George Lindemann Journal by Goerge Lindemann - "A Provocateur’s Medium: Outrage" @nytimes by Roberta Smith

The 2012 survey of the courageous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei seen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington has finally arrived in New York, and is much improved. The show, “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” which opens Friday at the Brooklyn Museum, has been beefed up throughout, but most notably by two installation pieces completed in 2013. One, “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” is perhaps the best work of art Mr. Ai has yet made.

As a result, this show is far clearer and more gripping than its original incarnation and something of a triumph. It brings many of Mr. Ai’s past efforts into focus as the juvenilia they often were, while making a persuasive case for his ability periodically to reconcile art and ideals and life — which in his case is usually, unavoidably, political — into a memorable balance.

The show originated at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, organized by Mami Kataoka, its chief curator. The Brooklyn presentation has been expertly overseen by Ms. Kataoka and Sharon Matt Atkins, the museum’s managing curator of exhibitions.

           

Mr. Ai is a complex, troublesome figure: an artistic provocateur who works in several mediums, an activist and thorn in the side of the Chinese powers that be and an impresario able to marshal scores of variously adept Chinese artisans to make ambitious pieces that he barely touches. He’s also a designer and part-time architect who collaborated with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the emblematic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. And he was the darling of the Chinese power structure, until he began jumping in where he wasn’t invited.

Initially, he made his presence felt on his outspoken blog, complaining about the destruction of the old alleyway neighborhoods of Beijing to make way for the Olympics (his involvement with the Bird’s Nest notwithstanding) — until the blog was shut down by the government in 2009. That year he was beaten by the police when, in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, he began to agitate for more information about the shoddily built schools that collapsed, killing thousands of children. Then he was held incommunicado for 81 days in 2011, and, since his release, he has been prohibited from traveling beyond Beijing.

That restriction has not stopped him from making artworks and spiriting them out of China, or from sending assistants to oversee his exhibitions.

Some Westerners may wonder why Mr. Ai doesn’t find a way to leave China (ignoring that his every move is carefully watched). But Mr. Ai is not like, say, a Russian ballet star, who can usually perform as well in London or New York as in Moscow.

Mr. Ai would be nothing without China. His country, its history, its artistic and material culture, its totalitarian government and the travails of its people drive his art. Conversely his art at its best bears witness to the often perverse machinations of the state. His recurrent theme, that of an individual wrestling with all this, is sometimes superficially touched upon in his earlier pieces and is usually detailed in wall labels. More recently, it is profoundly and frighteningly invoked.

This is the case with “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale last year and is now in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, where people see it as they enter and again as they leave. It brackets the rest of the show.

On first sight, its six imposing iron boxes resemble a work by Richard Serra. But each box has a firmly shut door and step-size iron boxes upon which visitors stand to peer down through an opening in the top. Inside is a roughly half-scale diorama of the tiny, sparsely furnished cell in which Mr. Ai spent his 81 days of detention. Each includes a painted fiberglass sculpture of Mr. Ai performing one of his daily activities — sleeping, eating, showering, using the toilet — always accompanied by two uniformed guards who seem deliberately to crowd him.

With each successive box, we follow Mr. Ai from chair, to bed, to table, watching a government trying to break an individual without touching him. Because it is enacted in almost real space, the piece gives this tactic a visceral immediacy greater than writing, photography or perhaps even film. This makes sense: Confinement is spatial limitation. The slightly reduced size enables you take in these scenes all at once, to get the picture and empathize, but also to conduct your own surveillance.

“S.A.C.R.E.D.” sets a high standard, a level to which the other works don’t always rise. That’s certainly true of “Stacked,” the newest and largest installation, which is also in the lobby. Consisting of his signature Chinese bicycle frames, but this time copies made from stainless steel, it is the latest, extravagant expression of his continuing involvement with Duchamp’s principle of the ready-made.

The ready-made that serves Mr. Ai best is life itself. As “S.A.C.R.E.D” implies, his strength is as a kind of imaginative documentarian who figures out ways to bring reality close, sometimes unbearably so. This gift has long been evident in his photographs, which are well represented here in gritty black and white, recording his life as a young artist in both New York (where he lived from 1983 to 1993) and Beijing; and in color images papering the walls that show the building of the gigantic Bird’s Nest as well as the destruction that cleared space for the Olympic build-out.

Further color images flutter past on a dozen monitors in “258 Fake,” an ebullient document of his life centered on a studio populated by friends, assistants and cats. (Mr. Ai calls his studio Fake, and 258 is its actual street number.) The documentary impulse is also evident in the show’s increasingly searing videos, one of which follows the plight of a woman infected as a child with H.I.V. from a blood transfusion in a Chinese hospital, part of a medical system that only grudgingly acknowledges her disease.

More traditional notions of the ready-made operate in the first gallery, which concentrates on Mr. Ai’s early work of the last decade. The space is dominated by sculptures made from lustrous wood and antique furniture salvaged from houses and temples doomed by the Olympics. Especially good are his reconfigured Qing dynasty tables, their legs planted on both the floor and the wall as if under great strain. Even better is “Kippe,” an exquisite wood-pile-like mass of scraps that suggest a funeral pyre.

Otherwise, the sadness of the stories is provided by the labels, though the pieces themselves are primarily familiar forms of international Conceptual sculpture translated into local materials. You glimpse Mr. Ai’s implicit rebelliousness in his repainted Han dynasty vases and photographic triptychs showing him dropping the irreplaceable objects, shocking gestures that gain resonance from his recent work.

Two other high points are room-size installations. One is an enlarged version of “Straight,” which consists of 73 tons of rebar (nearly double the tonnage at the Hirshhorn show) salvaged from the collapsed schools of the Sichuan earthquake, painstakingly straightened so that nothing appears to have been amiss and stacked in a thick undulating carpet that visitors walk around. It suggests both a landscape and the orderliness of a morgue. Its stark density balances its tragic back story. (But a large snake made of children’s backpacks coiled on the ceiling is an earthquake commemoration whose lightheartedness is almost insensitive.)

The other work is “Ye Haiyan’s Belongings,” named for a Chinese women’s rights advocate. The government has responded to her activism with repeated evictions, the last time dumping her and her daughter on the side of a highway. Mr. Ai responded first with financial aid and then turned Ms. Ye’s hastily packed household goods into a fairly successful artwork.

Four walls of the gallery are papered floor to ceiling with images of neatly arranged possessions of Ms. Ye and her daughter: clothes, CDs, teapots, rice bowls. This rather cheerful surround contrasts with the dusty and desolate array of the items themselves, packed in shabby cardboard boxes and suitcases on the floor, along with appliances, a motorbike and a bicycle.

In these last two works and in “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” we feel the crushing vortexes that the Chinese government creates for its citizens, sometimes in groups, sometimes individually. It is not clear how often Mr. Ai will find ways to enter these maelstroms and make them hauntingly, even beautifully, visible. But for as long as he can we will be lucky.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Two Miami-Dade museums win Kellogg Foundation grants" @miamiherald by Hannah Sampson

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Warhol and Basquiat at New York Auctions in May" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Andy Warhol's 'Six Self-Portraits' © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY/Sotheby's

Want to bet on a painting? Be ready to hang onto it for a long time. That's a lesson to be gleaned from a group of artworks headed to auction next month in New York.

In late 1981, Maryland collector Anita Reiner stepped into the New York basement of dealer Annina Nosei's gallery and watched a 21-year-old street artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, paint his self-portrait in the guise of a warrior king standing against a sunset-colored sky. Ms. Reiner bought it on the spot. On May 13, Ms. Reiner's heirs plan to resell the untitled work at Christie's for at least $20 million. Christie's specialist Brett Gorvy said the painting ranks among the artist's largest canvases, and it hasn't been seen publicly until now.

                                  

Untitled work by Jean-Michel Basquiat The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris/ARS, NY/Christie's Images Ltd.

The Reiner Family Collection is also selling off six other pieces by artists like Robert Gober, Paul McCarthy and Urs Fischer, Mr. Gorvy added.

Over at Sotheby's, London stockbroker Barry Townsley is offering up Andy Warhol's "Six Self-Portraits," that the artist assembled for his last London gallery show in 1986. These so-called "fright wig" silkscreens show the artist wearing his signature wig and staring piercingly at the viewer. Four years ago, designer Tom Ford sold a wall-size, purple "fright wig" Warhol for $32.5 million at Sotheby's. On May 14, the house will ask at least $25 million for Mr. Townsley's group of 22-inch versions, which are silkscreened in differing candy colors.

Mr. Townsley declined to comment, but dealers say he has often told friends about the good-luck day he walked into Anthony D'Offay's gallery on the eve of Warhol's show and paid $57,500 for the six artworks. Sotheby's expert Oliver Barker confirmed the price but said he could not discuss the seller.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Architects Mourn Former Folk Art Museum Building" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

Scaffolding on the former Folk Art Museum building on West 53rd Street. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

As scaffolding went up around the former Folk Art Museum building on Tuesday, one of its two architects broke his silence to say how devastated he and his partner are about the Museum of Modern Art’s decision to tear down “one of our most important buildings to date.”

“Yes, all buildings one day will turn to dust, but this building could have been reused,” Tod Williams said in his first interview since the Modern announced the demolition of this West 53rd Street building, completed in 2001. “Unfortunately, the imagination and the will were not there.”

Until now, Mr. Williams and his partner, Billie Tsien, have declined to be interviewed about MoMA’s hotly debated decision. Instead, since January, when MoMA confirmed its conclusion that the neighboring Folk Art Museum building could not be salvaged, this husband-and-wife architectural team had let a prepared statement speak for them.

Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien issued another such statement on Tuesday, in response to the appearance of scaffolding around the building, which MoMA bought in 2011 when the folk museum vacated it because of financial troubles.

“A building admired, visited and studied by so many will now be reduced to memory,” the statement said. “We understand the facade will be put in storage, but we worry it will never be seen again.”

MoMA declined to comment. It has defended the demolition as necessary for its expansion. The museum plans to extend galleries through the Folk Art Museum site and into new exhibition space that will be part of a tower to the west, designed by Jean Novel for the Houston developer Hines.

In response to protests, though, MoMA agreed to preserve the Folk Art Museum’s 82-foot-high facade, which is being removed ahead of the rest of the building; its future is unclear. For now, it will be transported to one of the museum’s storage sites. An ensemble of 63 copper-bronze panels, it was the most celebrated architectural feature of the building.

Some new homes for the facade have been floated, Mr. Williams said, including MoMA/P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Queens. This idea was proposed by Nina Libeskind — chief operating officer of the architectural practice of her husband, Daniel Libeskind — and Fredric M. Bell, executive director of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

“I believe strongly that the facade of that building was an integral part of the New York cityscape and that it should have, and could have, been incorporated into MoMA’s plans,” Ms. Libeskind said in an interview. “It’s a valuable piece of architecture that should be kept.”

Ms. Libeskind said she and Mr. Bell are scheduled to meet with MoMA about their proposal next week. “Whether or not they accept that, I have no idea,” she said. “I think it is a reasonable, very intelligent alternative.”

Asked why he and Ms. Tsien had not addressed the facade’s future earlier, Mr. Williams said, “We held out hope, even when we knew there was very little hope, that the complete building could be saved.” He added, “We were focused on saving the building so we did not think of the facade as a separate piece.”

Mr. Williams said he appreciated recent proposals to reuse the most publicly recognizable portion of the building, though he and Ms. Tsien have always maintained that the facade and the building were

That said, Mr. Williams explained that during the construction process, the facade was attached to the building as a separate element — “as an architectural mask.” Though fragments of buildings have been preserved at places like the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Williams said, “the idea of installing a few panels somewhere doesn’t interest me.”

When asked whether MoMA had contacted him and Ms. Tsien, Mr. Williams said, “Only when we were notified that the building would be torn down.”

He declined to address the personal issues involved; the situation has been particularly thorny because the Modern’s expansion plan involves another pair of architects with whom he and Ms. Tsien were friends: Elizabeth Diller and Ric Scofidio. That husband-and-wife team are part of Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the firm hired by MoMA to evaluate whether the existing folk art building could be integrated into the Modern’s expansion plans. Ms. Diller declined to comment.      

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/arts/design/architects-mourn-former-folk-art-museum-building.html?ref=arts&_r=0&assetType=nyt_now

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Ai Weiwei's Spring: Three Shows on Two Continents" @wsj by Mary M. Lane

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Ai Weiwei is seeing his work mounted in museums in Berlin and New York and at a gallery in London. Ai Weiwei Studio/Brooklyn Museum

When "Evidence," Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's biggest exhibition to date opened in Berlin last week, one person was notably missing from the guest list: the artist himself.

Barred from traveling abroad since his release from detention in 2011, Mr. Ai couldn't be in Germany—or in New York. There, his first museum show in the city opens at the Brooklyn Museum April 18 and runs through Aug. 10.

But Mr. Ai says that in some ways Germany in particular surrounds his home in Beijing every day. "When you walk in Beijing now you almost think you're in a German industrial city, because you see all these Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs everywhere," Mr. Ai, who owns a Volkswagen VOW3.XE -1.05% Volkswagen AG Non-Vtg Pfd. Germany: Xetra ^€192.40 -2.05 -1.05% April 14, 2014 5:35 pm Volume : 976,645 P/E Ratio 10.31 Market Cap€89.21 Billion Dividend Yield 2.11% Rev. per Employee €343,937 19619419219010a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 04/14/14 Peugeot Sets Out Recovery Plan... 04/13/14 Can New Hyundai Sonata Match P... 04/13/14 GM's Opel Could Break Even Ahe... More quote details and news » VOW3.XE in Your Value Your Change Short position and frequents a bar popular with German engineers, said in a Skype interview from Beijing last week.

Chinese hunger for German products triggered one piece in Berlin: eight vases from the Han Dynasty (202 B.C.—220 A.D.) dipped into the most popular Mercedes-Benz DAI.XE +0.11% Daimler AG Germany: Xetra ^€66.22 +0.07 +0.11% April 14, 2014 5:35 pm Volume : 3.74M P/E Ratio 10.35 Market Cap€70.77 Billion Dividend Yield 3.40% Rev. per Employee €428,427 6766656410a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 04/13/14 GM's Opel Could Break Even Ahe... 04/11/14 China Car Demand Slows as Euro... 04/10/14 Ai Weiwei's Spring: Three Show... More quote details and news » DAI.XE in Your Value Your Change Short position and BMW car paints in China. The altered antiques speak of consumerism, but also of the economic freedoms Chinese citizens enjoy today, Mr. Ai said.

The artist and his studio designed the new exhibitions, and a May show with art for sale at London's Lisson Gallery, to raise Mr. Ai's profile even higher than it is—while China still refuses to issue him a passport. It's a clear push for large exposure, simultaneously in three cities on two continents, at a prime season for art sales and tourism.

Mr. Ai says he is addressing two audiences: one foreign, one domestic. The artist hopes that Chinese tourists, whose presence has sharply risen in the West, will be exposed to his art and issues. "Because my work is banned from being shown inside China, the only way they can become aware of it is from the outside," he said.

The Brooklyn show "According to What?" originated in 2009 at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, with later stops in Washington, Toronto and Miami, but Brooklyn's version includes several major new pieces. Social injustice and sexual discrimination are key themes in the artworks. Among five videos screening in Mandarin with subtitles, the new "Stay Home" documents the anguish of a woman who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. Many Chinese still think of those with HIV/AIDS as promiscuous pariahs, to which Mr. Ai is trying to draw attention, says Sharon Matt Atkins, curator of the Brooklyn show.

Another added artwork in the roughly 13,000-square-foot Brooklyn show involves sex worker-activist Ye Haiyan, a close friend of Mr. Ai's. Ms. Ye has for seven years pushed to widen health-care access for Chinese prostitutes and petition the government to legalize prostitution and destigmatize rape and AIDS. Ms. Atkins said that last summer Ms. Ye fled to a hotel after being kicked out of her apartment in the wake of the publicity over her sex activism.

At the Brooklyn show, Mr. Ai created wallpaper that covers a room and portrays Ms. Ye's belongings including a phone, a teapot and a Guy Fawkes mask. Jumbled in front of the wallpaper are many of Ms. Ye's actual possessions—including her fridge, rolling suitcases and her Tiffany-blue moped.

Several subjects show up both in Brooklyn and the much larger German show, at the Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition hall. In a debut, Berlin features a replica of the detention room where Chinese authorities held Mr. Ai in 2011 for 81 days. Visitors can sit on his bed, at the desk or touch the toilet. "I was in jail, I was beaten, I was forbidden to go on the Internet—all because of thoughts that were inside my mind," said Mr. Ai in the video interview.

In the same vein, Brooklyn is showing "S.A.C.R.E.D.," a sextet of less-than-life-size dioramas featuring scenes from Mr. Ai's life in detention. "S.A.C.R.E.D." has only been seen during last year's Venice Biennale.

The artist added that he has consistently received "strong support" from Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel lobbied for his release from detention and he keeps a life-size cardboard cutout of her in his studio. Though some Americans have openly supported him, he says he still believes, as he stated in 2009, that America's approach to human rights abroad is becoming insular: "If it is not necessary, most people don't try to share the pain and struggle of others. That is just how society is."

Politics doesn't occupy all the space at the new shows. The artist's love of Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptual art whose work Mr. Ai discovered while living in Brooklyn in the 1980s, is present in the New York exhibition through a wire bent in the shape of Duchamp's face.

The artist's work often revolves around Mandarin puns that can get lost on Westerners. One such work displayed in both shows (and part of the U.S. tour from the start) is "He Xie," a pile of 3,200 hand-painted porcelain crabs. The Mandarin word means both "river crabs" and "harmonious society," but also designates the "Gang of Four," disgraced leaders who were tried in 1981 for treason.

In 2011, authorities bulldozed a studio that they had invited him to build in Shanghai in 2008. Mr. Ai first tried protesting. When that failed, he planned a feast of river crabs at the site and went on to create the porcelain crustaceans.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Breaking From Donor Dependence" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

ONE doesn’t typically think of drawing visitors to a cultural institution with a sheepshearing festival. But that is part of the strategy of Gore Place, a historic house in Waltham, Mass., that also has a working farm.

The farm has always been a part of Gore Place, the 1806 house and estate of Gov. Christopher Gore that is considered among the most significant Federal Period mansions in New England. Recently the institution has stepped up its for-profit events to include snowshoeing (rentals available at $8 for adults and $5 for children), farm dinners ($80 a person) and an evening “Tick-Tock a Tour” of the mansion’s clock collection ($15).

Such efforts are part of a growing consciousness among cultural institutions that they can no longer depend on donations and must develop revenue-generating activities beyond the cafe and bookstore.

“Museums are thinking of new ways to achieve their mission that earn money,” said Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, an initiative of the American Alliance of Museums.

“How do you break this cycle of charitable poverty?” Ms. Merritt continued. “How do you make a program self-sustainable, where you’re drawing a connection between people who value it and those willing to pay for it?”

Such projects come with some growing pains, museum experts say, particularly given the historical bias against mixing a cultural mission with business considerations. But at a time when contributions from foundations, corporations and individuals are shrinking — along with government support — such adjustments increasingly seem like a matter of economic survival.

“It requires a mind shift,” Ms. Merritt said. “To stop thinking automatically in terms of underwriting and stop thinking of earning money as somehow being a bad thing and start with the premise that if you’re delivering a program that’s mission-related maybe there’s a way of finding a capitalist way of supporting it.”

There are already such entrepreneurial ventures. This summer, the New Museum plans to open NEW INC, an incubator for art, technology and design in its adjacent building at 231 Bowery in Manhattan. Members selected through a competitive application process (deadline April 1) are to form an interdisciplinary community intended to foster collaboration and innovation. Those chosen will pay a monthly membership fee in exchange for work space, professional development, support services and a series of programs. The fee will go toward the incubator’s operations.

The Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., recently established “The Edge at The Dalí,” a creativity and innovation services program for businesses and nonprofit organizations. The museum developed its curriculum based on Dalí’s art and the psychology and neurology of innovative thinking.

Over the last decade, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has developed a commercial licensing business by marketing its digital image archive to the home furnishing, fashion and hospitality industries. Designers are drawing from the museum’s textile collection for products like tableware, drapes and pillows. “The purpose is to get the artwork and the imagery out there and to see it used in multiple functions,” said Debra LaKind, the museum’s director of business development and strategic partnerships. “It’s also a way of generating revenue.” The Bronx Museum of the Arts now hosts dinners featuring prominent chefs ($250 to $300 a person), runs a wine club that generates as much as $15,000 a year and recently started selling prints of works by some of its featured artists.

The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington charges a licensing fee to collaborators in its SparkLab National Network. SparkLab offers activities at the museum that are focused on invention, such as Science Stations, which explore concepts like radioactivity, and an Under 5 Zone where children can build with blocks or solve puzzles. The proceeds go into the program.

In exchange, the partners receive use of the Smithsonian, SparkLab and Lemelson Center names and logos; a set of start-up activities; two years’ worth of materials, and assistance and consultation services. The program ultimately aims to help its collaborators in the network — like the Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum in Reno, Nev. — create activities and programs that are specific to their institutions and geographic areas.

“The idea is to expand it out of the museum internationally to places that seem interested,” said Arthur Molella, director of the Lemelson Center. “They can take our basic material and add a lot of their own content relevant to the idea.”

Organizations like Gore Place feel as if they have no choice but to diversify. “Historic houses have to find ways to make themselves unique in order to survive,” said Susan Robertson, the executive director. “They have to be cultural resources, they have to be community resources, they have to be able to pay their bills, they have to attract visitors — they have to get a buzz going.”

“It’s an exciting challenge,” she added. “Whether we’ll succeed remains to be seen.”

Indeed, it is still unclear whether these experiments ultimately will make nonprofit institutions more independent of donor largess. Gore Place, for example, is in the second year of a three-year plan to pursue new sources of revenue — including farm stands.

“Like any new venture, there are all of the unknowns,” Ms. Robertson said. “You don’t know if the geese are going to come in and strip your pea fields in half an hour or you don’t know that you’re going to have an influx of rabbits and they’re going to eat up all your squash.”   

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "In Boston, Altering the Artist-in-Residence Concept" @nytimes by By HILARIE M. SHEETS

“I’ve never done a thing where I sort of seep into the fabric of the museum itself and the neighborhood around it, almost like an energy consultant coming in,” said Mr. Ritchie, 50. “But instead of talking about heat, it’s ideas.” The artist is known for his densely layered, expansive paintings and installations that diagram systems of religion, science, history and cosmologies, sometimes all at the same time.

“Matthew heard from us that we’re interested in activating more spaces in the museum and activating the museum in more spaces in the city,” said Jill Medvedow, director of the 78-year-old institute, who oversaw its relocation to the edge of Boston harbor in 2006 in a luminous glass building designed by the architectural firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro. “He took that and completely embraced it and has incorporated those goals of ours into these new works of his, which are all one big body of work.”

Leading the project is Jenelle Porter, senior curator at the contemporary art institute. She had seen Mr. Ritchie’s multimedia music production “The Long Count,” conceived with Bryce Dessner of the National, the indie rock band, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2009. Having worked with him before, she knew Mr. Ritchie’s penchant for collaborating across disciplines with musicians, scientists, architects and judges. “I thought it would be great to bring someone in who has the skill set to work with a lot of different people in the museum,” Ms. Porter said, “but whose work also requires and desires that kind of collaboration.”

She initially proposed that Mr. Ritchie stage a version of “The Long Count” in the museum’s theater; paint a mural on the lobby’s Art Wall, and produce a project with the Teen Arts Council. “Visual arts, performing arts and education are the most important programming elements for the I.C.A.,” said Ms. Porter.

From there, Mr. Ritchie’s residency evolved to include an additional mural in Dewey Square, a park near the institute, and an additional performance with Mr. Dessner, all unfolding through the year. “I’m imagining moving people through time and having all these disparate moments understood as orbiting planets in a solar system,” said Mr. Ritchie, who has also donated a painting, “The Salt Pit,” on view now in the museum’s collection galleries.

Mr. Ritchie has just completed the lobby mural; it covers a 50-foot wall and extends across an adjacent stretch of windows. While the piece is abstract, it builds on visual themes in the Dewey Square mural, completed in September.

“On one level, this is the story of the beginning of time,” says Mr. Ritchie. A large atom form, or big bang, is exploding on the top right, with smaller atoms falling into a kind of primordial seascape. From the center arises a vessel-like form with dense scaffolding, suggesting the building of a complex society, which then begins to break down and return to a state of nature on the left.

Within this epic history, the artist suggests ideas of Boston and the institute as well. The shape of the vessel alludes to the ship where John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, quoted the Sermon on the Mount to migrants from England in 1630 as he envisioned the future “city upon a hill.”

“The I.C.A. is also the model of the shining city on a hill,” said Mr. Ritchie, “clearly designed as a lantern that glows at night and was embedded with ideas of the future at that moment it was built.” Mr. Ritchie said he thought of museums as ocean liners moving through history and preserving things. He is interested in how the opening of the art institute’s building spurred rapid redevelopment of the once-dilapidated waterfront, with hotels, office buildings and condominiums going up all around it (the mural on the institute windows, in fact, obscures a construction site directly outside).

On March 29, the next episode of Mr. Ritchie’s complex vision comes to life in a performance that will begin in the museum lobby and conclude at a Roman Catholic chapel nearby, Our Lady of Good Voyage. Musicians on clarinet and guitar, including Mr. Dessner, will improvise a composition in front of the mural. When they proceed to the chapel, originally for seamen, the performance will develop into a choral work, with the vocalist singing Mr. Dessner’s composition “To the Sea,” accompanied by organ choir and imagery by Mr. Ritchie projected behind the altar.

It is meant to connect the innovative technological present, embodied by the museum and the contemporary art within it, to Boston’s maritime and religious roots, as well as the shift in art to a largely aesthetic experience from its more spiritual role in the past. The artist noted that the chapel itself would soon be relocated from its prime location in the middle of the redevelopment district.

Since the beginning of the residency last fall, Mr. Ritchie has met regularly with members of the Teen Arts Council at the museum and prompted them to think like him. “He’s directed us to take photographs of things in our day-to-day lives that might normally go unnoticed and connect them in this big photo map or web of overlapping concepts,” said Cecelia Halle, a high school sophomore on the council, which recently received the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program award from Michelle Obama. “Ultimately, we’re going to put these things into a video that documents the changing structure of Boston through the eyes of us teens.” The collaborative project, which will make use of the museum’s high-tech digital lab, will go on view this summer.

The artist has other surprises in store. He plans to embed an unannounced artwork somewhere in the museum later this year and is working with the bookstore about a way to provide an unexpected — and undefined — ghost text along with intended purchases. He’s also created a series of short films, which set his vocabulary of abstracted imagery in motion and can be seen and heard via smartphone at the site of each artwork and performance. The residency will conclude with a reprise of “The Long Count” in the museum’s theater in December.

“There are all these things swirling around each other and each person is going to be encouraged to solve it in a way,” said Mr. Ritchie. “It’s not about having a secret language but more to encourage exploration. Can you remember the mural you saw 15 minutes ago in Dewey Square when you walk into the lobby? Can you remember the performance you were at six months ago when you’re at another one that echoes it? Can these things have an algorithmic choral quality and build on each other not just in space but in time? It’s the sense of a haunting.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "The Met’s Director Looks Ahead" @nytimes by By ROBIN POGREBIN

IN the five years since Thomas P. Campbell became director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the museum world has had to grapple with declining philanthropic dollars, mushrooming entertainment options and a rapidly developing digital world. But in an interview, Mr. Campbell said he was optimistic about the public’s appetite for museums in general and the Met’s prospects in particular. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q. What is the biggest issue facing museums today?

A. Impacting all of us is technology. We’ve made a huge investment in transitioning from being an analog museum to a digital museum and there are great opportunities in that to see the collections on the whole, to deliver the information to our audiences in new ways. Still, at the end of the day, the core values remain the same: It’s about bringing people face to face with works of art and stimulating their curiosity.

Q. Can museums really hope to compete with computers for people’s attention and leisure time?

A. We’re all bombarded. Museums are like the quiet car of the world. It’s a place you can come to escape, where there’s authenticity, there’s uniqueness, there’s calm, there’s physicality. I feel it’s so refreshing. But at the same time, the exciting thing is that because of technology we’re reaching out to new audiences. Our attendance has increased from 4.5 million to 6 million over five years. But online last year we had 44 to 45 million visitors to the website.

Q. What in particular are you looking forward to at the Met right now?

A. Over the last five years, we’ve completed a number of major capital projects — the American Wing, the Islamic galleries and the re-presentation of the European paintings collection. Next up is the reopening of the Costume Institute in May. This has been a project that has long been planned but has been undertaken in the last two years. We’ve expanded the exhibition space and we’ve put in place state-of-the-art storage and conservation facilities. The opening exhibition is on the great but little-known American couturier Charles James, an amazing designer of both everyday wear and couture to whom many contemporary designers look back as the inspiring genius for their own work. And then in the fall we’ll have the reopening of the plaza, which of course has been under construction outside the museum.

Q. What are you looking to accomplish with that?

A. The plaza is the entry point for the museum. For many it’s the gateway to a great institution that many visitors feel very comfortable with. But for others, our great Beaux Arts facade is intimidating. And it certainly wasn’t helped by the deplorable state of disrepair that the fountains had fallen into. We started with a plan first to replace the fountains, and then one thing led to another, and we’ve totally reconceived the plaza so it will be a much more friendly, attractive, welcoming area for people visiting the museum or who, after a visit, want to sit outside and enjoy being in one of the great New York spaces. It’s a beautification project that will make the plaza worthy of our great facade, but it’s also an external manifestation of the emphasis on accessibility that we’ve really been making over the last five years. The Met is a museum for everybody.

Q. Given the goals you set when you became director, how are you doing so far?

Q. Talk a little about the Met’s technological advances.

A. We’ve wired the whole museum — there is wireless access everywhere in the museum for free. The catalog collection is now online and we’ve also put a lot of investment into creating cross-museum applications. The scholarly backbone is the Timeline of Art History set up about 12 years ago, which we continue to invest in very heavily. And we have a number of publications like “Connections” and “82nd and Fifth” that are aimed at being entry points for audiences who want — not such in-depth scholarly information — but to get an understanding of why certain works of art are important.

Q. What is the place of contemporary art at the Met and how are you planning to use the Breuer building when the Whitney moves downtown?

A. It’s clear from all of our surveys that our audience is very interested in seeing modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan. That was an explicit part of the job description when I was hired as director — to make sure the museum was engaging in a meaningful way with modern and contemporary art. The challenge we have is that our modern and contemporary galleries are not very well laid out and they’re also quite constrictive. So to operate the Breuer building is a great opportunity. It’s space that’s going to be especially well suited to the display of modern and contemporary art. We can provide an element of context that will differentiate our programs from those of MoMA and the Guggenheim and the Whitney. In a way, the Breuer building — because it’s not constrained — is a new space for us. We can perhaps be more experimental there, we can break away from the departmental restraints that often characterize the programs we run here at the main museum and we can really respond to the way contemporary artists are using multiple media. We can look very closely, not just at the European and American schools, but also think more internationally.

Q. Given these innovations, has there been any pushback from the old guard, saying, “This is too much change for us”?

A. By and large this is evolution, not revolution. The financial crisis of 2008 to 2009 was a sobering moment but the silver lining is, it forced all of us to think very hard about what our core priorities were about scholarship, education and accessibility, and out of that moment came a huge wave of creativity. The greatest asset along with the building and the collections is this extraordinary staff of curators and conservators at the core. I want to sustain the culture in which those scholars have flourished, so I’m not out to force any of those faster than they want to go. Most of my colleagues are as sensitive to the changes that are going on in the world as I am.

Q. How much of a hurdle do you think price is for a museum like the Met?

A. We’ve had a lot of negative press over the year about our admissions policy that really ticks me off. Five years ago, we had people telling us we should go to a compulsory charge. I felt, and the board felt, that making admission a voluntary donation was central to the integrity of an institution that was trying to make itself as accessible as possible. We’ve sustained that process in the face of financial pressure and I’m really proud of that. The average visitor costs us about $45 and we ask for a donation of $25. Of course, the reality is many visitors give much less, but that’s great. I don’t want to start charging for exhibitions. Here we have this amazing cornucopia of exhibitions and whatever you’ve donated — it’s all accessible.

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A Young Collectors dinner at the Guggenheim. Exclusive events for young donors help museums cement ties with new benefactors. CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

Several hundred millennials mingled under the soaring atrium of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue one recent frigid February night. Weaving around them were black-clad servers bearing silver trays piled high with doughnuts, while a pixieish D.J. spun Daft Punk remixes.

The occasion was the museum’s annual Young Collectors Party, and the increasingly tipsy crowd thronged in a space usually filled with visitors eager to see the 73-year-old institution’s priceless artworks. But on this night, the galleries displaying an exhibition of Italian Futurism were mostly cordoned off. Instead, youthful, glamorous and moneyed New Yorkers were the main attraction.

Many museums, including the Guggenheim, view events like this as central to their public programming. They get a new generation through the front door and keep potentially staid institutions relevant with a cultural landscape in flux.

But events like this are also, at some level, central to the future financial health of the museum. Before the Young Collectors Party, museum executives held an exclusive dinner for a select group of young donors already contributing at a high level. If all goes well, some of those in attendance will one day become trustees of the Guggenheim. Together, the dinner and the party took the museum one step closer to cementing relationships with these rising philanthropists and their friends.

“You don’t just go on the board overnight,” said Catherine Dunn, the Guggenheim’s deputy director of advancement. “You engage people in the life of the museum so that they can ultimately join the board.”

Across the country, museums large and small are preparing for the eventual passing of the baton from the baby boom generation, which for decades has been the lifeblood not only of individual giving but of boardroom leadership. Yet it is far from clear whether the children of baby boomers are prepared to replicate the efforts of their parents.

While charitable giving in the United States has remained stable for the last 40 years, there is reason for concern. Boomers today control 70 percent of the nation’s disposable income, according to data compiled by the American Alliance of Museums. Millennials don’t yet have nearly as much cash on hand. And those who do, the alliance found, are increasingly drawn to social, rather than artistic, causes.

Now, as wealth becomes more concentrated, tax laws change and a younger generation develops new philanthropic priorities, museums — like other nonprofit organizations — are confronting what, if unaddressed, could become an existential crisis.

“The generational shift is something a lot of museums are talking about,” said Ford W. Bell, president of the American Alliance of Museums. “The traditional donors are either dying, stepping back or turning it over to their children or grandchildren.”

Generational change is always occurring as new blood takes the place of the old. But as the boomers’ children take over, there is concern among administrators and trustees that millennials are not poised to meet the financial and leadership demands of increasingly complex — and expensive — museums.

“We’re not just talking about replacing one generation with another generation,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “We’re talking about a new generation that behaves so differently than the last one.”

Two-thirds of millennials want specific information about how their dollars will “make a difference,” according to the 2011 Millennial Donors Report. That can pose a problem for museums, which rely on individual donations to support everyday operations and build endowments.

“Younger philanthropists and donors today are looking for measurable results,” Mr. Bell said. “It used to be you gave because it was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But today younger donors have a lot of things they can give to. They ask what the impact is going to be and how you’re going to measure that impact. The Rockefellers gave, but they weren’t looking for specific metrics.”

Moreover, many are disinclined to contribute to long-term capital campaigns. “An older generation of philanthropists really understood the value of an endowment,” said Maureen Robinson, a member of the Museum Group, a consortium of senior museum professionals. “But endowments are looked at by younger people as dead money. They think, ‘I’m giving you a dollar to do something different.’ ”

What is more, there is a swelling debate about the merits of different types of charitable giving, with many arguing that arts institutions are less deserving than social and health causes. Writing in The New York Times last year, the philosopher Peter Singer said that “a donation to prevent trachoma offers at least 10 times the value of giving to the museum.”

This line of thinking is “a matter of some dismay to a generation that worked to build out community engagement in museums,” Ms. Robinson said. “All these things are great, but it’s as though museums appear to represent a lesser value and less moral use of time.”

And not only are 20- and 30-somethings today more interested in social causes like education, the environment and international aid than they are in the arts, but because of shifting demographics, there may simply be fewer wealthy young patrons to write checks.

“We’re seeing some significant changes in income distribution,” said Dan Monroe, director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. “You’ve got a shrinking middle class. And there’s a huge amount of wealth and philanthropic capability that is centered in a smaller number of people than was previously the case.”

Already anticipating this generational changing of the guard, some museums are racing to pursue younger donors and trustees.

At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, 75 percent of the board membership has turned over in the last seven years. That has brought new life to the Walker, which focuses on modern and contemporary art. But it has also meant the loss of several stalwarts who could be relied on for big checks and sage advice.

“Most of the oldest generation has completely gone off,” said the Walker’s director, Olga Viso. In its place, Ms. Viso said, a group of trustees in their 50s and 60s has moved into senior leadership roles and begun giving at higher levels, while a younger group of trustees in their early 40s and even late 30s has joined the board.

Among the more youthful members Ms. Viso has recruited of late are John Christakos, founder of the furniture company Blu Dot, who is in his late 40s and serves as the Walker board’s treasurer, and Monica Nassif, the founder of the fragrance and cleaning companies Caldrea and Mrs. Meyers Clean Day.

As well as being proactive, another way to attract young donors and trustees is to be a cultural powerhouse. Many prominent art museums in major metropolitan areas, in particular, are so far navigating this transition with ease.

“The very big institutions are doing very well,” said Ms. Robinson of the Museum Group. “They have a gravitational field.”

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Boldly Go" @nytimes by Roberta Smith

Rob Fischer’s “Good Weather (Glass House)” is at the Derek Eller Gallery in Chelsea. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times        

ACCORDING to the thermometer as well as the calendar, it’s finally spring, a great time for that urban sport known as gallery-hopping. The options in New York City have never been richer — in some neighborhoods, taking in the galleries requires Olympic stamina.

New York is often described as the former center of the art world, the torch having been passed to Berlin, London, Los Angeles or even New Delhi. Globalism notwithstanding, New York remains the center of the gallery world, and galleries are the bedrock of any truly thriving art scene.

No other city can match its sheer numbers, and such quantity creates its own strange, implicitly democratic form of quality. New York is still the place where the greatest range of art is selected for public view by the greatest number of people — namely art dealers, who operate independent of institutions. Month after month, they mount shows of artists or artworks they believe in for our consideration, and we don’t have to buy anything or pay admission (though occasionally we have to climb on something, after removing our shoes).

A few years ago, it seemed that Chelsea was the Cookie Monster devouring other gallery neighborhoods. But as our five selective reports demonstrate, New York has thriving scenes on the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side. The SoHo scene, once inundated by retail, is showing signs of bouncing back, and putting out new shoots in eastern TriBeCa. Bushwick is blooming in Brooklyn, and in the newly named Donut District an art scene is taking root virtually beneath the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

Our intrepid art critics went and looked. Now it’s your turn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/arts/design/a-gallery-guide-by-the-art-critics-of-the-new-york-times.html?ref=arts&_r=0

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