Companies desperately scramble to reinvent themselves as cultural moods shift. For example, A&E was once the “Arts and Entertainment” network, but has since become the “Art of Entertainment” channel featuring shows like Dog the Bounty Hunter, Growing up Gotti, and T.J. Hooker reruns. The “arts” (read: rock music and movie celebrities) being relegated to a bleary-eyed corner of Sunday morning with drool on its pillow.

Identity shifts are a common response to the market, public, the board, etc. The public may be momentarily confused as Bravo slowly becomes the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy channel, but in time they forget what the original intent of the name was, “Bravo what?” A schizophrenic shift, even momentary, for a museum may go unnoticed by the general public, but it can be harmful in the long run as it negates the institution’s efforts and history.

Contemporary Arts Center

This weekend I visited the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati. I looked forward to the trip after seeing all the press whirling around their new building designed by Zaha Hadid. The building is alright (reminds me of Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts, but without a reason to be difficult to navigate), the furniture is comfortable and not distracting, and their pedestals and display fixtures are very different from the norm, but work well with the art and space. However, most art on display seemed out of place in a contemporary art center.

On the second floor is an exhibition entitled Multiple Strategies. This exhibition centers around the production of artists multiples, primarily as practiced in the 60s and 70s. The first few works I saw were created by John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Joseph Beuys. Slide Show is a curatorial exercise in the early history of slide projections as art (1960s to the early 1980s). The artists represented include Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Smithson, Yoko Ono, and Dan Graham.

The CAC website states that the Center “focuses on new developments in painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, performance art and new media.” It seems to me that a museum which purports to be a exhibitor of new developments should dedicate itself to exhibiting contemporary work and leave modernism to more dusty edifices. I understand that often the board requests that bigger names be exhibited to draw a crowd. And names get bigger as they get older. However if there were ever plans to do an exhibition of modernist work, why bother with the contemporary moniker at all? The Museum of Modern Art manages to circumvent it’s name and exhibit both modern and contemporary art by stating that contemporary art “informs our evolving understanding of the traditions of modern art” (I wonder how they rationalize the upcoming Pixar exhibition that opens right around Christmas). If the CAC is twisting that excuse to show Robert Smithson slides (both slides and Smithson are far from new) as he has informed contemporary work, why not look at it in a contemporary context instead of projecting it in the company of his contemporaries?

In an effort to expand its audience, the CAC seems to be undermining the nature of a contemporary arts center. They get it right in spots - no permanent collection, most shows feature actual contemporary artists, current architecture, etc. I really think I hit them at a bad point, but I’d rather hit a bad point because they were trying hard instead of resting on the cushy laurels of old names.

I am curious to see what will happen to the CAC as it ages - as the building becomes more of an artifact of the early 21st century, as the work it currently champions slips into history textbooks. Will it harbor nostalgic vestiges of the work in its exhibitions as it currently does, or will it forge ahead and show work that is contemporary of the now? I would hate to revisit the Center in a decade and find it referring to itself as the Comfortable Arts Center while exhibiting old T.J. Hooker reruns.