Is the fact that nearly 1,000 visual artists applied for a program that will select 15 of them a positive or a negative?

Let’s take it as a positive (and not a sign that they can not survive in this economy), because the program is called the smARTpower initiative, and it was developed by the U.S. State Deparment with the Bronx Museum of the Arts — a new effort in cultural diplomacy.

In late January, the BMA put out an open call for applications from artists who would agree to travel to 15 countries, including China, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kosovo, Lebanon, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Venezuela, and work with communities in each place, collaborating on works of art that will address social issues, like women’s empowerment, health, the environment, civic engagement, education, etc., on either a local or global level.

They’ll be envoys and partners, according to the museum’s statement when it was selected by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs last October. They’ll stay up to 45 days.

The winners will be announced at the end of May, selected by a panel that consists of

• Tomie Arai – Visual Artist
• Sandra D. Jackson-DuMont – Deputy Director of Education and Public Programs and Adjunct Curator at the Seattle Art Museum
• Carin Kuoni – Vera List Center Director, Curator and Critic
• Tumelo Mosaka – Curator of Contemporary Art at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Holly Block – Executive Director at the Bronx Museum of the Arts

Despite a tight deadline — applications were due Feb. 28 — artists from nearly 50 states responded and Block (pictured above) said that, despite high expections, the museum received far more applications than it had predicted.

So the panel has its work cut out.

I like the program, but I do have a quibble: why must the works of art address social issues? What’s wrong with art that is simply aesthetically pleasing — or not — or art that addresses personal issues? Or art that references history? Does it smack of cultural imperialism to insist that our artists go to a country and push for an examination of social issues? I wonder.  

 

If polling the public is one way museums are trying to engage people, can another trendy method be far behind? I’m speaking of gamification, also known by techies as “funware.”

The practice, which turns non-game activities into games, is rampant on sites like Facebook and in the commercial world. In these games, participant rack up points, or achieve levels, or earn fake money, or compete against themselves or others, and so on. (Think “Farmville.”)

I am not much of a game-player (and never online), but I confess that a few years ago, when I was invited to participate in solving a mystery at the Metropolitan Museum, for which the more you knew about art, the better you’d be at finding the culprit, I said yes. In the end, the friend who invited me could not round up the minimum number of people required, and the evening fell through. (Whether the problem was the Met, the lack of art knowledge, or something else (cost?), I do not know.)

Some years ago, the late Thomas Hoving published a book of art games, Master Pieces: The Curator’s Game, which has now been turned into an app for the iPhone and iPad.

The point: gamification of museums is starting to happen: even current non-gamers might fall for gamification, and that might help museums win new audiences.

This isn’t a museum, but there’s a game coming up soon at the New York Public Library. Called “Find the Future: The Game,” it is being directed by acclaimed game expert and author Jane McGonical, author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, pictured above. The game was created with Kiyash Monsef, and designed and developed by Playmatics and Natron Baxter Applied Gaming.

It starts on May 20, and involves staying overnight in the main library on Fifth Avenue. In it, 500 people aged 18 and up “will spend the night exploring the Library and its world-renowned collections as they write a book together,” the member newsletter says. Here’s the description:

During the May 20 “Write All Night” event, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., 500 prequalified players (18 and older) will explore the building’s 70 miles of stacks, and, using laptops and smartphones, follow clues to such treasures as the Library’s copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand. After finding each object, players will write short, personal essays inspired by their quest — for example, how would they write the Declaration? Winning the game means writing a collaborative book based on these personal stories about the future, and this volume will be added to the Library’s collections.

Sign me up. But that won’t happen. When I went online to see details, I discovered that the game is meant for “young people.” See here.

Last summer, nine Smithsonian Institution museums (including the Hirshhorn and the Freer-Sackler) cooperated in a game called goSmithsonian Trek, which could be played from any iPhone or Android phone. It received some good press.

Are there other examples? Please comment if you know of any.

I’m calling attention to gamification now for a couple of reasons:

1. It seems bound to happen at museums, but I hope art museums don’t spend too many resources on it, for now. 
2. There’s a lot to learn about gamification before that. 
3. Let’s hope that museum games truly center on the art, and are a learning experience as well as rewarding fun. 
4. If possible, museums ought to share what they’re learning about gamification.

Competing with big games, developed by big developers, is bound to be expensive.

 

 

In a country whose populace has a reputation for not voting as diligently as it can — and should — it strikes me as a little odd that so many institutions are using voting contests to attract interest and involvement.

But here’s another one,  a new experiment in “visitor engagement” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and it raises an issue: Since Mar. 31, the MIA has been asking people to vote on the conservation destiny of a painting in its collection. I wonder if that is a choice that should be left “to the people.”  

It’s a little more complicated than that, of course. Here’s the short version of the story: For years, MIA curators have suspected that the red sportsman in the foreground of a painting called Landscape with a Watermill (above right)  by Meindert Hobbema was not painted by the artist, but rather was added at a later date. Recently, they confirmed their suspicions: he was added in the 19th century. The question is, should the figure be left there, as is, or removed?

MIA has posted this story on its blog “The Bubbler,” is asking the public to vote on the question. 

Hobbema has earned his reputation as a great landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, so this is not some throwaway painting by an unknown. As curators did their research, they discovered from auction records that the sportsman was added between 1810 and 1828. A 1809 record leaves him out of the description, while the 1828 and later records put him in it.

Why would the painting have been altered? Here’s what MIA says:

It’s impossible to know the exact reason, but we do know that in the early 19th century, sporting subjects were extremely popular, particularly in England. Perhaps it was added at the request of the owner, or to make the work more desirable (therefore commanding a higher price) at auction.

Yet, as the MIA also writes on the blog, the addition of the huntsman shifts the mood of the painting. Take a look at the painting without the huntsman, above left.

What to do? The MIA is asking blog visitors: “Does the painting benefit from the removal of the sportsman? Should a paintings conservator mask the 19th century addition of the sportsman (this process is completely reversible)? Or is the figure now part of the painting’s history?”

Nowhere does the MIA state its strong opinion or whether it will be bound by the vote (and that’s a good thing).

At the moment, votes are running nearly 60% to 40% against removing the sportsman, even though the process would be reversible.

Yet I side — and I suspect most art experts side — with those who want to take him out, and return to the painting to Hobbema’s original  vision. He’s the artist, afterall.

So what does MIA do if the public strongly feels otherwise? To return to my question, is this the kind of question that should be put to the public? If MIA can manage expectations, and disappointments, it’s ok. It is a great learning experience. But if the public thinks the vote will determine the outcome, then it’s not ok.  

Voting ends May 31.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

 

 

Max Gordon: does the name ring a bell? How about David Gordon?

A new book called Architect for Art: Max Gordon is one link between the two, but by no means the strongest: David Gordon, former director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, among other things, has written the Preface and an essay for the book about his brother Max, who died in 1990 of AIDs-related illness. I’m happy to highlight it not least because Max’s philosophy about architecture for contemporary art matches mine — or, I should say, mine parrots his: highlight the art, not the achitecture; use light to create space; make everything as simple as possible.

Max Gordon designed the Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road in London, which opened in 1985. Among his other projects: the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City; the homes of collectors Lewis and Susan Manilow, Keith and Kathy Sachs, Jackie Brody, and his own flat in London, plus David Juda’s gallery, Annely Juda Fine Art in London. The book is illustrated with pictures of all seven. Though not in the book, Gordon’s designs for galleries in Soho (Brooke Alexander’s, to name one) later influenced those in Chelsea.

Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, links Gordon’s Saatchi Gallery design directly to the hugely successful Tate Modern and credits Gordon in his essay for suggesting what became the Turner Prize. He writes:

Gordon was something of a rarity, an architect…who was…loved and admired by artists. Many architects associated with artists…However, very few architects are regarded as friends and equals by artists, let alone accomplish this feat on both sides of the Atlantic. Garrulous but shy, given to one-liners but never glib, Max Gordon was a central figure in the London and New York art worlds for more than twenty years…

But why this book now? As David Gordon writes in the preface, “after excesses of all kinds, including in architecture, of the recent past, it is time for a return to an architecture infused with the spirit of minimalism, simplicity and economy.” (Another view of this is here.)

And, two, David Gordon was too busy running MAM until 2008 to get to this task.

This book has more going for it than marvelous pictures: it’s full of cocktail-party tidbits (which artists told the Sachses they must use Gordon, whose gallery he designed on the inside of a cigarette pack and whose on a napkin over lunch, etc.), as well as comments and remininscenses by Alanna Heiss, Richard Serra, Jennifer Bartlett, Lawrence Luhring, Jasper Johns, and others.

And, of course, there’s serious stuff, too — including essays by Kenneth Frampton and Jonathan Marvel.

 

At a time when students in art history are said by many to be choosing overwhelmingly to study contemporary art (a point made here by Maxwell Hearn of the Met), the University of Pennsylvania is adding to its medieval studies department.

What gives? A gift to the Penn Libraries, that’s what, and a very nice one at that.

Penn recently announced that it has received a major collection of 280 Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, valued at over $20 million, from a Penn alum, and long-time benefactor and Library Board member Lawrence J. Schoenberg, and his wife Barbara Brizdle Schoenberg.

Along with the gift, the Penn Libraries plan to create the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies to promote the use of the Schoenberg’s gift and other manuscript collections. Presumably, art history students will get the message and sign up. According to the press release:

Items from the Schoenberg collection have already attracted graduate students completing doctoral dissertations, undergraduates writing class papers, and scholars engaged in research and instruction in History, English, Music, History of Art, Religious Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and South Asian Studies, from Penn and abroad.

The collection, according to the release and an article in the Penn Current, contains manuscripts in art, science, mathematics and technology. “It is comprised of early manuscripts in Eastern and Western languages that illuminate the scope of pre-modern knowledge of the physical world in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions,” the Current says, and adds:

The collection traces the reading and interpretation of ancient authorities that had central importance in the history of ideas, including Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy. It prefigures the advances of Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, and it illuminates lesser-known figures like Nastulus, the inventor of astrolabes, an ancient , and al-Zahrawi, devisor of medical instruments.

A catalogue for some items seems to be already online, including “virtual facsimiles.” That’s a page from an Eastern Mediterranean 15th Century herbal medicine manuscript above.

The Schoenbergs seem to be quite hooked on manuscripts. Penn says that their previous gifts to the university include “support for the creation of the Libraries’ Digital Humanities presence through the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI); the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, which tracks manuscript sales and provenance; as well as the annual Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscripts in the Digital Age; and the Lawrence J. Schoenberg & Barbara Brizdle Manuscript Initiative, established in 2006 to support the acquisition of manuscripts, preferably produced before 1601.”

They’re collectors, all right, and that’s a compliment.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Penn Libraries