Art Scoping

It's hard to run a museum at any time, let alone during a pandemic. In this episode we glean some wisdom from Brian Ferriso, long-serving director of the Portland Art Museum. We cover the recent spate of deaccessioning among museums, the quest for updated thinking about museum goals, his focus on contributed versus earned income, the need for strategy in making new acquisitions, some exhibitions that have resonated with his audience, and the particulars of running a museum in the Pacific Northwest, including obligations to the pursuit of social justice.

Art museum directors are caught up in competing travails, from financial shortfalls to racial reckoning to ill-advised deaccessioning. But talented curators across the U.S. are still managing to bring artistic talent to the fore, and Veronica Roberts, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, is among the museum field’s most imaginative, capable, and humane. We retrace her steps at the leading museums in New York to her adopted state of Texas, with detours to artists’ studios, including those of Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, and Diedrick Brackens. And we touch on her use of Instagram to champion emerging artists as well as flora, fauna, and architecture.

The digitally inclined will feast on this conversation with Robert Stein, among the art world’s most insightful and accomplished protagonists, who has conjured up and implemented innovative practices affecting museumgoers around the globe, both online and in person. We caught up with him during his first month as the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Deputy Director and Chief Experience Officer, and covered a host of topics, from virtual museum experiences during the pandemic to new research in the field, consulting enterprises offered by museums, online experiments that bore fruit, and a prediction about post-pandemic in-person conferences.

Museum directors are juggling more than ever before, and few as ably as Susan M. Taylor, the Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art since 2010. We retrace the beginning of her tenure, five years after Hurricane Katrina, and fast forward to the city’s appeal to international visitors, her 6 ½-acre expansion of the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, increased appointments of women museum directors, how she has addressed challenges in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the need to balance art history with the art of our time, and her tenure as president of the Association of Art Museum Directors.

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So you’re up all night, wondering: Should I build an art museum? Before you hire an architect, best to start by calling Rich Cherry, Managing Partner at Museum Operations. He’s served as an executive director, COO, deputy director, CTO and CIO at several leading organizations, from the Albright-Knox to the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC), and designed and built new museums and non-profits from the ground up, including the Broad Art Museum and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. He’s also co-chair of MuseWeb, the largest museum innovation and technology conference in the world, with about 800 attendees from more than 40 countries each year. We cover the real sources of museum revenue, retrofitting old buildings to limit their carbon footprint and load them up with connectivity, running private v. public museums, working with starchitects vs. architects, innocent (read unfounded) assumptions in the boardroom, how museum expansions sometimes make as much (aka as little) sense as building sports stadiums, and the challenges of coaxing museums to share data and technological innovations.

Nostalgic for a nation of laws, not of men? In eager anticipation of a Justice Department dedicated to something other than xenophobia and the promotion of imperial rule, we turn to intellectual property guru Jaime Michael Wolf, an attorney who sorts out claims and counter-claims involving publishers, artists and their estates, designers and even chefs. We cover social media’s damnation of memory issued to the soon-to-be-evicted tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, how copyright is adapting to everything from the Internet to tattoos, a clear definition of Fair Use, Justice Souter’s opinion in support of 2 Live Crew, which yielded the legal principle of “transformativeness”, a new small claims court in the Copyright Office, solutions to the proliferation of cybersquatting, phony Apple stores in China, and much more. After listening, you’ll be ready for the first post-pandemic cocktail party to show off newly acquired knowledge about IP and the arts.

“Be kind rewind” is what video rental stores used to implore their customers before VHS tapes were returned. Since the end of the year is finally here, we’re replaying memorable snippets from some of 2020’s guests on the podcast, along with thoughts about the arts in the United States, as massive quantities of sage are being readied for cleansing 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and while we’re all lining up for a vaccine. With sincere thanks to all our guests, here’s to a new start in January.

Art comes in all shapes and sizes--and sometimes it shows up on your screen. To separate the digital wheat from the chaff we turn to one of the world’s leading authorities in the field, Christiane Paul, author of Digital Art (Thames & Hudson), now in its 3rd edition. Prof. Paul is Director and Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and Professor in the School of Media Studies at the New School in New York, and Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She conceived and has for two decades overseen both the Whitney’s artport website and its new media exhibitions, beginning with Data Dynamics in 2001. Her talk at Tate last year provides a concise history of the field. We dive into the origins of digital art, preserving Net Art, museum collaborations, augmented reality, collecting versus licensing content, how artists navigate the commercial colonization of the Web, and the complex boundaries between acts of protest and anti-social hacking.

Many museums have emulated commercial attractions over the last generation—and now find themselves struggling back to life during the pandemic with reduced buzz, attendance, and contributions. For solutions we go to the source: a top advertising expert, Brad Brinegar, Chairman of McKinney, to help get their messaging aligned with these exceptional circumstances. He is predictably averse to thinking of museums as commercial preserves, and instead prescribes clever ways of reaching audiences, drawing on his studies in anthropology, as well as sharing wisdom about how empathy motivates consumer behavior. We cover effective advertising, including the Sherwin-Williams Emerald Paint campaign, how McKinney is going about achieving greater diversity in his sector, tv spots that went viral on the web, why art and art history can’t catch a break on television, how streaming services are challenging his field, and along the way remember shared experiences at the Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth’s humor magazine, whose alumni range from Theodor Seuss Geisel to Budd Schulberg, Buck Henry, Robert Reich, and Mindy Kaling.

You might think that COVID-19 has slowed everything to a near halt. That’s not the case with the looting of archaeological sites and proliferating sales of stolen objects online. For insight we turn to Tess Davis, Executive Director of The Antiquities Coalition, which battles cultural racketeering and the illicit trade in ancient art and artifacts. Founded by Deborah Lehr, who serves as Chairman of its Board of Directors, The Antiquities Coalition also seeks to improve law and policy, foster diplomatic cooperation, and advance proven solutions with public and private partners internationally. Tess Davis is a lawyer and archaeologist by training, and has been affiliated with the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, at the University of Glasgow, and previously worked for the nongovernmental organization Heritage Watch in Cambodia, first as Project Coordinator, and finally Assistant Director. We cover a lot of ground: How looters are taking advantage of sites left unmonitored during the pandemic, the illicit trade’s use of Facebook to fence stolen art, how U.S. law actually protects criminal conduct in the art market, the degree to which terrorist networks sponsor the looting and sale of artifacts, and a new program highlighting the “Ten Most Wanted Antiquities” worldwide.