In the annual Museums special section of The New York Times, published today, I have an article about the growing prevalence of exhibitions that focus on works owned by a single collector.

The gist is this: there are three reasons for these shows. One is economic; they’re cheaper than other loan shows. The second is what often gets lost when, say the New Museum controversially puts on an exhibition of works owned by trustee Dakis Joannou — they can be a legitimate way of viewing art. Third, many museums have total, or near-total, gaps in their permanent collections, but want to exhibit art in that category.

I disagree with those who say these shows should not be mounted unless the collection has been gifted to the museum.

Make no mistake: as I’ve said before (in Oct. 2009), museums should have rules about doing these shows, which are rife with potential conflicts of interest. There should, for example, be agreements with the lender against subsequent sales of the works on display for a reasonable time thereafter; the lender should not pay for the show, though I think a contribution toward the publication of a catalogue and payments for necessary conservation of the works on view are fine, etc.

Transparency is a necessity. (The Association of Art Museum Directors has some general guidelines, from 2007, that suggest questions museum directors should ask themselves regarding private collectors. In January, 2010, then AAMD president Michael Conforti addressed the issue in a message to members, but it doesn’t add anything.)

These exhibitions will continue, and they have a place in the museum repertoire. One person I called during my reporting who did not make it into the article — New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl — put it very well.

It’s a genre. A collection is like an essay that is not about art, but of art. Of course you can argue with it, unless it’s the Frick Collection, which is just perfect.

He also showed his gift with words — I called him out of the blue — with his first response to my question about their legitimacy: “There’s a whole constituency in the art world that acts like hall monitors, policing the manners of everyone.” He, like so many others, just want to see art that’s normally behind locked doors.

I cite several examples in my article. Recently, at the Art Institute of Chicago, director James Cuno has mounted a series of single-collector shows, including Richard Gray (whose exhibit included the drawing by Giuseppi Salviati, above left, and Donna and Howard Stone, whose collection includes the Roni Horn sculpture, above right.

But think of all the marvelous collectors who led taste or assembled troves of art that could not otherwise be seen by the public: the Vogels, the van Otterloos, Charles Saatchi, Eugene Thaw, on and on.  

And from the past: the Steins, the Arensbergs, Edgar Degas (who, had he not gained renown as an artist, would have gone down in history as a great collector), and Ambroise Vollard, among many others.   

This certainly should not be the third-rail kind of issue that some art pundits want to make it.

Still, it’s sensitive. For the article, I spoke too with John Ravenal, curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and president of the Association of Art Museum Curators. Ravenal was all for the shows, with sensitivities. But, he said, “you don’t want to be a place that routinely shows private collections.”

And, he added, before taking my call, the VMFA tightened up its own guidelines for such shows.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

 

 

The amount of time museum-goers spend looking at each art work is a subject of some study and much conjecture. Many years ago, a museum director told met that the average visitor spent 7 seconds looking at an art work in a museum. A few years ago, I heard that the number had dropped to 2 or 3 seconds. How these statistics were derived, I never learned (despite asking). I didn’t give them too much credence, except to note that experts thought the time we all were willing to spend looking, really looking, at art had dropped.

Leave it to London’s scrappy Daily Mail to experiment with the subject, with a twist. The Mail set out to determine what kind of art people wanted to look at — classical or contemporary. It sent observers to the Tate Britain; they spent a day sitting in front of four 18th and 19th century paintings and four works by young British artists. Actually, two days — a Monday and a Wednesday, on the theory that those days attracted more true art-lovers and included students.

As art critic Philip Hensher wrote in an article published Sunday:

The explosion of interest in art in recent years has focused on fashionable young artists, doing outrageous things  –  exhibiting their unmade bed or a dead shark, or persuading people to sprint from one end of the Tate to the other at two-minute intervals. 

These things easily get into the newspapers, and are famous among people who aren’t even interested in art. These days, Turner and Constable seem less exciting than these celebrity artists. Could the classics stand up in a simple test of people’s interest.

…We counted how many visitors stopped at each; for how long, on average, they spent looking at each work; what the longest examination was; and what sort of gallery visitor each work seemed to attract.

Surprise! The classics won, hands down. At Tracey Emin’s Monument Valley (Grand Scale), most people didn’t stop and those who did averaged 5 seconds before it. The longest time spent was two minutes. Rachel Whiteread fared little better, though “one fan…spent nearly five minutes in front of” her Black Bath (right). The Mail said Damien Hirst’s animal sculptures did seem to appeal to views, but not his spot paintings.

On the other hand, visitors spent on average two minutes, 15 seconds looking at William Hogarth’s The Roast Beef of Old England; 59 seconds looking at John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose; 1 minute, 57 seconds viewing Sir John Millais’s Ophelia (above), and 2 minutes, 5 seconds looking at Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights.

Ophelia attracted the most ardent fan: someone spent a half hour studying it.

Here’s a link to the Daily Mail article, which includes artwork-by-artwork statistics and illustrations.

What this all means is open to conjecture. To me it says something about aesthetics and narrative. People are more engaged when they see something that is “beautiful” and something that contains a discernable story. If an art work has both, all the better. 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Daily Mail

 

While we’re on the subject of the Egyptian Revolution, much has been made of the role of Facebook, Twitter, cell phones and technology in general for enabling the revolt.

Now a piece of contemporary art has come to my attention that takes off from ancient Egyptian art and adds the technology — from a California sculptor. The Evolution of a Revolution by Adam Reeder was written up today in Ahram Online.

Before we get to that, Ahram Online also had a pretty good article yesterday about Zahi Hawass, who denied all allegations against him. The best article I could find in English about those charges was published on Sunday in Al Masry Al Youm.

In Ahram Online, Hawass also recounted all his achievements since 2002, when he became secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Among them are the construction of 47 state-of-the-art museum storehouses at various archaeological sites, complete with alarm systems and televised circuit control, the start of a project to document Egypt’s antiquities, the appointment of 8,000 professional guards, and the assignment of archaeological experts to all airports and seaports in Egypt, to tighten security measures and crack down on smuggling.

Today, Hawass also blogged again on his website, posting an address he would have given to the UNESCO meeting in Paris this week on combatting illegal antiquities trafficking, had he gone, and linking to the Supreme Council’s so-called final list of items missing from the Egyptian Museum.

We shall see. (It is more extensive than, but overlaps with, the leaked list I printed here on Mar. 3. The trumpet and thot[h] and the scribe, for example)

Meanwhile, back in the contemporary world: Reeder, in his sculpture, puts cell phones in the hands of the ancients, lists Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and Morocco in the hieroglyphics — all experiencing protests in one form or another — and adds the symbols for Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Vodafone (which supplied mobile service in Egypt). Significantly, there’s a woman, since they were key in ther revolt.

Ahram Online interviewed Reeder, who has never been to Egypt, but said:

I see my role as one who chronicles the ways technology changes how we interact with our world. I think when the dust settles and Egypt has what it wants, I will make more art about it. For now, I have said what needs to be said, like a journal entry about a very good day.

Except for the casualties. Ahram Online today also carried the story of Ziah Bakir, an artist who worked for the Cairo Opera and who left home on Jan. 28 and never returned. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Adam Reeder

 

Almost since the start of the uprisings in the Middle East, I’ve been wondering about the state of contemporary artists there. They were clearly involved with the revolution in Egypt. As the Los Angeles Times reported in mid-February in a short article, there’s a fledgling group called League of the Revolution’s Artists whose members had “churned out drawings and caricatures, poems and plays inspired by Hosni Mubarak’s 30 years of autocratic rule” aiding the cause.

Earlier, in late January, the New Museum had sent out a press release detailing its next “Museum as Hub” project, which involved simultaneous programming with partner institutions, including one in Cairo. An exhibition called “An accord is first and foremost only a proposition” was guest curated by Sarah Rifky, of the Townhouse Gallery in downtown Cairo, not far from the Egyptian Museum.

With the help of the New Museum, I connected with Rifky, from whom I’ve learned some things. But not nearly enough. The situation in Cairo remains sensitive. Still, I’ve decided that a little is better than nothing. 

First, Rifky pointed me to reports that a prominent Egyptian sound-and-media artist named Ahmed El Basiony was among the casualties of the revolt. He died in the Cairo fracas on Jan. 28, the fourth day of the uprising. He was 32. A website called Dangerous Minds has a picture of him plus a sampling of his work.

There’s also an account of his death on a site called 1000 Memories; it reported that he taught art at Helwan University and “he organized educational workshops for digital, live and sound art, enabling numerous young musicians to enter the field.” Basiony’s last Facebook entry said, “I have a lot of hope if we stay like this. Riot police beat me a lot. Nevertheless I will go down again tomorrow. If they want war, we want peace. I am just trying to regain some of my nation’s dignity.”

In early February, Rifky gave an interview to Masress (which appears to be an online newspaper — its “About” page is only in Arabic), which reported on her and others. … She was traveling outside Egypt when the revolution began, but said

she began acting as a focal point for the dissemination of information online through Twitter and Facebook as well as through international phone calls during the internet outage in Egypt. Information about safety points, curfews, utilities and helplines became a valuable and inaccessible asset, she explained. “I began spreading the word in Cairo and other governorates through friends about SpeakToTweet”–an international phone line service that allows people to call in and leave voice news feeds and listen to those made by others. Once she was back in Cairo, she began providing real-time services, giving directions to people and verifying helpline numbers that were spammed with incorrect ones. “It feels like being conscribed over the past two weeks. I’ve been masquerading as a citizen reporter, journalist, humanitarian, human rights activist. I’d also be happy when I can start working on the analytical side of things.”

Rifky and I made contact after that, but she could add no more information. But I’ve looked her up and found that she’s tweeting about her activities.

 

On Mar. 11, she wrote “Open meeting in Rawabet in 20 mins to discuss how to help actor Aly Sobhy who was detained recently.” The day before, she said he had been arrested and faced a military trial. You can follow her here, though there’s much more about Middle Eastern goings-on than just the arts.

 

I also visited the website called African Colours, where I learned that this week a contemporary gallery called Darb 1718 is collecting photos, banners, placards used at Liberation Square during the uprising for a contemporary art exhibit on the revolution.

 

Very early in this movement, on January 31, ArtInfo published this account by Ben Davis, citing activities of a few contemporary artists for the revolution.  

 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Associated Press via the Los Angeles Times (top); of ArtForum (bottom)

Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, which I visited a few years ago, is a gem. Nice collection, nice building.

And now it’s an example of how museums should be addressing their collections. In a Mar. 9 press release, the museum said it had embarked on a comprehensive analysis of its 14,000 piece collection. Now, halfway through the process, conducted by staff and outside experts, the Speed said that this scholarship:

…is shedding new light on the significance of key pieces, leading to the reattribution of works [including the picture at left], revealing collection strengths not previously fully recognized, and yielding new perspectives on the history and development of the Museum’s collection.

It’s doing this to “identify key areas for collection growth and refinement, with the goal of strengthening the Museum’s holdings and making the collection more relevant and meaningful for the community it serves.” (That last part makes me a tad nervous, but nevermind for now.)

As a result, the release said,

The Speed will be deaccessioning works that are in poor condition, of lesser quality, have been discovered to be modified, or are inappropriate for an art museum…

The museum will sell through Christie’s, and the funds will go into acquisitions. Further:

…the Museum will post information on deaccessioned objects on its website beginning this spring. The Museum is developing a searchable online database of its entire collection, which will include information on deaccessioned works.

Great! And gosh, I thought, since I’ve been arguing for what I call deaccessioning in public for a while now (AKA transparency), maybe I am having an impact — others, including Max Anderson, are of course trying to foster the same thing.

But I had Five Questions, and Charles L. Venable, the Speed’s director, agreed to answer them.

1) It’s not often that a museum undertakes a comprehensive review of its entire collection. Many would probably say they don’t have the staff, the time, etc. for this. Why are you willing to devote the resources to this?

One of the primary reasons I came to the Speed in 2007 was to advance the expansion and renovation planning that was already underway.  A key part of that process was to determine how much additional space we needed for improved public areas (galleries, education areas, performance space, etc.) vs. back of house space, including art storage.  We were considering the ramifications of building off-site storage and I asked the staff to think about how many of the works would be stored and probably never shown. While that question could obviously not be answered exactly, it was clear that the Speed, like most museums, had many objects that had not been on public view for decades due to their condition, attribution, etc.  Thus was born the idea of reviewing the entire collection over approximately three years to better understand the collection, and how to strengthen it and provide for its long-term care.

2) In examining the first half, can you give me an example of how research shed “new light on the significance of key pieces”?

A result of the research we’ve been conducting has been to reaffirm the importance of works we believed were significant to our collection.  Walter Liedtke of the Met examined Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of a Woman and confirmed it was likely painted entirely by the master, an important distinction since many of his monumental canvases were largely executed by workshop assistants.
 
One of the great aspects of looking at the collection as a whole is that you see how the pieces fit together.  Charles Traub, from the School of Visual Arts in New York, reviewed our photographic works and helped us better understand what remarkable holdings we have of 1970s street and topographic photography.

3) Among the reattributed works, were any significantly upgraded? May I have the names of the works with previous and new attribution?

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