It might be satire, but Colbert asks the big questions that everyone should be asking of museums: What is the point of art?  Is art only good if an art critic says it’s good?  Can “good” art exist without an audience? Who decides how much art is worth? Who decides what goes in a museum?  Colbert even begins by saying: “I don’t like art…and that’s mainly because I don’t get art.” So I ask a further question: How can museums help visitors feel more comfortable around the art — how can we make them feel like they “get it”? (Further, how can we help them feel comfortable with the fact that it’s OK to not “get it” — after all, isn’t that why art is studied: because we never feel like we’ve completely plumbed the interpretations of a work of art?)

These are huge, massive questions. I don’t really think that museum staff have the answer to most of them, and that’s probably why we do what we do — because we want to begin to answer them. I do think they’re questions we should ask ourselves and our visitors, because they can help us learn more about our audience and about our collections and institutions.  So as a museum educator, I’m asking all of you, how would you answer the big questions put to Campbell last night? How can museums help you “get art”? Comment away!

(PS: A final thought… Colbert ends by asking about the art housed in the Met: “Do they [the public] vote? Do you let them vote?” He’s met with a chuckle, but what an interesting web 2.0/feedback venture that would be… to ask visitors as they exit: do you think we should keep this work on view in the Museum; why or why not? Would you want to do something like that in a Museum?)

Chick lit? Romance novels? Not for the art historian or museum professional, surely!  If you’re looking for a juicy read that you can apply to your day job, look no further than (the regrettably out of print) Making the Mummies Dance by Thomas Hoving.  I’ve been looking for a copy of this book for years, and finally found it for only five bucks among the vast shelves of my new favorite bookstore.  This book not only kept me sane through a week alone in my new apartment without TV or internet, it helped me get back into museum mode after a month of doing little more than catching up on Bravo marathons post-graduation.  

This wonderfully gossipy tell-all from the director who revolutionized the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1967-77 is readable, informative, and has all the famous and infamous names of the 60′s and 70′s. Hoving doesn’t shy from telling every detail, good or bad, about his former curators, trustees, donors, and enemies — and he’s also not shy about his own accomplishments. I found Hoving’s self-confidence more amusing than annoying, and in my opinion it was often justified: he did, after all, expand the Met’s encyclopedic collections as well as its campus, truly pushing the Met into the household name it is today  Either way, it’s not hard to get past the boasting (to his credit, he does identify what he thinks were his mistakes) and simply enjoy this conversational confessional, with its glimpse into the inner workings of the glittery world of Museum trustees and executives, who jetsetted back and forth between countries every other week, courted donors with grand parties, and built palatial palaces for art in an age before recessions and budget cuts.  Definitely a must-read for any museum professional or museum lover.

Making the Mummies Dance, Thomas Hoving, 1994. Buy from Amazon

Step through sculptures made of strings, see yourself reflected in what seems to be a volcano of glass, walk through a towering rusted spiral, gaze into huge, endless geometric pits, and imagine who wrote each of a set of 4,000 vintage postcards.  Where else can you do all these things but at the amazing Dia:Beacon?

I’ve attended college in the Hudson Valley for four years, and only now, in my final semester, have I at last managed to visit Dia:Beacon, the sprawling contemporary art installation museum in Beacon, NY (located about an hour or so from New York City).  Dia:Beacon has all the greats of contemporary art, including Richard Serra, Gerhard Richter, Donald Judd, and Agnes Martin, as well as a number of artists I’d never heard of before, but whose art fully engrosses you.

Fred Sandback, Untitled from Dia:Beacon website

The museum is a playground of optical illusions.  The stark white galleries immediately present you with the eye-numbing neons of Dan Flavin and then the meticulously layered pencil murals of Sol LeWitt, who seems a Dia favorite.  Throughout your journey through the huge, echoing Dia warehouse, you constantly wonder: What is real? What am I looking at? What is this space?

Fred Sandback‘s string sculptures (a view, at left) ask these questions playfully, creating larger-than-life rectangles and triangles that you know are flat and empty, but at the same time have deceiving depth, leaning against gallery walls as if discarded by the artist. On Kawara’s room of dated paintings from his ongoing Today series is a pristinely executed inquiry into time that manages to be both intimate and distant; the air is even ionized, and it feels somehow lighter as you inhale and exhale within the space.

Michael Heizer, North, South, East, West, from Dia:Beacon website

Meanwhile, the gaping holes of Michael Heizer‘s North, South, East, West (right) are an exploration into illusions of infinity, simultaneously mesmerizing and terrifying.  And one could spend hours in Zoe Leonard’s You see I am here after all exhibition — reading the text and studying the subtle differences in printing of the 4,000 vintage postcards of Niagara Falls, collected by the artist over the course of the year, getting lost in the stories of this place and forgetting any sense of space around you altogether.

(Not to be missed, by the way, is their bookstore, which, though small in size, houses a treasure trove of books on art, design, and theory from around the world.)

All in all, the collections of the Dia, much like the installation art in general, defy description, and beg instead to be experienced. And after all, isn’t that the point?

Dia:Beacon, Reggio Galleries, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon NY 12508 | Zoe Leonard’s You see I am here after all exhibition is on view until September 9, 2009

Art is a profitable commodity and always has been. But this is not an art auction at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Brandeis is a reputable academic institution, and its art museum, much like Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Gallery, is an indispensable resource for students, professors and members of the community. Furthermore, the Rose Art Museum has always supported itself by raising its own funds independently of the University. It prides itself on works of art from private donors, to many of whom the plan to close the museum was seen as a bald-faced insult.

[...] The Trustees are robbing the Brandeis community of a significant resource, and they’re tainting the University’s reputation in the process. Instead of cutting costs in multiple areas of the University, the trustees are striking a blow solely to the visual arts, compromising Brandeis’ reputation and credibility as a higher learning institution. Even if the Trustees were to re-open the museum in the future, under better economic conditions, who would donate to it, now that its reputation has been sacrificed?

The imperativeness of appreciating the resources available to us as students of the liberal arts is reinforced by Brandeis’ abrupt decision to close its art museum. Being able to study in an environment that values cultural exploration and resources is a luxury, not an entitlement. In a declining economy, nothing is certain and nothing can be taken for granted—least of all art.

Read Gabrielle’s full article at the Miscellany News website.
For more information on this topic, see the most recent article in the NY Times, which reports that the building will “remain open as a teaching and studio facility;” Tyler Green’s Q&A with Michael Rush, Rose Art Museum director; as well as CultureGrrl’s wrap-up of the responses to the incident.

This post is a little more personal, persay, than I’d ever really planned to write in this blog, but I wanted to share this experience and the thoughts it’s inspired.  I’m in a museum studies seminar this semester.  It takes place in the art museum on my university’s campus and is taught by the museum’s director.

In the course, as you can see, we have the opportunity to engage with works of art literally firsthand.  And one of the things I’m learning from being able to do this is the importance of getting back to the basics.  When you look at art, especially if you know a bit or even a lot about art history, it’s so easy to get carried away by what (you think) you know.  The class emphasizes focusing on what we can SEE — not the figures or objects depicted on its surface or sculpted shapes, but the actual material the painting is made with and on, the substance the sculpture’s been made out of.  For example, even if you can’t pick up a work of art, you can still go to an art museum and do essentially exactly what we did in class this week.  Without looking at the label, and divorcing the work from the objects in the galleries around it as much as possible, decide what material the support (or backing — like canvas, wood panel, paper) of the work is made out of.  Look at the texture of the surface; the way the pigmet (paints or charcoal, etc.) sits on it; look at the edges of the support against the frame.

These details have the potential to tell you so much more about the work of art than simply by looking at what the artist depicted on it (though of course, that’s still important!).  The type of wood, for example, can tell you what time it was made in, or even place — northern artists in the Renaissance favored a heavier, denser wood, southern artists a lighter, thicker type like poplar.  The quality of the paint — if it’s shiny or flat, if it has a yellow tint — can tell you what sort of technique the artist used: was it oil, with many painstaking layers, was it varnished, was it brushed on quickly?

Things like this can only be seen in person.  Of course, that ties back in to the importance of museums and going to see what are really looks like up close.  And obviously the experience of actually holding a painting — of lifting it up to see how heavy it is, helping identify what kind of wood the paneling could be — isn’t something you can do in an art museum.  But looking really closely, examining its edges, beginning to deduce its history?  That, anyone can do.

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium holds some of the finest Flemish and French art in Europe.  Ever wondered what these masterpieces look like up close?  Not to worry — here are shots of some of my favorite works in their collection, as well as many of the beautiful museum itself.  The building, located in Brussels, in fact houses two museums: the Museum of Ancient Art and the Museum of Modern art (explained in the captions below).  This is the second in the Art History Blog’s series called Art in Real Life, which aims to give context to some of the world’s greatest masterpieces of art.

Click on any of the pictures below to open the gallery; click next (or type “n” on your keyboard) to view the next photo.

TAHB’s Art in Real Life series: Paris | Brussels | Rome

About a year ago, I took a Vermeer seminar in which we discussed all of the works in Vermeer’s ouevre — even those most unlikely candidates… one of which was the piece at left.  This small painting surfaced most recently in 2004 in an auction at Sotheby’s, was sold to a private bidder, who sold it again, and has been under the radar ever since.

Until now, that is: this controversial little painting is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until around June.  Walter Liedtke, the curator of Dutch paintings at the Met, as well as the former paintings conservationist of the Rijksmuseum, endorse this painting as a late, authentic Vermeer.

I haven’t seen it myself yet, but I can definitely tell you I’ll be at the Met sooner rather than later to catch a glimpse of it.  Until then, share your thoughts — is it real, or as some art historians contend in this post-van Meergeren era of Vermeer studies, probably a fake?

A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, at the Met until June | Via CultureGrrl
(If you’re interested in the provenance of this work, see this article from the Sotheby’s sales catalogue.)

Here’s one more reason I have to go to Tokyo, and soon.  The Museum Lab, a joint project between the Louvre and Dai Nippon Printing, is an experimental space in Tokyo, Japan that combines the high art of the Louvre with brand new technology.  Exhibitions change every four to five months, and focus on one sole artwork, surrounded by multimedia setups that present extensive research on the painting or sculpture by the Louvre art historians.

The current exhibition is on The Slippers by Samuel von Hoogstraten.  Because you have to pay to get into the Museum Lab “museum” area, the descriptions on the websites are teasers rather than thorough, but are nonetheless quite intriguing… You can learn about the Dutch Golden Age and its painting style, step into the room van Hoogstraten presents–exploring the importance of perspective  for the artist (see above image), and even a space where you can share your own interpretations of the symbols/objects within the work.

I’m completely fascinated by these creative blends between art and technology–so I really wish I had the extra cash to take a trip to Tokyo and check out this museum!  Hopefully this experiment will continue for a while (there have been four previous exhibitions, including a Gericault and a Titian) so we can all continue to see what new innovations this space can create.  I’ll certainly have my eye on it–I wonder if any of these technologies will be offered or will catch on and be developed for other museums around the world?

Museum Lab website

Listen at NPR’s ‘Museums in the 21st Century’ series webpage.
Via Museum Blogging.

The first installment of Art in Real Life is in Paris, home to countless masterworks of art. I was lucky enough to go to Paris when I was abroad, and annoyed many of my friends by insisting they stand in front of artwork so I could get shots of how large the piece actually was.  Have you, too, wondered just how big David’s Oath of the Horatii is or whether you’re taller than the Mona Lisa?  Read on for highlights at the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay.

	Musée du Louvre A view of the central courtyard from the Richelieu Wing (much quieter than the famous Denon Wing, where the Mona Lisa is housed), and the famous I. M. Pei designed pyramid. Want to take a different sort of virtual tour of the Louvre? Check out their website.
	Venus de Milo Contrapposto, classical beauty, Greek drapery… it’s all there.  The statue is really quite big, and there are always at least 35 tourists around snapping pictures of her. Konica Minolta has reconstructed the Venus de Milo digitally, and it’s pretty stunning.  Check it out here.
	Nike or Winged Victory As you enter the famous Denon Wing, where all the greats of Renaissance art are housed, you’re greeted with the huge Winged Victory.  Another larger than life statue; you can feel the wind that blows her toga and wings back.
	Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa She’s actually really small, and you can barely get close enough to see her elusive smile.  Right around the corner, though, is Giorgione’s Pastoral Symphony…which you could breathe on, if you like. My professor had warned us she was really dirty, but I found the painting pretty bright (maybe that’s because my expectations were so low. True story: my English teacher in high school touched the Mona Lisa before it was under glass. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that anecdote.
	Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know this is one of my favorite paintings.  Check out what I wrote about it last year.  You can only imagine how much I freaked out when walking through this room… It was smaller than I’d imagined, but still quite formidable.
	Theodore Gericault, Raft of the Medusa Really big!  At least life size, if not larger.  The figure on the bottom right, which Gericault added on hanging day for the Paris Salon, literally tumbles out towards you as if it’s going to fall onto your lap. Fittingly creepy, as it’s a corpse.
	Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People The famous French Revolution picture is a lot smaller than I’d imagined — not quite the monumental size of, say, Raft of the Medusa — but the smoky haziness really emerges as you go past.
	Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker Again, if you’re a longtime TAHB reader, you probably know how much I love Vermeer — a whole lot.  This painting, probably a later work, is tiny and precious, and even though it doesn’t have that special quality that Vermeer’s works in the Rijksmuseum possess, any work by Vermeer can take your breath away. Want to see all of Vermeer’s paintings, in scale, side by side? Click here.
	Musée d’Orsay The d’Orsay is huge, has basically every important 19th century and 20th century masterpiece, and is housed in a former train station.
	Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral series We started at the top and worked our way down — thus also going backwards, but cleverly beating the crowds (I highly recommend that tactic!). Monet’s paintings were small, but not surprisingly so: big enough to immerse yourself in, but small enough to feel as if the scene is all yours.
	Claude Monet, Ladies in a Garden Meanwhile, downstairs, Monet’s earlier work hangs downstairs — much larger than his later works.
	Eduoard Manet, Olympia The famous courtesan follows in a long history — from Giorgione to Titian — and Manet’s “muddy” style, as critics like to say, is astounding in person.

Let me know what you think of this series — helpful? Useful? Cool? Lame? I’d love to hear your opinions as I keep working on other posts for it!

TAHB’s Art in Real Life series: Paris | Brussels | Rome