Archives for April 2010

I spent a couple of hours at the Whitney Biennial one recent Sunday afternoon, looking at the art, reading the labels, and watching the crowds. And it was crowded.

I was struck, though, by something that I didn’t see in the reviews I read: how much this show focuses on the process of art, rather than the substance. Or maybe the process is the substance. Yes, process has grown in “importance” in contemporary art over the years, but at the Biennial, that’s most of what’s on view — or at least remarked upon. Consider what was written (online, but this parallels the wall labels) about a work by Curtis Mann (above):

Curtis Mann’s photographs contain fragments of scenes that are partially erased and obscured. Mann’s process draws attention to the artifice of the photographic medium by demonstrating the malleability of images. He begins by culling images of strife and conflict in various international locations from photosharing websites such as Flickr and then has prints made. Once he has the prints in hand he covers portions of the photographs with a protective varnish and pours bleach over each one, stripping away areas not coated with varnish.

In After the Dust, Second View (Beirut), Mann has arranged a grid of snapshots of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah….

With Pae White, it’s about how she “began creating tapestries with photographic images of crumpled aluminum foil and plumes of smoke.”

With James Casebare: “Casebere’s process involves constructing tabletop models out of modest materi¬als, such as Styrofoam, plaster, and cardboard. He then dramatically lights these constructions and care¬fully positions his camera to manipulate the com¬position and the mood of the resulting photograph. Devoid of human figures, the constructions invite viewers to project into and inhabit the space.”

With Lesley Vance: “Lesley Vance carefully arranges and lights objects such as fruits or shells. The artist then photographs these arrangements, and the resulting images serve as the basis for her abstract paintings [above, left]. Vance creates these paintings by manipulating wet paint with a palette knife, erasing and editing her strokes until she feels that the final form has revealed itself.”

When the curators didn’t know what to say about the art, did they revert to talking about process/technique? Looks that way, and while process is interesting, it shouldn’t be everything.

I also noticed that the works that seemed (granted, this was one afternoon) to be attracting the most attention, the longest stays, from Whitney visitors: Stephanie Sinclair’s photographs of Afghani women who had set themselves on fire to escape abuse; Nina Berman’s photographs of a severely disfigured Marine; and the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s “portable museum,” whose installation comments on American culture using video and audio and a hearse/ambulance. Not  much about process there.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Artists and The Whitney Museum

 

Oh, the irony of it. Las Vegas, a metropolis with more than 1.8 million people that allowed its art museum to close in February, 2009, is about to get two new museums — about the Mob.

One, the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, is a city effort, being installed in a disused downtown courthouse (at left) and set to open next March.

It’s already been nicknamed The Mob Museum, which is its website address.

The other, the Las Vegas Mob Experience, is a private effort by something called Eagle Group Holdings, in conjunction with Antoinette McConnell, 74, the daughter of notorious Sam “Momo” Giancana, head of the Chicago mob from 1957-66 (AKA “Sam the Cigar,” “Sam Gold,” “Sam Flood,” and “Mooney”). It is set to open by year-end in a space in, according to a Page One article in Sunday’s New York Times, the Tropicana casino on the Las Vegas Strip. It sounds like a theme park that could well end up glorifying mob exploits.

The city effort, on the other hand, has engaged Dennie Barrie, who headed the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center during the obscenity flap over Robert Maplethorpe’s exhibition there, then led the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and later helped create the International Spy Museum in Washington. That means something: Barrie has substance. The restored courthouse will contain 700 objects arranged in interactive exhibits that tell stories about the law’s efforts against the Mob in Vegas. They include, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

an exhibit called “Mob Mayhem,” featuring weapons used by hit men and explanations of secret messages hidden within murders. The centerpiece…will be the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre wall from a Chicago warehouse where Al Capone’s men slaughtered members of a rival gang in 1929.

“The Skim” concerns Las Vegas’ casinos and the revenue they provided to crime families across the country. The walls will be papered with cash, Barrie said, and displays will show how casino profits were diverted….

Another exhibit will be “Bringing Down the Mob” and will focus on wiretaps and surveillance. Visitors will be able to listen to Mob conversations, view surveillance footage and learn about establishing new lives in witness protection.

Federal, state and local money, to the tune of $42 million, is paying for the museum, and Vegas officials tried but failed to get federal stimulus funds, too. They call it part of the downtown revitalization efforts, and expect 250,000 to 600,000 visitors a year (such a big spread that it sounds like a guess).

Contrast that with the LV Art Museum, which had 1,000 members at its closing. Las Vegas is a tough town for visual arts — the Guggenheim gave up after a trial run with the Hermitage, and so did Pace Wildenstein.

But where are the city’s arts patrons? Art may not be for everyone, and shouldn’t try to be. But it’s sad to think that so many people now lack access to a real art museum in their community.

LVAM remains as a website, with links to commercial galleries.

Photo Credit: Courtesy The New York Times

 

Over the weekend, the North Carolina Museum of Art re-opened in an expanded incarnation. The centerpiece is a 127,000 sq. ft. “light-filled building” designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners. A sculpture hall is the spine from which 40 galleries branch out, according to press materials.

I have not yet visited, but it seems to have done several things well.

For a start, as Chuck Twardy reported in the Raleigh News & Observer, it used the occasion to rethink the collection. He writes:

What’s surprising, though, is the degree to which the new building has influenced decisions about the collection. The scrims filtering daylight through its revolutionary roof can be changed to adapt to new configurations, giving curators flexibility to move art around and to rotate pieces in and out of view. The building allows them to show 18.5 percent of the collection at any time, and they are making the most of it.

 

“It was really an opportunity to show the permanent collection in a new way,” said Linda Dougherty, the museum’s chief curator and curator of contemporary art. “We didn’t want to just re-create the way we had installed it in our existing building. We really wanted to think about different juxtapositions, different relationships, between objects and between different areas of the collection.”

Later she says: 

 

It’s a really different building from our existing building, so it makes you think about the collection in a different way and I think people who are very familiar with the museum’s collection are going to feel like they are seeing new work, because it looks so dramatically different in this space.”

All true, no doubt. But I also like that John W. Coffey, deputy director and curator of American art acknowledged the museum had “weak spots” in its collection that resisted a strictly chronological approach. No sense beating around the bush, imho (though he also said that chronology was “boring,” and it isn’t necessarily if you have the goods).

 

Here’s a link to Twardy’s article and an interactive feature that lets you zoom into the galleries for close-ups is here. You’ll also find a tour with the director on the website, but it loaded so slowly on my computer that I gave up.

 

The museum, meanwhile, posted hundreds of photos of the building on Flickr, accessed through its website. Good idea, too.

 

And the museum has recently made some 200 aquisitions, including works by Ellsworth Kelly, Jennifer Steincamp, Roxy Paine, and Ursula van Rydingsvard.

 

Third, on Friday, according to the North Carolina News Network, the museum announced a campaign to raise funds for its endowment, programming and grounds. The goal is $50 million by the end of 2013, and so far the total committed is $26 million.

 

Many museums finish a capital campaign and take a rest, figuring they’ll get to the endowment later. Actually, capital and endowment campaigns ought to go hand-in-hand; but when they don’t, the one better closely follow the other.

 

The North Carolina museum did receive public funds — $73 million from the state, county and city, according to the NCNN. That makes an endowment campaign easier. Still, “more than 60 percent of the NCMA’s operational and programmatic budget is provided by private sources (individuals, corporations and foundations),” NCNN says. Here’s that link.

 

NCMA’s old building will reopen later this year.

 

Photo Credit: Courtesy North Carolina Museum of Art

 

 

Zawi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, wanted the current King Tut exhibition, which opens Friday at the Discovery Times Square Center, to be shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — as the 1979 show was (see here).

And he did have discussions, a few years ago, with Philippe de Montebello, then director of the Met. They could not agree on the costs/fees, and the Met stood down. That’s what Hawass said on Wednesday at the press briefing.

Of course it couldn’t work. PdM is adamantly against charging extra for special exhibitions — a policy with which I wholeheartedly agree — and Met’s admission is “suggested” at $20, not mandatory. Adult tickets for Tut are $27.50; for seniors, $25.50, and for children, 4-12, $17.50.

Hawass expects to take home $20 million from Tut’s NYC exhibition. The Met would not have delivered that sum. Nor would it, or should it, have accepted a show over which it did not have curatorial control.

This show, while no doubt having beautiful and interesting things to look at, seems to be more about commerce than coherence. It’s a fundraiser, and Hawass — as I said yesterday — makes bones about that. Good for him on that, even if he also believes that Tut “deserves” the Met.

Besides, there are other reasons Hawass should be happier where he — the mastermind of this expedition/exhibition — is. The Discovery Times Square space allows the artifacts to be spread out in a way that most museums could not accommodate. I have not seen the exhibition elsewhere on its travels — at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, for example (prices in those cities were even higher — $36.75 in Philadelphia, as I recall). But I’d hope those museums did not give over as much space to this show as the DTSC does.

Here, the exhibit flows from one dark (that’s dramatic, theatrical lighting!) space to another, and there are several feet — or more — between displays. That’s good for the crowds: there will be timed tickets, and the organizers have planned for 250 people per half hour. But what would have had to be cleared out to make room for this kind of display?

The press packet contained attendance figures for the Tut tour so far (some estimates or rounded, clearly), minus the deYoung:

LACMA, June 16-Nov. 20, 2005: 937,613

Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, Dec. 15, 2005-Apr. 23, 2006: 707,534

Field Museum, Chicago, May 26, 2006-Jan. 1, 2007: 1,044,743

Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Feb. 3-Sept. 30, 2007: 1,370,000

O2, London, Nov. 17, 2007-Aug. 31, 2008: 1,096,473

Dallas Museum of Art, Oct. 1, 2008-May 17, 2009: 600,000

Fascinating!

 

Before going to the press preview this morning for Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs, which will open at the Discovery Center Times Square on Friday, I had never seen Zahi Hawass in action. But now I know why Hawass, the Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has been so good at elevating the profile of Egyptian antiquities, claiming and repatriating artifacts from Western museums, raising money for archaeology and museums in Egypt, getting very good press in the process, etc. Too good, sometimes.

He’s a charmer, story-teller, teaser and advocate par excellence. Relating a tale about flying back to Cairo on Egypt Air with a coffin recovered with the help of Homeland Security officials here, he said a woman near him, learning that the coffin was in the plane’s cargo area, got the willies. “Don’t worry,” he told her, “If there had been a curse, I’d have taken Lufthansa.”

This came after he mercilessly teased American Airlines, one of the tour’s sponsors, for its checked baggage charges.

Then, when a Mexican reporter asked why Tut wasn’t going to Mexico City’s archaeological museum — he’d pick up on Hawass’s statement that he wished the exhibition were being held at the Metropolitan Museum, instead in of the grimy, commercial Times Square area — Hawass bluntly told him “you don’t pay anything.” Egypt needs the money from this tour, and the last time Egypt lent something to Mexico, it got beans, essentially.

So far, this four-year tour of Tut, seen by more than 7 million visitors, has earned more than $100 million for Hawass’s digs and museums, he said. In New York, where it’s bigger than elsewhere, Hawass is expecting more than 1.5 million viewers in the next nine months, and a take of $20 million more.

One of the new draws will arrive “within a month.” 

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