Archives for February 2010

$38 million gifts don’t happen every day in the cultural world, especially in the last two years, so I was tickled when I learned late yesterday about one such pledge via an email, which cited an article in Saturday’s Washington Post. 

A click on the link went to the news that the money is going to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s homestead on the banks of the Potomac. The donation comes from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, the same Las Vegas-based philanthropic outfit that purchased Gilbert Stuart’s “Landowne” portrait (1796) of the first president in 2001 and gave it to the Smithsonian, where it’s on view at the National Portrait Gallery. The total tab, including construction of a special space and a three-year tour of the painting, was $30 million.

That gift led to a second grant, of $24 million, which paid for construction of an education center; it opened in 2006.

This time the money will pay for construction of a research library (above) on the site, “bring[ing] together materials from the president’s estate and other archives. It is expected to attract scholars for primary research, which would filter into new scholarships, making its way to schools and elsewhere.”

The Post story starts out by saying that students nowadays are not learning about Washington very much — which is something Mount Vernon has been saying, and testing, for years — and notes that the site administration has set out to change that. This gift allows Mount Vernon to go public on its $80 million capital campaign. It says:

The library and adjacent guesthouse, which is expected to open in 2012, will cover 45,000 square feet and be within walking distance of the mansion. The library, officials said, will initially house about 45 books from Washington’s library, 450 letters and manuscripts written by Washington and a collection of 1,500 18th-century books and documents. In the future, the library will be the home for Washington’s correspondence, a 90-book project that scholars at the University of Virginia have been editing for 40 years.

Washington has found himself a beneficent patron, lucky for him — and the nation. Too bad the Reynolds Foundation doesn’t fund the arts and humanities, as a matter of course. This is a special project.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Mount Vernon (top); National Portrait Gallery (bottom).

 

This year has brought the art-world version of “If a tree falls in a forest…” On January 2, a modern art museum, designed by Mario Botta, architect of SF MoMA, opened in Charlotte, NC, and I’ve seen little mention of it outside the local press in the U.S.

Strange. The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art does indeed exist. It owns a collection of 1,400 works by artists including Warhol, Giacometti, Degas, Picasso, Calder, Miro, de Stal, Tinguely, Hepworth, Ernst, Rouault, and more. They were acquired by a Swiss couple named Hans and Bessie Bechtler, who made their money with an air-filtration company and began collecting in the 1940s. Their son Andreas, born in Switzerland but a resident of Charlotte since 1979, inherited some of their holdings. He suggested a museum and contributed the art; many of these works have never been on public display. The inaugural exhibition includes 116 of them.

The Bechtlers seem to have befriended many artists, as they collected, according to the Charlotte Observer; it has created a fascinating slide show of both vintage and new images, called “Inside the Bechtler Museum.” Among other things, it says that “Hans Bechtler founded the Alberto Giacometti Foundation in Zurich” in the caption for a lovely photo of the two. The Observer also published short briefs on various family members.

The Charlotte Business Journal, meanwhile, tells the Bechtler story here, and an excellent article by something called Swisster is here.

The cost of the building — which has 17,000 sq ft of exhibition space within a 35,600 sq ft building — was $20 million, picked up by the public as part of “a public-private partnership” for cultural facilities on Charlotte’s South Tryon Street. The other institutions in the “Wells Fargo Cultural Campus” are the Mint Museum of Art/Uptown, the Knight Theater and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts & Culture. It was the Wachovia Cultural Campus, named for the local bank that was taken over by Well Fargo, a victim, or perpetrator, depending on your view, of the economic crisis. The bank has a tower in the complex.

Maybe the Bechtler hasn’t received notice because it is seen as a vanity museum — but then what about the other single-collector, named museums? Maybe the art — despite the stellar names — just isn’t that great. Maybe Charlotte seems too far away from art-world centers of gravity — which would be a shame. The city’s population is nearly 700,000, and in the metro area, it exceeds 2.5 million.

Or maybe, there just isn’t the space or the budgets to do the story. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

 

Last night, I attended an unusual event at XXXX. It was a “Smash Down,” and it featured two local, all-female roller derby crews competing against each other. The OC Roller Girls and the Long Beach Roller Derby took turns crashing into 8-foot clay walls on each end of the California Gallery, accumulating points and making impressions in the clay for YYYY.

A DJ spun tunes, and beer and popcorn were served. When the roller derby started, one competitor crashed into a bystander and a large amplifier the DJ had set up. I thought that was a sure sign that mayhem would ensue, but the girls toned it down a bit after that. I guess they were just testing the boundaries in the beginning.

Is this art? It depends on how you fill in the Xs and Ys, doesn’t it? If X = ESPN, say, and Y = a television spectacle, it wouldn’t be.

But if, as is the case, X = the Laguna Art Museum and Y = “Long Beach artist Jocelyn Foye,” then most people in the art world would say “yes,” because Foye says it is. Foye, according to the post by Richard Chang of the Orange County Register (from which I quoted above) “plans to pour liquid rubber into the clay impressions. When the rubber hardens, that will be her final product, which she calls ‘redefined action painting.’ “

Some of her work — though not this piece — will be on view in The OsCene 2010: Contemporary Art and Culture in OC, opening today and on view until May 16 at the museum.

I’ve never seen Foye’s work, and make no value judgments about it — some of it, posted on her website, looks interesting.

But I do question whether the smash down should have been staged in the museum’s galleries. As Chang reported, “As the evening wound down, the young women posed for pictures and there was clay all over the California Gallery’s walls and hard wood floor.” (Chang posted videos of the event, if you’d like a look.)

I want museums to broaden their audiences, yes, but how they do it — what message they send — is important. When they move the focus away from art and toward spectacle, it’s a stunt — and a mistake. They may get crowds interested in roller-derby, but how many will come back to see other art? Meantime, are they driving away their core audience, which probably doesn’t want to see galleries laden with clay? Or be hit by a careening roller-skater?

Is the museum undermining its case for support when it stages something that, seems to me, belongs more in a commercial gallery? I think so.

Photo credit: Courtesy Laguna Art Museum 

 

Unbeknownst to me, when I wrote last weekend about romantic paintings for Valentine’s Day, the Art Fund in the U.K. was doing something similar. Except it sought nominations from experts and then took a public poll.

The works in contention were:

• Paul Gauguin’s, Nevermore, chosen by artist and broadcaster Matthew Collings
• Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, nominated by writer and broadcaster Andrew Graham-Dixon
• Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, selected by artist Grayson Perry
• Nicholas Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida, chosen by writer, critic and professor of literature at University of Essex, Marina Warner
• Samuel John Peploe’s Roses, chosen by presenter and Art Fund Prize chair of the judges, Kirsty Young

You can see them all here, with comments by the nominators.

Who won? Gauguin (below) — with 29% of the votes, the number of which was not disclosed. 

Then came Peploe (26%), van Eyck (19%), Poussin (14%) and Titian (12%). Wrong Titian, no?

 

 

Minnesota is a good place to be an artist for many reasons, and here’s one that takes place every 10 years (since 1980): Starting tomorrow, Feb. 19, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts will show the work of any Minnesotan artist. You heard that right. You don’t have to be famous, or have a gallery, or…anything.

There are limitations. The art work must fit into a box that measures 12 inches x 12 inches x 12 inches — which is labeled “Curator.” If it does, MIA puts it on display in the gallery, through June 13. This year, MIA is accepting video and time-based works, too — as long as they are no longer than 80 seconds.

What a morale booster to artists.

Five thousand of them submitted work and 5,000 of them are on display.

The show actually opens tonight, at a celebratory party, and hundreds of the participating artists are expected.

Have a look for yourself on YouTube, where the MIA posted a video of some participants introducing themselves — and holding their works. Or, go to Flickr for stills.

This isn’t for every museum, granted — I can’t see the Metropolitan or MoMA or … doing this. But as I said at the start, Minnesota is a different place.

Photo: Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art