April 2008 Archives

Continuing from this morning...

One of the points Tony Judt makes in this New York Review of Books essay is that one reason the U.S. so frequently finds itself forgetting the horrors of war is because we've never been conquered, occupied, or suffered mass civilian casualties the way European nations have. We don't understand the cost of war.

Henry Moore did. This is Moore's 1953-54 Warrior with Shield. I love these Moore Warrior sculptures of figures with shields; I think they're the most human, most affecting work in his oeuvre.

The cost of war is all too apparent here. There are the limbs or lack thereof. That's awfully hard to miss. But my eyes go right to the warrior's ribcage. He's plainly hungry. War has robbed him of nourishment. (I'm certainly not a military historian, but Europe's two world wars decimated agricultural land. And the Soviet influence in eastern Europe had an awful impact on agriculture, especially in Germany.)

The cost of the Iraqi war has largely been hidden from Americans -- in more ways than one. In terms of tax dollars, the war has cost $515 billion. Economists estimate that the total cost of the war to the U.S. will end up north of $1.5 trillion.

Related: 'Mission accomplished' and the lessons of history. Goya.  Manet.

Continuing from this post...

For the French, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was a disaster of the most total sort. The Prussian army strolled through France and laid siege to Paris. As a result, the French government fell, the country lost territory (Alsace-Lorraine) and the Prussian victory effectively enabled the creation of modern Germany.

France's leading painters offered mostly nationalist responses. Ernest Meissonier tried to squeeze triumph out of the siege with his goofy Siege of Paris, a painting so absurd that it rivals 'Mission Accomplished' as a propaganda piece. His student Edouard Detaille painted a few bleak scenes, but not many. This painting at the Musee d'Orsay presents the siege as a relaxing afternoon's entertainment. (And by the 1880s Detaille recovered his tendency toward romanticization.) Today both Meissonier and Detaille are remembered as academic jingoists, as artists who missed the story.

Manet did not. The painting here is 1878's Rue Monsier with Flags from the collection of the Getty Museum. The context of the painting has been well-discussed by T.J. Clark and others (including the Getty's web text): In 1878 France declared a national holiday in an effort to celebrate France's glorious recovery from war. Manet didn't have quite as rosy a view.

You can't miss the one-legged man, likely a war vet, at the left of the painting. The scene is apparently set on that national holiday and Manet juxtaposes the man against one of Baron Haussmann's famously straight Parisian streets. On the right -- on the other side of the street -- are Haussmann's new streetlights and a prosperous family. They all ignore the one-legged man. Manet is reminding us of the cost of war and of France's willful negligence of its warriors.

When I see the Manet I think of the Walter Reed scandal. Just as the wealthy Parisians on the sidewalk look away, our government has tried to ensure we do too.

Related: 'Mission accomplished' and the lessons of history. Goya.

This morning I posted about how artists have remembered war and about how their work should serve to remind us about war too. Don't miss Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books on history, war and memory.

Goya lived through almost non-stop national strife: Both internal civil conflict in Spain and wars with Great Britain and France. Most memorably he lived through the French occupation of Spain. If there was ever an artist well-positioned to understand war it was Goya.

This is Duel with Clubs from the Prado, one of Goya's Black Paintings. Goya presents the slog of conflict as simple and futile. The lesson in the painting is applicable to lots of circumstances, but when I look at it today I think of Iraq: Americans against Iraqis, Sunnis against Shia.

The May 1 New York Review of Books featured a terrific essay by Tony Judt about how history matters, about how all the old axioms about learning from history still apply, about how there's nothing new about the post-1989 world or the post-9/11 world. Judt persuasively argues that in our rush to declare a new world order or to fight a nebulous Global War on Terrorism that we've failed to learn from the past.

Speaking of history: Tomorrow is May 1, the fifth anniversary of President Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Judt never out-and-says-it, but that Sforzian event is the backdrop for his essay. Judt effectively argues that the hubris behind that speech was sadly, uniquely American:

"What, then, is it that we have misplaced in our haste to put the twentieth century behind us? In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war."

Clearly: Over 97 percent of American military deaths in Iraq have come since the 'mission was accomplished.' Even the Bush White House had to admit it blundered (in its own way).

Judt makes lots of connections between Bush Administration hubris and willful historical forgetfulness, but not all of them are relevant to an art blog. This one is:

"[T]he twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist -- praising famous men and celebrating famous victories -- or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities for the recollection of selective suffering."

That is effectively an argument in favor of art and artists, individuals with voices historically louder, stronger, and more piercing than official commemoration memorials-by-commission.  Art museums aren't just aesthetic temples, they are repositories of histories. For hundreds of years artists have been part of our shared human memory, especially of war. (And, as Judt would expect, European artists most of all. Artists were the vanguard of Western anti-war movements: Dada was the West's first anti-war movement.)

Throughout the day I'll be posting examples of art as memory-of-war here on MAN. If other bloggers want to offer up their own examples of such, I'll do a post of links on Monday or Tuesday. I've also opened up the comments for postings of relevant works (only).

• The Carnegie International has its own Flickr stream, complete with behind-the-scenes pix and a sense of humor. [Update: Someone seems to have removed the funniness...]
  
• Digging Pitt has been smartly, methodically previewing the show with a series of posts on CI08 artists.
• Pittsburgh alt-space Mattress Factory has its own blog.
• Curator Douglas Fogle and Pittsburgh-area NPR station WDUQ have recorded a bunch of short videos about the CI and CI08.
  

Continuing from this morning with 2008 Carnegie International curator Douglas Fogle...[Photo at left: Thomas Hirschhorn waiting to happen.]

MAN: So did artists understand your theme, the 'Life on Mars' idea, or did you get some strange looks?

Douglas Fogle: When I mentioned David Bowie, 90 percent of the people laughed, got it, and said, 'Oh my God, I love it.' No one has not liked it actually. A lot of the people who are really into music loved it, they all get it.

I think the best contemporary art takes us to other worlds. It's not a show about extra terrestrials, it's a metaphor. When I discuss the idea around Pittsburgh I have to be extra-clear because the Carnegie has a science center. I always say that the theme was just an interesting way of hooking on to some ideas that could form a bit of structure for the exhibit.

MAN: It's one of those '-ennial' years in America: You and the Carnegie, the Whitney, Lance Fung is doing a show in Santa Fe, Dan Cameron in New Orleans. Given that biennials are whatever they are now, did you feel any need or impetus to re-examine what a biennial was, to re-create?

DF: No, I didn't. The Carnegie International is really different. It has its own character. It's comes along only every 3-4 years, so it's not Documenta, but it's not like the Venice Biennial either. It's also the oldest one other than Venice, and Venice has the Carnegie by only six months. It has a legacy. It's never more than 40 artists. It's a third as many artists as I had in my group shows at the Walker, so each artist gets more room. I feel like the show, because of the ideas behind it, because of how I did the show: It's an exhibition, it's not a survey. [Photo: Pre-Barry McGee.]

It's also like Munster and those kinds of places in the sense that it's very much a show for the city of Pittsburgh and people here get very excited. It's such a part of the history and the legacy of the institution. It was set up as a way for the institution as a way to collect -- that's how they wanted to build the collection, so there are always works bought out of the show and always work by artists you bring in before the show by artists you want to invite.

I don't have anxiety about the form of the biennial, if you want to call it that, because [the CI] doesn't feel like that to me. It feels like a big group show we'd have done at the Walker.

MAN: How is it very much a show for Pittsburgh? How is the city a part of the project?

DF: I'm on the circuit here. The assistant curator on the project and I are out all the time. We do stuff over at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Pittsburgh. And not just about the show, but interacting and doing crits. We're trying to make ourselves part of the community because we are and we love it. I do as many studio visits as I can. I go give talks leading up to the CI around town and try to get people excited. We have had a series of great pieces on the local NPR station.

MAN: Do you know what you're doing next yet? Aren't CI curators expected to leave when the show does?

DF: No, there's no booting out the door. It's more de facto than any kind of written code. People do the show and then people call them. I have no future. Starbucks is always hiring.

The Carnegie International opens this weekend. The curator of the show is Douglas Fogle. For the first time the show comes with a subtitle: "Life on Mars." Today I'll feature a Q&A with Fogle and then I'll have a roundup of Carnegie- and Pittsburgh-centric links. [Photo, with , er, accompanying explanation.]

MAN: What is the origin of the title and, well, why?

Douglas Fogle: It's from David Bowie. "Life on Mars" is on the album Hunky Dory. The show has never had a title -- it's always had the title of 'Carnegie International,' and every show I'd done at the Walker had a title. There was a bit of a contact sport among my colleagues at the Walker with titling shows, and so I wanted to do one here.

For me the Bowie reference is important. I was a big fan as a kid, and he was a big influence on me in terms of art rock and art and rock. I learned a lot about visual art through music.

It was also a chance to post a question before [visitors] get into the show, to prepare you for where you are. The song sort of talks of a world - either a personal world or the world itself - spinning out of control and the protagonist asks if there's life on Mars. It can be read in many ways: It can be hopeful. It can be utopian, or it can be 'can we get out of this place?', which is a darker reading.

When I wrote notes about what this show could be about, I thought of the Pioneer 10 space probe. It's not a show about sci-fi or a space exhibit. I just loved that Carl Sagan and a bunch of scientists had put a plaque on Pioneer 10, a little drawing etched on metal of a man and a woman, a mathematical rendering of our place in the Milky Way galaxy, and a little diagram of the solar system. It's a mini-Lascaux cave for the 20thC and it was strapped on the back of this thing that went up . It did its job, and was slungshot out of the solar system. it was the first object that went literally into interstellar space, the first man-made object to leave the solar system.

And so for me it became this metaphor for this human desire to connect with another person or another world in a way. That was sort of a tip-off point for me thinking about what contemporary art should and could be about. I ended up thinking it should be a show about humanity and have a human quality, that it should be about connections, about the idea of trying to connect with someone else. You don't want artists to be Legos in your argument, but it's helpful for the audience to have a loose way of engaging the show.

MAN: So how does 'humanity' and 'human quality' get into a show? What about the show is those things?

DF: Work being done by hand being emphasized. Unlike with Sol LeWitt - who I love - the art in the show doesn't come from anything like a mathematical formula. It's very much a medieval, Renaissance way of approaching it: Work made by hand or directly onto the wall, that kind of ephemerality. Like with Richard Wright, who's doing a wall-piece. That kind of ephemerality - when you're done with the show, you paint over Richard's piece and it's gone. A month's worth of work by three people: It's there for a moment and then it's gone.

Continued: Part two is here.

Continuing from this morning...

MAN: Do you approach putting these shows together differently because you work at an encyclopedic institution?

Lisa Dorin: That's an important consideration, first for practical reasons - in order to get to our 'Focus' gallery, visitors have to pass through Chinese, Japanese, Asian ceramics and sculpture, and in our own galleries you walk by de Kooning, Mitchell [right], Hesse, Pollock and so on even before you even get to the 'Focus' shows.  Sometimes we try to tailor aspects of our permanent collection to address our 'Focus' shows, but most often we let the shows stand on their own. No matter what we put back there, I can't help think that there is a kind of dialogue between the collection and the shows. When artists come here for a site visit they tend to spend a lot of time with our museum's collection and sometimes choose to incorporate their responses into their 'Focus' shows. I think it's possible for artists to be awestruck or slightly intimidated by the context, especially if they've never been here before. But I think it ends up being a positive experience for them in the end. It maybe a challenge that encourages them to think about their own work differently. As curators, we definitely can't help but think about the encyclopedic context when planning shows, but I don't think we allow it to limit our choices.

MAN: I'm guessing that the institutional considerations that go along with being at an encyclopedic museum rather than a kunsthalle really changes what you can do too.

LD: It impacts it a lot. We have institutional constraints that have to do with the number of people who come through the museum every day, that have to do with museum policies in terms of conservation and safety for objects in the permanent collection that kunsthalles don't have to deal with.

It sounds glib but, our registrars are typically used to working with dead artists, so when an artist invariably makes last minute changes, or when a month before the show opens, the work is still not finished, and they are trying to arrange shipments, it is challenging for them. Another example would be the William Pope.L exhibition [left] we just did. His initial proposal was a peanut butter drawing on the wall of the gallery. It's something he's done in other institutions, but never in an institution such as ours - it's always been more in alternative-spaces or in kunsthalles. This was a challenge that I thought I might be able to overcome, but it turned out we just couldn't do it for a number of reasons: Health and safety was the primary one, people with peanut allergies being in crowded galleries with gallons of exposed peanut butter on the walls. We did not have the ability to completely make the museum safe for all of our visitors, particularly for children.

We couldn't overcome that, and we had to go back to the artist and work with him to find another proposal that we could do. So my job is often that of negotiator between the institution and the artist.

MAN: Do you go out of your way to work with artists engaging the present or the surrounding context of your city, or does that just happen?

LD: I don't know that I seek it out, but it seems to have happened now a couple times, with Jana Gunstheimer and now the next show with Mario Ybarra Jr. opening at the end of May. He's doing a new installation specifically for the 'Focus' show, and it will be engaging directly with the context of Chicago but bringing it back to his home context of Los Angeles, which is a theme in his work. He's making connections between the two cities but, that happened a little bit by accident. I originally invited Mario because I thought we wouldn't have any gallery space as we prepare to move into our new building. He was an artist I knew could be creative about doing a project in a different kind of context, but it turns out we do have gallery space and he's doing a gallery show.

Last week I criticized a Hirshhorn 'Directions' show for being too commercial, for being a Chelsea show masquerading as a museum exhibition. My email lit up, so I decided to talk with the two curators I mentioned in this post. Today: the Art Institute of Chicago's Lisa Dorin.

MAN: Do I have a point, do some of these mini-contemporary shows tend a little bit too much toward the commercial?

Lisa Dorin: I agree with you that museums do have - should have -- the responsibility and the ability to do different kinds of things than what happens in commercial galleries. Ideally, we take advantage of that. I can speak for ourselves and say that our motivation is to try as much as possible to try to do something different than what people are going to see elsewhere, and to understand what our context can provide that other contexts can't. In choosing the artists for each exhibition, that's always in our mind. As long as we do that, I think the process is going to be successful for the artist, for us, and for the viewers too.

MAN: I also griped about the scholarship that is and isn't done with these shows.

LD: With the 'Focus' shows there's always been an accompanying brochure. It's not a catalogue  so there's only so much we can accomplish there - it's a 2,000-word essay. We always do an essay, never just an interview with the artist. We always try to do something that situates the show both within the context of the artist's other work and within the context of contemporary art more broadly.

MAN: Can you talk a little bit about how you go about picking artists for your 'Focus' shows?

LD: Our approach is a mixture of things. In fact, I think one of the most unique things about our 'Focus' shows: We do bring in international emerging artists,  but we also focus on more established artists, specifically, strains of their practice that people might not necessarily be familiar with. My colleague James Rondeau has done an excellent job of this with some of his recent 'Focus' shows including Michael Asher/George Washington, the Mel Bochner 'language' show and our current James Bishop show. [Bochner's 1966 Portrait of Eva Hesse is at left.]

MAN: I think that being at a big museum with a big budget and big obligations changes what a curator can do, how edgy a show can be, etc. Does being big change what you think you can do? Does being encyclopedic change what you can and can't do?

LD: Yes, on both counts. But the 'Focus' shows are the one place in the museum where we can be more experimental and push a little more. The shows are smaller. The budgets are smaller than the other temporary exhibitions we do. In some ways that hems us in, but it also gives us more freedom because we can do things more quickly and less conventionally than the way other shows are done here.

MAN: And sometimes there's a museum-wide theme into which your shows work: The way you did Kasmalieva and Djumaliev during the museum's Silk Road project. [The image above is a still from Kasmalieva and Djumaliev's 2006 A New Silk Road.]

LD: I wouldn't necessarily say I have a program I'm trying to fill. It's rare that there's such  a direct tie-in to the broader museum context. In a case like the Silk Road project, my mandate was to find a contemporary artist from that region. And I chose to find an artist, or artists, whose work engaged critically with the concept of the museum's focus on the region. I think Muratbek and Gulnara's work did exactly that and what we were able to do with that show was give them a chance to make a new work.

Actually, they'd been wanting to do large-scale video installation on the theme of the "New Silk Road" for a long time, and they hadn't had the time or context to do it, so it worked perfectly. Since then I've not had that type of mandate again. We have a theme here this year, American art, and it just happens that the three artists we've shown this year are American: William Pope.L, James Bishop, and Mario Ybarra Jr. But that was an accident, it wouldn't typically have been the case.

Part two is here.

• Painter Paul Wonner died last week. He was 87. Kenneth Baker wrote the Chronicle obituary. I've long been a fan of Wonner's early, Bay Area FigEx work. Wonner was a superb practitioner of a key American style, but his palette differentiated him from David Park, Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, or his partner, Theophilus Brown. Enjoy examples from the collections of SAAM (on view now), the Hirshhorn, and Stanford's Cantor Museum. (Neither of SFMOMA's best Wonners is online. LACMA and MOCA seem not to have one.) This is Wonner's 1959 Still Life with Cup.
  
• Jerry Saltz on the dominant mode of current NYC art: Scattertrash.
• The Chicago Tribune's Alan Artner Q&As new MCA Chicago director Madeleine Grynsztejn.
• In the Village Voice, Martha Schwendener has a contrarian POV on Paul Chan.
• The MFA Boston is opening its Fens-side entrance in anticipation of closing its Pei entrance, thus restoring the Guy Lowell-designed flow through the museum, says the Globe's Geoff Edgers. Phew.
  
• The Stranger's Jen Graves finds that the Henry is providing art's window on current events.
• The Kansas City Star's Alice Thorson says that Anne Austin Pearce is KC's hot young artist to watch.
• Peter Schjeldahl wants to vote for Olafur Eliasson for an 'office' that should totally exist. (It would, for one, spare us Party Animals, et al.)
  
• Jori Finkel's NYT piece on fascinating fabricator Peter Carlson manages to leave out the newsiest part of the Carlson story: This lawsuit over the OldenBruggen Disney Hall 'bowtie.'
  

1.) Am I the only one who finds it a little bit amusing that in the space of about six months the Met will feature both Courbet and Morandi shows? Talk about opposite ends of the spectrum...

2.) Speaking of the Met, yesterday it distributed a 2008-09 advance exhibitions list. Carol Vogel mentioned this fall 2008 show this morning: "The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions" and asked, "Will Mr. de Montebello, whose mellifluous narration on the audio guides has become synonymous with the Met, tape a grand finale guide for this show?" Funny, when I think of art I don't first think of the audio guide.

I'm more interested in January 2009's "Pierre Bonnard: Still Life and the Late Interiors." The show will feature paintings mostly from Le Cannet between 1923 and 1947. Question: Are Bonnard's final 'bathtub paintings' of his late wife Marthe "still-lifes?" (Tip to Carnegie-goers: The CMOA has one of the best of the bunch.)

3.) I wish I understood why certain artists lodge in my brain at particular times. Lately it's Titian, and not just because Richard Lacayo had a post on late Titian yesterday. Maybe it's the mostly-Titian gallery at the NGA, which I think is one of the best rooms in America. I've been there about once a week for the last couple months. I think it's because the contemporary echoes in some of those paintings. Especially these two. (More on this on MAN over the summer.) A couple of years ago this Titian reminded me of something that was then in-the-news.

4.) I'm not sure why this story died down so fast, at least in the English-language media.

5.) Next week is Q&A week on MAN. I'll have curators Lisa Dorin from the Art Institute of Chicago and Anne Ellegood from the Hirshhorn talking about museo-mini-shows of contemporary art, CMOA curator Douglas Fogle on his Carnegie International, and a TBD guest on Chinati's Judd writing symposium.

• Greg Allen posts the codicil to John de Menil's will, which is unexpectedly interesting.
• Vote for your favorite Indianapolis Museum of Art t-shirt slogan.
• The Hirshhorn has a new website. The collection search tool ain't pretty, but its functionality is impressive. Try it.
• Dada meets UbuWeb. Literally.
• This is the lamest rubric imaginable. Context matters -- and that's OK.

I'm not sure why more museums that deaccession don't find a way to do this (I'm lookin' north toward Buffalo as I type), but the Philadelphia Museum of Art has deaccessioned some more Eakins in order to pay for its share of The Gross Clinic. The buyers: the Denver Art Museum and King Tut presenter Philip Anschutz.

Continuing from earlier today...

The first English-language mention of Juan Sanchez Cotan about which I know is in Sir William Stirling Maxwell's 1891 "Annals of the Artists of Spain" (the relevant volume of which is free to read or download here). Maxwell doesn't suggest how many Sanchez Cotan oil paintings are extant, but he gives a fine list of paintings and commissions the artist made for other monks and for monasteries. Maxwell also describes this Sanchez Cotan, now at the Prado.

The other American Sanchez Cotan still-life is at the Art Institute of Chicago. With its sweeping diagonal, it's as dramatic as the San Diego painting is subtle.

The AIC painting (above), which is obviously closely related to the San Diego painting, features the same tilted window-ledge-type-space as other Sanchez Cotan still-lifes. I'm hardly a Spanish art scholar, but I don't know of any similar construct in Spanish painting prior to Sanchez Cotan. (Similar spaces surface in later Spanish painting, perhaps most notably in Murillo.)

Finally, the other really terrific thing about the San Diego painting is its op-ish effect. The light source in the painting seems to be somewhere behind the still-life objects, back in the inky blackness. (Maybe the light source is the apple in the upper-left of the painting.) When you stand in front of the painting, it's almost like you can see the protruding cucumber from two different sides. (I can't 'find' it via JPEG.) I think that's because the brain is trying to rationalize the shadows, but maybe it's something else. It all makes for a mesmerizing painting. If you're in Boston the Cotan alone is almost worth the price of admission. (Which is -- gasp -- $23. Or $26.50 if you book online.)

Related: Reader JS suggests an essay by Siri Hustvedt in Mysteries of the Rectangle, which discusses Cotan. You can buy the book here, or if you search on "Cotan" you should be able to read the essay here.

Several years ago I was preparing for my first post-childhood trip to San Diego when a friend of mine emailed me a tip: Don't miss the Juan Sanchez Cotan still-life at the San Diego Museum of Art (c. 1600, at left). I took note, but thought to myself, 'San Diego has arguably the best Goya portrait in America. I'll look at this other thing, but I really want to see that Goya.'

I had never heard of Juan Sanchez Cotan. I mean, come on: Spain's golden age didn't have the bench that say, the Dutch golden age did.  So Juan Sanchez Cotan? Then I went and saw the painting and I've been thinking about it ever since. Apparently Time's Richard Lacayo has too: He's mentioned it twice in a week, including ending his review of the MFA Boston's El Greco to Velazquez, Spanish Art in the Age of Philip III with it. (The painting is in the show.)

We don't know much about Sanchez Cotan. He was from Toledo, and he was active at the turn-of-the-17th-century. Spanish art scholar extraordinaire Jonathan Brown reports that Sanchez Cotan was likely a student of Toledan painter Blas de Prado, a man who was "a rather ordinary figure painter whose still lifes made a great impact on his contemporaries, although none is known today." That makes Sanchez Cotan, who may have been his pupil, the first Spanish still-life painter whose paintings we've seen. They're jawdroppers. I believe that only seven Sanchez Cotans are known to exist; either three or four years after making the San Diego still-life Sanchez Cotan entered the Carthusian order and pretty much stopped painting still-lifes. More on him later today, including a look at the other Sanchez Cotan in an American collection.

Last year I saw several shows about the use of text in contemporary art. Perhaps Independence, Missouri high school senior Amy Burrow did too, because she mixes a little Sam Durant with a little Carl Pope... Bottom line: Cool piece. More here.

Yesterday I said that museum blogs should focus more on their communities and less on the art world, that they should seek to engage non-art-bloggers and others in their towns. Some more things for art museum-affiliated bloggers to keep in mind...

Get curators, conservators, etc. to contribute. I've written before about how museums, particularly contemporary museums, allow curators, etc. to hide inside drywalled ivory towers. With almost no exceptions, art museums do not expect their curators to interact with the public, to explain themselves, to engage in dialogue with anyone but, well, other curators. A museum's top art people shouldn't just be engaging with their peers and with artists, they should be engaging with the museum's public. Museo-blogs are a good medium for that. (I phrased that in art-speak just so museum administrators would understand my dialogue. And yes, I just said 'dialogue' twice. I'm trying to fit in.) Brooklyn has done a nice job of this.

Follow the well-established blog 'rules.' Post at least once a day. Link to other blogs (especially those in your area) frequently. Use pictures.

Write with verve. Institutions are, by nature, suppressive. The staffer on one museo-blog has this at the end of her bio: "The opinions of this writer do not necessarily reflect the mood, opinion, or authority of XX." Uh, that's a recipe for failure.

Recognize that it takes a while to build audience.

Try things that might fail.

Most importantly: Write about art. I like institutions. I'm interested in institutions. But art museums are about art (and sometimes architecture). If you are an art museum blog, write about art and arts issues in your community. Look at the blogs in yesterday's post. How many of them have posts about actual art in their top half-dozen posts? Not enough.

At right is the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA.

Well, kinda. It's BCAM as seen by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, which wrote up BCAM (kinda) for both the CLUI spring newsletter and "BCAM/LACMA/2008." The link is free; the publication costs $44. (Not kinda.)

In case you haven't figured it out by now, this is the Italian quarry from which the external skin of BCAM was taken. CLUI's write-up also reveals the sources for the concrete in BCAM's floors and parking garage, the silica for the glass, the gypsum for the wallboards, and the steel for the steel beams.

Speaking of CLUI, look for a 'CLUI in Houston' show at the University of Houston's Blaffer Gallery next year.

Looking for art blogs in Ohio, Michigan, upstate New York, Toronto, Wisconsin and western Pennsylvania. (Yes, it's a bad geographical construct. I'll change it if there are enough blogs in any particular place.) Please leave them in the comments.

Since Timothy Buckwalter tipped me off, I've been keeping an eye on the nascent SFMOMA blog. On Saturday morning I noticed this post, which included this phrase:

Inside (staff) and around (the nonstaff public) an institution like SFMOMA is a collection of individuals trying to make a go of understanding how art can be or is effective in the world, and trying to further its agency.

"Further its agency?" That sounds like a job requirement for an EPA spokesperson. It's a jargony museum-world phrase that a doesn't belong on a blog intended for general-audience consumption. While that phrase gives me the opportunity to make a joke, it also has focused me on writing about museum blogs. First up: Audience.

The museum blog is a relatively recent creature, an attempt by museums to communicate directly with their communities. Among the museums that blog are the Pulitzer/StL Contemporary, the Henry, the Walker, the Wexner, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, MAMFW, the Amon Carter, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins. NYC's Creative Time blogs too.

I enjoy the overwhelming majority of them. That's not a surprise. I'm their ideal audience: A web-aware, art-loving, institution-approving, hetero-WASP-atheist.

But that's also the first problem I see with most museo-blogs. They tend to think my ilk is their audience when their audience ought to merely start with me, and grow outward from there. Museo-bloggers should be a part of their communities, not just a part of their art communities. Or, to put that in museo-terms: Museo-blogs should be in dialogue with the dominant local paradigms, which in most cases are external to the cultural edifice. (How was that?)

So while I love that many museo-bloggers read MAN and link here, it's more important for them to read and participate in the biggest blogs in their communities, to build relationships with Metblogs, -ists, and wherever people in their towns go to find out about what there is to find out. After all, museo-blogs should have an advantage: They have the best blogger happy hour venues in town.

• Good line from Kenneth Baker on Rufus Corp.'s/Eve Sussman's latest: "[I]t seems drawn out and more enjoyable to recall than to watch."
• Christopher Knight on Anselm Kiefer: Is he a pre-modernist? Is he the resurrection of a prior artistic model?
• Roberta Smith on small big abstraction. Roberta Smith on artists going from small to big (galleries). Ed Winkleman replies.
• Dan Flavin comes full circle in St. Louis, and David Bonetti is so awed that he suggests you stop reading him and go see the show at the Pulitzer. Or see the online exhibit (borrowed pic at right), which is awesome.
  
• There's a whole genre of non-fiction books that focuses on what-if: What if Hitler had been assassinated?, etc. (Websites too.) And art: Ben Davis (whose day-job left him editing Charlie Finch's paean to their boss) reviews Josh Azzarella at DCKT in the Village Voice.

This is both unfortunate and hilarious. Given the Official MAN Nickname for the museo-ethics-deriding director of the MFA, this is merely the latter. (Regardless, the related exhibition could be a highlight of the summer.)

I closed out yesterday's Amy Sillman-at-the-Hirshhorn post by objecting to the increasing museo-trend of dropping commercial gallery shows into their galleries. Picking up from that post...

While the Hirshhorn's Amy Sillman is a perfect example of this trend, I don't mean to pick on the Hirshhorn. SFMOMA, MAMFW, MOCA, St. Louis, and other museums all do these small one-artist shows, brand them as 'Focus' shows, 'Projects' shows, 'Directions,' or what have you. I think it's time for art museums to consider whether they're presenting something up to the standards of the rest of their exhibitions program, or if they're not. And with occasional exceptions, they're not.

These small, immediate exhibitions have special merit when an artist and a museum can work together to present something in an institutional setting that would not have been possible in a commercial setting. I don't particularly respond to Jim Lambie's work and I thought his Hirshhorn 'Directions' show was numbingly decorative, but that was a good example of the proper use of the rubric: The Hirshhorn and Lambie (right) worked with an unusual, architecturally specific space (the gateway-to-utopia Bunshaftian fantasy that is the Hirshhorn lobby) to present a unique project, something that was not possible elsewhere. (The Lambie show also indirectly made the argument that the Hirshhorn should restore their entrance lobby to the condition Bunshaft intended, without a store in the middle of it.)

I admire the way the Art Institute of Chicago uses their 'Focus' program. Last year, while the AIC was in the midst of a series of exhibitions and other programs focusing on the Silk Road, the museum presented the work of Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, two artists whose work fits perfectly into the museum's focus on the Silk Road. (The artists show with Ed Winkleman. Ed is a blogger and a friend.)

I also liked what the AIC did with its Jana Gunstheimer 'Focus' show: It provided American audiences with the artist's first American exhibition. (That's another way in which these shows can transcend the typical: In best-case scenarios, institutions give their curators the freedom to discover.) Gunstheimer's show also specifically addressed Chicago. Both exhibitions were curated by the AIC's Lisa Dorin.

But too often museums simply present mini-commercial shows by commercially popular, even familiar artists, and then present the work in a way that fails to add context or depth. MAMFW's recent Joshua Mosley 'Focus' presentation didn't attempt to contextualize Mosley in any particular way, nor was there any notable scholarship affiliated with the show. (Again: How could there be?)

Understandably, when I raise this point with curators they typically respond, 'But Culver City galleries aren't in My Town. I'm bringing this artist to my audience.' And that's true. But if the artist is good enough or important enough to bring to their audience, they should do it in a more thorough, more museum-like way. If the museum can't bring some of the museum and its role to the exhibit, it shouldn't do the show. [Lambie photo. Gunstheimer photo.]

Related: Dorin talks with Gunstheimer on a Bad at Sports podcast. Art or Idiocy and James Wagner on Gunstheimer.

• The Stranger's Jen Graves is trying to figure out the Vogels' gift to the Seattle Art Museum. Sounds like SAM is hoping to have it figured out too. The Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers wasn't thrilled with the way the MFAB HUAM gift went down. [Ed: Sorry about that.]
  
• Also from Graves: Exhibition migrates directly from art fair to art museum.
  
• Also from Graves (geez!): The Gugg/SAM is taking this 'exhibition copy' thing about six steps too far.
  
• Like the rest of us, Kriston Capps is trying to figure out the weirdness surrounding Goya's El Coloso. He sees politics.
• When we are dead, cyan will represent us.

Last week the NYT published this web-only Ahmad Fadam dispatch about art in Iraq. Don't miss it. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Also: Earlier this week Michael Kimmelman contributed a strong feature story about culture and the presidency in France.

Amy Sillman is one of the most interesting painters in America, but there are problems with the Hirshhorn show.

First: the Hirshhorn's one-room installation. Within the gallery are 13 oil paintings and 12 works on paper. The works on paper are installed on a temporary wall that blocks the viewer from entering the gallery until s/he has looked seen the drawings. The 13 oil paintings crowd each other on the walls and in space, making it difficult to focus on any one painting without seeing bleed from the painting on either side. Many commercial galleries install art better than this.

Which brings me to the bigger problem with the Hirshhorn show: At a time when art museums should be emphasizing the differences between institutions and commercial galleries, Sillman at the Hirshhorn is Sikkema Jenkins 2.0. All of the work is from 2007 and 2008. The museum does not place the artist in any kind of context, not within her own 25-year body of work, not within the work of her contemporaries, and not with her historical antecedents.

The Hirshhorn exhibition is a commercial-gallery sales opportunity dropped into a museum. This is especially a problem for contemporary museums that show the most recent art; try as curators might, there is no amount of jargon that can historicize work made a month or two ago. (The Hirshhorn and the Tang, where this show goes next, certainly tried. The Tang published a catalogue that is impenetrable even by the falling standards of its type.)

Next: A common museo-rubric and its problems. Previously: Amy Sillman part one, two, critical response.

• Uh, ya think Renzo Piano has seen some Martin Puryear? (The closest image is an untitled 1997 work that Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro have promised to MoMA. Couldn't find an image to link to though.)
  
• Greg Allen has more on NuMu-featured painter Tomma Abts. (Me: Monday.)
  
• Mark Dion is traveling in the footsteps of Philadelphians John & William Bartram.
• Got podcasts for MAN's blogroll?
• British artist Steve McQueen remembers war with postage stamps... that could actually be postage stamps.
• Jerry Saltz offers up the NYC art canon of the last 40 years. OK... but the first piece was made in Los Angeles, and the last piece is by an artist whose aesthetic was substantially borrowed from an Angeleno. Unrelated (because I realize that Saltz writes for New York magazine, thus it's natural for his piece to focus on NY): I love NYC, but NYCers should be over their self-perceived import, their belief that their centrality is so all-consuming that 'their' city can or should exclude all else.
  
• Edward Winkleman spotlights a story that discusses usually undiscussed issues related to museum acquisitions of contemporary art. [Abts photo.]
  

Amy Sillman is a New York painter, an artist who is as much a New Yorker as, say, Lari Pittman is an Angeleno. Sillman's first six American solo shows were in New York, and she didn't have her first non-NYC show until 2002, when she was 47. (Pittman's first nine shows were in southern California, and he didn't have his first exhibition away from home until he was 42.)

How 'New York' is Sillman? Her commercial gallery shows have been reviewed by the following New York Times critics: Roberta Smith (1994, 2000), Michael Kimmelman (1996), Grace Glueck (2003) and Ken Johnson (2006). Jerry Saltz wrote a super piece about Sillman's last Sikkema Jenkins show for the Voice.  (That review was included in the package that made Saltz a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the second time.) Eight years earlier Peter Schjeldahl declared himself a fan too. Also worth reading: Carolyn Zick on a Sillman artist's book at PS1.

Meanwhile, the critical reception to Sillman here in Washington has been, well, shocked: Michael O'Sullivan's bizarre review in the Washington Post's weekend pull-out has been derided. I wasn't a fan either. (The Post's primary critic, Blake Gopnik, hasn't reviewed the show, and our alt-weekly hasn't given it a full write-up either. Quite oft DC seems to be unsure of what to do with post-color-field painting.) I like Matthew Mann's observation about Sillman's next-door neighbor. Artcade heard politics in Sillman's Hirsh Q&A with two curators.

Related: Sillman week on MAN: Part one, two, three. The Sillman above is P (2007).

Picking up from yesterday (part three here)...

Amy Sillman layers paint over layers of paint the way Richard Diebenkorn did. Sometimes she loads up her brush like Park, Bischoff or other Bay Area School types. She shmears wet paint across a canvas like Gerhard Richter. Sometimes she dabs it on almost tentatively, as Guston did in his great Turneresque abstractions.

Then there are the compositions themselves. Her diagonals reject a painter's tendency to grid, the same way Diebenkorn's did circa Ocean Park. This one recalls Lee Bontecou's delicate, small hanging sculptures from 1967. A green, red and gray section on the right-hand side of I (2008, below) seems informed by those atmospheric Gustons. The vaguely cartoony shapes in several of the paintings here (including this one) abstract Carroll Dunham's body parts. And Sillman's stitching together of seemingly disparate swatches of sometimes garish color and pattern recall 1980s David Hockney. Sillman's rejection of a traditional, harmonious, palette reminds me of of abstraction from about that period, including Howard Hodgkin, Jonathan Lasker and Thomas Nozkowski.

There are no shortage of sources in Sillman's paintings. While many abstract artists love to hide the quarries they mined -- such as how Clyfford Still spent decades denying and hiding the influence of landscape on his art -- Sillman flaunts hers. Like many painters who came of artistic age in the 1980s (Sillman first showed her paintings in NYC in 1982), Sillman has grappled with the history of American post-war abstraction. Instead of running away from it, she's cleverly chosen bits and pieces to embrace and incorporate. (The painters she's rejected stand out just as loudly: Her paintings include none of David Reed's finish, Joan Mitchell's free-fall, or Still's disdain for brushiness.)

What you think of Sillman's paintings probably depends on whether you think that riffing on abstraction, incorporating different strains of it, challenging it, and mixing it up is a worthwhile pursuit, or if abstract painting was good enough the first time or two (or three). I think Sillman's paintings make a strong case that abstract art is still fertile ground for painters today. They're exciting, hopeful.

The Hirshhorn show, curated by the Hirsh's Anne Ellegood and the Tang's Ian Berry, shows 11 Sillman oil paintings from 2007 and 2008, along with 12 ink-on-paper drawings (all from 2007). The show's set-up is straightforward: Sillman started with a dozen drawings of friends and abstracted them into paintings. The Hirshhorn almost bludgeons visitors with this point: The museum built a temporary wall just inside the entrance to the gallery that holds Sillman's paintings; A viewer can't avoid seeing the works on paper before advancing 'inside' to see the oil paintings.

The point of the exercise is to reinforce the archeology of Sillman's paintings: Look! They're rooted in figures! That's fine. But I'm much more interested in the other roots.

Yesterday MAN published an email from Smithsonian acting secretary Cristian Samper foretelling this Washington Post story about the resignation of the head of the Smithsonian Latino Center. If you thought Lawrence Munitz was a handful, wait until you read that Post story. The whole story.

The early leader for the 2008 Art History Mystery of the Year: Is this a Goya?

We're not just talking about any Goya, we're talking about Goya's famed, even legendary war painting El Coloso, The Colossus. At least I think we are -- The Independent (UK) story quoted above is a bit puzzling. It says that Prado officials have made a determination that El Coloso is not a Goya, and that the Prado has come to this conclusion without cleaning the painting to look for evidence that might support a Goya attribution. Prado officials aren't really confirming or denying anything until they can publish something authoritative. (Which is a fine idea, but why didn't they publish before a show titled "Goya in Times of War?" The exhibition opened today.)

FWIW: Goya's most recent biographer, Robert Hughes, presents the painting as absotively a Goya. Even though the painting's authenticity has been questioned for years, Hughes didn't raise even the possibility that it might not be a Goya.

Related: The most recent Google-discovered Spanish story on the story. (I ran it through Google Translate and, well, don't.)

First, thanks to the MAN readers who have shared their favorite sites. The blogroll is wonderfully helpful to me. Next up: Podcasts. Leave 'em in the comments...

The disorienting thing about Amy Sillman's paintings is that I think I've seen them before. Or at least parts of them. Aren't those reds and blues straight out of an early Philip Guston? Cubist, abstract Picassos are full of tall, dominant right angle constructions like the one in Sillman's L (2007, at left). And what about the way that bright orange pushes through a cool blue square there in the middle of the painting? That's right out of Alma Thomas' Evening Glow. (It's hard to see on a JPEG, but I provided a detail after the jump anyway.)

Sillman's paintings, a recent series of which is on view now at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, are rooted in the vocabulary and the history of abstract art. What makes them terrific is despite all the quotations from the past, they never look like anything but Amy Sillmans. New York-based Sillman's use of abstract art history is something like the relationship between Goya's hunting portrait of Carlos IV and Titian's portrait of Charles V: You recognize the source of the quotation enough to enjoy remembering the speaker, but no one would mistake the Goya for the Titian.

Sillman's paintings are so engrossing that they rise above the Hirshhorn exhibition's commercial gallery-like focus, cramped installation and its unnecessarily archaeological presentation. More on all of this throughout the week: Part two. Part three.

An email that acting Smithsonian secretary Cristian Samper sent to Smithsonian staff this morning indicates that the Smithsonian is bracing for another bit of bad news. (Read Samper's email by clicking below.)

UPDATE, 4/15/08: Here it is.

• Best read of the weekend: LATer Christopher Hawthorne on architecture's renewed "fascination with impermanence."
• Ken Johnson does a nice job with Tomma Abts at the New Museum -- but he fails to point out Abts' two clearest art historical ancestors: John McLaughlin and Jay DeFeo.
• David Bonetti goes back in time (without leaving StL) to muse on the history of the museum.
• So wait, the Seattle Art Museum is accepting a gift of 50 artworks but only knows what four of them are?!? Jen Graves (who has, in the past, noted, uh, oddities in SAM's collection-related practices) has an eyebrow raised...
• The Washington Post's Blake Gopnik profiles two of the nicest guys I know: Art-making twins Joe and John Dumbacher.
• The Denver Post's Kyle MacMillan wonders why the world needs another frickin' biennial (snooze), but hopes that Denver's succeeds? (Why? If it fails maybe something more innovative will come along.)
• The DMN's Michael Granberry on how Philip Haas came to make a film about the Kimbell's Annibale Carracci (above).
• In Obit magazine, Phyllis Tuchman tells the story of the Getty's new Gauguin.
  
• The LAT's Suzanne Muchnic says that LACMA is removing two outdoor sculptures, a Koons and a Ray, because their SPF wasn't high enough and because they were too popular with handsy visitors.
• The Baltimore Sun's Glenn McNatt discovers the Catholic Church's relationship with a Baltimore artist.
  

• SFMOMA acquires a major 1958 David Park painting... and shows it off with an image half as big as my thumb. Also: SFMOMA's other Parks.
  
• Some very cool Flickr-based postcards from/for the Walker Art Center. [via]
  
• Nelson-Atkins to MoMA: We see your helicopter and raise you ours.
• Dietrich Neumann discusses this book at the Hirshhorn this weekend, which makes sense given that seemingly every building in this town is lit-up at night. (Some of the pols too!) ArtCal Zine has more from NYC.
  

This is my last post on the Amon Carter Museum's Intimate Modernism show.

Cynthia Brants was the star of the exhibition. Represented by two paintings in the very last gallery of the show (and a print), Brants' mix of color and post-cubist abstraction deserves more curatorial attention -- and not just in Texas. (At left is The Centaur from 1953.)

It's no surprise that lots of American modernists took cubism as a jumping-off point. Wanda Corn notes in The Great American Thing that one of the primary challenges to American modernists was how to Americanize European developments, a topic on which I've touched in the last couple weeks.

For the first cubists, cubism was mostly static painting. Braque and Picasso painted all those still-lifes. Picasso and Gris (and others) painted portraits. Braque and Metzinger (and plenty of others) painted cubist landscapes. Everything held still. Brants' work, especially Cocktail Party (1947) takes cubism and adds movement, social interaction, figures in conversation or in relation to each other. By The Centaur, movement seems to have taken over.

Brants' Cocktail Party also recalls David Park's compositions from the same years. Paintings by both feature vertical, space-filling figures, some are right up against the picture-plane, some recede into the background, bright colors.

Related: A little more on Brants.

1.) The Art Gallery of Ontario is building a Frank Gehry-designed expansion. They're almost done. While most museums would come up with an 'opening on' date and promote the heck out of it, here's how the AGO is doing it: "We haven't set the reopening date yet but are aiming for Fall 2008." That's all. (The Maple Leafs are aiming for Fall 2008 too.) Also: Take a look at the construction webcams.

2.) If I were a contemporary art museum director and if I'd just read two weeks of posts about how curatorial writing about contemporary art is an embarrassment to the profession (which it is), I think I'd give potential hires a writing test. If contemporary curators can't effectively communicate their passion for work to their audiences, then don't hire them. (If applied retroactively, the ranks of contemporary curators would be thinned by two-thirds.) I'd ban wall text too. See here.

3.) And then I'd give curatorial job applicants another test: I'd make them do an installation in my museum to see how they put art on the walls. I can't believe how many contemporary installations are as awful as they are. Most commercial galleries install contemporary art better than most museums.

4.) Why isn't this an issue for someone, somewhere: What is the biggest American museum run by a gay man? And how many museums are run by gay men? Having worked in the social justice field for a number of years, I know that there a certain generation of gay men is sadly substantially missing. But still...

5.) I'm looking forward to the Carnegie International (in three weeks), but its website is, uh, well, er....

• Dallas PBS station KERA talks with Dave Hickey about the 'Intimate Modernism' show I've been discussing. (GoogleGlitch: The video appears to conk out at the 13-minute mark, but it will keep playing.)
• LOLcats meet contemporary art and hilarity ensues. (My favorite.) [via]
• Robert Morris recently gave a talk at the New School. Harry Swartz-Turfle attended, chronicles, and shares his first reaction to the variety in Morris' work: "It was as if McDonald's made automobiles."
• Credibility: G'bye!

How widespread is this?: I've noticed several recent news stories about how federal lawmakers are securing earmarks for art museums in their districts:

• The Allentown (Pa.) Art Museum picked up $245,000 for an expansion, reports the Reading Eagle's Jason Brudereckhg.
• The Houston Chronicle's Bennett Roth and Patrick Brendel note that a joint project of the MFA Houston and the Pearl Fincher Art Museum (in the Houston exurbs) is in line for $98,000.
• The Wilmington (Del.) Journal's Nicole Gaudiano reports that Winterthur could receive $120,000 for an electron microscope.
• The David Chipperfield-designed Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa scored $300,000, says the Des Moines Register's Jane Norman.

So how common is the practice of art museums pursuing (and receiving) federal earmarks? I searched Citizens Against Government Waste's quickie online database and saw projects for the Des Moines Art Center, the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa., the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Calif., the Bellevue (Wash.) Arts Museum, the Samuel Dorsky Art Museum at SUNY New Paltz, the Everson Museum at Syracuse Univ., the Heckscher Museum, the Heard Museum, the Huntsville (Ala.) Museum of Art, and dozens of projects for science and history museums. (Not to mention the Kansas Regional Prisons Museum. Yes, really.) [photo]

Last month I talked with Art Institute of Chicago director James Cuno about his new book, Who Owns Antiquity?, an attempt to reposition the antiquities debate in light of the arrangements museums such as the Getty, the Met and the MFA Boston have made with the Italian government.

Time's Richard Lacayo and Cuno recently talked about the nuts-and-bolts of Cuno's take on antiquities, which is simultaneously contrarian and traditional. (And, to many museum directors, out-on-a-limb. A source tells me that Cuno is not involved in drafting the Association of Art Museum Directors' revised position on antiquities.) I started my chat with Cuno explaining that as a Washingtonian, I wanted to talk less about his argument, and more about how each museum director is effectively acting as an ambassador from his museum.

MAN: Who do you hope is the audience for this book? Museum trustees? Your colleagues in the directors chairs of art museums? United Nations or government leaders and politicians both here and abroad? Or future generations?

James Cuno: I certainly wrote it for people who are interested in this issue, and these people include some or everyone you mentioned and some of the archeology community. And for the press, of course. That's sort of a narrowish band and I suppose I wrote it for people at universities and faculty and students there. I have no way of knowing this will be the case, but I hope that people in government will read it. I doubt that any foreign government will read it unless they want to feel slighted by what I say. I would hope that people in our government would read it because I think they have a role to play in all this.

MAN: You mention government officials. I've heard from several US museum directors that this whole situation would be easier if the US government was more involved. Do you wish that we had a more European-style cultural set-up at the highest levels of our government?

Cuno: As far as I know culture isn't dealt with the same way in all of Europe, of course. What is similar among all of them is that they have a minister of culture and we don't have that here. We have a terrifically decent system which works to our advantage most of the time, I think, but which works against our advantage when we have to talk to politicians because there's no one with whom to talk policy. There's no one who takes a leadership position within govt in these matters: Not in Congress, just the State Department.

It would be nice if [museums] did have someone who was designated as the person with whom we would speak [on antiquities issues], but I don't think even the NEA or NEH chairs for that matter have taken this position. It's a little hard without someone with whom to speak.

MAN: If there were to be a point person on these issues, who would it be? Where would it be?

Cuno: I think it has to be at State. These decisions [on antiquities] that are made have to be made in the context of diplomatic relations that, for the most part, happen at the State Department. Sometimes they're tinged with military relations or economic relations, but they're certainly about the relations between countries. There just ought to be someone with whom [museums] could speak... Congress drafted legislation in 1983 that was signed by the president that created the system that we have, so maybe an oversight committee in Congress should be involved.

• Tonight Michael Auping and Martin Puryear will talk at MAMFW. Last year I spotlighted the publication Auping's book of Q&As (a must-own at 60% off) by publishing this exchange between curator and artist. Watch for it here.
  
• Is an Australian Van Gogh really an Australian Rubens?
• Richard Lacayo digs Robert Adams. (Me too.) May I also suggest Joe Deal?
• David Hockney on the responsibility artists have to institutions. [via]
• The website for MoMA's Color Chart show is worth a look.
  

I've written about how the Amon Carter's 'Intimate Modernism' provides an opportunity to consider American modernism within the context of 20thC American history. Here's a painting in which art and progressivism come together.

In 1945 Dickson Reeder made this painting, Conversation Piece.

At the time, Fort Worth was a segregated, semi-Southern city. As in most other Southern cities there were separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites, and blacks were made to sit in the back of the bus. Lunch counters were segregated. Schools were segregated and would remain so until 1962-63, a change forced only after the NAACP won a lawsuit it filed in 1959.

Racial hatred had deep roots in north Texas. In the 1920s Dallas had the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter in the US, with Fort Worth's close behind. The Klan was so widely accepted in Fort Worth that the big annual livestock show featured a 'Klan Day.'

So how was it that Reeder was able to paint Conversation Piece, a painting of innocence and friendship complete with children-holding-hands paper-cutout, nine years before Brown and 18 years before the Children's Crusade in Birmingham? Was there a backlash against the image in Fort Worth or discussion of the painting among Reeder's circle or anyone else? The show's catalogue doesn't spend any time on the socio-cultural questions the painting raises.

Not only did Reeder paint his son playing with a girl believed to be the daughter of the family's maid, he focuses the viewer on the little girl. She is more richly painted, and the comics pages on the wall behind her serve to push her toward the viewer. The painting revolves around her.

And why did Reeder make Conversation Piece? (Is the title a hint?) The catalogue does not suggest that Reeder was updating Manet's Olympia Texas-style, but that seems likely, right down to the color of the girl's head-scarf and the inclusion of a cat. According to the Reeder bio in the catalogue, Reeder was an eager portraitist of distinguished Fort Worthers. Apparently he didn't worry that Conversation Piece might cost him portrait commissions?

Related: Intimate Modernism at the Amon Carter part one, two, three, four.

The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten has won the feature reporting Pulitzer Prize for a story mocking Washingtonians for failing to recognize classical violinist Joshua Bell as he played in the city's acoustically challenged subway. The story was 'gotcha' tripe of the silliest sort. As I noted a day later, papers that live in