Another Blog About The Cleveland Museum Of Art

     Page One Hundred Seventy.

The Cleveland Museum of Art with all the new additions. It's massive.

     I went to a volunteer luncheon at The Cleveland Museum of Art yesterday. It was quite small, only

The main entrance since 1970, though actually the back of the building.

for people in the department where I volunteer (marketing & research). but it was very interesting.
     This museum is the first one in America to have a gallery which is 100% interactive. Meaning: they've taken some of the most popular works from elsewhere in the museum and moved them into one gallery, then created computer interaction around each item. For example: you can walk up to the computer below a Picasso and click on any section of the painting and find that exact same
color or shape elsewhere in the
museum. There are tons of things like that in this one very large gallery. It's proving to be extremely successful. Emissaries from museums in New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and others are coming here to study what we're doing with this cutting edge art interaction technology.  

The original 1916 building.

     Also, I knew the museum was wealthy but I didn't know it was quite as wealthy as it is. Though I don't know exact numbers, our museum has the third largest endowment of any art museum in America. I really think that they could give me a million dollars just to be nice and they'd still never miss it.

The new atrium; the size of a football field. The middle of the museum.

     Next spring will be a good time to visit if you like Van Gogh. There's going to be a special exhibition showcasing 30 of his paintings. (They couldn't get 40? How cheap!) That's one of the most extensive collections of his work ever. The angle of the exhibition is that it's going to compare and contrast how he painted the same thing at different times. So there may be two different versions of the same tree right next to each other. And we'll be able to see how his mood changed thereby changing the colors in the tree, for example.
      Next year is also a good time to visit if you like Japanese art. Japan is lending us some of their primary national art treasures. Apparently, it will be the equivalent of the Louvre lending out the Mona Lisa.
     Also, the search for a new executive director continues. Last summer our executive director resigned after it came out that he was having an affair with another museum employee. She commit suicide and the whole thing was one big soap opera. Can you believe that things like this actually happen in real life, not just Wagnerian operas? Oh, for heaven's sake's!
     But at least whomever is our next executive director won't have to deal with any construction. After 10 looooooonnnnnnng years, the construction will officially end in one week when the final galleries open. Those galleries: Chinese art; Japanese art and Southeastern Asian art are among the museum's most famous. Then the museum can get back to the business at hand: renting out the atrium for weddings ($20,000). After all, admission to the museum is always free. So somebody's got to pay for that new atrium.