Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

Detroit Institute’s Facebook Experiment: The Results Are In

How good a marketing tool is Facebook? That question was posed in my Feb. 29 post here about the Detroit Institute of Arts, which offered Facebook fans free admission during March.

Now we know, and the answer is pretty good. The DIA says that 3,335 visitors took advantage of the free offer — an average of almost 160 people for each of the 21 days (the institute is closed Mondays and Tuesdays) of that month.

Visitorship overall during the month was also higher, year-on-year, despite the fact that there was no blockbuster exhibition. To get a fair comparison, the DIA subtracted school groups, which were also higher this year, and came up with this apples-to-apples comparison.

In 2012, March had 13,421 visitors versus 9,626 visitors in the same month last year, for a net increase of 3,795.

“Essentially, this indicates that the Facebook free admission promotion resulted in no decrease in general admission revenue over last year,” wrote Christine Kloostra, the director of marketing, in an internal email shared with me.

When, on Feb. 24, the DIA announced the free admission to those who “like” it on Facebook, the museum had just over 97,000 such fans and was seeking to top 100,000. When I checked just now, it had 115,738.

The response to the museum by new visitors was good, judging by comments posted on the DIA’s wall, too:

“Today was a fantastic day at the DIA, thank you! It was my first time attending and there were so many wonderful pieces to see. My family and I will certainly be back soon!” ~Anna Calhoun, Mar. 12

“Just went yesterday and it blew me away. Definitely returning.” ~Mollie Nasser, Mar. 10

“THANKS!! Will be visiting for the first time next week!” ~Candice Perdan, Mar. 9

“Don’t you just love The DIA for doing this!!!” ~Edie Lovejoy, Mar. 9.

“This is the most awesomest things the DIA has done in a long time. When I go, I’m gonna spend extra $$$ at the cafe and gift shop!!” ~Rob Kaplovitz, Mar. 1

Indeed, don’t you love it — especially the last sentiment? You can read more comments here.

And whoever at DIA thought of this should be given a treat, perhaps a drink at a place like John Sloan’s McSorley’s Bar, above, which is in the DIA’s collection.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the DIA

A Telling Moment For Crystal Bridges

Most reviews of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, including my own in the Wall Street Journal, noted that the best works came in the first few pavilions, before the art from the ’50s through now. I noted that Alice Walton, the benefactor, had passed up opportunities to buy major works by Mark Roth, Andy Warhol and Clyfford Still in the last few years. Her heart, I am guessing, just wasn’t in that period of art — though officials in Bentonville more often bemoaned the lack of opportunity.

Now they have another chance, and we shall see what happens. As reported in today’s New York Times, Christie’s will soon auction many works from the collection of David and Geraldine Pincus. The works on the block include at least two major works that would look great in Crystal Bridges.

One is Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow from 1961, an 8 ft by 7 ft painting of orange and red. Estimate: $35 million to $45 million.

The other, possibly more likely, is Pollock’s No. 28 (at right), from 1951, estimated at $20 million to $30 million, which was in the Pollock show at the Museum of Modern Art a few years back.

According to Christie’s, the Pincuses bought the work in the late 60s, “from the famed collection of Mr. and Mrs.
Arnold H. Maremont of Chicago, through Harold and Hester Diamond from whom the Pincuses acquired
the work.” It measures 38 x 54 inches and “is distinguished by its black enamel and silver grey paint with pourings and drips of white, red and yellow. There has not been a Jackson Pollock of this quality or scale at auction since 1997.”

It’s pricey, no question. Crystal Bridges likely could not purchase it on its own, without help from Walton, despite it $325 million acquisitions endowment. Will she come up with the money? Or would Geraldine Pincus, the consignor, do a private treaty sale for less money to see the work go to a museum?

 

 

Score Another Point For American Art: Another New Museum

Until I saw the Anschutz Collection on tour a decade or more ago, I didn’t much appreciate Western art. My mistake, because the best of it is very good. And Philip Anschutz has some of the best of it. Now, we’ll all be able to see it again, because in May Anschutz will open the American Museum of Western Art in downtown Denver.

It’s housed in the Navarre Building, built in 1880 and directly across from the Brown Palace. The Victorian building once was a school for girls, then a coed school, then a bordello, then a dining club, then a restaurant. Anschutz bought it in 1997 and restored it. It has been open to the public a couple of hours a week, by appointment, in recent months. In May, it will be open regular hours for walk-ins, though tours by curators will require advanced sign-ups.

Anschutz owns about 650 paintings, made from the early 19th Century to the present, as described on the website:

the museum’s holdings include examples of early American expeditionary painting, Hudson River School and Rocky Mountain School landscapes, 19th century American narrative painting, early American modernism, Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction, American Regionalism, “New Deal Art”, and even Abstract Expressionism.  

According to the Denver Post,  about 400 of them will be on view, hung in three floors of galleries. The paper also named some of the artists, including Frederic Remington, George Catlin, Charles Marion Russell, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe and Ernest Blumenschein. It added:

The paintings themselves are cohesive in their collective take on the old West — the work is as journalistic as it is artistic. Crossing from realism to abstraction, the paintings depict lush, hilly landscapes, Indian families, frontier settlers, cavalrymen in battle. They can take a wide view of high desert pueblos or offer a closeup of the patterns on native pottery. They are, at times, earthy, colorful, intimate, violent and serene.

The website has a slideshow preview of some works in the collection, including Thomas Eakins’s Cowboys in the Badlands, above, and there’s also the catalogue for Painters and the American West: the Anschutz Collection, which was shown at the Denver Art Museum in 2000.

 Need I say it? This is great news for Denver and for American art, which is having a moment in the sun — the new wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the renovated wing at the Met, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

 

Akron Museum’s Sherman Deaccession: Brave Or Foolhardy?

Christie’s announced a very unusual deaccession the other day: The Akron Art Museum plans to sell one of Cindy Sherman’s most famous images. Dating to 1981, the photo is known officially as Untitled, #96; unofficially as Orange Sweater, and comes from her Centerfolds series. As Christie’s noted in its release, “Another example of this image was sold at Christie’s in May 2011 for $3,890,500, which represents not only a world auction record for Sherman, but also a world record price for any photograph at the time.* The work from the Akron Art Museum is a vintage print in excellent condition and will have a pre-sale estimate of $2,800,000 – $3,800,000.”

Either museum director Mitchell Kahan is brave or foolhardy, I haven’t yet made up my mind.

In its release, Christie’s quotes Kahan saying, “The Akron Art Museum is extremely happy to partner with Christie’s on this sale. The result will be a new acquisitions endowment that generates significant growth for our collection. I am especially looking forward to continuing a commitment to Cindy Sherman by acquiring works made after the famous Centerfolds images.”

I have mixed feelings about this move.

On the “brave” side: Kahan’s goal is admirable — an acquisitions endowment. As I noted recently in an article for The New York Times, too few art museums have sizeable funds to buy art. Moreover, selling a contemporary work is rare. Most museums tend to clean out works from the past when they sell, even though many directors have told me privately that they should be weeding out what they’ve bought since the 1970s. That’s partly because of undiscriminating buying: some museums admit privately to purchasing “one of each” — that is, one example of many artists that somehow got buzz and critical acclaim for a moment, but have since dropped into to the 90 percent of all artists who will be ignored by art history. Little curatorial eye was involved. Now they’re stuck with things in storage that will likely never be shown. But they fear selling for two reasons: they don’t want to offend a living artist and his/her dealer and they fear making a mistake, even if only a public-relations one. 

On the “foolhardy” side: Whatever you may think of Cindy Sherman, the current consensus is that she is an important artist. The Akron museum owns another Sherman work, also from 1981, officially Untitled #93 and nicknamed “The Black Sheets.” But is the one they’re selling better than the one they’re keeping? It is better known. And aren’t collections supposed to have depth? Even if Kahan finds a later work by Sherman, from a different series, might that be less enlightening than showing two from the same series? Meantime, what example is Kahan setting for other museums? Is selling because of the jump in Sherman’s prices so tempting that museums will become active traders? And will other museums miss his subtler message of using the proceeds to acquire in the same area/time period?   

Kahan told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that adding the proceeds from this picture to the Akron museum’s $2 million acquisitions endowment could boost the amount of money it has to buy art to more than $260,000 a year, and added: “What’s the greater community benefit, keeping the ‘Orange Sweater’ and showing it once every five years, or having a few more million dollars generating money in perpetuity to buy more works of art?”

San Diego Museums Receive Transformative Gifts — But It’s Not News — UPDATED

This is a good news story for two art museums in San Diego, but the credit belongs not to them but to Max Anderson, who posted it on Facebook, which is where I saw it.

On Sunday, the San Diego Union-Tribune published an article headlined “Onetime Local Arts Patron, Wife Leave Unexpected Gifts to Two Museums.”

The article outlined how a man named Vance Kondon, once a resident of San Diego, remembered his city when he died, even though he had left it — left the country, in fact — in the early 1990s. He owned a collection of works by Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Gabriele Munter (her Tuntzing is at left), Robert Ryman, and others, that today is valued at $45 million, according to the paper.  

In his will (he died in 1996), he, and his wife, Liesbeth Giesberger (who died last year), made the donations. The Museum of Art, according to the paper, received 48 works, mostly pre-1950 works by Expressionist artists, including Schiele, Klimt, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Ott Dix and August Macke. Roxana Velasquez, the museum’s director, put a $20 million value on the gift.

Meantime, the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, received 30 works, ” mostly post-1950 Minimalist canvases, mixed-media works and sculptures by artists that include Richard Serra, Christo, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Craig Kauffman, Robert Mangold and Brice Marden.”  Director Hugh Davies called the windfall “the largest single gift in the history of the museum” and said they were “conservatively”worth $25 million.

Great for these two institutions, and — oddly – neither museum announced the gift, at least no on their websites. You’d think such transformative gifts would be worth a press release, no? Or at least a link to the Union-Tribune article? Maybe a note on their Twitter feeds (here – for the Museum of Art — but no), though the contemporary museum did tweet about it. Is it because the donors are deceased?

If I were running one of these museums, I’d be more active spreading the news.

UPDATE, Mar. 22: OK, the San Diego Museum of Art has now posted a short item on its homepage, with a link to the newspaper article. Not idea, imho, but better than nothing.

UPDATE 2: Now there’s a press release online, with more images.