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Gardner trustees win right to demolish buildings, drill hole in museum
By adamg on Thu, 03/05/2009 - 11:07pm
Greg Cook reports the Supreme Judicial Court ruled Wednesday that trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum can tear down buildings and build a new entrance to the museum:
It is in the public interest because it will extend the life of the building, it will reduce the risk of harm to the art objects from the increased number of visitors to the museum, and it will make a visit to the museum more meaningful for viewing art by reducing congestion.
Yay, we won! - Museum press release (OK, link is a paraphrase of what they said).
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Comments
Quirk works
I have been in town for a long long time and have passed by the ISGM a couple of thousand times but had never gone inside until a couple of weeks ago. Took some friends from out of town in, cold, without knowing anything about the woman or the place. I had some strong impressions:
1. The collection represents a little slice of the cultural "transfer" (none dare call it pillage, ala Indiana Jones-type harvesting) of artifacts from cash-poor locales to cash-flush collectors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's preservation, and the sales were probably mostly voluntary, and it's all for my eventual edification, etc. Still feels creepy seeing a bunch of art that was intended to be somewhere else shoved willy-nilly into this house built by someone who could just buy whatever caught her eye.
2. That said, what a cool and random assortment, and what a remarkably strange housing.
3. The front rooms, where women took art classes from MFA teachers brought over before skirts were allowed in MFA classes. Kept much as they looked in the day, like a little time traveling.
4. Would it kill them to put up a few more notices to tell me what I'm looking at? I know ISG's intent was that you did not need to know the provenance of an artwork to appreciate it, and you should be enlightened enough in the arts to know what you are seeing already, but come on. I work a real job. I don't have famous artists hanging around me all day whispering in my ear.
5. ISG's travel photos, some dating back to the 1860s, look to my layman's eye to be remarkably high quality for that time. Have these been scanned and made available somewhere?
6. What was up with her destruction of the Chinese Room? There is something more to that story.
7. When she was on her deathbed, she had old letters and papers burned, including a family Bible. When someone who could and did spend a lifetime ignoring society and its mores does that, there is again more to the story.
8. You have to love someone who would go to the BSO - when the crowd dress was tails and gowns - wearing a homemade head band (ala Dice-K) with "Oh You Red Sox!" written on it.
For $12, I will go back, but I am reading up on the place first.
Ms. Gardner did not destroy
Ms. Gardner did not destroy the Chinese Room--a pack of philistine trustees did that well after her death. A similar pack is about to do the same thing to an integral part of the museum--the carriage house. Ms. G had a very deliberate vision for her museum and the carriage house was a part of it. This will go down in the history of the museum as an act of uneducated barbarism, and if the citizens of this city cared about our cultural heritage we would do something to stop it.
Well, the carriage house was
Well, the carriage house was not a part of the will that specifies the rules regarding the rest of the museum. The SJC just confirmed that. Your opinion is spawned from the same cult of personality that made Mrs. Gardner such a celebrity in her day. It is both inspiring, and a little alarming, that people to the present feel such an emotional certainty about what Isabella would or would not have wanted. She played with the contents of her home endlessly. Her will just prevents certain things from being rearranged or removed in perpetuity. It doesn't require the museum to be a time capsule, however.
And "uneducated barbarism?" C'mon. Take a deep breath, there, my friend. What, is that your Charlton Heston moment of the week? I think an institution attempting to create sustainable facilities for growth probably falls outside the realm of "uneducated" and "barbarism." Stealing the paintings from the museum, uneducated barbarism. Building a classroom/exhibit space to augment the organization – that sounds like change, pure and simple.
Why does the museum need to
Why does the museum need to grow? I don't have any particular interest in Ms. Gardner as a "celebrity". What I have a problem with is a bunch of over-achieving MBAs expanding and "augmenting" and creating a "sustainable" facility so that everyone will know how cool they are for using buzzwords that smart people like to throw around.
So your argument amounts to
So your argument amounts to "don't use big words and be smart," followed by "don't change anything ever." Great.
Look, the museum business is a business. And, as in any business, if you can't think of ways to bring in new and more plentiful customers, you close. Especially in a culture recently and increasingly burdened with attention deficit and choice paralysis. If you can't offer something expansive and original, and if can't cut through the 99+ things available to the potential attendee/member with something fresh and compelling, you're passed over for the next successful enterprise.
ISGM has been laboring — unnecessarily, some might conclude — for decades with a single business model: The Palace. Want it to close? Clutch your precious imagination of what Mrs. Gardner's will says (without ever having read it, I would venture to guess) close to your change-fearful heart.
However, if you'd like it to be a vibrant and community-contributive organization in 2020, and 2040, and so forth, the museum needs to forge a path towards that goal. This project is one concrete effort in that direction, this humble patron and non-Gardner employee, might suggest.
Well, words that
Well, words that not-very-smart people throw around who want to seem so. I thought that was obvious.