Marc on KCBS

It's old news now, but Marc was interviewed on the KCBS morning show on Friday 2/6 about the Shepard Fairey - AP copyright flap.

It looks like the podcast isn't available on the KCBS site anymore, but if you want to hear it, I uploaded an MP3 version to his archive page.

Kim Speaking at PCA/ACA

I just found out that I will be speaking about comics and museums at another conference, the PCA/ACA (Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association) in New Orleans in April (thanks for the suggestion Hannah). My talk will be entitled Beyond High & Low: How Comics and Museums Learned to Coexist. More on this as the schedule evolves. I haven't been to New Orleans since the flood, so I'm looking forward to seeing what its present condition is with my own eyes.

The Graceful Goodbye

Here's a picture of the moment I've been dreaming of for the last eight years. They were very nice and respectful, but I'm really glad that they made it graphically clear that the Bush era is over.

I liked Obama's speech. Aside from the many things that have already been beat to death by CNN (I won't repeat), I thought, as a non-Christian, that it was great that Obama officially recognized that there are non-believers in this country. After eight years of erosion, maybe separation of church and state will survive after all. I'm not againist people expressing their beliefs, but I hope that the influence of the irrational right will be reduced for a while. I loved the faces of the multi-ethnic multitude in the crowd. If you've been to Washington, you know how vast the national mall seems, and to see it that packed with people was amazing.

Jon Carroll, one of my favorite SF Chronicle columnists, wrote about another small thing I noticed/enjoyed: Aretha Franklin's hat (or "THE HAT") and the new empowerment of all the "church ladies" that wear these hats. Also the comic Bad Reporter by Don Asmussen is actually funny today, quipping "Injured Cheney Confined to Wheelchair for Obama Presidential Inauguration; Denies that Injuries were Sustained Moving Death Ray Out of Office." It was a great moment, to see Cheney driven away in that limo. Sort of like Darth Vader dying at the end of Star Wars (only without the redemption part).

Thoughts on two articles about Museums

I’m writing today, as an interested observer and a student of visual culture old and new, about two interesting articles exploring the state of major museums, and how they have adapted over time. The first article was featured in this past Sunday’s (1/11/09) NYT, Museums Look Inward for Their Own Bailouts: Urban Institutions Rethink Their Missions in a Push for Survival by Holland Cotter. The second is an older article I discovered while researching my thesis, ART; Glory Days for the Art Museum by NYT writer Judith H. Dobrzynski, originally published October 5, 1997.

In the older article, Dobrzynski explores how museums transitioned from “places in which the halls were literally dark, designed for contemplation and existing primarily for elite visitors,” to the more democratic institutions we know now, dependant on blockbuster shows and sales in the museum store. She explains how early blockbusters like the 1963 tour of the Mona Lisa and the 1977 King Tut exhibition (which was seen by more than 1.3 million people at the Field Museum in Chicago before it toured, and is now embarking on a comeback tour) changed the museum world’s conception of who their audience was and how needing to consistently bring in this expanded level of visitors/members profoundly refocused the museum’s general mission away from elite connoisseurship and into education and outreach. This change effected every decision from architecture and gallery layout to staffing and publications. Dobrzynski talked to curators, marketing people and psychologists to find out what visitors respond to and why, and in this context, discusses the popularity of shows related to pop culture, using the MoMA’s infamous High & Low: Modern Art, Pop Culture show as an example.

Cotter’s more recent article looks at how three major museums, the Detroit Institute of Arts (where I first fell in love with Rembrandt at age 10), The Brooklyn Museum and the Newark Museum have adapted to stay relevant and survive in this age of economic upheaval. He talks about how these institutions took a hard look at their changing constituencies, and started mining their substantial yet underused permanent collections to draw these visitors in. The Detroit museum, funded for decades by the Ford family, has a deep collection of both classical and contemporary art. Noticing, for example, that African American families made up a large part of their regular membership, they redesigned their galleries, giving visitors easier access to their notable African art collection. Cotter discusses the Newark Museum’s history as a multidisciplinary “people’s” museum and their current strategies to contextualize their holdings in Asian, Indian and African religious art for an ethnically diverse audience. Discussing the Brooklyn Museum, Cotter revisits the popularity of pop art shows (like recent shows featuring Murakami or Hip Hop culture) and also talks about the importance of identifying an area of specialization that will be a constant source of scholarship (and visitors, of course) like the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art (permanent home of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party).

After reading the Cotter article, I thought it seemed to be mirroring the situations many of our bay area museums find themselves in. For the most part, the blockbuster dependant model defined in Dobrzynski’s article is a given, to the extreme of “non-collecting” institutions like YBCA and the Contemporary Jewish museum which solely focus on producing and showcasing outside exhibitions. Like the Newark museum, the Asian Art Museum struggles to put a wide range of religious art in context. SFMoMA and the FAMSF seem to be perfect examples of the institution dependant on blockbuster shows to draw both publicity and visitors. Controversial as some of the de Young's choices have been (Chihuly, most recently, see my post from 8/21/08 for links, etc...) Love it or hate it, you can see the logic of producing this exhibition within the context of the Dobrzynski article. Like Cotter's example of the Detroit museum, The FAMSF at both the de Young and the Legion of Honor have found solutions through their emphasis on education and public programming, and seem to have found ways to leverage their permanent collection to draw in both new and regular visitors. In many ways, the same could be said of SFMoMA, although the local critics seem a little more forgiving of their curatorial choices. I’m curious what others think of the state of our local museums, and would love to hear comments and discussion about it.

Classic Jazz Recording

Sometime ago, a friend Googled me and said, “In the results, I got all these old Jazz recordings. Is this you?” Actually it is me. Eons ago, when I first moved up to San Francisco from LA, my ex-husband and I owned a small record label called Blue Jazz Records. We recorded pianist George Michalski, the Waterfront Blues Band, Johnny Nitro and the Doorslammers and a few other people. The company itself wasn’t successful, in fact it cost us a lot of money, but other things came of it. I became president of the NARAS chapter, found a steady job at Winterland Productions through Bill Graham, and best of all, I met husband Marc. The other thing that came out of this was work on a huge batch of Jazz reissue CD’s in the mid -1990’s, and these are the recordings that search engines still find.

Orrin Keepnews, the jazz producer who owned Riverside and Milestone Records (Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans, etc…) was a long time board member and national trustee of the SF NARAS chapter. Last I heard, he’s still around and working at 86! Anyway, back in the mid-90’s the major record companies were buying up classic jazz labels and remastering all the music that could be rescued for re-release on CD. For jazz fans, this was a matter of some urgency. Manufacturers of recording tape had tried different formulas and materials at different times in the past, and many of the 2 and 4 track master recordings from the 1930’s and 40’s (even the 1960's) were literally falling apart. Record masters prior to that were recorded on reverse metal plates (remember, we are talking about technology used to press vinyl 78, 45 & 33 RPM recordings). The problem with the metal plates was that they warped, but still the deteriorating tape was a bigger priority.

Orrin was doing a bi-coastal thing. He was not only a respected producer knowledgeable about the artists and the circumstances of all the recordings, but he was also well known as a writer on jazz history. Because of this, he was hired by BMG to work on reissues of the Verve and Bluebird catalogs in New York, and he was also hired by MCA to work on reissues of the Decca, Commodore and Chess catalogs in LA. As he found himself alternating between the two from week to week (at 72!), he hired me as an assistant producer for the LA project, and we did about 20 reissue CD’s together (listed at the bottom).

We did all the digital sessions at MCA’s mastering studios in Burbank. A couple experiences are really burned in my mind. The first was when we played the original 1938 master for Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit (youtube video). This is probably hard to imagine now that we are accustomed to hearing extremely compressed digital music through tiny (tinny) ear buds, but to hear the lush analog 2 track master recording of this beautiful and haunting song through state-of-the-art recording studio speakers was a transcendent experience. You could close your eyes and imagine her singing into the microphone right in front of you. Unfortunately, the tape was in bad shape. We knew we would only have one chance to capture it digitally and the tape fell apart in strips as it played through the machine. The original was lost forever (but we got the digital capture!). I consider the opportunity to hear it that way one of the more fortunate things in my life.

The second thing was a visit to collector and jazz producer Steve Lasker. This was another unreal aural experience. Mr. Lasker lived in a… I’ll be kind and call it disheveled...house, right on Venice Beach with two huge shaggy St. Bernard dogs and hundreds of pre-tape metal masters. So, we’d sit in this funky living room with the wads of dog hair blowing around on the floor, surrounding a playback system he’d rigged up with an old Pioneer turntable. He would take a roll of quarters, and judiciously place them around to balance out the warping, and do other mad scientist type adjustments. To hear this music from the 1910's & 20’s come to life again was really something. And then the dogs would start to howl along, and we’d all laugh (and sneeze).

Here’s a partial list of recordings, many of these were boxed sets of 2 to 4 CDs:
The History of Chess Jazz - The Commodore Story - Billie Holiday: the Complete Commodore Recordings - Ella (Fitzgerald) : the Legendary Decca Recordings (this was a 4 CD set that had Grammy nominations for Best Historical Recording and Best Liner Notes in 1996) - Lester Young: The Kansas City Sessions - Jelly Roll Morton Last Sessions: The Complete General Recordings - Louis Armstrong: Satchmo at Symphony Hall - Pete Fountain: Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? - James Moody: Return from Overbrook - Art Farmer: Out of the Past - Ella and Friends - The Nat King Cole Trio Hit That Jive Jack: The Earliest Recordings and Hamp: The Legendary Decca Recordings of Lionel Hampton.

Sanlun Yishu & Tiffany

Photographer Tom Griscom will have work in a fascinating project, Sanlun Yishu, a “mobile gallery” in Beijing starting in March. Sanlun Yishu is meant to be an interactive project; the collaborators will trade small reproductions of the work (postcards?) for whatever the participants offer. They will also catalog the reponses and send them back to the artists. This sounds like a great way to stimulate a dialog about art between cultures with people that don’t often have access to galleries and museums.

Hannah Sigur has recently confirmed a speaking engagement for FAMSF on March 28th as part of a series of lectures related to the upcoming show at the Legion of Honor, Artistic Luxury: Fabergé, Tiffany, Lalique February 7, 2009 — May 31, 2009. FAMSF's web site describes the show as "the first comparative study of the work of the three greatest jewelry and decorative arts designers at the turn of the 20th century: Peter Carl Fabergé, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and René Lalique. Their rivalry found its stage at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris—the only exposition where all three showed simultaneously and where the work of each was prominently displayed. Some of their most elaborate designs for the Paris World's Fair are reunited for the first time in a gallery recreating the ambiance of this opulent international exposition. Looking critically at the development, design, and marketing of each firm, this exhibition explores how these designers responded to the demand for luxury goods in the years leading up to World War 1."

I have often heard Hannah discuss the important role the world fairs played in helping to expose people in the West to Asian artistic concepts and how this was an inspiration to artists/craftsmen like Tiffany. Hannah will also be signing her book The Influence of Japanese Art on Design .

Bravo to Tom and Hannah!

Marc & Kim speak about comics

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all enjoyed the season!

Husband Marc is on his way down to the AALS (Association of American Law Schools) conference in San Diego this week, to speak to the art law section on a panel concerning comics and the law. Marc is talking about some of his recent research on CBLDF (the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund). CBLDF is a non-profit that represents comics authors, artists, store owners and small publishers in a variety of cases related to censorship or unfair business practices.

Marc's talk will include the Georgia vs Lee case in which Lee, a comics shop owner in Georgia, was threatened with 21 years in prison for unknowingly giving a 9-year-old a comics complilation on free comics day that happened to include a couple pages from Nick Bozzeti 's graphic novel "The Salon," (a must see for arty types) a murder mystery set in 1907 Paris, which featured a few frames of Pablo Picasso painting (and answering the door) in the nude. After many convoluted twists and turns, the case was finally dismissed 10 years and $100,000. in legal fees later.

Marc will also talk about the Mavrides vs California Board of Equalization case. At one point, the California Board of Equalization decided that when comic artists finish their assigned pages and send them in to the publisher, the individual pages should be treated as works of art being sold, and should be taxed accordingly. Mavrides, a comic artist (a contributor to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) became the test case on this. CBLDF defended him, and the court agreed that submitting comics pages to the publisher was more like submiting a finished manuscript, and the state lost.

Marc also has a 90 minute slot speaking at WonderCon in San Francisco (end of February) on CBLDF, the Superman copyright case and other cases related to pop art/comic artist's copyrights. I will also be returning early from CAA to speak on a WonderCon panel about comic art in museums (this was the focus of my master's thesis). Peter Coogan of the Institute for Comic Studies tells me that the panel will include one other scholar writing in this area, and two artists whose work have been included in museum exhibitions. I'll post more specifics as they become available.