(Click to see larger)Ian Whitmore, Cameo, 2008, oil on canvas on panel, 19 x 16 inches, at G Fine Art GalleryKaren Ganz, Girl with a Gun, drawing #1, ink on paper, 10 x 13 inches, at Howard HouseDarren Waterston, Five Oblivions 3 (peak), oil on oval wood panel, 12 x 16 inches, at Greg Kucera GalleryAnybody want to add one? … [Read more...]

While not an expert in seeking remuneration, I instinctively feel that begging is not the best strategy for arts writers.Culture Grrl disagrees here, here, here and most recently here, the last having the distinction of being not only plaintive  ("Did no one miss me while I was gone?") but threatening ( "See you tomorrow (maybe).")Culture Grrl (Lee Rosenbaum) is an industrious reporter, especially on museum administration news. But if she's that intent on raising a bit of what Bernie Bertie Wooster calls the necessary, she should consult … [Read more...]

(Click images to enlarge.)The hill and dale of Thomas Hart Benton, detail from Susanna and the Elders, the de Young Museum in S.F. (Photo, C-Monster.)Benton swings again: John Currin, The Gimp (Gagosian Gallery) … [Read more...]

(Click on images to see them larger)History does not misplace a movement that rewrites the rules of its region across a time span of two centuries, but few of the 58 paintings in Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur have ever been seen in the wider world, even by scholars.Their base is the miniature. Jodhpur painters could produce palm-size cosmologies full of gods and goddesses, kings and queens, dancing girls, flute players, warrior monkeys and battles waged on the backs of elephants. Over time, however, they allowed themselves … [Read more...]

(Click on images to see them larger.) Helen Levitt died in her sleep on Sunday. She was 95. Lovely Margarett Loke obit in the New York Times here. For someone who had a long and distinguished career, Levitt seldom had much to say about it. If she grew tired of having critics exclaim over her early work and ignore her later, she rarely expressed this view in public. In the late 1930s and 1940s, she captured the animal radiance of an urban childhood - the chaotic fun of hanging out where lots was happening. As far as we know … [Read more...]

St. Sebastian is an S&M icon in Roman Catholic iconography. Joe Biel removes the weapon from its signal place in erotica and locates it in the horror of the day-to-day - an image of someone who is dead and doesn't know it. … [Read more...]

Joseph Mills, UNTITLED, INNER CITY #1398 Varnished silver gelatin print on expired photo paper, 1988 14" x 11 1/4 " Image from Reciprocity Failure … [Read more...]

From Carol Diehl's Art Vent, Daniel G. Amen's idea that apathological aversion to paperwork could indicate an imbalance in the prefrontal cortex. Amen's prescription? Hire someone else to do it. In other words, those with a paralyzing reluctance to fill out anything resembling a form are not just self-indulgent procrastinators but victims of their chemicals. Reading this, I was awash in my own Cherry Orchard moment, a feeling that, in the future, advances in medicine will make it possible for the formerly slothful to be tidy and timely. No more … [Read more...]

In what must be one of the least satisfying copyright suits ever filed by a major artist, Dale Chihuly resolved his 14-month-long copyright dispute with glass entrepreneur Robert Kaindl more than two years ago. Earlier than that, glass art's main man settled a similar suit with glass blower Bryan Rubino, who had worked for Chihuly for nearly a decade. Both Rubino and Kaindl had counter sued. Suddenly, all suits were void, and terms of the settlements sealed. At the time, Chihuly said if it had it to do over, he wouldn't. To sue or not to sue. … [Read more...]

Early in the 1990s, Richard Billingham rewrote the rules of the visual memoir, documenting his family with an appalled affection.Billingham's disreputable dad Ray has a mirror personality in Scobie from Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet, first book:Scobie is getting on for seventy and still afraid to die; his one fear is that he will awake one morning and find himself lying dead. Consequently it gives him a severe shock every morning when the water-carriers shriek under his window before dawn, waking him up. For a moment, he says, he … [Read more...]

Good art gore post on Modern Art Notes, here. MAN's Tyler Green went looking for intestines at the Philadelphia Art Museum and found plenty.One of his comparisons, however, doesn't quite make the grade - Jeff Wall's Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) with Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St Thomas.Dave Hickey forged the link that matters between contemporary art and Caravaggio's Incredulity in The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty from 1991, long out of print and now available … [Read more...]

By Ryan Molenkamp, painter and security chief at the Frye Art Museum, printed his insider top 10 list with his unfortunately unlinkable story, Basic Training for the Avant Guard, in Seattle City Arts, April edition.10. What is the most expensive piece here?9.   I should show my art here; can I see the curator?8.   Did you ever see Night at the Museum?7.   I've got this painting. (Describes work vaguely, typically forgetting the artist's name.) Can you tell me how much it is worth?6.   Why is it so hot in … [Read more...]

From Wooster Collective. … [Read more...]

Pick a neighborhood in North America, from Newport Beach to Newark. Walk its streets at night, you'll see the flickering colored lights of televisions talking to each other in living rooms, dens, kitchens, bedrooms and baths. The cathode ray light that saturates most of the world didn't exist until Philo Farnsworth invented it in 1928. Because he believed that corporations could be trusted, his career was a sad one. The honor they didn't give him came after his death, when Nam June Paik in 1974 turned what Farnsworth had wrought into … [Read more...]

Could this be the reason? Or, more recently, this? Whatever the stimulus package, the harvest is bountiful.Gregor Kregar is into maintenance men.Kerry Skarbakka tries (and fails) to defy gravity.Hugo Ludena celebrates gay marriage in a community setting..Bill Owens finds his sex making a difference in the world of median strips.Matt Browning and his friends toy with black-out drinking.Mark Newport represents sold craft values. With boyhood heroes gone, he continues to knit their empty suits. … [Read more...]

Julian Schnabel is one of those artists whom critics feel obligated to disdain personally. The list changes, but once artists are on it, they'll be pricked by kicks for some time to come. Even sanest man in art criticism - Richard Lacayo - goes mildly nutty at the mention of Schnabel's name. Here's Lacayo's drive-by Schnabel hit in a discussion of Guest of Cindy Sherman by Paul H-O:Paul comes off as a somewhat goofy but implacable guy who has a way of getting his foot in the door and a sense of humor about himself. He's not afraid to show us … [Read more...]

Jason Teraoka's aging women have the predatory weight of Jose Clemente Orozco's, especially the upside-down blonde at the bottom of the frame in a mural in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.Like Orozco, Teraoka knows how to take the air out of a room. He knows how to paint glamor after it's gone and everybody's time is borrowed. His women can eat you whole; his men have nothing to say and nothing to say it with. Teraoka grew up in Hawaii watching movies interrupted by commercials on late night TV. He paints with acrylics in wet glue: A few … [Read more...]

EMP hiring Christina Orr-Cahall as its next director did not go unnoticed by Seattle press: The Seattle Times published an interview earlier in the week (here), and the online-only Seattle PI managed a brief note, as did the Stranger. Today, however, Tyler Green pointed out that Orr-Cahall was director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1989 and canceled the Robert Mapplethorpe show in response to outrage from Congress, led by Jesse Helms. It was absolutely the wrong thing to do. She resigned in response to the chaos caused by her decision. (New … [Read more...]

Passionate love is Temporary Insanity the Chinese say that day I walked nine miles in a bowl the hill makes coming round and round avoiding the road in sane I realized a whole week later.... - Olga Broumas, from Landscape with Loaves and FigureAt Howard House, the title of the exhibit Dearly, Madly comes from a pathetically excessive sentiment expressed in Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo: I love her dearly, madly; I love her so much that I would shed all my blood to save her one tear.As soon as it's said, the loved one is looking for the door. … [Read more...]

NYT art critic John Russell once called an oil painting a "vegetable construct that changes in time." Conservation steps in to manage change, whether it evolved slowly or happened in a second. A case of the latter: Jeff Koons' St. John the Baptist probably cracked its arm during a short ride through Seattle from Artech storage to the Bagley and Virginia Wright Exhibition Space in 2004. Produced in an edition of three with an artist's proof, Saint John is from the 1988 Banality series of large-scale, ceramic sculptures. Michael Jackson and … [Read more...]

Why is it that Gee's Bend quilts could have come from a country fair when at the Tacoma Art Museum but were brilliant in Philly?The installation crew. The curator in charge.Sometimes the same curator improves dramatically from first stab to second. Greg Kucera Gallery's present Gee's Bend show looks much better than the gallery's previous. Through Saturday. … [Read more...]

Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata are undergraduates at the University of Washington. Their exhibit at the Seattle cooperative known as Punch continues to enthrall. I would have written about it earlier but had to move my books and files out of the old PI so the new online-only crew can get to work without formers hanging around, looking wistful. Young as they are, Hashemi and Hirata have a wistful edge. Maybe it's because all the good positions are taken. For artists in their early 20s, the chances of doing someone else's work without realizing it … [Read more...]

Finalists for the Brink Award at the Henry Gallery are Matt Browning (Seattle); the unlinkable Alex Felton (Portland); Aaron Flint Jamison (Portland); Isaac Layman (Seattle); Gareth Moore (Vancouver BC), and Isabelle Pauwels (Vancouver BC). The selection committee - Henry director Sylvia Wolf and curators Elizabeth Brown and Sara Krajewski; Seattle artist Joe Park; Portland artist Harrell Fletcher; Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery director, Christina Ritchie; and arts patrons John and Shari Behnke - will announce the winner April 17, 8 p.m. … [Read more...]

Mike Simi's version -  I Want To Make Something Beautiful But Find It Extremely Fucking Difficult To Do So (Bowl of Froot Loops) - in cast plastic and cereal from 2009 has an undertow of tragedy. Fred Muram's is robustly vulgar - a video titled Sharing a bowl of Fruit Loops with my dog, from 2008. Both graduated from the University of Washington in 2007. A review of their class debut at the Henry Gallery here. … [Read more...]

With rare exceptions, Matthew Picton's work is more satisfying to ponder than see. His ideas are rigorous, his delivery limp.Take his Postwar Landscape, An Urban History at Howard House. These documentary urban landscapes purport to show past and present in layers, all visible at once. If Harry Potter had one that worked in his debut novel, he wouldn't have needed those profitable sequels to understand his own story. Anselm Kiefer paints the Nazi past as poison leeching into the present, but covering the same plot of ground and history, Picton … [Read more...]

Nearly half a century after his death, Franz Kline still passes as an abstract painter. His breakthrough was a rejection of the worn-out world of surface representations. Beneath surfaces, he found good bones that he articulated as slashing diagonals, made either in black house paint loaded onto a broad brush and applied with the whole arm or condensed into smaller spaces in ink on paper.In a 2002 review, Holland Cotter described Kline's "fascination with radical forms of East Asian calligraphy," citing a drawing from 1955 that "has the … [Read more...]

The SF Chronicle's Mark Morford logged in on Friday with a spirited defense of the news organizations previously known as newspapers and a fine sprinkling of contempt for media theorists prognosticating about the future - Die, Newspapers, Die? - linked in ARTicles.Morford offers grudging respect to Clay Shirky's Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, because of Shirky's solid analysis, but Morford is sick of everybody without a stake in the old newsroom calling it done for:This, to me, is the hoariest snag in any preachy "a mature blogosphere … [Read more...]

Museum curators have no problem thanking collectors, both private and corporate, but frequently indulge a hardwired reluctance to share credit with dealers. Collectors can take a thank-you for granted unless they want to remain anonymous. Dealers, however, can't assume they'll see a tip of the curatorial hat for a job well done. Two recent cases in Seattle:Now at the Frye, Swedish video artist Nathalie Djurberg was at Howard House last year in a show curated by HH director Sara Callahan. The Frye wall text acknowledges only the high points of … [Read more...]

But do you have to do it in person? Reputable art critics say yes, at least for the purposes of any kind of review. When all the smart cookies agree, who am I to dissent? And yet, I'm glad I saw this replicated shadow online, thanks to an email from Robert Massa, who saw it in the field: the intestines of the earth alive in New Zealand - Louise Purvis' Dispensary, made of galvanized wire nets filled with pine cones. … [Read more...]

The SF Chronicle's genial arts writer, Jesse Hamlin, took a stab at a top 10 SF public art list over the weekend, here. Hamlin stepped into a gap; public art coverage at the Chron is  spotty. It's easy to blame the paper's art critic, Kenneth Baker, but the real culprit is the art itself. Forced to tiptoe around the sensitivities of the boutique city by the Bay, art arrives on the streets with a good back story to support its existence and very little forward momentum. Unless the artist is universally acclaimed and/or unlikely to offend … [Read more...]