I was interviewed yesterday by Art Business News Magazine on the subject of Cuban art, which is "sizzling."

Recently The Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (AHCMC) Board of Directors announced awards totaling more than $51,000 for arts and humanities programs in Montgomery County for the second half of fiscal year 2004 that began on January 1, 2004. Awards were given to around 40 institutions and ranged from $475 to $3,450.

Video artist and photographer Darin Boville smartly picked up on a very interesting issue that I think AHCMC should really consider.

Boville says:

This is ludicrous. Just over $50K spread scattershot over nearly forty recipients? This isn't support for the arts. This is more like the micro-loan programs that international agencies run in third world countries.

In grants of $600, of $1,000, of $2,000 you have to take very seriously the notion of subtracting out the time it took to fill out the forms, making the calls, having the meetings to decide to pursue the grant and so on from the value of the grant. From a policy point of view you also have to account for those cost of all those who applied but did not win. You have the take into account what it costs to administer the grant program.

Surely the real cost of giving away this money is larger than the value of the money that is given away.

So here is an idea for your list of things to do to make the DC-area a center for art:

Take the $50,000 for the next six months and don't give it to artists. This is like giving starving people just enough food to stay alive but not enough to do anything but wait for the next hand-out cycle. Instead, use it to hire a professional fund-raiser/PR person for the area art scene. That will pay for itself and then some. Stop the arts community from letting itself bleed to death.

Today is the Third Friday of the month, as thus the Georgetown's Canal Square Galleries opening night.

The four galleries (MOCA, Parish, Alla Rogers and Fraser) are in the Canal Square in Georgetown located at 1054 31st Street off M Street, NW.

See ya there!

One of the paradoxes of the Washington, DC art scene is the fact that our area has the second highest concentration of millionaires in the world (after Silicone Valley area), and yet an almost invisible local collector base to help support our area galleries, artists and cultural tapestry.

From my tunnel vision perspective, this phenomenom only seems to apply to the visual arts: The money is here, the galleries are here, the artists are here, and yet the collectors are not here - at least not in the same scale as in Miami, LA or SF. No one can challenge NYC, but one would think that Washington could certainly develop a collector base on the par with those other cities.

Why is that? I have several theories, which I will be mulling and blogging over the next few days. I also have the actual data (from our perspective) of where our sales go to, and interestingly enough, over half of our gallery sales go to collectors outside of Washington!

When we were working with Sotheby's to sell Washington artists' artwork, of nearly 1,000 lots that we sold in the last few years, all but two were bought by collectors from all over the US, Europe and Asia - only two to Washington area collectors out of nearly 1,000 sales! Worldwide collectors were buying Washington artists' art and Washingtonians were ignoring them.

Two out of 1,000.

Where do Washington area collectors go to buy art?

There are some local collectors and they do exist. We started our first gallery without a single name on our invitation list and had not stolen the collectors database from another gallery, so over the years we had to develop our "own."

And we have certainly developed several good collectors over the last few years - not just in Washington, but also other cities and countries, and in DC there are a handful of legendary art collectors (none of which are "rich" by the way), that we (and nearly every gallery in DC sells to) whose vast art collections are so large that nearly every Washington artist of note is hanging (wall-to-wall) in their homes. In one case, the collector has so many works that even his entire ceiling is covered with paintings!

But DC area art collectors do not exist in the numbers that a demographic like Washington's can and should deliver. We should have a collectors base of thousands, not dozens.

Why?

Part of the answer will be coming up soon here, but a hint is in the fact that while this goes on in DC, Miami struggles with dilemmas like this one. I wish we had their "problems."

The much maligned art of portraiture painting seems to move along forward even in the lost art nation of Great Britain, where even portrait painters (sigh) become art stars.

For a truly descriptive and eloquent piece on the art of creating a portrait painting (in this case the portrait of London's National Portrait Gallery's director Charles Saumarez Smith by artist Tom Phillips and filmed by Bruno Wollheim), read this cool piece in The Guardian.

"Nobody ever likes the work in the Turner Prize. Conceptual installation art is worthless and people don't want it. Galleries are desperately trying to find young artists who can draw..."

Above quote by well-known British artist Sir Kyffin Williams, who also accuses modern artists of being more interested in fame than art and describes teaching in art schools as "disgraceful."

Read The BBC story here.

One of my favorite painters, Eric Fischl (who one day we hope to bring to a show here in DC) will be in town Thursday, March 11 at 7pm at the Hirshhorn's Ring Auditorium.

Fischl, whose painting The Funeral: A Band of Men (Two Women) Abandonment! was acquired by The Hirshhorn in 1990 and is one of my favorite pieces in the Hirshhorn permanent collection (it is currently on view by the way), will discuss his work and the current direction of figurative art, which according to a couple of our local art critics is dead and "has been done."