Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Yesterday numerous outlets reported that the Smithsonian was restricting sequester-related collection gallery closures to only art museums, namely the Hirshhorn and the National Museum of African Art. Today I learned one other detail from Smithsonian spokesperson Linda St. Thomas: After ongoing exhibitions close in the full range of Smithsonian museums, those special exhibition galleries will remain empty through September 30.

For example: The Civil War and American Art show just completed its run at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The special exhibitions galleries in which that show was installed will remain empty through Sept. 30. A similar wave of closures will spread throughout all Smithsonian museums.

I have heard of only one exception so far: Expect the Hirshhorn’s Jennie C. Jones “Directions” exhibition to open as planned on May 16.

The Dallas Museum of Art will announce today that it will drop its $10 general admission charge and become free to the public. (Actually, it sort of already has: The JPEG above is a screenshot of the museum’s website. The video wasn’t live as of publishing time. Update: It’s now live. The DMA is free effective Jan. 21, 2013 and has announced a digital rewards program that could make membership free too.)

The DMA is continuing an industry trend of  making general admission free. In recent years museums such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art,  the Walters Art Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts (for local residents) have all decided that they can better fulfill their missions by eliminating barriers to access and entry.

The trend toward greater public access to art has yet to extend to museums in major tourist cities: MoMA soaks visitors — 60 percent of whom come from overseas — for $25. The Met asks for $25 (here’s why that’s a bad idea) and the Guggenheim charges $22. In San Francisco, America’s other big city for art tourism, SFMOMA charges $18. None of them offer free admission or discounts to their home audiences.

Museums outside the two big tourism cities that are behind the curve include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ($15, $20 for exhibition-access), the Art Institute of Chicago ($18), the Philadelphia Museum of Art ($20) and the Carnegie Museum of Art ($18).

Should your local museum go free? Yes, and here’s why. Will it hurt your local museum’s membership program? Evidence suggests that it will not.

This list will be updated throughout the day as art museums check in with post-Sandy damage (or not) reports.

• The Chrysler Museum: No damage despite high water.
• The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum: No damage to artwork.
• MIT List Center for the Visual Arts: A Mario Merz installed for the exhibition “In the Holocene” was unaffected.
• ICA Boston: Not impacted.
• No word yet on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but its website is down.
• Smithsonian: Buildings in good shape, no collection damage system-wide.
• Guggenheim: All is well.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has just announced a fall exhibition of work by Lauren Zoll, one of the artists from which the IMA’s art consultant program is commissioning work for a planned downtown Indianapolis hotel development. After Alyson Shotz, Zoll is the second artist with whom the museum’s for-profit art-consultant arm is engaged in a business relationship to be shown in the museum’s galleries. [Image: Lauren Zoll, Canary & Crenshaw, 2012.)

Earlier this week incoming IMA director Charles Venable seemed to express support for the IMA’s art consultant program, telling the Indianapolis Star that he is “very interested” in it. Venable formally begins his IMA tenure on Oct. 8.

The IMA’s first-of-its-kind business has attracted attention in part because museum experts have raised questions about whether the program is in conflict with the museum’s mission. For more on the IMA’s art consultancy program, please see this March story.

The Corcoran’s interest in moving outside the District of Columbia has attracted the attention of DC attorney general Irvin B. Nathan, MAN has learned.

“All we are saying now is that we are looking into the issues involved in the Corcoran’s possible move,” DC AG spokesperson Ted Gest said by email. [Image: The Corcoran, via Flickr user Adam Fagen.]

Corcoran spokesperson Rachel Cothran confirmed that in June the attorney general’s office asked for a meeting with Corcoran officials and that the meeting took place in July. Update, 7/31/12, 3:15pm: Cothran emailed MAN at 3:07pm Tuesday to say that the timeline the Corcoran outlined to MAN this morning was incorrect. As has been noted above, the attorney general’s office asked for a meeting in June and the meeting took place this month.

“The Attorney General’s office is aware that the [Corcoran] board has made no decisions and that no actions are imminent,” Cothran said via an emailed statement. “Representatives of the Corcoran have assured the Attorney General’s office that it will be kept informed of all significant developments in a timely manner.”

As of publication time, Cothran was unable to specify what if any documents the Corcoran supplied, or whether the attorney general’s office delivered a further communication to the Corcoran in mid-July. [This post will be updated as more information becomes available.]

The previously un-reported involvement of the attorney general’s office adds a new twist to the Corcoran’s troubles. The institution has been plagued by substantial operating deficits and debt, problems it has recently tried to address by selling property, by entering into a long-term land lease and a related monetization.

In June, the Corcoran announced that it was looking into the possibility of selling its 115-year-old, Ernest Flagg-designed building on Seventeenth Street NW and that the it would explore a move, possibly to Maryland or Virginia. The story was first reported by Kriston Capps for the Washington CityPaper.

Corcoran board chairman Harry Hopper III later told the Washington Post that a move away from the Corcoran’s landmark building near the White House was a possibility: “One of the clear options for us to consider is relocating to a purpose-built, technologically advanced, flexible, multipurpose facility that could house an integrated educational operation, with the college at the core, coupled with the [museum] collection.”

Corcoran president and director Fred Bollerrer told the Post that the Corcoran’s next steps would include contacting the mayor of the District as well as the governors of Maryland and Virginia to inform them of the Corcoran’s interest in a new home.

The Corcoran’s stated interest in Maryland and Virginia seems to have prompted the attorney general’s interest. The District of Columbia attorney general’s office has jurisdiction over non-profits in order to enforce compliance with their charters. Gest said that at present the AG is looking into the Corcoran only in that capacity.

The Corcoran was chartered by an act of Congress on May 24, 1870.  The incorporation states that the Corcoran be:

“hereby, created and constituted a body politic and corporate in law, by the name and style of the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art… and shall and may do and perform all other acts and things necessary or appropriate for the execution of the trusts createda nd conferred on them in and by a certain deed by William W. Corcoran, to them, the said parties hereinbefore named… one of the land records of Washington county, District of Columbia, to which reference is hereby made for greater certainty; the intent of this charter of incorporation being that the same shall be in execution of the trusts in the said deed declared and set forth, and not to any other intent or purpose whatever.”

Corcoran’s deed also specifically mentions siting the institution in Washington:

“William W. Corcoran, in the execution of a long cherished [sic] desire to establish an institution in Washington City to be “dedicated to Art” and used solely for the purpose of encouraging American genius in the production and preservation of works pertaining to the “Fine Arts,” and kindred objects, has determined to convey to a Board of Trustees the property herinafter described.

Update: On June 22 the Corcoran informed me that the numbers the institution originally provided MAN were incorrect. The post has been updated with the newly-provided monetization figure: $20.5 million.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design has confirmed to Modern Art Notes that it realized a previously unreported $20.5 million real estate-related gain late last year. Until now, the Corcoran had only announced the lease.

The payment came from the Corcoran’s monetization of the long-term ground lease it signed with Carr Properties for 1700 New York Ave. NW in late 2010. That’s the new address of the plot of land that had been previously earmarked for the Corcoran’s failed Frank Gehry-designed addition.  [Image: Carr's rendering of the proposed 1700 New York Ave.]

Earlier this week the Corcoran board of trustees announced its plans to explore the possible sale of the institution’s landmark building on 17th Street NW. The board cited what it said was the building’s need for over $100 million in maintenance that it says is necessary to renovate the museum’s 1897 building and bring it up to “modern museum standards.” The Corcoran has not outlined what work needs to be done or why it would be so expensive. The Corcoran was re-accredited by the Association of Art Museums three years ago. In addition, last year the Corcoran finished a two-year restoration of the building’s facade and replaced the building’s roof. The project was funded by the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasure program, the District of Columbia and by private donations.

The $20.5 million monetization came early in the Corcoran’s fiscal 2011, shortly after the museum booked a $7.2 million deficit in the preceding fiscal year. It is not clear whether the newly announced funds are (or were) earmarked for operating costs, for endowment, for facade-and-roof repair, or for another use.

Corcoran vice president for marketing and communications Kristin Guiter emailed MAN the confirmation after the close of business Thursday in response to a query I made on Tuesday morning. I emailed and called Guiter with the questions in the preceding paragraph this morning, but sometime between when I attempted to contact her with those questions and when this post is being published, Guiter resigned. After learning of Guiter’s resignation from this Kriston Capps report in the Washington CityPaper, I was unable to reach anyone else in the Corcoran’s press shop. I’ll update this post with information if and when it becomes available.

Should a non-profit art museum hire out its curatorial staff as art consultants to a collector or a corporation?

That question has emerged in the wake of the Indianapolis Museum of Art ‘leasing out’ its contemporary art curators as art consultants to a museum trustee’s business, a construction and real-estate firm called Buckingham Companies, for a reported $350,000 fee. IMA senior curator and contemporary art department chair Lisa Freiman selected 20 artists whose work Buckingham will purchase or commission for a hotel development in downtown Indianapolis. An IMA spokesperson said that the museum had also hired an “adjunct curator” to work on the project. Buckingham’s founder and president, Bradley Chambers, is an IMA trustee. The museum said that while Buckingham is its first client, that its new art consultancy is available to other potential customers as well. [Image: The Indianapolis Museum of Art via Flickr user Intiaz Rahim.]

The arrangement, which has been publicly announced but which is in the process of being contractually finalized, is apparently a first for an American art museum. It provides a non-traditional way for the museum to leverage Freiman’s status as the curator of the American pavilion at the most recent Venice Biennale.  (Asked if “art consultant” was a term with which the IMA was comfortable, spokesperson Katie Zarich said that it was.)

MAN contacted numerous experts, including the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Association of Museums, and found no clear precedents for the IMA’s endeavor. Elizabeth Merritt, the director of AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums said that the only comparable analogy of which she was aware was the Cincinnati History Center’s hiring out its archivists to local corporations that wanted to improve their record-keeping.

“It seems to me that this is in many ways the exact opposite of the primary mission of art museums, which is to focus on education, on their collections and scholarship,” said Christine Steiner, a former general counsel at the J. Paul Getty Trust who has an extensive background  in non-profit issues that includes working at the Smithsonian Institution and for the state of Maryland. Today Steiner’s private law practice works with artists and commissioning entities and she often works with art consultants. “To engage a curator who is presumbly is remaining on the museum payroll because the fee is being paid to the museum, to provide precisely the same curatorial services a curator is obligated to provide to the museum, that strikes me as an entirely new thing.”

Zarich said that she was unsure whether the museum had consulted AAM’s ethical guidelines in formulating its art consultant program, but that the museum had consulted AAMD’s guidelines. (The IMA is without a director or an interim director. The IMA’s board recently appointed a nine-person management council to lead the museum until a new director can be hired.) A MAN review of the ethical guidelines published by each institution failed to find anything that directly anticipates this particular situation. “The only AAM ethical guideline that would be relevant is whether there’s any potential conflict of interest,” Merritt said. [Image: Alyson Shotz, Geometry of Light, 2011.]

So far, the IMA’s art consultancy has made one recommendation that coincides with the museum’s own exhibition program. The IMA’s art consultancy recommended that Buckingham commission an installation by New York-based artist Alyson Shotz. Earlier this month, the museum announced that it will be installing numerous Shotzes, including a site-responsive work in its Efroymson Family Pavilion in May. The Shotz example raises questions about whether the museum might exhibit an artist to promote the IMA’s art consultancy business or a client’s project, whether the museum’s exhibition of a consultancy-recommended artist could enhance the value of art to which it leads a client, or if the museum would work with an artist at the museum in order to ‘protect’ its art consultancy’s selection of an artist.

“The problem for me is that museums lose their way in baby steps,” Steiner said. “They do something that seems appropriate and right, and before you know it you’re in the kinds of obviously conflicted arrangements that we thought were successfully addressed a couple of years ago, like the Guggenheim’s Armani show or the Metropolitan’s Chanel exhibition. Those all began with the right instinct and the right purpose but quickly went down the wrong path.”

In 1999 the Guggenheim accepted an eight-figure check from Giorgio Armani just as an Armani exhibition went on view at the museum. In 2004 the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a Chanel exhibition that was closely tied to the company: The Met’s exhibit was sponsored by Chanel. The Met’s annual Costume Institute Benefit Gala was co-chaired by Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld. The Met’s web page for the exhibition was hosted on Chanel.com, which provided visitors with ready access to Chanel’s e-commerce offerings. More recently, the Metropolitan presented an Alexander McQueen exhibition that was sponsored by Alexander McQueen, a subsidiary of French multi-national PPR. [Image: Rendering of the proposed Alexander Hotel, via CityWay.]

Zarich, who is one of the staffers on the IMA’s interim management council, said that the museum’s commercial relationship with Buckingham is the byproduct of the museum’s recent attempts to develop new revenue streams. In 2010 the IMA launched IMA Lab, making the museum’s pioneering and widely-praised technology department available to other non-profit institutions for a fee.  IMA Lab has taken on work for non-profits such as the Atlanta History Center and AAMD. According to Zarich, all of IMA Lab’s clients have been not-for-profit institutions.

Steiner said that the IMA Lab example is in keeping with industry-accepted norms. “There you are doing your work in support of a mission-related purpose for a fellow non-profit,” she said. “That’s the right way the museum lends you to the broader art or non-profit world.”

Steiner felt that the extension of the IMA Lab example into the for-profit sphere, where it would compete with independent art consultants, was problematic, but AMA’s Merritt suggested an analogy: “In the most general way it’s a second-cousin to this: Making their expertise available through speaking engagements.”

Zarich said that Buckingham and the IMA began talks with Buckingham in 2010, when Maxwell Anderson was the IMA’s director. Anderson left Indianapolis at the end of 2011 to become the director of the Dallas Museum of Art.

Anderson said that there was one substantial difference between the arrangement he began to negotiate and that the IMA concluded after he left. “I saw it as an opportunity to do something to reach out and then get something that would come back as a promised gift,” Anderson said, adding that while his conversations with Buckingham included that idea, negotiations between the IMA and Buckingham did not advance to the point where the two parties developed contractual language before he left the museum. [Image: Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 652, Continuous Forms with Color Acrylic Washes Superimposed, 1990. Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Image via Flickr user Shih-Pei Chang.]

Through a spokesperson, Chambers did not address the evolution of the negotiation between his company and the IMA. “Buckingham developed the agreement with the IMA to simply pay for curatorial services for consultation on the art acquired for The Alexander Hotel,” Chambers said in an emailed statement. “That agreement was made without any expectation that these works would be donated to the IMA. At this point, the agreement between Buckingham and the IMA only relates to the curatorial consulting services.”

Steiner said that if the works were to come to the IMA as a contractually pledged gift, that it would substantially change the situation from objectionable to innovative. “That has some legs,” she said. “And in some way it make sense. I had wondered if there were certain things we didn’t know after the museum made its announcement, and that would be a big one.”

Both Anderson and the IMA said that the art consultancy is related to the IMA’s mission. The IMA’s mission statement says the museum “serves the creative interests of its communities by fostering exploration of art, design, and the natural environment. The IMA promotes these interests through the collection, presentation, interpretation and conservation of its artistic, historic, and environmental assets.”

Zarich said that the new business fit the IMA’s mission statement because, “it was a way that we thought we could expose more people to art, that we could bring some more art to the city.” However, the museum said it would take the fee it is being paid as unrelated business income, a tax-law category that puts the arrangement in the same sphere as the museum bookstore.

Both the IMA’s past and present leadership cited what they described as contemporary art’s marginal status in Indianapolis as a reason for the museum to engage in outside consulting activity. However, the museum was unable to explain why a local business needed the local museum to provide those services instead of a traditional art consultant.

“I understand why commercial art consultants do this work,” Steiner said. “I don’t understand why a non-profit, an art museum would.”

“I think we also have a lot of activities — every museum does — that are ancillary and that are in support of its mission,” Anderson said. “Not every activity that any museum undertakes can be seen as a direct extension of the mission but, in theory, it is in support of it or otherwise. But in terms of how museums raise money, I don’t think the Armani show was in support of the Guggenheim’s mission. I think that was a commercial deal for the promotion of another entity, where this is a provision for the access to art and being remunerated for the expertise provided for it.”