Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Arts Funding Slashed In The House

Today the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee released its FY 2014 Interior and Environment Appropriations bill, and it’s worse for arts groups that you might have imagined:

I quote:

Museums and Cultural Institutions –

  • Smithsonian Institution – The Smithsonian Institution is funded at $660 million in the bill – a cut of $155 million (19%) below the fiscal year 2013 enacted level and commensurate with the overall reduction in the bill.
  • National Gallery of Art – The National Gallery of Art is funded at $104 million in the legislation – a decrease of $24.5 million (19%) below the fiscal year 2013 enacted level and commensurate with the overall reduction in the bill.
  • National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities – The bill includes $75 million for each program, which is a reduction of $71 million (49%) per endowment compared to the fiscal year 2013 enacted level.

Here’s the link to the press release. And here is the draft bill.

The National Humanitites Alliance decried the cuts and noted that “this funding level would devastate an agency that has already been reduced by 19 percent since 2010.”

An Orchestra You Will Not Believe — Heartbreaking and Heartwarming

This is blog is mostly about the visual arts, but I digress when so inspired and today I must. I don’t think you will mind.

landfill-5I came across this phenomenon — and I do not use the word lightly — when a friend posted a link to a short film on Facebook with the words, “Too Wonderful.” The link was to something headlined: “Watch the first 54 seconds. That’s all I ask. After That, You’ll Be Hooked, I Swear.” I don’t usually bite when I see such uninformative teases, but this time I did. Wow.

The film is called “The Landfill Harmonic Orchestra,” and it lasts less than 4 minutes. It’s about a town, Cateura, in Paraguay — called one of the worst slums in Latin America — where the children play instruments made from trash, fetched out of the garbage heaps on which their town is built. They play Bach, among other composers, on cellos made of oil cans, saxophones made from drain pipes. The organizer of this orchestra, Favio Chavez, says he started it to keep children out of trouble. But because a violin is worth more than a house there, instead of tempting the kids’ families to sell an instrument they were given, he and his colleagues lit on the idea of recycling the trash into instruments. Now some of the children say they can’t imagine living without music. The film brought tears to my eyes.

landfill-4Watch it here. That’s a link to a site called Upworthy, a social media site with the mission  “to make important stuff as viral as a video of some idiot surfing off his roof.”

I had to know more, and discovered that Upworthy followed a shorter film posted on YouTube last January, which is here. And last April, The Guardian wrote an article about the orchestra, officially known as the Cateura Orchestra of Recycled Instruments, then consisting of 30 schoolchildren.

A documentary is in the works, with money raised online, on Kickstarter.

There’s a mention in one of the films of a performance in Arizona this year, but I didn’t find any more information about that. It would be great if they performed here, wouldn’t it?

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Kickstarter

 

 

 

 

Form And Landscape: The Huntington’s Experiment With An Online Exhibition

Since May 1, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Garden has been presenting an online exhibition that is part of the Getty Center’s Pacific Standard Time Modern Architecture in LA initiative. Since everyone says we’re going to be having more of them (online exhibitions), I decided to find out how this one was going. It’s called Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940-1990, and it had a rich reserve to draw on: an archive of 70,000 photographs donated to the Huntington in 2006 by the Southern California Edison Co.

edison_shoppingbag550It’s a corporate archive, with the photographs taken to document the installation of telephone poles, electrification of various streets, equipment, etc. At first, they were all taken by staff photographers, according to William Deverell, a history professor at University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, who co-curated the show, and later by freelancers. Since the gift, they’ve all been digitized, catalogued and made available on the Huntington site, with support from Edison. In the press release for the exhibition, Deverell called it “a gold mine of history.” One look at the photos here shows that it contains some fascinating images — of places that are changed or may no longer exist.

This exhibition came about after Deverell and co-curator, Greg Hise, a history professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, proposed public programs that included an online component in response to the Getty’s request for proposals. “The Getty was most interested in this archive, and it wanted the exhibition to be all online because they were funding a lot of other actual, real exhibits,” Deverall said. “We were entirely happy with that because it was really fun. I’m a traditional scholar with books and print but it was really fun to explore this.”

So the two went back to the Getty with the idea of inviting “an eclectic group” of people (professors, authors, art historians, photographers) to dig into the Edison archive with a theme in mind. Each would choose 20 to 30 photographs from the period 1940-90 and write an essay.

09Opie04As a result, the online exhibition has 18 sections with themes like “Foodscapes,” “Consumption,” “Light,” “Flora,” “Collisions,” and “Noir.” They’re all great, Deverell said, but he singled out the last one because the curator, D.J. Walde, constructed a murder mystery from the photos and turned them into a film. “Those photos have a quality entirely outside their original intent,” Deverell said.

Speaking about the entire exercise, he noted that it was interesting that some images appear in more than one theme.

“We were really pleased” with the results, he said — and apparently the public is too. The Huntington says that 45, 238 unique visitors have explored the exhibition since May 1, and the site has had 156,210 page views. “That’s what we would hope to get for a brick-and-mortar exhibition, and it’s certainly more people than buy my scholarly books,” Deverall said.

It’s smaller than the Huntington’s website, though. Those numbers for the same period are 1,995,225 page views and 1,118,318 unique visitors.

Deverell said that he realized “how fun” this was as they did it, but more important — they as well as the curators at the Huntington learned more about this archive as the project curators explored it with different perspectives. So everyone’s gaining insight about LA history and architectural spaces. More online exhibits are probable: he can envision projects that track changes in a place at different times. In fact, the photo at right, City lights as seen from Mount Wilson in 1906  by G. Haven Bishop, has a parallel shot from 1911, which is part of Catherine Opie’s project, “Fabrication.”

I would agree with the Getty: this Edison archive was perfect for an online exhibition.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Huntington

 

A Merger That Worked — Museum + University

Inside Higher Ed took up the subject of financially weak museums who’ve looked for salvation at universities in a recent article. It’s a good subject. In New York, we’ve tried some partnerships and mergers that haven’t worked — most recently, the Museum of the City of New York gave up its management of the South Street Seaport Museum, which was damaged by Hurricane Sandy last fall and was already struggling to stay alive and vibrant.

The IHE article, cryptically headlined A Home for Artifacts, begins be setting the scene: institutions of higher ed may be worrying about their long-term financial viability, but that hasn’t deterred museums, which are in worse shape, from looking at them for help — “…and that’s likely because many of them face larger existential threats than their counterparts in higher education.” The upsides: economies of scale, potential new donors and security for museum, and new expertise for their curricula for the universities. The downsides: a loss of independence and the potential for getting lost in a larger organization for museums, new obligations for the universities.

As examples, the writer uses the Corcoran Gallery’s tentative pact with the University of Maryland; the Textile Museum recent union with George Washington University; the Jewish Museum of Florida’s leap into the arms of Florida International University, and most prominently Drexel University’s 2011 acquisition of the Academy of Natural Sciences in downtown Philadelphia.

Here’s a bit from the report:

…the process of incorporating the museum into the university has at times proven difficult, but that it has benefited both over all. The merger created a new biodiversity, earth and environmental science department within Drexel composed of 20 faculty members, including 13 academy scientists. The academy gets a new source of revenue in tuition from the academic department.

Drexel gained 13 faculty members — seven of whom are already tenured — in areas in which it did not previously have expertise, particularly environmental science and environmental policy. The university has already started offering courses in those areas. The affiliation has also opened up new potential co-op and internship opportunities for Drexel students.

The museum also cut its costs by about 5 percent as part of the affiliation with the university through shared services. Gephart said that some positions were eliminated, but that the academy was able to find jobs — either inside the university or elsewhere — for every employee who wanted one.

Gephart {president of the Academy] said the partnership with Drexel has been a boon to the museum’s fund-raising….

ETC.

I realize that this is a science museum, but there are parallels with art museums in certain cases. To me, it’s an example that, while a last resort for struggling museums, is worth knowing about.

A New Attempt Toward “Understanding Art” On Video

Making a great video about visual art is a challenge, so I’m glad producers keep doing it. In recent days, I’ve had an opportunity to sample a new DVD series called Understanding Art: Hidden Lives of Masterpieces that takes a new tack.

Understanding Art-Hidden LivesMade by Juliette Garcia and Stan Neumann, it has five episodes, each focusing on one artist with many works in the collection of the Louvre: Raphael, Rembrandt, Poussin, Watteau and Leonardo. Instead of telling the life of the artist, they essentially film the Louvre’s study days, then take the “best parts” and boil them down into a 58-minute or so documentary.

So the video part shows a bunch of art curators, academics, conservators, restorers and scientists standing and sitting around talking about paintings, which have been removed from their frames and their glass protectors and are sitting on easels — the better for close up examination. The experts often sit in an audience while one of them expounds his (mostly — there are women but far fewer of them talk) theories on how or why the painting was made, what changes the artist made, or others, made to his work, or what the artist was trying to accomplish. People talk in French, English and Italian, so there’s a voice-over, when necessary, explaining what is being said. That voice — which is fast-paced, thank goodness — also gives the necessary background about the artist when it is relevant. (Here’s a look at a trailer for the series and here’s a clip from the Raphael episode.)

The camera also goes in close, sometimes, to show to viewers what the experts are discussing, and sometimes the viewer sees simple, animated schematic diagrams that explain a point — e.g., how a painting is transferred from wood to canvas.

I watched only the Raphael and Leonardo episodes, so these comments may not accurately describe the other three segments. I learned some things, as clearly these are more educational than entertainment (though they do that at some level too). Some topics/points are simply debated, as the experts do not agree — such as whether that small Annunciation in the Louvre’s collection really is a Leonardo, whether he did some, but not all of it, and so forth. With Raphael, the experts discuss the compositions of the two Madonna of the Rocks works, how Raphael painted a portrait of a woman he never saw, who put that angel in The Holy Family from 1518 and what is going on in that Self-portrait with a Friend (1518-20). When they don’t know, or agree, more study is called for.

Oddly, this is neither preachy, nor boring. The episodes drag occasionally, and I could not imagine watching two days of this — experts like to pontificate and condescend, and while there’s a little of that here, for flavor, there’s not much; it has been edited out.

There is one drawback: these study days date to 2006, before the great Leonardo exhibition in London, and it’s a tad out of date on the restoration front. Perhaps with others, too. (On the other hand, some art historians you may know look a lot younger!)

But, bottom line: if you are really interested in these artists, you might buy this series ($49.99 for the five-episode, two-disc series) from Athena. (Search online, though, and you can find it for less — try Target.) If you have just a casual interest in art, these are not for you.