Results tagged “Maxwell Anderson” 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..."

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.