Museums

The Museum of Modern Art has been getting a lot of pushback on its decision to demolish the American Folk Art Museum — it’s increasing, rather than diminishing, and more big names are joining in. For example, the Architectural League of New York has just sent an open letter to MoMA against the plan, signed not only by Annabelle Selldorf, the League’s President, but by Thom Mayne, Hugh Hardy, Richard Meier, Wendy Evans Joseph, Frances Halsband, Robert A.m. Stern, Michael Bierut, and others (many members of the board of directors). It says, in full:

The Architectural League calls on the Museum of Modern Art to reconsider its decision to demolish the American Folk Art Museum. The Museum of Modern Art—the first museum with a permanent curatorial department of architecture and design—should provide more information about why it considers it necessary to tear down this significant work of contemporary architecture. The public has a substantial and legitimate interest in this decision, and the Museum of Modern Art has not yet offered a compelling justification for the cultural and environmental waste of destroying this much-admired, highly distinctive twelve-year-old building.

The Folk Art Museum, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, was sold to MoMA in 2011, and — truth be told — joining it to MoMA would not be easy. The floors don’t line up and, worse, the galleries, imho, are not ideal for showing art. They are small, irregular and dark. Unfortunately, many museum buildings are not great for showing art. So MoMA announced its plan to demolish the building by year-end and start afresh.

Several anti-MoMA petitions are circulating. One, started by Robert Bundy of New Haven, Ct. on Change.org, has 2,777 signatures as of this writing. It asks MoMA to save the building. Another on Change.org, started by Christopher Brandt of Rochester, seeks the same and has 2,984 signatures now. The Petition Site has one with 185 signatures, and SignOn.org has one with just three signers at the moment.

All this shows that today’s social media are making life a lot more complicated for everyone.

What else should be learned from this? Museum boards and directors should be far more careful about they get from architects to begin with. They’re the client; the architect is not the boss. The Williams-Tsien building may have been a little better suited to the folk art collection than it is for MoMA’s — but not much. It’s sad that a building may come down after just 12 years in existence, but I’m still wondering why it was approved in the first place.

I debated before posting this link to a video on the YouTube channel for the Dallas Museum of Art. Someone sent it to me. It’s a takeoff on Downton Abbey by the Dallas museum, called “Downton Artsy.” It stars museum director Max Anderson as lord of the manor, and includes curators and museum supporters in a little tale about the museum’s free admission policy and a museum gala.

I shared it with a few people, without much comment of my own. Everyone of them was aghast. They used these words to describe it: “cringemaking,” “appalling,” “narcissistic,” “embarassing,” “sends mixed messages,” “OMG,” “hilarious,” “infantile,” and “unbelievable.”

As I write this, 809 people have viewed it, and four have given it a thumbs up. There are no thumbs down.

See for yourself here.

I’m pretty sure the museum would tell critics to “lighten up,” and they have a point. But I can’t understand why the museum would waste the time and effort and money (and did it seek permission from Masterpiece Classic to borrow the look, feel and music?) on this.  What are they trying to do? What kind of image does it create?

What makes your museum — the one you love, the one you promote, the one you work at, the one you most visit — different? Special?

Some museums are lucky enough to have a true, world-class masterpiece or two — the Frick’s Bellini, MoMA’s Starry Night, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sunday on La Grande Jatte, etc. Better yet, some museums have specific, unduplicatable collections: If you are interested in Max Beckmann, you really must go to the St. Louis Art Museum, to name one example.

Back when I wrote a lot about corporations, and more particularly about corporate strategies, this differentiation was a big concern: what made Home Depot different from Lowe’s, or Cover Girl mascara different from Revlon’s? Marketing might do the trick — think Tide detergent’s sales over Cheer’s. But the companies that really did well were those that had more substantive product differentiation.

I thought of that the other day when I got a press release from the Denver Art Museum, announcing a $1.5 million 1 to 1 matching grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the creation of a $3 million endowment of a full-time, permanent textiles conservator, plus $250,000 to support a fellowship in textile conservation. I had already written about SPUN: Adventures in Textiles — the campus-wide docket of exhibitions related to textiles this summer, and I knew that SPUN was triggered by a $3 million gift to the DAM’s textile department.

So I asked the museum, how did the new grant come about? Did it ask the Mellon, was it taking the strategic course to put a lot of muscle into developing its textiles collection?

Indeed, the answer came back — this is not rocket science, but everyday good management — Christoph Heinrich, the museum’s director, and a development official visited Mellon in New York “to tell them about our Textile Art Department expansion and gauge interest in a proposal. They really liked the attention to textile arts, a medium they feel is underserved nationally, and invited us to apply for the grant,” spokeswoman Ashley Pritchard wrote back.

I also asked if I was reading the situation properly: DAM is known for Spanish Colonial art and Native American art, but other departments — which may have interesting pieces — are not considered to be exceptional (excepting British art, thanks to the Berger collection). Was it trying to add textiles to that short list? Again, from Pritchard:

We have a strong core collection of textiles in the textile art department, as well as the textiles held by other curatorial departments (Native Art, most notably). The curator is working to refine the collection – add to strengths, build out in certain areas, etc. We will become nationally known not only for our textile art collection and department but for our commitment to textile art conservation through this endowed position and the fellowship. A fellowship means that we are a center for conservation professional training, especially as it relates to textile art conservation, an underserved area.

This is smart. Especially in contemporary art, many museums have cookie-cutter collections. Textiles is a broad area that few museums focus on.

You can read more, in the museum’s press release on the Mellon grant. And here’s a link to some of the museum’s textiles in Spun – Adventures in Textiles_Image Highlights.

Photo Credit: Native American textiles at DAM, © Judith H. Dobrzynski