"There is a palpable tension between painters and the current - inaccurate - British idea of what modern art is. If you reject the notion that physical skill, natural talent or technical training have any value as art in themselves, then painters are screwed." [Read Full Article]
Posted By: The Guardian (UK)
On: 04/03/11
Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
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Showing posts with label Museum of Modern Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Museum of Modern Art. Show all posts
'Augmented Reality' Smart Phone Apps Revolutionize Museum Audio Tours
Art Gets Unmasked in the Palm of Your Hand
By ALEXANDER FIDEL
PARIS — “In the ’50s, we were the first museum in the world to have an audio tour,” Hein Wils, a project manager for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, said last month. “Today, we’re one of the first to have augmented reality.”
Mr. Wils was speaking about the museum’s project that lets people use their smartphones to enrich their museum visits. Smartphones can overlay digital content, like images or movies, across real spaces. Mr. Wils wants visitors to use their phones as lenses, allowing them to see otherwise invisible images — like sleek computer-generated sculptures or floating interviews with artists — on the screens as they walk around the Stedelijk and point their phones’ cameras at objects. This creates what developers are referring to as “augmented reality.”
The Amsterdam museum is not alone in its use of smartphones. Within the next year, many of the top museums in the world — especially contemporary ones — will introduce applications for smartphones, if they have not done so already. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offered smartphone applications this summer, and European museums are following suit. Think of it as a 21st-century update on the audio guide, that staple of museum education departments.
By next spring, the Stedelijk will allow people to interact with exhibitions on smartphones while at their home or in the museum. Although the Centre Pompidou in Paris has no anticipated starting date, it is six months into the production of a smartphone application and already sells exhibition guides to be used with smartphones. The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin are expecting Web sites or applications designed for mobile technology in the next two years.
The Museum of Modern Art’s application is one of the most popular. Since its iPhone application was introduced in August, it has been downloaded more than 400,000 times, according to Allegra Burnette, the museum’s creative director of digital media.
Drawing on earlier applications like those from the Museum of London and the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA’s application offers a selection of audio tours with images and videos and access to one-fifth of the museum’s collection. MoMA also started offering a Web site for mobile phones last month.
MoMA’s effective use of audio, video and slide shows on its smartphone application is likely to keep drawing new users, but the future of museum applications lies in how these features are combined. The Stedelijk is taking a gamble, putting audio and video features on an “augmented reality” Web browser on the smartphone. Stedelijk is using Layar, an application that lays three-dimensional objects over the smartphone’s screen when the phone’s camera is pointed at real rooms and buildings.
The Stedelijk used the Layar application at the Lowlands music festival in the Netherlands in August and in September at Picnic, a yearly conference in Amsterdam on art, science, technology and business. At Stedelijk stations set up at the events, visitors thumbed through collections showing the museum’s works. The works included bar codes that people could scan using a separate application. They then received a digital version of each work. Using Layar, they could “hang” the work on a geographic coordinate within the grounds of the festival. When other Layar users pointed their phones at the coordinate, they could also see the hung work.
The Museum of Modern Art was the site of another Layar exhibition. The Conflux Festival in New York held a show in October, using Layar on smartphones to display art in the museum’s galleries without first asking the museum.
Ms. Burnette, the museum’s digital media director, was unfazed by this new use. “That’s something we were really excited to see,” she said. “For us, it means that they care about the museum enough to participate actively in it.”
Participation is important for the new generation of applications coming from these museums. The Stedelijk, for example, intends to ask a lot of the user. “We want to make an A.R. project with strong emphasis on user-generated content,” Mr. Wils said, referring to augmented reality. He also emphasized the importance of getting artists involved in the process. “We want to see that artists are using the technology to come up with new user experiences,” he said.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art started offering an application last summer, called “In Still Life 2001-2010,” that required user participation.
“I myself would call it an interactive participatory work of art, but it’s up for interpretation,” said Amy Heibel, the museum’s director of Web and digital media, referring to the application that lets people rearrange 38 elements of a 17th-century Dutch still life.
This application, produced by the technology companies For Your Art and Ovation, yields results in the style of the contemporary conceptual artist John Baldessari. Its introduction coincided with the June exhibition of Mr. Baldessari’s work at the Los Angeles museum.
The general smartphone application for the museum is expected to be introduced by the end of this month. Through an icon that appears on the smartphone’s screen, the phone’s browser will be connected to the museum’s mobile Web site, where users can see 175 works from the permanent collection, with supporting text, video and audio from the curatorial department.
In Madrid, the Reina Sofía is taking a different track. Chema González, the head of cultural activities, says the museum is focusing on audio programming, in an effort keep visitors’ eyes on the artworks while enriching their experience. It plans to have four audio podcast channels from which people can download programming onto smartphones and use at home or in the gallery.
“The key is not to offer a substitute for real experience,” Mr. González said. With podcasts, Mr. González wants to mix oral history with the museum visit. “What is important is not to narrate each specific work of art,” he said. “The works are politically and socially engaged moments. We will focus on context.”
Beginning this month, two channels will have programming by exhibiting artists and curators. Another channel will draw programming from the museum’s 1970s collective conceptual art, and the last channel will be left for more conceptual programming by artists.
Most museums’ smartphone application projects have a similar approach to development, through contracting with outside companies or experts in the digital arts sector. The museums all offer information and gather feedback on social networking and media sites, and almost all the products are free. The Centre Pompidou sells smartphone audio guides to special exhibitions, and the Stedelijk is considering offering premium smartphone editions. But for the most part, all of these new experiences cost nothing but the time it takes to download them.
This article is from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/arts/02iht-rartsmart.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
Art is in the third eye of visual artist
NEW YORK (AP) — A New York University arts professor might not have eyes on the back of his head, but he’s coming pretty close.
Wafaa Bilal, a visual artist widely recognized for his interactive and performance pieces, had a small digital camera implanted in the back of his head — all in the name of art.
Bilal said last week that he underwent the procedure for an art project that was commissioned by a new museum in Doha, Qatar, in the Persian Gulf.
Titled “The 3rd I,” it is one of 23 contemporary works commissioned for the opening of the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art on Dec. 30.
The exhibition is titled “Told/Untold/Retold.”
“I am going about my daily life as I did before the procedure,” the Iraqi-born artist said in a statement.
Bilal, who is teaching three courses this semester at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, will wear the camera for one year. It is 2 inches in diameter and less than an inch thick.
The project will raise “important social, aesthetic, political, technological and artistic questions,” he said.
He declined to say when the camera was implanted or other details of the art installation, saying it “will be revealed to the public as part of the museum preview on Dec. 15” and on a website to be launched on the same day, http://www.3rdi.me.
He said he chose to have it put in the back of the head as an allegorical statement about the things we don’t see and leave behind.
How it all fits together is still a bit of a mystery.
The camera will capture his everyday activities at one-minute intervals 24 hours a day and then be transmitted to monitors at the museum, said curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath of Art Reoriented, who commissioned Bilal on behalf of the museum.
“He doesn’t have to alter his lifestyle or what he does. In principle, he’s moving on with his life,” Bardaouil told the Associated Press from Doha. “It will be a three-dimensional, real space-and-time experience. Once the piece is revealed, you’ll realize that the camera is only one aspect of the work and there are aspects as important that will be experienced.”
The project has raised challenging questions for NYU, the nation’s largest private school with about 44,000 students.
“As a school of the arts, a school whose mission is to educate artists, we place a high value on his right to free expression in his creative work as an artist,” NYU said in a statement.
“We also take seriously the privacy issues his project raises, its impact on our students, and the importance of preserving trust in the pedagogical relationship between a faculty member and students.”
NYU said it has had numerous “constructive and productive” conversations with the artist and was continuing “to discuss with him the right mechanism to ensure that his camera will not take pictures in NYU buildings.”
But a number of students said they were not overly concerned about their privacy being violated.
“I don’t really know what you would be protecting them (students) from, what would be happening in the classroom that couldn’t be shared,” said Erin Wahed, 22, who graduated in May with a degree in photography but did not take any of Bilal’s classes.
Seth Mrocska, who was friends with some of Bilal’s students but did not have him as a professor before graduating in May, agreed, saying, “It’s not that there’s much to hide in the classroom.”
However, he said he wasn’t OK with the images being transmitted to another country and “shared across a media platform to be stored for all to view.”
Bilal said “The 3rd I” builds on his other body of work that combines performance art, digital and body art and photography “into a unique conceptual piece.”
Many of his previous works have invited debate and controversy.
In a 2007 online installation, “Domestic Tension” in 2007, virtual users could shoot a paintball gun at Bilal 24 hours a day. The Chicago Tribune deemed it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time” and named him Artist of the Year that year.
A 2008 video game piece, “Virtual Jihadi,” was censored by the city of Troy, N.Y., where it was shown. In it, Bilal inserted an avatar of himself as a suicide bomber hunting then-President George W. Bush. The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a claim against the City of Troy for closing the arts center showing the work.
The artist has said the work was meant to shed light on groups that traffic in hateful stereotypes of Arab culture with video games like Quest for Saddam.
In a recent live performance piece titled “... and Counting,” Bilal had his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty. Bilal, whose brother was killed by a missile at an Iraqi checkpoint in 2004, used the piece to highlight how the deaths of Iraqis are largely invisible to the American public. The dots for the Iraqis were represented by green UV ink visible only under black light, while Americans were represented by permanent ink.
This article is from: http://inspiredhomeomaha.com/article/20101128/ENTERTAINMENT05/711289969
Guggenheim Struggles With Its Finances
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"]
[/caption]Tax Filings Show Struggles for Guggenheim
By KATE TAYLOR
The last two years haven’t been easy on New York museums, but they’ve been particularly challenging for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In a disastrous 2008, the museum’s net assets declined by 25 percent.
The latest tax filings show that 2009 was not nearly as bad, though the numbers still offer cause for concern. Despite a round of layoffs (completed midyear), expenses exceeded revenue by more than $12 million. Contributions were down from the previous year, to $20 million. The foundation’s endowment decreased slightly, to $62.5 million from $64.4 million.
A Guggenheim spokeswoman, Betsy Ennis, said that the foundation expected the endowment to finish 2010 slightly higher. (The foundation includes the museum on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street and its satellites abroad.)
Richard Armstrong, the new director of the Guggenheim, made $612,550 in 2009 — roughly comparable to the pay for his colleagues at other major New York museums. The exception was Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, who took home twice that amount between July 1, 2008, and June 30, 2009 (the period that that museum uses as its fiscal year).
Mr. Armstrong’s salary was lower than the $1 million the Guggenheim paid its former director, Thomas Krens, last year, as the second installment of a $2 million severance package. The Guggenheim also paid $816,295 in fees to the company that Mr. Krens started after leaving the Guggenheim, Global Cultural Asset Management, which was consulting on the planned new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi.
The tax filings show that the Guggenheim received $715,000 in 2009 for doing a feasibility study, jointly with the State Hermitage Museum, for a possible museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. Because of the economic crisis and turnover in the local government, that museum has not gone forward.
This article is from: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/tax-filings-show-struggles-for-guggenheim/?partner=rss&emc=rss
Boston's New MFA Wing - A Place For Art, Not Building
A wing that works
The beauty of the MFA's expansion is how it showcases the art without calling attention to itself
The handsome new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts is a place for looking at art, not a place for looking at architecture.
That makes it a departure from other art museums of recent years. At least since architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, back in 1997, it seems we’re always being told that the museum itself, not its contents, is the real work of art.
Not at the MFA. This is a building where the art is thoughtfully displayed in an architectural setting that doesn’t call attention to itself.
That’s a surprise coming from this architect, the British firm Foster + Partners. Led by Sir Norman Foster, one of the world’s so-called “starchitects,’’ Foster + Partners is known for such spectacular spaces as the skylit Reading Room of the British Museum in London and the reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin, with its spiral glass crown.
We can be grateful that Foster and his team held back on the fireworks this time. The Art of the Americas Wing, which opens to the public today, is a triumph of intelligence and pragmatism. It’s better inside than outside, but we’ll talk about that later.
There’s a lot to love in these interiors. First of all, there’s the openness. In the past, the MFA felt locked up like a guarded jewel box. The new wing throws itself open to the world around it. Artworks need to be protected from too much daylight, but the architects find ways to give us views of the Fenway, a neglected part of Boston’s famous Emerald Necklace of parkland. The Fenway now feels less isolated, more connected, more like the MFA’s own landscape. And there are other striking views, including a panorama of the downtown skyline. Whenever you feel a little claustrophobic, you can step out to a glass observation deck that runs across the front of each new floor.
Then there’s the variety. The 53 galleries of the new wing come in many different sizes, shapes, and colors. They are a refreshing change from the mazelike cube farm of white galleries you find in such museums as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sometimes the walls are covered with fabric patterns, derived from the same historical era as the art on display. Sometimes they’re painted in soft tones. A particularly sensitive touch is the handling of the captions that label each artwork. Instead of looking pasted on, they’re color-coordinated with the walls.
Finally, for the first time in my experience, it’s now possible to figure out where you are in the MFA. Since the opening of the museum’s West Wing in 1981, designed by noted architect I.M. Pei, that’s been almost impossible. Most visitors entered through the Pei wing at the extreme end of the museum and quickly got lost in what seemed to be disorder.
The first thing Foster + Partners did was study the floor plan of the original MFA of 1909, by architect Guy Lowell. Lowell’s plan, like much traditional architecture, was based on the human body. You entered at the head, and the building wings spread out symmetrically to the left and right like arms. It’s a kind of order we grasp intuitively.
Foster has restored that old order. The Pei entry will be now used only for bus groups. The rest of us will again enter the museum at its center, either from the Fenway or from Huntington Avenue. A spine of visitor services — ticketing, tourist shop, information — now connects those two entrances.
To help you further with your wayfinding, openings between galleries tend to be lined up with one another, creating long vistas you can look or walk down. It’s an effect that was called Parade Rooms in an earlier era. The vistas let you see one part of the museum from another. They lace everything together visually. Often, for further legibility, the curators and architects site an especially bold or famous artwork at the termination of a vista.
The London-based Foster + Partners worked with local architects CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares on the job.
One space in the Art of the Americas Wing is meant to be the highlight of the whole museum. This is the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard, a vast, three-story-high volume that’s mostly roofed and walled in glass. It feels like a conservatory, framed in greenery planted outside the glass walls. It’s an amazingly multipurpose space, containing a café, for instance, that can be totally whisked out of sight to make room for other kinds of events. A grand stair at one end leads you to the new galleries.
The museum sees the Shapiro Family Courtyard as a sort of town square where the museum visitor can relax with an espresso and take stock. The best you can say for this space today, though, is that it’s promising. Someone failed to figure out that in most sun conditions, the glass walls would function as mirrors. They reflect you instead of letting you see the green behind them. And the gray corporate furniture is better suited to an accountant’s seminar than a cultural space. There’s almost no art — just two big sculptures — a lack that creates a feeling of emptiness. All these problems, of course, are correctable, and it will be fun to see how the courtyard evolves.
I like so much about the new wing that I’m hesitant to deal with its exterior. I asked the MFA’s director, Malcolm Rogers, what he told his architects it should look like. “Not a palace or a prison,’’ he replied. Well, it isn’t either of those. The problem is that it lacks any particular character at all.
What you see from either the Fenway or from Huntington Avenue is a wall made of panels of glass and granite, crisply framed in black steel. The stone is the same Deer Isle granite from Maine that built the old museum. But instead of creating the impression of a massive wall, the new granite panels look as if they could be shuffled and rearranged in the frame.
It’s a modernist look, which is fine, and it rightly implies that the museum is expandable. But other than a glimpse of statues just inside the glass walls, it’s a look that fails to communicate much about the riches inside. And as often happens in architecture, there’s an unintended metaphor. This part of the museum looks too much like a stack of shipping containers on a wharf somewhere.
In the larger scheme of things, the disappointing facades don’t count for much. The Art of the Americas Wing is a deeply humane, deeply thoughtful piece of architecture.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
Huntington to Receive $100M Bequest
$100 million-plus for Huntington will be largest cash gift in institution's history
The suspense is over. Now that the late Frances Brody’s other heirs have received their shares of her fortune, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has a much clearer idea of its own windfall from the L.A. art patron’s estate: a gift expected to easily exceed $100 million.
This represents by far the largest cash gift in the history of the Huntington, which was previously $21 million from Charles and Nancy Munger in 2002. It could even surpass the original endowment created when railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington died in 1927, which is roughly $107 million if adjusted for inflation.
“A number of museums have received significant gifts when you value the art and cash donations together,” says Steven S. Koblik, president of the Huntington. “But as a pure cash gift, this has very few equivalents -- except for the founding gifts that create institutions.”
Tim Seiler, one of the directors at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, agrees. "It's an extraordinary gift, especially for the cultural sector. A $100 million gift more typically goes to a school or university, and it's often a naming gift."
The few comparables tend to come from New York. In 2005, David Rockefeller made a $100-million pledge to the Museum of Modern Art, which ranks as its largest-ever cash gift. In 2008, Leonard Lauder's art foundation gave $131 million to the Whitney Museum of American Art, also its largest.
Brody died in November 2009 at age 93, leaving behind a wealth of artwork — including Giacometti bronzes and Matisse paintings — that she had acquired with her husband, Sidney, a real-estate developer who had died more than two decades earlier. The value of this art directly affected the size of her gift to the Huntington, where she was a board member for 20 years.
This October, the institution received $15 million in cash intended by Brody to improve the botanical gardens, one of her most passionate concerns as a board member. That amount, Koblik says, was specified in her trust instrument and was not in doubt.
The mystery, rather, was how much money the Huntington would receive for also being named the estate’s sole “residual beneficiary” — the heir who is paid after all others should the estate have extra money left over. That’s when the art figured in. When the art world witnessed Christie's sell several of Brody’s masterpieces in May, led by Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” for $106.5 million (which set a record as the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction), Koblik was watching with particular interest.
“It was an amazing moment,” he says. “When the Christie’s sale of the artwork proved so successful, we knew that would change the nature of our gift.” In effect, the auction created a surplus of $80 million after the other estate payouts, an amount that hit the Huntington’s bank account last week.
Brody estate trustee Robert Shuwarger says the Huntington’s final gift will consist of proceeds from selling the remaining property, including Brody’s A. Quincy Jones house in Holmby Hills. The listing price of the house, which has been on the market since May, has dropped from $24.95 million to $21 million.
“There’s also some miscellaneous property — some silver, porcelain, antiquities, things of that nature — that will be going up for sale at Christie’s,” Shuwarger says. He anticipates that most of those sales will be completed within six months.
Per Brody’s wishes, the full Huntington gift will benefit the botanical gardens, which cover 120 acres of the vast property in San Marino. According to James Folsom, director of the gardens, high-priority projects include “improving and modernizing” a water irrigation system that dates to the early 20th century and creating a “potager” or kitchen garden to complement the existing herb garden. Folsom says that these were pet projects of Brody, who loved her garden at home and, though known for her high style, was not too glamorous to get into a truck with him to drive around and shop for plants at nurseries.
Koblik adds that using the Brody money for botanical purposes frees up existing funds to address other needs, like “making staff salaries more competitive.” This does not, however, mean “quick raises,” he adds, noting the importance of resisting the natural urge “to get overexcited and spend money quickly to do everything we haven’t been able to do.”
Rather, he plans to treat the windfall “like an endowment,” to be invested in a diversified portfolio. (The Huntington’s actual endowment is about $240 million.) The plan is to spend only 5% of the value of the Brody funds over a three-year running average.
And, yes, Koblik says, this legacy-building gift more than compensates for not receiving Brody’s now-famous Picasso. “Right from the beginning of our relationship, Francie said to me, 'You’re not getting the art.' It took the discussion off the table,” he says.
“It was clear to all of us who spent time with Francie that she wanted to make a fiscal difference at the Huntington — she understood the power of this kind of gift.”
-- Jori Finkel
Photo: Frances' Brody's home, which was designed in 1950 by A. Quincy Jones. Credit: Kate Carr Photography
This article is from: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/11/huntington-gift-from-frances-brody-estate-to-exceed-100-million-making-it-largest-ever-in-institutio.html
Are Women Artists Finally Getting Their Due?
The Women of pop art
Long sidelined, women artists slowly win recognition – and museum space.
By Carol Strickland, New York
Notice a tint of gender bias in terms like "masterpiece" and "old master"? Now a picture is emerging of not just historical, but persistent discrimination against women in the art world. A slew of recent museum exhibitions aims to fill in the blanks. The latest, "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968" (at the Brooklyn Museum through Jan. 9), brings a feminine presence to the masculine-sounding term "pop art."
'Black Rosy,' by Niki De Saint Phalle Court.
Courtesy of The Brooklyn Museum
The show features works by 25 women who helped develop pop art but who (except for the sculptor Marisol) disappeared from art history books. "These artists were all visible once," says Sid Sachs, director of exhibitions at Philadelphia's University of the Arts, who conceived the show. Yet when the first art histories and surveys of the movement appeared, he adds, "There was a real critical culling." Mr. Sachs made it his mission to "cherchez la femme" and says, that through exhaustive research, "I found the women!"
It’s not news that art by women has been under-recognized. H.W. Janson’s classic text “History of Art,” used in countless Art 101 courses, didn’t contain work by a single female artist until the 1986 edition, after the author was deceased. (That edition included 19 female artists out of 2,300 illustrations.) As late as 1979 Janson said, “I have not been able to find a woman artist who clearly belongs in a one-volume history of art.”
Sachs's essay in the exhibition catalog contains ample evidence of discrimination in the decade prior to the burgeoning women's movement of the 1970s. Women seeking admission to art schools were judged not by their portfolios but by their profile photographs. Jann Haworth, who invented soft sculpture (although Claes Oldenburg is given credit) recalled, "The girls were there to keep the boys happy." American artist Carolee Schneemann confirmed, “You had to shut up and affiliate yourself with really interesting men,” adding, “you had to be good looking.”
Nancy Heller, professor of modern art also at the University of the Arts and author of "Women Artists: An Illustrated History," notes that progress lagged well into the 1970s and '80s. "It was difficult to convince a committee in graduate school that any woman artist – dead or living – was worth a dissertation." Museums and galleries were also a no woman's land. "If you saw a major exhibition by a woman," Professor Heller recalls, "it was a cause for celebration and shock."
Museums now are in a do-over moment. Exhibitions displaying female artists abound. Exhibitions such as “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” (2007-08), the Brooklyn Museum’s “Global Feminisms” (2009), and “elles@centrepompidou” (through February 2011 in Paris) display female contributions. New York's Jewish Museum hails pioneers with "Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism" through Jan. 30, and the Museum of Modern Art features "Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography" through March 21.
MOMA's commitment to integrate its male-dominated galleries is much needed, since "MOMA historically has not focused on women artists," admits Connie Butler, chief curator of drawings. Since the museum's founding in 1929, only 5 percent of the 2,052 exhibitions have highlighted female artists. All that is changing. In the last five years, curators have sought to reclaim the missing women. Butler, who curated the “WACK!” show, calls the revisionism “transformative” saying, “We are more aware of the gaps in the collection in terms of women artists, we’re trying to target women artists in our acquisition program, and generally it’s raised awareness of having a greater representation of women in the galleries.”
Butler co-edited a comprehensive book, “Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art,” that covers both well-known and obscure figures, and the photography gallery has installed “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography” through March 21, 2011.
Catherine Morris, curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, sees "a groundswell of interest in re-examining feminist contributions to the art of the second half of the 20th century." It seems it's catch-up time.
Hold onto your horsetail paintbrushes! The Guerrilla Girls, activist female artists who criticize sexism and racism in the art world, think the fight isn't over. A founder of the group who goes by the pseudonym Frida Kahlo says, "When you look at the ranks of artists who get one-person exhibitions in museums or have monographs or whose work resells for a lot of money, women and artists of color are rarely in those top ranks."
Ms. Kahlo faults the system, saying, "American art institutions are run by and for art collectors on their boards of trustees ... white males who buy art that appeals to them, art about their values, not the values of the general culture."
Art collecting is indeed dominated by male collectors, often newly super-rich moguls and hedge-funders who view art as an investment or as a trophy to advertise their wealth.
"Until the structure of the art market and how art gets bought, sold, and donated changes," Kahlo says, "we'll be fighting this market attempt to define what our visual art history is."
"That's a historical truth," Ms. Morris admits. "I hope it's changing."
“We do live in a capitalist society,” Heller says, “but art is not pork bellies.” Nevertheless, the system where wealthy men collect easily recognizable, high-fashion art becomes “a vicious circle,” she says, which perpetuates the under-valuing of art by women.
Greg Allen (in a 2005 New York Times story) pointed out the glaring disparity in resale prices, citing evidence that an "X Factor" denigrates women's art. Only a handful of women have broken the $1 million mark at auction, while men's paintings have soared past $100 million. And it's not just paintings by historical figures. An old master as well as a new master still beats a Ms., generally by a 10-fold ratio.
What about for contemporary artists – the daughters of the feminist revolution? The Brainstormers, a young artist-activist group, document continued inequities. Brooklyn artist Danielle Mysliwiec, a collective member, cites the 50/50 ratio of male to female students in art schools, which disappears at commercial galleries in Chelsea, where more than 80 percent of artists are male. Even in galleries that represent emerging artists, males dominate (they account for 70 percent).
“Young women have a much more level playing field than they did twenty years ago,” Butler says, “but the numbers speak.” The numbers trumpet a higher economic value for art by men—disproportionate to cultural or aesthetic value. “They make me want to say ‘ouch’,” says Morris.
"You see a disturbing perpetuation of discrimination," Ms. Mysliwiec concludes, adding, "When you think about how an artwork increases in value, it depends on where it's shown, how many times it's shown, and in what venues." A problem with galleries preferring male artists, she says, is that "curators are dependent on gallery validation" to determine which artists to show in museums.
All acknowledge the benefits of increasing awareness of women artists' contributions. "We'd have an art [history] that represents who we are as a culture and what we're thinking about," Kahlo says. "Not just who the billionaire art collectors want to buy."
"Incorporating historical facts that have been removed because they were not seen as pertinent by a segment of society is incredibly useful," according to Morris. "It empowers half of the current culture and can teach us about how we've come to be who we are and what we need to do moving forward."
She adds, "I'd like my daughter to make assumptions about who she is in the world and what her history is and where she came from in ways I couldn't and my mother certainly couldn't."
Butler hopes the legacy of her generation of curators is to leave a more nuanced, complex, and complete version of art history than they were taught.
History is a mutable argument. It’s not set in stone, carved only by a male sculptor like Brancusi. Maybe it’s glued together—like a Louise Nevelson work—from fragments of wood. Not that one should replace the other. No one wants a ghetto-ized “Ladies Room” approach.
“To be judged on merit,” the young artist Danielle Mysliwiec sighs wishfully, “to have that be true.”
This article is from: http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2010/1117/The-women-of-pop-art/%28page%29/2
Commission Proposes Admission Fee For Smithsonian
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"]
[/caption]Proposal Recommends Charging Admission at the Smithsonian
By KATE TAYLOR
In New York, a visit to the Museum of Modern Art will set you back $20, but down in Washington, the Smithsonian Institution, which is 70 percent federally funded, has long been free. That would change under a proposal by the national commission charged with reducing the deficit. In a draft report Wednesday, it recommended that the Smithsonian’s federal appropriation be cut by $225 million, or roughly 30 percent, and that the institution make up the loss by charging a $7.50 admission fee.
The Smithsonian’s spokeswoman, Linda St. Thomas, said by phone that the Smithsonian had studied the idea of charging admission several times in recent decades, and at each point rejected it.
“The Regents have said repeatedly we don’t want to charge admission because it then makes it difficult for all people to come and visit the collections, which in theory are held in trust for the American people,” Ms. St. Thomas said.
She pointed out that, because the Smithsonian is federally funded, Americans are in a sense already paying to visit, through their tax dollars.
Various folks in Washington have been trying to throw an admission fee at the Smithsonian for years, without success. The most recent time the issue was raised was in 2006, when Representative James P. Moran, a Democrat of Virginia, suggested that the Smithsonian pay for building repairs by charging a $1 admission fee.
This article is from Arts Beat
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