Bad Acquisitions

Picture: GalleristNY.com

New acquisitions are always exciting.  For all that I pretend to hate novelty (which I define as more or less anything that happened after about 1820), I still skip through the galleries when I hear of a new loan or acquisition.  Given high prices and small budgets, acquisitions are carefully considered and usually deserve the inevitable plaudits.  But some acquisitions are ill-judged, and have a negative effect on the whole collection.  I don't think there's enough critical commentary about these bad acquisitions.

 

My first nomination is this fine still life by Spaendonck that has been given to the Frick Collection in New York.  It's a perfectly nice painting, but not really consistent with the quality of the Frick.  One of Henry Clay Frick's earliest old master acquisitions was a still life of fruit by Jan van Os, but he didn't include it in his bequest.  I can't believe that this painting is much better.  It will be hard for the Frick ever again to acquire anything of the standard of their supreme masterpieces, but they have still picked up some fine things that complement the collection - like the wonderful Liotard still life donated by Heinemann.  The Spaendonck doesn't make the cut. 

 

A few years ago the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo NY sold off a load of old stuff, including the superb Roman bronze Artemis and the Stag, below (which I saw when it was subsequently on loan to the Met in New York). 

 

Picture: Arts Journal

 

They were raising money to buy contemporary art, including Tracy Emin's Only God Knows I'm Good (below).  I leave you to judge for yourselves.

 

Picture: Albright-Knox

 

Now a controversial nomination to end with.  The National Galleries of London and Edinburgh jointly bought two of the greatest paintings still in private hands - indeed, two of the absolute highlights of western art - Titian's Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto.  Their quality and importance is irreproachable; my beef is with the way they were bought.  First there was an undignified roadshow as these large and fragile paintings were carted around the world to drum up funding.  Then there is the permanent impermanence of joint ownership, meaning that they will be subject to the stress of being packed up and shifted hundreds of miles every few years, in perpetuity.  Sharing the burden of very large purchases has become established practice.  I find it deplorable.    



Conventional Thinking

Photo: Art Newspaper

Fred Wilson is a conceptual artist who appeals to me, even as a hardened fogey who hates most contemporary art.  Some of his interventions in museums are quite witty.  I love that he dressed as a guard to give an artist's guided tour, and was of course not recognised by the patrons.  But there are only so many ways to make the point about exclusionary practises in museums; his work is losing its edge and becoming a bit repetitive.  And I'm not sure his criticism has bite any more.  Museums are falling over themselves trying to prove their inclusive credentials and highlight historical sins. 

Fred Wilson's upcoming exhibition in Cleveland "attempts to undermine the discourse-determining status of cultural institutions, almost from the inside out, by employing those institutions' own vocabularies, concepts and methods".  So many redundant words, so little content.  You have to know something of Foucault's concept of 'discourse' for this even to make sense - this guff is so much more exclusive and elitist than the old fashioned stuff that it criticises.  Then that weasel-word 'almost' - why 'almost' from the inside out? 

We're told that he's a political activist infiltrating museums.  His works "speak to the realization that culture is almost never homogeneous".  The terminology is conventional and banal.  Who ever said that culture was homogeneous?  This is the new insider art, and these are the new conventional ideas, dressed up as radical infiltration.