Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

Hurrah: Dallas Inventories Texas Art. What Will It Find?

Most museums — in my opinion — should have their own special identity, something different that makes visitors want to visit them, instead of simply going to a universal, encyclopedic museum like the Met. When I visited Cincinnati, I loved seeing the regional Ohio art on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and when I visited the Milwaukee Art Museum, I headed straight for its German collections — not just the Expressionism, but the earlier genre paintings, too. Even though I live in New York, I can’t see those kinds of works on display here. Then, I see the rest of their permanent collections.

But especially in contemporary collections, we see a lot of cookie-cutter approaches to buying art since the 1960s, at least.

So I both applaud the Dallas Museum of Art and chastise it, a bit, for an effort it is making regarding Texas art. The bad first: why did I have to find out about it on my own, instead of receiving a press release — as I do for the museum’s exhibitions, staff changes, etc.? I’d rather know about this effort, which is unique, than the press release I received recently about a grant to research visitor engagement.

NOTE: Dallas tells me it did send me the press release on Friday, though I never received it. We have to blame email gremlins…

Now the praise: Dallas has unveiled on its website something called the “Texas Exhibition History” — a  complete list of titles and dates for exhibitions of Texas art presented at the Museum since 1909, and part of its Texas Art section of its website.  This project apparently began two years ago when the museum was awarded a grant by the University of Texas at Dallas Texas Fund for Curatorial Research, to continue studying the Texas art acquired before the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts merged with the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Art in 1963 to form DMA — which now owns those Texas works. 

Here’s the link to the project, where you’ll learn more about Texas artists. 

There’s more to come:

Coming in spring 2013, the DMA website will add another new section to “Texas Art” detailing the evolution of the Dallas art community after 1963. “Dallasites: Charting Contemporary Art, 1963 to Present,” also funded by the Texas Fund for Curatorial Research, will establish the DMA as the primary archive in North Texas for contemporary art.

I can’t say whether any of the artists in the database deserve national attention, but if they do, they would make the DMA distinctive. And wouldn’t it be great if the museum discovered some underappreciated talent?

Above is a painting, picked at random, by Everett Spruce (1908-2002) called Swollen Stream.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the DMA

Surprise At The Met: What Tom Campbell Said At TED

Looking for completely different information on the Metropolitan Museum’s website today, I stumbled upon a blog post of the TED talk given by Met director Thomas P. Campbell last spring — it was just posted as a video on Friday, though he mentioned last March that he had made the speech.

So I watched.

Campbell performed brilliantly, even though he repeated that hoary old line about people finding museums intimidating. (Ok, maybe a few do, but I’d wager that the more appropriate adjectives for describing what reluctant museum-goers feel about museums include “boring,” “bewildering,” and “confusing,” because there isn’t enough way-finding information.)

But this post isn’t about that — it’s about Campbell, who shows wonderful passion in this speech. He’s so intent on breaking through to the TED audience that he drops the F-word in his opener. Not exactly what you usually hear around the Met.* But it sure got my attention and put me on notice that this speech might be a little different than I expected.

You should listen to the opener, at least, for yourself (or try here). Even if you don’t like profanity, the anecdote is quite funny and self-deprecating. And it leads to his main point: that it’s a curator’s job to suppress some of their academic, jargony training, to stop classifying art and start getting people to look at it.

Campbell reveals why he chose to focus on tapestries, why he went to the Met (so he could do really big tapestry exhibits), and how his career-making 2002 tapestry exhibit was written off by one senior Met staffer as “this is going to be a bomb,” despite the “experience” he created. (Obviously, it was  not.)

He likes the word “unpack” — as in, curators have to maintain the integrity of the art but unpack it for a general audience — and he unpacks how the Met created the oh-so-popular Alexander McQueen exhibit from 2011.

Finally, he suggests that one goal of the museum — he watches visitors enter in the Great Hall at times — is to create a zone where their curiosity can expand. He looks like he is having a good time, and it’s catching.

Although not every commenter agrees, most loved his passion, as did I. He could take this show on the road.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Met.

 

 

 

Brooklyn Does The Right Thing

No one wants to go now! Without it, we really don’t have a reason to go to the museum.

So said one Stephanie Morgan, a 30-year-0ld research epidemiologist and resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, to a Wall Street Journal reporter the other day.

You may have guessed the sad truth in that statement: she was talking about the dance party that has been part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Target First Saturdays for years — the evenings that bulk up the museum’s somewhat erratic attendance. (Back in 2009, figures the museum gave me showed that nearly 20% of its full-year attendance came on the 11 First Saturdays sponsored by Target.) But a week or so ago, the Brooklyn Museum “pulled the plug” on the dancing in the galleries, citing overcrowding in the third floor galleries.

No specific damage was disclosed in the blog post that carried the announcement:

while the attendance is growing, our building is staying the same size, and we’ve run into some challenges with capacity crowds and traffic flow throughout the building….[so] we are going to put the dance party on hiatus for the time being. This was not a decision we made lightly. 

In its place:

You’ll see new things like artist-led participatory activities, site-specific performances, and intimate issue-driven discussions

The museum said it was being proactive, rather than “waiting for a problem to happen.”

Brooklyn has always maintained that there are plenty of art activities on First Saturdays — and there are — but the question has always really been why people come. Morgan told the WSJ that she and her friends have gone every month “for years” and now they won’t? I say good riddance — they can dance elsewhere; they can’t see Brooklyn’s art collections and exhibitions elsewhere.

Brooklyn says it’ll bring the dance parties back, but I actually hope it doesn’t — at least not for some time. Let things shake out. Let’s see who comes now and in what numbers.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Timeout New York

 

Eastman House Hire Is Outside Normal Bounds: A Triple Risk?

Forget former gallery-owner-turned-museum-director Jeffrey Deitch as an outlier: The George Eastman House has gone even farther afield in hiring a new director: Bruce Barnes, whose appointment was announced last Thursday, has never served in a museum and has no formal art history education. He was, on the other hand, the CEO of Element K, a Rochester-based online learning company, and has worked on Wall Street. His PhD, from the University of Pennsylvania, is in economics, as was his undergraduate degree.

According to Business Week:

…From February 1997 to March 2000, he served as a Managing Director of Wasserstein Perella & Co., Inc. and a Senior Member of its merchant banking group since September 1998. He served as an Executive Vice President of Ziff Brothers Investments, L.L.C. from January 1995 to June 1996. Prior to that, Dr. Barnes served at Ziff Communications Company, the holding company for a predecessor of Ziff-Davis, as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer from September 1993 to December 1994 and as Vice President and Special Assistant to the Chairman from November 1992 to September 1993….

He has also, and perhaps still is, a director at a couple of companies.

What’s going on here? The Eastman House has been looking for a director since July, 2011, when Anthony Bannon announced his decision to retire in a year’s time. It’s unclear how they found Barnes — probably a search firm — but, reading between the lines, it seems that his vision sold the board. He wants to take the Eastman House’s fame international, which will build on Bannon’s work that made it national.

Barnes does have relevant experience. After leaving Element K, he founded  the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation, a private foundation based in New York. He is the sole trustee, according to public documents, and works there 20 hours a week.

The ADA1900, according to the Eastman House’s press release, “works independently and in collaboration with museums across the United States to foster understanding and appreciation of American decorative art from the period around 1900.”  Barnes co-wrote The Jewelry and Metalwork of Marie Zimmermann (2011), which was copublished by ADA1900 and Yale University Press. And ADA1900 copublished The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs (2008), “an award-winning scholarly book that accompanied an exhibition of the same title co-organized by ADA1900 and the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Huntington Art Collections, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.” With his partner, writer Joseph Cunningham, listed as director of ADA1900 on its website, he has through the Foundation has given gifts of decorative art to 14 museums (listed on the Foundation’s home page).

Looking at ADA1900’s 2011 990, Barnes has also done a little dealing — the foundation sold four Charles Rohlfs dining room chairs that he had donated to a collector last fall at an appraised value of $90,000, for example.

Aside from his own donations, ADA1900’s notable financing came from the Fairfield County Community Foundation ($70,00o) in the year ended last Dec. 31. It has net assets of $1.6 million and expenses of about $325,000 last year. No salary for Barnes was listed, so presumably he took none.

Nothing wrong with any of this, but it is interestingly non-traditional. The Eastman House says it expects Barnes to create “more worldwide traveling exhibitions and an enhanced virtual museum online.” His own statement is included in the aforementioned press release.

The hirer in situations like this never knows how the hiree will turn out. Running a museums is different from running a business — not to mention working on Wall Street – but Barnes definitely has relevant skills. He seems to be entrepreneurial — and that’s good. He sold a vision, and that’s good. He has already lived in snowy Rochester, so he can’t complain. He might  be just the ticket.

I wish he had some notable interest in photography, however, which many people still do not accept as a fine art. That’s a place where Barnes’s past focus on decorative arts will not help.

However, Bannon was a risk 16 years ago, too: He has a BA in biology, a Master’s and PhD in English, had worked as a newspaper critic before joining the museum world as director of the Birchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo. He recently returned there, as director of a much large institution now.

For my hometown’s sake, I hope Barnes fulfills his promise. Kodak itself is in dire straights, and today came more news that the Rochester Philharmonic is also in trouble.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the George Eastman House

The Expanded Stedelijk Opens; Ann Goldstein’s Chance and Challenge

The reopening of the expanded, improved Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which took place on Saturday, hasn’t gotten much press in the United States, despite its being run by an American, Ann Goldstein, formerly a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. That’s a pity. Especially because Goldstein came to New York to meet the press last spring: When was the last time the Stedelijk did that?

As I write in an article for Art in America magazine — the September issue — Goldstein has high goals. She exhibited, in our interviews, an interesting mix of assuredness, built on a long track records of organizing well-respected exhibitions, and willingness to change, adapting to a new country’s customs. I suppose that’s logical: as she pointed out to me, she’s from Los Angeles, where change is a constant. And she seemed so down-to-earth that I was a little surprised when she used American corporate-speak when she talked about her goals, wanting the Stedelijk to be alive, active, artist-centered, anticipated and ambitious. Pretty good aims, despite the hokey alliteration.

One article I read, not well done, noted the lack of Dutch artists in the opening exhibitions. That’s just plain wrong, as my article notes, though it’s a sensitive topic. After I raised it — prompted by a chat with a Dutch artist — and we talked it through, Goldstein nevertheless later wrote me an email, saying:

As you know, we will open in September with a presentation of our collection and one temporary exhibition, “Beyond Imagination,” which features the work of 20 artists who live an work in the Netherlands. It is part of a longstanding series of exhibitions known as the Municipal Art Acquisitions. These exhibitions, which are sponsored by the City of Amsterdam have been annual exhibitions and acquisitions that look at Dutch-based artists It was very important to me that we reopen with this exhibition, and as many of the artists have been participants in the residency programs here in NL: de Ateliers, Rijksakademie, and Jan van Eyck Akademie, it also gives us the opportunity to put a spotlight on the vital and important Dutch art community, which is also quite international.

 In addition, we have a magnificent new monumental textile commission by Dutch designer Petra Blaisse made specifically for our new entrance hall, our new graphic identity is by the Dutch design team Armand Mevis and Linda van Deursen, and our collection display will include the work of numerous Dutch artists and designers, including single gallery spaces devoted to the work of Marlene Dumas, Rineke Dijkstra, Willem de Kooning (here still considered Dutch), Erik van Lieshout, Guido van der Werve, Melvin Moti, Ed van der Elsken, Gerrit Rietveld, etc, as well as works by Karel Appel, Stanley Brouwn, Ger van Elk, Jan Dibbets, Daan van Golden, Loes van der Horst, Wim Crouwel, among many others in the various collection presentations.

The Stedelijk is an international museum, though, and Goldstein’s bigger challenge will be meeting the attendance expectations of the board, which wants 500,000 visitors a year – which it has never done. It will need to draw from the crowd at the neighboring van Gogh Museum, which attracts about 1.4 million visitors a year, and the Rijksmuseum, which gets more than 1 million.

The Stedelijk’s new entrance, on the museum square, will help, but it won’t be enough.

 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Stedelijk