Results tagged “Indianapolis Museum of Art” from Real Clear Arts

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.

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..."

The National Archives has been in the news in recent days for releasing another raft of Nixon materials -- some 30,000 pages of documents and 154 hours of tapes were opened to the public on June 23. But they've been well-covered in the national press, and I'm not writing about them here.

Rather, as the National Archives celebrates its 75th Anniversary -- and the picture here illustrates the condition of some War Department records, held during the 1930s in a White House garage, before their creation -- I simply want to call your attention to a 21st Century development there. On June 19, the Archives formally launched its own YouTube channel. On it, the Archives plans to showcase some popular archived films, including those on the space race, World War II, America in the 1930s, and clips of "favorite things" in Presidential libraries.

Here's the YouTube link.

If you are at all into American history, the NA website itself is full of things to see -- documents, photos, records of all sorts.

It's hard to tell how many museums and performing arts groups have YouTube channels. The Indianapolis Museum of Art does, as do the Metropolitan Museum (link) and the Columbus Museum of Art (link). There must be others. But when I made random checks, I found plenty of others, including the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, the Dallas Performing Arts Center, without them (some had posted clips, however).

If the National Archives and the Library of Congress, which also has its own YouTube channel, have moved in this direction, can arts organizations afford not to? Just asking.

UPDATE, 6/30, 11:30: The Indianapolis Museum of Art reminds me that it launched ArtBabble.org in April, as a destination for videos about art, with Art21, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the New York Public Library as partners. A wonderful development, and nothing to ignore. Moreover, IMA says, it will be naming more partners later this year. I was focusing on YouTube, however, because of its mass appeal. Maybe arts groups, like IMA itself, need both channels.

Photo Credit: National Archives

I come to praise the Brooklyn Museum* today. Over the past couple of weeks, I've obliquely mentioned a few of its failings: the lack of people in its permanent collections here and its American art galleries, which I consider to be woeful, here. Over the years, I've also disliked its penchant for mounting shows on the edge of art, or beyond it, like "Hip-Hop Nation" and "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth." There's more, but I won't catalogue my quibbles here.

But I give Director Arnold Lehman a lot of credit. After my post about the permanent-collection galleries, instead of getting angry or annoyed, he asked his PR chief Sally Williams to call me, say he agreed, and invite me out to talk about it. That's where I'll be later today. 

Arnie has made Brooklyn a leader in outreach, in some ways. At the Museums and the Web conference earlier this year, the "Brooklyn Museum flat out swept the Best of the Web awards and their main website won the overall award," the Indianapolis Museum of Art reported here. I just learned from a blog called Museum Marketing, where Jim Richardson reported here on the "Top Museums on Twitter," that Brooklyn comes in second only to the Museum of Modern Art among the top 50. When I checked the speakers at the 2009 Communicating the Museum conference, taking place in Malaga right now, I learned that two of the four keynote speakers are from the Brooklyn Museum -- Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology, and Will Cary, membership manager. I'm sure there's more, and these are all good things. (The CT scanning of four mummies from its permanent collection earlier this week, at a nearby hospital, was pretty cool too. One, always thought to be a female, turned out to be male.)  

What else can be done, or considered, to get more people interested in art -- especially permanent collections? If we come up with anything creative, I'll let you know.

Photo Credit: Brooklyn Museum of Art

* Disclosure: a foundation I consult to supports the Brooklyn Museum

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." 

As my recent review of the "European Design Since 1985" exhibition at the Indianapolis Art Museum indicated, it is exactly the kind of show serious museums should be doing. It's ambitious, it's rooted in scholarship, it's aesthetically interesting, and it's displayed well.

So it's more than a little curious that the Denver Art Museum (below), where the curator R. Craig  Miller worked until late 2007, and where he had organized two previous, widely traveled design shows, is not taking this one. DAM built its $110 million Hamilton wing in part to allow it to exhibit more traveling shows. In the catalogue's foreward, DAM director Lewis I. Sharpe and IMA director Maxwell Anderson call the show a collaboration and note that many people at both museums worked hard on it. 

When I was in Indianapolis, I asked Miller what happened. He told me that Denver would only take the show if he cut it to 100 objects, out of the 250 in his version -- a move that would, obviously, destroy its intent as a survey show. The Denver museum, he said, did not view his show as a big draw.

If you like design -- or want to learn more about it -- you should pack your bags and head for Indianpolis. R. Craig Miller, design curator at the Indianapolis Art Museum, has created a wide-ranging show of European design since 1985 that's a marvel. It's his third design survey show, and he knocks it out of the park.

That's a different metaphor than I used when I wrote about it in an article published in today's Wall Street Journal (where French seemed more appropriate).

The Journal, by the way, has a terrific slide show of about a dozen pieces in the show, different from those on IMA's website.

A gorgeous Sylvain Dubuisson desk is at right.

Photo Credit: Indianapolis Art Museum

The Indianapolis Museum of Art is having a good March: there's been a steady stream of announcements -- on a laudable new searchable database of deaccessions, the acquisition of Gauguin's "Volpini Suite" of zincographs, and this week on the news that the museum had met its goal of acquiring 125 gifts for its 125th anniversary in 2008.

But on my recent visit there -- too short -- I had a chance to see first-hand, and was charmed by, a less splashy effort by the museum. Last year, the IMA was among the first of the museums to receive art from the "Fifty Works for 50 States" program started by legendary collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel. They are, of course, the one-time mail clerk and librarian who donated 1,000 works to the National Gallery of Art and then had so much more to give that they set up a program to spread the rest throughout the land -- with 50 works going to one museum in each of the 50 states. 

I visited the Vogels last fall on an assignment for The Art Newspaper: They are exactly as billed. Soft-spoken, humble, the very opposite of many flamboyant contemporary art collectors, they really do have a rent-stabilized apartment on New York's Upper East Side that is filled to the ceilings with art works and art books. I sat at their kitchen table (as they do, below) and could find no place to hang my coat, bag or umbrella.

This was the situation after they had made their gifts!

Imagine what it was like before the trucks came to carry artworks away.    

Last December, the Indianapolis Museum became the the first to display all of its nifty 50 at once. And they look fine in a gallery of their own. Mostly works on paper, this collection includes pieces by Robert Mangold (below, Looped Line Torn Zone), Lynda Benglis, James Bishop, Elizabeth Murray, Edda Renouf and Richard Tuttle. They were made between the late 1960s and 2000.  

The IMA show runs through April 12. After that the works will be displayed throughout the collection. I'm not familiar enough with the IMA's collection to make a judgment about how these works fit in and fill in, but Max Anderson, the director, certainly seemed pleased with these acquisitions.  

As for the Vogels, because of their health and age, they've slowed down -- though they told me they are still collecting. And they love it when artist-friends drop by. In December, they made their first visit to Art Basel Miami Beach, where the documentary about them, "Herb & Dorothy," was being shown. And as the IMA shows, what a great legacy they've created.   

Here's a link to my article from The Art Newspaper, and here's a link to the documentary website. There, you can find out where to see the award-winning show.

Photo Credits: (top) courtesy Fine Line Media; (bottom) courtesy Indianapolis Museum of Art.  

Maybe the wave of censure directed at several museums for selling art from their collections has had a positive impact: yesterday, the Indianapolis Museum of Art announced that it has created and put online a searchable database of the art it has decided to deaccession, following a review of its collections begun in 2007. 

You can see what has been sold for what amount and what will be sold. In the future, IMA promises to link proceeds received from deaccessioned works to the new art they purchased. (That, of course, is the only way money from deaccessions is to be used, in accordance with Association of Art Museum Directors' policies.) IMA also posted its deaccessioning policy.

If other museums do this, I haven't seen it. I looked at some of the usual suspects (the Guggenheim, MoMA, etc.) just in case someone snuck it in while no one was watching, but -- zip on deaccessions. Therefore, kudos to Max Anderson, head of IMA, for knowing the value of transparency.

I hope others follow his lead. If museums are going to clean house from time to time -- and they are -- let them at least do it in public, giving advance word.

You can see the IMA database here. 

For the last couple of years, IMA has also published a (sort of) real-time dashboard with statistics on museum energy use, the number of new works on view, the endowment's value, the number of hours spent conserving art works, membership, and attendance, etc. One savvy person whose opinion I respect dismisses the dashboard as a gimmick -- and maybe it is. I still like it.

Photo: American Art Gallery, IMA, Courtesy IMA