Backstage Breakdown

CITY JOURNAL
July 6, 2014

Backstage Breakdown
by James Panero

The Met’s labor impasse penalizes opera lovers and supporters.

Labor troubles in the performing arts have often reached operatic proportions. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt stepped into the middle of a dispute over foreign musicians at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and he wasn’t the last head of state to intervene in a backstage conflagration. The loss of a performance season due to a strike or lockout is rightly regarded as damaging and even deadly to an arts house, posing a threat to the culture of art itself.

Considering the intensity of the discord surrounding ongoing negotiations at the Met, it would take more than a president to solve this year’s crisis at the 131-year-old opera house (its other crisis, if you consider the eruptionover its decision to stage The Death of Klinghoffer). With contracts for 15 of the Met’s 16 different unions set to expire on July 31, the rancorous talks now underway between management and labor could result in a lockout of part, if not all, of the upcoming season.

Who is at fault? On one side is Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. In an era of escalating expenses and dwindling ticket sales, Gelb says he is justified in seeking 16 percent cuts in pay and benefits from labor in an attempt to rebalance the books. But Gelb has spent lavishly: during his tenure, which began in 2006, the Met’s annual operating budget has increased from $222 million to $327 million. Gelb has paid for some of this increase through drawdowns on the Met’s endowment, which now contains less than a year’s worth of reserve funding.

Alan S. Gordon, the executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists and the representative for the Met’s unionized chorus singers, has been Gelb’s most vocal opponent, accusing the Met manager of waging “nothing short of economic warfare.” Gelb, he wrote in one of many publicly circulated emails, “has, in essence, declared war on [the Met’s] performing artists, instrumentalists, stagehands and on the unions representing them and on all of the Met’s other represented employees, in an effort to deflect focus from the waste, excess, extravagance and out-of-control spending that has been the hallmark of Gelb’s administration.”

While each side in the imbroglio lambasts the other as unrealistic, both the Met’s management and its unions are out of touch with today’s realities. On June 16, the Met released its latest tax filings. Gelb earned $1.8 million in pay and benefits in 2012. Granted, Gelb has since taken a modest pay cut, and his 2012 salary represented some one-time payouts. Yet a salary in excess of $1 million a year underscores the unreality of Gelb’s leadership. And Gordon claims that Gelb plans to keep his full-time Met chauffeur.

Even Gelb’s purported success, the much-touted “Live in HD” broadcasts beamed to a couple thousand movie theaters, has not covered the budget shortfall. Meanwhile the HD initiative has further eroded the primacy of the Met’s live audience and eaten into its main donor base, with everyone from singers to seamstresses now forced to play to the cameras rather than the live ticketgoers. Gelb earned his reputation through music television, arranging the broadcasts of Vladimir Horowitz’s 1986 return concerts in the USSR. Yet at a time when even our phones can record in HD, his vision of lavish live broadcasts has quickly dated. For greater accessibility, today the Met could simply post a handful of full-length recordings free to YouTube every year, with opera by iPad serving as an invitation to rather than a replacement for the live event.

But similar profligacy reigns on the union side. The Met’s tax filings reveal that three of the house’s five top-paid employees are members of Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees—stagehands whocommand pay and benefits in excess of $450,000 a year. Even Gordon’s beloved choristers, the 80 or so full-time employees who perform many nights behind the headline stars, take home an estimated $300,000 in annual pay and benefits. These are hardly proletarian sums, and the numbers are hard to justify to a millennial generation still suffering the job-market fallout of the financial crisis.

To move forward, both sides need to stop comparing their pay packages and begin proving their worth to a new opera public. Met management should pursue greater transparency in its nonprofit filings; the public deserves to see a line-by-line itemization of expenses for each new production and each star singer, as well as an explanation of where the money will come from to pay for it all. At the same time, the unions should explain why their meters click for everything from rehearsal time to costume changes, and open the door for workers of similar talents willing to do some jobs for less.

In the last few years, major arts organizations such as the New York City Opera have gone bankrupt; others, like the San Diego Opera, have verged on the brink of insolvency, and labor walkouts have silenced performances from Minnesota to Carnegie Hall. In most of these cases, management and labor have both been part of the problem. The losers are opera lovers and a future generation of supporters, increasingly treated with contempt. Joseph Volpe, Gelb’s predecessor and a seasoned negotiator whom management has kept out of current talks, pointed this out years ago, during an earlier round of strife at the opera house. “The most serious side effect” of a breakdown backstage is the crucial financial support of rank-and-file donors, Volpe wrote in his 2006 memoir, The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera. “[They were] turned off by all the bloodletting,” he added. “Opera is habit forming, but once the habit is broken, it’s easily kicked.”

Landscape with Sculptures

View of the South Fields at Storm King, all works by Mark di Suvero.  Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson

James writes:

Great sculpture needs to breathe. For more than fifty years, The Storm King Art Center has been showing modernist sculpture in the breathtaking landscape of the lower Hudson Valley. The nonprofit, founded and opened to the public in 1960 through the efforts of the late Ralph E. Ogden and H. Peter Stern, transformed the farmland of a country estate into a foremost site for examining the relationship between natural and man-made form.    

Mark di Suvero Pyramidian, 1987/1998 and Beethoven’s Quartet, 2003. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

The seasonal center in Cornwall, New York, near West Point, Bear Mountain, and across the river from Beacon, is a little over an hour drive north of New York City. The trip is best appreciated by heading up the riverfront roads on the picturesque western side of the Hudson. Directions and bus schedules are available here.  

Dan Budnik David Smith, South Field, Terminal Iron Works 

As the long-time director David Collins explained to me, the inspiration for much of what appears at Storm King  came from Terminal Iron Works at Bolton Landing, the rural New York studio where the sculptor David Smith often kept his work outside like crops in the fields. Many of these sculptures became early aquisions for the Center.

Mark di Suvero Jambalaya, 2002-06. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

In part thanks to commissions by Storm King, some of the most iconic works of the sculptor Mark di Suvero are now centerpieces here.

Mark di Suvero Frog Legs, 2002, Mozart’s Birthday, 1989, Neruda’s Gate, 2005. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

Alexander Liberman Iliad, 1974-76. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

The outdoor environment, and curatorial taste, has limited the range of sculpture in the Storm King collection, which is heavy on metal abstraction of the second half of the twentieth century. Some can seem overwrought and stuck in the 1970s.  

Maya Lin Storm King Wavefield, 2007-2008. Photograph by James Panero

But in recent years the Center has seen sculptors take on the landscape in new ways, such as Maya Lin's Wavefield, and, a favorite, the snaking stone walls of Andy Goldsworthy.  

 Zhang Huan Three Legged Buddha, 2007. Photograph by James Panero

To me a foray into contemporary Chinese art with work by the theatrical Zhang Huan (who is also the focus of this summer's exhibition) seems like a misstep. You can read more of my thoughts on Zhang here. To its credit, this artist's large Three Legged Buddha, with its incense-burning toes stomping a head into the ground, conveys a palpable sense of corporeal discomfort.  

Sculpture safari! Calder spotted on the ridge. 

What would I like to see next at Storm King? An increased engagement with the range of artists taking a new look at form and nature, from Giuseppe Penone to Rachel Beach. A "Storm King biennial" would serve as further reminder that there's more to contemporary sculpture than Koons, Koons, Koons. 

The Unknown Korea

Moon Jar, Early 18 century. Porcelain, Height 16 1/8 inches (41 cm). National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Treasure No. 1437. 

HUMANITIES
Spring 2014

The Unknown Korea
by James Panero

Little known treasures from the Joeson dynasty come to the United States

“Sacrifice,” writes Lee Myung-Bak, the former president of South Korea and CEO of Hyundai, in his autobiography The Uncharted Path. “That's what makes our mosaic so beautiful and rich.” Over the last sixty years, such sacrifice has turned a war-torn country into an economic powerhouse and brought what is known as the “Miracle on the Han River” to the United States. We Americans drive Korean cars, eat Korean cuisine, watch K-Pop on Korean electronics, and read Korean-American literature by celebrated writers such as Chang-Rae Lee.

The confident reach of South Korean culture follows that country’s emergence from a century of terrible upheaval, in which it was caught up in the territorial ambitions of China, Japan, and Russia as well as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Over a million people perished in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. And today, even as South Korea has emerged from darkness, North Korea remains captive to an aggressive tyrannical regime.

Sun, Moon, and Five Peaks, Artist/maker unknown, Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), 19th century, Eight-fold screen; colors on paper, 82 11/16 × 217 7/16 inches (210 × 552.3 cm), Private Collection 

For Hyunsoo Woo, curator of Korean art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the moment was right to look beyond her country’s recent past to the era that informed it: the 518-year reign of the Joseon Dynasty (pronounced “Choe-sun”), from 1392–1910, which gave Korea its culture of duty. What has resulted is an ambitious survey of one hundred and fifty works called “Treasures from Korea,” now on view at the Philadelphia Museum, an exhibition that will travel on to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The show is a “dream come true,” Woo tells me over lunch at the museum. “Everyone thought I was crazy.”

Crazy, in part, because of the difficulty in securing work for such a show. There is relatively little Korean art in American museum collections. “The number of Korean pieces in the United States is drastically smaller than for other Asian art. There is much less of it than Chinese or Japanese,” says Woo.

Portrait of Yi Jae (1680-1746), Artist/maker unknown, Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), Late 18th century, Hanging scroll; ink and colors on silk, 38 1/2 × 22 3/16 inches (97.8 × 56.3 cm), National Museum of Korea, Seoul. 

Known as the “Hermit Kingdom,” Korea under the Joseon was late to open its doors to the West. Korea only began normalized relations after establishing a trade treaty with the United States in 1882. “Korea didn’t know about the rest of the world,” says Woo. By 1890, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston already had a curator for Japanese art, and American collections of Japanese and Chinese artifacts were extensive. Even today, according to Woo, there are only four curators for Korean art at U.S. museums, and until recently only UCLA offered a Ph.D. program in Korean art history. As a result, Americans know sadly little about Korean art.

Joseon art and artifacts are rare in Korea, too, and are seldom lent overseas. “We went through a rough modern era: the annexation by Japan and the Korean War between north and south. The whole country was completely ruined,” says Woo. The upheaval led to the “loss of many treasures and cultural properties,” and some that did survive remain locked away in North Korea. What survives in the south can also be fragile: paper, hemp, silk. Woo’s only choice for a multicity exhibition was to find different objects to borrow from Korea for each location: “We are only allowed to show one painting at any venue, for conservation reasons. So it was extremely complicated. Books and paintings will all be rotated. Screens are on paper and silk.”

Ever since the war, in which 40,000 U.S. service personnel lost their lives or went missing in action, America has had a deep bond with South Korea. So “Treasures from Korea” grew from the spirit of cultural exchange between the two countries—and became far more expansive than even Woo first envisioned. In exchange for the loans from Korean institutions, many of them protected as national treasures, the three stateside venues, plus the Terra Foundation for American Art, first lent a historic three-century survey of their holdings for an exhibition called “Art Across America,” which showed in 2013 in Korea at Seoul’s National Museum, a key organizer of the current exhibition.

Jar with Design of Bamboo and Plum Trees, 16th to 17th century. Porcelain with underglaze iron decoration, 15 3/4 x 14 15/16 inches (40 x 37.9 cm). National Museum of Korea, Seoul. National Treasure No. 166. 

Just as Koreans might be familiar with Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, but new to the Hudson River School, the art and culture of the Joseon will be an eye-opener for American audiences. The word “treasures” brings to mind rich materials, but the Joseon, the longest reigning neo-Confucian dynasty in history, enforced an austere aesthetic. “Reserve, discipline, formality, simplicity, serenity,” says Woo of the Joseon. “It was a great culture of recording.” Its respect for tradition and self-sacrifice helps explain its singular longevity. Imported from China, neo-Confucian scholarship also gave Korea’s intellectual class a way to keep its monarchs in check. 

The art of the Joseon was far more spare than what you see from earlier Korean dynasties, such as the Buddhist Silla. Pronounced “Shilla,” works from this period were recently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Highlights of the Joseon include minimalist porcelain pottery, often left white and unadorned, and the detailed scrolls used to record and dictate royal ceremonies. “Japanese and Chinese art, if you look at it, you think, amazing, gorgeous, look at the level of technology and achievement,” says Woo. “But with Korean art, you don’t really have it. It takes some time to appreciate. That’s where the challenge is. There is no immediate response to it.”

Instead, Joseon art rewards close looking, with small imperfections, a fingerprint left here and there, revealing the soul behind the austerity. “There is a huge jar. A moon jar,” Woo explains of one large example from the early eighteenth century. “And it is really a difficult technique to perfect . . . because the diameter is so wide.” The same goes for the dynasty’s detailed, illustrated self-documentation, one that in a way mirrors our own “selfie” culture. 

Military Costume (Dongdari), 19th century. Silk, length: 45 11/16 inches (116 cm). Dangook University Seok Juseon Memorial Museum, Yongin. 

“We wanted this to be a great introduction to Korean art,” Woo says of her exhibition’s thematic approach, which ranges from sections on the royal family to dioramas of simple Joseon rooms, clothing, and everyday artifacts. “So we wanted to do the exhibition that way, to come up with some themes, to come up with some story based on the viewer’s own knowledge.”

The screen paintings, Woo’s academic specialty, take little to appreciate: Often symmetrical landscapes in gorgeous geometric patterns, filled with naturalistic symbolism, they were used as royal backdrops and objects of prestige. The exhibition’s innovative digital displays do an impressive job at unpacking and explaining the messages in these paintings. “We really wanted to integrate that technology to broaden the knowledge,” says Woo. “Because we knew that Korean art and Korea in general are new.”

Śākyamuni Assembly, 1653. Hanging scroll; colors on hemp, 39 3/16 × 25 7/16 feet (12 x 7.8 m). Hwaeomsa, Gurye. National Treasure No. 301. 

The biggest surprise, now at the Philadelphia Museum, is certainly the Śākyamuni Assembly, a thirty-nine-foot-tall hanging scroll of the Buddha, painted on hemp and used for outdoor services, from 1653. The fact that this towering object even made it to Philadelphia is astonishing—it is far too large to travel to the other venues. Woo had the vision of it hanging in the museum’s Great Stair Hall, where the statue Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens is otherwise displayed. “When I first told people that I really wanted to bring that painting here, everyone thought it was impossible. And I thought my chances were extremely slim because of its size, and it is designated a national treasure of Korea. There are about eighty paintings of that type that survived in Korea at different temples, and, among those, this is the best example in terms of size, quality, condition, and date of production. This is one of the earliest.”

Yet, Woo says, “along the way, people became convinced it was important to show because it was never introduced outside of Korea.” The transportation of the scroll by cargo plane from Korea to Philadelphia was a feat in itself, and the complex image, now in line with the axis of the museum’s grand east entrance and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, is breathtaking.

The lavish scroll hints at another side of Joseon culture. Beneath the asceticism of the dynasty’s official neo-Confucian mandates, a more fanciful Buddhist influence from earlier dynasties never went away. The same might be said of the two-part nature of Korean society today, with a fanciful pop culture that overlays a deeper, older mandate. “The spirit, the Confucian ideals,” says Woo, “you have to pay ultimate loyalty to your king and the state. Even in the current day, we see that. You put your family, your organization before you.”

In the north, we see a regime’s repressive interpretation of the old Hermit Kingdom. In the south, a Confucian work ethic drives the country’s exuberant contemporary culture. It has also brought a divided nation back from the brink. “When I was growing up, I rarely saw my father,” says Woo, “because he was working so hard, building the country.” During the war, she explains, he fled from the north at fourteen, leaving family behind. “He thought he would only be away for a few months. Now it has been sixty years.” Woo’s “Treasures from Korea” honors all those who have made the sacrifice to ensure the survival of this treasured culture.

Ten Longevity Symbols, 18th century. Ten-fold screen; colors on paper, 98 7/16 × 231 1/8 inches (250 × 587 cm). Private Collection. 

The traveling exhibition “Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty: 1392–1910,” originally on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from June 29 till September 28 and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from November 2 till January 11, 2015.