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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Around the Blogosphere
Unless I find out something like, oh, I don't know... who the Corcoran's new director is before the Dec. 2 announcement, this will be MAN's last post until Dec. 5. Lots of links at the top of the site for five days (don't miss the ABMB blogging-and-tips post), so click away!
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 30, 2005 | Permanent
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Miami: Guides and blogs
Helpful bloggers point out the must-sees of fair-o-rama and help with hours, scheduling, directions, all that stuff:
Live-blogging the fair (email me with omissions ASAP):
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Problems at Pulse and NADA
 MANscoop: As of 3:50 pm ET it's pouring in Miami. The Pulse art fair seems to be taking the worst hit. Water is in the tent -- lots of water -- and power is out. Installing galleries are not thrilled and there may be damage to artwork. Gallerists are evaluating.
UPDATE: I hear water is in the NADA space too. Aqua reports minor water leaks from A/C units run amok, but nothing that is affecting installation or the art itself.
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The December Artgasm
I can't remember the last time I expected to see so much good stuff in one month. Thanks to California being particularly good at a time when I'm doing holidy family travel, I'm gonna see lots of good stuff over the next 32 days. Here's what my list includes (am I missing anything?):
- The Miami fair-o-rama. Five fairs, over 430 galleries. Here is, as best I can figure it out, the breakdown: ABMB (195, which, I think, includes the containers and all that related stuff), Aqua (36), NADA (84), Pulse (48), Scope (71). New installations at the Margulies and Rubell warehouses. Kentridge at the MAC. Random artist installations around the area. A dozen things I don't remember.
- MOCA's Bob Rauschenberg Combines show at the Met;
- Chuck Close: Self Portraits (the catalog is exceptional), Robert Adams, Wangechi Mutu, and Kiki Smith at SFMOMA. (And I'll miss, by three weeks, shows about the 1906 earthquake/fire and Richard Long there.);
- After the Ruins, Photographing the SF Earthquake and Fire at the Legion of Honor;
- My second visit to the new de Young;
- Anselm Kiefer at MAMFW;
- A pile of rubble at LACMA;
- Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement at the San Jose Museum of Art (DCers: This show is coming to the Bipolar Katzen);
- Ed Ruscha at the Whitney;
- Julius Shulman at the Getty (which has revamped its website);
- Ecstasy at MOCA (which, alas, has not);
- Banjo art -- really, banjos! -- at the Corcoran (OK, maybe their unusual approach of announcing their new director when the art world is in Miami on Friday is a good idea.);
- Masters of American Comics at MOCA and at the Hammer;
- Phoebe Washburn at the Hammer;
- Damian Ortega at REDCAT; and
- Pixar at MoMA. (Just kidding!! HAHAHAHA!!! Oh, and in case you were wondering: Yes, of course, you can buy Pixar stuff at MoMA. It's gift-giving season! Not that that has anything to do with this exhibition. At all. Not a bit.)
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ABMB notebook
Coming tomorrow: A list of blogs that will be live-blogging, photo-blogging, whatever-blogging Miami fair-o-rama. For today...
- This has nothing to do with ABMB, but I did a long Chelsea roundup yesterday and now it's buried a couple screens down.
- If the Miami Herald is going to give us this kind of lazy slop this week, I'm not going to read it.
- Richmond reader ES shares the book-of-the-week: Art fairs now figure in novel plots.
- From the new Miami Metblog: The fairs, the hours, the prices. Print this out and save it.
- The Art Newspaper is publishing daily at ABMB and they couldn't make it harder to find/read/etc. online. How about a daily email too, TAN?
- The new-to-me Miami-based blog, The Next Few Hours, looks flat-out mandatory. It's already on the blogroll. (Thanks Ed, who has the other must-read blog this week.)
- In today's Miami Herald: The broad overview, Miami businesses love the fair (duh), and Herald art critic Elisa Turner says, uh, well, I'm not sure. Yikes. See first bullet point.
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SAAM launches museo-blog
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has launched a new blog called Eye Level. It's written by Kriston Capps, who also writes Grammar.police. Kriston's one of the most interesting bloggers out there, so Eye Level starts out as a must-read. DC artist James Huckenpahler's blog, Covert City, is new to the blogroll too. (Five Things, a DC-based artists' website that James spearheaded, is now archived online. It was a pre-blog blog, a trendsetter site that should be better known.)
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More on LACMA's garage: LAT op-ed
Morning note: Posts will come fast and furious today. Check back often. Today's second post is actually below this one -- I wanted to keep this one on top for a few hours this morning.
I'm on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page today:
This year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has embarrassed itself by handing over gallery space to private corporations (the King Tut exhibition), and it has sold masterworks from its supposedly permanent collection (at auction last month in New York City). Now LACMA is about to destroy art. On Dec. 1, the museum will tear down its parking garage. The plan is to erect in its place a $60-million building for the display of contemporary art. The problem isn't that LACMA is demolishing a garage so that it can add gallery space, the problem is that LACMA isn't saving the art it commissioned for the garage.
Related: My first post on the garage, Wooster Collective I, Wooster Collective II, garage pix from LA Weekly.
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A Chelsea season in 1,000 words
Note: The links are worth clicking -- lots of pix and lots of blogs to whom I don't normally link. Discover!
According to the art of the moment, the end of the world should arrive any day now. This season in Chelsea, show after show has foretold all sorts of doom: political, ecological, environmental, industrial, post-industrial, and more.
The season's discontent is not generalist and it has, surprisingly, avoided agitprop of the sort the artists often express five years into the term of a President that they don’t like.
The place to start our journey through Chelsea's winter is at Paula Cooper Gallery, where Hans Haacke’s art still has the political energy that got him kicked out of the Guggenheim almost 35 years ago. Central to Haacke's exhibition is a large, impossibly large section of the American flag. The section is the white-on-blue star field of the flag, and it is torn almost in two, the division of the 50 stars serving as a metaphor for red state-blue state, with-us-or-against-us, pro-choice or pro-life, Litmus Test America. (The flag’s 13 red-and-white stripes are nowhere to be found. Is Haacke saying that the fundamental principles on which 13 states formed the nation are still intact, if momentarily hidden, forgotten.)
Haacke's metaphor is almost too easy, but it still seems right. It updates Jasper Johns' flags, David Hammons' African-American Flag, even Leger’s fascinated, grateful American flag from his underrated Man with Hat (1920). The Haacke is surrounded by other emblems of a crumbling society. Most of them would appeal to the Ann Coulter v. Michael Moore set -- and are equally dismissible. Only a dot-matrix computer printer, spewing out news-wire copy about American disasters onto a roll of paper, captures the never-ending cycle of news, bad news, in a visually pungent way. The paper piles up.
In front of the torn starfield, Haacke has placed a small orange tree. It is bent, beaten down as if it had been out in the wind for a while. But it’s still green, it still bears fruit, and it is still standing. (Related: Nathaniel Stern.)
 Few of the other artists showing in Chelsea this season bother with optimism the way Haacke does. (They’re younger, they’ll learn.) At Bellwether two shows pointed toward ecological devastation. In Adam Cvijanovic's occasionally sloppy but gripping show, a tornadic force of some sort rips through apart strip-mall America.
In Bellwether's next show, Marc Swanson presented a post-apocalyptic forest in which someone seems to be living amidst six-pack yokes, beer bottle-filled bird cages, randomly strung pennants (no American flags here), and garbage. Swanson gives us none of the romantic forest, the place where Shakespeare sent lovers to discover magic and each other. This is forest as after-the-disaster hell. (Related: From the Floor, Phantastic.)
At Elizabeth Dee, Josephine Meckseper creates a storefront wherein capitalism has broken down and gone out of business. The premise is panicky, the execution is a little too precious, and the whole idea of the show is rooted in the breakdown of the only system that will certainly survive the present condition (the danger is capitalism run amok, Russia style, not the death of the system), but somehow it works. (Related: James Wagner, with pix.)
 Chris Doyle gives us a similar whiff of the reactionary at Jessica Murray Projects. Doyle has constructed a giant eagle out of cheap wood and fluorescent light tubes. It seems to be swooping down toward us, its talons open. Is Doyle's eagle a symbol of freedom or is it attacking us? Unfortunately Doyle didn't trust the power of his visual, and a goofy installation in the back of the gallery extends his point too far: The eagle, lit up, has been turned into a giant LCD-screen belt buckle. In case you still don't get the W'ian allusion, the belt is stamped "Max Lang, Houston, Texas." (Related: Amp power, and Whimpering like a little girl, where you'll need to scroll down a frame or two in the video window.)
Plenty of other shows this season have taken on similar themes: At Paula Cooper, Sam Durant proposed a re-conceptualizing of DC's monuments, Nick Lowe gave us penciled-in dystopia (strangely, not on John Connelly Presents' website), Ian Burns made a bid for best-show-of-season by presenting modern geopolitics as a crazy series of amuseument park rides at Spencer Brownstone, and at Charles Cowles, Edward Burtynsky photographed effecient, union-free manufacturing scenes from China.
In this environment eye candy doesn't stand a chance. Tim Bavington's new paintings at Jack Shainman are as delicious as ever, especially the parallelograms which extend Bavington's language a bit. But at Pace, John Chamberlain is still making crushed-stuff sculptures, but in veering off into making hunksa metal into curlicues he left me shaking my head. One of his structures even looks like a shuttlecock. (Thanks Claes & Coosje.) LA Wal-Martist Matt Johnson, the inexplicable posterchild of the Hammer's Thing show, showed some cute but vapid tricks at Taxter & Spengemann. Bill Viola looks stuck in a cliched Tristan rut at James Cohan, showing studies/rejects/etc. from his opera accompaniment at James Cohan.
 My two favorite shows were Jessica Rohrer's paintings at PPOW and Ryan McGiness' design-infused decorative modern-life upchucks at Danziger Projects. Rohrer is updating the heyday-of-industry-loving precisionism of Sheeler and Demuth and placing it in suburban America. The glimpses of the natural world in the windows of her buildings (see the trees there on the right?) hint at the world we've abandoned. McGinness is easier, poppier than Julie Mehretu or Benjamin Edwards, but that's OK. Like them he creates engaging visual puzzles for us to get lost in, almost Choose Your Own Adventure paintings. (Related: Rose-Colored Glasses, a personal moment from McGinness' previous life from BlogChelsea, SuicideGirl Raven, Thuggery & Skullduggery.)
Meanwhile, as artists show us our worst fears, as they show us how relevant creative people are, everyone I know is discussing the feverish state of the art market. I go through cycles when I'm sucked in too: "The market reigns at the expense of everything else," I wrote in one particularly overheated moment. "The art world has never been so flush with money," Jerry Saltz wrote in his annual Babylon column.
 There's certainly some truth in all this. Galleries are flourishing. Dealers converge on grad student studios. MoMA has long had a flip attitude toward engaging the art market through deaccessioning, but this season it has been joined by LACMA and even, as first reported here, by Harvard. (MoMA is the seller of the Avery at left.)
Naturally all of this talk of market influence has led to a certain fear of market influence. "There is a jittery feeling that we are heading for something like the slump that hit the once dominant French art market in the fifties, in the decline of the Ecole de Paris," Robert Hughes wrote. In 1984.
Oh. Fortunately lots of artists seem to have got the moment just about right.
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Artists and tax deductions
This is good news for artists: If you donate your work to a museum/etc., the U.S. Senate thinks you are entitled to a tax deduction for the value of the work, not just the materials. To cite an extreme example, if Bob Rauschenberg had owned Rebus and given it to MoMA, he could have taken about a $15 writeoff instead of a $30M writeoff.
The bill now goes into a House-Senate conference, and then to the President's desk.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 23, 2005 | Permanent
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Cassatt in the Globe
The Boston Globe picks up yesterday's MANscoop on the Harvard Cassatt. (Ahem ArtForum...) More later today... Also, readers are pointing out that the link below to HUAM's Cassatt page has been deleted. If you need an HTML version of it for some reason, email me.
Related: HubArts.com.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 23, 2005 | Permanent
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MoMA Turns One, Part II
 Monday: The Experience. Today: The Collection.
The success of MoMA's permanent collection installation is also it's failure. Think of MoMA's installation like this: It is the museum version of a greatest hits album. At MoMA, like on a 12-track CD, we dig the greatest of the great, but that's all we get.
That approach serves MoMA well up until 1930 or so. Then the question of what is a masterpiece becomes increasingly fuzzier and fuzzier. By the time MoMA gets to the contemporary period, the show-the-masterpieces strategy is exposed as a technique that can only succeed so long as there are clearly defined, inconic masterpieces to show. By the contemporary period, when art history is at its messiest and masterpieces have yet to assert themselves, MoMA is at its most incoherent.
In the post-war galleries MoMA's masterpieces technique is especially troubling. MoMA treats Jackson Pollock as the sole creator of abstract expressionism, giving him a whole gallery. (Only Matisse is afforded the same honor.) Clyfford Still -- who got there first and who was greater, longer -- is represented by just one painting. The gallery that holds the Still presents a foreshadowing of what is coming on the contemporary floor: MoMA clusters post-war art in a way that makes it difficult to see. Still's canvas is dominated by Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis, because Vir makes the rest of the gallery look red. Remarkably, in this gallery Newman's landmark Onement I looks like a lazy afterthought.
To really appreciate the arc of the last 75 years of art history, an art-lover must go to (at least) SFMOMA, MAMFW, MOCA, the Hirshhorn, the Whitney, the MCA Chicago, and Dia: Beacon. This is not necessarily a bad thing. MoMA's current installation reminds us that the museum is no longer the dominant exhibitor of art made from 1900 to the present. MoMA still reigns from about 1900 to 1930, but after that lots of museums have collection installations on par with -- or better than -- MoMA's. When I'm at MAMFW or SFMOMA I'm pleased to be reminded of that -- I suppose I should be equally happy about it when I'm not at MAMFW or SFMOMA.
After all, we're talking about the Museum of Modern Art, New York. MoMA's view of art history starts in Europe and essentially stops at the Hudson. You won't see Thomas Hart Benton, Wayne Thiebaud, David Park, Bob Irwin, or Jess here. MoMA is as Franco-centric as ever. There's nary a Morandi to be found, nor a Kiefer, a de Stael, nor a Pistoletto.
MoMA's masterpiece problem is on full view in the second floor contemporary galleries: The new second-floor installation is an improvement over the first attempt, but that's not saying much. Now a Marina Abramovic hangs in the middle of a gallery, screeching at visitors who are trying to look at Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters. (MoMA apparently believes that each contemporary installation must include a video that pulls your attention away from what's around it. Last time it was Joan Jonas.) A Kentridge video loses much of its charm because the audio track echoes throughout a vaulted gallery. And on and on.
When you're not sure what the masterpieces are, MoMA seems to be saying, hang lots of stuff densely and let them fight it out.
All that said, there are parts of MoMA's permanent collection installation that are thought-provoking and that deserve praise:
- John Elderfield's masterful Matisse gallery, which makes the case for Matisse as the pioneering abstract painter;
- The Matisse-Diebenkorn staircase;
- The juxtaposition of Matisse's Male Model and Picasso's Les Demoiselles, installed so that they face each other across a gallery;
- The works on paper galleries have been consistently strong; and
- MoMA's only contemporary art installation success is a mighty triumph indeed: Janet Cardiff's The 40 Part Motet.
MoMA's recent acquisitions have included some fantastic works: Bob Rauschenberg's Rebus is the best example. (MAN on Rebus, in three parts.) Gordon Matta-Clark's 1974 sculpture Bingo is also fantastic.
Finally, a familiar, well-worn complaint: MoMA's failure to appreciate the arc of American modernism is particularly disappointing. Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gerald Murphy and other Americans are relegated to hallways and exit-spaces. They all deserve better.
Christie's upcoming sale of American art provides more evidence of MoMA's disinterest in Americans. The museum is deaccessioning three paintings: two by O'Keeffe (Cedar and Red Maple, Lake George and Corn No. III) and one by Milton Avery (Morning Dunes). The deaccessioning is yet another example of MoMA's especially cavalier attitude toward its permanent collection. No museum in the world is more active in selling off work from its (allegedly) permanent collection. Any other museum in America would be proud to own any of the three paintings.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 23, 2005 | Permanent
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MANscoop: Cassatt seller identified: HUAM
 UPDATE: The Boston Globe picked up the story on 9/23.
MANscoop: Thanks to a reader tip, I've learned that the seller of the Christie's Cassatt is the Harvard University Art Museums. (The link is to HUAM's collection record for the painting.) Christie's estimates the painting at $3-5 million.
This is one of the stranger deaccessions I've seen in recent years -- and deaccessions are happening at a far-too-rapid rate these days. The painting has been in HUAM's collection since 1922. It is -- soon-to-be was -- one of only two Cassatt paintings they owned. And yet it's being sold. Museums exist to save and to preserve work, not to sell it.
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Help MAN ID the seller
Christie's is selling this Mary Cassatt for an estimated $3-5 million at an American art auction on Dec. 1. The seller is a university art museum. I want to know which one. Do any readers recognize the painting? (If I can find out, I can enjoy my evening in peace.)
More later today on three paintings the Museum of Modern Art is selling at the same auction. After all, what use does MoMA have for American modernism? I mean, we alllll know that American modernism is useless, the kind of thing you would only hang in a hallway or something, right?
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Q&A with FAMSF's John Buchanan
 Last week MAN was the first to report that the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco had a new director: John Buchanan, the director of the Portland Art Museum. He starts in Ess Eff on Feb. 1.
The FAMSF consists of two museums: the de Young and the Legion of Honor. The de Young just opened a new Herzog & de Meuron building, complete with eight contemporary art commissions, new acquisitions by artists of local relevance such as Mark Rothko, Jess, and Richard Diebenkorn, America's best collection of Oceanic art, and more.
The de Young is off to a remarkable start in terms of attendance, too. On opening weekend the museum was too popular for its own good. A recent free all-night event attracted nearly 51,000 visitors. The museum drew 25,000 paying visitors in its first full week -- a number which doesn't count visitors to the tower or the cafe. The de Young is pretty photogenic too: There are already 2,367 de Young photos up on Flickr.
Yesterday I talked with Buchanan via phone. He discussed the FAMSF's need for an endowment, the importance of focusing on contemporary art (at present the FAMSF's curatorial departments aren't set up in such a way that there is a dedicated curator of contemporary art), and more.
MAN: Walking into a new job with a building built and paid for gives you a tremendous amount of freedom to have vision, doesn't it?
JB: Extremely. You may know that of the last eleven-and-a-half years, I’ve been in a capital-raising mode for 24/7 for eleven of those years. So I’m very much happy to be able to… how do I say this, maximize everyone’s investment into the infrastructure in San Francisco and really begin to focus on the programming and the internal educational programs, the collections and the exhibitions of the museum.
MAN: At the same time the FAMSF is not a museum with an endowment on par with some of its peers. Is that a likely upcoming campaign?
JB: When I was a candidate for this position, I talked with the board about growing an endowment, and about how all organizations benefit from having as strong an endowment as possible. That's certainly something that I think will be of interest to sustaining the FAMSF into the distant future.
[The board here] was not engaged in an endowment campaign when they did their building project, so hopefully that’s something in the future that can be addressed. I think that probably everybody needs to draw a breath first. They've just come off a Herculean project. Once everyone's had a moment to take a breath that’s something that would be on my very short list of priorities.
MAN: In the SF Chronicle, FAMSF board chair Dede Wilsey said that the board wants the FAMSF to be the "best museum west of the Potomac." What is lacking, that is, what will it take for the FAMSF to be the finest museum west of the Potomac?
JB: I think there are really a great number of great museums in America and I think it is very noble to want to be the best that an organization can possibly be. I suspect that Mrs. Wilsey is interested in further collection development and in making certain that special exhibits in a number of different areas are of the most significance and of the highest quality possible. I'm sure she's interested in the access of the museum to as many San Franciscans and shareholders that can possibly happen.
The collections at the museum are very rich in their diversity and it's important that those collections be put forward and engaged with the diverse audiences in San Francisco and in the Bay Area. And to make certain that these assets are available.
MAN: Historically the FAMSF has been less involved in contemporary art, but with the new de Young the FAMSF commissioned some work and set aside some galleries for contemporary art. Will the FAMSF be involved in contemporary art?
JB: Yes, absolutely, and for a number of reasons. I think they're really ready to do this. I think that lots of persons interested in the museum are enthusiastic about that as well. I think it was great that they could achieve the commissions that they achieved. And as a museum dir who just opened the center for modern and contemporary art in Portland, I was envious that their commissions here were at such a high level.
And yet I think there are lots of different approaches to embracing the de Young's destiny with modern and contemporary art. I do think that the initial commissions were a wonder way to commence, and I think that they are a museum that can collect what we would call blue-chip contemporary art. I think there is also a commitment to artists of the region and I think that’s highly important to continue that.
I think something that they want to do on an ongoing basis, with more frequency, is [programming] that’s more cutting edge, something provocative and of the moment.
I think one of the most attractive factors for me about San Francisco was its practiced desire to be an international platform and its existing and ongoing international relationships. And I’m very interested in other cultures of the world not just historic but contemporary ones.
MAN: A pet peeve, if you will: The Piazzoni murals are currently obstructed by a railing that shouldn't be there. Will you take down the railing?
JB: (Laughs.) I'll have to think about that. I'll have to put that in a committee.
RELATED: Anna L. Conti on the de Young's Turrell Skyspace, sculpture garden, and first impressions of Buchanan. (Start at the top and scroll. Great pix.), A first look at the new de Young, the SF Chron on Buchanan's hiring, the Oregonian on Buchanan's departure, the Oregonian's Bob Hicks assesses the Buchanan years.
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ABMB Notebook
UPDATE: If you're an arts blogger and you need ABMB accreditation, email me ASAP.
A recurring feature over the next nine days....
- MAN hears reports that the Art Basel Miami Beach press office is not credentialing bloggers. First, ABMB should beg any of the bloggers on my blogroll to attend the fair and to write about it. There are art blogs that get more visitors than art magazine websites have readers. Second, this is soooo 2002. Three, here's an idea for the uncredentialed: Ignore the main fair and write about Pulse, Aqua, NADA, Scope, etc. (Aside to Pulse: We love you, but don't ever, ever, email anyone a 13MB press relase. Aside to ABMB and its PR firm Fitz & Co.: Change the policy.)
- Edward Winkleman is about to start a series on lesser-known Miami Fair Week attractions. Keep an eye out.
- Is one Miami gallerist keeping another out of the main fair? Some smart arts journo should do a piece on art fair selection processes...
- I hope you weren't planning on staying at the Sheraton.
- Sometimes it's best not to be a gallerist at the fairs.
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This week in antiquities
How long will it take some clever museum to take advantage of non-stop antiquities headlines (like these) and launch some kind of antiquities mega-show?
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MoMA Turns One, Part I
The most recent incarnation of the Museum of Modern Art turns one year old this week. To mark the anniversary, MAN will feature a three-part series on the new MoMA. Today’s first part will address the experience of visiting the museum. Part two will examine the museum’s exhibition program and on Wednesday MAN will look at the way MoMA has installed its collection over the last year.
On my first visit to the new Museum of Modern Art last November, I turned to a writer friend and said that we'd better enjoy today because this will be the last time we're able to enjoy the art. He pshawed me and accused me of being an elitist. Two weeks later he sent me an email and told me I was right. At the time I thought that maybe over time MoMA would learn how to adjust to its popularity. Nope.
MoMA is the most unpleasant museum in Manhattan at which to view art. In an apparent effort to accumulate as many $20 bills as possible, the museum has embraced tourist-friendly policies that make contemplative art viewing impossible. This represents both a success and a failure: For decades MoMA was the foremost evangelizer of modernism and modern art in the world. Given the crowds at MoMA and the success of other modern art museums around the country (MAMFW, SFMOMA, etc.), it has clearly won over the masses.
But in the new MoMA it has failed. Having triumphed, it seems intent on satiating visitors by providing sanitized and expected experiences rather than challenging encounters. (More on this later this week -- today we're just talking visitor experience.) MoMA is sadly content to be just another Manhattan tour stop.
It's impossible to spend a contemplative moment with art at MoMA. This is principally because the museum is mostly interested in allowing a visitor to take home a snapshot of himself in front of a Picasso. If you enjoy strobe lights, go to MoMA. Flash photography is not allowed, but the poor guards are always overwhelmed and they are often indifferent to what goes on around them. Just try to take in Monet’s Water Lillies. It’s like being in a dance club. During the previous second-floor installation, I twice saw visitors so intent on getting a photograph of a Cy Twombly that they stepped on a Richard Serra.
(Strangely, the guards are quite good at shushing cell phone violators.)
MoMA should ban cameras -- video and still -- from the galleries. They won't: They’re afraid that people won’t pay $20 if they can’t prove to Uncle Joe in Kansas City that they were there.
MoMA also has a crowd problem. Because of the size of the crowds the museum attracts and the disinterest of the guards, I’d bet more art is touched by more people at MoMA than at any other museum. The monumental Donald Judd on the fourth floor is probably the most handled artwork in an American museum. When an Anne Truitt was damaged last year, the museum went into bunker-mode. It refused to answer questions about what had happened, and it worked feverishly to kill stories about the damaged work. Better to try to get people to ignore the problem than to address its cause. If MoMA can't control the crowds it attracts, it needs to admit fewer people.
Related: Jerry Saltz on Year One, Edward Winkleman, Me, with a little more cheek, pointing out similar problems almost 11 months ago.
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The new Museum of Modern Art has been open for one year. I'm glad it's back, but
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Attn: Urban photographers
LAObserved has had two fantastic posts in the last two days (second one here) on people with cameras being harassed by law enforcement. Seems that some over-zealous fuzz thinks that anyone with a camera, taking photos of architecture or the like must be a terrorist, an evil-doer -- maybe even a Democrat.
Just judging from anecdotal evidence, this happens a lot. I wonder if some clever IT person might start a blog/wiki/something to which people could post incidents of law enforcment harassment...
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Museum directorships take center stage
In the next couple of weeks several high-profile museums will announce who their new directors are. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco goes first, announcing their new director today at 1pm ET. On Dec. 1 the Corcoran's new director will be announced to staff, with a presser on Dec. 2. (With those dates the Corc is saying that this is only a story for the locals. No one in the art world will be paying attention to anything but sun, surf and art in Miami.) And LACMA trustees have said that they'd like to have a director in place by Miami, but so far... nothing.
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Biggs asks, MAN answers!
On today's Getty news (see the post below this one), Getty board chair John Biggs said this: "Of course we think it's a conflict. I think everybody's uncomfortable with it, but we're not sure where to go from here."
Golly. I don't think that's such a tough question. Here's what Biggs should do:
- Place Trust CEO Barry Munitz on administrative leave until the Getty's investigation is complete;
- Place on administrative leave anyone in the chain of command who knew about True's, er, issues, until the end of the investigation;
- Place Barbara Fleischman on the trustee-equivalent of administrative leave until the end of the investigation; and
- Review the terms, conditions, and finances surrounding work that entered the Getty collections from the Fleischmans. The Getty paid $20M for part of the collection and gave the Fleischmans a valuation of $40M on the rest. (I gotta believe the IRS might want a look at that tax writeoff...)
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The Getty: A vortex of impropriety
Stick with me through this one: The panel of Getty trustees that is investigating the Getty's trustees and the Getty's administration because the California state attorney general and the LA Times are investigating the Getty has learned that the spouse of a Getty board member was involved in improper activity with a Getty curator.
(Confused? Here's a quick MAN Cheat Sheet to Who is Investigating the Getty: If you are a Getty trustee, know a Getty trustee, or if you are Trust boss Barry Munitz, chances are you're already involved in investigating the Getty. (And here.) If you fit that description but don't think you're involved in a Getty-related investigation yet, please call Munitz. I'm sure he'll want to add you to the team. Then call me: I wanna know why you've been asleep at the switch for so long.)
It is no surprise that the curator in question is Marion True, who accepted an unsecured $400K loan from the spouse of Getty board member and major Getty antiquities donor Barbara Fleischman. It is antiquities donated to the Getty (through True) that are at the heart of the Italian government's case against the True. (And I wonder what kind of tax write-off the Fleischman got on that donation...)
As usual, the question is what did Barry Munitz know and when did he know it? (The other question is how does this guy still have the trust of his trustees?) We already know Munitz knew about True's first improper loan for three years before acting. And how will Munitz explain away his inaction this time?
When I covered collegiate sports, I remember that colleges dreaded hearing the NCAA say that the NCAA infractions committee was concerned about a "lack of institutional control." If there's one thing the Getty has in abundance it's "a lack of institutional control."
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Top ten: My favorite cities for art
I haven't done a silly list in a while. These are not the best ten. These are my favorite ten. I reserve the right to change my mind as soon as this afternoon. And a reader points out that I should call this my U.S. list. He's right.
- New York City. Duh.
- Los Angeles. Great mix of artists, galleries, and museums. (MOCA, UCLA Hammer, Getty and LACMA get all the ink, but there's the Norton Simon, and the Huntington, too. Barnsdall Art Park, the Schindler House, and plenty of other spaces that do interesting things.) An uncontested No. 2.
- San Francisco Bay Area. Ess Eff has about a dozen perky galleries, a dozen top-line galleries, three fantastic museums (FAMSF, the Asian Art Museum and SFMOMA), a couple next-tier museums (Oakland Museum, San Jose Museum of Art), and some university spaces (Stanford, BAM, Mills College). And I grew up there, so phbbbbt.
- Houston. The MFAH is inconsistent and often laughable. The Menil properties are divine, so too James Turrell's Quaker meeting house. The Blaffer and the CAMH cover the contemporary side. Alt-spaces like Lawndale are a start.
- Dallas-Fort Worth. MAMFW is probably my favorite place in America to see art. The Nasher Sculpture Center is smartly conceived and flawlessly executed. The Dallas Museum of Art and a small gallery scene round out the city. Lacking alt-spaces. (Aside: I don't have a single Texas art blog on my blog roll. Am I missing any?)
- Philadelphia. The Barnes, the Philly Museum and the ICA are the headliners, but upstarts like the Fabric Museum and the Moore College put on interesting shows.
- Washington, DC. Strong museum scene, small gallery scene. Hampered by some awful-for-art buildings like Bunshaft's bunker and IM Pei's cavernous NGA East Building. The Corcoran is in seemingly perpetual regression. (Banjos. Seriously: banjos.) Static.
- Chicago. The Art Institute, MCA, and galleries. Good I suppose, but this is a favorites list and I've never liked Chicago. Perhaps because I lived in...
- St. Louis. Would make my list just for the magnificent Matisse Bathers at the St. Louis Art Museum. But SLAM has an under-acknowledged collection, and the Pulitzer is one of the most special art experiences anywhere. The Contemporary St. Louis has been programmed smartly too. Not many regional papers have a David Bonetti, either. The Pulitemporary blog is the best of its kind.
- Marfa. The mixture of art, land, sky, elements. One of my favorite places in America.
Rising fast: Denver (David Adjaye's new MCA Denver, the forthcoming Clyfford Still Museum), Boston (should be in the top ten probably, I just haven't been there a lot lately -- MFA and ICA are building, Harvard and Brandeis museums soon-to-expand.), Richmond (expanding Virginia MFA, VCU's Solvent Space is a too-well-kept secret, and VCU's Anderson Gallery is doing interesting things.)
Falling: Miami (Great fairs, but what is going on with your art museum? If you want to be an international city...).
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 16, 2005 | Permanent
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True appears in Rome
Ex-Getty curator Marion True's trial started today in Rome. In something of a surprise, she made an appearance. I don't want MAN to become all-antiquities-trial, all-the-time, so I'll see if I can set up some place here that will feature regular links to the goings-on. (Yo, LATimes.com, you should have a little Getty trial link/box on your front page too.)
UPDATE: Nevermind. The trial is back on hiatus until December 5.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 16, 2005 | Permanent
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LACMA says bye, bye, bye Barry McGee
UPDATE: Wooster Collective is "totally bummed."
As I mentioned this morning, the LAT picked up on the trouble LA Weekly and I started on the destruction of LACMA's parking garage. Which has art in it.
LACMA's position on the Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, etc. art in the garage is this:
[LACMA curator Lynn] Zelevansky said that she and conservators brainstormed about ways to save more of the garage paintings, which aren't on removable layers. One idea was to gird the painted sections of concrete with wooden supports and hope that those walls would remain standing amid the wreckage. But then the museum would have to move and store the surviving tonnage. That, Zelevansky said, would take "huge amounts of money" and contradict the off-the-cuff, street-art nature of the work.
Lovely excuse, that last bit. But seriously: Isn't that thinking about five times as complicated as it needs to be? If sections of the Berlin Wall can be preserved by cutting them out with a wet saw, why not do the same with McGees and Kilgallens from LACMA's garage?
And too expensive? If LACMA can budget $60,000,000 for a new building, why didn't they budget $60,025,000 to save some art? They can't find a McGee/Kilgallen collector or trustee to pony up a few extra thousand dollars? C'mon.
McGee doesn't seem to mind -- kinda:
"I always thought it was a temporary thing. My stuff, in particular, I don't give a darn about. That's the nature of the beast" when it comes to murals painted on the walls of parking garages. "Margaret's work, of course, I like seeing it. But I can't imagine saving it or chaining myself to the wall or anything like that."
Well, OK, but the whole idea of museums and curators is that they are supposed to be the ones who do the long-term thinking. LACMA appears to be thinking with a time-frame best measured by a parking meter.
Plus... McGee later, er, sings a slightly different tune, saying that saving some of the work from the garage is OK with him.
"It will be handled and treated as [I] couldn't have ever imagined. Imagine the company it will keep."
More should be saved.
Related: Wooster Collective.
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National Medal of Arts, part two
In this post on Thursday, I missed Frederick Hart, a sculptor who received the National Medal of Arts in 2004. (Thanks, Dan.)
I also received a bunch of emails pointing out the politics of the award. For example, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts received a medal this year. PAFA is a perfectly fine school, but I never hear it mentioned in the top echelon of American art schools or museums. So how...
Well, this can't hurt: PAFA board member Bob Byers is a Republican donor who gave at least $14,000 to Republicans in the last cycle. Bush even visited his company, Byers Choice, during the 2004 campaign. And now PAFA gets medaled.
(For conspiracy buffs: The Bushes commissioned a PAFA alum to paint their ranch, too.)
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The Trial of the (5th) Century (BC)
UPDATE: Modern Kicks makes an excellent point.
It's a big week in antiquities. Here's your cheat sheet:
Ex-Getty curator Marion True's trial begins Wednesday. The LAT will be there, and I think Bloomberg and the AP may be too.
On Friday, the Italian government asked for a meeting with Met director Philippe de Montebello. (I wonder if Carol Vogel will be assigned to cover that meeting. Could be risky -- she might get lost on the way because her knowledge of Manhattan geography seems fuzzy. Be confused by the third item.) Could the Italians ask for the return of the Euphronius krater (at left)?
In Cleveland, the Plain Dealer finally got around to running a story on the latest antiquities flare-up, but adds nothing that the LAT didn't break weeks ago. The story quotes the Italian antiquities prosecutor (for whom we really need a catchy nickname) criticizing the Cleveland Museum of Art for buying the controversial Apollo statue, but doesn't say if the Italians are targeting the Apollo (or not).
The Minneapolis Star Tribune also cribs from the LAT and identifies the MIA object that interests the Italians, and says the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is a target too. (I've read that nowhere else, and as the museum is identified as the "Richmond Museum of Fine Art" I'm inclined to think it's an error. More to come.) And the AP reports on two objects at Princeton.
On Friday, the three works the Getty gave to the Italians returned to Rome. The Italians welcomed them back with hyperbole: "'The Americans must above all be aware that the theft of cultural heritage is often connected with criminal organisations and that the illegal traffic of art works is one source of financing for international terrorism,'" said Republican spinmeister -- I mean Italian culture minister -- Rocco Buttiglione.
And finally, the weekend's must-read: The most interesting bit of antiquities-related opining was from LATer Christopher Knight, who excoriated Getty Trust trustees and boss Barry Munitz for effectively appointing themselves to investigate the scandals that they've ignored for the last year. Uh, folks, if you'd been paying attention before now... (Related: LAO points out that Knight disagrees with the LAT editorial board. Knight 1, LAT Ed Board 0.)
(If this is all too heavy, MANpal Choire Sicha went on a date with Tracey Emin last week. You tell us: Which one is the hag?)
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Friday photo candy
 I'm spending the day looking at art. (I say this all the time, but you'd be amazed how little time an art writer/critic spends actually looking at art.) Thanks to all those who wrote in on Paul Wonner earlier this week -- I can't remember the last time a non-Getty post generated that much email. (Are you listening museums? Hide your crappy Big Name Art and show us some breadth-of-collection.)
From the housekeeping category: If you're going to fair-o-rama in Miami next month and you plan to blog it, photo-blog it, or live-blog it, please drop me a note.
Today in antiquities: Philippe de Montebello is going to Rome to discuss the hot pot.
With the Flavin show arriving in Europe (London's Hayward Gallery and the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) next month, I thought I'd share this picture taken by Phyllis Tuchman at MCA Chicago. Enjoy the weekend.
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Today in antiquities
Finders keepers, losers... oh wait... The Getty sends three objects (back) to Italy.
Quick question though: From the US Attorney involved in the case:
"The act of giving it back speaks volumes, regardless of whether or not they admit guilt," Assistant U.S. Atty. John E. Lee, who filed the forfeiture complaint last year, said of Getty officials.
Last year? So why is the Getty returning items now?The strange timing of Getty actions seems odd. I mean, remember that Getty boss Barry Munitz knew about L'Affaire True for three years before acting.
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Today's quiz
Name the last two artists (and the years) to receive the National Medal of Arts. Answer late this afternoon. (The 2005 awardees were announced today.)
ANSWER: John Ruthven (2004), Helen Frankenthaler (2001).
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Around the blogosphere
For the first time in almost a month (and rendered cranky by Starbucks' insistence on starting the Christmas season about three weeks early), around we go:
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Artists we love(d): Paul Wonner
 I've been thinking a lot of what Jerry Saltz said at MICA on Monday about the length of artists' careers. Lots of artists have 30-month careers -- they have one or two ideas, they burn through them, and there's nothing left. A very few others have 30-year careers.
That doesn't mean that some of those artists didn't make a small body of fantastic work. Museums such as MoMA and SFMOMA think that people want to see the stars in their permanent collection hangings, so they're more likely to show us a mediocre Roy Lichtenstein than a fantastic Paul Wonner. As a result, we almost never see their work on view. (In other countries, they embrace these artists a bit more. Jean Helion, for example, recently had a whole gallery to himself at the Pompidou.)
Lately I've been thinking a lot about artists who jumped the shark, or who simply stopped making work in the public eye. They're the art equivalents of one-hit wonders. I'm going to try to spotlight some of these artists on MAN in the coming months -- and if readers want to email in suggestions that'd be great too.
 Today, prompted by tomorrow's day sale at Sotheby's (no links -- Sotheby's makes it difficult to link to auction lots), I'm plugging Paul Wonner, whose Woman with Flowers (1961) is above. Wonner was one of the Bay Area Figurative Expressionists. He was never a leader of the group, just a solid acolyte. Wonner is still painting -- he had a show in 2004 at John Berggruen -- but his realist still-lifes from the last few decades are painfully kitschy.
During his peak in the 1950s and early 1960s, he made fantastic work. Sotheby's estimates Woman with Flowers to go for $150-200K.
UPDATE: Wonner's auction record -- after premium -- is $265K. It's for Boy and Girl in Garden, from 1959. That's it on the right.
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Looting update
There were two notable stories yesterday on:
The LA Times summed up where we are and says that the following museums will or have received phone calls from Italy: the Boston MFA, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Getty and the Met.
Bloomberg reports that after some help from prosecutors, a smuggler is being urged to snitch. The Bloomberg report hints that the presecutor in the case, Paolo Ferri, wanted the smuggler to make accusations against major museums. The smuggler has refused.
And, finally, Mike Weiss is urging everyone to do the right thing or he'll call the cops.
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Paging Mike Weiss
On Monday, Nov. 21, MoMA HMLSS will set up on 53rd Street across from MoMA's main entrance. I wonder if Mike Weiss will call the cops on organizer Filip Noterdaeme.
UPDATE: Todd Gibson has more on the project here.
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Five things I think I think
Five riffs on various things Jerry Saltz mentioned yesterday in a talk at MICA:
- Saltz: Figurative painting got too perfect around the time of David, and over the next 100 years it got messy. Think Pollock. Me: What's too perfect now? High-edition, shiny, big, colorful c-prints.
- Saltz: Very few artists have 30-year careers. Me: Way few. Partial list of American artists with consistent, ongoing 30-year careers: Johns, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Stella, Celmins, Eggleston, Thiebaud, Andre. Next notch down: Oliveira, Neri, Chamberlain.
- Saltz: No one believes MoMA's march through art history is the way art history actually happens, happened, looks, anything-of-the-sort. Me: Yup. The list of artists not on view in MoMA's permanent collection is probably as good as the list of artists who are up: Kiefer, Morandi, Fischl, Whiteread, Thiebaud, Marin, Opie, Cattelan, Park...
- Saltz: MoMA is our temple, where we go to worship our ancestors. Me: Yes, agreed, but... to really understand where we come from, we've also got to regularly see the permanent collection installations at the Walker, SFMOMA, MOCA (oh, wait...), the Whitney, and Dia. It's increasingly impossible to see a diverse range of modern art in one city. Even in New York.
- Saltz: Chelsea makes us cry, but it's important to go anyway. Me: Yup.
Related: Amazon has Saltz's Seeing Out Loud back in stock.
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ArtForum conflict No. 4
The latest in a probably never-ending series, in which I chronicle the conflicts-of-interest that make ArtForum Chelsea's doorstop of choice...
Today we look at ArtForum's relationship with John Kelsey. Kelsey is a writer (he writes reviews and macro-pieces for AF), a gallery director (of Reena Spaulings Gallery), an artist (recently represented by American Fine Arts), and a member of the cooperatives Bernadette Corporation and Reena Spaulings.
(Perhaps Kelsey and ArtForum think that if they confuse enough people, no one will notice ArtForum's trademark incestuousness.)
In the December 2004 issue of ArtForum, Kelsey wrote an ArtForum piece about the NYC scene in which he referred to American Fine Arts as an especially fine gallery. No surprise there -- after all, Kelsey showed with AFA. (In a related story, newspapers and magazines that run my stuff are the bestest publications ever!!!)
Kelsey also reviewed shows of other artists who showed at AFA: Witness an October, 2003 review of a Merlin Carpenter show. And in the June, 2004 ArtForum Kelsey reviewed another AFA artist: John Waters, who had a show up at the NuMu.
In the other direction, ArtForum has twice written about Bernadette Corporation without mentioning that one of their most regular reviewers is part of the group. Witness this September, 2004 piece, or an October, 2005 review of a recent Bernadette novel.
Shameful. But, by now, do we expect anything else?
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The weekend that was
The only thing that really matters about the weekend is that the Caps won back-to-back games (including against the pixie-ish weenies known as the Toronto Maple Leafs) and that Alex Ovechkin is a better Calder candidate than the NHL's favored Son of Canada, Sidney Crosby. Yeah, I know, on to the art:
The H of H has just rehung its second-floor galleries, and it's a spotty showing. A room of Smithson, Truitt and LeWitt sculptures is both clever and interesting. A brand-new-to-the-Hirsh Olafur Eliasson is hypnotic and Pink Floydish (you Angelenos saw it a while back), but the rest of the floor... (Side note: The Hirshhorn has bought two Eliassons since last year.)
 Fortunately for my enjoyment, the Hirshhorn is presenting one of my favorite young video artists in its new basement black box gallery. (Gee, who suggested that three years ago?) Four Hiraki Sawa videos, including Dwelling (which has been shown extensively in NYC and at the Hammer in LA), are in rotation. The website says three videos, the wall text says four. Who knows -- the text is laughably bad.)
After the Hirshhorn, I wandered over to the National Gallery to see "A Model for Matisse," a recent documentary about the relationship between Sister Jacques-Marie and Matisse, a friendship that started in the nun's pre-Dominican days when she modeled for the painter, continued through a period when she painted the gouaches that Matisse later cut-out, and which finally resulted in the chapel at Vence. If you love Matisse, you'll enjoy the film. (Sorry -- can't find a link to a DVD.)
When I wasn't looking at art this weekend, I was reading about it. Yesterday I noted that the NYT published a Cliff's Notes version of the LAT's Getty coverage. The Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers reported that the MFA is going to be pro-active in its dealings with the Italian government -- but that the MFA strangely blames the Globe and others for it.
From the streets of Chelsea, James Wagner reports that gallerist Mike Weiss had police remove artist Eric Doeringer (he's the one who makes tiny knockoffs of contemporary works) from the sidewalk near his gallery. (Related on Bloggy. Related on Edward Winkleman.) Surely Mike Weiss has something better to do -- like running a less lousy gallery.
Leftover from just before the weekend: I attended a panel discussion on public art at the Hirshhorn. Steven Nash, the director of the Nasher in Dallas, argued that his museum's installations counted as public art even though the Nasher is a private museum that charges $10 for entry. I have no problem with the entry fee, but how exactly can a private museum with an entry fee 'count' as a public art installation? The H of H will be holding a series of panels on public art over the next year. That's great but some definition of the term is in order.
Finally, in one of the stranger written passages of the weekend, WP art critic Blake Gopnik referred to Kathryn Cornelius as a "barely emerging" artist. Huh? Now you have to emerge into emerging?
UPDATE: Hiraki Sawa's website is here.
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Photos of MFAB objects in Rome trial
The Boston Globe has more on three potentially looted objects in the MFA Boston's collection. (There is no evidence as of yet that MFAB director Malcolm Rogers has offered to provide the Italians with the three objects as part of a long-term rental.) The Italian's evidence is part of the True/Hecht trial docuemnts.
In a remarkably odd twist at the end of the story, Hecht positions himself and (his being caught up in the antiquities scandal) to Jesus Christ:
''You know the Bible, don't you?" [Hect] said. ''When they were going to take Jesus to be crucified, he said, 'Forgive them for they know not what they do.' "
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Yes, there should be a Congressional role
Whenever I write that Congress has a role in investigating non-profit governance, I get more oh-no-you-don't email than you'd probably expect. Yesterday, former Santa Barbara and LA County Museums of Art communications director Martha Donelan sent an email that was fairly typical:
You and Lee Rosenbaum have to be kidding.
Aside from the problem of their other overwhelming responsibilities, Congress is in NO WAY capable of overseeing a museum’s accessioning or deaccessioning policy – nor should they be. It’s simply not their job. With the possible exception of LACMA, in part, and obviously the Smithsonian, museums are not public institutions. They are private institutions and as such are answerable only to themselves about decisions they make. Would you suggest that Yale or Harvard should have any public entity overseeing their admissions or expulsions policies?
From the top: I can't speek for Lee. But I'm not kidding.
I have never suggested that Congress should oversee museum purchasing or deaccessioning. However, non-profit governance falls squarely within the jurisdiction of several Congressional committees. (Congress can juggle many responsibilities -- that's why it's broken into committees with different foci. The Senate Finance Committee has been especially interested in non-profit governance.) Certain executive branch agencies, such as the IRS, also monitor non-profits.
Congress should be more aggressive in its monitoring of non-profit organizations. And while most art museums are indeed private, they are 501(c)3 organizations exempt from paying taxes. As a result they are not answerable only to themselves. Nor are institutions of higher education -- witness the Senate Finance Committee's interest in the Munitz-like expenses that have led to the ouster of American University president Benjamin Ladner. Other museum-world practices that deserve scrutiny include the MFA Boston's rental of paintings to a commercial gallery, and deaccessioning at LACMA, MoMA and other museums.
Many other e-writers have suggested that "we" don't want the Republican Congress investigating "our" precious art museums. Hogwash. There is nothing partisan about this. There is nothing inherently liberal or conservative about an organization following its organizational mission or operating within its tax exemption.
Finally, Congress has previously proven itself capable of investigating non-profits run amok. In 2003 Congress looked at the operations of The Nature Conservancy and found plenty of improprieties. The investigation forced TNC to clean up its act. I'd love to see the same Senate committee go after a museum or two.
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Tut in Times Square?
From the LAT's morning story on the wrap-up of Tut in LA:
Tut has a snappy, hip-hop-derived marketing slogan for his next stop, the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where the exhibition opens Dec. 15 for a four-month run. There, the local tourism bureau has dubbed him "The Original King of Bling," and the catch-phrase emblazons a huge billboard now hanging in New York City's Times Square.
Who's got a picture?
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Lee Rosenbaum in the NYT
My email is thick with questions about Lee Rosenbaum's op-ed in today's NYT. (It is available for free online.)
Rosenbaum hits on one of the art world's two big stories: deaccessioning. (The other big story: Where'd ya get that neat old pot?) I've written two posts on this lately (here and here), so I don't think I have a lot to add to what Rosenbaum wrote.
However, at the end of the piece, Rosenbaum picks at AAMD, an organization for which I've never had much use. AAMD allegedly sets industry standards for its members, and then routinely looks away as members violate them. In a backhanded way, Rosenbaum agrees:
Legislators and government regulators should hold museums to the often ignored standards for disposal spelled out in the published guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors: poor quality, redundancy, or problems with title, authenticity or condition. "Redundancy," not defined in the guidelines, should be interpreted strictly to mean exact copies of prints or photographs, or sculptures in multiple editions. A museum's "redefining" of its mission should be cause for moving works to other public institutions, not for their lucrative transfer into private hands. All disposals from public collections should be publicized well in advance to allow opportunity for public comment.
When museums cross too many lines, the public's elected representatives must step in. Otherwise, it won't be long before pragmatic museum trustees sell a Degas "Toilette" to pay for the toilets.
In past writings here, for Bloomberg and in a Boston Globe op-ed, this is about what I suggested about other museum issues. AAMD won't hold its members accountable, so someone must. Here's looking at you, Congress.
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Blogroll adds
Cronaca, worth a daily read during this time of antiquities-related uncertainty, is new to the 'general arts' section.
The TJ Norris-penned Portland Oregonian art blog, Is it Art?, is new too.
And if anyone has blogs for me to consider for the non-blog-media section -- especially alt-weeklies -- lemme know.
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Italians: MFAB is next
The Italians have their next allegedly-looted-antiquities target: The MFA Boston.
Update: Here's the Bloomberg story Geoff Edgers referenced.
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LACMA deaccessioning, destroying
Last week I wrote about deaccessioning that was OK by me. I gave a couple of examples and didn't really address any of this week's sales. (Another example of reasonable deaccessioning I could have given but didn't: The Met's selling off of duplicates, etc. from the Gilman Paper Co. photo collection. Or the Hirshhorn's years-ago deaccessioning of a Clyfford Still because the museum believed it was damaged to the point where it could not be restored and honestly hung in a museum as a Still.)
 Today Christopher Knight takes LACMA to task for its deaccessioning. I said I was OK with deaccessioning of minor works when a museum has better, and works that are outside the scope of a museum's collection. LACMA's deaccessioning, as Knight points out, is neither of those things.
Worse, LACMA's next director will have to live with the results of this deaccessioning whether s/he approves or not -- Andrea Rich has just days to go.
With the exception of a story in this week's LA Weekly, I've read nothing about this anywhere: While not exactly a deaccessioning, LACMA has chosen to tear down its parking garage, home to some fantastic work by Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen. LACMA's not selling the work at Christie's, but it is destroying art it commissioned. (Street art, temporal, old argument, don't want to hear it. This is a major museum, not a train station.)
If chunks of the Berlin Wall can be saved, I don't know why the McGees/Kilgallens in the LACMA garage can't be. They should be. (Is there an engineer or something out there who can correct me? I could be wrong h | | |
