Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Archives for January 2013

Side Benefit to Denver’s van Gogh Show: Instilling Local Pride

I had no intention of writing again about Becoming van Gogh, the homegrown exhibition at the Denver Art Museum that chronicles precisely how Vincent taught himself to draw and develop the style that has made him so beloved and appreciated. I wrote about it on this blog twice in October, laying out why it was both so special and difficult for Denver museum curator Timothy Standring to do (here) and also about how its teaching moments were exceptional (here).

More recently, I mentioned that the exhibit was so popular that the museum was staying open overnight — allowing visitors to van Gogh from 8 a.m. on Saturday through 11:59 on Sunday night. The tickets sold out quickly. And even before that I knew — from talking with DAM director Christoph Heinrich when I was in Denver two weeks ago — that it was going to be a record-setter for the museum.

But today’s report in the Denver Post  (which has some visitorship and new membership information) reminded me of something else I wanted to say about the show. Post reporter Ray Mark Rinaldi stopped in at 4 a.m. on Sunday, and caught the crowd “transitioning from the ‘stayed ups’ to the ‘got ups’ ” and noted the “durable energy” in the galleries. Then he quotes a woman, there with her nine-year-old daughter, saying:

We live in Denver. We don’t get a chance to see something like this often.

That is both heart-breaking and heart-warming to me. Of course, van Gogh is one of the most well-known artists — even people who know little about art know about him. And that’s why some come to an exhibition like this, even when, say, the Toledo Museum of Art did not quite make its target for its recent Manet show.

But Denverites also seemed to have appreciated the fact that the exhibition was “made in Denver.” It wasn’t a traveling show. Standring told me recently that he’s now recognized by people as he goes about their daily business. Denverites are taking pride in their museum, and that’s a level up from simply attending a blockbuster.

Heretofore, as Rinaldi pointed out, “The museum’s biggest hits tend to be traveling shows that make a stop here, such as 2010’s display of King Tut treasures and and last year’s Yves Saint Laurent fashion show.”

Listen to a few reader comments posted after that Post article:

I saw another major Van Gogh exhibit in LA a decade ago and this one was every bit its match, not only in the quality of the works, but in the telling of the narrative. This was a major exhibition that any museum would have been proud to assemble. Congratulations to the DAM and the curator. You brought an amazing experience to this former cow town.

And:
Mr. Standring- Well done. I learned a lot and enjoyed the whole thing. And now I know where DAM is. Wasn’t exactly a regular before.
It’s a wonderful thing to create a blockbuster that draws in new people to an art museum — it’s even greater to make the local community proud of an art museum they rarely visited before.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Post

Austin Explores Creating A Folk Art Museum

Last summer, when I went briefly to Mexico City on vacation, I was totally bowled over by a collection of Latin American folk art I saw there. It was beautiful, it was different, it varied across regions and countries, it was sophisticated, and it was well-crafted.

affa-savethedate-followup4-webSo I was delighted to learn of an unrelated, but possibly similar, development in Austin: This Friday, a group of folk art collectors there who banded together in the late ’80s, will sponsor a public meeting to explore whether or not to start a folk art museum there. Austin Friends of Folk Art, a nonprofit, has brought experts to set the scene — two art people, two museum planning experts, and Ned Rifkin, whom you’ll remember as both a museum director and curator, now a professor at the University of Texas. (See invite at right.)

Folk art is a tricky thing. It’s not “hot” among collectors and some folk art museums — notably the one in New York — have had a hard time attracting sufficient audiences to meet their expectations. The Austin collectors seem to have a Latin bent. An article about the group’s hopes in the Austin American-Statesman mentions folk art from Mexico, plus grants to Latino organizations.

But the Friends group seems well aware of the potential pitfalls. The Statesman quotes Merry Wheaton, the current president of AFFA, saying:

Clearly there are a lot of (folk art) collections in town that will need to be housed and taken care of. We’re an all-volunteer organization, and we don’t have an endowment or maybe even the people who could lead the fundraising for a new building. But maybe we don’t need a building.

Instead, it might create displays at:

Hotel lobbies, the airport — any place people already gather. Art is already exhibited in such places.

And:

There are lots of possibilities. What we want is to put ideas out there, see what the community desires and see who else is out there and interested. If there’s energy out there for something, we can move forward.

Sensible, and perhaps enlightened. We shall see after Friday.

 

Will There Be Another Round of Admission Hikes?

The Art Institute of Chicago is digging deeper into our pockets: yesterday the Chicago Park District board of commissioners approved a hike in admissions and a bigger jump for non-Illinois residents. As of Feb. 1, general adult admission for instaters will rise from $16 to $18, and out-of-staters like me will pay $23, up from $18.

The Chicago Tribune quotes AIC director Douglas Druick saying:

If we didn’t have to do it, we wouldn’t do it. It was felt that this was reasonable, not too onerous and signaled our commitment to the city and to the state by putting more of the burden on out-of-state tourist visitors.Druick

It seems like only yesterday that the last increase occurred, but apparently it was 2009.

A later story in the Tribune said that the AIC currently gets 4% of its operating revenues from admissions. Averages for that figure are all squishy, if you ask me — they vary partly because the universe of museums that report each year to the Association of Art Museum Directors is not the same every year, nor are reporting practices of museums universal. But that seems low to me for a museum like the IAC, which should have a decent tourist trade (or should have. Whether they’ll come at $23 is another question.)

To me, this all means that the new modern wing is not living up to its initial promise. I am confident guessing that the 4% figure was higher before the new wing increased expenses. Did that outreach to the park bring more paying customers? Or just people who came the ramp, looked around and descended again?

I’m a realist: museums have to maximize revenues. That doesn’t always mean increasing admissions, and I do hope this doesn’t backfire.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune

A Diversion: Doubt, The Opera

I can’t say for sure, but I think that John Patrick Shanley is setting some sort of record. Shanley, whom you probably know as the author of Doubt: A Parable, the Pulitzer and Tony award winning drama about learning to live with uncertainty, is about to introduce that story in a third medium — opera. He has already written his script into a screenplay, as well as directed that movie, Doubt, which starred Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

JohnPatrickShanleyNow he has written the libretto for Doubt, the opera, which premieres next Saturday, Jan. 26, at the Minnesota Opera. (Douglas Cuomo is the composer.) Shanley may be the first writer to turn out one story, part of his own, in three different art forms.

I talked with him about this recently. He wrote the play, as he told me, in “four or five weeks — or my whole life.” After that, “it was thrust upon me both times,” he says.

A few other tidbits:

  • Shanley knew, and still knows, little about opera, but that didn’t stop him from writing the libretto.
  • To do so, he didn’t go back to what he had already written: “The benefit I bring – I go back to the neighborhood, not the film or the play  – this is my life.”
  • Yes, each of the four characters in the play — Sister Aloysius, Father Flynn, Sister James and Mrs. Miller — has an aria.
  • “With opera, you breathe a sigh of relief. There are all these other people [the chorus/congregation, for example] and the orchestra. Now we have a world to support the story.”
  • “In a play you write in a style. The characters share a world view. They agree what world they are living in, demonstrated by the language. In an opera, you share the music. Characters that may be in violent disagreement share the music.”
  • “Opera has spectacle, which is what people want to see.
  • “The opera will have new material, and it lose some from the movie/play. “You could not simply musicalize the play.”
  • “Film is a nightmare because there’s no tradition in film – no ‘I will put up with this film because it’s good for me.’ It’s a popcorn medium, a popular medium – people have to be entertained. They have to be involved.” 
  • “The latest medium is the best. It’s still a living thing.”

Droll, witty, and pretty much uncorked, Shanley is the subject of a Cultural Conversation that I wrote, which will appear in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. I laughed a lot during the couple of hours I spent with him. Having seen Doubt in both other manifestations, I’d like to be at the opera. But I’ll have to wait until another time, because I doubt I’ll get to Minneapolis.

Meantime, after it opens, I invite RCA readers to tell us all what it’s like by leaving a comment.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Edgemar Center for the Arts

 

Pacific Standard Time 2.0

You can’t keep a good idea down. The Getty knew it had a fantastic idea a few years ago by starting Pacific Standard Time, the sweeping roster of exhibitions and programs at 68 arts institutions across Southern California that in 2011 chronicled art in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980. It also drew in more than 70 private art galleries in Culver City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and the Greater Los Angeles area, which staged more than 125 exhibitions.

PST_logo_vert_CMYKNot wanting that brand to die, the Getty promptly said last summer that it would continue the effort with a run of shows on California architecture. It warned that the original PST took years to organize, though, and that version 2.0 would be smaller.

In September, a press release suggested that Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. would involve nine exhibitions, plus “accompanying programs and events” in and around Los Angeles between April and July of this year. At one point, Getty Foundation head Deborah Marrow told me that the Getty would split about $1 million on grantees in the partnership.

Fast forward to now: The Getty is out with new information — the roster has grown to 11 exhibitions and the Foundation has doled out $3.6 million in grants to 16 organizations for exhibitions, publications and programming. I suspect that galleries or others may figure out a way to participate, just as they did last time. This year’s version, though, will be much more manageable. (And btw, the new subject goes along with the Getty Conservation Institute’s Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative. 

Here are the architecture exhibition partners: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art; the Hammer Museum; the Getty; the A+D Architecture and Design Museum; the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara; the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture; and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. The other programming partners are the Center for Land Use Interpretation; Community Art Resources, Inc.; The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens; the Los Angeles Conservancy; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Machine Project; Pasadena Heritage; and UCLA Architecture and Urban Design.

You find the whole list of exhibitions in the new press release, and more information about them here. And of course there’s a separate website.

The Getty’s own show, Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990, is called “the first major museum exhibition to survey Los Angeles’s built environment and rapid postwar evolution into one of the most populous and influential industrial, economic and creative capitals in the world.”

As others catch my eye, I’ll may write about some of the individual projects in the weeks ahead.

The question is whether this is enough to keep the brand not only alive but also sexy. Or will it disappoint those who went to the first PST? Can 11 exhibitions and other programming combine to make a critical mass? We won’t know until we see the contents of the exhibitions.