Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Curatorial Matters

“Vote For Art” Winners At the Mint: Odd Experiment?

Remember back to early September, when the presidential election was just heating up, and the Democrats were holding their convention in Charlotte, N.C.? The Mint Museum there tried to capitalize on the connection with, as I related here, a crowd-curated project allowing residents and visitors to vote for three of six art works chosen by curators as candidates for acquisitions to the permanent collection.

Voting concluded last Friday, drawing nearly 20,000 votes in all. I’d have thought the number would have been higher — considering that each person could make three choices.

So what did they choose? A photograph called The Birth of Venus, after Botticelli (Pictures of Junk), by Vic Muniz (at right); a sculpture called Before Midnight by Mattia Biagi (at left); and Slice Chair Paper by Mathias Bengtsson — in that order.

You can see all six candidates here. Or, you can simply look at the three winners here.

What did we, and the Mint, learn from this experiment? I’m not sure, other than the aforementioned smallish number of votes. Further, it seems to me that the Mint undercut the whole process with this announcement:

And the Mint’s efforts to acquire works by the world’s best-known contemporary artists have not ended – the museum is committed to continuing to raise funds from the community to potentially acquire the three remaining “Vote for Art” candidates, works by NachoDoesn’t that negate the idea of involving the public in these choices?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Mint Museum

Meet The Chosen Curators: New Fellows Of Leadership Center

The Center for Curatorial Leadership has chosen its new fellows, 11 lucky winners in this sixth class, which begins training in New York in January.

This year, the CCL included international applications, and two of the 11 are from abroad. Here’s the whole list, with bios. Among the well-known names are Rebecca Rabinow, Modern and contemporary paintings curator from the Metropolitan Museum; Judith Dolkart, deputy director of the Barnes Foundation, and Emily Neff, American art curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Elizabeth Easton and Aggie Gund founded the program in 2007, to train curators for moving onward and upward, either as museum directors or in curatorial leadership  positions.

 

 

Discovering An Ancient Civilization In Cleveland — UPDATED

Last spring, when I was reporting an article about acquisitions endowments, I was seduced by a little guy who had been purchased not too long before by the Cleveland Museum of Art (which has one of the biggest purchase funds among U.S. museums).  Made sometime between 600 and 1000 AD, and pictured at left, he came from a culture — the Wari of Peru — that I knew nothing about. And I knew I was not alone.

Although I didn’t mention it at the time, I also knew that this painted lifelike human face on a hide bag, used to stash coca leaves, was to be featured in an exhibition this fall. And I watched for it. That 150-object show, Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes, curated by Susan E. Bergh, will open on Sunday at the Cleveland museum. It’s the first exhibition devoted to the Wari in the U.S., and so will introduce many of us to this culture (after Cleveland, it will travel to the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum).

We don’t know much about the Wari. That’s because, as I write in an article to be published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, the Wari had no written language (of course, neither did the Inca) and because they were almost entirely left out of colonial accounts (which the Inca were not).

But the Wari aesthetic is warmer, more human, it seemed to me when I looked at the beautiful catalogue published for the show. Bergh feels similarly: Inca material is more geometric, abstract, muted and simple, compared to the warmer colors and figurative nature of the Wari works. You can’t take that too far — as I learned from her — the Wari believed in human sacrifice, as did many other early cultures. (But less so, perhaps, than the Aztecs and the Incas.) Still, one of the Wari characters is called the sacrificer.

This is the kind of exhibition that I believe can attract those often-elusive wider audiences everyone wants — they don’t have to be like the Princess Diana thing I mentioned yesterday. In fact, as I usually do when I arrive somewhere to report an article, I started talking about the museum on my way in from the airport last week: my driver hadn’t been to it in years. He didn’t know it was free, and had not even heard of the museum’s ongoing expansion, whose new atrium opened this fall to wide publicity. But when I told him about the Wari, he said he wanted to go (and, btw, that that plan would please his wife!). I do not think he was mollifying me — when I got out of his car, he asked me again when the exhibition opened.

The Cleveland museum has been thinking about marketing, of course. One tangible piece of evidence: when it announced the acquisition (two, really — there’s a ceramic piece bought at the same time), the exhibit was called Wari: Realm of the Condor. The current title has more allure, I agree.

Cleveland received money from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help fund this exhibition, which is also telling. It’s an endorsement of its scholarly nature.

And as I mention at the end of my article, Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes is intended to provoke more research and study. Cleveland is not hosting a symposium during the show (its educators’ guide, posted on the museum’s website, is worth a look, though) — but maybe someone else will jump in.

Eric Lee, director at the Kimbell — could that be your museum?

Meantime, I’m going to post picture of a few objects you’ll see in the exhibit here as an enticement.

UPDATE: Eric Lee has written to me — the Kimbell will indeed host a symposium. Here’s what he said:

yes, the Kimbell is planing to host a half-day symposium on Saturday, June 15, 2013, during the exhibition’s opening weekend, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.  We are inviting three leading experts in the field to discuss current research and new discoveries.  The speakers have not yet been confirmed, but we hope to announce the topics and speakers early next year.

By the way, he added:

ten years ago the Kimbell acquired the Wari figure pendant (image attached) featured on the back cover of the exhibition catalogue.  It is only a couple of inches high, but has enormous presence and is a favorite of our visitors.

I agree. I saw the pendant in Cleveland, and now I have posted it here, at right. You can see why it’s a favorite.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Cleveland Art Museum

 

 

What Lesson Will Grand Rapids Draw From Princess Diana Show?

How does a museum define success? Too often, it’s by attendance — which brings me to the case of the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, which I chastised here about two years ago for presenting Diana: A Celebration, a display including her wedding gown, her tiaras, 28 designer dresses, personal momentos and “rare home movies.” GRAM charged $20 for adult admission.

Now we see the repercussions: Diana attracted “more than 97,600 visitors, helping attract over 318,000 visits and bringing the roster of museum members to 4,572 in the museum’s 2010-11 fiscal year,” according to MLive. That was up from 138,800 visitors and 3,196 memberships in 2009-10. This year’s total dropped to 265,000 visitors and 3,431 members. 

Individual exhibitions in the past year did not fare any where near as well as Diana. Warrington Colescott: Cabaret, Comedy, and Satire attracted about 11,300 visitors (Oct. 28, 2011 - Jan. 15, 2012) and an exhibit of works by Robert Rauchenberg borrowed from the Whitney Museum, the first in a series of loan shows, attracted 30,700 between Feb. 3 and May 20. A show called Cities in Transition got 24,000 between June 1 and Aug. 26. Those are small fractions.

The Grand Rapids Museum benefited most from ArtPrize, which brought  153,100 visitors this year.

Meantime, contributions to the annual fund dropped to $1.5 million in 2011-12, from $1.9 million a year earlier.

What does this tell us? Art, with the possible exception of a contest, couldn’t compete with Diana. Then again, it shouldn’t have to.

What the museum does now is key: does it look for other Dianas (a traveling exhibition that, elsewhere, was not staged at art museums but in other spaces) to fatten its stats and its coffers?  Or does it return to a past that included a world-class exhibition (many years ago) of Perugino? Me, I’d rather see things like Diebenkorn’s Ingleside, above, which is in the museum’s permanent collection.

In July, 2011, the museum got a new director, Dana Friis-Hansen, from the Austin Museum of Art. Maybe he wouldn’t have done the Diana show. Now he must resist the temptation those numbers no doubt present.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of GRAM 

 

 

Why Else Denver’s Van Gogh Exhibit Merits Attention

The Denver Art Museum may kill me for doing this — I didn’t ask permission or tell them in advance — but I want to share with you some of the Learning Moments (I think that’s what they are calling them) the museum’s staff has developed for Becoming van Gogh, the exhibition I wrote about yesterday. I couldn’t fit them into my article. But like the wall about terracotta at the Met’s current Bernini exhibition, I think they are models of what museum-goers should be able to see. And I’d like to see them posted online as well — so people can go back to them.

The Denver exhibit is, remember, a scholarly show — it explains how van Gogh became van Gogh.

One of the large panels talks about Charles Bargue’s Drawing Course, “a three volume do-it-yourself manual with an emphasis on drawing the human figure. Van Gogh got hold of the set and within six months he diligently copied all 197 plates at least once and all sixty of the nude poses at least three times.”

Later, we learn in the same panel that only two of his Bargue drawings survive — because van Gogh’s mother threw the rest away! What child or parent isn’t going to relate to that?

Timothy J. Standring, the curator, could not borrow either of the two surviving drawings, but he was able to find a copy of the Barque book — at Oberlin College, which agreed to lend it to the exhibition.

A second panel is about color. Van Gogh said “A good understanding of [color] is worth more than seventy different shades of paint.” He wrote to his brother, Theo, explaining his ideas about color and saying he was preoccupied by color. The panel goes on:

Somehow Van Gogh hit upon a way to experiment with color by winding different colors of yarn together. This astonishingly simple, cheap, and yet effective method kept the colors separate, just as Van Gogh kept his colors separate on the canvas in short, side-by-side brushstrokes of unmixed paint.

Van Gogh’s original balls of yarn are in the collection of the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

A third panel is about the perspective frame he built for himself, which he used throughout his career.

And a fourth is about his episodes at a drawing class that used plaster casts, which he hated. But why are his figure drawings from these classes of a woman’s backside? “Van Gogh and his new friend, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, were assigned seats typically reserved for the weaker students: looking at the sculpture’s backside.”

These tidbits qualify as what some editors refer to as “cocktail party conversation” — which is to say that they are memorable, fodder for casual conversation, buzzy — yet they are enlightening about van Gogh. Even if you knew about these facts before, they’re worth being reminded about.

When I started this post, I intended to upload the panels for you to view. But, it turns out, they are too big for this website.

You will just have to visit the Denver show yourself. Or get the catalogue.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum (Canal with Women Washing)