January 2005 Archives

Somehow I hadn't noticed this before: The UCLA Hammer Museum is pandering to the lowest Angeleno denominator: Access Hollywood culture. Next to about a dozen pieces from the Hammer's permanent collection are wall texts by LA stars/celebrities/Red Roof Inn pitchmen telling us what to think about art. Because if museum wall texts suck, slap a celeb's name onto them and maybe they'll be better? Heck, why look at the art when we can read Diane Keaton telling us about it, right?

(Much more on LA tomorrow. For now, here's the 411 on the panel I sat on with Doug Harvey and Christopher Miles.)

Last year, MOCA's trustees threw themselves a party to celebrate their museum's 25th anniversary. At the party they were surrounded by works from the museum's permanent collection, works that are rarely on view at the museum. (MOCA, despite having two buildings and an outlet at the Pacific Design Center seems not to have a really good place to display a broad range of work from its excellent permanent collection.)

In conversations at that party and afterward, MOCA trustees decided that was a problem that needed to be addressed. Expect MOCA to announce a solution this year, probably some form of a building project. And don't be surprised if Eli Broad, who was the founding chairman of MOCA but who hasn't been active at the museum in recent years (his allegiance seems to have shifted toward LACMA), is a part of that building project. 

Speaking of building, the Boston Globe and Harvard museums boss Thomas Lentz make it clear that Harvard will be doing some museum building in the near future. MOCA and Harvard plan to do the same thing: make their permanent collections more accessible (see MAMFW). But other than that, the two museums are completely different: the scopes of their collections, their missions, their geography.

MAN's on a jet-plane today, so we'll try something new: When I'm on travel, we'll just post an excerpt from GawkerForum so that our loyal readers can enjoy a good laugh:

"Jerry and Roberta hate me and Artforum doesn't know I exist," Cecily Brown was saying to playwright Tom Stoppard and Artforum editor Scott Rothkopf. The three were sharing a rear banquette on the third floor of 5 Ninth, where—despite the winter's first major snowstorm—Larry Gagosian had brought out the troops to toast Brown's opening at his Chelsea gallery.

(And in case you missed it, in the space of a couple dozen words a magazine that people look at but that no one reads managed to show Cecily that they're with her, all while elevating the 'zine to Saltz & Smith & Stoppard status. Seriously, these GawkerForum posts are like crack. They're way too easy.)

Speaking of Cecily: Scroll down to 3.17.2003.

And there's a new blog on the blogroll: Glowlab. (It's under NYC but I'll probably move it next week.)

Ess Eff arts blogger Anna L. Conti posts about SFMOMA's SECA award exhibit. Good read with lots of images.

A new to me art blog, hazel commentary, also has a SECA post.

(Hmmm, look at this buzz. Jerry was on to something...)

I haven't posted my last couple of Bloomberg reviews here because I try to keep the blog post-1900 or so. I'm posting some thoughts on Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence because I discussed (the lack of) portraiture now.

(I've long wanted to write more about this and in more depth -- the ideas here are pretty simple and easy. Kirk Varnedoe said that as he was considering his Mellon Lectures -- the last work he did before he died -- that he considered two ideas. The series of lectures that he chose not to give was about portraiture in contemporary art.)

Today, wealthy elites don't commission portraits of themselves as a way of crafting their image. Collecting art is certainly a component of modern-day social posturing, but nowadays collecting paintings of yourself is considered a bit over the top. In recent decades, portraiture has been dominated by down-market photography, and as such it no longer sends a message of prestige. After all, nearly every Wal-Mart and Kmart has a portrait studio. (The exception to the death of portrait painting is government officials, who may be the last major commissioners of painted portraiture.)

The few painted portraits that we see end up looking silly, and include indirect nods to painters such as Pontormo and Bronzino. A few weeks ago I was in a Marriott hotel. Behind the check-in desk, as at so many Marriotts, was a copy of a painting of two generations of Marriott hoteliers. Just as Pontormo sent a message by showing Alessandro sketching a beautiful woman, whoever painted the Marriotts included an image-crafting touch as well: one of the Marriotts held blueprints meant to encourage us to consider him as a builder and as a visionary. Viewed today, 350 years after the height of Italian mannerism, the Marriott portrait reads as high corporate camp.

In a way, that's a tribute to how thoroughly Pontormo, Bronzino, and their contemporaries conceived and executed portraits of the privileged. The Florentines just couldn't be improved upon.

• Because somehow last week we got sucked into playing where's-the-curator, we'll note that Anne Ellegood is leaving NYC for the Hirshhorn. Ellegood was most recently the NYC curator for the Norton Family Foundation and before that she was a curator at the New Museum. Are there any curators left in NYC? (Uh, yes.);
• Speaking of curators, there's that chief curator of drawings job open at MoMA...;
• ArtsJournal has a new book review blog;
• We'll be doing a MAN/abLA adult beverage gathering on Saturday night. Watch abLA for details;
• I updated yesterday's Jerry Saltz post with several links; and
• With that I'm off to go look at some Cy Twombly.

Regular MAN readers are plenty well acquainted with some of my ideas on how to fix what's wrong at MoMA. (MoMA apparently listens enough that they don't return my calls anymore.)

Last week, Jerry Saltz wrote a VV column about how he'd fix MoMA. The column itself -- independent of its content -- is a good thing, a sign that critics are over the Yay MoMA Moment, and are over the What a Nice Building and What Great Art Moment. Having beeen to the new building a few times, critics are beginning to assess the experience.

I'm not going to summarize Saltz' ideas (ah the beauty of links), but I think he raises some important points. MoMA's insistence on creating Hallway Bastards (Philip Guston, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O'Keeffe and the like) only highlights how limited some of their institutional thinking is. "We don't know what to do with these people," the hallway installations say. "So we'll just throw 'em up on the hallway walls and that way you can't say they're not here." Saltz' idea addresses that thinking.

(MoMA must also try to figure out why it is so clueless when it comes to the art of the present. Lots of museums do a good job with the art of the last 20 years so there's no reason MoMA can't.)

Each of Saltz' nine ideas makes a lot of sense to me. (Though if you create a real Projects space, do you still need an annual young artist's exhibit? Why not one or the other?) With only one or two exceptions they wouldn't be that hard (or expensive) for MoMA to implement. I'd suggest that they start with a panel of artists and/or critics that they don't like, a group of non-sycophants who will sit in their building and tell them what's wrong with it, tough-love style. In the wake of the damaged Truitt, MoMA has wasted no time in re-acquired a reputation as a stonewalling monolith that detests outside examination. (I've received email from MoMA'ites who are afraid of Getty-style retribution even.) And that's one of the last things an art museum should be.

UPDATE: Forward Retreat, Grammar.police, Modern Kicks.

If you're in LA this coming weekend, please stop by artLA on Sunday morning to hear Doug Harvey, Christopher Miles and me discuss art and art writing. (Also, expect some type of MAN/art.blogging.la beverage event during the weekend sometime. Watch abLA for details.)

If you've heard anything about the weather here in the northeast, you can guess what a strange art weekend it was here. Snow and high winds mixed to make galleries empty and museums emptier. Two examples:

I don't go to a lot of gallery openings -- they're a lousy way to see art and I feel like I have to be 'on,' to be engaging, witty and intelligent. I prefer to be alcoholically incoherent on Saturday nights at seven, so no openings for me. (And god forbid I'd accidentally slip into GawkerForum mode.)

But this past Saturday was an opening to which I had been looking forward. I've written about LA-based painter Robert Olsen a few times -- both here and for Artnet -- and his newest work just went on view at G Fine Art (which still has a Nov/Dec show on its website, hence the link to Olsen's site). The show is excellent, the best of many strong shows in DC galleries right now.

If you're going to paint artificial light, you have to paint night, or at least the darkness that makes artificial light stand out -- and Olsen paints the inkiest black imaginable. In a white cube gallery (which G is), his paintings are like black holes that suck the light out of the space, releasing only the manmade light on which Olsen wants us to focus.

Stranger was my experience at the Philly Museum (Dali!) on Sunday. As a result of a Bloomberg assignment, I had to zip up to the PMA ($2.6 million reasons to remember: Dali!) to take in a show, and I had to do it on Sunday. And I had to do it in a taxi-free city, with 15 inches of snow piled up around Philadelphia (Dali!), with temperatures in the low teens, and with wind gusts up around 40 mph. Then when I arrived at the museum, they told me that only parts of the 20th century galleries were open -- they didn't have enough guards to open anything else because the roads were still a mess.

I had a darn good time in the 20thC galleries until some of the rest of the place opened. Philly has a fine Jasper Johns room, one of the greatest Matisse portraits, and a fine Rothko and two Newmans on loan from private collections. (And oh yeah, a painting by some Vermeer guy.)

But just as the PMA got under my skin with their ridiculous Manet and the Sea shopping experience (with accompanying mediocre exhibit), they're already under my skin leading into their big Dali show in three weeks. The advertising banners in Philly's train station are about 20 yards long and cover three gates. Every train platform ad is for Dali. It's exhibit as marketing opportunity first, art second.

Also: It's harder to link directly to, but I wrote about Olsen when I first saw his work (in Sept. 2003). Scroll down about half the page to 9/18/2003, or just do a search on "Olsen."  

Excerpted from Christopher Knight in today's LAT because the LAT doesn't think you're worthy of reading it on their site:

What Edouard Manet was to Modern painting, Duccio di Buoninsegna was to the Italian Renaissance. A progenitor of what would become the artistic norm, he had one eye firmly fixed on tradition, the other acutely focused on his own uniquely sensuous experience of the world. That attitude produced a new way of thinking about art.

Gary Garrels is leaving MoMA for the Hammer, where he'll organize shows and start to build the Hammer's new contemporary collection. New Yorkers fleeing to LA...

(And in an unrelated story to which I can't resist linking: "Only a certain kind of person goes to galleries. But everyone goes to the toilet.")

On Thursday I posted this: "the DC visual arts community suffer[s] from a strange lack of sociocultural and world interest."

This basically came from some thoughts leftover from a panel discussion in which I was involved on Tuesday night. (The link is to the only factual discussion of the panel on the internet.) I was mostly talking about art-making -- about how artists who live in DC aren't necessariliy attracted to socio-politically/culturally-themed art, but my post didn't say that. And yes, there are exceptions. (And no, I still don't think Jim Sanborn makes Washington-themed political art.)

Mostly I was trying to make the point that DC would benefit from some socio-culturally-engaged alt spaces.

(Memo to self: Don't do quicky posts after a day of walking through cold, snowy, windy New York.)

Doug Fogle: Curator (in Minneapolis, not LA) and collector. This is spot-on, important and should be further investigated.

UPDATE: And from Artnet, we have news! The Walker says that Fogle bought the Mehretu for the museum in 2001.

On the Chris Burden-Nancy Rubins-UCLA bit of fun (bang!), check out GawkerForum, which has the most complete story on the whole thing that I've read.

One of the all-time NYT corrections:

An article on Dec. 14 about a judge's decision to let the Barnes Foundation move its art holdings from Merion, Pa., to Philadelphia misstated the number of works by Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso in the collection. (Several articles since 1991 have also variously misstated those figures as well as the number of works by Matisse.) There are 181 Renoirs, not 170; 69 Cézannes, not 55; and 46 Picassos, not 20. There are 59 Matisses, not 60. An e-mail message from a reader last week pointed out the errors.

Spent Wednesday in New York, mostly going through indy alternative spaces. In the last week I've visted apexart, plus three spaces familiar with the use of capital letters: The Drawing Center, Artists Space and White Columns.

I'll leave the apex show alone because I may Bloomberg it, but the other three shows can be summed up pretty easily:

• Drawing Center: Richard Tuttle should discover the round file;
• White Columns: More works on paper (mostly). Best show I saw in NYC on Tuesday, probably. No surprise -- this is the most professional and thoughtful of the alt spaces;
• Artists Space: Wellll... if you think you might be a gay man but you're not sure how you'd react to erect penises, this is the place to find out if penises are for you.

On Tuesday night I participated in a panel discussion (with about six or seven other people) in Washington, and we talked about things DC lacks. Visiting the alt-spaces in NYC reminds me that not only does the DC visual arts community suffer from a strange lack of sociocultural and world interest, but outside from the Big Institutions it mostly lacks edge and experimentation. That's probably why I enjoy my NYC and LA trips so much. I renew my plea for someone to turn the MLK Library on Ninth Street into a contemporary arts space.

Stream of consciousness....

• I'm happy to say that the news about MoMA's Anne Truitt has some legs. The New York Observer will be writing about it this week.
• Congrats to DC's Dan Steinhilber, the latest addition to the Hirshhorn's permanent collection. One of his 'hangar pieces' is installed between a Warhol and a Judd.
• Speaking of DC, since when can anything by Frankenthaler be considered a masterpiece?
• If you've been to Marfa, Van Horn, TX will sound familiar. It's the last food between the interstate and Chinati. Van Horn was discussed in the NYT this morning.
• If you're in San Francisco, don't miss SECA weekend at SFMOMA. I reviewed a show that included one of the awardees, Wal-Martist Rosana Castrillo Diaz, here last year.  
• Gallery Hopper thinks that flash photography is not so bad for art. Iconoduel does some work on this too. (I bet these two links generate about a dozen emails from photo curators...) Also: a constant barrage of flashes destroys visitor/viewer experience.
• Washington's Kelly Towles contributes to the Wooster Collective raffle (with image) for tsunami-related aid.
• Is it just me or is the National Gallery's show of Fauvism the same as their usual hanging of Fauvism with the walls painted a different color?
• I'm sure there's somebody at LACMA who wants to tell me the latest remarkable story about King Tut.....
• Here's hoping the St. Louis Art Museum builds a new website. Soon.

Sorry for the lack of posts today -- MAN HQ had no internet until about 10 minutes ago.

I've been wanting to link to this post from ArtsJournal's Andrew Taylor for a while now. Longtime readers of this blog (and I mean thsoe of you who have been with us since 2001) will remember that ClearChannel Exhibitions has been a regular target of this blog. More specifically, art museums who forsake scholarship, their own curatorial staffs, and their own collections in order to rent a show about monster trucks, Cheech Marin or some other such thing have been favorite targets of mine. Especially the Smithsonian, which shouldn't be renting out America's Museums to big business.

Andrew tells us about how Clear Channel has moved into performing arts venues as well.

And a reminder: It's not just Clear Channel that programs museums. Philip Anschutz -- the man whose company brought you Celine Dion in Vegas -- is renting out/buying out LACMA so that he can bring you King Tut. (Don't let the .org domain for the show fool you!)

Related: LACMA has posted the admissions prices for Anschutz' Tut show: $30 for adults, $15 for kids 6-17. As we discussed here last week, that age group gets into LACMA for free -- until now.

What with today being a holiday and all, expect little posting. Therefore, enjoy this.

I also wanted to plug two upcoming events. On Tuesday evening at 6:30, I'll be participating in a panel discussion hosted by the DC chapter of ArtTable. Fellow panelists will include artist Maggie Michael and collector Philip Barlow. For more info, call 202-332-0099.

And on Jan. 30, in Los Angeles, I'll join Christopher Miles and Doug Harvey on a panel at artLA. Hope you can make it.

On the occasion of an Anne Truitt having been damaged at MoMA, I've quoted some thoughts on damage by Truitt. It's a must-read, especially if you work at a museum. (In fact, if you work at a museum or gallery, please print out Truitt's words and post them where everyone in your building -- including guards -- can read them.)

Brenda Richardson, deputy director of the Baltimore Museum, installed the exhibition there. We had agreed that she would install alone so when I walked into the rooms filled with work dating from First, 1961 to 1991, I had the delight of seeing it from an entirely fresh point of view.  One of the trepidations I feel when my sculptures are exhibited is that they may be harmed: people like to touch their surfaces, they mar them without intending to.  Brenda forfended this  possibility by isolating groups of sculptures inside a designated  pathway: they stood aloof from touch save by imagination.  I had the happy feeling that the work was safe. [p. 146]

Some time ago a friend who had flown from his home in Boston down to  Richmond wrote me a postcard to say that he had seen in a bank there a sculpture he instantly recognized as mine. Recently a little girl saw that same sculpture, Signal. It is a small column, 59 inches
tall x 5 1/2 inches x 4 inches, painted in clear yellow, white and blue horizontal planes.  It must have looked like a Maypole to this enthusiastic child: she ran to it, hugged it, swung around it--and scuffed it.  I do so like her reaction, which mitigated the automatic spasm of anger I always feel when one of my pieces is damaged. The bank has sent me the sculpture for restoration. I am working on Signal now, with the good feeling that I can return it in pristine condition to a place where it apparently encounters appreciation.

Not all damage is that minor. A columnar structure running on a line of gravity from earth to sky is as intrinsically precarious as a human body; no matter how carefully weighted and how strongly constructed, it can be struck down. Knot, a column 81 inches x 8 inches x 8 inches, was recently so toppled. This sculpture had survived the Persian Gulf War in the basement of the American embassy in Tel Aviv, but last month a photographer backed into it and knocked it over. A representative of the U.S. State Department Art in Embassies program,
under whose aegis Knot had been placed in Israel, was present the other day in the studio when I uncrated it. As I raised it to its full height over our heads, we heard loud cracks. The material wedged into a solid cradle at its base, ballast to prevent its tipping, must have been shattered by the force of its fall. To judge from the scars denting its pure yellow, white and black encircling colors, it probably dropped at so tipped an angle that it hit the floor twice. The Art in Embassies representative remarked that the Tel Aviv embassy has a marble floor.  In any case, the internal damage is, for a variety of structural reasons, irreparable.

I have never been able to detach myself sufficiently to prevent a feeling of having been hurt myself when my work is damaged. I use the money I receive for restoration to make new work, but I never stop rather anxiously holding all my own work intact in my mind, hoping for its safety. In Knot's case, this attachment was augmented by the fact that it had traveled in a foam-lined bed inside a wooden crate beautifully made by an old friend. He had for many years packed my work. Last December, he was killed, senselessly gunned down in the street, instantly bereft of both dignity and life in yet another of the wanton murders that now characterize our urban area.  His crate was perfect; it stands in my studio reminding me of him, and of Knot as it will never be again. [pp. 159-60]

To buy Truitt's books: Daybook, Prospect (used only), Turn (used only).

After yesterday's post, MAN heard from several MoMA'ites all anonymously reporting the same thing: Anne Truitt's Catawba is no longer on view because it was damaged, almost certainly by a customer. (I mean: visitor. Bad writer!)

For two weeks I've been writing about how disinterested guards and over-sized crowds are endangering art at the new MoMA. Now we know that (at least) one work has been damaged, perhaps irreparably. What will it take for MoMA to change it's policies? MoMA must lower the number of people allowed in the building. They must ban strollers and cameras from the building, and they must train their guards better. They should also hold them accountable for the flashes that go off and the damage that occurs in their galleries. (And of course, they should hire more guards.)

MoMA should also admit they goofed. The first step toward fixing a problem is admitting you have one.

Museum professionals with blogs: Please weigh in.

UPDATE: Modern Kicks with some thoughts.

UPDATE: A reader suggested I link to this post, about responses to the WSJ piece, with this post.

1.) Carol Vogel spelled Chrissie Iles' name right this morning. Bravo Carol!

2.) Whitney boss Adam Weinberg on the Biennial: "There are lots of options on the table. We're looking at the possibility of the biennial traveling. But it's too soon to talk about anything right now. It should start with choosing the artworks first."

Longtime readers will recall that I've advocated a traveling Biennial before, most recently in the Wall Street Journal last March. (And aged readers will remember that once upon a time the Biennial was a traveling show.) So here's hoping it hits the road.

3.) The redesign of the Village Voice website, which includes a page for "art & photo." Who knew that they were separate things?

4.) AJ already plugged this Artnet roundup, but it's full of interesting stuff so I'm plugging it again.

UPDATE: We ask, we learn. Confirmed: Catawba was removed because it was damaged.

She was a dame, a solid dame. They called her Catawba and she was short and squat, which is good enough for me. Her green and black bands soaked up light the way a napkin soaks up the sweat falling down a beer glass.

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I knew where she was. Eleven West 53rd Street, fourth floor, right there next to a Sol Lewitt and a Don Judd. Then, like the fog just before lunchtime, suddenly she was gone.

Finding her is my job. I started with all the usual suspects up in Communications. Nothing. Email after email was ignored, just like that bum on the corner who waves a dirty cup in the face of the i-bankers.

So I'm stumped. I'm putting out a call for help. She was born in 1962 at the hands of Anne Truitt and, unless someone has sent her to Tijuana to work in one of those kinky juke joints, her name is still Catawba. Let me know.

UPDATE: We ask, we learn. Confirmed: Catawba was removed because it was damaged.

Unlike some other "blogs," we'll talk about art here today. But meanwhile, GawkerForum tells you where the in-crowd who went to the Daniel Reich opening (and maybe to the Perry Rubenstein opening also too) went to dinner afterward. Better yet, GF gives you an idea how long David Rimanelli stayed at dinner.

Normally I love making fun of ArtForum. But not even the (absent) promise of Thelma Golden making a GF appearance would inspire me. They gotta just blow the thing up.

Towleroad features a photo of The Gates being installed in Central Park. (More links from City Comforts.)

And, just for fun, from a museum advance release: "This exhibition selectively surveys contemporary art's representation of human responses to the second half of the 20th century."

No, really I do. No LA museum more consistently amuses me. You gotta love their logo and their breathless marketing materials. And who could forget their, ahem, original spelling of 'Renoir.' Plus, every time I go to the museum a bunch of paintings in the permanent collection are in the dark because bulbs have burnt out. Lest we forget: LACMA's Corcoran-esque new building project.  

But all of that will pale next to the ramp up for the LACMA/Philip Anschutz Mall of America-style presentation of King Tut. (To which I refuse to link because it's not a museum exhibition, it is a boondoggle.) Already MAN is hearing little leaks from LACMA'ites disgruntled with the project. (Leak on LACMA'ites! Leak on!) Yesterday we heard two doozies:

• In the early planning stages, LACMA considered not allowing staff into the Tut galleries except during narrowly designated hours. Why not? They weren't paying the $30/head.
• And better yet, LACMA is free to children 17 and under. But LACMA apparently has no intention of allowing children into King Tut for free and is presently searching for corporate sponsorship that would 'enable' them to bus in children and to cover their admission fees. Principles? Who needs them when there's money to be made...

(Seriously: Why isn't King Tut going to the Bellagio?)

(Doubly seriously: The LAT is treating the Tut story like a cold, smelly fish. And the Tuttites know it.)

A Daily Dose of Architecture has a cool little photo gallery of some of this year's AIA Honors winners. (Speaking of architecture, That Brutal Joint is back from a European sojourn.)

I also wanted to plug some of the bloggentary on Peter Plagens' weekend LAT essay, excerpted here yesterday. (Full version available to those who ask.)

Rarified Air makes an interesting point about how many NYC galleries function as quasi-museums while LA galleries are more developmental and experimental, the place to watch as work is evolving. (I can't help but note that PaceWildenstein does better quasi-museum shows on 57th Street thant it does on a rental basis in Las Vegas.) Insurgent Muse compares Plagens' comments to what Christopher Knight wrote about MoMA's opening.

The NYC blogs said not a word. (But I agree with Todd and James Wagner skates because he has such cool NYC stuff at the top right now.)

What is it with art people and their need for "dialogue?"

Last week, we shared Istanbul Modern chief curator Rosa Martinez' doozy: "This dialogue between the center and the periphery is very important. Istanbul Modern wants to catch this dialogue and provide it with a continuity."

In this Guardian story about 54th Street apartment owners being upset at how MoMA's visitors now look into their living rooms, a MoMA flack said that the museum has an "ongoing dialogue with the neighbours."

Only in the art world could voyeurism be transformed from a one-way street into a dialogue.

Interesting confluence of stories over the last 48 hours: In this morning's NYT, Alan Riding writes about how French museums are branching out, opening mini-Louvres and mini-Pompidous around the country. Meanwhile, here in the USA, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (thanks AJ, password, etc. here) tells us about how big arts organizations have become so dominant that they're crowding out small arts organizations.

Conclusion: While European arts organizations believe that they have a mission to spread culture beyond their most major cities (and the tourism motivation doesn't hurt), American arts organizations believe in centralization, in consolidating as much as they can under one board and one roof. (Or two roofs if you can get Renzo to build you a building.)

Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens thinks NYC is playing second apple to LA. So because the LAT won't let you read it, here's an excerpt from an essay by critic Peter Plagens. It ran in the LAT on Sunday:

L.A.'s contemporary art world is younger and hipper than New York's.

It operates more emphatically than New York's on the opposites (except perhaps for the teaching jobs) of everything cited. In L.A., the big competition seems to be among graduate-school studio programs rather than galleries; some students are scouted for gallery recruitment even before their master of fine arts theses shows have gone up. The ratio of big-time contemporary collector dollars to working young artists is greater in L.A. than anywhere else, including New York. Whenever I'm asked, I tell ambitious art students in the heartland to head west, not east, to try to get noticed.

But many young L.A. artists also experience the career arcs of top models or fruit flies: about one season, if that. And nowhere in the country -- maybe the world -- is popular culture more expertly conceived, technologically amped, attractively packaged, and overwhelmingly pervasive -- even unto gallery art -- as in Southern California. A few weeks ago, I prowled around Otis College of Art and Design and thought that if they'd just present the sketchbooks and mock-ups from the toy design department as the fine arts theses shows, Santa Monica galleries would snap 'em up whole.

Excerpted (and edited) from my Bloomberg review of SFMOMA's befuddling Roy Lichtenstein show:

At some point, presumably when Roy Lichtenstein was making his comic book-inspired paintings in the early 1960s, he wrote down a word list of comic book sounds. 'THWACK' was one of the words he wrote. So too 'POW,' BRRRP,' 'KPOW,' and 'WHUMP.'

Any of them would describe the way I felt after seeing "Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit is on view until Feb, 22.

Lichtenstein is famous for being the artist who made paintings inspired by comic books. These and later works, many of which were designed to look like compositions made of Benday dots, are nearly as synonymous with pop art as are Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans.

It is not surprising that a major American museum such as SFMOMA would launch a show of his work. But I have no idea what this particular show at SFMOMA is, nor why it is there.

It is not a Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) retrospective – it has just 68 works, almost entirely paintings with only a few works on paper and none of Lichtenstein's excellent sculpture, and omits works from several major periods of Lichtenstein's oeuvre. The show includes 13 works from 1961 and eight from 1962, when Lichtenstein was figuring out how to make pop work for him, but only 10 works from the last 20 years of his life, when Lichtenstein was producing some of his smartest paintings. In its promotional materials for this exhibit, SFMOMA hails this as the first "major exhibit" of Lichtenstein's work at a Bay Area museum. But this isn't a major show – it's a ragtag accumulation of apparently available Lichtenstein paintings.

There's plenty else that this show is not. It is not a focused exhibit exploring one part of Lichtenstein's career. It is not a narrow examination of just one or two of Lichtenstein's artistic periods or interests. Ultimately, this exhibit is nothing more than an excuse to hang some works by an artist about whom many Americans may have heard.

MAN calls 'em out, they respond. I don't understand a word of it, but respond they do.

Every once and a while I'll type up a post that I'm pretty sure will bore everyone but me. My post yesterday on Lee Siegel becoming Slate's art critic was one of those posts.

Therefore I was stunned when my email box overflowed with emails about Siegel and about Slate. I must have gotten 40 emails on this yesterday and a number of blogs added smart thoughts. Editors, the moral of the story is this: people who like the visual arts want to read smart writing by people who are primarily passionate and knowledgable about the visual arts.

So with yesterdays inundation (?) in mind, here are three more links: New Yorker scribe Alex Ross on critical authority, Superfluities on generalists, and Lee Siegel -- on Slate -- on his invisible cat.

Related: Brian Sholis responds to my Around the Blogosphere mention. Speaking of criticism, consider it corrected. Or uncorrected.

UPDATE: I should have just kept my mouth shut and waited to link to this post at Grammar.police. It's exactly right.

Terry Teachout weighs in here. My email is overflowing with comments on this, every single one wondering what the heck Slate is doing. (I've dealt with their culture editors in the past and the short answer is that they don't know much about art so they think they're being clever. I mean, this is a 'zine that just ran a story on college football art, fer chrissakes.)

Corcoran photo curator Paul Roth, who is an unusually wise observer of criticdom, offers up this on art criticdom and specialization (if you're just checking in, scroll down or kick here to see the beginning of this):

Mr. Siegel is not alone in his belief that he is qualified to write about anything, nor is he wrong.  It is true that he can write about anything. He cannot, however, write knowledgably about everything, and not everything he writes will be of much value to his readers, whether they know it or not. You say as much and you are absolutely right.

For example, many contemporary art critics write about photography without any knowledge of its past nor any interest in learning more. This makes much of what they write pretty thin, even meaningless. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how little of value is being written about Avedon in the aftermath of his passing by all the critics and journalists who know him because of his fame, think they understand his work and his context, but don't.

One thing I've found to be true is that the more I learn about, say, early 19th-century American painting, the more I realize how little I know about the material history, the technical dimensions, the art history, and so on. Of course I know more than the average joe, or even the curious casual fan. But so what? That doesn’t mean I know enough to form a really serious and valuable opinion, the kind that will help readers think in new and interesting ways about the art.

And so I have chosen to write only about things where my grounding is sufficient that I will have something interesting to say. In my case that means photography and, to a lesser extent, film. Which is not to say that I don’t have a lot more to learn in both areas. And this is what it comes down to ultimately: you wonder whether people like Mr. Siegel have enough humility to have the kind of curiosity that will, in turn, engender curiosity in their readers. If they think they are brilliant enough not to require knowledge of the specifics of any art form, period, personality, technology, or style, what could anyone take from such a person except their presumption?

I should say that I have not read Mr. Siegel. Mr. Teachout, another critic you mention, is rare in that he is a well-read generalist and writes solidly, entertainingly, and intelligently for a broad audience about many art forms, from dance to music to theater to film to various concentrations of visual art. I do not think he is characteristic of most art critics.

Shhhhhhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet. MFA Boston is: They've extended their rental of Monets to PaceWildenstein and a Vegas casino through May. No press release, no anything. Here's hoping the power doesn't go out again.

Previously: MFA Boston director Malcolm Rogers should be ashamed of himself and he should be sanctioned by his peers for his reckless behavior.

As a bit of an art critic, I wasn't thrilled to see what Nation book critic, New Republic TV critic and Slate art critic Lee Siegel had to say to the New York Observer (via Romenesko) about his new art writing gig:

Genres are blurring into each other, anyway, Mr. Siegel added. The "gravitational pull" of movies—one medium that’s not directly on his beat—is influencing all the other arts, he said. "I’ll be writing about books that have to do with movies," he said. " … As a TV critic, I have to refer to film." And as an art critic? "I can write about anything," he said.

"Maybe the era of specialized critical fields is coming to an end," Mr. Siegel said. "It probably should."

Well, as an art critic I hope he'll write about... art. And I disagree with my esteemed AJ colleague Terry Teachout about the lack of usefulness of specialized critical fields. There is value to readers in specialized knowledge, in a critic spending hours and hours studying, thinking about and examining a certain field. I'm sure Siegel will capably write about a big Monet show, for example. Heck, who wouldn't? (I mean, even John Updike can do that.) But what about providing context, insight and original thinking about contemporary art when the premiere of Alias is on at 8 tonight and there's a new novel to be read? What about doing the legwork to look at all that a critic has to look at in order to speak with some level of insight?

(Aside: Other critics invited to write in for posting.)

I haven't done one of these in a while because clickthroughs got pretty low. Let's see if I can entice you to click...

• How strange is this: LACMA is blocking employees from reading art blogs. Would they block employees from reading the NYT arts section?
• New to the blogroll: From Seattle, Artcollector.
• No click, just amusing to me: An emailer told me this morning that spammers have begun to use my name in "from" addresses. They like me, they really, really like me!
• If there's one thing worse than bloggers crossing over into big media, it's bloggers as curators.
• Dear Carol: Chrissie Iles, not Isles.
• Atlanta's The View... jumps on the ArtNews bandwagon and lists overrated and underrated artists.
• Insurgent Muse apparently likes elbows, ankles, collarbones... anything but vaginas.
• ArtCal tells you what's coming up this season in New York galleries. Super useful.
• Brian Sholis discovers that I can't stand Rachel Harrison's work, but decides that the complexities of it are so defeating that it must be wonderful. Brian is a heckuva nice guy who doesn't deserve the rudeness he's received from some of the yellow journo blogs who are too lazy to check into allegations before they make them, but I sure can't follow a word he's saying. Maybe Harrison's just not worth the time?
• Carolyn Zick on cameras and notebooks. Notebook writing in golf pencils? C'mon SFMOMA, that's too far.
• Reason No. 345 for galleries not to act peevishly: When you refuse to provide a publication with exhibit images for one of your artists, substandard images are likely to end up all over the place. End result: One of the very best very young artists I saw in 2004 looks a lot less studly than he should.

Only GawkerForum could get Barnes' will wrong and claim that the Barnes Foundation doesn't make money in part because of a "general lack of buzz." (Some clever blogger summed it up best: That's GawkerForum, careening between art theory and buzzy party coverage.) At least they've got one blog-like factor down -- grammatical errors!

(And I'm really tired of people claiming that they haven't seen the Matisses, etc. there because it's hard to get to or get into. It's practically across the street from one of the biggest cities in the US, between DC and NYC. No, it's not the same as walking into the NGA, but it's not rocket science either. Plan. Go.)

Last week I spent a couple days at SFMOMA, which reinstalled its permanent collection over the summer. Some thoughts:

* Virtually everything SFMOMA had on view on its second floor (roughly 1906 -- get it? -- to 1970 or so) is a top-notch example of that artist. Or, put another way, when a museum doesn't bother showing second-tier works by first-tier artists, they're one of The Bigs.

* SFMOMA has excellent early Matisse, and the first gallery shows off 11 of them. SFMOMA isn't real strong in Picasso, so the Matisses all but get the entrance to the permanent collection to themselves.

* Noted sighting: Paul Strand in the paintings galleries, on a wall with Albers and Ralston Crawford.

* Noted omissions: Northern Californian Wayne Thiebaud. (How?!?) Post-war German painting.

* Pleasant surprise: Helen Torr, aka Mrs. Arthur Dove. I can't remember the last time I saw a Torr in a permanent collection installation.

* Bay Area room: Well, the Still room is a Bay Area room, but the gallery devoted to two Richard Diebenkorns, two Joan Browns, two David Parks, a Jess, some Bruce Conner, and a fine Raymond Saunders is pretty fantastic. The Joan Brown sculpture was a pleasant surprise and the Parks and Diebenkorns shine.

* Strange juxtaposition: An Artschwager sharing a space with an Agnes Martin? A litlte overhwelming. Also in that room: Two Ana Mendietas on view? Yawn. (My summation of Mendieta: Mother Earth, over and over.)

* Smart installation: SFMOMA has a room-sized Doris Salcedo installation up right now. It's as good a Salcedo installation as I've ever seen... yet is oddly absent from SFMOMA's website. Quite nearby: Eva Hesse. Also, on the fifth floor, the juxtaposition of a blue Anish Kapoor with a blue-highlighted Giovanni Anselmo.

* Also not on the SFMOMA website: A terrific Deborah Luster installation.

* John Edwards moment: Seeing Sally Mann's 1988 photo The Two Virginias.

* Happy to see: David Wojnarowicz on view in San Francisco.

Dear Glenn,

How ya been? Long time no talk. At least 30 years, right?

I'm writing because I wonder if you walk through your galleries to see how people are experiencing your headquarters. Sorry about that -- slip of the tongue. I mean your museum. 

On Friday a friend of mine and I spent about five or six hours at MoMA. It was obvious that you're experiencing some growing pains and I wanted to talk with you about them before those pains become lost revenue. Gosh -- there I go again. I mean before those pains diminish the interaction people have with art.

You've got operational problems, Glenn. The crowds in your museum are so massive that they're endangering the work. I saw people bumping into sculptures, even paintings, because the galleries were so crowded. And you need more guards -- the fourth floor galleries and the contemporary galleries were so full of people that anyone who wanted to touch a painting could. Heck, I saw women with strollers bumping into the art. If Gordon Matta-Clark was alive, he'd be comin' after you with a chainsaw after what I saw people doing to his work in your museum.

And the cameras, Glenn. You must ban cameras from the building. I must have seen about 100 flashes go off in five hours. The guards simply can't keep up with every camera flash that happens. It's bad for the art and it's bad for the viewing experience of everyone else in the room. Let me share two camera specific stories with you:

1. In the contemporary galleries, one customer (I am so sorry about that! -- I meant visitor) was so preoccupied with taking the perfect photo of your massive Twombly that as he walked around to set up the picture, he stepped on a Richard Serra. Now Glenn, you don't want to piss off Richard Serra. Serras have injured men before. Imagine Gordo coming after you with a chainsaw as Serra set up a core-ten trap.
2. And in the works on paper galleries, one visitor was taking lots of flash photos as a guard stood and watched, doing nothing. A friend of mine asked why he was being allowed to do that. The guard replied that it was New Year's Eve and he didn't want to ruin anyone's day.

Frankly, these are easy things to fix. Ban strollers -- they take up too much space in the galleries, the parents of the little ones too frequently allow them to scream and distract others, and what's a sleeping sub-two-year old gonna get from a visit anyway? Over and over again I saw strollers bumping into art, sculptures and paintings. The stewardship of art is your most critical mission and strollers are endangering the art.

Ban cameras -- you have slides and postcards available in your shops. Hire more guards. Work is being damaged. (Maybe it already has been -- what happened to the Anne Truitt on the fourth floor?)

Finally, too many people were in the building on Friday. The situation was not safe for the art. All three of these items get to the core of your mission: Your job is to take care of art, Glenn. That's the most important thing your institution does.

I know some of these changes would hit you where it hurts -- in the wallet. I know you need those $20 admission fees to pay for those 630,000 square feet you have there.

But remember that in Whose Muse? you wrote this: "Art museums should be venues of pleasurable experiences, they should be amusing and delightful places where the act of discovery and learning is enjoyable and engaging..."

Your museum is not delightful right now.

Sincerely,

Tyler

Related: Gallery Hopper. To say nothing of the web comment boards and anonymous emails calling me an "ass" and a "jerk." Parents are mighty defensive about them strollers -- but why, when there are art-safer ways (here and here and here) of taking little ones. Why is preserving art a bad thing?

Today's jargon gibberish award winner is Istanbul Modern chief curator Rosa Martinez, one of the curators of the 2005 Venice traveling art party: "This dialogue between the center and the periphery is very important. Istanbul Modern wants to catch this dialogue and provide it with a continuity."

This is the final week of Flavin at the National Gallery of Art. What better way to assess Flavin at the end of the show than to read Greg Allen's Sunday NYT piece on the artist's intentions, and to read his two follow-ups at greg.org?

In one, Greg talks with Stephen Flavin about being the caretaker of his father's legacy. In another, Greg chats with Emily Rauh Pulitzer, a collector and former St. Louis Art Museum curator who did a Flavin show in 1973, about Flavin.