Now this is the difference between the way something is covered in Discovery News, and the way it’s covered in a British tabloid, the Daily Mail.

The subject is the consumption of culture — going to museums and attending concerts, etc. — and Discovery’s headline ran: Cultured People Feel Less Stress.

The Mail, on the other hand, wrote Looking for the ideal man? Try the Nearest Museum or Art Gallery, Say Health Experts.

Actually, the Mail’s story was a little more complete. So let me quote from it:

…men who regularly  indulge in cultural activities are likely to be in better shape, both mentally and physically, than those who do not, according to a study.

Going to the theatre, concerts and even the cinema results in a range of benefits for men, including less depression and anxiety.

Women also benefit, but not to the same degree, says the largest study of its kind.

The study, led by Koenraad Cuypers of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, analyzed information from 50,797 adults who live in Norway’s Nord-Trondelag County. It was published in the British Medical Association’s Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

There’s another difference between the male and female benefits, now quoting Discovery:

For men, passive activities such as taking in a concert or museum exhibition are associated with an upbeat mood and better health, it found.

For women, though, the link is active, in that they were less likely to feel anxious, depressed or feel unwell if they played music or created art.

I can imagine the difference in the way men and women are interpreting those results.

Is there a lesson in marketing here? There may be. Per Discovery:

The results indicate that the use of cultural activities in health promotion and healthcare may be justified,” they conclude.

As extensive as it is, this is just one study — and it’s not clear to me that people everywhere would feel the same as Norwegians do. There’s also a cause-and-effect question — does cultural consumption lead to happiness or does happiness cause people to seek culture?

Still, given the male gap in arts-going, this kind of thinking might be looked at as an opportunity. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Thomas Struth, Gallerie dell Accademia, Venice

 

On Sunday, the Kimbell Art Museum opens its newest special exhibition, Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912. Ho-hum, you may be thinking. What’s new about that?

The Museum of Modern Art, for one, mounted a landmark show on the duo, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, in 1989. It was lauded as setting the record straight on their relationship, for concluding that Braque was essential to the development of Cubism (e.g., see Michael Brenson’s review in The New York Times). What more is there to say?   

Besides, that exhibition included about 400 works; the Kimbell’s (organized with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art) has 16 paintings and 20 etchings and drypoints. Case closed.

But not so fast. The Kimbell and Santa Barbara have something up their sleeves. They focus on the two critical years, and provide new scholarship on the role of format and its representational consequences in Cubist experimentation. For example, how did the use of oval-shaped canvases play into their Cubist game? How were those compositions to be framed? The Kimbell’s oval painting was framed as a rectangle — should it have been?  

Plus — probably more exciting for non-experts — for the past year, the Santa Barbara Museum has been working with MegaVision, a local company that makes high-quality cameras for professional, scientific, cultural and medical uses. With its digital-imaging equipment, the museums have taken “spectral images” of certain works in the exhibition. Spectral imaging can reveal features invisable to the human eye. So:

The spectral imaging created by MegaVision will be incorporated into interactive software that will allow visitors and online users to manipulate and study works with a level of detail and precision never before possible for museum audiences….this cutting-edge visual technology introduces new ways to look at and understand the processes, relationships, and stylistic developments of this important movement. Hand-held, touch-screen computers will provide mobility and interactive media content to exhibition visitors. For the first time in a museum setting, every visitor will have the opportunity to sit in front of an actual painting by Picasso or Braque and independently zoom in on the smallest brush strokes and specks of color.

This is just one example of the new technology’s capability, the Kimbell says.

It’s no surprise that the technology is made available by a specially created iPad app, “affectionately called iCubist,” and designed by Reza Ali.  

From the press release, it allows users to:

View and study works with a level of detail and precision never before possible for museum audiences….to manipulate a succession of digitized spectral images that show the artworks at different light frequencies (ultraviolet and infrared), revealing the most minute details…[and to] uncover important decisions made by the artists in developing their compositions.

Deconstruct a Cubist composition and attempt to put it back together.. [and thus] learn first-hand about the intellectual and creative processes employed by Picasso and Braque in their paintings. The physical act of moving visual elements emphasizes compositional choices made by the artists to create, for example, a sense of balance or movement. It also highlights recognizable elements and describe their significance.

Compare digital reproductions of paintings by the featured artists, Picasso and Braque, by clicking on markers that pop up to explain key aspects of their individual styles. This interactive activity will help visitors exercise connoisseurship to distinguish between the artists’ hands, despite their close similarity during the Cubist years.

Explore the history of Cubism by means of an illustrated timeline that includes vintage photography of the artists and their friends and reproductions of key works of art.

I can’t exactly show you here what you’ll see on iCubist, but the top picture is a Braque painting in visible light and the bottom one shows it in infrared. You can see the tabs that you’d be able to use if this screen were really an iPad — Explore, Time Travel, Compare, etc.

So maybe the last word on Picasso-Braque was not said all those years ago. This certainly seems like exciting technology for the exploration of paintings.

Photo Credits: Courtesy ARS/Kimbell Art Museum 

Just for fun, I attended today’s groundbreaking for the Whitney downtown — ok, not really, I had other business in the neighborhood and decided to include it on my itinerary to Chelsea and below.

For one, I stopped in at the Gagosian gallery exhibition, Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’Amour fou, which is worth the trip. I understand that some people are tired of Gagosian’s rolling out of these niche Picasso exhibits. But I’m not. I agree with Jerry Saltz’s review — which concludes, “As Walter herself said, ‘You don’t resist Picasso … a woman doesn’t resist Picasso.’ See this show; heed her words.”

But back to the Whitney ceremony, which took place in a tent on the spot near the High Line where Renzo Piano’s building will rise.

Despite the shovels hung from the ceiling (left), there was no ground breaking, per se, just a performance by Elizabeth Streb which had dancers jumping through glass panes and her standing under a shower of dirt, which was later turned over several times by the powers-that-be, including Mayor Bloomberg and Whitney director Adam Weinberg (below). 

The whole thing struck me as more of a pep rally than a groundbreaking. Several people received standing ovations for being introduced (e.g. the founder’s granddaughter, Flora Miller Biddle), and Weinberg got a lot of foot-stomping, too. Everyone mentioned that the Whitney was returning to its roots downtown, which — after a while — sounded more like people trying to convince themselves than that they believed it now.

There is, I think, a lot of wishful thinking in the Whitney’s move — and that may or may not turn out to be a good thing. One worry: the capital campaign is far from over: Of $720 million, just over $500 million has been raised.

Still, I may rue this day, but I’m going out on a limb regarding the architecture: Piano’s design, based on the drawings and sketches I’ve seen, look pretty good (though that clunky model Piano is holding at right gives me pause) for the display of art. I have disliked many of his more recent museum projects — the Morgan Library expansion, LACMA’s Resnick pavillion, etc. The Art Institute of Chicago is having problems with its Modern wing, and we still have to see about the expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner, which opens next year.

But the Whitney is looking better. I’m not talking about the outside; this is about how the art will look.

Interestingly, for the Whitney, Piano got to design a whole new building, like his Beyeler Foundation, his best museum, and not an expansion, like the others I’ve mentioned. It may just be that he’s at his best with a clean sheet of paper. I’m hopeful.

The Whitney opens a new exhibit, Designing the Whitney of the Future, in is lower gallery on Thursday, where we’ll see more.

And the museum’s home page, which was flashing neon about its groundbreaking when I last checked, has also embedded a video preview of the building. UPDATE: on 5/25, the Whitney home page is back to normal, but you can still access the video.

Photo Credit: © Judith H. Dobrzynski

 

“There hasn’t been an exhibition in London for Barbara [Hepworth] since 1968, says her granddaughter, the art historian Sophie Bowness. “It’s shocking.”

And so it is. That comes from an article published in Sunday’s Telegraph that argues that Hepworth deserves better. And now that she has a new museum of her own, in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England, maybe she will. It complements her studio-garden museum at the Tate St. Ives in Cornwall.

The  £35 million Hepworth Wakefield museum (right) opened on Saturday; it was designed by the increasingly popular David Chipperfield (although, according to the BBC, some locals don’t like this one). It has ten galleries, and will show the work of other artists as well as Hepworth’s abstract sculptures.

The “Hepworth Family Gift” consists of 44 full-size working models, prototypes in plaster and aluminium made in preparation for the works in bronze Hepworth executed from the mid-1950s to the end of her career. It also includes drawings, plus a large group of lithographs and screen prints by Hepworth.

After a sneak preview, Wil Gompertz, arts editor of the BBC, said “Barbara Hepworth is one of the great artists of the 20th Century and these plaster sculptures give a particular insight into how she worked. I’m delighted they are now on public view.”

But to return to the art world’s indifference in recent decades, experts note that Hepworth felt, as did others, that she was always in the shadow of Henry Moore. Notes the Telegraph:

There are many parallels. Both came from Yorkshire, studying in Leeds, then at the Royal College of Art in London. Both were at the forefront of a generation of sculptors that emerged in the Twenties and believed in the Modernist credo of carving directly into wood or stone.

Maybe Moore is due a reevaluation, too.

Next month, the Milwaukee Art Museum opens its “Summer of China,” featuring The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City and four smaller exhibitions.

There’s also a hefty schedule of lectures, art talks, a trip to Chinatown and other programs.

So it was timely of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s art critic Mary Louise Schumacher to raise the outstanding pertinent question about all this the other day in a piece headlined Should the Milwaukee Art Museum Protest Ai Weiwei’s Detention?

This is the same show that recently left the Metropolitan Museum and previously drew crowds at the Peabody Essex Museum. But Ai Weiwei’s arrest had not yet occurred when those exhibits opened. Coming last on the tour, MAM has had ample time to consider its position — and do to something.

As Schumacher writes:

Ai’s imprisonment since April 3 has sparked statements of outrage from government officials around the world and demonstrations in places like Hong Kong. It has also spawned an unprecedented response from the international art world and debates about whether cultural institutions have a role to play when artistic expression is suppressed by foreign nations….

Should the [Milwaukee] museum join many of the world’s other cultural institutions in signing petitions and speaking publicly? Would China pull the show? And if they did, would MAM lose the exhibition fee, presumably in the millions?

If MAM is mum, however, will it run the risk of the appearance of appeasement? Does the museum have an obligation to educate its audience about the oppression of Ai Weiwei during its “Summer of China?”

Does this show provide an opportunity for dialogue or even diplomacy? And – a question for all art museums – will overt forms of protest be more effective than behind-the-scenes efforts in affecting Ai’s release?

MAM has yet to say anything about Ai, and Dan Keegan, the museum’s director, declined several requests to be interviewed by Schumacher. He did, however, “release a brief statement by e-mail”:

The political situation is extremely complex and the Museum is sensitive to the discussion that Ai Weiwei’s detention has created and we are obviously concerned for his well being. To that point, I think that our ‘Summer of China’ can play a role in expanding understanding and forwarding the dialogue between cultures.

Schumacher covers the issues beautifully in her article, giving both sides, and she is scrupulously fair, neither condemning nor condoning MAM.

In the end, she takes what I think is the proper stance: “The “Summer of China” should not pass without an airing of Ai Weiwei’s case.”

I think she is correct: MAM doesn’t have to join the protest, but it should provide some forum, some panel, some context, about dissent in China and about Ai’s case. Otherwise, the Summer of China will look like propaganda, whether it is or not.

UPDATE, 5/24: Many others have now take the same stance as Schumacher, and me, and she has summarized and gathered links to some of those comments here.

 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum