July 2004 Archives

I'm on travel today, but don't miss this news from the Whitney, and this Steve Mumford Baghdad Journal from Artnet.

Charlie Finch goes serious to discuss presidents and art. But why should American presidents factor in art (that is either made or shown)? And when an individual and his/her inner circle is so much a part of our daily visual experience, do we even want to see art featuring that person? And would we really see it if we saw it?

Whose Muse?, a collection of essays by Museum Directors You Know, is my current light summer read. (OK, OK, I read Aaron Elkins, P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers too.) I'm only about halfway through it (so don't expect a thoughtful review in this post), but I can already tell that this is a book that anyone who cares about the role of arts institutions must read. I haven't gotten to the Glenn Lowry essay yet. I wonder if I have to pay $20 to read it...

(Lowry promises a deontological approach to something. That sounds expensive or painful or both. At the very least, I hope Lowry tells us how it's deontological to charge $20 a pop to allow his institution to compete for your "leisure" dollar. And remember, that's his word, not mine.)

Update: I'm hearing that the LAT is changing some things on the fly and that the system may not be fully accessible. Will follow up.

If you love reading about art, today is a pretty cool day. The Los Angeles Times is back. No more silly pay-for-view to read stories about the visual arts (or any other art forms). I'd like to think the constant whining of blogs like this one and abLA had some impact, but I know that what really did it was the recent mass defection of LAT cultural staff (including architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff) to the NYT.

Therefore, it is great fun to link to this story, MAN's first link to an LAT story in forever. (You'll still have to register for lat.com -- it takes about two minutes.) You may remember that MAN is not a fan of the unnecessary OldenBruggen that has been proposed for the front area of LA's Disney Hall. Neither is Christopher Knight:

The sculpture is being fabricated now, and it won't be installed until next summer. But based on a digitally fabricated picture of the sculpture on-site, it works like the giant Carpeteria genie or Michelin Man outside a rug shop or tire store — sculpture that functions as a sign. In less than a year, Disney Hall has become perhaps the most famous building in Los Angeles, which means one of the most famous in the nation. You wouldn't think it needs a sign.

(Side note: "OldenBruggen," which I've been using on MAN for a few weeks now, is not my invention, it was Knight's.)

http://www.cinquehicks.com/blog/2004/07/random-thoughts-on-center-of-world.html

If you haven't clicked over to AJ's Classical Conversation blog -- a discussion about classical music issues with a dozen or so prominent critics -- you really should. I'm a complete cretin when it comes to classical music so I'm enjoying learning new stuff, but just as interesting is that much of what is being discussed over there is relevant in the visual arts too.

This really could be a weekly feature... But from this mention (not a review -- reviews are longer than a mere 147 words) of a show: "With seventeen contributing artists, mostly emerging or not recently shown in New York..."

Because we all know that if it doesn't happen in New York, it doesn't happen -- or that it's irrelevant. (Of course, that's a perfectly valid phrase for a NYC-only publication. But ArtForum is a national/international publication, right? Right?)

Before we swing around the blogosphere, here's an update on a situation at the Hirshhorn: A while back MAN complained about a Sally Mann installation... and shortly thereafter the Mann disappeared. Huzzah!

Well, last week I complained about the hideous tape the H of H put around an Anne Truitt... and shortly thereafter the tape disappeared. Unfortunately, it has been replaced by tape-text on all four sides of the sculpture that says something like, "Do not touch." (Ever see that sign around a painting?) The new tape sounds awful. Solution: Put a guard (well, maybe not -- the Hirshhorn's guards are on the shortlist for most inept museum guards in America) or a volunteer in the room, for chrissakes.

• Todd Gibson on the recent emphasis on the 'market' part of art market;
• The conversation will be bloggerized: AJ will be hosting a 10-day, blogged discussion of classical music criticism. I don't know my Mozart from my Chopin, but it sounds pretty fascinating anyway. For more, check out the top post on the main AJ page;
• A Daily Dose (which you really should read daily) says that Frank Gehry will be on the next season of The Simpsons (now if only ADD could fix its linking problems -- you may have to scroll down to get to this post);
• Joseph Clarke of That Brutal Joint is about to do an architecture tour of France and Italy. Expect regular posts;
• Beverly Tang and I both enjoyed this Claudia Bucher installation at LA's MFA show, Supersonic;
• This has nothing to do with the blogosphere, but I believe that the LAT goes back to the registration model for its arts coverage (and dumps the PPV model) on Tuesday. So wait until tomorrow to read Nicolai Ouroussoff's profile of huge-in-LA starchitect Thom Mayne.
• Not a blog, but this AJ-provided link deserves a huzzah!;
• Tomorrow on MAN: Thoughts on Richard Serra's anti-Bush art.

The first room of the Museum of Contemporary Art's minimalism show, A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968, is the best room I've seen in a year and a half. It is the entrance to the show and gives us everything that is best about minimalism. It is tactile but distant, it attracts me but scares me, its simplicity stuns.

As I walk into this room, a large Carl Andre covers much of the central floor, and three more Andres stand nearby. Shall I walk across this one? Or will an unknowing guard or museum-goer tut-tut me and make a scene? Three large early Frank Stella paintings hang around the Andres. If I can walk on the Andre, can I touch the lines in the Stella, can I feel the wooden stretchers under the canvas?

The minimal, repeated straight lines in the Stellas echo the minimal, repeated straight lines in the Andres – or is it the other way around? The colors, well, there aren’t really colors here… just surfaces that have so much character and so much visual depth that I remember color when only texture exists. Museum-goers will be talking about this room for years.

But then the show retreats into disappointment, raising more questions about the choices made by curator Ann Goldstein than it provides great work.

To borrow a distinction from the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, Goldstein chose to build a museum show, rather than a gallery show. As such, A Minimal Future? is a lead-you-by-the-nose march through art history. I wish that Goldstein had created a gallery show, a show where the greatest minimal art was shown on its own, to be appreciated as great work, not as a link in a chain.

A Minimal Future? is an examination of art that happens to be minimal and that was made between 1958 and 1968. A walk through the show isn't so much a stroll down a timeline, as it is a stroll through museum rooms (and hallways) dedicated to each of 40 artists. This means that Larry Bell and Donald Judd receive equal time. Robert Huot is spatially equal to Agnes Martin. Alas.

In A Minimal Future? minimalism is no more than another -ism, an -ism that needed to be chronicled, has been, and now that's that. With the exception of that first room, the show completely misses what makes minimalist art greater today than it was when it was made – and isn't that the ultimate test of art? Minimalism is to American art what icons were to Catholic churches. You can see both minimalist art and icons with a cursory glance and know what the object is. In each work, you are not seeing the supernatural but you feel affected by something extra-natural. If you take the time to study a great individual minimalist work or a great icon, you will find the subtle majesty within it.

I think that the link between religious art and minimalism is especially apt. For many years now museums have been where secular America goes to church. In an era where most mainstream entertainment is designed to be as baroquely overblown as possible (what else could possibly explain The Rock?), museums provide rich visual quiet. Minimalism is the art that best typifies what art museums are now. It is quiet. It is sublime. It rewards careful attention and a meditative gaze. It is quiet.

Goldstein's show is not a quiet show. It drives me out of the work and into the questions that fill my mind. I understand that minimalism's first decade was from 1958-68. But why did Goldstein establish an artificial 10-year benchmark and why she chose the '58-'68 period in particular? So many of the artists in this show, from Donald Judd to Anne Truitt to Robert Ryman, made their best work after 1968.

Why 40 artists, and why so many examples of fourth-tier artists who barely matter in the minimalism's history? (See Chicago, Judy or Novros, David. If we needed a show that revealed minimalism's bench as unworthy of future examination, we got it.) Why is there a Claes Oldenburg in the show and why does it share a room with Judd?

Goldstein seemed so eager to include so much art by so many artists that her installation suffers. Why can't I walk all the way around Hans Haacke's Blue Sail the way the artist intended (and the way James Cohan Gallery thoughtfully installed it in a group show about a year ago)? Why are there four Dan Flavins packed into one gallery, making it difficult to see any one of them? Why is there a Dan Graham slideshow in the exhibit, and why is it projected across a busy hallway? Too much of this show is shoehorned into barely available space.

Despite the problems, there is some great work in this show. In addition to the first room, work by Brice Marden, Anne Truitt, Agnes Martin and Dorothea Rockburne looks fantastic. Most surprisingly, I never expected to be so absorbed by Michael Asher, but here he looks ready for a significant examination.

This is not the minimalism show that I hoped it would be. The early years of minimalism have now had their academic survey. I'm ready for the rest and best of the story.

 

Memo to art writers: Don't use the verb 'cohere'.

Memo to headline writers: Don't use this headline, ever.

Greetings from Detroit. A few notes from around the art world:

This will get your morning started. From Reuters: "The German expressionist painter Joerg Immendorff confessed at the start of his trial on Tuesday to having taken cocaine in a hotel room where he was found with nine prostitutes last year."

There is so much fascinating news up on Artnet right now that I don't know where to start. Maybe with the exhibition schedule for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, maybe with Barnes news, maybe with Walter Robinson's NYC roundup...

No, really. I'm serious about you clicking on that Immendorff link up there. Maybe I need to tease it with another quote: "[Immendorff] had ordered 11 prostitutes, but two arrived after police had raided the suite."

I'm not sure why my pals in LA have yet to complain about this sentence from Peter Schjeldahl's lackluster review of the Ed Ruscha shows at the Whitney: "For much of his forty-year career, he has been patronized as a Los Angeles—that is, a marginal—artist." LA = marginal? My views on the energy of LA right now are no secret, so I won't bang the drum again. Then again maybe it wouldn't hurt: Only one artist out of about 40 in the upcoming Carnegie International is from LA. Only five out of about 55 at SITE Santa Fe's biennial are Angelenos. The common factor between these two shows is that both are curated by at least semi-NYC'ers: Laura Hoptman was at MoMA before curating the Carnegie, and Rob Storr was at MoMA, is now at NYU, and put together the SITE Santa Fe show. Curators need to discover Jet Blue. Or just lose the dated notion that NYC is still the center of the art world.

Did I mention that the black tape around the Anne Truitt that's up now at the Hirshhorn is just atrocious and embarassing?

Ignore some of the silly cliches in this NYT story, and this is a must-read for artists. It's about David Ross' Artist Pension Trust, a retirement plan of sorts for artists. MAN will have more on this next month, after my travel schedule cools a bit...

Last weekend I subjected myself to the ICA Philly's Big Nothing show. It is a leading contender for the worst show I've seen all year. It is the art exhibit for people who prefer reading about art or theorizing about art to actually looking at it.

It is a show full of art that appeals to the October subscriber base and anyone else who values an idea more than the execution of that idea into a work of art. The Big Nothing attempts to demonstrate that art need not be visually engaging, that it need not be looked at, that all you have to do is think about it and somehow that in itself will be fulfilling. This is an exhibit that should have been a book.

No art exhibit I have seen in years has so thoroughly rejected the idea that art can be or should be beautiful. Well, you can't look at an idea. And art is supposed to be looked at, not just thought about. So I was pretty damn sure that whatever art I saw this weekend was going to be more interesting than what I saw last weekend. And it was.

There are new permanent collection installations at both the National Gallery and the Horn of Hirsh. New at the National Gallery: a 1971 Sol Lewitt wall drawing, a (lousy) early Brice Marden three-canvas painting, a wicked-good Agnes Martin, a 'blackboard' Cy Twombly, a latex-filmy Eva Hesse, and a good-but-not-great, just-purchased, canvas-and-steel, black-hole Lee Bontecou. The Martin is great, but somehow nothing else struck me as a best-level example of that particular artist. The Bontecou speaks to a fault in the NGA's contemporary art collecting strategy: by the time the NGA decides that a contemporary artist is worth owning, the best of the best of that artist has all been snatched up. Institutional competition for contemporary art is more intense than it has ever been. The NGA is a conservative, puttering institution when it comes to collecting contemporary work, and, as a result, will have to rely on a favored fatcat or two someday to get great work made from about 1980 forward.

And there are a lot of new rooms up at the Hirshhorn and I'll talk about them (and one shockingly bad installation) in a post later today. And later this week, day-job willing, I'll have a longer post on museums and permanent collection installations, especially the Hirshhorn's.

Related: Philly Inky critic Edward Sozanski on The Big Nothing; Brian Sholis on The Big Nothing; Michael Kimmelman on The Big Nothing; and a previous installation mistake at the Hirshhorn. Unrelated: The huge number of links into MAN's chat with Jerry Saltz. Just wanted to say thanks.

The Hirshhorn has finally opened some newly re-installed permanent collection galleries. Some are good, some are dull, most are uneven... kind of a microcosm of the Hirshhorn's permanent collection.

A couple of highlights (from the new stuff):

• The basement atrium (for lack of a better phrase) features a Brice Marden Cold Mountain painting, plus work from Christopher Wool, Gerhard Richter, Jonathan Lasker, Cecily Brown and Willem de Kooning. The Lasker is atrocious (a redundancy if ever there was one) and Wool doesn't thrill me, but it's a hanging that looks much better than anything should in that space.
• A new room of Joan Mitchell paintings is especially strong. (There's a lot of early Guston and Hans Hofmann in these paintings.) Take out Weeds (1976) and this might be the best room in the building.
• Henry Moore's Falling Warrior is an important work to see right now.
• The glass-covered Sally Mann about which I complained is gone (buzz is that the artist didn't like the glass either), replaced by a Gursky (the sod rollers) from his recent Matthew Marks show.

On the negative side (again, from the new stuff):

• Whoever mandated that black tape be put on the floor around Anne Truitt's Night Naiad should be sentenced to spending 40 days and 40 nights trapped between the H's breasty Sam Taylor Wood and the H's breasty John Currin. (This room, right off of the Hirshhorn's window room, presents the argument for ugliness in breasts.) That black tape interferes with the sculpture in a most horrible way. Credit the Hirshhorn for installing it right on the floor (last time it was out it was on a riser), but the tape is an insult to the work.

(That said, I understand that the Hirshhorn's curators find the security staff to be useless. On Saturday I watched a child handle, touch and pull on a Sol Lewitt sculpture while a guard that stood fifteen feet away, looked the other way, and said nothing. (The guard continued to do nothing or pay attention to the child even after I yelled at the child.) Earlier in the day, I saw a child try to pull paint off of a Joan Mitchell painting. Not a guard in sight. So either fix the (obvious) security problem or put the Truitt back in storage until it's fixed.)

Lots of links still coming in for our Jerry Saltz chat (thanks!). Here's part one and here's part two.

Some notes from the blogosphere...

• Greg Allen likes Donald Moffett's DC 'paintings;'
• Terry Teachout's blog turns one, so happy birthday!;
• So Stanley Crouch saw literary critic Dale Peck and decided that a beatdown was the appropriate greeting. That and a few slurs. What a jerk. Terry agrees;
• DC-based Thinking About Art writes about Alison Owen, whose work I recently enjoyed at Bank in LA;
• Joy Garnett gives us another reason to be opposed to Clear Channel's emerging role in the arts. Recently LATer Christopher Knight lit into Clear Channel Exhibitions and their vapid shows, and I ripped Clear Channel and their bedmate, the Smithsonian, some time ago (scroll down to June 12). Clear Channel's role in culture is a major story that is substantially undercovered;
• Anish Kapoor's new public work in Chicago, with photos, from Daily Dose.

These are two parts of the same issue:

A MoMA friend has decided that MoMA doesn't need curators, it just needs him. And the institution seems to agree.

In the Post, Blake Gopnik's first six paragraphs spotlight an emerging issue (ajreader; access) -- museums that use marketers instead of curators.

Shared theme: Curators, useless. Collectors + marketers = museum.

This is the second part of MAN's two-day chat with Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz. A collection of Saltz' VV writings, Seeing Out Loud, was recently released by The Figures press. (Day one of our chat is here.) Amazon and Printed Matter have both sold out of the book, but a reader emailed in to tell us that Dia seems to have some copies available.

Art critics are, by and large, one-city creatures right now. Meanwhile, curators and collectors are multi-city observers.  New York critics mostly stay in NYC, LA critics mostly stay in LA, etc. With a variety of centers being so important now, does one-cityism play a role in keeping critics from being as much a part of the conversation as collectors and curators?

First of all, the Voice doesn't pick up my quarter to go to Brooklyn, so I'm on my own travel-wise. As someone with a weekly deadline I only have a few days to see a show and go write about it. Travel for me is necessarily limited. And I feel limited by that. I'm jealous of all the people who spend their own money or have other people spend their money to send them around. I wish I could see all those shows and lounge around in those hotel lobbies. [Earlier in our chat Saltz had summed up a newspaper critic's job really well and I want to toss it in here: 'That's what weekly art criticism is, it's hit-and-run. It's meatball criticism. You're in, you're out. It's all gut and mind and reaction and fire and depression.']

Still, I'm really lucky – New York City isn't the center of the art world any more but it is the trading floor. Almost no career happens without happening in New York. If I stay in my trench, sooner or later I'll get a shot at everything. [For example] I didn’t get to see Manifesta in Spain this summer, but eventually I hope to get to see a lot of the artists who pop up there this summer. It's the critics job to, as Bruce Nauman said, pay attention.

The one thing you don't want to be, in my eye, is a local critic who is merely a booster, someone just writing on the artists from your zip code or gender or sexuality or political base. This is very bad. Another lucky thing about New York is our bigness. However, it's also its great disadvantage.

In London, say, everybody is sleeping together, eating together, arguing with one another… If a new artist appears, everybody in the whole termite nation is aware of that on the same night more ore less. New York is so huge that … there are lots of different parties going on at the same time. We don’t really know about one another that much. There are many parallel art worlds in New York. I think that's pretty exciting as long as you make it your own business to get out of your own party as much possible. 
 
Saltz and I talked ‘round-and-‘round a  bit about rampant positivism among critics, how some critics tend to write all-positive, all the time. I had no particular question, we just talked back-and-forth:

I think we need more critics who are willing to write about what they like and what they don't like… I think there needs to be more of that across the board. This is a serious problem. If all criticism is enthusiastic it sells the art world short. I call it "Happy Criticism."

[Negative or mixed criticism] doesn’t happen enough. Which is strange. When you're out there in the art world and talking to people you hear a lot of negative things. But then, the magazines are filled with all this merely descriptive stuff or happy reviews. Newspapers are better than magazines. Magazines need to change.

People often ask me, 'Why do you write about things that you don’t like?' And it breaks my heart. You would never say that to a sportswriter or a restaurant critic or a film reviewer or a book reviewer. But in the art world, for some reason, people get down on or even demonize you for saying something is faulty. It's a very Bush-Cheney time. I think writing what you really think is a way of showing art respect. 

I know it hurts to be criticized. When people say things about me I think "How could you not like that, how could you disagree with me?" On top of that, sometimes people will say no one wants to read reviews where a critic is saying [here Saltz speaks in a little bit of a sing-songy voice], 'This one is good and this one is bad.' I agree; You have to set up context. You want a kind of rigor. You want the ability to say why this one may not be as good as that. Also, I really don’t like reviews where you don’t know what the critic is thinking until the last paragraph and then there’s one adjective that makes you think, 'Oh, maybe the critic doesn’t like this … possibly.' As a writer you have to put yourself at risk just like the artist.

Read (at least) the first six paragraphs here to understand the context of our discussion about critics and having positions:

I've been thinking about Barbara Kruger again lately and trying to think what is my criteria. I guess I've thought about how I'm looking for vision or the visionary. However, I think that everyone has a vision.

The army has an expression that ideas are like assholes, everyone has one. So I guess the second part of my criteria is, Is this vision rendered in an original way? 

Beyond that I guess I’m looking for energy, but a very particular energy, one that puts off more than it consumes… a very mythic or mystic kind of energy. Look at a Pollock drip painting and it clearly is doing that. It is still putting off gobs of power. You can see that when people look at it and how they recoil from it or don’t like it or how they are in awe of a bunch of drips on canvas.

If you read MAN, you certainly know that Jerry Saltz is the art critic of the Village Voice. A collection of his VV reviews and essays, Seeing Out Loud, was recently published and even if you read Saltz every week you should own it. (It should be in your library next to Peter Schjeldahl's collections and Christopher Knight's collection.) Re-reading a collection, like Saltz', is like experiencing years of art at once. You'll think new thoughts, remember things you forgot, and, best of all, you'll have some of your previous thoughts challenged. Last week I asked Saltz if he'd be willing to chat about a range of things and he was kind enough to agree. Today and tomorrow MAN will feature our chat.

How did the book, Seeing Out Loud, happen?

Geoff Young, an excellent poet in Great Barrington (Mass.) runs a terrific small press called "The Figures." He has published a lot of poetry as well as two volumes of Peter Schjeldahl’s collected writings. Young approached me and asked me, "Would I?" and I said, "Yes I will." Needless to say, I got no money. This is a labor of love and I did it because he asked me and I’m thrilled that he did. The first edition has sold out and we’re doing a second. Now, of course, I’m trying to finagle a volume two, a "Seeing Out Louder." (Order it here.)

Do you have a favorite piece in the book? (Saltz' collection is made up of 122 reviews and essays.)

Oh wow. I have a lot of different favorites. I'm as craven as anyone who makes things. There are days when I think I'm a God of art criticism: All of them are great. Then there are days when I think they all fall short. 

But since you ask, I have a soft spot for the first piece I ever wrote for the Voice -- "Making the Cut," on Kara Walker. I remember being terrified I'd be fired. After that it took me about a year to get my bearings. I'm still happy with the pieces on the problem with photographic painting ("The Richter Resolution"), the one about how all art can be divided into either a "drunk" or "stoned" sensibility ("Blotto Meet Buzzed"), and "Reaction Shot," my response to the over-the-top critical adulation of John Currin. I'm proud of the Norman Rockwell, Nan Goldin, and Jorge Pardo columns, as well as the pieces on museums, on the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, and more recently the Whitney. I'm also partial to the Babylon pieces. I think there are five of them in the book. Each September I've tried to write a where-are-we-now column. Each has the word 'Babylon' in the title. I would love people to read the Babylon pieces back-to-back-to-back-to-back. [Here's 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003.] I write them in July and August. I'm working on one now, although now is such a murky moment that I don't know that I will do one. There are also columns I'd like to tinker with, columns where I wasn't clear enough, or too easy on something, and one or two where I might have been too hard.

How did the little Frieze book, An Ideal Syllabus, happen and do you still get much feedback on it?

I was – and still am - sick of critics quoting from the same seven writers to support their ideas. If I read one more review that begins with a quote from Barthes or Baudrillard I’m going to slit my wrists. But, I'm a slow reader. I didn't know who else I should read, so I asked about 50 artists and curators and critics who they thought a young artist should read now. Frieze Magazine published it. [Scroll down about halfway.] I'd love to update it (if anyone would publish it) and ask a whole new group of artists and whatnot what they're reading now. We're in a very different phase now, a post-9/11 time, compounded with a pre-November 2nd nano-second where everyone is holding their breath.

One word that pops up in a lot of your reviews/essays is 'spectacle.' It's in your writings about Lari Pittman, Andreas Gursky, Cecily Brown, Sarah Morris and others. Could you define spectacle and do you see it as a good thing or a bad thing?

First of all, I think spectacle is like pornography: I may not be able to define it but I know it when I see it. I would never say it's a bad thing but nor is it necessarily a good thing. I do know it was sure popular in the late 1990s. Artists made spectacles of themselves. (I wish someone would collect all the images of artists in fashion magazines and whatnot and run them together in a little cautionary booklet.) Spectacle art was in every festival and nearly every gallery. Someone like Gursky is the great pre-9/11 artist. He showed us what we looked like from that God's-eye view. We saw our border-to-border, edge-to-edge hum. Gursky gave us this image of things happening to everybody, everywhere, all at the same time. He showed us the context of no context.

After 9/11 it's very different. 

Now that vision feels very different doesn't it? At this point I'm afraid Gursky is just going from place to place, taking spectacular images of things that look like Gurskys. Now, however, we can no longer stand outside history because history is something we all experienced. History is a lived and felt thing, not something to be risen above or corrected (as it was during the 1980s and 1990s). Gursky – who could use a little more Salgado, not that I'm a Salgado fan – was a great pre-9/11 artist and he will be great again possibly. [The recent show at Matthew Marks] certainly was not. All the pictures were just big. I did like the weird scale and the hyped-up color of the one of the sod being laid. Other than that, he’s on automatic pilot.

DC's silly craft project, the party pandas, inspires some folks to blithering incoherence. Which is about right.

I had planned to discuss museum permanent collections today, but Michael Kimmelman's Sunday essay so floored me that it's gotta come first.

After reading the piece ask yourself a supremely simple question: How is this moment in NYC any different than any other moment in the last five years? The last 10 years? The issues Kimmelman raises could have been said about any of those museums any time in the last decade, give or take a couple years.

Basically Kimmelman pulled together bunch of interesting and important items -- most of them, I think, discussed here and lots of other places at great length -- and declares a "crisis," a "precarious moment," and finds that NYC's museums seem to be lacking responsibility. It is a lazy way to build an essay.

So let's say that Kimmelman wants to build an essay around issues at the Met, the Whitney, the Gugg or MoMA. There's an essay to be written around issues at each of those institutions and Kimmelman's points about each are good. But to lump them all together lets each institution off the hook and glazes over serious issues. It puts Kimmelman on record as concerned about those institutions without having to really call out each institution on specifics.

And let's say that Kimmelman wants to build an essay about laxity in museum management. Fair topic. There's plenty to be said there if... you include the West-of-Hudson world in your thinking. Museum ethics? Think MFA Boston, the Phillips, and several other institutions. Gate-turning blockbusters? Think MFA Boston, the Smithsonian. Corporate influences in museum programming? Think Clear Channel Exhibitions and the museums that have picked up their shows. Think Altria.

(This last bit is part of a broader problem with the NYT's visual arts coverage. The NYT is a national paper. It covers national issues in politics, policy, business... in most areas except the visual arts. Sure, on occasion the Times gets outside NYC, including to Los Angeles for the recent minimalism shows, but not too often. Now, more than ever, there is one art world. Why, for Michael Kimmelman and the NYT does the world so often end at the Hudson?)

A writer punches out a novelist. Cool! Art world rumbles we'd like to see:

 

MAN readers are not happy about MoMA's upcoming $20/head admissions policy. My day job has kept me from posting some reader responses (following up on this post), so finally here are a few...

• Laura Burkhalter (assistant curator, Des Moines Art Center): In Des Moines, $20 will pay for just about any kind of entertainment the city offers. [MAN: Remember, Glenn Lowry said that the $20 charge was okey-dokey because MoMA is now priced the same as other, ahem, entertainment.] Specifically: two movie tickets (with popcorn), three martinis at any of the ritzier bars, entry into any live music venue, or lunch for two just about anywhere. Anyone who wants to see the Art Center's world-class collection can do so for free.
• Autumn Seguin (who lives in Ulster County, just north of NYC): In one day, with the help of a car, $20 will buy me: One crossing for the Mid-Hudson Bridge for $1; a visit to the Vassar College Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center, which is free; a foreign or indie film at a second run matinee at South Hills Mall for $2.50; a visit to Dia:Beacon for $10 (or free if you're a member); and a 15-pack of Stroh's cans $5. [MAN: Hey Glenn! Don't forget, MoMA goers like Stroh's, not just the top ten wines in Wine Spectator's rankings!]
• Sean Bonner (co-owner of LA's Sixspace): Two words: lap dance.
• Over at Thickeye, Benjamin Godsill included his breakdown in a post.

A number of museums maintain a space for small installations or exhibits of up-to-the-minute art. Some museums move the installations around: the Hirshhorn's last three Directions shows have, variably, been in galleries and in the museum’s lobby. As I recall, MoMA's Projects series most often featured an installation downstairs in the old building on West 53rd Street.

The UCLA Hammer Museum features more contemporary mini-exhibits than any other museum I can think of. It uses three spaces: One is the lobby of the office building the museum inhabits, one is a room off of that lobby, and one is a vaulted gallery on the main museum floor. None of the spaces are terribly art or artist-friendly. If I was an artist and I was invited to exhibit in the Hammer’s lobby space, I'd be wary, very wary. I can imagine the museum’s pitch to artists: "Yes, we’d like you to exhibit in our lobby. Just one thing… there's gonna a big ol' staircase in the middle of your exhibit, plus a security desk or two, a cloakroom, a table on which we hand out materials and a bedeviling mix of artificial light and filtered L.A. sunshine. How about it?"

I'm not sure if it's a credit to the artists themselves or the Hammer’s selection of artists that installations in that lobby so often look good. The best two of the several Hammer Projects shows I've seen in my last two trips to LA have been the Pae White installation in the Hammer's lobby and the Tara Donovan installation in the Hammer's vault gallery.

White's installations of paper and thread, hung from the ceiling down to various levels of the lobby (the top of the stairs, a landing on the stairs, and all the way down to the lobby's floor), have a delicateness that is seemingly inappropriate to the space. That is precisely why White's installation is so successful. Instead of competing with the lobby (as did Markus Linnenbrink in a recent installation), she counterpunches, creating ephemera that seem to exist separate from the space around them.

White's installation provides a blissy counterpoint to a show that recently closed at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary space in Little Tokyo, Sitings: Installation Art 1969-2002. The premise of MOCA's show was direct: we have all this installation art in storage and now seems as good a time as any to put it on view. (The show was only a success if you’re especially attracted to wallowing in 10 or 15 of the ugliest pieces of art on the planet.) Most of the artists in the Sitings show used all the objects and effects that they could muster to assert their installations. White does exactly the opposite – she uses as little as is necessary and has faith in what she's made. In White's world  installation art can be light, airy, transcendent and quiet. I like White's approach.

In the Hammer's vault gallery is a similarly straightforward Tara Donovan installation called Lure, an accumulation of blobs of monofilament. The end result looks like a bed of sea anemones on the gallery floor. The opaque, milky clumps of fishing line mostly absorb light, but occasionally throw off a pale blue color which adds to the feeling of walking on the bottom of the ocean.

Donovan is a Wal-Martist, one of an unaffiliated bunch of artists who build common everyday materials into visually rich accumulations. Along with Dan Steinhilber and Rosana Castrillo-Diaz, Donovan is one of my favorites. Like Steinhilber and, less to my liking, Tony Feher, Donovan presents objects as minimally as possible, in a way that places the presence of the artist deep in the background. Lure is not Donovan's finest installation. Her best pieces, such as Toothpicks, inspire a sense of wonder at what can be done with familiar objects. While the exhibition essay (written by former Corcoran curator Paul Brewer) tells us that Donovan has accumulated millions of strands of monofilament, there is little visual awe here.

Steve Mumford's latest is up. Don't miss it.

Dear Chicago,

We hear you've built a Gehry. Want an OldenBruggen?

Sincerely yours, Los Angeles

In an attempt to try something that will fail spectacularly, I thought I'd assign homework for a post I'll be doing next week. SF MOMA has just re-installed its permanent collection. SF Chronicle Feature Writer Kenneth Baker (Oh wait... his byline says he's their "art critic." Funny, he sure seems to write a lot of features and he sure seems not to write a lot of criticism.) looks at SF MOMA's re-hanging. So does Anna L. Conti. And last year I wrote about the Hirshhorn's permanent collection project, Gyroscope.

(Mind you, I wrote about the Horn of Hirsh and Gyroscope a year ago. I'll be updating my thoughts here soon.)

Also coming next week: A chat with VVer Jerry Saltz, mostly about his recently published collection, Seeing Out Loud. (Which you should buy now.)

Congratulations to my blogmate Terry Teachout!

I don't plug Terry Teachout as much as I should because I assume that a very high percentage of MAN readers click over to About Last Night. But this is an excellent post, one that you should not miss. It goes not just for theater, but for the visual arts. See Serra, Richard (below).

Regarding today's NYT auction story: Why does the Times put an auction in London in the arts section and auctions in New York in the metro section? Why are auction previews in the arts section (and in Carol Vogel's notebook in the arts section), but the actual auction stories are in metro? (IMHO, auctions are business stories, not art stories.) Are you listening Jon Landman?

ArtNews' annual top 100 collectors list is one of the silliest magazine issues ever conceived. For proof, I give you a quote that is sending Larry Gagosian and Mary Boone scurrying to send their collectors art-buying Cialis:

But another Top Ten source said, via cell phone from a European airport, that the passion to acquire art "lasts much longer than eight to ten years or up to the age of 55. It can easily go to 70."

(Aside from being funny on its face, I felt a certain kinship with the quotee. Whenever I say stupid, inane things, I also claim to be on a cell phone at a European airport because it makes me sound so much more continental.)

VVer Jerry Saltz has a fun take on the annoyingly ubiquitous Andrea Fraser. But I disagree with him about this point:

However, whether you like it or not, Fraser should be commended for doing something brave, and in the middle of a mind field. Outside the art world she will be labeled a slut and a nut. The art world will likely call her a narcissistic showoff. But the art world is a place that says that you should be free. But ask Jeff Koons if the art world is free. He acted free with his ex-wife in the early 1990s and it all but got him kicked out of the art world. He was excluded from the 1992 Documenta and hasn’t been in a Whitney Biennial since. Apparently, the art world patrols its borders as diligently and as insidiously as those it says it hates. Fraser’s Untitled is no big deal (although no doubt certain types will make much of it in theory classes). Even so, she doesn’t deserve the patronizing bitch-slapping she’s getting in some quarters.

Uh, well, no. I'd argue that Koons has been shunned becuase his work is boring, tired and schlocky. It's not any good. It has little to do with his porn star ex-wife. (Saltz is a Koons fan and has argued for his re-inclusion in mega-shows before, so his Koons endorsement isn't a big surprise.)

Richard Serra really doesn't like George W. Bush. An alert reader points me to Serra's efforts to re-defeat the pResident at pleasevote.com. The post-Goya image is on the back cover of the current Nation, and the other image (the one at left) will be on the back cover of an upcoming issue.

The right-wing, largely non-plussed by Abu Ghraib and a war sold to the American people and the world with a pack of lies, is fightin' mad about art (which, in this example, has not resulted in 871 American deaths in Iraq). What's in Scott's Head discusses, as does Archy, Petrelis Files, Blogumentary and more. Finally, keep an eye on NewsGrist, where Joy Garnett frequently weighs in on the intersection of art and politics. (Send in other links; I'll post the good ones.)

Check it out: There's a new Five to See over on the right. And it includes no dining options, not even the really good Ben & Jerry's I had in Westwood. That's right. Ice cream. What do you think I am... Canadian?

After being on travel for much of the last couple of weeks, I'm home for most of this week. Hopefully I'll get caught up on a few things, including sharing more about traveling to Los Angeles, the new $20 MoMA, and more. But I wanted to start by picking up where Christopher Knight and Blake Gopnik started on Sunday, with the question: Why minimalism now? CK's take is available from me, by request, via email. BG's is here. Mine, blog-style (and having nothing to do with zebra fish), is here:

First, careerism. Curators saw that minimalism shows hadn't been done and they saw opportunities to make a professional splash. That's impossible to dismiss. But also... 

For many years now museums have been where secular America goes to church. In an era where most mainstream entertainment is designed to be as baroquely overblown as possible (what else could possibly explain The Rock?), museums provide rich visual quiet.

The current run of minimalism shows makes clearer than ever that museums are the new churches. Some minimalist art is hard, flat and repelling (think Judd, early Stella, Andre). It provides the viewer with something wonderful to look at, but it doesn't give the viewer a place to go within the work (like Matisse does). Instead, it forces the viewer to examine his own response to the work as much as the work itself.

Other minimalist work, say Reinhardt and Truitt, draws the viewer in and requires a deep, meditative gaze before it reveals its mysteries. There's no distracting narrative here, just spiritual transcendence.

Some artists have known about this link for a while: Sol Lewitt has pointed to the Shakers as an influence. I'd even draw a direct church-to-museum line in some now-standard museum practices. Example: In Italy, no Catholic Church would have been complete without artist-made icons; nowadays you can't build a new museum wing without installing a Lewitt or a meditative James Turrell Skyspace.

The conventional wisdom in the art world had long been that minimalism is difficult, but strong attendance for minimalism shows exposes that theory as elitist bunk. Museum boards, the folks who fund these shows, apparently love minimalism too. That's no surprise: Museum boards are now what main-line Protestant church boards used to be: the bastion of the moneyed establishment. Museums are the new churches. The sudden prevalence of minimalism makes that clearer than ever.

Inspired by Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik (ajreader, access), here's a summary of my trip to Los Angeles:

• Thursday: An excellent dinner at Tanino in Westwood, after-dinner drink back at the hotel.
• Friday: Breakfast at Starbucks, lunch at Champagne in West Hollywood (the smoked salmon with brie panini), dinner at Joe's in Venice.
• Saturday: Breakfast at Starbucks, lunch at La Dijonaise in Culver City (Ever seen a gallerino/a in Culver City eating a cookie? They bought it at La Dijonaise), dinner in Pasadena.
• Sunday: Breakfast at the hotel.

Oh yeah, I saw art too. But food is so much more important. I mean, why weigh in on pressing cultural issues such as the Smithsonian's support of Clear Channel, Inc., or the Corcoran's struggles to build its Gehry when we could be talking about my excellent duck liver ravioli with a lovely port-based sauce? (That was from Tanino, by the way. MOCA honcho Leonard Nimoy at the next table. Quite excellent. The ravioli, that is.)

The LAT's absurd pay-for-view-for-arts model is toast. By the end of July LA rejoins the critical mainstream. Huzzah!

I'm on travel. But while I'm in the air, try and figure out why NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin is in favor of NPR's arts coverage speaking to the average shmoe instead of to the smartest 20 percent. Good work, good criticism, challenges and entertains.