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Victoria Skelly

Contributor

BSR Contributor Since December 16, 2009

Victoria Skelly is a retired management consultant with extensive involvement in the world of art. (She is daughter to artist Michael Ciliberti.) She lives in Wayne and can be reached at [email protected].

Victoria Skelly has written/thought extensively on the crafting of environments that inspire creative endeavor. Her work experience includes organizational consulting for the research and development division of a pharmaceutical company. She is a graduate of the Russell Ackoff-inspired "Organizational Dynamics" program at the University of Pennsylvania, which encourages a holistic rather than quantitative approach to solving leadership and organizational problems.

Victoria, who grew up in a family of artists, has indulged her lifelong love of art and literature by traveling to exhibits worldwide and reading extensively about what others have to say about it. She has participated in the art education program, "Art Goes to School," and the docent programs at both the Barnes Foundation and the Woodmere Museum.

By this Author

35 results
Page 1
'A Great Piece of Turf': Nurtured in his studio.

Albrecht Dürer at National Gallery in D.C. (1st review)

In weeds we trust, or: What made Albrecht Dürer happy?

Albrecht Dürer prodigiously produced religious images. Yet the National Gallery's current exhibit shows clearly that he took his greatest delight in his renderings of the natural world.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 4 minute read
Toogood's 'View of Tobacco Bay': Where Philadelphia artists flourish.

Bermuda's Masterworks Collection

One gorgeous island's sense of place

Some countries generate a sense of national identity via sports teams, fireworks and military parades. A beautiful island like Bermuda does it through the work of artists.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 3 minute read
Serota, by Paul Harvey: Is it art, or just marketing?

Nicholas Serota, the Tate's dubious wunderkind

Dostoyevsky would love this guy

Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, attracts record crowds and brings youthful excitement to London's art scene. Well, yes. But is Serota a museum director or a carnival barker?
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 3 minute read
A sort of Japanese elegance.

Jan Baltzell at Schmidt-Dean Gallery

If it's abstract, why not call it Untitled?

Jan Baltzell's luminous abstractions lack descriptive titles, and rightly so. Instead of trying to figure out her meaning, just let yourself be carried off by her looped and tangled lines, smooth textures and juicy colors.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 3 minute read
Paul Schulenburg's 'Art Lover': Quest for quiet contemplation.

On renewing my Art Museum membership

Far from the madding crowd, or: Surviving the new world of art museums

America's major art museums, strapped for funding, are revamping themselves into popular entertainment venues, and jacking up their membership fees in the process. What's a serious art lover to do? Let me suggest a few stimulating and affordable alternatives.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 7 minute read
'After Cole: Sunny Morning On the Hudson River' (2012): Don't forget your microscope.

Mia Rosenthal's Landscapes at Gallery Joe

All creatures, great and small

Mia Rosenthal steps inside the familiar landscapes of the Hudson River School to insert her own whimsical takes on the region's flora and fauna. The result is an aesthetic pleasure as well as a science lesson.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 2 minute read
Lead image from the Megawords website, which asks: 'What belongs in a city?'

Adventures with 'Megawords' at the Art Museum

Is this ‘new art thinking' or old management thinking?

Megawords, now at the Art Museum, calls itself an “experimental media project” designed to “ask questions about the way things are done.” Sounds like the kind of work I used to do as a management consultant.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 6 minute read
Van Gogh's 'Wheat Field in Rain': Depressing, or joyous?

The struggles of Tanner and Van Gogh, reconsidered

Van Gogh, Tanner and the myth of the tormented artist

Was Van Gogh really depressed? Was Henry O. Tanner really hampered by racism? Better ask: Why do we cling so tenaciously to our romantic vision of the artist as a tormented soul struggling against all odds to create?
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 8 minute read
$100,000 at Gagosian, or $7 at Wal-Mart?

A better way to destroy Damien Hirst

A free-market response to a truly dotty artist

Damien Hirst, AKA Britain's bad boy of art, sees contemporary art as a con game and the super-rich as his marks. But the rest of us can play this game too. After all, there are 99 of us for every one of them.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 3 minute read
Who will make the case for the long trip to Verizon Hall?

Suburbanites and the Orchestra

On saving the Orchestra: The view from the suburbs

BSR readers have heard from a music professor and a 20-something about how to save the Philadelphia Orchestra. Let me speak for another underserved and potentially huge Orchestra constituency: suburbanites.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 4 minute read
Bono thanked everyone except....

Of AIDS and the Philadelphia Orchestra

The unsung heroes of the AIDS battle (not to mention the Philadelphia Orchestra)

What do scientists at big drug companies have in common with musicians at big orchestras? They're essential— and taken for granted. And what does that say about the rest of us?
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 3 minute read
'Card Sharps and Fortune Tellers': A shadowy underworld gets a sterile showcase.

Caravaggio in Fort Worth: All that light

That sanitized feeling: Caravaggio in Texas

Louis Kahn designed the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth to provide “perfect, subtly fluctuating illumination for works of art.” Those light and airy spaces may be well suited for contemporary art, but they dilute the vivid drama and power of the gritty Baroque Italian milieu in which a master like Caravaggio worked.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 6 minute read
'A Woman Worshipping Brahma' (c. 1650): More enjoyable with music.

"Ragas and Rajas' at the Art Museum

Art and music, in harmony

As a new exhibit from India persuasively demonstrates, nothing enhances visual art like appropriate music, and vice versa. The courts of the rajas specialized in this kind of musical imagery for more than two centuries.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 3 minute read
Nauman's 'One Hundred Live and Die': What else is new?

The "death' of conceptual art

Is it art, or is it cost-efficient? My problem with conceptual art

Far from dying, conceptual art has become mainstream in the art world. And that's the problem: We've become inured to art that intends to shock. Thank goodness the once "academic" concerns of craftsmanship are again in vogue.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 5 minute read
Protesters at Friday's groundbreaking: Who you calling selfish?

The Barnes: A protester's story

Radicalized by the Barnes: My new life as a public protester

I never thought much of protest demonstrations during their heyday in the '60s. But if you care passionately about keeping the Barnes Foundation in its original home, what other option do you have these days?
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 4 minute read