Archives for September 2009

What gets measured gets done: it’s an old management maxim, and it’s often the, or at least a, reason that businesses go wrong. If you pay CEOs by how many people they manage —
as the U.S. once did — they will bloat their staffs. If you pay them by the price of their company’s stock, they will take measures that drive up that price now, often at the expense of the company’s longterm prospects.

The pay of museum directors and curators isn’t related to attendance figures — I don’t think. But they, trustees, funders and the media pay a lot of attention to foot traffic, myself included. The “gate” doesn’t generally contribute all that much to a museum’s earned income, but we all still use attendance as a measure of success.

And it should be, partly.

But a visit to the Morgan Library & Museum* on Sunday afternoon got me thinking about other measures of success. I had heard, incorrectly it turned out, that the Morgan’s attendance this year was down by a show-stopping 38%. So I was paying close attention when I went through three shows.

Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations From the Morgan was packed, possibly because it was the last day. But something else was going on: people were really, really looking hard at these beautiful manuscripts (that’s Scenes From the Life of David, from the Winchester Bible, above). The average time people now spend before museum pictures is said to be 3 seconds, down from 7 seconds about a decade ago. Not here.

[Read more…] about Extra Credit For The Morgan Library

G. Wayne Clough, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution since July 2008, has given another interview, this time to the Associated Press. And for at least the third time, he hasn’t said much about art at the Smithsonian. In fact, the 19 museums he oversees are barely mentioned in the articles, and when one is it’s often the Air & Space Museum or the National Museum of American History.

This is starting to be worrisome.

In the latest interview, Clough puts a little meat on themes he has mentioned in the past. For example, he says he has secured a $1.3 million gift that will allow him to hire a Smithsonian-wide education director, with a particular focus on K-12 curriculums. He’s working to forge a research collaboration deal with the University of Maryland and has done a deal with George Mason University to pair students with researchers at the National Zoo. Climate change, education and immigration remain his priority issues.

Clough also repeated a theme he has made in speeches — that he wants to use technology to share the Smithsonian’s 137 million artifacts and specimens with the public. Well, at least that references the art museums. In July, he told the National Press Club that he would soon hire “a new media person who will capture the creativity going on across the Institution” for posting on YouTube.  

Clough seems to be operating with a policy of benign neglect toward the art museums; he is, after all, a science-engineering guy. For that to work, the museums need strong leadership — and perhaps aggressive leadership. Clough has embarked on a $1 billion capital campaign, and the art museums need some of that money, too. If Clough’s head is elsewhere, what happens to the art?

Here’s a link to the AP article, and, if you want to refresh your memory, to the New York Times and Washington Post articles from a year ago.

The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents holds its annual public meeting on Sept. 21 — details are here. It’s seeking questions and comments — send to comments@si.edu. It’s time to pin Clough down on art, and if reporters aren’t doing it, others may have to.

Photo: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution  

Andy Warhol has been stolen again: The news broke late Friday. A very “clean” theft, police
said, took place at the West Los Angeles home of Richard Weisman. Thieves captured a collection of works that Weisman commissioned from Warhol in the late 1970s, including 10 silk-screened portraits of athletes and one of Weisman himself (right). According to Reuters:

Among them were boxing great Muhammad Ali, tennis champion Chris Evert, Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Olympic skater Dorothy Hamill and former football star turned “Trial of the Century” defendant O.J. Simpson.

An “anonymous donor” — presumably Weisman — has offered a $1 million reward for the return of the art. A housekeeper noticed that the works, which hung in Weisman’s dining room, were missing on Sept. 3, but there was no sign of forced entry.

According to the Art Loss Register, Andy Warhol is one of its top ten stolen artists. It has 212 missing Warhols in its database.

Weisman’s name should ring a bell: He comes from the famous art-collecting Weisman family: His father, Frederick R. Weisman, is responsible for the Frank Gehry-designed Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, an eponymous museum at Pepperdine University, and an eponymous art foundation.

Frederick Weisman once headed Hunt Foods, owned by Norton Simon (the company). He married the founder’s daughter, Marcia Simon — Norton’s sister. Norton Simon’s own collecting is of course even more legendary; here’s a link to his museum. 

The Weismans built a huge collection — I heard stories of stacks of paintings (do I recall hearing that some hung on the ceilings?). Starting in the early ’50s, they bought Abstract Expressionism and Pop art before those movements earned critical acclaim, and once owned one of the most important private collections in the U.S. It was split by their divorce in 1979. Marcia gave many of her works to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She died in 1991; he died in 1994.      

Their son Richard, the victim here, published a book of his collection, Picasso to Pop: The Richard Weisman Collection, in 2003. 

Here’s a link to the Reuters story and here’s a link to the LAPD’s crime alert, which has pictures of the stolen works.

Photo: Courtesy LAPD 

 

The Museum of the City of New York* has just named its version of “the 400” — a new elite of the city’s movers and shakers — paralleling the list put together for Caroline Astor by Ward McAllister, the late-19th-century arbiter of social status, as suitable for being entertained in her ballroom. 

This list was made to help mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s epic 1609 voyage into New York Harbor, and create excitement about “New York 400: A Visual History of America’s Greatest City,” published by the museum for the occasion. It includes the living (who number 46) and the dead. It was released yesterday for the opening of a small exhibition, mostly cityscapes related to the book.

Now New York likes to think of itself as the cultural capital of the U.S., if not the world. So I perused the list carefully, counting how many were artists, definintg that loosely to include some in pop culture.

Turns out the Museum did pretty well: 137 of the 400, at least, are artists, architects, actors, writers, choreographers, filmmakers, critics, or other kind of cultural bigwig. That’s more than a third, and the number includes Berenice Abbott, Alvin Ailey, Woody Allen, Diane Arbus, Harold Arlen, Louis Armstrong, Brooks Atkinson, Louis Auchincloss, John James Audubon, Richard Avedon in the As alone. (In the Bs, there was Margaret Bourke-White, above.)

Granted, my count was personal and therefore somewhat arbitrary. Jackie Gleason, yes; Elsie de Wolfe, no. J.P. Morgan — as omnivorous collector and patron that mattered — yes; Henry Clay Frick, no. Your count, then, could be even higher — have a look for yourself.

Don’t go to the museum looking for an exhibit of the 400, though. For the moment, the list is just a list. But at a reception on Wednesday, the museum was taking nominations for its next version — for release next year?  

The book, on the other hand, is a physical presence: It’s hefty, containing more than 500 images from the museum’s collection and dozens of essays by historians of the city — much bigger than any September issue of Vogue.  

*Disclosure: a consulting client of mine supports the museum.   

 

I’ve written about museum hours before (here): I think they need an overhaul. Museums should open at night, because that’s when people have time for leisure activities. If it means opening later a few mornings a week, or closing an extra day, so be it.

Libraries, it seems to me, have an even greater responsibility to be open and accessible as much as possible. I was totally taken aback when I read here on ArtsJournal last week about the Seattle Public Library’s decision to save money by shutting its doors and even its website for an entire week. I don’t buy the logic, and I wrote why in an opinion column just published on Forbes.com called “Bookless In Seattle.” Here’s an excerpt:

The questions must be asked: Is it simply easier to close for a week, than to orchestrate more complex rolling closures? Is it simply more convenient for staff? Can you imagine a critical service business shutting for eight days without losing customers? Only a “monopoly” like a city library would try that.

The Seattle Library, with its Rem Koolhaas building, has basked in the glory of being a model for the 21st Century. It has a responsibility to live up to on this issue as well as on its architecture.