Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Good News From a Buyout, For A Change

I’ve been holding my tongue for a few days, but today I can give you the news of Richard Aste, the European paintings curator at the Brooklyn Museum. Aste took the museum’s buyout offer–it’s shrinking, as is the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

RichAsteBut now comes official word that Aste will become director of the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio.

Interestingly, the first quote in the McNay press release comes from the Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, which–I suppose–shows that he didn’t leave for negative reasons:

Over the past six years, Rich rose to be one of the most treasured curators at the Brooklyn Museum. With a focus on Latin American art, he brought insightful exhibitions to vast publics while expanding the Museum’s reach and scope to increasingly diverse audiences.

Among his exhibitions in Brooklyn were Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898 and Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World.

From Sarah Harte, president of the board of trustees at the McNay, came this:

Rich exemplifies everything we were looking for in our next director: a collaborative leadership style, intellectual curiosity, and a deep knowledge of the arts. With his broad international perspective and culturally varied background, he is poised to build, strengthen, and diversify relationships between the McNay and the community of San Antonio.We are confident he will take the McNay to the next level.

Those who know Aste, including me, would agree.

Here’s his bio.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the McNay

Diane Arbus, The Met and “The Envelope”

BreuerArbus2Maybe it was the heat, or the humidity. Maybe it was the artist–Diane Arbus, and the fact that diane arbus: in the beginning is focused on her eaerly works, with more than two-thirds of the works on view never before shown.

Whatever the reason, the Met Breuer* was packed when I visited on Sunday afternoon. To all those reasons above, add another one for me: I wanted to see the exhibition design, which is unusual if not unique. It’s the work of  Brian Butterfield, a Senior Exhibition Designer at the Met since 2014. Seems to me that he was a very good hire. He also designed Kongo: Power and Majesty, also a beautiful installation.

The Arbus show is a forest of free-standing pillars, each one mounted with one photograph on each side (see photos). This eliminates the all-over-gray, this-looks-boring effect of an exhibition of small, black-amd-white photos, which these are. People can wander through, stopping where they like–there’s no particular preferred order. There’s no beginning, middle, end. I liked it.

BreuerArbus-studyI liked it for another reason, too: As museums attempt to draw new audiences, some have changed the context of art in a way that takes away, instead of enhances, the art. This design doesn’t do that. You know what you are there to see, to focus on. Some art folks I know have asked me why I and other critics remark on “the envelope,” when it’s what’s inside that counts. But the envelope is not neutral. It creates an atmosphere, needless to say. It should never distract, and the very successful, to me, Arbus design doesn’t.

It was interesting to note two other things: the room set aside for perusing the Arbus catalogue was completely full. Also, Unfinished, the inaugural special exhibition that has not fared well with critics or the public, wasn’t empty, but wasn’t quite a full as Arbus either. (For me, any opportunity to see that van Eyck, Leonardo, some Turners, Rembrandts, etc. so close at hand is a big bonus.)

I was reminded of this issue in another artistic discipline on Monday night, when I attended IlluminatedHeart816“The Illuminated Heart” at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival. The concert showcased wonderful singers performing Mozart arias, one after another, on stage, with no set changes. The “envelope” here was designed by British director Netia Jones–and brilliantly. She used video projections (all simple and many gorgeous) to enhance the music, never distracting from it (a rendering, above). They were humorous at times, and always appropriate.

Both pieces offer a lesson, an example, to other museums and other arts organizations.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.

 

 

Is This A Portrait If I Say So? A Gutsy Exhibition

But enough about the Met, for the time being at least. Let’s let a little dust settle there. Can we talk about art for a day?

ThisIsAPortraitSpecifically, I want to commend the Bowdoin College Museum of Art for its current exhibition, This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today, which I’ve reviewed in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. It is billed as “more than 60 abstract, symbolic, and conceptual portraits across a wide range of media–reexamining over a century of portraiture and inspiring new ways to see ourselves and others.” The exhibition may be introduced with splashy red walls, but the labels–many of those for individual works run to more than 200 words–use words like “non-mimetic.” This is not for low-brows.

Given the push for crowd-pleasing exhibitions these days, it was a gutsy show to present. True, college museums are in better position to resist the pressure to present dumbed-down shows, but they are not immune to trends.

It was also a bit risky because, as I write in my review, much of the art in the show is not visually attractive, though it may be interesting. The intellectual content of some works is high, while others are humorous and some are even (to me) pranks. They employ symbols, everyday objects, typography and–later in the show–a lot of technology. Many, as Anne Goodyear, the co-curator who is also co-director of the Bowdoin Museum, told me, are “friendly representations, or teasing ones…done in the spirit of fun and friendship.”

Green-GreyAbstractionThe roster of artists in the show is impressive. They include Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia. Eleanor Antin, O’Keeffe, Dine, Yoko Ono, Ross Bleckner, Roni Horn–the list goes on.

Specifically, you can see Marden Hartley’s Portrait of his German lover, Karl von Freyburg, and Antin’s Carolee Schneemann, which consists of jar of honey, a velvet-draped easel and a full-length mirror, and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2008-2011 (the Map of the Land of Feeling I-III), a set of three mixed media scrolls that capture his movements around the world via his passport pages. Tom Friedman’s “Untitled” looks like an abstract color field painting—horizontal stripes—but is actually a rearrangement of the pixels in a digital portrait of himself. With nothing conventionally identifiable, the work mysteriously seems to be the opposite of a portrait. And is O’Keeffe’s Green-Grey Abstraction (right) a portrait, and of whom?

There is a problem for the casual visitor: To assess the success of some works, you have to know something about them and art-world networks. Or you have to be willing to learn. To get the most of out this exhibition, you have to work a little. But you will learn.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art  

 

Met Layoffs: “Nobody is Ruled Out”

My Friday post about staff shrinkage, from buyouts, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art* set off quite a stir: Emergency meetings were held inside the museum to discuss what was going on and the press office ramped up to get information and interview opportunities to various news outlets with Daniel Weiss (pictured), the Met’s president, and Thomas P. Campbell, the director. In that order, which itself says something.

Weiss-MetThe upshot, as I predicted, is that not enough people took voluntary buyouts to achieve the necessary cost savings and that therefore there will be involuntary layoffs, starting in the fall. And who would that entail? Weiss gave The Wall Street Journal the most interesting statement: “Nobody is ruled out.”

That is a good thing, probably. Buyouts were available only to those aged 55 and over who had at least 15 years of experience at the museum. Some 56 people signed up, and with them goes a lot of expertise and institutional memory. Some departments, notably technology, apparently escaped unscathed because they have few to no people with 15 years of experience, and these departments will have to slim down, too. The Met is seeking to trim at least 100 people, all told, from its payroll (though some will clearly have to be replaced).

The “nobody” quote, however, raises questions. I presume, for now, that the Met will not fire Campbell (trust me, for a bit). Certainly not as part of the layoffs.

But my sources have frequently mentioned that Sheena Wagstaff, whom Campbell hired in 2012 as chair of the department of modern and contemporary art, is vulnerable. For one, few people consider the Breuer building to be a rousing success. Many have noted that attendance is often mimimal–sometimes the galleries are nearly empty–though the museum told The New York Times  that attendance (185,000 in the first four months) had exceeded its target (155,000).

(That, btw, would make an annual target of just 465,000 people–which is smack in the middle of the Whitney’s experience there. In the late ’90s, the Whitney attracted 650,000 to 670,000 visitors a year, but by the time it announced its move downtown, that had slipped (in 2009) to 322,000.)

The new Diane Arbus show may change that, but it’s a photography show–different department from Wagstaff’s. Maybe the Kerry James Marshall exhibition, which opens in October, will help. Interestingly, the Met in early July changed the Breuer building hours, adding Saturday, and forgoing Thursday, as one of the two nights it is open until 9 p.m., along with Friday–just like the Fifth Avenue building.

But back to Wagstaff: if people are unhappy with her leadership–and they are–she, I’m told, isn’t a happy camper at the Met either. Her husband still lives in London and a A daughter who wanted to live here, near her, could not extend her necessary work permit. UPDATE: Wagstaff’s husband, Mark Francis, now informs me that he lives in New York now. My apologies for using old information.

I’m sure Wagstaff is well paid, but she is not listed on the Met’s tax return as among the highest paid employees either.

On that list for the year ended June 30, 2015, ten of the 20 have already departed or are in the current buyout class. (I am excluding Campbell and Emily Rafferty, Weiss’s predecessor, from the number: They would bring the total to 22–but the percentage gone is the same, as Rafferty left last year, too.)

Let’s keep some perspective, here: 100 cuts from a 2,300-strong workforce is not devastating, in and of itself. It all depends on which people are going.

It was worrisome, though, that Campbell said exhibitions would be cut to 40 per year from 55 to reduce costs. That’s more than a quarter.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of GW Magazine

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.

More Major Met Museum Departures–And More Woes

The exodus, and the troubles, continue at 1000 Fifth Avenue: announcement of the departure of Carrie Rebora Barratt (below), a deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum* and longtime close associate of director Tom Campbell, is imminent, I hear. In 2009, Campbell called her “the Director’s right hand.” It will probably come on Monday, my sources tell me–or leaked on Sunday night.

Carrie BarrattBarrett’s exit won’t be the only one, of course. In April, the museum announced that, as part of a cost-reduction plan, it would offer voluntary buyouts to staff member aged 55 and older with a certain amount of service. The deadline for applying–and hearing back–was this week.

I understand that 50 to 60 people are taking the offers, including many curators. Some feel that they were pushed to take the offers, as the museum’s president (for one), Daniel H. Weiss, has said that layoffs would likely be necessary if not enough people take the current offer. That is standard corporate behavior: take the buyout and get a financial reward or risk not taking it and getting fired with no financial package.

So who, among the curators, is leaving?  Naturally, I could not get official confirmation for any of this. But among the names I hear are Timothy Husband, Peter Barnet, Charles Little (all in the medieval department) and Kenneth Moore (head of the musical instruments department). I also hear that some people in object conservation and, possibly, public relations are going, perhaps Elyse Topalian, the vice president of communications.

Also, probably, Donna Williams, in multicultural audience development, and Linda Sylling, manager for special exhibitions, gallery installations and design.

Remember these are rumors, but these are big losses.

But the most “meaningful,” in one way, is Barrett’s departure. Campbell plucked her from the curatorial ranks in 2009, elevating her to the position of Associate Director for Collections and Administration. It was always a controversial promotion, but Campbell promoted her again in 2014 to Deputy Director for Collections and Administration, when he called her an “essential manager and spokesperson whose expertise lies in the areas of digital media, the collections, and the long-term feasibility of the institution.” She started at the museum in 1984.

You can bet that he did not want her to go. That means that Weiss is in control here, not the CEO. We’ve known that, but this confirms it.

The big question: did enough people volunteer? I understand that there was no “target” number, but also that no one who applied for the buyout was turned down.

But the Met is trying to save on the order of $20 million in expenses annually. This doesn’t seem to do that. How else can the museum save? Have fewer and longer exhibitions is one ploy. Skimp on design, delay maintenance, postpone as many expenses as possible. We’ll see if those things start to happen, too.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum 

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.