When it comes to viewing great art, Americans face a disparity of opportunity — a fact that has always troubled me. It may be politically incorrect, but it shouldn’t be controversial to say that most of the best visual art in the United States lies east of the Mississippi, largely because the East’s museums had a head start. They were richer, and more conscious of catching up with sophisticated Europe, first.

What is more troubling is the perpetuation of this pattern, partly because of money and partly because some areas are better than others at developing and/or maintaining a tradition of funding the arts.

Or so the story has always gone. Now the Foundation Center has provided some analysis — emphasis on “some” — to back up the thesis, and it has displayed its results in a fascinating “Focus on Arts Funding” interactive map that illustrates regional differences. 

The map has limitations: it maps not grants, but the location of grantmakers funding arts and culture, an assumption presumably being that at least some focus more on local/regional giving than national giving (in my experience, a reasonable assumption).

What you will see if you go to the Foundation Center site (link below) and click on a category (on the left, “arts, general,” “humanities,” “museums,” “performing arts,” etc.) is the distribution of grantmakers in that category. Mouse over any given chosen state, and you get the actual number of grantmakers in that state.

So, it’s no surprise that New York consistently comes out on top, in every category. Is it shocking to see that South Dakota, Arkansas and Mississippi have no grantmakers in the visual arts?

Or that, only New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have a sizable number of grantmakers interested in historical activities?

By all means take a look.

So as not to overstate the case, let me repeat what I have said before: Foundations provide a small share of arts funding.

Nevertheless, there’s a problem here. My solution is more, and less equal, partnerships — with richer arts institutions sharing more with those out of their league, which is to say below it. 

Surprisingly, some RCA readers seem to have interpreted my last post, about Mark Bauerlein’s criticism of the arguments used to advocate for arts education — which was certainly not against arts education itself — as a lack of interest in early arts education.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m for arts education, no matter how we get it done — and where. In fact, among the items of interest that I’ve saved in the last few weeks to comment on here is one about a museum pre-school.

The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA., announced this month what it calls the first pre-school in an American art museum. The parent cooperative school — Lincoln Nursery School — will hold class there for 4- and 5-year-olds from September 13, 2010 through June 9, 2011; it will, according to the press release, “broaden its hands-on, experiential philosophy at deCordova’s campus, utilizing all the Sculpture Park and Museum have to offer.”

The deCordova is building on an existing relationship with the Lincoln Nursery School, which “has taken advantage of deCordova’s campus by exploring, discovering, and learning about the sculpture, art, and landscape. For example, in the fall of 2009, Lincoln Nursery School students visited the Sculpture Park for a field trip and soon after, created their own sculpture at the Lincoln Nursery School, inspired by Steven Siegel’s environmentally-friendly newspaper installation, Big, with rift.”

Charming, apt, and enlightened. If the picture above, from the school’s website, doesn’t warm your heart, I don’t know what will.

Nancy Fincke, Director of Lincoln Nursery School, said in the release:

…I believe environments influence our thinking. The opportunity to experience the Sculpture Park, nature, the studio classroom, and the Museum at large on a daily basis will inspire children and adults to observe, ask questions, and express their stories through movement and materials. We (the faculty) will in turn make visible to the community the children’s expressions of their experiences.

The only downside I can see about this is the 15-child limit, no doubt because of space. I’d bet there’s a long waiting list. And maybe it will be an inspiration.

And speaking of inspiration, I have no idea if this is a first, but I tip my hat to David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea for hosting, last week, a one-day exhibition and reception for youngsters (aged 6 to 13) participating in New York City’s Dept. of Parks & Recreation summer camps.

Yes, lots of museums do this, but I’m not so sure about commericial galleries, which created the event for the kids and their parents, but opened it to the public. Zwirner also showed a short documentary showing the children making art inspired by classic contemporary artists, like Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Here are the details.  

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (top); Lincoln Nursery School (bottom)

Why do we want students to learn about the arts? Is it for their social benefits? Because they “save” students who are little interested in math or English? Because they teach tolerance for other viewpoints?

Why are we all for arts education?

I’d guess that many (most?) Arts Journal readers don’t even think about the why. We just know the arts are intrinsically wonderful. But are we making the best argument for arts in education?

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, doesn’t think so. In a recent post on his blog on Brainstorm, the group blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, he offers “How Not to Save The Arts.” It refers, in turn, to an article he wrote for Education Next called “Advocating for the Arts in the Classroom.”

Bauerlein once worked at the National Endowment for the Arts (2003-05), under Dana Gioia, and he criticized current chief Rocco Landesman’s methods of advocacy:

[His] emphasis falls on the unusual student, the difficult kid, not on the arts as a subject for study. Landesman doesn’t defend arts education as a rigorous discipline that builds concentration and requires practice, practice, practice. Nor does he say, We need arts education to keep alive the legacy of American art–Thomas Cole, Martha Graham, Duke Ellington… He doesn’t highlight the provocative stuff with something like, We need arts education to train young people to comprehend innovative, boundary-breaking art. Instead, the purpose is salvation. Some students don’t fit the [No Child Left Behind] regime and other subjects don’t inspire them. Talented but offbeat, they sulk through algebra, act up in the cafeteria, and drop out of school. The arts “catch” them and pull them back, turning a sinking ego on the margins into a creative citizen with “a place in society.”

This view, Bauerlein believes, is a mistake — and so do I. If salvation is, for some, a byproduct of the arts, fine, but it’s not the reason to study them. (Nor, btw, is audience development.) Bauerlein continues:

It doesn’t insist upon the arts as a discipline, but rather sentimentalizes the arts as a salvation. (See the rendition of the hood “Carlos” in the event described in the essay.)  It doesn’t make other teachers in math, science, English, and social studies respect the arts as an integral part of liberal education. It makes them regard the arts as a vacation from standards and rigor.

Well said.   

Real Clear Arts readers know that I am a fan of The Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Masterpiece column, subtitled “Anatomy of a Classic.”

Today’s piece — about music — is no exception. It celebrates the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth with a column about his 24 Preludes, “tiny microcosms [through which] Chopin established the hegemony of the Romantic miniature.”

The piece, by David Dubal, a professor of piano performance at the Juilliard School, also contains this statement, which astonishes and pleases me (a Chopin fan) immensely:

Probably more people have come to great music through Chopin than from any other composer.

What an achievement that is.

 

I’ve been wanting to weigh in on museum blogs for a long time now. Trouble is, there are too many, and they seem to me to be inconsistent. Frequently, museums have lowly curatorial assistants writing the posts, probably because curators don’t want to. Many posts don’t seem all that interesting. Maybe they’re heavily edited — or maybe they’re not edited at all. 

So I put the idea aside. Now someone at Best Colleges Online has come up with a list of “50 Awesome Art Museum Blogs.” I had to look.

It seems that raters at Best Colleges Online had trouble as well. They do not disclose how the blogs were chosen, or ranked. In fact, they are listed not 1 to 50; rather, 10 (or so) are listed by region. It’s unclear whether they’re in order or random. But here the top three listed for each area:

The Northeast: Brooklyn Museum, Fogg Art Museum, “Face to Face” of the National Portrait Gallery. 

For the South: “The Modern” of the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, Gibbes Museum blog; Amon Carter Museum.

The Midwest: Indianapolis Museum of Art, NIU Art Museum, Blog @ the Nelson-Atkins.

The West: Asian Art Museum blog; University of Wyoming Art Museum, Hammer News + Blogs.

International: National Museums Liverpool Blog; Behind the Scenes: the East Lothian Museums Blog, the McMaster Museum of Art blog.

The rest of the list is here.

Blogs are an important part of a museum’s communications strategy, but clearly, much of this is suspect. So why am I bothering you? Because I was tipped off to this list by none other than the “Other articles, essays and recent items of interest” section of the “Research Roundup” of the Center for the Future of Museums of the American Association of Museums.

Why they listed it I do not have a clue. Why they would consider a website about online universities credible regarding museums I do not know.

I expected better from the Center.