When Michael Darling leaves his job in July as modern and contemporary
curator at the Seattle Art
Museum to become chief curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, it’s
good news for Chicago, bad for Seattle. He’s an extraordinary gifted
curator. Objects speak to him, suggesting patterns and relationships
that root and waken in his exhibitions.
(Photo, Mike Urban, Seattle PI 2007, accompanying my profile of him, here.)
A curator on the job for three years is cracking open the territory. Darling has the wit, energy and vision to connect part of what’s genuinely of merit in the NW to art globally. He is capable of breaking the isolationist bubble of regionalism to move artists who move him onto a larger stage. He’s leaving in part because he can’t do it alone. Having brilliant chops is not enough in the NW, either for artists or curators.
Darling’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78 (June 27 to Sept. 7, 2009) is extraordinary by anyone’s measure. From my review in Modern Painters:
Target Practice focused on artists who saw painting as a closed world
and attempted to pry it open. With single and multiple works by 40
talents from Europe, Japan, North America, and South America, it engaged
what remains a fresh chaos of ragged representation and stands as the
best contemporary-art survey in the museum’s history.
Kurt has everything desperate art museums need. Through it they can achieve an attendance boast without sacrificing substance. (No disgraceful Star Wars exhibit, no dubious Tim Burton.) Kurt is rigorous art straight up, with a built-in bridge to popular culture. Had Darling organized this exhibit for Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, it would have a catalog, and it would have a touring schedule.
At SAM, Darling has no help. What he does, he does without assistance. His exhibit’s ideas, paperwork, phone calls and other legwork come from him. Nearly all art museums outside of Texas have financial problems, but SAM has the additional problem of a deal with a failed bank. While it’s not as bleak as formerly, 60,000 square feet of space SAM needs to rent out remains vacant.
Plus, the cuts continue. In May SAM announced…
Immediate reductions to staffing levels, other compensation-related
expenses, and a two-week furlough and museum closure…The reductions were achieved through a
combination of attrition and the elimination of current positions.
Additionally, after the completion of the Pablo Picasso exhibition in
late January 2011, the museum plans to close its three principal
buildings for a period of two weeks (January 31-February 13, 2011) as an
additional cost-saving measure. Several top level administrators at SAM
will accept a 10% reduction in pay for the coming year only, and
(director Derrick) Cartwright has planned for a still larger reduction to his own executive
compensation next year.
(Jen Graves story on cuts here.)
In Seattle, Darling works with deeper and wider collections than will be at his disposal in Chicago. He is not a curator of the last five minutes. SAM’s range is a boom for him. His curatorial peers at SAM may not all be the hippest, but they are all masters in their territories, and yet Chiyo
Ishikawa, SAM’s Deputy Director for Art & Curator of European Paintings and
Sculpture, says that the Chicago offer was just too good to pass up.
What’s so good about it? A rosier financial picture, assistants on his team and, above all, the cache to secure the right sort of attention for his efforts. Darling will be great in Chicago. In Seattle, he had the chance to be historical. He could have undermined the art-world prejudice that continues to view the city as a backwater. In the national view, Portland is DYI cute, but Seattle is overblown and underfed. It’s not true, but no points accrue from being misunderstood.
Frances Bacon, Of Truth, 1601:
What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
If there’s any doubt about Seattle’s standing, the New York Times’ story announcing Darling’s departure from SAM eliminated it. Amid minor errors concerning where Darling was when, the writer asserted that Darling was only the second to hold the position of modern and contemporary curator at SAM. He’s the sixth. I wrote about the error here, and the Seattle Art Museum requested a correction. To date, no correction has appeared in the paper of record.
Next: Ideas for Darling’s replacement.
Well done. Looking forward to your ideas for Darling’s replacement.
The SAM Contemporary Art Council annual meeting is next Tuesday so it’ll be interesting to see what the mood is.