The Whitney Museum debuted its newly redesigned website today, with new technology and new features, like a background that changes from white to black as day changes to night, plus a series of commissioned internet art projects.

I’m not tech-knowledgeable enough to pronounce on those advancements, but I do like several features, including:

• Each day, the museum’s hours are posted on the home page — they change with the day, so I don’t have to click “visit” to find that basic information.
• Events of the day are on the home page.
• The permanent collection is there — with acess by artist, by decade collected, by artists’ birth decade. Only about 400 works are shown, for now — which is not enough — but the images are high quality. And you can browse them separately, too.
• The commissioned works “appear on every page of whitney.org for ten to thirty seconds at sunset and sunrise in New York City.” I didn’t catch that today, but there’s time as each will last on the site for three to four months. As Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of new media, said in the press release: “What distinguishes these projects is that they use whitney.org as their habitat, disrupting, replacing, or engaging with the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces.”
• The first one is called Untitled Landscape #5, by ecoarttech, a collaborative founded in 2005 by artists Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir. It consists of “fluctuating, glowing orbs of light that disrupt the ‘digital landscape.’ The size and speed of the orbs will vary based on the number of visitors to the site since the previous sunrise (for sunset) or sunset (for sunrise); higher visitation results in larger, slower-moving orbs.”
• There’s audio and video — but the home page doesn’t take forever to load (like MoMA’s, which I avoid if possible, both because it takes so long time to appear and because it’s hard to navigate. I have heard, grapevine, that the museum knows this and is redesigning its redesign. Say it’s so, Glenn…).
• There’s the usual feature nowadays for registering, saving your own collection, etc.
• The conservation section, listed on the home page (bravo for that!), is thick with information.
• Ditto the research page.
• The navigation stays right there on the left all the time, so there’s no need to return to the home page all the time.
• There’s a “press” button on the home page! Need I tell you home many arts groups make finding press information/contacts difficult?

Kinks are bound to exist, but I haven’t found them yet. Bottom line: Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, says the redesign involved nearly every department in the museum — great, because it doesn’t at all look as if it has been designed by committee.

Here’s the link to the press release, which has more information — including details on a wiki feature.  

 

 

One speech does does not a policy make, but some people are wondering about President Obama’s commitment to arts education after hearing his speech on education last week.

Delivered in Madison, Wisc., on Nov. 4, the president’s speech to Wright Middle School discussed his plans for overhauling the educational system on a national level. As one reader of Real Clear Arts pointed out to me, it contained not a single word about art or creativity.

Read it for yourself; here’s the link, from Madison.com. A key passage:

It means improving instruction in science, technology, reading, math, and ensuring that more women and people of color are doing well in those subjects. 

The Presidential lapse was all the more ironic because that very evening, Mr. Obama sat through the classical music concert at the White House, joking about his lack of knowledge about when to applaud. “If you didn’t know in advance who delivered it, you might have thought it came from a different administration,” the reader wrote of the speech.

So, is President Obama soft-pedaling his campaign commitment to arts education? Just asking.  

As it goes with art prizes, so apparently does it go with art museums: you (meaning, I) just get finished writing about one, or two, and another pops up.

Today, the New Museum, possibly trying to change the subject, announced the six finalists for its Ordway Prize, which makes two $100,000 awards — one each to an artist and a curator or arts writer. (My take on “the subject” — single-collector exhibits — is here.)

The artist finalists are Tania Bruguera, from Cuba; William Pope.L, from the United States; and Artur Zmijewski, from Poland.

The curator/writer finalists are Sabine Breitwieser, from Austria; Hou Hanru, from China; and Hamza Walker, from the United States.

Read more about them and the prize here.

And late yesterday, I Iearned that famed American Art collectors Richard and Jane Manoogian are putting their names on a new museum, in an 1830s Indian dormitory on Mackinac Island, Mich. (left). This was announced last year, hasn’t received much publicity, and just came up in another context. The museum will display both fine and decorative arts inspired by Mackinac Island, including 18th – 20th century maps, Native American baskets, hand-tinted black-and-white photographs, paintings and other art objects.

The three-story building will open next summer and will offer a studio where visitors can learn to make art. 

Mackinac Island State Park recently put out a call for artists to enter its contest for a $5,000 purchase award at the opening.

On the new museum front, last week brought news that the Dia Art Foundation was planning to build a home in Chelsea, on the footprint of its old premises. Good news when it happens, if it happens. Dia’s turbulent history doesn’t exactly instill confidence.

Nonetheless, two new museums have moved ahead in recent days.

In Denver, the Clyfford Still Museum, which had been stalled by the recession, has started up again, setting groundbreaking for Dec. 14. According to the Denver Post, the $29 million museum will now open in mid-2011, a year after originally planned.

The Styll museum, which was given some 2,400 works by his widow, Patricia, was stalled by the financial crisis. Prudently, its leaders decided not to start construction until they had raised at least $25 million of the budget, plus $5 million for a fledgling endowment. And they asked for a redesign:

The museum’s design, by Portland, Ore., architect Brad Cloepfil, has undergone minor modifications since it was unveiled in March 2008 (it has dropped from 31,500 square feet to 30,000), but its low-lying, rectilinear look remains essentially unchanged.

In part because of those changes and lower construction costs brought on by the depressed economy, the building’s estimated cost has been cut from $33 million to $29 million.

Good moves, I think, but of course we won’t know until we see the building (above, in a 2008 rendering).

UPDATE, Nov. 13: The Barnes Foundation broke ground today on its new home in central Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, a new museum has opened.  

[Read more…] about New Museum Front: Two, Maybe Three, Steps Forward — UPDATED

How would you go about updating, reinterpreting, a Hudson River School painting? We’ll soon see one answer, from artist Valerie Hegarty.

On Wednesday, Hegarty will install a site-specific work on the High Line, the elevated park built on a disused rail corridor along the Hudson River, which is turning out to have a snug connection with contemporary art even before the Whitney Museum branch is built there (if it is).

Her “artwork often poses as artifacts of art history gone awry,” and this installation — on the wall between section 1, which is complete, and section 2, which is under construction — references a painting (above) by Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson River, 1860.

Cropsey’s painting, owned by the National Gallery of Art, was painted from memory in the artist’s London studio. It “created a sensation among many British viewers who had never seen such a colorful panorama of fall foliage,” according to the NGA website.

Hegarty’s work is not so beautiful. Her take on a Rothko is at right. For the Cropsey, the High Line says, she “imagines a nineteenth century Hudson River School landscape painting that has been left outdoors, exposed to the elements.”

Nature becomes the artist — and what does nature do?  

[Read more…] about Mother Nature, AKA Valerie Hegarty, Alters Jasper Francis Cropsey