December 2010 Archives

Light Fright: Great view of Washington's horse. Not-so-great view of George.
(This photo was taken without flash.)

With all this talk lately about Museums 2.0 and "apps," I've been inspired to inaugurate CultureGrrl 2.0 with a new technological innovation. (Well, it's new for me, anyway, but I'm a late adopter.) I'm also pleased to note that Arianna Huffington's much discussed (above-linked) "Museums 2.0" column has now been transformed by Copy Editing 1.0. (The gaffes that I noted in my post about Huff's post have now been corrected.)

By now, like it or not, you're all very well acquainted with CultureGrrl's Irreverent Photo Essays. Now, thanks to my souped-up new computer and its upgraded photo-editing software, I bring you the first CultureGrrl Irreverent Narrated Slideshow! My first victim...I mean, "subject"...is the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Having taken you around the outside of the expanded museum, with its spacious new wing designed by Norman Foster, I'm now escorting you inside, to give you my impressions (many of which are quite favorable) of the interior architecture and art installations throughout the four floors of galleries in the new Art of the Americas Wing.

Since I'm new at this, you may find that you'll need to adjust your volume up and down a bit. I think I need a souped-up recording microphone to go along with my other technological upgrades. (Unfortunately, CultureGrrl Donors appear to have taken a holiday, after kicking in one-half the cost of my new computer. New Year's resolutions, anyone?)

This slideshow is followed by a brief CultureGrrl Video exploring a few vexing installation gaffes that I encountered during my visit (including the one pictured above). Although I don't mention it in the video, the installation of the Cole that I decry at the end of the second clip below was personally ordered by the museum's director, Malcolm Rogers. (As writers know, sometimes even the editor-in-chief needs an editor.)



CultureGrrl Narration Gaffe: In my voice-over for the video below, I mistakenly state that Gilbert Stuart's "George" and "Martha Washington" are jointly owned by the BMFA and National Gallery in Washington. The co-owner is, in fact, the National Portrait Gallery.

William Ivey

Bill Ivey, director of Vanderbilt University's Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy and chairman, from 1998 to 2001, of the National Endowment for the Arts, defends my criticized take on the "Hide/Seek" show at the National Portrait Gallery:

I believe that the display of value-challenging art in publically-funded environments can never be executed without some willingness to compromise. Those who take absolutist positions often seem to have something other than a happy outcome in mind, as inflammatory language only escalates and entire enterprises of real value can be threatened over rather inconsequential issues.

A sense of proportion is required as it is not a good idea to convert every small offense into a fight over principles. Our president can compromise on tax breaks for the rich, producing an opening for good legislation some of which will advance the very community celebrated in the Portrait Gallery show. The show is the thing, not one tiny (already-edited) piece. Let's calm down and get on with it.

While you're all calming down, assuming the lotus position and taking deep breaths, wanna get a peek at the show everyone's been talking about? Now you can! A very calm video walkthrough, posted by the National Portrait Gallery and accompanied by a soothing Schubert soundtrack, makes this hot-button show seem quite serene and mild. Then again, you never come close enough to the art (or stay with any piece long enough) to get a good look at the exhibition's many sexually charged moments. (Still, that arrow-shaped fig leaf, below, is rather provocative!)

Strangely, the NPG has posted this on YouTube as an "unlisted video," which means that only those who already have the link (or the embed code) can view it:

Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington's art-related post on her eponymous news-and-commentary website has been lighting up links around the art blogosphere, partly because people are pleasantly surprised that this new-media titan cares enough about museums to write about them.

In her post, Museums 2.0: What Happens When Great Art Meets New Media?, Arianna argues:

The danger of social media becoming the point of social media---connection for connection's sake, connection to no end---is one museum's [sic] need to particularly guard against.

Where are some good copy editors when Arianna really needs them? (And while they're removing that errant apostrophe from "museum's," they should also delete the last paragraph in her post, which repeats her first paragraphs almost verbatim.)

[UPDATE: Huff's "Museums 2.0" has now been updated by Copy Editing 1.0.]

Being myself a sometimes HuffArts columnist, as well as a generational contemporary of Arianna's and a "Museums 0.0" devotee, I felt moved to post a comment on Huffington's post. While even audio guides are too much technology for me, I recognize that younger audiences need to be reached on their own wave-lengt­hs. That doesn't mean dumbing down. But it probably does mean tech-ing up. As long as that doesn't interfere with my own old-fashioned contemplation and concentration, I'm (reluctantly) okay with it.

I wrote a lot about art-related multimedia applications during their first wave, including this piece on art CD-ROMs for the NY Times, pegged to the 1998 debut of the Metropolitan Museum's survey disc, "Masterworks From the Collection," which I described as being possibly "the last chance to breathe life into a dying genre." Met 2.0 is more web-based than disc-based, but art DVDs are still alive, well and selling in museum bookstores.

But what we all really want to know is: What does the Museum 2.0 blogger have to say about Huffington's "Museums 2.0"? (So far, nothing.)

[UPDATE: Nina Simon, the Museum 2.0 blogger, has now weighed in. She thinks "Ariana's" (sic) post is "reactionary."]

Cézanne, "Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory," 1891, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The journalistic benefits and pitfalls of the NY Times' de facto status as house organ for the Metropolitan Museum have recently been demonstrated not only by what the newspaper has published (yet another Met-related scoop, thanks to privileged treatment from the museum) but also, much more problematically, by what it hasn't published.

"Philip IV," the painting that the Times, in last week's front-page story, breathlessly described as a "vindicated" Velázquez, I regard as vitiated Velázquez. When you're handed a gift story, though, it's hard to look it in the mouth. The result is great promotion for the museum but not necessarily great journalism.

The continued frustration of the rest of the scribe tribe with the Met's "Times-first" policy can be dismissed by some as sour grapes from the scoop-less. But this sweetheart relationship between a news organ and news source starts to look like a Faustian courtship when one considers an important story, concerning an undeniable masterpiece at the Met, that for almost three weeks the Times has NOT seen fit to print.

On Dec. 9, Chris Herring and Erica Orden of the Wall Street Journal broke the story of a lawsuit filed against the Met in U.S. District Court by Pierre Konowaloff, an heir of the legendary Russian collector Ivan Morozov, claiming title to Cézanne's "Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory." I followed up with a detailed report and analysis and provided a link to the complaint (a public document that the Times could easily have obtained).

This case is significant not only because of the painting's importance but also because of the important precedent that could be set: Konowaloff, through his lawyers, is trying to claim that the same concessions that museums have made to claimants in Nazi-loot cases should also be extended to Bolshevik-loot claimants.

One might speculate that the Times agrees with the Met that this lawsuit "is totally without merit" and therefore not worthy of coverage, except for the fact that the Times has covered (albeit briefly) Konowaloff's claim for another ex-Morozov work---van Gogh's "The Night Cafe," in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.

Perhaps the Times will get around to the New York-based story when the Met's lawyers file their response to Konowaloff's complaint (not posted on the court's website at this writing).

I'm not saying that the Times shouldn't accept free scoops from important sources. What journalist in her right mind would turn down privileged access? (Bring it on!) But if coverage appears to be influenced by favors repeatedly granted, we've got, at the very least, a perception problem and, at worst, a professional problem.

For comments regarding this issue that were made publicly by Sam Sifton, the Times' former cultural news editor, go here.

I was sufficiently excited by the NY Times' front-page treatment last Monday of the Metropolitan Museum's second recently "rediscovered" Velázquez to rush right over to see it the next day.

The rest of the world, apparently, was in no such hurry:


Velázquez, "Philip IV," probably 1624, installed to the left of the glass door

In fact, aside from handing the story to Carol Vogel of the Times, the Met itself seems to be in no great rush to tout its "vindicated Velázquez" (as the Times' headline has dubbed it). No press release has been issued at this writing, and there are no in-gallery wall panels detailing the findings of the curator, the conservator and Velázquez expert Jonathan Brown (who gave the attribution his thumbs-up).

There's a brief announcement and a detailed catalogue entry on the museum's website, and this gallery label, to the right of the painting:

 

By contrast, last year's reattribution to Velázquez of the Met's "Portrait of a Man," ca. 1630, was accompanied by an engrossing and convincing dossier exhibition. Unlike "Philip," "Man" debuted with a press preview, where we got to hear directly from Brown and Keith Christiansen, chairman of the Met's department of European paintings, about the reasoning and connoisseurship behind the upgraded authorship.

Having now viewed the royal youth (acquired in 1913 as a bequest from distinguished collector Benjamin Altman), I can understand why the Met might be low-keying it. While I was thoroughly won over by the Met's much smaller-sized Velázquez portrait of an uncertain subject (which Christiansen likes to think could be the artist's own self-portrait), "Philip," for me, was dead on arrival. I'll accept that it may well be an "authentic" work by the artist. But to me, it lacked the vitality and painterly aplomb that we expect from the master.

It doesn't help that the glare makes it hard to get a good look at Philip's face (missing his left eye, until the Met's chief paintings conservator, Michael Gallagher, restored it):



Here's a close look, from the Met's own website (much better than my amateur photography), of the faces of the Met's two reattributed portraits. You can click the images for an even closer look:


Left, "Portrait of a Man"; Right, "Philip IV"

The stiff appearance of "Philip" may be, in part, due to its being a formal royal portrait. But its lifelessness may also owe something to the canvas' having been a near-cadaver. Its severely compromised condition may have drained the vigor out of its subject. The Times' website (but, strangely, not the Met's) has a nifty multimedia feature showing the painting's condition before and after restoration. This reveals the extent of its serious losses. Both reattributed Velázquez portraits were messed with many decades ago by the London-based art dealer Joseph Duveen, to make them more salable.

The best thing Philip has going for him right now is his right hand:



But wait a minute! There's Keith, making his way through the galleries during my visit, having just shown off his new discovery to a few privileged guests. (I snapped a quick photo but decided not to interrupt his conversation.)


Keith Christiansen
 
When I recently revisited the Met's webpage devoted to the dossier exhibition for its prior Velázquez upgrade, I discovered, to my amusement, that the museum had devised a bit of interactive connoisseurship---a visitor poll (scroll down), consisting of six questions related to the identity of the painting's sitter. (Brown disagrees with Christiansen's self-portrait theory. The public gets to break the tie.)

The poll's final question:

Do you think there is enough evidence to support the theory that "Portrait of a Man" is a self-portrait of Velázquez? [73% responded "yes"; 27%, "no." I guess that settles it!]

Maybe the Met should devise a new survey, asking how many visitors believe that the restored version of "Philip IV" is (as its wall label contends) "of exceptionally high quality."

David Ross, chairman, MFA in Art Practice, School of Visual Arts, New York

The twitterati have been piling on me (retweeting an ARTnews magazine tweet), over one comment in CultureGrrl's Friday post that took issue with Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post. He had called for the resignation of the Secretary of the Smithsonian over the "Hide/Seek" affair and stated that G. Wayne Clough's decision to remove David Wojnarovicz's video from the National Portrait Gallery's show had "ignited fury in the museum world."

I had responded:

While some museum professionals may be privately simmering (and have shown the video removed by the NPG), the "fury" has been emanating chiefly from gay activists and some art writers.

Until receiving David Ross' BlogBack, published below, I have not heard or read any publicly expressed "fury" from the museum world.

But ARTnews' construing what I said to mean that I believe no one else is "upset" about Congress' pernicious art intervention is a misquotation and distortion. I believe that most of the artworld is concerned and upset about the video's removal. I'm concerned and upset. But describing the reaction of the museum world as "fury" is, to me, yet another example of the over-the-top rhetoric that has inflamed this debate, to everyone's detriment.

Another example is another tweeter's characterizing my stance on "Hide/Seek" as "sycophancy veer[ing] toward blinkered bigotry." My repeated calls for "Hide/Seek" to tour the country or, failing that, for other museums to mount their own gay-themed shows are not the words of a bigot. But people are now name-calling, based on what ARTnews tweeted, instead of what I actually wrote.

"HIde/Seek" is not "Mapplethorpe" (at least not yet). One work, which had been posthumously and problematically altered by the show's curator (who said he received approval from the artist's estate), has been excised. The show is up and the Smithsonian vows that it will remain so. If the show is hit with a legal challenge and/or is shut down, you can recruit me into the "furious" camp.

I had expected that some principled people would misinterpret my nuanced position. I had also anticipated that reasonable people would disagree.

One of the latter is David Ross, who is former director of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is currently chairman, MFA in Art Practice, School of Visual Arts.

Ross writes:

I disagree with you, fully.

Clough has behaved disgracefully, and indeed, he should not continue to run the Smithsonian. He has singlehandedly set back the clock to the days of Culture Wars. But more important, he made it clear that he has no understanding of or sympathy for the management of an art museum---or any museum for that matter.

I know you are trying to hold the moderate position, and while I understand your rationale, I could not disagree more vehemently with your critique of the spot-on WaPo column.

Roy Neuberger, receiving National Medal of Arts from President Bush in 2007

Roy Neuberger, who greatly enriched major museums with works from his pioneering American contemporary art collection, died yesterday at the age of 107. In 1974 he inaugurated the Neuberger Museum at Purchase College, New York, with a donation of 108 works and a mandate to support the work of contemporary artists.

Here's his official bio, released by the his eponymous museum:

In 1928...Mr. Neuberger seized upon his guiding principle: to support living artists by purchasing their works. He got a job on Wall Street and started collecting in 1939, the same year he founded Neuberger Berman. He purchased works from artists early in their careers, including: Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Lee Krasner, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Max Weber.

Barbara Haskell, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art (WMAA) said:

His collection was actually very risky. He purchased work that was not well recognized by the establishment or even among members of the art world. Now, they're assured masters in the canon of American Art.

In addition to his collecting, Mr. Neuberger started a trend: He bought art to hang in his company's offices, which helped pioneer what became a common practice--corporate art collections.

Starting in the mid forties, Neuberger donated hundreds of paintings to museums and colleges across the country, including: the Whitney, Metropolitan Museum, and Museum of Modern Art. In 1969, at the request of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, he donated a significant portion of his collection to New York State to establish the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College. The NMA now has over 7,000 works of modern, contemporary and African art. To provide support for the NMA, Mr. Neuberger founded the Friends of the NMA in 1972, which now raises more than 60% of the Museum's annual expenses....

In addition, Mr. Neuberger was a tireless advocate of the visual arts. He devoted many years to the American Federation of Arts (AFA)....[and] became president in 1958 [to 1967]....Neuberger was awarded the 2007 National Medal of Arts....

Mr. Neuberger served as a Whitney trustee (1961-1968) and was named trustee emeritus in 1969. He was elected an honorary trustee for Life at the Met in 1968....

Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Met, summarized his impact:

Few living persons have served the Met--indeed the entire world of art and art museums--longer, or with more distinction than Roy Neuberger. A man of taste, passion, persistence, and generosity, he has shared much of his private collection with the public, and for generations has supported activities that bring people to museums, and motivate them to return again and again.

UPDATE: Katherine Burton of Bloomberg has published a flavorful obit on Neuberger. Edward Wyatt's NY Times obit is here.

Philip Kennicott, Washington Post culture critic

[UPDATE: In my original post, I neglected to link to Kennicott's article.]

Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post jumps off the deep end of irrationality today by calling for the resignation of Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough over his decision to remove David Wojnarovicz's "A Fire in My Belly" from the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide/Seek" exhibition.

This debatable removal of one clip---which even Kennicott describes as "an unfinished work that was not among Wojnarowicz's best"---is surely not sole criterion by which the Smithsonian secretary's entire job performance should be judged. Reasonable people can disagree (as I do) over whether Clough made the right call. Either way, one "wrong" decision (if it was that) over one artwork should not cost Clough his job.

In asserting that Clough's decision was "tactically stupid because the culture wars were effectively over, at least in the museum world," Kennicott misses the point: The Culture Wars may (or may not) be "over" in the museum world, but recent events have proved that they are not over in the minds of those on the other side of this "war"---some politicians and conservative commentators. We'll never know if Clough's conciliatory efforts might have calmed down the video vigilantes, because the Culture Wars have now been escalated by the very people who have the most to lose---the champions of artistic and academic freedom.

Kennicott writes that Clough's decision has "ignited fury in the museum world," but while some museum professionals may be privately simmering (and have shown the video removed by the NPG), the "fury" has been emanating chiefly from gay activists and some art writers.

Lost in the brouhaha is the fact that this video is hardly worth fighting for, except as a symbol of oppression and discrimination for those who see its removal as "censorship." No one (except me) has paid any attention to the fact that this "Wojnarovicz" video is not even an authentic work by the artist, but was significantly altered by the curator, Jonathan Katz, who said he got permission from the artist's estate to render it more suitable for museum display (as was explained publicly, in great detail by the curator himself during a recent discussion at the New York Public Library). Instead of focusing on supposed censorship, we might more properly focus on the moral rights of an artist not to have his work posthumously tampered with.

Also overlooked in this debate is the fact that the Smithsonian is a federal institution with direct Congressional oversight---by virtue of both its funding and the fact that six member of Congress sit on its board. If any non-government museum did what the NPG has done, I'd say it was inappropriate. In this case, I'd call it politically prudent.

I'll give Kennicott one thing, though: I agree that Clough does need to step out of his office and address this brouhaha forthrightly in a public forum. The courageousness and compassion with which the National Portrait Gallery's director, Martin Sullivan, extemporaneously addressed the criticism of audience members at the end of the New York Public Library's event was a model of museum crisis management. (You can see my video of his full remarks at the end of this CultureGrrl post.)

After Sullivan handed over the microphone, the hostility of the crowd melted into applause. As a former university president, Clough must surely have experience in addressing opposition and building consensus. He needs to call upon those skills right now.

As a public servant, serving at the discretion of Congress, Clough needs to go public.

the Art and Institutions Committee of Manhattan Community Board 2, was a big hit yesterday on CultureGrrl (and, presumably, also on Curbed). It was posted to YouTube (and available for embedding on other websites) by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

Now, anyone who tries to view that video sees this:
Xiaobo) Downtown Building Project, all you'll see about Monday's Community Board presentation is a link to Erica Orden's Wall Street Journal piece covering the meeting. There's no press release about the presentation and no announcement of the May 24 groundbreaking date.

Posted in its Tuesday item about the meeting (linked here at the top), Curbed still has 14 images of renderings and plans for the Downtown Whitney. These look to me like amateur photos of slides that were shown at the meeting, not images officially distributed to the public or press (let alone posted on the museum's website).

Here's a look at one gallery:



But who knew that the Whitney had all those George Segal people? (Just kidding.)

I have queries in to the Whitney and the GVSHP as to why the video has vanished. If and when I know more, I'll update here.

The tripartite façade of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts' new Norman Foster-designed wing

In yesterday's video of my hike around the perimeter of the old and new Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I left you hanging when things were starting to get interesting---at the emergence, around the east corner of the original building's façade, of a view of the new Norman Foster-designed wing for the Art of the Americas.

Let's now continue our journey and parse the architecture. We'll end our tour with a view of the splendid-looking building that the museum has acquired for its NEXT expansion.. Purchased by the BMFA in 2007, this confection in brightest white (particularly brilliant on the glorious fall day when I visited) opened in 1914 as the Forsyth Dental Infirmary. Last August, the museum leased it for 10 years to nearby Northeastern University, while it ponders how it will eventually use the building.

Museum spokesperson Amelia Kantrowitz told me that the BMFA is now "making enhancements to portions of the Beaux Arts-designed [Forsyth] building," in preparation for its use by the university. (You'll see it arrayed in scaffolding, at the end of this video.)

Agnes Gund, while sitting opposite Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art
Photo: Marco Anelli

With President Obama's announcement today that he is nominating Agnes Gund to the National Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts will have at least one member on its advisory body with substantial visual arts creds. Gund is president emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art, as well as a major art collector and philanthropist. (Phoenix Art Museum director James Ballinger's term on the council expires this year. Gund's, if approved by the Senate, would expire in 2016.)

But what we all want to know is: Why has NEA's chairman, Rocco Landesman waited this long to orchestrate the return of fellowships for individual artists---one of his stated goals? With the possible return of the Culture Wars and the definite return of a more conservative Congress, good luck with getting grants for individual artists reinstated now.

Entrance to BMFA's 1981 I.M. Pei-designed West Wing, now open only for groups and handicapped visitors

Now that you've flown through the planned Downtown Whitney, it's time to hike around the vast perimeter of the completed (at least for now) Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which last month opened its 121,307-square-foot, Norman Foster-designed Art of the Americas Wing.

As CultureGrrl readers may remember, I did a U-turn on the highway during my fall-folliage trip to the press preview for the BMFA's expansion, because our home-hospice nurse called to say that my mother's health was failing. When I did make it up north, a few weeks late, I did my own self-guided press tour (except for a curator-guided tour of the refurbished and reinstalled gallery for 18th-century European art and decorative arts).

As you can tell from my narration, I didn't know quite what to expect as I began my inspection at the front of the West Wing. That 1981 I.M. Pei-designed building had been the main entrance to the museum before 1995, when Malcolm Rogers reopened the much grander Huntington Avenue entrance of the original 1909 building, designed by Boston architect Guy Lowell.

This videoed walkabout is in two parts: Below, the old MFA, with just a glimpse of the new as we round the east corner of the old building.

COMING SOON: My take on the Foster addition and a look at the next expansion site.

Now you can!


Architect Renzo Piano's rendering of the planned new Whitney Downtown

Listen to Whitney Museum director Adam Weinberg narrate the video below, giving a preview of the brave new Whitney. (Groundbreaking: May 24) The clip was produced despite Renzo Piano's usual distaste for fly-throughs, Weinberg told the local Community Board on Monday. He confided that the floors will be wood (not studio-style concrete, as they appear below). The ceilings will also be different.

These cavernous spaces look suitable for monumental works, but we can only hope they will be subdivided for the Edward Hoppers and John Marins. (The smaller uptown spaces may not be an option, because negotiations are reportedly proceeding to cede the Breuer-designed Whitney flagship building, at least temporarily, to the Metropolitan Museum for its modern and contemporary collections.

Speaking of Marins, where are watercolors and other light-sensitive works going to be shown? The galleries in the walk-through look drenched in sunlight: great river views; not so great for viewing art.

We can only hope that the fundraising keeps chugging along: Weinberg told the community board that 70% of the $680-million target has been raised (as reported by Erica Orden in the Wall Street Journal).That would mean approximately $100 million has been come in since last May, including the proceeds from the museum's sale of its adjoining townhouses, which were once expected to be used for an on-site Madison Avenue expansion.

The plan is to open in 2015.

UPDATE: Why has this video gone dark?



The cladding of light-colored metal panels comes straight out of the Piano playbook: Think Morgan Library and Museum in New York and High Museum in Atlanta.

For much more (including photos) about the latest news of the Downtown Whitney, go to Pete Davies' post, Whitney Unveils New Designs, Divorces the Highline!, on the Curbed NY blog.

Dept. of Damage Control---Has anyone noticed the unfortunate similarity in these two logos? Let the sunshine in!

My second Huffington Post opinion piece (here's the first) on the "Hide/Seek" controversy---"Don't Ask, Don't Tell": A Useful Policy for the "Hide/Seek" Show at National Portrait Gallery---argues that over-the-top words and actions of the defenders of David Wojnarovicz's (curator-altered) video make sense only if they want to provoke an equal and opposite reaction, touching off a full-blown Culture War.

What I didn't say in my latest HuffPost column is that, unlike many observers (including the show's curators and, it also appears, the National Portrait Gallery's director), I believe that Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough made a politically astute, if unpopular, decision in trying to defuse Congressional opposition efficiently and expeditiously, before the situation exploded.

But Clough's own staff and the NPG's outspoken guest curator, Jonathan Katz, seem determined not to let the Smithsonian pull off its retreat-to-victory strategy. The activists' Pyrrhic victory in winning this battle for liberal-minded public opinion may cause them to lose the Culture War. Paradoxically, in trying to defend freedom of expression, they are likely to cause it to be curtailed in a conservative backlash. I hope I'm wrong.

Why the Warhol and Mapplethorpe foundations would withdraw all support from the institution that green-lighted this landmark show, because of the removal of one hot-button video that isn't even the artist's original work is beyond me. Why artist AA Bronson wants to remove his well known and truly crucial work from the exhibition, to protest the removal of another work, defies reason. (Here's the Smithsonian's statement explaining its refusal to grant Bronson's request to take down "Felix, June 5, 1994," on loan to the show from the National Gallery of Canada.)

 
AA Bronson, "Felix, June 5, 1994," National Gallery of Canada

Everyone will have a chance to vent and rend garments on Jan. 29, when the National Portrait Gallery hosts a symposium on "Hide/Seek" (details to be announced). As it happens, I have longstanding plans to be in D.C. that day. I'll see if I can manage to steal away from my more pleasant activities to take in some of the contentious NPG doings.

Meanwhile, those sunny logos at the top of this post have reminded me to extend my radiant thanks to CultureGrrl Repeat Donor 152 from glorious Astoria, Queens.

Jonathan Katz, co-curator of the National Portrait Gallery's hot-button show, responds to "Hide/Seek" Flap: "Silence = Death (but so does intemperate rhetoric):

While I can in no way object to your excoriating me for my rhetoric, I can and will object to your sly rhetorical shift from critiquing my passion to insinuating that I did a kind of curatorial violence to David Wojnarowicz's work. The film existed in a 13-minute version and a 7-minute version--neither definitive. In short, I edited an unfinished piece, one that might have assumed a very different form had Wojnarowicz been able to complete it.

As it was, the four-minute version was merely a condensation of the seven-minute version. I had the permission of the estate and to my knowledge no one who knows Wojnarowicz's work well has objected to the shortening, agreeing that it was more important to represent his films in the exhibition than to leave them pure, untouched and unseen.

Todd, a CultureGrrl reader who works for an art museum and declined to give his last name, (and who published a previous "Hide/Seek" BlogBack) says this in response to prior comments made by Katz:

The fact that Jonathan Katz tried for 15 years to place this exhibition could be the result of museums' shying away from controversial content and/or being homophobic, as he suggests.

Another possible reason for the years of rejection is that curators and museum directors did not think that his proposal was strong enough. Hundreds of proposals are rejected every year by museums and they are frequently from scholars, like Katz, who are often more interested in their thesis than giving visitors a curated experience that is aesthetically charged or even visually revelatory.

While I agree with Katz on some points, I take issue with his point about homophobia in museums. From working in a number of contemporary museums and frequently visiting a wide variety of them, I have found that most of them do not shy away from material with homosexual or even homoerotic content.

Speaking of which, Ruben Cordova, an art historian, curator and CultureGrrl reader, directed my attention to Because We Are, a recent 10-artist exhibition (that included Wojnarovicz) at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston. It explored "issues regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual civil rights. Fundamental concerns include gay marriage, the AIDS crisis, religious and legislative persecution, hate crimes and gay sexuality," according to the show's description.

Left: A Polaroid from the files of convicted antiquities trafficker Giacomo Medici of dirt-encrusted Athenian Red-figure volute krater, attributed to the Methyse Painter, 460-450 B.C.

Right: Photo of the spiffed-up krater, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

As CultureGrrl readers may remember, Kaywin Feldman, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, recently shot off a letter to the editor of the NY Times, taking exception to the paper's Repatriating Tut editorial that criticized museums' reluctance to repatriate cultural property.

Feldman then wrote:

American art museums responsibly manage their collections of ancient art from other countries and cultures. The members of the Association of Art Museum Directors...subscribe to the highest principles of collecting and stewardship of their collections---even as new information about specific works may come to light.

"Information" has "come to light" about a Greek vase in Feldman's own Minneapolis Institute, but the revelations are not all that "new." Back in November 2005, under then director William Griswold (who had assumed his post the previous month), the museum issued a statement acknowledging that "an object in our permanent collection could be among a number of objects in American museums that the Italian government alleges to have been recently excavated in Italy....If after gathering the facts it is established that the Italian government has a legitimate claim, we will respond in an appropriate and responsible fashion." (The full statement was reproduced here; the museum has confirmed to me today that it is accurate.) Feldman succeeded Griswold (now director of the Morgan Library and Museum) on Jan. 1, 2008.
 

Act Up (Gran Fury), "Neon Sign (Silence = Death)" from "Let the Record Show," 1987, New Museum

There was a moment when I cringed while sitting in the NY Public Library's auditorium beside the National Portrait Gallery's director, Martin Sullivan, listening to his curators discuss the NPG's controversial "Hide/Seek" show. It was a supremely quotable moment that I didn't manage to capture on video, nor did I publish those comments in this post.

I had recoiled because it seemed to me that far from serving the cause of furthering exhibitions on gay themes, the name-calling by curator Jonathan Katz---a SUNY Buffalo professor given to no-holds-barred "academic activist" rhetoric---could only hurt his (and the NPG's) cause by goading the opposition.

Today Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post published a soundbite from Katz's "American Taliban" quote. The "representatives" he excoriates have undoubtedly now seen it.

Here (from my audio recording) is the long version:

We are almost united in opposition to the Taliban and their destruction of religious imagery in Afghanistan---the destruction of the famous statues. But we have an American Taliban that we haven't called as such---an American Taliban that is very much invested in the destruction of images they don't like, in contravention of freedom of speech and, of course, the separation of church and state enshrined in our constitution.

It is appalling to me that our representatives align themselves with that American Taliban and nobody seems to say anything.

Perhaps of more artworld interest than this counterproductive escalation of rhetoric were Katz's remarks suggesting that the controversial four-minute clip that visitors to the exhibition had seen (until it was removed from the show) was not exactly the work that David Wojnarowicz had created. It was, in part, a concoction of the curator.

In response to an informed question from the audience, Katz stated:

As people probably know by now, I edited the film down to about four minutes. It was much longer in its original version. And I did so only in terms of length, not in terms of content. Every scene that's in the original is in the four minutes; it's just truncated in terms of time frame. And that was, of course, for museological display. The original was simply too long.

We had this problem, where [either] we put it on the wall and people will see it in a much shorter time frame, or we put it separately and run it full scale, but then only a fraction of the people would actually see it. I wanted video to be integrated in the exhibition; I wanted it to be on the wall. [Sullivan later said, as captured in yesterday's CultureGrrl Video, that the NPG didn't have the space to provide a separate space for the video.]

The point of the soundtrack is absolutely critical. Famously, a beautiful and powerful soundtrack was recorded by Diamanda Galas for this image. That was not the soundtrack that was original too it. It was originally silent.

What we elected to do was to find a soundtrack that was, in some sense, between the familiar Diamanda Galas version and an earlier silent version. That was using a tape from an Act Up demonstration that David Wojnarovicz himself had taped. With the permission of the foundation, we applied that as the soundtrack for the film, precisely because it has moments, as activist actions often do, of loud noise and moments of silence.

A member of the audience then asked:

She [Galas] had no idea about the marriage of the two works until about two years ago and only officially knew about it after it was yanked from the gallery. So I'm wondering what you know about that version. Who married those two artists in that way?

Katz's reply:

As far as I'm able to understand, it came about in a [1990] film called Silence = Death, in which the filmmaker, Rosa von Praunheim, scored the two together. But that may not be the first iteration of it, and if there is one, I'd love to hear what it is.

Wojnarowicz, as I stated in my Huffington Post piece, might well have appreciated the current controversy over his work. It's arguable, though, whether he would have approved of tampering with it. To me, it seems inarguable that there's no such thing as "curatorial license," giving a museum the right to alter a dead artist's work to render it more museological.

Martin Sullivan, director of National Portrait Gallery, sitting next to me at NY Public Library discussion of "Hide/Seek" (to his left, NY Times art writer Kate Taylor, clutching her laptop)

I don't have a nose for news. News has a nose for me!

While I sat second-row-center in the New York Public Library's auditorium, waiting for the start of last night's discussion about "Hide/Seek"---the exhibition and the controversy---who should happen to sit down next to me but Martin Sullivan, the man at the center of this firestorm. The director of the National Portrait Gallery and I were in there to hear the show's co-curators, David Ward and Jonathan Katz, discuss some key works on display in the Washington show and field questions from the audience.


David Ward, National Portrait Gallery historian, left; Jonathan Katz, director of doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, right

David Wojnarowicz's hot-button video was not discussed during the first part of the evening; Eakins, Bellows, Hartley and Cadmus (among others) were. But Wojnarowicz was Topic A during the audience-participation portion of the proceedings.

I asked my captive interviewee, Sullivan, whether there was any chance that "Hide/Seek" might travel to other institutions (as I have advocated here and here). He said this couldn't happen, "because of the number of loans and lenders and their conditions" and also because touring the show would be "very expensive."

The good news, he told me, is that the NPG has just received a $50,000 gift to "beef up the website and add a lot more images and a lot more depth. That's going to have to be our way of getting it out more."

After the public discussion concluded, I asked Sullivan whether he agreed with a comment made by Katz (an "activist academic," according to the NYPL's program announcement), that the removal of the video was "stupid."

Sullivan replied:

How can I say it was stupid? I think there were considerations that the Smithsonian and the whole Federal Government has right now. I think what David [Ward] said about [the downside of] "acting in haste" [in removing the video] was appropriate.

He added that related to the removal of the video was "the whole money issue. Everyone is just so jittery about money."

Wayne Clough, the secretary of the Smithsonian, whose made the decision to pull the plug on the video, was not in attendance. But his Dec. 15 "holiday message" to Smithsonian employees was present in my inbox (sent by the Smithsonian) yesterday afternoon. Here's what Clough wrote to his staff about "Hide/Seek":

I am being criticized for removing one item from the exhibition of 105 works, but I stand by my decision. Whether we left the video in or removed it, we would face criticism. Some critics have cried "censorship."  I do not agree. I believed the protests over a small part of the exhibition would potentially drown out the voices of the many other artists in this carefully curated show. Others have criticized the placement of the entire exhibition in a publicly funded museum....

What has been obscured in the media buzz is the fact that NPG and the Smithsonian had the courage to mount the exhibit, making its important works available for free to all Americans and to people worldwide.

With the benefit of hindsight, would Sullivan have done anything differently?

Let me start by saying a fundamental reality when I came to the Smithsonian three years ago is that you may have a museum, but you're part of a big strong bureaucracy---a parent organization---and you don't always know where the parent organization is going to go.

Would I do the show? Absolutely. The whole show.

Now, let's go to the two video tapes. First, the curators have their say:



At the very end of the program, after a hostile questioner asked if Sullivan was in the house, he stood up next to me, requested the microphone and to my mind (and also, it seemed, to the audience's) acquitted himself admirably:

Friday brought the news that Michael Rush, whose embattled directorship at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University ended on June 30, 2009, has landed firmly on his feet as the newly appointed founding director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, scheduled to open in 2012. The university's president, Lou Anna Simon, described Rush as the "essential missing piece" for the new facility, complementing its deep-pocketed, eponymous sponsors and world-renowned architect, Zaha Hadid.


Michael Rush, founding director, Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University

What's good for Michael is good for CultureGrrl, because I now have a news peg for this report of my visit last week to the Rose, which is rebounding from its near-death experience. I'll conclude this post with a CultureGrrl Video of my conversation with the museum's de facto director (officially, "director of operations"), Roy Dawes, and its recently appointed director of academic programs, Dabney Hailey.

I dropped in, impromptu, on my way home after viewing the new Norman Foster addition to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (Patience, art-lings! I'll take you there in a future post.) After I made my presence known to a student receptionist, I was joined by Roy and Dabney. By the time we met, I had admired most of the Rose's two very hastily but expertly assembled and rewarding exhibitions---"Waterways" and "Regarding Painting" (to Apr. 3 and May 22, respectively).

Curated by Dawes, "Waterways" assembles a wide-ranging variety of works in diverse media, mostly drawn from the permanent collection. It explores several water-related themes, from the rapturous to the ominous, with works ranging from a 1924 John Marin watercolor to very recent multimedia works by Andrew Neumann, with hauntingly disturbing works by Gregory Crewdson and Sally Mann in between. The museum's permanent indoor water feature, enhanced by the sound of spraying jets, seemed custom-made for this exhibition:



Below is an installation shot from the lyrically beautiful part of the show. That's a Fairfield Porter in the far distance, a green Neil Welliver in the middle and an arresting Clifford Ross photograph (on loan) of a wild waves, "Hurricane LII," 2009, on the right:



As you can see from the above photos, I had the museum almost to myself, which might be attributable to the timing of my visit, during the period when students were studying for finals.

"Regarding Painting," curated by Hailey and showing off the highlights of the Rose's collection, explores four themes, including "The Act of Painting," with the museum's signature "action painting," de Kooning's 1961 "Untitled," as its centerpiece:


Reproduction of de Kooning's "Untitled," at the right of the entrance to the Rose
(You'll get a view of the real thing in the video at the bottom of this post.)

The toughest and most riveting part of "Regarding Painting" is "Trauma as Subject." Here's Dabney standing between two of those paintings, Ana Mendieta's harrowing "Body Tracks," 1982, blood and tempera paint on paper; and a particularly fine example from Robert Motherwell's "Elegy to the Spanish Republic" series:



These shows were assembled in next-to-no-time because of the gaps in the exhibition schedule left when artists Bill Viola, Eric Fischl and April Gornik pulled out of one planned fall show and James Rosenquist withdrew from another. The fact that this tour de force could be pulled off so quickly was a tribute to both the resourcefulness of the curators and the resources at their disposal---the Rose's outstanding collection. That's Warhol's "Saturday Disaster," 1964, on the right; Kelly's "Blue White," 1962, in the far distance:


Installation shot from "Regarding Painting"

In our videoed conversation, you'll hear Roy and Dabney discuss Brandeis' announced plans to rent parts of the collection, in deals to be brokered by Sotheby's. (So far, no works have left the building.) They describe in some detail their laudable efforts to integrate the Rose more fully into the academic life of the university, so that no one ever again regards the museum, once targeted for closure, as expendable.

Dawes told me he hadn't "heard a peep from Sotheby's" about any rental nibbles. He regards the fact that Hailey's new position was created and that a search committee has been formed to find a new permanent director for the Rose as signs that the financially pressed university is committed to the museum's future. Hailey (speaking off-camera but on-the-record) also takes encouragement from the fact that Brandeis' incoming president, Frederick Lawrence (who starts on Jan. 1), is "very involved in the arts community. I enjoyed looking at art with him. He was very insightful."

According to Dawes, an expansion designed by Shigeru Ban several years ago (but now on hold) is still not off the table.

In fact, here it is, on the table:

 
Model of Shigeru Ban's proposed Rose expansion, on display at the museum

The university's spokesperson, Andrew Gully, told me in an e-mail this week that the Sotheby's plan is still alive but "those discussions are confidential." As for the university's difficult financial situation, which prompted the interest in monetizing the art collection, Gully stated:

The university developed a five-year financial plan that will achieve a balanced operating budget by 2014 and we saw our endowment reach $657.3 million on Oct. 31---92% of its pre-crash value of $712 million in June 2008. At the same time, we are continuing to work with a $10 million-$15 million structural deficit.

  Now for some good news. Here are Roy and Dabney: 

Reasonable people can disagree, and I disagree with just about everyone on the Smithsonian "Hide/Seek" controversy. To cement my reputation as an artworld contrarian, I have posted an OpEd-style piece on HuffPost Arts, "Hide/Seek" Gamesmanship: National Portrait Gallery is Wrong Target.

I don't usually link from this blog to my Huffington Post columns, because they closely resemble what I post on CultureGrrl. (But art-lings come first: CultureGrrl posts appear before HuffPost spinoffs.) I made an exception this time because what I did for Arianna distills and further develops the ideas that I've touched on here, here and here. It is pegged to Monday's news development regarding the Warhol Foundation's hot-headed threat to deny all future support to the Smithsonian unless the National Portrait Gallery restores the removed David Wojnarowicz video to the "Hide/Seek" exhibition. Who's bullying who?

For an antidote to all this hysteria, I direct your attention to an online clip showing Wojnarowicz speaking about the 1980s Culture Wars. (I link to and quote from that clip at the end of my HuffPost piece.) The creator of the grating, raging (and now viral) video, A Fire in My Belly, which has sparked such irrational outrage on both sides of the current controversy, comes across here as softspoken, reasoned and committed to freedom of expression.

If you value CultureGrrl's unfettered expression, I hope you may join the very much appreciated CultureGrrl Donors 150 and 151 from Marshall, VA, and Northhampton, MA, who have brought the level of recent contributions to this blog up to a level that defrays half the cost of my new computer (on which I have now loaded new, improved photo and video software to boost my blogging prowess).

I'm also very grateful for the two recent CultureGrrl Classifieds that have appeared in my middle column (one of which has just expired), and I hope you have not failed to notice the Blogads button in my upper right-hand column, which gives you a chance to place more professional-looking ads than the ones that I'm able to place myself. Those ads (should there be any) will appear at the top of the right-hand column and will give you more options for dimensions, durations and display than the CultureGrrl Classifieds (which will still remain an option). Please click the Blogads button to learn more and, perhaps, to place an ad.

COMING SOON: CultureGrrl knows the Rose. (It's high time I visited Brandeis!)

Cézanne, "Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory," 1891, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last month, the NY Times astonishingly called for the return to Egypt of Nefertiti and the Rosetta Stone, while praising the Metropolitan Museum for its return to Egypt of some minor antiquities.

But the Times has been surprisingly silent, so far, on the latest news development related to restitution and the Met: A descendant of Ivan Morozov, a celebrated Russian collector whose trove of great Impressionist and modern masterpieces was seized by the Bolsheviks in the early 20th century, has called for the return of two of his ancestor's works that found their way to the United States. Most of Morozov's collection, along with that of fellow Russian textile merchant Sergei Shchukin, resides in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. 

Last week, Pierre Konowaloff, who says he is Morozov's great-grandson and sole living heir, filed a 15-page complaint against the Metropolitan Museum in U.S. District Court for Cézanne's "Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory." Last year, he had filed a similar suit for van Gogh's "The Night Café" at the Yale University Art Gallery.

The lawsuit against the Met was reported on Thursday by the Wall Street Journal. The painting's full provenance (including Morozov), as recorded by the Met on its website, is here.

This is a case that I feel emotional about: That painting was one of my personal touchstones as a young museum habitué hopping a D train in the Bronx to savor Manhattan's cultural riches. The suit seeks not only the painting but also cash---unspecified "actual economic damages" and "compensatory damages."

Both the Cézanne and van Gogh came to their respective American homes from the distinguished collection of Stephen Clark, who had served as chairman of the Museum of Modern Art and trustee of the Met. The still unresolved Yale situation, which began with the university's preemptive lawsuit last year, is described in the Yale Daily News here.


Van Gogh, "The Night Café," 1888, Yale University Art Gallery

In Nazi-loot cases, such claims sometimes result in a financial settlement, the details of which sometimes are not disclosed. Konowaloff and André-Marc Delocque-Fourcaud, Shchukin's grandson, also sought financial compensation for works from their forebears' collections when they were displayed in a 2008 Russian loan exhibition at London's Royal Academy.

Here's the statement issued by the Met about Konowaloff's claim for the Cézanne:

The Metropolitan Museum acquired the portrait of Madame Cézanne as a bequest from Stephen C. Clark in 1960. In the 50 years since, the Met has always been open about the work's ownership and provenance, widely exhibiting and publishing both the work and its full ownership history. The Museum firmly believes it has good title to the painting and that this lawsuit is totally without merit. The Museum intends to defend this lawsuit vigorously.

It sounds like one of the defenses will be that, in light of the museum's 50 years of open ownership, the claim is too stale. But conceptually, if not legally, this is (partly) another case of: "Where do you draw the line?" Should claims for works expropriated by the Bolsheviks at the time of the Russian Revolution be treated differently by American museums than claims for works expropriated by the Nazis before and during World War II? American museums have been receptive and responsive to Nazi-loot claims. How far back should they go to right historic wrongs?

One of Konowaloff's lawyers, Allan Gerson, maintained in a phone conversation with me last week that Bolshevik loot should be treated no differently than Nazi loot, because "by the 20th century we had in place international laws and conventions that prohibited the seizure of cultural property without compensation." Konowaloff, he said, is "seeking title to the painting" and financial compensation, but "the family has no desire to remove the painting from public view."

Wait a minute! Allan Gerson? Where have we come across him before?


Allan Gerson

He was the author of Plunder Goes on Tour, a 2008 NY Times Op-Ed piece that I had criticized as lacking "a reasonable grasp of the facts." Last week he told me that he had been engaged by Konowaloff as a direct result of his Times essay.

Konowaloff claims (in his U.S. District Court complaint) that Clark should have known that his Cézanne had been wrongfully expropriated from Morozov. Clark acquired it notwithstanding U.S. court rulings "that the Bolshevik confiscations were unlawful," in the words of the complaint. The Met, Konowaloff alleges, acquired the work without determining whether the painting had left Russia legally. Its export, he says, was unlikely to have received the "approval of the highest authorities," as required by Soviet law.

This seems to be trying to have it two ways: Soviet law should be disregarded when it allows expropriations of personal property, but respected when it bars important cultural property from leaving the country without government approval.

How have the Bolshevik confiscations been regarded in modern-day Russia? Let's go to a catalogue introduction by Mikhail Piotrovsky's predecessor as director of the Hermitage Museum, his father Boris Piotrovsky. Below is what Boris wrote for a breathtaking exhibition that traveled the U.S. in 1975-76---Master Paintings from the Hermitage and the State Russian Museum, which appeared at four major museums and at the Knoedler gallery, New York.

Knoedler got to host this museum blockbuster thanks to the key role in arranging the show played by the gallery's then owner, American industrialist Armand Hammer, who had close ties to Russia. (Clark had purchased the Morozov Cézanne through Knoedler.) That exhibition, which I saw in New York, included several modern masterpieces formerly owned by Morozov and Shchukin.

Boris Piotrovsky's catalogue introduction for that show stated this:

By the eve of the October Revolution of 1917, certain important schools and periods of art, which should be included in any great museum, were either represented inadequately or not represented at all. To remedy this, major acquisitions were made after the Revolution from important private collections and noblemen's palaces which had been nationalized. The number of works of art acquired in the post-revolutionary years was fantastic.

"Fantastic" indeed!

Gerson indicated to me that Konowaloff has no plans to go after the Russian museums' holdings---more than 200 ex-Morozov works (along with a similar number of ex-Shchukins), according to Gerson. The legal and political hurdles for wresting them from Russia would be daunting, if not insurmountable.

[CORRECTION: Mary Haus, director of marketing and communications at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, called me on Dec. 16, asking me to correct this post to reflect the fact that Peter Marzio had died of cancer, but he did not have prostate cancer, as an early version of the Houston Chronicle obit had stated. The family, Haus said, is "not disclosing what he had."]

The Houston community and the American artworld were shocked today by the unexpected announcement that Peter Marzio, director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, died last night at age 67. The cause of death was not announced, but he had prostate cancer, according to the obit in the Houston Chronicle. [See above correction.] He is survived by his wife, Frances Marzio, a curator at the museum.

[UPDATE: The museum's announcement, linked to in the above paragraph, has been greatly expanded into a full-fledged bio and appreciation since I posted this earlier today.]

At his death, Marzio was one of the longest-serving directors of an American art museum, having begun his stint at Houston (where he arrived from Washington's Corcoran Gallery) in 1982.  He was skilled in attracting major support from Houston's moneyed moguls, and relied more than most museum directors on a steady diet of single-lender blockbusters (sometimes incurring hefty rental fees to obtain them).

Marzio personally provided partial funding (scroll down) for his museum's current exhibition of works loaned by the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments---Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria (to Jan. 9). Houston's next upcoming high-profile loan show will be French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, opening Feb. 20.

In CultureMap Houston, Clifford Pugh and Steven Thomson report:

Many in Houston's art and business communities were stunned to hear of his death, because he had kept his illness extremely private.

A memorial is being planned "to celebrate Dr. Marzio's 28 years at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston," according to the museum's brief announcement (linked at the top of this post). A fuller tribute will likely appear soon on its website.

Cézanne, "The Card Players," 1890-92, Metropolitan Museum of Art

I can't wait to see the newly expanded "Card Players" when they return to New York!

According to Carol Vogel's report in today's NY Times, the Metropolitan Museum's iconic  Cézanne painting, "The Card Players" has swollen eightfold! These guys have been sitting around too long and must have put on a lot of weight.

When last I saw them, the painting's dimensions were a mere 25 3/4" by 32 1/4 inches (as described in the museum's online collection database). Now, Vogel reports, it measures a whopping 6-by-8 FEET! How did this happen?

The Met's beefy card sharks are now in a temporary exhibition, Cézanne's Card Players, at the Courtauld Gallery, London (which travels to the Met in February). So it must be the Brits who upped their ante. (Or was Vogel just bluffing?)

COMING SOON: a more serious report on another iconic Met Cézanne, related to a story published elsewhere yesterday but yet to make in onto the Times' website, let alone its newspaper. (Meanwhile, my thanks go out to the devoted CultureGrrl reader who alerted me to the Cézanne expansion.)

New cases in the former librarian's office of the Morgan Library and Museum

[Part I is here.]

It has taken me far too long to complete my two-part post, expanding upon my Wall Street Journal piece, Morgan in a New Light, which assessed the restoration and reinstallation of the Morgan Library and Museum's original McKim building. My travels and several breaking news stories (most notably the "Hide/Seek" controversy) intervened.

At long last, let's now join Jennifer Tonkovich, the Morgan's curator of drawings and prints, and William Griswold, its energetic director, as they give me an advance look at J.P. Morgan's study, his private vault and his librarian's office. This preview tour occurred back in August, when the project was still (as you will see) very much a work-in-progress. We'll conclude with some photos of the beautifully realized restoration, and we'll focus on a few of the objects that I mentioned in my WSJ article. We'll end up, as do many museum visitors, in the gift shop, and append a few thoughts about how the 2006 Renzo Piano addition is working out (or not).

Here are my gracious guides, Jennifer and Bill:



Now let's see those spaces transformed. Here's the finished study, as seen on opening day:



And here are two objects now installed in the sumptuous study, which I mentioned in my article---the late-16th-century bronze of St. John the Baptist, after Michelozzo di Bartolomeo...



...and one of the earliest dated globes, 1530, gilded copper, by French sculptor Robertus de Bailly:



This is what the barren vault, which we entered in the above video, now looks like, as seen from Morgan's study. The vault's heavy metal doors can be seen on either side of the entrance:



And here's a view from the McKim building's atrium into the former office of Morgan's librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, now repurposed as a gallery space. Visitors can traverse this room for the first time:



Turning to the left as you enter the former office, you can see examples of Morgan's important collection of Ancient Near Eastern cylinder seals. The seals themselves, carved in semi-precious stones, are in the upper lefthand corner of each three-part display, with an impression of the seal, rolled on clay, to the right of each seal and a high-resolution enlarged image of that impression below. At the bottom of each of these cases, one seal is highlighted. This absorbing, visually arresting installation was conceived by Morgan curator Sidney Babcock:

Kaywin Feldman with her museum's antiquities

Two astoundingly intemperate and, to my mind, wrong-headed NY Times editorials published in the past eight days made me wonder if someone new had been assigned the arts beat on the Times' editorial board. But it looks like Verlyn Klinkenborg is still the only one described as a culture pundit on the newspaper's list of its 15 editorial writers.

Kaywin Feldman, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, was sufficiently perturbed by last week's Repatriating Tut editorial to shoot off a letter to the editor, published yesterday, stressing that "American art museums responsibly manage their collections of ancient art from other countries and cultures."

But while affirming the need for "appropriate research" before objects are returned, AAMD failed take the Times directly to task for its most eye-popping statement.

In suggesting that other museums have not been as "responsible" as the Met in returning cultural property to countries of origin, the Times specifically took the side of Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities chief, in calling for the return of the Mummy Mask of the Lady Ka-nefer-nefer by the St. Louis Art Museum, as well as the bust of Nefertiti by the Neues Museum, Berlin, and the Rosetta Stone by the British Museum, London.

With friends like the Times' editorial board, the Met doesn't need enemies. The 19 relatively minor objects from King Tutankhamun's tomb that it recently relinquished had been subject to a clear stipulation governing the finds of Tut discoverer Howard Carter: He was required to leave all his Tut tomb finds in Egypt.

The histories of the other objects demanded by Hawass and mentioned by the Times are more complex and less clearcut. I hardly think the Met wants to become role model (as the Times tries to make it) for wholesale repatriations of important objects long held in encyclopedic museums.

And then there was yesterday's inflammatory editorial targeting the Smithsonian, which stuck its neck out by mounting a groundbreaking show exploring homosexuality, only to find itself vilified from the right for showing such art and from the left for removing one video from the show. Instead of lambasting the Smithsonian for its "appalling act of political cowardice," the Times should be recognizing the National Portrait Gallery's courage in mounting such a show and for trying to salvage it, in the face of calls to shut it down, through conciliation.

I think the most powerful way in which members of the museum community could counter attacks on gay content, while expressing solidarity with the National Portrait Gallery, is not merely to display the expurgated Wojnarowicz video; it's to show the show: If possible, the NPG should offer "Hide/Seek" as a traveling exhibition, giving other institutions the chance to explain to their regional constituencies (and political leaders) why this project is worth doing and seeing. With all its notoriety, this show is sure to draw a crowd (think Mapplethorpe). Alternatively, other museums could craft their own shows and interpretations of this under-explored topic.

Actions speak much louder than rhetoric...or Times editorials.

Jonathan Katz, co-curator of "Hide/Seek" show at National Portrait Gallery

Jonathan Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and co-curator with David Ward of the National Portrait Gallery's controversial Hide/Seek exhibition, takes strong exception to CultureGrrl's take on the issues raised by that show:

As the co-curator of "Hide/Seek," I think you couldn't be more wrong. Do you honestly believe that a privately funded museum would even go for this exhibition in the first place? I tried for 15 years to slate variants of this exhibition somewhere without so much as a nibble.

Private institutions are entirely in the thrall of their boards, which is to say, their donors. Controversy in general is bad for donations. Surely you've noted how extensively the American museum world has become an extension of private capital and in the process lost any commitment to public service.

We did this at the National Portrait Gallery because the National Portrait Gallery had the courage to do what was right. Instead of asking why we did the exhibition at NPG, you should instead be asking why MOMA has not done such an exhibition, or even acknowledged the full content and context of the Wojnarowicz images they have mounted on their walls?

Ask why the Metropolitan Museum, Whitney and Guggenheim have not only refused to acknowledge the import of sexuality in recent exhibitions of the work of living artists like Johns or Twombly (and Rauschenberg, who was alive when his retrospective was up), but dead ones, too, as in the Met's Eakins retrospective. Even worse, let's ask why 25 plus years of queer studies scholarship has been purged from the catalogs for these shows.

You are blaming the wrong parties here. We need you to underscore that the museum world is and has been systemically and profoundly homophobic since the Mapplethorpe controversy in 1989 and only the NPG, finally, had the will to break a taboo that art writers like you should have been talking about all along.

In this context, it should be noted that at least one privately funded museum---the New Museum in New York---announced on Monday that it would show, through Jan. 23, "A Fire in My Belly," the Wojnarowicz video that the NPG withdrew, under pressure, from its show. Other museums are displaying other works by Wojnarowicz or hosting screenings of the hot-button video.

And in other "Hide/Seek" news:

---The Smithsonian issued a new statement on Monday, Smithsonian Stands Firmly Behind "Hide/Seek" Exhibition, which states that "the museum and the Smithsonian stand firmly behind the scholarly merit and historical and artistic importance of the exhibition." The statement continues to defend the removal of the video on the grounds that "the attention it was receiving distracted from the overall exhibition."

---The statement issued yesterday by the College Art Association takes a stance that I support: decrying the political pressure brought to bear on the NPG and encouraging people to let the politicians know how they feel. CAA praises (rather than condemns) the NPG for its "thorough, pioneering scholarship and the challenging curatorial judgment."

---Dan Cameron, who in 1999 curated a Wojnarowicz retrospective at the New Museum, issued a statement dated Dec. 5 (in the e-mailed message disseminated yesterday by the Fluent~Collaborative, Austin): Why Wojnarowicz Matters. He decries the removal of the video as "an act of unspeakable aggression against artists, writers, intellectuals, people affected by AIDS, and especially the entire LGBTQ community in this country and throughout the world."

---The NY Times today published an editorial, Bullying and Censorship, calling the NPG's removal of the video "an appalling act of political cowardice."

What's most "appalling" to me is the escalation of intemperate rhetoric, because while it may feel good right now to righteously hammer home points about homophobia and the cowardice of museums, the end result may be that cultural institutions get hammered.

My expanded views on this brouhaha can be found at the links in the first paragraph of this post. I think it can't be emphasized enough (as Katz states in his comments, above) that the NPG was brave, not cowardly, in mounting this show. I'm glad that some other museums are stepping up to the plate in showing Wojnarowicz.

 I'd like to see this contretemps serve as a teaching moment about the importance of including in museums' exhibitions and collections the creations and sensibilities of all Americans in our pluralistic society---LGBTQ and all the other acronyms in our social alphabet.

Well this certainly wasn't what I expected when I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts yesterday to view its new Art of the Americas wing!

Just as the museum was closing this afternoon at about 4:40 p.m., while my husband and I were on the coatcheck line, an alarm sounded and the museum was hastily evacuated. I still have not been able to find out from the museum whether there was an actual fire. I'll update when I learn more.

One thing's for sure: The museum really needs to improve its public address system, so that you can actually understand what they're saying. I finally found out from a guard that it was a fire alarm and we had to leave the building immediately.

As you may remember, I also unexpectedly witnessed (and videoed) a fire in Beijing's Tiananmen Square at the start of my recent trip to China. Do I bring bad luck when I visit new places?

Here's what happened in Boston:



UPDATE: The BMFA has just gottten back to me this morning, Here's the explanation from media relations manager Meg Blackburn:

The alarm was activated by food that was being prepared in the museum's kitchens for an event later that evening, which triggered the heat sensor. The alarm was turned off, and staff were allowed back in the building shortly after. The event was held as planned.

Here's the coverage (with full names) in the Washington City Paper. The protesters assert that the video cameraman was handcuffed and that he and the iPad bearer were barred from the Smithsonian for life.

UPDATE: In a subsequently posted Q&A, the Smithsonian stated that the protesters were not barred for life, just 12 months.

My Late Parents, in healthier times

I'm going to try, once again, to make it all the way to Boston today, for a short stay. As you may remember, I had to do a U-turn three weeks ago, when I was heading for the press preview of the new Norman Foster-designed expansion of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, because of my mother's suddenly deteriorating condition.

My mother was a strong woman of great style, intelligence, grace and caring. She hung for on more than a week longer than her hospice nurse had expected. (Who can predict these things?) Having lost both of my parents within three months of each other, I'm now starting to pick up the loose ends of my life. But I still do have to remind myself that I don't need to call to see how they're doing or visit their apartment to cheer them up.

To cheer me up, I decided I owed myself that trip to Boston that I had been planning. It's always good to see a new museum facility with real people (not just press people) roaming its spaces, so maybe this change of date will have a plus side. (I have another art-related sidetrip in mind, but we'll see how that goes.)

I may or may not be blogging on Monday and Tuesday. If I do, I won't be e-mailing the links to those posts to CultureGrrl Donors, until after I return home.

Speaking of donors, my warmest thanks go out to Repeat CultureGrrl Donor 149, who has singlehandedly defrayed nearly one-third of the cost of my new computer (which, so far, is a Rolls Royce compared with my five-year-old jalopy).

Also, sharp-eyed readers may have noticed a subtle link in a small gray box at the top of my righthand column. It's soon going to be changed to something a little more enticing (and noticeable). But at this writing, it says:

Buy a Blogad!

By clicking on that, you'll arrive at the web page where you can advertise on CultureGrrl through the Blogads Network (which also includes such well-known blogs as PerezHilton, DailyKos and Wonkette). The "blog advertising" link below the gray box brings you to the entire network.

Advertising through Blogads will give you many more options in terms of size, duration and special effects (flash) than are available in my middle column's "CultureGrrl Classifieds" (which still exist as an option for advertisers).

I'd be thrilled to have museum and gallery exhibition ads brightening up my righthand column. Doesn't your museum store or art gallery have some catalogues, blue hippos or Picassos that you really need to bring to the attention of CultureGrrl's generous, devoted art aficionados?

Now you can!

"Hide/Seek," the catalogue

I've received some thoughtful comments, pro and con, about my take on the National Portrait Gallery's video controversy, and I'll publish a few, below. But first, a news update (in addition to AAMD's just released statement and another from the Association of Art Museum Curators) and a few additional comments from me:

David Wojnarowicz's controversial video, "A Fire in My Belly," expelled from the National Portrait Gallery, has found a new home at a small eight-year-old nonprofit gallery for emerging artists, Transformer. It's too bad (but not at all surprising) that a larger Washington institution (i.e., the Corcoran) has not, so far, volunteered to stick its neck out. But I'm not sure this video belongs in a storefront window (as it is at Transformer), where passersby of all ages can see it. [UPDATE: And e-mail from Transformer's manager, Barbara Petro Escobar, just hit my inbox, telling me that the gallery "is now showing the full 13-minute version of "A Fire in My Belly," inside our gallery space, and no longer in our storefront."]

This afternoon, P·P·O·W, the New York gallery that represents the estate of David Wojnarowicz, issued this statement taking issue with the NPG's removal of the video and announcing its plan to post three different-length versions of "A Fire in My Belly" on its  YouTube channel (at this writing, video-less).

UPDATE: This just in from P·P·O·W's channel: "YouTube has flagged Wojnarowicz video due to 'inapproprate content.' P.P.O.W Gallery will be posting to website soon." No matter. Someone else posted it to YouTube three years ago, and it's still here...for now.

Those seeking exhibition copies of the video are invited to e-mail the gallery. This fracas is going to greatly expand Wojnarowicz's audience, but (unlike "Piss Christ" artist Andres Serrano) he's not around to enjoy it.

Here's today's Washington Post editorial (posted online last night), which concludes:

"Hide/Seek" should be a platform for cultural debate, not the target of a misguided political vendetta.

I still think that federal institutions in Washington, such as the National Portrait Gallery, may not be the best venues for highly provocative shows on emotionally charged subjects. Even the Washington Post notes that "public sensibilities must be taken into account when taxpayer funds are in play."

In a sense, "Hide/Seek" was asking for trouble, and this is not the first time that a flare-up like this (over other hot-button topics) has occurred at the Smithsonian. I find it hard to believe that the curators at the National Portrait Gallery were completely innocent about what they might be getting themselves into.

My ambivalence about this controversy has caused two CultureGrrl letter writers to accuse me of supporting censorship, which couldn't be further from the truth. I want shows like "Hide/Seek" to be done, and I want the "vile video" (as opponents have called it) to be shown (as I stated here).

What I fear is that this episode will result in more widespread political interference as well as preemptive self-censorship by museums. By predictably provoking the backlash it has now received, one federal institution---overseen by a board that includes six Congressmen---may ultimately bring an avalanche of criticism down upon art museums nationally. With this one skirmish, the decency police may have been called back to active duty.

But enough of me. Here are some of the comments CultureGrrl has received. The first one, from Todd, who works for an art museum that he didn't want to identify, is closest to my own views:

Do you really think that fighting about this video piece is worth it in the long run? While I respect the opinion of journalists like yourself and others who have weighed in on this topic, it is frustrating that we are now headed back into Culture Wars 2.0, in a recession.

It is not what arts organizations---especially ones in red states---need at this time. I now have to comment on this to every funder I speak with in my community. Many of them watch Fox News regularly. The Smithsonian has handed them a piece of red meat and they are now tearing into it. Had this piece of art been in a non-Smithsonian venue it never would have made the news.

I wish someone would comment on the shortsightedness of this move by NPG. They might win this battle but they'll lose the war for EVERYONE for the next decade.

I feel that it is extremely shortsighted to turn this event into a rallying cry for government funding supporting edgy and controversial art. Let the privately funded institutions show it.

And this from Katherine Solender, an independent museum professional from Cleveland:

I listened to the NPR report Wednesday evening. There's an obvious response to Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who said that if it's wrong for government to be pro-religion, it should also be wrong to be anti-religion: Very few museums (including Smithsonian museums and the National Gallery) in this country DON'T display Christian art that, by it's very nature, is extremely pro-religion!

I understand your conflicted feelings, but I think it's a shame the Portrait Gallery removed the video. If Christians are offended, perhaps rather than getting angry and feeling persecuted, they could reflect on the actions people take in the name of religion. Like condemning people with AIDS. Or people who are gay. Or people who aren't Christians. I find THAT offensive.

Finally, this from Sherman Greene, a retired civil servant:

The Smithsonian's "Hide/Seek" exhibition should be protested by everyone who cares about art, not for offending the religious, but for turning art into a propagandistic tool of identity politics. The show and the phony "controversy" it has predictably engendered have nothing to do with art.

Sometimes composing a forceful, principled statement takes time. This just in: the Association of Art Museum Directors' statement on the "Hide/Seek" controversy at the National Portrait Gallery (online here):

It is extremely regrettable that the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, a major American art museum with a long history of public service in the arts, has been pressured into removing a work of art from its exhibition "Hide/Seek."

More disturbing than the Smithsonian's decision to remove this work of art is the cause: unwarranted and uninformed censorship from politicians and other public figures, many of whom, by their own admission, have seen neither the exhibition as a whole or this specific work.

The AAMD believes that freedom of expression is essential to the health and welfare of our communities and our nation. In this case, that takes the form of the rights and opportunities of art museums to present works of art that express different points of view.

Discouraging the exchange of ideas undermines the principles of freedom of expression, plurality and tolerance on which our nation was founded. This includes the forcible withdrawal of a work of art from within an exhibition-and the threatening of an institution's funding sources.

The Smithsonian Institution is one of the nation's largest organizations dedicated to the dissemination and diffusion of knowledge-an essential element of democracy in America. We urge members of Congress and the public to continue to sustain and support the Smithsonian's activities, without the political pressure that curtails freedom of speech.

Saying that it is "extremely regrettable" that the NPG "has been pressured" to remove the video falls just short of saying that it shouldn't have removed it.

The National Portrait Gallery does not belong to AAMD. The institution that it shares a building with---the Smithsonian American Art Museum---does.

Sotheby's Five-Year Stock Price Chart

There have been mixed messages about how sales are doing at the still-in-progress Art Basel Miami, which I have once again perversely failed to attend.

So while all you CultureGrrl readers are away from your computers, catching the rays and perusing the booths, here's a bullish market signal to contemplate:

Sotheby's has gotten back into the guarantee business and (unlike privately traded Christie's) has released figures that quantify this. Guarantees are the amounts that the auction house promises to certain consignors, whether or not bidding reaches the level of the guarantee. Both auction houses sharply cut back on guarantees after the bubble burst in the fall of 2008.

But as you will see, Sotheby's laid off most if its risk by securing "irrevocable bids" from third parties on the guaranteed works.

In its most recent quarterly report filed with the SEC, Sotheby's revealed the following:

For the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Sotheby's reported net income of $64.7 million, an increase of $144.8 million when compared to the prior year's ($80.1) million net loss....

As of September 30, 2010, Sotheby's had outstanding auction guarantees totaling $77.2 million [compared with only $5.3 million a year ago and a whopping $319.6 million on Sept. 30, 2008], with the related property having pre-sale low and high estimates of $76 million and $103.6 million, respectively.

Sotheby's financial exposure under these auction guarantees is reduced by $73 million as a result of irrevocable bids from unaffiliated counterparties....The property related to these guarantees is being offered at auctions occurring in the fourth quarter of 2010 [including last month's big Impressionist/modern and contemporary sales].

And here's a bullish CultureGrrl indicator:

My warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Donor 148 from San Francisco. Her contribution, however, will not be sufficient to defray my big purchase of this week, which I made for you, art-lings. (After all, how do you think I spend most of my computer time?):

I guess it just had to happen.

While I was focused on Washington, this slipped in yesterday from Nashville:

Fisk University announced today that it has filed a notice with the Davidson County Chancery Court that it will appeal the ruling of the Court concerning Fisk's request to enter into a sharing arrangement with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas for Fisk's Stieglitz Art Collection.

In her statement on the planned appeal, posted on the university's website, Fisk President Hazel O'Leary decried the stipulation in Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle's ruling that the financially struggling university could accept Crystal Bridges Museum's $30-million offer for a half-share in Fisk's Stieglitz Collection only if the university relinquished two-thirds of that "to endow a Nashville connection for the collection."

O'Leary argued:

This restriction effectively confiscates proceeds from the approved sharing agreement and places Fisk in a more risky position than before.

In an e-mail to me last night, a spokesperson for Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper Jr. signaled that he's more than ready to do battle once again:

We welcome the opportunity to urge the Court of Appeals to fashion a solution, such as the Pearl Creswell Fund, that will fulfill the donor's intent and keep the Stieglitz Collection in Nashville and available to Fisk students full-time. We will ask the Court of Appeals to prohibit the sale and adopt one of the alternatives provided by our office.

The Court of Appeals could overturn Chancellor Lyle, as it did once before. Here's what C. Michael Norton, one of Fisk's lawyers on this case, had to say in response to my query about whether the higher court could prohibit any sale of a half-share in the collection:

That is a risk if the Attorney General files a cross-appeal asking the court to invalidate the sale. We expect him to file such a cross-appeal. We expected him to file an appeal even if Fisk did not, so Fisk does not take on any greater risk by appealing.

After the last decision came down, I asked Crystal Bridges, now scheduled to open next Nov. 11, a few questions:

---In light of the Association of Art Museum Director's statements regarding the Fisk/Stieglitz case, can you tell me whether there is any thought on the part of Crystal Bridges about changing or terminating the collection-sharing arrangement?

---Is Crystal Bridges in discussions with AAMD regarding this matter, and, if so, what is the nature of those discussions?

---Have Fisk's legal costs in this matter been paid by Crystal Bridges, Alice Walton (founder of the museum), or a Walton-connected entity?

Here is the answer that was conveyed to me by museum spokesperson Virginia Germann:

Our position is not to comment on the Alfred Stieglitz Collection.

I also had asked AAMD's executive director, Janet Landay, whether the association had contacted not only Fisk (over which it has little leverage) but also Crystal Bridges (over which is has much) to attempt to dissuade the Alice Walton-founded museum from deploying its vast resources to encourage another institution to both violate donor intent and monetize its artistic assets. I also asked for any information she could provide about the nature of those contacts.

Here's Landay's reply, sent to me on Nov. 9:

AAMD has contacted Fisk and Crystal Bridges regarding the collection given to the University by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Apparently those "contacts" have done nothing to alter Crystal Bridges' resolve. Perhaps AAMD should now publicly comment on what action, if any, it plans to take against an AAMD wannabe whose museum has encouraged an educational institution to exploit its art collection, in the words of AAMD's admonitory letter to the university, "as a fungible asset and using collections to pay for daily expenses."

A meditation on the fragility of the human flesh.

That's how National Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan---in today's NPR segment, Smithsonian Under Fire For Gay Portraiture Exhibit---described David Wojnarowicz's incendiary (literally and figuratively) video, "A Fire in My Belly," which had become the center of a political firestorm.

But this harsh, grating piece is no peaceful meditation. To me, it looks like a forceful, in-your-face statement about the sanctimonious intolerance suffered by those who have suffered from AIDS. Soft-pedaling a montage that makes your skin crawl doesn't do the video justice and doesn't explain why it has aroused such a bitter backlash.

You can hear Sullivan's comments, the voices of newly minted art critics who have lambasted the video, and my own soundbite (at about 2:40) in NPR correspondent Elizabeth Blair's above-linked report on the controversy.

While I think the National Portrait Gallery was prudent to do what it did in this instance---withdraw one work, rather than take a defiant stance that could jeopardize not only the entire exhibition but also the future of national arts support---this sets a very dangerous precedent that could embolden other self-styled arbiters of taste to usurp the curatorial role when a provocative work offends them.

A stand on behalf of museum professionals must be taken immediately, preferably by the Association of Art Museum Directors (which has not, at this writing, responded to my request for comment). And I would add my voice to Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik's call for another Washington art museum to embrace the "offending" video, making the point that although federal institutions like the Smithsonian may be hampered by the unique political nature of their oversight, artistic and academic freedom at cultural institutions must prevail in a free society.

My own Q&A with the Smithsonian is here.

Martin Sullivan, director, National Portrait Gallery

Keying off this CultureGrrl post, NPR interviewed me today for an "All Things Considered" segment on the controversy over the National Portrait Gallery's Hide/Seek exhibition.

If all goes according to plan, that report will air this evening, possibly after 5:30 p.m. You can listen live to NPR here; I'll post the link to the audio (with or without my comments) when it's up.

In the meantime I've gotten the Smithsonian Institution's take on this brouhaha. In response to my e-mailed queries, spokespersons for the Smithsonian and its National Portrait Gallery (Linda St. Thomas and Bethany Bentley, respectively) jointly sent me the official statement by the NPG's director, Martin Sullivan, on this culture-wars flare-up, as well as answers to the additional questions that I posed.

Here's Sullivan's statement (now also posted online, but with a different last paragraph):

"Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" is an exhibition of 105 works of art that span more than a century of American art and culture. One work, a four-minute video portrait by artist David Wojnarowicz (1987), shows images that may be offensive to some. The exhibition also includes works by highly regarded artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Thomas Eakins and Annie Leibowitz.

I regret that some reports about the exhibit have created an impression that the video is intentionally sacrilegious. In fact, the artist's intention was to depict the suffering of an AIDS victim. It was not the museum's intention to offend. We are removing the video today.

The museum's statement at the exhibition's entrance, "This exhibition contains mature themes," will remain in place.

Here's my Smithsonian Q&A (questions sent before I received the above statement):

CultureGrrl: Why did you decide to take down "A Fire in My Belly" [the Wojnarowicz video]? Is it going to stay down?

Smithsonian: Yes, it will stay down. The other videos will remain on view. [The "why" question gets answered at the end of this Q&A.]

Q: Are there going to be any other changes in the show?

A: No.

Q: Have you been formally asked by anyone (i.e., a Congressman or other federal official) to make other changes or to take down the entire show?

A: No. [House Speaker-designate John] Boehner and [incoming Majority Leader Eric] Cantor issued statements directly to the media. They did not contact the museum or the Smithsonian Secretary. Several Congressional offices did contact our government relations staff. (Note: six members of the [Smithsonian] Board of Regents are members of Congress---three senators and three representatives.)

Q: Have the Congressional critics actually seen the show?

A: Not that we are aware of. It has been open to the public since Oct. 30 and when members of Congress visit exhibits, they generally call us in advance or ask for a tour. We know of no visits.

Q: Have you received any reactions from the broader museum and artist communities? If so, what?

A: As you would expect, we have some e-mails and calls from citizens about the Smithsonian's caving in to conservative Congressional pressure. The position was pretty well stated in the essay by Blake Gopnik in today's Washington Post.

Q: Going forward, are there any lessons to be learned from this?

A: Art exhibitions are sometimes controversial, as you know better than we do. Many works of art, especially contemporary art, may offensive to some people. We do not shy away from art exhibits because of this nor do we refrain from exhibitions about other controversial subjects. For example, evolution hall [the Hall of Human Origins at the National Museum of Natural History] is controversial to creationists, but we opened that permanent exhibition earlier this year.

Q: What else do you think people should know about this?

A: Eleven seconds of a four-minute video were seen as the entire exhibition. It's a huge exhibition, one of the largest ever at the National Portrait Gallery, with 105 works of art, many of them masterpieces that have been displayed in museums around the world. But that few seconds of video featuring the crucifix became the focal point, and the significance of the exhibition would have been overshadowed by that one piece [had the museum not agreed to remove it]. 

"David Wojnarowicz Smoking" by Peter Hujar

As if rising tensions between North and South Korea, Iran's scary nuclear program and the damaging diplomatic fallout from WikiLeaks weren't enough, the Republican leadership of Congress has found another burning issue requiring immediate action---the screening at a federally funded Washington museum, the National Portrait Gallery, of late gay activist David Wojnarowicz's provocative 1987 video, "A Fire in My Belly," which includes images of large ants crawling over the body of Jesus.

The piece is admittedly very tough, very grating, and definitely not for the children. I had to force myself to watch (online, here) the full four minutes that were excerpted from the original 30-minute video, on view in the NPG's current exhibition---Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (to Feb. 13). (The "difference" referred to discreetly in the title is homosexuality.)

As reported by Christina Wilkie in yesterday's Washington Scene:

Kevin Smith [spokesman for House Speaker-designate John Boehner] said, "Smithsonian officials should either acknowledge the mistake and correct it, or be prepared to face tough scrutiny beginning in January when the new majority in the House moves [in]." He later clarified that Boehner wanted the exhibit "cancelled."

[Incoming Majority Leader Eric] Cantor demanded that the exhibit be "pulled," calling it "an outrageous use of taxpayer money."

The museum has already pulled the plug on the incendiary video, as reported yesterday by the Washington Post. Ironically, this self-censorship occurred just before World AIDS Day, which is today. I can't imagine that the NPG would completely capitulate by taking down the entire show without a fight. And the arts community---no matter how reluctant it might be to take on this battle at a time when times are tough---would be almost obliged to rally behind the NPG, taking a stand for free artistic expression and against inappropriate government meddling in museums' professional prerogatives.

There's just one catch, however: Although it does receive private donations (which funded the now controversial exhibition), the National Portrait Gallery is not merely an institution that gets some federal support. It's a federal institution---part of the Smithsonian. I may catch some flak for saying this, but the rules of engagement for a federal institution in the nation's capital are arguably different than for the Whitney Museum or the New Museum, where pushing the envelope is understood as part of the mission.

I previously wrote about this possible difference in protocols for federal institutions in my 1996 Wall Street Journal article about a hot-button photography show on slavery---The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation. Ruffling the feathers of some Library of Congress employees, it was taken down by that federal institution the same day it was put up (and later mounted instead at the local Martin Luther King Library). And who can forget the National Air and Space Museum's drastic revision of its controversial show about the Enola Gay (another controversial "gay" show!), the plane that carried the bomb to Hiroshima at the end of World War II?

What I'm trying delicately to suggest is that federal institutions may not be the most appropriate venues for highly provocative or controversial takes on emotionally charged subjects. The likelihood of goading conservative politicians into cracking down on the arts more broadly makes such undertakings in D.C. uniquely risky. On the other hand, a show on the gay experience in America---surely a legitimate area of exploration anywhere---might be incomplete without the inclusion of the anguish, rage and, of course, sexuality that are part of any comprehensive consideration of this topic. Some might persuasively argue that the nation's capital is exactly where such a show should be seen.

If I seem conflicted in my views about this, it's because I am.

This was not the first time that Wojnarowicz's work has been targeted by federal officials. In the NY Times obit for the artist, who died young of AIDS in 1992, art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote:

Wojnarowicz gained the national spotlight in 1989, when the National Endowment for the Arts decided to rescind money for a catalogue to an exhibition about AIDS because of an essay in which he attacked various public figures. The endowment reversed itself. It also supported a 10-year retrospective of his work that was organized at the University Galleries of Illinois

Maybe this will be another instance where Wojnarowicz---posthumously this time---snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. Frankly, I'm not all that optimistic.