“EVERYONE IN GRAND CENTRAL AGOG AND SMILING. ALL JUST FEELING GOOD.”

That’s what Edward Steichen telegraphed Kodak upon viewing a Colorama in 1950, and that’s how many of those giant color panoramic images in Grand Central Terminal were indeed greeted by New Yorkers for 40 years. Coloramas ended in 1990, and while the restored Grand Central is beautiful on its own, they’re missed.

Now comes news that you can see them again, and that they have a new home: no surprise, it’s the George Eastman House in Kodak’s (and my) hometown, Rochester. Kodak has donated its entire trove of 565 that were put on display to the Eastman House. Kodak has also surrendered several thousand other items, such as images intended as Coloramas, but never displayed featured, and research documents, negatives, guide prints, proof prints, model releases, and digital files.  

For those who don’t remember the images, here’s a description from the press release: 

Coloramas were promoted by Kodak as ‘the world’s largest photographs’ and called “technically remarkable” by Ansel Adams, who photographed several. The towering backlit transparencies were 18-feet high and 60-feet wide, each illuminated by more than a mile of tubing.

…Making the exposures for each display was a full day’s work in almost total darkness. In early years the wet 20-foot transparencies were dried overnight in the swimming pool at Kodak’s employee recreation center — the only building large enough to accommodate Coloramas-in-the-making.

The Eastman House has organized a show, opening June 19, which will travel internationally, of 36 of the images — though not even one fits in the museum. It’ll focus on the ’60s, showcasing cowboys in the Grand Tetons, waterskiers in Florida, children breaking wishbones on Thanksgiving, tourists at the Taj Mahal, snowmobilers in New Hampshire — Norman Rockwell images, which is what some were. Other simply broadcast beauty.

It’s been 20 years since the Coloramas were last seen, and it’s great to learn that they’re back. 

You can read more details here. It should make us “agog” again and smiling. 

Photo Credit: Jim Pond. FAMILY IN CONVERTIBLE SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS, June 3-24, 1968. © Kodak  

The death of Getty Trust President James N. Wood on Friday came as a shock to everyone, and I agree with what Mark S. Siegel, the Trust’s newly installed chairman, told the Los Angeles Times: “What we need to do next takes a back seat today to respect for Jim and reaching out to his family.” I’d interviewed Wood many times, when he was at the Art Institute of Chicago, when he was retired, and after he took the Getty job, and I offer my condolences to his family as well. R.I.P.

But I’m writing today to reverse in part what I have written about the Getty. As I’ve said before, in The Wall Street Journal, the Getty Trust has been an underperformer from the outset. Perhaps the expectations were too high, but it has always disappointed. As I’ve also written here, the current structure — a presiding CEO, with the heads of the Museum, Conservation Institutute, Research Institute and Foundation reporting to him (it has always been a him) — could in theory work well, but it never has.

Yes, Wood had made some progress toward achieving collaboration among the four, with the exception of Michael Brand, who resigned from the museum director’s job in a huff last January. His job remains unfilled. But the Getty still has a long way to go to work to its ability.

So, it’s time. With a new chairman, and two executive vacancies, the Trust has an opportunity to restructure and try something that would achieve greatness. I’m joining the chorus.

The board should re-do its directions to the search committee/search firm hired to find Brand’s successor. They should search for a knock-out museum director — not someone who needs to learn on the job — to run the whole shebang. Not some young gun with potential, not someone nearing retirement (or already retired) either. They need a seasoned, respected director who is running a large museum, someone comfortable with delegating authority but taking responsibility for the whole.

There aren’t that many such people out there, and some are new-ish in their current jobs.

But this is a moment to start fresh that the Getty board should not pass up. It’s unlikely to come around again.  

 

How is it that a museum that was thinking of building galleries, at a cost of $15 million, just three years ago, now can’t pay its employees and has closed?

That’s what has happened in Fayetteville, N.C., which has a population of more than 200,000. The Fayetteville Museum of Art closed at the end last month, with more than $500,000 worth of debt and no cash for the payroll.

“We’re dead,” Tom Grubb, the museum’s executive director since 1990, told the Fayetteville Observer.

It’s a far cry from 2007, when, according to the Observer:

Museum officials unveiled an ambitious plan to raise $15 million to build a nine-story white tower at Festival Park and establish an endowment to help operate it. It had long been their desire to relocate to the city center – to a more visible location in a bigger building.   

The museum was apparently counting on public money as an anchor, but it never materialized, and the project went poof! Then it lost operating support, with local government cuts. And then there were accounting questions, and then… it was all over.  

In an update on the situation last week, the Observer said trustees were seeking help:

Board President Meredith Stiehl said the board agreed to use an advisory panel of “proven community leaders” to recommend ways to fulfill the museum’s mission of collecting, preserving and displaying art and promoting art education.

In contrast to the loony editorial published by the Boston Globe about the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, the Observer editorial board has got it right. Editors there wrote, in part:

While the museum is reorganizing, it’s up to the Arts Council to help fill the void and bring good art shows to town. If the museum fails in its reinvention, the entrepreneurial job of creating a new museum will become the council’s responsibility.

We hope everyone in the local arts community will unite to support the visual arts and a first-class museum for them. There is no good time for a city to lose a key part of its cultural foundation, but this is one of the worst, as city, county and other groups try to recruit new businesses and residents coming to this region with BRAC expansions at Fort Bragg.

The museum’s closure should be a short story, not another chapter in a long, bitter novel.

Let’s hope.

When I last posted about the wonderful Mourners exhibition, it was starting its seven-city tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,* and I raved not only about the exhibition but also about the website. The figures will soon be on view at the St. Louis Art Museum (see entire exhibition schedule here), more about which soon.

This is about the web. I was so entranced by The Mourners site, which offers visitors a chance to rotate “digital high-resolution, multi-perspective, and stereo 3D photography of these masterpieces,” that I contacted the webside designer/art director, Rory Matthews, who is based in Britain. I was not surprised to learn that I had seen — and been impressed with — his work before: It was an interactive site for the Cleveland Museum of Art called “Museum Attic,” in conjunction with an arts-and-crafts movement exhibition in 2005. It’s no longer available, but I remembered it being fun to explore. So you may want to check out the other projects listed on Rory’s site; he even has the Queen’s royal warrant, btw. 

Rory agreed to do a Five Questions with me.

Here goes:

1) What is the biggest, or most common, mistake museums have made in their overall web presence?

Most museums are highly sophisticated in their awareness of how to use the web these days, so the big problems of the past, such as using the site to reflect internal hierarchies rather than taking a visitor point of view, have largely disappeared. In this more mature era the biggest problem I see is almost a product of the richness of the content available online. Often there is so much content in a museum site that it is simply overwhelming and hard to navigate, especially to a first time visitor. Bearing in mind that many visitors do not come in through the “front door” of the home page, but rather via search engine results, establishing a clear sense of where you are throughout the site is essential.

2) Not counting your own projects, what are your favorite museum websites and why?

I admire the Smithsonian (http://www.si.edu/) for its scope and richness, and the level of attention and thought that they put into their web presence. I also admire the work of SFMOMA (http://www.sfmoma.org/), where consistently over many years they have pushed new technologies to help their visitors understand and interpret modern art.

3) What do you think of the new “augmented reality” site at the Getty, and what’s the outlook for things like that in the future?

This “Augmented Reality” feature from the Getty invites the viewer to print off a simple “target” and then to offer it up to their webcam after loading one of two web pages. The program then locks on to the target and presents a realistically rendered and image-mapped 3D model of the Augsburg Display Cabinet – a “Cabinet of Curiosities” from 17th Century Germany [picture below]. (I am very familiar with this object having made a very modest interactive presentation of it some years ago!)

By manipulating the paper target (rotating and tilting it) the viewer can rotate and tilt the object model. A certain amount of zooming can also be achieved by moving the target nearer to or father from the webcam.

I found this to be an interesting and successful experiment on the following levels.  

[Read more…] about Five Questions For Designer Of The Fabulous Mourners Website

What, you don’t read Reality TV World? That’s what I’m here for.

Not usually, of course, but when I learned that it published a long article on Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, which is of course the show produced by Sarah Jessica Parker debuting tomorrow night, I succumbed. The show features 14 “aspiring artists as they compete in art-themed challenges from a range of disciplines — including sculpture, painting, photography and industrial design.”

I haven’t seen the show, or a preview, but I think some of the hand-wringing commentary in the art world about it is rather silly. If it introduces some people to how artists work, great. If it’s a total bore or a silly mess, who cares? It can’t damage the art world, imho. Many people who’ll be watching already think their children can make better art than much that’s on display anyway, so what’s the loss?

Were Parker not the executive producer, the show would not be getting air time at all, even on Bravo, the erstwhile arts network.  

Funny thing about it, people already interested in visual art may tune in, only to be disillusioned. Or bored. Yet it’s not made for us — as Parker knows. As the article puts it, quoting judge and host China Chow:

We’re trying to reach a mainstream audience with this…I feel like it’s a gift more to mainstream America to be able to witness art — artists making their work and having a dialogue about it.

Pretentious? No more than one hears every day in galleries.

Aside from Chow, the article quotes only New York Gallery owner Bill Powers and Simon de Pury, “auctioneer” — ID theirs, not mine. We do not hear from Jerry Saltz, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Andres Serrano or Jon Kessler.

Nor do we hear from the Brooklyn Museum, which has agreed to give the winner an exhibition. (The jury is still out on its participation, but we’ll decide after we see the show and learn more.)  

But there’s much more to tell, so here’s the link. Some artist’s life is about to change.

And if you’d like to know what some members of the public think of the art work, try this, from Salon, of all places — that educated, liberal bastion, which says in part:

“My approach to art is purely phys-ee-cal,” offers de Pury. “I normally know in the first split second if it’s a great work or not.” Oh sweet Jesus. Have you ever heard anything so deliciously pompous in your entire life? This guy is my new TV hero. But what is he doing on TV?

I rather like what guest judge Richard Phillips, “a realistic painter,” reportedly said in Reality TV World:

You know, reality television is here to stay whether you like it or not. And so rather than just condemn the whole genre while not trying to find a new level, a new way to maybe elevate or differentiate the genre.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Bravo