Artworld Salon

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  For Museums, a New Twist on Instrumental Benefits

  Posted: 31-January-2011, 6:33pm EST by András Szántó

  For years the debates have raged about how to argue for the arts, and never more so than now, when public money for museums is everywhere drying up. As I wrote not long ago in the Art Newspaper, a thorny problem for arts advocates is that they have boxed themselves into a corner by developing instrumental arguments for the arts. According to the now widely-used reasoning, investments in the arts are supposed to yield tangible returns — tourism dollars, construction jobs, white collar citizens, booming maths scores, etc. — which, in turn, advance cities and their inhabitants in the global economy.

  The trouble is that in the meantime the art community has lost sight of what in the first instance is important and intrinsically valuable about the arts. And as far as policy arguments go, funding cultural institutions to obtain the aforementioned outputs is a rather inefficient way of going about the business of improving education, competitiveness, and neighborhood health.

  Now philosopher Alain de Botton has waded into this fertile rhetorical swamp by proposing a new twist on instrumentalism. Let museums be a means to and end, he argues in a polemic published on BBC’s website. But let those ends be moral. Did anyone say moral?

  Invoking the old chestnut about museums being our secular churches, de Botton argues: “I try to imagine what would happen if modern secular museums took the example of churches more seriously. What if they too decided that art had a specific purpose - to make us good and wise and kind - and tried to use the art in their collections to prompt us to be so?” He goes on to ask, “Why couldn’t art be - as it was in religious eras - more explicitly for something?”

  The philosopher has pointed out a valid contradiction. While arts advocates have willingly instrumentalized their cause when arguing for subsidies, they insist on a neutral, open, cause free definition of the contributions of artists and cultural institutions. But what would museums look like in the scenario suggested by de Botton?

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  Zuckerberg to VIP Art Fair: “Users are fickle…”

  Posted: 26-January-2011, 4:00pm EST by Jonathan T. D. Neil

  There is a scene in The Social Network when Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg is laying into his then CFO, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), for freezing the company account of the then-neo-natal Facebook. It’s the best 30 seconds on the fragility of a company’s online profile that one can possibly find, and it goes something like this:

  Do you realize that you jeopardized the entire company?…If the servers are down for even a day our reputation is damaged irreversibly.  Users are fickle…Even a small exodus, even a few people leaving would reverberate through the whole user base. The users are interconnected, that’s the whole fucking point!

  The VIP Art Fair is not Facebook.  It’s not a social media platform and was never billed as one. Rather, it is the first successful attempt at bringing something like an Art Basel or Armory Show to your browser. But here’s the thing: “Users are fickle.” And VIP learned that lesson the hard way.

  The scrutiny and criticism have been relentless: my colleagues at ArtReview questioned VIP’s default email sharing/privacy settings (another Facebook lesson), about which collectors were pissed; bloggers, as they do, have offered comment and cattiness, on everything from the experience to the idea; everyone I’ve spoken to trashes the interface, or has said the art looks “flat” (you are looking at it on a screen, I remind them); and rumors abound that exhibitors have been asking for refunds.

  Barring those rumors, all of this confirms that VIP is indeed a success, a qualified one, but a success nevertheless.  People logged on, looked, commented, contacted (too many it seems). This is what happens at an art fair. If the chat function didn’t work, or no one was manning the booth?well guess what? This happens at art fairs too.  And if there was no “buy now” button on the screen, if you couldn’t give your credit card number and get an email confirmation of your purchase, then again?that doesn’t happen at an art fair either. Those transactions have always been “offline” so to speak, just as they were here.

  The issue is that we expect more from the online environment, or rather we expect different. It simply isn’t enough to replicate the experience, it has to be remediated and enhanced. One thing that it absolutely must be, however, is seamless. VIP is a success, but its reputation is damaged. Irreversibly?

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  The Girl With the Art Magazine

  Posted: 5-January-2011, 2:28pm EST by András Szántó

  Yesterday was a good day for art journalism. Lindsay Pollock was named editor of the Art in America, opening the way for the rejuvenation of one of our most venerable magazine brands. Like that other old workhorse of the art journalism trade, ArtNews, the 98 year-old Art in America has lost its way of late, as the worlds of art and journalism transmogrified around it.

  I?ve been lucky to follow Lindsay Pollock’s career since when she was working on her biography of the art dealer Edith Gregor Halpert, which later appeared as a book titled The Girl With the Gallery. She has since evolved into an art reporting powerhouse, known to readers through her precise market coverage at Bloomberg and The Art Newspaper, and more recently, at her website, Art Market Views, an increasingly vital source of breaking art-world news. She is fair, informed, a happy peripatetic denizen of the global art scene, but also tough as nails. Her commitment is to a broader dialogue than straight art news. She has a deeper interest in art than what happens at the nexus of pictures and money.

  So what now with Art in America? It clearly needs an energy boost. Its detached, ivory-tower approach, where long reviews dutifully appear long after exhibitions have closed, seems like a quaint anachronism. The magazine has a reputation for pulling its punches. Its cautious academism is out of synch with a culture where opinions are supersized. What new leadership can bring to the magazine above all, I think, is a fruitful demolition of the walls that divide scholarly and aesthetic writing, on the one hand, and thoughtful journalistic appraisals of the “dark side” of art as an institutional and ? gasp ? commercial system.

  No one?s better suited to open up those fertile pathways than Lindsay, who sees the life of art as an all-encompassing totality that spans from the artist studio to the scholarly study to the champagne and canapé-besotted halls of Art Basel.

  The greatest mistake would be to dilute Art in America’s authority by bloggifying it ?though no doubt Lindsay’s digital bona fines will come in handy. We need a magazine of record that sits somewhere between Art News and Artforum. Neither insidery nor too distanced. Neither a sanctum of PhD graduates in art history nor a hive of ink stained journos who cover arts like any other news beat. My hope is for a magazine where the world of art is presented just as the exciting hybrid world that it is, where the best of our cultural legacy intermixes with the most current and occasionally the most mundane, but always the most fascinating, personalities and institutions of contemporary life.

  What do you think would be the best for Art in America now?

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  Museums 2.0

  Posted: 24-December-2010, 12:35pm EST by The Transom

  

  Adam Levine writes:

  Amidst the glamour of Art Basel, earlier this month, one panel in the ?Conversations? series?moderated by AWS?s Andras Szanto, as it happens?stood out in its attempt to tackle a more intellectual topic: How museums will operate in the digital world?

  The discussion revolved around the use of digital media in three areas: (1) platform development, (2) marketing strategies, and (3) business models and fundraising. I?d like to offer additional models that complement what was discussed in Miami.

  One of the panelists, Max Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, has arguably done more for the development of open-source museum platforms than anyone. That the IMA is incurring most of the costs for such efforts seems unreasonable and inequitable. Crowd-sourced models of fundraising were discussed, but no mention was made of crowd-sourcing development. One model that has been profitably used elsewhere is for a pool of money?raised from multiple institutions all interested in open-source museum software?to be awarded as a prize for superior development work. The template for this strategy, the so-called ?Netflix Challenge,? was quite successful.

  In the portion of the Miami conversation on marketing strategies, little was made of the ability to develop targeted campaigns on the basis of what people are viewing online or in the galleries. Such data, which is already available given current technologies, holds the potential for a more intimate museum experience. Using technology of the sort the company Art.sy has developed, museums can market exhibitions to visitors on the basis of their preferences. They can even suggest new works to visitors on the basis of things that they have liked in the past. Similar technologies, deployed much like ?smart shopping carts? in supermarkets, could conceivably be used in certain museum settings as well.

  In the exchange about fundraising and new digital business models for museums, there was no mention of the ?freemium? model. This would still allow for free general access to a museum?s online collections, but offer an additional option for a more highly-curated experience for a premium charge (e.g., a custom museum itinerary).

  To move museums forward, the single most important thing is not technology but the creation of ideas. While idea generation is about as ?analog? as it gets, forums like these are the real ?open source? venues for rethinking how museums do business. I wonder what other approaches, digital or not, the ArtWorldSalon community can suggest?

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  Enter the Activist Foundation

  Posted: 14-December-2010, 9:31pm EST by Pablo Helguera

  While assessing the extent of this country?s liberals political apathy, Harper?s magazine writer Thomas Frank remarks: ?say what you like about the Tea Party movement, but at least they showed up.? It is precisely the combination of the dormant state of progressives (be it due to either disillusionment, boredom, or exhaustion) and the huge motivation of conservatives that tables have turned in this country?s politics, and the art world appears to be only a tiny turf where the latest battle is being waged. It is playing out in the current Wojnarowicz-gate at the Smithsonian, where the bigots showed up to tell us what art should be; but instead of protesting in front of the museum, the art world went to Miami.

  Until yesterday, when the Warhol Foundation entered the fray. The fact that a Foundation has taken such a brave stance is significant in many levels. The Warhol Foundation was established in 1987, the same year than David Wojnarowicz made ?Fire in my Belly? and amidst the culture wars. Ever since that time, it has continuously been an advocate for the central issue that caused the NEA debacle then ? the idea of an individual artist grant (as it is exemplified by its funding of organizations like Creative Capital), so its announcement to suspend funding to the Smithsonian is more than a simple act: it is a restatement of its founding mission, and a reminder to us of that history. Equally significantly, though, the noise of the Warhol?s announcement also underlines the deafening ?and really, unacceptable ? silence of the contemporary art world about this affair up to this moment.

  Are we really so comfortable with letting art being criminalized this way? Is our reaction going to be limited to sign some Facebook petition? The Warhol has done what very few in the visual arts has had the guts to do yet, and we should look at their example to follow suit and press others to do so as well. A curator friend of mine had recently told me: ?when institutions take the initiative in art, it means that artists are not doing their job?. Who knew that two decades after the culture wars art foundations would have to take the lead in defending culture? Say what you like about our supposed liberalism as the cultural producer class, but in this case it was the foundation who showed up.