Category: museum

art, museum, New York City, Whitney Museum

Buckminster Fuller

Christa Avampato

I went to the Whitney today with friends Dan, Steve, and Liane. It was our inaugural museum / dinner quarterly outing. (As just decided by Steve at the conclusion of our time at the Whitney.) Dan and I had been planning to go to the Buckminster Fuller exhibit for a good 6 weeks and finally our schedules aligned today. Luckily Steve and Liane were free as well. 


Fuller is an interesting guy, though after an hour long tour by a woman who is clearly a scholar and viewing close to 100 pieces of his work, I’m still not sure if or how he is relevant to the art and architecture worlds. Entirely self-taught, he can’t be called a designer, architect, or engineer. (Leaving me highly skeptical about his relevance to begin with.) At 32, the age I am now, he had an epiphany that rather than commit suicide by drowning himself in Lake Michigan, he would spend his time as a guinea pig of design, throwing out crazy ideas one after another and seeing if any of them stick to help improve the quality of life on this planet. Hmmmm…I am growing more skeptical by the minute. 

Fuller was very concerned with a handful of concepts and activities: marketing and branding, developing a design language all his own, optimism under all circumstances, and the state of the human condition. Now I’m growing a bit more interested. And then two other facts really pulled me in: he did not give a lick about the historical preservation of architecture (he cared only about the futuristic city) and he was so obsessed with the ideation / prototyping phase of a project that none of his ideas ever made it to market. 

As someone who loves the history of architecture and often spends days walking around a city just looking at buildings, I’m horrified that anyone in this field would ever admit to not caring one way or another if any architecture is ever preserved. And then I considered how many people I know who love thinking up ideas with no ability / desire to execute them. I like endings; I enjoy completing projects and reveling in the analysis of the outcome. (Perhaps that’s because I was born a Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac.) I cannot imagine anyone loving to think up ideas for ideas’ sake and not doing what it takes to see those ideas realized first-hand. To say you are a visionary with no ability to operate is like saying you would enjoy the company of other people if only you didn’t love to hide in your apartment. A million good ideas have no relevance if you don’t have the inkling to make them come to life. Or do they?

My friends and I left the exhibit interested and confused. Why on Earth would the Whitney devote an entire floor to a man who couldn’t get things done? I thought about this on my walk to dinner. This sliding scale of a man, equal parts genius and crack-pot. This man with no formal training who has talents that defied any kind of definition. A man without a community. 

I wonder if it is people like Buckminster Fuller who provide the shoulders for us to stand on to do great things after him. He could see that building environmentally sustainable vehicles and communities would be important, even if he didn’t have the ability to get them built. He could see that we were building so much manufacturing capability in this country that someday those resources would have to be used in new ways such as green energy production. So the question becomes can someone else with more energy and organization pick up the good points of his ideas and run with them to create something that benefits humanity in a tangible way? Maybe that is his lasting legacy: he confused, inspired, and infuriated us so much that people picked apart his ideas and salvaged the pieces that could be brought to life with a little ingenuity and a lot of hard work. Not a bad legacy for a man who almost ended it all at 32 on the shores of Lake Michigan. No bad at all. 
art, museum, technology, theatre

A meeting of the minds: art and technology

Christa Avampato

I have been out of professional theatre management for quite some time now. I love going to shows, love reading about the industry. Every once in a while I get a twinge to go back to it, and then about 5 seconds later I have a moonstruck “snap out of it” moment. We idealize the past.

While I am not sure if I will ever return to the industry, I am passionate about propagating the arts. I read Michael Eisner’s book A Work in Progress about 6 months before I moved to New York City to begin my career in theatre. It is not an exaggeration to say that he very much influenced my decision to give it a shot and see what I could do in the industry. He has a quote in the front cover that to this day is one of my favorites, and it bears repeating. “What hope there is for us lies in our nascent arts, for if we are to be remembered as more than a mass of people who lived and fought wars and died, it is for our arts that we will be remembered. The fortunes wither, the kings depart. What survives are the creations of people who are makers and artificers of the spirit.”

I am now an outsider of the industry with some wonderful friends still very much inside. Over the past few months I have begun to wonder how on Earth the industry expects to survive without embracing technology beyond complicating lighting plots and set designs. With all of the competing interests for time that consumers now face and a shaky economy, the arts cannot expect to rely on local audiences and tourists to make up the whole of their subscriber base. The traditional subscriber model needs to be ripped to shreds and rebuilt. Why should Lincoln Center limit their viewers to only those who can get to NYC? Why not develop a subscriber base that spans the globe?

I’m talking about a technological platform that would film performances and museum exhibits in very high definition to be broadcast via subscription on the web to those who pay per log-in. I am already hearing the naysayers – “theatre is about being there”, “what about the live interaction that the actors need?”, “no technology can replace actually being there in person”. I agree with all of that. And the die-hard subscribers will, too. They will still come to performances and exhibits.

Let’s consider those who can’t get to the theatre or museum: why should art institutions leave that money on the table? Why shouldn’t all people everywhere be able to experience and appreciate art wherever it is? If we don’t do this, can we hope to hang on to young audiences who are so intrinsically linked to technology? And don’t our artists deserve to have the ability to reach audiences far and wide?

The other bonus that this kind of technology would offer is the ability for those who see the performances to interact with one another, to keep the artistic discussion going long after the curtain goes down. Not to mention the diversification of revenue – new subscribers and the increased ad money that could be made available to arts organizations to not only survive but to thrive.

I have a certain disdain for critics – how they kill works of art before the performers even get their arms around a piece. Why should the critics decide what shows stays open on Broadway and what closes? Why does this very select group of people get to determine the art we see and enjoy? Opening up the subscriber base and encouraging the conversation among patrons returns the power to the people it rightfully belongs to – the patrons.

The above images can be found at http://infocusmagazine.org/3.2/images/eng_beyond.gif

art, creativity, museum, New York

Delightful Doodles: the art of William Steig

Christa Avampato

Yesterday I took a walk across Central Park to stop in to the Jewish Museum of Art at 92nd Street and 5th Avenue. There is a new exhibit there that celebrate the art work of William Steig, a cartoonist who achieved early fame as an illustrator of the New York and became a children’s book author at age 60. Though he is most famous for conceiving the idea for and creating the story of Shrek, that one work, as wonderful as it is, does not do justice to a career based on enchanting doodles.

Like many art exhibits, this one has multi-media components – a short film, narrated by Steig, about his life and work, models of the Shrek characters, letters he’s written to and received from monumental figures in the art world, interactive pieces such as a children’s library, and of course, his marvelous sketches. Immediately upon entering the exhibit, the greatest nugget to genius is written plainly on the wall. When asked about how he developed such a successful career, Steig said “I don’t think like other people. I never really did grow up.”

It’s his wonderful sense of honesty and childlike desire to connect with people on a very profound basis that had me smiling all throughout the exhibit. His doodling and intentional coloring outside of the lines kept me dreaming, entering his world of fair tales that had meaningful lessons to teach viewers about their real, everyday lives. Steig said his best work came from drawing with no direction, with no purpose. Drawing for the sake of drawing.

This had me wondering all the way home what works I could create if I had no agenda in my creations. How would I live my life if I just did what I wanted to do without any sense of having to do something “useful”? By letting go, we can break-through.