Archives for April 2010

Artists are rallying around the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, whose collection — as I reported here recently — is still under threat of being broken up by the Administration.

On May 17, Chuck Close, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Kiki Smith, Joel Shapiro, Fred Tomasselli, Richard Tuttle, James Sienna, Claes Oldenberg, Tara Donovan and Jim Dine are co-hosting a benefit to raise money for the legal costs of the suit to stop the sales.

Pace Gallery, along with Meryl Rose, a Rose trustees and family member, and Jonathan Lee, chairman of the Rose board, are the other hosts. The benefit will take place at Pace, 545 West 22nd St. There’ll be “cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and cake!” Tickets cost $250.

The organizers have also created a website — here — for their effort, The Rose Preservation Fund (from which I grabbed the picture above). They write:

We do not believe the art is the university’s to sell. We are confident about the prospects for our case and believe that in the end precedent will be set for all museums. The Attorney General of Massachusetts is suing Brandeis as well.

An earlier update is here.

As I’ve said, it seems to me that Brandeis is not in the dire condition it claimed to be in a year ago: its actions have not backed up the crisis. So the art should not be for sale.

Meantime, btw, Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz, who resigned last year, has finally told everyone where he is going: to the presidency of the Mandel Foundation in Cleveland, which has donated money to Brandeis. The news came out the other day, but publications are just catching up with it today. Here’s one article.

 

Speaking of the Guggenheim Bilbao/Frank Gehry, which I was here before detouring into jazz yesterday, it looks as if revisionism — or reality — is starting to set in.

Last Friday, a New York Times article about Metz described how the city is hitching its wagon to the star of a Centre Pompidou-Metz, hoping to attract 200,000 visitors annually:

Metz has dreams of becoming a European artistic hub, but that will mean cashing in on what many here, including the mayor, call “the Guggenheim effect,” after the urban transformation of Bilbao, Spain, that centered on the striking Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry.

But then the article brought Metz down to earth.

For Thomas Werquin, an economist and the president of an association that studies urban planning projects, the Guggenheim effect is a “myth.”

“A lot of cities now think that having a big, branded museum is enough to make a name for themselves; it’s a big problem,” he said. “The museum is a great element of urban marketing, but not a cultural policy.”

For Mr. Werquin, the Guggenheim museum only served as an “accelerator” in Bilbao’s already strong and determined urban policy.

I’m with Werquin. Museums are being asked to do too much. They’re about art, not tourism — except when those two things align.

The article had one very interesting revelation (to me), however: It said that Pompidou-Metz “will have the right to choose among the 65,000 artworks that the Pompidou center in Paris, the largest contemporary collection in Europe, has in storage.” In storage? How will that draw people?

Sounds to me as if they are counting mainly on the architecture (pix here), not a good bet for sustained tourism.

Map: Courtesy The New York Times  

I’m no jazz expert, but I do love the music. A couple of weeks ago, I had a great evening at Dizzy’s Club at Jazz At Lincoln Center, listening to The Manhattan School of Music Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, lead by Bobby Sanabria. They were fantastic, and near the end, NEA Jazz Master Candido Camero — he who introduced jazz to the conga drum and who played with Dizzy, among others — came out, climbed up on stage, and put his bandaged fingers to work for the audience. It roared in approval (not that it hadn’t already).

It was a wonderful evening made even more so because I was there on assignment, interviewing Nikki Yanofsky, the 16-year-old Canadian songstress, for New York Magazine.

I’ve written here about Yanofsky before, after hearing her on NBC Nightly News. NEA arts participation surveys show interest in jazz declining, especially among the young, and I hope Yanofsky can help reverse that. She’s got a big voice, and she wants to be a star. Her first U.S. album, “Nikki,” will be launched at Dizzy’s on May 4.

“Nikki” is a mix of standards like “Take The A Train” and “I Got Rhythm” with songs she co-wrote with Jesse Harris, Ron Sexsmith and others. She added vocalese to “A Train,” though — to make it her own. I predict that reviews from jazz journalists will be mixed (too tame for some, too retro, etc.), but you never know. And because I think she can create jazz followers among her generation, I’m hoping the album is a smash. (Jazz is getting some help from Michelle Obama, too, of course, which if sustained coule be a real plus.)

Here’s the link to my New York article.

 

Frank Gehry doesn’t believe in green buildings and he, designer of the signature Guggenheim Bilbao, doesn’t think much of the architect who is probably in most demand by museums — Renzo Piano. (I confess Piano’s popularity is puzzling to me, too; a matter of taste, I’d venture.)

Then there’s a little matter of a museum cartel whose existence Gehry implied.

I’m picking this up from an article in Bloomberg Business Week, which reported on a Q&A session between Gehry and Thomas Pritzker, chairman of the Pritzker Foundation, at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago on Apr. 6. Quoting BW:

What would you think, Pritzker asked him as they sat in hard-backed chairs on an auditorium stage, if a client said he wanted a LEED-certified building? “Oh, great,” Gehry answered in a high, mock-excited voice, as the audience laughed. Then, back in his regular voice, he dismissed environmental concerns as largely political concerns. “A lot of LEEDs are given for bogus stuff. A lot of the things they do really don’t save energy.”

He also said the expense of building to LEED standards often outweighs the benefits. On smaller projects, he said, “the costs of incorporating those kind of things don’t pay back in your lifetime.”

It is true, I have been told, that various LEED points are, well, debatable at best. But to seemingly suggest that it’s all nonsense suggest that Gehry has no interest in the goal.

But on to sexier things, Gehry’s comments on the architect of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing:

“He’s gotten better,” he faint-praised Piano, again to laughter. “You know the sibling rivalry between architects. We love each other, but we’re insanely competitive. Even at 81, I still do it. I can’t help myself.”

He suggested that [for the AIC’s new wing] something bold, like his Bilbao museum, would have been a better [sic — the dropped word was probably “choice”]. But he said right after that building opened, the world’s top museum directors got together in London and, according to a friend who was there, voted never to commission another like it. “I think museum curators and directors like the predictable, so it’s all easy,” Gehry said. “A little bit of laziness, maybe.”

Well, well, well. I guess Gehry doesn’t count his pal Tom Krens, former director of the Guggenheim, as having been a top museum director. Krens, of course, commissioned a museum for Lower Manhattan, pre-9/11, that was very much like Bilbao (above).

Also, that sentiment certainly doesn’t square with several museums built since Bilbao that are designed specifically to be spectacular, to be tourist attractions themselves (Denver Art Museum, Art Gallery of Alberta, Centre Pompidou-Metz, etc. etc.).

Sometimes starchitects live in their own reality.

 

Regular readers of Real Clear Arts know that I am a fan of history and archives and libraries, so I am always happy to share some news about them. Here’s one item:

The George Eastman House has just acquired the entire collection of Merchant Ivory Productions — some 2,600 elements from more than 40 films, including the Oscar-winning A Room With a View (1986) and Howards End (1992), plus great films like The Remains of the Day (1993), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), and The Bostonians (1984), which garnered Oscar nominations (and should have won). 

The Eastman House called it “one of the most important acquisitions in its 61-year history,” and said it was honoring James Ivory with the title Honorary Eastman Scholar at a benefit in May. The press release describes this as a gift from Ivory, and quotes him saying:

Ismail Merchant’s worry for years was that all those films of ours, made in so many places, stored in so many labs around the world, would never be brought safely home and might be lost. Now the George Eastman House motion picture archive is that home, safeguarding the continuing life of Merchant Ivory’s work for the next generations.

Ivory’s film, City of Your Final Destination, starring Anthony Hopkins and Laura Linney, opened this week. That’s Ivory with Linney on the set, above.

The gift includes the pair’s correspondence and shared records of Merchant-Ivory Productions and film labs and film archives all over the world.

Read more in the press release here. Scholars, start your engines.

Did you know, btw, that Hopkins is a sometime painter? He has been at it since 2002, and in February, Hopkins showed some of his work at Gallery 27 on Cork Street in London, and then at The Dome, in Edinburgh, in March. “When I paint, I just paint freely without anxiety regarding outside opinions as criticisms,” Hopkins said at the time. “I do it for sheer pleasure. It’s done wonders for my for my subconscious…I dream now in colours.”

The Guardian printed several and said they ranged “from calm pastoral scenes to nightmarish figurations.” Here’s one, above, plus a link to the story with a slide show.  

Photo Credit: Photograph by Juan Quirno. Copyright 2009 Merchant Ivory Productions (top); Anthony Hopkins/The Guardian (bottom)