Art Scoping

Dany Khosrovani tells the truth—truth in branding, marketing, and advertising. Founder in 2017 of The DKG Perspective, a consultancy for CEOs who are at crossroads, she previously spent decades at leading agencies including J. Walter Thompson, Bates Worldwide and Young & Rubicam, and her clients were top-tier companies. Oxford-trained, she shares a fresh and candid assessment of the need for a moral framework for museums, leadership challenges in the face of mounting public criticism of questionable business practices, shortcomings in addressing racial injustice, and the current wave of stated corporate concerns about issues like voter suppression. We touch on the “brands” of the UK and the US, and advice for museum directors and for corporate leaders, peppered with insights won over a brilliant career.

In this episode we turn to an accomplished chronicler of our times. Michael Shnayerson is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of eight books on a range of nonfiction subjects, including “Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art,” which lays bare secrets of the largest unregulated financial market in the world. His wide-ranging interests have taken him into multiple facets of the 20th century—including laboratories combating disease, Harry Belafonte’s recollections, a political dynasty, and most recently a page-turner about the notorious gangster Bugsy Siegel. He’s not done with the art world—we learn about a current collaboration with Alec Baldwin to delve into spectacular tales of modern art forgeries.

Raising money to support the arts is demanding in the best of times—let alone during a pandemic, and when so many are focused on social and racial justice. Our guest Nina Diefenbach is Senior Vice President and Deputy Director for Advancement at@The_BarnesFoundation in Philadelphia. A century ago, Dr. Barnes had an abiding commitment to supporting his African American employees and students at @LincolnUofPA,the nation's first degree-granting #HBCU, and we learn how the Barnes has adapted to the last year’s many challenges along with facets of its exceptional offerings.

Museum directors and curators get the credit when exhibitions or collections open, but what about the museum designers? Look no further. We turn to one of the world’s leading exhibition designers, Dinah Casson. Her design partnership with Roger Mann since 1984, called Casson Mann, has completed high-profile assignments in the UK, US, Russia, Italy and the Middle East. We dip into her new book, titled Closed on Mondays: Behind the Scenes at the Museum, published by Lund Humphries, and learn about assignments from a proposed UNESCO museum of world heritage outside Turin, under the aegis of AEA Consulting, to the British galleries of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, to the Lascaux Cave in Montignac in the Dordogne.

We check in with Nina Del Rio, Vice Chairman, Americas, at Sotheby’s, for an inside look at how the art market performed during the past year. She concurs with recent assessments of a drop in market volume, but contends that the bottom line wasn’t as affected as all might assume. We delve into how objects make their way into private sales versus auctions, a farewell to printed auction catalogues, a surprising prediction about the future of glamorous in-person evening sales, the impact of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in the art market, museums’ reassessments about mission affecting their participation in the market, and how AAMD’s loosened deaccessioning guidelines has revealed a deep divide among museum leaders regarding the disposition of funds realized from art sales. She also notes an increasing appetite among private collectors to be the stewards of their own holdings--or to insist on restrictions prohibiting deaccessioning.

There are endlessly conflicting views about cultural authority these days. For perspective we need an enlightened scholar to sort it out--and find her in Sarah Lawrence College Professor Jerrilynn Dodds. From the inapposite definitions of Islamic and “Western” art and architecture permeating our language, to the decolonization of the curriculum, we touch on Spain’s medieval history, the mythology of a common European identity, the misguided trope of American ‘exceptionalism’, why Hagia Sophia’s return to its function as a mosque should surprise or offend no one (she exuberantly dresses me down for singling it out as a political gesture), the social activism of today’s youth, her favorite state-sponsored architecture, and other kernels of good-humored wisdom. You’ll be amply rewarded, with no tuition bill to follow.

Miami is a harbinger of changing demographics in the United States, and we’re lucky to have as today’s guest Franklin Sirmans, director of Pérez Art MuseumMiami (PAMM), a modern and contemporary art museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting international art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Our conversation ranges from PAMM’s navigation of the pandemic to the impact of Black Lives Matter on art museums, the need for staff and boards to reflect a museum’s community, the representation of indigenous people in museum programming, reservations about deaccessioning as a path to diversifying collections, the shifting priorities of collection-building versus offering temporary experiences, and the stereotype of Miami and L.A. as sybaritic settings for culture.

We head to the UK to hear from Sir Charles Saumarez Smith about his new book The Art Museum in Modern Times. Former director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery, and Royal Academy, he reflects on contests of authority bearing down on museum leaders, ranging from the influence of private wealth, to restitution claims, the assault on the canon of art history, and the failure of museums to address the legacy of slavery and prevailing discrimination. He discusses the preparation of future directors, purging endowments of investments in regressive industries, challenges to the primacy of permanent collections, the ‘anti-woke’ agenda of Boris Johnson’s government, the dearth of educational collaboration among museums online, the ascendancy of a commercial paradigm over public access, and his hopes for the future of museums.

Bruce Mau is a globally renowned problem-solver. In this episode we touch on some of his past and upcoming achievements, including a new documentary about his extraordinary influence in the design sector and beyond, to have its world premiere at the upcoming SXSW. We discuss his insights in Designing for the Five Senses, his new book MC24, his childhood in Canada, the origins of his landmark exhibition and publication Massive Change, memorable experiences of working with globally renowned leaders and innovators, and his thoughts on design practices and life as the pandemic recedes.

Dr. Lisa Freiman reflects on the recent forced resignation of the chief executive of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (for now clinging to the nickname @newfields) along with her major exhibition of the work of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, her role as Commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion in the 2011 Venice Biennale, which presented new works by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Alfredo Jaar’s extraordinary Park of the Laments in the 100-acre sculpture park she devised, and a recent project she curated at the University of Washington’s Hans Rosling Center for Population Health. Candid, insightful, and passionate, she addresses the institutional culture of art museums and encourages more resolve in tackling persistent discrimination and resistance to change.