Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

When I last checked in with it, on August 11, the multi-venue art extravaganza started by the Getty Trust to celebrate the birth of the Los Angeles art scene in the ’60s, PST involved 60 cultural institutions. They had an amazing roster of exhibitions.

Today, PST organizers announced that more than 70 private art galleries in Culver City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and the Greater Los Angeles area will join in, staging more than 125 exhibitions. This truly looks to me to be what the press release actually says, an “unprecedented cultural collaboration.” 

Focusing on the years immediately after World War II right through the 1960s and 70s, the galleries — which include Blum + Poe, David Kordansky, LA Louver, to name just a few — will present Pop art, Minimalism, assemblage, ceramics, political graphics, printmaking, conceptual art and much more.

Museums and galleries don’t always mix in public (though galleries often link their shows to museum shows — right now Achim Moeller is showing Lyonel Feininger, as is the Whitney, for example). But as Andrew Perchuk, Deputy Director of the Getty Research Institute, said in the PST press release:

Galleries played a critical role in L.A.’s post-war art scene. These spaces gave artists venues for experimentation and innovation and created a much-needed community for artists and patrons at a time when other resources for artists were scarce in Los Angeles.

Considering the vast subject, and how large the effort is, this collaboration between the public and the private seems to pass muster, at least with me.

The list of participating galleries is not yet online, but it will be soon — at the link in the first line of this post.

The sexiness of contemporary art, and of being center of the arts, seems to be a global phenomenon — a matter of imagination, of aspiration, of pride, and probably of business, too.  

Recently, Nigeria — which has stabilized a bit in recent years under a civilian government — got into the act. Its onetime capital, Lagos, has a National Museum, which displays bronzes and ivories from the Kingdom of Benin, but no contemporary art.

To fill that void, no one is erecting a grand new physical space for a contemporary art in what remains a poor country — which is smart. Rather, the Pan African University has started a “Virtual Museum of Modern Nigeria Art.” The site is still under construction, but it’s a start and it’s something of a plus to museums around the world that are trying to have a global outlook in an era of shrinking resources. And to the curious. (Not that anyone is going to collect art after seeing what’s on the virtual museum website — but it does provide an introduction.)

As Jess Castellote, the Spanish architect and art observer who was hired to run the site said recently, “There are many Nigerian artists who have produced great works but (who are) unknown. This is a challenge; the museum will not solve the problem, but it is a small contribution.”

I learned about the effort in a Nigerian publication called Next, which published an article about it last month. (Next has a robust section on culture, btw.)

Here’s how the museum explains itself:

The Virtual Museum of Modern Nigerian Art (VMMNA) is an online, free, searchable database of Nigerian art from the beginning of the twentieth century. Its main aim is to serve as an educational resource that will contribute to the dissemination of knowledge on modern Nigerian art and artists among the widest possible audience.

The artworks displayed in this virtual museum are held in private, corporate and institutional collections in and outside Nigeria.

And here’s a sample of what’s on view:

The Next article does a good job of describing what you’ll see on the site:

The Virtual Museum of Modern Nigerian Art has 10 rooms, a number of which are dedicated to major Nigerian art schools and styles.

Master printmaker, Bruce Onobrakpeya, however, has an exhibition solely dedicated to him in recognition of his landmark artistic achievements. There is the Zaria Exhibition Room, Nsukka Exhibition Room, Lagos Exhibition Room, Yaba Exhibition Room, and The Oshogbo Experiment.

The virtual museum also features Ife Exhibition Room, Auchi Exhibition Room, and The Future (which showcases works of a group of young artists who have not yet been stylistically defined).

81 artists are spread across the rooms at present, but Castellote intends to increase the number to 100 by the end of the year. There are also approximately 400 works comprising mostly paintings and sculptures, but the architect and his assistant hope to gather more by working with art collectors and artists.

There is also provision for a virtual exhibition space which will feature past, present, and upcoming exhibitions, apart from the artists and rooms.

It’s unclear to me how virtual museums will develop, and whether they attract visitors steadily after the initial burst of interest. But for countries like Nigeria striving to stake out territory in the contemporary art world, they seem worth a try.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Modern Nigerian Art  

A few thoughts after a trip to the Metropolitan Museum* yesterday:

• Based on an unscientific, mid-afternoon observation, which admittedly can’t be made too much of, the hike to $25 for the suggested admission price on Sept. 1 either was not known to the people who went on Labor Day, or didn’t deter many. The museum was pretty packed in several areas — the Frans Hals exhibit, the European paintings permanent galleries (some were “benched” off, and closed), the European decorative arts galleries and the Medieval galleries. Also — the store, where there was a short line for the cash registers.
• Let me be clear: I’m not in favor of high admission charges, but the Met knows its costs ($40 per visitor) and this is a suggested price, not mandatory. The museum has to find the money somewhere.
• The Hals show includes the painting above called “The Fisher Girl” (1630-32), which the label notes was sold by the Brooklyn Museum* in 1967. It is now in a private collection, and hasn’t been seen in years. Out of curiosity, I later looked in The New York Times Archive to see if the deaccession then had caused a fuss. I couldn’t even find a reference, let alone a fuss, which makes me wonder if the Brooklyn sold it privately, unannounced — if so, I strenuously object. The only reference that I found to the deaccession via a search, and it was a disapproving one (thankfully), came in 1976, when Thomas B. Hess wrote in New York Magazine, in a column called “scandals and atrocities”:

Some years earlier (1967) another director sold a unique Old Master (Frans Hal’s Fisher Girl, to be exact) to expand the museum’s considerable 19th century American holdings. In short, unwise leadership, while attempting to cope, succeeded in exacerbating certain problems…including disillusionment in parts of the community with many of the standards traditionally associated with a great museum.

     According to the Brooklyn Museum’s online records, it seems to have given the Hals painting to Wildenstein for sale, along with still lifes by Cezanne and Rodin. The Brooklyn does have another Hals, a better one, but still…

This is why we need transparency in deaccessioning. I love American art, but I’d still like to know what the Brooklyn bought with those funds.  

*I consult to a foundation that supports these organizations.

From time to time, as recently as last Thursday in fact, I’ve written about museums’ use of the Internet, and often I’ve thought, “nice try, but…” There’s still a lot to be discovered about using the Interest effectively and to its best advantage.

Yesterday, though, I discovered a particularly effective effort, after a somewhat frustrating visit to the Morgan Library and Museum.* I’d gone there to see Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands, which ends today. It’s a rich show, and as I walked around I felt a bit like an opera-goer without opera glasses: I needed a magnifying glass to really see these fantastic manuscripts, and I wondered why the Morgan hadn’t supplied some for visitors. (I have raised this subject before, and I have praised the Nelson-Atkins Museum for doing so.)

Later, at home, I went to the Morgan website and discovered the online exhibition for the fashion show. Here, forty-eight illustrations are online, each with a zoom-in function that allows viewers to see the works and probably better than I would have seen them onsite with a magnifying glass.

Of course, the Morgan is hardly the only museum to mount online exhibitions, and this is one of more than two dozen at the Morgan, so the effort is hardly new.

But for visitors to the fashion exhibit, it’s a fabulous find (and maybe should have been noted at the exhibit?), and for those who can’t get there, a magnification of the exhibit’s audience.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Morgan

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Morgan

Another post triggered by Facebook today: And frankly, I am of mixed mind about this one.  

Today, instead of letting people ask curators questions on its Facebook page (as it does once a month, with curators sitting in a conference room with their laptops), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts turned the tables and had its curators ask questions of people visiting its page.

Some of the questions were, to me, beside the point — for example, “What’s your favorite place to eat when you’re visiting the MIA?” and, just behind it, “Which part of the Asian art gallery is your favorite?” Ok, such questions humanize curators, I suppose, and create a little relationship, but it’s a shallow one and hardly worth a curator’s time.

Other questions were middling — “Who else at the MIA, besides the curators,  would you all like to direct questions to on facebook?” I was pleased to see someone wanted to hear from the volunteers.

Others asked for exhibition suggestions, favorite craft artists, and so on.

I think the one that drew the most interesting answers was about acquistions — “…Assuming we had 7 million dollars, who are the top three artists we should acquire?”

It also drew the most comments, I think — 21. The answers seem a bit surprising. Among the suggestions: Twombly, Rubens, Schiele, Dix, Poussette-Dart, Richter, Caillebotte, Sargent, Rothko, Pollock, Homer, Friedrich (!) etc.  

These are classics; they are not the hot artists pulling down gigantic prices in galleries. Of course, great works by them are also hard to get, and expensive — though $7 million could buy something good/great.

But the answers are unlikely to have any impact on the acquisitions committee, and they shouldn’t. So what’s the point? The answers are too few to be meaningful to the museum, and it shouldn’t be polling visitors about acquisitions anyway. So it’s just fun, and there’s nothing wrong with fun, unless people think they are having a say.

One commenter is already a little angry; he wrote: “I suggest you not acquire the same artists that every other museum is exhibiting. The international Tour de Museums is starting to resemble the tourist districts of every urban center, offering your average expected fair; Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret, ad nauseam…. There have been many competent artists who aren’t getting the recognition they deserve. Establish yourself as ahead of the pack, not one of the pack.”

All this tells me that the MIA, and other museums, are still figuring out how to use social media — and will, probably, for a long time.