September 2009 Archives

Two of America's most prominent nationally-focused art critics have been beating the drum for The Art of the Steal, the Barnes Foundation documentary that one of them, Time's Richard Lacayo calls "the surprise hit" of the Toronto film festival. (Christopher Knight has also been blogging and tweeting up a storm about the doc.)

Over the last few days Lacayo has posted four times about the documentary. The posts are more important than anything I could type here this morning, so don't miss them: Part one, two, three, four, five.

And oh yeah, I'm still waiting for the Philadelphia Museum of Art to announce it's hosting an Art of the Steal screening...

This week PBS is airing a Ken Burns documentary on the history of America's National Parks system. I haven't seen the series yet, but I hope the documentary makes this point: Artists were a key motivating force behind the creation of what Burns calls America's "best idea." If you need an example of how and why the arts matter to a society and to the United States in particular, the founding moment of our national park system is a good place to start. [Image: Grizzly Giant, Carleton Watkins, New York Public Library.]

Throughout the middle of the 19thC artists were on the vanguard of making Americans aware of the grandeur of the land. (Writers, including John Muir and John Wesley Powell, were influential too.) None were more important than Carleton Watkins, America's first great artist. Watkins' photos of the American West, and his 1861 pictures of Yosemite in particular, were a revelation to Easterners who had little context for the scale and majesty of the West.

In 1863 Goupil's Art Gallery, an important New York space, showed Watkins' pictures of California to great acclaim. Among the visitors was Albert Bierstadt, who promptly made plans to go west to paint. Magazines such as North Pacific Review and Atlantic Monthly reviewed the work favorably. Influential opinion leaders such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes saw Watkins' work and were moved to advocate for not just the westward movement of Easterners, but for the land itself. Frederick Law Olmsted, who had apparently seen Watkins' pictures even before the Goupil's show, urged Congress not to privatize great natural places, but to instead hold them in public trust.

But that's not all: Watkins' interest in Yosemite lands also provides an unusually direct example of how art can impact public policy. In February, 1864, a representative of a steamship company proposed to California Sen. John Conness that the federal government set aside Yosemite valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove as protected areas. The representative included in his correspondence with Sen. Conness a portfolio of Watkins' photos of Yosemite.

Conness was likely already familiar with Watkins' work -- Olmsted and scientist Josiah Whitney had shared Watkins' stereoscopic photographs with Conness, who showed the portfolio and the stereoscopes to his fellow senators as he lobbied for passage of his bill. Watkins' work was a hit, the bill passed and President Abraham Lincoln promptly signed it into law. The 1864 legislation addressing the preservation of the Yosemite valley and Mariposa Grove was the precursor to the 1872 legislation that created the nation's (and the world's) first true national park.

(Watkins' role didn't end there: Olmsted became an appointed commissioner of Yosemite and promptly enlisted the photographer to consult with him as to the best ways to preserve and use the park.)

Related: I wonder if Georgia O'Keeffe saw Watkins' Grizzly Giant? Key sources and books to read on Watkins, the West and American environmentalism: Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception edited by Douglas R. Nickel, Richard Grusin's Culture, Technology and the Creation of America's National Parks, and Aaron Sachs' The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism.

This would have run yesterday morning had it not been for AJ's server hiccup. Most of these links have stayed fresh though...

• Two San Franciscans died over the weekend: RIP Donald Fisher, Gap founder, art collector and SFMOMA patron. RIP Emile Norman, artist (my uncle restored this piece).
• The LAT's Mike Boehm excerpts Michelle Obama telling the G-20 why the arts are important to a free society. 
• Christopher Knight puts the GOP-driven NEA faux-kerfuffle in context.
  
• Brandeis president and wanna-be Larry Gagosian Jehuda Reinharz is resigning. The Globe's Peter Schworm has the story. Reinharz does not cite the Rose Art Museum problems as a factor. Ohhhh-kay.
• In the LA Weekly, Christopher Miles says that Kevin Appel is doing his best work.
  
• Jerry Saltz on Georgia O'Keeffe at the Whitney.
• In the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Gaile Robinson looks at an Amon Carter exhibition that looks at America's exploitation of the West -- and how Americans liked to see that use, er, masked via art.
  
• SFMOMA gave Carol Vogel a preview of the Fisher gift and she gave them 175 words. (Worth it or embarrassing?) Kenneth Baker has the (also leaked) story you should read.
  

Nota bene: MAN and other ArtsJournal-hosted blogs had some database issues between sun-up and 3:15pm EDT today. Apologies for the lack of posting. Normal content will resume tomorrow, complete with a delayed 'weekend roundup' post.

First on MAN: As I first reported via Twitter, the Smithsonian Institution has offered its staff a buyout/early retirement package. The email cites "budget challenges." The full email from the castle to staff is in the jump.

I'm traveling. Blog content is back on Monday, tweeting will be as usual. Meanwhile, in case you were away this past summer here are some links to some posts you may have missed. I think that the series on the NGA's Titian/Giorgione may be especially entertaining...

Each year I do a roundup post of substantial posts you may have missed while vacationing this past summer. This is the 2009 version. As always, you can read months in their totality by using the pull-down menu at right.

June

• The National Gallery of Art's so-called America.
• 'Cezanne and Beyond' in Philadelphia: Part one, two, three.
  

July

• Examining the latest industrial threat to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
• The next steps at the Great Salt Lake.
  
• Critiquing deaccessioning by making art.
• Remembering Robert Hilferty.

August

• Addressing the future of art journalism -- if there is one (a September follow-up).
• The mystery of the Venetian gentleman: Is a National Gallery of Art portrait a Titian? A Giorgione? Or something else? Part one, two, three, four.
• Reading Ovid with Ellsworth and Jerome (at the Pulitzer Foundation).
  

Posts on torture and national responsibility on MAN (January through summer)

• An inaugural presentation as America transitions from Bush to Obama: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn;
  
• The Abu Ghraib photos and the national collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress: part one, part two;
  
• The Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler's The Gray Drape;
  
• Bruce Nauman at the Venice Biennale: Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America's torture of Abu Zubaydeh; with a look at Nauman's hanging chair sculptures in Chicago and Washington: part one, part two; and
  
• Gerhard Richter's Uncle Rudi: A foundational painting. As discussed by Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Gallery (UK), as discussed by Art of Two Germanys at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. MAN analyzes: Uncle Rudi and quiet confrontation, Uncle Rudi and the response to torture.

Over the summer I spent a couple days sitting on art:21's advisory panel. I was there to talk about web-related stuff, but I was surprised to find myself most fascinated by art:21's schools-focused programs. Before the panel sessions I didn't know anything about art:21's education-focused offerings, educational uses of the program, any of that. (My excuse: I don't have kids, most of my friends don't have kids and with the possible exception of NHL-draft-eligible, major-junior hockey players, I'm just not that plugged into the under-18 set.)

So over the course of several days I heard schoolteachers and the art:21 staff talk about how art:21 was used in America's schools to inject art and artists into conversations that students are already having about insert subject here. This did not exist when I was in school. In the whole of my elementary and secondary school career the closest I came to discussing art in the classroom was about 75 minutes on Renaissance painting when I was a sophomore in high school. (Thanks Mr. Holubar!) Given the increasing American focus on preparing students for standardized tests instead of preparing them for the world, my experience was, sadly, on the vanguard of American education.

Yesterday art:21 released the education materials that go along with its fifth-season program. They're smart. They don't shy away from challenging subjects. The first question on the education guide for Doris Salcedo is: "What are the different ways in which our society remembers current and historic events? In what ways do monuments, textbooks, or works of art convey history and historic events?" Right next to the question is a picture of Salcedo's installation at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial. Nothing watered-down about that.

Take a quick look at art:21's materials. Or better yet, pass the link on to your kids' teachers or to a teacher you know.

Related: Season Five education guide. More resources, events for educators.

In 1975 the Baltimore Museum of Art included a number of Anne Truitt's Arundel paintings in an exhibition. The works are white, starkly white, with a little white paint on top, and some marks in graphite. I've never seen one, so that's all I know about them.

When they were exhibited at the BMA they caused something of a fuss. Truitt told the story in Daybook, her now-legendary journal:

... I encountered the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. He told me that there  has been something of a clamor in Baltimore to the effect that the public's money is being misspent placing on display in the city museum such meaningless works as the Arundel paintings. So vitriolic were these comments that the mayor of Baltimore telephoned to assure him that he stood behind the museum's decisions.

Truitt was taken aback by this reaction. Later she found out that a Baltimore newspaperman had written a sarcastic review and that over the course of several successive Sundays the newspaper had piled on and on. In the final anti-Truitt, anti-abstract-art installment, the paper had vaguely suggested that the museum should lose municipal funding. That's when the mayor of Baltimore called the BMA director, Tom Freudenheim, to express his support.

Over the last few days I've been thinking about Truitt's experience in 1975 and about the response to abstraction now. Those of us who live in the art world think nothing of abstraction. We've had 100 years to get used to it. Still, earlier in my lifetime it prompted mass civic agita in a then-major Eastern city.

And now! There are two ways of demonstrating how the public response to abstraction has changed. First, the fancy-pants way: This season northeastern museums are all about abstract painting. These shows are among the most anticipated of the year, both by critics (ahem) and by Joe and Jane from Islip.

The exhibitions include two painters beloved by the public for their representational work: Georgia O'Keeffe at the Whitney, and Claude Monet at MoMA. At the Guggenheim, a Wassily Kandinsky retrospective completes the rare opportunity to consider Monet's late abstractions with Kandinsky's experiments. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has never been shy about presenting smart, audience-challenging shows (see Newman, Barnett) and this season the museum brings us an Arshile Gorky retro. And here in Washington, the Hirshhorn launches the first Truitt retrospective since Walter Hopps' Corcoran show in 1974. (It's not just the northeast, either: Across the country even SFMOMA, the 'safest' modern/contemporary museum around, is trumpeting its relationship with abstractionists in a fall show.) None of these museums are niche, hip contemporary art spaces. They're all big museums with broad audiences. All these shows will draw big crowds.

That's nice. But the best indication of how thoroughly abstract art has gone over is that the biggest, best-known National Football League team has used it to decorate and to gussy-up the ultimate mainstream-American, Joe Suburb, macho-man site imaginable: the ginormous new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The stadium features 14 works of contemporary abstraction by Olafur Eliasson, Franz Ackermann, Teresita Fernandez and more. (Here's a complete list. At left: Mel Bochner.)

How thoroughly has abstract art won over middle-America? NBC's Today show sent out the uber-bland everyman Al Roker for a tour of Cowboys Stadium art. A football fan who had been to the stadium-opening George Strait concert was so taken with a Gary Simmons mural that he Flickred how much he dug it. (Just as interesting is how thoroughly artists have been won over by the opportunity to present abstraction to the masses: Read Dave Muller's comments on making a piece for Cowboys Stadium.)

In a way, a football arena is the ultimate test. Throughout the biggest stadium ever built in America, abstract art competes for fan attention with installations by Ford, Dr. Pepper, Mitsubishi and Pepsi. It's as if abstraction has become a brand that can compete with anything.

Can technology help art museums avoid or resolve cultural heritage snafus?

The Indianapolis Museum of Art's tech team has helped the Association of Art Museum Directors launch a new site: The AAMD Object Registry. The site will help present new acquisitions of certain archeological materials and works of ancient art as well as document the resolution of claims of Nazi-era cultural objects.

Could Pennsylvania be the first state to tax art museum admissions? The Philly Inky's Stephan Salisbury says yes, and explains the state's rationale. [Image]

Nevermind that this is a regressive idea, at odds with the spirit of non-profithood and the state's other policy goals (such as education) and nevermind the policy implications; this tax proposal raises practical issues for Pennsylvania arts organizations. It's a difficult tax for even the state's major art institutions to lobby against: The Philadelphia Museum of Art's most recent IRS filing indicates that the tax as applied to PMA visitors in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008 would have netted the state about $300,000. That figure is small enough that it may not be cost-effective for an individual institution such as the PMA to lobby over.

(Regarding lobbying: the kindness and connectedness of a plugged-in board goes only so far. The PMA knows it -- in that same tax filing the museum reveals it spent almost $83,000 on lobbying that year. Besides, why should the PMA be opposed to this tax? If it goes through imagine what a boon it would be to upper-middle-class-targeted museum membership programs. There's are certainly reasons for an art museum to not arduously oppose this tax.)

Not all cultural institutions work the way art museums do. Here's hoping arts groups in Pennsylvania have built strong, Harrisburg-effective coalitions. Art museums in other states should take this as a lesson to make sure they've built the same.

Next, the real question is: Why are Pennsylvania institutions facing this now? It's hard to miss the confluence of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's outrageous 'Cezanne and Beyond' ticket fees and this tax proposal. Extortionately high exhibition charges -- the PMA asked a family of four for $88, over $100 with parking -- helped create this problem.

Those fees have done two things: First, they say that the museum (and the arts in general) is a place for mostly the wealthy, so why not soak the rich with a sneaky tax no one else will notice or pay? And secondly, if a museum looks like an opportunistic business and if it acts like a greedy price-gouger, how can it be surprised when a local government wants to treat it the way it's been acting?

• Some newspaper critics spend most of their so-called reviews on Art 101-style biographical re-hash. In discussing Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, Peter Plagens tries something different, something more critically engaged: He starts with Kandinsky and then skates through a dozen or so painters -- both famous and not -- who carry on after Kandinsky's pioneering abstractions. 
• Sometimes it reads like a critic wants to like a work whether he does or not, like when Sebastian Smee types up Damian Ortega at the Boston ICA.
• I think Katharina Grosse is one of the most underrated abstract painters out there, and the Denver Art Museum provides her with a potentially fantastic mix of canvas and painter. Kyle MacMillan follows Grosse as she creates. (The story includes an unusual assertion from a curator: "She knows what she's doing...")
• Jen Graves cringes. You will too.
• The Buffalo News' Colin Dabkowski notices a surge in art about decay and entropy.
  
• Richard Lacayo visits Jerry Jones Stadium. Gasp.
  

On Sunday, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter spent 1,400 words telling us that he wants the museo-blockbuster to be over, that tight, little shows should become the new norm. "I want to see our big museums seriously rethink the blockbuster phenomenon," he said. "It started decades ago as a publicity stunt and quickly became an addiction for audiences and museums alike... as a default exhibition mode, supersizers can be killers. They divert attention from everything else in the museum and cost a bundle."

I expressed an opposing view. Christopher Knight did too, tweeting, "Art museum blockbusters are only lame if their motive if financial or they're badly done; otherwise, on with the show." Yesterday Richard Lacayo wrote in praise of blockbusters: "As [art] historical education goes, museums are just about the only real schoolrooms we have anymore," he said. "Museums that don't regularly revisit the "familiar" chapters of that history are letting us down."

Cotter was silent.

Today, Cotter reviewed a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at the Whitney. Nowhere in the write-up does Cotter reference his Sunday think-piece. Instead he raved about the show, describing it as a "vivid and surprisingly surprising show of more than 130 paintings and drawings."

One hundred and thirty paintings? Of the most popular American painter of the last century? In a season-headlining show at a big New York museum? Wouldn't that be... a blockbuster?!

So, what art-museum-with-a-film-program will be the first to screen The Art of the Steal, the fantastically-reviewed  new documentary about how moneyed Philadelphia interests are hijacking the Barnes Foundation?

The film was made last year and even hard-to-impress critics were bowled over by the film team's meticulous preparation. Philly Inky film critic Steven Rea has written up the film twice: Last week Rea wrote a first-thoughts story in which he declared the film "important and fascinating" and then today Rea declares The Art of the Steal one of the "unlikeliest stars" of the ongoing Toronto International Film Festival. In Variety, Todd McCarthy also raves, calling the doc "impeccable" and "heartrending."

As of this writing the film is scheduled for only Toronto and the New York Film Festival. As I hear about more cities I'll tweet 'em.

In one respect, art museums are better positioned to weather a recession than other non-profits. Food banks need to keep buying food, but art museums typically already have art -- and they usually have art that isn't on view and that could be. At a time of budgetary pressure, any museum worth its utility bill should have curators eager to present works from their collections in new and interesting ways.

Take for example the work at left, Louise Nevelson's Aquatint I, one of a suite of Nevelson collages currently on view at the Hirshhorn. In the dozen years I've lived in Washington I'd not only never seen these Nevelsons, I'd never even heard about them. They're fantastic, the best Nevelson-anythings I've seen. I'd never thought of Nevelson as a particularly astute colorist or composer, but each collage reveals an acute understanding of how to bring the eye into a composition, how to bounce it around a bit and ultimately how to hold on to it.

When I start with Aquatint I, I go right to that purple vertical. Sometimes my eye trails off to the right, following the grey semi-diagonal toward the green... only to be pulled back toward the purple vertical by the light purple horizontal. Then I find that narrow zip of red, and I try to solve the '7' to the right of it, or the little black patch that looks like a nest with eggs in it. Before I know it I'm following that red skein back to the purple vertical and I'm lost in the collage.

Side note: One of the nice things about blockbusters is that museums take them seriously: Everything is framed and lit and installed as perfectly as museums can do it. The Nevelsons at the Hirshhorn get no such love. They're behind horrid highly-reflective glass, making the subtleties and color in each work nearly impossible to see. Grrr.

• Time's Richard Lacayo has a good post about a Nazis-related claim on a Vienna Vermeer and asks why it's been a big year for restitution cases. (That question deserves further examination.)
• Keith Olbermann thinks Christopher Knight is the "World's Best Person." Here's why.
• Speaking of which, if Fox News art critic Glenn Beck finds out about this he will likely go into paroxysms of conspiracy-crazed wingnuttery.
  
• If the Albright-Knox gets an expansion so that it can show more of its fantasterrific collection, it will be because New York state government sees cultural tourism as Buffalo's best driver of regional economic growth. Which, presumably, is why someone paid for this study and then made sure Tom Buckham at the Buffalo News wrote about it.
  
• As you'd already know if you follow me on Twitter, this morning the Art Institute of Chicago announced that it was borrowing a major Caravaggio, The Supper at Emmaus, from the National Gallery in London. Expect the AIC to install it surrounded by Cecco del Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Manfredi and Guercino.
• Brandeis is seeking dismissal of the Rose Art Museum suit.
• What to do when I (often) enjoy the work, but can't understand a word the artist says?
• MOCA North Miami is losing a key exhibition space.
  
• Hirshhorn employees staying in shape?
  

Outside Toronto, an early, iconic Richard Serra earthwork remains endangered.

David Anderson of the King Township Sentinel reports today that while the King City council is leaning toward designating Richard Serra's Shift (1970-72) a protected site under the Ontario Heritage Act, a developer is playing hardball, hard-to-get and every other obstructionist card in his toolbox. The King City council is giving the developer until Nov. 30 to come up with a resolution or the council will act. Even if the council imposes a heritage designation on Shift, public access is not assured. [Photo: Shawn Micallef. More here.]

As I noted here in January, 2008, Shift has a fascinating history. Serra considers it a pivotal work: "To me it was a breakthrough piece," Serra told the Toronto Star. "You can find many pieces (by others) which came after Shift. They have direct links back to that piece."

Perhaps because Shift is outside the United States and perhaps because Serra made it in concrete and not his trademark core-ten steel, it's not as well-known as earthworks in the American West or Serra's other landscape interventions, such as this one at Storm King. The Storm King piece, titled Schunnemunk Fork and made 20 years after Shift, is descended from it, as is Sea Level (1989-96).

Also notable: Shift is the latest important earthwork to be threatened by development. For several years now MAN has chronicled industrial threats to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Arguably the first contemporary earthworks, created by Dennis Oppenheim and Michael Heizer in the East Bay hills near Berkeley, Calif., were covered by subdivisions several decades ago.  

Related: Christopher Knight says that Shift is "a pivotal work in the history of contemporary sculpture." An aerial photo of Shift, the Google Satellite version of same (above, right), a nice Flickr stream of photos of Shift in winter, more Flickr of Shift in spring, Shift after the harvest. Serra explains how he and Joan Jonas found the site in the summer of 1970. A King City resident tells a great story about how he found Shift and came to admire it. Earlier this month Andrea Carson of View on Canadian Art visited Shift, tells the story and shares great pics.

In this weekend's New York Times, Holland Carter argued against blockbusters and in favor of tighter, smaller, narrower and maybe smarter shows. Cotter's position is the conventional wisdom among the arterati. At the risk of being a spot cynical, it's a position that's easy for museumfolk to take. If you can't afford a blockbuster or if you can't raise money to launch one, why not suddenly take a principled position against them?

Cotter's position is also an easy one for a mid-career, seen-it-all art critic to take: Cotter has stood before Courbets 3,200 times and standing before Courbets for the 3,201st-to-the-3,301st time likely won't make that big a difference to him. However, a 20-year-old who is just beginning to contemplate the world beyond Far Rockaway might have a different take on the merit of a major historical show on a major figure. For her, a Courbet show at the Met may be an eye-opening opportunity, an exhibition that turns her from Courbet-unaware to art-engaged. Mid-career art critics sometimes fail to step outside their khakis.

And so I rise in defense of blockbusters, at least some of them. Let's have a sense of context here. There's nothing inherently wrong with big shows. Museums that have the resources and the access to curatorial talent to do them right shouldn't succumb to externally-imposed austerity. Sure, sometimes blockbusters have real merit and sometimes they don't. But let's differentiate rather than lump. Let's not throw out the baby with the Mary Cassatt.

Via @amhistorymuseum: One hundred and ninety-five years ago today, in the midst of the War of 1812, soldiers unfurled a giant American flag over Fort McHenry. The sight so moved Francis Scott Key that he wrote a song about it, a song that became our national anthem.

Ever since then (at least) the American flag has been motivated artists. Last year I asked contemporary art curators to pick their favorite works that included or responded to the American flag. Check out: The series intro, Lawrence Rinder picked Eduardo Paolozzi, Connie Butler picked David Hammons, Rita Gonzalez picked Juan Capistran, John Ravenal picked Yukinori Yanagi, Michael Taylor picked Marcel Duchamp, Anthony Huberman picked Lutz Bacher, David Rubin picked Sam Wiener and I spotlighted Hans Haacke and William Pope.L. (Given the right-wing jingoism of the last few weeks, I think the Pope.L is plenty au courant.)

Several weeks ago, the National Arts Journalism Program launched a contest hoping to find new models for arts journalism. I questioned the exercise but wrote that I was grateful that NAJP had "provided an opportunity for a broader discussion of what art journalism should become."

Not any more. Last week NAJP made two announcements regarding the public-program portion of its contest (which will take place on Oct. 2 in Los Angeles). First, it released the names of five presenters. Next, after the contest-entry period was closed, NAJP announced that it had modified its contest rules. These developments leave me with little expectation that the NAJP contest will end up being a useful discussion of arts journalism.

Of the NAJP contest's five announced presenters (apparently five contest finalists are being held back in secret until Oct. 2), four have little-to-nothing to do with journalism. Three are infotainment projects that more closely resemble a hybrid of iTunes and Access Hollywood than they resemble the investigation, presentation or analysis of events, facts or news. (Take the Indianapolis Museum of Art's ArtBabble, for example. It's a fascinating project, but it makes no pretense of being even so much as related to journalism.) Another presenting project is a software program developed by the University of Southern California, which is hosting the NAJP contest.

The National Arts Journalism Project's drift away from journalism is disappointing, but the next problem with the NAJP contest is just as puzzling. It laid down guidelines for entrants -- and then admitted that it was disregarding them.

As I noted here, the NAJP project's request for proposals sought commercially "sustainable" projects, and stressed that NAJP was "looking for viability, both as a business and as a journalistic enterprise." I criticized that as a misreading of the current journalism environment, noting that in recent years niche journalism and related innovation had overwhelmingly come from the non-profit sector. The NAJP request for proposals, with its unambiguous emphasis on commercial sustainability and business viability, explicitly rejected the non-profit approach. (This approach was all the more unusual because one of the foremost champions of new journalism models, and non-profit journalism in particular, is Geneva Overholser, the director of the journalism school at contest host USC.)

However, in last week's announcement NAJP admitted that it changed the rules while the contest was underway (and apparently told no one), thus stranding potential non-profit-focused applicants who took the organization and its RFP at its word (and who chose not to apply). Strangely, NAJP's recent release indicates that non-profit projects who ignored NAJP's RFP and applied anyway will be considered. NAJP tried to explain this away in last week's announcement:

We had noted on the submission form that we were interested in viable business models. Admittedly, the definition of what constitutes a business model these days is unclear. Strictly speaking, an operation that relies on donated labor and sweat equity has yet to find a sustainable business model. A project that relies solely on philanthropic contributions also has no business model in a strict sense. What we're looking for, therefore, is not so much a commercial business plan but some indications of long-term operational viability.

If the organization was going to change the rules in midstream, it should have announced that while non-commercial applicants could have participated. If it was going to devalue journalism as the raison d'etre of the exercise, it should have announced that too. Moving the goalposts after the entrants were in strikes at the integrity of the enterprise.

Journalism and people who care about the place of the arts in a free society deserve a vibrant conversation about how journalism can initiate and sustain a national dialogue about the place of art and artists in a free society. The NAJP contest isn't it.

• Christopher Knight introduces Fox News art critic Glenn Beck to irony;
• Bruce Nauman realized an early (1969) earthwork in the skies over the Southland this past weekend. A write-up from Knight, video at Pasadena Adjacent, pics from Crudegrace and more first-person from Middle Stanza;
• Also in the LAT, Suzanne Muchnic examines the history of Korean art at LACMA; and
  
• The Star's Alice Thorson reports that the Kansas City arts scene -- including the venerable Nelson-Atkins -- is about to be co-opted by the public relations wing of a federally bailed-out corporation. AAMD has remained silent regarding this use of non-profit gallery spaces (typically used for exhibiting collections and scholarship) for corporate glad-handling.
• ArtsJournal is ten years old. Happy birthday!
  

Two years ago I spent a month talking with three curators about how artists had responded to 9/11. Each curator selected some work to spotlight and then we talked about their choices and about art and 9/11. Here are they are, in the order in which I posted them:

• MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel's picks: Tom Friedman, Thomas Hirschhorn, Robert Gober, Luc Tuymans. Wrap-up with Schimmel.
• MoMA (now) chief curator Ann Temkin: In conversation part one, part two, part three.
• Art Institute of Chicago curator James Rondeau: Kay Rosen and Christopher Wool, Wolfgang Staehle, Joel Meyerowitz, and Fritz Koenig, In conversation part one, part two.
• Me: Shirin Neshat's Tooba.

On Monday I linked to Christopher Knight's review of an Independent Curators International show about Dick Cheney's America. Titled "The New Normal" started a multi-country tour last year and continues into 2010. Curator Michael Connor's blog has been silent since July, but maybe with the show arriving at a new venue he'll pick it up again.

Perhaps sensing an uptick in the economy -- or eager to rid themselves of storage-related costs -- art museums are unleashing a big wave of deaccessioned objects on the first round of fall auctions. The Hirshhorn, the Montclair Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago are the big deaccessioners at the early fall sales at auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's. [Image: The Hero and his Lady, Howard Chandler Christy, deaccessioned by the Hirshhorn.]

Here's a roundup of works on offer and from whom they come:

The Hirshhorn, which has been especially active in recent auction seasons, is offering 29 pieces, including works by Alexander Istrati, Victor Vasarely (2), David Burliuk (2, 3, 4, 5, 6), Henry Moore (2, 3, 4), Karl Knaths (2, 3, 4), Max Ernst (2, 3, 4), Moses Soyer (2, 3), Walter Stuempfig (2), Raphael Soyer (2), Albert Andre and the Howard Chandler Christy above. (Just for fun: The Washington Post has a long history of 'borrowing' items such as this without crediting the original reporting, so hi Posties! See you soon!)

The Art Institute of Chicago has not been a prominent deaccessioner in recent seasons. It is offering a minor Julian Alden Weir portrait, Louis McClellan Potter (2), Anna Hyatt Huntington, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (2), Walter Ufer, Pauline Palmer, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, and five paintings by Arthur B. Davies: Summer and the Mother-Hearted, Evening Among the Ruins, Lake and Island, Sierra Nevada, Dirge in Spring, and Leda and the Dioscuri.

St. Louis' Kemper Museum is hoping to part with minor works by Paul Burlin and Walter Quirt.

The St. Louis Art Museum is offering an Augustus Saint-Gaudens bronze relief and a Charles Grafly bronze bust. SLAM has been an aggressive deaccessioner in recent years, including the deaccessioning of ten works in 2007 in order to help enable the museum's purchase of an Edgar Degas.

Baltimore's Walters Art Museum, not known for its collection of contemporary art, is selling a minor Andy Warhol: A 1957 drawing of a horse.

The Palm Springs Art Museum has been a busy deaccessioner in recent auctions. This season it's selling a vaguely Duchampian 1957 Robert Irwin painting, a Kenneth Noland and an Alexander Liberman.

Montclair continues the sale discussed here by deaccessioning works by Allen Tucker, William Zorach, Joseph Floch (2, 3), Frederick Judd Waugh (2), Ernest Lawson, Bruce Crane, Thomas R. Manley, Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt,

The Delaware Art Museum is offering a painting by Ogden Minton Pleissner.

The Carnegie Museum of Art is offering a minor 17th-century Korean screen.

The Wadsworth Atheneum is deaccessioning two 12th-13thC Chinese ceramics, a 19thC Chinese bowl,  and a blue Chinese vase, three 10thC-12thC dishes,

The weirdest deaccessioned object of the bunch is this scary crocodile, unwanted by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. FAMSF is also selling a Chinese sculpture of a ram.

UPDATE: In late June the Indianapolis Museum of Art deaccessioned dozens of works. Most have yet to be consigned to auction houses, but thanks to the IMA's transparency policies you can see the list here. For the umpteenth time: Every American art museum should copy this.

Nota bene: I've tried to make this list as comprehensive as possible, but the auction house search tools aren't perfect and it's certainly possibly I missed a work or two. If readers notice something I missed, I'll happily add it to this post. Thanks.

Must-read story of the week: This morning the Los Angeles Times' Raja Abdulrahim reports that the Iranian government has refused to allow an artist to ship work to a Los Angeles gallery because it is green. The color green, worn and wielded by the supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the run-up to Iran's recent election, has become something of a color-of-dissent in Iran. [Image: War against Peace, 2009, ICY.]

I'm not going to summarize the whole story -- go read it, Tweet it, Facebook it and do with it whatever it is that kids these days do. Instead, I'll ask: Should the US government (or the EU) make an official, public response to this kind of behavior from Iran? If this were a big-business matter, they almost certainly would. Alas, I suspect our government isn't likely to do or say much.

That's too bad. This should be an opportunity for Western governments to stand up for the freedom of expression, to ally themselves with Iran's enormous, plenty-motivated youth culture, and to pressure Iran's dictatorial clerical regime. 

Last year Art Institute of Chicago director James Cuno told me that the U.S. government needs to have a point-person to deal with other nations on cultural heritage issues, particularly antiquities: "These decisions [on antiquities] that are made have to be made in the context of diplomatic relations that, for the most part, happen at the State Department," he said. "Sometimes they're tinged with military relations or economic relations, but they're certainly about the relations between countries. There just ought to be someone with whom [museums] could speak." [Image: Peace Girl, 2009, ICY.]

Cuno's idea makes  a lot of sense. With some minor tweaking, the same person could be the State Department point person on cultural freedom issues such as this. Even though that kind of position or diplomat doesn't currently exist, the State Department should find a way to address this situation ASAP. It is nothing short of outrageous that an artist can't ship an artwork because it's the 'wrong' color.

Related: Via Crewest's Flickr stream, images of work by the artists in the show. Crewest's website.

It was only a matter of time before Michelle Obama's guns were back in the news.

This month, Women's Health magazine features an article titled "The First Lady's Fitness Secrets." The story reveals that Michelle Obama's trainer has put her through an "intense weight- training routine made up of compound movements that work multiple muscle groups" and that the first lady has built herself up over the course of 1,872 workouts. (And often at 5:30am! OMG! No way!) Yesterday NBC's Today show piled on, inviting the magazine's editors onto the program to talk about the First Lady's amazing arms.

When did a woman's nicely superbly-built arms become such a major topic of discussion, a national focus, an object of covetous, even lusty admiration? Oh, starting in about 1503, in Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, wherein the artist made a Madonna into the Michelle Obama of her day. (History does not record whether Michelangelo was invited onto the Programma Oggi.)

Here's the story: In her thrilling book Renaissance Rivals, art historian Rona Goffen points out that Michelangelo often used men as models for his Madonnas. We know this because one of Michelangelo's preparatory drawing for the Bruges Madonna shows the Virgin as a fantastically well-cut man, later well-disguised. (The drawing is in the collection of the British Museum. I couldn't find it online.)

Enter the Doni Tondo (at right), Michelangelo's only surviving, completed panel painting. Goffen notes that the sculpted Madonna in Doni Tondo is in direct opposition to the soft, rounded, dewily feminine Madonnas that Leonardo was making. Goffen and other art historians believe that Michelangelo saw Leonardo's Madonnas and was reacting to or against them.

There is nothing traditionally, gently womanly about Michelangelo's Madonna in the Doni Tondo. To put it in the lingua franca of our day, the Michelangelo Madonna's got guns and she's showing them off. In the detail image (below) you can see that Mary is holding baby Jesus in a way that exhibits her right bicep while the position of her left arm shows off a taut tricep and a bangin' deltoid. While Leonardo covers his Madonnas' arms with folds of fabric, Michelangelo's Mary features a rolled-up sleeve-of-sorts.

The composition of the Doni Tondo creates invisible lines that seem to end right at Mary's triceps and deltoid: The fence on which all those naked folks in the background are sitting (ahem) runs directly behind Mary's left arm. Mary's arm is directly below Joseph's left eye, a line which establishes the central axis of the panel. Mary's left elbow is the apex of an assertively composed triangle that has its other two points at Mary's left knee and her right hip. The painting is designed to impress you with Mary's build. Mission accomplished.

Of course there's a difference between 1503 and 2009. In the 16thC Michelangelo masculinizes his Madonna to bring her closer to a 16thC male ideal of, athletic manliness. (Goffen calls Michelangelo's Mary "virile," which is a fantastic word choice.)

"Believing (with most of his contemporaries) that the male was superior to the female," Goffen writes, "Michelangelo intended to honor Mary by making her male... In images, the Renaissance norm remained the feminine ideal embodied by such Madonnas as Leonardo's. But Michelangelo abandoned this tradition, masculinizing Mary in part to exempt her from his own society's oppression of women and to shield her from dangerous and inappropriate female sexuality."

Compare that to today: None of the discussion about Michelle Obama's guns is about her build personifying an idealized male body, but is instead about her having an idealized female body. While Michelangelo's Mary is a woman masculinized to separate her from the way women were viewed in the 16thC, Michelle Obama's presentation of herself explicitly associates her muscular womanhood with modernity.

Finally, the sexualization of Michelle Obama's buffness -- and make no mistake, it is sexualization -- is about about our acceptance of her presentation of what we now consider an idealized female build. Five hundred years ago Michelangelo needed to use a man to create an exalted female form. Michelle Obama doesn't.

Continuing from yesterday with soon-to-retire Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art director Marc Wilson...

MAN: No one outside Kansas City remembers it now, but when the Nelson-Atkins bought and installed Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's Shuttlecocks there was a big hullaballoo about whether that was a silly, stupid, insulting or whatever thing to do. Of course, the museum rode out the controversy and now Shuttlecocks is beloved civic icon.

However, I can't think of the last time an American art museum got caught up in something like that, in presenting, defending and permanently installing contemporary art quite that way. Why not? What's changed between 1994 and now? [Image of Wilson courtesy the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.]

MW: I think I'd first ask if [museums are] taking any risks. I'd start there. Contemporary art should be a land that is a little uncharted and maybe there are going to be some shoals.
 
That'd be my first question: Are museums taking risks? Risk and recklessness are very different things. Creativity always involves risk. We are willing to take risks. I think that nowadays people think that taking risks such as that is like astronauts: If you lose, you lose big.

At the time some of the reaction to Shuttlecocks was nasty, nasty, nasty. A lady sent me a box with her return address on it. It was from Independence, Missouri. I opened it up and it was a diaper full of baby poop along with a note saying that this was her daughter's work of art and it was certainly the equal of the Shuttlecocks. She wanted me to know her daughter was available to produce more of that. We got lots of personal attacks and all that. So yes, I feel very vindicated because now they are the icons of the city and people are out there every single week having wedding pictures taken with them. [Image.]

MAN: Did your experience with Shuttlecocks inform your thinking as you commissioned a sleek, contemporary building to sit alongside your Beaux Arts building?

MW: I thought that the controversy with the new building came more at the end. It was some of the same, 'This is not architecture, it's ugly.' It's the usual argument over contemporary things and how can you do this to this beautiful [neo-classical] building.

MAN: There aren't a whole lot of museum directors out there who've been doing this for 27 years. What do you think has changed in the profession, in art museums between 1982 and now?

MW: I think a few things have changed. For one, there's our expectation of the audience. There was a time when a member of the audience, a visitor, had to bring something of themselves, they had to make an effort. That is, a successful visit depended on them. I think audiences have abdicated their responsibility and put the success of their experience on the institution, on the producer, on the musician, the orchestra or whomever. They don't seem willing to take into account their level of preparation, their willingness to exert of themselves. I think that's a huge change. [Image.]

Those changes in audience also involve, from the audiences point-of-view, how I feel about something rather than what I know about something or have analyzed about something. That uninformed reaction is seemingly the new measure of truth and worth.

Experiment is the way to confirm truth. If there is anything about this age, anything that's really changed in the last 30 years, it's that people believe that the truth is what [they] think it is, even if actual truth or demonstrated or experiments-informed experience says otherwise.

Related: Part one.

At a time when art museum directors often bounce around like free agent baseball players, Marc Wilson is an anomaly. Wilson joined the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art as a curator of Chinese art in 1971 and went on to become the museum's director, a position he's held for 27 years. Earlier this year Wilson and the N-A announced that Wilson will retire in 2010.

While in Kansas City recently I talked with Wilson about how his museum's much-admired  Bloch Building is working out and about how museums and his profession have changed since he became the Nelson's director in 1982. I'll post our chat in two parts. [Image of Wilson as, er, Saint George courtesy the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.]

MAN: When a museum opens a new building critics rush in to gush or pan. However, we rarely return a year or two later to see if the building works for visitors, for curators, for art. So how's the Bloch Building working for the Nelson-Atkins?

Marc Wilson: In terms of our goals it has met every single goal and there's nothing we would change. I think that's an unusual statement. We did our homework and I think so far as the architecture goes we were an exceptionally strong client. From the beginning, the building project had tremendous community participation. It wasn't just the director and a couple people. We interviewed 250 people. We went to our market cities like Wichita and Omaha and we talked to taxi drivers and teachers and patrons and so forth. It had broad input and that helped us end up with our goals. We then hired a firm that took these things and quantified them in architectural terms.

We wanted to set up an environment different from the static museum sensibility, such as rectangular spaces arranged around a circulation space, usually a corridor or a series of corridors. Our 1933 building is absolutely typical of that. It's all highly homogenized. Have you ever seen the Durer print of the artist looking through the grid? That's happened with the total [museum] experience. They all get homogenized and are basically infinitely expandable or contractible by that grid. It has the physical effect of static. [Image.]

So what I wanted and what Steven Holl wanted was something where space and time and light are like putty, so it's like traveling down the museum, so it's like canoeing. Here you get an experience like canoeing the Ozarks. It goes and goes and it's slow -- and then the canoe speeds up as the current speeds up, and there's a corner... and you don't know what's around it... and you get around it and it's a new experience. Our new building works on that sensation and feeling. Everyone understand and feels that kind of sensation.

I think the other important thing we got right with the building is the light. About the time the Getty was built there was this huge fashion and phase that all paintings would be great under natural light. The only thing about natural light is that it comes directly from the sun and for us light is a matter of composition. So we mix it and we bounce it [all over our galleries] from above. In the Bloch Building we used all kinds of light. Our works of art there are perfectly well lit because the light comes from all around, not just one window or one skylight.

MAN: So it works for you, but what about for audiences? Do you notice any quantifiable differences between how your visitors look at post-war art and photography in Bloch as compared to how they look at art in the 1933 building?

MW: A third of attendance now comes from households with incomes of less than $55,000. That tells you the people who are coming are not just on our lofty donor boards. [Image.]

Also, folks are coming and they are spending more time in front of individual works of art. How do we know? We have measured the time they spend with specific works. The guards have a stopwatch and we can track how much time people are spending with certain works. In the Bloch Building they are spending about three times as much [as in the 1933 building] and we're loving that. Museums should be special places, not like a strip mall.

Our galleries are always designed around the phenomenological experience, making that primary and not the taxonomy of art history. I'm not trying to teach you art history, I'm trying to open your eyes, your own sens and your own intelligence to what's in those works of art. That's the first step. If you're a history buff, then you can go through all those doors.

• If ever you doubted that in New York the trading floor is about as important as the art itself, Roberta Smith surveys the "mood of the market."
• The NYT's Randy Kennedy visits the Asia Society to discover Pakistani contemporary art -- and what it might tell us about Pakistan.
• Is it old-fashioned of Christopher Knight to insist on seeing an artist's archive before considering whether they're genuine or not? Or is there some reason that both a blogger and art historians jumped the gun on the debate over Frida Kahlo and authenticity?
• After 9/11 Dick Cheney said that a "new normalcy" would take over American life, a normalcy that came to include illegal domestic surveillance, illegal detention and an extensive American torture regime. Knight looks at Pomona College show that examines Cheney's America. (More on the show here later this week.)
• Jen Graves details an unusually hilarious artists' talk at the Seattle Art Museum.
• Art critic David Bonetti has left the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, leaving another American newspaper sans art critic.
• Finally, Tut-master/Anschutz-enabler Zahi Hawass popped up in an NYT story this weekend Writer Michael Slackman dropped in this hanging phrase, which made my eyes stop: "If you don't restore the Jewish synagogues, you lose a part of your history," said Zahi Hawass, general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who in the past has written negatively about Jews because of the clash between Israel and the Palestinians. "It is part of our heritage." The italics are mine. They make you wonder, don't they...
  

New York magazine senior art critic Jerry Saltz emailed me this morning with a challenge to Fox News art critic (that's from MAN, this morning) Glenn Beck:

A large gallery or museum should ask Glenn Beck to curate two shows this season (he would be free to ask other associates at Fox News to assist).

• The first: Images of art in NYC, or actual works, that he would like to see demolished; and
  
• The second: A show of CONTEMPORARY art that he approves of.
  

Saltz promises to review both shows. (Triple Candie, are you listening?)

Last night talk-show host Glenn Beck debuted as the Fox News art critic.

Yes, really. On last night's "Glenn Beck" program, Beck, who is best-known for hysterical, tearful, racial rantings that have cost his program nearly five dozen sponsors in the last few months, tore into the "progressive" Rockefeller(s) on the charge that they were responsible for delivering "communist" and "fascist" art to New York. Beck went on to suggest that "Rockefeller" (which one or ones was not made clear) was a communist-sympathizer, a fascism-supporter and a hater of America. [Image above: Beck on "Glenn Beck," Fox News Channel, Sept. 2, 2009.]

Beck opened the segment by arguing that a 1937 Carl Paul Jennewein intaglio carving, Industry and Agriculture, was "communist" art because one figure is holding a longhammer and because the other is holding an agrarian tool, a sickle. Beck went on to imply that because an unnamed Rockefeller had put the Jennewein there, that Rockefeller was a commie symp.

Not quite. The sickle and the hammer have been used separately to signify agrarian interests and workmen or craftsmen in art respectively since at least the Byzantine period. In the 19th and 20th centuries the hammer and sickle were often fused in a range of European symbology, in both provincial heraldry and in state insignia. It wasn't until 1922 that the Red Army adopted them as a state symbol. (It became the Soviet state symbol in 1923.)

Beck's next target was Attilio Piccirilli's 1936 Youth Leading Industry (detail at right, image of entire work here), a Pyrex-brick relief. Piccirlli, best-known during his lifetime for the Marine Memorial at Columbus Circle and for being New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's favorite artist and best friend, occasionally dipped into imagery with which Italian fascists would have been comfortable. (Another of his sculptures for Rockefeller Center, Advance Forever, Eternal Youth was so close to such that on Dec. 12, 1941 Rockefeller Center covered it with a wooden board.) Apparently aroused by a particularly striking, allegedly fascist male figure, Beck tore into the Piccirilli.

"Who is this? Who is this?" Beck asked, his voice rising to a yell. "This is the strong leader taking that, using that industry and those machines to lead us into the, uh, bright future, led by our children. Gee, who's having indoctrination next week? Oh yeah, that's right, our  president. Completely unrelated. This represents, at the time this was made, Mussolini. This represents Mussolini."

I've done a quick survey of the literature on Youth and actually no, the figure at the right doesn't represent Mussolini. It's just a generic, heroic male figure representing industry. There is no evidence to indicate that Piccirilli was a fascist-sympathizer. At the time of the commissions discussed here, he'd lived in New York for four decades. He received these commissions only after a much-publicized dustup about Rockfeller Center pursuing Europeans such as Matisse and Picasso to create the art for Rockefeller Center.) Youth Leading Industry survived World War II intact and unobstructed and has remained on view ever since.

Shortly after that, Beck pivoted into an accusation that the Obama administration is using art as an indoctrination tool of some kind: "This administration is beginning to use art as propaganda. This is nothing new to progressives." (Nevermind that the greatest propagandistic work of our time was the Matthew Barney-esque installation-art-cum-performance created by Scott Sforza, a Republican.) Beck didn't explain how the Obama administration is using art as propoganda. I still haven't figured out how the Rockefellers ended up as agricultural collectivist, labor-loving progressives, either.

Beck closed his segment by appealing to the black helicopter crowd: "Don't let any of these people ever tell you anything other than the truth... the progressives of today -- it makes sense that we're headed down this road. It makes sense that you feel a little uneasy, and everything seems to be a little hidden. It's not if you look. You're awake you need to see the things hidden in plain sight."

Yes, even if you have to make them up in order to see them.

UPDATE: New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz issues Beck a challenge.

Related: Rockefeller Center's website has an entire section on the art and architecture at the site. A multi-generational look at how the art at Rockefeller Center glorifies its builder: Paul Manship's Prometheus and Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror.

Over at the Buffalo News' blog, Colin Dabkowski absolutely nails it as he examines why the Cleveland Museum of Art's attempted financial shenanigans are a national story -- and maybe just the tip of the rust-belt iceberg.

One of the pleasures of traveling to look at art is the opportunity to see works of art that don't make it into the textbooks, the opportunity to build your own visual memory and to see connections that artists make to each other through their work.

The current installation of Old Masters at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts features two big, salon-style-on-Ando installations that encourage a viewer to think about paintings within the context of other paintings. So I did.

Among the paintings so-installed was this Harvard canvas by Domenico Tintoretto, Personification of Fidelity (c.1595-99). It's a particularly sketchy painting, almost the kind of piece an artist makes as he works through an idea, a pose, a something. (It also gives off a whiff of the son doing the father -- or of the son continuing his father's $tudio in the years immediately following Jacopo Robusti's death in 1594.)

As I stood at the Pulitzer and looked, I slowly realized why the painting was so familiar. Two days earlier I'd been in Kansas City, at the Nelson-Atkins. One of the greatest European paintings in America is at the Nelson, a best-of-his-best Caravaggio: St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604-05). Caravaggio painted five different versions of the subject, and while each one is a knockout it's hard to top the Kansas City painting.

I thought I saw something in the Domenico Tintoretto that was vaguely familiar and I thought it had to do with Kansas City's Caravaggio. I quickly dialed up the Nelson painting on my PDA. Sure enough... well, take a look. Dame Fidelity and boy wonder John aren't posed exactly the same and there's no reason to believe that Caravaggio was much interested in Tintoretto figlio. That was fine; they're similar enough that I thought that they had to be part of the same family tree. But what tree?

Caravaggio painted this version of John the Baptist near the end of his time in Rome, probably just a year or so before he fled the city after a run-in with the law. When artists living in Rome introduce a new pose in their paintings, there's one obvious place to begin to look for their source material: the Sistine Chapel.

Ergo, here's Michelangelo's Daniel, painted in the Sistine Chapel in 1505. As in the Domenico Tintoretto and the Caravaggio the figure in the Michelangelo is mid-turn. The figures are sited similarly within their spaces. Big, strong diagonals run from the center-left-top of each painting, down to the right. The left leg is similarly placed, anchoring the bottom-right cornerof each painting. Each artist has a little trouble filling the space in the lower-right: Domenico inserts a Fidelity-appropriate dog, Caravaggio turns John's shawl-like garment into something drapery-like and Michelangelo gives Daniel a swollen knee.

No, they're not identical. But they are close enough that while I was standing in the Pulitzer, I repeatedly looked from the Domenico Tintoretto on the wall to JPEGs of the other two paintings on my Blackberry.

Eventually my bizarre, slightly obsessive, squinty behavior attracted the attention of the security staff and a guard walked over to tell me I couldn't take pictures. I told him that I wasn't and he asked me exactly what it was that I was doing. I showed him the Caravaggio on my phone. He looked up at the painting on the wall, down at my PDA's screen, shot me a skeptical look and walked away. Fair. He wasn't convinced. But...

Related: I think Sam Francis riffed on the Sistine Chapel ceiling for the great Basel Mural I now at the Norton Simon. The two institutions that do web presentations of exhibitions best are MoMA (here's the Ensor site) and the Pulitzer. So don't miss the Old Masters website, complete with time-lapse video.

Talking Points Memo has the invitation list for tonight's White House Ramadan Dinner, an annual event at which the White House "highlight(s) the contributions of American Muslims." Even though artists are among the most prominent Muslim intellectuals in the United States, there isn't a single artist on the invitation list. (Suggests: Shirin Neshat, Shahzia Sikander...)

Each year I do a roundup post of substantial posts you may have missed while vacationing this past summer. This is the 2009 version. As always, you can read months in their totality by using the pull-down menu at right.

June

• The National Gallery of Art's so-called America.
• 'Cezanne and Beyond' in Philadelphia: Part one, two, three.
  

July

• Examining the latest industrial threat to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty;
• The next steps at the Great Salt Lake;
  
• Critiquing deaccessioning by making art; and
• Remembering Robert Hilferty.

August

• Addressing the future of art journalism -- if there is one;
• The mystery of the Venetian gentleman: Is a National Gallery of Art portrait a Titian? A Giorgione? Or something else? Part one, two, three, four.
• Reading Ovid with Ellsworth and Jerome (at the Pulitzer Foundation).
  

Posts on torture and national responsibility on MAN (January through summer)

• An inaugural presentation as America transitions from Bush to Obama: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn;
  
• The Abu Ghraib photos and the national collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress: part one, part two;
  
• The Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler's The Gray Drape;
  
• Bruce Nauman at the Venice Biennale: Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America's torture of Abu Zubaydeh; with a look at Nauman's hanging chair sculptures in Chicago and Washington: part one, part two; and
  
• Gerhard Richter's Uncle Rudi: A foundational painting. As discussed by Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Gallery (UK), as discussed by Art of Two Germanys at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. MAN analyzes: Uncle Rudi and quiet confrontation, Uncle Rudi and the response to torture.

There is something a little bit intimidating about reading aloud one of the greatest works of classical mythology to a Tadao Ando-designed room of St. Louisans, plenty of whom are following along in the text -- and in the original Latin, for Jupiter's sake. It's even tougher when you read a section of that epic poem, Ovid's Metamorphoses, ten feet to the right of a brilliant scholar-saint who is rolling his eyes at you while clutching a stone in his throwing arm. (OK, it was Ribera's Saint Jerome (at right), from Harvard, and he was substantially more likely to harangue himself with the rock than me.)

That was my circumstance on Saturday afternoon, when I read 15 minutes worth of Ovid at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts' A Marathon Metamorphoses. The Pulitzer's construct was simple: Invite people to read The Metamorphoses, Cosmogony to Caesar, in 15-minute increments over 16 hours and 45 minutes split between two days, all while surrounded by Old Master paintings from the Harvard Art Museum and the St. Louis Art Museum. Simple that is until, like me you get 13 minutes, 30 seconds into your passage, remember that you're sitting under a killer Ellsworth Kelly and that a stone-gripping, skull-luving Jerome lurks, at which point you feel your mouth dry up and your throat contract.

No matter. I had only 90 seconds to go. I was confident I could make it through my last couple paragraphs without tripping over my tongue. But no, alas, I was doomed. It was at just that point that I arrived at an Ovidian smackdown: A sentence with a dozen Latin names, each of which consisted of ten syllables -- or more. I did the only thing I could: I screwed up every single name and kept on going as if I'd nailed 'em. (Later that day a friend congratulated me on my reading, concluding his bonhomie with: "Nobody noticed you got some of those names wrong," which confirmed for me that I'd gotten those names even wronger than I'd feared.)

My blunders notwithstanding, reading Ovid in the well of a lovable Ando was quite a thrill. While I was scheduled to be in St. Louis for several days last week, I had expected to attend A Marathon Metamorphoses only as a listener. Then, at the last minute, a Missouri state senator who had been scheduled to read found himself on the short end of several federal election law violations. Perhaps realizing that his situation vis-a-vis a federal prosecutor was roughly analogous with Holofernes' situation in Judith Holding the Head of Holofernes by Giordano (on view upstairs from the reading site in the Pulitzer's main gallery), the state senator resigned from both the program and his seat.

I lucked out. Not only did I get to participate in a very clever idea -- the relationship between Ovid's stories and art is as direct as the relationship between Ando and concrete, and for a weekend the Pulitzer was transformed into art gallery + community gathering space -- but I just happened to read one of the most famous stories in The Metamorphoses, the story of Perseus' slaying of Medusa.

When I was done reading I wandered the building listening to the succeeding readers while I enjoyed a dramatic Sebastian, a familiar-looking Tintoretto (more on that tomorrow), a room of gilded panel paintings, all lit by nothing but Ando's windows. Typically art museums are so grateful to get visitors in the doors that they ask as little of us as possible. This past weekend the Pulitzer asked a lot: Come sit still and listen to a challenging bit of epic poetry. Look at paintings absent wall-text and all the other allegedly visitor-friendly accouterments. Depending on the time of day, you'll have to walk around a bit to see them -- the light at a particular moment may sit perfectly on a van Ruisdael waterfall but less perfectly on a Giaquinto 30 feet away, so you might have to wander the gallery, back-and-forth-and-back, to see everything just the way you want to see it.

I love that. When a museum asks something of its visitors it encourages more intense engagement. Every museum should try to create days like Saturday, days on which they provide something for audiences willing to fully invest themselves in experience, audiences that are willing to do a little work in order to enjoy more, to understand more, to be motivated to continue their love affair with art. In my case I ended up seeing a pious, skull-clutching, rock-wielding, half-naked old man as the kind of hermit worth befriending.

Related: The Pulitzer's Flickr stream of the event. A couple of short videos. Behind the scenes. Visual evidence the whole thing really happened, with both photos and drawings.