I come to praise the Brooklyn Museum* today. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve obliquely mentioned a few of its failings: the lack of people in its permanent collections here and its American art galleries, which I consider to be woeful, here. Over the years, I’ve also disliked its penchant for mounting shows on the edge of art, or beyond it, like “Hip-Hop Nation” and “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth.” There’s more, but I won’t catalogue my quibbles here.

But I give Director Arnold Lehman a lot of credit. After my post about the permanent-collection

galleries, instead of getting angry or annoyed, he asked his PR chief Sally Williams to call me, say he agreed, and invite me out to talk about it. That’s where I’ll be later today. 

Arnie has made Brooklyn a leader in outreach, in some ways. At the Museums and the Web conference earlier this year, the “Brooklyn Museum flat out swept the Best of the Web awards and their main website won the overall award,” the Indianapolis Museum of Art reported here. I just learned from a blog called Museum Marketing, where Jim Richardson reported here on the “Top Museums on Twitter,” that Brooklyn comes in second only to the Museum of Modern Art among the top 50. When I checked the speakers at the 2009 Communicating the Museum conference, taking place in Malaga right now, I learned that two of the four keynote speakers are from the Brooklyn Museum — Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology, and Will Cary, membership manager. I’m sure there’s more, and these are all good things. (The CT scanning of four mummies from its permanent collection earlier this week, at a nearby hospital, was pretty cool too. One, always thought to be a female, turned out to be male.)  

What else can be done, or considered, to get more people interested in art — especially permanent collections? If we come up with anything creative, I’ll let you know.

Photo Credit: Brooklyn Museum of Art

* Disclosure: a foundation I consult to supports the Brooklyn Museum

Your faithful reporter can not follow up on the summer meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which I wrote about here several days ago. The agenda, we knew, included plans to talk about a new strategic plan, the economy, the need for better statistics, deaccessioning, and other things. I made a few suggestions for topics needing discussion, and so did some commenters.

Janet Landay, AAMD’s executive director, spoke with me before the meeting, and I told her

that I’d check back afterwards. Today, I tried — but she declined to talk. Her response to my email, trying to set up a good time, mentioned a “fairly detailed” press release posted on the website and included the comment that “there were no concrete results.” In a second email, specifically asking about a statistics effort, so we all can learn where museums stand more quickly, she confirmed that “we continue those discussions but there’ve been no decisions.”

Well, I asked, should I check then with Michael Conforti, AAMD’s current president, from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute? “Neither Michael nor I are going to have anything to say about the meeting beyond what’s in the press release.”

You can read the press release here. The only thing we know now that we did not know before is who spoke to the group. On the economy, a panel included Donald Marron, former head of Paine Webber and MoMA trustee, Glenn Lowry, MoMA director, and Mimi Gates, former director of the Seattle Art Museum. Johnnetta Cole, recently appointed head of the National Museum of African Art, spoke about diversity.

Museum directors have no obligation to talk to me or anyone else about internal matters, but I’m still disappointed — about their lack of openness and especially about the lack of those “concrete results.”  

As anyone who keeps up with the news knows, Wal-Mart is one of the few companies that is doing just fine during this recession. Why? Value. Forget luxury purchases; everyone wants value for their money now.

So I took notice a few weeks ago when I saw something about a “Fairfield/Westchester
Museum Alliance,” which offers the members of six museums free admission to all the others (as well as a 10% store discount). Non-members that pay at one museum receive free same-day admission to any of the participating museums.

What a great idea, especially now. This alliance, which started this spring, includes the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers (pictured below), the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill. The new program began in May and will continue through December.

Are other museums doing similar things to increase their value to members?

[Read more…] about Getting Creative About Museum Memberships — It’s Time

The Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City claims “one of the strongest” American art collections in the U.S., and the opening in April of new galleries for that work, art made in the U.S. from colonial days through World War II, was an occasion. The museum
spent $7 million to gut its old space, conserve and reinstall about 175 works from the 3,000-plus works it owns. It also borrowed a few works to fill gaps. Among the works on display are the marvelous Marsden Hartley, Himmel, from 1914-15, at right, a Herter bookcase, 1852-53, below left, and Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising From the Sea — A Deception, bottom.

Of course the museum re-thought the whole enterprise. Out went an organization based on “people, places, and things.”

Like other recent reinstallers, the Nelson-Atkins decided to integrate decorative arts with paintings (a practice I am not entirely comfortable with). And it chose to use historic themes, rather than art themes (ditto). Assessing its collection and key moments in American history, curators found six matches, and installed their works to illustrate them: 1776, 1826, 1850, 1889, 1913 and 1939. (Here’s a link to a complete explanation.)

I haven’t seen the reinstallation, though I did see the galleries in 2007, before they were gutted, when I reviewed the museum’s Stephen Holl expansion, the Bloch Building, for The Wall Street Journal. I was shown the plans at the time, and found them to be — perhaps — more sensible than other rethinkings and, probably, better than the old model, which had portraits by Copley, Sargent and Eakins hanging in the same room. 

Since a long-distance review is impossible, Margaret C. Conrads, curator of American art at the Nelson-Atkins, agreed to answer Five Questions.

Other museums have reinstalled their American collections thematically, too (Brooklyn comes to mind), usually, in the view of critics, not successfully. How does yours differ from those?

I don’t consider our galleries thematic. Rather, a general chronology is at the core of the installation, punctuated by high points of American history and art history. Groupings of work from geographic regions are arranged around those key dates. It is a plan that is very flexible, reflecting the ebb and flow of the history of American art and the scope of our collection.

[Read more…] about American Art’s New Digs At the Nelson-Atkins: Five Questions

Even while galleries in Chelsea are closing, or hinting that they will this summer, there are people who believe that the art market is close to its floor.

That’s the message today from ArtTactic, a British company that tracks, analyzes and
 comments on the art market, is out today with a new U.S. and European Art Market
Confidence Survey — much like the consumer confidence index for the U.S. economy published by the University of Michigan.

Art Tactic charges 75 British pounds for the report, and therefore doesn’t publish it for all to see. But it does reveal a few things, free:

• Confidence in the market is on the rise: After an 81% drop in the ArtTactic Art Market Confidence Indicator in December 2008, the recent survey from June 2009, shows that confidence is cautiously coming back again.
• Increased optimism about the 6-month art market outlook: ArtTactic’s Expectation Indicator currently stands at 46% above the Current Indicator, although the majority of respondents still have a short term negative outlook.
• Speculation risk abates as market contracts: With buyers becoming increasingly selective, and with auction liquidity down 70-80%, there is little room for short-term speculation in the current art market.
• Market recovery could take place earlier than expected:  64% believing the contemporary art market could rebound in 2010/11.
• Price correction loses momentum:  A majority (74%) of the survey sample believe the art market would adjust another 10-20% or less, indicating that prices could be about to level out.

ArtTactic was established in 2001, but most of its research is behind a wall — so there’s no way I can see its track record.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Art Basel