October 2007 Archives

Dave Hickey lists his ten favorite works of art in the new Believer magazine, says The Stranger's Jen Graves.

Everyone who admired the Monet poster above their fourth grade teacher's desk has a similar list in mind. I know I do, but I've never committed it to pixels. Honestly? I didn't know you could -- the whole idea seems unserious, irreverent in the wrong way. After all, a silly, Letterman-like top ten list makes a mockery out of hundreds -- nay, thousands -- of years of art history. It elevates a few arbitrary pieces over the sanctity of the whole. It abolishes respect for the timeline of achievement. It diminishes artistic practice and progress.

Which is why Dave Hickey kicks serious ass. Consider, for a moment, the critical and curatorial problem of the moment (a problem that inflicts other adjectives as well): The apparent passing of judgment -- that is the death of judgment, oh that it were the other kind! -- a widespread, systemwide acquiescence to mere popularity. Right now everyone wants to be invited to the right party, the right scene event, to be liked rather than respected. As a result, there's too much going along to get along.

This trend brings to mind two Peter Schjeldahl stories. One is from about 2002, when in a Brice Marden review (I think) Schjeldahl pined for the days when art lovers had a favorite abstract painter to which they were committed. You were a Kline guy, a Hassel Smith woman, and so on. Schjeldhal noted that this was no longer the case, that people now tend to line up by medium: He's a paintings curator, she's a fan of installation art, and so on. That trend has accelerated, leading to more validation of media and less judgment.

The second Schjeldahl story that comes to mind is a story about an experience. Somehow, about four years ago, I found myself across a Hollywood dinner table from Schjeldahl. When Dean Schjeldahl asked me to -- and I quote -- "Please pass the bread," I worried that I might do it wrong. (I spent the meal with my mouth shut and my hands busy funneling baked goods toward the distinguished ex-sportswriter from North Dakota.)

Something Schjeldahl said that night has stuck with me ever since: When discussing a minimalist gone south, Schjeldahl sniffed, "He is not an artist," and then asked for the butter. My dining companion and I nodded. The dean's speech was plain, it came with conviction, and it concluded just in time for him to discover that he needed the butter. It was as fair a place to begin a discussion of said artist as any. Where can I go to hear a conversation about Richard Prince started that same way?

Back to Dave Hickey. Top ten lists force judgment upon you. In some ways they're a pretty good exercise because they make you pick and choose. They force you to think about what you like, what you really, really like, and why. They force you away from the ever-so-safe 'This is what's important' to the much riskier, 'This is important but it doesn't touch me in an affecting way.' To commit to a list is to commit to judgment. (I'm guessing that they don't do this at SVA's much-advertised grad program in art criticism.) So I look forward to seeing what Hickey includes in his top ten. And I'm going to make my own. And I hope a few other people do too.

Update: Ronald Bladen's The X is not a hint. Of any kind.

Over at his Exhibitionist blog, the Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers says that MFA Boston director Malcolm Rogers would face some "challenges" if he left Beantown for the London's National Gallery. Among them: That the National Gallery has only $82 million a year in acquisitions money to spend. Given that in the last two years for which I have tax filings the MFAB has spent roughly $16M and $8M on acquisitions, $82M doesn't seem so bad. (By comparison, the Met has averaged spending $67.5M per annum on art acquisitions in the last couple years.) Given my thoughts on King Malcolm, I'd prefer it if Edgers emphasized how attractive the London job is.

Yes, there is a rivalry. Remember: The Hammer landed some ex-MOCA board members. So is it on? Will the Hammer respond to MOCA by booking 50 Cent?

Earlier this month Emily Jacir won the Golden Lion for artists under 40 at the Venice Biennale. I've been fascinated by the subversiveness and the urgency of Jacir's work since I first saw it at NYC's Debs & Co. a number of years ago. My friend Choire Sicha was half of that gallery, so on the occasion of Jacir's Venice award I asked him to share his favorite Jacir story.

Choire Sicha: "Working with Emily was crazy-difficult -- and not because she was a diva like some artists, though she was immensely thoughtful about the display and context of her work. [My partner] Nick Debs booked her first New York show with us for May 2003 and we were planning it during 2002, during some of which she was teaching and living in Palestine.

That year the Israeli army, having already bombed Ramallah by air, came into [the] town and raided houses, attacked people on the streets, cut off the electricity, and took over the local media. The emails we got from Emily (when she could!) were unbelievable. Mostly I remember us being in New York and our concerns were like, 'We need to get prints for collectors who want them delivered before their next dinner party' and she was like, 'Okay, I'll get back to you in a couple of days, we're not able to really leave the house and we're staying out of bullet range of the windows.'

I may have never seen a piece of art as remarkable as the secret video recordings she made of her daily commute through the checkpoints just to get to work. [Shown here is a still from that piece: 2002's Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work).]I remember her emailing us about how the soldiers had seized her passport and harassed her on her way to work. That she produced such clear conceptual work under those conditions is hard to believe. (And to think I used to complain about how there was no good public transportation to the West Chelsea gallery district!) She was such a compulsive traveler -- having grown up stateless, in a sense, it was almost like she was more comfortable in transit. Some days I wouldn't know what country she was in. She's amazing."

Related: Jacir's current NYC gallery, Alexander and Bonin, has lots of images of her work.

First on MAN: The MCA Chicago's new director will be Madeleine Grynsztejn, SFMOMA's senior curator. Grynsztejn has curated a number of major shows, including the 1999 Carnegie International, a Richard Tuttle retrospective and the Olafur Eliasson extravaganza on view now at SFMOMA.

Grynsztejn replaces Robert Fitzpatrick, 66, who had led the MCA for a decade. MCA Chicago has a roughly $13 million operating budget.

Background on what I'm doing. I added more Denver blogs today. Next: Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Eyeteeth and Off Center are already on the lead list. Please leave suggestions in the comments.

Also: I just discovered that some 'good' comments were being diverted into a 'spam' folder. Sorry about that. I'll keep a closer eye on the 'spam.'

Today the Chronicle of Philanthropy came out with its annual Philanthropy 400, a look at what 400 American charities received the most in private giving in 2006. If you work in the non-profit sector, want to, give to it, and so on... it's a must-read.

The key line for art-lovers is this: "Among the Philanthropy 400, arts and culture organizations achieved the biggest fund-raising gains last year. Their donations grew by nearly 51 percent, as they mounted capital campaigns or other special appeals." However the Chronicle counts 'arts and culture organizations' separately from museums. Only these art museums made the list: MFA Houston (at No. 87), MoMA (125), the Smithsonian (128), MFA Boston (129), the Met (171), the Art Institute of Chicago (217), the Philly Museum (227), and the Nelson-Atkins (269). (The NYPL came in at 344. The Huntington Library was included in the 'arts and culture' list and came in at 345.) Building projects obviously have a major impact on who makes the list and who doesn't.

A couple of observations:

At right, Lari Pittman's 2003 Untitled #16.

From Doug Harvey's review of Pittman's 2003 Regen Projects show for LA Weekly: "At times over the last decade, it has seemed as if Pittman was struggling to find a vocabulary that could resolve his sense of personal and political isolation. Perhaps he discovered the obvious: Sometimes you just have to wait until everyone is as paranoid as you."

From today's Paul Krugman column in the New York Times:

Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration's rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up -- perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base's older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general.

And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear.

Just to be clear, Al Qaeda is a real threat, and so is the Iranian nuclear program. But neither of these threats frightens me as much as fear itself -- the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America's two great political parties.

Related: I have a couple more Pittman-related posts coming in the next few weeks. Pittman is featured in the current season of Art21. 'His' episode ran last night in most markets. I don't keep a list of my ten favorite works of the decade, but if I did this Pittman would be on it.

I'm in Detroit. If you are, come listen tonight. I talked with Detroit's alt-weekly, Metro Times, before I arrived.

Speaking of Detroit and the silly 'museums are endangered' file: The DIA just scored itself a big Calder.

And one note on the back-and-forth Richard Lacayo and I have going on the NGA's mistake: I certainly have no problem with museums doing collector-driven shows of gifts they've received. But that isn't the case with the NGA show about which we're talking. Only about half the show is going to the museum. The rest goes back to the collector -- with lots of free publicity attached, the work validated and the market value of the art enhanced. Museums don't exist to fluff collectors.

Denver is now on the blogroll. The Southwest is next: Las Vegas, Arizona, New Mexico. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

Time art writer/critic Richard Lacayo's Looking Around blog has been extra-good of late, but I disagree with this post about the National Gallery of Art's single-collector-driven snapshot show. Lacayo:

The National Gallery show, which was curated by Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner, has a wonderfully weird and funny (in all senses) selection of snaps. I only wish it had been possible to combine them in later galleries with a few examples of Winogrand, Friedlander and so on, to show how an anti-aesthetic developed into, well, an aesthetic. It may not have been possible to do that with this show because it's drawn entirely from the holdings of a single collector, Robert E. Jackson. But it stands on its own as a great adventure into the terra incognita that is us.

Uh, of course it was possible, the NGA simply chose not to do it. Instead of doing an actual exhibition about snapshots, etc., the NGA chose to do an exhibition about a collector. Hold them accountable for that decision, Richard! I've written about this before here. Modern Kicks piles on.

After watching the dead-tree NYC media consider art as part of a scene loved by upper-income Americans and not much else, I decided to join in. Sort of. I decided to ask a couple artists what they thought about how The Money is treating their work -- in particular their work as prepared for photographers from the New York Times Style Magazine. First was Adam Helms with whom I talked last week here and here.

While I was a little perplexed by the Adam Helms installation spotlighted by the Times mag, I loved the installation of this Jennifer Steinkamp by Deedie and Dusty Rose. I asked Steinkamp if she did too.

"I do like the way Eye Catching is installed in a cistern since that is the way it was originally installed in Istanbul," Steinkamp said via email. "I never thought the work would find another cistern."

Eye Catching was first shown in a cistern at Dan Cameron's 2003 Istanbul Biennial. Steinkamp has a superb website, including the photos and details of that setting and presentation. (Sweet.) The page includes where the piece has been exhibited and by whom, Steinkamp talking about the piece, and a Quicktime movie of it.

The Roses have pledged their collection to the Dallas Museum of Art. No word on whether the museum will find a way to install it similarly well.

Related: One of my favorite art museum experiences involved a Steinkamp in Buffalo.

Los Angeles is now on the blogroll. Denver and the mountain West is next. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

In 1953, 300,000 people lived in Seoul. Today, metropolitan Seoul is home to 22 million people. Depending on how you count these things, Seoul is somewhere between the second- and eleventh-largest metro area in the world.

A couple of weeks ago I spent five days in Seoul, essentially as the critic-in-residence at Platform Seoul, a contemporary art exhibition that partnered with about two dozen commercial galleries to create a contemporary art festival of sorts. The center of the event was Tomorrow, a two-museum group show that featured 32 artists. The show was curated by Sunjung Kim with assists from David Ross and Dan Cameron. (Kim's next US project is an exhibition of South Korean contemporary art that will arrive at LACMA in 2009. Kim is assisting Lynn Zelevansky on the show.)

Over the next couple weeks I'll be sharing some thoughts about the show, about a couple of galleries, and about Seoul. In the meantime check out the show's website above and its blog here.

It's official: The Dallas Museum of Art is making a fool of itself by allowing a private business/Philip Anschutz to make millions from its galleries. DMA curators must be going nuts. (And so far the Dallas Morning News' coverage is more awed than it is probing. I hope that changes.)

My favorite part of this disaster-in-the-making -- remember, only one art museum has dared touch this show so far, and its director departed shortly thereafter -- is this photo that ran on the Morning News' website yesterday. Nice costume. You stay classy, DMA!

Related: Remedial education on AEG's King Tut show. (As you may recall, FAMSF confirmed it was taking the show, then backtracked, and now who knows.

Two notes about me, I'm afraid: In the November Art in America, distinguished critic and artist Peter Plagens leads Jeff Jahn, Regina Hackett, Edward Winkleman, Libby Rosof, Roberta Fallon and me through a discussion of art-related blogging.

If you're in Detroit this Thursday, please come by the Wendell W. Anderson Jr. Auditorium at the College for Creative Studies at 730 pm. I'll be talking as part of the Woodward Lecture Series.

Admin note: Don't miss this morning's weekend roundup -- a ton of must-read stuff.

Ana Finel Honigman is one of our great satirists. In a hilarious, cloying post on the Guardian's excellent art blog, Honigman sticks her tongue firmly in cheek and roasts Artforum and its much-derided GawkerForum pseudo-blog.

"Every page in Artforum's annual ten issues, from the precious ad space through the erudite editorials, is devoured and savored by art students, artists and art professionals," Honigman writes. Ha! Stephen Colbert couldn't have said it with a straighter face. Maybe Honigman is hoping for a guest spot -- after all, Colbert occasionally invites smart, insider online figures onto his show.

Honigman continues: "ArtForum has retained its intellectual integrity and cultural relevance by responding substantively to seemingly superficial aspects of the art world with sober and informed commentary."

That's hitting the Artforum crowd where it's most vulnerable. After all, this is the same magazine that created a fake person to write about how much fun he had at excloo parties. (You may recall that Artforum knowingly presented a sockpuppet to its readers -- a fake writer that was apparently Jack Bankowsky-with-a-pseudonym. The sockpuppet vanished from AF.com after being exposed by MAN.) And later the magazine's website published an article in which one of its editors bragged about playing creepy children's' clothing dress-up games at the house of a person he was supposed to be covering. By referring to Artforum as "sober" and as having "integrity" Honigman is smartly zeroing in on the magazine's weakest spot.

As if that weren't vicious enough, Honigman then targets the pseudo-blog known in the art world as GawkerForum: "[The magazine's] sobriety is maintained on the website, even at Scene and Herd, the international art world's premiere social diary, where gossip and art star-spotting are interspersed with informed and insightful criticism of their work," she writes.

Which is borderline unfair, because to call further attention to the joke that is GawkerForum is to humiliate the magazine and its writers more than is probably necessary. After all, GawkerForum is best known for comparing visiting a Miami art fair to covering the war in Iraq, where 119 journalists have been killed on the job. It's "insightful criticism" has included this gem: "After the reception, the sluggish elevator to the dinner in Klagsbrun's West Village penthouse gave us time to reflect on [artist Billy] Sullivan's success." And: "I have not given [Tacita] Dean's work the attention it deserves..." Or: "I couldn't see everything, though, as I had to run to the Swiss Awards ceremony."

And as it turns out, Honigman is just warming up! Honigman goes on to critique Artforum's grossly out-of-date website, poking fun at it by describing it as a model even though the site is stuck in about 1999 and even though its most regularly updated feature, the headlines, frequently includes attribution mistakes. Obviously my ignoring AF's website hasn't exactly spurred it to change, but perhaps Honigman's biting critique will have more impact.

Honigman finishes her mini-essay with a bit of excess. By this point we understand the Jonathan Swift, let's-eat-the-babies treatment, so was this really necessary: "Don't you agree that artforum.com ought to be a role model for other art magazines, who can learn from it that there is life beyond the newsstands?"

UPDATE: Oops, sorry. I've fixed the link to Robin Givhan's Kara Walker story.

I've been doing MAN for over six years now and I can't remember a weekend this full of stuff you've just got to read. Of course the weekend also included one of the most stupefyingly over-the-top things I've ever read in my life. It'll get it's own post.

Performance art has been completely assimilated into American culture. Or, to put it another way: That's hilarious. [via]

Lightning History is going up. Is that the only other LA blog you think I should add? Leave 'em in the comments.

Part one of my back-and-forth with Adam Helms is here. This post will make more sense if you read part one first. This post stems from Helms and I talking about the current collector-focused art scene and how he, The Artist, deals with it.

Adam Helms: It's obviously a great and necessary privilege for an artist to have their works of art purchased. It contributes to not just living (and I should point out living in place as expensive as New York, no longer the bohemian paradise it's touted to be), but also to giving artists time in the studio to focus exclusively on an artistic practice. This also means that works of art produced leave the studio and go out into the world, more often than not, into private collections. These private collections more often than not are in people's homes.

(There are many exceptions to this in terms of collectors who build exhibition spaces, to show their collections and give credence to work itself, rather than live with them exclusively in their homes. Some examples who I can think of are The De La Cruzes, the Rubells, the Scholls, the Sender Collection, Saatchi and others that aren't popping into my mind. Still the majority of other collectors ending up 'living' with work. They place the work within the confines of their homes to coexist with the furniture and all else.)

I'm sure that many artists would be uncomfortable with where their work ends up in someone's house and the context it finally ends up in. Still, this isn't something in my case I try to concentrate or focus on. For me it's the making work in the studio, and the gallery or museum context where the work is publicly received. If an artist can stand behind and exhibition at a gallery, then that's what matters the most. I've been lucky enough to have some of my works included in permanent collections at museums, and that's the ultimate context we can all hope for.

Other than this, I've also been able to work with gallerists (In LA I show at Sister and in New York with Marianne Boesky), who focus on placing the work with collectors who aren't interested in interior design, but the importance of the work in art historical terms and issues involved with the work itself. After that I try to remember that it's about sustaining the studio practice and being able to focus on time to make the work. Thinking about contexts where much of the work ends up is much like the art world and the 'system' itself: depressing and soul sucking. The importance needs to remain in the studio and the responsibilities artists set for themselves.

After a week of watching the dead-tree NYC media consider art as part of a scene loved by upper-income Americans and not much else, I decided to join in. Sort of. I decided to ask a couple artists what they thought about how The Money is treating their work -- in particular their work as prepared for photographers from the New York Times Style Magazine.

The first artist I decided to email was Adam Helms, whose work is here, above the sofa. That seemed like a good idea until I realized that the NYT spread/feature was at the home of his dealer, Marianne Boesky. 'Good start, writer,' I thought. But I emailed Helms anyway and he replied. Over the course of two posts today I'll share his thoughts. My intent was to ask him what he thought of the installation, but what follows was his reply to a less scripted back-and-forth.

Adam Helms: Marianne actually is moving my piece at my request. It wasn't until recently that I actually went up to her house to see the work. I thought initially that my piece should be moved elsewhere, down where a viewer can see the pieces more directly. In my mylar work, it's important to be able to see the abstractions within the ink. That's an important part of the tension of those pieces. I thought that at the height they were, no one would be able to see this.

What I did like was how they seemed to lord over the space at that height. In terms of a feeling of the work being 'neutered' in the space, the way they are, it's just where that particular piece is going to function within Marianne's house. Which is what her space is, her home.

My 'insurgents' existing above a couch is perhaps not ultimately where I would like to think of them, but any guest in her house who will see them - and look past them as objects that match a sense of interior design - and think about the implications of the work in their minds, is as much as I can ask for in this case.

I do agree that the piece in the Times, as slick as it looks, makes all the work appear de-contexulized to a degree. But this is ultimately where the context lies for much of contemporary art. Hopefully the artist can feel some comfort in the reasons why collectors decide to 'live' with the work the way they do and understand the practice, intention and relevance of the work to the continuing dialogue of art history. When these reasons are giving credence to issues within work, I try not let myself be bothered by what piece of furniture is near the work, or even if it's being contextualized near other pieces that don't at all fit with what my work deals with.

In this specific case with Marianne's place and the Times' mag, I'm glad to be involved with someone like her, who understands what I am trying to do and wants to support my practice for the long term. I know it all sounds a bit [dramatic], but it's honest. I just try and focus on the studio and deal with the rest.

Part two is here.

Related: Helms was in the Walker show Ordinary Culture and his work is now in the museum's collection (not online). He's in the Whitney's collection too.

For background click here. Marshall Astor, The Expanded Field and The Flog are on the lead list. If you have Southern California-based blogs to suggest, leave 'em in the comments.

This is yesterday's news but I was having so much fun with the shark that I didn't get around to posting this: The Portland Art Museum scores its first Van Gogh. (But never you mind: Museums are "endangered!") For some reason Portland writers are obsessed with the monetary value of the gift. Heck, the Portland Oregonian's DK Row drops 160 words not just on the possible value of this Van Gogh, but on the value of other Van Goghs. Guys: It's going into a museum. It's not going to Christie's. Consider context, then type.

Here's one way to think about it: The Met was so nervous about Steven Cohen's Damien Hirst's shark that it let Roberta Smith in to see it only under cover of night. And how ironic is it that the most famous European artwork of the last 20 years goes up in NYC just after the NYT's chief art critic flees for Europe?

Brent Burket has the day's best write-up. And Edward Winkleman is good too.

As for me? This is proof that Robert Smithson's ideas about art and natural history museums have finally jumped the... Oh nevermind.

Yesterday I started to discuss Jerry Saltz's Babylon07 column. Some final thoughts...

Saltz writes that this is an unprecedented moment in the history of art markets (for lack of a better phrase). In one anecdote, he tells us about a cheering auction audience "understanding that art had become a currency to manage. Perhaps it was ever thus; it's just more thus than ever." As New Yorkers are want to do, Saltz falls into the trap of the superlative present: Now is the "-est": the biggest, the most-est, and so on.

An art history moment, please: In 1650, in the middle of the Dutch golden age, Amsterdamers were so art-buying-mad that the average home owned 10 paintings. The late 16th/early 17th-century Roman art market was particularly awash in scudi as cardinals, merchants, and various cardinal-and merchant-affiliated off-shoots of the Catholic Church competed for painters and publicity (and the related coffers-filling donations to churches with splashy new art). Heck, the excesses of the early Italian Baroque oft resulted in fights between rival gangs of painters, not to mention the churchly doctrine-vs.-art battles that were a part of the Counter Reformation.

I don't think that the average New Yorker hangs ten paintings in his home and I don't see gangs of painters outside the Shake Shack rumbling over who got a Public Art Fund commission. (An aside: Money-soaked ages are rarely a bad thing for art and artists. Look at the two examples above. Those two periods -- or, ahem, those two art markets -- gave us Hals (above, at the unlinkable Rijksmuseum), Rembrandt, Steen, Vermeer, van Ruisdael, Caravaggio, Gentileschi, and Bernini.)

Also, Saltz: "Meanwhile, do we think less of an artist whose art sells for less or doesn't sell at all?" Why is an art critic even considering this question? The whole underpinning criticdom (and not a collector) is that the critic is endowed with the imperative of ignoring this question. (Let alone the answer.)

Finally, was I the only one who thought Saltz's drive through MASSMoCA/Buchel was a little strange in a piece that has always been about New York? It's easy to read Saltz's detour as a response to the blowback after Roberta Smith's Buchel write-up. True: Every art critic on the planet -- even those of us who resisted -- have been sucked into this story, so maybe it's not a huge surprise that Saltz weighed in. But usually the firm of Saltz & Smith does an honorable job of not using its multi-platform megaphones in concert.

Related: I just found out about this today and wanted to be sure to mention it: Anaba discussed some of same territory that I've covered, and did it last week.

Couple of pieces from around the web: In yesterday's Washington Post, Paul Richard has an interesting take on the Brooklyn Annie Leibovitz survey that has touched down at the Corcoran. He invokes Gilbert Stuart which brought to mind the celebrity-filled 2004 Stuart retro at the Met. From my review:

"When Stuart was at his best, his portraits capture great men an all their seriousness. When Stuart was less interested, when he was simply painting for his fee, his paintings are flat. Fortunately for us, Stuart did his best work when the most important Americans were before him... [W]hen painting the less prominent, Stuart appears to have been uninterested. In a 1798 portrait of one Samuel Gatliff, Stuart makes his subject look like a surprised bird. In the accompanying portrait of Gatliff's wife and daughter, proportions are askew and a number of body parts appear to be strangely attached. (Stuart seemed to be vaguely disinterested in many of the women he painted. Walking through this exhibit it's apparent that Stuart gave many different women a single, sweetly stupid expression.)"

Also: Time's Richard Lacayo has been posting a Q&A he did with SFMOMA director Neal Benezra: Part one, part two. (Benezra is, well, wrong about museums and buying at art fairs -- I've noted many examples here over the years, including most recently this.) But while we're on Benezra, he's probably the only museum director who got into art when he first saw Clyfford Still's 1945 Self-Portrait. Benezra was fascinated that a self-portrait could be abstract... and decades letter the painting is in the collection of the museum he runs.

And speaking of Benezra speaking of Still: I (very) belatedly found out that SFMOMA has recently reinstalled its Clyfford Still gallery for the first time in eons. (And by recently I mean "in July." Oops.) Benezra requested the re-hang which was carried out by curator Janet Bishop.

The new hanging features seven paintings, including two representational works. Bishop's picks show Still at his largest, including two massive 9.5-feet-by-8.5-feet abstract paintings from the 1950s and an even bigger 9.5-feet-by-13-feet 1960 painting given to the museum by Hunk & Moo Anderson. A 9.5-feet-by-14-feet painting from 1974 rounds out the hanging. (At least one major American curator wants to do a show of these mammoth Stills, but that'll have to wait until the Clyfford Still Museum is up and open.) Gone (for now) is the Peggy Guggenheim-gifted Self-Portrait that Benezra loves.

For background click here. Anna L. Conti's blog is on the lead list. If you have San Francisco-based blogs to suggest, please leave 'em in the comments.

Today is Blog Action Day, so in the spirit of the thing I thought I'd offer Jason Middlebrook's APL. Unfortunately, I can't find anything image-wise, but here's the 2003 Sara Meltzer press release, and here's a fine write-up by William Powhida in the Brooklyn Rail.

I think Jerry Saltz is one of the most astute commenters on New York art. In fact, Saltz is held in high regard by not just the Chelsea crowd, but by his journalist peers: Among art critics, only the LAT's Christopher Knight has been a more frequent Pulitzer Prize finalist than Saltz. But with this year's Babylon column Saltz missed the mark.

'Babylon' is Saltzian shorthand for the critic's annual fall look at New York. The current installment is Saltz's first since leaving the Village Voice for New York mag. After a ridiculously alarmist headline (for which I blame the magazine) "Has Money Ruined Art?," Saltz spends 3,700 words not on art, but instead on the pre-eminence of money in the art world. In near GawkerForum-style, Saltz builds up clubby NYC-centric anecdote after anecdote to present an image of a community awash in cash. Ironically, for at least a week Saltz joined the crowd he professes to dislike: He became one of those writers more interested in the scene than in art.

Here's why I don't like it: One of the important roles of a critic is to step outside the immediate present, to resist fads, to exert judgment when popularity dominates. By so doing a critic should place art in what s/he thinks is the right context, s/he should say what's important now and s/he should consider what could matter in 50 years, in 100 years -- and not what will matter at the next Bottino Boesky bash.

If you are a critic and if you care about art and think that the party story has overtaken art, hold your ground: Advocate, pontificate, elevate, urge, denounce and push. With his 2007 Babylon column, Saltz effectively ran up the white flag of surrender and joined in the Weltschmerz of the moment, the GawkerForum-ization of the present.

"The words 'New York is dead' rocketed through my head last month," Saltz writes introducing three paragraphs in which he decries how A-listers are treated and how C-listers aren't at an Aaron Young performance. Saltz never quite comes to judgment or insight, he mostly covers the scene the way GawkerForum sucks up at Brice Marden openings. Why can't art be considered within the context of art and not within the context of the scene? Isn't that what a critic is able -- in fact, privileged -- to do more than anyone else in the art world? In fact, the critic is supposed to be above the fray in a way that collectors, dealers and curators aren't -- and that's an important and presently undervalued seat. It is much of the source of the critic's authority. If the critic can't ignore the scene to write about the work, who can? That's why when David Rimanelli goes to write about a show for Artforum and ends up trying on children's clothing in the show's curator's closet -- and writing about it -- we guffaw and feel sorry for what Rimanelli became: A joke.

Worse, much of Babylon07 touches on something else that's crept into so much art writing: A want to belong, a desire to preserve 'the art community,' to keep it the way it was, the writer's desire to be in the right crowd with the right people. Saltz joined Money in the spirit of its enterprise: Elevating the moment, the scene, the glitzy dirty sexy money, the par-tay, over art. For those of us who are uninterested in the scene, who roll our eyes at those who just want to belong! to fit in!, the art is everything. The trend is away from that: I think of one recent emailer who told me that he was proud that the art critic at his city's newspaper was finally "representing" the city. Well, sycophantic side-shows represent, yo. That's not an art critic's job. The trend toward featurization of art writing has also generated a rash of writers who unquestioningly fall hook-line-and-sinker for PR spin knowing that they'll stay on the right lists. Too many writers prefer using gushy feature stories as their ticket to the dance and have given up on challenging authority, on earned, begrudging respect.

Babylon07 is from a trope much-favored by scenesters: It's an insider's lament, the kind of write-up that earns props inside a community because the writer has spoken out against the perceived dominant influence. Simultaneously the writer seems to have gained credibility outside his community because he has dared to challenge Big Players who are squatting on his home turf. Except in reality Saltz is the dominant influence. And he isn't so much challenging as he is acquiescing. (New York is a company town, and Saltz & Smith is the biggest firm in art writing.)

Back in January Saltz covered some of this same ground (complete with many of the same examples, including Dumas and Eder) in a tighter, more probing lament for the Village Voice: "In our studios and before artworks we still experience moments of authentic serenity, passion, and meaningfulness--places on the edge of language that the market can't strip away. In this imperfect realm we can intuit the elemental feeling that sometimes, just by making or looking at art, we might glimpse the full range of human possibilities. The market is art minus otherness. The rest is gossip."

Babylon07 is gossip.

Part two is here.

For background click here. PORT is on the lead list. If you have Portland, Oregon, Idaho, Montana or Wyoming-based blogs to suggest, leave 'em in the comments. I'll be adding:

As I wrote here many years ago, while Julius Shulman is best-known as a photographer of mid-century Southern California modernism, his earlier documentary work about early, growing Los Angeles is at least as important. As a child in 1920, Shulman was a part of the first wave of immigrants into the Southland and he was a student in the first UCLA class to meet at the then-new Westwood campus. In today's LAT the paper's architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes a look at a show of Shulman's photographs of LA -- and not just the famous stuff. The exhibit is from the Getty Research Institute and is on view at the LA Central Library. The GRI has its own website for the show here.

Bonus: Hawthorne notes a recent cantankerous exchange between actor Ben Stiller and Shulman. Here's the play-by-play on LA Observed.

For background, click here. Today I'm adding Seattle. Regina Hackett's Art to Go is already on the lead list. (UPDATE: Doh. So is Hankblog.) If you have Seattle-based recommendations beyond the list below, leave 'em in the comments:

For those of us who like accuracy in art history, Christopher Knight reviews the "Birth of the Cool" show at the Orange County Museum of Art.

I'd like to link to Knight's review, but the LAT makes that difficult. Or easy. I'm not sure which. Turns out the write-up is at two different URLs. Each has the same text, but each features different images. Here's one. Here's the other. Read to the end: As usual in Knight's reviews, the best stuff is last.

While we're here, OCMA is one of the more underrated museums in the country. It has a smart chief curator, good gallery spaces, and just the right amount of ambition. Its scanty-but-loud website, however, gives me a blip-blip-blip headache. One of the reasons I like OCMA is that it embraces an art history that includes -- even emphasizes -- the West. (Or, to put it another way: OCMA embraces an alternate version of the provincialism that dominates the NYC museum scene.)

Knight smartly insists on the centrality of artists and art movements in southern California within the larger story of modern and contemporary art. LACMA, SFMOMA, FAMSF (ha!), and plenty of others should listen up and then collect, program, and exhibit accordingly.

Richard Lacayo and I thought of the same thing when we saw Doris Salcedo's project for the Tate Modern: Hey, Andy Goldsworthy cracked a courtyard in San Francisco.

OK, yes, there is a vague, superficial, formal similarity. On second thought, it's not so much a formal similarity as a linguistic similarity. Goldsworthy's 'installation' is one of the more trite, silly artistic interventions imaginable. It is a thin one-note that references a mammoth event -- an earthquake -- with a minor gesture. Think of it as afterthought-with-chisel, or as the arts version of my punny headline.

Salcedo's Shibboleth, which I have not seen in person, is no minor gesture.

The beginning of MAN's new blogroll is down there on the right. Check it out. Each of those sites is worth at least a weekly look and many of them are worth a more frequent perusal.

So as to make blogroll overhaul more manageable for me, and in an effort to make the new blogroll as comprehensible as possible, I'm going to try something new: Each day for the next few weeks I'll add a city. The last (scheduled) post of each day will spotlight the newly-added city and I'll ask commenters to suggest blogs that I missed. I'll then add blogs that I think belong.

This should go without saying: There will be no bomb-throwers on MAN's blogroll, no catty gossip sites, no blogs that I've found to be factually lazy, and no sites that add little to the conversation. Call it juried, call it curated, call it whatever you want. I figure that if the blogroll is useful to me it might be useful to others as well.

Sounds like Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff is as sick of reading about THE ART MARKET as I am. (Question: If the art media were geographically better distributed, would the market stories dominate?) This from a Q&A with Bloomberg's Farah Nayeri:

All the attention of it -- how much money is paid for a Peter Doig or a Damien Hirst -- distracts us from thinking about what the work is about. It's amazing that these contemporary artworks are selling for as much money as they do, but I don't think it necessarily helps anybody appreciate what's interesting about contemporary art.

Amen. What's worse: We're all supposed to have an opinion on the market. Even worse than that: Magazines that turn art (or stories that should be about art) into stories about money. I'm looking at you, New York.

Admin note: I'm shaking off a flu bug, so posting here is likely to stay relatively pithy this week.

Few artists mix visual impact with emotional wallop the way Doris Salcedo does. Given the difficulty of much of her work -- true, sometimes she requires a bit of wall-text -- she doesn't seem a likely candidate for the Tate's festivalist Turbine Hall series. But she's there now and already Salcedo's Shibboleth is showing signs of being a Flickr hit.

(There are a bunch of really good Salcedos in the U.S. including at the Pulitzer, MCASD, SFMOMA and the de Young. )

Given the socio-political content of Salcedo's work, it's a disappointment to me that she's never been asked to do a major public commission in Washington, DC. (Oh, wait, who exactly would commission that...) So far as I know there's only one Salcedo in Washington: at the Hirshhorn.

Related: How the Turbine Hall piece may have been made, understanding Shibboleth within the context of Salcedo's recent work, will the Tate's audience take Salcedo seriously after, say, the Holler, Salcedo concurrently on view at White Cube, Jonathan Jones on Salcedo and architecture, Richard Dorment is still haunted by the piece, five dozen pieces (already) in the British press about Shibboleth.

Greg Allen has the story of how a French art collective spent a year sneaking into the Pantheon at night in order to fix a rusting clock that was suffering from neglect. Great story. Don't miss it.

Proposed solution to the French security issues: Obviously they need to spend money on protecting art. I suggest a telethon...

I hardly know what to say: Italy, a country in Europe, holds a telethon to raise money so it can save antiquities.

Oh, wait, I do: The Getty should cheekily 'respond' by commissioning a 'telethon' from Francesco Vezzoli.

I was on a plane yesterday when this story was happening, so it's old news that someone stuck his hand into a Monet at the Musee d'Orsay. My favorite tidbit about the story was this sentence from Time's Richard Lacayo: "Christine Albanel, the French Minster of Culture, has now promised to seek improved security for French museums." I see. Well, let's add a bit of context...

This is (at least) the second time in 14 months that art in a French museum has been badly damaged. Just for fun, let's compare Albanel's reaction to the Monet tear to how museumdom reacted to how it damaged and destroyed art in last year's "Los Angeles 1955-85" show: "It's not our guilt," Catherine Grenier, who curated the show for the Pompidou, said from her Paris home. "For me, it's not a coincidence. These two works were made of the same materials, and made in the same period. And both were incredibly fragile."

Each day this week I'm posting an excerpt from 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes, a book of conversations between MAMFW chief curator Michael Auping and dozens of artists.

Michael Auping: Let's start with a very basic question about the process of making Ladder for Booker T. Washington. Do you remember much about how this piece developed?

Martin Puryear: Yes, absolutely. It was made from an ash sampling -- a very tall, young ash tree that I cut on my property and brought into the studio. I kept it for quite a while and I knew I wanted to do something with it because it was such an interesting form. Most saplings that grow in the woods grow ramrod straight. This one had a lot of very interesting undulations in its stem.

I've always been interested in working with wood from nature. A lot of the sculpture I do I make from wood that I buy, processed lumber -- boards or planks, and so forth, that are veneered. But once in a while I like to get a tree and make a piece of sculpture out of a tree or part of a tree. In this case the undulations were fascinating to me, and I kept it for quite some time just in that shape, with a kind of broad trunk with the bark on it. Eventually I peeled the bark off, and began thinking about it in relation to a ladder.

I had been in France working at Alexander Calder's studio on an invitational grant for nine months. This was about ten years ago, and I noticed quite a few of these homemade ladders made in the French countryside, mostly in tiny little towns in the Loire Valley.

From Jori Finkel in today's NYT:

"Four Abstract Classicists" traveled to London, where the work was more accurately called "hard-edge painting." A reaction against the emotional excesses of Abstract Expressionism, the movement offered a Californian counterpart to geometric work by Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and the New York Color Field painters; it later included other California painters like Helen Lundeberg and June Harwood.

I'm delighted to see the NYT getting out of Manhattan a bit of late (Atlanta, Philly, LA in a Dodge). But I'd prefer it if the paper would do so accurately. "Four Abstract Classicists" did indeed travel to London, but the work was called hard-edge in the show's catalogue -- that is, the term was not a London invention nor was it a term unique or specific to London. Furthermore, the NYT write-up does what the NYT always does: Puts the world within the context of NYC developments instead of the other way around. The term 'hard-edge' was not applied to Kelly and Stella until about a decade after it was first used in LA. And California hard-edge painting was not even remotely a response to Stella, Kelly, & Co. (California hard-edge preceded them.) The work of the still-underrated John McLaughlin, for example, has everything to do with McLaughlin's synthesis of Japanese art (he lived there in the 1930s) and nothing whatsoever to do with New York.

Related: Emvergeoning.

MAN will be on more of a normal posting schedule starting tomorrow. Coming soon: Lots from Seoul. Meanwhile, getting the grumpies out:

1.) Why do newspapers spill so much ink on attendance at art museums? At movie theaters, the objective is to make money. As a result, tickets sold is the measuring stick. Makes sense for the media to focus on box office. But art museums are non-profits -- not businesses. Attracting the maximum number of visitors ain't in the mission statement, ain't what they're all about. I mean, if it was all about showing popular stuff, about maximizing attendance, wouldn't museums show us Thomas Kinkade and Peter Max? (Sigh.) So why does this story keep popping up? (A: Because many journos have a fundamental misunderstanding of non-profits and of how art museums are run and funded. Sadly, so do some boards -- see below.)

2.) Don't think that the only story about the Visual Artists Rights Act is about Christoph Buchel and MASSMoCA. Ed Winkleman has had smart things to say about other cases all week.

3.) I love the way Regina Hackett takes on art, the White House, and the Washington Post all in one big scoop. We'd better keep Hackett away from this bloody bizarreness.

4.) I love that James Kalm is on board the Clyfford Still bandwagon. (OK, true, among writers it's me, him, and, uh, er, ah...) Check out his Brooklyn Rail write-up, complete with video. (Something about the unsteadiness of that video is just right for falling into one of those jagged Stills.)

5.) The Washington Post ran a big package on museums yesterday. Good idea: When it comes to art, the DC scene is dominated by institutions. But when it comes to the Post's execution... sigh. There are plenty of opportunities for smart, in-depth coverage of DC museums. You've read it here, and others have agreed. Beyond that meme, the Post missed plenty of opportunities for real institutional stories, so here are a few for it to consider next time: The end of major acquisitions at the National Gallery. The total lack of contemporary art at the NGA. How SAAM's leadership holds on. Whether the Phillips will ever stop doing mindless, gate-craving impressionism shows. The role of super-secretive mega-trustee (NGA, Hirshhorn) Mitch Rales. Speaking of Rales, should this merit a tax write-off when it's hardly open to the public? (I've never been.) The National Gallery as fluffer. The unstaunched degeneration of the Corcoran under its new director. Has the Sackler put 'Muhammads' back on view and why or why not? I could keep going. Bottom line: I'm not surprised. The Post's art coverage needs a thorough overhaul.

Cheery bonus: From the latest Worth1000 fine art Photoshopping contest, this makes me laugh.

Each day this week I'm posting an excerpt from 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes, a book of conversations between MAMFW chief curator Michael Auping and dozens of artists.

Michael Auping: What do you talk to [art students] about?

Agnes Martin: Living with inspiration, how to accept inspiration. you have to be careful with the intellect as an artist. The intellect struggles with the facts. That's not inspirational. if you are an intellectual and you are going to buy a house, you would think about the cost, check on the taxes, look at the survey, and go through a whole list of things that make you feel better about buying the house. If you couldn't rationalize it, you wouldn't buy it. If the house genuinely inspired you, you wouldn't worry about the list. You would find a way to buy it. You have to deal with the practical matters, but you wouldn't worry about them because you would be involved with your inspiration. That's what artists have to do. They have to stay involved with their inspiration. They can't be constantly worried about the cost of paint.

Each day this week I'm posting an excerpt from 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes, a book of conversations between MAMFW chief curator Michael Auping and dozens of artists.

Michael Auping: It is strange -- strange how people see or interpret the same thing differently. An artist will look at something real -- a scene or a landscape of some kind, and see it as an abstraction, which is why I sometimes think artists are freaks a little bit, the way they read a phenomenon. Then someone will see the abstraction and see a rabbit or something -- like different witnesses at the scene of a crime. When abstraction was invented, it really twisted the rules of visual thinking or visual interpretation.

Ellsworth Kelly: That's what makes abstraction so interesting, not as a historical phenomenon but as a visual phenomenon -- simplicity and complexity all wrapped into one single image... Speaking of the scene of a crime, early in my involvement with abstraction I had a funny thing happen, or at least it seems funny now. I was invited to be in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This was in the very early fifties, and I was living in Paris. It was an alumni exhibition. I had gone to the Boston Museum School and I sent one of my early abstractions [La Combe III].... It was a very conservative exhibition and those were very conservative times.

Abstraction wasn't really an accepted language yet, and I think the work I sent was one of the only abstractions in the exhibition. When I shipped the painting a problem arose with Customs. I don't know exactly how it all unfolded, but the Customs people questioned what it was and when they were told it was a painting, they got suspicious because they couldn't see anything recognizable. Remember, this was the Cold War, and it's still hard for me to believe this, but they suggested it was some kind of code, secret communist code. Can you believe that? [Laughter.]

It's just funny how we see. Actually, I like the idea they might see some abstract code. Ironically, the image came from a photograph I took of some shadows on stairs, If you saw it with the photograph that I took to capture how interesting the shadows looked, you would see how very real the image is.

Washington's best modern art curator, Leah Dickerman, is headed to MoMA. She co-curated last year's blockbuster National Gallery of Art Dada show. Usually I don't mention curatorial staff changes here on MAN, but Dickerman's departure is another example of this.

Each day this week I'm posting an excerpt from 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes, a book of conversations between MAMFW chief curator Michael Auping and dozens of artists.

Michael Auping: Did [Marcel Duchamp] ever say anything [about the sculptures of yours on view at the Peridot Gallery in 1949, 1950 and 1953]? What did he think about them?

Louise Bourgeois: Well, he didn't say much. He was a man of few words. But he would say, 'Louise, tell me about it, what does that mean?' Duchamp sent Pierre Matisse to see these early works. he also sent Alfred Barr. Barr, who was quite a card -- that one, you know, I could write a book about Alfred Barr -- he came into the room, and he looked very detached, very museum-like, un gros legume. He pretended that he was not overly interested, that he had come because Marcel had told him. Very detached, you know. So I didn't know what to say about that.

And then, I noticed that he approached a particular piece that was full of little pieces hanging from it -- Persistent Antagonism. So, he stood along time in front of this piece and he touched those little hanging things. I was watching, I didn't say anything. I always say the wrong thing. But I was watching him, and he took them like this and he lifted them. He was having a lot of fun. Then he said, 'This is very erotic.'

I didn't answer. Better not to answer, right? And he went all around the room, and he made believe that he was interested in one piece, when actually he had the intention of buying another piece, right. Finally, he decided. I'll have to make the story short -- but finally he bought one piece for The Museum of Modern Art, Sleeping Figure [at right]. It's totally anti-erotic. Even though he was a Puritan, he did not deny to himself the fact that genitals gave him a kick. And he paid $400 for Sleeping Figure. Alfred Barr was a fantastic buyer. He knew how to bargain.

It's open house weekend in Marfa, Texas. Over the next few days the Chinati and Judd Foundations will welcome hundreds of art world city-slickers into far West Texas. With that in mind...

On my first visit to the Chinati Foundation, I was talking with one of the interns about Donald Judd's 15 untitled works in concrete. You know the piece: It's the series of square, open-ended boxes that point the way south, down Highway 67, and toward the Chinati Mountains. The young man told me that a few weeks before, an antelope or a deer had given birth in one of the boxes.

"No..." I said, vaguely disbelieving. Then I felt bad about questioning the guy and I tried to turn my faux pas into a joke. "Did you see it? I mean, does that often happen during the 10 o'clock tour?"

He laughed, mostly politely, and tossed his head at the forms. "No. I'm the one who had to clean it up."

Visiting Chinati back in August - yes, I like Marfa best when it's empty - I thought of that story and that birth. As I was applying sunblock in anticipation of the morning tour, I saw about 10 deer a ways off in the distance. The concrete forms were to my left, the deer were down a road to my right. To my urban eye, they all looked to be solidly middle-aged. I wondered if one of them had been born in a Judd.

I've been to Chinati a few times now and I'm over the unlikelihood of the place. I think that just like any works of art, you have to get past the shock of awe, you have to settle in before you can begin to consider the work. When I'm walking around Chinati, I don't worry about the rattlesnakes anymore, and if that isn't comfort I don't know what is.

What Donald Judd did in Marfa sure isn't earth art or land art. His installations in Marfa make no attempt to measure themselves against geol