Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Research

Mellon And MoMA: A New Kind Of Research Team?

Museums conduct all kinds of research, if sometimes fitfully. Recently, I learned of a new effort, though, which might break some ground. It brings graduate students and faculty to a museum’s collection. It’s happening at the Museum of Modern Art and funded by the Mellon Foundation, though neither one of them has published a press release.

Keifer-WoodenRoomThe best information I found online was in the form of a job posting. It’s for the role of “museum research project coordinator,” and despite the low-end title and mostly administrative duties, it requires a master’s degree. Go figure.

From the posting, we can glean something about the project:

With the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Museum of Modern Art has embarked on a four-year (January 1, 2013–December 31, 2016), Museum-based pilot program for the study of objects in MoMA’s collection in partnership with graduate students and faculty from the art history programs at Princeton University, Yale University, Columbia University, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. This Museum Research Consortium is intended to facilitate the joint study of key works in MoMA’s collection by curators and conservators from the Museum and faculty and graduate students from participating universities.

This will be accomplished through semi-annual Consortium Study Sessions for the study and discussion of selected groups of objects.  In addition, the Museum will host five annual full-time Fellows in a one-year mentorship program to work with a MoMA curator in the execution of various scholarly curatorial projects and programs, including the organization of exhibitions, collection displays, and collection development and interpretation.

One good thing about this is that it puts graduate students in close contact with MoMA’s  great works of art — they won’t be studying just theory or depending on slides. Another: MoMA will dig more deeply on a sustained basis into its permanent collection. It will learn new things that might lead to public disclosures, new exhibitions, new connections, or something completely different.

I like it.

Now what should be the research priorities? I surely do not know. I selected this work, Wooden Room by Anselm Keifer, simply to show something from the collection that, while on view (according to the website) is not already known by everyone.

Photo Credit: © 2013 Anselm Kiefer, Courtesy of MoMA

 

It Pays To Nag: SMU Creates An Arts Research/Data Center

Someone’s listening. I’ve not been the only one who’s called repeatedly for more and better information — real data — on the cultural world, but I’ve been in that camp for a long time. (For example, see here and here.)

Tonight, Southern Methodist University in Dallas is announcing an answer to those pleas: the creation of a National Center for Arts Research there. It will, according to the announcement, “aggregate and analyze the largest database of arts research ever assembled in order to create the most complete picture of the health of the arts sector in the U.S.” and draw on SMU faculty in “arts management, marketing, and statistics” to work on them. The research will be made available to the public in a “Dashboard” that is continually updated.

I was with them completely until the mention of the Dashboard. While those I’ve seen are interesting — as at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art — they don’t go deep enough, with longitudinal information to provide context. We’ll see what SMU does to use that format for more meaningful information.

BowenJoseSMU says it has “an unprecedented number of partners to contribute data, provide analysis, and create tools to make the information accessible” – “including the Cultural Data Project (formerly part of the Pew Charitable Trusts), Theatre Communications Group, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Census Bureau, the National Center for Charitable Statistics, Boston Consulting Group, TRG Arts, the Nonprofit Finance Fund and IBM.” Well, that’s good. Of course, the research coming out of this SMU Center is only as good as the data going in — and much of it is lacking.

Still, NCAR is a start in the right direction. As José Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, rightly says, “In today’s competitive environment, arts and cultural organizations, from museums to orchestras, need to do more than create great works of art. Arts organizations must have a more research-driven understanding of their markets and industry trends in order to more deeply engage existing audiences and reach new ones.”

Back in 1999, the Pew Charitable Trusts started something to collect data about arts organization (now given to SMU) as part of its plan to forge a national cultural policy, which I wrote about here in The New York Times. Unfortunately, that $50 million policy effort, all told, was later abandoned, or perhaps slimmed down radically, to be more precise.

This isn’t as easy as it looks. So I wish SMU more than luck. If you’d like to learn more, here’s the NCAR release.

 Photo Credit: Courtesy of SMU

 

Jim Cuno Takes On The Art History World

I’d never heard of an online publication called The Daily Dot until it was called to my attention yesterday because, of all things, the president of the Getty Trust — Jim Cuno — had written an op-ed piece for the site.  And in what seems strange to me, his piece has more Facebook likes (262 at this writing) than any other op-ed on the new opinion page – weird considering the esoteric subject.

But maybe, perhaps, not quite so weird because Cuno chastises art historians for being behind when it comes to digital technology, and the site is for web communities. His piece is headlined How Art History is Failing at the Internet. He writes:

…Of course we have technology in our galleries and classrooms and information on the Web; of course we are exploiting social media to reach and grow our audiences, by tweeting about our books, our articles, including links to our career accomplishments on Facebook and chatting with our students online.

But we aren’t conducting art historical research differently. We aren’t working collaboratively and experimentally. As art historians we are still, for the most part, solo practitioners working alone in our studies and publishing in print and online as single authors and only when the work is fully baked. We are still proprietary when it comes to our knowledge. We want sole credit for what we write.

Cuno then goes on to compare the ethos of conservation scientists versus that of art historians — citing the Getty’s Closer to Van Eyck project on the Ghent altarpiece.

In short, humanists largely work alone and on timelines with long horizons. Scientists work together, experimentally, and publish quickly.

Rather, he writes:

…we should be experimenting with ways of compiling archives of formal and iconographic incidents across hundreds and thousands of images and then organizing and reorganizing them in ways that ask new questions and suggest new answers from cross-disciplinary and international perspectives.

To a certain extent, what Cuno writes is self-serving. To a certain extent, he’s also right, I think. Even if he’s mostly wrong, he’s taken up a worthy subject, though I think he could have found a better forum for it than he did. It’s a speech made for the College Art Association.

Photo Credit: Mel Melcon, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times

 

It’s Another Getty Coup: Big Acquisition

Buying an archive might not seem as sexy as buying a painting or a sculpture, but today the Getty Research Institute announced a wonderful acquisition: the archive of Knoedler & Company Gallery,  which is widely cited as New York’s oldest art gallery. It has operated here since the mid-19th century. The acquired records date from about 1850 to 1971 – comprising a “vast trove of diverse original research materials including letters, telegrams, albums, sales books, stock and consignment books, card files on clients and art works, rare photographs, reference photo archives, and rare books,” according to the press release.

Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute, called it an “invaluable American cultural resource” and that’s not hyperbole.

The press release does not mention the seller, but I believe it is Michael Hammer, chairman of the defunct gallery and son of legendary business man and somewhat controversial collector, Armand Hammer. Although Knoedler was shuttered earlier this year — in a move supposedly unrelated to the fraud cases pending against it and former director Ann Freedman, my understanding is that Hammer retained ownership of the archive separately. He has been trying to sell it for at least a few years — to places including the Archives of American Art, the Frick Art Reference Library and the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

The first two — at least — wanted it, but neither could afford the price Hamemr was asking, which was at one time said to be between $5 million and $10 million. No one was biting at that level, and I suspect the price has come down substantially. The Getty did not respond to that particular question asked by me.

Hammer was recently added to the suit filed against Knoedler by Domenico De Sole, chairman of Tom Ford International, and Eleanore De Sole, in an amended complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan. Knoedler closed in 2011.

Knoedler, of course, not only brokered the sale of many, many important European pictures to American collectors during the Gilded Age and since then, but also sold American art by the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Eva Hesse, to cite a few examples. Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Robert Sterling Clark, and Catharine Lorillard Wolfe.

The Getty Museum has purchased more than a dozen paintings and drawings from Knoedler or which had passed through Knoedler’s hands at some point, including van Gogh’s Irises (right).

The Getty already owns archives of such galleries as Goupil & Cie, Boussod Valadon galleries, and the Duveen Brothers. Although Knoedler’s records are said to be in good order, the Getty must catalogue, process, and conserve them before making them available to researchers on site – and also digitizing them for online research. The latter is the only consolation to New Yorkers. The purchase is fantastic for the Getty, but not so good for New Yorkers.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Getty

Toledo Museum Calls Out “Hey, Baby, Wanna See My Paintings?”

Art museums everywhere are searching for and trying to appeal to younger audiences, but the Toledo Museum of Art may just have everyone beat. It’s offering “baby tours” designed for parents or caregivers with infants up to 18 months old — one baby per adult please. And no strollers.

Now, many art museums have family programs, but this is the first time I’ve seen one offer an initiative like this. (Do let me know if I’m wrong.)

I learned of these baby tours in the TMA’s ARTMATTERS May-August magazine and they seem noteworthy.

The article about them cites the TMA’s director of education, Dr. Kathy Danko-McGhee, a former professor of early childhood art education, as someone who has studied how babies respond to art. Noting that the visual system of humans develops during the earliest days of our lives, it says newborns as young as nine minutes old prefer to look at photographs and pictures resembling the human face; that newborns can see color; that a one-month-old can distinguish between red and green, and that at 12 weeks old, infants prefer colors over white.

So the TMA is offering baby tours of its Jules Olitsky exhibition (his Purple Golubchik, right), on five Friday afternoons at 3:30 p.m. The Pitch: “Watch your baby respond to large colorful paintings and learn ways to facilitate early visual literacy skills.”

Looking at art “promotes early neuron connections in the brain. And for the verbal toddler, interacting with an adult in naming images and describing different characteristics in a work of art lays the groundwork for visual, cognitive and language development,” the TMA says.

Surprisingly, the magazine invites people to learn more by calling Danko-McGhee and printing her phone number.

Kudos to the TMA.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art