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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
The Corcoran's last gasp attempt to build a Gehry
The Corcoran is running the white flag about halfway up the flagpole. With today's announcement, the Corcoran is in effect saying, "If we can't get government help, the Gehry addition is dead."
In case you missed it, today the Washington Post and the Washington Business Journal (thanks AJ) reported that the Corcoran has asked the District of Columbia for $40 million in the form of a loan that would be paid back out of property tax and sales tax revenue from downtown businesses. Anthony Williams, DC's mayor, supports the plan.
The request is as close to a tacit admission as the Corcoran will make that its Gehry plan is in dire trouble, that it is having major problems raising the necessary funds to build the new wing. It is no sure thing that the DC City Council will go along with the mayor's plan.
Especially interesting here is the way the project would be funded and what it says about the recent present and possible future of the Corcoran. The $40 million in funding would be "repaid" to the city in the form of expected increased sales tax revenue and expected increased property tax revenue from businesses within one mile of the Corcoran. In effect, the plan anticipates that an expanded Corcoran will bring more money-spending folks to the area around the Corcoran, and the money those folks spend will, over time, pay off the $40M.
First off, it's a heckuvan assumption that the Gehry in and of itself will draw more people to the Corcoran and that those people will spend that much money in the area and that property taxes will go up as a result. The plan expresses remarkable faith in destination architecture.
The plan, if implemented, would also put pressure on the Corcoran to schedule shows that bring in visitors. Unfortunately, this is not likely to be a problem for the Corcoran, an institution that has repeatedly shown that its credibility as an art museum is of secondary importance. Over and over again the Corcoran has scheduled exhibits designed for just one purpose: to turn the turnstiles. (Think J. Seward Johnson, Judith Leiber and the dresses of a certain First Lady.) If the city buys into the $40M plan, I think we could safely assume that the quality and merit of exhibits at the Corcoran will continue to decline. If that's not reason enough to oppose the governmental handout, what is?
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Around the blogosphere
First, thanks so much to everyone who wrote in about MoMA's new $20 entrance charge. I probably got about 40 responses, which is more than most posts generate. Obviously I've been on travel (and I have more coming up), so I'll be emailing people for permission to quote them on Tuesday and I'll try to have a post up on Wednesday or, more likely, Thursday. BTW, not a single email approved of MoMA's asking price.
Also, check back later today for my thoughts on today's Corcoran news. (ajreader, access)
On to the blogosphere:
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New York in June
I'd like to thank the New York galleries that were closed this past weekend. It's reasonable to assume that their level of offerings would have been about the same as the level of offerings served up by the galleries that were open. And holy cow was that work uninteresting.
In all the years I've been going up to New York, I'm not sure that I've ever seen such thin June shows. I frequently write here about how Los Angeles' galleries scene is more interesting than New York's is right now. This past weekend was a good example -- I literally cannot name a gallery about whose entire show I can say good things. Team and Jeff Bailey came closest.
The best reasons to be in New York right now are the Brancusi semi-survey at the Gugg and the Agnes Martin semi-10-year-survey at Dia:Beacon. The Gugg has created a new kind of show: it's not a retrospective, it's not a coherent group show (see Primary Objects, Structures, Forms, Repeated, Staccato or whatever the heck that last show was called), it's not anything in particular. It's a thrown together jumble of good art. The Gugg says that the Brancusi show "seeks to capture the essential character of Brancusi's sculpture." Translation: We took what we could get and put it on the ramp. Still, what they got is darn good. In the coming days I'll come up with a shorthand term for these Gugg shows.
Agnes Martin at Dia. Just go. It's a wonderful little three-gallery installation.
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LAT exodus to NYT
We started talking about this on MAN quite a while ago, but the migration from the LAT cultural beats to the NYT is picking up mainstream media attention. LA Weekly discusses it here. I love how the LAT bosses say that the lure of the NYT is just too strong, and that they did everything they could to keep them in LA.
Bunk. When you hide a critic's work from his/her peers by hiding it behind a bizarre pay-for-view setup, you deny your critics that which they love most: involvement in the international cultural dialogue. Time to junk the system, LAT.
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Mass blogging/reviewing
As most of you know by now, ArtsJournal is the place to go for arts news from around the world. Occasionally figuring in that news is... ArtsJournal.
Today's Seattle P-I writes about how a Seattle theater has set up a blog with AJ where audience members can comment on shows, discuss them or review them. It's called Blog the Boards and you can find it here. Sounds like a cool idea that could work for visual arts institutions too.
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$20 buys you...
One ticket into the new MoMA.
No, really, I'm not kidding. When MoMA reopens, it will cost $20 to get in. Glenn Lowry told Carol Vogel (this was a few weeks back -- I'm slow) that this is in line with other entertainment expenses. If your idea of entertainment is a glass of 25-year old single malt scotch, then maybe. But if your idea of entertainment is a few beers while watching the Yankees game, well... no.
$20! If readers would like to email me over the next few days with what $20 will buy in entertainment where they live, I think I see a Monday post materializing...
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Things that must be stopped
 What will it take to get the Warhol Museum to stop announcing new exhibs?
At the left is the image of the OldenBruggen sculpture that will go up in front of Disney Hall in LA sometime next year. It's hideous. It must be stopped. (This just in: Obviously, ideas do not work at any scale.)
(Letter from MAN to Eli Broad, going out in the morning post: Dear Eli, Congrats on figuring out a way to destroy Frank Gehry's greatest creation. I know you're not listed as a donor for the OldenBruggen, but c'mon. Who are you kidding? Anonymous donations are wonderful, aren't they? Hey, your secret is safe with me. Clearly you had a master plan to destroy Gehry's masterpiece. You are Dr. Evil himself. Yours in your success, T.)
The exit profile. Uh, Muschamp is almost out the door. Takes a lot of guts to take him on when he's on his way out, Clay Risen.
Non-existent art. He said it, not me: "I don't do anything," Maurizio Cattelan on his own art, which is occasionally non-existent. (Literally.)
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Sculptural Disney Hall needs a sculpture?
Suzanne Muchnic of the LA Times reports that by next summer, downtown LA's beautiful Disney Hall (that's the Gehry) will be marred by a Oldenburg and Van Bruggen sculpture. It will be a -- gasp -- dress-shirt collar and bow-tie. It will be installed on the sidewalk right in front of Disney Hall's entrance. Muchnic does not report that it will look like hell, but I will: It will look like hell.
It gets worse: The OldenBruggen (I wish I could claim credit for that but I can't) will be partially funded by the Getty Trust. Several months ago, MAN and others suggested that the Getty help create a cultural district in downtown LA, along Grand Street, by having some form of presence in the area. (You can read the ideas here -- I still wish they could happen, 'wish' being the operative word.) At the time, the Getty said it was committed to its existing locations and wasn't all that interested in downtown LA. This is a most disappointing way for the Getty to become interested in downtown LA.
The OldenBruggen will apparently be the only sculpture that goes up outside Disney Hall. A Richard Serra sculpture was originally conceived as part of the site plan as well, but it was scrapped early on.
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The weekend that was
Aside from making jokes about feeling like being tired of being stoned, it was an arts weekend experienced mostly from a comfy chair in the great out of doors. This is not a bad thing -- I love reading about art stuff.
The only art space I visited was the Phillips Collection, which has put together a lovely show of Aaron Siskind photographs. There are two other shows at the Phillips... and they have a lovely show of Aaron Siskind photographs.
I just finished a Tim Bavington/Leo Villareal review for Artnet, and something about that piece compelled me to re-read some parts of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe's Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. I'm not a theory fan and JG-R is a theorist, but B&CS reads like a stroll through the aesthetic present and it's full of good ideas and observations. It's certainly not an easy read -- JG-R never met a 53-word sentence that couldn't be turned into an 87-word sentence -- but I enjoy the time I spend with it.
I read newspapers too. Paul Richard quick-spotlighted this Charles Sheeler painting, Skyscrapers, in the Washington Post on Sunday. Richard pointed out that the drawing on which the canvas is based is in Chicago and that the photo on which both the drawing and the canvas are based is in Houston. I'll add to that: The photo's negative is in the Library of Congress, and anyone can order up a print, made from the original negative, for well under $100.
In Los Angeles, Christopher Knight took on Clear Channel Exhibitions and two San Diego museums (neither of which deserve links -- that'll show 'em!). Here's an excerpt and if you have my email address you know how to get the whole thing:
Question: Why should a publicly funded, tax-subsidized art museum help underwrite the potentially lucrative business activity of private corporations -- especially when art is the least of the show's concerns? That question is not addressed on the website. But profit-sharing isn't much of an answer. Periodically American corporations do overwhelm our public institutions; they did during the Gilded Age and again in the Roaring '20s, and they have since the go-go 1980s. The current privatization of the public world, which began as part of the so-called Reagan Revolution, is today a booming fact of daily life.
Longtime MAN readers may recall that last year about this time (June 12, to be exact -- scroll down about halfway) I went on my own little Smithsonian/Clear Channel rant after Clear Channel literally traded an exhibit for display space at the Smithsonian to put up an exhibit (or a "mega-experience" as CCE calls it on its website) about the human genome. Clear Channel and a corporate sponsor, Pfizer, paid for everything related to the exhibit and in return, the Smithsonian gave them a place to show it. (The Smithsonian also hosted the Chicano Visions show that Knight critiqued.) That's our national museum: if you pay for it, they'll give you a space to put up your exhibit.
Just because: This is just silly and borderline incoherent. (Thanks AJ, and ajreader; access.)
Blogwise, Caryn Coleman makes a great point about the Chicago Tribune's list of the 50 best magazines in America.
I have one other note from LA, this one involving the sidewalk in front of Disney Hall, but I'm saving that for a post later today. Until then, this would rock.
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We don't need no stinkin' center
You know you've become the center of the art world when you finally, after years of waiting and months of hoping, score a Mark di Suvero show.
At least that's the gist of a Richard Dorment column in the Brit daily The Telegraph (thanks AJ). Dorment says that the opening of two new commercial galleries makes London the center of the art world. Dorment goes on to compliment the Albion Gallery on its stable of artists, which includes "Vic Munoz," who Dorment tells us works primarily in chocolate, and "Hiroshi Sukimoto."
At this point I'm reading mostly for comedic value. Fortunately, Dorment doesn't disappoint, telling us that a gallery like Albion doesn't so much compete with other galleries for business, but with the Tate Modern for exhibits and visitors. (Somehow that doesn't quite explain the Mark di Suvero thing, but I'll leave that alone.)
But back to this center of the art world stuff. There is no center of the art world. There hasn't been for at least a decade, maybe two. Here are some quick reasons why:
- Curators from Chicago go see art in Spain and Venice and Vancouver, BC, not just in Chicago;
- Dealers from New York show artists from Europe and Asia all the time;
- A curator from Washington, DC is curating a biennial in South Korea;
- The internet makes work viewable anywhere, anytime; and
- Big art fairs bring much of the art world together many times a year. The art fairs, especially Miami, are now more conventions than fairs.
There is no center. (Well, maybe there is if you're a critic at the New York Times. The NYT would like you to believe that only New York matters. I mean, how often do you see a Kimmelman/Roberta/etc/ byline on a non-NYC review? One of them occasionally gets to DC to review a big museum show and they seem to agree that an LA trip is necessary once every two years, but that's it. The NYT is a national paper, except in their visual arts coverage. Here's hoping that Nicolai Ouroussoff's move to NY will influence the paper's coverage westward.)
DC's not the center. We have strong institutions, but lately they mostly show never-ending Ben Nicholson installations (Hirshhorn) or gawdawful American impressionism (NGA) these days. And the gallery scene in DC is perpetually "emerging," which means that you'd better learn to like it the way it is because this is as good as it's going to get.
LA's not the center because, while it is the best place in America to see art being made now, its institutions are not particularly strong. Say what you like about New York, it supports its arts institutions both with private donations and with state and city money. As my LA friends remind me all the time, you'd have to give away Rothkos to get Angelenos to go downtown to MOCA.
London's not the center because to be a center you have to be better at fire prevention.
The whole idea of a center is one of those rare art-world ideas that is completely invalid. The only people who advocate on behalf of their place being the center are provincialists who are too lazy to look beyond their town, so they puff it up as a big deal as a way of compensating for their short-sightedness. If there really is a center, it's at your local airport. There's no one place where you can see it all.
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Around the blogosphere
MAN's more-or-less weekly look at a few things that are going on in the art blogosphere. Updates throughout the afternoon...
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Five things I think I think
With the usual apologies to Sports Illustrated NFL scribe Peter King...
1.) Herbert Muschamp is out at the New York Times. New York Mag reports that the Times is close to hiring Nicolai Ouroussoff away from the LAT. Ouroussoff is my favorite architecture read. I hope that the LAT wonders if their inane policy of keeping the world from reading their arts critics is partly to blame for Ouroussoff jumping ship.
Speaking of the LA Times, they editorialized about Steve Kurtz (ajreader, access) yesterday.
2.) I'm thrilled to see Carol Vogel do something other than answer the phone when the PR person at Sotheby's calls, but why exactly should I give a flying fig whether or not the Met is engaged in the (cosmetic?) reorganizing of one of its curatorial departments?
Because the NYT did a story, the AP followed up on it. I love this: New boss of 19th-century painting, modern art and contemporary art, that is art from 1800-2004, (and I'll leave that alone for now, except to say, "Huh?") Gary Tinterow called his new department, "a significant change [for the museum]. It's one that will be perceived by the public," he said."
It will? If Tinterow thinks the public is that concerned with perceiving shifts in museum bureaucracy, he needs to go out and get drunk more. I mean, who cares?
3.) Speaking of Vogel, why isn't she always leaves LACMA out of the list of Renzo Piano projects? ("Mr. Piano likes a design challenge and has had considerable experience designing museums, including the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Among his current museum projects are the Morgan Library and a 220,000-square-foot wing at the Art Institute of Chicago.") This is the second time in a month.
4.) It kills me, just kills me, to say this, but this month's ArtForum is pretty much a must-read. I still don't understand their aversion to critics (the magazine prefers writing from academics and curators), but I've pretty much given up on that one. Still, in the nearly three years I've been doing this blog, I don't think I've ever referred to ArtForum as a must-read.
5.) Remember the Tom Chamberlain works at Kontainer that I referenced last month? Here's what I wish I'd said about them (I got a little preview of the show at Kontainer but didn't see the actual show):
Tom Chamberlain's paintings demand nothing but your time, and they repay the debt in spades. At Kontainer Gallery, the young London-based artist adds to a current mini-Brit-Art invasion with his American solo debut of abstract paintings.
Layers of acrylic are brushed over relatively fine canvas in almost imperceptible strokes. Sometimes monochrome, sometimes not, all the surfaces seem to spread light. This halation is hard to explain and harder yet to pin down in your vision. A small silvery panel titled "Closer Still" coaxes your eyes exactly that way -- closer and closer still, to no explicable avail.
"Closer Still" looks rather like the shimmery surface of the sea witnessed through the hazy light of a summer day. Other works in rich browns and ethereal whites organize themselves around spots of shadow or light, creating cottony webs across the surface of the canvas. The paintings' edges tend to be more uniform in tone, so that the optical effects pull away from the sides in a manner familiar from Abstract Expressionism and Analytical Cubism.
In short, you seem to be looking into atmosphere, which rises up from the surface. A gallery handout explains that Chamberlain's paintings are made from "repeated marks, which travel in an ovular arc from one edge of the canvas to another;" where the repeated lines cross, a spot of light or shadow gradually builds up.
Maybe -- but, try as you might, you can't tell that just by looking. Like some improbable offspring of Vija Celmins and Ross Bleckner, these paintings retain a stubborn, gorgeous mystery.
Of course, I didn't write that. Christopher Knight of the LA Times did.
Note: Thanks to some problems at Yahoo, I can't seem to reply to email. So if you sent me email anytime after about Monday afternoon, sorry... but I'll get to it.
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Gabriel Orozco at the Hirshhorn
Editor's note: Orozco collector Greg Allen and I are playing Siskel and Ebert with Orozco today. His post is here.
Correction: The show is made up of 34 works, not "about 50." The exhibition checklist handed out at the show lists 51 works, but it is apparently incorrect.
In the first sentence of the brochure the Hirshhorn offers at the entrance to its three-gallery show of Gabriel Orozco photographs, curator Phyllis Rosenzweig tells us that Orozco has never considered himself a photographer. By about midway through the second gallery, I found myself wishing she'd listened to him. Just because Orozco is a wicked-fun sculptor doesn't mean that when he takes pictures that he's a photographer of any distinction.
The Orozco photographs in this show, the latest in the Hirshhorn's Directions series of small exhibits by up-and-coming contemporary artists, border on the puerile. Perhaps it's reassuring that a prominent contemporary artist has moments where he makes art that only a high school student could be proud of, but it's not reassuring that a major museum thought we deserved to see them. Not everything An Artist makes is of equal merit, and this show proves that. Completism in exhibiting any artist can indeed be a vice.
 If there's a theme that binds together the 34 photographs in this exhibition it's Orozco's fascination with simplicity in the world around him. Orozco likes to toy with that simplicity by changing the context of what we're looking at as a way of, er, well, I'm not sure. Too often in this show, Orozco's contextual twists are childish. My favorite example is Cats and Watermelons, a photograph of a stack of watermelons in a supermarket. Orozco placed cans of cat food on about a dozen of the watermelons, so that the cartoon drawing of a cat on the cans of the cat food were looking back at the photographer. Snap. If your eight-year old did that and then ran across the grocery store, pulled on your shirt and said, "Daddy, daddy! Come look at what I did!", it would be kind of cute. Orozco is not eight.
And while I have read Orozco's explanation of Extension of Reflection, I fail to see why I should be nearly as impressed as he is by two puddles on a patch of pavement. (To see the image, click here.) In Orozco's photograph, the puddles are joined by wet tire-tracks, as if a child had ridden his bicycle round-and-round between the puddles. Actually it was Orozco who rode his bike between the puddles and was then so awed by his achievement that he photographed it. Just because An Artist has an idea doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or one worth much consideration. And when the idea behind in image is weak, the image itself is doomed from the start.
 Much of my disappointment in the show stems from knowing what Orozco is capable of making. His sculptures play with some of these same themes and succeed because he adds another element: Orozco’s billiard tables and ping-pong tables are fascinating objects that question the origin and the rules of the games we play. And they're fun to look at. His photographs prompt me to no such examination and they're mostly visually uninteresting.
Only one image in the entire show sticks in my mind as being worthy of future thought. Turista Maluco is a photograph of an empty Brazilian market. Orozco arrived at the market just after it had closed for the day and all that remained of the bustle of commerce was some oranges that had been discarded. He placed one on each table and snapped a picture. The result is a meditation on seriality, the power of the minimal to evoke the maximal, a false memory created by the presence of objects. I didn’t see the hustle and bustle of the market, but something about those oranges on those tables and some scattered litter on the ground makes me feel like I know what happened there. It is an adult image, informed by art history, context, and an understanding of the place. Too many of the other images in this show lack all of those things.
Gabriel Orozco: Extension of Reflection is on view from June 10 to September 6, 2004 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
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Weekend that was
It was a vaguely bizarre art weekend.
The Sally Mann show at the Corcoran was more beautiful than death should be and you should see it. But after I saw it on Saturday morning, art stuff kind of took a turn toward the strange.
The first bit of oddness was Henry Allen's review of the show in the Sunday Post. In the first paragraph, Allen tells us that Mann's work has something to do with "feeling like being tired of being stoned." (No, I'm not making this up. I'm giving you that link because I know this all sounds slightly far-fetched.) It gets worse from there. If newspaperly incoherence becomes a new trend, we'll know who started it.
Then, merely hours after that, I stumbled into the Hirshhorn to look at their just-opened three-gallery Gabriel Orozco Directions show. Everything in the show is a photograph that Orozco took. That is really too bad. I'll try to write a mini-review of it later this week, but for now let's just say that if you're in DC and you want to see a photography show, avoid the heck outta the Hirshhorn.
Last was this story in the Inky about how the keep-the-Barnes-on-the-Main-Line folks are trying to raise money to pay their legal bills. (ajreader@artsjournal.com, access.) It will be interesting to see how much money they raise from Main Liners, eh?
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Is there Waldo in the water?
It must be something in the water here in Washington. From a post back in March:
Like many writers, I don't allow myself to read what other people have written about a show if I know I'm going to write about it too. So I had saved Paul Richard's Washington Post review of Ian Whitmore's Fusebox debut, and it was with great pleasure that I opened it. Richard's review included the following sentence:
"Look into the splatters of the picture he calls 'Feted' (2003) and you will find a flock of fat and fleecy sheep gamboling among them. It's sort of like 'Where's Waldo?'"
When I read this sentence I just about fell out of my chair (but did not, it should be noted, spill one drop of the precious Bowmore). I've heard that somewhere, I thought to myself...
Last May, I reviewed a painting show that was at... Fusebox. It was an exhibit of an L.A. painter named Patrick Wilson. My review included this passage:
"Once you've found Wilson's Eames plywood chair or the little squares of paint at the bottom of his canvases, you've found all the subtle rewards of the painting. Wilson's paintings remind me a little bit of those Where's Waldo books: It's fun to look through the crowds and to look for Waldo. But once you've found Waldo, you can move on."
(It was a description that did not endear me to the folks at Fusebox. But did they know I'd be such a trendsetter? Because in Sunday's Washington Post...)
... Jessica Dawson including this in her description of a Nikki Lee show at Numark Gallery:
"In photographic projects capturing her young Asian American self among members of various ethnic and cultural groups, she invites us to play a sophisticated version of Where's Waldo -- one replete with cultural critique."
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Art and AIDS
Some links, because it's been a week of remembering one life more than 21,000 deaths.
If readers would like to send in a favorite link or two, I'll try to add them to this post as the day/weekend goes along. If you have a blog, do a similar post and let me know about it so I can link to it. Best of all, send a friend one or two of these links. The mainstream media won't mention AIDS all day. It's up to us to remember.
Submitted links:
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Cameron/New Museum update
MAN has confirmed that New Museum senior curator Dan Cameron is now on leave from the New Museum.
Background: Gallerist Oliver Kamm sues Cameron, New Museum; New Museum director Lisa Phillips' email to the NYC art world.
UPDATE: In response to a pretty good bit of reader mail: Cameron is curating the East Village U.S.A. show that opens on Dec. 3.
In other art world news, Jason Kaufman's Art Newspaper scoop about the National Gallery being sued for plagiarism is now online. (Still nothing on the story from the Washington Post or the New York Times. Today the Post ran their biweekly arts notebook and instead told us about the opening of a sculpture school in Washington.) And Carol Vogel, who may be feeling the heat of the coming NYT cultural coverage shakeup, does a nice job with the story of the coming fixing-up of the Gugg.
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Dia:Chelsea on the Dia:Block?
Newly-annointed must-read Thickeye points me to this post from NYC real estate site Curbed. The buzz is that with the success of Dia:Beacon that the Chelsea property is rumored to be on the block. Dia denies it, says it's going ahead with renovation plans.
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RCD wins SFMOMA SECA award given by I/S
 SFMOMA has named this year's winners of its Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art award (given by this SF MOMA auxiliary), and one of them is Rosana Castrillo-Diaz. Regular MAN readers will recall (OK, they won't, and that's why I'm writing this post) that I wrote about Castrillo-Diaz several months ago and spotlighted her work during our look back at Anne Truitt's Daybook. Here's perhaps the only coherent paragraph I wrote in the review that included Castrillo-Diaz' work:
"If work with consumer objects can be more minimal than [Dan] Steinhilber's, Rosana Castrillo-Diaz' work is. Her installation in "Warped Space" is called Tape Drawing, a roughly 9 x 6 foot web of narrow white tape installed about two inches off of a wall. Remarkably, it is perfectly parallel to the wall behind it. In the CCA Wattis galleries it is unlit, adding to the illusion of absence. When I first walked into the gallery, I didn't see it. Heck, I'm not proud: The second time I walked into the gallery I didn't see it. But when I finally did see it... the wispy white tape revealed itself the same way a spider web reveals itself: slowly, hesitantly and only to someone who is willing to leave it alone once it is discovered. As with the best art, you see and enjoy Castrillo-Diaz' Tape Drawing more the more you look at it (and in my case, for it). This is the first work of Castrillo-Diaz' I've seen and I look forward to seeing more."
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How Lowry can tell that we're unsophisticated
"We're talking to a younger and in many ways better-educated audience but one that is not necessarily more sophisticated," MoMA boss Glenn Lowry on MoMA's audience in the new building.
So without further ado, here's how Lowry can tell that MoMA's audience is unsophisticated:
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The New Museum speaks! (Kind of.)
From New Museum director Lisa Phillips, sent via email to NYC art world types about 20 minutes ago:
"The New Museum has been informed that you may have received an email and/or a letter from Dan Cameron in May regarding a personal dispute between him and Oliver Kamm, a Chelsea gallery owner. If you did indeed receive these items of correspondence, we want you to know that they involve a personal matter between Mr. Kamm and Mr. Cameron, and the statements made by Mr. Cameron are not the statements of the New Museum and do not reflect the views of the New Museum."
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Five art world websites that should be better
Inspired by Caryn Coleman over at art.blogging.la...
- Artforum.com. The website posts a couple stories from the magazine, the table of contents, and some extremely short (under 200 words) exhibit descriptions they don't call reviews, but call "critics' picks." They occasionally run web specials, but they're usually the same kinds of things that no one reads in the magazine and not very web-friendly. The message boards are a spam-filled donnybrook. The news section is AJ lite, very lite. Pet peeve: In that critics' picks section, they often have a writer based in one city writing about a show he (presumably) hasn't seen in another city. For example, Christopher Miles' mini-write up of the Bontecou show in LA surfaced a couple months later as a critics' pick for the Bontecou show in Chicago. Same text.
- LACMA. They may have a redesign underway, I'm not sure. But this is their main page? Please.
- The National Gallery of Art. They have great information about (and often images from) their permanent collection, but the design is so 1997. (See also Art Museum, St, Louis.)And with all that money, why can't I listen to past Mellon Lectures via streaming audio?
- MoMA. What a jumble of broken links. Not much information either.
- Lots of galleries who don't put their hours on their websites. It wouldn't be fair to pick out examples as there are lots and lots of guilty parties. This is a separate issue from galleries staying open during the hours that they say they will be open, which drives me up a wall.
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Morning potpourri
If you're in Washington: The Orozco opening at the Hirshhorn, scheduled for Wednesday evening, has been cancelled in observance of Ronald Reagan's funeral procession to the Capitol. I've heard nothing about this week's openings at the Corcoran, the Phillips, Hemphill Fine Arts or Flashpoint being cancelled.
If you enjoyed the Baltimore Museum of Art's show on French posters and lithos from the 1890s, take a look at this Souren Melikian story in the Int'l Herald Trib. Talk about a great way to collect!
Holocaust claims are back in the news in a major way this week. The Supreme Court is allowing Americans to sue foreign governments in U.S. courts over Holocaust claims. (Username: ajreader, password: access.) And ArtsJournal central control has the news that Sotheby's is being sued for $1.8B by survivors who claim that it has recklessly trafficked in works of art stolen from Jews during WWII.
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From the site stats
A couple of things I'm noticing in MAN's site stats lately:
- There is quite a good bit of interest in Kirk Varnedoe's Mellon Lectures and when they will be published. I don't know. Princeton University Press, which is publishing them, doesn't know. (I'm not sure Varnedoe's literary executors know either, but I will ask one of them this week.) When I find out I'll pass it on.
- The Cameron/New Museum/Kamm situation is getting Googled like crazy.
- When I wrote this post about the Armory/Scope/Whitney Biennial weekend, I was worried about what search phrases would show up in my site stats. I was wise to worry.
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Around the blogosphere
It has been way, way too long since MAN did a swing around the blogosphere (it's been too long since I caught up on email too, so hopefully I'll be through that by tonight), so happy clicking:
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News and notes
It's a bit of a hectic morning at MAN HQ so more posting later today, but you can't go wrong if you start your week with these three stories:
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LA galleries roundup, part two
I've been trying to get around to posting this all week, but between my real job (heh.) and Camerongate, I just haven't had time. Oh, and those pesky Stanley Cup Finals ate up a lot of time. Notice that OGIC hasn't been posting over at About Last Night, either (of cousre, she could still be crying about her first-round losers). Without further excuses, the end of the LA galleries roundup. I'll update this a couple of times during the day, so check back. (More from LA institutions next week.)...
 Ori Gersht @ Angles Gallery. It seems like every day there is bad news from the Middle East. With so much regular news about the horrors of the present, do we sometimes forget about the past? Ori Gerhst's absorbing, washed-out-looking, faux-aged c-prints of ancient olive trees remind me that the history of the region goes back hundreds, thousands of years. These olive trees were planted there by someone and heck, they're still there. History can be cause for optimism.
Gersht lives in London now and visits the Middle East and other war zones from time to time. (A more complete Gersht arc is here.) But there is no trace of war in these photos as there is in other works of his. It's as if Gersht is tired of conflict and wants to focus on what lasts rather than what's now.
When I look at these photos, I think of Sally Mann's recent photos of Civil War battlefields: new work, made to feel old and nostalgic; images that are simulatneously haunting and ominous. Gersht's photos are more ambiguous -- these are twisted trees and sandy desert, not a battlefield full of lumpy, shallow graves -- and their aged look seems a little more forced than Mann's work. (A c-print will be a c-print will be a c-print.) Gersht flirts with a Matthew Brady aesthetic but his work feels more painterly than anything else. I guess that's OK, but these are c-prints so they'll degrade over time. The olive trees in these photographs will outlast the artwork. There's some irony there.
I noticed something about the two galleries in which these works were installed. I walked into Angles with two friends. When we walked into the gallery we were chattering away about this and that. When we walked through Gersht's show, surrounded by images of brush-filled desert and olive trees, we stopped talking. There was something immediately placid and hushing about the work.
 Tracy Powell @ 4-F, Brian Wills @ Happy Lion. The Chinatown/Chung King Road gallery district just north of downtown L.A. is the best place in America to see the work of young, emerging artists of whom you've never heard. If I were a Chelsea gallerist, I'd stop going to all those NY-area art school MFA shows and I'd plan a monthly trip to LA instead. If I were a Whitney Biennial curator, I'd spend a lot more time on Chung King Road and a lot less time in Brooklyn.
On this most recent trip, two young artists stood out: photographer and (UCLA MFA candidate) Tracy Powell and painter Brian Wills.
Powell's work recalls Cathy Opie's most recent surfer-filled work even before I knew that Powell was at UCLA (where Opie teaches). Powell's photographs are about moments found in the midst of journeys, moments both personal (a photograph of bikes on a porch, or of a bus on a beach in Bombay) and globo-institutional (shipping ports, one of which is at right). Lots of photographers are exploring similar ideas right now but Powell's eye is quirky, human and in no way cold or distant (there is no Big Germanism here). These are more personal memories than documentary photographs. This show is a mite inconsistent, but Powell is clearly full of promise.
There are a handful of Brian Wills paintings in a group show at The Happy Lion. Wills' paintings mix a little bit of Agnes Martin simplicity with Wal-Martist materials. They are subtle and initially easy, but the more I looked the more I was caught up in the mystery created by the materials and the surfaces. Sometimes Wills uses encaustic, sometimes acrylic, sometimes fingernail polish. Wills' paintings are still a little bit too easy, a little bit too simple, but they're good enough for him to be on my watchlist.
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Friday delay
So I was all ready to wow you with a Friday morning post finishing the gallery roundup from my recent LA trip. But then Game Five of the Stanley Cup Finals went into overtime and, well, priorities!
So while I catch up on what I should have written last night (look for the post around 11am), here's how you can help MAN recover from watching great hockey:
- If you're a New Museum board member, email me to tell me what happened at last weekend's not-so-secret meeting about a not-even-remotely secret topic. Anonymity ensured;
- If you're Robert Hughes and the burr has been removed from your saddle, drop me a note and say hi; and
- If you're in LA, and feeling left out by lawsuits in DC and NYC (Hello! Times and Post!), email me to tell me what scrums you'd like to see in the Southland.
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Friendster
Gothamist is all agog over the new Friendster CEO: "These days, Gothamist seems to use [Friendster] to see if the random, unwitting names du jour... are on Friendster." You mean like the Gallerist in the News, who lists one of his interests as, well, go check for yourself...
ASIDE: There are two major museum lawsuit stories out there right now, ArtForum has picked up on neither of them... (That said, the summer issue of ArtForum looks like the first one in months/years that I actually want to read.)
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Five things I think I think
1.) The National Gallery of Art is, in effect, being sued for plagairism. So far the story has been covered in depth in The Art Newspaper (not online), less in-depth in the Washington Citypaper (!), and in a way that I can't access in the subscribers-only Montreal Gazette. It has been covered not at all by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Hello!
2.) I think that the Corcoran Museum of Art's upcoming Sally Mann show will be the best museum show in Washington this year. (After seeing what the Hirshhorn did to a Sally Mann photo, I hope it is.) My guess is that only the NGA's Flavin show will come close. On the downer side, I've also seen what the Corcoran has done in recent months, notably a J. Seward Johnson show, so it's not a slam dunk. But back in the plus column, no one in DC (and maybe no one in the East) does photo shows like the Corcoran, so....
3.) I think I've been remiss in not writing about the Julie Mehretu show I saw in Buffalo back in March. It was a completely wonderful show and I barely mentioned it here. The show is now in Los Angeles.
4.) I think this was my favorite part of the Kimmelman/Whitney curators interview in the Sunday Times:
"MOMIN The Biennial doesn't have to serve its original purpose. There are millions of other biennials. Consequently this can become more a subjective vision of whoever is curating it. I think it should be every five years.
SINGER Or every three years.
ILES I'd say probably somewhere in between.
KIMMELMAN That would be four."
5.) I think that one reason to see shows of artists whose work you think you know really well is to find out how much more you love them. I have long known that I'm a major fan of Richard Diebenkorn and Carleton Watkins, but seeing Diebenkorn at Artemis and Watkins in an otherwise horrid show at the Getty has me happy.
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Kamm & Cameron: Cont'd.
So what impact did the Kamm-Cameron relationship (whatever form that relationship took) have on Kamm's artists? I could find evidence of only one gallery artist-Cameron link: gallery artist Jim Richard. (It is Richard's May 7 opening referenced below.) Cameron wrote a catalogue essay for a 1995 New Orleans Museum of Art show that Richard was in and for The Hyde Collection (1991), which Richard is in. I don't know if there are Kamm artists in shows that Cameron has planned.
UPDATE: A sharp reader points out that I missed one. Cannon Hudson was included in the 2002 New Museum group show Out of Site.
Of course, it's possible that Cameron didn't include Kamm artists in shows because of his relationship with Kamm as well.
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The details: Kamm sues Dan Cameron, New Museum
If you're the New Museum and you're finishing up a capital campaign that will pay for your new building in the Bowery, this can't be good. As Page Six reported yesterday, senior curator Dan Cameron and the New Museum are being sued for not less than $1 million by Chelsea gallerist Oliver Kamm. We'll start where Page Six left off.
On May 27, Kamm filed suit against Cameron and the New Museum. I've read the filing and it's a doozy. The art world will be talking about nothing else all summer (and that's not a good thing). In a nutshell, the suit alleges that Cameron was romantically obsessed with Kamm, that Kamm turned down Cameron's advances, that Cameron was unable to leave Kamm alone, and that Cameron took revenge against Kamm by badmouthing him to the art world by way of both a letter and an email sent to scads of art folk. The suit alleges that this alleged activity harmed Kamm's alleged ability to make a living and to promote his alleged artists. (Get used to the word "alleged.") I've seen no press release/anything similar from the New Museum. (And if/when there is, it will probably be here.)
The complaint: On the bottom of page two of the filing, Kamm's lawyers (specifically, an attorney with art-world experience) get right to the point:
"Cameron, acting in his capacity as the Senior Curator of the Museum, has set out to destroy Kamm because of Kamm's refusal to respond to Cameron's obsessive romantic interest in him. As detailed below, these actions can be traced to Kamm's rejection of Cameron's self-described, "bizarre," "obsessive," "overwhelming," and even "dangerous" preoccupation with Kamm, a preoccupation that he once described as a "profound love" that turned into "a grief and rage that is increasingly difficult to manage." (Nearly all of the words attributed to Cameron in this complaint, whether in quotation marks or otherwise, come from written communications issued by Defendants, including letters and e-mail.)"
The complaint continues to allege that because Kamm spurned Cameron's alleged romantic advances that Cameron told art world types all kinds of mean and untrue things about Kamm. The complaint also identifies the form that these alleged advances took over a period of time.
According to the complaint, Cameron was an initial supporter of Kamm's gallery and even encouraged him to open a gallery of his own. Cameron, says the suit, introduced him to artists and assisted with exhibitions. It's not exactly normal for curators to help commercial galleries get off the ground and the complaint refers to this with a backhanded allegation: "Cameron had a strong physical and romantic interest in Kamm; indeed, he characterized it as a 'profound love.'"
So far, this could all happen outside the art world. But here, on page five of the complaint, it goes all art world-y. Under the subheading of "Cameron's 'Bizarre' Behavior Begins,' the filing continues:
"No later than December 2002, Cameron came to recognize, as he put it, the "grim reality that not only [would Kamm] not accept [Cameron's] love, but that [Kamm] would not acknowledge its existence." Cameron's interest was not returned and at no time did Cameron and Kamm have a physical or romantic relationship. At that time, Cameron "felt [his] inner world collapsing around" him and turn into "a grief and rage that [was] increasingly difficult to manage." Cameron blamed this "rage" and the "bizarre" and frightening outbursts that he repeatedly unleashed "at full blast" against Kamm on "periodic struggles" with a "manic obsessive disorder, especially as it concerns boundaries of affection." He described this as sometimes taking the form of a "sudden, overwhelming preoccupation with someone who is already a friend" and noted that this could be "dangerous."... Cameron attempted to minimize its seriousness by dubbing it "Operation Oliver."
The complaint goes on to allege that Cameron asked Kamm in Dec. 2002 to keep all this under wraps because the art world is a wee bit, er, gossipy. (Well, I never...)
The complaint alleges that Cameron acknowledged that he should stay away from Kamm but that he could not do so. According to the complaint, the two men had an apparently normal relationship for the first half of 2003, but the suit alleges that there were "disturbing undertones indicating that Cameron was still obsessed with Kamm." The suit alleges that Cameron and his boyfriend were invited ("agreed to receive," says the suit) to Kamm's mother's Long Island home, but that Cameron appeared without his boyfriend and then became "frighteningly enraged" when Kamm tried to end the visit. "Cameron's outbursts culminated in threats to "destroy" Kamm and his gallery," alleges the suit.
After that visit, Kamm and Cameron attempted to resolve their differences in psychotherapy, says the suit. The suit alleges that Cameron violated the ground rules of the sessions by contacting Kamm between meetings and that the psychotherapist recommended that Cameron avoid all intentional contact with Kamm. The suit alleges that Cameron agreed to this, but frequently tried to contact Kamm anyway.
The suit alleges that on April 22, 2004, Kamm became so "concerned" with Cameron's visits to his gallery that he asked Cameron to make advance appointments at the gallery so that Kamm could not be there. According to the suit, Cameron agreed to this.
The suit alleges that after this, Cameron began to contact Kamm's clients and friends (what we might call "the art world") and complained about Kamm. On May 7 of this year, Cameron attended an opening at Kamm's gallery, during which the incident covered in Page Six allegedly occurred.
The suit alleges that on May 10, Cameron sent, on New Museum letterhead, a letter to Kamm's attorney, Kamm's artists, clients, family and friends that attacked Kamm. According to the suit:
"The May 10 Letter contained many explicit statements and implicit threats that were intended to and did harm Kamm, including that Kamm: a. was "abruptly fired" from two galleries; b. spent time in a drug rehabilitation clinic; c. suffered serious setbacks in his physical health and romantic life; and d. was subject to a general art world boycott. The May 10 Letter contained many statements that are false and were known to be false by Cameron when he made them, including that: a. Kamm has a background in art that is sketchy at best; b. Kamm suddenly became emotionally abusive towards Cameron on the weekend of June 7-8, 2003; Cameron never violated the tenets of the agreement that he made in the psychotherapist's office; d. Kamm has developed a very unhealthy fixation with Cameron; e. Kamm was aware that Cameron had planned to attend an opening at Kamm's gallery on May 7, 2004; and f. Cameron feared that his ability to walk safely in the streets of Chelsea had been compromised."
According to the suit, Kamm tried to seek a formal order of protection from the NYPD. Cameron attended a meeting with the police and Kamm was subsequently unable to get the order of protection. According to the suit, after returning from the police precinct, "Cameron composed and addressed an email and letter from the Museum to Kamm's clients, friends, family and to "a wide range of Chelsea galleries.'" Kamm's suit alleges that this letter went after Kamm in a big way, and that the letter claims that.
"Kamm had staged a public assault through steroid-enhanced goons... Kamm has a weird private vendetta against Cameron... Kamm is trapped in a cycle of pathological behavior which could turn deadly... all evidence points to the very real possibility that Kamm has become a genuine menace to the New York art world and an increasing danger to himself and those around him..."
The suit goes on to detail the New Museum's support of Cameron. Cameron and the New Museum have until June 27 to respond to the suit.
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How museums are run
The best non-profit administration is done in private, so seemlessly that no one outside senior staff and the board knows what's really going on. That makes it all the more fascinating when a non-profit completely messes it up, as is the case with the Art Gallery of Ontario's expansion. The Toronto Star had two stories over the weekend, making public the private stuff at the AGO. Here's one, here's the other (on Gehry design tweaks), and thanks AJ. (Here's the AGO's not-yet-updated page on the Gehry remodeling.)
BTW, you have seen Frank Gehry's way-cool World Cup of Hockey trophy, yes?
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The weekend that was
Over at About Last Night, Terry often begins the week with a roundup of the arts weekend-that-was. Concluding that theft is the better part of blogging, I thought I'd do the same:
Popped into the old Hirsh of Horn to see what permanent collection goodies were up at the Bunker by Bunshaft. (For better or worse, the Hirshhorn mostly shows off its permanent collection these days. They call it Gyroscope, perhaps because the marketing department thinks that it's better to give a permanent collection hanging an exhibit-like title. Or perhaps because 'gyroscope' is just a cool word.)
In particular I was looking forward to seeing the Hirshhorn's new Sally Mann. I love Mann's new work, first shown at Edwynn Houk last year. To my exceptional disappointment, the Hirshhorn has covered their new Mann with a sheet of glass. I understand that museums have to do things to protect art, but the surface of Mann's new photographs are so critical to their being and to their visual feel, that the sheet of glass just destroyed the work for me. Alas.
Also wandered over to the lobby of the National Gallery, otherwise known as the East Building, to see what there was to see there. It was a short trip. I mean, how much Eakins can one man be expected to stomach in a lifetime?
The Saturday gallery crawl was somewhat limited by one of my destinations being unexpectedly closed, but I absorbed Leo Villareal's show at Conner. More on it on Artnet in a few weeks.
The Sunday stop was the all-over-the-map National Building Museum, which befuddled me with a rather uninspiring show of architectural drawings from MoMA's collection and sadly underwhelmed me with what should have been a fantastic show about The Rural Studio. (Better-than-the-show book about the project here.)
Bookwise I spent some time with the catalogue from the Gugg's don't-call-it-minimalism show. There seems to be an essay in there about a dance company. I'm not quite sure why. The essay on minimalist architecture was a bit of fun.
Other reading included Blake Gopnik's spot-on pooh-poohing of DC's pandering panda project (other cities have slightly more original ideas) and a delightful read on Hopper from the UK's The Telegraph.
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