Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Judith H. Dobrzynski

Obama Finally Replaces Librarian of Congress

It took more than six years, but President Obama got his way today, appointing the first African-American as Librarian of Congress: Carla D. Hayden, head of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore’s public library. I should say “nominating, because with this Congress and this President, who know what will happen.

CarlaHaydenI first suggested that the LOC’s librarian James Billington, then 80, would be eased out back in 2009. My sources in Washington for that also tipped me to Hayden’s likely appointment.

But Billington has his friends and they contributed money to the LOC. He survived reports of mismanagement, including one issued a year ago by the GAO, as reported by the Washington Post:

The result of a year-long investigation by the Government Accountability Office, the report reveals a work environment lacking central oversight and faults Librarian of Congress James H. Billington for ignoring repeated calls to hire a chief information officer, as required by law….

“There’s nobody running the ship,” said retired inspector general Karl Schornagel, who worked with Billington for almost 13 years until retiring in 2014. “There’s a lot of individual parties doing their own thing.”

Billington finally retired at the age of 86 last year.

And Obama has kept steady on his goal of making a historical appointment. As I recall, not everyone was happy her either, but that’s Washington for you.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Baltimore Sun

 

The Met versus The Met–At Least People Care

I am, of course, talking about the Metropolitan Museum* and the Metropolitan Opera. Since I last posted, on the Met Museum’s new logo, many people have weighed in both here and on other sites as well as to me personally. The naysayers have been more vocal, if not more numerous (that is hard to tell).

A couple are worth sharing, starting with one that wonders about plagiarism. Well, there’s nothing new under the sun, but just take a look at the rendering of
“Met” in these two pictures:

MMAcrop

MetOperacrop

 

 

 

 

On the left we have the opera–an old libretto; on the right, the museum.

Look a little similar? For this the Met Museum paid millions–the number $3 million has been cited to me by several people, inside and outside the museum, but the museum has told me that is too high. I simply don’t know.

Now, it’s true that the millions will cover the design of the whole rebranding campaign, not just the new logo.

The Wall Street Journal‘s article on this, published Friday, engendered a couple of trenchant comments. Here’s one I like, edited (boldface mine):

The former logo was superior, especially so because of its homage to da Vinci and thus artistic tradition. The new Macy’s logo is merely OK. And it scares those of us who fear an eventual Brooklynization of the great institution. I’m referring to the somewhat recent morphing  of the Brooklyn Museum into a landfill of modernistic/contemporary junk.

The justification of the new mark, that it represents a more inclusive welcome to the masses, is nonsense….

That a red color was chosen  because it “embodies passion and vitality…across time and culture” should have added  “and Madison Avenue” to make it more accurate. Is the store on the 1st floor going to be made bigger?…

Here’s another:

Not an art major, but one thing that bugs me is the lack of a serif on the ‘E’ in MET.  How to explain it, like the ‘M’ is pulling down the ‘E’.  I see the problem there, but don’t know how to fix it.

Over at Vulture, where Justin Davidson broke the story, there was this comment:

I am not a designer, but I have eyes and the semblance of a soul and this is atrocious. In fact, I am calling it an act of hostility. It’s the equivalent of a bride forcing her bridesmaid into an ugly frock.

And another:

Abject design failure. Why bother changing such a great, iconic logo? As other commenters mentioned, with all the artists in residence and in the NY/NYC area, this is what they came up with? Yuck.

And then of course there was this:

The words do not yet exist to properly describe how infinitely abhorrent this wretched thing is. Perhaps one day, centuries into the future, the people of earth will unite in an effort to properly define this abomination so that the generations proceeding may right the wrongs of their ancestors and see to it this never happens again.

So, right, let’s all relax. The Met is not happy about the controversy, but it should be happy that people care so much.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.

 

The Met’s New Logo

It’s a disaster, as I predicted here last June in “The Met’s Coming Rebranding: A Puzzlement.” In fact, it’s worse than I had heard. Justin Davidson posted this image on New York magazine’s Vulture site earlier today. Ugh.

17-met-logo-new.w529.h352

Davidson nailed it:

The whole ensemble looks like a red double-decker bus that has stopped short, shoving the passengers into each other’s backs. Worse, the entire top half of the new logo consists of the word the.

MetLogoWhy anyone thinks that is better than the Metropolitan Museum’s* old logo is beyond me.

Now I will go away and try to think of something deeper to say about this huge mistake. In the meantime, please go to my 2015 post on the subject, which tries to provide Tom Campbell’s rationale, shaky though it is.

For a museum, one has to ask: does anybody there have an eye?

*I consult to a museum that supports the Met.

The Arts: By The (National) Numbers

A few years ago, when the National Endowment for the Arts said it would join with the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to determine how much the arts contributed to the economy, I applauded. When the very first data was released, I even tried to sell an article to about the beginning of this worthwhile effort. The editor I pitched passed, saying that we should wait until the data was more meaningful and more revealing.

How right he was. I still welcome the NEA’s initiative, but the release of a report today shows that this task will be harder than we perhaps thought. What we have now is not, to my eyes, very revealing about museums, operas, jazz venues, etc. The data are too encompassing.

Look at the headline numbers, quoted from the NEA release:

In 2013, arts and cultural production contributed $704.2 billion to the U.S. economy, a 32.5 percent increase since 1998, and 4.23 percent of total GDP…. more than some other sectors, such as construction ($619B) and utilities ($270B).

The annual growth rate for arts and culture as a whole (1.8 percent) was on par with that of the total U.S. economy (1.9 percent). But it grew faster than other sectors such as accommodation and food services (1.4 percent), retail trade (1.3 percent), and transportation and warehousing (1.1 percent).

Another key finding is that consumer spending on the performing arts grew 10 percent annually over the 15-year period.

The production of performing arts services has grown at a faster clip than arts and cultural production in general, contributing $44.5 billion to the U.S. economy in 2013.

In 2013, arts and cultural sector employed 4.7 million wage and salary workers, earning $339 billion. Industries employing the largest number of ACPSA workers include government (including school-based arts education), retail trade, broadcasting, motion picture industries, and publishing.

The industry with the fastest growth in arts and culture production between 1998 and 2013 was “other information services,” a category that includes online publishing, broadcasting, and streaming services (12.3 percent). Other fast-growing industries were sound recording (9.5 percent), arts-related computer systems design (including services for films and sound recordings) (7.7 percent), and regular broadcasting (5 percent).

You can see already one of the key problems. The numbers do not separate profit-making arts businesses from non-profit cultural institutions. Therefore, in that wonderful $44.5 billion contributed to the economy by performing arts services, what is (non-profit) opera? What is jazz? Are they shrinking while performances of “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” and “Menopause; The Musical” toured to more cities?

That consumer spending number also asks more questions than it answers: does it mean that more people went to performing arts productions, that prices were raised faster than other consumer spending, or both? Or something different?

Also, what would happen to these aggregate numbers if you subtract the motion picture business, television, “craft arts” (meaning production of jewelry, china, silverware and custom architectural woodwork), fashion, manufacture of musical instruments, etc.?  They are all part of these accounts. The definitions are overly broad. (Witness this chart.)

ADP9--fast-growing-industries%20

The employment numbers include tattoo artists, TV broadcasters, newspaper photographers, business agents and camera repairmen as well as fine artists of all disciplines, btw.

I won’t go on. I’m glad the NEA/BEA are trying this, but for now it’s not much use to what RCA readers would consider the arts unless it continues to be refined. And I would ward off any use of the cultural sector being bigger than the construction sector without a definition in terms–to cite one example. The cultural sector, after all, gains nothing if its facts are not credible.

Chart Courtesy of the NEA

Miles To Go: The Met Breuer’s Unspoken Task

The Metropolitan Museum* put on a show for the press last week at a briefing on the Met Breuer. It took place, oddly (for the Met) in a black gallery in the main museum building and over cocktails at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Tom Campbell, Sheena Wagstaff, Jeff Rosenheim (photography) and Limor Tomor (performances) spoke. I was encouraged by two things in particular: Campbell said that the Met has spent time and money spiffing up the building, returning it to the condition in which it opened in 1965, they said. Wagstaff spoke also somewhat, and I learned more in conversations over drinks, by the range and potential of Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, the first large exhibition set for the Met Breuer. I hope the exhibit lives up to its potential, which is large.

Met-breuerThe building opens to the public on March 18, to members beginning March 8, and–presumably–to trustees, donors and patrons before that.

And, I would hope, to another group, for the Met Breuer has a very big job to do aside from showcasing modern and contemporary art in historical context, as only the Met can do. The Met Breuer must win over potential patrons, specifically collectors of modern and contemporary art.

It’s no secret that the Met’s collection in these areas is, shall we say, full of gaps. But I’m not sure the extent of the gaps have been digested by the press, though surely Wagstaff knows.

So today I conducted a little exercise. I made a list of the top best-selling living artists last year, American and European. I added in a few names, like Kiefer, that few people would quarrel about as important. Then I put all of their names into the Met’s online collection database, and recorded the number of works by each the Met owns, the number on view, and whether or not (Y or N) the Met owns a major piece. (? means it’s debatable.)

The results are  below.

I know there will be quarrels with this list. The market doesn’t rule taste or historical importance, I agree. I actually hope the Met doesn’t acquire art by some people on the list. But this roster is better than an arbitrary list drawn up to my taste. And by the very fact that these artists attain high prices at auction, the Met probably cannot afford to buy them, and therefore must depend on donations from collectors.

The Met does have something to offer collectors, and rightly it is the historical context that might make contemporary works more understandable or give them more gravitas (we wish). The Met Breuer, if it shines, should begin that process in earnest.

Here’s the list.

ARTIST                 OWNED      ON VIEW          MAJOR WORK?

  • Auerbach            2                 0                      N
  • Bacon                 2                  1                      ?
  • Cattelan              1                 0                      N
  • de Kooning        27                 3                     N
  • Doig                    2                 0                      N
  • Frankenthaler    46                2                       ?
  • Freud                 12                1                       Y
  • Hammons           1                 0                       N
  • Hirst                    3                 0                       N
  • Hockney            76                 2                      Y
  • Johns                81                 4                       Y
  • Kapoor                2                 0                      ?
  • Kiefer                 58                1                      Y
  • Koons                 0                   0                    N
  • Marden               5                  0                     N
  • Martin                 4                  0                      N
  • Nauman             8                   0                     N
  • Noland               0                   0                     N
  • Ofili                     1                   0                     N
  • Pistoletto            1                   0                     N
  • Polke                   6                   0                     N
  • Pollock            125                   2                     Y
  • Prince               11                    0                     ?
  • Reilly                  0                    0                    N
  • Richter               7                    0                    N
  • Rothko              17                    3                    Y
  • Ruscha             49                    0                    N
  • Ryman               3                     0                    N
  • Stingel                0                    0                     N
  • Warhol            109                   4                    N
  • Wool                  1                     1                    N

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Met

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.