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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Art museum: Art? You can have it.
Even a vacationing man cannot avoid the New York Times. (Or chooses not to.) So when I saw this, I knew I would blog about it when I got back. (Remember, MAN loves art theft stories.)
Quick intro: Munch paintings stolen in Oslo. New York museums react. Here's the great quote from the NYT:
"At the end of the day, it's just art, and you would not want someone to take a bullet for it," one New York gallery official said. "There's only so much you can do."
Uh... it's just art? Forgive my stupidity and perhaps I've spent too much time at altitude recently, but aren't art museums all about preserving art for future generations? I thought it went without saying that a museum's first responsibility is to its art, to its collections... and that they should do everything possible (short of taking a bullet) to keep art from being stolen.
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I'm back
I'm back. MAN will have lots from Texas and New Mexico in the next week or two (including some news tidbits that you'll read nowhere else... take that Carol Vogel!), including a Q-and-A with Fort Worth Modern chief curator Michael Auping and a couple of reviews. But first, here are some highlights from around the southwest. We’ll start in New Mexico.
(Admin note: Do I know why this is the only post on the page? Uh, no. But if you click on archives you can find the rest of August, etc.)
Best surprise: Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe. I know nothing about folk art, but I love looking at inventive, well-made art objects. This museum has lots of them, thoughtfully presented.
Best group show: SITE Santa Fe's grotesque show. Curator Rob Storr's exhibit is tight, never varies from its focus, and includes lots of strong work from artists I enjoy.
Worst biennial: SITE Santa Fe's biennial, which included few new or commissioned works and lots and lots of work more than two years old. Let's call it a sorta-ennial.
Best indication that a show is curated by a New Yorker: Rats on the outside of SITE Santa Fe's building (a former beer distributor's warehouse).
Favorite museum idea: Taos' Harwood Museum provides folding stools for visitors to take with them through the museum and thus encourages visitors to find a few favorite artworks and to camp out in front of them.
Favorite museum idea, retro version: There are four Donald Judd-designed stools in the Harwood's Agnes Martin gallery. The idea was Martin's – she specifically requested Judd stools.
Favorite museum idea, lightbulb version: Each of the Harwood's Martin paitings is lit with a single 40-watt bulb. Just that and some natural light.
Favorite work by an artist I'd never heard of: In the Harwood, a Charles Ross installation of 137 yellow, sun-scorched panels brings together the environment, a work of art, and natural processes.
Best reason to rethink an artist: Inka Essenhigh's Chainlink Fence, 2004, at the SITE Santa Fe sorta-ennial. Essenhigh's painting addresses a central issue of our time - who is free and who is a captive - and does it with a painting that is both flowing and tense. A smart, big-deal museum should snap this one up and get it on display as soon as the sorta-ennial goes down.
Favorite Peter Schjeldahl quote (from a talk in Santa Fe): "I distrust any work where the first thing I think about is how well it’s done."
Favorite rejoinder by me: "Peter, what then is your first thought about John Currin?"
Favorite quick reply from Schjeldahl: "How astoundingly vulgar it is... [I see it hanging on a wall and I think] can you do that?"
Peter Schjeldahl’s Ten Commandments for Artists: "Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, don't whine."
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Vacation!
It's vacation time. I'll be back blogging on Aug. 31.
At the moment, the guest blogger plan is dead... but check back every once and a while. If the chap gets the institutional go-ahead, he'll be here....
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Barnes op-ed in the PDN
Our guess: Something is about to happen in Barnes-land. When the president of the board of trustees places an op-ed in a major metro daily, it's not usually because he's feeling like joining the civic dialogue, it's because something's about to go down. (Of course we are talking about the Barnes here, where nothing the institution does makes much sense, so I'm probably over-reading this. Presidents of boards usually don't bother with August op-eds either.)
My most favoritest paragraph is this one, which precisely zero percent of MAN readers will believe:
The Barnes is proposing to relocate its art collection to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway for one overriding reason: to enrich the lives of tens of thousands of students from Philadelphia, the suburbs and beyond. At the same time, the Lower Merion campus will remain our home for research and horticultural programs - a "win-win" for all.
Right. And the millions of dollars and creating a tourist draw on the Parkway have not so much to do with it.
Also in Philly: The Calder Museum, on life support as recently as last week, appears to be in line for a major cash infusion from the state.
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Around the Blogosphere
Had to do an Around the Blogosphere before I left! But first, for those of you who emailed me about yesterday's post, no, Grace Glueck is incorrect. None of you non-Glueck guessers were right either. Hah! (I'll try to catch up on email today.)
- At Ionarts, contemporary forest art. And it looks much better than it sounds;
- Towleroad, one of my favorite daily reads, discusses how classical statuary turned human turned TV censorship.
- Two of my favorite art-heavy blogs are Barry Hoggard's bloggy and jameswagner.com. The two men, partners, are progressive activists as well as art collectors. Both are also just back from LA. Read the main pages and click through a few screens of archives, too.
- Dangerous Chunky has a lot of good stuff too, none of it permalinkable. (You should read her daily anyway.) Her first two posts, on slide projectors, are great fun.
- Iconoduel has been discussing the role a big art fair plays in a big city (in his case, Chicago). Would you believe budding scholars have written theses about art fairs? Are you paying attention Miami?
- Erik's Rants and Recipes discusses Diebenkorn and his relationship to California and why he thinks NY'ers don't get RD.
- Blake Gopnik's Sunday proposal is being widely discussed around the blogosphere. (The soon-to-launch DCist here, Erik's Rants here, Greg.org here, Anna Conti here, to name but a few) I wonder if Gopnik knows... I know a number of national and regional art critics keep a close eye on the blogosphere and love to watch what people say about them...
- From the Floor has three posts about the journey to Spiral Jetty. This makes Todd Gibson well-prepared for MOCA's upcoming retro.
- Photography blogged at Coincidences. I can't summarize the top couple posts quickly, but go take a look.
- A Leon Golub linkfest, at NEWSgrist.
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Pups in places...
 MAN hears that this magazine (no, really, click on the link...) will soon have a story on the joys of taking your canine companion to art galleries.
Naw... we're just kidding.
But we do hear that they're profiling a major newspaper's art critic and his pooch, a former Westminster Kennel Club best of breed (at left).
Whoops! Kidding again! (When we're this punchy, it's time for a vacation...)
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Introducing Brian Sholis
Brian Sholis has graciously agreed to be MAN while I am enjoying the Southwest. I asked Brian to guest because I don't think he and I have ever agreed on anything. I guarantee that you'll be reading a voice that is different from mine. If I have brain cramps when I get back from New Mexico, I can milk a few E-Z posts out of writing the opposite of everything he writes!)
Plus, we all know that I can't stand Matthew Barney's work... so if Barney is named the American artist for Venice 2005 in the next 12 days, Brian will have more interesting things to say about it than I would.
For those of you who don't know Brian, he's a writer and he was recently hired as the associate editor for Artforum.com. (Which means that he's fixing it.) You can read more about him at his website.
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Vacation time for MAN, bonus for you
For the first time in years, I'm taking an extended vacation and an extended vacation from MAN. On Thursday I leave for Santa Fe/Taos, Marfa, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston. I'll be back blogging on Aug. 31. (If MAN readers have tips, please email me!)
In addition to the trip, I'm excited that MAN will feature a guest blogger while I'm gone. I hope to have an announcement soon...
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Gopnik's proposal
In Sunday's Washington Post, Blake Gopnik made a modest, gelato-free proposal (username/password here):
Let's call it the Washington Collectors' Project. Here's how it would work: A consortium of the city's best collectors of contemporary art would come together to make their art available for exhibition. They would find a modest, white-cube space and invite independent curators to fill it with selections from their holdings.
The project would be a win-win all around.
I think not. Here are a couple problems with Gopnik's idea: The art world is global, moreso now than ever, and his idea is based on a narrow, artificial, regionalist construct. Furthermore, Gopnik's idea has nothing to do with art and everything to do with the mere geography of amalgamation. When the art world is becoming more interconnected, when group shows at even medium-sized institutions are filled with loans from two or three continents, why would we want something that is so internal, narrow and exclusionary?
Why would DC collectors (and others) want their works seen only next to other DC-owned work? Or why would a collector want their $6M Richter shown in a semi-pro space? And why would a curator, a serious curator, want to confine him/herself to only using work from DC collections if s/he is trying to build a conceptually tight show?
Gopnik's idea treats DC like its collections exist on an island, apart from the "rest" of the art world. Why would the capital of the free world want to peg itself as a regional backwater (when it comes to art) by investing time, energy, and funding in such a middling concept? Why would collectors who have spent years amassing important collections (and any curator, gallerist or collector who is plugged into the art world knows exactly who Gopnik is describing in that first paragraph and each is a major collector) want to take a step down to show their work in such an empty context?
All that said, Gopnik is right-on in one key area: DC needs some form of an 'Institute of Contemporary Art.' (I've been writing about this on MAN for years... about six months ago I got so tired of typing about it that I've shut up about it, so I'm glad to see Gopnik raise the flag. As I've written here before, I'd like to see an ICA in DC's downtown MLK Library, which is a late Mies building. Either eliminate the central library or build a new one at the site of the old DC convention center.)
While Gopnik argues for a stand-in project until DC gets its ICA act together, his arguments are all strong arguments... in favor of an ICA now.
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Clyfford Still donation terms...
Most of the newspaper coverage of the Still estate gift to Denver has mentioned how Still was a notoriously demanding donor when it came to giving his work to museums. So MAN has been doing a little hunting to find out what some of Still's requirements were. Yesterday we got our hands on Still's one-page agreement (the person who shared this with me tells me that similar agreements today run to the dozens of pages) with a major American museum:
- A selection of works must always be on view in a gallery dedicated only to Still;
- Exhibition loans should be approved by the estate; and
- The museum director would pick the paintings that this institution received from Still.
That's it. The whole agreement. Pretty simple. In the last week I've heard rumors about Still making lighting requirements, not allowing conservation or cleaning of paintings, and more. In the case of this gift -- one of Still's earliest -- none of that. Today, I can't imagine that a museum would accept a gift if the donor required that a gallery of the work be on display forevermore, but my memory isn't that good about what museums would let donors get away with 25 years ago (gimme a break, I was five).
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NADA is so much fun....
We love NADA. We really do.
Er, well, I guess we'd better be honest: We could really care less about the NADA as an organization, but we love their Miami art fair. The NADA Fair plays a key role in ensuring that Art Basel Miami Beach is more than just fuddy, Botero-filled Art Basel; NADA is a critical part of making the first weekend in December the best weekend of contemporary art in America. (Now that we've just complimented you NADA, do us a favor: Jury some of those Brooklyn glue-and-glitter galleries outta the fair. Not only is the work atrocious, but if there's one thing I hate it's going to see art for eight hours straight, then sitting down for a drink at the end of the day only to find glitter floating in my Johnnie Black.)
That's why we want the NADA fair to happen this December. Sadly, from what we're hearing from gallerists around the country, NADA's on really, really thin er, sand. (Honestly? The best thing about ABMB is that when you're drunk at 2 in the morning, and fall down, it's no big deal because the beach is padded, or something.) What NADA needs to do is to cut a fat check to their curatorial/organizing team fast, or just give up on Miami, thus freeing NADA-ready galleries to find or create other options. (Scope: $5000. Of course, Scope is so well-run that in the opening hour of the opening day of their 2004 NYC fair the front door broke.)
So while NADA is figuring out what the heck it's gonna do (we hear that they're in ack-what-do-we-do-now mode), we here at MAN are fascinated, simply fascinated, by this description of what NADA does:
NADA is a collective of professionals in the arts. Its mission is to create an open flow of information, support and collaboration in the arts in order to create a stronger sense of community. NADA believes that the adversarial approach to exhibiting and selling art has run its course and that change can be achieved through fostering constructive thought and dialogue between various points in the art industry from large galleries to small, non-profit and commercial spaces alike.
MAN cares about those things, whatever they are. (I think MAN really cares about the 'community' part because that we think 'community' is a euphemism for 'smokin'-hot chicks.') So here's hoping that NADA can foster constructive thought and dialogue with someone who can make their fair happen.
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Is the IRS going after museum execs?
If you work in a big American museum, today's big news is that the IRS may be coming after your boss. As reported best in the Washington Post (and also in the NYT), the IRS is planning on taking a close look at the salaries of non-profit executives.
Art museum directors are some of the best paid non-profit executives in America. It's reasonable to expect that museums are going to be hearing from the IRS. Here's a look at what some names-you-know pulled down in the year of their most recent tax filing:
- MoMA's Glenn Lowry: $500,595 in salary, $41,822 in benefits, $76,800 in expenses;
- The Met's Philippe de Montebello: $518,151, 94,469, 253,963;
- The Gugg's Thomas Krens: $450,000, 21,468, 89,083;
- The Art Institute of Chicago's ex-director James Wood: $338,000, 165,588, 1,250;
- SFMOMA's Neal Benezra: $350,000, zip, 34,583;
- The National Gallery's Rusty Powell: $427,829, 93,215, zip;
- Boston MFA's Malcolm Rogers: $427,829, 22,074, zip;
- MOCA LA's Jeremy Strick: $235,598, 176,722, zip;
- The Getty Trust's Barry Munitz: $545,000, 41,805, zip: and
- Getty Museum's Deborah Gribbon: $425,378, 31,237, 34,052.
I'm in favor of paying non-profit executives, especially museum execs, at a high level. Museums are the storehouses of our cultural past and present. They should be run by the best people they can attract and keep, not transitioning mid-level Citicorp executives (or some such thing). Museum directorships should not be the refuge of the idle rich, either. Every institution on this list pays their director what they should be paying the person who is their director. I hope the IRS leaves alone museums.
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MoMA JAs gone wild
I love it when Greg Allen goes on vacation. This means I can poke fun at MoMA's newish Junior Associates blog all I want. (The JAs are MoMA's yuppie members. Greg is their leader. Truth told, if Greg wasn't hanging out with ambassadors he'd be enjoying this too.)
This week, the JAblog goes all Gawker on us. The juicy bits: JAs need to be reminded to tip their bartenders (they pay $500 a year for to be anti-hipster JAers and someone needs to tell them to tip for beer?), they go all wobbly when they see Bono, they gossip about Bono's love for the "Turrell Room," and they fantasize about discussing artist Doug Aitken with Bono.
NOTE: More on Clyfford Still (and Calder and Helmut Newton) and more on downtown LA later today/this week. I'm doing a little information gathering.
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NADA News
MAN has confirmed that NADA has no space for its December fair in Miami. NADA's Sheri Pasquarella tells me that they're working on completing a deal on a space, but that they don't have it done yet. Pasquarella says that she's not worried about it... but MAN has heard from plenty of gallerists who are frustrated that they have little idea what's going on with their biggest event of the year. (Can you blame them?)
Pasquarella says that she hopes that confirmations on the space and gallery acceptances will go out within two weeks.
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Clyfford Still goes to Denver. Yes, Denver.
NOTE: If you didn't read yesterday's late-in-the-day post on the mess that is NADA, it's below this one. Also, LA picks the creators of NYC's Time Warner Center (password: go here) to develop their downtown arts district. More on this soon....
A few years back St. Louis was the hot art city. It had a new Tadao Ando-designed private museum, a new contemporary art kunsthalle designed by one of the hottest young American architects (Brad Cloepfil), and the St. Louis Art Museum has long been one of America's top museums.
Denver noticed. Denver has decided that it's next.
 Yesterday's news that the family of Clyfford Still will give Denver over 2,000 pieces of Still's art (provided that the city can raise $7.5 million to build a building) is Denver's latest -- and boldest -- move to be a major visual arts destination. A few months ago the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art selected David Adjaye to design its new 20,000-square foot space. And a Daniel Libeskind-designed addition will nearly double the size of the Denver Art Museum. (Big-name architects that can make buildings into destinations are a theme here.)
Denver's power play is all the more fascinating because there is no Still connection to Denver. (Still's primary geographic associations were with San Francisco, New York and New Windsor, Maryland. I'm a little surprised that Still's work didn't end up in San Francisco, where he lived, taught, and worked in the 1940's. Neal Benezra, who worked on a retrospective of Still's work in 2001, is now the director of SF MOMA.) It didn't matter to Denver officials that there was no Still-Denver connection -- they wanted the Still collection for one reason: to create a Western art supercenter.
I haven't read any journalists discuss this (readers are always invited to correct me), but I think that what is happening in Denver is part of a major shift in how municipalities/states/regions approach the arts. Art is no longer supported because it's art -- look at how state arts agency budgets have been getting whacked in recent years. In Colorado, for example, the state government has cut the state's arts agency's budget by 80 percent, to a meager $200,000. Well underway is a trend is to take money away from state government agencies and to put it toward specific projects.
States and cities (Denver has $7.5M to raise -- I guarantee you that a chunk of that comes from the state capital, which happens to be in... Denver) increasingly view arts organizations as revenue drivers or enhancers. To put it slightly more bluntly, paintings are tourist magnets. In Philadelphia, to name just one example, the city and state of Pennsylvnania want to move the Barnes Foundation so that it will drive tourism dollars to the downtown area. Denver is clearly convinced that its investment in arts institutions will pay off.
UPDATE: The Rocky Mountian News has an interesting story here.
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Is the Miami NADA fair in trouble?
Last year, during Art Basel Miami Beach weekend, two side fairs offered younger, riskier, newer and less expensive art. One fair was the Scope fair, which took place in a South Beach hotel. The other, the New Art Dealers Association (NADA) fair, was full of (too many) Brooklyn glue-and-glitter galleries and was housed in a vacant office building. NADA was a little too Brooklyn for its own good, and had planned to expand in scope this year. Art dealers from all over America had applied for this year's NADA fair... and buzz was building that the NADA fair was going to be The Place to Be in Miami.
Today, nearly six weeks after the application deadline for NADA 2004, this email went out to NADA members and fair applicants:
Dear Member/ Applicant,
We hope that you are well & enjoying your summer.
Due to unforeseen changes in staffing/administration of the NADA Art Fair 2004, we must postpone the notification of all acceptances for the fair. We thank you in advance for your patience and hope to let you know by late August or early September.
Please note that Janet Phelps is no longer working for the NADA Art Fair; for all of your questions regarding the fair from this point forward, please feel free to contact Margaret Wray or Sheri Pasquarella at XXXXX @hotmail.com.
We apologize for the inconvenience & look forward to being in touch with you again shortly.
UPDATE: I'm already hearing that gallerists are peeved. Deposits for the 2004 fair are due to NADA on Aug. 20. No word in this email on what's up with that date. As you might expect, this makes it difficult for gallerists to plan for the biggest art fair of the year. MAN wants to know more...
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Ubiquity thy name is McGinley
 The Marfa Lights. Stonehenge. The lost world of Atlantis. Each one is an unexplained phenomenon, something that we have yet to decode or fully understand. To this list I would add Ryan McGinley, whose most recent appearance is in the NY Times Sunday Magazine.
If you don't know Ryan McGinley, consider yourself two things: a non-New Yorker, and blessedly fortunate. Young McGinley is the photographer of the moment. Young McGinley is to 2004 what Wolfgang Tillmans was to 2002. Young McGinley was the recent beneficiary of a solo show at the Whitney, a solo show at PS1, and he was featured in this weekend's NYT Mag. Young McGinley is, clearly, a slutterbug.
If you've managed to skillfully avoid McGinley's work (email me to tell me how you managed to avoid him -- I can learn from you), here's a short summary: McGinley makes pretty photos of young people with lithe bodies and winsome looks. They are not having lithe, winsome sex, but that usually seems the likely next step. My guess is that McGinley's photos particularly appeal to people who have graduated from lithe and winsome sex and are mostly having leisurely, single-malt scotch-influenced sex. (When Lagavulin drinkers attempt to be lithe and winsome, they usually pull a muscle.)
Anyway, I'm not sure that McGinley's photographs are particularly awful. But the problem with an artist who has chosen saturation as a career move is that the viewing public (read: me) doesn't have a chance to catch its breath and to assess the artist in question. When I'm confronted with an artist who considers ubiquity an attribute, I generally react with negativity. I feel like he's hiding something, that he's sacrificing quality in favor of volume, like he's hoping that we are so busy looking at so many images that we miss the obvious flaw.
With Tillmans the flaw is that he lacks an off-switch. He's the Energizer Bunny of photography. Wolfgang Tillmans is the argument for self-editing. I don't know if McGinley has a similarly obvious flaw. I'm sure of this: his portfolio of lithe, only occasionally winsome swimmers in the NYT Mag is stupefyingly average, the kind of pictures that sports photo journos have been taking for years. We've all seen shots like that during previous Olympics, both from still and TV cameras. Maybe McGinley's flaw is this: he's so busy taking so many images that he hasn't stopped to come up with interesting ideas.
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Top tens
On Tuesday I thought I'd try to help myself through the summer art doldrums by posting a top ten favorites list. (I already can't believe I left off Morandi.) I promised to link to bloggers who posted their own lists and let me know about it. Therefore, voila (and notice how much Richard Diebenkorn pops up!):
If I missed you, please drop me a note...
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Cameron & Kamm: Over.
Let peace and joy ring out in New York. There will be no more squabbles in the art world, no more backstabbing, no more bitchy gossip. MAN sincerely hopes that the email quoted below ushers in an era of good feeling, an era of optimism, cooperation and love.
But it probably won't.
Last night, sources tell MAN that Dan Cameron sent this email to dozens of New York artfolk:
You may have received some communications from me concerning Oliver Kamm and 5BE Gallery. I was distressed and angry when I made these statements and now realize that they were wholly inappropriate and unwarranted and may have caused Mr. Kamm harm. I sincerely regret having sent these communications and take full responsibility for my actions.
To clarify matters, I want you to know that many of the communications I sent wrongly gave the impression that they came from The New Museum of Contemporary Art. They did not.
I also want to be clear that in all my dealings with 5BE Gallery, Mr. Kamm behaved professionally, and I have the utmost respect for 5BE Gallery and the artists the Gallery represents. Finally, I am pleased to tell you that Mr. Kamm and I have resolved the lawsuit Mr. Kamm filed a short time ago.
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Re-post
I almost never re-blog something I've already posted. But I'm going to make an exception here:
Read this Megan Stack story in the LA Times about a Syrian artist and curator, his drive for free expression, and his struggle to show and work in dictatorial Syria. (If you aren't registered at lat.com, click here for a bypass.) Think about Stack's story in the context of the near-total lack of American cultural diplomacy. During the Cold War our government had dedicated programs, run by the CIA and the State Department with participation from America's cultural elite, to promote American culture and free cultural expression around the world. Most of those programs don't exist anymore. That's too bad.
(The definitive history of the role cultural diplomacy played in the Cold War is Frances Stonor Saunders' The Cultural Cold War.)
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As the Barnes turns
The Barnes Foundation has told Judge Stanley Ott that its appraisal of assets not on gallery walls falls short of the $50M mark. Ott told the Barnes to explore the value of art in storage and its Ker-Feal estate in order to see if they could be sold off to create an endowment that might kick off $2-2.5M a year. The Inky doesn't find out what the appraised total was, but adds that the group challenging the Barnes' move plans its own appraisal.
Nothing terribly earth-shattering there, just more details for we Barnes nuts... (And a reminder of the slowness of August, scroll down for top ten fun...)
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A summer top ten
Welcome to August. August in the art world. I guess this means it's time to be excited that Bruichladdich is newly available in Washington... and to be more excited that its 15-year takes a couple of ice cubes quite nicely.
Notice that I didn't mention art in that sentence. What's an art blogger to do during August? How about some frivolous, pointless, silly fun?
Here are my ten favorite artists. Or at least my ten favorite artists as of when I typed this. And to make this an even sillier exercise, I'll give a one-word summary of what I like best about each artist. (Remember: August! It's this or another post about Ben Nicholson at the Hirshhorn.) If you're a blogger, pile on and make sure I know it -- I'll link to similar lists on Friday.
1.) Henri Matisse. Line.
2.) Pierre Bonnard. Movement.
3.) Richard Diebenkorn. Painter.
4.) Carleton Watkins. Pioneer.
5.) Robert Ryman. True.
6.) Barnett Newman. Optics.
7.) Vija Celmins. Sublime.
8.) Agnes Martin. Human.
9.) Charles Sheeler. American.
10.) Amadeo Modigliani. Sexy.
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Beauty on the radio
PRI's Studio 360 -- that's Kurt Andersen's show -- discussed beauty (mostly) in the visual arts this weekend. Included on the show were segments on Tomaselli and Serrano. Elaine Scarry was the guest commentator. For more fun with Tomaselli, click here and scroll down about one screen.
Sidenote: In introducing the Tomaselli segment, Andersen makes use of one of my least-favorite writerly cop-outs: the lazy reference to unnamed critics: "For some art critics to call a painter's work beautiful remains a subtle diss..." Andersen says. Well, who said that? Call the specific critics to account.
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Kimmelman reviews Bontecou?
Michael Kimmelman has finally left the New York Times. You may not have heard: He has begun writing essays for those little handouts you receive when you enter museum exhibits.
Whoops! Turns out that was his Lee Bontecou review from last Friday's New York Times.
What has happened to Michael Kimmelman? Is there a more irrelevant major-newspaper art critic in America? (C'mon, fess up... you were hoping that Kimmelman was in the Hamptons and that Roberta Smith would review Bontecou. I know I was.) Kimmelman's Bontecou 'review' is a perfect example of what he has been writing lately: explanatory essays, often biographical in nature (Kimmelman's review of the Jewish Museum's Modigliani show is a fine example), not reviews.
(I don't want to nitpick lines in Kimmelman's essay, but it was frustrating. I especially wanted to know this: How is MoMA's show different from the Hammer version? Kimmelman says the show was thinned, but how much?)
(While I'm at it, does MoMA think that this is an exhibition website? Weak.)
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