A Billionaire's Eye for Art Shapes Her Singular Museum - New York Times

Yet her mission is unlike those of her predecessors, or of more recent art patrons like Ronald S. Lauder and his Neue Galerie. They set out to put great works on display in cultural capitals like New York and Boston. Instead, Ms. Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art — the first major institution dedicated to American artists in 50 years, to be housed in a building more than twice the size of the current Whitney Museum of American Art — seeks to bring high art to middle America here in this town of 35,000 that is best known as the home of Wal-Mart. 

Ms. Walton, the daughter of Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, has worked on the museum for nearly a decade, but has said little about it in public until now. In a recent interview at Town Branch, her family home here, she said she wanted to turn Bentonville into an international destination for art lovers when the museum opens on Nov. 11. At the moment the most significant nearby cultural attractions are two hours away: a museum of Western and American Indian art in Tulsa, Okla., and, in the other direction, the country-music magnet of Branson, Mo.

“For years I’ve been thinking about what we could do as a family that could really make a difference in this part of the world,” said Ms. Walton, who is 61. “I thought this is something we desperately need, and what a difference it would have made were it here when I was growing up.”

The 201,000-square-foot museum was designed by the Boston architect Moshe Safdie for a site around two ponds on 120 acres of former Walton family land. Named for the nearby Crystal Spring, the museum will display top-flight works by American masters from the colonial era to the present, with the largest concentrations coming from the 19th and 20th centuries. Although the collection — currently about 600 paintings and sculptures — is still small by the standards of big museums, it is growing at a steady clip.

“She has not just been concentrating on what could be perceived as the greatest hits in American art,” said John Wilmerding, an art historian and professor at Princeton University, who has been advising Ms. Walton for seven years and is now on the Crystal Bridges board. “She has collected the work of some of these artists in depth,” quietly amassing substantial bodies of work by figures like Martin Johnson Heade, Stuart Davis, George Bellows and John Singer Sargent.

Ms. Walton, who has been an art collector most of her life, turned to buying art specifically for the museum in 2005, resulting in a years-long spending spree that has made her a recognized force in the art market. She has been one of those mysterious anonymous buyers at auctions and at galleries who often pay top dollar and has spent many tens of millions of dollars on works like Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington from 1797 ($8.1 million), Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” from 1849 ($35 million) and Norman Rockwell’s 1943 “Rosie the Riveter” ($4.9 million).

She has also bought more recent works, including a Jasper Johns “Alphabets” painting from 1960-62 (priced at $11 million) and a 1985 Warhol silkscreen of Dolly Parton and a 2009 Chuck Close triptych depicting Bill Clinton (prices unknown). (She is hoping that both Ms. Parton and Mr. Clinton, a friend, will attend the opening.)

Her museum has commissioned several major site-specific works, including a giant silver tree by Roxy Paine that sits at the entrance and a hypnotic large-scale light installation by James Turrell. (The museum’s director, Don Bacigalupi, recruited nearly two years ago from the Toledo Museum of Art, is a specialist in contemporary art and has been encouraging Ms. Walton to expand the museum’s holdings by living artists.)

Museum officials said they were planning for about 250,000 visitors in their first year and expect an annual operating budget of $16 million to $20 million. In addition to the 120 full-time jobs the institution is creating, they said, it will pump millions of tourist dollars into northwest Arkansas.

Ms. Walton first started thinking seriously about building an art museum on family land in the late 1990s and brought it up a few times at the meetings the family holds three times a year. She felt she needed the backing of her nieces and nephews, she said, because the land would have eventually become theirs. (Ms. Walton, who is divorced, has no children.)

“That decision brewed for a year and a half,” she said in her Arkansas drawl, before there was unanimous agreement.

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RISD names new director of Museum of Art - Providence Business News

PROVIDENCE - John W. Smith will be the new director of the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art, beginning in September.

Smith, currently director of the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, will take over for Ann Woolsey. Woolsey has served as interim director of the RISD Museum of Art since August 2009, following the resignation of former museum director Hope Alswang.

"John is an admired leader, a skilled fundraiser, and passionate about connecting people with art in meaningful ways,” said William Tsiaras, incoming chair of the museum board of governors, in a June 16 release.

While at the Smithsonian, Smith raised nearly $15 million private and foundation philanthropic support, oversaw the "landmark" acquisition of the Leo Castelli Gallery archive, and led the project to digitize the Archives' collections and redesign its website.

Smith said the strength of the museum’s collections, its “gifted staff, and connection to one of the world's leading schools of art and design provide limitless opportunities for fresh and innovative programming.”

Prior to joining the Archives of American Art, Smith served for 11 years at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pa. As assistant director for collections, exhibitions, and research from 2000 to 2006, Smith raised funds, organized exhibitions, published books and oversaw all aspects of the permanent collection.

Smith also served as chief archivist at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1990 to 1994, visiting archivist at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, in 1991, and as founding curator of special collections and archives at the Chicago Park District from 1988 to 1990.

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China's art-market boom threatens Europe - MarketWatch

By Virginia Harrison, MarketWatch

SYDNEY (MarketWatch) — Forty years ago, it was illegal to own a piece of art in China. These days, it’s the second-largest art market in the world.

A new wealthy class, along with a lack of investment options, has propelled China’s ascendancy in the global art trade, which last year was worth around $63 billion. The United States dominates at about $21 billion.

As China’s slice of the international market has grown steadily, Europe’s has declined. As a whole, the development of Asia’s art trade poses a real threat to Europe, where taxes are rising along with a perception that it’s a tough place to do business.

Sotheby’s Zhang Xiaogang’s “Forever Lasting Love (Triptych)” sold in April for approximately $10.2 million — a world record for contemporary Chinese art.

“The same thing happened to Paris, the center of the art trade in the 1950s. The taxes and regulations became just too onerous on buyers and sellers,” according to economist Dr. Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics. “The whole market shifted from Paris to the U.S. and the U.K.“

Sales already are drifting east. The value of China’s art market — which includes mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan — has more than doubled since 2009.

In March, a report by the European Fine Art Foundation found China was behind only the United States as the world’s biggest art market by value, coming in ahead of the United Kingdom for the first time.

But as Europe grapples with its business challenges, China confronts a serious image problem: The Chinese art market is saturated with tales of fakes, fraud and underhand practices — a barrier to international buyers and longer-term success.

A flood of works and the money to buy them have supported the rapid domestic expansion of China’s art market. “There’s a rich history of thousands of years of art in China, so there’s a huge amount of supply coming onto the market for the first time,” McAndrew said. See a slide show of recent auctions in Asian art breaking price records.

The number of billionaires in China nearly doubled this year to 115, while the United States added just 10 in the Forbes list of the world’s richest people.

Anthony Lin, the former chairman of Christie’s Asia, as well as chairman of Christie’s Hong Kong and Taiwan, is a now a fine art dealer based in Hong Kong. He said a lack of investment options — including an overheated housing market — is steering the Chinese to art.

“In China, they don’t have open money markets or commodity markets. For the amount of wealth that has been generated, there’s not many options for investment. The art market is one of the few areas where there is quite a strong investment position being taken,” Lin commented.

McAndrew notes China is “quite undeveloped for the amount of cash floating around,” and believes that local buyers have embraced the money-making potential of art more quickly than other societies.

“Chinese are more interested in the investment angle of buying and selling art than other countries,” she said. “Especially in Europe, people sort of look at you with disdain. The Chinese are taking it on straight away.”

The year 2006 “was the first time we really saw China coming into the global marketplace in any big way — at about 5% of the global value of sales,” elaborated McAndrew, who prepared the March report for the European Fine Art Foundation, known as TEFAF.

“Last year it took a huge jump into second place, and pushed out the U.K. It’s a big deal in Europe, because there are a lot of fears that the art trade is shifting out of Europe anyway and going more to the U.S. and China,” she said.

China was the fastest growing market for contemporary art, according to the TEFAF report. Traditional sectors including porcelain, ceramics and Chinese painting and calligraphy also saw record auction prices, more than tripling year over year.

“Chairman Mao was in power until the end of the 1970s, and it was illegal to own a piece of art or to exchange or inherit it. It was a closed shop to the rest of the world. China has come from virtually nothing to be a huge global power in a short space of time,” McAndrew added.

The detention of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and a crackdown on political dissent on the mainland is pushing Hong Kong's artists to creatively express their concerns. Video courtesy of AFP.

In the southeast Australian city of Melbourne, Marjorie Ho founded the East & West Art gallery 38 years ago, exhibiting Asian art and antiques. “The sorts of paintings that I bought in the 1970s when China first opened didn’t sell. Not even to the big boys,” she said.

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Is Modern <b>Art</b> Intentionally Obscure

While browsing this morning I stumbled on an interesting take on the obscurity of modern art as some kind of conspiracy theory of the art elite. Yeah, it does sound exaggerated and I beg to disagree with it. But it's a nice starting point for a discussion I'd like you to join as well. Is the modern art really hat obscure? Is it made that way by intention of an elite that tries to protect its position?

But let's start from the beginning, by the question the mentioned article tries to answer: What is art?

In our time, the answer to this question is under the control of the art elite. The answer to the question is simple:

“Art” is x,

where x is a variable. The value of x is approximately “something that an ordinary person could never understand.”

The reason that x is a variable, and not a constant, is because its value must continually change. If ordinary people begin to understand what x is, then the value must change, so that they do not understand what x is. The reason for this is simple also: If people understood what x was, then they could answer the question “What is Art?” themselves, and there would be no need for the art elite. Thus, the art elite must continually change x, as a matter of survival.

I told you it sounds like a conspiracy theory. While I am usually fond of conspiracy theories, this one doesn't stand.

During the history, art is changing because everything around it is changing. Art doesn't live on its own, disconnected from us and our world. As the world, our civilization and culture are changing, so does the art. Those are inseparable. Most of the time, those changes are slow and subtle, but sometimes things turn a bit more drastic as the case was as we were approaching the 20th century.

I'm not even sure if we can safely say that every change in art was towards something that "ordinary person could never understand". European art in the middle ages was primarily intended to depict and clarify biblical themes to a common person who couldn't read. Renaissance turned to more earthly themes and contexts – another step towards the common person.

The only time when art seemed to go against easy understanding starts somewhere in the second half of the photo by Jeff Tabaco19th century with the shy beginnings of what we call the modern art. But if you look closely at the history of that time, you'll see that it wasn't only the art that was changing. Great empires collapsed just recently, Second Industrial Revolution did its part in creating the whole new world, sciences and medicine started their mind-blowing development. World of that time was nothing like it was just a couple of decades before.

If you'd like more colorful details, that's the time when blue jeans, basketball, volleyball and first record players were invented. Freud was making the first notions about psychoanalysis. Red Cross was formed and Olympic Games revived. Which all opened the door for the start of the 20th century and everything that came with it. Cubism and other "hard to understand" art movements included.

So it's hard to defend the assertion that movements of the modern art were invented by the art elite to obscure the art and secure their positions. Everything was turning upside down. Not o mention that the art elite of the time was strongly against those movements – impressionism, fauvism and cubism were all derogatory terms at those times and most of those artists were ridiculed and starving.

It's also hard to assert that those artists tried to obscure the art themselves. They were just offering new perceptions and depictions of the world just as the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics did in physics. Just as jazz did in music. And while one can say that those are obscure and impossible to understand as well, it's not that they were invented with that intention. Thing is that we still have to get on terms with the changes that early 20th century brought, but that's a whole new topic to explore.

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<b>Art</b> History Toys! Andy Warhol � <b>Art</b> History Ramblings

Another plushie I bought from Little Thinkers.  They seem to love dressing their artists in red.  By the way, the hair on its head?  Just as wildly messy when I purchased it.  Which puzzles me because his hair always looked relatively neat.  I do love his snooty pout.  Also, your eyes do not deceive you, they dressed him in dark jeans.

But why red glasses?  Seems an odd choice.

Categories: Andy Warhol, Art History Toys, Artists . Tags: Andy Warhol, plushies, toy . Author: Catherine Be the first to like this post.

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Fine <b>Art</b> Instruction School Uses MySpace to Increase Online <b>...</b>

Fine Art Instruction School Uses MySpace to Increase Online Presence and SEO

Mission Renaissance, the world’s largest fine art instruction program, has launched their official MySpace page.

Mission Renaissance will be using the social media power of MySpace to promote their students art work, give drawing and painting tips to the public, and to provide a platform for special announcements regarding their fine art drawing and painting instruction programs.

According to Mission Renaissance CEO – Ted Prescott – creating a professional MySpace profile is all part of the plan of increasing Mission Renaissance’s online presence, which fits into the larger plan of the schools overall expansion.

“This year we will be aggressively increasing our online presence as part of our expansion strategy. There are over 100 million MySpace users, eBay moves 40 billion dollars in merchandise every year, and RSS feeds send news and communication all throughout the world. We will ensure that our company is taking advantage of all the internet has to offer. Our online campaign will include mostl aspects of social media, commercial outlets such as eBay, and professional RSS news outlets to increase our online presence. As well as to further strengthen our companies branding identity and to promote both our in-house fine art drawing and painting courses as well as our ‘Art of Drawing’ home instruction DVDs and online drawing instruction courses.”

Mission Renaissance has hired full time web developer and internet marketing professional Eric Hines to help implement their online marketing strategy. This strategy also includes a professional eBay store promoting their art supplies and drawing instruction DVDs, an Amazon store, a Yahoo shopping store, a MySpace and Facebook profile, videos on YouTube sharing drawing and painting tips, rss press releases, and a complete search engine optimization overhaul of their website, http://www.thegluckmethod.com

Eric Hines – the new Mission Renaissance web developer – has this to say regarding the Mission Renaissance MySpace profile.

‘I am very excited to be working with Mission Renaissance. The last SEO project I completed was for a large Los Angeles based home improvement company. With the help of fellow web development specialist Bjorn Enki we were able to secure a #1 position for them in both Google and Yahoo for their specific keywords. The results in the increase of estimates and resulting sales was quite impressive. I am looking forward to creating the same level of traffic and internet buzz with Mission Renaissance.

We are opening a Mission Renaissance MySpace profile for many reasons. The first reason is to provide a social media network where we can make announcements and keep in communication with our students. We have over 3,000 students in our 20 drawing and painting instruction studios every week and untold thousands using our ‘Art of Drawing’ home instruction DVDs.

Second, using press releases, a link strategy, and developing buzz about our MySpace profile we intend to have Google index it quickly into their search engines and get it to a Google page rank of 4 or 5 within a few months. Thus providing our MySpace profile with outside traffic. Unfortunately a high page rank on MySpace won’t be of any use in regards to outbound links to our main website.

MySpace recently has added a function called msplinks. It uses a 302 redirect function to handle unwanted spam links. However it completely wipes out any ranking power any legitimate links have as well. The traffic still arrives to your site though and we are confident that our website is interesting and useful enough that this new flow of traffic will still result in people linking to our site.

Third, most of our students are of the younger demographic. Social media tools such as MySpace and Facebook are THE way that these kids, teens and young adults are communicating with each other. Some of their friends will of course see our logo in their friends list, and thus pay a visit to our profile and hopefully our website, where they too can learn how to draw and paint like their friend is.

Fourth, to create a useful and fun-to-visit MySpace profile. We intend to do this by posting our student’s art work, providing drawing and painting tips, and announcing exciting news, such as our students selling their artwork to help raise money for favorite charity or donation of art classes to private and public schools.

Of course making the profile attractive is important too. The students are work is gorgeous and completely compliments the layout. Even the tempo of the profile music in the background matches the same tempo of our slide show showing off our student’s art work.

Making our profile beautiful and fun to visit will inevitably help get links to both our MySpace.com profile as well as our main website. Which of course raises the Google page rank and position in the search engines.

I am also excited about releasing our eBay store later this month. There is a wealth of potential to sell our drawing and paint supplies as well as our fine art drawing instruction DVDs worldwide.

When it comes down to it it’s all part of getting our company into a viral marketing run.’

You can visit their MySpace profile at http://www.myspace.com/missionrenaissance. Send them an invite, they will be glad to call you friend.

Mission Renaissance was founded by renowned Fine Artist and educator Larry Gluck in 1975. Mr. Gluck and continues to expand teaching more students how to draw and paint via the patented Gluck Method every year.

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Tags: Amazon Store, Art Instruction, Art Supplies, Art Work, Billion Dollars, Commercial Outlets, Ebay, Ebay News, Ebay Store, Eric Hines, Expansion Strategy, Fine, Increase, Instruction, Myspace, Myspace Profile, Online, Online Marketing Strategy, Painting Courses, Painting Tips, Presence, Prweb, School, Special Announcements, Students Art, Time Web, Uses, Web Developer

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Midtown the <b>Art</b> Lover's Paradise : Coffee for me

Article by Larry Austin

New York is definitely an art lover’s paradise. From Theatre District to Chelsea the art freak is treated with the best of Broadway and modern art. The thriving art scene of Midtown Manhattan brags a range of art galleries, unusual art exhibitions,Broadway theatres as well as a range of other theatres guaranteed to complete your hunt for arty skill and craft.

For a modern experience try the downtown Chelsea neighborhood where in every nook and corner you will find illustrations of modern art. This popular art heaven brags more than 200 art galleries featuring both the upcoming and established artists. To make sure you navigate through this labyrinth of Galleries successfully its best to visit their individual websites as you plan you trip so that you can map out a plan to include the best exhibitions in your agenda.

For a less modern encounter try the world famous Museum of Modern Art – home to a sweeping collection of contemporary and historical art collections. And while you are at it explore the painting and sculpture galleries, photo exhibitions and if time permits treat yourself to one of the daily film programs at the museum’s theatres.

The Theatre District of the Midtown area caters particularly to the theatre buffs, as it is home to most of the Broadway theatres as well as a range of other theatres including movie theatres and other places of entertainment. The area extends from the 40th Street to 54th Street and from west of Sixth Avenue to East of Eighth Avenue including the famous Time Square which features some of the popular Broadway theatres. And this particular section of Broadway in the Midtown section of the New York City borough of Manhattan is labeled the ‘Great White Way’ – a stretch of Broadway well known as the height of the great American theatre industry.

If your trip to the Broadway is without much prior plans, simply step in to the New York City Theatre to sample some of the finest theatre in the world. Home to the most popular shows, concerts, comedies and operas, from award winning productions to all time favorites and the most enjoyable musicals, the New York City Theatre can certainly add glam to your visit to Midtown.

About the Author

arry Austin is a freelance journalist who writes on travel related topics such as pennsylvania_hotel-H0471.html”>hotel and destination reviews etc.He is currently working for roomsnet.com which offers visitors the option of world wide hotel bookings. roomsnet.com offers many last minute hotels_in_midtown-s0015.html”>hotels in midtown Manhattan hotel deals for holidaymakers.

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