June 2007 Archives

Lots of blogs are weighing in on the most influential painting meme kicked off by Newsweek's Peter Plagens:

In Sunday's NYT Holland Carter checks in with a look at the Smithsonian. Or part of the Smithsonian anyway -- in a series of mini-overviews of the SI's museums Cotter leaves out American History, Natural History, Air & Space, the Renwick Gallery (which is sort of part of the American Art), the National Zoo, the National Postal Museum, and the Anacostia Museum. He never says why he doesn't include them.

Cotter's essay has nothing whatsoever to do with the scandals racking the Smithsonian's leadership, the apparent reason that this piece is running on Sunday. But however inadvertent, his approach reflects The Question facing the Smithsonian: Is it possible for the Institution to focus on a big-picture mission and purpose when the Smithsonian is made up of umpteen semi-autonomous fiefdoms? Should it even try? Do we need a national museum that tells our national story?

Yes, there are good programs at some of the Smithsonian museums (and Cotter is particularly astute on the Hirshhorn and the Freer/Sackler) and there are bad programs at others (American Art is a perfect metaphor for W's government), but the Smithsonian problems that need to be addressed first are about governance, accountability, and infrastructure. What's the point of museums strengthening their collections if the buildings that hold them leak so much that repair estimates approach $3 billion? Only when the big questions are addressed can the questions about collection-building, exhibition programming strength, and so on be considered.

I know that WSJ stories don't get discussed much on the web because they are usually hidden behind a firewall, but this line in James Panero's Venice Biennale review from yesterday is too shocking to go unmentioned:

One can only imagine that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are the natural extensions of Mr. [Rob] Storr's understanding of avant-garde art.

Nowhere in Panero's review does he explain how anything in Storr's biennale is anti-Semitic. He doesn't even come close. Panero's charge is cowardly: He walks up to the line of calling Storr and his show bigoted, but puts nine toes over that line instead of ten.

It's quite a charge to hurl... and yet the WSJ ran it despite a total lack of evidence. Certainly not the paper's finest moment -- nor Panero's.

The NYT and WP have the rundown on yesterday's Smithsonian-related hearing on Capitol Hill. The hearing was Exhibit A for senatorial cluelessness as Sen. Dianne Feinstein urged the Smithsonian regents to forgo a thorough search for the next secretary and to hire someone. Anyone. Fast. This is part of why the Smithsonian's governance is a mess: Clueless senators urging dimwitted solutions on delinquent regents.

Of special note is this DiFi quote from the NYT story:

Ms. Feinstein said the Smithsonian should not count on public support to cover $2.5 billion in revitalization and maintenance costs.

"What I'm trying to do is push you into the mode of coming up with a program that solves the problem instead of coming up with a piecemeal solution year by year," she said.

Mr. Sant replied, "We accept the challenge."

First, excuse me for not feeling terribly confident when I hear an asleep-at-the-switch-for-years regent accept a challenge. But more importantly: This is the big question about the future of the Smithsonian. Will it be eventually be 'privatized' into an independent non-profit? Or will it continue to be the national museumplex? As I asked in a 2005 LAT op-ed, the biggest question is this: Should America have a national museum that tells the nation's story?

In the current Newsweek, Peter Plagens asks and answers: Which is the most influential work of art of the last 100 years? Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Plagens makes a plenty convincing case. You can't pick Les Dems and go wrong. But I'd still take Matisse's 1907 Blue Nude, the painting that was so revolutionary, so avant-garde that it pushed Picasso to make Les Dems.

The first account of Picasso encountering Blue Nude comes from an American art student named Walter Pach, who included this encounter in his 1938 memoir Queer Thing Painting:

"Does that interest you," asked Picasso. "In a way yes..." [Pach replied.] "It interests me like a blow between the eyes. I don't understand what he is thinking," "Neither do I," said Picasso. "If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design. This is between the two."

And of course Les Dems is too. Jack Flam also wrote about Les Dems as springing from Blue Nude, pointing out that while Picasso certainly took something from African sculpture (as Picasso oft claimed), he was only able to do it after Matisse showed him how.

Flam also notes that Picasso remained obsessed with Blue Nude for many decades. Flam points to 1934's Nude in a Garden. And there are Blue Nude-type figures in Picasso all the way through his Women of Algiers series: In this 1955 example Picasso makes his reference to Matisse as clear as possible.

Sure, Les Dems is more famous. But Picasso needed Blue Nude to make it, and for decades thereafter.

Let the NYT cover Hirst like mad. Here at MAN we're more amused by the funky side of the art market. Take this David Hockney, Untitled (Two Apples and a Lemon), a 'color offset lithograph, signed in marker.' It was originally available 20-plus years ago for $0.25, that is, as a free insert in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner newspaper. It just sold at auction for $1,200 (with buyer's premium), a 480,000 percent increase in value. Or price. Or who-knows-what. Many tens of thousands of these were printed, so cumulatively they're worth well over $100 million. Sorta.

It was hard to miss this line in NYTer Carol Vogel's Monday story about the London art market:

[London] is teeming with contemporary art galleries, and most of them had special exhibitions timed to the auctions. One, White Cube Gallery, is getting the most attention as people line up to see Damien Hirst's $100 million, platinum skull set with 8,601 diamonds. (It was still unsold as of Friday.)

You can't blame the New York Times for the skull's availability. The paper has written about Hirst's opulent tchotchke five times in the last 24 days, six times in all. While the NYT's critics rail against the impact of the art market, their own editors have apparently decided that a mere 'for sale' sign is newsworthy. (Meanwhile the Times' critics haven't said one word about the Hirst.) What Paris Hilton-goes-to-jail is for Perez Hilton and cable news, Hirst's skull is to the NYT.

The paper's coverage started on May 23, 2006 when the 'Arts, Briefly' section mentioned that Hirst was creating a work out of "8,500" diamonds costing $15-18.8 million. Nice, quiet, sure, fair enough.

Just over a year later the Hirstian onslaught began in full: On June 2 Alan Riding cited the price as $98 million and upped the diamond count to 8,601, where it has remained ever since. The next day William Shaw reported in the Magazine that "if, as expected, it sells..." it would be" the single most expensive piece of contemporary art ever created." (No, not the most expensive ever created, the most expensive ever sold. If it sells..)

Still, at least Shaw and the Magazine hedged, however mildly: That Vogel story yesterday declared the Hirst a bona fide $100 million work of art even though $100M is only the publicity-seeking asking price. (In a related story, I'm a $15/word magazine writer.)

Back to the onslaught: On June 13 Riding wrote about the skull again, questioning the price tag: "But $100 million for a diamond skull that cost $23.6 million (£12 million) to make? Even Russian oligarchs and hedge-fund billionaires might think twice." (And they apparently are.) So in an effort to perhaps be helpful, Vogel checked in last Friday with tips on how to view the bloody thing. Given the continued availability of the Hirst, maybe that's where the Times should have started.

On Sunday the New York Times featured a major story on what the paper calls a "ferocious" crackdown on dissent in Iran.

In the current Brooklyn Rail, Robert Morgan writes about his recent experience as an art juror in Tehran. Morgan's piece is well worth a read, but I wondered: Was the art he saw pre-screened by the authorities in any way? If so, would he know? (I don't mean to criticize Morgan in any way -- I'm sure he wondered the same thing.)

Somewhere between these two stories is another Iranian art story: The issue of artists practicing self-censorship in the interest of self-preservation. A couple of years ago I heard Iranian-based artist Farhad Moshiri tell a (very crowded) room at Virginia Commonwealth University about making art in the Islamic Republic. He presented nearly every slide/work of art as a compromise between what he wanted to make and show, and between what he could make and show -- and be left alone by the state.

I have, by now, become accustomed to NYT critic Holland Cotter's cheeky asides about the art market. (Unfortunately that's all they ever are -- I can't remember Cotter having written a think-piece explaining his apparent disdain for how art is bought and sold. Given how much attention the NYT pays to the art market -- more on this tomorrow -- I think a little critical discussion of all this is in order.) Cotter's review of Documenta included the usual market-slamming cheeky comment, except, well, except...

Cotter, on how Serious Curating is apparently opposed to the market: "By being almost perversely esoteric, at least by Western market standards, [Documenta] takes the usual "international" roundup in another direction, away from the New York-London-Berlin trade route."

Cotter, a few paragraphs later: "The Beijing-based Conceptualist Ai Weiwei may not ring corporate bells in New York, but he is a figure of Warholian celebrity in China and a major force in that country's neocapitalist vanguard culture. As if to make the point..."

So apparently it's only the American-European market that's worthy of derision, and it's OK for the 'neocapitalist' market in China to pick its culture's vanguard and to start a conversation? (This strange dichotomy/loose editing reminds me of this.)

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has recently returned from a trip that more northeastern elites ought to take. In last week's New Yorker, Ross wrote that he was all-too-familiar with the big, famous orchestras such as those from Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. He found a flight to somewhere in the middle of the country, rented a car, and drove to hear what he could hear. He visited the symphony orchestras in Indianapolis, Birmingham, Ala., and Nashville and reported back that each were awfully good:

I learned what touring musicians have been saying for years: that lesser-known orchestras can deliver sure-footed, commanding performances, and that the notion of a stratospheric orchestral élite is something of an illusion.

From the first day I started writing MAN I've tried to do the same thing: Art in America exists away from the so-called elite northeastern institutions. Many of those alleged elites -- say the Met, the National Gallery of Art, or the Whitney -- have contemporary art programs that are so so-so, that institutions in Minnesota, Texas, California, and elsewhere have blown by them. Collections in cities such as St. Louis, Kansas City, Fort Worth, and Minneapolis might not have the depth of New York or Washington collections, but they show a broader range of art history. In many cases their high points are just as high. There's nothing anywhere like Chinati. The way the sun moves through Tadao Ando's Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis so that it hits an Ellsworth Kelly just before sundown has to be seen to appreciated.

So check out Alex Ross' journey. Remember Jerry Saltz's observation that NYC isn't the center of the art world, it's just the trading floor. Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how I can get to Taos to see a Richard Diebenkorn survey...

Related: On AJ's Flyover blog, Joe Nickell makes some darn good points.

Time's Richard Lacayo agrees with me (see the two posts below this one) on the unfathomability of the delinquent Smithsonian regents picking the next Smithsonian secretary:

In Japan that kind of embarrassment would require ritual suicide. In the U.S., as Green points out, it gets you appointed to the search committee for Small's successor.

This morning I wrote that former Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small isn't the only leader who should be held responsible for the mess at the Smithsonian -- the SI's regents should be too. (Edward Winkleman agrees, so does my AJmate Andrew Taylor.)

Unfortunately it appears as if the regents themselves don't agree that they should be accountable for their (55 pages worth) of disinterest. Here's why it appears that there will be no mass resignation of regents: Earlier this week the Smithsonian announced the search committee that will look for Small's successor. Six of the ten search committee members are regents who fiddled as the Castle burned, as Small spent, vacationed, and served Chubb and Marriott. (A seventh is the administrative assistant to an ex-officio regent who serves as Smithsonian chancellor.)

If I were a Congressional overseer I'd wonder why the very regents who enabled Small's excesses are being allowed not just to continue, but to find his successor.

The two reports on Smithsonian governance that were released this week (one by the institution's own regents, one by an independent commission) were astonishingly clear on two points: Secretary Lawrence Small (and his deputy Sheila Burke) abused their positions, the trust of the public, their board and Congress, and were rife with professional conflicts of interest that wouldn't have been tolerated at a small non-profit, let alone a $1 billion non-profit. Small's irresponsibility and ineptitude were thoroughly chronicled in both reports. (I'll post some 'best of' moments later today. In the meantime the reports are far more entertaining lunchtime reading than you'd believe a wonky DC report could possibly be. Here's the regents' report; here's the independent report.)

The second point on which the two reports were clear has been little discussed -- so far. Both reports made clear that the Smithsonian's regents have been derelict in their duties. The release of the two reports was sad comedy: First, the regents released a report acknowledging incompetence while simultaneously refusing to be held accountable for it. Its 55 pages can be summarized as: "We goofed. We failed to do our jobs. Oops. Our bad. Mulligan!" Then the independent commission's report revealed the scope of that incompetence.

Small's errors are his own (and many of them were Barry Munitz's, too). But Small was enabled by a disinterested, irresponsible, nearly negligent board. There should be mass resignations.

Later today: Will there be mass resignations?

The MCASD has acquired Ryan McGinness' The True Knowledge of Things, a painting that was recently on view in La Jolla as part of a McGinness solo show at Quint Contemporary.

McGinness is a New Yorker, but his co-opting of a decorative aesthetic is straight out of LA's Lari Pittman. (In a related story, it's just a matter of time before Dave Hickey writes about McGinness.) Like Pittman, McGinness uses familiar iconography (MCASD says there's a Warhol wig in the painting above, but it's hard to find in a JPEG) and relies upon his viewer's recognition of symbols, graphics, logos, and so on. While Pittman's best work can be emotionally gripping, McGinness' basks in a post-Koonsian kitsch. It's certainly pretty; is that enough?

Related: McGinness' website. Leah Ollman reviewed a 2005 McGinness show in AiA. The last paragraph is a doozy.

The Smithsonian Independent Review Committee's report on the mess at the Smithsonian is here. The IRC was particularly tough on former secretary Lawrence Small's service on corporate boards. More later.

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is trying something different for curator Valerie Cassel Oliver's Black Light White Noise exhibition. Instead of producing a typical catalogue -- 120 pages, some color plates, bound, essays, you know the drill -- CAMH has gone high-tech.

For $20 you can by a jewelboxed DVD, complete with a small booklet of essays and such. The 'catalogue' DVD includes audio tracks and moving images from each of the (non-static) artists in the show, a clever way to show how artwork that uses light 'moves' and changes. (In a related story, James Turrell pics are always more creepy than they are true to how you experience a Turrell.) The CAMH catalogue is the same size as a jewel-boxed DVD you might buy at Amazon or Blockbuster. The usual art book distributor, DAP, carries the DVD.

So how much does all this cost the museum? About the same as a traditional catalogue, say CAMH's recent Andrea Zittel book.

I haven't seen the CAMH show, but I've been enjoying the DVD from my couch. Museum professionals (and high-end galleries) should check it out.

Fun note: The DVD was produced by Brock Jessel, whose day job is doing many of the scoreboard graphics and animations for the Houston Astros.

Time's Richard Lacayo picks up the ten-per-century meme and tosses out some 20thC names I didn't even consider, including Francis Bacon and David Smith. (And he agreed on Bonnard, the artist on whom I least expected agreement.) I found it extra-interesting that Lacayo used a sports term I use in conversation about this stuff: game-changers. ("Andrea Zittel will ultimately be considered more of a game-changer than Matthew Barney.")

Once again the MFA Boston amazes us: Yes, college students get a discount on the MFA Boston's (egregious) $23 charge for Edward Hopper. How much? Just $2; student tix are $21.

It's official: The Smithsonian is pathetically mismanaged. A recently-created and permanent Committee on Governance blames the Smithsonian's board ('regents,' in SI parlance) for being disinterested and ineffectual, so much so that leaders such as former secretary Lawrence Small operated in a preposterously permissive environment. The regents then took steps to fix their own mess: They accepted the resignation of Small's No. 2, former Sen. Bob Dole chief-of-staff Sheila Burke, changed some job descriptions, and banned Smithsonian staff from paid service on corporate boards.

(MAN broke the story about the potential conflicts of interest raised by Small's and Burke's service on corporate boards. The Post later followed MAN and, as usual, failed to mention the debt.)

The Jackie Trescott and James Grimaldi WP story is here, the Robin Pogrebin NYT story is here. The Post has provided the Governance Committee report here.

So what's next? The Smithsonian is still a mess. It's just great that the institution's leadership is giving itself a mulligan, but it's going to take more than an admission of guilt to fix the Smithsonian. As I've noted here (and elsewhere) for years, the SI needs massive public investment in facilities and it needs to substantially upgrade many of its collections. It needs a secretary and a leadership team that can work with government on the SI's capital needs, a group that can especially work with collectors and philanthropists on improving the SI's art collections, which are uneven. And none of that will happen until there's a new secretary.

Season four of PBS' Art21 begins on October 28. Here's the artists list: Jenny Holzer, Mark Dion, Nancy Spero, Robert Ryman, Laurie Simmons, Mark Bradford, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Catherine Sullivan, An-My Lê, Alfredo Jaar, Lari Pittman, Judy Pfaff, and Pierre Huyghe.

UPDATE: This link is fixed:

Last week Ed Winkleman posted this little cocktail party conversation starter: "I had drinks and a chat with, IMO, one of the greatest minds of the New York art world last night, and he and I eventually came around to this very question, agreeing that the world has been lucky to have 10 truly great artists per century..."

Summer was made for this kind of step-back-and-think game. (I've seen Wolfgang Tillmans enough times and in enough cities to have completely maxed out on the combination of Scotch tape and photographs.)

At first I thought that EW's number was preposterously low. Ten? Think of the artists that would leave out! For example (and in no particular order):

ADMIN NOTE: Apologies for the quiet week here -- it's hard to blog when all your notes/etc. are in a plastic box that acts like a doorstop. Data recovery is underway, a new Vaio is on the way, and sometime next week all should return to normal.

1.) Art gets sold at art fairs. Dealing is the primary function. But if I have to read the same 'art sold at art fair' story for the 389th time I'm going to... (Here's a substantially undercovered angle: Curators use art fairs to find/select/track artists.) Art journos are on such cruise control that they write things like this and their editors let it slide: "Dealers are complaining that it has become difficult to sell great works. Collectors are grumbling about the scarcity of top-quality art." Uh, well... either that's not quite right, or it sounds like NYT (essentially) art market scribe Carol Vogel could act as a middleman there....

2.) Crystal Bridges has launched a blog, complete with posts from its director and chief curator.

3.) Is it just me or is there no promising/good summer art (book) read this year?

4.) Museum directorships soon-to-be-vacated/still open: Nasher, Walker, MIA, Wadsworth Atheneum, Phillips, Kimbell, Henry, MCA Chicago. Quite a list.

5.) I'm disappointed to learn that CalTech is going to destroy Lloyd Hamrol's Moore's Stone Volute to make way for a chemistry building. It's a relentlessly pleasant piece, a kind of late earthwork of sorts.

This morning I led off with the latest on the Barnes sale. The other big news of the day comes from Nashville, where a Davidson County judge has told Fisk University that it may not sell anything from the O'Keeffe bequest. The next court date is July 16 -- see the end of Jonathan Marx's Tennessean story for why.

What better way to recover from a dead laptop than with a frivolous list? Most beautiful museums, exterior edition.

1.) Philadelphia Museum of Art. Anyone who has taken the train north from Philadelphia has enjoyed one of the best museum views in America: The PMA as viewed from across the Schuylkill River. The only Beaux-Arts building on the list because, well, picking three would be lazy.m

2.) Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis. Speaking of views of museums: Approaching this early Frank Gehry building from across the Washington Avenue Bridge (under which flows the Mississippi River) is pretty fantastic.

3.) Menil Collection campus, Houston. When LACMA hired Renzo Piano to fix their jumbled mess of buildings, they surely had the Menil in mind. Everything there works together, from the light to the Heizer to the peculiarly-located bookstore-in-a-bungalow.

4.) Guggenheim, NYC. OK, so it's not as great inside as it is from the outside, but who doesn't get a little Frank Lloyd Wright rush as they walk up Fifth Avenue?

5.) Dia: Beacon. There is no way this building should be beautiful but it is. (Maybe it's because when I stand outside it I think of then-director Michael Govan's aerial photos, the ones that show off the building's sawtooth windows.)

Honorable mention: Harwood in Taos, Chinati in Marfa, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, Des Moines Art Center, MAMFW, lots of Beaux Arts piles, including Nelson-Atkins, St. Louis, Barnes Foundation, Palace of the Legion of Honor in SF.

The news item of the day is well-hidden on the LA Times' website: Montgomery County has offered to buy the Barnes Foundation. Offered price: $50 million -- or more. (The Inky has the story too.) No one expects the Barnes to take the county up on its offer, but the proposed deal would give the county a stronger argument in court as it tries to keep the Barnes on Latches Lane.

This is the second oh really moment in the Barnes saga in the last week or so. (Last week some Barnes-in-MontCo advocates came up with the idea of getting the Foundation named a National Historic Landmark, a step that would apparently prevent the move.)

This is getting very, very interesting...

I am officially a blog cliche: My beloved, aged Vaio laptop quit on me today. Posting will resume Wednesday.

Tears at a time of war to... well, tears at a time of wars.

That SFMOMA acquisition of Ann Hamilton's indigo blue that I've blogged about a couple times has been finalized...

Earlier this week I unloaded on the poor, clueless Washington Post for failing to note a key moment in the tenure of departing Phillips director Jay Gates. In the Express, the Post's free daily, Kriston Capps gets right the story the 'rest' of the paper got wrong.

And on the heels of the Albright-Knox's stunning $25.5 million Artemis sale: Back in March I spoke with Albright director Louis Grachos and then devoted three posts to re-evaluating my position on the A-K sale. Here they are. (The economic situation, collecting, the mistakes.) I'll add one postscript: It should have had a major acquisition lined up to announce at the end of its $64M+ firesale. (Maybe it does.)

Could the Barnes Foundation move be blocked if the Paul Cret building and the collection, etc. are named a National Historic Landmark? Here's what it takes to be so named...

Last year I posted about the Virginia MFA's Artificial Light show, an exhibition that was also on view at MOCA North Miami during ABMB (part two here). Today the VMFA announced that it has acquired two works from the show, this Ivan Navarro and Spencer Finch's Kaaterskill Falls (July 30, 2006, 12:37 PM).

Alan Riding, the NYT's European cultural correspondent, will leave the paper at the end of July. Riding, who has written for the Times for 30 years, has held a variety of positions at the paper, including bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro and Paris. He's had his current gig since 1995. His most recently byline was this write-up of Anselm Kiefer at the Grand Palais.

Riding told me that he turned down an opportunity to continue with the Times as a contract writer, but that he will write for the Times now and again on a free-lance basis. Mostly he will turn his attention to writing a book about the cultural life of Paris under German occupation. (Riding has previously written Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, and he is the co-author of a book on opera.)

"He can write for The Times any time he wants to," Times culture editor Sam Sifton said. "Moving forward, his tenure is likely to continue. And that's a good thing: He is one of the best we've ever had."

Sifton refused to comment on whether Riding's departure has anything to do with Michael Kimmelman's upcoming, year-long continental sojourn. Sifton wouldn't confirm that the paper would maintain the position of 'European cultural correspondent' in the future, although he did say that, "our coverage of European culture will remain robust in coming months and years."

It's been a couple years since I saw one new museum building get so much attention in so many places. The Nelson-Atkins' new wing is everywhere:

The Washington Post's Jackie Trescott has the news that Phillips Collection director Jay Gates is retiring from the museum world. I love the Phillips. But somehow Trescott's Post story fails to mention the damage Gates did to the Phillips and to American art museums: Gates was the first art museum director to do business with a Las Vegas casino. A deal he made between the Phillips and the Bellagio was (in effect) the first museum-casino art-leasing deal. After the Phillips/Gates blunder, Detroit explored the possibility of a casino deal only to decide against it, and then Malcolm Rogers and the MFA Boston drove a truck through the opening provided by the Phillips. The Phillips-Bellagio deal is a key -- and deeply unfortunate -- part of Gates' legacy at the Phillips.

Related: The story of the deal(s).

I think that Tom Friedman manages to fly mostly under the radar. Case in point: A couple years after Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman sculpture scandalized Americans who remembered people falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11, Friedman showed this untitled sculpture of a person having apparently fallen and, well, splattered all over the ground. (Fischl was apparently ahead of his time: Don DeLillo has mined the same idea in his new novel, Falling Man.)

Maybe Friedman files low because he uses humble materials, or maybe because he has a wicked sense of humor, or maybe because he makes small work not look-at-me sized work, or because he frequently makes trompe l'oeil works and what's more traditional than that? Regardless, MOCA has just acquired a new Friedman: 1996's Untitled (Polystyrene Tower) shown here. It's thirty-one and a half inches of styrofoam. MOCA now has at least seven Friedmans.

Like many Friedman works it captures a specific, fleeting moment, the moment when a drop hits a larger body of water, sending up a bit of a plume. Except Friedman's plume is dramatically, mysteriously elongated. Another Friedman characteristic is here too: Irony. Styrofoam is a material about which we don't think a great deal. It is quickly, often clumsily stamped into form. In this piece Friedman makes a detailed, obviously delicate object out of something we're used to mentally -- and literally -- discarding.

Related: MOCA receives 33 works from its board chair and his wife.

I don't care. I simply, honestly don't care. I didn't care about his lame pill paintings at Gagosian a few years ago either. There's nothing there worth thinking about. That is all.

Last week I linked to a story in which Ann Hamilton said she was happy to have a piece (probably) enter SFMOMA's collection because she thought that only one other Hamilton installation was in a U.S. museum. (The Hirshhorn owns a couple Hamiltons, and Hamilton serves on the museum's board.)

Turns out the number is at least three: MCASD owns the Hamilton shown here, 1990's linings. (MCASD also hosted a Hamilton exhibition that year.) Hamilton being Hamilton, the stuff the piece is made out of is worth mentioning: felt boot liners, woolen blankets, grass, glass, ink on paper, monitor with video loop.

Hamilton will also be included in an upcoming MCASD/Berkeley Art Museum show called Rare Art, an exhibition that Robert Pincus says, "will focus on the relationship between the environment and the human impact on it in various settings. The show will include new work by internationally known artists Ann Hamilton, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Marcos Ramirez (ERRE), Xu Bing and Mark Dion - many in response to natural and cultural World Heritage sites around the world. The show is scheduled to open at the MCASD in the fall of 2008."

Starting today out of order...