Results tagged “Richard Armstrong” from Real Clear Arts

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.

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."