January 2008 Archives

This just in from the Utah governor's office: The comment period about the Spiral Jetty-impacting energy development has been extended to Feb. 13. For more information from the state of Utah, click here. For more information on how to comment, click here.

UPDATE: The Seattle P-I's Regina Hackett says that the state of Utah has already received 1,000 comments, and that those comments have begun to alert them to the importance of the Jetty. "I think they were impressed to be taking calls from Europe and Japan about an artwork in Utah," the acting director of the Salt Lake City Art Center, Leslie Peterson, told Hackett.

Help me out: Submit Boston and New England art blogs in the comments...

The Toronto Star's Peter Goddard says that Richard Serra's landmark earthwork Shift (1970-72) is possibly threatened by development. (Don't miss that link -- Serra's story of how he got permission to use the land is fantastic.) Art lovers are hoping that the site will become protected by the Ontario Heritage Act, perhaps as soon as Feb. 11.

Shift is located in King City, Ontario, just north of Toronto. (You can see it via Google Satellite.) The piece was made from concrete, but Serra would now like to replace the concrete with steel.

"To me it was a breakthrough piece," Serra told Goddard. "You can find many pieces (by others) which came after Shift. They have direct links back to that piece."

Related: Serra talks about how he and Joan Jonas found and walked the site in the summer of 1970. Neat story by King councillor Cleve Mortelliti about how he found Shift as a kid... and then again years later.

The Menil recently acquired Goode's Torn Cloud Painting 60 (1971-76), a gift of the artist in honor of Walter Hopps.

One way to think of Joe Goode's work is this: How can an artist destroy the picture plane while remaining true to it? There are his milk-bottle paintings of the 1960s, in which Goode plays pop off of trompe l'oeil -- here's a consumer object in front of the canvas, here's a (painted) shadow, here's a (non-painted) shadow... what is 'real' and what isn't? (MOCA recently acquired one of these Goodes in as part of a gift from Michael Asher.)

And then there are the cloud paintings of the 1970s, in which Goode tears into the picture plane, revealing a painted surface below. In this series Goode mixes in references to Magritte, an artist whose influence on Los Angeles-based artists in the 1960s and 1970s was a subject of LACMA's recent 'Treachery of Images' show.

"I like those particular paintings," Goode said of Magritte's cloud-heavy paintings in a series of interviews with the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. "[They] did look surreal, but, to me this idea of looking through something was more important than the image itself. And the idea of seeing - when I did the milk bottle paintings, I would take the milk bottle and I'd set it in front on the step, and then I would have a line that went back into perspective to show that this milk bottle painting came out of this environment, at this very specific place in this painting.

"So I was totally unconscious in thinking about this but at the time I didn't understand that I was trying to show this idea of perception, that you see through something."

Related: The Portland Art Museum acquired a nice Goode last year.

UPDATE: 1/31: Comment period extended.

Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson's widow, recently sent an email out detailing specific threats to Smithson's masterpiece, Spiral Jetty. Click below to read it -- and please take action before 7 pm ET Wednesday.

In 1969 Ellsworth Kelly made Spectrum V (left), which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In that same year Kelly wrote "Notes of 1969," a meandering tract of attached sentences about his work, his inspiration, and the lineage in which he considered himself. (He edited some of the notes in 1993.)

"My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved or square," Kelly wrote. "I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves." And later: "I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a very personal handwriting, putting marks on canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something which has a different use."

Kelly's Spectrum works, especially the horizontal ones, are where presence meets color. When they were painted, mostly in the 1960s, they must have seemed preposterously huge. (Today, when we're well-accustomed to big paintings, it takes architecture to equal the same kind of presence. The Baltimore Ravens' very purple football stadium is my favorite example.) If you stand in front of one of the Spectrum paintings and look from the left to the right realfast, you understand what Kelly means by paintings that have a different use. They aren't ephemeral or phenomenological like Light & Space work, but they are Presence & Color. That's in the same league, just in a different division. (This one is SLAM's Spectrum II.)

Which brings us to Olafur Eliasson and his 360-degree room for all colours (2002). The piece is a giant, circular room in which the colors of the walls gradually change. The effect is both soothing and creepy -- I actually felt my eyes adjusting to the different colors and to the varying brightness of the light.

Eliasson's room isn't anywhere near as totemic as Kelly's canvases, but they share some chromatic effects. The subtle variations in color pulls the eye through Kelly's canvases, and when I'm standing in Eliasson's room my eyes want to race around his wall the way a hamster races around its wheel. As in Kelly's work there are no marks in 360 indicate that an artist was here, Eliasson is trying to create the same kind of "presence" that Kelly did. And he succeeds.

Previously: Related: Olafur Eliasson meets... art history. Pieter de Hooch. Richard Serra. Vija Celmins.

Lots of good blogs just added to the MAN blogroll under "New York City." Scroll down, look right.

Yesterday I talked about how a confluence of factors has led to a situation in which art museums ought be concerned about the future of their audiences, and why. Today I want to suggest some ways art museums could address this.

I'm surprised how little art museums -- especially contemporary museums -- do to communicate with their audiences. Most do some kind of monthly or quarterly newsletter, a lame affair that mentions upcoming exhibits and upcoming items in the store. The Hammer's includes paparazzi-style photos of their famous supporters. MOCA members receive Dwell magazine, which is lovely but has nothing to do with contemporary art. I'm on the press/something list for about 25 museum publications and there isn't one that rises above useless. (The exception is an annual: Chinati's newsletter. And in a non-contemporary way, the Met's Bulletin is useful too.)

So where's the innovation in how museums spread the word, where's the spirit of progressive non-profits that make earning and motivating audiences a key part of their mission? Why hasn't an art museum partnered with an NPR station on local/regional programming, or with NPR itself on a national podcast? Why haven't art museums studied how aggressive progressive non-profits reach and build and inform/educate their target audiences? (Have they? I haven't seen any evidence...)

I'm a writer, so my biggest suggestion will involve writing. It stems from an idea Christopher Knight had a couple years ago regarding the possible expenditure of the Getty billions.

I'd like to see 6-12 art museums partner to create a smart monthly magazine about art and artists of the last century. The magazine would launch with a circulation of a couple hundred thousand affluent urban types, the precise audience that advertisers love to reach. Think of it as The Atlantic, Believer, Harper's or Dwell for the visual culture set. The project would probably require venture philanthropy from someone such as the Getty or another large foundation, and a commitment from at least half a dozen museums. (That's even a really good fit: Most parts of the Getty are trying to find a way to be more involved in contemporary art.) A big museum, such as MoMA or SFMOMA, would have to sign up first. Eventually the magazine would be available on newsstands.

As journalism has gotten out of the business of cultural coverage, it's become increasingly clear that if cultural writing matters to the art world (and stuffed-to-the-gills museum press offices are an indication that museums want coverage), art institutions are going to have to become involved in supporting cultural journalism.

The magazine I have in mind would include long-format feature stories and profiles about architects, artists, curators, and other important players in contemporary art. It would feature reviews of major shows, a big-ideas back-of-the-book that is more New Yorker or Atlantic than Art in America. The magazine would be about art, but it would use art as a lens through which it looks at the world: It would feature Wangechi Mutu talking about Kenya, Julie Mehretu on diaspora, Spencer Finch on light, and so on. It would focus on how art exists in the world, not on how a market for art exists. The magazine would be a bridge between the impenetrable museum exhibition catalogue intended for scholars, and the exhibition brochure intended for lunchtime conversation.

Almost as important, the magazine would provide a place for young writers to demonstrate their chops. When I read national magazines these days I'm almost embarrassed about some of the arts/artists-related features and profiles I see. There needs to be a bench behind Calvin Tomkins.

Sure, there are some issues here. It would be important for the magazine to have editorial independence. It would important for it to do issues-oriented journalism regarding museums, federal and state arts policies, and all kinds of informed reporting instead of just puff-pieces. It will have to pay freelance writers competitive rates, north of $2/word. The magazine cannot be the only way contemporary art museums work together to spread the word.

But it would be a place to start.

Every single time I'm in an art museum, I hear a variation on this conversation:

"What a painting."

"Yes, it's a Warhol. And this one is by Wayne Thiebaud."

"I wonder what they're worth?"

"Millions. Otherwise they wouldn't be in a museum."

It's hard to imagine a greater indictment of the current art world than that kind of exchange. I've been going to art museums since I was knee-high to a Gris and I've not heard those conversations as much as I have in the last year or two.

I think we all know why people see art and think money: In the press, art is all about the market, $140 million sales here, and auction records there. Even New York's top contemporary art critic, Jerry Saltz, has given in and apparently considers an artist's retail prices a guiding barometer of worthiness. (If NYC's top contemporary art critic won't assert the power of his pulpit to steer us toward deserving artists, who will?) The news media, which has responded to shrinking circulation and ad revenue by cutting staff and coverage -- especially arts coverage -- understands the market story and writes the heck out of it. The result has been an under-considered change in American arts journalism, a devolution that has major ramifications for art institutions.

Consider: Only a handful of newspapers treat art and arts institutions as a journalistic rather than hagiographic subject. The trend in American journalism is to treat art and visual culture as a fussy little features area, the kind of thing that belongs in its own Sunday section so that it doesn't contaminate the rest of the paper. The only exception is when something gets sold. Money is something editors understand.

In recent months even the best art-covering newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, has been hit with staff cuts. For the first time in recent memory it has ignored major institutional stories in its own backyard, such as the continuing budget and endowment trouble at MOCA, and the unconscionable fluffing of private collectors by the Hammer and LACMA.

It's not just the LAT: The Dallas Morning News had no idea how to cover the announcement that King Tut was coming to town, and made a drooling ass of itself. The San Francisco Chronicle has only the faintest inkling of how to report the disastrous tenure of John Buchanan at FAMSF. The Miami Herald writes about art for a week every December, and that's about it. And coverage of actual artists? Forget about it.

It may come as a surprise to most MAN readers that these changes don't much bother managers at newspapers and magazines. Their businesses are changing far too dramatically, their balance sheets changing too alarmingly, for them to be worried about specific areas of coverage. So as journalism increasingly treats art as nothing but a business story, who is most impacted?

Art museums. Instead of hanging art to which people respond, museums now find themselves increasingly hanging objects that are the subject of dollars-related curiosity. It's not just the near-death of arts journalism that's caused this condition -- and that's why arts institutions should be paying attention. The slow death of arts journalism should be the event that causes art museums to take notice of some recent trends.

Art museums are now operating in an environment that has depleted their audiences of much of their oxygen: Mainstream art journalism is almost gone. Arts education has been nearly entirely removed from the public schools. The notion that a collegiate education should be grounded in the liberal arts is a relic of our parents' generation. (Many museums have built up excellent schools-focused education programs, efforts that benefit from government grant money. One of the most under-covered education stories of the last decade or two is how as states have eliminated art education in schools, they have funded art education through museum at mere pennies on the prior dollars.)

Museums, desperate to maintain their audiences in the face of diminishing public attraction to actual art objects have launched singles' nights, sewing circles, bingo games, podcasts that feature museum patrons vapidly saying vacuous things about art, fashion shows, lame education 'exhibits' (my all-time favorite is in the Matisse show at the Baltimore Museum of Art: "How to Look at Sculpture") and so on. Too few museums engage their audiences in the broad area between scholarly, unreadable catalogues available for $75 at the end of an exhibition, and a sewing circle. (If ever a catalogue had an opportunity to be a fun read, it's SFMOMA's Olafur Eliasson catalogue. And, well, the pictures are good.)

Museums need to realize that they must engage their public in ways that journalism and schools used to do for them. In no way is it in the medium-to-long-term interest of art museums for people to walk up to a Pollock and have their first reaction be, "What's it worth?" Art museums exist in their current form because of the far-sightedness of the American people, as evidenced by a tax code that encourages cultural philanthropy. If art museums are ever seen by the American public as mere trophy houses for the accumulated baubles of the wealthy, you can bet that the education-related tax exemptions that allow museums to be museums won't last any longer than Robert Mapplethorpe did at the Corcoran. (Witness the hostility of powerful Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), whose distaste for museums is barely concealed.) In addition to their tax exemptions, many art museums rely on local and state governments for financial support. One, the St. Louis Art Museum, even relies more directly on the citizenry -- on local property taxes -- for much of its budget.

Therefore it is intensely in the interest of arts institutions -- especially museums -- to ensure that their audiences see more than dollar-signs-in-acrylic on their walls. Obviously it is asking too much of, say, a $25 million museum to make up for the banishment of art from schools, from core curricula, and for the business problems in American journalism. But within the spirit of their missions -- what MoMA calls "the encouragement of an ever deeper understanding and enjoyment of modern and contemporary art," I think that art institutions can and should be more innovative in how they wean their audiences off of the compulsion to see dollar-signs first, and art second.

Tomorrow: Kicking around some ideas on ways to do that...

"Arriving at LACMA's gates, Director Michael Govan had to ask permission to be let into his own museum," the LA Times reports this morning. "After producing his ID, he was allowed inside." (The photo is by LATer Brian vander Brug.)

What else do you need to know to understand how bizarre a day it was at a handful of Southern California museums yesterday? Federal agents served search warrants on the Pacifica Asia, Mingei International, and Bowers Museums, as well as LACMA in an antiquities-related sting. According to the LAT, the museums may have smuggled items in their collections and some of them may have knowingly inflated valuations for tax purposes. The focus of the investigation appears to be a Southland commercial gallery, Silk Roads Gallery.

(In a related story, we've just learned how to avoid a 20-25-minute wait in the LACMA members' ticket line: Arrive with a search warrant.)

How weird a day was it? Former NYT staffer Sharon Waxman, last seen shamelessly defending Getty antiquities curator Marion True, who had major antiquities-related ethics problems of her own, sent out a bizarre email. The subject said that there was "breaking news on smuggled antiquities." The email then said the breaking news was really in the LAT. No word on whether Waxman is on the paper's marketing team.

Related: Lee Rosenbaum felt the need to "counter-balance" the LAT stories by saying that there's no scandal story here, and that the antiquities involved are "relatively minor." Seriously. (In a related story, if I steal $20 million from a bank with $10 billion in assets, I want Rosenbaum on the jury.)

The Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers has a fine piece today about a Nazi-era-provenance-issue claim on a painting at the MFA Boston. At the crux of the issue is whether a really good Kokoschka was sold under duress. The question of duress -- by the way, you remember the Nazis, yes? -- was, er, indelicately questioned by MFA deputy director Katherine Getchell.

"Would you also say that people who sold things [during] the Depression, yes, they sold them under duress?" she said. "Yes, if somebody sells their house now because they can't meet their high mortgage payment, is that a forced sale of a house? I think it's very dangerous to make the supposition that everything that happened during a period of time was forced."

Vija Celmins is fascinated by untouchable beauty in nature: starfields, ocean waves, spider webs. She is not, I hazard to say without looking at one of the umpteen Q&As with her that have been published in book form, all that interested in where the heck waves come from, in how they're made by what. Her drawings of photographs of ocean waves are solely concerned with the crests and valleys and rolling water. (The Celmins shown here is a detail from MoMA's Untitled (Ocean).)

As I've been discussing this week, the mix of art history and natural processes is right in Olafur Eliasson's wheelhouse. (A major Eliasson survey is on view at SFMOMA.) Of course, for centuries artists have painted the sea. The Dutch Golden Age masters emphasized both the sky and the Dutch merchant ships that brought the Netherlands great wealth. Courbet emphasized dramatic horizon lines and expressive brush-and-rag work in his representation of dramatic, foamy waves. When Eliasson made Notion motion I don't think he was interested in any of those kinds of things. Instead he went the Celmins route.

Vija Celmins' oceanscapes -- of nothing but waves -- are 'graphite-field' drawings that cover entire surfaces. The oceanscapes don't begin or end, they just fill. Eliasson's Notion motion does the same thing. In this piece Eliasson bounces the light from HMI spotlights off of a shallow pool of water and onto a projection-foil-backed nylon scrim. On the other side of the scrim a few wooden planks protrude from a wooden floor. When a viewer steps on the planks it creates disturbances in the pool of water, which result in small waves. Those wave patterns then cover the entire surface of the nylon scrim.

Celmins' and Eliasson's waves are both two-dimensional. Celmins uses familial perspectival tricks to impart texture, to allow us to 'see' the peaks and troughs of the waves. Eliasson isn't so interested in being so literal about reproducing a natural phenomenon. His waves are completely flat, nothing but curvy lines.

(The first four or five photographs here show the piece installed at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Installed in 2005, the piece was substantially different.)

Related: In a catalogue essay, Mieke Bal also reaches into art history in an effort to contextualize Notion motion. Bal cites Friedrich, Claesz, and 19thC Dutch painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag, all of which I find unconvincing for the reasons I mentioned above.

Related: Olafur Eliasson meets... art history. Pieter de Hooch. Richard Serra.

In 1995, Richard Serra and a team of respirator-wearing workmen re-created Serra's landmark Gutter Corner Splash at SFMOMA. The original site-specific work, made in Jasper Johns' studio in 1969, was destroyed when Johns moved his studio. Later he 'gave' the piece to SFMOMA, which brought Serra in to create a 1995 version.

Over the course of several nights -- it was imperative to make sure the fumes from the toxic lead were completely out of the museum before it was open to visitors -- Serra and his team heated up 15,000 pounds of lead. Serra ladled it out of a pot and flung it against the right-angle formed where an SFMOMA gallery wall and the floor met. Each time Serra completely plastered the section of wall and floor with lead, he and his workers crowbar-ed the metal away from the wall and started again. The piece, re-titled Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift, is permanently installed at SFMOMA (though sometimes it's hidden behind a false wall of drywall). You can see video of Serra's installation here.

Olafur Eliasson's Moss Wall (1994) is the B-side to Serra's Gutter Corner Splash. The Eliasson is a sheer gallery wall covered in arctic moss, complete with a little roughly foot-long 'extension' at the base of the wall, on the gallery floor. (The photo is a detail of the piece. The only images I can find, including those on SFMOMA's website, are of a different installation.)

Where Serra used a highly toxic, mined material, Eliasson chose an organism that grows naturally. While the physical Serra slung his heavy, leaden ladle to make his piece, Eliasson's is delicately constructed, with each little bit of moss having to be carefully handled and placed. Serra's material is heavy, Eliasson's is light. The lead had to be heated to 621 degrees Fahrenheit before it would melt. Arctic moss grows at the bottom of tundral lakes, safe from surface temperatures that average -15 Fahrenheit in the winter. With Arctic Moss Eliasson is responding to Serra's danger-daring, occasionally earth-moving, macho minimalism with something that's less GTO and more Prius.

There's one other broader art historical level on which Moss Wall works: As a landscape painting. Quite simply it's landscape, on a wall. Presto: Landscape painting.

Related: Olafur Eliasson meets... art history. Pieter de Hooch.

There's a terrific Pieter de Hooch painting at the National Gallery of Art called The Bedroom. It's a classic 'keyhole' De Hooch, featuring an interior scene, an open door that pulls the eye through the room out onto a little patio, and then through a patio door out into what looks like a garden. Sure, it's a perspectival study, but it's also a study in how a skilled painter can portray different kinds of light in different ways and how he can use that skill to suck the viewer into the scene. When I look at The Bedroom I can almost feel my eyes walking through the changes in light.

Speaking of which: That's exactly how Olafur Eliasson's One-way colour tunnel at SFMOMA works. The piece is installed on Mario Botta's fifth-floor bridge. It transforms a chilly white space (one that gives fits to we mild acrophobics) into a kaleidoscopic pathway into the exhibition. Like a de Hooch, it pulls the viewer through the piece into new light and new colors. (And, in this case of SFMOMA's installation, the viewer ends up in Eliasson's 360-degree room for all colours.)

It is also worth paying attention to the title of the piece: 'One-way colour tunnel.' If a viewer walks one way across the bridge s/he gets the colorful view. In the opposite direction the piece is muted, even darkened. Quite often De Hoochs feature darkened interiors and to reach the promise of light you have to look through all those keyholes to from where the light is coming. Eliasson's One-way works this way too: If you walk across the bridge in the 'wrong' way, the bridge seems darker, as in this picture. If the viewer look through the darker bridge to what's on the other side, s/he looks through to a bright white wall in which is a small window -- just like a de Hooch come to life 21st-century-style.

Because Eliasson is nothing if not thorough, that window is even highlighted with another Eliasson, Sunset kaleidoscope. (Sorry, I can't find a pic that shows this. But you can kinda, sorta get a sense of it here. Sunset is behind the man's head.) I find myself thinking about the two pieces this way: Eliasson has smartly used the pretty colors and neat-o effects to suck in 95 percent of the audience... all the while knowing that just enough artfolk will enjoy the influence of a Dutch master.

Between having seen umpteen Olafur Eliasson shows and installations, read 43 magazine and newspaper profiles of the artist, and having read Christopher Knight and Kenneth Baker weigh in, I thought I was well-prepared to see the Eliasson survey at SFMOMA.

Knight wrote about Eliasson as the "first major European artist whose work evolved from a Los Angeles precedent -- Light and Space art, a unique perceptual aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s." Baker thought that Eliasson was such a phenomenologist that the exhibit "will disappoint people who go to the museum primarily to look at things."

So when I saw the fantastic, jaw-slackening SFMOMA show I was surprised at how different my reaction was to theirs. There's no question that Eliasson has synthesized Light and Space and that he has updated it. And certainly it's not an object-driven show the way, say, a Maillol retrospective would be.

But it's absolutely a show in which looking brings rewards. And the more I looked, the more I saw something that surprised me: Eliasson's phenomenology is much, much more rooted in art historical precedent than I'd realized.

In fact, I think that Eliasson doesn't start with natural processes or with nature, but that he takes major works of modern and contemporary art and alchemizes them. Each day this week, starting with a post this afternoon, I'll pick a work or two in the SFMOMA Eliasson show, point out its art historical precedent(s) and I'll show how Eliasson 'activated' the earlier work.

Related: SFMOMA has a sometimes-cool Eliasson website. It spend too much time on user-generated comments, which seems to be some kind of fetish at the museum. (SFMOMA's podcast is rendered unlistenable by a steady stream of "gosh shucks" comments.) Eliasson's own website.

Village Voice editor Tony Ortega announces that art critic Christian Viveros-Faune will no longer appear in the VV.

MAN is off for the holiday. See you Tuesday.

Updated as others publish... Journalists have begun to respond to Christian Viveros-Faune's VV-ignored conflicts of interest: Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe takes him apart here, and Jen Graves of The Stranger isn't happy that Viveros-Faune implied that critics are unprofessional and fence-straddling. Gawker's Maggie Shnayerson says that Viveros-Faune's approach to all this is "unnerving" and she thinks that the VV is going to have to address this issue, Paddy Johnson says that Viveros-Faune's behavior is "shameful," and Timothy Buckwalter, who writes about art for SF PBS station KQED, finds irony in Viveros-Faune's conflicts. UPDATE: Time's Richard Lacayo agrees with MAN, says: "[T]his isn't even a gray area." UPDATE: Seattle P-I art critic Regina Hackett says: "You can't star in the movie, sell the popcorn and write the review." UPDATE: Washington CityPaper critic Jeffry Cudlin -- who has done a fine job of avoiding sticky wickets -- points out that Viveros-Faune effectively said that he is "embracing conflict over academia."

In the final part of this week's Q&A with Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune, I asked Viveros-Faune how it was that he worked as an organizer and co-director of two commercial art fairs (Volta in NYC, Next in Chicago) at the same time he was the Village Voice's art critic. One of the fairs, Next, is owned by Merchandise Mart, the a major player in American art fairs and the owner of NYC's The Armory Show. The arrangement puts a Village Voice art critic in bed with a major art market player. "Why isn't that the most basic kind of conflict-of-interest?" I asked.

Viveros-Faune's answers are in the post below this one, or here.

This is a textbook case of an unethical conflict-of-interest. Would Roger Ebert work for a film distributor? What if the LA Times' theater critic decided what plays are shown at Geffen Playhouse and was financially reliant upon the success of those plays? What if NYT art critic Grace Glueck sat on the board of an art museum? (Oh, wait...)

By virtue of being a Village Voice's art critic -- a job previously held by major figures such as Peter Schjeldahl and Jerry Saltz -- every other week Viveros-Faune holds either the third- or fourth-most-prominent position in the NYC art-critical landscape. Just like Saltz before him, Viveros-Faune is in a position to impact critical thought, to move the market, to decide what artists and what galleries make it -- and which don't. Viveros-Faune also has the opportunity to use his Voice presence as a way to review -- even promote -- artists and galleries he has selected for inclusion in the art fairs in which he is involved. (Conversely, if a gallery isn't interested in participating in a Viveros-Faune fair, he could punish them by refusing to review their shows.) Both fairs have big-dollar sponsors, and Viveros-Faune is listed as Next's contact for sponsorship. Would a critic negatively review artists owned by one of his sponsors? Or would he be extra-likely to consider artists owned by a sponsoring private management group? The possibility of impropriety, the exact sort of thing ethics are supposed to prevent, is acute. That is flat wrong.

Because conflicts-of-interest strike at the very heart of the integrity of journalism, newspapers and other news organizations are typically extra-careful about avoiding them. Nothing is more devastating to a newspaper than the revelation that it employs someone who may be using the newspaper as a front for that individual's private interests.

So have Viveros-Faune's commercial interests impacted his Voice columns? First: The whole point of ethics is to ensure that this question isn't even asked. But because Viveros-Faune and the Voice have so flouted journalistic norms, we must. When it comes to what he has chosen not to write, we'll never know. That's troubling. According to Volta's website, the exhibitor lineup for that fair, of which Viveros-Faune is a co-director, will not be released until February. There is also no available lineup for exhibitors of the Next fair, which Viveros-Faune co-organizes.

The Voice, of all papers, might be expected to be extra-careful. Sixteen months ago the paper emptied its arts staff, replacing many experienced veterans in the process. You'd think that the new leadership, notably editor Tony Ortega, would be extra-vigilant to make sure nothing like this happened. (A source tells MAN that Village Voice Media has no in-house ethical handbook or guidelines that its writers must follow.) Yesterday I emailed Ortega for comment. He did not reply. In a subsequent email to the paper's spokesperson, I again asked to talk with Ortega. He didn't reply to that request either. Yesterday morning VV arts and culture editor Brian Parks sent me this email:

Critics in the arts sometimes also have other involvement in their fields. Whether in the fine arts or elsewhere, we regularly review our critics' activities with them, and are confident that they will not abuse their critical role for personal gain elsewhere in their field. I have discussed your concerns with Christian, and I am convinced that he has avoided such a conflict of interest, keeping his curatorial efforts and critical writings distinctly separate.

Parks did not return a phone message seeking clarification of the final sentence of his email: The issue at question is not "curatorial efforts" (at, say, a college art gallery or some such place), but Viveros-Faune's management/organizing role in two commercial art fairs. (In our Q&A Viveros-Faune used the same defense, indicating a bizarre inability to differentiate between effectively choosing commercial galleries for a commercial endeavor, and being a curator.)

"I think that you can sort of wear a lot of hats in the art world," Viveros-Faune said. Yes, if you're existing solely within the art world, you can do that. But by writing for the Voice, Viveros-Faune works both in the art world and in the journalism world. That means he must be held to journalistic standards. Viveros-Faune's indication that he should be able to disregard ethical standards because he needs to make money is particularly galling.

On a personal note, this is uncomfortable for me. I've done dozens of Q&As on MAN with all sorts of art world figures, people such as Getty CEO James Wood, critic Jerry Saltz, Gugg curator Nancy Spector, ex-Walker director Kathy Halbreich and artist and New Yorker photographer Robert Polidori. I hope the history of this site indicates that I don't do ambushes and that I don't do gotcha-journalism.

So I want to explain how this all came out: On Monday, impressed with a recent Lawrence Weiner review, I asked Viveros-Faune to come on MAN and he agreed. That night, while researching and preparing for the Q&A I discovered the hiding-in-clear-sight conflicts-of-interest discussed here. When Viveros-Faune and I did our Q&A on Tuesday, my last few questions were about this topic. I expected him to say that he was in the process of separating himself from his commercial interests, or some such thing. He didn't:

What should happen next is pretty clear: Viveros-Faune should immediately withdraw -- both in terms of involvement and any financial interest -- from the two commercial art fairs he organizes, and the Village Voice should explain to its readers how it published his work in the face of such obvious conflicts. If Viveros-Faune won't do that, the Voice has only one option: It should stop publishing him.

A MAN Q&A with Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune, continued from part one and from part two...

MAN: You're a managing director of a commercial art fair, Volta, and an organizer of another commercial art fair, Chicago's Next fair. At the same time you're a writer, a journalist, you're the art critic for the Village Voice. Why isn't that the most basic kind of conflict of interest?

Christian Viveros-Faune: I think essentially, because, I believe you can wear a lot of hats in the art world, and one needs to because, among other things, critics can't survive on the money that they make from writing. Very few critics can. And, not only that, but I'm interested in curating, and I firmly believe that there is no interest in the art world without a conflict of interest.

Now, that may seem counterintuitive, and it is, but I would argue that the art world is counterintuitive in the extreme. In what other industry, for example, does one of the major magazines that chronicles both the creative and the business end of the art world establish an art fair of the same name. Obviously, I'm talking about Frieze.

And that's nothing. Examine, for second, the practice of writing catalog essays. You know and I know that there is no such thing as a negative catalog essay and the reason for that is obvious: one way critics make money is by writing promotional copy for galleries and, hopefully, artists they like or love. And then there's the business of curators and critics slinging their asses around to universities and institutions for speaking engagements.

Shall I go on? I mean, again, what I'm arguing for here is honesty all the way around. Like every other business (or form of writing or discipline for that matter) this is not a pristine business, no matter what the NY Times rules of engagement say. It is full of peaks and valleys. I'm honest about my climbing those peaks and going down into those valleys. Maybe that makes me stupid, I don't know. What I do know is it doesn't affect my ethics when I write. I'd rather not write about the market, because weirdly enough, it doesn't interest me much.

Can I curate an exhibition as an art fair for a company that will pay me money for it? You're damned right I can. Do I see a conflict there? No I don't, I see potential for a conflict, which is not the same thing. It's the same dilemma I have every day when I decide not take candy from a baby. One it's easier than it looks, and two it's just not done, it's unethical and uncivil. Decent, cool people don't do it, and that's that.

MAN: Did the Voice ask you about that, ask you to address that in some way?

Viveros-Faune: I told my editor, so he knows, and of course I hope the paper is not going to care much. They should take it under advisement with regards to the pitches I submit, that would be natural.

MAN: Have you considered what it says about you, about the Voice, about the state of the art world when someone holding one of the three major critical positions in New York City has hands in two different pots, both trying to be a journalist, to be a critic, while operating in the commercial side as well?

Viveros-Faune: Honestly, I thought it basically came with the territory. It's either that [conflict] or teaching. We're not nuns here. I actually really prefer to sort of stay in the active end of the art world. I'm not a guy with degrees, and I like teaching, but have never really been interested in that end of things, in joining the academy. I like people who make things, rather than study them long after the impulse to make them is gone. I do firmly believe that there is a way to stay critically focused and active in the actual sort of 'doing' end of things, and that is what I'm trying to do.

And, of course, I'm not the first person to do it, nor is it the first time that I've done this, meaning functioned with a similar conflict. For a while when I was writing for New York Press - actually, nearly the entire time I was writing for NYP -- I was running my own gallery. [Viveros-Faune was a partner in Roebling Hall.] Eventually I left the Press because my gallery became successful and I realized I couldn't review people who were my peers, which at the time was really sort of the stuff I was interested in writing about. Now my critical tack is different, I am more concerned in work with legs beyond the next half decade, and that is the work I prefer to write about. And again, I don't write about the market. Also, in case anyone has missed this detail: I no longer sell art work to anyone, which in my mind takes me out of the area of real conflict, period.

When I started listing my ten favorite works of art earlier this month, I said I was going to confine myself to 1880 forward. The reason was simple: That's about what I deal with on MAN.

Predictably enough (except by me, apparently) several people have asked me what pre-1880 works would have made my list. Well, I don't know. That's a whole different kind of thinking. But these would have been contenders:

A MAN Q&A with Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune, continued from here...

MAN: You've taken on NYTer Roberta Smith at least twice: In Martin Kippenberger and in Lawrence Weiner. Is that a conscious decision to take on someone away from whom others have shied? Is it taking on the lion? Or is it pure coincidence?

Christian Viveros-Faune: It's impossible not to mention [what I wrote] with Weiner in particular. Everyone's sort of looking to Weiner as some sort of salutary balm and look, I fess up to a significant sort of anti-conceptual bias. I don't truck with a lot of work from those generations. That doesn't mean I don't understand it, it doesn't mean I don't appreciate it and it doesn't mean I don't understand how it's seeped into the bedrock of what everyone's doing right now and how important it is, but a lot of it is shallow and in the case of someone like Weiner that's what I'm saying: That this is no recipe for engaging ideas. These are kind of shitty ideas. They're shallow. They're not particularly fulsome. I think we've advanced past that and that's what I was trying to point out rather than trying to get into anything specific with Roberta, who has me outdistanced by miles and miles. I'm not being disingenuous.

MAN: It seems to me that most critics shy away from taking on or disagreeing with Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith. I love them, they're great. But a little disagreement wouldn't kill anyone.

Viveros-Faune: I happen to have an opinion that's very much my own. I don't want to sound like [Barack] Obama here, but I have a set of opinions that they obviously don't share, and I don't share with them. It is true they have exerted a great deal of influence, and we love them for it because it means that they're really doing their jobs, they're really out there and they have opinions and that's what you want a critic to do, to have opinions and commitment.

But the issue is: No one disagrees in the art world. There is very little active disagreement in the art world, especially compared to the literary world where people eviscerate each other. You have an argument in the New York Review of Books and you have the writer and his friends piling on, and in the art world you don't have that. I wish you did. I'd love nothing more than for a pile of letters to come in to tell me I'm wrong about Lawrence Weiner, not because I might change my opinion if I found something there, but you want to get people riled, get people agreeing or disagreeing with you.

But in the art world, because success is so based on inside information and insider relations, I find very few people tell you what they really do think. I would bet that... nine times out of ten a critic can walk right back into the gallery that he or she did a review about, particularly a negative review, and not a peep will be said about that by the dealer, which I think is kind of wrong. I think a dealer should say thanks for reviewing it, but it's better to be there than not be there. But then the second thing I want them to say is, 'I really disagree with it, do you really think what you wrote is correct?' Am I naïve to think that?

MAN: But you have mostly written positive reviews so far -- one exception being that you took the same swing at MoMA everyone else takes, which is fine. It's spot-on. So why not negative reviews?

Viveros-Faune: I've done that a bit. I haven't come down on a single show, that you're right about. I guess one is considerably more [inclined] to take on larger people, there's a David and Goliath sort of issue there. Or the bigger you are, maybe the more germane it is for one to have a contradictory opinion, to sort of receive wisdom. Wisdom isn't necessarily received about the second show of a 32-year old painter.

But anyone who shows Terence Koh in Chelsea, I'll be waiting at the door with pen-in-hand to take apart that guy. It's some of the worst, shallowest, most facile work around and I really really despise it. I would do that. I guess I'm waiting for other shows in Chelsea that really pop-up, that really drive my pleasure or my ire enough that I really get on it. I'm also writing twice a month right now for the Voice, so I think my record might be a little fuller in six months time.

Time's Richard Lacayo agrees with me that LACMA director Michael Govan's comments to the LAT were... odd.

When I read Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune's review of the Lawrence Weiner show at the Whitney, a couple lines jumped out at me. I referenced them when I linked to the piece on Monday: For the second time Viveros-Faune did something that New York critics rarely do: He went against the Roberta Smith-penned conventional wisdom. By the standards of the go-along-to-get-along New York art world, Viveros-Faune was throwin' down.

So I emailed him and asked him if he'd sit for a MAN Q&A. He said yes. On Tuesday we talked about a range of topics, including the Jerry-Roberta critical axis, negative reviews, and ethical responsibility. I'll run this in three parts: Two today, one tomorrow.

MAN: Realizing you've only been in the job since about August, do you know what you want to do with your bully pulpit. Do you want to 'make' artists? Do you want to point out structural issues, or....

Christian Viveros-Faune: There's this sort of Kenneth Tynan thing, this sign that he had sort of pegged over his desk: 'Be light, be stinging, be melancholy.' 'Lacerate, goad, raise whirlwinds.' It seems to me that the mission of the critic is to do that, to a great degree. To provoke positively and also sort of negatively. To be able to point out serious lapses in general judgment and also to be able to celebrate things that require celebrating whether they're discoveries or not, in fact, even if there the most obvious thing in the world. That always seemed to me to be the point of being a critic.

Bob Baker... at the Voice weirdly concurs with me on this. We're one of the few folks that I know anywhere who like Robert Hughes. [Hughes] has very little to say about art past 1985, but he's encyclopedic before that, and he's a guy with an opinion. He knows where he's coming from. I guess my mission -- and to be honest I have not been around at the job long enough to articulate it properly -- but if I have one it's to make sure that I'm imparting some sort of insight and also judgment to a readership both wide and specialist.

MAN: To be the anti-Kimmelman, to write more than mere hagiography.

Viveros-Faune: It's wanting someone to actually make up their minds on the page. Someone like [NYT chief art critic Michael] Kimmelman is the one at the Times to provide the contrast with Hughes because he doesn't seem to have opinions that distinguish him from anyone else and I find that problematic.

MAN: There has been much hand-wringing about art criticism, particularly by NYC critics, about how art criticism is allegedly dead. Do you subscribe to any of that?

Viveros-Faune: Yes and no. What a cop-out answer. I do realize that some of these issues that have been diagnosed are real. But does anyone really want to play the role of kingmaker anymore? Do we need a [Clement] Greenberg around? And it seems to me that we don't.

I suppose that I sort of got to hang around with Peter [Schjeldahl] quite a bit when I was doing this profile of him and he does have this certain catholic way about him, and he seems to take the good with the bad pretty evenly.

But it does occur to me that when you're faced with mountains you don't try to move the mountain, you try to go around it, and I think there are ways to make criticism important (from one particular desk) without really trying to engage some of these issues -- like the market -- head on. I've been involved in the market as a dealer and I've been disinvolved with it for some years now and the stuff I like writing about has nothing to do with the market and I still think there's a lot of room for that.

MAN: I've been complaining about that on MAN for a while now, that critics such as Jerry Saltz complain about the market instead of taking advantage of their bully pulpit. And that the NYT for a while couldn't write a review without hand-wringing about the market.

Viveros-Faune: I don't mean to say that folks shouldn't write about the market. The market is relevant, it definitely is. But it still seems to me that the critic's job is to talk about art, you know? I like Jerry, I respect what he does, but if you keep harping on the same notes, there's an aspect to a one-note song that one begins to hit.

What's the line about a broken clock? It basically strikes the right time twice a day. If you keep on saying the market's going to go, the market's going to go, of course it's going to go. It's a law of nature: Things that go up must go down. These things must be talked about, these are important things. I think in the NYT you find that art writers and the critics share a platform. Like you, I'm sure I read both, and I'm interested in both but the stuff that tends to matter, aside from the 'Damien Hirst sold for $100 million' is the stuff that gives you a sense of what is out there beyond just regular life. Ways in which a general reader can engage something that can give him and her meaning.

I hope I'm not being naïve in saying this: This is part of what we're supposed to do, to entertain ideas to the degree that they're imminent in artworks, to try and sort of get those across to a general audience in a way that's meaningful.

As LAO's Kevin Roderick put it, "LACMA director even talks to some local rag."

After oddly choosing not to talk to the LA Times when news of the Broads' collection decision broke -- he talked to the paper the day after the NYT story, but not in time for the paper's arts section's deadline -- Govan's thoughts on the Broads-related developments were in a Christopher Reynolds story in yesterday's LAT. And they're bizarr-o.

"Eli has never changed his story with LACMA," Govan told the paper. Well, except he has: In 2004 Broad told the LAT that he wouldn't be building BCAM if he didn't intend to donate part of his collection.

Then: "I do imagine that many of these works will live at LACMA," said Govan. "Will they be owned by LACMA? I'm not sure it matters."

Really? Isn't collecting exactly what museums exist to do? Quick refresher course: Museums collect important cultural objects, conserve them, provide the public with access to them, and enable scholarship around them. I mean, if it doesn't matter if LACMA owns anything, why doesn't the museum turn its acquisition monies into the Free Chocolate Sundaes for Schoolkids fund, and just show borrowed works in perpetuity?

Furthermore, if there's one art museum director in America that should know how much it matters that a museum own the art on its walls instead of someone else, it's Govan: When he was the director of Dia, the Judd Foundation sold work off the walls of Dia: Beacon. (Yes, I know that in this specific case that the Broads have committed to not selling TBAF art.)

I understand that Govan is spinning furiously. He's got Mitt-mentum.

Related: I loved LACMA president Melody Kanschat's article-ending confession: That BCAM is just like LACMA's other buildings, "except it's newer and it doesn't leak."

MAN has learned that the Phillips Collection has added an exhibition to its 2008 schedule: Diebenkorn in New Mexico. The show, which was my pick for best exhibition of 2007, will be on view in Washington from June 21 to Sept. 7. Before coming to DC the show will make a previously announced stop at NYU's Grey Art Gallery from Jan. 25 through April 5. (This is extra good for me: I'd been looking forward to reviewing the San Jose presentation of show. But when no one at that museum returned three weeks worth of calls/emails, I gave up. Now I get a second chance.)

Richard Diebenkorn and the Phillips go way back. In 1944, when Diebenkorn was in the military and stationed in northern Virginia, he spent a lot of time at the Phillips, studying the collection and smoking cigarettes. The Phillips owns eight Diebenkorns and there isn't a dud among 'em.

Shown here is the St. Louis Art Museum's Albuquerque No. 4, which Joseph Pulitzer gave to the museum in 1969. It's in the show.

Related (sort of): New Phillips director-to-be Dorothy Kosinski's Q&A with MAN, part two.

I do not understand why art museums don't do more exhibitions like this: I love it when art museums remind those who relegate them to the frivolous entertainment section of the local newspaper, to the column space next to an 'American Idol' recap, that they are ignoramuses. Art is the cultural record of civilizations, peoples, nations and communities. It has an important role to play in telling us who we've been, who we are and where we might be going.

The St. Louis Art Museum seems plenty aware of this as it has launched a special little show about George Caleb Bingham's 1852 The County Election. David Bonetti wrote a fine piece about it in Sunday's Post-Dispatch, which is why I'm writing about it here. Curator Andrew Walker gets credit for the presentation. (And because this is at the St. Louis Art Museum, it's free to everyone.)

The connection between the Bingham and the present is pretty obvious: We're in the midst of a year-long election season. In the 155 years (!) since Bingham painted this scene of the Saline County Courthouse in Arrow Rock, the Frank & Jesse James gang likely thundered through, the Courthouse in the painting was destroyed in the Civil War and elections in the US have changed, er, significantly. But yeah, once upon a time, we really did do it this way. (Bingham lived much of his life in Arrow Rock, and I believe his home is still open for tours. Added bonus: When Bingham was a young man he caught smallpox and lost his hair. I seem to recall his toupees being on view at the house.)

SLAM's mini-show pairs one of the museum's two Bingham versions of the painting with drawings and engravings made after the painting was widely shown in the midwest.

The museum has put together a Flash-based website mostly intended for children, but adults will probably get a mild kick out of it too. If you click through to here you'll also see a big, detailed image of the painting.

Buckle my seatbelt, NYC is next. Here's what I'm trying to do here. If you have an NYC art blog you love (or write), please tell me in the comments.

Some artists make fundraising posters... this one threw a fundraiser for North Carolina Senate candidate Jim Neal (D).

Continued from here with new Phillips director-to-be Dorothy Kosinski...

MAN: You told the Washington Post that you want to add $40 million to the Phillips' endowment, which wouldn't sound like such a challenging figure were it not for what's about to become a very crowded high-end DC fundraising environment. The National Gallery of Art is committed to raising $100 million if -- and probably when -- its expansion goes through. Most local observers, including me, think that they'll end up raising around $250M. The Smithsonian has announced that it will start a big fundraising push in 2008 too, and that will likely run to many hundreds of millions of dollars. Fundraising here is about to get really, really competitive. Worried?

Dorothy Kosinski: That's true everywhere. Here in Dallas we have very successfully augmented our endowment and our collection and funded all sorts of projects. The donor pool is very small. It's the same group of people [here] who are building the new opera house, the performing arts center up the road, and who are the donors to the hospital. I think that kind of competition in any kind of city is not new. I won't pretend yet to understand DC and I don't underestimate that it's a very special environment.

I suspect I will not find there the kind of deeply held and personally motivated civic pride that I know here, in a city like Dallas. I'm sure it's a different kind of attitude and different motivations, but I think the good news for the Phillips is that they have a sophisticated group of very dedicated trustees who seem to understand that this is an important moment in the growth of the institution, where it's moving form being very private collection, and kind of moving away from the control of single family to being something with roots in a broader public sphere. I think that they understand their fiduciary fiscal responsibilities in helping to augment a significant endowment so that the institution can function in a sophisticated and responsible way.

MAN: During the last half of the tenure of the director you succeed, the Phillips' collection was was a traveling road show. Please tell us that the collection is home to stay for a while.

Kosinski: I guess they were sending big chunks of it hither and yon during the construction cycle... but yes, they also had, I guess, several touring exhibitions of important aspects of their collection on the road. And I would say that's hardly something that I would aspire to. I can imagine that it was important in terms of promoting the institution to a broader public, and it was also important financially and I don't underestimate the significance of that, but I'd like to go back to what I was talking about a little bit earlier, about wanting to [make] the permanent coll the jumping-off-point for a major touring exhibition. That is, a painting or a group of paintings becomes a seed for a bigger concept and a broader context. That's how many of our great temporary exhibitions emerge so I would embrace that as a model. I think also paintings, or any work of art, suffer from traveling and that's not something that curators and conservators frequently advocate.

MAN: In the last couple years several Washington museums have worked to differentiate themselves and to establish themselves as filling certain niches. What is your Phillips going to be?

Kosinski: Honestly, that's something that I really want to do some serious examining about. Talking about what is our mission with our staff and our trustees. I would venture to say that it seems to me the key is that the Phillips touts itself as the first public museum of modern art in America, and I think there's the key. That and the fact that they've now galvanized around the Center for the Study of Modern Art. It's a museum of the classic era of late 19th, early 20thC. What do we mean by modern art? What was modernism? It's such a rich art historical moment and it is such a compelling historical epic. Duncan Phillips thought internationally. And I just think that to really dig in and, as I was saying before, not allow ourselves to not go for the obvious but have thoughtful exciting maybe a little bit against the grain examinations of what does that mean? What is modernism? Let's think seriously and look deeply at modern art. That might be a clue or a key to sort of galvanizing the meaning of the collection within that broader Washington community of cultural institutions.

And as I said before, Duncan Phillips gives us permission to think about the arts of our time. There's a lot of creative freedom that unfolds within the shadow, or the legacy of Duncan Phillips.

Change in plans: Part two with new Phillips director-to-be Dorothy Kosinski coming on Monday.

Most of the works I've mentioned as favorites have been such for years, a decade or more. Henry Moore's Falling Warrior (1956-57) is a more recent favorite. In fact I don't remember having any clear memory of the sculpture until late 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan. In the six-plus years of non-stop American war that have followed, I have found myself especially drawn to Falling Warrior, which is often on view at the Hirshhorn.

It is, I suppose, a spectacularly ambiguous piece. Moore imbues the work with neither heroism or cowardice, success or failure. There is nothing glorious or ignoble about the 'warrior.' He is simply a fighter -- albeit one without a weapon -- who has fallen. It is a sculpture that demands that the viewer first think of the sadness of death, with no thought of the warrior's circumstance or allegiances. It is completely human, almost innocent.

Moore started working on the concept of a falling warrior in 1952-53. In 1956 and 1957 he made several versions, including this 'Fallen Warrior' maquette at the Tate, which seems to have led to this larger piece (titled "Falling Warrior") at the Liverpool Museum. (Another in the edition is here.)

In a convenient tie-in with what's coming next on MAN: In 2001 Dorothy Kosinski wrote about how a corporate CEO posed with Falling Warrior, perhaps as a symbol of his business 'victories.'

Sylvia Wolf, whose curatorial background is in photography, is the new director of the Henry. Question (to which I don't know the answer): Is Wolf the first photo curator to rise to the helm of a non-photo institution?

A thought on the Philippe de Montebello succession obsession: I'm reminded of something Blaffer director Terrie Sultan told me a year or two back when we were talking about how women ran/run many contemporary art museums: "Look at the men who are in big museums," Sultan said, speaking of MFAH's Peter Marzio, then-AICers Jim Wood and Jim Cuno and de Montebello. "A lot of those real old gray eminences are going to be retiring in a number of years. Then see what happens."

The first thing that happened is when NYTer Randy Kennedy (baselessly?) floated names for PdeM's job, it included... zero women.

Christopher Knight weighs in on the Broad/LACMA plan/situation -- and he is not amused.

In 1973 the New York-based Barker Welfare Foundation loaned a Titian-and-workshop painting, Danae, to the Art Institute of Chicago. It's been on view there pretty much ever since. When I read that LA super-collector Eli Broad was planning to deposit his collection at The Broad Art Foundation (TBAF > BAF) and that he would make the collection widely available for loans (including an open-ended commitment to have 200 or more works on loan to LACMA for the foreseeable future), I thought immediately of that Titian-and-friends painting in Chicago.

I'm not a Chicagoan. I've made many fewer visits to the AIC than I have to, say, Philly or Baltimore or FAMSF. But it seems to me that the Chicago-Barker-Titian arrangement works: The painting has been there for 34 years. Visitors to the museum, whether they're locals or tourists such as me, know it's there and know that they can go see it. Because we've had the opportunity to see it over and over again, over many years, we have the opportunity to find new things on the canvas, to build a relationship with the work, to look forward to seeing it. Because it's been a long-term loan it's become part of the civic fabric of Chicago.

So what I wonder about TBAF's loan plan and LACMA (and, presumably, other museums) is this: Will the TBAF/LACMA/etc. plan/arrangement give Angelenos the opportunity to build relationships with works in TBAF's collection?

Who knows. Certainly if the entire installation at LACMA changes every 6-10 months, no. Relationships with favorite paintings at favorite museums take years and years to happen. I said this on a California NPR station earlier this week: I can't imagine Washington without Bonnard's Open Window. I didn't fall in love with that painting in two visits; I've been seeing it for 15 years. If the TBAF/LACMA rotation doesn't encourage visitors to build similar long-term relationships with great works in TBAF's collection, it won't work. It won't work for the art, it won't work for the artists' legacies, it won't work for LACMA in terms of its ability to build relationships with its community. The same goes for TBAF loans to other museums, be they on Grand Ave., or in East Lansing.

It's hard for a work of art to become iconic and beloved if it's not seen and if it's not seen a lot. This is especially true of contemporary art. (Museums are fantastically shy about anointing anything made since, say, 1970 an 'always-on-view masterpiece.' Name all the pieces made since 1965 or 1970 that are always on view at the Hirshhorn or SFMOMA or MoMA. Ain't many. If any.)

It would be wonderful and special if TBAF makes sure that Los Angeles gets to fall in love with specific works. For me that will be one of the key long-term tests of whether the TBAF loan concept works.

Gordon Bunshaft's Hirshhorn is not a particularly influential building. But there are clear echoes of its modernist fantasy in Zaha Hadid's design for Hong Kong Polytechnic University. [via]

Like a lot of Washingtonians, I think of the Phillips Collection as my hometown museum. It has history: It was America's first museum of modern art. It has a remarkable collection, comfortable spaces in which to view art, and the best kind of old-fashioned feel. Unfortunately, in recent years the Phillips has bombarded us with the endless Impressionist shows that have not much to do with the Phillips' history, and its send-the-collection-on-the-road program has kept Duncan Phillips' treasures away from the people with whom he intended to share them.

Come May 1 the Phillips will have a new director: Dorothy Kosinski, who is currently the senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Dallas Museum of Art. Yesterday Kosinski and I talked about what her Phillips will be. I'll post this in two parts over two days.

MAN: I have this vaguely romantic idea that the Phillips always has been and always should be a temple to Duncan Phillips' vision and collection, that exhibitions should spring forward from the institution's collection. In recent years we Washingtonians have been fed a heavy dose of Impressionist of the Month. But that's just me. What do you think the museum should be?

Kosinski: Thinking about what has transpired in the recent past at the Phillips... there were lots of shows I think that were really important and substantial. T hey collaborated on the Daumier show for example. [Ed: The Daumier retro was at the Phillips in 2000.] The catalogue is staring at me across the room from the shelf in my office. Even given the dreaded 'I word,' the current show they have is a knockout. I was much surprised when I walked through there. It's really strong. It's a very compelling aesthetic experience. So I say that as a cautionary footnote.

But I do think that the story the legacy of Duncan Phillips' collecting is a very complicated narrative. And by no means is it impressionism -- it's largely figures from the 20th century. When you start to really tease out those various threads, it's a very complex tapestry of his tastes. For me, as a modernist, some of those elements I find very tantalizing because they also happen to address parts of the narrative of the history of 20thC art that have been largely neglected everywhere recently. I think that if we follow thoughtfully or carefully the hints that the founder leaves for us, it's a complicated, interesting, and very personal and quirky vision of the arts of the 19thC and first half of the 20thC.

MAN: There's been a recent flight of curators from the Phillips. I'd guess you'll be hiring.

Kosinski: Definitely anticipate adding positions, oh yes, oh yes. The projects of which I'm most proud of as a curator were those where you can very frequently excavate great artists that have been marginalized, or take popular artists or art forms and contextualize and show how much more complete the story is than we normally make it to be. Smart shows. Shows that are driven by concept and authority. I hope we can continue that and make that progress robust.

But I think I heard the message loud and clear form the board: They agreed with me that what's gone to the side too much, too much to the margins, is the fact that Duncan was excited about the art of his times, about conversations with artists and a dialogue-like exchange, and I think that it's really important to look at the collection and think of which artists of our time could help us offer a response to, 'Who are the artists whose works can be included in major exhibitions so as to activate and animate a loud resonance of the collection?' So I want to do work with contemporary artists and show contemporary artwork as part of a progression that highlights artists and works within the collection. Otherwise I think you potentially make the Phillips into something rather more like a mausoleum than a really vital exciting personal and experimental and lively encounter with works of art.

So yes, we'll hire for two positions. One person, I think, has to be a good, well-versed modernist and the other should be someone who is thoughtful and active in the realm of contemporary art.

Tomorrow: The Phillips' place in Washington, and how the Phillips fits into what's about to be a very busy Washington fundraising environment.

First: Unlike certain bloggers and newspapers, I won't be doing 83 posts on the PdeM resignation and I won't speculate on 37 possible replacements. (That's not fair to anyone.) So please don't ask.

Following up on this morning's post, in which I talk about how this weeks' Broad Art Foundation semi-announcement is the beginning of a process, not the end: