Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Uncategorized

MoMA’s New Audio+ Guide: I Like It

Today, the Museum of Modern Art announced a new “mobile platform” and I tried out this new-generation audio guide. It’s called Audio+ — since it involves video too and, best of all, the ability to save and share selected information.

MoMA_Audio+_MSeck_067_300-res_cc-300x200Introduced to visitors in Beta mode (which continues) in stages beginning last July 3, these devices — modified (or programmed) iPods Touch devices — replace the museum’s handheld audio wands.

Here’s how it works, my experience shows: You take the iPod on a lanyard and hang it around your neck. Then you take earphones, put them on, plug them into the iPod, and you’re off. Touch the screen for an introduction to the exhibition or permanent collection — I went to the American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe exhibition, as instructed by the press office (which held a session on digital initiatives). You can stop it at any time, or you can plug in the number of selected works to hear something about it (just like an audioguide) and — here’s the new part — you can take pictures with the iPod touch. The device automatically saves the audio you listened to, the pictures you took, etc. and — here’s the best part — the device lets you email your tour to your own email address. So when you get home, you have an email with the subject line “Hi, I went to MoMA and…”

detail_52E634C6-B621-4D41-A98E-988CBDC4878AOpen it to get to “My Path,” which is a compendium of the videos you viewed and the photos you took (one of mine is at right). You can listen again to the audio bits you heard, and so on. The email reads:

Thank you for visiting The Museum of Modern Art. We hope your visit was an inspiring one and that you enjoyed using MoMA Audio+, our new mobile guide. Here is the link to your saved personal path:

LINK

You can also stay up to date on all that MoMA has to offer by signing up for E-News.

We look forward to seeing you at MoMA again soon.

“My Path” comes with a little dashboard for your visit, which includes how many works you looked at (actually, listened to — I looked at many more than were recorded), what years they covered, what mediums, and so on — versus the number that you could have looked at. “My Path” for me said I explored just three paintings (not true, but those are the three listened to guides for) made in the 1920s. I took 12 photos (including some labels, because I wanted to know the dates/names/donors, etc.).

The museum now has 2,000 of them available for visitors, who average 9,000 a day at MoMA, but officials there said there haven’t been any real problems with scarcity (people simply wait for returns, I guess). And since July 3, MoMA says (in a press release):

…more than 160,000 visitors have taken advantage of its numerous features, taking and sharing more than 700,000 photos and accessing and sharing their saved personal paths. Antenna International provides the mobile guide operation, including staffing, device distribution, and audio production.

As MoMA said, this is still in beta. There are kinks. But it does seem to me to be an improvement on anything else I’ve used at museums (NB: I have not tried Gallery One at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which had not yet gone live when I was last there). Normally — unless I know absolutely nothing about an exhibition — I don’t take an audioguide. But I can envision myself using this device, because I can send home what I did and use it again later.

I like it.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of MoMA (top) 

 

 

 

Reason To Rejoice With The New Museum in San Antonio

Art-Artifact-Pancho-Villa-SaddleSan Antonio has a new museum, in an excellent location for visitors, and a clear mission that doesn’t duplicate another nearby museum’s — good signs for the future. I’m talking about the Briscoe Western Art Museum, which opened on Saturday. Situated on the city’s popular River Walk, in a restored historic building that once housed a circus museum, its inaugural exhibition contains about 700 objects, including Santa Anna’s sword (bottom), Pancho Villa’s saddle (top), and an Apache olla basket (middle).

Although the lobby contains a life-sized sculpture of cattle herds by John Coleman, officials say the Briscoe is not a museum of “cowboy art,” but rather will also collect art depicting and related to the American Indian and Spanish and Mexican vaqueros. In the collection or on loan now are paintings by E.I. Crouse and Maynard Dixon, among other things.

Here’s more about what is inside  and more about the collections.

You may not like Western art and artifactsArt-Artifact-Basket-Olla-Apache (I do, btw), but there’s another reason to know about this museum. Again, as in Dallas, the San Antonio city officials and business executives are vocal about the importance of having museums. As reported by the Native American Times,

The Briscoe adds a new element to the city’s cultural offerings as the first dedicated Western heritage museum. Briscoe officials and city leaders see the new museum fitting into a well-established niche: the tourism industry. Located at Market and Presa streets on the River Walk, the museum is within easy reach of various tourist destinations.

“They’re a walk away from the Convention Center. They’re a walk away from the major hotels downtown, so it’s an added value to that experience,” said Felix Padrón, director of the city’s Department for Culture and Creative Development. “If we can encourage tourists to stay an extra day not only to go to the Briscoe but to the Tobin or other institutions downtown, that’s a win-win situation for all of us since we’re supported by the hotel-motel tax.”

Pat DiGiovanni, CEO of Centro Partnership San Antonio, said cultural attractions such as the Briscoe are key to the effort to revitalize the city’s core. “This is the kind of asset we need to build off of if we’re going to have a vibrant, 24-hour, seven-days-a-week downtown,” he said.

Art-Artifact-Santa-Anna-SwordNot that there weren’t troubles along the way. According to the San Antonio Express,

About 10 years in the works, the three-story museum initially was slated to open in 2009. It was delayed as the original design changed and the price tag grew from $18 million in 2006 to the final $32 million. More than $7 million in taxpayer funds has gone into the project, including $6.25 million from the county and about $1 million from the city. The rest of the funding has come from the private sector.

Former Gov. Dolph Briscoe, who died in 2010, contributed $4 million to the project. The museum is named for him and his wife, Janey.

“The public-private partnership was such a successful model for this project,” said museum board Chairwoman Debbie Montford. “Private donors came together with both the city and the country to restore a building with great bones, and I think it’s energized this entire piece of the river. We’re so happy. I mean, we’re looking at each other and saying, ‘I can’t believe it’s finally here.’”

There’s more to the story at both newspaper links.

 

Auction Houses, Too, Are Taking Up Themes

MaurerLike art museums (see here), auction houses are increasingly “curating” their sales to themes. On November 5, Swann is presenting a sale called “The Armory Show at 100,” for example. And soon Phillips in London will offer “The Architect,” a sale of furniture and other objects created by architects, Christie’s South Kensington will present “The Art of Food and Drink,” and Sotheby’s will have “The Courts of Europe: From the Renaissance to the Rococo.”

Expect more. As Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, told me of themed sales, “They are growing in importance and relevance.” Themes, of course, aren’t needed for the big evening sales where buyers are not entering the market, but they draw in new collectors to lower priced and less-prized art, by giving them a hook to latch onto — a story, context.

That was the subject of an article I wrote for The New York Times, in Sunday’s paper, headlined Auctions Organized by Theme, With a Narrative Pull. 

Yes, this is driven by marketing, but I think it’s a good thing anyway. Themes draw more people into art, and they learn more about the art. Several of the titles could have been titles of museum exhibitions and, in fact, “The Armory Show At 100” is one — it’s the title of a show at the New-York Historical Society. That’s one of the lots, a nude by Alfred Maurer, at right.

It may be a fad — I don’t know how long it can last. But I’ve looked at a few catalogues for some of these shows, and they provide good information. Let’s enjoy it while we can.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries

 

 

 

Public Sculpture Is Home On the Range In Dallas

Dallas likes to think of itself as an arts city, what with the growing Dallas Arts District, which includes the Dallas Art Museum, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra, the Dallas Opera, the Texas Ballet Theaters, and much more.

NasherLogoBut as of Oct. 19, as I mention in an article in today’s New York Times’s special section on Fine Arts and Exhibitions, it has busted out of those confines because of the Nasher Sculpture Center’s 10th anniversary exhibition — called Nasher Xchange, partly as a pun on the Roman numeral. Instead of celebrating on its own premises, the Nasher has commissioned 10 sculptures for its show and placed them all over the city, as I say in In Dallas, 10 Sculptures for 10 Years. Further, in all but one case the participating artists worked with local communities, which is also signaled in that title.

The Nasher came up with this idea because, as Jeremy Strick, the Nasher’s director, told me, “Some of the most interesting work being produced today is for the public sphere and therefore by definition doesn’t fit into the context of a museum or even in our garden.” It’s also a link back to Ray and Patsy Nasher’s history with sculpture, as you’ll see in the article. Plus,

He and his curatorial team selected artists whose approaches were varied enough to make “Nasher Xchange” tantamount to a survey of contemporary public sculpture. “With 10 works you can’t cover it all,” he admitted, “but you can begin to suggest the range.”

sculpture-2013-10Rochelle Steiner, former director of the Public Art Fund in New York and former dean of (now professor at) the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, was one of a couple sources who told me she had heard of other places who’d like to have city-wide sculpture exhibitions. Of course, some, like those in Munster and Munich, already exist.

But back to my lead paragraph, above. Last winter, when the Nasher center announced the exhibit, the city’s mayor, Mike Rawlings said “We’re closer than ever in Dallas to becoming that international arts city that we want to be. Believe me, the world is watching.” And he also said that Nasher Xchange would “challenge us to rediscover, reconsider and reclaim our city.”

At the time, the Dallas Business Journal also said that “Rawlings cited benefits of art, ranging from the ability of sculpture to inspire and define public spaces to fueling growth, stimulating tourism and encouraging companies to relocate. Rawlings said he believes great art and great business go hand in hand. He said the public art program will touch all corners of the city.

I never like to put that burden on art, no matter how true it is — but I can’t  help wishing that Rawlings’s comments would find their way into the ears of Kevyn Orr and his bankruptcy team in Detroit.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center; Liz Larner’s X at right

 

 

 

The Frame-Up In California

BB-current frame 2What’s wrong with this picture, at left, of The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough’s 1770 masterpiece?

Nothing perhaps, except that styles change — and sometimes change again, reverting back.

That’s what’s going on right now at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.  Henry and Arabella Huntington purchased this famous painting in 1921, for the then-record sum of $750,000. But people didn’t like the painting’s “bulky 19th-century frame.” And in 1938, the complaints were wearing down the Huntington’s curator of art collections, Maurice Block. Then,

According to a memo written on May 6 of that year, “We have cut down one of our old frames to put the Blue Boy into it.”

The replacement frame [a blog post by Catherine Hess, the chief curator of European art at the Huntington, says] appears to have been an extra supplied by [Joseph] Duveen and probably had been in storage for some time in the Huntington Art Gallery basement. This frame [i.e., the one in the picture at left] is of the so-called Carlo Maratta type, widely used in England from 1750 through the turn of the 20th century.

Lots of other works in the Huntington’s collection similarly have frames supplied by Duveen.

But the Huntington recently decided to reframe The Blue Boy again.

We first approached Michael Gregory, frame specialist at Arnold Wiggins & Sons in London, a workshop specializing in the adaption and reproduction of antique frames….Noting that the frame aroundThe Blue Boy appeared a bit heavy on the picture, Mr. Gregory suggested several 18th-century English frames as possible replacements. Working with Kevin Salatino, the Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Collections at The Huntington, I helped select a splendid Rococo example that complements the framing of Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie.

So that’s what is happening now. By the end of next month, Blue Boy will look like the digital mockup below.

BlueBoyNew

So what do you think? Which is best for the Boy?

Photo Credits: Courtesy of The Huntington