Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Government Support

FUN Fellowships At An Art Museum Are No Joke

As is often said, non-fiction is stranger than fiction: Sometimes you just can’t make things up as well as life does. That is certainly the case with a press release that DIDN’T land in my email box last week. Someone had to tip me off to it.

The announcement was made by the Museum of Arts and Design, and it said that it had chosen four winners of its “FUN Fellowship,” which “was established in 2011 by the Museum of Arts and Design in recognition of the vital role nightlife practitioners play in the city’s creative community and artistic endeavors.”

The winners receive both financial and logistical support “to help them advance and realize their latest nightlife-related projects.” This year’s winners are Ladyfag, FCKNLZ, CHERYL, and Babycastles. The release continues:  

The Fun Fellows were identified through a complex, competitive process. MAD invited 100 individuals from the art and nightlife communities to each nominate a candidate. From this group, 35 individuals and collaboratives were selected as semi-finalists by a collection of their peers, and the winners were chosen by a jury comprised of curators, nightlife luminaries, critics, and previous Fun Fellows. “We wanted to make sure we’re not trying to force nightlife practitioners into the fine arts sector, but rather expanding the sector to better accommodate the practice,” said Jake Yunza, MAD’s Manager of Public Programs and founder of the THE FUN fellowship.

The “fine arts sector”? And why would MAD think New York City’s nightlife needs such support? Check that press release link for the nature of these subsidized projects, which involve dance-induced euphoria, private “Dayclub” events not open to the public, video game hacking workshops, and theatrical restagings of club-kid talk show appearances.   

It’s easy to poke fun at this, but there’s a serious nature to this post. When it comes to gathering public support for arts institutions — meager as it is — these kinds of programs work against the whole arts community. No one is against fun; but people are not eager to subsidize it in such difficult times.

The Museum of Arts and Design’s URL is “madmuseum.org.” In this particular case, it is mad. 

BTW, I emailed MAD’s press office earlier today asking for the size of the monetary support, the source of the money and the nature of the logisitical support. If and when I receive an answer, I’ll update this post.

Ladyfag, btw, is pictured.

Art21 Reveals A New Group of Artists: A Test — UPDATED

Art21 is in the news today, and not in a good way — according to various reports, the National Endowment for the Arts is planning to cut the funding it has supplied to this self-described “chronicler of contemporary art and artists.”

I was going to blog about it sometime soon anyway, because Season Six of “Art in the Twenty-First Century” makes its debut on PBS on Friday at 9 p.m. (although, as they always say “check your local listings”).  Season Six

includes 13 profiles of artists from five continents gathered into four, one-hour thematic episodes: Change, Balance, History and Boundaries. Spanning the globe from Nigeria to New York City, from Beijing to Brazil, the programs reveal the artists at work and speaking in their own words as they demonstrate the power of art to alter perception, challenge convention, and change how we see the world around us.

That’s a tall order. The artists vary widely, from Sarah Sze to Ai Weiwei, from Marina Abramovic to Robert Mangold, from El Anatsui to Mary Reid Kelley, from Rackshaw Downes to Glenn Ligon. And more. There’s a short clip for each of the shows here, plus  lots of other images/background material. And the press release.

I watched only the four-minute trailer for the season, with excerpts from each artist. Can you guess which one said, and I’m sometimes paraphrasing slightly:

  1. My work is about change, regeneration, bringing about new.
  2. I get very possessive about my places and I don’t want any other artists coming around here to paint them.
  3. People prefer to be positive about history and they always want something from it.
  4. It’s important for an artist to fnd the right tool.
  5. Art is about new possibilities.
  6. I really like the idea that natural wildlife survives in this intense metropolis.
  7. I try to build an object complex enough to start feeling like it’s alive.
  8. What I’m committed to is not love of painting but love of the idea of making ideas.
  9. Rather than my influence coming from nature, it comes from culture, the history of art and the culture of our times. 

I’ll update with the answers sometime soon — but feel free to leave your answers in the comments section below.

Meantime, I suspect Art21 could use more public support — watching and, if you like what you see, giving.

UPDATE — THE ANSWERS:

  1. El Anatsui
  2. Rackshaw Downes
  3. Mary Reid Kelley
  4. Marina Abramovic
  5. Ai Weiwei
  6. Sarah Sze
  7. David Altmejd
  8. Glenn Ligon
  9. Robert Mangold

Photo Credits: David Altmejd’s “The Eye” (top), El Anatsui making “Change,” bottom; Courtesy of Art21

 

European Arts Groups Need Money, So Do Ours: A Modest Proposal

Today’s New York Times page one story on arts cuts in Europe addresses something that’s been on my mind for a while. I of course sympathize with arts groups that are having to grapple with sudden declines in the money they receive from their governments. But I’m not too crazy about the phenomenon described near the end of the article, namely:

As a result, some European arts institutions have begun looking for financial support in the United States, courting American companies or wealthy Americans with emotional ties to an ancestral homeland. But that means, as Mr. [Andreas] Stadler [director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York and president of the New York branch of the European Union National Institutes for Culture] acknowledged, that “we are also competing with American institutions, which are also hit hard.”

No kidding. Many European institutions have been recipients of American philanthropical largesse for decades – Save Venice, for example, goes backs to 1966, when Venice suffered crippling floods, and has raised more than $20 million from Americans for various projects since. American Friends of the Israel Museum dates to 1968. The Royal Oak Society, which raises money from Americans to preserve historic houses in the U.K., takes in nearly $2 million a year from Americans. American Friends of the Louvre started in 2002, and American Friends of Musee d’Orsay was begun last year. The list goes on, now growing longer in recent years with Asian groups like the American Friends of the Shanghai Museum (founded in 1995).

What’s wrong with this? My concern is that it’s almost entirely a one-way street. Dollars flow to cultural institutions abroad through U.S.-registered 501(c)3 groups making all donations tax-deductible. Very few Euros, shekels, pounds sterling, or yuan are coming this way — though one recent counter-example is worth a mention. In December, the Kennedy Center in Washington announced a $5 million naming gift from Russian investor/philanthropist Vladimir Potantin (above right) that made headline news. In return, the Center plans to renovate its Golden Circle Lounge, with additional funds from The Vladimir Potanin Foundation, and renamed it the Russian Lounge upon reopening next fall. 

I wish he had more company. Until he does, I think we should tinker with the tax code — making donations to groups abroad, when the money flows out of the country — only partially tax-deductible. Say, by half. If many experts are right, that won’t stop the flow, because they say people don’t give for the tax deductibility (we’d see, wouldn’t we?). But other Americans would no longer be picking up the tab.  

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Vespig.Wordpress.com

President Obama’s Arts Budgets — Up, But DOA

Given the state of politics, it hardly makes sense to report President Obama’s  budget requests for FY 2013. The budget is already DOA, say the pundits.

Nonetheless, for the sake of discussion, I can report that the President did ask for a slight increase in the budgets of the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities. Each one, as usual, would get the same amount: $154,255,000 — including a one-time $3 million request to facilitate their moves from the Old Post Office building. You didn’t know about that? That’s a whole different story.

The total minus that allocation is a 3.6% increase over the current year’s allocations.

Here’s a link to the NEH budget release and here’s one to the NEA budget release.

Next, you can bet, comes a whole lot of talking and postponing.

 

The White House And Visual Arts: Found Lacking

Calderon-FKahlo.jpgA strawberry today to Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who while on a state visit to Berlin this week stopped in at Martin Gropius Bau to see the Frida Kahlo retrospective. Yes, I know: photo op, tourist visit, etc. So, perhaps just a small strawberry.

Still, the tidbit reminded me that the Obamas have so far given pretty short shrift to the visual arts. Yes, they too made a museum stop overseas: when they visited Paris last year, the family went to the Pompidou Center and later the First Lady and the girls visited the Louvre.  

But a while back, a source at the National Gallery of Art told me that, although the President had been invited, he had not yet visited the museum. And neither had the First Lady or the girls. A Google search hasn’t turned up any references to anything subsequent.

I would love to be found incorrect.

This behavior contrasts starkly with the White House’s attention to music. As I’ve written here before, Michelle Obama has hosted afternoon workshops for students and pros, plus evening concerts with the President in attendance, for jazz, country, Latin, classical and civil-rights-era music. Good for her, though the President — to some minds, including mine — did not “perform” well at the classical music event. (They, too, have dropped off the calendar, probably because social secretary Desiree Rogers, who has left the White House, planned them.)

The Obamas have also shown up at the Kennedy Center. But visual arts, not so much.

Last week, Mrs. Obama made a visit to a community center in Washington and, along with some Congressional spouses, helped plant a butterfly garden and a vegetable plot. They also painted a butterfly mural, but even she joked about it, saying that school officials were taking a risk entrusting their walls to “not necessarily artistic people.” The results are below.

It’s a short trip from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to the NGA at Constitution Ave. and 3rd St. The Obamas should try to make it — very soon.  

ObamaMural.jpg