March 2007 Archives

Gawker has the scoop.

I'm a day late on everything lately: Christian Marclay responds to Apple's Marclay-esque iPhone ad discussed on MAN here.

But my favorite link of the day is from Toronto, where (new-ish) Art Gallery of Ontario curator David Moos discusses a year-old installation in the museum's famed Henry Moore gallery. Think (and see) pole-dancers. (This one's good too. And here's this funny snapshot.)

Over the last six months or so I've talked with a number of curators (both on- and off-MAN) about what they most want to add to their collections. Almost every curator has wanted a Robert Morris felt piece.

The NGA just got one, the untitled 1976 piece shown here. Morris, who just wrote an essay for the NGA's Jasper Johns catalogue, started making felt pieces in 1967. Once upon a time Morris' use of nontraditional materials was strikingly avant-garde. His early felt works (such as this one in the Gugg's collection) were relentlessly untidy, almost haphazard in the way they allowed natural processes (gravity, time) to act on them. (Category-obsessed Octoberists call this Process Art.) Morris' felt also challenged the strict, masculine-emphasizing hard-edges of previous minimalist work, such as Morris' own plywood pieces and Don Judd's right angles.

Related: Pepe Karmel, who curated a 1989 show of Morris' felt pieces for the Grey Art Gallery, Q&As with Morris. One of MoMA's Morrises is on view now.

Unrelated food for thought: The Corcoran hosted a Morris retro in 1969. Now they think they're being 'smart' by giving us Annie Leibovitz. Woe is us.

The National Gallery of Art has acquired two contemporary works: An untitled 1976 felt piece by Robert Morris and Alfred Jensen's Twelve Events in a Dual Universe. More on both tomorrow.

Hilarie Sheets emails in to say that she traveled to both Indianapolis and Seattle for stories I referenced in this post. Sheets says she was in Seattle one year before OSP opened (and one year before her story ran), hence no dateline on that story. For whatever reason the NYT failed to put a dateline on the Indy story.

I briefly mentioned Holland Cotter's NYT museums section essay in this morning's first post. (Aside: Why didn't Cotter just pick up a phone and call Chris Gilbert fer chrissakes? I don't know Gilbert either, but I'm pretty sure that within three phone calls I could track him down.) Cotter makes many good points I'm leaving alone because I want to tackle the money issue with which everyone in the art media seems unduly fascinated.

Art-and-money is the new art writer's crutch: The art world is newly awash in money! Everyone's making money, spending money, buying art! We must talk about the money!

But the real story is that there's nothing new here. Art-making has been driven by money before there was money. Institutions, be they Renaissance guilds, the Catholic Church, or European governments have used money to buy and present art. Individuals, be they kings, earls, dukes, Habsburgs, industrialists, software engineers, or merchants painted by Hals have done the same thing. There is nothing new about money in art. What's new is that art writers and critics can't stop writing about it. And they can't stop writing about it in a way that seems to ignore history.

I don't mean to pick on Cotter, but here's a line from his essay: "Money is like white noise, so there that you forget it's there...Every American city, to be a proper city, now needs to have its own jewel-box art museum." Great, if by "now" Cotter means the last hundred years. If you geographically chart the history of art museums in America, you will also be charting the history of regional wealth in America. It's no coincidence that the St. Louis Art Museum, for example, came into being when St. Louis was a new economic power that wanted to remind the East that it was an important, wealthy city. Decades later, it's no coincidence that the Aspen Art Museum came into being when wealthy people started moving to Aspen.

There is good art writing on money out there: Look at much of the coverage of the Albright-Knox deaccessioning issue. But to merely point at the existence of money in the art world, and to keep pointing again and again, is lazy -- and an old story to boot.

Here's a quick index of recent Smithsonian posts:

First, see this morning's post about the NYT's strikingly lame story about conflict-of-interest-laden LA critic-cum-dealer Edward Goldman.

Then be -- gasp! -- surprised that yesterday Goldman gave the NYT a big wet kiss on the air -- and never mentions that they're about to give him a big wet kiss too. "Los Angeles still has a lot to learn about the art of promotion," Goldman says in the commentary. Really?!

UPDATE: I should have noticed this sooner. The Lisa Napoli-NYT piece about Goldman that started all this quotes one "Shoshana Wayne." Shoshana Wayne is a gallery in Santa Monica. Shoshana is one person. Wayne is another. But somehow in the NYT...

New York has the Public Art Fund. Chicago has, among other things, Millenium Park. Washington, DC, the nation's capital, has, uh, well, a range of embarrassments that have included painted elephants and donkeys ('Party Animals' -- get it?), and painted pandas (think the National Zoo).

What DC needs: For local arts professionals, civic and government (city and federal) leaders, and local businesspeople to get together to create and fund a DC version of the Public Art Fund.

Last year Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood started a series of panel discussions about public art at the Hirshhorn. Perhaps the Hirshhorn should transform Ellegood's initial investigations into leadership on the issue. That would be very Washington. (And no, next week's Yoko Ono-god-knows-what-event at the Hirsh, which the museum has apparently and wisely kept off its website, isn't what I had in mind.)

Lots of good arts-related content in America's newspapers today -- and so far I've only read two stories in the NYT's museum semi-advertorial.

Today's must-read: The NYT editorial crue nails the challenges facing the Smithsonian.

Related, from MAN: What (should be) next for the Smithsonian, the SI art museums report.

A couple weeks ago Stranger art critic Jen Graves wrote about a prominent Seattle art critic who reviewed artists -- and then asked for art from them in return. It was a shocking story, a perfect example of something that should never, ever happen.

Then today, in the NYT's museums near-advertorial (now we know what it takes to get the NYT to pay attention to art and museums outside NYC), Lisa Napoli writes about LA's Edward Goldman, a little-considered local critic. (Why the NYT thinks Goldman is a big deal or influential is absolutely beyond me. If you're gonna write about an LA art critic, why pick Goldman when the city is home to a three-time -- and current -- Pulitzer finalist? Methinks the NYT should send an art critic to LA rather than to London.)

Goldman opines about art on NPR affiliate KCRW. I've heard him plenty on trips to LA and via podcast. Problem is: He's a corporate art consultant, a salesman, a kind of dealer. KCRW listeners have no way of knowing wither Goldman's musings are furthering the financial interests of his clients, furthering a deal he's trying to make or whether he's using his public radio platform to promote art or an artist he's suggesting that someone buy. This shouldn't be complicated: If you're going to be a critic, get out of the art market. If you're active in the art market, don't present yourself as a disinterested critic.

That shouldn't be acceptable to KCRW: Goldman should be a critic or he should be a dealer/consultant, but not both. And the NYT should have called both Goldman and KCRW out on this, rather than mindlessly promoting him.

(Side note: KCRW isn't stuck with Goldman. There are plenty of credible, integrity-laden alternatives such as Doug Harvey or David Pagel.)

Related: Two years ago the NYT's museums advertorial prompted me to ask (maybe) the best question I've ever blogged.

Smithsonian Under Secretary for Science David L. Evans has resigned, effective April 21. Ira Rubinoff, the director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama will serve as acting Under Secretary for Science until a permanent replacement is found.

For this morning's Smithsonian post, click here or look down one post.

Given Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small's resignation yesterday, here's what I hope happens next at the Smithsonian:

Last week the Smithsonian released a report on the state of its art museums. Great, but what about the rest of DC in general? Each day this week I'll post an idea about something I think would improve the museum scene in America's No. 2 art museum city. Also: Today I'm on travel so I'll be auto-posting and off email.

Improving the National Gallery of Art's modern and contemporary art programs. At present, art from 1900 receives scant permanent collection space at the National Gallery, and many galleries (think Small French Paintingzzz) haven't been changed up in years. Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross deserve a better space, and the ab-ex gallery is over-crowded. I could keep going.

Two recent developments provide the NGA an opportunity to think big when it comes to modern and contemporary art. Last year contemporary mega-collector Mitchell Rales joined the NGA's board. (Rales is also the vice-chairman of the Hirshhorn's board.) And sometime in the next six or so months the NGA will replace its top modern and contemporary curator, Jeffrey Weiss. (He's leaving to run Dia.) Rales is DC's biggest contemporary art collector, and second-place is a ways back.

Here's my idea: Four blocks from the National Gallery of Art sits the only Mies van der Rohe building in Washington. It's currently the District's central library, but District lawmakers have made it clear that they'd love to be out from under the building. I think that the NGA should make the District an offer for the building, and then turn it into the NGA's Contemporary Wing, a place to show art from World War II forward.

The District's Mies building could transform the NGA from a post-war-art backwater to one of the top venues in America, if not the world. And think of the curatorial talent the NGA could attract (and keep!) with that kind of space.

On Monday I listed five paintings that could be movies. Today bloggers respond.

Bloggers: If you enjoy our latest little bit of top-five fun, remember to post your paintings-to-movies top five. Links go up first-thing tomorrow (and will not be updated during the day).

Artists have appropriated images from each other for hundreds of years. Titian's Venus of Urbino led to Ingres' Odalisque with Slave led to Manet's Olympia, and so on. The next step in appropriation came with Duchamp, who appropriated not just composition and subject, but other artworks, such as the Mona Lisa, and everyday objects like wine racks. The pop artists continued in Duchamp's moustache by appropriating design from commercial culture.

In between Duchamp and pop, Robert Rauschenberg established appropriation as the major theme of his work. He laid out his theme most clearly in 1953's Erased de Kooning Drawing and continued appropriating everything in sight for his combines: Family photos, animals from second-hand shops, stuff from garbage bins, and, literally, whatever.

But with the cardboards, on view now at the Menil, Rauschenberg did something different and new: He didn't mine composition as artists had for centuries. He didn't just repossess objects from the everyday as Duchamp had, or re-purpose common cultural iconography as Warhol did. With the cardboards he mined the conceptual underpinnings of artists such as Donald Judd, Yves Klein, and Eva Hesse, appropriating their ideas for his own ends. He didn't take their art to riff on, he took the intellectual supports behind their work and played with it.

With Klein -- see Tuesday's post -- Rauschenberg didn't borrow composition, objects or anything else. He took the ideas that formed the basis of Klein's practice -- performance and a particular color -- and re-made those ideas in cardboard. Klein's models lay flat on canvas: Rauschenberg found cardboard that instructed the handler to "LAY FLAT -- DO NOT STAND ON END." And when Klein's models were, well, standing, he didn't want them to stand on end. Instead he famously had them walk around his studio while he worked -- not so much because he was using models in the traditional pose-so-I-can-draw-you way, but to set the 'proper' art-making mood.

In the 1950s Jasper Johns achieved his conceptual breakthrough by making the ultimate American nationalistic icons -- the flag and our country's footprint -- into painterly objects. Rauschenberg took the map to which Johns and done something and did something else to it: Made it the subject of a cardboard titled National Spinning Co. Furthermore, Rauschenberg kept doing things to it, turning the map this way and that. (And do the large and small boxes stuck to Rauschenberg's piece represent large Alaska and small Hawaii?)

To the best of my knowledge the role of Rauschenberg's cardboards (and the related pieces) in the history of 'appropriation art' is little examined. Hopefully the Menil show starts that conversation.

Related: The show at the Menil.

I'll have more to say on this next week, but for now here's a link to the report and a couple of things that jumped out at me:

Yesterday's part one of MAN's two-part Q&A with outgoing Walker director Kathy Halbreich is here. And Geoff Edgers has an eight-question exchange with Halbreich here.

MAN: How is the job of museum director different now from when you started?

Kathy Halbreich: I think the job inevitably gets more and more complex. And for me one of the things I wanted to see was if it was possible to change the audience and whom we serve. I think one of the real changes during the time I've been here had to do with the increasing centrality of audience. When I first came here and was looking at the mission statements of sister institutions I was shocked. I found lots of commentary about objects but very few mentions about audience. Once you make the audience central to your preoccupation it changes everything. It changes how you think about your programs, your staff, your board, whom you do business with, the language you use, the programs you do. I think what makes the Walker special is this ability to hold artists and audience close to our collective heart.

And the Walker's audience has changed during your tenure?

Oh yeah, definitely. We built this amazing program for teens that started about the first or second year I was here. We developed a seminar that involved public television, the parks department, an organization that dealt with gangs, and I can't remember whom else but we met for a day a week for months to collectively study what teens thought about, were up to, the challenges in their lives, etc. While I was somewhat Pollyanna-ish in hoping that we would all move together simultaneously, I think that's where the Walker's Teen Arts Council came from, and I think that the programs that we've developed and the way in which that program is organized has become a template for many other institutions here and abroad and I think that's fantastic.

I guess that came out of my own experience as an adolescent... and from a very wise man who was the provost of MIT at the time I was there who said to me, 'Why can't you make something that helps young people acquire ideas rather than choose the right sneakers?' That really stuck with me. When I came to Walker I was able to actually try to put that into practice. I think about 14 percent of our audience now are young people who come [on their own and] not in school groups. That's because of our Teen Art Council of 12-14 kids. They have their own budget, they have a staff, they recruit their own successors and they tell us what's important to them -- and I think you can also see it in the numbers of people of color who come to this institution. That's a group we didn't even count before I came here.

How has the latest rise of the contemporary art market changed contemporary art museums? Or has it?

Being around 16 years you do get to see the cyclical nature of the market. I remember in the '80's thinking that something is really wrong when you have to think about buying pictures through transparencies. And I think something was really wrong. I suppose for an institution like Walker which positions itself as being often but not always or exclusively ahead of the market, that has become sometimes more difficult. But it only is more difficult if you only look at New York City and London as the market. There are still enormous continents of art history that I still think are less visible than they one day will be visible. And that's where the research imperative is so crucial to cultural institutions and so misunderstood sometimes.

You know I think there are of course more private museums coming up. I'm not sure how that's going to change the art world yet. Walker, after all, started as one. But I think the civic nature of public institutions is really key to our mission. And I'm not sure that's the case for single-person-created institutions.

Is there anything in the contemporary art museum model that is broken, that needs to be fixed?

My advice to any institution would be: Endow yourself well. It's the most important thing you can do in buying yourself artistic freedom.

I basically think and this is something that Glenn Lowry and I had a lunchtime conversation about some time ago: We're all undercapitalized. It's easy to see that -- it's just difficult to figure out the multiple strategies to get yourself out of that position.

One of the things we're finding that's really fascinating is that our attend is moving disproportionately toward the free days. For us that's Thursday nights and the first Saturday of every month. There's a story in there. I will leave that for the next director to solve.

Admissions is a big deal in contemporary institutions, however I do think there's no reason why people who can pay shouldn't pay. I think what you have to provide is a gracious way for people who can't pay to engage with the institution.

Thanks to the over 50 of you who sent in suggestions for blogroll additions and changes. Thirty new blogs will pop up over there in the next week or two. (I'll try to add them in a way that maximizes the attention they get, which means I won't just link-dump.) Look for the first additions late today.

Over the last few days the Washington Post's James Grimaldi has penned a series of damning stories about Smithsonian secretary Lawrence Small's spending patterns. This story concerns Smithsonian spending at Small's home and in his office, and in this story (co-written with Jacqueline Trescott) the Smithsonian's former inspector general reveals that Small attempted to interfere with an executive compensation audit.

All important stories (especially that last one). But I'm concerned about this: Lawrence Small sits on the boards of directors of several companies, including The Chubb Corporation and Marriott International.

In the post-Watergate era, Congress passed a series of governmental ethics reforms, one of which prevented Cabinet officers and the like from serving on corporate boards. Those reforms did not extend to the secretary of the Smithsonian. Small's directorships are publicly known and are even included in his official Smithsonian biography.

But does that make it right? Chubb is one of the world's largest insurance companies. They do a tremendous amount of business in the art and museum worlds. Should the leader of America's largest museum complex sit on Chubb's board?

To take it a step farther: Small and his Smithsonian deputy Sheila Burke both sit on the Chubb board. And they fill two of the four seats on Chubb's compensation committee. Should the top two leaders of the Smithsonian be in position to have that kind of impact on a corporation with which many of their peer institutions do business? (Especially considering that Small and Burke are in a position to profit from their involvement in Chubb through stock and options holdings.)

Related: Small's holdings in Chubb stock, including millions of dollars in transactions over the last six months.

As MAN was the first to tell you yesterday, Walker Art Center director Kathy Halbreich is leaving the institution after a 16-year run. Earlier today she and I spoke about both her time at the Walker and about being a museum director. Because her resignation is still news, today I'll post Halbreich talking about her time at the Walker and what she may do next. Tomorrow I'll publish the big-picture stuff. That may read like I'm jumping into the middle of our chat... but I am.

MAN: What are you proudest of accomplishing at the Walker?

Kathy Halbreich: Let me talk about what I think is least visible. I'm acutely aware of this, having experienced what my message meant to the staff yesterday. That has to do with when I realized it would be very, very difficult to be both a museum director and a curator. I had to develop a scenario whereby my creative energies could be put to good use.

In a way, I think I fell back on being a child of the late '60's in the sense that I had always wondered whether it was possible to create an institutional culture that was flat, that was respectful of every person's role within it, that gave people more responsibility than they thought they might initially be comfortable with and that made a trade. That trade was: If people are responsible, they will have enormous freedom that will bring the best and the brightest independent minds into contact with each other, that tried to solve challenges and identify possibilities through consensus.

I'm extremely proud of, for example the young fellows who have come through the Walker. From Eungie Joo on through, the field is populated with them. To great curators like Philip Bither in performance art to Richard Flood to Liz Armstrong to Joan Rothfuss, all people who have done important shows. The Fluxus show was Liz and Joan, the Bruce Conner show Joan did when no one else was able to do a show with Bruce Conner, to the remarkable way Phillipe Vergne put together the Latitudes exhibit.

From the incredible crew who will never say to an artist, 'This is impossible,' to the designers who make remarkable catalogues in concert with artists and curators, to the educators who are fearless, every person could tell you what the mission of the Walker is. And I think that's what makes it strong. In a certain funny way I think it's a healthy cult.

Do you have a favorite acquisition from your time at the Walker?

Oh gosh. I mean it's like asking me if I have a favorite artist. And the luxury of my position is that I've had incredibly deep and interesting relationships with a very board cross-section of artists form around the globe.

I remember once a director asked [chief curator] Richard Flood, 'How's Kathy?' and Richard said, 'Kathy is happy because there are artists in the house today.'

Do you have any disappointments from your time at the Walker?

I wish we had an even bigger endowment. [Ed: The STrib pegs the Walker's endowment at "roughly $200 million."] I was really thinking about this the other day. Honestly, programmatically, no disappointments. Institutionally, no regrets. And I guess that's one of the reasons why it feels like a good time to leave. I realize that there are also things I want to get back to which came from my recent sabbatical, and that has to do with being able to look at art exhibitions more than once. Having a different kind of stress in my life. I kind of thrive on it, but I'm willing to sort of say that a new challenge might have a different kind of stress attached to it.

But the thing that I really wanted to teach myself before but couldn't is something I've learned from artists and Buddhists, and that is for a control freak the best thing she can learn is to cede some control and to live in the present. And I must say that much to my surprise, having made the leap into the void it's also exhilarating. I realized that [I'm not] leaving Walker to go to some other place. I am leaving Walker so that Walker could continue to challenge the status quo. I am a person of commitment and I've got a chunk of time left to commit to something that I can have another professional love affair with.

What's next for you? A return to curating? Another directorship?

It's a little too soon for me to really know. It's just a little too soon. I've got really seven months left at Walker to make sure that the transition is as smooth as possible. And I'm really determined to allow myself to be as open as possible to whatever opportunities cross my desk.

Even another directorship?

Potentially.

So you're not sour on directing art museums.

No, but I would tend to want to direct a different kind of institution, and a different scale of institution.

You mean somewhere smaller?

I mean smaller. You know I've had, you know...

Opportunities to go elsewhere.

Yes. The thing is, where do you go after Walker if you're me? People assumed I would climb this ladder they had in their minds, and I haven't had a job interview in 16 years because I was absolutely satisfied with the challenges and opportunities I had here.

For two days AJ blogger Lee Rosenbaum has been gushing over LACMA boss Michael Govan for not deaccessioning an Indian sandstone sculpture. "I KNEW someday my prince would come!" Rosenbaum wrote yesterday. And today: "We need the Michael Govans of this world -- respected museum directors who are not afraid to lead the charge against deaccessions -- to begin to set things right."

It was under Govan that the deaccessioning was moving forward in the first place. The plan was stopped less by Govan than by former LACMA curator Pratapaditya Pal, who went public with his objections to the museum's sale, forcing Govan and LACMA to do a 180.

Yesterday MAN broke the story that Walker director Kathy Halbreich is retiring. (Others followed.) Early this afternoon MAN will feature a Halbreich Q&A.

When I got to Volon (Cardboard), a blue cardboard box that once held god-knows-what from the Burlington Glass Fabrics Company, I had solved the exhibition. The mystery -- that is, the exhibition -- was Robert Rauschenberg: Cardboards and Related Pieces at the Menil Collection. The work was almost entirely pieces Rauschenberg had made out of cardboard between 1970-72, a period during which Rauschenberg took a break from nearly 20 years of medium-creating art to survey the exploding global contemporary art scene.

The first mystery I had solved was what Rauschenberg was doing with all of this cardboard: He was re-making the art of his contemporaries by paring it down to a simple, common material. Sometimes he even re-made his own work, but whichever, he did it with nothing but cardboard, maybe a piece of rope, possibly some spray paint. Sometimes Rauschenberg flattened the boxes, sometimes he glued them to something else, and sometimes he built them out off of the wall and into the room, but nothing that Rauschenberg did to any of them required art-making techniques learned after third grade. The Menil show is thus essentially a wildly entertaining whodunnit in which each work asks, 'Whose art is Raushcenberg deconstructing here? Whose is he aping there?'

The show's strength is also its weakness. Visitors who are not well-versed in the history of post-war art are going to be lost. The cardboards were as much a mental workout for Rauschenberg as they are presentable art objects. (Only one of them was included in Rauschenberg's first full retrospective, a number that quintupled by the mid-90s Guggenheim retro.) As a result this show is art for art history geeks. Or as one friend told me after I copped to liking the show: "That's what you get for being over-educated."

So back to Volon. About twenty minutes after I had first looked at it, I finally realized what -- and whom -- it was about. It is the only blue cardboard work in the show. It's Rauschenberg's deconstruction of Yves Klein's work, especially his signature 'International Klein Blue.' But for Rauschenberg one reference wasn't enough. Stamped to the cardboard in several places was the instruction: 'LAY FLAT - DO NOT STAND ON END.' It is, of course, another reference to Klein and to his 'dojo paintings' in which models, slathered in blue, lay down in performance or lay down onto Klein's canvases, leaving a blue imprint. As with most every Hercule Poirot I read, I feel like I should have solved Volon sooner.

More on Rauschenberg at the Menil later this week.

First on MAN: Walker director Kathy Halbreich is retiring, effective Nov. 1. Yet another museum top-job is open -- and this is an A-lister. More tomorrow on MAN, I think...

A couple weeks ago we learned that a fetid Thomas Kinkade painting has a future as a movie. In a similar, er, spirit, here are five paintings that really should be movies:

1.) Pierre Bonnard, The Terrace at Vernonnet (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Bonnard painted film stills before there were film stills. (Cinema was born in France in 1895. Here's where that fits on Bonnard's timeline.) His compositions crackle with tension between people, movement at the edges of the picture, and as a colorist Matisse is his only peer. I could have picked any one of 50 Bonnards to list here, but this one is particularly mysterious.

2.) James Rosenquist, F-111 (Museum of Modern Art). Is Rosenquist generally considered to be a narrative painter, a contemporary history painter? He should be. I know it's difficult for MoMA to have a painting this massive on view more often, but it's one of those contemporary masterpieces that should I always feel like I need more time with. (Of course when a painting is bigger than my apartment...)

3.) Henri Matisse, The Music Lesson (Barnes Foundation). This painting isn't as well-known as is its abstracted brother, MoMA's Piano Lesson. In many ways that's a bolder painting, but the Barnes' version is tenser, crueler, quicker. (It was painted just days before Matisse's son was to leave to fight in WWI.) How cruel is this painting? Matisse's wife Amelie has been banished to the out of doors. Matisse's Reclining Nude sculpture of her, made 10 years prior, hovers menacingly above her. And if that's not enough, the painting in the upper-right corner of the painting appears to be a conflation of two Matisse portraits of two famed beauties: one of Matisse's pupil Olga Merson and one of Greta Prozor. Matisse did not sleep with Prozor -- but he may have slept with Merson. (Biographer Hilary Spurling emphatically says no, but there's no question that Matisse was more captivated by Merson than by his wife. Interestingly, Matisse seems to have attempted to soften the psychological impact of Merson's inclusion in a sensitive family moment by mixing two portraits.)

4.) Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (Hirshhorn). Ruscha's masterpiece. Why is the museum on fire? And how will the fire end -- or will it? Sure, there are art historical answers to these questions, but the movie version wouldn't have to follow reality, would it? I see Johnny Depp as the art critic and Angelina Jolie as, well, anything.

5.) Eric Fischl, The Funeral: A Band of Men (2 Women) Abandonment! (Hirshhorn). I wrote about this painting five years ago and a Hirshhornian emailed me to tell me the painting's origin. I'll tell you what I told him: I know, but I wish I didn't. The painting tells a sad enough story without knowing, well, the story.

Bloggers: List your top five and I'll link to them on Friday. (Make sure you link back here so I see it via Technorati.)

It's time for the blogroll's sorta-quarterly overhaul. If you like a blog that's not on the list or if you're a blogger who isn't on the list, email me with suggestions at tylergreendc(at)gmail.com by Sunday night. Please put "blogroll" in the subject line. (That email address is temporary.) Thanks.

Also, after having been on travel for most of the last two weeks, I'm home. This means I'll be catching up on email this weekend. Sorry, and thanks for your patience.

Back in November I wrote a post in which I complimented the Albright-Knox on its thorough, transparent deaccessioning. In contrast to much-larger institutions such as MoMA and LACMA, who deaccession major work in as close to the dead of night as possible, the Albright was strikingly forthcoming. It even printed a list of all the objects to be sold, put them in a lovely green folder, and sent it to anyone who asked.

At the time I pointed out that the museum was selling the work that didn't fit its mission; it had been over 50 years since the A-K spent substantial institutional energy on non-modern/contemporary art. It made sense to me that a small museum in an economically struggling community focus on its core mission.

Unfortunately that November morning was the high-water mark. Since then the museum has repeatedly gotten in its own way. A partial list:

How artists look differently than the rest of us. [via]

Feb. 2, 2006: Michael Govan's appointment as director of LACMA.

Feb. 5, 2006, by Christopher Knight in the LAT: "More often than not, masterpieces of domestic L.A. architecture go to wrack and ruin or hang on by a fingernail beneath the threat of the wrecking ball. No need to list the horror stories yet again. The Getty could acquire significant houses; restore them; install architecture students from USC, UCLA and SCI-ARC in residence; and, finally, devise a way to regularly open them to the public."

Edward Wyatt in today's NYT: "Shortly after moving here last year to take over as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Govan started looking at houses -- not as a place for him to live but as potential museum pieces.

His idea -- one that has rarely, if ever, been tried on a large scale by a major museum -- is to collect significant pieces of midcentury residential architecture, including houses by Rudolf M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright, and to treat them as both museum objects and as residences for curators."

The director of San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, Emily Sano, is retiring after 15 years of chief curatorship, deputy directorship and, finally, the top job. Sano was the director who steered the museum -- backed by big donors such as Mr. Sen. Dianne Feinstein -- into its new location on Ess Eff's Civic Center. Sano also helped fund the restoration of the Piazzoni murals that are now on view at the de Young. (It's not her fault that the de Young displays them as if they were luncheon menus.)

Sano's retirement opens up a big job (the Asian has a $20-25 million annual budget) and contributes to the latest carousel of open directorships. The top jobs at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the MCA Chicago are all open.

It's time for the blogroll's sorta-quarterly overhaul. If you like a blog that's not on the list or if you're a blogger who isn't on the list, email me with suggestions at tylergreendc(at)gmail.com by Sunday night. Please put "blogroll" in the subject line. (That email address is temporary.) Thanks.

SFMOMA has acquired its first Dan Flavin: An iconic the diagonal of May 25, 1963. The version SFMOMA purchased is blue. It's currently on view on the museum's second floor.

The early history of Flavin's diagonals is somewhat, er, non-linear. Flavin's initial diagonal, later dedicated to Constantin Brancusi, was yellow, but the first one he exhibited was daylight white and was shown in the iconic "Black, White, and Gray" show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in January, 1964. When Flavin showed diagonal next, at NYC's Kaymar Gallery in March, 1964, it was in cool white and he dedicated that one to Robert Rosenblum. Since then Brancusi has been associated with the yellow color, and Dia owns the original. The cool white version remained dedicated to Rosenblum and, so far as I know, is in a private collection.

Later, apparently in 1966 when Flavin had his first European exhibition at Rudolf Zwirner's gallery, Flavin initiated an inventory of light editions and created nine versions -- yellow/Brancusi, cool white/Rosenblum, and seven other colors. Flavin dated all of them 1963 and capped each edition at three. SFMOMA's blue diagonal, which Flavin 'created' in 1966, is thus dated 1963.

I've always liked Flavin's description of his own diagonal epiphany, first written for Artforum and then later revised (and revised):

From a recent diagram, I declared the diagonal of personal ecstasy (the diagonal of May 25, 1963, a common eight-foot strip with fluorescent light of any commercially available color. At first I chose "gold." ... There was literally no need to compose this system definitively; it seemed to sustain itself directly, dynamically, dramatically in my workroom wall -- a buoyant and insistent gaseous image which, through brilliance, somewhat betrayed its physical presence into approximate invisibility.

Related: Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights is $50 off here.

I've written a lot here about how a light-and-space historical survey show is overdue given how much light art is in the zeitgeist right now. One of those zeitgeist shows is a Refract, Reflect, Project, a collection show at the Hirshhorn. Spencer Finch's Cloud (H2O), a recent Hirsh acquisition, is included in the show.

When Finch is at his best, he makes beautiful installations that stand on their own. In his less-good work he creates installations that require a lot of background knowledge about his process, his inspiration for the piece, and so on. Finch knows this is an issue in his work and talks about it near the end of a podcast-available Q&A with Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood. (Cool idea Hirsh folks -- more museums should do this. It's cheap and easy.)

In a related story, and from the Lawrence Weschler-inspired file of convergences, compare Finch's Cloud (H2O) with an Erich's Lamp Shop, the derisive nickname East Germans had for the light installations at The Palace of the Republic. (The building was home to the East German parliament, government offices, bars, cafes, a bowling alley, and was a venue for Communist Party events.)

Related: Spencer Finch's website.

I also wanted to get the two relevant newspaper stories on the A-K's deaccessioning plan on the blog early this morning:

Isn't $900,000 enough for mid-sized museum to spend on contemporary art each year?

I don't know. I think it's a fair question, but I know next-to-zilch about the contemporary art market, what a Rachel Whiteread costs compared to a suite of Cathy Opie photographs, or what it costs a museum compared to a private collector. Ultimately it depends on this: How strong a collection do you want to have? Do you want to be one of the first museums in line for top work or somewhere in the middle?

By seeking to essentially double it's art acquisition endowment, the A-K is saying that it doesn't think it can collect at a prominent level for $900K. By comparison, in 2005 (the most recent year for which Guidestar has the relevant tax filings) SFMOMA spent $2.1 million, MAMFW spent $1.2 million, and the Walker spent $2.3 million. Both museums receive frequent contributions of art from donors, whereas the A-K less so. One of the A-K's arguments is that even though it is in a struggling community it is trying to collect art on a near-par with bigger, wealther institutions and communities.

(Hence shared acquisitions, such as Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (Domestic), which the A-K co-purchased with the Carnegie.)

That's a pretty good argument. But why aren't more contemporary art museums, curators, collectors, dealers, and such rising to the Albright's defense? You'd think that they'd all welcome what the A-K is doing. Easy: The A-K has made all kinds of mistakes in this process, both major and minor.

Tomorrow: What those mistakes have been, and whether they're substantial enough to kill the A-K's deaccessioning plan. Related: An overview, the irony of deaccessioning to enable collecting.

Buffalo News' Mark Sommer: Members back deaccessioning by a 3-to-1 margin. More tomorrow.

Related: Re-overview, the irony of selling collection to enable collecting.

E&P's Joe Strupp says that one of this year's three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism is an art critic: LATer Christopher Knight, who had something to do with major changes at the Getty and at LACMA... and who wrote plenty about stuff on walls too. This is Knight's third time as a finalist.

The other two finalists are LAT classical music and opera critic Mark Swed, and LA Weekly restaurant critic Jonathan Gold.

In the current Fortune magazine Warren Buffett announces that he's instructing charities to spend his wealth fast -- within 10 years of the closing of his estate. Buffet is concerned that if he set up a Pew-type foundation that his money might not be spent as he intended. This issue, known as 'donor intent' is one that we in the art world know well. So I wrote about that for the magazine, and you can read it here. (Complete with a killer Nigel Dickson photo.) In the print version of the magazine is a sidebar featuring Buffett talking about the issues raised in my piece.

When I was about eight years old, we Greens took a family vacation to Colonial Williamsburg. My parents promised a range of 18th-century fabulousness, especially a maze made of hedges at the home of King George's man in Virginia, the Governor's Palace. But when we arrived at the Governor's Palace, there was no maze. It had been torn out for replanting.

Last week, I got my maze. It's tucked into a side-yard of Maastricht's Bonnefanten Museum, and it's a Richard Serra.

Titled The Hours of the Day it is installed outside of the Bonnefanten, a part of its permanent collection. On three sides the Serra is bordered by Aldo Rossi's brick museum building. Side four is open to the Meuse River, and to a superb view of the oldest section of Maastricht. As you can sorta see from the photo (above), The Hours of the Day is made up of a series of Cor-Ten steel plates, irregularly installed in rows.

It is impossible to walk straight from the river to the back of the Serra; I wended my way through the steel -- and I couldn't see what was coming until I moved through the plates immediately in front of me. I knew that the plates ended at a windowed wall that the courtyard shared with the museum shop, but I didn't know how I was going to get there until I was getting there. Like good early Nauman, interacting with the sculpture activated it, making the viewer into a performer. It was Choose Your Own Adventure, Serra-style.

Playful fun in a Serra? Quite a departure from his Tilted Arc days, no? As we all know, a decade before making The Hours, Serra famously split a lower Manhattan plaza in two, creating a big, messy, public art fight between The People, who wanted unencumbered access to what they considered to be a public space, and The Artist, who wanted to dictate the art-viewing experience. Contemporary art lovers, who expose themselves to enough art-crap so as to be considered masochists, were happy to do as The Artist wished. A quarter-century later, the Tilted Arc Affair is to aspiring MFAs what case studies are to aspiring MBAs.

Here in Maastricht, The Hours represents a mellowed Serra. Chronologically and emotionally it's halfway between the domineering austerity of Tilted Arc and the captiv(ating) funhouse-style terror of the torqued ellipses. To be sure: There's still a bit of the controlling artist here. When I was halfway through the sculpture I looked back and realized I was completely surrounded by steel plates -- but that the sculpture 'wanted' me to move through it. I thought about Serra as having three Cor-Ten periods: Young Serra dominated you, physically or psychologically. Middle Serra encourages you, but keeps your eyes moving side-to-side. Older Serra puts you on his knee and tells you look, ol' Grandpa Serra isn't such a threatening guy.

Most people I know have a favorite Serra. They like the scary ones that threaten life and limb, or they love the mix of seduction and ur-bulk of the ellipses. I don't have one favorite set. But I do have a favorite Serra narrative: It starts with Tilted Arc and continues through Schunnemunk Fork at Storm King. Schunnemunk Fork is awful in the way that an unexploded mortar is awful: It's captivating, but it represents violence. The four-part sculpture forces itself into the Hudson River Valley landscape (and into the rich American art history that the valley connotes). The Serra at the Bonnenfanten, conceived at about the same time, prompted me to a childhood memory -- and a good one.

Related: You can sorta see the installation on Google Earth. Some Flickr images of Serra at Storm King here, here, and here. I can't find one picture with all four parts of it.

As I mentioned last Thursday, TEFAF in Maastricht is an uber-luxury fair, a marketplace for old master paintings, fine jewelry, antiquities, 19th-century canvases, old silver, 20th century works on paper, and, recently, for modern and contemporary art. So how much contemporary is here? And whom or what?

If Art Basel Miami Beach or Frieze is Amazon.com, then contemporary-wise Maastricht is your neighborhood Sam Goody's: There's not much selection, but can find some big Top 40-level names.

I saw two Christopher Wools, but only two. I saw two Basquiats, but only two. The John Currin was tame, though mildly breasty. Facile Elizabeth Peytons and Alex Katzes were abundant -- I saw more Peytons here than I saw in Miami.

Slightly more challenging Eric Fischls were prominently on view. Sometimes it seems as if dealers had worked hard to bring contemporary work that referenced the past, such as a Keith Haring that incorporated a Mona Lisa. Warhols, especially his late portraits (hello Mrs. Theodore Law), were everywhere.

Sometimes I felt like the surrounding fair was having a snicker at some of the newer work. Peter Halley flatly did not belong (and may never). James Lee Byars' The Female Figure, at Werner, was radiant, as was virtually every Richter I saw. Another artist who was out in abundance was context-sensitive John Chamberlain, whose work looked wonderfully subversive when surrounded by Old European money.

Related: Overview, the auction houses go stealthy.

Christmas must be stopped. [via]

Several days ago I pointed out that the NYT hadn't (yet) reviewed Wack at MOCA. Today Holland Cotter did -- and did it well.

One of the subplots of this year's Maastricht fair - and increasingly all art fairs - is the turf battle between dealers and auction houses. Christie's 'owns' a London gallery called King Street Fine Art, which exists mostly to sell at TEFAF. Sotheby's recently purchased Noortman, a well-known Dutch gallery of pre-modern art.

Anyway, as luck would have it (or not), King Street Fine Art and Noortman are both in Maastricht and they're across an aisle from each other. KSFA has mostly modern and contemporary art such as a fine Donald Judd single-stack, a big, fat Jenny Savile, and a busty-cool Mel Ramos and is still somehow located in the Old Masters section of the fair. And while most gallery booths are open to the aisle - all the better to lure you in - both KSFA and Noortman have small openings and visitors must carefully navigate their way into the two sancti. I don't think that this is an attempt by KSFA or Noortman to appear more exclusive. Instead I think Christie's and Sotheby's are trying to discourage other dealers, most of whom are livid that the auction houses are here, from watching them, from eavesdropping.

Here's probably what they were hoping to discourage:

While I was admiring the pink luminescence of the KSFA Judd, a woman came tottering in on an impossible set of heels. "Hey, hey!" she chirped, seeking the attention of gallery staff. It was soon apparent that she had just bought something from KSFA. The gallerinas weren't as attuned to her 'hey, heys' as she would have liked, and she looked around impatiently. As one saleswoman moved slowly toward her, the customer called out to her: "You're owned by Christie's, aren't you?"

She might have told the booth that she had just found a lost Caravaggio. Three KSFAers raced over, shushing all the while. The tottering customer noticed that she was being hushed, but not answered, so above the white noise of the 'quiet down!' brigade, she tried again, as if to a child: "You're. Christie's. Aren't you?" One of the staff finally answered: "Yes, yes, we are, but they ask us not to, you know, broadcast that. Or even mention it."

The customer looked triumphant. "Well I'm a Christie's customer!" she said, loudly. "I want a discount!" And with that the woman was skillfully led away, into some private area. I lingered for some time, but I never saw her again.

At one end of the Wildenstein & Co./Pace Wildenstein booth here at TEFAF, a pasty Renoir and a delightful Degas pastel look out at the Old Masters section of the art fair better known as Maastricht.

As I walked through the Wildenstein rooms, time advances through impressionism and into the 20th century. In the middle of the booth are two of the worst Bonnards I've ever seen. The canvas on the left is almost entirely consumed by a chunky cow. The one on the right is bisected by a starving horse, with the need for equilibrium between the paintings clear but never reached. By the time I exited Wildenstein by way of a red-white-and-blue Dubuffet, a Rauschenberg, and a Lichtenstein 'Asian landscape' painting, I was in the modern-and-contemporary wing of the fair.

It was a good example of the markets that this fair is trying to bridge. (The Wildenstein booth was surely intentionally placed.) Maastricht is an uber-luxury fair, a marketplace for old master paintings, fine jewelry, antiquities, 19th-century canvases, old silver, 20th century works on paper, and, most recently, modern and contemporary art. (I'm here on a press trip funded by the Dutch.) This is my first visit and it's nothing like other fairs to which I've been. I've seen good stuff, such as other Bonnards, lots of Magritte, and one divine van Dongen. I've also seen mistakes waiting to be AmExed, such as more 19th-century British seascapes than you can point a compass at. Oh, yeah - you can buy antique compasses here too.

So what do I think? Maastricht is nothing like contemporary art fairs. The carpet was better, softer. About ninety-five percent of the male visitors wore suits. A higher percentage of the women have left their original breasts intact. The attendees are older, and so are the dealer staffs. The lighting was obscenely bright, perhaps partly to help those aging eyes. At the opening day all-you-can-drink wine came with the invite-only admission, though naturally TEFAF doesn't speak Sizzler-ese. The quality of the art was fair-level. There were some real finds and some real horrors. Over the next few days I'll share with you more about what I'm seeing here - and I don't just mean the art.

Continued from yesterday.

And that's the irony: The Albright-Knox thinks that the only way it can survive as a collecting institution of modern and contemporary art -- which is what the museum has been for over 100 years -- is to continue to collect. And that the only way to focus on its collection is... to sell off part of its collection, the parts that it thinks don't fit its mission.

"The one thing no one really wants to listen to or address is that these collections had never been developed," A-K director Louis Grachos says. "Not once in our history had we brought in a specialist in the Asian collection or given the material the kinds of resources that we would need. Likewise with antiquities and the older art. There's never been a commitment in terms of scholarship or agenda."

And according to Grachos, there isn't going to be one. With the A-K's planned deaccessioning, Grachos and his trustees are conceding that they don't have any chance of ever having enough money to do any of those things. The planned deaccessioning is, more than Grachos probably wants to admit, an admission of regional defeat, an admission that the A-K, in economically struggling Buffalo, has no chance to raise money to hire curatorial staff in those areas, to launch exhibitions in those areas, or to display those works in proper contexts.

Even sadder, Grachos' argument in favor of deaccessioning boils down to this: It was a mistake for the museum to ever acquire non-modern and non-contemporary works.

And as for why the A-K isn't selling all of its pre-modern work? "The curators have worked hard to maintain key objects that they felt were helpful in telling some stories," he says. "There's a cycladic figure and such that our curators like to refer to in terms of its relationship to early modernism, so we kept certain objects. There were objects we felt we could utilize in terms of education opportunities but that weren't central to the mission. So we didn't do a complete deaccessioning of everything that was not in the realm of modernist thought. We were also very conservative in that we wanted to [keep] our Hogarth or our David. These were artists who were starting to lead to something that came in the 19th century, and we could see the seeds of how thing swere starting to change through the collection."

Next: If the A-K spends $900,000 a year on contemporary art, isn't that enough?

Expect me to go on about this for a few days before coming to a (personal) conclusion...

We'd all agree: The Albright-Knox deaccessioning is all about money. But I think the story here isn't so much about the A-K's desire to make some scratch in the hot art market - though that's unquestionably clear - but about what happens when regional economic realities collide cultural spending. Rust Belt museums take note: What we're seeing in Buffalo isn't just a debate over deaccessioning, it's a debate over how to stay vital. Is it more important for contemporary art museums to increasingly be as they were, or for them to continue in the spirit of their mission?

First, a quick historical rundown: The A-K is a small, historically significant museum based in a city that has gone from being prominent and wealthy, to being an economic backwater in just two generations. Buffalo is one of a handful of cities in America with fewer residents in 2000 than in 1900, and more than a quarter of the city lives below the poverty line. One percent of the Buffalo area's workforce evaporates each year -- the only workforce in New York state that isn't growing.

Meanwhile, the A-K is probably America's best modern and contemporary art museum with the least money, the smallest fundraising base, and the least-likely-to-improve donor community. (Last week I asked A-K director Louis Grachos what the museum's last six-figure endowment gift was. He laughed and then sighed. He didn't know, but said that it had been a long, long time. And that there was no prospect of fundraising on that level in the imaginable future.)

The A-K's budget hovers mostly in the $6.5-to-$7.5 million range, about one-fifth the size of, say, SFMOMA. However, thanks to restricted endowments mostly established 50 years ago, the Albright manages to spend about $900,000 a year on acquisitions of contemporary art, almost 15 percent of its total expenditures. For those of us who think that collecting institutions - and not just wealthy collectors - have a role in preserving the art of our time, that's a pretty good thing.

Then again, it has to be - the museum doesn't have any other options. A few years ago, after a traveling blockbuster from Washington, DC's Phillips Collection was a financial bust, the museum decided that it had to go out of the blockbuster business. Instead it would emphasize its collection with its exhibitions, and it would take smaller, less expensive, less flashy shows. In short, it would offer collection shows based on what Grachos says has always been the museum's core mission: the art of its time.

Tomorrow: Irony of ironies.

LATer Mike Boehm has the story on British Petroleum's $25 million strings-attached gift to LACMA. (Several MAN readers astutely noticed something was up when this tent popped up on the LACMA Broad Contemporary construction webcam yesterday.)

The LAT story has all kinds of contextualization of the gift. But the next story for LACMA is: Who gives next? When MoMA built its new building, every board member (save one, I think) gave at least $5 million. In terms of publicly-announced gifts, LACMA isn't anywhere near full board participation in its campaign (which has two stages to go), let alone participation at that level.

Also, so far few businesses have given to LACMA's campaign: As of Feb. 1 the only corporate donors were BP ($26 million, when you count a previous $1 million gift) and Johnson Controls ($500K).

Housekeeping notes: Later today I'm leaving for the world's largest art fair: TEFAF in Maastricht. Check back in for blogging from the fair on Thursday and Friday, and maybe on Wednesday and Saturday too.

The Kimmelman story ate up my blogging time last night, so I'm bumping my Albright-Knox deaccessioning update to Wednesday. I'll have at least one more post today before I leave.

Only on MAN: Sources tell MAN that Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic of the New York Times, will soon leave New York for a stint in Europe. Expect him to leave in the late summer and to stay there for about a year. Kimmelman will not take a leave of absence, and he will retain the "chief art critic" title even as he's 3,500 miles from New York.

Kimmelman's move comes as the NYT already fails to review important shows west of the Hudson. Among the shows/openings the paper has not reviewed are: Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park, Oiticica at the MFAH, Rauschenberg at the Menil, Icons of Sinai at the Getty, Celmins at the Hammer, Magritte and pals at LACMA, Matisse sculpture in Dallas, Wack at MOCA (so far), and on and on. Apparently even though the NYT is a national newspaper, it is not important for the paper's chief art critic to review America's major shows.

Or for him to cover New York. (Will any prominent gallerists or museum directors write to the Times asking what this says about the paper's commitment to its own backyard?) Sure, NYC is not as central to American art as you'd think from reading the NYT's arts section, but the way to fix that would be for the chief art critic to spend more time in Texas, Chicago, California and such -- not for him to decamp for Europe, where Alan Riding is already one of the NYT arts section's top writers.

And if Kimmelman is going to leave, Roberta Smith should become the 'chief art critic.' To many of us, she already is.

Related: To Kimmelman's credit, he reviewed Hank Wessel at SFMOMA in Tuesday's paper. Of course Ess Eff would have been an easy stop near a Kimmelman speaking gig in Portland on Feb. 18. And I liked Kimmelman's US Open blogging.

How good does this sound: An August weekend in Taos, New Mexico full of Diebenkorn events. On August 24 the Harwood Museum is hosting a symposium in conjunction with their Diebenkorn in New Mexico show. Scheduled speakers include MoMA chief curator (and Diebenkorn drawings curator) John Elderfield, Bay Area fig-ex expert Susan Landauer, Diebenkorn retro curator Jane Livingston, Diebenkorn monograph author Gerald Nordland, painter and RD in NM co-curator Charles Strong, and Mark Lavatelli.

In case you missed it: In Saturday's NYT the chairman and president of MoMA, Robert Menschel and Josee-Marie Kravis, finally responded to Stephanie Strom's story about Glenn Lowry's secret cash stash. They did so not by talking with Strom, but in a letter to the editor. (I'd guess that Strom wonders why her paper would run the letter when the relevant figures didn't or wouldn't talk to her...)

The letter reveals MoMA's scandal strategy: Obfuscate. Confuse the issue. The letter is filled with assertions that have little to do with the what was revealed in the story. Especially this paragrpah:

Since 2004, all compensation paid to Mr. Lowry has been part of the museum's operating budget and reported on its tax forms.

Yes, but the whole point of the story was the slush fund that trustees created for Lowry that paid him between 1995 and 2003, $5.4 million worth.

They also write: "All actions taken by the museum and the trust were legal, ethical and disclosed." Well, we'll see about that. The New York attorney general and the IRS will decide if it was legal. There is no question that it was shady and unethical.

Related: MoMA, MoMA, MoMA.

In recent years we've seen curators realize a number of artworks conceived -- but not made -- by artists before they died. The most prominent of these projects is Nancy Spector's realization of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres for the U.S. pavilion in the upcoming Venice Biennale. The Venice presentation will "feature a never-before-realized work in the entrance courtyard of the Pavilion: two adjoining reflecting pools that form a figure eight, the sign of infinity, as both a silent mirror on our collective culture and a beacon of hope," wrote Spector in her show proposal. FG-T originally designed the piece for the sculpture park at Western Washington University.

This week MAN has featured Q&As with Spector, Hirshhorn director Olga Viso (scroll down to see them). Today: Andrea Rosen Gallery/Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation guru Michelle Reyes on the forthcoming Venice project.

MAN: How did the idea for realizing this piece in Venice come about?

Michelle Reyes: It was Nancy's [Spector] idea to include the piece in the pavilion. She had just written her proposal and emailed it to me which was the first time that I heard about its inclusion.

And as I understand it Felix had indicated that this was a piece he wanted to have realized after his death? How did he leave that idea behind?

I know that Felix hoped to see this piece realized before he died, whether it was in Washington state in 1992 or later.

Because this work did not have the opportunity to be made [for Western Washington University], since that time Felix was continually thinking about that particular work. He was not an artist who had a studio so he was always re-working things in his head in different scenarios and contexts, occasionally making drawings in his notebooks... I've seen drawings he made in notebooks of this piece and never once did he sway from the form of the piece. There is one drawing in his archives from 1993 that indicates he wanted to include it in his "Traveling" exhibition at the Hirshhorn in 1994. For him this is a work that all along he had plans to exhibit in the future, but for whatever reason it just never happened during his lifetime.

I have to say that Felix was an artist who was very specific about what he wanted to include in his oeuvre and this work was one of them. He left instructions to some extent for many of his pieces, but, given the nature of the work, this was not atypical. Take the Untitled (America) light-string piece. The ideal installation of this piece is outside, strung across a street but Felix never lived to see it installed in this way. There are things that can happen after an artist's life that don't happen during an artist's life. Pieces have a history after an artist has died whether or not they were manifested.

Do we know why the piece planned for Venice was not installed?

It probably wasn't the right moment. Finally it was something he was considering for an exhibition that he was planning on doing at CAPC Bordeaux, but ultimately he developed and decided to include other site-specific pieces, one of them an in-ground pools piece and the other an incredible double billboard installation. I have a bunch of paperwork [about that]. It's interesting because the in-ground pools piece had a completely different genesis and the above-ground pools piece, as you know, was originally with this proposal from 1992.

In terms of his process, how far along did he get in realizing this piece?

For Felix it was more the idea and someone else with expertise was going to figure out how to make the piece based on Felix's parameters, but it never got to the logistics stage. This process was not antithetical to his working practice and pertains to many other works of his.

So what we have and know of his intent for this piece is all in drawings and such?

There were also meetings and conversations we had too. He would call us on numerous occasions every day to talk about his work, including this piece. He had very set ideas about this piece. In addition, we have the drawings he intentionally left -- an evolution of drawings. There is the final drawing, but it was an evolution for Felix to get to that final drawing. It started with the Western Washington University proposal.

Do you know how many drawings he made for this piece?

I don't know how many there were... I can tell you how many I know of: Two official drawings, one that he proposed to Western Washington, which is very sketch-like, and one that is a more fully-formed drawing that he proposed in 1994-95. I would say that there are other drawings, at least two others, but not having gone through the full archive or his notebooks fully - they haven't been archived - there's no way of knowing how many drawings were in that evolution.

In some of the drawings of other artists that have been realized, say Smithson's Floating Island, there have been notes on the drawing or maybe even questions about what the realized piece would include. Is that the case for this piece?

This is fully formed, completely, no questions. But as per Felix's working practice, there were parameters for the flexibility intrinsic to the work - there is a choice of two sizes and a choice of materials. As with the majority of Felix's work, it will look different each time it is installed. There is no one true installation. This is one of the core aspects of the nature of all of Felix's work.

Will you show any of the drawings that Felix made for this piece, either in Venice or in New York?

That would really go against Felix's practice. When you bring these things into the public realm it would obfuscate how he wanted his body of work represented.

So will anything of the history of this project be published as a book or some such thing, drawings, documentation, what-have-you?

I don't know about a book, but there's always the potential in the future for papers from his personal materials to be archived for the public so that scholars, students, and such, can have access to them. The Estate and the Foundation are thinking about this in terms of a long-term decision. The Foundation has already become a place researchers can visit and access the information we have here now.

Part one of MAN's Q&A with Hirshhorn director Olga Viso is directly below this post.

MAN: Why do you think conservation is the right analogy for realizing the work of a deceased artist?

Olga Viso: We have a piece we don't honestly know what to do with. It's the great Fishman by Paul Thek (left). The last time we showed it we knew it would be the last time we'd be able to show it because it was completely disintegrating.

The thing that's interesting is that our conservators are consulting with somebody in Europe. In Germany they have the same piece from the same year and it hasn't disintegrated the same way ours has. They're all talking to hear how it was stored, what was the climate, and such. (It was in a collection before it came to us, which creates variables.) The big question was: Do we cast it, make a duplicate for study purposes even as it disintegrates? It would be destroyed in the casting process - but it would be destroyed anyway.

So people have different opinions about that. There's a Paul Thek retrospective coming that might clear some of this up. [Ed.: The Thek retro will be at the Whitney. There's also a Thek show at Alexander and Bonin this spring.]

You can also look to the conservation model for when the institution does intervene or make a value judgment. It has to be clear about what it's doing. In conservation-speak it means that if you make an alteration it's reversible, especially if it's not clear because the critical opinion could change 20 years from now or there could be science that gives options that aren't available now. If it's that invasive you have to be clear about it, that this is what it is or the piece has been restored to allow you to gain a sense of the work

To underscore, I think the questions are just bigger now, more complicated just because of the way artists worked.

Are we going to see more of these kinds of issues in the coming years?

Yes. I think that as we're looking at artists of this generation, these issues just come to the fore a lot more. Because of the nature of the way these artists work, the site-specificity of a lot of this work, the fragility of a lot of this work, the ephemerality of a lot of the work -- all these issues and questions are just harder I think, and more frequent.

This issue has come up a lot in the past in a way... How many posthumous casts are there? I was just contacted by a gallery who did a posthumous cast of a Modigliani. I don't think it's such a new issue -- I think it's a new set of questions and problems that arrive because so many artists resist the question of their art being institutionalized.

I think a museum, as an institution and as a curator, I think one responsibility is to hear all those voices and perspectives, and to weigh them. You have to weigh a lot of things, the long-term [health] of the piece, making it available. To me the most paramount thing is respecting the artist's intent and the originality of the work.

Also as a museum, we think it's important to interview the artist when the work comes into the collection, and to ask, 'If this happens to the piece, do you feel comfortable with that?' Because down the line, when none of us are here, we want to make sure there's as much clarity as possible. Sometimes artists haven't thought through that.

What do you do when there's less documentation?

I think in the case of Gene Davis that was the issue. There was no clarity in terms of text or words that he left behind as it relates to that particular piece. I think I was convinced that there was as a translatability of the stripe paintings to different venues, but there was something about the Kennedy Center and that site and the circularity that I think is site-specific. It just wasn't clear to me that the circularity should translate into a different context. If you look at the original site plan it was made for a place with that circularity to it. If he were alive and that site were to be discussed, would he have carried over that circularity? For me that's impossible to know. For me that's a judgment call and it wasn't clear enough to make an authoritative decision on.

In recent years we've seen curators realize a number of artworks conceived -- but not made -- by artists before they died. The most prominent of these projects is Nancy Spector's realization of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres for the U.S. pavilion in the upcoming Venice Biennale. This week MAN will feature Q&As with Spector, Hirshhorn director Olga Viso, and Andrea Rosen Gallery FG-T guru Michelle Reyes on realizing the unrealized. Today: Olga Viso. This is part one of two.

A few years ago then-Hirshhorn curator (and now director) Olga Viso curated a retrospective of Ana Mendieta in which Viso wrestled with how to present a Mendieta that would have had to be semi-reproduced. And earlier this year Viso was on a Washington, DC panel that decided not to make an unrealized Gene Davis stripe painting on the National Mall. (The Davis was designed for a circular area outside the Kennedy Center; the (sometimes) grassy areas on the Mall are not round.)

MAN: When should and when shouldn't an artist work be created after his/her death?

Olga Viso: Since people are doing survey exhibits and looking at this work more deeply, all of these issues come to bear. A lot of artists resisted these things in how you present the work. When I did the Ana Mendieta retrospective, this was a big question. I still debate whether we did the right thing or not in terms of presenting one specific work. I talked to a lot of people who knew the artist, who worked with the artist, scholars who spent a lot of time looking at her writings and my own in-depth study of her words and trying to come to terms with what was appropriate in the spirit of her work.

Do you have one over-arching principle you use in determining whether creating an unrealized work is acceptable, or no?

Conservators deal with these issues all the time. I think it's case by case. I don't think you can apply one specific programmatic logic to these things I think you have to immerse yourself fin the artist's world and how open-ended their works were and with what they left behind.

I think you have to get as close to the artist's intent as you possibly can. In some cases it's very clear and in other cases it's not so clear.

I think you have to be clear about what it is you are presenting. In the case of Ana Mendieta we spent a year and a half dialoguing with conservators and with Chrissie Iles. There was this gunpowder piece she had executed in Miami. [Ed.: Maroya.] It was really the only gunpowder piece that was intended to be a permanent piece. She made a lot of pieces out in the landscape, they exploded and that was it. This one she created with the actual intent, as an incense burner that could be lit and relit over time. So this collector who had this...[was about to leave the house where the piece was made and] was in this moment of crisis of what to do. Do you just leave it, or do you excavate it and what is it once you excavate it?

He excavated it, and it broke into pieces. he brought it up to the cons lab and I got deep into my research about it and for me the piece was very much a trace or a residue of an action. I was very clear that if we were going to present it would be presented as that. I found very clearly in her words and actions and articles that she had tried to translate the Smithson idea of bringing the non-site inside, and she was not happy with that solution, bringing in glass and grass and creating faux-nature inside. For her it was not a successful solution, so I didn't think we should do that.

It was 16 inches deep so it would have to be built or put in a pedestal and it would fall apart... I was really clear that would be presented as a fragment. We talked about whether to dig it into the pedestal or some kind of display that would let you see the underneath of it. For me the big judgment call was this: It was the only piece, the residue of the piece, that would give you a sense of the scale, the texture and the materiality of her work because everything else was text or photos. So presenting it as a residue of an outdoor piece along with her original photos and films that showed how these things [existed] in the landscape is ultimately how we decided to present it. I don't think we got it right at the Whitney, but I think we got it right by the time the show traveled.