Archives for January 2011

Two financially troubled West Coast museums are finishing the first week of the new year with lifelines.

The Seattle Art Museum (right), you’ll remember, suffered when the primary tenant of its new building, Washington Mutual, failed in 2008. After getting a $10 million gift from J.P. Morgan Chase, which bought WaMu at the instigation of the federal government, SAM still needed another $17 million to retire its debt.

Yesterday the Puget Sound Business Journal reported that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave SAM a $5.5 million gift in November, which went unannounced until now. SAM has raised another $2.5 million from other donors. But it must still find another $9 million to pay off its debt.

The bad news is that SAM is still borrowing from its endowment. More details are here. On the other hand, it’s currently showing masterpieces from Musee Picasso in Paris, and was hoping for a good bump in admissions and related sales. We’ll soon find out.

Meantime, yesterday San Francisco and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco reached an agreement with Chase to restructure its debt. I wrote about the museum’s predicament here — when people were talking about bankruptcy because the museum could not pay interest on bonds it floated years ago, then refinanced. The bonds, downgraded recently to junk by Moody’s, ended up costing the museum and its sister foundation much more than envisioned — or planned for.

The deal yesterday is complicated, but essentially the museum gets a break on the principal owed (reduced to $99 million from almost $120 million), a return of some cash pledged as collateral, fixed-rate bonds (4.6% coupon) to be floated by Chase to replace the variable rate bonds, and a pledge by the Asian Art Museum Foundation to embark on a big, three-year fundraising campaign to get this albatross off its neck.

UPDATE. 1/7: I somehow missed a key point, which was at the bottom of the press release: the city of San Francisco is guaranteeing the museum’s debt.

More details are here. The San Francisco Chronicle’s article is here and The Bond Buyer’s article is here. 

Will more bailouts will be needed this year? I’d sure like to know where. Email me.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the respective museums

 

There’s news on the deaccessioning front. The New York State Board of Regents has decided who will help it decide what it should do.

Let’s recap: The Regents voted in September to let temporary regulations on deaccessioning expire. Despite all the outcry, I figured that the Regents were not abdicating their responsibility on the subject, but rather were taking a measured approach — and I made no comments at the time, And, happily, they were refusing to be bullied into action by scare stories of museums and libraries who would rush to put their collections up for sale (for an overview, see a New York Times story here.)

I haven’t seen a selloff, have you?

In any case, my views on deaccessioning are more nuanced than those who are anti-deaccessioning except in cases where the proceeds are used to purchase more art. I won’t repeat them, but you can get a good idea them here, here, here and here (among others). One thing I will say: The decision to deaccession should always be a deliberate one, and transparency about the decision, before the act, is a necessity.

In recent days, I have learned, the Regents have named a 16-member ad hoc advisory committee on deaccessioning. The list includes some usual suspects, such outspokenly anti-deaccessioner Michael Botwinick of the Hudson River Museum, and some not-so-usual suspects, including out-of-stater Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery and recently in trouble for…well, you know what.

The others:

• Roger Tilles, a Regent who is also chair of the cultural education committee of NYS Education Dept.
• Carole Huxley, chair of the Regents ad hoc advisory committee on deaccessioning
• Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum of Harlem
• Anne Ackerson, director of the Museum Association of New York
• Steven Kern, director of the Everson Museum
• Stephen Elliot, president of the Fennimore Museum/Farmers Museum and the New York Historical Association
• Beth Levinthal, executive director, Hofstra University Museum
• Henry Lanman, associate general counsel, MoMA
• Scott Schaefer, associate dean of science for collections, American Museum of Natural History
• Caroline Welsh, senior art historian and director emerita, Adirondack Museum
• James Corsaro, consultant, retired special collections librarian, NYS Library
• Jeffery Cannell, deputy commissioner for the Office of Cultural Education, NYS Dept. of Education
• Clifford Siegfried, assistant commissioner, director of NYS Museum
• Richard Trautwein, office of counsel, NYS Dept. of Education

So there you have it: these people will help shape what I hope is a reasonable policy on deaccessioning in NYS, which has often been cited as a nationwide standard. We will see what they come up with.

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art* rolled out the first effort of its new Digital Media Department yesterday; it’s called Connections, and it is planned to be a once-a-week release of a 4-minute online interactive feature. For the kickoff, the Met has posted four of them.

Here’s the description:

Episodes are comprised of audio narration and slide shows of the works of art discussed, as well as links to contextual background. Each Connections episode explores a broad theme through the subjective and personal viewpoint of a Museum staff member. Participants will include curators, conservators, scientists, librarians, educators, photographers, designers, editors, digital media producers, technicians, administrators, executive staff, and many other staff.

Met director Thomas Campbell introduces the feature here.

The subjects of the first four are promising.

• “Small Things,” in which Associate Director Carrie Rebora Barrett (above) seeks out tiny works in the collection.
• “Virtuosity,” which finds paintings conservator Michael Gallagher (below) talking about “the appeal of technical virtuosity.”
• “Maps,” wherein Medieval art curator Melanie Holcomb explains “how maps help her make sense of the world.”
• “Tennessee,” in which video producer Christopher Noey waxes nostalgic about his childhood home via works in the museum.

These topics, all interesting, illustrate a nice range of access points for people not necessarily versed in art and who want to enjoy it anyway, and for people who are knowledgeable about art to see things from a different perspective. For all, they are a way to listen to an expert and see their selections.

The interactive part is minimal: “visitors can link to additional information about the works of art: the time period in which they were made, the geographic origins of the works, and where works on view can be found in the Museum’s galleries.”

Still, for the idea, I give the Met an A. 

The execution, however, is…well, needs improvement. The two I sampled — more about why in a minute — were slide shows of artworks with voiceovers by the narrator. Very static. I had pictured a real video, with the narrator holding or standing near the artwork, in the galleries, and perhaps a walk from one to another (speeded up, for fun). But there was nothing like that. And why are the narrators pictured in black and white?  

Barrett’s entry also suffers from a mismatch between what she’s saying and what is being seen on screen, which is pretty unforgivable. That was fixed in Gallagher’s virtuoso picks. 

Barrett’s has two other flaws: In a riff on “small things,” the feature does not provide dimensions of the works. And, horribly, when you click on “In the Museum,” to find out where to go to find these objects, several are not currently on view. That’s also unforgivable.

What about the other two episodes? I don’t know, because my computer froze during the loading process. I has to shut it down, and reboot — and I decided to finish this post before going back to Connections, to see if I could Connect. This problem could well be my computer, and I do not blame the Met (for now).  

I like this idea, and I expect the Met to improve on its execution. Right now, it’s a bit of a disappointment. 

More details in the press release, including the ideas behind the next five features. 

If you go to the Met’s home page, btw, you’ll notice a change — which I think may have happened on Jan. 1. No more landing page, with the artwork of the day. You go right to the home page, where there’s a rotating banner of temporary exhibitions. 

I get it, some people didn’t have the patience to “Enter.” But I kind of liked seeing the artwork of the day. 

The new website wasn’t announced, and it’s obviously still in the making. Perhaps it will be rolled out one change at a time.

Which brings me to another problem: there’s no link to “Connections” on the website — for now, at least, you have to know the URL (www.metmuseum.org/connections).

UPDATE, 1/5: As a commenter (below) reported, the announcement of Connections is now posted on the home page, with the link to it, under “Now At the Met.” And it’s permanent home looks to be under “Works of Art,” right beneath the Timeline of Art History.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.

Well, that didn’t take long: It’s only Jan. 3, and another new museum designed to be an “attraction” is about to open. It’s a statement museum in a statement complex.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love architecture, beautiful architecture. It’s just that I think many new museums are pretty inhospitable to art. And most new museums are not the Guggenheim Bilbao, we have all learned to much dismay.

Set to open on Feb. 17, this one, billed as the “world’s first ArtScience Museum” is part of a $5.5-billion multi-use complex (the casino, hotel, shops, etc., complex is above) in Singapore known as Marina Bay Sands. Designed by Moshe Safdie for the Las Vegas Sands company, MBS has nine elements, according to the fact sheet posted on Safdie’s website, and No. 6 is a 161,500 sq ft museum with 64,580 sq ft of gallery space.

It was designed somewhat like a lotus flower, with 10 fingers emanating from a round central base — it’s at left in the picture at left.

Las Vegas Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson called it the “welcoming hand of Singapore,” according to published reports. Reuters added: “The design of each finger reveals different gallery spaces featuring skylights at the “fingertips” that illuminate the dramatically curved interior walls.”

What’s in it?

[Read more…] about A New Year: A New Destination Museum, In Singapore By Safdie

This year, MIT celebrates its 150th anniversary with a wonderful neologism: inventional wisdom. MIT, naturally, put the term in an arithmetic form on its celebration website: MIT + 150 = Inventional Wisdom.

I liked the term as soon as I saw it, and more so when I Googled it, to see how common it was, and Google offered “Did you mean conventional wisdom”?

Decidedly not.

Inventional Wisdom could (should?) be the byword for the arts in 2011 — not a New Year’s resolution, but a goal, a challenge for art-lovers, museum officials, and others who care about the future of the arts in America. In different ways, we’re all thinking about the arts, about trying to broaden interest in the arts, to give other people the same (or similar) joy and enjoyment we feel when we participate in the arts. Somehow, vast numbers of people don’t seem to get it, we sometimes think — or why aren’t they coming?

It’s pretty clear to everyone that museums (or operas, theaters, orchestras, even jazz bands) can’t simply keep doing exactly what they have been doing: arts participation in the U.S. has fallen across the board, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.

It’s also clear, to me at least, that some “solutions” to the problem aren’t solutions at all — they’re distractions at best and, at worst, changes that negatively alter the very essence of art museums (and operas…etc.). Worse, some such ideas are becoming conventional wisdom, with museums (etc.) simply joining and following the herd.

Arts institutions must innovate, but with Inventional Wisdom. That’s often learned from experience, of course. And from analysis. Experiments are wonderful, even failed ones, as long as they’re not repeated.

Inventional Wisdom — which to me means true innovation — is hard, and not even MIT is always inventionally at the head of the pack. To celebrate its 150th, for example, the university is mounting an exhibition of its “unique qualities” and it says it has done so in a “unique way.”

Not quite. That “unique way” turned out to be a crowdsourced exhibition, the MIT 150 Exhibition, which as I recently noted the Brooklyn Museum and the Walker Art Center have also tried. Crowdsourced exhibits are fine, but I doubt that they are the answer to museums’ attendance troubles. 

Nonetheless, MIT’s exhibit will be interesting as a view of the university’s history and the contributions its people have made to the culture: It will include:

…large scale artifacts – a racecar, a wheelchair, and an outer space control system simulator, as well as simpler objects like the wooden model of the city of Boston used in the wind tunnel experiments that solved the not so simple problem of window panes falling from the John Hancock Tower when it was built in 1976….also…the old and the rare – like the 19th century notes of Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT’s first female graduate student who was instrumental in creating the first water quality standards in America, along with the new – a virus built battery recently shown to President Obama….[a]nd the controversial; faculty who provoked politicians on both sides of the aisle with their science and their opinions, and those who irritated their own institution, by proving, with data, that women were always given smaller labs than men….

And, oh yes, the Polaroid 95A camera, above left.

In the visual arena, the MIT museum is soon offering its 3rd annual Luminous Windows winter exhibition of holography, the most advanced method of imaging yet invented. And it might just inspire some artist out there to do something wonderful.

It might even be something worthy of being called Inventional Wisdom, which is what I wish for the arts in 2011. When I find examples, I’ll be delighted to highlight them.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of MIT