Vandals took out their anger at BP on the Durango Arts Center's canvas awning sometime last week, but the misguided protest is going to hurt the struggling nonprofit, its director said Monday.
DAC Executive Director Sheri Rochford Figgs said she'll have to replace the entire awning, which faces East Second Avenue and is decorated with the names of "significant" donors, except for, now, BP.
The controversy has divided Britain's art community. Those pushing for a boycott of BP sponsorships argue Britain's arts and cultural institutions are demeaning themselves by lending a little of their cache to the embattled oil giant.
The opposing argument was most pungently summed up by Jonathan Jones, art critic for the liberal guardian newspaper. If, in these perilous times, Britain's museums and galleries can get money from Satan, himself, he wrote, they should take it.
Great art has always been involved with great fortunes: it was only a temporary distortion of history, a hangover from the Romantic idea that artists need be poor and tormented, that insisted art must be uncontaminated by trade. Patronage may well be a non-negotiable part of artistic activity. For a while, this principle was blurred when the interventionist
economist J M Keynes helped found the Arts Council after the Second World War. Keynes simply made the state a patron. Do the oily protesters advocate refusal of the Arts Council's "government" money supporting the Tate because the same government money funded an illegal war in Iraq and a tragic war in Afghanistan? Of course they don't.
In search of something new, the museum abandoned its 1996 plan to create a traditional park with monumental sculptures by, say, Alexander Calder, Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois. Instead, it commissioned works by emerging and underappreciated midcareer artists—Kendall Buster, Alfredo Jaar and Los Carpinteros, among them—and will keep most of them on view for only a few years. It will add at least one new work a year, financed by drawing from the park's $15 million operations and art endowment.From Time Out Chicago:
And one more thing: The museum asked the artists to study the parkland and to create "site-responsive" works. Far from being a manicured lawn, the property—officially "100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park"—includes woodlands, meadows, a lake and wetlands, giving the artists plenty of potential inspirations.
When Freiman joined the museum eight years ago, she decided 100 Acres should engage the public in two unusual ways: Unlike most sculpture parks, it would commission site-specific works and define those works as “temporary,” lasting a few years to a decade, to tempt visitors back to Indianapolis. “[100 Acres] hinges on the notion of change,” Freiman says. “We wanted to introduce a sense of surprise and wonder into this park.” The park’s free (like the IMA’s permanent galleries) and open from dawn to dusk.Apparently, the funding, including an operating endowment, for the project was in place before the economic downturn. It's heartening to see a major institution be so forward-thinking and be able to raise money for that vision. It is, of course, depressing to think about all the amazing ideas that will be dead-on-arrival in this current economic climate.
The benefits of arts patronage far outweighed its costs, philanthropy professionals said.
“If they were spending billions on it, then people might say that it was a waste of shareholders’ money, which should be spent on cleaning up beaches,” said Colin Tweedy, chief executive of Arts & Business, a nonprofit organization that links arts bodies with corporate and private donors. “Saving that money will not do anything to the coastline of America.”
“It’s a relatively small amount, but the impact they can have with it is far greater,” said Tweedy.
