People

I’ve never met Cameron Kitchin, who began his job as director of the Cincinnati Art Museum today. He is making an interesting start: today, in the museum’s Great Hall, he met the public from 4 to 6 p.m., over light appetizers and a cash bar. Presumably, he walked the museum and met staff earlier in the day. Those are the right gestures to make.

Kitchin, you’ll recall, isn’t a first-time director (He came from the director’s post at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and has other interesting experience, which you can read about here), and it shows. His meet-and-greet, inside and outside the museum, is especially important because the Cincinnati museum was roiled by its last director.

There’s another reason I am hopeful about him, and it came in a piece by him that the Cincinnati Enquirer published on Sunday. The headline was not particularly promising: New director sees you at museum’s center. But it was not quite on target, thankfully–he said the beneficiary of museum activities was you, the public, and that’s different. Here is more (boldface mine) from his article:

Among the traditional fundamental responsibilities of an art museum, collecting and preserving the community’s cultural heritage is most certainly at the forefront; the 60,000 objects in CAM’s collection make it one of our nation’s most important museum collections. This work will continue with vigor and energy. As we look forward, the work of the art museum has grown in exciting ways, always mindful of our practice, scholarship and purpose. We now have the opportunity and call to integrate more deeply the strength of our collection, exhibitions, staff and the sublime power of great art with the city’s advancement and well-being.

Art first, in other words. And he sees the purpose of the museum as bringing people and art together, which is in fact in the mission statement (or used to be, I think–I can’t find it on the website), and that’s fine. He didn’t say bringing people to the museum, or making the museum serve the community, or any of those other popular mantras. Those goals are fine, but they be predicated on art at the center of initiatives, as the driver of attendance, education, conservation, etc.

So I’m hopeful about Cincinnati. No more, I hope, shows about things like wedding dresses. Or at least a preponderance of more serious, more art-centered scholarly exhibits.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Cincinnati Art Museum

Of course he wants it to be one: he’s an architect. But the project announced by Jean Nouvel last week, plans for a National Art Museum of China, won’t just be innovative in design; it seems–from the announcement and resulting press coverage–that the Chinese, with Nouvel’s help, will be out to establish new practices in museums, or at least to confirm what other museums have been trying, as standards.

NAMOC, as it has been dubbed, seems to be aiming for upending the museum world a bit. Aside from gallery spaces, a research and education center, an auditorium, NAMOC will have many public spaces plus an interior garden. All told, it will be 1.4 million square feet. By comparison, the Louvre has 652,300 square feet; the Metropolitan Museum of Art has 2 million square feet. NAMOC’s collection will extend from the Ming era in the 14th century to the present, and it seems they will be mixed together.

From the Nouvel press release (a bit jargon-y, but I wouldn’t dare “translate”):

…The museums should become lively places, resonating with invention where exhibits prove that sensations and emotions triggered by art are amplified by time, by the complicit juxtaposition of works from various times, and all the eras of invention. The most sincere inventors of our time must absolutely find in these moments a place for expression. It is our responsibility to invite the creators into a place where they can dream, in which they can be recognized, and offer the artists the means to express themselves better than ever, to reveal themselves more clearly and intensely than anywhere else.

The NAMOC represents an incredible opportunity for the most ambitious materialization of a place for expression, of communication and attraction, a place that witnesses the vitality of a civilization, the civilization of the greatest people on earth. Our proposal is the result of one year of catalysis, of immersions, of dialogs and explorations to translate, synthetize, symbolize and materialize the spirit of the Chinese civilization… our goal is to protect the miracles created with ink throughout the centuries, to reveal the force of a living art… to welcome the artist of tomorrow. The museum is a milestone that now establishes architecture as a civilizational medium, as the memorial symbiosis of nature and human expression. These exceptional conditions are able to elicit this rising attitude, this symbiotic response, and goes beyond being just a traditional competition of established styles. Today, the role of architecture is to catalyze, to precipitate the spirit of a situation should it be individual, plural or civilizational.

 A few pictures might help; from them, it seems somewhat attractive. I like the perforated facade, and the internal garden, especially in fall–as shown above. 

Here is a longitudinal.

The Summer  Hall, with its gold ceiling:

The Grand Terrace:

Notice anything odd? I did. Why no pictures of the galleries? Where the, um, art goes. There wasn’t a one in the press release. It seems, alas, that this is another example of a starchitect museum that will be far more about the building than about the art inside.

The Beijing Institute of Architectural Design is collaborating with Nouvel on this 21st Century museum; neither a cost nor a timeline for completion was disclosed. 

Photo Credits: © Ateliers Jean Nouvel

He’s called (by some) the most important architect working today, which is debatable, but there’s no question that Frank Gehry is one of the world’s most innovative and creative architects. In the U.S., he’s still having trouble with the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, despite a revision in his design delivered earlier this month. According to the Associated Press,

In the revised design, Gehry’s Los Angeles-based team eliminated two large, metal tapestries on the sides of the memorial park, along with some large columns. One long, stainless steel tapestry would remain as a backdrop, depicting the Kansas landscape of Ike’s boyhood home. The park would also include statues of Eisenhower as president and World War II general and inscriptions from some famous speeches.

But if he can’t get traction here, two other big Gehry buildings are opening this fall. Biomuseo, his only commission in Latin America, opens Oct. 2 month at the entrance to the Panama Canal, Pacific Ocean side, in Panama. This museum looks familiar — except for the wild and playful colors. Frankly, pun intended, it looks attractive and, if designed to attract families, inviting.

Biomuseo, btw, is a joint venture with the Smithsonian — specifically, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution. The other parters are “the non-profit Amador Foundation, established by private citizens of Panamá to raise awareness of the country’s natural and cultural history and encourage preservation of its extraordinary biodiversity, and the Government of Panamá, which contributed the site for the project and adjacent revenue-producing properties,” according to a press release.

The museum is centered around an outdoor atrium, covered by the canopies, which refer to local buildings and Panamá’s neotropical habitat. Seems fitting to me.

Meanwhile, in Paris, Fondation Louis Vuitton opens on Oct. 27. It’s definitely a Gehry building but a little different from the others too. It’s supposed to resemble a cloud, and it’s on the northern edge of the Bois de Boulogne.

A few words, but not much, about the exhibitions program are here.  It has 11 exhibition galleries, for permanent collection display and special exhibits–the first about the construction of the building.

Here’s a look at that.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Biomuseo (top) and Fondation Louis Vuitton (bottom)

It’s very trendy these days to insist that museums should be visitor-centered, not art-centered. Most recently, I was called on the carpet yet again for suggesting that art comes first, but not just that; in fact, someone I do not know accused me a restarting the culture wars when I wrote here about the Portland Art Museum’s Parklandia. The blog post was called “The Value of Museum Selfies.”

I’m not going to provide the link, partly because the writer misconstrues and mixes up ideas illogically and uses as justification for selfies that they are “pretty awesome” (not to mention badly misspelling my surname and assuming a familiarity that we do not have). It doesn’t get better, and it’s not worth your time. (You can easily find it if you search for it.)

Whether a museum pays attention to art or visitors is a false dichotomy.  They must do both, and the questions are always: which is the driver and what is the balance. Some museums manage to do it well; others go astray.

But as I was reading the most recent publication sent to me from the Cleveland Museum of Art, I was taken by the way its new director, William Griswold (at left), framed the “issue.” Here is what he wrote:

Cleveland is simultaneously the quintessential connoisseur’s collection and one of the most community-focused museums in the country. At first, this might seem a contradiction; however, it is not if one embraces the premise that the greatest art is great, in part, because it embodies the most eloquent communication of the most universal human experiences. Cleveland has always demonstrated its faith in art to communicate and in audiences to “get it,” and the museum has seen its role as facilitating that connection through beautifully designed galleries, thoughtful interpretive materials, and–in recent years especially–the innovative and intelligent use of technology.

That is exactly right. If curators and museum administrators do their job well, art will do the rest of the job. We need to repeat this, or something like it, again and again.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Cleveland Art Museum