Archives for May 2010

The Tate Modern is having its 10th anniversary this week. Starting Friday, it’s hosting a three-day arts festival, and it’ll stay open until midnight on Friday and Saturday.

Unquestionably, the Tate Modern is a success. It draws 5 million visitors a year, and more important it has affected culture in the U.K.

Before the Tate Modern opened, London had no great museum of modern art. Britain lagged behind other European countries, not to mention the U.S. As AFP reported, Michael Craig Martin, a former Tate trustee and a conceptual artist, said that people liked it immediately, and surprisingly.

“It’s hard not to remember just how much suspicion and unease there was about contemporary art before, whereas now it’s everywhere — it has become a part of the cultural life of the country in a way that was unimaginable 20 years ago, and the Tate has played a very big part in that,” he told the Daily Telegraph.

“I don’t think anybody imagined it would be as successful as it was. But from the minute the doors opened, people liked the place. It feels welcoming.”

In fact, today there was a children’s procession from Borough Market to the museum, led by a samba band (above) and concluding with a cake-cutting ceremony where Nicholas Serota, the director, cut the cake. Sounds like great fun (except perhaps that the parents of some children might not want their kids to see some of the art at the Tate Modern, but that’s another story).

To my mind, the Tate Modern should be a bigger museum role model than the Guggenheim Bilbao, which has succeeded for complex reasons — not just because it’s a museum-building-as-destination. (For example, the new Pompidou Metz.)

Now, though, the Tate is planning a £215 million expansion that’s expected to open in 2012.  

Several days ago, the Guardian previewed the 10th anniversary with a good story and a Q&A session with Serota, with questions asked both by art-world professionals and the public. Here is how he answered the expansion question:

Anyone who visits at weekends knows how overcrowded the gallery is. Anyone who tries to subscribe to our learning programmes knows they are wildly oversubscribed. So we have to grow. Every museum of modern art has grown in the last 20 or 30 years…. We have an expanding collection and need to have space to show that collection. If we don’t grow, people will stop giving us things?

Fair enough. Regular readers know I am wary of overexpanion — but the U.K. is a different place than the U.S., and Serota can count on more public support, presumably. Plus, London is Europe’s largest population center and draws millions of tourists.

Serota is a well-respected museum leader, deservedly (based on second-hand information). I found only two answers he gave troubling. In one, he answered the inevitable “where are the women artists?” by citing an acquisition made two years ago: “Marisa Merz…It is as good as anything made by her husband, Mario, or other arte povera artists.”

And answering another, from a realist artist who accused him of being “as orthodox, dogmatic, conventional and blinkered as the academies of a hundred years ago,” Serota replied that the Tate wasn’t governed by a single view, but by curators, too. Then he said:

If you come to the Tate with an open mind, you are bound (with the exception of this questioner) to find something interesting and engaging.

But we all make mistakes.

Last month, the Kresge Foundation in Troy, MI, announced a new national strategy for its arts and culture programs: fostering the long-term health of cultural institutions.

It sounds so simple, so non-controversial. What’s the big deal?

The $3.1 billion Kresge is a titan: In 2009, it awarded some $197 million to 404 non-profits. Among the arts beneficiaries: The Public Theater of New York, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Plains Art Museum and the Kansas City Ballet. (Kresge’s LEED-certified HQ is at right.)

But, for too long, the focus throughout the cultural world has been on increasing everything: new buildings, expanded buildings, new programs, etc. etc. Now, as I’ve written before, we probably have too much capacity — maybe not overall, but in various locations. It’s unsustainable, as various closures have proven.

As Kresge said, in an article in Philanthropy News Digest:

“Kresge was a critical player in the twenty-year cultural facility building boom that swept the arts sector,” said Kresge arts and culture program director Alice L. Carle. “But numerous signs suggest that the building boom is over, halted by a combination of the economic recession and the staggering challenges of running capital campaigns and then covering steadily rising fixed costs. Our new grantmaking strategy is designed to assist organizations in successfully making this transition and positioning themselves for long-term sustainability.”

Kresge’s Arts and Culture program now has new standards, a new policy, communicated in this equation:

Well-capitalized cultural institutions + Well-resourced artists + Well-integrated arts and community building = Strong, vibrant cities, towns and communities.

Indeed, it says on its website: “The Arts and Culture Program will no longer consider traditional facilities-capital challenge grant applications. All requests for facilities funding must be made through Institutional Capitalization as outlined above.”

I’m coming to the “outlined above,” but first I have to say hooray.

Back to Institutional Capitalization:

[Read more…] about Financial Sustainability: Kresge’s New Funding Policy Leads The Way

When Don Thompson, a marketing and economics professor in the MBA program at York University, Toronto, published his view on the art market, The $12 million Stuffed Shark, in 2008, it garnered a couple good reviews, but was ignored by some art publications and mainstream media. He sketched much of his analysis in terms of brands — branded artists, branded dealers, branded museums, branded auction houses, etc. Some of it seemed right to me, some seemed off-the mark. Last month, the paperback version was published.

So on the eve of the bellwether spring contemporary art sales, I went back to Thompson for Five Questions. Curiously, Thompson doesn’t list the book on his C.V.

As for his answers – well, they weren’t entirely satisfying, either. See what you think:

1) What have you learned about the art world in the three years since the book was first published? What did you get wrong?

The market crash came faster and more dramatically than anyone foresaw, triggered by the 2008 financial market meltdown. I thought there would be a period of flat price levels for contemporary art, followed by a gradual decline. I also thought the prices of museum quality art would hold up, because so many new museums around the world were bidding. Turned out that selling prices for museum quality art fell 20-30%, against 40 – 50% for most of the contemporary art market.

 

2) If I knew nothing about art and read your book, I’d come away thinking that it’s all a hoax — is that what you intended?

It is not a hoax, there are properly described art works, and willing sellers and buyers. It is just that values are based on intangibles, not always the intrinsic quality of the work.

 

3) Do you think the markets/the economics, of other categories of art — Old Masters, Impressionism, national art, etc. — are more legitimate, and why is that so or not so?

The economics of earlier schools of art often differ from contemporary in two ways. The standard test of “it takes two generations to determine the lasting value of art” has been met, and there is the factor of scarcity, following the death of the artist.

 

 

4) Tell us a little about the reaction you received from readers — and was it different in Europe vs. the U.S.?

Reader reaction to the book has been good both in Europe and North America. A number of artists have said how discouraging it is – to them – that the best known, best compensated artists include many, like Damien Hirst, whose work is produced by technicians.

 

5 If the contemporary art market is as crazy as you describe it — based on so many “intangibles” — do you see any ways to make it more rational, more related to the intrinsic value of the art?

The market is not crazy, and buyers are not irrational. Buyers are simply responding to a different set of motivations than you and I might – plus they have a great deal more money. Last [week] (May 4th), a 1932 Picasso brought a record US$106.4 million at Christie’s in New York. Is a Picasso worth the price of a Boeing 737? To that particular buyer, it was – partly the brand of the artist, partly the “wall cred” of how recognizable it is, partly scarcity, partly size, plus who knows what else. Is that price outrageous? There were three bidders still in at $90 million, and an underbidder who dropped out one bid lower.

 

Put differently, assume the price was four months income for the buyer. Lots of people pay four months income for a painting they love and want to live with. Those people just earn less than the buyer of the Picasso.

 

 

OK, I’ll admit it, I was curious about Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art.* So, given the opportunity one day in late April, I went to sit with her myself. I was third in line, and had to wait only about 25 minutes, give or take. (You have heard about the man who has at least twice sat with her for an entire day, while dozens waited in line for their chance? I call that selfish.)

Since I knew that I would not be able to sit long — work was pressing — I told a curatorial assistant there in the atrium that I hoped I wasn’t being impolite. She responded with an amusing and presumably accurate answer: “Marina doesn’t judge people,” she said.

I had no idea what the experience would be like, and it was surprisingly intense. In the course of daily life, most people don’t lock eyes, expressionless, for long periods of time. After a few minutes, I purposely softened my expression, largely because my blank stare seemed unnatural, but didn’t quite smile. I wasn’t thinking about much other than this was a new experience, that Abamovic looked (at this early hour) completely normal, if intent and practiced. I’m not sure others who sit with her think much more; MoMA’s “Visitor Viewpoint” webpage isn’t very revealing, and the Sitting With Marina group on Facebook has only 116 members and little commentary. I am mystified by another website showing that people end up in tears, sometimes after only four or five minutes. See: Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry.

Far too much, probably, has already been written about the show. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if most other museum exhibits got as much attention?

And here’s another “wouldn’t it be wonderful” from Colm Toibin’s blog for the New York Review of Books, who wrote about his 20-minute experience sitting with Marina.

…It made me feel that I could spend the day there opposite her, and maybe the next day too, and it also made me want to go, it made me consider at what point I would leave.

As soon as I began to think over my options, I forced myself to look at her more closely. I had no clear idea what she was thinking but she was doing a good imitation of someone gazing in the most serious way at someone else, like a painter might gaze in that second before applying the brush to the canvas, or like the sitter in turn might gaze at the painter. Or like we should look at paintings ourselves, or at things we believe in.

 

Photo: Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art

*A consulting client is a supporter of MoMA.

The Webby Awards, which honor excellence on the web, were announced the other day, and with them comes a window on what the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences thinks of cultural websites — and what web denizens think, too, as each category has a People’s Choice award.

Specifically, arts institutions compete in three categories, though they might potentially squeeze into a couple of the other 100 categories, too. “Youth” maybe? This year, that award was won by National Geographic Kids, and I see no reason why a museum kids site couldn’t compete. “Best Visual Design — Aesthetic” and “Best Visual Design — Function” are also possibilities, though no cultural institutions made it to the finals this year, unless you count the National Geographic Society, again.

But more to the point:  

In the “art” category, the Tate won with “The Unilever Series 2009: Miroslaw Balka, How It Is.” It is full of bells and whistles, and I understand its appeal to sophisticated members of the digerati. But I prefer the People’s Choice — MoMA popart. Be prepared to spend some time with each.

In the best Cultural Institution category, the winner was the Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House Interior Restoration Project (left). I love this one; it’s fun to play with. The People’s Choice trophy went to the Smithsonian’s NMNH Ocean Portal. Surprisingly, to me, no visual arts entry — assuming there were some — figured in the finals. 

The Best “cultural blog” was Mashable, and the People’s Choice here went to 1000 Awesome Things. Neither one is really a “cultural” blog using my narrower definition of the word, and for the purposes of Real Clear Arts.

Here’s a link to all the winners.

Photo Credits: Courtesy The Webby Awards, Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House Interior Restoration Project