Traveling Exhibitions

The November 16 issue of the New Yorker has a long article by Ian Parker (not accessible in full online) about Zahi Hawass, Egyptian archaeologist and head of the country's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), which oversees all Egypt's historic sites and artifacts. Hawass has been extremely influential over the past decade (at minimum) in controlling the direction of Egyptian archaeology and has worked extensively with the National Geographic Society and with television networks to produce many specials. The part that caught our eye, as museum folks, was a paragraph about the Tutankhamun exhibition (recently in Atlanta) that he put together with Arts and Exhibitions International:

In 2005, Hawass accepted a proposal from A.E.G., the sports-arena owner and events organizer, to take Tutankhamun back on the road, with an explicit ambition of making money. Andres Numhauser, the exhibitions executive, works for Arts and Exhibitions International, an A.E.G. subsidiary, and he told me that Hawass has "professionalized exhibitions," adding, "Egyptians don't appreciate what he's doing." A.E.G. agreed to pay Egypt for access to a few dozen of its thousands of Tutankhamun artifacts, and to involve the National Geographic Society, whose name would go on the poster. Any museum that took the show would be given a share of the ticket proceeds, but it would have to stomach the loss of almost all curatorial control. In San Francisco, for example, the de Young Museum was able to veto items in the exhibition's accompanying gift store, and it ruled out a tissue box whose papers exit through the nose in a Pharaoh's mask. Beyond that, the museum was the provider of floor space. John Norman, the C.E.O. of Arts and Exhibitions International, said, "We lay it out, we bring all the elements--the cases, the text panels, the lighting, everything is ours. Where they have input is in the label copy. Their curator might want to say the same thing that's on that label but in a different way, and we give them the opportunity to edit. And there might be a two-per-cent change."

Just an interesting look at what's involved sometimes with a blockbuster show.

A Case for Extensive Wall Labels

In the September 14 issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane writes about the photographer Robert Frank's The Americans, now on view again at the Met, as this New York Times article covers. It's a wonderful article in its own right. Despite the fact that Lane is primarily a film critic, he's easily able to venture outside that narrow field to write about literature, art and more, and he delves deep into the ways different groups have viewed Frank's work as well as his own take it (documentary, not polemical or explicitly political), but in the course of doing so, he explains why wall labels should cover more ground rather than less:

What pulls me into the picture is the fuzz of its focus and the murk of its grain; Frank was using Kodak Tri-X, a famously tolerant film, which only proves how low the light was on the assembly line. Sometimes, to judge by the contacts, he switched to Plus-X, a slower emulsion, but nobody in the catalogue can tell us whether this was a deliberate choice, or a simple matter of loading what came to hand. Again, what lens did he fit to his Leica for the River Rouge shot? Much of “The Americans,” I would guess, was shot on 50-mm. or wider, but the way in which the Ford workers are stacked up tight suggests a short telephoto lens; if museumgoers are informed, by a small plaque, that a painting was executed in egg tempera, or oil on poplar, why should lovers of photographs be left in the dark? These things matter, whenever battle is joined over art. It matters, for instance, that Jasper Johns’s “Flag,” on which he labored from 1954 to 1955, was painted in oil and encaustic, a wax-based medium: first, because it allowed him to embed barely visible scraps of newsprint beneath the pigment, like messages from the journalistic beyond, and, second, because the rough stickiness of the surface—so uncomfortable a contrast to the dry nap of an actual Stars and Stripes—added to people’s genuine unease about whether he was paying due homage or making insubordinate sport.

Media are especially easy to overlook in a book, where, no matter how good a photograph and scan are, texture tends to blur, but they are indeed a crucial aspect of any work of art and well worth examining.

A Story About a Cover

The cover for this week's New Yorker has an interesting back story. Drawn by artist Jorge Colombo, the cover was composed on the artist’s iPhone, with an application called Brushes. In an article in the New York Times and an article in the New Yorker itself, the artist comments on how he enjoys the anonymity offered by the digitized canvas, as opposed to pencil and paper, when working outside.

Also at the New Yorker, a video recorded by the Brushes application shows the creation of the piece from start to finish.