MuseumOfModernArt

Own Original Works of Art - MoMA and Peter Norton Team Up To Raise Money for P.S. 1

Filed under: Art, Charity, Holiday Guides, Big Givers

Would you like to own a unique piece of privately commissioned artwork? Now is your chance. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is offering up for sale limited quantities of collectible works.

Entrepreneur and art collector, Peter Norton is known not only for his genius in creating computer software but for commissioning art and for his philanthropy. Every year since 1988 he has asked artists whose work he collects to create unique pieces to be sent as gifts to his family and friends. This year he is donating various pieces to be sold to the public through MoMA with all proceeds to go to P.S. 1. For those who are not familiar with P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center it is one of the oldest and largest non-profit art institutions in the United States. It is an exhibition space and devotes its resources to displaying experimental contemporary art.

Some of the artworks featured include:
Untitled (Condoms), Daniel Martinez, 1990
Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times, Kara Walker, 1997
Untitled (Dollhouse), Yinka Shonibare, 2002
Untitled (Music Box), Christian Marclay, 2005 (shown above)

Certain items can be bought individually with prices ranging from $150 to $1,000 dollars, while other pieces must be purchased as a complete MoMA set" for $6,200. To see a samples of the various works in person, head to the bookstore on the second floor of the museum, otherwise the works can be viewed and ordered online.

Gallery: Own Original Works of Art - MoMA and Peter Norton Team Up To Raise Money for P.S. 1

Untitled (Dollhouse), Yinka Shonibare, 2002

Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times, Kara Walker, 1997

Untitled (Condoms), Daniel Martinez, 1990

Tags: charity, MoMA, museum, Museum of Modern Art, MuseumOfModernArt, P.s.1ContemporaryArtCenter, Peter Norton, PeterNorton

How Much Should A Museum Director Earn?

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

This past year we've watched museum after museum struggle through the recession. Some have been forced to close, others have had to fire employees. Nearly all have watched their endowment shrink. Therefore the annual news of the salary earned by Glenn D. Lowry, the director of New York's Museum of Modern Art strikes a particularly off note this year. Lowry, shown above with artist Ron Arad at the opening of Arad's retrospective at the MoMA, has long been one of the highest paid museum directors around. This year he actually took a pay cut, Bloomberg News reports that he earned $1.32 million in pay and benefits in the year ending in June, down from $1.95 million the year before. Lowry took a voluntary pay reduction; the previous year he had received a 13 percent raise. Lowry's compensation includes not just his salary and bonuses as well as a pension and health insurance but he also lives rent-free in the 52-story Museum Tower lifting his total compensation to $2.7 million in 2008.

After this year's big business meltdown many people are questioning how much CEOs of publicly owned businesses should be allowed to earn, a concern that has been around for a long time in the nonprofit world. Those who defend the high salaries say that the high-pressure job of being a museum director is worth the price and that the right director is key for attracting the big givers who donate both money and their prized collections to museums. But for museum staffers who often have advanced degrees and yet earn low salaries this can sometimes be hard to take. To Lowry's credit, he has balanced the museum's budget every year since he became director in 1995 and the museum has expanded its exhibit space and increased attendance. The Museum has also not had to lay off any employees yet.

All across the country museum boards are starting to look at salaries of directors. Like CEOs, museum directors have to satisfy a board of directors who want to see results. But instead of profits, museum success is measured in a variety of ways: success of fundraising, museum attendance and landing the big art donations are just a few of the criteria. There is no doubt that it is a challenging job. But after the rough year that nonprofits have experienced it seems unlikely that many directors will continue to receive seven figure salaries.

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Tags: art, glenn lowry, GlennLowry, moma, museum of modern art, MuseumOfModernArt, museums

Tim Burton Gets A Show At The MoMA

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art, Celebrity Design

Director Tim Burton is known for his fantastical view of the world showcased in movies like Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks, Sweeney Todd and many other films. His distinctive screen style, equal parts creepy and whimsical, bizarre and sentimental, is the end result of a deeply inventive imagination. Burton will bring a different kind of creative output to New York's Museum of Modern Art this fall. Burton's artistic efforts including drawings, storyboards, costumes, puppets and paintings, some related to his movies and others related to non-film projects. The exhibit of more than 700 pieces was organized by Ron Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, and Jenny He, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, with Rajendra Roy, the Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film. The Tim Burton retrospective will run from November 22 through April 26, 2010.

[via Wired]

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Tags: moma, museum of modern art, MuseumOfModernArt, tim burton, TimBurton

Jesus Stops Traffic on 5th Ave

by Tom Johansmeyer (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

A row of cars waiting for a green light was concealed by four large canvases proceeding across New York's busy Fifth Ave., creating the appearance of emptiness from W. 51st St to Central Park and beyond. Artist Nelson Diaz chose Palm Sunday to reveal his latest project, "The Isolated Christ," to the people of New York. The response to this unique mix of street art, performance art and oil on canvas was nothing short of astounding.

Five years in the making, The Isolated Christ is a four-part rendering of the most famous figure in one of Leonardo Da Vinci's most recognized works. Diaz "isolated" the image of Jesus Christ from the apostles in DaV inci's "The Last Supper" and plotted thousands of points on the image by hand. Then, using advanced calculus techniques, he fed the point into an equation that exposes "hidden" four dimensional space in the original image and used the results as the foundation for his signature perspective.

The result is four faces of DaVinci's Jesus, reflecting various situations. The final canvas – transcendence – offers an obscure, almost headless presentation, signifying the departure from the norm. The meaning is left to the viewer, with the religious assuming resurrection and the atheist likely to posit obsolescence. Diaz remains coy with his intention, believing that interpretation (like faith) is a personal affair.

With half a decade spent on the vision and production of The Isolated Christ (all four paintings were completed by hand – sans brushes, literally with his fingers), Diaz spent the last few months struggling with venue. He decided last summer to skip the traditional alternatives (such as art galleries) during his protest against the treatment of art as a commodity, during which he auctioned 10 paintings on eBay for the princely starting bid of $1 each.

"The old way of doing things is dead," he explained during several of our meetings. Deep-pocketed buyers writing checks for pieces they don't understand, he believed, would not be able to sustain itself ... a lesson to which the art market was treated last September. Diaz wanted a public setting. As with his eBay experiment, he wanted to return the aesthetic to everybody, not a self-proclaimed elite.

That left only one "gallery" from which to choose: the streets of Manhattan.

Gallery: Nelson Diaz and The Isolated Christ