August 2008 Archives

New Regime: the September issue

It's out with the old, in with the new in the September issue of Art in America magazine, where Marcia Vetrocq assumed the editorship in June, replacing artworld editorial giant Betsy Baker (who remains as "Editor-at-Large/Special Projects").

A redesign is underway, which for September features bolder headlines and bylines and new layout for the contents page that gives more prominence to the masthead. It's there that major changes have occurred---not just in the aforementioned staff changes, but also in the roster of contributing editors---the magazine's family of writers.

I had the dubious distinction of being immediately removed from that list (in time for the August "2008 Guide"), as a direct result of displeasure with my above-linked posts. Perusing the September issue, I now find myself in good company. Other newly deleted contributors (many of whom, admittedly, hadn't contributed all that much in recent years) are: Holland Cotter, Jamey Gambrell, Ken Johnson, Nancy Marmer, Walter Robinson, Jerry Saltz, Peter Schjeldahl and Brian Wallis.

In her "Editor's Letter," Vetrocq promises:

New writers are joining our regular and valued contributors. A dynamic website will be up and running soon.

This month's newly anointed contributing editors are: Pepe Karmel, Peter Plagens, Gregory Volk. The website, at this writing, is still comatose. But Rome wasn't built in a day; home pages take a little longer.

A CultureGrrl reader helpfully alerted me to the fact that Max Hollein, possibly to be named the next Metropolitan Museum director, is also on the board of trustees of the Neue Galerie, New York. And I've also discovered that a documentary film has recently been made about him by Avanti Media.

According to the description of "Max Hollein---My Life":

Hollein's museum policies have raised a lot of attention in the last years. Some are envious of his success and blame him for being too commercial and American. Hollein prefers to play his cards close to his chest, turning the spotlight to his museums rather than to himself.

For "Ma Vie/My Life„" Hollein makes an exception, allowing the camera to follow his trip to New York.

Hmmm. Did the camera follow him into the offices of the Met? And where can I get a copy of this film?

Max Hollein: The frontrunner?

Pop Quiz for Met Museumologists:

Which of these four museum professionals is not like the others?
A) Gary Tinterow, the Metropolitan Museum's curator in charge of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art
B) Ian Wardropper, the Met's chairman of European sculpture and decorative arts
C) Thomas Campbell, a curator specializing in tapestries, from Wardropper's department
D) Max Hollein, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, since 2001 and, since 2006, also director of Frankfurt's Städel Museum and the Sculpture Collection of the Liebieghaus.

Right again, art-lings. The Vienna-born Hollein, son of the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Hans Hollein, is the wild card in this multiple-choice list, which an informed CultureGrrl source has good reason to believe is the Final Four in the tournament to determine Philippe de Montebello's successor.

My informant, whom I have sworn to identify no further (on penalty of death), is well connected but not completely in the loop (i.e., not a Met trustee or headhunter). Deep Throat is reasonably confident (but not 100% certain) that this is indeed the list of those still in the running. This is a blog, not the mainstream media, so allow me to indulge in some well grounded speculation.

While most of the New York artworld is out of town, the surviving candidates are said to be engaged this week in the final round of interviews, one contestant per day, in advance of the Sept. 9 board of trustees meeting where their fate may be decided. That's not to say that an announcement will be forthcoming then: After selection comes contract negotiation.

Why do I guess that Hollein (above) may be the frontrunner? Two reasons: If my informant is correct, he's the only outside candidate who made the cut, which gives him special status. Also, I remember something that architect Steven Holl once told me about the Museum of Modern Art's competition for its expansion: The finalists were assembled in one room, looked around at one another, and correctly concluded that the assignment would go to Yoshio Taniguchi, whose work stood out as different in character from the others' more edgy oeuvre. In that group, he was the wild card.

Hollein spent several years working at the Guggenheim Museum, but is nevertheless unfamiliar to me. So let's all get up to speed:

The Metropolitan Museum's trustees were said to be looking for someone young to be the next director. Born in 1969, Hollein certainly qualifies. And he has an impressively extensive background for a 30-something. His experience is broad geographically (museum jobs here and in Europe) and art historically. (Here's a list of exhibitions he has overseen as director at the Städel---everything from old masters to contemporary.)

He has had extensive involvement with contemporary art and was commissioner and curator of the U.S. pavilion at the 7th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2000 and commissioner of the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

He's also got that increasingly hot qualification---business creds: He earned degrees in both business administration and art history.

According to his bio, issued by the Städel Museum:

From 1996 until late 2000 he worked closely with the Guggenheim's director, Thomas Krens, first as Executive Assistant to the Director and from 1998 onward as Chief of Staff and Manager of European Relations, with responsibility for such essential projects as the construction of the exhibition spaces of the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Guggenheim Las Vegas, for exhibition tours, and for the opening activities of the Guggenheim Bilbao as well as for contacts to European cultural institutions, collectors, media, curators, and sponsors.

So this is another Krens protégé made good. (Think Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum, and Julian Zugazagoitia, director of El Museo del Barrio.) A more recent American connection: He was an editor of the catalogue for the Women Impressionists exhibition now at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which was organized by his Schirn Kunsthalle.

Not surprisingly, Hollein was widely believed to be in the running for the Guggenheim's top spot, as reported by both Bloomberg and the NY Sun. Phillips Oppenheim, the headhunting firm for the Met's directorship, is performing the same function for the Guggenheim.

Now let's allow Max to speak for himself, in a May 2007 Goethe-Institut interview with Daniela Gregori, with whom he discussed his views on the contemporary art-market boom and the role (or lack thereof) of art critics:

In the hangover that will occur after the boom, the art critics will again appear on the scene and suddenly they will be listened to again....Once the hype has settled, attention will fall on different tendencies in art and it will be noticed that they have been there all along in recent years as parallel phenomena.

An art market boom is always the result of something. This time it is the result of a good business cycle and a more intensely globalised economy that have generated high liquidity and an increased demand for luxury goods. When this cycle collapses, money will be quickly invested in commodities less susceptible to inflation. It then takes about a year until the art market also collapses. It's all quite simple.

And I suppose that directing one of the world's premier art museums is, likewise, a piece of cake. Time and the Met's trustees will tell.

UPDATED here.

Damien Hirst, "For the Love of God," 2007

It looks like the investment syndicate that owns Damien Hirst's diamond skull, "For the Love of God," has finally succeeded in lining up an exhibition for it at a major museum: The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, has just announced that it will present the "world premier of the work's international tour," Nov. 1-Dec. 15.

But wait! There's more:

To accompany the exhibition, Hirst has chosen a personal selection from the Rijksmuseum's collection of 17th-century art...."For the Love of God" and Hirst's personal selection of works from the Rijksmuseum collection reveal how fear of death has provided a theme in art over the centuries.

This is the same museum that previously let film director Peter Greenaway have his way with Rembrandt's iconic "The Night Watch." The obvious approach for Hirst would be to haul out the vanitas pictures.

An exhibition of the skull at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, had been scheduled for last March, but as Georgina Adam reported in the Financial Times in April, those plans fell through. No word yet on the next stops for the pate's "international tour."

But any museum that displays this bauble is abetting the syndicate's admitted objective: to boost the value of its purported $100 million investment through exposure at prestigious venues.

Claude Gerstle, subject of an Impact Film Festival documentary on stem cell research, being shown during each party's national convention

Now that we've shifted from the athletic Olympics to the political olympics, it's time to peruse Barack Obama's Platform in Support of the Arts (see P. 3). It's pro-arts education and also favors a budget increase for the National Endowment for the Arts.

But here's the hot-button paragraph, which will gladden most art advocates:

Ensure Tax Fairness for Artists: Barack Obama supports the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT). The Act amends the Internal Revenue Code to allow artists to deduct the fair market value of their work, rather than just the costs of the materials, when they make charitable contributions.

Although Patty Gerstenblith, De Paul University law professor and outspoken advocate of the repatriation of antiquities, is on the 33-member Obama National Arts Policy Committee (listed on P. 2), the platform doesn't touch that particular hot potato.

As a side note: While others have written about the visual-art activities pegged to the Democratic National Convention, I haven't seen anything yet about the Impact Film Festival, to be held during each party's convention. It features socially-themed documentaries, dramatic films and related panel discussions, intended to "spark conversations on important policy issues, creating a ripple effect throughout both Conventions."

I have a personal interest in this: My friend, neighbor and fiercely competitive bridge-playing opponent (above) is the focus of one of the documentaries, Accidental Advocate, being screened today and Sept. 2. Here's the film's website. And here's its description:

When Claude Gerstle, a surgeon and athlete, suffers a tragic bicycle accident that leaves him paralyzed from the neck down, he and his daughter, Jessica (former producer, Dateline NBC), embark on a moving odyssey to track down the thinkers, politicians, crusaders and nay-sayers at the heart of the federally funded stem cell research quagmire. Featuring Michael J. Fox, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Orin Hatch, Sam Brownback.

Another of the Impact Festival films is The Black List, which is also being shown this week on HBO.

Damien Hirst, "The Virgin Mother," 2005, the Lever House Art Collection

When it comes to the two mega-million contemporary art-market stars---Koons and Hirst---I've sometimes thought that the sensibility that feels attuned to one cannot also strongly admire the other (unless you're a profit-oriented dealer or a trophy-hunting collector).

The former artist is engaged in what seems to me a shallow pursuit of joy; the latter morbidly dwells on more profound issues of mortality and vanity---the fact that we and the rest of the fauna inhabiting this planet are the stuff that dreams are made on (with an emphasis on "stuff").

As you can guess, I'm a Hirstian. Roberta Smith in yesterday's NY Times piece on public sculpture seemed to declare herself a Koonsian, praising his pieces (especially his undeniably cute flowery puppy) while dismissing Hirst's "The Virgin Mother" (above)---a monumental bronze sculpture of a flayed (to expose her innards) pregnant woman, which was installed in Lever House's outdoor plaza in Manhattan, in connection with the elaborate display of dead sheep and other Damien detritus in the building's lobby.

Without elaborating, Smith damned the mega-momma as evidence that "new public sculpture is not always good." Why this piece is no good, she never does tell us. I think a critic owes us (and the artists she criticizes) a bit more explanation of her condemnation.

She did sort of like the shark at the Met, though.

John Russell and his wife, Rosamond Bernier
Photograph by Trish Lewis

The last time I saw John Russell, the former NY Times art critic who died Saturday at 89, he looked frail, supported by his wife Rosamond Bernier, the arts writer and cultural raconteur, at the opening of the expanded Taniguchi-designed Museum of Modern Art. I asked him what he thought and, of course, he gave his approval. Ever the constructive force for encouraging creative endeavors and audience interest, he was not one to rain on artworld parades.

The Russell-Bernier wedding occurred in 1975 at Philip Johnson's Glass House, to which the couple merrily returned (see photo) in June 2007 for the Inaugural Gala Picnic celebrating the opening of the house to the public.

Russell and Hilton Kramer were the good cop, bad cop of Times art criticism. Hilton, frequently acerbic, if not vitriolic, was the more riveting read. John, erudite and even-tempered, almost always made nice. The Times obit, written by the paper's former culture writer, restaurant reviewer, book critic, and now obituary writer, William Grimes, quotes Russell explaining his good will towards the artworld and artists:

I do not see my role as primarily punitive....It has never seemed to me much of an ambition to go though life snarling and spewing.

Once in a while, though, he was a bit too nice, as in his gullible endorsement of the so-called Michelangelo of Fifth Avenue. The ambitious attribution's 1996 debut in a front-page article by Russell, along with the support of several scholars, gave traction for a while to the notion that an early lost work by the great Italian Renaissance sculptor had been hiding in plan sight just a stone's throw from the Metropolitan Museum, in the lobby of the mansion that houses the cultural offices of the French Embassy.

It's too bad that the Times' farewell couldn't have included a personal appreciation by an art critic who had known Russell well and had worked with him closely. Perhaps that will soon be forthcoming.

Eric Gibson, editor of Wall Street Journal's "Leisure & Arts" page

Eric Gibson, on today's "Taste" page in the Wall Street Journal, adds his baritone to what he calls the "chorus of condemnation" against the idea of selling the Pollock held by the University of Iowa's art museum. And he appends a new verse, recommending that the federal government step in to deter future disposals of the public's art to bankroll operating or capital needs.

Gibson suggests:

Perhaps the time has come for both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to start enforcing professional standards as well as making grants. They can have a powerful effect not only because of the money they dispense but also because other sources of funding follow their lead. Let the NEA and NEH start withholding support from museums that are so cavalier about their trusteeship responsibilities. If you can raise money by selling what's on your walls, why do you need a handout from Uncle Sam?

Maybe it's also time for the field's leading professional organizations (the Association of Art Museum Directors, American Association of Museums, College Art Association and Association of College & University Museums & Galleries) to serve notice on their members that if they don't adhere to the bedrock principle that art should be sold only to improve the collection, they will not be only censured but also booted out of the associations of their peers. That should at least get the attention of the board members of museums and universities who care about their institutions' reputations.

But perhaps the definitive commentary on this contretemps has come from a former Iowa City Press-Citizen sportswriter, who in today's paper puts his tongue in his cheek and praises Michael Gartner (the university trustee who sparked the current firestorm by requesting a financial appraisal of the Pollock), as "the best friend of art in Iowa City."

Bob Elliott, who is also a former Iowa City Council member, observes:

In the more than 40 years I've lived in Iowa City, this has been the greatest outpouring of emotion in support of the value and necessity of art. As a result, Pollock's "Mural" has been a hotter topic than the Hawkeyes' quarterback. And heading into fall in Iowa City, that's saying something---about both the Hawkeyes and the painting.

I first realized the power of such a psychological move years ago when then Iowa Gov. Harold Hughes observed that the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it. Similarly, my father told me the best way to make someone stop taking something for granted is threaten to take it away.

So like it or not, Gartner has energized our collective interest in art....At this point, I doubt we'll hear much more about the possibility of selling it.

As I suggested here, the Iowa brouhaha may paradoxically turn into a win-win---raising national consciousness about proper university museum stewardship and also about the need for a financial infusion to address the flood-devastated University of Iowa museum's plight.

In the meantime, maybe the Iowa sports hero who IS a "hotter topic" than Pollock, Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Shawn Johnson, should pay a visit to the University of Iowa after her homecoming next Tuesday at the Wells Fargo Arena, Des Moines, to endorse not just Wheaties but also the state's great Pollock!

Crystal Bridges: the plan

In its recently file appeals brief arguing for a proposed $30-million deal with Alice Walton's planned Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas, Fisk University sought to convince the Tennessee Court of Appeals that the in-construction institution will be a solid collection-sharing partner.

Using information supplied in the legal deposition of Bob Workman, the museum's executive director, Fisk's brief revealed some illuminating financial details about the much anticipated museum-in-progress:

Crystal Bridges has the personal financial backing of Alice Walton, who considers her obligation to be binding. Alice Walton and members of her family and a family foundation have given $317,000,000 to Crystal Bridges for the development of the Museum.

Crystal Bridges has $488,000,000 in assets, of which $138,000,000 are liquid assets. The Museum, scheduled to open in 2010, will have 32,000 square feet of exhibition spaces with space for 200 to 300 art works on exhibition.

But will it really open in 2010? According to the Arkansas museum's What's Going On? blog, a "frequently asked question" is, "When will Crystal Bridges open? The short answer is we already are!"

That's because the museum has a satellite outpost in downtown Bentonville, featuring a scale model of the facility designed by Moshe Safdie and recent construction photos, as well as lectures, films and small exhibitions.

So that gives us the "short answer." Now, what's the update on the long answer?

Fisk University's Carl Van Vechten Gallery, prior to closing

In its appeals brief (full text here) seeking to enter into a $30-million collection-sharing agreement with Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum, Fisk University continues to send a mixed and contradictory message about its ability to display and care for its Stieglitz Collection. (Complete list of its 101 works is here.)

On the one hand, Fisk feels compelled to argue that it is now financially capable of properly caring for the collection. Otherwise, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum may again assert its claim that, as the successor-in-interest to O'Keeffe, who gave the collection to the university, it should receive ownership of the artworks if Fisk can no longer fulfill the donor's wishes. (In its appeal, Fisk is again challenging the legal validity of the O'Keeffe Museum's contention that it could have a claim on the collection.)

On the other hand, the financially beleaguered university covets Alice's cash. So it is reduced to saying this:

Fisk concluded its 2008 fiscal year with increased fundraising and reduced expenditures. This has permitted Fisk to divert operating funds that were not previously available to complete the [Carl Van Vechten] gallery improvements.

The increased donations Fisk received are not guarantied [sic] as a recurring revenue source, and while the funds assisted Fisk this year, there are no certainties of sources of income in the future. It does not, therefore, answer the real question---How long will Fisk survive without the $30 million it can receive from Crystal Bridges? For that answer, there must be a trial.

Fisk's attempt to have it both ways, it seems to me, fatally undermines the credibility of its argument for doing the Walton deal. If Fisk has now managed to raise the cash needed to maintain the collection over the short term, it should labor mightily to extend this fundraising success over the long term, rather than taking the quick but legally and ethically problematic way out by monetizing the collection. Eventually, we'll see if the Tennessee Court of Appeals agrees with me. This could take quite a while.

Fisk spokesman Ken West told me yesterday that, in accordance with the stipulations in Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle's permanent mandatory injunction, the Stieglitz Collection will go back on view on Oct. 6 in the university's Van Vechten Gallery, now closed and undergoing renovation.

What's REALLY interesting about the brief is what it reveals to us about the finances of Walton's Crystal Bridges: COMING SOON.

Thomas Hoving

Tom Hoving has a journalistic conflict-of-interest problem. As a newly minted columnist for Artnet Magazine, he's got a not-so-hidden personal agenda---to rehabilitate his reputation as an authority who knows what's best for museums in general and for the Metropolitan Museum in particular. Marginalized long ago by the institution he used to run, he seems to be trying to get back into the fray.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his most recent column, A Billet-Doux for the Met, in which, not very doucement, he tells the museum's next (as yet unnamed) director what to do when he takes over the job that Hoving himself once held.

There's nothing wrong with recommending future directions for the Met-in-transition. I did it myself, here. But such ruminations should be grounded in firm knowledge of the current state of the museum and of professional practice. Hoving's shaky grasp of both would not win him any gold medals on the uneven bars. (Yes, I watched Olympic gymnastics yesterday.)

Among Hoving's flubbed suggestions for the Met:

---"Solve the chronic deficits, which are beginning to look like permanent acquisitions." In fact, the most recent annual report, fiscal 2007, showed a sizable surplus of $2.05 million.

---The Met should "deaccession at least 10 percent of all the holdings" and "slow down, even stop collecting." Don't get me started. Likewise for: "Show but do not collect modern or contemporary art (except in the most minimal numbers)" and "make deals with the Museum of Modern Art to give or sell the Met works that are arguably 'old modern masters' by now." Do I really have to rebut these eccentric notions? Go here and here. It's ironic that Hoving, who got his museum into a heap of trouble over deaccessioning, should now be advocating sweeping disposals. In addition, the idea that an encyclopedic museum should excise the last chapter ignores the importance of seeing the art of our own time in historical context.

---"Mount shows that teach about the wonders of art and are more ambitious than the one-man omnibus everything-including-the-kitchen-sink 'catalogue' shows that are current." What about two theme shows opening this fall---Art and Love in Renaissance Italy and Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.? Do they not count as ambitious and instructive? And what's wrong with comprehensive, scholarly catalogues?

---"The subterranean restaurant beneath the Medieval Sculpture Hall is unappealing." (Okay, I'll grant him that.) "Use its space for a grandiose crypt for a Medieval Treasury." As Hoving the medievalist well knows, they already have a Medieval Treasury at the Met's uptown outpost, the Cloisters. And newly renovated and reinstalled medieval galleries will open in the Fifth Avenue headquarters this November.

But the biggest Hoving howler is this:

The current director was instructed 30 years ago to consolidate the revolution of the late 1960s and '70s [i.e., Hoving's]. Three decades of consolidation is a bit much.

As I recall, the "current director" (who's that again?) was brought in to redress the imbalance between showmanship and scholarship that was Hoving's problematic legacy. "Consolidation of the revolution" was not the mandate: A return to core values was. As Philippe de Montebello takes off for Abu Dhabi (and perhaps also for Qatar, if Kate Taylor's report in the NY Sun is to be credited), it's safe to say there are few who believe that his distinguished reign at the Met was "a bit much."

You can't get too much of a good thing.

Cash Cow: Warhol limited edition key ring

Does anyone worry any more about cheapening an artist's image by indiscriminate commercial licensing of images?

The Andy Warhol Foundation has been in the forefront of exploiting art as a licensing cash cow, an activity regarded by some as consistent with Warhol's own values, because "early on he saw himself as a brand, as a vehicle to promote different items," as the foundation's licensing director, Michael Hermann, once told Maria Puente of USA Today.

Now there's been a new spurt of licentious licensing, as reported today by Licensing.biz:

The Beanstalk Group has been busy boosting the licensing programme for the Andy Warhol Foundation, revealing a number of new deals to Licensing.biz [including jeans, resort and beachwear, luxury porcelain]....Nuit Blanche will be producing Andy Warhol chocolates and biscuits for Europe, launching in time for the Christmas season.

John Morganelli, Candidate for PA Attorney General

In a press release posted Friday (go here, click "Press Releases" and then on the Aug. 13 release), John Morganelli, Democratic candidate for attorney general of Pennsylvania, blasted Republican incumbent Tom Corbett for his "failure [in the Barnes case]...to fulfill his responsibilities to represent the public interest when it comes to charitable trusts."

Corbett was not yet in office when the Barnes Foundation successfully sought a court decision allowing it to move from Merion to Philadelphia, but he opposed reopening the case in recent court proceedings brought by petitioners who sought reconsideration by Judge Stanley Ott of Montgomery County Orphans' Court. Gov. Edward Rendell, a former Philadelphia mayor and a Democrat, like Morganelli, has been a enthusiastic advocate of the Philly Barnes.

Morganelli asserted:

People who leave large sums of money for benevolent purposes must have confidence that their wills and trusts will be honored. The failure of AG Corbett to protect Dr. Barnes' wishes and thereby the public interest, undermines the likelihood that generous individuals will do good things with confidence that their wishes will be respected. This hurts charities across the board.

As I've lamented here and elsewhere, the AG's office did a shockingly inadequate job of protecting the interests of the general public in the Barnes Foundation case. Even Judge Ott himself scathingly observed (in his Jan. 29, 2004 opinion allowing the move) that the AG's conduct in the case "had constituted an abdication of that office's responsibility." Yet despite his low opinion, Ott recently ruled that the AG was the only government representative with the legal authority to argue the Barnes case on behalf of the public. (In seeking to reopen the case, Montgomery County, where the Barnes is located, cited new developments that might have improved the Barnes' financial viability in situ.)

Morganelli pledged that, if elected, he would try to re-open the Barnes case so that the court could "consider the options available to keep the Barnes' collection in Montgomery County."

He added:

At the very least, this matter deserves to be considered on the merits. Moving the Barnes' art collection should be only a last resort after all other options are fully investigated and presented for serious consideration. It was the job of Mr. Corbett to see that this was done, and he failed. As a result, Judge Ott was left with his hands tied, and had no options than to rule as he did.

Meanwhile, in other Philly Barnes news, Inga Saffron, architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, reports the following, on her Skyline Online blog:

In preparation for the two moves [that of the city's juvenile detention facility and the new Barnes that would replace it], the city's public property department spent the week packing up two groups of sculptural figures that have humanized the forbidding juvenile prison for the last half century. The two groups [she posts a photo], by the respected sculptor Waldemar Raemisch, are being relocated to the so-called Microsoft High School on Girard Avenue.

Do these high school students really want to gaze at art that formerly "humanized" a youth lock-up?

Fisk just won't give up.

In a case of unfortunate timing, the Nashville university last week filed in Tennessee Court of Appeals a brief arguing for reversal of a lower court decision that prevents Fisk from selling for $30 million a half-share in its Stieglitz Collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum. Just a few days later, the Association of Art Museum Directors released its strong statement deploring the possible sale of the University of Iowa's Pollock to shore up that institution's flood-ravaged finances.

I'll have more details on the brief (and Rosenbaum's Opinion) next week.

The spokesperson for Super Cooper, the Tennessee attorney general, told me: "We don't have anything new to report at this time," but added that the AG has 30 days from Fisk's filing to file his own reply brief, should he decide to do so.

Little mentioned in all the excitement about the new Whitney ocean liner (as I described it Tuesday on WNYC), which is expected to be launched in late 2012 in New York's Meatpacking District, is that several buildings will be have to be demolished and businesses relocated to make way for it. (The museum will also construct a new meat refrigeration facility as part of the deal. Can they cold-storage film in there, as well?)

But wait! Stop the bulldozers! There's art displayed on those buildings:


A mural with two whimsical cows on the former Premier Veal (Lamb Too) facility...

Okay, so WNYC has relaunched its entire website in a new format, and somehow my Whitney expansion commentary, which some of you may have heard live yesterday afternoon, has (at this writing) vanished, except for this audio-challenged link.

But fear not, art-lings: My New York Public Radio editor has forwarded to me the segment's mp3, which I have managed to post in playable form below. The audio bar may not look as snazzy as the radio station's embed, and it doesn't say "Hear It Now," but at last you can!

Just click the arrow to the left:

Other CultureGrrl posts on the Downtown Whitney are here, here, here and here. Stay tuned for one more Whitney post tomorrow---another of my irreverent photo essays!

Pam White, interim director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, leading a media tour through the flood-damaged facility (Photo from the museum's blog, Art Matters)

[UPDATE AT THE END: AAMD's just-released statement.]

The blogosphere (including my blog) has been getting bent out of shape about the request by one of the University of Iowa's board members, Michael Gartner, for an updated appraisal of the Pollock owned by the university's art museum, which he suggested could help defray the cost of recovering from damage caused by the major June flood. The museum hopes to move to a new, less flood-prone site. The painting had been recently appraised at $100 million for insurance purposes by Sotheby's.

But while bemoaners of the lost art have been noisily catastrophizing, the university's art museum director, Pam White, has been quietly taking care of business. In response to my queries yesterday, she said that "the ethical issues involved in any sale of any part of the collection" have now "been made clear" to the university's board. White, a lawyer who teaches the class "Art Law and Ethics" and heads Museum Studies at the university, added:

It is my belief that the majority of the Regents (the name of our governing board) would be opposed to such a sale. The idea put forth by Regent Gartner was to explore the various things involved. And now, with all the support for NOT selling, I think they would not favor any such action.

We can only hope that she's right. A clear, immediate no-sale statement by the board would put a stop to the criticism.

Opponents to monetizing the Pollock have been forcefully vocal: The Des Moines Register reported that both the university's president and the state's lieutenant governor strongly favor retaining the painting. And the Boston Globe's Exhibitionist blog quoted Dan Monroe, director of the Peabody Essex Museum and head of the Art Issues committee of the Association of Art Museum Directors, saying (on his own behalf, not as spokesman for AAMD):

Several private colleges and universities have recently chosen to sell works of art to fund operations. Sales of works of art from university art museum collections to support university operations or endowment violates AAMD policy. To date, these unfortunate transactions have taken place at small, financially strapped colleges or universities.

Selling art from a university art museum collection to support university operations reflects financial mismanagement, loss of institutional integrity, and loss of important works of art to students, faculty, and the general public. It is hard to imagine the University of Iowa resorting to such ill-conceived measures given their high standing the the fields of the arts and humanities.

Fisk University and Randolph College: Do you copy?

The Iowa brouhaha may well turn out to be a tempest in a teapot, while having the salutary effect of raising national consciousness about proper university museum stewardship and about the need for a financial infusion to address the University of Iowa museum's plight, which was described yesterday in harrowing detail by Joel Henning, on the "Leisure & Arts" page of the Wall Street Journal.

UPDATE: This just in---a letter from the Association of Art Museum Directors to David Miles, president of the University of Iowa's board of regents. Here's an excerpt:

The idea of [Pollock's] "Mural" being sold is an alarming one to museum professionals and art historians, and should be as well to those who appreciate art from a more laic perspective. The possibility of the work passing into private hands and becoming unavailable for study and enjoyment alike is a particularly frightening one.

Its deaccessioning would also harm the reputation of the University of Iowa Museum of Art; the museum's ability to attract future donors of works of art would no doubt diminish, as well as its competitive edge in winning grant awards and fellowships in the field of visual arts. Great schools have great museums, and the tarnishing of the reputation of the University of Iowa Museum of Art would certainly reflect on the reputation of the university as a whole.

In this difficult time, as the state of Iowa seeks to rebuild and repair all that it has suffered in the floods, the university should focus its attentions not on short-term fiscal gain, however necessary it may be, but keep its eye on the bigger picture: the valuable visual arts legacy to the people of the state that this painting symbolizes.

As representatives of the board and membership of AAMD, we urge the University of Iowa Board of Regents not to deaccession Mural from the collection of the university's museum of art. We offer you our help in the development of plan or course of action to preserve your collection intact as a fundamental resource in furthering the university's important mission.

If you missed it live, you CAN'T hear me now, commenting on the Whitney Museum expansion on WNYC. That's because they're revamping their website tonight and relaunching it tomorrow. The culture editor said she MIGHT get it up tonight. There is an audio bar for my commentary here, but so far it doesn't work. We can all try it again later.

For now, let's just say that I offered much praise and expressed some reservations about the project. You'd expect no less.

Today was definitely Whitney day at WNYC. When I signed in at the reception desk, I saw that curators Michael Hays and Dana Miller had preceded me: They were on the Leonard Lopate show earlier this afternoon, talking about the Whitney's Buckminster Fuller exhibition.

Bear with me, art-lings. I want to hear what I said, too! Like the Whitney's fundraising drive, my online audio is presently in the "silent phase." Below is my non-working podcast (which may come to life at some point in the future). Don't believe it when they say, "Hear It Now." It's really, "Hear It Later":

What's an antiquities-collecting American museum to do?

In one important respect, the American Association of Museums' Standards Regarding Archaeological Material and Ancient Art, issued yesterday, substantially differences from the standards announced on June 4 by the Association of Art Museum Directors. This may confuse the issue for U.S. institutions trying to do the right thing.

Like AAMD, AAM wants museums to "require documentation that the object was out of its probable country of modern discovery by Nov. 17, 1970," the date of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.

But while AAMD seems to allow for acquisition of objects known to be out of their source countries by Nov. 1970, no matter how they originally left those countries, AAM goes much further, saying that "museums should not acquire any object that, to the knowledge of the museum, has been illegally exported from its country of modern discovery or the country where it was last legally owned" (even if that illegal export occurred before 1970). AAM acknowledges in its statement that this sweeping recommendation goes "beyond the requirements of U.S. law."

Interestingly, most of AAM's 10-member Task Force on Cultural Property came from art museums, including: Graham Beal, director of Detroit Institute of Art; Sharon Cott, secretary and general counsel of the Metropolitan Museum; Gail Harrity, interim CEO of the Philadelphia Museum; Gary Vikan, CEO and director of the Walters Art Museum, among others.

Did they realize what they were saying? Presumably a prominent museum lawyer like Cott must have understood the full import of this divergence in wording.

Members of New York's City Planning Commission (Amanda Burden, chair, in white), minutes before today's Whitney vote

Embraced on all sides by glowing adjectives, the Downtown Whitney expansion project was unanimously approved this afternoon by New York's City Planning Commission, which had heard nothing but accolades in testimony by community denizens and government staffers at hearings held last month. The commissioners were "thrilled," "very excited," "very pleased" and "happy." They termed the project "an unparalleled partnership" (with the soon-to-open High Line elevated park to its north), a "creative design" and a development that was "changing the neighborhood in a wonderful way."

Time (and $680 million dollars) will tell. The building is due to open at the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013.

One of the Whitney's lawyers for the project, Albert Fredericks, told me that the project would likely come before a City Council subcommittee at the beginning of next month, with a final vote by the full Council likely to come "a week or two after." Then, the last government-approval hurdle will have been cleared.

But will it clear the CultureGrrl-approval hurdle? If all goes according to plan (always a big "if"), I'll be commenting on the project tomorrow (Tuesday) at about 5:30 p.m. on WNYC, New York Public Radio, 93.9 FM and 820 AM. You can also hear me live here. And I'll post the audio on CultureGrrl when it's available. I'll try to update this post, if the time changes.

UPDATE: My revised air time is 5:46 p.m. (Time will tell.)

Installation shot of "Lee Krasner: Little Image Paintings" at the Pollock-Krasner House

I finally made the pilgrimage to the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio in The Springs, NY, just a week after the opening of a great focus exhibition at the house: "Lee Krasner: Little Image Paintings, 1946-1950" (to Oct. 31), organized by Helen Harrison (seated above), director of the Abstract Expressionist shrine, on the occasion of Krasner's centennial year. (The artist and widow of Jackson Pollock died in 1984.)

This intimate show of just nine works, one-third of the known surviving paintings in this series, gave me a greater appreciation of this overshadowed artist than the many displays giving pride of place and space to Krasner's large-scale, later works that too often come off as wan wannabe Pollocks. (The show also contains a Krasner-created round table from the same period, shown in the living room, above, and what is thought to be her earliest self-portrait, dated 1929.)

The paintings now displayed in Springs are intense, dense gems, some painted in the very room in which they are now displayed---the couple's living room. Others were painted in a small upstairs bedroom. Apartment-sized rather than loft-sized, they vary from all-over paintings reminiscent of Pollock but with their own coloristic pizzazz, to others that have been called "calligraphic" but are more pictographic. Krasner seems to be experimenting in these small formats, but all are highly finished, fully conceived works.

The Krasner show of what may well be her best work was a revelation, but the greatest thrill was donning foam-bottomed booties and treading on the floor in the sacred studio where Pollock flung and slung his landmark masterpieces, including "One," "Autumn Rhythm," "Convergence," "Blue Poles," ghosts of which are visible underfoot. I had seen the full-scale re-creation of Pollock's studio at the Museum of Modern Art's brilliantly illuminating 1998 Pollock retrospective, curated by the late Kirk Varnedoe with Pepe Karmel, but authenticity is all (and you couldn't walk on that copy). Krasner's splatters are on the studio's wall where she labored over her larger canvases after Pollock's death.

Strangely, I couldn't find an online link for this show on the Pollock-Krasner House's website, maintained by Stony Brook University, which is also administrator (through its foundation) of this National Historic Landmark artists' site. But below are photos of some of the works in the exhibition:


"Untitled," 1949, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery, NY---one of the pictographic paintings

I couldn't say this until I got my correspondent's permission this morning: The person who tipped me off late yesterday afternoon to the possibility that the University of Iowa might be thinking about selling its Pollock was none other than the marketing and media manager of the museum itself, Maggie Anderson...

...which bespeaks a real concern among museum staffers about the eventual fate of their signature artwork---shades of the Maier Museum Massacre at Randolph College.

Jackson Pollock, "Mural," 1943, University of Iowa Art Museum

It's down-the-slippery-slope time again. Only this time that slope has been slicked by the Iowa floods. Brian Morelli of the Iowa City Press-Citizen reports:

The Iowa state Board of Regents will conduct a study to determine the value of one of University of Iowa's most prized and expensive possessions.

Regent Michael Gartner requested the study of Jackson Pollock's "Mural," which is part of the University of Iowa Museum of Art collection [given to it by legendary collector/dealer Peggy Guggenheim]. Gartner said the painting was estimated to be worth more than $150 million several years ago.

UI President Sally Mason said UI does not plan to sell the painting....Gartner said he is "not proposing the painting be sold," but that it would be good for the regents and the university to be aware of what options are out there as UI faces major expenses in flood recovery.

Appraising the painting can only mean that the university is thinking of monetizing it, whatever is now being said for public consumption. The Association of Art Museum Directors, the College Art Association and the Association of College & University Museums & Galleries should jump all over this one, as they did (to no avail, alas) in connection with Randolph College's Maier Museum art sales. I'm counting on AAMD's president, Michael Conforti, to make this his first sermon from his new bully pulpit.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece June 30 on Iowa's Pollock. Pamela White, interim director of the university's disaster-evacuated art museum, then told Michael Judge of the WSJ:

We might be looking at building a new museum to house the collection. But I can assure you, "Mural" will be a part of that collection...

...or maybe not.

UPDATE: More CultureGrrl coverage of the Iowa brouhaha is here and here.

Sotheby's stock chart, as of 12:57 p.m. today

Investors seem not to have loved what they heard in Sotheby's Tuesday announcement of its first-half results and its much more detailed elucidation of its finances in the Form 10-Q, filed yesterday. The auction house's publicly traded stock yesterday slid nearly 8% on a day when the Dow rose 40 points.

Yesterday's filings provided more details on Sotheby's experience in offering guarantees (amounts that the auction house agrees to pay consignors, regardless of whether bidding reaches that level) and its attempts to reduce risk in these economically dicey times.

Here are some nuggets mined from the 10-Q:

As of June 30, 2008, the Company had outstanding auction guarantees totaling $106.6 million, the property relating to which had a mid-estimate sales price of $118.4 million. The Company's financial exposure under these auction guarantees is reduced by $16 million as a result of risk sharing arrangements with unaffiliated partners [third-party guarantees offered by dealers, collectors or others]...

As of July 29, 2008, the Company had outstanding auction guarantees totaling $62 million, the property relating to which had a mid-estimate sales price of $69.6 million. The property related to such auction guarantees is being offered at auctions in the second half of 2008. As of July 29, 2008, $36.9 million of the guaranteed amount had been advanced by the Company.

The report did acknowledge that Sotheby's had a "less favorable auction guarantee experience" than it did last year, and that there has been "an increase in risk reduction arrangements and strategies in an effort to reduce the Company's exposure to auction guarantees in response to an uncertain economic environment over the last year." Although the overall guarantee portfolio was said to be profitable, there was one big loss:

For the three and six months ended June 30, 2008, principal activities decreased $10.5 million and $12.9 million, respectively, when compared to the same periods in the prior year, primarily due to losses recognized in the second quarter of 2008 related to property offered and sold under one auction guarantee, for which there was no comparable shortfall in the prior period.

The 10Q also acknowledges that "competitive pressures...in certain cases have caused the Company to accept lower auction commission margins in order to win consignments."

I also got a little more financial information from privately held Christie's, which doesn't have the rigorous disclosure requirements imposed on Sotheby's as a publicly traded company. Christie's press release doesn't break out its auction total from total sales figures (which include private sales). But in response to my query, Christie's said that first-half auction sales amounted to $3.23 billion (compared to $3 billion at Sotheby's).

What do art museum PR people do in their spare time?

It isn't every art museum press officer who writes a book good enough to get favorable notice in the NY Times and the New Yorker. (Okay, maybe Lincoln expert Harold Holzer of the Met.)

But Erin Hogan, director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, scored that coup with her Spiral Jetta (so called because it chronicles her ride to see Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" and other earthworks in her Volkswagen Jetta). Tom Vanderbilt in the NY Times Book Review described Erin's travel memoir as "unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing." The New Yorker's unsigned capsule review called it "a soft lens on some hard ideas." And Kevin Nance in the Chicago Sun-Times found it "smart and unexpectedly hilarious."

Guess I gotta get a "Jetta."

Both Sotheby's and Christie's managed to eke out small increases in the total sales (including both auction and private sales) for the first half of 2008 over that of 2007, and both (as was also true last year) were neck-and-neck. As a public company, Sotheby's (unlike Christie's) reports not only sale totals but also revenues, net income and earnings per share. Those figures, despite Sotheby's efforts at cost management and risk reduction, were not as impressive.

Sotheby's reported total sales for the first six months of this year of $3.44 billion (up from last year's $3.24 billion); Christie's reported $3.5 billion (up from $3.25 billion). But Sotheby's fudged its figure a little bit: It included its contemporary art sales, occurring in London on July 1 and 2, which fell just outside this year's first half (but HAD been in the first half last year). Christie's London contemporary sales this year occurred on June 30 (the high-priced evening sale) and July 1 (the more modest day sale).

In a conference call yesterday with stock analysts, Sotheby's president and CEO Bill Ruprecht repeatedly reminded participants that the 8% decline in Sotheby's revenues and 37% decline in net income from the first half of 2007 were largely due to this year's calendar shift of the London contemporary sales to the third quarter. Diluted earnings per share were down from $2.02 to $1.29.

He made the best of things by observing (in the press release, issued before the conference call):

These results are the second best in our history, and are remarkable in the context of today's global economic environment.

During the conference call, Ruprecht said that the auction house's experience with guarantees (amounts promised to consignors, even if bids fall short) was profitable in the first half, despite a $10 million loss on one collection. When asked if the auction house was considering a buy-back of shares (which have never recovered from their huge decline last fall), Sotheby's chief financial officer, Bill Sheridan, remarked:

It's a very topical discussion and something we will be looking at in the third and fourth quarter.

Gary Tinterow

I come to praise Gary Tinterow, not to bury him.

CultureGrrl readers know I've been periodically critical of the Metropolitan Museum's curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art. But in a laudable collection-sharing arrangement that we can only hope will proliferate more widely at the Met and other institutions, Tinterow has agreed to long-term loans of some 28 mid- to late -20th-century sculptures to the University of Texas at Austin, to be installed across campus as part of the school's ambitious Landmarks public art program.

What's more, it's a collegial loan, not a fundraising rental. Carol Vogel of the NY Times reports (scroll down):

The university is paying for the installation, shipping and insurance; the Met is not charging a loan fee. The loan agreement is renewable in five years.

You don't need a long memory to remember Gary's unfortunate plan to sell at Sotheby's the Met's Chillida sculpture, Silent Music II. That sale was aborted after the work's donor angrily objected. The piece had been part of the 1987 inaugural installation on the Met's roof garden, but Tinterow declared a couple of years ago that the museum no longer intended to exhibit it. In a happy resolution of the contretemps, that sculpture was loaned in 2006 to the grateful Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas.

David Galenson, University of Chicago economics professor

Is Richard Hamilton's 1956 Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (click and scroll down) the fourth-greatest artwork of the 20th century? Somehow, I doubt even the artist would make that claim.

David Galenson's ranking of the importance of this and other 20th-century landmarks according to how many times they were illustrated in "33 textbooks he found" is so dead-on-arrival that it would be beneath notice, except that Patricia Cohen did notice it in her piece in today's NY Times---A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks. (The above quote about the "found" textbooks comes from that article.)

Inquiring skeptics want to know:

---What "textbooks" did Galenson choose? (Coffee-table compendiums or works of serious scholarship?)
---Where did he "find" them? (In the local middle-school library? In the pile on the floor of his office, above?)
---Must illustrations be in color to be counted?
---Does size matter?
---Does it matter that virtually no serious art critics, art historians or art lovers will take this analysis seriously?

Cohen cites beer-dumping expert Don Thompson as an authority who seconded the notion that illustration-counting is a valid gauge of artistic importance. Charles Gray, co-author of "The Economics of Art and Culture," chimes in with this:

We all want to believe there is something special about the arts, but I don't buy that there is a difference between artistic and economic value.

Glenn Lowry and Deborah Wye at Tuesday's Kirchner preview

Why has the Museum of Modern Art decided to give Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a middling German Expressionist, the "first New York museum show devoted entirely to his work" (as decribed by the show's curator, Deborah Wye)?

The chief focus of Kirchner and the Berlin Street, which opens to the public on Sunday, is an eye-popping lineup of seven of the 11 paintings from Kirchner's series of Berlin street scene paintings of 1913-15. Director Glenn Lowry touted the show as also providing an opportunity to see the museum's particularly rich trove of the artist's works on paper, arrayed on either side of the rogues gallery of streetwalking prostitutes and potential clientele.

Wye, MoMA's chief curator of prints and drawings, observed at Tuesday's press preview that "Kirchner is not so well known in the United States as he should be."

Maybe so. But two years ago he became a whole lot better known...as a lot: His "Berlin Street Scene," 1913, was offered at Christie's historic Impressionist/modern sale of Nov. 8, 2006, better known as the Night of the Soaring Klimts. While four restituted Bloch-Bauer Klimts were making the evening's big headlines, Ronald Lauder, who had already privately purchased Klimt's golden portrait of "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" for an estimated $135 million, astonished even Kirchner's greatest admirers by paying some $38.1 million, trouncing that artist's previous record, for a work offered at Christie's that had just been restituted to the heirs of a Nazi victim.

The auction house said at the time that the painting had been acquired by the Neue Galerie. But its label for MoMA's show now describes its ownership as "Neue Galerie New York and Private Collection" (Lauder's).

In any event, its composition, size and subject matter make it so similar to a Kirchner street scene acquired by MoMA in 1939 that they could almost be regarded as pendants---a fact certainly not lost on Lauder, who is MoMA's honorary chairman:
















Left: "Berlin Street Scene," 1913, Neue Galerie, New York, and private collection [Ronald Lauder]
Right: "Street, Berlin," 1913, Museum of Modern Art

MoMA's painting is included on museum's Provenance Research Project website, which lists works in its collection "that were or could have been in Continental Europe during the Nazi era." Its complete provenance is here.

The exhibition label for Lauder's painting suggests (largely on the strength of the jutting cigarette) that one of the men fraternizing the streetwalkers could be the artist's self-portrait. If true, that would certainly enhance the picture's allure. But that's a claim that not even the auction house's sales-pitched catalogue entry tried to make.

Until the Christie's sale, I had never realized that the elegant subjects of Kirchner's signature street scenes were prostitutes. So I was relieved to read this excerpt from Wye's catalogue essay:

I was among those confused about the motif in MoMA's "Street, Berlin," thinking it only a scene of elegantly dressed figures on the way to the opera or some such fancy event. But closer inspecton gives many clues to the contrary. For example, would it be common in this period for women to be out at night, unaccompanied, and all dressed up?

It makes for a diverting focus exhibition for the slow-news days of summer. But it's surely no match for John Elderfield's profound Manet and the Execution of Maximilian exhibition (which I cited for its timely pertinence here), to which Lowry compared the new show (because of their concentration on specific series), which is installed in the same space.

Speaking of Elderfield, I caught sight of him near the end of the press preview, quickly cruising through the Kirchners, paying them scant attention. He told me he was looking forward to shucking his administrative shackles as the museum's chief curator of painting and sculpture, so he can dedicate himself to the Matisse and de Kooning shows that he's organizing for MoMA. Caught in the museum's "65-and-out" mandatory retirement policy, he declined MoMA's offer of future office space, saying that when the late William Rubin had kept a post-retirement perch at the museum, he got sucked into mundane matters that sapped attention from more rewarding pursuits.

Today is, in fact, Elderfield's first day as a civilian. No replacement for this irreplaceable scholar/curator has yet been announced.

But at least they've got Wye, whom Lowry called (in the presence of less effusively extolled MoMA curators), "one of the most talented, remarkable and, I think, most insightful curators working anywhere today."