August 2006 Archives

I've seen not nearly enough coverage of this important story in the American press: Donny George, the head of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritiage and the director of the Baghdad Museum, has resigned his post and fled the country for somewhere safer -- like Syria. [via, who has reaction to the news] The NYT/International Herald Tribune's Edward Wong says that George felt "under treat from fundamentalists with ties to the Shiite-led government." The Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer says that George tried to safeguard what was left before he departed.

It's too bad that we're not hearing more about this. A lot of the problems in Iraq: personal safety, sectarian threats and violence, the cultural threads that united a land all come together in this story.

(Meanwhile, all Zahi Hawass and Philip Anschutz have to do is blow the dust off of a mummy and the American media eats it up. Ah but we laugh last and hardest, Zahi: We love "The Official International Dr. Zahi Hawass Fan Club" you've created for yourself!)

Obviously every step of the American engagement in Iraq has been a total debacle. But the manner in which the United States has allowed the cultural history of a region to be decimated and looted is a special horror. When the US went to war in Iraq, the plan was for first-wave invading troops to quickly guard cultural sites. Those troops were supposed to enter Iraq from Turkey. When the Turkish government refused to allow U.S. forces to enter Iraq from the north, the Pentagon never established a backup plan.

Today, years later, it's still a mess.

Starting the Tuesday after Labor Day, MAN will be back to art-world biz-as-usual. No, we won't be charging $20/head and we don't have a trustee's dining room. There's nowhere here to have a guerilla wedding. But, like at all the coolest galleries, we will refuse to say hello to you when you visit. Of course with us it's a technological consideration and for them it's just cooler-than-thou.

Before we go, and to entertain you over the weekend, we just got word of a guerilla performance at SFMOMA's big Matthew Barney opening. Apparently the guards/etc. thought it was officially museum-sanctioned. And that, maybe, the performer was Barney's babe Bjork herself. (With video!) And don't miss Greg Allen's takedown of AEI's WSJ analysis of MoMA's tax economic impact.

P.S. For September we've got dynamite posts lined up: Matthew Barney, the GuggAbu, the AICA Awards nominations, and the month that was in GawkerForum.

• Tropolism: Architecture and design.
• Amp Power: Alice Perry on the arts from NYC.
• Hankblog: The Henry Art Gallery's blog.

In 1947-48 Mexican architect Luis Barragan built himself a house in the suburbs of Mexico City. An apparently simple 1,100-square meter concrete structure, the house is famously understated. A high ceiling in the house's main room was designed to allow light to fill the house throughout the day, and the windows framed views of Barragan's garden. "Any work of architecture which does not expres serenity is a mistake," Barragan once said.

All of which makes Barragan's home a perfect place for Luisa Lambri to photograph. The Carnegie Museum of Art has recently purchased four Lambri photographs of Barragan House (Untitled #03, 04, 20 and 30, all 2005). They are on view through Nov. 12 as part of Carnegie curator Douglas Fogle's first Pittsburgh show: Forum 57: Luisa Lambri and Ernesto Neto. (Lambri and Neto?! Apparently the word of the day in Pittsburgh is "architecture.") Fogle is also the curator of the next Carnegie International.

Lambri's best photographs -- and these are among them -- make a viewer stop and hold still. At two recent solo shows (at Marc Foxx in LA and at Luhring Augustine in Chelsea), I found myself holding my breath in front of Lambri's pictures. It was as if I was afraid that little bit of movement would affect my ability to soak in the meditative space that Lambri had captured for me.

Part of that feeling comes from Lambri's palette. Within individual photographs, it's narrow. If you move while looking at, say, the photograph above, you miss some of the richness of the color white, the way light moves across Barragan's surfaces. I felt the same way about the greens in the foliage outside modernist windows in Lambri's photographs of a Oscar Niemeyer house in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Lambri's photographs focus on the most personal, detailed aspects of built spaces. She updates architectural photography by turning away from the whole that, Ezra Stoller or Julius Shulman captured, to focus on on the interplay between light, space, and surface. The result is a photograph that provides an introspective moment rather than Dwell magazine-style interior design porn. "Luisa Lambri's artistic ambitions make her architectural photographs almost useless as documents," Roberta Smith wrote in the NYT last year. That's why I like them (and it's why Smith didn't.)

Related: The Barragan House is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Brian Sholis wrote about Lambri's Luhring show for Artforum. Lambri photographed Menil House in 2002 and was featured in a 2004 show at the Menil.

According to a WSJ piece by a couple of economists from the far-right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute, MoMA isn't having a $2 billion impact on the NYC economy. Well, duh.

Got me wondering: Does MAN have an economic impact on anything? I don't think so. But apparently Lee Siegel thinks that MAN can have an impact on his bank account: "[M]aybe you'd want to suggest to your readers that they not buy my forthcoming book of essays? [I]t would help sales," Siegel writes.

Happy to help. I officially suggest that you don't buy Lee Siegel's forthcoming book of essays. I haven't read the book, but I've read enough Siegel to know that reading his book would be a waste of my time. While Siegel may not be Peter Schjeldahl or anything, we don't wish financial hardship on anyone so we're only too happy to fulfill Siegel's request. If you want to further support Siegel, read his blog.

This seems just about right for the last week of summer: Wanna get married at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Fuhgeddaboutit. Not allowed. (You may, however, buy wedding presents at the Met. And corporate events are welcome. The sculpture court (that's it, barely, at left) holds 250 guests for dinner and dancing. Just not for a wedding, dinner and dancing.)

But if you're smarter than the system, there's always a way. Painter (and Jeff Koons assistant) Sarah Chuldenko and her beau Stephen wanted to get married at the Met. So they did: They held a 'guerilla wedding.' ("The plan: "Get married... Before they get kicked out.") The couple walked into the Met, paid admission, and proceeded to an apparently agreed upon place. Their guests did the same. The pictures are here.

How did Chillida's Silent Music II get from the Met to the Nasher? Well, now we know: After the Met was (rightly) forced to give up on deaccessioning it, Nasher director Steve Nash called the Met. You know, Nash said, if you don't have room for it, we'd be thrilled to borrow it. The Met was, obviously, all for that plan. It's now at the Nasher indefinitely.

I asked a museum spokesperson if the Nasher was interested in owning the Chillida. After all, it's pretty obvious that Gary Tinterow wants no part of it. The Nasher's answer: "At this point it's just on loan."

It's been a sleepy August here on MAN, but I think we've got some good content ready for September. Among the posts we have lined up is a Q&A with writer Lawrence Weschler, whose most recent book is published by McSweeney's: Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.

Weschler is one of my favorite authors and his "Vermeer in Bosnia" essay is one of the best things I've ever read. (It's not online, but you can buy the essay collection of the same name for $10.)

If you want to check out the book it's less than $20 at the link above. Also: The McSweeney's website is hosting a Convergence of Convergences, a weekly contest based on the ideas and images in Weschler's book. Weschler himself is judging the contest each week.

Related: Weschler's book about Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, is also a must-own.

Sometimes a show just fits better in one museum than in another. Was it great to see the MOCA's Robert Rauschenberg show at the Met, in that certain context? No doubt about it. But is a museum such as MOCA better equipped in terms of staff, facilities, and commitment to an exhibit to put on this show? Yes. And I enjoyed the show a heckuva lot more in LA than I did in NYC. (Well, except for the MOCA's over-zealous, pencil-pushing bit of stupidity. Seriously. Dumb. Policy.)

Some random notes and links from the show at MOCA:

• As in New York, the first work in the exhibit was Minutiae. It has several pieces of colorful fabric hanging off of it. When MOCA's front door opened or when people walked by, the cloth waved in the breeze. Given that Minutiae was a stage piece used by Merce Cunningham's dance company, and that there was once fabric-flapping motion all around it, that seemed just about right.
• Rauschenberg's Paint Cans was made in 1954. Jasper Johns owns it. Johns painted his Ale Cans in 1960.
• How wonderful it would have been if all four of Rauschenberg's Rebus-esque paintings had been together in either NYC or LA. (Three were: MoMA wouldn't loan its new Rebus.) In LA I saw SFMOMA's Collection in a new context, and came to think of it (or Steven Cohen's untitled Rebus-like work, also from 1954) as the first Rebus. MoMA's was finished in 1955. The first two share some objects in common, such as a copy of part of a Renoir painting. The fourth Rebus painting is MOCA's own Small Rebus, from 1956.
• The 1959 combines are littered with pants. (Dam, Kickback and Inlet all feature them.) Why?
• The catalog is fantastic -- except for one thing. No index.
• Many of MOCA's programs for the show are online. You'll want the catalog nearby when you listen to Mizzou grad Mary Beth Carosello's discussion of wordplay in the combines. Schimmel, Rauschenberg and Calvin Tomkins shoot the breeze. (Second part here.) And Rachel Rosenthal talked about Rauschenberg here. (Second part here.)

Related: The first part of my post on Combines at the Met. (I may have accidentally deleted part two?!)

I'm an old sportswriting newspaper guy. So is Peter Schjeldhal. I'm OK with seeing art critics stretch, with seeing art critics get out of Renzos for a while. (Where's he going with this?!) And I used to spend 4-6 days at the US Open tennis tourney every year, and couldn't have enjoyed it more. In fact if I wasn't multi-tasking like mad right now, I'd probably be there this wekeend. So all that said, I'd like to introduce you to your New York Times US Open blogger...

Michael Kimmelman.

What is the relationship between the work of Roberto Matta and the work of his son Gordon Matta-Clark? A new exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art takes a look at it. So does Christopher Knight's review, which gets more and more thought-provoking as you get closer and closer to the end.

Old, but I keep forgetting to link to it: Houndstooth blogs about the SITE Santa Fe biennial. Curator Klaus Ottmann responds in the comments.

At the St. Louis Art Museum, David Bonetti tells us about a curator-driven re-installation of the permanent collection.

From The Stranger's Jen Graves: Landscape art, built on a bluff above the Columbia River, as a 'billboard.' Sounds really, really cool.

Last week LATer Christopher Hawthorne did Toledo's new SANAA. Today it's NYTer Nicolai Ouroussoff with a quite-different but equally enthusiastic take.

Remember Lee Siegel? He's one of America's worst art critics. (Who could forget his fantastically clueless, "You cannot fully understand Cy Twombly's art unless you know that he is gay.") Well, this just in: You can't fully understand Lee Siegel unless you know that when he tutored Uma Thurman, he wanted to have sex with her. When she was 16. And -- it gets better -- that Siegel considers not doing it one of his life's regrets. (UPDATE: Siegel writes to point out that he didn't want to have sex with Thurman and that he didn't write that he did. He's right: As I re-read it I'll agree. Ezra Klein --- to whom I linked -- posited that suggestion, not Siegel.)

Before I go for the weekend, I wanted to point out Kriston Capps' review of the Hirshhorn's Michael Auping Anselm Kiefer show. Not only did he pretty much see the same show I did, but he reveals that the Hirshhorn's guards have been doing their usual pathetic job at keeping visitors from handling the art. Pretty much every time I'm at the Hirsh I see the same kinds of things: Visitors touching art, handling it, leaning against it, etc.

With so many things working well at the Hirshhorn right now it is simply stupefying that the museum's leadership has failed to address basic security issues. If I were a collector or another museum, there is no way I'd loan work to the Hirshhorn.

On Monday: Rauschenberg in Los Angeles.

You remember Gary Tinterow: He's the Met's curator of 19th-20thC art as well as the museum's resident used-art salesman. Twice this year he's tried to deaccession works from the Met's collection and twice he's failed. And now we learn that when Gary Tinterow says he doesn't have room for something in his precious storage vault, he's not kidding.  

Quick backgrounder: Back in January, Tinterow tried to deaccession a Eduardo Chillida sculpture, Silent Music II. NYT critic Michael Kimmelman called him out on it and Tinterow and the Met had to pull the piece from auction. MAN has learned that the Chillida is now on view: At the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. (And by "MAN has learned" I mean: "MAN saw on Tuesday." Yeah, you're probably gonna hear more about this one.)

What is the relationship between minimalist art and minimal, high modernist architecture? LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne explores that question (and plenty more) in a fantastic review of SANAA's first American project: An expansion of the Toledo Museum of Art. It's the most interesting architecture review I've read in months -- don't miss it.

SANAA's US profile is about to dramatically increase. It has designed NYC's new New Museum and it's one of the five finalists to build the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. (UPDATE: Reader EF writes in to say that SANAA is shortlisted for the new Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive too.)

Related: The museum has 17 slide shows that document construction. And here's the FAQ referenced in Hawthorne's piece. Designboom features an interview and a bunch of pix of SANAA projects.

I'm updating the blogroll over the next few days. Some blogs will drop off, some will be added, the whole thing will be shorter and hopefully a little easier to use. Blogs that come off aren't bad blogs, they just have become less and less about art or haven't been updated in a while.

This is my first day back in Washington after a week or so visiting Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, CLUI Wendover, San Francisco, and 10 hours in Dallas’ arts district. Over the next month or so I’ll do some posts on that trip, including about how the Jetty looks now, on Sun Tunnels, SFMOMA's stash of rarely-seen Clyfford Stills, the treasure trove of Diebenkorns at the de Young, CLUI Wendover, and more. For now, here are some things that I’ve had on my brain from and while traveling.

• The Dallas of Museum of Art bored me. Or maybe it’s just that the current traveling, sleep-inducing Richard Tuttle retro. Has any show of the last few years more revealed an artist to have failed at discovering a second good idea?
• The Nasher Sculpture Center has the Renzo Piano that everyone else signed up for.
• One of the best three-work installations in an American museum right now is this troika on SFMOMA’s fifth floor: Jeff Koons' Michael Jackson and Bubbles, Marilyn Minter’s Strut, and Andy Warhol's Red Liz. When I was enjoying the grouping on a quiet Monday afternoon, a 15-year old (or so) walked in with her father. The dad acted bored, but the teenager looked quietly at the troika and turned to her dad and said, "They go together, don’t they?" Yup.
• Other cool grouping: SFMOMA's Sol LeWitt stack of cubes and its new Olafur Eliasson grotto.
• For years -– years -– I've complained that SFMOMA doesn’t champion artists from its region the way MoMA pushes New York. (See Murray, Elizzzzzabeth.) Right now SFMOMA has only one Diebenkorn on view. (The de Young has 10.) SFMOMA's Diebenkorn collection isn’t nearly as deep as you’d expect his hometown museum to have. (I could say the same thing about MOCA, actually.) Ditto SFMOMA and Thiebaud.
• Incidentally: The de Young has 8-10 Thiebauds up, SFMOMA two. Jess: de Young 3, SFMOMA 0.
• All that said, SFMOMA still has out two Joan Browns two Parks, several Conners, a DeFeo, and such. But only one Ruscha? One Baldessari? No Pittman, no Oliveira, no McGee, no Hockney, no di Suvero, no Ramos, no Lobdell, no Neri, no Kilgallen… I mean, if the museum has room for two Yves Kleins and two Joan Browns…
• Jess' 1954 Boy Party at the de Young makes me smile every time I see it. Big gay interracial sex party. Painted in 1954. And compositionally super-tight.
• Drawing Restraint. Matthew Barney. Wake me when he’s gone. Let's call him a ‘rococo minimalist.'

Kimmelman, RoSmith and Cotter will be joined by... who? A what?!?! (And no, it's not a joke.) Of course, at least they're not reporting this. [via]

Here's a good idea: Starting Sept. 1, SFMOMA will offer free admission to students of all three SF art schools. (I guess art history students at Cal or Stanford, for example, are on their own.)

I'm back (and will catch up on email by Wednesday). One of the things that bloggers can do that dead-tree critics can't do as easily is re-visit a recently opened museum. So with that in mind, here are some thoughts on the de Young Museum, which I first wrote about last June.

The good:

• Is there a better place in America to see Richard Diebenkorn? Right now the museum has seven RD paintings and three RD Crown Point-produced prints on view. (Plus one Jess painting, 'signed' with a snarky 'RD.') They span the artist's entire career. The de Young's Ocean Park #116 may be the best painting in the series.  
• MoMA's retrospective of local-to-them artist Elizabeth Murray showed that major art museums can be narrowly regionalist -- and be damn proud of it. At the de Young Mel Ramos, Jess, Sam Francis, Wayne Thiebaud, Frank Lobdell, David Park, Mark Rothko, Chiura Obata, and Diebenkorn all look fantastic. Joan Brown and Mark di Suvero less so. (From the overdue retrospectives file: Mel Ramos.)
• The de Young's re-jiggering of its contemporary art gallery is a success. Its new Cornelia Parker, Anti-Mass, anchors a half-room-sized installation about artists responding to oppression. Nearby is the de Young's wonderful Salcedo non-chair and Christopher Brown's painting The Darkness of Grey.
• Last year I liked the way some 20th-century paintings were mixed into the de Young's American paintings galleries, which mostly featured works from the three preceeding centuries. But even as I liked them I wondered if they'd feel gimmicky after a while. They don't. They look better than ever. Examples include Jasper Johns' Bread in a gallery of mostly 19thC trompe l'oeil, a Sandow Birk painting of a traditional Western landscape -- with a prison sneakily hidden in plain view in the background, and Charles Sheeler's Williamsburg Kitchen surrounded by paintings of colonial America donated by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III (The Sheeler was also donated by Rockefellers, the family that restored Colonial Williamsburg.)

The bad:

• Too many paintings galleries are too crowded. If one painting came off of every long wall, that'd help a lot.
• The modern painting galleries are not aided by having massive di Suveros or David Smiths in the middle. Too cluttery.
• I like the Richter whatever-it-is when the de Young's lobby is empty. For some reason it loses some oomph (that's the technical art critic term) when the space fills up.
• Needs. More. Benches.

Later today: The de Young's biggest, most embarassing, ongoing failure.

Related: SF Chron art critic Kenneth Baker on Cornelia Parker. Lee Rosenbaum recently wrote about the NYT's re-re-re-re-re-visiting of the Morgan. The Diebenkorn string at Flickr is a fun surf.

Why would an art museum obstruct a work of art by placing big, fat bars over it?  In its Piazzoni room the de Young still does exactly that. (Here's how the de Young's Bingham would look like with the de Young treatment.)

FAMSF director John Buchanan has been at the museum long enough to have removed the bars from the Piazzoni. Being new to the museum is no longer a good excuse for inaction. Show some respect for the art and for the artist, de Young. Take down those bars.

Previously: We let Buchanan off the hook. Why? Last time I talked with him about it he'd been at the de Young for only six weeks.

Last January, Jerry Saltz complained that one of the things wrong with the new MoMA (uh, we've gotta replace that phrase) was that it has no 'Projects' gallery. That it wasn't doing 'Projects' shows. From what he wrote:

There is no longer a "Projects" gallery in the new museum. MOMA is already appallingly squeezed for space. Nonetheless, it can't only do "New Acquisitions" shows or allow P.S.1 to take up the slack in this critical area. Seeing Mark Dion's nifty "Project" wedged into the theater lobby of the sub-basement is depressing. MOMA should immediately re-establish a project space. Following this, a large-scale annual exhibition of eight to 10 important young artists (with a catalog) should be instituted.

He's got his wish. Sorta kinda. MoMA has just announced three new Projects shows: Monika Sosnowska, Josiah McElheny, and Dan Perjovschi. They won't have a fixed space, but...

Last Friday I talked with Derek Gillman, the new boss of the Barnes Foundation. (That's him below and here's why.) Normally I'd follow a post like this with some kind of broader thought about what the new director said, but... I'm on vacation. Suffice with this: Gillman's claim to the legitimacy of the move is pretty clearly laid out in the answer to the first question below. (It was actually the last thing about which he and I talked on the phone on Friday, but I thought it was key enough to bump it here.)

Again: See y'all on Aug. 21. (I probably won't catch up on email until Aug. 23 or 24. I'm already about 25 behind from the day or so before I 'officially' left.)

MAN: In March, Barnes board chair Bernard Watson said that the Ben Franklin Parkway is where the Barnes belongs. But in late 2004 you said that the move would have Barnes rotating in his grave. Can you tell us how you went from believing Barnes would be spinning his grave, to sharing your board chair’s vision that the Parkway is where the Barnes belongs?

DG: I've been a supporter all the way along. What I was saying is that I support the move -- but I think Barnes would have been rotating in his grave. I’m not going to retract that.

The point I've been trying to make is that there were certainly two Barnes which are really different from each other. There’s the Barnes who died leaving this tight indenture -- which the Orphans' Court has acted on --  which was constrained and constrained and constrained. Barnes at the end was very clear about what had to be at Merion, and that’s very different in spirit and in vigor and in optimism from the Barnes who started the project in the teens and twenties.

When he wrote the original indenture with [John] Dewey, it was optimistic and big-pictured and optimistic about American society and making the collection accessible. The Barnes who died prematurely would indeed [rotate in his grave], I'm sure… It's evident from the indenture that he left that he wanted the limited access, the investment of funds in low-yield government bonds and so on… But that's not the Barnes that I think we need to go back to, [I prefer] the Barnes who had this wonderful vision for this wonderful collection who was dedicated to improving America. That Barnes/Dewey vision of changing the world was an exemplary one.

MAN: Which is more important: taking care of the art and honoring as many of the donor’s wishes as  possible or serving a business and politically-minded board that wants to create a tourist attraction?

If it was a choice between those alternatives, you'd naturally say the former. But I don't think it is. There’s no question that there is an obligation of the board to look after it and to do the very best you can. That's just a given. That’s a basic premise of any org that belongs to AAM or AAMD -- which the Barnes doesn't yet belong to. The basic principles the ground rules for being a member of these organizations is that you adhere to those fiduciary responsibilities. As to your comment, I would not tend to agree with that. Having met them it’s a thoughtful board which is committed to serving the intentions of Barnes' desire to make it an accessible institution.

They have been cast into the role of a 'corporate board' that is devoted to those goals [of tourism promotion, etc.],  but I don't see that at all. It's a board which is really about trying to make the original vision of the Barnes a reality.

MAN: But, of course, Barnes didn’t exactly intend create a museum. He considered what he was founding a kind of educational institution.

DG: Like [PAFA] it's hard to distinguish what's distinctive about it because categories are easy. You want to drop things into categories. But the Barnes in allowing visitors to allow various people to look at pictures on the wall does things that are similar to museums. And in conducting education programs for adults it does things that are not dissimilar to what universities do. Some of this is getting to see that there are categories that we use as a matter of shorthand, and the Barnes doesn’t fit into any of these.

MAN: Before the Barnes board had hired a director it determined that it would re-create the Merion installations on the Parkway. Do you support that?

DG: It's as specified in Judge Ott's decision. He wants the galleries to be replicated. The arrangements will be replicated as they were in Merion. I think that’s the spirit of Judge Ott's decision. I think everybody -- the board, myself -- is committed to working within Judge Ott's constraints. I think that’s how he would interpret that. I read the decision carefully at the time. I think he’s a very thoughtful man. He spent huge amounts of time reviewing it.

MAN: Will you pledge to sell none of the Barnes' art, neither work on the walls in the galleries or otherwise?

DG: I have no thoughts of selling art. To say will I pledge holds me in a way when I haven't even started the job and I haven't even met all of the members of the board. But I will say that I have no thoughts of selling… It's not something I see as being necessary. There are times when you deaccession to build a collection which I’ve done [at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts]… but the Barnes doesn’t need its collection built. You only deaccession to build a collection. It's one of those collections where the founder says he doesn’t want to add to it. I suppose if you want me to say I pledge I could say I pledge.

MAN: What will you do with Ker-Feal?

DG: I don't know at the moment. I honestly don’t know. I'm at the point where I've just accepted the job and there’s so much thinking to be done.

MAN: For how much longer will Merion be open?

DG: I think that really does depend on how long the program phase takes. I guess construction is a bit more predictable because of how long it takes to build a building of that sort of scale which is a bit more predictable. I believe that the chairman Bernie Watson has said that it will be around 2009. You're looking at the time the building is completed before you move the art. It’s clearly going to take a very decent chunk of time to move everything even a short distance. I think people will have the opportunity to enjoy the collection in Merion in for a considerable time longer.

MAN: The condition of the galleries is not ideal. The light is horribly yellow and its intensity is often more harmful to a contemplative gaze than helpful. And there are works on paper that simply should not be out for decades on end and that are fading badly. Will you make changes in the galleries in Merion in short order?

DG: I must tell you this story: I once had a conversation with somebody who is long gone from the Barnes. They were pointing out a picture on the second floor, a Cezanne, and they were telling me about the blue areas. They said, 'Can you see the marvelous blues and the marvelous reds and how they relate?' I said, 'I can't relate. The blinds are yellow. The lights are yellow. So it’s green.' One has gotten pretty much used to seeing everything under that yellowish hue.

But I don't think there’s going to be a great deal of, I don’t know, to be honest at the moment I'm not there yet. All I know from doing other construction projects is that by and large one tends to focus on the new rather than on what’s there. The building is still going to be used further down the track and how it’s used is yet to be determined. It's a very beautiful piece of architecture.

MAN will publish a Q&A with new Barnes boss Derek Gillman on Monday (and then I'll promptly disappear for a week-long vacation). Here's Philly Inky art critic Edward Sozanski on the Gillman hire:

His appointment confirms that, since the Barnes received court permission to expand its board, it has become thoroughly corporate in its outlook. The current board, dominated by lawyers, financiers and business people, was selected to raise the several hundred million dollars the foundation needs to underwrite a radical transformation from school and domestically scaled gallery to international tourist attraction. Based on his record at the Pennsylvania Academy, Gillman appears to be an appropriate point man for this dubious mission.

This morning's news events remind me of a conversation I had dozens of times in the years immediately after 9/11: Where is the art the responds to the attacks of that day? I've always intended to write something long and thoughtful about this or to give a talk on it somewhere, but I never have.

For several years afterward I looked intensely for 9/11-specific artwork, finding little. Shirin Neshat's Tooba, an updating of several traditional Sufi motifs, was the best single work of art I saw about 9/11 and the immediate aftermath of the attacks. In 2003 I wrote:

Tooba shows us that while middle easterners people may try and try to escape the violence and oppression in their backgrounds, while they may think they have found an Eden to which they can emigrate, they find that the modern journey does not end as simply as the mythical Sufi journey.

I also thought that Lari Pittman's post-9/11 paintings captured something very specific about the fear Americans felt after the attacks. In 2004 I wrote this for a magazine:

Built from matte oil, aerosol lacquer, and cel-vinyl paint, Pittman’s paintings are full of suns and moons, violent implements, recliners, axes, totem poles, robots, diamonds, spray bottles, spray mists, cucumbers with barbed spikes, desolate, mountainous landscapes and about a zillion other things. While violence usually tears situations apart, here each painting is held together by the threat of violence. These paintings draw their strength and unity from that which scares us most.

A few other pieces come close to Neshat's and Pittman's work. Hiraki Sawa's dwelling is too funny to be haunting. An Eric Fischl sculpture is too direct. I've seen some other 9/11-specific work, but most of it has been reactionary or too close to agitprop. Bloggers? Others?

• Anish Kapoor in Rockefeller Center (with photos);
• The Getty hires a UK-based ad firm to, uh, to... well, to do something;
• The New York Observer's Michael Calderone notes that James Truman is staffing 'his' new art mag Modern Painters with Artforumers. (Scroll to second item.) Oh goody: If there's one thing better than one sleep-inducing art magazine it's two sleep-inducing art magazines.

In this morning's NYT (and in what could have been a front-page story) Alan Riding looks at the Victoria and Albert's new Islamic art galleries. Included in the piece:

The question is pertinent because, notably since 9/11, many museums in Europe and the United States have begun highlighting collections and exhibitions of Islamic art as a way of promoting greater understanding and bridging the cultural gap between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds.

Well, not exactly. For years I've been complaining in this space that American museums have largely ignored Islamic art, whether contemporary and not. Yes, there are exceptions: MoMA launched a show of art from the 'Islamic world' (more on that deeply problematic exhibit here). The Smithsonian's Freer/Sackler has held several exhibits of Persian manuscript painting and there are a couple of other examples too. The Met's Islamic art galleries have been closed, but for renovation. But by and large, American museums have pretty much ignored Islamic art over the last five years. (Many even hid specific works in the wake of the Danish cartoon firestorm.) Collectively it's one of the biggest failures of American museumdom in the post-9/11 years.

(America's art critics haven't done much better on this one. I haven't read anyone calling out American museums on this.)

Last night Ned Lamont beat incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman to win the Democratic nomination for Connecticut's U.S. Senate seat. A few weeks ago Lamont supporters created this parade float to spotlight Lieberman's post-SOTU kiss of President Bush. It's better than any Thomas Hirschhorn I've seeen.

Related: The U.S. Department of Defense creates a John Baldessari.

From Carol Vogel's new-Barnes-boss story this morning. (And in case you've forgotten, today is Tuesday):

"This is not a low-profile institution, nor is it a low-profile challenge," Mr. [Derek] Gillman said in a telephone interview on Sunday. "But it's an incredibly important one."

If Vogel discovered the story on Sunday or if the Barnes' PR firm handed the story to Vogel on Sunday, why didn't it run until now?

And this makes us laugh: The news was actually on MAN many hours before it was on NYT.com. We claim no scoop -- we just read the press release and posted the news. Therefore the (possibly) embargoed leak-to-Vogel was scooped by... a PR firm's own press release! Doh!

At what point does the NYT cease to be a newspaper and at what point does it begin to be an agent of and shill for PR firms? (You may recall this story which the NYT also got on an embargoed basis -- and still screwed up.)

Over the last few weeks I've been enjoying all of the attention that DC-based artist William Christenberry has been receiving. For no particular single reason, Christenberry's everywhere. Here's a list:

• Christenberry is semi-retrospected in a major year-long show at the new Smithsonian American Art Museum (Christenberry video is here);
• And also in a show at the Aperture Foundation in Chelsea (Flash warning) that, I think, opens at the Birmingham (Ala.) Museum of Art on Oct. 1.
• DC's Hemphill Fine Arts has a small selection of Christenberrys on view;
• The New York Times' Philip Gefter wrote an excellent Sunday story about Christenberry last month, and the LAT mentioned him too. National Public Radio talked with the artist, and the Washington Post's Jessica Dawson did too; 
• A new Aperture-published book of Christenberry's photography is out; and
• Blogs have piled on too, including Artists Unite.

In 1928 Clyfford Still was a young man caught between two worlds.

Four years earlier, at the age of 20, he graduated from a Spokane, Wash. high school. Still did not particularly enjoy his years at home. Whether in Grandin, North Dakota where he was born, in southern Alberta, or in eastern Washington, his family farmed. Still hated farming. He didn't talk much about his childhood, but when he related stories about farming he used typically absolutist terms. "He always said farming was about constant killing, whether it's the wheat or the birds of the meat," Diane Still, his daughter, told me last year.

Like many fathers and sons, Still and his dad didn't get along. The senior Still did not approve of Clyfford's interest in art, at one point throwing out paintings his son had made. John was a committed but not especially good farmer, and it may have also bothered him that his son so hated how he made his living. Still's mother supported his creative interests, both painting and piano playing.

So in 1925 Still traveled to New York, intending to study at the Art Students League. He quickly left and returned to Washington, where he enrolled in Spokane University. In 1928 he returned to New York and the Art Students League, and quickly gave it up again.

It is at about this time that the Smithsonian American Art Museum believes Still painted the painting above, which is on view in SAAM's Luce Center. It is one of not more than a couple of paintings from this period of Still's life that are known to exist. As far as I know, it's the only one on view in a museum. As I'll discuss in my next post, I think it's particularly autobiographical.

• Is there anything fishy about the ICA Boston's construction delay? The Exhibitionist asked the Walker's Kathy Halbreich, who is probably the museum director most respected by her peers;
• Fixing Las Vegas traffic with a concrete spiral in the sky. (Memo to spiral-ers: Louis Kahn was here first.);
• Emily Jacir live in Lebanon. Or would be if I'd linked to this on July 28 when she wrote it. In a related story, Jacir and others are calling for a 'cultural boycott' of Israel (more here), that is the "cancel[ing of] all exhibitions and other cultural events that are scheduled to occur in Israel."

According to Le Monde (and as translated by Artforum) butterfingered curator Catherine Grenier is a finalist to run the Jeu de Paume.

You may remember Grenier: Not only were three pieces of art in her Los Angeles 1955-85 show broken or damaged, but she seemed shockingly unconcerned and blamed, uh, well, anyone but herself for it.

Here's one way to get the attention of the French: Museums and collectors should start pulling their loans from the Paris version of the Rauschenberg combines show. I mean, if I owned a combine, I sure wouldn't trust the Pompidou with it...

Loners who make art apart from a community of fellow progressives are often derided. Art history has labeled some as 'outsider artists' and and punted them into folk art museums. Others, such as Henri Rousseau, are sometimes denied the measure of their accomplishments: If you aren't a radical, how can you create -- or receive credit for creating -- great, progressive art?

Easy: By following what interests you instead of leading a pack. It is an art historical myth that Rousseau was a clueless naif on a government pension, unaware and uninfluenced by the art of his time. As a smallish Rousseau retrospective at the National Gallery shows, Le Douanier knew exactly what he was doing. His paintings were more formally accomplished in the stylish manner of the day than is usually recognized. His interest in bourgeois pursuits was in line with his impressionist contemporaries. He is an authentic modern pioneer. That's the cleverness of the NGA show: It makes clear just how cutting-edge Rousseau's paintings were while nodding at how much Rousseau wanted official approval for his canvases.

In the space of just 49 paintings, it is obvious that Rousseau not only was no bumpkin, but that he knew enough about the academic and state tastes of his day to paint in the academic style -- to a point. Compared to the revolutionaries of the day, the impressionists, Rousseau was tame in one obvious way: in his handling of paint. The impressionists were big on painterliness. Load up the brush and slather on the oils, the more impasto the better. That wasn't Rousseau. He laid paint on the canvas thinly, carefully, smoothly, flatly -- exactly within the preferred academic style of the day. He subverted academic painting in every other possible way: subject matter, disfigured figures in portrait, light sources, you name it. But the one rule to which Rousseau hewed, almost inexplicably really, was in painting glassy-smooth canvases.

Looking at those paintings now, Rousseau's paint handling makes his jungles and park scenes look all the more stunning. (When confronted with a jungle scene from 40 paces, a viewer is tempted to slip into the time-honored dismissal my child could have painted that. But the closer you get to a Rousseau, the more obvious it is that lil' Teddy could not have.) Rousseau painted few academy-preferred, Meissonier-like scenes: No military triumphs, no mythological tableaux that recalled the more recent glory of France. Of course, Rousseau wasn't as anatomically precise as Meissonier (the academy admired that too), but as it turns out, so what? Meissonier was overtaken by the camera, Rousseau remains Rousseau.

That atypical subject matter doesn't make Rousseau a cluelessoutsider, it makes him a bonafide modern. Like Degas, Manet, and their contemporaries, Rousseau was painting life as it was lived around him. His jungle scenes were inspired by popular interest in exotic animals and far-off places. His portraits featured people he knew, parks he visited, and games that were popular with the emerging middle class (at left). (The NGA show presents case after case of cheap magazines and other common entertainment that makes it clear how grounded in pop culture Rousseau was. Were Rousseau painting today, it's easy to imagine him being into Carrie Underwood, Tim Gunn, and NASCAR scenes.)

This NGA show makes a backhanded claim for Rousseau as a modernist pioneer, a painter of modern life who took inspiration from pop culture more than any other artist wood until Warhol. That's not simple, that's visionary.

Related: The exhibition catalog is fantastic.

Some stories (more or less) from the weekend:

• Harvard has a $26 billion endowment -- and it still has to raise museum admissions fees? Lame. Oops: Harvard students do get in for free, other students pay the you're-not-good-enough-for-Harvard tax of $6.
• In the NYT Ted Loos tells the story of the Gugg's docent-guides. (Note to Ryan Hill, the ex-Gugg education manager of adult interpretive programs who is quoted in the NYT story: Welcome to your new job at the Hirshhorn! You have your work cut out for you because the Hirshhorn is the worst-guarded museum in America, a 'Pompidou oopsie!' waiting to happen. On Saturday I walked into the museum, turned left at the top of an escalator and saw a child leaning against an Arneson. A gallery away two guards were chattering away, oblivious to their, uh, jobs.)
• Christopher Knight saw the same Cathy Opie show at the OCMA that I did.
• Ken Johnson -- you've read him in the NYT -- is the Boston Globe's new art critic.

Last week we told you about the Virginia MFA's slobberknockin'-good new Julie Mehretu painting. The museum also has a new Sally Mann: Jessie #34, a 50-by-40-inch gelatin silver print with varnish of Mann's daughter Jessie. (You may recognize the image from the invite of Mann's last Gagosian Gallery show.)

The making of images in this series of close-ups of Mann's family (including herself) is documented in the recent documentary about which we've told you before: What Remains. And, as you might possibly be aware, Mann has photographed her children before, when they were much younger.

Another neat thing about the VMFA acquiring its sixth Mann: She lives 135 miles away in Lexington, Va. Along with part-time resident Cy Twombly (also a Lexingtoner) Mann is Virginia's most prominent living artist. A few years ago Republican Virginia governor James Gilmore publicly chastised the museum for showing Mann's work. The museum, obviously, was unbowed.

Related: Some other recent VMFA acquisitions are spotlighted here. Sally Mann's What Remains book (at almost $20 off).

Lots going on today (and we posted a good bit late yesterday, so scroll down):

• The opening of the ICA Boston has been delayed;
• LA Weekly scribe Doug Harvey on Jason Rhoades and his absence from LA;
• CRASH! Sorry -- that was just the Pompidou checking in with a 'bonjour;'
• The destruction of the National Mall continues;
• Getty chairman John Biggs, who often seemed to be looking the other way as malfeasance grew around him as if it were kudzu, is out at the Getty.

That's it for us today unless we hear of museum(s) or major collector(s) pulling out of the Pompidou's version of the Rauschenberg combines show. Speaking of which: The Pompidou just can't keep its feet out of its mouth. From Carol Vogel's follow of the story the LAT broke yesterday:

As for the [destroyed] Peter Alexander sculpture, [a Pompidou spokesperson] said: "I understand it hadn’t been shown in years. We worked closely with the artist and followed his precise instructions." (Yes, because who cares about art if it hasn't been shown in years?)

and;

Referring to the two wall sculptures... the Pompidou Center [spokesperson] said that perhaps it was "no coincidence that works of the same period were affected." She added: "We do regret this enormously. We are experienced and do look after fragile works of art." (Yes, because it's the artists' fault?!? And by we "do look after fragile works of art," she means "after they've fallen to the ground and shattered.")

Word of the Pompidou's incompetence is racing through the art world this morning. Given not only the gross incompetence of the museum but the museum's non-chalant attitude about its having destroyed art, I hope that MOCA's Rauschenberg Combines show never makes it to the Pompidou. (It is scheduled to open there on Oct. 11.) Are donors pulling out of the show? It seems likely. We're working the email/phones now...

UPDATE: I've emailed ten American museums that have loaned to the show. I don't know yet how many of them planned to send work to Paris. For example, the Art Institute of Chicago has two pieces in the show -- but they weren't going to Paris anyway. More as I hear it...

This spring, the Pompidou Center hosted a major show about the rise of contemporary art in one of the world's major art-making centers. Titled "Los Angeles 1955-85," the exhibit featured hundreds of works -- and challenged the usual, tired art historical view that New York was the only nexus of American contemporary art. (The New York Times, remarkably, seems not to have known of the show. Not a word. I mean if Artkrush can do a Parisian show, you think the NYT might have a clue about it, right? Right?)

In a fantastic story on the front page of today's LA Times, Christopher Reynolds reveals that the Pompidou "accidentally destroyed" two works: A nice LACMA-owned Craig Kauffman sculpture and a Peter Alexander. Both were, essentially, dropped. A third piece, a Bob Irwin 'dot painting' was damaged. From the LAT:

"It's not our guilt," Catherine Grenier, who curated the show for the Pompidou, said from her Paris home. "For me, it's not a coincidence. These two works were made of the same materials, and made in the same period. And both were incredibly fragile."

A LACMA curator seemed unconcerned: "We documented the images photographically," she explained. "We still have the pictures of the pieces. In color, too."

Oops! Wait a second. Sorry, my bad -- I just got confused there. That was actually pretty much LACMA's reaction to its destruction of its own art, not to the Pompidou's destruction of LACMA's art.

Let's see if I can get this right: "It's a terribly important piece, for the artist, the institution and the community. It's a major loss for us," LACMA curator Lynn Zelevansky said of the Kauffman. "Whatever the market wants to say about it, in terms of the history of Los Angeles art, this is crucial material, and this was a very important piece."

Ah, much better. (Kind of.)

Because this is the story that keeps on giving, then Grenier, the French curator, kept talking: "We are waiting for the report to tell exactly what was wrong. But it's not something with the installation, not something with the public."

Uh, then, uh... how did the works get destroyed? Evil Hogwarts? George W. Bush tried to give them a backrub? Puh-leeze.

Diane Haithman's LAT Jason Rhoades obituary is here. It is full of remarkable passages, such as:

At the time of his death, Rhoades was preparing a live event for Aug. 12 in Portland, Ore., with curator Marjorie Myers. It was to feature a wrestling match involving homeless teenagers wallowing in a plastic pool filled with bath soaps, lotions and sexual lubricants.

Hah! I'd like to see the Pompidou break that! (And: Who would they blame?) Here's a quick blogosphere rundown on Rhoades. (All have photos of Rhoades' work.)

• PORT;
• The Stranger;
• Leap Into the Void;
• Art or Idiocy; and
• Spastic Robot.

Last year we told you that Harvard was selling a Cassatt. (Harvard tried to be sneaky about the sale, listing it merely as property of a university art museum.) While the Harvard University Art Museums failed to return several of my phone calls, it eventually told the Boston Globe that it was selling Cassatt to buy a better Cassatt. The Globe's art blog Exhibitionist followed up this week: HUAM told the Globe that it recently made a Cassatt purchase.

What they got doesn't sound like a $4 million buy to me, so whatcha doing with the rest of the cash HUAM? UPDATE: Apparently Cassatt prints are pricier than I would have guessed (and did). So maybe... 

The three Whitney-owned works in the Rauschenberg combines show (Satellite, Summer Rental +2, Blue Eagle) are staying in.

Museums such as the Virginia MFA, the Albright-Knox, the Des Moines Art Center, SFMOMA and the Walker weren't planning on sending their combines to Paris anyway. The only Sonnabend work about which I've heard word is Canyon, which was never scheduled to go to Paris.

Artist Jason Rhoades has died. Portland alt-space Organism was to have hosted a Rhoades event on Aug. 12 and has posted a short note. Art.blogging.la has the news too. Nothing yet on the website of his NYC dealer David Zwirner. Elsewhere:

• For most of the last day or two, photos of Ron Mueck sculptures have been prominent among the most-viewed and most-emailed pix on Yahoo;
• MAN and AJ seem to be experiencing some outages today. Sorry about that;
• David Ng writes about museum blogs in the LAT. In a related story, the Walker's Off Center is a year old and wants some feedback;
• Also in the LAT, Christopher Miles says ya gotta see the Matthew Barney show at SFMOMA, mostly;
• In the StL P-D, David Bonetti finds the St. Louis Art Museum's new permanent collection installations worthy of attention. More critics should write about these;
• We like it when regional newspaper-based critics travel: DMNer Janet Kutner goes to Santa Fe.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts may be in the midst of a $108 million Rick Mather-designed expansion, but that hasn't stopped the museum from acquiring contemporary art. VMFA curator John Ravenal has recently scored Julie Mehretu's Stadia III (2004), which was first exhibited at the 2004 Carnegie International. Ravenal picked out the painting in Mehretu's studio before the 2004 show.

(The piece was purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts Fund for American Art and was a partial gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.) 

I think Ravenal chose well: The Mehretu Stadia triptych was the highlight of the 2004 Carnegie. Stadia III is the right-most panel in the group (see below). All three pieces are now in museum collections; SFMOMA and the Carnegie own the other two. (Neither is online.) The fourth Mehretu Carnegie painting, Seven Acts of Mercy, is in the collection of Miamians Debra and Dennis Scholl (scroll down for a pic). It was recently on view at the Scholls' World Class Boxing space, and is now touring with the Whitney's/Elisabeth Sussman's Remote Painting show.

Mehretu's best paintings aren't just globalist, they try to explore, even define, what exactly globalism is. (For example: A 2003 Smithsonian National Museum of African Art show featured Mehretu's take on diaspora.) In Stadia Mehretu examines the confluence of corporate interest and nationalist ambition. In each of the three paintings it's  hard to tell national flags from corporate flags. Corporate logos (and Olympic logos, as if to say 'what's the dif?') overlay anything they want to. And why not -- does it matter if Siemens is an American company or if Adidas is based in Tokyo?  

The 2004 Carnegie went up at the end of an Olympic year, and Mehretu's works mine the Athens games for all those flags and pennants. The flurry of competition looks to be here too -- that green patch in the lower-right serves as grass. At the Olympics sport is merely the enabler of multi-national corporatism, so of course the playing field is shunted to a corner, away from the hullaballoo going on above it. Who was more excited to see swimmer Ian Thorpe win gold in Athens: his home country of Australia, his UK-based sponsor Speedo, or the readers of Towleroad? 

And in the lower-right of the painting, just where it would be if this were a TV screen, is an NBC logo. The business of governments, federations, and corporations goes on and we're left to watch on television.

Related: Apparently Mehretu herself is a global brand. While looking up some links for this post, I noticed that eBay has bought the top ad spot for the Google search phrase "Julie Mehretu."

Julie Mehretu in Bomb magazine. With VMFA in construction mode, Ravenal's next show, Artificial Light, will open at VCU's Anderson Gallery before traveling to MOCA North Miami's Goldman Warehouse, where it will open on ABMB weekend. I'll have news of another VMFA pick-up tomorrow. Previous acquisition posts are now listed on the right-hand side.

Confirmed: Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman has secured two key loans of delicate works for her upcoming Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective: SFMOMA's Splitting: Four Corners (left) and MoMA's Bingo. This is the 2007 show to which I'm most looking forward.

Sussman had been hopeful of getting the two loans, but given that both works are fragile and given the vagaries of travel... well, ya never know until you know. The show is scheduled to open at the Whitney next February before traveling. From what I hear, don't be surprised if the show touches down in California, too.

(Bingo must be sturdier than Rauschenberg's Rebus, which MoMA wouldn't send to Paul Schimmel's Rauschenberg combines show at MOCA.)

Disclosure/odd confluence/irony: My uncle is a San Francisco-based architectural conservator. He consulted with SFMOMA on the acquisition of Splitting.

Catching up on a few news items from last week:

• Last year I hoped against hope that an OldenBruggen sculpture of a black-tie-and-collar, slated to be plopped on a sidewalk in front of LA's Disney Hall, would somehow be not-plopped. In the LAT, Suzanne Muchnic reports that I've gotten my wish.
• The Italian government continues to cut a path through American museums. The latest to return antiquities with a shaky provenance: The MFA Boston. Strange how Malcolm Rogers had one answer for the wealthy Italians and another answer ('Buy them back') for the much-less-wealthy Guatemalan government, eh? (Also: An amusing side-note about the Italians' pursuit of objects in Harvard collections.)

It's back: Our monthly swing through GawkerForum, Artforum's usually incoherent proof that it can vacillate between impenetrable, unreadable printed screeds and impenetrable, unreadable, starfucking (or at least what passes for stars among the Artforum crue) in which the art is about as important as the temperature of the white wine.

"Encountering a cracked sheet of bulletproof glass on which the gnomic half-question 'Just an Image in the Room in Which this is Happening of Good Taste?' was spelled out in drippy enamel, I knew I had found what I was looking for." -- Catherine Taft. Apparently pre-gallery-going hits of acid are in.

"Bigwig dealers are keen to tell you that nada means "nothing" in Spanish, but proud NADA members had traveled from far-flung places like North Carolina and Massachusetts to attend this summit." -- Andrew Berardini. Apparently GawkerForum has completely dropped the pretext of the art world having anything to do with art. Because in this dispatch GF reports on a networking-heavy cocktail party of dealers.

"The next day, the shuttle bus, a mighty beast of seasoned age whose history was marked by the scraped-off casino logo on its side, took us from the Standard to the Ovitz Family Collection in Santa Monica. Ovitz was not in attendance, but collection curator Andrea Feldman Falcione led the tour with a sophisticated intern, Julianne Rosenbloom, in tow—a step up from the Broad collection tour, where a recently recruited intern led the proceedings alone." -- Berardini, who seems to think an art collection or art viewing experience is dependent on the tenure or 'sophistication' of the intern leading a tour.

David Velasco slips a metaphor past his editors: "When the discussion turned to the conspicuous lack of meat-based work in Chelsea, artist Peter Coffin divulged that his very first sculpture, crafted at the prime age of sixteen, was a 'scary monster made from raw meat.' "  

When GawkerForum-style make-sure-I'm-invited-to-the-party brown-nosing inadvertnetly becomes the punchline of the anecdote: "Koolhaas and Balmond have devised a translucent ovoid canopy that bulges over the curtain wall sheltering the café and auditorium, and while some talked of hot air balloons soaring over summer skies, others talked of golf balls and fungi, and one newspaper critic told me it was like a space station but also like a supermarket and concluded, 'You see, you just can't see up the sphincter of the thing, and that's no good!' " -- Morgan Falconer.

"It's always difficult to appreciate individual works in charged (and humid) circumstances..." -- Sarah Thornton. If only someone at GawkerForum had read this before posting anything in July!!! (Ed: Or ever, you mean?) This sentence alone could have presented an entire month of GF writer complaints about the heat -- and would have saved me the 45 minutes it took to read through their swampy argot. Next: If you can't see the art in crowded, humid circumstances, why go? Why write about it?

Too good to just quote: Old standby Linda Yablonsky ("Attending these art fairs is a bit like combat reporting, where you keep hopping on whatever helicopter is heading out to the next battlefield") spends 835 words freaking out about how after five weeks outside New York, the art scene has become full of people she just doesn't know! Ohmigod! Or that she's been 'forgotten!' Oh no! (She then drops about 200 names and spells them all correctly.) Oh, and the art? Shrug. Whatevs! (OK, OK, one FabYab quote: "[Matthew] Higgs was also collecting signatures, asking all the artists present to sign a blank canvas for later auction on behalf of a charity he supports. I signed too.")

Related: April, June.