Monthly Archives: July 2012

July 9, 2012 · 10:35 am

More on the Corcoran

I used a column in Sunday’s paper to examine how the Corcoran’s curatorial history, its identity as an institution, and an all-too-frequent failure to capitalize on success has led it to its current financial woes. But there’s nothing there that can’t be fixed by passionate, enlightened, dedicated leadership. The Mapplethorpe controversy of 1989 played a role:

When case studies are written about how to blow up a nonprofit institution, the Mapplethorpe controversy is key among them, a classic map that prefigured controversies such as the implosion earlier this year at the breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure (which suddenly appeared political after trying to deny funding to Planned Parenthood), the 2010 censorship of an exhibition of gay and lesbian portraiture at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and the current power struggle at the University of Virginia. In all four cases, institutional leadership seemed unaware of the basic human capital invested in the organization, unaware that the people who keep the institution alive view it in essentially familial terms, not bureaucratic or organizational ones.

But the current leadership’s willingness to throw the entire museum into limbo while they pursue the horrible idea of selling the building could well be the death knell for the institution:

Yet at a critical moment, when the Corcoran desperately needs people to rally behind it, the board of directors has indicated that it is seriously considering a move that would further alienate supporters of the museum. Board Chairman Harry Hopper, in an interview with Washington Post reporters, said he and the board “weren’t out pounding the pavement on behalf of the institution” until they have “a plan that makes sense.”

Not “pounding the pavement on behalf of the institution” at the moment? I was gobsmacked by that when I first heard our reporters recount their interview with Hopper.

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July 3, 2012 · 4:59 pm

At the Aspen Ideas Festival

Last week, I spent two and a half very pleasant days at the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual meeting of intellectual leaders from around the planet, with a focus this year on China. I moderated two panels, one on telling stories through film, another on re-imagining public space. I wrote up a few thoughts  I brought home from my time there at the Post’s The Style Blog.

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July 2, 2012 · 3:24 pm

Let’s retrain our non-profit leadership…

            We need to examine the parallels between what happened at the University of Virginia this past month, and what is happening at the Corcoran today. Is there perhaps an epidemic of short-sighted thinking running through the elite circles that control our academic and cultural organizations? Have two decades of fetishizing corporate-style leadership of non-profit organizations finally borne inevitable fruit: An environment in which the basic humanist purpose of academic and cultural organizations has been lost or supplanted? Is it time for some idealistic large foundation to create a program that educates potential board members of cultural organizations about the balance between fiscal responsibility and the real purpose of their institution (which will never make money, never pay for itself, never be anything but a torrent of red ink on the balance sheets)? It is astonishing to me that the Board of Visitors at UVA didn’t include one person who identified as a poet or artist or academic. Was there anyone in the room who could speak up for keeping the German program intact? For teaching the classics as the essential ground on which our society is built?

            I’m on record as deeply opposed to the sale of the Corcoran’s building. I think a move would be disastrous for the organization, diminishing its stature and severing its relation to existing audiences and communities. The building is an essential part of the Corcoran’s collection, an inviolable property that may be in disrepair, yet is superbly suited to the Corcoran’s mission, which includes displaying art. I call it “cultural vandalism” in my review of the new Richard Diebenkorn exhibition—which looks so good in the Corcoran’s galleries I can’t imagine how the gallery’s leadership could ever contemplate leaving.

            Of course, it’s easy for someone who isn’t on the board, who doesn’t have fiduciary responsibility for the organization, to cry foul on the proposed move. Organizations that rely on fund-raising have been suffering acutely for the past few years, and the fund-raising challenge has never been greater. But the Corcoran, though mismanaged and ill-tended for decades now, isn’t a small, fly-by-night non-profit. It has a major collection, it sits opposite the White House and it has been serving Washington and art for far longer than the National Gallery of Art. It’s too easy to think, Oh the Corcoran again, maybe we should just shut it down. But there’s too much at stake to be defeatist.

            What it needs is new leadership and probably a new board, reconstructed with people passionately committed to keeping the Corcoran alive and vital in tough times. Donors will support a dynamic leader with an exciting vision for the museum. What’s on offer from the current leadership—institutional suicide—isn’t vision, it’s an unimaginative form of despair.

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· 12:40 pm

A Return to Castleton

     

Tyler Nelson and Cecelia Hall in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville”

       Friday night’s big storm blew through the Castelton Festival, creating drama that evening, and a cancelled performance on Saturday. But by 2 p.m. on Sunday the festival had an enormous, truck-sized generator hooked up and the air conditioning was running in the big performance tent, an oasis of cool atop a lovely little hill in Virginia’s horse country.

            It had been several years since I was last there, for a performance of Britten’s Turn of the Screw in the pint-sized home theater attached to artistic director Lorin Maazel’s house. Yesterday’s performance of Rossini’s Barber of Seville was the first time I’ve been in the big tent, and I liked it very much. The festival has the feeling of a genuine festival, a high-spirited coming together in a beautiful spot for music. The views outside the tent, of rolling hills, giant round hay bales and a sultry, shimmering horizon of green in the distance make it clear why the rich and fortunate flock to this region, despite its isolation and ferocious summer heat.

            The young cast gave a good show, albeit with a few tentative moments here and there, and perhaps a little too much stage business for the chorus. Otherwise, it was everything one wants from Rossini: Absurdity, speed and occasional pauses for emotional interjection. The set was a single piece on a turntable, representing Figaro’s shop, and the inside and out of Dr. Bartolo’s elegant home. The lighting was a bit sketchy here and there (the storm cues seemed a little odd) but the costumes, meticulous period pieces, flattered the cast.

            Singing Count d’Almaviva, Tyler Nelson, a tenor with a small but appealing sound, was sometimes hard to detect in ensembles. But he has great musicality, and his performance of “Se il mio nome” in Act 1 demonstrated a refined sensibility and a voice capable of haunting tenderness. Tyler Simpson, as the lecherous Bartolo, is already a fully-fledged opera singer, and he has a fine comic sensibility, creating a muscular and manipulative Bartolo rather than the usual buffoonish and ridiculous caricature. Cecelia Hall’s Rosina was suitably impish, and if the coloratura isn’t quite fluid yet, the tone quality is attractive and the voice very promising. Both Jonathan Beyer as Figaro and Evan Hughes as Don Basilio had something pleasingly subversive in their slightly fey portrayals, and Beyer’s “Largo al factotum” set a high standard early in the performance for technically accomplished singing.

            It’s good to see Castleton progressing so rapidly towards serious festival status. It’s a privilege to have Maazel in the pit on a Saturday afternoon in Washington’s backyard. The operas performed this season (Barber, Boheme and Carmen) are standard fare, and one misses the novelties that were present in earlier iterations of the festival. But the whole Castleton experience is a pleasure, a drive through beautiful country, an encounter with young artists and a leisurely return on back roads to Washington… through a landscape with a few thousand fewer trees than the last time I made the trip.

Credit: Leslie Maazel, courtesy the Castelton Festival

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