His original piece ‘It’s Time To Free N.Y. Museums‘ at the NY Daily News.
Panero offers some course-correcting criticism for New York’s public museums, which may be depending too much upon ticket revenue, operating more like businesses.
You can get it in if you pay a penny, but they can pressure you to pay the full $25, mainly to get the higher amount from foreign tourists.
‘Thomas P. Campbell, the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has issued an “important message” responding to the criticism I and others have raised over the ticketing policies at his and other public-private institutions in New York City. The Director’s affable but ultimately defensive message tells me the Met has heard the criticism but hasn’t listened to it.’
Don’t forget the little people, and your core mission:
‘But big business can be bad business at a non-profit designed to serve the public good. The ever-increasing demands of what I call the museum-industrial complex was the topic of my essay in The New Criterion a year ago, titled “What’s a Museum?”
That piece here.
So, we’ve got the ‘educational-industrial complex’, the ‘military-industrial complex’, and now the ‘museum-industrial complex’.
We’ve got a lot of complexes.
This blog remains skeptical of people interested in broad definitions of the public good which often line up with their own interests, especially upon the ‘greatness’ model: ‘A great nation deserves great art.’
Such folks can eventually become entrenched on the public dime, having self-selected into a group of cultural gatekeepers, resistant to any change. They never manage to serve all the public, just usually the public as they’d like it to be, despite the good they can do.
From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?…From 2 Blowhards-We Need The Arts: A Sob Story
Related On This Site: MOMA is private, so perhaps it’s not as decadent if they display Tilda Swinton in a box:
Tilda Swinton At MOMA-From Arma Virumque: ‘Nightmare In A Box’
…From The City Journal Via Arts And Letters Daily: Andre Glucksman On “The Postmodern Financial Crisis”
Roger Scruton says keep politics out of the arts, and political judgment apart from aesthetic judgment…this includes race studies/feminist departments/gay studies etc.: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment
Goya’s Fight With Cudgels and Goya’s Colossus. A very good Goya page here.
Joan Miro: Woman… Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers…Some Quotes From Kant And A Visual Exercise
A Reaction To Jeff Koons ‘St John The Baptist’
Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’