The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Welcome to the intersection of art, ego, philanthropy and jealousy. It’s where you’ll find the Jorge M. Perez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County.

My initial reaction to renaming the Miami Art Museum for Jorge Perez was negative. Why should our stunning new $225 million civic art museum — with $103 million coming from taxpayers — be named for any individual, no matter how generous his donation? The decision by MAM’s board of trustees to change the name struck me as weak-kneed and wrong-headed. And the requirement by Perez to do so as arrogant and self-aggrandizing. I said as much on TV.

But I’ve reconsidered. After speaking to Perez and looking at how other arts institutions are funded here and across the country, I’ve concluded that Perez should be thanked, not condemned for his $35 million gift to MAM. If the price is for the museum to bear his name, hang his art and be his legacy, well, why not? He’s certainly not the first South Florida art patron to make a deal like this. The Arsht Center? Taxpayers kicked in about $440 million toward the PAC and Adrienne Arsht got her name on it for $30 million, supplanting Carnival Cruise Lines, which had given $20 million.

The new Frost Museum of Science, to be built across from the Perez Art Museum, honors Pat and Phil Frost for their $35 million contribution. There appears to be a $35 million threshold here for naming rights, and Perez has met it, although he’s doing it on the installment plan — $20 million over 10 years and his $15 million art collection. Still, it all adds up to the requisite magic number. You can’t really change the rules in the middle of the game, which is what his critics seem to want.

Like those critics, there’s part of me that rebels against having Miami’s main civic art museum named for anyone except those who mainly paid for it. But we can’t really call it the Taxpayers’ Art Museum of Miami-Dade, can we? Many years ago when the Metropolitan in New York or the Art Institute of Chicago or the Louvre in Paris or Prado in Madrid were created they were paid for by the cities that built them because they were tangible symbols of culture and achievement. Wealthy art lovers contributed money and works of art, but didn’t expect civic museums to carry their names. A wing, a gallery, a plaza, yes. The entire museum, no.

But times have changed. Museums along with other cultural, academic, medical and academic institutions are now more often than not paid for by a major donor who gets his or her name on the edifice. Locally, think of the Miller School of Medicine of the University of Miami ($100 million from the Lennar founder Leonard Miller and family); The Frost Art Museum at Florida International University (Pat and Phil Frost once again), the Lowe Art Museum at UM and the Bass Museum on Miami Beach. Joe Robbie Stadium. There are, of course, exceptions. Lin and the late Ted Arison started and continue to sustain the New World Symphony.

Jorge Perez tells me some of the furor over the MAM renaming may have to do with his Hispanic heritage. “You know, the name Perez is new to Miami’s philanthropic society,” he said. “I think we need names of Latin descent to go hand in hand with great Anglo and Jewish names that have shown generosity in the past.”

It’s possible there could be an anti-Cuban tinge to the criticism, although I don’t see it. Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz, prominent art collectors who’ve been outspoken about the MAM name change, are proudly Cuban American. I suspect some part of the criticism is because of Perez’s role as a major real-estate developer who got very rich by helping overheat the housing market . But as he points out, when it cooled down he lost three-quarters of his wealth. And still ponied up $20 million in cash and art worth $15 million. “That’s art I look at every day,” he says, “art that I have an emotional attachment to.”

He’ll be able to see it, as will we, at the Jorge M. Perez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County. Got a problem with that? I did at first, but I’m OK with it now.

Anti-casino advocates gathered in Miami’s artiest neighborhood Saturday morning and warned that bringing mega-casinos to South Florida threatens to reverse the city’s cultural progress.

“Downtown is finally becoming what we want downtown to be,’’ former Miami-Dade commissioner Katy Sorenson told a crowd of about 120 people at the Light Box Theater, a performance space in Wynwood. “We’ve got some unique, funky Miami kind of things going on. Why do we want to these huge mega-resorts to come in?”

The speakers at the Urban Environment League forum covered the full range of anti-casino arguments, from worries over gambling addictions to traffic woes if Florida approves a bill designed to bring three $2 billion casino resorts to South Florida. But the setting — the Goldman Warehouse, home to art non-profits and owned by Tony Goldman, the developer behind Wynwood’s emergence as a gallery district — highlighted the role the arts are playing in the debate.

In May, Genting Group announced its $236 million purchase of The Miami Herald site at an Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center conference room. The chairman of the center’s board, Mike Eidson, joined executives of the Malaysian casino company at that first press conference, and later talked about the center running a 700-seat theater for Genting.

But after the friendly debut, Eidson and others in the Arsht leadership backed off, voicing worries about Genting’s plan to build the world’s largest casino across the street. In an interview Saturday, Eidson, a prominent lawyer, spoke in the harshest terms yet on the Genting resort’s potential impact on the county-owned Arsht center as a cultural hub for downtown.

“It’s too big. It overwhelms the entire arts concept we had there,’’ Eidson said. “We could never come up with a plan that could accommodate that.”

He said the center’s initial willingness to work with its new neighbor in developing the neighborhood turned to “grave” concerns at a subsequent lavish dinner on an Arsht stage when Genting executives outlined just how big the resort would be.

“It makes the Arsht Center look insignificant,’’ he said. “All that money we put into that facility, and you wouldn’t even notice it anymore.”

Genting executives were not available for interviews Saturday. But in past statements, the company has argued its 30-acre Resorts World Miami will elevate the city as a global destination by bringing stunning architecture and a new wave of Asian tourists.

It also argues the 5,200-room resort would bolster the Arsht center by delivering a steady stream of guests to the tax-funded facility and paying for permanent shows on slow nights.

Genting’s plan has galvanized many in Miami’s growing arts scene. Norman Braman, one of the city’s wealthiest art collectors, is a leader in the anti-casino movement. Jorge Perez, whose $35 million gift would put his name on the Miami Art Museum’s new home across I-395 from the Genting site, has criticized the plan. Art Basel, the Swiss-based arts show that comes to Miami Beach in December, has privately warned it might seek a different winter home if the casino resorts move in, according to city officials.

 

But not everyone is happy that the institution, now known as the Miami Art Museum, will be recast as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County to recognize Mr. Pérez’s $35 million gift in cash and art.

Four board members have resigned in protest. Several are threatening to rescind their contributions. Protest e-mails to museum officials have complained that an institution being built on public land and largely financed by taxpayers should not be named for an individual, no matter how generous.

“Name a plaza or a wing or the building,” said Rubén A. Rodríguez, one of the trustees who resigned, “but not the institution.”

The naming and renaming of institutions, arenas, even bridges, after people, to raise money or recognize civic contributions, typically engender little fuss. (Think of the Guggenheim or the Getty, not the former Brendan Byrne Arena.) There was hardly a peep when the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center became the David H. Koch Theater in 2008, after Mr. Koch’s pledge of $100 million.

But in an era when the need for cultural largesse by the wealthy is only expanding, there has been an unusual level of opposition here to the idea of renaming a community resource after an individual patron of the arts.

Is it the timing? The size of the gift? Mr. Pérez’s career as a major developer here? Or perhaps jealousy on the part of others whose own major contributions to the arts have never secured such a high-profile designation?

Museum officials say they’ve been surprised by the community reaction to the name change, though they caution against exaggerating the response. The change, after all, they said, was approved last week by a vote of the museum board; of the 35 members present, only 4 voted against, with 1 abstention.

Thomas Collins, the museum’s director, said the institution was fortunate that Mr. Pérez, a trustee, stepped up to take a lead role in its $220 million capital campaign to bolster its endowment and construct the new building, to be completed in 2013. Mr. Pérez’s $35 million gift includes a pledge of $20 million, along with $15 million worth of Latin American art, which he collects avidly.

“He has been part of the governance and leadership of the institution,” Mr. Collins said. “He has made a major commitment of fine art to the museum. Institutions have been named for people who’ve done just one of those things.”

Many institutions have taken to naming just about anything — hallways, lobbies, staircases — to raise money. In Miami naming has become something of a rage. In 2008 the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts — named for the cruise line — was renamed for the businesswoman and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht after her $30 million gift. When the Miami Science Museum opens its new building in 2014, it will be renamed the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science. There is also the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami and the Frost Museum of Art at Florida International University.

Naming is often a prickly issue for an institution, since it links it to a person in the public’s mind.

Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, said that institutions have to be careful about whom they agree to be associated with. “I’m not sure anyone would want to have the Bonnie and Clyde Opera Company,” he said.

Sometimes property has to be unnamed. The Vilar Grand Tier at the Metropolitan Opera House, for example, went back to being just the Grand Tier after its benefactor, Alberto W. Vilar, failed to come through on his financial commitments.

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"And whether you want to be occupied by Art Basel or Occupy it, you can’t deny the event’s role in revitalizing Miami culture over the past 10 years. (Both the Miami Art Museum and MoCA North Miami have new buildings in the works, and the Wynwood district is chockablock with galleries, studios and street art.)"

During a recent opening at the Carol Jazzar gallery in El Portal, longtime holographer Mark Diamond used the headlights of his 1989 Caprice Classic station wagon to show a newbie artist his latest experiments with 3-D photography.

The artist, Alicia Apfel, is a lawyer by day. But Art Basel Miami Beach, with its yearly injection of art euphoria, has compelled her not only to collect art but also to get her hands dirty making it. A while back, Jazzar let Apfel use her space for an installation: a build-out of a living room with only traces of the person who might have just inhabited it.

“Mark came to see it and we got excited about the possibility of a collaboration,’’ Apfel said. “We think his three-dimensional photography might be able to capture the gist conceptually, and in terms of emotional content, of these rooms I’m interested in building.’’

The 10th edition of Art Basel, with its avalanche of blue chip art and its invasion by the who’s who of international art-world players, opens this week in a Miami that’s nobody’s uncultured cousin anymore.

From thriving art schools to the explosion of galleries and street art in Wynwood, from the expansion of local museums to the impassioned toiling of artists both unknown and on their way to the international stage — Art Basel’s presence over a decade has helped transform a town that was less known for high-minded cultural engagement than for the lowbrow if glam pursuits immortalized in MTV music videos.

“People forget there was a Miami art scene before Art Basel,’’ said Dennis Scholl, vice president of arts programs for the Knight Foundation. “That’s what drew the fair here. But there is no question Art Basel has had a profound influence. A rising tide lifts all boats. I think Art Basel has helped the visual arts, and the arts in general, fuse into the fabric of the community.’’

The fair brings with it enough collateral action to seize the town for a week, clog up traffic around the Beach and Miami’s urban core and make it nearly impossible to score a taxi or a reservation at the top restaurants. Involved in the arty tangle: more than a dozen satellite art fairs that pitch tents and take over hotels and warehouse spaces around the Beach and the mainland; just about all of South Florida’s museums and private collection spaces, which put on special shows; public art pieces and guerrilla art by locals and out-of-towners blanketing the town. It takes a master strategist to attend just a sampling of glam dinners, cocktail parties and after-hours soirees marketing goods that this year include Ferrari, Dom Perignon and headphones by Dr. Dre.

But when Basel first put down stakes here in 2002, there was no Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. No Frank Gehry-designed home for the New World Symphony. No South Dade Performing Arts Center or Aventura Performing Art Center. No De La Cruz Contemporary Art Space. No starchitect-designed parking garages getting ink around the world, such as the Herzog & de Meuron structure on Lincoln Road and the one coming to the Collins Park area by the famed, London-based Zaha Hadid.

“The impact that Art Basel has had in Miami from the international perspective is tremendous,’’ said Juan Ignacio Vidarte, director of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, another town transformed by art and the presence of its Gehry-designed contemporary art museum.