The Art of Giving

Amid old hotels, church missions, a furniture shop, and numerous restaurant-supply stores, the 31-year-old New Museum last month opened a new building on this city’s infamous Bowery street. And unlike anything else in this gritty neighborhood of worn bricks and faded signs, the new New Museum gleams.

Its facade shines white, and rainbow-striped letters four feet high greet the Bowery with the words “Hell, Yes!” Tall, clean glass doors welcome pedestrians at street level and open into a hallway of pristine white walls. The building rises playfully from the first floor like giant white blocks stacked off-center, as if the eight-story museum might tumble onto the notorious Sunshine Hotel flophouse next door.

The 60,000-square-foot new building wasn’t cheap: The museum spent $50-million, almost all of which came from individuals and businesses. But instead of letting fund-raising challenges get to them, the curators turned the necessary concern with money toward creative ends by devoting an exhibit, “Donor Hall,” to arts philanthropy.

Located in the basement, Donor Hall captures the myriad ways that corporations, governments, and individuals support the arts.

The exhibit uses quotes, statistics, pie charts made from photographs of pie, and cartoons of animals, like cats and pigs, that mean good luck in various cultures. The exhibit also singles out those who donate nothing to the arts. It’s a quirky, confrontational collage, which is just what its designer, Jeffrey Inaba, intended.

Mr. Inaba, an architect who directs the C-Lab think tank at Columbia University, says the topic motivated him because “we’d heard conflicting stories that arts organizations are in desperate need, and also that there was more giving now than ever before.”

He came to no conclusion about whether arts groups are flush or strapped, but says his exhibit does “illustrate the breadth of giving” in the United States and abroad.

In fact, the exhibit shows so much breadth it’s hard to take in all at once. Richard S. Flood, a chief curator at the museum, correctly says it’s “an epic amount of information.”

So, to grasp how the exhibit conveys that information, it helps to peel back each of its layers, one at a time.

First and foremost, Donor Hall is a hallway, about 50 feet long and eight feet wide. The exhibit consists only of black-and-white pictures on the 11-foot-high walls because people need to walk through the space. There’s no room for free-standing pieces. Even the pictures are interrupted by doorways and exit signs.

And unlike galleries on higher floors, many museumgoers find Donor Hall accidentally, while waiting for the bathrooms, drinking fountains, or elevator, all of which are just off the hallway.

Study the Walls

This placement has created some confusion, says Gabriel M. Einsohn, director of communications. Not only are people not sure what they’ve found, but “people who don’t read the wall text [explaining the exhibit] get confused. People think it represents giving to our museum,” not to all arts groups.

However, “the art crowd takes the time to educate themselves,” she adds, and people stay to study the walls.

They probably notice first that Donor Hall divides giving into nine categories — nations, individuals, four types of businesses (communications, finance, and energy companies, and a miscellaneous category), religious groups, foundations, and political groups.

For each category, Mr. Inaba and his think-tank researchers mined public documents to find the year’s biggest donors and what they gave. The figures represent only grants paid to arts groups (mostly in 2006), and nothing about what those donors gave to humanitarian aid, medical work, or other charitable causes.

To present the information in a digestible form, the researchers constructed pie charts. But not sober PowerPoint charts: Each of the nine categories got a different circular food. Data for how much religious groups gave to the arts was fitted to a cheese wheel about five feet in diameter, while giving by political groups is portrayed as a gigantic fried egg.

When asked about this — whether there was any reason why energy companies were shown as a sushi roll, for example — Mr. Inaba laughs. “That’s up to the viewer,” he says, adding, “the more important aspect of it is that they were the shape of pie graphs.” But he also liked the food metaphors, since charitable donations get consumed.

Consumption comes in again with the people who donated nothing to the arts in 2006, according to Mr. Inaba’s research. Those holes were represented by enormous, cartoonish bites out of hamburgers and doughnuts, as if such people take a bite out of society and give nothing back.

That sounds cute, but Mr. Inaba named names and courted controversy. Of the millions of people that supposedly donated nothing to the arts, Mr. Inaba highlighted Fidel Castro, president of Cuba, and Halliburton, an oil company with ties to Vice President Cheney that receives heavy criticism in the news media.

Other spots on the wall confront viewers in a similar way — who knew that Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, gave $63-million to the arts in 2006, or that Applied Scholastics (the Church of Scientology) gave $2.1-million?

The text explaining the exhibit provokes viewers, too. Culture, it announces, can be a “weapon,” and Mr. Inaba believes philanthropy can be a weapon, too.

“It’s a way for organizations to have influence,” he says. “It’s not that philanthropy would be exclusively a weapon, but it does have other effects than just beneficent purposes.”

‘Hello Kitty’

Donor Hall exhibits a playful side as well, like the giant animals splashed across the walls — thick white outlines cutting through the black and gray pictures. There’s the long tail of a rat here, a “Hello Kitty”-like cat dangling upside-down there. There is even a slot for a piggy bank arched over a doorway.

This animal motif repeats on a smaller scale as well. The large pictures and pie charts are not solid. Like a literary pointillist painting, they are made of thousands of lines of text in tiny type, from floor to ceiling. And in between each sentence are small animals in lieu of line breaks: red swans, yellow rats, lime butterflies, fuchsia squirrels. They spackle the walls like flecks of paint, the only color in the pictures.

And after the huge pie charts, the text itself — 163 quotes, repeated ad infinitum — gives visitors to Donor Hall something bite-sized to concentrate on. They also provide perspective on giving, not just a year’s snapshot. Some quotes come from John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Some come from Homer, Goethe, and the Bible. Others come from Jay Leno and the management guru Peter Drucker.

There was even an excited rumor among museum staff members — someone suggested getting a ladder and magnifying glass to hunt — that the entire text of O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi” was on the wall. (Unfortunately, Mr. Inaba says, that’s not quite true. There are only excerpts.)

Eventually, perhaps with a last glance around the hall, people will continue on with whatever drew them to the basement before Donor Hall sidetracked them: the bathroom, the theater, a phone call. So, in the end, what will they take away?

Mostly, an appreciation for the variety of groups offering support. Governments, political groups, patrons, and corporations are all handing out millions in grants. The arts seem impossible without philanthropy.

Slyly, the New Museum reinforces this notion when people leave Donor Hall. Seemingly every nook in the building has a donor’s name attached: staircases, the lime-green elevator, the 188 stackable chairs in its theater, even drinking fountains.

Every amenity, the museum points out, depends on donors’ generous support.

The museum celebrated its opening by staying open to the public for 30 straight hours (an effort supported, naturally, by a patron, the Target Corporation). But by next December, Donor Hall will probably be gone, says Mr. Flood, the chief curator, replaced by something else.

When that happens, Mr. Inaba doesn’t know if he will take his exhibit on the road, but he is pondering it. He also has considered a book “that would explain further our thoughts on the geopolitics of cultural philanthropy.” But he would first update his 2006 figures, finding new groups to highlight and single out. “It would be evolving instead of just a static thing,” he says.