Results tagged “Metropolitan Museum” from Real Clear Arts

It may not be news at all that states are decreasing their arts funding. Nonetheless, a recent Associated Press article noted the same trend I did last week in corporate funding, namely, that it's getting worse. Here's the money quote:

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies estimates states reduced their arts funding an average of 7 percent in the fiscal year that began July 1. That average doubles to 14 percent when Minnesota is not included because the state almost tripled its art budget to $30.2 million thanks to a new sales tax.

In financially strapped states like Arizona, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana and Florida, the reductions are steeper, falling 30 percent or more, forcing agencies to trim the amount or value of grants, shutter programs that provide arts education and lay off employees. In two states that haven't completed their annual budgets - Pennsylvania and Connecticut - lawmakers are considering eliminating their state arts agencies entirely.

The rest of the article can be read here.

On the other hand, yesterday The Gap showed that corporate sponsorship is still alive, announcing that it will sponsor the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum's spring show: American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity.  

Considering the trouble Gap Founder and Chairman Emeritus Don Fisher has had trying to build a museum for his extensive contemporary art collection in San Francisco, written about here, that may be a wonder. It's a natural marketing match for The Gap, of course. 

The show, by the way, makes use of the "newly established Brooklyn Museum
Costume Collection" at the Met, according to the press release. The clothes were transferred to the Met from Brooklyn last year, because Brooklyn had neither the room to exhibit them nor the ability to care for them. 

Details about the Gap sponsorship and the spring show are here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

San Francisco's Asian Art Museum sure has a problem. Last June 12,  it opened an exhibition called Lords of the Samurai, which runs until Sept. 20. It's the only U.S. venue for a show described in the museum's press release as:

Through more than 160 objects--armor, weaponry, paintings, lacquer ware, ceramics, costumes, and more--this special exhibition explores the principles that governed the culture of the samurai lords. Nearly all of the objects in the exhibition are from the collection of one of the most distinguished warrior clans, the Hosokawa family. This collection is housed in Japan's renowned Eisei-Bunko Museum in Tokyo and in the family's former home, Kumamoto Castle on Kyushu island, Japan. Seven of the artworks on view have been designated Important Cultural Properties, the highest cultural distinction awarded by the Japanese government. Three of the artworks are designated Important Art Objects, another prestigious distinction awarded only to the works of notable artistic and historical significance.

As I understand it, everything was going along well -- nice reviews, etc. -- until very recently, when someone(s) started a blog parodying the museum's website. Calling the show "Lord, It's the Samurai" and labeling the museum "orientalist," the website -- Asians Art Museum -- is very clever.

It all sounds so simple: The Cleveland Museum of Art has petitioned the court for permission to use money generated by four funds within its $558 million endowment that are currently restricted to art purchases to complete its expansion plans. The museum wants to take $75 million over ten years to finish construction of its $350 million building by 2013, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It quoted the museum's lawyer, Stephen J. Knerly Jr., and other officials as "expecting no controversy" over the request. They have previous experience:

The only precedent came in 1955, when the county probate court granted the museum permission to use income from art-purchase funds to build an expansion completed in 1958 (since demolished).

Why the request?

The museum needs access to the art funds because it's in a financial squeeze. So far, it has raised $212 million for construction. To finish by 2013, it needs another $138 million. The museum is confident it will raise the amount, but not by 2013, because the poor economy has slowed donations.

But, the article explains, if construction doesn't proceed on schedule, the whole effort will cost more. (You can read more details here.)

It's true, the Cleveland Museum is one of the nation's better-endowed art museums. But I still have worries.

If I can make it down to Wilmington in the next few months, I'll be stopping in at the Delaware Art Museum to see "Exposed! -- Revealing Sources in Contemporary Art." It's a home-grown exhibition that began on Aug. 15 and, as you may have guessed, explores the use of existing images, either in quotation or appropriation, in paintings, photographs and prints.

Drawing on the museum's collection and loans from collectors, the exhibit juxtaposes 27 works alongside the works they borrowed from. Aside from poster-boy Richard Prince, whose Nurse paintings (inspired by book jackets) have had a stunning runup in prices over the last few years (and recent decline, no doubt), artists in the exhibit include Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Glenn Ligon, Grace Hartigan, Ellen Gallagher, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Colescott.

Heather Campbell Coyle, curator of American art at the museum, organized the show, which runs until Oct. 4. She also started an exhibition blog on Aug. 3, which she claims to be having fun doing. One entry: she spent a mere $163.48 on exhibition source materials, buying comics, pulp novels, a paper-doll book and other emphera mostly from eBay and Abebooks (and possibly crossing swords at one point with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, over a certain Vogue needed for its "Model As Muse" show).

Heather agreed to answer my Five Questions.

Bloomberg published an article the other day about the pay afforded by some large museums, and although the reporter, Philip Boroff, was measured, the story obviously raises questions about whether such pay is appropriate. As it happens, Charity Navigator just released its own pay survey for non-profits, including arts groups, that put the Bloomberg piece in context.

To review, according to Bloomberg, Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art* (left, in 2005), took home the biggest pay-and-benefits packet last year: $1.32 million -- "down from $1.95 million the year before, as the museum cut costs amid the recession."

Elsewhere:

• Philippe de Montebello was paid $818,935, up 7 percent, in his last year running the Metropolitan Museum.*
• James Wood pocketed $1.1. million as CEO the J. Paul Getty Trust in the year through June 30, 2008.
• James Cuno received $626,175, as president of the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Malcolm Rogers was paid $719,621 to run the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.*

How does that stack up against other non-profits and other arts non-profits? 

What can one say about an exhibit -- Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul -- that has been on tour in the U.S. since May, 2008, and on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art*, its last stop, since June 23? Newspapers, magazines and other AJ bloggers have written about this show, too, including Chloe Veltman in Lies Like Truth (here), who described the poignancy:

To stare at the soberly-lit glass cases filled with such objects as a glowing pair of gold shoe soles found in the tomb of a nomadic princess or the smooth clay head of a temple sculpture from the Greek-influenced royal city of Ai Khanum, is to begin to grasp the deep heritage of a country that seems, owing to its near-constant presence in current new headlines, to have no past -- just a destructive present.

But I just got there over the weekend, and I am moved to say something about this not-to-be-missed show. Every one of the 200-plus items is stunning. One of my favorites pieces is the ceremonial plaque of Cybele, Greek goddess of nature, riding in a chariot driven by Nike, above.

The only thing I question about the Met's version is the gallery filled with the "Bactrian hoard" jewelry. Along the upper walls are sweeping photos of the desert, which is ok -- though it feels more like a natural history museum than an art museum. The vitrines, however, are set among swirling maze-like partitions that separate them, each section representing a tomb where the objects on display were discovered. The partitions, to me, interrupted the flow, and I almost missed an entire section, which would have been a shame.

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.  

An article in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer brought back fond memories of reporting I did a few years ago. The story heralded Bert Levy, a 96-year-old docent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which gave him a birthday party:

Levy has volunteered as a guide at the art museum since 1996, and his colleagues can't get enough of him. "He's revered," said Ronn Shaffer, a fellow guide. He quotes Shakespeare, reads and writes Latin, knows French, recites poems and doesn't hold back his sense of humor.

"The art museum saved my life," Levy responded -- explaining to the reporter that it was where he had turned for diversion after his wife, whom he had known since his teens, died.

Not to one-up Mr. Levy, or the Inquirer, but I attempted to write an article about volunteers at the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago. My lede was about Laura Reiburn Kashins, who volunteered at the Met for 28 years, until August 2004, when she was 101. She, too, told me that working at the museum saved her life, when I interviewed her by phone at (almost) 103.

More interesting, neither Ms. Kashins nor Mr. Levy are unique. I interviewed many Met volunteers, young and old -- they were so devoted to the museum that they seemed, at times, like a cult to me.

I discovered, while looking up Jessica Lange's photography credentials on the Aperture website for my post about her show at the George Eastman House (here), that Philip Gefter -- a photo editor I used to work with at The New York Times -- has a new book out called Photography After Frank. It was published by Aperture last month.

I reconnected -- he, too, has left the Times -- and now I have a copy of the book.

Philip also wrote about photography for the Times, and you'll find many of those essays as well as new material in the book. Frank's 1959 book The Americans -- described by the National Gallery of Art for its recent exhibit Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans -- "looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a profound sense of alienation, angst, and loneliness" and was a turning point in photography. To refresh us on why, Philip writes:

Frank's pictures reflect the stream-of-consciousness art-making of the period, and his attempt to capture the experience of an authentic moment in visual terms established a departure from the traditional photographic imagery that preceded him. The immediacy, sponaneity, and compositional anarchy in his picture frame changed expectations about the photograph. 

From there, Philip divides his writings into themes, creating sections on The Document, The Staged Document, Photojournalism, The Portrait, The Collection and The Marketplace.

News Flash: Actor Kal Penn started his job at the White House today, as an associate director in the Office of Public Engagement, where he is the liaison to the arts and Asian-American and Pacific Island communities. To prepare, he told reporters on a by-invitation conference call this afternoon, he put on a suit and tie, brushed his teeth, flossed, and did the things most people do when they start a new job.

Don't blame Penn for those quotidian details, though -- he was merely answering the fluff-ball questions pitched by reporters from places like The Washington Post, People, TV Guide and Dow-Jones. They proved, again, either that celebrity still makes mush of many reporters or that no one expects all that much of Penn in this job, or both. (I was in the queue to ask a question, but my time did not come before his time was up.) 

Penn, whom I wrote about here in April, has been starring in "House" on television and the "Harold & Kumar" movies. He said today he's taking sabbatical from acting so that he can serve his country.

What else did we learn in the call, which lasted about 20 minutes?

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

ARTnews is out now with its take on the Future of Museums: Called "Reshaping the Art Museum," it too seems to insist that unless museums change, consequences will be dire (only students and senior citizens in the galleries!).

The article says that some museums are using game theory, interactive technology, and more special events to draw visitors. But some of the "remedies," imho, are akin to the Vietnam War excuse of bombing the village to save it. Art museums are not meant to be community centers.

I won't repeat the ideas in this article -- bad or good -- but I am prompted to give a  raspberry to one voice after reading this paragraph:

Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, believes that the primary mission of art museums will evolve even further to include more social benefits. That may mean providing services for autistic children, a possibility he is discussing with specialists at Johns Hopkins University; or, as AAM director Ford Bell has suggested, it may mean providing space to teach English as a second language to immigrants.

Primary mission? Come on. Raspberry to Vikan.

Fortunately, Robin Cembalest, the magazine's executive editor and author of the article, gives the last word to Thomas Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum:

And for all the innovations in programming, marketing, and education, Campbell argues, the core mission remains the same. "We can make ourselves more user-friendly, but ultimately one of the key experiences of visiting a museum is that moment of standing in front of an object," he says. "Suddenly you're responding to something physical, real, that changes your own perspective. And great museums will always do that, as long we get people through the doors." 

Art museums are about art. It's elitist to think that the way to attract new visitors is to change that. A strawberry to Campbell. May his view reign.

Here's a link to the article. 

This was, unofficially at least, American art week in New York. The sales at both Christie's and Sotheby's were unexceptional, and so was most of the art. The tallies:

• Sotheby's sale totaled $15.3 million, with 62% sold by lot, 73% sold by value
• Christie's, $16.8 million, with 62% sold by lot, 70% by value.

Christie's sales report touts three "world records for the artist," but on examination, they were tiny, all below $80,000. The artists were Charles E. Humphriss, Edwin Willard Deming and Eric Pape. Top lot was Milton Avery's Sketching By the Sea, which fetched $2.2 million.

Sotheby's had a more interesting "world record for the artist" -- Harriet Whitney Frismuth''s bronze The Vine (left), which had been estimated at $400,000 to $600,000 and ended up bringing $962,500 including the premium (which is never in the estimate).

The Vine, in a much larger version, is also on the front page of the New York Times Weekend (Fine Arts/Leisure) section today, illustrating Holland Cotter's review of the Metropolitan Museum's renovated American Wing.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Sotheby's

New York's arts world has gone ga-ga over Michelle Obama's new role as arts ambassador, proving once again that hope springs eternal among them that maybe, just maybe, the President will elevate the arts during his administration (contrary to his first few months in office, which I wrote about here, here and here).

In fact, after I filed my report on her ribbon-cutting visit to the Metropolitan Museum to the Daily Beast last night and signed off, the editors headlined it "Obama's New Arts Czar: His Wife."

"The excitement was palpable," one person at the Met ceremony told me. Later, at the American Ballet Theater, she wowed the audience again, saying "My husband and I believe strongly that arts education is essential for building innovative thinkers who will be our nation's leaders for tomorrow. And it is our hope that we can all work together to expose, enrich and empower Americans of all ages through the arts."

I hope they're all right, and that Michelle's arts involvement -- and offensive -- lasts. As I reported for the Beast, the Met added some nice touches to reinforce any thought the First Lady has on her role: they held her meeting with about 40 New York arts leaders (chosen by the White House) in the gallery named for Hatshepsut, the woman pharoah, and as they guided her through the Temple of Dendur they made sure to say that Jackie Kennedy helped the museum get the edifice. (Here's a link to my article.) 

At the meeting, participants told me, she listened intently, and she asked for their ideas. There's no official word on Michelle's role going forward, but she clearly likes her forays into the arts world.   

Last week, ArtsJournal listed, among the stories on the left of the page, an article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy about online giving: "Non-Profits Lure More Online Donors, But Donors Give Less." The total raised grew but the average gift dropped.

Digging into the details proved more interesting. In its paper copy, the Chronicle broke down the numbers for 211 organizations, including eight arts/cultural/public broadcasting groups. The star of that class was undoubtedly the Metropolitan Museum, which in FY 2008 not only boosted the amount raised online by 30.4% but also hauled in nearly $2.7 million online. Its closest competitor, the Smithsonian Institution, raised about $1.1 million online.  

I visited the Met site to see if I could learn the secret of its success. One thing was clear -- it offered many ways to give, with fewer clicks to do it, and higher suggested contributions. At no other site I visited can one buy tickets to a fancy benefit, as you can on the Met site. Its top suggested contribution is $10,000 or fill-in-the-blank vs. $1,000 or fill-in-the-blank at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Met's highest membership category, online, is the President's Council for $20,000 -- vs. $500 for a Muse membership at LACMA. At the Huntington Library, top membership is $2,500.

It's hard to generalize from such a small sample. The top Smithsonian "enter a gift amount" is $250 or fill-in-the-blank, and that doesn't square with the other examples. And we don't know how much of this money is "new" money, adding to the pot. 

But the Met is clearly doing something right. And why not offer as many ways to give online as possible? It can't hurt, can it?

Photo Credit: Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Over the weekend, the Frick Collection's Center for the History of Collecting in America put on an excellent symposium called "Holland's Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals." Sounds too academic to be interesting, I know -- but the fact that the overflow audience was filled with collectors, dealers, auction house experts and people who are just interested in art suggests otherwise. (Disclosure: Inge Reist, the Center's director, is a friend, and as a consultant, I helped direct some funding to the Center.)

The Center is just two years old, and was formed to address this gaping hole in art historical scholarship. Collectors, after all, are the ones who largely stock museums. The Met's longtime curator of 20th Century art Bill Lieberman used to say he was a "collector of collectors," not of paintings. More exhibitions -- like Walter Liedtke's "Age of Rembrandt" show in 2007 and the 2006 show of dealer-collector Ambroise Vollard, both at the Met -- are likely to be organized around collectors.

The Center has already held four symposia (plus co-sponsored one in Venice on women art collectors), established fellowships for scholars, offered workshops and announced the creation of a prize, funded by Sotheby's, for a distinguished publication on art collecting in America.

I've gone to sessions at a couple of the symposia (one on artists as collectors, another on "tuning points" in modern art collecting).

This one was the best so far.

As the White House announced yesterday, Michelle Obama will visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday. She'll be there for the ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the redone American Wing. Afterwards, she'll meet with some of the city's "arts and entertainment leaders," and then -- no doubt after changing clothes -- she will head across Central Park to the Metropolitan Opera House for the opening gala of the American Ballet Theater's spring season.

That's all good news; I'm as thrilled as any arts-lover that the First Lady will bring more attention to the arts.

But there's still something wrong with this picture: call me a grouch, but why is it always the First Lady's job to visit museums and go to the ballet? Admittedly, the President has watched the Alvin Ailey company perform at the Kennedy Center and I believe he attended the poetry jam at the White House on Tuesday night (at least he was there to introduce Michelle as "the star of the show").

I'm not suggesting that he ignore the economy or health care or Afghanistan. But the arts aren't women's work, and I wish he would break the pattern of turning them over to the First Lady.   

The museum world gets bigger this week, with the opening next Saturday of the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing, a 264,000 sq. ft. structure set to hold the museum's 20th and 21st Century collections, and the opening this past Sunday of a rooftop sculpture garden at   the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Sitting on top of an parking garage, it includes an indoor glass pavilion gallery and two outdoor spaces. Among the works on view are Henry Moore's Large Torso Arch (right). And I can just imagine the dramatic cityscape view from this fifth-floor space.

The Art Institute's Modern wing includes the Bluhm Family Terrace, with 3,400 sq. ft. of outdoor exhibition space, though I doubt the view can compare.

I'm surprised that, during the past decade of museum expansions, there haven't been more rooftop galleries.

There it was again: another example of a logical fallacy in the way arts institutions think about appealing to new audiences (translation -- younger and more diverse audiences). Somewhere along the way, reaching out to new audiences was equated with new works, as if those in a museum, or in a dance company's or orchestra's repertoire, couldn't possibly attract the hip young people that seem to be the holy grail of cultural organizations. In The New York Times Arts & Leisure section this weekend, writing about the 50th anniversary of Lincoln Center, Tony Tommasini exhibited a very mild version of this affliction:

It could also be argued that the complex's citadel-like feeling has deterred potential audiences. With its institutional appearance, Lincoln Center does not look at first glance like a place for innovative or experimental work.

We saw the same kind of "logic" earlier this year when some critics expressed disappointment that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had chosen Thomas P. Campbell -- a tapestries curator, for heaven's sake -- as its new director. What could that possibly forbode, they asked, for displaying contemporary art and luring new audiences to 1000 Fifth Avenue?

To me, this is not only a fallacy...

As I mentioned two posts ago when I wrote about the New Museum's UnGala, which was mightily aided by the auction of a commissioned portrait by Karen Kilimnik, arts institutions in New York have been telling me, anecdotally, that donations are not down as much as might be expected. So far, I've not run across a single case where they are down as steeply as the stock market decline. 

But many are suffering from another fundraising problem, which I outline in an article in today's New York Times. Many -- even as important as Carnegie Hall (right) -- can't find honoress from the business world for their benefits, and honorees are key to reaching new constituencies and to luring corporate donations. Executives who once sought out honors are now saying no. Or they are agreeing to be honored only if they don't have to pressure their business contacts into buying tables.

It's a problem many expect to get worse in the next year, partly because many organizations extended invitations to this spring's honorees before the worst hit last year. And, as one fundraiser told me, "people are gala'd out -- they don't want to be seen having a good time now."

Not everyone, though: rumor has it that tomorrow's annual Costume Institute benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is again set to be a titanic success.

Here's a link to my Times article.