Archives for March 2011

Every now and then, a museum acquisition is worth highlighting because either the work is, to me, fanatastic, or because it makes another point.

The other day, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, announced that it had acquired a dozen light-based works by James Turrell. Turrell has many fans. Now, I have not seen the Roden Crater, but his light works haven’t always thrilled me. When I recently visited the MFAH, I was underwhelmed by the work that runs underground in a tunnel linking the museum´s two buildings. It´s called ¨The Light Inside.¨ (It´s pictured here.) On the other hand, I do like his skyscapes.

And, since many do think Turrell is an excellent artist who will stand the test of time, the acquisition is notable on the second score: MFAH has had a ¨longstanding commitment¨to Turell´s work, and this builds on that strength. It could well be one of the museum´s points of differentiation, at a time when too many museums are building too-similar collections.

The purchase, using funds from an acquisitions endowment, continues a partnership that dates to the 1994, and it evolved from conversations Turrell had with the late Peter Marzio, who directed MFAH for nearly 30 years until his death last December.  

Turrell, the museum says, titled the group of works aquired by MFAH “Vertical Vintage” — because it is a retrospective selection that reflects the full arc of his engagement with artificial light. Dates on the works begin in 1967 and continus to his most recent “Tall Glass” series, dated 2010.

Read more in the press release here, including the list of works.

As MFAH notes, just this month, Turrell was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and later this year, his work will be shown at the Venice Biennale.

Swiss collector Donald Hess has built a museum for Turrell´s work, but it´s in northwest Argentina. The flight from Argentina takes more than two hours, according to the Wall Street Journal. Not every Turrell fan will be able to go there. If MHFA is a place his fans turn instead, MFAH´s purchase will have been worth it. Of course, we don´t know that price…it wasn´t disclosed.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of MFAH

 

 

I’m traveling, and unsure of access to a computer. I’ll post if I can, so please check back!

In the annual Museums special section of The New York Times, published today, I have an article about the growing prevalence of exhibitions that focus on works owned by a single collector.

The gist is this: there are three reasons for these shows. One is economic; they’re cheaper than other loan shows. The second is what often gets lost when, say the New Museum controversially puts on an exhibition of works owned by trustee Dakis Joannou — they can be a legitimate way of viewing art. Third, many museums have total, or near-total, gaps in their permanent collections, but want to exhibit art in that category.

I disagree with those who say these shows should not be mounted unless the collection has been gifted to the museum.

Make no mistake: as I’ve said before (in Oct. 2009), museums should have rules about doing these shows, which are rife with potential conflicts of interest. There should, for example, be agreements with the lender against subsequent sales of the works on display for a reasonable time thereafter; the lender should not pay for the show, though I think a contribution toward the publication of a catalogue and payments for necessary conservation of the works on view are fine, etc.

Transparency is a necessity. (The Association of Art Museum Directors has some general guidelines, from 2007, that suggest questions museum directors should ask themselves regarding private collectors. In January, 2010, then AAMD president Michael Conforti addressed the issue in a message to members, but it doesn’t add anything.)

These exhibitions will continue, and they have a place in the museum repertoire. One person I called during my reporting who did not make it into the article — New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl — put it very well.

It’s a genre. A collection is like an essay that is not about art, but of art. Of course you can argue with it, unless it’s the Frick Collection, which is just perfect.

He also showed his gift with words — I called him out of the blue — with his first response to my question about their legitimacy: “There’s a whole constituency in the art world that acts like hall monitors, policing the manners of everyone.” He, like so many others, just want to see art that’s normally behind locked doors.

I cite several examples in my article. Recently, at the Art Institute of Chicago, director James Cuno has mounted a series of single-collector shows, including Richard Gray (whose exhibit included the drawing by Giuseppi Salviati, above left, and Donna and Howard Stone, whose collection includes the Roni Horn sculpture, above right.

But think of all the marvelous collectors who led taste or assembled troves of art that could not otherwise be seen by the public: the Vogels, the van Otterloos, Charles Saatchi, Eugene Thaw, on and on.  

And from the past: the Steins, the Arensbergs, Edgar Degas (who, had he not gained renown as an artist, would have gone down in history as a great collector), and Ambroise Vollard, among many others.   

This certainly should not be the third-rail kind of issue that some art pundits want to make it.

Still, it’s sensitive. For the article, I spoke too with John Ravenal, curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and president of the Association of Art Museum Curators. Ravenal was all for the shows, with sensitivities. But, he said, “you don’t want to be a place that routinely shows private collections.”

And, he added, before taking my call, the VMFA tightened up its own guidelines for such shows.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

 

 

The amount of time museum-goers spend looking at each art work is a subject of some study and much conjecture. Many years ago, a museum director told met that the average visitor spent 7 seconds looking at an art work in a museum. A few years ago, I heard that the number had dropped to 2 or 3 seconds. How these statistics were derived, I never learned (despite asking). I didn’t give them too much credence, except to note that experts thought the time we all were willing to spend looking, really looking, at art had dropped.

Leave it to London’s scrappy Daily Mail to experiment with the subject, with a twist. The Mail set out to determine what kind of art people wanted to look at — classical or contemporary. It sent observers to the Tate Britain; they spent a day sitting in front of four 18th and 19th century paintings and four works by young British artists. Actually, two days — a Monday and a Wednesday, on the theory that those days attracted more true art-lovers and included students.

As art critic Philip Hensher wrote in an article published Sunday:

The explosion of interest in art in recent years has focused on fashionable young artists, doing outrageous things  –  exhibiting their unmade bed or a dead shark, or persuading people to sprint from one end of the Tate to the other at two-minute intervals. 

These things easily get into the newspapers, and are famous among people who aren’t even interested in art. These days, Turner and Constable seem less exciting than these celebrity artists. Could the classics stand up in a simple test of people’s interest.

…We counted how many visitors stopped at each; for how long, on average, they spent looking at each work; what the longest examination was; and what sort of gallery visitor each work seemed to attract.

Surprise! The classics won, hands down. At Tracey Emin’s Monument Valley (Grand Scale), most people didn’t stop and those who did averaged 5 seconds before it. The longest time spent was two minutes. Rachel Whiteread fared little better, though “one fan…spent nearly five minutes in front of” her Black Bath (right). The Mail said Damien Hirst’s animal sculptures did seem to appeal to views, but not his spot paintings.

On the other hand, visitors spent on average two minutes, 15 seconds looking at William Hogarth’s The Roast Beef of Old England; 59 seconds looking at John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose; 1 minute, 57 seconds viewing Sir John Millais’s Ophelia (above), and 2 minutes, 5 seconds looking at Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights.

Ophelia attracted the most ardent fan: someone spent a half hour studying it.

Here’s a link to the Daily Mail article, which includes artwork-by-artwork statistics and illustrations.

What this all means is open to conjecture. To me it says something about aesthetics and narrative. People are more engaged when they see something that is “beautiful” and something that contains a discernable story. If an art work has both, all the better. 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Daily Mail

 

While we’re on the subject of the Egyptian Revolution, much has been made of the role of Facebook, Twitter, cell phones and technology in general for enabling the revolt.

Now a piece of contemporary art has come to my attention that takes off from ancient Egyptian art and adds the technology — from a California sculptor. The Evolution of a Revolution by Adam Reeder was written up today in Ahram Online.

Before we get to that, Ahram Online also had a pretty good article yesterday about Zahi Hawass, who denied all allegations against him. The best article I could find in English about those charges was published on Sunday in Al Masry Al Youm.

In Ahram Online, Hawass also recounted all his achievements since 2002, when he became secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Among them are the construction of 47 state-of-the-art museum storehouses at various archaeological sites, complete with alarm systems and televised circuit control, the start of a project to document Egypt’s antiquities, the appointment of 8,000 professional guards, and the assignment of archaeological experts to all airports and seaports in Egypt, to tighten security measures and crack down on smuggling.

Today, Hawass also blogged again on his website, posting an address he would have given to the UNESCO meeting in Paris this week on combatting illegal antiquities trafficking, had he gone, and linking to the Supreme Council’s so-called final list of items missing from the Egyptian Museum.

We shall see. (It is more extensive than, but overlaps with, the leaked list I printed here on Mar. 3. The trumpet and thot[h] and the scribe, for example)

Meanwhile, back in the contemporary world: Reeder, in his sculpture, puts cell phones in the hands of the ancients, lists Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and Morocco in the hieroglyphics — all experiencing protests in one form or another — and adds the symbols for Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Vodafone (which supplied mobile service in Egypt). Significantly, there’s a woman, since they were key in ther revolt.

Ahram Online interviewed Reeder, who has never been to Egypt, but said:

I see my role as one who chronicles the ways technology changes how we interact with our world. I think when the dust settles and Egypt has what it wants, I will make more art about it. For now, I have said what needs to be said, like a journal entry about a very good day.

Except for the casualties. Ahram Online today also carried the story of Ziah Bakir, an artist who worked for the Cairo Opera and who left home on Jan. 28 and never returned. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Adam Reeder