A Collection of Links

We've just discovered the Georgia College Curator blog, run by Shannon Morris, who works at the Georgia College and State University Museum, in Milledgeville and posts her thoughts about artists, upcoming events and exhibitions and more. It has far more information than the museum's Web site and some interesting investigations into artistic production.

This article from the Wall Street Journal's arts and entertainment section discusses those cases where facts and accuracy are necessary in art, which tends not to be a situation we think about very often.

If you've been wondering what Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Museum at Brandeis, has been doing to occupy his time, this piece from the Boston Globe on an exhibition he's organized at MIT will clue you in.

We also really enjoyed flipping through this Flickr gallery of visitor responses to an exhibition on WPA art (something GMOA specializes in) at the Detroit Institute of Arts. People were asked to imagine what they would produce if they were a WPA artist working today, and the range of responses (as evidenced by the one we selected above) is odd, amusing and inspiring all at once.

Finally, we've been meaning to post this link to the Art Newspaper's article about whether U.S. museums will be able to reinvent themselves in the current economic era. Although it ran in mid-January, its questions are by no means outdated a month and a half on, and they are serious ones to consider.

A Follow-Up

When responding yesterday to Rudolph Weingartner's column on the deaccessioning at the Rose Museum, we hadn't yet seen James Steward's response in Inside Higher Ed, which is far more eloquent than our dashed off prose and contains some additional excellent points about the value of university museums. He mentions the interdisciplinary nature of the research currently being done and the importance of collaboration across disciplines on campus, calling attention to the fact that even medical schools have found university art museums useful as a training tool for visual acuity. He also puts the answer to "Why collect?" absolutely beautifully:

And why do we university museums so annoyingly feel the need to collect artworks, creating the inevitable drain on resources caused by those pesky stewardship requirements? I offer in answer a fundamental article of faith, that even in the digital age, the sustained engagement with original works of art necessary for teaching, research, and layered learning would be difficult if not impossible if we ceased to be collecting institutions and instead taught only from objects temporarily made available for exhibition.

In the way that great texts live in our libraries, available for revisiting and sustained scholarly investigation, the works of art in our museums offer the possibility of deep critical engagement, close looking, and technical analysis -- made all the deeper when brought together as collections in which dialogues arise through the conversation of objects with each other and with their scholarly interlocutors. Surely a key role of the academy -- the advancement of new knowledge and the challenging of past knowledge -- is that fruit of curatorial, faculty, and student research made possible by the sustained presence of great works of art, whose survival for the future is also thus (and not incidentally) guaranteed.

We're sure this discussion isn't over by a long shot, but we would encourage you to go read Steward's entire piece, which is passionate and thoughtful.

Different Thoughts on Brandeis

We meant to link to this last week, but Rudolph Weingartner, former dean of arts and sciences at Northwestern, wrote a column for Inside Higher Ed on the deaccessioning at the Rose Museum that presents the other side of the issue. Weingartner makes no bones about where he's coming from, even early in the piece:

Understand that my print collection went to Northwestern because I had been dean of arts and sciences there for thirteen years. Understand also that regarding this issue, my experience as dean trumps my love of art and that is why I disagree with the views expressed in numerous articles in The New York Times and one this month in Inside Higher Ed called “Avoiding the Next Brandeis."

He argues that university museums do little to promote relationships with the rest of campus, writing

But why should they be so regarded when, by my admittedly not systematic observations, most of those museums do nothing or very little to deserve to be so regarded? As dean, I had to bludgeon the Block Gallery to present an exhibit of the work of Northwestern’s prize painters, William Conger, Ed Paschke and James Valerio. (This was before the Gallery was transformed into a Museum and long before its current director, David Robertson, came to Northwestern.) Art history departments are mostly held at arm's length by campus museums who prize their (inappropriate) autonomy. Mostly, the museums don’t even know how to communicate with other than art faculty on campus.

But should deans have such an influence over what the university museum presents? Doesn't that tread on curatorial independence? Weingartner's other major argument is that these museums need not own the works they present, that temporary exhibitions would do just as well to promote the study of works of art:

It is excellent, therefore, that this cluster of issues is being looked at. In my view, however, the goals sought by the task force for campus art museums are not likely to be realized by means of works of arts owned by museums, but rather by means of exhibits brought in and often locally curated for specific pedagogic purposes.

But having works on display for a limited time and inaccessible after that period by necessity limits their study. A permanent collection is a huge asset to a campus, not to mention that the acquisitions of university museums are naturally different in intent than the acquisitions of private institutions, private collectors or galleries. We understand where Weingartner is coming from, and, again, he admits his bias early on, but we also respectfully disagree with many aspects of his argument.

Museum Issues

Inside Higher Ed has a good article titled "Avoiding the Next Brandeis." It calls attention to the ACUMG petition we informed you of a while back, which you can still sign if it slipped your mind, and gets a lot of good material from David Alan Robertson, president of ACUMG.

He noted that campus museums are in an unusual situation in that many of them receive substantial funds from non-college sources and yet report to colleges. At Northwestern, he said, about 35 percent of the annual budget for the museum comes from the university, another 18 percent from endowment funds designated for the museum, and the rest is from a variety of source -- gifts, grants and so forth. Much of the outside funding comes with goals relating to the public, and there can be "a tension between the museums' public responsibilities and their university responsibilities," he said.

The new task force has already held meetings with two of the regional accrediting agencies for higher education, trying to impress upon those bodies that museums shouldn't be viewed as extras, but as "teaching institutions and research institutions" that are central, Robertson said.

Another strategy being discussed is encouraging colleges to define the financial exigency plans -- or what they would do in a severe financial crisis -- and to make the case that museums should not be the first institutions to be closed, Robertson said.

In less serious news, you may also want to check out this New York Times article on the spread of the verb "curate."

For many who adopt the term, or bestow it on others, “it’s an innocent form of self-inflation,” said John H. McWhorter, a linguist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “You’re implying that there is some similarity between what you do and what someone with an advanced degree who works at a museum does.”

We actually try not to use "curate" as a verb--it's a pet peeve of our director's.

An Update on the Rose Museum

The advisory committee formed at Brandeis University to make recommendations on the future of the Rose Museum has issued its report, and here's the Boston Globe's summary of it. As everyone notes, the report recommends that the university keep the Rose open but takes no stand on whether or not it is acceptable to sell any of the museum's collection, which, of course, is the central issue here.

Opinion Piece: Cotter Doesn't Coddle!

Holland Cotter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff art critic for the New York Times, writes about which exhibitions pique his interest in the coming year, which artists to watch, and how museums will pull themselves out of the muck. His article adopts a serious, castigatory tone, but maybe he’s right.
Yes, he may sound ornery, but Cotter’s impertinence is necessary in a time when the Rose Museum scandal is not an uncommon occurrence. He irately refers to another similar incident at UCLA that has perpetuated the sucking-your-university-museum/library-dry-to-stay-afloat trend. Granted, we are working against an inexorable economic tempest forcing museums, one of the first recession targets, to economize in a number of ways. Sometimes, drastic measures must be taken, but if museums in dire straits meditate on his suggestions, they may not have to perform artistic seppuku.
Cotter implores and pleads with museums to reconsider shutting down or selling heirloom pieces and to instead consider downsizing flashy, costly “supersizer” exhibitions, playing up their permanent collections, and even looking to university museums (of which the Georgia Museum of Art is one) for ideas. As university museums have always had to manage small budgets, bigger enterprises can learn how to be effective with little money. He adds that university museums are interesting management models because they are typically staffed with a young, enterprising and creative direction, an especially valuable treasure when the fiscal climate is changing quickly.
Cotter also mentions a fairly new trend, which places artists in the role of the curator. Why could that possibly be helpful? He says that “what we need is someone detached from the old buddy system of curators and critics who can give the moribund biennial concept life”. Perhaps we just need to weigh drastically different options rather than admitting defeat.