Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

The implicit contract amongst the board of a non-profit institution, its staff and its community goes something like this: If the staff does a good job, the community will embrace the staff’s work and the board will support it at a level that allows it to continue to do good work. It’s a triangular feedback loop that has worked well for art museums, which are, happily, overwhelmingly well-run. Art museums collect and preserve our visual and cultural heritage, generate scholarship, provide more education than any other organizations except schools, and expose Americans to peoples and ideas that would otherwise be outside their experience.

But somehow that traditional, tripartite system has broken down in Los Angeles and Indianapolis, where boards have failed to support widely respected institutions. In Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art is in its fifth year of crisis. Last week the Los Angeles Times reported that in addition to merger talks with the University of Southern California, MOCA’s board has initiated similar discussions with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Until the directorship of Jeffrey Deitch, MOCA had been America’s most admired and copied contemporary art museum. By bringing traditional art historical rigor to today’s art, MOCA set a standard that every significant contemporary art museum in the U.S. has followed. Many in Europe have too: Two of the continent’s top modern and contemporary art museums — Amsterdam’s Stedelijk and Cologne’s Ludwig — are run by former MOCA curators.

In Indianapolis, IMA director Charles Venable announced last week that the IMA was laying off 21 people, 11 percent of the museum’s staff, and that it was eliminating 29 jobs in all. (The Walker Art Center also recently announced a much smaller round of layoffs.) Under Max Anderson, Venable’s predecessor, the IMA had emerged as one of America’s top-performing art museums. The IMA’s digital initiatives, such as its transparency-providing Dashboard, its video service ArtBabble and its open-information deaccessioning policy, set new standards for the field. Under Anderson the IMA became free, providing everyone in Indiana with the same access to the art the museum held in trust for them. The IMA also spearheaded the United States presentation at the 2011 Venice Biennale and, at a time when too many Americans rushed to demonize Islam, the IMA presented a significant exhibition of Islamic art. When Anderson left the IMA, the museum was a national model.

The MOCA and IMA situations would appear to be as different as can be: Indianapolis is a fraction of Los Angeles’ size. MOCA is a contemporary art museum and the IMA is an encyclopedic institution (though via projects such as its new 100 Acres sculpture park, it has demonstrated better than most of its peer institutions how an encyclopedic museum can put contemporary art its heart.) MOCA has an international board of billionaire contemporary art scenesters, the IMA’s governors are almost entirely Indianans. But the two boards share one thing in common: They have allowed the implicit contract between staff, board and community to fail. MOCA’s board has been leading poorly for more than half a decade. Now the IMA’s board has joined them. [Image: Los Carpinteros, Free Basket, 2010. Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.]

MOCA’s situation and the unwillingness of its board to support the museum is long-chronicled, most recently by Christopher Knight on the front page of Saturday’s Los Angeles Times. The Indianapolis Star is no Los Angeles Times, so the Indy situation is less clear. Let’s focus there.

As with MOCA, the IMA story is about not just the board, but about how the board is allowing a director to lead. In the Star, Venable recently claimed that the IMA cannot afford its current level of services and that he needs to cut around $2 million from the museum’s budget, roughly 10 percent of expenditures. He told the paper that the core of the alleged problem is that the museum is drawing down about six percent of its endowment this year. Venable considers this is an unacceptably high figure, not just in terms of draw, but in another, more novel way. [Image: Edouard Vuillard, The Seamstress, 1893. Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.]

“In my opinion, endowments ideally should not be used to support more than 50 percent of operations as a rule with the other half being supported through donations and earned revenue,” Venable said. In over a decade of covering the non-profit sector and in years of working for non-profits before that, I’ve never heard of any remotely similar formulation or management theory. Nor could I find one when I looked.

How much should an art museum draw from its endowment each year? There is no industry-standard figure. Under rules put forth by the Internal Revenue Service, each year private foundations must make eligible charitable expenditures that equal or exceed five percent of their endowments. (The IRS rule also details what counts toward that figure and how it may be calculated, but that’s a little beyond where we need to go here.) Art museums are not private foundations. They may, if they choose to, spend far less than five percent of their endowment per year. Or far more. But for better or worse, art museums and other non-profit institutions have taken the IRS’ ‘five percent rule’ for foundations as a guideline.

According to Venable, the IMA is exceeding that figure by about one percentage point. Venable seems to have presented this percentage point to the Star as an irresponsible expense that will damage the institution if it is not controlled. Is six percent on the high end of the average art museum endowment draw? No data is available, but based on years of conversations with museum directors, I’d say yes. But is it irresponsibly or dangerously high, a level of spending that will damage the institution? Certainly not. It’s within the realm of reasonable. However, the Star accepted Venable’s analysis and wrote that the museum is “struggling.” But is that really true?

No, and it’s not even close. The IMA is an exceptionally well-endowed institution. As of last June, the IMA’s endowment stood at $326 million. (With the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 12.1 percent and the S&P 500 up 14.2 percent since the IMA last reported its endowment total, today that figure is likely substantially higher.) While there is no available accumulated set of data that ranks current art museum endowments, the IMA’s endowment is likely within the top 15 in the country. [Image: Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, about 1629. Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.]

According to the Star, just over $200 million of the IMA’s endowment is available for operating expenses. So when Venable talks about an alleged need to cut $2 million from the IMA’s expenditures, the math is pretty obvious: $2 million equals almost exactly one percent of eligible endowment draw. Venable’s decision to axe staff and to reduce the IMA’s mission-delivery capability stems from a false imperative to reduce endowment draw — and at a time of fast-rising financial markets, too — and a novel formulation of from where a charity’s revenues should come.

(Especially galling: Just as Venable decided that he needed to cut $2 million, $1.7 million of which will come in staff cuts, he admitted to spending about $1 million to launch a show of art rented from the Baltimore Museum of Art, effectively sending money raised and earned in Indiana not into the IMA coffers, but to Maryland.)

This brings us to the choice made by Venable’s bosses, the decision to either instigate or allow devastating cuts to staff and mission fulfillment. The IMA board is doing its best MOCA impersonation: Instead of increasing giving as part of a considered medium-range effort to reduce its endowment draw — for this is how such reductions typically work — the IMA board chose to fire staff and to lessen the IMA’s ability to serve its community. Instead of building on the generosity of the past donors who built the IMA’s endowment and MOCA’s collection, their current boards are content to coast on the wealth of the past. Instead, they should be giving so as to enable their museums’ present and ensuring its future. That’s both flinty and an abdication of responsibility to staffs and previous donors who have helped make the two museums respected national leaders. [Image: JMW Turner, The Fifth Plague of Europe, 1800. Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.]

Even worse: Two days after the IMA and its board mandated austerity, the Dow Jones hit an all-time high. Apparently Rep. Paul Ryan’s America lives on the IMA and MOCA boards.

The decimation of MOCA’s capabilities has been well-chronicled. The cuts made by Venable and his board are already degrading the IMA’s ability to fulfill its mission: The IMA laid off its director of publications, which portends poorly for the IMA’s ability to produce scholarship, particularly on its many excellent collections. Last night the museum’s librarian sent an email to IMA staff outlining cuts in library services: The IMA’s library will no longer provide open access to the public. It is also cutting its hours and will be open only six hours a day. The museum has signaled that further cuts are coming to the curatorial and conservation departments. Those cuts will be especially self-defeating as those are two of the museum departments most able to attract substantial grants from regional and national donors and foundations.

There’s an additional unsavory edge to Venable’s early IMA tenure. It’s clear from my conversation with journalists, present and former IMA staff and others involved in the arts in Indiana that someone or someones have initiated a whisper campaign portraying the museum’s previous leadership as irresponsible, profligate spenders, the kind of people that Indianapolis just couldn’t afford. Heck, the whisper campaign has continued, this place just doesn’t need to provide for its community the way museums in Minneapolis or Kansas City do, let alone museums in Los Angeles or in that place Anderson came from, New York!

On many levels, poppycock. The IMA is immensely popular in its community: In terms of population, the Indy metropolitan area ranks No. 33 in the U.S. It is not a city that draws a significant number of tourists. Yet according to the most recent available survey data from the Association of Art Museum Directors, with over 400,000 visitors per year the IMA ranks No. 19 in museum attendance, ahead of better known museums such as the Frick Collection and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The community has clearly embraced the staff’s work. [Image: John Marin, Hurricane, 1944. Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.]

Venable himself fed the Star some data that allegedly pointed to Anderson’s irresponsible ways: Venable claimed that only 7,000 people visited a recent IMA exhibition of Islamic art. Yesterday, Anderson took to his Facebook page to reveal that figure as false: According to Anderson, 20,000 people visited the exhibition, and on a cost-per-visitor basis the show was not exceptional. Sniping at the previous museum director and presenting misleading data about his programming is small. The IMA board and director should be trying to build on the successes I detailed above, not explaining them away. (The exchange is revealing in another way: Anderson’s IMA was focused on being a museum that was engaged with world culture, art, artists, scholarship, conservation and education. Venable, who has proposed an exhibition of automobiles, seems  more interested in fairgrounds-style attractions and less interested in collections, historicizing exhibitions or in enabling and publishing scholarship.)

Should all this matter to art-lovers outside Indianapolis or Los Angeles? Yes. When the boards and directors of large, successful museums abandon the staffs and past donors that have produced and enabled significant work, and when they shrug at the communities that value that work, it serves as a warning shot for the whole field. It is the kind of behavior that should be documented and noted, as a warning of worst-practices. If it can happen at admired institutions such as MOCA and the IMA, it can happen anywhere.

The artwork was destroyed by the climate change of which the artist had long warned.

“Important,” artist Robyn O’Neil tweeted last Wednesday. “Remember that piece I worked on for 2 years? HELL. The one that almost killed me? Well, it got ruined in the hurricane. So if I kind of disappear and don’t respond to things for a while, please understand. Can’t quite get my head around this.”

HELL was O’Neil’s latest magnum opus, a roughly seven-feet-by-fourteen-feet triptych born from pencil and 35,000 separate collage elements. According to Susan Inglett Gallery, the piece included 65,000 figures. O’Neil’s oeuvre is rich with such ambitious, large-scale graphite works: Earlier this year the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth acquired her These Final Hours Embrace At Last; This Is Our Ending, This Is Our Past (2007). (O’Neil came onto Episode No. 38 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast to talk about that piece.) Her masterpiece may be the 12-foot-wide Staring into the blankness, they fell in order to begin (2008, below). Her work is also in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art and the MFA Houston.

Many of O’Neil’s massive drawings play with the paradox of weather: It’s beautiful, dramatic and it fascinates us, but its power makes us small and can even destroy us. O’Neil has long been fascinated by weather and by the way artists have engaged it. “I think it was the mere mention of wind in Courbet’s painting [The Gust of Wind at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston] that did it for me,” O’Neil told me in 2008. “I was reading a fabulous book called “Defining the Wind” by Scott Huler. It’s basically a long essay on how the Beaufort Scale, and wind in general, is poetry.  Such a great sentiment. I also loved the quote in the beginning from Hemingway (writing to John Dos Passos): ‘Remember to get the weather in your goddamned book — weather is very important.’ I couldn’t agree more.”

O’Neil’s work has never been explicitly about climate change per se, but climate change surrounded the work like fog, an obvious explanation for the extraordinary power of the natural forces O’Neil portrayed again and again. Ironically, HELL feels like a bookend, the termination of that work, a piece that serves up our Boschian reward for ignoring the danger.

And now HELL is gone, extant only as a JPEG’d memory, a victim of a late-season hurricane that may be related to the changes in weather wrought by climate change. Even worse: HELL is just one of hundreds — thousands? — of artworks stored in New York galleries and studios that were destroyed or damaged by water that Sandy pushed into Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Every day for the last week the New York art media has had new photographs and stories documenting the destruction of contemporary cultural heritage — and not just artworks, but archives too. More than a week after Sandy hit New York, it’s become clear that Sandy has created what will eventually be considered empty spots in art history.

Whether art was destroyed in war or by weather or by fire, ‘lost’ art and archival material is something with which art history is accustomed to dealing. For example: You can’t flip through a monograph about Gustav Klimt without wincing when you get to the black-and-white pictures of the University paintings, the major murals destroyed at the end of World War II, or Leda, probably the most sexually suggestive painting of early modernism. Today they exist only as photographs.

But at least a representation of them exists in some form, however comparatively minor, at least we can see something of what they looked like, at least we have a thin window into understanding how they were impacted by the art that came before and how they impacted the art that came next. Something is better than a void.

Which brings us to the post-Sandy recovery. While many artworks and much archival material has been destroyed by Sandy, the technology to save materials related to them exists: Here’s hoping someone — the New York Foundation for the Arts? The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts? — provides funding to start a digital archive that will preserve whatever we can of art and archival material destroyed by Sandy. It could be something as simple and as low-cost as a crowd-sourced wiki. Or it could be as lavishly produced as the Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art.

Either way, it won’t be long before critics and historians find it mighty useful. And while it’s no substitute for actual artwork, perhaps such an archive would provide some solace to artists who fear Sandy destroyed the future memories of their work.

The dispute over the future of the Corcoran seems to have reached a new level: The “Save the Corcoran” group delivered this letter to the Corcoran late yesterday and distributed it to media late last night. In today’s Washington Post, Corcoran spokesperson Mimi Carter unloaded on the group, saying that the Corcoran was “surprised and distressed by the many false statements and inaccuracies in the letter.” The Post’s story also re-hashes some territory covered on MAN in July, when I reported that the District of Columbia attorney general was monitoring the Corcoran situation and why.

And if all that wasn’t enough, someone pulled a pretty epic art-prank on the Corcoran (and at right) this morning.  [via]

One quick thought: I love that the Save the Corcoran folks have a little spunk-and-sandpaper to ‘em. But the likeliest outcome of Save the Corcoran’s letter is that it’s now even harder for donors and foundations to return to or to begin to support the Corcoran, which will in turn make it harder to ’save’ the museum and the school. The problem here is not just that the Corc is giving every indication of wanting to sell its landmark Flagg building, it’s that the Corcoran is spending a lot more money than it’s taking in via donations and tuition, and has been for a long, long time.

It’s plain that Washington has little faith in the Corcoran’s current leadership — the institution’s anemic fundraising numbers make that plenty clear — but the STC letter will likely further erode donor/foundation confidence in the current leadership, without necessarily leading to anything new or different.

I don’t know what will ’save’ the Corcoran — aside from some kind of outside take-over, which still seems the likeliest ‘ending’ here — but the only way this kind of full-frontal assault will help is if it prompts the board to make wholesale changes in the Corcoran executive suites — and in its own boardroom. There’s no sign anything of the sort is likely, at least not yet.

Previously on MAN: Forget about the school for a moment, does the Corcoran Gallery of Art have a future? DC AG looking at possible Corcoran move. The Corcoran’s monetization of a long-term lease raises more questions. The Corcoran by the numbers. A long-term failure of leadership.

In last night’s debate, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney talked a lot about job creation and how he’s good at it.

Not when it comes to jobs in the arts. The creative industries are a big job creator in Massachusetts. They make up 2.3 percent of all Massachusetts jobs. There are more people who work in arts-related fields in Massachusetts than who work in turning livestock and agricultural goods into food.

Here’s Romney’s record on arts jobs:

• As governor, Mitt Romney repeatedly tried to cut funding for arts jobs in Massachusetts. In 2006 and 2007 he tried to cut the appropriation for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, cuts which, if enacted, would have cut hundreds of jobs.
• Romney opposed the major cultural funding initiative of his tenure, the creation of the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund, which makes capital improvement funds available to arts institutions. Romney line-item vetoed the CFF, but by a 33-3 vote (!) the state legislature overrode his veto. The fund has been important to arts organizations such as the MFA Boston, the ICA Boston, MASS MoCA and dozens of smaller organizations, all of whom have used the funding to renovate or expand existing facilities. The CFF has created 8,800 jobs. Mitt Romney tried to stop it from being created.

See my column in this month’s Modern Painters magazine for more.

Image: The Bakalar Gallery at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, photo via Flickr user Nick Sherman. The Bakalar and Paine Galleries are the largest free contemporary art spaces in the region. Originally part of Boston Normal School, the three-story facility was constructed in 1905-06 and has undergone only minor renovations since. MassArt has received two Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund grants related to the Bakalar gallery: A planning grant and a grant for the renovation and expansion of the galleries.