The Detroit Institute of Arts has launched a very cool “exhibition.” The question, to me, is whether it’s making the most of it.

First the facts: in celebration of its 125th anniversary, DIA has put up 40 framed, life-sized digital reproductions of works in its collection on street locations all around its four-county area. They went up on Friday.

So, when you and other passers-by visit Centennial Park in Oxford, you’ll see van Gogh’s Bank of the Oise at Auvers, and when you go to Metro Beach Metropark on the Harrison Turnpike, you’ll see Martin Johnson Heade’s Seascape: Sunset.

If you visit Noir Leather in downtown Royal Oak, you’d see Henry Fuseli’s “Nightmare,” at left.  

The reproductions were made by a local company called SM/ART Editions that specializes in large-scale vinyl reproductions for home and office décor. Its owner, Marc Schwartz, is sponsoring the show and offering the reproductions for sale. That’s smart — he’ll presumably do good and do well.

Is the DIA getting as much as it can from the show, which it calls DIA: Inside|Out, and describes as “treating metro Detroit as a grand, open-air gallery.” It continues: “Each work is displayed in an ornate frame, accompanied by an information plaque. Some of the reproductions will be installed on walls and others on free-standing posts. They will remain on view through November.” The museum wants people to “reconnect with the legacy of the DIA’s collections,” per the press release.

That seems to be the only goal. But how about unobtrusively seeking voluntary contributions? A little line at the bottom could say, “if you like this painting, text XXXX and donate $5 to the DIA.” Maybe even set the donation at $10.

Or, the DIA could have had a contest — see how many paintings you can see between now and the close of the exhibition. Register online, and everyone who sees them all will be entered in a drawing for a membership (or 5 free passes, or something). How to check, other than the honor system — I don’t know but so little is at stake (individual membership costs $65 and tickets cost $8), who cares?

DIA did, thankfully, publish a map online. 

Or, people could vote for their favorite, via text or its website — DIA could even charge $1 per vote, the way the Chicago Opera Theater allows voters to select one opera from three choices with the winner produced for its spring festival season. Release the vote counts — assuming they are big enough — every two weeks on the website, to get people more involved.

I am sure there are other ways to capitalize on this. As my AJ co-blogger Amanda Ameer says, describing her Life’s A Pitch — “The arts are marketable.”

Photo Credit: Michael H. Hodges, Courtesy of The Detroit News 

 

Last year the Brooklyn Museum* made good use of its collection of mummies, and now the Nelson-Atkins Museum is entering the mummy-discovery fray

Brooklyn, you’ll recall, subjected four specimens to CT scans at North Shore University Hospital — and got a lot of press for it. Three doctors at the hospital analyzed the mummies, which date to as long ago as 1064 B.C. and up to 395 A.D., give or take, and discovered that one, thought to be a female, was actually a male. Among other things.

When it was all over, the mummies went back to Eastern Parkway and are now part of the museum’s Mummy Chamber semi-permanent exhibition.

The Nelson-Atkins has taken a different route, forging an unusual partnership with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). ATF’s forensic scientists/special agents worked for more than three months on a mummy named Ka-i-nefer, who lived in Egypt 2,500 year ago but now resides in the museum’s new Egyptian galleries, which opened in May.

Sharon Whitaker and Robert “Randy” Strode used “a sophisticated computer program known as the Electronic Facial Identification Technique (EFIT) Program” to make a composite image of what the fellow looked like.

His composite image is above; the agents, with curators, also determined that “Ka-i-nefer was a man who lived to be about 45 to 55 years old, who stood about 5 feet 5 inches and wore size 7 shoes.” 

The Nelson-Atkins is holding a presentation of these results for the public this afternoon.

Now, I am aware of the opposition to such analyses, published in a recent New Scientist article: “research on mummies is invasive and reveals intimate information such as family history and medical conditions. And, of course, the subjects cannot provide consent.”

That does give me pause. But I am rather inclined, for the moment, to agree with N-A director Julián Zugazagoitia, who said in the press release: “This sort of marriage between science and art enhances our scholarship…”

Archaeology magazine has a complete assessment of the Brooklyn adventure here, and the Brooklyn Museum has an interactive about the exercise here.

UPDATE, 9/12/10: The Kansas City Star has a nice article on the subject (here), with more detail about the process and the involvement of a local cardiologist.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the respective museums

* I consult to a foundation that supports the Brooklyn Museum.

Here are two little causes for joy: a reattribution, in Dallas, and a reclamation-release, in New York.

Yesterday the Dallas Museum of Art announced that it owned a George Romney, not a painting by an unknown, probably American colonial artist, perhaps Ralph Earl. “Young Man With A Flute” entered the collection as part of a bequest in 1987.

Ten years ago, a British art dealer named Phillip Mould suggested that the painting might be by Romney, but had no evidence and the museum paid scant attention. This year, when Olivier Meslay, the senior curator of European and American Art, arrived from the Louvre, saw the painting and learned of Mould’s suspicion, he decided to investigate. Eventually, Romney expert Alex Kidson, the consultant curator with the National Museums Liverpool, saw and analyzed the painting, determining that it was indeed by Romney, a key figure in 18th-century British art and a contemporary of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.

The painting hangs next to a Reynolds at the DMA. Read more in the museum’s press release.

In New York, the story is curiouser. In 1971, Faith Ringgold was commissed to paint a mural at Riker’s Island, which then held women prisoners as well as men. “For the Women’s House,” her first public commission, depicted women in various forms of work and was hung in the cafeteria of the Women’s House of Detention. In the early ’90s, when RI became all-male, it was painted over, moved to the basement and slated for disposal. Luckily, a female guard contacted Ringgold, who appealed to the Corrections Commissioner, and the painting was restored — but rarely seen.

Until now: On Tuesday, the Rikers Island warden told the Neuberger Museum of Art that it would lend the mural to its coming People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s. It will be there when the exhibition opens on Saturday.

The things art works go through.

 

There’s unquestionably an art to farming, but how about farming as an museum exhibit?

If that sounds a little odd, you were not a judge in the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation’s biennial exhibition awards. Three 2010 winners were announced on Sept. 1, and $150,000 will go to an independent curator named Sue Spaid. Her exhibit, Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots will run at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, in September, 2012 — if all goes well. Here’s the description:

Green Acres aims to be the first museum exhibition solely devoted to the cultivation and distribution of edible foodstuffs. [It] will explore a global art movement that has been developing over the past 40 years wherein artists have developed and realized novel farming practices to inspire self-reliance, improve food quality, demonstrate sustainable farming techniques, engender community actions and foster local identities. These acts — whether of resistance, empowerment and/or genuine pleasure on the part of artists and participants alike — offer viable alternatives to the standard corporate farms upon which we depend. Green Acres combines an indoor exhibition of historically significant works, including the refabrication of Newton and Helen Harrison’s Survival Series (1970-1973), a completely functioning indoor farm, a photography installation and live video feeds to farm-as-art projects in New York, Thailand and Israel, as well as six on site outdoor sculptures.

Maybe you have to see it to decide if it’s museum-worthy. But Spaid has her work cut out to persuade me.

The Tremaine award “rewards innovation and experimentation at the curatorial level by supporting strong thematic exhibitions that challenge audiences and expand the boundaries of contemporary art.” Environment, along with art and learning disabilities, is one of the foundation’s program areas, so Green Acres provides a measure of synergy, I suppose. (See the award’s eligibility rules and goals here.)

But to me, this is a stretch, part of the museum as town-hall/art-isn’t-necessarily-central trend. And it’s sad.

Tremaine gave two other exhibition awards: Steven Matijcio, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, was awarded $85,000 for Paperless, which will showcase artists “wrestling with the implication of paper as artifact.”  

And João Ribas, Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, was awarded $150,000 for Man in the Holocene, which “will explore how contemporary art acts as a speculative science of objects and phenomena… as a form of inquiry into how we perceive and configure our physical world.”

Over at Brainstorm, Laurie Fendrich has been writing about art in America, so to speak — beginning with the line: “I’ve noticed, during the nearly three years I’ve been blogging for Brainstorm that whenever I blog on art, the reaction is deafening silence. When I blog on politics, on the other hand, people are at the ready with their opinions.”

That caught my attention because, on the surface at least, it basically says that people don’t care enough about art to argue about it.

Fendrich argues the case somewhat differently: she believes that people react to a work of art in one of three ways — they like it, they don’t like it, or they’re indifferent to it — and also that, the heck with specialists like art historians and curators, “people firmly believe that art is a subjective matter, and that all opinions about it are therefore equally valid.”

At the same time, she continues, a lot of people — even sophisticated people — think modern art is a joke, but the sophisticated ones don’t want to admit to that. So people don’t talk because they feel they don’t know enough. Getting aesthetic taste to “broaden,” she writes, would require a lot of direct experience with art, like hanging around museums. 

That was her Part One. I agree with it, mostly — except I think the bigger problem is that people don’t care enough to know enough. They’re not interested in spending more time looking at art, and they think it’s a closed circle.

In Part Two, Fendrich almost makes that reticence a virtue as she dissects why everyone feels so free and almost obligated to talk about politics: “For most of us, talking about politics has become merely another means of self-expression — another way to yell (if we’re bullies), rant (if we’re full of tension), sound reasonable (if we’re nice people).”

But that has consequences: “People eagerly opine about politics because talking about politics today has deteriorated into nothing but a game of chatter–a way of responding to the unsettling modern world that seems so devoid of much that’s beautiful or good.”

So cheer up, art-lovers. Would you rather have a lot of people blather on and on about something, even when they don’t know much, or remain quiet because they don’t know much?

We’re in the second universe today, and I think I prefer it.  

We’d all love it if more people cared about art (and visited museums and galleries), but can you imagine the heated rantings (and more) that contemporary art could cause if people felt uninhibited?