January 2011 Archives

The Smithsonian's Board of Regents today released the six-page report of its ad hoc advisory committee on exhibition policy, formed in the wake of the "Hide/Seek" controversy.

Here are the key passages:

The Smithsonian must encourage and provide a forum for dialogue on the important issues of the day. This mandate carries the obligation to produce exhibitions that may be controversial. Topics such as immigration, race and ethnicity, religion, climate change and sexual identity are within the scope of the curriculum and should lead to informed civic discourse....

In the absence of actual error, changes ot exhibitions should not be made once an exhibition opens without meaningful consultation with the curator, director, Secretary [currently G. Wayne Clough] and the leadership of the Board of Regents.

As a guide for dealing with sensitive exhibitions, the committee also endorsed Smithsonian Directive 603 (which I discussed in my Huffington Post report of my interview of Clough)

The "mystery museum director" on the three-person advisory committee, by the way, was Rusty Powell, director of the National Gallery in Washington. That's keeping things inside the Beltway.

In total, the report seemed largely in accord with Clough's current position on the "Hide/Seek" contretemps and the path going forward.

Rocco Landesman, chairman, National Endowment for the Arts

Rocco Landesman has mouthed off again, and the news may not be good for Peoria.

But this time, I think that Rock-the-Boat Rocco has expressed some hard truths that have relevance not only to the world of theater, which he knows the most about, but also, perhaps, to the world of art museums.

In his post yesterday on the blog of the National Endowment for the Arts, which he chairs, Landesman expanded upon comments he made at a recent conference on the future of American theater at the Arena Stage, Washington.

On Friday, Peter Marks of the Washington Post reported:

In a session Wednesday, Landesman suggested that the field may be too crowded for its own good. "We're overbuilt," he declared, to an audience in Arena's newest space, the Kogod Cradle. "There are too many theaters."

Needless to say, this provoked a storm of controversy.

But in a recessionary era that has, perhaps, disproportionately challenged the arts (which are regarded by many funders as a "frill" in tight times), there's bound to be a shakeout. The weakest institutions---those that haven't built a strong audience and a solid financial base---may not survive.

This goes for museums as well as theaters. I've had the same thoughts as Landesman recently, particularly prompted by the plight of an institution close to my own home---the endangered Jersey City Museum. I've kept quiet out of reluctance to express any disrespect towards a small, struggling local art institution, with worthy goals and exhibitions, that's been floundering for a long time. Its home page now lists no current or future exhibitions or events.

The situation for art museums is more complicated than that for theaters, because many small, embattled art venues, like the Jersey City Museum, own collections that should, according to professional guidelines, not be sold out of the public domain to defray debts. If the worst occurs, such institutions should make every effort to find a home for their holdings in other public institutions, preferably in the same geographic area.

I wish the Jersey City Museum well. I've visited there several times, but rarely. With the proximity of the cultural riches of Manhattan, not to mention the Newark Museum, it's been fighting an uphill battle for visitors and supporters for a long time.

In my most recent Huffington Post entry, which amplified slightly my recent CultureGrrl posts about federal arts funding and the President's "State of the Union" address, I ended by observing:

Arts funding is certainly not sacrosanct and is apt to be adjusted as part of a government-wide effort to reduce the deficit. In the likely event that cultural support is trimmed but not eliminated, the President's smoked-salmon punchline may acquire new resonance for arts mavens. As all bagels-and-lox lovers know, the most skilled practitioners behind the deli counter slice it extra thin, making a little nova go a long way.

No matter how you slice it, though, a little can't go as far as a lot. A scarcity of resources may have dire consequences for certain arts institutions.

And now, like Landesman, I should probably duck.

Speaking of scarce resources, my warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Repeat Donor 155 from New York City.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities

In a case of bad timing, the Egyptian government announced last Monday that antiquities chief Zahi Hawass had sent a letter to Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Germany, renewing his demand for the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin's Neues Museum. (Germany promptly replied that the request hadn't been made through proper government channels.)

Four days later, on Friday, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was looted.

This immediately brought to mind a comment made to me three years ago by Richard Leventhal, director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, University of Pennsylvania, and an ardent advocate of repatriation. Over lunch during my visit to the university, where I had been invited to give a couple of talks on cultural property issues, Leventhal mentioned to me that when he discusses with his students issues to be pondered in repatriation claims, one important consideration is whether returned objects will be properly cared for if returned to countries of origins.

Leventhal is one of the signatories to a statement on the Egyptian crisis issued today by six American organizations involved in cultural property issues. It calls on Egyptian authorities "to exercise their responsibilities to protect their country's irreplaceable cultural heritage."

The statement continues:

At the same time, we call on United States and European law enforcement agencies to be on the alert over the next several months for the possible appearance of looted Egyptian antiquities at their borders.

Meanwhile, in Cairo on Sunday, Hawass issued on his website a statement on The Situation in Egyptian Antiquities Today, in which he tries to cast the looting of museums (which, as he notes, has spread to other cities) in the least damaging light. Hawass at first had misleadingly claimed that there had been no damage to the cases holding the King Tutankhamun artifacts, only to later acknowledge (in the face of published pictorial evidence) that one Tut case had indeed been compromised.

In his Sunday statement, Hawass declared:

What is really beautiful is that not all Egyptians were involved in the looting of the museum. A very small number of people tried to break, steal and rob. Sadly, one criminal voice is louder than one hundred voices of peace. The Egyptian people are calling for freedom, not destruction....

Due to the circumstances, this behavior is not surprising; criminals and people without a conscience will rob their own country. If the lights went off in New York City, or London, even if only for an hour, criminal behavior will occur. I am very proud that Egyptians want to stop these criminals to protect Egypt and its heritage.

What happened in Cairo is not analogous to any "criminal behavior" we've seen in modern times in New York or London, where the police have never abandoned the streets to mobs, and looters have not targeted cultural treasures in museums.

My reaction to Leventhal's scruples at the time was that if something has truly been "stolen" (and he and I do have some differences on what "stolen" should mean in a cultural-property context), we don't ask what the rightful owner plans to do with the property; we give it back.

But the visceral impact of seeing the images of the looted Egyptian museum, one of the world's greatest cultural treasuries, gave me pause and made me wonder if Leventhal could be right in his preservation-related criterion for repatriation.

Looters have broken into several cases at the famed Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass, told the Associated Press that the celebrated King Tutankhamun treasures were safe. But The Eloquent Peasant [via]---the blog of Margaret Maitland, a D.Phil. candidate in Egyptology at the University of Oxford---has matched images (from the Al Jazeera news service) of some of the damaged fragments with existing images of intact Tut objects.

UPDATE: Rania Abouzeid of Time magazine reports: "The intruders broke into some 13 glass panel display cases as well as one case in the Tutankhamun exhibition....Citizens, as well as three police officers who refused to leave their posts, apprehended the nine alleged culprits as they tried to flee the museum with their loot, including two mummy skulls and a statue of Isis."

Here's an AP video, posted on YouTube, of the army securing the museum and surveying the woeful damage. (The idiotic ads that Google placed at the end of this video, when I watched it, offered "Cheap Flights to Egypt" and a deluxe Nile River cruise.)

In her Thursday NY Times piece, The Permanent Collection May Not Be So Permanent, Robin Pogrebin constructs a straw man and then knocks it down: She mentions several museums that have recently put works up for sale and observes:

A few years ago sales like these were likely to have gone unnoticed. Yet deaccessioning---the art world term for selling pieces from a museum's collection---has become a dirty word and the focus of increasingly intense attention.

Actually, most of the sales that she mentioned---by the Cleveland Museum, the Getty and the Art Institute of Chicago---have gone largely unnoticed, even in these deaccession-sensitive times. That's because even the "deaccession police" (like me) recognize that carefully considered disposals of works of inferior quality or relative insignificance can be part of responsible collections management.

The most important of the recent sales Pogrebin mentioned that HAS been unfavorably noticed (by Lita Solis-Cohen in the Maine Antique Digest and then by me) are the recently completed and upcoming sales by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (which I assume is what Robin really meant when she referred to the "Pennsylvania Museum of Fine Arts"). In this case, historic works by established names was being sacrificed for the new and trendy.

What's strange is that, with the exception of the National Academy's sales of two major Hudson River School paintings to pay for operating expenses and debts, and the Rose Art Museum's now suspended plans to sell some or all of its collection to help solve Brandeis University's financial problems, Robin failed to mention widely publicized recent deaccession controversies that have, in fact, caused great artworld concern: Fisk University's ongoing attempt to sell a half-share of its Stieglitz Collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges in order to ease the school's financial difficulties; deaccessions of important works for a similar purpose by the Maier Museum at Randolph College in Virginia; the New York Public Library's sales of major paintings---most notably Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits," which was bought by Crystal Bridges.

Pogrebin quotes Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, as an authority on deaccessions, but fails to mention that one of the most deplorable disposals in recent times occurred on his watch---the sale of a seminal Cubist Picasso, which left MoMA with only a fractional interest in another comparable work.

Notwithstanding what Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum, told Pogrebin about his museum's acquisition of a Marsden Hartley portrait (funded by selling other Hartleys it regarded as "secondary"), I believe that museums should not be selling "A" works to get an "A+" work. That's what donors and acquisition endowments are for.

What belongs in the public domain should stay in the public domain.

Smithsonian Regent John McCarter Jr.

Next week we're likely to discover more about what the Smithsonian has learned from the "Hide/Seek" contretemps and whether this painful experience will have any lasting impact on institutional policy and practice.

A brief report by a three-person panel, which met only once (earlier this month) to review Smithsonian policies in the wake of the "Hide/Seek" controversy, will be discussed at this Monday's day-long public meeting of the Smithsonian Institution's Board of Regents (its governing body). A press conference (which I will not be likely to attend) will immediately follow that meeting.

Chairing the ad hoc panel is Smithsonian Regent John McCarter Jr. He also chairs the Regents' Audit and Review Committee, and is president and CEO of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. McCarter was formerly senior vice president of Booz Allen & Hamilton, the strategy and management consulting firm.

The other two members of the volunteer (unpaid) panel, according to Linda St. Thomas, the Smithsonian's chief spokesperson, are "a non-Smithsonian museum director" (whom she would not identify) and David Gergen, senior political analyst for CNN, who served as advisor to four U.S. Presidents. (Gergen's new Smithsonian role was noted but not defined in previous reports.)

St. Thomas told me that the panel's "review of policies" was "not solely about 'Hide/Seek.'"

I wonder who that mystery museum director might be. They clearly needed someone with deep experience in the artworld---not science, not engineering, not natural history. Contemporary art specialists preferred.

Where's Michael Govan when we really need him?

President Obama delivering last night's State of the Union address
White House photo: Peter Souza

Given the ruffle-no-feathers tone of President Obama's long, tedious "State of the Union" last night, It's not surprising that art and culture never enlivened the speech. In the least substantive such address in recent memory, one of the few moments when the orator-in-chief ventured to take a forceful, potentially controversial stand on any issue was when he declared that "no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love." (His stated intention to eliminate "the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies" was another rare, hot-button moment.)

Obama seasoned his talk with repeated references to the service and sacrifice of our nation's troops---a surefire bipartisan applause line. (We bagels-and-lox fans did greatly appreciate the smoked-salmon reference, but he should have cited the New York deli tradition of slicing it thin, so a little goes a long way.) He gave us a lot of generalized objectives, like reducing the deficit. But he provided no detailed roadmap on how we're going to get there.

Given recent developments on the Mall, it's hardly surprising that the importance of our nation's commitment to the arts was omitted from a propitiatory, let's-work-together speech. And the arts are usually considered too peripheral for inclusion in a rumination on the nation's most pressing concerns.

But there are compelling arguments why, in these politically contentious times, the arts are needed by our country for more than their intrinsic value (which should be argument enough for support). I'm not talking about their value in stimulating the economy and jobs---the quantifiable rewards that are always trotted out (scroll to bottom) to appeal to politicians.

At a time when the President has been stressing our nation's need to "out-innovate...the rest of the world," the role of art in stimulating creative thought---both in those who create it and those who experience it---should not be discounted by the budgetary number-crunchers. And at a time of alarmingly (some say, lethally) uncivil discourse, the role of art as a force for civilization and civility should makes it more worthy than ever of public funding for the public good (notwithstanding occasional eruptions of controversy---a healthy symptom of a free society).

Speaking of controversy, Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times is wrong if he believes that Great Britain, unlike the U.S., has a "Separation of Art and State," as the headline for his Wojnarovicz-related article today suggests. It's surprising that when Kimmelman consulted Nicholas Serota for some British perspective, the director of the Tate had to go all the way back to the 1997 "Sensation" show at the Royal Academy to come up with a political firestorm over art.

Serota conveniently forgot to mention the 2009 visit to the Tate Modern by the obscene publications unit of the Metropolitan police, which resulted in the temporary closure of the museum's "Pop Life" exhibition and removal of the show's catalogue. Deleted from the show, as a result of the police visit, was Richard Prince's "Spiritual America"---his appropriation of Gary Gross' photograph of the nude, pre-pubescent Brooke Shields. The police action was taken "to pre-empt any breach of the law," according to Adrian Searle's report in the Guardian. (The same work had been shown in the Prince retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum, without incident.)

And who can forget the 2007 fracas over the exhibition of Elton John's photographs by Nan Goldin at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England? One of the images was seized by police as possible child pornography, prompting the rock star-collector to close down the entire show. Perhaps the flashpoints are different, but it's wrong to regard the British as more broad-minded about controversial art than we are.

While we're on the subject of budgetary number-crunching, my warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Donor 154 from Manhattan, who writes me:

Your perceptive, intelligent and brave coverage is a real stand out. If you ever need any help, let me know.

How about a little help from the rest of CultureGrrl's classy readership!

Rep. Scott Garrett (R., NJ), chairman of Republican Study Committee's Budget and Spending Task Force

As we eagerly await President Obama's "State of the Union" address tonight, wondering whether the arts will merit a passing mention, it's gratifying to know that former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a recent discussion with Candy Crowley on CNN, added his voice to those of us who are struck by the absurdity of Republican suggestions that eliminating federal funding for arts- and humanities-related agencies can make a meaningful dent in the deficit.

In its proposed Spending Reduction Act, the Republican Study Committee---"a conservative bloc that counts more than two-thirds of House Republicans as members" (as described by David Herszenhorn of the NY Times)---recommended no funding at all for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities ($167.5 million apiece this year) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($445 million). The overall goal of the Study Committee's laundry-list of cuts is to save an average of $250 billion a year. The three cultural cuts would account for three-tenths of one percent of that total.

But do not be overly alarmed, art-lings (at least not yet). Herszenhorn notes:

The cuts would require the agreement of the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House, which is highly unlikely.

That's not to say, however, that reduced appropriations for for the arts, humanities and public television won't be used as easy bargaining chips in negotiations to arrive at a budget agreement.

Here's what Powell has to say about all this:

You can't fix the deficit or the national debt by killing NPR or the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Arts. Nice political chatter, but that doesn't do it.

Instead, this retired four-star general recommends cuts in military spending, saying that he does not believe that "the defense budget can be made sacrosanct and it can't be touched."

Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough appears to be changing his story.

Mike Boehm of the LA Times reports that during a brief interview after the public Los Angeles forum addressed by Clough yesterday, the Smithsonian's head stated (in Boehm's words) that he "didn't consider [the removal of David Wojnarovicz's video from the "Hide/Seek" exhibition] an act of censorship because in making the decision, 'I didn't judge this work of art.'"

UPDATE: Sue Manning's Associated Press account of the LA event presented a longer and more revelatory quote from Clough on this point:

Censorship is when you are making a judgment about a work of art and you're making a judgment about whether that work of art, per se, should be part of an exhibition. That's not the basis of my decision. The basis of my decision was to protect an exhibition and thinking about the whole institution itself and thinking about the audiences we serve. That's part of my job," he said.

Clough had been far more judgmental about the removed work of art in his comments to me, when I interviewed him in his office on Tuesday for yesterday's report in the Huffington Post. He surprised me during our conversation by indicating that his decision was based not only on strategic pragmatism, as I had thought, but also on a personal judgment about the work itself. (This despite his later admission to Boehm that he hadn't personally viewed the video before ordering it removed.)

The Smithsonian's secretary essentially privileged the judgment of outside critics over that of his curators.

Here's our exchange on that point, verbatim. The three dots mark a place where his own words changed direction without his completing the sentence's initial thought. No words have been excised from these remarks:

Rosenbaum: Do you personally feel that the video should have been in the show or not? What's your own feeling?

Clough: No, I don't think it should have been. I think that in retrospect, if we had thought about all the ways people view things...we had a strong focus on what we were doing, and that was to present the contributions of gay and lesbian artists in the art of America. We didn't look at that through that lens, I don't think, as well as I think we should have.

Rosenbaum: What do you mean by that?

Clough: We didn't see that particular work through the lens of how someone else would perceive it---as religious desecration. We could have done a better job there. And we will learn from that.

This could be a very bad lesson.

I can understand a strategic decision to remove one work from an important temporary exhibition at a federal institution that's under intense Congressional scrutiny and pressure. But I can't understand an ongoing policy to remove or avoid showing works on the grounds that "someone else" is likely to object to them, based on very subjective, highly debatable interpretations. This could lead to the hijacking of not just one exhibition but the entire professional mandate of curators and museum directors.

Where are the Masters of Strategic Communication when Clough really needs them? Actually, now he's got one!

When David Met Jonathan: Behind them, at December's New York Public Library symposium, is a photo of Walt Whitman, left, and his lover, Peter Doyle, whose relationship started the two curators talking about the show that eventually became "Hide/Seek."

I really did try to give David Ward, co-curator of the National Portrait Gallery's hot-button "Hide/Seek" show, a chance to speak about something other than the removed David Wojnarovicz video, which, even in its absence, has created a major public distraction from the monumental achievement of the National Portrait Gallery's landmark exhibition---beautifully installed, intelligently explicated, eye-opening and enormously well attended. (Its numbers were up 74% in November and December from the same period last year.)


Left, the touchscreen kiosk where viewers could previously access the NPG-edited version of Wojnarovicz's "A Fire in My Belly," along with James Bigwood's dreamy, soft-porn video, "Pink Narcissus" (still running)
Right, AA Bronson's "Felix, June 5,1994," National Gallery of Canada

I encountered David on Tuesday in the galleries, where he was giving an interview to a Voice of America reporter who started off by noting that he had never heard of Wojnarovicz before the "Hide/Seek" controversy erupted.

When that taping was through, I planted Ward in front of Thomas Eakins' photograph of Walt Whitman, the father figure for this show, and asked him to talk about the fateful day (described in the "Acknowledgements" section of the show's catalogue) when "Hide/Seek's" co-curator, Jonathan Katz, approached Ward about a label Ward had written for an 1865 image (above) by an unidentified photographer, which had been displayed in the NPG's 2006 Whitman show. The photo depicted the celebrated poet with his male lover, Peter Doyle. The rest, as they say, is history. (In the video below, Ward attributes the photo to Mathew Brady, but an NPG spokesperson told me that was in error.)

As you will see from this video, Ward felt compelled to bring up Wojnarovicz himself, so I followed his lead and threw in a couple of controversy-related questions (in a very raspy voice, fighting a very bad cold):

Does this new Guggenheim have less than a snowball's chance in Helsinki?
(Above, left to right: Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén, director, Helsinki Art Museum; Tuula Haatainen, deputy mayor, Helsinki; Richard "Strong-Arm" Armstrong, director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Jussi Pajunen, mayor, Helsinki; Ari Wiseman, deputy director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)

Back in May 2003, when the plans were in full swing for the Guggenheim Rio (now dead) and a feasibility study was underway for the Guggenheim Taichung (ditto), I published my first (and probably last) spoof piece for the Wall Street Journal about high hopes for the Guggenheim Antarctica: Perpetual Motion: Where Next for the Guggenheim?. (As with all such spoofs, some WSJ readers actually believed me.)

"Masterpiece" Turned Merchandise: Willam Merritt Chase, "Autumn Still Life"

In my May 1990 article for ARTnews magazine---"How Permanent is the Permanent Collection?"---I coined the term "off-the-wall deaccessions" to describe disposals of works important enough to the selling institutions to have been recently shown on their own walls.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts still hasn't responded to my repeated requests for information about time spent on the walls of PAFA's permanent collection galleries by the 10 deaccessioned works that it has recently sold or consigned to dealers for sale. But it did provide me with a list of the works' inclusion in special exhibitions over the past three decades. (You can see the images of nine of the 10 deaccessioned paintings at the above link, with the above-pictured Chase, illustrating my initial Ditzy Deaccessions post about PAFA's market maneuvers.)

Among other things, PAFA's compilation reveals that Twachtman's "Flowers," Childe Hassam's "Looking over Frenchman's Bay at Green Mountain," Prendergast's "Bathers in a Cove" and Ernest Lawson's "Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia," were all displayed in a widely traveled 1990s exhibition, "Light, Air And Color: American Impressionist Paintings From The Pennsylvania Academy Of The Fine Arts."

Robinson's "Girl at Piano" was shown in 2004-2005 as part of "Theodore Robinson: Painting at Giverny," seen at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, and Wadsworth Athenaeum. Chase's "Autumn Still Life" was deemed worthy of the title "masterpiece," in "Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life," seen at, among other places, the Baltimore Museum and the National Academy in New York.

In other words, to bankroll today's curatorial spending sprees, PAFA sold historic works that its own curators had previously valued enough to include in special exhibitions (and probably also in the museum's permanent-collection displays).

But wait. There's more! The complete exhibition histories that PAFA sent to me last week for its recent "off-the-wall" deaccessions are here.

Now up on HuffPost Arts is Form Foils Function, in which I reach a more forceful, focused conclusion, based upon my prior CultureGrrl musings, about Diller Scofidio + Renfro's perplexing plans for the new museum that Eli Broad intends to build in Downtown LA for his 2,000-piece contemporary collection.

Despite my criticism of the design, I have to take issue with Nicolai Ouroussoff's statement at the beginning of his own appraisal of The Broad for the NY Times:

Mr. Broad's reputation as a cultural patron is, to put it politely, subpar.

It's true that Eli is often exasperatingly exacting and sometimes capricious and difficult to deal with. But he rescued LA MOCA from fiscal oblivion, played a leading role in the creation of LA's widely acclaimed Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall and bankrolled a cluster of new art facilities---the Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Meier-designed Broad Art Center at UCLA; and the planned Hadid-designed Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. What's more, he's been a generous lender of works from his important collection to many nonprofit institutions.

Eli may strike a hard bargain for his money, and he may be in it for the personal glory as well as the public good. But without his support, the cultural life of Los Angeles and the rest of the nation would be much the poorer. In her Broad-bashing report, The Art of the Billionaire: How Eli Broad Took Over Los Angeles, for the New Yorker's Dec. 6 issue, Connie Bruck made it appear that Broad had bailed out LA MOCA so he could "gain control of MOCA's collection." At the end of her Broad profile, Bruck disdainfully dismissed his cultural philanthropy as an "ill-fitting avocation."

That this self-made man (whom I've previously interviewed in person) likes to call the shots and has a big ego, a strong will and a propensity for ruffling feathers is undeniable. That he has used his substantial resources for the public good (including major grants for education and stem-cell research) is indisputable.

Whatever his faults, Broad deserves substantial recognition and gratitude for his wide-ranging benefactions. The skeptical reception he has received illustrates the tired old adage, "No good deed goes unpunished."

Opening shot from Museum of Modern Art's new acquisition

As I discovered firsthand when I visited the New Museum recently to view two different versions of "A Fire in My Belly," the question we should be asking about the David Wojnarovicz video that was removed from the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide/Seek" show is not merely Whose "Belly" Is It?. (I've argued that the clip that was fleetingly displayed by the NPG and posthumously edited by its curator is not truly the artist's work.)

I now realize, more strongly than ever, that we also need to ask: "Which 'Belly' Is It?"

Through Jan. 23, the New Museum is continuously screening in its lobby two different "Fires"---both without soundtrack, which is how Wojnarovicz left them. The seven-minute version, which builds in momentum to an apocalyptic climax, was found in the artist's studio after his death and is far more powerful and transfixing than the more diffuse 13-minute version, known during his lifetime, or the NPG's more recent four-minute bowdlerized version (not on view at the New Museum). The NPG's label for the video (reproduced at the first link in this post) stated that there was originally a 30-minute version.

New evidence that David Wojnarovicz's artworld reputation has gotten a major boost from this otherwise counterproductive contretemps came with yesterday's proud announcement by the Museum of Modern Art that it has become "the first institution to acquire" Wojnarovicz's "Fire" (both the 13- and seven-minute versions), now on display in its galleries. "Belly" joins 12 other works by the artist in the museum's collection.

And in other "Belly" growls---the NPG has now announced the schedule for its marathon "Hide/Seek" symposium, 9 a.m.-8 p.m. on Jan. 28. It appears to be not at all about the show and the rancorous debate it inspired, but about "New Scholarship in Sexuality and American Art."

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

As promised in Tuesday's post about the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' ditzy deaccessions, I'm publishing images in the lefthand column, below, of the four of the five works recently sold by the Academy. (The fifth is the William Merritt Chase pictured in Tuesday's above-linked post.) In the righthand column are five of the works purchased, in part, with the deaccession proceeds. (A sixth recent acquisition, by Odili Donald Odita, was pictured in Tuesday's post.)

This juxtaposition is not intended to suggest any one-to-one correspondence between a sold work on the left and the acquired work to its immediate right. But you'll get some flavor for what types of work are being let go and what is now being sought.

I don't presume to be able to accurately assess the relative quality of the bought and sold works from digital images. Even if I saw them all in person, I'd be comparing apples to oranges---traditional, historic works with contemporary works and/or works by women and minority artists who are less well represented in PAFA's collection.

But given the fact that the proceeds from the five castoffs totaled $5 million (not counting dealers' commissions)---an average price, with commissions, of more than $1 million per piece---it's safe to say that the sold works were not objects "of poor quality" (in the words of the Association of Art Museum Director's "Criteria for Deaccessioning and Disposal").

The criteria that PAFA says it did employ in choosing expendable art---"works [that] are represented in PAFA's collection by more important examples and/or [emphasis added] ones that relate better to core works in the permanent collection"---leave a lot of wiggle room on the question of what it means to "relate better to core works in the collection." Perhaps works that differ from, rather than "relate to" the "core works" are exactly what the collection needs for greater variety and broader scope (as witness the effort to diversify the contemporary holdings with the types of works and artists not already well represented in the collection). And "important examples," even if there are other equally important ones, should stay where they are. Part of the proper function of museums is to collect in depth.

The disposal of traditional, historic works to acquire freshly minted pieces and/or works by minority and female artists brings to mind the much criticized 2007 disposals by the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, of highly important antiquities and other masterworks, to bankroll a contemporary art-buying spree. There's a longstanding (but, obviously, not universally held) school of professional thought that says proceeds from deaccessioned works should be used acquire works from the same or similar collecting areas. I subscribe to that belief. (The Albright-Knox finessed such scruples by changing its mission to accommodate its collection revamp.)

Below is the sold-bought (left-right) evidence of PAFA's folly. (The relative sizes of the images do not conform to the relative sizes of the actual works.):




SOLD: John Twachtman, "Flowers," 1893, left;  BOUGHT: Mark Bradford, "Untitled: [Dementia]," 2009, right

Ai Weiwei's Shanghai studio, as designed by the artist, before it was wrecked

What Chinese government authorities had ominously promised has now occurred: The Shanghai studio of Beijing-based dissident artist Ai Weiwei was demolished yesterday, as reported by NY Times reporter Edward Wong, who described Ai as a "protean artist."

The Times piece is accompanied by a woeful photo of Ai at the site, holding a piece of the rubble. Not notified in advance, he flew in from Beijing to witness the devastation-in-progress.

For photos of the demolition work, see this flickr page, linked on Ai's Twitter feed.

Evan Osnos blogs about the demolition for the New Yorker's website:

Knocking down the studio of China's most uncooperative public intellectual is the kind of spectacularly counterproductive public-relations move that makes one wonder how China's economy is run so professionally when other parts of the state are not.

There's a different kind of promise that the Chinese government has been less efficient in fulfilling: Human Rights Watch has just published a 67-page report on China, tellingly titled: "Promises Unfulfilled."

More evidence that Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough needs to quickly and publicly get out in front of the "Hide/Seek" "censorship" crisis comes in the Huffington Post arts section, with a piece posted yesterday by one of the lenders to that show, hedge fund specialist-turned-art finance advisor Jim Hedges. Following the lead of artist AA Bronson (who has now retained an attorney to help him get his painting back), Hedgie Hedges had wanted to yank (scroll down) from the National Portrait Gallery's show his Jack Pierson "Self Portrait."

Jim still feels conflicted (as I do) about the Smithsonian's actions. But a recent meeting with Clough changed his mind about withdrawing the Pierson:

When we spoke, Mr. Clough described an environment in which he and the Smithsonian leadership had been as thoughtful as they could be in order to allow the arts discourse to take place on the playing field of the arts, rather than at the Smithsonian overall---an institution that includes a zoo, research and scientific organizations as well as museums for the visual arts.

By removing the Smithsonian from the arts/censorship debate, the organization attempts to preserve its reputation for when it goes to Capitol Hill for 2011 and 2012 budget requests.

It appears to the author that having [Martin] Sullivan [director of the NPG] and the National Portrait Gallery fall on their sword was precisely what was needed for the larger Smithsonian to distance itself from the controversy and retain its ability to seek Congressional support for approximately $760 million per year....

I have made a decision to rescind my request to remove Jack Pierson's work from the "Hide/Seek" show [emphasis added]....And so to Mr. Clough, I say, thank you for five more weeks of lending me your real estate so that the curators' visions can be seen by thousands of visitors. I hope that as many members of Congress as possible get a chance to see Jack Pierson's masterpiece.

Clough has indicated that he will soon come out of hiding, seeking opportunities to explain his position. Given his effectiveness in influencing one skeptic, that can't happen soon enough.

Sold: Willam Merritt Chase, "Autumn Still Life," left
Bought: Odili Donald Odita, "Future Perfect," 2010, right

Janet Landay, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors, has precipitously bestowed the professional organization's seal of approval on the ongoing deaccession program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. I think AAMD urgently needs to rethink that position at its midwinter meeting next week.

CultureGrrl readers may remember PAFA's deplorable disposal of Thomas Eakins' "The Cello Player" to help pay for the Academy's half-share (with the Philadelphia Museum of Art) of the $68-million purchase price for Eakins' "The Gross Clinic."

Now the Academy is engaged in another dicey deaccession---the $5-million sale of five quality works by historic American artists to take a flier on some very recent art. AAMD states, in its Professional Practices in Art Museums, that "standards applied to deaccessioning and disposal...should not be subject to changes in fashion and taste." The works acquired with the proceeds are, for the most part, contemporary and demographically correct---emphasizing female and black artists. This desire for increased inclusiveness is laudable; the method employed in fulfilling that goal is not.

I have been sitting on this story since late December, trying to pin down information about how important the sold works have been to PAFA itself, in terms of their exhibition history and time spent on display in the permanent collection galleries. But since the Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday published a favorable piece by Stephan Salisbury about the disposals and acquisitions, I'll go with what I've got and update later.

The sales were arranged through two private dealers---Avery Galleries and Menconi & Schoelkopf. (Avery's Richard Rossello, as CultureGrrl readers may remember, was the buyer of record for Jasper Johns' record-breaking $28.6-million "Flag" at last year's Michael Crichton auction at Christie's.) When I asked why PAFA favored private sales over public auction, Marsha Braverman, the Academy's executive vice president of marketing and communications, replied:

PAFA sought valuations from five dealers and two national auction houses. The sales estimates of the dealers were consistently higher, sometimes by 100% or more....Moreover, auction houses no longer provide minimum guaranteed prices and buy-in rates in recent American art sales have been high. If a work fails to sell at auction, it is unlikely to sell for the foreseeable future.

The Academy's press release states:

In each case, the artists of deaccessioned works are represented in PAFA's collection by more important examples and/or [emphasis added] ones that relate better to core works in the permanent collection.

Maybe so, but in a subsequent post, I'll supplement the images above with more examples of what the Academy has deaccessioned and what it bought. Then you can decide for yourself. I wonder whether AAMD's Landay saw these images, as I have, before expressing her endorsement of the transactions to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Salisbury reported:

Landay...said she was "pleased to hear this story [about PAFA's deaccessions] because this is the direction we are encouraging our institutions to go."

Landay said she knew of no other museum that has made such a specific public announcement of sales [Had she never heard of this?], and said it could be an important step toward providing "more transparency" for such normally murky transactions....Landay...noted that it is common for museums to sell from one section of a collection in order to strengthen another.

"It's a normal part of building a collection," she said. "It shouldn't be such a touchy subject."

PAFA's so-called "transparency" and its "public announcement" came only after Lita Solis-Cohen published an article questioning the then unannounced deaccessions in the Maine Antique Digest. I saw that article (but I've lost the link and the date), which prompted me to send my list of questions, on Dec. 26, to Braverman.

More to come, here and here.

Alan Gilbert, music director, New York Philharmonic

Let's remain off-topic today, while I continue to exercise my musical muscles (normally neglected on this art-centric blog).

On Saturday night, I attended the same NY Philharmonic program (on a different day) that NY Times chief music critic Anthony Tommasini rhapsodized about in his recent review. Reading his rave, after getting home from the concert, I felt as if we could not possibly have attended the same event. I also wondered, once again, whether the critic who had lobbied in the Times for Gilbert's appointment can now listen with unbiased ears and entertain the thought that the new music director has not, so far, lived up to expectations.

I'm a lifelong listener to classical music and a Philharmonic enthusiast since the Leonard Bernstein days. But on Saturday night, occupying my third-row-center subscriber's seat, I made what, for me, was an extremely rare gesture of disapproval: I withheld applause for what I regarded as the most boring performance of Mozart's beloved Symphony No. 40 that I've ever heard. Tommasini described Gilbert's interpretation as "lean, lithe and elegantly shaped."

This wasn't the first time I've been disappointed by Gilbert's lackluster renderings of highly familiar classical warhorses since he became the orchestra's music director last season. In this perfunctory Mozart run-through, the orchestra, which under Gilbert's baton has largely lost the rich sheen burnished by his predecessor, Lorin Maazel, seemed to be on autopilot. Maazel's occasional performance stunt was to stop conducting and demonstrate how his well-rehearsed orchestra could play a passage with no onstage help from the maestro. This wry gesture was, in part, an expression of his confidence and pride in the musicians.

But Gilbert's Mozart found the orchestra on autopilot for the entire piece, in a competent, fast-paced but dull rendition of a work they can (and did) play in their sleep.

In contrast to the much older Maazel's energetic and precise conducting style, Gilbert swayed to the music and often didn't bother keeping a beat. He seemed, for the most part, to be responding to the music, rather than leading it. Most conductors move hands and batons slightly ahead of the music, to cue the musicians; Gilbert's gestures often accompanied the music.

The next piece, Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder," was magnificent, thanks to the profoundly moving and vocally lustrous performance of baritone Thomas Hampson, a Metropolitan Opera stalwart who acted the part of mourning father in an affecting, operatic manner, rather than the often less overtly dramatic delivery of song recitalists. Tommasini, while praising this performance, called Hampson's voice "sometimes...gravelly." I can't speak for the condition of his vocal equipment on Thursday, but gravel was completely absent on Saturday. After slightly constrained delivery in the first song, the voice opened up gloriously.

Tommasini rightly praises Gilbert for bringing more contemporary works into the orchestra's repertoire. I found Thomas Adès' 2008 "In Seven Days," with the composer at the piano, intriguing and worth a second hearing. But in an unfortunate turn of events for anyone---especially frustrating for an art and architecture writer like me---the view of Tal Rosner's accompanying video, featuring abstracted images of LA's Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall and London's Royal Festival Center, was almost totally obscured by the grand piano for audience members, like me, who were seated front-and-center, below the level of the stage.

The video screen, instead of being installed on the wall behind the orchestra, should have been hung from the ceiling, above the musicians, which would have caused some craning of necks but no obstructed views.

There's no more Gilbert in my concert series this year. Coming up (and eagerly anticipated) are Esa-Pekka Salonen and Michael Tilson Thomas.

Fear not, art-lings. Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I'll be getting back to my usual (non-baton) beat!

From the program: The star of Green Day with the stars of "American Idiot," the Broadway musical

Primarily an art blogger, I don't usually write about theater that I attend. But by coincidence, NY Times theater critic Charles Isherwood today reappraises the nearly nine-month-old production that riveted me this weekend---Green Day's American Idiot. It's a musical based on a concept album with a narrative arc, in the rock-opera tradition of both The Who's "Tommy" and its "Quadrophenia" (both of which became movies and were later staged.)

As with the progenitor of Broadway rock musicals, "Hair," and the more recent Billy Joel/Twyla Tharp dance-centric show, "Movin' Out," "American Idiot" brings us the solipsistic preoccupations of kinetic, disaffected youth against an ominous backdrop of war. This theme may have a new tragic resonance for those seeing the play after Saturday's horrifying events in Arizona. (I was in the audience on Friday.)

The occasion for the Times critic's return to the St. James Theatre was a recent return to the cast by Green Day's frontman and brilliantly quirky lyricist, Billie Joe Armstrong, who is demonically demented (and I mean that in a good way) in the supporting, subversive role of drug-abuse enabler St. Jimmy---a name that I assume may have been derived from psychedelic rock saint of my era, Jimmy Hendrix, whose early death was thought to be drug-related.

My unique take on this much reviewed production comes from attending it with CultureDaughter and her boyfriend, and CultureSon and his wife. In a complete reversal of what I had expected, my husband and I were giddily enthusiastic about what we had seen, while the kids, who are contemporaries of Green Day's fan base, were merely all right about it.

I actually own and have marveled at the "American Idiot" album, introduced to it long ago by my daughter's then boyfriend, an acolyte of the band, with whom she attended several of the group's concerts. To the middle-aged tag-alongs, the theatrical production was fresh, exciting and ultimately moving. To the twenty-somethings (with my 30-year-old son as the group's elder), not so much. It was a bit shocking to me when I learned, in today's Times' Q&A with Armstrong (conducted by David Itzkoff, that Bille Joe is now a hoary 38, with wife and kids.

Green Day's music ranges from the riotously cacophonous to ballads that you can almost croon like traditional showtunes. Added evidence of the soft-rock side of Green Day's punk rock came after the conclusion of the play, when the otherwise snarling, leering Armstrong stepped stage-front for a mellow rendition of his all-too-familiar "Time of Your Life." While watching the play, I had found myself wishing for him to have been assigned the vocals for the poignant, meditative "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," sung in the play by John Gallagher Jr. and Rebecca Naomi Jones, the lead actor and actress.

To my young theater companions, "American Idiot" reprised an overly familiar score. The sketchy plot line, single set and familiar punk-rock choreography (which struck me as idiomatic, lively and effective) didn't, in their view, add much value to what they have previously experienced.

That, perhaps, helps to explain why the show has reportedly had attendance problems most of the time, whenever Billie Joe isn't bolstering the box office. Not many people of my generation will flock to punk (as witness the Broadway fate of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, an innovative play with an original, punk-inflected score, in which I had haplessly played a bit part while it was still Off-Broadway). For my contemporaries, Million Dollar Quartet (which I haven't seen) is all the rage.

"American Idiot's" target generation, it seems, would rather attend a rock concert than a takeoff on a rock concert. For them, this is probably too much like a tribute band, at a time when the real group is still very much alive and definitely kicking.

Now you can!

The press conference on the plans for The Broad, has occurred, and more information is now available on the Broad Art Foundation's website about the project.

If you have claustrophobia, please take the elevator, rather than the escalator-tunnel leading up to the vast skylit gallery space. I've experienced the architectural gambit of "compression and release," but this one's a bit extreme:



Wait a minute! That huge, columnless gallery seen in the video has no art in it! What's more, its mesh-like walls don't appear to be at all hospitable to hammers and nails.

Here's an image of what the gallery will look like once it harbors some paintings, instead of mere earthlings gazing off into galactic space:



Considering that mega-collector/philanthropist Eli Broad had insisted that the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) be streamlined to provide as much space for the art as possible, why are the outer walls around the perimeter in his personal museum devoid of art, with paintings relegated to temporary, freestanding slabs?

Here's the explanation I received from Karen Denne, chief communications officer for the Broad Foundations:

The free-span third-floor gallery can be shaped and divided into a variety of configurations, according to the curatorial needs of each installation or exhibition.

All right. Still, that's a lot of lost wall space that would ordinarily have been used for display. What's more, how can light-sensitive works be shown under a ceiling that's one vast skylight?

Karen explains:

Part of the design process for the skylights in the coming months will be to devise the right system for closing or filtering some of the individual skylights to darken certain areas. Another option is to include opaque or light-filtering ceilings or scrims in those galleries where light-sensitive works are being displayed.

As I remember, Broad had complained about the expense of Renzo Piano's elaborate skylight systems during the planning of LACMA's BCAM. This one doesn't sound like it will come cheap. Maybe that's part of why The Broad's cost estimate has increased from $80-100 million at the time of the August announcement to $130 million now.

Art critic Christopher Knight argued yesterday in his LA Times appraisal of The Broad that skylights might be unnecessary or even inappropriate for display of contemporary art. But the exterior's mesh cladding (reminiscent, to me, of the exterior of the Sanaa-designed New Museum in New York), which architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have dubbed "the veil," is the most distinctive part of the design.

What we all really want to know is: Why was the drive-through museum (mercifully) eliminated? (The initial design called for visitors to come face-to-face, as they entered the lobby, with cars driving through the garage.)

Denne told me:

While that feature was an imaginative idea for the competition, it did not fit into the final design that had to incorporate all of the museum's needs.

While we wait for the physical Broad to materialize, let's go back to the ethereal renderings (with their see-through, ghostly visitors). As Banksy might say, let's "exit through the giftshop" (in the lobby) and peruse the offerings:

Rendering of The Broad, the planned new LA museum for Eli Broad's art collection

Dubbed "The Broad" (as distinguished from the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Eli Broad's new 120,000-square-foot contemporary art showcase in downtown LA, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro for the mega-collector's 2,000-object art collection, will consist of "almost an acre of column-free gallery space, a lecture hall for up to 200 people, a ground floor multimedia gallery,...state-of-the-art archive, study and art storage space," according to the Broad Art Foundation's announcement.

The off-kilter rendering, above, that accompanied the announcement on the foundation's website appears to differ substantially from the image that illustrates Mike Boehm's advance report of the plans for the LA Times. In the newspaper's photo, the structure appears to be a series of  horizontal layers.

Presumably all will be clarified at today's press conference, scheduled for 11 a.m. Pacific time at the acclaimed Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, which will be The Broad's neighbor on Grand Avenue.


The Broad will be to the left of Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, shown above

The new museum's original plan, announced in August, called for the building to cost some $80-100 million. Boehm now reports the cost as $130 million.

But what we all really want to know is: Will visitors walking into the lobby still be brought "face to face, through glass, with drivers on their way down to the museum's parking garage," as had been reported in August by the LA Times' Christopher Hawthorne? Will car-centric LA finally get its first drive-through museum?

UPDATE: The answer, for now, is: no drive-through, as reported today in a detailed piece on the facility's design by Hawthorne. Leaving the car culture outside could (to my mind, not Hawthorne's) be a GOOD thing! Hawthorne has also informed me that the layered image published with Boehm's piece is "simply a section diagram to show the different levels, NOT an architectural rendering proper."  (That wasn't made clear in the newspaper's caption for the photo, which merely called it and "artist's rendering" of the design for the new museum.)

Broad, 77, indicated that the new museum's opening, scheduled for winter 2012-2013, couldn't come soon enough for him. He told Boehm:

I'm impatient, I'm not getting any younger. We don't want this to be a memorial building.

Whatever life holds, it should enhance his lasting legacy to LA.

James Romberger

Robin Cembalest, ARTnews magazine's executive editor, has posted online today a detailed opinion piece on the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide/Seek" controversy (to appear in the magazine's February issue), adding her voice to those of us who have called for Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough to come out of hiding and seek a forum for public discussion of this contretemps. Robin also provides a useful history of present and past Culture Wars and convincingly argues that "arts professionals need to be proactive now if they want to forestall a new culture war."

But the more I learn, the more convinced I become that while political interference in the arts must be steadfastly guarded against, the National Portrait Gallery's version of "A Fire in My Belly"---a four-minute clip that was altered by the show's curator but presented as the work David Wojnarovicz---is simply not worth going to the mat for.

As noted in the removed label that had accompanied the removed artwork (full text at the bottom of this post), the duration of the original 1985-87 video was 30 minutes, which was "edited down to 4." The label doesn't reveal that the final edit was performed by the show's curator, who did it to make the video more suitable "for museological display," as curator Jonathan Katz has publicly stated.

On his Facebook page, Katz has characterized the removal of the video as "appeasing tyranny." While his rhetoric is consistently over-the-top, Katz does have a valid point: Even though the video is partly (as its conservative critics contend and as the video's exhibition label had acknowledged) a condemnation of religion, that's no excuse, in a free-speech society, for trying to suppress it.

The question, to my mind is whether it's worth provoking Congressional budgetary backlash over a four-minute snippet of curatorially tainted goods, displayed in a federal institution. Even if approved by the artist's estate, the video's alteration ignored Wojnarovicz's moral right to the integrity of his work---especially important posthumously, when he's not around to defend it. (I have a query in to the National Portrait Gallery asking why it saw fit to display the altered, truncated version.)

But don't just listen to me. Listen to comic book creator James Romberger, who gives extensive background and commentary about "A Fire in My Belly" on the "Hooded Utilitarian" blog [via]. Romberger had collaborated on a graphic novel, "Seven Miles a Second," with Wojnarovicz, whose autobiography provided the novel's storyline. In 1987, Romberger viewed the now controversial video in Wojnarovicz's apartment, where they discussed it together. He claims to be "one of the few who saw David's original film."

Romberger is candidly blunt about Wojnarovicz's attitude towards the Catholic Church (which he describes as adversarial "for good reasons") and notes that "unfortunately, some of the response [by the video's defenders] to the Smithsonian's subsequent removal of the film from 'Hide/Seek' has thus far also suppressed David's intent regarding religion."

Romberger is equally outspoken about the alterations made to the video:

What is being shown on YouTube and elsewhere online is not the original film. Its intent has been changed because elements have been added that are misplaced in time. The versions in circulation now both have imposed soundtracks and their meaning is altered with added imagery that was made years later....

Not everyone is as concerned as Marion with ensuring the integrity of David's art. Even before the film was removed from the show, David's voice had been recontextualized. [Bomberger described "Marion S." (full last name, "Scemama") as Wojnarovicz's "friend and collaborator," who had declined, "in the absence of her partner," to continue working on an unfinished Wojnarovicz film, for which the late artist had left detailed instructions.]...

The fragments of "A Fire in My Belly" from the Fales [Library] collection [at New York University] were altered and an anachronistic soundtrack was added to a film that was thought to be silent. The images of David with his lips sewn shut are also misplaced in time. They are from Rosa von Praunheim's and Phil Zwickler's 1989 film Silence = Death [my link, not his] and impose a focus on the AIDS crisis on a work from a time just before David primarily dedicated his work to his ordeal with AIDS.

Below is the complete text of the label that, along with the video, was removed from the National Portrait Gallery's show:

"A Fire in My Belly"

"When I was told that I'd contracted this virus, it didn't take long for me to realize that I'd contracted a diseased society as well."
---David Wojnarowicz

As the above line suggests, Wojnarowicz's art continually moves out from the specific to the general, from self-portraiture into a broader indictment of social intolerance and discrimination. A Fire in My Belly, a compilation of footage largely shot in Mexico, weaves together numerous images of loss, pain, and death into a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic; it concludes in a picture of the world aflame.

Cutting rapidly between disjointed but not unconnected images, Wojnarowicz keeps returning to images of a loaf of bread being sewn back together-and a mouth sewn shut. A brief shot of a construction worker hammering away at the concrete upon which he stands underscores the political metaphors that power his poetic, yet furious, condemnation of the way greed, religion, and selfishness conspire to label certain people as outside the scope of our caring.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992)
Video, 1985-87
Duration: 30 minutes (edited down to 4)
Courtesy Fales Library, New York University, New York City

CORRECTION: The second paragraph of the Romberger quote in the orginal version of this article said (in the bracketed explanation that I had written) that "Marion S.," respecting the integrity of Wojnarovicz's art, had declined to work on "A Fire in My Belly" after the artist's death, even though he had left detailed instructions. Romberger told me today that the project Wojnarovicz and Marion S. had been working on was a different film (not "A Fire in My Belly"). The point about not posthumously tampering with an artist's work still pertains.

Lindsay Pollock

In what seems sure to augur a shift of emphasis at Art in America magazine, Lindsay Pollock, a cultural news reporter since 2005 for Bloomberg, today assumes the editor-in-chief spot at Art in America magazine---an appointment announced just yesterday.

Lindsay, author of a biography of dealer Edith Halpert, is an accomplished journalist, albeit in a narrow field---the art market. But notably absent from her professional accomplishments, as listed in AiA's press release (not online at this writing), is any past history as an editor. And whereas AiA has historically focused on art history and criticism, Lindsay, who majored in art history at Barnard and (like me) got her masters at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has written almost exclusively about economics, not aesthetics. Unmentioned in the press release is that she also has considerable personal charm and presence, and she's a witty and savvy panel moderator.

Perhaps signaling where AiA is going, mega-collector Peter Brant, chairman of Brant Publications, which owns the magazine, praised Pollock as someone who would bring "a dynamic news sense and experience with web-based arts coverage that will enhance our publications and platforms."

Lindsay told me:

This is a tremendously exciting opportunity to write about, think about and develop stories from different angles---something I had been hoping to do for some time. It is fascinating to write about the art world from the lens of the business of art and the art market, but that is ultimately one lens.

But what I really want to know is: Will Pollock restore to the "contributing editors" masthead some of the illustrious names (including mine) that were unceremoniously dropped by the previous editor-in-chief, Marcia Vetrocq? Marcia had been promoted from within after the resignation of veteran editor Betsy Baker (one of the finest, if exasperatingly exacting, editors I've ever worked with). Vetrocq lasted in the top spot for two and a half years.

When I asked Lindsay if her predecessor would remain at the magazine, she replied:

I don't have any information about Marcia just yet.

Happy Together: My Qin Dynasty friend in the Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum near Xi'an, China

I did manage to make it to China, but because of my personal losses, 2010 was a tough year for me.

It was still a reasonably good year for CultureGrrl, however: This was the first time that the total number of "unique visitors" to the blog for a full calendar year topped (by a large margin) half a million. The Cult of CultureGrrl has now spread to the Huffington Post, bringing me a new platform and bringing new readers to CultureGrrl. My commentary continued to be heard on local public radio stations in New York and California (WNYC, WQXR, KCRW) and on National Public Radio, not to mention Swedish public radio! I ended the year with a new (for me) technological innovation---a narrated, annotated slideshow (using my own photos) of the architecture and installations at the expanded Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

I'm particularly grateful to the many contributors and advertisers who have supported my work during times that were economically challenging for many and personally challenging for me. After ArtsJournal stopped placing ads on its blogs (due to technical difficulties), several advertisers stepped up to my new CultureGrrl Classifieds. Late last year, I joined the Blogads network, hoping to attract a broader base of sponsors. (So far, nothing. Hope springs eternal for a prosperous New Year.)

On New Year's Day, I did my usual end-of-year accounting and my ritual shaking-of-the-head after comparing the blog's small income with my very large expenditure of time and effort. But I was blogging on auto-pilot last year: I didn't aggressively seek out paid journalistic assignments (although I managed to publish five Wall Street Journal pieces---all but one in the first half of the year).

Dealing with my parents' gradually deteriorating conditions, as their only child, felt like falling in slow motion off a cliff. Under those circumstances, blogging was the easiest way for me to satisfy my professional urges---quick, punchy, immediate and compatible with my frequently disrupted schedule. This discursive diversion helped me to maintain a semblance of sanity over the past year. What was, I hope, informative for you was definitely therapeutic for me.

Given what I've been through, this New Year feels to me like a major watershed---a time to think about how best to use the time remaining to me, now that I can focus on my own goals.

I still harbor a probably vain hope that I can eventually find a website, a publication or a blog angel to financially support the continuation of CultureGrrl and to help me devise a business plan. More likely, though, I'll become more proactive in approaching mainstream media publications with article proposals and taking paid gigs as a speaker or panel moderator. (I had to turn down a couple such invitations last year). Time spent in those pursuits will likely reduce my posting frequency (but you've heard me say that before).

In any event, here's hoping that the New Year brings auspicious new beginnings, for you and for me.

In the meantime, here are CultureGrrl's Top 20 Stories for 2010, in chronological order, with an emphasis on the controversies that we've been following:

Dealer-to-Director: Why Jeffrey Deitch is Wrong for LA MOCA
Getty-Brand Face-Off: Ex-Director Gives Me His Side of the Story
Dealer-to-Director: More on Why Jeffrey Deitch is Wrong for LA MOCA
The End of Art History: Getty Abandons Preeminent Research Database (rescued here)
My Q&A with Christie's Marc Porter on Third-Party Guarantors and the "Tilted Playing Field"
Deitch Assumes Directorship: What He Needs to Do at LA MOCA
Cleveland Museum's Bonds for Expansion Backed by Art Acquisition Funds
To BP or Not to BP? Should Art Museums Accept Polluted Sponsorship?
Single-Collector Museum Shows: CultureGrrl's Seven Recommended Ethical Guidelines
Fisk/Walton Saga: AAMD's Admonitory Letter Sent to Wrong Recipient
National Academy No Longer Ostracized: It's About Time! (with WNYC podcast)
Brooklyn's Costume "Transfer" to the Met: A Huge Deaccession-in-Disguise
MeTube: Morgan Library's Glorious Restoration, Before and After (Part II, here)
From "Piss Christ" to Ant-Covered Jesus: The Culture Wars Resume
Heir Files Claim for Met's ex-Morozov Cézanne: Is Bolshevik Loot Like Nazi Loot?
MeTube: Curators and Director Discuss "Hide/Seek" Controversy in NYC
Transparency Gap: Minneapolis Institute Refuses to Discuss Greek Hot Pot
WaPo Kennicott's Bad Call on Clough's Call: Seeing "Hide/Seek" in Black/White
Met's Lackluster Velázquez Rediscovery: "Exceptionally High Quality"?
Reinstalled Art at "New" BMFA: My Irreverent Slideshow (and video)