September 2007 Archives

Look for a blockbuster week coming up on MAN. Among the highlights: I'll be posting from Seoul, South Korea; Art Institute of Chicago curator James Rondeau on art and 9/11; Chinati and the Judd Foundation prepare for Open House weekend; and excerpts from Michael Auping's just-released book 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes. I usually can't stand books of artist interviews, but this one's a blast.

In an unrelated story: In the last year the art blogosphere has grown enormously and obviously my blogroll hasn't kept up. It's time for a re-build. Look for that in the next week or two.

I've posted a good bit about how I don't buy into the 'crisis in criticism' theory. I think that the bigger 'problem' is in arts reporting. The Guardian's Jonathan Jones begins the discussion here. He could have added plenty more tired tropes: Auction stories, market stories, outsider artist stories, artist-makes-art-on-a-corn-chip stories...

And so it has degenerated to this: Christoph Buchel finally speaks about the MASS MoCA mess. And how? With a childish retort. MASS MoCA speaks too: Through a blog post that should be required reading for any grad student that is considering being a curator. Oh ye young Harv(B)ard-ians, learn from their experiences.

So far most of the pontificating I've read in print and online about the Buchel/MM extravaganza has been about the merits of the legal case or about the 'When Is It Art?' question. Most critics and observers have chosen sides. After all, this is a case that positions the little guy -- The Noble Artist! -- against the big institution -- The Museum as The Man -- and that kind of mano-a-mano set-up lends itself to horse-picking.

But both Buchel and the museum are in the wrong; both sides have behaved badly. More importantly, they've each served the other and their shared public poorly -- but not for the reasons you think. Nevermind whether MASS MoCA should have shown the unfinished whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Honestly? I don't care. Nevermind whether Buchel made unreasonable demands. Creative types have done that since the beginning of time. Museums show things, artists always want more: Both characters are playing true to type.

MASS MoCA's mistake was not saying 'no' or 'stop' before it reached this point. Maybe the mistake was not saying 'no' when Buchel's name came up in a meeting. Every curator or dealer -- every single one -- that I know that has worked with Buchel has found him to be impossible. The museum had to know this going in and still failed to work out an iron-clad agreement with the artist regarding mutual expectations and obligations for the installation. (In fact there's still no agreement about how this thing got started: MASSMoCA director Joe Thompson told me that the museum and Buchel agreed to an iron-clad budget: "It was explicit, and it was agreed upon," Thompson said in email. " Buchel's attorney, Donn Zaretsky says there was no agreement.)

Buchel's mistake was not showing enough respect to the institution and the small army of people who worked to help him realize his vision for the piece. (To put it another way: MASS MoCA's mistake was institutional, Buchel's mistake was lacking humanity.) In the end, he didn't deserve them. An institution and a town were willing to spend time, money, energy and space on him and instead of realizing he was in a situation that near every artist would kill for, he spat on them. He needs to be sent to the corner for some quiet time. And probably will be: What museum would go near him after this?!

Finally, MASS MoCA and Buchel should both read this book. It's called What Makes a Great Exhibition? It was published last year by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. It's not just for curators, it's for artists too. It provides wise advice on dealing with institutions, advice that often applies more broadly.

Kathy Halbreich, who recently retired as director of the Walker Art Center is going to MoMA to become an associate director. Halbreich will lead the museum's contemporary art curatorial group and will work to improve contemporary art offerings at MoMA and PS1 via both acquisitions and exhibitions.

In a related story, when MoMA director Glenn Lowry leaves the museum, a highly qualified in-house successor is in place.

Related: Carol Vogel follows MAN.

Don't miss this essay-masquerading-as-blog-post from Errol Morris. It touches on Sontag, the Crimea, Roger Fenton, and order. From 2004: My review of the Fenton retro at the NGA.

My favorite work about 9/11 is Shirin Neshat's film installation Tooba. I first saw it when Neshat gave the piece its American debut at a lecture at the American Federation of Arts in 2003. I remember leaving the event with my date and feeling obliterated by what we'd seen. I wrote about the piece on MAN about a year later (more on that later today), and then in 2005 I wrote a long feature about Neshat for the Los Angeles Times. These excerpts come from our conversation for that piece, which took place in NYC early in the summer of 2005.

Green: Where were you when it happened?

Neshat: I was right by the World Trade Center. My son was in school right near there, a couple of blocks away. I was on my way to do some editing [on a piece] and I looked in that direction. I looked up and someone said a plane had an accident. Not long after that I saw people jumping out of windows.

Green: In the days and weeks that followed, how did the attack affect you? [Ed. Here it's worth pointing out that in 1996 Neshat made her last visit to Iran. When she was leaving the country she was detained at the airport by state forces. She wasn't exactly arrested, but, as Neshat says, she was held "just enough so that the message was that I shouldn't re-enter." For the next five years she longed to return. She says that she had a "grand vision" of going home and making art.]

Neshat: I became even more vulnerable. I was worrying about my son, worrying about the future, worrying about where to live. I wondered if it got to the point where we were not so welcome here. Philosophically I felt this new fear over my head. I thought about leaving, but I didn't know where we'd go.

Green: So you said that you, like everyone else, fled north, north of SoHo where you lived. When did you get back?

Neshat: What was really traumatic the next day was the thing about looking Middle Eastern. Police had barricaded the whole area south of Houston and we had to pass every time and show IDs. I was surrounded by Iranian people and I was scared.

Green: And so at some point you decided to make art about 9/11.

Neshat: I had been thinking about what I wanted to do for Documenta. But the truth is, prior to that I had thought a lot about going to Iran and going to my father's ex-farm. [Ed: Neshat's family owned a large farm of mostly fruit trees outside of Qazvin. It was taken away from them by the government after the Islamic Revolution.] I had really romanticized about a big project, about how Documenta could be about my reunion with Iran. It had to do with my father's farm.

I thought it would be beautiful that I could make my first work going to back to Iran, that I could go back to this farm and this would really symbolize the conflict between the government and my father. The farm is literally dying because they wouldn't let him water, and they wouldn't let him care for it. So for me this garden this farm became the omen that was for me very metaphoric. So I called my brother and he was trying to work my visa out to come. And then 9/11 happened and I just said I don't want to come to Iran. I said, 'Forget this romantic idea.' I'm never going back there.

Green: So the garden in Tooba...

Neshat: I stayed with the garden, not the farm.

Green: I wrote about this on MAN a while back, about how Tooba was about 9/11, but I haven't read about that view of it anywhere else. Was I close?

Neshat: It was very much about 9/11. What's interesting is that 90 percent of people missed the whole point about how it was connected to that. It had everything to do with that. Very much consciously. Obviously it was bit of a reminiscence about what I'd been thinking about Iran, but it really took form after 9/11 as a film installation about paradise, about sanctuary and the need for security, and that tree being the epitome of a savior or a paradox. It is about you and me and about how everyone in the crowd desperately wanted to be safe, all of us running looking for some kind of sanctuary.

The most important American artist of the present is Andrea Zittel. Right now America is involved in a war that has everything to do with how we live our lives, our insatiable, mostly unaddressed need for oil to fuel our sprawl, our agriculture, and our industry. The world's greatest challenge is climate change, a catastrophe toward which we are racing because for decades we've been unwilling to reconcile how we live with how future generations might live. Andrea Zittel's work addresses these issues in a way no other artist does: She examines how we live, how we use the land, whether we must use it the way we do, whether we must live our lives with such disregard for whomever comes next. She offers clever alternatives that are functional, and, well, beautiful.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has recently acquired one of Zittel's A-Z Homestead Units (2001-2005). Expect it to be on view when LACMA opens its new Broad Contemporary Art Museum in 2008.

I tend to think of Zittel as the latest in a very specific line of post-Vietnam artists: There is Robert Smithson, who revealed to us how we use the land, the impact we have on it, and started us thinking about placing human events, sites, objects in geologic time. William Garnett, Robert Adams, Joe Deal and other 'New Topographics' photographers came along and showed us -- in a much more personal way -- what suburban expansion was doing to the landscape. Now Zittel. This is from a piece I did about her for Black Book magazine:

In the middle of A-Z West is Zittel's home, a white cabin tucked into the middle of the hill, and about the size of three Hummers parked next to each other. The only tree I can see on the hill -- and one of only two trees I can see in what must be a 200-square-mile panorama -- is planted right in front of the house. I recognize a lot of the stuff strewn around Zittel's acreage: A-Z Wagon Stations, an A-Z Work Station, an A-Z Travel Trailer Customized by Miriam and Gordon Zittel, an A-Z Homestead Unit, an A-Z Yard Yacht, and The Regenerating Field. I'm only slightly disappointed not to see Zittel's most humorous product, A-Z Thundering Prairie Dogs, in the desert. (Of course, prairie dogs live on prairies, not in deserts. I think.)

And why the A-Z Everything? Zittel gave herself a brand name because when she called industrial suppliers, no one took seriously a high-pitch-voiced girl named Andrea. When she told them that she was calling on behalf of A-Z West, they assumed she was legit. A-Z West has even joined the Joshua Tree Chamber of Commerce.

Zittel drives up in her Subaru. She is tall, skinny, and is wearing an A-Z Fiber Form Uniform (Fall) made out of grayish-brown merino wool. She has big eyes, straight blonde hair, and a jaw line that seems made for life in a windy desert. She welcomes me into the cabin as if we've known each other for years. "I wanted a house without other homes around it," Zittel says, as we enter her living room.

"How'd you find this one?"

"It took a few trips," she says. "It's an original homestead cabin from the 1930s. There's nothing more fun than driving around looking for cabins in the desert."

Related: Zittel's survey show is on view (barely) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Stranger's Jen Graves on the show there.

**From late Friday afternoon: The St. Louis Art Museum's (only) deaccessioning mistake: A fine Jean Metzinger.**

In the second and third parts of my Q&A with MoMA curator Ann Temkin about 9/11-impacted/influenced art, Temkin and I talked about how there has been a recent profusion of art about degeneration and decay. I've written about this topic dozens of times before here, including to say that I was surprised that there hadn't been a museum-level group show about it.

This past summer there was: Phantasmania, curated by Elizabeth Dunbar at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. It was a good show made up mostly of work by barely-30something artists with only a solo show or two under their belts. As a result the show feels a little too 25th Street, a bit like processing-in-progress. There were no elegant, mature considerations of fear a la Pittman or anguish a la Neshat, but there was plenty of confused angst. That matches what I've seen from young artists in, say, their second Chinatown or Chelsea shows, but it seems a little underambitious. Too often in Phantasmania, say in the work of James Benjamin Franklin or Anna Conway, the artists seem to still be figuring out what to say or how to make a tight painting. Jon Pylypchuk's self-consciously slapdash installations are termite art 'supersized' for terriers. And Jules de Balincourt may someday become more than an American Neo Rauch, but not yet.

Still, within a narrow slice of a narrow slice, Phantasmania presented a coherent look at a generation of late 20something/early 30something artists who have grown into artistic, er, early-age during two American wars, unprecedented global climate change, and persistent (if occasionally both exaggerated and ignored) terrorist threats and how they've responded.

And perhaps I quibble. True: Dunbar tapped into something that's going on artists' studios. Her catalogue essay is unusually readable. Her wall-text was clear and coherent. (Given most of what I'm forced to read from curators, these things surprise me.) Among the shows' highlights:

John White Cerasulo's dark, romantic, mysterious, uncomfortable paintings of implied grotesquerie. They hint that something's not quite right and provide the viewer with a clue or two as to what it might be: In Untitled, Essex Island a man wearing a cape stands on an iceberg. The moon shines through clouds or fog. His right arm seems deformed in some why. Why is he there, how did he get there... In Untitled, Middlesex County, but from Waterbury (above), a man seems to be resting his head on a table, between two glasses with flowers in them. He stares vacantly into the distance. It is vaguely uncomfortable to look at him in what is a difficult, personal moment. Something's wrong, but what? Cerasulo's scenes are creepy enough to rise above his clunky brushwork, but in time... (Both of these images are from Sandroni Rey and both are substantially, annoyingly lighter than the actual paintings.)

Angela Fraleigh's big paintings of vacant lust and decay. (That's all consequence as soon forgotten above.) Fraleigh is one of plenty of painters who appear to be fascinated with the Hummerized decadence of American society. Like Ken Weaver, Fraleigh channels her observations into big, debauched paintings that combine the excesses of the Roccoco with Tiepolo-esque cheesecake and big, wet, lush swaths of abstract painting. (Weaver does it with orgies, cleavage and Caligula-esque sex scenes.) Like Cecily Brown had to early in her career, Fraleigh is still reclaiming the sexualized female figure from de Kooning's objectification of her, but that's OK. She's worth watching (so too her website).

This is the best painting that the St. Louis Art Museum is deaccessioning: A Jean Metzinger landscape from 1916-17. It's the only Metzinger in SLAM's collection and it's been on view regularly and lately, from 2002-2006. (I've also just seen images of the Lhote, the Utrillo and the Harpingies. Not worth your bandwidth.)

I think it's pretty hard to get worked up about SLAM selling some little-seen, fourth-rate Matisses and Renoirs, the kind of paintings that just aren't museum-quality. But this Metzinger is a different story, a mistake.

Related: The SLAM sale: the Cassatt; the Braques, the Matisse, the Renoir, the de Vlamnick, the estimates.

This just in: Kevin Consey is retiring from the directorship of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. What a season....

Also: A newsy afternoon has bumped this down the page. There's good stuff there.

Here are images of five more paintings to be sold by the St. Louis Art Museum this fall at Christie's. Between these five and the Cassatt I posted yesterday, only one potentially significant painting remains unseen: the Metzinger. (And the Metzinger is the one I'm most interested in: It's SLAM's only Metzinger oil. The museum is also selling its only Utrillo, but from the thumbnails I've seen it's less interesting than the Metzinger.)

I think I'm beginning to come to a firmer opinion on SLAM's deaccessioning: Can't blame 'em. Of the paintings I've seen, only the de Vlamnick could be considered interesting -- and it's such a clear crib from Cezanne that 'interesting' may not be much of a compliment. (It was last on view in December, 2006.)

To be frank, the Matisse is angry and looks, well unfinished. No wonder it's never been on view at the museum. The Renoir, with its chunky rosiness, could have been Barnes candy. The Braque sunflowers are depressing and the Braque still-life is discombobulated. (You can't see it from the tiny JPEG here, but the fish in the dish is downright Seussian.) I'm showing the five paintings at about the same size here, but of course that's a bit misleading. The Braques and the Matisse are all similar in size: none is more than 20 inches tall. The Renoir is a bit bigger, at 22-inches-by-18-inches, and the de Vlamnick is 26-inches-by-32-inches.

A couple other notes from my chat with SLAM assistant director for curatorial affairs Andrew Walker:

The museum does not have a written policy of only selling modern works to buy other modern works, but that's pretty much the way it works: "We are fairly rigid about how those funds are directed," Walker told me." What happens at our institution here, given its size and our opportunities, is that it's very much a divisional conversation that involves the departments broadly. A painting like a Cassatt would never go to buy an antiquity. But because she was an American working in France... funds from a Cassatt could go to a European painting, sure."

Walker also took care to distance SLAM from the Albright-Knox's sales. One of the disappointments in how the Buffalo museum handled its deaccessioning was that it refused to acknowledge on-the-record that the hot art market was a factor. And the A-K's decision to put the money brought in at auction into an acquisitions endowment rather than to specifically earmark it for new art was controversial. (Which isn't to say that it would have made a lot of sense for the A-K or any other institution to spend tens of millions of dollars in one year on contemporary art, either.)

"We don't' (talk about market heat)," Walker told me. "[SLAM director Brent Benjamin] has been good about guiding us. We tend to sell in the market that we want to buy in. It's not necessarily the most prudent decision to sell and hang onto the money for 30 years."

Related: You can see the Christie's estimates here.

Neat Guardian feature here of photos of where writers write. Among the featured was biographer John Richardson, whose third volume on Picasso comes out this fall. In the interview accompanying the piece Richardson says: "The third volume, published this autumn, has taken seven years -- so it would be unrealistic, at 83, to start on another. The fourth will be done with someone else." Volume three will take Picasso through 1932.

Earlier this afternoon: The Albright-Knox buys a Philip Taaffe.

First on MAN: This is Francoise in Green, Sewing (ca. 1908 says SLAM, 1911 says Christie's), the Mary Cassatt that the St. Louis Art Museum hopes to sell at Christie's this fall. The estimate for the roughly 32-inch-by-26-inch painting is $1.5-2.5 million. It's the first SLAM sale image to pop into my email. (Thanks to Christie's and Christie's Images Ltd. for sending it over.) As images trickle in, I'll post more about what SLAM is selling, why, and whether its deaccessioning is routine museum collection-culling, or whether it's a Big Deal.

"It is our only Cassatt painting," Andrew Walker, SLAM's assistant director for curatorial affairs told me. Walker's area of art historical expertise is American art. "I have a certain love of Cassatt, of course, and we do have very much a priority, a goal, to find a Mary Cassatt that meets the quality of our collection. I think the challenge of many of these works -- certainly the Cassatt -- is that they weren't of a quality that matches the rest of our collection. We have the goal to acquire a Cassatt that does. Cassatt is high, high on our list of priorities. Either a pastel or an oil."

The Cassatt was last on view at the museum in late 2001, for just five weeks. The painting isn't exactly in demand from other museums either: Before that it last left storage in 1981. I'm no Cassatt expert -- if I had to pick the most over-rated artist in American history I'd pick Cassatt -- but I'd say it's fairly clear that this Cassatt isn't as good a Cassatt as SLAM's great Beckmanns are Beckmanns, etc. I mean... is Francoise working a plug of tobacco in her right cheek?

The other paintings SLAM is selling mostly have thin exhibition histories. The museum has never shown the Matisse. The Renoir was last on view in 2001, for eight months. (It has been included in two shows in the last 20 years: In Columbus, OH, and in Nagoya, Japan.) One of the Braques hasn't been exhibited in 55 years, and the other was last shown for seven months in 2001-02. Only the Metzinger has been on regular view: It was up from September, 2002 until September, 2006.

My major question about SLAM's sale has been this: How much of the Degas will be covered by deaccessioning? (After all, I wrote multiple posts praising the museum for raising money to both buy and build. Now it looks like they may be mostly deaccessioning-to-buy, and building.)

"We are interested in seeing how our sales do, and my sense would be that we just really can't look in the crystal ball yet," Walker said. I'll have more as more images come in...

Philip Taaffe is the artist-historian of abstraction, a painter who mines high art, low art, Barnett Newman, graphic design, early photography, Playboy, ancient decorative patterns, L.A. Pattern and Decoration, Tom Downing, Matisse, lots and lots of other stuff for his paintings. Taaffe came to prominence in the 1980s, when appropriating for appropriation's sake was an artistic fad. More than any other artist who emerged in that period, Taaffe has taken what he borrowed and turned it into a new language, a cabinet of curiosities smartly regurgitated onto canvas.

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has recently purchased this 2006 Taaffe, Locus Auratus. The painting was included in Taaffe's Gagosian-Madison Avenue show earlier this year. With this painting Taaffe appropriates from a new source: Himself. Sort of. Some of his earliest paintings featured riffs borrowed from Bridget Riley. Obviously this one does too.

The A-K purchase caught my eye because I think we've recently hit the point when major museums are starting to re-examine the art stars of Taaffe's generation to determine what artists should be more thoroughly represented in their collections, and who merits the mid-career survey treatment. (For example: The Hirshhorn bought a Troy Brauntuch last year.) I started re-thinking about Taaffe's early work when Dan Cameron included Madame-Torso-In-Deep in his East Village USA exhibit. It stole the show.

Related: Taaffe's website. NYTer Roberta Smith on the 2007 Gagosian show from which the Albright purchased Locus Auratus. Taaffe and Bob Nickas discuss the 1980s. Totally unrelated: Amy Sillman is also an artist-historian of abstraction. She has a show up now at the University of Houston's Blaffer Gallery.

Last week I started talking with several of America's top contemporary art curators about artists' responses to 9/11. Here are the posts I did with MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel. Today, the final part of my chat with MoMA curator Ann Temkin. Part one is here. At the end of part two Temkin discussed how while artists may make work that's in response to a certain event, it's not always clear from their work. I pick up from there...

MAN: The Robert Gober that MoMA bought has that same quality.

Ann Temkin: The most explicit part of that installation is these drawings of people embracing, couples [juxtaposed] on the remakes of the September 12th New York Times. When I saw those in the Matthew Marks Gallery that spring... that was probably my first real goosebumpy, tears-coming-to-my-eyes kind of reliving of that moment. I think it was as much seeing those newspapers turned into artwork. Then with these super-imposed embracing people -- Gober was being absolutely direct there.

MAN: We've been talking around this idea but I wanted to address it more head-on: I don't know if this is a coincidence-of-timing or an indirect response, but for several years now Chelsea and Los Angeles have been full of art about decay and degeneration. (I see less of that from European artists, but maybe that's just me.) Do you see that and if you do, do you see bits of the post-9/11 mood in that?

Temkin: I was going to bring this up to you too because one of the things that does happen (which is interesting but also problematic) is that we end up reading work through the lens of 9/11 when it didn't necessarily have anything gto do with that.

For example, there's this work by Martin Kippenberger, of a 'crushed Metro entrance' which was made in 1997. and it's a gigantic sculpture of what would have been a structure that would have conceivably been a subway entrance but basically it's just a geometric-looking room with a stairway in it, and it's crushed. When he did it in 1997 the reason for doing it was this Kippenbergerish joke that this sculpture, which is almost 30 feet long was too big to get into a gallery, so it had just been bulldozed to get through the doors it needed to get through. That's his typical irreverence or sanctity about a work of art. If you look at that sculpture today you might say, 'He was such a prophet!' or you might say, 'Oh this piece is about the twin towers,' and it just wasn't.

I think that there is a lot of work that has been made in the past decade, and sort of a lot of work that has been made throughout modern art history (at least) that has to do with destruction, that has to do with decay and time passing and loss. That's almost for me such a constant of 20th-century history that you can almost pick any decade, hook it up to some war, or the Holocaust and so on, so to make the causal assumption there is hard. And yet what's interesting to me is the fact that one does it. Once you have this historical event to sort of read the art through the intentions of the artist almost are beside the point. Every viewer comes to it with his own interpretive viewpoint.

Last week I started talking with several of America's top contemporary art curators about artists' responses to 9/11. Here are the posts I did with MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel. Today: MoMA curator Ann Temkin. Part one is here.

MAN: You're a curator at a New York City institution. Have you or any other MoMA curators sat around in acquisition meetings and said, 'You know, we need this one in part because there's a connection to our city's history?'

Ann Temkin: Certainly when we purchased both the Tuymans and the Matthew Marks installation that Bob Gober did the topic came up. I do think that there was a strong feeling, I believe, on Tuymans' part and on Bob Gober's part that they were feeling -- or maybe we were just feeling it on their behalf -- that these were works of art that ought to stay in New York City. Of course, for the works of art to be "good" they should be good for viewers in any time and in any place, but we felt that these pieces would have particular potency for artists and audiences in New York City, that the connection between those places and times would be strongly felt here. I think that that helped us... that, and that their dealers weren't inclined to send them off to other places.

MAN: The reaction you and Paul both have to the Tuymans is especially interesting to me. As I'm sure you know, it's not actually a painting of a tower falling, nor is it from a photograph of a tower falling. But we see that painting and because of our shared historical experience, we think 9/11.

Temkin: Exactly. It's so much more the indirect effect [of 9/11] than the direct effect that ends up being the most interesting. And when it comes to keeping one's eyes out for this kind of effect in art this is the beginning rather than the end. I think that neither artist would be happy if one was to say that they're works only about 9/11. They're not like Guernica.

That brings up the point that a lot of the work that one might say is an artistic response to 9/11 you'd never know it. It could be an abstract work that's just incredibly moving because there is just this very introspective quality to it. But all it might be is a field of color, say, or some massive material. But if you were to talk to that artist they might be 100 times more explicit about the impact of the event: See this red square? That was all about 9/11. So it's not necessarily something that the work of art wears on its sleeve. And it would be wrong to think about it only in those terms.

For example this art historian in London wrote a decade ago about Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross as a response to the Holocaust. There's an example of one thing where it's a 20-year time lag, and if you look at Newman's Stations of the Cross there's nothing in them that would say to you this is all about the Holocaust. But this historian created what was, for some people, a very convincing argument about what those incredibly abstract paintings were all about. These are very subjective areas.

And I also think it's important to make the distinction between what the artist intends and what the viewer's response is because the artist doesn't have control over what the viewer takes form the work. It might be nothing they could have predicted.

Last week I started talking with several of America's top contemporary art curators about artists' responses to 9/11. Here are the posts I did with MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel. Today, the first part of my conversation with MoMA curator Ann Temkin.

MAN: Is there any art about 9/11 that really speaks to you?

Ann Temkin: Two of the works that Paul referred to are in the MoMA collection. Those are the two that would have come to mind for me most immediately: The Gober installation and the Tuymans.

I think that my reactions were very similar to his when I first heard what your question was because I think that might be something that's almost beginning now, rather than something that would have been happening over the last six years. These things have a kind of built-in delay, I think.

There's a value in the sort of sudden impact of this event on an artist's life -- perhaps, sometimes, that will result in a really great work. But chances are [that initial work] is most apt to be a great and profoundly felt personal reaction, and not a great aesthetic processing. The processing of something like 9/11 into what ends up being a great work of art is much more apt (to me) to be something that comes between five and ten years later, and more.

MAN: Paul mentioned Goya's Third of May. It was made six years after the events it depicts. We're six years after 9/11 now.

Temkin: Exactly. The difference is when you're talking about these historical things is that the difference between, say, 1870 and 1862 doesn't sound so great to us. But at that moment, it was. So for me it would be easy to see some art historian writing 20 or 50 years from now calling anything made in this whole decade as something that's easy to link to that 2001 event.

MAN: Have you considered doing a 9/11 show? If you did and decided not to do it, why not?

Temkin: I didn't consider doing it, and I think that reflects my point-of-view that the art comes first and that it's not a subject that will make art great or not. What I'm interested in is art that is great as great, not art that is aspiring to be great on the basis of the issue that it addresses. So for me to do a show about that would be less art-centric than topic-centric. That's something that I'm not against, but it wouldn't be something I personally would do.

I'm not surprised that it hasn't happened yet because most people do share the feeling -- or most artists would share the feeling -- that the primary motivation for whatever the work of art comes to be has to be a whole lot more profound and complicated than something you could sum up as a response to a historical event. It's just too simple somehow to hang a whole bunch of works of art on that hook.

The big news of the morning is obviously this MANscoop about the St. Louis Art Museum's planned, hoped-for eight-figure deaccessioning. (Or, if you're from the New York Times, the big news is probably still the Degas purchase itself. Talk about missing a big story...) I'm expecting to have more on MAN later today. The SLAM news buried this fun post.) Also later: MoMA's Ann Temkin on art after 9/11.

Geoff Edgers has the word.

First on MAN: The St. Louis Art Museum is planning to deaccession ten works through Christie's. The works, by Matisse, Braque, Cassatt and others, carry a high-end estimate of $11.1 million. Its new Degas cost $10 million. SLAM director Brent Benjamin told MAN last week (and published Monday) that the museum was planning a deaccessioning. Today I received the details.

"One of the ways the Museum builds and continues to enhance the collection is through a thoughtful deaccessioning plan," Benjamin said in a prepared statement. "Through this process, selected works are evaluated by experts who determine which works do not meet the standards of the collection, based primarily on quality. The funds realized are set aside specifically for the purchase of works of art.

"Works are selected based on their consideration as being minor, and/or never or infrequently exhibited works by artists for whom there are far greater representations in the collection."

No word yet on what chunk of these expected funds go to the Degas and what chunk goes to future acquisitions. The details:

Yes, I know I have to do something about the out-of-date blogroll. No, I don't know what that will be.

So what about art, especially contemporary art, in Washington, DC? How much worse can it get, seems to be the question of the moment.

To review:

From the FAMSF Follies file: Kenneth Baker's write-up on FAMSF director John Buchanan's sorry exhibitions program (and more) apparently didn't go over so well in the museum's corner offices. A few days after the story ran the museum's troubled press office sent this out to some of the softer local outlets, society 'zines and the like:

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle examined the exhibition schedules for the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor and asked: "Is it art?" Director John E. Buchanan, Jr. thinks this is a good question and he's prepared to tell you why. We would like to offer a live interview with Mr. Buchanan to address such issues as:

-What's the difference between fluff and fine art?

-What makes fashion art?

-Why have decorative arts exhibitions?

-What kind of experience should museum visitors expect?

-How are exhibitions organized and selected?

The article has sparked a provocative and valuable debate. Check out the responses posted on the Chronicle's web site:

The email then listed a URL that has expired. So far: No takers. When a museum has to defend itself as really showing art -- we swear it! -- it's got obvious problems.

Also: This Peter Max show was curated by... Peter Max. Why have curators at all? Museums? Scholarship? Nahhhhh...

Related: See some JPEGs of the Peter Max show. Scroll about halfway down.

Correction: Please note a correction that outgoing Hirshhorn director Olga Viso asked me to make to the second part of our Q&A: "Everything that distinguishes the Hirshhorn in terms of its collection and its free public exhibitions is supported by private funds, not the federal allocation. The Hirshhorn is not fully funded, it's very much a public-private partnership as all the SI museums are."

Last Thursday I featured a Q&A with Charlotte Eyerman, the St. Louis Art Museum curator who brought this Degas into the St. Louis Art Museum. And on Friday we examined the Walker, SLAM, and how they made news. Today, SLAM director Brent Benjamin explains how -- and why -- the museum found the money.

MAN: You're in the quiet phase of a capital campaign that will pay for your David Chipperfield-designed expansion and more. You're still asking people for tens of millions of dollars for that project. And one morning in walks a curator who wants $10 million for a painting. How did you react?

Brent Benjamin: I said, 'That looks terrific.' In a collection that has the strengths it does in the impressionist and post-impressionist era and in this early modern group of artists, that seemed to be a very important gap for us. And, of course, it was one we despaired of filling because there are relatively few such things available and we knew should one come available the price would be rather high. But one lives in hope.

So when Charlotte came to me... we talked about the price, what would be required [for us to be able to pay that], and certainly we considered whether or not there was a potential for a negative impact on the fundraising campaign that is underway in support of the expansion. Those are conversations that I had with my head of external affairs and with certain members of the board while we sent Charlotte off to see the painting in the flesh. She came back and was enthusiastic about it. So we discussed it.

The fact of the matter is, this is a thing that's possible [at this museum] and I'm thrilled that that is the case. It's really important to add great things to a great collection, and the reality is that one does not control the timing of that. I think that the excitement that this acquisition has already engendered in St. Louis about the museum and what's possible is going to do nothing but help the fundraising for the expansion.

MAN: So how did you put the $10 million together?

Benjamin: It's a complicated package. It's a combination of funds that includes donated money, monies from endowment funds restricted for the purchase of art at the museum, funds that come from net income from the museum shop and from the membership program, and it includes some funds from deaccessioning.

MAN: How do you, as the director, make a decision to go to donors and ask for more money, money that is for something else, when you have the priority (if that's the right word) of a capital campaign?

Benjamin: To the latter point, yes, you do have to prioritize. You can't do everything all at once. There's no question about that. But to the first part, about whether we can go back to an individual so quickly: I think in that case you really have to ask yourself, 'What is the level of vision and impact of what you're trying to do?' and that if the answer to that question is that you're going for immense impact, you can go back to individuals for [additional] support for these kinds of things. I was thrilled to get support from my board in this instance. The reaction wasn't you have to do this, it was ohmygosh the museum HAS to do this. One of the wonderful things that came out of this was incredible enthusiasm for acquisitions at this level being an important component of the program going forward.

MAN: Can you tell whether the Degas will have an impact on the capital campaign yet?

Benjamin: There are great works of art here that are in storage here because of a lack of gallery space. People understand that it's a really important thing to do. They also understand that the presence of gallery space will be important in convincing local collectors to give things to the museum, and we have collectors with museum-quality stuff in St. Louis and the process of [planning the building] has inspired people to give gifts already, which is terrific and exciting. So the Degas is an absolutely logical step toward that, to demonstrate that the collection continues to grow by purchase and by gift, and that the reason to build the expansion, to support the expansion, is to house that. If we're successful, we'll have to build again before too long. That's why we plan.

For example, we made a call to a long-term supporter and asked for support for the expansion, received it, and the collector said, 'Well, what about my collection?' It's not like we don't go into those conversations unprepared for that, but the degree to which that's been happening has been really reinforcing people's confidence that this is the right thing to do. Not only with their financial support, but also by making commitments of their collections.

MAN: When you open the new building, could you pull a Seattle and announce lots of collection donations at once?

Benjamin: [Laughs.] We're still a few years away. We haven't thought about it at that level of detail.

We'll be back on Monday with SLAM director and Degas buyer Brent Benjamin. I don't often do end-of-the-week summary posts, but after posting a lot of content late most days this week...

UPDATE, 1130am EDT: Third paragraph.

I spent five years living in Missouri for college, attending college some more, and then living in St. Louis for a short time. I think that gives me a reasonable understanding of the way midwesterners who are a part of the art world think about being midwesterners in the art world: They feel overlooked, and under-considered -- and they're right, they are. So it's been interesting to watch how two of America's top museums, both of which happen to be within a bike ride of the Mississippi River, have handled their big news this week.

First, the Walker and their directorship: Like many museums, they seem to feel like they aren't making news that matters unless the New York Times writes about them. Nevermind the press at home, it's all about the Carol Vogel write-up. Museums go to great lengths -- and make great promises of exclusivity -- to get NYT attention. (When word of their news gets out before Vogel can publish, those museums are often unhappy. Many a time PR people at museums have begged me not to publish things I learned through sources before the museum-authorized leak was published in the NYT. A few have yelled. My take: Their problem, not mine.)

In this case, the Walker sent out a version of their director-hiring release that was embargoed until Wednesday morning. And then the news popped up in the NYT before 3pm on Tuesday, over an hour before the staff was told of the hire. (And Vogel's lede reveals that she was handed the story on Tuesday.) For the Walker, NYT coverage trumped all, ahead of local media such as the Star Tribune or Minnesota Public Radio. The Walker has a simmering feud going with STrib writer Mary Abbe, which doesn't help. (Can you blame them? Abbe stories can come with strange points of emphasis and mistakes. The Hirshhorn's collection strength is the 19thC?!)

Meanwhile, down in St. Louis, the first word of the Art Museum's $10 million Degas surfaced in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where critic/writer David Bonetti broke the story. And sure enough: Even though the SLAM Degas is the priciest American museum acquisition in two years, the NYT has yet to mention it. Obviously the NYT prefers primacy to judgment, enforcement of the NYT First Code(TM) over what's fit to print.

And the St. Louis Art Museum was, apparently, fine with that. The museum could have played a little "embargoed release" game with the P-D as a way of "landing" an NYT story, but chose not to. One possible reason: The museum is raising money for a building. Almost every penny of that money will come from St. Louis.

In my dealings with SLAM they have a confidence about their place in the art world that few midwestern museums have: They know they're good, they know their collection is superb, they don't worry about playing the NYT's game. As a result it was more important for the museum to be quietly certain of its role in the firmament, to show itself off at home than to puff its feathers to distant, less interested audiences. Besides, the acquisition was so splashy they figured that national outlets would come around in time. (Obviously MAN did.) We'll know the NYT "admits" its mistake when it runs a belated, freelanced Sunday feature on St. Louis. ("St. Louis Art Museum Lives Within its Means?")

Continued from yesterday afternoon, this is part two of MAN's chat with outgoing Hirshhorn director Olga Viso. She starts as director of the Walker Art Center in January, 2008. Today: Viso's thoughts on Washington and the state of the museum scene here.

MAN: I'm becoming a little concerned about contemporary art in Washington, DC and the next few questions will probably reflect that. If the top rank of contemporary art museums are MoMA, SFMOMA, Walker, MOCA (even though they don't have collection space), and maybe the Whitney and the Guggenheim when they want to be, going forward what stands between the Hirshhorn and that tier?

Olga Viso: I don't think anything, I think we stand right there. We're always mentioned in the top five.

MAN: Well, I don't mean programmatically, I mean in totality. The Hirshhorn doesn't have a $190 million endowment, for example. Your curatorial staff is smaller.

Viso: I think that's one of the really impressive things about the Hirshhorn actually, that the institutions that are considered our peer institutions are in many cases double the staff and double the budget we are, and we have a lean-and-mean staff that produce these very exceptional programs to the best that we can.

That's a point I have made, certainly to the Smithsonian Institution and to our board is that the reputation we have is pretty exceptional considering we are smaller in terms of budget and staff size and in endowment... We have an acquisitions endowment that is comparable or even better [than some of those institutions], but we don't have a program endowment the way they do. Of course we do have a federal allocation, which is different. I think it's important to understand too that the Hirshhorn is really fortunate to have the federal allocation because it does support base operations, and it does pay for almost all of the staff, and it does keep the museum open. Everything that distinguishes the Hirshhorn in terms of its collection and its free public exhibitions is supported by private funds, not the federal allocation. The Hirshhorn is not fully funded, it's very much a public-private partnership as all the SI museums are.

MAN: You're about to be DC's most recent ex-director - and the most prominent. When I look around the DC museo-cultural landscape I see the two marquee modern/contemporary museums without a director, I see a Smithsonian report that has said that another SI art museum's leadership is a "weakness" and is "ineffective," I see a vacant contemporary curator job at a museum with scant interest in art of the last 30 years (the NGA), and one other museum that may not have a contemporary curator going forward. This is either a bad moment here or there are structural issues that need to be addressed. Which?

Viso: I don't see it as a moment of crisis. I see it as a moment of opportunity. I think it's a process of finding the right staff and it's a moment when there are a number of vacancies in museum positions around the country. It isn't specific to Washington. It's a generational shift as you have curators switching to directorships.

I think one of the challenges that DC faces and I'd say any modern or contemporary institution faces in terms of its garnering support is that DC doesn't have a history -- and certainly the Hirshhorn doesn't have a history of -- consistent or ongoing philanthropy from the corporate sector. That's always very challenging for contemporary museums because the artists you present aren't familiar names and the programs are riskier and more challenging. Although the NGA does well with that they have more established names and a more encyclopedic program. I think it just has to do with the kind of city DC is.

And in DC, where you have a lot of national museums that have boards that have members from across the country, it's just a different dynamic so funding challegnes are pronounced across the board. Also, more broadly across the country, corporations are funding differently now. They're not doing as many straight sponsorships as they are marketing initiatives and marketing-based support, so that's changed across the board.

In DC, because a lot of the museums are national I think you have a wider constituency of support, but they may not be as deeply invested in the institution from the heart. That communal pride is more challenging for the national museums. One of the things we started at the Hirshhorn that I hope continues is reaching out to the local community. The Hirshhorn has a really large percentage of the audience that's local. Thirty-eight percent of the Hirshhorn's audience is from the DC metro area, where as at Air & Space or Natural History it's 10-12 percent.

MAN: People are wondering if the problems at the Castle have anything to do with your departure. Has the Institution's leadership issues made it a difficult time to be a SI museum director?

Viso: It really has nothing to do with my decision. I had an opportunity that was very, very hard for me to turn down. I have always had, and the Hirshhorn has always had, very strong support from the Smithsonian administration and even through all of the last few months the SI could not have been more supportive than it has been in encouraging us to take the direction we've taken.

While it's disappointing that there's been such focus on this in an ongoing way, it's just disappointing to have to be inundated with all the negativity in the media. It really... we have proceeded with ever more vigor to do the great programs that we do. I think the Hirshhorn has been fortunate throughout all this to get consistently great coverage for its programs and for what the Hirshhorn is and does in the community. The Hirshhorn has been able to proceed business-as-usual throughout this.

So how big is the St. Louis Art Museum's $10 million purchase of this Degas? As best I can tell, it's the most expensive single acquisition by an American museum since the MoMA bought Rauschenberg's Rebus in 2005. (And no, the Ronald Lauder/Neue Galerie Klimt doesn't count. That's a different kind of thing.)

All the more stunning: SLAM did the Degas while in the midst of raising money for its David Chipperfield-designed expansion. (The museum is in the 'quiet' phase of its fundraising campaign. No goal has been publicly announced, but it will be north of $80 million. I've heard whisper numbers as high as $120M.) So because it's a huge buy, and because it's coming at an unusual time, I talked with both curator Charlotte Eyerman and director Brent Benjamin about the purchase. Eyerman and I talked about the art, Benjamin and I talked about the how. I'll have the Q&A with him tomorrow. But first, Inadvertent Q&A Week on MAN continues with Eyerman:

MAN: You were at the Getty before moving over to SLAM. In fact, you were in LA when the Getty purchased its Milliners painting. Any connections between the two?

Eyerman: I was the assistant curator working with Scott Schaefer and I did a lot of research on that picture, so I was familiar with these kinds of paintings and the bibliography and the market for them. It came to my attention that the new St. Louis Degas might be coming up last November. This painting was not on the radar when I was working on that Getty painting. Although they did have similar provenances and were made at similar times.

MAN: The Getty's painting has been x-rayed and studied pretty carefully. Has this one? Are there similarities between the paintings?

Eyerman: The Getty Milliners is very similar in date, and it shares a lot of interesting characteristics with our picture in terms of palette and formal concern. One of the figures seems to be identifiable as the same in the Getty picture. Degas is so interested in repetition, the ballet dancers, and so on... it's about rehearsal and repetition. In these paintings Degas gets interested in repeating this subjects and trying them out. The Getty has more psychological complexity because he did rework it. Ours is different because I did discover in my research -- both in terms of market research and art historical work -- is that there was a pastel Degas did, in color, for our picture. The pastel is exactly the same composition. It was sold at auction, at Christie's, in 1996 and I would like to track it down in the event I ever do an exhibition or publish on our picture. It makes the important point that he did plan the picture.

MAN: So tell us the story of how you happened to find your new painting.

Eyerman: When I talk to art dealers, primarily in New York, London and Paris, they ask me what I'm looking for. Because [my area of responsibility] spans a collection of 200 years, I try to identify the major gaps in the museum collection. So when I talked to dealers they say, 'What are you looking for?' Because I was trained at the Getty I always say, 'Extraordinary works,' and a Degas oil was high on my list. I didn't expect I would find one.

So I had that initial conversation in November, went to Paris, and ended up looking at lots of things. Some were minor and attractive, but I told the dealer who was showing me things that I was looking for something major. I asked him, 'Do you have a Degas oil?' He said no, but he said that his partner had one coming up. He would send me other things like an obscure 19thC sculpture and I would say, 'That's very nice, but how about the Degas?' I was very persistent.

And then as luck would have it, the Degas painting did become available. The dealer started sending me information in February. I saw the JPEG and it was intriguing, but it wasn't until I walked in the door of the warehouse in Geneva in March that it took my breath away. It was a real 'Wow!' moment.

MAN: Then you had to go ask your director for $10 million even though the museum was in the middle of a capital campaign.

Eyerman: I put it on Brent's desk knowing it was bold and assertive. He was very captivated by it and we started talking about how to do it. Your point is very well taken. We're all aware that we're asking our patrons to make gifts to our capital campaign, we are building a building. But the museum had the vision and the ability and the tenacity to buy the painting under very happy circumstances, privately, without going to auction. I negotiated the painting down. The director wants the public to understand that even though we're building, the museum is about art first.

This is turning into Q&A week on MAN, but that happens when the sloth of August gives way to the news of September. I'm going to break my Q&A with new Walker director-to-be Olga Viso into two parts. First, Viso's thoughts on what she accomplished at the Hirshhorn and what she's taking with her to the Walker. Tomorrow afternoon I'll post the second part: Viso's thoughts on Washington and the state of the museum scene here.

MAN: You've been at the Hirshhorn since 1995, the last two years as director. What's your legacy there?

Olga Viso: First there is the collection, and the focus on building certain aspects of the collection. That gave me great pleasure and I have great pride in having been a curator there for for many years. To have been able to build some depth in some particular artists -- that's one of the strengths the Hirshhorn has.

Another is how the staff and the board have really gone back to the founding roots of the Hirshhorn and to go back to the art and artists of our time by supporting artists over their careers. Hopefully I've gotten everyone to be in touch and in tune with that again. Certainly shifting the program to a more contemporary focus by getting in touch with those roots with great commitment and passion.

MAN: Was two years as director enough for you to be able to accomplish what you wanted to do there?

Viso: I think I had the benefit of really four years because I was deputy director for two years and a lot of the programmatic initiatives and the shifting in direction, the restructuring of the program and staffing... all of that was something I began with [former director Ned Rifkin] as his deputy. I had the benefit of having two years of investment in shifting the direction of the museum and building a team of people and setting out a program, so early on I didn't have to go through that one-to-two year assessment that a new director often does.

Of course there are things I have yet to do. One has a two-year and a five-year and a 10-year plan. One of the things I'm proud we accomplished was a strategic plan with the board and the staff, something done in an integrated way across the institution, from 2005 to 2011. Many of those initiatives have begun and many will launch this fall, such as the new website, the new calendar and the new graphic identity. Exhibitions and other programming is well underway. A lot of them emphasize our strength and underscore those strengths.

MAN: And that strategic plan will go forward?

Viso: Yes. We're well into the second year of that and a lot of the core initiatives may evolve and take another form, but the basis of the thinking is all there for someone to build upon.

MAN: What do you take from the Hirshhorn experience to the Walker?

Viso: I think there are many wonderful parallels between the Hirshhorn and the Walker. We are sister institutions and we do have a history of collaborating together. Some of those parallels are having a sculpture garden and having an international scope in terms of our programming, as well as having depth in works of individual artists and committing to artists over a period of time.

I think that one of the things that has really worked and resonated really powerfully at the Hirshhorn and with the community is our work with artists, our work with artists curating from the collection, our after-hours programs, our inviting artists to do workshops, bringing artists into every part of the museum's practice. It's resonated for the public at large, and it's inspiring to the public -- and to the staff. The Walker certainly has a history of doing that and it's something I'd like to translate to there.

Part of what makes Walker appealing to me is that it has a strength in performing arts, but also in film and media. There's a possibility to do even more cross-disciplinary programming and to encourage artists to use those platforms. Contemporary artistic practice is so cross-disciplinary in the world in which we live, and I think the Walker is uniquely positioned to create interesting platforms for artists in which to work.

Subsequently: The Washington Viso leaves behind.

This should put that "endangered" museums canard to rest: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch's David Bonetti reports that the St. Louis Art Museum just dropped $10 million on this Degas. Look for more on the purchase on MAN tomorrow morning...

Here are the four works about 9/11 that MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel picked for yesterday's look at art about 9/11:

Carol Vogel has the story in the NYT. The big question for the Smithsonian: Can they keep talented, highly-regarded directors in the midst of scandal?

Continuing from here, this is MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel's final pick of art about 9/11 and its aftermath. I'll run a short Q&A with Schimmel tomorrow morning.

At left is Luc Tuymans' Demolition (2005). It is currently on view at MoMA, which owns it.

Tuymans first exhibited the work at Chelsea's David Zwirner gallery in 2005, in the show perhaps best-remembered for The Secretary of State. "Tuymans specifically saw them as a pairing," MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel told me. "A lot of people wanted to buy the Condi painting and Tuymans wanted to sell them together because he saw them as a certain kind of diptych."

Demolition was not painted from photographs or video of the collapse of the World Trade Center, but it certainly recalls countless images from that day.

Previously: Tom Friedman, Thomas Hirschhorn, Robert Gober.

Continuing from here, this is MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel's next pick of art about 9/11 and its aftermath.

At left is Robert Gober's 2005 installation at Chelsea's Matthew Marks Gallery. (The entire installation entered the MoMA collection last year, but the museum has yet to install it.)

"I remember when Bob made this piece," Schimmel said. "He was very taken by 9/11, it really affected him very personally in that he saw that as a moment to move back from the country. He was spending much more time out in Long Island and after that he re-started his studio back in the city. He started making those pieces then. He very deliberately moved back. I remember when he told me about it, him touching his heart and saying he was moving back to the city.

"For Bob, who has with very political things through newspapers -- gay identity or the pope and the church. This was really a history tableau. "

If Schimmel hadn't raised this piece I would have posted it on MAN as one of my picks. The Marks show, which was on view in the spring of 2005, prompted a bunch of memorable response. "[Gober's] art is very much about our increasingly-damaged world, even though there's never any shouting," wrote James Wagner. Roberta Smith wrote wonderfully about the show too.

Previously: Tom Friedman, Thomas Hirschhorn.

Continuing from here, this is MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel's next pick of art about 9/11 and its aftermath.

At right is Thomas Hirschhorn's Non-Lieux (2002). (Non-Lieux translates to "Non-Site," a reference to Robert Smithson.) MOCA , which owns the piece, and Hirschhorn's gallery list the materials as "cardboard, wood, candles, glass, electric train, paper, collage, lights and trestles." It's on view at MOCA now.

"We purchased it from his London dealer who had brought it to Miami Basel, where it did not sell for reasons that shouldn't be that shocking to anyone," Schimmel said. "It's a very interesting, complex view of these twin towers which are at the top of this wax mountain. It was made not long after the attacks on the World Trade Center. What's really interesting about it is that you have the twin towers on top of these hippie-like wax mounds and, they're surrounded by boxes of cleaning supplies, and then flags proclaiming democracy and then there's an electric train that goes around... it's for connecting people and it links a landscape that is populated by Taliban or Afghan soldiers who are then juxtaposed with images of racy, Western, glamorous, and pornographic women. And then all of this is surrounded by all of this then surrounded [on the blue apron] by a utopian essay called "Empire" which is a critique of nation-building, and which is then surrounded by images of St. Francis of Assisi.

"Thomas Hirschhorn is a very political person and his work, by nature, is very political. It's wanting to take a viewpoint that wasn't a very American viewpoint, that isn't ambiguous, but that certainly is layered, complex, and multi-faceted. I think that's very much in keeping with him. I suspect in some ways... I wouldn't say it's unique in his oeuvre, but it's very special in that it's something that's in the way of what Goya was painting about what was going on Mexico. There's a simultaneousness of [making work about] something right out of the news that's unusual for him."

Related: Marshall Astor has a large, detailed, 3MB installation shot (which I have borrowed).

Previously: Tom Friedman.

This is the first post in MAN's series of conversations with contemporary art curators about artists' responses to 9/11. The first curator to join us is Paul Schimmel, chief curator at MOCA. I asked Schimmel if there were any works about 9/11 that have really stuck with him, that he thinks are important. I'll feature the four he listed today. Along the way, I'll share some of our Q&A.

This is an untitled Tom Friedman work from 2005. It's 96x16x16 and is made of rigid insulation. It was included in MOCA's 2005-06 Ecstasy show, which Schimmel curated.

"It's a single, monolithic tower, and a plane appropriately scaled is just touching it," Schimmel told me, adding that it was a late addition to Ecstasy and that Friedman was insistent about including it. "It's like the moment before, it's the moment before everything changed. It's very reductive and minimal, but it's a very charged political piece."

As I've been working on putting these posts together, that's something that has come up quite a few times: "The moment before..." Every time I hear that phrase I think of what is probably the ultimate moment before painting: The Third of May.

Coming to MAN starting tomorrow: A month-long series of posts on artists' responses to 9/11. The series will feature my conversations with prominent contemporary curators about post-9/11 art that they think is especially important. We'll also talk more broadly about how artists and arts institutions have responded to the attacks. I encourage other bloggers to write about post-9/11 work they think is worth mentioning and then emailing me here.) Tomorrow I'll feature MOCA's Paul Schimmel.

In this morning's LA Times, Christopher Knight pointedly suggests that Judge Stanely Ott take seriously the recently-filed Friends of the Barnes petition. By lunchtime we found out that Ott agreed: He's ordered a response from the Barnes and from the Pennsylvania AG. Ott also issued citations to a bunch of Barnes board-types, but not to Pew chief Rebecca Rimel. The Philly Inky hasn't covered any of this yet. (Stunner.)

I've posted a great deal about Steven Holl's wonderfully confrontational Bloch Building for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Some random thoughts on the installations in the new building...

From the which came first, the chicken or the egg file, arts journalists too-rarely write about acquisitions and museums even-more-rarely promote them. (One that does.) As we've just seen, the result can be under-informed opining.

So (belated) kudos to the Brooklyn Museum for using its blog to discuss and promote its recent acquisitions. (MAMFW too.) During the last few weeks BM curator Joan Cummins has been discussing acquisitions and how they happen in her department, Asian Art. Her posts are well worth a print-out:

Just yesterday I was complaining to a friend that the LA Times had yet to hold the Hammer to account for its Ricky Jay fluff job. As you may recall, the Hammer seems to think it's more important to glorify and promote a semi-celeb than it is to present an exhibition with integrity. Then I saw this on LATimes.com yesterday and decided that the dot-commers, at least, get it:

More reminders that, notwithstanding what you may have read, museum collection-building is not "endangered..."

Smart museums highlight their commitment to individual artists by aligning their exhibition and collection programs. (Gotta love how the Guggenheim, whatever else it may do, smartly -- and adorably -- collects Cathy Opie, and is planning a major Opie survey.) So here's an example of one artist, two museums and their collecting and exhibiting strategies: Robert Irwin, MCASD and Chinati.

In October, MCASD will launch a major Irwin show at its downtown locations. The shows, which will cover nearly 50 years of Irwin's production, will include 50 works mostly pulled from the MCASD's collection. (Among them will be this 1960 untitled abstract painting, a gift from Ruth and Murray A. Gribin.) The museum has also received Irwins from other donors and purchased some with its own funds. It collects Irwin via any means necessary and possible. Not only is MCASD able to collect Irwin, it's obviously able to do so in depth. (Who could forget this crowd-pleaser?)

Out in far west Texas, the Chinati Foundation doesn't try to collect a career's worth of work by an artist. Instead it carefully selects individual artists, finds a place for them on its property, and then buys or commissions major installations for its collection. The next major Chinati commission is likely to be an Irwin: The foundation is working with the artist to develop an installation for an abandoned US Army medical building on Chinati's property. (The site is in the center of this satellite image.) When I was in Marfa a couple of weeks ago I toured the site and saw Irwin's most recent drawings for the project. Assuming various logistical issues are solved and that fundraising goes smoothly (and I can't imagine that Chinati and a 78-year old artist would spend this much energy on a project if they weren't pretty confident), the Marfa Irwin will be the finest permanently installed Irwin in the U.S., at least.

This is hilarious: Play the game.

Love this: SF Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker smacks around FAMSF director John Buchanan a bit... then cozies up to SFMOMA director Neal Benezra. All within five days. Coincidence? I doubt it. (Baker also hints that an SFMOMA expansion could be coming...)

Last week I was amazed to read new Portland Art Museum director Brian Ferriso say things that many museum directors want to say, but don't. They were the kind of things an August Personage can get away with -- but Ferriso has only been in Portland for ten months. "Either he won't last the month or I'm ready to deify him now," I wrote. Yesterday Ferriso and I talked about whether he was expecting to receive unemployment benefits anytime soon.

MAN: Last week you told the Portland Oregonian, "If there aren't enough people visiting the museum to satisfy the board and others, then maybe I'm the wrong guy." How do you get away with that? How do you know you can say that publicly?

Ferriso: Maybe I don't. Maybe I'm just foolish. I worked at the Milwaukee Art Museum for a number of years and was part of that expansion project. I remember the conversation that was happening there. I was the director of curatorial affairs and people were saying, 'Get us exhibitions! Get us exhibitions! We've gotta get the gate!' -- but they didn't know what it took to get great exhibitions, that you had to have great people, strong curators and a more cohesive strategy. That experience made me a little more thoughtful.

MAN: I know lots of museum directors who want to say that, who might say it over drinks or something, but very few who will say it when our ties are still on. And it certainly countermands the Krensian wisdom that you have to do splash to be relevant.

Ferriso: I guess it's interesting to hear your thought on that. Maybe that's a bold statement, I don't know. When I came to the [job] interview here, I talked about the economics of exhibitions and I laid that out to people. The percentage of admissions dollars that contribute to the overall budget isn't that much. [Indianapolis Museum of Art director] Max Anderson and others really drove down on this and really tried to understand methods and costs. There's obviously been a metric here in Portland that has looked at admissions, numbers of members and aggregate dollars raised [as a way of justifying the previous exhibitions program]. Ultimately I think you're maybe not fulfilling your mission or really not trying to come to terms with your nonprofit education mandate if you think in terms of admissions dollars. I think I've been fairly consistent on this with the board, in my interview and with the community.

MAN: I ran some of those numbers in a very rough way and put them on MAN a number of years ago. Museum directors emailed, told me I was wrong. I said, OK, here are the tax forms from which I took my argument. What am I missing?

Ferriso: I guess that the counter-argument is that the gate drives people coming to the museum for the first time, which drives memberships, repeat visits and so on?

MAN: Yes, but I've never seen a study that validated or proved what seems like a fanciful theory.

Ferriso: Yes. I love this field and I love museums. I think it's a very important time for us. This shift of really understanding - as I think Max [Anderson] said, we are not an attraction. We are an educational institution. We have been positioned at some levels [to be] attractions and if we continue to go that way we will make ourselves insignificant very quickly. We need to really change the conversation, and the conversation needs to be: We are a non-profit. We are something that is essential to the human experience. Art is why we exist because art is essential to the human experience. It's not cancer research versus the art museum; you need both to have a healthy mind and a healthy body. I believe in that. Museums need to have newly defined metrics or perhaps just metrics that reach back to what they used to be.

MAN: You also did something else that you don't see too many new directors doing publicly: You picked an ethics battle right off. That is, you severed a contract because you saw ethical problems.

Ferriso: I actually don't know if I picked it quickly, but it was an observation I had about the institution. It's my opinion that there was a compromised position, that our individual who was consulting on acquisitions in a certain area had a husband who was a highly-respect dealer in that same area. That's my opinion. Other colleagues may feel differently. I do feel that Penelope [Hunter-Stiebel] has done an excellent job for us and I have no qualms about saying that. I feel I can be supportive of her and her role here and what she's done, and I can see her perhaps providing guidance on major exhibitions. I feel very comfortable speaking highly of her to my colleagues and about her professional qualifications. It's just this idea that perception and the compromised position she was in on acquisition is something that we need to have clarified, and maybe have a clean line of understanding on what her role was.

MAN: What was the impetus for your prioritizing the issues about which we're talking?

Ferriso: I had a friend who worked at Enron and I saw what happened there. I've watched and observed what Christopher Knight has written about several Los Angeles institutions, what has been written about and what has happened at the Smithsonian. I think we need to be very clear about values and what you believe in.

Related: The paper to which Ferriso refers several times is Metrics of Success in Art Museums. Anderson wrote it while doing a stint at the Getty. Here it is in PDF form, here in HTML.

Picking up from this morning...

I'm not a particular Kehinde Wiley fan. His portraits seem a little bit too easy, a little bit too obvious in their sampling of art history. However many, many curators I know just love him, especially because of what Wiley's work enables them to do across departments in their museums.

One of those curators is John Ravenal, the superb modern/contemporary curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Ravenal and the VMFA recently purchased this Wiley, Portrait of Willem van Heythuysen. Last week I popped into the VMFA to see some Bonnards and such and happened to bump into Ravenal, who was walking through the museum with a print-out of his new Wiley in-hand. I made some reference to the Wiley and Ravenal lit right up. He said he was looking on his feet, planning some ways to install the Wiley with older works in the VMFA's collection, hoping to help visitors to see connections between artists, between subjects, amongst portraits. (Now if only the VMFA can borrow this Frans Hals!)

What Ravenal and the VMFA plan to do with their Wiley is a nice example of how American museums are able to acquire work that illuminates both present artistic practice and art history. Not only is the sky not falling when it comes to American museums and acquisitions, but smart curators obviously know how to get bang for their museo-bucks.

Greg Allen is the latest to contribute a smart post taking apart Lee Rosenbaum's op-ed in yesterday's LAT: "Rosenbaum's op-ed... is so wrong in so many ways, even Tyler Green can't keep track of them all." So Allen pitches in and his post is awfully good. Picking up where he leaves off...

Rosenbaum goes on and on about how museums can't compete with the big, bad market, about how museum collecting is drying up. True: Museums don't buy $80 million paintings. (And like I said yesterday, they probably shouldn't, except for when the Getty's or the Kimbell's portfolio managers discover that they were invested in a Google-driven venture capital fund.)

Rosenbaum is in such a hurry to string together random news bits in an attempt to make an overly broad, and, as Allen points out, little-informed 'argument,' that she suggests that American museums are no longer able to collect and that they're not able to purchase art. Which couldn't be any more remote from the truth.

To pick some examples at random: In the most recent year for which I have tax filings, SFMOMA spent $2.1 million on acquisitions. That's not chump change: That's nearly 10 percent of SFMOMA's operating budget. The Walker Art Center dropped $2.3 million, more than 10 percent of its operating budget. What about encyclopedic museums? The Philly Museum spent $5.5 million on acquisitions in the most recent tax year available, also more than 10 percent of its operating expenses. On a percentage basis MCASD did even better: Last year it spent $1.4 million on art, 18 percent of its operating budget. That's commitment! (And a couple of new building commissions, I suspect.)

The story isn't the market and museums' failure to buy high-end, high-dollar works. That's existed since the beginning of museo-time and always will. It has nothing to do with fractional gift laws -- and I have no idea what that has to do with the rest of Rosenbaum's op-ed. (Furthermore, the recent tax law changes are not a deterrent to art donations, they are a deterrent to people receiving tax breaks for art donations.) The story is that American museums, especially contemporary art museums, are extraordinarily committed to purchasing art, and that this serves us (and artists) quite well. The commitment American museums have to acquiring art is one of the great under-told stories in American museumdom (which is part of why I try to spend so much time on it here on MAN). Throughout the rest of the week, I'll post some examples of how well American museums are doing when it comes to buying art...

Could it be that the just-filed Friends of Barnes petition is spurring Philly's powers-that-be to finally get serious about making room for the Barnes? That's the subtext of this Philly Daily News story that suggests that Philadelphia has figured out how to move various entities around the city so as to clear a site for the Barnes on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Several months ago a tipster suggested that I keep an eye on the FAMSF board of trustees. It was a good tip: The turnover on FAMSF's board under director John Buchanan has been remarkable.

Here's a list of FAMSF trustees when FAMSF hired John Buchanan to be director. Here's the current list. In the 22 months since Buchanan was hired, FAMSF has lost 18 trustees, a stunning number. That's extremely unusual not just in the museum world, but in all of non-profitdom. Organizations that are healthy don't turn over that high a percentage of their boards that quickly. There's your follow-up, Kenneth Baker...

That's it. Summer's over. The fall arts season effectively begins today and will run through Dec. 9, when Art Basel Miami Beach ends. Then we'll all take a holiday break and begin again in January. Before we get to the good stuFamsF later today, here are a few morning reads:

As previewed on MAN, today's San Francisco Chronicle features a front-page piece on John Buchanan's FAMSF by Kenneth Baker. Some of it will be familiar to MAN readers: The dumbing-down of the museum and the King Tut fumbling which until now has been only reported on MAN, but there are more juicy bits, including an outspoken board member and more... In fact, much more here on Tuesday.