Hasta La Ideas

Staying with museums a bit longer, we return to our shores and head to Ohio, where there’s been some major shifts at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The museum has named Deborah Gribbon as their interim director, who will take over for current director Timothy Rub this September as he leaves to take over the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gribbon, you might remember, used to be the head honcho at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and left there less than pleasantly after not getting along very well with the Getty’s board. And while she’ll likely be entering the Cleveland museum with less hostility in place, she certainly isn’t stepping into an easy job, as the announcement of her taking this position was simultaneous with the news that the museum had been forced to lay off 14 employees and leave another eight unfilled for the time being, all due to the plague of nearly all museums these days: a much smaller endowment. What’s more, these layoffs aren’t apt to play well against backdrop of the musuem’s ongoing $350 million expansion. So Gribbon definitely has some work ahead of her.

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So you read how people were traveling great distances and waiting in lines around the block to get into the City Museum and Art Gallery in Bristol to check out popular street artist Banksy‘s exhibit and now you’re thinking of ways to get him into your own local museum? Well, you’d better dig deep, because it’s going to cost you. After a Freedom of Information Act request was put in to release how much the British city had paid Banksy, the total came out to a whopping £1, which seems like a major bargain until you convert that into American dollars and you get kinda sorta close to two whole bucks. So maybe when we said “dig deep” and “it’s going to cost you” we meant that you’d need to dig past your pocket lint and car keys, toward that change you have down there. And while you’re on the hunt, it’s probably wise to see if you happen to have a birth certificate that proves Banksy was actually born in your town, because we’re thinking maybe Bristol being his original haunting grounds might have something to do with the low fee.

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Although we are very, very, very rarely ever wrong (this may even be the first time, so why not print out this post and put it in your scrapbook?), but when we speculated that museum director Michael Govan‘s somewhat passive words concerning his very controversial decision to shut down the Los Angeles County Museum of Art‘s weekend film program would do little to appease the angry masses, we were apparently way off. Instead of getting mad at Govan and/or the museum and doing something like protest, send off angry letters, or put together some sort of boycott, the people of Los Angeles have done just the opposite by donating millions to help keep the program afloat. While this is a great thing for any museum in need during these trying times, we return to critic Kenneth Turan‘s comments about LACMA’s decision to cut the program, saying that their problems of fewer and fewer people coming to see the screenings wasn’t so much from a lack of funds than from the museum completely dropping the ball and refusing to spend much time with it, essentially just ignoring it and letting it die. But let us all hope that this latest storm of controversy and opinions does something to revive the program, no matter the course. Also, we should mention that Govan is a non-stop salesman:

Last week, Govan said about $5 million would endow a basic film program; today he upped the ante. “I’d love to see $10 million.” As a rule of thumb, nonprofits aim to spend about 5% of an endowment annually, so a $10-million endowment would yield about $500,000 a year to run a film department.

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In other “getting mad at museums for making cuts” news, following our post the other day about film critic Kenneth Turan being upset over the Los Angles County Museum of Art‘s director Michael Govan‘s decision to shut down the museum’s four-decade old weekend film program, the LACMA has had to answer to a whole slew of complaints, petitions, and celebrity statements of support that have resulted since the announcement. Although they haven’t changed any of their original plans yet, Govan has had to answer to members of the Save Film at LACMA group that has popped up, trying to keep the program going by getting petitions signed and requesting sit-downs with the museum’s administration to figure out a better way to move forward than just shutting it all down for a while. Govan’s response is that it’s all well and good that people have gotten worked up about it, but to make the program last, they’ll need to keep up with that enthusiasm:

“It’s been astounding. It’s touched a nerve and I think it’s all for the positive,” he said. “If we can convert that energy to sustained support we can have an exciting future.”

…Govan doesn’t expect every person who signs the petition to send a check, but some patrons have to show up before film is back in the museum full-time, he said.

“Film is special. We need to make it clear it is a big deal and we won’t live without film,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how long it takes to build something significant.”

We understand his points, but we’re doubtful that his response will do anything to calm the anger of the anti-closure group, or Kenneth Turan, who don’t see this situation so much as a lack of interest by the general public, but a long-running lack of support by the LACMA’s administration.

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If you travel in certain circles, you may have heard that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had decided to put its four-decade old weekend film program on hold. While the museum’s director, Michael Govan, has said this is only a temporary move, stopping these screenings of foreign and art films, as well as conversations with filmmakers, largely due to fewer attendees and likely having a little to do with the LACMA’s tight budgets and smaller staff, the decision has left people like film critic Kenneth Turan livid. He finds the temporary cutback as a stand-in for a larger problem at the museum, saying their temporary stand-still on a program they weren’t spending any time working with from the beginning, “sounds suspiciously like the apocryphal Vietnam War rationale that ‘we had to burn the village to save it.'” Although Turan apologies for being tough on museums in some of their darkest hours, he beautifully argues that maybe, beyond the endowment shrinking, it’s ideas such as this recent decision to stop the screenings, that have resulted in times being even more difficult for these institutions:

It is that contempt that is possibly the most distressing element in the entire LACMA equation. To shut this program down, in Los Angeles of all places, betrays both a disdain for the most vibrant of popular arts and a demeaning narrowness of vision about what Los Angeles wants and needs.

Make no mistake, the LACMA closure is an egregious slap in the face to those who believe in film as perhaps the most alive and vibrant of the arts. The fact that it’s coming from the very people whose job it is to protect and promote, makes the whole sad scenario sadder still.

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