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The Corcoran: Art Museum or Think Tank
Jacquie Trescott reports in this morning's Washington Post that David Levy's successor intends to recast the venerable Corcoran Gallery's role from art galllery to think tank.
Paul Greenhalgh (pronounced Green-halsh) declares:
"I think one way to see the Corcoran is as an art research center, a think-tank-type organization," he says. The combination of a museum with a historic collection and a college is rare in the art world. "We are in a perfect situation here to be exploratory about the nature of visual arts, and that will be the way we carry ourselves."
Innovation vs. Tradition
In something that struck me as both unusual and gutsy, Greenhalgh framed the collision between innovation and tradition as a branding issue that often gets over-simplified:
"The idea that you would brand yourself with one message is, of course, the idiot's approach to museums," he says. "Museums are complicated places. There is no reason we can't be the edgiest institution and the most experimental over a period of years."
Greenhalgh comes to the Corcoran from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, one of the respected contemporary art centers in Canada and certainly an institution that has walked Greenhalgh's talk when it comes to both complexity and edginess.
I, for one, will be very interested in seeing how Greenhalgh's think-tank positioning plays out here in the Washington metro area. I confess that I'm intrigued, but I've never set foot in Rand or Brookings, and the only time I was ever in the Urban Institute was as an interview respondent for an arts research development project a few years ago. Do gallery audiences frequent think tanks? It's an interesting positioning strategy with tension between traditional frames of reference (art gallery vs think tank).
Good luck, Mr. Greenhalgh. And great story, Ms. Trescott.
Posted on July 15, 2006 09:52 AM | Permalink
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Comments
This is a fascinating post. Interestingly, Greenhalgh studied at NSCAD which is known for its conceptualist approach to art and the museum institution. In fact, the art that can be seen as the backdrop in Greenhalgh's photo is a piece by Gerald Ferguson titled "I will not make any more boring art." Ferguson has been a cornerstone of the faculty at NSCAD for at least three decades.
I beg to differ with Shawn Van Sluys. The artwork behind Mr. Greenhalgh is by American artist, John Baldessari and was made in 1971. In the seventies, many avant-garde artists were invited to NSCAD to teach and many, among them Joseph Bueys and John Baldessari, left works behind in the NSCAD collection. My personal feeling is that the curatorial departments of all great museums are run like think tanks. The Corcoran has a superb photography collection and could become a renown study center and museum of photography.
Leave it to Joan to catch my mistake!! Of course, it's by Baldessari. Thanks, Joan. I wrote that before having coffee.