Archives for November 2010

Foreign Policy magazine is just out with a list of “ten traditions you never thought needed protecting,” a riff on the latest UNESCO List of Intangible Culture — the article poked fun at some items on the list, like “banguettes and brie” (actually, “the gastronomic meal of the French”), a wrestling festival in Turkey, and “the scissors dance” of Peru (pictured below). The roster — 46 new items in all — also includes such cultural treasures as Spanish Flamenco, Kumiodori — the traditional Okinawan musical theater, and rug weaving techniques of several countries.

It’s a fascinating list — have a look.

Foreign Policy‘s humor reminded me of something on my mind recently: Are we, as a country, defining the arts down? (I borrow from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote a landmark article in 1993 called “Defining Deviancy Down,” which criticized our liberal culture for normalizing deviant behavior.)

I recently learned from that in some schools, for example, arts education includes the “gastronomic arts.” So not only is there little arts education to begin with, but classes in food have replaced any exploration of music and the visual arts.

The National Endowment of the Arts recently published its “first-ever” study of outdoor arts festivals — “small-town affairs, with most festivals (77 percent) taking place in towns with fewer than 250,000 residents, and 39 percent of these in towns with fewer than 10,000 people. Festivals also provide education, employment, and volunteer opportunities to local residents. Outdoor arts festivals rely heavily on volunteers…”

You can argue that such festivals offer the arts, but at what quality? And I wonder if the NEA should be spending money studying them instead of grappling with more difficult issues.

I could list any number of museum exhibitions that, in the old days, would never have filled the galleries of a prestigious museum, but here’s just one: Forty: The Sabres in the NHL, which is currently occupying space at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. It consists of 200 photographs, plus a video and film exhibition, chronicling the history of that hockey team.

A couple of recent posts provide others examples (here and here).

I’d be curious to learn of other examples where the arts have been defined down. Thoughts?   

 

Ever walk through a museum and see a painting that just doesn’t look right? I have, and it always raises questions in my mind. Is the painting a fake? Is it my eye? Has the museum been tricked, or has it simply not bothered to check on a painting that was, perhaps, donated? Once, when I mentioned a particular work in one American museum to an expert on the artist, he speculated that the work had been donated and that the museum did not want to offend the donor by investigating authenticity.

If so — and I have absolutely no proof that it is — that’s a sad tale.

So I commend the Detroit Institute of Arts, which today opened Fakes, Forgeries and Mysteries, joining the other museums that have come clean on mistakes in their collecting (the Metropolitan’s Rembrandt, Not Rembrandt of a few years back comes immediately to mind, but there are others).

DIA’s exhibition assesses about 50 paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, drawings and decorative arts from throughout its collections in European, African, American, Asian, Islamic and Ancient Near Eastern. It explores attribution, authenticity, and other research mysteries. 

That little head above, for example, is now described:

Head of a King, about 1925, granite. Formerly by unknown artist, Egyptian, either Saite period, 664-525 B.C.E., or New Kingdom, 1570-1085 B.C.E. Currently by Oxan Aslanian “The Master of Berlin” (German, 1887-1968). Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts

Quite a difference!

In today’s Detroit Free Press, critic Mark Stryker tells the tale of another work in the exhibit, Tewkesbury Road (above), which came to DIA in 2004 as a Monet, with his signature and the date 1871, when Monet was indeed living in England. The pigment and canvas are consistent the period and the painter.

But DIA curator Salvador Salort-Pons tracked the painting, discovering that it listed in a catalogue as by Alfred East.

And then he found the smoking gun: a photo of the painting with East’s signature visible. So, sometime between 1910 and 1947, a crook — sharp enough to know that Monet was in England in 1871 — removed East’s signature, forged Monet’s signature and invented a provenance to throw skeptics off the scent.   

Here’s the link to Stryker’s story, which has more examples.

For families, Fakes, Forgeries, and Mysteries also includes:

a hands-on lab with interactive activities and opportunities for discovery. Kids will enjoy using clues and magnifying glasses to try their hand at solving mysteries. Visitors can also conduct their own investigations using pigment analysis, dendrochronology (using tree rings to date wood), and x-ray images, giving them a real sense of what goes on behind the scenes.

These kinds of exhibitions can be exemplary on many levels: I hope the execution is as good as the concept, though that’s something I can’t tell from afar.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Art

  

It’s still autumn, the leaves remain on the trees in Central Park, but some arts programmers are thinking about spring. Or maybe they are counter-programming.

In addition to the New Museum’s new facade sculpture, Rose II, by German artist Isa Genzken, which was installed last Saturday (below), New York City’s Parks and Recreation Department, the Fund for the Park Avenue Sculpture Committee, and Paul Kasmin Gallery said the other day that they are putting Will Ryman’s The Roses, a new site-specific installation, along Park Avenue beginning January 25.

So New York will be abloom in mid-winter.

Ryman is making 38 sculptures of pink and red rose blossoms, rising as high as 25 feet, plus 20 scattered rose petals that will be sprinkled on the Park Avenue Mall, mostly between 63rd and 65th Streets. The roses themselves will stretch from 57th to 67th Streets, ending near the Park Avenue Armory (rendering above).

It’s Ryman’s first public art exhibition, and will run through spring — until May 31.

“In my work I always try to combine fantasy with reality,” Ryman said in a press release from Kasmin. (There’s also a press release from the Parks Department.) “In the case of The Roses, I tried to convey New York City’s larger than life qualities through scale; creating blossoms which are imposing, humorous, and hopefully beautiful.”

Whatever you think about the art, you know that both of these installations will bring smiles to onlookers’ faces. And that’s a good thing.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the New Museum (top) and Paul Kasmin Gallery (bottom)

 

Let’s consider the “deaccessioning” situation at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. The other day, it emerged that Dean Sobel, the director, has a plan that would allow the sale of  four works — before they are officially accessioned — to raise money for the museum’s endowment.

Here’s the gist: The Still Museum will soon receive 825 Still paintings from a bequest of Still’s widow, Patricia, who died in 2005 — plus more than 1,000 drawings. However, the museum has petitioned the court to release four paintings to the city of Denver before official distribution of her estate, so that the museum does not violate museum ethics policies against deaccessioning for purposes other than buying new works of art. The city would sell them for the benefit of the museum. The take could be as much as $25 million, according to published reports. The museum would use the money for all museum activities, including research and publications.

Still (seen at right in a 1940 self-portrait) wanted all his works in one place. On the other hand, his widow has already donated or sold 13 of them.

A few other factors to consider: the museum is making — or rather enabling — the sale openly, announcing it. Sobel chose the four works carefully, according to a report in the Denver Post, making a package that covers all three phases in Still’s career. They will be sold in a group, and only to another museum.

Critics have called this “problematic” saying that Sobel is using a “loophole” in standard museum policies. The second part is true, for sure. The first — let’s say it’s not ideal.

But nobody is going to walk through an exhibit of nearly 2,400 Still works, the total of its holdings. The museum is only 28,500 sq. ft. all told anyway. So many works will go straight into storage. Why shouldn’t the Still Museum sell a couple to a museum that will put these paintings on display? They would not be leaving the public trust.

A bigger question, to me — can any museum plunk down $25 million for the paintings? And if not, what does the Still do? When it opens late next year, will it start out behind?

The museum has already cut back. Last November, the Denver Post reported that it had trimmed its cost from $33 million to $29 million, and quoted Sobel saying, “It was very difficult to get to this point in this economy.” This point is $26 million, so there is still further to go. Sobel talked hopefully about raising a $10 million endowment, but figured he might have to settle for $5 million.

I would rather see the sale of four paintings from the collection than see the museum start out life shakily. Besides, I have heard that selling donated works before official accessioning — which sometimes takes place years after the initial gift or bequest — is hardly rare among museums. It just happens in secret. 

So, in this case, and as you may have imagined, given my advocacy for a rational, difficult process to consider deaccessioning, which should be rare, I’m siding with Sobel. If we had a real process, we wouldn’t need loopholes. 

Let’s hope Sobel can find a museum with the bucks.   

Photo Credits: Courtesy Clyfford Still Estate (top); Untitled, 1957 — SFMoMA (bottom)

A quandary: In September, I wrote about an exhibition at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum called Wine and Spirit: Rituals, Remedies, and Revelry, which coupled “the histories of wine and art in a cross-disciplinary fashion” for the first time. I liked the idea, which seemed both scholarly and popular.

Now comes How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, opening on Saturday. It seemed only right to weigh in. Do we applaud, for the same reasons, or think it’s pandering and pop culture (not art)?

The Mount Holyoke show included many paintings, going back in time, and was founded on scholarship. The SFMoMA show “explores transformations in the visual and material culture of wine over the past three decades, offering a fresh way of understanding the contemporary culture of wine and the role that design has played in its transformation.” It calls itself “the first exhibition to consider modern, global wine culture as an integrated yet expansive and richly textured set of cultural phenomena.”

In the show are “architectural models and design objects with works of art, some newly commissioned, and multimedia presentations, as well as objects drawn from viticulture and everyday life. Viewers will encounter artworks, objects, and information within immersive, quasi-theatrical environments that engage multiple senses including smell.”

And there will be artifacts, such as the two winning bottles in the 1976 contest, in Paris, that pitted French and California wines against one another, which California won, along with “the original Time magazine article” about the so called Judgment of Paris. And that carafe, by Etienne Meneau, from 2005, above. And the photo by Dennis Adams, SPILL, at right (love it!).

Meanwhile, one piece of art is described:

Veritas, a newly commissioned wall work by Peter Wegner that charts more than 200 house paint colors related to wine. Wegner’s mural, more than 70 feet long, wraps an 18-foot-high curved wall; it vividly demonstrates the diffusion of wine-related language into everyday life while calling attention to the gaps that structure language and its relation to perception.

The press release has many more details — e.g., that major support comes from Riedel, the wine glass manufacturer, and there’s a gallery of wine glassware.

I have mixed feelings: I love wine, and I’d like to see this exhibition. It does, however, seem a tad too trendy, too much about ephemera, for a great art museum — especially one that doesn’t have room for its permanent collection. But I’m wobbling, hopeful that it includes enough examples of modern design. You?

Photo Credits: Courtesy of SFMoMA