New Board President Rockin' the Knox

Keep up the good work A-K.

Did she approve of the previous sale? Is she going to sell more of the A-K antique and period art collection or will she recognize its value to the A-K and Buffalo finally displaying it?

Someone please teach her how to dress the AKAG ain't the Junior League Show House.

See end of article for updated, increased hours at the AKAG due to a county funding increase.

I wonder who the new Christine is?

I wish her the best and hope that she has the independence to freshen (and resist) the ossified thinking of this board and leadership.

The A-K has agile PR and an uncritical, sympathetic press in Buffalo, which has taken a lot of pressure off them. This Chardonnay-soaked chatter usually descends into bromides about how "relevant" and forward" the museum has been--selling off donated art to make money, buying the pranks and foolery of skill-hungry hucksters and self-anointed artistes. This is not the case outside Buffalo, where the museum's wisdom and vision have been questioned in The NYT, Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, and by every artist I have spoken with (outside of Buffalo).

But the A-K is seen as a temple here in town. And we don't question the priests of the temple. Well, starting with that scandal of a sale a few years back, people did start questioning. And what was the temple's response: baffled, self-righteous, priestly arrogance (lathered to a froth by the servile press). It was a pleasure to withdraw membership and withhold money from such a place.

In the last decade the museum has simply hardened into a puzzling granite stubbornness about its purposes. What serious artist has ever endorsed these strangulated, sliver-wide categories of art into eras like antiquities and "contemporary"? This is the stance of tedious art mags, po-mo curators and professors of relevance and culture studies. It's the antithesis of art's spirit, and when it's wedded to a Madison Avenue sensibility, you get the slick sanctimony of the A-K.

This was once a fascinating museum, a place where we could erase time, relevance and self-consciousness to meditate in peace on human and cosmic mysteries. It still has riches to see, but it's increasingly a venue for casual perusal of whatever happens to catch the eye.

I'm having a hard time understanding EricOak's comment. Galleries and museums specialize in eras or art forms all the time. The A-K since its inception has focused on contemporary art. I can find no fault at all in their quadrupling their acquisition endowment by the careful and thoughtful decision to auction some peripheral pieces of artwork.

If I ran a museum that focused on Native American paintings, and someone donated a Rodin sculpture, would you have this same kind of scorn if I chose to raise acquisition funds by selling the Rodin piece?

As a member of the servile press, I attended the recent media event, where, among other things:
-a wonderful Robert Mangold show--in which I would defy anyone to see "pranks or tomfoolery," as wonderful as those terms are—was unveiled.
-the first female president of the board was announced.
-a substantial expansion of hours was announced, making the museum more accessible to the public than it has been in a while.
-4-6 very exciting 2010 shows, focusing on 1. an impressive donation of 50 works by the Vogels, important 60s-80s era collectors who chose the AKAG over MOMA; 2. a major installation by Sol LeWitt; 3. mid-century French-Canadian modernism; and 4. amazing paintings by Guillermo Kuitka (among other shows) were announced, as well as several shows from the collection featuring seldom-seen works.

This all sounded--and looked--pretty good to me.

See, I guess because of my servility (a quality I have never been accused of in the past, to my knowledge), I was unable to see how these announcements could be anything but good news. But no, once again, for some visitors to this site, any new development at the Knox is held hostage to a sale that happened two years ago, of works that truly were not part of the museum's most important focus.

Check out the museum, and enjoy. It's more exciting and vibrant than it has been since I started visiting in the 70s.

Elizabeth,

The local press about the AK has been nearly all uncritical, at times fawning and consistently uninteresting. There can be no robust conversation about institutions (or art) when they are treated that way, when there is a received opinion about an institution that no one challenges. The recent articles about the AK in the Buffalo News sound like bad press releases. I think Spree, the best publication by far in town, prints many terrific articles; the coverage of the AK I can't say is among them.

I can't help it if the AK made what many think was a tremendously stupid decision to sell artworks that cross centuries, some of them among the most valuable of their genre in the world. It was the museum, not readers of BRO, who created this environment.

And about the focus and mission of the museum. The museum always exhibited meaningful art... with an eye to including the best art that was current. There was a much more embracing sense of universality at its inception. This has been narrowed and narrowed... and for what purpose? What is the great gain--financial, aestheic, or civic-- from this constriction and arbitrary labeling of art according to period?

Finally, the bylaws stated clearly: no sale of masterworks. That small, uncomfortable imperative was removed by the board alone before they announced the big sale. That seems to me the real affront on the true mission of the museum: to show masterful, meaningful works of art.

The list of recent shows is impressive to you and underwhelming to me. I say that as someone who really enjoys art of the last 50 years. The restoring of hours is noteworthy only because they had been curtailed. The gender of the incoming board president seems unrelated to any of this. As for vibrant, that's a word quickly becoming a cliche. I'm not sure what it means anymore or why it would be the first adjective of choice for the experience of art.

Instead, I think people look for enduring quality (including talent), vision, and range of imagination in art. No one serious about art cares deeply when it was done. By these measures I see the experience of art at the AK as parochial, and I wish that were not so.

I think the Albright's main challenge is a desperate lack of space. There is just not enough room to balance and expand their permanent collection and, at the same time, mount great temporary exhibitions. The compromised result is that the Albright is often more of a stage set than a museum. That's not always such a bad thing because I remember the days when people complained that the Albright never changed out the paintings on the walls. I do think the Albright would get more respect it had the space to really show off the goods.

The Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica has the same problem. It's an under-rated institution with a collection of over 25,000 works of art but there is even less space there to present their vast collection yet mount worthwhile temporary exhibitions. They do their best, though, and it's always worth a visit.

I respect Eric Oak's concerns, but it seems as if he has thrown the baby out with the bath water when it comes to the Albright. These are challenging times for poor cities like Buffalo to maintain their cultural institutions. With few patrons and a community that likes to talk about the Albright (but rarely visits the place), the choices are quite limited.

EricOak,
The Albright has about 140,000 visitors annually. That's a low number. Perhaps, some of it can be attributed western New York's decreasing population, but I think the local community takes the institution for granted. Unfortunately, that same attitude brought the demise of Studio Arena.

PaulBuffalo,

Low numbers of people attend museums in all cities-relatively speaking. And Buffalo is not a tourist city; does not receive any spike from huge numbers of tourists, the way cities like NYC, LA, Chicago, do. Los Angeles ranks lower for museum visitors than Houston and Glasgow, much smaller cities. Milwaukee's museum, in a bigger metro area than Buffalo, had roughly 165,000 visitors in 2000 (cf. AK 140,000), which then jumped to over 350,00 AFTER the Calatrava wing opened. Its attendance is now down 45%. Not impressive.

I see no evidence that Buffalo takes for granted its largest museum any more than any other city. But it's the museum's responsibility to the community, not the reverse, which is the issue at hand. In that relationship I don't think the AK has served well the interests of its members or the larger community.

"I don't think the AK has served well the interests of its members or the larger community."

How?

The membership voted to support the deaccession, right?