What is it about opera in Chicago and a dollar bill? In the last year, two companies there have used the buck as a way to draw in people and raise some money at the same time. 

Last year, the Chicago Opera Theater set up a six-week "People's Opera" contest, asking people to choose the opera, out of three, that they wanted to see produced -- for $1 a vote. They selected Mosè in Egitto by Gioachino Rossini, which will open the 2010 Spring Festival Season in Millennium Park next April. Chicago Opera Theater, run creatively by Brian Dickie, raised $40,000 from the voting (including a $16,000 matching grant). Voters chose a work -- chronicling Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt -- that hadn't been seen in Chicago since Abraham Lincoln's days. Britten's Paul Bunyan came in second; Mozart's La finta giardiniera placed third.

I was reminded of this yesterday, when I received an email...

The National Endowment for the Humanities gets far too little attention, imho. So I took some time this past weekend to look at its most recent round of grants, which were announced earlier this month. Nearly 200 awards worth a total of $20 million were made to cultural institutions, universities and libraries in 36 states and Washington, D.C., plus a couple of scholars working overseas. The grants cover digital humanities, preservation/access, educational and public programs, research and collections.

The biggest award -- $1 million -- will go to the Asia Society for a traveling exhibition, plus website, symposium, educational and public programs, catalogue and film on the life of the Buddha. The traveling show focuses on the "art of Buddhist pilgrimages" to sites important in the Buddha's life. The Asia Society hasn't issued a press release about this, yet at least, nor is there any further information about it on its website, so the show must be a ways down the road. But it sounds like an interesting show.

The Newberry Library in Chicago actually received more money in this grant round, just over $1.2 million, but that total covers five separate projects involving educational programs, archives, fellowships, and so on. One grant will pay to plan an online and traveling exhibition called "Make Big Plans: Daniel Burnham's Vision of An American Metropolis," about the 1909 Plan of Chicago, which is said to be America's first comprehensive urban plan.

There are plenty of other interesting awards on the grant list. For this post, I focused on those that will aid exhibitions:

• $250,000 to the Brooklyn Museum for a traveling exhibition on the Plains Indian tipi
• nearly $350,000 to the Frick Collection to digitize "deteriorating" photographs of American paintings 
• $300,000 to the Oakland Museum for a permanent gallery on California history
• $350,000 to the University of Illinois at Chicago for a new core exhibition at the Jane Addams-Hull House Museum
• $380,000 to the Peabody-Essex Museum for a traveling and online exhibition called "Fiery Pool: Maya and the Mythic Sea," plus a catalogue and public programs.

The rest are listed on the NEH website. I know several cultural groups -- not just museums, but orchestras and theaters -- who say they've never applied for an NEH grant.

Depending on the project, they may or may not qualify. But I think there's more there than many people realize. In 2006, for example, the Frick received a $750,000 challenge grant toward a $3.75 million endowment for a senior decorative arts curator. I mentioned that grant to another museum director recently, who was stunned.

When budget time comes around, the NEH deserves as much support as the NEA.  

Photo: Standing Buddha, Afghanistan, 1st Century   

While "Chelsea Visits Havana," the first big group show of American art in Cuba was moving into place -- it opened on Friday at the 10th Havana Biennial -- there was other art news on the Cuban front that slipped below the radar. Credit my friend Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, who pointed me to it in an item in her regular Saturday column for the Financial Times.

In late February, the U.S. State Department said it would investigate the current ownership of a painting, now in the hands of an Italian-Argentinean dealer, that was confiscated from the billionaire Fanjul family in 1961, when they were forced to leave Cuba after the revolution.

The work, Malaga Porta, was painted by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (whose self-portrait is below), and has been variously

valued at $250,000 to $3 million. It's considered a minor work by Sorolla, Spain's best Impressionist.

The Fanjuls, one of Cuba's wealthiest families before the revolution, have nevertheless been trying to get it back for years. With a fortune made in sugar and property, the dynasty owned many majestic homes in Cuba and an important art collection to go with them. It included hundreds of paintings by the likes of "Caravaggio, Goya, Murillo, Nattier, Boucher, Lebrun, Largilliere, Hoppner and Boldini, plus a Michelangelo pencil drawing, plus 14 paintings and three sketches by Sorolla y Bastida," according to Peter Watson, who detailed this whole tangled tale in an article in The Age in 2005. 

The family believes the works were largely sold onto international markets after the Soviet Union fell, leaving Cuba without a patron state and in need of hard currency. 

Now, according to a press release issued on Feb. 24 by a lawyer for the Fanjuls, who started anew in the U.S. and are said to be billionaires, the State Department has agreed to probe potential violation of the Helms-Burton Act by one Bruno Sciaoli, the dealer. The Helms-Burton act blocks those who deal in property confiscated by Cuba, and their immediate families, from entering the U.S. and exposes them to potential damages.

The Fanjuls are not alone in seeking their confiscated art; they and others have listed them with the Art Loss Register, which keeps track of stolen works so that auction houses, dealers, and collectors may check before they buy or sell. 

But the European Union deplored the Helms-Burton Act and passed a resolution essentially making it unenforceable in member countries. As Georgina writes:

The problem is complicated, because European governments recognise Cuba and accept the nationalisation of the collections, but under US embargo laws it is illegal to trade in confiscated property from Cuba. But if the State department finds the art dealer guilty in this test case, it could have a major impact on sales of these Cuban-sourced works. ALR executive director Chris Marinello compared the issue of confiscated Cuban art as "a similar situation to the holocaust."

I tend to agree with Marinello: confiscation is confiscation.

The Fanjuls have long covered their political bases by donating to both Democrats and Republicans, though at one time they were particularly close to Bill Clinton. Various members contributed to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2007-2008. Interestingly, I could not find any mention of the investigation on the State Department website.

There've been many articles on the Fanjul case, but the Maine Antique Digest in 2005 published the only one, by David Hewett, that I could find with a (partial) list of the Fanjuls' lost works.

Twenty-four hours after first reading Lynn Chu's op-ed in Saturday's Wall Street Journal on the proposed Google book settlement, it's still on my mind. I have not been following this issue as closely as I should be, and no doubt there are counter-arguments. But her analysis certainly disturbed me. Here are some key passages:

There is nothing more individual in the world than a book, an author, a publisher, and the value of a contract. The aging baby boomers now flacking the settlement don't seem to understand that PDF scanning (how Google and everyone else digitizes books) isn't rocket science; it's cheap and easy. Books will be digitized without Google. But the Google settlement sets in amber today's overhyped role of the Internet, ruled by that great and magnificent Oz -- Google.

And:

Under the settlement, every rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private contract data, on every edition of every work they ever wrote -- and every excerpt permission ever granted to others -- at the peril of losing the money Google will be making on their backs. This is a massive burden on everyone in the book industry, making us all, in effect, Google's data-entry slaves. Indeed, in most cases such information about every permission ever granted is unlocatable. It opens a Pandora's box of disputes and mistaken claims about who actually owns what.

 And:

We already have a good system. It's called the system of private property and free contract, designed for dispersed, autonomous individuals -- not command-and-control centers. The U.S. Constitution grants authors small monopolies in their own copyrights. Author market power is talent-based and individual, not collective. This class action seeks to wipe all this out -- just for Google.

Ms. Chu is a literary agent at Writers Representatives, and she clearly believes Google is being evil with this proposed settlement of its dispute with the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs in their class-action suit against the company. I hope that the 385 pages of the settlement document don't scare others in the publishing world away from understanding it before the May 9 deadline for deciding whether to opt-in or opt-out.

Here's a link to the WSJ article (though, as a subscriber, I'm not sure whether or not it's behind a firewall).

Ms. Chu continues her argument, advising writers to do nothing, here.  

 

Friday afternoon: waiting for callbacks for stories I'm working on, callbacks that rarely come on Fridays after about now. Unfortunately. Which set me to some Friday afternoon pipe-dreaming.

The Frick Collection has been thinking about expansion since at least Sam Sachs was director there; current director Anne Poulet has echoed the call for "limited expansion," as she has termed it. For nearly a year, the gorgeous 45-foot-wide townhouse around the corner, at 22 East 71st St., has been up for sale. It was, of course, home to the late Salander-O'Reilly Gallery. Sotheby's has the listing, and you can see what a perfect match for the Frick it would be. Or take the short-cut and read a description from the Times last year:

THE Salander-O'Reilly Galleries...provided a museumlike space to display old master paintings, tapestries and sculptures. Customers entered through the arched wrought-iron gates in the Italian Renaissance facade, up a few steps under a vaulted ceiling of coffered plaster. They stepped softly on the polished marble into a gallery with stone walls and a broad staircase designed by C. P. H. Gilbert in the 1920s.

The asking price is $75 million, out-of-reach for the Frick. But the mansion is owned by arts patron Aby Rosen, the real estate developer. It's true his tastes are contemporary. Here's how Phoebe Hoban described them in a March, 2008 profile of Rosen in New York Magazine:

Looking over his blue-chip collection of 80 Warhols (and counting), the naughty Richard Prince nurse, the Basquiats, the Christopher Wools, the Harings, the Koonses, the Bacon, people wonder as they did with Charles Saatchi whether it's Rosen or the company that owns this vast trove. (Through a spokeswoman, Rosen declined to comment.)

But wouldn't it be great if Rosen simply gave the building to the Frick? I don't know what the real estate collapse has done to his net worth, but if websites like Curbed are accurate he is still active and out-and-about in New York. Jeff Koons, one of Rosen's friends, is said to collect Old Masters. Maybe he can plant the idea.

Just a thought.

 

There's no debate over the state of the contemporary art market -- it's pretty dead. But the once high-flying Chinese contemporary art market, well, that may or may not be equally depressed.

On March 10, The New York Times said it was, citing recent auction results and quoting Zoe Butt, the director of Long March Space: "The era of Chinese contemporary art commanding such high prices is over." Long March recently closed two of its three galleries in Beijing.

On Mar. 11, Pace Wildenstein chairman Arne Glimcher fought back, publishing a piece in The Daily Beast asserting that "I've heard people saying 'the China thing' is over but that's not true." He provided no backup, though, and failed to disclose his self-interest. (A commenter called him out, telling readers about Pace's new gallery in Beijing and its representation of two prominent Chinese artists.)

A few months back, when I interviewed Belgian Baron Guy Ullens -- who has collected these works works for more than 20 years -- for the April Town & Country, he said the days of everything-sells were over.

Yet, next Thursday, Acquavella Galleries -- always highly attuned to what sells -- will open the first U.S. solo show, 20 works in all, of Zeng Fanzhi (right, Self-Portrait, 2008). Zeng holds the auction record for Chinese contemporary paintings, $9.7 million. 

Ullens, who recently announced that he was selling part of his huge collection at a May auction (according to Bloomberg), provided some very interesting context about the coming years, though: "Before 1998 or 2000, the Chinese were not producing a lot. The good stuff of the old times is limited....[But] There are 50,000 to 70,000 going to art school in China right now. You can see the wave coming."

Ullens, who with his wife cofounded the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, was looking forward to seeing the work of that wave, which will eventually make its way here. That could be energizing to contemporary art.

But consider this: So far, only about 40 contemporary Chinese artists have gained art-historical recognition, according to Yishu: The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.  Is there an appetite for so many more? Will the weeding take place there, or here?  

Photo: Acquavella Galleries 

A grand jury has spoken: art dealer Larry Salander has been indicted on 100 counts, "including grand larceny, falsifying business records, scheming to defraud, forgery and perjury," according to The New York Times website. Salander has been arrested; more details will be coming out during the day. The total stolen was calculated at $88 million.

Everyone who ever visited his posh gallery on East 71st Street in New York wondered how Salander did it; we're about to learn more details. In the context of Wall Street scandals, this must look small -- but the art world doesn't need this now.

Here's the Times story.

 

I know AJ's readers want to believe that the Obama Administration will do wonders for the arts and humanities communities. I know you don't like to hear otherwise. But I have to tell you honestly what my reporting turns up: so far, not so good.

Yes, the $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts in the stimulus bill was great news. But while we wait for appointments to head the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the appointment of Kareem Dale (below) as mini-czar -- which is now likely to be temporary -- and two lesser appointments suggest politics-as-usual.  

Last night, The Daily Beast published my report on this. As I hinted when I first wrote here about Dale (stay tuned, I said), his appointment is not likely to last very long. It's sad that his name was discovered by, or leaked to, The New York Times in the first place. 

The most disappointing element of the story, however, is the appointment of Hollywood fundraiser Jeremy Bernard as the NEH's White House and Congressional liaison; it's an important job. Bernard claims a bachelor's degree from Hunter College on his website, but Hunter says he did not graduate. When queried, the NEH said the degree is not in his documentation for the appointment. But the whole thing, not just the resume inflation, makes him a bit of an odd fit for the scholarly NEH.

I am pretty sure, by the way, that the White House has recognized this whole situation as a personnel snafu that has to be fixed. And it will -- the question now is how and when. 

Here's a link to my Beast article.

And P.S.  I did not write the headline or deck.   

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.  

A few weeks back, I mentioned an article in the Wall Street Journal describing an effort by the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy to get foundations to devote a much larger proportion of their grants to minorities, poverty alleviation and other social causes. If the Committee succeeded, the arts would obviously be disadvantaged.

Today the Journal continues its coverage with an article about reaction to the report. Some foundations are fighting back. One -- the California Wellness Foundation -- even cancelled its membership with the Committee, the author, Mike Spector reports. And Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, called the recommendation "breathtakingly arrogant."

Kudos to the Journal for its continuing coverage. You can read the whole article here. The comments are good, too.

 

is more Jack Nicholsons. Seriously.

This revelation came in Monday's New York Post, which said that a new memoir from Allegra Huston, Angelica's sister, included a passage on Nicholson's acquisition habits. "He collected paintings to the point of obsession," she wrote.

A little snooping around turned up more details. Nicholson apparently owns an eight-room  home, modest by Hollywood standards, on Mulholland Dr. that is stuffed with just part of his collection -- not just on the walls, but stacked in unoccupied rooms. The rest is in storage. Among his paintings are works by Picasso, Magritte, Bonnard, Matisse, Bacon and Dufy. In late 2007, he told the Times of London:

"I just like art...I get pure pleasure from it. My grandmother was an amateur painter."

And: 

"I got involved in buying paintings when Diana Vreeland [the former Vogue editor] got me to an auction in England. Up came this beautiful Tiepolo drawing at Sotheby's. I bought it for Anjelica Huston as a present. That's how I got started."

And:

"People look at an abstract painting and ask, 'What's it supposed to be? What's the point?' Hell, it's a painting, that's the point. It's not supposed to be anything. Its job is to get you to look in a different way. That's also what actors are supposed to do. Provide a stimulating point of departure for thought and feeling."

Spoken like a true collector. 

Why is the Iranian new year, Nowruz, a reason for celebration in the arts world?

Well, the Met can rejoice because a group of Iranian-Americans held a sumptuous dinner-dance at -- where else? -- the Temple of Dendur. David Patrick Columbia's New York Social Diary has the pictures. (Keep scrolling -- NYSD also has some great pix of Maastricht.) That must have added some much-needed cash to the Met's coffers.

But President Obama also gave a little signal when he sent a videotaped message to the Iranian people late last week. It offered a new beginning in diplomacy between our two countries -- and contained a message  to the cultural world here, too, according to a couple of White House-ologists and cultural mavens.

The President used the occasion of an ancient Persian festival called Nowruz to extend the olive branch. Then he said:

Nowruz is just one part of your great and celebrated culture. Over many centuries your art, your music, literature and innovation have made the world a better and more beautiful place....We know that you are a great civilization, and your accomplishments have earned the respect of the United States and the world.

Obama made no promises, offered no cultural overtures. But at the end of the message, he returned to the arts:

There are those who insist that we be defined by our differences.  But let us remember the words that were written by the poet Saadi, so many years ago:  "The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence."

Obama is a master of symbolism and of gesture. His campaign arts policy promised he would expand cultural diplomacy, though the post-election task forces, according to one knowledgeable source, did not focus on the issue. This speech, though, indicates that Obama is thinking about it.

Maybe the nation's orchestras, operas and museums should be too.  

With arts groups struggling all around us, an article in yesterday's New York Times, "As Detroit Struggles, Foundations Adjust," really caught my eye. It contained a warning for arts organizations and arts-lovers. Describing how their reduced resources made them change the way they operate, foundation officials said they were "being forced to pick winners and losers." In some cases, the foundations were forcing mergers. As a condition of aid to "Women Arise," for example, the Hudson-Webber Foundation merged it with Matrix Human Services.

Then comes these key paragraphs:

Thus, the Hudson-Webber chief executive, David O. Egner, is asking himself whether Detroit needs both a world-class symphony and its Michigan Opera Theatre, and, if so, whether they could share an orchestra.

"These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking," Mr. Egner said.

Hudson-Webber is a big foundation in Detroit. In 2007, the most recent figures available on its website, net assets totalled $174 million and it gave away nearly $8 million in grants. Of that, it donated $15,000 in operating support to the opera and $20,000 in operating support to the symphony, plus $200,000 of a three-year grant to support the symphony's "summer initiative."

But... 

It's encouraging that people are trying to think creatively abou the broken publishing model, which I mentioned on this site in my March 11 post, "Everyone's A Writer." After all, who's going to cover the arts and publish reviews and criticism if not newspapers and magazines?

Turning newspapers into non-profits (on purpose, that is) is one; micro-payments for using online news sites is another.

Here's another, by Dan Gillmor, posted earlier this week on BoingBoing. Gillmor argues that a critical mass of elite journalism organizations -- from the New York Times to the Economist to the New Yorker -- should band together and charge readers for access to their websites. Only after a few days would the content become free.

The implementation problems are obvious: someone would pay for the content and put it up online free elsewhere. Sure, that violates copyright laws, but it happens all the time.

But Gillmor's "thought experiment," as he calls it, may at least generate more thinking. It's worth reading.  

West Side Story -- a new production of the great musical by Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and of course Jerome Robbins -- has arrived on Broadway, opening last night. It's an event.

Since I haven't seen it yet, I asked my friend Amanda Vaill -- who has -- to weigh in. Amanda wrote both Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins (2006) and Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About, the American Masters documentary that aired on PBS last month. Robbins was billed as the choreographer, director and conceiver of the 1957 original production, which was seen as a radical show.

What was Robbins trying to do with his staging of West Side Story?

 

What changes have been made, why, and do they work?

 

Other changes cut more painfully into Robbins's design, though.

I can't let today's special section on museums in the New York Times pass without handing out raspberries, for the dumbest things that were said, and strawberries, for the smartest. Plus, something for Tom Campbell, of the Met.

Raspberries to:

Ann Philbin, director, Hammer Museum, UCLA: "We can't just be about art anymore.  Museums are the new community centers."

Lori Fogarty, director, Oakland Museum: "We're moving away from the authoritarian voice of a museum. We're taking the approach that everyone's perspective is valid."

Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums: "People don't expect the museum visit to be passive. They need more than three dry sentences of wall text."

Strawberries to: 

Neal Benezra, director, SF MoMA: "If you cut excessively -- and I think I can say this is wisdom for our current situation in our field right now -- the public will lose interest in you. It's a very fine line, but you can create a recession of your own making if you're too extreme in the reduction of your program."

And Benezra again: "A really great museum that grows to maturity dedicates itself to its collection. I would ultimately like to see a 50-50 ratio without cutting the exhibition program."

Bruce B. Dayton, museum trustee: "A real strong interest in art -- that's the No. 1 criterion [for recruiting trustees]. And then the ability to give and the ability to raise money."

Lora Urbanelli, director, Montclair Art Museum: "We're all talking about how to get this next crop comfortably fluent, if not conversant, in the arts. We have to provide people with the tools to learn how to look."

Best Straddle:

Thomas P. Campbell, director, Metropolitan Museum: "This is a good moment to refocus and reinvigorate. We want people to know we're here and have been for 138 years. We're a place of infinite experiences. Last year there were something like 20,000 different events from lectures to tours. A tour leaves every 15 minutes. It's really quite phenomenal."

 

My thanks to Doug McLennan at Diacritical for introducing my AJ blog earlier this week. I am glad to be here.

Then yesterday Doug posted "Is the NEA Bad for the Arts?" about cultural policy, which sure brought back memories. It was 10 years ago this coming August that I wrote an article for the New York Times about the Pew Charitable Trust's effort to get the nation to focus on culture. The key paragraph:

Over the next five years, the Pew plans to devote about 40 percent of its culture budget, some $50 million, toward getting policymakers to focus on issues like arts financing, intellectual property rights, zoning in historic areas and an arts curriculum for public schools. The effort will involve academic research, opinion polls and more media coverage, among other things.

The Pew later retrenched, ending its efforts. But Stephen K. Urice, who headed the project for the Pew, was right when he told me: ''The next Presidential election should be the last one in which the parties are without a cultural policy plank in their platforms. But first they need to have smart academics, think tanks and data focusing on this, and that's where we're headed....We're talking about developing an infrastructure for understanding the role of culture in America.''

That infrastructure -- though a little bigger now -- still doesn't exist.

I was very interested in the subject then, and remain so; I hope to find more developments.

Here's the link to my 1999 article -- "Heavyweight Foundation Throws Itself Behind the Idea of a Cultural Policy."

In the business world, this would be illegal collusion. In opera, it's a way to help struggling companies survive.

I wish I could say it was money, but it's not. And the idea was too little, too late for the Baltimore Opera Company and the Connecticut Opera, which were too crippled to avoid being shut down in recent months. But maybe the information-sharing that Opera America decided to begin last fall will help its nearly 200 member companies through this recession. It's a little idea, but it may be a useful one for other arts organizations, too.

Since December, Opera America has been convening monthly telephone conference calls for its members' general directors. During the calls, they discuss their operations, the remedial measures they're taking, what works, what doesn't. All very practical stuff.  

"We talk about strategies, and share our best ideas," Marc A. Scorca (left), Opera America's president/CEO, told me. So far, 80 pecent of his members have participated in at least one of the monthly calls. At that rate, they have to be learning something useful. After each call, Opera America circulates summaries of what was said to members, who presumably pass them on to their boards, Scorca said. (I certainly hope they are doing that -- boards need this information.)  

The program has been so well-received that Opera America recently started...

Every year the World Economic Forum, also known as Davos, selects a crop of 200 to 300 Young Global Leaders of Tomorrow. "Extraordinary" people all, they're supposed to work together on global problems, using their knowledge and energy to make the world a better place. Drawn from the business, academic, non-profit, arts and media worlds, they meet at biannual summits, plus other Forum events, and collaborate on various initiatives. They network.

I have no idea what actual good comes of this. But I thought it would be interesting to see who from the arts made the 2009 list, which was announced last month. It has 230 names; from the arts come... 

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  

Late last week, the White House seems to have appointed an arts czar -- but no one seems to have noticed. His name is Kareem Dale, according to a short item in Saturday's New York Times. As of 1 p.m. on Monday, there's no press release on WhiteHouse.gov and no reports of the appointment at the Associated Press or Reuters.

I don't know Mr. Dale, a lawyer from Chicago who is partially blind, but he doesn't seem to have much of a profile. Searches on Google and Kosmix and in Factiva (which has articles from most major newspapers and many minor ones) turned up very little.

According to published reports, Dale hails from Chicago, graduated with a bachelor's degree in advertising from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and stayed there to earn a law degree and an MBA, which he received in 1999. He founded and is CEO of The Dale Law Group, which has no website. Campaign finance records show that Dale contributed $2,300 to Obama's campaign in 2008 (and about the same during the primary season); then he volunteered for it. At some point, he became the campaign's Disability Vote Director. The only mention of arts I could find was during his campaign volunteer days, when Dale was a member of the campaign Arts Policy Committee, plus service on the board of Chicago's Black Ensemble Theater.

I can't help but think this is not what many people in the cultural world had in mind when they asked President Obama to appoint a powerful person in the White House to raise the profile of the arts in the U.S.

Another oddity: in mid-February, the White House announced that it had named Dale to the post of Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy. He still seems to hold that post. 

Stay tuned.  

It's a rare cultural institution -- maybe even a unique one -- that hasn't had to cut its budget in these turbulent times. And everyone's still worried about further declines and even closures. For some perspective, I decided to call someone who's been both an advice-giver and an arts manager -- Adrian Ellis, once a fulltime consultant in the arts and, since 2007, the Executive Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Like me, Ellis thinks there'll be more casualities, because single-digit budget trimming isn't enough. Museums, he believes, will have to close galleries to lower their fixed costs, and performing arts groups, for example, may have to band together to share resources. Ellis also says that the old "pyramid" model for fundraising -- where 10% of the donors give 90% of the money -- is "too steep." Smart institutions will seek more money from smaller donors to broaden their base. They will also sharply focus their programs, because those that survive will be the institutions with clear, well-defined missions that have rabid fans -- and the big ones integral to a community's identity.

But is Ellis practicing, at Jazz, what he preaches?   

Uh-oh. Turns out that the Los Angeles Philharmonic's charismatic music director Gustavo Dudamel is not so popular with eBay fans. Maybe they don't yet know who he is. As I mentioned here earlier this week, someone at the New York Philharmonic had put a T-shirt autographed by Dudamel and Pinchas Zukerman up for sale on eBay, with proceeds going to the NYPhil.

Alas, no bidding contest ensued. Just one bid, the minimum $100, was made when the auction ended today. The $100 goes to the NY Phil.

 

It has been more than a week since Francis Wilkinson published an incisive commentary in The Week headlined "Is Writing For the Rich?" In it, Wilkinson (below), The Week's executive editor, dissects a growing problem: the number of people willing to write for free, and where that leaves professional writers, which is even poorer than they used to be.

Wilkinson focuses on young writers, unable to get started. But this is a problem for established writers, too -- just ask any of the thousands of journalists who've been laid off in the last 18 months or the battalions of freelancers trying to ply their trade. I know a Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter/author of three books who is leaving the profession because she can't find a job and can't earn a living freelancing.

I called Wilkinson to ask if he'd gotten any reaction from any publishers. "No, nothing," he said. "They've been battered." He has heard from tons of writers and people who want to be writers. Unless they have other income, few can afford it.

Why should you care? Imho, when you pay writers less, you get less: articles and books are less well-reseached, less well-written, and less thoughtful. They have little value-added editing. Readers have to compensate by reading more things -- or they suffer, perhaps without realizing it, from being less well-informed.  

Read Wilkinson's article here. It's not news that the business model for publishing is broken, but it's surprising that more attention hasn't been placed on writers. And if anyone has any ideas for a new publishing business model, I'd love to hear them.

Official word on results from the Armory Show is in, and it's not bad. This year's expanded version -- 243 exhibitors -- drew 56,000 people, versus 52,000 last year. Dealers reported "solid sales" that were better than they expected.

Some of the larger deals:

Lisson Gallery, London: two Anish Kapoor sculptures at $1 million and $700,000 respectively; 

Cheim & Read, New York: a Louise Bourgeois for $1 million;

Galerie Michael Schultz, Berlin: a Sigmar Polke for $340,000 (o.T.(02), 2003, pictured, right);

Sicardi Gallery, Houston: a Gego wire sculpture for $195,000;  

Michael Rosenfeld, New York: a Werner Drewes painting for $170,000.

Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris, and Peres Project, Los Angeles, both said they sold the entire content of their booths. 

 

A friend of mine was recently lamenting the parlous state of the one-and-only non-profit theatre in her city -- you can tell this was not New York -- which was in danger of closing, unless it found an angel philanthropist. Then I learned that last week the Madison Repertory Theatre closed down -- at least a half-million dollars in the hole.  

So I decided to see where similar theatres stood. I was pleased to find that last fall the Theatre Communications Group started doing "Snapshot Surveys" of its members, some 460 theatres in 47 states, on fiscal matters. 

The first set not only indicates danger -- little surprise there -- but also shows just how quickly the world has changed for theater in the last six to eight months. 

Last September, of the 241 members who completed the survey, 41.5% reported a surplus, while 36.5% said they had ended their most recent season in the red. The rest broke even. Subscriptions and single-ticket sales were growing.

There are several short-hand ways to indicate approval or disapproval. Internally, The New York Times used to publish a list of "winners and sinners" and the Columbia Journalism Review has a column called "Darts and Laurels." From time to time, I'm going to give out a few Raspberries and Strawberries.

First, a strawberry to Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who told the Associated Press that "he believes the arts are key to generating revenue and strengthening the community" and that "getting children engaged in the arts must be a priority." Nutter has also created an Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, and has increased funding for the arts in his proposed budget. Read the whole story, which was published Sunday in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Next, a raspberry to Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. The number of people who called Leonardo by the name "Da Vinci" was bad enough before he mistitled his book. Now, as this article from the Christian Science Monitor makes clear, even people who know better are doing it. We now have "The Da Vinci Experience" exhibit on view at the San Diego Air & Space Museum and the "Da Vinci: The Genius" exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, to name two. Even some curators and critics are calling the master by his birthplace. Pity.  

Even the New York Philharmonic wants to cash in on the star power of Gustavo Dudamel, the talented, glamorous new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- and there's nothing wrong with that. Just by chance, I stopped in on the NYPhil's website today, and discovered that a one-of-a-kind T-shirt, autographed by Dudamel and violin master Pinchas Zukerman after their mid-January performance at Lincoln Center, is up for bid on eBay.

The minimum bid is $100, and proceeds go to the NYPhil. At the moment there are no bids, and you have until 11 a.m. PDT on Mar. 12 to make a bid. It's the only bit of Dudamel memorabilia on eBay now -- but who knows where this could go?

Picture credit: © Dan Porges

You may have missed the most interesting arts story in Sunday's New York Times, because "Pulling Art Sales Out of Thinning Air" appeared in the business section. It was a profile of Larry Gagosian, with a "nut graf" -- the paragraph giving the gist of the story -- saying: "Everyone is vulnerable. Especially Larry Gagosian." 

Some of the choice bits:

His business is the ultimate black-box operation, a never-ending and international swirl of cash and canvas that is built for maximum secrecy. What is certain is that his overhead is a multiple of his competitors'. Also certain is that the prices of work by the young artists he has been luring into his galleries -- prices that have doubled or tripled in some cases, courtesy of his imprimatur -- are falling like bank stocks. Worst of all, the days of the $75 million private deal have ground to a halt.

In honor of the Armory Show in New York -- where, barring a miracle, sales are likely to be slow -- today I was going to post a cartoon that's on view in an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum: "On the Money," a collection of New Yorker cartoons, is full of very funny drawings by artists commenting on money and how it defines us (whether it belongs at the Morgan is a question for another day, and also related to money). But late yesterday, I learned from the Morgan that it could not grant permission for me to reproduce it. So -- you'll have to visualize.

The cartoon, by Whitney Darrow, Jr., shows an man beside his painting, and reads "Buy now, save up to $50,000." It was published in September, 1951. Darrow meant the man to be the artist, but now it could well be a dealer, too! 

UPDATED: Last night I ran into a senior figure in the art world, who told me that he'd been told that sales during February's five-day ADAA Art Show, which I wrote about for the Daily Beast (link), came to just 14 sales among the 70 dealers. I posted that here, with a caveat, and set out to confirm. When I finally reached Linda Blumberg, ADAA's executive director, she said that was wrong. Speaking from the Armory Show, she did not have numbers at hand; but, she said, more dealers sold something than not, and some sold many pieces. "Granted," she added, "more were at the lower end of the price scale." But not all, as I mentioned in the Beast piece.  

I won't be writing about the Armory Show, but The Art Market Monitor has been keeping track of several reports from the floor.    

 

All around the globe, financial traders, corporate executives, and consumers are holding back, keeping their wallets closed and sitting on their hands. No one -- as recent economic statistics depressingly show -- is doing much buying. So it comes as rather a shock to find out, as The Art Newspaper just revealed, that Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is rushing in where others fear to tread. Govan has commissioned Jeff Koons to make a titanic life-size replica of a locomotive suspended from a crane for LACMA's collection. Price tag: $25 million. The Art Newspaper called it the most expensive commission ever by a museum, and said LACMA has already spent about $1.7 million of the $2 million so far pledged for the piece. I have to wonder about Govan's sanity.

Last week, I wrote a piece on Forbes.com about UNESCO's International Year of Astronomy (link), which kicked off in January. In it, I mentioned the "Galileo: Images of the Universe From Antiquity to the Telescope" exhibition opening this month at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

I particularly like shows like this, exhibitions that link two disciplines, because they attract both audiences, in this case, people who are interested in either science or art.

Americans, I've been told by experts in arts participation, often favor one discipline -- always attending the symphony for example but rarely going to an art museum, and vice versa.

At times like this, when cultural institutions are seeking to broaden their bases, cross-disciplinary shows are a good model.  

My Forbes article was by no means a comprehensive roundup of all activities during the International Year of Astronomy. But afterwards I learned of a show like the one at the Palazzo Strozzi much closer to home. On April 4, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia will open "Galileo, Medici and the Age of Astronomy," which -- judging from its website -- also looks great. Alongside Galileo's gear, there'll be art and artifacts from the Medici family.

Here are two samples, both borrowed from the Institute and Museum of the History of Science, Florence: at right is a polyhedral sundial, with nine faces all telling the same time no matter which face is used, from 1587; below is a cylindrical sundial, whose horizontal brass arm marks time on the cylinder, from 1574-1587. From afar, they look like works of art.   

I thought there was going to be another example of this in last Sunday's New York Times, when I saw the City section's article about "birding in a museum." It put me in mind of a little tour at the Metropolitan Museum I had a few years ago: New York Audubon, with the Met, escorted bird-lovers around the collection, picking out and explaining images of birds from antiquity through the present. It was charming.

Some of the hard-core birders present had probably not set foot in the Met before. But I bet they've been back.

The City section's story, by the way, was about an Audubon water color show at the New-York Historical Society -- not quite the same thing, but no doubt a good exhibition anyway. 

Then you may want to read this op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal. As the author, Naomi Schaefer Riley, says, a similar effort to dictate to philanthropists in California died. But the activists have not let up. It will pay to be informed about this.

 

Welcome to my blog, which -- I can say with certainty -- will evolve; blogging is a new experience for me.

I'm going to cut right to the chase (you can read about my plans for this space in "about") and start with what's on everyone's mind: the economy. Everyone's scared. No one knows quite how to cope. It's a rare cultural institution that hasn't cut its budget. But last week's lavish, record-setting Yves Saint Laurent auction in Paris is actually a good sign, not the last gasp of conspicuous consumption.

The total, you've probably read, reached $483.8 million, and one item, an Art Deco arm chair, fetched $28.3 million against an estimate of $2.6 million to $3.9 million! More important, the money spilled forth in every category of art, from Old Masters to German silver. Seventy-seven items sold for more than one million euros.

I don't think the sale augurs well for the art market, near-term; it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy high-quality objects with great provenance. But it does show that there are plenty of people with liquid assets who'll spend money for something they really want.

What if those people really want something everyone benefits from, like a strong museum or a vibrant theater scene, rather than a trophy object. That $28.3 million spent on a chair could have purchased, say, Franz Marc's rare "Grazing Horses III," which set a record at auction last year, and still left $4 million in the buyer's pocket. It could have paid for the entire Museum of American Folk Art, which cost $22 million at its opening in 2001. It could have paid for almost 30% of the grants made by the National Endowment for the Arts in recent years.

Even before the stock market plunged brutally yesterday -- again -- many experts believed that the "conspicuous philanthropy" that prevailed during the boom was dead. And maybe it is -- if it's defined as mega-gifts for buildings. But if the buyers in Paris last week were willing to spend so publicly, can't cultural institutions convince people like them that a rescue gift is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? And would these donors then be heroes and heroines?

To give them recognition, I would be willing to take nominations for a "national honor roll" published right here on this blog.

What about that other worry -- that donations to arts groups are bound to decline when social needs are so great. It's real, and there will be a drop, as there was after Katrina and other calamities. But, if past is prologue, there will be a rebound; most arts funding comes from individuals, not corporations or foundations.

Riding out these financial troubles won't be easy, and even conspicuous philanthropy won't save the many cultural groups that over-expanded. But there's hope for those who can get back on a prudent course -- with one caveat. If President Obama goes ahead with plans to limit the tax deductibility of charitable contributions, the woes will deepen. That's a subject I'll return to soon.

This blog is about culture in America as seen through my lens, which is informed and colored by years of reporting not only on the arts and humanities, but also on business, philanthropy, science, government and other subjects...

Now an independent journalist, I've worked as a reporter in the culture and business sections of The New York Times, and been the editor of the Sunday business section and deputy business editor there...