Sales at the AIPAD Photography Show in New York, which ran from Mar. 26 through 29, were better than expected, AIPAD is reporting. And attendance held steady at about 8,000, the same as last year. I can’t vouch for the sales, but it was pretty crowded when I visited on Sunday afternoon.

Not that I saw the boldface names AIPAD said were there: Jeremy Irons, Ralph Fiennes,
Peter Riegert, Alexis Stewart and Bob Colacelo, plus Richard Prince and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, and many more from the collecting and museum universe. Many probably attended the benefit night.

Looking around, I saw plenty of very good works but few that I hadn’t seen before or that looked like something new. The  influence of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and their followers was everywhere in the contemporary works — and there seemed to be fewer staged photos, a la Gregory Crewdson, than in the past.

Maybe, in these conservative-spending times, that’s why the dealers made sales, they say. AIPAD doesn’t provide show totals, but many dealers reported multiple sales at prices as low as $100 and as high as about $50,000.

One star of the show was a gelatin-silver print of Barack and Michelle Obama in 1996 (right) by Mariana Cook; Lee Marks Fine Art sold “numerous” prints of it. Then again, those purchases probably mean nothing at all for the photography market. 

Aside from whether the Annenberg Space for Photography, which I wrote about here, is a joy to visit and a good place to view photography, it poses a larger question: Will it have any impact on other museums and galleries that aim to showcase photography?

That’s what the Annenberg Foundation set out to do: create a new paradigm. ASP is unquestionably more interactive, more in tune with the trend to combine the educational aspects of a museum space with viewer engagement than other spaces devoted to more static displays of photography. And I think that’s great.

But it is treading a fine line, and I hope it doesn’t lean too much toward entertainment — which is different from engagement.

Since I haven’t yet been to ASP, I would be curious to hear what those who have think.

 

This is photography season in New York — with the AIPAD Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory over the past weekend, followed by auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s (both achieving rather lackluster results).

But on the West Coast, there was photography news, too. Last Friday (following a Wednesday night red-carpeted party), the Annenberg Space for Photography debuted in Los Angeles — and, while I haven’t been there, I think it probably deserves more notice than it has received so far.

ASP (an amusing acronym, no?) is an attempt to go beyond traditional displays of photography. In 10,000 sq. ft., along with images in print format, ASP will project images
using a “state-of-the art” high-definition digital presentation system — with slide shows, simultaneous displays of multiple images, multi-media presentations with music and computer graphics, and so on. Nearby, the artist may be seen discussing his or her work for today’s ADD-afflicted multitaskers.

In some cases, visitors will be able to see — and contast — the same image in print and digital formats.

And Annenberg, using Microsoft technology, will have 30-inch “Surface tables” that allow visitors to pick images from a collection, using their hands and gestures to interact with them. I think you have to be there to understand this completely, but it sounds neat.

The first show, guided by Houston Museum of Fine Arts curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, includes work by 11 artists, like John Baldessari, Lauren Greenfield and several photographers from the Los Angeles Times.  

LA Times critic Christopher Knight reviewed it here, saying he liked it because it was free and eclectic, approved the selection of artists but not the incoherence of the show, and panned its corporate feel and problematic lighting. I hope to see for myself sometime soon.

Here’s a link to ASP’s website.

Photo: Annenberg Space for Photography 

What is it about opera in Chicago and a dollar bill? In the last year, two companies there have used the buck as a way to draw in people and raise some money at the same time. 

Last year, the Chicago Opera Theater set up a six-week “People’s Opera” contest, asking people to choose the opera, out of three, that they wanted to see produced — for $1 a vote. They selected Mosè in Egitto by Gioachino Rossini, which will open the 2010 Spring Festival Season in Millennium Park next April. Chicago Opera Theater, run creatively by Brian Dickie, raised $40,000 from the voting (including a $16,000 matching grant). Voters chose a work — chronicling Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt — that hadn’t been seen in Chicago since Abraham Lincoln’s days. Britten’s Paul Bunyan came in second; Mozart’s La finta giardiniera placed third.

I was reminded of this yesterday, when I received an email…

[Read more…] about $1 Goes Far for Two Chicago Opera Companies

The National Endowment for the Humanities gets far too little attention, imho. So I took some time this past weekend to look at its most recent round of grants, which were announced earlier this month. Nearly 200 awards worth a total of $20 million were made to cultural institutions, universities and libraries in 36 states and Washington, D.C., plus a couple of scholars working overseas. The grants cover digital humanities, preservation/access, educational and public programs, research and collections.

The biggest award — $1 million — will go to the Asia Society for a traveling exhibition, plus
website, symposium, educational and public programs, catalogue and film on the life of the Buddha. The traveling show focuses on the “art of Buddhist pilgrimages” to sites important in the Buddha’s life. The Asia Society hasn’t issued a press release about this, yet at least, nor is there any further information about it on its website, so the show must be a ways down the road. But it sounds like an interesting show.

The Newberry Library in Chicago actually received more money in this grant round, just over $1.2 million, but that total covers five separate projects involving educational programs, archives, fellowships, and so on. One grant will pay to plan an online and traveling exhibition called “Make Big Plans: Daniel Burnham’s Vision of An American Metropolis,” about the 1909 Plan of Chicago, which is said to be America’s first comprehensive urban plan.

There are plenty of other interesting awards on the grant list. For this post, I focused on those that will aid exhibitions:

• $250,000 to the Brooklyn Museum for a traveling exhibition on the Plains Indian tipi
• nearly $350,000 to the Frick Collection to digitize “deteriorating” photographs of American paintings 
• $300,000 to the Oakland Museum for a permanent gallery on California history
• $350,000 to the University of Illinois at Chicago for a new core exhibition at the Jane Addams-Hull House Museum
• $380,000 to the Peabody-Essex Museum for a traveling and online exhibition called “Fiery Pool: Maya and the Mythic Sea,” plus a catalogue and public programs.

The rest are listed on the NEH website. I know several cultural groups — not just museums, but orchestras and theaters — who say they’ve never applied for an NEH grant.

Depending on the project, they may or may not qualify. But I think there’s more there than many people realize. In 2006, for example, the Frick received a $750,000 challenge grant toward a $3.75 million endowment for a senior decorative arts curator. I mentioned that grant to another museum director recently, who was stunned.

When budget time comes around, the NEH deserves as much support as the NEA.  

Photo: Standing Buddha, Afghanistan, 1st Century