Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Mass MoCA Dreams Big: And Wakes Up Almost Middle-Aged

With the stroke of Gov. Deval Patrick’s pen a few weeks ago, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art got the go-ahead to realize the nearly 30-year-old dream of transforming a 19th century, 26-building, 16-acre factory complex into a destination arts center that would also help revive the economy of North Adams, Mass.

p_mass_mocaAs the art world knows, the road has been a bit bumpy and, along the way, the vision has changed. But Mass MoCA has hit something of a groove of late, giving state officials the confidence to allocate $25.4 million from state coffers for the expansion. Now, under director Joe Thompson (pictured below) — who’s been there for 29 years, from the beginning — it will reclaim almost all of the 600,000 square feet campus. Massachusetts taxpayers’ money will pay for the necessary infrastructure improvements, for fitting out the parts of the factory complex that are not currently in use, to make them ready for more art.

I tell that story, in detail, in this coming Sunday’s New York Times, in the Arts & Leisure section. The expansion raises questions — can he raise the additional money required? Will his plan — which draws on partners to lend art — swamp Mass MoCA’s stated mission of seeking “to catalyze and support the creation of new art,” put elsewhere as being “a laboratory for art-making”? Is Mass MoCA really, as local state representative Gailanne Cariddi said recently, “something of a national poster child for how the arts and creativity can be generators of jobs and economic growth,” or is it unique?

But so much got left out! As usual. So let me make a few additional points about Mass MoCA here.

  • JThompsonThompson is one of those museum directors who still keep their hand in curating, along with his two visual arts curators, Susan Cross and Denise Markonish. I think it’s a good idea for directors to do that, when they can. Among Thompson’s efforts were Cai Guo Qiang’s “Inopportune: Stage One,” that smashup of nine cars that later hung in the atrium of the Guggenheim, and Xu Bing’s “Phoenix,” the two gigantic birds made of detritus that are now on view at St. John the Divine Cathedral. I saw the Xu Bing work in North Adams last summer, and I confess it was one of the things — aside from the investment from the state — that got me reinterested in Mass MoCA.
  • Thompson said that “Lewitt was an eye-opener for me” — referring to the gigantic installation of Sol Lewitt’s works that has been in place there since 2008. That is for two reasons: it gave Mass MoCA something of a permanent collection (technically semi-permanent) and it created the model that Thompson is using to expand. That is, he’ll borrow works on long-term loan from foundations, collectors, artists. We love the art he’s getting, but there’s a bit of a problem — many people come explicitly for these “masters” exhibits, not the new art Mass MoCA wants to midwife. Mass MoCA’s art-laboratory image, therefore, may be swamped by the long-term installations of contemporary masterworks.
  • Expect some announcements on those coming partnerships this fall. (BTW, Art in America magazine hailed these partnership as “a template for other ambitious museums with limited resources.”)
  • One measure of a museum’s curatorial success is how many of the shows it originates travel to other museums. Because Mass MoCA’s key asset is space — lots of it — it’s not quite fair to use this as a criterion of success. ““I wish there would be more partner places, but I’d rather not compromise just so a show can travel,” Markonish told me. However, some do travel — and even her “Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America,” a survey  that included 100 works by 62 artists and was deemed “a revelation” by Boston Globe critic Sebastian Smee, went to Calgary and the Maritime Provinces. But it had to be split into four venues in each place.
  • TFernandez_1How does Thompson feel about being a model for the kind of “Our Town” projects that Rocco Landesman encouraged when he was NEA chief with grants to foster “arts-based community development”? “I get calls all the time from people who have a large industrial building in a financially struggling town asking for the recipe,” he told me. But it’s not that simple — the enticing Berkshires have a lot to do with Mass MoCA’s success. “We probably have a higher density of art assets per capita than any other place in the U.S., except maybe Santa Fe,” Thompson said. “Even with these resources, it’s not easy.”
  • At the nearby Clark Art Institute, director Michael Conforti mentioned a reason that the “synergy” the Clark has with Mass MoCA is about to get better: The Clark’s recent move into 20th century art. “In times past, people might go to Mass MoCA but it’s not necessarily the same group coming here to see our Piero de la Francesca and Degas,” he said. “But we are recognizing that the 20th century is art history, and that may result in a closer link with Mass MoCA audiences.”
  • Many artists still want to go to Mass MoCA for residencies and for shows. That’s part of the current Teresita Fernandez exhibit at right. Coming up in a couple years: Nick Cave, who reportedly wants to “reinvent his practice.”

In some ways, I think it’s fair to say, Mass MoCA is no longer the scrappy upstart it once was. But I think that’s ok. Every institution evolves and ages.

Ethics 101 For Dealers: Deaccessioning

Are dealers are “accessories” to an ethical violation if they agree to sell works of art for museums, like the Delaware Art Museum (pictured below), that are selling to raise money for capital or operational purposes? Accessories to criminal acts may, after all, be guilty of an infraction.

That’s the underlying question, but not my point, in a short piece I wrote, published today, on a  a new(ish) website based in London and with an international audience, mainly of art and antiques dealers.

Delaware-Art-MuseumThe site, Art Antiques Design, was started by a former antiques dealer named Elliot Lee, and he describes it as “a virtual meeting place and a connector for art, antiques and design professionals. It is a bridge for integration, learning and dialogue between these three markets.” Lee says he advocates greater transparency in the art markets. 

My piece, headlined Ethics for Dealers: Deaccessioning, was meant to provoke thinking on the issue, not criminalize business. What I learned in the reporting of it is that none of the dealer trade associations I checked with, including the Art Dealers Association of America and the Private Art Dealers Association, mention the issue in their codes of ethics — if they have a code of ethics. Dealers are obviously self-policing, and just obviously these groups could expel a member for bad behavior. But wouldn’t it be better to have something written down?

I did not cover the auction houses in the piece — for obvious reasons. They usually get the business from deaccessioners for any purpose because they seem more transparent than private dealers. In actuality, probably just a little. But they are bigger, corporate businesses, and they’re not going to quibble about the motive of a consignor (most probably).

I’ve written two other short pieces for AAD, both much lighter in topic and tone. One was about Art Everywhere US, here, and the other a trifle on the Jeff Koons handbag offered to Whitney Museum members in an “exclusive” way that was not so exclusive under examination — but was a great marketing tool. 

You might check out AAD. I won’t be cross-posting everything here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy MC McGrath

Name The Best Four Hudson River School Paintings — To Go On Stamps

On Monday, the Nelson-Atkins Museum announced that its wonderful Grand Canyon painting by Thomas Moran, from 1912, would grace a Forever stamp as part of an homage to the Hudson River School of artists — it’s one of four tributes.

What are the other three paintings? (I got no other press notices.) Were the other three museums, as the Post Office would choose only from works held in the public domain, mum on the honor? Guess so. But I looked it up.

As you can well imagine, the other three artists in this series are Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand and Frederic Church. Who’s got the best of their works? According to the Post Office:

  • For Cole, the choice was chose Distant View of Niagara Falls, from 1830, which is in the collection of  The Art Institute of Chicago.
  • For Durand, it was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Summer Afternoon, from 1865.
  • For Church, the Post Office selected Sunset, from 1856, from the collection of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, NY.

Here’s what they’ll look like:

689504-01-main-600x600

They all go on sale on Aug. 21, as part of the American Treasures series. You can order them here.

You can read much more about the Moran painting in the Nelson-Atkins press release.

 

Corcoran Case: Over. “Painful.” But Necessary, Alas?

Judge rules that mergers can proceed, a headline about the Corcoran Gallery of Art cy pres case would say. But the decision, D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert Okun made, he said, was “painful.”

Corcoran Gallery via APThat’s sort of how I have felt from the beginning: it’s a bad situation and it’s pretty hard to dream up a way to save the Corcoran as it was. The Corcoran’s troubles and management/governance, or lack thereof, had simply got too bad, and the Corcoran was damaged goods. I never believed in the plan of Wayne Reynolds to save it; in the long run, I feared, he would have become a black knight, not a white one.

Okun’s order “effectively dissolves the Corcoran as an independent entity,” the Washington Business Journal quoted him as saying. He added:

This court would find it even more painful to deny the relief requested and allow the Corcoran to face its likely demise — the likely dissolution of the college, the closing of the gallery and the dispersal of the gallery’s entire collection.

You can read his entire Corcoran Order at that hotlink. A few more excerpts, via WBJ:

The issue before the court is not whether the Corcoran could have been managed more efficiently over the past decade, but whether it currently is impracticable for the Trustees to carry out the existing deed of trust….

Undoubtedly, Mr. Corcoran would not be pleased by this turn of events. It seems likely, however, that he would be pleased to see that the college will be preserved through its partnership with the very university to which he donated both property and his company’s archives … and that the gallery will be preserved through its partnership with one of the country’s pre-eminent art institutions.

Though it is the most practical solution, the Corcoran’s board and management still have a lot of proving to do. Their sometimes questionable behavior during this saga — including the reneging last week on a job this September for adjunct professor Jayme McLellan, a co-founder of the Save the Corcoran group that opposed this plan vocally and in court — will have to be rectified, with, I hope, some magnanimous gestures.

Meanwhile, Save the Corcoran’s attorney was gracious in defeat. He said in a statement:

While this is not our vision for the Corcoran, we received a full and fair trial and are grateful that we were given the opportunity to defend the legacy of one of the oldest and most beloved museums in the nation,” he said. “We wish GW and the National Gallery all the best as the new stewards of Mr. Corcoran’s gifts.

Save the Corcoran will  not appeal. It’s over. The Corcoran will now merge with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University. Details are here, from the NGA.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Associated Press

Museum-Goers Say The Darndest Things

3 El Morocco New YorkWinograndRemember the old Art Linkletter “House Party” TV show feature, “Kids Say the Darndest Things”? Linkletter would interview kids and they would provide answers that boggled the mind, either because they were funny or poignant.

I couldn’t help think of it yesterday, after a visit to the Metropolitan Museum.* Among the exhibits I visited was Garry Winogrand, which consists of “more than 175 of the artist’s iconic images, a trove of unseen prints, and even Winogrand’s famed series of photographs made at the Metropolitan Museum in 1969 when the Museum celebrated its centennial.” It’s “a rigorous overview of Winogrand’s complete working life and reveals for the first time the full sweep of his career,” the museum says. 

On my way out, I stopped to look at the book where visitors leave comments. “Good exhibit,” the last person wrote. Then I noticed that he or she had ranked the exhibit, on a scale of 1 to 10, and a 3.

My eyes went back to the comment line: “You should colorize them,” it said.

Photo Credit: © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, Courtesy of the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

* I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.