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#DolnaArtUpdates : Italy's one step forward becomes the big leap for art

The Uffizi gallery in Florence. The new director will have to develop innovative cultural programmes and bring some creative flair to financing as government budgets are cut. Photograph: John Kellerman/Alamy

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/aug/18/italys-culture-minister-looks-abroad-overhaul-art-galleries-museums

Italy's culture minister looks abroad for overhaul of art galleries and museums
Dario Franceschini ruffles local feathers by appointing seven foreigners to head Italy’s most prestigious galleries, including Florence’s Uffizi and Accademia

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Italy’s culture ministry has appointed 20 new directors to manage some of its top museums, including Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, with a number of foreigners brought in to revamp the way the country’s vast heritage is presented to the public.

Fourteen art historians, four archaeologists, one cultural manager and a museum specialist make up the new directors, who will be at the forefront of cultural reform in Italy. The majority have international backgrounds and half are women, although the culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said nationality and gender had no influence on Tuesday’s appointments.

Beyond daily museum management, each director will be tasked with coming up with innovative cultural programmes and impressing both local and international visitors. The new bosses will also need to bring a creative flair to financing, making way for alternative funding models such as philanthropic donations in the face of tight government budgets.

Their appointment comes eight months after hopeful candidates responded to an advert in the Economist magazine, issuing an international call for directors at Italy’s world-class museums. Despite the stringent requirements, including at least five years’ managerial experience and a cultural or scientific specialism, the ministry’s plea attracted 1,222 applicants.

Eighty foreigners applied for the positions, and seven of the chosen directors hail from elsewhere in Europe, with three Germans, two Austrians, one British-Canadian and a French director taking up posts. A further four are Italians returning from positions abroad.

Florence’s Uffizi Gallery is to fall under the management of Eike Schmidt, a German expert in Renaissance and Baroque sculpture, who has previously worked at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Sotheby’s auction house in London.

The city’s Accademia Gallery, home to Michelangelo’s David statue, will also fall under German directorship. Cecilie Hollberg is a historian and cultural manager who has since 2010 been director of Germany’s Municipal Museum in Brunswick(Braunschweig).

The presence of foreigners at the top of the country’s most famous art galleries has raised eyebrows, although Franceschini said a focus on nationality was unjustified.

“They were chosen on the basis of their experience; naturally they need to understand Italian art and speak Italian,” he told the Guardian. “This discussion in the museum world doesn’t make sense, because it’s about the quality of their CV.”

The new directors will take up their posts between September and November and should be ready for a “great challenge”, the minister said. The directors will need to improve a wide range of museum services, such as bookshops and cafes, as well as handling some of the world’s most prized artworks.

“Some of these museums don’t have great numbers [of visitors] but they have remarkable collections and great potential,” Franceschini said.

Less well-known sites to get foreign directors are the National Gallery of Marche, where Peter Aufreiter, formerly of Vienna’s Belvedere museum, has been appointed, andMantua’s Ducal Palace, which will be run by his fellow Austrian Peter Assmann. Meanwhile, a third German director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, takes over at the Paestum archaeology park in southern Italy, while the nearbyCapodimonte Museum in Naples will be managed by Sylvain Bellenger, a French art historian.

Pinacoteca di Brera, a leading art gallery in Milan, will be taken over by James Bradburne, a British-Canadian architect and museum specialist, who arrives after nine years successfully managing Florence’s Strozzi Palace. He said the high proportion of foreign directors reflected the experience needed as the Italian government moves to make its museums more autonomous.

“Why foreigners? We have a lot more experience running museums that are structured like that,” he told the Guardian. “The [current] generation of Italian managers has risen through the ranks in the normal way; if you change the structure the local experience is going to be less relevant.”

But after a decade Bradburne said he believed a new generation of museum directors would be ready to take over Italy’s transformed cultural spaces. “We’re standing at the threshold of a moment of change and optimism. Italy has been a leader in the interpretation of art many times; it’s time for them to reclaim that leadership.”

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-downtown-dance-party-deja-vu-at-the-guggenheim-1439853431

A Downtown Dance-Party Déjà Vu at the Guggenheim
‘Stamina,’ a new work by New York artist Agathe Snow, attempts to revisit a wild 2005 party

Agathe Snow’s ‘Stamina’ will make the Guggenheim Museum a night club Thursday. Above, the artist in front of some of her sculptures.PHOTO: JOHN TAGGART FOR THE WALL STREET

By: ANDY BATTAGLIA

At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum this week, one artist is testing whether it is possible to revisit the wild, uninhibited nights of her youth—with a 24-hour dance party and performance event that peers back through time.

“Stamina,” a new work by New York artist Agathe Snow, will employ live bands, DJs, a cash bar and a flashing light-up disco floor in an attempt to summon the spirit of a fabled downtown party she threw a decade ago. Starting Thursday at 6 p.m. and open to the public all night, the déjà-vu event will unfold alongside a 24-hour-long edit of archival video footage from the original party, playing on a nearly 30-foot-wide screen.

The original, clandestine party—held in a vacant building near ground zero—drew a coterie of then art-world up-and-comers who were part of a gritty, often drug-fueled, downtown scene.

Among Ms. Snow’s 300-some attendees back then were the photographer Ryan McGinley,one of the youngest artists to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art;Dan Colen, an artist now represented by the powerful Gagosian Gallery; neo-pop artistNate Lowman, and Ms. Snow’s late ex-husband Dash Snow, a graffiti-tagger-turned-artist who was a scion of the renowned art-collecting de Menil family.

“Everyone was just basically starting out,” Ms. Snow said of the era of the party, “so it wasn’t an art project. It was a community-building, community-affirming project.”

The original premise for the 2005 affair was a sort of dance-marathon contest, to be filmed for a potential TV show. There was live music by bands including A.R.E. Weapons, active then in the city’s electroclash scene. DJs spun tunes by the Smiths and New York Dolls member Johnny Thunders, whose 1978 song “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” blasted through an especially festive moment.

Nine cameras rolled throughout the night, filming dancers as well as staged bits of drama and interviews with bleary-eyed attendees. After a few hours, the dance-marathon concept went astray.

“Now it’s more a documentary of all of us close to ground zero,” Ms. Snow said of her record of the energy and hedonism integral to her era’s downtown milieu.

“Those days were dramatic and riveting and really creative. It was a rock ’n’ roll time,” said Lizzi Bougatsos, an artist-musician who will perform as part of the “Stamina” event in her duo I.U.D. “There were a lot of drugs and a wild sex-on-the-streets kind of vibe.”

Much of the art made in Ms. Snow’s circle drew from the same anarchic, renegade spirit. Mr. McGinley’s early photos documented his cadre of friends—always in motion, often barely clad, taking drugs, sexually cavorting. Messrs. Snow and Colen, for their part, became known for ransacking hotel rooms into what they called “hamster nests,” complete with a bed of shredded phone books and tattered paper on the floor.

The party footage in “Stamina” portrays that hard-partying, rebellious culture.

“People were making out, I saw myself making out with some guy and have no recollection. It’s like this diary we kept away in a dark place and now it’s here for everyone to see,” said Ms. Snow.

“Imagine giving an interview at 7 in the morning in a place like that, totally drunk, totally high. Now they have to see it 10 years later,” she said of her friends, some of whom will be in attendance for “Stamina.”

The illicit behavior took its toll, leading to the loss of many movers in the scene. An especially high-profile fatality was the young Mr. Snow, who died alone in a hotel room at the age of 27, of an apparent heroin overdose.

A hanging mobile sculpture that Ms. Snow made as a portrait of Dash is currently on view at the Guggenheim as part of “Storylines,” an exhibition of contemporary art from the museum’s collection. Related work in the show, which focuses on art with narrative storytelling aspirations, includes photographs by Mr. McGinley—including one of Mr. Snow in a deli on Avenue A—and paintings by Mr. Lowman.

The Guggenheim event will have a bar serving drinks until 4 a.m. on the rotunda’s ground floor, which will transform into a breakfast bar in the morning, with juice and muffins. When the museum opens for regular business at 10 a.m., visitors will happen into the party still in progress.

“I actually don’t know how I’m going to stay up for 24 hours—I’m a bit terrified,” said Ms. Snow, who vowed she has parted with her wild, youthful ways. Now 39, she lives on Long Island with a partner and a 5-year-old son.

But those downtown memories remain close to her heart.

“I never had the sense that you could be young and speak your mind and make art and people would listen to you,” said Ms. Snow, who made her way to New York after growing up in France. “You don’t get that sense in Europe. New York is amazing for that: getting a voice when you are young.”

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POW! WOW! Transforms Long Beach, Calif. Into A Canvas For Street Art

POW! WOW! Transforms Long Beach, Calif. Into A Canvas For Street Art

By Contributor- Ann Binlot

Over at the Varden Hotel in Long Beach, California, a psychedelic, monochrome mural by artist Tristan Eaton attracts stares from passersby. Across town at an apartment building called the Ocean Chateau, artist Cryptik covered its wall with ancient script. On East 4th Street, a mural by the French artist Fafi depicts two of her sassy characters frolicing before a wall of flowers. The streets and walls of the city of Long Beach, California have been transformed into an art gallery, all because of POW! WOW! Long Beach, an initiative founded by artist Jasper Wong in response to the dearth of culture in Hong Kong while he was living there.

Tristan Eaton’s mural at the Varden

“I started my own gallery from the carcass of a defunct restaurant in the outer edges of Hong Kong,” said Wong. “The very first exhibition was the inaugural POW! WOW! The goal was to champion collaboration,process and public engagement. I wanted to remind the artists of why we paint in the first place.”

POW! WOW! since launched in Hawaii and Taipei, and finally landed stateside in Long Beach last June, calling on nearly two dozen artists who include — Aaron de la Cruz, Jeff Soto, Hueman, Benjie Escobar, Jeff Staple, Madsteez, Push and more — to adorn the city’s walls with their art. Organizers reached out to various property owners across Long Beach to see who would be willing to have their buildings turned into a canvas for the sake of public art. The results were a citywide exhibition that demonstrates the way that art can affect a community.  “What artists want in the end is to create, and they just wanted that canvas, and that scale of the canvas for them is so great, that they just really wanted to resonate,” said Julia Huang, CEO of advertising agency interTrend, who is also one of the directors of POW! WOW! Long Beach.

Fafi’s POW! WOW! Long Beach mural

“The artists are a combination of long time cohorts as well as fresh faces that we’ve never worked with before,” adds Wong. “We also try our best to include a few local artists into the mix as well. Both Jeff McMillan and Bumblebee are Long Beach artists representing their city.”

POW! WOW! Long Beach also extends into the city’s largest art institution, the Long Beach Museum of Art, through the exhibition Vitality and Verve: Transforming the Urban Landscape, which brings together dozens of street artists, like Aaron Horkey, Alex Yanes, Andrew Schoultz, Audrey Kawasaki, Brendan Monroe, Brandon Shigeta, Cryptik, Esao Andrews, Greg ‘Craola’ Simkins, Hot Tea, James Bullough, Soto, John S. Culqui, Low Bros, Meggs, Nosego, Nychos, Saber, and Eaton.

A collaboration between Madsteez and Hueman

The exhibition, which is on view through October, opens with a mural by Los Angeles graffiti artist Saber, who painted a tribute to unarmed victims of police shootings. Australian artist Meggs, recreated a bullet hole, which shows a graphic of a man holding again juxtaposed against a Native American, which on the other side has a sign that reads “Not the Enemy.” Monroe painted a trippy black-and-white section ideal for selfie enthusiasts. “There are people who support the museum, and come to the museum, they are now looking at art in the streets and understanding it,” said museum director Ron Nelson, who is also one of the directors of POW! WOW! Long Beach. “The same thing is happening with, there’s enough names and a lot of street cred in the exhibition, that people who would never come to a museum are visiting and feeling safe to do so.”

The main objective for POW! WOW! Long Beach is to bring the community together through beautifying the city, as well as putting a global spotlight on the city, while educating its residents about art. With engagement and museum attendance far exceeding the organizers’ expectations, it looks like they’ve succeeded. According to Wong, “The name speaks for itself. “POW!” is the impact that art has on its viewer. “WOW!” is the reaction to it. Together they form a term that is a gathering to celebrate art, music and culture.”

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