January 2007 Archives

First on MAN: The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts has sold what may have been its best Thomas Eakins: The Cello Player. The painting was sold to a private collector, a museum spokesman confirmed.

Proceeds from the deaccessioning will be applied toward PAFA's co-purchase of Eakins' The Gross Clinic, which PAFA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are co-purchasing from Thomas Jefferson University.

According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's website (taken before The Cello Player sale) the two institutions have raised less than half of the painting's $68 million purchase price.

Eakins painted The Cello Player in 1896. It portrays celebrated cellist Rudolph Hennig, a Leipzig Conservatory product who moved to Philadelphia. PAFA purchased the painting for $500 in early 1897. It was Eakins' first museum sale since 1879 -- and he split the fee with Hennig. The painting was included in the Met's just-closed Americans in Paris 1860-1900 show. (Explanation: The painting helped Eakins earn an 'honorable mention' at the 1900 Exposition Universelle).

PAFA board vice-chair Herbert Riband recently told the Philly Inky that deaccessioning to raise money for The Gross Clinic was a possibility. No word yet from PAFA on whether this will be its only deaccessioning, the sale price, or the identity of the buyer. I have a phone call into the PMA to see if they will be deaccessioning as well.

UPDATE, 11:40 pm: The Philly Inky follows MAN, goofs on the name of Eakins' cellist. NYTer Carol Vogel follows MAN too. Gee, I wonder why "PAFA announced..."

Peter Plagens sent me a long, thoughtful note about yesterday's post. He OK'd quoting some of it here. Here are a couple of choice morsels:

[A]lthough what [Michael] Kimmelman writes in the way of a review of a retro at MoMA may turn out to be hagiography, it's still his "considered judgment," i.e., a longish piece of prose in polite language in which he sets out his case with some clarity. Which is to say, "considered judgments" are often wrong...

I didn't compare "a blog--which is a medium--to art criticism." I merely said that some art writers have gone into blogging. If I'd said that some art writers have started writing for daily newspapers, I wouldn't be comparing daily newspapers--a medium--to art criticism, would I? And as for art criticism being a "format": I'd be pressed to find format a whole lot of similarities in, say, Holland Cotter's stuff and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh's. Wouldn't you? ...

Snark may be only a tiny fraction of what you do in MAN (in terms of number of words, perhaps--but one clever little phrase, as you well know, can snarkify a whole blog item), but it's what I read you for... (Hell, I even regularly read Charlie Finch--who thinks I'm a piece of sh*t--because he's so good at it.) The art world is besotted with press-release thinking and -- in guises ranging from breaking news to theory snooze-hagiography. (Yes, I've written some [hagiography] myself.) So many balloons, so few pins.

If you're an art-lover it's a good night to stay home and watch TV. Or internet-TV. Or both. Here's the lineup (all times ET):

Sorry for the AM sloth: AJ had some server issues...

1. I think that the de Young does this in their American art galleries -- and to fine effect.

2. I think I can't get into this Pollock story but Exhibitionist has all the links.

3. I think this is a fun exchange from a Michael Auping-Hiroshi Sugimoto podcast:
   

   Auping: There are so many interesting contradictions about you as a person, I think, but also about your work. You were basically a marxist art dealer.
   Sugimoto: The NYT titled me once the 'zen marxist.'

4. I think that the Miami Art Museum's Herzog & de Meuron building will be pretty, er, cool. Can you find the hints about their design plans in the Miami lecture Jacques Herzog gave last week?

5. I think that the two big new American sculpture parks wanna throw down! The Hirshhorn has been hosting a semi-regular series of panel discussions on public art... so here's hoping the Hirsh builds a ring for a rollicking public program.

I think one of the most masturbatory discussions in the art world is about whether art criticism is dead. (Translation: Is anyone reading me?)

In this month's Art in America, former Newsweek critic Peter Plagens broadens that discussion by looking at what's up in the newspaper and magazine worlds. Most of his analysis seemed pretty in-touch, but I respectfully disagree with him on this paragraph:

"Exceptions [to reader disinterest in art critics] exist -- as with the lead critics for a few of the major dailies -- but they don't abound. More and more people in the audience for contemporary art would rather read Tyler Green snark somebody in his blog, Modern Art Notes, than ponder the considered judgment of Michael Kimmelman on a MoMA retrospective. Many art writers have either added unpaid blogging to their activities or been squeezed into it from want of other, traditional outlets -- for which many bloggers don't have enough writerly inclination or discipline, anyway. Each of those art bloggers has a following of fans and other bloggers, and each of those bloggers has... and so on. A growing form of art criticism consists of posting links to other people's criticism, which consists of posting links... and so on."

Comparing a blog -- which is a medium -- to art criticism -- which is a writerly, often journalistic format -- is like comparing film to a Henny Youngman one-liner. Some blogs claim to be repositories of criticism, many make no such pretense.

And to the extent that critics such as Kimmelman have lost their audiences, they have only themselves to blame. (Plagens' choice of Kimmelman is odd -- when it comes to retros Kimmelman has nearly completely ditched "considered judgment" for mini-biography, usually hagiography. He is not so much the NYT's 'chief art critic' as the NYT's chief art-features writer.)

Why have bloggers found an audience -- and a growing one at that? Bloggers are writerly entrepeneurs. Instead of expecting an audience to come to us in the musty art magazines, we work to earn readers, to build audiences, to be a writerly 'brand.' Many bloggers, myself included, have consciously rejected the 'traditional' art criticism model because it's confining and appropriate only for dino-media.

And on MAN: Snark is about two percent of what I do here, and most of the snark here is short-hand for years-old, oft-repeated positions (such as virtually anything I type about Malcolm Rogers). I'd like to think that there's plenty of art criticism on MAN, a lot of considered judgment, plenty of only-on-MAN news, information, and hopefully some fresh ways of thinking about art and about issues in the art world. If the site isn't that, I'll have to work harder to get it there.

The Judd Foundation's mission is to "promote a wider appreciation and understanding of Judd's artistic legacy by facilitating public access to these spaces and resources (in NYC and Texas) and developing scholarly and educational programs. How's it doing?

Among the most-expensive house-tours in America: The Judd Foundation is now offering tours of Donald Judd's 101 Spring Street residence at 11am on Fridays. The cost: $30. [via] The first once-a-week groups of eight went through the house last Friday.

(As of this typing, the Judd Foundation has yet to formally announce the opening of the property. A press release is supposed to go out today. I only heard because the Foundation leaked first-word to a lifestyle mag. Preventing sticker-shock by hiding the sticker?)

I'm hardly an expert on house tours, but here are some points of admissions-price comparison: The Biltmore Estate, which weighs in at 250 rooms and is thus somewhat bigger than 101 Spring, charges $25-44 for entry. Hearst Castle, which is also a bit larger than 101 Spring, has a complicated ticket pricing system with prices (I think) between $20 and $30. Early American decorative arts mecca Winterthur charges $20. The $30 fee is 50 percent more than New York's two most-expensive regular museum admissions ($20 at MoMA and $20 suggested at the Met). Judd will offer student and senior tickets for $15.

I'm glad that 101 Spring Street is open to the public, but the price is exclusionary rather than inclusionary. I'm not sure how this furthers Judd's legacy or makes his work more accessible to anyone except those already enamored of it -- and wealthy enough to get in.

Chinati is still $10.

Related: The Judd Foundation sale part one, part two.

Jasper Johns is one of the co-stars of the Magritte & Pals exhibition at LACMA. "Of all the artists of the post-war generation who absorbed the spirit of Magritte," writes Stephanie Barron in the show's catalog, "it is Johns who displays the closest links." The proximity of several Johnses in Barron's installation (including LACMA's own Figure 7 at right and the Broad Art Foundation's White Flag) makes a killer case.

Meanwhile, yesterday a Jeffrey Weiss-curated exhibit about Jasper Johns' 1955-1965 output opened at the National Gallery of Art. Rene Magritte is mentioned nowhere in the catalogue.

So how is it one major curator thinks that Magritte is central to Johns' work, while another apparently doesn't? Answer: For reasons not immediately clear to me, Weiss has excluded Johns' flags and numbers and so on from his show, allowing only four Johnsian motifs: targets, the stenciled names of colors, the imprint of the body, and handprints. Weiss knew that the exclusion of those works would be questioned, and addresses it in his catalogue essay:

"Isolating the structure of the linkage from the rest of Johns' production is a heuristic conceit, but the pattern it represents cuts through the center of Johns' activity, establishing terms by which process divulges itself to be the primary source for a poetics of the work."

Or, to put it in English: 'I have an argument I want to make, and because I can eliminate a couple of key bodies of work, I will.' Fine. Curator's prerogative. But the result is an oddly incomplete look at Johns' best decade; too much argument and not enough The Way it Was.

Back in LA, Barron's Johnses make her thesis sing: Certainly no artist in Barron's show owes more to LACMA's seminal Magritte. With his flag paintings Johns was saying "This is not a flag," but he was also saying, "Can this be a painting?" and then, "Can it be both a painting and a flag?" Like Magritte with his pipe, Johns is happy to leave his questions sitting there, unanswered. (In 1991 Robert Gober took Magritte's question, did something with it, and then by tackling Johns' questions did something else to it.)

I don't mean to imply that tying Johns to Magritte would improve the NGA show, just that the banishment of key works (works so effectively used 3,000 miles away) make up a befuddling omission. (More on this next week, I think.) I can't imagine that a curator would launch a show of mid-1960sThiebauds and leave out all paintings of pies, or that a curator would put together a Flavin show that included no diagonal lights -- only verticals or horizontals. I'm not sure what would be gained or learned from those exclusions. And I can't figure out what we learn about Johns' first decade by excluding some of his best works.

Previously: Magritte & Ruscha I,and a dream juxtaposition.

Last year I was the low-light on a panel of fairly distinguished arts journos. (The panel discussion was held at a National Arts Journalism Program conference.) Our ranks included Bloomberg's Jeff Weinstein, NYT arts editor Sam Sifton, PRI's Kurt Andersen, and others. At one point Sifton said something about his staff and blogging and I replied that I thought that the MSM should probably hire bloggers to blog because to that point I hadn't seen a lot of daily journos really figure out the whole blogging thing.

Now, eight months later, a bunch of print journos are active in the art-blogging realm: There's Geoff Edgers at the Boston Globe, Richard Lacayo at Time, Regina Hackett at the Seattle P-I, the Washington City Paper's Jeffry Cudlin, Jen Graves at The Stranger, and so on.

It has become obvious that I was wrong, that many daily journos eventually figured it out. Sure, many daily journos who blog write endlessly long, character-lacking posts (see many of the 'blogs' at washingtonpost.com, for example), but in the arts realm all of the writers I just mentioned maintain entertaining sites. All of them interact with the rest of the blogosphere. Few of them attempt to drive an agenda via blog the way experienced bloggers do (the political blogs excel at this), but in time...

Anyway, I was wrong. And I'm really enjoying being wrong on this one well into the future. I'd love it if Doug Harvey started blogging. And Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Robert Hughes, Alan Riding, Ren Weschler, Kenneth Baker...

UPDATE: My wrongness continues: Doug Harvey's new-ish blog is here.

Flickr for art museums: No, this isn't another fair-use/flashbulbs story. A bunch of American museums, including the Met, the Gugg, SFMOMA and Indianapolis are putting their entire collections online via a platform called Steve. Sounds very cool. There's more in this thorough story by Erika D. Smith in the Indy Star. [via]

(This sounds like it would be especially good for use in classroom situations. Which makes it all the more too bad that art history has been largely taken out of public schools.)

Christopher Knight on LACMA, the Hammer and shared interests: This makes way too much sense for it to happen.

It's official: MAN is now all-Gugg, all-Vezzoli, all the time! Last week I told you about Francesco Vezzoli's forthcoming appearance at the Venice Biennale and I've been posting Gugg stuff like mad the last two days. So here's one last tidbit....

Expect the Gugg to work with Francesco Vezzoli to create a Marina Abramovic-type event at the museum during the next Performa.

Continued from yesterday's catch-up-with-the-Gugg posts, when we discussed membership and architecture and design. Today: Collecting.

From my NYO story: "In fiscal years 2001 to 2003, the Guggenheim spent an average of fewer than a million dollars per year on acquisitions, half to a fifth as much as comparable museums such as the Whitney, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. (In 2004, the Guggenheim's 2004 numbers were more in line with its peers.) 'My ambition is to double [what we spend on buying art] as quickly as possible,' Ms. Dennison said."

Today: The Gugg hasn't doubled its acquisitions budget yet. "I think what I take great encouragement from was that at our last board meeting I was happy to report that in addition to the monies that our collection groups had raised for acquisitions over the past year we had a substantial [growth in] percentage, about 20 percent, above that of donated funds from members the collection committees," Dennison said. "Which means that we're getting them excited about what we wanted to acquire and they're stepping outside their dues to help us buy works of art."

The Guggenheim is showing signs of becoming more permanent collection focused: The Gugg will increase the number of collection shows it puts on (to one out of every three exhibition cycles), and Dennison says that she is working to make more space in the museum for permanent collection galleries. ("We're close, but we haven't finalized that yet," she said.) And it's increasingly buying out of exhibits: "We've asked our curators to prioritize work from exhibits, such as the Russia show," Dennison said. The Gugg bought or is in the process of buying two pieces from that exhibition.

Dennison is also proud of what the museum has acquired in her tenure, including a gifted 1959 Agnes Martin drawing (above), this Cathy Opie, a set of early Richard Prince photographs, Roni Horn, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Hughye, and the Francesco Vezzoli we wrote about here recently. And under her watch Deutsche Bank gave the Gugg the commissions it sponsored as part of a recent series, including works by Bill Viola (Going Forth by Day, shown here and the last good Viola I've seen), Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, Lawrence Weiner and James Rosenquist.

You no doubt know that each day ArtsJournal summarizes the day's top art news and opinion stories on the AJ front page. Today AJ editor-boss Doug McLennan summarized an Artnews magazine story thusly:

How "did a work by Klimt, who was largely ignored by the art establishment just a few decades ago, suddenly vault more than four times to a previous auction record of $29.1 million? How did he surpass even Picasso, whose $104.2 million Blue Period Boy with a Pipe (1905)--still a much discussed market milestone two years after the fact--officially holds the slot for the most expensive painting sold at public auction?"

Answer to Artnews' question: Easily. And it's a totally goofy, market-based comparison. Boy with a Pipe is an average Picasso, a painting from Picasso's pre-breakthrough 'safe' period, a market scarcity rather than a great work. Adele is one of Klimt's three greatest, most important paintings, and one of the paintings that helped usher in modern art.

And while Klimt may have been ignored by the US art establishment until recently (he certainly wasn't ignored in Europe), that's because there was so little Klimt here, because so much Klimt scholarship has been done in German and not translated into English, because Americans tend to run their 20th century art history through Paris and not Vienna and so on. In short: Here's an example of the art media being more interested in following the market than in writing about art.

Last year I wrote a series of posts about the best Clyfford Still ever to come up for auction. The 1947 painting (at left) blew away all previous Still auction records, selling for $19 million, over five times the low estimate and six times Still's previous auction record. As is often the case, the painting promptly disappeared after the auction and I couldn't find out who had bought it. (I don't think anyone else did either.)

This just in: The painting has turned up. Blogger extraordinaire Jeff Jahn found it here.

It's a busy afternoon at MAN HQ so I'll wrap up the Gugg troika tomorrow. (However I have updated this morning's post with SFMOMA's recent membership data.) In the meantime some blogroll adds:

Taking pictures with pricey digital cameras is apparently a topic to which everyone can relate. At the end of a musing on the topic about which I posted yesterday, the Seattle P-I's Regina Hackett finds a photo she wishes she'd taken. (I've given you a hint there on the right.) And at Heart as Arena, Brent Burket finds the world's neat-o-est kunsthalle photo policy.

But this is still my favorite story about photography in sculpture parks. (How many museum directors do you think would offer up that story unprompted?)

Continued from here... Architecture & design:
Then: Dennison "may expand the Guggenheim's curatorial structure and collecting focus to include architecture and design"

Now: "We are going to be hiring a senior curator of architecture and design," Dennison said. "Last year we brought on an assistant curator for architecture and design, which has underscored the need to build the [area]. To really move forward and take on challenging issues, like should we have a collection in architecture and design, is to bring on someone with more expertise."

Dennison added that in February the Gugg would convene a group of "eminent thinkers in the world" to strategize how to find the right curator and to consider how to add architecture to the museum's programming.

Fifteen months ago I wrote a piece for the New York Observer about the end of the Tom Krens' directorship at the Guggenheim Museum and the beginning of the Lisa Dennison era. In that story Dennison discussed three priorities:

* Increasing membership;
* Doubling the Guggenheim's spending on acquisitions; and
* Exploring adding architecture and design to the Guggenheim's curatorial and possibly collecting portfolio.

Last Friday Dennison and I talked about how she was doing on her priorities. (Journos are frequently accused of not following up on things like this, of checking with directors at only the beginning and end of their tenures. I know I do this too, so I thought I'd check-in with the Gugg for a status report.) Over the course of three posts today I'll take a look at each issue Dennison raised. Membership is first.

Membership: From the NYO story: "Museum membership is so low that a museum spokesman wouldn't even release the numbers upon request. 'There's definitely room for improvement,' Ms. Dennison said."

Today: "It's gone up, but we're still looking to increase it," Dennison said. "There's room for improvement in tri-state-area memberships." A museum spokesman told me that membership stands at ~7,700, a 17 percent increase over 2005 and a 32 percent bump from 2004.

Dennison said that the Guggenheim's First Friday's cocktail hour, aimed at young professionals, had led to an unexpected rise in memberships -- members don't have to wait in line, and who wants to wait in line to get in to a shindig? But the best part for Dennison is, well, see the picture above. "In a year during which we've looked like we're under construction," Dennison said. "Membership has improved."

However the Gugg still trails its peer institutions in membership numbers. Intentionally random points of comparison: Cleveland Museum of Art: 16,000; ICA Boston: 6,500; Metropolitan Museum: 125,000; Frist Center for the Visual Arts: 11,000. (Slobberknocker comparison: In 2004 SFMOMA had 57,000 members. I'll try to post the 2006 number here later today. UPDATE: SFMOMA's current membership is ~36,000.)

Two interesting posts on whether photography is OK in art exhibits:

The New Museum's new exclamation-pointed panel discussion series Hot Button! is now available via podcast.

I'm been enjoying the back-and-forth titled "Passion," which features one-namers such as Gioni, Saltz and Obrist. The surprise of the panel is Gioni asking John Richardson (a one-namer if not for the common surname) if he saw Pablo Picasso naked. The duh moment of the panel: When asked to talk about passion, Hans-Ulrich O. talked about... himself.

One last post on Ruscha & Magritte: As I walked through LACMA's Magritte & Friends, I found myself hoping that I would arrive at a gallery in which Magritte's Time Transfixed (left) would be juxtaposed with Ruscha's The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire. I knew that it wasn't going to be, but I felt like the show was building to a faceoff between the two.

LACM is the closest Ruscha got to making a surrealist painting. Instead it is 'spectacularly unlikely' even richly 'unreal.' Ruscha painted it between 1965 and 1968 when he painted a number of works that are similarly unreal --check out Give Him Anything And He'll Sign It, No Sleep, Strange Catch For A Fresh Water Fish, all from 1965. In 1966 Ruscha apparently dropped unlikely unreal-ism for his new liquid paintings, which occupied him throughout much of 1967 as well.

In 1968 he returned to unlikely unreality, possibly only to finish LACM, a painting that the Hirshhorn says he started in 1965. Most everything else Ruscha made in 1968 were liquid words, with a burning Standard station thrown in for good measure.

While Magritte painted lots of unlikely and unreal images (with a hat-tip to Rene Russo, we referenced one of them yesterday), Time Transfixed is among the most unique and unlikely images in his oeuvre. (He riffed on his own apples, bowlers, pipes, etc., but not so far as I know on this one.)

Again, Ruscha to Lynn Zelevansky (excerpt) in the LACMA show's catalogue: "The struggle between the unreality and the reality of the painting is the right kind of struggle to make a great picture, and I think maybe that's why it could be my favorite [Magritte]."

Zelevansky: "I think it's often interpreted in Freudian sexual terms."

Ruscha: "I hope it is. It better be. It is sexual. It is all those things."

Oh by the way: Ruscha started painting LACM in 1965, when he was a little-known, just-beginning-to-be-exhibited artist. It was also the year that the LA County Museum opened. Freudian indeed?

(I meant to include this as a funny in my last post and forgot.) Obviously I'm not the only one intrigued by the Lion in Oil-Magritte juxtaposition: Could Stephanie Barron and Michel Draguet be the closet Sean Burke fans behind Lion in Oil. This is not a sports blog?

Of all the surrealists and near-surrealists, Magritte was the painter least interested in the subconscious. So it's ironic that Ed Ruscha and several other artists in the show mostly deny a direct Magritte-ian influence, instead indirectly suggesting that Magritte's influence on them was... subconscious.

In his LAT review Christopher Knight quoted extensively from a gripping Ruscha-Lynn Zelevansky interview in the show's must-own catalogue and after seeing the exhibit I understand why: It's a Ruscha show inside a Magritte show. Even though there are only six Ruschas on view (bested among his contemporaries only by Marcel Broodthaers' seven) the Ruschas dominate. And it sure seems like it's because they're the paintings most directly indebted to Magritte.

But: "He wasn't a source for me," Ruscha told Zelevansky. "Only later on did I see something simpatico there, something that I might have shared with him." And later: "His imagery involving writing never grabbed me... His inscriptions on his paintings, whenever they become dominant, don't really have much of an impact on me."

I'm always wary of putting to much stock in what artists say about their own work - like magicians they have an interest in remaining illusionists. But the Ruscha-Magritte links sure seem strong. Let's look at one of my favorite Ruschas, Lion in Oil (above).

Just as The Treachery of Images questions the relationship between text, the painted image, and reality, so too does Lion in Oil. Ruscha's palindrome has a range of meanings, ranging from classic kitsch painting (just try Googling lion in oil sometime!), to a homonym that hints at swinger-era pornotopia. And of course the phrase "lion in oil" fails to directly describe the mountainscape behind the words (though the palindromic text reveals the key to how Ruscha made his mountain).

But there are parallels: Magritte used neutral, contemporary sign-painters' cursive; Ruscha used neutral, contemporary billboard-like sans serif. In Magritte the words challenge the image, so too in the Ruscha. And in both paintings the phrase lingers in the mind longer than does the painted pipe or mountain. Quick and without scrolling: What does Magritte's pipe look like? (The blue area near the base of Ruscha's palindromic mountain even appears to be an upside-down Rorschach inkblot, thus hinting at the treachery of ascribing any particular meaning to the image.)

So Ruscha says that Magritte wasn't a direct influence. Fine. But I think he has a very active subconscious.

Usually this is my final Monday post but today I have another LACMA-Magritte post coming later. Lots of good stuff this week:

Influence shows are the new blockbusters.

On the heals of Matisse Picasso I, Matisse Picasso II, Picasso and American Art and so on, LACMA curator Stephanie Barron and the Musees Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique's Michel Draguet have brought us the longest-titled influence show of them all: Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images.

The premise of Barron's exhibition is simple: Belgian semi-surrealist Rene Magritte had a substantial influence on contemporary art, and one of his most influential paintings, The Treachery of Images (above) is in LACMA's collection. By presenting Magrittes with the works of artists such as Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins and Roy Lichtenstein, Barron lays out her case. While the show is full of wall-text it hardly needs it: A grade-schooler could look from the Magrittes on view to the insert-artist-heres on view nearby and point to the influences. (We can do it via HTML too: See SFMOMA's Personal Values and LACMA's Vija Celmins Untitled (Comb).)

At times the exhibition is an art historical duh, no kidding (see above) but that's ok -- sometimes artists borrow by way of the most direct route possible. The exhibition is rollickingly entertaining, an unabashed crowd-pleaser. (Reminder to our curator friends: Curators at major museums have a responsibility to present art to the public. If you are uninterested in a populist ethos, recede into the Octoberist halls of academia where we can ignore you forevermore.)

But what elevates Barron's show from good to superb is that it's a show for both a high school kid who thought Rene Russo's weren't the only great apples in "The Thomas Crown Affair," and his parents, who enjoy thinking about how art's history contributes not just to popular culture, but other art as well. Over a number of posts this week, I'll talk about some ideas in the show that I particularly enjoyed.

UPDATED, 535pm EST. Today's Ottawa Citizen has yet another story linking Louise T. MacBain to the apparently-for-sale Armory Show. The confusing part about this rumor: MacBain already owns a lot of art magazines that definitely aren't tops in their sector (as if being at the top of the art mag sector was worth a hill of beans), why would she want another runner-up?

This makes more sense: MAN hears that Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc., owner of ArtChicago, is pursuing The Armory Show. A second source said the deal was nearly complete. (UPDATE: An MMPI spokesperson refused to comment.) MMPI operates many trade shows and consumer events, such as the Architectural Digest Home Design Show. It's easy to imagine why the Armory Show might be a valuable property for MMPI: Galleries that want into Armory, the No. 2 contemporary art fair in the US but $trategically positioned in the world's No. 1 art market, are likely to curry favor with the fair's owners by signing up for ArtChicago, the No. 3 U.S. contemporary fair.

Another reason this kind of deal would make sense: MMPI, whose parent Vornado Realty Trust is based in NYC, owns a 450,000 square-foot facility at 7 West 34th Street -- and there's only one trade show on the facility's calendar between Feb. 17 and April 20. The Armory Show, which desparately needs a facilities upgrade, could be slotted in to the 7W New York space.

The blogroll should be back to normal. (Look for some adds next week, too.)

1. How great is photography at West Coast institutions? SFMOMA and the Getty have two of the top four or five collections in America, and both have major permanent galleries for those collections. The Getty's permanent photo collection galleries are newly expanded and are now the largest in America. They provide a pleasant, aesthetically precise amble rather than a pull-you-by-the-nose march. At SFMOMA a collection show titled Imposing Order: Contemporary Photography and the Archive was smart and diverse. Examples: Richard Barnes' Unabomber cabins.


2. I saw Michael Auping/MAMFW's Kiefer show at SFMOMA, its final venue. I saw three of the four versions of the show, and each was pretty thoroughly different. I don't think I've ever seen an exhibit that changed so much from iteration to iteration.


3. Between the John McLaughlins I saw in Miami, in Buffalo last year, and at the Oakland Museum of California, I agree with LATer Christopher Knight that a McLaughlin retro is long overdue. Paging LACMA.


4. Speaking of the Oakland Museum, they have some nice Diebenkorn, Park, Bischoff, Thiebaud, Ramos, Corbett, and Rothko drearily installed. Between the unkind building, so-so lighting, and ugly everything, art really struggles there. Across a gallery they have nice examples of early photography, including Carleton Watkins. It struggles too.


5. Orange County Museum of Art California Biennial: Big yawn. Lots of work featuring mindless appropriation and stand-on-its-own Photoshopping. Highlights: Jane Callister's mural-like use of abstract painting's language and, uh...

Welcome to MAN's new look. Everything's the same except our new, 21st-century look. And the RSS feed should work better. Enjoy!

(That said, if you notice a hiccup or two here over the next few days it's because I'm a Luddite and because I'm adjusting to everything.)

Jen Graves thinks that this Johanna Burton-ism is a big deal:

Installation acknowledges the viewer as central to the work, provides or professes to provide or satisfy an experience, where sculpture continues to posit itself as central to the work. It's glad you're looking at it, but it really doesn't need you.

I think it's a massive waste of pixels (and it's worse if you read the whole passage on Slog). Who talks like this?! A Picasso sculpture doesn't need me but a Thomas Hirschhorn does? Huh?! (And believe you me, I'm being kind by not pointing you toward the entire 90MB podcast from which Graves took said Burtonism.)

What does "need me" mean anyway? If we for 10 seconds accept this 'neediness' drivel, I'd suggest that a Henry Moore 'needs' a viewer to walk around it as much as anything else does. Matisse too. Jack Flam wrote about how the compression of space and the demolition of a single persepctive in Matisse's sculpture are best understood when viewing from multiple angles, which requires -- needs! -- the viewer.

Curious about how museums market exhibitions to the public? Take this joint Whitney-Jewish Museum survey (don't ask, I don't know) to see how the two museums are trying to figure out how to market several shows, including a 60s-70s art/culture show and a Louise Nevelson survey.

My reason for wanting to see these shows (as requested by the survey): "This exhibition is not the Whitney Biennial, therefore I think I will have a high degree of interest in it."

Related: Last year LACMA tried the online survey thing too. It was even more fun than the Whitney/JM survey!

Last week I posted about the LACMA-MOCA joint purchase of Chris Burden's Hell's Gate Bridge, a 28-foot long sculpture. I found the joint acquisition of something other than new media art to be unusual and unlikely to become commonplace.

Yeah, well, nevermind: Yesterday the Carnegie and the Albright-Knox announced that they had co-purchased Rachel Whiteread's 2002 Untitled (Domestic). In the spirit of the partnership, here's Harold McNeil's Buffalo News story and Timothy McNulty's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette write-up.

This is not like two tiny North Dakota museums buying a piece together. The CMOA and the A-K are good-sized museums with good-sized acquisition budgets. The A-K in particular has a distinguished record of using its acquisition-specific endowments to be an active acquirer of contemporary works. (I wrote about the AK's 2005 acquisitions here, and its lusts here. In that second post Grachos mentioned his Whiteread-lust and how his museum was working on a Whiteread acquisition.)

And despite whatever Michael Kimmelman thinks and doesn't see, the CMOA is one of America's most contemporary-art-active regional museums. (You've heard of the International?) So when these two team up for a contemporary acquisition -- and one that won't be super-easy to truck up I-79 -- it makes me think that we could be seeing the beginnings of a major change in how art museums acquire contemporary art. (I'm leaving Gross Clinic out of this discussion because it was a Philly one-off, born out of a freakish circumstance.) More on this on MAN in the near future.

I particularly enjoyed a couple of permanent collection installations when I was in California last month, none moreso than three related works at MCASD:

The more David Hammons I see the more David Hammons I want to see. MCASD's downton 1001 Kettner space (I know, it's confusing -- here's a map. The new MCASD Downtown is at the train station; 1001 Kettner is nearby.) MCASD had up a small collection show called Material Actions. It featured abstract sculpture inspired by the body.

Hammons' 1989 Champ (right) is impeccable and clever, beautiful and sad. The materials are simple: inner tube, (silver) duct tape, and boxing gloves (with laces hanging down). Hammons smartly mixes a deflated sport with deflated materials to examine the role of the prize fighter in American culture, especially black culture. Before the NBA was a dreamed-of escape-valve for urban youth, boxing offered the bruising, difficult way up. Fighters such as Jack Johnson and Joe Louis were heroes to black America, fighters who crossed-over and had success in mainstream society. But with success came tragedy: Louis died broke, his funeral paid for by German rival Max Schmeling. The tragedy went beyond individual figures: Countless young black men hoped boxing would provide a way up but instead were merely pummeled, used as entertainment, in match-fixing schemes, as disposable cogs in brutal entertainment.

I also think about Champ through the prism of what was happening in the sporting world in 1989. Hammons had to be influenced by what was happening around him: Mike Tyson was on top of the boxing game, destroying every in-ring opponent in sight, the most prominent athlete in America. But signs of Tyson's soon-to-be-messy-end were everywhere: In late 1988 Tyson's wife, Robin Givens, accused him of beating her. Tyson broke his hand in a much-publicized street fight with boxer Mitch "Blood" Green and wrapped his BMW around a tree, which the New York Daily News reported as a suicide attempt. "Real freedom is having nothing," Tyson said at the time. "I was freer when I didn't have a cent. Do you know what I do sometimes? Put on a ski mask and dress in old clothes, go out on the streets and beg for quarters."

In 1989 Tyson continued to dominante opponents in the ring, but struggled outside it. His divorce from Givens was finalized. He was accused of fighting with an LA parking attendant. And early in 1990 he'd lose his heavyweight title to unknown Buster Douglas in one of the greatest upsets in boxing history. In 1991 he was arrested on a rape charge. Tyson's sport has never recovered from the damage he did to it -- and to himself.

So Hammons' Champ feels right. There are wounds on the 'fighter,' a melted patch on the left side, and 'stitches' on the right, near the top, where the head might be. The duct tape holding the gloves to the inner tube looks old, almost inert. Like boxing, Hammons' tired Champ won't be coming back to life anytime soon. (Of course Champ is a near-relative of MoMA's terrific 1990 Hammons, High Falutin'.)

Across the gallery from Champ was Martin Puryear's Vault. And in La Jolla MCASD was showing their nice 1995 Doris Salcedo. Vault, a crafty-cave, is just big enough for a human to fit in. Salcedo's cement-filled cabinet is seven-feet tall, also big enough for a person. Each comes with a set of associations: Intentionally or not, Puryear's Vault conjures an Underground Railroad hiding place. Salcedo's work brings to mind people who have disappeared, possibly been tortured. Seeing the three in the course of a morning was the good kind of haunting.

• Wanna know the difference between America's two biggest arts sections? From the LAT: Two news-driven stories on what is driving and allowing both museum acquisitions and deaccessioning. In the NYT: Two recent featurey puff pieces.
  
• I would link to Ken Johnson's Sunday Boston Globe story, but I'm not going to inflict upon you the Globe's 83 pop-ups and Flash-driven ads. (MAN will not link to any Globe stories as long as they try to take over my PC.)
  
• Nasher Sculpture Center director Steve Nash is leaving the museum to run the Palm Springs Art Museum, says Scott Cantrell in the DMN.
  
• LATers Christopher Reynolds and Hugh Hart on the thorny history of the UCLA Hammer Museum and Leonardo's Codex Leicester. It cracks me up that the Hammer thinks that because it has AAMD's blessing it is acting ethically. Riiiight. AAMD is a spineless rubber stamp. Over and over again it has had the opportunity to object to Jay Gates and Malcolm Rogers renting paintings to casinos or casino partners, to foolish deaccessioning, and so on. It never does anything about it.
  
• Steve Litt says Italy is (clumsily) targeting the Cleveland Museum of Art next: "[Italian government lawyer Maurizio Fiorilli, in a display of the efficiency for which the Italian government is known] said three e-mails to the museum have gone unanswered, although he acknowledged that the e-mails may not have been addressed properly and may be missing."
  
• If you missed it on Monday: SDU-Ter Robert Pincus had a thorough piece on the new MCASD Downtown.

Selected (and link-to-able) off-blog writing:

• In Fortune magazine: Art Basel Miami Beach: Davos for the art world.

• In Fortune magazine: Ronald Lauder and the Neue Galerie purchase Klimt's "Adele." The exclusive story of how they did it.

• In the Los Angeles Times: Congress is failing the Smithsonian Institution and so is the current Smithsonian leadership's reliance on corporate America. What to do?

• In the New York Observer: MoMA keeps the walls clean: An Islamic show sans politics.

• In the LAT, necessary reforms at the Getty Trust: How to bring the Getty down from the hill.

• On NPR's All Things Considered, the confluence of the antiquities scandal and the opening of the Getty Villa.

• LACMA's very bad year: In the Los Angeles Times, I wrote that in 2005 LACMA embarrassed itself by handing over gallery space to private corporations (the King Tut exhibition), sold masterworks from its supposedly permanent collection (at auction last month in New York City). Then it destroyed art.

• Thomas Krens hands the Gugg over to Lisa Dennison: In the New York Observer, I explain why Krens is the most influential museum director in America.

• In the Boston Globe, MFA Boston director Malcom Rogers monetizes the museum's collection by renting it out to a private, for-profit business.

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Seattle's $85 million Olympic Sculpture Park opens next weekend, and its generating oodles of buzz. (I haven't been.)

The Seattle Times has a wonderfully cool online section about OSP, including a Sheila Farr story about how other cities (including NYC) are gonna copy what Seattle has done. (That detail was missing from the NYT's own story on OSP.) The Stranger and the P-I have yet to do a mondo package on the park, but Jen Graves told us how Calder's Eagle made it to Seattle.

The Seattle Art Museum's own OSP visitor page seems a bit thin. Naturally, the fundraising campaign page is better. For pure visuals: Go check out the pix on Flickr. Or the arguments about the Park.

And the P-I's RM Campbell wrote about how SAM raises all thi$ money -- not just for the sculpture park, but for the opening-this-summer, expanded SAM downtown.

Related: Putting the park in the context of the surrounding area (needs more parking).

I think many museums are doing neat things with blogs. I think many museums are doing neat things with podcasts. But who but the Rijksmuseum is doing this: Check out the Rijkswidget, which puts something fabulous from the Rijksmuseum on your desktop. And it changes every day.

Yesterday's part one.

MCASD Downtown's galleries are made less for paintings and photography (the MCASD's La Jolla galleries are more traditional) and more for installation and new media art. For example, the museum will open with an Ernesto Neto work (not installed when I visited) and the premiere of a new Eija-Liisa Ahtila four-screen video piece. (The MCASD is co-purchasing the piece with the Berkeley Art Museum.)

Smaller galleries will house a small paintings show. New commissions include a light-and-spacey Richard Wright (installation at right), and a Jenny Holzer (which won't be turned on until the museum opens). The MCASD Downtown's neighbor is still a functional train station, and a confrontational, space-separating Richard Serra commission (below) serves as a baggage-meets-the-minimalist-cube dividing line between the tracks and the museum's rail-side entrance. The facility also includes a small studio for an artist-in-residence. (First up: Bob Irwin.)

The two large galleries off of the central corridor are the ones that artists will love. One is a new media gallery, totally configurable by an installing artist. The projectors can be put anywhere, a screen or screens can be hung from the ceiling or placed on a wall, the floor, wherever. Natural light can be let in -- or not. If I were a new media artist, this gallery would be at the top of my I-wanna-show-here list.

On the other side of the entrance corridor a larger gallery will host the Neto. It's more light-filled, and that alone should attract artists to San Diego (If you don't like San Diego light, you don't like light.)  

The spaces are typical Richard Gluckman. The Santa Fe railroad baggage depot is a 91-year old building designed by San Francisco's Bakewell & Brown (an eminent firm that built San Francisco's City Hall, Stanford's Hoover Tower, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Pasadena's City Hall). The Gluckman formula fits here: Think Mary Boone Gallery meets the West, where some of the past is left naked, and some of it is dressed in drywall.

The new downtown space won't instantly vault MCASD to Walker- or SFMOMA-level in terms of facilities. MCASD doesn't have the capability to host a traveling exhibition and to install supporting works from its permanent collection within a 20-minute drive of each other, let alone in neighboring galleries.

But MCASD does have a differentiating factor that it shares with only one other American museum: It smartly looks south for the avant garde, not just to Europe. (Miami also looks south. And MCASD isn't the only San Diego institution to think cross-border: inSite does too.) With its new downtown space, MCASD has strong spaces in which those artists can best present themselves to American audiences.

UPDATE: Apparently MAN readers take their holidays seriously. So we will too. Back with more MCASD tomorrow.

In America, the preservation of historic buildings often comes with a catch. We often retrofit and re- re-purpose on the way toward restoration. For example: When I was in college I frequently visited St. Louis' Union Station, a rail depot that had been transformed into a Hyatt, a shopping mall, and a parking lot where the pro beach volleyball tour came every summer.

Our art museums generally take care of their own buildings, but they aren't usually interested in re-purposing older structures. When American museums want new galleries, they build: In Davenport, Iowa, the Figge could have rehabilitated an old riverfront building but opted to build a David Chipperfield. MAMFW could have picked a cattle-is-king era building, but hired Tadao Ando, and so on.

So it's surprising that the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego decided to expand into an old building downtown, it called Richard Gluckman, who helped the Warhol and Dia into older buildings. With Gluckman's help, MCASD converted a 1915 railway station baggage building into galleries, tacked on a modest new structure, and, $25 million later, is opening the doors this week.

It's easy to imagine the MCASD Downtown becoming an artist's favorite. It's a light-filled two-fer, the old baggage facility and a new, three-story, plus-sized townhouse that will house an auditorium, education facilities, meeting rooms and administrative offices. (Most of which are available to outsiders -- for a price, of course.)

Next: The galleries. Related: Robert Pincus has a nice piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune. MCASD curator Stephanie Hanor's acquisitions wish-list.

• Wanna know the difference between America's two biggest arts sections? From the LAT: Two news-driven stories on what is driving and allowing both museum acquisitions and deaccessioning. In the NYT: Two recent featurey puff pieces on nothing of any great import.
• I would link to Ken Johnson's Sunday Boston Globe story, but I'm not going to inflict upon you the Globe's 83 pop-ups and Flash-driven ads. (MAN will not link to any Globe stories as long as they try to take over my PC.)
• Nasher Sculpture Center director Steve Nash is leaving the museum to run the Palm Springs Art Museum, says Scott Cantrell in the DMN.
• Christopher Reynolds and Hugh Hart on the thorny history of the UCLA Hammer Museum and Leonardo's Codex Leicester. It cracks me up that the Hammer thinks that because it has AAMD's blessing it is acting ethically. Riiiight. AAMD rubber stamps everything and objects to nothing. Over and over again it has had the opportunity to object to Jay Gates and Malcolm Rogers renting paintings to casinos or casino partners, to foolish deaccessioning, and so on. That fractional-gift tax exemption that museum types want back? AAMD only raised a stink about it after it had passed into law. Oops.
• Steve Litt says Italy is (clumsily) targeting the Cleveland Museum of Art next: "[Italian government lawyer Maurizio Fiorilli, in a display of the efficiency for which the Italian government is known] said three e-mails to the museum have gone unanswered, although he acknowledged that the e-mails may not have been addressed properly and may be missing."

• The question is: Does New York realize that it's as provincial as anywhere else?  
• Seven reasons why Art Miami bites. (OK, why the ad bites.)
• Year-end top-ten lists are over. It's time for ten-worst lists!
• You've probably heard about the political mondo-blog DailyKos. But do you know ArtKos?
• The story behind Andreas Gursky's $2.5 million photograph.
• Visiting David Chipperfield's Figge Art Museum -- and, inadvertently, previewing what's coming to St. Louis.
• What's cooler than living with books?
• On the side of MoMA: "Your video art here."

When Edward Burtynsky won his TED award a while back, he said that one of his three wishes was to make an IMAX film that would help take his work to audiences beyond the art world. It's not an IMAX, but a documentary about Burtynsky will debut at Sundance on Jan. 19. (The film has already been shown in Canada, where it has won several awards.)

Titled Manufactured Landscapes, the 90-minute film, directed by Jennifer Baichwal, shows Burtynsky exploring Chinese landscapes from the Three Gorges Dam to China's oversized, overpolluted suburbs. You can see a two-minute trailer here.

Related: Burtynsky's personal site. A wee bit of me on Burtynsky, with links to more.

Alec Soth: "Is art really about learning? I'm much more comfortable with the pursuit of beauty."

Holland Cotter: "I love art for its pleasures, but I believe it is ultimately about teaching and self-education."

• Time magazine's Richard Lacayo just started blogging about art at Looking Around.
• The Tate has begun a series of podcasts.

The New Museum is hosting a memorial tribute to celebrate founding director Marcia Tucker. You need not be at The New School's Tishman Auditorium (at 66 West 12th Street) on Friday at 3pm to participate -- the event will be e-broadcast live over the internets here. Speakers will include: Martin Friedman, John Baldessari, Carol Becker, Ned Rifkin, Pat Steir, and Susana Torruella Leval. And kudos to Artforum for putting NewMu director Lisa Phillips' reflections on Tucker here.

On Tuesday I posted about artist and video art on YouTube, prominently mentioning Francesco Vezzoli's Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's "Caligula" as a high-quality, non-camera-phoned-off-of-a-MoMA-wall example of something on YouTube. Seeing as Vezzoli didn't post it on YouTube himself, I wondered how he felt about it.

"I am sort of delighted and surprised about the number of people that watched it," Vezzoli said via email. The YouTube viewer count is pushing 26,000. "Of course if any of the actors will complain with me about Caligula being on YouTube I'll have to make an offical request to have it withdrawn from the site."

Vezzoli's remake stars Helen Mirren, Adriana Asti, and Gore Vidal from the 1979 film, and also Karen Black, Benicio Del Toro, Milla Jovovich, Courtney Love, and more.

Leap Into the Void has the LACMA admissions tidbit of the day. Kevin Roderick piles on.

When I looked at the work of young sculptors/installationists in Miami I saw a tremendous amount of work exploring architecture and lived-in environments. It was as if Gordon Matta-Clark and Rachel Whiteread were in the ether. Many of the artists seemed especially interested in how we experience space and aesthetics in space, bringing to mind Judd, Flavin, Andre, LeWitt, Zittel, and Serra.

Magnus Thierfelder at Elastic (Malmo, Sweden): Thierfelder starts with objects we expect to find in built environments: power outlets, drainpipes, windows, throwrugs, etc. and then tweaks them. When I look at his surreal Explorer (left) I feel like I'm a character in a video game. In Lost Control, the tops of potted plants have apparently detatched themselves from their pots, and have drifted up to the ceiling. Theirfelder's work places the viewer in a comic book, or outer space, or anywhere other than places to which I'm accustomed. Lots of artists (including many mentioned above) have deconstructed the places we live using deep-voiced, manly things like core-ten steel and saws. Thierfelder does it with humor.

Kirsten Nelson at