Category: Design

For the past several weeks, dozens of candidates have been facing a five-person committee in a dark, book-lined room at Italy’s Culture Ministry, hoping to convince the panel that they should be selected to direct some of Italy’s top museums, including the Uffizi in Florence, the Capodimonte in Naples, the Brera in Milan and seven others.

Ten candidates are up for each job. The committee will whittle each list down to three, based on the interview and the candidates’ knowledge of a host of issues — new technologies, cultural heritage legislation, sponsorship opportunities — as well as their vision for each museum. The final selection will be made sometime next month by Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s culture minister, and Massimo Osanna, the ministry’s director overseeing museums.

It has been eight years since a reform granted some Italian arts institutions greater autonomy and opened up the position of museum director to people from outside the culture ministry’s ranks. The then-culture minister, Dario Franceschini, sought applications from foreigners to shake up the museum sector, even publishing the job advertisement in The Economist magazine. At the first 20 museums affected by the reform, Franceschini appointed seven foreigners and several Italians with experience abroad, who were hired for a four-year contract, that could be renewed once.

“It was an opening that brought fresh air into the whole system,” said Luca Giuliani, an archaeologist who was part of the 2015 committee that selected those directors. However, many Italian art historians and archaeologists had felt snubbed, and several colleagues stopped speaking to him, he said.

This time around, the mood is different. Though the new minister, who is part of a nationalist, right-wing government, has said that nationality was not an issue, of the 90-odd candidates shortlisted (some are in the running for more than one museum), only a handful have significant experience outside Italy. And two of the foreigners up for jobs already run two top Italian museums.

Given the government’s political bent, “it would have been a surprise if they had been looking for international candidates,” Giuliani said.

In an email, Sangiuliano said that there were “no preclusions on nationality.” What mattered, he added, was that a “director had to be good and have ideas.”

Yet culture experts say that the prestige and perks of running an Italian museum — which include some of the world’s most celebrated arts institutions — are dampened by downsides including lower salaries compared to comparably important museums abroad, limited contracts and the many headaches of Italian bureaucracy.

“I think that a colleague that has worked in the United States, or in England and Germany, might wonder whether it’s worth it,” said Enrico Parlato, the president of CUNSTA, an Italian association of university art historians. “To be crude about it, the salaries cannot compete,” he added.

Critics also say that by giving the culture minister the last word over the choice of directors, the 2015 reform also gave the minister outsized influence, including over diplomatic questions like loaning rare works abroad, or dictating the content of exhibitions.

“The reform was intended to put museum directors on a leash,” said Tomaso Montanari, the rector of the University for Foreigners of Siena and a well-known cultural critic. He cited the National Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery, which recently opened an exhibition on J.R.R. Tolkien, the author whom Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has cited as an inspiration. “There is very strong political intrusiveness,” Montanari added.

Under the Franceschini reform, 20 of Italy’s top museums — including the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the Accademia in Venice and the Archaeological Museum in Naples — were given more managerial autonomy, shifting oversight for budgets from the culture ministry to the directors, who were also encouraged to fund-raise.

But the reform had an impact beyond that top tier. Museum revenues that were once given to the culture ministry and redistributed among less visited sites now mostly remain in the coffers of the autonomous museums.

Sixty museums now have some level of budgetary and administrative autonomy. Montanari said that financial independence had forced those museums to try and attract as many visitors as possible, “using a business logic,” which he said was the antithesis of their cultural mandate.

But some of the museum directors whose terms are expiring said that, without the reform, many of the changes they enacted during the past eight years would never have happened. Under the old system, requests to make major changes had to go through long pipelines before they were approved, as did requests for funding.

At the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, the French art historian Sylvain Bellenger restored and revitalized the surrounding 330-acre park, transforming it from a neglected haunt of drug dealers to a pristinely landscaped, much frequented park.

The revamp was only possible “because of the reform, when for the first time Italian museums looked toward international standards and realized they were much behind,” said Bellenger, who has become so popular in Naples that thousands have signed an online petition begging Italy’s culture minister to extend the contract of “the man who changed the face of Capodimonte and of our world.”

Eike Schmidt, the German-born director of the Uffizi Galleries, said the reform had required directors to become “visionary,” and that financial independence demanded finding ulterior sources of revenue through sponsors and donors.

Schmidt has made the shortlist to lead the Capodimonte Museum, but might also make a run for mayor of Florence in elections next year, an eventuality that “under certain conditions I would not exclude,” he said in a recent interview.

Some directors said that the 2015 reform fell short on a number of fronts, however, especially when it came to hiring staff, which still depended on an open competitive exam through the culture ministry. That meant that they couldn’t hire who they wanted. And Italian bureaucracy also dampened efforts for massive change.

James Bradburne, the Canadian-born, British director of the Brera Museum, said he’d struggled to overcome some of the museum’s “profoundly flawed” structures, like the way human resources were allocated, or administrative loopholes that slowed down getting economic resources. These created “multiple moments for delay, change, error and waste,” he said.

“When I raise this point, which I’ve raised for eight years, they look at me and laugh and say, ‘Oh James, siamo in Italia,’” — we are in Italy — “the universal answer for things that are patently absurd and a waste of money and don’t make sense,” he said.

The culture ministry declined to say how many foreigners had applied for the jobs this time, yet Montanari said that the lack of foreign candidates on the shortlists suggested that, at the very least, top officials from comparably prestigious museums had not applied.

“You have a country like Italy, which has all the problems, without all the financial means,” Montanari said, “even as you have politicians breathing down your neck. “

“It’s no wonder that directors of foreign museums didn’t apply,” he added. “They’re not stupid.”

There’s more than one answer to the question “What is photography?,” and this fall in London, there are a dazzling array of possibilities on show in retrospectives of the Japanese artists Hiroshi Sugimoto and Daido Moriyama.

Born 10 years apart (Moriyama in 1938, in Osaka, and Sugimoto in 1948, in Tokyo), both photographers came of age in Japan’s postwar photography boom. During this time of political change and technological innovation, practitioners explored, and frequently critiqued, the photograph as journalistic document, art object and mass media advertisement. Photo books and photography magazines proliferated, as did connections with American art scenes including Minimalism, Pop and the grainy realism of street photography.

Both photographers are also invested in the more ephemeral, even metaphysical, qualities of the medium: How it freezes or reconstitutes time, brings the dead or the inanimate to life, unsettles concepts of memory, reality and vision itself. If these questions unite Moriyama (whose London show runs at the Hayward Gallery, through Jan. 7, 2024) and Sugimoto (at the Photographers’ Gallery, through Feb. 27) their many-decade oeuvres could scarcely be more different.

“All my life I have made a habit of never believing my eyes,” Sugimoto has said. Across four floors of the Hayward’s stark, Brutalist galleries, nine black-and-white series spanning 1976-2022 are staged in austere displays. Each body of work addresses the seen and the unseen, exterior and interior life, with deceptive simplicity.

A sequence of “Diorama” photographs, begun shortly after Sugimoto arrived in New York in 1974, capture scenes from the American Museum of Natural History with otherworldly precision. Using an old, large-format camera, long exposure times and elaborately tuned lighting, Sugimoto enhanced both the artifice and the verisimilitude of the institution’s taxidermy wildlife tableaus behind glass.

“Polar Bear” (1976) shows the majestic white animal roaring over a fresh kill: the bloodied body of a seal whose inert form is bulky and dark against an Arctic white background that stretches into the distance. Look closely and behind the bear — with its luscious coat of fur, its big paws so heavy in the snow you can almost hear it crunch — the line between two and three dimensions is just visible: a jagged crevasse in the ice floe beneath the two animals merges almost seamlessly with a painted backdrop of receding icy peaks.

The eye judders between these realities. The dead bear, momentarily brought to life by the vividness of the photograph, dies again, and is preserved again, a copy of a copy, frozen between past and present. Similar fates await a pair of ostriches defending their new hatchlings against a family of wart hogs (“Ostrich-Wart Hog,” 1980) and a placidly floating mother manatee and her calf (“Manatee,” 1994).

Sugimoto’s play with photographic abstraction is evident in a series of “Seascapes,” dominated by long horizons and blank skies, “Lighting Fields” produced with bolts of electricity sent across sheets of unexposed film and rich chromatic studies (“Opticks”) made by shining light through a prism demonstrate Sugimoto’s play with abstraction. But it’s the “Theaters” series, arguably his most famous, that maintains the most beguiling promise of photography to capture a flickering in-between state.

In cinemas, drive-ins and abandoned palace-style theaters across the United States (and sometimes Europe), Sugimoto set his camera’s exposure time to the length of a movie screening. His device sees what no naked human eye can apprehend: a bright white vortex of time elapsed, frame upon frame upon frame, at once stilled and in motion. In Massachusetts, Indiana, New York, Philadelphia, the shadowy rows of seats, crumpled velvet curtains and decorative wall moldings are irradiated by a central focus that is not an image but a light so bright and uncontainable that its edges are smudged like a ghost.

Across town at the Photographer’s Gallery, also unfolding across four floors, the Moriyama retrospective does away with any sense of the photograph as a rarefied art object. Where Sugimoto’s images are clear, large, refined, singular and precious, Moriyama’s are multiple, democratic, immersive, rapid and haphazard, and varied in size, material and presentation.

“When people realize that the time they supposedly live through actually has no substance,” Moriyama has said, “they tend to be seized with fear and an unspeakable apprehension about the excessive uncertainty of it all.” In the end, he added, “human existence has essentially nothing to rely on.” Displayed on wallpaper, in grids, projections, photocopies, conceptual assemblages, contact sheets and books, his work embraces the dark flux of life that cannot be contained, but must somehow be preserved.

Moriyama’s subjects are accidents, political conflict, urban ennui, loneliness, cheap commercial goods, all the details of the everyday — as many as possible — caught in passing and printed in high-contrast black-and-white. Rakish angles, extreme close-ups, blurred fragments and decentered, deliberately awkward cropping dominate the profusion of images arranged in nonlinear displays that leave interpretation to the viewer: an open mouth, a movie theater marquee, a boy playing with a ball, Lyndon B. Johnson on a television screen, a crowd of police in the night, a black cat in a hallway.

In his 1969 “Accident” series, chaotic combinations scramble perspective while also taking aim at the omnipresence of mainstream media sensationalism. Later series are more intimate and melancholy. “Farewell Photography” (1972) brings together images that might usually be considered errors — grainy, blurry, out-of-focus (are, bure, boke in Japanese) — to dismantle photographic expectations of clarity and truth.

In “Memories of a Dog” (1982), made during a period of creative crisis, Moriyama revisits locations of his peripatetic childhood in search of scenes that reflected his current interior state: scrolls of film, a hand against the sky, a cherry tree in blossom — as if photography were a form of time-travel, bridging the rift between past and present.

What world does a photograph show? Is it a record or a work of art? As Moriyama wondered, “What is the work that unites light, time and the visible world?” In these two exhibitions, which encourage slow, careful, sometimes rapturous looking, there is — refreshingly — no need for an answer.