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The New York / Baltimore Disconnect

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Shaping History

What is it about Baltimore that makes us take ourselves more seriously when people and publications from outside our city pay attention to us? We all talk about how great this city is, how authentic, how real, but it somehow only matters when those from other places think so. The problem with this assumption is that it means we don’t take ourselves seriously enough and then we’re frustrated when the outsiders get it only partly right.

Case in point: This week the New York Times wrote an article about the BMA’s 28 million dollar renovation, and celebrated the positive changes that Doreen Bolger has brought to the museum as director. This is well deserved and I am thrilled these accomplishments celebrated, but I wish the writer had focused on the BMA, rather than segueing into a vague boosterism of a Baltimore that doesn’t exist.

After discussing some of the most recent, and decade-long changes at the BMA, author Dorothy Spears somehow connects Bolger’s emphasis on accessibility in the museum to stats from the Baltimore Collegetown Network, a self-reporting organization of 14 colleges located in and around Baltimore, that state that “the number of students in the area expecting to stay after graduation is up to 38 percent in 2012 from 19 percent in 2003.”

Please note, this is not a number of actual students staying in town, but the number who say they expect to stay. Then we have MICA’s Ray Allen saying that the quirky John Waters days are over in favor of wider lifestyle choices. I am not sure what he means by “It’s not a one-size-fits-all situation anymore… It’s varied.” Is he suggesting that Baltimore ever was one type of thing or for one type of person? What type of person would that be?? While the city is growing and more people want to live here, especially middle class creative people, this comment comes off as vapid and commercial at best and insensitive at worst.

The article cuts to the mayor claiming that “the creative class is crucial to having a diverse city, and it’s going to help us grow,” which is fine and in line with many of the comments made in the Mayor’s Cultural Town Meeting last Wednesday, but is, like the Collegetown quote, based on expectations of the future, rather than actual accomplishments.

I get that Spears is making a point about the recent levels of accessibility at the BMA and equating it to larger changes in creative culture and growth, with Allen and Mayor Rawlings-Blake seemingly backing that up, but using the museum’s accomplishments to celebrate city-wide improvements that haven’t yet occurred feels like a hollow commercial for a new and improved city of Baltimore that I don’t recognize. Is this article about the BMA or Baltimore’s new accessibility and growth?

Last, the article switches gears and claims that some (unnamed) members of the Baltimore art community feel that “Ms. Bolger has courted local artists at the expense of collecting art of national and international importance.” Then it names collector and BMA acquisitions member Connie Caplan, who says that, in the past the museum has hosted groundbreaking exhibitions like Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, and Gilbert & George, “way before they were noticed or taken seriously on the New York scene.”

Although I do not believe Caplan is saying this, the author of this article is suggesting that the BMA has sacrificed quality for accessibility. Is the implication that the museum has compromised its ability to discover ‘legitimate’ i.e. New York artists by focusing on members of its own community? New York is the center of one art world; using it as a means to calibrate artistic success in other places creates a zero-sum game of winners and losers. Let’s get one thing straight: Baltimore artists are not in competition with those in New York – if we wanted to be, we’d move there.

Why should all world class museums collect the same few anointed global artists? Why should success in New York mean that artists are worth collecting or showing in Baltimore? Why shouldn’t museums discover unique, regional talent and invest in the careers of those who live and work in the surrounding community? As part of recent changes at the BMA, the permanent collection has added a significant number of women artists and artists of color, as well as artists based geographically in the region, which points towards a groundbreaking, forward-looking way of operating. It would have been good journalism for the New York Times to focus on the ways the BMA is leading the way for other museums, but that somehow does not compute in a New York state of mind.

Attention from the New York Times is fine, and putting the accomplishments of the BMA in front of a global audience is gratifying, but the implication that accessibility and quality are somehow mutually exclusive is an elitist way of evaluating the rest of the world through New York-colored glasses. In addition, explaining accessibility as if it’s a way to sell something to the masses, rather than a way to experience and enjoy the richness of this place, well, to me, this is the difference between Baltimore and New York.

* Author Cara Ober is Founding Editor at BmoreArt.

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