This year has brought the art-world version of “If a tree falls in a forest…” On January 2, a modern art museum, designed by Mario Botta, architect of SF MoMA, opened in Charlotte, NC, and I’ve seen little mention of it outside the local press in the U.S.

Strange. The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art does indeed exist. It owns a collection of 1,400 works by artists including Warhol, Giacometti, Degas, Picasso, Calder, Miro, de Stal, Tinguely, Hepworth, Ernst, Rouault, and more. They were acquired by a Swiss couple named Hans and Bessie Bechtler, who made their money with an air-filtration company and began collecting in the 1940s. Their son Andreas, born in Switzerland but a resident of Charlotte since 1979, inherited some of their holdings. He suggested a museum and contributed the art; many of these works have never been on public display. The inaugural exhibition includes 116 of them.

The Bechtlers seem to have befriended many artists, as they collected, according to the Charlotte Observer; it has created a fascinating slide show of both vintage and new images, called “Inside the Bechtler Museum.” Among other things, it says that “Hans Bechtler founded the Alberto Giacometti Foundation in Zurich” in the caption for a lovely photo of the two. The Observer also published short briefs on various family members.

The Charlotte Business Journal, meanwhile, tells the Bechtler story here, and an excellent article by something called Swisster is here.

The cost of the building — which has 17,000 sq ft of exhibition space within a 35,600 sq ft building — was $20 million, picked up by the public as part of “a public-private partnership” for cultural facilities on Charlotte’s South Tryon Street. The other institutions in the “Wells Fargo Cultural Campus” are the Mint Museum of Art/Uptown, the Knight Theater and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts & Culture. It was the Wachovia Cultural Campus, named for the local bank that was taken over by Well Fargo, a victim, or perpetrator, depending on your view, of the economic crisis. The bank has a tower in the complex.

Maybe the Bechtler hasn’t received notice because it is seen as a vanity museum — but then what about the other single-collector, named museums? Maybe the art — despite the stellar names — just isn’t that great. Maybe Charlotte seems too far away from art-world centers of gravity — which would be a shame. The city’s population is nearly 700,000, and in the metro area, it exceeds 2.5 million.

Or maybe, there just isn’t the space or the budgets to do the story. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

 

Last night, I attended an unusual event at XXXX. It was a “Smash Down,” and it featured two local, all-female roller derby crews competing against each other. The OC Roller Girls and the Long Beach Roller Derby took turns crashing into 8-foot clay walls on each end of the California Gallery, accumulating points and making impressions in the clay for YYYY.

A DJ spun tunes, and beer and popcorn were served. When the roller derby started, one competitor crashed into a bystander and a large amplifier the DJ had set up. I thought that was a sure sign that mayhem would ensue, but the girls toned it down a bit after that. I guess they were just testing the boundaries in the beginning.

Is this art? It depends on how you fill in the Xs and Ys, doesn’t it? If X = ESPN, say, and Y = a television spectacle, it wouldn’t be.

But if, as is the case, X = the Laguna Art Museum and Y = “Long Beach artist Jocelyn Foye,” then most people in the art world would say “yes,” because Foye says it is. Foye, according to the post by Richard Chang of the Orange County Register (from which I quoted above) “plans to pour liquid rubber into the clay impressions. When the rubber hardens, that will be her final product, which she calls ‘redefined action painting.’ “

Some of her work — though not this piece — will be on view in The OsCene 2010: Contemporary Art and Culture in OC, opening today and on view until May 16 at the museum.

I’ve never seen Foye’s work, and make no value judgments about it — some of it, posted on her website, looks interesting.

But I do question whether the smash down should have been staged in the museum’s galleries. As Chang reported, “As the evening wound down, the young women posed for pictures and there was clay all over the California Gallery’s walls and hard wood floor.” (Chang posted videos of the event, if you’d like a look.)

I want museums to broaden their audiences, yes, but how they do it — what message they send — is important. When they move the focus away from art and toward spectacle, it’s a stunt — and a mistake. They may get crowds interested in roller-derby, but how many will come back to see other art? Meantime, are they driving away their core audience, which probably doesn’t want to see galleries laden with clay? Or be hit by a careening roller-skater?

Is the museum undermining its case for support when it stages something that, seems to me, belongs more in a commercial gallery? I think so.

Photo credit: Courtesy Laguna Art Museum 

 

Unbeknownst to me, when I wrote last weekend about romantic paintings for Valentine’s Day, the Art Fund in the U.K. was doing something similar. Except it sought nominations from experts and then took a public poll.

The works in contention were:

• Paul Gauguin’s, Nevermore, chosen by artist and broadcaster Matthew Collings
• Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, nominated by writer and broadcaster Andrew Graham-Dixon
• Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, selected by artist Grayson Perry
• Nicholas Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida, chosen by writer, critic and professor of literature at University of Essex, Marina Warner
• Samuel John Peploe’s Roses, chosen by presenter and Art Fund Prize chair of the judges, Kirsty Young

You can see them all here, with comments by the nominators.

Who won? Gauguin (below) — with 29% of the votes, the number of which was not disclosed. 

Then came Peploe (26%), van Eyck (19%), Poussin (14%) and Titian (12%). Wrong Titian, no?

 

 

Minnesota is a good place to be an artist for many reasons, and here’s one that takes place every 10 years (since 1980): Starting tomorrow, Feb. 19, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts will show the work of any Minnesotan artist. You heard that right. You don’t have to be famous, or have a gallery, or…anything.

There are limitations. The art work must fit into a box that measures 12 inches x 12 inches x 12 inches — which is labeled “Curator.” If it does, MIA puts it on display in the gallery, through June 13. This year, MIA is accepting video and time-based works, too — as long as they are no longer than 80 seconds.

What a morale booster to artists.

Five thousand of them submitted work and 5,000 of them are on display.

The show actually opens tonight, at a celebratory party, and hundreds of the participating artists are expected.

Have a look for yourself on YouTube, where the MIA posted a video of some participants introducing themselves — and holding their works. Or, go to Flickr for stills.

This isn’t for every museum, granted — I can’t see the Metropolitan or MoMA or … doing this. But as I said at the start, Minnesota is a different place.

Photo: Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art

 

This will get lots of press, so I won’t dwell on it — let’s just get the news out:

The Getty Museum just announced that it has reached an agreement with the Sicilian Ministry of Culture and Sicilian Identity for a long-term collaboration including exhibitions, object conservation, scholarly research, conferences and earthquake protection of collections.

The first exhibition sounds very exciting:

[It] will investigate Sicily during the Classical and Hellenistic Periods (the fifth through third centuries B.C.), an era that witnessed the emergence of its founding Greek colonies as some of the wealthiest and most powerful metropolises in the Mediterranean world. Provisionally entitled Between Greece and Rome: Sicily in the Classical and Hellenistic Period, the exhibition will open at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa in 2013 and will borrow from a number of Sicilian museums as well as from international museums with significant collections of antiquities found in Sicily.

A second will dwell on Selinunte (Selinos), “an important Greek colonial settlement in southwestern Sicily, best known for its Greek temples from the archaic and classical periods.” Date for that is not yet determined.

 

In conservation, the press release says this:

 

The Marble Youth from Agrigento (above) will be brought to the Getty in the fall of 2010 for the development of a custom earthquake isolation base to protect it while on display. The object then will be placed on view at the Getty Villa with the museum’s permanent collection. Similarly, an attic red-figured krater by the Niobid Painter from Agrigento will come to the Getty Villa in April 2010, and after the development of a custom earthquake isolation base, will be displayed with the permanent collection.

 

Finally, a remarkable marble statue known as the Youth from Motya (left) will also be studied in order to develop a new seismic restraint and to improve its aesthetic presentation. Following the conservation efforts, the youth from Motya will be included in the exhibition Between Greece and Rome. When all three works are returned to Sicily, they will be accompanied by their new seismic isolators for display in their home museums.

On first glance — just reading the press release, not the fine print, if there is any — this is all great news. Congratulations to both parties.

 

Here’s a link to the press release.