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While at the groundbreaking for the downtown Whitney Museum last week, I got to thinking about the uptown building. As with most change, there are risks associated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent deal to occupy the Whitney Museum’s Madison Avenue Breuer building when it decamps for Tribeca.
But there is a huge opportunity too. So forget about the knee-jerk reactions others have expressed about how putting contemporary art into the Whitney “outpost” turns it into a stepchild, or how Met will lower its quality standards to fill those galleries.
Or even, from another point of view, how it will divide the Met’s audience — the cool kids will go to the contemporary galleries and the fuddy-duddies will go to the Fifth Avenue Met.
I have aspirations for the Met-Whitney, which are related to the third.
It isn’t always easy for museum-goers to see or understand links between old art and new art, yet many contemporary artists are inspired by pre-WW II art. I would like to see the Met organize exhibitions in the Breuer building that helps people learn about those relationships.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
British Museum
People hold strong opinions about museums. Some assert that their primary function should be scholarship, others insist that it’s more important to communicate with a wide audience. In pursuing either of these goals, should museums focus on exploring objects or investigating their contexts—are they about looking at things or telling stories? Adding to the debate, there’s lingering anxiety about relativism; some commentators (and probably many visitors) think museums should strive to be objective, others relish a variety of views.
It has become a cliché to say that museums are today’s churches—special places for contemplation, separate from day-to-day concerns; conversely, there’s an argument that museums should aim to be commonplace, part of normal life. It is intriguing that museums were once talked of as places that reinforced cultural hegemonies, but now they are more often seen as democratising access to art, and even as politically correct when they attempt to include groups formerly omitted from history. While some believe museums have changed far too much, others think they haven’t been transformed enough.
Maurice Davies
The Art Newspaper
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Adam D. Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, presided over a groundbreaking ceremony on Tuesday for the museum’s new building on Gansevoort Street at the southern entrance of the High Line in Manhattan. The architect of the project, Renzo Piano, was also on hand, as were a number of city officials, members of the Whitney board of trustees and performers from the STREB Extreme Action Company.
“Today, we begin to create the Whitney of the future, an aspirational space where contemporary artists can realize their visions and audiences can connect deeply with art,” Mr. Weinberg said in a statement. The building is scheduled to open in 2015, and will be a decidedly different type of structure than the Whitney’s building at 75th and Madison, where Jacqueline Kennedy attended the ribbon-cutting in 1966, and a far cry from its first space, in 1931, in back of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s studio in some row houses at 10-14 West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village.
New York Times
Albert C. Barnes, surrounded by his collection. The residual presence of this prescient connoisseur and progressive liberal will be lost in the transition to the Parkway.
Six more weeks is all you have for a final infusion of “tranquil respite,” something you’re not likely to experience next year on the Parkway. Your farewell tour will be especially poignant because Merion’s second floor has been closed since the first of the year.
July 3 won’t initiate a simple geographical transition, a brief hiatus in operations as the fabled art collection is trucked eight miles across the city line.
This isn’t, for instance, like the Whitney Museum of American Art moving from uptown Manhattan back downtown, which is supposed to happen in a few years. The closing of Merion not only marks the end of an era, it also represents a radical transformation in the nature of the institution. In the process, the essential spirit of the place – its genius loci – and a good deal of Albert C. Barnes as well, will be left behind.
Barnes Parkway will resemble Barnes Merion in some respects. The 23 galleries are being replicated, so if you were led in blindfolded you wouldn’t immediately notice a difference, except perhaps for ambient traffic noise.
The Replica also will better accommodate the public for things like parking, shopping, and getting lunch.
But the Replica (or, if you prefer, the Faux Barnes) will be a different institution, a museum with members instead of a school. No more strolls through the Merion arboretum (the “tranquil respite” component) and, most important, no more historical context.
Edward J. Sozanski
Philadelphia Inquirer
The bronze statue of Rocky near the Philadelphia Museum of Art irked Jessie Hemmons. She found the statue too big, too macho and too touristy, so last month Ms. Hemmons, a 24-year-old artist, bombed him. With pinkish yarn.
Using a stepladder and a needle, Ms. Hemmons stitched a fuchsia-colored hooded vest on the fictional boxer with the words “Go See the Art” emblazoned across the front, to prod tourists to visit the museum that so many skip after snapping their photo with the statue.
She calls the act of artistic vandalism “yarn bombing,” adapting a term for plastering an area with graffiti tags.
“Street art and graffiti are usually so male dominated,” Ms. Hemmons said. “Yarn bombing is more feminine. It’s like graffiti with grandma sweaters.”
Malia Wollan
New York Times
Can you recall your first visit to a museum? Your first exposure to great art? Or, perhaps, a museum visit or a work of art that turned you into an art-lover? Or an artist? What are your museum memories?
Tomorrow is International Museum Day, an annual event created by ICOM, the International Council of Museums that has been around since 1977. This year, ICOM says that more than 30,000 museums in about 100 countries will take part. And the Association of Art Museum Directors, meanwhile, calculates that about 100 American art museums will participate, often by reducing admission rates or offering special programs. (Not everything takes place tomorrow, though — some museums shift the day to make it more convenient.)
This year, ICOM has chosen the theme “museums and memory” in an attempt to prompt museums to explore how they help preserve individual and collective memory.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
Photograph: Andy Wong/AP
Detained artist Ai Weiwei seems to be in good physical health but mentally conflicted and tense, his wife has said after seeing him for the first time in six weeks.
Lu Qing said she was taken to see her husband for about 20 minutes on Sunday afternoon, the first contact friends and relatives have had with the 53-year-old Chinese artist and activist since officials stopped him at Beijing airport on 3 April.
It is not clear where he is being held and the people who arranged the visit did not show her identification, she added.
“I could see redness in his eyes. It was obvious that without freedom to express himself he was not behaving naturally even with me, someone from his family,” Lu told Associated Press. “He seemed conflicted, contained, his face was tense.”
Tania Branigan
Guardian
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82…
Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism.”
Michael Kimmelman
New York Times
A visitor looks at Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads at Somerset House in London. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters
Twelve 363kg (800lb) bronze animal heads have gone on display in the historic courtyard of Somerset House in London , the first contemporary sculpture to be featured there. The artist responsible, Ai Weiwei, was the missing element, his wellbeing and whereabouts still unknown after he was detained by Chinese authorities on 3 April.
A solemn opening ceremony included readings of his sayings. Gwyn Miles, director of the Somerset House Trust, called it “a bittersweet occasion”. “Along with many people around the world, we are hoping for his quick and safe release and that he should be allowed to continue his powerful work as an artist, able to speak freely without constraint,” she said.
“We believe the best support we can give Ai Weiwei is to show his stunning new work and to demonstrate the power of his vision.”
Mark Brown
Guardian
A toothless garbageman who once wandered Hong Kong’s streets with dingy bags of ink and brushes tied to his crutches is now the subject of a major retrospective. About 300 calligraphic works by the late Tsang Tsou-choi — who is best known by his self-dubbed title, the King of Kowloon — are showing at the ArtisTree art space in a high glass tower.
The show, “Memories of King Kowloon” (until May 31), in a spacious corporate-sponsored dimly lighted gallery, quiet as a library, would have been foreign territory for Mr. Tsang. He was most at home under the tropical sun and neon lights. An outsider artist, he spent half a century dodging security guards and police officers as he obsessively covered lampposts and mailboxes, slums and ferry piers, with his distinctive Chinese text.
Mr. Tsang, who died in 2007 at the age of 85, created an estimated 55,000 outdoor pieces, almost all of which have been washed away, painted over or torn down by the authorities and real estate developers. He was a rebel graffiti artist decades before it was fashionable, creating art brut in a city that has no time for outsiders.
Joyce Hor-Chung Lau
New York Times
