It’s been a pleasure to be working at home a couple of recent days during the one o’clock hour, because that’s when WNYC is rebroadcasting The BBC/British Museum’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects.” I was surprised to be as interested as I actually was in the importance of the handaxe, and then the Clovis spear point too. And I’m sorry that I’ve had to miss a couple episodes (though I know, yes, that one can hear them online — but it’s somehow more meaningful when you know that others are listening along with you).

The series, which began in New York last week, reminded me of another radio series that BBC Radio is about to launch: Beginning next month, to mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee, it will broadcast an eight-part series called The Art of Monarchy. It will attempt to illustrate the history of the British monarchy through the art that kings and queens have acquired.

Before I get to the details, these two series make me wonder why we don’t/can’t have such art-focused radio in the U.S.

I suppose it’s no use bemoaning that British culture somehow manages to devise and execute radio and TV about the arts in a way that American culture never does — but I am. Why has no one used the collections of the Smithsonian, say, to tell American history? Or the Museum of the City of New York’s collection to tell the history of New York in 10 objects? Or why doesn’t American TV come up with a Downton Abbey instead of yet-another variation on CSI?

It’s interesting that the British efforts don’t come off there as stuffy. I note that the tabloid Daily Mail heralded the Art of Monarchy series last month by playing up the sexiness of an early portrait of Queen Victoria. “…this ‘secret portrait’ of the young queen is sure to get pulses racing, as it did for Prince Albert when it was first painted 170 years ago,” the story said. (The picture is above.) So what?

Here’s the series description:

Travelling from Balmoral Castle in Scotland to the Royal Library at Windsor and from the State Rooms of Buckingham Palace to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Will [Gompertz, BBC Arts Editor] speaks to historians, academics and Royal Collection curators, all of whom share their expertise and explain how the chosen objects illustrate the subjects examined in the programmes, including faith, progress, war and legacy. 

And of course there will be a website, as there is for History of the World, with more information, videos, and zoom technology.

I doubt that either a TV network (broadcast or cable) or a radio station would do something similar in the U.S. without — most of all — a sponsor for it, and a champion at a museum with a fairly broad collection.

But it seems to me that a series about art, or art and history, could be more inviting, more enticing to more people as some other so-called accessibility projects we hear about.

 

Photo Credits: Queen Victoria by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (top); The Letter, by Gerard ter Borch (bottom), Courtesy of the Royal Collection, © 2011

 

 

Taking potshots at the Damien Hirst Complete Spot Paintings, 1986 – 2011 exhibition has become the sport of the day, and I’m not one to disagree. I find them simply boring. They fared poorly in a test of what visitors view, too.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to say about them, though.

First off, despite the breadth of works shown around the world, these are not the “complete” spot paintings. Hirst has taken credit for about 1,400 of them, and only 331 are on view in this global exhibition. About half of those on view are for sale, with the rest borrowed.

How many do you think Hirst painted himself? True, we all know that he employs a battalion of workers to paint for him, but this article, in London’s Daily Mail, reveals it all for us: Hirst actually painted only five of the spot paintings. Hirst, according to the Daily Telegraph, evaded the question when he was asked to confirm or dispute the figure. 

The Telegraph refers to an interview Hirst did with Reuters, in which “Hirst claimed that ‘every single spot painting contains my eye, my hand and my heart. I imagine you will want to say that if I don’t actually paint them myself then how can my hand be there? But I controlled every aspect of them coming into being and much more than just designing them or even ordering them over the phone. And my hand is evidence in the paintings everywhere.’ ” 

And what does Hirst tell his army of workers? According to Blake Gopnik, writing in Newsweek, “One rule Hirst gives the assistants who execute these works is that no color can repeat in any single piece. Another is that the gaps must be the same size as the spots.”

Art in America‘s January issue provides a few interesting “Spot Stats,” namely that the largest is 10 by 40 ft. and can be seen in London/Britannia St., the smallest is 1 by 1.5 inches at Davies St. in London, the earliest — from 1986 — is on Madison Ave. in New York and the “spottiest” is “in progress” and will feature 1 million spot.

They show no sign of going away, but why would they?

As Richard Dorment wrote in the Telegraph,

They are perfect corporate artworks, ideal for banks, board rooms, and modernist collectors who have no particular knowledge or taste. Cheerful but not cheap, you don’t have to look at them for more than a second or two to get the point. The fact that every corporate collection in the world has one is also a plus. It’s like knowing everyone else at the Tate Modern opening is wearing an Armani suit. Their suit may not be exactly like yours, but you know you are dressed correctly because it’s Armani.

The ctitical views I’ve read have not much disagreed.

Meantime, Larry Gagosian profits from this totally over-hyped, gallery around-the-world exhibition. 

Photo Credit: Zinc Sulfate, 2008, Courtesy of Gagosian Galleries

 

Two’s company, as they say. On Wednesday, the French Cultural Services Office of the French Embassy in the U.S. informed me that Will Barnet, who turned 100 last May and was honored recently by the National Academy Museum with an exhibition, had been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, with the insignia to be conferred on him on Jan. 19.

I let it pass without remark, though I didn’t forget it, until yesterday, when a similar email came announcing that Gary Tinterow, late of the Metropolitan Museum and now director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, has been named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. (That’s a higher grade.) He will receive his insignia on January 23.

I quickly went to the website of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy of the U.S. to see if there’d been anyone else — but, alas, the press part of the website is open only to registered journalists, and I never have (so far).

So we have these two. Established in 1957, according to Wikipedia, these honors may go, according to French government guidelines, to “citizens of France must be at least thirty years old, respect French civil law, and must have, ‘significantly contributed to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance.’ ” But, “Foreign recipients are admitted into the Order, ‘without condition of age.’ “

In any case, both Will and Gary are older than 30. 

The press release about Tinterow cites his many exhibitions (related to French culture), including Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch (1999), Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (2003), and Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2010), as well as the award-winning Origins of Impressionism and The Private Collection of Edgar Degas in 1995 and 1997, respectively. Plus his many acquisitions of French art and his collaborations with French institutions.

Barnet was a bigger surprise, to me at least, as his art seems very American to me. But the press release begins with a relevant quote from Barnet:

I remember at the age of 12 sitting on a big rock in front of the Beverly Massachusetts lighthouse that faced the Atlantic Ocean directly across from Paris and dreaming of going to Paris. At time I was reading French novels and learning about French art. By the time I was 14, I had read all five volumes of the French art historian Elie Faure’s “History of Art.’ What kept me alive was that I identified with the masters-they were my guiding light. 

Then it cites the French painters, “notably Honoré Daumier, Picasso, Ingres and Cezanne,” who influenced Barnet.

They each get a medal, an eight-point, green-enameled asterisk — gilt for Tinterow, silver for Barnet, and a green ribbon with four vertical white stripes. Tinterow’s also has a little circle in the middle, shown at right.

So now you know.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the French Cultural Services Office 

 

I know there is a Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, but it’s for kids. How many times have you viewed an artwork, particularly sculpture, and really wanted to feel it?

Many, for me, most recently at the Metropolitan Museum’s* Renaissance Portraits exhibition. (I didn’t.)

But I, and those of you who feel the same way, should try to visit Baltimore between Jan. 21 and April 15, while The Walters Art Museum presents Touch and the Enjoyment of Sculpture: Exploring the Appeal of Renaissance Statuettes. I hope it lives up to its billing, which is:

This groundbreaking focus show explores the implications of tactile perception for enjoying sculpture by melding the research of a Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist studying how the brain reacts to tactile stimuli and a Walters curator interested in the increased appreciation of tactility as an aspect of European Renaissance art–a period marked by a new availability of small “collectibles” meant to be held. Did artists anticipate a reaction to tactile stimulus in shaping sculpture, specifically statuettes of female nudes?

Visitors can hold and register their evaluations of replicas of “appealing” statuettes, as well as variants assumed to be unappealing. Displays illustrate the Renaissance attitudes towards touch, the sensation of touch being stimulated without actual contact and the neural processing and perception of objects during touch.

Ok, so it’s a little disappointing that visitors aren’t allowed to touch a Donatello. But I’m hoping the brain stimulation is the same for visitors, and the very exposure to these sculptures and this research makes up for that.

There’s more in the press release.

If museums are going to experiment with new exhibitions, this one strikes me as far more interesting and far more related to the core missions than the frou-four shows we’ve seen elsewhere. I hope it’s a crowdpleaser.

Photo Credit: Anonymous (Italian), Modest Venus (Venus Pudica), ca. 1500, Courtesy The Walters Art Museum

 

 

With government support for the arts on the wane in most places, here’s a city singing a different tune:

…The mayor has a plan. That plan has been to reestablish municipal support for the arts through the cultural office, and to enhance and expand city efforts that support artists and their organizations. This has taken the form of everything from maintaining the city’s cultural fund, which provided $1.6 million in grants directly to 201 arts groups this year, to rethinking non-arts programs so they might provide support to the sector.

In 2010, for instance, the city came up with an innovative use of community block grants enabling $500,000 in federal stimulus funding to be used for eight arts-related projects.

Can you guess what mayor, what city? (Not Boston, that’s for sure.)

It’s Philadelphia I’m talking about, and for the third time since I began this blog in 2009, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has won notice from me because of his support for the arts (see here and here).

Now, as the article I quoted from above (in the Philadelphia Inquirer, printed in late December) notes in its last paragraphs, the money Philadelphia devotes to the arts is only $4 per capita, much lower than the leader, San Francisco, which devotes $90 per capita to the arts, thanks to a dedicated hotel tax that dates back to 50 years ago (it’s 5.3% today).

But Nutter is talking the talk in a difficult environment and, I hear, he shows up to support the arts. A while back, Nutter appointed a Cultural Advisory Council to devise an arts plan, with the goal of creating a roadmap to keep creative activity going on in Philadelphia. It recently reported:

The vision plan sets a goal of increasing the city’s investment in the arts from $7 million in fiscal 2010 to $20 million in fiscal 2014. That $13 million increase will bring its public spending on arts and culture up to the per-capita average of $11 found in 20 cities studied by the task force.

Now I have a bigger task for Nutter. I notice that he is vice president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and I wish he’d get the art on the agenda there. In the group’s programs, it’s bad enough that “Arts” is lumped into Tourism, Arts, Parks, Entertainment & Sports.

Worse, that page is bare.

UPDATE, 1/12: Reader Jeffrey Barg reports, in a comment below, that Philadelphia today announced another art-lifting initiative — a two-year marketing campaign

supporting Philadelphia’s varied visual arts scene and the many artists who make it the colorful canvas that it is. The highly integrated campaign, the result of a first-of-its-kind partnership among 10 city organizations and cultural partners, will tout Philly’s eclectic art offerings — everything from museum stalwarts to independent collectives to plentiful public arts to popular annual events.

Again, bravo, Philadelphia.

Photo Credit: “Philadelphia on a Half Tank” by Paul Santoleri, Courtesy of the Mural Arts Program, Philadelphia