December 2008 Archives

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As we wind down 2008 I want to say thanks for making MAN's seventh year the biggest year yet.

This December, for the second straight year, I've asked MAN readers to show their appreciation for this site by giving to the MAN-DonorsChoose.org challenge to support arts education projects in public schools. With this news out of Los Angeles yesterday, it's increasingly clear that arts education in America's schools is in trouble.

This is the last week of the challenge and three projects remain unfunded. (So far MAN readers have donated $2,418, $2,468, $2,592, $2,692, $2,792, $2,887 to help over 1,000 kids learn about the visual arts in their classrooms.) We have until Friday to fund them. Please take a look at the project page here. (If you fund them today, I'll add another one or two over the holiday.)

While I've we've all been celebrating solstice (and other holidays), the LAT has been demonstrating that it still has the best visual arts coverage of any American newspaper -- and that second-place is far back. (Just try to imagine any other paper flooding the zone on a major art story like this.) The last week's unlinked-to-yet highlights:

• Christopher Knight: The bullet points of the MOCA/Broad agreement.
• Knight: MOCA still faces substantial leadership issues.
• Diane Haithman: Yup.
• Knight: MOCA's path to recovery starts with getting its collection out of storage. Knight has been talking about MOCA's unfortunate tendency to hide its light under a crate since 1995. (It's been a regular topic on MAN since 2004.)
  
• Dissent: At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Laurie Fendrich shrugs at the MOCA mess.
  
• Meanwhile, the LAT has managed to walk and chew gum at the same time: Suzanne Muchnic says that the Orange County Museum of Art has postponed its much-anticipated Diebenkorn Ocean Park show until 2010.
• More Muchnic: The Norton Simon's glorious Francisco de Zurbaran still-life gets a cleaning and much is revealed.
  
• More Knight: An Eakins deaccessioned by the National Academy went to LACMA.
• (Disclosure note: Warhol Foundation president Joel Wachs is one of four people appointed to an advisory group that will help steer MOCA into its next phase. I'm working on a paper for the Warhol Foundation.)
  

It's about time that the Sunday NYT ran a topical and newsy arts story instead of forcing the usual saccharine yawn on us. Jori Finkel's story about deaccessioning is solid.

Still: The story discusses a number of deaccessionings without fully explaining the context of each case. It ignores deaccessionings at major museums, such as MoMA, LACMA and the Getty (they've all sold in recent years). Incomprehensibly, it leaves out one of the stickiest examples: this donor-benefitting sale in Denver. Finally, there is a big difference between art museum deaccessioning, and non-art-museum institutions that sell art, and that's somewhat lost in Finkel's story. (Oddly, she or someone else at the NYT seems to have 'created' a museum at Thomas Jefferson.)

But here's the real head-scratcher: Finkel lets National Academy director Carmine Branagan skate with this shamelessly, preposterously, unbelievably ridiculous claim:

"I remember saying: Unless you believe you can support sweeping change, then do not vote for deaccessioning. The tragedy isn't that we're going to sell these four pieces. That's not a tragedy. The tragedy would be if in 10 or 15 years we were back here having the same conversation."

Uh er, uh... except that's exactly what has happened: The NAD has deaccessioned three times in 30 years. Finkel should have called Branagan on that.

• At the Seattle P-I, Regina Hackett has a fun spin on year-end top ten lists: Top ten art 'events.' 
• George Will on an NEH program that gets art (posters) into schools. (A half-measure, if that.)
  
• RIP Robert Graham, say Suzanne Muchnic and Cara Mia DiMassa in the LAT.
• In the DMN, Michael Granberry reports that the AEG not-really-King-Tut show is suffering from an attendance problem. Unknown: If the AEG-Tut problems will spill over onto the DMA's balance sheets. That's going to be one fascinating tax return in a year or two. (Unless the contract leaks out...)
  
• Posting sked this week: Later today I'll have another links post, mostly to the fantastic LAT MOCA coverage. Expect posts Tuesday. But after that, probably not much until next week.

I'm sorry to report that the Museum of Contemporary Art has taken about a $30,000,000 to $2,343 lead over MAN readers in the DonorsChoose.org-MOCA trustees challenge.

Fire up folks! Come roaring back! You do not have to take Eli Broad's/MOCA's splashy move sitting down. I've added three new projects here. Please give. (Update: Code-garble fixed.)

The LAT's Diane Haithman reports that MOCA has accepted Eli Broad's lifeline and that former UCLA chancellor Charles Young will take over as the museum's CEO. Jeremy Strick is out of a job. Some thoughts:

• Charles Young was Andrea Rich's boss at UCLA. The last non-artsy administrator to run a major museum was Rich, at LACMA. That didn't go so well. The rash of non-arts people running museums was a 1990s management fad, and one that worked so poorly that it's almost-completely gone away. Here's hoping that Young is a mere transitional figure. This should go without saying: The nation's best contemporary art museum deserves art-smart leadership.
• Inexplicably, so far none of the MOCA trustees who put the museum in dire straits have resigned. Is there no responsibility ethic? (As I've said before, Tom Unterman apparently does not understand enough about museums to serve as a board chairman. He should be the first to go.)
• LACMA made a big, loud, splashy public bid to try to deprive Los Angeles of the nation's top contemporary art museum. It was bold move, it was ill-advised, and it was predatory.  LACMA lost. It looked bad in the process. Call it LACMA boss Michael Govan's most public failure. In the last couple years Govan has been involved in two high-stakes gambits: His departure from Dia and subsequent move to LA, and the MOCA bid. He left Dia a bit of a mess, its most important board member feeling betrayed and disillusioned. And now this.
• What does MOCA do next? It needs more money than has been discussed so far in order to be stable. It needs an endowment drive, a permanent collection-display plan, and a director who can transition the museum away from a two-headed leadership structure.
  

MAN readers have given $2,063 $2,343 to the MAN-DonorsChoose.org effort to help out arts education programs in America's public schools. With about 10 days to go, you're 35 percent ahead of last year's entire haul. Thanks.

Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim: Spot-on title, fantastic catalogue, mind-numbingly stupid installation. Even when the Gugg gets one right, it can't get one just right.

Sarah Oppenheimer at the Mattress Factory: The Carnegie International-concurrent show in which Oppenheimer was featured had its ups-and-downs, but the New York artist's nearby installation stole the show. (Part one, two.)

Dialogue Among Giants at the Getty: This show should have been titled "He's Carleton Watkins and No One Else Was." The exhibition has a simple, straightforward concept: Carleton Watkins was a mega-stud, a photographer to whom composition was paramount. His peers, notably Eadweard Muybridge, were wanna-bes. I don't know if this was the best show of the year -- no catalogue?!!? -- but it sure was the most thrilling.

The Year of Mark Bradford: For me, his roof-top installation at the Carnegie International is the work of art that best sums up America in the Bush years. (Did he know a financial meltdown was ahead?) He had a breakout year. (With Vija Celmins.)

Steve Roden at Suzanne Vielmetter: Usually when painters pack about 20 influences into their paintings, they end up looking like they're trying really hard. Roden's paintings at Vielmetter looked so easy and so natural it hurt.

Chris Burden's Urban Light at LACMA: A populist metaphor + destination.

Cottage Industry at the Baltimore Contemporary: In hindsight, it's amazing that no one else has done this show (and that they left out Filip Noterdaeme, but oh well). (Part one, two, three, four, five.)

Robert Irwin at the Indianapolis Museum of Art: The artist's only permanent indoor installation at a U.S. museum. (Irwin rises above.)

Remodeling the Huntington, Cleveland: The Huntington's Portrait Gallery is now one of the best, most elegant rooms of art in America. The Cleveland Museum of Art re-opened its 1916 building, to superb effect.

Vik Muniz, Rebus at MoMA: A clever marriage of concept, collection.

Honorable mention: Morandi at the Met, Miro at MoMA, Francis Alys' Fabiola at LACMA,  Franz West at Baltimore, the Carnegie International, Dargerism at the American Folk Art Museum, Oranges and Sardines at the Hammer.

• Kenneth Baker: Wayne Thiebaud picks up stuff on Franz Kline's floor, aids in teaching career, results in exhibit.
• Christopher Knight's 2008 best-of list. Nary a mention of the market.
  
• Meanwhile, read the NYT's best-ofs and it's market, market, market. And then there's Holland Cotter, who displays the now-familiar NYT cluelessness about Los Angeles: "[MOCA is] a funny place, with its internationalist sheen and market-driven program occasionally interrupted by inspired, could-only-happen-here shows." Uh, really? Here are MOCA's three 2008 Geffen Contemporary shows: California conceptualism, Lawrence Wiener and Allan Kaprow. The Grand Ave. lineup featured two collection shows in four exhibits. Cotter goes oops.) UPDATE: A reader points out I didn't point out ongoing shows: Bourgeois and Kippenberger. True. At the time I wrote the post I figured that everyone had MOCA on-the-brain as much as I do. I don't think that their inclusion changes my point.
  
• In LA Weekly, Christopher Miles has a best-of list as well. My list will have one show in common with his...  (Come back this afternoon!)
• Jerry Saltz does a list too.
• Jen Graves discovers that Bob Irwin has not read Ren Weschler's definitive work on him.
• Peter Plagens picks his perfect work of art for the Bush era.
• This week on MAN: Posting will be normal today and tomorrow. Wednesday is TBD and expect no posts on Thursday and Friday. I'm traveling, so when MOCA news breaks I'll probably be a bit slow to post here. (I'll probably post pretty quickly on Twitter though.)
  

Well, at least officially. And while the MAN DonorsChoose.org challenge to help support arts education projects in America's school will continue through Jan. 1, we're running out of time to run-up the score on MOCA's trustees. (Current tally: MAN readers $1,255 $1,380, $1,461, $2,018, $2,038 MOCA trustees $0.) Please take a look at the projects page and give. Here's what some donors have said about the projects they've helped fund:

I gave to this project because art class was always my favorite.

I gave to this project because... Art Books are one of my favorite things..they bring the Museum into the readers hands. I love to share them with friends.

I gave to this project because...I'm a college student at a university where there are thousands upon thousands of art books; the sheer number and quality is an embarrassment, a glory of riches. I don't make much at my part-time library job, but I believe strongly that everyone should have access to art and the stories behind them.

The LA Times' Diane Haithman reports that the MOCA board is moving toward accepting funds from Eli Broad that would save the museum, and that director Jeremy Strick is on his way out.

(The LAT report is substantially more measured -- saner, even -- that the schizo NYT story. The first four paragraphs will give you whiplash: By the fourth you'll wonder how the paper published the first. It would have been clearer if the NYT had... said what the LAT said. Doh.)

I'm in a deadline maze today, but here are links to LAT MOCA coverage. (You remember the LAT; its coverage is clearly, meaningfully sourced.)

• AAMD issues statement;
• LA mayor issues statement; and
• MOCA Mobilization delivers petition.

Previously: Franz West and Vienna in Baltimore: Part one, two, three, four, five, rhymes. BMA acquires West's Swimmer.

I want to end my West posts where they started, with a story that reveals how profoundly Klimt's Vienna led to West's oeuvre.

In 1903, a rumor raced through Vienna's coffeehouse scene: Gustav Klimt had impregnated one of his models, Mizzi Zimmerman. Klimt effectively confirmed the rumor with a scandalous painting, Hope I, in which he painted Mizzi not just pregnant, but looking out at the viewer, happily and confrontationally. While the pregnancy was a minor scandal in Catholic Vienna (this was no virgin birth), the painting quickly became a major one: Klimt planned to immediately exhibit it at an early-career retrospective of his work at the Secession.

Just before the exhibit opened, the education/culture minister of the Habsburg government, Wilhelm August von Hartel, intervened. von Hartel, who had defended and supported Klimt throughout a recent scandal over a government commission, told the artist: Congratulations on your forthcoming one-person Secession show. Remember how I've supported you... and don't you dare show Hope I at the Secession.

Klimt admired von Hartel. Klimt knew that von Hartel had incurred the wrath of Vienna's powerful, ruling anti-Semites for supporting him and he was genuinely appreciative. He acquiesced to von Hartel's request and Hope I was not shown publicly until 1910, and then in Munich, not Vienna.

Then as now, bold collectors snapped up daring pictures, and a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer and art collector named Fritz Waerndorfer quickly bought Hope I. (Nearly all of Klimt's major collectors of this period were Jewish, and Klimt's art was known as Le Gout Juif, The Jew Taste.)

However: Waerndorfer realized that the painting was too outre to hang openly in his home, that there were some things that even the most progressive of Viennese art collectors just could not do. In keeping with local custom, Waerndorfer, the first major supporter of the Wiener Werkstatte, hired renowned Vienna designer Koloman Moser to design a cabinet in which he could keep the painting hidden from view.

Visitors were only invited to see it after tea (think of the tea hour as the Vienna equivalent of happy hour -- the tea was rum-soaked) when Waerndorfer's wife Lili would lead guests to where the Waerndorfers kept their paintings collection. Lili and a member of the serving staff would use separate keys to unlock the cabinet (wouldn't want the guests to think that the Waerndorfers were so perverted that they'd look at the painting alone!), show the guests Hope I, and then theatrically lock it back up, re-hiding it from view.

Fast forward to 1996, when Franz West was cranking out his 'Adaptives,' sculptures that encouraged viewers to pick up art and to play with it. West, who acknowledged his debt to Klimt in the earliest work in the Baltimore Museum of Art's West retrospective, went back to Klimt's era and borrowed an idea. In Mirror in the Cabinet with Adaptives (left), West built a cabinet, but instead of using the cabinet to hide work, he put a mirror and a video camera inside. "Take an Adaptive and go into the cabinet," instructs the text on the outside. When viewers go inside the cabinet to play with  Adaptives, their fun is shown on a television screen outside. It's a perfect perversion of Klimt and the prim reserve of his era.

Related: Franz West and Vienna in Baltimore: Part one, two, three, four, five, rhymes. BMA acquires West's Swimmer.

Today Eli Broad will attend his first MOCA board meeting in years. Coming on the heels of Tuesday's meeting, LACMA's takeover offer, and snow in the desert Antelope Valley, Broad's presence likely signals that MOCA is running out of 'chances.'

Also: MOCA Mobilization issues a press release that calls for "the reality of independence - not the appearance of it."

It's an agenda-setter. Don't miss it. 

First on MAN: Today J. Paul Getty Trust boss Jim Wood announced to Getty staff that the Getty's endowment is down 25 percent since June 30, 2008, leaving it at just under $4.5 billion. (The S&P 500 is down 30 percent since July 1.) The endowment ended fiscal year 2008 at $5.98 billion, meaning that the Trust has suffered losses of $1.5 billion in the last five-plus months. At the end of FY2007 the Getty was the third-largest American foundation by asset size. Wood told staff to expect "significantly reduced" spending in FY10. Wood has also frozen Getty hiring and promotions. Wood's email to staff is in the jump.

I checked with the California Attorney General's office to see if California law requires the AG to approve a merger of two non-profits. Long answer: The two non-profits must provide 20 days written notice to the AG, complete with a range of documents, including whatever the AG asks to see in order to complete his review. After considering said documents, the AG can either approve or block a merger.

In other words: If MOCA agrees to be taken over by Museum Associates/LACMA, California attorney general Jerry Brown has the power to approve or block the transaction.

"Overall, it is our responsibility to assure that charitable assets are protected and that any assets held pursuant to a restricted trust are maintained in accordance with the donor's intent," Brown spokesperson Dana Simas told me.

1.) If MOCA agrees to be taken over by LACMA, does the California attorney general (who is investigating MOCA and who has oversight over California non-profits), have to approve the deal? And would the California attorney general approve such a deal?

2.) Right now MOCA pays $1-per-year in rent to the city of Los Angeles for its Grand Avenue space and for the Geffen Contemporary. If Museum Associates/the Los Angeles County Museum of Art took over MOCA, would the city extend the same $2/year deal to the county/Museum Associates? (I doubt it.) The city could, in theory, effectively scuttle the extant proposal by raising the rent to $10 million per year, per facility.

3.) From yesterday's Los Angeles Times: "Aiming to discourage the merger, Garcetti and Councilwoman Jan Perry, whose district includes MOCA's downtown venues, introduced a council motion Tuesday asking the city Community Redevelopment Agency to give MOCA $2.8 million in rent money derived from the neighboring California Plaza development." Is that one-time support or annual support? (Question to which I do know the answer: Could the LA City Council have a clunkier website? The motion discussed in the LAT is not yet online. UPDATE: Here it is.)

4.) What does this mean: On Friday, LA City Councilperson Jan Perry filed this motion. The motion would create a "Little Tokyo Public Art Park" effectively adjacent to the Geffen Contemporary. It says that MOCA "has now expressed a willingness to design, construct and maintain the Art Park," and it indicates that $1 million in design costs are available. The motion also mentions what could be MOCA's third city lease. The timing seems either strange, coincidental, or, well, something else entirely.

What's appalling is that LACMA is not just waiting to see what happens at MOCA, it's that LACMA is aiding and abetting the destruction of one of America's best, most-respected museums. LACMA isn't just trying to kill MOCA, it's trying to kill a national treasure that happens to be seven miles away. LACMA is acting as if it thinks MOCA is a corporate competitor. There is no other explanation. (Other than megalomania, that is.)

This is what LACMA director Michael Govan told the Los Angeles Times: "The thing to understand is that we're not swallowing up MOCA."

Please.

Yesterday afternoon LACMA publicly released a formal takeover offer in which the county museum proposed to subsume MOCA, to take over its buildings, and to show its art in the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the under-construction Resnick Exhibition Pavilion. That's not just swallowing, that's gulping down in one bite. LACMA's one nod to the museum it is now trying to kill is the preservation of its name in some materials. Like maybe wall-texts.

Nevermind whether LACMA is engaging in behavior beyond the way one art museum should treat another. That's obvious. LACMA is actively attempting to damage its city and its county, and with no greater purpose than to engorge itself.

Part Two
So as strange as all that is, there's also how LACMA is doing it.

Every time I've been in Govan's presence, his tie has been perfectly knotted. His suit has looked great. His jokes have been timely and well-delivered. If hairs on his head were out of place, I'm pretty sure it was because Govan was trying not to look too boyish. He exudes likability and competence. Moreso than most executives he understands that occasionally people are going to disagree with him and he handles that well. Govan may be chatty, he may appear to be casual and easy-going... but except for his departure from Dia (the organization still hasn't recovered), nothing he does is sloppy.

So geez, what happened on Tuesday?

If you're LACMA and you want MOCA's collection/etc., your best bet is to sit tight. (And if MOCA ultimately fails -- and no matter LACMA's behavior, MOCA's not there yet -- it is in the best interest of Los Angeles and of art that the MOCA collection remain whole.)

LACMA had previously made it clear both privately and publicly that it wants MOCA's art. Its best chance at getting it is that MOCA's board is so terrified of Eli Broad that it would rather hand the keys to LACMA than accept Broad's charity. Throwing an extra grenade in the room is not constructive, not even to LACMA's own Saturnine interests.

To be sure: The MOCA trustees are more terrified of Broad than they are ashamed at having run a major national museum into near-insolvency. How paranoid? Read today's strange NYT story -- unclear-on-the-concept headline: "Los Angeles Museum Proposes to Save Another" -- the Broad-ian 'information' in which does not match anything I've heard from either 'side.' (The LAT story is the better read.)

And instead of sitting tight and waiting, LACMA made a clumsy offer and its director said clumsy things clumsily. (Complete with an apparent, unnecessary shot at MOCA director Jeremy Strick, who has enough problems at his museum without a brother-director taking a swing at him.) A sloppier performance under fire could hardly be imagined. It's as if Govan and LACMA felt the need to do something just to show Broad that they aren't afraid of him. Nyah.

Part Three
Just in case it needs be said again, the MOCA trustees are proving that they're the worst art museum board in America. (And yes, there's plenty of competition for that title these days. At 'best,' MOCA's bunch is tied with the National Academy of Design.) The idiocy of this cannot be overstated: The MOCA board is apparently more willing to inflict upon itself an embarrassing public failure than it is to admit it needs help. Is there a 12-step program for non-profit mismanagement?

The solution to the museum's mess is simple: Write checks, the checks you have failed to write for half a decade. Some of you should resign, including board chair Tom Unterman, who does not understand trusteeship. Accept Eli Broad's donation. Pledge to work with the future Broad Art Museum the same way you'd work with the MCASD or SFMOMA or MoMA. Work out a deal with the county whereby the county gives MOCA at least $1M/year, a sum that would cover MOCA's education program. Rebuild the board. Rebuild a community's trust. (And FWIW: Dean Valentine needs to stop throwing gasoline on the fire. Dean: You were part of MOCA's failure. If you want to be involved, write a check and help save the place. Otherwise, sit down.)

Part Four
The Getty is silent. Aside from Broad, every other major collector and philanthropist in Los Angeles has been silent.

Is there an adult in Los Angeles? A wise man who can congregate the key players, lock the doors, and threaten and cajole this into a resolution that benefits everyone? A mediator with clout, an attorney general, a foundation head, a someone? Today is the day to step forward.

LACMA proposes merger. Details at LACMA.org. Subtext: Govan v. Broad, it's on.

• Just-back-from-California C-Monster doesn't understand why Jerry Saltz is so impressed with Urs Fischer's 'Chris Burden.'
• Eight of Peter Schjeldahl's top ten shows of 2008 are in New York City. (Time's NYC-based Richard Lacayo: Five of ten.)
  
• Amusing and related: "Henry Moore in America" should have been titled "Henry Moore in New York City." They are not the same thing.

• The Hammer's current headliner, Oranges and Sardines, is a fascinating show about which you'll be reading more here. Take a tour with curator Gary Garrels.
• And after your main course, have dessert: (Pricey) cookies at MOCA.

As I noted when I wrote about the Baltimore Museum of Art's acquisition of Franz West's Swimmer, West grew up as an artist when pop art and minimalism were king. He rebelled against their consumerist tidiness and machined neatness by making objects that were pointedly unrefined, obviously handmade.

For several decades West has toyed with the work of contemporary masters by riffing on their work messy-style: West plays with Richard Tuttle's barely-thereness in a work called Tuttle (1974). It's a papier-mache wall-mountable that both refers to a pink, untitled 1967 Tuttle, and to the German slang term 'tuttle,' which roughly translates to 'tits.' (Sorry, no pix.)

Then there's West's Kobo (above), one of West's 'illuminations' pieces. Kobo seems like a clear Westian riff on James Turrell's skyspaces. (The viewer is meant to stand under it and to look up into the light.) And West's Provisorium (in MOCA's collection, at least for today, right Tom?) recalls Warhol's oxidation paintings.

Finally, the most obvious rhyme: Robert Gober's Cigar (also in MOCA's collection) is reminiscent of many of West's 'cigars.' (The one at right is from West's 2007 Venice Biennale installation.)

Related: West and Vienna in Baltimore, parts one, two, three, four. Tomorrow: Closing out West by going back to the beginning.

Today MOCA's board meets in an attempt to... well, uh, who knows. Here's the recap of the last 96 hours:

• Last Friday it seemed possible, borderline-likely, that a small group of board members would publicly announce pledges to the museum. As of 9am ET, that hasn't happened;
• The LAT ran a front-page Mike Boehm-and-Kim Christensen story on Sunday detailing how MOCA got to this point. It's a must-read;
• Late yesterday the LAT ran this story by Mike Boehm about how board co-chair Tom Unterman and trustee Jane Nathanson are open to selling off MOCA's collection. Unterman calls selling art to pay bills a "logical option." Nathanson: "...one has to look at alternate possibilities."
• MAN readers have a commanding $1,245-0 lead in the DonorsChoose.org-MOCA challenge. To see how you can continue to run up the score by helping arts education projects in America's public schools, click here.
  

Unterman obviously doesn't understand his responsibilities as an art museum trustee, let alone as a board chair. He should resign -- in shame -- at the earliest possible date. Nathanson's comments were less egregious, but not by much.

So what happens today? No one knows. The MOCA-to-LACMA talk, which first went public here on MAN when LAMCA's Michael Govan expressed openness to LACMA's absorbing MOCA's collection, has quieted substantially. Eli Broad's initial $30 million offer, detailed here, is still on the table, but as of the beginning of the weekend the two 'sides' had not had substantial conversations to work out an 'acceptance agreement.' It wouldn't surprise me to see the dollar number Broad is willing to commit rise substantially if MOCA's trustees dawdle, especially if they dawdle in the direction of selling art or toward LACMA.

And other than that, we'll just have to wait and see.

Franz Wests are never just cigars. They're never just phalluses either. I think they're a directly Sigmund Freud-referencing part of West's long exploration of the cultural and intellectual history of his home town, Vienna. (See parts one, two, three of my discussion of the West retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The photo at left is from West's 2007 installation at London's Canary Wharf.)

There is no single Westian path through Freud. West has mined Freud and Vienna's role as a pioneering center of psychoanalysis for 30 years, but for the purpose of this post I'll confine myself to West's oft-thrilling, epoxy-resin-and-fiberglass (or sometimes aluminum) sculptures. The sculptures are gorgeous and explicitly tactile -- that is, West often encourages viewers to touched them, sit on them, etc. They're among the most engaging (and naughty) public sculptures being made today.

I think that West has probably had Freud's thoughts on libido in mind throughout this series of sculptures. Freud proposed a specific progression of libido, starting with babies and moving toward adulthood. Infants start with an oral phase, such as in a child's nursing-focused interest in breasts. (Also: Breasts abound in West's childish collages.) Freud posited that infants then progress to an anal stage during which a child is fascinated by excretory processes, and then in adolescence and on into adulthood we finally enter a phallic stage, during which the phallus is the primary motivator.

Start with West's Swimmer, recently acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art, and on view outside the museum. Read it as an infant's gummy mouth (or in a number of other ways).

Move on to any number of West sculptures that recall the anus or excretion, including this work that is also on view at the BMA. (And that sense of humor I mentioned earlier? West isn't immune to riffing on anal sex toys.)

Finally there are West's cigar-recalling phalluses, which he's apparently delighted in making over and over and over. (Look for a 'rhymes' post on West's phalluses tomorrow morning.)

In fact, West's recent work is so specatcularly phallocentric (a focus that is nothing if not Freudian) that the 62-year-old artist might be accused of being in the throes of what the mostly pre-Freudian Viennese sexologist and psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing might call paradoxia, a later-in-life obsession with sexual desire. (The work above was on view at the Albright-Knox in 2005.)

In 1892 Paul Gauguin made this painting, Tahitian Women Bathing. It's in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1930 Matisse traveled to Tahiti. In 1930-31 he made his series of four 'Backs.' This is Back IV, in multiple collections including MoMA and the Hirshhorn. The Gauguin nods to a classical pose, showing his model holding her hair, as if wringing it out after bathing. Matisse, who never fully shook off being a proper Artist, had riffed on the model's hand-behind-her-head post since for almost 30 years, since at least his first great Blue Nude. He could simplify the form (as he did in Backs), but he remained truer to the classical pose.

1.) MOCA's next board meeting is Tuesday. 

2.) Possible but not certain: Sometime between now and Tuesday, I think that a small group of the museum's trustees may break their silence. And I think the words they speak/release may include the word "million." And I think the figure will more likely be in the sevens than in the eights. It would be a start, the first sign of life. (And it would mean that MAN readers' $925-0 lead in the DonorsChoose.org-MOCA challenge would, er, be lost. Give here, and help support arts education in America's public schools!!)

3.) I'm more optimistic that MOCA will continue as MOCA than I was three weeks ago. It's not clear what that museum will look like though. Or who will run it at either the administrative or board level.

4.) I think that Angelenos should be asking the mayor and the city council to step up. I think that local government should be asked to support MOCA's education program. In its last fiscal year, MOCA received $248,000 in government funding. The museum spent $973,000 on education programming. Maybe the ask should be for the county to annually fund MOCA's education efforts, at minimum $1 million per year. 

5.) I can't find any evidence that anyone in a position of impact has thought of this idea (which may say something about the quality of the idea): If MOCA is saved, it will need to rebuild its board and its administration. It seems overwhelmingly likely that MOCA will have to attract a new director and some new senior-level staff. Can it attract quality staff -- and a broader, stronger donor base -- with the current board? No.

So what if the Getty Trust agreed to operate MOCA in a kind of 'non-profit receivership' for 18-24 months? That would buy MOCA's new leadership time to straighten itself out. It would provide MOCA access to the Getty rolodex as it tries to rebuild its board and other relationships. (MOCA is a national treasure, and it happens to be based in Los Angeles. Its board should include civic-minded philanthropists who understand the value of having a national leader in downtown LA.) It would make it easier for MOCA to attract talented staff. It would give the organization an opportunity to work with a major philanthropic player as it develops a strategic plan.

The Getty would get something out of it too: Trust boss Jim Wood has already done a good job of 'bringing the Getty down from the hill,' especially when it comes to the Getty's involvement in funding the compilation, chronicling and exhibiting of the recent art history of Los Angeles. Playing a role in saving MOCA would further involve the Getty in the most important visual arts issue facing Los Angeles -- and it would further a key Getty initiative.

I've floated this idea past several Players in the last week or two, and not only is anyone of import discussing the idea, no one knows if it's workable under California law -- or if it isn't. But it would address a lot of the extant and forthcoming issues that MOCA faces.

Christopher Knight thinks the AAMD's condemnation of the National Academy of Design was a warning shot across MOCA's bow. If you buy that theory (and I do), then I think you also have to consider it a shot fired at the Corcoran (and other museums that have deaccessionings under consideration).

Continued from part one and part two, in which I described Vienna's cultural and intellectual history as the backbone of West's work.

When I was walking through the Franz West retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I discovered a woman sitting on Franz West's Couch (1989, left). (As I noted on Monday, West often encourages such hands-on -- or butts-on -- interaction with his work.)

"Is it comfortable?" a friend of the sitter's asked.

The woman smirked back. "As comfortable as an analyst's couch."

Which was, of course, precisely West's point. Like much of West's work, West's 'sittables' are firmly rooted in his exploration of the cultural and intellectual history of his hometown, Vienna.

The 'sittables' are a neat two-fer: First, they reference the classic psychiatrist's couch, a reference to Vienna's history as the pioneering center of psychoanalysis. Next, they tweak the Wiener Werkstatte, an early 20thC community of artists, architects and craftsmen who developed a distinctly Viennese tradition of fine arts, especially decorative arts. The Werkstatters believed in merging fine arts disciplines and making objects and buildings that emphasized direct shapes, geometric forms and patterns, and spare decoration. They weren't exactly modernists and were uninterested in design for the people: "Since it is not possible to work for the whole market, we will concentrate on those who can afford it," said leading Werkstatte architect Josef Hoffman.

West mocks that approach with Couch, a crude bench with a headrest and footrest attached. The materials are cheap, the craftsmanship is practically non-existent, and if Couch wasn't by a famous artist it would be plenty affordable. West plays with the same ideas in numerous works, including Auditorium (1992), a dozens-of-couches piece most famously installed at Documenta IX, and in this 'couch,' (right) which is also on view in Baltimore.

Like much of West's work, Couch and his other hindquarters-welcoming works make the most sense when surrounded by more of West's work. Encounter them within the context of a permanent collection installation and they look kind of lonely, forlorn, in need of wall text. That's part of why BMA curator Darsie Alexander's West retrospective is such a must-see: It provides the context for a thorough immersion in West, the kind of West experience an American audience has never had. (The show travels to LACMA next year.)

So sure, West's interactive, 'sculptural' works are plenty smart. But as the woman in the above picture shows, the Westian context also enables the fun. After all, some of West's 'couches' are eerily comfy. In a way, that's West's final tweak at Vienna's psychoanalysts: He has found a way for us to enjoy being on the couch.

Christopher Knight explains how the Getty snatched a delightful 17th-century Roelandt Savery, Wilderness with the Temptation of St. Anthony, out of London's National Gallery. Here's the new Getty painting.

Check out the jump to see a closely related Savery composition: From the NGA, Landscape with the Flight into Egypt.

• The Cedar Rapids Gazette's Diane Heldt tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the University of Iowa Museum of Art's collection was saved as this past summer's flood waters rose.
  
• The Indianapolis Museum of Art's blog explains the historical connection between coffeehouses and art. My favorite item involves the origins of Sotheby's and Christie's.
• Oops: ICA Boston breaks a Joe Zane sculpture. (Zane supplies replacement.)
• Jumping in Art Museums visited MoMA on Monday night. My favorites are the jumps in front of Matisse's Dance at the bottom of this post. More here.
  

MAN's look at Franz West at the Baltimore Museum of Art will continue tomorrow. Here are parts one and two.

UPDATE: $800 $875-0.

The domination continues. (And without an Eli Broad challenge, either! If ex-MOCA trustee Dean Valentine really wanted to stick it to the MOCA trustees -- and he sure seems to want to -- he could help us run up the margin here...)

If you're new to the concept: This month MAN is raising money for a series of arts education projects proposed by public school teachers on the website DonorsChoose.org. I've set up a project page where you can go to see if any of the projects fit your philanthropic fancy. You can give as little as $10, or as much as emailing me to suggest that I make more projects available for you to fund. (Got that, Dean?)

In the spirit of the project, I wanted to share a story from the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts' shared blog, 2buildings1blog.org about a recent school visit to the Pulitzer: Click here to discover what the fifth graders did for the day at the Pulitzer, and click here to see how they sketched the Pulitzer's iconic Joe, Richard Serra's first torqued ellipse. The photo with this post is from the Pulitzer's Flickr stream.

• Christopher Knight on Cathy Opie at the Guggenheim. (Wow.)
  
• The Getty has a cool new webpage that details how people visit, what art they look for, etc. The Indianapolis Museum of Art did this kind of thing first.
• Art:21 has a fab Robert Adams video.
• The Baltimore Museum of Art's YouTube channel has some cool Franz West videos, including here, here and here.
  

Continued from part one, in which I described Vienna's cultural and intellectual history as the backbone of West's work.

Vienna's leading 1960s avant garde artists were known as the Viennese Actionists. Like their far-away contemporaries who were exploring performance-driven art, the Actionists believed in making art that directly engaged the viewer with live actions, art that was explicitly confrontational. Their confrontationally transgressive work included naked bodies, a fascination with bodily fluids and carcasses, interaction with their audience -- and often encounters with Austrian police, which found their work indecent.

Much has been made of how a young Franz West absorbed the performances of the Actionists and how their work informed his 'adaptives' and other 'please touch!', viewer-activated sculptures that have been a staple of West's oeuvre for over 30 years. The concept behind West's adaptives is simple: It's art. The viewer is invited to handle it, to play with it, and to join others in playing with it. [Above: BMA photo, which isn't staged, no, not at all. The text says, "Take an Adaptive and go into the cabinet." Visitors' interactions with the adaptives are shown live on the television screen at the lower-right.]

The Actionists weren't the only artists who influenced West toward creating art that was both interactive and hands-on, and art that was unusually frank in referencing both sex and bodily functions. Both West and the Actionists learned from Vienna's first modern: Gustav Klimt.

Klimt was the first modern artist to use sex and then-radical portrayals of the body as a response strategy. Throughout his career -- but especially in 1902-1907, his peak, controversy-soaked period -- Klimt used sexual paintings as a specific way of responding to his critics. (Most famously: In late 1902 anti-Semitic politicians and journalists, outraged in part at the way in which Klimt was openly consorting with Jewish women, circulated a petition expressing outrage at Klimt's art. Klimt responded by posing his favorite model effectively and suggestively mooning the viewer, looking over her shoulder and grinning. Klimt wanted to title the painting 'To my critics...', but friends talked him out of it.)

Klimt was especially notorious for maintaining a studio-cum-sexual-playspace in which his models both posed and performed sexually, as directed by Klimt. Hundreds of surviving drawings serve as documentation of the way Klimt's models entertained him by masturbating (apparently at Klimt's direction), by performing sexually with each other (again, apparently at Klimt's direction), or by having sex with Klimt, who seems to have drawn himself having sex with his models. Or, to look at it another way, Klimt was handling, playing with and joining the women who would become the art.

The Actionists learned at Klimt's feet, and used their bodies, sex and sexuality in much the same way. Like Klimt, they were eager to respond to bourgeois society with bohemian progressiveness, a formula that often equaled 'sex.' Hermann Nitsch's Actionist theater took Freudian ideas about sexuality and orgies as jumping-off points. (Nitsch later expliclitly acknowledged the debt to Klimt in a painting that abstracts the embracing figures in Klimt's famous The Kiss.) In 1970, Actionist Otto Muhl formed a utopian, free-love commune that by 1972 had become well-known in Viennese progressive circles: The commune had grown to house 600 people and had 'branches' across central Europe. (In fact, 1972 was something of a last hurrah for the Actionists, as West would have known: In addition to 1972 being the peak year for Muhl's sex commune, Nitsch participated in Documenta V and created 'Aktions' in the United States. Gunter Brus' artists books documenting and referencing Actionist performances were published in 1971 and entered wider circulation in 1972.)

But by 1972 the Actionists were also notorious: Nitsch and Brus had been imprisoned for their provocations, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler was dead. A 25-year-old West likely wanted to demonstrate that his work had roots other than in the most recent, notorious Viennese art, and so that year West produced this work-on-paper (which I showed yesterday.) It indicates that West was aware of the salacious details of Klimt's studio practice (which were well-documented by contemporary visitors to Klimt's studio), and grounds his forthcoming practice in the work and practice of Vienna's earliest modern. The drawing sets the stage for much of West's work that is to come, work that would marry sex, the body, performance and art.

On Friday I mentioned that former Whitney and SFMOMA director David Ross had started Twittering. Since then Ross has been tweeting ten cultural policies that he thinks the Obama administration should adopt.

The list (which I hope Ross is developing into an op-ed) is well worth a look. A couple of the provisions (1, 7) already have a good amount of support in Washington. Many of the rest are notably progressive (3, 6) and would re-inject the government in the direct funding of the creation of culture (2, 4). All should be examined by the Obama Administration's cultural transition team, which is led by former NEA boss Bill Ivey.

The most entertaining gallery in the Franz West retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art is the first gallery. The most interactive gallery is the second gallery. But the most important gallery is about halfway through the exhibition: It's where curator Darsie Alexander has installed the show's earliest work, the pieces with which West stakes out the territory he will stalk for the rest of his career.

The gallery includes a 1972 untitled work on paper (above) that features a golden patterned ceiling, a nude model, an explanation ("Chez Klimt") and a declaration of intent via West's signature and the date right in the middle. With that work, West announced that the cultural and intellectual history of his hometown of Vienna would be the backbone of his artistic practice. Since then, West's work has explored the work, practice and even jokes about the Secessionists, the Wiener Werkstatte, Freud, the Viennese Actionists, and maybe even a few of Krafft-Ebing's "cereberal neuroses."

(It's worth noting that West leaves alone Vienna's most troubling intellectual and political legacy: its rabid, institutionalized turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism (which eventually led to Hitler's rise), and the corresponding response of Vienna's Jewish intellectual elite, including pioneering Zionist Theodore Herzl. As recently as 2000, Vienna's anti-Semitic past became Austria's present when Jorg Haider and his right-wing Freedom Party formed a coalition government.) 

The Vienna-centrism of West's work should make it difficult for American audiences to absorb: For most American art lovers, the history of modernism runs through Paris, not central Europe. No European artistic capital is as little studied or appreciated in the United States as is Vienna. (When it comes to contemporary art on the continent, Germany looms large, while the rest of central Europe is mostly an afterthought.) Still, much of West's work translates well, in part because, well, it's so much fun. Plus: It likely helps American audiences that West often marries his Wiener references to other 20th-century artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Richard Tuttle or James Turrell. [Photo: West's Qwertz (2001), on view last year in Rotterdam.]

This is West's first US retrospective. It's necessarily incomplete: Some of West's most ambitious work, such Auditorium (1992), which was presented at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, has been site- or event-specific (and Alexander has not included documentation of such projects in the exhibition, though many are mentioned in the catalogue). Furthermore, apparently some of West's most provocative work is too outre for an encyclopedic American museum, even one in John Waters' hometown. Nonetheless, despite the abundance of West's formulaic and often uninteresting works-on-paper, the show serves as a smart, ridonkulously entertaining presentation of a cloying, mischievous artist.

Next: Franz West starts with Gustav Klimt.

Related: The Baltimore Museum of Art acquires a West.

Starting with MOCA: LAT columnist Tim Rutten nails it by urging massive leadership changes at MOCA. (Interesting to me: How many journalists and collectors/trustees have publicly discussed Strick-related leadership changes at MOCA since this post.) Also, the MOCA Mobilization group has launched a new, non-Facebook webpage.

• LATer Holly Myers reviews Peter Sudar at Mihai Nicodim. The paintings look gorgeous.
• Robert L. Pincus discovers how important residencies and institutional support has been to Beacon, NY-based painter Alison Moritsugu.
• A lede I love, from Steven Litt in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "It's time to ask whether the Cleveland Institute of Art can be saved from the architectural embarrassment it's about to inflict on itself."
• Somehow the web wizards at the Boston Globe cut off the first few words/sentences/who knows of a Sebastian Smee analysis of why Boston is such a bad town for modern art. It's well worth reading anyway. (Here's the Matisse mentioned in the story to which the Globe doesn't link. Dear newspapers: Duh.)
  
• In the Dallas Morning News, Charles Dee Mitchell writes about collection-building at the DMA. I wish more newspapers/writers/critics did this.
• This week's third gotta-read: The Chicago Trib's Blair Kamin discusses the Obama spending plan not in the context of economic recovery, but aesthetic impact and import.
• Philip Kennicott on the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center: A total dud.
  

1.) The New York Times as Cliffs Notes. If you've read the LAT or MAN on MOCA, you already knew everything that was in the NYT story, and you knew it days/weeks ago. (On the bright side: I congratulate the NYT on finding a direct way to educate its own chief art critic on MOCA's import.) In a related story, this probably means that any day now the NYT will 'discover' the financial troubles at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

(Meanwhile, Lee Rosenbaum scoops the NYT on the biggest NYC art story in months. Oops.)

2.) So, Twitter... (If you don't know it, here's the skinny.) I've noticed that lots of museums, from the stodgy Met to hipper museums such as Seattle's Henry, have started tweeting. That's a good thing. Connecting with your audience where they are is always a plus. (Related: Carol Vogel has noticed only Brooklyn. Stunner.)

Unfortunately way too many museums are unclear-on-the-concept. As usual, art museums are stupidly shy about using new technologies to feature what they're all about: Art. Instead, museums tweet about all kinds of preposterous silliness, like party pix. Exceptions: The Whitney. MoMA, sometimes. More typical is the Hirshhorn, which has never once tweeted about an artwork.

Motivating factor behind this post: This morning, the Walker Art Center offered up what might be the dumbest tweet ever:

"Wondering what people would like us to tweet about more. Got suggestions? Reply!"

Moments later, a brilliant response from schmelzenfreude:

"Tweet about snow shovels! Or great botanical gardens of the world. Or quantum physics. Or fisheries biology. Or yarn."

The Walker Art Center is one of America's best contemporary art museums. Its building is full of modern art and contemporary art from its permanent collection of art. It hosts art exhibitions, and it employs art curators and other smart art people. I'd bet that its offices are full of art. The place exists because of art. And the Walker Art Center can't figure out what it should be tweeting about? (I mean, you know it's time to lay off the entire web/interactive/whatever staff when...)

Tweeting about art couldn't be easier. I often wander into a museum and 'tweet' my visit, posting 140 characters or less about the great Emile Bernards in Indy, or about Carleton Watkins at the Getty. (My feed from a recent visit to the Indianapolis Museum of Art is in the jump. Thanks IMA.) And it's not just me: Former Whitney and SFMOMA director David Ross just started tweeting. His recent Met visit resulted in a van Eyck-related tweetgasm. 

Bottom line, museums: If you blog or tweet, make sure at least half of your blog posts are about art objects.

A couple weeks ago I started posting about some recommended changes to the Washington art scene. Then MOCA happened. So here's the third and final part.

Washington has two primary entry-level visual arts organizations: Washington Project for the Arts and Transformer Gallery. Both are small non-profits that serve young artists. They fulfill their missions in different ways -- broadly speaking, Transformer has a more regular exhibition program and WPA does more career-building-for-artists.

Ideally, Washington wouldn't have two such organizations, it would have one. Transformer and WPA should merge. In many ways the two organizations have similar needs and issues: They compete for the same pool of young, first-time board members who are learning how to be trustees. They serve overlapping audiences. And they both need space -- badly.

Transformer has its own gallery, a shoebox-sized lightbox-of-a-building near Washington's hip 14th & P Street intersection. It is a space that has never been particularly appropriate for art that's bigger than a breadbasket. The WPA bounces around town, from available space to available space. The single biggest obstacle to programmatic growth at both institutions is their lack of decent exhibition space.

Washington, like many cities, has a provision that requires developers to 'spend' one percent of the capital budget of new buildings and other large capital projects on somehow bringing the arts into those projects. Developers have regularly pooled 'one percents' to create destination arts facilities, such as The Shakespeare Theater's Sidney Harman Hall on F Street.

A combined Transformer/WPA would be in a strong position to compete for one-percent-driven spaces. A merger would also result in a single, stronger board, in more competitive salaries for staff, and in a more substantial local profile. Combining the two organizations would probably make it more likely that a strong, local DC arts organization comes out of the global financial crisis.

A few weeks ago the director of the WPA announced her resignation: It's a good time for change.

One of my favorite places to gaze away an afternoon is Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum. Today Norton Simon ace Suzanne Muchnic reports that next year the museum will show an Ingres on loan from the Frick. (The gem in the post is a Frick curator calling the Ingres "a tour de force of verism," which is my new favorite, er, insult.)

Also from the Norton Simon: A new website. (Flash-heavy museo-websites are ubiquitous this season, sigh.) It's about the best only way to see more than the superstars of the NSM's 20thC collection.

UPDATE: CQ reports that for the first time, the entire National Mall will be open on Inauguration Day.

On Jan. 20 an estimated 1-1.5 percent of Americans will descend on Capitol Hill and the National Mall for Barack Obama's inauguration. The National Gallery of Art is only a couple thousand feet from where the swearing-in will take place, and will be either the best place from which to watch the festivities (that is, if you have access to the NGA's offices/library), or the best place to take refuge from the cold. With three-to-four millions in mind, I asked the NGA if it was planning normal hours/operation on Jan. 20. Here's a spokesperson's response:

At this point in time, we are planning to be open to the public as usual, but... this could change as the final plans evolve for Inaugural Day. It could change in terms of the Gallery being open at all or being open at certain times and via certain entrances. We will let everyone know when we know.

For months -- years even -- I've chronicled the systematic elimination of arts journalists at American newspapers and magazines. The result has been a steep decline in both the quality and volume of American cultural journalism. 

Now, Roger Ebert tells us that the Associated Press is restricting its 'entertainment writers' to 500 words, a further diminishment of journalism's role in cultural discourse. Ebert's take on the topic is well worth your time, more important to journalism and to the arts than anything I could post here this morning.

No strings. (In a related story, $626-0. MAN's readers are already demonstrating commitment. Maybe we should have put out the word we were failing too?)

MAN's DonorsChoose.org, arts-education-in-public-schools drive gets the Chronicle of Philanthropy seal blog-post-of-approval. Click here to see how you can help teachers expose their students to art. 

• At 230pm PST KCRW's Politics of Culture will host a conversation about the MOCA situation with LATer Christopher Knight, artist Lari Pittman, OCMA director Dennis Szakacs and Warhol Foundation director Joel Wachs ex-MOCA trustee and KCRW trustee Dean Valentine. Listen live via the link at the very top of the page, or via podcast later. UPDATE: Link to program is here. Most panelists ripped MOCA's board and to a lesser extent, its director, Jeremy Strick. Valentine came this close to calling for Strick's resignation.
  
• The MOCA Mobilization Facebook group is urging Angelenos to contact their local elected officials. Find out how here.
• MAN readers have now donated $606 $626 to public school arts education projects. MOCA's trustees have publicly announced gifts of $0 to MOCA. MAN readers are dominating the competition, eh? Click here to read about two projects and to join the rout.
  

The University of California Press has published curator and museum director Marcia Tucker's memoir, "A Short Life of Trouble, Forty Years in the New York Art World." The book was edited by Liza Lou. (It's 35% off via that link.) So how is it?

It's a little all over the place. "A Short Life" is not just a memoir of a career, it's an accounting of Tucker's childhood, her relationships, her feminism, her insecurities and her museums. "A Short Life" may not be a classic of the genre, but anyone who lived through the NYC art world from Vietnam through the go-go '80s will find plenty that they recognize. More importantly: Anyone who works in the contemporary art museum world will likely learn lots about the origins of what they do. The most obvious dichotomy between Tucker's early years in the museum trade and now is what women do, where -- and how! Today women run more important museums than I can list (though I did in an LAT story a couple of years ago). When Tucker was starting out as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, on her first day a fellow staffer thought she was a new secretary.

The best passages are in the five chapters that cover Tucker's early years as a pioneer at the Whitney, and then her departure to start the New Museum. Tucker tells about her shock at being hired at the Whitney, her shock at realizing why she was hired, and how she tried to figure out what contemporary art curating was while she was doing it. It's a section of the book that should send young art museum staffers and gallerinas scurrying to their libraries to see what has changed since Tucker helped start their profession -- and what hasn't.

• At ArtCal, Dan DeNorch and a group of artists known as W.A.G.E. discuss questions around artist compensation and American exhibition practices. It sounds dry, but the Q&A is full of thought-provoking ideas about artists and how they're compensated here and abroad. Must-read.
• PORT's Arcy Douglass visits Michael Heizer's Double Negative.
• Regina Hackett digs the funny in recent art.
  

MAN readers have donated $463 and have fully-funded two DonorsChoose.org arts education projects. (This means that MAN readers are still outperforming the MOCA trustees over a comparable campaign period. It's 463 $581-0. Join the rout!)

Please consider supporting one of these two arts education projects: Help high schoolers in Oklahoma learn about the rich history of mosaics in art, or help students in Louisiana learn about art by helping their school add art books to its library.

I spent the long weekend mostly at home, entirely with some lousy bug. Without much to do but watch hockey and read, I had a blast flipping through art books, including Robert Hughes' Goya bio and the Prado's recent Tintoretto catalogue. For whatever reason I found myself thinking of Tintoretto and Jackson Pollock. Here's Tintoretto's Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, which is (obviously and obnoxiously) in the collection of Christ Church, Oxford. The compositionally-similar Pollock after it is SFMOMA's 1943 Guardians of the Secret.


Then, as I was doing this morning's weekend roundup post, I discovered that the Village Voice's RC Baker was thinking of Pollock and Tintoretto too, just in a different way than I was:

Like Jackson Pollock, [Terry] Winters has evolved beyond depiction even as he has created believable environs on canvas. Pollock used his studies of Tintoretto's swirling Renaissance figuration to embody nature in the form of graceful loops and snarls of poured paint.

The latest new site: The Guggenheim. Result: Eh. The collection section is still flimsy. The museo-addiction to Flash-heavy sites continues. The most recent available podcast is from February. 

• In case you missed your weekend MOCA news: I posted some end-the-stalemate thoughts  on Thanksgiving morning, including a potential landing spot for embattled MOCA director Jeremy Strick. On Saturday Christopher Knight updated us on the quicksand that is the MOCA board.
• You may recall that a couple years ago the Pompidou had some trouble taking care of some art from Los Angeles artists. Most notably, a Craig Kauffman mysteriously fell off a wall and was destroyed. Kauffman has fabricated a 'replacement' that will go into LACMA's collection and LATer Suzanne Muchnic reports that LACMA is installing it (safely).
• The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott on the success and failures of two recent Frank Gehrys: The Art Gallery of Ontario and a library at Princeton. I read the piece with Gehry's plans for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mind.