Just a few years ago, a visitor curious about Frank Lobdell’s 15 April 1962, in the Oakland Museum of California, could have scanned its wall label to read this description of the painting: “A tightly coiled form struggles against the confines of the canvas. Thick paint, hot colors, hard lines, and a gouged surface reinforce the sense of uneasiness. They express the artist’s view of the human condition as a struggle for meaning and dignity.”

But in the four years since that text was written, curators at the Oakland Museum and countless other art institutions have initiated a quiet revolution in the way they engage and converse with visitors about the treasures in their care. These institutions are working hard to move away from what Graham W. J. Beal, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, calls “the priestly voice of absolute authority.” Their aim now is to provide information and context about the works—and then encourage people to respond to them in their own way.

The Lobdell label was one of many given a makeover in conjunction with the reopening of the Oakland Museum. It now reads: “The horrors of Frank Lobdell’s firsthand experiences of World War II affected him deeply. With roughly coiled lines, intense colors, and a scabrous surface, Lobdell seems to be expressing the struggle of humankind, as raw paint strokes metamorphose into gnashing teeth in headless jaws.”

Gone are the formal language about painting and the pronouncement about Lobdell’s intentions. Instead, the new label places the making of the work into the context of Lobdell’s own experience and that of his times. Even the word “seems” in the final sentence cues the viewer that other interpretations of the painting are possible.

As art museums have become destinations for more socially and culturally diverse audiences, they have been working hard not only to attract visitors but also to keep them engaged once they are inside. They have come to realize that visitors who feel bored, overwhelmed, confused, or stupid are unlikely to return. “Interpretation should be the biggest priority,” says Sara Bodinson, director of interpretation and research at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Using both staff members and outside experts, these institutions are running focus groups and observing people strolling through the galleries. They have clocked how much time viewers spend in front of an object and how much time they spend reading a label, and noted whether they look back at an object after reading about it.

They know how many words visitors can tolerate in object labels (about 50), room labels (no more than 150), or longer introductory texts (300 is the maximum). They know that most visitors spend ten seconds in front of an object—seven to read the label, three to examine the thing itself. They know that for most people museum fatigue sets in after about 45 minutes. And they have learned that the issues and questions on the minds of visitors are often the most basic:

* I don’t know where to start.
* I don’t know what to look at first.
* Have I looked at this long enough?
* What does circa mean?
* Your labels make me feel stupid.
* How did the artist make this?
* Why would a museum put this on display?
* Is this really art?

“We cannot make assumptions today about what people know,” says Geri Thomas, founder of the art consulting and staffing firm Thomas & Associates.

The Detroit Institute of Arts determined in 2000 that it needed to reexamine its own assumptions about visitors—and wound up giving the museum a complete makeover. Curators, educators, community members, security guards, and marketing experts were assigned to cross-departmental teams to generate ideas about how each gallery might be made more comprehensible and welcoming. Outside consultants helped with strategy and research.

Staff members succeeded in developing a range of interpretive strategies, including a spectacular high-tech projection designed to draw people into the undervisited decorative-arts wing. At that installation, visitors sit around a virtual dining table and “participate” in an 18th-century French feast, with courses served on the same porcelain plates they see in the display cases lining the room.

In other communities, museums such as the Oakland Museum or Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts are convening local panels to help write and vet labels.

The museums also want to introduce the voices of artists into the viewing experience. “One of the things people tell us is that they want to connect with the artist,” says Nancy J. Blomberg, curator of native arts at the Denver Art Museum. With master teacher Heather Nielsen, Blomberg is reinstalling the collection to focus on the artists behind the objects. A large touch-screen version of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s 2004 painting Trade Canoe for Don Quixote, for example, will allow visitors to zoom in on specific sections and hear the artist talk about them.

A pioneer of the new interpretive methods is the Newark Museum, which hoped to make its collection of 12,000 objects more relevant to its increasingly blue-collar community. In 1992, when the museum began restoring the Ballantine House, an 1885 mansion that anchors one side of its campus, a team was created to rethink how to guide visitors through the grand rooms full of such esoteric treasures as a peacock chair from the Philippines and silver-gilt gas sconces. Decorative arts curator Ulysses Grant Dietz and his team reoriented the traditional focus of the exhibition from “house” to “home,” hoping to touch on the ways in which all people construct comfort and shelter for themselves and their families.

Rather than identifying each object with the classic “tombstone” label (artist-date-medium), the team came up with three ways to convey information. The first is a fictional narrative about a housemaid displayed in a storybook, with a new page opening in each room. The maid’s daily chores, such as laying coal fires or polishing silver, cumulatively create a sense of the activity in a grand home in the 19th century. Wall quotations in each room also draw attention to themes such as “Are we doing the ‘right’ thing?” which introduces information about the etiquette of the period and invites visitors to think about how manners have changed. Finally, traditional information is presented in each room in a laminated flip chart that challenges visitors to take up a kind of treasure hunt: “Can you guess what no. 3 is?”

Even at the more conservative Metropolitan Museum of Art, director Thomas Campbell stresses that “it is incumbent on us as an institution to be much more sensitive to the diverse audiences that come here.” He and his staff are reviewing a visitor-experience study that addresses everything from banners to maps to the signage that directs people around the museum. “The second component of the study is a new look at the way we deliver the didactic information,” Campbell says. “We want to be engaging our audience. Even a small anecdote can make a difference.”

Contemporary-art museums have generally lagged in adopting new interpretation practices, even though visitors frequently complain that the work stumps them, that they don’t know where—or why—to look. “For visitors who aren’t familiar with contemporary art, there’s a feeling that they’re being tricked,” acknowledges Whitney Museum education director Kathryn Potts. “Our job is to strike a balance between the artist’s wishes and our responsibility as an institution to make the work accessible to the public.” That balance, she adds, “isn’t so easy to get right.” Roni Horn’s recent retrospective, for example, was given the spare installation the artist wanted. Labels were clustered at the entrance to each gallery, rather than displayed next to individual works. An introductory wall panel, video interviews with the artist, and a take-home brochure were also available.

Situated at the far end of the interpretation spectrum is Houston’s Menil Collection, which has no education department and no docents. Its founders, John and Dominique de Menil, believed that art objects had an inherent spiritual life of their own. “Perhaps only silence and love do justice to a great work of art,” Dominique once said. The museum upholds this founding philosophy: labels are minimal and works are hung relatively low so that they “address the viewer’s body in a direct way,” according to associate curator Kristina Van Dyke. “And we hang work minimally, so you can have a one-on-one experience with a work of art.”

Other contemporary institutions, such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, have come to see language as critical to their mission. The Walker now assigns “audience engagement” teams, composed of designers, marketers, editors, and curators, to come up with interpretation plans for each exhibition. “And we’re very sensitive about the language we use,” says chief curator Darsie Alexander. “We’re not talking to each other. We’re talking to a person who could be entering the space for the first time, or a person who’s got a very sophisticated frame of reference.”

At the Art Institute of Chicago, whose contemporary-art collection recently expanded into a spacious new wing, curators have begun using the security staff, museum educators, and visitor-services employees to provide interpretive help to viewers encountering such challenging works as Robert Gober’s 800-square-foot installation Untitled (1989–96). As part of the expansion, new interpretive labels of up to 150 words have been created for every object on view. “We strive very much to include as much specific information about a work as we can. And we try to include the artist’s voice as much as possible,” says Lisa Dorin, assistant curator of contemporary art.

Other institutions tackle the “I’ll never understand this” response to contemporary art by quoting artists in their labels, by featuring a response from a community member, or by asking a viewer for his or her own thoughts about a work. In Oakland, for instance, poet Jaime Cortez was hired to write “personal perspective” labels for pieces in the collection; they not only convey his experience looking at a work, but suggest a way of looking for other viewers. “This is a hard working sculpture,” Cortez wrote about Ruth Asawa’s woven copper wire sculpture Untitled (1959). “It is defining an inside space without enclosing that space. It is turning its own shadow into art. It is showing you many faces as you circle it. It is taking the delicate art of crocheting and making it lift weights. Most of all, it is using one plain piece of wire to map a winding path of transformation.”

But retrofitting centuries of museum practices with new interpretation strategies requires time, money, precious gallery space, the support of the entire institution, and firm direction from the top. “This kind of wholesale change—which is putting the visitor at the center of our thinking—is an attitudinal change,” says Kelly McKinley, director of education and public programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

At the Oakland Museum, executive director Lori Fogarty acknowledges that team-based interpretive practices “put the curator more in the role of a kind of moderator rather than a sole author. Curators are experts in their fields, and in an art museum the curator typically develops an entire project. That’s a lot of authority and control to let go of.”

Teamwork demands time to study visitor needs before an exhibition, as well as follow-up evaluations to determine what has succeeded and what has failed. Some museums, such as the Detroit Institute, have even hired full-time evaluators to ensure that new interpretation strategies live up to their promise. And, increasingly, institutions such as Oakland are using visitors to test-drive new galleries, where signage can be tweaked even after they open.

The wall-label revolution does have its detractors. Some worry that scholarship will suffer and that writing will be “dumbed down” for the widest public. In a 2009 exhibition review, for example, New York Times critic Ken Johnson disparaged the Newark Museum’s irksome “curatorial commentary.” Educated visitors who liked their local institutions just the way they were complain that valuable treasures have been consigned to storage so that signs can be bigger and exhibitions more interactive. Still others long for the exalted hush that hung over the galleries—a hush that increasingly is being replaced by conversation and activity.

But the majority of visitors are telling museums that they can’t relate to endless corridors of objects that appear to have been born with their labels. Audiences now want to touch the art, to have conversations in the galleries, to make their own work in response to what they see, to peer into the inner workings of a museum, to converse with artists and challenge curators.

And museums are listening. Visitors should keep their eyes on those little labels—and the new touch screens, videos, and activity stations that supplement them—as they increasingly are invited into what museum consultant Douglas Worts has called “a new form of partnership” that activates “the muses within all of us.”

Over the past week, dozens of brightly-painted pianos have appeared on the streets of London and New York.

In a square next to St Paul’s Cathedral, in the City of London, a man wanders over to an upright piano, plays three notes and then walks quickly away. Nearby, at the Millennium Bridge, a group of Spanish students crash out the chords of Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, segueing into Beethoven’s For Elise.

Chopsticks is noticeable by its absence. The street pianos are the brainchild of British artist Luke Jerram whose Play Me, I’m Yours project has been touring cities globally since 2008. This year the project is being presented simultaneously in London and New York. “This isn’t about me and my creativity,” says Jerram, speaking by phone from a piano in New York’s Times Square. “The pianos act as a blank canvas for everyone else’s creativity. This is an opportunity for people to express themselves and connect with one other. You get strangers giving each other piano lessons.” It can lead to unexpected results. “There were two journalists who met over a piano in Sydney who recently got married.”

In London, 21 street pianos have been placed in public gardens, streets and squares until 10 July 2010 to celebrate the City of London Festival. In New York, there are 60 pianos in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. “I’ve just met Cyndi Lauper – she was playing a piano in Times Square,” says Jerram. “There are lots of people who are trying to play all the pianos in one day – so there’s a lot of fun to be had.” He adds: “I’ve got another eight more cities to go this year – Belfast, all the way to Cincinnati. It costs 10 times as much to do it here as in London because of the level of bureaucracy.”

Street performers

At London’s Millennium Bridge piano, a man sits and plays an improvised piece that captivates a passing skateboarder. The impromptu pianist is Maximilian White, an Italian living in London. “I think it’s a brilliant idea,” he says. “A lot of people are too embarrassed to play but they’ve got a lot of hidden talent. Sometimes encouragement comes from within, but sometimes you need help.” Jonathan Brandon, a student in London, strikes up a tune at the same piano. “I think it’s a really neat idea. I play music in general, so I’m always attracted to the opportunity to sit down and play an instrument whenever I can.”

Canadian Ryan Ard, visiting from Ottawa, plays a simple melody from a song he’s writing on the guitar. “A lot of times I walk past music shops and I want to walk inside and play an instrument to kill 10 minutes – so it’s great to have it out on the street like this.” From 1-4 July, the Millennium Bridge piano will be linked by webcam with the piano in Times Square. Although the pianos are out on the streets for several days, Luke Jerram says vandalism hasn’t been a major problem. “We’ve had one or two vandalised in Bristol, but with the 60 in New York there’s been no problems so far. “In Sao Paulo a piano costs a year’s wage and none were stolen – what’s important is the art project reaches a diverse audience. “You’ve to take some risks to be able to reach people who don’t ordinarily get access to art and go to galleries.” After the event the pianos are donated to local schools and community groups.

From BBC Arts.

Family spokesman Mickey Cottrell says Allen died at his Hollywood home on Sunday.

Allen played Buzz Gunderson in the 1955 movie. His character loses a knife fight with Dean’s and dies when his stolen car plunges off a cliff during a “chicken run” challenge.

Allen had a number of other TV and film roles before turning to television directing in 1969. In 1984, he won an Emmy for directing an episode of “Hill Street Blues.”

He also directed the two-hour pilot for “Star Trek: The Next Generation” as well as episodes of that series and the follow up, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

The painting, called the “Taking of Christ,” or the “Kiss of Judas,” and considered the most valuable piece of art in Ukraine, was stolen from a museum in the Black Sea port of Odessa in 2008 in what officials described as a “cultural catastrophe.”

“On June 25, in Berlin, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry agents together with their German colleagues detained three Ukrainian citizens and one citizen of Germany and recovered Caravaggio’s painting,” Interior Minister Anatoly Mogylyov told a briefing.

It was recovered in Germany, where the four were detained.

Mogylyov said another suspected member of the gang, which focused on high-value thefts, had been detained in Ukraine.

“We have carried out more than 20 searches and proven (the group’s) involvement in more than 20 thefts in Ukraine,” he said.

The painting had been bought by a Russian ambassador to France and presented as a gift to a Russian prince before being turned over to the Odessa museum last century.

Doubts had been expressed about the painting’s authenticity, but Soviet art experts in the 1950s confirmed the work was indeed by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It underwent restoration work in 2006.

A version of the same painting by Caravaggio hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

From Yahoo!

The museum said Tuesday the drum will be shown from July 7 — Starr’s birthday — through December.

The instrument was presented to the drummer by the Ludwig Drum Company in Chicago during the Beatles’ 1964 U.S. tour. It was given to him in appreciation for popularizing the Ludwig name. Starr played on a Ludwig oyster black pearl drum set during the Fab Fours’ 1964 appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Starr also will start the second season of the PBS series “Live From the Artists Den” with a performance taped at the Met. It will be shown the week of his birthday.

The 60-year-old dedicated his performance to Michael Jackson, who died almost exactly a year ago, and Wonder performed a moving harmonica version of the late King of Pop’s “Human Nature.”

He also performed hits including “Superstition” and his own take on Beatles classic “We Can Work it Out.”

The artist invited Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis up on to the stage and sang his famous track “Happy Birthday” to celebrate the festival’s 40th year.

It was a high point on which to close an event which this year basked in glorious sunshine for four days, and Wonder’s musical prowess and interaction with the fans helped ease the pain of England’s loss to Germany at the soccer World Cup.

Earlier in the day tens of thousands of people crowded around giant screens erected for the big match, only to see their team crash out 4-1.

Summing up the ebullient spirit among Glastonbury-goers, John Hutcheon refused to allow the loss to mar the music.

“There is definitely more to life than football,” said the 24-year-old from Hull.

BARE CHESTS, BIKINIS

This year raincoats and rubber boots were replaced by bare chests and bikinis as temperatures soared.

Around 150,000 people danced to acts including Gorillaz, Muse, Radiohead, Scissor Sisters, Shakira and Snoop Dogg, as well as hundreds of less famous names playing across a bewildering array of stages and venues.

Eavis, who founded the event in 1970 when 1,500 punters paid a pound each to attend what was then known as the Pilton Pop Festival, said he had had the best birthday ever.

“I’ve never enjoyed myself so much,” said the softly-spoken 74-year-old, describing his Saturday night when English rockers Muse were joined on stage by U2 guitarist The Edge for one of this year’s highlights.

“I didn’t feel tired, I had such a buzz off it, and I was very proud of what I’d created. For four or five hours it was total magic.”

He added he had already identified three headline acts for the next festival, but declined to name them.

Glastonbury is one of the music world’s most coveted slots for performers because of the size of the crowds and reputation it has built over the years.

The 2010 edition has not all been easy, however.

Gorillaz were brought in at the last moment to replace U2 as the opening act, and, despite performing with the likes of Lou Reed and Bobby Womack during their Friday slot, they failed to win the crowd over.

But rappers Dizzee Rascal and Snoop Dogg, a surprise set by Radiohead, Kylie Minogue’s brief guest appearance with Scissor Sisters and Colombian singer Shakira’s sizzling set helped lift the mood through Saturday.

Plater produced numerous works for the stage and screen, including seminal police drama Z Cars and an adaptation of The Barchester Chronicles.

His work was also featured on Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play, while he adapted World War II trilogy The Fortunes of War for TV.

Plater, who also penned six novels, was honoured with a CBE in 2005.

In the same year, he was presented with the Dennis Potter award for writing at the Baftas.

His other accolades included a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of Great Britain in 2007.

Plater’s agent Alexandra Cann told the BBC that he had been “very robust” until the final week of his life when he was admitted to a London hospice.

His final screenplay, a World War II drama called Joe Maddison’s War, starring actor Robson Green, is due to be aired on ITV later this year.

Plater’s Last of the Blonde Bombshells

Ms Cann said it would be a “fitting tribute” to the writer, who was able to see the drama in production.

Among the 200 full-length dramas he produced for the stage, screen and radio was the Beiderbecke trilogy and A Very British Coup, which won a Bafta in 1989.

His later work included Last of The Blonde Bombshells, which boasted Dame Judi Dench in the cast.

Plater was born in Jarrow-on-Tyne but moved to Hull with his family as a young child. He trained as an architect but left the profession after a short time to pursue a career in writing.

Plater, whose career spanned six decades, was celebrated for writing about ordinary people in ordinary settings.

He is said to have been pleased when a critic hailed his first TV play as combining the voices of Coronation Street and the spirit of Chekov.

The dramatist later said that being invited to write for Z Cars was “like a Papal blessing… it was the biggest thing that had ever hit British television”.

Plater went on to write 30 episodes for Softly, Softly – a later spin-off series of the gritty police drama.

His most recently-seen work was four episodes of detective serial Lewis, the last of which screened earlier this year.

From BBC.

The sale of 1,200 photographs from the Polaroid collection was ordered by U.S. bankruptcy court in Minnesota when businessman Tom Petters, whose operations once included Polaroid Corp., was convicted last year of a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme.

Petters, sentenced in April to 50 years in prison, bought the bankrupt firm several years ago, and it was forced back into bankruptcy when the fraud was exposed in 2008.

Collectors and the curious jammed the salesroom at Sotheby’s — competing fiercely with telephone bidders for works by artists like Adams, who alone was represented by some 400 works. There were also works by Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lucas Samaras and William Wegman.

Nearly 90 percent of the lots offered found buyers, with the total easily beating the high pre-sale estimate.

Sotheby’s said the auction was its first based on technology, rather than an artist or theme.

“Polaroid materials, in the hands of innumerable artists, redefined the aesthetic of the 20th century,” said Denise Bethel, Sotheby’s photography department director.

Adams was best known for majestic American landscape and nature photography, in particular Yosemite National Park. “Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park” achieved the sale’s top price of $722,500, a record for the photographer.

It was bought the Alinder Gallery, a California specialist in Adams, who was a close friend of Polaroid founder Edwin Land and had six of the sale’s top 10 prices.

Some photographs by Warhol and Close soared to 10 or even 20 times pre-sale estimates as records tumbled.

Warhol’s “Self Portrait (Eyes Closed),” estimated at $10,000 to $15,000, fetched a record $254,500 for a Warhol photograph. Close’s “9 Part Self-Portrait” sold for $290,500, a record for photographic work by the artist.

William Thomas, senior vice president, publisher and editor in chief at Doubleday, announced Monday that Toobin’s “The Oath: The Secret Struggle for the Supreme Court,” will be published in 2012.

“The battle between a conservative court and a liberal president will be one of the central behind-the-scenes dramas of the Obama years,” said Toobin, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a senior analyst for CNN.

“The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court” remained on The New York Times list of best sellers for more than four months.

The novel is a complicated mixture of murder mystery, fairy tale and exploration of the medieval world of the Turkish miniaturist painter.

The novel begins – surreally – from the point of view of the murdered man; his body thrown down the bottom of a well, he waits for this death to be discovered. The story is then taken up by a myriad of characters, which include a coin and a horse, as well as the colour Red itself. They recount a chapter at least each – in fact this book has twenty narrators and yet, as James Naughtie and readers testify, it is a page-turner.

My Name is Red is the most popular of Pamuk’s in the English speaking world, due he says to the whodunnit element, but also to the global appeal of the art.

Orhan Pamuk discloses how as a young man he longed to be a painter, and so as a successful writer, it was a natural progression to write about the joys of painting, and to explore how an artist feels as their hands move across the page.

His reputation as the funny man of his family is also in evidence. Despite his intellectual credentials, humour is an important tool for him. He says he doesn’t like writing a serious book, and if the reader isn’t smiling when he reads his work, then he feels guilty.

June’s Bookclub choice : The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks

From BBC.