What do you see when you look at the logo here on the right?

Some people might see the equivalent of money — that is, the sign of a non-profit funding group. Burlington Magazine saw “a lowered neckline that appears to announce a mail-order firm for adult lingerie.” And a year ago, the Fitzwilliam Museum of Cambridge University was so turned off by it that the powers-that-be there decided against applying for Â£80,000 in funding to acquire “The Dead Christ” by Marcantonio Bassetti because the logo would have had to be placed beside the work. Director Timothy Potts told The Art Newspaper at the time that it would be “an unacceptable distraction” and “the currency of marketing.”

But the May issue of The Art Newspaper has a short item revealing that the director of The Art Fund, Stephen Deuchar, has bowed to the criticism, chucked the teddy and introduced a new logo, also at right. The lingerie is gone, but the hot-pink heart remains.

Potts would undoubtedly still object, but plenty of other museums are willing to go along with the Fund, which was started in 1903 and which annually awards about £4 million in grants to British museums and galleries.

The other day, The Art Fund announced the four finalists for its annual £100,000 prize, which will be announced on June 30. The finalists are the Blists Hill Victorian Town, the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, the Ulster Museum and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. 

This year, this Fund is allowing people to vote for their favorite, saying that the judges will take the tallies and the comments into account. No other promises, which is good.

Will the judges take the opportunity to give the money to Oxford in a “take that, Cambridge” stance? We’ll see.    

 

The press release’s headline read “The Most Enigmatic and Mysterious Artist of the Renaissance,” and I was intrigued. The question (“who’s that?”) had never occurred to me. But I do like art-history mysteries (more are here, here, here, here and here), so I read on.

The artist turned out to be Giorgione (b. circa 1477-78), and he’s a bit of a mystery because — the exhibition description says — “the documents that outline his biography can be counted on one hand and are all limited to the final stage of his life, which the plague brought to a premature end in 1510. Giorgione isn’t even mentioned by name in the 16th century, but is always referred to via his place of origin as the painter ‘from Castelfranco’ or – as in a 1528 inventory – as ‘Zorzon,’ a nickname that according to Vasari derives ‘from the build of the man and his greatness of soul’.”

There is, apparently, no definitive catalogue of his work, either, and art historians disagree significantly about the interpretation and importance of his works.   

Hence the exhibition, in Giorgione’s hometown of Castelfranco, Veneto, on the fifth centenary of his death in his house museum, Museo Casa Giorgione, which opened last year.

Unfortunately, the press release was also a mystery, because the exhibition — which drew loans from the Hermitage, the Uffizzi, the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, the National Gallery in Edinburgh, Louvre, and other top museums — ended this month.

I plowed ahead anyway, because Museo Casa Giorgione created an exhibition website that gives many of the details and provides a photo gallery, with a zoom-in feature. Try it; you’ll like it.

His “Three Ages of Man” is above, from the Palazzo Pitti (but it may not be that at all, according to some experts).

Something else on the website caught my eye: “Adopt a Giorgione Project.” When I clicked, I discovered that the museum had raised money from companies by allowing them to link their names to a specific painting. They are listed on the website and — I’d guess — on the wall labels.

That took me back: In 1999, I wrote a Page One article for The New York Times about a similar “adopt-a-masterpiece” program at the Brooklyn Museum. I recently asked director Arnold Lehman if it was still going — and the answer was yes.

  

 

The Tate Modern is having its 10th anniversary this week. Starting Friday, it’s hosting a three-day arts festival, and it’ll stay open until midnight on Friday and Saturday.

Unquestionably, the Tate Modern is a success. It draws 5 million visitors a year, and more important it has affected culture in the U.K.

Before the Tate Modern opened, London had no great museum of modern art. Britain lagged behind other European countries, not to mention the U.S. As AFP reported, Michael Craig Martin, a former Tate trustee and a conceptual artist, said that people liked it immediately, and surprisingly.

“It’s hard not to remember just how much suspicion and unease there was about contemporary art before, whereas now it’s everywhere — it has become a part of the cultural life of the country in a way that was unimaginable 20 years ago, and the Tate has played a very big part in that,” he told the Daily Telegraph.

“I don’t think anybody imagined it would be as successful as it was. But from the minute the doors opened, people liked the place. It feels welcoming.”

In fact, today there was a children’s procession from Borough Market to the museum, led by a samba band (above) and concluding with a cake-cutting ceremony where Nicholas Serota, the director, cut the cake. Sounds like great fun (except perhaps that the parents of some children might not want their kids to see some of the art at the Tate Modern, but that’s another story).

To my mind, the Tate Modern should be a bigger museum role model than the Guggenheim Bilbao, which has succeeded for complex reasons — not just because it’s a museum-building-as-destination. (For example, the new Pompidou Metz.)

Now, though, the Tate is planning a £215 million expansion that’s expected to open in 2012.  

Several days ago, the Guardian previewed the 10th anniversary with a good story and a Q&A session with Serota, with questions asked both by art-world professionals and the public. Here is how he answered the expansion question:

Anyone who visits at weekends knows how overcrowded the gallery is. Anyone who tries to subscribe to our learning programmes knows they are wildly oversubscribed. So we have to grow. Every museum of modern art has grown in the last 20 or 30 years…. We have an expanding collection and need to have space to show that collection. If we don’t grow, people will stop giving us things?

Fair enough. Regular readers know I am wary of overexpanion — but the U.K. is a different place than the U.S., and Serota can count on more public support, presumably. Plus, London is Europe’s largest population center and draws millions of tourists.

Serota is a well-respected museum leader, deservedly (based on second-hand information). I found only two answers he gave troubling. In one, he answered the inevitable “where are the women artists?” by citing an acquisition made two years ago: “Marisa Merz…It is as good as anything made by her husband, Mario, or other arte povera artists.”

And answering another, from a realist artist who accused him of being “as orthodox, dogmatic, conventional and blinkered as the academies of a hundred years ago,” Serota replied that the Tate wasn’t governed by a single view, but by curators, too. Then he said:

If you come to the Tate with an open mind, you are bound (with the exception of this questioner) to find something interesting and engaging.

But we all make mistakes.

Last month, the Kresge Foundation in Troy, MI, announced a new national strategy for its arts and culture programs: fostering the long-term health of cultural institutions.

It sounds so simple, so non-controversial. What’s the big deal?

The $3.1 billion Kresge is a titan: In 2009, it awarded some $197 million to 404 non-profits. Among the arts beneficiaries: The Public Theater of New York, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Plains Art Museum and the Kansas City Ballet. (Kresge’s LEED-certified HQ is at right.)

But, for too long, the focus throughout the cultural world has been on increasing everything: new buildings, expanded buildings, new programs, etc. etc. Now, as I’ve written before, we probably have too much capacity — maybe not overall, but in various locations. It’s unsustainable, as various closures have proven.

As Kresge said, in an article in Philanthropy News Digest:

“Kresge was a critical player in the twenty-year cultural facility building boom that swept the arts sector,” said Kresge arts and culture program director Alice L. Carle. “But numerous signs suggest that the building boom is over, halted by a combination of the economic recession and the staggering challenges of running capital campaigns and then covering steadily rising fixed costs. Our new grantmaking strategy is designed to assist organizations in successfully making this transition and positioning themselves for long-term sustainability.”

Kresge’s Arts and Culture program now has new standards, a new policy, communicated in this equation:

Well-capitalized cultural institutions + Well-resourced artists + Well-integrated arts and community building = Strong, vibrant cities, towns and communities.

Indeed, it says on its website: “The Arts and Culture Program will no longer consider traditional facilities-capital challenge grant applications. All requests for facilities funding must be made through Institutional Capitalization as outlined above.”

I’m coming to the “outlined above,” but first I have to say hooray.

Back to Institutional Capitalization:

[Read more…] about Financial Sustainability: Kresge’s New Funding Policy Leads The Way

When Don Thompson, a marketing and economics professor in the MBA program at York University, Toronto, published his view on the art market, The $12 million Stuffed Shark, in 2008, it garnered a couple good reviews, but was ignored by some art publications and mainstream media. He sketched much of his analysis in terms of brands — branded artists, branded dealers, branded museums, branded auction houses, etc. Some of it seemed right to me, some seemed off-the mark. Last month, the paperback version was published.

So on the eve of the bellwether spring contemporary art sales, I went back to Thompson for Five Questions. Curiously, Thompson doesn’t list the book on his C.V.

As for his answers – well, they weren’t entirely satisfying, either. See what you think:

1) What have you learned about the art world in the three years since the book was first published? What did you get wrong?

The market crash came faster and more dramatically than anyone foresaw, triggered by the 2008 financial market meltdown. I thought there would be a period of flat price levels for contemporary art, followed by a gradual decline. I also thought the prices of museum quality art would hold up, because so many new museums around the world were bidding. Turned out that selling prices for museum quality art fell 20-30%, against 40 – 50% for most of the contemporary art market.

 

2) If I knew nothing about art and read your book, I’d come away thinking that it’s all a hoax — is that what you intended?

It is not a hoax, there are properly described art works, and willing sellers and buyers. It is just that values are based on intangibles, not always the intrinsic quality of the work.

 

3) Do you think the markets/the economics, of other categories of art — Old Masters, Impressionism, national art, etc. — are more legitimate, and why is that so or not so?

The economics of earlier schools of art often differ from contemporary in two ways. The standard test of “it takes two generations to determine the lasting value of art” has been met, and there is the factor of scarcity, following the death of the artist.

 

 

4) Tell us a little about the reaction you received from readers — and was it different in Europe vs. the U.S.?

Reader reaction to the book has been good both in Europe and North America. A number of artists have said how discouraging it is – to them – that the best known, best compensated artists include many, like Damien Hirst, whose work is produced by technicians.

 

5 If the contemporary art market is as crazy as you describe it — based on so many “intangibles” — do you see any ways to make it more rational, more related to the intrinsic value of the art?

The market is not crazy, and buyers are not irrational. Buyers are simply responding to a different set of motivations than you and I might – plus they have a great deal more money. Last [week] (May 4th), a 1932 Picasso brought a record US$106.4 million at Christie’s in New York. Is a Picasso worth the price of a Boeing 737? To that particular buyer, it was – partly the brand of the artist, partly the “wall cred” of how recognizable it is, partly scarcity, partly size, plus who knows what else. Is that price outrageous? There were three bidders still in at $90 million, and an underbidder who dropped out one bid lower.

 

Put differently, assume the price was four months income for the buyer. Lots of people pay four months income for a painting they love and want to live with. Those people just earn less than the buyer of the Picasso.