“First and Foremost, You Have to Look”

For the last two years we've doing a lot of looking and watching and waiting with great excitement for the Renzo Piano-designed Whitney Museum of American Art to open in The Standard, High Line's backyard. Now it's here, and you can actually see into the galleries from our Hudson-facing guest rooms.

The Meatpacking district has come a long way since the club kids held their noses as they slipped on slimy sidewalks; since the elevated trains delivered livestock to the meatpackers; since the shipbuilders hammered away. The opening of the new Whitney marks an important moment, both as the anchor to the High Line and as an iconic cultural landmark returning to its downtown roots.

We had the privilege of sitting down with Chief Curator Donna De Salvo to discuss the institution's new home, its debut show, “America Is Hard to See”, and the simple pleasure of looking.

STANDARD CULTURE: What do you think of your new neighborhood?
DONNA DE SALVO: Well, it isn’t exactly new to me. I’ve lived downtown forever, but what is so incredible about the Meatpacking District is the sense of history that’s here, even with all the development you still have this incredible sense of a New York that once was. This land was once owned by the Gansevoort family, which was related to Herman Melville. The site we’re on now was once a pumping station for the fire department. Then it became Premier Veal. And then the Whitney.

It’s true, even amongst all the new, some of the grit remains intact.

New York is like that. It sort of accumulates. You see the layers.

Taking it back to Mrs. Whitney and her original plan for the museum, I wondered if there is anything to make of the fact that the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the MoMA were all founded by women.
Well, yes. That women are great. And these women were visionary. Many museums were actually founded by women. Many of them. The thing that sets Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney apart though was that she was very much an artist in her own right.

Was American cultural inferiority a motivating factor when the museum was first built?

Absolutely. It was still a very new place that wasn’t yet embracing its own culture. Very few people were collecting American art at the time. The Met was primarily a European collection and MoMA, too, was very much slanted towards European art, Cubism and the school of Paris. Mrs. Whitney was frustrated because she wanted to support American artists and there was not a place for them, and as you may know, she offered her collection to the Met with an endowment and they declined, which led her to found her own museum.

Does one have to look at everything in a show, or can we just focus on the stuff we like?

I don’t think that people should feel compelled to consume everything. I often feel that way. When I’m a visitor, I feel like I have to see it all, but that way you get a broad brush, the general feel of things, but I think it’s great to survey the room and see if there are a few works that attract you, that you have an experience with, because that’s what you hold on to. At least I do. They really stay with me.

Do you remember the first time you were taken by a piece of art?
I would say for me it was the first time I saw Jacques Louis David’s “Death of Marat” at the Louvre. I had studied it in Jansen’s Art History, but seeing it in the flesh blew me away. That’s when it clicked in my head about how things live in space and how you make this mind/ body connection with a work of art.

What are some of your favorite small, out-of-the-way museums around the world?

The John Soane in London, is a great little museum that’s really fantastic. He was an architect and it’s a quirky house that has all these architectural fragments. It’s like a cabinet of curiosities. I also love the Menil collection in Houston that Renzo designed. It’s a highly personal collection, which I love. It really traces the artist’s vision. Also the Walter De Maria “Lighting Field” in New Mexico. It’s a work in the landscape of stainless steel rods that are one mile by one kilometer, and you have to go for a 24-hour visit. It just kind of messes with your mind.

The word curate has been co-opted by pop culture. What’s your take on that? 
Well, what it implies in pop culture is a kind of agency—that you have the opportunity to choose what you want. We’re all niche markets now. We’re no longer a mass audience and we can have agency.

In the old days, in Europe, curators would be called, “The Keepers” of the collection and that was a different kind of word, and it’s true that you are a sort of keeper or custodian of it all. I think it’s fascinating that it has made its way into pop culture. I’m always interested when things are re-interpreted in some new way. As a curator that’s often what you’re doing. You’re interpreting and creating meaning, and so in a pop culture way it’s about how people want their lives to mean, in a kind of existential way.

You can curate your own visit to the Whitney, now open, just a hop, skip, and a jump down the High Line.