Via Modern Art Notes comes the Indianapolis Museum of Art Dashboard, which gives a view into some of the metrics the museum tracks about its operations. Attendance as a percentage of population, percentage of attendance from museum members, number of pieces on loan to other institutions, percentage of Indianapolis third graders that have visited the museum this year, etc.

I suspect that there is a very small intersection between the set of people who appreciate lolcats and the set of people who appreciate Jenny Holzer. If, like me, you find yourself in that intersection, you will most likely appreciate these loljennyholzers.

Tyler Green, at the end of his great little bit about how the Met is "contextualizing" the Damien Hirst piece they've installed:  "This is proof that Robert Smithson's ideas about art and natural history museums have finally jumped the... Oh nevermind."

Chuck Close in a New York Magazine interview: "I don't work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work." (Via Mike.)

Jen Bekman has launched 20x200. Jen is one of the web's original pioneers; she and I did a stint together as community managers of Netscape.com in like 1997. Since then she's escaped the 'net and built a wonderful art business in New York. It's great to see her combine two of her (many) passions -- art and the web -- into this new venture.

We introduce two new pieces a week: one photo and one work on paper. Each image is available in three sizes. The smallest size is reprinted in the largest batch – an edition of 200 – and sold at the lowest price – $20. Hence the name 20x200. (200x20 just didn't sound as good.)

Jen has a great eye, and the work that's already up is fantastic. If you've never bought art before, maybe this is the way for you to get into collecting.

The SF Chron's Kenneth Baker had a front page piece this weekend about the issues at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco @ the DeYoung. I found the tone of the piece to be a bit odd -- it's clear that Baker doesn't like what's happening out in the park, but laid most of the criticism at the feet of unnamed "local artists, art dealers, collectors and other frequent museumgoers."

The one thing that I found refreshing, though, is the criticism of the building. Most people you talk to love it. It's bright and shiny (figuratively, not literally) and has brought people back into Golden Gate Park. I think the building's great for parties (esp weddings!), but find the experience of actually looking at art in the building to be lackluster. Here's the relevant graf:

The installation of artworks at the de Young consistently gives the impression of overcrowding. Promises to donors to keep certain works perennially on view explains this to some extent. But Cornell pinpointed the ultimate problem: For all the size and sheen of Herzog and de Meuron's immense new building, "I think to say that the museum doesn't have the space it needs is a fair criticism."

If you want to follow all the fun about FAMSF, check out Modern Art Notes. Tyler Green's gonna have a field day as this unravels...

Todd Gibson, who is sitting in for Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes, speculates that the art market bubble has already started to burst, and that the credit crunch will continue to hurt "the small subset of the NetJets-set who do the art fair and contemporary auction circuit with checkbooks in hand."[1]

Here's the key point in Gibson's post; that the market for the ultra high end of the contemporary art market is very small:

The law of pricing in the secondary art market is that it takes only two people with money to push the value of Peter Doig's work to $11.2MM. Or the value of a Rothko painting to $72.8MM. Or a Picasso to $104MM. If only one of the two doesn't have that extra $10MM or $70MM or $100MM anymore, the work is no longer worth that amount.

Art Basel Miami will be the true test. From what I've heard the past few years have been frothy; by December we'll know whether or not the bubble has truly burst. Will as many pop stars and hedge fund managers be making the rounds with their art buyers as in years past?[2]

[1] Don't bubbles burst immediately? If a bubble "starts" to burst, doesn't it just burst with a bang? Dear popular press, please invent a different metaphor than "bubble" because even if there is rapid decline, it's not a burst.

[2] Comments are open for the hell of it.

Bob Fosse was a genius.

Kenneth Baker on the possibility of a Fisher collection museum in San Francisco's Presidio.  "on Tuesday, Donald Fisher said that to have given SFMOMA their collection would have burdened the museum with unbearable pressures of storage, conservation and display. The facility the Fishers propose would have more exhibition space than SFMOMA as a whole contains." (Holy shit.)

Tyler Green takes apart the Fine Arts Museum of San Franciso's program. Though it was site of probably the most beautiful wedding I've ever been to (save mine, of course), I'm not really a fan of the DeYoung as a museum. It's an interesting building (or, rather, it's a beautiful facade and a dramatic lobby), but I've always found the program confused (Sugimoto and Annie Leibovitz?) and there are rarely shows that inspire me to encourage friends to take the trek to the park.

But Green, of course, is the much better blogger because back in February he blogged a bunch of ideas to make FAMSF better. Diebenkorn! Park! Maybeck! Morgan! Still! Yes yes yes! Please!

Art  Books  Business  Design  Favorites  Food  Games  Links  Meta  Movies  Music  People  Pictures  Products  Quotes  Science  Software  Sports  Television  Trash 

(un)filtered is a product of michael sippey. there are older things at sippey.typepad.com/filtered, with archives back to 2003, and even older things at stating the obvious.