Did you by chance catch the 1,000-word article in the Sunday New York Times about the
 remaking of France’s President Nicholas Sarkozy as
more cultured?

It outlined how Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, is tutoring him, probably as prep for the 2012
election: she’s changing not only his loud clothing and flashy watch to more suitably Presidential fare, but also his reading habits, his music, his films. The Daily Beast chimed in today with a more tabloidy version.

I was struck that neither one mentioned the visual arts. 

More than ten years ago, I wrote in the Times about the French trying to play catch-up with Britain, Germany, the U.S., etc. in contemporary art (link). Alan Riding, then European arts correspondent, continued the theme as recently as 2006 (here).

Just for a random test — and not of all that much import, admittedly — I googled “French contemporary art” and came up, first, with a gallery in London that sells French art and a Wikipedia entry that talks about the 20th Century.

But peruse any large international catalogue — from Art Basel, say — and you still don’t see much great contemporary art coming from France.

Is the French public indifferent to contemporary art? Does anyone there care about Bruni’s omission? Should they?

For whatever reason, jazz has been on my mind recently, but this isn’t about the music
exactly. This is about visual art. Over the weekend, an exhibit
 about jazz caught my eye. 

Trouble is, The Jazz Century, which opened at the Center for Contemporary Culture in
Barcelona on July 22 (and is on view there till Oct. 18), isn’t coming to the U.S. 

Curated by art critic Daniel Soutif, the exhibit premiered at the Mart museum in
Rovereto, Italy, then moved to the Musee du Quay Branly in Paris. Not a history exhibit, it’s described as “a chronological account of relations between jazz and the arts throughout the 20th century [that] shows us how the sound of jazz has nuanced all the other arts, from painting to photography and from the cinema to literature, not forgetting graphic design and cartoons.” Sculpture, too. And album covers, posters and sheet music.

Among the artists: Pollock, Picasso, Dubuffet, Bearden, Thompson, Warhol and many more.

Sounds delightful. Craig Winneker, writing in The Wall Street Journal in March, when the show was in Paris, concluded:

Like any great jazz piece, this show has so much going on at once you might need to play it a few times to catch all the nuances. But amid the flurry of notes, the beat is always there.

Three venues is the usual run, but this show belongs in the U.S.   

Here’s a link to the WSJ piece; The Los Angeles Times also reviewed the Paris run here, and if you speak Spanish, you can get a glimpse here.

Photo Credits: Larry Rivers, Public and Private, 1983-84, top, Courtesy CCCB ; Thomas Hart Benton, Portrait of a Musician, 1949, bottom, Courtesy University of Missouri, Columbia.

Since Michelle Obama and the NEA drew my attention to the status of jazz last month (link), with festivals being cancelled and audiences shrinking, I’ve been paying much closer attention
to it. The other day, a news item about the Newport Jazz Festival and impressario George Wein caught my eye. Wein, who helped found the Newport Jazz Festival 55 years ago and the Newport Folk Festival five years later, told the Providence Business Journal that he plans to create a non-profit organization to present the two events after this year’s offerings.

But as I looked into that, I found something much more interesting: a company interested in the arts-health link.

First, Wein’s thoughts:

It is my hope in the next few years that I might be able to make [the festivals] into a 501(c)3 nonprofit and have local people in the state and the city involved in it. That’s the only way it will last forever.

Pointing out that most cultural organizations are nonprofits, he said the festivals “really belong in that arena now,” adding that subsidies wouldn’t have to be that steep. You can read the rest of the article here.

That’s where I grew intrigued by CareFusion, the San Diego medical technology company that earlier this month agreed to sponsor next month’s Newport Jazz Festival. CareFusion had already agree to sponsor what used to be the JVC festival in New York next year. 

[Read more…] about All That Jazz: Links Between the Sounds of Newport and Health

An article in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer brought back fond memories of reporting I did a few years ago. The story heralded Bert Levy, a 96-year-old docent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which gave him a birthday party:

Levy has volunteered as a guide at the art museum since 1996, and his colleagues can’t get enough of him. “He’s revered,” said Ronn Shaffer, a fellow guide. He quotes Shakespeare, reads and writes Latin, knows French, recites poems and doesn’t hold back his sense of humor.

“The art museum saved my life,” Levy responded — explaining to the reporter that it was
where he had turned for diversion after his wife, whom he had known since his teens, died.

Not to one-up Mr. Levy, or the Inquirer, but I attempted to write an article about volunteers at the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago. My lede was about Laura Reiburn Kashins, who volunteered at the Met for 28 years, until August 2004, when she was 101. She, too, told me that working at the museum saved her life, when I interviewed her by phone at (almost) 103.

More interesting, neither Ms. Kashins nor Mr. Levy are unique. I interviewed many Met volunteers, young and old — they were so devoted to the museum that they seemed, at times, like a cult to me.

[Read more…] about Museums Can’t Live Without Them — A Tribute

When was the last time you went to the movies on a weekday between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.? How about a concert, a dance performance or a play? If you can’t remember, I am not surprised. Most of us are working during those prime hours. We simply don’t have the luxury of taking time off from work to go to a matinee. 

So why is it that 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (or, worse, 4 p.m.) are the most common hours for art museums to be open?

To save money, many museums are trimming back hours — incredibly, some are cutting out evening hours. The Cincinnati Art Museum (left), for example, recently announced that it would no longer be open on Wednesday nights and said the decision was taken “to maintain the highest possible levels of service in programming and exhibitions.”

Sorry, but I can’t fathom decisions like that, which seem to me to be more for the convenience of staff than for the convenience of visitors. Traffic patterns at museums probably vary from city to city but, except for school groups, I’d bet that most museums see the bulk of their visitors on weekends and in the evening, if they are open. The Brooklyn Museum recently disclosed numbers showing that nearly 20% of its visitors come to the museum on just 11 nights of the year — its Target First Saturdays, when the museum remains open until 11 p.m.

Cutting back on evening hours seems clueless, and self-defeating.

A few museums do seem to get this basic fact. When Seattle Art Museum recently cut hours, it announced that it will be closed on Tuesdays, beginning the week of Sept. 7 — but according to its website, SAM remains open on Thursday and Friday nights until 9 p.m.

Who else is on this honor roll?  

[Read more…] about Museum Hours: Time For A Change