January 2009 Archives

The strongest commentary yet on the proposed Rose Art Museum dissolution comes from David Bonetti, Brandeis '69 and veteran art critic of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His one-word description of his reaction---"fury."

There's much more:

The Rose Art Museum, then [when Bonetti attended Brandeis] one of the few museums in the country devoted to contemporary art, was instumental in the development of my interest in art and my subsequent career as an art critic. The highlight of my four difficult years at Brandeis---being a college grad in 1969 on an activist campus was no lark---was the seminar on the New York School I took with the Rose's director, William Seitz, who had been a legendary curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To think that other students might not have the opportunity to discover the visual culture of their times at the campus museum makes me very very sad.

And angry. I believe that Jehuda Reinharz should be fired by the board for his gross mismanagement of the university's endowment.

I don't know enough about the Brandeis situation to comment on Reinharz's financial stewardship or lack thereof. But there's no question in my mind that "gross mismanagement" are the right words to characterize how he's handled the Rose Museum situation---failure to inform, let alone consult with, the stakeholders before the decision was announced; and injudicious, conflicting pronouncements about the plans, which demonstrated his astonishing lack of understanding or willful disregard of the complexities and consequences of the disposals.

By auctioning its art, Brandeis would be selling off its reputational and educational capital. This wrongheaded plan has opened the door to an investigation by the Attorney General's office, which will seek to determine which artworks are subject to donor restrictions that could preclude disposal. (This is probably why Reinharz, who must not have fully appreciated this major technicality, is now saying that not all the works will be sold.) Once in the door, the AG could conceivably decide to broaden her investigation to determine whether, as Bonetti alleges, the university's finances were mismanaged.

But more importantly, the decision to eviscerate one of the university's great strengths has roiled the artworld and Brandeis' own donors, who are rightly concerned that hocking some of the institution's most precious assets would greatly diminish the educational and cultural life of its students.

Interestingly, Brandeis has allowed the Rose's director, Michael Rush, to post a strong statement on the museum's website (which is part of the university's website), expressing his "shock and horror" at the administrators' decision. Academic freedom rules! Or perhaps Reinharz has yet to notice Rush's diatribe, on the same website that lauds the disposals as an "important step in the ongoing resource management and allocation process."

It's time for the broader Brandeis community to denounce this deplorable decision and the administrator and trustees who made it. What they need is some tough-love donors who will step up with the big bucks, on the condition that the Rose blooms and financial management reforms are instituted.

Not EVERYONE invested with Bernie Madoff!

Jeremy Strick, at the old place

I look forward to working with a talented staff and committed board to create a program that through its quality, scope, and ambition will capture the attention of the world.

So says Jeremy Strick in the press release announcing the appointment of the formerly embattled director of LA MOCA to his fresh new gig as director of the marvelous but currently rudderless Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. Clearly the Nasher's board wants the high profile and is not too worried about the finances.

Still, Strick does get a bit too self-congratulatory when he tells Michael Granberry of the Dallas Morning News:

This news will be welcomed around the country and around the world.

Granberry's article is also worth reading for the details it gives about LA MOCA's finances and Strick's take on that situation. More on the story from Carol Vogel of the NY Times is here.

Sorry about my headline, by the way. I've been reading too much about the "Fast Fourier Program model" and "von Kármán spectral density."

Don't ask.

I've got lots of posts in (Third) mind to do, but first I've got to get out that application for the award that I previously mentioned (and that I won't get).

To divert me further, my doctoral-candidate daughter, also applying for an award, has just e-mailed me, for my editorial guidance, a 22-page paper entitled, "Enhanced Sound Propagation Modeling of Aviation Noise: Hybrid Parabolic Equation-Fast Field Program Method." (You KNOW I couldn't make this up.)

Don't we stop having to read our kids' work after the college-application essay? It will be interesting trying to edit (and cut two pages from) something on a topic that I'm clueless about. And I've got to do it today, because she too is on deadline. (She learned procrastination from me.)

Where are those consolation-prize CultureGrrl ads (which I shamelessly begged for at the end of this post) when I really need them?

The late Olga Raggio

A Metropolitan Museum assistant museum librarian, Stephanie Post, who took pity on me in my vain search for a photo to accompany my Wednesday night Olga Raggio obit, has sent me the above image from a luncheon given for the longtime Met curator when she stepped down as chairman of European sculpture and decorative arts.

Stephanie writes:

I was touched that you wanted to include a picture of Miss Raggio with your post. I worked with her for seven years in ESDA, and she will not soon be forgotten.

Ford Bell, AAM's president, speaking Monday at New York University

I was wondering what was taking them so long. We have already heard from AAMD and ACUMG, CAA and a group of contemporary museums, and AAMC. But AAM's statement on the Rose woes was well worth the wait:

Taking a page out of the CultureGrrl book (4th paragraph), or, more likely, illustrating the maxim that "great minds think alike," the American Association of Museums has not merely condemned Brandeis' plan to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its art. AAM has proactively proposed "an alternate solution to the sale," involving the transfer of the collection to another museum.

As it happened, I ran into Ford Bell, AAM's president, at a conference in New York on Monday, and he mentioned in passing (hours before the Rose news broke) that the next urgent problem confronting AAM was getting university museums to abide by the association's deaccession standards. Little did I know...

Here's AAM's statement in full. The last paragraph is the clincher:

January 29, 2009

AAM Statement on the Closure of the Rose Museum at Brandeis University

The American Association of Museums is alarmed and dismayed at the decision by Brandeis University to close the Rose Museum and sell the objects from its collection. Such a drastic action would be an irreparable loss to the university and its community. Present and future generations of students and the public would be deprived of a priceless educational experience.

Museums hold collections in the public trust. These collections are a part of our common heritage and belong, in a moral sense, to all of us. It is the museum's job to preserve them for future generations.

By selling its art collection for cash to the highest bidder to erase a temporary deficit, Brandeis University is in fundamental violation of the public trust responsibilities it accepted the day it founded the Rose Museum. Such a sale is also a betrayal of the donors, who generously gave art for the benefit of the students and the public, not for paying bills. This is a direct violation of the AAM Code of Ethics for museums.

If it cannot afford to maintain and exhibit its collection, we urge Brandeis University to seek another steward of it. There are many fine museums in the region capable of caring for these works, even on a temporary basis, while the university explores other options. In choosing an alternate solution to the sale and irrevocable loss of the collection that was entrusted to its care, the university would serve as a role model for its students, faculty and community.

And this just in from Brian Friedberg, a Brandeis graduate student:

Thanks for your relentless posting on the travesty at the Rose. I'm a Brandeis grad student (museum studies) organizing visual protests on campus. Some of us are fighting back and attempting to raise the attention on student activism. More info below, I just wanted you to know what we've got going on on a micro level:

COMESEEART, a collection-based exhibit + conversation
Friday, January 30, 6-8p.m., Shapiro Student Center, Brandeis University

The "unanimous" decision by the Trustees of Brandeis University to liquidate the Rose Art Museum's outstanding permanent collection and to close the facility is not only ill advised, but destructive to the entire Brandeis community. We demand a more detailed explanation as to how this decision was reached, considering the Rose is one of Brandeis' greatest cultural offerings.

This situation must be remedied in efforts to defend both the reputation of the school and its many concerned students and faculty. We must consider the impact that the Trustees' decision will have on our experience as students and our future as professionals.

Using projected and reproduced images from the Rose's collection of over 6,000 art objects and footage from student protests on campus, COMESEEART is the beginning of a conversation on the nature of visual imagery and authenticity, the future of art at Brandeis, and how this weak decision can strengthen us as a community.

Can this museum be saved? Its director, Michael Rush, thinks not.

I'm getting sore.

How come Tom Campbell has time to speak [via] to Ed Pilkington of the Guardian, but not to Lee Rosenbaum of CultureGrrl (and occasionally even of the Wall Street Journal)? Believe me, I've asked. How come those Brits have all the fun?

I know why: because it looks like Pilk got bilked---another of those bleeping beeper-timed interviews, with little of substance to show for it. The Grrl needs at least 45 minutes, not 30, of deep down discussion with the Metropolitan Museum's new director. Maybe in my next lifetime.

But wait a minute! Pilky did get some new insight into the mysterious Campbell: We now know that he likes the punk-rock band Pendulum! "Who?" you say (or at least I say. I've lost track of popular music since my kids learned to drive and I reclaimed control over my car radio.)

I had already found out from a recent New York Public Radio program what Philippe de Montebello likes---lots of classical, of course. But really, how can he not like Verdi???

Since I want to get right in tune with the new director, I did my due diligence and found this Pendulum video. Looks to me like your average curatorial meeting at the Met. (Roll over that black box and click the arrow, if you dare!)

Yet another county heard from: The Association of Art Museum Curators says this about the possible dissolution of the Rose Art Museum:

The decision to regard the collection of the museum as an asset rather than as a wealth of ideas in physical form was made without consultation of all the most important parties. The professional staff of the Rose Art Museum and its student employees, all of whom who will lose their jobs, were informed only an hour before the decision was announced.

The art and art history faculty, past donors to the institution, and its distinguished board of Overseers, many of whom are alumni of the university, were not consulted; nor were the thousands of students who love the museum.

To shut down this wonderful institution and to sell its spectacular collection of modern art--a collection formed over four decades by perceptive and forward-looking donors, including many artists--would be, for ever more, a blot on the reputation of the university. Closure of the museum would deprive future generations of students at Brandeis, and regional and national visitors to its campus, of a precious cultural patrimony.

Marsden Hartley's "Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony)," 1912-13, Rose Art Museum, seen at today's Guggenheim Museum's New York press preview of The Third Mind (Can we keep it?)

The College Art Association has added its voice to the chorus of condemnation against the possible dissolution of the Rose Art Museum. Here is its statement:

CAA Protests Rose Art Museum's Closing and Art Collection Sale at Brandeis University

January 29, 2009, New York, NY - The College Art Association (CAA) was shocked and dismayed to learn of the decision by Brandeis University to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its entire art collection for operating revenue.

CAA supports the Codes of Ethics of the American Association of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors, which clearly state that works of art in museum collections are held as a public trust and that any proceeds of sales must only support the acquisition of new works. However, perceiving an entire art collection as a disposable financial asset and then dismantling that collection wholesale to cover other university expenses is deeply troubling for all college and university collections.

The closing of the museum at Brandeis will be devastating to the academic community, not only affecting our colleagues at the museum and students and faculty in the Department of Fine Arts, which offers programs in both studio art and art history, but also depriving the entire arts-loving public in New England and around the world. The teaching of art and art history in higher education is untenable without the direct study of physical works of art, and it appears the Brandeis Board of Trustees has disregarded the kind of scholarship and creativity that have been the hallmark of CAA members for nearly one hundred years.

According to news reports, neither Brandeis University nor the Rose Art Museum is on the brink of economic collapse, nor are they unable to maintain the collections. Given that no clear explanation has been offered on the school's financial exigencies, the closure of the Rose Art Museum and the sale of its collection appear to be in violation of professional museum standards and of academic transparency and due process; the decision also demonstrates a lack of academic responsibility and fiduciary foresight. We appeal to the Trustees of Brandeis to revisit and reverse their decision.

Another condemnatory salvo was fired off by a group of 18 directors of contemporary art museums and institutes, including college and university museums such as the MIT List Visual Art Center, the Weatherspoon Art Museum of the University of North Carolina, the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois. Some excerpts:

We are...writing to express our outrage at the announcement today of your decision to close The Rose Art Museum and sell its highly distinguished and internationally recognized collection. This decision violates every rule of ethics and responsible governance adopted by museums across the country, and it is all the more reprehensible that this decision was reached through a process that lacked candor and transparency....

The Rose itself was not in financial dire straits, so it is unconscionable that the University would identify it as an expendable resource given the limited stake Brandeis maintained in its operation and given its demonstrated ability to stand on its own at a time of financial instability.

Meanwhile, Judith Dobrzynski, in today's Daily Beast, give the view from Brandeis' executive suite. Dobrzynski reports:

In an exclusive interview [why "exclusive" on a topic of widespread public interest?], Peter French, Brandeis' chief operating officer, explained that the university's situation is far more dire than it appeared in news accounts....Brandeis has already cut expenses and staff this year and last, and raised tuition and fees.

French said the alternative now was either a drastic shrinking of the university or selling the art. Faced with the prospect of closing 40 percent of the university's buildings, reducing staff by an additional 30 percent, or firing 200 of its 360 faculty members--any of which, French said, would drastically change the university's mission and essentially cripple it--"We'd rather use Rose."

Before finalizing the decision, French explained, the university made an emergency appeal to donors, only to confront the [Bernard] Madoff losses.

Interestingly, the URL for this story says, "did-bernie-bankrupt-brandeis"---probably the original headline, until calmer editors prevailed.

Which brings me to the only plausible explanation for the bizarre, erratic behavior of the university's administration in lurching through this mess: They're infected with Madoff Madness.

In punishing the National Academy for its desperation deaccessions, the Association of Art Museum Directors went too far. The unfortunate byproduct of that has been to galvanize certain art lawyers and museum consultants, who think that some institutions (perhaps those to which they provide counsel) would benefit by a loosening of deaccession standards. If it's okay for museums to sell art, these critics reason, then it should be okay for them to use those proceeds however they wish (not just for acquisitions), especially if that money is essential to institutional survival.

As I've stated before, the deaccession-or-die argument is too often an easy substitute for the hard work of fundraising and responsible museum management. Loosening standards would make it much too easy for inept administrators and trustees to run an institution into the ground and then dig themselves out by using collections as ATM machines. If AAMD were to weaken its stand against monetizing collections, the slippery slope would become an avalanche.

But AAMD has left an opening for those who argue for a looser grip on collections, by not making its own deaccession guidelines tight enough. It's NOT okay for museums to sell art, or at least it shouldn't be, unless that art is manifestly not of museum quality and has no use for study purposes.

In my view, it's not even okay for one museum to sell museum-quality art to another museum. Doing that means that the public is, in essence, paying for the same object twice: The tax exemptions that are granted to nonprofit institutions and the tax deductions allowed to donors are the way by which the American public subsidizes museums and their acquisitions. The objects are held in trust for us by these nonprofit institutions. If a museum truly has no use for a museum-quality work, it shouldn't sell, but give it to another museum (as recently happened with the transfer to the Metropolitan Museum of the Brooklyn Museum's costume collection).

AAMD's "Criteria for Deaccessioning and Disposal," as presently worded, are not binding criteria; they're SUGGESTED criteria. They are presented in the association's "Professional Practices in Art Museums" as reasons why art disposals "might be contemplated." Those reasons include: poor quality, poor condition, redundancy, inauthenticity, problems of title, inconsistency with the museum's mission.

If AAMD wants to assert moral authority and take the high ground on this issue, it should insist that its own stated criteria be the ONLY possible justifications for disposals of objects, rather than factors that "might be contemplated." And if it truly wants transparency in museum deaccessioning, AAMD should insist that its members publicize contemplated deaccessions in advance, on their websites and/or on AAMD's website, so that the public can be properly informed of plans to dispose of the public's patrimony. Publication in an auction catalogue, after an item has already been consigned for sale, is not sufficient notice.

Only with a requirement for advance public disclosure will stealth deaccessions like the National Academy's become a thing of the past.

And now, in other deaccession news...Jehuda Reinharz, as quoted in today's (Thursday's) Boston Globe by reporter Geoff Edgers, simply cannot be serious! If you thought Brandeis University was flip-flopping before, just get a load of this.

The late Olga Raggio

Olga Raggio, 82 [via], was, during her time at the Metropolitan Museum, one of the relatively rare high-ranking female museum professionals in this country. Seriously considered for the directorship that was ultimately won by Philippe de Montebello, she was at that time chairman of the Met's Western European arts department. She was praised by Thomas Hoving, in his book about his own Met directorship, as "the sharpest eye in the business."

In addition to her museum work, she had taught at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts as an adjunct professor. We learn from Grace Glueck's 1971 NY Times profile that Raggio was born in Rome and fluent in six languages.

I wish I could find you her photo and/or an appreciation on the Met's website, but so far nothing is posted there. [UPDATE: The above photo was later supplied by a sympathetic Met staffer.] The best I can do is direct you to this obit in the NY Times classifieds that was placed there by the Met. It credits her for "her role in organizing ground-breaking exhibitions, such as 'The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art' in 1981, and for exemplary publications such as 'The Gubbio Studiolo and its Conservation,' 1999."

In its written statement Monday announcing its plan to close the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University said that "the university will publicly sell the art collection."

Let me repeat that: It said "THE art collection." It didn't say "SOME of the art collection."

But now Fred Thys of Boston's public radio station, WBUR, reports that Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz informed him that the university "does not intend to sell the entire art collection, just some of the works. He promises that the university will check the donors' wishes before selling. And, he says Brandeis hopes to avoid dumping these works onto the art market at a time when prices are depressed. It intends, rather, to take its time selling them piecemeal at the best prices it can get."

All of this backpedaling (bringing to mind other misstatements) appears to be a direct reaction to criticisms that have been heaped on Brandeis' misconceived plan by artworld luminaries, Brandeis donors, some faculty members, and the university's own museum director and staff, who were never accorded the courtesy of being warned, let alone consulted, about the impending Rose Rout. Clearly, the university was hellbent on selling, and didn't want to be confused by such professional concerns as ethical standards, legally enforceable donor restrictions, or the plummeting market for contemporary art---all of which might have come up in discussions with the museum's director, Michael Rush, if only he'd been asked.

Here's more from the journalist who owns this story, Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe, who reports on the negative reaction to the plan from many quarters. (Once Geoff's astute reporting singlehandedly rescues the Rose, I'm sure he'll succeed in his mission to reunite the Kinks.) The Globe has added its own negative reaction, in the form of a strong opinion piece by its art critic, Sebastian Smee.

Also weighing in is NPR, which interviewed David Genser, a collector who had recently donated a Rosenquist print. More importantly, Time magazine's Looking Around blog features an illuminating Q&A between art critic Richard Lacayo and the Rose's director.

My guess is that Rush, who's supposed to have his director's job until June 30, may be pushed to an early exit if he doesn't stop mouthing off against the university's administration. My second guess is that he doesn't much care: He wants this story to be told.

Now I'm going offline for a few hours, in order to complete an application for an award that I'm not going to get. As an advance consolation prize, I hope that some of you will finally respond to my CultureGrrl Ad Drive. While I'm happy to have all that "Jazz" in my righthand column, the Grrl cannot live on one ad alone. As you well know, I've got no lack of vanity, but I'm loath to engage much longer in a vanity project---a labor-of-love that's respected but unremunerative.

If you want me to keep hurling my fastballs, you gotta step up to the plate.

It's "The Spectre of the Rosenbaum":

Malcolm Rogers

In my diatribe yesterday against the decision by the board of the Association of Art Museum Directors that its member museums should deny loans to or collaboration with the National Academy, I noted that six museums listed on the Academy's website as lending art to an upcoming Academy show have now been deleted from the online description of that show. The only lender still listed was not an AAMD member. What I didn't say is that I had contacted Carmine Branagan, director of the Academy, several times for comment on this, but received none.

This just hit my inbox this morning from Malcolm Rogers, director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts:

I believe you will find that the Metropolitan Museum, the MFA Boston and the National Portrait Gallery have not yet decided whether to withdraw their loans to the National Academy's exhibition, pending discussions at the AAMD conference. I believe there is some sympathy for the notion that one ought not to rescind existing loan agreements, or adopt too punitive an approach.

Sounds like rebellion in the ranks may be brewing. It should be an interesting meeting.

[NOTE: I originally intended to post this yesterday, until the Rose Art Museum situation preempted it. But recent developments make this recommendation more relevant than ever, as I will argue below.]

I'm second to no one in deploring the National Academy Museum's desperation deaccessions, but I think the Association of Art Museum Directors' reaction to that watershed event went too far in one respect. In another respect, though, AAMD has yet to go far enough. My opinions on this are only reinforced by the late-breaking news (here, here, here and here) about Brandeis University's decision to "deaccession" its entire Rose Art Museum.

There are two fixes that I think AAMD's membership should consider during the deaccession deliberations at the association's midwinter meeting this week. Here's the first:

Rescind the AAMD board's decision to isolate the National Academy.

The National Academy made a deplorable mistake in selling two important paintings to fund operations and pay debts. I completely agree that losing its AAMD membership is the price it must pay for violating the association's written ethical standards. Being removed from the leading professional organization of its peers imposes significant hardships, in terms of loss of reputation, loss of collegial fellowship, and the likely loss of financial support from donors and government funders repelled by the Academy's actions.

That (as I've previously suggested) should be punishment enough.

To declare that AAMD members should no longer lend art to the National Academy or even collaborate on otherwise worthwhile projects, however, strikes me as nothing less than an assault on academic freedom. Not only are AAMD members withdrawing promised loans from future National Academy-organized exhibitions that have important public and scholarly value, but other museums that were planning to partner with the Academy now find themselves scrambling to change their plans so as not to incur the disapproval of their colleagues.

If you go to the Academy's website, you can see the harm that AAMD's blacklisting has already inflicted: The description (scroll down) of the museum's future show of Zorn, Sargent and Sorolla no longer contains the names of the following institutions that were originally listed as lending works: the Metropolitan Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, National Portrait Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Clark Art Institute, New Britain Museum of American Art. All that's left from the original list of lenders is the Hispanic Society of America, which does not appear on on AAMD's membership list.

Meanwhile, Brian Allen, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, recently described on his museum's blog the difficulties that AAMD's edict had caused his institution. Allen explained:

I think the art museum directors did the right thing. Unfortunately, its decision puts the Addison in a bind since we had planned to collaborate with the [National Academy] museum on a show called Maverick Modernists [Apr. 29-July 31, 2011], organized by the Addison and traveling also to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum. We have, at the request of the Association of Art Museum Directors, dropped the National Academy and are now working to replace it with another venue.

As it happens, the Addison had not intended to borrow works from the National Academy for this exhibition, as I was told yesterday by Juliann McDonough, the museum's curatorial associate who is working on the show. But the logical extension of AAMD's illogical excommunication is, "Neither a lender nor a borrower be." Everyone, not just the National Academy, is the poorer if not only its staff but also its art becomes untouchable.

Imagine if this same policy were now applied to Brandeis University because of its profoundly wrongheaded plan to sell its entire art collection. Should curators from museums that are members of AAMD now be directed to steer clear of that university's professors? Surely the Brandeis' deaccession transgressions would be far worse, if realized, than the Academy's. But blackballing its scholars seems, to me at least, unthinkable.

As you can tell from my Wall Street Journal article about Michael Conforti yesterday, AAMD's leadership was, to put it mildly, miffed that Academy director Carmine Branagan, disregarding the association's counsel and offers of help, forged ahead with the sales of its Frederic Church and Sanford Gifford. This strong displeasure at being deliberately defied undoubtedly figured into the board's decision to do something beyond what is required by AAMD's own guidelines.

The association's policy guide, "Professional Practices in Art Museums," states:

AAMD members who violate this code of ethics [which includes the stricture against selling art to raise operating funds] will be subject to discipline by reprimand, suspension or expulsion from the Association. Infractions by any art museum MAY [emphasis added] expose that institution to sanctions, such as suspension of loans and shared exhibitions by AAMD members.

The action taken by the association's board against the Academy was excessive, unnecessary and unprecedented. It should be revisited this week by AAMD's full membership.

COMING SOON (paradoxically): The need for stricter deaccession guidelines.

Masachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley

Sometimes, it seems, we can't trust what Brandeis University's publicity machine would have us believe. As I reported here, a university spokesman told the Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers that the Massachusetts Attorney General had been informed of university's plan to sell the Rose Museum's entire collection. The university spokesman declared that the AG (in Edgers words) "will not block" the disposals. It now appears this may have been mere wishful thinking on the university's part.

And the statement released yesterday by Brandeis' press office, which was specifically an announcement of the plan to close the Rose and sell the art, made it sound as if the faculty had approved this:

In a special session on Jan. 22, the Brandeis faculty voted unanimously to support the president and trustees as they combat the effects of the economic recession and work to make Brandeis stronger academically and fiscally for the 21st century. Faculty members agreed that the university should maintain the strengths that have helped position Brandeis among the nation's top liberal arts and research institutions.

Both of these attempts by Brandeis to spin the story have been cast in doubt by subsequent reports.

Randy Kennedy and Carol Vogel of the NY Times now inform us:

The Massachusetts attorney general's office said on Tuesday that it planned to conduct a detailed review of Brandeis University's surprise decision to sell off the entire holdings of its Rose Art Museum...Emily LaGrassa, director of communications for the state attorney general, Martha Coakley, said that Brandeis had informed the office on Monday of its decision, but had not consulted with the attorney general in advance. The attorney general has approval powers over certain actions of nonprofit institutions in the state.

Ms. LaGrassa said that in the case of Brandeis, the attorney general would review wills and agreements made between the museum and the estates of donors to determine if selling artworks violated the terms of donations. "We have not yet offered any opinion on any aspect of the proposed sales," she said, adding, "We do expect this to be a lengthy process."

Long enough, we hope, to make the university rethink its bad decision.

As for the unanimous faculty vote, whatever it was about, it cannot have been a referendum on the Rose plan, although the press release made it sound that way (and even fooled the Art Law Blogger Donn Zaretsky).

Here's what the Inside Higher Ed website had to say about faculty involvement (or lack thereof) in the Rose decision :

While faculty leaders say they feel confident that they will have a meaningful voice in the curricular debates, the decision to close the art museum and sell its holdings was not taken to the faculty or faculty committees for a vote or recommendation....

William Flesch, a professor of American and English literature and chair of the Faculty Senate, said that some faculty members had discussed on a faculty listserv the possibility of selling the museum's collection to deal with the current budget crunch. Flesch said that this "wasn't a leading idea" and was never recommended or approved in a formal way by the faculty. He said he did not object to the administration making the decision on its own. Asked if he knew about museum standards that consider the planned sale unethical, Flesch said he was not aware of them.

It sounds to me like the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, and the Association of Art Museum Directors need to do better job of publicizing and explaining their strong positions against monetizing collections. Otherwise what was once a "slippery slope" could fast become an avalanche.

UPDATE: Geoff Edgers has amended his Boston Globe report on the AG situation as follows:

Correction: Because of incorrect information provided to the Globe by a Brandeis University spokesman, a Page One story yesterday on the university's decision to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its art incorrectly characterized where the attorney general's office stands on the matter. The office was merely informed of the university's intention and has not taken a position.

David Robertson, President, ACUMG and director, Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Northwestern University

The Association of College and University Museums and Galleries (ACUMG), the leading professional organization for such institutions, has issued this statement lamenting Brandeis University's plan to close its Rose Art Museum and sell off its collection:

Speaking on behalf of the ACUMG, we are saddened and disappointed to learn of the decision by Brandeis University to close the Rose Art Museum. This act is the culmination of a series of attempts to sell works of art from university and college museums throughout the U.S. over the last few years for the purpose of compensating for financial difficulties for which the museums have played no role.

We all recognize that the current financial downturn is serious, but we object to institutions that have no exigency plan to address downturns in enrollment or endowment, and simply look for something that is easy to capitalize to compensate for a lack of serious advanced planning involving administrators, trustees and faculty.

Brandeis' action places all university and college museums in jeopardy by this proposed action. The decades and hard work it took to build their collection, develop donor relations, and make the museum an integral part of the education of Brandeis students will simply be ended. Future generations of students who might select to go to Brandeis will not have the opportunities offered by the Rose Museum to generations of past and present students. All of us are diminished by this.

And this just in from the Association of Art Museum Directors:

We are shocked and dismayed by decision of the leadership of Brandeis University, and will be taking up this matter at the meeting of our members this week.

UPDATE---AAMD has just augmented its statement:

AAMD is shocked and dismayed to learn of Brandeis University's plans to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its collection. This is a sad day for the students of Brandeis, the University, and its community. The Rose Art Museum plays a vital role in bringing modern and contemporary art to the public and increasing understanding of the art of our time.  AAMD's mid-winter meeting begins tomorrow and its members will discuss the ramifications of Brandeis' decision and any actions the Association may take in response to these regrettable plans.

Thumbs down on Brandeis University President Jehuda Reinharz

Forget the Quincy Jones Petition.

If you want to sign an important artworld action document, go to the petition by Concerned Alumni of Brandeis University---In Opposition to the Closing of the Rose Art Museum.

The petition says it all:

The Brandeis University Board of Trustees in a closed meeting and without any community input decided to sell off the University's unique collection of modern art in order to meet a budget shortfall. But there are other ways to do this. The Rose Art Museum must be preserved.

I got the link to the this from my Exhibitionist blogging buddy who moonlights (just kidding) as ace arts reporter Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe. Go-get-'em Edgers has a fleshed-out story today on Brandeis University's woefully wrongheaded plan. He gets extensive comment from the museum's shell-shocked director, Michael Rush, who says the collection could be worth over $350 million. We don't even want to know.

Here's the part of Edgers' story that makes me see red:

A Brandeis spokesman said that the Massachusetts attorney general's office, which oversees donations, has been informed of the move and will not block it.

Geoff, get that on the record from the AG's office, with explanation, and then make a Freedom of Information request for whatever documents, if any, Brandeis submitted to that government agency. (I did this for my Wall Street Journal story about the NY Public Library art sales, and, after a struggle, got the goods.) Knowing your style, you're already on it.

Whatever the AG decides to do (or not), the Rose's art donors and financial supporters will not stand for this (and could decide to sue, depending on restrictions placed on gifts). The art museum community and leading professional organizations in the field will not stand for this. If AAMD wants to blackball someone, it should blackball any auction house so mercenary as to accept this consignment from hell.

Here's the "Important Message Regarding the Rose Art Museum" that Brandeis University sent out to its alumni and other friends [forwarded by Cousin Deb, into whose inbox this bombshell landed at 7:46 p.m. last night]:

January 26, 2009
Dear Friends,

The global financial crisis and deepening national economic recession require Brandeis to formulate and execute decisive plans that will position the university to emerge stronger for the benefit of our students. To this end, our response to the crisis is to focus and sustain our core academic mission. I am writing to tell you that the Board of Trustees met today and voted to close the Rose Art Museum. The decision was difficult and was reached after a painstaking assessment of the university's need to mobilize for the future and initiate a strategy to replenish our financial assets.

The Rose has been a marvelous addition to the Fine Arts program, and we are grateful to everyone who expressed their love for art and admiration for Brandeis's academic mission by helping to create, build, and support the museum. Choosing between and among important and valued university assets is terrible, but our priority in the face of hard choices will always be the university's core teaching and research mission. Today's decision will set in motion a long-term plan to sell the art collection and convert the professional art facility to a teaching, studio, and gallery space for undergraduate and graduate students and faculty.

The university's official public statement can be found below [posted here yesterday on CultureGrrl]. I will be writing to the community shortly to update you on other initiatives currently under discussion by the faculty and the administration.

Sincerely,
Jehuda Reinharz
[Brandeis University President]

UPDATE: There is now also a Save the Rose Art website.

Michael Conforti's WSJ Portrait, by Ismael Roldan

You can read me now: He's a Museum Leader for These Troubled Times, my Wall Street Journal profile of Michael Conforti, director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors.

Of course when I wrote this piece for today's (Tuesday's) WSJ "Leisure & Arts" page, I had no idea just how troubled these times would be!

Now AAMD members will REALLY have something to talk about at their midwinter meeting, beginning tomorrow in San Diego. No, not my article, but how best to mobilize against Brandeis University's shocking plan to monetize the entire collection of its Rose Art Museum.

If Tennessee's Attorney General Robert Cooper can express serious reservations about Fisk University's plan to sell a half-share in its Stieglitz Collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum, we can only hope that Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is concerned about selling the whole Rose, and has also read William Blake.

Michael Rush, director of Brandeis University's withering Rose Art Museum

[More CultureGrrl coverage of the Rose: here, here, here, here, here and here.]

Forget about the National Academy's selling a couple of major paintings---mere chicken feed. How about selling your museum's ENTIRE collection?

After you rub your eyes in disbelief, read it and weep---Geoff Edgers' and Peter Schworm's Boston Globe article about the planned closing and art cleanout sale of Brandeis University's 47-year-old Rose Art Museum.

Here's the university's entire press release. The headline is beyond belief:

With vote to close art museum, Brandeis renews 'unwavering' commitment to students, research and academic mission

WALTHAM, Mass., Jan. 26, 2009 -- Brandeis University's Board of Trustees today voted unanimously to close the Rose Art Museum as part of a campus-wide effort to preserve the university's educational mission in the face of the historic economic recession and financial crisis. Board members stressed that the museum decision will not alter the university's commitment to the arts and the teaching of the arts.

"These are extraordinary times," said Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz. "We cannot control or fix the nation's economic problems. We can only do what we have been entrusted to do---act responsibly with the best interests of our students and their futures foremost in mind."

Opened in 1961, the Rose Art Museum houses a large amount of modern and contemporary art. Plans call for the museum to close in late summer 2009, and transition into a fine arts teaching center with studio space and an exhibition gallery. After necessary legal approvals and working with a top auction house, the university will publicly sell the art collection. Proceeds from the sale will be reinvested in the university to combat the far-reaching effects of the economic crisis, and fortify the university's position for the future.

Brandeis officials said the decision to close the museum is part of an emerging new vision for the university aimed at streamlining it for the future while bolstering its focus on undergraduates, the liberal arts and research. In recent months, the university has been reviewing expenditures and discussing new initiatives to meet the serious economic challenges. Belt tightening has already brought substantial decreases in administrative budgets.

In a special session on Jan. 22, the Brandeis faculty voted unanimously to support the president and trustees as they combat the effects of the economic recession and work to make Brandeis stronger academically and fiscally for the 21st century. Faculty members agreed that the university should maintain the strengths that have helped position Brandeis among the nation's top liberal arts and research institutions.

Brandeis officials have estimated that the economic recession will continue to adversely affect operating expenses, performance of the endowment, financial aid and scholarships. At Brandeis and schools around the country, fundraising revenue is declining and families are looking for more financial aid to help them cope with their own unenviable economic straits.

Reinharz said the Rose Museum decision was very difficult. But he characterized it as an important step in the ongoing resource management and allocation process on the school's campus. "I am satisfied that our commitment is unwavering; that someday we will look back and say that when the quality of education and student services was at stake, we made hard choices so that Brandeis could emerge even stronger."

We can only hope that the university doesn't get those "necessary legal approvals."

Where is Brandeis Class of '75 alumnus Michael Kaiser, the turnaround expert, when the Rose really needs him?

Janet Landay, newly appointed AAMD executive director

As you wing your way tomorrow to the midwinter membership meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors in San Diego (Jan. 28-30), all you artworld luminaries should fasten your seatbelts, make sure you've found your flotation devices, and then turn to the "Leisure & Arts" page of your copy of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal, where you can eavesdrop on my "cultural conversation" at the Harvard Club in New York with your association's very articulate president, Michael Conforti.

He speaks to me of deaccessions, financial-crisis rap sessions, cultural exchanges, the importance of museums as stable havens in hard times...and, let us not forget, his son's 17th birthday. Happily, there were no potted plants (scroll down) at the Harvard Club that Michael felt impelled to rearrange. (Now I've gotten him peeved at me again.)

Speaking of rearranging things, I've got a couple of things that I'd like AAMD to rearrange at the members' meeting. More on that soon.

Conforti told me that topics he and his colleagues will be discussing include: deaccessioning; how contemporary art and the contemporary art market affect museums; diversity initiatives in arts education and in the museum profession.

I'm sure they'll also be talking about their just-announced new executive director, Janet Landay, who will replace (effective Feb. 23)  the long-serving Mimi Gaudieri. Landay, who has worked at five art museums and at the American Federation of Arts, is best known for her 13-year stint as curator of exhibitions and assistant to the director at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. [UPDATE: You can read more about Landay in AAMD's press release, here.]

"We are not planning any resolutions," Conforti told me. In that case, I'd like to suggest two. (COMING SOON)

I'll link to my Wall Street Journal article when it's online, probably later tonight.

David Smith, teacher, author and overthrower of culture czars

As you might have expected, CultureGrrl readers are engaged by the question of whether there should be a cabinet-level Secretary of Culture in the Obama administration. (My thumbs-down is here and here.)

At the end of this post, you can read what Bill Ivey, who was appointed by President Obama to lead the national transition team for the three federal cultural agencies (National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services) has said on this topic.

But first, let's go to some reader responses:

---From David Smith, senior lecturer in history at Baylor University and author of Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy:

I was the guy Elizabeth Blair [NPR's cultural correspondent] put up against Quincy Jones on Morning Edition last week. I also was interviewed Wednesday [along with Blake Gopnik, the Washington Post's art critic] on WAMU [American University Radio] in D.C., on the same thing.

You're right about its being a difficult position to support government spending on the arts but to oppose this notion of a Department of Culture, Cultural Czar, or whatever they're calling it today.

In the past couple of days, I've received a few e-mails from people who oppose the idea, including one from a guy who works with a major symphony orchestra. So despite those exploding petition numbers, there are at least a few of us out here.

David, who seems to be the news media's go-to person on this topic, also had an anti-culture czar piece in Saturday's Wall Street Journal---An Old, Bad Idea for the Arts.

---From Julia Gleich, an American dancer, choreographer and teacher, who works in London:

I was relieved to see your article about the culture minister. I agree that chaos is important and that those wishing for a Secretary of the Arts are neglecting to see the drawbacks. My Facebook status recently said, "Julia remembers that both Stalin and Hitler had national cultural policies."

I live in England and dance here is very confused, Ballet was considered the honored national dance form for most of the 20th century, a time when modern dance was thriving in other parts of Europe, but most especially in the U.S. Modern dance was a reaction against tradition. As a result there is little history of modern dance here.

Now this is a small example. But the bigger example comes from my own experiences. ALL of my students want to dance in New York, to work in the U.S., because it is more open to a range of arts.

---From William Osborne, an American composer who has lived in Europe for the last 30 years:

The U.S. is the only industrial country in the world without a comprehensive system of public arts funding. The negative effects on our society are obvious, though unpublicized. On a per capita basis, Germany has over 20 times more full-time, year-round professional orchestras than the U.S. Similar embarrassing ratios are found when comparing the U.S. to almost all other European countries. Why does this remain unmentioned?

Are Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and Austria really that bad? Do they suppress the arts? Are they Czarist societies? Can you really generalize that the cultural lives of these countries are less "nimble" than in America? Why not discuss the liveliness and innovation of the arts in Europe and their relationships to adequate and consistent funding?

Why not note how Finland's generous public funding system has essentially made it a world power in classical music, even though it has a population of only 5.5 million? Why not discuss the cultural richness that Europe's system of state radio orchestras, theaters, and opera houses brings to their societies?

In reality, I think it might be our own plutocratic system of arts funding by the wealthy that leads to suppression. Only a few financial centers like New York City end up with adequate cultural lives. Why can't we Americans have public arts funding like everyone else, without people using terms like "Culture Czar"?

So what's Bill Ivey's take on all this?

Let's go to the Publishers Weekly review (scroll down) of Ivey's May 2008 book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights:

Ivey's answer is an official U.S. Department of Cultural Affairs...committed to the idea that the arts are "key to a high quality of life for all Americans."

Gee, I thought this was Quincy Jones' idea!

UPDATE: More on Bill Ivey and various hopes and predictions about the new administration's arts policy in Robin Pogrebin's article in today's NY Times.

Seattle Art Museum director Mimi Gates, speaking at 2007 press preview for SAM's expansion

When I read last night (here, here and here) that JPMorgan Chase, which has acquired Washington Mutual Bank, was not going to honor WaMu's lease of eight floors above the new Seattle Art Museum expansion, my first thought was that the museum might sue. It has been receiving some $5.8 million annually for 240,000 square feet of office space, which SAM had the future right to occupy when it was ready for its next expansion. Now, a day after a major employer in the region, Microsoft, announced that it would be cutting up to 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months, everyone's thinking contraction, not expansion.

In October, shortly after JPMorgan Chase had acquired the failed WaMu, I asked Nicole Griffin, SAM's associate manager of public relations, if getting JPMorgan Chase to assume WaMu's lease could pose a problem. She then informed me that there were "change-of-control provisions in the lease agreement" that could protect SAM's interests. She indicated that the museum hoped the new owner would honor WaMu's rental obligations.

Think again. For now, JPMorgan Chase is keeping ownership of the top four floors of SAM's 16-story, Brad Cloepfil-designed building, as well as the 42-story WaMu Center office building behind SAM, which was constructed on museum-owned land in conjunction with SAM's 2007 expansion. But this March, JPMorgan Chase intends to terminate the lease on the eight floors directly above the museum. SAM is left searching for a new tenant (or tenants) willing to accept the museum's right eventually to occupy that space.

As for why no legal action is contemplated, Griffin told me this:

The change-of-control provisions would have pertained to a merger or acquisition of the bank by another commercial entity and would have been enforceable in a normal commercial transaction. However, the WaMu situation was unique in that the bank was briefly seized by a federal agency, the FDIC, which has federal statutory authority to abrogate obligations of financial institutions it may take over. In selling WaMu to JPM, it provided JPM with a much wider range of options in regard to lease terminations than would otherwise have been the case.

JPMorgan Chase sweetened this sour deal (and perhaps headed off any thoughts of litigation) by coming across with a $10-million grant, to be paid over the next five years. This beneficence occasioned a manic joint SAM-JPMorgan Chase press release (not online at this writing), in which the museum's director, Mimi Gates (who last June announced her intention to retire, effective this June 30), extolled the bank's "commitment to the community" and its "collaboration and sincere generosity." Chase chimed in with self-congratulation for its "special relationship with SAM....We strive to be a good corporate citizen in all communities where we do business."

Still, $2 million a year leaves SAM short about $3.8 a year. The money was going towards the museum's $59-million debt from the expansion, and "related obligations" for the rental space, according to Griffin. The museum professes optimism about finding a new tenant for what Griffin called "Class A office space in a superb location and a very competitive price."

And let us not forget that classy movie theater, right across the street.

UPDATE: In today's Seattle Times, reporter Jim Brunner added his byline and financial acumen to yesterday's story (first link at the top) by Janet Tu. Here's some of the added information in today's report:

The move means some risk for Seattle taxpayers because the city guaranteed $65 million in bonds for SAM's expansion. If the museum were to default on the bonds, Seattle would be on the hook for about $4 million a year in bond payments.

Dwight Dively, the city's finance director, said he sees no imminent threat of that. "That is not to say it couldn't happen over a longer period of time" if SAM cannot find a tenant or its financial condition deteriorates, he said.

To help find a new tenant, SAM has turned to Matt Griffin, the Seattle developer who arranged SAM's complicated expansion deal with WaMu.

Is turning to the guy who got them into this mess a good plan?

Taft Museum, Cincinnati

Let's leave Washington and go back to Cincinnati, where Eric McCauley Lee, current director of the Taft Museum and director-elect of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, aced his CultureGrrl interview.

As promised last week, here are some excerpts from our phone conversation.

---On the Kimbell's planned expansion:

I think Renzo Piano is absolutely the right choice as architect. At the same time, I want to make sure that the integrity of the Kahn building is maintained and that the special qualities that make the Kimbell unique will be maintained with the new addtion.

I'm very sensitive to the architecture of Louis Kahn. I went to college and graduate school at Yale and spent a lot of time with the Kahn museums there. Louis Kahn did so much to shape my views of architecture and I think that's something that I bring to the table, especially with the expansion. My reverence for Kahns's architecture will play into that.

The design is still in the very early stages. I do hope to contribute to that. Respecting the original Kahn building will be critical. At the same time, it [the Piano building] should be strong in its own right. It shouldn't completely defer to the Kahn building. That said, the Kahn building is arguably the greatest purpose-built museum building in the world. I certainly think it is. And you cannot tamper with that at all.

---On his vision for the Kimbell's collection and exhibitions:

I think the Kimbell has benefited from having directors and also staff members with among the best eyes of their generation. I certainly want to build on the Kimbell's legacy of acquisitions with an emphasis on quality and importance. I hope that the recent fall to earth of the art market will create additional opportunities for acquisitions.

I want to maintain the Kimbell's reputation for stellar, important exhibitions. I do want to reach out to a broad, general public. At the same time it's important to balance those exhibitions with exhibitions that make a contribution to scholarship. You always want to have exhibitions that try to do both.

I think it's a mistake for museums to organize exhibitions that veer too much to one extreme or the other. I think it's a mistake for museums to be strictly "ivory tower." But a museum like the Kimbell certainly should not veer too much into more commercial territory.

---On his track record, which is short on major art purchases and world-class exhibitions:

I've followed the art market very closely for decades and I certainly have honed my eye and I have a great deal of knowledge about the art market. That will certainly come into play at the Kimbell.

I've had more experience as a director than as a curator. When I finished grad school, I had the choice between working as a curator at a large East Coast museum or working as a director at a small museum that had tremendous potential for growth. I decided to go the director route.

I was able to build a new museum building [a 34,000-square-foot wing designed by Hugh Newell Jacobson for the University of Oklahoma's Fred Jones Jr. Museum, which Lee directed]. The collections grew tremendously, primarily through gifts [most notably, the Weitzenhoffer bequest of French Impressionists], rather than through actually buying them. The museum at the University of Oklahoma has among the strongest collections of any public university-based museum.

I've curated many shows myself and I've been director of museums that organized important exhibitions. At the University of Oklahoma, I organized a Leon Polk Smith show shortly before I left for the Taft. I was very proud of that exhibition. [As reported in my previous Lee post, an upcoming exhibition that sounds promising, "Dutch Utopia," was initiated during his short time at the Taft.]

My academic background is in European old master painting, above all. I've taught in that field. I also taught courses on architectural history at the University of Oklahoma.

As it happened, the exhibition at the Taft Museum when Lee arrived there was the National Academy's "Luminist Horizons" show of highlights from its James Suydam Collection. Two important Hudson River School paintings were infamously deaccessioned by the National Academy from that collection late last year. Here's what Lee had to say about those disposals:

I was heartbroken to hear they had been sold. I believe that art is the reason why a museum exists and should not be capitalized. A museum has operating expenses in order to serve the mission of caring for the art and presenting that art to the public. For a museum to sell major works from its collection in order to fund operations is counterintuitive.

I'm bothered by the precedent that the National Academy has set and I believe that the strong stance taken by AAMD was important to send a message to other museums that might be tempted to sell works in order to fund their operating budgets, especially in these difficult times. I think AAMD's stance helped to lessen the potential impact of the precedent set by the National Academy.

Well said.

Alexander Avdeyev, recently named culture minister of the Russian Federation

[Part I is here.]

Proponents of the idea of a cabinet-level Secretary of Culture point out that foreign culture ministers currently have no counterpart in the U.S.

There's good reason for that.

Many foreign countries have a tradition of substantial government subsidies for cultural institutions. When your government pays the culture bills, you need the oversight of a government agency. But there are big tradeoffs for being largely dependent on government handouts---not only the specter of government interference but also the sleepy complacency that comes from not having to make a strong case to outside funders.

The nimble American model of multiple income streams, not the lumbering European tradition of large-scale government subsidies, is the wave of the future---hence the news reported Tuesday by Farah Nayeri of Bloomberg that the Louvre is becoming "the first French museum to establish an endowment," using "the 175 million euros ($230 million) it received to set up an Abu Dhabi offshoot."

A cabinet-level U.S. Department of the Arts would be a culture ministry without a cause. Our arts institutions are not going to get the kind of subsidies that have been common in Europe...nor should they seek them. Without a substantial financial underpinning, a ministry of culture would be added bureaucracy without adequate benefit.

Quincy Jones

I've got nothing against better coordination among government programs involving the arts and humanities. Regular meetings of representatives from the relevant offices and agencies could foment creative synergies. Perhaps a White House official with advisory, not managerial, responsibilities could help facilitate this without inserting what we emphatically DON'T need---an extra layer of bureaucratic control over our nation's cultural activity.

The notion of a cabinet-level Secretary of Culture, advocated in a petition (167,533 signatories, at this writing) promoted by Quincy Jones, music producer and Friend of Barack, runs contrary to the pluralistic, appropriately disorderly nature of creative life in this country. As we saw during the culture wars of the 1990s, which imposed decency standards on federal arts grants, anything that potentially makes the arts into more of a political football is fraught with peril.

It's time for the artistic community---artists, museums, performing arts groups---to counter the push by Jones and other Secretary of Culture advocates---including William Ferris, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors (see pages 4-5)---who think like the bureaucratic class, not the creative class. More government oversight will inevitably lead to more government interference and control.

For more on this issue, see the Washington Post's Quincy Jones Leads Chorus Urging a Cabinet-Level Arts Czar by Jacqueline Trescott, and listen to National Public Radio's Does U.S. Need a Culture Czar? by Elizabeth Blair. Jones told Blair that he "doesn't know" whether he'd like the arts cabinet post himself.

UPDATE: I just looked again at the petition site, and the number of signatories is surging by leaps and bounds. Can anyone stand in front of this runaway train? Support of the arts shouldn't be equated with supporting a Secretary of Culture. I fear that, in many people's minds, it is.

Part II is here.

Tunesmith Jerome Kern: Inaugural Ditty

The deep emotional resonance of the inauguration in Washington today had everything to do with the extraordinary ascent of our first President of color, but little to do with the power of his words. To me, the speech was thoughtful, serious and substantial, but not (as many had hoped) inspired or inspiring in the manner of Lincoln, FDR or even Kennedy. One thing you could say for it: There was no demagoguery. He low-keyed it, giving the adoring crowd little occasion for cheers or sustained applause.

It's disconcerting when one of the most memorable moments of the speech---one that the NY Times chose to put up near the top of its account of this historic occasion---echoes the lyrics of a bouncy 1936 Jerome Kern ditty.

Pick Yourself Up goes, in part, like this:

Will you remember the famous men
Who had to fall to rise again?
...Pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
Start all over again.

They probably wished they could have started the oath of office all over again: The most astonishing part of the ceremony was the double-flub of that solemn moment, which I gather, was chiefly Chief Justice Roberts' fault for scrambling the proper order of words. Don't they rehearse these things?

A factual flub also needed a do-over: Obama was not the 44th American to take the the presidential oath, as he stated in the third sentence of his inaugural oration. One of Jerome Kern's "famous men" whom we "will remember" (or should) is Grover Cleveland, who served as both the 22nd and 24th President of the United States.

For best deployment of words, my vote goes to the final speaker, who delivered the spirited, sparkling benediction---the 87-year-old Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He's got a long-time reputation for "rhyming and rollicking," as evidenced by the 1997 NY Times account of his farewell address to the SCLC. He injected a needed dose of wit and ebullience into the proceedings.

And it fell to Rev. Lowery to finally echo the Obama campaign rallying cry that we were all waiting for:

Yes we can.

"Septimius Severus," Roman, about AD 193-200, the British Museum

For the ultimate erudite lesson in "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," we take you to school with the Don herself, Mary Beard, a Cambridge classics professor and my blogging buddy at A Don's Life, who brings us news from the second century A.D.: One Lucius Septimius Severus has just become the the first African-Roman emperor of Rome.

As Mary tells it:

Like Obama he was of mixed race---his father from Libya, his mother of European descent. He too had an outspoken and determined wife, from Syria. And his first task on coming to the throne in 193 AD was to deal with a military disaster in Iraq ("Parthia," as it was then known)....

Did the success of Septimius Severus show that race no longer mattered in Roman politics? And is there a message in his story for the new President-elect?

If so, the message is a double-edged one. A few more African-Romans did make it to the higher echelons of the imperial government (in many cases members of the emperor's own family, or his wife's friends). But on the wider view, it was not so much that his race did not matter, but that the Roman upper class and the Roman media made sure that it simply was not seen....

No one is suggesting, of course, that Obama's publicity team will attempt, literally, to whiten the image of the 44th President. But the "Septimius Severus problem" is already clear enough....The more you present Obama as any other president, and peddle the self-congratulatory clichés about the end of a raclal divide at the highest pinnacle of American politics, the more you are simply refusing to see that for most people in the U.S. and the rest of the world race does still matter.

The Don has more of interest to tell us (including some musings on the Margaret Thatcher problem), but you'd best read it on her own site (linked above the quote) and then surf over to the website of the British Museum, which owns the above-pictured statue of the mixed-race emperor/general, "where he looks slightly more "African" than in most," as Mary wrote me.

Or you can click on today's British Times Online and read an Op-Ed by Natalie Haynes, a former student of Mary's who went on to better things, becoming a stand-up comedian (inspired no doubt by Beard's own sense of humor). Haynes opines:

Barack Obama is the modern incarnation of the Emperor Titus, who ruled the Roman Empire from AD 79-81, before death cut his reign tragically short. [I hope she's not suggesting a parallel there!]

This is Suetonius: "Titus had such winning ways---perhaps inborn, perhaps cultivated subsequently, or conferred on him by fortune---that he became an object of universal love and adoration."...Then I realised that almost all leading politicians are reworked emperors. You just have to match them up.

And she proceeds to do so for a roster of recent politicos, including Tony Blair (Augustus), Gordon Brown (Tiberius), and let us not forget, Richard Nixon (Caligula).

We Americans, of course, know nothing of ancient history, so we look to our own nation's antecedents: Is Obama the new Lincoln or is he FDR?

I think he's sui generis. You can't pigeonhole him, which is what makes him special. For now, I'm proud of what my country has done. It remains to be seen what the man can do with the hope and goodwill that he's inspired in the many who find something in his variegated background and accomplishments that they can relate to as their own---even if they're classicists!

For me (and the NY Times' Michiko Kakutani), what resonates most is his canny appreciation for the power of words. We'll likely experience more of that today.

Michael Dorf

I don't know Michael Dorf, the attorney reported by Allan Jalon of the LA Times to be a frontrunner for the post of chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. But any friend of the late Congressman Sidney Yates, the best political advocate the arts ever had, is a friend of mine.

Dorf's bio on the website of his law firm, includes a six-year stint as special counsel to the Illinois Democrat, for whom "he helped to develop national policies on arts funding." Orchestra consultant Drew McManus, on his Adaptistration blog (from which I got the link to Dorf's bio), says this:

I am familiar with Mr. Dorf's work here in the Chicagoland area and I feel he would be an excellent chairman of the NEA. He brings an unusually high level of understanding about the complexities of arts issues from a legal, financial, artistic, and administrative perspective.

I have long believed that seasoned experts who are savvy about administration and government relations, not artists (such as writer Dana Gioia and actress Jane Alexander, past NEA chairmen), should be the heads of government arts agencies. The job requires not just commitment to the arts, charm and the ability to generate good will, but also well honed administrative skills and, above all, political smarts. Dorf has represented President-elect (for one more day) Obama in matters related to election law and campaign finance compliance. So he's already got that political base covered.

It is also critically important that the NEA chairman understand his primary constituency to be artists and cultural organizations of professional caliber and the audiences for their work---not educational organizations, not amateur groups, not labor unions. The LA Times' report of several favorable responses to Dorf's possible appointment makes me a little uneasy on that score. But the views of the endorsers do not necessarily represent those of the endorsee.

Jay Kislak, Former Chairman of the State Department's Cultural Property Advisory Commitee

Everyone wondered why it was taking so long for the U.S. State Department to act on China's request---pending since May 2004---for the United States to impose sweeping import restrictions on artifacts from that country dating from prehistoric times all the way to 1911. The State Department, guided by its Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC), has usually been quick to grant source countries' requests and had never previously turned one down.

Now that the State Department has finally announced, in the last days of the Bush administration, an agreement with China (which it says "is consistent" with CPAC's recommendation), we can begin to understand the reasons for the delay: Unlike past import-restriction agreements, the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with China didn't give the source country everything it wanted. It included significant concessions to serious objections raised by U.S. museum officials and dealers.

The biggest compromise was narrowing the scope of the agreement to objects created before the year 907 A.D. (not 1911, as China had requested). Import restrictions also cover monumental and wall art that are at least 250 years old. James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, in testifying before CPAC almost four years ago, had complained that the broad range of cultural property subject to restriction under China's request would have included "material...often made for the market and...circulated in the trade since the Han Dynasty, more than 2000 years ago."

I was encouraged earlier this month when my end-of-year post, urging you to decorate my dreary right-hand column with some attractive ads, actually brought two signs of tangible reader support of my efforts for the New Year.

Now that my ad space is back to bare, I'm back to wondering how long I should keep CultureGrrl going as a labor of love and a public service (or a public nuisance, as the case may be). I was really thinking of pulling the computer plug last week, when Eric Lee, the incoming director of the Kimbell Museum, began our interview (here and here, with more coming this week) by saying that he reads CultureGrrl so regularly that he feels like he already knows me. On the same day, an amazingly well qualified young woman contacted me out of the blue, offering to be my unpaid assistant. This is certainly an idea whose time has come.

It seems that whenever I feel like stopping, something comes along and tells me not to.

If you too value this timely news and informed commentary, as well as the large audience of artworld elites who read me daily (total hits since mid-2006: more than 1 million), your advertising support would be a tangible vote of confidence. I'll know that the Metropolitan Museum finally appreciates me when I get an ad for the ever-popular Sardis Column Cuff Links. (At this writing, the Met store has not one but TWO ads on Richard Lacayo's Looking Around blog. Do you think I'm a little jealous?)

It's really easy (and cheap) to cheer me up: Just go to the ArtsJournal advertising webpage, click the CultureGrrl box and scroll down to fill out the ad form. Just a few strokes of the keyboard and your ad will be seen by the movers-and-shakers of the artworld...and I'll be able to buy this ridiculously expensive mother-of-the-groom dress:


No, this huge one is NOT my size...and I'm probably going to opt for a cheaper one. Do you think the designer might like to buy an ad? (Just kidding!)

Old masters gallery at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

[UPDATE: It turns out that the "Dutch Utopia" show I describe below was NOT conceived by the Taft, as Lee had led me to believe. It was organized by the Telfair Museum, Savannah.]

If you watched the video clip that I linked to yesterday at the end of my report on Eric McCauley Lee's appointment to the directorship of the Kimbell Museum, you know that the Taft Museum, which he currently directs, has a two-year lead time for exhibitions. That means that the exhibition plans that Lee initiated during his two-year tenure in Cincinnati will not be realized until after he leaves for Fort Worth.

That's just another reason, aside from his scant curatorial and art-purchasing experience, why it's hard to predict just how well he'll do at the Kimbell. But I liked what I heard, including this description of an upcoming show he oversaw at the Taft, which combines an intriguing art-historical slant with a substantial local vibe.

Lee told Lee:

We're planning a show called "Dutch Utopia," which features American artists who worked in the Netherlands during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And that complements or permanent collection very well: The Taft's strengths are European old master paintings and decorative arts, and the Taft has a very strong collection of Hague School paintings, which were popular among American collectors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This exhibition will complement that aspect of the collection and it will also feature many artists who were from Cincinnati, which has an amazing history of significant American artists, especially from the late 19th and early 20th centuries---John Twachtman, Edward Henry Potthast, Frank Duveneck, Worthington Whittredge, Robert Henri was here for two years---and it goes on and on.

Who knew? All of those artists, he said, will be in the "Dutch Utopia" show at the Taft, Feb. 5-May 2, 2010.

I'm going to postpone a more detailed report on our discussion until next week, because the Wyeth obit preempted the time I had planned to spend on the Lee report.

In the meantime, for a more personally informed perspective on Lee, let's go to Janelle Gelfand of the Cincinnati Enquirer. She yesterday reported the news of Lee's imminent departure from her city, after receiving a press release from the Taft that broke the Kimbell's strict news embargo. (Eric, what were you thinking?)

Here's what Gelfand wrote to me this morning:

I actually like Lee, as museum directors go. He seems very real, accessible and has a sincere love for art and architecture (not evident in every museum director I've met). I'm rather new in this "beat," since we didn't replace our art writer when she took the buyout.

(One more bit of bad news about the state of cultural criticism at our nation's newspapers.)

The Kimbell's press release, from which you can learn more about Lee's background, is here. The Taft's farewell press release, where you can learn more about what he achieved in Cincinnati, is here. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram report is here. The Dallas Morning News report, here.

Andrew Wyeth, "Christina's World," 1948, Museum of Modern Art

Many serious art historians have long admired the work of Andrew Wyeth, who died today at his home in Chadds Ford, PA. Most of them are experts in traditional, pre-20th century American art. He's anathema, I now think unfairly, to contemporary art enthusiasts, because his art is so stubbornly traditional, if not reactionary. It can be dour, obsessive, overly sentimental and irritatingly pretentious in insisting on poetic meaning for the prosaic.

But at its best, it can also be meticulously crafted and movingly evocative. There's a reason why, like it or not, the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection galleries must always display "Christina's World." As MoMA's label for the painting tells us: "In this style of painting, known as magic realism, everyday scenes are imbued with poetic mystery."

The catalogue for the sprawling 2005 retrospective, "Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic" (which I saw at the High Museum in Atlanta before it traveled to the Philadelphia Museum) included essays by such distinguished art historians as John Wilmerding, then professor of American art at Princeton; Kathleen Foster, curator of American art at the Philadelphia Museum, and Christopher Crosman, then director of the Farnsworth Art Museum, ME (now chief curator at the planned Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR).

That show caused me to rethink my reflexive disdain for an artist who, for me, is at his best with spare interiors, brilliantly painted, that evoke an aching loneliness and wistfulness. As Ken Johnson wrote in his NY Times review: "Going through this exhibition, you would have to be a pretty determined Wyeth opponent to resist his magic realism and his cannily economical ways of composing scenes and telling stories."

My previously negative opinion of Wyeth's work had been cemented by the infamous, over-hyped show, "Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons," 1976, at the Metropolitan Museum, organized by the director himself, Thomas Hoving, whose canonizing of Wyeth's canon seemed way out of proportion to the merits of the work on display. Of that show, NY Times critic John Russell said: "It is really rather odd that a nation which rightly prides itself on its buoyancy of spirit should identify itself so firmly with an artist whose specialty is the study of wounded or inarticulate natures in an unforgiving landscape."

Unable to get beyond the popular appreciation of Wyeth's work for the wrong reasons, many critics can't admire it for the right reasons. He was an old master in a modern age.

The next director of the Kimbell: Eric McCauley Lee
(Photo by Tony Walsh)

I promised not to break the news embargo set by the Kimbell unless someone else did. We were asked to wait until tomorrow (Friday). But another reporter (Janelle Gelfand of the Cincinnati Enquirer) has jumped the gun (or, more likely, got her news independently, from the Taft Museum's staff), so we're off to the races.

I had never heard of him, let alone spoken with him, until this week. But Eric McCauley Lee, 42 going on 30 (as you can see from the photo), who has just been named to become the next director of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, strikes me as ripe for his fortunate ascendancy to one of this country's premier art museums. He comes there, effective March 23, from the directorship of the distinguished, but comparatively modest, Taft Museum, Cincinnati.

How fortunate he was to get his new post is suggested by Gelfand's revelation in the Enquirer that he "was approached about the Fort Worth job several months ago." This job search is a year and a half old: It's been going on since Timothy Potts suddenly resigned, without explanation, in May 2007. The press release then said that he would "stay until Sept. 1 to allow time for his successor to be identified and to ensure a smooth transition." Malcolm Warner, the museum's senior curator, became deputy director after Potts' announcement and has been acting director since Potts left.

We can only surmise that it may have been hard to attract a replacement for Potts (now director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), and that the board is taking a flyer on someone they began considering only recently, who looks ready to step up.

And to me he does. The only time Lee lost his composure during our phone conversation yesterday was when I asked him whether he was reasonably confident that he would not be negatively affected by whatever issues may have caused tensions between previous directors and the long-entrenched board. (The departure of Ted Pillsbury, Potts' predecessor, was also a sudden surprise resignation.) The board's president is Kay Fortson, niece of Kay Kimbell, whose bequest bankrolled the eponymous museum that opened in 1972.

After stumbling a bit over his words, Lee hit upon the diplomatic dodge to my dodgy question:

Timothy Potts did a fantasic job at the Kimbell. I don't know the complete details of why he decided to leave. I find the board a wonderful group of people. The Kimbell is a great museum in large part because of the work of the board.

Lee is a persuasive speaker---fluent but not glib, intelligent but down-to-earth, knowledgeable about the institution he's about to lead and articulate about the broader issues facing museums. (And deft at deflecting questions that he shouldn't answer.)

Although he has solid scholarly credentials (Yale art history Ph.D., with study in London at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and the Courtauld Institute) and a decent professional trajectory (directorships at the Taft for two years and, before that, the Fred Jones Jr. Museum at the University of Oklahoma for almost 10), he lays claim to no spectacular art purchases or world-class exhibitions---staples at the Kimbell.

Tomorrow, I'll share some excerpts from what Lee (no relation to the late Sherman, another, more renowned, Ohio museum director) said during our conversation that left me with the impression that his marriage with the Kimbell may well succeed.

In the meantime, you can get a sense of his interviewing skills by clicking here (have patience: it takes a while to load) to see a video of a conversation that took place when he began his Taft tenure. Do not be alarmed: The guy with the David Lee Roth hair, whom you'll see first, is not our Lee. He's Mark Perzel, WGUC's able interviewer.

Nevada Museum of Art, Reno

Yesterday, in connection with my post about the whirlwind tour of American museums by Italian cultural officials, I issued a rare CultureGrrl correction. I had said that an already touring show of Leonardo drawings from the Biblioteca Reale, Turin, would be be coming to the Nevada Museum, Reno. In fact, it wasn't. I had based my erroneous report on a recent press release (in Italian) posted on the Italian Culture Ministry's website.

David Walker, executive director and CEO of the Nevada Museum (whom I contacted for help after my mistake), clears up my muddle:

At the 11th hour, due to complicated international agreements that couldn't be modified in time, the decision was made to let the Leonardo drawing exhibition travel back to Turin as scheduled following the close of the exhibit in San Francisco. The Nevada Museum of Art was not originally in the plans when the two-venue tour was organized.

We do plan to regroup and along with a yet-to-be identified partner museum in the U.S., organize a second tour of the drawings, tentatively looking at a June or July date for the Nevada Museum.

Our meetiing with the Italian delegates on Jan. 4 included an interesting discussion about a long-term relationship whereby we would (along with our local partner in Reno---ARTE ITALIA) establish a program to bring certain Italian artworks to Reno each year. The Leonardo exhibit would represent the first of several exchanges. The Northern Nevada region has a rich Italian heritage so we believe such a relationship with Italy would be fruitful.

George Grosz, "Eclipse of the Sun," 1926, Heckscher Museum

Time magazine's Richard Lacayo, on today's Looking Around blog, takes the deaccession discussion to the next level. Lacayo opines:

Why is it that museums routinely do these sales---meaning sales entirely within the rules as the AAMD has devised them---without making any kind of public announcement?...Quiet selling gives the whole undertaking a slightly clandestine quality, which just muddies the whole debate about deaccessioning generally. Better to just issue a press release, explain your reasoning and be done with it.

It's the AAMD's position that it's "important that a museum's deaccessioning process be publicly transparent." But I'm not aware that the group details for its members just what steps they need to take to ensure that transparency. Maybe they need to think about that.

I fully agree with the principle of systematic public disclosure, as I've often stated (although, as I will explain, below, I think there's a better way to go about it). I believe that a vigilant, informed public is the best deterrent to sales of museum-quality works that should remain in the public domain. Public outcry helped to scotch recent plans by Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York to sell an important Thomas Cole painting to fund its building plans after a donor reneged. And several years ago, something similar happened when the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, NY, decided to sell one of its signature works, George Grosz's Eclipse of the Sun (above), also to fund building plans.

Interestingly, one of those who led the successful charge against the Heckscher disposal was Chris Crosman, a former director of that museum, who wrote a strong NY Times Op-Ed piece against the sale in 2005, when he was director of the Farnsworth Museum, Maine. Crosman is now chief curator at Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum, which is involved in a deaccession-related controversy of its own, as it seeks to acquire a half-share of Fisk University's Stieglitz collection which many (including me) believe should remain where the donor, Georgia O'Keeffe, had intended it to be.

I don't think issuing press releases every time a museum sells something is the best solution. Here's what I said on the subject, back in the early days of CultureGrrl (July 2006). Given the latest round of deaccession controversies, it's worth repeating:

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.

Logo of the Italian Culture Ministry

Reading yesterday's Wall Street Journal article on Mario Resca, Italy's entrepreneurial cultural advisor (and former McDonald's executive), inspired me to surf over to the Italian Culture Ministry's website, and lo and behold, Big Mac has just been traveling all over the U.S., sitting down to Happy Meals with American museum directors and curators to discuss exchanges of objects, collaboration on exhibitions and (who knows?) maybe even a few tasty rent-a-shows.

According to the ministry's press release (in Italian), Resca (along with ministry advisors Alain Elkann and Angelo Crespi) was dispatched here by Culture Minister Sandro Bondi and has met with the following: Katherine Getchell, deputy director, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, David Alan Brown, curator of Italian Renaissance painting, National Gallery; Malcolm Warner, acting director, Kimbell Art Museum; Heather Macdonald, associate curator of European art, Dallas Museum; an official (unidentified in the press release) of the Timkin Museum, San Diego; and David Walker, executive director, Nevada Museum, Reno.

The Italian trio also paid "unofficial visits" to the Metropolitan Museum, the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, and the Nasher Sculpture Center and Rachofsky House, both in Dallas.

Did I mention that the three also dropped in on Michael Brand, director of the Getty Museum? "Several plans involving exhibitions and loans are in the works, and will be realized in the coming months," according to Italy's press release. The Getty discussed possible loans of photographs and manuscripts to Italy.

We can only hope that Brand is getting close to announcing which ancient objects will come to the Getty on long-term loan, under the terms of the Los Angeles museum's agreement to relinquish 40 antiquities to Italy. Remember, Michael, you once vowed to me that when you were ready to announce the Italian loans, "you'll be the first person I'll tell." (Could that have been tongue-in-cheek?)

Resca also met in New York with Michael Conforti, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and director of the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, and Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum, to discuss far-reaching Italy-United States collaborations on exhibitions and other cultural activities.

CORRECTION: James Ganz, curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, informed me that the Leonardo drawings exhibition that has just closed at his museum is NOT traveling to Reno, as the Italian press release had seemed to indicate. I have deleted that part of this post.

Hitting the jackpot: Kevin Salatino gets matched with MoMA's Glenn Lowry and Tate's Nicholas Serota

I don't know about you, but I find these odd couples interesting.

The second group of curatorial fellows selected for intensive training that's intended to lead to professional advancement (including directorships) has just been assigned mentors and residency hosts by the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

It's a pretty stellar list (both the teachers and their pupils). I think the synergy works both ways: They will all learn a lot from each other.

Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston
Mentor: Madeleine Grynsztejn, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Residency: Olga Viso, Director, Walker Art Center

Gloria Groom, Curator of 19th Century European Painting, Art Institute of Chicago
Mentor: Deborah Card, President, Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Residency: Mimi Gardner Gates, Director, Seattle Art Museum

Maxwell Hearn, Curator, Department of Asian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Mentor: William M. Griswold, Director, Morgan Library & Museum
Residency: James Cuno, Director, Art Institute of Chicago

Robin Held, Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections, Frye Art Museum
Mentor: Thomas W. Lentz, Director, Harvard Art Museums
Residency: Joseph Helfenstein, Director, Menil Collection

Eik Kahng, Curator and Head of the Department of 18th and 19th Century Art, Walters Art Museum
Mentor: Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Residency: Kaywin Feldman, Director and President, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Mary-Kay Lombino, Chief Curator, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
Mentor: Julián Zugazagoitia, Director and Chief Executive Officer, El Museo del Barrio
Residency: Adam Weinberg, Director, Whitney Museum of American Art

Kevin Salatino, Curator and Department Head, Prints and Drawings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Mentor: Glenn D. Lowry, Director, Museum of Modern Art
Residency: Sir Nicholas Serota, Tate, England

Britt Salvesen, Director and Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Mentor: Ann Philbin, Director, Hammer Museum
Residency: Neal Benezra, Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Rochelle Steiner, Director, Public Art Fund
Mentor: Michael Conforti, Director, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Residency: Michael Govan, Chief Executive Officer and Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Matthew Welch, Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs; Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Mentor: Michael E. Shapiro, Director, High Museum of Art
Residency: Maxwell L. Anderson, Director, Indianapolis Museum of Art

Wait a minute. Shouldn't Kevin Salatino, the prints and drawings specialist, have been paired with Bill Griswold, whose field matches his own? Does Gloria Groom plan to orchestrate her 19th century European paintings shows to music by Brahms and Debussy?

I guess the idea, in some cases, is to gain exposure to things you don't already know.

Italy's Mario Resca, framed in today's Wall Street Journal
(image by Zina Saunders)

Having just written about how the economy might put an end to profit-driven rent-a-shows, I was disappointed by these comments, published today in a Wall Street Journal profile of Mario ("Big Mac") Resca, whose planned appointment as Italian culture's "super manager" provoked widespread opposition. (He's now called "advisor"---one of several concessions to the critics.)

Francis Rocca reports:

"Our heritage is our ambassador around the world," he [Resca] says, arguing that Italy's cultural "assets" should therefore circulate more freely. Loans to foreign museums could be an important source of revenue as well as prestige, says Mr. Resca.

I guess in Mario's entrepreneurial lexicon, circulating "freely" is anything but free. At least Resca will be circulating freely: "He will be drawing no salary for his government work."

Despite the shortcomings of some of his notions, his desire to make Italian museums more user-friendly is surely an idea whose time as come. The question remains whether an executive best known for his stint at McDonald's is the right person for the assignment.

Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old woman

One favorable museum development related to the current financial crisis, aside from greater emphasis on permanent collections, may be a reduced emphasis on rent-a-shows---those blockbuster exhibitions through which museums raise money from other museums by charging exorbitant fees.

Andrew Herrmann and Dave Newbart of the Chicago Sun-Times report:

Financial belt-tightening contributed to the [Field] museum's decision not to present Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old fossil of an ape-man species that was to debut here this fall.

As you may recall from my previous post about that show, the tour of "Lucy's" remains was controversial from the start, with leading scientists expressing concern that this elderly woman was too fragile to travel.

Sir John Pope-Hennessy: Most recent Brit in a major American museum job?

Will the real Tom Campbell please stand up?

The London Telegraph's Jasper Rees snagged an interview with the Metropolitan Museum's new director for today's paper. I got real excited when I got to this paragraph:

As the exhaustive interview process with the 12 trustees began, it became increasingly apparent to Campbell "that the ideas that I was bringing to the table seemed to be very much resonating with the ideas and concerns they had."

Now for the good stuff, I salivated. And then:

What those ideas are will remain under wraps until Campbell assumes office.

Gee, Jasper, he's already there! But what Campbell thinks of the pressing museum issues of the day still remains mysterious. We eagerly await the first substantive interview. It's a bit scary, though, that Campbell let a beeper go off when Jasper's allotted 30 minutes were up. I've never heard a beep in a lifetime of interviews with museum directors and other high-profile artworld luminaries.

Speaking of whom, Rees further demonstrated his fuzzy grasp of the American museological scene with this obtuse observation:

No one from these [Great Britain's] shores has held such a high-profile museum job abroad since Sir John Pope-Hennessy, the great Renaissance scholar, was made the Met's director of European paintings by [Philippe] de Montebello.

Actually, he was appointed by Philippe's predecessor, Tom Hoving. And where did Malcolm Rogers and Graham W.J. Beal come from? Da Bronx?

Lord Colin Renfew, Met Gadfly

Here's one of the first substantive changes at the Metropolitan Museum since the ascent of its new director, Thomas Campbell:

On Tuesday, the Met posted on its website its revised Collections Management Policy [reported on David Gill's Looting Matters blog], which incorporates the Association of Art Museum Directors' tightened standards, published last June, for the acquisition of antiquities. That means that the Met has (as it told me in June that it would) has officially dropped the AAMD's former 10-year rolling rule, which was strongly favored by the Met's former director, Philippe de Montebello. That previous policy had deemed it acceptable for a museum to acquire an ancient work with a known provenance going back at least 10 years.

As I previously stated here, the 10-year rolling rule improperly institutionalized the time-honored practice of thieves who let hot merchandise cool off for a decent interval before marketing it. Now the Met will follow the new AAMD guidelines, which mandate that a museum should normally not acquire an ancient work "unless research substantiates that the work was outside its country of probable modern discovery before 1970 or was legally exported from its probable country of modern discovery after 1970.

Could it be that Lord Colin Renfew deserves some credit for the Met's new transparency? The LA Times' Mike Boehm reported, three days before the Met's online posting, that the British archaeologist and his associates had complained of the difficulty they encountered in obtaining a written copy of the Met's antiquities collecting policy. That new policy was officially adopted on Nov. 12, but has only now been posted.

Perhaps the Met had its reasons for being slow to grant Renfew's request. He is scheduled to receive an award from SAFE (Saving Antiquities for Everyone) tonight in Philadelphia, where he will lecture on "Combatting the Illicit Antiquities Trade: The 1970 Rule as a Turning Point (or How the Metropolitan lags behind the Getty)."

As a point of reference, here's the Getty's antiquities collecting policy and yes, it does go further than the Met's: For the Getty, it's not enough that the object have a known provenance going back to 1970. There must also be "no reason to suspect it was illegally exported from its country of origin," even if it did come out before 1970---a condition present in neither the AAMD's nor Met's guidelines. What's more, the Met's and AAMD's guidelines, but not the Getty's, say that museums may make an "informed judgment" to acquire works that "lack a complete documented ownership history." Such works must be posted on AAMD's Object Registry, to give potential claimants a chance to come forward.

Met Museumologists will be pleased that the museum's entire collections management policy---not just its rule for antiquities---is at last available for all to peruse. There's one catch: While that policy is linked to on the museum's press-release web page, it wasn't sent out to those of us who are on Met's e-mail list for press releases. The new transparency is still slightly cloudy.

What's that new addition to the Metropolitan Museum's old masters galleries, catty-cornered with the museum's iconic Vermeer, "Woman with a Water Pitcher"?



Let's approach for a closer look:


Vermeer, "Young Woman Seated at a Virginal," Private Collection

Wait a minute, I know that lady with the vacuous expression and the awkward arms. I last gawked at the gawky girl when she was exhibited at Sotheby's, New York, before her auction in London on July 7, 2004 (catalogue entry and a better photo, here).

The painting sold then for $30 million, an auction record for the artist, to an "anonymous" buyer (later identified as casino mogul Steve Wynn), who showed it for a time at the Philadelphia Museum. Last summer, the painting was at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in a show called Vermeer and the Delft Style---a title echoing the Met's 2001 Vermeer and the Delft School. The Tokyo show also included the Met's "Woman with a Lute."
 
On Oct. 26, Norm Clarke of the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the peripatetic painting had changed hands again:

Resort developer Steve Wynn has sold the Johannes Vermeer painting he purchased four years ago for $30 million, sources have confirmed.

If true, that would mean he sold it at the price for which he bought it. A tipster told me that it is now owned by Leiden Gallery, New York, which an official at the gallery subsequently confirmed. The Met's press office told me that it was hung on Dec. 29 in Gallery 14A of its European paintings galleries (where it is labeled as from a "Private Collection"). I saw it on Tuesday.

Until Sotheby's had reported (in advance of the 2004 sale) the favorable findings of a committee assembled to study and restore the work, many experts had regarded this painting as a "near-Vermeer"---an imitation by a less gifted artist. A new book by Benjamin Binstock, Vermeer's Family Secrets, theorizes that it (along with six other generally accepted Vermeers) was painted by the master's eldest daughter---a hypothesis that Martin Bailey, in his review (not online) for this month's Art Newspaper of five recent books on Dutch old masters, derided as a "wild assumption based on limited information."

Although Walter Liedtke, the Met's curator specializing in Dutch 17th-century art, now accepts the painting as a Vermeer (and includes it in his new monograph on the artist's oeuvre), he balks at the yellow shawl.

According to the Met's label:

Until recently this late work by Vermeer was little known, even to specialists. Technical examination and passages of painting very similar to those in Vermeer's picture of the same title in The National Gallery, London, support the Delft artist's authorship. However, another hand may have painted the yellow shawl, under which are traces of less voluminous attire.

Although Liedtke had displayed the painting without attribution in his "Vermeer and the Delft School" exhibition at the Met, he told me shortly after perusing the Sotheby's report and the pre-auction restoration by Martin Bijl, former head of paintings conservation at the Rijksmuseum, that he considered the painting to be "a minor late work" by the master. He noted that Vermeer's works from the 1670s were generally "less subtle in execution" than his best paintings.

The Met's spokesperson, Elyse Topalian, told me on Wednesday that she was "waiting to hear back about how long it will be on view." [UPDATE: Elyse now says that the painting "will be on view until June."] As it happens, Holland Cotter reports in today's NY Times that he visited the Met's Dutch painting galleries just a few days ago. Did he notice that there was an interloper among those Vermeers?

Super Cooper: Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper

Lawyers for Fisk University, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the Tennessee Attorney General's office got another chance to rumble at yesterday's hearing in Tennessee Court of Appeals, where the university is seeking a reversal of a lower court decision that prevented the Nashville university from selling a $30-million half-share in its Stieglitz Collection to Alice Walton's planned Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville.

The collection was given to Fisk by artist Georgia O'Keeffe, which is why the O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, is in the case: It argues that it should receive the works (as the donor's "successor-in-interest"), if Fisk can't comply with O'Keeffe's wishes. On one thing both Fisk and the Tennessee Attorney General agree: They want the judge to rule that the O'Keeffe Museum should be removed from the case.

What most interests me about how Fisk's half-deaccession proposal is playing out is the continued activist role of the state's attorney general, Robert Cooper, whose stance on deaccessioning has been in sharp contrast to that of his counterparts in some other states, who have been sleeping watchdogs when it comes to safeguarding the public's cultural patrimony.

WPLN, reporting on yesterday's hearing, quotes this statement by the AG:

This office has stated to the court of appeals and in its briefs that it has serious concerns and reservations about that deal [the one with Crystal Bridges], and about any deal that would remove the art from this community and this state, and keep it from being enjoyed and used in the way that was intended by the original donor....

Obviously, if Fisk were to go forward, we would be vigorously involved in that lawsuit [which could revert to the lower court for determination of whether it had become impracticable and impossible for Fisk to maintain the collection].

This falls short of a statement that Cooper would oppose the deal. But read this excerpt from the AG's brief, filed in connection with Fisk's appeal:

Fisk's aggressive claim seeking permission to sell a half-interest in the collection is...problematic. Even if the court found that...Fisk's financial condition rendered compliance with the gift's restrictions impracticable or impossible, the court would still have great discretion of which conditions should be amended to address such findings. Such relief would not necessarily include, and would likely fall short of [emphasis added], a sale of the Collection....

Fisk attempts to argue in its brief that the Crystal Bridges agreement most effectively achieves O'Keeffe's intent....It is entirely possible that a much less drastic...remedy than selling the collection would satisfy Fisk's needs, if Fisk is entitled to any...relief at all.

Colby Sledge of the Tenneseean reports that the judge's decision "could take a few weeks to several months. Eric Schelzig's report for the Associated Press about the hearing is here.

There was something ineffably sad about visiting the Metropolitan Museum a couple of days ago (as I did) and sensing that it's still just as Philippe de Montebello had left it, but he's no longer there. (Or maybe he was, packing up the last few mementos and belongings.) He will be greatly missed.

Still, it's now out with the old, in with the new, and Philippe's not the only Met official who can achieve video stardom.

Here's the new director, Thomas Campbell, in a museum-produced YouTube snippet, where he introduces himself to Met fans. (Whoever directed this scripted clip must have sternly instructed Tom: "You absolutely must smile at the end!")

 

Fisk exhibition traveling to Crystal Bridges' Massey outpost

No, this is not a report on this morning's court hearing.

It turns out that while Fisk is working hard in court to effectuate a $30-million collection-sharing agreement with Alice Walton, they've put together a print exhibition that opens Feb. 13 at the Massey outpost of the Wal-Mart heiress' in-construction Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR.

First seen in the university's Aaron Douglas Gallery in 2007, Proof Positive (scroll down) "presents the story of African-American printmaking in the 20th century by representing many generations of artists from the Harlem Renaissance to present," including Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Martin Puryear, James Wells and Hale Woodruff.

Meanwhile, what Alice really needs to do with her money is invest in a better Crystal Bridges website. The home page now features a shuffling card deck of selected acquisitions that cannot be enlarged sufficiently to appreciate them.

The museum's most recently announced acquisitions are here, with completely illegible thumbnails. (Some do have clickable images here.) Better reproductions can be found on two flickr pages here and here, that were posted by the mythical "Mith242" from Fayetteville.

Where's a good webmaster when Alice really needs one?

Fisk University President Hazel O'Leary

Fisk University just won't give up trying to do that $30-million deal with Alice Walton to monetize its Stieglitz Collection, which was given to it by artist Georgia O'Keeffe.

Back in court everyone goes later today (Wednesday), including representatives from the office of Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper, who has not publicly taken a position on the plan, other than to say that "a significant factor in our evaluation will be whether a reasonable alternative emerges that would allow the Stieglitz Collection to remain here on a full-time basis."

Fisk will argue in Tennessee Court of Appeals for reversal of a lower court decision that prevented the university from selling for $30 million a half-share in the Stieglitz Collection to Walton's planned Crystal Bridges Museum.

Back in August, I described Fisk's initial appeals brief in my post titled: A Brief That Strains Belief (where I linked to the brief's full text).

Meanwhile, Erik Schelzig of the Associated Press suggested Monday that while Fisk has reopened its Carl Van Vechten Gallery to display the collection (as ordered in the February decision by Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle), little appears to have been done to promote public awareness, let alone visitorship.

Schelzig reports:

The gallery on Fisk's Nashville campus reopened to little fanfare in October after nearly three years out of the public eye....[Lucious] Outlaw [Jr.], now a professor at Vanderbilt University and a critic of the school's [Fisk's] management, said officials there haven't made enough of an effort to drive traffic to the collection. "Obviously a lot more could be done and should be done," he said....

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen said he was unaware the collection was back on display when asked about it by The Associated Press. The governor said it was unusual for him not to have heard about the gallery reopening. "I usually get about 14 invitations to help launch one of those," he said.

A Fisk spokesman did not return a message seeking to find out how many people have visited the gallery since it reopened.

Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's head of contemporary art

A video recently posted on Sotheby's website, Contemporary Art Market: A Candid Look from the Inside, features a cast of five---the auction house's contemporary art team---looking chastened as they candidly discuss the disastrous November sales but try to calm market jitters by assuring sellers that "despite a worsening economic climate, if the right object comes to market, there's an enormous amount of cash around to buy that object," in the words of Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's head of contemporary art.

The auction houses have yet to issue their end-of-year round-ups of sales results, but since publicly traded Sotheby's posts its totals online, we can do the math: Sales in 2008 totaled $4.83 billion, only a 9% drop from the $5.33-billion sale total for 2007.

If that doesn't sound too troubling, it's because year-to-date 2007 sales didn't overtake 2008 sales until November. The sales total for November and December was $752.21 million in 2008, a vertiginous 54% drop from the $1.64 BILLION in 2007. November contemporary art sales in New York, the subject of Sotheby's video, suffered an even steeper decline---62%, from $418.32 million in 2007 to $160.94 million in 2008.

As for the 2009 outlook for contemporary art, the star of the reassuring video, Meyer, offers "two very comforting observations: There is a market, and the market is very stable [!?!] and has a long tradition."

I know this blog has got to stop being "all National Academy, all the time." But first, I feel compelled to relay this timely job posting:

Date posted: 12/18/2008

Application deadline: 1/15/2009

The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts seeks a development assistant to join the National Academy's development team.

Development team? I thought director Carmine Branagan had indicated they didn't have one. ("A fundraising structure has never been built here.") I guess the art sale proceeds, as she had told me, will pay for the new hire.

Interested CultureGrrl readers can learn more about this position and the requisite qualifications by clicking the link at the top of this post. An appreciation for the importance of Frederic Church and Sanford Gifford is not essential, or even desirable. Your responsibilities will including "assist[ing] the Director of Development and Senior Development Officer."

There ARE such persons? Where were they when the Academy really needed them?

Graham W.J. Beal, director, Detroit Institute of Arts

Jim Zarroli, a business and economics reporter for National Public Radio (he's their Madoff man), did a segment today on museums' financial difficulties, with an emphasis on the National Academy situation. You can both listen to the audio and read the summary text for "Museums Exhibit Signs Of Economic Distress," here.

The piece includes comments by Carmen Branagan, director of the Academy; Bruce Altshuler, head of New York University's museum studies program; Graham Beal, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts; and Tom Finkelpearl, director of the Queens Museum of Art.

The I-didn't-know-that moment came when Branagan commented that she "actually worked gratis [at the National Academy] for many months." She started there only last July.

Beal, whose own institution is in financial distress, cemented his status as the field's most articulate spokesperson against desperation deaccessions. He described the wrongheadedness of selling art to pay operating expenses this way:

You're really selling part of what you are. The institution is there to safeguard the art. The art is not there to support the institution.

His stance carries all the more weight in light of the fact that his institution is operating "under considerable financial stress," as he candidly concedes on the museum's website.

Zarroli concludes:

The question is how far they [museums] should go to survive and whether they can do it without compromising the trust the public has placed in them.

The National Academy

I've been getting many thoughtful responses to my revelations about the sales of art by the National Academy, the subsequent fallout, and my analysis of lessons to be learned from this sorry episode.

Here are four reactions from CultureGrrl readers:

Michael Botwinick, director of the Hudson River Museum, writes:

You have broken an incredibly important story. And this is an issue that is likely to emerge again and again as trustees fail to understand the real meaning of their fiduciary responsibilities in this very difficult economic time, and turn to the easy pickings of the collection as "sleeping asset."

A museum official, who had sought to be named the Academy's director, writes:

I was very interested to learn about the sale of the two paintings by the National Academy. I was asked to interview for the job of director there last year (still haven’t heard!), so I had time to learn about its inner situations.

Finances were indeed troublesome and I was asked about my abilities in that regard. I happen to love fundraising on behalf of the arts and would have had no problem celebrating the unique character of the Academy. One artist on the search committee said that artists usually are not wealthy and thus could not be expected to be of much help. I noted that while artists may not be wealthy (though some Academicians are) they usually know people of means, or their dealers know people of means.

The reported $15 million gained from the sale of the paintings is a nice sum of money for the Academy and will certainly tide it over for several years, depending on how they spend it. When a pot of money suddenly appears at a museum, everyone wants to dip into it and in no time it’s gone. Look at what happened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which once upon a time had a $40 million endowment!

Selling art for big bucks gets the current Academy board off the fundraising hook. They are excused from their fiduciary responsibilities. Selling stuff from the collection to pay for operations and capital improvements is not the kind of responsible fundraising museums should pursue.

Geoffrey Fleming, president of the Long Island Museum Association, writes:

The predicament that the Academy finds it self in is not new. It is an institution that has long been plagued by poor management and a board of trustees that seemed to ignore the pressing need for they themselves to raise money needed to operate the institution. Allowing the Academy to sell two of its best works to correct their incompetence is a terrible loss for the city and people of New York.

It is an added tragedy that the works in question were part of the Museum's most important bequest---the gift of James A. Suydam (1819-1865), an artist and one of the academy's most important supporters. It is hard to believe, just two years after publishing a massive book about Suydam and his legacy to the museum (which coincided with a major exhibition), that the board felt these were the two works that should be sold.

We have to remember that in New York State all museums hold their collections in trust for the benefit of the public. Too many museum trustees ignore this important fact. The way to save a museum as poorly operated as the National Academy is to remove its Board, appoint a board of museum experts and wealthy donors, sell its real estate holdings in NYC, and move it to a new location. Then it can be organized and endowed so that its collection can remain intact and the issues that got it to this position are not repeated.

Eileen Carr, independent curator, former curator of education, Dayton Art Institute and former president, Dayton Visual Arts Center, writes:

The National Academy's sale (and the AAMD's condemnation of it) is, as you suggested, something we're going to see more of. It's too bad, but I would suggest that in light of the options (which, for many institutions, will be closing or merging), deaccessioning is not the heinous crime that AAMD would have us believe. There are surely times when deaccessioning is called for.

Whether as the result of unprecedented economic times, or as the result of the much more typical inadequate board supervision, museums of all kinds find themselves in terrible straits today. Although art museums have for many replaced religion (thereby explaining the over-the-top and rightous condemnation of the AAMD), the reality is that these are organizations that should serve their communities--not some abstract and sacred principle.

While a sale of works should be considered as a last resort, it is both foolish and condescending to maintain that deaccessioning should NEVER be done except to invest in more art. Works of art--as wonderous as they are--are still objects and assets, and museums, if they are to function as anything more than storage lockers, are responsible to their communities to function as a living and changing entities.

And now, after a whole month of National Academy deaccessions, LA MOCA rescue plans, and reckless New Year's frivolity...we finally return to our regular programming:

You may remember that a couple of weeks ago, when we perused the Getty Trust's 2008 financials, we discovered that, unlike the statements for prior years, this year's account omitted both the amount of the deficit and amount of endowment money that was used to fund operations. I then promised that I'd report to you the amount of last year's deficit, "if and when I have that information."

Sorry. That's not going to happen. Here's the response that I received from Ron Hartwig, the Getty's vice president for communications:

For what ever reason, those preparing our financial statements in the past used to list an "operating deficit." Interestingly, your question last year triggered Patti [Patricia Woodworth, vice president, CFO and COO] to look into why this was happening, and we have now correctly removed that line.

The Getty does not have an operating deficit. This is because we are an operating trust and because we do not spend more than our Trustees authorize us to spend. That was true in FY '07 as well, which is why showing an operating deficit was not correct.

As Patti pointed out..., the only limit on expenditures is what our trustees impose, and they approve the level of expenditures reported in the financial statement, which includes revenue from all sources (e.g. endowment, parking, book store, food operations, publishing, etc.).

Going forward, you will not see "operating deficit" listed in our financial statements because a deficit doesn't exist.

That was certainly not my intended effect in reporting the deficit figure that did exist in last year's report. The incredible disappearing deficits, reported in the statements for 2007, 2006 and 2005, were $49.36 million, $18.29 million and $47.85 million, respectively.

It now appears that when it comes to spending down the endowment, anything goes, so long as the trustees say it's okay. Nonprofit art institutions customarily designate a fixed rate of annual endowment spending, and if they've got to kick in more than that to meet expenses, they call it a deficit. At the Getty (because it's an operating trust and not a 501(c)(3), according to Hartwig), it's called an expenditure authorized by the trustees.

That's not to say that the Getty is unconcerned about its eroding endowment, which declined some 30% since June 30, 2007: As I reported last month, it is instituting a job freeze and other cost reductions in an attempt to address the problem. Just don't call it a deficit.

Laura Iris Blau, "The Female Eunuch"

Feeling growing revulsion against the excesses associated with the economic bubble that has burst, some collectors are looking at the work of emerging artists in a new way---not as a speculative opportunity for making a killing by getting in early on the next new thing, but as a way to acquire affordable works of quality, for rewards that are strictly personal.

In that spirit, and in harmony with this week's "out with the old, in with the new" theme, CultureGrrl ventures where she has never gone before (and probably won't ever go again)---a rave for a young artist with no exhibition track record other than a recent MFA show at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

What's worse, I know her personally.

Laura Iris Blau, a Brooklyn artist who imbues her meticulously crafted sculptural assemblages with troubled and troubling psychological intensity and a dash of black humor, is the daughter of my long-time friends. Overriding my strong taboo against reviewing someone to whom I have a personal connection is my stronger conviction that this is work of such beauty and power that it demands attention.

Laura's wall pieces and freestanding book-based sculptures conform to the scruffy, found-material aesthetic of the New Museum's  Unmonumental, the inaugural show in its new building, which I previously described as "a scrappy display [that] is a welcome corrective to the market-obsessed, reputation-fixated artworld."

But the found materials in Laura's (now closed) show, Proof (read), pack an emotional punch: They're the feminist and child-rearing bibles of her mother's (which is to say, my) young adulthood---The Female Eunuch (above), The Hite Report, Understanding Pregnancy and Childbirth, The Drama of the Gifted Child, etc., etc. She has exploded, sliced, shredded and (in some cases) embedded these hoary texts with talismans from her own difficult personal journey to adulthood.

Aside from what they say about Laura's private struggles, these blasted books, removed from her mother's personal bookshelf, read to me as a detonation of my generation. I know all of these books by their covers, if not always by their contents. The message seems to be: "You devoured all these books to learn how to be the strong New Woman and the Perfect Mother, and look at what you came up with---imperfect me." The joke, which cuts both ways, is delivered with aesthetic elan and painstaking focus on detail.

I was relieved to read in Laura's online description of the project that it brought her "closer with my own mother....We can now more freely discuss these issues...like never before."

"Cathartic" does have "art" in it.

Images of book-based pieces from Laura's thesis show are here and here. While you can get a good sense of the wall pieces, the photos can't do justice to the freestanding altered books, which have layers of meaning (and felicitous visual encounters) embedded within the layers of the pages.

Her home page, from which you can access her description of the project, as well as contact information, is here. The website is still a work-in-progress (which is why I had to wait so long to post this). The art, to my eyes, is ready for its close-up:

Here's my more-naughty-than-nice list of what some artworld boldface names have vowed to do in the New Year. Few have fulfilled their 2008 Resolutions, but hope springs eternal.

Tom Campbell: As the Met's new director, I will institute casual Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, but I will designate Fridays as "Dress Like Philippe Day." I will also aspire to implement all of CultureGrrl's Ten Suggestions, especially the fourth one, which I will fulfill by granting her an early in-depth interview (not one of the kid-in-the-candy-store variety).

Damien Hirst: To fearlessly confront the terrors of financial mortality, I will orchestrate another one-artist auction at Sotheby's entitled, "The Physical Impossibility of the Death of the Art Market in the Mind of Someone Selling." It will consist entirely of "dot" and "spin" paintings embalmed in tanks of formaldehyde.

Michael Govan: Since I failed in my bold attempt to annex LA MOCA, I will now adopt the model of my mentor, Tom Krens, by announcing a new quest to conquer the struggling Dia Art Foundation, which I formerly headed. It will become the Los Angeles County Museum's first East Coast satellite.

Tom Krens: Far from laying low after relinquishing the directorship of the Guggenheim, I will deliver the Apr. 2 keynote address on "The Global Museum" at the three-day seminar on museum law offered by American Law Institute-American Bar Association. (This one is true.)

Adam Weinberg: Since our $680-million fundraising campaign for the 185,000-square-foot Downtown Whitney has been in the "silent phase" so long as to seem moribund, I will turn the property over to Michael Govan, who confided that he'd like to renovate the Premier Veal (Lamb Too) facility for a new Dia Meatpacking exhibition space.

Jeremy Strick: I will write a tell-all book: "How I Ran the World's Greatest Contemporary Art Museum with a Snazzy Vuitton Boutique but Hardly Any Cash."

Philippe de Montebello: I will not write a tell-all book...unless Harold Holzer finds me sufficiently Lincolnesque and decides to ghostwrite.

William Ruprecht: Instead of handing over to sellers a slice of the buyer's premium, I will henceforth offer them options to buy Sotheby's stock at January 2008 prices.

Mitchell Kahan, director, Akron Art Museum: I will provide complimentary double espressos for the guard, below, whom CultureGrrl caught napping in our little-visited 19th- and early 20th-century galleries in the old wing (which has been dramatically upstaged by the new Coop Himmelb(l)au-designed wing for contemporary art):


The unguarded guard (who first urged me to let him know if I wanted to sit down) and the Global Krens are both fact. As for the rest---just kidding!