Not two months ago, an important collector sat on an art market panel and described his over-arching desire to create his own museum. In the boom years, that was hardly a singular ambition. Toward the end of the boom cycle, it seemed that collectors and museums were beginning to face a stand-off over funds and art.
Everything’s different now. And this article in the Los Angeles Times reminds us that money is short everywhere, especially at museums.
Unlike the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is partly controlled by the county, MOCA receives minimal government funding. Its annual budget has grown to exceed $20 million, but it relies on donors to pay about 80% of its expenses. When the gifts have fallen short, as they have more often than not during Strick’s nine-year tenure, the museum has gone into its savings.
In recent years, the museum has averaged 250,000 visits annually to view critically acclaimed exhibitions and a collection boasting works by such post-World War II masters as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko.
By one important measure — “unrestricted assets,” money that can be used for any purpose — MOCA is in dire straits. Its federal tax returns show that early in this decade the museum had spent all $20 million of its unrestricted funds to meet routine operating costs. By mid-2007, it had borrowed an additional $7.5 million from “restricted” accounts, even though those are designated by donors for specific uses, such as education or buying art. [ . . . ]
Kelly Crow’s magnificent story on the Al-Thani’s new museum in Qatar:
The museum is hard to miss, sprouting from an artificial island in the Persian Gulf located just off the sandy shore of Doha, the capital city. The architect Mr. Pei, inspired by the geometric forms of a 13th-century fountain at a mosque in Cairo, shaped the five-story museum like a staggered set of creamy building blocks, each cube adjusted just enough to catch a triangle of harsh light or deep shadow. Visitors can reach it by boat — there is a dock for dhows, an Arabian-style fishing vessel made of wood — or by traveling a palm-lined path and crossing a small bridge.
Inside, the dimly lit atrium feels like a futuristic temple. A pair of crescent-shaped staircases rises to a mezzanine level, while smooth stone walls shoot even higher to a dome whose metallic interior is crowned by an oculus.
But the museum is just the first step in a larger plan for Doha:
The emir needs to impress the global art establishment if he’s going to transform Qatar into a cultural hub. It’s a tall order, given the lavish museum plans and Las-Vegas-style tourist attractions already lighting up the nearby sheikhdoms of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. At first glance, Qatar’s scholarly minded Islamic art may not seem as provocative as Dubai’s indoor ski run, but art experts say the quality of MIA’s Pan-Arabian collection could make it the Met of the Middle East. (Sotheby’s has also decided to put down roots in Doha and plans to hold its first auction there March 18.)
Who would have thought that the art handlers would have such leverage in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? But here’s Bloomberg on the orphaned art collection:
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said it plans to sell about $8 million of artworks warehoused in New York and Paris to help pay creditors.
Lehman, which filed the biggest U.S. bankruptcy Sept. 15 with liabilities of $613 billion, said in a court filing it had a “desire to monetize the art collection through sales, for the benefit of” creditors. It asked the court to let it pay $20,000 in overdue bills to art-handlers who would move artworks to and from the warehouses and display them to prospective purchasers.
“The art collection represents significant value to the debtors’ estates,” Lehman said in a Nov. 10 filing. [ . . . ]
If Lehman doesn’t pay the art handlers’ bills, they have the right under New York state law and French law to seize all the artworks to satisfy their claims, according to the filing.
Turns out the art movers are the unsung stars of the art world. They got this segment on the Leonard Lopate Show on New York’s WNYC.
A few weeks ago the Times had a conversation with Vinnie Verga, an art mover:
There’s an art to handling art. It’s not just about picking up a painting and moving it, or hammering a nail into a wall. It’s a lot more challenging than most people think. You have to know what you’re looking at, and you learn by experience. We become artists to figure out how we are going to hang something that weighs 300 pounds. There is engineering involved, and carpentry skills. [ . . . ] Getting big things into New York buildings is another challenge. Sometimes you have to hoist the piece up through a window, or fold it in half. I’ve even put stuff on the top of elevator cars.
The New York Times has a little video story on the state of the art market in the “new economy.” They mean the new nightmare economy, not the internet fantasy of a decade ago. Despite Catherine Opie and Richard Armstrong expressing their thanks at still having day jobs, the story doesn’t tell you much you couldn’t guess. Of course, the Guggenheim benefit auction they’re at sold eveything above estimates. Surprise! So maybe this video is playing catch up to reality, like the rest of the art market.
To understand Morandi in his sullen greatness, to appreciate the full flowering of his art that took place in the 1950s, you need to understand his evolution as it is set forth at the Met. Half a dozen still lifes of bottles on a table from the mid-1950s can be seen as the logical summation, if not the manifest destiny, of Morandi’s entire career. They are the goal to which, patiently and methodically, he advanced over half a century, though not without the occasional detour or misstep. In getting to that point, much of Morandi’s earlier career proceeds along two parallel tracks. On the one hand, he is fishing around in the sundry styles of his day and producing works of widely differing appearance. On the other hand, at any moment he can return to the placid quasi-realism of those bottles on a table that he produced, with remarkably little fundamental variation, throughout his career. [ . . . ]
The retrospective Masriadi’s work at the Singapore Art Museum closed yesterday. But the show coincided with the artist’s work achieving new records in the Hong Kong sale. Here, in a short film created by the museum, the artist talks about his work:
Who’s Going to Pay for All of These New Museum Buildings?
Alexandra Peers has great take on the other side of the art boom: the over-committed expansions and reliance on financial figures for funding:
The art boom of the past two decades, and the resulting skyrocketing costs of acquisitions and insurance, led museums to staff their boards with more than a few deep-pocketed executives from real-estate firms, financial institutions and hedge funds — industries that are now among the hardest hit. Plus, the tough times come at the tail end of a nationwide boom in museum expansions, and many of those glamorous buildings and new wings are not yet paid for. A handful of major institutions financed those expansions with bond issues that face the same climbing adjustable interest rates that are bedeviling homeowners. Read the rest of this entry »
The Wall Street Journal Reviews of the Wang Hui Exhibition of Chinese Landscape Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
As the eye moves across, so many genres of art come simultaneously to mind: narrative battle scenes, Canaletto’s quadrants, Chinese wall maps, Van Gogh’s striations, Cézanne’s geometric hills, the natural dyes and telescoped sweep of tapestry chronicles. Some cross-cultural influences doubtless occurred. Figurative Persian carpets and Silk Road miniatures, each modeled on the other, certainly reached China before the first millennium. Conversely, Van Gogh and Cézanne’s debt to Far Eastern influences is well-enough known.
Among the catalog’s densely informative and scholarly essays, there’s a fascinating passage on how, from Cézanne to abstraction, Chinese styles influenced Western art down to the present, and indeed how many of the former’s aesthetic struggles prefigured our own. The Chinese, as ever, had been there already.
In Hong Kong’s recent sales, Chinese Classical Painting stood tall amid the carnage created in the art market by the credit collapse. It’s clearly a category worth paying attention to.
If the NPG can raise £350,000 by the end of the year, it will display Marc Quinn’s refrigerated Blood Head alongside portraits of kings and queens, statesmen and scientists who made their mark on the nation’s history.
David Lee, a leading art commentator and editor of The Jackdaw, said: “This suggests to me that the NPG is beginning to collect art rather than portraits, which is against its remit … What I’d question is whether Marc Quinn is famous enough to be in the NPG.” Read the rest of this entry »
Kate Taylor was a star at the New York Sun. She reappears quickly after that paper’s demise in the New York Times. Let’s hope they make the most of their good fortune. Here Taylor details the internecine battle among John and Marcia Friede’s heirs over their collection of tribal art ear-marked for San Francisco’s de Young Museum:
A feud between Mr. Friede, 70, and his two brothers over their mother’s estate has led to litigation in three states, with the two brothers, the museum and Sotheby’s auction house all laying claim to the art.
[ . . . ] “My enormous preference would be to do what is traditionally done by big collectors who are not just boiling over with cash, where there is a small purchase and a large gift,” he said, referring to the common museum practice of paying for only part of a donation’s value, which allows the donor to claim a tax deduction and also reap direct proceeds. “Another possibility would be having to sell off a section” of the collection, he said. “That would be a darned shame.” Read the rest of this entry »
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