Archives for September 2011

A few thoughts after a trip to the Metropolitan Museum* yesterday:

• Based on an unscientific, mid-afternoon observation, which admittedly can’t be made too much of, the hike to $25 for the suggested admission price on Sept. 1 either was not known to the people who went on Labor Day, or didn’t deter many. The museum was pretty packed in several areas — the Frans Hals exhibit, the European paintings permanent galleries (some were “benched” off, and closed), the European decorative arts galleries and the Medieval galleries. Also — the store, where there was a short line for the cash registers.
• Let me be clear: I’m not in favor of high admission charges, but the Met knows its costs ($40 per visitor) and this is a suggested price, not mandatory. The museum has to find the money somewhere.
• The Hals show includes the painting above called “The Fisher Girl” (1630-32), which the label notes was sold by the Brooklyn Museum* in 1967. It is now in a private collection, and hasn’t been seen in years. Out of curiosity, I later looked in The New York Times Archive to see if the deaccession then had caused a fuss. I couldn’t even find a reference, let alone a fuss, which makes me wonder if the Brooklyn sold it privately, unannounced — if so, I strenuously object. The only reference that I found to the deaccession via a search, and it was a disapproving one (thankfully), came in 1976, when Thomas B. Hess wrote in New York Magazine, in a column called “scandals and atrocities”:

Some years earlier (1967) another director sold a unique Old Master (Frans Hal’s Fisher Girl, to be exact) to expand the museum’s considerable 19th century American holdings. In short, unwise leadership, while attempting to cope, succeeded in exacerbating certain problems…including disillusionment in parts of the community with many of the standards traditionally associated with a great museum.

     According to the Brooklyn Museum’s online records, it seems to have given the Hals painting to Wildenstein for sale, along with still lifes by Cezanne and Rodin. The Brooklyn does have another Hals, a better one, but still…

This is why we need transparency in deaccessioning. I love American art, but I’d still like to know what the Brooklyn bought with those funds.  

*I consult to a foundation that supports these organizations.

 

From time to time, as recently as last Thursday in fact, I’ve written about museums’ use of the Internet, and often I’ve thought, “nice try, but…” There’s still a lot to be discovered about using the Interest effectively and to its best advantage.

Yesterday, though, I discovered a particularly effective effort, after a somewhat frustrating visit to the Morgan Library and Museum.* I’d gone there to see Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands, which ends today. It’s a rich show, and as I walked around I felt a bit like an opera-goer without opera glasses: I needed a magnifying glass to really see these fantastic manuscripts, and I wondered why the Morgan hadn’t supplied some for visitors. (I have raised this subject before, and I have praised the Nelson-Atkins Museum for doing so.)

Later, at home, I went to the Morgan website and discovered the online exhibition for the fashion show. Here, forty-eight illustrations are online, each with a zoom-in function that allows viewers to see the works and probably better than I would have seen them onsite with a magnifying glass.

Of course, the Morgan is hardly the only museum to mount online exhibitions, and this is one of more than two dozen at the Morgan, so the effort is hardly new.

But for visitors to the fashion exhibit, it’s a fabulous find (and maybe should have been noted at the exhibit?), and for those who can’t get there, a magnification of the exhibit’s audience.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Morgan

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Morgan

 

Another post triggered by Facebook today: And frankly, I am of mixed mind about this one.  

Today, instead of letting people ask curators questions on its Facebook page (as it does once a month, with curators sitting in a conference room with their laptops), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts turned the tables and had its curators ask questions of people visiting its page.

Some of the questions were, to me, beside the point — for example, “What’s your favorite place to eat when you’re visiting the MIA?” and, just behind it, “Which part of the Asian art gallery is your favorite?” Ok, such questions humanize curators, I suppose, and create a little relationship, but it’s a shallow one and hardly worth a curator’s time.

Other questions were middling — “Who else at the MIA, besides the curators,  would you all like to direct questions to on facebook?” I was pleased to see someone wanted to hear from the volunteers.

Others asked for exhibition suggestions, favorite craft artists, and so on.

I think the one that drew the most interesting answers was about acquistions — “…Assuming we had 7 million dollars, who are the top three artists we should acquire?”

It also drew the most comments, I think — 21. The answers seem a bit surprising. Among the suggestions: Twombly, Rubens, Schiele, Dix, Poussette-Dart, Richter, Caillebotte, Sargent, Rothko, Pollock, Homer, Friedrich (!) etc.  

These are classics; they are not the hot artists pulling down gigantic prices in galleries. Of course, great works by them are also hard to get, and expensive — though $7 million could buy something good/great.

But the answers are unlikely to have any impact on the acquisitions committee, and they shouldn’t. So what’s the point? The answers are too few to be meaningful to the museum, and it shouldn’t be polling visitors about acquisitions anyway. So it’s just fun, and there’s nothing wrong with fun, unless people think they are having a say.

One commenter is already a little angry; he wrote: “I suggest you not acquire the same artists that every other museum is exhibiting. The international Tour de Museums is starting to resemble the tourist districts of every urban center, offering your average expected fair; Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret, ad nauseam…. There have been many competent artists who aren’t getting the recognition they deserve. Establish yourself as ahead of the pack, not one of the pack.”

All this tells me that the MIA, and other museums, are still figuring out how to use social media — and will, probably, for a long time.