December 2007 Archives

For her ninth birthday, Cathy Opie got a Kodak Instamatic camera. One of the first things that Cathy figured out about her new camera was how to use the timer. She decided to photograph the subject of greatest interest to any nine-year-old: Herself.

Cathy headed out to the backyard of the family home, looked through the viewfinder and composed her picture. First, she decided to fill the foreground of the picture with lush lawn. Then, on the right-hand side of the picture she placed her family's single-story house, complete with its shiny, white aluminum siding. On the left was Cathy herself. She set the timer and walked a few steps backward. She flexed her biceps, grinned, and the camera took the picture. It was Cathy Opie's first self-portrait. Almost four decades later, Opie's 'continuing' series of self-portraits is one of the greatest, most important series in contemporary art.

This is Opie's 1993 self-portrait, often misidentified as her first (professional) self-portrait. (That would be this 1992 pic: Bo.) Opie's self-portraits are evidence of a changing America and of a changing subculture: They mirror changes in what gays and lesbians have wanted and in change that they have been able to assert. From an art history point of view, I love them because they're smart self-portraits. Artists aren't much interested in that old rubric anymore.

So am I nuts for saying that a Kodak Instamatic image from 1970 is Cathy Opie's real first self-portrait? Well, think of it this way: That 1992 self-portrait, titled Bo, is a picture of Cathy as her alter-ego. In Cathy's mind, Bo was an aluminum siding salesman from Sandusky, Ohio.

(Sorry for the Friday delay -- I managed to screw up publishing before getting on a plane this AM...)

This is Bonnard's Open Window, one of the most popular paintings at Washington's Phillips Collection. I've been visiting Washington since I was knee-high-to-a-lobbyist and I've lived here for about a decade. I've seen Open Window at least 100 times. It still makes me swoon.

It's a classic Bonnard: The color is rich and soaks up every candlewatt in the room. It has film-still-like action going on at the edge of the canvas -- in this case a woman feeding or greeting a cat. It has signs of domesticity and, in a reminder that Bonnard liked his little psychological games, a tamed animal. After all, outside, beyond the open window, nature lurks and looms over the interior scene, hinting at wildness.

Open Window was probably one of Richard Diebenkorn's two favorite Phillips paintings too. His Girl with Plant (1960)is a clear homage to the Phillips Bonnard.

Today the Smithsonian announced that chief curator Kerry Brougher has been the Hirshhorn's acting director since Dec. 22. Olga Viso, the former Hirsh director who is on her way to run the Walker, finished at the museum on Dec. 21. (In a related story, today is, uh, Dec. 27.)

Continuing my list of ten favorite paintings... This is Clyfford Still's 1957-D, No.1, the headliner of the Albright-Knox's Still collection.

My favorite experience with the painting came a number of years ago: As I walked out of a series of narrow galleries into the Albright's cavernous main hall, I sat on a bench near Still's 1957-D, No. 1. I stared. It was as if I was seeing a Still for the first time.

Three high school kids came noisily skipping through. This kind of thing annoys me and I prepared to shoot them a stern look. But when they entered the hall in which Still's painting was hung, the kids stopped. They had all seen the painting at the same time, and fell quiet.

Finally, one spoke: "Let's go sit in front of it."

"Yeah, I bet we can feel it," came the reply.

And like monks approaching an apse, they walked toward the painting. When they were six feet from it, in unison, they sat on the floor. For several minutes none of them said a word. As the kids were being baptized, I was being converted. In a few minutes of careful study, I saw things I'd missed in years of looking at Mr. Still's paintings.

The painting felt like this: When I was in college, two friends and I drove to the Grand Canyon. We found a lonely place on the South Rim, away from the crowds, and looked at this massive gash in the earth. Feeling a little bolder, we moved to a rock that jutted out into the canyon. Under the rock, there was nothing for 1,000 feet. A little beyond that there was nothing for 5,000 feet. As my eyes moved down into the canyon, my stomach moved up into my throat. When you look at a Clyfford Still painting, you feel like you are on the precipice of irrelevance.

A couple of months ago, fired up by Dave Hickey's declaration of ten favorite paintings in The Believer magazine, I resolved to post my own ten favorite paintings. In keeping with the more-or-less focus of this blog, they'll all be from about 1880 forward. Here goes...

This is Alma Thomas' 1972 painting Evening Glow. It's in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it's been on near-constant view for the last 10 years. (I think it's a little lighter than this JPEG, but so it goes.) The BMA is full of paintings that rank among my very favorites -- all those Matisses! -- but ever since I briefly lived in Baltimore this is the painting that I've most looked forward to seeing there.

Everywhere I've seen Thomas on view in the last few years I've thought her work has held up well. About a year ago the Hirshhorn installed a gallery of Thomas and Agnes Martin. If I had a list of 'best permanent collection installations of 2006,' it would have been at the top of the list. Works by both artists -- and the Hirsh has superb Thomas and superb Martin -- stared each other down, holding their ground.

Welcome back from the holiday weekend.

One little newsy bit to get us started: LACMA confirmed to MAN that the Sonnabend Gallery Collection is loaning the museum four paintings for the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA. One of them, Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon (1959) had been on loan to the National Gallery of Art for the better part of the last decade. It's been replaced by an Elizabeth Murray. (Advantage: LACMA.)

The others are: Rauschenberg's Interior (1956), Hymnal (1959), Magician (1959) and John Baldessari's Everything is Purged... (1967-68).

Bit by bit, news about the first BCAM installation is trickling out: MAN already told you that LACMA's big, new Andrea Zittel will be on view.

Because I'm taking a long Xmas weekend and because there ain't much at the top of the site, here are some recent faves:

No posts today or Monday. On Tuesday -- that's Xmas -- we'll wrap up our DonorsChoose campaign and thank donors. Normal posting resumes Wednesday...

Admin note: I looked at the stats at lunch today and realized Xmas has begun. Matisse-in-Baltimore discussion resumes in 2008.

MAN readers have now funded six of six challenges and have donated $1,200. Number Seven comes from Baltimore: A high school that needs funds for art supplies for sculpture and print-making. They need $354 $178 $153 to help 80 students. This could be our last challenge, so this might be your last chance. Let's close out strong! Check it out here.

Too much public art is decoration. (Kind of like this hot mess.) Here in Washington, public art is a synonym for "dead white guy on a horse." Few organizations have figured out public art as well as NYC-based Creative Time.

Earlier this year the Princeton Architectural Press published Creative Time: The Book chronicling CT's projects. For anyone interested in what public art can be -- and we're not talking about painted styrofoam elephants here -- this one is a must-read.

Related: Creative Time's blog.

In the last week or so collector and Caravaggio historian extraordinaire Dennis Mahon (who is 97!) has been back in the headlines: He's discovered another 'lost' Caravaggio, a painting from around 1595 that is similar to The Cardsharps in the Kimbell's collection. Here's a Telegraph story on the discovery, here's Andrew Marton in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram finding a wee bit of Kimbell skepticism. The 'new' Caravaggio is now on view in Trapani, Sicily.

I've had a particularly Caravaggio-ish year. I saw the glorious and remarkable Nelson-Atkins Caravaggio -- probably the best one in the US -- for the first time in years. I read Peter Robb's biography: M.

So I have Caravaggio on the brain. The book I'm featuring today didn't come out this year (, but because of the recent discovery and because of Mahon's role in it, I wanted to plug a book about a Caravaggio discovery that features Mahon: Jonathan Harr's The Lost Painting. It's part history, part detective story, part chase -- and all fun.

MAN readers have given just under $1,000, have funded four challenges, and have helped around 200 students have art as a part of their education. Today: Two challenges that are within quick-strike range of being fully funded: An elementary school teacher in Tulsa, Okla. needs $100 $80 $0! (thanks!) to be able to launch a project that enables students (95 percent of whom qualify for the free federal lunch program) to use an art program to explore hidden emotional truths. (Read the Tulsa proposal and give here.)

And in the Bronx, a sixth-grade teacher has started a project by which the students create 'artist trading cards' and share their work with each other. It needs $98 $68 to happen. (Read the Bronx proposal and give here.)

I've always wondered: In the late 1890s Matisse began the experiments in painting that eventually came to full fruition in the Fauve summer of 1905. These early canvases were jarring, full of colors that didn't belong together. In one 1899 still-life Matisse painted a red plate on a blue table, the knife behind it so perspectivally-challenged that it looks like the plate has a handle. Another 1899 still-life shows Matisse clearly borrowing from Cezanne, but using more pure, bold color.

The explorations continued into 1900, when Matisse painted (or at least started) this small still-life, and Male Model a painting in which Matisse treats oil as if it was modeling clay. These were revolutionary, academics-challenging paintings: Their surfaces were mottled, their colors jarring, their brushstrokes stabbing.

So when Matisse turned to sculpture somewhere around 1899-1900, why did he embrace the traditional academicism he'd by now shrugged out of his painting? This is one of the most interesting questions about Matisse's pre-Fauve work and Matisse: Painter as Sculptor (on view now at the Baltimore Museum of Art) doesn't address it. I complained yesterday that I didn't really know what this show was about, but it seems to me that here's a clear place where the curators could have addressed a notable gap between the progress of Matisse the painter and Matisse the sculptor. This kind of examination would have been appropriate no matter what the thrust of the show actually was.

In Baltimore, the exhibition opens with The Serf, a sculpture that Matisse began in 1900, and its closely-related painting, Male Model, also from 1900. Only then does the installation skip back to Matisse's first sculpture, Jaguar Devouring a Hare (copy after Barye), which Matisse started in 1899. Jaguar is a deeply conservative work, a near identical copy of Barye's then-famous attack scene (pictured here). It's striking how quickly Matisse moved from the academic me-too-ism of Jaguar, to The Serf. Except that's not how Baltimore installed it.

Perhaps it's not surprising that Matisse started making sculpture so conservatively -- his first paintings from the mid-1890s are full of mild Bohain browns. He started sculpture the same way he started painting: Carefully, timidly. But I'm still struck by how avant garde Matisse's painting was at the time he was copying Barye. It would have been easy for Baltimore to have shown us this dichotomy: The museum's collection includes two superb early Matisses: the shocking pre-Fauve Convalescent Woman from 1899, and a painting closely related to the 1899 Cezanne-esque still-life I mentioned earlier, Still Life, Compote, Apples, and Oranges.

I don't read much fiction -- simply no time. But I cleared my desk for Don DeLillo's Falling Man, a book about how a performance artist responds to 9/11, and how both the attacks and the art impact people around him.

I also enjoyed how DeLillo brought art history into the book as a point of emotional reference. When DeLillo writes about Morandi and the calm in his work, I immediately thought about Morandi's somewhat monastic life and how different that was from New York, 2001. Is Falling Man all about art? No. But it is about how art is part of what helps us be human.

True, this is not a book about art. But if you're interested in Robert Smithson, and if his fascination with entropy, with art that exists in geologic time, and in evidence of man's presence that exists in nature far into the future, you'll be fascinated by Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.

The concept of the book is simple: What would happen in various places around the earth (NYC, the Panama Canal, the Korean DMZ) if we vanished from the earth tomorrow. While Smithson isn't mentioned in the book (!), you'll think of him and of his work throughout. It's one of the most entertaining books I've read all year. (The author's page is here.)

First: We're only $66 from funding Challenge No. 3. Please finish it off here. Challenge No. 4 is simple: Kids in a Rocky Mount, NC art class want canvases on which to paint. They need $189 more to be able to do it. Help 'em out!

I love tight, focused shows that dig deeply into a particular aspect of an artist's oeuvre. Unfortunately, Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, at the Baltimore Museum of Art, is not that kind of show. Instead it's bloated, overarching, and often forces connections between Matisse's paintings and sculptures where none exist. If the exhibition had been a third the size, and if it had focused on four or five groupings of work, or if it had focused on how Matisse used sculpture in his painting, this would have been a much smarter, better exhibition. Instead it's a textbook example of what happens when too many curators (six) group-think.

What a missed opportunity. If the entire show had been done from works in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, which has one of the world's half-dozen best Matisse collections, it might have been the show of the year. The real revelation of this exhibit is just how deep and remarkable the Baltimore Matisse collection is.

Ultimately it wasn't clear to me exactly what this show was intended to be. First, it is not a show about how and why Matisse incorporated his sculpture into his paintings. (That would have been fascinating, but would have required difficult loans from Russia and impossible loans from the Barnes.)

Is it a sculpture retrospective with some paintings as supporting evidence? Is it an exhibition intended to demonstrate how Matisse's sculpture influenced his paintings? Or vice versa? And when the show opens with Matisse's quote about how sculpture will always be secondary to his painting, should we consider the leitmotif of the show to prove that out? Because it does... but that seems like a thin thread on which to put a lot of bronze. Matisse: Painter as Sculptor essentially seems like an excuse for some big museums to aggregate a lot of Matisses.

For the rest of the week I'll discuss aspects of Matisse: Painter as Sculptor: Some things I liked, and some things I didn't.

Related: The catalogue, however, is superb. And Time's Richard Lacayo said this was his second-favorite show of the year.

MAN readers have fully funded two challenges -- and you're only $66 away from fully funding No. 3. Let's start the last week before Christmas with a clean slate... (See background here.)

By now you've probably seen MAN's exclusive coverage of the National Gallery of Art's expansion plan. (Here's the post that broke the story, here's Rep. John Mica discussing the plan and the NGA confirming its involvement and its intent to raise $100M+, and here's an update on where a key Democrat stands on the bill.) Some things to keep in mind as we track the story going forward (I'd be stunned if a few newspapers didn't finally catch up tomorrow...):

Rep. Jim Oberstar's (D-Minn.) office tells MAN that it is looking into the NGA expansion proposal being pushed by Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), but that Oberstar has yet to take a position on it. Oberstar chairs the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (Mica is the ranking Republican), and his support is critical to the plan's future.

UPDATE: That was fast! $198 in about an hour. Challenge No. 3 is up here, please keep giving! Thanks to yesterday's eight donors. You fully funded Challenge No. 2 for a school in Chicago. We've got only $198 left to fully-fund Challenge No. 1. Click here to read MAN's initial post on it, and click here to give.

For first time, National Gallery of Art confirms participation in Apex Building expansion; says it will raise over $100 million.

MANscoop: In an exclusive interview, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) told MAN he would undertake a "blockbuster" effort in 2008 to enable the National Gallery of Art to expand into the Federal Trade Commission headquarters. Mica is the ranking minority member on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He said that the National Gallery of Art had told him it is committed to spending in excess of $100 million to renovate and move into the FTC's Apex Building. As a result, the NGA could add much-needed space by expanding into a so-called North Wing at no cost to the federal government.

(The Apex Building is at the top of the image above. For MAN's initial scoop on the NGA's planned move and for more on the building, click here.)

For the first time, a National Gallery spokesperson confirmed the NGA's cooperation in the plan to expand into the Apex Building. "We're committed to raising at least $100 million," NGA spokesperson Deborah Ziska said. She added that the Gallery's internal planning has determined that the NGA needs an additional 150,000 square feet of space. In part because of the uncertainties involved in renovating an older building, it is not clear how much space the Apex Building would provide.

"If we act now, we can move the project forward," Mica told MAN. "I'm very committed to this. To get blockbuster-level support next year is my top priority."

Mica said that the deal was important for the FTC, too: Right now the FTC has 450 employees in the Apex Building, and others in at least 200,000 square feet of rented office space around Washington. The FTC's leases expire in 2012, and if Congress acts in 2008, all of the FTC's offices could be moved into a single building in a timely fashion. Mica said that Washington, DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has agreed to the plan, provided that the FTC jobs stayed in the District of Columbia. (At publication time, Norton's office had not returned a phone call.)

"This way we could meet this future space requirements for the FTC and the future space requirements for the NGA," Mica said. "We'd end up with a cultural triangle and millions of people would have access to the building instead of just a handful of FTC employees that are split from their other locations."

The National Gallery of Art currently rents 60,000 square feet of office space at 601 Pennsylvania Ave. The NGA's leases expire in the same year as the FTC leases: 2012.

Mica said that he'd already started a "full-court press" to line up key legislators behind the proposal, including a meeting with Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) just before he spoke with MAN on Thursday. Brownback is the ranking minority member on the Senate appropriations subcommittee for financial services and general government. Mica listed several other Republicans he had talked with, including Rep. Ralph Regula, Brownback's appropriations subcommittee counterpart in the House. Mica said that the only Democrat whose support he'd secured to date was Del. Norton's. Democrats control both the House and the Senate.

Mica said that he became interested in moving the FTC 5-7 years ago. "I saw its rough condition," he said. "Then I learned that [the FTC] had a split operation. I went to both the National Archives and to the National Gallery to see who would have the best use for [the Apex Building]. It just seems to make sense that those two would be logical participants for that space. The Archives just underwent a huge restoration, and they weren't as interested in such a huge thing. The National Gallery needed more space and had not had a chance to do some of the things that the Archives did.

"There are so many things that could be done with the project. I've used the library at the National Gallery and it's totally confined. They could use a dramatically expanded space. The nation's National Gallery of Art should have a premier library. Some of the top floors in the FTC would be great for something like that. There are a lot of other spaces in the NGA that are crammed, for research and administrative purposes, but would be suitable space to free up in both the East and West Buildings, especially on the bottom floor and in the central atrium [of the East Building] that would lend itself to incredible additional exhibition space. We need to plan for more.

"Washington should not only be the center of politics and government, but the center of our nation's culture. And when you have public asset like [the Apex Building] that is not properly utilized, and an opportunity for a great common sense project that would benefit generations, well then, let's do it."

UPDATE, Friday 10am EDT, and only on MAN: A key House Democrat has yet to take a position on the Mica/NGA expansion plan.

UPDATE, Friday, 3pm: Analysis of the plan, ramifications.

Glad to see donations coming in today! Thanks to all of you. To see Challenge No. 2 click here. Or go directly to MAN's challenge page on DonorsChoose here.

There is nothing new about video artists working within a documentary or faux-documentary tradition. Some of the earliest video art pieces are essentially mere video presentations of what we'd now call performance art. Others, such as the collective Ant Farm, have used documentary footage as the jumping off part for video art that is part mockumentary, part performance, and/or part social commentary. (Ant Farm's 1975 The Eternal Frame is a fine example.) In Miami last week, World Class Boxing showed Aeronaut Mik, a Dutch artist who employs similar strategies.

Which brings me to the Spanish collective Democracia, which exhibited its most recent installation, Welfare State at Tomorrow in Seoul. (The work was also recently exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial. For more on Tomorrow, see below.) Welfare State is a four-channel video installation that chronicles the bulldozed destruction of a shanty town. In addition to showing people evicted from their shacks, it shows a group of onlookers watching the heavy machinery move in and tear down people's homes. The 'fans' appear to be gleeful: They cheer, they sit on the edge of their seats, they raise stadium-style beer cups, and they seem to discuss the ongoing razing with delight.

The obvious question is: Is the scene real, or is it entirely constructed by Democracia? On its website, Democracia describes Welfare State as a "staging," but leaves alone the question of whether part of the spectacle was staged or if the whole thing was. (There's a pretty clear hint below, and another in the jump...) No matter, the ambiguity isn't the most interesting part of the piece, the 'fans' are.

The first thing I noticed about Welfare State is the way it is installed: The screens face wooden benches on which viewers are meant to sit. Viewer seating echoes the way the 'fans' in the video watch the destruction from similar bleacher-style seating. The razing of the shantytown feels like a spectator sport that takes place between the 'fans,' who do nothing but have a good time, and us, who can do nothing but watch. The violence that they applaud from the stands is reminiscent of a bullfight, or, in American parlance, a football game.

The fans split video-time with the destruction itself, which is sudden, brutal, and incredibly loud. The message of the destruction scenes is all-too-clear: Mechanization equals progress, industrial might equals power, those with the ability to destroy the less fortunate or those who live on the margins of society may -- and will -- do so, the little guy gets screwed. As political theater it is extraordinarily direct, almost too much so.

That leaves the 'fans' to make the piece, to make the spectacle more than just a brutish socio-political cliche. They make "Welfare State" into theater, and they remind us that we're a part of the video -- even if we're not sitting in the front row of the actual video, wearing a 'Welfare State' t-shirt. I found myself occasionally bored with the shots of destruction -- we've all seen buildings get torn down. But every time the 'fans' were onscreen, I couldn't look away.

Related: Introducing Tomorrow. Inhwan Oh. Xu Zhen.

Time's Richard Lacayo had this news yesterday afternoon: MoMA chief curator John Elderfield is retiring.

My first post on this generated one donor. (For more on DonorsChoose.org and on these posts, please click here.) I'm pretty sure that MAN readers can do better... For about $300 in donations, we can fund this entire project. Please go to this page to see both challenges.

Challenge No. 2:

I am the art teacher at [Chicago's] Lowell Elementary. It is my 5th year of teaching. It is a school in a high poverty neighborhood with a lot of gang activity. Many children struggle with self-esteem issues. They are exposed to very little art beyond my room. Our school really supports the arts, but unfortunately is limited in budget.

I have access to all kinds of wood scraps since my husband is a carpenter. I have found students love working with wood. It is something they would normally never get to do. They get very excited to sand the wood and pick out shapes. My 3rd grade students will make an abstract face sculpture using wood and then paint it. Students will study and discuss abstract art. They will learn how to create a relief using wood and try different painting techniques. They will also learn about scale and proportion.

I would not be able to do this project without additional outside funding. I have all the wood and sandpaper; I just need brushes, a few more colors, and craft glue. Students will learn about relief, abstract art, working with wood, mixing paint and using paintbrushes. It will allow for creativity...

When I walked into Art Basel Miami Beach on Wednesday at 12:01 pm, my first stop was The Project. They were offering a Julie Mehretu painting, the unexceptionalness of which led me to lean in toward the label to see if it was brand new. It was. In fact, it was so new it was dated "2008." Apparently galleries are so eager to get work from their artists for a big fair that they'll show next year's work this year. (A Projectian quickly corrected the label with a Sharpie.)

I don't have any big overview-type thoughts this year. After six iterations of the Big Shindig there's really not too much new to say, unless you care about the market. (And I don't.) Over the next few days I'll post some work that caught my eye. I'll start with artists who have never been mentioned on MAN before moving on to artists we know. I'm not posting these in any particular order -- JPEG availability trumps all else.

Don Voisine at McKenzie Fine Art (NYC): Between my recent posts on 1950 at MoMA, and the Birth of The Cool show at the Orange County Museum of Art, I have hard-edge painting on the brain. Apparently Voisine is thinking about hard-edge too, because his oil-on-board abstractions are elegant updates of classic, pre-minimalist, hard-edge painting. Each of Voisine's paintings mixed soft, almost gentle color (mauve instead of red, orange or purple, a faded bluish teal instead of blue, and so on) with inky blacks and right angles. Those inky blacks were rarely uniformly black on any one canvas. Sometimes they were shiny, sometimes matte, sometimes textured. Parts of his paintings sucked up light, parts of them threw it back at you. And like the best hard-edge paintings they grabbed my eye, threw it around the painted surface, and kept me looking far longer than their seeming simplicity would seemingly require.

Lilly McElroy at Robertello (Chicago): McElroy is already an internet phenomenon. A video of her performance The Square made the round of the internets earlier this summer, complete with plugs on Rocketboom and NPR.org. (McElroy's website makes it near-impossible to find. But if you click on 'performative videos' at the bottom of the page, and then on 'The Square,' you'll find it. Good luck.)

In The Square McElroy marks off an area of a busy sidewalk with a chalked white square. Then she stands inside it Marcel Marceaux-style, effectively creating personal space amidst the mayhem of the concrete trail. She's essentially daring anyone to invade the 'personal space' that she's created in the middle of a busy area. And, remarkably, no one does. McElroy's performance is a clever metaphor for the seeming difficulty of finding a place of one's own -- spiritually and physically -- in an ever more-dense world. And it's funny as heck -- something you almost never, ever, never see in performance art.

The latest examples of museums not being "endangered:" LACMA scores a massive gift of high modern art, including 20 Picassos, Brancusi, Giacometti, and more. (Warning: LAT.com, in its apparently never-ending mission to be as reader-repelling as possible, has the world's most annoying Flash-based ads that prevent you from seeing the story for five seconds. And I hate it when writers, in talking about art gifts to museums, attempt to assess their financial worth. It. Doesn't. Matter. The value of the gift is not monetary, it's cultural.)

Furthermore, you'd think the LAT op-ed page might want to revisit that 'museum collections are endangered' bit, wouldn't you? And the writer of that infamous op-ed is long overdue for a mea culpa.

MANscoop: The Art Institute of Chicago has determined that a Paul Gauguin sculpture in the museum's collection, The Faun (c. 1888), is a fake. Sources tell MAN that director Jim Cuno told his staff today. The sculpture is now attributed to the recently sentenced Greenhalgh forgery gang of Bolton, England. The Faun was in the AIC's "Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South" show.

The museum purchased the sculpture from a private dealer who had acquired it at auction from Sotheby's. Documentation now believed to be counterfeit was then accepted by all parties. Cuno told AIC staff that the museum and Sotheby's are discussing compensation.

MANscoop: The National Gallery of Art wants to expand. MAN has learned that the NGA has engaged in talks to acquire the Federal Trade Commission building, which is located directly across Constitution Avenue from the NGA's John Russell Pope-designed West Building. (In the Google Satellite image above, the FTC building is in the upper-left, the Pope building is across from it, and the East Building is at right.) Best-known as the 'Apex Building,' the FTC headquarters was designed by Chicago-based architect Edward H. Bennett, who oversaw the entire Federal Triangle project. The six-story Apex Building opened in 1938, three years before the NGA's Pope building.

Multiple sources tell MAN that the deal is not yet complete and it is possible that the transfer of the building from the federal government to the NGA may eventually fall through. However, each of the sources with whom I spoke were confident that the NGA would complete the transaction. Internal NGA planning has estimated that the museum could open galleries in the building as soon as 2012.

A separate source pointed MAN to HR 31, a bill that Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.) introduced in 2005, when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. The bill calls for the FTC to "vacate" its building and for it to be made "available" to the National Gallery of Art. Congress took no action on the bill, and it has not been re-introduced in the current Congress.

A National Gallery spokesperson said that the NGA had no comment.

An NGA expansion is long overdue. The National Gallery is one of the few major American museums to miss out on the expansion boom of the last dozen years. (The NGA last opened substantial new spaces in 1978, when the IM Pei-designed East Building opened.) Partially as a result of a lack of appropriate space, the NGA lags behind its peer institutions -- both in the US and abroad -- in showing contemporary art. Compared to other major museums, the NGA shows little art of the last 100 years. Its photography department, which acquired its own galleries several years ago has been hampered by galleries too small to accommodate contemporary photography. A number of NGA collections, including 19th and 20th-century central European art, are rarely on view for lack of space.

The Federal Trade Commission headquarters was the last building to be constructed in the Federal Triangle, the enormous Depression-era building project that sits roughly between the White House and the Capitol. The Apex Building, which looks like a dull, under-adorned Beaux Arts box from one end, is likely best-known for its rounded Ionic colonnade, which points toward the Capitol. As with other Federal Triangle buildings, the Apex Building is clad in limestone and sits on a granite base. The 'point' of the Federal Triangle is completed by the Mellon Fountain.

According to the FTC's history of the building, in 1987 the Apex Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a component of the Pennsylvania Avenue Historic District. (This is the view from the FTC roof across the street to the NGA's buildings and to the Capitol beyond.) A Historic Structure Report from that same year determined that the Apex Building "has an integrity of historical occupation, having been designed [for] and continuously occupied [by] that agency. Further, the few and relatively minor physical changes that have occurred since its completion in 1938 have left the architect's historic design intent largely intact. On the whole, the building enjoys a level of integrity seldom matched in Federal buildings."

While Bennett stripped his building of many of its planned architectural details because of federal budget problems caused by the Depression, it has extensive exterior art. The best-known work is Michael Lantz's sculptures Man Controlling Trade. (While the sculptures are Washington faves, Michael Lantz is less well-known than his brother Walter, who created Woody Woodpecker.) The building also features work decorative panels by Carl Schmitz, Chaim Gross, Robert Laurent, and Concetta Scaravaglione.

The NGA expansion would further concentrate Washington museumdom around the National Mall. The Newseum, located across Pennsylvania Ave. from the NGA's West Building, is under construction and is due to open in 2008.

Be sure to check back this afternoon... but until then:

Only on MAN: Earlier today, Dia director Jeffrey Weiss talked to MAN about the sale of Dia's Chelsea exhibition space, how the money will be used, and more.

Oodles of research reveals just how important arts education is when it comes to developing young minds. According to Americans for the Arts, young people who participate in the arts are many times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement, to be elected to class office within their schools, and are more likely to participate in a math and science fair. Before I was born my mother was an art educator, so I'm particularly disappointed in how a lack of prioritization, the so-called No Child Left Behind law and other factors have driven the arts out of public schools.

A few weeks ago I learned about a micro-philanthropy website called DonorsChoose.org. The concept is simple: When school teachers have programs they want to implement that go beyond what their (typically disadvantaged) schools will support, they post 'proposals' to the DonorsChoose.org website and ask microphilanthropists for a few hundred dollars in direct project support. (Here's more on how it works.) So far the site has raised almost $16 million for projects that have served 800,000 kids.

Every day between now and Christmas I'll be posting on arts-related project from DonorsChoose. Most of them will require less than $500 to fully fund. DonorsChoose accepts microphilanthropic gifts of $10 and up. I hope MAN readers support worthy projects either as individuals or as a group. I'll list donors on Christmas Day. If you put a little group together, say the 'Springfield Art Museum curatorial department,' email me so that I know to list you as such. I've started a web page where you can see a list of proposals and where you can track our progress.

Today's project comes from Washington Elementary School in Fort Wayne, Ind. It needs $442 worth of donations to be fully funded:

I am a first year art teacher of students in grades K-5 at a Title I school.

These kids love art and they love to read. I go to the public library to check out art related books for them to read at the end of art class. Many students plead to take the books home but I cannot allow that. They also ask if I can copy pages from the "How to Draw" books. Due to copyright laws, I can't do that either.

By getting my proposal funded, I will be able to create an Art Library from which students can check out books to take home for short periods of time. By taking the art books from my library they will still be able to take 2 books a week, on other topics, from the regular school library. I hope to add to my Art Library with future proposals on other art topics. Also, many of our low income students come from families who do not have transportation to get them to a public library.

The drawing books would be used all year long in class and at home. At the start of each school year the basic concepts of lines and shapes are taught. Students are then expected to draw familiar objects using many different types of lines. They are most eager to draw things familiar to them, such as animals, super heroes, and cartoon characters. Having many books with these kinds of drawings will give students the chance to succeed and feel good about drawing. Most young kids do not think they are very good at drawing. By taking the drawing books home they will increase the amount of time applying their newly learned skills. I am also expecting to have more student art chosen for display at our local children's art show.

Your help will make it possible for my students to expand their observation and drawing skills and give them access to resources that more affluent students take for granted. Seeing the expressions on the faces of students when they produce a drawing that they thought was too hard is priceless, and the increase of their self-esteem is unmeasurable. Thank You in advance!!!

My project needs nearly 50 book titles to encourage art students to look for patterns and details in the everyday objects they like to draw.

To give to this project, please click here.

While in Miami last week I told you that Dia had sold its Chelsea exhibition space for $38.55 million. This afternoon I spoke with Dia Art Foundation director Jeffrey Weiss about the sale. (And because the NYT has apparently decided that a story isn't a story once it's on MAN, here's your only chance to hear about it.)

Weiss emphasized that the sale does not mean Dia is about to re-open anywhere in New York and that it does not mean that Dia has 'finalist' sites that it is considering as a permanent home. "The two things, funnily enough, are unrelated," he told me. "The sale is something we needed to do because we knew we were going to move. On the other hand the move itself is still unfolding... This money will be for the most part be invested, and from the investment we will draw money for largely for operating budget and related things."

Weiss said that the sale is also unrelated to a $1.1 million fundraising effort that would enable Dia to purchase a permanent conservation easement on 6,000 acres of ranchland adjacent to The Lightning Field, the Walter de Maria installation outside Quemado, New Mexico. The state of New Mexico has kicked in $500,000 and Dia is working to raise the remaining money by May, 2008.

"It's a separate thing," Weiss said. "We've got plenty of needs. The Lightning Field effort is very specific and the places we're looking for help are relevant to that project in a way that they wouldn't be for other things. [For example, last month Dia sent out a fundraising letter to anyone who has spent a night at the Field. -- Ed.] It still feels right to us to be fundraising for that separately and to not fall back on existing resources."

Along those lines, none of the money will be used to support Michael Heizer's City or James Turrell's Roden Crater. "We are currently not supporting City or Roden per se," Weiss said. "We're lending administrative support for now. When we can, hopefully that will change in the future."

Finally, I asked Weiss what would happen to the Jorge Pardo installation that has been in Dia's lobby since it was installed for a 2003 show. "The Pardo was always a temporary installation and actually has been maintained in the building longer than originally planned," Weiss said. "Jorge knows that the building was for sale and he knows that we sold it, but the installation was never intended for preservation. It was always understood to be temporary. So now the new owner could choose to preserve it if they like, but it doesn't belong to us anymore."

(I still think the Pardo would look great at LACMA, but that's another story entirely...)

Before leaving for Miami I started a series of posts on Martin Puryear, focusing on how the unifying theme of Puryear's art is his use of abstract sculpture to explore the centuries-long, mostly painterly and representational art historical march from flatness to depth and back again. This is the final post in that series. (Links to previous posts are below.)

The 'well-that-was-a-good-idea' moment in MoMA's Martin Puryear retrospective comes when you enter the museum's second-floor atrium, where curator John Elderfield has installed a mini-survey of Puryears about perspective. There's MAMFW's breathtaking Ladder for Booker T. Washington, MoMA's own Greed's Trophy, and the brand-new Ad Astra (at left).

As I noted here a couple weeks ago, Ad Astra is plainly an updating of Puryear's first two-in-one persepctive piece, 1977's Box and Pole (at right). Both works feature a trope that Puryear has used time and time again in the intervening 30 years: Pairing two objects -- a flat object (often a cube) and an object that runs away from the viewer into space.

In 1979, Puryear created an outdoor piece called Equivalents, a work which has since been destroyed. (There is a photo of it in MoMA's Puryear catalogue, but I couldn't find a JPEG.) The piece was as simple as Box and Pole (and demonstrates how far Puryear's practice has run away from minimalism in recent decades): It consisted of a wooden square, and a wooden cone, installed next to each other. The tip of the cone was as tall as the cube. The cube confronted the viewer with flattened space, the cone showed how perspectival space runs away.

Two of my very favorite Puryears are not in the MoMA show, which is too bad. 1979's Her and She (at left, from the collection of the California African American Museum) are among Puryear's most clever, subtle examinations of perspective and the lack thereof. Often installed perpendicular to each other, Her and She go beyond the simplicity of Puryear's cube-and-vanishing-point works to more subtly explore how other shapes can be flat, nearly flat, and how they can also recede from the viewer. To the best of my knowledge, after 1979 Puryear gave up the simple cube-based installations for more subtle explorations of flatness and receding space, as evident in his 1993-94 structure at California's Oliver Ranch. (Ad Astra comes close, as Puryear discussed with David Levi Strauss in the Brooklyn Rail.)

Related: MoMA's Puryear website offers up a groovy video of the installation of the atrium, but the site is Flash-based so I can't give you a more direct link.

Previously: Puryear at MoMA, considering perspective; Puryear and Augustus Vincent Tack. Puryear and Ellsworth Kelly. Puryear and the Getty's That Profile, Photoshopping art history: Puryear and (possibly) Uccello.

Thanks to The Stranger's Jen Graves for hosting MAN while I was away. Don't expect a macro-Miami post today... I dimply don't have any macro thoughts about Miami VI. Posts about art I saw start tomorrow. Also: Check back this afternoon for a new, two-week, MAN holiday series.

Sorry I'm so late, but it's been far from dead around here with Tyler's great post about the Dia Art Foundation's sale of its Chelsea building to chew on.

It's deadline day at my real job, and in next week's Stranger I'll take a look at the major differences between SANAA's New Museum building and the firm's other designs, thanks to a SANAA exhibition that opened in Seattle the same day as the museum opened in New York.

This installation shot from the exhibition shows, lined up in the foreground, a grid of dozens of draft models for the ways the rooms could have been configured inside the one-story, glass-enclosed circle of SANAA's 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Towering in the background are, of course, the boxes of the New Museum. The installation says it all about the differences of the two buildings, not in scale--the scale of the models is not comparable--but in terms of the relative priority of the interior spaces (21st Century Museum: high, New Museum: low).

I learned something else about the New Museum, too, looking at the Seattle SANAA exhibition (that's a SANAA-designed "tree" and a flower table at left). Since what I've written isn't out yet (next Wednesday on www.thestranger.com/visualart, if you're interested), I won't cannibalize it too much. But here's a trailer:

Maybe it's a fundamental mismatch of sorts. Self-consciousness and anxiety--the stock in trade of the super-sophisticated downtown museum, and something you feel throughout the galleries--is not a SANAA trait.

With that, I'm signing off. I wish I'd written about Richard Prince, and why I don't like him. And about why I thought Martin Puryear's show at MoMA made him look weak. And about what I did love in Unmonumental at the New Museum (Nate Lowman's Not Sorry, for one--the triptych of bullet-ridden teller's windows sitting upright on the floor in the image at right). With any luck, I'll get into some of those lengthier subjects on my home blog, Slog Visual Art, soon, if you want to visit me there.)

As to the question of whether I should have gone to Miami after all, I'm still torn when I read urgent reports like this, in today's Art Newspaper:

Art Supernova was brought to a hushed halt by a bizarre series of alarming shrieks moving mysteriously from booth-to-booth like some dangerous dadaist performance. Just as security was about to be summoned, the source of this scandal was revealed to be top Paris dealer Anne de Villepoix whose mysterious involuntary sneezing has made her the subject of much medical research, the velocity of her allergic outbursts being measured at 1,600 km per second.

What was I thinking?

--Jen Graves
jgraves@thestranger.com

UPDATE, Dec. 10: Dia director Jeffrey Weiss on the sale, more.

Breaking while I'm in Miami: According to NYC real estate transaction records, the Dia Art Foundation has sold its Chelsea exhibition space for $38.55 million. At this point the buyer is only known as "548 West 22 Street Realty LLC." The sale closed on November 29. Despite repeated requests Thursday, a Dia spokesperson refused comment (and initially referred MAN to an administrator who is on vacation until Monday).

We may be witnessing an interesting moment in the NYC cultural/real estate/commercial galleries world: Dia started Chelsea. Dia leaves Chelsea. The NuMu opens in the Bowery... and commercial galleries are following.

UPDATE, Friday AM: Dia wouldn't talk yesterday so we don't know the answer to this question (and lots of others): What will happen to the Jorge Pardo installation? Other unanswered questions: Will all of the money go toward Dia's (presumably) next NYC space? Who is the buyer? Is this deal about finding a new space for Dia or do they need operating funds? Or will the money go toward a Dia project, such as Roden Crater?

In honor of Miami, some party reporting from Seattle.

The party was Tuesday night, the night of all the Miami previews, at Gary Hill's loft condo in Seattle. Magda, Gary's warm and beautiful X (wife? girlfriend? partner?), introduced me to Alex, a quiet, smiling man standing alone in a corner.

She had known Alex only for two hours. Gary and Magda had run out of gas on the highway around 4 pm, and Alex stopped to help them. "No Americans would stop," Magda said before skipping off to pour drinks. Magda is from Poland.

Alex, I learned, is from the Ukraine. He is a business student at a local community college. Before coming to the party, Alex looked up Gary's work online. He had never heard of Gary before. "I like, classic, like, art," Alex told me. All night Gary and Magda made sure Alex had someone to talk to. He was the surprise guest of honor.

Nobody was talking about Miami. If there was a sustained topic of conversation in the little circles of artists (sound sculptor Trimpin, video artist Tony Weathers), the occasional celebrity (that wizened and bearded man in the corner was Torben Ulrich, a former tennis pro, father of Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, a musician in his own right, and evidently a visual artist too), and a few members of the weekly meditation group that meets in the loft, it was not art but politics. Earlier in the day Bush had started making renewed and appalling noise about Iran. But when the party hit that familiar slide into despair, somebody would pull it back--there were the Democratic radio debates in Iowa that day to consider. Dennis Kucinich may not be getting more electable but he's still getting air time.

The planned guest of honor was George Quasha, the artist/poet/writer visiting Seattle in part to finish a 400-something page book about Gary that's almost complete. All of this was coinciding with a performance the next night in Seattle by Alison Knowles, the early Fluxus artist who happens to be an old friend of Quasha's, like Gary. Knowles wasn't at the party yet; she was expected for round two, to be held at a nearby restaurant.

When the party moved to the restaurant, I went home with a DVD of Quasha's latest project. It's a series of ongoing and constantly changing videos called "Art is," "Poetry is," "Music is," and, most recently, "Peace is." They're based on a simple concept: ask an artist what art is, for instance, and turn the camera on. Some of them perform, some ramble, some tell parables. "Basically, I'm a painter and I basically paint," Alex Katz says to kick things off. "A good part of what I do, I don't understand. Somehow the instincts tell you, you have ideas that get transported into paintings and, uh, you sort of do the best of your talent and instincts. And basically, other people tell you what you've done. It's relatively simple." After the last part, he laughs.

^{A still from Gary Hill's Church and State, 2005}

--Jen Graves
jgraves@thestranger.com

I'm from upstate. Albany. (Richard Prince, you may as well have produced those dim-witted, reverse-tourism images of upstate from a perch in NYC.)

Albany has no art. This is not quite a true statement, but it was true enough for a kid growing up there in the 1980s. The only cultural remnant I consciously carried with me from my childhood was the Egg, that unlikely marvel of concrete sculptural architecture that doubles as a performing arts center. (There, I witnessed Mummenschanz.) No museums, no galleries. No art.

Wrong. The art wasn't in a museum. It was underground.

It had gone underground in me, too. I made this discovery during a wintertime trip back home. I was in Albany only for a few hours, and I wanted to see the Egg. It was freezing out, so I went underneath the Empire State Plaza, that nearly 100-acre complex of civic architecture. I thought I'd stop into the state history museum for nostalgic reasons.

Here's what I found in the first gallery of the museum, devoted to New York City history: Photographs of skyscrapers, an early orange taxicab, and an orange Donald Judd stack.

I nearly fell over. Upstate New Yorkers who had no real art museum of their own had a Donald Judd just sitting there, a civic object, an anthropological thing, a part of their history, something that belonged to them. Specific objects indeed. I wish I had snapped a photograph of the scene.

A lone Judd? No. What I discovered below ground, on the concourse level connected to the museum, was the entire, 92-piece Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection.

I should say rediscovered.

Every work of art I came across on the underground concourse came back to me when I saw it. They're all memories I had simply forgotten to access for all that time. In art, you can go home again.

The collection, Rockefeller's pride and joy, is a gift--paintings, sculptures, and tapestries by artists including Motherwell, Kelly, Kline, Warhol, Guston, Gabo, Noguchi, Oldenburg, Calder, Mitchell, Pollock, Nevelson, Rothko, Segal, Smith, Noland, and Bontecou.

Here's Warhol's portrait of Rockefeller, hung in the lower-level lobby of the Corning Tower at the plaza, where there's an astonishing mini-exhibition of collection highlights. Here's the checklist of what's in the hallway behind the escalators on the right side, in order of appearance: Clyfford Still, 1964, 1964; Morris Louis, Aleph Series IV, 1960; Helen Frankenthaler, Capri, 1967; Joan Mitchell, La Seine, 1967; Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1967; Andy Warhol, Portrait of Nelson Rockefeller, 1967; Franz Kline, Charcoal Black and Tan, 1959; and Jackson Pollock, Number 12, 1952, 1952. Across the escalator bank: Philip Guston's great Smoker, 1963.

Another gift: The FREE 215-page full-color glossy catalogs available for the taking at the visitor's office on the concourse, complete with fold-out plates for the enormous works, like a 30-foot Noland from 1968, a 55-foot Alvin D. Loving Jr. from 1973, and a 90-foot Al Held from 1969-'70. According to the catalog, the Rockefeller collection is "the greatest collection of modern American art in any single public site that is not a museum." (Anyone care to take umbrage?)

Images of the works in the collection are ridiculously difficult to come by through official channels. (The curatorial office tells me it takes a month or more to get permission to publish any of them.) I wish I had a better image than this one of a work notably missing from the catalog: Pollock's garish and odd Number 12, 1952. The painting was damaged by a fire in the governor's mansion, and not restored until the late '90s. (Is it even restored? Its surface is quite marred still.) I also wish I had an image of Conrad Marca-Relli's black-and-white canvas collage of 1958, Black Rock.

This remarkable untitled construction from 1966 by Lee Bontecou--displayed at the Whitney Annual that year--is taken from Anaba, which had a nice post about the collection this spring. There are more cell-phone images there.

--Jen Graves
jgraves@thestranger.com

Those ungrateful... Check out Brett Sokol's look at Miami's take on Art Basel Miami Beach, in New York magazine.

--Jen Graves
jgraves@thestranger.com

Hey, I didn't say it, I'm just passing it on. I hereby nominate this slip-up for Best Art Typo of the Year.

--Jen Graves
jgraves@thestranger.com

UPDATE A DAY LATER: The typo has been fixed. The Internet can be so little fun sometimes.

It was the great expectations that got me.

I had such hopes for the New Museum. Seattle is in the midst of reshaping its contemporary museum landscape, and the New Museum is a model.

Seattle's dominant museum of new art, the Henry Art Gallery, is in search of a director and a fresh approach after a series of years spent wandering as though in search of something it doesn't quite have the energy to find.

Seattle Art Museum is about to launch a contemporary series in its new building and has an entirely new modern and contemporary curatorial staff.

The jewel-box Frye Art Museum, once a bastion of conservative anti-abstraction, has been reinvented in the last few years by Robin Held, formerly of the Henry, in a move not unlike Marcia Tucker's famous act of founding the New Museum.

For now, the Frye is what keeps the juice in the system of Seattle. By being genuinely, not just rhetorically, dynamic, the Frye has demonstrated how to be a hotbed of ideas tied equally to a specific history and to the spirit of experimentation.

But another, major source of juice ought to be Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park. Imagined by Lisa Corrin, this thing was not supposed to be a fixed 19th-century garden. She hated the idea of calling it a "sculpture park." There are no figurative bronzes. There is a living vivarium by Mark Dion. There is no admission charge and there are no walls separating it from the city--unless you consider the large, panicky "OUCH" don't-touch signs as tiny little walls in themselves, which they most ridiculously are.

No, the Olympic Sculpture Park was supposed to be a dynamic place in constant conversation with its surroundings, and maybe it still will become one. (The museum has no current plans to add to or alter the outdoor sculpture lineup that went up last January. At the very least, it ought to consider moving the most poorly installed sculptures, including Mark Di Suvero's Bunyon's Chess, which stands, grossly miniaturized, below a path at the base of a downward slope. But I digress.)

Researching the Olympic Sculpture Park about a year ago, just before it opened, I was curious about how the quite, yes, unmonumental, nature of sculpture since, say, the 1970s, but especially since the 1990s, would fit in a sculpture park. Would this format be yet another ill-fitting modernist box? Would the outdoors itself neuter the impulses of contemporary sculpture?

For points of departure apart from other sculpture parks, I found Anne Ellegood's 2006 Hirshhorn exhibition The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas (with artists such as Isa Genzken and Rachel Harrison), a streamlining of some of the issues raised in the Hammer's Thing from 2005, especially by artists like Kristen Morgin and Lara Schnitger. At the Rubell Collection at Art Basel Miami Beach last year, I caught on to the assemblage work of Aaron Curry as an artist following these concerns, and at Eden's Edge at the Hammer this summer, there were Elliot Hundley, Matthew Monahan, and Anna Sew Hoy.

Which is all to say that it was quite nice to see all of these artists (except Anna Sew Hoy) and others (especially Nate Lowman, Carol Bove, Sarah Lucas, and John Bock, all with strong works) represented in Unmonumental at the New Museum, but new, it was not. It was a coronation for these artists and these ideas, not an introduction--the sort of late-in-the-day institutional move that, in the best-case scenario, might prompt a rejecting response (I can see the bumper stickers now: Visualize Monumentalism!). Is this the gist of the work of a contemporary art museum? It's not what I want to see happen in Seattle.

The New Museum seems to have the same uneasy relationship to progress that many institutions share, then. Nothing new about that. Except that, as almost every critic writing about the New Museum's architecture has pointed out, progress in this case is measured not simply inside the museum but outside it, too, in the gentrifying neighborhood of the Bowery--the latest symbol of the frightfully gentrifying universe of New York (and of what the rest of us fear in our smaller cities).

It is easy, then, to see the New Museum as a referendum on New York's place in art, and maybe even art's place in the world, as naive as that may sound. In this, I agree with Christopher Hawthorne, who described the pseudo-roughness of SANAA's building as the gesture of an architecture that is hedging its bets, claiming both to be "of the streets," with all of their past, and "of the future," with its promise of more buildings that look like this one instead of like the grimy brick supply stores on the Bowery now.

As a sculpture, from the exterior, the building is ingenious, light, and coherent. The inside, by contrast, feels drab and monotonous. There are some exceptions--the bright green color inside the elevator, the way the elevator opens on both sides in the middle of the galleries to give unexpected views of the exhibitions, the lone narrow back-of-house staircase between the third and the fourth floors--but these random details remain random. The shifting of the skylights due to the setbacks of the twisting stacked boxes is the exception to this rule: a detail that is both gorgeous and grounding.

But the chain-link-like cladding on the building and the repetition of mostly undifferentiated large spaces with high ceilings makes the museum feel like, as other critics have also noted, a simulation of a repurposed warehouse gallery in a sketchy neighborhood. The screamingly self-conscious rows of antiseptic fluorescent lights are the nail in that creepy coffin.

I wish the New Museum, both in its architecture and its first exhibition, had taken a look at the double-edged sword of newness, at the rather discredited avant-garde idea of the new, rather than simply pretending to be new in its exhibition schedule and pretending not to be new in its architecture. Then again, may we all be more cautious, and more daring.

--Jen Graves
jgraves@thestranger.com

And I'm Not Going to Miami.

While the rest of the art stream went east this weekend, I flew back home to Seattle after spending a week in New York. This week, while also a personal vacation, was supposed to provide a "substantial" art experience as opposed to the craven follies of ABMB. That's the word a curator used to encourage me when I told him I was anxious about not going to Miami. I'd had to decide between a vacation and Miami, and my editor at The Stranger was disinterested in reading about Miami for a third year in a row.

In a fit of overcompensation for my near-future of cluelessness, I went to the Brooklyn Museum, where I finally attended Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and caught a redux of Global Feminisms; at the Guggenheim, I came to understand better why I dislike Richard Prince; at MoMA, I stared deep into the half-closed eyes of the lonely shark and found myself surprisingly underwhelmed at the forest of Puryears. At the Met, I revisited a Goya favorite (while finishing Robert Hughes's ultimately disappointing biography) and looked longingly at the Age of Rembrandt. At the Whitney, I silently applauded Kara Walker's withering drawn responses to her critics, and I delicately sidestepped Lawrence Weiner's two minutes of spraypaint on the floor. I zigzagged Chelsea (Charles Ray, Carl Andre, Thomas Demand, Ross Bleckner, Edward Burtynsky, Wolfgang Tillmans, Liz Craft).

By then it was Thursday, and time for the substance of the substance: the press opening of the New Museum, that legendary place said to outpace everything.

What I found instead was a fashionable show of familiar artists based on a stale concept under hideous lighting in hesitant architecture.

Maybe I should have chosen Miami. More tomorrow.

--Jen Graves
jgraves@thestranger.com

CORRECTION: The shark hasn't moved. It's at the Met, still set marvelously perversely astride a window overlooking Central Park (which is the best thing about the display, not the other shark paintings on view), not at MoMA. What a dumb slip. My sincere apologies.