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curated by sierra gonzalez 
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"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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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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Saved by Science: Behind the scenes at AMNH


Waiting Room, Justine Cooper, 2005.

As part of Seed's birthday celebration for Charles Darwin, Carl Zimmer went behind the scenes at the American Natural History Museum in New York to look at the history of collecting science collections. Justine Cooper's accompanying photographs capture some haunting vignettes of the museum behind the curtain.*

*I had the Wizard of Oz in mind when I wrote that, but now it reminds me of Charles Peale's self portrait that reveals his personal collection--America's first museum--behind a red curtain:

The Artist in His Museum, Charles Willson Peale, 1822.

Filed under  //   behind the scenes   museum   new york   photography   science  

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MoMA Atlantic/Pacific

Momaspan

Photo: Chester Higgins Jr. for the New York Times

Until mid-March, Brooklyn's Atlantic/Pacific subway station will host over 50 masterpieces from the MoMA... sort of. The glossy reproductions of Pollock, Picasso, and others (complete with the same wall text seen at the MoMA in Midtown) are part of the museum's ad campaign designed to remind New Yorkers of the masterpieces in their backyard and drive membership sales. The project, which occupies every single ad space in the station, also includes a microsite with video tours, a Flickr-generated gallery, and resources to learn more about the art on display. [NYT]

Filed under  //   advertising   art   brooklyn   museum   new york   public art  

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