Archives for March 2009

What is it about opera in Chicago and a dollar bill? In the last year, two companies there have used the buck as a way to draw in people and raise some money at the same time. 

Last year, the Chicago Opera Theater set up a six-week “People’s Opera” contest, asking people to choose the opera, out of three, that they wanted to see produced — for $1 a vote. They selected Mosè in Egitto by Gioachino Rossini, which will open the 2010 Spring Festival Season in Millennium Park next April. Chicago Opera Theater, run creatively by Brian Dickie, raised $40,000 from the voting (including a $16,000 matching grant). Voters chose a work — chronicling Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt — that hadn’t been seen in Chicago since Abraham Lincoln’s days. Britten’s Paul Bunyan came in second; Mozart’s La finta giardiniera placed third.

I was reminded of this yesterday, when I received an email…

[Read more…] about $1 Goes Far for Two Chicago Opera Companies

The National Endowment for the Humanities gets far too little attention, imho. So I took some time this past weekend to look at its most recent round of grants, which were announced earlier this month. Nearly 200 awards worth a total of $20 million were made to cultural institutions, universities and libraries in 36 states and Washington, D.C., plus a couple of scholars working overseas. The grants cover digital humanities, preservation/access, educational and public programs, research and collections.

The biggest award — $1 million — will go to the Asia Society for a traveling exhibition, plus
website, symposium, educational and public programs, catalogue and film on the life of the Buddha. The traveling show focuses on the “art of Buddhist pilgrimages” to sites important in the Buddha’s life. The Asia Society hasn’t issued a press release about this, yet at least, nor is there any further information about it on its website, so the show must be a ways down the road. But it sounds like an interesting show.

The Newberry Library in Chicago actually received more money in this grant round, just over $1.2 million, but that total covers five separate projects involving educational programs, archives, fellowships, and so on. One grant will pay to plan an online and traveling exhibition called “Make Big Plans: Daniel Burnham’s Vision of An American Metropolis,” about the 1909 Plan of Chicago, which is said to be America’s first comprehensive urban plan.

There are plenty of other interesting awards on the grant list. For this post, I focused on those that will aid exhibitions:

• $250,000 to the Brooklyn Museum for a traveling exhibition on the Plains Indian tipi
• nearly $350,000 to the Frick Collection to digitize “deteriorating” photographs of American paintings 
• $300,000 to the Oakland Museum for a permanent gallery on California history
• $350,000 to the University of Illinois at Chicago for a new core exhibition at the Jane Addams-Hull House Museum
• $380,000 to the Peabody-Essex Museum for a traveling and online exhibition called “Fiery Pool: Maya and the Mythic Sea,” plus a catalogue and public programs.

The rest are listed on the NEH website. I know several cultural groups — not just museums, but orchestras and theaters — who say they’ve never applied for an NEH grant.

Depending on the project, they may or may not qualify. But I think there’s more there than many people realize. In 2006, for example, the Frick received a $750,000 challenge grant toward a $3.75 million endowment for a senior decorative arts curator. I mentioned that grant to another museum director recently, who was stunned.

When budget time comes around, the NEH deserves as much support as the NEA.  

Photo: Standing Buddha, Afghanistan, 1st Century   

While “Chelsea Visits Havana,” the first big group show of American art in Cuba was moving into place — it opened on Friday at the 10th Havana Biennial — there was other art news on the Cuban front that slipped below the radar. Credit my friend Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, who pointed me to it in an item in her regular Saturday column for the Financial Times.

In late February, the U.S. State Department said it would investigate the current ownership of a painting, now in the hands of an Italian-Argentinean dealer, that was confiscated from the billionaire Fanjul family in 1961, when they were forced to leave Cuba after the revolution.

The work, Malaga Porta, was painted by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (whose self-portrait is below), and has been variously

valued at $250,000 to $3 million. It’s considered a minor work by Sorolla, Spain’s best Impressionist.

The Fanjuls, one of Cuba’s wealthiest families before the revolution, have nevertheless been trying to get it back for years. With a fortune made in sugar and property, the dynasty owned many majestic homes in Cuba and an important art collection to go with them. It included hundreds of paintings by the likes of “Caravaggio, Goya, Murillo, Nattier, Boucher, Lebrun, Largilliere, Hoppner and Boldini, plus a Michelangelo pencil drawing, plus 14 paintings and three sketches by Sorolla y Bastida,” according to Peter Watson, who detailed this whole tangled tale in an article in The Age in 2005. 

The family believes the works were largely sold onto international markets after the Soviet Union fell, leaving Cuba without a patron state and in need of hard currency. 

Now, according to a press release issued on Feb. 24 by a lawyer for the Fanjuls, who started anew in the U.S. and are said to be billionaires, the State Department has agreed to probe potential violation of the Helms-Burton Act by one Bruno Sciaoli, the dealer. The Helms-Burton act blocks those who deal in property confiscated by Cuba, and their immediate families, from entering the U.S. and exposes them to potential damages.

The Fanjuls are not alone in seeking their confiscated art; they and others have listed them with the Art Loss Register, which keeps track of stolen works so that auction houses, dealers, and collectors may check before they buy or sell. 

But the European Union deplored the Helms-Burton Act and passed a resolution essentially making it unenforceable in member countries. As Georgina writes:

The problem is complicated, because European governments recognise Cuba and accept the nationalisation of the collections, but under US embargo laws it is illegal to trade in confiscated property from Cuba. But if the State department finds the art dealer guilty in this test case, it could have a major impact on sales of these Cuban-sourced works. ALR executive director Chris Marinello compared the issue of confiscated Cuban art as “a similar situation to the holocaust.”

I tend to agree with Marinello: confiscation is confiscation.

The Fanjuls have long covered their political bases by donating to both Democrats and Republicans, though at one time they were particularly close to Bill Clinton. Various members contributed to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2007-2008. Interestingly, I could not find any mention of the investigation on the State Department website.

There’ve been many articles on the Fanjul case, but the Maine Antique Digest in 2005 published the only one, by David Hewett, that I could find with a (partial) list of the Fanjuls’ lost works.

Twenty-four hours after first reading Lynn Chu’s op-ed in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal on the proposed Google book settlement, it’s still on my mind. I have not been following this issue as closely as I should be, and no doubt there are counter-arguments. But her analysis certainly disturbed me. Here are some key passages:

There is nothing more individual in the world than a book, an author, a publisher, and the value of a contract. The aging baby boomers now flacking the settlement don’t seem to understand that PDF scanning (how Google and everyone else digitizes books) isn’t rocket science; it’s cheap and easy. Books will be digitized without Google. But the Google settlement sets in amber today’s overhyped role of the Internet, ruled by that great and magnificent Oz — Google.

And:

Under the settlement, every rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private contract data, on every edition of every work they ever wrote — and every excerpt permission ever granted to others — at the peril of losing the money Google will be making on their backs. This is a massive burden on everyone in the book industry, making us all, in effect, Google’s data-entry slaves. Indeed, in most cases such information about every permission ever granted is unlocatable. It opens a Pandora’s box of disputes and mistaken claims about who actually owns what.

 And:

We already have a good system. It’s called the system of private property and free contract, designed for dispersed, autonomous individuals — not command-and-control centers. The U.S. Constitution grants authors small monopolies in their own copyrights. Author market power is talent-based and individual, not collective. This class action seeks to wipe all this out — just for Google.

Ms. Chu is a literary agent at Writers Representatives, and she clearly believes Google is being evil with this proposed settlement of its dispute with the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs in their class-action suit against the company. I hope that the 385 pages of the settlement document don’t scare others in the publishing world away from understanding it before the May 9 deadline for deciding whether to opt-in or opt-out.

Here’s a link to the WSJ article (though, as a subscriber, I’m not sure whether or not it’s behind a firewall).

Ms. Chu continues her argument, advising writers to do nothing, here.  

 

Friday afternoon: waiting for callbacks for stories I’m working on, callbacks that rarely come on Fridays after about now. Unfortunately. Which set me to some Friday afternoon pipe-dreaming.

The Frick Collection has been thinking about expansion since at least Sam Sachs was director there; current director Anne Poulet has echoed the call for “limited expansion,” as she has termed it. For nearly a year, the gorgeous 45-foot-wide townhouse around the corner, at 22 East 71st St., has been up for sale. It was, of course, home to the late Salander-O’Reilly Gallery. Sotheby’s has the listing, and you can see what a perfect match for the Frick it would be. Or take the short-cut and read a description from the Times last year:

THE Salander-O’Reilly Galleries…provided a museumlike space to display old master paintings, tapestries and sculptures. Customers entered through the arched wrought-iron gates in the Italian Renaissance facade, up a few steps under a vaulted ceiling of coffered plaster. They stepped softly on the polished marble into a gallery with stone walls and a broad staircase designed by C. P. H. Gilbert in the 1920s.

The asking price is $75 million, out-of-reach for the Frick. But the mansion is owned by arts patron Aby Rosen, the real estate developer. It’s true his tastes are contemporary. Here’s how Phoebe Hoban described them in a March, 2008 profile of Rosen in New York Magazine:

Looking over his blue-chip collection of 80 Warhols (and counting), the naughty Richard Prince nurse, the Basquiats, the Christopher Wools, the Harings, the Koonses, the Bacon, people wonder as they did with Charles Saatchi whether it’s Rosen or the company that owns this vast trove. (Through a spokeswoman, Rosen declined to comment.)

But wouldn’t it be great if Rosen simply gave the building to the Frick? I don’t know what the real estate collapse has done to his net worth, but if websites like Curbed are accurate he is still active and out-and-about in New York. Jeff Koons, one of Rosen’s friends, is said to collect Old Masters. Maybe he can plant the idea.

Just a thought.