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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
You don't suppose...
 OK, we had our fun with the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
If the Getty and Barry Munitz really, really wanted to change the subject, here's what the Getty would (and might?) do: Buy a $50 million Gauguin. The painting, on auction at Sotheby's on Nov. 4, is Maternite (II) from 1899. The estimate from Sotheby's is $40-50 million. According to the Getty website, the Getty owns only two minor Gauguins.
Gettyites: Is the Getty considering the painting?
Speaking of the Getty: KCRW's Politics of Culture featured the Getty on their show yesterday. (NPR junkies will recognize KCRW as a Southland NPR station.) Christopher Knight was one of the guests. Listen at the link...
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Frivolity
Because we've been so seriously lately -- Getty this, Corcoran that -- we thought it might be fun to do a completely silly, subjective, pointless post. A few months back I did a top ten list of my favorite artists, complete with a one-word reason. (Somehow I left G. Morandi off my list, thus proving that frivolous ideas often open the door to stupidity.) So today, my ten favorite museums, same rules.
1.) Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth. Elegant.
2.) The Phillips Collection. Home.
3.) St. Louis Art Museum. Focused.
4.) MOCA
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Munitz' plan?
UPDATE: I made a slight change to the Cattelan post below. He is an odd bird.
Barry Munitz apparently has begun to implement a strategy to fend off his critics: placing op-eds that link his previous career (that would be running the California State University system, not that S&L thing) to his current career.
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Cattelan removes work from Carnegie Int'l
The Maurizio Cattelan installation at the Carnegie International, titled Now, has been removed from the International by Cattelan. Here's the story:
For the opening weekend, Cattelan's installation was placed in what is called the Founder's Room, a small, dark, beautifully ornate room off of one of the entrances to the Carnegie. The Founder's Room is not typically a space open to the public, but it was the space that was available for the work during the opening weekend.
The intent of the artist and of the museum was that Now would be moved to the Hall of Architecture after the opening -- the museum needed the Hall for the gala dinner. Cattelan had twice visited the Carnegie and was adamant that Now go in the Hall. After the opening, he changed his mind and he removed Now from the exhibition.
Now is still at the Carnegie Museum of Art, just not on view. The museum is hopeful that Cattelan will return to Pittsburgh to choose another site for the piece.
Related: Calvin Tomkins wrote about Cattelan and the creation of Now for the New Yorker recently. It is not online, but the blog Book of Joe recently discussed the Tomkins profile. Excerpts from my review (for Bloomberg) are here.
Updated 10/27: An artist in Pittsburgh doesn't like me, but that's OK. I'll link to her anyway.
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Flavin catalog
 First, sincere apologies for turning Steve Morse into Jeffrey Weiss (or vice versa) in this morning's first post. Thanks the the sharp readers who caught it. I'd email all of you, but that would leave me no time to reply to the mountain of Getty-related email I'm happily receiving.
I promised a post about the Flavin catalog that accompanies the Dia/NGA show. As anyone who has flipped through the catalog has noticed, the colors are deep, intense and fill the entire photographic frame. How'd they do that?
They're not exactly photographs. They're digitally-altered compositions of photographs taken by Dia at Dia:Beacon especially for the catalog. I don't know of other examples where art images have been digitally manipulated in this way in order to give a reader a truer picture of what it's like to experience a work of art. But I think it works in the Flavin catalog. (That's one of the images at left.)
Related: Excerpts from my review of Flavin, for Bloomberg.
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Flavin, Day Two
I promised some thoughts on the second of this past weekend's two Dan Flavin events...
The National Gallery's second panel featured Dia's Tiffany Bell, Flavin Studio head Steve Morse, and Flavin pal and artist Michael Venezia. The panel was moderated by NGA curator Jeffrey Weiss. I didn't take extensive notes on every anecdote, but I wanted to share three things that I heard discussed during the panel but didn't know much about before Sunday:
- I did not know that Flavin designed a project for the National Institutes of Health in suburban Washington. I'd love to see the drawings;
- Flavin worked on a program with some scientists at General Electric. I wonder what they were working on and how far they got;
- I'd love to see more of the work Flavin created with ultraviolet light, including the photo of the outdoor ultraviolet work created for the University of Rochester.
As I've noted here before, there are no photos or slide show of Flavin's site-specific works in the NGA exhibit. (I've heard that there may be at the next venue, in Fort Worth.) I understand why that isn't a part of the show, but after Sunday's panel I think I'm kinda wishing that the site-specific work was represented somehow.
I'll have another Flavin tidbit later today, this one explaining why that show's catalog is so visually striking.
Related: A DC artist named Trish Tillman also blogged about the panel.
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Opie and California
Kevin Starr's new book about the crisis that (always) is California, Coast of Dreams, features a Cathy Opie on its cover. The photo is from her surfers series that was on view at Regen, Gorney and at the Whitney earlier this year.
This is particularly interesting to me because when I wrote about Opie for Black Book earlier this year I considered placing her within a tradition of California chroniclers of the cultural present. (Think Joan Didion, The Eagles...) Ultimately I went in a different direction with the piece, but the use of the Opie image on Starr's book reminded me that I'd like to revisit that idea someday.
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AJ, LAT on the Getty
The morning Getty updates: AJ's Andrew Taylor on the root of the troubles at the Getty...
Speaking of the Getty, the email is still coming in. A lot of it. Basically I'm trying to communicate with some leakers about what kind of detail I'd like to have to post and they're seeing what they can find...
If you are in a position to be able to leak legal documents (there are two in particular I want to see and if you're at the Getty you know which two), information from the IRS' audit of the Getty (Munitz' benefits package is pretty... striking), and information on the severance packages paid to ex-employees, let me know. And, of course, if you're the director of the museum and you're about to no longer be the director, and you just happen to be a MAN reader, we'd love to hear from you in some way...
Today the LA Times did their first Getty investigative piece. (It's in Calendar, so it's behind the silly wall. As you might expect, I have a, er, emailable copy.) It lays the foundation for their upcoming Getty coverage. They introduced the players and hinted at where some of the future coverage will go. Think of it as part of a process that encourages more and more Gettyites to leak more and more items.
There are no blockbusters in today's LAT story, just some subtle... hints about the deeper problems at the Getty. There are lots of references to Munitz' management style, etc. Jill Murphy is mentioned only in passing. (The Times did not, for example, mention whether or not there is still a photo of Murphy and Munitz sailing in Europe on Munitz' desk. The LAT mentioned that Munitz loves Hollywood, but didn't tell the story of how Munitz promised a Hollywood starlet that he'd have Getty staff research some specifics about society on the isle of Lesbos for her.)
Two paragraphs in particular really caught my eye:
The 13 board members live on both coasts and are not all in frequent contact with the institution. They meet four times a year.
Blenda J. Wilson, who has been a Getty trustee for 12 years, said she had no knowledge of morale problems and it wasn't her role to get in the middle of personnel issues. "I don't need to know until I'm told," she said. "I don't work at the Getty. I'm a board member."
Barbara G. Fleischman, who joined the board in 2000, was reluctant to address specifics about tension at the Getty. "I think morale is very good there," she said. "All I can say is that we're very excited about all the different areas of the trust."
Uh, Blenda, a board's job isn't just to believe whatever the CEO tells you or to wait until you're told (something)...
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Flav(in)-o-rama
This past weekend Washington was the capital of not just the USA, but of Flavination. Timed to overlap with a Dan Flavin retrospective, the National Gallery hosted two days of Flavin discussions. The first day, which featured Dia boss Michael Govan and a bunch of academics, was painfully dull. (Only Govan was interesting.) The second day, which featured friends and colleagues of Flavin's was flat-out fascinating.
How bad was the first day? It was the tin man panel -- a bunch of people (minus Govan) who were looking at art without any soul, without any heart. Picture five self-important bloviators trying to demonstrate to each other that each of them matters a great deal. (When of course, they don't.) If I had heard one more egghead use the word "dialectic" one more time, I might have nodded off. Oh yeah, they might have talked about Flavin too. But maybe not.
I also heard one of the academics, Anne Wagner, say one of the most preposterous things I've ever heard anyone say about art. Speaking about Flavin, she said, "If we grant him any achievement..." If they grant him any achievement? I'm sorry, is there an Academics Achievement Board that decides what is and what isn't an 'achievement?'
Maybe I should feel a little sorry for the ivory tower bunch. Within the context of contemporary art -- or even recent art such as Flavin's -- they just don't matter. Collectors and gallerists have the first impact on new art, then curators and critics who can broaden the audience for that work. Institutions (and more curators) step in next to canonize the work, and only then do academic theorizers get a shot... By then, who cares? Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe was on the panel. I have enjoyed every book of his I've read. But on Saturday... oye. Obviously, Flavin is widely accepted as a big deal. Flavin doesn't need a few fusty elbow-patches to tell him whether or not he achieved.
Later today I'll try to post about the second panel, which was wonderful...
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The weekend email
Getty email continues to pour in. Among the tidbits:
Seventy-five percent of the emails I'm getting from current Getty staff discusses a "climate of fear" that exists at the Getty. That's sad. I hope the board is paying attention...
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Getty or Starbucks?
Getty-ites, et al: I'm in New York City today. I won't be able to respond to email until Sunday. But please, keep the email coming.
From Barry Munitz' introduction of himself to Getty staff, delivered in the same auditorium where Deborah Gribbon received a standing ovation when she resigned (and reported by more than one emailer):
"If you don't like it, you can go work at Starbucks."
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Giorgio Morandi @ Schoormans
From my Bloomberg review of the Giorgio Morandi show at Chelsea's Lucas Schoormans Gallery:
 Giorgio Morandi is the least-known great painter of the 20th century. Few of his canvases are bigger than a newspaper page. Each is a testament to the impact of passion painted tiny.
A rare exhibit of Morandi paintings is on view at Chelsea's Lucas Schoormans Gallery. This show of six oil paintings and two works on paper (one for sale with an asking price of $30,000) is a special experience. It will be on view until Dec. 4.
Morandi (1890-1964) remains a relative secret because he and his work were so unassuming. Almost exclusively, he painted still-lifes. He rarely traveled, and he lived with his sisters in Bologna. His bedroom doubled as his studio.
Throughout his life, Morandi composed the same few objects: boxes, a few vases, pitchers, bottles. I don't often see Morandis on view at museums, but when I do it's like seeing old friends. Looking at Morandi's paintings in different venues is like seeing snapshots of friends taken over a number of years. Both acquire a
somewhat mournful patina.
Appreciating a Morandi starts with its size. I am six or seven times bigger than any Morandi at Schoormans. Unavoidably aware of that, I approach the pictures delicately. I have to bend over and hunch my back to see them.
I look at how Morandi filled his backgrounds with quick, firm, zig-zagging strokes. The outer edges of each brushstroke pushed up paint, creating thick ridges. The result is a painterly topography that gives life to monochrome.
The still-life objects themselves are sometimes recognizable, but often they're just shapes. There's a 1955 still-life from a German museum at Schoormans that is an excellent example of Morandi painting only the shape of an object, not the object itself. It's as if Morandi painted an outline, then filled it in by pushing paint around with a brush until it felt right.
Sometimes Morandi filled his shapes with detail. In a 1954 painting owned by the Smith College Museum of Art, Morandi's objects are identifiable. Two candlesticks stand next to a round box. The brushstrokes that make up the box's curves are the most delicate lines in the painting. Morandi painted these lines carefully, slowly. They are wavy and hesitant. To look at them closely is to see the shaky hand of a 64-year-old man.
Related: On Tuesday, this Morandi, with a high estimate of $475,000, sold for $625,000 at the London Sotheby's. Artnet and the New York Times have also reviewed Schoormans' Morandi show. (The NYT managed to reverse the image that ran with the Kimmelman mini-review.) A gallery of three Morandi paintings is on view at the Hirshhorn. A major American museum is in the process of purchasing its first Morandi. More on Monday (I hope.) Naturally, a Morandi show is a New Criterion kind of show.
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Getty: Things I think I think
Getty-ites and ex-Getty-ites: Keep those emails coming! If you're a current Getty employee and are considering emailing me from home tonight, I'll be checking/replying to emails until about midnight ET. I'll be away tomorrow, and responses will resume on Saturday. Thanks.
I think that somehow a big newspaper will get its hands on the confidentiality agreement that the Getty forces employees to sign. (Hey Gettyites! You can email it to me, too!);
I think that somehow some of the lawsuits floating around the Getty will come out and will be reported on;
I think it's funny that a running joke up at the Getty is that staff wonders if Barry Munitz keeps a tanning bed in his office;
I think that if you are a prominent bigwig (or lack thereof) at the Getty and initiate a round of layoffs, that you probably shouldn't show up at work the next week driving a new Porsche SUV;
I think that if you're going to have sex on the beach in your office (that is have it, not serve it), you should worry that either the people who found out and were later fired (I mean: resigned) will talk or that all those ex-Gettyites who know about it will talk. (And at least one of them is professionally close to a Getty trustee); and
I think that if you work in the Getty's human resources office and you have good files, that you should make sure that you keep a copy of the good stuff somewhere safe. There may be items in those files that serve the institution well.
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More from the Corcoran
Yesterday I wrote that the next key question in the Corcoran/WPA/C affair is the answer to this question:
The Corcoran is receiving $40M from the District of Columbia for its hoped-for Frank Gehry building. The Party projects are city government projects. Did someone from the city make a call to the Corcoran regarding Barlow...?
In today's edition, Chris Shott of the Washington Citypaper reports that yes, the city contacted David Levy about the management of his institution, specifically about a curator and his vision of a show:
Corcoran President and Director David C. Levy had heard personally from [District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities] Chair Dorothy McSweeny about Barlow's comments. "She was kind of unhappy about it," [Levy] says. And Levy, in turn, called up [WPA/C boss Annie] Adjchavanich.
After that is when WPA/C Options curator Philip Barlow was canned. It sure looks to me like Levy and the Corcoran, desparate for $40M in city subsidies for their Frank Gehry building, bowed to pressure from the District government. Or, put another way, the city has levaraged its subsidy into influence (or control) over the Corcoran's internal operations and curatorial integrity.
That is scandalous. The Corcoran board must investigate (and here's hoping the Citypaper and the Washington Post keep digging too) and they must hold Levy responsible for allowing the city to pressure the institution that they supposedly run.
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Dear Getty board...
Dear Getty board,
Hope you're enjoying the LA weather. I know you're meeting today, so I just wanted to share a few thoughts.
First, remember that this meeting is Barry Munitz' attempt to rally you around him as the rest of the art world criticizes your dismissal of Deborah Gribbon. As trustees, you should seek out some art world folk and learn more about how the Getty is viewed by senior staff at peer institutions.
Next, you really must ignore what Bill Griswold is telling you about how good staff morale is. I've heard from dozens of staffers and ex-staffers. Every single one, worried about retribution from Munitz, has asked me for anonymity. Most complain about the way they've been treated by Munitz underboss Jill Murphy. Versions of the phrase 'ran the place by promoting fear' popped up in more than a few emails. Most emailers know about the lawsuit.
A good thing for the board to take a look at: The rate of staff turnover, especially the numbers of longtime staffers who have left. You should call up some ex-staffers and beg them to tell you what they know about the Getty under Munitz.
You're going to have to contact them. Another thing I've noticed from the email: Staff and ex-staff feel like they have nowhere to go with their experiences ... at the non-profits I've worked at or for, staff usually knows how to get access to a board member or two or three if there's a real need, an ethical reason to be in touch with organizational authority. I've asked several emailers if there's a way to do that at the Getty and all have said the same thing: If we did that Munitz would know and we'd be fired.
There is reason to be encouraged. People who work at the Getty now and in the past genuinely care about the institution. They're desparate for a reason to be excited about the Getty again. In the three years I've done this site, nothing has ever generated more email. (Heck, yesterday I called out the poor leadership of the Corcoran and not a single emailer wrote in defense of those leaders. Of course, maybe people just don't write in defense of their bosses -- I haven't received any pro-Munitz email either.)
Finally, read what Christopher Knight said about Munitz. (Password, etc.) Go ahead, we found a free link.
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Latest on the Getty
NOTE: Welcome Getty-ites. I'd still like to hear from you, with your name attached or with your name unattached. If you're looking for yesterday's Munitz/Getty post, please scroll down. Oh, and Carol... the Getty news was on MAN first.
My email overfloweth. If I were a Getty boardmember, I would be on the phone to prominent, long-term ex-employees trying to learn whatever I can....
Today's big Getty development is LAT art critic Christopher Knight's anti-Munitz essay. From Knight's essay, available ye who know how to ask:
Monday, when Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon abruptly announced her resignation, all hell broke loose. The scant two weeks' notice she gave was a clear sign that she was being forced out, lending credence to rumors that had swirled for months. Art museum directors promptly lined up with megaphones to support an esteemed colleague. They spoke openly to reporters, loudly denouncing the event and even criticizing Getty Trust President Barry Munitz.
"A black eye to the Getty Trust," said retired Getty Museum director John Walsh, one of the most revered senior figures in the profession.
"I am sorry that she is leaving," said Philippe de Montebello, director of the mighty Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who almost never discusses personnel issues elsewhere.
"My chief concern is that Barry Munitz, who came to the Getty without any background or knowledge of museums or art history, is making moves that have enormous consequences for Los Angeles, for culture in Southern California and beyond," said Hugh Davies, director of San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art and former president of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors. "I am very worried that there is a toxic atmosphere at the Getty, and I lay it at his door."
"Black eye," "sorry," "toxic" - like I said, extraordinary.
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For longtime museum watchers, this avalanche of public dismay from within the upper echelon of American art museum administration amounts to a stunning rebuke. It's the art world equivalent of a public slap-fight between Colin Powell and Dick Cheney in a Georgetown restaurant.
Gribbon's highest priority, like Walsh's before her, has been the direct encounter between the public and great works of art. The trust's priorities have been more diffuse - scattered among secondary matters like scholarship, criticism, conservation, educational symposia, grant making and family fun events as much as art.
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Munitz, as president and chief executive of the Getty Trust, plays public second fiddle to the art museum's director, even though it's but one of four program areas and he has greater authority.
Playing down the centrality of the museum and its art and fluffing up the secondary activities are the only options.
How does he get away with it? Simple. Since coming to the Getty Trust in January 1998 from a background in business and university education, Munitz has done what any corporate CEO would do. He has remade the board of trustees in his own image.
Just three of its 13 members are prominent figures in art, all as collectors. Businesspeople and university educators make up the rest. Crucially, roughly half owe their slots on the prestigious board to Munitz.
In a separate LAT story, Suzanne Muchnic tells us about William Griswold, the Getty's new acting director. It's behind the LAT wall, but, er, you know the drill.
Also re: the Getty: In three years of doing this site, no single issue has generated more email than Gribbon's ouster. (Speaking of email: How many emails in defense of the Corcoran and the WPA/C have I received today? None. How many emails of agreement have I received? Several dozen.)
Literally 100 percent of my email, from Getty staff and ex-staff, is running against Munitz. Nearly every emailer is saying morale is pitiful, Munitz' decisions regarding staff and dismissal have been caustic and destructive, and everyone knows that it's only going to get worse. There are more major stories about Munitz' tenure coming down the pike. From what I'm hearing, his board will not be able to ignore what's coming.
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The Mess at the Corcoran
NOTE: Welcome Getty-ites. I'll have more on the Getty later today. And I'd still like to hear from you, with your name attached or with your name unattached. If you're looking for yesterday's Getty post, please scroll down. Oh, and Carol... the Getty news was on MAN first.
OTHER NOTE: Welcome to museum administration day at MAN. We're kicking off the day with a look at Washington's very own Corcoran. A little later today we'll discuss the latest at the Getty and what LAT art critic Christopher Knight has to say about the mess that Getty Trust boss Barry Munitz has made.
The Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran and the Corcoran have fired the curator of the WPA/C's Options show. The firing, the way it was handled, and Corcoran director David Levy's comments afterward reveal the Corcoran to be a dysfunctional mess.
The story may be a little bit confusing if you're not from DC, but bear with me. It's worth it.
The WPA/C is a Corcoran project that (kind of) facilitates opportunities for emerging DC artists. One of their key programs is an -ennial, called Options. The curator for the next Options show was to be a DC collector named Phillip Barlow. I know Barlow well -- I can't think of anyone in DC more committed to local artists and supporting work made here. He's deeply respected for reasons that go far beyond check-writing.
When Barlow took the job, he made it clear to the WPA/C's executive director that he would not include artists who had participated in the DC government program that put "Party Animals" on DC streets. (Picture decorated pandas, donkeys and elephants on the streets of our nation's capital.) Traditionally the Options show has been for artists who have not exhibited in Washington, or who have shown narrowly. Anyone who has had an animal on the streets of the city has exhibited. Widely.
WPA/C executive director Annie Adjchavanich told me that she knew right from the outset that Barlow planned to exclude those artists. She hired him knowing that. I know of no one who told Barlow that he couldn't execute his vision of the Options show.
Then, in late September, Barlow gave an interview to the Washington Post during which he discussed his decision to exclude the Party decorators. While perhaps this wasn't the most politic thing Barlow could have done, the interview publicly confirmed the vision for his show that he had outlined to the WPA/C.
At this point, Corcoran Museum of Art director David Levy started hearing about Barlow's decision, and the Post interview. Levy made it clear to Adjchavanich that this was unacceptable. Instead of backing the curator she had hired and the vision to which she had agreed, Adjchavanich asked Barlow to resign. Barlow said he refused and was fired. The WPA/C says Barlow resigned.
A press release from the WPA/C (dated Oct. 15) accuses Barlow of "violat[ing] basic ethical norms of curatorial practice, which is in direct conflict with the Corcoran's policy on Freedom of Artistic Expression, and subsequently the WPA\C's, mission statement." Well, if Barlow's vision of the show did all that supposedly awful stuff, why did Adjchavanich go along with Barlow's vision until the Corcoran stepped in? I asked Adjchavanich that question and she told me that she was finished with the issue and was moving on to find another curator and a space for the show.
I do not understand how Adjchavanich could be fully aware of Barlow's vision when hiring him, how she could support his vision as he worked to build the show, only to later fire him for implementing that vision. The only answer I can think of is this: Feeling heat from Levy, Adjchavanich fired her curator for doing what she hired him to do.
***
The handling of this issue by the Corcoran and by the WPA/C has received substantial scrutiny in Washington. The Washington Citypaper, the local alt-weekly, and the Washington Post are both said to be investigating. (It wouldn't surprise me to see both feature stories on the matter in their Thursday editions.) The DC blogosphere, from arts sites to general interest sites such as DCist has been all over this. As a result, the WPA/C and the Corcoran have been busy playing defense.
Yesterday, MAN obtained a copy of an email David Levy sent to an inquiring artist. (The same email was sent to a number of DC news organizations, including to the Citypaper and to the Post.) In it, Levy claims that by insisting on the ouster of Barlow that he was flying the flag of tolerance, that he played a role in firing a curator who was, in his view, discriminating against people:
"If we begin by excluding one entire group, where do we draw the line? Communists? Republicans? Blacks? Jews? People with red hair? This is a Pandora's box that cannot be opened in a society that values liberty."
It is fair to disagree with Barlow's curatorial decision not to include Party decorators. That would have been a perfectly appropriate debate both before he was hired and after he was hired. But for Levy to equate a curatorial decision with bigotry is wrong and inexcusable. If Levy does not understand the difference between a curatorial decision and bigotry, he has no business holding a job at a museum.
Ultimately, how much disgrace will Levy's board tolerate? They tolerated a show of handbags. They tolerated the J. Seward Johnson show. Washington Post critic nailed it when he wrote that (password, etc.), "The Corcoran has tumbled all the way from nobody to laughingstock." (To be fair, Gopnik might have pointed out that the Corcoran's photography department is among the two or three most respected photography departments in America.)
Will the Corcoran board also tolerate his institution's clumsy handling of the WPA/C/ Barlow affair? And how will they handle a director who can't tell the difference between a curatorial decision and bigotry that imperils "liberty?" (And how bizarre is it to read that paragraph from the director of the Corcoran, the museum that turned away Mapplethorpe?)
I understand that this has been a difficult week at the Corcoran. Last week board chairman Otto Reusch died. Services are planned for this weekend. It is unfair to expect the Corcoran board to address this situation right away.
But address it they must. It is time for a housecleaning at the Corcoran. As the Barlow affair makes clear, neither Levy nor Adjchavanich are serving the institution well.
And this story isn't over... Here's where it may go next: The Corcoran is receiving $40M from the District of Columbia for its hoped-for Frank Gehry building. The Party projects are city government projects. Did someone from the city make a call to the Corcoran regarding Barlow...?
Related: Thinking About Art asks the right questions, Grammar.police discusses.
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ArtForum: still clueless
How NY-centric is ArtForum? In their daily news roundup, they don't even mention Deborah Gribbon's dismissal at the Getty Museum. Whoops.
Update: They've got it on now. Their link is to a TV station... not the LA Times. Odd.
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Barry Munitz Smackdown
UPDATE: MAN is getting swamped by hits from getty.edu servers. Welcome Getty-ites. Leak to me. My email address is tylergreendc@REMOVETHISyahoo.com...
One of the nice things about living in Washington is that I'll be 3,000 miles away from Getty Trust uber-boss Barry Munitz when he reads this morning's LA Times. (Password/etc.)
Barry, recently "resigned" Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon has more friends than you. (MAN readers know this story from yesterday -- MAN broke the news via a blind item.)
How bad is this morning's LAT story for Munitz, who, apparently forced out Gribbon? Put it this way --Munitz runs the Getty Trust, one of the wealthiest institutions in America. His job is to give away money and to spend money. And the LAT could still only barely found anyone to say anything nice about Munitz.
Meanwhile, if you wanted to call LAT journos Suzanne Muchnic and Louise Roug to say something nice about Gribbon, you probably got busy signals. "[John] Walsh, who ran the museum from 1983 to 2000, called Gribbon's departure 'a black eye to the Getty Trust,'" Muchnic wrote.
I can't help picturing this story as a kind of tag-team pro wrestling event. Picture the big, hulking wrestlers taking on, oh, I dunno, a former California state government bureaucrat. I imagine Munitz, knocked into silliness by Walsh's quote, watching from the mat as Walsh tags teammate Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and past president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. Davies thunders into the ring, bent on one thing and one thing only: delivering his signature move, the devastating CultureFlexer Hammer-lock:
"My chief concern is that Barry Munitz, who came to the Getty without any background or knowledge of museums or art history, is making moves that have enormous consequence for Los Angeles, for culture in Southern California and beyond.
"I am very worried that there is a toxic atmosphere at the Getty, and I lay it at his door. This concerns a cultural legacy for all of us."
Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! (OK, that's boxing, not pro wrestling. Shaddup.)
I picture Munitz reeling dizzily, muttering something about how the MCA San Diego will never see a dollar from the Getty, when he falls on his butt. Munitz shakes off the blow and tries to look around for the Southland's cultural leadership elite, hoping for help. He searches the ring area for Jeremy Strick (MOCA), Ann Philbin (Hammer) and Andrea Rich (LACMA). Seeing none of them, still clutching Gribbon's "resignation" letter, he mutters something about being "dumbfounded."
Davies and Walsh high-five. Then, as occasionally happens in pro wrestling, while Davies and Walsh are celebrating, help for Munitz arrives.
"Barry has provided strong leadership for over six years. He is a great supporter of all of the Getty programs and has brought us into active engagement with the world at large as well.
"We love our museum," [Deborah] Marrow added. "We have a beautiful, wonderful museum, but we have other programs as well."
Munitz looks temporarily revived! But wait... Deborah Marrow... isn't she the director of the Getty Grant Program? She works for Munitz! To get someone to say something nice about Munitz, Muchnic had to call an employee? And an employee whose job it was to run the Getty program that most competed with Gribbon's museum? Back to our pro wrestling analogy...
The referee, who had been temporarily distracted by whatever pro wrestling referees are usually distracted by, is back in the ring. "Foul!" he cries. Everyone knows that when a journo quotes an employee praising her boss that it's a last resort, that deadline was looming and sometimes ya gotta take what you can get. The referee's punishment: Well, a quote from an employee (especially when accompanied by a handpicked Getty-family-of-c3s board member) is the journo equivalent of giving someone an atomic wedgie. It's just plain embarassing. Atomic wedgie to Munitz.
The worst part about an atomic wedgie is that you're so preoccupied with having been atomic wedgied that you might not see what's coming next. Because as Munitz is trying to solve the wedgie problem, Davies has wandered back into the ring. He's brandishing a quote and he's about to whack Munitz upside the head with it:
"First John Walsh left, then Stephen Rountree [executive vice president and chief operating officer], then Barbara Whitney. The last straw is Deborah Gribbon. I see this as part of a deliberate and deeply troubling purge of the best and the brightest people in the field."
Ouch.
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Random thoughts on the Getty...
So Deborah Gribbon was forced out at the Getty. Some random thoughts...
This morning Glenn Lowry woke up, read MAN (ha!) and thought to himself: "Drat, now I have competition for running the Met."
Who's in the running for the job...
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Getty: It's official
MAN's morning item realized: Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon is officially out. (And maybe she'll e-mail MAN to dish some dirt!) Getty chief curator Bill Griswold will serve as acting director.
UPDATE: I'm receiving a bunch of anonymous emails with stories about the Getty and the director search. Please sign emails -- I won't reveal names on the blog if you ask me not to.
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MAN goes blind
MAN has heard from multiple sources that one of LA's major museums isn't as well-oiled a machine as it might appear to be. Its director might be on the next train out of town. It could happen this week...
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More from the Carnegie
Some random thoughts about the Carnegie International...
"...[W]e asked Chiho to make a new mural, and she said yes. And I gave her a 40-foot wall in front of the museum -- not the first thing you see but almost. And I thought, this is going to be great. This beautiful utopia and these bright colors are going to be great as the opener for my exhibition.
Anyway, about two weeks ago I got the pdf file of the mural that we're getting and -- it's an apocalypse! It's our war. It's unbelievable. It never occurred to me that an artist who is interested in zombies and lizards and cherry blossoms would directly engage with our moment in this way. Well, 40 feet in front of the museum is a pretty big venue for a battle scene, so I was hesitant to put this in Pittsburgh’s collective public face."
Are you kidding me? A curator of contemporary art is surprised when an artist engages with the present moment in a work for a major international exhibit? And... it's a tame mural. Very tame. Big waves? Fire? Doves? C'mon.
- Speaking of Hoptman, I have rarely read anything so incomprehensible as her catalogue essay. For a fine ennial catalogue essay (and they're rare), check out Rob Storr's essay on the grotesque. Hoptman did a fine job with the Drawing Now catalogue... therefore methinks the problem is with the format: the capture-it-all-in-23-pages ennial catalogue format.
- I hope we are now officially done with R. Crumb installations in big group shows. And that I won't have to look at a retro anytime soon. Yawn.
- Discuss: Mark Grotjahn and Jay DeFeo;
- What's most important about the Carnegie isn't what the ArtElite 1000 think of it (we're sluts, we do anywhere there's art), but whether Pittsburghers go see it and what they think of it. How does it play in Peoria?
- How come I never see a bad Neo Rauch? There must be some, right?
- Having been to all three of this year's ennials, it's pretty darn clear that curators don't do DC. There are 6-12 artists here that would be look great in those ennials... I mean, if my pals and I can JetBlue around the country, why can't Big Shot Curators?
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The Carnegie International
Excerpts from my Bloomberg review of the Carnegie International, on view now in Pittsburgh (if you'd like the full review, email me; the image below is R. Crumb's Untitled (Carnegie International poster), 2004; Courtesy of the artist (© 2004) and Paul Morris Gallery, New York):
There is some really good work, some pretty average art and some work that is terrible. A mattress, stuck high up on a wall, painted yellow and dripping yet more yellowness, fits the latter category. Part of an installation by Jim Lambie, it may or may not be a monument to bedwetting.
 Because curators are eager to rationalize personal choices, they often scramble to create an argument that pulls their show together. The theme of this show is supposed to be something about life's "Ultimates.'' Before the show, Hoptman told Artnet Magazine: "The time now might call for a look more at the macro rather than the micro. And in art terms maybe this exhibition is going to focus on the epic rather than the everyday."
OK! In addition to a mattress tacked to the upper regions of a wall, Hoptman's show included two artists exploring pantyhose (Saul Fletcher and Senga Nengudi) and a suite of photographs of pole dancers (Philip-Lorca diCorcia). ...
... The hit of the show seems to be a video installation by little-known Polish video artist Katarzyna Kozyra, who has exhibited extensively in Europe, but only at some smaller venues in the U.S. Her "Rite of Spring'' is a stop-animation mix of gender-bending and Igor Stravinsky that should raise her profile. Senior citizens equipped with artificial genitalia are shown lying on the floor acting out the physically demanding ballet movements once choreographed by Nijinsky. It is an odd meditation on life.
And some MAN-only thoughts...
During my final walk through the installation, I shared Kozyra's gallery with two of Pittsburgh's manliest men. Picture a couple of guys -- dragged to a museum by wives who thought culture would be good for them -- who were alternately transfixed and cracking up.
***
With the opening of the Carnegie, for the first time all three major American surveys opened in one year: Think of the Whitney Biennial, which was up from March through May, as the New York City kids' show; the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, which opened in July and is still on view, as the teen on his way to a not-quite-Ivy-League school; and the Carnegie as the mature adult show.
The Whitney is always a bit of a blunderbuss. This year it was a decent show featuring 108 artists. SITE Santa Fe was an excellent show with 60 artists, but it was more of a themed group show than a true biennial. Over half of the work was more than two years old and virtually none of it was commissioned. Rats.
Once upon a time, "ennials" were one of the few ways to see contemporary art in an institutional setting. Now most art museums include contemporary art in their collecting and exhibition programs. Biennials – even the Whitney's – look like regular old group shows.
America's "ennials," in their current form, have outlived their usefulness. All three institutions, especially the two urban museums, should consider how they can make their "ennials" more special and less like mundane theme shows.
In showing an average of 10 works from 40 artists, Hoptman is on the right track. When I ignored the alleged theme, I enjoyed parts of the International. More work by fewer artists is one part of how museums should reinvent their biennials. It gives viewers a fighting chance to find and remember a few favorites.
Related: Blake Gopnik on the Carnegie (password, etc.); Hoptman interviewed on Artnet; Fallon and Rosof here and here.
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Day O' Ennials
Because every arts institution worth its education program has a biennial, the Orange County Museum of Art has launched a 2004 California Biennial.
Christopher Knight, always happy to champion California artists, reviewed the OCMA show in the LAT this week. Knight says it's a good show... and cleverly uses the occasion to raise the flag for California and LA art:
...OCMA is positioning itself to be the go-to museum for the region's art. And since California -- especially Southern California -- has been producing arguably the most significant American art since the 1990s, the prospects are tantalizing. ...
Cosmopolitanism is also a standard. Only nine of the 28 artists were born in California. A like number were born abroad -- Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Israel, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Portugal. The rest moved here from around the United States; like most of their foreign-born counterparts, they typically came for one of the state's celebrated art schools, then stayed.
Los Angeles is the epicenter of new art. Nineteen of the artists are based in L.A., with the rest working around the Bay Area. L.A. is a powerful magnet for talent, with an array of significant studio and exhibition possibilities more dense and more readily available than elsewhere. The Orange County Museum is taking good advantage of its location as a satellite of its northern neighbor.
More on -ennials later today (that is, I'll post excerpts from my Bloomberg review of the Carnegie), but for now, let's just say I was surprised and disappointed that there was only one Angeleno, Mark Grotjahn, in the International. (There were five Angelenos in Rob Storr's SITE Santa Fe biennial.) I think that if I were an LA museum director or curator or art school bigwig or something of that sort, I would consider it a smart career move to find residencies, visiting crtic/curator/etc. programs and such to get curators and critics out to LA and San Francisco more.
Related: abLA, me on Artnet last year, writing about regional biennials, Knight's full review, available if you know my email address.
Unrelated: A couple of people have emailed me to tell me that the NYFA link appears to be broken. It's working now.
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(The latest) funniest thing ever
So yesterday LACMA hosts a press preview for their new exhibit, the Phillips Collection's roadshow of marketable, turnstile-rattlin' Impressionist-era stuff from Dunc's collection. LACMA director Andrea Rich stands to speak before the assembled press. From the museum director's podium of authority, she tells the ink-stained wretches how excited she is to be able to bring art to The People. How it's a great mission. How it's a wonderful thing.
Meanwhile, behind Rich, a big banner promoting the show touts the work of an artist who painted Luncheon of the Boating Party. An artist named "Renior."
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Reminder: Creative Commons
 Reminder: MAN is licensed under a Creative Commons License. I've noticed that gallerists tend to think that what is on this site (see below) is promotional copy for them to use as they wish. It's not. Starting next week, gallerists using MAN copy as promotional material on their websites or in other places will hear from me. Sorry, but I don't want to be a salesman.
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Gallery crawling in LA II
 Best paintings that New Yorkers will never understand: At the Armory Fair last year, artist Patrick Wilson tipped me off to an Angeleno painter named Tom LaDuke. Good tip Patrick. I thought about LaDuke when I wandered through the re-opened Phillips Collection over the weekend. One of my favorite paintings at the Phillips is a small cityscape by Charles Sheeler, Skyscrapers. (The photograph on which the painting is based is available, printed from Sheeler's original negative, from the Library of Congress.) Sheeler's painting, which isn't much bigger than a laptop computer screen, smartly captures the rapidly emerging verticality of New York.
Tom LaDuke paints the relentless horizontality that is Los Angeles and suburban America. His paintings are tall and the 'burbs fill the bottom couple inches of the painting. They are relentlessly detailed, full of playful tweaks on scale, kind of like ships-in-a-bottle. They portray the steady, fluorescent, color-leeching suburban light, the dirty air, the creepiness of an area that has no specific sense of place.
This show at Angles in Santa Monica (website, people!) features both paintings and a room-sized sculptural installation. The sculptural installation is less successful than the paintings – the paintings have a well-developed language and the sculpture is a construction in search of a rationale.
LaDuke is a painter that will never be 'discovered' by New York or Chicago or London until he is shoved down their eyeballs. He's exactly the sort of painter who deserves a local champion, say, the Laura Owens treatment from the Hammer Museum or MOCA. (If SF MOMA was more interested in young, emerging artists and less interested in turnstile-turning, LaDuke would work there, too.)
Most rapid maturation: As the entire known art world has been buzzing over iona rozeal brown's fusion painting, I've held out. Brown's early paintings were too simple for me, too elemental, one-liners in a medium that forgets one-liners quite quickly. With her just-closed show at Sandroni Rey in Culver City, Brown has grown up in a hurry. Her paintings, still focused on Asian interest in hip-hop culture, have become denser, more narrative, more complete. Instead of showing us one Asian figure riffing off of one element of urban African-American culture, Brown's new paintings are more complete scenes, film stills from a story that exists only in Brown's head.
(Brown's work is on view now at Caren Golden in Chelsea.)
Random other sightems: Karou Mansour's paintings at LMAN in Chinatown are the same as they ever were, which is just fine by me… Bank's back gallery featured an "interactive table installation" by Osman Khan (above) in which light was projected on to a white table and the objects on that table created trails of color. It sounds gimmicky but I found it clever and fascinating... I've never seen more Katy Grannan photos in one place than I saw at Michael Kohn. I still haven't decided if that's a good thing, but the images are stuck in my head. But just as the Big German aesthetic is ubiquitous, there's a certain Big Yalie aesthetic that rivals it. Paging Kurland, Justine, for example… Ernesto Caivano's show at Bergamot's Richard Heller is drawing as craft and it's beautiful and haunting. Heller is notorious in LA for closing early, so if you go, call ahead…
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Gallery crawling in LA
In quickie fashion, some favorites from my most recent (two weeks ago) Los Angeles gallery crawl. This is the first of two posts today:
 Best photography: How good is Julius Shulman? There is a series of little Shulman black-and-whites up at Bergamot's Craig Krull Gallery. They're 3.4 inches by 2.1 inches. They're California in the 1930s. They're exquisite and mesmerizing. A wonderful rejoinder to Big Germanism.
Oh is it?: To hear the Bushies talk, Iraq is a bed of roses, ready for democracy and oil pumping. Simon Norfolk's photos at Gallery Luisotti juxtapose the scattering of war up against what was (presumably) present before war. Not all the photographs in this show are winners... but in context they're a powerful demonstration (or, for Bushies, a nagging demonstration) of the present.
Best gallery show, period: The best gallery show I saw in LA was an exhibit of Glenn Ligon's text paintings at Regen Projects. They are words, and they are evocations of other words. They are not (exactly) paintings, but they evoke paintings. They refer to race and sexual orientation, but without intending to provoke a single response. These aren't paintings that are made to be great paintings; they are paintings made to make you think.
So close: Aaron Romine's show at Karyn Lovegrove is about the pleasure -- the sometimes nearly naughty pleasure -- of looking. In each of Romine's paintings the viewer is making an intrusion into personal intimacy. The figures in these paintings are engaging directly with the artist, not defiantly but comfortably. I wanted to love these paintings but they didn't quite get there for me. They're just too simple.
Not sex, doilies: At SolwayJones (website, people!), Mark Flood is an abstract painter. He paints lace that is decorative, tactile and sensual in a way that recalls antiques, not lingerie. His lace is colorful, considered and detailed. Still, somehow, these are obviously paintings by a man. I haven't figured that part out, but I look forward to working on that when I see more of Flood's work.
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The weekend that was
As I mentioned on the blog last week, I spent the weekend in surprisingly attractive Pittsburgh, where the powers-that-be at the Carnegie Museum cleverly scheduled the opening of the International to coincide with the turning of fall colors. The hills around the city were spotted with color and the hills of southwestern Pennsylvania were especially vivid. I enjoyed the drives.
 The reason for the trip was, of course, opening of the Carnegie International. As you may be coming accustomed to by know, my thoughts on the show will remain a secret until my Bloomberg review runs later this week. I also enjoyed a stroll through the Carnegie's permanent collection, especially the time I spent with Pierre Bonnard's Nude in a Bathtub (1941-46). It's one of Bonnard's finest canvases painted after his wife's death. Washingtonians and New Yorkers have seen the painting several times in recent years. It's a gem.
It's an excellent example of the back-and-forth between Bonnard and Matisse. Did Bonnard borrow the sleeping-dog downstage center from Matisse's 1934 painting Interior with Dog (at the Baltimore Museum) or did Matisse borrow the 'phrase' from Bonnard's 1932 masterpiece The Bathroom (which is at MoMA)? Regardless of whether you date Bonnard's Nude to 1941 or 1946, he painted it at a time when Matisse's health was failing. Was Bonnard's painting an homage to his dead wife... as well as to his ailing friend?
(Dear MacArthur, Guggenheim or some other such foundation: Offer me a 4-year, $400,000 grant to write a Bonnard biography and I'll come up with a guess.)
I also checked out the Mattress Factory, an edgy kunsthalle on Pittsburgh's North Side. The Mattress Factory's two locations feature Cuban-born installation art. Most of it is pretty generic scattertrash, but Erik Garcia Gomez stood out. Gomez' installation, a series of time-lapsed photographs of an entire day, built into a room-sized aluminum square, was elegant and mature, an Olafur Eliasson-esque evocation of time and space.
The final Pittsburgh stop was The Warhol Museum. I felt indifferent.
The highlight of the trip was a stop at Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece. It's amazing. The leaves around it were yellow and orange. Bear Run was a-runnin'. Just go. (But when you're there, ignore the subpar Diego Riveras, et al.)
Elsewhere: Fallon & Rosof on the Carnegie, Boing Boing on R. Crumb at the Carnegie (kind of), and more Roberta & Libby: A chat with Laura Hoptman.
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Overheard
"I can't help it if the artist is a freak, Arlene!"
-- overheard over the weekend at a museum that shall remain nameless.
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Random thoughts on Flavin @ NGA
Late last week I posted an excerpt from my Dan Flavin review (scroll down to the image). And smart readers know how to get their eyes on a full copy. Today I wanted to toss in some random thoughts...
- I mentioned in my review that Flavin is installed on carpet. It's really awful. Buzz is that the show's curators know it, aren't happy about it, but couldn't put down wood floors because the structural floors in the I.M. Pei building are uneven. (The wood floor would crack.) Look for the NGA to do some significant floor work in the East Building sometime in the next few years;
- I also mentioned that some of the rooms are too densely installed. Flavins bleed into Flavins, thus diluting some of their power;
- My favorite mix of installation and artwork is Flavin's monument for those who have been killed in ambush... When I blog I try not to 'give away' parts of shows, so I'll just leave it at that;
- If you're art-smart enough to be reading MAN, you'll love one of the last rooms of the exhibit. In it the curators have assembled Flavin work that Flavinizes other artists. Go with a friend and see who can nail all the references;
- Dear National Gallery: Benches!!;
- The curators of the Smithson show in LA and the Flavin show in DC independently made the same decision: My artist made site-specific works. Nothing I can do in my show can capture those works because they're so site-specific. So I'm not going to show them. Even as I type that, it sounds like it should be a mistake. But it's not. Both teams of curators made the right choice. Photographs of Spiral Jetty or Amarillo Ramp would look cheesy when surrounded by Smithson's other work. Same with Flavin's site-specific work;
- Speaking of installation... why is there still a Tony Smith and Gerhard Richter installed on the mezzanine? They weren't made to be lit by green light.
- Why do the Flavins in the catalog look so good? Most of the works shown in the catalog were installed one at a time in Dia's building in Chelsea, then photographed, then taken down. Smart.
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Corcoran Biennial artists announced
Just as I'm on my way to the Carnegie, the names for America's fourth biennial, the Corcoran, are announced (kinda): The show, titled Closer to Home, will include: Rev. Ethan Acres, Chakaia Booker, Matthew Buckingham, Colby Caldwell, George Condo, Adam Fuss, James Huckenpahler, John Lehr, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Rezac, Dana Schutz, Jeff Spaulding, Kathryn Spence, Austin Thomas and Monique van Genderen. The show opens March 19, 2005.
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Dan Flavin @ the NGA
Here are some excerpts from my Bloomberg News review of Dan Flavin: A Retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. The excellent, colorful catalog is here. The complete catalog of Flavin's light works is here.
When I'm standing before a really great Dan Flavin sculpture, fluorescent light emitting all around me, I want to be quiet. I want to clear my mind and allow my eyes to absorb all of the colors the light has to offer. It's a little like being in church.
 Right now, "church" is the National Gallery of Art, where "Dan Flavin: A Retrospective" is on view until Jan. 9, 2005. The show's national tour is sponsored by Altria Group Inc. The Washington exhibit is presented by the architecture and design firm, Lehman-Smith + McLeish. It is a good, thorough show with a few installation problems.
Flavin (1933-1996) is one of modern art's undisputed geniuses and there is plenty of great art in this retrospective. Yet Flavin's work looks best when it is installed in galleries with reflective floors.
The show's curators, Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell of the Dia Art Foundation and Jeffrey Weiss of the NGA, know this. In their beautiful catalog, every photograph of a Flavin shows it installed on wooden or concrete floors. But as a result of building logistics, the NGA has installed Flavin on speckled gray carpet. That carpet, and the overly dense installation of several galleries, hold back the show.
***
If stained glass windows hadn't been invented until the 20th century, Dan Flavin would have dreamed them up. He is one of modern art's finest colorists. Flavin is the alchemist updater of a 2,000-year-old art form. In these works, colored glass is replaced by mercury and argon vapors. The artisan's hands are replaced by the artist's imagination. And the light comes not from on high, but from electricity.
Flavin's creations may be built from industrial light, but soaking in his art is similar to standing under a colorful church window. As with stained glass, the work of art itself provides only the beginning of the experience. Flavin's light fills a space and everything in it. The glow envelops gallery-goers, turns walls into canvases and leaves unexpected bursts of color on ceilings, in corners and on the white t-shirts of gallery visitors. ...
Bloggers on Flavin: Greg Allen, Grammar.police, Felix Salmon.
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Wee explanation
I am way behind on some posts I want to do. I want to post about the good stuff I saw in LA last week, about two more things I've seen in DC, and about the Barnes. I have an interview with MOCA curator Ann Goldstein on tape that I haven't had a chance to type up yet either. In short, I'm way, way behind.
Todd Gibson leaked the news about why I'm behind and several other bloggers have posted about it. (Thanks.) In short, I have (or have had) deadlines on reviews of the following shows in a ten-day period: Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin and the Carnegie International, plus a cool piece for a web-only publication TBA. I'm happy with the first two reviews, and I leave for the Carnegie on Thursday.
I don't think that every week is going to be like this. The fall arts season has just hit its stride and there have been a remarkable number of important shows that aren't in DC or NYC. (Making them a wee bit harder to get to.)
On the bright side, this is a great time for you to be checking out some of the other stud art blogs: Bloggy, James Wagner, NEWSgrist, From the Floor, Modern Kicks, Dangerous Chunky, Gallery Hopper, Grammar.police, and abLA all of which have been strong this fall. abLA is especially dead-on about this. (Heck, wander over to Poynter to read about how NYTBR has become The New Republic.)
So I promise to catch up. When Smithson and Flavin run, there will be lots of extra content on MAN. Maybe that will make up for my blog-sloth of late.
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Artnet rocks
Readers will be (apparently) thrilled to hear that the choice cuts idea just died. (No one's clicking the links!)
While the NYT is busy boring us all silly by telling us that young, shapely NYC babes are buying artworks by eight-year olds at auction (nota bene: that's the condensed version of a week's worth of NYT arts coverage), Artnet is on fire. Why is Artnet better than the Times right now? Easy. Artnet's editor has a background in... art! Don't miss:
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Choice cuts, part one
Anecdotal reports indicated that something like only three percent of MAN readers were clicking through to Around the Blogosphere links, so I want to try something different. As is standard operating procedure here at MAN, over a series of posts today I'm going to steal Terry's way of doing things (conveniently, this allows me to finish my Dan Flavin review):
Greg Allen, who doubles as a MoMA bigwig, gives us the early skinny on the new MoMA:
The "core historical collection" as taken in another generation, and art from the last 30+ years--which is still in process and historical flux--will be shown in consecutive 9-month views. Beyond these accretions and intentional change, the space, the vistas, the juxtapositions and potential paths generated by the new building are probably the greatest difference.
Todd Gibson has been discussing corporate art collections with UBS curator Petra Arends. It's her stuff that will be in that new MoMA building we've heard so much about (and so recently):
Public cultural institutions are increasingly subject to enormous pressure and can no longer do the work of providing a place for culture on their own. The governments do not have a lot of money to acquire art any longer.
We believe that it is part of our cultural commitment to support and invest in parts of our culture, in the arts. And we are ready to give that back to our community. We do believe that it is our duty as a global corporate player to show a cultural commitment and give back to the community.
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LAT: Archihire
The LA Times has a new architecture critic. Christopher Hawthorne, recently the architecture critic for (art-averse) Slate, is the guy.
(If you've been living in a bunker, the previous LAT critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, is now the man at the NYT.)
Speaking of the LAT, Alex Pham wrote a nice piece about some emerging conservation issues in art. (Password, etc., here.) One addition to his piece: Conservation funding for museums is practically non-existent... and the number of conservators working in the field -- and being trained -- is tiny.
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Revealed: NYT cultural revamp
Apparently the NYT's cultural revamp consists of two foci:
- The NYT has selected a conservatively funky new headline font; and
- More stories about grade-school children who paint. (Number of NYT feature stories on painting tots in the last week: 3. Number of NYT feature stories on adult artists: 0.)
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The Weekend That Was
 Last Tuesday, upon my return from a trip to LA (which came fast on the heels of a season-opening trip to NYC), I hinted that the best art place right now isn't NYC or LA... it's Washington, DC.
After a weekend of wandering around DC -- and being acutely aware of what I have yet to see -- I'm feeling on pretty firm ground with that assertion.
For starters, we have Dan Flavin and they don't. For more specifics on Flavination you'll have to wait until later in the week when my review runs on Bloomberg News. (I promise to post more of it this time.)
But gallery-wise, DC's as good as it's been in many months. For starters, painter Maggie Michael's first (real) solo show at G Fine Art is strong. In previous shows, mostly group forays in DC and elsewhere, Michael has demonstrated a visual language built around the pour. This exhibit demonstrates Michael adding words and phrases to that vocabulary.
Across the street(ish) from G Fine Art, I think I saw the first thing I've liked at Transformer since they did an artist's books show about two years ago. (Transformer is a non-profit alternative space that is about the size of your bathtub.) That's not to say that Transformer's entire show is solid -- it's not. But Jesse Amado's clever text-filled works are smart without being gimmicky (as wordy art often is).
Numark Gallery is featuring a group show about the intersection of art and architecture, art that deals with buildings, space, and such. The best piece in the show is by Isidro Blasco, a giant built-environment that derives its effect from how Blasco uses photography. Robert Lazzarini's 'desk' isn't the best Lazzarini I've ever seen -- maybe because it's the second-biggest. It's a hoot nonetheless.
At Conner Contemporary I think a drawing and video installation by Avish Khebrehzadeh (a DC'er who won the Young Italian Art award at the last Venice) is interesting but Conner's dated space is so tiny that it's hard to tell. I was as far away from the wall on which it was projected, and I still couldn't see very well.
And then there are the shows I haven't seen: a massive Gary Winogrand show at the Smithsonian's International Gallery and Calder Miro at the Phillips.
It's pretty good here....
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Revisiting Frieze
In the last few months I've heard Jerry Saltz talk over and over again about how good Frieze magazine is. Being the stubborn sort, I'd never actually picked up a copy to see if the magazine had, indeed, improved. So while I was in LA last week, I saw Frieze at the MOCA bookstore and bought a copy.
Uh, it's really good, really engaging, really readable. Instead of writing lots of stories about the same conceptual artist (OK, maybe it just seems to me like that's what ArtForum does -- or maybe an entire summer of looking at Franz West images on artforum.com drilled that into my head), Frieze engages the broader art world. For example, it included stories on institutional issues such as deaccessioning, as well as readable, thoughtful reviews.
So, for the first time in eons, I subscribed to an art magazine. I think this qualifies me for a twelve-step program.
Plus: AbLA talks about Frieze too.
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