Results tagged “Guggenheim Museum” from Real Clear Arts

Are there more art prizes for individual artists this year, or does it just seem that way? And are they all worthwhile?

I've posted here about several -- the MacDowell Medal, the Wolgin Prize, Guggenheim Fellowships, the Public Art Award, the Biennale's Golden Lion award, and of course ArtPrize. Some new, some old, and just a small sampling of those available.

Last Thursday came the brand new "First Annual Art Awards" produced by artist Rob Pruitt at the Guggenheim Museum "in association with" White Columns and "event partner" Calvin Klein Collection. Phew.

The dozen awards were for lifetime achievement, an international exhibition, and nine meant for exhibitions and projects that had significant impact on the field of contemporary art and took place between January 2008 and June 2009 in the United States. Artists and art world professionals (it's unclear how they were chosen) selected the winners, except for the two Lifetime Achievement Awards, which were determined by Pruitt, the Guggenheim and White Columns, and the Rob Pruitt Award, which "was decided solely by the artist."

The awards were given at a dinner at the Guggenheim, intended to rival the Oscars: "Tickets for the event were offered by invitation only." The prizes, designed by Pruitt, were fashioned as buckets of Champagne that are actually lamps.     

Ok, it was a benefit, but the whole thing strikes me as off-key -- a fest for the elite that ends up being more about partying than art, and alienates the general public. And, yes, as the Los Angeles Times' Culture Monster blog said, it was supposed to be ironic -- but I wonder if that's how it was perceived. David Ng, the LAT writer, wondered, too. Many news outlets seem to have ignored the whole thing.

Philadelphia artist Ryan Trecartin, just 28, has hit the jackpot this year. Several days ago, he won the inaugural Wolgin Prize, $150,000 awarded by the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and claimed as the largest prize to a visual artist in a juried competition. The Temple Times has the story here.

On Thursday night, he won the "Calvin Klein Collection New Artist of the Year Award" at Rob Pruitt's First Annual Art Awards at the Guggenheim. And earlier this year, he won a fellowship awarded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. 

Trecartin's work has been show in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the New Museum, the Getty Museum and at the Royal Academy and the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Guess we'll be hearing more about him.

Photo: Re'Search Wait'S (Edit 1: Missing Re'Search Corruption Budget), 2009, Courtesy Ryan Trecartin and Elizabeth Dee

Just in case you all want to chat online about art, but don't have time -- per my post on Oct. 19 about the Guggenheim Forum -- I went back to the website to see what this iteration, which was about spirituality in art, had yielded. The Forum/chat was triggered by the Kandinsky retrospective now on view, prompted by his belief that art "belongs to the spiritual life." A transcript of the one-hour chat, which took place on Oct. 22, is posted on the Guggenheim's website (here).

This chat, hosted by Krista Tippett, of Speaking of Faith, seemed to be more substantial than the last one, which was on design, but I noticed the same problem -- people talking all around an issue and at cross-purposes. It's the nature of online discussions.

Here are some interesting quotes drawn from the transcript, but missing the connective tissue (NB: my listing them here does not imply agreement!):

At 2:20: I like this line in Louis' last post: The artist is a tuning fork for an out of tune and unlyrical society...

2:21: I feel like people are realizing that materialism and attachment to things didn't bring them meaning or happiness. Art often awakens parts in people that have been dormant for a long time and remind them that there is life right now in them.

2:27: I look at the work of Jeff Koons & some of it really makes me smile... there is something divine going on there.

2:30: a lot of the art with humour in it comes from a place of suffering indeed - whether mental, physical, spiritual, whatever -but 'drawing in black' so to speak/type, is quite easy... it's letting the light in that's hard.   

Hey, want to chat? Online? About art, specifically Kandinsky?

The invitation comes not from me, but from the Guggenheim Museum. Nowadays, it's holding online discussion and chat sesssions called Forum, which it billed as "innovative" in a recent Guggenheim Magazine. The point, it says, is "to discuss and debate topics related to major museum exhibitions."

Its seems a bit retro to me, but I'm withholding judgment. According to the Guggenheim's website, the first Forum was last summer. It was titled "Between the Over- and Underdesigned." I read the posts and the chat and felt -- under-enlightened. It was bland, deadly bland. See for yourself at that link.

But there's another chance coming this week, starting on Monday and through Oct. 23. This panel of experts will talk about "Spiritual (Re)Turn" in relation to the musem's Kandinsky retrospective:

This...Forum takes as its point of departure Vasily Kandinsky's famous advocacy for a union of the spiritual and art. Overall, however, modernity has seen fine art and religion diverge. Now that spirituality has become increasingly divorced from religion--Kandinsky himself approached the issue through the esoteric belief system of Theosophy--is it possible that we could see now see a reunion of the two?

The online chat part starts on Thursday at 2 p.m. EST and involves moderators Krista Tippett, the host of the popular public-radio program, Speaking of Faith, and Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., the William M. Suttles Chair of Religious Studies at Georgia State University.

The other panelists, who'll comment during the rest of the week, are Huma Bhabha, who won the 2008 Emerging Artist Award from the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and Mark C. Taylor, Chair of the Department of Religion and co-director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University.

And good luck to them. Still, I thought, haven't we been here before? I decided to consult Max Anderson at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who's usually up to date on museum activities on the web.

Next stop: Baku? The capital of Azerbaijan wants to join the contemporary art-circuit, and it has apparently convinced former Guggenheim Museum director Tom Krens (left) that its bid is serious. Krens, still an advisor to the Guggenheim's Abu Dhabi project, has been counseling the Azerbaijani government through his consulting form, Global Cultural Asset Management (GCAM). His job: make it happen.

ARTnews has the story on its website.

The envisioned museum, designed by Jean Nouvel and approved by the government of President Ilham Aliyev, would attempt to make Baku another Bilbao. The article says:

The contemporary-art museum is one of several museum projects that President Aliyev signed into being with a decree several years ago, among them a museum of independence, a museum of oil, and the renovations of the museum of carpets and the museum of visual arts--all with the strong backing of First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva. The decree stipulated a "new approach" to the activities of the country's museums according to "international standards" of museum practice, as well as to "Azerbaijan national ideology." Last spring, the first couple, along with Unesco director-general Koïchiro Matsuura, opened a provisional contemporary-art museum with a collection of more than 800 works by local artists. At the same time, Matsuura presented Azerbaijani artist Tahir Salahov with Unesco's Picasso Medal for his cultural achievements.

ARTnews did not gain an interview with Krens but, drawing on information in an online journal called agitarch and other sources, says that Krens would also be involved in a master plan for the city. Costs, financing and other details have not been determined.

Stranger things have happened in the art world, but Baku seems like a long shot to me.

There was something new at the Guggenheim Museum when I visited the other evening -- and it wasn't just the Kandinsky exhibition. Which is, btw, quite fine. Beautifully installed. If you go, don't miss the works on paper in the side gallery. My two morning newspapers -- The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times -- gave it good reviews (here and here, respectively) on Friday. Not much more for me to say, really.

Except. I noticed one definite improvement at the Guggenheim as I walked up the spiral: there were small, round, elegant seats along the way, usually in groups of three. They fit right in, nestled against the walls separating the gallery bays. One or two hugged the winding rotunda wall, but I couldn't tell if someone had moved them there or if that was intentional.

Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong was down in the rotunda when I finished seeing the show, so I asked him about the seats. Indeed they are new, styled to go with this exhibition. Armstrong believes, as I do, that people will get much more out of art if they stop and look deeply at the paintings along the way -- seating facilitates that. Maybe people will linger more now.

The museum, he told me, already owns furniture designed for Frank Lloyd Wright's building, but it hasn't been used. (At least recently.) After the Kandinsky comes down...

If you're wondering why I bring this up at all, it's because little amenities matter to visitors. More than one director, in the past, has told me that when they ask people what changes they'd like to see, the first thing on their list is often "more parking." And then, more seats.

Photo: Composition VIII, 1923, Courtesy the Guggenheim Museum

Darned if reading "And Now, An Exhibition From Our Sponsor," the article by Robin Pogrebin that ran in Sunday's New York Times (link), didn't put me in a bad mood.

It described how many museums -- small ones in particular, with less wherewithal, like the new Millenium Gate Museum in Atlanta, at left -- were eager to show exhibitions drawn from the collection of Bank of America, packaged (ok, curated) by the bank, and sponsored by the bank. Since B of A began this practice -- a marketing tool -- in 2007, it has placed nearly two dozen shows, and has another 16 set for the next two years. "And," the article says, "there is a waiting list."

J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, Deutsche Bank and UBS also regularly lend out shows drawn from their collections, but none has perfected the turnkey exhibition idea as much as B of A.

Now, the banks' position is totally understandable: the practice works, drawing new customers and creating good will in the community. But the comments of several museum directors -- complacency personified -- are less explicable to me. Only Glenn Lowry, head of the Museum of Modern Art, and Richard Armstrong, head of the Guggenheim (whom I've criticized here for displaying his inner cowboy vis-a-vis museum practices), seemed to be dubious. Good for them.

Even more surprising was the neutral response of John Ravenal, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts who recently became president of the Association of Art Museum Curators.

A recent trip to the Guggenheim got me thinking about one organizing principle for exhibitions that's seems to be going around -- showing works acquired by, or during the term of, a museum's director. The trend seems to stem both from happenstance and anniversary-marking. The Metropolitan Museum honored Philippe de Montebello on his retirement; the Philadelphia Museum of Art honored Anne d'Harnoncourt soon after her sudden, unexpected death. The Cleveland Museum of Art recently opened an exhibition honored its legendary former director, Sherman Lee, who died last year. And the Guggenheim, which just turned 50, is showing The Sweeney Decade:Acquisitions at the 1959 Inaugural.

Sometimes, this idea clearly does not work -- at the Guggenheim, for example. The Sweeney show simply doesn't shine. James Johnson Sweeney, who headed the museum from 1952 to 1960, acquired many works by artists whose names are well-known today: Jackson Pollock (that's his Ocean Greyness, 1953, at right), Willem de Kooning, Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tapies, William Baziotes and Hans Hartung, among them. The press release suggests he bought works by artists "whose work emphasized the emotional aspect of abstraction." That wasn't apparent to me. The works are boring, the reviews have been mixed, and the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition nearby seemed to me to be generating more interest.

But it's not just the works that matter. I liked the way the de Montebello exhibition was organized -- chronologically, according to the year they were acquired. That meant works of all styles were shown side-by-side, which is a great way to train your eye. But curators at the Met have told me that the public did not like the show.  

Time for a little update on ArtBabble, the website for art videos founded by Max Anderson and the Indianpolis Museum of Art. Yesterday, AB's enthusiasts there sent out an email -- an e-babble, they called it -- announcing Art Babble News! of Ten New Partners! to Art Babble Fans!

I appreciate their enthusiasm, so I decided to announce the partners here: 

• Art Institute of Chicago
• KQED
• Museum of Arts & Design
• Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
• Norman Rockwell Museum
• Rubin Museum of Art
• San Jose Museum of Art
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
• Van Gogh Museum
• Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

But they had to come up with some numbers for me to make this post worthwhile. Since its launch in April, ArtBabble has had more than 100,000 unique visitors, according to Robert Stein at IMA.

They stay, on average, a little less than five minutes, he says, "which is comparable to the average length of a video on ArtBabble." And, "pages per visit is hovering around 4 and about 45% of our visitors are return visits."

Fittingly, IMA has posted the most videos -- 161. You can see which are the most popular since the launch by visiting the site, though as Rob Stein warns "to be fair most of these views likely occurred during the site launch..."

Visiting upstate New York this weekend -- way upstate -- I spent a day in Buffalo, checking out two new must-see art attractions, the Burchfield Penney Art Center and the Darwin Martin House, Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece and the subject of this post. 

Even people who find Wright's prairie house style not to their liking will appreciate the Martin House. Although it's still being restored, and will be even more beautiful in about three years' time, the restoration group that saved it essentially announced that the home was ready for prime time this spring, when they opened a $5 million visitors center designed by Toshiko Mori. With its floor-to-ceiling windows, long flat shape and an orientation parallel to the pergola Wright use to unify the Martin House complex, the center is a perfect complement to Wright's design.

Here's the home's background: Around the turn of the 20th century, Darwin D. Martin, an executive of the Larkin Soap Co. and one of the country's best-executives, formed a friendship with Wright that led to several commissions, including the pioneering Larkin Soap Co. office building in Buffalo and the building of this domestic complex in 1903-05. It includes the home (front view, above; side view, below), a pergola linking it to the conservatory, stables, carriage house, a home for Martin's sister and (off to the side) a gardener's home. When Martin died in the '30s, his wife, who never liked the home because it was dark, moved to their summer place, Graycliff, also designed by Wright (and also open to the public, though I didn't get there).

Unoccupied, the Martin home fell into disrepair and was vandalized. Later, it was purchased by a well-meaning owner (who nevertheless modernized the kitchen with yellow formica counters!) who developed money troubles. His predicament prompted him to sell the pergola/conservatory/carriage house, which were demolished and replaced with apartment buildings.

Interesting, because the Guggenheim had signed up to be the third venue for Prendergast in Italy, a show organized by the Williams College Museum of Art (it begins there on July 18) that will then go to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In April, after many loan agreements were signed, news came that the third venue was, instead, to be the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I know this because I own a small, atypical Prendergast in the show, and I was asked to sign additional papers. I recently had an opportunity to ask why, and was told that the Guggenheim backed out for cost reasons.

The Prendergast exhibition was pulled because of costs but well in advance of these cuts and the current economic downturn. The show was never 100% confirmed.

Yesterday Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Art Museum, sent me a link to an interview he did with Richard Armstrong, the new(-ish) director of the Guggenheim Museum. It's quite a revelation -- on the nature of Biennials, an overcultured New York, his audience and collecting plans and, most of all, about deaccessioning.

In the beginning -- the video, which was posted on ArtBabble yesterday, runs for 49 minutes and 28 seconds -- Max (left) simply lets Armstrong (right) talk, telling how the Guggenheim got to where it is today. But around the 40th minute, Max asks about deaccessioning. Armstrong replies:

"The collection needs to be shaped. It's slightly misshapen....One wonders, does one need to own 114 Kandinskys, for example."

Max, surprised, offers "we're interested in Kandinskys," and Armstrong plows ahead: "I just think there's a way of deploying assets slightly differently."