Archives for February 2010

What art-lover doesn’t have mixed feelings about crowded museums? Even as many took encouragement from the statistics released by the Association of American Museums last week, which show attendance rising at many museums (by at least 5% at more than 40% of the self-reporting museums), we probably grumbled about the impact. 

(I will not digress here, much, to note that AAM’s statistics — while better than nothing — leave much to be desired. For one thing, the response rate was just 21%, and those with good news were more likely to respond. RCA readers know of my regular advocacy for good studies/statistics, e.g., here.)

Still, it was fascinating to see Rob Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art, artist and onetime curator at the Museum of Modern Art, take up the subject of crowds in the current issue of Frieze Magazine.

No, the trouble in Paradise – where multitude once morphed into solitude – is the inexorable logic of ‘crowd management’ to which every sign and didactic label, corridor and door width, lobby and gallery dimension, security checkpoint and sales point, moving walkway, escalator and exit indicator conforms.

Skipping an amusing reference to Willem de Kooning, we go to this description:

…the mechanisms in play are horridly like those of a sci-fi monster that ingests people in great gulps, pumps them peristaltically through its digestive tract in a semi-delirious state, and then flushes them out the other end with their pockets lighter and with almost no memory of their ‘museum experience’ other than a mild anaesthetic hangover. In short, one leaves the halls of culture much as one does a colonoscopy clinic.

That bad?

Storr concludes with a story about a recent, better experience in Austria, too difficult to summarize, but which you can read here.  

These are things many say to each other — in milder language, of course. Storr just puts it out there, no holds barred. I don’t know what we can do about it, but it’s a description of the bind museums are in — and food for thought.  

The world got a new van Gogh painting this week, when on Wednesday the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam authenticated an early work called “Le Blute-Fin Mill,” which was painted in 1886. Van Gogh was living in Paris at the time, and the scene depicts Montmartre, with what the van Gogh museum terms atypically large human figures for the artist.

The work is on display in the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, the Netherlands.  

According to the Associated Press, “it is the first Van Gogh to be authenticated since 1995 and the sixth to be added to the confirmed list of the artist’s paintings since the latest edition of the standard catalog was published in 1970.”

The painting has a tale behind it, of course. It was purchased along with another painting by Dirk Hannema in 1975 for 5,000 Dutch guilders, which the AP calculated at $2,700. He bought it from a Parisian antique and art dealer and “immediately insured the painting for 16 times what he paid.”

Hannema, who had been director of the Boijmans Museum, “knew” he had a van Gogh but few believed him. He had lost credibility in the ’30s when a work he purchased as a Vermeer turned out to be a fake and again later when he ran Holland’s museums during World War II and was viewed as a Nazi collaborator.

But on this painting, he was right. Read more in the AP article on Yahoo News.

“It’s Not Too Late To Save The Barnes!” says the poster announcing a rally tonight in Philadelphia at the Ritz 5 Theater, where “The Art of the Steal” will be premiering in Philly.

Good for the Friends of the Barnes. I hate to hazard their chances of turning things around and stopping the move this late in the game, but as I implied here on Jan. 31, they should use the documentary any way they can to rally support opposing the move.

I have since seen the movie, and I agree with what Evelyn Yaari told me then: The documentary is “an unbelievably powerful piece that makes the Parkway Barnes look toxic.” (Well, I might remove the “unbelievably.”)

The documentary also revisits the issue of neighborhood opposition to increased access to the Barnes in Lower Merion: some neighbors opposed it years ago, and the Barnes is today paying the price. But as the documentary shows, the tour buses and private cars were coming for specific occasions — the return of paintings from their worldwide tour — and were so badly managed that the complaints are completely understandable.

If you’re not in Philadelphia or New York, where “The Art of the Steal” is showing at IFC, you can find out where you can see the film at Sundance Selects, where you can also purchase it “on demand.”

China’s contemporary artists have been toasts of the West for years now, and the interest has probably helped draw even more people into the profession. Last spring, Baron Guy Ullens, the big Belgian collector of Chinese art, told me that “50,000 to 70,000 [are] going to art school in China right now.”

But now comes word that in Beijing, at least, commercial development of shops, highrises, restaurants and galleries is threatening artists, even those in art zones.

According to The Guardian:

This week a group of artists said they were beaten with bricks and batons by thugs trying to evict them from their studios. More than a dozen of them mounted an unusual public protest in the heart of the capital on Monday against the demolition of art zones and the overnight attacks upon them….

The demolitions in Chaoyang district are only the latest of many. One person whose studio is threatened has been evicted four times already.

The artists say that some of them signed contracts for periods of up to 30 years and had spent a lot on improving the studios but had been in the Zhengyang and 008 zones for a matter of months before their landlords said the developers were moving in.

The police are investigating, but they also dispersed artists who were protesting on one of Beijing’s main streets, Chang’an avenue, and confiscated their banners. The Guardian mentions nothing about the political aspects of this, if any, but one has to wonder. Artists have irritated politicians there before, with Ai Weiwei being a big target and another example taking place at last summer’s Beijing 798 Biennale. As The Art Newspaper reported then:

The inaugural Beijing 798 Biennale, held in the sprawling 798 art district in China’s capital, saw a chaotic opening on 15 August, with major works by Chinese artists widely censored by authorities.

Specifically, works dealing with Sichuan province, prostitution, Nazis and female genitalia were removed.

Read more from The Guardian here and The Art Newspaper here. 

UPDATE: The New York Times also has a good article on this here.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of The Guardian and The Art Newspaper

Crime dramas are among the most popular TV programs. Wouldn’t it be interesting if they could help get people interested in visual art? My musings on this started when I read what may have been a throw-away line or may yet come to pass.

In mid-January, at a press conference disclosing 2009 art crime statistics, Franceso Maria Giro, an under-secretary in Italy’s Ministry of Culture suggested that the activities of the carabinieri’s art-and-antiquities squad would make a great TV drama. The idea was reported as a tiny item in the Italian press, put on Facebook, and then picked up in a few sentences by The Art Newspaper (February issue), where I first read it.

Giro proposed a TV show that would be fictionalized, but based on fact and made with the help of experts. He thinks it would encourage Italians to place more value on their heritage. I think it might also teach viewers a thing or two about art and antiquities, painlessly.

Giro said he had already discussed his idea with Sandro Bondi, the culture minister, and that he would approach RAI, the state-owned broadcaster.

Heaven knows there’s plenty of fodder. Here’s an open:

…A report arrives on the desk of Col. Giovanni Pastore, second in command of a military police unit charged with protecting Italy’s cultural patrimony. The few pages list everything from antique watches to Renaissance paintings that were either ripped off or recovered the day before.

Robbers entered a church in Ascoli Piceno and left with two ancient wood pews, the better for making fake antique furniture. A burglar at a church farther north in Novara had just enough time to break the wooden arm off of a baby Jesus, as it lay cradled in the arms of the Virgin Mary…. Meanwhile, at a family villa…thieves stole off into the night with a cache of marble statues. On a bright note, more than two dozen sculptures, antiques and paintings, including a 16th-century triptych of the Holy Family, were recovered just one month after their theft from a villa outside Milan.

Not included in the report were the holes likely dug the night before by tombaroli, the grave-robbers notorious for busting open Etruscan tombs…

That’s how a 2006 article about the art squad in the Wall Street Journal began. Italy then had 300 police at work on these cases, plus volunteer archaeologists, professional and amateur. Yet, “Between 1970 and 2005…845,838 objects were reported stolen, while less than a third of that number were recovered and only 4,159 arrests were made.”

Compelling TV about the visual arts has always been scarce (something I wrote about in 1997, perhaps too positively then, and it’s worse now), but Giro’s idea is different.

It might work, even in the U.S.