I’m flushing the matzo out of my brain cells with strong coffee and have returned to posting, thanks to those of you who met the CultureGrrl Challenge (more on that below).
So here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for—CultureGrrl in Swedish! As I mentioned last week (scroll to bottom), I was interviewed by Mårten Arndtzén, art critic/reporter for Sveriges Radio (Swedish public radio) about the controversies over the New Museum’s Joannou show and LA MOCA’s Deitch directorship.
My Swedish is a little rusty, so I used my fluent English for this interview (which yielded two soundbites), preceded by more expansive comments (also in English) from Noah Kupferman, a private client manager for U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management, who teaches a course on art as a financial asset at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. (Noah had previously been interviewed for the NY Times‘ front-page story about issues raised by the Joannou show.) He described the relationship between the New Museum and its collector/trustee as “incestuous”—a word that Arndtzén appreciatively savored in Swedish.
If it starts working again, you can hear us here, by clicking the blue text after the first paragraph. The audio had worked for me yesterday, but didn’t this morning. (UPDATE: The audio seems to work better if you click here. The first voice you’ll hear is Noah’s. My comments start at slightly before the 2:00 mark.)
Mårten did translate for me some of his commentary for the piece, as well as its sensationalistic headline: “American Museums Sell Out Their Integrity.” Judging by that, it appears that my relatively temperate remarks didn’t translate well into Swedish. What I said in the comments they used was that in the current financial crisis, museums’ dependence on private donors has grown and, with that, donor influence. I added that we’ve seen a change in what’s deemed acceptable museum practice over the past 10 years, and that we need to get back to basic principles.
At least I now know their word for “blogg”!
Speaking of “bloggs,” New Museum chief curator Richard Flood, taking a shot at online pests, played Whack-A-Mole (or, more accurately, whack-a-prairie dog) in his lecture on Saturday at the Portland Art Museum. As quoted by Lisa Radon on the Hyperallergic blog, Flood hammered cyberpundits who keep popping up to annoy his institution. He unconvincingly claimed to have “just found out about blogs” three months ago. I suspect he meant that he just found out about the power of blogs three or four months ago, when they took his institution to task for awarding a single-collector show to its own trustee.
Here’s what Flood said in Portland, according to one “prairie dog’s” (Radon’s) report:
Blogs are like being out on a prairie and one prairie dog pops up; none
of the others can see it, but they can feel the movement in the earth.
So another pops up. And another. They are not communicating with each
other. They have no idea. History means nothing to them. Truth means
nothing to them. They have no mechanism in place for checking [facts].
My art-lings know better. Four CultureGrrl readers heard my plea for clicks on my neglected “Donate” button. My warm thanks go out to Repeat CultureGrrl Donor 120 from Boston and new CultureGrrl Donors 121 and 122 from Villanova, PA, and Beverly Hills. With Donor 119 (previously thanked), that makes four who answered my call.
Wait a minute! I said I needed FIVE: I’m also counting the return on Monday of the PADA classified ad in my middle column (which yields more remuneration than most individual donations).
Every bit of encouragement helps! Please don’t wait for me to beg again for support. If you like a post, please let me know with a tangible sign of appreciation. Otherwise, the next time I get whacked, I might not have the strength to pop up again!