Modern Art Notes

Perhaps because New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz has been having an interesting couple of months, John Yau's Brooklyn Rail essay on Jeff Koons' Puppy and Saltz's fawning reaction to it seems to have been mostly presented and considered as a Yau vs. Saltz thing. (Blame Saltz. He sometimes reacts against people instead of welcoming engagement and critical discourse around what he writes. His response to the Rail essay? "How very d*ckish of John Yau." And his response degenerated from there.)

Treating Yau's essay as some critical cat-fight is missing what he wrote. Yau's essay is a thoughtful engagement with Koons' work. Don't let Saltz's dismissiveness distract you from Yau said. [Image: Koons' Puppy in Rockefeller Center, 2000.]

I want to focus on two paragraphs of Yau's essay that I think deserve extra attention. (They benefit from the context of the rest of Yau's essay, so now would be a good time to go read it.) In both passages Yau reminds us that when we treat art as little more than a rich man's bauble that we regress to Rubens, that we fail to appreciate the early 20thC transformation of art from mere glorification of the collector's wealth and status into an agent of socio-cultural commentary, engagement and sometimes even a call for change. From Yau:

Koons is the kind of male child both the art world and commercial culture prefer because even though he is spoiled, he is also ambitious and productive. In this regard, he is no different than the CEOs and real estate barons who buy his work, or the curators or critics who lavish him with praise. One of the reasons Koons's work appeals to them is because they see in it a reflection of their own narcissism.

I think that Yau's comment is especially poignant in the context of Puppy, the fourth presentation of which was in 2000, at New York's Rockefeller Center. Rock Center is an especially loaded venue. I do not expect to see Nayland Blake, Emily Jacir or Paul McCarthy showing there anytime soon. Rock Center is an unusually specific, corporatist venue. (In 2006 I considered an Anish Kapoor there: Prometheus and Sky Mirror part one, part two.) I'm pleased that Yau and I took different paths and reached some similar points.

Yau also examined Saltz's Koons boosterism within the context of whether Koons' Puppy really was representative of the 2000s (the quoted passages are from Saltz):

Are Koons and Puppy "emblematic of the decade" that began in 2000? Will we -- 10 years (or 15 minutes) from now -- look back at the Bush years with fondness and yearning because we remember it as a wonderful, joy-filled time? Will we want to return to an era that witnessed the institutional sanctioning of those who need to be fawned over, their every move worshipped by those who dream of the day they too can commission others to make "something utterly perfect, powerful, and beyond criticism"? Is this "our America?" Or is this Jerry Saltz shilling for Jeff Koons?

Like Yau, I'd be thrilled to see more critics address and contextualize art and artists that engage with issues. (I tried to do this last year by examining how artists (and art museums) engage with the Bush torture legacy and the extent to which Americans have a shared responsibility for what happened during the Bush years.)

Art is not important when it validates a rich person's taste or when a critic uses it to promote his place in the New York art world or when it makes it onto reality TV. I like Rebecca Solnit's formulation: Art is important when artists exercise their freedom to ask the biggest questions about us, our society, our past, present and future. Good for Yau for establishing consideration of such as the proper critical priority.

Related: Yau is not the first critic to be gob-stopped by Saltz's take on Koons' Puppy. Christopher Knight was too. Forget Puppy, the Koons that matters is Lifeboat (1985).

I was substantially disappointed by the traveling, partial reprise of the seminal New Topographics exhibition, but there was one point of commonality across the photographers' work that caught my eye: Power lines. Every single New Topos photographer of the West included power lines in his pictures. The artists did not consider them a bit of pictorial clutter to be excluded, but a part of the West, a key part of the West they wanted to show us. [Image: Henry Wessel, Jr., Hollywood, 1972.]

So why were the power lines so apparently important to the New Topos? Think of them as a key link between New Topos and their West-exploring photographic great-grandfathers fo the 1870, '80s and '90s.

Some context: In his book, Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster notes that many of the first large-scale Eastern plans for the American West involved irrigation, converting arid desert into agricultural land: "In the latter part of the nineteenth century they could be found all over the West," Worster writes. "They were the brigade of hydraulic engineers, and they had more to do with making the modern West than all the fur trappers and cowboys and sheepherders there ever were."

(The other primary Eastern 'plan' for the West was mineral extraction, especially hydraulic mining. It was oft chronicled by Carleton Watkins.)

This 'brigade' and the men they employed were chronicled by many of the West's first photographers and many of the government's first photo-documentations of the West. The Library of Congress and the National Archives are chock-full of such pictures (many of which have recently been made available online for unrestricted use). [Image: Irrigation ditch under construction at San Carlos Indian Agency, Arizona, National Archives. Undated, but possibly 1886.]

Those late 19th-century irrigation and hydraulics projects later gave way to the most ambitious taming of the land imaginable: The 20th century's rivers-altering hydroelectric projects. Before Americans were done damming the West, pretty much ever Western river of significance was controlled by man. (We even created some new 'rivers,' such as the California Aqueduct.)

All those power lines in all those New Topos photographs serve to remind us of how hydroelectric (and massive-amounts-of-water-requiring nuclear) power made man's incursion into the West possible. They remind us to trace the lineage of post-World War II projects to the engineering projects of the previous century. They also remind us that the history of the West and the history of American photography are closely linked.

Related: I loved the show's catalogue.

• The New Orleans Museum of Art won its Super Bowl bet with the Indianapolis Museum of Art. This JMW Turner is going to New Orleans!
• In the NYT, Dorothy Spears profiles Luc Tuymans and in so doing reminds us that the adverb "cooly" and back-story are always present when discussing Tuymans' work.
• Kenneth Baker thinks that Tuymans is an artist's artists.
  
• Two artist profiles in American newspapers in one weekend!: Suzanne Muchnic in the LAT on Rachel Whiteread. Christopher Knight reviews the Hammer's Whiteread drawings show.
  
• SFMOMA announced that it has raised $250 million toward a fundraising goal of nearly half a billion dollars: Baker in the Chronicle; Knight in the LAT.
• In the Miami Herald, Tom Austin considers the Miami Art Museum's 'Space as Medium' exhibition. 
• Doug Harvey takes to the LA Weekly to write about, well... just read it. It's so wacky it's gotta be made up. I think. Well, maybe not.
• The San Diego Union-Tribune's Robert L. Pincus discusses a new American collection installation at the San Diego Museum of Art and reveals that Robert Irwin's last West Coast commercial gallery show was... 30 years ago?
  
• The Brooklyn Rail's John Yau wrote a thoughtful, measured response to Jerry Saltz's (geographically mis-placed) enthusiasm for Jeff Koons' Puppy. Saltz responds: "How very d*ckish of John Yau." Ohhhhh-kay then.
  

Word is that Washington will be socked with up to 26 inches of wet, heavy snow over the next two days, so I'm going grocery shopping. In celebration of the pending weather, enjoy two of my favorite winter paintings: Gilbert Stuart's The Skater and Pieter Bruegel's Winter Landscape with Bird Trap. Tweet me other snowy faves and I'll share 'em on Twitter/Facebook.

Update: The Nelson-Atkins just announced a ton of major collection gifts. I'll be tweeting/Facebooking them today, so 'tis a good time to sign up for Twitter/follow me/etc.

"California minimalism" is a peculiar phrase, one I'd never really heard before January 8, when this show opened at Chelsea's David Zwirner Gallery. It's a phrase not much in the literature about minimalism, either because the Californians are rarely considered within the arc of minimalism's history or because, well, the stuff coming out of southern California in the late fifties, sixties and seventies was sort of minimal and sort of not. (Much of it wa80s more perceptual than minimal.)

For years this art has been a mainstay of California museums and galleries, particularly in southern California. LACMA, MOCA and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego all have significant collections of the work.

However, some of the reaction to the Zwirner show has reminded me that this California-based art is little-known in the East: Robert Irwin has been the star of just one New York museum presentation since a 1977 Whitney retrospective, a 1998 show at Dia. Doug Wheeler has virtually no New York museum footprint, ditto other key Light and Space and fetish-finish artists. Perhaps as a result, New Yorkers have tended to see art from the period as a reaction to New York.

That may account for Peter Schjeldahl's New Yorker-published reaction to the Zwirner show. It's not online, but an audio slideshow is. Schjeldahl opens by describing 'California minimalism as "an under-sung movement mainly of the late 1960s that reacted to the development of minimal art in New York."

Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight noticed that wasn't exactly right and raised an tweeted eyebrow at Schjeldahl by pointing out that geometric minimalism in Los Angeles pre-dates the same kind of work in New York. Knight quoted from Schjeldahl's printed review: "Time travel: From 1959-1961 L.A. artist Larry Bell 'absorbed influences of triumphant [1963] New York minimalism.' Wow!" Larry Bell was exploring minimal forms at least as early as 1959. [Image above: Bell, Lux at the Ferus, 1961, from MOCA's collection.]

(It wasn't just Bell, either. Irwin was exploring perception in the way that would become key to 'California minimalism' in 1962, also before New York minimalists began showing their work.)

So if Californians weren't reacting to New York work that -- as Knight points out -- didn't exist yet, what were they reacting to? Like seemingly everyone else in art they were certainly reacting against abstract expressionism. (Irwin, for example, made abex paintings as late as 1961. Amazingly, in 1959 Irwin's palette seemed right out of Clyfford Still. He moved forward fast.)

Installations currently on view at LACMA and MOCA hint at the other likely answer. Both museums are showing works by hard-edge painter John McLaughlin: three at LACMA, four at MOCA. The MOCA McLaughlins are hung in a gallery with Ellsworth Kelly, 'before' the museum's minimalism galleries. I suspect that California art of the period had a lot more to do with McLaughlin than it did than anything in New York (and it looks like MOCA's curatorial team at least partially agrees). Next year post-war California post-war art will be surveyed by virtually every art museum in southern California. Alas: McLaughlin remains substantially overdue for re-evaluation. (Fortunately, New Yorkers can see more now.)

Related: Re-discovering Doug Wheeler. An Albright-Knox acquisition reminded me that California hard-edge painting (as a whole) is under-considered. Jackson Pollock and John McLaughlin: 1950.

I'll have a couple more notes on the response to the David Zwirner 'California minimalism' show later today, but first: The Zwirner show effectively serves as New York's re-introduction to Doug Wheeler, one of the three pioneers of California Light & Space. (The others: James Turrell and Robert Irwin.) Before the Zwirner show, I think that Wheeler was last on view in New York in the Guggenheim's 2004 Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) exhibition. The Wheeler in that exhibition, which is in the Gugg's collection, received scant notice. The Gugg's Wheeler isn't even included among the works listed in the museum's online collection resource.

Fortunately, over the last couple years Wheeler's work has been receiving more attention: In 2008 the Hirshhorn acquired a major Wheeler and its installation was the hit of this show. Right now Wheeler's up both at Zwirner and in MOCA's collection exhibition. Next year Wheeler will be a major player in the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego's Getty-funded 2011 Light & Space survey show -- so major that he may get the museum's downtown train station location to himself, as a kind of mini-retrospective. [Above: MOCA's RM669, 1969.]

Wheeler has long lived in rural New Mexico and is known as a recluse. I don't think Wheeler had given an interview in 30 years... until he agreed to come on MAN in October, 2008. (When I asked Wheeler when he'd last spoken with a writer, he said: "I'm not sure I've ever done it.") With Wheeler on view on both coasts, I thought now would be a good time to spotlight last year's Wheeler posts: Re-introducing Doug Wheeler, talking with Wheeler part one, two, three, four. I also re-published a short 1968 review of Wheeler by then-Los Angeles Times critic William Wilson.

• It would be hard to imagine a creamier puffier interview with a news-involved subject (Dakis Joannou) than this one from Chris Bors on Artinfo. Question: Given that it's an embarrassment for Artinfo, why did they run it? (True: The mistake is the New Museum's for doing the show, but Joannou is certainly involved.)
  
• LA County Museum on Fire (how has someone not outed this person yet?!) raves about LACMA's newly remodeled Dutch galleries.
  
• The Met has launched something that seems to be a bit more than a blog, that is still a blog. It's called Now at the Met.
• Which Dutch master shared technique (more or less) with Thomas Kinkade?
• This might be the coolest story of art being sold. And re-sold. And sold again. And, yes, once again, being sold. The twist: The work of art is selling itself. Read this first, read this next.
• The Brooklyn Museum is continuing its annual tradition of blogging an Egypt dig. Lots of pictures, fun stories. Catch up here.
• Today in interactions with public sculpture of which we approve.
  

I wonder if the partial reprise of the famed 'New Topographics' exhibit -- recently on view at LACMA and opening later this month at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz. -- was launched in gallery form just so the assembling curators could put out a catalogue? I don't know any other way to explain how such a lackluster, missed-opportunity of a show could result in such a fantastic publication.

"New Topographics," published last year by Steidel and the Center for Creative Photography in cooperation with the George Eastman House, is one of the best exhibition catalogues I've read in the last year. (If I'd read the catalogue in 2009 it would have been a shoo-in for my top-10 list.) It captures the zeitgeist around the New Topographics' creation in a way that goes beyond merely documenting or admiring the show.

The catalogue includes pretty much everything you'd want in a historical examination at the seminal 1975 exhibition, including plates, installation shots from the 1975 hanging at the Eastman House, a reproduction of the original catalogue, a thumbnail checklist of the 1975 exhibition (which makes it easy to see what was left out of the 2009-12 show) and two smart essays. In the first, Britt Salvesen examines what motivated and influenced the photographers and details how the show came about and Alison Nordstrom examined how the show itself has been historicized. All the catalogue lacks is an index.

I particularly enjoyed Salvesen's essay, which continues what is now a full-fledged art historical trend: the sourcing of much American art of the late 1960s and 1970s to an interest in environmentalism. Call it the death of the art-ism: Sometime after abstract expressionism or minimalism, artists were less likely to hitch their studios to 'isms', schools, Cedar Bars and the like, and instead increasingly looked outside art for motivation and inspiration. Given American art's centuries of preoccupation with the land and landscape, it's not surprising that artists would be prominent in the first generation of Americans to be caught up in the then-nascent environmental movement. [Image at right: Cover of the 1975 catalogue.]

One of the under-sussed-out memes from that period of early American environmentally-aware art is its lack of dogmatism. In New Topos photography, man wasn't necessarily the enemy of nature, he was just a factor to be considered. Yes, that consideration often included a carefully expressed cringe, but most enviro-engaged work from the period -- including the New Topos' -- lacks Greenpeace-level ardor. (That would work its way into art with the next generation, as photographers such as Richard Misrach and Emmet Gowin chronicled the massive degradation of Western landscapes, in particular the impact of the American military's systematic bombing and contamination of the West. In a related story: I hope we're getting close to a major exhibition that chronicles the influence of the environmental movement on American art: It's one of the few American landscape shows left undone.)

Salvesen notes that the New Topos weren't reflexively anti-industry or anti-development, that they were asking questions more than they were shouting answers. She quotes Robert Adams -- whom she identifes as the greenest of the New Topos -- even finding a wee bit of romanticism in his examinations of the "man-altered  landscape": "What I tried to do in The New West... was to include the objects we'd brought to the landscape and which by common consent are the most ugly, but also to suggest that light can transform even grotesque, inhuman things into mysteries worthy of attention." The undercurrent of environmental awareness in the exhibition was so muted that Salvesen notes that only one reviewer -- the Los Angeles Times' William Wilson -- wrote about the show in the context of America's emergent eco-awareness. [Image: Joe Deal, Untitled View (Albuquerque), 1974.)

That's especially interesting when considered in the broader context of American environmentalism: Books such as Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire (1968) or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) were nowhere near as muted as the art of the period, including the New Topos' work.

No question: If you're a photography-lover, interested in art about the West or if you're interested in how artists were early participants in the American environmental movement, don't miss this one.

Previously: Considering the exhibition.

The blogroll is dead. The are too many art blogs coming and going and coming back for me to keep up with them all. I'll still try to link to as many places as I can both here and on Twitter, but the blogroll is too time-intensive for continual updating.

I will try to keep the 'lead list' and the institutions list somewhat up-to-date. I've revised the 'lead list' and I've given art institutions their own section. The criterion for the lead list is completely subjective: I particularly dig those sites. If a site isn't there, it doesn't mean I don't read or enjoy it.

If you have a particular objection, tweet me. (I will not reply to emails. Just can't.) Better yet: If you find something there you like, tweet it!

• The Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt explains how El Anatsui installs a piece at the Rice University Art Gallery. Interesting pics of the process, too.
• In the Boston Globe, Sebastian Smee says this year's DeCordova Biennial is unusually bold.
• Christopher Miles almost loses me by opening his review of a Tom LaDuke show with Buchloh (when did LA Weekly become "October?"), but saves it.
• In the Village Voice, Christian Viveros-Faune says: A show at the David Zwirner gallery suggests LA minimalists 1, NYC minimalists 0.
• The Kansas City Star's Alice Thorson spotlights artist Nick Cave's triumphant return to Missouri.
• In the Wall Street Journal, Candace Jackson reports that the Indianapolis Museum of Art has already decided where the New Orleans Museum of Art's Claude Lorrain will hang should the Colts beat the Saints on Sunday.
• Replacing the flood-damaged University of Iowa Museum of Art could cost $40 million, reports the Iowa City Press-Citizens B.A. Morelli.
  

It's deadline-madness time at MAN HQ. Back Monday. If you're looking for the post on the art museums' Super Bowl bet, it's here.

I don't mean to pick on one writer or on one blog, but here's a good example of why I'm enjoying the Super Bowl-wager back-and-forth between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art: Yesterday the big sports blog site SB Nation ran a post on it here: "I'm as surprised Indianapolis has an art museum as you are," SBN editor Holly Anderson snarked.

Well, that's the point. People who never thought about art or about Indianapolis having (a quite fine) art museum are now looking at IMA paintings. Heck, Sports Illustrated media critic/reporter Richard Deitsch is so amused that he's posted multiple tweets about the directorial discourse. The IMA and NOMA are chest-thumping with the rest of their communities. Bye-bye fusty, hello Team Us.

I've always liked the way cities rally around their sports teams, the way a team becomes a point of commonality. Why shouldn't art museums try to do the same thing -- and in the process become somewhere that more people in their communities think about visiting?

Related: Instead of doing multiple posts on the wager, I'm just updating this post, which is just below this one. It's updated to reflect agreement on a wager!

UPDATE, Wednesday, 130pm EST: The bet is made and done. See below/bottom.

In response to the proposed Super Bowl bet between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art about which I posted on Monday, NOMA director E. John Bullard has come roaring back in defense of his Saints.

First, some background: On Monday, IMA director Max Anderson initially proposed wagering an IMA loan of an Ingrid Calame painting. That was a nice choice... but apparently Anderson wasn't too worried about having to pay off the bet: "We're already spackling the wall where the NOMA loan will hang," he tweeted.

On Tuesday morning Bullard emailed MAN HQ:

"Max Anderson must not really believe the Colts can beat the Saints in the Super Bowl. Otherwise why would he bet such an insignificant work as the Ingrid Calame painting? Let's up the ante. The New Orleans Museum of Art will bet the three-month loan of its Renoir painting, Seamstress at Window, circa 1908, which is currently in the big Renoir exhibition in Paris. What will Max wager of equal importance? Go Saints!"

Anderson TwitPics from his seat at the Colts' Lucas Oil Stadium. I expect a response...

UPDATE, Tuesday, 2:20pm EST: SNAP! Anderson tweets back at NOMA: "We'll see the sentimental blancmange by that "China Painter" and raise you a proper trophy: [A Jean-Valentine Morel jeweled cup, which won the Grand Medal at the 1855 Paris World Fair.]"

UPDATE: Tuesday, 11:20pm EST: These museums are getting serious.

In an email I received while I was, er, on my way to dinner, Bullard raised the stakes: "I am amused that Renoir is too sweet for Indianapolis. Does this mean that those Indiana corn farmers have simpler tastes? If so why would Max offer us that gaudy Chalice -- just looks like another over-elaborate Victorian tchotchke. Let's get serious. Each museum needs to offer an art work that they would really miss for three months. What would you like Max? A Monet, a Cassatt, a Picasso, a Miro? Sorry but we have no farm scenes or portraits of football players to send you."

Ouch!: I suspect Bullard knows that the Indianapolis Museum of Art actually owns a farm. (It's part of the IMA's endowment.)

A couple hours after Bullard's rejoinder, Anderson replied to both Bullard and to @NOMA via Twitter: "Colts will win; here's how sure I am: [the IMA's four-by-six-foot JMW] Turner for Vigée Lebrun's Portrait of Marie Antoinette."

[The Lebrun, painted in 1788 when Marie Antoinette was queen and just a year before the French Revolution, is the middle image. The Turner, from 1800, is the bottom image.]

• Think there's more to architecture than Renzo & Co., designers to moneyed discernment? You'll love the Mammoth best architecture of the decade. 
• I had no idea the Art Institute of Chicago had a blog, but that's how I found out that the AIC is rotating Bruce Nauman's Clown Torture out of its contemporary galleries. Here's what's next.
• Greg Allen has been looking into the under-examined art histories of Washington. He's found the Tom Wesselmann painting that linked JFK and a nude and he examined hard-edge painter, Anne Truitt best friend and JFK mistress Mary Meyer.
• Possibly the most eclectic blog post on photography ever. Yes, this means it includes David LaChapelle. 
• I would like a temporary writing studio, please. 
• How a fantastically great Jackson Pollock ended up in San Francisco. (Re: the same painting, hello, Tintoretto.)
• Wet-plate collodion photography: It's back.
• Linking industrial communities via art.
  
• So far no word from the New Orleans Museum of Art on a Super Bowl bet with the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I'll try to get an answer by the end of the day.
  

Finally, museum-exhibition catalogues are going digital.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will announce a new online catalogue-publishing initiative today. LACMA will kick off the program by publishing 10 out-of-print catalogues online. Many of them present scholarship LACMA produced during the early boom years of contemporary art in Los Angeles, including Maurice Tuchman's 1966 catalogues for an Edward Kienholz show (several works from which are now in LACMA's collection) and a two-man show of Robert Irwin and Ken Price, James Monte's 1968 Billy Al Bengston publication and The Museum as Site: Sixteen Projects, the publication that accompanied a 1981 exhibition curated by Stephanie Barron.

The catalogues are being published in partnership with the Internet Archive using open-source software. Each publication can be viewed online, downloaded in PDF format, or downloaded for use on electronic book readers, such as Amazon's Kindle. (Update: The software is Kindle-capable and includes a Kindle option, but LACMA says it is not yet distributing via Kindle.)

In April, starting with "Myths, Legends and Cultural Renewal: Wagner's Sources," LACMA will begin to publish some of its new extant catalogues relevant to new shows online (as well as in print). It will also develop catalogues for online-publication-only and it will publish additional out-of-print catalogues online as well.

LACMA has been in the vanguard of institutions publishing digitally for several years. In 2008 the museum put its first out-of-print catalogue online, a book documenting its 1967-71 Art & Technology Program. (That publication is also one of the 10 that LACMA is publishing with its new reader.) LACMA's blog, Unframed, is one of the best museum blogs. The new catalogue initiative will be published on a section of LACMA's website called Reading Room.

LACMA gave MAN a preview of several of the books it is re-publishing online. The quality is good and the powerful zoom feature make even the occasional blurry type easily readable. Complicated images -- such as photos of Kienholzes -- are crisp. I was surprised at how quickly the books loaded. (I don't have a Kindle, so no Kindle test.) The export-to-PDF feature creates a strikingly clear, clean PDF copy of each catalogue. The feature is so good (and easy-to-use) that I suspect many individual users or educators will keep LACMA digital catalogues on their computers for easy reference.

Reading museum catalogues on a screen is a different reader experience than reading them in print. I found that reading digitally prompted me to make associations between work in the catalogue and newer art, associations that I could quickly explore by opening another tab in my browser. For example, while flipping through Monte's Bengston catalogue [cover and detail above], I realized that I was thinking of Matthew Barney's 'field emblem' in the context of Bengston's stacked chevron. I opened a browser tab and looked around for information on how Barney developed his symbol and whether he'd noted Bengston as an influence. At a library I'd have had to go to the library with this idea in mind, find Bengston and Barney books in a library catalogue, asked a librarian to pull them out of stacks, and then hunted.

The catalogue initiative piggy-backs on a Getty Foundation program to re-imagine the collection catalogue in online form. LACMA is working with the Getty to put its Southeast Asian collection catalogue online. It is one of nine institutions working with the Getty on that project. (MAN revealed the Getty initiative here and here last February.)

Traditionally rights for reproductions of works was an issue or a concern for museums considering digital publications. A LACMA spokesperson told me that the museum feels good about its legal position. "We did reach out to artists on some occasions, but these are books that LACMA published," LACMA communications director Allison Agsten said. "They're our books and so in some instances we did take a little risk." Agsten said that the museum consciously chose not to start the Reading Room with new books of new art, and that rights-and-reproduction issues will be something the museum continues to examine as it digitally publishes books about contemporary art.

Related: The more easily art museum catalogues are accessible, the more scholarship about art can bleed into other areas.

This morning, via Twitter, I'm playing matchmaker in trying to arrange a Super Bowl bet between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

IMA director and Twitter-devotee Maxwell Anderson stepped up and wagered a three-month loan of this recently acquired painting. Nice choice... but apparently Anderson isn't too worried about having to pay off the bet: "We're already spackling the wall where the NOMA loan will hang," he tweeted.

Museum directors talking trash? My, my. You gonna take that, NOMA? Follow it here.

• I can't improve on Greg Allen's tweet: "Glenn Ligon in Blake Gopnik's [Washington Post] article about black artists: "We're still the subject of articles about black artists."
• Holland Cotter reviews New York's contribution to the season of big, big drawings shows: Bronzino at the Met. (In Los Angeles: Rembrandt and his Pupils at the Getty.) Cotter's review is lovely, but apparently it's just the latest exhibition that is exempt from Cotter's Rule. 
• Patti Smith popped up on NPR's Fresh Air to talk about her new memoir and spent a lot of time on Robert Mapplethorpe.

One of my most valued books is a tiny little tome that Jerry Saltz edited for Frieze over a decade ago. Smartly titled, "An Ideal Syllabus," it features artists, curators and critics picking their favorite or most-valued books.

Earlier this month I asked some artists to essentially re-create the exercise for MAN. Next up: Andrea Zittel, the Joshua Tree, Calif.-based artist. Zittel is currently building a 'floating island' for the Indianapolis Museum of Art's Art & Nature Park. She talked about the project with the IMA's Richard McCoy on art21's website yesterday. (Tip: Lots of cool pictures.) Zittel's work is also on view as part of SFMOMA's 75th-anniversary exhibition and in MOCA's 30th-anniversary exhibition. Earlier this month Zittel announced a new format for her long-running High Desert Test Sites project. [Image: Prototype for Billboard at A-Z West, 2007, Andrea Zittel.]

Two best ever coffee table books
Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric by Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen. (Published 1971, 1986.) The ultimate textile book. A stunning orgy of tapestries and weavings from the heyday of craft -- back when it expressed the IQ and experimentation of jet propulsion laboratories.

The exhibition catalogue for the 2001 Gio Ponti exhibition at the Queens Museum, curated by Brian Kish. One of my all time favorite designers.  Gio Ponti is over the top, edgy, flamboyant and all-the-way Italian. In no way is this the tamed-down, taste-made modernism of the international style.

Two change-your-life Books
The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto, translated by David A. Thayne. (Beyond Words, 2004.)  This is my newest find so I'm undeniably enthusiastic. A Japanese scientist discovers that molecules of water are affected by thoughts words and feelings.  

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. *Harper, 2008.) I've loaned or bought this book for countless friends. Part sociology, part pragmatism, part self-help. An astute analysis of the human mind that will change the way that you pursue your life ambitions.

Two books that hit at the dark soul of California
Where I Was From by Joan Didion. (Knopf, 2003.) First person narrative at it's best, Joan Didion draws from details of her upbringing in central California and then dives headfirst into the dark side of the Golden State.

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit.  (Viking, 2003.)  Ostensibly written as a biography of Muybridge, this book is also a spectacular description of post-gold rush San Francisco, railroad magnates and the representation of the last vestiges of the once-wild West.

Related: Anne Appleby, Kate Shepherd.

I tweeted this yesterday but given today's first post (which I wrote over the weekend) it seems relevant: Jonathan Jones on how museums should think bigger. [via]

The land is to American art what  mythology, religion and belief were to European art. From nearly the beginning of American art, painters made romantic, idyllic paintings of the land. Those portrayals continued for almost two centuries. They went up the Hudson River, west to Niagara Falls, across the great rivers of the heartland, over the West and her mountains until finally the land was so used-up by Americans (and artists) that full-field abstraction was the only way left. For almost the whole of our nation's first 200 years, this bucolia was interrupted only by horrific (staged) photographs of corpses strewn across the Civil War-ravaged land. (Aside: That art historical blip could have been part of this examination of the period.) [Image: Henry Wessel, Jr., Buena Vista, Colorado, 1973.]

Then, thanks to a group of photographers working independently of each other in the late-Vietnam years, that changed. Tagged 'The New Topographics,' Eastman House curator William Jenkins gave photographers who showed the docu-truth about how Americans were treating the land a show in Rochester, NY in 1975. The exhibit traveled to Los Angeles and Princeton, NJ.

The 'new' show includes two-thirds of the pictures in the original. It closed at LACMA just after the New Year and will travel to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz., SFMOMA and then to museums in Linz, Cologne, Rotterdam and Bilbao. It debuted at the Eastman House last summer. The LACMA installation was curated by Edward Robinson.

The exhibition is a missed opportunity. The partial re-presentation of an important, 34-year-old show is curatorial rote recitation, a blown chance to present and re-contextualize the most important American art of the 1970s.

The current exhibition was a chance to thoroughly re-examine the entire field of 'new topographic' photography, to re-historicize it and to include artists whose work not only fits the meme but whose work helped create it and who were not included in the Eastman House show. (In fairness to Jenkins and his colleagues: They did not have the resources or technology available to later curators. Presenting a reasonably complete examination of 'new landscape photography' is easier now than it was then.)

True: LACMA tacked Ed Ruscha onto the show by including some of his artists books, including "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" (1966). But ultimately Ruscha's inclusion looks shrugged-in, a tacit admission that this exhibition's curators merely (partially) re-staged a classic instead of considering a period. Photographers such as Pirkle Jones, Dorothea Lange and William Garnett -- all of whom were doing what we call 'new topographic' work before the Eastman House artists were -- deserve to have their work included in examinations of new topographic work. Art exhibitions at major museums should be more than the re-opening of time capsules. [Image: Frank Gohlke, Landscape, Los Angeles, 1974.]

A proper re-examination of the period might also have included a look at how artists' changed approach to the American landscape continues to influence American art today. Again, LACMA included a tack-on that's apparently intended to stand in for dozens of other artists: A video from the Center for Land Use Interpretation that documents the oil industry in the Western landscape. I think Matthew Coolidge, CLUI's majordomo, is an important thinker, a philosopher of the American West in the Rebecca Solnit or Marc Reisner mold, but CLUI's inclusion here demonstrates the artlessness of its enterprise and the exhibition's unfortunate lack of intellectual and curatorial ambition.

Upcoming on MAN: More on the show, including a look at its (fantastic, well-written, must-own) catalogue and a look at Lewis Baltz's masterpiece.

Just before MOCA hired New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch to be its next director, I published two posts on two works of art on view in Washington: Byron Kim's Synecdoche at the National Gallery of Art and Yinka Shonibare's Double Dutch at the National Museum of African Art. Then Deitch got hired and the two posts got buried under a pile of news.

Ever since, I've wanted to re-stitch them together. Voila. I also wanted to share the response that the Kim piece drew from Seattle-based critic Regina Hackett. Hackett's commentary is a masterpiece of strawmanism: it repeatedly takes me to task for things I never said. After the jump, I fact-check Hackett's presentation of my arguments.

• Is this kind of thing really in the spirit of Sol LeWitt's work? (And is that book really free?)
• Considered at PS1: What happens when global warming changes swamps New York's waterfront?
• I would like to read in this room.
• A Gerhard Richter neon-ab painting improved... by jumping!
• This beats art fairs every day of the week, and twice on macaroni-and-cheese Mondays. In a related story, the Hirshhorn thinks it needs a $5-$15 million bulbous membrane to do community-engaging events. It also kicks the Hirshhorn's butt, for 1/10,000th the cost.
  
• What is a Rembrandt and what isn't?
  
• Art Work: A national conversation about art, labor and economics is well-worth a peruse. In a related story, Chris Burden suggests you send him money. That is all. [via]
  

Despite being interrupted by the holidays and recent breaking news, I've been looking at the recent Baltimore Museum of Art Matisse prints retrospective. See part one, part two.

In part two of my consideration of "Matisse as Printmaker" at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I noted that Baltimore curator Jay Fisher's catalogue essay suggests that we view Matisse's prints as "pages in a sketchbook -- work from the studio before a process of selection and refinement." Later in his essay, Fisher continued: "Printmaking was Matisse's primary means of demonstrating to his audience his working process, the character of his vision, and the way his drawing transformed what he observed."

I think we see evidence of that if we consider the prints Matisse made in 1914 within the context of a painting he made in the same year: His famed Portrait of Mlle. Yvonne Landsberg. The picture is revered for many reasons, but the one that interests us here is those remarkable arcs around the body, the way Matisse dug what was probably the butt-end of his brush into the black-painted ground, creating or further delineating his sitter's shoulders and legs, as well as negative space throughout the canvas. In his 2001 book Matisse Portraits, John Klein described Matisse working through this painting as an "extended period of evolution, and the intensive labor suggested by the appearance -- scraped, rubbed, scumbled -- of the painting itself," and that it exemplifies "the difficulty Matisse sometimes encountered, or made for himself, in this period in constructing the image that would express his responses most completely."

And what was Matisse's "sketchbook" for this kind of painting? How about a non-painting process that also involves scraping, rubbing and scumbling: Printmaking. The year Matisse painted Yvonne Landsberg, 1914, was one of his peak periods of printmaking. In 1914 Matisse made 70 prints, almost 10 percent of his career total. They ranged from portraits (such as of the painter Albert Marquet [right], perhaps Matisse's most famous monotype, to nudes to still lifes. Most of them -- about 50 -- were etchings, including one of Landsberg.

The celebrated painted portrait of Landsberg isn't in the Baltimore show, but numerous prints from 1914 are, including the monotype of Marquet. Years later, Yvonne Landsberg's brother Albert wrote a letter to Alfred Barr. William Lieberman quotes a line from it in a 1956 essay about Matisse-the-printmaker (the essay is reprinted in the Baltimore show's catalogue): Matisse was "very much pleased with those prints of his of white lines on a black background." Sure enough, there they are in Matisse's portrait of Yvonne, white lines cut into a black background, a clear example of Matisse using something he learned from printmaking in a painting.

• In the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott looks at a new PBS biography of 'America's First Architect,' Benjamin Latrobe.
• The Stranger's Jen Graves talks with Seattle dealer Greg Kucera about Deitch-to-MOCA. She joins the ranks of critics who better voiced a question I tried to Deitch (and failed to properly articulate): "Maybe MOCA should organize a show called, 'We Hired Jeffrey Deitch,' about commercialism and museums. Institutional critique."
• The SF Chronicle's Kenneth Baker says SFMOMA's newest round of 75th-anniversary exhibitions sag a bit.
• In LA Weekly, Tom Christie sums up Western takes on MOCA's hire.
• PRI's Studio360 talks with Iranian director-in-exile Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
  
• It is becoming increasingly uncomfortable to watch whatever is happening to Jerry Saltz. Artinfo catches Saltz publicly using a four-letter epithet to describe PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach and notes that Saltz is claiming credit for coming up with PS1's 'Greater New York' show. (Also: This is not the first time Saltz has given himself credit for an something a New York institution has done or said.)
  

Regarding the ongoing situation in Iran, Claire Messud takes to the New York Review of Books' blog to point out that the dearth of fiction that is coming out of Iran is hindering our ability to understand life in Iran under the current clerical dictatorship. The essay is, in effect, an argument for the importance of the arts in detailing a nation's history and it's peoples lives. Don't miss it.

Messud's essay reminded me of one of my favorite quotes. It's from John Ruskin: "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."

While there may not be much fiction coming out of Iran, visual artists and filmmakers have been significant figures in their fields for some time. Unfortunately (but for obvious reasons), no American museum curators of whom I know have 'specialized' in or focused on Iran in the way the Hammer's James Elaine has specialized in China. (One possible reason: Many Iranian artists, such as Shirin Neshat and Shirazeh Houshiary live in (sometimes forced) diaspora.)

Commercial galleries have also worked to present Iranian artists: Last year Los Angeles' Crewest gallery launched a show of recent Iranian street art and starting this weekend New York's Arario Gallery is presenting The Promise of Loss: A Contemporary Index of Iran.

Given the expense and obvious difficulty American art museums would have in curatorially examining new Iranian art with any authority or thoroughness, this should be an area where art journalism could be reveal a lot about art in Iran. I'll try to focus on Iran more in the coming months.

Related: The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art is holding its 14th annual Iranian Film Festival. I profiled Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat for the Los Angeles Times in 2005; it's in the jump. Also, me in the New York Observer on MoMA's "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Seeing" exhibition, a show that featured mostly artists from the Islamic world, including several Iranians.

As Jeffrey Deitch transitions from New York art dealer to Los Angeles museum director, is it fair to ask the question: Will 'his' artists, artists he has shown and with whom he has worked at Deitch Projects, be in MOCA shows?

Yes. Deitch Projects is a big gallery. Jeffrey Deitch has had a long career. It would be nearly impossible for artists with whom Deitch has a relationship to not show up in a MOCA show or installation every once in a while. No big deal.

A related question is playing out now at SFMOMA, in the museum's first 75th-anniversary exhibit. The near-final gallery of the show is features works of 'visionary urbanism,' almost entirely from SFMOMA's collection. It was put together by SFMOMA architecture-and-design curator Henry Urbach. Before joining SFMOMA in 2006, Urbach spent nine years running ran a Chelsea gallery called Henry Urbach Architecture.

One of the artists Urbach showed was Lebbeus Woods, an artist whose work has long been interested with many things visionary and other things urban. Urbach has included Woods in his 'visionary urbanism' gallery. No big deal: He belongs. [Image above: Lebbeus Woods, Nine Reconstructed Boxes, 1999. Collection SFMOMA.]

When it comes to dealers who transition into non-profit art museums, the better question is: What about artists they haven't shown or represented? Will they get as 'fair' a shake as artists with whom the curator or dealer has worked in the past?

Urbach's gallery at SFMOMA includes lots of work by artists and architects he didn't show, people such as Steven Holl and Simon Ungers. And of course it does: They belong too. [Image: Simon Ungers, Rendering from Art City, 2005.]

The question I posit is mostly unanswerable. If Deitch's MOCA or Urbach were to show 25 artists in the next year and if 23 of them were artists with whom they'd had a business relationship, that would raise flags. Urbach isn't doing that. Deitch won't be selecting anything close to every artist in every MOCA installation and only a really short-sighted curator would try to curry favor with the new boss by curating Deitch Projects-related artists into show after show after show. Is this a potential issue? Sure. Journalists will be keeping an eye on it. Is it an issue with much potential? Probably not.

Related: Urbach has penned a blog post/essay about his installation for SFMOMA's Open Space. It's the kind of essay that includes "dialogic" in Sentence One, but some people like that sort of thing.

• A short, clever Walker Art Center video: Top Five Things that Have to be Identified as Art. [via]
• LACMA's blog turns the tables on semi-retiring, ex-LAT art journalist Suzanne Muchnic. (She's a writer who would never stoop to that cliche. Or that one.)
• I was not alone in my amusement at Roberta Smith thinking Jeffrey Deitch's clothes are relevant. (Which would not be a big deal if she'd hit on, you know, any of the thorny ethical issues that emerged within 24 hours of the hire.) Dig the comments.
• What Pig 05049 has to do with global warming, food processing, global trade, artist/designer Christien Meindertsema and MoMA curator Paul Galloway.
  
• British artist/writer Saskia Olde Wolbers' Trailer (2005) is a part of "Automatic Cities," on view until the end of January at MCASD. Seeing her piece in the show reminded me of a slightly unusual artist-Q&A she and I did a while back. Instead of an artist-Q&A, we did a writer-Q&A: Part one, part two.
  

On Monday, MOCA hired New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch to be its next director. (He officially starts the job on June 1.) It only took until Tuesday afternoon for some of the difficulties in hiring an art dealer to run a museum to become clear. [Image: Nancy Rubins, Chas' Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson's Airplane Parts, About 1,000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosian's Beverly Hills Space at MOCA, from MOCA's collection and on view in MOCA's plaza.]

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times' Mike Boehm wrote about how thorny it will be for Deitch's MOCA to conduct its programming normally, in a way that is transparent and beyond reproach. Also yesterday, over the course of interviews on KPCC's "Air Talk" program, on MAN and with Artinfo.com's Sarah Douglas, Deitch seemed to backpedal from comments he made on Monday (also here on MAN) that he was "ceasing all commercial activity as of June 1." Deitch said that he reserved the right to continue to sell art from his personal stash when he wanted to. (Deitch said that yesterday's comments weren't backpedaling but instead constituted a 'clarification.')

Deitch also said that he would comply with all Association of Art Museum Directors guidelines, but AAMD rules specify that a "director shall not deal in works of art." The guidelines do not make clear whether a director engaging in the selling side of commercial art activities is "dealing." Deitch seems to be staking MOCA's faith in him and the experiment of an art museum hiring an art dealer to run it on a Clintonian parsing. (In a related story, imagine the hullablloo that would result if Jim Cuno sold an antiquity that he owned just before giving a lecture about commerce and cultural heritage or if Tom Campbell sold a Renaissance tapestry just after launching a show on tapestries made for traveling royal courts.) Deitch's best friend in all this could be his board, which could -- and should -- be much clearer and firmer about what he can and can't do as its director.

The issue reveals that Deitch is still learning that the non-profit sector is a place with rules and ethical standards that are far beyond those in the famously murky, anything-goes commercial art trade. That shouldn't be a surprise. Deitch has been MOCA's director-in-waiting for 24 hours. It's unlikely that anyone could fully absorb and understand a foreign set of responsibilities within 24 hours of taking them on.

It's also clear that Deitch is also getting used to being accountable to a public broader than his client base. One of the things a museum director must do is be able to make the case for why contemporary art and artists are important to a democratic society, to be able to talk about how artists are free to ask the biggest questions about subjects that humans face, about how they've done that for hundreds of years and why it's important that our nation should continue to value that. A contemporary art museum director needs to be able to make that case with his words and through is museum's programming and acquisitions.

Deitch is passionate about art. There's no reason to believe he won't figure out how to do all that. However, at his introductory press conference, his first opportunity to do so, he passed and took no questions from the assembled press. (To Deitch's credit, he has been through a mini-gauntlet of one-on-one interviews over the last few days. When repeatedly confronted with the change in his position on commercial art activity, he showed no sign of indignation. He seemed to realize it's an issue -- but it's not clear he realizes it's a legitimate one.)

Deitch should spend the next few months studying the differences between the business world he's supposedly leaving, and the non-profit world he's joining. He should study Christopher Knight's post-hiring think-piece for some tips. When critics such as The Chronicle of Higher Education's Laurie Fendrich ask, "Can a man who's made his living dealing contemporary art put all that behind him and now approach art as something to be valued for its own sake, and for a non-buying general public's sake, and not [as] something that's for sale?" he should take the question seriously and he should try to address it head-on, publicly, every chance he gets. Deitch has a well-established flair for splashy events and grand gestures. He would be particularly wise to bring some of that tendency-toward-impresario to the intellectual arena, perhaps by inviting Fendrich to join him for a public conversation at MOCA on June 2.

All of this underscores how new Deitch is to the non-profit sector and to a public position. There will be growing pains. (There already have been.) Deitch will have to learn about a new set of obligations and responsibilities. He deserves more than 24 hours to demonstrate that he can adjust to his new reality. Still, yesterday certainly showed us why MOCA's hiring of Deitch is a gamble.

On Southern California NPR affiliate KPCC, just-named MOCA director-to-be Jeffrey Deitch seemed to walk back comments he made on MAN yesterday regarding his art-selling activities.

First, from yesterday:

The other thing I want to emphasize is that my collection is really one of my lifetime projects... This collection is really a major thing in my life and I have never sold a major work in this prime collection.

There, of course, are many works I've sold, but not the collection works and that's what I hope to be able to continue to do, to keep it intact. The goal is not to make money with it, but to create something that's a special document about my relationships, my career and hopefully I'll be in a position to make a gift of it or do something or put it into a foundation.

I have zero intention to be selling works of art beyond things I might need to do connected with the expenses of getting out of leases and liquidating my business.

And later:

[F]irst, let me emphasize I'm ceasing all commercial activity as June 1. There will be zero commercial activities in art: No dealing, no art consulting, no art trading, no investing, nothing like that.

On Tuesday afternoon, on KPCC host Larry Mantle's program 'Air Talk,' Deitch seemed to contradict Monday's comments and left the door open to selling from his collection: "From time to time, to augment supplement a museum director's salary, I'll be selling something small," he said.

In FY 2007, the most recent year for which a MOCA tax filing is available on Guidestar, MOCA's then-director was paid salary and received benefits of $494,474.

I contacted the museum and Deitch to ask if he misspoke on KPCC or if he would be selling art while serving as MOCA's director.

"Perhaps. I hope not," Deitch said. "I just wanted to clarify that the business activity as an art dealer will cease totally, 100 percent, as of June 1. So [I'll be] selling nothing that's on consignment from an artist or collector. Zero art dealing. As I told you the last thing I want to do is sell something major from my collection. My collection is one of the most important projects of my career. I hope at some point to give the collection to a foundation. I can't commit to that because who knows what's going to happen in life. 

"In terms of more minor things in the collections, I hope not. But from time to time, if there is some expense that comes up, sure. I might need to sell something and that will be done according to a procedure that has been reviewed very precisely with the board of directors of MOCA. What you do is tell the ethics committee  of the board of trustees what you intend to do. The work is offered first to the museum, and if the museum doesn't want to buy it then it can be offered on the art market. And I want to be very clear: I hope not to have to do that, but from time to time I might. It's not something I would consider to be business activity."

I asked Deitch if he'd discussed this with MOCA's board and if the board was comfortable with it.

"Absolutely," he said. "This is nothing new. Those of us who have lived our lives in art this is our asset. And people who are in other fields, they accumulate real estate and stocks. This is my field. This is what I did with [my] earnings, earnings I didn't need for daily living. I've always bought works of art, since I was a teenager.

"And again I have never sold a major work of art that's in the mainstream of my collection. I hope I never have to do that but I'm going into a very different world now where I'm not going to be earning the kind of income I was. For expenses from time to time I might sell something. I'm being straightforward here. There's nothing to hide. If I wanted to profit from art I'd remain an art dealer. I'm giving up something enormous. I fully expect to abide by all the ethical standards of the [Association of Art Museum Directors] and of MOCA. The last thing I want is any kind of distraction like this because I have a lot to do here."

In effect, Deitch says he won't deal other people's work, but that he reserves the right to deal art from his collection. AAMD guidelines specify that a "director shall not deal in works of art." The guidelines do not make clear whether a director selling work from his or her own collection is "dealing."

Deitch's new comments raise questions about whether it would be appropriate for MOCA's director to deal from his own collection. They open the door to the questions MOCA had hoped to avoid: Whether an art museum should hire a (soon-to-be former) art dealer to be its director, and how the museum should draw the lines to make sure its programming and its director's activities are beyond reproach.

The situation Deitch outlines opens the door to a potentially serious conflict-of-interest: Imagine that MOCA launches a group show. Imagine that one of the artists is not so well-known, and that her inclusion in a show at America's top contemporary art museum would represent a substantial elevation of her profile. Imagine then that Deitch then decides to sell three works by that artist from his collection. That would be deeply problematic. I'm not suggesting that would happen, I'm merely pointing out the sort of situation that should be prevented.

The audio from the KPCC interview is available here.

• MAN's three-part Q&A with incoming MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch: Transitioning from the commercial sector to the non-profit sector, navigating possible ethical conflicts, MOCA's future.
• Christopher Knight has the must-read piece of the day. Don't miss it. His last three paragraphs engage an issue I tried (and failed) to address in my Deitch Q&A re: commercialism and contemporary art museums.
  
• Speaking of the LAT, its coverage of the day's news is a reminder that they're the most important art journalism-producing commercial publication in America. Mike Boehm has a good lead story.
• Joerg Colberg makes a particularly perceptive analogy, one of those things I wish I'd thought of.
• The second-biggest whiff of the day is from Roberta Smith, who fails to engage with most of the issues raised by MOCA's hiring of a commercial gallery owner. I would hate to think that's because familiarity or collegiality trumps examination, but her piece reads as if Deitch is a member of the New York Art Lovers Club, and therefore the hire must be OK. Remarkably, Smith goes all Ben Brantley with a line like this: "He has always looked like a museum director. His hair is always in place; he wears almost without fail a dark (bespoke?) suit and French cuffs."
• The least thoughtful piece is by Bloomberg's New York scenester-playa Linda Yablonksy, who thinks it's important that Deitch will be delivering "panache" and "business savvy" to MOCA. (What, is accessorizing a wardrobe or a dining set an imperative skill for a museum director? And typically, Yablonsky spends more pixels detailing how she was a part of Deitch's in-crowd-orbit than she does on substantive engagement with issues.) Regarding Yablonsky's "business savvy" line, see yesterday's post.
• Love the headline at the Jewish Journal: "Nice Jewish Art Dealer Becomes Museum Director."
  
• @magdasawon gets the last word. [via]
  

This is the first published interview with incoming MOCA director and current Deitch Projects gallery-owner Jeffrey Deitch. It was conducted via phone with Deitch in Los Angeles earlier tonight. (MOCA communications director Lyn Winter was on the call with Deitch, but did not participate in the Q&A.) [Image.]

For the sake of reading-ease, I'll post this in three parts. The posts are roughly thematic, but are absolutely chronological in terms of how our conversation took place.

In part two, Deitch and I discuss some of the ethical questions created by his new position. In part three, Deitch and I discuss his plans for MOCA's future. In this section, part one, Deitch and I discuss move from commercial dealer to non-profit executive.

MAN: Let's start with a simple one. As you leave the gallery for MOCA, what do you see as the differences between running a commercial gallery and an art museum?

Jeffrey Deitch: Of course there are major, major differences. One is private-sector, one is public-sector. The museum director is responsible to a very extensive community: All the museum staff, the trustees, the local artists, the local art audience, Los Angeles civic leaders, [people] running other institutions and just the large audience that is here. Everyone is a stakeholder in this. Everybody feels that they are a part of the museum.

It's nothing like a sole proprietorship. Running an art gallery, you're only responsible to yourself. It's maybe not as different as one might think though. The art world also takes a kind of 'ownership interest' in any kind of public program, so people who visit exhibitions at my gallery feel free to make public comments and give their suggestions. So I've been working in the public arena for many years. Even in a commercial art gallery you are responsible to the artists, the works of art and responsible to uphold the integrity of the art work and the integrity of the field.

MAN: A decade or two ago we saw museums bring in a run of MBA directors, people such as Tom Krens. Was that experiment, during which museums eschewed non-profit and academic art historical expertise, a success?

JD: I think very much so. One of my inspirations is Jack Lane. [Lane directed SFMOMA and the most recently the Dallas Museum of Art.] I believe Jack has a business degree and he is someone who is comfortable both as a creative manager and as a financial manager. It really does depend on the person and the situation. But ultimately the best person to run an art institution, whether it's a museum or an opera company, is someone who is comfortable both in the creative world and in the management world. You really need to apply both skills and apply them simultaneously.

MAN: A museum director is a spokesperson for art, a spokesperson for the importance of art and artists in our society and an administrator who helps to enable acquisitions and scholarship. A dealer engages with a much narrower slice of the public, effectively people with the means to buy art. Being the public face of today's art to a diverse community such as Los Angeles, probably the most diverse city in America, is very different from selling art to rich mostly white men, isn't it?

JD: That is not at all how I conceived my role at the gallery. First of all I've run a public gallery with three spaces and with lots of public projects. Ninety-nine percent of my constituency running my gallery is the art-public, same type of public as the public of MOCA.

And the sales to art collectors -- who are not at all just rich, white men -- that's not the way it is anymore at all. We sell all over the world and a lot of our clients are women, maybe even half of our clients are women. That's the part that corresponds to raising money from trustees and other people in the community. I don't feel that I am going into a completely different world, but a lot of the same people, same principles.

It's obviously quite different going from the private sector that is commercial-sector, to the public sector supported by contributions and some revenue streams that have nothing to do with the commerce of art. But I feel that what I've been doing at Deitch Projects is in a way running my own private institute of contemporary art. I've just been using the market system to support it rather than contributions to support it. I've run a program that has non-commercial historical exhibits, historical exhibits with little or nothing for sale. [I've also done] projects that engage a large, young community like Michel Gondry's mini-film studio, which cost a fortune to produce but with no chance to get any commercial revenue.

MAN: I understand all that, but I think I was getting at something a little bit different: As a museum director,  you will be the public face of contemporary art to an enormous audience, much of which won't care about contemporary art or will be suspicious of it. How will you represent art to those communities, particularly people who may not think they are interested in art.

JD: That's a very good question, because that gets to why I wanted to take this on with MOCA. I'll be serving a much larger, diverse audience, even though in my gallery I try to do that. I try to build a large community that is diverse and I think we have. At my gallery we've reached a much more diverse audience than most mainstream galleries. But that is one of the exciting challenges of MOCA.  I'm very idealistic. I do believe that art can enhance people's lives.

I believe in art as an economic generator. In a city like Los Angeles that no longer has that many corporate headquarters, large companies, where it doesn't have the manufacturing base it once had... but what it has is one of the largest populations of creative people in the world, some of whom are engaged with art, some of whom are not, it's a remarkable potential audience to reach. I'm also hoping people on the board and on the staff are committed to art education, to using the art assets such as MOCA's collection, its curators, to reach out to people who haven't had direct access to art. In the strategic statement I prepared for the board there's a lot of emphasis on building a larger community and outreach.

MAN: What values from the commercial world are not applicable to museum directorship?

JD: In terms of the way I have approached the field, I began as an art critic. My first job after receiving my MBA from Harvard was at a museum. I was a curator at the DeCordova. I've always treated the field as an opportunity to get involved in the promotion of analysis or interpretation of art. In certain parts of my career the best way for me to do that was the non-profit sector, and in parts it was working in a corporate structure -- when I was co-managing art advisory at Citibank and more recently it's been at a private art gallery -- and now will be at MOCA.

My motivations and interest in connoisseurship, scholarship, doing great exhibitions, projects with artists: It's all the same. It's not going to change that much. My values really don't change. For the past 30 years when I was primarily an art dealer or art adviser, I simply used the market system to support what I was doing, whether it was ambitious independent shows like Post Human, books like our recent monograph on Keith Haring, or public projects like the art parade.

MAN: Funny you mention that. Earlier today I was picturing the art parade going down Grand Avenue.

JD: We're going to try to bring the art parade to LA! That's not the first priority, certainly, but that's something I'd like to do.

Anyway, now I'm looking at art to do something else. My orientation is to try to do amazing things with living artists, to do ambitious, thematic historical shows - that's always been my motivation and I've been training all my life to be able to work on this larger platform as director of a major public museum. The ethic remains the same.

Continued: Part two. Part three.

This is the second post of MAN's three-part Q&A with incoming MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch: The ethical questions created by his new position. Part one, in which Deitch and I discuss his move from commercial dealer to non-profit executive, is here. Part three, in which Deitch and I discuss some of his plans for MOCA's future, is here. [Image.]

MAN:  I'm sure you've had a chance to consider some of the ethical questions around your appointment. Appendix A of the Association of Art Museum Directors' 'Professional Practices in Art Museums' says that museum directors must exercise "extraordinary discretion" when it comes to their collections, to collecting art while they're directors, and so on. Will you make available a list of works of art and artists in your collection?

Jeffrey Deitch: Yes. We'll prepare it. There's nothing to hide at all. It will be something that I will prepare for the board of trustees of the museum. It is a question of exactly how it can be released. We'll make that decision with certain security reasons [in mind]. It may not be the best thing to just have this list circulating around, but there's nothing to hide.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that my collection is really one of my lifetime projects, so one of my goals was to acquire, if I could, a major work of art from every artist with whom I had an important professional relationship whether they were someone in an exhibition I did years ago, or someone who I work with in my gallery, or someone with whom I had a deep friendship. This collection is really a major thing in my life and I have never sold a major work in this prime collection.

There, of course, are many works I've sold, but not the collection works and that's what I hope to be able to continue to do, to keep it intact. The goal is not to make money with it, but to create something that's a special document about my relationships, my career and hopefully I'll be in a position to make a gift of it or do something or put it into a foundation.

I have zero intention to be selling works of art beyond things I might need to do connected with the expenses of getting out of leases and liquidating my business.

MAN: Will you make the list available just to the MOCA board then? Or will it be made available to the public?

JD: That hasn't been addressed, but there's no reason to restrict it. I have nothing to hide. You're the first person to bring it up, whether I would make it public. There's probably no reason not to.

At this stage I would prefer to keep discreet about it just because some people prefer to be low-key in their lives and don't want to flaunt things. Major pieces in my collection are sometimes lent anonymously because I don't want to draw attention to something valuable I might own.

MAN: I don't know if your gallery has had financial backers or not, but if so will you make their names public?

JD: My gallery has never had financial backers. I've never had a partner.

MAN: What will the relationship between your gallery artists and 'your' museum be? What mechanisms will be put in place to address the business relationships you've built with collectors and artists over the last 20 years?

JD: We've discussed that. So first, let me emphasize I'm ceasing all commercial activity as June 1. There will be zero commercial activities in art: No dealing, no art consulting, no art trading, no investing, nothing like that.

Then, when the question comes about artists with whom I've been involved and with artists in my collection and whether works of their s can be exhibited in the museum, that's a tough one. I've been in the field since 1974. I've had relationships, professional relationships personal relationships, bought the art of hundreds of artists and I'm very privileged that in in my career I've been able to work with most of the major international artists. Whether it's in public art projects in my gallery, in the John Weber Gallery I worked for in the 1970s, in buying major works of [artists] and placing them in important collections, I've worked with almost everybody. That's part of my strength, that set of relationships is part of what I bring to a museum. So it's very difficult to get into restrictions.

It's also possibly quite unfair to people. So let's say there's someone whose work is really essential to be in a certain thematic show, but that's someone who showed in my gallery five years ago. Can we say, 'No this artist can't be in the show?' I don't think so. So my answer to this is, we're going to be very mindful of potential perceived conflicts of interest and [we'll] be aware of that and behave appropriately. But it's very hard to restrict. I would hate to think that a very important artist who I might have worked with and who is having an important show at another museum and might be interesting for MOCA to take the show and restrict it, and then say, 'No this artist can't show in LA because Jeffrey Deitch did something with him at the gallery five years ago.' So we have to break some new ground here.

What I'm doing is unprecedented. Richard Flood went from director of Barbara Gladstone to the Walker and then to the New Museum. There have been other cases like this. We have to look at some of these situations from a very current perspective.

I really have to emphasize that I have been doing all this really out of a belief in the art, a passion for the field and I never went into the business side as a way to reap enormous financial rewards and put a lot in my pocket. The people who know me know that I live modestly. I live more modestly than a number of the artists I support. Making big money has never been my motivation. That's one of the reasons I'm coming here. That's not what I'm interested in.

MAN: Could you return to dealing after MOCA?

JD: My intention is -- I would hope -- I have a five year contract here. I would like to be here ten years, if I could, and at that point it would be time to concentrate on my writing. No, I do not intend to go back to art dealing. I've always intended this as a wonderful opportunity, to take on the museum. I always intended to wrap up the commercial side of the gallery to write about this period I've been so involved in.

Continued: Part three. Part one.

This is the third post of MAN's three-part Q&A with incoming MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch: Plans for the future. Part one, in which Deitch and I discuss his move from commercial dealer to non-profit executive, is here. Part two, in which Deitch and I discuss some of the ethical questions created by his new position, is here. [Image.]

MAN: I'm sure you have a list of things you want to do at MOCA, things you told the trustees you would prioritize. What are they and do you have any pledges of money to do them?

Jeffrey Deitch: Part of the deal is that the fundraising is on my shoulders. We can really do anything here if I can find the means to fund it. So the first priority is to build on the momentum of what's happened during the past year, the financial turnaround that has put the museum on a more solid financial footing. That's really the No. 1 priority. Right now the museum is on an austerity budget and we need to bring in some stability here. It can't happen without adding some exciting and inspirational programming right at the beginning, so we have to do both.

I've prepared a strategic plan outline for the board with lots of ideas, but that was before coming here and studying the situation. So right now that's what I need to do: Study the situation, talk to every member of the staff, spend a lot of time with key members of the staff. I've already spent a lot of time in conversations. I need to talk to current and former trustees and patrons and understand more about the history of the museum and then understand who the potential supporters are. There's a lot to do. But that is the job: to spearhead the fundraising and to do that simultaneously to supporting the curators and their programming and then developing some inspiring new programming.

MAN: Like maybe the art parade.

JD: We joke about that, but yes, that would be just a fun addition.

But you know, from my perspective I am very interested in this new, younger audience that is not a professional art-going audience, but that is very interested in art. MOCA has a great collection and these very rigorous, historical exhibitions, exhibitions that are very meaningful and that advance the field to people who are professionally involved in art. But in order to thrive, the museum needs to engage a larger local audience and that is part of my mandate. Hopefully we can create programming that's like Paul's famous 'Helter Skelter' show that at the same time is rigorous, serious and ground-breaking but is also mentally exciting and brings in a whole new public.

MAN: MOCA describes itself as the "defining museum of contemporary art." That's actually in its mission statement. It takes some chutzpah for one institution to say something like that, and I kind of admire that. Anyway, because of the prominence of today's art market - especially in New York  - is commercialism, by necessity, a part of what a museum that describes itself as "the defining museum of contemporary art" has to address?

JD: The museum is an economic entity. The museum needs  to attract an audience. It needs to attract funders. So it is in the public sector as a non-profit, but it is in the economic system. It needs to bring in revenue that exceeds its expenses, so yes it has to consider its relationship to commercial activities and in some cases participate in commercial activities.

A priority of mine is to make a new model of a museum gift shop which we might be able to take beyond Los Angeles, to try to find an interesting new revenue source like that. Maybe there are partnerships that one could do with say a website or a publication and that could be advertiser supported in part. A museum must look beyond the traditional means of support of relying on an august foundation or a wealthy family that's been around for a few generations to support the museum. You have to go way beyond that to find new sources of support.

MAN: MOCA has its two primary spaces in downtown Los Angeles. Is that where it should stay? Should it move to the Westside? Should it have a bigger presence in a building on the Westside somehow? Does MOCA need to or will it expand?

JD: There's a very strong consensus in the community around MOCA that MOCA is 100 percent committed to downtown. MOCA is a downtown Los Angeles institution.

There is an outpost at the Pacific Design Center that is fully funded by the owner of the PDC and that's something that the board is very excited about continuing. We need to find the appropriate programming for that. It may make sense to make that more film-oriented.

But yes, this is definitely a downtown institution. There is going to be no talk of moving to the Westside. That's not going to happen in this term.

In terms of expansion: There is some city-owned land adjacent to the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo that has some possibilities for expansion. It doesn't belong to the museum, it belongs to the city, but if the right plan or funding is there, there are options to expand the campus.

Of course, every museum has lots of ambitions and plans and there are plans to revamp Grand Avenue  to change the way one enters the museum. These are some exciting ideas. Right now the priority is to work on the financial stability and to develop programming. At the right time we'll introduce some new initiatives.

MAN: Have you told Eli Broad that it would be best for MOCA if the Broad Foundations built their proposed project and galleries downtown?

JD: Eli has some very good options. He will make his decision. I have told him I hope that he locates his foundation on Grand Avenue.

MAN: You mean the piece of land across from the Colburn School of Music? 

JD: That particular property, yes, that for me would be wonderful. I hope that that's the plan that makes the most sense for him, but I'll be supportive of whatever he decides.

MAN: All three 'continuing' directors at Los Angeles museums effectively come from contemporary art. Could that mean that there's more collaboration between you and your institutions than we might see in another city, somewhere where directors and museums all have divergent backgrounds and interests?

JD: Yes. I am very enthusiastic about that possibility. This is a wonderful situation. We are all friends. I've known Michael and Annie for a long time. Annie used to be my neighbor in SoHo when she was director of The Drawing Center. She knows I got so much inspiration from her programs at the Drawing Center and that's where I first learned about the work of Barry McGee. I've had a long dialogue with Michael too. He's one of the most impressive people in the field. I think it would be a dream for us to work together and do joint projects. I'm sure there will be someone exciting coming into the Getty that we can work with as well, and there are other art organizations in LA. I think that we can put a lot of this together and do some wonderful joint projects.

Continued: Part one. Part two.

I'm waiting to have an opinion on the MOCA hire until I learn more, until I talk to Jeffrey Deitch tomorrow. (Maybe I'm the old-fashioned digital journalist.) Until then, I want to quickly comment on a few things I've read today. In short: Deitch's hiring raises questions that Deitch will spend the next 24 hours addressing. Good. It's important to understand the issues raised by Deitch's appointment at MOCA and to discuss them -- but first let's understand what some of those issues are.

First, from Paddy Johnson:

"I'm not overly concerned with Jeffrey Deitch's predilection for tacky art as a qualification for the job. He's not being considered for a job as a curator, but rather, a business executive and fundraiser for the museum. On that level, I can't imagine anyone more qualified for the job. Jeffrey Deitch is known to be an extremely creative financial wizard; in 1979 he helped start an art advisory service for wealthy clients at Citibank and established the now common practice of allowing clients to leverage art loan collateral."

Deitch is not being hired to be a "business executive," he's being hired to be a non-profit executive. The difference between the for-profit/business world and the non-profit world and their attendant missions and responsibilities is why there's a discussion about whether it is appropriate to hire a businessman to be a non-profit/museum director.

Next, Johnson points out that Deitch has experience creating financial instruments. That is the opposite of what you want a non-profit administrator to do. Non-profit executive directors are supposed to be fiscally cautious and conservative. Remember: MOCA just emerged from a period of free spending, a period during which it spent from its endowment. Having a background in financial creativity doesn't make Deitch "more qualified" for the job, it ensures that he will face smart, tough questions about how he sees his new job at MOCA.

Next: Edward Winkleman is one of the most responsible writers on art and dealing I know, but here he flirts with Godwin's Law more closely than seems necessary. I've read no reputable writer argue that a dealer is "too soiled" to run a non-profit -- that's a strawman. But there are legitimate questions that Deitch will have to answer about how prepared he is to fulfill a non-profit mission and to be the public face of contemporary art to a community (as opposed to being a salesman in a room of wealthy collectors). That's not demonization, that's understanding there's a difference in job descriptions and responsibilities. My guess is that's one of the first things MOCA's trustees discussed with candidate Deitch.

Next: In a haven't-I-read-that-before piece on New York magazine's website, Jerry Saltz pulls out this cliche: "[B]ear in mind that MOCA desperately needs to think outside the box..." Actually, no it doesn't. It was thinking "outside the box" (namely: profligate spending) that got MOCA into trouble in the first place. MOCA needs to continue to do what it's done well for most of the last 30 years: collecting contemporary art and launching smart, historical, revisionist exhibitions and programs that define the period.

Saltz: "[Deitch is] a high-flying impresario who can meet with artists, handle pesky millionaires, raise money, and run a business." See above.

The whole key to whether or not the hire works out for MOCA is whether Deitch and the MOCA board understand what it means to run (and be a trustee of) a non-profit art museum. This whole 'run a museum-as-a-business' thing is, well, Krensian. That didn't work, did it?

Next: In the Los Angeles Times, Selma Holo, the director of USC's Fisher Museum of Art, an art history professor at USC and the director of the university's International Museum Institute:

"I think that the news out of MOCA is, frankly, stunning. Deitch has done amazing work as an extremely innovative art dealer. At the same time, we would be remiss not to ask ourselves how he and MOCA are planning to make the transition from the world of commerce and its values to another universe. One understands that these worlds blend, but there are still or should be some lines that are not crossed."

The "transition" about which Holo speaks is key.

The Los Angeles Times' Christopher Knight breaks the news via Twitter: "MOCA's board has unanimously voted to name Jeffrey Deitch the museum's fourth director. He will be introduced at a Tuesday press conference."

Speaking of tweets, here's what I tweeted (mere minutes before Knights news): "Am I old-fashioned for wanting to hear from Deitch -- if MOCA hires him -- before expressing an opinion?" (Finalizing details now: I'll have Deitch on MAN tomorrow afternoon EST for a MAN Q&A.)

In a Friday post about Byron Kim's Synecdoche (1991-present), I noted the work's intellectual roots in America's 1980s and 1990s debates about multiculturalism.

The United States wasn't the only country to have a national conversation about multiculturalism in those years and it wasn't just Kim who used tried-and-true art strategies to engage with that discourse: Great Britain had its own debate about multiculturalism and what it meant for the British. Like Kim in the US, British-born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare became engaged in the discussion in Great Britain. (For a quick rundown of multiculturalism in Britain, see this Kenan Malik essay.)

A career-length Shonibare survey is on view at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. Organized by Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and curator Rachel Kent, the exhibition includes Shonibare's Double Dutch (1994, above), an artwork strikingly related to Kim's Synecdoche, which is on view across the National Mall at the National Gallery of Art.

Double Dutch is a single-wall installation made up of emulsion and acrylic paint on 50 Dutch cotton canvases installed in a grid. (For a sense of the scale of the piece, click here.) The patterns on the individual canvases reference textile designs created in the Netherlands for the export market and then shipped to Africa and Indonesia, where they became known as African and Indonesian fabrics. Since at least 1994 Shonibare has used this kind of doubling-back of textile design and trade as a metaphor for economic colonialism.

Kim and Shonibare address related topics by using a similar art vocabulary: Abstract painting, minimalism, the grid and so on. Is there any particular reason that they should use the same language to address multiculturalism? I'm not sure, but I don't think so. Any young artist coming of age in the early 1990s -- Kim was born in 1961, Shonibare a year later -- grew up with the same recent art historical influences, and abstract expressionism and minimalism are the two most important art 'movements' of the post-war era. Artists have been exploring the push-me-pull-you between them at least since Robert Ryman.

But if there is something more than coincidence at work here, it's this: Both abex and minimalism were almost exclusively the territory of white men. (Sure, there are a couple second-generation outliers on the abex side, painters such as Sam Gilliam and Norman Lewis. Only one woman was engaged with early minimalism: Anne Truitt. And until recently she was barely included in the history of the movement.) By engaging both languages in works that address multiculturalism, Kim and Shonibare were able to bring some of their examinations of multiculturalism to the movements that influenced them.

Ultimately I'm not sure either work successfully engages the ideas and histories for which it aims. While the Kim might be a curator's darling, the Shonibare certainly is. Sans explanatory wall-text or a press release, its references are obscure and the work is unsolvable. It is art back-storied by something important rather than art that is itself important. It's the work of a young artist trying to figure out what he's going to make -- and to Shonibare's credit, he eventually figured out where to go. (Still, Shonibare's subsequent work tends to result in multi-disciplinary origami made from too-complicated back-stories. In that they resemble the most baroque Ann Hamiltons.)

• The LAT's Mike Boehm begins to ruminate on the whole MOCA-Jeffrey Deitch thing. Jerry Saltz, er, re-reports it in a New York magazine blog post and fails to credit the LAT. Saltz even called Deitch "high-flying," a peculiar descriptor that just happened to be... in the first paragraph of Boehm's LAT's piece. [via] Lovely. UPDATE: A reader sends in another, er, strikingly similar locution that debuted in the LAT and that Saltz later used. LAT: "American museum directors typically come from within the curatorial, academic or other nonprofit ranks." Saltz: "American museums usually pick directors from the curatorial or academic ranks..."
  
• At 11:06 EST last night, MOCA indefinitely postponed the press conference at which it was to name a new director.
  
• Meanwhile, a busy Boehm also says that across town, Santa Monica and Eli Broad are playing footsie.
• The Buffalo News' Colin Dabkowski runs down some of the Albright-Knox's recent acquisitions. 
• Amusement of the day: In the San Francisco Chronicle, one Tamara Straus borrows from MAN for a short feature on pioneering SFMOMA director Grace McCann Morley -- and then bungles the attribution. When did lifting reader e-mail from MAN become 'reporting?'
  
• Kenneth Baker gives some historical background on SFMOMA.
• In the St. Louis Beacon, Bob Duffy takes a second look at St. Louis' still-new (and still fantastic) downtown sculpture garden.
• Check out the new live chatting feature to the right. Enjoy!