Here’s a new twist on mixing art and politics: Philadelphia’s City Hall has an art gallery. Mayor Michael A. Nutter cut the ribbon on the new space last Wednesday night. 

“The Art Gallery at City Hall” was funded by the PNC Foundation’s Arts Alive program. It’s an 800 sq. ft. space, intended to showcase homegrown art, tighten the connection between art and the public, enliven City Hall, and increase the audience for art.

At the gallery’s opening last week, Mayor Nutter said:

Philadelphia is one of the foremost creative cities in the world. This new public gallery and central office for the creative economy demonstrate the importance of arts and culture to our city, to our residents and to this Administration.

according to a blog called Politic365.com.

The first exhibit, called On the Rise, opened last Wednesday and runs through Aug. 6. It features 12 Philadelphia artists, and “is a collaboration with Center for Emerging Visual Artists, InLiquid and Philadelphia Sculptors,” Politic365 says. They include Samantha Lynch, Benjamin Volta, and Leslie Atik. The local NBC station’s website has a gallery here.

Philadelphia’s City Hall has been showing artists’ work since in its hallways since 1984, in the building’s upper floor halls. The new space is on the first floor, and that will be much better for public access.

Nutter has spoken out in favor of the arts before, and he created the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy at City Hall, which manages the art gallery. Can we get other mayors to emulate him on this score?

Photo Credit: Courtesy Politic365 

The Art Newspaper, for which I wrote a recent article about the book Modern Women, part of the Women’s Project at the Museum of Modern Art, is continuing its coverage of women artists: In today’s special edition of the paper at Art Basel, it tracks the dearth of women artists at booths at the fair, which is generally considered the best contemporary fair in the world.

“The top 40 most represented artists on show at the fair are all men,” the story says. It’s topped, no surprise, by Andy Warhol, then Picasso, then Calder (?), and… see the chart here.

Here is one explanation:

Dealers say that the imbalance can be partly explained by prices. Male artists continue to fetch the biggest sums at galleries and at auction. “Is it true that a Brice Marden drawing is a zillion times more expensive than a comparable work by a woman artist? Yes,” said Barry Rosen, who advises the estates of Eva Hesse and Lee Lozano. …

The fact that male artists command bigger prices also precludes some collectors from considering works by female artists. “It’s not only because they are women,” said Monika Sprüth of Sprüth Magers, which is showing a number of female artists on their stand (B12). “There are certain kinds of speculators in the art world who pride themselves on price, and this tends to favour certain male artists.”

Catch-22.

The two women with the most work for sale at Art Basel are Louise Bourgeois (her work at Cheim and Read is above) and Joan Mitchell.

How are women artists going to enter collections if they’re not on view in the biggest single, one-stop-shopping arena for high-quality art?

Read the entire story here. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Cheim & Read, via The Art Newspaper

 

Summer is almost here, and it’s not supposed to be this busy. But it is. So I’m again playing catchup. Here are a few interesting developments:

Reuters reveals what’s happening with art commissions.

Which Modigliani just fetched a record $52.6 million?

Regarding antiquities, the Indianapolis Museum of Art says this is the wave of the future. 

The Baltimore Museum of Art gets out the paint in an attempt to become “a magnet.”

Which former opera director is opening a contemporary art gallery in Santa Fe?

The Prado (right) selects a partner museum in the U.S., and it’s not one you’d expect.

Back to my usual posts tomorrow.

 

Modotti, now playing in a limited run at the Acorn Theater on Theatre Row/West 42nd Street, tells the story of the Italian photographer/actress who became a revolutionary in Mexico and Edward Weston’s lover.

It’s not Red.

True, playwright Wendy Beckett doesn’t have the rich material about art that John Logan had with Mark Rothko for Red. (I was not one of the critics who found his talk about art unbearably pretentious; Red won the Tony award for best play on Sunday night.)

But Beckett had a far more action-packed life with Modotti; she had sex, violence, revolution, oppression, intrigue. Logan had Rothko’s intellectual fervor, true, but Beckett also had Modotti’s Italian origins and her love of life, politics, and adventure.

Somehow all that has worked to Modotti‘s disadvantage rather than its advantage.

Because Modotti is far from being a household name, the play begins, at a small party among friends, with a lot of exposition. Unfortunately, it seems both unnatural and too-drawn-out. There’s a lot of rhetoric, and there’s some interesting dialogue. But when Modotti explains to a potential collector how she works, it seems like an afterthought, unimportant to the play. When she says she wants to use photography in the service of the revolution (her Workers Parade, 1926, is above), it seems pie-in-the-sky and irrelevant: Modotti’s real actions as a member of the communist party in Mexico were far more critical in her life. Weston, bewitched by her, is nonetheless overwhelmed by her talk of politics, tired of it too, and so is the audience.

Disparaging “art as a political tool,” he’s more interested in photography as art — at one point as abstraction.

Surprisingly, to me, Weston comes off as not only weak but also unlikable. (I hope I forget that by the time I see another of his wonderful photographs.) Diego Rivera, meanwhile, comes off as shallow, a sell-out, and not a very engaging one at that.

So, as far as art goes, Modotti doesn’t cut it. As a drama, I wish Beckett had focused on one or two incidents in her life, rather than trying to write a bioplay. 

The New York Times has just published online, and will publish in tomorrow’s newspaper, a very important story on the Brooklyn Museum:* Populism Hasn’t Boosted Brooklyn Museum’s Attendance. In fact, 2009 attendance dropped 23% — while comparable museums suffered much, much smaller dips. Two trustees have quit, and I’d bet some people who used to visit the museum have been alienated.

This is a subject I have railed about for years. The answer to making museums interesting, engaging, worthy of visiting in a time-pressed era with so many other options to choose from does not, imho, reside in exhibits of popular culture, in dumbing content down, or in deploying any other gimmick. Nor dies it lie in party nights (here). Nor does it lie in “destination architecture.”

Yes, Tim Burton at the Museum of Modern Art* set records, but so (to cite a few random examples) has the current exhibition of Caravaggio at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. As the Associated Press just reported:

After days of seeing the public wait in blocks-long lines in sweltering heat to admire works by the Baroque painter, city officials decided to keep doors open nonstop from Saturday morning until the end of a four-month run Sunday at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT).

And so did Raphael’s La Velata at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. Last Thursday, friends who tried to see the current Picasso exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art* — this was a weekday — could not get in, because the line was too long. They went instead to, and were thrilled with seeing, American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, an exhibition drawn, sadly enough, from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, which was given to the Met for lack of exhibition space.

As I wrote last July, when I disclosed here that nearly 20% of the Brooklyn Museum visitors came on just 11 nights of the year, those sponsored by Target, part of the problem is museum hours. In many cities — not all — museums must change their culture and remain open at night, even if that means shortening hours on some days.

The full answer is more complicated, of course, but I am convinced that people — not all, but enough — will go to see real art, well-displayed, in engaging exhibits. Museums who go for the quick pop in attendance will lose people who really love art — not to mention supporters.

The NYT story is tough on Brooklyn; admittedly, Brooklyn has a difficult situation — sited near so many other high-quality museums in a very diverse borough. I think director Arnold Lehman’s heart is in the right place, and I have often given him wider latitude than others. 

But the Brooklyn experience should be a lesson for other museums. “Populism” isn’t the answer. What is requires more thought, and day-in, day-out blocking and tackling. I recall the phrase Woody Hayes used to describe his conservative, grind-it-out, very basic football strategy: “three yards and a cloud of dust.” Hayes’s career record: 238-72-10.  

Photo Credit: Courtesy Brooklyn Museum (top); The Hermitage (bottom)

*I consult to a foundation that supports these museums.