Archives for September 2011

Further on boundaries. This is another “small thing,” really, but it’s indicative of an entrenched problem at the New Museum: the lack of boundaries with the commercial world.

According to the New Museum’s website, an artist called Dzine is giving manicures and doing people’s nails in the museum’s store: it’s called “Getting Nailed at the New Museum.” And that’s not all. Here’s the description:

Continuing his investigation into Kustom Kulture and its relationship to art, sub cultures and self fashioning, Dzine will set up a mini-mobile nail salon in the New Museum Store lobby window, a project in collaboration with Salon94 and The Standard Hotel. Part sculpture, part performance, the nail salon will offer free nail designs to museum visitors on three consecutive Saturdays during the month of September. New York nail artists from different cultural backgrounds will be present to paint their unique style of designs on visitors’ fingers.

Due to the overwhelming response, we are fully booked for all nail sessions. We apologize for not being able to accommodate everyone.

Those are my boldface names — added for emphasis. Italics wouldn’t do in this case.

Plus, there’s this: in the New Museum’s store, Dzine is selling his “limited edition of 40 unique 24kt gold-plated Pinky Nails for the New Museum. They’re all a little funky, a little eccentric, and completely ghetto fabulous.”

Why not just rent out the museum to commercial ventures?

People complain all the time about the contemporary art world, saying it’s too much about the money and about being cool (and maybe even ghetto fabulous — where is Tom Wolfe when we need him?). This sure does not help.

After getting bad press when it allowed trustee Dakis Joannou to show his own collection, in a show curated by his artist-friend, Jeff Koons, the New Museum might have been a tad chastened, even careful. Guess not. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Dzine/The New Museum
 

Talk about boundaries, and lack thereof.

The other day I ran across this article in yesterday’s  News-Leader about the Springfield Art Museum in Missouri (at left).

The community is invited to share feedback about the search for a new Springfield Art Museum director at tonight’s regular museum board of directors meeting….Community members — particularly local artists — have expressed interest in what qualities a new director will have and in how the museum will evolve…Arts advocate Jeanie Morris says she and other community members have written letters about what they hope to see in a new director….

She wants to see the museum evolve into something more like an “art center”…””What a wonderful opportunity for the community to help craft the future of our art museum”…

…Many of us feel that now it’s important for the museum to collaborate and partner up with the many wonderful arts organizations in our community. We also feel it is important to do things to make the museum inviting and exciting to the community. It should be alive with people enjoying the art, learning, shopping and dining. It should be a go to place for many! Our area art educators should feel welcome to bring in their students. We would love to  see workshops from nationally known artists, art talks, slide shows. The auditorium should be used by theater groups and other organizations!”

Now, it’s true that this is a city-owned museum, and that it is NOT accredited by the American Association of Museums. Nor are we talking about the Met. And no museum — or its director — should be unapproachable. But choosing a director with so much public input, voiced at a public meeting, will raise expectations about that poor director’s consultations with the public in the future. He/she will be expected to consult, even on matters — such as curatorial and exhibition decisions — that should not be voted upon. Will anything be the purview of the director? 

Who’d want that job? 

But wait, it got worse. A subsequent article, published Friday, said attendees demanded to be heard vocally after the board asked them to make their comments on Post-It notes. Well, trustees raised expectations — they had to suffer the consequences. 

A facilitator from the city’s human resources department said verbal comments were not scheduled that evening, but the floor was opened when Judith Fowler, a local artist, said: “As a board member, I’d like to hear what they have to say.”

Morris was the first to speak.

With several pages of notes in hand, Morris gave myriad suggestions to the board.

She also voiced some disappointment that the number of director candidates had been narrowed to three from 80 applicants.

“I think we should cast a wider net,” she said, adding that the new director should focus on marketing and outreach in the community.

Wider than 80? Or was she simply upset that the board narrowed the choice before they invited people to speak up?

This has been handled very badly by the board. Hiring a CEO is always the responsibility of the board. I pity the person who takes the job. It’s hard to restore boundaries once they’ve been breached. 

This is a small museum, but it seems to me that some much larger museums are treading too close to boundaries as they experiment with “access.”

That’s the headline on an article I’ve written on single-picture exhibitions, published in the September issue of The Art Newspaper.  It’s not online, at least at the moment.

But I have posted it – in a longer version — on my website. That’s one of the joys of having no space limitations on the web. It’s still not long — just about 800 words.

The story adds a few examples to those I’ve already chronicled on Real Clear Arts (e.g., Titian’s La Bella at the Kimbell, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum and Moran’s Shoshone Falls on the Snake River in Portland.) The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art and the Frick are among others doing it, too.

At the Speed Museum of Art, director Charles Venable told me that he’s negotiating the loan of a sculpture, thematically linked to the Kentucky Derby, for a show next spring. He can’t say what — any guesses?

Meantime, isn’t the picture here, of visitors viewing Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller at the Speed, fabulous?

Here’s how the Cedar Rapids exhibition came about, according to Sean Ulmer, a curator at the museum:

Three years ago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art approached the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art asking to borrow its seminal work, Grant Wood’s Woman with Plants (1929), for an upcoming traveling exhibition they were planning focusing on the art of the 1920s.  “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” opens at the BMA this October and then travels to the Dallas Museum of Art and then the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

 

Knowing that Woman with Plants is a pivotal work of art in our collection, the BMA generously offered us a choice from their collection in exchange.  In consultation with the Director, we decided that we wanted a truly significant work, one that had much to tell our visitors.  Part of this decision was based on our previous experience of displaying our 8 Rembrandt etchings during the 400th anniversary year of the artist’s birth, along side enlargements and accompanied by magnifying glasses.  Visitors welcomed the opportunity to slow down and look more carefully at these works, seeing Rembrandt’s craftsmanship in a way they never had before.  In choosing a work from the BMA’s vast collection, we wanted to create another opportunity for the museum visitor to focus on a singular work and to consider all it has to say. 

 

Fortunately, Terry Carbone, the curator at the BMA was able to help us narrow our field by listing several works she found particularly rich, not only in form but also in content.  We arrived at Charles Willson Peale’s 1776 portrait of George Washington, commissioned by John Hancock.  Created less than a year after being named Commander in Chief and shortly after his early success in the Siege of Boston, Washington sat for this portrait in late May 1776.  Hancock, President of the Second Continental Congress, was a successful merchant and major landowner in Boston and commissioned this work as a way of acknowledging Washington and how he saved Boston, and thus Hancock’s fortunes.  This important painting will be displayed in a gallery by itself and accompanied by panels that discuss several different aspects of the painting: George Washington, John Hancock, Charles Willson Peale, the Battle of Boston and the Revolutionary War.  There will even be a panel that discusses Grant Wood’s fascination with George Washington and the Revolutionary War.   In this way, we will offer the visitor a chance to look carefully at an American masterpiece and to consider all the stories it has to reveal.

Photo Credit: By Kertis Creative, Courtesy of the Speed Art Museum

Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

When I last checked in with it, on August 11, the multi-venue art extravaganza started by the Getty Trust to celebrate the birth of the Los Angeles art scene in the ’60s, PST involved 60 cultural institutions. They had an amazing roster of exhibitions.

Today, PST organizers announced that more than 70 private art galleries in Culver City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and the Greater Los Angeles area will join in, staging more than 125 exhibitions. This truly looks to me to be what the press release actually says, an “unprecedented cultural collaboration.” 

Focusing on the years immediately after World War II right through the 1960s and 70s, the galleries — which include Blum + Poe, David Kordansky, LA Louver, to name just a few — will present Pop art, Minimalism, assemblage, ceramics, political graphics, printmaking, conceptual art and much more.

Museums and galleries don’t always mix in public (though galleries often link their shows to museum shows — right now Achim Moeller is showing Lyonel Feininger, as is the Whitney, for example). But as Andrew Perchuk, Deputy Director of the Getty Research Institute, said in the PST press release:

Galleries played a critical role in L.A.’s post-war art scene. These spaces gave artists venues for experimentation and innovation and created a much-needed community for artists and patrons at a time when other resources for artists were scarce in Los Angeles.

Considering the vast subject, and how large the effort is, this collaboration between the public and the private seems to pass muster, at least with me.

The list of participating galleries is not yet online, but it will be soon — at the link in the first line of this post.

The sexiness of contemporary art, and of being center of the arts, seems to be a global phenomenon — a matter of imagination, of aspiration, of pride, and probably of business, too.  

Recently, Nigeria — which has stabilized a bit in recent years under a civilian government — got into the act. Its onetime capital, Lagos, has a National Museum, which displays bronzes and ivories from the Kingdom of Benin, but no contemporary art.

To fill that void, no one is erecting a grand new physical space for a contemporary art in what remains a poor country — which is smart. Rather, the Pan African University has started a “Virtual Museum of Modern Nigeria Art.” The site is still under construction, but it’s a start and it’s something of a plus to museums around the world that are trying to have a global outlook in an era of shrinking resources. And to the curious. (Not that anyone is going to collect art after seeing what’s on the virtual museum website — but it does provide an introduction.)

As Jess Castellote, the Spanish architect and art observer who was hired to run the site said recently, “There are many Nigerian artists who have produced great works but (who are) unknown. This is a challenge; the museum will not solve the problem, but it is a small contribution.”

I learned about the effort in a Nigerian publication called Next, which published an article about it last month. (Next has a robust section on culture, btw.)

Here’s how the museum explains itself:

The Virtual Museum of Modern Nigerian Art (VMMNA) is an online, free, searchable database of Nigerian art from the beginning of the twentieth century. Its main aim is to serve as an educational resource that will contribute to the dissemination of knowledge on modern Nigerian art and artists among the widest possible audience.

The artworks displayed in this virtual museum are held in private, corporate and institutional collections in and outside Nigeria.

And here’s a sample of what’s on view:

The Next article does a good job of describing what you’ll see on the site:

The Virtual Museum of Modern Nigerian Art has 10 rooms, a number of which are dedicated to major Nigerian art schools and styles.

Master printmaker, Bruce Onobrakpeya, however, has an exhibition solely dedicated to him in recognition of his landmark artistic achievements. There is the Zaria Exhibition Room, Nsukka Exhibition Room, Lagos Exhibition Room, Yaba Exhibition Room, and The Oshogbo Experiment.

The virtual museum also features Ife Exhibition Room, Auchi Exhibition Room, and The Future (which showcases works of a group of young artists who have not yet been stylistically defined).

81 artists are spread across the rooms at present, but Castellote intends to increase the number to 100 by the end of the year. There are also approximately 400 works comprising mostly paintings and sculptures, but the architect and his assistant hope to gather more by working with art collectors and artists.

There is also provision for a virtual exhibition space which will feature past, present, and upcoming exhibitions, apart from the artists and rooms.

It’s unclear to me how virtual museums will develop, and whether they attract visitors steadily after the initial burst of interest. But for countries like Nigeria striving to stake out territory in the contemporary art world, they seem worth a try.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Modern Nigerian Art