Forgive me if this has gotten around: as I mention above, I’m in Europe, at meetings, and therefore not seeing much news. But I’ve received word that The New Republic is starting a new section on its website called The Book. As TNR literary editor Leon Wieseltier wrote in his explanation of it, “the plan was to rush in and fill the vacuum in book criticism that is being left by the carnage in American newspapers” — only better.

The Book plans to run a review most days, as well as to aggregate book criticism from not-the-usual suspects. It will also contain “classics” — reviews of books drawn from the TNR archives — and other features, like a roundup discussion of books on a particular genre, like thrillers. Some features are yet to be developed.

And though The Book is named in the same way as many TNR blogs, like The Vine (about the environment), it won’t be a blog, Wieseltier says.

Some of this sounds similar to Arts & Letters Daily. But not exactly. In any case, I certainly welcome it. Anything of quality that adds to the discussion of books has got to be a godsend to publishers and readers everywhere.

 

I’ve been watching the web feature the Metropolitan Museum* created for its American Stories: Paintings of Every Day Life, 1765 – 1915 exhibit with great interest. Like much that takes place at the Met, it’s not cutting-edge innovative in any way I can tell. But the components are good, and I believe they do two things very well: They introduce people to the show before their visit, to make the trip to the museum much more edifying, and they may provide sufficient interest to lure people who have already seen the exhibit to go deeper.

The exhibition web page contains an exhibition overview and four short summaries of its sections. Then, there’s a page of all exhibition images, with a detail, the artist, date, location and other details. You can click on each one to get the full image and a description, or you can mouse over each one to get the full image. Or you can view them all in a slide shoe.

There are podcasts — with Eric Fischl commenting on two of Sargent’s Venetian scenes and James McPherson talking about two of Homer’s Civil War scenes), with more to come.

There’s room for YouTube videos, but I don’t see any yet.  

Finally, there’s a blog, written by Katie Steiner, a research assistant in the American Paintings department, with room for comments and comments on the comments. She goes behind the scenes, and I know museum-goers like that. Still, it looks as if H. Barbara Weinberg, the American Paintings curator, and Carrie Rebora Barratt, the American art curator who was recently promoted to Associate Director for Collections and Administration — both organizers of the exhibit — may contribute, but haven’t yet.

I’d like to see both of them chime in — soon. Some museums acknowledge that curators should interact more with the public, and a blog is one way.

I would also like to see the Met link to all reviews of the exhibition, good and bad.   

The exhibition started only on October 12, and runs until January 24, so there’s plenty of time for that and to dream up more innovative features.  

Photo: Buffalo Newsboy, 1853, Thomas Clear, Courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art 

* I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.

To hear some people tell it, connoisseurship is a concept that has been lost by much of the art world — or at the very least, underplayed. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts this week opens an exhibition that instead puts connoisseurship back in the spotlight.

In Pursuit of a Masterpiece, which opened on Sunday, has been designed to help visitors take a closer look at nearly two dozen paintings, prints and other objects in the museum’s permanent collection and compare their quality, their form and the techniques used to produced them. They come from seven curatorial departments.

The first section, called “Changing Historical Definitions of a Masterpiece,” includes pieces like the Chinese ritual water basin at left — which was not labeled a masterpiece when it entered the museum’s collection — and considers how that decision was made. This area also includes pieces that were “masterpieces, only to be revealed as fakes.

The second section, “Connoisseurship: Knowing a Masterpiece When You See One,” contains works never doubted as to quality or authenticity. Courbet’s “Deer In The Forest,” right, is an example.

The third section is called “Taste and the Evolution of Knowledge,” and it’s probably the most interesting. It explores how taste and new scholarship have altered the “art historical canon.” For a start, it’s fascinating that a museum would today acknowledge that there is a defined art historical canon, let alone attempt to define what’s in it and what’s not in it. But MIA has placed several works in this category, including a Djenne horseman sculpture from 15th Century Mali (left), a Francis Bacon painting it acquired in 1958, when Bacon was not widely admired, and Jasper John’s Figure 2, purchased in 1970.

Another entry consists of two prints of the same photograph by Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, one printed in 1961 and the other some time in the 1970s. The quality difference is discernable. 

The exhibit accompanies a loan show called The Louvre and The Masterpiece, and is another example of a museum using its permanent collection creatively. MIA director Kaywin Feldman is the curator of In Pursuit of A Masterpiece.

Photos: Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Hey, want to chat? Online? About art, specifically Kandinsky?

The invitation comes not from me, but from the Guggenheim Museum. Nowadays, it’s holding online discussion and chat sesssions called Forum, which it billed as “innovative” in a recent Guggenheim Magazine. The point, it says, is “to discuss and debate topics related to major museum exhibitions.”

Its seems a bit retro to me, but I’m withholding judgment. According to the Guggenheim’s website, the first Forum was last summer. It was titled “Between the Over- and Underdesigned.” I read the posts and the chat and felt — under-enlightened. It was bland, deadly bland. See for yourself at that link.

But there’s another chance coming this week, starting on Monday and through Oct. 23. This panel of experts will talk about “Spiritual (Re)Turn” in relation to the musem’s Kandinsky retrospective:

This…Forum takes as its point of departure Vasily Kandinsky’s famous advocacy for a union of the spiritual and art. Overall, however, modernity has seen fine art and religion diverge. Now that spirituality has become increasingly divorced from religion–Kandinsky himself approached the issue through the esoteric belief system of Theosophy–is it possible that we could see now see a reunion of the two?

The online chat part starts on Thursday at 2 p.m. EST and involves moderators Krista Tippett, the host of the popular public-radio program, Speaking of Faith, and Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., the William M. Suttles Chair of Religious Studies at Georgia State University.

The other panelists, who’ll comment during the rest of the week, are Huma Bhabha, who won the 2008 Emerging Artist Award from the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and Mark C. Taylor, Chair of the Department of Religion and co-director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University.

And good luck to them. Still, I thought, haven’t we been here before? I decided to consult Max Anderson at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who’s usually up to date on museum activities on the web.

[Read more…] about Guggenheim Forum: What’s It All About?

Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?

That was the headline on an op-ed in The New York Times the other day by Dennis Dutton, the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution and co-founder and co-editor of Arts & Letters Daily. The piece was pegged to the auction of a medicine cabinet by Damien Hirst. A key passage:

Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his “ready-mades” — a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance — for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.

But Dutton was really writing about the importance of art to humans, and the future of art. He takes a dim view of conceptual art, and opines on its future — implying, to me at least, that he wishes the time of the current generation of conceptual artists would pass. “We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture,” he writes.

He concludes this way:

I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it — even before they could put their love into words.

I’m with Dutton on sharks and vacuum cleaners. My main question is why he couched his argument in terms of art’s investment value — but then again, I haven’t read his book, which may have made his argument head-on. Here’s a link to the NYT piece.