September 2008 Archives

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A couple weeks ago I noted how gee-whiz cool it was that Lynne Cooke's essay about Francis Alys' Fabiola projatect was available on LACMA's website. (The exhibition on view at LACMA.) I wondered why more museums didn't post scholarship related to exhibitions on their websites.

Over the last couple of weeks I've asked several museum types about this. The answer has little-to-nothing to do with the publishers of exhibition catalogues, and everything to do with 'that's the way we've always done it.' All a museum really needs to post essays/etc. on its exhibition website is the permission of the essay author. For example, when LACMA wanted to post Michael Govan's Dan Flavin essay on its website, they had remarkable success in obtaining Govan's permission. Most museums just don't think to ask or don't think to include the essays on their sites. They should.

Pictures/images are a little trickier. The Baltimore Museum of Art is one of many museums that has started its own Flickr stream. I asked the museum why so few of the images there were licensed under Creative Commons. The explanation: We can post images of the works, but quite often the museum doesn't have the right to create a CC license of an image of a given artwork. (Pesky artists' rights and all.)

All of which means that this picture of Franz West's Dorit is completely awesome, but I can't post it on MAN. (If I took a picture myself and posted it, that would be OK under fair-use law.) In a related story, the first American Franz West retrospective opens at Baltimore next month. It will travel to LACMA next year. Here's hoping that LACMA and the BMA share the written content (essays and artist interview) from that catalogue online.

• See the Peabody Essex Museum's newest trustee near-orgasmically writhing in bed (while clothed).
• There are two new books out about fake Vermeers. Christopher Knight says this is the one to read.
• Some arts organizations have dedicated, tax-based sources of funding. One example: The St. Louis Art Museum (which is free to the public). Should your museum pursue same?
• The NYT's Friday Weekend section editor is answering questions this week. Maybe she can explain to us how the Times magically arranges for arts news to always happen on Fridays, and whether Carol Vogel really does have a gavel-shaped red phone with a direct line to Christie's.
• Five famed photographers on their favorite films. [via]
• Once upon a time, architects designed houses for people who had four-figure net worths. One of the most beloved examples is Frank Lloyd Wright's Pope-Leighey House in northern Virginia. Wright's client died last week, making now a good time to revisit his story.

A couple notable blog posts on last week's (eternal) Spiral Jetty series here on MAN:

• Greg Allen, who has ties to Utah and who has written extensively about Spiral Jetty, raises additional questions about the Jetty and stewardship;
• Kriston Capps, who has written about the Jetty for The American Prospect, asks whether groups working on Jetty preservation are as focused on land as they are on water.

A food bank doesn't plant trees in city parks. The Red Cross doesn't build houses, Habitat for Humanity does. So why are non-contemporary art museums so intent on becoming contemporary art museums? 

In recent years art museums with virtually every imaginable focus have tried to make sure it does contemporary art. Each museum has its own reasons: The Met's confused installation of Damien Hirst's shark looked like a lame donor-grab because it was. Sometimes museums chase audience or hipster cachet.

In the last couple weeks I've noticed two particularly cringe-worthy examples. First up, at the end of next month the Getty Villa is showing a series of drawings sculpture by Jim Dine, the Clive Cussler of contemporary art. If Jim Dine didn't exist Pace Wildenstein would create him. (Oh, wait...) UPDATE: Correction here.

And over this past weekend the Phillips Collection, America's first museum of modern art, a museum with a spectacular 1890-1940ish collection, held a symposium on painting in the 21st century, an area in which the museum has virtually no art and no curatorial expertise. (Perhaps this is why three dealers ended up on the day's program.) I attended. Some of it.

My favorite part was a panel discussion on criticism and painting, during which Washington Post provocateur Blake Gopnik said that painters were responsible for what he considers to be the weak state of contemporary painting criticism. Call it the Gopnik Doctrine.

On its own that's a pretty remarkable assertion, but it was flat-out amusing given the 'keynote address' that preceded it. The keynoter was Suzanne Hudson, who opened her talk by discussing the alleged death of painting (I could have sworn I heard Whitesnake and Richard Marx songs in the background) and then quickly moved on to painting's alleged death within the context of today's art market, inadvertently using ten minutes of whiplash to fuse two decades of cliches.

The best part: Under the Gopnik Doctrine, painters are to blame for Hudson's talk.

All of which isn't to suggest that museums shouldn't be interested in contemporary issues, just that they should try to engage within the context of what they do best.

I love it when museums think everyone else is stupid. Case in point the Seattle Art Museum, a museum that has long had, er, transparency issues.

SAM could be facing an acute financial problem as a result of the failure of Washington Mutual. Here's why: Several years ago SAM and WaMu partnered on a new building for both the museum and the bank. As part of the deal, WaMu pays rent to SAM.

When WaMu's troubles first made news 10 days ago, the Seattle P-I's Regina Hackett asked SAM what could be the financial hit to the museum, that is, how much rent the bank paid to the museum each year. A museum spokesperson "declined to say" what WaMu was paying.

That was silly and unnecessary. The figure was in SAM's tax returns, which is open to the public. So sure enough, after WaMu failed and was purchased by JPMorganChase, Hackett requested the tax filing, looked up the number and reported it on Friday: SAM received $4.6 million in rental fees from WaMu in SAM's most recently available fiscal year. The museum has a operating expenses of $24 million.

• Wal-Martist Tara Donovan profiled by Carol Kino in the NYT. And Donovan tells W's Diane Solway where she was (ha!) when the MacArthur genius people called her with the news.
• Christopher Knight considers why the faux-debates ignore cultural issues.
• Knight also says that the pope is concerned about Martin Kippenberger's frog.
• Robert Pincus reports that Tijuana -- a city of 1.4 million -- has built its first kunsthalle. Did you know: With over five million people, metro SD-Tijuana is bigger than Miami, Phoenix, Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
• It's nice that the LAT is proud of it's not-exactly-local museum director, but Michael Govan is becoming known for a lot more than just a pretty face and a creative contract.
• In the midst of an NYC-based financial meltdown, Nicolai Ouroussoff channels Gordon Matta-Clark.
  
• Combat painter Steve Mumford's story is well-told, which is awesome. The latest chronicler: the KC Star's Alice Thorson on the occasion of a Mumford show in Missouri.
• Speaking of Thorson, she writes about a Nelson-Atkins show that examines artists' take on technology and industrial progress (in the 19th century).
• After Ike, the Rothko Chapel was happy to find that its Rothkos were mold-free, says the Houston Chron's Douglas Britt.
• The Corcoran is deaccessioning ten paintings. Missing in Jackie Trescott's Washington Post story are curators and trustees, which makes me wonder a bit... Also lacking: Perspective from the industry.
  
• How lost was Holland Cotter in his review of Cathy Opie's Guggenheim retrospective? Cotter's second paragraph is problematic.
  
  

  [Opie] is an insider and an outsider: a documentarian and a provocateur; a classicist and a maverick; a trekker and a stay-at-home; a lesbian feminist mother who resists the gay mainstream; an American -- birthplace: Sandusky, Ohio -- who has serious arguments with her country and culture.
  

  With that first (cliched) phrase Cotter is setting up classic, oppositions. Insiders can't be outsiders, and outsiders simply can't be insiders. A provocateur can't be as mundane as a stay-at-home... but Opie manages to be both the yin and the yang. We get it.
  
  So that last one: an American -- one from Sandusky, Ohio -- can't have serious arguments with her country? Please.
  
  And let's not even get started on whatever Cotter was talking about referring to "leather queens." At least he got that opposition right. Or wrong. Or whatever.

MAN's series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What's happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia's 'buffer' approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

I hadn't planned on including this post in this week's series on the future of Spiral Jetty. However during the week enough emailers asked me about federal protection that I thought I'd add it as a postscript. Non-Jetty content resumes Monday.

When I asked Friends of Great Salt Lake director Lynn de Freitas if she thought there was any kind of federal monument protection that would be help preserve Spiral Jetty, I could practically hear her wrinkle her nose at me.

"There is this funny, knee-jerk thing about Utah and the feds," she said. "There's this belief that we don't need to talk to the feds."

de Freitas remembered Utah's reaction in 1996 when the Clinton administration effectively unilaterally created the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. The state didn't like that the governor and the state's congressional delegation were told about the new monument only 24 hours before it was created. To make matters worse, President Clinton announced the monument from Arizona.

With the exception of that kind of presidential edict, only Congress can create a new national monument. Given Utah's experience with Grand Staircase, experts such as de Freitas and National Trust for Historic Preservation mountains/plains director Barbara Pahl aren't enthused about that as a viable option. Besides, even you if conservationists were to push through some type of Spiral Jetty National Monument, there would be other issues. Just because an area is designated a monument doesn't mean it's necessarily closed to industry.

"Even if you get a bill, you'd have to [pass] a bill that has a stipulation that talks about protection," Pahl said.

Another kind of federal recognition, placement on the National Register of Historic Places, provides virtually no protection.

All of which leaves Jetty preservationists with one clear option: Work with each other and with the state government.

MAN's series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What's happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia's 'buffer' approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

In September, at an early meeting of Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman's just-appointed Great Salt Lake Advisory Council, an official from the Utah Department of Natural Resources made a surprising admission: The reason that Utah, the state with the most industry-permissive extraction policies in the West, had convened a major new effort to consider how to best utilize the lake was that thousands of people from around the world had raised a stink when an oil company tried to drill near Spiral Jetty. Instead of taking a pinprick approach to conservation, the state decided to take a comprehensive approach. [Photo]

The advisory council, which includes environmental advocates such as Friends of Great Salt Lake, industry groups such as Great Salt Lake Minerals, and a range of local administrators and elected officials, is charged with ensuring the long-term viability of GSL and its  ecosystem. Conspicuous by its absence on the panel is the Dia Art Foundation, which owns Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Dia is based in New York, all of the other groups are at least nominally Utah-based. (For example, Great Salt Lake Minerals is a subsidiary of a Kansas-based company.)

"The makeup of the commission was intended to represent a broad collection of stakeholders while maintaining an effective body," Huntsman spokesperson Lisa Roskelley told me. "Yes, all of the representatives live in the state, though certainly anyone from Dia who is interested would be more than welcome to attend any of the meetings or be part of the technical committees that will be providing information to educate and aid the process."

(Dia said that it looks forward to making a presentation to the group.)

The council's focus poses two challenges to Dia: First, the state of Utah is taking a holistic approach to lake management and so far this year Dia has focused on the Jetty itself but not on broader issues in the ecosystem. Next, if Dia becomes more broadly interested in working on issues relating to the GSL ecosystem, how can a New York-based non-profit, a group with responsibilities, projects and close relationships in Texas, New Mexico, and all over New York state, be effective in Utah?

One way is for Dia to be involved with state officials. For example, Dia took the lead in making sure the governor trekked out to see Spiral Jetty. Dia officials say they will continue to work with the governor and with the Utah Department of Natural Resources.

But Dia could also be effective from a distance by forming coalitions with interested groups, a more rigorous version of its ad hoc relationship with FOGSL. Dia says that it is counting on FOGSL to help keep an eye on the Jetty through the advisory council process, but Dia has no formal connection to FOGSL. It provides FOGSL with no funding for Jetty-specific work or advocacy.

"We haven't, to be honest with you, considered re-granting to them," Dia deputy director Laura Raicovich told me. "That's not really what Dia does."

"That's not a bad idea," added Dia director Philippe Vergne. "But we haven't thought about it."

And why should it? Dia has has little experience in participating in broad-based coalitions that work on mutual interests. (For example, FOGSL was unaware of Dia's 'buffer plan' until I asked FOGSL about it.) Meanwhile environmental groups are accustomed to working in coalition with a range of allies -- associations of hunters, fishermen, philanthropy, scientists and so on.

Dia's approach isn't surprising: Art organizations, especially art museums, typically don't work in coalitions with other groups on issues such as this because there's rarely a reason to. (Is there an art museum equivalent to an entire ecosystem?)

To make matters even more difficult, there is little or no philanthropy leadership around conservation issues at the Great Salt Lake, nothing remotely like the coalition-driving philanthropic partnerships that have built up around other ecosystems, such as the Hudson River. Dozens of organizations work on issues that impact the health of the Hudson. Down the Atlantic seaboard, the largest non-profit that works on Chesapeake Bay issues, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, spends $20 million a year. FOGSL's operating expenses last year were $57,000.

And therein lies an organizational challenge for groups with an interest in the GSL, and specifically for people with an interest in Spiral Jetty: It's hard to blame Dia for not partnering with a non-existent coalition. It's hard to expect FOGSL to have morphed into the Chesapeake Bay Foundation when GSL conservation issues are relatively new. It's hard to know who would organize philanthropy around GSL issues, the kind of issues that are important to brine shrimpers, hunters and art lovers. There is an opportunity for leadership.

Vergne has been at Dia for less than two weeks, but it sounds like that's where he wants to go.

"We are taking a very holistic view of what responsibility means," he said. "As you know and due to the nature of the piece in both cases, Spiral Jetty and also for the Lightning Field, when we talk about the enviornment we're talking about miles away from the piece...[The] work needs to be secure and protected so of course it's the road and the physical nature of the Jetty but it's also preserving the experience of the work and the experience of the work includes the way you access the work the way you experience the work on site."

Check out Culture Monster, the new arts blog from the Los Angeles Times. Especially cool: A Christopher Knight post on Mark Bradford's post-Katrina ark for New Orleans. In a related story, C-Monster throws down.

MAN's series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What's happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia's 'buffer' approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

Over the spring and summer, as Dia formulated what to do to preserve Spiral Jetty, it looked back to what it had done with other earthworks in its care, notably Walter De Maria's Lightning Field. For decades -- practically since the creation of the work -- Dia has pursued a 'buffer' strategy by which it bought up ranchland (or conservation easements) around Lightning Field. [Photo of aerial view of Rozel Point.]

Informed by that experience, in March Dia officials approached the state of Utah with a similar plan in mind. "The first step that we asked that the state to take was that it conduct a viewshed analysis on the actual area," Dia deputy director Laura Raicovich told me. "They're working on that, and we should have the results of that literally any moment. Once we have that in hand, we can do an analysis on our part of both the viewshed impact and possible geophysical impact on the Jetty from oil drilling. This proposed [Pearl Montana] test-drilling sites are only, in all likelihood, the first of other attempts. It's not just about defeating this set of proposals, but dealing with the future."

Several potential Dia allies think it's an idea with potential. Barbara Pahl, the mountains/plains director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation says that NTHP has worked with industry to donate leases to conservation groups. In 2002 the Anschutz Corporation donated some Montana drilling leases to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, effectively saving a canyon important to American Indians.

I asked Lynn de Freitas, the executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, if she thought creating a buffer around the Jetty, perhaps by Dia controlling oil leases, was an effective approach.

"Yes, it could create a precedent of sorts, if indeed [the state allows] that precedent to be created at all," de Freitas said. "It's a great idea. Those are the kinds of leveraging measures that can put the conservation community's playing cards in the game. If the state really is looking for some sort of economic livelihood, and for the sake of protecting something that is really for the greater good, then why wouldn't they take a smaller value in return for the lease potential. You've got a player, you've got an interested party that can pay and isn't that great because it's really a win-win." [Photo of Great Salt Lake Minerals Co. evaporation ponds in Clyman Bay. GSLM has proposed doubling the size of these ponds. The expansion would be roughly north and east of the existing ponds.]

But would the approach go far enough toward preserving the Jetty? Buying up leases would address one issue -- drilling, rigs and potential oil leaks or spills -- but it doesn't seem to address other Great Salt Lake issues that could potentially impact the Jetty, such as the GSL's mercury level or the impact evaporation ponds could have on the ecology of Clyman Bay.

"I think that's absolutely right," de Freitas said. "The interesting kind of conundrum here for Dia, as I see it, is the integration of the ecosystem into the preservation plan for Spiral Jetty."

Tomorrow: How the Pearl Montana proposal and how it might impact Spiral Jetty changed everything in the Great Salt Lake, and what that means for the future.

MAN's series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What's happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia's 'buffer' approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is in the collection of the Dia Art Foundation. In Lynne Cooke's 2005 book on the Jetty, Dia describes itself as the Jetty's "custodian." So where is Dia on the three clearest ecological threats to the Great Salt Lake?

On Monday I asked Philippe Vergne, who was seven days into his tenure as Dia's director, and deputy director Laura Raicovich about these and other issues. (Raicovich was Dia's acting director after Jeffrey Weiss left Dia in March. In an email, Weiss declined to discuss the Jetty.) [Photo]

Vergne said he was unconcerned with the Great Salt Lake's level, which is at a 40-year low. The lake level has concerned Utah officials, industry and sportsmen because the lake's level seems out-of-whack with recent precipitation levels. Vergne, who doesn't have a brine shrimpery to think of, instead considered the lake level within the context of the Jetty's history. "It's something that's been part of the life of the Jetty and Robert Smithson was aware of that," Vergne said. "[Sunday] in Beacon we screened the film about the Spiral Jetty and a few years ago the Jetty was under six feet of water. Some of that is natural."

I asked Dia officials if the staggeringly high mercury levels recently discovered in GSL imperiled the Jetty itself, the red algae that Smithson considered essential to the piece, or even visitors to the Jetty.

"Obviously that's not our area of expertise," Raicovich said. "We've been trying to keep abreast of those developments. It's not just the oil drilling itself or the visual impact from a derrick, or a rig, or the impact of a spill, but this mercury issue is potentially enormous."

And what about Great Salt Lake Minerals Company's proposed evaporation ponds? [Photo, with evaporation ponds at bottom.]

"I don't really know enough about that to comment," Raicovich said. "I just know what's in the paper." Raicovich said that Dia has not studied the question of whether the ponds would impact the Jetty or its viewshed, and that it has not contacted EPA about its draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) on the ponds. The DEIS is due to be released next month with three public hearings to follow in November.

The challenge for Dia is that it is an art museum-with-a-(big)-twist. It has lots of experience working with artists and with art objects -- but with little experience in tackling varied, layered, and expansive ecological issues or in working with numerous allies as part of a coalition. As a result, Dia's approach to the Jetty -- and to works such as Walter De Maria's Lightning Field -- has been to address single issues as they come up. Think of it as keeping the temperature at a safe level by putting out fires instead of addressing climate change.

This approach has worked well in other places. The only clear threat to Lightning Field was ranching-related development on the edges of the field. Dia worked with the state of New Mexico on the issue and in June Dia finished raising $1.1 million and purchased a conservation easement for 6,000 acres on the south side of Lightning Field. When artist Michael Heizer became uncomfortable with the possibility of nuclear waste-laden rail cars passing close to City, Dia hired a Washington lobbyist, took some meetings with the secretary of the Department of Energy, and was effective.

But Dia's record isn't as good on the Jetty, which is why both art lovers and Dia's putative allies are concerned. When Nancy Holt sent out a letter about the drilling threat on Jan. 29 and the blogosphere picked up on it the next day, Dia was caught unaware of the issue. [UPDATE: Dia says that it became aware of the issue on Jan. 28 and began working on it then.] Dia didn't issue any kind of public statement until Feb. 6. If Utah hadn't extended the drilling public comment period because of blogosphere-driven reaction, Dia would have missed the issue completely.

Officials at several groups with an interest in GSL issues have told MAN that Dia has dropped out of sight in recent months, even failing to return phone calls and emails. No one questions whether Dia understands or values the Jetty -- the organization has produced a significant scholarly publication on the Jetty as recently as 2005, it has ensured that officeholders such as Utah's governor visit the Jetty to experience it for themselves, and it has made sure it was accessible to visitors -- but Dia's most obvious allies have significant questions about whether Dia is interested in working with allies on the broader environmental issues that have the potential to impact Spiral Jetty.

"The interesting conundrum here for Dia as I see it there is the integration of the ecosystem at stake," said Lynn de Freitas, the executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake. "In the Jetty's part of the lake there are a lot of appealing aspects of development that could happen up there, in Gunnison Bay, that is. Whether or not Dia is..." de Freitas trailed off before starting again. 

"I don't know. I'm not used to working with the arts community. I really don't know what level of expectation can really come from an organization interested in the preservation of a single piece like Jetty, and how feasible it is for Dia to consider, 'What about these other things?' I would like to think they are every bit as interested in them as Friends and the broader conservation community are. But I can't be sure. I don't know what kind of soul-searching Dia's going to do, whether it will come back and say, 'Yeah we're with you for the long haul, regardless of what the issue is.'"

Which is not to say that Dia doesn't have its own ideas about preserving the Jetty. More on that here.

• Some Dallas parents are concerned that art:21 could inspire their kids to learn more about art on the internet. [via] Just for you, Dallas: Here's a new art:21 interview with Gabriel Orozco.
  
• Anthropologie loves art so much that they appropriate it.
• The Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt asks why Houston's mayor shut down the arts... but left movie theaters open.

MAN's series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What's happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia's 'buffer' approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

The Great Salt Lake is changing quickly. It is not clear why.

Lake levels have plummeted to the lowest levels in over 40 years. Mercury levels are rising and rising fast. The problem has emerged so quickly and unexpectedly that the Great Salt Lake now has one of the highest concentrations of mercury of any body of water in the United States. And this summer extractive industries filed new applications in an effort to create immense new evaporation ponds just west of Spiral Jetty. The ponds would be so enormous that they'd nearly double the size of existing GSL evaporation pools. If they are approved, the size of the new evaporation facilities would be bigger than the footprint of Salt Lake City.

[The image above shows evaporation ponds in Bear River Bay to the east of Spiral Jetty, which is off this image to the left, west of the Promontory Mountains. The green patches on the right of this Google Satellite picture are Ogden exurbs.]

"When you manage a hemispherically important ecosystem with one eye covered something has to give," says Lynn de Freitas, the executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, the environmental group that monitors the lake. "It's not just Spiral Jetty that's at risk. Currently, economics is the bottom line for all management decisions about Great Salt Lake. Development on and around the lake, diverting water for the growing population, and failing to fund research to determine why Great Salt Lake has the highest mercury levels ever recorded in the nation puts the entire ecosystem at risk of death by a thousand cuts."

Each of these developments has potential ramifications for Spiral Jetty.

Lake level
Last week the Great Salt Lake's elevation was 4,194 feet, a 40-year low. That has puzzled scientists: The winter of 2007-08 was a wet one in Utah. Lake levels should be higher. Instead, they're low and falling, effectively sped up because of the shallowness of the lake. It's not clear if the changes in lake level are part of a natural cycle -- they seem too extreme and relatively sudden for that -- or if they stem from increases in population around the lake.

Robert Smithson, the artist who created Spiral Jetty, expected that the Jetty would sometimes be visible and that it would often be underwater. If lake levels continue to recede because of human intervention -- and not just because of global climate change -- obviously the work will be substantially less likely to be underwater.

Mercury level
Three years ago U.S. Geological Survey scientists conducted routine tests around the Great Salt Lake and found something that stunned them: The lake's mercury levels were alarmingly high. Those 2005 tests found that the most poisonous form of mercury, methylmercury, exceeded 25 nanograms per liter of GSL water. How high is that? When the same form of mercury was found in the Florida Everglades at just one nanogram per liter, governments posted fish consumption warnings.

The state of Utah, caught off-guard, responded to the news by warning residents not to eat certain kinds of ducks. Multiple federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are now using federal funding to study the issue in an effort to find out what's going on.
 
There are three ways that increased mercury levels could affect the Jetty. First, it's possible that high mercury levels could effect brine shrimp, birds, or the red algae that gives the Jetty a blood-like hue. That hue was important to Smithson, who spoke and wrote frequently about the importance of the red algae to the Jetty. (See Smithson talking with Kenneth Baker in an interview first published in Dia's 2005 Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty: True Fictions, False Realities, and in his application letter for the Jetty's land lease. Also, Suzaan Boettger explains Smithson's interest in the red algae in her book Earthworks.)

Second, it's not clear what affect mercury could have on the salts on the earthwork itself. Finally, It is unclear if high mercury levels in the Great Salt Lake could eventually impact human visitation to the Jetty (or to other parts of the GSL).

Evaporation ponds
In 2007 the Great Salt Lake Minerals Corporation filed to install 33,000 acres of new evaporation ponds in the Great Salt Lake. Most of them, 22,700 acres would be installed just west of the Jetty. The rest would be on the other side of the Promontory Mountains, in the Bear River Bay. [The image at right is taken from GSLM's application. The black area marks the proposed new evaporation ponds in the Jetty's neighborhood. I added the red dot to mark the Jetty.]

It's not certain that the ponds would be visible from the Jetty or Rozel Point. They are further west of the Jetty than the Promontory Mountains are east. Regardless, the ponds would certainly introduce a dramatic change into the ecology of the northern sections of the lake. Groups such as the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network and FOGSL have expressed concern about the new pools.

As with the proposed oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake, the ponds must go through what is effectively a permitting process. Next month the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will release a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) regarding the Great Salt Lake Mineral Corp.'s plan. The EPA review will examine a range of environmental factors, including "wildlife habitat, water quality, Great Salt Lake water elevations, wetlands, hydrology, cultural resources, transportation, endangered species and industry." The DEIS is expected to be released in October, and EPA has scheduled three public comment meetings in Utah in November.

While these are the three most apparent, immediate threats to the ecology of the Jetty's neighborhood (and possibly to the Jetty itself), no one I've spoken to in the last three weeks expects these to remain the only threats.

"[The Jetty's] part of the lake is being looked at for obvious reasons for oil and gas, but also for its high concentration of salts and the easy evaporation of those resources," FOGSL's de Freitas says, adding that the state of Utah tends to approve such use. "Remember, the state motto for Utah is, 'Industry.' That's the whole thing."

Tomorrow: Where does Dia stand on these issues?

MAN's series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What's happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia's 'buffer' approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

On January 29, 2008 artist Nancy Holt emailed friends about a threat to her late husband Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty: Pearl Montana, a Canadian oil-and-gas company, had asked the state of Utah for permission to engage in energy exploration and extraction near the Jetty. The greatest and most important earthwork in the world was potentially threatened by a corporation that wanted to make a buck regardless of the possible cost to the health of an ecosystem or to a seminal artwork. Holt urged people to contact the state of Utah as soon as possible, to explain to state officials the cultural import of the Jetty and to urge the state to deny Pearl Montana's application. Holt asked them to act quickly: The end of the public comment period was 36 hours away, on Jan. 31. [Photo]

Holt's email was first published on Jan. 30, here on MAN. By the end of the day, scores of blogs picked up on Holt's plea. (Most of the traditional media didn't pick up the story for a week. The New York Times, for example, didn't publish anything until Feb. 6.) On that afternoon after Holt's email went up on MAN, so many blog readers from around the world flooded the state of Utah with emails and phone calls that the state extended the public comment period on Pearl Montana's application. Mostly as a result of a blogs-driven, international 'Save the Jetty!' outcry that resulted in Utah officials receiving over 3,000 emails, Pearl Montana's application was delayed. On August 7 state officials rejected it. Thanks substantially to blog readers, art won.

For now. Eight months later it's clear that Pearl Montana's initial application to explore and drill for oil just west of Spiral Jetty won't be industry's last attempt to treat the Jetty's neighborhood as a commercial resource. It's also clear that drilling is just one of many threats to the Great Salt Lake and to the Jetty. Conservationists are confident that Pearl Montana will be back with a revised application soon, that the company is waiting for the initial 'save the Jetty' fervor to die down. [The map at right is an old Google Satellite image of the Great Salt Lake. The Jetty is marked with a red dot.]

The question is: Is Spiral Jetty threatened by future commercial development? And are arts organizations, most of which have little or no experience in dealing with the confluence of interests and entities involved in preserving an artwork in the landscape, using all available and appropriate measures to save the Jetty?

In a way, Smithson himself expected the Jetty and other earthworks to serve as a catalyst for this kind of engagement between industry, government and environmentalists. Smithson wrote this in 1972, as part of a proposal to a mining company for a project in Ohio:

Our new ecological awareness indicates that industrial production can no longer remain blind to the visual landscape. Earth art could become a visual resource that mediates between ecology and industry.... I am developing an art consciousness for today free from nostalgia and rooted in the process of actual production and reclamation... A dialogue between earth art and mining operations could lead to a whole new consciousness.

Smithson was prescient. That "consciousness" is the debate which began when Pearl Montana filed its first application and when the art world responded. 

This week on MAN I'll detail the latest threats to the Jetty and its view-shed, as well as threats to the Great Salt Lake that could have -- or are already having -- a substantial impact on the Jetty. Here's the lineup:

• Tomorrow I'll discuss the health of the lake and industry's latest attempts to claim more of it;
• On Wednesday I'll write about Utah's first, tentative steps to decide what kind of resource the Great Salt Lake should be, and what the stakeholders are doing about the GSL and the Jetty;
• On Thursday I'll discuss whether the Jetty should be protected by the state or the federal government; and
• On Friday I'll analyze at whether existing organizations with stewardship of the Jetty and an interest in the lake are doing enough.

This morning's bit of ham-fisted fundraising comes from the Smithsonian, which is using the 'events-only' email distribution list of at least one Smithsonian museum to beg for money. It's possibly the silliest fundraising solicitation I've ever received.

First, let's remember that for years the Smithsonian has fiddled and spent money on private jets while its facilities rotted. Those museums and storage facilities have rotted to the tune of $2.5 billion. Congress, upset at rampant mismanagement throughout the SI, has long ignored the need. And now the Smithsonian wants to build another $1 billion worth of new museums. This is an old, old story.

But this morning the SI sent out an email saying " The U.S. Congress has challenged us to raise the money needed to address this critical situation immediately. We have 9 days left in our fiscal year to show Congress we have the support of people like you!" The email goes on to say that the SI has to demonstrate it can reach an unspecified goal that Congress will give it an extra $15 million, one two-hundred-and-thirty-third of what the SI says it needs. And there are only nine days! This just became extra super-duper important now, but it's so double-secret important we can't tell you what the goal is!

In a related story, the SI leaked to the NYT the news that former Gates Foundation boss Patty Stonesifer will  be the new chairman of the SI board. The Gates Foundation is America's largest grant-making foundation and has $39 billion in assets. But nevermind that: There are only nine days left!

• Several years ago, when I was working as an art critic for Bloomberg, I wrote about how horribly awful the Damien Hirst 'pill paintings' show at Gagosian was. My editor didn't like that I'd ripped the show, and she told me I had to be wrong. Her rationale? Gagosian claimed that the show sold out before it opened. (Yeah. I departed shortly thereafter.) On Saturday Roberta Smith examined how Damien Hirst toys with the market -- and how he isn't afraid to make horrible art (like pill paintings) to do it. Don't miss the last paragraph. UPDATE: Richard Lacayo cleverly agrees.
  
• Speaking of Smith, how close did she come to saying that Vincent Van Gogh was the greatest Western artist since the mosaicists at Ravenna?
• In the NYT Hilarie Sheets profiles Cathy Opie. Bonus amuseument: Watching the NYT figure out what to call the leather community. Or the S&M community.
  
• SFMOMA's temporary Sol LeWitt murals installation lasted eight years, reports the SF Chron's Sam Whiting. Here's what's next. (Although what their financial value has to do with anything I have no idea. The works are in SFMOMA's collection. They've been permanently demonetized.)
•  The Chron's Kenneth Baker digs a show of (the tres underrated) Frank Lobdell at SF's Hackett-Freedman.
• The SD Union-Trib's Robert Pincus says this show at MCASD (which has an awesome website) makes you think in all the right ways.
• Struggling Detroit has lots of empty space. Why not let artists take advantage of it, posits the Detroit Metro Times' Rebecca Mazzei.
• Over the summer I spent a week discussing the Baltimore Contemporary's Cottage Industries show, an exhibition about communitarianism and art. A Detroit couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert take to the Metro Times to propose a project that would have fit right in. And Berliners Stephane Orsolini and Erika Mayr create a project involving bees and open space. The Baltimore Contemporary picked up on something...
  

I'm taking a day off. Back Monday with a week-long examination of the future of Spiral Jetty and the role arts organizations are (or aren't?) playing.

While some newspapers have been gallivanting about the globe spending big dollars and daily attention on vacuous entertainment-meets-business stories such as the Hirst auction, the most important arts journalism of the week comes from Mark Stryker in today's Detroit Free Press: The Detroit Institute of Arts, one of America's finest museums, is facing major financial problems. Stryker reports that the DIA is facing a staggering FY 2009 operating budget shortfall of $17 million on operating expenses of $34 million. [Image: A DIA Degas.]

Stryker does a nice job of outlining the factors that have gone into DIA's troubles: macro-economic problems in Detroit and in Michigan, years of operating shortfalls that have been covered by depriving the museum's endowment of roughly $100 million, and a massive decline in government support. He also outlines how the museum hopes to fix the problem -- and the plans sound mighty thin.

The DIA story certainly has particulars rooted in problems in Michigan, where unemployment is at nine percent. (The national figure is 6.1 percent.) In metro Detroit it's even higher -- 10 percent -- and in the city itself the figure is over 14 percent. (Compounding the hurt: In Detroit consumer prices are up five percent in the last year.) The Michigan economy is so strained that not even the beloved Detroit Red Wings sold out playoff games during their recent run to the Stanley Cup.

But what's happening at the DIA is also part of an under-examined macro-narrative: During the first peak period of American museums, then-wealthy cities in America's industrial belt supported great collections and museums. Many of the finest art objects in America are in museums in Detroit, Toledo, Dayton, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Rochester, NY. [Image: A DIA Van Gogh.]

But over the last couple decades the rust belt economy has suffered, and those cities have faced economic stagnation or recession. This past summer, a report from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that cities such as Dayton and Buffalo lost as much as seven percent of their population just last year. (Meanwhile, population is booming in the sun belt, a region with few great museums.) When Buffalo's Albright-Knox looked at its ability to stay relevant as a contemporary art museum, it decided it had to deaccession art in order to be able to continue to acquire art.

And now the DIA is in trouble. They won't be the last rust belt museum to struggle.

Sez DCist: Polar bear stunt bemoaned here this morning organized by Greenpeace and local provocateur Mark Jenkins.

• The MFA Boston has met its expansion fundraising goal of $504M.
• Before people get too excited, let's remember that (for now) this is a possible New York issue, not a national one.
• The Getty is advertising on television? [via]
• SFMOMA takes down its massive Sol LeWitt wall murals.
• Jim Hodges designs clothes?
  

The latest Carol Vogelism, from today's breathless NYT coverage of the Hir$t orgy:

Alberto Mugrabi, a New York dealer, sat through the two-day sale but was able to buy only two works, a spot painting and a drawing. He called the event a phenomenon. "It's a way to escape from reality," he said. "And over time it could be a really good investment."

Interesting. A 'phenomenon!' A "really good investment!" Sounds... promotional. Makes me wonder if Mugrabi... and sure enough. From Vogel, in Tuesday's paper:

Alberto Mugrabi, a Manhattan dealer and collector, said he had been getting calls from people who have never bought a work of art before, asking for his advice. "It will open up his market," said Mugrabi, who owns about 150 works by Hirst and will be attending the sale.

If today's story was about traders shorting AIG or on hog futures, any journalism outlet would insist that the quoted expert's financial interest was outlined. Vogel, who seems to only make these mistakes on the bullish, pro-market and pro-auction-house side of the gavel, should have learned this by now.

No sooner do I finish tweaking the Washington Post for failing to write anything substantial about new Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough, than the Post goes Annie Oakley and publishes something substantial about Clough.

Jackie Trescott's story has far more details on Clough's background than did Monday's NYT piece, but ultimately it's a source-greaser, that old Washington standard whereby welcome-to-town feature stories are used to cozy up to an administrator in an attempt to ensure future access. In fact, Trescott may have even taken a sly dig at the genre in a particularly puffy section in which she tells us how the new boss is a man of the people:

While touring the Smithsonian, Clough has shown that same personal approach that people back in Georgia admired: very hands-on. At the airplane restoration facility in Suitland, he walked into an area where the workers were wearing masks and sanding. "He got right in there and climbed over barriers," said Gen. John Dailey, director of the National Air and Space Museum. "And he shook hands with mechanics who had grease all over them."

Cute. But like the NYT, the Post skirted the major questions.

New York has Creative Time and the Public Art Fund. Washington has... well, donkeys, polar bears, and white, dead guys on horseback.

Washington has one of the three most vibrant institutional arts scenes in America, but remarkably it has no public art program of any consequence. Except...

Yesterday this photo of a bear suit popped up on popular Washington blog DCist. This being George W. Bush's America: The bomb squad promptly arrived, a poetic but misguided, out-of-proportion response to a non-existent threat. Throughout the day DCist chronicled other polar bear sightings, including this one pushing a shopping cart with a globe in it around the National Mall. And later I found that Wooster Collective had posted a couple pictures on its site that seem to indicate that this whole 'public art' thing was nothing more than a tree-hugging-style environmentalist stunt.

Still, that's as 'good' as it gets for public art in the capital of the free world. Alas.

So how would a 'Creative Time' happen here? The Hirshhorn, which doesn't have any room to expand (or, for effectively 370 days now, a director, vision, a plan, etc.) could take on public art in Washington as a form of 'expansion.' (But would it be too worried about offending?) Or some far-sighted funders and a whip-smart young director-with-an-idea could put something together, which hasn't happened. In the meantime, apparently public 'art' in your nation's capital involves bomb-squad interventions, which seems far too apropos.

Christopher Knight reviews LACMA's presentation of Dia's Francis Alys "Fabiola" show, complete with a thorough explanation of who-the-heck Fabiola was, how the Catholic Church treated her badly, and why "Fabiola" is like Cindy Sherman, sort of. (Phew.)

Couple other things around this show that I like: It replaces one of LACMA's most unfortunately installed galleries. And the museum has also posted curator Lynne Cooke's catalogue essay online. Don't see that too often. (Why not?! I'm finding out.) Finally, I can't think of an exhibition that seems more perfect for Flickr. Which brings Knight's argument full-circle.

Related: On the Hammer's recent Alys survey, myths of the doomed are at the center of Alys' work: Part one, two, three.

A couple months after G. Wayne Clough took over the secretaryship of the Smithsonian, the NYT is the first publication to run a major piece on him. It's by Robin Pogrebin and it's here. (Despite the Smithsonian being a major driver of science, the arts, and tourism in Washington, no Washington publication has written a major piece about him. Which is stupefying. Ed: See update below.)

Clough (at right) is vague on his plans and doesn't outline a vision for the Smithsonian. He sounds most focused on limiting any possible appearance of SI extravagance, even requiring museum directors to have their travel approved by SI administrators. (No wonder the Hirshhorn can't find anyone to take its directorship...)

Today the Times corrected a major error in the story: Yesterday the NYT reported that the SI is launching a "major capital campaign of $5 million to $7 million." The correction amends that to a five-to-seven-year campaign in pursuit of $1 billion, which has been both the term and dollar figure about which SI watchers have been whispering since the campaign was announced last November.

That's real money, but it's far short of the Smithsonian's actual needs: The General Accounting Office has agreed with the SI's estimate for building-related construction/maintenance needs: $2.5 billion. And none of these figures -- not Pogrebin's and not GAO's -- includes $500M-$1 billion needed for two new museums to which Congress and the SI have committed themselves. (In fact Pogrebin never mentioned the two new museums.)

So does Clough have new commitments from Congress? Is he merely hoping for such? Is there another plan? Or are massive cutbacks coming soon to the Smithsonian? Those are the major questions about the Smithsonian. So far: No answers.

UPDATED, 9/17/08: The Washington Post catches up, sort of.

The Houston Chronicle's staff started updating the paper's Arts in Houston blog this afternoon. (Well, so far it's just Douglas Britt.) Recent heds: Good news on public art in the city, and what appears to be good news on the Galveston Arts Center.

Time's Richard Lacayo on why he's not covering today's Damien Hirst auction: "I do what I can to talk about art but I don't know what to say about shopping."

This morning I rounded up the Ike-related news. Here's everything else.

• The weekend's headline stories are LATer Jason Felch's three-part series on Roxanna Brown and the antiquities scandal that led to investigations and arrests earlier this year at Southland museums. Felch's stories tell the tale of a beautiful, daring journalist turned antiquities-preserver turned federal prisoner. Don't miss it: Here's part one, part two and part three.
  
• The Cleveland Museum of Art acquires much 20thC work, including this creepy-weird Emil Nolde, says the Plain Dealer's Steven Litt.
• The Boston Globe's Sebastian Smee is late to the Turner retro -- it's already been through Washington and Dallas, and there's only a week left in the NYC run -- so he reviews the reviewers, which is much fun. (And, I'd say, spot-on.)
• The Washington Post's Blake Gopnik on the powerful-folks-as-regular-folks portraits of Richard Avedon, on view now at the Corc.
• The Stranger's Brendan Kiley is happy to see Dana Gioia leave the NEA.
  

As Ike approached the Texas coast over the weekend, I was thinking most about two potential targets. Naturally I was thinking about Houston's art museums, especially about the Menil, which is surrounded by trees and which has some pretty fabulous modernist sculpture on the grounds (di Suvero, Heizer, etc.) So far as I've heard, there are no accounts of Ike having done major damage to any of Houston's major museums. On Sunday a Menil Collection official told me that the museum's buildings had suffered no damage from Hurricane Ike, and that generators were providing power to the principal Menil buildings. There was no immediate word on the outdoor sculpture. The Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt heard many of the same things.

As of this writing many of Houston's museums had not announced their plans for the week, but many are expected to remain closed all week. MFAH seems likely to open on Thursday.

But I also thought of the former Hitchcock Naval Air Station, a blimp base that the military long ago abandoned and that I visited a couple years ago. [Photo by Kathleen Shafer] Hitchcock is only about 15 miles inland. When Ike's eye took an unexpected northern turn and just missed hitting Galveston head-on, it also missed Hitchcock. I don't know if the NAS survived -- it's somewhere between middle and nowhere -- but I hope it did.

Further up-storm but as a result of the remnants of Ike and Lowell, Mies' Farnsworth House has flooded. (The flooding at Farnsworth comes from the nearby Fox River, which overflowed its banks. The house sits on five feet of stilts, which makes this picture, from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, all the more striking.) Yesterday, at least a foot of water sat in the the modernist masterpiece. The rest of the pictures and a video at that link are fairly shocking. The Chicago Tribune's Vikki Ortiz also wrote a short blurb about the flooding.

(The more traditional weekend roundup comes later this morning.)

No news yet on/from officials at the Menil, MFAH, CAMH or from the Blaffer. Will update MAN as soon as information comes in.

• Here's what it looked like this morning less than ten blocks from the Menil, and about five blocks from Rothko Chapel. Houston Chronicle describes Menil's neighborhood as "mostly stable."
• First Flickr images of the Menil here and here.
  

Carol Vogel, NYT, September 9:

[New Metropolitan director Thomas] Campbell faces the task of maintaining the quality of the museum's programming and covering its vast operating expenses in the face of eroding corporate support.

Carol Vogel, NYT, September 12:

More generally, Mr. Campbell said he hopes to make better use of the Met's rich collections, given that increasingly rocky economic times will make expensive loan shows harder to produce.

If Vogel knows about financial issues or problems at the Met, she should write a story about them. These kinds of winking drop-ins near the ends of stories are unfair to the Met and to readers. Either Vogel and her NYT editors are practicing lazy journalism because they assume there are pressures, or they're not publishing a story that ought to be written. It's Journalism 101: Write the story or don't.

... keep the art from eating the visitors.

For the last week or so Time's Richard Lacayo has been all-Hirst, all-the-time. I'm not particularly interested in Damien Hirst. I think his few fascinating works have been dulled by an abundance of lesser output that is dull, sterile and commercial. (Or, as Lacayo put it, "Hirst's career always threatens to amount to a core of genuine invention surrounded by a vast penumbra of middling merchandise.") But I had a blast reading Lacayo's story and posts on Hirst:

• Time Europe cover story;
• Lacayo Q&As Hirst, part one, two, three, four;
• Ex-Timer Robert Hughes on Hirst; and
• Hirst on ex-Timer Robert Hughes.

Oh, one other Hirst thought: In the US, Hirst is hardly a curatorial darling. I almost never see his work in permanent collection installations at US museums. (Except at BCAM at LACMA, which...)

• King Tut is ticked off at Philip Anschutz and Zahi Hawass.
• Brent Burket really, really digs the (vaguely Klimtian) work of Jennifer Coates. 
• A $24.95 Hirstian skull.
• Regina Hackett on artists and 9/11.

Next month Sharon Waxman is publishing a book on the antiquities trade. This is both fascinating and amusing because Waxman's grasp of the facts when it comes to the Getty and antiquities-related issues/staff has proven to be, er, questionable.

Today Getty president/CEO Jim Wood sent out an email to staff alerting Getty-ites to the book. Instead of addressing it in any direct manner, Wood simply described Waxman as a "a former New York Times Hollywood entertainment writer," and moved on. (In a related story, the book is blurbed by media gadfly and noted antiquities expert Tina Brown.) Wood's e-mail is in the jump.

What is the chief art critic of a big New York newspaper to do when he's been living in Berlin, is disconnected from the U.S. museum scene, knows virtually nothing about incoming Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Campbell, and has to write an analysis piece for the morning paper?

Easy: He spends much of 1,500 words walking in place and taking thinly-veiled, name-free digs at anyone he can. The result: Michael Kimmelman's analysis of the Met's new hire unfairly seems to use LACMA chief Michael Govan as a stanz-tasche. (I counted at least three name-withheld digs at Govan, who must be thinking, "Hey Mike, if you're going to spend an analysis of the Met ripping the director of another museum, at least have the eier to confront me by name, 'k?" FWIW, when I wrote about Govan and LACMA yesterday, I wrote about Govan and LACMA.)

Of course Kimmelman wasn't going to admit what his piece made obvious: The 'chief art critic' of America's most important newspaper wasn't able to produce anything informed on the Met's new director. Time and time again Kimmelman typed warm fuzzies about the importance of objects and cultures, boilerplate that could be as easily dropped into an analysis about the Kimbell as the Met.

Kimmelman was apparently unwilling to publicly admit how little he knows about Campbell so he fudged. Sample the veiled silliness:

Since Philippe de Montebello announced his pending retirement, among the names bandied about in the art-world echo chamber for the longest time were a few lightning rods and contemporary-art favorites who, it was suggested, could provide useful connections to new money and links with living artists -- so that the Met might become, as if it weren't already, sufficiently "relevant."

No names, no real information, just insinuation and winks. It's the kind of uninformed balderdash that would be at home on Page Six.

Campbell is regarded as energetic, level-headed, popular, not visibly unhinged -- like at least one curator turned Met director of the past -- and not someone whose career was a long public campaign for the job.

Afraid to name names again?

Likewise, it might appear that Mr. Campbell's role is simply to be caretaker and not mess things up. The Met today is a well-oiled machine. But caretaking always leads to somnolence. The National Gallery of Art in Washington since Carter Brown retired in 1992 is a case in point.

Once again, in a piece about the Met, Kimmelman takes a cheap, under-developed shot at another institution. The NGA deserves more thorough consideration than a one-off. (Just curious Michael, when were you last there? You last reviewed an NGA show three-and-a-half years ago.)

The popularity of the [Met's] recently reinstalled Greek and Roman Galleries proves that connecting with a broad, young public doesn't require hiring Jorge Pardo or some other living artist to design the cabinetry.

If I were Michael Govan I'd be wondering who this arschloch thinks he is, to rip Jorge Pardo's pre-Columbian installation without, apparently, having seen it.

If the paper's chief art critic can't keep up on the US -- on New York! -- from Berlin, the NYT should find itself an NYC-based "chief art critic."

No idea. In the last 15 hours I've talked/emailed with a number of museum directors in an effort to find out a little about the Met's new hire, Thomas P. Campbell. No one knew him. The collective shrug was so completely shared as to be almost audible.

Over the next few days you'll read lots of insta-analysis about the Met's selection of Campbell. Most of it will be pure balderdash. (Discussion of one such example will be discussed on MAN this afternoon.) I liked the way Time's Richard Lacayo handled the hire this morning: He presented Campbell, offered a relevant macro-comment and didn't try to pretend he knows a lot about someone he doesn't know a lot about.

My only thought: Confident institutions hire lesser figures, confident that they'll be able to help him/her grow into the job.

Tomorrow will be the one-year anniversary of the Walker Art Center hire of then-Hirshhorn director Olga Viso. The Hirshhorn still has not found a successor. 

Met curator Thomas P. Campbell will be the next director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Campbell is a curator in the Met's department of European sculpture and decorative arts, as well as the supervising curator of the Met's Antonio Ratti Textile Center. Press release after the jump.

The first paragraph of introductory wall text at LACMA's Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections from the Cheech Marin Collection is unexpectedly revealing. It explains, in strikingly direct terms, why this exhibition is at one of America's major art museums. [Photo]

The paragraph explains that the collector's celebrity is the basis for this exhibit. The wall text has nothing to do with the art on view. For the artists whose work is in the show, it's an insult of the worst kind: 'You're only here because of your association with a Hollywood star,' it says. The exhibition is an embarrassment.

And the presentation gets worse: At the entrance to the exhibition two paintings are hung in opposition: Both are 'expressionist Thiebauds' by Carlos Almaraz. One is Sunset Crash (1982) from Marin's collection. The other is Crash in Phthalo Green (1984) from LACMA's collection. The message of the installation is that the private collection is installed here as legitimately as are works in the museum's collection.

The baldfaced equivalency is inappropriate. It insults the LACMA curators and trustees who have worked to build LACMA's collections. It says that all their scholarship and collective wisdom is worth no more than this one guy's credit card, that Visa can get an art collection installed at the museum just as readily as can the LACMA staff's professional judgment.

To wit: The Cheech Marin show stomped all over LACMA's excellent Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement. I can't imagine that "Phantom Sightings" curators Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox, and Chon Noriega were thrilled that their own museum was one-upping them. (Perhaps that's why Fox kept his name off of Cheech's show, a withholding first noted by Christopher Knight.)

'Cheech at LACMA' demonstrates that LACMA director Michael Govan is still growing into his job. No question the museum, which had suffered under poor leadership for years, has been recovering: LACMA seems to be making amends with long disaffected collectors,  recent acquisitions have been impressive, and many of LACMA's galleries look better than they have in years. Chris Burden's Urban Light is both smart and endearingly populist. Those are all important developments for which Govan deserves lots of credit.

But two of LACMA's recent exhibition decisions are confounding. It's not just the Cheech Marin debacle: Next month LACMA will open a show called Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008. The museum describes the show as "the first major exhibition to bring together the magazine's historic archive of rare vintage prints with its contemporary photographs." The museum's press release -- which is little more than promotional boilerplate of the sort that would appear in a Vanity Fair media kit -- says that the exhibition was "conceived" by VF editor Graydon Carter and that it was co-curated by VF's "editor of creative development." (The show opened at London's National Portrait Gallery and will travel to other portrait galleries. LACMA is the only encyclopedic art museum on the tour.)

The show is unaccompanied by scholarship, or anything else that would indicate that it belongs at LACMA. (Above: Vanity Fair has produced a book "[b]y Graydon Carter and the Editors of Vanity Fair; [w]ith an essay by [Vanity Fair columnist] Christopher Hitchens.") Like the Cheech show, it's pure celebrity grab-ass with a side of advertising.

Govan has spoken frequently of making LACMA an encyclopedic museum with contemporary art at its core. Instead, his museum looks like an encyclopedic museum motivated by brushes with celebrity.

Related: Christopher Knight agrees on the fluffing of Marin and exposes the museum's decision-making rabbit hole.

• The UN World Food Program offers this painting quiz. Correct answers win the WFP 20 grains of rice (from advertisers). Bet you can donate 500 grains 5:00.
• PORT's Arcy Douglass visits Barnett Newman's 18 Cantos at the Portland Art Museum and reflects on the (potential) problems of the border.
• New Orleans outsider artist Roy Ferdinand considered (with a ton of pics) by collector Martina Batan at art e-zine Triple Canopy.
• I've flown in and out of SFO 100 times and never known about this Vito Acconci.
• Is this an over-reaction?
  
• This year the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program has a 'bloggers' category. Grant applications are due by Sept. 22. I'd like to be excited by this, but I'm not. Not only is this the program that has brought us "writer's" grants for "Collectivism in 20th-Century Japan: A History of Strategic Alliances," and "The Importance of Being Iceland," but the program has a history of asking writers who publish online to apply and then failing to grant to them. Furthermore, Warhol is intentionally unclear about who is evaluating applications, a level of secrecy that's not just unnecessary, but that runs counter to the ethos of the the online community to which they say they plan to grant. I suppose I'll apply, but I'm skeptical.
• If you have or read a particularly smashing post that you want to make sure I consider for linkage, email it to LinksforMAN-blog (at) yahoo(dot)com.
  

In a post last week I argued that argued that the best work in the Hirshhorn's just-closed "The Cinema Effect: Realism" show worked because it was the video equivalent of trompe l'oeil.

Part of why trompe l'oeil painting is beloved is because it acknowledges that the viewer understands the difference between reality and un-reality and then plays with that dichotomy. Painters such as Peto and Harnett only try to fool the eye enough to establish the type.

That's why Francesco Vezzoli's Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story [a still is above] is so good.

Vezzoli's Marlene (which received its first U.S. presentation at the Hirshhorn) is an over-the-top send-up of the vacuous, trashy celebrity-documentaries that fill cable television, a post-Warholian examination of our fixation with the rise and fall of stardom. Of course the 'star' that is the subject of Vezzoli's documentary is not Marlene, it's Vezzoli himself. (And Vezzoli is as much a celebrity likely to be profiled by E! as, well, you are.) In Marlene we see Vezzoli's rise, we see Vezzoli's fall, and each anecdote is more seriously-told and more preposterous than the last. "He was only four or five and they were already calling him 'Director,'" says one of Marlene's faux commentator. "His needle-works are nothing but decorative," says one 'museum curator,' a self-reflexive dig that recycles one of the oldest art world insults. Adds a "damage control expert": "Francesco is a pushy little sh*t, but I consider that a positive, not a negative."

Vezzoli's use of the 'celebrity documentary' follows in the footsteps of the 19th-century trompe l'oeil painters in that he riffs off of an established format that is familiar to his audience. For example: In their trompe l'oeil paintings, artists such as George Cope riffed on Civil War 'regalia' paintings frequently commissioned by politicians on the make in the years after the Civil War as an advertisement of their war-era heroism. Similarly, Vezzoli takes a medium plenty familiar to anyone who's watched E! at their gym (because no one would watch that tripe at home, right?) and tweaks it forward. It's less fool-the-eye than it is fool-the-brain, but the mixing of reality, unreality and wit is the same.

To a less-direct extent, Corinna Schnitt's Living a Beautiful Life does the same thing. The Schnitt features a couple of attractive actors (a 'husband and wife') reading from a script based on the answers Schnitt received after asking Los Angeles-area teenagers 'what constitutes a beautiful life?' The nail-with-its-shadow of the Schnitt is a handsome, well-put-together man [above] expressing that his life is a success because, "I enjoy having a hot mistress every two months." Who would say (admit?) that, even to their best friend or therapist? Schnitt doesn't tackle an established format as much as Vezzoli does, but her willingness to smirk at convention and honesty is what makes the piece work. She's not laughing at the actor or at the teens who supplied her with material, she's laughing with us at our ideas of how the other half lives.

Imagine if, in the fall of 2037, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced a show titled "Steven Cohen the Collector." Or if The Pushkin Museum launched "Abramovich the Collector." Imagine "Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, the Collectors," to open at the Getty and then travel to Italy's Rutelli Museum? (Ahem.)

Seems a little ridiculous, no? Well, what about "Hearst the Collector," soon to open at LACMA? The LAT's Suzanne Muchnic tells the story behind the show.

Shows of collections of dead guys seem more common of late, perhaps as a curatorial mirror on today's overly market-obsessed art world. The worst, silliest, lamest example of such was the Met's recent installation of Dutch paintings from its collection, installed by donor and time-of-gift. Here's hoping LACMA allows that mistake to inform its Hearst show. (Prepare for the show by reading David Nasaw's magnificent biography of Hearst.)

• Christopher Knight rolls his eyes at the florid scholarship that accompanies the NuMu/Hammer Tomma Abts show;
• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch may have the worst website of any newspaper in America. For starters it has stopped posting David Bonetti's articles in its "visual arts" section, a nearly unimaginable stupidity. As a result, I missed Bonetti's recent story explaining the St. Louis-wide Light Project, of which Spencer Finch's ice cream cones (see pix here) are a part. While the project's creators point to Munster's sculpture event as a point of departure, I might point to Turin's... annual holiday festival of light.
• Who knew that the Akron Art Museum had what the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Steven Litt calls one of the largest collections in the U.S. of anti-Nazi graphic designer John Heartfield? It's going on view.
  
• The story of the NGA's selective disclosure about its upcoming Leo Villareal presentation gets weirder: Kriston Capps says the NGA flat-out fibbed to him when he was fixin' to write a magazine story, perhaps/apparently because the NGA preferred a minor NYT mention.
  

• Time's Richard Lacayo Q&As with MoMA chief curator Ann Temkin;
• Glasstire's Titus O'Brien makes an art trek to the Texas panhandle. The best stuff -- on Cadillac Ranch/Amarillo Ramp enabler Stanley Marsh, his un-Gorky and such -- is about halfway down.
• The Washington Post's Blake Gopnik sees a real estate ad and Barbara Kruger.
• A Yale MFA student was kicked out of school because she "listened too much to her instructors' advice?"
• If you have or read a particularly smashing post that you want to make sure I consider for linkage, email it to LinksforMAN-blog (at) yahoo(dot)com. Don't just email the address of your blog. Call my attention to something specific.
  

Three months ago, when I was working on a major story about the future of the National Gallery of Art, the NGA's cursory attention to contemporary art was a major point of discussion between the NGA's curators and me. In both on-the-record conversations I had with an NGA spokesperson present and in on background chats I had with a range of sources, curators and staff pointed to an upcoming Leo Villareal project as proof of the NGA's commitment to contemporary art. Except no one was allowed to point to it publicly -- the NGA's spokesperson forbade it. Rarely has a more open secret been treated as something to cover up.

What was happening was clear: Regardless of how it impacted the museum and the presentation of the museum's interest in contemporary art (in the first major magazine story on the NGA in years), the NGA's chief spokesperson wanted the Villareal item to debut in the NYT. This week, as NYT reporter Carol Vogel returned from her annual August sabbatical, all kinds of news suddenly, magically appeared in the Times: Ann Temkin's promotion and a Braque acquisition at MoMA, the NGA Villareal. (Collusion made obvious: Even after MoMA and the NYT announced the news on NYT.com, MoMA refused to send a writer a press release on the Temkin appointment.)

It was a week in which the implicit bargain between the NYT and arts institutions was made clear: In return for receiving stories first, the NYT provides coverage. The obverse of the rule is also abundantly clear: If the NYT doesn't discover major arts news stories first, it doesn't report on them. (The subtext to this unofficial deal is even more unfortunate: Cooperate with us, the NYT tells the institutions it's supposed to cover, and we may take it easy on you if anything untoward happens...)

Accordingly, the NYT has completely failed to report on the two major visual arts news stories of the summer: The University of Iowa regents' interest in assessing the University of Iowa Museum of Art's great Jackson Pollock Mural for possible flood recovery-related sale, and the Denver Art Museum's deaccessioning scandal, the most questionable art museum sale in half a decade (and the first time in the same period that the museum industry association has investigated same). Both stories have been extensively covered by major national news outlets such as Time and the Wall Street Journal, by regional media, and by industry press.

(The NYT ran an unreported 'roundup' item on the DAM affair, and later a correction on the faulty roundup item. The end result was the NYT crediting the proper outlet with breaking the story, while getting the rest of it precisely wrong.) 

I can't imagine a week in which the NYT's approach to cultural coverage could be clearer: Either they get the press release first, or they don't cover the story at all, no matter the import or newsworthiness. That's beyond shameful and that's beyond un-journalistic. It's negligence with a side of cronyism.

This morning I posted about Spencer Finch going all 31 flavors on St. Louis. He's not the only ice cream-artist out there: Check out The Center for Tactical Magic's Tactical Ice Cream Unit (and here).

As ye return from summer, here's a glimpse of what you may have missed on MAN while you were recreating...

• A Q&A with artist Robyn O'Neil about her work and the American Folk Art Museum's Dargerism show: Part one, two, three, four.
• Rethinking Sam Francis' spectacular Basel Mural I at the Norton Simon.
• The Chinati Foundation is building a major Robert Irwin.
• The best contemporary show of the summer may have been the Baltimore Contemporary's Cottage Industry: Intro and parts one, two, three, four.
• Andrea Zittel created a swap meet of sorts, complete with a surprise.
• MAN broke the news of an AAMD investigation into a questionable Denver Art Museum deaccessioning. Last I checked, the situation was still unresolved.
• Despite not having expanded in 30 years, the National Gallery is having a hard time finding a place to grow.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art's re-opening of its 1916 building is a hit.
• What Richard Diebenkorn was doing in New Mexico: Part one, two.

I love Spencer Finch. I love ice cream. So how cool does this sound: As part of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts' 'Light Project,' Spencer Finch is making ice cream.

Sweet. Because if I were to eat a typical Spencer Finch I'm pretty sure it would taste like fluorescent lights, which are not as tasty as ice cream. Even cooler: Finch and the Pulitzer, in partnership with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, are giving away the ice cream every day but Monday. (That's either the cows' day off, or Ted Drewes threatened to sue.)

This being a Finch, there's an atmospherics related tie-in: The ice cream is made with solar panels and some ice-cream making equipment, and it involves something Finch calls an "edible monochrome," a color that has something to do with the St. Louis sunset. (If your dog ate your McCracken that would make it an edible monochrome too. And just wondering: Does the sun shine on Finch wherever he goes? That would be awesome.)

The picture at left is an Arthur Dove-recalling Finch watercolor that references a St. Louis sunset. The image above is of the first test of ice cream making and shows two guys eating the finished product. (And, as the The Light Project's Spencer Finch page says, they are "saving some for later.")

Check out more at this fantastically complicated and absorbing Light Project website. (Other Light Project artists include Ann Lislegaard and Jason Peters.) And if you can't head down Grand Ave. for some ice cream of your own, subscribe to the ice cream's RSS feed. There's also more at this Pulitzer blog post and at this Contemporary blog post.

• Don't miss the Walker Art Center's UnConvention.
• I wrote about this for Smithsonian magazine last year, and now there are pictures (and more): Trenton Doyle Hancock designs for Ballet Austin.
• Two years ago Sarah Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, AK, pop. 5,469. Take a look. Doesn't Wasilla look like '70s-era Stephen Shore?
• The NY Sun's Kate Taylor reports that Richard Armstrong is close to being named director of the Guggenheim, and that the Met is down to four.
• New MoMA chief curator Ann Temkin has stopped by MAN on occasion: Part one, two, three of MAN's art after 9/11 series.
  
• And I'm starting something new on the links front: The sheer number of good arts blogs has blown by my ability to keep up with them all, and I know I'm linking to many of the same blogs too often. So if you have or read a particularly smashing post that you want to make sure I consider for linkage, email it to LinksforMAN-blog (at) yahoo(dot)com.
  

At the end of the classic 1952 film-about-a-film "Singin' in the Rain,"  the movie's last hidden reality is revealed: Debbie Reynolds had been serving as Jean Hagen's voice in Monumental Pictures' "The Dancing Cavalier."

The unmasking was pretty straightforward: Hagen had to sing the movie's title track, "Singin' in the Rain," in front of the audience at the film's premiere. [Above.] The problem was: Hagen couldn't sing, and that's why Reynolds had been serving as her voice. So in "Singin' in the Rain's" last big scene, Reynolds stood behind a curtain, singing as Hagen mouthed the words. The three male leads, led by Gene Kelly, pulled back the stage's curtain, revealing the film's -- "The Dueling Cavalier's" not "Singin' in the Rain's" -- last deception.

Well, sort of. Many of the rest of the deceptions in the film were hidden... but were plenty realized by contemporary audiences. In two of Debbie Reynolds' musical numbers, her voice was replaced with Betty Noyes'. (And in one of those two, Reynolds sang her own part later in the film.) In another scene, when Reynolds is allegedly dubbing over Hagen's voice in "The Dancing Cavalier," the voice of the dub isn't Reynolds', but Hagen's. The result is Jean Hagen doing Debbie Reynolds doing Jean Hagen.

The entire film is full of this kind of clever references to itself and to recent film history, all knowing nods to the false reality of movies. "Singin' in the Rain" is arguably the wittiest, slyest, most tongue-in-cheek exercise in playing with truth that Hollywood has ever produced. Among the children of the film are Mel Brooks' madcap comedies, mockumentaries such as "This is Spinal Tap," the Scary Movies, and The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, on view at the Hirshhorn. The exhibition features contemporary video art and film installations that play with the idea of reality.

The show's curators, Anne Ellegood and Kristen Hileman, impressively and thoroughly demonstrate their thesis, that the question of what is real and what isn't is a particular interest among many film and video artists. But unfortunately most of the work here is tedious, academic and self-important. Installation after self-reflexive installation fails to tap into what makes reality plays so much fun: Mischievous wit. That's what makes painting's version of reality plays, trompe l'oeil, so much fun. And "Singin' in the Rain" isn't just witty, it's self-eviscerating. (To say nothing of centuries of gender-bending live theater!)

One of the reasons trompe l'oeil and "Singin' in the Rain" work is because the players -- painters, actors, directors, whomever -- delight in revealing the conceit behind the artifice. Who but a fool in a Hollywood movie would dance down a street in the rain (especially rain mixed with milk so it would show up on film)? The painted shadow of a trompe l'oeil nail or a 'tacked on' dollar bill is a smirking nod at the gag. With only a couple exceptions (most notably Francesco Vezzoli's self-obliterating Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!), "Realisms" takes itself as seriously as a graduate student certain he's discovered something new when he hasn't.

At the heart of the show is Runa Islam's Tuin (1998), an artless multi-screen expose of how Rainer Werner Fassbinder created a shot in the 1974 film "Martha." We see the actors, the outdoor set, the cameras, and we see the track on which the cameras move. Islam limply presents mere deconstruction and re-creation as revelation. Compare Islam's installation to the way Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds play with the tools of their trade: In order for Kelly to tell Reynolds he's infatuated with her he cranks up all kinds of movie-making equipment --- a fan, bright lights, a cheesy romantic set -- to not just show Hollywood myth-making in action, but to poke fun at the silliness of both Hollywood and storybook romance. Islam just shows.

Reality plays work best when they acknowledge that the viewer is smart enough to understand the trick, not when they club him into understanding. (Witness: Gene Kelly spends much of "Singin' in the Rain" poking fun at recent Gene Kelly movies such as "The Three Musketeers" and "An American in Paris.") "Realisms'" curators apparently realized that little of the work stood on its own without acres of explanatory wall text. Sometimes -- such as in Mungo Thomson's New York, New York, New York, New York, a four-screen exploration of a movie set built to resemble New York City -- the wall-text precludes the viewer from having any chance to discover the work on his own. But more often the text works like a car salesman, trying to excuse a lame bit of narcissism, such as in Kerry Tribe's Double in which Tribe hired actors to play her. Or the Phil Collins piece in the show. (Would his career be possible without the invention of wall text?)

Next: What worked, and why.

Sign of the times: The three headlining art books of the season are as much about commerce as they are about art.

• Cynthia Saltzman's Old Masters, New World examines the acquisition of art by western oligarchs;
• Jonathan Lopez's The Man Who Made Vermeers looks at a master-forger seduced by the Nazis and by the opportunity to fake-for-a-buck;
• Edward Dolnick takes on the same topic in The Forger's Spell, which Publisher's Weekly says is a lesser version of the Lopez book. (Incidentally: Gawker noticed that the NYT seems to be, er, incestuously boosting Dolnick.)

The Saltzman book is pretty directly about the market and the other two less so. But I think there's a pretty common theme running through a lot of art-related journalism and publishing: The zeitgeist is about the market first, and art last. If the art world decides that's an unfortunate focus, it's going to have to do something to change it.

University press to the rescue: The University of California press is releasing an updated version of Lawrence Weschler's classic book on Robert Irwin, complete with a new cover picture that seems to be from Irwin's recent MCASD exhibition. [via] The hardcover will retail for $50 (!), but you can pre-order the paperback for under $17. (Also from UC Press: A quarter-century of Weschler's conversations with David Hockney.)

• The Dallas Morning News' Scott Cantrell reports that the debate over the Kimbell expansion continues in Dallas.
• Just curious, NYT: Please explain how there's a "new art movement" in Denver and not in Minneapolis-St. Paul. If I had to pick one as an art destination, the MIA and Walker beat out Denver every time. I guess the week before the Democratic National Convention was just a little light cheesy-feature-wise?
• Actual arts news happened in Minneapolis: The NYT picked up this awesome Minnesota Independent story last week without giving credit. Not that we've ever noticed the NYT doing that before, or anything.
  
• Doug Harvey writes about garbage and the documentarian exhibitionists that are the Center for Land Use Interpretation for LA Weekly (which annoyingly insists on breaking up Harvey into two pages).
• The KC Star's Alice Thorson reveals a new William Pope L. flag project in Kansas City. (Hint: It vaguely recalls this Hans Haacke.) Grand Arts has posted project details here. [Aside to the Hirshhorn: 'The flag in modern and contemporary art' would/could be a smart, appropriate, awesome show.]
  
• We're into September, so normal posting resumes this week.