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How to Solve Greek Problems? Return the Elgin Marbles

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Dakkis Joannou, who was involved in the Guggenheim’s expansion in Blibao, sounds off on the Greek financial crisis to Bloomberg. He’s frustrated at Greece’s government. The government, no doubt, is frustrated that the United Kingdom won’t return the Elgin Marbles:

“Culture is a big business that people are hungry for and we have huge assets,” Joannou, 71, says from his office in the shadow of the Olympic stadium. “But the government uses our assets to make political statements and to gain votes. It’s a matter of survival for them, and nobody wants to invest in culture or anything else in a climate of bankruptcy.”

Even so, Joannou says that the two main political parties, Pasok and New Democracy, are devoid of the necessary cultural drive, and that the government’s projected 12 percent rise to 16.5 million foreign tourists visiting Greece in 2011 compared with last year is a Pyrrhic indicator.

“The tourists who come to Greece go to the sunny islands, making any rise in visitor numbers pathetic in comparison to our assets,” he says. “Culture management must be creative, imaginative, exciting and that can’t be done here.”Continue Reading

Lindemann: The Whitney Could Have Used a Krens

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Adam Lindemann offers a masterly analysis of how Thomas Krens changed the world of museums. He also suggests why it might have been better if the Whitney had followed Krens’s playbook for the Guggenheim by selling some works to shore up the endowment and playing up their architectural masterpiece as a tourist attraction appealing to European visitors:

Compare this to the poor job done by the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is the owner of a fantastic brutalist Marcel Breuer masterpiece, a building that sadly has less than half the attendance of the Guggenheim, and 80 percent of its visitors are mere New Yorkers. To add insult to injury, the museum is abandoning its flagship on Park Avenue and renting it out to the Metropolitan Museum, because the Whitney is pouring all its resources into a newer, bigger, downtown Whitney designed by Renzo Piano, the volume of which will allow the Whitney to show more of its vast collection.

If bigger doesn’t result in better, the Whitney will have done New York a terrible disservice, one that could have been easily avoided if only it had raised funds by selling a few artworks out of its vast holdings. Isn’t the Breuer building a work of art, one that is more meaningful to the museum’s identity than any painting could ever be? Imagine if it had the vision to leave the “uptown Whitney” as a true museum of American Art, the only one in New York, where the museum’s amazing collection of Ash Can artists like Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and George Bellows would be on permanent display. Would I care if the downtown museum were cut in half? Absolutely not. There is plenty of museum quality free art to see downtown in all the Chelsea galleries; who needs to pay good money to see any more of it?

Whatever Happened to Thomas Krens? (NY Observer)

Daskalopoulos Doesn’t Live with Art

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Carol Vogel looks into the controversy surrounding the Guggenheim’s show of a trustee’s work. Dakis Daskalopoulos ends up revealing much more interesting information when he describes his collection and the fact that it lives in storage:

Over 20 years Mr. Daskalopoulos, 53, has amassed a collection of more than 400 works by almost 200 artists, including international names like Damien Hirst, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic, Robert Gober, David Hammons and John Bock. Much of the collection, however, consists of overscale work, not the kind of thing that’s easy to display at home.

As a result, “most of my collection has been in the darkness of crates,” he said. In his Athens home he lives with almost no art except a “worthless carved statuette I bought in Thailand when I was 17,” as well as a painting by Rebecca Horn that he bought in 1992, his first contemporary-artwork purchase.Continue Reading

The $600,000 Museum Director

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Katya Kazakina drops the bombshell that former Guggenheim Director Thomas Krens is making three times his successor’s salary in a development deal for the museum’s overseas expansions:

On Friday, the foundation disclosed in its 2009 tax return that it paid Krens’ company, Global Cultural Asset Management, $816,295 last year for overseeing plans to build a Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. Krens also received a second and final $1 million installment of a $2 million bonus and severance awarded when he resigned as the Guggenheim Foundation director in 2008.Continue Reading

Russian Guggenheim Board Member Takes Leave

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Janna Bullock has taken a leave from the Guggenheim Foundation board to return to Russia to deal with a classically Russian battle over her business interests there. The story in the New York Times doesn’t make it clear why a leave from the board is necessary, though it does repeatedly make reference to “malicious rumors”:

The Guggenheim was the first among New York museums to seriously cultivate relationships with rich Russian collectors, beginning in 2002 with the election to the board of the businessman Vladimir Potanin, and continuing with its 2005 exhibition “Russia!” for which Ms. Bullock helped raise money.

But Ms. Bullock’s sudden withdrawal may be a reminder to the museum of the risks of relying too much on Russian fortunes — what Mr. Wolf called, in another context, “the danger of doing business” there.

Museum Board Member Caught in Russian Intrigue (New York Times)

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