Association of Arts Museums Directors Interview

Kenneth Baker of the SF Chronicle, Sunday Feb. 19th:

The Association of Art Museum Directors met in San Francisco in mid-January. Few people outside the field noticed, but discussions that took place at the convocation may affect the experiences that art museums offer visitors in the future.

To get a sense of the organization's function and the thinking behind it, I sat down with Dan Monroe, current president of the association board, and director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.

In 2011, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco hosted a grand exhibition from the PEM: "Dutch and Flemish Masterworks From the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection." Not long after Monroe and I met, the van Otterloos announced their gift to PEM of an endowment of his position.

Q: Just what is the AAMD?

A: It's an association of art museum directors from the U.S., Canada and Mexico. I'm not sure what the latest number is, but we have about 220 members. ... There's an advocacy arm of AAMD that works with Congress on issues of concern to art museums. There is not an accrediting function, but the AAMD does set standards of professional practice.

Q: Does AAMD have disciplinary power should members violate best practices?

A: Yes, we do. The board of AAMD has the power of censure, the power of expulsion or suspension of a member. ... The issue we care about most ... is deaccessioning art to support operations, which if it were allowed to become a widespread practice would fundamentally compromise the integrity of the public trust. We have, for example, recently sanctioned the National Academy of Design in New York. Sanctions have a significant impact because they limit the ability of the institution to make loans, and loans are the life's blood of art museums. It's very difficult to create exhibitions if you can't make and receive loans.

We've also censured Fisk University for its intent and plans to sell a half interest in its Alfred Stieglitz Collection to Crystal Bridges.

Q: How often does the AAMD board rotate?

A: The president serves a one-year term and continues on the board for a period of time after that. The president is nominated by a committee that's independent of the board, and is then elected by the membership.

Q: What topics dominate the agenda of these meetings?

A: A big topic is trying to understand and consider how art museums develop and advance over the next several years. ... The most obvious issue is the restructuring of the economic environment, which affected, I would say, every art museum in the country. ... Those museums that are dependent on city or state support are finding it quite difficult.

There are shifts in philanthropy. The technology is also changing in a variety of ways. And there's a lot of thought being given to what's the role of an art museum.

There's a lot of concern about how we ensure sustainability and about how we can discover new opportunities. One of the examples we talk about on the board is what has happened to cultural journalism and its relation to art museums. It's not just a matter of journalism but the whole nature of the way people receive information, the quality of information, how it's vetted.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/16/PKHT1N5116.DTL#ixzz1n3CVjENI

Splendora of India's Royal Court

Explore the life and times of India’s great kings by getting close to the objects they used and the art they commissioned, collected, and loved. Nearly 200 stunning artworks—including a gold throne, a silver carriage, Man Ray photographs, and a diamond belt—illuminate the dazzling world of Indian royalty from the 1700s to the 1940s, a period of dramatic change.

Journey from the throne room of an Indian court to the inner sanctum of the palace. Visit a variety of kingdoms to learn about India’s shifting political powers, its colonization by Great Britain, and the emergence of the independent nations of India and Pakistan in the modern era.

Along the way, discover fantastical art created especially for this exhibition by contemporary artist Sanjay Patel. Don’t miss more of his colorful works on the second floor inspired by classical Indian art and Hindu epics. On the third floor will be a showcase of magnificent Indian courtly art from our own collection.

At the Asian Art Museum

asianart.org/maharaja

Victorians: Prudish and Sensuous

'Cult of Beauty: Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900'

Jesse Hamlin

Sunday, February 12, 2012

San Francisco Chronicle--Datebook Section, pink

People didn't know what to make of Whistler's 1862 painting "The White Girl" when it was first shown at a London gallery that year. The picture - which the expatriate American dandy later titled "Symphony in White No. 1" - shows a red-haired young woman wearing a flowing white dress and a blank expression, standing in front of a whitish curtain on a fang-baring wolf-skin rug. There's a white lily in her hand and a sprig of flowers dropped on the brushy brown pelt.

"It shocked viewers at the time because it doesn't have a subject matter," says Lynn Orr, the curator of European art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "They didn't know what it meant. It's not a portrait. It's the most beautiful choreography of color - this white on white, cream on white. This is Whistler beginning to explore formalist ideas at the expense of story."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/09/PKK31N1V2E.DTL#ixzz1mBze0Tq6

The Flaneur

Gustave Caillebotte's "Paris Street; Rainy Day," from 1877

View the flâneur as an emblem of modernity,
his figure (and it was predominantly a “he”) is now firmly associated with 19th-century Paris. The flâneur would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades — those stylish, lively and bustling rows of shops covered by glass roofs — to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.”

While not deliberately concealing his identity, the flâneur preferred to stroll incognito. “The art that the flâneur masters is that of seeing without being caught looking,” the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once remarked. The flâneur was not asocial — he needed the crowds to thrive — but he did not blend in, preferring to savor his solitude. And he had all the time in the world: there were reports of flâneurs taking turtles for a walk.

The flâneur wandered in the shopping arcades, but he did not give in to the temptations of consumerism; the arcade was primarily a pathway to a rich sensory experience — and only then a temple of consumption. His goal was to observe, to bathe in the crowd, taking in its noises, its chaos, its heterogeneity, its cosmopolitanism. Occasionally, he would narrate what he saw — surveying both his private self and the world at large — in the form of short essays for daily newspapers. To use link below: CTRL+C to copy and then CTRL+V to paste to browser.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html?scp=1&sq=Cyberflaneur&st=cse

McKee Student Art Exhibition Now Open

Some of the preparations that go into the McKee Student Art event.
Take the kids to this one.

Edwardian Ball in S.F. Celebrates Mod-Vic, Steampunk and Edwardian Period

In the Bay Area, which drives the world's latest inventions in futuristic technology, San Francisco's recent Edwardian Ball, where thousands of people gathered to celebrate all things circa 1900, seemed a curious turn to the past.

The ball, held Jan. 21, was themed the Iron Tonic, after a Gorey poetry collection about a melancholy hotel for ill and elderly guests, and was the capper to a weekend's worth of fun that began on Thursday with a burlesque show at DNA Lounge. On Friday, guests partook of afternoon tea before a nighttime Edwardian World's Faire at the Regency ballroom. There revelers danced to Edwardian-tinged rock music.

On the building's top floor, guests wandered a Museum of Wonders with taxidermied animals, living statues, fortune-telling and sideshows. And throughout the weekend, there was a vendors' fair in the basement with dozens of shopkeepers selling clothing for the event.

One of the newer trends at the fair is the emergence of a steam-punk aesthetic - a look that combines elements of the steam-powered era (top hats adorned with goggles and temperature or humidity gauges) and hand-crafted clothing for the "punk" element.

Jim Siegel of Distractions, a Haight Street clothing shop, said that in the 36 years he has owned the store, "I've never made more money than I have since I've switched to Victorian steam-punk and Wild West clothing. It's a huge counterculture trend."

Whatever one calls it - ModVic, steam-punk, or Edwardian - Siegel believes it started in the 1960s, when San Francisco hippies began scavenging attics of Western Addition homes torn down to make way for urban renewal. "They were finding all these boxes of old clothes, and girls began wearing granny dresses," he said.

Killbuck Killbuck, a purveyor of steam-punk fashions in Reno, said the Edwardian Ball and dress-up fairs are "a wonderful rebellion against mass-produced industrial design and the conformity we live in. It's a good way to bring style back into people's lives."

Said Bernardo Montoto, a director of commercial sales operations in Oakland: "You can be yourself, or not yourself. Nobody judges you."

To paste the link below into your browser, you can use CTRL+C to copy and CTRL+V to paste it.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/26/LVRJ1MSVP4.DTL#ixzz1lAfi2syG