ArtCurious News This Week: November 18, 2022
Happy Friday, listeners! It’s Jennifer, ArtCurious host, back at you this week with our short-form Friday roundup of my favorite art history updates and interesting news tidbits. This is ArtCurious News this Week, and this gets you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history. Today is Friday, November 18, 2022.
This week’s stories:
Black Trustee Alliance: The Art Museum Trustee Survey
Ithaka S + R: Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2022
ArtNews and the Art Newspaper: Banksy Comes Out On Top in EU Trademark Challenge, Allowing Him To Stay Anonymous
ArtCurious: Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop LIVE Q&A at the Alamo Drafthouse
Casa Buonarroti: The restoration of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Inclination in Casa Buonarroti
International Council of Museums: Statement: Museums and Climate Activism
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Episode Transcript
Why, hello there. It’s Jennifer, ArtCurious host, in your ears today with our short-form Friday roundup of my favorite art history updates and interesting news tidbits. This is ArtCurious News this Week, and this gets you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history.
Today is Friday, November 18, 2022. And this week was one of those where I had about a dozen news tabs open on my laptop with ideas for potential stories to share with you today. It’s usually not easy for me to narrow down the latest and greatest, but here are my top choices for the week—and they are actually all good news, or at least they show possibilities. First off, this week two separate studies announced findings that U.S. museums are increasing in diversity. First, the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, an organization established in 2021 to, quote, “dismantle barriers that block the entry and advancement of Black staff and leadership in the cultural field,” compiled survey responses from 134 art museums around the country, noting that more than half of them—83 in total—have at least one Black member as a part of their Board of Trustees. This is an improvement to a previous study on trusteeship that was performed in 2017 by the American Alliance of Museums, who found at that time that less than half of U.S. Museum boards had people of color in these leadership and oversight committees. A second report, this time courtesy of the Mellon Foundation, similarly noted improvement in the diversity of U.S. museum staff, receiving responses from more than 30,000 individuals spread across over 320 museums. The key word in the Mellon report is “moderate,” meaning that the findings aren’t vastly improved, but improvement of any sort is great, in my books, and hopefully signals more change to come. According to their findings, 27 percent of museum staff included in the report identified themselves as people of color back in 2015; now, in 2022, that number has risen to 36 percent. Even better, the number of Black folks in managerial positions has more than doubled in that time period. Women, who have consistently been represented more in museum settings in the past twenty years, are still holding steady but are entering more museum leadership positions, with 66 percent of institutions reporting women in these roles.
All this is great. Really great. But it doesn’t mean that everything is smooth sailing. According to the Mellon report, the growth of diversity of U.S. museums has long been in departments like facilities, security, and education, which are areas that have historically held the most diverse members of a museum’s staff. And at the Board of Trustees level, diverse folks—especially Black people—tend to be relegated more frequently to committees for Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, and not to other areas like acquisitions or construction. But this is still helpful. Even though it’s not extraordinary yet, the growth of underrepresented folks across race, gender, sexuality, income, and more is a net positive as museums worldwide work harder to present art and spaces to view that art, that more easily reflect their own diverse visitorships. And studies like these help museums to work smarter, too. As leaders of the Black Trustee Alliance noted in a statement that accompanied their report, quote, “Looking ahead, we understand the importance of establishing a benchmark from which we can measure changes in the field. Creating an equitable institution takes time.”
Next up, The Art Newspaper reported this week that Banksy, that mysterious street artist, had a double win via a European Union Board of Appeals. Earlier this year, the EU’s Intellectual Property Office declared that a trademark on Banksy’s image of an ape was invalid, though Pest Control, the name of the organization that authenticates Banksy works, filed a trademark for the ape design in 2018 and officially registered it in 2019. A greeting company titled Full Colour Black established a lawsuit, claiming that the work was trademarked in “bad faith,” since it was not, quote, “distinctive enough.” Banksy had been using this particular image of an ape, one emblazoned with a sandwich board around his neck, since at least 2002, and has populated it in several works since that time, including a spray-paint-on-metal work that sold at Sotheby’s in 2021 for just shy of $3 million. So, win number one for Banksy, since the EU decided to overturn that trademark lawsuit. But the most important element of this suit is this, the second Banksy win: Banksy can stay Banksy, an anonymous entity. According to ArtNews, quote, “A previous dispute over the copyright to Banksy’s Flower Thrower found that ‘if Banksy could not be identified as the ‘unquestionable owner’ of his graffiti, as his identity is a secret, ‘it further cannot be established without question that the artist holds any copyrights to a graffiti.’” That’s a bit of a brain bender, but it essentially establishes that not only can Banksy hold onto his trademarks, but that his identity can stay concealed. And really, isn’t that the best part about Banksy, that he’s this joker who seems to pop up in a location, like in Ukraine recently, creates a work of art, and then seemingly disappears? Banksy would lose his “Banksiness,” I’d say, if we found out who he—or she, or they!—really are. This win for Banksy is, in my mind then, a win for us all. And P.S., if you want to know more about Banksy, I did a bonus episode of ArtCurious live from the Alamo Drafthouse in Raleigh, North Carolina, talking about the mysterious maker himself. I’ll link to this in the show notes today and on this episode’s blog post at artcuriouspodcast.com.
More stories are coming to you from ArtCurious News This Week. So please support me and the show by listening to a couple of ads or join me over at Patreon and support this show ad-free for the price of a latte. We’ll be right back. Thanks for listening!
Welcome back to ArtCurious, and our News this Week. For our last story today, I’m returning to another one of our favorite artists over here at ArtCurious—and one whom I feel like we’ve been talking a lot about recently, which is extra cool. This week, art restorers in Florence, Italy, started a restoration project on a long-censored painting by none other than the great Artemisia Gentileschi, the famed Baroque painter and one of the most famous women in Italian art. This work, a piece from 1616, is called Allegory of Inclination, features a life-size female who was originally painted nude (as many allegorical figures are). It was commissioned by none other than Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger, the great-nephew of Michelangelo himself, in a Florentine building that was once owned by the artist, and then passed down to his nephew, Leonardo, and finally to Michelangelo the younger. Artemisia received this commission when she was 22 years old, when she had relocated to Florence in the aftermath of her infamous and horrendously scarring rape trial in her hometown of Rome. Allegory of Inclination was, in the words of Linda Falcone, a member of the Artemisia Up Close project, quote, “in the Florentine context… her debut painting, the same year she was then accepted into the Academy of Drawing, which was the first drawing academy in Europe at the time.” It was a debut that allowed for her acceptance into the highest realms of artsy Florence, a painting that burst her onto the scene as an important Baroque painter in an important cultural city. Falcone continues, quote, “She was able to hobnob with Galileo and with other great thinkers. So this almost illiterate woman was suddenly at the university level, producing works of art that were then…appreciated by the Grand Duke. And she became a courtly painter from then on.”
Not that Gentileschi necessarily impressed everyone. About 70 years after its completion, another member of the Buonarroti clan brought in a painter to add modest drapery to the nude figure, one that is said to be a self-portrait by Artemisia. The story goes that the figure was covered to preserve the delicate sensibilities of any women and children who might be milling about and thus might gaze upon the dreaded female form. And part of the restoration project was meant to return Allegory of Inclination to its original, Artemisia-created state. But once lead conservator Elizabeth Wick and her team began analyzing the work, they discovered that though they can differentiate the layers of paint between Artemisia’s handiwork and those of the later censor-slash-painter, the overpaint cannot be safely removed without damaging the work irrevocably. So instead, a digital reconstruction will be established to accompany the final restored work of art. Both will be on view as part of an exhibition chronicling the conservation project that is due to open in September of next year at the Casa Buonarroti. And if you happen to visit the Casa between now and April, you can watch the work being restored in real time, and you can even enjoy a conversation with the conservation team every Friday. I’m linking the details in today’s blog for those of you lucky travelers who might be in and around Florence in the next six months so that you can learn more.
One brief update before we go today. We’ve been closely following the actions of climate protesters for several months now as they’ve focused their campaigns on art as a vehicle to raise awareness for governmental action and environmental policies. This week, the International Council of Museums released a statement regarding what they call “climate activism actions in museums.” In a brief but powerful statement made more explicit in that it comes at the same time as the COP27 meeting, the UN Climate Change Conference currently occurring in Sharm-el-Sheik, Egypt, ICOM states their equal concern about the threat to our planet from climate change but asked that museums be seen as allies in the fight, not targets. In part, the statement reads, quote, “ICOM wishes to recall the role of museums as key actors in initiating and supporting climate action with their communities and commends their commitment to this mission demonstrated through educational programmes, dedicated exhibitions, community outreach and research. ICOM calls attention to the impact that these demonstrations could have on the work of museum professionals and volunteers who strive to protect and promote these valuable items of heritage for the enjoyment of the public. To reach the full transformative potential that museums have for sustainable development, ICOM wishes for museums to be seen as allies in facing the common threat of climate change.” As usual, I’ve linked the story in the blog post, so you can read the statement in full there.
That’s all I have for you today, everyone--thanks for listening to ArtCurious News this Week. Just a little programming note that ArtCurious News This Week is going on a hiatus for the next couple of weeks, first because next week is the Thanksgiving holiday for us in the U.S., so happy Thanksgiving for all my stateside listeners! And after that, I’m heading out of town again for a couple of weeks—but don’t worry, you’ll be getting more fun YouTube videos out of that one, so stay posted there. Speaking of YouTube, a new release this week includes my very first video from my recent trip to the South of France with Like Minds Travel—this one involves an overview of the completely awesome Musée Chagall. If you’re into modernism, you don’t want to miss this one. In the meantime, thank you all for your support and for listening today—until next time, stay curious.
