The Metropolitan Museum* and the Art Institute of Chicago announced appointments today — one curatorial and one staff. Oddly, it’s the latter that’s more intriguing.

On Fifth Avenue, director Tom Campbell followed his pattern of seeking expertise in Mother England; he named fellow-Brit Sheena Wagstaff (right) to “the newly created position of Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art;” she is currently chief curator of Tate Modern, “where for the past decade she has been responsible for programming strategy and planning.” 

That’ll be a switch; the Tate Modern is aggressively contemporary, which the Met has never been. Most recently, contemporary at the Met was led by Gary Tinterow, chairman of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. He has been named director at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (in fact, his farewell party at the Met was last night), and had more expertise in 19th Century and Modern art. Met-watchers have been predicting that Campbell would split the departments again (as they were until 2004, when the late Bill Lieberman, former head of contempary art at the Met, “stepped down”) and go very contemporary. Looks as if he has.

Wagstaff starts at the Metropolitan Museum in late spring, following Luke Syson, who just joined the Met as curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts from his post as Curator of pre-1500 Italian Paintings and Head of Research at London’s National Gallery. Syson curated the blockbuster Leonardo exhibition now packing them in in Trafalgar Square.

In Chicago, it’s Art Institute meets HomeMade Pizza Company. That’s right, according to an email from AIC arrived that in my imbox today. It announced the appointment of Gordon Montgomery (left) as Vice President of Marketing and Public Affairs. (Oddly, it was effective January 3, 2012, so his office is a little late getting the news out.)

Montgomery, most recently Chief Marketing Officer for HomeMade Pizza Company, has no art expertise (at least according to the release). Before the pizza place, he worked at NewSight Corporation, a new media and technology startup. There, he marketed “early generation 3DTV (albeit without glasses),” among other things, and he has also worked at Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett Worldwide, the ad agency, where he worked on accounts for Gateway, Maytag, Motorola, Sony, and Procter & Gamble, among other clients.

This is as big a switch, and in some ways a riskier one, than the Met’s. It was announced not by AIC director Douglas Druick, but rather by David Thurm, Chief Operating Officer of the Art Institute. Druick has said, however, that he wanted to beef marketing — I trust this simply means he is comfortable letting Thurm manage his areas of the museum.

Not too long ago, I heard that the Art Institute’s new wing, which opened in 2009, hasn’t brought the crowds that were expected. Yes, attendance surged that year to about 1.85 million, but it settled back — as is normally expected — in 2010 to 1.6 million. I haven’t yet seen numbers for 2011, but the AIC had similar attendance in 2002 through 2005, and it was higher in 2001. So was the expansion a wash in terms of drawing visitors?  

The Art Institute is hardly alone among museums in needing better marketing, and this could end up being a brilliant move — even if it is reminiscent of Al Taubman talking about marketing art being the same as marketing root beer, way back when he bought Sotheby’s.

As my friend Ron Culp, a long-time Chicago-based PR and marketing expert, with a long-standing familiarity with the Art Institute, says:

That certainly is an unconventional hire. I’m encouraged, however, by institutions that take creative risks when it comes to marketing and communications. They’ve found that traditional cultural marketing doesn’t necessarily cut it like in the good old days.  His grassroots, store-by-store targeting of individual customer wants could lead to a refreshing change of approach for this staid institution. Will be on the lookout for changes at Michigan and Adams.

Indeed! These two appointments suggest big changes at both institutions.

 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Tate Modern (top) and Art Institute of Chicago (bottom)

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met

 

Just when I got tired of watching George Clooney — courtesy of The Descendants, which I thought was rather a boring movie, though I know I am in the minority (I found The Ides of March to be more entertaining) — he comes up with a project I probably will want to watch.

On Saturday, at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Clooney said he’s going to make a movie telling the story of the Monuments Men — the American men and women who worked in Europe after World War II to rescue art that had been looted by Hitler and his henchmen.

Clooney is reportedly writing the script with Grant Heslov, his regular production partner, and plans to both star in and direct the film. 

The movie will focus on the art historians who landed at Normandy — a “group of 11 civilian art experts [that] included Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet; George Stout, who worked at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum; and James J. Rorimer, from the Metropolitan Museum,” according to John Horn of the Los  Angeles Times, who added:

The team had never trained for combat, and yet they faced live fire–two of them even died on the mission. Even though the experts were mere privates, they occasionally had to shout out battlefield instructions–“Don’t aim your tank over there, that’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa!” Clooney suggested–to preserve the works of art they were charged to find.

The announcement is another coup for Robert Edsel (above), whose 2009 book The Monuments Men, and website, has done well spreading the word of this marvelous moment in American history and art history. I last wrote about him here, when his Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art found a woman member of the team still living in Boston: Mary Regan Quessenberry. She died in 2010.

Edsel is from Dallas, and the Dallas Morning News has an article today saying Edsel’s ” passion has drawn the attention of George Clooney.” I think it’s more than that. As I recall, from a contact made some years ago, when Edsel published his first book, he has connections to Luke and Owen Wilson. 

Clooney hasn’t cast the movie yet, so now’s the time to weigh in. What role should he play? And who should play the others?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Dallas Morning News

 

 

There’s more gold in the annual art investment report from Skate’s, Part 2. (Comments on Part 1 are here.)  And it involves what the market is saying about individual artists.

First some context: In its survey, Skate’s included sales from 30 auction houses around the world, and concluded that “throughout 2011 the art market has resisted pervasive global economic turmoil and instability, with its high-end segment growing on every measure in 2011 compared to 2010.”

As I said the other day, more than 2,000 art works sold for more than $1 million last year; now this report says that 721 works sold in 2012 for more than $2.1 million, the figure that vaulted a work into the Skate 5000, the world’s most valuable art works according to auction house records. Those 721 lots were created by 250 artists, 81 of which were new to the top 5000 hit list.

With those numbers out of the way, let’s look at some of the artists in the report. Skate’s analysis goes beyond the top prices of the year (although they are in the report, too) to more interesting items.

Who are the ten “most liquid” artists, for example, with the highest number of repeat sales in 2011? You can probably guess that Andy Warhol is at the top (9 last year), but who’s next? Monet, Picasso, Richter and Basquiat, in that order. Then Calder, Leger…etc. (See the report.)

Which art work sold last year earned the greatest return? Skate’s says it was Lady in Solitude (above) by Fu Baoshi (who will soon have a show at the Metropolitan Museum,* coming from the Cleveland Museum of Art and opening on Jan. 21). Someone bought Lady three years ago for $262,830 and sold it last year for more than $1.9 million, an annualized investment return of 93.82%.

Works by two other Chinese artists came next, Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-Chun, followed by Richter and Polke. I don’t think one can extrapolate much from those five examples, except perhaps that some people are cashing out of Chinese art. Skate’s does note, though, that this is Richter’s second consecutive time with a top five return, both for abstract works from the same period.

The lack of liquidity in art shows up in the five works with the lowest rate of return: by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Cranach the Younger, Wesselman and Hesse. Lichtenstein’s Still Life with Mirror, purchased last May for $5.8 million, had been bought for $9.6 million three years before — a big loss.

But none of the works in this category had been held for more than 4 years, which was probably the cause of the loss — not necessarily the quality of the picture. Were they fire sales? Perhaps a longer holding period would have led to a return.

Skate’s calculates the top ten losers by looking at artists whose works — many works and works losing much value — were forced out of the top 5000. One can see trends here. Both number and value lists are topped by Renoir, followed by Monet in numbers and Pissarro in value. Of living artists, Damien Hirst figures in both lists, probably cheering David Hockney.

But not for long. Who, according to Skate’s, are the most valuable living artists? In order, the top ten are Richter (his record-setter, above), Koons, Johns, Hirst, Zao, Prince, Zhang, Doig, Zeng, and Ruscha. Freud and Twombly fell off because of their deaths.

One can make too much of this kind of analysis — but we won’t. To me, it’s just fun and somewhat fascinating to use analytical tools on art. Take a look — these are just the highlights; there’s more.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Sotheby’s (top) and Bui Gallery (bottom)

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.