Archives for September 2010

Some people, and museums, stoop to gain attention, but a consortium of art centers around Buffalo today went in the other direction: they hired French tightrope walker Didier Pasquette to perform a high-wire walk between two statues atop the city’s landmark Liberty Building. It takes place at 6:30 this evening, and Pasquette will walk again at noon on Sunday in Niagara Falls.

The point, I guess, is to kick off Beyond/In Western New York 2010: Alternating Currents, an extragavanza of art at more than two dozen venues in Erie and Niagara Counties, upstate.

I’m sad that art needs a stunt to gain attention, but at least this one isn’t horrible and doesn’t lower the discourse. And maybe it will excite people to see this biennial, which would be a good thing. If you’re reading this before Pasquette takes off, you can watch it live here.

The roots of this show go back to 1934, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, but it has gone through a couple of reincarnations (and protests) along the way. This time, it’s showing art from the region as well as, for the first time, art invited from non-regional artists, like Andy Goldsworthy and Lorraine O’Grady. I wish BIWNY had not done that: it’s hard enough for artists outside the big art centers to get showings without making it tougher on the occasions meant for them — at least by taking attention away from them.

On the other hand, I do like that this year’s theme, Alternating Currents, refers to two historical events in the area: In the 1890, the war between Thomas Edison’s view of electricity (DC) and Nicholas Tesla’s (AC) was carried out in Niagara Falls, ending with Tesla’s AC delivery of electricity to Buffalo. Two years earlier, King Gillette advocated the building of a Utopian city in the area, powered by Niagara Falls. Hopefully, many artists drew inspiration from these events or the theme overall.  

The exhibition, which was juried, is expected to attract 80,000 visitors during its run, which extends until Jan. 16, 2011. 

I’m not going to attempt to talk about the quality of the art from afar, though I have the catalogue, except to say that much looks to be worthy. Happily, the website listed above has a list of the artists, with a sample of their work and a podcast statement from each one –so you can look yourself. Nice touch, that recorded statement.

The biennial’s events, which really get underway tomorrow, are also listed, along with travel and other information. If you’re in the neighborhood, why not stop in? 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Beyond/In Western New York  

Now here’s an idea: Have a government team audit the country’s public art collections to see just how many women are included, how often their work is exhibited, and why there isn’t a greater proportion of art by women in museums.

OK, maybe not, not in the U.S. But that’s what’s happening in Sweden, where seven researchers are assessing the collections of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Goteborgs Konstmuseum, and the regional museums in Malmo and Norrkoping. Jeff Werner, research director at the Goteborg museum, is leading the effort, according to a short report in The Art Newspaper’s September issue. Werner plans to study “acquisition strategies and organizationals structures to see how they have influenced gender representation.”

And the report will be published, not hushed up like a lot of museum information in the U.S.

I’m not really advocating that the U.S. government undertake a parallel effort here. In Sweden, the project is costing $58,000, with funding provided by the Swedish Arts Council. But imagine the cost in the U.S., and the probable outrage about interference from the government and wasted spending.

Still, I would like to know the numbers; the museums should do the work or they should agree to provide access to interested researchers. A few are trying, like the Museum of Modern Art.*

The numbers would raise consciousness of the issue. Afterall, biases may be unconscious.

Photo Credit: The painting is by an artist named Marie Bashkirseff, and I borrowed the image from a blog called Art and Influence by Armand Cabrera. 

* I consult to a foundation that supports MoMA

How do artists work? As much as the creative process is a mystery, really, that’s what people often want to know. Even when artists don’t know themselves.

But they leave traces, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe has been mining the photographs, drawings, rocks, bones, artifacts, paints, brushes and other materials O’Keeffe left behind when she died in 1986.

Its new O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials, which opens on Friday, aims to shed light on both her technical and creative processes — a great idea, except for one qualm I have.

The show’s billing quotes O’Keeffe:

I have picked flowers where I found them, have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked. When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too. I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.

O’Keeffe was very organized. She placed her drawings in named file folders, took photographs of her still subjects from many vantage points in different light, trimmed her brushed meticulously, and so on. Associate curator Carolyn Kastner, who organized the show, told the Associated Press that she looked hard for something “messy,” but could not find a thing. (Here’s a link to the AP story.) 

I’m all for these kinds of shows; they engage people in a different way than a traditional exhibition, and that can draw new people to look at art.

But back to my qualm. There could be a slight downside in this one: already, O’Keeffe’s life story is what so many people know, her steamy affair with a married man, the marriage, the breakup, the sexual allusions in her art that she fought, and so on — even more than the aesthetics of her art in some cases. If this show reinforces that interest in her life, over her art (and I’m not saying it will, for sure), that would be a shame.

Photo Credit: Courtesy the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

 

Now it can be told: Bloomberg LP will be giving more than $1 million to Richard Koshalek’s “Seasonal Inflatable Structure,” the blue bubble designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that he announced last December, without providing many “why” details.

It’s a naming gift, and thus won’t be official until the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution meet to approve it this fall. But it’s real, and it comes on top of $1.5 million Koshalek has raised for another part of his $15 million project to put the Hirshhorn Museum on the world’s cultural map — a classroom of the future in the lobby.

Koshalek has never been a man of small ambitions, and his bubble combines elements of the World Economic Forum at Davos and TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conferences. He calls his attempt to insert art into to national and international dialogue “lifelong learning,” and thus part of a museum’s purview, and “a cultural think tank.”

As he told me:

I took the job because of this. If we can develop an educational program that’s national and global in outlook, we can have an impact on cultural policy in the U.S.
 

I lay the whole story out in a Cultural Conversation with Koshalek that will be published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal — where there are many more details and examples of the programs he envisions. Let me say right here that lots of people have tried, and failed, at getting the U.S. to have a cultural policy — I’m for some elements of what people call a cultural policy, and against others — let alone inserting the arts into national affairs. So we’ll see.  

Now, if this were all Koshalek were doing at the Hirshhorn, he might deserve a little of the criticism he’s been getting for the sin of leaking the initial story of the bubble’s existence to The New York Times last December (but most of that is sour grapes. The whiners/critics should grow up: life isn’t fair).

Once he gets this funded and organized, it will  be run by his deputy Erica Clark, who was also with Koshalek at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

That will give him time to go back to the Hirshhorn’s core activities — collection-building, conservation, exhibitions, etc. That’s his main job, and while I am sure he will hobnob at the forums, he seems to know it. His actions will speak for him.

 

“Times are changing for the traditional exhibition catalogue,” I write in the September issue of The Art Newspaper. It’s a subject I’ve pondered before, but for the recently published feature, I dug much deeper, prying some rule-of-thumb numbers from sources and discovering  several worthy experiments.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for example, is offering a print-on-demand anthology of articles for its Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins exhibition, rather than a traditional catalogue. (His The Champion Single Sculls is at left.)

The Philadelphia Museum of Art produced no catalogue for its recent Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris, initially thinking it would publish one online, but later deciding to post a “gallery guide” allowing online visitors to “walk through” the exhibition remotely.

And, since 2002, the Brooklyn Museum has produced “mini-catalogues” for smaller exhibitions whose content and budget don’t allow a traditional catalogue. These “grand brochures” are generally 6- by 9-inches, hard-bound, fewer than 100 pages, and printed on the museum’s onsite four-color press.

Behind those experiments are factors like these:

• Production costs – paper, ink, printing, binding and so on – for 10,000 copies of a 250-300 page book typically range from $150,000 to $250,000.
• Add in the time spent by curators on research, writing and editing, the fees paid to outside authors, reproduction rights for dozens of images, design costs, distribution, and so on, and the actual cost per book can reach into three-figures. So they are all money-losers. 
• As few as 2% of people visiting an exhibition usually buy the catalogue. 5% is a big deal.
• The more popular an exhibition is, and the more familiar the artist is, the lower the sell-through rate. That’s because popular shows draw wider audiences, composed of regular museum-goers who may feel they know the artist and occasional visitors whose interest in art is less serious; apparently, neither category wants to shell out, say, $30 to $60 for a catalogue.

It’s pretty clear that museums would like to dispense with these big catalogues, possibly in favor of e-books. They can’t for two reasons — lenders to a big traveling show want a catalogue and reproduction rights for pictures online catalogues are more difficult to obtain.

What’s emerging may be a hybrid, with a printed catalogue where some elements — like the checklist — are left out and available only online.

Or, back at LACMA, for California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way, beginning in October, 2011, a curator’s wish to include a directory of designers and manufacturers in the catalogue led to a different solution: a stand-alone, print-on-demand book, possibly with pictures of artists in their studios, not of objects in the exhibition, is in the offing.

Read the whole article on my website. All of this, seems to me, is good.

Photo Credit: Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art