November 2009 Archives

I'm taking a Friday off. I'll have two more posts on Edward Burtynsky next week, plus I'll kick off our 2009 DonorsChoose.org drive. (Last year you gave $3,000 to help provide art education to 1,300 students!)

In 2006 I wrote a post detailing some acquisitions at SFMOMA. Among the SFMOMA curators with whom I spoke was Sandra Phillips, who heads up the museum's photography department. She told me this story. I've tried to interest magazines in it for years (maybe it would be a better book?), but because it's a season of New Topographics at LACMA and because of the recent launch of a George Eastman House project, I thought now would be a good time to share it.

Robert Adams and Nick Nixon are two of the grand men of recent American photography. Nixon has been recently celebrated in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art and at the Museum of Modern Art, and in the last few years Adams has been the subject of solo shows at SFMOMA and at the Getty Museum. Their work is in the permanent collection of just about every major American museum.

The two men have been friends since they were included in a 1975 exhibit at the George Eastman House. Titled "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape," the exhibition is arguably the most important photography group show of the last 35 years. This season it is being celebrated at LACMA via a reprise of sorts.

In 2004, Adams and his wife Kerstin celebrated their friendship with Nixon by giving SFMOMA a gift of 51 Nixon photographs. [Image above: Nicholas Nixon, View of the River Street Bridge, Storrow Drive, and the Charles River, Boston, 1975; gelatin silver print, 8 in. x 10 in. SFMOMA. Gift of Kerstin and Robert Adams.] All are gelatin silver prints. Some are four-by-six inch baby photos, some are classics of Nixon's oeuvre. What distinguishes them is what's on the back of the prints.

"Bob has had this very long relations with Nick Nixon," Phillips told me. "The relationship exists not only in person, but in letters and through photographs. The wonderful thing about this gift is that on back of the photographs are letters to Bob from Nick."

Phillips explained that for the last three decades the two men have exchanged old-fashioned, hand-written notes directly on the backs of their photographs. The notes are not written on paper taped to the back of the photos, but are on the photographic paper itself. The letters are about their families, their lives, and about their shared love of photography.

"Bob is a very important guy and he's a very approachable guy among his peers," Phillips said. "This relationship started many, many years ago and I think there's a mutual admiration between Nick and Bob Adams. When you see Bob you know that when you talk to him that you know about his friendships. He very much values his relationship with Nick." [Image above: Nicholas Nixon, Nina and John SZ, 1979; gelatin silver print, 8 in. x 10 in. SFMOMA. Gift of Kerstin and Robert Adams.]

I have not seen the correspondence, but I wonder if it's a dialogue between two different Americas. Adams, who has lived in California, Colorado and now in rural Oregon, is arguably the most-admired photographer of the evolving, increasingly developed American West. There are not a lot of humans in Adams' landscapes. Nixon has been an Easterner his entire life. Boston is his base. He has long made portraits and communities the focus of his work.

It may be that no one aside from Adams, Nixon and a couple SFMOMA curators has seen the correspondence. Maybe that can change: Earlier this year the George Eastman House, with the help of a federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, launched a new photo wiki called Notes on Photographs. (A detailed description of the project/wiki is here.) Among the features of the wiki is a section that will chronicle the marks on the backs of photographs: signatures, labels and so on. Digital images of such are and will be available on the Notes on Photographs website: Here's a Margaret Bourke-White, a Weegee, and a lot of Hines. It seems like a good place for SFMOMA to begin to share with us the Nixon-Adams relationship in its collection...

Related: I reviewed the NGA's 2005 'Brown Sisters' Nicholas Nixon exhibition for the Boston Globe. Me on Robert Adams at the Getty in 2006. Thanks to Luke Strosnider's Touching Harms the Art for the Eastman House project tip.

An artist interested in tackling a big subject -- a subject such as mankind's dependence on oil -- has a tough job: You can't do it in one picture. Photographer Edward Burtynsky understands that. For the last 12 years he's taken hundreds of pictures in an effort to document our relationship with oil. A thrilling, haunting exhibition of 56 of them, "Edward Burtynsky: Oil," is on view now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The show reveals not just the way we live and how, but it demonstrates that Burtynsky is a masterful story-teller. [Image: Talladega #1, 2009. For a screen-sized image, click here.]

Burtynsky's pictures are more New Topographics than they are, say, Robert Frank. The best of Frank's pictures have a self-contained narrative. Burtynsky's pictures don't work quite that way. Like the New Topos -- more on Burtynsky's apparent interest in them later in the week -- Burtynsky prefers telling his story slowly, over dozens of photographs.

That's not to say individual Burtynsky photographs are not tour de forces. They are. Consider the four-by-five-foot, detail-intense picture around which the Corcoran swirls: Talladega #1. Nothing about this photograph of the run-up to a NASCAR race at Talladega Superspeedway says much about our reliance on oil or our use of the planet in our pursuit of it... but considered in the context of 55 other pictures, the sentences that make up the book fall into place.

Acres of lawn fill the center of Talladega #1, a greenness made possible by petroleum-based fertilizer. Tens of thousands of people fill the stands. They drove to remote Lincoln, Ala. to see this race. The 43 cars that will run 499 miles around Talladega will burn through a gallon of gasoline every three or four miles. (Because a NASCAR sponsor wants to make sure you get the point, there's a Sunoco 'gas station' behind pit road.)

At the top right of the picture, military jets are flying in the missing-man formation, a symbolic four-plane grouping that is intended to recall the memory of a fallen pilot. This act of symbolism -- which, oddly, reinforces the recruiting the military does at NASCAR races -- requires an enormous amount of jet fuel. The asphalt on which the cars will race is made from oil.

Finally, in the foreground of the picture, a gas-guzzling big-rig cab pulls a big American flag down the Talladega tri-oval. Fans stand and cheer. Many hold up cameras to take pictures of the truck and the flag. Burtynsky, with Roth's help, is making a specific point by including this picture in the middle of a show about oil: Americans conflate consumption -- specifically the consumption of massive amounts of oil -- with patriotism. Talladega #1 is flanked by pictures that demonstrate the impact of the way we live, of how we have come to define the American dream.

More tomorrow.

Related: The personal story behind Edward Burtynsky's interest in oil.

• I'm behind on posting a couple major items out of Los Angeles: Christopher Knight has reviewed MOCA's two-building permanent collection installation. I've read his write-up and I've seen the checklist: Wow. LACM on Fire visits too. (The Walker is also launching a new, substantial permanent collection installation this month.)
  
• Christopher Hawthorne, the LAT's architecture critic, considers the possible sites for Eli Broad's museum. The paper's Mike Boehm outlined Broad's options.
  
• James Wagner considers the comportment of some NYCers who are trying to change the subject from the New Museum's ethics problems.
• Speaking of which, here's something intelligent about private collections and historicization. (I loved the recent Vollard show.)
  
• It's nice to see the NYT and Randy Kennedy focused on some of the issues with Spiral Jetty. Kudos to art21's blog and to Indianapolis Museum of Art conservator/writer Richard McCoy for writing about these same issues several months ago. I'm still hoping the NYT focuses on the broader conservation issues that impact the Jetty. Aside to the Times: Better enterprise reporting lately. Here's what you might cover next. (Key deadline this month too!)
  

On a summer day in St. Catherines, Ontario, a 25-year old Edward Burtynsky reported for a temporary job at the local General Motors plant. He'd been around auto plants his entire life: his dad had been a line worker for GM and in the 1960's and 1970's and it seemed like everyone in St. Catherines worked for either GM or Ford. When Ed finished high school, he worked some stints in auto plants, stamping car and truck frames for GM, assembling front ends for Ford. He'd already worked at the Red Lakes gold mine too. Taking on the toughest jobs that no one else wanted was nothing new to Ed; he had to make enough money to help out his widowed mother. [Image: Edward Burtynsky, Recycling #2, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2001. Credit.]

On Ed's first day at GM, a Company Man gave him the Company Spiel: Welcome Ed. Your dad worked here for a lot of years. He did damn good work. Sorry he died. Guess it's been about ten years now, eh?  Welcome to the family. Here are protective gloves. Wear them. Here is a protective suit. Wear it. Here are tanks of oil. Empty them into barrels. Simple enough, right?

Oh, and Ed, one other detail. Whatever you do, do not let the oil touch the cement floor of the factory. It will seep right through the cement, into the ground and into the water table. The oil has a half-life of decades. We don't want oil in our water. Simple enough, right?

Oh, and Ed, I forgot the other thing. This oil, well, when some primates were exposed to it, you know, like monkeys and stuff, most of them got cancer and died. So you probably don't want it touching your skin, or anything like that, OK Ed?

Ed looked at the Company Man, and then he looked around the factory. That oil, the stuff with what would come to be known as PCBs in it, wasn't just in tanks or barrels. It was on the floor, it was squirting onto machines every time they piston-pistoned, it was all over all the people, the pipes, the bins. PCBs were a part the oily air. All of a sudden, Ed understood.

Ed walked over to the part of the factory where his father had worked. A bunch of guys were there, some working, some standing around. Ed asked them how many had known his father. One man raised his hand. Ed asked the others if they, too, had worked with his dad. Only the man who had raised his hand responded.

I'm it.

Where are the others?

They all died.

From what?

Cancer. They had all died from the same cancer that killed Ed's dad. Soon Ed noticed that when he got home from PCB cleanup, he'd blow his nose and the tissue would turn black.

A few months later he quit the auto plants for good. He entered college, and later received a C$15,000 grant to begin his art career. Thanks to that first bit of support, Ed jumped in his 1981 Volvo station wagon and lit out across Canada, taking pictures of the industries he'd left behind. Inevitably, when Ed would call home from some far-off province, his mother would ask, "Eddie, who wants these pictures?"

"I don't know mom," Ed would reply. "I don't know."

Two decades after that trip, Ed Burtynsky is at the peak of his profession. In 2003 the National Gallery of Canada organized a retrospective of his work and now an exhibition featuring Burtynsky's photographs of the impact oil has had on us and our landscapes in on view at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art.

This is excerpted/adapted from a profile of Burtynsky I wrote for Black Book magazine in 2005. Look for more on the Corcoran's Burtynsky show tomorrow and on Thursday.

New York-based critic Ken Johnson via Jerry Saltz's comments thread on Facebook (and re-published here with Johnson's permission):

[I] don't know if anyone has mentioned this, but what's also at stake is the intellectual mission of the museum. Unlike a gallery, a museum is more than just a showcase for art. It should be a forum for points of view, and that's one reason it has its own hopefully independently minded and even skeptical curators -- to offer perspectives and familiar ways of thinking about art rather than to echo the commercial status quo. To have an artist who is deeply represented in the collection he's curating necessarily casts doubt on the intellectual independence of the show. There can be little doubt, however, that it will be hugely popular and add much-needed coin to the [New Museum's] dwindling coffers.

Agreed. One minor note of dissent: Admission revenue made up only about nine percent of the NuMu's operating budget in FY 2008 -- a high percentage for a contemporary kunsthalle, a low percentage for a museum in a major tourist city. I don't think one show will move the needle much one way or the other.

The Art Institute of Chicago has acquired Paul Chan's 6th Light (2007), a 14-minute digital projection. [Image: Jean Vong, New Museum]

The works in Chan's 7 Lights series, seem like a direct response to recent violence, particularly the 9/11 attacks. The works start with a slow, emergent light reminiscent of the slow spread of dawn's light. The light seems to quietly proceed through the day -- until something happens and recognizable objects seem to fall into view, and down out of it. The effect is at once beautiful and intoxicating, silence-inducing and haunting.

Works from Chan's 7 Lights series are in the collections of the Whitney, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Walker and the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. (Chan's gallery, Greene Naftali, declined to tell me which works are in which collections. However, web-based collection resources indicate the Whitney owns 1st Light (2005) and the Guggenheim and the Walker also own 6th Light.)

Related: The New Museum put together a nice, thorough website for its 2008 Paul Chan show. It includes video of the lights, including this complete video of 6th Light. Paul Chan's website. A DVD of 7 Lights is available for $30.

• A LACMA-motivated season's worth of looks back at the influence of the New Topographics photographers begins now, with this Leah Ollman-penned LAT look back at yesteryear.
• Speaking of Ollman, she reviews the new LA show of artist-in-the-news William Powhida.
• In the NYT Magazine, Randy Kennedy profiles Pipliotti Rist.
• LA Observed's Kevin Roderick says that the proposed-but-homeless Broad Art Museum could be headed to the Santa Monica Civic Center.
  
• Doug Harvey takes to LA Weekly to consider the underrated Roy Dowell.
• Presumably no one loves this MOCA+Vezzoli+Lady Gaga+$3.5M-for-MOCA stuff more than writers. Case in point the LAT's Jessica Gelt who was able to write this: "The highlight of the evening was a five-minute production created by video artist Francesco Vezzoli called "Ballet Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again)," which involved pop princess Lady Gaga performing her new song, "Speechless," on a rotating pink grand piano painted with blue butterflies by Damien Hirst.
• Finally, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jerry Saltz relishes his role as the New York art world's top positivist, as the city's up-with-art cheerleader. That stance provides him with the energy to slog through New York's strip-mall-for-art, Chelsea. I admire his verve. However, Saltz's Rodney-King-approach serves him less well when it comes to addressing ethical issues at art museums.
  

His first published piece on the New Museum mess came down firmly... on both sides. His latest is even more puzzling. Saltz: "Showing the Joannou collection not only will be a benefit to audiences; doing it this way takes on the idea of showing private collections." Uh, really? So now the NuMu is crusading to 'take on an idea?' Not even the NuMu itself has rolled out that argument. UPDATE: A couple emailers say NuMu director Lisa Phillips suggested exactly this here. Maybe she does... I'll confess to being confused by Phillips' concept of a "public-private partnership," especially in the context in which she framed it. For example: See Wikipedia's definition thereof. Doesn't really fit, does it?

Saltz: "The art boom simply made new art too expensive for institutions." Balderdash. Museums from coast-to-coast have launched and continue to launch lots of curator-driven exhibitions of contemporary art, exhibitions that don't fluff single private collectors/trustees. (And no one is suggesting that museums compete with private collectors to acquire the trendiest art. That's not their role. And museums certainly know that you don't have to own art to show it.)

Saltz: Museums are not in "deep trouble." Yes, America has gone through a deep, long recession and non-profits have been affected. But no prominent New York museum is at the point of failure. Nor are any close enough to qualify as being in "deep trouble." (Little noted: Art museums that collect are in better shape to weather an economic downturn than almost any other kind of non-profit because they can always show/research their own art. They don't need to find more donations of canned food, etc.)

Saltz goes on to excuse the NuMu because MoMA re-opened in 2005 with a dreadful, much-criticized-here show of the UBS collection. Jerry! Just because MoMA made a mistake doesn't mean the NuMu should too! This is NuMu-ian logic.

Finally, Saltz says that the installation itself will settle the ethical questions. No, it won't. The issue is how the work happens to be coming to the NuMu.

• Time magazine's Richard Lacayo is the latest to wonder: What was the New Museum thinking? Lacayo also writes the single best NuMu line of the week: "[A]re shows at the New Museum essential exhibitions, or just the last word in product placement?"
• Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, I agree with Lacayo, who argues against an "absolutist position" on these shows. Example: Shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Miami-based collectors Dennis and Debra Scholl sent part of their collection to Tulane's museum. At the time the New Orleans Museum of Art's collection was in storage and it was the only art in the city. That was a honorable single-collector show. Also, very small museums with limited or no curatorial staffs often have few other options. The NuMu, the Met and the National Gallery of Art have plenty of other options.
• Via @16miles, a spectacularly striking 1989 Whitney Biennial catalogue essay signed by Lisa Phillips, Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall (two of the three of which have been in the news this week, of course): "We have moved into a situation where wealth is the only agreed upon arbiter of value. Capitalism has overtaken contemporary art, quantifying it and reducing it to the status of a commodity. Ours is a system adrift in mortgaged goods and obsessed with accumulation, where the spectacle of art consumption has been played out in a public forum geared to journalistic hyperbole." The essay later cautioned against "the spurious authority of a collectors' consensus." (All quotes taken from True Colors, by Anthony Haden-Guest.)
  
• The Whitney has (finally) launched a new website, complete with a flashy icon, a sometimes-black background and expanded collection-related resources. Web designer Perry Garvin breaks it down.
• MoMA's got a new blog. 
• I tweeted this yesterday -- and remember, there are fewer links posts on MAN because I tweet most links as soon as I find them -- but don't miss Mike Boehm's LAT story on MOCA's 30th anniversary. You won't believe it. Just. Won't.
  

Among the more unusual passages in yesterday's Deborah Sontag and Robin Pogrebin NYT story on the ethical problems at the New Museum was a quote from Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Campbell:

In discussing the New Museum show, several museum leaders cautioned against what Thomas Campbell... described as "overly puritanical" judgments about "the delicate dance" between museums and collectors.

"The Met wouldn't be the Met -- the Met wouldn't have the collections it has -- if it hadn't been for private collectors," he said.

No one has suggested that the Met bought all the objects in its collections. No one is suggesting that museums should stop working with collectors in pursuit of donations of art.

I asked a Met spokesperson for clarification, if Campbell was explicitly endorsing the NuMu's show(s). The response: "Thomas Campbell's quote was meant as a general caution. While the Met declines to comment about exhibitions and programs at other institutions, pertinent Metropolitan Museum examples are Vermeers that were shown here decades ago and the Annenberg Collection, now all part of the Met's permanent collection."

Translation: Fluff shows are OK with the Met, which had such an exhibition on view as recently as April.

If Campbell thinks that fluff shows are necessary to enable art donations, his inexperience is showing. The overwhelming majority of gifts to museums are not "encouraged" with fluff shows. (And museums such as the National Gallery of Art and the Met itself have been embarrassed when collectors walked away after their fluff shows.)

The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney have explicit prohibitions against private collector fluff shows. Both have succeeded in attracting significant gifts of art. The Met should have a similar policy. Campbell should seize the opportunity to demonstrate that he's growing into his job by working to change the Met's position. After all, Campbell and the Met's trustees should be ashamed that their ethics are more in line with the New Museum than they are with the positions of more mature museums such as MoMA and the Whitney.

Related: On its ArtsBeat blog, the NYT posted more extensive Campbell quotes, including the director's answers regarding a fluff show the Met launched earlier this year. One other Campbell quote caught my eye: "Our trustees are not involved in any way in determining the exhibition program. All of our shows ­ or the vast majority of our shows ­ are proposed by the curatorial departments." Really? Who other than the Met's curators are proposing the Met's exhibitions? Jean Bonna is not a Met trustee, did he propose his own show?

The NYT's Deborah Sontag comes right back with a blog post that reveals the tangled web of (mostly commercial) art world relationships that surround the New Museum.

Related: William Powhida's recent drawing on the NuMu situation.

This morning's New York Times features a front-page Deborah Sontag and Robin Pogrebin article on a story that MAN has been aggressively covering for six weeks: The New Museum's self-made ethical problems regarding its exhibition of a trustee's collection. (Click here for a roundup of links to MAN's coverage. Click here for an op-ed I wrote for the current issue of The Art Newspaper.) Some thoughts:

• New Museum director Lisa Phillips seems unconcerned about the transgression and is plainly piqued at having been called to account for it. "We're not the first to do an exhibition of a private collection, and we won't be the last," she told the NYT. That's true. In a related story, it's not OK to rob a bank because other people have done it and because other people will do it in the future.
  
• Journalists are not picking on the New Museum. Similar stories have previously been covered by the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. For years MAN has been consistent in questioning museums that do these kinds of ethically questionable collector-centric shows. Previous examples include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. The New Museum isn't being singled out; it failed to learn from the past.
• Another reason the NuMu situation is egregious: The museum didn't just announce this show, but it announced that it was going to do a whole series of ethically problematic shows called "The Imaginary Museum." To the best of my knowledge, no other museum has had the hubris to name a series of its own transgressions.
  
• Unexpectedly funny moment in the Times story: An auctioneer praises the whole thing, air-kissing a collector via the front page of the New York Times. Kind of makes part of the reason the NuMu show is a problem extra-clear, no?
  
• If Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong thinks it's OK for a non-profit (of any sort) to explicitly engage in activities that lead to private wealth-creation, he should study the Internal Revenue Code.
• It's an extra-bad day for the New Museum: By way of an Urs Fischer review in the Village Voice, Martha Schwendener thoughtfully slammed the New Museum for its ethical problems. Don't miss it.
  
• It's clear what should happen next: The New Museum should immediately cancel the show in question and it should announce that it has ended plans to continue its "Imaginary Museum" series. The Association of Art Museum Directors and the Association of Art Museum Curators should re-examine their policies regarding these shows. Museums with plans for similar shows -- such as the National Gallery of Art -- should cancel them.
  

I'm delighted to see that the NYT's Deborah Sontag and Robin Pogrebin have picked up the New Museum story that MAN has been pushing covering. Here's a quick, chronological, linksy roundup of my posts on the issue:

• MAN's Oct. 1 Q&A with New Museum director Lisa Phillips: part one, part two.
• Response from the Association of Art Museum Directors.
• Response from the Association of Art Museum Curators. 
• My, er, frustration with the pace at which the NYC media and blogosphere were catching onto the story.
• Artist William Powhida's cover-of-the-Brooklyn-Rail drawing about the story.
• I have an op-ed on this issue in the soon-to-be-current issue of The Art Newspaper.
  
• Not by me, but well-worth reading: James Wagner on the NuMu.
• UPDATE, 11/11/09, 4:30 pm: Some thoughts prompted by today's front-page NYT story.
  

The response to the news that the Dia Art Foundation was returning to New York City has been predictably ebullient. The journalistic response has been even less surprising: The New York Times repurposed Dia's press release and revealed little about the details. Jerry Saltz took to Facebook to declare both victory and point-of-origination. ("Great news: DIA coming back to NYC. I met with the DIA folks last year & yelled, 'You dummies ALREADY OWN the PACE Gallery building. Take the f*cking building back! OPEN in Chelsea again!' I was hysterical. Barked to the fantastic Phillipe Vergne, 'DIA closing in NYC was the worst museum blunder of the decade.'" Aside to Saltz: Uhh...) [Image.]

But before everyone gets too excited, it's important to note some realities: Dia did not announce that it has raised the money to pay for its plans. It did not announce that it was planning a capital campaign or that it was launching a capital campaign with $X million already committed to the cause. So far Dia has simply said, "We're gonna do it!" So far the 'announcement' is no more than a cheap pop, an easy applause line. (In other news, the Whitney announced an expansion designed by Michael Graves and the Guggenheim announced plans to build a Frank Gehry-designed museum on the East River. The two museums will open in... never.)

In the years since it stopped showing exhibitions in Chelsea, Dia has become a projection screen for the New York art world. Commercialism and a lack of institutional integrity permeates the other Downtown Darling, the New Museum? Great!: Anti-commercial Dia will ride to the rescue! Chelsea is full of galleries showing little more substantive than marketable MFAs? Great!: Thoughtful, long-term-thinking Dia will ride to the rescue! It's easy to hope for all these things, but I'm with Time's Richard Lacayo: We'll see.

Dia is not important because it wants to start showing exhibitions in Chelsea again. No matter how much the Dia Art Foundation means to the downtown New York art world, it means much, much more to a broader community of people who care about art.

Dia Beacon is a unique American museum, the only accessible place where minimalism and post-minimalism is permanently installed as it should be. While Beacon is special, the most important thing Dia does is to hold in trust the world's two greatest earthworks: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field. Dia has done a good job of ensuring the long-term integrity of The Lightning Field, but it has struggled to find the best ways to take care of Spiral Jetty. Dia's success or failure as an organization -- and Philippe Vergne's success or failure as a director -- will be judged by how well Dia protects one of 20th-century art's great masterpieces from present and future threats.

So it's nice that Dia wants to have a New York City space again. I just hope that the organization is darn sure it can manage its other responsibilities before it engages in the tough work of following through on its promissory press release.

Related: Problems at Spiral Jetty, 2008 version: Part one, two, three, four, five, postscript. The latest threats to Spiral Jetty, 2009 version: Part one, two.

"Like LA's MOCA, Brandeis' Rose Art Museum suffered from not permanently displaying its permanent collection." -- Christopher Knight via Twitter.

'Twas a weekend during which closely-related stories came together to reveal an under-considered truth: Contemporary art museums that collect and that don't commit themselves to their collections are creating problems for themselves. In the Boston Globe, Sebastian Smee looked at a new exhibition of the Rose Art Museum's permanent collection and wonders why the @*&$@! wasn't this stuff on view? The LAT's Mike Boehm featured MOCA's upcoming two-venue permanent collection install. You can practically hear her wondering the same thing. 

It seems so obvious: Why collect if you aren't committed to showing your collection, to establishing your own story of what recent art is good and important, of why your audience should care about both art (and your museum)? And yet... museum after museum makes the same mistake.

True: Not many art museums have the disinterest in their own collections that MOCA routinely displayed. But MCASD (and its donors) have never prioritized permanently displaying its contemporary collection. Neither has the Whitney nor the Guggenheim. Even museums that show their contemporary collections somewhat regularly do so in a way that treats key contemporary artworks as passing fancies rather than as works or artists to whom they are committed: There have been times when you can go to SFMOMA or LACMA and not see a Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park painting. The Hirshhorn's great Ed Ruscha, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire hasn't been on view in years. If I was a curator at MoMA (especially!), I'd be planting the flag of canon-creation. If it was up to me, David Hammons' High Falutin' would always be up. (Heck, even some encyclopedic museums -- the Baltimore Museum of Art comes to mind -- are more committed to consistently planting flags from their contemporary collections than MoMA is.) Off the top of my head I can't name ten post-1970 works that the Whitney owns -- can you?

One reason contemporary art and artists are important to a free society is that they are particularly free to address the present, to explore the biggest questions in expansive ways. Contemporary art museums must identify works they own that do that -- and then they must keep them on view. Otherwise art museum are not serving anyone well: Not the artists, not their communities and -- as MOCA and the Rose have shown us -- not themselves.

• In the LAT, Sharon Mizota discusses how a show at LA's Sam Lee Gallery picks up where the New Topos (now at LACMA) left off.
• Kenneth Baker reviews Anne Appleby's latest San Francisco show. Appleby might be the best American painter (mostly) ignored by the museum establishment, the kind of overlooked artist somewhere such as the New Museum would champion if it wasn't busy being a commercialist validator. 
• Jenny Barchfield of the Associated Press details the Pompidou's newest, wackiest idea -- one that American museums such as MoMA or the Smithsonians might consider. 
• Roberta Smith reviews Roni Horn at the Whitney. It's fabulously assertive and smart, the Roberta we wish we got more often.
• Nicolai Ouroussoff on Bauhaus at MoMA.
• The San Diego Union-Tribune's Robert Pincus wants this J. Seward Johnson to get the heck outta town.
  

Back next week. Must look at art.

1.) I enjoyed the reception to William Powhida's drawing about the problems at the New Museum. I was disappointed that several commenters/publications celebrated Powhida while completely missing the point: In the New York Press, Mike Spence asked if "this is just an example of one artist sounding off until he is brought into the circle." Well, no. This issue at this museum fits Powhida's interests and practice as perfectly as anything Powhida's uber-'menace' Zach Feuer might do. Flavorwire's Kelsey Keith declared that somehow Urs Fischer makes the ethical issues around showing private collections go away, a stance born of confused meme-conflation. (In a related story, I can confirm that C-Monster out-racks me.) Related: James Wagner. NuMu director Lisa Phillips on her fluff shows here and here. AAMD and AAMC stay on the sidelines. I complained that New Yorkers were staying silent, but that's obviously ending (except for the NYT, which missed the story and now looks kind of out-to-lunch).

2.) Outgoing Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz defines cheek anew.

3.) Several weeks ago I argued that the much-ballyhooed White House art installation didn't mean that much. And, right on cue, Christopher Knight gives us an (indirect) example demonstrating I was on to something.

4.) The College Art Association has posted the titles of papers that will be presented at its 2010 conference. One of them is "The Copulation of Theory and Practice in the Creative Arts." Someone please tell me that The Onion is presenting a paper... (In a related story, I think these are all legit, somehow.)

5.) OMG! Look! It's more socialist-fascist art!

New York-based artist William Powhida, who frequently satirizes art world figures and conventions in his art, has taken on the New Museum's "suicide" in his latest work.

Excerpted above, Powhida's drawing details "How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality," and includes James Wagner, Lisa Phillips, Marcia Tucker, Jeff Koons, and plenty of others who are somehow engaged in the NuMu's self-injury. You can see the drawing here at Powhida's website (click on it for a high-res image). New Yorkers will see it on the cover of the next Brooklyn Rail.

Related: The next issue of The Art Newspaper will examine the NuMu/fluff shows situation as well.

In this week's New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban examines two new books about Dorothea Lange: Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits is a biography and Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field is an in-depth look at Lange's experiences in 1939.

Raban clearly has something he wants to say before he jumps into the books: His essay puts Lange's Farm Security Administration work in an interesting European-derived context... a context which he thinks is strangely (but appropriately) applicable to the American West. In a nutshell:

[V]ersions of [the European] pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, "The Fenimore Cooper Indian" (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson's sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen.

The whole essay is a fine read. (And if you have as much trouble reading NYRB essays online as I do, know that this one prints out at seven pages.)

Related: Raban mentions the Oakland Museum of California's online Lange archive. Et voila.

• The Globe's Sebastian Smee explains how Krzysztof Wodiczko is bringing the voices of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to the ICA Boston. 
• Richard Lacayo examines Arshile Gorky in Philly in Time.
• Christopher Knight 'reads' R. Crumb's Bible at the Hammer.