpture would never be exhibited at the Met, because it is too large. But, as Michael Kimmelman reported in the NY Times, it had already been exhibited there three times, making the curator's resolve never to show it again seem questionable.
There are probably a number of art museums that would be very pleased to make room in their galleries or sculpture gardens for an important Chillida. If the Met has no use for a museum-quality work, it should lend or give that object to a sister institution that CAN use it, thereby keeping it in the public domain where it belongs.
The spectre of finite exhibition and storage space, raised by Tinterow in the comments I quoted last Friday, is a real concern. The late Stephen Weil, a noted authority on legal issues involving art museums, once suggested that institutions were going to have to consider "triage" for their collections, because they had accumulated more stuff than they knew what to do with.
But not all museums are overstuffed. Collection-sharing IS an option---one that should be more seriously explored by all museums with a superabundance of riches.
We hyperlink to our own topic pages (please notice that all hyperlinks in the story take the reader to internal New York Times pages), and so we can't include the link to your blog.For those of you who took the trouble to Google me, you can link to my posts related to the Met's admission-fee hike here, here, here, here, and here. (Do you think I'm overdoing it?) Y'all come back now!
What journalists have to understand is that curators and administrators make decisions about the formation of the collection every day. We're the gatekeepers, going in, and we're the gatekeepers coming out. When something gets here, it's because a curator has made a decision to admit this work. When something leaves, it's because the curator has made a decision for it to leave. So the notion that there is some purity to a collection, that some greater force has brought works of art into a museum and the curators therefore are not the appropriate voice to determine the shape of the collection is to ignore how collections are formed to begin with. Museums have actually acquired back works that they sold. What you assume is that we have unlimited storage and unlimited money, and neither is the case. Not only do opportunities change, but tastes change. And what didn't make sense in 1900 might make sense in the year 2000. No one has a crystal ball and you are always making the collection from the perspective of today. Something can be sold [from the museum], can be bought by a collector and can be regiven [to the same museum] in 50 years. So we don't have the sense of finite opportunity. The collections are organic. The most precious thing really is not money. The most precious thing is space. And that is our most severely restricted resource: it's space, both for exhibitions and for storage. And that's how we have to manage the collections.The "most precious thing" is SPACE? I had always thought it was the art.
The NY Times apparently decided it needed to balance its arts reporters' crusade against the coming increase in the Metropolitan Museum's "sugggested" (make that "recommended") adult admission fee. So it brought in someone from the Business Section, David Leonhardt, to bring some economic pragmatism to the discussion.
An interloper in today's "Weekend Arts" section, Leonhardt offers a detailed economic and political argument in the Met's defense.
If you view his article on the Times' website, don't neglect to click on the sidebar, "The Price of Admission," to see what some other U.S. museums are charging. Several other museums rightfully belong to the "$0 Club," including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
Next week, we will undoubtedly hear from someone in the Times' Style Section: what to wear on the Met admissions line, so that the cashiers won't think that you're a rich cheapskate and will hand you your button without giving you a dirty look.
Is there no end to this discussion?
More on the Berry-Hill Galleries' bankruptcy situation has been posted online today by The Art Newspaper. Reporter Martha Lufkin indicates that other dealers, who are Berry-Hill creditors, are getting nervous.
James Berry Hill, a director of the gallery, told me on June 26 that the gallery was settling claims against it, "so that nobody is harmed." He also said at that time that the gallery's East 70th Street premises were no longer for sale.
But here they are, still available on Stribling's website for $20 million. The offering is described as "a once in a lifetime opportunity," but no longer characterized as "a court supervised sale."
Pssst, wanna own a Frank Gehry?
Now you can: Tiffany & Co. has just put his new line online.
Doesn't this polymath already have enough building projects to occupy him from now until 2050?
Do you think my 25-year-old son Paul and his gorgeous, intelligent girlfriend Lisa will read this and get ideas? (Oy! Am I in trouble!)
Geoff Edgers, in today's post on his arts blog for the Boston Globe, thinks he detects "a feud brewing in the arts blogosphere" between me and a certain redhead.
Tyler's been a very kind mentor (and linker) to this blogging newbie, and Lee likes him. But, as my evil alter ego, CultureGrrl, always snarls: Reasonable people can (and frequently should) disagree.
Isn't that what blogs are for?
Here are a few readers' responses to my defense of the Metropolitan Museum's new suggested $20 adult admission fee.
CRAIG RANAPIA: I'm not really sure the "suggested admission fee" isn't really a semantic slight of hand. After all, as anyone whose met my mother can tell you, 'suggestions' properly expressed can sound a hell of a lot like an order. I'm quite aware that cultural institutions don't keep their doors open on moonbeams and good intentions, public and private charity are unreliable sources of income, and I always have the choice to turn on my heels and walk out if I think a clearly posted admission charge is unreasonable or I just don't have enough cash. (While I don't like it any more than you, I can see a rationale for charging admission to special exhibitions while leaving core collections open to the public. Whether these so-called "blockbuster" shows are worth the tab for visitors and institutions is another debate.)As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to install a turnstile in your entrance be honest about what you're doing and why. Don't try and shame twenty dollar bills out of people.
MARK BARRY: The new Met admission isn't that important, as long as they retain the "suggested" portion. I'm immune to the cashier, no matter the response. Many of them are also artists and could care less. My wife gets embarrassed at times, so to compromise I'll give a quarter, for two.
A PRESS RELEASE FROM THE HOMELESS MUSEUM, which describes itself as "a subversive, multi-disciplinary art project": The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the richest museum in the country, is in dire need of funds. The Homeless Museum (HoMu) invites you to support this great institution on Tuesday, Aug. 1, when the Met's new "suggested" admission fee goes into effect, by paying the entire $20 fee with pennies only. Please present 200 ounces (or 12.5 pounds) of pennies at the cash registrar for admission.
This is HoMu's second Penny Campaign. The first one was conducted in November 2004 at the Museum of Modern Art.
Do you think Randy Kennedy will pony up his pennies?
Speaking of critics, I commend to you Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the July 24 New Yorker on Ronald Lauder's purchase of "Adele Block-Bauer I" for the Neue Galerie, New York.
An outtake:
Is she worth the money? Not yet. Paintings this special may not come along for sale often, and the hundred and four million dollars spent for a so-so Picasso, "Boy with a Pipe," two years ago indicated that irrational exuberance could be the booming art market's new motto. But Lauder's outlay predicts a level of cost that must either soon become common or be relegated in history as a bid too far.And the identity of the artist gives pause. The price paid is four and a half times the previous high (already a stunner, in 2003) for a Klimt; until a few years ago, the artist ranked as a second-tier modern master both at auction and in the estimation of most art critics and historians....The purchase of "Adele" tests the possibility--ever less to be sneezed at, these days--of rewriting art history with a checkbook.
Here's CultureGrrl on the art market's irrational exuberance.
Coming Soon: A further examination of the Neue Galerie and its collection.
This post may seem to be what one of my editors disapprovingly calls "inside baseball." It grows out of my post yesterday, responding to a critic who criticized my criticism of a critic. Have I lost you already? Probably. Nevertheless, here goes:
Why do you rarely see strongly negative reviews about new or newly expanded cultural facilities? Cesar Pelli's (pre-Taniguchi) expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, Santiago Calatrava's new wing (with wings) for the Milwaukee Art Museum---all received generally favorable notices when they opened, only to become more controversial with the passage of time. Similar revisionism also seems to occur in reviews of the acoustics of new concert halls---Rafael Viñoly's Kimmel Center in Philadelphia comes to mind.
And now that the initial euphoria over the November 2004 reopening of the Museum of Modern Art has passed, a second wave of assessments has been considerably more critical than the first round of polite plaudits.
As one who has enjoyed her share of hardhat tours and press previews of expensive, ambitious museum construction projects, I can attest to a natural reluctance to rain on these elaborate and expensive parades. So many well-meaning, talented people have spent so much time, intellect, money and effort on these new cultural facilities that it's hard to be unkind, let alone censorious.
And there's another dynamic at work: The most successful architects are also great salesmen. They convince clients to hire them by making their concepts and designs seem like the most appropriate and creative solutions to the problems at hand. They are such powerful advocates for their own work that they (or their enthusiastic museum-clients) also succeed in winning over the critics with the same rhetoric. Too often, these writers see with their ears instead of their eyes.
So we have Taniguchi "making the architecture disappear," with walls that seem to "float." We have "a flotilla of sails" atop Renzo Piano's addition for the High Museum in Atlanta, and "piazzas" (that might otherwise be called merely "lobbies" or, if outdoors, "plazas") at Piano's addition to the Morgan, his planned Whitney expansion and the High. All of these were originally the words of the architects and their clients, which were later appropriated by the critics as their own. Too often, however, the reality is more prosaic than the hyperbole.
The architects and museum officials think about these buildings far longer and more deeply than the critics, who spend a few days at most to arrive at their pithy assessments. It is tempting, while up against a deadline, to adopt the intelligently expressed, well-honed party line. But it's a temptation to be resisted, or at least carefully examined.
As for Michael Kimmelman's initial MoMA appraisal, it seemed like a grudgingly positive review, with a more skeptical assessment struggling to get out. Maybe (if last Friday's swipe is any indication) it soon will.
Blogger Tyler Green incorrectly claims today that I object to NY Times critic Michael Kimmelman's flipflop on the new MoMA.
"Critics," my blog-colleague wrote, "shouldn't be locked into one viewpoint for life."
Hey, CultureGrrl's been known to change her mind every now and then. That's a woman's (and a critic's) prerogative. What I objected to yesterday was, as I wrote, "the manner in which Kimmelman chose to announce" his apparent about-face: in a discordantly gratuitous aside, buried in an article about something else.
If he's formed a substantially new opinion on something this important, the chief art critic of the cultural paper-of-record should, as I wrote yesterday, craft "a more considered article about what he REALLY thinks," instead of slipping a fast one by us, without explanation or elucidation.
Is "that too bad," Tyler?
More tomorrow on the problems and challenges that writers like me (and Michael?) face in appraising new cultural facilities.
Here's the second part of my article, appearing on the Leisure & Arts page in today's Wall Street Journal. (Here's Part I).
The MIA [Minneapolis Institute of Arts] had not originally planned to engage a "starchitect." But it was essentially shamed into doing so by the ambitions of its institutional peers: For its 2005 expansion the Walker Art Center had used Herzog & de Meuron, the Minneapolis Central Library had hired Cesar Pelli, and Jean Nouvel has designed the new Guthrie Theater, which began regular performances on Saturday.
A relatively conservative establishment in a quiet residential area, the MIA "didn't really see a need to promote cutting-edge architecture, because that isn't who we are in art. That's the Walker," noted curator Jacobsen, who had served as architectural liaison for the contractors, architects and curatorial staff. But after talking to three local architectural firms, Mr. Jacobsen recalled, the MIA ultimately felt "we had to go with a bigger name." Enter Mr. Graves, who had designed the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, as well as the renovation and expansion of the Newark Museum in New Jersey. Also important were what Mr. Jacobsen termed the "well established connections" between the architect and Target, the MIA's biggest corporate donor, for whom Mr. Graves had designed a well-received line of housewares.
Speaking of the architect, Evan Maurer, who was the MIA's director until 2005, recounted during a recent interview that "what he and I talked about was how to be Michael Graves and be contemporary, but to exist between a 1974 minimalist building and a great Beaux Arts building-with materials, with proportions, with references. I think he did that brilliantly."
If not architecturally dazzling, the new wing is respectful of the museum's pre-existing facilities and hospitable to its art. Appealingly clad in richly textured Jura limestone, its box-like structure is relieved by niches and slim columns-deliberate references to the flagship neoclassical building. Its one glaringly false note is the kitschy faux sky, strewn with abundant white clouds, that is painted on the Venetian plaster dome crowning Graves's three-story atrium.
More daring in design, and strikingly dissimilar from each other as they are from the MIA, are Cesar Pelli's library and Jean Nouvel's theater. The former is invitingly open and light-filled, with soaring spaces and frosted images of digitized Minnesota nature photos, silk screened and baked onto its expansive glass walls-an evocation of Minneapolis' famously frozen winters.
The Guthrie Theater, Mr. Nouvel's first completed project in North America, is dark both inside and out. Meant to be mysterious and theatrical, it instead comes across as disorienting and gloomy. It transforms the distinguished regional theater from a 87,000-square-foot, one-stage facility adjoining the Walker Art Center into a 285,000-square-foot complex of three diverse performance spaces, a restaurant and education center-all relocated to the city's old industrial area on the banks of the Mississippi. Once best known for its flour mills, the riverfront is fast becoming the new trendy area for restaurants and residences.
Critics and audiences alike will continue to debate the merits of these recent high-profile additions to this city's thriving cultural scene. But as Mr. Griswold recently observed, one thing is beyond debate: "There could be no more exciting time to be in the Twin Cities."
[But wait! There's more to the story that could fit in the WSJ. Coming in CultureGrrl, later this week, more Minneapolis maunderings!]
As you know, I can't link to the Wall Street Journal's subscribers-only site, but I AM allowed to post the text of my article. I'll do it in two parts, so as not to tax the short attention spans of hyperactive blog readers. (It's on today's Leisure & Arts page (D6), for those of you who still turn pages, instead of clicking hyperlinks.)
Minneapolis
With unflashy simplicity, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has bucked the attention-seeking trend in museum expansions: Its new 113,000-square-foot wing for 20th- and 21st-century art, designed by Post-Modernist Michael Graves, boasts neither eye-popping "destination architecture" nor interior "Wow" space, and wasn't motivated by a desire to supply sumptuous accommodations for megashows circulated by world-famous institutions. What's more, the Midwestern museum's new director and president, William Griswold, seems far more intent on organizing what he calls dossier" exhibitions focused on individual works from the permanent collection.
The new structure joins the museum's original McKim, Mead & White building and its last expansion, designed in the mid-1970s by Kenzo Tange. "It's very much a building about the art," explained Mr. Griswold, who came here in October after having informed the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where he was acting director, that he did not want to be named permanent director.
The MIA's expansion and renovation increase the gallery space for its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions by some 40%. Nearly 1,000 works have emerged from storage-among them, a 1969 wall-sized painting from Frank Stella's "Protractor Series" that was too large for the old galleries. Prominently displayed in the new wing is the museum's sexiest new acquisition---its first car, a sleek, silver-painted 1948 Czechoslovakian Tatra T87, designed in 1936.
For the first time, the museum will have galleries for the permanent display of textiles, 20th- and 21st-century prints and drawings, contemporary crafts, silver, American regionalism, folk art, Chinese export porcelain, Ukiyo-e paintings and postwar color photography. On a recent press tour of the expanded premises, Mr. Griswold paused in the color-photography gallery, candidly describing the museum's collection in that area as weak. "I wanted this gallery to propel us to collect,"
he observed.
The collection's most glaring weakness is in the area of American paintings from the 19th to early 20th century-a gap largely blamed on one of the most infamous art-selling sprees in American museum history: From 1955 to 1958, a former director, Richard Davis, unloaded some 4,500 objects, including at least 350 paintings (among them, important works of the Hudson River School). He believed the museum should stop trying to be encyclopedic and, instead, focus on certain areas that he deemed important. Works he bought with the sale proceeds included a Seurat and a van Dyck.
The MIA's current holdings are strong, however, in decorative arts (including 16 period rooms), Old Master paintings (including highly important works by El Greco, Rembrandt, Poussin and Goya), and Chinese and Japanese art. The number of Japanese galleries has just grown from nine to 15, all newly named for collector Mary Griggs Burke, in appreciation of the recent announcement by the 90-year-old St. Paul native that she will bequeath "a significant portion" of her personal and her foundation's collections to the museum. (Another portion is destined for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.) The MIA recently received a six-month loan of 55 Burke works-from the 12th century to contemporary-to celebrate its expansion.
The museum's Chinese art collection, one of the finest in the country, owes much to a two-person, gallery-filling juggernaut-Bruce Dayton, longtime MIA trustee and former president and chairman of Dayton Hudson Corp. (the original parent of Target Corp.), and his wife, Ruth, a devotee of Chinese culture and philosophy. Some 2,600 objects in every curatorial area came to the MIA thanks to Dayton benefactions. At a recent VIP cocktail reception, Robert Jacobsen, senior curator of Asian art, introduced the Daytons to their latest sight-unseen purchase for the Chinese galleries-a rare, unusually large ding (cauldron) from sixth century B.C., labeled as "a masterpiece of late Chou bronze casting." Other recent high-profile purchases have included a $5 million landscape by Claude Lorrain.
But gaps remain, and to fill them the museum is raising $50 million for its acquisitions endowment, in addition to the $50 million for its renovation and expansion. Some $91.2 million in gifts and pledges has been raised to date, all of it from individuals, foundations and corporate donors, not government allocations. Target, headquartered in Minneapolis, contributed more than $10 million for the expansion, for which it received naming rights to the museum's Target Wing.
[If you just can't stand the suspense of waiting for Part II, invest in a copy of the WSJ!]
Michael Kimmelman, in last Friday's NY Times, offhandedly demolished the Museum of Modern Art's Yoshio Taniguchi-designed building in a one-sentence putdown:
The sums that places like the Museum of Modern Art squander on mediocre buildings, which become obsolete the moment they open, are scandalous.
Come again? Here's the same art critic, reviewing the same building, at the time of its opening (Nov. 19, 2004):
By and large the redone museum, although more than a trifle like the new corporate headquarters of modernism, is a triumph of formal restraint and practical design---an eloquent reaffirmation, within its galleries, of the enduring beauty of the Modern's historic, albeit tendentious, account of modernism....Mr. Taniguchi solved the problem of designing an immense museum by trying to make it disappear. Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian and Bonnard, not Mr. Taniguchi, are still the stars here, to Mr. Taniguchi's credit.
What made Friday's decision-reversing jab all the more startling was that it was gratuitously slipped deep into an article about the Neue Galerie's Klimt, to which it had no other connection than the expenditure of large sums. Do Kimmelman's reviews, like MoMA's "obsolete" building, have built-in obsolescence?
Mind you, I'm no fan of MoMA's new building, as CultureGrrl readers well know. But I was surprised by the manner in which Kimmelman chose to announce his new view. (Actually, to be fair, there was a previous, similarly unexplained, aside: On Christmas Day, 2005, Kimmelman opined that the new MoMA had "all the charm of the Cherry Hill mall on Black Friday.")
Maybe its time for a more considered article about what he REALLY thinks! Is it a "triumph," "mediocre" or just a bad day at the mall?
Right again, art-lings. The answer to yesterday's question is: C) Tom Hoving, author of "False Impressions, the Hunt for Big Time Art Fakes."
Better known as Philippe de Montebello's predecessor as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hoving dukes it out over Duccio in this CultureGrrl BlogBack:
James Beck has apparently not followed the standard methodology of determining a fake in the case of the Duccio at the Met.
For one thing, he doesn't take into consideration that the piece is a private devotional image, a non-"maniera-Greca" icon. So, it is not strictly correct to compare it with larger works by Duccio and his contemporaries. There is nothing with which to compare it.
For another, Beck does not put himself in the mind of his "forger." In the 19th century, Gothic items were invariably prettified. I have seen a dozen or so that are invariably more sinuous and soignée than anything made in the early 14th century.
The Met Duccio is too unpretty to be a 19th century fake. Beck's argument that the anatomy of the Christ is rather ugly is in fact a good argument for its being ca. 1300.
Similarly, the parapet or pedestal (or whichever it is) is exceedingly rare in Gothic art. Forgers virtually never add anything to their fakes that is rare and thus
risky. The foundation of fakery is to be safe.
Thus Beck's argument here, as with the one mentioned above, tends to substantiate the piece as authentic.
CultureGrrl says, let the debate continue. What we really DO need is a Duccio dossier exhibition, organized by the Met, to allow the experts to convene, compare and contrast key examples from the artist's early oeuvre.
Tomorrow, read a CultureGrrl BlogBack on the Met's Duccio, by an artworld luminary sometimes known as the "showman," who now calls himself a "fakebuster." Who might that be?
A) Zahi Hawass
B) Dale Chihuly
C) Tom Hoving
D) Nigel Spivey
For the answer, art-lings, click me Monday morning!
Must be another slow cultural news day at the NY Times: It dispatched reporter Randy Kennedy to "humbly proffer" 50 cents to five different cashiers at the Metropolitan Museum. (The museum had announced this week that it would raise its suggested adult admission fee from $15 to $20, effective Aug. 1.)
Journalism 101 says not to prejudge a story before doing the actual reporting, but Kennedy confessed that he walked up to the unsuspecting set-ups and "waited to measure the level of scorn that would pour down" on him.
Instead, he found "that brand of aggressive disregard particular to New York that is sometimes much more effective in evoking shame and extracting money. The first clerk...never even looked up from his screen [how dare he?]" but handed over the admission button "with the detachment of a Vegas dealer parting with a dollar chip. If he had been trained...in the most effective ways of wounding a conscience, he could have done no better."
Maybe Kennedy's conscience was fragile because he knew that his undeniably strong investigative reporting talents should really be put to better use (and also because his guilty conscience knew he was merely feigning an inability to fork over three fivespots).
What exactly did he want from those workaday cashiers: an effusive, "Oh thank you so very much, sir"? The Times is still trying to turn a non-story into a populist cause. Just pay what you want, Randy, and don't agonize over it.
Oh my. The minions who put ads on my site (unchosen and unreviewed by me) came up with this. Apologies to Ronald Lauder and Gustav Klimt.
Please go down to this morning's first post, to see that CultureGrrl, despite her tacky moments, deserves to be taken seriously!
CultureGrrl occasionally strays to other art forms. (After all, I'm not merely ArtGirl, though I kinda like her site!)
I feel moved to note the complete disconnect between two reviews of the same theatrical event---Lincoln Center Festival's DruidSynge---a marathon 8 1/2 hours of the six-play theatrical oeuvre of Irish playwright John Millington Synge.
Here's the acerbic John Simon, in today's Bloomberg:
The brogue used is so thick it could blunt any knife trying to cut it, and left most of the audience chasing after comprehensible words like sparrows after sparse crumbs. The poor acoustics at John Jay College's theater made things tougher yet. Of the 19 actors, maybe three or four belong on a metropolitan stage....Garry Hynes, the Druid's artistic director, is not really major league despite her lofty reputation at home and abroad. She gets the job done, but without that inconspicuously convincing extra touch that marks the true master.
Most important, poor, tubercular Synge, dying at age 37, did not grow into a significant dramatist.
And here's the ecstatic Charles Isherwood, two days ago in the NY Times:
Grandly entertaining and powerfully moving, "DruidSynge" is a major achievement for Ms. Hynes, her design collaborators and her superb 19-member acting company. Ranging across wide emotional territory without missing a beat, it brings alive a milieu that feels both intriguingly remote and utterly intimate, exotic in the eccentric syntax and unruly lyricism of its earthy dialogue -- God bless the Irish! -- but familiar in its consoling knowledge of the loneliness and despair that are the sorrowful scars of all humankind.Interestingly, Simon (or his editors?) mercifully withdrew a slap at veteran actress Marie Mullen that appeared in an earlier posting of his review (which I saw). Isherwood called her "great and glorious."
In today's Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout comes down somewhere in between. (You'll have to scroll down a couple of items on his blog's July 14 entries to get to Synge.)
Who would you trust, in deciding what to do with 8 1/2 idle hours on a summer's day? (As for me, I'm going to Broadway to see Sarah Jones this weekend!)
Harold Holzer, the Metropolitan Museum's senior vice president for external affairs, thanked me yesterday for my favorable admissions-fee story. It must be time, then, for the curmudgeonly CultureGrrl to bite the hand that stroked her.
So lets dissect a disturbing first for the Met: its upcoming Masterpieces of French Painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1800-1920, touring next year to the the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. As the images on the Houston website show, its 135 paintings include some of the Met's tastiest Impressionist and Post-Impressionist crowd-pleasers.
Sure to attract hordes (as did the Museum of Modern Art's masterpieces compendium in 2004, which also traveled to Houston and Berlin), this show marks the Met's sorry entry into the growing field of museums that use their collections as cash cows, renting out blockbusters for big bucks. The upcoming Met blockbuster, as Holzer told me, is an "opportunistic event," made possible by the need to remove the museum's French 19th-century paintings from the walls while those galleries are expanded. It is, he said, intended to "raise funds for this construction"---the first time that the Met has structured a traveling exhibition as a big moneymaker.
Houston will up its admission fee from $7 to $15 for those wanting to see this show. The Met, as I observed in yesterday's post, doesn't believe in charging extra for special exhibitions on its own premises. But, in this instance, it's apparently happy to let others do it.
Ironically, when the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, was recently asked (at a NY Times-sponsored symposium, Mar. 6) how much other museums pay for borrowing and displaying Met-owned objects, he replied, "The loans are not rentals. They are not paid for." The borrowers, he said, just reimburse the Met for its expenses.
This collegiality used to be the norm all over, and, until now, laudably remained so at the Met. But with its upcoming show, the Met joins the ranks of the Louvre and the Hermitage, which have no qualms about bolstering their own finances at the expense of sister institutions. (For a better role model, see my previous post on Clark Art Institute's loan show of Impressionist masterpieces.)
Whatever happened to building buildings the old-fashioned way, through the generosity of donors? I guess that with the disappearance, some years ago, of financier André Meyer's name from the Met's 19th-century European galleries, naming rights just aren't what they used to be.
For those of you who just got to this post, thanks to the mention in Roberta Smith's July 22 NY Times article, you can link to my other posts related to the Met's admission-fee hike here, here, here, here and here. (Do you think I'm overdoing it?)
Here's the post you came here for:
Relevant to the current brouhaha over museum admissions fees are these comments by Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, excerpted from a roundtable discussion by major museum directors published in Whose Muse: Art Museums and the Public Trust. (The Met has just announced an increase of its suggested admission fee for non-senior adults to $20, effective Aug. 1. MoMA instituted the same fee, as mandatory, when it reopened in November 2004, after its expansion.)
Glenn Lowry: I think there are different factors that come into play here. On one level it's almost a moral duty that museums should be free. Our collections are part of everyone's cultural heritage. We should make them available in as broad a way as possible. And an admission fee is one of the greater barriers to attendance.Philippe de Montebello: Wait a minute. Can we be both practical and philosophical? On the matter of barriers, the people who squawk most about the cost of a museum pay huge amounts of money to go to rock concerts, sports events, all of which are very expensive. I don't buy that "barrier" thing. Philosophically, what is it about a work of art that makes it mandatory that it should be available for nothing, whereas the C Sharp Minor Quartet Opus 131 of Beethoven should be paid for, that Aida should be paid for, that Ibsen should be paid for? What is [it] about art that it shouldn't be paid for?
Glenn Lowry (later in the discussion): Part of me wants museums to be free because there is a sense that our collections and visitors' experiences of them belong to the public at large and should be available to anyone regardless of cost. Another part of me, though, says, why should it be free? Why should this treasured experience be free, especially for an entity that gets virtually no government funding? And by making it free, are we inadvertently devaluing it?
Populism or pragmatism? It seems to me that the "suggested fee" concept is still the best compromise. But it also seems to me that free admission, far from devaluing the art, is valuing the public.
Come Aug. 1, the Metropolitan Museum will cost you $20, but only if you want it to. You got a problem with that?
Carol Vogel, in today's NY Times, implies that the Met tried to sneak one by us by announcing the increase to arts editors "with little fanfare." (Next time, Philippe, please hire the Canadian Brass.)
The Met's enlightened admission policy says that you can pay whatever you want, as long as you pay something. The fact that the fee is "suggested" is posted at the cash register. Children under 12 and members are free; suggested admission for seniors and students is $10. (Full disclosure: Thanks to my press pass, I freeload all over town. Suggested journalists fee: $100?)
If people feel "intimidated" by this suggested fee, as suggested by one Jane Kaplowitz, quoted in the Times, they should get assertiveness training. What you pay is up to you.
When Philippe retires (some time in 2050), I suspect that the Met will begin to follow the standard museum practice of charging substantial extra fees for important special exhibitions. If I'm still blogging then, I'll lament that change: Blockbuster surcharges discourage some people from seeing those exhibitions, and they make loan shows seem more important than the permanent collection.
The Met's operating deficit was $3.4 million in fiscal 2005, an improvement from the $4.8 million in fiscal 2004 but still troubling. The last increase in the suggested admission fee---to the current $15---occurred in January 2005. That did help to reduce the size of the deficit, but more effective solutions (a big boost in the endowment from a stock-market rally, perhaps?) are urgently needed.
Next: Eavesdrop on a past colloquy about admission fees by the two director-members of the "$20 Club."
I love it when art historians get angry! So here's Columbia Professor James Beck's letter, Duccio a dud, published in today's London Times, responding to last Saturday's letter by Metropolitan Museum curator Keith Christiansen, Met's Duccio is no dud.
Here's an excerpt from Christiansen:
If Professor Beck would like to see a fake Duccio, I would be happy to show him one that the Metropolitan was given in order to compare a fake with the genuine masterpiece.