Archives for November 2011

How funny, and inconsistent, the public is sometimes. When the Metropolitan Museum* raised its suggested price to $25 earlier this year, the outcry was tremendous. Ditto the Museum of Modern Art’s* admissions hike — mandatory — to $22.50.  

But when Christie’s charges $30 per ticket to see 850 items once owned by Elizabeth Taylor —  “including [her] legendary jewelry, haute couture, ready-to-wear fashion, handbags and accessories, and a selection of decorative arts, and film memorabilia being sold in the live auction” for four days, Dec. 13-16, no one says boo. No one complains that the tickets to the exhibition (Dec. 3 through 12) are available only online, are timed and offer no discounts to students or seniors. Oh yes, and add the $30 cost of a “printed gallery guide.” (The catalogues for the four-day sale cost $300.)

Is there also irony in the fact that Christie’s suggests that visitors spend an hour and a half in the exhibit?

Here are the answers to other frequently asked questions.

People will pay and go. Taylor’s items have been on a three-month global tour that has included stops in Moscow, London, Los Angeles, Dubai, Geneva, Paris and Hong Kong. Some of those shows were free, but Christie’s also charged for admission to the exhibition in Los Angeles, where “tickets…sold out online within a matter of days, and Christie’s added extra, late night viewing hours to accommodate the many fans and collectors who came to see the exhibition,” according to its press release.

Christie’s, of course, has every right to charge what it wants. The market is bearing it. But it does make one wonder why people will pay for celebrity but not for the highest arts. What’s the message for museums?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met and MoMA.

 

As I’ve been away, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do — it’s amazing how much can happen or be written about in the art world in just five days. 

Let’s start with a headline that intrigued me: The Accidental Art Mogul. I quickly learned that the moniker was given to someone who deserves attention — the art dealer Marian Goodman. Writing in Newsweek magazine, Blake Gopnik shines a light on a gallerist (the term she prefers) whose track record of showing artists that matter, early in their careers, not after everyone else has discovered them, is an open secret in part of the art world — but who gets much less attention that showier dealers who follow taste or, rather, the money. 

Goodman, meanwhile, has roster of artists that includes Gerhard Richter, William Kentridge, Jeff Wall, John Baldessari, Julie Mehretu, Thomas Struth (his picture of her is at right), Tino Sehgal, and many more. Not all are my taste, but they are (mostly) serious artists.

As Gopnik writes,

Kerry Brougher, deputy director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, calls her a “curator’s dealer”: “It’s not enough for her just to sell it to a private collection for a great amount of money. The art has to be out there where the public can see it.” Brougher says that he’s actually heard Goodman complain when art prices rise. At a recent dinner for one of her artists, Goodman sat at a head table that included curators, artists, a critic, and various other culturati–but not a single collector.

And:

Almost every big contemporary gallery is funded by the blue-chip old works they sell out of the back room, while Goodman almost never sells works that her artists haven’t made. “It’s all front room,” says Tate director Nicholas Serota. “It’s an achievement to build a gallery on those terms.” Where other major galleries seem to have a supermarket approach, with something to feed any billionaire’s habit, most Goodman artists conform to one vision. “There’s an ethos in the gallery that you don’t find in many others,” says Serota. Goodman spots good work by young artists who seem likely to matter–the Jeff Walls of this world–and then sticks by it.

Have a look at some works she has sold here.

Goodman isn’t very accessible to the press, and that’s part of why she has gone unrecognized. To some editors (and I’ve tried), she’s a hard sell for that very reason. So kudos to Gopnik for getting her to talk and to Newsweek for printing it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Marian Goodman/Thomas Struth via Newsweek

 

Dear RCA Readers,

If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted, my apologies. I am just back from a quick trip to Italy, where I expected to have more access to a computer — and more time to post — than I actually did.

But I’ll be posting again soon, probably later today.

 

 

 

So much attention is paid to contemporary art in China that I thought it might be a good idea to highlight two exhibitions, on opposite sides of the country, that focus on modern, but historical Chinese art.

Since Oct. 30, the Denver Museum of Art has been showcasing the work of Xu Beihong (1895-1953). His name may not ring a bell, but it should. The Denver museum calls Xu “the father of modern Chinese painting.” Xu, who was one of the first Chinese artists to study in Europe — Paris, in his case — was an advocate for incorporating Western techniques into traditional Chinese painting. Over the course of his career, he became a prominent teacher and global ambassador for Chinese art, making a difference both in China, where he helped revolutionize the arts institutions, and abroad, where he helped reshape international perceptions of Chinese painting. 

This show will include 61 paintings, most borrowed from the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, most of which never before been on view in the United States. Read more here about the exhibition and here about the man. The exhibition will end on Jan. 29.

In New York, meanwhile, the China Institute has been displaying Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art, 1974-1985, since Sept. 15. But as the description notes, few exhibitions have asked the question, how did internationally oriented art appear, given the background of 35 years of socialist realism?

This exhibition does, “focus[ing] on paintings and sculpture from three unofficial groups of artists, the No Names, the Stars, and the Grass Society, which pushed beyond Maoism in the early post-Cultural Revolution era. Each group pursued creatively diverse paths to artistic freedoms under the harsh political strictures and against the accepted aesthetic norms of the time. The work they produced opened the door for the avant-garde movement to emerge in China and paved the way for Chinese artists working today.”

It runs until Dec. 11.

Photo Credits: Six Galloping Horses, Courtesy of the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum (top), and Wang Keping’s Silent, Courtesy of the China Institute (bottom)