Now that all the euphoria has died down about the Whitney Museum’s announcement in May to break ground in downtown Manhattan, it’s time to take a look at a few issues the move raises.

For a start, in the press coverage, little if any attention was paid to the Whitney’s declining attendance. Yet its drop is far worse than other museums. As I write for the June issue of The Art Newspaper, 

The board’s excitement about the move has as much to do with the building’s location at the south end of the elevated High Line park created on a disused railway line [as it does with the new space]. The site is seen as the answer to the Whitney’s attendance problem. Last year the museum drew a meagre 322,000 visitors–a sharp decline from past years. In the late 1990s the museum regularly attracted 650,000 to 670,000 visitors.

[But] New York’s meatpacking district hums with activity morning, day and night, and the High Line, which opened in June 2009, attracted more than two million visitors in its first year. “Many of these people will wander into the Whitney, and be smitten with art,” hopes a board member.”The core of people that go to the Whitney will grow exponentially.”

UPDATED: I should have added here that neither the Metropolitan Museum, nor the Museum of Modern Art, have trouble attracting audiences uptown. MoMA’s in particular is the younger audience the Whitney seems to crave.

So why should the Whitney have problems? Something has obviously gone wrong with its programming. Museums like the Whitney should, if they’re programming well, offer a mix of programming. I suspect that’s part of the Whitney’s problem. It may also be marketing, or lack thereof. 

But a move downtown may not solve this problem. The Guggenheim’s Soho outpost, after all, failed.

NOW BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POST:

Whitney staff is also working now with architect Renzo Piano, brainstorming how all the new space, including outdoor terraces, might go beyond the “white box” look.

And the Whitney board is considering nighttime hours, according to Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, a longtime trustee. That’s something I’ve argued for here. The Whitney currently closes at 6pm, and 9pm on Fridays, and I hope the trustees will blaze a trail here for other museums — staying open until 8 or 9 most nights, even if it means opening at noon.

The Whitney is mum on what it will do — long-term — with the uptown Breuer building (it can’t afford two buildings, most outsiders say), probably because it doesn’t know. The posssible leasing deal with the Metropolitan Museum is short-term.

At my suggestion, The Art Newspaper asked a couple of people for their thoughts on the long-term. My own feelings align most closely with those of David Ross, a former director, who said, in part:

…an idea that has for quite some time has intrigued me, would be that the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum (and possibly even MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem) would collaborate on a space devoted to an expansive presentation of early though mid-century 20th-century American Art. The building is perfectly suited to the exhibition of American Modernism, and frankly, neither the Met nor MoMA devote enough major space or sufficient resources to this period, and the Studio Museum is years away from being able to provide space appropriate to its important mission.

I hadn’t thought about the need for collaboration, but I love the idea of a museum of American Modernism.

(That’s Breuer in his Whitney in the photo, btw.)

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Art Newspaper 

You know the work — Charles Demuth’s The Figure 5 in Gold — and probably appreciate it viscerally. Even children do, as I write in today’s Wall Street Journal, where I’ve written an anatomy of the painting for the Saturday Masterpiece column.

But there’s so much more to the painting. To wit:

“…It’s the best work in a genre Demuth created, the “poster portrait.” It’s a witty homage to his close friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, and a transliteration into paint of his poem, “The Great Figure.” It’s a decidedly American work made at a time when U.S. artists were just moving beyond European influences. It’s a reference to the intertwined relationships among the arts in the 1920s, a moment of cross-pollination that led to American Modernism. And it anticipates Pop art.”

Read the rest here. And read more about the Masterpiece column here.

Photo Credit: Courtesty Metropolitan Museum of Art

Is it possible that some cities simply don’t deserve art? I hate to say that, but Las Vegas is making a great case for it. As I’ve written before, the city in the desert, with a metro population of about 1.8 million people, has watched its art museum close even as it supports a museum about the mob, with another one on the same subject going up nearby.

Today’s Wall Street Journal recaps more gory details: plans for a contemporary art museum were scrapped, a sculpture park on which the city spent $700,000 “sits empty,” awaiting private funds, and now two arts partrons — Dave Hickey and Libby Lumpkin, who “propelled the city’s artistic ambitions” — are moving out. Both academics, they’re joining the faculty of the University of New Mexico, because they could not find work in Las Vegas (particularly, a full-time post for Lumpkin at UNLV, which has a bad history in the arts).

“They brought a lot of attention to the city,” said Elizabeth Herridge, who directed the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian casino in Las Vegas before that gallery closed in 2008. “This is such a visual city. It’s really kind of odd that we can’t have something that is a bricks-and-mortar expression of that interest.”

Odd indeed.

Hickey and Lumpkin were controversial — he once argued that the city’s rhinestone and neon culture have the “same excitement as highbrow fare,” for example. (And didn’t he also praise Thomas Kincaid?) But they were also movers. Aside from curating the collections of Steve Wynn, she directed the Las Vegas Art Museum, beginning in 2005, and took it “from a museum with a $300,000 budget, two paid staffers and a part-time curator into a $2.7 million organization with 13 employees.”

Their influence would be hard, maybe impossible, to replicate. As the article (here) says:

Soon after they arrived in 1990, the art on view in Las Vegas took a giant leap forward. When Mr. Wynn opened his Bellagio in 1998, he put his personal collection–with works by Van Gogh, Cezanne and Renoir–on display, part of a strategy to lure a high-end clientele.

The Venetian casino followed a year later with two Rem Koolhaas-designed art galleries run by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. One was also a partnership with Russia’s State Hermitage Museum.

But the experiment of putting art galleries in casinos was, for the most part, short-lived. Both Guggenheims closed. Mr. Wynn put an art gallery in his Wynn Las Vegas resort, which opened in 2005, but soon replaced it with a Rolex watch shop.

“It just didn’t seem to be that important,” Mr. Wynn said in a recent interview. A Rembrandt is hanging in his office.

An arts scene built on so slim a reed isn’t really sustainable. Las Vegas continues to show it deserves its reputation as a cultural wasteland.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Las Vegas Weekly

This spring, the National Endowment for the Humanities gave gave Peter Meineck, the NYU classics professor shown at left, a grant of $800,000 — one of its largest-ever in any category and the largest-ever in theater. It follows an earlier grant of nearly $300,000.

Why?

What does he have that proved so convincing to the NEH (which I constantly hear is tough to get money from)?

As I write in today’s Wall Street Journal, in a Cultural Conversation with Meineck, he’s got a program called Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives — Poetry-Drama-Dialogue. It will take staged dramatic readings of works by the Athenian playwrights to 100 public libraries and art centers in 20 states. Actors like Olympia Dukakis and Gary Sinise — hopefully — will read from Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Ajax, and Euripides’ Trojan Women, among others; afterwards, classics scholars will lead “town-hall” discussions examining the connections between the classics and contemporary America. The program also includes scholarly lectures, reading groups, master drama classes and a resource-laden website. And it’s aimed especially at combat veterans, inner-city residents and rural communities — all underserved by the arts.

Meineck’s story is enlightening. For example, his trip to the Brooklyn Public Library, prompted by the NEH’s desire to involve libraries, showed him a way to attract new audiences to theater. 

There’s more in the full article. Meineck’s mission — to make the classics relevant — is compelling, and so is his own story — from expulsion at 15 from a tough South London boys’ school to an exuberant evangelist in many ways for the ancient Greeks.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Page and Stage

 

Go ahead and gush about the Getty Museum’s $45 million purchase of Turner’s Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino in London tonight. (You can read the Bloomberg story on that here.) I’ve got a simpler tale to tell about a library with a big painting and a big heart — one that decided to make a not-uncontroversial loan.

A few days ago, the Dover Free Public Library, in Morris County, took Emigrant Train Attacked by Indians, by Emanuel Leutze, down from its walls, packed it, and put it in a truck destined for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will be on loan there for five years. After that, no one is talking.

Why?  

Dover library director Robert Tambini told the Morris Country Daily Record that he was bothered that such an important painting, which hung in the library’s reading room, was unrecognized, unseen by enough people. It was lent to the library in 1934, and given to it in 1943 by a local family, the Derrys, in memory of Olivia Smith Derry.

Recently appraised for insurance, it was valued at $2.5 million, up from $300,000 in 1988, according to the DR. Here’s a link to the article. 

Some library members were unhappy, but not Tambini. At the Met, he said, “It will be something people will come to see. It will be the centerpiece in a new exhibit. That’s a big deal.” Besides, he is saving the steep cost of insurance, which in this economic environment, is nothing to sneeze at.

The Met, of course, owns Leutze’s most famous work, Washington Crossing the Delaware, which I wrote about here just last week.

The Dover Library owns about 55,000 books, plus other reading/listening/viewing materials. Dover’s population is less than 18,000.

I believe in collection-sharing, though I think there should be more of it from large museums to small ones.

A strawberry to the Dover Library.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Daily Record