Category Archives: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Doing Dumb Stuff?

Posted on by
Stills from video “I will not make any more boring art”, in which Baldessari writes that phrase repetetively

 “John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad. His style is familiar and recognizable, wry and dry: It usually incorporates a photo or grid of pictures, often black-and-white and grainy, with the vibe of a seventies issue of Artforum; text of some kind; a found object placed casually; a video or maybe a newspaper clipping or some other element taken from popular culture. The approach is hugely influential, setting the precedent for interesting artists like Cindy Sherman and David Salle. In a sense, Baldessari imagined a large circular room with a hundred entrances and exits. Thousands of artists could go through, and did. After a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective, you’ll see that Baldessari’s children have overrun Chelsea.

And that’s the problem. Even a former student like Salle admits that “at least three generations of artists” doing “dumb stuff … is largely John’s fault.” Baldessari’s interesting niche bewitched too many people, creating a hackneyed academy of smarty-pants work that addresses the same issues in the same ways, over and over, just the way Baldessari and others of his generation did 40 years ago.”

 -Great article on John Baldessari (ostensibly inspired by the new exhibition at the Met) by Jerry Saltz
True?
Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, John Baldessari

Sculptures made of what?

Posted on by

It’s time to play “guess that material.” What do you think the tall white tower in the middle is made of? It was originally used, as you see it, to display flowers at a 18th C. Viennese table setting. Up at the Met through March, these sculptures and the surrounding exhibition examining the growth of porcelain making in Europe. The rest of the pieces on the table are porcelain, but these twin tower sculpture are made of sugar. These sugar paste towers have been holding fruit and flowers since the 1700s, which is kind of amazing. Unfortunately–the label notes- they are not edible.

Loot

Posted on by

Q: When is it legal to take an ancient and valuable cultural object out of its country of origin without the consent of the inhabitants?

A: Before 1970, the UNESCO cut-off date for pieces without provenance (often smuggled). Especially in the colonial empires of the 19th century, archeologists from England and France and Germany would race to get the best plunder for their home museums. If the book I’m reading now is correct, this has not changed so much as gone under the table.

The Euphronios Krater
I just got to the chapter ‘Tomb Raiders on Fifth Avenue’ in Loot, a book by Sharon Wexman describing the battle over stolen antiquities. Until last January, she describes how a red and black pot sat alone in its glass vitrine in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, labeled “Terra cotta calyx-krater. Greek, Attic 315 BC. Lent by the Republic of Italy.” This deceptively understated label did not mention that this was the Euphronious Krater, an exceptionally rare and fine vase.

Of course, it also did not mention it was raided from tombs nearby Rome as late 1971 when pieces of unclear provenance should not have been bought by museums. It turns out the curators were aware that it was stolen and did not care. Italy was immediately suspicious but could not prove that the items were indeed stolen until January of last year. The Euphronios krater was returned to a victorious Italy, where it symbolized the war against illicit trafficking of the nation’s cultural patrimony.

The Lydian Hoard
The Euphronios Krater is by no means the only questionable antiquity under the Met’s roof. In 1993, after much press and pressure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to give back the Lydian Hoard, a collection of coins and jewelry looted from Usak, Turkey in the 1960s. Turkey similarly celebrated the return of this excellent collection, and housed it in the town where it had originally been discovered. The tomb robbers who sold it came back to see it in its new home. All was well. Then in 2006, the masterpiece of the collection–a golden hippocampus–was discovered stolen. It had been replaced with a fake. Still unsolved, many suspect the museum director, a respected local archaeologist.

However, he is hardly the only person who might have done it given the museum’s lack of security. There was one guard who was also in charge of tickets, one small lock on the glass case holding the hippocampus, security cameras that didn’t work, and no visitors to witness anything–the museum estimates to have had 769 visitors in the first five years it opened to exhibit the collection. This state of underfunded disorganization is hardly limited to the museum in Usak. Theft is a problem in museums throughout Turkey.

As the Euphornios Krater and the Lydian Hoard suggest, the tide is beginning to flow the other way in the battle for restitution. You might have noticed with the recent opening of the Acropolis museum and renewed demands for the Elgin marbles. On one hand, antiquities belong in the land where they are discovered as part of the cultural heritage there. The blatant recent thefts are shocking and greedy. On the other, developing countries like Turkey or Egypt often have a richer cultural heritage than government budgets allow them to care for, causing problems of maintenance and security. ‘Universal’ museums such as the Met and the Louvre have the laudable purpose of giving their millions of visitors a round-the-world knowledge of civilization. Very little of the Met’s universal art collection would remain were we to begin returning things to their ancient homelands. How much restitution is enough?