Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Tentacles of the Beast, 2008

I just returned from a trip to New York in the height of the August heat with all of the lovely smells and suffocating humidity that comes with it. The goal of this trip? To spend as much time with artists and their work as possible, to slip into the city’s unique rhythms and magic anonymously and deeply. To see again.

My first experience with art on this trip happened unexpectedly and almost immediately. When I got to my Midtown hotel to drop off my bags before rushing down to a Chelsea studio on 26th Street, I pulled back my curtains and opened the windows, letting in the outside air to equalize the freezing air in my room. Set before me was a Hitchcockian scene, a 21st century Rear Window. I looked outside of my room on the eighth floor and saw various people engaged in quiet, disparate activities: in one window a woman busy at her desk, in another two people kissing, and an old man walking out onto the fire escape to grab a secret smoke. There were silent intimate recognitions, an awareness that we were all seeing each other, despite our resistance to acknowledging it, a fierce refusal to allow our eyes to meet directly. Extreme privacy and exposure both at once. I was reminded of the Impressionist era opera paintings where the subject of the work is spectatorship, the reciprocal experience of looking and being looked at. What happens in the space between.
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6 years ago, I stood in a classroom on the campus of Indiana University and gave a presentation on the marketing department of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. A first year graduate student pursuing my master’s degree in Arts Administration, I was enrolled in a course called Arts Marketing and Audience Development. As part of that course we were required to analyze the marketing program of an arts organization that we admired. Significantly, I chose to do my class project on the IMA.

I’m not going to bore you with the over-confident analysis outlined in my paper. (I’m embarrassed at how much I thought I knew.) Nor will I link to my power point presentation. (I was a bit obsessed with animation and clip art). However, I will provide you with the final lines of my paper: Read the rest of this entry »

An art museum provides a very specific sort of context for its contents.  As a visitor walks through the collections, there is a kind of underlying thesis at work: these things all fit, in one way or another, into a broad category.

It isn’t as simple as “If it’s in a museum, it must be art”, but then again… it almost is that simple.  I think that idea explains why we all sometimes respond so strongly when we encounter an element of an exhibition that doesn’t immediately fit our own perception of what the parameters for contents of the “Things that Go in an Art Museum” category of objects are (or should be).

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I have just finished an upload of a new set of Flickr images assembled by Andrea Mason, an IMA conservation intern.  She worked this summer with a contracted furniture conservator named Mark Minor to return a sideboard by Eliel Saarinen to its original glory.

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A continuation of the conversation between the members of Type A…did you miss the first Type A post?

Hey MC Blogmaster 5000,

Here I am again, getting back in the writing groove. Funny enough, just read a story in the last New York Times Magazine (August 3rd) about a group of internet pranksters that generally call themselves “trolls.” Seems they like to nuke web sites and mess with people very aggressively. One of them is quoted as saying that he “wants everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed.” Guy seems like a real party. Too much free time, if you ask me.

But back to the arts.

The project has evolved significantly since we last exchanged thoughts this way. We’ve completed our first two-day workshop with everyone in the Team Building project and have been talking about what it all means ever since. Right after the second day concluded we went out with Lisa (Freiman) to discuss where this was going and exchanged some really interesting ideas.

Type A has always made work that respects the idea first and the medium second. Ultimately the medium we choose for a project must be in response to the concept driving that project, and, in fact, the medium ideally helps to inform and reinforce the concept. Read the rest of this entry »