Archives for July 2011

As promised, here’s a report on art in Iceland — mainly from my visits to museums in Reykjavik. I didn’t see many art galleries — though there are many design stores with artist-made goods for sale — but I’m sure they are there, just not where I was walking. 

The city is home to the National Gallery of Iceland and the Reykjavik Art Museum, which has three branches. The Harbor House branch, in the Old Harbor area, shows contemporary art; the main current show while I was there is Perspectives: On the Borders of Art and Philosophy, an overview of Icelandic art that was organized by several curators. Honestly, I didn’t see a single thing worth noting. The museum was pretty empty; at times I was the only person in a gallery and there were never more that three or four others.

That, by the way, was typical in my other art adventures there — so it doesn’t seem to be a reflection of the art on display.

The Ásmundur Sveinsson Sculpture Museum is Asmundur’s (1893-1982) home and studio, surrounded by a sculpture garden, and it’s quite handsome. But again, while he isn’t bad, I wouldn’t rush out to see his works, which seem to have changed, and progressed, in line with what other artists were also doing during his lifetime.

The Kjarvalsstaðir is the museum’s main branch, and on one side it’s showing Jor! Horses in Icelandic Art. (The Bruce Museum in Greenwich has a similar show, Saddle Up! Horsing Around at the Bruce Museum  — about 30 works featuring the horse from its permanent collection; it might be interesting to compare the two.) The exhibit includes art from many decades. One notable piece is by Louisa Matthíasdóttir (which you can see on the exhibition website at the link above).

I took pictures of a few other offerings. Above right, Riders on a Green Slope, is by Jóhann Briem (1907 – 1991), an Icelandic expressionist who studied in Dresden. (But this work reminded me of Milton Avery.) Below that is Unicorn (1995) by Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson (b. 1953), who I’ve read is one of the best-known contemporary artists in Iceland. Two works by Þuríður Sigurðardóttir (b. 1949) from 2008 and 2009, untitled, are tight closeups of the hair on horsehide. I couldn’t really get a photo of them, but they are apparently from a series called Herd, which you can see here.

I didn’t love the exhibit, and found only a few pieces to be of interest, really. But I’m glad I went to all three branches of the city’s art museum.

Then I went across the museum to see the works of one of Iceland’s most beloved artists, more about which in another post.

 

 

Just what museum are we reading about in this article from today’s New York Times?

…the museum is almost out of cash, hurt by fewer visitors than it had hoped for, higher operating costs than it expected and less city support than it had counted on.

…Already, hours have been cut back.

…Museum backers and even civic leaders who do not much like the building [designed by Frank Gehry] still hope for what has come to be known as the “Bilbao effect.”

…Part of the problem might have been…the cost, which climbed to more than $45 million from about $15 million .

If you guessed the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Miss., which we last heard from here last November, when it reopened, you win. 

The reopening was partial: some of Gehry’s designs are still to be realized. The whole thing was to open next year.

Now, thanks to those items above, it may not — at least not as planned.

Anyone see a common thread of oversized dreams here? It’s great to dream big, but higher operating costs and fewer visitors seem to figure in the woes of many museum (over)expansions. These are things that can be forecast, and yet in Sunday’s Biloxi Sun-Herald, we read:

Ohr President Larry Clark said, “We have exhausted grants that were available and the revenue is not enough to cover the cost of operating the museum.”

…The budget for operations was $1.9 million, in anticipation the city would provide money on a monthly basis. The fact that it hasn’t has been part of ongoing negotiations between the two entities.

The amounts discussed in the past have been in the range of $10,000 a month.

At this point, that wouldn’t make a dent in the need Director Denny Mecham estimated to be $250,000 to $300,000.

Earned revenue is never enough to cover operting costs.

Back in November, the museum said it was expecting 100,000 visitors a year. I should have been more skeptical at the time, but — frankly — I was rooting for the Ohr-O’Keefe.

 

 

Today the Museum of Modern Art is announcing that it is raising its admission charges to $25 — not “suggested,” as at the Metropolitan Museum, but mandatory.

That’s steep, as anyone would acknowledge. The rule-of-thumb comparison used to be with movie tickets, but not any more.

From the release:

The new prices are $25 for adults, $18 for senior citizens 65 and older, and $14 for students, with children 16 and under remaining free. Tickets ordered online at MoMA.org will be available at a reduced price of $22.50 for adults, $16 for senior citizens, and $12 for students, with no service charges.

The change is effective Sept. 1. MoMA said it last raised its fee in 2004, and since then has faced cost increases virtually across the board. With attendance in its last fiscal year of about 2,8 million, MoMA isn’t lacking for visitors. But at some point, you have to wonder what price will discourage visitors.

Like the Met, MoMA is raising prices more than the inflation rate, if you use 1998 — when I wrote an article about museum pricing for The New York Times — as a guide. The admission price then would be about $16 in today’s dollars.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, with a $20 million gift from WalMart, Crystal Bridges will be free. 

 

Whatever fears you had that the Smithsonian would be punished for mounting Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery should be allayed by the recently released report by the House Appropriations Committee that handles its budget (among many others). It’s impossible to tell what would have happened had G. Wayne Clough (pictured), the secretary, not caved in and removed the bowdlerized version of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly, but…

The committee report proposes $626,971,000 for the Smithsonian’s operating budget, which is $7,918,000 below the fiscal year 2011 enacted level and $9,559,000 below the budget request. That’s less than a 2% drop vs. last year’s enacted budget — which is a very small drop versus other agencies.

Further, the committee had some nice things to say about the Smithsonian, and ignored completely the Hide/Seek contretemps. For example:

The Committee commends the Smithsonian Institution, the largest museum and research complex in the world, for reaching new audiences and broadening access to a diverse array of educational activities and resources to nearly 5,000 school classrooms and millions of people worldwide….

The Committee strongly supports efforts to create virtual natural history collections utilizing advanced information technologies to make regional and rural museum collections more accessible.

The Committee also supports the joint venture between the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution creating a comprehensive compilation of audio and video recordings of personal histories and testimonials of individuals who participated in the Civil Rights movement.

The Committee remains committed to the preservation of Smithsonian Institution collections, including the priceless military uniform collection, at the National Museum of American History. The Committee urges the Smithsonian to continue placing a high priority on the preservation of these irreplaceable historical collections.

There’s nary a word about art, though, which I don’t like — but then again, that’s pretty consistent with Clough’s stance on the Smithsonian’s art museums. He tends to ignore them.

Where the Smithsonian did take a hit was the capital budget, which came in a separate request for $225 million, including $125 million for the construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. (Here’s a link to the budget request press release.)

Rather, the Committee proposed $124,750,000 for facilities capital, “equal to the fiscal year 2011 enacted level,” and says additional funding is not feasible at the moment.

Accordingly, the Committee recommends $50,000,000 for construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. These funds, which will ensure that construction begins on time, complement $45,000,000 provided by the Committee in prior years for pre-construction planning and design.

All in all, considering what’s going on in DC, not a bad result. Of course, the full House and the Senate have to weigh in, but so far, so good.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Smithsonian

 

 

As I’ve said before, you never know what you’ll find in the basement — even if you work at an art museum. Here’s another case in point.

Over the weekend, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran an exclusive about a find at the Cincinnati Art Museum: more than 800 antique musical instruments have “languished” in storage for decades, forgotten and untouched. Charles Rudig, a former head of musical instruments for Sotheby’s, said about the discovery:

They’ve got a fabulous world music collection. It’s wonderful. It’s big. And it’s very similar to the Metropolitan Museum (New York) collection. The Met’s is bigger, but they were both formed at about the same time – the late 19th century.

Rudig has been hired as a consultant to assess and catalogue the collection, which the newspaper said “spans four centuries and represents the cultures of more than 20 countries on four continents.”

Among the treasures are a “19th-century African drum carved from a log, a Burmese crocodile zither, a Chinese version of a hammered dulcimer, a Native American ceremonial raven rattle and a beautifully carved Turkish harp… a rare 17th-century Amati viola, an 18th-century oboe d’amore by Jakob Denner (one of four known to exist) and a stunning Ruckers virginal (a keyboard instrument), one of just two known in the country.”

The museum plans to clean 75 to 100 of the instruments and display them in 2012, when the World Choir Games take place in Cincinnati.

Here’s a link to the article. 

But then, the article says, while some pieces with be interspersed in the galleries, the museum has no plans to create a gallery for them. The director, Aaron Betsky, says that wouldn’t fit the museum’s current mission.

I’m not sure why not. I could not find the museum’s mission statement on line, but in the volunteers’ section, it was stated simply as “to bring people and art together.”

On Guidestar, the CAM states its mission this way:

We will actively engage a diverse and growing audience with great art for the enrichment and enjoyment. We will collect, preserve, study and exhibit art in accordance with the highest professional standards. We will operate in a fiscally responsible manner.

In the Enquirer article, Betsky himself is quoted as saying, “When I arrived here in 2006, a few of them were out, like the Amati in the case upstairs … I found out that we hadn’t really paid attention to this incredible collection because, like so many other parts of our collection, we don’t really have enough room. This is really about instruments from around the world. And it was collected for the visual intensity of the pieces, not necessarily for their functionality. It shows the delight that people took in designing and decorating these objects.”

Giving them permanent space doesn’t seem off-mission to me. Of course, I don’t know what else is in storage, so I can’t make the call.

But I’m not the only one who seems to feel this way. Quoting the article:

J. Kenneth Moore, curator in charge of the Musical Instruments Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “You don’t find these things in many places. You just find them in a handful of places. It’s something that, I think, should be put on display and should be appreciated by Cincinnatians, and people who visit your city. It should be a point of pride.”…

“We have seen an increase of visitors in our [musical instrument] galleries, and it’s not only just the treasures of Western art music,” the Met’s Moore said. “I think there is more of an interest in the non-European cultures, in understanding them on various levels, and music is one of them. Certainly, the instruments can tell you a lot about what’s going on.”

It seems to me that displaying these instruments would be one way to distinguish and differentiate the Cincinnati Art Museum, in an era when many museum collections seem generic.

Photo Credits: 19th C. Balkan angel harp (top); 19th C. Native American carved flute, detail (bottom), Courtesy of the Cincinnati Enquirer