March 2003 3.31.2003 Monday news and notes * In part because I'm heading to Dallas/Fort Worth on Wednesday, I'm shamelessly pilfing this link from MANfave ArtKrush: Glasstire. * The Washington Post previews Kirk Varnedoe's Mellon Lecture series. * ArtFORUM continues to helpfully translate Venice Bienniale news. This link includes more news on artists at national pavilions as well as some of curator Bonami's special projects. * LA Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic checks in with a feature on Ed Ruscha and photography. Ruscha was scheduled to give a lecture at the National Gallery last Sunday but no-showed as some form of war protest (or so said the NGA staffer who had to explain Rushca's absence). * Van Gogh turned 150 over the weekend. (MANsources at the big party reveal that the birthday boy said nary a word.) This story is in Spanish, but the link should translate it. (If it doesn't I'll try to troubleshoot it.) * If anyone in NYC will be going to this Shirin Neshat event @ the Asia Society on April 2, please e-mail me. I'll be in Texas but would appreciate an audio tape. Thanks. posted by Tyler at 11:09 AM 3.28.2003 The Washington CityPaper, which usually runs eight bad movie reviews for each visual arts story, features a story on Joe Mills this week. Here's the Mills exhibit at the Corcoran. The NY Times raps NYC's big museums for being inept at crowd management. It never once mentions the obvious solution: timed entry tickets. posted by Tyler at 3:25 PM Having never been to Russia (but looking forward to it someday), I'm looking forward to seeing this digital film, called Russian Ark, about the Hermitage. posted by Tyler at 9:49 AM 3.27.2003 A new online magazine called Contemporary Art and Islam has just gone online. (The zine is published by Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt, in collaboration with the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, as a part of the project Universes in Universe, which is a website that focuses on internationalism in the art world.) The Contemporary Art and Islam zine was supported by Germany's Foreign Office. I can't see USAID or the US State Department doing that, can you? posted by Tyler at 11:16 AM The Royal Art Lodge, a Winnipeg-based cooperative (there's a phrase you'll never see anywhere in any other context) has a show up at Toronto's Power Plant. Washingtonians will know the work of Lodger Marcel Dzama from the Corcoran Biennial. The Toronto Globe & Mail reviewed the show today. posted by Tyler at 10:32 AM 3.26.2003 Miami Herald art critic Elisa Turner writes a feel-good profile of Shirin Neshat. Will Turner review the traveling Neshat show now open at the Miami Art Museum? Speaking of Neshat, if anyone in NYC will be going to this event @ the Asia Society on April 2, please e-mail me. I'll be in Texas but would appreciate an audio tape. Thanks. posted by Tyler at 2:38 PM Perpetually effusive NYT art critic Michael Kimmelman will be giving the annual Wattis Lecture @ SF MOMA on April 3. It will be titled, "Out of the Box: America's Greatest Generation of Artists and the Great American Dream." It would be nice if SF MOMA recorded the audio for online distribution. posted by Tyler at 1:40 PM I rarely link to shows in galleries -- mostly because ArtKrush does such a good job of hitting everything -- but this site from James Cohan's Trenton Doyle Hancock show is such fun that I can't resist. While I'm at it, why doesn't Regen Projects (in LA) have a website yet?! posted by Tyler at 6:26 AM 3.25.2003 Simplistic discussions of "what makes good (contemporary) art," seemed to be the rage in American newspapers over the weekend. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel poses the question to an assembled panel and bores me to tears (thanks AJ). This art-criticism-by-multi-headed-soundbite is a perfect example of what arts criticism should not be. And Blake Gopnik, dissed here yesterday, also goes simplistic about art cliches. posted by Tyler at 10:49 AM The Lucelia Award is an award given annually by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to a "leading American contemporary artist." It's funded by The Lucelia Foundation. Jorge Prado and Liz Larner are the two previous winners. The 2003 award should be announced in NYC in the next week or two... Reminder: Please use full and real names (no pseudonyms) on the comment boards. If I notice continued pseudonyms, etc. I'll switch to a more restrictive, authoritarian comment system and that would just eat up time I'd rather spend posting. posted by Tyler at 10:28 AM 3.24.2003 Blake Gopnik has a piece on Slate (which has dramatically increased its arts coverage lately -- bravo!) that takes issue with the presentation of photos in recent major exhibits of painters Eakins, Vuillard and Bonnard. I think M. Gopnik is rather off base in his critique. Gopnik's argument boils down to this: "Preparatory drawings have been recognized as having independent worth and beauty at least since Michelangelo. But the preparatory photos of Vuillard, Bonnard, or Eakins didn't have that status in their day." Speaking to Bonnard in particular, Bonnard used his forays into photography as a preparatory technique. I don't find it relevant what umpteen other artists were using as preparatory materials in Bonnard's 'day,' but I think the use of Bonnard's photos in the Phillips' Bonnard exhibit (now in Denver) made clear that Bonnard used them as such. If we're talking about Bonnard, let's talk about Bonnard, not lots of other artists of his day. I have the catalog from the 1987 Musee d'Orsay exhibit of Bonnard's photography (MANbabe rocks) and flipping through those photos and some Bonnard books makes clear how Bonnard used his photos to see how light landed on the figure or how he could frame the figure. (I'll see if I can find some examples (with photos and canvases) to post here tonight, but I'm not sure I'll find the relevant material online.) posted by Tyler at 12:15 PM I could have said Columbus, Sedalia and Seattle. The latest city to feature a contemporary art space is Seattle. It sounds more Menil than MOCA, but it's still better than what we have. posted by Tyler at 10:10 AM 3.21.2003 Does anyone (other than you Ms. Botten) know what the Lucelia Award is? (No fair using Google.) Check back for the MANswer on Monday. posted by Tyler at 5:23 PM I love how ArtFORUM tells us right up front that their two-issue silliness about the 80s will suck: "The hope is that our two-issue study, in its promiscuity and its plenty will ease the process of incorporating this contested swath of our recent past... As for the threads dropped, the countless unavoidable omissions [ed: TWO issues! Omissions are unacceptable if you're taking two frickin' issues for this project!] even as one volume grew to two -- take them as the inevitable flaws of a rough draft..." Newspapers are the first rough draft of history. Magazines looking back on something 13-23 years later ought to aim for a little better than rough. posted by Tyler at 12:13 PM I'm afraid I'm still not excited by DC NPR radio station WETA's new arts show The Program. Look at Sunday's lineup. Any MAN readers listened to the show enough to have an opinion? posted by Tyler at 10:47 AM The DC theater community has organized themselves enough to not only do that Helen Hayes Awards thing but to get the DC government to give them cash. Someone needs to make sure an ICA/MOCA is part of the replacement of the convention center as part of making sure the visual arts get support too. Possible slogan: If Columbus, Ohio and Sedalia, Missouri, can do it, so can we! posted by Tyler at 9:55 AM 3.20.2003 M_ARS: Art and War, an exhibit in Austria. posted by Tyler at 9:09 PM Beginning March 30, the National Gallery of Art hosts the annual Mellon Lectures. MAN has put together a handy bunch o' links that will help contextualize Kirk Varnedoe's six-week series on abstract art. * Previous Mellon Lectures in book form. * This year's Mellon Lectures are the 52nd annual lectures. Yale University Press has this history of the first 50 years of the lectures. * Kirk Varnedoe talks with Rugby Magazine. * Books by Kirk Varnedoe. posted by Tyler at 12:01 PM A few weeks ago the New Museum launched a new website. As with their museum shop, their online shop has stuff you won't see anywhere else. posted by Tyler at 10:47 AM 3.19.2003 Two fine updates from New York: The Armory Show & Cremaster. posted by Tyler at 11:18 AM 3.18.2003 I'm just now catching up on the January/February Flash Art magazine (in part because it doesn't arrive in the US until early March!) and I was fascinated by Jens Hoffmann's story, titled "New Voices in Curating II." In it Hoffmann continues a dialog begun a year ago in Flash Art (in No. 222 to be precise, one I seem to be missing... anyone wanna fax me a copy of the story?) about the role of the curator. Background: Hoffmann curated an exhibit that opened in Rio yesterday. It's title, "The Exhibition As A Work Of Art" indicates its position. The show, says Flash Art, will "be an exhibition that emerges from questions on exhibition making to reach a point where an exhibition could potentially exist without any art works but become a work of art on its own. The aim is an investigation on the creative and artistic engagement of curators within the making of art exhibitions." Some excerpts to consider (from Flash Art): "[T]he irony that was so prevalent in the '90s to early '00s seems to be losing out to a strong desire for sincerity," Xandra Eden, assistant curator, The Power Plant, Toronto. "Curatorial practice should deal with the redefinition of the public and the private, and help to rethink the role of an intellectual class today, and the capacity for art, as a practice, to open up a space in which different cultural paradigms can be at work," Chus Martinez, curator, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao. "The most exciting moments in any exhibition are when art catches us off-guard, takes us by surprise. I don't believe an exhibition can give lessons, explain or illuminate," Cristina Ricupero, curator, NIFCA Helsinki and associate director, ICA London. posted by Tyler at 12:08 PM On experiencing art: The languid, romantic pace of museum-going and remembering art as we go about our daily experiences. posted by Tyler at 9:43 AM 3.17.2003 Cecily Brown: Lush/ousness “Where the masculine seems unable to separate itself from the language of power, which obliges it to suspend sexuality in the service of an ideal – hardness and restraint as ideological imperatives – the feminine, fluid and unrestrained, could provide the possibility of a secularized beauty which we know as the glamorous and which in effect suspends the idealisms of power – through the substitutions of the thrill for the thought, arousal for contemplation – by virtue of its implicit powerlessness.” (1) – Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe It is so cool to diss Cecily Brown. Over the course of Brown’s recently concluded mini-survey at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum, the catty diatribe ran something like this: Bitchmeat’s paintings are sentimental smut for the nouveau riche. Bitchmeat is as much publicity hound than artist (Those photos in Vanity Fair! That Girl Pollock pose for the New Yorker!) Bitchmeat gets attention because of her famous father. Bitchmeat is a $50K per pop gimmick. Starting with complaint number one, let us consider. As artnet.com’s Charlie Finch wrote, “If I were some ding-dong Gagosian crony, kicking back with a cigar and martini in Malibu, the fresh fleshy Cecily paint might even make me a little horny.” (2) I can’t disagree with Finch, so guilty as charged. Brown emerged as an art media figure by penning a pro-painting polemic for Euro-serious Flash Art (3). As her painting career has progressed (two solo shows in two years at Deitch Projects followed by several shows at Gagosian outposts in both New York and California and this year’s Hirshhorn show), she has moved down the media ladder, most notably wearing a tight t-shirt emblazoned with a dollar sign on it while lounging on her studio floor for a Vanity Fair photo. Guilty. Brown’s father is indeed noted British art critic and historian David Sylvester. Guilty. Brown’s paintings command big bucks and are sought after by the Broads, the Saatchis and the Newhouses of the collecting world. Guilty. Those are the art world’s indictments of Cecily Brown and they stick. But this backbiting has nothing to do with the quality of her paintings. Hedonistic frolicking doesn’t begin to describe the scenes Brown paints. Try carnality. Try fucking. Try cocks, balls, pussies and assholes. In Cecily, Howard Stern’s vulgar male obsession with three-hole women meets the woman who is focused on their joys. With thousands of paint smears on each canvas Brown rejects the Hefner-ian vision of woman as passive pin-up and reminds us that a woman can be a powerful, active participant both in fucking and in the portrayal of fucking. Still, despite this cornucopia of concupiscence I find nothing vulgar or pornographic in Brown’s paintings because Brown’s best and most explicit paintings are indistinct. Brown’s most successful paintings are focused on the tactile and emotional exuberance of sex rather than on the nitty-gritty. Brown’s canvases are a reminder that sex is not about doing an act, it is about feeling your partner’s skin, feeling your emotions surface even as sensation overwhelms you. Brown’s best paintings explore different ways of feeling and are similarly layered. First, Brown’s paintings are governed by ambiguity. They shimmer between abstraction and representation. This ambiguity would fail on its own, but it succeeds because of three underlying strengths of the work: the works are decadent and painterly; they are transcendentally carnal, and; they are rooted in womanhood. Much critical writing about Brown focuses on how her works are neither abstract nor representational. “[W]hat’s most remarkable about Brown’s queasy paintings is that their images drift in and out of focus,” (4) wrote David Pagel in the LA Times. Other critics (including New York’s matrimonially linked critical couple, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith) discuss this at length, as if this is a new development or the most important feature of Brown’s paintings. It’s neither. Artists have been mixing figuration and abstraction since David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Willem de Kooning did it over 50 years ago. Today’s art world tends to expect painters to declare a position as an abstractionist or as a representationalist. Inevitably, the rare artist who mixes both will be viewed with suspicion and the mere mix of styles is discussed ad absurdem. Brown’s work isn’t about exploring the muddle between figuration and abstraction. Brown’s style-straddling allows her to explore sexuality in a way that female painters have rarely done. (Imagine the outcry if a woman artist had created Jeff Koons’ mid-1990s sex-with-my-porn-star-wife paintings?) While the ambiguity of the images enables Brown to paint sex, it is her paintwork that injects explicit eroticism. Were Brown’s canvases painted realistically, or even almost realistically, they’d be a medium removed from the images on the box of a porn video. The impressionists used their broken brushstrokes to paint light and the abstract expressionists used their brushstrokes (and other paint application techniques) to act out the angsty inner-self. Brown paints the way sex feels to a woman. If Cecily painted her erotic scenes with the flat detachment of, say, David Salle, who would look twice? (Does anyone feel a need to look twice at a Salle?) In male-centric work such as Salle’s, the sex act (or the implied) sex act is emblematic of a moment of male power. There is no emotion, there is no feeling, just act. The way Salle’s canvases are free of painterly presence or ardor can be read as a metaphorical reference to what that sexual moment means to the male: It’s a conquering moment devoid of tactility. (Another male take on the sexual moment can be found in the paintings of John Currin, who explores the awkwardness of the male gaze and the discomfort or anxiety a man can feel when confronted with voluptuous female sexuality.) In Cecily, the sexual moment is fluid and wet and colorful. Waves appear to be rippling through Cecily’s canvases. High-gloss varnish leaves them slippery. The sex, like the paint, is palpable, luxuriant and unrestrained. This was evident in two paintings in the Hirshhorn’s recent survey of Brown’s work. In front of Bacchanal (2001), I practically pressed my nose to the canvas because I wanted to know if the prominent, fleshy phallus was painted on or smeared on with fingers or a knife. I decided it was a smear and then realized how voyeuristic it was to get as close as possible to a painting to see how a cock was made. I was caught in a completely Cecily moment: From afar it was clear I was looking at sex in a painting, and I really wanted to get closer so that I could see the sex. In Spree (1999), a giant painting of a giant cock and balls, the space around the cock and balls is painted in a frenzied, post-action painting manner. The paint is slathered on rather than dribbled, splashed or gestured in the classic abstract expressionist manner. The effect isn’t quite that of the paint jerking the giant cock, but the action is implied by the obvious zest behind the painterliness. Just as Brown’s handling of paint is infused with a woman’s perspective on sex, the sex she paints has girl power. In Cecily’s paintings women are always the central figure: either a woman is the protagonist of the painting or we look at the subject with a woman’s eye. As for the paintings themselves, to merely call them carnal would be like summing up Robert Ryman’s paintings by simply describing them as white. Cecily doesn’t just paint sex, she paints specific sexual acts and specific evocations of sex. The way the body and lust are portrayed is as important as the choice of sex as a subject. (I’d compare Cecily’s clitori-centric take on sex to a hetero-centric male artist contemporary who paints sex but there aren’t any worth mentioning.) Sweetie (2001) is a painting about female pleasure, in which a female is being penetrated as she sits side-saddle on a man’s lap. The man is further pleasuring her by taking her breast in his mouth. The female smiles and her blissy eyes gaze into the distance. Her upright body is twisted to maximize the sexual body parts on display: the artist focuses us on the breast that is front and center in the middle of the canvas. The woman’s sex and ass are positioned directly below the exposed breast. The female body is given painterly detail, including shadows, tan lines and a myriad of flesh tones. By contrast, the man’s face has been all but painted out. The only part of his face that is identifiable is his mouth – which is being used to pleasure the female. Aside from his legs, which are among the least painted surfaces of the canvas, the only part of his body that merits Cecily’s painterly attention are his cock and balls. His cock is the reddest anything on the canvas, a prominence that reminds us from where Sweetie takes her bliss. When Cecily’s subjects are having more languid sex, the paintings fail. These Foolish Things (2002) is an example of Cecily exploring a quieter moment of sexual introspection, in this case mutual masturbation. The viewer is meant to be drawn to the manner in which the two protagonists gaze into each others’ eyes as they jack and jill. The painting is limp for a couple of reasons: the man and woman in the painting are lying next to each other, leaving their heads only a few inches apart. Their gaze doesn’t create a strong enough tension to carry the canvas. Their bodies are portrayed in a more representational mode than in Brown’s best canvases and as a result they come across as less passionately engaged. In another of Brown’s more recent works, Two Figures in a Landscape (2002), the girl power is also gone. In both These Foolish Things and in Two Figures, Brown equalizes the male and the female within the canvas. When her perspective becomes more gender-neutral, her canvases fall back on the distance of academic biography. When Brown paints from between her legs, her paintings last as a memoir of passion. I think that Cecily Brown is in the top rank of contemporary painters. Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz is among those with a different view. “Bringing together abstraction and figuration and adding sex is merely oil painting as usual,” (5) he wrote, presenting a cynical view of painting as a formula dictated by a certain recipe. But despite working in a medium that has addressed sex and sexuality for hundreds of years (the first several hundred of which were nearly completely dominated by male painters), Brown has found a new way to portray sex in painting. This is not enough of an accomplishment to make Brown one of the great painters. But, at 34, she has lots of time left to explore more new ideas. (1) Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, New York, Allworth Press, 1999, p. 72. (2) Charlie Finch, “One More Thought on Cecily Brown,” artnet.com, February 18, 2000. (3) Cecily Brown, "Painting Epiphany: Happy Days Are Where, Again?," Flash Art, May/June 1998. (4) David Pagel, “When the Abstract and the Figurative Mix,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 14, 2003, p. C26. (5) Jerry Saltz, “Painting.com” Village Voice, February 15, 2000, p. 69. Copyright 2003 Tyler Green. Editorial Note: Gagosian seems to have made a site change that makes it impossible to link to the image slide shows on their site. To view the Brown images from the recent Gagosian-CA show, please go to Gagosian's website, click on artists, then on Brown. posted by Tyler at 11:29 AM Notes: The panel on the fission/fusion show @ the Mexican Cultural Institute is @ 630 on Wednesday night. Blake Gopnik will moderate. (The day of the week was listed inaccurately on the MCI website.) * Five Things, RIP. * Favorite museum press release lead paragraph of the day: "The Norman Rockwell Museum announces the release of its first self-produced exhibition video for The Berenstain Bears Celebrate: The Art of Stan and Jan Berenstain, opening at the Museum on February 8, 2003. The video is a documentary and features an interview with the creators of the successful Berenstain Bears children's books." posted by Tyler at 10:23 AM 3.16.2003 Corcoran curator Paul Roth penned a piece about filmmaker Stan Brakhage (who recently died) for the Washington Post. Greg.org has the low-down on Cremaster @ the Guggenheim. Other DC-based news: MANfave Maggie Michael will have a solo show @ Georgetown's G Fine Art this fall. Bet on October or November. An arts/cultural center will be included in the plan for the old, soon-to-be-demolished DC Convention Center. Benjamin Forgey wrote about this in a fine call-to-action in the Post on Saturday, but I couldn't find a link to or a PDF of the relevant planning document. Can anyone help? posted by Tyler at 3:10 PM 3.14.2003 With the news that MOMA has finally hired a new chief curator of painting (it's John Elderfield), Michael Kimmelman reminds us that the intrigue at MOMA isn't over yet. Elderfield is known for his pre-WW II expertise. He will (hopefully) move swiftly to hired one or more curators with expertise in contemporary art. Who are the candidates? New Museum and Istanbul Biennial curator Dan Cameron? Carnegie curator and former MOMA drawings curator Laura Hoptman (who organized the Drawing Now show)? Studio Museum Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs Thelma Golden? Other ideas, oh informed and plugged-in MAN readers? (I'll avoid sniping about anonymous posting if you email me telling me who you are, etc.) posted by Tyler at 10:31 AM A MANsource tells us that this panel discussion about the much-lauded fission/fusion show on March 19 @ the Mexican Cultural Institute will be moderated by WP critic Blake Gopnik. Update: Finally, the Washington Post has run a piece on fission/fusion. Michael O'Sullivan reviewed it for Weekend today. It's a little heavy on adjectives for my taste, but I'll take it. posted by Tyler at 9:22 AM 3.13.2003 Hilton Kramer's review of the Marsden Hartley show is a must-read. Like Kramer I've long been a Hartley fan, but unlike Kramer I have a theory as to why Hartley appreciation has been slow in coming. How many gay, pre-WW II American artists have gotten their full due? posted by Tyler at 12:22 PM Local notes: Kudos to the Washington Post for having a day's worth of arts coverage to be proud of. The Post ran three stories today: a Blake Gopnik piece about some new artists he spotted at the Armory Show (alas, this one is only partially online), a Jessica Dawson review of the current show at Conner Contemporary and a Nicole Miller piece on some photo shows around town. I particularly liked Dawson's review which took a strong position on work and defended it. Dawson's critique of Mary Woodall's work is smart and focused, especially her comparison of Woodall to Hatakeyama. (She could have mentioned Ann Lislegaard too. This image is stronger than anything in Hatakeyama's series. It's more layered and has more visual depth. But I digress.) It was also fun to read Dawson as she took on the occasionally forced essays that accompany shows in contemporary galleries. I thought she came close to critiquing the show through the essay instead of straightforwardly critiquing the show (channeling Jed Perl, perhaps), but that's a pretty minor criticism. Fair question for Dawson though: She says remarkably benign things about horrid shows in the hinterlands. (I'd link to an example but the WP retires links into their pay-to-read archives for pieces older than 14 days.) If she's going to slam a show at a prominent DC gallery (a practice that, when she dislikes a show, I heartily endorse), why isn't she bolder about slamming the stuff she looks at for her Third Thursdays galleries piece? * Regarding the fission/fusion show that MAN likes so much, MANspies tell us that the Mexican Cultural Institute is not keeping regular/predictable hours. As a result I recommend calling the MCI before you go. Their number is (202) 728-1628. posted by Tyler at 11:37 AM 3.12.2003 Jiminy. Atlanta has a biennial of area artists and Washington doesn't. Atlanta!!! Speaking of Atlanta, the new Art Papers magazine is out and online. Fine issue. Unrelated new site: CollectorsWorld, created by the folks at Axa Insurance (who run a great little gallery in midtown Manhattan and who are major insurers of artworks). posted by Tyler at 11:06 AM Apparently not one to be scared off by jittery editors, LAT scribe Christopher Knight wades back into war-related issues. His platform is a discussion of a billboard of Guernica that some artists have put up in LA. By night the billboard is black-lit and you can see the UN logo and blue curtains superimposed over Guernica, an artistic rendering of what the UN actually did several weeks ago. I couldn't find a photo of the billboard, but if an LA MAN reader has one, please post the link in the comments. posted by Tyler at 10:23 AM 3.11.2003 Wanted: MAN readers who know enough about the Dallas gallery scene to create my knowledge of said gallery scene. The comment boards await! posted by Tyler at 7:20 PM Flash Art has a new(ish) website. posted by Tyler at 1:43 PM Consider Andreas Gursky, whose new work is contemplated here by The Guardian's Adrian Searle, within the context of Living Inside the Grid @ the New Museum. Bonus Housekeeping Note: I love comments on the boards and I'm happy to be disagreed with, but if you're going to post, sign your name. posted by Tyler at 10:37 AM 3.10.2003 Find me a cooler exhibit website than the Walker's How Latitude Becomes Forms, Art in a Global Age. The site goes well beyond the wavy geo-gravy front page, so explore... posted by Tyler at 12:00 PM Continued apologies for the bugs MAN has encountered since moving to Blogger Pro. Needless to say if you're a blogger and you're considering upgrading, wait. Some weekend notes: I'm not exactly surprised that the Washington Post and CityPaper ignored the fission/fusion show all weekend, but I'm still disappointed. Despite stiff competition, this failure to see past the Mall museums is a low point in arts coverage for both publications. I saw the Joe Mills show and the Joe Mills book @ the Corcoran this weekend. While I haven't seen the National Gallery's Kirchner show yet, this is the best installed show in town. Curator Paul Roth must have spent hours sifting through paint samples looking for just the right color to complement Mills' shellacked photos. Mills' documentary photos of Washington in the '80s are powerful and often shocking. The book, put togehter by Roth and George Hemphill's crew, is beautifully made and bound. For DC art afficionados and anyone else with an interest in urban documentary photography, it's a must-own. (I know many DC-based MAN readers have seen this show. Please add your comments about it in the comments section!) MAN also recommends Auto*Focus Raghubir Singh's Way Into India @ the Sackler, another documentary-ish exhibit. In it, Singh looks at India as viewed around, over, and through the ubiquitous Ambassador sedan. posted by Tyler at 10:26 AM 3.8.2003 Housekeeping, Part Umpteen: If anyone has linked to me lately (and driven a lot of traffic to my site), I apologize for not knowing about it and reciprocating. My stats thingy is down becuase Blogger Pro is buggier than a flourescent light on a swamp-facing porch and so far isn't worth the $$ it cost. So if you did link to me, drop me an email and I'd love to peek at your site. posted by Tyler at 2:06 PM 3.7.2003 Granted, the Mexican Cultural Institute is a bit off the beaten path as DC galleries go, but is there a better example of a disconnect between Washington's visual arts community and the Washington arts media than the attention paid to this show? As I wandered through last weekend's Marisa Telleria-Diez opening @ Fusebox last Saturday, I heard lots of people talking about the MCI show, titled fission/fusion. Fusebox's owners, wundercouple Sarah Finlay and Patrick Murcia, distributed invites to the show even though none of their artists are in it. My mini-review of the show has generated an exceptionally high number of hits over the last week or so. (And because I haven't plugged the show in the last few days, consider this a prodding to go see it.) But to date, the DC media has completely ignored the show. The CityPaper hasn't mentioned it. Michael O'Sullivan hasn't reviewed it in the Post's Weekend section. Jessica Dawson didn't review it in the Post's Style section this week. (Dawson has gravitated toward arts feature stories and away from criticism of late.) To be fair, Blake Gopnik may still review the show (I don't think I'm telling tales out of school if I say that he was looking forward to seeing the show) and who knows, maybe there's a surprise coming in Sunday's Post. I hope so. posted by Tyler at 2:22 PM Check out Bay Area-based culture journal Kitchen Sink. posted by Tyler at 12:53 PM Regular MAN readers know that I avoid public policy as much as possible here. But there are always exceptions to the rule... Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) has introduced legislation that would increase the amount of federally provided indemnity coverage to museums staging exhibitions. The current coverage is capped at $5 billion and $500 million for any one show. McCollum wants to raise those figures to $8 billion and $750 million respectively. (Thanks ArtsJournal.) Museumfolk know that this is a big deal. The Matisse Picasso show in New York had trouble getting insured because of terrorism fears. Shows of artists who don't have a massive career output or artists who created fragile works -- think Modigliani, Vermeer or even Hesse -- are high insurance risks too. Passage of this bill would be a big deal to museums. (Memo to WPer Jacqueline Trescott: There's a Smithsonian angle here...) Exclusive feature available ONLY at MAN: Because MAN's day job is as a political consultant, here's some instant analysis of McCollum's chances of getting HR 829 passed: don't hold your breath. (Note on the link: Type in "HR829" as the search phrase in Thomas. I couldn't make it work as a live link from MAN.) McCollum has four cosponsors, only one of them a heavy hitter. (At least she has one GOP cosponsor.) Her bill has been sent to the Committee on Education and the Workforce, but she has no cosponsors from among the senior members of that committee. Someone at the Association of Art Museum Directors or Americans for the Arts should get busy doing some strategizing and coalition-forming! This one should be a slam dunk. posted by Tyler at 10:56 AM 3.6.2003 If you're a museum admin and you're going to schedule a blockbuster and promote the heck out of a blockbuster, why are you shocked (shocked I tell you!) when there are big crowds? MAN has figured it out! If PMA is "surprised" at the big crowds, you can justify selling more tickets (@ $20 a pop) per hour than can make it into and through the exhibit. You can tell the press something like, "Well, the audience response to this show has been tremendous and beyond our wildest expectations. More people want to see it than we expected and people are spending more time with the art than we expected. This is really a triumph for the museum and it says a lot about the sophistication of our audience that they spend so much time in an exhibit as fine as this one." Philly has held big blockbusters before. (If I didn't have a killer cold I might go through my library in an effort to find an essay I once read on how PMA's Cezanne exhibit contributed mightily to blockbusteritis.) As much as any museum they're responsible for the Age of Blockbuster. They knew exactly what they were doing with this show. Appropriately for Philadelphia, it's all about the Benjamins. (Another example of a museum doing a horrible job with a blockbuster is the Met, the last major museum in the US not to bother with timed tickets. Why exactly does the Met think people should have to spend 90-120 minutes in line to see the Leonardo show? Longtime readers know that I'm a museum slut. I've probably been to at least 50 museums in the last year. So I feel safe in this pronouncement: No museum on the planet treats its visitors more shabbily than does the Met.) posted by Tyler at 11:33 AM Housekeeping: MAN has made the big ($!) move to Blogger Pro software. This means a couple of good things for you the user and a bunch of good things for me. For one, the archives shouldn't go down every time I sneeze (which, this week, is a lot). For another, I'll be able to give headlines to the longer, more critical posts, which will hopefully get them a little more attention. Within the next week or so, MAN readers should be able to get certain MAN posts (probably the longer, critical writing ones) delivered to them via email. Finally, and best of all, there should be better (faster) message boards up soon. I hope all these transitions are quick and painless, but we'll see... Edit: Yes, there are obviously bugs. We're working them out. posted by Tyler at 11:03 AM 3.5.2003 MANfave Jason Falchook tips us off to this photo show of the Debra and Dennis Scholl collection that is presently at the Baltimore Contemporary. The website provides a good look at the work. posted by Tyler at 1:34 PM MANfave greg.org has the scoop on the Larry Gagosian/Sam Waksal tax issues that the NYC press has been buzzing about. Greg figured out all the details on the art sold, etc... It's better than rubbernecking on the Beltway! posted by Tyler at 12:06 PM It's been 35 years since a Kirchner retro opened in the United States but still the National Gallery's Kirchner show is getting zero buzz. Why? Well Richter, Gainsborough and Vuillard certainly have something to do with it. But even the NGA's own promotion machine seems uninterested in the Kirchner show: Vuillard and Gainsborough get special plugs on the NGA's front page, and Kirchner doesn't merit a mention. MAN likes to be helpful, so here's the press page for the Kirchner show and here's the general public info page. The Post has this slideshow of Kirchner's work. posted by Tyler at 10:35 AM 3.4.2003 Contemplate within the context of the Hirshhorn's Richter exhibit: "Painting's ability to survive and persist, encumbered by history but not in that necessarily defined by historicist argument, detraction, and even repression, does seem to me to be a function of its redundancy, of all that its abolition by photography left it free to do: to realize, for example, the promise of its modern origins in impressionism, which sought to realize the possibility of a world seen without first being drawn." -- Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. Over to you M. Falchook... posted by Tyler at 1:24 PM The Corcoran will host a panel discussion on their biennial on Sunday @ 230. The title of the discussion is "The Museum and the Multiplex: Contemporary Art and Display," and the panel will be moderated by DC's own Dr. J. P. Binstock. Participants include Thelma Golden, Chrissie Iles (who is one of the three curators who will assemble the next Whitney Biennial... any DC artists who have a visit with Ms. Iles may anonymously email me to leak the news!), Adam Lerner and others. posted by Tyler at 1:09 PM Morning Tidbits: An interview with MOMA bigwig David Rockefeller @ The Art Newspaper is more interesting than Rockefeller's comments about MOMA in his memoir. A link to add to your bookmarks: Photo District News. LAT-based MANfave Christopher Knight examines an exhibit about the visual culture of Islamic Senegal. And yes, the archives are broken again. Working on it. posted by Tyler at 10:49 AM 3.3.2003 I'm glad that art-averse Slate is writing about something arts-related, but this is a gimmick and Slate bit. posted by Tyler at 1:20 PM Monday refer note: Over the weekend I linked to an LA Times story. Given that weekday readership is about quadruple weekend readership, I wanted to plug it again. At the risk of turning MAN and ArtKrush into some form of mutual admiration society, there are definitely things that AK does that merit all the plugging MAN can provide. One of them is how AK has archived and perpetuated the journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Today AK posted the new issue, all about the concept of collaboration. posted by Tyler at 10:32 AM Begging the question, what was a Dali doing in a jail? posted by Tyler at 10:03 AM 3.2.2003 Longtime MANfave Sol Lewitt is featured in a show @ Phillips Academy's Addison Gallery (!). posted by Tyler at 1:03 PM 3.1.2003 This is a fantastic LA Times story about the intersection of the drug trade, drug lords, Mexico, art and influence. A must-read. I want to see this work. posted by Tyler at 3:39 PM posted by mclennan @ Monday, March 3, 2003 | Permanent link