Hard Times

Most articles that have appeared over the past year or so detailing the financial straits of museums and, as a result, their turn to permanent collection shows (and it is an entire genre of articles by this point) have focused on the positives of such a move, but the Wall Street Journal's "Picasso to the Rescue" takes the unusual tack of pointing out some negatives.

Exhibits drawn entirely from permanent collections can sometimes feel incomplete or unsatisfying, museum observers say. "Very few museums have got a deep enough collection to pull this off convincingly," says David Gordon, the former director of the Milwaukee Art Museum who now works as a museum consultant. He adds that the Met's extensive holdings make it one of the possible exceptions.

It's unclear whether Gordon is speaking specifically about blockbuster permanent collection shows like the Metropolitan Museum of Art's upcoming Picasso exhibition or generally. He has a far better point if he means the former than the latter, which would suggest that museums shouldn't even bother with permanent collections beyond what's on the walls at all times. Author Candace Jackson mentions one reason permanent collection shows can be valuable: namely, fragility.

Most museums display less than 10% of the artwork in their collection at any given time. The works in storage often include a mix of museum-worthy pieces that can be pulled out for special exhibitions, and others that aren't fit for public viewing because they are fragile, damaged or simply no longer considered examples of great art. The Met has 34 Picasso paintings, but usually shows only 25 to 28 of them at a time. The artist's drawings and prints are generally not on view at the museum, because they are more fragile, but they will be included in the spring exhibit.

She also uses an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as a positive example of a creative permanent collection show:

Though not every museum has a closetful of Picassos to draw from, institutions across the country have come up with creative ways to put together shows from their own storerooms. At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, museum-goers can take another look at the museum's permanent collection—using binoculars. The "Benches & Binoculars" exhibit features a salon-style gallery, hung floor to ceiling with works from of the museum's collection, like "Office at Night" by Edward Hopper. Visitors are encouraged to view the works through binoculars. Chief curator Darsie Alexander says the exhibition was meant to be "experimental, maybe even light-hearted," and to her surprise, has become one of the most popular galleries in the museum, requiring additional security guards because of the crowds.

The quote from Gordon actually follows this paragraph immediately, which makes it even more (potentially) insulting. Not all exhibitions aim to be comprehensive, and it's doubtful that even the Met's will be. Part of the appeal of permanent collection shows comes from seeing how a collection is built, not from rehashing the same old masterpieces once again, and these shows can be interestingly focused in a way larger exhibitions rarely are.

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.

Ceci n'est pas un record store

The Wall Street Journal has an article about No Longer Empty's latest project, a recreation of a record store in a vacant space in Manhattan.

Ted Riederer and 40 other artists have created the mock "shop," which will include record albums that have their covers blacked out except for a few words. Visitors flip through the stack to read a poem. It's a piece that Mr. Riederer calls a "love letter" to the dying concept of a record store. "My goal is ... to have them in the store for 30 minutes until they realize it's not a store," he says.

Luckily, being located in Athens, Ga., we still have record stores, including ones that sell LPs, but the concept is still a fun use for an empty space.

Art and the Brain

Image: Jean Arp's "The Woman of Delos"

This week the exhibition “Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics" will open at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore as part of a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University that, with the cooperation of museum visitors, will look at why certain artwork attracts the human brain, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Equipped with 3-D glasses and clipboards, participants will be asked to view altered 3-D versions of sculptures by the abstract artist Jean Arp and indicate which versions they found most and least attractive.

Gary Vikan, director of the Walters and curator of the show, hopes that this study will provide insight into the unique brain activity produced in response to compelling works of art, the idea that successful artists have an inherent understanding of the brain and what aesthetic qualities please the areas that process visual cues.

Professor of neuroscience at the Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins Ed Connor is overseeing this study. The findings from the Walters will be combined with results from another experiment that measures participants’ reactions to the same works of art using magnetic brain-imaging scanners.

Connor and Vikan are hopeful that the findings from these studies and others like them could be used to make exhibitions more engaging and aesthetically pleasing to visitors.

Bring Back the Donations!

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, a proposed change to the 2006 Pension Protection Act may make donating works of art to museums more attractive to wealthy collectors. The current act prevents collectors who pledge a work of art to a museum incrementally from receiving tax benefits on any appreciation of the work’s value. It also limits to 10 the number of years a collector can take to complete a donation, which discourages financial advisors and estate lawyers from recommending this method of donation to their clients.

Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York proposed a bill in August that would extend the period over which a donation could be made to 20 years and allow donors to receive tax deductions on a percentage of the works’ appreciation. These changes are expected to stop the decline of art donations by making partial contributions more attractive to collectors and give the public the opportunity to see works of art that otherwise would have remained hidden in private collections.

Image: Sen. Charles Schumer, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal

Construction Controversy

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, we learn that the Cleveland Museum of Art is at the center of a controversy that has many members of the art community concerned. The museum is currently undergoing a $350-million, eight-year expansion that would significantly improve its ability to fulfill its mission. Unfortunately, having a large portion of its funding tied to endowments has left the museum short on funds during this rough economic period. This blow comes at the beginning of the second phase of construction, and stopping the project does not seem to be an option for the museum.

Left with a limited range of choices, the museum has come up with a solution that has many people unsettled. The museum has been granted permission to draw up to $75 million over 10 years from the interest paid out on two endowment funds and two outside, restricted trusts for acquisitions. In 1955, the museum found itself in a similar predicament when it ran out of funds for an expansion. A judge allowed the museum to use money from restricted acquisitions endowments to pay for the rest of its project. Now three of the same funds will be accessed to support the current building endeavor, and the fourth fund the museum plans to use was established by Leonard Hanna, who supported the 1955 decision to use those funds for that expansion.

Museums are not allowed to sell works of art unless they use the proceeds to purchase other works of art. The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) set and attempts to enforce this rule; however, there is nothing yet in AAMD’s best practices that prevents a museum from taking funds from restricted acquisitions trusts for non-acquisitions purposes. These trusts were created by donors for the purpose of acquiring art. The museum’s argument is based on the idea that the donors would want, above all, the museum to continue to fulfill its mission, and the only way it can do this is by completing the current construction project. The opposition to this plan worries that a decision in favor of tapping into these funds for non-acquisitions purposes would set a bad precedent.

In a time when many people are feeling the effects of a tighter financial situation and the arts seem to some an expendable endeavor, it makes sense for the museum to try and tap into the resources it has, but should it be allowed to make assumptions about the intent of its donors? This is a heavy question. There are many people who believe that if donors wished for the museum to use the money in the way they saw best fit it would have been stated in their trusts.

Those of us at the Georgia Museum of Art are interested in what you think about this issue and to hear any opinions about Cleveland’s decisions.

Photograph: Courtesy of Rafael Vinoly Architects © Brad Feinknopf, 2009
The Cleveland Museum of Art’s new East Wing, off the 1916 building.

GMOA in the News

We would be remiss if we failed to mention the fact that, in a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "How to Sell a Museum Masterpiece," our director, William U. Eiland, was quoted. The article, by Daniel Grant, focuses on the criticism directed at the Orange County Museum of Art's recent sale of 18 California Impressionist paintings to a private collector in Laguna Beach, not, in this case, because of their being deaccessioned at all (procedures were followed there), but because of the way in which they were sold. The guidelines set forth by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), for which Eiland chairs the professional issues committee, do not require sale at public auction, and every situation is different, but, as Eiland put it, "At auction, there is no gerrymandering the price, no hocus pocus." We recommend you read the article, which is useful in the way it explains one of the many thorny issues of museum ethics, and we extend a high five to our fearless leader.