Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

Banner Year For The Met: Record Attendance

The Metropolitan Museum of Art* just released its attendance for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2012, and all I can say (up here) is congratulations: 2012 was a barn-burner, with some 6.28 million visits, including those to The Cloisters museum and gardens. That is more than any year since the Met began tracking attendance more than 40 years ago, it says.

Last fiscal year, total visitors were about 600,000 fewer.

And here’s another tidbit worth noting: Membership has now reached a record-breaking 170,000.

There were reasons, starting with the new galleries for Islamic art, inaugurated last Nov.1, and the opening of the final portion of the refurbished and reinstalled American wing, which opened in mid-January. These two gallery suites attracted 593,000 and 365,000 visitors respectively.

But exhibitions did very well, too:

  • The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde drew 324,000 visitors;
  • The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini: 205,000
  • Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City: 179,000
  • Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations: 166,000
  • The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen from the Isle of Lewis at The Cloisters (97,000)

Saraceno and Schiaparelli and Prada are still on view. It’s worth noting, too, how well the Cloisters did with the little chessmen. Although the Steins (including Matisse’s Woman With A Hat, right) did well, I’m disappointed that the show did not fare as well as, say, Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which between April 27 and August 15, 2010, attracted 703,256 visitors. The Steins was a traveling show, with loans from all over and a powerful narrative — but not that Picasso name. The Picassos looked great, but the museum does own them all.

FY 2012 also benefited from the final five weeks, with extended hours, of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. The Costume Institute’s Schiaparelli/Prada is far less crowded, but it’s still a great show — better than I ever expected.

The Met’s release also notes that its website “had 44 million visits in Fiscal Year 2012. The Museum’s Facebook page now has more than 677,000 fans and its Twitter feed has more than 471,000 followers.”

Final note (for now): The Met raised its suggested price to $25 about a year ago, and that hasn’t seemed to deter visitors much, though I’d like to know what the average contribution is now.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Met

* I consult to a Foundation that supports the Met

 

Catching Up On The New Parrish Museum

Tomorrow night, the Parrish Art Museum holds its last midsummer benefit in its Italianate mansion home in Southampton, Long Island — by next summer, the Parrish will have moved to its new digs in nearby Water Mill.

This has been a long time coming, as followers will recall — because its first expansion plan was scrapped  by the economic crisis: too big, too involved, too expensive. The new new Parrish, which will open next November, is smaller, less difficult to maintain, and still — probably — beautiful. For once, a museum blinked, reconsidered, and reconfigured to match its resouces. That’s a good thing, and I wish more over-expanded museums had done that.

You can read more about the current situation in an article I wrote, commissioned by Hamptons Magazine, out today.

One main gain in the new building is this:

November will bring the first-ever installation featuring art from all periods in the Parrish’s 2,600-work permanent collection. Many will be completely new to visitors, including some from the more than 30 works that have been acquired in the ongoing “Campaign for Art.” They include a large Louise Nevelson sculpture, Dorothea Rockburne’s Touchstone and Rainer Fetting’s Two Sunsets in East Hampton. [Terrie] Sultan, like every museum director, has her eye on more. “We covet a major Jackson Pollock, and some more great Abstract Expressionism pieces,” she says. “We have some, but it would be nice to have more works by Fischl, Salle, Bleckner, Close, Alice Aycock….”

After the first year, when visitors flock to new museums just because they are new, visitorship usually drops and become exhibition-driven. The Parrish should have plenty of ammunition within its permanent collection to create related exhibitions that will be fresh. It has already begun that, with shows of still lifes and artists like Dorothea Rockburne in the last few years. The new Parrish needs to be ambitious without ignoring its roots in the art of artists who lived and worked on Long Island. That leaves it plenty of territory to explore.

 Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Parrish Museum

Lost In A Museum? Google To The Rescue

It’s true, museums are confusing to people who don’t frequent them. I don’t mind wandering, unless I’m in a hurry, but I know that other people do.

As the newsdesk of the Smithsonian wrote yesterday:

“What can we see?” and “How do we get there?” are two of the most common questions asked by Smithsonian visitors.

Naturally, Google, which annoyed me and other art-lovers by forcing us to use the Google Art Project only on its browser, Chrome, is making that up to us by using its mapping app in museums. All 17 of the Smithsonian’s museums (and the National Zoo) have been mapped room by room in cooperation with Google. As the Smithsonian said:

Beginning today, many of the millions of yearly visitors to the Smithsonian can electronically explore the building interiors, floor by floor, and pinpoint themselves within the building. The technology allows visitors with Google Maps for Android to navigate within and between each museum.

Users will see themselves on the map as a blue dot that will show their location and orientation within the context of exhibits, stairs, restrooms, eateries and other features. Step-by-step walking directions between destinations are also available within the app, providing visitors guided navigation within each museum.

Actually, it’s not just the Smithsonian — the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Museum Center (?) and the American Museum of Natural History in New York have also submitted their floorplans to Google, which has made them available.

This is the same technology Google uses for airports, casinos, malls, Bloomingdale’s and other places people need directions. Made available last November, this app now includes more than 10,000 indoor maps, according to PC Magazine.

For its part, Google said:

More museums are adding their floor plans to Google Maps for Android soon, including the SFMOMA, The Phillips Collection, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. If you’re interested in getting your museum’s floor plan included in Google Maps, visit the Google Maps Floor Plans tool.

I was just talking about technology with a couple of museum directors in recent days, and while it seems that technology is coming to every museum, they may be forced to choose which company’s technology they’ll favor in their own use. It’s inevitable, I guess, but I’m not sure it’s a good thing.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Google

Catching Up With The Berlin Gemaeldegalerie Situation

The Association of German Art Historians has written an even stronger petition against the planned “irresponsible” move of Berlin’s Old Master painting collections out of the Gemaeldegalerie and into the Bode Museum, partly, plus much more into storage than the one I’ve written about before. Here’s one paragraph from it:

To put it bluntly: Bode’s vision of showing painting and sculpture together cannot be used to gloss over the disappearance into storage of large parts of the Gemäldegalerie collection of Old Master paintings. We also consider the token solution proposed in official statements, namely to stage rotating presentations of the works that the Bode Museum is far too small to house, as irresponsible on conservation grounds. Would such a solution be conceivable in the newly redesigned Louvre? What would Bode have said about it?!

So far, 4,154 German art historians have signed on. The link above includes an English translation. Meanwhile, the petition launched here in the U.S. has 6,363 signatures. But Jeffrey Hamburger, the Harvard art historian who created it, today wrotes to supporters:

At the rate of ca. 850/day, we have done quite well. We need, however, to do more. Just think: if each of you recruited one additional person to sign, we’d have close to 12,000. Two more, close to 20,000. With a little effort, we can greatly magnify the impact of our common cause. Now is not the time to sit back, but rather to redouble our efforts.

Authorities in Berlin have taken notice of the petitions, but apparently claim that no one goes to see the Old Master paintings. Nonetheless, they are being forced to respond and, as someone put it recently, their thoughts are “evolving.”

Sign here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Gemaeldegalerie

Schimmel, Part 2: MOCA Tries Damage Control And Fails Miserably

Late Friday, the Museum of Contemporary Art issued a press release – not in its press room, but posted on its blog, which is appropriately (in this case) named “The Curve,” about the abrupt and worrying departure of Paul Schimmel, their chief curator, last week.  You can tell how guilty the board and the administration is feeling by how they couched it.

First, they insisted it was a resignation, not a firing — despite the fact the Schimmel was called to the office of Eli Broad (right), the financier who gave MOCA a lifeline in Decemberm, 2008, to learn of his fate. Wouldn’t you have liked to be a fly on the wall to hear that conversation?

Second, they said the press release was drafted with Schimmel.

Third, they said he would work for MOCA as an independent curator in the future, finishing at least one of this current exhibition projects, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962, which opens in September.

Fourth, they named a gallery in the Geffen Contemporary after him.

The release did not disclose his departing pay package, however, which I would guess could be substantial (for a museum) and probably includes hush money aka a nondisparagement clause. So we may never really know what happened.

Nor did the release say what will happen to the Richard Hamilton retrospective that Schimmel has been co-curating with partners at the Tate Modern in London and Reina Sofia in Madrid.

If you have the stomach or want a good laugh, you can read the release here.  Or you can read Jori Finkel in the LATimes here.

There is no conceivable way to construe the week’s events as anything less than dysfunction at MOCA. There is an obvious dichotomy of vision between director Jeffrey Deitch and Schimmel, and a board that seems to have taken over when those two couldn’t work it out. Given the choice between the commercial gallerist they hired and the guy who has been there, mostly as chief curator and the producer of some of its most well-received shows,  in the last 25 years, they went — naturally — with their hire.

Trustees are not fooling anyone.  As of this writing, for example, the Curve post has elicited 24 comments from MOCA followers: 23 back Schimmel (several say fire Deitch), and one says let’s move on. None agree with the “resignation.”

Worse, this all proves Deitch is either a puppet or a coward, and possibly both. If he’s the boss, he should have dealt with his own chief curator — whether or not they were still speaking.

If the board thought they were insulating Deitch from this decision, they made a mistake. It will take MOCA a long time to recover from this.