Two Minutes of MOMA

We first saw this on Culture Grrl, but we keep going back to it. If you need a two-minute break and want to have art from MOMA's collection flash before your eyes faster than you can intellectually process it, we highly recommend you click above to play.

GMOA in the News

Checking our Google Alerts this morning after a holiday weekend, we noticed two mentions of the museum. Culture Grrl mentions our director, William U. Eiland, in a post on the deaccessioning press release by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), complete with a link to the release. Bill is cochair of AAMD's Deaccessioning Task Force. Unsurprisingly (and rightly), the release reiterates AAMD's policy on deaccessioning ("works cannot be deaccessioned to provide funds for operating or capital purposes and such funds may only be used for the refinement and expansion of the collection").

Also, if you happen to be in or near Greensburg, Penn., on March 25, our friend Jason Schoen is speaking at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in connection with an exhibition of paintings from his collection, "Concerning the 1930s in Art: Paintings from the Schoen Collection." Schoen has been a wonderful friend to GMOA, placing many of the works in his collection (both paintings and works on paper) on long-term loan with the museum, and we plan to reopen with "The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection," a fine exhibition of just such.

Museum Expansions

Prompted by an article in the New York Times that declares in its headline, "In the Arts, Bigger Buildings May Not Be Better," CultureGrrl has some good thoughts on the matter, pointing out some inaccuracies and some crucial cases overlooked, as well as taking a more measured stance. Yes, many arts institutions seem to build huge structures on a whim, focusing on sexy architecture and the potential of increased tourism more than actual needs, and perhaps we're particularly sensitive to criticisms of this sort, being right smack in the middle of a building project ourselves (a desperately needed expansion!), but the article does seem like the kind of not particularly thoughtful questioning of what the journalist perceives as received wisdom. Here's the key paragraph from Rosenbaum's response on her blog:

Nevertheless, museum expansion isn't an evil to be avoided, as Robin's article seems to suggest. It just needs to be done for the right reasons and with a secure financial underpinning. That means not only knowing in advance where the necessary construction money is coming from, but also amassing the endowment funds required to cover the increased operating costs of the expanded facility. If you don't know where that money is coming from, you need to delay the project. There's nothing wrong with that.

Nimbleness

Amy Miller, our shop manager, first provided a link to Tom Campbell's appearance on The Colbert Report, and CultureGrrl has an embedded video you can watch. It's hard enough for a PR department to prepare its museum's director for a regular TV appearance, but we take our hats off to whoever ran Campbell through his paces for Colbert. He handled every question about as well as anyone could, without trying to make a bunch of jokes (no one's going to beat Colbert at his own game) or getting huffy at incredibly stupid questions.

Speaking of complicated museum issues...

Lee Rosenbaum, a.k.a., CultureGrrl, cornered Timothy Rub, current director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who was previously director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, about his former institution's court battle and attempt to redirect funds designated for acquisitions to construction of its new wing, due to a downturn in the stock market. Yes, it's a complicated financial situation, and his time was limited in this case, but it would have been nice to see him explain a little better the details of why he and his board felt these particular decisions had to be made rather than saying,

My point to you is it's a really interesting and very complex calculation that has to do with things as varied as bond ratings and cash flow from pledges that we currently have or that we might anticipate in the future. It has to do with bonding capacity and with calculating the cost of capital. It has to do with the institution's willingness to take on risk in terms of future obligations. It has to do with whether you resolve to pay for something now as opposed to having the institution pay for it much later.

At any rate, you should go read the rest of the interview.

Video

CultureGrrl may have taken the week off from blogging, but she's still posted an interesting brief video of Glenn Lowry speaking at MOMA's press breakfast in which he expresses some wonderful things about how museums should work, especially emphasizing what being curatorially driven means and the importance of the collection, which takes precedence over exhibitions. You should go watch it. We also like his hipster jacket.

Attribution

Is it or isn't it? An article in the New York Times this morning discusses the Metropolitan Museum of Art's decision that the painting pictured above really is by the hand of Diego Velázquez, but blogger CultureGrrl, who we read every day, has her own strong opinions about the seesaw back and forth. So what do you think?

Edit: Ah-ha. It's another attribution issue she questions. We just didn't follow the link to this page on a hypothetical Michelangelo. Still, as we're currently wrapping up the long, long project that is the three-volume "Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South," attribution is on our minds. Many of the entries deal with the differing opinions of scholars about just who painted a given image, as with the Lowe Art Museum's "The Savior," currently attributed to Benedetto Diana but previously to an artist of the Venetian school (ca. 1500) and to Girolamo Mocetto.