Archives for October 2010

The Los Angeles Times carried an article in Saturday’s paper that begs comment.

It was about Michael Govan, whose contract as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had quietly been re-upped for six more years in July. The news was disclosed when LACMA posted its audited financial statements for FY 2009-10 online, and the Times rightly dissected them.It found that news, plus several gossipy, telling tidbits, like the $1-million bonus Govan received for completing his initial contract and the dispute he is having with collector Eli Broad over a $5.5 million cost overrun on the Broad building at LACMA.

But here’s where I have to raise questions. Citing Govan’s accomplishments, the article said:

Govan, who led New York’s Dia Art Foundation before coming to LACMA, said last year that he hoped to be at LACMA for the long haul, as long as the trustees supported his ambitions for the museum. On his watch, LACMA has planned and built one facility, the Resnick Exhibition Pavilion; opened another that was in progress when he arrived, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum; and purchased property along Wilshire Boulevard that could permit further growth.

I looked for the next paragraph of accomplishments, but it never came. Where was mention of great exhibitions held at LACMA? How about great acquisitions? Completed conservation projects? The Reading Room project, which makes its art catalogues available online? Anything new on the educational program front?

I well know the limitations of space at publications, and I know the pressure to write what editors and reporters think people want to read. But this seems to me to be a case where the media is complicit in fostering the wrong measures of accomplishment for museums. Even if the building projects were the only thing mentioned in the report, even if the bonus payment was contingent only on them, it wouldn’t have taken long to come up with a few other examples of success on Govan’s watch. LACMA’s Fall edition of its “Insider” bulletin has many of the answers — an Eakins exhibition, a Matisse acquisition — and I think the public does care about more than expansions, even if trustees don’t.

Here’s one bright spot: at least the article didn’t mention attendance on Govan’s watch. Too much attention is paid to that already.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The New York Times 

 

At the risk of being repetitive, I am returning to the exhibition of Thomas Moran’s Shoshone Falls, a one-painting show at the Portland Art Museum that opened yesterday. I wrote about it, and sang the praises of these small shows, in September, when PAM announced the loan from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa (here).

I like them because a focus on one painting seems special to me — just what single painting merits a show of its own? — and it almost forces visitors to look, really look. Probable cost savings, versus large exhibitions, are another plus in these difficult times. I think these shows, of the right high-quality works, should be part of virtually every museum’s mix.

Funny, though — not every museum director seems to agree, at least not wholeheartedly. They worry that people would not make a trip to the museum for a single piece of art. And they wonder if such an exhibit would get a review, or other media coverage.  

Fair enough, and I suspect that varies from city to city — and the artwork in question.

Still, I decided to see what kind of a reception Shoshone Falls has received in the Oregon press. And either the Portland Art Museum is very lucky, or these shows are marketable to the public.

In Friday’s Oregonian, Bob Hicks reviewed the painting (here), noting “Whatever you think of single-painting shows, Moran’s got the quality” and concluding “…what a painting. You should see for yourself.”

And there was more: a gallery of 14 photos illustrating the hanging of the painting at the museum (here).

And more: on the same day, Hicks did a Q & A with museum director Brian Ferriso (here), during which he revealed that he’s “finalizing negotiations on a third one-piece exhibition — after Shoshone Falls and last year’s showing of Raphael’s portrait La Velata — and shuffling through ideas with chief curator Bruce Guenther for two more after that. ‘We have some wish lists,’ he says.”

Which is what I’ve been saying: museum directors everywhere ought to have a little list of five or six top-quality works of art, perhaps with some geographic or thematic relevancy to their community, that they’d like to borrow. Dream big — the Gilcrease didn’t originally intend to lend one of its star paintings, after all. You just never know.

Maybe this little parlor game could even be interactive — museums could ask members what single work of art that is able to travel (which leaves out, say, the Mona Lisa) would they like to see on their home turf? It’s worth a shot.

Photo Credit: Amiran White, Courtesy of the Portland Oregonian 

If art (frequently) explores social issues, and the economy is an issue on so many people’s minds lately, is it a wonder that there haven’t been more art exhibitions about money in the last few years?

I suppose that is what drew me to the idea behind Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art, which is on view at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University (and will later travel to the Huntington Library near Pasadena, Calif.).

It’s a small show that showcases the responses American artists had to financial panics in 1857, 1869, 1873 and 1893. A few weeks ago, I drove down to State College, Pa., to have a look. My review of the exhibition appeared in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

I expected a narrower version of American Stories, which ran at the Metropolitan Museum late last year and through January. But the Palmer show turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, partly because the quality of works on view was very uneven and partly because it covered a dizzying array of topics in a small number of works. The exhibit suffered, I think, because plans for a more encompassing exhibition collapsed under current financial pressures. It’s less than half its intended size, yet the catalogue shows some excellent works that could not be borrowed.

Still, this strain in American art deserves exposition and examination. Though the show includes works by Whistler, Harnett and Inness, it also shows many artists you’re unlikely to know — mostly minor ones, to be sure.

And maybe it will prompt more contemporary artists to respond to the Great Recession of today.

That’s Frank Moss’s Rockwellian A Difficult Job above. I like what co-curator Kevin M. Murphy wrote about it: “Perhaps tellingly, his frown repeats the arc of the shoe, as if the former is a result of his unrelenting labor on the latter.” 

My visit to the Palmer a few weeks ago was my first, and since then the museum has opened another unfashionable show — At the Heart of Progress displays seventy-five prints and posters about coal production and its use in by the iron, steel, and transportation industries from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Though it was organized by the Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it’s an interesting choice and, as the museum says, a show that “perfectly harmonizes with Penn State’s academic and cultural legacy.” Rather brave in this day in age, isn’t it? 

 

Looking for something else on the web today, I came across a 6-minute interview with Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry at the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt.

It was posted last spring, but what Lowry said about museums and contemporary art is evergreen, and worth both sharing and a few comments.

First on museums: “For any museum to thrive,” he said, “it needs to grow and change and constantly rethink itself,” whether it’s a history museum or a museum of contemporary art. They should not be afraid to become a different institution, he added.

Well, in spirit, I agree — institutions that remain embedded in amber often lose touch with reality and may sink into irrelevance. I have a little quibble with the word “grow,” however, if it is misunderstood as meaning “expand.” We’ve seen too many museums expand way beyond their capacity to sustain themselves.

On contemporary art, Lowry said:

I believe that contemporary art is central to the way any major art museum thinks about itself because ultimately the past is meaningful only to the present when we understand it. And contemporary artists are among the most important interlocutors between the past and the present anywhere in the world.

So contemporary art in a way vitalizes not only how we understand today but it’s a window into looking at the past. And I think when you can create a dialog, a conversation, an engagement between the most interesting art of today and the art of the past, that’s when you create the very rich environments that the Stadel is and will be.

On this, I am conflicted. While I would like to think what he said is true — and it certainly could be a goal, especially the last bit about those rich environments — I don’t think it is. Lots of contemporary art, even that judged to be the best by the best museums, has little, if any, relationship to “the past.” If it does, it’s not apparent, and critics that I’ve read have rarely commented on it.

So, is Lowry campaigning, so to speak, for contemporary art — making promises it doesn’t deliver on? Are critics at fault for not writing about how contemporary art is “a window into looking at the past”? Or is the content of contemporary art (in general — I realize this is a sweeping statement) itself remiss, failing to do what it is supposed to do?

Just asking. 

 

A post on the American Theater Wing’s blog, by Howard Sherman (hat tip to You’ve Cott Mail for pointing it out), got me thinking about a parallel — and possible solution — for museums.

Sherman wrote, lamentingly, about the common desire for a short running time.

If you are a regular theatergoer, you are undoubtedly in the habit of ascertaining, before you see a production, what the running time will be….undoubtedly you have found yourself cheered, more than once, when your inquiry results in the answer, “90 minute, no intermission.”

It is the cheerfulness which concerns me. I am not entirely certain when the tide turned towards the single-act play (and in some cases musicals), but they seem much more prevalent of late….In recent weeks, I have noted an articulate and enthusiastic theatre tweeter lobbying for exactly that – that all plays should be unbroken and brief….

[But] let’s not create a producing and theatergoing environment in which only the brief can survive. We need plays of every shape, size, subject and length if the theatre is to remain alive and vital.

Museums don’t have that problem, exactly. Visitors can come and stay for 20 minutes or all day. But there’s a catch: that equation changed as museum admissions have ratcheted up to $20 (MoMA, MFA-Boston), $18 (the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Art Institute of Chicago), $16 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum [see comments below]), $15 (Seattle Art Museum), etc.

People who pay those prices are probably committing to a longer visit, which is good — unless it keeps some people away.

That’s why I liked what I saw, by chance, when I recently visited MFA in advance of the opening of its new Art of the Americas wing. General admission at the museum is a very steep $20, but included in the price is “one free repeat visit within ten days.”

Such a deal may exist elsewhere, but I’ve never seen it. It’s great idea. It may well boost attendance, turning one-time visitors into repeaters, and it obviously allows the time-challenged an opportunity to stretch their dollars further. I doubt that MFA loses a lot of admissions fees this way, and what it gains in good will probably makes up for that.