Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Research

Once More Into the Storerooms >> Discoveries!

1016728-1-669x1024Now it’s the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh’s turn to find fantastic art works in its storerooms, as many other museums have done. Among the newly discovered pieces: a hand-painted enamel bowl with roundels of butterflies from the Yongzheng period, a “bizarre googly-eyed dragon bowl” and cinnabar lacquer panel (below right) from the Qianlong period, a ritual bronze from the Western Zhou period, a Gupta period Buddha head (at left), a gilded bronze Thai Buddha head and a Bamana Boli figure.

Many are going into a reinstallation of the Carnegie’s “Art before 1300” galleries, which will open next year. The museum says it discovered strengths, like Chinese ceramics, Buddhist and Hindu sculpture from South and Southeast Asia and African masks, that it didn’t know it had.

1019076-1024x689The Carnegie does not have a dedicated curator for either its Asian or African collections.

So, in this case, “As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen visitor engagement with the museum’s permanent collection,” it hired outside consultants to review its collections: Philip Hu for the Asian works and Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers for the African collection, which is quite small. The museum also, of course, contacted curators at other museums, who–as is practice–“generously shared information and advice,” a spokesman said. The process has been going on for four years.

From the press release issued about these discoveries, I’ve pasted a few images here.

Also, there’s this wonderful Nkisi Nkondi figure, below.

Nkisi

I have just a little sympathy for museums that don’t know what’s in their storeroom–but not always that much. This case is more understandable. And also credit museums for announcing discoveries like these, rather than just putting them out there, as if they knew all along. Transparency on this matter is the way to go.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art

The Future Of Art Book Publishing Is Here

Wow! Today I had a look at the first digital-only publication of the Museum of Modern Art,* and I can really see — even after only a short time of experimentation — how much digital technology can do for art books.

PicassoCubism_cover-300x400The book, Picasso: The Making of Cubism 1912-1914, comes in iPad or PDF form. Here’s the official description, from the press release:

Edited by Anne Umland, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, and Blair Hartzell, independent art historian and curator, it embraces the innovative features and infinite real estate of the digital format in order to present new scholarship on a breakthrough moment in the history of Cubism and twentieth-century art. [This] …cross-disciplinary project…presents in-depth studies of 15 objects made by Picasso between 1912 and 1914….

So how is it different? For a start, there’s an easy jump from text to source. Footnote numbers appear in red, click on it, and you go right to the footnote. The trip back to the text is not as simple. it’s manual, but I suspect that will be fixed in future digital books.

UPDATE: MoMA tells me that ” if you click on the red numbers again while you’re in the footnotes, it’ll take you back to the page you were on.” Good — but that was not intuitive.

Better are the thumbnail images in the margins. Click on them and they popup as enlargements.

For each work of art, here’s a description of how the book “works”:

Each of this publication’s fifteen chapters is devoted to a single object created by Picasso between 1912 and 1914. Each chapter has six components: Portfolio of Images, Essay, Conservation Notes, Provenance, Selected Exhibitions, and Selected References, accessible through the persistent navigation bar running along the bottom of each page. The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of the artwork discussed and can be paged through in sequence, from beginning to end. Alternatively, chapters (along with front and back matter) can be accessed through the Table of Contents. Tapping or clicking a comparative figure brings up a full-page view of that image, with caption. Selected artworks (the artist’s
Guitar constructions) may be “rotated,” or viewed in the round.

All true, as I was beginning to discover with Picasso’s Guitar on a Table, from 1912. It was fun to click on the nav bar, going from “recto” to “verso” to “raking” to “UV” to “Reflected IR” to”Transmitted Ir” to “X-ray.” Then I had to leave my office and go home.

MoMA had warned me that “it has to be read with Adobe Reader or Adobe Pro in order for all the features to work.” I do have Adobe at home — not X, not XI, which is apparently what I need. Many features, like the flipping I described above, didn’t work in Adobe X.

I know that I could just download that, and get back to my exploration. But not tonight, as I write this. Suffice to say, this is a very interesting development in art books, the beginning of a new future in art books.

Picasso: The Making of Cubism 1912-1914 sells for $24.99. For the iPad app, go to the App Store. For the enhanced PDF version, which can be read on a laptop or desktop, go to MoMA’s online store. It’s a big file — almost 348 MB. It took a few minutes to download. On first glance, it’s worth it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of MoMA 

*I consult to a foundation that supports MoMA

Try This NYT Web App To Track Art Coverage Trends

Who is mentioned more often in pages of The New York Times from its start in the 1850s through 2011?

  • Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci?
  • Van Gogh, Degas or Gauguin?
  • Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois or Mary Cassatt?
  • Impressionism or Modernism?
  • Monet or Manet?

You can see for yourself how the Times chronicled art trends — or any other trends — with a new web app called Chronicle. It allows you and me to tap into “Visualizing language usage in New York Times news coverage throughout its history” to discern trends.

chronicle-logo

 

 

 

 

Big hat-tip to Hyperallergic, which did a few tests (not those above, which are mine) several days back, testing things like “contemporary” versus “modernism” and groups of contemporary artists. See them here.

The answers to the questions I posed were not so predictable:

  • Michelangelo
  • Van Gogh, then Degas
  • Louise Bourgeois, then Mary Cassatt
  • Modernism
  • Manet

I’d have thought that Monet would have beaten Manet, but this one test has a flaw. I used Claude Monet as the search term because there was once a big jewelry brand named Monet. But I am not sure that the Times consistently used Manet’s first name in English or French… a quandary.

You can also click on a year to see articles from that year.

This doesn’t prove anything, of course. But it’s an indicator of what the general public, in the East, at least (and in years past maybe more broadly, given the New York Times syndicate distribution, which I’m guessing has decreased in total circulation distribution, but maybe not).

 

“No Time To Think” — Are Museums Part of the Problem Or Antidotes?

Has the worm turned? Are people weary of multi-tasking, interactivity, overcommitment, overextension and too tied to mobile devices?

BrainIf you read an article in the July 27 edition of The New York Times headlined No Time to Think, you learned two things. First, the answer is no. As the article said:

In 11 experiments involving more than 700 people, the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes…

…It could be because human beings, when left alone, tend to dwell on what’s wrong in their lives. We have evolved to become problem solvers and meaning makers. What preys on our minds, when we aren’t updating our Facebook page or in spinning class, are the things we haven’t figured out — difficult relationships, personal and professional failures, money trouble, health concerns and so on. And until there is resolution, or at least some kind of understanding or acceptance, these thoughts reverberate in our heads. Hello rumination. Hello insomnia.

But the second thing the article said is that this is really harmful.

…Suppressing negative feelings only gives them more power, she said, leading to intrusive thoughts, which makes people get even busier to keep them at bay. The constant cognitive strain of evading emotions underlies a range of psychological troubles such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression and panic attacks, not to mention a range of addictions. It is also associated with various somatic problems like eczema, irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, inflammation, impaired immunity and headaches.

Studies further suggest that not giving yourself time to reflect impairs your ability to empathize with others….

Researchers have also found that an idle mind is a crucible of creativity. A number of studies have shown that people tend to come up with more novel uses for objects if they are first given an easy task that allows their minds to wander, rather than a more demanding one.

Of course, I’ve simplified here, but you can read the rest of the article at the link above.

As I read this article, I kept thinking two things — are museums becoming part of this problem? And how, instead, could they become part of the solution? Could museums be an antidote, or has — to borrow the old cliche — that train left the station?

I’m still thinking.

How Many Museums Is Too Many?

Some people would say there can never be too many museums. I would rephrase that to say there can never be too much art, but there can be too many museums. The U.S. may be there now.

IMLSlogoAccording to recently released information from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the U.S. has twice the number of museums previously accounted for – 35,144 museums nationwide, up from an estimated 17,500 museums in the 1990s. The count is based primarily on IRS 990 forms filed by nonprofit museums, botanical gardens, zoos, aquariums and historical societies between 2009 and 2013, reports the AP. The 1990s method relied only on state museum association records.

Equally interesting and sometimes troubling is the distribution by state and by discipline. The vast number — 48% — are historic sites, societites and houses. Historical societies claim another 7.5%. General and “unclassified” museums are 33%. Art museums? Only 4.5%. I really doubt that all of those historic organizations are sustainable. You can see the chart here.

Geographic distribution is also skewed. In raw numbers, California has the most museums and Delaware the least, lower than Arkansas, North Dakota, Wyoming and Hawaii, which round out the bottom five. New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio round out the top five. See that chart here.

The map showing museums per 100,000 population shows some of the trouble: The most museum-dense states are Wyoming, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. The South and Southeast — where populations are growing fastest — are the least dense in museums.

Art museums can helps solve the problem with traveling exhibitions, partnerships and collection-sharing. But not those historical societies, for the most part. I think there will be closures in the coming years.