Archives for December 2010

A report in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer gives new life to those who oppose the move of the Barnes Foundation into downtown Philadelphia (including me).

In fact, I’ve been wondering why this hasn’t happened before: The recession is causing state public officials to review the commitments that would be funded by a $1 billion bond issue, and they include the Barnes’s move.

Politics – and the reality of the recession – might stand in the way of the Rendell administration’s plan to borrow $1 billion to help finance public-improvement and other construction projects across the state.  

The governor has signed off on a $1 billion taxpayer-financed bond issue, but other top state officials, both Democrats, on Wednesday slammed the brakes on it.

 

Pennsylvania Auditor General Jack Wagner refused to approve it, while Treasurer Rob McCord said he wanted first to consult with Gov.-elect Tom Corbett, whose administration would be saddled with helping pay off the debt. Corbett said he would review the matter.

The Inquirer, which has backed the Barnes’s move, says that approval from one of the two is necessary for the issue to move forward.

 

Here’s a link to the article.

 

No surprise that activist and artist Nancy Herman, of Friends of the Barnes Foundation, is calling for a rethinking of the move, since the movers haven’t raised the necessary $200 million yet, even with Rendell’s public funding. As well she should.

It’s a slim hope, but at least it is a hope.

There’s one worry: that saying public money should not go to the Barnes move might jeopardize other funding for the arts during bad times. 

You know the visual art world is in trouble when even “sophisticated” New Yorkers think that art is boring…

At least that is what they (and people around the country who tuned in to closed-circuit showings of the program) said when Steve Martin and Deborah Solomon spent the better part of their program at the 92nd St. Y on Monday talking about art. As The New York Times reported the saga,

Midway through the conversation, a Y representative handed Ms. Solomon a note asking her to talk more about Mr. Martin’s career and, implicitly, less about the art world, the subject of his latest novel, “An Object of Beauty.”…

The audience cheered when Ms. Solomon read aloud the note.

Interestingly, this happened the same week as the Park Avenue Armory is mounting Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway, the noted filmmaker’s attempt to make the 15th century masterpiece relevant in a multi-media world. (Though it opens tomorrow, I went to yesterday’s press preview.)

For his work — one of ten such masterpieces he is recreating — Greenaway has used sound, light and video to create the feeling that visitors are in the Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milan, where they view a virtual clone of the painting.

That’s not all they view, of course — and the sound makes the contrast with the real refectory quite stark. Is it beautiful and fascinating? Yes. In this 45-minute experience, Greenaway uses effects, like the sun passing overhead in the course of a day and the outlining of the figures in white, to bring the mural to life. Meanwhile, in the space surrounding the refectory, visitors see extremely close pans of the wall pigments, for example, as the paint flakes and flies away before their eyes. An all-white recreation of the table and its contents stands in the middle, itself undergoing various lighting effects. The music is dramatic.

Many viewers will never get to Milan to see the real thing, where the experience is completely different — and that’s ok. Will this get them to look harder and longer at this and maybe other paintings? Perhaps, in which case it would be a good thing. Spending 45 minutes before a painting is virtually unheard of nowadays.

I think much less of the 6- or 7-minute video prologue, which is more of a travelogue, and serves no purpose in my mind. The epilogue, Greenaway’s take on Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, is a much more serious lesson in art history, with Greenaway explaining the figures, composition, and theories about the painting’s content.

I join the Armory and the Y programs to ask what they mean for art and the public.

Is art boring unless it moves or is controversial? (I could, here, bring in the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, but enough already. To me, once an exhibition is up, the NPG should not have bowed to pressure to remove it. But it’s an open question whether the art work under attack was worth showing to begin with — one with as many answers as there are viewers.)

Art isn’t boring, most likely, to anyone reading this post. Why, then, is it seemingly so uninteresting to much of the public?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Park Avenue Armory

 

Every December for the past 18 years, the prestigious London-based Apollo Magazine gives awards recognizing the “best” achievements in the art world over the past 12 months. The 2010 awards have now been posted online, and the winners are:

Personality of the Year: Sam Keller, who “changed the way an entire generation of young collectors looks at art. While still in his 30s, he cemented Art Basel’s status as the ‘Olympics of the art world’ before parlaying the brand into Art Basel Miami Beach, nowadays America’s best fair for modern and contemporary art. And since taking over, in 2008, as director at the Fondation Beyeler, he has put on a series of spectacular exhibitions and helped open up this magnificent private collection to the public.”

As an aside, that “Olympics” reference comes from an article I wrote for The New York Times in 1999: “In The Olympics of Art World, Anything For An Edge.”

Museum Opening of the Year: The Art of the Americas Wing at MFA, Boston. Apollo, knowing that I had written articles about MFA director Malcolm Rogers and his campaign to build the wing, asked me to write a short piece for the award. I began it:

The new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, began with a big idea. Unlike so many museum expansions, it wasn’t about erecting a signature piece of architecture to draw visitors but which might steal attention from the art inside. Nor was it simply about creating more space.

I’ve written way too much about MFA-Boston this fall (see here and here), but…it deserved every article. 

Exhibition of the Year: The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700, at the National Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, “revealed to us – in breathtaking manner – an oft-neglected area of art history.”  

Book of the Year: French Porcelain in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, by Geoffrey de Bellaigue — a “monumental three-volume work (1,291 pages, with 2,400 illustrations – nearly all in colour) that scholars, collectors and amateurs of Vincennes/Sèvres porcelain have been anticipating eagerly for such a long time and the likes of which will probably never be seen again.”

Acquisition of the Year: the Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in 2009 and saved for the UK after a fund-raising campaign, “where they belong” — “jointly secured for Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. It is an acquisition of unparalleled importance for both organisations, and for the West Midlands in general.”

Fine choices, I’d say. Congratulations to the winners.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Apollo Magazine