|
|
MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Art BS alert
Jen Graves thinks that this Johanna Burton-ism is a big deal:
Installation acknowledges the viewer as central to the work, provides or professes to provide or satisfy an experience, where sculpture continues to posit itself as central to the work. It's glad you’re looking at it, but it really doesn’t need you.
I think it's a massive waste of pixels (and it's worse if you read the whole passage on Slog). Who talks like this?! A Picasso sculpture doesn't need me but a Thomas Hirschhorn does? Huh?! (And believe you me, I'm being kind by not pointing you toward the entire 90MB podcast from which Graves took said Burtonism.)
What does "need me" mean anyway? If we for 10 seconds accept this 'neediness' drivel, I'd suggest that a Henry Moore 'needs' a viewer to walk around it as much as anything else does. Matisse too. Jack Flam wrote about how the compression of space and the demolition of a single persepctive in Matisse's sculpture are best understood when viewing from multiple angles, which requires -- needs! -- the viewer.
|
In which we help out the Whitney
Curious about how museums market exhibitions to the public? Take this joint Whitney-Jewish Museum survey (don't ask, I don't know) to see how the two museums are trying to figure out how to market several shows, including a 60s-70s art/culture show and a Louise Nevelson survey.
My reason for wanting to see these shows (as requested by the survey): "This exhibition is not the Whitney Biennial, therefore I think I will have a high degree of interest in it."
Related: Last year LACMA tried the online survey thing too. It was even more fun than the Whitney/JM survey!
|
Albright, Carnegie to share a Whiteread
 Last week I posted about the LACMA-MOCA joint purchase of Chris Burden's Hell's Gate Bridge, a 28-foot long sculpture. I found the joint acquisition of something other than new media art to be unusual and unlikely to become commonplace.
Yeah, well, nevermind: Yesterday the Carnegie and the Albright-Knox announced that they had co-purchased Rachel Whiteread's 2002 Untitled (Domestic). In the spirit of the partnership, here's Harold McNeil's Buffalo News story and Timothy McNulty's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette write-up.
This is not like two tiny North Dakota museums buying a piece together. The CMOA and the A-K are good-sized museums with good-sized acquisition budgets. The A-K in particular has a distinguished record of using its acquisition-specific endowments to be an active acquirer of contemporary works. (I wrote about the AK's 2005 acquisitions here, and its lusts here. In that second post Grachos mentioned his Whiteread-lust and how his museum was working on a Whiteread acquisition.)
And despite whatever Michael Kimmelman thinks and doesn't see, the CMOA is one of America's most contemporary-art-active regional museums. (You've heard of the International?) So when these two team up for a contemporary acquisition -- and one that won't be super-easy to truck up I-79 -- it makes me think that we could be seeing the beginnings of a major change in how art museums acquire contemporary art. (I'm leaving Gross Clinic out of this discussion because it was a Philly one-off, born out of a freakish circumstance.) More on this on MAN in the near future.
|
Hammons, Salcedo, and Puryear at MCASD
 I particularly enjoyed a couple of permanent collection installations when I was in California last month, none moreso than three related works at MCASD:
The more David Hammons I see the more David Hammons I want to see. MCASD's downton 1001 Kettner space (I know, it's confusing -- here's a map. The new MCASD Downtown is at the train station; 1001 Kettner is nearby.) MCASD had up a small collection show called Material Actions. It featured abstract sculpture inspired by the body.
Hammons' 1989 Champ (right) is impeccable and clever, beautiful and sad. The materials are simple: inner tube, (silver) duct tape, and boxing gloves (with laces hanging down). Hammons smartly mixes a deflated sport with deflated materials to examine the role of the prize fighter in American culture, especially black culture. Before the NBA was a dreamed-of escape-valve for urban youth, boxing offered the bruising, difficult way up. Fighters such as Jack Johnson and Joe Louis were heroes to black America, fighters who crossed-over and had success in mainstream society. But with success came tragedy: Louis died broke, his funeral paid for by German rival Max Schmeling. The tragedy went beyond individual figures: Countless young black men hoped boxing would provide a way up but instead were merely pummeled, used as entertainment, in match-fixing schemes, as disposable cogs in brutal entertainment.
I also think about Champ through the prism of what was happening in the sporting world in 1989. Hammons had to be influenced by what was happening around him: Mike Tyson was on top of the boxing game, destroying every in-ring opponent in sight, the most prominent athlete in America. But signs of Tyson's soon-to-be-messy-end were everywhere: In late 1988 Tyson's wife, Robin Givens, accused him of beating her. Tyson broke his hand in a much-publicized street fight with boxer Mitch "Blood" Green and wrapped his BMW around a tree, which the New York Daily News reported as a suicide attempt. "Real freedom is having nothing," Tyson said at the time. "I was freer when I didn't have a cent. Do you know what I do sometimes? Put on a ski mask and dress in old clothes, go out on the streets and beg for quarters."
In 1989 Tyson continued to dominante opponents in the ring, but struggled outside it. His divorce from Givens was finalized. He was accused of fighting with an LA parking attendant. And early in 1990 he'd lose his heavyweight title to unknown Buster Douglas in one of the greatest upsets in boxing history. In 1991 he was arrested on a rape charge. Tyson's sport has never recovered from the damage he did to it -- and to himself.
 So Hammons' Champ feels right. There are wounds on the 'fighter,' a melted patch on the left side, and 'stitches' on the right, near the top, where the head might be. The duct tape holding the gloves to the inner tube looks old, almost inert. Like boxing, Hammons' tired Champ won't be coming back to life anytime soon. (Of course Champ is a near-relative of MoMA's terrific 1990 Hammons, High Falutin'.)
Across the gallery from Champ was Martin Puryear's Vault. And in La Jolla MCASD was showing their nice 1995 Doris Salcedo. Vault, a crafty-cave, is just big enough for a human to fit in. Salcedo's cement-filled cabinet is seven-feet tall, also big enough for a person. Each comes with a set of associations: Intentionally or not, Puryear's Vault conjures an Underground Railroad hiding place. Salcedo's work brings to mind people who have disappeared, possibly been tortured. Seeing the three in the course of a morning was the good kind of haunting.
|
MCASD Downtown: The galleries
 Yesterday's part one.
MCASD Downtown's galleries are made less for paintings and photography (the MCASD's La Jolla galleries are more traditional) and more for installation and new media art. For example, the museum will open with an Ernesto Neto work (not installed when I visited) and the premiere of a new Eija-Liisa Ahtila four-screen video piece. (The MCASD is co-purchasing the piece with the Berkeley Art Museum.)
Smaller galleries will house a small paintings show. New commissions include a light-and-spacey Richard Wright (installation at right), and a Jenny Holzer (which won't be turned on until the museum opens). The MCASD Downtown's neighbor is still a functional train station, and a confrontational, space-separating Richard Serra commission (below) serves as a baggage-meets-the-minimalist-cube dividing line between the tracks and the museum's rail-side entrance. The facility also includes a small studio for an artist-in-residence. (First up: Bob Irwin.)
The two large galleries off of the central corridor are the ones that artists will love. One is a new media gallery, totally configurable by an installing artist. The projectors can be put anywhere, a screen or screens can be hung from the ceiling or placed on a wall, the floor, wherever. Natural light can be let in -- or not. If I were a new media artist, this gallery would be at the top of my I-wanna-show-here list.
On the other side of the entrance corridor a larger gallery will host the Neto. It's more light-filled, and that alone should attract artists to San Diego (If you don't like San Diego light, you don't like light.)
 The spaces are typical Richard Gluckman. The Santa Fe railroad baggage depot is a 91-year old building designed by San Francisco's Bakewell & Brown (an eminent firm that built San Francisco's City Hall, Stanford's Hoover Tower, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Pasadena's City Hall). The Gluckman formula fits here: Think Mary Boone Gallery meets the West, where some of the past is left naked, and some of it is dressed in drywall.
The new downtown space won't instantly vault MCASD to Walker- or SFMOMA-level in terms of facilities. MCASD doesn't have the capability to host a traveling exhibition and to install supporting works from its permanent collection within a 20-minute drive of each other, let alone in neighboring galleries.
But MCASD does have a differentiating factor that it shares with only one other American museum: It smartly looks south for the avant garde, not just to Europe. (Miami also looks south. And MCASD isn't the only San Diego institution to think cross-border: inSite does too.) With its new downtown space, MCASD has strong spaces in which those artists can best present themselves to American audiences.
|
Next stop: MCASD Downtwon
UPDATE: Apparently MAN readers take their holidays seriously. So we will too. Back with more MCASD tomorrow.
 In America, the preservation of historic buildings often comes with a catch. We often retrofit and re- re-purpose on the way toward restoration. For example: When I was in college I frequently visited St. Louis' Union Station, a rail depot that had been transformed into a Hyatt, a shopping mall, and a parking lot where the pro beach volleyball tour came every summer.
Our art museums generally take care of their own buildings, but they aren't usually interested in re-purposing older structures. When American museums want new galleries, they build: In Davenport, Iowa, the Figge could have rehabilitated an old riverfront building but opted to build a David Chipperfield. MAMFW could have picked a cattle-is-king era building, but hired Tadao Ando, and so on.
So it's surprising that the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego decided to expand into an old building downtown, it called Richard Gluckman, who helped the Warhol and Dia into older buildings. With Gluckman's help, MCASD converted a 1915 railway station baggage building into galleries, tacked on a modest new structure, and, $25 million later, is opening the doors this week.
It's easy to imagine the MCASD Downtown becoming an artist's favorite. It's a light-filled two-fer, the old baggage facility and a new, three-story, plus-sized townhouse that will house an auditorium, education facilities, meeting rooms and administrative offices. (Most of which are available to outsiders -- for a price, of course.)
Next: The galleries. Related: Robert Pincus has a nice piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune. MCASD curator Stephanie Hanor's acquisitions wish-list.
|
Burtynsky documentary coming to Sundance
 When Edward Burtynsky won his TED award a while back, he said that one of his three wishes was to make an IMAX film that would help take his work to audiences beyond the art world. It's not an IMAX, but a documentary about Burtynsky will debut at Sundance on Jan. 19. (The film has already been shown in Canada, where it has won several awards.)
Titled Manufactured Landscapes, the 90-minute film, directed by Jennifer Baichwal, shows Burtynsky exploring Chinese landscapes from the Three Gorges Dam to China's oversized, overpolluted suburbs. You can see a two-minute trailer here.
Related: Burtynsky's personal site. A wee bit of me on Burtynsky, with links to more.
|
A philosophical difference
Alec Soth: "Is art really about learning? I'm much more comfortable with the pursuit of beauty."
Holland Cotter: "I love art for its pleasures, but I believe it is ultimately about teaching and self-education."
|
Art in Miami: None of the above
 When I looked at the work of young sculptors/installationists in Miami I saw a tremendous amount of work exploring architecture and lived-in environments. It was as if Gordon Matta-Clark and Rachel Whiteread were in the ether. Many of the artists seemed especially interested in how we experience space and aesthetics in space, bringing to mind Judd, Flavin, Andre, LeWitt, Zittel, and Serra.
Magnus Thierfelder at Elastic (Malmo, Sweden): Thierfelder starts with objects we expect to find in built environments: power outlets, drainpipes, windows, throwrugs, etc. and then tweaks them. When I look at his surreal Explorer (left) I feel like I'm a character in a video game. In Lost Control, the tops of potted plants have apparently detatched themselves from their pots, and have drifted up to the ceiling. Theirfelder's work places the viewer in a comic book, or outer space, or anywhere other than places to which I'm accustomed. Lots of artists (including many mentioned above) have deconstructed the places we live using deep-voiced, manly things like core-ten steel and saws. Thierfelder does it with humor.
Kirsten Nelson at Frederieke Taylor (NYC): Speaking of deconstructed spaces, Nelson uses building materials such as drywall, wood, and spackle to turn rooms inside-out. In so doing Nelson puts back the spaces that Matta-Clark deconstructed, but she does it in a way that keep the guts he exposed on view. (Reminds me of a Jasper Johns gesture: 1956's Canvas.) Her work is nearly colorless, which focuses attention on her use of materials and the teeny bits of neutral color therein. Are all of our spaces this droll until we spice them up?
 Sarah Bostwick at Gregory Lind (San Francisco): When the Christian Era began, early Christian artists were particularly interested in two media: mosaic and relief sculptures. Technology has passed by mosaic techniques, but thanks to laser-cutting relief is more precise -- and fresher -- than ever. (See Albenda, Ricci for a variation thereon.) Bostwick's reliefs read as memories and as spaces, both of which are waiting to be be completed in the mind's eye. Bostwick's pieces are generally fairly small -- a couple feet by a couple feet -- but I'm curious as to what she might make large. Related: ArtFever.
Conrad Shawcross at Victoria Miro (London): Shawcross is the one that doesn't belong with the rest of the artists here. He makes big stuff out of big beams of wood and light, big objects that allude to big ideas such as the solar system, big science, big everything. Shawcross' big stuff is fantastically appealing (Charles Saatchi was an early buyer), but since scale only takes you so far...
|
Marcia Tucker tribute
The New Museum is hosting a memorial tribute to celebrate founding director Marcia Tucker. You need not be at The New School's Tishman Auditorium (at 66 West 12th Street) on Friday at 3pm to participate -- the event will be e-broadcast live over the internets here. Speakers will include: Martin Friedman, John Baldessari, Carol Becker, Ned Rifkin, Pat Steir, and Susana Torruella Leval. And kudos to Artforum for putting NewMu director Lisa Phillips' reflections on Tucker here.
|
Vezzoli on Caligula on YouTube
 On Tuesday I posted about artist and video art on YouTube, prominently mentioning Francesco Vezzoli's Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's "Caligula" as a high-quality, non-camera-phoned-off-of-a-MoMA-wall example of something on YouTube. Seeing as Vezzoli didn't post it on YouTube himself, I wondered how he felt about it.
"I am sort of delighted and surprised about the number of people that watched it," Vezzoli said via email. The YouTube viewer count is pushing 26,000. "Of course if any of the actors will complain with me about Caligula being on YouTube I'll have to make an offical request to have it withdrawn from the site."
Vezzoli's remake stars Helen Mirren, Adriana Asti, and Gore Vidal from the 1979 film, and also Karen Black, Benicio Del Toro, Milla Jovovich, Courtney Love, and more.
|
Acquisition: Chris Burden's Hell Gate Bridge
 Chris Burden's first bridge, 1998's Hell Gate Bridge (at left), is on its way back to Los Angeles. The sculpture will be owned 50-50 by MOCA and LACMA. It is a partial gift from John McEnroe (who kept it in his loft) and a joint acquisition with funds provided by the Broad Art Foundation. It's the first acquisition that MOCA and LACMA have made together.
"No one was thinking about this at the outset," Broad Art Foundation boss Joanne Heyler said. "But the piece being a bridge..."
While Burden's bridges have been on view in Los Angeles before -- in 2003 at Gagosian's Beverly Hills space -- Hell Gate Bridge has never been shown in LA. And it's not immediately clear when it will be -- the 28-foot long HGB is too large for either LACMA or MOCA to slide onto view. While I understand that most of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA installation is finalized, it's possible that HGB could go on view at the BCAM in a year or so. To date the piece has been installed at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in the UK, in Chicago and at the Venice Biennale.
MOCA might not have a big new building to fill, but the acquisition makes sense for it too -- MOCA has much of the Lannan Foundation's Burden holdings.
Related: I hear there's an LAT story on this, but I can't find it.
|
Internet video: Art and artists
 Yesterday we talked about two museums that have recently launched their own channels on YouTube: MoMA and Indianapolis. But what about artworks and artists?
I can't find too many examples of artists posting video art straight to YouTube or to Google Video. Brian Presnell, who received a solo show at Indianapolis MOCA last year, has a YouTube channel with his work. (It was curated by On the Cusp contributor Christopher West.) NYC-based Swede Annika Larsson posts her video work on her MySpace page.
But the overwhelming majority of the video art on YouTube appears to be there without the direct consent of the artist who created it. Francesco Vezzoli's Caligula (above)-- now in the collection of the Guggenheim -- has been on YouTube long enough to have been viewed 25,000 times. (Via. You'll need to sign in or use BugMeNot to view it.) There are dozens of other examples, including of video that visitors to museums have recorded on their digital cameras or cell phones. Much of that content seems to come from MoMA, which can be as much a photo arcade as it is an art museum. Pipilotti Rist's Ever is Over All is one video-to-digital example.
 Museum visitors also like to capture whatever they can, whether it's video or not. Check out Janet Cardiff's 40-Part Motet at MoMA or Carsten Holler's slide at the Tate Modern. Actually, Turbine Hall seems made for YouTube as Rachel Whiteread is all over YouTube and Olafur Eliasson is too. One MASSMoCA visitor filmed Ann Hamilton's Corpus, but I'm guessing Hamilton prefers the video on her own site (at right).
And what would the internets be without a little parody? How about The Passions, a Bill Viola send-up, complete with a wry stand-in for Viola's ubiquitous waterscapes?
Finally, there are a few websites that aggregate video. Ubu.com features a lot of early video art (expect the Getty Research Institute to put some of its early video collection online someday too), and Joao Ribas' Expanded Cinema features Ribas-selected work.
Related: Chris Jagers makes a point I was going to make.
|
Internet video: Museums
 About a year ago I was talking with an ex-museum-director friend about video art and the internets. He told me that he was surprised that more video artists hadn't taken advantage of the internet as a way of getting their work seen. "I keep waiting for video art to pop up on iTunes," he said. "And I check at least once a week."
Ever since that conversation I've been keeping an eye on sites such as Google Video and YouTube for any sign that new media artists are looking for broader audiences via the web. I haven't found much -- but that could also be because I don't know where to look. (Anyone know of a good blog with this stuff?) So let's start with what two museums are doing:
The Museum of Modern Art has recently started a YouTube channel called MoMAvideos. Given the museum's partnership with Creative Time on Doug Aitken's sleepwalkers, two 'trailers' for Aitken's MoMA projections are the channel's first programming -- and they're well worth a look. (The trailers are also on Google Video, and MoMA has an Aitken site on moma.org.)
So far the museum doesn't have any plans to post works from its collection on YouTube, to commission work that would be shown there, or to launch a video art 'exhibition' on YouTube... but that's not to say those things won't happen in the future, I'm told.
One reason to expect MoMA to be among the first to explore online possibilities: MoMA recently created a Department of Media, and put curator Klaus Biesenbach in charge of it. That means there's a place in MoMA's hierarchy to explore outside-the-box ideas such as this. For example: MoMA may post video of Aitken's sleepwalkers as projected on its buildings once the exhibition starts on Jan. 16. After all, dozens of New Yorkers will probably post their own homemade sleepwalkers vids on YouTube, so why shouldn't the museum do so itself? (That's a MoMA-distributed rendering of sleepwalkers at right.)
Another benefit of using a YouTube channel instead of putting this all on the museum's own website: It costs MoMA virtually nothing to put video on YouTube. If MoMA had to host the video and pay for the bandwidth, who knows how much that could cost.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art also has a YouTube channel (It's My Art) and it seems to be experimenting with how to use it. So far it's posting videos that it has produced in-house, such as a conversation with Nigerian artist Prince Twins Seven-Seven and a five-minute documentary on one collector's contributions to the museum in the 1930s and '40s.
Next on MAN: New media art on YouTube, usually guerilla-style.
Related: Doug Aitken's studio. Greg Allen with foreshadowing.
|
Admissions fees and membership
 Back in October I spoke to the directors of four free museums. And in preparation for those conversations I talked to several other directors. Many -- probably most -- had stories about how their membership programs had thrived more than expected after they went free. "When we decided to become free, our membership went up," said Contemporary Arts Museum Houston director Marti Mayo. "I also think that's because membership here has been more of a gift. It's a different kind of mindset. Membership surveys tell us that the highest motivation for becoming a member is philanthropy."
A few days later, Marc Wilson at the Nelson-Atkins told me a similar story: "You can actually make that a part of a [membership] appeal: 'Your membership helps make your museum free. You're contributing to the welfare of your community by making us free and keeping your museum open.'"
So as were talking about admissions here last week, I thought I'd try to compare museums of comparable size (and comparable foci, when possible) to see how the membership dollars generated by free museums compare to the membership dollars plus admissions dollars at not-free museums. This isn't a completely realistic comparison: free museums also usually benefit from higher traffic in their museum stores, cafes and in their parking facilities. And it's impossible to find museums with similar budgets, similar missions and similar funding streams, but I tried to match museums as closely as I could. All data is from the most recent available tax returns. I think the numbers will be closer than you'd expect...
- Free museum: Dayton Art Institute: $565,000 in membership. ($9.8 million in total revenue, $7.6 million in total expenses.)
- $8 for admission: Joslyn Art Museum: $260,000 in membership, $140,000 in admissions. Combined: $400,000. ($9 million in revenue, $7 million in expenses.)
Free museum: Des Moines Art Center: $420,000 membership. ($6.5 million revenue, $4.7 million expenses.)
$8 admission: Norton Simon Museum of Art: $157,000 membership, $457,000 admissions. Combined: $614,000. ($7 million total revenue, $5 million total expenses.)
$9 for admission: Santa Barbara Art Museum: $395,000 membership. $190,000 admissions. Combined: $585,000. ($8.6 million total revenue, $7 million total expenses.)
- Free museum: Toledo Museum of Art: $1.3 million membership revenue. ($26 million total revenue, $18.5 million in total expenses.)
- $7-10 for admission: Indianapolis Museum of Art: $500,000 membership revenue*, $770,000 admissions.* Combined: $1.3 million. $50.5 million revenue (building project), $20 million expenses. [Because the IMA was closed for part of 2005 and only partially open in 2004, I averaged the '04 and '05 membership totals and I used the 2005 admissions figures. Of course, the IMA became free on Jan. 1.
|
Art in Miami: Photographers
From this AM, don't miss: What the Hammer's Valentine reveals about MOCA's trouble$.
Nick Waplington at Museum 52 (London): A hundred years ago, Henri Matisse led a revolution in which painted images were pushed up against the picture plane and perspective was nearly abolished. Matisse's visual language came to be full of props: samovars, violin cases, and arabesques. Nick Waplington's 2006 photograph, Faustian Nightmares, Interludes of arabesque wallpaper at Museum 52 cleverly riffs on Matisse's breakthroughs.
Mads Gamdrup at Nils Staerk (Copenhagen): Gamdrup's work zeroes in on nature and natural processes, such as the stereographic card of a waterfall he showed at Staerk. (While we're on art historical allusions, it's hard to see a stereoscope image of a waterfall and not think about Watkins & Co. in Yosemite.) Gamdrup is probably best-known for his desert images, shot around the world and shown at the Blaffer in 2003.
 Sarah Pickering at Daniel Cooney (NYC): KABOOM! Pickering's newest series is made up of photographs of explosions, big ones, happening somewhere in empty landscapes. (Well, that's a relief.) Humans have long found watching something about stuff being blown up to be fascinating, even meditative -- witness fireworks (art about fireworks: Cai Guo-Qiang), or nuclear weapon tests (art about nuclear tests: Michael Light). Pickering's photographs are in the same tradition, simultaneously frightening, but accessible because they've been so thoroughly controlled that they benignly exist on a lambda print.
In Sook Kim at Richard Levy (Albuquerque): Kim is a South Korean who studied under Thomas Ruff in Germany. At Levy's booth (Kim doesn't seem to be on Levy's webpage) he showed photographs of a dinner party, which were apparently shot from the outside, from the other side of a window. The party appears to be some kind of S&M-themed dinner-time prelude to a naughty play party. Decadence is another meme running through much contemporary art of late -- Kim's work reminded me of Ken Weaver's not totally dissimilar focus.
 Primoz Bizjak at Begona Malone (Madrid): Over the last couple years I've noticed dozens of artists exploring the theme of societal degeneration. To me it's as prominent a meme in the '00s as bombed-out emptyhood was in the art of the 1970s. (I've probably made that abundantly clear through a zillion posts about it, eh?) Bizjak's photographs take a look at what happens when nature reclaims what man has left behind. Others look at how abandoned buildings take on the empty, haunting feel of memorial sculpture.
Other standouts: Sarah Charlesworth's color cups at Margo Leavin, Catherine Yass' photographs of locks (think canals, not keys) at Lelong. Mathilde Ter Heijne's installation of photos-on-postcards at CiFO.
|
Valentine's gift to the Hammer
About four or five months ago Dean Valentine was one of four trustees who left MOCA's board. There was much whispering as to why, whispering that became louder when MOCA's most recent tax filing revelaed a $4,259,138 FY 2005 defecit. (In a related story, $4,259,138 seems to have come out of MOCA's endowment in FY 2005 too...) Today the LAT and NYT both have the news that Valentine and his wife Amy Adelson are giving 24 works to the Hammer Museum. (I'd give you images, but the Hammer handed the story to the Timeses, and didn't tell me.)
From Valentine, via Diane Haithman in the LAT: " 'I think it's fair to say that, while MOCA is a wonderful institute, the Hammer is better suited in terms of my interests,' Valentine said, citing the Hammer's strong focus on emerging artists." The LAT also has the roster of artists included in the gift.
The loss of a trustee and the loss of a gift does not create a crisis for MOCA, but... for years it's needed a place to show its permanent collection and it hasn't built one. For years it's needed a solution to its attendance problem -- it's long been a doggone shame that the contemporary art museum with America's best exhibition/etc. programming (MOCA launched Smithson, Ecstasy, Rauschenberg combines, A Minimal Future, co-created Visual Music, etc.) has trouble attracting visitors to its downtown HQ. (MOCA earned just $330,000 in admissions in FY 2005.) This is an ongoing story...
|
Two from the Globe
Yet another 30-foot Lichtenstein would appear to be upon us: Exhibitionist reports (and shows) that UMass is installing one now. Alas: The Hirshhorn has one too.
But you really, really shouldn't miss Boston Globe critic Ken Johnson's takedown of a show that Malcolm Rogers has given to a private collector in Boston. (Rogers loves these kiss-up shows. If an exhibit doesn't suck up, pay off or move merchandise, his museum won't touch it.) Let me tease you with the first sentence: "Who is Scott M. Black and why is a dreary exhibition of works from his art collection on view at the Museum of Fine Arts?" Click and enjoy...
|
Are admissions fees worth it for all museums?
UPDATE: More on this Friday, actually. Waiting for some data to come in...
I have lots of art to post about -- more from Miami, Turin, SF, LA and SD -- but while we're on admission prices I want to raise another question: Why don't more museums consider it a part of their mission to provide access to art to the largest number of people possible? And at what point does a museum's admissions fee do more access-restricting harm than bottom-line-fueling good?
Let's look at some specific examples. Last year the Hammer brought in $320,000 in admissions fees. Its operating expenditures were $7.4 million -- and the museum was in the black by nearly $1 million. Four percent of the Hammer's operating expenditures were covered by admissions fees. I picked a handful of other museums from around the country and looked up their numbers too. All data is from FY 2005 tax returns:
- SFMOMA: $3 million in admissions, $31 million in operating expenses, $34 million in total revenue.
- Milwaukee Art Museum: $1.4 million, $16.3 million, $31 million.
- Henry Art Gallery: $60,000, $2.2 million, $2.9 million.
- Miami Art Museum: $27,000, $4.3 million, $5.1 million.
- Whitney: $2 million, $28 million, $33 million.
- MoMA: $16 million, $180 million, $335 million. (You may have heard: They built a building.)
I know there are some problems with looking at the numbers this way: Museums frequently get grants from governments for schoolchildren, etc., and those grants can be tied to what the admissions charge for kids would be. But I'd (educated) guess that free museums such as Indy or the Nelson-Atkins have ways of working around that while still getting education-related grants.
And the numbers sure make it clear which museums are in cities with big tourism economies. (But even those museums don't derive more than about eight percent of their operating expenses from admissions.) I'd have pulled out a few other major examples such as MFAH or the Art Institute of Chicago, but they both run schools, which skew the revenue and expenditures numbers.
Still, the data make me wonder why contemporary art museums (such as the Henry or Miami) bother charging at all. I betcha Miami's cost for accounting/handling cash/credit cards is probably about the same as what it earns in fees.
Many museum professionals say that one reason to charge admission is to incentivize membership. We'll look at that later today.
|
LACMA and pricing, part three
 Next time a museum director tells me that no one cares about museum pricing except some art critics who don't pay for their own tickets anyway, I'm going to show them the email I get from y'all.
LACMA Magritte curator Stephanie Barron emailed to say that Magritte-and-friends is free for children 17 and under. All they have to do is ask for a free ticket at the box office. That's good news, though it would be better news if LACMA actually told people about this: The deal is not mentioned on the admission and ticketing section of the museum's website, when I called the museum to fact-check my post I was told that the price was indeed $19 on weekends, and the free-deal is not mentioned on LACMA's Magritte-ticketing website until you are about to check-out from the special e-commerce/ticketing site. (Which, obviously, required so many clicks that I couldn't find it yesterday. And Barron had to guide me through it before I found it today.)
Barron curated the (excellent) show, so surely she knows about which she speaks... but LACMA has a ways to go to make sure the train runs on time. (Meanwhile: The $22 fee is still nuts, students 18+ still have to pay $19 on weekends, and Lari Pittman has been joined in email by more than a few other college profs.)
|
LACMA: We prefer AAA to art students
 Posts about museum admissions fees generate more email than just about anything else. After yesterday's post about LACMA's preposterous Magritte-and-friends fees, our email overfloweth.
We were particularly happy to hear from MANfave and UCLA professor Lari Pittman. (In 2004 I called Pittman "the most important painter in America" because of his elegant, forceful canvases about post-9/11 America. And after seeing him address torture in a new painting that was on view at Regen Projects at ABMB, I still think so. Richard Serra's "Stop Bush" gets more pub -- and Whitney wallspace -- but it's an agitpropy one-off.)
As you might expect from someone who teaches at one of America's top art schools, Pittman takes his classes to local museums. MOCA, a fine museum that understands that it is an educational institution, provides passes for Pittman's classes. I called a few other museums on Tuesday and found that this is pretty much standard operating procedure when artists want to bring their students...
 ... Except at LACMA, the art museum substantially funded by the County of Los Angeles, which demands that students in Pittman's classes pay. (Pittman thinks this is preposterous and he pays his students' admissions charge out of his own pocket.)
Meanwhile, unlike many museums LACMA has no membership level or admissions break for artists. For example, MoMA offers artists memberships for $35, a substantial discount from the $75 regular price. When I called LACMA yesterday to see if there was a discount for artists I was told no... but that AAA members get 20 percent off. Awesome.
Here's a chance for LACMA's still-new director, Michael Govan, to do the right thing by changing LACMA's policy. Here's what he should do: Admit students from California high schools and colleges for free -- and not just to the permanent collection but to special exhibits too. Then create a $35/annum artists membership tier.
Related: At the top is a detail from Pittman's Optimal setting for atmospheric conditions that can induce distraction in the male, which is in MOCA's collection. Pittman's students may see it for free. The smaller image is a detail from Pittman's With appreciation, I will have understood the decorum of my mobility, which is in the Broad Art Foundation collection. The Broad Art Foundation is also free to students.
|
A newsy Wednesday in LA, NYC
 Dueling major stories this morning before we turn to a little LACMuckraking later in the day:
The LAT leads with a major, must-read investigation into the origin of one of the most prominent pieces of ancient art in the United States: The Getty Aphrodite. Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino discover that somehow Getty officials have spent 19 years with their heads in the sand, but seem willing to come up for air. Most dramatic, picturesque detail: They get one of the players in the case to issue a 'no comment' "the second-floor balcony of his home in Sagno, a village in the foothills of the Alps."
And in the NYT, Carol Vogel has news that MoMA has made a deal to expand its permanent collection galleries by 50,000 square feet (huzzah!) and to add $65 million to its endowment. The deal is part of an agreement between MoMA and a real estate developer concerning a vacant lot on West 54th Street that the museum owns. According to Vogel, the lot was purchased by Mexican businessman David Martinez, who promptly told Bloomberg and The Baer Faxt that he had done no such thing. When reached for comment about the conflicting reports, Vogel said: "I left several phone messages for Martinez and he never responded. If he didn't buy [the vacant lot], why didn't he call and tell me?" (Not really! The developer with whom MoMA dealt was Hines. We kid because we care. And again, it's not that we think Martinez didn't buy the Pollock, it's that the NYT's sourcing on this stuff is un-credible. And then they ran a story reporting the opposite of what they reported.)
|
Best of the blogs
The Walker Art Center's Off Center blog asked me to compile a top ten list to celebrate the end of 2006. Seeing as I'd already done a list for MAN, I came up with a new one for Off Center: The top ten art blogs. My list is about halfway down the page and is surrounded by lots of other interesting top tens.
|
You can't spell LACMA without a '$'
(And you won't see this post on the LACMA web page devoted to showing-off how many people have paid attention to its existence...)
 As I walked through LACMA's superb Magritte-and-friends show I noticed something odd. No, it wasn't the clever, sublime juxtaposition of Koons, Magritte and Weiner (more on the show in the weeks ahead), it was something about the people in the galleries themselves. I realized that I was the only person there under 50 years old. It was as if the exhibit and I had accidentally stumbled into a Del Webb community clubhouse. It didn't take me long to realize why I was surrounded by middle-aged (and up), affluence: On weekends, LACMA charges a ridiculous $22 to see the show. That's more than MoMA's ridiculous, tourist-soaking fee. But at least at MoMA kids 16 and under and many college students are free. The most a student pays at MoMA is $12.At LACMA's Magritte show students get a discount -- to $19. (And LACMA keeps the exhibition price a secret -- it isn't mentioned here.)
Now, I'm hesitant to pop off about LACMA again. For a writer there's real risk to criticizing an institution too regularly. And as we all know by now: For several years LACMA has distinguished itself with short-sighted thinking, An$chutz-driven decision-making, strange exhibition programming, and with curators who shrug off the destruction of art by pointing out that they have photographs of that which they destroy. I've complained about all of it. So I thought about keeping this one under my hat. But...
It's hard to imagine how LACMA could be doing a better job of limiting its future audiences than by boneheadedly charging $19-22 for a show. That pretty much guarantees that the only people under 35 who are going to see Magritte-and-pals are Ron Burkle's kids and David Geffen's cabana boys.
So I have two questions for LACMA's two groups of overseers, its trustees and the L.A. County supervisors. How is this kind of numbnuttery acceptable to you? Have you noticed that in one of the most diverse places in America, your exhibition audience is 95%-plus white? How are you going to make sure that your museum has an audience in ten or twenty years when you're working so hard to limit it now?
This is failure No. 1 of LACMA's Michael Govan era. Perhaps Govan's too busy spending time in NYC's soak-the-visitors museum culture to realize that a $22 fee is nuts.
| |
|
 |
 |
|
MODERN ART NOTES
|
| |
MODERN ART NOTES home
MODERN ART NOTES archives
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Write
Me:
tylergreendc@yahoo.com
| | | |
FIVE TO SEE |
| | [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
LONGER PIECES |
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
More |
| | |
SITE SEEING
|
|
[an error occurred while processing this directive] |
| | | |
OTHER AJ BLOGS |
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| |
| | |
| | | |
| | |
| | | |
Seattle's $85 million Olympic Sculpture Park opens next weekend, and its generating oodles of buzz. (I haven't been.)
Awesome: Watch for an Amy Sillman exhibit coming to Houston's Blaffer Gallery in September, 2007. The show will be curated by Claudia Schmuckli.
