Mission impossible?

Ed Winkleman's latest post looks at the appointment of two former museum heads to positions at dealer galleries. Ed writes:

with all due respect to my friends in museums ... I've always gotten this sense from many of them that the commercial gallery system is seen as somewhat, shall we say, tainted, in their circles. This notion is exemplified by nothing so much as the fact that it's widely believed to be harder for a commercial gallerist to become a major curator or director of a museum than it is for a camel to squeeze through the eye of needle. And yet, as we see, the constriction seems to apply in only one direction.

This something I've thought about before. There seems to be little flow between dealer and public galleries in New Zealand. Hamish McKay got his start at the then-National Art Gallery; several dealers and dealer gallery staffers (including Melanie Rogers and Michael Lett) have walked the floors as attendants at Auckland Art Gallery. John McCormack and Dominic Feuchs at Starkwhite both had careers in public galleries before shifting over.

Ed cites this quote from an artinfo.com article about David Ross (former director of the Whitney and SFMOMA) and Robert Fitzpatrick's (most recently director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago) move to commercial galleries:

“I wanted to work more closely with artists, rather than patrons and trustees,” says Ross, explaining his transition to the commercial side of the industry. Fitzpatrick agrees, describing dealers as having a “passion for art, artists and helping their work become better known.”

I can't think of any examples in NZ where a person from a dealer gallery has moved into a (senior) position at a public gallery. Anyone?

Meanwhile, in a sad side-bar to the Bill Henson fiasco, the recently-launched Art World magazine has been forced to pulp 25,o00 copies of its next issue, which included a reproduction of the image at the centre of the storm. I was really enjoying Art World (the pulped issue was only the third, I think?) and hope the $100,000 this has cost its publishers doesn't send them under.

The GLAMS sector

Returning to the NDF conference ....

One of the most interesting moments of the conference was when a session chair asked for a show of hands, to see what kind of instition people who were attending the conference worked at. The results looked something like this:



That blue sliver is 'galleries' - and it's probably over represented. About 3 people out of 300 raised their hands when 'galleries' was called out by the chair.

Three things worry me about this. First, the NDF conference (not so much this year, but definitely last year) is a great place to learn about what cultural orgainisations are doing online to increase and serve their audiences. Last year's presentations by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum and a nice fellow from the V&A were total eye-openers.

Second, NDF is currently the most obvious manifestation of what's being called in political dialogue "the GLAMs sector": galleries, libraries, archives and museums. I'm not sure that art galleries are aware that they're meant to be part of this group - or that they're being represented on a national level by this body.

And third - this reinforces my feeling that compared to some of our other cultural instititions, galleries are really not that interested in working collaboratively, sharing information and ideas, or even just hanging out together.

Around the web

Jori Finkel in the New York Times, on dealer galleries underwriting shows of their artists' work in public art galleries. Institutions draw the line in different places: MoCA received 6-figure sums from Blum & Poe, Gagosian Gallery and Emmanuel Perrotin to underwrite its current Takashi Murakami show; the Walker Art Center regularly accepts donations from dealer galleries to underwrite catalogues, but not exhibitions; MoMA and the Met won't take dealer contributions for shows or publications.

Inside Higher Ed asks if university museums are academic units: 'To what degree is a college art museum considered central to an academic mission, and to what extent is it seen primarily as a financial asset?'

Jerry Saltz does some Guerilla Girls-style counting at MoMA: 'Each fall since MoMA’s reopening in November 2004, I’ve gone to these two floors, counted the number of artworks on view, tallied the number of women artists included, and then pitched a fit in print.'

Nothin against MoMA though: equally dismal amounts of art by women artists are on show (or not) at 6 other New York museums.

Keeping art safe

UPDATE Audio from the Nine to Noon article here

The Bill Hammond survey exhibition 'Jingle Jangle Morning' opened at City Gallery Wellington this weekend.

The show comes to Wellington from the Christchurch Art Gallery. One work - Living Large 6 - is missing from the show. Its owner withdrew it from the touring programme after the painting fell off the wall during the installation at CAG. You can read more in two stories from The Press, here and here.

Apparently this morning - although I couldn't find it on the online programme - Kathryn Ryan will be talking on National Radio about the growing reluctance of owners to lend works to public galleries for exhibitions, due to the number (?) of stories like that of Living Large 6.

Of course, it goes without saying that lenders should expect that their works to be well looked after. And stories like that of Living Large 6 seem to be relatively rare - as compared to, say, people putting an elbow through a Picasso. But if lenders lose faith in the ability of galleries to care for their works, the public will be the losers. So here's hoping the Nine to Noon story is a balanced one.

Private / public

Over the last few weeks, there's been an interesting little flurry on the American blogs, on the topic of publicly-funded institutions building shows out of the holdings of private collectors.

At the beginning of this week, Richard Lacayo blogged about the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978".

Lacayo liked the show, but observed that it would have been nice to mix these vernacular photos in with the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander (etc). This wasn't possible because the show was drawn from a single person's collection - Robert E. Jackson.

About six weeks ago Tyler Green lambasted the NGA over the show, for fluffing collectors. Green felt that (1) the NGA shouldn't do vanity exhibitions and (2) the NGA effectively abdicated responsibility for the show - curating the collector, not the collection.

Green weighed in again yesterday; Lacayo replied that he was okay with shows built from private collections, more iffy about permanent installations of private collections; ModernKicks posted a thoughtful consideration; Regina Hackett doesn't agree with anyone.

Of course, I understand that when an institution shows a private collection they're increasing its worth (well - if they're any good at what they do they should be). But New Zealand's gallery system would be sunk without private lenders: very few institutions can afford to collect comprehensively anymore, and moreover, I have the feeling young curators are losing interest in working on / with permanent collection (to whit, this article) .

Overall, the question seems to less about the content, more about who gets to 'own' the presentation. Is it okay for a curator to make a show from a single (private) collection, not okay for the collector to do it? What about taking a whole show from a dealer gallery? Or consistently sourcing exhibitions from the same small group of suppliers? When do networks become cabals?

New kid on the block

The Tauranga Art Gallery was opened on Saturday, with guest speakers Prime Minister Helen Clark, Tauranga Mayor Stuart Crosby and ... Lynn of Tawa addressing a crowd of 400 people.


The Gallery has an operating budget of about $1 million, mostly funded by the Tauranga City Council. This is already under threat, with Councillor Murray Guy pushing to halve the Council's subsidy over the next five years, and introduce an entry charge next year.

Images: from the Tauranga Art Gallery website (gallery image from open day earlier this year)

Paying the piper

The more I read about the way American galleries and museums are funded and managed, the more I wonder whether New Zealand might be blessed with its municipally-funded public art galleries and centrally-funded contemporary art spaces.

While of course there have been times where the art community has felt that council involvement has negatively affected art gallery operations (Michael Laws and the Sarjeant, the gone-very-quiet Paradigm shift, what's-its-name in the Waikato) you've got to wonder sometimes what the alternatives are. If you're not going to have your gallery funded by ratepayers, and overseen by officials elected by those ratepayers, or funded by taxpayers, and overseen by government, what are you left with?

In this context, Joe Nocera's 8-page interview in the New York Times with ex-Dia director Michael Govan and ex-Dia board chairman Leonard Riggio over the creation of Dia:Beacon and the subsequent unravelling of their relationship makes fascinating reading.

Image: by Dave Kemp, via Flickr.