Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

New Web Resources Everywhere, It Seems

Hard on the heels of the recent announcement by the Vatican, that its bounteous library had begun digitizing all 82,000 manuscripts in its 135 collections — thanks to help from the Japanese Japanese technology group NTT Data — the Tate has made available a rich artistic resource. It’s called Audio Arts, and it consists of 245 hours of more than 1,640 interviews with artists, critics and other art world figures. This one is already available here.

Beuys+Furlong_1985As the Tate’s press release describes it:

The list of interviewees …includes some of the most important artists of the late twentieth century. It features, among others, Marina Abramovic, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, John Cage, Tacita Dean, Michael Craig-Martin, Tracey Emin, Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor, Ellsworth Kelly, John Latham, Richard Long, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Nancy Spero, Sam Taylor-Wood, Mark Wallinger, Andy Warhol and Rachel Whiteread. Many artists were interviewed when they were beginning to be known, and subsequently at later dates, shedding light on the trajectory of their artistic careers and the development of their ideas and views.

This archive, acquired from Bill Furlong (seen interviewing Joseph Beuys) in 2004, involved more than “350 boxes of taped interviews on reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes and digital formats, as well as other material such as mock-ups of each issue, associated correspondence and photographs.” They’ve all been digitized over the past two years, with support from The Rootstein Hopkins Foundation.

More details are here. Start listening.

 

Now Hirshhorn Loses Interim Director

The job of Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution, just got a little harder. Kurin has been responsible for the search for a director of the Hirshhorn Museum since last spring. You’ll recall that former director Richard Koshalek stepped down after his seasonal inflatable bubble idea was killed by the Smithsonian amid board turmoil at the Hirshhorn and questions about who’d pay for it.

kerry_brougherKurin appointed Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s deputy director and chief curator, to be interim director. Kurin, about the same time as the scathing resignation of trustee Constance Caplan, said he’d convene a search committee and begin the search toward the end of last July.

Strangely, director searches take a year or more to settle on the right person. But now Brougher is leaving to be head of the museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news last week, saying:

Landing the seasoned museum executive is a coup for the high-profile $300 million project, which is slated to break ground at the end of the year under the aegis of architect Renzo Piano in the renovated May Co. building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus. The museum, a top priority of Academy CEO Dawn Hudson, has been the source of some concern in recent months over how it will balance the populist appeal of Hollywood with the strong intellectual rigor of a top-notch museum.

It makes sense for Brougher, who has a masters in the history of film and television from UCLA,  but clearly he is not leaving controversy behind.

THR went on to say:

It is unclear what title Brougher will be given at the museum. In an interview Friday, the AMPAS museum’s managing director, Bill Kramer, told THR that the museum committee had recently chosen the institution’s “creative leader,” noting “the announcement will take place very, very soon” but declining to identify the selected individual or specify whether the person would be named an executive director or chief curator or some combined role. He explained that the hold-up is, at this point, merely “an HR issue.”

“An HR issue”? That’s more than a little odd. I hope Brougher can quell the disagreements there. I also wish Kurin good luck with a search — fast. Nothing worse that a museum adrift and a board in turmoil.

Meantime, THR recently provided a look inside the fledgling museum in this gallery.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Washington Post

 

At Last: NEH To Get A New Chief

Yesterday, President Obama announced his new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities: Dr. William “Bro” Adams, the current president of Colby College in Maine, a position he has held since 2000. Adams announced his impending retirement from Colby — in June — at the start of 2013.

bro_hires_2005Previously, Adams had been president of Bucknell University, 1995 to 2000, and before that he was vice president and secretary of Wesleyan University, 1993 to 1995. He has also been program coordinator of the “Great Works in Western Culture” program at Stanford University, from 1986 to 1988.

In making the announcement, the President cited Adams’s “demonstrated leadership and decades of experience as an administrator at major universities and liberal arts institutions” and his “clear dedication and lifelong commitment to the humanities.”

Adams has a B.A. from the Colorado College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, though the announcement did not cite what subjects he focused on. It did say he has taught at Stanford, Santa Clara University and the University of North Carolina (political philosophy at the latter two).  He also served in the Vietnam War as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army.  He was a Fulbright Scholar in 1977, a time during which he “conducted research at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.” He’s also a member of the Board of Directors of the Maine Film Center and the Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation.

I don’t see any books by him in any database/website so there seems to be little trail of his intellectual interests.

When Adams announced his retirement, Adams said he’d like to complete a book about French philosophy and art, referencing his time in Paris. He also said that he and his wife were “going to remain residents of Maine and certainly stay involved in some ways in the Waterville community.” Guess not now!

Based on this information, he seems to be an administrator rather than an intellectual powerhouse, but we shall see.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Colby College

 

Detroit News Also Takes Stand Against Art Sale

Here’s that paper’s opinion piece: Offers to save DIA would mean big trade-offs for city, pensioners.

DIA-DNThe Detroit News  is less emotional about the riches in the Detroit Institute of Arts than its rival Free Press, but a column by Daniel Howes too argues against a sale and for the so-called grand bargain (foundations ponying up money to secure the DIA’s art from sale and remove it from city ownership). An excerpt:

The DIA is the central battleground in Detroit’s high-stakes bankruptcy and the prize is winning the support of pensioners who have the power to achieve one of two things, mainly: Take the richer DIA fund deal offered by Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, or reject it, lose the additional funding and steel themselves for what is shaping up to be a bankruptcy cramdown of epic proportions….

[Judge] Rhodes, who has demonstrated an admirable ability to call BS from any and all sides when he sees it, doubtless will be obliged to consider the DIA alternatives filed Wednesday. He’ll see that the FGIC offer says the DIA fund isn’t what it purports to be. Details of the offers matter, but so does the fact that federal bankruptcy laws holds that only the city in a Chapter 9 case can decide to sell any, all or none of the DIA assets.

That’s why the DIA fund, raised mostly from Michigan-based donors, is so critical. The four potential alternatives offered by FGIC range from a low of $895 million from Yuan Management Hong Kong Limited for 116 works to a $2 billion loan from Art Capital Group LLC. It proposes to use the entire DIA collection as collateral for a loan to be serviced by the foundations and DIA donors.

How those proceeds would be used and to benefit which creditor class or classes is not clear — but it should be to pensioners who would be the sole beneficiaries of the DIA fund being offered by the foundations, state and DIA donors. That’s why the Big Money guys are so unhappy.

Good for him too.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Detroit News

 

 

Detroit Free Press Takes Strong Stance

“Buzzards”…”Hands off our stuff, you soulless, greedy, scavenging vultures”….”bald stupidity involved in selling off the DIA”…”The whole idea of municipal bankruptcy is to prevent this kind of shortsighted destruction”…”would destroy the state’s most important cultural asset”…”Chopping up the collection at the DIA would be a brutal and culturally ignorant extension of that very dynamic”…

DIA-galleriesThose are some of the strong words contained in an editorial in today’s Detroit Free Press, from a writer named Stephen Henderson, the Freep‘s editorial page editor and the host of American Black Journal. Good for him. I won’t quote the whole thing here, of course — I can’t — but there are choice bits worth reproducing.

Such as:

Take pieces that are part of a public collection and sell them into privacy for the super-rich. It drips with a galling elitism that says art is for the privileged, not people in cities like Detroit….

It’s even more insulting than the efforts made by creditors to pit protection of the art collection against the efforts to protect pensioners, which falsely sets up a zero sum game by which the city shouldn’t be able to manage both interests….

FGIC is way out of line, offering to hock Detroit’s cultural soul in a process that’s designed to protect citizens from that kind of fleecing….

And finally:

And the art? It ought to stay exactly where it is, in the museum that collected it for the people of this city.

Well said, all of it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Detroit Free Press