Gallery Economics, Part II
Second in a two-part series
The loss of financial resources in and for our arts institutions opens up channels of creativity within the staffs of these venues which, paradoxically, may flourish while the economy rights itself. Just as attendance at the movies soared during The Great Depression, museums and arts centers could see an attendance boom: they provide an entire day's entertainment, education and stimulation, usually free or for less money than a movie or a cheap dinner out.
Either the Contemporary Arts Center and/or The Cincinnati Art Museum should immediately begin to plan the revival of the regional Biennial. These juried exhibitions of artworks by artists who live and work here are popular, inexpensive, and long overdue: in the mid-1980's, the CAC mounted three: landscape, object and figure. Computer maturity can allow international jurying, and various 'new media' categories can be added. Following the original idea and leadership of the late sculptor and educator Patricia Renick, all of the museums, non-profits and commercial galleries might band together to examine a single theme or topic (hers was 'Women's Sculpture'). By the time Renick's original series was ready, thousands came from around the nation for the shows and the concurrent Women's Sculpture Conference. The Chamber of Commerce might be amenable to help with the funding and marketing, perhaps with the assistance of the various Young Professional organizations which are proliferating and eager for creative leadership. As the city attempts to brand itself as a graphic design/packaging hub, perhaps an exhibition on these newer art forms could enlist their support and creativity. Our institutions might break though to an elusive younger audience at the same time. We have strengths here which are undertapped and/or have not been linked together before.
Art museums have a plethora of riches in their permanent collections. A great paradox of the rotating exhibition schedule is the tendency to skip the permanent galleries. We need to encourage our curators not only to see their collections freshly and creatively, but to be allowed to mount exhibitions which move parts of the collection around: let's cross disciplines, cultures, centuries. See how Dutch portraits, for example, look with photographs, costumes or landscape paintings: the ideas are huge in number and possibility, but have never been tried. The historical record and sense of how life was lived would be clearer if mediums were mixed (the 'new' art history of the 1980's more than convinced us of that). Reinstall galleries frequently, thematically, chronologically, formally, aesthetically; use a feminist perspective, a Marxist one, various postmodern ideas: INTERVENE within what we already own.
(It's possible that the current structure of museums - territorial and severely hierarchical - have mitigated against or away from these kinds of creative interventions. We have a right to expect more from these professionals, whose talents may well soar when unleashed.)
The institutional resistance here to using guest or independent curators might be rethought, reexamined. The art museum and the CAC have weak ties to the artistic communities regionally; membership alone amongst artists at the CAC is low. Recently, I read about a competition for an exhibition for a regional artist to be had at the CAM, and learned that judges were simply members of a young collector group ('The Fourth Floor Club'). Why not ask area curators who work frequently with our artists to guest curate small group shows? We have an unusually large amount of artistic talent here; so little of it is ever seen at the CAM or the CAC. Regional artists still sit in the back of the bus.
A collaboration between, say, The Cincinnati Ballet and the CAC might be modeled on the exciting period of early modernism (1905-1913), when the impresario Sergei Diaghilev brought the Ballet Russes to Europe. Stravinsky music was paired with stage sets and designs by painters Leon Bakst and Francis Picabia. 
Modern dance maestra Martha Graham commissioned minimalist costumes for her interpretations of Greek tragedies from the American designer Halston and collaborated for nearly half a century with sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Both Robert Rauschenberg and David Hockney have designed sets for the theatre. Why not something similar in Cincinnati? We have a gold mine of music, musical arts et al. at CCM and a nationally acclaimed Department of Fashion and Design within DAAP at the University of Cincinnati. We might, in the deal, reconnect with the old-fashioned type of patron: someone who loves an art form and who wants to create something new, unique, original.
Corporate thinking is, by nature, conservative. Business schools are keen on teaching entrepreneurship and leadership. Leadership Cincinnati now has offshoots, like C-Change. The partially successful renovations of Over-The-Rhine and Covington (with Northside not far behind) are ripe for new and small arts programs. The over-niching of America by corporate marketing strategists may have discouraged the types of collaborative, interdisciplinary creativity being proposed here (look at the successful transformation of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved into the opera Margaret Garner for a recent success).
Lecture series on collecting, artists' and critics' panel discussions on exhibitions, artist residencies, collaborations between academia and art institutions all can be spiked up. Cincinnati advertises and markets itself as a cultural hub, but it is difficult to determine to whom this hub is marketed. 
I would add a visual or performing artist on every downtown committee, commission, panel or leadership group: with the decline and end of corporate culture as it existed since the '80s, we might, too, begin to get rid of the Boards of Trustees as little more than groups of corporate leaders, and bring back the involvement and leadership onto our Boards of collectors, intellectuals, academics, informed citizens, artists and small business people.
Last thought: we need more places to sit outside, such as park benches. ArtWorks alone might generate them: infrastructure money possible for these? As we redefine what it means to have a public (like Fountain Square), maybe we will locate those endlessly possible artistic spaces located in every community. Arts leaders and artists need to think smaller and larger, and more collaboratively. Creativity itself cannot be quantified, but what if we discover, during difficult economic times, that money is not always the solution, and that money and creativity move on different planes altogether?
