| July
11, 2004
New York's Bizarre Museum Moment
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
SUDDENLY
museums all across town are suffering identity crises.
Just as New York is shaking off its sorrows
and crawling out
of debt, making new claims on the world stage with a bid
for the Olympics, our museums seem to be going through
weird convulsions,
falling apart, abandoning their collections, being hijacked
by trustees or suffering delusions of grandeur. This is their
most precarious moment in many years.
The
Whitney oh, the poor, perennially insecure Whitney, which
can never get
its act straight is going through another of
its periodic upheavals. Its last director was pushed out,
a new one was hired, the old staff gracelessly purged or
induced
to quit, yet another curatorial crew brought in. The Whitney
has become like Stalin's politburo. The only long-term
survivors are the people everybody in the art world knows
really need
to go: the trustees.
Cash
short as always and feeling inadequately loved by the Manhattan
art world, the Brooklyn Museum seems
virtually
to have said to hell with it all. Raising a fortune for
a
glitzy
new facade, it has at the same time been shopping or
thinking of shopping parts of its great collection, renting
exhibitions
of "Star Wars" costumes and cheapening its
venerable permanent displays, all in the name of community
outreach. "If
that's not significant to critics," its director,
Arnold Lehman, told The New York Times last April, "you
know and you can quote me I don't care."
The
New-York Historical Society, the city's oldest museum,
is in turmoil
again, scaling back local-theme shows,
firing experts, betting questionably that expensive
blockbusters will save the place rather than destroy it. The
once high-rolling Guggenheim, which a decade ago was expanding
in New York
and around the world, is now
crumbling,
literally,
the facade of its landmark Frank Lloyd Wright building
cracked and peeling. Its SoHo satellite is, like SoHo's
heyday, a
dim memory; the dream of a Frank Gehry-designed palace
on the East
River in Lower Manhattan has gone the way of the museum's
intemperate scheme to bank its fortunes on a branch
in Las Vegas.
As
for the Museum of Modern Art, its new building opens this
fall, a sprawling megastructure in Midtown.
Will
bigger be
better? Born a frisky place, it became increasingly
defensive and constipated as it grew. Now we'll see
whether it
becomes what it promises the ultimate treasure house
of modernism,
rejuvenated, majestic and frisky again or just a
bloated, super-size custodian of its own self-importance.
And
at $20 a ticket,
who will go?
Even
the Met, the gold standard of museums, is in some transition.
A reshuffling of its European paintings
and modern-art departments
sounds eye-glazingly irrelevant. But it may be
lousy news for anybody still hoping that the museum will
fulfill its
decades-old
promise to deal properly with the art of its own
time.
At
the Whitney, the most recent director to get the boot is
Max Anderson. He wasn't perfect he'd
staged
his own
messy staff
turnover and miscalculated the quality of some
curators and exhibitions but he brought in a
bunch of good
shows. Attendance
and membership were up. A team of curators he
put together staged the recent Biennial, a good one
for once. The
permanent collection and art conservation were
getting professional
attention, finally.
But
the place remained dysfunctional at the top. The chairman,
Leonard Lauder, who has given
millions
in
cash and art,
and the president, Robert J. Hurst, were instrumental
in bringing
on as trustees Jean-Marie Messier, the subsequently
indicted chief executive of Vivendi, and L.
Dennis Kozlowski,
the Tyco tycoon, also later indicted. Mr. Hurst
is the former
vice chairman
of Goldman, Sachs, which took Mr. Lauder's
company, Estee Lauder, public and which has several executives
on the
board. Even
after Mr. Hurst was investigated and found
to
have evaded millions of dollars in taxes on
his art
collection, the
Whitney kept
him on as president.
Meanwhile,
the trustees were shoving vanity shows into the mix an
Agnes Martin
display,
for example
and were
overheard grumbling that the place should
be more fashionable, should
reflect their own tastes in collecting, should
expand but with an architect they liked now
as opposed to
yet another
of the
ones they thought they liked before, and
should compete with
the Modern, which just happens to be run
by Mr. Lauder's younger brother, Ronald.
So
Mr. Anderson had to go. The first move by his successor,
Adam Weinberg,
was to fire
a
curator who was on leave
to care for her seriously ill child. After
that public relations
debacle,
the subsequent turnovers were handled more
discreetly. The latest to call it quits
is a Biennial curator.
You
can bet she's not going to be the last. At most museums,
curators stay put when directors
change,
as professors
do when college presidents go, because the
affiliation
is with
the
institution and its permanent collection.
At the Whitney, they come and go like Yankee managers
in George Steinbrenner's
early
days.
Over
at the Met, the director, Philippe de Montebello, has appointed
a seasoned expert
in Impressionist
art with a background
in Cubism, Gary Tinterow, to oversee the
museum's 19th-century European paintings
and its modern
and contemporary
collections. Even some Met curators are
baffled by the logic. Why
European but not 19th-century American
art or photography? Anyway,
the larger question is whether this fuzzy
reorganization means
the museum will finally do better by contemporary
art or even worse. The prospects are not
great: the curator
in
charge is
intelligent and resourceful but not a specialist
in the period; his mandate is exceedingly
broad and Mr.
de Montebello
has
made many statements to the effect that
he himself has little interest in the stuff.
Why
should the Met bother with what's contemporary? Because
history
doesn't stop. Under Tom
Hoving, its former director,
the museum started collecting and showing
new art more aggressively. It briefly
became the
anti-Modern,
a
troublemaker and alternative
voice with special authority behind it.
Now
it's the sleeping giant of contemporary art. Every modern
curator in the world knows
its enormous
potential.
Its resources
and audience are peerless. One hundred
percent of that audience is contemporary. Artists
consider the
museum
a second home.
Other great historical museums, even those
without any new art in their collections
(the Louvre,
the National Gallery
in London) collaborate with living artists,
who bring in new audiences and put the
older art
in fresh perspective.
But the
Met's outgoing modern-art chief kept the
place in limbo; he brought in gifts but
mounted hardly
any
shows of
new
art, bought
tons of junk and displayed the collection
badly. An overhaul is due. A further retreat
is not.
A
friend called me the other day. Browsing through art sales
catalogs, he came across
a painting
on the block
at Skinner,
a Boston auction house. The picture was
by a once-fashionable, occasionally stylish
Viennese-born society painter,
Emil Fuchs, an acquaintance of Sargent's,
who became popular
in New York
after World War I. The catalog identified
the sitter simply as John McCormack. My
friend knew that McCormack was the great Irish tenor. But
the catalog didn't mention
it: apparently
the seller
had shipped
the painting off for auction without
bothering to figure out what it was. The estimated
price: a few
hundred
bucks.
The
seller, it turns out, was the Brooklyn Museum. Fuchs had
bequeathed the museum
all the art in
his studio in
1929, shortly
before he killed himself. He chose
Brooklyn because he loved the place. My friend
bought the painting
for $360
(including
commissions), which is exponentially
less than what he has been told it
would sell
for had
it been properly
identified and auctioned more auspiciously
by the museum.
This
was alarming news. But not surprising. Curators at Brooklyn
have said that
their director, Arnold
Lehman, has them scouring
the whole museum for art to sell
off or otherwise get rid
of. A spokeswoman for the museum,
Sally Williams, said it's just "business
as usual," that museums always
assess their collections. "Collections
are always being reviewed with an
eye toward gaps and duplications," she
said. The Fuchs was just part of
housecleaning.
A
century ago, an ethnology curator named Stewart Culin collected
American-Indian,
Korean, Chinese,
Japanese,
Eastern European
and Indian objects on expeditions
for the University of Pennsylvania
and
for
the
Brooklyn Museum.
This was the
sort of museum
Brooklyn was: a broad-minded and
far-reaching place. Thanks to Culin,
it even opened a study room for
artists
and designers to view the ethnographic
materials
he acquired.
Pairing the
art with
fashion and textile designs it
inspired, the museum arranged exhibits at department
stores
and elsewhere
around town.
That was outreach.
The
ethnographic clothes Culin amassed ended up, along with
who
knows how
many of the
fashion designs,
in
the museum's
costume collection, a populist
gold mine full of high fashion
but also
dresses
that real
middle-class Brooklynites
wore
when the Brooklyn museum was
in its heyday, throughout the early
and middle decades of the 20th
century.
Now museum officials are talking
with the Fashion Institute of
Technology and the
Met about taking
all or part
of the costume collection. That
would at least keep it in
the
city and in
public hands. But it's appalling
to
think that Brooklyn might squander
or give
up on one of
its defining
assets just because
it costs money to maintain.
And
in favor of what? In favor of a pandering overhaul: Brooklyn's
landmark
gallery
for American-Indian art, full
of Culin's treasures, has been
repainted
with
cheesy eagles and sunsets on
the walls. Pseudo-Egyptian
props in
the
Egyptian
galleries,
which are presumably supposed
to make the rooms more accessible,
cheapen
a world-class collection. The
American
galleries are crammed distractingly
with
wall texts
and videos.
Brooklyn
clearly
believes that people weaned
on television and the Internet need
that kind of
stimulation. Art isn't
stimulating
enough, apparently.
That's
the heart of the problem: that museums don't all still
trust art to
excite people
on its own;
they increasingly
think it needs to be packaged,
marketed and diluted. Does
the public
also think so? How popular
was that "Star Wars" show,
anyway? Back across the river
at the Modern, where a different
sort of overstimulation may
become an issue, the museum
that started in a modest
gallery space, then moved
into a town
house,
is soon to become so vast
it could qualify for its
own ZIP
code. Here's hoping it will
be spectacular, but the Modern's
entire temporary space in
Queens, which demonstrated
what could
be done with a small gallery
at an obscure location, would
fit into one of the bigger
rooms in the new building.
To
explain the planned $20
ticket price, the Modern's
director,
Glenn D. Lowry,
said "it's a more
expensive museum to operate" (no
surprise), and he compared
it to "other
leisure activities" that
charge the same or more.
But is that what a museum
is?
Reducing
museums to nothing more than a leisure
activity
would
obviously be insane.
So would
consigning them
to an ivory tower:
part of their beauty
is their hubbub. "Dream
houses of the collective," the
phrase Walter Benjamin
concocted for the Paris
arcades, suits museums
today, with their shops
and their mobs who go
to flirt and eat and
pose.
But museums
are also our traditional
palaces of rational entertainment,
places for people to
discover something they
didn't already
know, or didn't know
they needed to know.
They are
sacred spaces, too, no
matter how unfashionable
that may sound: we expect
to have in them encounters
with authentic objects
in a context
that is respectful of
our intelligence.
People
go to museums,
in the end, to have
an experience
unlike what
they
can get
elsewhere, because
works of art are not
like everything else
in life.
For
a variety of reasons, many of the most important
museums
in New
York
find themselves
simultaneously
in the throes
of transformation.
Collectively they
are grappling with
identity, and
some of them
clearly have
begun to lose
track of their
priorities. But their
crises are also an
opportunity. These
institutions
should seize the
moment to interrogate their
role
in this swiftly changing
culture to
recognize what their
function
is and get to it.
Part
of that function
does
not change: unlike "other
leisure activities," museums
still set standards
of aesthetic quality,
not equivocating
but declaring what
we should
value
about our culture
and standing by those
convictions.
We can decide for
ourselves if we agree.
To
do so, however,
they must attend
to one profound
obligation:
to
cherish and
preserve
culture for
posterity. Museums
are our only institutions
to do that, and
the museums of
this city set a
standard. It's time
for them to live
up to that responsibility. This
article is copyright © The NY Times. It is reproduced
with thanks to the NY Times and the author, and hopefully
is incorporated into the Resume in a Bottle Project under
the educational Fair Use law
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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