Art in the City of Brotherly Love

Has anyone ever written a book about small talk between random people while traveling? If not:  between my encounters with a Dutch politician who lectured me on the need for Americans to depose the Bush administration and the sheer pandemonium I caused with three Scottish men when I innocently questioned, “But isn’t Scottish the same as English?”, I think there may be a fantastic book proposal in my future (Copyright © 20XX Meg!)!  Outwardly a lackluster example in comparison with the Dutch don and Scottish diehards though equally noteworthy for me, I met a businesswoman from Philadelphia in August on a flight back from Mississippi.  We exchanged standard pleasantries, which included her asking if I had visited the art venues in Philadelphia. “Unfortunately, no” was my reply.  Then she proceeded to tell me about the city’s museums, centers, and galleries.  Of course, this meant she sufficiently peaked my curiosity about this “Philadelphia” place.

Fast-forward a month and half: Speaking of quotes in seminar this past week, I love this statement from William Pickens: “Living together is an art.” Indeed it is, and, concurrently, art is capable of fostering collectivity, open-mindedness, and awareness—all valuable qualities for peaceful cohabitation.  With aesthetics and society being so mutually dependent, no wonder museum studies frequently concentrate on the relationship between museums and the community.  In “Mastering Civic Engagement,” Ellen Hirzy writes,

Civic engagement occurs when museum and community intersect…. The museum becomes a center where people gather to meet and converse, a place that celebrates the richness of individual and collective experience, and a participant in collaborative problem solving. It is an active, visible player in civic life, a safe haven, and a trusted incubation of change…. (9)

Wanting to conduct my own case study on civic engagement, I thought back on my informant from the airplane and chose Philadelphia.

Handily, Randy Kennedy wrote the article “Art to Make You Laugh (and Cry)” about Philadelphia last month in the New York Times.  He described the Philadelphian artistic ethos as a “hardy, low-budget, do-it-yourself, do-it-for-love creativeness,” and he showcased several art institutions throughout the city, a great starting point.  First, the Museum of Mourning Art resides in a cemetery and contains a local collection of art as quirky as the name implies: relics from over the last century that together create narratives about death, grief, and remembrance.  The Fabric Workshop and Museum serves to expose locals to both the importance of and trends in contemporary art, and they enjoy a distinctive collection of 25 years of accumulated works from artists who have benefited from the organization’s residency program.  Another venue—Fluxspace—also offers local artists and curators lodging facilities along with exhibition room for “unrestricted and uncensored experimentation,” which they may not find in other areas of Philadelphia.  Then there is the Mural Arts Program, which boasts the designation of “the nation’s largest public arts initiatives of its kind.”  The epitome of an institution implanted in civic engagement, the Program provides work for hundreds of artists, fashions murals to exhibit the varying strains of culture in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, and binds its aesthetic tasks with tasks of other local institutions striving to thrust community development. Kennedy goes even further with details about the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery and  Pifas (Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study), but his journey through Philadelphia’s art scene only skims the surface!  The city also harbors local artist spaces like Supermarket, Space 1026, Philadelphia Open Studio Tours, and the Artists’ House Gallery.  This list could go on and on, especially if including traditional museums like the acclaimed Philadelphia Museum of Art.

What binds all these institutions together is one pervasive force, and that force is the community.  In 2002, Christine Pfister, the Pentimenti Galleries director, said "I have seen major growth of Philadelphia's art scene during the past 10 years, both in terms of the number of artists and in the number of sales." Subsequently, she notes, "The 

community here is very vibrant." In a New York Times article from 2006, journalist Steven Stern identifies Philadelphia as a relief from “overheated scenes, unwelcoming galleries and the economy of the latest thing” by instead offering a “community of generosity.” Likewise, the aforementioned Kennedy weaves in and out of the Philadelphian art scene, noting the peculiarities of the city scene along the way.  Conclusion? The art scene can denote the joie de vivre in the community, display the character of a community, and organically intertwine with other facets of community life.  Perhaps it is also profitable to view the relationship between communities and their museums in the same way John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking propose to study ‘learning’ in museums: “holistically” (9)

Call me naïve in terms of American art scenes, call me romantic in my reverence for institutions that heavily emphasize community, but I am impressed with Philadelphia.  Now I feel that old familiar itch—the travel bug.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/arts/design/28philly.html?scp=19&sq=museums%20and%20local%20community&st=cse

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HMU/is_7_29/ai_88577422/

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/travel/tmagazine/19liberal.html

Identity Crisis!

Lately I have come under the impression that perhaps museums (by “museums” I mean the professionals) are having an identity crisis. They seem to be in constant defense of their roles in the community and art circles, the message they send to the public, and the manner in which they operate. Not to mention, today’s museums appear plagued by whether they perform in the entertainment industry, function as members of the business sector, or run in the circles of university academia. My question is, if Glenn D. Lowry notes the “mingled character” of the museum and James Cuno illustrates museums as “juxtapositions,” then what, exactly, is so terrible for a museum to juggle them all? (137, 54). Why do museums, as Michael Kimmelman states, have to be at a “crossroad”? (130).

Another German example: With the establishment of the Landesmuseum for Kunst und Kulturgeschicte in Muenster at the turn of the twentieth century, founders hoped to create a place for the gathering and cultivation of local citizens. The Landesmuseum used everything at its disposal to attract visitors and promote the museum and the museum’s collection. Of course, in 1908 this meant books, lectures, leaflets, exhibitions, and member meetings. In the New York Times article “In Lean Times, New Ways to Reach Out” from March 2009, director of Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum Ann Philbin reasons, “We can’t just be about art anymore. Museums are the new community centers.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/arts/artsspecial/19strategies.html?pagewanted=1&ref=artsspecial) With the Landesmuseum in mind, have museums ever been “just about art”? Granted, yoga at MoMA and biking at the Hammer Museum seem a little “out there” in terms of bringing in larger, broader audiences, but at the same time, are they not simply using considerations of their social and cultural contexts and the tools provided by technological advances to promote themselves and, in turn, their collections?

Also, I hate to state the obvious: money makes the doors of a museum stay open. Yes, they are, on the whole, non-profit organizations, but someone still must provide financial backing for the institution to stay afloat, which means drawing in more supporters and sometimes hiring business savvy professionals (Are these typically curators?! I lament the fact that I took no business classes in undergrad!). Did I not just read over the summer how the Guggenheim, one of the giants of the museum world, laid-off nearly twenty percent of its staff? And the Seattle Times just released an article about the new director of the Seattle Art Museum and his pending financial battles. (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/entertainment/2009271160_museum28m.html). Even the Museum of Contemporary Arts sways to the tune of the economy and hopes to find monetary relief by displaying, for the first time, a full house of their own collections rather than bringing in big-budget temporary exhibitions.( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/arts/design/13finkel.html?ref=design) Does the catchphrase “business is business” ever become appropriate for museum operations? (I do not know the answer.) What’s more, why NOT use everything possible—yoga, bicycling, anything!—to make sure that people come to the museum? I think (perhaps naively, perhaps not) that when a person visits, regardless of whether or not their initial motivation is true to the art, that the art they encounter will inexorably draw their attention and ideally their repeated attendance. Ideally.

Side note: I love this trend of museums promoting and exhibiting a greater portion of their own collections! I will never forget the tinge of sadness I felt, about five years ago, at the sight of all the fantastic artworks in the storage spaces of the Birmingham Museum of Art. I kept thinking, “I would take them home to display!”

Trendsetting...

Just last week I read an article in Elle Magazine (guilty pleasure) that highlighted renowned high fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg’s new jewelry collection, inspired by a Latin dance troupe. I found this concept interesting: dance inspiring jewelry: gold, woven, elaborately diamonded. Seemingly, the path of fashion trickles down from the “highs” to the “lows,” from those who can afford Rodeo Drive and Diane von Furstenberg to those who are lucky to afford to purchase fashion knockoffs (me). But aren’t their other times when the low culture, or popular culture, climbs the ladder on to the high? What about trends like grunge wear appearing back on the catwalks in the last season?
Following our reading from Art and its Public, I seem to be on a long, thoughtful quest to discover my position on the topic of “high” and “low” culture and the semantics question as to whether it is even possible to distinguish between the two. While trying to discover the trend among curators and how museums handle the purported divide, I came across several reviews for a 1990 exhibit at MoMA titled “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture”? (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,971450-1,00.html) According to the reviews, the critics completely balked at the display for two reasons: one, placing “low” art alongside “high” art (perhaps because this blurred distinctions?) and two, exhibiting “low” art in an “elitist” institution like MoMA. Now my question is why have we, as students of and professionals in museums, returned to this question of categorizing high and low culture, and their differences and similarities, almost twenty years later? Even each of the authors of the first three chapters of Art and its Public brought up the topic. As I mentioned in my previous post, the Tate Modern will be exhibiting a show that seems so similar to the 1990 MoMA show, but do I think the Tate Modern will be forced to stare down the same type of criticism? Certainly not if I take our readings in AMUS in to account…

Black and White and Gray Oh My!

I spent the better part of the last two years researching and writing about modernism, particularly as it unfolded in the provinces of late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century Germany (I will, in advance, apologize if Germany becomes my go-to example!). In particular, the observation of late-nineteenth-century Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal concerning the dual quality of modernism has reverberated with me: “Today,” he explained, “two things seem to be modern: the analysis of life and the flight from life.” As von Hofmannsthal suggests, the very nature of artistic modernism was a contradiction: it condemned modernity even as it furthered modernity. Artistic modernism, of course, abhorred the upheaval characteristic of modern life and aimed to remedy the social and political ailments of modernity via reflective, novel artistic productions. This advancing, sanguine quality of modernism, however, fastened the art movement to modernity itself, and rather than negate modern progress, artistic modernism sought to first dissect, then enlighten, and finally reconstitute modernity in artworks. Furthermore, modernists reorganized tradition for modern use, thereby rending tradition as not merely evocative but actually existing.
In the chapter “Museums: Theory, Practice, and Illusion” in Art and its Publics, author Danielle Rice appears to put a similar spin on contemporary issues, especially in relation to museums, by negating the primacy of any one “Zeitgeist” and questioning the creation of an one-size fits-all category for popular culture (90). She explains that to paint a museum black or white (elitist or conformist, high culture or popular culture) is to deny the institution’s propensity to exhibit shades of gray. Instead, Rice optimistically suggests that museums have the ability to appropriate elements of popular culture and to aptly integrate them into the more “traditional” museum culture. In October, the Tate Modern in London will open the “Pop Life: Art in a Material World.” The curators (Jack Bankowsky, Alison M. Gingeras, and Catherine Wood), in recent art forum article (http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200907&id=23504), explained the exhibits intent to “make the case that to cross the line between commerce and culture is nothing less than to ‘engage with modern life on its own terms.’” For example, by commercializing themselves or their art, artists were not necessarily “selling-out” but rather exploiting and rearranging the structure to suit their own agendas and feed their works, just as the early modernist artists used aspects of modernity as material for reflection, progression, and illumination. Today’s curators are obviously grappling with how to keep their museums popular without being considered “popular.” A really interesting website I came across while searching for ideas for this blog’s content was from the NY ART Beat: Info and Opinion on NY Art and Design called “Young Curators on the Art of New Ideas” (http://www.nyartbeat.com/nyablog/2009/08/young-curators-on-the-art-of-new-ideas/). Karen Archey, one such youngling, shared her idée fixe of “Low Museum.” Her aim is to unravel the curatorial profession by examining the production and function of a curator, especially in terms of contemporary art and in light of popular culture. What seems a superfluous mission becomes (at least to a hopeful curator-in-training) highly necessary in light of such people as Mordy the Blogger (http://popculturecurator.blogspot.com/). Mordy, among weekly listings of music he deems noteworthy, has decided to label himself “Pop Culture Curator,” because he hopes to “forward a vision of Pop Culture, a way for thinking about pieces of music/art/etc.” This statement, of course, precedes the über-pedantic word “list'ize” in the following sentence. “Curator”?!