Gosh! Miami ART Basel 2012 offered the goods we are willing to travel for. I focused, this year, on seeing the main show. I saw it during the vernissage, or private, viewing and almost every other day during my brief, five day, intense trip to Miami Art Basel 2012. I returned to take another look, last night with art-pal, street artist and chalk activist, Alex Schaefer and his friend, the very bright, Nick Christos. Yes. The fair did not fail to razzle and dazzle the innocents, moi included. What a spectacle! So many layers of “value,” it was enough to boggle my monkey-mind. I hadn’t appreciated what a feat it is to create an art fair, before this trip when my focused shifted, TO THE BIGGER PICTURE.
On Friday morning, in the rush of the gigantic energized art fair, I met Geoffrey Dietch. We exchanged a few words. I had the audacity to ask him about his future at MOCA, my BAD. Dietch, made an immediate positive impression on me. I get the strong feeling of a his being a person I'd like to meet again. Earlier, the same Friday morning, I had the pleasure of briefly meeting Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and after Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles at the "Conversations," section, Moderated by András Szántó, Author and Consultant to arts and philanthropic organizations, New York
“Conversations,” which I caught by chance, as I arrived early at the fair on Friday for a meeting that never happened. “Come in, YOU are press,” said the guard, and I figured he was right. Besides, “Conversations.” I like to talk and listen. Thus, I crossed the white curtain and found a place to stand. Much to my surprise, the director of The Metropolitan Museum of ART was speaking. Now... IF you know FRAU.... You know I’m NUTS for the MET! I’ve spent so much time there. As a kid it was a playground and when I came into some share of maturity it became a quiet hide-out, a place to go; NEVER on the weekends, but before college I was there almost every week, and during college, when I studied art history at Columbia University, i’d visit several times a week. Growing UP in NYC, the MET, like Columbia University, familiar as a mother. These grand institutions feed New Yorkers little bits of peace, quiet, reflection. They give so much food for thought, over and over nourishing the public’s curiosity and giving visitors vibrant samples of glorious past to chew on. Ah!
“Solace,” is a word that Mr. Campbell used to describe one of the many functions of the Metropolitan provides the residents of Manhattan. They visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in times of crisis, after a storm like Sandy or in the tear soak days after September 11. The stability. The peace. The bling of heroes, conquerers shining eternally bright and alluring. The treasure house reassures the people that life goes on. Empires crumble and in the rubble new sprouts of life.
I fell right into Mr. Campbell's narration of his vision for the museum and I found it... well... British. He is stuck in an ideal of EUROPEAN excellence and translating that glory is his mission. I respect that. I do. However, as he spoke of his pride to head the collection, without a moment’s reflection on the fact that the pristine, unending past which is celebrated at the Met must take into account alternate narratives of peoples not represented by the European hegemony.
Mr. Campbell’s speech, left me with a feeling that colonialism is not over. It has morphed to producing instructions in 18 languages and yet the perspective is that English, the more enunciated and Oxford, the better... and leadership, its sound and look hasn’t changed with the changes in who visits the museum. It has simply grown to embrace these hordes and educate them in standard Western idolatry.
“I am the child of the museum. The one that learned to play, gently, in its quiet halls. I am the one that loves the Pompeii Room, the Kouros, Gauguin’s carved cane form a part of my knowing, my imagining.” I realized that my favorite museum in the world, the MET, is a fabulous dinosaur, destined to LIVE forever but not necessarily leading in adaption to the current climate of multi-cultural interest in the European past as a PART not necessarily, end-ALL-be-ALL culmination of human potential. Before me was a man whose sheer training, the accent revealing a life-time of study in which FUN was never a priority, was palpable across time and space.
In contrast, Mr. Govan, director of LACMA looks at the world, from another perspective. His understanding starts with now and the past is not necessarily a relentless parade of European glory. The present, its light, and the importance of contemporary artists LACMA leads in vision of the world, starting with NOW and then filling in the blanks. LACMA serves the community from a place of interest in the present tense.
I see it very fitting that Mr. Govan began his tenure at LACMA with Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008). The work is an absolute statement of JOY in the present tense. It is formal and unique. It moves and invites. Bravo, LACMA!
NOTE: one year later, the day before yesterday, I happen to return to LACMA, this time with my dear husband in tow, to see the Turrell exhibition for the second time. My eyeballs were tickled by a chance sighting of LACMA’s head, Mr. Govan in a well cut suit. What a dashing Male Muse for www.talkinggrid.com to focus ON!