Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Delaware Museum Sells More Art

Homer-MilkingTimeThe Delaware Art Museum issued a statement late yesterday saying that it had sold its beautiful Winslow Homer, Milking Time (at right), and a painting by Andrew Wyeth,  Arthur Cleveland, to pay off its debts.

That makes four art works sold to pay for bad mistakes (overexpansion, imo) by the museum’s board and administration. You’ll remember that the museum has already auctioned off William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil, which fetched £2.5 million in London, and Alexander Calder’s Black Crescent. The Calder was sold privately, as were the two paintings just deaccessioned.

Said the release:

The sales mark the end of a process, announced in March 2014, to protect the Museum from closure by retiring its $19.8 million bond debt….No works of art acquired through gift or bequest were sold. With these sales, the Museum was able to fully repay the debt in September 2014 without significantly depleting its endowment—a vital source of funds that allows the Museum to continue to provide its community with access to collections, quality exhibitions, and important educational programs.

“Today, we close one of the most difficult chapters in the story of the Delaware Art Museum,” said Delaware Art Museum CEO Mike Miller. “We reached our most important goal—keeping the Museum open and thriving. We are very grateful for those who have understood the arduous and complex decisions that we encountered during this long and challenging phase. There has been overwhelming and unyielding support for protecting and preserving this beautiful Museum for our community.”

Many questions remain. The museum did not say whether the new sales would do anything to replenish its endowment, which was was drawn down to meet debt payment deadlines. Further, the museum remains without a director. And the museum was sanctioned by its peers last year; what will it do to try to rejoin the art museum community? And when?

 

“Artless” In America: Why, Oh Why?

What irony. And what a contradiction. Here we are in an era when paintings and sculpture regularly make national headlines and television newscasts for selling at sky-high prices and, at the same time, we are know-nothings about art. And we care less.

181-michael-lindThe latter half of that contradiction was asserted several days ago by Michael Lind (at right), a writer whose last of 14 books (listed on his Wikipedia page) was a 2012 economic history of the U.S. He has also been an editor or staff writer at magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New Republic. Pretty great credentials.

The Smart Set published Lind’s piece called “Artless: Why do intelligent people no longer care about art?” In it, he asserts:

The fine arts don’t matter any more to most educated people. This is not a statement of opinion; it is a statement of fact.

As recently as the late 20th century, well-educated people were expected to be able to bluff their way through a dinner party with at least some knowledge of “the fine arts”— defined, since the late 18th century, as painting, sculpture, orchestral or symphonic music, as distinct from popular music, and dance/ballet. … it would have been a terrible faux pas not to have heard of Martha Graham. You were expected to know the difference between a French impressionist and an abstract expressionist….

[But] As far as I can tell, very few college-educated people under the age of 50 pay any attention to the old fine arts at all.

Lind bases his opinion on his knowledge of the content in ‘zines like Vox and n+1.

But wait for it: Lind goes on to blame the very market that, for now, puts art in headlines most often. By his reasoning,

… It was not the mockery of Pop artists but the capitalist art market itself which, in its ceaseless quest for novelty, trivialized and marginalized the arts….

Markets tend to prize fashionable novelty over continuity. The shocking and sensational get more attention than subtle variations on traditional conventions and themes. Capitalism, applied to the fine arts, created the arms race that led to increasingly drastic departures from premodern artistic tradition, until finally, by the late 20th century, “art” could be everything and therefore nothing….

…The process of escalating sensationalism ultimately reaches its reductio ab absurdum in any fashion-based industry. In the case of painting and sculpture the point of exhaustion was reached by the 1970s with Pop Art and minimalist art and earth art and conceptual art. Can a row of cars be art? Sure. Can an empty canvas be art? Sure. Does anybody care? No.

Lind has a point, but he uses too broad a brush to indict contemporary art. Some art being made today seems empty and does estrange people; but much of it is very creative, sometimes even overloaded with content. Yet is “content,” as he defines it (Pop Art certainly was about something), what makes art either good or bad?

Further, to say that art–and museums–do not feature in today’s publications is simply wrong, and relies on too small a reading sample. Maybe art does not register in the cultural mainstream the way Life magazine and Time magazine, to cite two examples, covered it in the good old days, but you have to blame Time (and the death of Life) and readers, or lack thereof, for that. The U.S. simply lacks a core of publications that everyone reads nowadays. There’s so much more on offer. We no longer have just three TV broadcasters to choose from either. The cultural core has splintered.

What’s more, I’d say from observation that newspapers all over the country regularly cover what is happening in their museums; I see and read a lot of that coverage. Sometimes, to be sure, the coverage is scant on real content. Maybe it’s not enough, maybe it’s not national coverage, but still–it’s coverage.

Further, those well-educated people he cites have a far bigger smorgasbord of activities–cultural and not–to choose to learn about out, enjoy and spend time with now. Why blame art, and art alone?

I share Lind’s concern that many people have never heard of artistic giants–that the only names they may know are Picasso, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Monet, and Jeff Koons (or thereabouts).

But to cite only his perceived emptiness in contemporary art as the reason lets too many other causes and people off the hook. We’ll never fix something if we don’t correctly analyze what’s wrong.

NB: I’M SORRY TO SAY THAT I AM NOT PUBLISHING MOST COMMENTS ON THIS POST, MAINLY BECAUSE THOSE OFFERED SO FAR ARE REPETITIVE COMMENTS BY THE SAME PEOPLE. IF YOU HAVE NOT LEFT A COMMENT PREVIOUSLY ON THE SUBJECT OF “WHAT ART IS AND WHAT IT ISN’T,” I WILL CONSIDER PUBLISHING YOURS. 

The Broad Museum Answers Back

Several days ago, I asked here if any other art museums in the U.S. were spending as much money buying art as the Crystal Bridges Museum. I had added up the announced purchases over the past year or so by Crystal Bridges and it came to more than $150 million.

Robert-Longo-Untitled-Fer-010I could think of only the Broad, which hasn’t opened yet, as a contender. This morning, I received an email from the Broad announcing “more than 50 new artworks added to the Broad collection in anticipation of the September 20 opening.”

But I still think CB is spending more. That’s because:

Most of the additions to the 2,000-work Broad collection built by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad are artworks that were acquired within a year of the artist producing them, reflecting the museum’s commitment to build a dynamic collection of the most comprehensive and current contemporary art.

Interestingly, though, the names at the top of the release are all well-known. They include Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami (with “the largest painting in the Broad collection”), John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool and Damien Hirst, a 1954 combine by Robert Rauschenberg and three sculptures by Cy Twombly. Less-known Goshka Macuga and Ella Kruglyanskaya were also cited.

In its 50,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Broad will install for its inaugural show about 250 works from the 2,050 or so it owns.

Some of the new highlights:

  • Mehretu’s Invisible Sun (algorithm 8, fable form), 2015, an ink-and-acrylic-on-canvas piece “currently on view at the Art Basel art fair in Switzerland.”
  • Robert Longo’s Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014), a charcoal drawing of the Ferguson, Mo. police line last year, after the shooting death of Michael Brown; pictured above.
  • Murakami’s 82-foot-long and 10-foot-high In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow.
  • Macuga’s Death of Marxism, Women of all Lands Unite, Suit for Tichý 4 and Suit for Tichý 5.
  • Kruglyanskaya’s Girl on a Hot Day, 2015.
  • Hirst’s Fear, 2002 (thousands of dead flies thickly encrusted in resin)
  • Wool’s Untitled, 2015, the 20th work by Wool added to the collection
  • John Currin’s Maenads, 2015
  • Ruscha’s BLISS BUCKET, 2010; JET BABY, 2011; PERIODS, 2013; WALL ROCKET, 2013; and HISTORY KIDS, 2013 (five lithographs)
  • Koons’s Hulk (Organ)
  • Baldessari’s Pictures & Scripts: Honey – what words come to mind?, 2015; Horizontal Men, 1984; plus a full set of screenprints from his 2012 Eight Soups series (bringing the collection’s Baldessari holdings to 40 works spanning nearly 50 years).
  • Twombly’s three sculptures brings the collection’s holdings in work by Twombly to 22.

More pictures are here.

Photo Credit: Petzel Gallery via The Guardian

The Met’s Coming Rebranding: A Puzzlement

MetLogoIt’s no secret that Thomas P. Campbell has been working overtime to make his Metropolitan Museum* different from the one he inherited from Philippe de Montebello. And the change has been dramatic–some covered in the press, some not. At least not yet.

But as the King of Siam sings in “The King and I” (and here I will stop to give a commercial to the current production at Lincoln Center Theater; if you haven’t seen it, go. It is one of the best productions I have ever seen of any musical), some of what is going on at the Met is “a puzzlement.”

MetLogo1For example, word is that the Met will soon introduce a new logo. What precisely is holding this up is unclear. I hear from insiders that the design was chosen some time ago. Perhaps the ad campaign isn’t ready? Perhaps there are second thoughts?

Anyway, Campbell–distancing himself from the past–had (I’m told) hired a rebranding consultant. Some say it’s the same one that changed the name of the Tate in London to simply “Tate.” Dropping the article before a proper noun is a trendy thing to do–witness Facebook. But, I’ve noticed, few publications actually drop “the” before Tate. The Whitney, in its new downtown location, also sports a logo that’s just “Whitney,” no “the,” no “museum,” although its press releases and other written materials continue to use the article and the full name, Whitney Museum of American Art. That’s unlike the Tate, which puts horrible sentences like “Tate holds the national collection of British art” and “Tate is a charity” in its materials.

MetLogo2The Met’s consultant also proposed calling the museum at 1000 Fifth Avenue “Met.” That’s it. Someone–perhaps trustees on the board?–rejected that idea. The last I heard, “the” stays; the museum will be called “the Met.”

But a new logo was designed, replacing the one I’ve posted at the top here (a perfectly good logo, if you ask me). It will, I predict, be more streamlined, designed to appeal to the young. I know people who have seen it, and none of them like it. It’s red, not blue or black, and it looks nothing like the current one, which alludes to Leonardo’s Vitruvian man. Will the Met’s new logo refer to art at all?

The Met has had other logos; I’ve pasted two I found on the web here. I anxiously wait to see what the new one looks like.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.

 

 

Crystal Bridges Makes A Few Announcments

d4913730xWhen it come to art purchases, there could  be a “Crystal Bridges” watch–it seems to me that the museum in Bentonville built largely with Alice Walton’s and the Walton Family Foundation’s money is spending more money buying art than another other U.S. museum currently open to the public.

For a short item in tomorrow’s New York Times that is now online (and is a better, longer version than what will be in the print version), I disclose five more big purchases: two sculptures (including Quarantania, at left) and two paintings by Louise Bourgeois purchased through Cheim & Read (worth about $35- to $40 million, all told) and the Jasper Johns’ “Flag” that sold at Sotheby’s last fall for $36 million.

Going back to previous announcements, I totaled up the museum’s purchases over the last several months as costing about $150 million; I also mention a few other, undisclosed purchases that the museum has made, and I identify Alice Walton as the buyer of a big Rothko and a Bourgeois for her personal collection–so far. They may go to the museum, someday.

So, Eli Broad may be spending more–I don’t know–but his museum in Los Angeles doesn’t open until the fall. It may be, too, that Mitchell Rales, who owns Glenstone (currently closed), Peter Brandt, whose space in Connecticut is open by appointment, or another big art buyer is stashing things away in their private museums. But public? If another public museum is buying more art than CB, I’d like to know. (Not acquiring–i.e., by gift–buying.)

Read the item here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’sÂ