Art History Today

CAA on Detroit

For those not in the CAA (College Art Association) loop, I’ve just heard about an open letter to the “emergency manager” handling the Detroit crisis expressing opposition and deep concern to the Detroit situation. For those unaware of the Detroit Situation, this is the possibility of the city’s art collection being sold off to cover Detroit's debts.

Must admit when I got the news about this I felt sick at heart.  I’ve expressed my own concern about the museum in the neoliberal era, the era of corporate finance- but this!  As the article asks, “what next?”

I hope CAA, and indeed, other groups and voices add to the clamour expressing their dismay at what amounts to selling off the “family silver,”the culture and traditions of this great city. The collection is an extremely impressive one that includes Van Gogh, two works by Poussin, like the Roccatagliata Madonna shown here, and many more. Works like this should stay in the public domain, which is what museums are there for.

 

Here’s the letter.and here's a link to the letter on CAA's website.

An Open Letter to:
Mr. Kevyn Orr, Emergency Manager
City of Detroit
2 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan 48226

Dear Mr. Orr:

On behalf of the College Art Association that represents over 14,000 art historians, artists, curators, art educators and art conservators we express our shock and concern upon learning of the possible selling of the Detroit Institute of Arts collection to cover the city’s debts.

The Detroit Institute of Arts is one of the greatest art museums in the country that represents the finest creative achievements throughout the history of the world. The DIA is not only a great treasure but one of the very few places in Detroit where all people can enjoy, contemplate and study art and its many related concepts. The DIA has developed itself as a public educational institution and has been a leader in the profession at engaging with all segments of the community.

The CAA adheres to the principal that public art museums are held in the public trust and as such are to be protected for the public good. It also supports the Alliance of Museums Code of Ethics and the Association of Art Museum Directors’ Policy on Deaccessioning that states that the sale of art museum collections to support operating expenses is unethical.

We appeal to your higher judgment in assessing the true value of the DIA and its critical role for the public good of the city, state, and the country in deliberating on the future of this great collection.

Sincerely yours,
Anne Collins Goodyear
President

“We don’t do Byzantine.”

Brian Sewell laments the state of art history teaching today, including the neglect of Byzantine studies; though he ends on a hopeful note-  on THES site. Yes, an art history education should open up great cultural possibilities whatever your station in life.

“If, on graduating, the student of art history has grasped enough of the discipline to form a chronological frame for further observation and experience, then he can add to it. No matter whether he becomes a monied banker or digs tunnels for the new fast train to Birmingham, his appreciation of paintings in the Louvre and the Prado (or even Birmingham), the architecture of Amsterdam and Angkor Wat, and the sculpture of Michelangelo and pre-Columbian Mexico, will be enriched by what he sees and reads and hears. No other compulsory subject (and certainly not mathematics) pursued in our adolescent years could so swiftly, broadly and ubiquitously elevate our cultural lives.”

Am I glad that I recently taught some Byzantine art, at least its influence on the early renaissance, like the painter Berlinghieri shown here . I can’t run to Pre-Columbian, but I will be doing some Egyptian and Etruscan art on my Vatican blog. Watch this space.

 

Latest installment of Vatican blog.

go here

Or for just images here.

 

 

 

Re-visiting Taste and the Antique…and a new blog.

I first came across Francis Haskell’s and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Ancient Sculpture 1500-1900 when I was doing my doctorate on Poussin. NP has a reputation for being steeped in “the antique” and so I needed to familiarise myself with the canon of sculpture, the “admiranda” the group of ancient sculptures admired by antiquarians, scholars, travellers, and of course artists. For example in his painting, Gathering of the Manna, nearly every figure is based on famous classical sculptures, all of which appear in Taste and the Antique.

I don’t know the exact division of labour in the book but I’m guessing that Penny mostly handled the cataloguing of the sculpture, and the late great Haskell brought his considerable knowledge of taste and collecting to the series of essays that precede the catalogue. Both catalogue and a series of essays on such topics as Rome and the antique, the critical fortunes of the antique in the 18^th century, and the decline in the interest of this famous collection of taste, are equally indispensable. Apart from the wealth of information, insight and scholarship, mention should be made of the reproductions which are superfine.

During my doctorate I spoke on Poussin and the antique at a Classical Association conference in Manchester (I think) and from them I learnt more about sculpture which isn’t in the book, partly because it hadn’t been found during the heyday of the canon. I collected books on Greek and Roman art, studied the drawings after the antique in the Greek and Roman section in the British Museum, studied the cast gallery in the Ashmoleon, and broadened my knowledge of classical art which has stood me in good stead when looking at figurative paintings from the renaissance onwards. You can’t understand renaissance art without a grounding in the antique. Did you know that the Elgin Marbles helped scholars to understand Piero della Francesca’s Arezzo frescoes? With the appropriation of the Elgin Marbles and more knowledge about original Greek sculpture coming to light- most of the statues in the book are copies from the Imperial period, the lustre of the canon of the antique began to fade. As Haskell said in Rediscoveries of Art, antiquity was still admired in the early nineteenth-century but it was “a different antiquity. ” From the early nineteenth-century onwards, we hear of artists professing their admiration for the Theseus from the Parthenon in the British Museum rather than the Apollo Belvedere, though that statue, along with the Laocoön and the Barberini Faun is still held in high regard among the cognoscenti.

Though my respect for the book hasn’t diminished one iota, re-visiting it and with a greater knowledge of classical art, I wonder if the selection was slightly biased. There is no sarcophagi or tomb sculpture; there is a handful of relief sculpture; there is hardly any sculpture that could be labelled “genre,” or concerned with the everyday. Take this sculpture of a Boy and a Goose, which didn’t make the cut. Yet, we find it reproduced in a book of iconography in the middle of the nineteenth-century alongside famous statues all of which are included in Taste and the Antique.

Haskell and Penny were mainly “concerned with the creation, the diffusion and the eventual dissolution of a “canon” of universally admired antique statues.” They weren’t interested in the historical dimension of these statues; what could be gleaned about the culture of Hadrian from studying statues of his young lover Antinous, for example. Haskell was to devote an entire book to the problem of how art could be seen as historical data- History and its Images, which should be consulted too. In Taste and the Antique, he and Penny were trying to present a cultural history of Europe, with the antique dispersed throughout a network of art, economics, taste and social status.

The aesthetic side of this sculpture is only appreciated by a minority these days, the “happy few” who still find pleasure at looking at classical art, whilist appreciating the cultural context into which it emerged and from whence it came. When you’re looking at these statues, you’re conscious of a time that has gone and is irretrievably lost. As the authors say, tourists flock to the Sistine Chapel, not the Belvedere sculpture gardens in our times. Yet back in the renaissance, the finding of the Apollo and the Laocoön would have been of tremendous importance. No such interest nowadays. A renaissance scholar would be more likely to ask how much the marble of the Apollo Belvedere cost, whether it was luxury goods or functional object, or what pricing structure it falls into. And we have a culture secretary who can’t name a work in the British museum. God help us in this age of neoliberalism!

I’ve used Taste and the Antique extensively for a course I’m teaching on the Art of the Papal Collections. There’s a new blog with lots of information here, but if you just want to look at the images, here are the links to the SkyDrive galleries.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

The images of Julius II finding the Apollo and the Iconographical dictionary comes from this great site dedicated to the drawing of these sculptures.

The Museum in the Neoliberal Era.

Sorry for lazy blogging. When I heard about the Tate/BP re-hang I thought it was time for a post, .

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a large multinational conglomerate, BP, is advertised in the name of an exhibition designed to inaugurate the Tate’s makeover. In fact you have to admire the audacity of a corporation putting its name on an exhibition encompassing “500 Years of British Art,” especially as its origins are in 1909, not 1450. It’s like BP are laying claim to the traditions and cultures of British art, absorbing all the historical continuities, disruptions within one brand name. History packaged as a commodity to be sold to the “visitor’s economy” in the unhappy neoliberal speak of our times. Not that there’s anything new about BP advertising at the Tate. In his Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s. Chin-Tao Wu traced the infiltration of the museums by corporations such as BP which one of the largest sponsors of art in this country. Excellent overview of corporate activity in the art’s sector. Not an alarmist political diatribe, but a very cool and objective analysis of how the corporations have gained footholds on the boards of trustees, annexed space and generally encroached on the museums and galleries, all inspired by the Thatcherism revolution. My favourite corp tale was the semiotic shenanigans of the Swedish Absolut Vodka to sell their product at Oxford Modern Art.  There are many examples of this; it’s become endemic to the culture.

Some directors have become habituated to the role of corporations in modern museum culture. It’s not even a subject for discussion- just glossed over for fear of offending the sponsors. In an article in yesterday’s Evening Standard, the current Director of Tate Britain Penelope Curtis doesn’t even offer a rationale for the inclusion of BP in the exhibition’s title. “Our criterion for the new BP Walk through British Art, as we are calling it, has been to create a sense of flow and to encourage the pleasure of looking at art as it changes.” (my emphasis) Absolutely no attempt to explain the inclusion of the corporation in the title of the re-hang- the question doesn’t arise.

This comes just a few weeks after the Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, told a stunned conclave of arts supremos that they have to give their projects, museums and culture completely over to the discipline of the free-market, give up all claims to art for art’s sake and regard art in brute economic units, turn art into commodity, turn aesthetic material into the tools of advertising. Miller has a background in advertising, and it’s clear that there’s going to be more pervasive marketing in our cultural spaces in the future, which doesn’t bode well for the gallery-goer seeking sanctuary from the commercialism of modern life. I’m too lazy to check the reference but I think one of the original ideas behind the National Gallery was that the art would provide relaxation, a break from work, not that the visiting experience would be an extension of work into the space of the galleries. I know people who work in the commercial, financial sector, who love their art- and I’m sure they’d want that kind of experience. There’s a debate about distraction and work emerging here- but another time.

This public space has been under attack for twenty years or so. Since the days of the Enterprize culture of Mrs Thatcher, the arts have been forced into a Faustian bargain and it’s becoming clear that they sold their soul for nothing. The terms of the devil’s bargain went something like this. “We’ll give your museums money for refurbishments, exhibitions, cultural innovations- just allow us to put our brand names on the pages of catalogues, on the pennants flying outside your museums, some advertising in the media.” “OK, we’ll do that; no harm in doing a bit of advertising, not too intrusive, and it’ll still be arts for art’s sake, with the money/commercial success we might make from it an after-effect, not as an entrepreneurial goal.” Faustian pacts aside, my feeling is that the arts have massively underestimated the ambitions of the corporations, urged on by the privatizing ambitions of this government. Reading advertising agency trained Miller’s stark ultimatum which has been met with utter dismay by many leading figures in the arts – see BG’s detailed post on AHN- and thinking about “500 Years of BP British Art” it’s difficult not to conclude that corporate advertising in the arts might be entering a new phase, especially as the axe of austerity is inevitably going to fall heavily on the funding for arts and culture. The arts aren’t confident that MM is going to “fight their corner” with the Treasury in the looming spending reviews. We’re embarking on a new chapter in the narrative of the museum in neoliberal culture, and it’s likely to be unedifying and banal.