The director of Denver's contemporary art museum was in Scottsdale tonight to share his sometimes hilarious secrets to engaging community.
Museums here in the Valley have increased attendance with events that bring together cocktails, DJ music and fashion shows. This guy mixes show tunes and aquatic plants or hot sauce and Jewish mysticism.
And it works.
Adam Lerner is not your typical stuffed-shirt museum administrator. As head of The Lab at Belmar -- an experimental art space in Lakewood, Colorado -- he messed around with all kinds of ideas. Lectures tying advice from his nutty Aunt Miriam in New York to the meaning of art in Colorado didn't always work so well, but Mixed Taste -- in which two disparate topics are brought together for an evening -- has become a Denver mainstay. Hence, side by side lectures on absinthe and Arctic ice caps, with a question and answer session mixing the two afterward.
These events sell out a month in advance.
Ultimately (and ironically), he said, he learned that "it's precisely the fragility of art that makes it so special to us."
That does not include fingernail "art".
But Lerner still whole-heartedly embraces the notion of doing what it takes to get folks in the doors of the museum (though he made it clear he doesn't support dumbing down the nature of what's actually hanging on the walls).
Lerner was too polite to tell Scottsdale what to do -- even when asked directly. And he made it clear that what flew in a "lab" setting (like a post-event survey asking attendees to grade an event on a 1 to 8 scale, with the lowest labeled "big waste of time" and highest, "I almost peed my pants") won't necessarily be embraced at a major museum.
But he offered a lot of food for thought -- including the notion that food can be a way to access an appreciation for art -- hence Mixed Taste lectures including olives, sausage and whole hog preparation. And always, a healthy dose of humor.
"For a Jew from Queens," he said, "it's funny that I built this program on the backs of pigs."
