Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museum Funding-Fundraising

British Art Tours In China: Cushion Or Couch?

Many museums, especially in recent years, have sent their collections on tour, but rarely has one been so open about it as the Bury Art Museum near Manchester, England. There, the museum’s manager, Tony Trehy, has gathered together works from several provincial museums and sent them on a multi-city tour of China in an exhibit titled Toward Modernity: Three Centuries of British Art.

beijingworldartmuseum-turnertakescentrestageNow, before you move on, remember that Manchester was once a rich, rich town of manufacturing and manufacturing moguls. Hometown Bury boy Thomas Wrigley, a paper tycoon, “amassed a collection of 200 artworks during the Industrial Revolution,” according to the BBC, and opened the Bury Art Museum in 1901 to house it. Among the treasures are J.M.W. Turner’s Calais Sands [at right at the Beijing World Art Museum] and George Clausen’s 1888 work Spring Morning [below, left]. But faced with potential cuts in government support, Trehy approached similar museums in England — in Chester, Bolton, Salford and other once-rich towns — and asked them to lend their best pieces for the tour. Chinese galleries, including those in Beijing and Shanghai as well as smaller cities, have been eager to get the show. Trehy told the BBC:

Put it this way. It’s sufficiently lucrative that people have stopped talking about cutting us.

Now, Trehy “is now hoping to take to other countries, and which could provide the template for further themed exhibitions.”

The BBC notes that this beats what the Bury Council did in 2006, which was deaccessioning a painting by L.S. Lowry “to plug a budget deficit,” causing an uproar.

aspringmorning_512Indeed it does. Trehy and others want to send the show to other countries, too. And while it seems that many, many museums are renting their collections this way, what I don’t think is good is this comment from Trehy: “Assuming we can do it on a regular basis, it becomes a significant new source of funding for museums.”

It seems to me that these tours should provide a cushion, in extraordinary times, not something that is, so to speak, baked in the cake. Once that happens, the next funding drought or economic downturn will require another remedy — and what might that be? We are back to deaccessioning or closure.

Treasures from Wales are also on view in China, but the arrangement for that, between the National Museum Wales and the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing, is a traditional partnership (I think).

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the BBC (top)

 

 

Miami Gets Anonymous Donation, And Puts It Where It Should

Here’s a bit of refreshing news: The Miami Art Museum, aka the Pérez Art Museum Miami, received an anonymous gift worth $15 million the other day. Not only did the donor not ask for anything to be named after him or her, or acknowledged publicly — a bit of a slap to Perez considering the controversy over the naming conditions of his gift — but also the museum is allocating it well.

Miami-Art-MuseumMuseum Director Thom Collins told the Miami Herald that “This money will go into the endowment,” because the capital campaign to pay for the cost of the bricks and mortar museum now under construction is mostly completed. Since the donor gave art worth $3 million, the endowment just jumped by $12 million — which is, according to my sources, about what the value of the museum’s endowment was at the end of its last fiscal year. So, the endowment just doubled.

As the article said:

Still and possibly forever unclear: how exactly the gift came about, whether the giver has an established relationship with the museum, what the donated art is and why the benefactor wants to remain anonymous.

The namer, Jorge Perez, a real estate developer, gave about $35 million, with $15 million of that in art and $20 million in cash. Overall, the museum has raised about 85% of its $220 million goal, including $100 million raised in a bond issue approved in 2004. In the controversy over the naming, I sided with the dissenters, some of whom have quit the board. Meantime, the art portion of Perez’s gift has been revalued to $20 million (c’mon) even as its quality disappointed some people.
Meanwhile, the museum is said to be on schedule for opening in December.

Young Audiences: How To Get Them

SFMOMALast week, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art issued a press release stating that it had raised 89% of the goal of its capital campaign three years ahead of schedule and therefore was increasing the goal from $555 million to $610 million. I didn’t pay too much attention until I read the final line of the explanation:

The additional funds will enable SFMOMA to pursue three goals: to become a national leader in digital engagement; to pursue an expanded art commissioning program in the museum’s public spaces; and to increase accessibility to the museum, particularly for school-age children. As part of this new campaign goal, the museum also announced a $5 million challenge grant from an anonymous donor, with the aim of creating a $10 million endowed fund that would enable SFMOMA to offer free admission to all visitors ages 18 and under.

That is one way to get younger audiences, and it made me go look at other museum policies. My quick survey turned up these results:

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney, you have to be less than 18 years old to get in free.

At MoMA in New York, people under 16 are admitted free.

At the Guggenheim, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Seattle Museum of Art, children 12 and under are admitted free.

At at MFA-Houston and the Denver Art Museum, kids 5 and under are admitted free.

And at MFA-Boston, it’s complicated: children 6 and under are always free; childen 7 to 17 are free after 3 p.m. on weekdays, and all day on weekends and public holidays.

I’m not one who believes that art museums should be free in all circumstances — if they are, great; if they can’t afford it, don’t do it. But I do think that museums who now charge for those between 5 and — what? — 17 might rethink their policies. Kudos to the anonymous donor in San Francisco for raising the issue and doing something about it. Maybe other donors out there will draw inspiration from her/his example.

 

Fundraising On American Shores: Tate Finds A Way

I am not a huge fan of foreign museums that expect to raise a lot of money from Americans: it seems to me, as I’ve written here before, that the money mainly flows in one direction — from the U.S. overseas. Not too many Europeans and Asians are giving a lot of money to American museums, though there are exceptions. The Guggenheim, for one, has a couple of foreign trustees, and I would hope that they are providing strong support, as all trustees are supposed to do.  One of them, Victor Potanin, has made a few headlines here for giving. I mention that and more in that previous post.

MatthewBrannonAmerican taxpayers therefore subsidize foreign museums; most other countries do not allow deductions for philanthropic contributions, or limit them, so they don’t have that problems.

So I was set to be mildly annoyed when an email arrived the other day about a benefit here in New York for the Tate Americas Foundation this coming Wednesday. Aside from playing up the celebrity culture by naming the expected guests — “fashion luminaries,” artists (including Matthew Brannon, one of whose works is shown here), collectors, curators, gallerists and museum directors — I was expected to see a number for the expected haul from Americans. You can read more here, though that news item does not contain the list of expected luminaries.

Among its sentences: “Since 1999, the charity has raised over $100 million in cash and art donations,” the charity being the foundation, which was formerly known as American Patrons of Tate.

But I softened on another line: “Money raised from the Artists Dinner will be used to acquire art for Tate from the Americas.” Later, we learn that the funds go into a restricted endowment for that purpose.

That’s better. If American taxpayers are to subsidize foreign institutions, let them all fashion a way that the money helps American artists, although — thinking about it — how “American artist” is defined needs further explanation.

 

 

Perez Collection Disappoints Some: Buyers Remorse?

The controversy over the Miami Art Museum, which traded its name for $35 million to Jorge Perez in 2011, had died down. Trustees who quit over the decision and outside opponents (including me) had no choice but to grin and bear it: the $220 million project proceeded despite complaints that the Perez gift was not large enough in the whole context of the building. Nor were questions about the quality of the art he was giving as part of the gift ever answered.

roberto-matta-315pxNow they are coming back. Since March 14, the museum has been showing a selection of the works Perez donated — the first look by the public. Frames of Reference, on view through June 2, includes some 45 works by the likes of “José Bedia, Beatriz González, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta Echaurren, Diego Rivera, and Joaquín Torres-Garcia, among others,” according to the press release (which, by the way, pegs his gift now at $40 million). It’s the last show in the museum’s current space; it moves to the new Herzog & de Meuron building in December.

The exhibit has sparked two responses. In the Miami Herald, Anne Tschida put the show in context:

…this is not a complete survey of Latin American art, and it should not be viewed as such. These are framed references to the origins of certain genres of modern and contemporary Latin painting, mostly figurative, from lands below our border; they are also specifically references to the world of the man who collected them.

…What jumps out next is that this doesn’t look like a typical Miami show. Our emphasis and strength has been contemporary art — often art made in the decade of this century. Because of the newness of our institutions and even our art scene, we rarely see big, sprawling shows focused on earlier eras.

Tschida likes some of the works, particularly Matta’s Crucificción (above), but notes that others, specifically the early works by Lam and Rivera, are not top-rate. But she’s willing to wait to see the remaining 65 paintings in the gift before making a judgement.
Over at the Miami New Times, however, art critic Carlos Suarez De Jesus is not happy. He calls the show a “thorough sampling” of the 110, and says “it also raises worrying questions about whether the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s permanent collection will match its world-class facility…the collection lacks the cutting-edge punch the museum will need to equal the excitement surrounding the new building on Biscayne Bay designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron.”
He too singles out the Lam and Rivera as second-rate, says the exhibit “doesn’t inspire great hope for MAM’s new permanent collection” and adds “Inside MAM’s old home on Flagler, viewers are left with the impression of a collection checked off a wish list by someone with a picky taste for the traditional rather than the adventurous.”
I would think that the museum would have put out the best from the 110-painting gift in this exhibit, considering the questions the public had. For now, that gives the edge to the view of Suarez De Jesus.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Miami Art MuseumÂ