Category: visual

The Milwaukee Public Museum is in financial difficulty. And its board was unaware in January when told the museum’s endowment stood at $6.4 million at the end of 2004. “That was wrong – the endowment was about $2.5 million at the time, down from $4.6 million at the end of August. Now, the fund contains less than $500,000.”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has found half of the team it plans to install to replace departing president and director Andrea Rich. “Melody Kanschat, a 16-year administrator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will take over the museum’s presidency July 1, museum officials said. The move is part of the restructuring that will make the presidency the second-ranking job in the institution.” The top job will be director, and LACMA’s search to fill that position is ongoing.

“The Art Gallery of Ontario announced yesterday it has raised more than 70 percent of the CAN$254-million it says it needs to bring superstar architect Frank Gehry’s renovation to fruition by spring, 2008, and not coincidentally pay off ‘a little bit’ of the debt from the AGO’s last $60-million expansion, in 1993… The gallery has earmarked CAN$30-million of the anticipated CAN$254-million for the administration and maintenance of its collections, with another $5-million going into a fund to acquire Canadian and international contemporary art.”

AGO’s fundraising triumph represents a considerable turnaround from the museum’s misfortunes of a year ago. For a while, it seemed that AGO couldn’t stumble out of a crisis without bumping headlong into another one. But Toronto’s cultural elite rallied behind the beleaguered museum, and this week’s announcement that AGO is within striking distance of having money in the bank sufficient to stabilize itself and pay for a glamorous new building goes a long way towards rehabilitating its bruised image.

How is it that American art museums are flourishing, even as orchestras, theatres, and so many other arts institutions find themselves desperate for cash and running annual deficits? The answer may be as simple as an increased focus on the customer. “Art museums have learned the lessons of successful retailers in that they allow people to visit at all times of day, including evenings and weekends, not at a prearranged time. And a visitor can go at his or her own pace in a museum, looking, reading, thinking and enjoying. Plus, a concert, dance, performance or film is often included in the price of admission.”

A major investor in art says that art prices for contemporary art “are in fantasy land — they’re near lunacy.” “Prices for works by Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock have trebled since 1996, according to index-maker Art Market Research, and New York’s $300 million of contemporary art auctions in May set more than 30 records. While some hedge funds may be putting investors at risk, buyers of contemporary art have more chance of losing money on their purchases.”

Jerry Saltz isn’t a fan of art auctions: “Contemporary art auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theater, and brothel. They are rarefied entertainments where speculation, spin, and trophy hunting merge as an insular caste enacts a highly structured ritual in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight. Everyone says auctions are about “quality.” In fact, auctions are altars to the disconnect between the inner life of art and the outer life of consumption, places where artists are cut off from their art. Auctions have nothing to do with quality.”

“The Philadelphia Museum of Art is embarking on what would be the largest cultural expansion in Philadelphia history, an extremely ambitious, $500 million effort to expand and renovate its iconic building at the end of the Parkway.”

The four-city tour of King Tut in the US that begins next week in Los Angeles is a marketing extravaganza. “Little about Tut II is like anything the museum world is used to, let alone the museum world of 1976-1979 when Tut virtually invented the blockbuster museum exhibit. For Tut II, museums are merely the venues, not the prime organizers, in large part because no museum could afford to insure the exhibit for its official value of $650 million. Also, Egypt has become a savvy negotiator determined to squeeze as many dollars out of Tut as possible.”

Michael Kimmelman writes that Richard Serra’s new installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao is “one of the great works of the past half-century, the culmination of a remarkable fruition in Mr. Serra’s career. It rejuvenates and pushes abstraction to a fresh level. And it is deeply humane, not least because it counts on individual perception, individual discovery.”