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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Indianapolis Museum Stirs Up A Hornet’s Nest

What the Indianapolis Art Museum did Friday has to fall into the category of major PR blunder. In a press release headlined “IMA announces new campus enhancement plan to improve visitor experience and financial sustainability,” it sneaked in the fact–in the ninth paragraph, no less–that:charles_l-_venable

To build stronger relationships with guests, ensure quality programming through customer feedback and to guarantee long-term financial sustainability, the IMA will be refining its admission pricing policy. Visitor research has shown that IMA guests do not like paying for parking and key programs like exhibitions separately. Starting in April, an adult general admission ticket of $18 will include the cost of both parking and exhibitions. ($10 for children ages 6-17; ages five and under are free).

What it did not note explicitly anywhere in the release is that currently general admission is free. From now on, only the nature park, the cafe and the museum store are free all the time.

It’s bad enough to go from $0 to $18 overnight–though the museum has been charging $5 for parking and a fee for special exhibitions: $20 on weekends and $15 during the week for adults for the current Georgia O’Keeffe show. But to couch this new fee, and hide it, as a benefit is sure to anger people. And it did. On the Indianpolis Business Journal website, comments included:

  • “Admission to the museum was free from 1941 to 2006, when it started charging $7 for nonmembers. Former CEO Maxwell Anderson dropped the fee the next year after attendance flagged and admissions rebounded dramatically.” Even at $7, they had a problem. They don’t think they will at $18? Who is doing their thinking for them?”
  • “This is shameful! I am a paying member, and would pay more to be a member in order to ensure free admission for all of the citizens of the city. The museum just decided to turn its back on at least 50% of the population for which a casual free Sunday visit just became a $56 family outing (two adults and 2 children)!! Way to grow an appreciation for the arts for our inner city and middle class children. Turning the museum into a playground for the rich is a sad state of affairs.”
  • “I wonder what great mind came up with this. Such a cynical attempt to sell memberships. So obvious. I wonder if they understand how much goodwill they wiped out in one simple misguided action. I wonder if they care. I wonder if the IMA will be yet another a abandoned building in a city that leads the league in abandoned buildings. There’s a reason why everybody who can get out does get out of Indy. The reason is this kind of thinking. Greed, cronyism, corruption and a naive belief that the people will continue to pay. Uhhh, no. Good luck IMA. You were once great. Now you’re just sad.”

Charles Venable (at right), who took the IMA director’s job in 2012, has been having many problems–with curators leaving, deep staff cuts and retrenching, and dumbed-down exhibitions, among other things. He hired the founder of the International Cat Video Festival to do “audience engagement.”  Recently, that person said in a brief interview, “I am curating anything that isn’t an object—so events, performances, film, dance, music, anything that is activating our audience…I really think that art can be anything that causes you to react, to contemplate something, or to create conversation.”

What is happening to a museum that used to be, maybe not great, but pretty darn good?

 

Boston’s Arts Czar–Real Or Window Dressing?

This fall, Boston’s relatively new (Jan. 2014) mayor, Martin J. Walsh, appointed a cabinet-level arts czar: Julie Burros, who has been director of cultural planning in Chicago for nearly 15 years, where she helped develop a cultural plan for the Windy City. Many in the arts there were thrilled. Talking with the Boston Globe, ArtsBoston executive director Catherine Peterson said: “I think it is a potential game changer for the city. It embeds somebody who reports directly to the mayor, so the arts are not just at the center of what goes on in our museums and theaters, but at the center of life in the city.”

07_3KK3982AAs the Globe wrote in September, Burros will have “…a staff of nine and an annual budget of $1.3 million, with most of it going to salaries, officials said. Burros will also oversee the Fund for Boston Neighborhoods, currently at about $1.1 million, funded largely by contributions from organizations and individuals and used for events such as First Night. She will be paid $125,000 a year.” And, it added:

The idea behind the appointment is that a strong arts sector yields cultural, economic, and quality-of-life benefits that touch everyone in the city. “This is one area that crosses over almost every single department of city government and every single piece of city life,” said Walsh.

Last month, Walsh and Burros amplified their view with an op-ed in the Globe, saying (among other things):

Together with city residents, we will look at how arts and culture can play a greater role in the lives of all Bostonians — experiencing, learning, and creating. Experiencing the arts means enjoying the beauty of that which others create for us. Learning about the arts means that children and adults can see the world around them through a new lens. And creating art means finding ways to express thoughts and feelings to heal, connect, and inspire.

Our cultural plan will be a road map of a long-term strategy for how to enrich and strengthen our civic fabric as only the arts can. We seek to make the arts more accessible to residents of all neighborhoods and to support public art and design as a key component of how we envision and develop space in Boston.

All well and good, I think. Except. I remember when the Chicago Cultural Plan was revealed in fall, 2012, and I don’t have fond memories. It was maddeningly general and full of feel-good language to make the public seem as if their words were heeded.

But the Chicago Reader beat me to writing up what was wrong with it, enumerating Ten Things Wrong with the Chicago Cultural Plan So Far. The Reader called it a wish list. A year later, that publication went back to the plan to assess progress. It found that One year in, the Chicago Cultural Plan is already receiving plaudits. But that doesn’t mean it’s not window dressing. The writer, Deanna Issaacs, quoted a Chicago commissioner saying that “half of the 241 initiatives in the plan have been addressed.” In a year?

If so, either the bar was set too low or that was an exaggeration. You may want to decide–here’s a PDF of the plan’s Executive Summary and here’s a PDF of the plan itself.

One thing Bostonians should be looking out for. Chicago hired Lord Cultural Resources to write the plan. As a global firm, it has a reputation of cookie-cutter solutions. If Burros hires them in Boston, let the skepticism begin.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Boston Globe

Spalding Takes On Art’s “Self-Congratulatory In-Group”

I suppose I first became aware of Julian Spalding, the British art museum director, when I went to Glasgow some years ago and visited Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. I hated it, and I blamed Spalding, who was then the director of art galleries for Glasgow. Kelvingrove’s collections–which include Dali’s  Christ of St John of the Cross, Rembrandt’s A Man in Armour, and works by van Gogh and Monet, among other things–had been reinstalled for maximum tourist appeal, in themed galleries with dumbed-down labels. The lobby was like a playground for kids, who were running around, and the noise level was very high. Forget about a sanctuary; Kelvingrove was like a noisy New York City restaurant that required shouting for communication.

SpaldingNow I see that Spalding, who was said to be responsible for what people termed was this “populist” approach, is far from the knee-jerk person I suspected him to be. My apologies.

In his latest salvo, Spalding takes on the art-world powers in the U.K. In a speech he was set to deliver today, according to The Guardian, he is expected “to launch a ferocious attack on work that ‘rejoices in being incomprehensible to all but a few insiders’.” The article continues:

In a lecture on “the purpose of the arts today”… Julian Spalding...will say that the public purse should only fund work that is “both popular and profound, as truly great art is”. He will also criticise the supporting of works that appeal “to a self-congratulatory in-group”.

By 2015, the Arts Council will have “invested” £2.4bn of funds from the government and the National Lottery over a four-year period. According to Spalding, state arts funding should be restricted to subsidising “peaks in our shared culture” – such as King Lear, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – rather than the “rarefied delights” of artists such as Jeff Koons and Hirst, who he says create “sham, glittering ornaments of an amusement-arcade culture”.

And here’s a passage I like:

Spalding said that great art cannot be predetermined to tick boxes on funding application forms: “No government money should be spent on trying to influence the creation of art. The arts have to be personally felt.”

Right now, in this country, we have a lot of grants being offered to artists making socially conscious art, or art with a social purpose. I doubt, as I think Spalding would, that artists trying to please a funder on this will make great art.

Spalding goes on to blast a few works by name and artists. Read them here. I leave decisions on those works in particular up to each of you.

Overall, though the U.S. has a different system of funding for museums, mostly, I think he makes points well worth heeding here.

 

Directorial Job News: Emily Neff Out, Benedict Leca In

1383588824466Emily Neff, who took the job as director of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma just last January, left the job quietly last month. Neff, who was formerly curator of American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, resigned–probably under pressure–in early October, according to local reports, and it was accepted by the university president, David Boren, and then in late October by the board of regents. .

I have not been able to reach Neff, so I will not be able to go into details. But my understanding from talking with art world sources is that it was a mismatch from the get-go. Her strategy and her approach did not mesh with those of the museum’s advisory board or staff.

Neff, also chief curator at the Fred Jones museum, was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership a few years ago and is president of the Association of Art Museum Curators.

Here is a link to one of the local reports, in the Oklahoman,

BenedictFull11.20.14On a more pleasant note, Benedict Leca, who curated The World is An Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cezanne exhibition (answering five questions about it here) at the Barnes, and had been chief curator of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, in Ontario, and previously curator of European art at the Cincinnati Art Museum, has been named executive director of the Redwood Library & Athenæum in Newpost, RI.

The Redwood has a permanent collection of art, as well as space for changing exhibitions, I’m told. Currently, it is presenting a small show called Portraits of Interiors, including “interior landscapes of Newport houses by Walter Gay, David Mode Payne, and Mstislav Dobujinsky as well as contemporary artists working in and continuing the legacy of this genre.”

Leca’s vision for the Redwood includes “expansive art exhibitions,” I’m told. He starts Jan. 15.

You can read more about him and the Redwood here.

Photo Credits: University of Oklahoma (top); Redwood Library (bottom)

 

Oops: There’s Bigger News Today From Sotheby’s – UPDATED

RuprechtWilliam Ruprecht, the CEO, is stepping down, and the board has begun a search for a new chief executive. Obviously, while I was busy here writing about the Georgia O’Keeffe record sale today at Sotheby’s, a lot more was happening on York Avenue in NYC.

The announcement arrived a short time ago:

Ruprecht, who has served as CEO since 2000, will continue as Chairman, President and CEO until his successor is in place to ensure a smooth transition.

The Board has formed a Search Committee to oversee the recruiting of a new CEO and has retained Spencer Stuart, a leading executive search firm, to assist in the process.  The Committee is led by Domenico De Sole, Lead Independent Director.

Ruprecht joined the company in 1980 and became CEO in 2000. He’s been beleaguered by activist hedge fund manager Daniel S. Loeb for a long time now. Last May, Loeb joined the board, along with two colleagues, and he hasn’t let up the pressure to get better performance out of Sotheby’s. Ruprecht’s days were numbered.

Here’s a link to the Bloomberg story on the situation last May.

UPDATE, 11/21: The New York Times, which got this story out there first, has what I think is the most complete wrap-up of the situation, including yesterday’s 7% stock jump on the news in after-hours trading. At the moment, the stock maintaining most of the jump. But it will be interesting to watch who Loeb and his pals bring in. The NYT story reminds us that:

…Mr. Loeb took on Yahoo two years ago, unearthing evidence that the company’s chief executive at the time had overstated his academic credentials. He gained three board seats and then helped the company hire Marissa Mayer as its chief.

He later sold the majority of his stake back to Yahoo for $1.2 billion, earning a big profit.

Yahoo’s stock is certainly trading above where it was two years ago, but it’s still considered a company in search of a mission.