Money, money, sex, web design

Round the web today, folks:

A long and detailed examination of the Detroit Institute of Arts financial predicament: it lost US$17 million last year, making a whopping grand accumulated shortfall of US$100 million over the past 10 years.

How to raise US$500 million, at Boston's MFA. Sometimes, it's the small things that count: take the case of trustee and regular mega-donor Fred Sharf:

Last year, Sharf attended a meeting in the MFA's conference room. He was disgusted by the run-down furniture. "This is a disgrace," he said. "We should do something." Just like that, he gave $25,000 to have the space redone.

Making use of a hoary public speaking device (SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX!!!!!! Okay, now I have your attention I'd like to speak about waste water management) Jerry Saltz reviews the Guggenheim's Theanyspacewhatever show, and his night in Carstein Holler's satin-sheeted bed.

And finally, Tyler Green on SFMOMA's new site design: "Outside of the Pulitzer, I've not seen a museum use so much Flash. In fact, you don't so much as see SFMOMA's website, you hold still while it throws itself at you."

Peel

Following the 'deinstallation' of a Sol LeWitt at SFMOMA, the Modern Art Museum of Fort worth shows how you take down a Kara Walker.

Dear Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; will you PLEASE set up a Flickr account & post pictures of the removal of Snow Ball Blind Time?

Second chance

Yesterday's post about the video of the painting out of Sol LeWitt's walldrawings at SFMOMA got pushed down the Best of 3 homepage pretty quickly yesterday, so I'm re-posting it now.

If you didn't watch the video yesterday, hop to it. I promise it'll be 2 of the best art watching minutes you spend this year.

Saying goodbye

This video on the SFMOMA blog showing the Sol LeWitt drawings being whited out (earlier post here) is exactly the kind of thing I want art galleries posting for the public to see. Thrilling and almost sacrilegious, it lays out the workings of the institution for all to see.

Mid-week musing

SFMOMA is currently deinstalling (aka painting over) Sol LeWitt'' s Wall Drawing #935 and #936 in preparation for the Martin Puryear exhibition. Artist Chris Cobbs, who has executed many of LeWitt's works, muses on the event on the SFMOMA blog.

Irving Sandler interviews Jerry Saltz - a sample:

To become a critic I read Artforum religiously. I wanted to write the way they wrote in that magazine, which seemed very cool, smart, and reserved, although I was secretly horrified because I barely understood a syllable of what I read. Worse, when I did understand what I read I kept thinking, “These people hate art!” At first I tried to write like that. Whenever I read what I had written afterwards I had no idea what I was talking about. I had all these other thoughts and feelings I wasn’t sharing. That’s when I began to change in my attitude about writing.

In home town art debate, here's John Hurrell on the Walter's Prize on Radio New Zealand and his blog. From the blog post:

... when the selection committee for this year pick two past finalists (Reynolds and Robinson) to resubmit, something has to be wrong. The message is that Aotearoa doesn’t have the quantity and range of exciting practices to keep the exhibition continually fresh. In this country the inherent vibrancy needed doesn’t exist.

That is clearly not the case. More likely the committee didn’t do their homework and thoroughly scour through all the dealer exhibitions the length and breadth of the land. But with no South Island curator on the panel there was no incentive to ensure that. And with two of the four selectors from Auckland alone, the result seemed predestined to ensure Auckland parochialism, especially when the two repeating artists live in Auckland.

From conversations I've had recently, people are poking holes in the Walters from all directions, with a surprisingly common sentiment being that Reynolds and Robinson should have stepped aside.

Personally, I'm fine with people being re-nominated, if their work is judged by the committee to be at the top of the pile of the past two year's exhibitions. If you don't judge on merit, then the award risks turning into an everyone-gets-a-turn event.* My main complaint still lies in the lack of urgency for a two-yearly prize, and although I didn't get to New Plymouth for Peter Robinson's opening in the weekend, pictures I've seen confirm my suspicions that Ack will look outdated next to Snow Ball Blind Time.

*Sports analogy - sure, it'd reduce the feel-good factor if the same person wins twice in a row. But you don't stop sports people from competing just because they've won before. I guess you could always handicap artists like they do racehorses (make them install in the dark, maybe?)

Cross sell, up sell

File these in the god, why didn't my marketing team think of that? folder:

Cosying up with a brewery to promote (the work of) your students

Parcelling up exhibition entry with tickets to REM concerts

Going the whole hog with your exhibition merchandise (Diego Rivera paper doll anyone?) a la SFMOMA

And while you're here, don't forget to take the Reviewer Survey - results next Tuesday.

Image
Frida Kahlo socks in the SFMOMA store, via C-monster.net

Holding hands with Olafur

More Olafur Eliasson visitor engagement, as the SFMOMA show 'Take your time' tours to MoMA and PS1.

I recently wrote about the SFMOMA experience of trying to get visitors to the show to share and discuss their experiences. At MoMA/PS1, visitors are being invited to apply for a "special cell-phone camera" to hang around their necks. As they walk around the show the cameras take pictures at random intervals, "documenting the visitors' journeys through the exhibition in a candid and experiential way".

Some of the photos are then being incorporated to "appear in the background" of the online exhibition (which is nice, but BEFORE YOU CLICK know that it's a slow loader). I wasn't sure initially what 'in the background' meant, but I think now that it means 'underneath this long piece of expository text'. After a bit of back-and-forward buttoning, I got this page, which shows just the visitor images. (It's not listed in the nav, as far as I can see).

The online exhibition is very beautiful, btw, and has a nifty little feature where when you hover over images it displays the title and the site where the work is on show - subtle, but useful for a multi-site exhibition.

At first, I wasn't sure about this hang around your neck, random timing thing. Why not let visitors decide what to photograph and how? And then I thought, if the whole Eliasson thing is about experiencing the work, having a visitor thinking about documenting the work instead of just being in it constitutes failure (or at least, the failure of the museum to fulfil the artist's intentions).

So I came around, and although I reckon some visitors must be subverting the instructions and pointing the cameras at things they hope to photograph, I like the idea that I'm seeing fragments of people's visits in quite an unmediated way (except - god, it's always except, isn't it? that they're being selected by someone inside the museum. Maybe they could put the whole unfiltered set up on Flickr).

Image
Olafur Eliasson, 1 m3 light, 1999, photograph by Matthew Septimus. From www.ifweranit.com

They were the only ones in the room

Quite a few months ago, I briefly blogged SFMOMA's online project for their Olafur Eliasson show - a kind of virtual visitors book for people to record and share their experience of the exhibition.

Last month, I had a chance to hear Peter Samis from SFMOMA speak about the project, in one of the most open and generous presentations I've heard. As Samis explained in his talk, Eliasson wanted to put the visitor's voice, rather than the curator's, at the centre of the dialogue around the show (sorry - that's a terribly art-history-essay sentence, but I'm sure you know what I mean).

For Eliasson, the visitor's experience completes the work. The objective of the virtual visitors book was to "encourage visitors in their own critical process of self-observation". The site included some multi-media interpretive material from the Museum, but the point was to engage the visitor to build the discussion of the works.

So, people came, they saw, and they wrote. And what they said was a mixed bag. But the key point for me in Samis's presentation, in his own words, was this:

We said our piece in our multimedia voice(s)
We opened the blog door to let visitors voices in
... And we left

They were the only ones in the room.

SFMOMA staff didn't respond to the comments on the blog. I find this fascinating, and not totally unexpected. It's one thing to get people talking to you. It's quite another when you suddenly realise you might have to talk back.

If you're looking at ways to engage (with) your visitors online, I'd really recommend Samis's paper, which gives a description of the why and the (technical) how of the project, an analysis of activity on the blog, staff's feelings about the visitors' comments, the kind of insight into your visitors you get from this sort of project, and what you could do with that information. Slides from his presentation (which you can follow pretty well without reading the paper) are on Slideshare. And some great notes from another attendee are here.

Art online - an update

Christchurch Art Gallery have added three new podcasts to their online offerings: an introduction from director Jenny Harper, and tracks on the pre- and post-2002 Gallery.

SFMOMA have hacked the Wordpress platform to create a simple online visitors' book to accompany their Olafur Eliasson exhibition.

And you can DIY Pollock at http://jacksonpollock.org. Hints: right-click your mouse to change colours; hitting the space bar gives you a new canvas to work on. [Suggested improvement: adding a buy-now feature, so you can print your squiggles on to canvas and then hang it above your sofa, in the spirit of reality TV home-makeover programmes ...]

Image: Best of 3 does Pollock (with a familial resemblance to Andre Hemer )