Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Every once and a while an art museum (or two or three) does something so jaw-droppingly clever that in hindsight it seems like an obvious thing to do. So it is with the decision by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum and various entities at Yale University to make high-resolution images of art from their collections available for anyone to use, for any purpose, copyright-free. (At Yale special credit goes to the Yale Center for British Art, which got out ahead of the rest of the school’s similar efforts.)

As a result, if you want to make a t-shirt, a tote bag or a beach towel out of a YCBA Rubens, just download-and-go. If you’re a PhD student who wants to publish her dissertation about Constable as an e-book, here are scores of Constables you can download and e-publish free of charge.

My column for Modern Painters this month (not yet online, but on newsstands now) is about how and why LACMA, the YCBA and the Walters are tearing down the copyright wall — and what they could be enabling:

[W]hile the result of all this openness could ultimately be a special boon to marketers, advertisers and others who might want to use these images commercially, the more important reason for museums to tear down the copyright walls is to encourage scholarship and innvoative, image-rich educational materials. Any university student can now publish images from LACMA, Yale or Walters collections as part of her dissertation.

“It’s now free for schools everywhere to use our art in their classrooms,” Govan said. “I have a 16 year-old in New York schools and it’s a big issue. Teachers are always trying to find ways to get them images for nothing. Now they can.”

Here’s hoping we see innovative creative-folk swoop in and take advantage of the great artworks made available by LACMA, Yale, the Walters and others. Heck, if some art-smart craft brewer creates ‘A Philosopher’s Ale’ and puts LACMA’s Ribera on its label, I’ll buy it.

In the last year, governments in the United Kingdom and in the United States have made huge, job-killing cuts to arts spending. Quick quiz: Who has made the deeper cuts: The Conservatives-led coalition government in the UK, or Democrats in the US?

The answer may surprise you. My latest column in Modern Painters magazine takes a look at spending cuts in the UK and in the US and examines the way arts lovers in the two countries responded.

I posit that one reason that our federal and state governments cut art spending over and over again is because American art lovers don’t really object. Why not? Well, the biggest, most powerful players in America’s art world don’t organize in support of arts funding or in support of arts jobs. Who would that be? Click here to read the column and to find out.

In my most recent column for Modern Painters magazine, I examined the climate for Smithsonian funding. It struck me that the clearest parallel to what the Smithsonian faces this year is what the Corporation for Public Broadcasting faced during the Clinton-Gingrich years. No, the situations are not identical. But there are enough similarities that I thought it might be instructive to revisit the past in the context of the present.

Last fall, Washington was visited by a minor but utterly commanding self-portrait by sort-of Dutch Golden Ager Michiel Sweerts. (Sort-of: Sweerts was Flemish, painted mostly in Italy, eventually traveled to Palestine and died in Goa.) The Sweerts is in the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. While the Allen was closed for some renovations, Oberlin sent some paintings to museums such as the Metropolitan, the Phillips and now to the National Gallery of Art.

The painting re-started me thinking about a favorite topic of mine: The decline of the self-portrait. It’s always hard to prove a negative, but I’ve long believed that artists are as little-interested in representing themselves now as they have been in hundreds of years. I don’t know why: Were Jeff Koons’ self-indulgent porno self-portraits so bad that they encouraged everyone to move on? Does it have something to do with Facebook and Twitter, which so democratize the self-portrait that artists don’t want to ‘compete’ with the bourgeoisie? (Throughout art history, artists tend to resist engaging in anything that the bourgeoisie has embraced.) Is it something else? In this recent column for Modern Painters, I take some guesses… and notice that quite a few artists are putting as much thought into their social media avatars as  artists once put into their self-portraits.

In my November column for Modern Painters magazine, I noticed that artists are increasingly taking advantage of opportunities traditionally used by journalists. Conceptualist Emily Jacir uses “60 Minutes”-style techniques expose practices at international hot-spots. Painter Steve Mumford embeds with American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was curious about how much the artists themselves thought about how closely they flirt with journalism, with the relationship between fact and truth. One of the artists I talked with was photographer Zoe Strauss, who recently visited the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill:

For Strauss, a photographer who will be the subject of a retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in early 2012, the Gulf oil spill was particularly well-suited for her modus operandi: Telling a personal story through a series of color photographs, pictures taken over a period of many months, even years.  As soon as Strauss realized that the spill was a long-term story and event, she worked with United States Artists, a grant-making, artist-advocacy non-profit organization, to raise $5,000 to make several trips to the region. Like Mumford, she took advantage of resources – boats, planes and so on – made available primarily for journalists.

But there, Mumford and Strauss both say, the similarity between artist and journalist ends…

Here’s this month’s Modern Painters table of contents. Subscribe here. Or subscribe to the multi-platform (iPhone! iPad!) digital edition for under $20.

Related: My illustrated Q&A with Zoe Strauss: Part one, part two.