Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Will There Be Another Round of Admission Hikes?

The Art Institute of Chicago is digging deeper into our pockets: yesterday the Chicago Park District board of commissioners approved a hike in admissions and a bigger jump for non-Illinois residents. As of Feb. 1, general adult admission for instaters will rise from $16 to $18, and out-of-staters like me will pay $23, up from $18.

The Chicago Tribune quotes AIC director Douglas Druick saying:

If we didn’t have to do it, we wouldn’t do it. It was felt that this was reasonable, not too onerous and signaled our commitment to the city and to the state by putting more of the burden on out-of-state tourist visitors.Druick

It seems like only yesterday that the last increase occurred, but apparently it was 2009.

A later story in the Tribune said that the AIC currently gets 4% of its operating revenues from admissions. Averages for that figure are all squishy, if you ask me — they vary partly because the universe of museums that report each year to the Association of Art Museum Directors is not the same every year, nor are reporting practices of museums universal. But that seems low to me for a museum like the IAC, which should have a decent tourist trade (or should have. Whether they’ll come at $23 is another question.)

To me, this all means that the new modern wing is not living up to its initial promise. I am confident guessing that the 4% figure was higher before the new wing increased expenses. Did that outreach to the park bring more paying customers? Or just people who came the ramp, looked around and descended again?

I’m a realist: museums have to maximize revenues. That doesn’t always mean increasing admissions, and I do hope this doesn’t backfire.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune

A Diversion: Doubt, The Opera

I can’t say for sure, but I think that John Patrick Shanley is setting some sort of record. Shanley, whom you probably know as the author of Doubt: A Parable, the Pulitzer and Tony award winning drama about learning to live with uncertainty, is about to introduce that story in a third medium — opera. He has already written his script into a screenplay, as well as directed that movie, Doubt, which starred Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

JohnPatrickShanleyNow he has written the libretto for Doubt, the opera, which premieres next Saturday, Jan. 26, at the Minnesota Opera. (Douglas Cuomo is the composer.) Shanley may be the first writer to turn out one story, part of his own, in three different art forms.

I talked with him about this recently. He wrote the play, as he told me, in “four or five weeks — or my whole life.” After that, “it was thrust upon me both times,” he says.

A few other tidbits:

  • Shanley knew, and still knows, little about opera, but that didn’t stop him from writing the libretto.
  • To do so, he didn’t go back to what he had already written: “The benefit I bring – I go back to the neighborhood, not the film or the play  – this is my life.”
  • Yes, each of the four characters in the play — Sister Aloysius, Father Flynn, Sister James and Mrs. Miller — has an aria.
  • “With opera, you breathe a sigh of relief. There are all these other people [the chorus/congregation, for example] and the orchestra. Now we have a world to support the story.”
  • “In a play you write in a style. The characters share a world view. They agree what world they are living in, demonstrated by the language. In an opera, you share the music. Characters that may be in violent disagreement share the music.”
  • “Opera has spectacle, which is what people want to see.
  • “The opera will have new material, and it lose some from the movie/play. “You could not simply musicalize the play.”
  • “Film is a nightmare because there’s no tradition in film – no ‘I will put up with this film because it’s good for me.’ It’s a popcorn medium, a popular medium – people have to be entertained. They have to be involved.” 
  • “The latest medium is the best. It’s still a living thing.”

Droll, witty, and pretty much uncorked, Shanley is the subject of a Cultural Conversation that I wrote, which will appear in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. I laughed a lot during the couple of hours I spent with him. Having seen Doubt in both other manifestations, I’d like to be at the opera. But I’ll have to wait until another time, because I doubt I’ll get to Minneapolis.

Meantime, after it opens, I invite RCA readers to tell us all what it’s like by leaving a comment.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Edgemar Center for the Arts

 

Pacific Standard Time 2.0

You can’t keep a good idea down. The Getty knew it had a fantastic idea a few years ago by starting Pacific Standard Time, the sweeping roster of exhibitions and programs at 68 arts institutions across Southern California that in 2011 chronicled art in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980. It also drew in more than 70 private art galleries in Culver City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and the Greater Los Angeles area, which staged more than 125 exhibitions.

PST_logo_vert_CMYKNot wanting that brand to die, the Getty promptly said last summer that it would continue the effort with a run of shows on California architecture. It warned that the original PST took years to organize, though, and that version 2.0 would be smaller.

In September, a press release suggested that Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. would involve nine exhibitions, plus “accompanying programs and events” in and around Los Angeles between April and July of this year. At one point, Getty Foundation head Deborah Marrow told me that the Getty would split about $1 million on grantees in the partnership.

Fast forward to now: The Getty is out with new information — the roster has grown to 11 exhibitions and the Foundation has doled out $3.6 million in grants to 16 organizations for exhibitions, publications and programming. I suspect that galleries or others may figure out a way to participate, just as they did last time. This year’s version, though, will be much more manageable. (And btw, the new subject goes along with the Getty Conservation Institute’s Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative. 

Here are the architecture exhibition partners: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art; the Hammer Museum; the Getty; the A+D Architecture and Design Museum; the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara; the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture; and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. The other programming partners are the Center for Land Use Interpretation; Community Art Resources, Inc.; The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens; the Los Angeles Conservancy; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Machine Project; Pasadena Heritage; and UCLA Architecture and Urban Design.

You find the whole list of exhibitions in the new press release, and more information about them here. And of course there’s a separate website.

The Getty’s own show, Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990, is called “the first major museum exhibition to survey Los Angeles’s built environment and rapid postwar evolution into one of the most populous and influential industrial, economic and creative capitals in the world.”

As others catch my eye, I’ll may write about some of the individual projects in the weeks ahead.

The question is whether this is enough to keep the brand not only alive but also sexy. Or will it disappoint those who went to the first PST? Can 11 exhibitions and other programming combine to make a critical mass? We won’t know until we see the contents of the exhibitions.

 

 

Albright-Knox Goes Far Afield For Director

The Albright-Knox has just announced its new director, Janne Sirén.

SirenNot one of the usual suspects, that is true. He comes from five years as director of the Helsinki Art Museum in Finland, whose collection of 8,900 works covers the territory from the late 19th century to contemporary art. It “operates two exhibition spaces in the heart of Helsinki: Tennis Palace and Kluuvi Gallery, an innovative gallery space focused on showcasing experimental works by emerging Finnish artists,” according to the press release.

Siren, who was in Buffalo today for the announcement, was “found” by Russell Reynolds, which was tasked with finding a successor to Louis Grachos last year. He left in December, as I recall, as the museum was closing out its celebratory 150th year. At the time, the board said it could have a replacement announced by Jan. 1 — which seemed ambitious to me.

But they came close. Give credit for that — far too many museum director searches take a year or more.

The Albright-Knox says he is “the first Director from the Nordic region to take the helm of a major American art museum.” But he was educated here, earning a B.A. in Art History from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester and an M.A./Ph.D. in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He’ll take up the post in “late spring or early summer.” And he was behind the aborted scheme to build a branch of the Guggenheim Helsinki — it failed to pass muster with the city’s government, though there were also questions about the Guggenheim’s enthusiasm for it.

Siren, who is is 42, “has overseen the organization of several major international exhibitions, including Georgia O’Keeffe; Georg Baselitz: Remix; Enchanting Beauty: Masterpieces from the Collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery; Surrealism and Beyond: Masterpieces from the Israel Museum; Defiance and Melancholy – German Painting from the Dresden Albertinum/Galerie Neue Meister and Helsinki School – Photography and Video Now,” the Albright-Knox said.

Siren told the Buffalo News:

From the moment I set foot in Buffalo, it was sort of love at first sight. I just felt that in Buffalo there’s this very positive aura about the next chapter in the city’s future, not only at the Albright-Knox, but more generally in Buffalo. Things are sort of happening, and you see in little bits and pieces around there, it’s sort of in the air. And that’s tremendously exciting.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Albright-Knox

Ah, Manet: Blockbuster in Content, But Not As A Draw

I don’t know when I fell in love with Manet’s work. Was it when I first saw The Railway? Olympia? A Bar at the Folies-Bergère? The Balcony? In the Conservatory (below, left)? I once had a poster of The Grand Canal of Venice (Blue Venice). Or was it when I saw them all together, in 1983, when a sweeping exhibit in honor of the centenary of his death, organized by Charles Moffett and Francois Cachin (and with a catalogue to match), was on view at the Metropolitan Museum?

In_the_Conservatory_ManetAlas, being one of my favorite artists does not mean Manet is a household name. So I have watched from afar the Toledo Museum of Art’s recent Manet: Portraying Life exhibition with my fingers crossed for its success. The show was a joint production between Toledo and the Royal Academy in London, and it brought together some 40 portraits by Manet — the first show focused on his portraits. Toledo has long owned one of the best, Antonin Proust, from 1880 (see it here), and it borrowed the rest from museums around the world. When I mentioned the exhibit to a New York-based art connoisseur last spring, he told me Toledo couldn’t do it — so precious are Manet’s pictures — before I could finish the sentence saying it had. Kudos to Toledo.

After that buildup, how did it do? Measured by attendance, not as good as hoped. The Toledo Museum tells me that the exhibition drew just shy of 47,000 people, a tad below the target of 50,000, during its run from Oct. 7 through Jan. 1.  On the other hand, critics liked it and 94 percent of the 2,972 visitors who filled out the museum’s exit survey rated it “Excellent” or “Very Good.”

manet-artThe museum is undertaking a thorough evaluation of the exhibition, but in the meantime, here are some things Toledo says it has learned:

  • Because of Manet, the museum opened, for the first time, on New Year’s Day (warming my heart) and “We are most likely going to be open on New Year’s Day from now on because of the positive response from the public and good attendance.”
  • “We sold more than 1,000 Museum memberships during the run of the show, including 113 memberships at the $1000 or above level, adding to our existing base of 6,500 members.”
  • “Our retail store and café did exceptionally well, with gross revenue increases of 33 percent (retail) and 52 percent (café) respectively over the same period last year.”
  • “Nearly 20 percent of our attendance came in the last seven days of the show. Overall Museum attendance in December (37,757) was the highest since the opening of the Glass Pavilion in December 2006.”
  • About 75 percent of our visitors came from Ohio, the rest came from 38 states and several foreign countries.

The museum says it faced a headwind in the media because of the presidential election, with Ohio being perhaps the swing state at stake. “It was impossible for us to get on television and lots of potential visitors simply were overloaded with media,” the press office said.

Two more bits of context:  Color Ignited: Glass 1962–2012, which did not require tickets (Manet did) and ran for about the same time, drew 40,306 last summer. And The Egypt Experience:Secrets of the Tomb, which ran over nearly 14 months and was ticketed, drew 39,906. So Manet, less sexy than Egypt, usually, still did better.

I know this won’t discourage Toledo from organizing serious shows in the future. But I wish Manet would receive the recognition from the general public that he so deserves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Columbus Dispatch (bottom)