Frank Gehry doesn’t believe in green buildings and he, designer of the signature Guggenheim Bilbao, doesn’t think much of the architect who is probably in most demand by museums — Renzo Piano. (I confess Piano’s popularity is puzzling to me, too; a matter of taste, I’d venture.)

Then there’s a little matter of a museum cartel whose existence Gehry implied.

I’m picking this up from an article in Bloomberg Business Week, which reported on a Q&A session between Gehry and Thomas Pritzker, chairman of the Pritzker Foundation, at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago on Apr. 6. Quoting BW:

What would you think, Pritzker asked him as they sat in hard-backed chairs on an auditorium stage, if a client said he wanted a LEED-certified building? “Oh, great,” Gehry answered in a high, mock-excited voice, as the audience laughed. Then, back in his regular voice, he dismissed environmental concerns as largely political concerns. “A lot of LEEDs are given for bogus stuff. A lot of the things they do really don’t save energy.”

He also said the expense of building to LEED standards often outweighs the benefits. On smaller projects, he said, “the costs of incorporating those kind of things don’t pay back in your lifetime.”

It is true, I have been told, that various LEED points are, well, debatable at best. But to seemingly suggest that it’s all nonsense suggest that Gehry has no interest in the goal.

But on to sexier things, Gehry’s comments on the architect of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing:

“He’s gotten better,” he faint-praised Piano, again to laughter. “You know the sibling rivalry between architects. We love each other, but we’re insanely competitive. Even at 81, I still do it. I can’t help myself.”

He suggested that [for the AIC’s new wing] something bold, like his Bilbao museum, would have been a better [sic — the dropped word was probably “choice”]. But he said right after that building opened, the world’s top museum directors got together in London and, according to a friend who was there, voted never to commission another like it. “I think museum curators and directors like the predictable, so it’s all easy,” Gehry said. “A little bit of laziness, maybe.”

Well, well, well. I guess Gehry doesn’t count his pal Tom Krens, former director of the Guggenheim, as having been a top museum director. Krens, of course, commissioned a museum for Lower Manhattan, pre-9/11, that was very much like Bilbao (above).

Also, that sentiment certainly doesn’t square with several museums built since Bilbao that are designed specifically to be spectacular, to be tourist attractions themselves (Denver Art Museum, Art Gallery of Alberta, Centre Pompidou-Metz, etc. etc.).

Sometimes starchitects live in their own reality.

 

Regular readers of Real Clear Arts know that I am a fan of history and archives and libraries, so I am always happy to share some news about them. Here’s one item:

The George Eastman House has just acquired the entire collection of Merchant Ivory Productions — some 2,600 elements from more than 40 films, including the Oscar-winning A Room With a View (1986) and Howards End (1992), plus great films like The Remains of the Day (1993), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), and The Bostonians (1984), which garnered Oscar nominations (and should have won). 

The Eastman House called it “one of the most important acquisitions in its 61-year history,” and said it was honoring James Ivory with the title Honorary Eastman Scholar at a benefit in May. The press release describes this as a gift from Ivory, and quotes him saying:

Ismail Merchant’s worry for years was that all those films of ours, made in so many places, stored in so many labs around the world, would never be brought safely home and might be lost. Now the George Eastman House motion picture archive is that home, safeguarding the continuing life of Merchant Ivory’s work for the next generations.

Ivory’s film, City of Your Final Destination, starring Anthony Hopkins and Laura Linney, opened this week. That’s Ivory with Linney on the set, above.

The gift includes the pair’s correspondence and shared records of Merchant-Ivory Productions and film labs and film archives all over the world.

Read more in the press release here. Scholars, start your engines.

Did you know, btw, that Hopkins is a sometime painter? He has been at it since 2002, and in February, Hopkins showed some of his work at Gallery 27 on Cork Street in London, and then at The Dome, in Edinburgh, in March. “When I paint, I just paint freely without anxiety regarding outside opinions as criticisms,” Hopkins said at the time. “I do it for sheer pleasure. It’s done wonders for my for my subconscious…I dream now in colours.”

The Guardian printed several and said they ranged “from calm pastoral scenes to nightmarish figurations.” Here’s one, above, plus a link to the story with a slide show.  

Photo Credit: Photograph by Juan Quirno. Copyright 2009 Merchant Ivory Productions (top); Anthony Hopkins/The Guardian (bottom)

I’ve strayed again into opera: Today’s Wall Street Journal has my Cultural Conversation with Renee Fleming: Aria on the Future. In it, she discusses where she is in her career — thinking strategically about her remaining years as a singer — and whether operas should be reinterpreted. Plus, she talks about traditional opera’s appeal to youth, her venture into indie-rock, and how HD simulcasts are changing opera. We talked about “Armida,” in which she’s currently starring. (Overall, I liked the production below, which I saw Monday, though it’s not perfect, and I do agree with critics who said her voice did not fill the house.) 

It was a sweeping interview.

Even so, some things were still in my notebook, and I pulled them out for this post.

Fleming called herself “a big art lover” and said she frequents museums, especially for 20th Century Art. She claims Chuck Close and Elsworth Kelly among her friends. She’s fascinated by artistic collaborations among people in different disciplines, citing John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham as one example.

More important, Fleming voiced her regrets that popular culture and mainstream media have squeezed out the arts, and misses the days when Johnny Carson not only put Beverly Sills on the Tonight Show, which was then far more powerful than it is today, but had her as guest-host. “I’d love to have a chance at that,” she said, adding that hosting for the Met’s simulcasts is “so much fun.”

Fleming asserted that she was not an elitist, but she noted that knowledge of the classics — not just opera and classical music, but Shakespeare, literature, poetry, and visual arts — is no longer valued as it once was. 

“It was not that long ago when to be upwardly mobile meant playing the piano, reading and other things like that,” she said. “And then it became about having material possessions, as opposed to having an education.”

How do we get it back?

It has to start with education, she said: “Children are completely open-minded.”

UPDATE: Opera Chic has linked to my WSJ piece, and commenters are commenting — you might to have a look (here).

Photo Credit: Armida promotional photo (top); Act III (bottom), Courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera

 

I was wrong. I said the other day that Rocco Landesman’s testimony before Congress about the NEA budget on Tuesday would be “interesting.” That was my hope.

Instead, it was a total bore. Landesman not only said nothing, but what he did — closing most of the “American Masterpieces” program to find money for his “Our Town” initiative — will amount to nothing, too.

I can not attest to the efficacy of American Masterpieces, but at least its idea — bringing performances, visual art exhibitions, erc. to communities around the country — was a good one, especially for small communities that lack access to great art. “Our Town,” which is supposed to create local arts districts, isn’t. Or doesn’t seem to be — Landesman is supposed to provide details soon. It strikes me, so far, as too commercial. Although I agree that arts provide real jobs and create economic activity, I don’t think that’s what the NEA should be spending its small budget on.

Which is why I’m writing this morning — I had no intention to blog again until this afternoon/evening. But an email from NEA just arrived that seems like more movement in the wrong direction. To wit:

The National Endowment for the Arts announced today that Jason Schupbach will join the NEA as Director of Design at the end of May….

…Since 2008, Mr. Schupbach has held the first-in-the-nation position of Creative Economy Industry Director for the Massachusetts Office of Business Development where his accomplishments include coordinating the growth of new industry cluster groups, such as the Design Industry Group of Massachusetts (DIGMA), and launching a Design Excellence initiative, an effort to improve procurement processes in Massachusetts in order to build more sustainable and longer-lasting buildings and communities, and increase the number of designers being offered contracts….

Etc. That’s not the kind of art that needs bolstering. (Read the whole press release here.)

I’ve got nothing against Schupbach. But I don’t like the commercial drift, which is the direction the NEA is going.

 

 

I wandered over to Sotheby’s over the weekend, and came out aghast. I had overlooked or forgotten the news, in January, about the dimensions of tomorrow’s sale of historical documents from the James S. Copley Library. It is a tragedy. This immense library collection, of about 2,000 items, is being sold by the Copley Press newspaper chain. Heaven knows, newspapers need the money nowadays, and I don’t begrudge a company a sale of assets it was always the unlikely owner of, but…

These documents — which include letters and manuscripts signed by Washington, Lincoln (see his letter to George McClellan, below), et. al. — are likely to go to many private collectors. They include a broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence ($600,000 to $800,000) from that July of 1776 and a 1776 Congressional document signed by Button Gwinnett (a signer, picture at left, who died in a duel within a year, leaving few autographs) valued at $500,000 to $700,000.  

Who knows when they will be seen again?

And they’re unlikely ever to be seen together, as they were in the Copley Library in La Jolla, which apparently has been suffering from neglect.

One measure of the richness of this collection, whose manuscripts cover literary, artistic and scientific achievements as well as historical ones: It will take Sotheby’s eight sales to disperse it: four big sales and four single-lot sales. Sotheby’s created a sales video about the collection (here) that tells more.

Copley, the adopted son of the utility magnate Colonel Ira C. Copley and his wife, collected for less than 10 years before he died, and his interest was sparked by, of all things, service as chairman of the U.S. Bicentennial Commission.

“This library is a love lettter to America,” said David Redden, vice chairman of Sotheby’s, on that video. Later, he added, “He was absolutely inspired by the story of America.” Redden said it’s unlikely that a collection of this size and quality could ever be assembled again.

So where is someone who will step forward with the $15 million total estimate, and buy it for a public institution? Hundreds of paintings have sold more more.

I’m not sure whether I hope that places like the NYPL and the Ransom Center at UTexas have been out there beating the bushes for a willing billionaire to buy it for them or not. Failure, at such a low price, considering the value, is incomprehensible.

If it doesn’t happen tomorrow, there are more chances with the rest of the sales. Here’s the press release.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Sotheby’s (bottom)