May 2008 Archives

I'm taking the rest of the week off. Back on Monday with some thoughts on self-portraits and on Aaron Douglas at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Over the weekend the most recent Archives of American Art Journal arrived in the mail. It's full of interesting write-ups from critics and academicians who have used the Archives' resources to tell some stories about American art in the 1960s.

Of special interest given the discussion of Robert Rauschenberg here last week is Jonathan Katz's essay on Johns' Watchman (scroll right for image), Rauschenberg and how their relationship impacted their work. Titia Hulst's write-up about the early days of the Leo Castelli Gallery is full of smart tidbits that remind me that much of the current discussion of the art market is not-so new.

(Speaking of Rauschenberg, you can read a 1965 interview with him here.)

The Journal is available by membership/subscription here. Single issues are $15.

• The MFA Boston appears to have quite the flimsy case in a new Holocaust-era claims suit, says the Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers. Further raising eyebrows: The story is full of quotes from historians and museum professionals, but the MFA stays silent, referring the Globe to legal filings and prepared statements. When a museum is resorting to prepared statements, you know things are not all good.
• Elmgreen and Dragset, the same  wild and crazy kids who brought you Prada Marfa, unveil their Berlin Holocaust memorial. Ed Winkleman on some of the fascinating details behind the unveiling.
  
• Is Spanish painting the new impressionism? Attendance figures from Boston suggest maybe.
• The Walker Art Center wants you to have a political yard sign that you want to have, complete with contest and everything. Project page here. The sign above was created by Andy Pressman.
  

In the last year there have been probably 100 Chelsea shows of 35-year-old-ish artists with so-so CVs. So why has the New York Times decided that one Alison Elizabeth Taylor is worthy of a long profile? (Note that I'm re-creating the NYT's HTML coding, ha ha.) I mean, there's nothing wrong with Taylor or her work (which appears to be the lovechild of Fred Tomaselli and Stephen Balkenhol), but why her and not 100 other artists?! The Carol Kino-penned story never makes that clear. If the paper of record is going to declare one artist whose history is indistinguishable from scores of others worthy of this kind of attention, it should explain why.

Why is Goya perpetually contemporary, asks the Guardian's Jonathan Jones. Jones goes on to answer his own question, and to praise three newly-discovered Goya works-on-paper. (Also here.)

I think Jones' points are pretty much spot on. I'd add that Goya had a particular skill for walking a fine line: He was a court painter, but privately, on his own time, he eviscerated the court (and everything else in Spanish life). There's something in that ability to get along with power while satirizing it that seems especially clever and timeless.

Goya is also the subject of one of the best artist biographies I've read, Robert Hughes' Goya. If I were ever to teach a class on artist biographies, that'd be Book No. 1. (Also worth a look: Janis Tomlinson's Phaidon monograph on the artist.)

Related: Just as up as an El Coloso authenticity flap flared up, it disappeared. The Prado still lists it as a Goya here. Also, alas: the Guardian is also shamefully allowing the disgraced, discredited Lee Siegel to try to rehabilitate himself. Siegel is one of the saddest, most dishonest commentators in America. Why are publications still giving him a platform?

• Favorite line of the week from a Washington Post story headlined, "Ducklings Die in Pool Drain at American Indian Museum: "'Nobody wants to see any sort of wildlife killed,' spokeswoman [NMAI] Leonda Levchuk said. The incident was especially painful for the museum because it occurred at a busy hour and in an area full of visitors, she said. 'We hate to see when visitors actually witness [ducks] kind of being sucked away.'"
  
• The Huntington Library has the best Renaissance painting in Los Angeles? So says Christopher Knight as he reviews the Huntington's re-opening.
• Say Wha? Award to Calvin Tomkins' for a confusing New Yorker profile of Paul Chan. It was muddy from the start: How can Paul Chan be "one of the more closely watched artists of his generation," and then, two paragraphs later, be someone whose "name still draws a blank among some art-world professionals?" (It's not online.)
  
• Roberta Smith of NGA show of work from the Afghanistan National Museum is timely, heartbreaking and thought-provoking. (So of course the NYT buried it inside the Friday arts section.)
• The KC Star's Alice Thorson reviews this show of Nelson-Atkins contemporary acquisitions. Thorson buries her lede in her last paragraph: That the museum's purchases are too tame.
• The second major new Barbara Kruger in Southern California this year is too designy, says Robert Pincus in the SDU-T. (Kruger is new to the famed Stuart Collection at UCSD.)
  
• Sebastian Smee is leaving Australia to be the Boston Globe's new art critic.
  
• Art:21 has posted an elegy to Robert Rauschenberg.
  
• Last week I knocked the Village Voice for reviewing MFA shows, and this week the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Stranger have done it too. (And The Stranger reviewed BFA shows!)

• I'm looking for your favorite art blogs in Florida and in the Southeast. Please leave them in the comments;
• Some Matthew Barney-in-LA pix pop up on Flickr (Christopher Knight's scathing review is here); and
• Regina Hackett has fun with the names of art blogs.

Continued from yesterday...

One of the great joys of visiting an art museum is the freedom to study, to look at the art as intensely as you like. The best museums do all they can to encourage quiet, prolonged contemplation: They light artworks just so. They put it on the wall at just the right height, or they place sculpture away from the wall so that you can walk around it. With any luck they provide a bench so that you can soak up any painting you like. The privilege of looking at what you want for as long as you want is such a basic part of museum-going that none of us think much about it.

But as soon as I discovered that Sarah Oppenheimer's 610-3356 went through a Mattress Factory floor, I realized how it dramatically changes the relationship between the viewer and an artwork, between the museum and the visitor, and even between the museum and it's neighborhood. Here I was, standing in a museum gallery looking at an artwork, and the artwork didn't just accept my gaze the way a painting or a sculpture might, but it re-directed it. Furthermore, it re-directed it outside the museum, into the backyard of a museum neighbor. Oppenheimer had transformed the private, privileged museum-goer's gaze into an intrusion, a violation of someone else's space.

Ever since at least Michael Asher, artists have enjoyed playing with the concept of what a museum is, and how it creates and communicates histories. Oppenheimer's work, both 610-3356 in Pittsburgh and (from what I can see on the web) her Horizontal Roll at the St. Louis Art Museum go a step further: They don't just invite us to look and then think, they decide how we look, and thus play a much more active role in determining how we think about what we're seeing. As I noted earlier this week, there's a mini-resurgence of artists who are interested in institutional critique; Oppenheimer goes further than any of them. She isn't just critiquing the institution, she's changing the way we look, the way institutions relate to their audiences, their neighbors and their communities.

• This is six weeks old and I just noticed it now: An AEG King Tut show will touch down at the Atlanta Civic Center in November, remaining on view until May, 2009. The show will be hosted by the Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum. Only on MAN: AEG has been in negotiations with the Brooklyn Museum to bring the show to NYC. (As of this posting, the museum had not responded to an email.) In 2004 'Tut' organizers approached the Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding the exhibition that debuted at LACMA, but the Met passed. UPDATE, 5/22/08: A Brooklyn Museum spokesperson says that the museum will not be taking the Atlanta Tut show.
  
• Time to laugh and cry: A sculptor whose work is juuust right in chocolate.
• National preservationists come out against the Fishers' Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio, says Marisa Lagos in the SF Chron.
• Witnesses tell Congress that the National Mall is a "disgrace."
• Laura Lark steals the show (ahem) by reviewing this exhibition at TCU's new Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. (I saw the first show there, and judging from what I saw and what I read in Lark's write-up, this is a space to watch.)
• I'm addicted.
  

The day before the Carnegie International opened, I pulled into the Mattress Factory to see Inner and Outer Space, an exhibition curated by Dara Meyers-Kingsley. (The Mattress Factory is a semi-kunsthalle located in a former industrial building on Pittsburgh's North Side. It's best known for its exhibition program and for its James Turrells.)

When I arrived at the museum, an attendant told me to take the elevator to an upper floor because the show started there. I obeyed. Upon exiting the elevator, I saw that the door to the gallery holding the 'first' artwork was closed. After a nod from another attendant, I opened the door and looked around. I saw nothing at eye level, which reminded me how conditioned art-lovers are to walk into a gallery and to quickly glance at each wall, looking for objects hung at about shoulder level. All I saw was a couple of large, bright windows. It was a nice sunny day and the trees outside were just beginning to turn a sickly spring green.

I knew there had to be something in the gallery, so I looked away from the view and discovered the work of art: a piece of molded plywood that had either been embedded into the floor, or that was lying on top of it. It was a well-machined bit of beige loveliness, nice but not extraordinary.

After I took my second step into the room my stomach fell into my shoes. The plywood whatchamacallit -- the view above is equivalent to what I saw from just inside the door -- magically transformed itself. It wasn't a solid mass at all. The molded plywood wasn't resting on the floor; it was a cut through it. The cut was so total that it went clear through the entire floor and directed my gaze outside the museum and into the backyard of one of the Mattress Factory's neighbors. Just about the time I realized I'd been duped, my stomach returned to place. Even after I'd revealed Sarah Oppenheimer's 610-3356 to myself, it left me staggered.

Tomorrow: More on Oppenheimer's 610-3356. After the jump: The 'reveal.'

Related: The Mattress Factory's blog has a nice post on Oppenheimer's piece. Both photos are from the MF's Flickr stream. The St. Louis Art Museum currently has an Oppenheimer on view as part of its 'Currents' series. David Bonetti reviewed the show and the St. Louis PBS station, KETC, featured it here.

• The art market as dumping ground for kitschy post-stadium-art souvenirs: Christopher Knight eviscerates a Matthew Barney 'event' near Los Angeles. (One would think that 'unauthorized' photos would have leaked onto Flickr by now, but not yet...)
  
• SFMOMA owns many of the important Rauschenbergs discussed in the last few days: Erased de Kooning Drawing, Automobile Tire Print, and more. See them here in an interactive feature.
• Frank O'Hara's thoughts on Rauschenberg.
• Sweden's Moderna Musset has a nice Rauschenberg page up. It includes a not-usually-seen pic of Monogram, and more.
• Speaking of Cao Fei, she's probably best-known for her Second Life-based work iMirror. (Her alter ego, China Tracy, has a YouTube channel.) Another Second Life-based 'documentary' has arrived.
  
• Institutional critique by artists is alive and well: I've linked to Filip Noterdaeme a bunch. Recently the Indy Museum's blog wrote up Sean Miller's John Erickson Museum of Art. I'll feature another institutional critique-er on MAN on Thursday, I think.

In Time this week and on Looking Around yesterday, Richard Lacayo talks about a couple of the season's big photo happenings: The republication of Robert Frank's The Americans and of Robert Adams' The New West. Robert Adams is one of my favorite artists; his West is the west I remember driving through as a child and even in college. I wrote about a large Adams show at the Getty in May, 2006.

To Lacayo's list I'd add a show: On June 7 the High Museum opens Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. And while we're adding photo blogs to blogrolls (OK, Lacayo was), Aperture has a blog worth checking out here.

As I read through the news coverage of Robert Rauschenberg's death last week, I noticed a disturbing sameness: Most writers and critics refused to say that Rauschenberg was gay, and all but two critics were unwilling to say why that is important. This is a problem for two reasons: Rauschenberg frequently referenced his homosexuality in groundbreaking ways in his own work (much of which was autobiographical and even more of which was intensely about the then-immediate present), and because history tends to hetero-wash whenever possible, to ignore or deny homosexuality when it's convenient.

Critics at America's largest publications, including Michael Kimmelman, Alan Artner, Blake Gopnik, Richard Lacayo and Peter Plagens, mostly avoid the topic. Kimmelman's queasy reference to Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, and "the intimacy of their relationship" was the closest the Times came to acknowledging that Rauschenberg was gay. The Boston Globe's Mark Feeney, Obit magazine's Phyllis Tuchman and Newsweek's Plagens and others also took the Johns route. (My links-filled Rauschenberg roundup is here.)

The two major papers in Rauschenberg's home state were even more timid. In the Dallas Morning News Kriston Capps obliquely mentioned Rauschenberg's AIDS-related fundraising, and shamefully hoped that wink-and-a-nod insinuation would take care of the rest. Lisa Gray included a reference to Rauschenberg's partner, Darryl Pottorf, in the final paragraph of her Houston Chronicle write-up.

Many other publications weren't even that oblique. The New Republic's Jed Perl was among those on the icked-out extreme. He refused to engage with Rauschenberg's work, his life, or anything else, dismissing it all with a don't-bother-me shrug.

Only two critics prominently mentioned Rauschenberg's homosexuality, and both did so eloquently, in a way that explained why it matters. In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch David Bonetti called Rauschenberg a "patriot," and contextualized his description. LATer Christopher Knight smartly tied Rauschenberg's homosexuality to a discussion of the landmark Monogram (1955-59, above). [An untitled 1955 combine from Johns' collection is above.]

Just as important to the Rauschenberg story (and to the story of gay life in America): At a time when being openly gay was considered a mental disorder and almost unspeakably awful, Rauschenberg was loud and proud through his work. For decades American artists, from Hartley forward, had hidden references to homosexuality. In Rauschenberg's work gay life and love is not hidden in an abstract, oblique reference to be noticed by those in the know; it is central, autobiographical and humanized. Rauschenberg played a pioneering role in bringing American gays into the open. It's there in dozens of pieces, from landmark works such as Rebus, which includes a passage that questions the link between being gay and being creative, to a great, rarely seen lusty 1981 combine in Baltimore titled Honorarium (Spread), a piece in which Rauschenberg riffs on every gay cliche imaginable. (It's below. In a related story, how many cliched, barely-cloaked references to homosexuality can you find in Glenn McNatt's Baltimore Sun write-up of Rauschenberg's death?)

I also think it's important to place Rauschenberg within the context of one of the great under-examined migrations in American history: That of gays and lesbians from rural America to cities in the decade after World War II, and the immense changes in American culture that migration helped kick off. Furthermore: While many obits mentioned that John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg partnered to re-create whole disciplines, few mentioned that all four were gay, and how that commonality informed and enabled their practices and their friendship.

Sadly, one particularly revolting write-up filled this hetero-normalized void. At the end of a thoughtless semi-obituary, Roger Kimball included a subtle dig:

Along the way, there was no aspect of contemporary artistic culture that is not mocked, trivialized, or turned into some sort of joke [in Rauschenberg's work]. The only exceptions were the ghostly exposed blueprints that Rauschenberg did in 1950 in collaboration with his then wife, the artist Susan Weil. These were the only two works, out of several hundred on view [at a Guggenheim retrospective], that communicated any genuine aesthetic emotion. But these works were said to have been Susan Weil's idea, and they served chiefly to highlight the poverty of everything that surrounded them.

In other words: The only thing worthwhile in Rauschenberg's entire oeuvre is that which (Kimball claims) had its origins in the heterosexual.

• From LATer Lynne Heffley at BCAM@LACMA: Underpowered art?
• Aside: It's nice that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch re-designed its site, but the paper has made its visual art coverage annoyingly harder to find.
• Oh good lord: The Village Voice's RC Baker reviews thesis shows. Yes, really.
• Chuck Close talks via phone with The Stranger's Jen Graves, which she thinks is about right.
• Jerry Saltz says that Elizabeth Peyton is aging well.
• Pulitzer-winner Mark Feeney: "It's true that [Georgia] O'Keeffe would likely have disapproved of being placed between two slices of bread." His write-up is about this show in Portland, Me. It opens in about a month.
• The Detroit Metro Times' Glen Mannisto on Sam Wagstaff's triumphant posthumous return to Detroit.
• I've updated the Rauschenberg roundup.
  

I'll be back Monday with some thoughts on Robert Rauschenberg and some thoughts on the most disappointing aspect of the media coverage of his death. Until then, enjoy taking the market at commerce off of your computer screen...

Also, I'm now on Facebook. Not sure what I'll do with it, but I'm open to suggestions.

• Montgomery County Orphans' Court Judge Stanley Ott has thrown out a suit seeking to provoke a hearing on the Barnes Foundation's move to Philadelphia. The Philly Inky's placeholder story is here, the ruling is here.
• The General Accounting Office has released its report on Smithsonian governance. Apparently the GAO is as unhappy with the SI regents' performance too. The phrase "persistent neglect of duties" pops up again and again...
  

Previously: Impressionism, Sheeler, Epstein.

Throughout the week I've shared examples of artists whose work reflected the way people in their time thought about industry. Today industry is dying in the U.S., and I can't think of an American artist who spends much time on the subject. As a result of globalization, industry has moved to Asia, especially to China. Artists have too.

The best example of an artist's interest in Chinese industry is surely Canadian Ed Burtynsky's photographs of Chinese factories and the surrounding industry 'towns.' Burtynsky, who is obsessed with photographing the biggest examples of 'X,' is especially interested in the previously unimaginable scale of Chinese factories. A recent documentary about him, Manufactured Landscapes, emphasized this with a remarkably long opening shot that traversed the length of an entire factory floor. (See the trailer here. The Burtynsky below is 2004's Manufacturing #7, Textile Mill, Xiaoxing, Zhejiang, China.)

Chinese artist Cao Fei is also interested in China's industrialization. Her interest is in the people who fill Chinese factories, the assembly lines of young people who do careful, dexterous manual labor on the cheap. In Whose Utopia (still above, 2006-07), on view now at the Carnegie International, Cao focuses on the people in China's massive factories, suggesting how an active fantasy life can try to make up for the repetitive drudgery of menial work. Cao shows us a line worker dressed up as a ballerina, another dancing, and so on, all posed in their work environment, complete with the painful artificial lighting therein.

I don't think it's the best work in the Carnegie. Whose Utopia never really gets beyond the surface of the issue it tries to aestheticize. I found myself grimacing rather than understanding or feeling. The installation doesn't help: Whose Utopia is awkwardly placed at the foot of a stairway and the sound is difficult to hear. But it is the first work of art I've seen about workers in China's factories. It's a start. Artists have been fascinated by industry for 140 years, so I'd bet we'll see more.

Previous Carnegie International posts: The bleakness of the 2008 CI. Vija Celmins and Mark Bradford. Richard Hughes.

Starting next week Night at the Museum II: Escape from the Smithsonian, a Ben Stiller vehicle, will be filmed at the Smithsonian. This is the first time the Smithsonian has allowed its name to be used in a commercial movie title. See the complete memo from Smithsonian acting Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture Richard Kurin after the jump.

• Installing El Anatsui at the Nelson-Atkins.
• Rolling out Eames chairs on NBC circa 1956.
• Doug Aitken's Migration (at the CI) meets a Disney video from Boing Boing.
• There's been much discussion of Robert Rauschenberg's 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing in the last 24 hours. Here's the actual piece JPEG'd large.
• Lari Pittman's studio on art21.
  
• The "Harvard Art Museum" or "Renzo Piano's Art Museum for Harvard" or whatever the former HUAM is, was, were or will be, is sort of announcing expansion plans.
  

I'm still updating this post of Rauschenberg coverage. And I'll have a post of my own on the artist soon.

Previously: Impressionism, Sheeler. Next: Cao Fei at the Carnegie International.

In the fifty years it takes us to get from Sheeler to Mitch Epstein (which is about the same amount of time it took us to get from impressionism to Sheeler and the precisionists), we changed: Love Canal. Cleveland's river caught fire. Superfund sites. The Soviet degradation of eastern Europe. Chernobyl. Climate change.

Epstein has lived through all this, and its impact on him shows in his work, most notably his American Power series, which started in 2003. [This is Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia, 2004. It's in SFMOMA's collection.] Gone is the impressionist co-existence with industry, and gone is Sheeler's awe. After being banished by Sheeler, people are back -- but they're hidden from our view. (There are people in a number of other 'American Power' pictures.)  The pollution that is so romanticized in impressionism -- smoke from smokestacks melding into clouds -- permeates everything in Amos. It's Turner's mist, only worse. The shadow of the tree in the foreground of the picture is sickly.

Epstein's picture is foreboding, even scary. I'm tempted to yell into those houses, 'Do you people realize...' And I know that they do, and it's a little bit heartbreaking.

I'm not sure exactly when in the 20th-century artists went from lionizing industry (think of all those heroic WPA-era pictures, or Margaret Bourke-White's love of shiny, machined things) to being wary of it. In her book on earthworks Suzaan Boettger argues that earthworks are deeply influenced by the environmental movement, but that's different. Time-wise though, it's probably right around 1970 or so...

If you read this story in the Los Angeles Times and you're looking for Getty CEO James Wood's March memo, it's here.

Obituaries: Michael Kimmelman, Alan Artner, Christopher Knight (part two via PBS), AP, Rachel Campbell Johnston, Blake Gopnik (who gives credit for the recent Combines show to the Met rather than to MOCA, which organized it), Alastair Macaulay, Diane Haithman, Rauschenberg's Time magazine covers, Kriston Capps, Richard Lacayo, Regina Hackett, Peter Plagens, Jen Graves, Ed Schad, David Bonetti, Mark Feeney, Lisa Gray, Phyllis Tuchman, Glenn McNatt, Jed Perl, Kenneth Baker, James Wagner, Rauschenberg's 'hometown' paper, the SW Florida News-Press. Also: A nice New York magazine-enabled excerpt from Mark Stevens' and Annalyn Swan's de Kooning bio is here.

Nota bene: I'll keep the Rauschenberg post at the top today, updating it as I can. As a result, this will be the last 'industry' post today. Continued from this morning...

This is Charles Sheeler's 1931 Classic Landscape, from the collection of the National Gallery of Art. The people are gone. There is no sense of siting; whereas 50 years earlier the impressionists showed industry within the context of suburbia and bourgeois weekenders, Sheeler shows us a giant Ford Motor Co. plant as a self-contained monstrosity. There are no people visible in this painting or in any of Sheeler's Rouge River paintings. Pissarro used a gravel path as the diagonal that led us into this painting; Sheeler uses industry itself in the form of a railroad track.

One similarity between this Sheeler and the 1870s French paintings: Impressionists often showed smokestack emissions melding with clouds. Sheeler does too.

Last week I posted a Manet that I first remembered seeing in a T.J. Clark book. Writing the post inspired me to pull the book off of a shelf and to re-read it.

One of the chapters in The Painting of Modern Life is substantially about how the impressionists incorporated industry (or pointedly didn't) in their paintings of early Parisian suburbia. I wrote about this a little bit here last April when I discussed a fine Pissarro show at the Baltimore Museum of Art: Impressionists, especially Manet and Pissarro (the Indianapolis Museum of Art's The Banks of the Oise near Pontoise is at left), used suburban smokestacks as compositional keystones, as 'rhymes' for other elements of their paintings, and as a curious (to our eyes) backdrop for bourgeois leisure time.

Consider: In 1863 Manet was putting his frolicking urbanites at play in forests, as French painters had done for generations. By the mid-1870s he was putting them along the Seine and in front of a smokestack. For Parisians the playground had changed, and it revealed something about how they were happy to share space with industry. One hundred and forty years later...

Throughout the day I'll feature some rapid-fire posts on how artists have portrayed industry, how it's a reflection of the times in which they made their work. I'll wrap up the mini-series of posts tomorrow morning (back) at the Carnegie International.

I'm a sucker for museum construction webcams, so when I read the Chicago Tribune's Blair Kamin say that a Renzo Piano-designed bridge between the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing and Millenium Park was going in over the weekend, I looked forward to daylight and checking out the AIC's webcam. Here's the image I took from it at about 3:15 EDT. The latest full-size JPEG will be that link, and here's a Kamin update.

At first glance, it is a discarded, moldy, soggy, disgusting mattress. It looks like it's been in the weeds for a while: Grass seems to be growing where water has pooled in the middle. Mushrooms are pushing up too. Only a musty stench would make the scene more complete.

The 'mattress' one of three Richard Hugheses in one of the most dour galleries in the Carnegie International. Last week I said that curator Douglas Fogle's CI was one of the bleakest shows in recent memory. Hughes' gallery is especially grim. Everything here points toward when societal disintegration has progressed to abandonment. There is The Big Sleep (2007, above), Chandlerian in both title and allusion to the inevitable fatalism of noir. (But Robert Gober-ian in construction: The Big Sleep is made of jesmonite, pigment, acrylic paint, modeling putty and plastic.) In the middle of the gallery are two shoes with their laces tied together, as they might be if someone had tossed them over a power line. (Trip Over, 2007, below.) Except here the laces are on the floor, under a 'brick' and the shoes are sticking straight up in the air. Are we underwater? Is that why paint is peeling off the walls, revealing layer after layer after layer of prior care? (That would be untitled, 2008.) Did climate change cause sea levels to rise that much? Or did something else cause all this?

Along the same line as Hughes' work is Doug Aitken's Migration: 365 Hotel Rooms (stills here), in which animals have re-taken land (and hotels) apparently given up by humans. Ditto in Bruce Conner's photograms in the Carnegie's Hall of Sculpture: There are no people in them, only vapors left behind. In all of these works, humans seem to have vanished.

None of these artists offer any looks at what might have gone wrong, why the people just got up and left. In fact, that's one of the most fascinating things about the 2008 CI: There is little -- if any -- artistic musing about problems, difficulty, specific issues, or anything of that sort. There is no art explicitly about global warming, or Iraq or globalization or anything else. (Thomas Hirschhorn's Cavemanman comes closest to being about something specific -- terrorism --  but it's so cartoonish, such a shallow, Baroque scattertrash one-liner, that it doesn't earn much consideration.)

Instead the exhibition is full of a dry acceptance that we live in a time of decline. Nevermind what's causing it, Fogle seems to be arguing, accept it.

Related: The bleakness of the 2008 CI. Vija Celmins and Mark Bradford.

• The Indianapolis Museum of Art is suing the state to avoid registering as a porn purveyor, says Tim Evans in the Indianapolis Star.
  
• David Bonetti headlines a thorough package on St. Louis architecture in the Post-Dispatch.
• In a related story, an Eero Saarinen retrospective has touched down at the National Building Museum. The Post's Philip Kennicott digs it. Images here.
  
• Perhaps most of today's stories will have a link to Saarinen: The Oakland Museum of California is a catch-all museum that has long lacked an identity. (The museum's confused early Kevin Roche design doesn't help.) The museum has a decent art collection, but has never known what to do with it. That's changing, says Timothy Buckwalter in the SF Chron. The story includes this gem of a quote from the museum's chief art curator, Phil Linhares: "[T]he Art Gallery was designed like a Rite Aid drugstore, with dividers spaced throughout: toothpaste here, hair-care products there."
• The SDU-T's Robert Pincus basks in the art historical references in Julie Heffernan's paintings.
• The Chicago Trib's Blair Kamin says that a Renzo Piano bridge linking the AIC to Millenium Park is now in place. (Or should be.)
• There's a nice story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about a show of New Deal-era art at the Weisman, but it's impossible to link to without seeing 98 pop-ups, scrolling through umpteen pages, and being yelled at by my browser. So here's a link to the Weisman's show instead.

Your weekend awesome: Jumping in Art Museums. Yes, really.

• How often can an art blog steal from a hockey blog commenter? Probably just this once: This is what it would look like to wear a Dale Chihuly.
• The behavior of one NYC gallery continues to puzzle and amaze.
• I have a soft spot for cheeky, clever public art.
  
• NYTer Roberta Smith reviews the Carnegie International in today's NYT. (Notable: The NYT's big gun reviewed the Carnegie and not the WhiBi, which means that neither of America's two top critics chose to write-up the Whitney.) I read the piece twice and wondered if Smith saw a different show than I did. And then I realized: Yeah, maybe she did. The exhibition was still being installed during last week's press preview, and Smith was in Pittsburgh the day before the rest of us. (I noticed that at least one of the show's installations changed while I was eating lunch.) I read a different catalogue too -- Smith loved it and I found it unreadable. Douglas Fogle's essay felt all the right things, and that was about all. And what was Paul Chan, who isn't even in this year's International, doing in there? I guess the art world really does love Paul Chan.) 

On the Guardian's blog, Francesca Gavin writes about what various UK museum membership programmes offer the publick. (See: I speak British.)

Her post got me thinking about membership programs at American museums. Are there any programs that are really different from the standard 'free' admission, 10% off at the store/cafe offerings? Someone out there must be doing something innovative with museum membership, right? (And offering a shelter mag such as Dwell free to your members doesn't count. That's just befuddling.) Some small, nimble museums must be offering some innovative perks, right? If you know of something unusual that your favorite museum offers, please leave it in the comments.

On the membership downside: One trend I've noticed is that museums seem to be limiting members to one 'free' pass for a popular big exhibition, which seems a little counterproductive.

More on the Carnegie International on Monday (sorry, deadlines), but for now: Steven Erlanger's NYT Richard Serra story and slideshow sent me to Flickr to look for more images of Serra at the Grand Palais in Paris. Sure enough, there are a few there. (There is no 'flickr.fr.') In fact there are 6,180 Flickr photos that match 'Richard Serra.' This left me wondering: Is Richard Serra the most 'popular' Flickr artist? His works are huge and picturesque (ask Hiroshi Sugimoto), so maybe...

UPDATE: Greg Allen went down this path in 2006. Olafur Eliasson is up to 4,227. Also, readers have suggested Henry Moore (a presumably common name, but still 14,490) and [Alexander] Calder (17,471, last name only).

I don't usually think of Vija Celmins' paintings as being particularly bleak. Instead they're achingly beautiful, even delicate, and their starfields stick in the imagination like a pop tune. But in this year's Carnegie International, they are something else: Reminders.

There are nine here. Eight are starscapes such as Night Sky #2 (right), a 1991 painting from the Art Institute of Chicago. The ninth, the National Gallery of Art's 1988 untitled (Comet) is the only one to feature an object we recognize to be in motion.

One Celmins is a morsel, nine of them is an experience. Surrounded, I felt small, alone, a mass of carbon in the middle of a vast, turbulent, changing galaxy. The Celmins gallery seems like International curator Douglas Fogle's way of hammering the point that we're just us, one species on one planet in one galaxy. After seeing Thomas Hirschhorn's Cavemanman references to suicide bombers, and Matthew Monahan's post-apocalyptic statuary, and Cao Fei's soul-deadening Chinese factories and on and on, the Celminses seem to say: Humanity is a nice idea, but for now bleakness is the present condition. Get used to the bleak.

The Celmins gallery is in the middle of the International, but its 'bookend' is the show's first gallery, a tour de force of three Mark Bradfords.  Two are the L.A.-based artist's familiar dystopian mixed-media collage 'paintings,' apparently bird's-eye views of desolate, empty, possibly abandoned urban areas. [Image at right.] The works are hung on the left and right walls of the room. Like the Celminses, they're landscape paintings with a different perspective on 'land.'

In between them, on a wall of its own, is A Thousand Daddies (2008), actual posters (plus some Bradfordian collage) that read, "My child says DADDY..." They are urban advertisements for child custody and divorce attorneys. ("1-866-72-DADDY") The gallery is a devastating, affecting declaration of dysfunction. But there's one more Bradford artwork to come.

It is on the Carnegie's roof, unseen by show-goers but visible to anyone looking in on us from, say, somewhere in one of Vija Celmins' paintings: Here.

Related: The 2008 Carnegie Int'l: Woe the humanity.

• Christopher Knight reviews the Carnegie International. Worth noting: Knight did the CI and passed on the WhiBi. Accidental? Uh, I don't think so. Tells you all you need to know about the state of the WhiBi, too.
• Super story in today's NYT by Steven Erlanger: Richard Serra takes on the Grand Palais. (The WWW pix have it all over the print versions.) The Serra quotes are terrific, including this one, which addresses a topic much on my mind of late: "People don't perceive the art but the surplus value of art -- art as photographs, as J-PEGs. [sic] People talk of art and ask: 'How much does it cost? What's its pedigree?' "

There are three galleries around which curator Douglas Fogle's Carnegie International revolves. One features nine intense Vija Celmins paintings of starscapes. Another features Mark Bradford's 'paintings.' And finally there's Richard Hughes' room of human abandonment, a hint of what, say, a steel town might look like if the locals suddenly went Anasazi. [At left, Hughes' 2007 The Big Sleep and a 2008 untitled wall-piece.]

The theme of Fogle's more-or-less triennial -- there's so much art production around the world that macro-surveys are no longer have authority or integrity, and Fogle has wisely chucked that concept  -- is humanity, contact. As Fogle told me two weeks ago, his idea was to make a show about "this human desire to connect with another person or another world in a way... 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."

But what Fogle didn't mention was that his idea wasn't to show art that was about connecting in a romantic, fuzzy, Match.com kind of way, but a show in which contact is a survivalist imperative born from dystopia. Fogle's International, subtitled "Life on Mars," is the smartest bleak museum show I've seen in years. It is not a warning of what will happen if humankind doesn't respond to global warming, AIDS, famine, or any one of numerous global problems: It's too late for that. Instead Fogle presents artwork after artwork portraying a world far gone, a world beyond preservation. Sometimes people have left, sometimes they're disfigured, and sometimes the reference is more abstract.

This afternoon: Celmins and Mark Bradford.

Talking with Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood about museo-mini shows of contemporary artists. Continued from parts one, two...

MAN: So it's not a commercial gallery show simply because there was interaction between the artist and the curator(s)? The differentiating factor is something that happens between the artist and the curator(s) and not between the art and the viewer, that is, the difference isn't in the presentation of the exhibition itself?

Anne Ellegood: Well, context is crucial. I think viewers understand the difference between a commercial space and a museum space, particularly because an exhibition like Amy Sillman's Directions show is not the only thing on view. At any given time, the exhibitions we do are surrounded by other exhibitions and collection galleries. [Sillman's 2007 L, is at right.]

Showing new work is something we've often done with the Directions series, although these shows have also focused on existing works, or a combination or new and existing works. It really depends on the project. Institutionally and curatorially, showing new work has to do with our desire to work with artists in a very intimate way and to support artists in their endeavors, sometimes in direct relationship to the museum, as in site-specific projects. So this sometimes means getting behind them when they are doing something new and supporting them in this process -- I think that's been an important component of the series.

The comparison you made between Jim Lambie and Amy... What Jim did was site-specific in terms of the floor piece but he, too, made new works for the show. It's interesting that this work doesn't get read as a commodity, or the show read as a 'gallery show,' when a painting show does.

MAN: Well, my point wasn't that paintings are commodities. I was merely saying that site-specificity is one way that an institution can provide an artist with an opportunity. [On April 17 I posted, "All of the work is from 2007 and 2008. The museum does not place the artist in any kind of context, not within [Sillman's] own 25-year body of work, not within the work of her contemporaries, and not with her historical antecedents."]

AE: Amy's show is in a museum that has several other galleries of other paintings that are in the collection that contextualize the work that she's doing much differently than you would have in a gallery. I also think that the obvious fundamental difference is that nothing we have on view is being sold. You can't just dismiss that. [At left: An untitled 1959 de Kooning from the Hirshhorn collection.]

I could have re-hung the nearby collection galleries in conjunction with Amy's show but felt that there were several existing galleries that complemented Amy's show well and added to the discussion about painting. [The galleries that 'bracket' Sillman in the Hirshhorn donut are Ellsworth Kelly and Clyfford Still. Willem de Kooning is one gallery away and Arshile Gorky is nearby.] As you know, we've been making particular selections of collection works to display in conjunction with exhibitions. It's something that many of the curators are interested in doing and many of the artists we work with are interested in doing.

There are certain pieces I could have put up near Amy's show that would have been great--it would have been great to see the work with Richard Diebenkorn and Guston -- but I feel like, in the history of painting, Amy's commenting on and quoting so many people that we had great connections already at play, particularly with de Kooning and Gorky on the same floor. I felt that to have her work in the context of what already existed in our galleries was sufficient.

MAN: You have those two galleries there of key abstract artists: One that Sillman consciously rejected (Still) and one that she has obviously embraced (de Kooning).

AE: It's not like we want to hit people over the head, but it's just the very obvious point that her show is in a museum context where you can see a number of works from the history of 20th century painting, and a show at Sikkema Jenkins doesn't have that. That's kind of the beauty of being in a museum that has a collection like ours: Those relationships are visible and you don't have to spell them out too much with an abundance of didactic texts.

One thing I wanted to bring up that might be interesting as a kind of counterpoint: The flip side of this contention that museums are doing gallery-like show is that so many galleries are doing museum-style shows. Did you see the Flavin show at Zwirner & Wirth? They recreated this wonderful 1964 Green Gallery show. The consistency, of course, is that the original show was in a gallery, but it still seems like something that a museum could do. And there are other examples of galleries doing, sometimes quite large-scale, exhibitions of an artist's work made up primarily of pieces borrowed from institutions and private collections that are not for sale. 

Continued from this morning with Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood...

MAN: Do you think about the museo-commercial dichotomy? Tell me about what you do to try to not merely present commercial-style show.

Anne Ellegood: I want to address the question from two perspectives: One, more broadly, I think that this issue of distinctions between institutions and organizations -- and even curatorial methodologies -- in the contemporary art world is important. I think we're all seeing those distinctions getting blurred in particular ways. We're always hearing that art fairs look like biennials and biennials look like gallery shows. It's an interesting moment. Those of us who work in various types of institutions need to articulate and put forward what it is that we do that is distinct. Often it is, in fact, inaccurate to describe these things as the same. A biennial is very different from an art fair and that difference is important.

The distinction between a museum and a [commercial] gallery is crucial. I think there are a lot of things about a museum that are different from a gallery, and, of course, the most obvious is that museums are not in the business of selling works of art. It's easy to look at a painting show and see it as commercial because we see paintings as commodities more readily than other types of media. I think your comment about Amy Sillman's show looking like a gallery show is partly related to the fact that she's a painter. [Above: Sillman's T, 2007] But a lot of the difference between museums and galleries has to do with the working process. The curatorial process for the presentation of contemporary art in a museum -- the interaction between the artist and the curator, the artist and the institution -- is different from that of the gallery.

Specifically, I think there are a couple points that are important: Amy is an artist who has had a lot of commercial success in the last 10 years. She has three galleries [around the world] and she's an artist for whom the only thing her career is lacking is museum acknowledgment and support in terms of exhibitions (not collections). For her, the opportunity to work in a museum was, in fact, very distinct from doing a gallery show, and one she was excited about. She repeatedly acknowledged [to the curators] how the working process was really different--that is, the on-going dialogue between her and the curators, both Ian [Berry of the Tang] and I, throughout the process of putting the show together.

One reason we wanted to present new work by Amy was that when I approached her about doing a Directions show at the Hirshhorn, she was working toward a show at the Blaffer [2005's Shecky Green, right, was in that show] that would include her work over a period of time. I didn't want to duplicate the curatorial approach for our show, but moreover, Amy had begun working on this project about couples and coupling, and both she and I were really excited about what was happening in this work. It seemed ideal for Amy to be able to plan for a substantial presentation of this work in a museum, rather than one of her galleries, which would offer a different context and would have a different audience.

Having this museum show allowed Amy to put off a gallery show for a period of time and to focus on making this new body of work without commercial pressure. It gave her the freedom to say, 'None of this work is available for a gallery show or for sale because I want to make it available for the museum show, and Ian and Anne have first dibs on what to include in the exhibition.' She was able to keep the work in the studio, so one painting could respond to another painting and she could work simultaneously on the paintings and drawings, and that was really important for her.

Next, the fact that we were able to do the catalogue was really crucial. Our Directions shows don't often have accompanying catalogues, but we were able to offer it because the Tang had funding. I think with Amy in particular, as a painter who has been working for many years and nonetheless has had very few catalogues, being able to produce a catalogue was something that we felt really excited about. This is another thing that I think we were able to do that is distinctive from the gallery -- to offer a platform in which Amy's thinking about her work [the interview] and a curatorial and critical analysis of the project could take place. We also have other platforms--such as public programs and podcasts--where the voice of the curator, the artist, and other thinkers about the work can come forward.

Continued: Part three.

A couple of weeks ago, in writing up the Hirshhorn's Amy Sillman 'Directions' show, I complained that the exhibition resembled a commercial gallery show: The paintings were fresh out of the studio, that the installation didn't provide any specific Sillman-related context, and that the Hirshhorn show was essentially indistinguishable from how Sikkema Jenkins would show fresh-from-the-studio work. In a succeeding post, I discussed that this was a broader, substantially unexamined museum issue. Last week I talked with the Art Institute of Chicago's Lisa Dorin about these contemporary mini-shows here and here. Today: Three posts with the Hirshhorn's Anne Ellegood, who curated the Sillman show.

MAN: I think readers are probably familiar with the Hirshhorn's 'Directions' rubric. Tell us how you pick artists for these shows.

Anne Ellegood: Several curators on staff propose artists, so the program is not envisioned by one curator. The idea is to work with an artist who is not super-established, but I'm reluctant to use the word 'emerging' because I'm not sure what that means anymore. The series presents a combination of U.S.-based artists who haven't yet exhibited substantially in Washington and international artists who typically haven't exhibited much in the U.S. Because they are small, these projects are meant to be a bit more nimble, a bit more responsive, than our other large-scale exhibitions, which can take years of research and development to implement.

Amy Sillman is an interesting example. She's quite well known, particularly in New York where she has lived and shown for years, and she's probably further along in her career than most of our Directions artists. She's someone who has a certain amount of visibility. But, the reason we were interested in her was, in part, because she's had few museum shows. So, here is this artist who's been operating without a lot of museum attention and without the kind of critical inquiry that goes along with that.

Part of the challenge for us is that there are many, many artists who we'd like to work with and there are only so many Directions slots a year. The exhibitions don't have to focus on a single artist, but they tend to. Often when you get into a group show format, an exhibition tends to become a bigger project outside the scope of Directions. I'd be interested to see us do some two- and three-person Directions shows.

Continued: Part two, three.

• Robert Gober meets coat rack.
• Sean Connery, "Bond, James Bond," and Goya, circa 1961-64.
• Interesting confluence of stories: LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne on Grove developer Rick Caruso's new project, the Americana at Brand in Glendale; a U.S. plan for the future of Baghdad's Green Zone.
• I'd have plugged this in advance if I'd known about it: LACMA hosted an art-book swap meet.
• Art from Afghanistan coming to the US: The NGA's thorough website.
  

I'm glad that the Denver Post's Kyle MacMillan dug into this story: What does it mean when the Denver Art Museum sells half of a painting it owns to a local collector? Is that 'deaccessioning?'

In case you missed it: Last week the Denver Art Museum half-acquired Thomas Eakins' Cowboy Singing [below] and two related drawings. Colorado businessman Philip Anschutz helped out with at least some of the $8-10 million DAM half-spent, and in return will own half of the 'new' Eakins (not so unusual) and half of a painting previously in DAM's collection, Charles Deas' Long Jakes, The Rocky Mountain Man.

The Deas, described by DAM on its website as "[t]he crown jewel in the institute's collection" and "the single most influential image in Rocky Mountain iconography" is now co-owned by DAM and Anschutz, each of whom will have physical possession of the painting for half of a year. (And check out the credit line on the Deas: DAM acquired it less than a decade ago. I wonder if all those folks are thrilled with this deal... The line is impossible to link to, so it's in the jump here.)

Nice job by MacMillan in jumping into all of this. But he frames the deal within the context of the art market and the alleged new difficulty of museo-acquisitions, which I think is precisely wrong. (After all, when has it ever been easy for a museum to buy an $8-10 million painting?)

The story isn't that the market is 'forcing' anyone to do anything; it is not. The story is not that museums have to do wildly creative things to acquire paintings; they don't. Quite simply: It is not an imperative that art museums participate in the art market beyond their means. If you can't afford a painting, you can't afford a painting. No one was pointing a banjo at the museum's head forcing it to half-deaccession its self-proclaimed "crown jewel," it simply chose to do so in order to half-acquire another painting.

DAM made a remarkably unusual deal that deserves continued scrutiny. Is the museum's collection now half-available to anyone who wants to buy half a painting? Is this an apporpriate use of collection as a fundraising lever? Also: Why isn't the Association of Art Museum Directors questioning this half-deaccessioning instead of excusing it? (I know, I know: AAMD exists to provide cover for the fudging of standards, not to uphold them.) And why did the super-reclusive Anschutz come out of the tombs for this deal, for this painting?

• Roberta Smith's review of this show is lovely, but she missed the show's strikingly dishonest title: "Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning and American Art 1940-1976." Uh, really? Here's the roster of artists. One city does not equal 'America.' (Nor two: there are a couple Washingtonians in the show.)
  
• Dear NYT: This is not an art story, it's a business story. People care about art because it's art, not because it's dollars.
• Christopher Knight on Evan Holloway: Take that James Turrell!
• What is this? A review? A class? I hate it when art critics get preachy-educational, learn-this-because-it's-good-for-you. Guess what? It's OK if not everyone gets or likes minimalism or abex or whatever. I don't like Rubens and you know what? That's OK too.
• David Bonetti reviews Sarah Oppenheimer (with a little help from Ellsworth Kelly and Chuck Close) at the St. Louis Art Museum. More on Oppenheimer coming up on MAN, probably next week.
• Baltimore Museum of Art director Doreen Bolger is looking for a Matisse.
• The Washington Post's Blake Gopnik on the Takashi Murakami show in Brooklyn: "Its work outdoes Goya in revealing our folly, though it puts on a lighthearted air. That makes it even more chilling."
• Also, if you missed it: MAN's Q&A with Richard Shiff about this past weekend's Judd writings symposium in Marfa: Part one, two.
  

Continuing from this morning...

MAN: For many years all of Judd's writings were out of print. Did that have an impact on his legacy or on opportunities for Judd to influence a generation of artists?

Richard Shiff: It's hard for me to judge that. Any good university library had Volume One because there were enough of them going around. Some good university libraries might not have Volume Two. [Here's a link to the 1959-1975 writings at ~40% off.]

I think that university people were very lazy about Volume One and tended not to actually read it. They would read the famous essays, especially 'Specific Objects,' the longer essays. They would read them often in excerpted form because bits and pieces of Judd ended up in all kinds of anthologies that are used by students. So I think people had a very fragmentary sense of them. I think only in the 1990s did the academic community get more serious about it and read the things in depth. That then cast the famous essays in a somewhat different light.

If you read everything you get a different sense of how Judd used words, and some of the words that seem inscrutable become almost obvious in terms of their meaning. I think he used words very accurately, but he had his way of using them. When he uses the word 'specific' he means specific in his sense as the opposite of 'general' as it is for most people. Judd applies it to art all the time. There are features of art he regarded as 'general' and that he regarded as as 'specific,' so it takes on a special meaning.

MAN: What about artists though? I mean, you can't walk through an artist's studio without seeing Smithson's writings, which have long been in print. But Judd... not so much.

RS: Smithson was, for whatever reason, in the academy a more fashionable figure. That filtered down to art students and art students would maybe take a class and the art historian would be talking more about Smithson and less about Judd - and even maybe negatively about Judd.

MAN: This is something that's been batted around on several art blogs of late: What artists today write or use writing the way Judd did?

RS: I think David Reed is a terrifically good writer and extremely thoughtful in the way that Judd was. David can take a period that he's lived through and capture it in a few paragraphs, like what the art world was doing in the 1970s. I don't think his style is like Judd's style. Judd's style is peculiar and I don't know that anyone else really wrote like that or writes like that.

The one predecessor Judd had was Barnett Newman. Newman thought he learned how to be an artist by writing. I don't know if Judd would go so far as to say that it was essential to his art career, but Newman thought it was essential to him as he developed. I think it's good for a certain kind of person. Mel Bochner used to write a lot - and he still writes I guess. He'd be a parallel case maybe, and he's one of the speakers here.

This weekend Judd-ians are gathering in Marfa, Texas for a Chinati-hosted symposium about Donald Judd's writings. The speakers include Roberta Smith, David Rabinowitch, Ann Temkin and David Raskin. You can listen in to the symposium on Marfa Public Radio or wait for Chinati to publish a paperback version of the remarks in late 2008. The symposium will be moderated by today's Q&A guest, University of Texas professor Richard Shiff.

MAN: What about Donald Judd's writings remains substantially unexamined?

Richard Shiff: Some of the later things that never got published are probably the least known. They were available to of the symposium participants. They're interesting and some of them are pretty substantial. The later things are not review writing. Primarily they're thought pieces. They're very deliberate.

They're very different from the review writing that begins around 1959 or so. [Here's a link to the 1959-1975 writings at ~40% off.] The review writing is mostly short pieces, but they're very witty and they're very incisive. It's remarkable that he did so many so quickly, but he was serving a kind of journalistic function as a critic in the streets and he did a damn good job of it. Those things he had to do very fast. The latter writings he could publish when he felt like it.

Marianne Stockebrand and Donald Judd were working on putting them together when he died. So although those writings were collected, they still haven't been published because the rights belong to the Judd Foundation. It's up to them as to what they do with it. I've found a lot of them, but I'm an academic and I used inter-library loan to find them.

MAN: The reviews are better known, even well-known. Why did he write them? Was he staking out a position relative to other artists? Was he figuring out what he was interested in? Was he being communitarian?

RS: It's interesting: He's taking very perceptively about artists who are now very canonical. His writing about Frank Stella is damn good. When he's talking about early Stella, which he really liked, he's talking about it as he's being made.

I think he was learning on the job so to speak. I think he was figuring out what needed to be said about the artists who really appealed to him: Bontecou, Chamberlain, Oldenburg, Stella, Westermann, Flavin. George Ortman is another who people have sort of forgotten about these days. These were all artists whose work had features that spoke to him because they seemed to him to break out of traditional patterns of both painting and sculpture. He was gradually by writing about these works and writing about them over and over again -- because he'd do it once a year when they'd have a show -- he'd refine his own language his own sense of what was special about them, and yes, it was affecting his own artistic development. He was learning how to be a better critic and how to be a better artist at the same time.

Part two to come later...

I'm on travel, so no more posts today. If you haven't read yesterday's posts on European artists, war and art-as-memory, check 'em out. Good stuff in the links below this post, too. I'll be back tomorrow with Richard Shiff talking about this weekend's Donald Judd writing symposium in Marfa.

• C-Monster's been doing priceless research.
• Artnet is mostly a head-shaker these days, but Steve Mumford's stories from Iraq are always worth a read.
• Speaking of Iraq, here's a lovely story from a volunteer at the Nelson-Atkins.
• PORT's Arcy Douglass remembers when Donald Judd juggled his famed National Gallery of Canada retrospective with a big show in Portland.
• Can you guess what art museum(s) voluntarily decided to call itself HAM?
• The sad, bizarre story of Kent Twitchell's Ed Ruscha mural takes a turn for the better.
• I prefer dancing at SFMOMA to impromptu art installations/whatever in a bathroom at MoMA.
• Richard Lacayo on Miley Cyrus and the Frick. Yes, really.