Hasta La Ideas

Some further developments on the Orange County Museum of Art scandal that’s been the talk in museum circles these past few days. After secretly selling a handful of paintings to a private collector without first mentioning their desire to sell to other museums in the area, thus potentially keeping the pieces accessible, the OCMA’s director, Dennis Szakacs has said that he is more than happy to tell other museums who they sold the paintings to, but they plan to keep it a secret from everyone else:

“The person’s identity is going to be known within the museum community,” even though OCMA has promised not to divulge it to the general public, said Szakacs, who called the Times from Venice, Italy, on Thursday. If another museum asks, he added, “I would absolutely direct them to the collector, and I would make that introduction, and help facilitate that loan…or give any other museum an opportunity to cultivate this person, build a relationship with them, invite them to be on their board. All these opportunities are available to anyone in the [museum] community.”

We’re guessing it’s just a matter of time until the name gets leaked, but until then, and likely even after, Szakacs and his museum won’t be the most popular people in the area for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of hard times in the museum industry, the Orange County Museum of Art has found itself being marred by criticism over their recent sale of nearly all of their California Impressionist paintings to a private art collector. All of this was done on the quiet and quick back in March, but was discovered due to a tip to the LA Times‘s Culture Monster blog. Now that the information has been released, it’s brought the debate over deaccessioning back to the table, particularly if the Orange County Museum followed the guidelines set forth by museum organizations (e.g. it’s okay if you’re selling work to buy more work, but it’s not okay to sell work just to pay the bills, and it’s also important that you try and get the pieces to other museums, instead of into the hands of collectors who plan to squirrel them away). So now the museum is playing on the defense, trying to smooth the situation over with their critics and explaining the sales. But they’ve certainly yet to soothe everyone, with or without the full story:

What OCMA says it did is not a clear-cut ethical breach, said Janet Landay, executive director of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors. “Frequently these things are less than black and white,” she said, and a private sale to a collector “isn’t in that level of egregious behavior” and “could easily be a very legitimate decision.”

That doesn’t wash with Bolton Colburn, director of the Laguna Art Museum, and Jean Stern, director of the Irvine Museum. Both say that if they’d known the California Impressionists were for sale, they would have sought donors to bankroll bids. The genre, often called “plein air painting,” is important to both museums.

Sure, a tree grows in Brooklyn, but in the Bronx, they talk—one in the voice of starchitect Daniel Libeskind. Or at least they will beginning this Sunday, when artist Katie Holten transforms the Bronx’s Grand Concourse into a “tree museum” as part of a year-long centennial celebration of the thoroughfare designed by Louis Risse. Commissioned by local organizations including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Holten’s Tree Museum will consist of 100 “talking” trees along the four-and-a-half-mile path: each will be designated with a unique phone number that passersby can dial to hear a recorded voice of Bronx history. Jim Dwyer previewed the leafy voices in a recent New York Times article:

Tree No. 39, a honey locust at Marcy Place, will feature Jose Ortiz of the percussion group BombaYo. At another honey locust, No. 52, at 175th Street, Lurry Boyd, who grows peaches and strawberries in a community garden, will narrate. In Poe Park, a London plane tree (No. 75) will connect listeners to the story of the park, a former apple orchard that is now home to a cottage where Edgar Allan Poe lived. People often danced around the park’s bandstand at night, as Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian, tells it, including two sisters named Clooney. One of them was the singer Rosemary Clooney, aunt of the actor George Clooney.

As for Libeskind, he’ll speak for tree number 97, a hawthorn that stands at the Concourse’s northern end. “As a teenager, I was an immigrant to the Bronx and the Grand Concourse was my iconic street,” says Libeskind. “Street of extraordinary trees, a kind of boulevard that I only dreamt of, because it reminded me of Europe.” No word as to whether tree number 97 will be fitted with distinctive rectangular-framed eyeglasses, but our fingers are crossed.

Back in late March, we reported that the Louvre had maintained its coveted position as the world’s most popular museum for the second time in as many years. But while their visitors keep flocking to their front doors in endless droves, and kids and teachers now eager to get in for free, thus further driving up the count, the Louvre is simultaneously starting to get very nervous about the future. Reason being, following the past year and the half of a collecting streak all gone right, with many sizable donations of important work and aid being given to support purchases, they’ve created something of “an illusion of financial security” (certainly not a boom at all, but not the selling off pieces of their collection to help pay the bills as many other museums are having to). The concern is that if their recent streak of lucky breaks comes to a halt, they might find they don’t have the money/support to continue their business-as-usual acquiring and everything will slow way, way down, meaning the museum might have to begin really struggling with the realities of the economy, which is a major downer, even if you are really popular. Here’s a bit:

How long this pace, which is modest for a museum of the Louvre’s size, can be sustained is the question that haunts [Director Henri Loyrette and the curators. Art acquisitions are only a fraction of the budget of an institution that has been deeply transformed since the appointment of its director in 2001. Its elaborate financial structure, fine-tuned over the last five years, suddenly looks too precarious for comfort.

Let us now take a quick tour of the Earth to collectively tsk-tsk at recent events we have found shocking in its various nooks and crannies. First, we go to Durham, North Carolina, where, this weekend, vandals broke in to the Museum of Life and Science Dinosaur Trail to lop off the neck and head of a beloved plaster brontosaurus figure, leaving just the steel bar used to support it. Why would someone do such a thing? And where in god’s name are they going to put a gigantic dinosaur head and neck? And of course the museum is going through tough financial times like everyone else, so they won’t be able to repair it. Nice going, jerks. Second, and far more political (we’re guessing), protesters/vandals have hit the Richard Meier-designed Ara Pacis Museum in Rome with water balloons filled with red and green paint. The NY Times reports that “they also left a porcelain toilet and two packs of toilet paper nearby.” We don’t understand any of it, and it all seems entirely too European-artsy-protesting for most anyone to comprehend (see also: the anti-Jeff Koons balloon man), so maybe we’ll just spare a tsk-tsk’ing on this one. Last, the Johnny Appleseed Heritage Center in Ashland, Ohio apparently overestimated the visitor draw it was planning and has run into a good deal of financial troubles, chiefly among them, the architect who designed and built their structure is still owed nearly $175,000 for his work, having only received $5,000 thus far over the past five years. Again, maybe not tsk-tsk worthy, as we feel badly for everyone involved and hope the Center begins to thrive and everyone gets paid in the end. So one tsk-tsk, one head scratcher, and one “best of luck.” End of post.