Smart Guy
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At first blush this coup for the Smart looks like a step down for Hirschel. At the Indianapolis museum–one of the largest in the country, with a 50,000-object collection, 152 acres of grounds, and a $20 million annual budget–he headed a staff of 260. At the Smart–launched just 30 years ago with a $1 million gift from the family foundation of Esquire magazine founder David Smart–he’ll have a collection of 7,000 objects and a staff of 15. But it’s a return to his area of expertise: before the IMA, Hirschel, who’d begun his career at the Yale University Art Gallery, headed Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum and the University of Virginia Art Museum. Word is he’s got the chops for the U. of C. and is likely to be comfortable with the administrative structure and more focused mission of a university museum. At the same time, the Smart has outgrown its beginnings as an art department adjunct and little sister to U. of C.’s more adventurous resident, the Renaissance Society. It claims to serve the city and region as much as the university, and aims to be a leader among museums in Chicago and university museums nationally. “The Smart Museum has enormous ambitions, intellectually and aesthetically,” Hirschel says. To realize them, he hopes to raise visibility, develop partnerships (locally and beyond), and add space to allow for more visitors, students, and exhibits.
In spite of parallels to the situation he inherited in Indianapolis, Hirschel says he doesn’t anticipate the same problems. “In these situations everyone is exuberant about the expansion, but understanding how to sustain the level of interest and pay for the expanded operation over the long term” is where it gets dicey, he says. “One of the most important things is that everyone’s issues are on the table to start with. The [Smart] board, faculty, and administrators have already spent two years getting to a preliminary plan. They’ve argued over the questions about who they need to serve and how the program will develop. There is a very sound foundation,” he says. “Problems arise when, at the end of the project, people realize they had different ambitions and only some of those ambitions are going to be realized and somebody else says, ‘Well, after all I did? What happened to what I wanted?’”
NEA chairman Dana Gioia stopped at the Harold Washington Library last week on a publishing industry-supported tour to talk about the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report, based on 2002 data gathered by the Census Bureau. “It’s my pleasure this evening to depress you,” Gioia said. “Over the last 20 years the U.S. adult population grew by 40 million while the number of readers remained flat.” According to the report, less than half the population now reads literature, and the trend–especially in the last decade, with the proliferation of electronic media–is down. Gioia, who says Oprah understands the social context of reading better than Harold Bloom, faults universities for “making literature more remote, abstract, highfalutin, and pretentious than ever before. Now,” he says, “there are college graduates who proudly say they don’t read.”
