Farewell

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