Cleveland Art Museum

The Cleve­land Art Muse­um is slat­ed for a $258M expan­sion in the com­ing year. I’m glad that they’ll have a chance to get more of their large col­lec­tion on dis­play, but I can’t help but think that $258M dol­lars [and the $8M chipped in by the state] could do a lot more good else­where. Yes, pri­vate donors can donate wher­ev­er the hell they want to, but what’ll it take to make ’em donate to the eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment of the region? Hope­ful­ly the $80M/yr esti­mate will hold true by attract­ing more vis­i­tors to the area, and I’m glad to see that they say admis­sion will still be free, but we’ll see what six years of con­struc­tion does to that tune. I wish they’d got­ten a Cleve­land archi­tect for the design instead of Rafael Viñoly. A friend of mine also took excep­tion to this:

Rafael Vi? [sic], the inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned archi­tect who designed the project and a native of Uruguay, called the applause that fol­lowed the vote Mon­day “an almost Latin lev­el of enthu­si­asm. These peo­ple are real­ly hap­py.”

Appar­ent­ly norteam­er­i­canos don’t get real­ly excit­ed about stuff? Wel­come to Cleve­land, bub.

Hey, I’m grouchy today; I’m com­plain­ing about good things. I’m also igno­rant and not rich so I’m sure by tomor­row I’ll have changed my mind some­what. I’m still glad it is hap­pen­ing. Shaddup Adam.

4 thoughts on “Cleveland Art Museum”

  1. Evi­dent­ly, the Cleve­land MA has one of the largest endow­ments in the coun­try, par­tial­ly enabling them to keep their admis­sion free. I don’t see this chang­ing in the next six years. It’s some ridicu­lous­ly high mil­lion dol­lar num­ber or some­thing, and half of that endow­ment goes toward pur­chas­ing. The oth­er half is used for oth­er pur­pos­es. So they don’t need to make mon­ey. They also seem to pride them­selves on their free admis­sion, tout­ing that they and the Nation­al Gallery of Art are the only remain­ing free major art muse­ums in the coun­try.

    With Cleve­land being this great big dead city like it is, it is nice to see at least SOME­thing in the city is revered enough to be devel­oped. Cleve­land does have one of the fin­er art col­lec­tions in the coun­try (per­haps not as impres­sive as New York), so it is worth invest­ing in.

  2. Yea, I got­ta agree with your last sen­tence (the whole “shaddup” thing). Sure, the $$ *could* be used for oth­er civic devel­op­ments. But, to their own cred­its, the arts con­tin­ue to be a hard sell in Cleve­land. We’re mak­ing improve­ments, but it still has a ways to go. So, to that end, I say “yeah!” for the Cleve­land Muse­um of Art hav­ing the cash to be able to make these improve­ments and expan­sions. I’ve been to a good # of art muse­ums and CMA con­tin­ues to be one of the best around (obvi­ous­ly, not as good as NYC, but that’s NYC), so I see their improve­ments as keep­ing up the lev­el of qual­i­ty they’ve had through the years. True, I feel their mod­ern art sec­tion to be lack­lus­ter and pret­ty bland, but here’s hop­ing they improve that with the funds.

    I would much rather see this cash go the Muse­um rather than some­thing like anoth­er godaw­ful con­ven­tion cen­ter or, worse yet, a casi­no or some shit.

  4. That’s because, while lega­cy vil­lage is nice to look at, I don’t know any­one who can afford half the crap they sell there.

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