Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Indianapolis Museum Stirs Up A Hornet’s Nest

What the Indianapolis Art Museum did Friday has to fall into the category of major PR blunder. In a press release headlined “IMA announces new campus enhancement plan to improve visitor experience and financial sustainability,” it sneaked in the fact–in the ninth paragraph, no less–that:charles_l-_venable

To build stronger relationships with guests, ensure quality programming through customer feedback and to guarantee long-term financial sustainability, the IMA will be refining its admission pricing policy. Visitor research has shown that IMA guests do not like paying for parking and key programs like exhibitions separately. Starting in April, an adult general admission ticket of $18 will include the cost of both parking and exhibitions. ($10 for children ages 6-17; ages five and under are free).

What it did not note explicitly anywhere in the release is that currently general admission is free. From now on, only the nature park, the cafe and the museum store are free all the time.

It’s bad enough to go from $0 to $18 overnight–though the museum has been charging $5 for parking and a fee for special exhibitions: $20 on weekends and $15 during the week for adults for the current Georgia O’Keeffe show. But to couch this new fee, and hide it, as a benefit is sure to anger people. And it did. On the Indianpolis Business Journal website, comments included:

  • “Admission to the museum was free from 1941 to 2006, when it started charging $7 for nonmembers. Former CEO Maxwell Anderson dropped the fee the next year after attendance flagged and admissions rebounded dramatically.” Even at $7, they had a problem. They don’t think they will at $18? Who is doing their thinking for them?”
  • “This is shameful! I am a paying member, and would pay more to be a member in order to ensure free admission for all of the citizens of the city. The museum just decided to turn its back on at least 50% of the population for which a casual free Sunday visit just became a $56 family outing (two adults and 2 children)!! Way to grow an appreciation for the arts for our inner city and middle class children. Turning the museum into a playground for the rich is a sad state of affairs.”
  • “I wonder what great mind came up with this. Such a cynical attempt to sell memberships. So obvious. I wonder if they understand how much goodwill they wiped out in one simple misguided action. I wonder if they care. I wonder if the IMA will be yet another a abandoned building in a city that leads the league in abandoned buildings. There’s a reason why everybody who can get out does get out of Indy. The reason is this kind of thinking. Greed, cronyism, corruption and a naive belief that the people will continue to pay. Uhhh, no. Good luck IMA. You were once great. Now you’re just sad.”

Charles Venable (at right), who took the IMA director’s job in 2012, has been having many problems–with curators leaving, deep staff cuts and retrenching, and dumbed-down exhibitions, among other things. He hired the founder of the International Cat Video Festival to do “audience engagement.”  Recently, that person said in a brief interview, “I am curating anything that isn’t an object—so events, performances, film, dance, music, anything that is activating our audience…I really think that art can be anything that causes you to react, to contemplate something, or to create conversation.”

What is happening to a museum that used to be, maybe not great, but pretty darn good?

 

No Other Word For It: Fundraising Failure

The Phillips Collection crowdsourcing effort, an attempt to raise $45,000 in a month to support a website abut Jacob Lawrence, has failed miserably. When the drive ended on Dec. 10, only $2,988–a mere 7 percent of the goal–had been pledged. And that took 41 supporters, for an average contribution of about $73.

logo_color_lockedupAll of the background is here, in my previous post on the subject.

Why would this campaign fail? I can think of several possibilities, or a combination of some of them:

–Not enough visibility for the campaign. I checked the Phillips’s Facebook page and saw just three posts about the campaign. Now, I’m guessing there were emails to supporters, perhaps a little local press, maybe some Tweets? Whatever it was, it was likely not enough.

–An over-ambitious goal. Raising $45,000 in a month from the grass roots is hard and time. Raising it for a future website, which can’t/won’t be seen for months, is harder. And there was some skepticism about the full, $125,000 cost of the website–why so much?

–An artist whose name isn’t that well known in the public. Sad, but true.

–In the visual arts, crowdfunding is less than it’s cracked up to be, most of the time. Previously, we know that the Hirshhorn failed in its attempt to crowdfund an Ai Weiwei work: it raised $555 of a $35,000 goal. The Freer-Sackler tried it for its Yoga exhibition, but few of the links then in use work now. This one does work–it shows support from 616 donors, but no total donated. This article, however, says the Freer-Sackler raised $174,000 for the show, including $70,000 from Whole Foods.

Yoga has a vast following, though, and I’ll bet the Whole Foods connection helped, too.

I’m thinking that crowdfunding is a gimmick, and one that, most of the time, requires another gimmick to make it work.

That’s the new Phillips logo above, btw. I think I like it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Phillips Collection 

Adrien de Vries Sculpture Fetches Record $27.9 Million

DeVriesA record was set at Christie’s today for an Adrien de Vries sculpture–one that was withdrawn from sale in 2011 because it lacked an export license–and the winning bidder was the Rijksmuseum.

The Mannerist sculpture, which is widely recognized as a masterpiece by the 17th century artist known as the “Dutch Michaelangelo”, was won by the museum after a tense three-way phone bidding battle that lasted four minutes and captivated the audience at Christie’s Rockefeller Center saleroom in New York.

The final price, including the premium, was $27,885,000, or £17,743,735.

Christie’s crowed in its press release: “The excellent results of the Bacchic Figure Supporting the Globe reassert the continuing momentum of the masterpiece market, which has gone from strength to strength throughout the course of 2014 at Christie’s.”

I’ll say. Here’s one measure of art-world inflation. In summer 2011, when the piece was called Mythological Figure Supporting the Globe, it was on the block in London and estimated to fetch £5-8 million, or $8- to 12.8 million. This time, in “The Exceptional Sale,” it was estimated at $15- to $25 million.

I tell the story of this sculpture, found after 300 years in a garden, here, in my piece on the Old Master sculpture market, which I wrote for Art & Auction.

More details about the piece, including provenance, are in the lot info at Christie’s. And here is  much more about the piece.

Christie’s made no reference to the sculpture’s past difficulties with export authorities, so somehow that must have been resolved.

Last month, when Christie’s was promoting the piece as a record-buster, it said:

The current world auction record for European sculpture was set in 2003 when Christie’s sold a parcel-gilt and silvered bronze roundel depicting Mars, Venus, Cupid, and Vulcan, Mantuan, circa1480-1500, for £6.9 million. Prior to that, the most valuable early European sculpture was The Dancing Fawn, the most recent work by de Vries to be auctioned, which was sold to the Getty for £6.8 million in 1989. Thought to date to circa 1615, it is smaller than the bronze offered today and was neither signed nor dated.

That £6.8 million would be about £16 million today, or about $25 million.

 Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s

Menil Repurposes Sacred Space For Contemporary Art

When the Byzantine Fresco Chapel at the Menil Collection in Houston opened in 1997, it displayed a group of 13th-century Greek Orthodox frescoes. But after restoration of the works, which the Menil had rescued from looters for the Church of Cyprus, the museum returned the frescoes to Cyprus as a donation when the agreed loan expired in 2012.

ByzantineChapelMuseumSo what to do with that chapel (at right), which has now been deconsecrated? The Menil has commissioned a year-long installation from the team of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet has been a hit wherever it is installed, but especially when in 2013 it was place in the Cloisters’s 12th-century Spanish chapel, as the first work of contemporary art ever to be shown at the Met’s medieval art branch.

So perhaps this was a natural. The duo, says the Menil release:

will fill the now-deconsecrated space with a sonic and visual experience inspired by ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras’s concept of “the music of the spheres.” This theory that the movement of celestial bodies creates harmonies has recently been corroborated by scientists. Visitors will hear an audio collage including recordings collected by the NASA spacecraft Voyager when monitoring the interaction of solar winds and Earth’s ionosphere. Because the ions vibrate within the range of frequencies audible to the human ear, it has been possible to convert their resonances into sounds, which will become part of the aural experience. Among the objects suspended in the mobile will be an array of mirrors and a small player piano.

The Chapel, meant as a sacred space, will from now on house these long-term, contemporary installations, the museum said. This one, I hope, will be more like Forty-Part Motet than like Cardiff’s Murder of Crows.  We will see on Jan. 31, when it opens.

 

 

Boston’s Arts Czar–Real Or Window Dressing?

This fall, Boston’s relatively new (Jan. 2014) mayor, Martin J. Walsh, appointed a cabinet-level arts czar: Julie Burros, who has been director of cultural planning in Chicago for nearly 15 years, where she helped develop a cultural plan for the Windy City. Many in the arts there were thrilled. Talking with the Boston Globe, ArtsBoston executive director Catherine Peterson said: “I think it is a potential game changer for the city. It embeds somebody who reports directly to the mayor, so the arts are not just at the center of what goes on in our museums and theaters, but at the center of life in the city.”

07_3KK3982AAs the Globe wrote in September, Burros will have “…a staff of nine and an annual budget of $1.3 million, with most of it going to salaries, officials said. Burros will also oversee the Fund for Boston Neighborhoods, currently at about $1.1 million, funded largely by contributions from organizations and individuals and used for events such as First Night. She will be paid $125,000 a year.” And, it added:

The idea behind the appointment is that a strong arts sector yields cultural, economic, and quality-of-life benefits that touch everyone in the city. “This is one area that crosses over almost every single department of city government and every single piece of city life,” said Walsh.

Last month, Walsh and Burros amplified their view with an op-ed in the Globe, saying (among other things):

Together with city residents, we will look at how arts and culture can play a greater role in the lives of all Bostonians — experiencing, learning, and creating. Experiencing the arts means enjoying the beauty of that which others create for us. Learning about the arts means that children and adults can see the world around them through a new lens. And creating art means finding ways to express thoughts and feelings to heal, connect, and inspire.

Our cultural plan will be a road map of a long-term strategy for how to enrich and strengthen our civic fabric as only the arts can. We seek to make the arts more accessible to residents of all neighborhoods and to support public art and design as a key component of how we envision and develop space in Boston.

All well and good, I think. Except. I remember when the Chicago Cultural Plan was revealed in fall, 2012, and I don’t have fond memories. It was maddeningly general and full of feel-good language to make the public seem as if their words were heeded.

But the Chicago Reader beat me to writing up what was wrong with it, enumerating Ten Things Wrong with the Chicago Cultural Plan So Far. The Reader called it a wish list. A year later, that publication went back to the plan to assess progress. It found that One year in, the Chicago Cultural Plan is already receiving plaudits. But that doesn’t mean it’s not window dressing. The writer, Deanna Issaacs, quoted a Chicago commissioner saying that “half of the 241 initiatives in the plan have been addressed.” In a year?

If so, either the bar was set too low or that was an exaggeration. You may want to decide–here’s a PDF of the plan’s Executive Summary and here’s a PDF of the plan itself.

One thing Bostonians should be looking out for. Chicago hired Lord Cultural Resources to write the plan. As a global firm, it has a reputation of cookie-cutter solutions. If Burros hires them in Boston, let the skepticism begin.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Boston Globe