Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Consolation Prize: $17 Million For Old Masters

Back in December, I wrote here that the bid by the Dallas Museum of Art to buy the recently discovered Leonardo, Salvator Mundi, had failed — not enough money to satisfy the owners, who reportedly wanted $200 million but had agreed to settle for somewhat less to see it go to Dallas. Alas, the gap was too big.

marguerite-hoffman-img_0092Today the museum announced that good things can come from failure: one of the donors to the fundraising drive, trustee and past chairman Marguerite Steed Hoffman (left), has decided to establish of a $17 million endowment for European art created before 1700: $13.6 million will be a restricted acquisitions endowment and $3.4  million will go to an operating endowment in support of pre-1700 European acquisitions, exhibitions, and programs. As the press release said, “this new fund more than doubles the DMA’s acquisition endowment and brings total funds in support of the Museum’s acquisitions to 50,000,000.”

The museum talks about its strength in late 19th- and early 20th-century European works, “with the most significant collection of French impressionism and post-impressionism in the region.” (That’s not that hard… given Dallas’s location in north Texas.) “But its collection of old master paintings is comparatively modest,” the release says.

What’s very nice is that Hoffman and her late husband are collectors of contemporary art:

Even prior to this gift, Marguerite and Robert Hoffman were already among the greatest benefactors in the Museum’s history. In February 2005, the Dallas Museum of Art announced the unprecedented gift of modern and contemporary collections from Marguerite and Robert Hoffman, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, and Deedie and Rusty Rose. The idea behind the joint gift came from the Hoffmans, who at the time co-chaired the Centennial Campaign, which was launched in 2003–04 to ensure the Dallas Museum of Art’s continuing stability and growth. To jump-start the campaign, the Hoffmans issued a bold challenge: If the Museum reached its goal for the first phase of the campaign, they would bequeath to the Dallas Museum of Art their art collection and an endowment to care for the collection as well as make a generous gift to the campaign. Their action provided the foundation for a successful campaign that ultimately raised over $185 million.

More details here.

What’s also nice is that prices for Renaissance and Baroque art are sometimes low enough for the museum to make significant purchases if it shops wisely and accumulates funds from year to year. I hope Dallas does not ignore Old Master sculpture.

It’s Far From Over Yet: LA-MOCA’s Independence Campaign

It’s a journalistic convention: after an election, the emergence from bankruptcy, or some other momentous change, we often write headlines that say something along the lines of “Now Comes The Hard Part.” It’s common because it usually happens to be true.

JeffreySorosEarlier today, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles announced that it had received pledges from donors that would place its current endowment above $60 million (versus $23 million earlier this year), and that it was building toward a goal of $100 million. You can see various versions of the story here — from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Here is MOCA’s own press release.

The fundraising campaign is being called “MOCA Independence.”  In the release, Jeffrey Soros (pictured, left), the board’s president, said, “The financial support we have already raised demonstrates the commitment of the board to ensuring that MOCA remains a world-class independent contemporary art museum, and we call on others to join in this campaign.”

It’s great that this board has finally stepped up to the plate. But now comes the hard part — really. Not only do the trustees have a long way to go to get to $100 million, but that will generate only about $5 million a year if the trustees are lucky. MOCA’s budget is about $14 million annually. Getting about a third of your revenue from the endowment isn’t bad — many museums don’t achieve that — but it means that trustees will have to keep opening their wallets in annual contributions.

Plus, even if trustees are intent on turning down the merger offer from Michael Govan at the LA County Museum of Art, they still must deal with Eli Broad and they still must heal the divisions in the board. Not to mention addressing the directorial question – in my opinion, Jeffrey Deitch is a bad match for the job, part of the problem, not the solution.

So, thanks to the trustees who have pledged more than $35 million in the last few weeks. But now comes the hard part.

 

 

 

A Little More About SPUN

“It’s a way to activate our collections.” That’s one of the outtake quotes from Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum, that I did not use in my article published last week in The New York Times headlined In Denver, Exhibits Interveave Genres. (Did anybody catch the importance of “interweaves” in that headline, which signified that the exhibits were about textiles?)

bbbbI like Heinrich’s choice of verb: activate. He was talking about SPUN, Adventures in Textiles, the museum’s spin on the range of exhibitions that will be on offer throughout the museum’s two buildings this summer, from May 19 through Sept. 22.

I’ve written several times before (see here and here, for example) that museums MUST make more to-do about their own collections, and Heinrich is pioneering one way. His approach, biennial museum-wide festivals that focus on one aspect of the collection, may not work everywhere. A collection has to have depth in several areas — not all — for it to work. Aside from having the goods, a museum has to have the marketing creativity. In 2011, ceramics became Marvelous Mud. Before settling on SPUN, Denver toyed with using fabric, fiber, threads, material and other words in the exhibitions’ title.

SPUN goes with the museum flow on another aspect, though. Like many other art museums, the new, expanded textiles gallery — a gift for which was the impetus pushing SPUN — will have a “PreVIEW Space,” where visitors can, for example, watch a textile conservator work on pieces.

Among other things. Alice Zrebiec, the textiles curator, told me that “the museum is committed to showing what goes on behind-the-scenes. It’s not just conservation, it’s the whole process — looking at an object for the next rotation, or an acquisition, a conservation assessment, then the conservation work itself. There is a big glass window for people to look into the space even when we’re not there. “Open Window” [when a conservator or curator is there] will take place every Thursday, and there will be selected programming at other times, special ones for members.It’s all a trial balloon.”  There will also  be a Textile Art Studio and a family installation.

If you read my article, you got a gist of the range of exhibitions SPUN entails — but not the images, which are great. Please take a look at this document: Spun – Adventures in Textiles_Image Highlights. (Here, too, is the press release.) .

Although I started this post talking about permanent collections, I can’t resist showing something the resourceful paintings department has gone far afield to borrow: a picture called Women Sewing with two Children (at right) by a late 17th Century Venetian painter known as the Master of the Blue Jeans.

Aside from being relevant, it shows people who believe that jeans were an American invention that the term is actually derived from their city of origin, Genoa. And they may also learn that “denim” is related to Nimes, the city in France that originated a similar blue fabric. The Galerie Canesso in Paris had a show for the Blue Jeans painter in 2010, whose 68-page catalogue can be perused here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Galerie Canesso

 

Bread And Circuses: A Coup At The Corcoran?

Even if you disliked Nicholas Sarkozy, in one way you couldn’t help rooting for him to win the presidency of France a few year back because he was so entertaining. Loud, outspoken, a shameless self-promoter who liked to challenge convention, he was great to write about and read about.

ReynoldsThere’s more than an element of Sarkozy in Wayne Reynolds, the brash Washingtonian who wants to be chairman of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Late last week, he began emailing potential supporters of  his quest with an invitation to an open bar reception on the top floor of the ­Hay-Adams Hotel next Friday, which he is paying for and organizing with the Save the Corcoran group. The recipients included the Corcoran’s students, faculty and staff.

“Do I have a choice?” Reynolds [told a Washington Post reporter]. “Harry Hopper [the current chair] has told the board not to talk to me, not to meet with me. It’s not really a reflection of me. It’s a reflection of the way they operate their board. . . . We’re staging a revolution. ”

He also told the paper’s David Montgomery that he will pay the $10,000 cost of the party, and that he’s worried that the 300-person capacity of the banquet room might be exceeded.

In the Post article, Reynolds elaborated a little on his plans — and here’s where the worry comes in:

Reynolds says he will explain at the reception his vision for what he calls a national Corcoran Center for Creativity. He would expand the college and focus the museum on digital art, photography and contemporary art. Most controversially, he proposes creating an endowment of “a few hundred million dollars” in large part by deaccessioning — selling — a fraction of the collection that is rarely displayed.

…Reynolds says that a respected scholar, familiar with the collection, has pledged to consult on deaccessioning and has given assurances that such a sum could be raised without sacrificing great paintings.

Not likely.  Apparently Reynolds named the scholar — or Montgomery discovered it in another way — but the person in question declined to be identified. I’ll bet. I’d sure like to know his/her fee arrangement, too.

Also, if the Corcoran under Reynolds focuses on the three areas he mentioned, what’s to become of the 102 pre-1945 American paintings featured in the 2011 Corcoran catalogue? (Have a look here.)

One part of Reynolds’s view — “It’s shameful what’s happened there” — is correct. If he goads the current board into action, that would be a good thing. If he somehow wins, the East Coast will have its own version of the mess at LA-MOCA.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Washington Post

Saturday Night At The Met, Oh My!

This Saturday, at 7 p.m., if you feel like paying $30, you can see a performance by the Metropolitan Museum’s “artist-in-residence” DJ Spook, doing “Of Water and Ice: A Concert of Compositions Based on Water and Arctic Rhythms.” A couple of art-lovers have brought this to my attention, thinking it just awful, but I’m not going to get all worked up about it. Roger Kimball, at The New Criterion, has done that for us.

220px-Paul_Miller (2)DJ Spooky, described by The New York Times last October as a “hip-hop turntablist, composer and author,” will be at the Met* doing heaven knows what in his year-long residency. His coming event is advertised this way:

This event is one of several comprising The Met Reframed, an unprecedented, multilayered, artistic partnership with Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid), a composer, multimedia artist, writer, and DJ. His recorded output includes remixes of music ranging from Wu-Tang Clan, Metallica, and Bob Marley to classical/new music legends Steve Reich and the Kronos Quartet, and he has performed as a DJ at major festivals, including Bonnaroo and Power to the Peaceful. His work as a media artist has been featured at the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennial, and Miami/Art Basel; and his first collection of essays, Rhythm Science, was released by MIT Press in 2004, followed by Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media (MIT Press, 2008).

Kimball is incensed. He writes:

…A little investigation reveals that Mr. Spooky is not a composer, artist, or writer in any ordinary sense of those terms. He barely qualifies as a DJ, though he does preside over events where people are subjected to noise at least partially contrived by him. His chief distinguishing feature is command of an academic polysyllabic patois of inadvertently comic pretentiousness, reminiscent in some ways of Walt Kelly’s P. T. Bridgeport….

…Mr. Spooky is one of those performers who likes to deploy the specialized vocabulary of science and philosophy in order to make it seem that his pompous version of aleatoric art is full of deep significance. His “concerts” are really just randomized noise…

…This installment of Met Museum Presents is short but profoundly depressing. Here we have a premier cultural institution, an institution that was created to preserve and transmit the artistic treasures of the past, and what does it offer us? Rebarbative, politically correct nonsense from the dregs of our increasingly senile avant-garde.

Well, not quite. Here we have a premier cultural institution trying desperately to be “relevant” to young people. It’s not the way I would do it; it’s not the way I would spend my money if I were Tom Campbell, the museum’s director. Getting people to watch Spooky in the Rainey auditorium (it’s also being streamed online, for the curious) is not going to get them to go upstairs and see art in the permanent collection. So it’s really just padding attendance numbers, imho.

But let’s keep things in perspective. I found that description above by looking on the Met’s calendar for Mar. 23 — it is one program of 26 events that day. It’s not the end of civilization as we know it. It’s more like a middle-aged bald guy doing a comeover in hopes of attracting hip, younger women. It doesn’t usually work — so why bother?

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met