When I wrote about museums and women artists here yesterday, I noted that Jerry Saltz had taken up the subject a while back on Facebook, where he specifically attacked the Museum of Modern Art for not including many women in its permanent collection galleries.

What I didn’t know, not being a Facebook member, was that Jerry had come up with a list of
women whose works MoMA owns, and still hadn’t put them on view in the critical fourth and fifth floor galleries. Artist Eva Lake, who blogs here, told me about that in a comment on my post and, when asked, she helpfully provided the list (or at least part of it, as Jerry has been writing a lot about this). Take a look:

Florine Stettheimer, Alice Neel, Hannah Hoch, Anni Albers, Alma Thomas, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Jo Baer, Paula Modersohn-Becker, … Eileen Gray, Clementine Hunter, Joan Brown, Chryssa, Maria Lassnig, Gego, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John, Adrian Piper, Jane Freilicher, Lee Lozano, Dorothea Tanning, Minnie Evans, Louise Nevelson, Meret Oppenheim, Betty Parsons, Bridget Riley, Dorothea Rockbourne, Claire Zeisler, Kay Sage (her Le Pasage, 1956, is at right), Grandma Moses, Sister Gertrude , Hilma af-Klimt, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Janet Sobel, Atsuko Tanaka, Francoise Gilot, Anne Truitt, Ruth Vollmer, Jane Wilson, Sylvia Sleigh, Marguerite Zorach……”

 

I haven’t analyzed who precisely is hanging in the permanent collection galleries at MoMA lately but, well, you be the judge.

  

Members of the Association of Art Museum Directors head to Toronto this weekend for the group’s semiannual meeting, Sunday through Wednesday. While they’re there, directors will be visiting not only the Art Gallery of Ontario — which last year opened its new Frank Gehry-designed space (at right) —
but also the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the new Burchfield Penney Art Center in nearby Buffalo.

On the agenda: the start of a new strategic plan for AAMD. Matthew Teitelbaum, director of the AGO, chairs the committee. They’ll also be talking about the economy and other undisclosed museum issues. (Survival, probably.)

The AAMD exists for the good of its members and not the press, of course, but sometimes our interests overlap. So, when I spoke the other day with Janet Landay (below), AAMD’s new executive director, I made a plea for more and better statistics. The AAMD surveys its 190 members each year in a State of North America’s Art
Museum report — but the numbers it discloses are fairly useless. For example, if you read the report on 2008, you will discover that 20% of respondents increased their acquisitions in 2008 while 15 percent decreased them, and 63% had no change. Is that by number? Value? By what percent did they go up or down? It doesn’t say. Ditto for other questions. Here’s a link to the last report, on 2008, released on April 30 – you’ll see what I mean.

Wouldn’t it be useful for the public to know how museums in general and their hometown museum in particular is doing in this climate?

When I brought this up with Landay, she agreed that the numbers “are useless” and said “we need to fix a lot of that. It’s on our agenda of things we are going to do.” We both need better and more frequent numbers. In March, I noted here that the Theatre Communications Group had started doing “Snapshot Surveys” of its members, some 460 theatres in 47 states, on fiscal matters. They aren’t perfect, but they are much more useful than AAMD’s statistics. Maybe TCG will share how it does it.

What else should be on AAMD’s agenda?  

[Read more…] about Museum Directors Meet This Weekend: Here’s What They Should Discuss

I don’t belong to Facebook, and therefore can’t see what Jerry Saltz has been writing about the paucity of women artists at the Museum of Modern Art. I may not even have known about his seething criticism of MoMA’s “gender-based apartheid” had it not been for this entry on Doug McLennan’s Diacritical blog last week.

But back in early May, when I first heard about MoMA’s “Modern Women’s Project,” presumably designed to redress the problem, I thought it was — frankly — stupid. According to published reports, MoMA’s project involves a series of exhibitions showing work by female artists and a book called “Women Artists in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.” So the way MoMA shows that it is an equal-opportunity exhibitor/collector is to create a ghetto for women artists?

That’s certainly not the way I would approach the problem. Morgan Freeman’s famous remark calling the idea of a month dedicated to black history “ridiculous” came immediately to my mind: “I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history,” he said.

And I don’t want “women artists’ shows” — if curators can’t find women, in this day and age, whose art measures up to, or exceeds, work being created by men, they’re not doing their jobs.

Nor do I want shows that herald an artist who happens to be female as a woman artist — as if that in itself were a valorous and courageous thing to do.

So I was pleasantly surprised the other day when I received notice of the National Gallery of Art’s Judith Leyster, 1609 – 1660, which opens on June 21 and runs through Nov. 29. That’s her Self-Portrait, c. 1630, above. 

[Read more…] about Women Artists in Museums: Take a Clue from an NGA Show

It’s the broad view in the contemporary art world that Venice is all
about art (and parties) and Basel is all about money (and parties). Of course, it’s not true — and never has been.

I don’t usually just link to someone else’s articles on Real Clear Arts. But my friend Georgina Adam, Editor-At-Large for The Art Newspaper and columnist for the Financial Times, parsed the differences and similarities between the two so well in an article in the FT on Saturday that I will simply do that. Here’s the link.

If there’s one key paragraph, it’s this:

The “traditional” countries with pavilions in the Giardini tend to show artists who are already well established and have an existing market, so it is inevitable that pieces are sold there. But this year sees new pavilions from Montenegro, Monaco, Gabon, the Comoros and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the chance of finding newcomers from other countries in the 38 collateral events. Many will come from countries without a developed gallery system, and the excitement of the Biennale is this element of discovery. “Biennales are very different from art fairs: they are laboratories,” says Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, who has directed biennales in Berlin, China, Russia and elsewhere. “They are often about process and experimentation.”

As a result, nowadays, Venice shows much more video and installations; Basel offers much more painting and sculpture, pieces people can more easily buy.  

My apologies to Guy Ben-Ner, the Israeli video artist who has represented Israel at the Venice Biennale and whose 2000 video, Moby Dick, was recently acquired by the Museum of

 Modern Art. He has a show at MASS MoCA, but when I was there on Saturday, I fled — not because of his work, but because some young man was in the galleries bleating into his cell phone. Guards are few at MASS MoCA, and no one stopped him from chatting away during the video.

But this is not just a plea to museums to enforce the no-cell-phones ban, though it is that, too.

Rather, the situation started me thinking about art and focus. My one-time colleague at The New York Times, the retired music critic Bernard Holland, used to stir up dozens of reader letters at the mere mention of a cough in the audience. This happened not once or twice, but — as I found when I just searched his work at the Times — in 14 articles he wrote over the years touching on the problem. Everyone agreed that coughers should not be tolerated.

A cough is often involuntary. What would Carnegie Hall denizens say about the gallery-goers who nowadays think nothing of pulling out their cells while others are trying to look at art?

In a world in which we are all multi-tasking and suffering from many demands on our attention, looking at art remains different. So should consuming other forms of art. 

[Read more…] about On The Nature of Art and Human Attention