Category: visual

“Museums and galleries are facing a crisis of acquisition. As the art market booms, it becomes increasingly obvious that we have pitifully meagre resources with which to buy works of art to add to, and keep up to date, our museum collections. How on earth can we increase our collections if works of art cost so much? How can we find new sources of funding?”

Washington DC’s National Portrait Gallery is holding a competition. But it has some problems… “Maybe the worst move of all was to limit the contest to the old-fashioned arts of painting and sculpture. If you’re simply looking for the best imaginable portrait art, why rule out all the photographic media that artists love to use these days? Some of the best artworks of recent years have been pictures of people, done in film and video and photography, by world-famous artists.”

“The whole idea of some kind of more fundamental ‘Americanness,’ seeping into all our art the way the landscape of Bordeaux seeps into its wines, falls apart as soon as you start testing it. What if it turned out, for instance, that all of Jackson Pollock’s pictures were actually painted by a Frenchman — a certain Jacques Saint-Paul Oc — who got a hard-drinking young American to flog them for him? Someone would be bound to insist that only a Frenchman could have managed all that insouciant paint-dripping, with its Gallic joie de vivre and a soupcon of panache.”

Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum is rearranging its collection. “Typically, there are rooms for paintings, for sculpture, for silverwork, for ceramics, for furniture, etc., and never do the various media meet. That, however, has changed in Kansas City. ‘It is a new museum concept. It grows out of this idea that I had that people weren’t getting enough out of it’.”

There’s no longer any doubt that Russian collectors have been fuelling a major art boom on both sides of the Atlantic. But how long can this particular bubble last? “The last time the market hit such heights was at the end of the 1980s, followed by a crash that saw New York’s SoHo, then the city’s main gallery district, end up a ghost town… According to current wisdom, this boom is safer because the new globalised market means more stability. The last boom was all about one economy, Japan’s, so it was snuffed out when that economy collapsed. But the new markets could be as yet too new and shallow to rely on.”

Wassily Kandinsky may have had more than just paint in mind when he crafted his masterpieces. “Music – and the idea of music – appears everywhere in Kandinsky’s work… To support his colour theories, Kandinsky appealed in his manifesto to the evidence of synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another (as when someone hears the ring of a doorbell as tasting of chicken or whatever).”

“This week, even as an information picket went up around the Art Gallery of Ontario (its 266 staff represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees could strike after June 29) management told the annual meeting that all was well. Although the AGO is undergoing a major reconstruction, its annual attendance topped 475,000 visitors, and it is on budget and acquiring new works. The upbeat report communicated management’s positive attitude to the picketers, but it bears scrutiny.”

“The Cleveland Museum of Art has delayed an addition to its parking garage — an important part of a larger, $258 million expansion and renovation — because of a holdup with a $7.5 million federal grant. The delay could increase the cost of the garage expansion because the museum had to reject construction bids this month and will have to seek new ones… The delay also means the museum will have fewer parking spaces than it needs in February when it holds a blockbuster exhibition on the paintings of French Impressionist Claude Monet.”

The British Museum’s Michelangelo show has been so popular the museum has stayed open as late as midnight to accomodate the crowds. “Youths in black carried their skateboards, iPods playing the British rave band Arctic Monkeys shoved into pockets. Elderly people leaned on their canes. In the dim light, thousands stood in silence to focus on the artist’s 90 drawings, ranging from Annunciations to Crucifixions to male figure studies.”

The agreement between Italy and the Getty for longterm loans is becoming a trend. “Though long-term loans have been around for decades, the new twist is that the loan is becoming part of a resolution. That has to be a good thing, in that it allows the object still to have a very broad degree of public access in more than one country. That’s what museums are all about: providing a way for people to experience great works of art directly — unmediated through their computer screens and books and other things — in the context of other great art.”