Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Media

“National Gallery” — The Film

Oddly, so soon after I wrote here about “Mr. Turner,” the British film about J.W.M. Turner, I just learned about a British documentary called “National Gallery” about that august London institution. It, too, was shown at last spring’s Cannes Film Festival and it’s on view in New York City from today through Nov. 18. It’s at the Film Forum, which describes it like this”

NatlGalleryFilmLondon’s National Gallery…is itself portrayed as a brilliant work of art in this, Frederick Wiseman’s 39th documentary and counting. Wiseman listens raptly as a panoply of docents decode the great canvases of Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Turner; he visits with the museum’s restorers as they use magnifying glasses, tiny eye-droppers, scalpels, and Q-tips to repair an infinitesimal chip; he attends administrative meetings in which senior executives do (polite) battle with younger ones who want the museum to become less stodgy and more welcoming to a larger cross-section of the public. But most of all, we experience the joy of spending time with the aforementioned masters as well as Vermeer and Caravaggio, Titian and Velázquez, Pissarro and Rubens, and listen to the connoisseurs who discourse upon the aesthetic, historical, religious and psychological underpinnings of these masterpieces.

Now, the film is 181 minutes–very long for a documentary on one institutions, and even one by 84-year-old Wiseman, who uses a fly-on-the-wall technique, never straying into interviews, voice-overs or identifiers.

But, and this is where I learned of the film, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis on Wednesday called it “magnificent…at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach.” And that’s just the first paragraph.

Dargis goes on to say that Wiseman delves into the NG’s history (including the slave-trade origins of a founder’s fortune) and, to her, the very important role played by money concerns at the NG. She concludes:

…the experience of watching “National Gallery” is pleasurable and immersive because he’s a wonderful storyteller. It is also unexpectedly moving. Because his other great theme is how art speaks to us, one he brilliantly expresses in the relay of gazes that finds us looking at museumgoers looking at portraits that look right back — at artists, art lovers and moviegoers — even as Mr. Wiseman, that sly old master, looks at all of us in turn.

Last May, the Telegraph also wrote a very positive piece, including the words:

The real joy of his film is that it never needs to strain for effect; it sits back. It’s like being lulled with intelligence. However long it is since you last climbed the gallery’s steps, you’ll watch this truly inspiring piece of work and rue the interval.

 The Guardian didn’t like it as much,

I have not seen the film, and though I hope to I’m not sure I can get to the cinema before Nov. 19. Perhaps it will move somewhere else in New York.

Meantime, here’s a short trailer.

Chicago Has Some Fun Marketing Magritte

We all know that it’s hard for museums to get attention sometimes; there’s so much competition for everyone’s attention. The Art Institute of Chicago has mounted a major marketing campaign for Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 that’s a bit unusual and may be working. It started back in June, but for whatever reason the AIC just sent out a press release.

CT FOD_sculpture1.JPGThey call it “unthinking.”

…Beginning in early June, billboards and train stations throughout the city began to invite passersby to “unthink” everyday words and ideas. …Downtown shop windows began filling with surreal tableaus populated by some of Magritte’s favorite subjects: black bowler hats, open umbrellas, blue skies with white clouds, and word play. Threadless.com kicked off a contest to design the best Surrealist T-shirt. A dark figure, dressed in black and blue, began showing up at public events toting a mysterious eye balloon….

On the evening of Thursday, July 24, the line to enter the museum stretched for nearly a block as visitors showed up with “surreal” objects that they traded for free admission to the Magritte exhibition….

Then, on Friday, July 25, something even stranger happened. Two massive feet, right out of Magritte’s painting The Red Model, appeared on the sands of Oak Street Beach alongside a sign urging viewers to “Unthink Long Walks.”

The feet were snatched from the artist’s painting The Red Model.  You may want to check out other “Feet facts” at the press release link above (E.g., each weighs 800 pounds).

Other than the nearly 500 people who lined up and entered the museum free on July 24, the Art Institute makes no claims that this campaign is bringing visitors. But it does seem to be getting some attention. Here are a couple of links: in the Chicago Tribune and on Chicagoist.

There’s more to come, the release notes. And over at Little Black Book Online, there’s more information, too:

The campaign communicates that Magritte’s work does more than make us rethink. It makes patrons believe Magritte, through his work, through his unique view of the world, wants them to Unthink. “Unthink Magritte” will appear in newspaper, print, web, events, and an “Unthink” mobile app. It will also appear prominently in out-of-home including bus shelters, spectaculars and ambient.

Patrons of the Art Institute of Chicago can create and share their own audio, text and photographic interpretations or “Uninterpretations” of the Magritte exhibition or the world around them as inspired by Magritte’s work, using the Unthink Magritte mobile app also created by Leo Burnett Interactive.

That was posted by Leo Burnett Chicago, which created the campaign pro bono, lucky for AIC.

I love it — it’s fun and it’s about the art.

Photo Credit: Antonio Perez, Courtesy of  the Chicago Tribune  

The BSO And Arts Journalism: Don’t Let This Spread

Heaven knows that arts journalism is not as robust as it once was, or needs to be. But the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is trying something that is, simply, a bad idea.

BaltimoreSympThe BSO is offering a journalism “fellowship,” through which an early to mid-career reporter will be “embedded” with the symphony for a year beginning in mid-June. This person would be tasked with telling “the underreported stories of orchestra musicians (both the BSO and those outside of Baltimore/Bethesda), Music Director Marin Alsop, guest conductors and guest artists, and a wide range of activities happening within the BSO.”

That’s not a journalist; that’s a PR representative. Maybe embeds can be justified in time of war, as the U.S. tried in Iraq, but in a symphony?

In the description of the job, which pays $38,000 for the year, plus benefits, the BSO calls it a residency.

This Residency is intended to cover orchestra-related news, features, trends, profiles and enterprise work; it will not include reviews, personal essay or opinion writing. The fellow will have access to rehearsals, performances and everything that happens off and on stage, including after-hours talks, meals and drinks with musicians, staff and the community. This is the first and only embedded arts journalism residency of its kind in the country.

It also says:

Multimedia stories will include breaking news, features, trends, profiles and enterprise. Stories will be posted to the BSO’s brand new website and throughout social media channels and other online media. The newest iteration of BSOmusic.org is content-rich, hosting a prominent Stories Newsfeed on its homepage, dedicated to the stories created by the Arts Writer-in-Residence. We aim to establish partnerships between the BSO and outside news organizations and hope that the Fellow’s content will be syndicated to news outlets that have an understaffed arts desk.

But many important details are left out — first and foremost, who’s going to edit the work? Who’ll have control? What if the embed turns up information the BSO does not want disclosed? Will the embed quit? And why would a legitimate news outlet want to take articles from an embed?

I could go on. This isn’t the same as, but it carries as many potential troubles as, the situation in 2012 when Peter Gelb tried to limit what Opera News, published by the Met’s Opera Guild, could print.

According to an article about this in The Chronicle of Philanthropy,

The [BSO] recently underwent a website redesign and was encouraged by new board member Amy Webb, head of Webbmedia Group, a Baltimore digital-strategy consultant, to develop more “self-generated content as a way to better engage our patrons,” says Eileen Andrews, the orchestra’s vice president for marketing and communications.

That may explain it — the push for more “content” from a web firm executive who sits on the board. But blurring the line between journalism and PR is never a good idea. Anyone who is media-literate will know the difference and doubt the content or the motivation.

 

Who Would You Pick To Play Picasso? Plus, Best And Worst Artists’ Films

Most movies about art and artists leave a lot to be desired. We shall see how Picasso is treated in a movie about the making of Guernica, with Antonio Banderas starring as the artist. Banderas, who like Picasso is a Malaga native, said that he “turned down the chance at one point of playing Mr. Pablo, but the time has come in my life where I understand him better, and I am nearly at the age he was when those events happened, in 1937, when he was 55 or 56, and I’m getting close,” according to Fox News Latino. Banderas is 54.

Antonio_BanderasCarlos Saura will direct the movie, to be called “33 dias.” That’s about how long Picasso spent painting Guernica. 

Oh, the movie will also star Gwyneth Paltrow; IMDB says she is “rumored” to be playing Dora Maar.

You can find a few more details are here, but there’s nothing on a production schedule. IMDB puts release as 2015, and lists more cast and crew members.

I couldn’t think of any good artists’ biopics — I haven’t seen that many — but it turns out that Getty curators have been pondering the question, and they made a list. In a February blog post about art in movies, they named these as “the best biopics”:

  • The Moon and Sixpence (1942), about the life of Paul Gauguin
  • Moulin Rouge (1952), about Henri de Toulouse–Lautrec
  • The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), starring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo
  • Caravaggio (1986), about the story late-Renaissance master
  • Camille Claudel (1988), about the tormented sculptor (and Rodin’s muse)
  • Basquiat (1996), about the brilliant American painter
  • Artemisia (1997), about the 16th painter
  • Pollock (2000), which includes the story of one of the artist’s most important commissions, Mural, 1943

That post also lists movies, good and bad, that have “art on the big screen.” Where do you think they put Legal Eagles, about the Rothko case?

 

Another Director’s Job Is Now Open

Jim-BallingerThe Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Barnes Foundation, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester — those museums all need directors. And now, so does the Phoenix Art Museum.

Last Thursday, on Apr. 17, Jim Ballinger — director there since 1982 — announced that he was retiring, with the effective date undisclosed but, I’d guess, probably related to the selection of his successor. The search will start immediately, the museum said.

Ballinger turns 65 this year, and started at the Phoenix museum as a curator there in 1974. According to the museum’s press release:

During Ballinger’s tenure, the museum has presented nearly 500 exhibitions and the collection has grown by 10,000 objects. Ballinger has personally organized more than 50 exhibitions, authored exhibition catalogues, a book on Frederic Remington, administered two major capital campaigns that expanded the museum from 72,000 square feet to its current 285,000 square feet and brought a number of blockbuster exhibitions to Phoenix, including the current Hollywood Costume. He currently manages a staff of more than 115 and an operating budget of $11.6 million a year. He is recognized as a leader nationally in the field of Western American art.

…”Today, the museum is four times the size physically and the budget is more than 10 times the size as when I started as director,” [Ballinger said].

That’s 40 years in one place, an anomaly in today’s world.

Details here.