Comments on: UC Berkeley’s Art Museum Foibles

By: Ghislaine Sulit

Ghislaine Sulit — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:09:58 +0000

really wonderful webpage, very good operate, decent to understand.

By: Random Links « d’Arte Board

Random Links « d’Arte Board — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:06:51 +0000

[...] wrote earlier about UC Berkeley’s plans regarding its University Art Museum. Well, it turns out they are just going to renovate the existing [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:09:45 +0000

I found it rather odd during the Nineties that public schools seemed to be getting bigger. I worked on the construction of one here where I live and found it to seem merely like a penitentiary for midgets from its outside appearances. I couldn’t help wonder if we were going the wrong direction in heavy centralization of schools. I’d rather they got a better education in a smaller, unpretentious building than in a mediocre education in an excellently designed building. Therefore, such an education could engender more appreciation for the arts in general. It meant perhaps the loss of a football program and less use of the automobile, but you know, oh well!
There is a museum going up in Denver that I need to get better informed on, the Clyford Still Museum. Damn this recession!

By: jasongrayfineartist

jasongrayfineartist — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:43:17 +0000

This is an excellent problem that you and the original writer of the article bring up, J.D. I say that knowing that, in less than a month, the art museum that I work for will begin construction on the largest expansion in its history (adding more than 30% of additional exhibition space). What’s more, that expansion has been delayed by more than a year because of the economy, and the museum has been forced to enact several rounds of mass layoffs in the meantime. I think that what might be of even more pressing concern (than whether or not to build big, self-glorifying monuments to art, just for the sake of it) is whether or not these new additions/museum buildings confront the inevitability of the waning attention span of museum attendees for antiquated methods of presentation. Let’s all face it, the museum as box (no matter how pretty or shocking the box) wherein art is placed on the walls, or in a room, for the limited interaction of a populace that is sparsely informed on the topic presented is basically Victorian. Museum’s need to do more now than merely follow a pattern. The NYC Guggenheim, after Wright’s post-humous construction of it, attracted oglers in droves, but that shock and awe campaign has seemed to be less effective as time moves on, and even then, serious critics pointed out that the buildings design flawed considerably in terms of art presentation. Nonetheless, here we are today, still following a sixty-year old idea about how to re-invigorate a 19th century concept, and only the financial drama of an economic crisis makes us question, “Why?” One can’t really fault the museums completely; after all, good ol’ Estados Unidos has seldom shown more than a reserved support for the arts, and considering many of these institutions depend on large sums of government money for their operating budgets, can we really expect them to be all that vicarious to forward-thinking movements?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:41:38 +0000

Alternatively some of the text on the PDF article could read:

“Once the funding for the new
library was in place, world-renowned
New Mexico architect Antoine Predock
was selected to design Pueblo’s new
library. Interestingly, Predock’s design for
the library ultimately contributed to the hijacked
future of Pueblo’s architecture by making
the library a modern interpretation on
Pueblo’s historic past.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:33:30 +0000

sorry! that embedded link wasn’t working. Try this:

http://www.archinnovations.com/featured-projects/civic/antoine-predock-robert-hoag-rawlings-public-library/

or:

http://www.pueblopulp.com/issue5/P5-library.pdf

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:19:36 +0000

Interesting!
Your buildings are very expensive, very big…or something. Twenty million here will get you an Antoine Predock library that looks a lot
an aircraft carrier stranded 1,000 miles inland. It started out a mediocre three-story with a 12 – 18 million dollar budget, but then someone appealed to the local newpaper tycoon (God! I love that word when it’s the only true, albeit antiquated, descriptive term) “With your help, perhaps we could dedicate the entire fourth floor to a museum about your newspaper”, must’ve been the closer. It’s a grand thing when vanity works on this level. So we got our aircraft carrier, er, I mean library. I was on the crew of the painter who was painting the house of the general contractor at the time. He got all the other contractors to work for barter on that with assurance that they would get the work on the boat later. (I can only imagine he took a huge loan on the house before it was even completed – as it was a big one. Then underbid all the competing firms with a little financial razzle-dazzle.) My boss said he couldn’t afford to do that, since we would be painting his house for a longer time than all the other trades would spend there. So. Never got to paint the sea-going airport.

I did not know there was a tag for “Californian Despair” until just now.