Art museums, let’s face it, have never been on the regular itinerary of a vast number of Americans. Whether they are intimidated, bored, uninterested, too busy, or afflicted by any other aversion, some people just won’t go look at paintings, sculpture, installations or any other kind of art.

But this entry isn’t about them. This entry is about art students who won’t go to art museums. Apparently, some students today think that viewing art online is good enough or better. That’s what I discovered reading a blog item by Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York and is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University. Here’s what she wrote:

Yesterday a colleague who teaches painting emailed me that it’s hard for him to get his students to go to a museum to look at a work of art. They just can’t see the point. Why schlep into New York to go to a museum to see a painting, especially since, as often as not, the hyper-bright, clean crisp image of it that’s posted on the museum’s Web site makes the real thing look limp and lame by comparison?

And later: 

Going to a specific place in order to stand in a room and look at something that can’t be changed by a mere click and isn’t instantaneously about to morph into another image leaves a lot of the under-30 crowd utterly nonplussed. It’s easy to look at pictures, they think. They’ve been doing it their whole lives. They’re right — but what they don’t know is that they’ve been smothered by them, and no longer can really see them. 

Well, as Canute proved, you can’t hold back the tide — in this case, technology. And who would want to? Technology has done marvelous things for the art world.  

But that doesn’t mean surrendering to it either. It seems to me that art teachers, museum directors, curators and other professionals should be thinking just as hard about making the case that seeing the real thing is essential as they are about putting collections online and adding interactive technology. Technology can act as a gateway to art, an enhancer of understanding of art, and a tool for making art — but not as a substitute for seeing the real thing.

Fendrich’s blog is on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm site, here. If you go there, take a look at the comments, including this one from Alice V. Clarke.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that, while we always need to meet students where they are, and the digital era and all its multitasking have given us many advantages, it’s part of our job to nudge kids, kicking and screaming if need be, toward acquiring that old-fashioned type of focus required for deep reading, sustained viewing, and active listening. The culture at large isn’t going to foster that–it’s up to us.

Food for thought.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum 

 

Well, that was quick: The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced today that
it has recovered seven of the eight ancient Egyptian artifacts that were stolen from the Bijbels Museum in Amsterdam in the middle of the afternoon on July 29, 2007. The Art Loss Register found them at a Manhattan auction house when it perused sale-catalogue galleys circulated to ALR (the usual practice). It called Customs, which had been asked by the Dutch police to help.

One earthenware piece, Shabti of Ptah-Irdisu, 1300-1200 BCE, picture at right, is still missing.

When I called Christopher A. Marinello, ALR’s executive director, he declined to name the auction house, but he said that it was one of the big two — Christie’s and Sotheby’s. He called the case a “textbook” example of what should happen in art thefts because everyone — Customs, ALR, the Dutch police, the auction house and the consigner — cooperated.

The consigner said he bought the artifacts from a Russian gentleman who lived in Ireland. The Russian claimed he had owned the pieces since 1939, according to Marinello. ALR declined to value the items and said the auction catalogue did not yet carry estimates.

ALR described one recovered piece as a 7-inch-tall Shabti figure with arms folded over the chest and tools in each hand, dating to 1307 – 1070 BCE. Others include a bronze figure of Imhotep, one of Horus as a child, and a painted wooden Osiris figure, all dating as far back as 712 BCE.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Art Loss Register 

Yesterday Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Art Museum, sent me a link to an interview he did with Richard Armstrong, the new(-ish) director of the Guggenheim Museum.
It’s quite a revelation — on the nature of Biennials, an overcultured New York, his audience and collecting plans and, most of all, about deaccessioning.

In the beginning — the video, which was posted on ArtBabble yesterday, runs for 49 minutes and 28 seconds — Max (left) simply lets Armstrong (right) talk, telling how the Guggenheim got to where it is today. But around the 40th minute, Max asks about deaccessioning. Armstrong replies:

“The collection needs to be shaped. It’s slightly misshapen….One wonders, does one need to own 114 Kandinskys, for example.”

Max, surprised, offers “we’re interested in Kandinskys,” and Armstrong plows ahead: “I just think there’s a way of deploying assets slightly differently.” 

[Read more…] about Richard Armstrong Reveals His Inner Cowboy, Especially on Deaccessioning

Lindsay Pollock and Philip Boroff of Bloomberg have the scoop:

Manhattan art dealer Lawrence B. Salander is trying to rise from the ashes of a 100-count indictment in a quaint storefront in pastoral Millbrook, New York, about two hours north of the city.

 

As U.S. flags drifted in the soft Memorial Day breeze Monday, Salander sat behind a desk at the aptly named Phoenix Art LLC, surrounded by colorful canvases, landscape photographs and an eclectic mix of sculpture and art objects. He was arrested on March 26 and pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include fraud and grand larceny. He was released after posting bail of $1 million.

 

Dressed in a crisp, white linen shirt, Salander declined an interview request. He did say that he works at the gallery, that he didn’t own it and that his father-in-law, Donald Dowden, also works there. He wouldn’t disclose the owner of the gallery, which opened several weeks ago, other than that it is a “friend.”

 

Neighboring dealers identified the owner of the gallery space as Philip Mactaggart.

 

Well, a guy’s gotta make a living, I guess. Here’s a link to the full story. 

ARTnews is out now with its take on the Future of Museums: Called “Reshaping the Art
Museum,” it too seems to insist that unless museums change, consequences will be dire (only students and senior citizens in the galleries!).

The article says that some museums are using game theory, interactive technology, and more special events to draw visitors. But some of the “remedies,” imho, are akin to the Vietnam War excuse of bombing the village to save it. Art museums are not meant to be community centers.

I won’t repeat the ideas in this article — bad or good — but I am prompted to give a
 raspberry
to one voice after reading this paragraph:

Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, believes that the primary mission of art museums will evolve even further to include more social benefits. That may mean providing services for autistic children, a possibility he is discussing with specialists at Johns Hopkins University; or, as AAM director Ford Bell has suggested, it may mean providing space to teach English as a second language to immigrants.

Primary mission? Come on. Raspberry to Vikan.

Fortunately, Robin Cembalest, the magazine’s executive editor and author of the article, gives
the last word to Thomas Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum:

And for all the innovations in programming, marketing, and education, Campbell argues, the core mission remains the same. “We can make ourselves more user-friendly, but ultimately one of the key experiences of visiting a museum is that moment of standing in front of an object,” he says. “Suddenly you’re responding to something physical, real, that changes your own perspective. And great museums will always do that, as long we get people through the doors.” 

Art museums are about art. It’s elitist to think that the way to attract new visitors is to change that. A strawberry to Campbell. May his view reign.

Here’s a link to the article.