April 2007 Archives

I'm on travel on Tuesday and Wednesday. I probably won't be posting until Thursday, but... ya never know.

In a 1966 essay titled "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," Joan Didion looked under the skirt that was California's post-war, middle-class normalcy to reveal a society in which violence, drug use, and all the rest were the norms rather than the exceptions. (Didion did this in lots of essays and they fill two remarkable collections: The White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem.)

Reading Brent Burket's recent post about Marilyn Minter reminds me that Minter is the artist who does the same thing around today's conceptions about celebrity, appearance and wealth. She is a devastating artist in the way that Didion was a devastating essayist.

Related: Burket visits Minter's studio. His post was prompted by this group show. MAN on Minter in the 2006 WhiBi. Alec Soth riffs on Marilyn & Pam too.

UPDATE: As the Art World Turns may have solved the LAT+Alex Prager mystery...

Walking out of the Baltimore Museum of Art the other day, I found myself thinking: What makes my favorite museums my favorite museums? Some ingredients:

I just don't get this: Is there no journalist in Colorado willing to call the Denver Art Museum on its, uh, questionable spin job on why it is cutting its budget and laying off staff?

Earlier this week museum director Lewis Sharp was a guest on Colorado Public Radio's Colorado Matters program. I can't exactly say he was interviewed. More like chatted-up. Sharp didn't repeat the museum's bizarre free-admission explanation for its staff/budget cuts, but he wasn't questioned about the museum's post-opening shortfall very intelligently either. He actually said that the DAM was something of a liberator because it allowed laid-off employees to explore new chapters in their lives. And got away with it.

Sure, it's possible that some of what the museum is telling the Denver media is true. But the initial round of stories in the Denver Post and in the Rocky Mountain News were regurgitated press releases. Denver media: When you stand up, MAN will stand down. (Where have I heard that before...)

P.S. Why does this matter? If Denver gets away with blaming its budget probs on free admission...

These are fun:

Aqua Art Miami, the coziest of Miami's fairs, is close to finalizing a major upgrade: Aqua is in the final stages of negotiating a three-to-five-year lease for a warehouse space in Wynwood, not far from the Rubell and Margulies collections, fair owner Jaq Chartier told me. Chartier wouldn't tell me exactly where the building will be because she and her husband, fair co-organizer Dirk Park, are still finalizing the contract.

As a result of the warehouse addition, Aqua plans to offer two spaces this December: The 'traditional' space for 42-43 galleries at the Aqua Hotel, and what Chartier calls a "slightly upscale" warehouse for another 40ish galleries. "Sometimes hotels are given short shrift by collectors who see them as lower on the totem pole," Chartier said.

Not only is Aqua going warehouse, but it plans to reconceptualize how galleries and visitors experience the Miami fairs. Gallery spaces at the Aqua warehouse will be as large as 500 square feet, 60 percent larger than the gallery spaces at NADA. And Aqua wants to do away with the aisles-and-booths layout of most fairs. "What we want is a sense of contained rooms," Chartier said. "We want people to have a sense of being in a gallery space. It will be more of a museum-type space, where you flow into rooms instead of down aisles."

Another change from the fair norm: Because Aqua will be leasing the entire warehouse year-round, Aqua plans to build permanent walls for its gallery-booths. Expect prices for dealers to run around $40 per square foot. (Last year NADA charged about $30 per square foot, a figure which is expected to increase for 2007. I've heard several reports from Miami that fair organizers are seeing a dramatic increase in their rental costs, with space rentals as much as tripling.)

I asked Chartier if Aqua conceived the expansion to target NADA and the collectors who consider it No. 2 after Art Basel Miami Beach. "Definitely," she said.

People from whom we're waiting to hear on the Smithsonian's foot-in-the-door, see-if-anyone-stops-us admissions charge:

I find art magazines to be worth their weight in doorstoppers, so it's with sheepishness that I admit this: I keep an eye on a couple UK-based mags, including Tate Etc. The current Tate Etc. includes a Simon Grant Q&A with Vija Celmins. I find most artist Q&As to be worth their weight in dust, but how can you not love Vija Celmins? (The image here is MAMFW's Night Sky #17, one of their three Celminses.) So here's the Q&A and here's a great line:

Grant: Why just [paint] things in your studio? What about outside? Because Venice Beach, where you were living at the time, is a nice place, isn't it?

Celmins: Yes, but artists in Los Angeles didn't sit outside in the smog on the freeway, painting.

This is a big deal. The WP's Jackie Trescott reports that the Smithsonian is kicking down the access-for-all door by establishing tiered entry. Even more notable: It's the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum that's experimenting with the charge. The Smithsonian's interim secretary: Cristian Samper, the former head of the Natural History Museum. Tsk tsk.

Here's hoping that American for the Arts or some such arts group lobbies against the Smithsonian charging access to parts of our national museums. And fast.

UPDATE: From Thursday, April 26: From whom I want to hear on the admissions charge.

1.) What is Paul Goldberger's (perpetual) hurry? The New Yorker's architecture critic has raised premature reviews to the level of common practice. Recently he reviewed the Denver Art Museum before there was, well, much art in the museum. And this week he's at Steven Holl's addition to the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City. (The N-A doesn't open for over six weeks.) Sure enough Goldberger's review reads half-done: He mentions that there's some art in the building but what about the N-A's big new photo galleries? Nary a word. (That space is probably not installed yet.) How art exists in art museums is central to the whole enterprise. Patience Paul, patience.

2.) It's Fortune 500 week in American business. I don't know what the top ten American museums are in terms of operating budget for 2006, but here's a guess: Metropolitan, Getty, National Gallery of Art, MFA Boston, Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, LACMA, Philadelphia, FAMSF... and then a lot of museums in the $20-30 million range.

3.) Is it Jeff Wall or is it Memorex? [via] And what does that say about Jeff Wall's work?

4.) Rob Storr talks with Time's Richard Lacayo about the Venice Biennale. Storr says to expect something new that's old.

5.) I'm bummed by the LA media/art critical establishment response to Andrea Zittel's show at MOCA. Christopher Knight passed on it at the LAT, and so is Doug Harvey at LA Weekly. (Instead the Weekly has run an ineffectual profileish thing by Arty Nelson.) I think Zittel is a game-changer, the kind of artist who mixes sculpture, performance, conceptualism, community (and post-industrial idealism) together better than anyone -- including M. Barney. There probably aren't more than four living artists about whom I'd want to write a book. Zittel is at the top of the list. (PGWP blogs about the upcoming High Desert Test Sites, and Liale discusses Zittel as a non-Wacky feminist.)

Bloggers: Post your painting/photo rhymes by 5pm Thursday for a MAN linkfest on Friday. Here are some examples from the last week or two:

I mentioned this briefly yesterday: The third volume of John Richardson's Picasso biography now has a release date: November 6. It will cover 1917 to 1932.

I've been re-reading a few Picasso books over the last few weeks. Before doing yesterday's post on Picasso and El Greco I looked up a few things in Richardson I and remembered how far Richardson goes toward hagiogrpahy, how he elevates Picasso to the expense of all others (especially Matisse).

Got me wondering about this: Since Richardson II (1907-1917) was published in 1996, Matisse has been ascendant among the public (and probably among art historians too). I wonder how Richardson will treat Matisse in Volume III, especially with Hilary Spurling's two-volume Matisse biogrpahy having been published in the years since Richardson II, and especially since Matisse's Nice years are, er, uneven. My memory is that Richardson's first two volumes discount Matisse as much as possible. Will that continue? (Less relevant: Alex Danchev's Braque biography has come out since Richardson II as well.)

I may have to spend some of my summer re-reading Richardson and Spurling -- and it's definitely time to read Danchev too.

Unfortunately, this thought-provoking Alec Soth post goes rather well with what I wrote about earlier this morning.

What a difference four years makes, in which we juxtapose a 2003 Christopher Knight LAT review with comments Richard Lacayo made at his Time magazine blog last week:

In January of 2003, two months before the United States invaded Iraq, LAT art critic Christopher Knight reviewed a show of anti-war art at a Los Angeles space called Track 16 Gallery. Knight described the show as:

...a provocative historical exhibition that surveys antiwar agitprop during the last half-century, while tacitly participating in today's budding movement. On view are nearly 120 posters from the past 50 years, all made in ardent opposition to a wide array of American involvements in foreign military escapades.

That part wasn't controversial. In the opening of his review Knight laid out where the American people were on the idea of going to war with Iraq, and why that opposition to Bush's war plan didn't matter much:

A Los Angeles Times poll last month showed 72% of respondents -- including 60% of Republicans -- saying the president has not provided enough evidence to justify starting a war against Saddam Hussein.

The reason is simple. President Bush keeps shifting his explanations for invading Iraq; yet, even minus a coherent argument, he seems prepared to proceed without a public mandate. Fear begets action.

And in the first sentence of the review Knight called Bush's war plan "imbecilic," making it clear where he, the critic, stood on the issue the art he was reviewing addressed. A reader couldn't ask for a clearer roadmap to the critic's thinking.

Apparently the LAT editorial honchos thought differently. Thirteen days later (ok, so it took them a while to get around to thinking differently) the LAT issued the following "editor's note:"

The first sentence of an art review in Calendar on Jan. 15 characterized the Bush administration's plan for war on Iraq as "imbecilic." The article went on to state that the administration lacked a "coherent argument." It was an unusually harsh political judgment, particularly in the context of a work of cultural criticism. The subject of the review was an exhibition of antiwar art, and therefore a degree of political background was appropriate. The attack on the Bush policy, however, went beyond that legitimate mission. It was, in our view, a gratuitous political statement and, as such, a distraction from the legitimate substance of the review. It should not have been published.

At the time the LAT apparently wanted its art critics to quietly muse on color selection or something similarly tame, and to stay out of the pressing issues of the day with which artists themselves were dealing. Apparently the LAT wanted the reader to have as little information as possible about from where a critic approached an exhibition.

Fast forward to last week, when a gunman killed 32 people and injured 29 more at Virginia Tech University. Time magazine art critic Richard Lacayo responded with two blog posts. First, on April 17, he posted a solemn Mark Rothko painting from SFMOMA's collection. The next day he explained why he gave us a Rothko. In that second post Lacayo offered up two pretty directly political comments:

The first time I visited the Rothko Chapel in Houston, in the late 1980s, I was operating under the influence of a remark by the poet Czeslaw Milosz, something to the effect that the Western search for meaning in abstract art was a case of expecting too much from mere pigment. As you probably already know, as guides for the perplexed, the writers of central Europe cannot be beat. History has equipped them with just the right balance of the tragic and the ironic dimension. (For anyone making his or her way through the second Bush presidency, these qualities have a lot to recommend them.)

And later, Lacayo directly advocates for a political conversation:

One last note. Yesterday I also put up a favorite quote from [Rothko]. "Silence is so accurate". But if there's any chance now of resuming a real conversation over gun control, then let's decide that the moment of silence is over soon.

I asked Lacayo if he'd heard anything from his editors about his foray into political commentary. His answer: Not one word, and he'd be "astonished" if anyone said anything. "I also don't become another person just because I'm writing about art," Lacayo emailed me, noting that he once wrote about affairs of state. "Art and politics are intertwined anyway. But I definitely don't plan to turn my lemonade stand into a soapbox."

To me the dichotomy between the LAT's delayed-panic response to Knight's review and Time's shrug toward Lacayo is indicative of a nation the is relieved to be at the end of a lame, lame-duck presidency. We're tired of tumult, be it the latest bombings in Iraq, a crazed gunman in Blacksburg, or the other failed war (Afghanistan, remember?). And so we -- from news editors to bus drivers -- shrug and quietly nod: Well, yeah, that's true...

Related: You can read Knight's entire review here. The exhibition was culled from the archives of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. LA Weekly's John Powers on the LAT's response to what Knight wrote.

Last week I mused: Will there be consolidation in the art fair industry?

As if to shame my sloth, Artworld Salon's Marc Spiegler promptly got on the phone, talked to people, and came up with an answer.

I'm having fun posting paintings that rhyme. (I'm not sure why, other than that it gives me a chance to post about actual art. And maybe a visit to a wonderful paintings collection such as the Art Institute of Chicago's has my brain spinning in that direction.) I don't think anything here is particularly new (though I'd love to see someone confirm my Cope-Hartley suspicions), but I'm having fun and that's enough.

So: At right you see Picasso's 1905-06 Boy Leading a Horse, which is on view now at MoMA. (It's pretty much always up, so don't rush over or anything.) There are lots of bizarrely riveting things going here -- imaginary reins! -- but I particularly like the way Picasso makes the color of the sky into the color of the horse.

(I'm also fascinated by the way that particuilar young acrobat surfaces in painting after painting. With one of MoMA's Matisses is in Dallas, the kid gets double billing in New York. Heck, he's everywhere, including in the Barnes' Acrobat and Young Harlequin, and in the $104 million Boy with a Pipe, perhaps the least good Picasso using him as a model. He's gotta be in the NGA's superb Family of Saltimbanques, but I can't definitvely peg him in that painting.)

Picasso painted Boy Leading a Horse near the end of a period in which he put a lot of El Greco into everything he did. (The blue period might as well be called the El Greco Period and even Picasso's post-Blue paintings are full of the great Spaniard's hands, poses, hooded figures, and postures. Picasso biographer John Richardson dates that "obsession" back to 1897, and even more specifically to an 1899 notebook in which Picasso wrote "I am El Greco.") Boy Leading a Horse, painted at the tail end of the El Greco period in 1905 and 1906, is one of Picasso's most direct cribs from any artist. He took much of the painting from El Greco's Saint Martin and the Beggar, including the painting's proportions.

Speaking of the AIC: It owns one of El Greco's several versions of the painting, including the one pictured here. The National Gallery owns a version, as well as a copy by El Greco's studio.

Picasso probably saw one of these two paintings, probably the NGA's painting which was in Paris in 1906. (The canvas now identified as a workshop painting seems to have been in Paris during Picasso's time too.) But I wonder... Remember how I said I liked how Picasso's horse and his sky shared a palette? I wrote in my notebook in Chicago that there's some sky blue in El Greco's white horse. I don't see any blue in the NGA painting. So maybe Picasso saw the other one?

Related: The third volume of John Richardson's Picasso biography will cover 1917-1932. It will be published in early November, and you can pre-order it for 35% off here.

Bloggers: Anyone else having fun rhyming? Post 'em this week and I'll link to them on Friday. John Firestone has a head start on you -- and picked on the same El Greco.

1.) In 1880, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened, President Rutherford B. Hayes was in attendance and gave a short talk. (Very short: I think it was one sentence.) In 1939, when MoMA moved into its new building, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a 15-minute national radio address. In 2007... that's all kind of hard to imagine, isn't it?

2.) Unexamined question for art journos: Will there be consolidation in the art fair industry? When I talked to Art Basel's Sam Keller last year he pooh-poohed the idea. (And no consolidation has happened.) But doesn't it make sense for that to happen at some point? I mean: I don't even know when artDC is -- and it's this month.

3.) Earlier this week, a grad student asked me a great question: What's the best exhibition I've ever seen? My two answers: Barnett Newman in Philadelphia, Carleton Watkins at SFMOMA, NGA, etc.

4.) Dear State Department: The Bush Administration says that it values Iranian culture. How about an exchange of art exhibitions between the US and Iran?

5.) Five artist biographies I want to read: Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Titian.

Next February the Metropolitan Museum of Art will co-present the first Courbet retrospective in three decades. The show (which will also touch down at the Musee d'Orsay and, I think, at the Musee Fabre) made me wonder: Are we in the middle of a Courbet resurgence?

To recap: In early 2006 the Getty launched one of the best shows of the year: Courbet and the Modern Landscape. (The Getty show also prompted one of the best reviews of the year, by Doug Harvey in LA Weekly.) Two American museums bought stellar Courbets: FAMSF and the Wadsworth Atheneum. FAMSF (whose Courbet is above) was so proud of its new painting that it included it in a Monet show. At my visit, Ess Effers were more interested in the Courbet than in the Monets.

The publishing world has discovered Courbet too: Also in 2006, Ross King's The Judgment of Paris, a popular history of the dawn of impressionism, featured Courbet as a central character. A new book by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu titled The Most Arrogant Man in France (can't beat that title) positions Courbet as a media-savvy rabble-rouser.

So if we are in a Courbet moment, why? Is it because Americans, unhappy with their government and stuck in two wars that are going badly admire Courbet's down-with-the-government spirit? Or...

On Monday I posted about a rhyme between a William Cope Civil War genre painting and a Marsden Hartley painting about his lover Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in World War I. Today, also from the Art Institute of Chicago, a less linear rhyme.

I've been paying extra attention to painterly portrayals of the Danae myth of late, so I was looking forward to seeing the Titian on loan to the AIC. (The painting is owned by the Barker Welfare Foundation.) Titian painted a bunch of Danaes (Naples, Prado) and they're all a little different. One of the distinguishing features of the Chicago Titian is a little dog curled in the lower left hand corner of the painting. I've read many versions of the Danae myth and in no account does her father, King Acrisius, leave her locked up in a tower with her pet dog. The usual art historical reading of Titian's pooch is that it signifies loyalty or fidelity, though I'm stumped as to whom or what young Danae was being loyal.

Fast forward a few hundred years to Matisse's marvelous Interior with Dog at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Here the dog is just being a dog. (And, most probably, a compositional element.) The dog is napping in much the same pose as the Titan pooch, but it's hard to think that there's much connection between the Matisse and the Chicago Titian.

But then I started thinking about one of Bonnard's remarkable paintings of his wife, specifically the brilliant canvas in the Carnegie's collection. The Carnegie painting features Marthe in the bath, a familiar Bonnardian set-up. In front of Marthe, right in the center of the foreground, is a curled up little dog. Odd: Bonnard generally hid pets (cats mostly) at the periphery of his paintings, using them to create movement or action. The dog in this Bonnard is right there in the middle of the painting. And oh, one more thing: Marthe passed away in 1942. Bonnard finished this particular painting in 1946. The Marthe in the bathtub is long dead.

I dig the little dog in that painting, but he's always puzzled me. A classic art historical view of the painting would probably be that the dog symbolizes Bonnard's fidelity to his late and, uh, floating wife. (He and Marthe had an odd relationship: Bonnard was by no means faithful during their marriage -- his mistress eventually committed suicide -- and Marthe was a reclusive, probably depressed, hypochondriac. But by most accounts Bonnard was devoted to Marthe even though he painted her and his mistress in opposition, and even though his nudes of his wife in the boudoir show her to be strangely out of reach due to numerous strange barriers such as chairs, screens and the like.)

So that dog in the foreground. One frequent art historical guess is that Bonnard took it from his friend Matisse. Maybe. And maybe he took it from Titian -- Bonnard's pooch is just as weird as Danae's, but for different reasons. Or maybe, compositionally, Bonnard just liked it there. Who knows. But it made me think of three wonderful paintings and that's fine too.

In case you missed it, for the second straight year an art critic was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and for the second straight year the Pulitzer went to someone else. The 2007 Pulitzer for criticism went to LA Weekly restaurant critic Jonathan Gold instead of to LATers Christopher Knight or Mark Swed. Rats.

I'm sure that Gold is a fine writer. (Example: "Home of the Porno Burrito.") But journalism -- and particularly journalism prizes -- is about having an impact on people, on one's region, and on the world. How does judging tacos compare to critiquing and contextualizing cultural art forms that have existed for thousands of years? Perhaps Gold's writings led to the ousting of a sous chef or two, but Knight's work affected major change at the Getty Trust and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, two of the nation's top arts institutions. No (American) arts critic was more influential last year -- or in the year before -- than Knight. I can't even think of who might be in second place.

The Pulitzer board, which has tended to give criticism awards to consumerist guides in recent years, blew it.

So where does that leave art criticism and prizes? We have the Frank Jewett Mather Award, which is given out by the College Art Association. It has increasingly gone to non-critics, including to academicians/curators (Okwui Enwezor) and to anonymous agitators (The Guerilla Girls). Writers who take on contemporary art and the intersection of art and contemporary culture just don't seem to fit anywhere. That strikes me as an opportunity for a progressive foundation or funder.

Marc Spiegler finds a rather, er, direct similarity between Barbara Krugers and campaign posters for a French presidential candidate. (I like Spiegler's third reason for the apparent crib.)

About three galleries into MoMA's Jeff Wall show I realized why the installation seemed so polite, so quiet: Curator Peter Galassi used no wall-text beyond a small plate that gave the work's title, year, and owner. Perfect.

And kind of ironic, given that it was Alfred Barr who brought wall text to America. In Riches, Rivals, and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America, Marjorie Schwarzer says that before Barr, American museum walls were blank. A work's title, and the artist's name were typically announced on a small label attached to the bottom of a painting's frame. Schwarzer, whose book was published by the American Association of Museums, says Barr moved that information onto the wall, and that Barr added the artist's country of origin, information on that country, a short bio of the artist, and an explanation of how the work related to other art in the gallery. Phew.

Naturally, European museums used wall text before Americans did. In an excellent essay devoted to wall text in the collection What Makes a Great Exhibition? Ingrid Schaffner writes that in 1857 the British House of Commons passed a "rule" that in national museums objects would be accompanied by 'a brief Description thereof, with the view of conveying useful Information to the Public, and of sparing them the expense of a Catalogue.' (Schaffner quotes from a 1957 pamphlet by F.J. North, "Museum Labels: Handbook for Museum Curators." Bet that was a page-turner.) By 1890, says Schaffner, labels were printed for general distribution. They regularly ran to 300 words and "threatened to turn exhibition displays into textbooks."

Gimme Galassi's approach any day.

Related: A Flickr user finds some unintentionally hilarious wall text. Blogrollee Marshall Astor also gives us the large version of the Thiebaud text above.

Related thing that amuses me: Wall text under a Lawrence Weiner.

Modern Kicks responds to my Friday post. So does Lee Rosenbaum.

I just spent a delightful Saturday at the Art Institute of Chicago. I'm on travel today (Monday), so I'll auto-post at least one painting rhyme inspired by work I saw at the AIC.

First up is the juxtaposition of an 1887 trompe l'oeil painting by George Cope titled Civil War Regalia of Major Levi Gheen McCauley. The major was a prominent businessman in West Chester, Pa. -- which I'll get back to in a minute -- who commissioned Cope to make this painting of his Civil War gear. (McCauley was also a Civil War hero of some sort and it was became commonplace in the 1880s for Republican businessman to commission this kind of self-promoting painting. Lacking Scott Sforza, McCauley made do with Cope.)

Cope's painting of McCauley's gear was almost immediately exhibited to much notice and acclaim in Philadelphia. While I haven't seen the painting's exhibition history, it wouldn't surprise me if it was exhibited up and down the east coast in the 1880s and 1890s: It was an important painting for both the hero-in-claiming McCauley and for the painter-on-the-make Cope.

I wonder if Marsden Hartley ever saw it. Hartley was born in 1877, began his art training in Cleveland in 1892, and moved to New York in 1899.

Hartley's great 1914 Portrait of a German Officer, which is in the Met's collection, has several notable details in common with Cope's painting. (Portrait is Hartley's homage to his lover, Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in World War I.)

The black cross at the top of the Hartley echoes the cross on the cap at the top of the Cope. Two stars flank said cap and abstracted medals or such seem to flank the cross in Hartley's painting. Cope features the number seven, his regiment number, prominently on a canteen; Hartley features von Freyburg's regiment number at the bottom of his painting as well. Two tassels hang off of McCauley's swords, and two tassels hang at the lower-right of Hartley's homage.

Related: The Cope is not available for more detailed viewing on the AIC's webpage. More on the Hartley is on the Met's website here.

Last week Lee Rosenbaum and several other bloggers argued that Americans who donate money to foreign museums should not be entitled to a federal tax deduction. The America first of it all didn't sit well with me.

The United States fancies itself the world's leading nation. Most of the world's wealthiest individuals are Americans and our citizens, from Warren Buffett to Joe Six-pack, are the most generous people in the world. America's finest moments in the Bush years have been not government actions, but the extraordinary philanthropy of individuals (Witness: The response of individual Americans to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.)

Surely the writers who argue that Americans should not receive tax deductions for giving to a charity in The Hague (say, the Mauritshuis) must believe that Americans should not be incentiveized to help to victims of the 2004 tsunami?

One of the reasons I'm attracted to art - and I suspect that this is true of many people who donate money to museums the world over - is that it is a Big Idea. It is not a Big French Idea, a Big Moroccan idea or a Big Iranian idea. The art of those places, going back hundreds of years, is interrelated. One reason people are attracted to art is because artists have found ways to bridge cultures and eras.

Donors who support the Mauritshuis or the Belvedere understand that it's just as important to maintain and display Rembrandt for the Dutch or Klimt for Austrians as it is to take care of that art for all of us. Art is a shared human history. The preservation of our shared culture should not be limited to narrowly-incentivized, nationalistic funding streams. (Similarly, disasters such as the tsunami or the Qom earthquake are shared events. They devastate specific geographies, but their impact is felt the world over.)

When a donor chooses to help save the Hermitage Matisses, we should thank her for saving a bit of our common cultural history. If we, through our tax code, withhold our gratitude because we feel she should have saved Matisses in Philadelphia instead, we have begun a zero-sum exercise in smallness.

Today the Washington Post Smithsonian crue ran a story that it didn't pilfer from MAN: Sen. Dianne Feinstein -- who knows a bit about the museum world because she and her husband were (and maybe are) major donors to Ess Eff's Asian Art Museum -- thinks that the Smithsonian's governance structure needs to be overhauled.

DiFi (as we called her back in California) is right. (DiFi also raised the issue MAN first told you about three weeks ago, about the Chubb conflict and Smithsonian officials admitted that it should have been considered a problem.)

I've been meaning to link to this for a week or so: MOCA North Miami is expanding. The project will more than triple the museum's existing space. Price tag: $18 million. Likelihood of museo-layoffs? Depends on, ah, how many free days the museum offers. (Miami Herald architecture critic Beth Dunlop has more.)

You can read about former Smithsonian secretary Lawrence Small and current deputy Sheila Burke's relationship with Chubb in today's Washington Post.

But chances are you already read about it here, on MAN, back on March 21. As usual, the Post failed to credit MAN.

Related (sorta): The Post, Joshua Bell, and Sol DeWitt?!

As I walked through the magnificent pop art collection at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne a couple of weeks ago, I first passed Ed Kienholz's wicked Portable War Memorial, and then continued on through Warhol, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, and Johns. Eventually I ended up in front of another Warhol, 1963's Pink Race Riot. I looked around and kept walking out of the gallery. I told myself it was time for lunch.

As I sat in the Ludwig's cafe, I was well aware that I'd just ordered seven euros worth of turkey sandwich that I wasn't hungry enough to eat. Leaving Pink Race Riot had nothing to do with lunchtime, it had everything to do with not being seen in front of Pink Race Riot. I was an American in Germany. Standing in front of a painting that riffed on one of my country's worst moments had made me uncomfortable. What would Germans think if they saw an American staring at Birmingham policemen unleashing dogs on helpless, innocent people? Would they think I approved? Was I looking at the painting too neutrally and without enough indignation? Is there such a thing as standing passively in front of a painting but indignantly in front of what it portrays?

Pink Race Riot is one of a series of death-and-disaster paintings that Warhol produced in 1962 and 1963. (I've also seen this painting called Red Race Riot, but the Ludwig uses 'Pink.') The series started with images of car crashes and suicides and reached its apex with the Race Riot paintings (pink, silver, mustard, and so on) made in June, 1963.

To me the race riot paintings are Warhol's most mysterious and unlikely paintings. The rest of the death-and-disasters show mostly random, anonymous, and frankly unimportant incidents of, well, death and disaster. None of them have any social content beyond the shock-and-awe of bloody death, and how the American media (and by extension the American public) is fascinated by it. Even the 'other' sorta-kinda socially loaded painting in the series, canvases of electric chairs, is presented as neutrally as possible, without a body or corpse. It's all rubber-necker art.

But Pink Race Riot isn't. Unlike the other Warhol D&D images the Race Riot paintings prompt a deeper emotional response. What's in them isn't just awful for the people involved as in Warhol's other D&D images, it was horrific for an entire country. The Race Riots involve the viewer in a deeply emotional way.

So after walking out on Pink Race Riot I started trying to figure out why I was so uncomfortable in front of it. I realized that my discomfort begins with part of the painting's title: Race Riot. Warhol's titling here remains a mystery. The events portrayed in the paintings were not riots. The photograph Warhol used for Pink Race Riot was taken by Life freelancer Charles Moore on May 3, 1963, when the Birmingham police unleashed fire hoses and dogs on peaceful civil rights protestors. The pictures were published in Life's May 17 issue. Along with televised images of those days in Birmingham -- and this is when TV was brand new and had an impact that's hard to over-emphasize -- the pictures in Life (and in the NYT) stunned America. They had immediate impact and emotional resonance. Warhol had to know that Moore's pictures were different from a picture of a random car crash in the midwest. Right?

Edward Winkleman is musing on audio guides. My complaint: By merely offering audio guides a museum is looking at you with a condescending eye. You, dear vi$itor, aren't smart enough or well-informed enough to know what you're looking at. So you'd better listen to this so we can tell you all about it.

For me, one of the great joys of art is going to a museum, seeing the work of an artist of whom I've never heard or about whom I know little, and then going home and trying to find out more about that person. It's the joy of discovery times two.

Yesterday the Washington Post, the major American paper with the least and worst fine arts coverage, tried to make DC look culture-stoopid by asking prominent violinist Joshua Bell to play in a Metro station. The idea was to see if anyone noticed. Almost no one did. The Post knew that would happen: Their writers have been in DC subway stations during rush hour, when the average Washingtonian just wants the tourists to get out of her way.

Today the Post itself looks culture-stoopid. This screen-grab was taken from the front page of the paper's website at about 11:40 am EDT. Fifty-five minutes later, the Post caught the mistake and fixed one of its two graphics. (Bell played for 43 minutes, which officially makes the Post more culturally clueless than its readers.)

The links point to the Post's Paul Richard appreciation of LeWitt. Also today: LATer Christopher Knight on LeWitt.

In yesterday's Denver Post, John Wenzel reported that the Denver Art Museum is laying off staff. You remember the DAM: They just built a big new Libeskind.

The reductions amount to 14 percent of the museum's staff. The museum's explanations are goofy, ranging from blaming bad weather to other factors. (Memo to DAM: If your budget is so precarious that you need six days of sunny weather in December to maintain staff levels...)

Amazingly, the museum's explanation gets even goofier. Here's DAM's communications director on the other reason for the budget problem: "We accommodated almost 34,000 people in our opening weekend with free admission, so we're making adjustments for the popularity of those free programming days."

Oh really. Well, first, who decided to open free in the first place? Uh, that would be the Denver Art Museum.

Next: How much gate revenue did that cost DAM? Admission for Colorado residents is as follows: adults are $10, seniors $8, youth $3. Members visit free. I can't imagine that having a free opening weekend 'cost' the museum more than $200,000 in admissions revenue. (The musueum's budget is in the $25 million range.)

And that doesn't account for likely higher-than-normal gift shop and cafe revenue during that weekend. So how is it that letting people in for free, which earned the DAM a ton of free publicity, and probably didn't end up 'costing' the museum more than $150,000 after you account for gift shop and food revenue, force them to lay off or buy-out 38 staffers? To put that in context: That's about five-tenths of one percent of DAM's annual budget. (Oh that Wenzel had called the museum out on this, but in this era of he-said-she-said journalism many reporters print what they're told without questioning it.)

Apparently Denver planned badly. And blaming a free opening weekend is simply lame.

My favorite Sol LeWitts are probably the two big Wall Drawings (#935 and #936) he did for SFMOMA. I don't know that they're any better than any other LeWitts, but the combination of their size, their brightness, Mario Botta's building, an absurd lobby/party space made strangely just-right by LeWitt... somehow it all works for me. Those two LeWitts make walking into SFMOMA something more than walking into another big museo-atrium (The photo here was taken by Wayne Bremser.)

About three years ago a magazine asked me to write a mid-length Sol LeWitt profile. I said yes, the magazine said, 'Wait, hold on,' and I'm still waiting. Last night, when I read Michael Kimmelman's fine NYT obit of LeWitt, that's mostly what I thought about.

There is of course the art, which is as unlikely as beauty can be. (All those systems, those 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, those grids, those rules... and yet somehow you can't tear your eyes away from the thing. That's antithetical to what we think beauty should be.) The death of an artist is an unusual kind of passing: More than most people, artists leave themselves behind. So I can (and will) continue to visit favorite LeWitts in San Francisco, Beacon, and here in Washington.

Last night I was thinking about LeWitt and beauty. He wasn't one of the artists embraced by the writers who promoted beauty in contemporary art in the early 1990s. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe wasn't interested, and I can't remember Dave Hickey having much to say about LeWitt either. Maybe LeWitt's wall-drawings flirted with decoration too much for them? I don't know. (There are a lot of super and decorative Italian frescoes, too.) But when I think of LeWitts, be it the bright piece at SFMOMA or the more muted work at the Virginia MFA, for some reason I always think of the sun as being out, and shining on them, which seems kind of neat.

But the reason I'm disappointed I didn't get to write that LeWitt story hass less to do with the art and more to do the person about whom I've read. Stories of LeWitt's generosity to other artists and to the art world are everywhere. In addition to supporting groups such as Printed Matter, for years LeWitt traded work with near any artist who wanted to trade with him. He kept the works he received in a warehouse near his home, in Chester, Conn. He sent his collection of contemporary art around the country, mostly to small museums that have limited access to top new art. I would have enjoyed trying to learn more about what drove LeWitt's generosity. (And I still would -- there's probably a good memorial web project in that for someone.)

Also on MAN today: Sol LeWitt at SFMOMA, end-of-day roundup.

Related: The Hartford Courant's Deborah Hornblow also has a good piece on LeWitt. Phyllis Tuchman walks us through the NYC LeWitt wall drawings. Sol LeWitt's wall drawings: A survey at MASS MoCA in the fall of 2008. LeWitt on Artcyclopedia.

I was away from the office all yesterday afternoon. When I sat down this morning I saw crazy things.

First, the Tennessee AG is saving Fisk from its own dunderheadedness, telling it that it can't sell a ~$20Mish O'Keeffe for $7 million. (The Tennessean's Jonathan Marx has some potential solutions.)

Then the MFA Boston, once again proving it never met a sideshow it didn't want to be a part of, made a deal with the Herb Ritts Foundation to bring in $2.5 million, put Ritts' name on a gallery, and to bring almost 200 Ritts photos into the museum's collection. Yes, that Herb Ritts.

And finally, in the NYT, Carol Vogel mindlessly promotes an auction house in the arts section, instead of in the business section where she (usually) belongs. (Sum total of sources: One. Source of source: The auction house selling the painting. Non-Christie's-related context: None.) Having spent all week on a story that the NYT screwed up in the first place (my take has been picked up by LAO, Regina Hackett, Marshall Astor, abLA, and by Fishbowl LA), I'm tired of noodling the NYT and I'm skipping the Vogel bit.

What does all this mean? That it's hard to find an art story out there without dollars attached to it. Which makes me want to go to a museum and look, not read.

The Kimball is the latest to commission a Renzo Piano expansion: "Mr. Piano seemed predestined to design the expansion of the Kimbell Museum, having worked as a young architect in the office of Louis I. Kahn in Philadelphia," the museum's press release notes.

Yesterday afternoon, as I was perusing mega-media site LA Observed, I noticed this at the bottom of a post about the ethical problems (and here) of KCRW and its art critic Edward Goldman:

[KCRW general manager Ruth] Seymour responds to LA Observed: "I don't respond to anonymous allegations, which could just as easily be made by someone who is angry about a bad review or about not being reviewed at all."

Twenty minutes later, I KCRW emailed, telling me that Seymour was willing to chat with me. (For several days Seymour had declined, through a KCRW spokesperson, to talk with me.)

When we talked yesterday evening, I asked Seymour if it was OK for an on-air critic to personally profit from his position, particularly from access provided by a public radio station.

"I've known Edward," Seymour said. "He's worked for us for 20 years. He's been wonderful for the art scene here in Southern California. When I called him to say, 'Who is this guy Tyler Green?' he had only the most complimentary things to say about you. So I regret that I didn't just pick up the phone to call you... Ed talks to people who are outside the world, people who are not as knowledgable about art, and he is sometimes able to communicate his own passion for art. There is no way Edward would ever write a review that he did not believe in."

I told Seymour that I hadn't suggested Goldman ever wrote something he didn't believe. I said that the ethical questions that gallerists raised were partly related to things he had said on-air and partly related to how he leveraged his position as an on-air critic to demand questionable kickbacks (or, to use a much more permissive term: beyond-the-industry-norm commissions) from galleries.

"But to quote these anonymous people who won't even give their names!" Seymour said. "Why do you believe them?"

I explained that I knew who they were, I had independently checked out their stories and that the stories were solid. And that surely she could understand that people who wanted to be reviewed on Southern California's most prominent radio platform, KCRW, who wanted maximum exposure for their artists, surely weren't going to risk infuriating the station's critic by going public. That that was the whole problem: Goldman had allegedly demanded money from (at least) one gallery because he knew that it couldn't say no.

"I think what you're saying is just not borne out," Seymour said. "If, in fact, he reviews something and says, 'This is a wonderful piece,' and two or three weeks later one of the people in his class buys the piece, you're assuming..." Seymour trailed off and changed course: "You're not saying he wrote the review because he wanted the person to buy the piece. But that would be the conflict. The conflict is exactly that."

I pointed out to Seymour that one of the two examples on MAN yesterday raised that precise question, which is why this was a real ethical problem: Given the station's obscenely permissive ethics policy (scroll down to the pull-quote), who knows when Goldman is saying something he belives and who knows when Goldman is saying something to move an art object? I'm not saying Goldman has done that, but that's what ethics policies are for: to remove that possibility. Seymour wasn't buying it.

For there to be a problem "there has to be a direct fiduciary relationship between the guy putting the record on the air and also being a stake holder in the record," Seymour said, using a music analogy because KCRW is a national leader in indie-music broadcasting. Then Seymour told me that she didn't believe the gallerists who talked to me and suggested that they were using anonymity to lie. She said that if they were telling the truth surely they would have just picked up the phone and called her. I repeated my explanation about why I think a gallery would be reluctant to do that.

"No, I can't understand why they'd need to be anonymous," she said. "After 20 years -- I'm a real access person. And at the end of the day I'm not someobody who doesn't know anything about the art world. I lived in that world in the sixties. I'm connected enough so that on a personal basis -- not even someone directly calling me at the station -- I'd have heard about this from a lot of people. I'd say in the 20 years that this just hasn't come up. I just don't believe it given the people who run art in this town... people aren't afraid to tell me things like this."

In our entire 30-minute conversation, despite my repeated attempts -- and even taking the specifics of these two cases out of the equation -- Seymour never told me if it was OK for a critic of hers to demand kickbacks from galleries or if it was OK for him/her to promote something on the air and to then attempt to profit from it. "It exists on every level," she said about conflict, suggesting that KCRW's listeners should just learn to live with it. Earlier in our chat she told me that, "anybody who appears on KCRW... hopes that it will somehow further their career."

"I'm not going to can anybody on the basis of anonymous charge," she said. "Given my connections here and my 20 years of being in this town I would have heard about this from people. There's no reason that [gallerists] should so terrified of speaking to me. I understand what you're saing about Edward, but there's a way of approaching me as well. I'm not going to make any decisions based on anonymous accusations."

Continuing this morning's post:

Another LA dealer has told me that KCRW art critic Edward Goldman tried to leverage an on-air review into a sale to a client. As with this morning's post, the dealer insisted on anonymity and for the same reasons.

According to this dealer, Goldman reviewed a group show on KCRW but strangely spent the review substantially discussing just one piece. The dealer later discovered Goldman trying to sell that artwork to a client. (Goldman did not report this on air.)

As I mentioned in my first post, Goldman did not respond to multiple emails and KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour refused to talk with me.

In the wake of last week's NYT story on KCRW art critic Edward Goldman (and my post about that story) a Los Angeles dealer has told MAN that Goldman has engaged in ethically questionable dealings with his gallery. Based in Santa Monica, KCRW is the major National Public Radio affiliate in the Los Angeles area.

Goldman, who has been KCRW's art critic for two decades, also works as an art consultant for private individuals and for corporations, a highly unusual arrangement. The NYT story detailed how Goldman charges entry-level collectors $500 apiece for tours of Los Angeles galleries, 'classes' that Goldman calls "The Art of Collecting."

The gallerist, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity because he didn't want to anger LA's second-most prominent critic, says that those $500 tours that have led to his gallery's problems with Goldman. According to the gallerist, one of the collectors on Goldman's tour bought a piece from the gallery. Afterward, Goldman called the gallery to demand a 25 percent "commission" for the sale.

At most, art consultants receive 20 percent commissions on sales and their relationships with collectors and galleries are agreed upon beforehand. (Ten and 15 percent commissions are more common.) Consultants typically work between the gallery and the collector, handling billing and such. There is typically an agreement in place between consultant and dealer before a sale.

This gallery told me that there was no prior agreement with Goldman and that the standard elements of the consultant-dealer relationship were absent. Goldman did not handle billing or relations between the gallery and the collector. Instead, Goldman inserted himself only after the transaction was complete, essentially demanding a kickback for having brought the collector to the gallery as a part of his 'class.'

I tried to ask Goldman about this, but he failed to respond to several emails. KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour refused to talk to me (and thus did not know of this gallerist's allegation). She issued this statment through a spokesperson:

KCRW's policy for all its programmers is that if a DJ, commentator or critic benefits financially from the record or the subject that that he/she is playing or discussing --then the programmer must reveal that relationship on the air.

Edward Goldman has been KCRW's art critic for 20 years, speaking about the dynamic art scene that exists in Southern California. In all that time, KCRW has never received any information or complaint about impropriety or conflict of interest.

Edward is known to the galleries, the museums and the artists. His directness and frankness have at times ticked off the most powerful institutions, but he has been undeterred from speaking frankly and with passion in his reviews.

Edward is regarded -- justly, we believe -- as someone who not only loves art but has the ability to communicate his understanding and dedication to an audience.

The gallerist told me that he felt he couldn't deny Goldman the payment for fear of angering the critic. He also told me that he didn't complain to KCRW because he was worried that Goldman would not review shows at his gallery in the future.

Continued.

(Disclosure: I have been a guest on KCRW programs.)

Related: The Stranger's Jen Graves on a recent critical conflict in Seattle.

I frequently criticize the NYT for its scant coverage of the art world outside NYC. (The NYT's apparent response: But we did a semi-advertorial!) Today: An embarrassment in the paper's (belated) Robin Pogrebin story on the mess at the Smithsonian. It's in a passage about a recent report on the SI's art museums:

On the National Gallery, the report said, "The museum's chief weakness is the later 20th-century and contemporary collection, which has evidently been formed much more by opportunism than by strategy."

Ah, no. The National Gallery is not a Smithsonian museum. That passage was about the Smithsonian American Art Museum. SAAM was formed by the Smithsonian (several names ago) as a response to Andrew Mellon's NGA. Oh well; I guess it all looks the same from New York.

The Nelson-Atkins is opening it's Steven Holl addition on June 9. It's probably the most anticipated expansion opening since the Walker's a couple years back.

I've enjoyed following the reinstallation of the museum's permanent collection on its blog. Sure looks to me like this Donald Judd stack is smartly installed. And this factoid about the N-A's Cranach is so gee-whiz cool that I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

Just about every faith tradition in the world has some kind of garden myth: Buddha created his belief system while in a garden. Eden is the setting of the first scene in the holy book of both Christians and Jews. All of these garden myths seem to share a common genesis: The building of the first garden, in Persia, probably about 3,200 years ago.

The garden has maintained a special place in Asian art ever since. A new collection show at the Sackler, somewhat kitschily titled East of Eden, shows how Asian cultures have worked gardens into art.

It's a nice show, but it would be even better if it had brought its theme forward into modern and contemporary art: If anything, Asian artists are more interested in gardens now than ever before. Such a presentation could have included:

Some museum donors want to have the entry space named after them, say the Daddy Warbucks Atrium. Other donors might 'buy' the naming rights to a major permanent collection gallery or even the museum's education center. And then there's...

Continued from earlier today: Compare Pissarro's treatment of early industrialization to Mitch Epstein's treatment of late industrialization in Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia 2004, from SFMOMA's collection. (It's also on view now at Sikkema Jenkins in NYC, and you can see lots of Epstein at his website.) The same plant surfaces in several other Epstein photographs, including this one. It always feels threatening.

In the Epstein at right, the coal plant looms over two small houses, threatening them. The light in the photo is hazy, almost smoky. The shadow of the tree in the foreground of the photo is soft. Everything about the composition hints that something ominous is coming, perhaps from the high levels of mercury in the coal plant's emissions, or maybe from global warming.

And maybe from all that and more. The Amos plant (located here) is among the dirtiest coal power plants in America, and is West Virginia's worst polluter. It goes through 23,000 tons of coal a day, some of which has come been strip-mined via the questionable mountaintop-removal process. Amos ranks 11th in the U.S. in power creation and 12th in pollution. It's also polluting the air more and more: Amos had the largest increase in CO2 emissions between 1995 and 2003. To learn more, check out this Les Line story in Audubon Magazine.

For Pissarro industry and countryside could co-exist. For Epstein it's a dangerous relationship.

Related: Epstein and Thomas Struth will be in conversation at the Baltimore Museum of Art on April 12. This Epstein was also in ICP's Ecotopia show.

A lovely, subtle Pissarro show at the Baltimore Museum of Art chronicles Pissarro's mild transformation from a Barbizon-style landscape painter to an impressionist. Most interesting to me was the evidence of what academic Pissarro has in common with avant-garde Pissarro: A compositional interest in strong and dramatic verticals, and the presence of industry in the French countryside. Of the 45 or so paintings in curator Katy Rothkopf's show, six of them include the smokestack of a major industrial plant along the Oise, at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone. Two of them are from what Rothkopf delineates as Pissarro's Barbizon period, four are from after.

Throughout this transitional decade Pissarro frequently painted along the Oise: See how the smokestack blends into some masts in this painting, or how it balances a single mast in this painting in Indianapolis. My favorite part of Baltimore's show was watching Pissarro find ways to integrate this smokestack into his gentle landscapes.

The painting above is 1867's Banks of the Oise at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone, from the Denver Art Museum's collection. Typical of the six landscapes here, Pissarro shows a smokestack (or two or three) as a small but key part of his compositions, certainly happily