Blake Gopnik and the Hirshorn’s Ned Rifkin talk about how museums protect artwork. “Is it possible that museums are actually too eager to preserve their art? That preservation, in a sense, has become fetishized to the point where it can detract from the art experience, rather than serving it? How should a museum strike a balance between protection and presentation?”
Tag: 06.01.03
How Artists Represent America
“When the Vennice Biennale opens to the public in two weeks, Fred Wilson will be America’s artist. His $650,000 show, titled ‘Speak of Me As I Am’ and organized by the curator Kathleen Goncharov of the List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T., will scrutinize some longstanding American themes — immigration and integration — but will view them through Venetian history.” So how was it decided that Mr. Wilson would represent us? A panel of course…
Hadid’s Latest Is A Coup For Cincinnati
Cincinnati’s new arts center is not the type of outsized, over-the-top structure generally associated with today’s high-profile architecture. In fact, Zaha Hadid’s design is in many ways the antithesis of the Blockbuster Building, which may be part of the reason that critics have been falling all over themselves to praise it. Benjamin Forgey is impressed with the building, if not with the hype, and says that the museum will reflect well on its hometown. “For the city itself, which contributed money along with the state and private donors, the architecture is a coup. The building will become an “early Hadid,” a period piece folks will fight to save from the wrecking ball in a half-century or so.”
The President And The Arts Advocate
How did an outspoken advocate of publicly funded art wind up as part of an administration which is, at best, indifferent to art, and at worst, opposed to anything remotely controversial? No one seems quite sure of the answer, but Dana Gioia is clearly not intimidated by the president who appointed him to the top job at the National Endowment for the Arts. Frank Rich thinks that the key to Gioia’s success may be his refusal to get involved in “the ugly culture wars that the likes of Lynne Cheney and William Bennett embraced during the Gingrich revolution. Many of those battles were in one way or another about N.E.A. grants to artistic projects with sexual content, especially homosexual content. Mr. Gioia will have none of it.”
Saving Money Through Theatrical Synergy
“Increasingly, nonprofit presenting organizations… are joining forces with for-profit entertainment companies to invest in Broadway shows and their subsequent tours. In some cases presenters put money into new tours of shows that closed on Broadway long ago. By so doing presenters are guaranteed that there will, in fact, be shows to present. And the producers of Broadway shows are guaranteed a major chunk of their budget.”
Public Art And Civic Pride
It seems as if the Sculpture Garden may be to this era what the large-scale mural was to an earlier time: a relatively cheap, attractive way to feature art in a public place, and a method of urban beautification which doesn’t require the razing of neighborhoods or the construction of hundred-million-dollar buildings. Denver has had a sculpture garden since 1997, but it has sat empty for most of the period since it was built. Kyle MacMillan says that Denver needs to start branding itself, art-wise: “So far, at least, no single acquisition has become a signature work that is widely identified with the city, one that art aficionados would come to Denver specifically to see.”
How To Be A Critic
So what makes art good? How about music? Or movies, or books? Most anyone who reads a newspaper spends a fair amount of time being told what’s good and what isn’t by supposed experts in the field, but how do the critics draw their conclusions? What’s the frame of reference? The Denver Post’s critics get together to offer readers a look into their world, and the results are as diverse as the writers themselves. TV critic Joanne Ostrow sees occasional quality as a welcome relief from the broadcast wasteland. Art critic Kyle MacMillan says that all great art, even the topical kind, can withstand the test of time. And rock critic G. Brown thinks that, in an industry dominated by fakes and puffery, real quality is found by looking for the musicians who make you believe what they’re singing.
Mental Illness Is Not A Plot Device
“The movie industry is hardly alone in its tenuous grasp of mental illness… But the movies are writ wide and large, and they’re heavily reliant on drama and excitement that everyone can see for the price of a ticket. Short cuts and misrepresentations are common, if not always malicious. And they have an enormous influence on the ways we view a variety of very painful conditions.”
Stop Bashing Cannes
The general consensus among critics is that this year’s Cannes Film Festival did not measure up to previous installments. Several writers went so far as to call it the ‘worst Cannes ever.’ Michael Wilmington isn’t buying, although he acknowledges that the field of main category entries was the weakest in quite some time: “I tend to take acerbic verdicts on Cannes, even seemingly well founded ones, with a grain of sel – because I hear them so often. Every single year – with the exception of 1997, the 50th anniversary annum – I’ve heard somebody at Cannes insist this was the worst fest ever. Often the nix comes from dilettantes who see no more than one or two movies a day while hunting the next party to crash or celebrity to schmooze.”
Musicians Who Need A Push
It is notoriously difficult to fire an orchestra musician in the U.S. A strict tenure system and decades of tradition make it a tremendous challenge to remove a musician who is no longer pulling his/her weight, and more often than not, a music director is reduced to pleading with substandard musicians to simply retire, rather than force the organization to begin the long, drawn-out process of dismissing them. Ordinarily, the public never hears about such internal confrontations, but in Chicago, where the music director has often been heard to condemn the tenure system, an unusual number of recently announced ‘retirements’ have brought the issue to the fore.