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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Hirshhorn news: New director
MANscoop: Olga Viso will be named as the new director of the Hirshhorn, probably today. She had been deputy director. (Update: Announcement made.)
Ned Rifkin, who had been running Bunshaft's Bunker, becomes full-time Smithsonian Under Secretary for Art (no such alliteration available).
Mark Felt was not our source.
Things that amuse me: The Hirshhorn held no press conference introducing their new director. The Corcoran, however, just held a presser to announce that they don't have a director!
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You made me do it: On criticism
A month ago a thoughtful story in the LAT Calendar section would go uncommented upon. Sure, occasionally blogs, er, stole content from Calendar and shared it with the blogosphere (ahem, whistlin' dixie here...), but that's not the same as content being widely available.
So my guess is that some folks at the LAT must be quietly thrilled that they've started a meme that has rippled throughout the blogosphere and the MSM. Scott Timberg started it a week ago with a story headlined: "Critical condition: Once almighty arbiters of American taste, critics find their power at ebb tide. Is it a dark time for the arts, or the dawn of a new age?"
Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones picked up the meme on Sunday (you'll need BugMeNot) and so did Dominic Papatola of the St. Paul Pioneer Press (you'll need BugMeNot again). And at Art Basel, Marc Spiegler (who wrote about all of this for The Art Newspaper several months ago) and Jerry Saltz will take the meme across the pond. Speaking of Saltz, his write-up for the VV this week could be read as a lament that auctioneers and those-who-buy-at-auctions have more oomph in the art world -- and sex -- than do critics. It's a fascinating read. Saltz slyly reminds us that while a collector can make an ass of himself by dropping $1M on a Marlene Dumas, that ultimately it's the critic who points out how big an ass he is.) And of course the blogosphere is all over this one: Grammar.police and Modern Kicks have gone back and forth, to name two of a dozen. (And I took on a variant of this convo too.)
So I was going to leave all of this alone. Then I started reading today's email. Everyone seems to want to talk about either this topic or the new MoMA (you hate it, you really, really hate it). So let me add two thoughts:
- There never was a golden age of art critics when the world moved in lock-step with what art critics said is good and bought/museo-attended accordingly. Never was. And every story I've read seems to start with the belief that such a time existed. The whole question of "influence" is a canard. What is "influence" anyway? (And don't gimme Clem -- at times he acted as much like a production-determining/controlling/advising dealer as anything else.)
- On blogs and art: There is a historical precedent for the role blogs play in the art world. What we do is quite similar to the role pamphleteers/'zines/etc. have played in conversations about art in the last 120 years. Guillaume Apollinaire, to name one example, wrote in tabloid handouts, sometimes doing no more than listing the artists who were in shows he'd seen. Freebie tabloids = blogs. Apollinaire's columns were often sandwiched betwen patent medicine ads. Kind of reminds me of Google Ads for erotic art posters I see 'round the 'net.
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The weekend that was
 1.) The Whitney's "Landscape," a show of work from the Whitney's permanent collection, isn't a strict landscape show (Flavin?), but it is a reminder that the Whitney needs a place to show their permanent collection. (The Rothko and the Newman are delightful. But no Clyfford Still?) Next summer the Whitney will hang its permanent collection all summer. And it would have been neat-o if the Whitney had slipped its fantastic new Florian Maier-Aichen into the show as well. (It's on view, three floors away.) (Related: From the Floor did the Whitney this weekend too.)
2.) I'm happy to report that Anne Truitt's Catawba is back out at MoMA. (It was damaged several months ago.) It's nestled up against a wall (which is how the Hirshhorn has installed their Truitt for now), but that's a start.
That's not to say MoMA's off the hook regarding security problems. (Why is there reflective glass on a Brice Marden beeswax painting? I mean... talk about unclear on the concept!) I saw lots of examples of guards doing nothing -- except talking on their cell phones. In the galleries. Not a supervisor in sight. The most remarkable thing I saw on Saturday was this: I was looking at the fifth-floor Don Judd (yo, MoMA: dust it!) and a woman walked up, only-semi-sneakily gripped it with two hands and pulled and pushed to see if it would move. Fifteen feet away, a guard chattered away on his cell phone and did nothing.
3.) In the middle of the Met's gallery of 10 Clyfford Still paintings, (the 10 given to the museum in 1986 by Still's widow Patricia) is a David Smith sculpture. Why? It's horrible. It destroys the room. (I'm working on a magazine story about Still and the coming Still museum in Denver, so I'm extra-sensitive to all things Still at the moment.)
4.) Among the good news to come out of the resignation of David Levy at the Corcoran: The museum confirmed that it will not consider deaccessioning as a way of balancing its massive budget defecits.
5.) I'm surprised how little comment there has been to the replacement of Paul Signac's Portrait of Felix Feneon at the entrance to MoMA's "first" painting gallery. Van Gogh's Portrait of Joseph Roulin has replaced it.
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At the H of H
A few days ago I wandered through the Hirshhorn, taking a look at the latest permanent collection hanging. A couple of things jumped out:
 The Hirshhorn just acquired Miguel Angel Rios's A Morir ('til Death), a fantastic three-screen video installation showing a Central American playground game. All three screens show a contest involving spinning tops on a grid. The tops buzz around, they fall down, more tops enter, they fall down, and eventually only one is standing. It's plainly -- almost too plainly -- a five-minute metaphor for life. (As I watched the video, I thought to myself that it's about as long as a pop song.)
The other Hirshhorn gallery that I enjoyed included several paintings by Spain's Juan Genoves. (The gallery put together by curator Valerie Fletcher.) Genoves's paintings (and etchings) address surveillance and the power of the state. In Man, Genoves splits the canvas in two. On the top half, a fleet of shadowy, silver planes hovers. On the bottom half, in a red spotlight, a man runs, attempting to flee from or hide from the ominous planes. It feels futile.
In each of the Genoveses the H of H has up, the individual seems doomed to control by shadowy figures that seem to represent the looming, oppressive power of the state. Given what we know about American practices at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan, that's an uncomfortable thing to think about.
Related: As Congress watches and does nothing, the Smithsonian's physical infrastructure is falling apart, allowing objects from our nation's history to be damaged or destroyed. Read the summary of the report here and the full report here.
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Edward Burtynsky in SD
 In today's LA Times: Christopher Knight's thoughts on Edward Burtynsky as a dramatic updater of Carleton Watkins and Timothy O'Sullivan, a "chronicler of human intervention." It's really good.
(The occasion is a Burtynsky show at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. A larger version of the show originated at the National Gallery of Canada (lots of cool multimedia here), and I saw an expanded version in Burtynsky's hometown, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, last year. The show will touchdown in New York this fall at the Brooklyn Museum.)
Last year I wrote a short profile of Burtynsky for Black Book. I think he's one our most important artists. I especially admire how his work comes out of his own biography and his own life experience (and not from an MFA degree): Burtynsky grew up in southern Ontario, the son of an auto worker who died young from cancer likely caused by exposure to PCBs. ("PCB" is, essentially, a fancy way of saying 'super-toxic oil.') As a young lad, Ed worked in the same auto plants his father did and saw first-hand how dangerous PCBs were: Nearly everyone who had worked with his father, nearly everyone who had mucked around in the same PCBs, was dead.
I didn't use this paragraph in my Black Book piece, but after reading Knight's piece last night I wanted to post it. Knight points out that Watkins and others chronicled human intervention in the west. Watkins in particular photographed how Americans began to exploit one of America's most prominent national resources: trees. Burtynsky updates their work not just formally, and not just in spirit, but by chronicling our abuse of another natural resource: oil.
Ed Burtynsky is the world's only oil tourist. Ever since that first day of PCB cleanup at the GM plant in St. Catherine’s – they all died – Ed knew that working in industry wasn't for him. Obviously oil drove the auto industry, but it drove everything else around Ed too. There would be no mining without the means to power the mines and transport the minerals. That was powered by oil. How are goods shipped around the world, creating the much-praised phenomenon of globalization? Oil. The ships that are destroyed and recycled in Bangladesh: What fuels those ships? Oil. The highway interchanges, truck stops, and fields of pump jacks Ed has photographed? Oil, oil, oil. Even when Ed photographed things that weren’t directly tied to oil, the connection is there. The Three Gorges Dam, which will provide one-ninth of China’s power, is considered a necessity by the Chinese because they don’t have any oil. Just dirty coal.
Related: Me on Burtynsky at Charles Cowles in 2004; tease for my Black Book story (with a great image from the Three Gorges Dam series); the remarkably good catalogue for Burtynsky's show; Burtynsky's own image-filled website; Burtynsky, with Bono and Robert Fischell, wins the 2004 TED Prize, complete with video and other fun.
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Future of arts journ... zzzzzz
Here's a topic I usually avoid like a Corcoran sculpture exhibit: The Future of Arts Criticism. (Organ music here.)
Today comes word that Columbia University closed the National Arts Journalism Program. The National Critics' Conference kicks off this week in LA with much hand-wringing about the future of art criticism. On Sunday the LA Times ran a piece asking if critics were relics. (Warning: I'm quoted in that one.)
People, get over ourselves. Criticism and arts journalism is not dead, it is in a transitional stage. In my experience, regional magazines are clamoring for arts writing. (Hello demographic match!) Local blogs such the -ists frequently include reviews, and by names you know. Sure, the quality and insight isn't the same you get in a daily paper or in an alt-weekly, but the medium is new and evoloving. Art blogs are thriving and are full of new and interesting voices, unless you're Lee Siegel in which case you think that art blogs exist to tear you down. (See that LAT link above.) Well, yes... there is enough vibrant writing about art out there that propagating goofy homo-theory tends to get certain writers fast-tracked to derision.
(Speaking of blogs, art and the 'Net... The not-yet-open Katzen Arts Center at American University has a blog. And more Big Journo should embrace culture-blogging. Here's a collaboration between the Inky and the Philly Orchestra (which seems slippery to me, but no one asked.)
(Cleverly) related: From the Floor.
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Off to the Corcoran
I'm on my way down to the Corcoran, where the powers that be are about to announce director David Levy's dismissal, the death of the Frank Gehry addition, and who knows what else. This was all inevitable -- and it was inevitable two years ago, if not three. What took the board so long? Why did they wait until we almost completely stopped caring? I can't even remember the last time I eagerly looked forward to a non-photo show at the Corc.
To people outside of DC, this is a big non-story, merely the 18th open museum directorship in the U.S. But frankly, I'm not sure why it's a big story to people in the DC arts community. It's been a long time since the Corcoran stood for anything. (That is, anything except J. Seward Johnson, handbags and something having to do with dresses. Populism of the pandering kind.) The Corc reps speaking today must indicate that they take the integrity of the museum and the public's trust seriously. David Levy never did. The Corc must make us want to care what happens there. Because right now, I don't.
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Best press release ever
From the Prague Biennial. Or one of them. Or something. The headline on the press realease (which is not, alas, online) is: "PRAGUE BIENNIAL is the one and only PRAGUE BIENNIAL." Apparently another biennial in Prague decided to call itself the PRAGUE BIENNIAL and the organizers of the first PRAGUE BIENNIAL got all pissy about it.
(Can't the UN pass a law against biennials? Geesh.)
My favorite lines from the press release:
- "For those who live outside the Czech Republic and do not know Milan Knizak, perhaps a brief introduction is necessary. One of the latest Fluxus artists and certainly not one of the best, he is known to have been a bit of a rebel in the past, opposing local traditions and systems."
- "An all round man of power indeed. Power which in a short while made him forget his past as an arsonist and made him become a fierce and implacable enemy of every form of new and progressive/avant-garde art. He bitterly fights and boycotts all the young artists from Prague and only patronizes the mediocre and incapable ones."
- "[w]e, being people who like to work calmly and without traumas [!!!!!] (the work and stress are tiring enough without additional trauma from internal battles) tried to find a venue for the new edition of PRAGUE BIENNALE that was not the National Gallery, having to face substantial stress and costs that reduced our already limited budget."
- And best of all: "The other exhibition at the National Gallery is merely a group show, a caravan of artists and curators that act as testimony of Milan Knizak's mental confusion and his sole desire to bring harm to others."
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Thing @ The Hammer
I would guess that not very many people have seen both Thing at the UCLA Hammer Museum and Greater New York at PS1. This is too bad. One is an example of what a tight and focused group show can be, and the other is a sprawling, unruly behemoth.
(Number of curators for Thing: 3. Number of curators for Greater New York: 31.)
Thing is the better of the two shows. Its premise is clear: Artists in LA are redefining what sculpture is. Here's how.
(Number of artists in Thing: 20. Number of artists in Greater New York: So many that the museum doesn't know. The show's press release promises "more than 160.")
 That's not to say Thing is perfect. It includes too much lifeless trompe l'oeil, such as the work of Kaz Oshiro or Matt Johnson. I'm fine with work that is decorative and happy -- Mindy Shapero's sculptural Pattern & Decoration -- but it just feels out of place here. Krysten Cunningham's yarn art tries to marry craft with a minimalist aesthetic, but it fizzes out and ends up looking like, well, yarn art.
The best work in Thing shares a unifying principle: Something bad has happened. The world is decaying, it's falling apart, or it's already over. This is what's left.
Joel Morrison's sculptures are made up of garbage wrapped in packing material, fiberglass or metal. They are contained and abandoned energy. I wondered what the garbage inside them was. How they were balanced. Where the garbage came from. If Morrison wrapped a David Smith if I would like the Smith better.
Kristen Morgin's Sweet and Low Down (above) inspired visions of an apocalyptic, post-carbon emissions world, in which the planet we destroyed in turn destroyed our fossil fuel-burners. Except Morgin's car is made of unfired clay, wood, wire, cement and glue. Ultimately what is durable is materials that come from the earth itself. Morgin's work was my favorite in the show.
Renee Lotenero's work apes meticulously built architectural or design environments that have simply fallen apart. How?
Even the show's less successful work is full of detritus as art: Rodney McMillian's work appears abandoned, and Chuck Moffit's has crashed.
At the end, I wondered if the critters Nathan Mabry's sly sculptures will rule the next world. And if all these artists know something is coming.
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Morning reads
Later today, some thoughts on Thing at the UCLA Hammer Museum. But first, your morning reading. There were four big art stories this weekend. To the great relief of everyone who reads MAN, none of them were in the NYT.
In the LAT, there is plenty wrong with King Tut. And the more you think (and read) about it, the more there is wrong with it;
In the Inky, the Barnes story. Kind of. Well, part of it. In fact, parts of it that are rather old, around 1995ish. Come to think of it... huh?
In the WP, David Childs, the planning czar of LA's Grand Avenue and NYC's Ground Zero, gives up on DC. He's turned over the chair of the Commission of Fine Arts to Rusty Powell, whose background in planning includes... overseeing an addition to the sprawling, disjointed monstrosity that is LACMA's campus. Oye. (Dear NGA: Do the WASPs say 'oye?') The chairmanship of the CFA is a reasonably powerful gig in DC -- how do you think the WWII Memorial got built where it got built? -- so I wonder what Powell wants... perhaps a NGA photo museum?
Finally, friend-of-the-IRS Larry Gagosian must be thrilled his gallery doesn't have a Seattle outpost, har har. (Via)
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NY and LA, at it again
This is hilarious -- especially if you click through the link to read...
And our girl Tracey Emin is back in The Independent today. She's less funny and more confusing. Except this part. Which is kind of funny because it's so, well, revealing:
This is a really obvious thing, but I can't understand that anybody would be cruel to children. Mental abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. Babies with cigarette burns up their arms, Children sitting in their own excrement in dustbins for days - the list is endless.
But let's go back to Buckingham Palace. I was invited there once before, by the Queen's equerry...
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MoMA hearts NYT
NOTE: While this is the top post on the page, the top story of the day is right below this one.
I love it when predictions play out... exactly as predicted. You think Carol Vogel and MoMA don't have a symbiotic relationship? Today Vogel runs with the story of the Harvey Shipley Miller-Rothschild Foundation-MoMA drawings gift.
Earlier this week, I told you about the gift. The Art Newspaper followed MAN. Artinfo.com called MoMA's press office in an effort to confirm what we'd published. MoMA refused to tell them anything, providing a cryptic, bizarre answer: "Contacted by Artinfo.com, MoMA spokesperson Margaret Doyle could not confirm the invitation since, she says, it was not a public document issued by the press office."
So everyone knew the gift was a done deal. But MoMA wouldn't tell anyone "officially" because Vogel had to have it "first."
Strangely, this brings us to yesterday, when NYT boss Bill Keller announced the appointment of new culture editor Sam Sifton. In his welcome memo he wrote: "One of the most gratifying things about the past year in Culture — a distant second to the sheer pleasure of reading it, of course — is the collaborative spirit that has grown up in the place." We didn't realize he meant the collaborative spirit between MoMA and Carol Vogel.
(Also this week: Michael Kimmelman hints at deaccession scandals at MoMA. Of course, an NYT investigation into that might damage that collaborative spirit!)
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Blogger favorites
 UPDATE: I'm bumping this up. Just for fun. And I've finally made my two choices:
Favorite painting in America: Pierre Bonnard's The Open Window at the Phillips Collection (at left). (Am I cheating/changing my mind? Yes, it's a woman's prerogative. Which doesn't explain why I'm doing it. The beauty of this being about favorites is that pliability-of-thought rules.)
Favorite American painting: Picking a Diebenkorn or MAMFW's Rothko is too easy and predictable. So I'm going to pick the Whitney's My Egypt, by Charles Demuth.
Bloggers are beginning to post their own favorite painting in America and their own favorite American painting. I'll update this post as others weigh in:
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Waste of newsprint
I was going to ignore this, but it just went up on the main AJ page: Why is the Washington Post so proud of being clueless and uninterested in art? That story is plain embarassing. Why are stupidity and a lack of curiosity traits a writer would want to proudly show off? (And assuming your audience is stupid makes for bad writing.)
It also occurs to me that the Post didn't run this kind of story when artworks from the estate of Post publisher Kay Graham were up at auction a year or two back.
(And equally good question: How did this tripe get past editors at the Post? Are they that eager for their paper to be seen as dumb? Meanwhile, the Post is ignoring real arts stories, such as the John Wilmerding-NGA-Durand scandal.)
(And speaking of uncovered stories -- why haven't the San Francisco papers mentioned the forthcoming retirement of FAMSF head Harry Parker? That's one of the top museum gigs in America and the local papers haven't mentioned it at all.)
Related: Gallery Hopper disagrees.
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Because this makes sense
Artinfo.com, the newish news aggregator, is beginning to include original content. Today's gem is the MoMA press office's response to this item on MAN. (And of course, by running it this way, writer Sarah Douglas pretty much guaranteed MoMAites will just looove her. So good for her.)
"Contacted by Artinfo.com, MoMA spokesperson Margaret Doyle could not confirm the invitation since, she says, it was not a public document issued by the press office."
In a related story, MoMA's press office could not confirm the existence of Les Desmoiselles, because it was not issued by the press office either. MAN is, however, pretty darn sure that it's MoMA's.
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Sol LeWitt on the Met's Roof
A Bloomberg review of a Sol LeWitt installation on the Met's roof:
In New York, roofs have long been popular as places for small patches of greenery. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has added more colors to the mix in Sol LeWitt on the Roof: Splotches, Whirls and Twirls. The exhibit, which has more words in its title than works on view, is mostly made up of whimsical and fetching sculpture.
 LeWitt, 76, is an artist who has long loved rules, systems and process, and knows how to marry them with color and form. During his career he has riffed on Edward Muybridge's serial photographs of movement, explored whether the plain geometry of open, white cubes can be visually engaging, and has designed drawings and paintings governed by strict written prescription, executed by his assistants or local art students.
Along the way he has become one of the art world's most beloved figures, exchanging work with thousands of artists, and building a warehouse in Chester, Conn., to hold his work and the art for which he has traded. He has been a significant donor to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and his support of non-profit art spaces, such as the artist's books outlet Printed Matter, are among his finest legacies.
LeWitt's sculptures seem to be fumaroles that emerge up out of the Met, solidifying into tapered fiberglass blobs. The best of them are covered with straightforward shades of three primary and three secondary colors: The yellow has been borrowed from "Sesame Street's" Big Bird, the orange from the fruit, the red from a fire engine, the green from the just-emerging leaves in Central Park, the blue from a dark, deep pool of water, the purple from Barney the dinosaur. It’s as if pigment had escaped the paintings below and pushed up through the museum in gaseous form, only to harden when exposed to the air above.
The most striking of his sculptures at the Met is Splotch #3 (above), which is on the south end of the Met’s roof, facing the skyscrapers on Central Park South and beyond. Perched on top of a pedestal, #3 is 12 feet long and about three feet deep. LeWitt produced #3 in 2000, so it’s unlikely that he had this spot in mind for it, but the installation is witty. #3 spoofs the grey, rigid skyline beyond, offering an alternative, Technicolor fantasy of amorphousness.
Less effective is one of LeWitt's wall drawings, which seems strangely out of place on the Met’s roof, an area not previously known for its walls. For much of the last 15 years or so, it seems like every American museum that has opened a new building or expanded has installed a LeWitt drawing in a central place. Two examples featuring wide bands of color bordered with black tower over the atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and one stands guard at the entrance to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art's contemporary collection, telling visitors that they’re leaving centuries-old art behind for something fresher. The list is too long to continue.
Here, on a sheet of white that hides some of the Met’s heating and cooling systems, LeWitt’s minions have painted winding, colorful bricks in acrylic. The Met’s roof does not need a yellow-brick road, nor one with red, green, orange, blue, and purple.
In addition to the vivid sculpture, there are two color-free examples on view. Splotch #8 and Splotch #7 are black and white, respectively, and offer a pared down meditation on shape. When surrounded by colorful splotches, and by the canopy of Central Park, they look emasculated. But in a different context their absence of color would be fascinatingly strange.
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Has MoMA accepted drawings gift?
Nothing official from MoMA's flacks, but it sounds like MoMA has accepted the Judith Rothschild Foundation/Harvy S. Shipley Miller drawings gift. Here's the unusually interesting backstory. Here's the invite that MoMA has sent out via email:
PLEASE SAVE THE DATE FOR THE FOLLOWING EVENT (HARD COPY OF INVITATION TO FOLLOW SHORTLY)
Kathleen Fuld, Chairman
The Trustee Committee on Drawings
The Museum of Modern Art requests the pleasure of your company at dinner in honor of Harvey S. Shipley Miller on the occasion of the gift to The Museum of Modern Art of The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection
Friday, June 10, 2005
Cocktails and Buffet Dinner
8:00 pm to 11:00 pm
LOCATION, ETC. REDACTED, Venice, Italy...
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A nation's favourite painting
Dear UKers,
What's your favourite painting?
While I realize that (given the post directly beneath this one) the National Gallery isn't especially disposed toward taking my advice at the moment (OK -- at any moment), Americans love lists and rankings just as much as the ex-imperialists across the pond. Brits will be buzzing about this bit of fun all summer or, as they call it, a fortnight.
So why does the NEA insist on sending Prendergasts to scare children when they could do something like this? (Or you, Americans for the Arts.)
I had fun last night pondering my favorite painting in America. I think it'd have to be Matisse's Bathers with a Turtle, at the St. Louis Art Museum, though I cop to that being a particularly personal pick having more to do with my biography than anything else. If I had to step outside life experience, I'd take Matisse's 1907 Blue Nude, in Baltimore.
If the game was changed a little bit, and turned into Favorite American Painting, I'd be tempted by a John Marin skyscraper or a Joseph Stella of the Brooklyn Bridge. Both are thoroughly American. Maybe a Rothko, too. Or James Rosenquist's F-111. I'll probably keep thinking aloud on this one all day.
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Five things I think I think
1.) Before I type this, I want to emphasize that I'm hearing no whispers. But given the significant money problems at the Corcoran -- a gallery is being converted into library space, fer chrissakes -- ya gotta think a couple of trustees noticed this. I mean, when you're doing shows about designer handbags and playground filler (and when there's a bigger link on your home page to "Host your next event at the Corcoran," than there is to the Corcoran Biennial) you have stopped being about art, so...
1a.) If it's such a sad day when NYers lost that Asher Durand, why didn't Michael Kimmelman opine about it before now, when his voice and platform could have made a difference?!?!?! (Yes, that's four NYT criticisms in under a week. Which is serious overkill. But they seem to make a mess out of everything.)
2.) I've been asked by at least a dozen people why I didn't rip Matthew Marks for what he told NY Mag about Agnes Gund. I didn't think his absurdities merited any more audience.
3.) M$2oMA should do this.
4.) I think LAWeekly-er Doug Harvey's Olafur Eliasson lede simply cannot be beat.
5.) I love how the PaceWildenstein's/Bellagio's press release announcing they're renting more art from the MFA Boston relentlessly refers to the MFAB as "venerable." The exhibition currently on view at this venerable institution: cars owned buy a guy who sells shirts and khakis. And recently: Fashion Photographs by William Wegman.
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Gober to MoMA... in Queens?
For a couple of weeks the art world has buzzed with wonder about what museum would make a play for the recent Robert Gober installation at Matthew Marks. I mean, we knew it wasn't going to Los Angeles -- Gober's art is not for elegant older men -- but rumors flew fast and cluelessly about potential interest from the Walker and SFMOMA.
(The Walker rumors were particularly understandable. Their current Gober installation -- no pix online, alas -- is the best museum installation of Gobers I've seen.)
To her credit, when MoMA called Carol Vogel to tell her they'd gotten it, she answered the phone. But -- and I'm really sorry there's a but because I've beaten up the NYT so much this week that I'm tired of it -- Vogel buried the story. Here's the critical paragraph:
After showing the work, which takes up 5,000 square feet, at its newly expanded home on West 53rd Street, Mr. Lowry said the museum was considering showing it in affiliates like the P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art in Long Island City, Queens.
Oh are they? The second-floor galleries on 53rd Street mostly show art of the last 30 years, not art of the now. Is this a step toward the banishment of the art of the present to Queens?
(That said, I hope the Gober is in MoMA's soon-to-come second floor re-installation. It's a fabulous piece, one of the most remarkable things I've seen all year.)
Update: A reader points out that Vogel refers to "affiliates." Exactly how many affiliates does MoMA have? The same reader points out that the Gober could present installation issues (jackhammering into the floor) on 53rd Street, which makes sense to me. Still, if they're going to install it there once...
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My favorite thing ever, cont.
Background info on King Tut continues to roll in (Hello LACMAites! Feel free to send more!):
In response to the morning emails: Yes, sand. And it will all be removed after the party, and before the members' preview the next day. Perhaps.
MAN hears that Anschutz Entertainment Group is actively making a mockery of the last vestige of credibility the exhibit has -- educational value. AEG refused to release to LACMA the information for groups that have purchased school group tickets. This means that the LACMA education department cna't send pre-visit packets to the relevant schools. Furthermore, LACMA can't send to teachers information about museum regulations/care-of-art/behavior-in-museums issues, so AEG is indirectly putting LACMA's collections at risk.
LACMA also has funding to admit 10,000 children free of charge, but AEG won't share the waiting list with LACMA. So much for those 10,000 educational opportunities.
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My favorite thing ever
On June 15, the day before Philip Anschutz opens his King Tut show in the rental hall known as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA will host a wee shindig. The fete will include an Egyptian bazaar and camels. Live camels. The Governator and his wife Maria Shriver will be there, their children in tow. There will also be sand.
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Around the blogosphere
Well, I didn't find a Pollock in my attic, not even a Brancusi, so AtB we go...
- On the confluence of design, bullshit, Robert Irwin and Richard Meier;
- I think that Peter Wegner is a smart, sly, engaging colorist, but is another Bunshaft building (no, not the Hirshhorn) torpedoing yet more art?
- I'm close to finishing the Shirin Neshat profile on which I've been working, so I have lots of Neshat on the brain. Emmywerks almost met Neshat (those stories are always better than the ones where the blogger meets the artist), and Joy Garnett reminds us that museum directors take big risks too -- and we're not talking about taking on trustees;
- Only in LA? Never underestimate the importance of boredom?
- What happens when the Department of Defense focuses its energy on an Afghani-born American artist?;
- If rotisserie baseball and football can be huge, why not fantasy art auctions? (Do four Kara Walkers = one Twombly?)
- This is a good idea. As an art critic, when I need to look something up and I know it's in the Hugh G. Collection Art Museum, I can look it up in their catalogue and find what I need. But how cool would it be to be able to look stuff up in private collections in the same way?
- Artists who paint bullfights (Goya, Picasso, etc.) and the California bullfighting season?
- Another reason to watch the Walker blog: They're streaming (and archiving) lectures and live events.
- Eisenman's memorial in Berlin prompts blogosphere back-and-forth. Most sites with images better than the NYT's.
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A section adrift
UPDATE: Post updated with the link to Christopher Knight's Getty-Stark piece.
This morning's NYT arts section is the clearest example possible that the paper's art coverage is without motivating principle. The lead story is an inexplicable puff piece about how art collector and Hollywood semi-bigwig Ray Stark liked erect penises, flirting with women, parking police cars in his driveway, and watching birds crap on art on his lawn. Oh by the way, that art -- minus one erect penis -- is on its way to the Getty, fawns the NYT. The clueless story doesn't even address the Getty's acceptance of the gift -- it's written by the NYT's semi-bigwig Hollywood movie industry writer, Sharon Waxman.
LATer Christopher Knight told us all about the Getty-Stark deal several weeks ago. I think Waxman must have missed it.
Just below Waxman's suck-up piece, Michael Kimmelman notes that fishy, commercial interests are a motivating factor for Manhattan museums. He obfucsates this point by bringing Nazi sympathizing into the picture, and never once suggests what about contemporary museum practices should change. Should someone be held accountable for the UBS show at MoMA, Chanel at the Met, etc.? Who knows. Still, at least Kimmelman raised the points -- that's more than Waxman did in her Stark piece.
Meanwhile, on Friday's NYT op-ed page, Lee Rosenbaum did a far clearer job of taking the Met to task for Chanel. On today's letter page, the Met effectively pleads guilty.
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NYT supports Dia move, apparently
Interesting Carol Vogel story in Monday's New York Times. The short version: Dia is moving to the Meatpacking District.
But you know where I'm going with this... Why is Carol Vogel so plainly buying into Dia's spin? First, Vogel presents Dia's move as making sense because upgrading/climate-controlling the Chelsea space would cost $8 million, which is too much. Therefore, a move into new $35 million digs is somehow logical. Huh? Maybe it is logical -- but Vogel never tells us why.
Then this: "Dia's existing buildings... have not functioned efficiently..." So 60,000 visitors on, roughly, 200 open days a year is 300 people a day. And their massive space couldn't function efficiently with 40 people per hour going through the building? Please.
And about that last detail: "Before [Dia] closed for renovations in February 2004, attendance had grown to about 60,000." Except the building isn't being renovated -- it's being left behind.
So we still don't know why Dia is moving. (And I'm not saying the move is a bad thing -- Dia hasn't given me a briefing on the plan.) But the reasons for Dia's move are not in the NYT.
Related: Brian Sholis, Felix Salmon.
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A contribution to the void
"[In a talk at the St. Louis Art Museum, University of Missouri-St. Louis professor Susan] Cahan will examine several contemporary artists, their work, and how they are inspiring new views of the world. She discusses [sic] the ways in which contemporary art can positively affect people’s lives within the context of our current fractured, media-saturated culture."
-- so says the St. Louis Art Museum, in a press release. (The emphasis is mine.)
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Cameron to do Gwangju?
MAN has learned that Dan Cameron was invited to submit an exhibition proposal to be the artistic director of the Gwangju Biennial. A South Korean newspaper just ran a story substantially cribbed from MAN's Kamm/Cameron coverage of a while back. The paper managed to mangle the facts. The Gwangju Biennial folks are trying to put out the fire... but would they bother if Cameron weren't close to getting the gig?
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Metaphor
I'm going to hate myself in the morning, but I'm going to post this anyway:
I've been writing a profile of Shirin Neshat. Her work is more reliant upon metaphor than any artist I can think of, visual or otherwise. So I found film director Mike Nichols' thoughts on the death of metaphor to be interesting. (Nichols emailed this to the Huffington Post, a non-blog that thinks everything famous people have their assistants type is interesting because they're famous. Or something like that.)
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Wynn reviewed
LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, fresh from reviewing the latest Koolhaas palace over the weekend, tells us about Las Vegas' newest, er, palace:
You've probably heard by now that the Wynn Las Vegas is something of a rarity: a new hotel and casino on the Strip that doesn't have an architectural theme, the way the Venetian, the Paris, the Luxor and countless others do. But it turns out the Wynn does have a theme -- just a very odd one:
The theme is midrise office tower in Houston, circa 1983.
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Jim Cuno smacks down MFAB's leasing agent
Last Thursday Art Institute of Chicago boss James Cuno gave a talk at the Corcoran. Cuno believes that the museum-as-fun-palace trend of recent years is overdone, and that if a museum shows good art and shows it well that its mission is complete. Given that the Corcoran is, sadly, better known for passing off revenue opportunities as exhibitions (J. Seward Johnson, Judith Lieber, I could keep going...) than it is for its good shows (usually photo exhibs, think Robert Frank or Sally Mann), the Corc's inviting of Cuno was bold, clueless, or both. (I'm going with the latter.)
Being a trouble-maker, I asked Cuno what he thought of the latest outrage perpetrated by his old nemesis, Malcolm Rogers. (You may recall that the MFA Boston has just rented more paintings to a commercial gallery in a Las Vegas casino.)
Cuno, after reminding the audience that he'd long been a critic of Rogers' shenanigans, that he was opposed to this rental. He gave three main reasons. To paraphrase:
1.) Claude Monet did not intend for his paintings to be shown in casinos. Cuno argued that an art museum, when deciding how and where to exhibit art, should take an artist's intent into account. Monet specifically intended for his work to be shown in the greatest museums in France. There are no examples of him having accepted a commission from a Monte Carlo casino.
2.) A non-profit institution should not leverage its assets -- in this case art -- in such a way that a for-profit institution can make money off of them. (MFA Boston is renting art to a PaceWildenstein-operated gallery at the Bellagio.)
3.) The MFA Boston is a tax-exempt, non-profit institution. As a result of that tax exemption, the city of Boston and the commonwealth of Massachusetts make no tax monies on the MFA Boston's property, etc. By renting paintings to a casino in Nevada and engaging in an intellectually and culturally vacuous enterprise with a for-profit business, the MFAB is effectively thumbing its nose at Boston and Massachusetts. Cuno pointed out that Rogers has repeatedly claimed that he's giving the good people of Las Vegas a chance to see great art. Cuno countered that diversionary claim by pointing out that there are a great many people in Boston and Massachusetts who haven't seen MFAB's collection -- why not focus on making sure they have that opportunity?
In the strangest moment of the evening, Corcoran boss David Levy actually took on Cuno, lamely half-arguing that museums should follow MFAB's lead. Cuno was plainly stunned, mumbled something about how the discursive dialogue would continue, and went on with the Q&A. (Update: An emailer reminds me that at a recent Corcoran opening shindig, the gallery allowed someone to stand next to their admissions desk, hawking rugs "inspired by" The Quilts of Gee's Bend exhibit.)
Related: Another reason not to rent paintings to a desert casino, and what should happen to you when you do.
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Tracey goes over the falls in a barrel
A wise tipster tells us that even though Tracey Emin's weekly column appears to be pay-for-view today, it opens right up. So here's the link -- click it while you can.
This week, in under 1,000 words, our girl Tracey covers sex with Jack Nicholson, police protection for Sharon Stone, Niagara Falls, Egyptian antiquities, Labour and this somewhat appropriate doozy: "When I try to explain to people that my kindred spirit and soulmate is a cat they think I'm trying to be cute."
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Inadvertently great photography
 Rarely does a photograph so perfectly capture the mood of a moment. Just as rarely does an opening sentence of a blog post so perfectly capture a cliche in a metaphoric attempt to spoof the picture.
The photo at left, taken from the BBC's website, is indicative of the absurdity of TV news. The five people photographed make up part of the BBC's elections team. They all walk with purpose, determination, and certainty. Except they're all looking in different directions. For no apparent reason. They are as confused as... TV news itself.
Related: My favourite British polling place (mind the paintings).
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Attn MM: Meet the Nimoys
With this post, MAN is announcing a massive new effort to help Matthew Marks avoid making a fool of himself. As abLA noted yesterday, Marks seems to think Los Angeles is where elegant old farts go to buy Thomas Kinkades, or some such thing. His example of a clueless Angeleno was Leonard Nimoy. (Explanation: This will be a "massive" effort because, apparently, it's gonna have to be "massive" to keep MM from sounding like a provincial MMoron. Yes New York, you can be just as provincially naive as North Dakotans.)
As luck would have it -- sadly, a wee bit too late for MM -- a few weeks ago I did a Bloomberg Q&A with Leonard Nimoy and his wife Susan Bay Nimoy (she's the vice-chair of MOCA). I've seen much of their collection and there's nothing clueless about it. So MM, this excerpt is for you:
Q: You've given to Los Angeles organizations for years, but only recently have your names been affiliated with your gifts. Why?
Susan Bay Nimoy: Leonard comes from a very orthodox Jewish tradition which says the highest level of giving 'tzedakah' is anonymous. So for a long, long time we insisted that our giving be under the radar screen, which had a lot of benefits, I might add. Nobody knew we were doing it. The phone didn't ring as much and we didn't get as much mail.
But then Leonard was convinced that maybe in the less-than-philanthropic entertainment community -- Leonard's community really rallies when you have a tsunami – being public about giving helps drive more giving. It's been so rewarding to see it happening.
Q: In the last couple of years you've begun funding a series of artists' fellowships at museums and institutions all over the country. Is that an outgrowth of Leonard's own experience as a photographer?
Susan Bay Nimoy: I think that with Leonard becoming more public with his own photography, feeling like a new and emerging artist in the community, we started thinking about new and emerging artists and how difficult it is for them to get their work into a museum setting. Curators look at new art all the time and money is so tight in institutions.
So after working with people we saw there was a little niche where there was a lack of funding. We wanted to create something that didn't exist and now it's called the MOCA Focus Series. By doing that a lot of money followed us in and now MOCA has a series that will highlight new and emerging artists three times a year.
Leonard Nimoy: Each year, we go and visit each and every one [of the fellowship recipients]. What great trips they are. We go to meet the artists and to see the project.
Susan Bay Nimoy: How lucky are we? First, that we have the money to give away, and second, we get to meet all these fantastic people that give us things to think about that we never would have begun to think about.
Related: Gallery Hopper on Nimoy.
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Spotted at GNY
I don't read what other critics write about shows until I've written about them, so I'd been saving Jerry Saltz on Greater New York. I agree with most of what he wrote. (We differed on the number of curators who worked on the show -- I took my number from PS1's press release. And the more Dana Schutz I see, the more Elmer Bischoff and David Park I've seen.)
Saltz' editors encourage him to write for an art-smart audience, and my editor asks me to write for a more generalist crowd, so we wrote about the show completely differently. For example, here's an anecdote I cut from my review because it was too art-world insider:
As I walked through Greater New York, I ran into Jules de Balincourt. He was taking some friends through the show, and naturally stopped in front of his own work. After a few moments of telling his pals about his pop-precisionist riffs, de Balincourt stopped talking. He walked up to the wall, not stopping until his nose was three or four inches from a painting. Then he stepped back, reached out, and peeled a strip of tape off the canvas. "Oops," he said, and everyone had a good laugh.
The work in GNY is so fresh that some of it wasn't even ready to be exhibited until it had been... exhibited for two weeks.
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Five things I think I think
1.) I think the two most promising May exhibs in NYC will be the Edward Hopper drawing show at Peter Findlay and the Jasper Johns painting show at Matt Marks.
2.) I think that I wonder why New York mag is profiling Matt Marks and not, oh... Jasper Johns? Must be because, uh, er, the dealer is more important than the artist?
3.) I think it's a little sad that NYC has all these museums, and not one of them has a show opening in May that rivals a couple of galleries. Now I know that May is a tweener month in the museum world (I write reviews every week -- boy oh boy do I know), but c'mon...
4.) I think that Teresa Heinz Kerry has a funny sense of color. Upon giving Mark Di Suvero a $250K prize, THK said: "The works of Mark Di Suvero have stopped us in our tracks, confronting us with audacious colors and shapes and mesmerizing us with subtle energy and intricate proportion."
4a.) Where would this post be without Artnet?
5.) I think I'm disappointed that The Independent now requires some coin for Tracey Emin. I meant her column.
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On the Tate & LA
This is an interesting Guardian essay on how the Tate Modern has changed the perception of contemporary art in Britain -- and maybe even how Brits see themselves, period.
As I read the essay I kept thinking about Los Angeles. The Getty and LACMA are both undergoing major, fundamental changes in leadership (and more). MOCA is considering what to do about its pereptually-hidden permanent collection, and whether it should build a place to put it. LA's art schools have taken some timid steps to work together in the last year or so, and the Norton-Simon has been, for now, content to observe it all from Pasadena. I can't help but think that there are some lessons, both good and bad, for the Angeleno museocracy in the Tate Modern's story. After all, New York has no collecting primarily-contemporary-art museum, and depending on Eli Broad LA could have three by the end of the year.
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Review roundup
Some blurbs from some of my recent Bloomberg reviews, starting with Greater New York:
Visiting P.S. 1's Greater New York a survey of works by more than 160 artists from the metropolitan region, is like taking a stroll through one of the city's commercial gallery districts, such as Chelsea or Williamsburg. Except I've never seen art installed in the bathroom of a Chelsea gallery, as I did here.
The show occupies every available space at the former Queens elementary school. At least 31 curators took part in the selection process -- probably at least 28 more than any one show really needs. The Whitney Biennial, on which this show is modeled, has on occasion made do with just one.
Most of the show feels like an attempt to build an encyclopedic exhibit of art recently made in New York. Geography aside, here's no reason why this bunch of artists should be shown in the same building at the same time. Painting and sculpture dominate; photography is mostly excluded.
On the Met's Max Ernst retro (which has a particularly good catalogue):
The first couple rooms of the Met's exhibit show Ernst as a young man, influenced by Paul Klee and the cubists. An early collage, The Master's Bedroom from about 1920, is Ernst's updating of Vincent Van Gogh's The Bedroom. Ernst's work features the same end-of-the-room point of view, as well as Van Gogh's yellow bed and red blanket, but everything else in the piece is new.
Ernst gave Van Gogh's bedroom the surrealist treatment by completely altering perspective in the room. A bear standing against a wall in the back of the room is twice the size of a whale in the front of the room, exactly the opposite of what you'd expect. (And then there's the question of what a whale and bear are doing together in Van Gogh's bedroom.)
The show's first dramatic moment comes in the second gallery, where The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E., and the Artist receives an entire wall to itself. (The presentation is all the more sensational because the painting is in the collection of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and is rarely seen in America.) It is Ernst's most crucial painting. In it he makes a dramatic break from the art of the past and establishes his bona fides as a top-notch surrealist.
The painting features two figures in a disjointed landscape of pastel-colored walls. Ernst has placed the baby Jesus in the lap of the Virgin Mary, where he is being spanked. His halo has fallen to the ground. Ernst and his surrealist pals Andre Breton and Paul Eluard look on from a window, unimpressed by the sacrilegious scene below them. Ernst had studied art history in college in Bonn. He was thoroughly familiar with the intermingled histories of art and its great patron, the Catholic church. With The Blessed Virgin Ernst sticks a paintbrush in the eye of that history – and with his pals he acts like it's no big deal.
On In the Realm of the Princes: The Arts of the Book in 15th Century Iran and Central Asia at the Sackler:
No Persian artist had more influence on future generations than Bihzad. His work was popular in India, where it influenced Mughal miniatures. If Matisse didn’t see Bihzad's work in Paris or on his travels to Morocco, Italy or Russia, he certainly saw the work of imitators. Many of Matisse's experiments to flatten pictoral space come directly from Bihzad and other Persian painters. In the center of Sa'di and the Youth of Kashgar, for example, is a pitcher and a flowerpot which hold Bihzad's composition together. Matisse used pitchers and flowers in the same way.
On Andy Goldsworthy's Roof, on permanent display at the National Gallery:
For the first time since the National Gallery of Art’s East Building opened in 1978, the NGA has installed a commissioned sculpture: Roof, by British artist Andy Goldsworthy.
The indoor-outdoor work is made up of nine stacked slate domes. Each is just shorter than a person and 27 feet in diameter. They are installed in a walled-in garden on the north side of the building, and two of the domes bleed into the building itself.
Roof is just the sort of easy-on-the-eyes contemporary work that the NGA loves. It's faintly decorative but it has enough conceptual underpinning to endure – Washington is full of neo-classical domes, and it is to them Roof refers. The work adequately demonstrates Goldsworthy's ability to mix man-made influences with his interest in the processes of nature.
On Cai Guo-Quiang's two-Smithsonian exhibit:
Two Smithsonian museums, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Sackler Gallery, are jointly showing Cai Guo-Qiang: Traveler, an exhibition by the Chinese artist best known for making art with gunpowder. (Cai was just named to organize the first-ever Chinese pavilion at next year's Venice Biennale.)
The best work is at the Hirshhorn, where curator Kristen Hileman and the artist have installed Unlucky Year: Unrealized Projects from 2003–2004, a series of drawings made from igniting gunpowder on seven-and-a-half-by-nine feet sheets of paper. Bird of Light, Proposal for the Miramar Air Show, San Diego, 2004 is the highlight, a heart-wrenching piece in which Cai starts with the image of a plane on the left hand side of the paper, and through a series of 'gunpowder drawings' morphs it into a flying bird by the time the plane reaches the right-hand side. Just as the plane completes its transformation into a bird, it dissolves.
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In June, the Whitney will open the Robert Smithson retro that's been traveling from MOCA east. Several months ago I posted that the