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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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A Few Thoughts About Robert Hughes, American Art Critic

I met the critic Robert Hughes only once, and had no intention of writing about his death until I read a couple of his obituaries, which mostly ignored or belittled one of the things I admired about him. The New York Times didn’t mention it, neither did Time magazine‘s main piece (there’s apparently a separate story behind the paywall), and the Wall Street Journal, referring to a review of a book Hughes wrote, faulted him for it.

It was not his writing — everyone recognized his high style — or his eye, which agree with or not, signaled a distinct and definite taste, backed by erudition. No, I liked Hughes — an Australian who came to the U.S. via Britain — because he believed that American Art was/is underrated and did something about that — making an eight-part public television series called “American Visions” in 1998. That’s when I interviewed him.

My piece, A Critic Distills American Art into Eight Hours, describes the grueling work that went into the series, which was produced with comparatively little money given its ambitions; the accompanying 648-page book; and a special issue of Time magazine, where he was then critic (here’s an index to his work there). (Can you imagine Time putting out a special issue on art today?) Here’s an excerpt from my article:

…they filmed at more than 100 locations from Maine to Malibu — without the Hollywood conveniences.

“Whenever I’d see movie crews in SoHo, with their mobile toilets and makeup vans, I’d get jealous,” Mr. Hughes recounted. “Our makeup van was carried by a production assistant in her handbag. And when I was dripping in sweat, someone would produce a ratty package of Kleenex.”

The sheer volume of work was a bigger strain, threatening Mr. Hughes’s marriage and sending him to a psychiatrist for the first time. “After finishing the series about a year ago, I had severe depression,” he said. He blamed overwork, a crisis of confidence and postpartum blues.

Yet with deadlines for the book and then the bonus magazine looming, plus the reviews he writes for Time, there was no time to wallow. Sticking to a schedule he used on the road while writing the scripts, Mr. Hughes got up daily at 4 or 5 A.M. to churn out as many as 3,000 words a day.

“I nearly went bats having to write the book at such speed,” he said, dressed in blue jeans and a button-down blue shirt in his loft, which is chockablock with books and papers but devoid of art….

I can attest — 3,000 words a day is a lot; 3,000 good words is really a lot. But Hughes craved the accolades and attention his writing provoked:

Mr. Hughes has been noted for his idiosyncratic, nothing-is-sacred willingness to take on both the academically and politically correct, as well as for his vivid, irreverent language: when he says something clever, he will often stop to savor it and to make sure it has been recognized.

Over the years, it has been. Many deem him the most successful art critic today. In profiles and reviews of his books, writers have called him — besides the apt “ever voluble” — “erudite,” “famously pugnacious,” “brilliantly destructive,” “consistently entertaining,” “sardonic,” “pontificating” and a string of other colorful adjectives.

He is certainly “Nothing if Not Critical,” the title of his last book about art, a collection of his essays. In them, for example, he disparages the importance of Andy Warhol (on whom he has since mellowed) and taken many contemporary artists down a peg, including David Salle, Eric Fischl and Louise Bourgeois.

Hughes told me then that he wanted to make what became  “American Visions” as soon as he finished his more renowned “The Shock of the New” television series — which was broadcast in 1981. It took him until 1992 to enlist a backer — the BBC, not PBS, which added to the BBC funding, did Time, later.

Hughes told me much more in the course of our interview, worth reading if you appreciate Hughes — which artists he regrets leaving out, how he filmed at Monticello, why producers changed locations between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., why he tied his choices to the land, and so on.

It’s worth reading, actually, even if you don’t like Hughes, and many people don’t. Even his detractors, however, agree that he made people go look at art, which is a good thing.

 

Syria’s Cultural Heritage Under Threat: Sadly, No Surprise

We knew this was coming: Political troubles in Syria are causing damage to the country’s ancient treasures.

As the inimitable foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, now working for The Independent but with experience at British newspapers including The Times and the Sunday Express, wrote in Sunday’s paper:

The priceless treasures of Syria’s history – of Crusader castles, ancient mosques and churches, Roman mosaics, the renowned “Dead Cities” of the north and museums stuffed with antiquities – have fallen prey to looters and destruction by armed rebels and government militias as fighting envelops the country. While the monuments and museums of the two great cities of Damascus and Aleppo have so far largely been spared, reports from across Syria tell of irreparable damage to heritage sites that have no equal in the Middle East.

Even the magnificent castle of Krak des Chevaliers – described by Lawrence of Arabia as “perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world” and which Saladin could not capture – has been shelled by the Syrian army, damaging the Crusader chapel inside.

Fisk’s article, headlined Syria’s Ancient Treasures Pulverised, goes on to detail some damage and the reasons why — e.g., armed rebel hiding behind ancient wall, thinking that the Syrian Army would not blast them, wrongly. They did.

He quotes Joanne Farchakh, “a Lebanese archaeologist who also investigated the destruction and plundering of Iraq’s historical treasures after 2003, and helped the Baghdad museum to reclaim some of its stolen artifacts,” calling the losses “catastrophic.” Then, she adds:

One of the problems is that for 10 years before the war, the Syrian regime established 25 cultural museums all over the country to encourage tourism and to keep valuable objects on these sites – many placed stone monuments in outside gardens, partly to prove that the regime was strong enough to protect them. Now the Homs museum has been looted – by rebels and by government militias, who knows? – and antique dealers are telling me that the markets of Jordan and Turkey are flooded with artifacts from Syria.

Fisk, who has lived in the Middle East for more than 30 years, primarily in Beirut, places these battles in a historical context, noting that it has all happened before so many times. He concludes by saying we need inventories of what’s in national museums and on ancient sites. A mild remedy, I’d say.

Interpol issued an alert about Syria in May, calling for “vigilance of its 190 member countries as to the risk of illicit trafficking in cultural goods from Syria and neighbouring countries.” On July 27, the Director-General of UNESCO called for the protection of Aleppo, where fighting has been fierce.  Last month, the Association of Art Museum Directors issued a statement deploring the destruction of ancient sites in Northern Mali, a few days after articles in The New York Times about the situation there.

Nothing about Syria as of this moment (guess they are waiting for confirmation of the damage by the Times), though AAMD did speak up when Iraqi and Egyptian heritage was under threat. Nothing on the site of the American Institute of Archaeologists either…or the World Monuments Fund.

Not that I believe that such statements — other than Interpol’s warning — have much effect. But they do focus attention on the issue, and that is usually good.

Photo Credits: Roman Theater in Borsa, courtesy of The Independent (top); Wikipedia (bottom)

Stay Tuned: News Coming About MOCA This Week

The Los Angeles Times is back on the MOCA case. Over the weekend (today’s paper, I think, but online yesterday), they let director Jeffrey Deitch have another stab at telling his side of the story, which he has been unable to do successfully a couple of times in the past. Before we get to that, though, he did suggest that the week ahead would bring developments. The article’s penultimate paragraph says:

Deitch says that two “significant’ new trustees will join the board within days, and he intends to recruit new artists to the board to replace Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger and John Baldessari. The core of his board and staff, he declares, is now fully behind him.

I find his locutions amusing. Does he think other trustees are insignificant?

But let’s let that pass, and wait to see who these people are: their names will be telling. Would any artist sign up now? Would truly independent people, unbeholden to megapatron Eli Broad, sign up? We’ll see.

In the article, Deitch tries to defend his stance and his record at MOCA — noting that he has boosted attendance to record levels, is taming the museum’s budget troubles, and is generating scholarship for such exhibits as The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Andy Warhol (on view through Aug. 20).

But the article’s sources are very telling. On Deitch’s side, the paper cites “Aaron Rose, who co-curated “Art in the Streets,” MOCA’s exhibition on the history of graffiti and street art, for Deitch” and artist Shepard Fairey, who has a contract to develop a graphic identity for MOCA. Not exactly unbeholden to Deitch, are they?

On the other side, there’s Lenore S. Greenberg, a MOCA life trustee, who “says the museum’s problems stem from Deitch’s programming decisions as well as new board members who ‘are not familiar with what their responsibilities are’ ” and then added, “The board is dysfunctional, and I don’t think the director is functional either.”

She’s a significant trustee.

 

“Where There’s A Mill, There’s A Way”

That’s the clever headline on an article by me in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. I didn’t write the hed; Adrian Ho, an editor at the Journal, did, and I thank him.

It refers, of course, to the situation in the Detroit area. Next Tuesday, voters in the three counties whose residents most use the Detroit Institute of Arts will vote on whether or not to levy a tiny millage tax — $15 per $150,000 worth of property value — to support the museum. If not, director Graham Beal (left) told me, the museum will go into “a death spriral.”

Ordinarily, Beal would be blamed for letting the museum get so close to the brink, but no one I know or talked with about it would do that. Rather, some of his colleagues see his tenure there as rather heroic. Despite a deteriorating city around him and the worst economic conditions in Michigan in more than 50 years, the DIA has been operating in the black and has no debt.

And, as Samuel Sachs II, who preceded Beal as the DIA’s director, noted, “If you visit the museum, you don’t know it’s undergoing tough times. If a museum starts looking shabby, it’s really in trouble.” I didn’t go to Detroit for this story, but last year, when I was there, I would have agreed — the DIA looked splendid. When I told Beal about Sam’s comment last Friday, he complimented his “very stressed” staff. (Sorry, Sam, this was in the WSJ story but got cut.)

Still, as the article says, the DIA is at a point where it needs to ask donors, each year, for gifts to cover more than its operating funds, a model that’s simply not sustainable. I laid out the economics fairly succinctly, but if you would like to see it graphically, take a look at the charts published by the Detroit Free Press. The Free Press published its own narrative of the story, with much more detail, on July 22.

I can honestly say that I can’t think of what else the museum could be doing either, other than asking for public support — which the DIA has chosen to do with a millage tax. Today’s Free Press carried an exclusive poll showing that 69% will vote for the tax — but pollsters interviewed just 237 adults. True, Aug. 7 is a primary, so a small number of people are likely to vote, but still…

The DIA has made a gutsy move, and I just hope it works. It would be a tragedy to see that museum go into decline.

Here’s the link to my piece.

UPDATE: I can’t resist adding this piece on MLive, which in the process of reporting a rally on the millage, tells the tale of two kids who sold lemonade to raise money for the DIA. They took in $22.50 in 45 minutes.

 

New College Course: Teaching Artists To Manage Themselves

School is about to start in some places of the country and at some levels, so it seems like a good time to go back to some news released about a month ago: On Wednesday, James Hart, an award-winning actor, director and producer will take up his post at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, as the first Director of Arts Entrepreneurship, an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Division of Arts Management and Arts Entrepreneurship, at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts.

The new position is part of what SMU says is both new and unique in the U.S. — an arts entrepreneurship program at the college level. It’s a minor, not a major.  Meadows’s dean, José Antonio Bowen, said in a press release at the end of June: 

The creation of this undergraduate minor is one of Meadows’ most significant curricular initiatives, giving our students the opportunity to learn how to turn their artistic dreams into sustainable business plans. Audition skills are not enough! With the appointment of James Hart – an artist and educator with extensive experience in the fusion of arts and entrepreneurship education – the Meadows School is already positioned as the leader in this new and critical field.

I would agree on that. Again and again, we’ve seen the “talent” (as everyone says in TV so why not here?) rise into management, and sometime they mess it up. That was one excuse cited recently for the dismissal of Edward Villella as artistic director of the Miami City Ballet, as this article in the Miami Herald says. (Sample sentence: “The ballet had a deficit of over $1.5 million, and was in one of the worst financial crises in its history.” But who really knows?)

Bowen said he hired Hart because he “ s the owner, founder and former dean of TITAN Teaterskole (The International Theatre Academy Norway) – a full-time professional theater training program and the first school in Europe to offer intensive training in arts entrepreneurship at the professional conservatory level.” There, “His teaching method stresses the importance of students’ development of entrepreneurial and business skills in addition to traditional arts techniques.”

Others have tried to instill management or simple business skills in artists, but not in the same way. SMU believes it’s starting something that will become routine

As for Hart, a Dallas native. he has taught at the Yale School of Drama, New York University, the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, Tufts University, Fu Ren University in Taipei, Taiwan, Harlem School of the Arts, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Kirkenaer Ballettskole (Oslo), among others, his bio says.

He has also “directed classics of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Marivaux, Gogol, Miller and others, including a large number of world-premiere productions. He has also directed several films…[is] producing The Voice Within, a documentary about master acting teacher and former head of acting at the Yale School of Drama, Earle Gister. As an actor, Hart has performed in a number of venues including the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre, Utah Shakespearean Festival, Dallas Theater Center, Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, Theatre Alliance in D.C., and in St. Petersburg, Russia and Taichung, Taiwan. Hart earned his M.F.A. in acting from the Yale School of Drama in 1999 and graduated from SMU with a B.F.A. in theatre in 1996.”

Good move, SMU.