Tag: 09.12.04

How Malcom Rogers Transformed The MFA

Outside of the Guggenheim’s Thomas Krens, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts director Malcom Rogers is probably the most controversial museum director in America. When Rogers took the job, he inherited an institution in considerable distress. He’s made changes, big changes. “There’s something so fundamentally annoying to the museum profession about the efforts to break the academy walls down and kind of rethink the role of great art museums in America. They’re so concerned about these fake, institutional standards that I don’t think these people ever look at Malcolm clearly. They immediately have glasses on that blind them to the end product, which I think is a healthy MFA.”

Cuno: Museums Losing Focus

Is the continuing spread of blockbuster traveling exhibitions distracting museums from what should be their primary focus? Art Institute of Chicago president James Cuno thinks so, and he’s raising eyebrows by saying so in public at a time when many museums view high-profile exhibits and big, fancy in-house gift shops and restaurants as the only things keeping them afloat. In his years at Harvard, Cuno “came to espouse what has been called an ‘essentialist’ view. It’s a view that seeks to refocus attention on the acquisition, preservation and presentation of research of museums’ permanent collections.” The theory works in academia, but can it fly in the open market?

Atheneum Takes A New Track

Hartford’s Atheneum has seen a 27 percent drop in attendance in three years. It’s dropped an expensive building expansion and is embarking on an alternative plan. Changes in the museum’s focus are underway. “The idea that the Atheneum can do an important blockbuster show year in and year out is simply not true anymore. Those shows were, in my judgment, the product of an economy which no longer exists, and they are a product of a certain way of thinking about museums that I’m not so sure that in the end was productive.”

Spiegelman’s New (Personal) Holocaust

Twelve years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his Holocaust-themed comic book, Maus, artist Art Spiegelman has again put ink to paper to memorialize a great human tragedy. This time, the tragedy is 9/11, and the work is autobiographical. “In content and theme, Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers share some ground. Each of the books deals with a relatively ordinary man, a Spiegelman of one time and place, confronting mass murder (on vastly different scale and a wholly distinct nature, of course) and an arrogant, power-hungry regime (again, on a far different level). Both focus on the primacy of family and tribe to their protagonists, and both evoke the incoherence, the gruesomeness and the vainglory of war.”

The Forgotten Art That Won’t Go Away

“When it comes to swimming against the tide, Olympic gold medals should go to all representational artists. For half a century, they have been almost completely ignored by museums, boycotted by prestigious galleries and scoffed at by critics.” Still, a renaissance of figure drawing has been evident for some years, led by countless amateurs and enthusiasts, and embraced by a few diehard pros. But “in a society that values quick and easy success… and when so many galleries and museums prefer to give their space to video art, conceptual art and installation art, why do so many keep struggling to master a skill that art critics insist is anachronistic and old hat? Why this continuing compulsion to draw?”

When Do They Find Time To Practice?

David Finckel and Wu Han, the new co-directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, could be said to be the poster children for 21st-century musical multitasking. The two are chamber music’s power couple of the moment, with Mr. Finckel best known as the cellist of the Emerson Quartet. They run their own internet-based record label, founded a stunningly successful chamber music festival in California last year, and each maintain a full performance schedule. Unusual? Sure. But in these days when classical music is increasingly serving a niche market, it takes that kind of dedication and willingness to diversify to succeed.

Subtracting The Superstars

It’s opening week for many American orchestras, and a new trend is emerging in response to the years of deficits plaguing so many ensembles: less star power, more homegrown talent. Research shows that a vast majority of the modern orchestra audience decides whether to attend a concert based on what’s being played, not on who’s playing it, so it hardly makes fiscal sense to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a big-name soloist who will only marginally increase the gate. In Minnesota, both of the Twin Cities’ major orchestras have bought into the idea of showcasing the ensemble rather than some traveling star, and the upcoming season will be an acid test of the attendance theory.

Broadway Turned Into Sculpture Row

British sculptor Tom Otterness Otterness is mounting “the biggest one-man sculpture exhibition in New York City parks since a show of Henry Moore works in 1984.” Otterness is “well suited to the diversity and commercial energy of Broadway. He is both popular and populist — an artist whose sculptures are intended to work everywhere and be understood by almost everyone. The sculptures in ‘Tom Otterness on Broadway’ range in size from under 2 feet to over 20 feet tall.”

Broadway Turned Into Sculpture Row

Sculptor Tom Otterness is mounting “the biggest one-man sculpture exhibition in New York City parks since a show of Henry Moore works in 1984.” Otterness is “well suited to the diversity and commercial energy of Broadway. He is both popular and populist — an artist whose sculptures are intended to work everywhere and be understood by almost everyone. The sculptures in ‘Tom Otterness on Broadway’ range in size from under 2 feet to over 20 feet tall.”