CultureGrrl

Why do I bother trying to do serious journalism, anyway?

This post, in which I reported my discovery of a 2004 obit for one Robin Gunningham of Bristol (the same name and town of the person identified as, possibly, the elusive guerilla artist, Banksy) is, at this writing, Number One on the Google hit parade that appears when you search, "Robin Gunningham." (The implication of my discovery is that the cunning Gunningham name-dropper could be a hoaxster, meaning that the true identity of Banksy remains secret.)

I'm not aware of anyone in the mainstream media picking this up. Even Time magazine seems to have bought the far-from-convincing story that originated in London's Mail on Sunday. But there sure has been a lot of Internet buzz created by my little piece of digital detective work. (Suspecting identity theft, I went straight to the high-numbered Google search pages for Gunningham, and came upon the late, lamented Robin.)

You would not believe how much blog traffic is coming to me because of this throwaway item. No one cares a jot about Tadao Ando's concrete or Michael Conforti's antiquities analysis.

What am I doing here? I've learned my lesson.

COMING NEXT: Larry Gagosian unmasked: He is Steve Martin. (Just kidding.)

Michael Conforti, Director of Clark Art Institute and President of AAMD

When we sat down for a chat at the new Stone Hill Center last month, Michael Conforti, director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, must have thought he was talking with Rosenbaum, not CultureGrrl. He asserts that he never reads blogs (although he's been known to read posts forwarded to him by others).

As the new president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, with a two-year term for a post that formerly lasted one year, Conforti is in a position to implement many of his well-honed principles of museum governance. I was particularly interested to see if he agreed with the premise behind my recent cultural-property posts (here and here), in which I made specific suggestions about what the next steps towards a ceasefire in the antiquities wars ought to be.

CultureGrrl: It seems to me that the next step in the antiquities guidelines should be: "What do you do with the stuff you've already got?" Are you going to develop guidelines about what museums should do about claims?

Conforti: This [the most recent antiquities guidelines issued by AAMD] is focused on prospective acquisitions. My goal at AAMD is to get people to start talking about other things that we can do with one another. What the Italians were very anxious about has now been returned. They feel quite good about that. The point is: What is the Italian public interested in? It's not antiquities; it's Impressionism! We send more objects to Italy on loan than Italy sends to us.

Once you start to talk about things like that openly, in an environment of trust, you're going to have a different conversation. I can't say there will be no more requests for things, but that's certainly not the future of conversation between Italy and the United States. It has to be about other things. I think that's true of many countries. Italy may be a little more willing at this point, because of the particular nature of return. But I think we're going to see that the Americans are now in harmony with much of the rest of the world and we can start engaging with the rest of the world without focusing on what we've done in the past vs. what we might do in the future.

CultureGrrl: Does AAMD have no intention to draw up guidelines about what to do with works already in American museums' collections?

Conforti: We have our guidelines: The guidelines are about [future] acquisitions. We do allow for gifts or even purchases of objects with an unclear provenances after 1970. I think we are doing this responsibly and it won't happen very often, because we are putting them on our website [none are listed yet] and we're very open about that. So there will be a return policy then, if something occurs.

If there are claims for objects with unclear post-1970 provenances, I know that American institutions will respond responsibly, but I'm not sure that's where the future will be. We're talking 30-35 years here, and how much was actually collected and what else do we have to deal with? Is it all about moving those things around, back and forth?

Our world cannot be about dismembering institutions that were established in the past. They're part of our intellectual history. Traditions of associating objects with power were long established, from ancient Roman times to the Renaissance and the rest. We've moved away from that now but to what degree do we go back and change it?

CultureGrrl: What do you want to do with AAMD in the next two years?

Conforti: We have many challenges: the continuation of the communication regarding the new guidelines, and we're in the process of long-range planning. We now have an executive committee of the board of trustees and we're having our first meeting next week [the week of June 23]. Glenn Lowry [Museum of Modern Art], Melissa Chiu [Asia Society], Tim Rub [Cleveland Museum] and I are going to meet in Glenn's office. We will be talking about next stage, particularly our search process [for a new executive director, replacing Mimi Gaudieri] and our long-range planning process. [I later asked Conforti for details about that meeting, after it occurred, but he said that information was confidential.] 

We have an intention to be as open and as communicative with media as we can and that may not have always been as consistent in the past. These are the messages we're anxious to communicate, so that not only the American public but, particularly, Washington knows what great value art museums are to culture. I think we sometimes, in the noise around other things, have missed that.

CultureGrrl: Do you have any interest in the position that I nominated you for?

Conforti: I have no intention of being anywhere but here at the Clark....This [who should succeed Philippe at the Met] is something that museum directors never talk about. Not only don't we talk about it because it's not polite. It's just that there are so many other things to talk about. The last people to ask are the museum directors.

If you haven't had enough yet on the topic of international cultural-property issues, here's a recent KCRW, Santa Monica, radio colloquy between Conforti and James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of a controversial book on the cultural-property wars:

 

Many new buildings have "punch lists"---things that didn't get done quite right the first time and need to be fixed or replaced. At the new Tadao Ando-designed Stone Hill Center built by the Williamstown Art Conservation Center and the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, the problems involve the window shades and the building material that Ando is most famous for---concrete.

Here's what the shades look like now (at the top of the window, pointed out by Lisa Green, the Clark's director of communications and design):



Lisa told me that the white pull-down shades (none of which were in use in the public spaces during the recent press preview) would be replaced with inserts that will fit within the window frames, to show off the building's design details to best advantage. The color of the scrim in these inserts will be gray instead of white, which she said would allow visitors "to see outside more."

That's the simple part. There are, as I suggested in my earlier Clark/Ando post, significant problems with the appearance of the concrete, not all of which are as easily changed as window treatments.

Green, who conceded that there were some defects, said that Ando had approved the concrete and had had the option to reject it. Still, I doubt this is the level of craftsmanship to which he is accustomed in Japan:


pitting...

Because I've been posting less, I've dropped the ball on a number of recent developments on stories that we've been following. Here's a quick catch-up rundown:

---Jacques Steinberg of the NY Times reports that "construction workers have begun dismantling the scaffolding that has encased the Guggenheim Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for nearly three years." I recently learned from a construction-company source that a ceremony related to this major makeover is scheduled for Sept. 22.

But that doesn't mean that the restoration is almost done. Eleanor Goldhar, the Guggenheim's deputy director for external affairs, acknowledged the Sept. 22 event, but told me: "No completion date is confirmed to me yet." And while part of the Guggenheim at the end of June looked like this (freshly painted, but with visible flaws, such as the chipped edge to the right of the street sign)...



...the bulk of it still looked like this (my shot of the not-so-grand entrance):



---UNESCO's World Heritage Committee, at its meeting earlier this month in Quebec, issued an ultimatum to the French administrators of Lascaux, the famed prehistoric site in Dordogne. WHC called on France to address expeditiously the serious condition problems afflicting the renowned cave paintings, or else risk seeing its iconic but publicly inaccessible site placed on next year's list of World Heritage in Danger.

According to a press release (not online) from the ad hoc International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux, the WHC has instructed Lascaux's administrators to:

• Make an impact study prior to any further interventions in the cave.
• Invite a WHC mission inside Lascaux to examine the current conditions of the cave.
• Submit to the WHC a conservation report by February 1, 2009 on the specific causes of the damage to the paintings with a view to considering, in the absence of substantial progress in finding out the cause of the damage to the art, the possible inscription of the cave on the 2009 List of World Heritage in Danger.

I could find no information about this development on the WHC's website; my e-mailed requests for WHC's report or comments has not yet been answered. But John Lichfield of the Independent has the story about the recent Lascaux lashing.

---Donn Zaretsky of the Art Law Blog comments on my post about the Vuitton-Murakami Morass and offers his legal analysis (with which reasonable lawyers and bloggers may disagree) of the litigation over the sale of limited-edition canvases at LA MOCA.

---James Reginato in W magazine discusses another of the Middle East's planned new museums---the I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar. Reginato reports:

Qatar has been just as ambitious [as other Middle East venues] in its aspirations to become a cultural center, but by starting with a focus specifically on Islamic culture, the country has been doing it in a more homegrown way. Unlike Abu Dhabi, furthermore, Qatar is not renting art....

During the past decade, representatives of the Al-Thani family---most famously, an art- and antiquities-obsessed cousin of the Emir, Sheikh Saud---have purchased almost every significant piece of Islamic art that has come on the market. Meanwhile, planning for the country's other major institution, a Qatar National Museum designed by Jean Nouvel, is well under way.

---The Shelby White divestments continue: Maria Petrakis of Bloomberg reports that the American collector, who recently relinquished nine antiquities to Italy (with a 10th to be dispatched in 2010), has now "agreed to return two antiquities from her private collection to Greece. The section of a tomb stele, dating to the early 4th century B.C., and the bronze calyx wine bowl from 340 B.C. will be returned this month."

I particularly like the fact that the stele fragment will be reunited with its lower segment---a nice small-scale precedent for you-know-what.

Speaking of which, Marbles Reunited, the British group lobbying for reassembling the sundered Parthenon frieze, announces that it has named a new campaign director, Thomas Dowson.

---Lots of journalists have been reporting that the New Acropolis Museum in Athens will open in September. But my source at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture tells me the much delayed event won't happen until "late 2008 or early 2009" (unless they postpone again!).

Not Coptic: Limestone Relief of a Paralytic Carrying a Bed on His Back, Brooklyn Museum

For those of you who have heard my WNYC commentary, Fake Art at the Brooklyn Museum, here's more:

Edna Russman, Brooklyn's curator of Egyptian art, told me last week that the problem pieces that will be displayed as part of the museum's Coptic sculpture show, Feb. 13-May 10, were known to have come from Egypt, especially from the village of Sheikh Ibada. The limestone from which they were composed was, in fact, unearthed from authentic Coptic sites.

Those sites, she said, were being dug up "mostly by people looking for papyrus. They threw the stone blocks around." The modern fakes were made "on the remains of very damaged ancient pieces." They traveled first to Europe (primarily Switzerland), then to the U.S.

Brooklyn's 10 outright forgeries and five substantially reworked pieces were acquired in the 1950s through early 1970s, mostly through purchase but partly through gift. By the late 1970s, doubts were already being raised by Thelma Thomas, now associate professor at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts and Gary Vikan, now director of the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. (We can only hope Vikan will soon add an entry about this contretemps to his own very lively and opinionated blog on the Walters' website.)

At first, the American scholars' doubts (which ran counter to the views of respected authorities in Europe) were "just one opinion," Kevin Stayton, Brooklyn's chief curator and vice director for curatorial affairs, told me last week. "It sometimes takes years for conviction to grow in a curatorial body." It's always considered a worse crime to demote a piece that's authentic than to allow a piece to be deemed innocent until proven guilty.

Russman noted that a previous generation of scholars had wanted to believe that the sculptures contained Christian imagery (hence the name "Coptic," which refers to early Christianity in Egypt), but they were "making it up as they went along." The forgeries, with unambiguous Christian references, played to preconceptions of the time.

Brooklyn was already revising its view of the period (4th-7th century A.D.) by the time of its 1997 handbook of the permanent collection, which noted that an illustrated Coptic openwork relief, although "almost certainly" created for a religious building, was nevertheless "completely lacking in Christian iconography." This illustrated "the problems inherent in interpreting 'Coptic' as an exclusively religious designation."

The cardinal rule of fake detection is that spurious works generally remain convincing for, at most, a generation, because they reflect the tastes and prejudices of the era in which they were produced. Stayton told me:

We are now able to look back and see these objects as fakes. But with an object made for our own tastes, we would have a harder time.

The lesson to be learned, he said, is that "we always have to be very careful," examining provenance and thinking "about whether a piece is too good to be true."

Kudos to Martin Bailey of The Art Newspaper for breaking the story, and Kate Taylor of the NY Sun for a fascinating follow-up.

Richard Dearden, Freedom of Information Fighter

The Ottawa Citizen newpaper wants to know what issues are involved in the David Franklin/National Gallery of Canada court battle and it's initiating its own court battle to find out. Federal Court Deputy Judge Orville Frenette on Wednesday had ordered the permanent sealing of the file pertaining to Franklin's application for "a judicial review."

Paula McCooey of the Citizen reports:

Citizen lawyer Richard Dearden [above] says the paper will be filing a motion seeking to unseal the file on the grounds that it infringes the open court principle and Charter guarantees of freedom of the press.

"This is a highly unusual order in that it orders that the registry return to counsel for the parties any and all documents filed in connection with the judicial review application," Mr. Dearden said, adding the media should have been given proper notice about the sealing of the documents so they would have had an opportunity to make arguments against the ban. "There was no need for absolute secrecy in this case."

Fight on, Fearsome Dearden! Citizens (and inquiring Citizen journalists) have a right to know.

My New York Public Radio segment on the Brooklyn Museum's Coptic art fakes was bumped to Monday by an story on Iran (fair enough) but it's up on their website today and I've got permission to post it on CultureGrrl.

For those of you who still want to hear it on the radio, I'm told that it will air at 7:30 a.m. But these things can change (and probably will).

At any rate, you can listen now by clicking the arrow below (or WNYC's website) and I'll post more on the topic next week, after this airs. For now, I'll only add that I stole the quip at the end of my comments from Samuel Sachs II, who, many years ago, was discussing the Minneapolis Institute of Arts' "Fakes and Forgeries" show of 1973 (when he was that museum's director).

I will never call WNYC's studios "shabby" again. Today I visited New York Public Radio's shiny new headquarters, to tape a segment (which, if all goes according to plan, will be aired tomorrow on Morning Edition) about the upcoming Brooklyn Museum exhibition of Coptic stone sculptures, real and fake. I'm no longer caged in a glass booth, but I can't see host Soterios Johnson, even though he sits opposite me, because that plump new microphone is in my face.

I wonder if I'll sound better on the new equipment!

In any event, you can listen live online here tomorrow morning. (I don't know the time yet.) If you're in the New York metropolitan area, tune in to 93.9 FM or 820 AM.

I'll post the link to the audio podcast on CultureGrrl tomorrow, when available.

David Franklin, on leave and in court

When David Franklin suddenly went "on leave" July 2 from his post as deputy director of the National Gallery of Canada, the museum's director of public affairs, Joanne Charette, told me:

The man has a right to his privacy....Eventually, there will be further explanation.

Now there is: Yesterday he went to court against both the museum and its director, Pierre Théberge, who had announced previously that he would be leaving his post once a new director was appointed. Franklin had been thought to be a possible candidate, according to press accounts.

Paul Gessell of the Ottawa Citizen reports:

Deputy Judge Orville Frenette dismissed Franklin's application for "a judicial review." Frenette's short, written ruling did not reveal what Franklin wanted reviewed. The judge also ordered the court file "permanently sealed," denying access to the public in perpetuity....The Ottawa Citizen has learned that Franklin feared Théberge was unfairly trying to fire him or to otherwise thwart his career ambitions.

That last loaded sentence from Gessell's story appeared in the version of his report on Canada.com's above-linked Global TV website, but not on its Ottawa Citizen website.

Whatever the issues, it's a safe bet that we've not heard the last of what Gessell calls "a veritable civil war at the National Gallery."

At this writing, my e-mailed and phoned requests for further clarification from Joanne Charette, the museum's director of public affairs, have not been answered. I will update if more news becomes available.

UPDATE: Charette ignored my detailed questions but has just sent me this press release. It still gives Franklin his museum title and says that he is still working on an upcoming museum show:

The National Gallery is delighted to announce the exclusive presentation of the exhibition "Raphael to Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome," on view May 29 to Sept. 6, 2009.  Deputy Director and Chief Curator David Franklin continues to devote his efforts...to this unique exhibit....

Dr. Franklin has been working hard and focusing his efforts on assembling what is expected to be the largest exhibit of major pieces of art from the Renaissance Rome period (1500 to 1600) ever held outside of Rome itself....

As the exhibition lead curator, Dr. Franklin was released from his institutional duties to support his writing of the main essay and numerous catalogue entries and he is also acting as editor of the exhibition catalogue.

Some enterprising reporter needs to get hold of Dr. Franklin and reveal the real picture beneath the whitewash.

SECOND UPDATE: The chary Charette has just sent me this reply to my follow-up e-mail asking for answers to my questions:

I have communicated all that I can. David Franklin is working on the Raphael exhibition. He will then resume is full duties of Deputy Director and Chief Curator.

That last bit is something we didn't know (and still wonder about).

Three limited-edition "Monogramouflage" canvases in the Vuitton boutique at the Brooklyn Museum's recent Murakami show

I've always thought that ceding a museum's nonprofit space to a for-profit Louis Vuitton boutique (as occurred at the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brooklyn Museum) was a bad idea and an even worse precedent.

But never did I anticipate the negative outcome that has now occurred. As most of you by now probably know, the show has ended but the bad taste lingers on: LA MOCA is now stuck with defending itself in court against a lawsuit by someone who bought limited edition Murakami canvases at the museum's Vuitton shop. The plaintiff, Clint Arthur, says those works lacked documentation legally required in California. (Mike Boehm of the LA Times article describes the lawsuit in greater detail here.)

Unsurprisingly, Vuitton, through a spokesperson, told me that "this lawsuit has no merit" and added: "We intend to vigorously defend ourselves against this baseless litigation." All the same, officials at the Brooklyn Museum, where the show and its handbag emporium have just closed, must be biting their fingernails.

While the show was still open, I asked Adam Husted, Brooklyn's media relations manager, whether there were any signs that his museum might be drawn into a similar lawsuit. (New York's print-disclosure statute was modeled on California's and contains similar requirements for documentation.)

Husted's reply:

The Museum is not being sued and there are no indications that we may be. Vuitton is solely responsible for the store. I believe that the works [the limited-edition canvases] are still on sale, but Vuitton would have to confirm that and whether anything has changed.

Museums cannot afford---ethically or (in light of the possible legal costs) financially---to disclaim knowledge or responsibility for what goes on smack in the middle of their own exhibitions. After what happened in LA, Brooklyn had little excuse for eschewing due diligence---especially since the dispute involved the sale of artworks within the confines of an art museum.