The Fresno Metropolitan Museum’s woes — as reported by the Fresno Bee this week — suggest that it may not be long for this world.

“Absent a miracle, The Met will have to close in the very near future,” said Fresno bankruptcy lawyer Riley Walter, who has represented the museum as a financial crisis consultant for months.

Like other museums, the FMM (at left) had large ambitions — too large, probably — and undertook an overambitious expansion. As the Bee reported last March, in an article headlined “Big Vision, Big Troubles At Fresno’s Met,” trustees were unrealistic:

[Paul] Gottlieb [the museum’s chairman] says it’s not the trustees’ fault that they were overwhelmed by a “perfect storm” of economic woe: cost overruns impossible to anticipate, then a severe national recession that dried up donations and grants.

“I don’t think we’re in bad shape,” Gottlieb says. “We have a financial challenge. And this board or another board will figure out a way to work through it.”

Let’s hope.

Meanwhile, how many other museums are in the same spot? Impossible to know, of course, but the best source on this is the American Association of Museums, which is where I went.

As Dewey Blanton in AAM’s media relations department wrote, “with the caveat that this is by no means definitive, we know of 28 26 closures. That’s of a field of an estimated 17,500 museums.” They are: 

The Bead Museum

Gulf Coast Museum of Art

Las Vegas Museum of Art

12 historic sites shut by the state of Illinois (the state hopes to re-open these)

National Sports Museum, NY

Sports Museum of LA

Three museums closed by the U. of Arizona

Minnesota Museum of American Art

Three history museums in Oregon City, OR

Two Delaware historic sites

Pioneer Museum, Colorado Springs UPDATE: AAM has learned that the Pioneer Museum received public support and is operating after all.

Railroad Museum of Pa. UPDATE: See comment below.

“Many others came close,” Blanton says, “but have been saved by local or state government or, in some cases, by the community itself. And of course, hundreds of others have cut staff, hours, programs.”

 

I loved it when I picked up my New York Times yesterday and saw the inflatable bubble expansion that the Hirshhorn Museum is hoping to build — on the front page. Nicolai Ouroussoff has it right when he said the Hirshhorn plan had the potential to “delight” visitors to the National Mall and could “transform one of the most somber buildings on the mall into a luminous pop landmark.”

But I have had a few second thoughts. A rendering in rusty red is not so attractive. Even in blue, what will this look like when it’s no longer new? Or is the inflatable bit renewed every year — and how much would that cost beyond the $5 million estimate now? 

I also agree with Blake Gopnik’s commentary in today’s Washington Post:

the problem with this project, or with any other grand museum project you could name, is that it risks making activity and action the museum’s central goal, with contemplation pushed to dismal second place.

Art, he continued, and I wholeheartedly concur, needs to come first. Is that art, or a movie, in the rendering of the interior?

Anyway, does Washington really lack spaces to talk about contemporary culture and issues? That, as Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek previously told the Post, is his goal:

We want to turn the symbolic center of the Hirshhorn into a center for international dialogue. The issues are going to be very broad, so we can attract a pluralistic audience. It’s also going to be based on very strong partnerships and collaborative efforts.

Koshalek is someone I’ve known and respected for a long time, and he loves architecture as well as art — maybe more. He also knows how to create dazzle and excitement, which is a good thing for the unloved Hirshhorn.

Whenever there’s a museum expansion that may or may not be necessary (for space reasons), I always ask: what art could be bought for the same amount of money?

$5 million isn’t that much in today’s art secondary market, but it could buy a lot from primary galleries. And it would go far to underwrite exciting, crowd-drawing exhibitions.

So while I like the bubble, before the Hirshhorn decides, I hope it considers the alternative way to create excitement — with new art. I’m not making the call, just asking the question, a question I hope the Hirshhorn trustee have considered — or will. 

Photos: Courtesy Diller Scofidio and Renfro

Two recent posts here come together to reinforce my point:

A month ago, on Nov. 15, I wrote about the Disney show at the New Orleans Museum of Art, detailing why giving museum galleries over to show of only Disney animation pictures, curated by Disney employees, who also wrote the catalogue, paid for and tied the opening to the debut of the movie from which some of the pictures come — The Princess and the Frog — is all wrong.

And on Dec. 6, I wrote here about journalism, and why it’s wrong for reporters and critics to “protect” arts institutions from scrutiny and criticism.  

The New Orleans exhibition opened in November and the movie opened last Friday — topping the weekend box office but with a lower-than-hoped-for total.

Time for a media assessment.

According to my search on Factiva, a database of articles published in newspapers and magazines, the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper has run more than two dozen articles, shorts or listings that mention the Dreams Come True exhibition in the last three months.

I could not find a single word of criticism of the exhibition or the museum in any of them. About the only non-positive glimmer of thought came in the article I cited in November, which quoted museum director E. John Bullard (right) as rejecting people who “look[ed] down their noses at popular culture,” which — of course — no one had done.

Far more typical in the newspaper were items like this paragraph, published on on Nov. 11 in an article of short takes listing “five things rattling around in the head of one movie buff“:

NOMA’s “Dreams Come True” Disney exhibition ” — Art and pop culture collide at what promises to be a magical family-friendly show, timed to coincide with the release next month of “The Princess and the Frog,” Disney’s New Orleans-set animated fairy tale.

So in addition to hoodwinking the museum, turning it into a commercial gallery, Disney has also managed to turn the local newspaper into an arm of its PR machine. (One article actually touts Disney’s merchandise for the movie.) 

Nice work, for Disney, but not for the public. Both the museum and the newspaper have acted abominably.

Photos: Courtesy Times-Picayune, New Orleans Museum of Art

Last night, United States Artists announced the winners of its annual $50,000 awards at a ceremony in Santa Monica. There were 50 lucky winners, including ten in the visual arts:

Diana Al-Hadid, Brooklyn
Terry Allen, Santa Fe
Vija Celmins, New York
Anthony Hernandez, Los Angeles
Joan Jonas, New York
Kim Jones, New York
Martin Mazorra and Michael Houston, Brooklyn
Dave McKenzie, Brooklyn
Judy Pfaff, Kingston, New York (one of her installations is at right) 
Dario Robleto, Houston

Looking at the list, it’s hard to draw any conclusions about winning characteristics, except one — New York (including Brooklyn, of course) is still the center of contemporary art.

On the other hand, for this round of awards, the fourth, “USA Fellows” in all disciplines — dance, architecture, design, literature, theater arts, music, media — come from 18 states, according to a press release. They range in age from 28 to 82. More information is here. 

 

No doubt about it: the research released by the National Endowment for the Arts last week on arts participation is eye-opening. In its entire 104 pages, there’s hardly any good news and only a few hopeful signs. And believe me, I searched.

I took one morsel of hope, though, and made an anecdotal survey of how well art museums are exploiting one aspect of it: Forty percent of adult Americans who use the Internet used it last year to “view, listen to, download or post artworks or performances.” And, “typically once a week, 20 percent of all Internet-using adults viewed painting, sculpture or photography online.” (Granted, that finding says nothing about how Internet users view art online, and doesn’t define whether “photography” includes snapshots, photojournalism or, for that matter, pornography, but…it is what it is.)  

In any case, the finding brought back to me a moment a few months ago when I was looking at the Morgan Library website, and was surprised to find a tiny “Social Media” link at the top — with a link to its YouTube channel (as well as to Twitter and Facebook).

Cool, I thought, until I looked at the channel’s results, which I just did again: Since joining YouTube in July, 2008, the Morgan has gained only 5 subscribers, and the last sign-in was a month ago. That makes sense because the Morgan hasn’t uploaded a new video in five months — and that makes sense because the video with the most traffic was viewed only 780 times. Not a virtuous circle. (Total video views are just over 3,000.)

Admittedly, YouTube is only one way to look at art online. I’d bet that more people view visual art by looking at photographs of a collection or exhibition. For video, art-lovers in the know may go straight to ArtBabble, the hub at the Indianapolis Art Museum that now includes 20 partners. (I last wrote about ArtBabble, including some usage statistics, here.)

But I know that many museums have a presence on YouTube, and the Morgan’s experience makes me wonder if that makes sense. Should they spend precious resources generating video content? And when they do, is it easy enough to find? 

So I looked at a random sampling of more than a dozen museums’ websites — and found varying approaches.  

[Read more…] about Museums and YouTube: Spreading Video of Art