Tuesday, April 04, 2006

NYC's like a graveyard

EDIT James Bailey makes sense of the Corcoran Galleseum of Art in the comments.

Scene 1:

At Art Basel, as told by NY's PaceWildenstein Owner Marc Glimcher:

"I overheard these young dealers, people who had booths in the fair, talking about what they’d do when the (art) market crashed—Hollywood producer, agent, etc.,"

Scene 2:

Check out that press promotion on the Sally Mann show at Gagosian:

"...Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951. She has won numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of major museums and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Corcoran Museum of Art."

Wait, what?


-According to the handy rent-the-Corcoran-out-for-a-wedding-PDF.

1 Comments:

Blogger Digital vs. Film said...

Dear Adrian,

I'm so glad someone else has noticed this about the Corcoran Museum of Art. I'm not betraying any secrets at this point (since the Gehry project tanked), so here's the deal:

It was Gehry's idea that the Corcoran Gallery of Art should legally rename itself as the Corcoran Museum of Art. Gehry viewed the word "Gallery" as being several steps beneath the word "Museum", in the case of the Corcoran. He thought that by elevating it through a name change to a "Museum" that that act would help inspire donations for the Gehry addition. In Gehry's mind the Corcoran Museum of Art sounds much more sophisticated than the Corocran Gallery of Art. The word "Gallery" popularly describes one space. The word "Museum" popularly describes a large facility with multiple spaces. Or at least that's the way Gehry saw it with the Corcoran.

Prior the departure of David Levy, the Corcoran was promoting (on its web site at least) some shows as being hosted at the Corcoran Museum of Art. Sally Mann's show was listed that way on their web site at the time.

I suspect that what was happening at the time was a slow and subtle change over to a new name. The idea being that they would just start calling it the Corcoran Museum of Art, and then one day just say, "Hey, we've been calling it that for some time now with no objections, so why don't we just go ahead and formally change the name."

Of course, Levy left, the Board of Trustees abandoned the Gehry project and the issue of any name change is probably moot at this point.

James

P.S. I've really enjoyed your DCist reviews. Write more, man!

9:31 AM, April 05, 2006  

Post a Comment

<< Home