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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Others I could have added
UNRELATED: Tom Krens' penthouse is no longer listed on Corcoran's website.
Something about yesterday's museum post inspired MAN readers to email in. Great fun. As a result, I'm going to explain three omissions:
I tried to pick museums that were smaller and less-known. Two museums that I enjoy as much as any of the five on the list -- the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art -- didn't make it because I thought they were too big. IMA, for example, has an annual budget bigger than the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young and the Legion of Honor.
A reader also noted that I could have had the Norton Simon on my list. I should have.
Other readers noted the omission of the Texas museums, but they get lots of pub here and other places so I held them out. Other reader suggestions included the Nelson-Atkins in KC, the Des Moines Art Center, the MCA San DIego, and the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum. The OC Art Blog suggests the Laguna Art Museum.
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Barney's back
Artnet tells us that Matthew Barney is headed back to a museum near you, and that he has new work: Look for it at SFMOMA in 2006. Fortunately, there's no New York venue (yet).
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Bye bye to Boesky
 MANscoop: Lisa Yuskavage has left Marianne Boesky. (Maybe she didn't want the new Boesky space to be known as The Brickhouse?) Buzz is Yuskavage hasn't signed with anyone yet.
Back in December of 2003, John Currin left Andrea Rosen and the New York Times did a big ol' story on it. Well, will the Yuskavage news get the same treatment, or was Greg on to something?
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Five fave flyover museums
A week ago I was in Buffalo, working on a magazine story about Clyfford Still. When I came back and started chatting with my friends, they all winced when I told them I was in Buffalo. No wait, I'd offer, the Albright-Knox has a top-notch collection. That earned me a lot of pitying looks. I'd seen those looks before... whenever I'd been to a city that most people don't think of as having a top-notch art museum. So because lists are fun (and I'm always meaning to do more of them) and in no particular order, here are five really good, but less-considered, art museums that are nowhere near Fifth Avenue. If bloggers have other nominations, I'll link later.
- Albright-Knox Art Gallery: Fantastic permanent collection, great old building with both big spaces and small, the best Clyfford Still ever, and a good example of a museum that devotes itself to showing lots of parts of its permanent collection, lots of the time. And their contemporary Chinese art show this fall could be the sleeper hit of the season.
- St. Louis Art Museum: Best German contemporary art collection in the US, and one of my favorite Matisses. Downside: They've got to be embarassed by how good the blog/websites StL's other art spaces are. (I love the Pulitemporary blog and you should too.)
- Baltimore Museum of Art: Speaking of Matisse, here and the Barnes are nirvana for Matisse fans. The BMA's contemporary galleries feel a little tired, but they have nice Truitt and a fantastic Alma Thomas.
- Orange County Museum of Art: When I talk with curators, more and more they mention OCMA as a favored destination. (I've still gotta do a post on institutions and my last LA trip.) LA travel tip: Fly in or out of Long Beach and visit OCMA on that day. OCMA is not that far from the best little airport in the US.
- Harwood Museum of Art: The best permanently-installed Agnes Martin experience in the US.
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Judy Dayton Q&A
Excerpted from Bloomberg, of course...
When the Walker Art Center decided to build a $70 million Herzog and de Meuron-designed addition, it was no surprise to anyone in Minneapolis that Kenneth and Judy Dayton would be the biggest donors to the project. The couple has donated $16.4 million to the Walker's capital campaign, over $6 million more than any other individual donor.
Kenneth Dayton, who died in 2003, was the former chairperson and chief executive officer of Dayton Hudson Corporation. (Dayton Hudson changed its name to Target Corporation in 2000, and Target gave $5 million to the Walker's campaign.)
The Daytons started collecting art almost 40 years ago. In the 1960s, the Dayton Hudson department store in downtown Minneapolis sold contemporary art out of a space in the store called "Gallery 12." Judy and Kenneth Dayton bought some of their first pieces from Gallery 12, and went on to join the ranks of America's top collectors of modern and contemporary art.
I talked with Judy Dayton at her home in Minneapolis about her family's interest in the arts.
Q: How did your involvement with the Walker begin?
A: In the case of the Walker it started with Martin Friedman who was the most incredible director. At the time Ken and I had a latent interest in art. We were at a Dayton Hudson event at the Walker in honor of Twiggy, the model. As I was chatting with people, I discovered one of the curators from the Walker. I asked, "What goes on around here?" because I hadn't really been to the Walker a great deal. The galleries were closed but he had a key and he let us in and flipped on the lights. There was a show of Minnesota artist Charles Biederman. It turned me on and a few days later we went back and got involved.
Q: How and when did you start buying art?
A: We started in the first year of our marriage by buying a painting on the Left Bank of Paris, a landscape of Montmartre. From there it was never a collection, it was always kind of an adventure. We were never out to build a collection – we think that's kind of a precious word.
Q: And at some point you got interested in Roy Lichtenstein, an example of whom is right behind us.
A: That painting was on the cover of the Sunday Times one day. They did a story on Roy and that painting was in the background of a photograph. We called Leo Castelli and said we'd like to buy it. He said, "But you haven't even seen it, how you can buy it?" Push came to shove and we got it.
Q: You also have a wonderful Richard Serra in your backyard. How did you come to own it?
A: We had fun with that. That was in the Museum of Modern Art in their sculpture garden at one point. That's where we saw it. Some of the curators at MoMA wanted to keep it and some of the curators didn't think it was big enough. So it was for sale, and we just happened to be there when the apple fell.
When it came time to install it at our home outside the city, a contractor made a model of it so we could move it around. The contractor brought out the model, and they dumped it in the middle of this circle we had outside the house because Richard Serra was going to come out the next day to help us place it.
The next day Serra came. We told him to go look and see where you think we should put it. He walked all around creation and then looked at the model in the circle. He said, "I wouldn't move it at all. Put it there." And we did.
Q: Will your entire collection end up at the Walker?
A: Yes. We've tried to be temporary custodians of some of these things but eventually they'll end up at the Walker because that's the appropriate thing.
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Peace & quiet at the Met
NOTE: If you're looking for the Tom-Krens-lists-his-penthouse post, it's here.
Inspired by a rush of morning email (Aside to Met folks: MAN readers love you people), here are five places in the Met that are almost always quiet/empty:
- Five feet in front of the Velazquez portrait of Juan de Pareja. This is, for my eyes, the most gripping painting in the museum. But boy do you have to work to find it, hence the peace and quiet.
- The Clyfford Still gallery. (None of which are online. None.) Now part of the reason this gallery is usually empty is because the Met has incomprehensibly and inexplicably put an atrocious, horrible, terrible, David Smith creation right in the middle of the gallery. Destroys the whole space. (Still and Smith couldn't stand each other -- and this installation brings home part of why.) Not all of the Met's Stills are top-notch, but a 1943 painting is one of the first abstract paintings made in America, and about half of the rest of the room is pretty durn good.
- "European Paintings, Gallery Twelve." Or, better known as "where the Vermeers are." (Don't miss a fantastic de Hooch, either.) Again, you gotta be really lookin' for this space to find it. The problem sure ain't Vermeer -- the National Gallery's Vermeers always attract a crowd.
- In the contemporary galleries, the Met has a 1980-81 Jasper Johns triptych hung between two Clyfford Stills. A friend of mine argued that the Johnses are too early to reference AIDS and he's probably right. But go look and tell me if you don't think the same thing too. (They're not online.)
- In the Gelman Collection galleries hangs Matisse's first great figurative painting, The Young Sailor. It so shocked Matisse after he painted it, that he told his friends that his postman had made it and given it to him. Matisse's friends didn't buy it. (The Gelman Collection galleries are often empty, as they're tucked behind and under the more popular early modern and impressionist galleries. The galleries of Pierre Matisse's gifts to the Met is usually empty too. Makes sense -- they're really best for art history buffs.)
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An empty Met?
This is the photo that greets visitors to the Met's website. Have you ever seen the Met that empty? No. Or without the souvenir/book cart at the top of the staircase? Me neither.
Yikes: MAN readers -- a brainy, art-nutty bunch who, like me, often get to museums when they open so as to avoid the crowds -- are taking this post really personally. Yes, if you get to the Met right when it opens it's pretty empty. Yes, I know that the book cart is just out of the frame. My point was that the photo is a very rare experience.
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The weekend that was
Obviously, the big news of the weekend is in the post directly below this one. I think it will be an interesting week at the GuggEnron. I can't imagine that'll be the only Gugg-related news to hit this week. (Gawker is expecting more -- they started a Thomas Krens index.)
I spent a lazy Sunday drifting through Manhattan, popping into some off-the-usual-track spots for a Bloomberg August write-up. One of my favorite pops was into a little museum known to the locals as the Met, where I re-wandered through the Matisse show. If I lived on the Upper East Side I'd make that a weekly wander for the duration of the show.
Wandered into the Clyfford Still gallery too. I'm not sure why there's a big David Smith sculpture in the middle of the gallery. Still would not have approved.
Finally, I nominate Louisville, KY's Robert Stagg for the MFA Boston board. (Thanks.)
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Weekend special: Thomas Krens' loft on market
UPDATE, 8/3: See here.
MANscoop: Guggenheim director Thomas Krens' 4,500-square-foot downtown loft is on the market. (All ten photos of the space are viewable via that link.) The asking price is $5.5 million. (Notice the Frank Gehry-designed chairs in the dining room.) Is Krens, unquestionably the art world's least-liked museum director, finally on his way out of New York?
Rumors have swirled about Krens' status at the Guggenheim for several weeks. Are the rumors nothing more than a response to Vicky Ward's Vanity Fair detailing of the Gugg's most recent troubles under Krens? Or is, say, GuggEnron deputy director Lisa Dennison looking forward to a bigger office?
Worth noting: In the months after 9/11, Krens' building had the highest indoor levels of asbestos dust in Manhattan.
(How does a museum director live in a $5.5M loft? According to the Gugg's IRS Form 990 tax filings, the Krens-directed Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has carried a a $1.5 million interest-free housing loan to Krens on its books since at least FY 2001.)
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Midsummer wish list
These things would make me happy:
- So Frank Gehry is designing a skyscraper for Grand Avenue in downtown LA. It'll be right across the street from Disney Hall, a block (kind of) from MOCA. Virtually no one knows it, but MOCA has a fantastic permanent collection. It's rarely on view, except in small permanent collection hangings. So I hope that there's, oh, 80,000 square feet or so for MOCA in the new Grand Gehry tower, and that there is someway to physically connect the new and the old.
- I hope that Tom Krens gets booted out of the Gugg and that someone like, oh, Lisa Dennison takes his place.
- I hope that Bill Griswold (see the post below this one) phones up Suzanne Muchnic or Jason Felch or someone else at the LA Times and promises to tell some stories.
- I hope that MoMA reinstalls that second (contemporary) floor soon. Didn't they promise six-month rotations? (I'm honestly asking: I confess that this is something that I remember and not something I can find. Can someone wiki me? UPDATE: Todd Gibson remebers MoMA saying 'annually.') Well, it's been eight.
- I wish that all comment boards were as interesting as Edward Winkleman's. There's a lively and intelligent Dana Schutz thread going on here.
- Better summer gossip. Oh wait...
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PM quickies
Lest you think writing about art is a glamourous gig, I'm coming to you from the Greater Rochester International Airport, where every other word is a total frickin' joke. I spent the day working on a magazine story at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo. Had a great seven hours there, having a lousy time here.
So some quick links because I'll be getting home quite, quite late tonight:
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Five things I think I think
1.) The Walker Channel is very cool. On this page, the Walker archives webcasts of lectures, conversations and the like. The current headline cast is a chat between Alec Soth and Andrei Codrescu. On Sunday, the Walker will webcast -- live -- a conversation between Chuck Close and curators Siri Engberg (the Walker) and Madeleine Grynsztejn (SFMOMA). (BTW, I thought that a Walker chief curator announcement was right around the corner, and that was six weeks ago...)
2.) King Tut: $25-75. Basquiat: $8.
3.) This is fourth summer I've written MAN. This is the fourth summer I've realized how difficult it is to write an art blog in the summer.
4.) Don't ya love it when dead-tree media feels threatened by the present? (You'll need BugMeNot.) (Thanks Transom.) Makes me rather pleased and relieved that if there's one area of journalism/etc. world that loves the blogosphere, it's the art crowd. Well, the American art crowd anyway.
5.) Pure cajones. The National Gallery doesn't own this painting because a National Gallery trustee consulted to someone bidding against the National Gallery. And it's on view at the National Gallery. I'd bet that this story isn't over...
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Pulitemporary Contempitzer launches blog
Er, or something like that. The Pulitzer and the Contemporary Art Museum StL, two museums that share a city block have launched a joint blog. Methinks it will be a cool one. It's new to the blogroll. (It should also remind the St. Louis Art Museum that they have the worst website of any major American museum.)
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Basquiat
Last night I realized that I hadn't posted much about the Basquiat show. It just opened at MOCA -- and I hear the crowds have been massive. So here's what I wrote about it back in March.
 Jean-Michel Basquiat painted like a man who had nothing to lose. His work is exuberant, frantic and urgent. It is as if he knew that heroin would kill him at age 27.
Basquiat a retrospective of the artist's work [now at MOCA], captures that rush to create without sanitizing the messiness of Basquiat's achievements. This attractive show doesn't reveal any new surprises, but are there any to be found? The last Basquiat (1960-1988) retrospective opened at the Whitney only 13 years ago and since then Basquiat has been further memorialized in a Julian Schnabel-directed biopic in 1996 and in a 1998 best-selling biography by Phoebe Hoban.
Thanks largely to those three efforts, Basquiat has entered the pop culture lexicon as a James Dean-like figure who lived fast and died young, his legend assured. Basquiat's life provided a 1980s twist on that biographical rubric, complete with the excesses that mark the decade. At the start of his career he didn't have money and lived in a cardboard box in a city park, but by the end he was buying art supplies by throwing a wad of bills down in front of a clerk and telling him to take the relevant amount. And of course, there were the drugs. When Basquiat died in 1986 of an overdose, that seemed about right.
The paintings he left behind are a testimony to creativity born not out of an master's in fine arts program or a careful consideration of line and form, but out of life and self. Essentially, Basquiat was a gifted urban folk artist who quickly assimilated self-taught lessons about art history, and was then embraced by the surging art market of the 1980s. He painted autobiography, black history and he made paintings about the music he loved. An essay in the catalogue that accompanies the show positions him as an originator of hip-hop.
Basquiat started as a graffiti artist on the streets of New York and never lost that need-for-speed, a certain make-it-quickly-so-I-don't-get-caught. From that speed comes a centrifugal energy that holds together even the most non-sensical and spasmodic of Basquiat's paintings. I've caught myself spending five or ten minutes looking at a Basquiat painting, such as, Riddle Me This, Batman (1987), trying to figure out what it's all about, only to realize that it's a frivolously bizarre musing on drinking and superheroes.
But at his best, Basquiat's work is a frantic mix of color, line, subject matter and originality. In 1981's Untitled (Head), Basquiat's earliest great painting, a floating head dominates the painting. The outline of a head is clear, but from there Basquiat has scratched in lines and splotches of color. A series of stitches hold the head to the background, the head's nose to its forehead, the jaw to the back of the skull. The head -– perhaps Basquiat's own -– is locked into an expression that conveys both anger and determination -- but the head's eyes are downcast, almost sad. At the top of the painting, Basquiat as scratched the words "head of" and then crossed out the unreadable letters that follow those words. It's as if his own creation scared him so much that he dared not to identify it.
Other times Basquiat would turn his language toward the simplest themes that reflected the experiences of a young man growing up. In Arroz con Pollo, a man enters the painting at stage right, bringing with him a fresh-out-of-the-oven bird. A naked woman responds, offering a breast toward the man. Basquiat, was 21 when he made this painting, and with this painting he's laying out his early-adulthood understanding of the relationship between the sexes.
Basquiat was an artist in a hurry, and that mania is clear in every room of this show. When Basquiat didn't have a canvas, he'd make do with painting on whatever was nearby, a door or hunks of wood. (A young, similarly destitute Robert Rauschenberg's similar experimentation provides a parallel.) If Basquiat wanted to include words in a painting, he'd slap them into place, unconcerned with details such as spelling. And, most obviously, Basquiat's paintings are less painted than they are scratched into place.
A 1982 tribute to jazz great Charlie Parker, CPRKR demonstrates Basquiat's tendency toward first emotional response. The work is a simple scratching of letters on an canvas with oilstick. "CPRKR," says the top of the painting, followed by the details of Parker's death: "STANHOPE HOTEL APRIL SECOND NINETEEN FIFTY THREE." But Basquiat realized that his death date was incorrect, so he crossed out "THREE," and wrote under it "FIVE."
Many of Basquiat's paintings are brilliant, many others in this show would receive little attention except when an artist dies young second-rate work makes its way into thorough retrospectives. That's easily excused.
Related: Christopher Knight, Jerry Saltz, Rhapsody Radish on a Basquiat-based jazz CD, abLA finds that MOCA is hip, hip, hip.
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Marfa: Judd Foundation
NOTE: I'll be updating the post below this one all day, probably.
Last week I wrote that visiting Marfa is imperative if you want to understand Donald Judd's work. One part of a Marfa visit is the Chinati Foundation, the other is visiting the less-well-known Judd Foundation. I have no idea how to write about the Judd Foundation properties -- two weeks after getting back I'm still processing all I saw.
Judd owned a lot of Marfa. He did not own all of downtown, but he owned chunks of it (and the Judd and Chinati Foundations still do). The Judd Foundation still owns The Block, the entire city block that Judd controlled between Highway 90 and the railroad tracks (in the center of the image -- look for the two white rectangles), and several buildings downtown, including the Marfa National Bank.
The Block is made up of several buildings the US Army abandoned in 1923 as well as a couple residences that Judd purchased. Judd lived here, installed art here, and kept what is probably the largest art library in West Texas here. All of it is more-or-less as he left it. The work is remarkably well-preserved, perhaps because not too many visitors go through, and perhaps because of the arid climate.
The highlight of the Judd Foundation property -- and one of the most remarkable art places in America -- is Judd's studio. He didn't work here for very long, but it's full of hints as to his process and working methods. It's walk-through biography.
At the Marfa National Bank: Judd kept a series of offices upstairs. He devoted one office to one project, all along the second floor of the building. Much of the furniture in the bank is of Judd's design, but many pieces from of his design and art collection are installed as well.
In one of the residences and another building in The Block: Judd's early paintings. Most are flat horrid, full of Avery, Kandinsky and biomorphic abstraction. Sometimes all at once. But one painting, from 1961, anticipates Robert Mangold in the most remarkable way.
Why a Judd biography hasn't been written: One reason is that the archival materials owned by the family and the Foundations is sitll being catalogued. An early stage project won an NEA grant, but it will cost many millions more to put the materials together in a way that is useful to scholars. Some of the material is scattered -- in an organized, Judd-ian way -- throughout the Marfa National Bank building.
Show idea: I think I've suggested this before, but what about a show of the impact of military service on 20th century American art? Judd served in the Army in 1946-47.
Some things Judd owned: Early Navajo tapestries, silver and turquoise jewelry, prints/etchings of Daumiers, Goyas and Rembrandts, lots of Albers, kimonos, furniture by Breuer, Mies, and Rietveld, a Morandi-esque abstract painting by Antonio Calderara.
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MK in NYT: Sounds familiar to me
A hearty MAN hello to Michael Kimmelman, who is strikingly up-to-speed on some of our favorite topics, not to mention our arguments about them.
But: In Sunday's essay, Kimmelman takes on half a dozen serious issues about art and art institutions, and lumps them together in one catch-all essay. It's a typical Kimmelman tactic, and it waters down good, individual arguments to what comes across as an all-institutions-suck rant. It hurts all of Kimmelman's good (and correct) individual points that they are lumped together in an art critic's casserole. (As coincidence would have it, Kimmelman wrote a strikingly similar piece almost exactly one year ago.)
Related: Me on the MFA Boston, MTAA-RR sees political motivation, Cranky Professor, From the Floor.
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Smithson in LA, NYC
I reviewed the Robert Smithson retro twice: Once for the WSJ (which didn't use it) and once for Bloomberg. A couple weeks ago I posted what I wrote for the WSJ about visiting the Jetty. Here's a put-'em-both-together. It reads a little shmooshed because, well, it is.
 A few days before I saw the Robert Smithson retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I prepared myself for the show by studying a book of Smithson's writings. Smithson's essays are so widely revered in art circles that they are required reading for nearly every art student in America. My little study session seemed like an excellent idea.
After seeing the Smithson exhibit, I realized it was a stupid idea. I had fallen into the art historical trap of revisiting an artist through his words, rather than through his art. Fortunately, curator Eugenie Tsai (who was assisted by Cornelia Butler) did not make my mistake. Her Smithson retrospective, titled Robert Smithson, is one of the finest shows I have seen all year (I wrote that in 2004). It exhibits Smithson the artist -- and leaves Smithson's mediocre philosophical ramblings to mediocre philosophers. Best of all, Tsai's exhibit rescues Smithson from the reluctant compliment, "one of the most important artists of the 20th century," and allows his work to make the case for him as one of the best.
Smithson was the major early figure of the earthworks movement that redefined art as something that could exist outside an art gallery. Feeling that traditional art media (such as painting) were inadequate for showing work that would last, Smithson made his best art out of steel, mirrors, rock and chalk. For Smithson, 'lasting' was a matter of context: He didn't want his art to share a lifespan with museums, he wanted his work's endurance to be measured against the time frame of geologic processes.
One of the triumphs of Smithson's art, and of MOCA's presentation of it, is that it proves conceptual art can be as exciting to look at as any other kind of art. Smithson understood that no matter how high-minded the idea behind an artwork, it must be fun to look at, it must be visually engaging. If a viewer doesn't like looking at a work of art, they'll never think about the ideas behind it.
The show includes some rarely seen early drawings and paintings, many fine examples of Smithson's 'nonsites,' which brought earth and rock into art galleries, a video of Smithson's explorations of Mono Lake, a 30-minute documentary about Smithson's buried building on the Kent State campus, and a number of sculptures in which Smithson explores systems of progression.
Smithson (1938-1973) was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and like many suburban kids was fascinated by New York. At the time the art world didn’t require a college degree for admission, so Smithson worked his way into the scene by writing poetry, befriending artists, and publishing both acute criticism and meandering essays. In the mid-60s, Smithson began to make the work for which he is best known: sculpture made from sheet metal, conceptual drawings, and ultimately art placed directly in the wide-open landscape. He died in a plane crash while examining the site for a land art in Amarillo, Texas.
Nearly every room in Smithson reveals the artist’s fascination with entropy (those maudlin philosphical ramblings deal with entropy too). Instead of applying his interest in long-term decay to civilizations, he applied it to suburban American life. In 1967 Smithson took a series of photographs called Monuments of Passaic which showed how buildings and structures in his hometown were aging, positioning them as contemporary monumental ruins.
Smithson also explored how we see what we see. Painters have long used mirrors or other reflective surfaces to play with perspective in painting –- Henri Matisse used them to put himself in his drawings, right next to his nude models, for example -- but Smithson took the idea one step further. In Mirrors and Shelly Sand, a long pile of sand and pebbles is spread out over 28 feet of gallery floor. Fifty mirrors are placed in the sand, equidistant, throughout the length of the gallery. Looking at the piece, it’s not immediately clear where the actual sand ends, and where the reflection of sand begins.
There are a couple of minor gaps in the show. Smithson's finest indoor sculpture, Gyrostasis, is not in the exhibit. (The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden refused to loan it, citing conservation concerns.) And the earthwork project on which Smithson was working when he died in a 1973 plane crash, Amarillo Ramp, isn't represented at all. (Tsai told me that the drawings available to her weren't good enough for inclusion in the show.)
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$75-$102.50
The Tut folks, being helpful: "We have had too many people walk up and say, 'This is my only day in Los Angeles. Is there any way I can get in?'" said Mark Lach, vice president of Arts and Exhibitions International. "It was done with that in mind. We have opened up 100 tickets a day and limited it to that. As we have gotten up and running, and learned a thing or two about making the guest experience as good as it can be, that's something we thought we could accommodate."
Related: abLA concurs, draws the right parallels.
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MoMA & PIXR II
As promised in this post, here's MoMA boss Glenn Lowry (emphasis is mine):
The key term here is moral authority, which, I would argue, brings us back to the issue of responsibility... If art museums are to continue thriving they must recognize that their moral authority derives from the trust the public invests in them because the public believes they are acting responsibly and for the common good. Any diminution of that trust is ultimately a diminution in that museum's authority and credibility, and once lost, that trust is very difficult to regain. The question, however, is not whether art museums can find a way to embrace commercial culture but whether they can demonstrate that there is a clear and discernible difference between art and commerce that is worth preserving.
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$82.50 for a museum show?
Yup. AEG's newest subsidiary, known to most of us as LACMA, is now offering a $75 "VIP ticket" to King Tut. Factor in the apparently mandatory $7.50 "convenience charge" and you can (if you're, uh, stupid) spend $82.50 for one Tut ticket. I'm pretty darn sure this is the most expensive museum ticket in the history of U.S. museums. Only the Met's $50 Monday admission is even close.
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MoMA & PIXR
Yesterday Scott McClellan, the WH flack, used the word "criminal" like it was going out of style. This did not escape the notice of veteran Washington-watchers, such as ABC's The Note:
It is interesting (wethinks) to Note how McClellan used the word "criminal" so often in the briefing yesterday (when he wasn't on the verge of throwing up) — as if to define the scope of what's appropriate, so when (assuming) Rove doesn't get indicted, Scott can say "the criminal investigation concluded he did nothing wrong, so there's nothing to talk about."
That spinnin' spirit reminds me of my recent journey to MoMA's upcoming exhibs website. As you may know, Pixar Animation Studios (Nasdaq: PIXR) will be exhibited in MoMA's (NYSE: UBS) galleries starting on Dec. 14, 2005. Something about an exhibit... or was that something about a pre-Christmas shopping opportunity in the MoMA store?
Nope, definitely an exhibit. Just as McClellan used the word criminal, so too MoMA uses the word "art."
The Museum of Modern Art presents Pixar, in the most extensive theater and gallery exhibition it has ever devoted to the art of animation. Pixar Animation Studios has had worldwide critical and box office success with its feature films, from Toy Story (1995) to The Incredibles (2004). The exhibition marks the first time Pixar is lending its collection of art and films.
It's a good thing that this is an art show, and not museum-as-entertainment-complex-style pandering to the masses. Fortunately, MoMA boss Glenn Lowry has spoken about and written on this:
"What distinguishes the Guggenheim from other art museums is that rather than keeping a fine balance between the museum as school and theater, a place of learning and a place of enjoyment, it has focused its energies on becoming an entertainment center and appears to be no longer interested in or committed to the ideas and the art that gave birth to the museum at its founding."
Wow. Well, it's a good thing Lowry is talking about the Guggenheim.
Upcoming, all week!: More from Lowry.
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We're back -- and so's the Getty story
Apologies: The software that runs AJ, including MAN, has been on the blink since about 4pm yesterday. I had planned two long posts for today: An account of my visit to the Judd Foundation, and an Around the Blogosphere post, but given that we're getting a late start and that I'm a-feared of long posts today, we'll stick to the shorter stuff until tomorrow.
While I was on vacation last week, the Mark Lacter of the Los Angeles Business Journal examined the LAT story on Barry "Koz" Munitz's perks, and the Getty's response to the story. Some excerpts, because the story is not online:
John Biggs is in a bit of a fix. As chairman of the J. Paul Getty Trust, he must defend the extravagant compensation and perks that the board has bestowed upon... Munitz. This is the same Biggs who several years ago was praised for his reformist views on corporate governance -- so much so that the accounting industry derailed his chances of heading the government's accounting-oversight board because it didn't like his support for expensing stock options, among other things...
So why on earth is this reasonable-sounding guy signing off on Munitz's spending sprees, which according to the LA Times include [you remember, oui?]...What I can tell you is that Biggs considers the Times investigation to be a crock, and as of late last week [that'd be the end of June] the Getty honchos were preparin ga lengthy response in which they supposedly dismiss everything the newspaper dredged up while affirming their support for Munitz.
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What does matter is the perception that Barry Munitz is out of control -- first suggested with the stormy resignation of Getty Museum Director Deborah Gribbon (who apparently rode in plenty of first-class seats herself), followed up with the Times piece, and finally Sen. Charles Grassley's rebuke of the Getty board for "spending more time watching old episodes of 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous' than doing its job of protecting the Getty's assets for charitable purposes.
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Barry Munitz might or might not be the best thing that's ever happened to the place -- the job description is so broad it would be hard for an outside to tell -- but his spending habits and perks are more than a little out of whack. So is his judgment. And the Getty board, like so many corporate boards, goes along with the excesses -- perhaps out of fear or perhaps just resignation that even in an age of Sarbanes-Oxley, it's the way their world works.
That's probably why they haven't said much about the Times story. That's probably why they haven't said much about the Grassley comments. Just grumble in a few discreet places and hope that the questions will fade away. There's a pretty good chance they will.
I kind of doubt it.
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Cuno on blockbusters
There's nothing wrong with the concept of a blockbuster museum show. It's in the execution that dem exhibs often fall apart. On the occasion of the deeply flawed, mostly maudlin Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre show that opens at the Art Institute of Chicago this week, this line from James Cuno (thanks AJ), the only American museum director with the onions to call out the disreputable among his colleagues:
"Temporary exhibitions are a critical part of our mission because they bring things to Chicago that can't otherwise be seen here and because they supplement and amplify our permanent collection, as it does in the case of Toulouse-Lautrec, or last year's Seurat exhibition. But you have to ask yourself: Why are you doing it? You have to ask the Guggenheim Museum, 'What relationship does an exhibition of motorcycles have to do with your permanent collection?' You have to ask the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, 'What relationship does an exhibition of antique cars have to do with your permanent collection?' "
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Marfa: Chinati Foundation
For 20 miles southeast of El Paso International Airport, the land on either side of the US-Mexico border is irrigated. When man stops feeding the desert, roughly here, a visit to Marfa begins. Sure, there's another 130 minutes of driving or so left before you pull up at the gate of the Chinati Foundation, but those 170 miles are part of what Marfa is. The harshness and the desolate beauty of craggy desert prepares you for an encounter with Don Judd.
(I am certain that to fully appreciate Judd's complete control over the environments he created in Marfa, you must trek through the desert. I'm sure it's fashionable to jet into Marfa's little airport, but anyone who does that is failing to read the introduction to the book.)
Marfa is for Judd what Plains, Georgia is for Jimmy Carter. It's where you to go immerse yourself in someone, to understand. The only other place I can think of where Americans can go to immerse themselves in an American artist is Hannibal, Missouri, the boyhood town of Mark Twain. Hannibal has been commercialized to the point of Dollywood-ization. Meanwhile, Marfa is still the kind of place where a dude will challenge a man to a fight when the dude catches the man talking to 'his' girl. (I can bear witness.)
I won't get into a long description here of what Chinati is and how it happened -- as usual I assume art literacy here. I'll just say that this is the best place to see Judd and John Chamberlain, that it's a really good place to see Flavin and Roni Horn, and that it's an OK Place to see Ingolfur Arnarsson, Carl Andre, Ilya Kabakov, John Wesley and Oldenbruggen.
In Marfa, an art-lover can understand that Flavin was right: Judd was a colorist. That the only way to respond to the big sky and bigger desert (or is it the other way around?) is to control what you can control: Make sure that box is machined perfectly. That the only light that matters comes at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. That as the landscape changes, the art changes. That Judd was generous and unafraid of competition. That looking at an art object is not the same as experiencing an art object... and that experience can only be created by joining art with setting. (This is why we look at art at MoMA, rather than experiencing it.)
Marfa is not a one-trip thing. I was in Marfa last August, and I'll go back as soon as I can. There always seems to be a reason to go back: This year's Open House will feature an exhibition of John Chamberlan foam sculptures and a Tony Feher installation in the fort's arena. (Feher is testing ideas now -- in one of the fort's decaying structures, there are hanging bottles and paper pieces on the walls. Twice I walked toward the building to go take a closer look, and both times rattlesnakes suggested that I let Feher figure out his piece in peace.) Robert Irwin is also working on an installation at Chinati, but it could be a year or two before he figures out what it will be.
 I also love the stories I hear in and about Marfa. Just before I left for Texas, Hammer PR boss Steffen Boddeker told me that when he worked there, Anselm Kiefer came to visit. Well, that would help explain why Kiefer is building is own Marfa-like project in a series of 12 underground caverns in the south of France.
Myfavorite story from this trip involves this Richard Long sculpture, which is one of the few Long circles that is outdoors. A while back Martha Stewart visited Marfa. As she approached in a helicopter, the pilot apparently thought that the Long was the landing target. As he approached it, Chinatians ran toward the helicopter, waving it away from the art. The pilot found another place to land.
Tomorrow: Also in Marfa, the Judd Foundation.
Related: Jeff Jahn at PORT.
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GawkerForum: The prosecution rests
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present Paris Hilton.
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An art story with a bit of everything
From while I was gone: I really enjoyed Jesse Hamlin's SF Chronicle story on the Gottardo Piazzoni murals that used to hang in the SF Public Library. His piece has a little bit of art history, the repurcussions of museum expansion, civic responsibility, regional history, conservation, all of it.
I've seen the murals installed at the de Young and they look fantastic -- except for these gosh-awful bars that hang across the front of them. Maybe they're temporary. I can hope.
RELATED: Ansel Adams' photograph of Piazzoni working on the mural.
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Where, oh where have LACMA's curators gone?
UPDATE: Caryn Coleman at abLA makes a good point: "When policies, bad choices, and rented exhibitions start being discussed more than [LACMA's own] exhibitions, then it's time for a serious re-evaluation."
Dear applicants for the directorship of the LA County Museum of Art:
Whatever you do today, you must read Holly Myers' LAT critique of LACMA. Combine that essay with the cavalcade of King Tut-related criticism and you'll have some idea of the fix-it job you're going to have to do. The first few and the last few paragraphs are lethal.
LACMA is the most buzz-free major museum in America. LA's art bloggers -- a smart, engaged group -- rarely bothers to discuss LACMA. In fact, the Orange County Museum of Art gets more pixels than LACMA does. And justifiably so -- OCMA's exhibition program in the last year or two has been awfully strong, (even if they are showing private collections that haven't been gifted to them). When I chat with New Yorkers and Washingtonians who ask what to see when they're in LA, they never, ever ask me what's going on at LACMA. And why should they?
Southern California's museums are resurgent. The Hammer has eliminated its admissions charge for the summer, runs a smart projects series and is building a permanent collection. MOCA has the best exhibitions program of any contemporary art museum in America. The Getty -- for all its faults and boy oh boy oh Munitz are there faults -- still does smart shows, especially photo shows. REDCAT misses more than it hits so far, but that's OK. And I just mentioned OCMA. So LACMA... get with it.
(And to emailers who wonder why I don't link to more Washington Post or NYT pieces/reviews, here's an easy answer: When was the last time you read a piece like Myers' in the NYT or WP?)
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I'm back
UDPATE: I messed up the link to Felix Salmon. It's fixed. And there's a new link below.
I'm back from my New Mexico and Texas trip. (I posted from Marfa and El Paso yesterday.) I'm a day late, thanks to a flat tire I suffered just north of here on July 3. The nearest town of more than 100 people was 80 miles away, which meant driving a long, long way on one of those donut spares. Then there was no getting said flat patched in Marfa on July 4, so I couldn't fly home until yesterday.
I'll have at least two posts on Marfa in the next few days. (This is good because the summer doldrums have definitely arrived in the art world and there ain't much to post about.) I'll also be replying to a week's worth of email as quickly as I can.
On my Globe op-ed: Joseph Clarke and Felix Salmon have both posted about it. Felix seems intent on missing my point and on knocking down points I didn't make -- and he refuses to consider museums and commercial galleries different things -- but you can make up your own minds about who's right. Todd Gibson disagrees with me. I'm all for museums bringing in revenue, lots of it. How they do it is the issue.
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At The Lightning Field
 I first saw The Lightning Field from the backseat of the blue Chevrolet Suburban that delivered us from Quemado, New Mexico to the cabin at the Field.
The Lightning Field begins about 50 yards from the cabin.
It is framed on four sides: To the east, by a low shelf. To the south, by the Sawtooth Mountains, the tallest of which rises 9,500 feet above sea level. The Sawtooths run about halfway across the back of the Field. Most of the rest of the southern backdrop is filled by 10,244-foot Alegres Mountain. To the West is a higher shelf, beyond which is 10,912-foot Escudilla Mountain. The cabin sits on the north.
The poles are farther apart than I expected. When the sun is high in the sky, between 10 am and 5 pm on June 29, the Field is almost invisible. During those seven hours, I could only see the Field where the aluminum poles stuck up beyond the tops of the surrounding mountains. From there, my mind voluntarily filled in the locations of the other poles, leading my eyes to where they were.
Looking at Lightning Field was like looking at a painting. When my eyes found one pole, it led me to the next one. The poles moved my eye around the landscape the way the discovery of objects, cats, and people in a Bonnard move my eye around the canvas.
The earth in the northern part of Lightning Field is dry, cracked, and nearly gave way when I walked on it. The scrub in the Field is mostly brown, with flecks of green prairie grass.
The wind blew at about 20-25 miles per hour on Wednesday afternoon. It kicked up no dust. Some of the poles swayed in the wind.
The poles are pointed at the top. I was not expecting that.
I saw lizards, bats, ants, rabbits, coyotes, mice, gophers, crickets, and birds. I might have seen one kit fox. A mouse ate some granola that my friends Dennis and Michelle bought in Santa Fe.
We shared the cabin with two architects who work for Jean Nouvel in Paris.
When I looked at the Field, I felt like I should be whispering. So I usually did.
There is a faint trail where people have walked along the northern edge of the Field.
The poles are two inches in diameter. When I was walking along the Field, or through it, I had difficulty seeing them. When I stopped and held still, I could see them clearly as long as the sun was low enough in the sky.
When I pressed my forehead to one of the poles, with my right eye on one side of the pole and my left eye on the other, the entire line of poles disappeared. They lined up perfectly.
From the cabin porch, sometimes clouds seemed to rest on top of the Field.
There is animal scat everywhere.
There is a giant ant hill about 18 inches beyond the pole at the southwestern-most corner.
I found The Lightning Field neither meditative nor introspective. When I looked at it, I thought about the field and the way my eyes moved around it, not about myself.
In the southeastern section of the Field, I saw a cactus flower. It was bright yellow and its radius was about two thumbs. I saw lots of cactus, but just one flower.
I walked along the north edge of the Field, turned left, walked down the western side to the southern edge, and then cut into the Field diagonally, until the cabin was between two rows of poles. I turned left and headed for the cabin. This took several hours.
When the sun came up on Thursday morning, the birds were loud. By 10 am, when it started getting hot, they were quiet and they hid.
The hottest point of the day, around 5 pm, it was 90 degrees. The humidity meter at the cabin said the humidity was 22 percent, but according to the weather readings I read later on the internet it was four percent. I did not sweat at all, even in the 90 degree sun, so I think the humidity dial was wrong.
As the sun fell in the sky, in the early evening, the pointy tips of the poles captured the light best. Then during the last 30-60 minutes of the sub being above the horizon, entire poles caught the light and held it.
During that hour, I saw white, pink, peach and yellow on the Field.
Dennis said that Dan Flavin would have been jealous. I agreed.
With about 20 minutes before sunset, and with a wispy cloud between the sun and the Field, all of the poles turned pink. The pink first left the poles in the east, then in the middle, then in the west.
For the last five minutes of sunlight, the sun emerged from behind that cloud. The Field turned white. When the sun went down, the Field was invisible again.
At six in the morning, just before first light, the temperature was 40 degrees.
When the sun came up, the Field did not catch light until the sun was halfway above the horizon. Within just a minute or so of that first capture, the poles were the same color as the craggy Sawtooth Mountains.
The first color was pink, then orange, then white, then invisible.
I saw light move up the poles as the sun rose from the horizon into the sky.
Land art is not about the hubris of the artist who places an object in the landscape in an attempt to draw the eye away from nature. It is about being modest, about being willing to have your art dwarfed by the earth.
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Hi from Marfa
UPDATE: Thanks to a tire issue in Middluhnowhere, TX, I'll now be back in DC on the night of July 5. However, I think I'll have an op-ed in the Boston Globe on July 4. (I think that depends on the news about Sandy Baby.) Check for it here. More on MAN on Tuesday, of course.
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It's summer so I'm going to post things I'd ordinarily not. Oh, who am I kidding? I would have posted this in January: