ideas + images

curated by sierra gonzalez 

"Price less" works of art [NYPost]

I feel that the museum respects that you can pay what the economy allows you to pay. That way, you can come more often.

Retired Long Island teacher Joan Smyth, 60, who normally pays the full $20 "suggested admission" at the Met but on Monday decided to pay half

Filed under  //   economy   museum   museum admission   new york   value of art  

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NYTimes annual museums special highlights economic hardships

The annual NYTimes section on museums has a predictably somber tone: in these economic times, how do these organizations cope? I haven't read 'em all, but these are the stories directly linking museums and the current economy. Of course, there are articles on other topics too, but grouping these articles together gives a sense of the big-picture impact and the areas of museum management that must develop strategies for survival.

Shovels sit idle as some projects are delayed: economy forces museums to downsize and delay projects

Wish you were here: as resources dwindle, museums pioneer new ways to reach out

In zoo cuts, it's man vs. beast: budget cuts are forcing zoos to make tough decisions

They didn't love Lucy: In Seattle, Lucy's famous fossils fail to attract crowds

The good stuff in the back room
: Showcasing archives, museums bring out the good stuff

Taking a step-by-step approach to growth: In San Francisco, a museum director takes a pragmatic approach to growth

New York's local museums feel the pinch

Filed under  //   art market   economy   museum   recession  

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Slow growth at the Gardner


Because the will of museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner stipulates that nothing in the collection ever be moved and no new works brought in, the frame of a Rembrandt stolen 19 years ago still hangs empty today. Photo credit: Keith Meyers/The New York Times

If a painting were stolen out of a contemporary art gallery where the walls are all white, you might say it’s a shame for that artwork. But the way that people who visit this place feel violated, it’s like somebody stole this art out of their own living room.

Ulrich Boser, author, The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft

Last Sunday's New York Times looked at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and some of the difficulties it faces due to its founder's strict will, which basically requires that no changes be made to the collection and the building that houses it. A recent ruling from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts allows the museum to begin plans for a new expansion designed by Renzo Piano; this "reasonable deviation" from the will allows the museum to protect the current building from too much wear and tear.

The New York Times profile also dives into the story of the theft of 13 artworks that have remained missing for 19 years. In accordance with Gardner's will, the frames that housed the missing paintings are displayed bare. Gardner's wishes also preserve her curatorial eye and personal arrangements, and the missing paintings evoke an intimate and emotional response as hinted in the picture above.

Filed under  //   art theft   art market   boston   museum   museum expansion  

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"Unearthing the Truth" in the Brooklyn Museum


On display at the Brooklyn Museum: Frieze of Animals in Plant Scrolls. Egypt, possibly from Herakleopolis Magna, 4th century C.E. Limestone, traces of paint.

The Brooklyn Museum started to research an exhibition of Coptic and Pagan (worship of ancient Greco-Roman deities) sculpture and realized that eight of the selected pieces were actually forgeries. On the museum's blog, curator Edna R. Russmann recounts the discovery:

Some of the forgeries appear to have been carved in pieces of stone that had been salvaged from destroyed antiquities. Others are fashioned in a very porous stone that would not have been used in ancient times; it has been suggested that these forgers thought the small natural holes would resemble ancient damage!

Unearthing the Truth: Egypt's Pagan and Coptic Sculpture opened in mid-February, and judging from the exhibition comments online visitors have been pleasantly surprised by the museum's transparency in displaying the forgeries alongside the ancient artifacts.

The museum also has an interesting feature on its website where you can test your ability to identify between Ancient, Near Ancient and Modern (i.e., fake) artifacts. However, I would have loved to first see a brief background on the distinguishing features of each time period to make the quiz more compelling (what should I notice in the materials? craftsmanship? depictions of human figures? religious motifs?). I understand the exhibit's focus on authentic Coptic and Pagan pieces, but even a visual example of each of the three categories would help turn this online activity from a guessing game to a more meaningful memory/assessment game. (In the PDF teacher packet on the exhibition web site, there are two helpful examples of how to "read" an image and evaluate its authenticity. Also, cheers for including related activities in art, history, economics and science!)

Filed under  //   ancient art   authenticity   brooklyn   forgery   museum   quiz   transparency  

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Mid-century science and faux sci-fi books

I enjoyed the visual kinship between two recent discoveries: a gallery of video games as vintage sci-fi paperbacks and a Flickr set of science and technology ads published in the '50s and '60s. The simple lines, blocks of color and clean fonts in both galleries indicate that the video game spoofs did pretty well at picking up on a "vintage" aesthetic. The video game paperbacks were curated by Kotaku from this Something Awful thread; the Flickr set popped up in my Google Reader via Design Observer.

Filed under  //   advertising   color   game   graphic design   mid-century   sci-fi   science   technology   video game  

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Formulas for good design

Is there a mathematic equation for good design? A few articles from February tackle the relationship between beauty, math, science and design.

Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica | Wolfram blog
The developers of Mathematica, a modeling and computational software, riffed on a few corporate logos in a recent blog post. While it's hard to understand their process without experience using Mathematica, it's certainly fun to view the transformations; the Mercedes Benz exercise is even animated on their demo site (you can view a web preview without downloading their software). It seems like a compelling way to quickly view variations on a geometric design—but only if you've got the formula to create it first.

Unlocking the secret of beautiful design with mathematics | Boston Globe

Collector Horace "Woody" Brock has good design down to a science: he believes there is an optimal and measurable amount of symmetry that determines aesthetic satisfaction. Brock explained his ideas to a skeptical Boston Globe reporter covering an exhibit of Brock's decorative arts collection on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the exhibit catalog actually includes an appendix of equations and graphs to illustrate Brock's theory.

My problem with Brock's theory might simply be one of semantics: I think "beauty" is subjective, but it's clear that there are mathematical patterns found in nature (and in the built world) classically considered pleasing and "natural." (I don't think beauty is necessarily naturally pleasing—take Stravinsky, for example.) Brock acknowledges that what he considers "good design" is intuitive—"You just sense it," he says, "that's how it's supposed to be"—so perhaps he means classically pleasing rather than beautiful.

Bonus: to see how Brock applies his ideas to both design and music, read his review of Roger Scruton's The Aesthetic of Music (and Scruton's rebuttal, too).

Core Principles: How science can inform a theory of design | Seed
What is MoMA curator Paola Antonelli doing writing a design column for science mag Seed? Antonelli uses her first column to explore what it means to "design" and to link the practice with scientific discovery, both activities being reflections of culture and necessities for progress.

"Design" as a noun is stretched in so many directions, the only way to grasp its meaning is by abstracting it to its most conceptual skeleton, its basic construct. Science can teach design how to find its own core.

Filed under  //   beauty   collectors   design   logo   math   science  

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EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment

Here's a fun one for the end of the work week. MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli is such a fan of Post-its that she named them one of the 100 "humble masterpieces" that are icons of good design. Who knew, though, that they'd be able to bring this much fun to the office?

Filed under  //   color   good design   iconic design   moma   office   post-it   whimsy  

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Is anybody buying art these days?

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine includes an interesting profile of the Mugrabi family, New York art dealers whose collection of Warhol, Hirst, Basquiat and other modern artists, is one of the largest and most valuable in the world. The Mugrabis' collection of Warhols (around 800 pieces last year, according to the Wall Street Journal) essentially singlehandedly controls the price of the remaining Warhols on the market. According to that WSJ article, "Most people don't realize that Warhol is the Dow Industrial Average" for the art world, said Richard Polsky, a longtime private dealer in Sausalito.

The article looks at the economic climate through the Mugrabis' eyes—they attended a record-shattering Sotheby's auction on the same day Lehman Bothers declared bankruptcy. I encourage you to read the whole article, but here are a few teasers of the things I found most interesting (emphasis mine, of course):

Jose [Mugrabi, the patriarch] had been talking about the incongruity between the day’s financial news and the auction frenzy, and ventured an interpretation: “When the empires fall — Roman, Greek — all that is left is the art.”
“You can’t have an impact buying one or two pictures per artist. We’re not buying art like Ron Lauder — just to put it on a wall. We want inventory.” [Older son Alberto] equated inventory with liquidity: “It gives you staying power.” In the commodities sector, the analogue would be making a run on a precious metal — in order to manipulate the price.
Last year, when Jose learned that a sculpture by the Cuban duo Los Carpinteros he’d just donated to the Guggenheim was requisitioned to storage, he bought it back. “From now on, if I make a gift, I tell them, ‘You have to expose the art,’ ” he said.

The sheer volume of the family’s collection strikes some people as something that is in opposition to the public good. “It’s not that they don’t love art,” Charlie Finch, a columnist for Artnet.com, said. “They’ve just been hogging everything. Come on, let someone else in on the game.”

[Artist George Condo] considered [the Mugrabis' interest in his works] a pretty big stamp of commercial approval: “They’re prestigious collectors. To see your own paintings in one of their apartments, hanging next to a beautiful Basquiat — it feels great.”

“They said it was Black Monday — well, not for Damien,” Tony Shafrazi, a gallerist from New York, said. “It was magic, it was. It was rainbows. This proves that art is more important than money.”

“Damien Hirst should be running Lehman Brothers,” Alberto said.

Related note: The De Young in San Francisco just opened Warhol Live, an exhibit that showcases Warhol's relationship with music. I haven't checked it out yet but have heard that it's enjoyable.

Filed under  //   art   art business   auction   collector   economy   new york  

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Scaling down the Met brand

As if responding to my suggestion of the Met's interest in thrifty marketing, the museum announced Monday that its endowment has taken a 25% hit, membership and attendance is down, and Emily Rafferty, the Met’s president, said that “we cannot eliminate the possibility of a head-count reduction.” This falls in line with experiences at other cultural institutions, but the Met is also responding to the economy by curbing one of its most unique assets: its nationwide retail operation.

According to the New York Times, the Met had 23 stores across the country last year; now, they're scaling down to 8, with plans to focus on their online and catalog sales (they also have a handful of international locations). I've always been curious about the business/marketing decision to take the Met store off site, and even thousands of miles away from the museum. It might be that the Met earned $90 million annually in store revenue with a gross margin of about 50 percent, as James Twitchell reported in 2004.*

Museum stores are curious things: as part of non-profit institutions, store revenue directly supports the operating costs of the museum, including maintaining collections and organizing educational programs. On the other hand, museum stores put a discrete price on culture: you can buy reproductions of Egyptian jewelry, copies of Buddhist sculptures, and Art Nouveau-inspired perfume bottles, all carrying the additional cultural cachet of museum approval. (Curators and art historians OK all store products before they hit the shelves to ensure "authenticity.") Bradford Kelleher, who built the Met Store empire, once said, “Our test is whether the curator concerned with the object can tell the reproduction from the real thing.”

Some museums have national brands (like MoMA/SFMOMA) or even international reach (the Guggenheim and the Louvre are both planning outposts in Dubai), but they've all got multiple museum locations. Not counting the Cloisters (the Met's Manhattan branch dedicated to medieval art) the Metropolitan Museum of Art is using its store—and not the original objects in its collection—to build international awareness. Kelleher said, “If it’s a faithful reproduction, it has educational value and it’s a way of giving the object wider circulation outside of the museum."

*Twitchell's Branded Nation, p. 250; net income for the Met Stores is around $1 million.

[Sorry for the lengthier post, I reverted to my grad school days a little bit here.]

Filed under  //   cultural capital   economy   merchandising   museum   new york   store  

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Penelope Cruz: protect art, our universal language

Art, in any form, is and has been and will always be our universal language and we should do everything we can, everything we can, to protect its survival.

Actress Penelope Cruz, on receiving the Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

Filed under  //   art   awards   film   pop culture   quotes  

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