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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
On Julius Shulman
Julius Shulman's photographs of modernist California architecture are His photographs show him as a true believer, an evangelist for modernism. In his photographs modernism is beautiful, functional, and futuristic.
The most ardent believers are those with the passion of the converted. Julius Shulman did not grow up in modern America. In the years before and during World War I, Julius Shulman (b. 1910) grew up on a farm in rural Connecticut. The Shulmans pumped water from a hand pump on the kitchen sink, made do with outdoor commodes and used Sears Roebuck catalogs for toilet paper.
In 1920, Julius' parents decided that they wanted their 10-year old son and his two siblings to grow up not on a farm, but in America's new land of promise: California. They boarded a train in New York and moved to Los Angeles. It didn't take Shulman long to understand the promise of California: He enrolled in the first class at the new UCLA campus, and by 1936 he was photographing the works of the greatest West Coast modernist architects.
(pictures that were just as much about hoOne of the shows I've been most looking forward to this year is Julius Shulman at the Getty. I'll have more on the show later (I thought that maybe I should see it first, ya know?). First:
One of the reasons Shulman interests me is his biography and how it fits wonderfully into the story of America's westward migration. Today, a bit on Shulman:
Related: A Julius Shulman oral history in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.
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Miami fairs: Old friends
The first buncha posts I did on art in Miami focused on artists who were new to me. In this post I'll quick-focus on some artists with whom I was previously familiar.
 David Schnell at Eigen + Art, Frank Nitsche at Hetzler, everywhere else: Want to know what a 'knowing shrug' looks like? Walk up to a David Schnell or a Neo Rauch and say, "Another good German painter." The person you're with will nod and give you... a knowing shrug. Yes, it's quite good. Yes, yes, Leipzig, got it. Uh-huh. Next?
Schenll and Nitsche are two of the best of the current German crop. Schnell's work mixes abstraction, representation and, seemingly, structural references. (Hmmmm, kind of reminds me of Richard Diebenkorn, with whom Schnell shares a palette...) Nitsche is dedicated to abstraction, making tight, energetic paintings whether he's working small or large.
Katrin Sigurdardottir at Anhava/Bjergaard: I first saw Sigurdardottir's work at the excellent Surface Charge show at Virginia Commonwealth U. Her work plays with our expectations of space and structure. At VCU deconstructed a wall into a twisting tale of drywall-and-timber. At ABMB she reduced large cities into carry-on-sized suitcases, a twist that was both fun and a little bit eerie.
Giorgio Morandi at Tega: Seven Morandis in a row: five oils, two works on paper. That's the second-most Morandis I've ever seen in one place in the US. Completely blissy.
Kate Shepherd at Lelong: You'd think shiny, fetish-finish-style minimalism was played out. Apparently not.
Random sight-ems: Jason Middlebrook's paintings at Sara Meltzer felt hurricane-y; Luisa Lambri's windows at Luhring's (indoor, in the artificially lit middle-of-it-all) booth were sly and witty, Dmitri Kozyrev's paintings at Cirrus reminding me of landing at MIA, jumping into a car, and driving toward the ocean.
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Endowments 101
How beneficial is it for small non-profit arts organizations to have an endowment fund? Thanks to a $5 million challenge grant from the Lannan Foundation, Len Riggio and Dia, the Chinati Foundation has the opportunity for a 1-for-1 endowment match. If Chinati raises $5 million by Oct. 1, it will find itself with a $10 million endowment.
Based on Chinati's FY 2003 operating expenses -- just under $1 million -- that endowment could fund 65 percent of Chinati's operations in FY 2007. Maybe more.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 21, 2005 | Permanent
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MoMA & Pixar: Aggregated
Just for the sake of convenience, here are links to MAN's MoMA/Pixar coverage:
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 21, 2005 | Permanent
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More on the Getty, COF
I wanted to start the day by leaving Around the blogosphere (click for cool links!) at the top of the page and then by wrapping up MAN's Miami coverage, but the good ol' Getty Trust can't keep itself out of the news.
As MAN first reported yesterday, the Council on Foundations, the foundation industry's association, has put the Getty on probation for 60 days. The COF intends the move as a slap upside the travertine, the institutional equivalent of: 'Don't blame the foundation community for the Getty's problems. We can't rein them in either and we don't want their problems to reflect poorly on the rest of the natoin's foundations.' (Especially on Capitol Hill, where Senate Finance Committee chairman Charles Grassley is known to prefer the Getty saga to Robin Leach-hosted television shows. Kind of.) The COF wants the Getty to participate in COF's investigation of the Getty's practices.
The Getty's reply is inadvertently comic: So many people are investigating us we can't keep up. Recap: Here's who is investigating the Getty in various ways:
- The Los Angeles Times;
- The California Attorney General;
- The Council on Foundations;
- Italy. The country.
- Greece. Also a country.
- The Getty's own board -- which must be wishing they'd been a little more observant all along because this is beyond embarrassing at this point -- with an assist from 'outside' attorney Ronald L. Olson; and
- The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, Los Angeles lodge. (OK, I made that one up. Probably.)
About the only body with jurisdiction that isn't already investigating the Getty is... the Senate Finance Committee. If COF further disciplines the Getty, the door for a Senate investigation opens wide.
MAN prediction: Sometime in the next 10 days the LA Times editorial board will call for Munitz' ouster. Will that be all or will they call for board chair John Biggs' removal too?
Pet peeve: Will the LA Times please stop calling the Getty "the world's richest art institution?" The phrase is perfectly correct. But the Getty is more than that: It's the third-largest foundation in America, an industry titan. The mess at the Getty is of interest to me personally because it's an arts organization, but L'Affaire Getty an important national story because it's behind only the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation in assets.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 21, 2005 | Permanent
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Around the blogosphere
The last ATB before the end of the year...
- I love the idea of small, tidy, self-contained urban dwellings.
- New Indianapolis blog On the Cusp tipped me off to this: The Indianapolis Museum of Art is starting a Felix Gonzalez-Torres public art project, and it includes a blog by IMA's Roseanne Hennessey Winings. Another really good-looking institutional blog.
- Other ways of living, from Acconci to Zittel.
- Perfect holiday card photos: Tadao Ando and Richard Serra, with a dusting of snow.
- Three terrif posts by Anna L. Conti: Twenty Ess Eff museums are hosting a free kids/families day on Jan. 8. Great idea. Podcasting is huge at Bay Area museums, especially at SFMOMA, which offers podcast-related discounts. And this sounds like a fun book.
- A list of links to public art directories around the USA.
- This is funny on about six levels. (Gugg vs. MoMA, urban vs. suburban, and, uh, four more.)
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Saltz on Criticism II
Jerry Saltz checks in this week with his second major broadside against much current art writing:
Art is a way of thinking, a way of knowing yourself. Opinions are tools for listening in on your thinking and expanding consciousness. Many writers treat the juiciest part of criticism, judgment, as if it were tainted or beneath them. The most interesting critics make their opinions known. Yet in most reviews there's no way to know what the writer thinks, or you have to scour the second-to-last paragraph for one negative adjective to detect a hint of disinclination. This is no-risk non-criticism.
Saltz took on GawkerForum back in April: "[T]he gushy New York items read like the Us magazine of art criticism, regularly reporting the flings and bling of an insular group of art worlders who regularly mingle with and applaud one another." He's right: Is there any difference between the GawkerForum passages Saltz quoted in April and the ones I quoted after Miami?
However Saltz names no names or pubs. (Well, Jerry...!) So I will. The art magazines (and not just the one I rip here a lot) excel in presenting masturbatory, get-me-into-the-party prose and calling them reviews. There is no writer in any art magazine who I can't wait to read each month. LTB's new Artinfo presents lots of copy, Q&A, and summaries of reported stories and reviews, but no critical writing. Neither does any of the LTB magazines. (Are you listening James Truman?)
In the general interest press, it's easy to attach Saltz' criticisms to Michael Kimmelman and Holland Cotter. Kimmelman's hagiographies-as-reviews read like he's carefully made sure his essays say exactly what artists want them to say. Cotter often pulls together interesting threads but rarely reaches judgment. (See last week's Hans Haacke review.) In the San Francisco Chronicle Kenneth Baker has the title "art critic" but mostly writes short features and newsy notebooks -- nary an opinion to be found. Neither of the major Texas papers runs art criticism of any sort. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Gaile Robinson review of Kiefer ("Kiefer is considered an excellent painter.") was an embarrassment. I could keep going.
Sadly, the prevailing mentalitly in the art world is perfectly reflected in most art writing: It's us-against-them, we hedonistic urban libs against the sheltered exurban cretins who don't like art -- or who like the wrong art. We must band together and support each other. We must explain what we do to a doubting world.
For most writers, their art writing is motivated by the going-along-to-get-along aesthetic of constant approval, a desire to be invited to the hip parties, a belief that being a part of the scene is more important than writing about the art that makes the scene. Much art writing reads like the author is mostly hoping to be invited to contribute to the Whitney Biennial catalogue, so it's best if s/he not write too aggressively. Wouldn't want to offend a curator, an artist, a dealer who could blackball the writer.
This kind of writing is most obvious at GawkerForum, but it's not just there. That's how Charlie Finch writes for Artnet, that's what Artinfo and The Art Newspaper published every day in Miami. ("Dealer Mary Boone... may not have a booth in the fair, but was spotted on the terrace of the ultra-swanky Delano Hotel, dressed to kill in a daffodil yellow dress and clutching a shiny red cell phone that matched her bright red heels.") If the art press can't write smartly, maybe we should be surprised when anyone does.
So where is the liveliest art writing? For years -- decades -- it has been Peter Schjeldahl, but of late he's been writing like a critic closing accounts just before retirement, a critic making final pronouncements and final revisions to his assessments of artists. (His Winslow Homer review from August is a perfect example.) Christopher Knight and Roberta Smith are as sharp as ever (even if Smith took a called strike three on Pixar).
Alt-weeklies such as the Village Voice often feature art writing willing to take risks. For example, I wish Doug Harvey was in LA Weekly every week. And bloggers are among the sharpest observers out there: Todd Gibson, Ed Winkleman, and Jeff Jahn are more direct than most print critics, which is why they sometimes make big institutions skittish. We need more writers pushing more people -- artists, curators, dealers, collectors, PR types -- to better engage us, not just to invite us to better parties.
Related: Saltz' piece is generating thoughtful blog buzz at Ed Winkleman and at Gallery Hopper.
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MoMA defends itself (again)
I woke up this morning to discover that MoMA is again feeling defensive about Pixar. In a Paul Lieberman story in today's Los Angeles Times, Ronald S. Magliozzi of MoMA's Department of Film and Media (and one of the curators of the show) complained that I raised questions about the Pixar show:
Magliozzi noted with a laugh that the [Pixar] show had indeed drawn criticism, some before it opened. Some critics, "before they had any idea what was going to be in it," suggested this was another case of a museum "selling out to a corporation," he said, and compared it to the Guggenheim's controversial show of Armani fashions, which was accompanied by a generous gift from the Italian designer, or the Met's showcasing of Coco Chanel's dresses.
One such critic, arts blogger Tyler Green, commented last week that the Pixar show "is unquestionably seven weeks of free advertising for a commercial business" and noted that one sponsor of the exhibit is Porsche, whose product is featured in Pixar's next feature, "Cars."
Magliozzi is probably also referring to my New York Observer essay from October, a version of which is here. (He could also be referring to Friday's first post -- from which the LAT quoted -- or Friday's second post.)
I'm pleased Magliozzi has given me the opportunity to point out that it is entirely fair to criticize a show on principle rather than on content. For example: Is a museum's relationship with a corporation too cozy? Does a given exhibit contradict a museum's mission? Does a given exhibition belong in a museum or in a shopping mall? Is a museum doing an exhibit in an effort to generate massive exhibition fees/gift shop sales or is it doing an exhibition because it has art historical or scholarly merit? These are all important questions for critics to consider and all are mostly not about the work on view. Each of these questions can be discussed before a show opens. And after it's gone.
Regarding the Armani comparison, I explicitly pointed out in the Observer that MoMA did not receive a cash contribution or exhibition sponsorship from Pixar. I did, however, address the show's ethically intriguing sponsorship on Friday. And I noted that it was strange that Pixar was announcing the show's travel schedule and that Pixar was boasting about how Pixar was working with UK institutions on the show, and that it was Pixar doing these things, not MoMA.
And witness this passage from Lieberman's story includes this passage, which makes me wonder even more if this is Pixar's show and if MoMA just happens to be providing wallspace: "Pixar officials say they expect to bring the exhibit to a museum in L.A. as well." (As the institution -- in this case the corporation -- loaning much of the work in the show, it's natural that Pixar would have some say in where the show goes. But it's usually museums that negotiate and announce traveling arrangements and destinations, not loan-providers.)
Also in the Observer, my criticism of the Met/Chanel wasn't quite that the Met did the show, it was that:
The Met's [Philippe] de Montebello is also guilty of criticizing [ex-Guggenheim Museum boss Tom] Krens only to copy him. This summer, the Met showed a retrospective of fashions from Chanel. The exhibit was sponsored by Chanel. The Met’s annual Costume Institute Benefit Gala was co-chaired by designer Karl Lagerfeld of, yup, Chanel. The Met's webpage, under a tab marked "educational programs," directed visitors to a special website for the exhibition. That site was hosted on Chanel.com. Within four clicks of visiting, a visitor was instructed on how to purchase Chanel products. In a rebuke on the op-ed page of the New York Times, art critic Lee Rosenbaum wrote, "[The Met] should be far stricter in drawing the line between scholarly presentation and commercial promotion." Or as one museum director might have said, "They’re after the money."
Previously: Pixar curator Steven Higgins responds to my criticisms, kinda. MoMA boss Glenn Lowry does too, kinda.
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Some Xmas wishes
Sorry, posting was down this morning...
Some Christmas wishes (expect this list to grow during the day):
- New Corcoran director Paul Greenhalgh: The courage to think way outside the Beaux-Arts box and to dramatically reinvent his museum.
- LACMA: Can 'a clue' be a Christmas gift? I wish LACMA a director. Preferably one who cares more about art than the last one did. (Caryn Coleman on LACMA back in July: "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.")
- Robert Rauschenberg: Enjoyment of the Met-MOCA Combines two-fer.
- Los Angelenos: The announcement of a new Getty photo museum to be built in their city. The announcement of a MOCA expansion that will put the museum’s fabulous collection on permanent display.
- MoMA: See LACMA.
- The Whitney: An identity. Because the museum seems to be throwing away its "Museum of American Art" identity with its 2006 biennial.
- The Whitney II: Better neighbors.
- GawkerForum: The end.
- The Phillips Collection: A new lighting design for the galleries in the Goh Annex.
- The National Gallery: That it be as interested in contemporary art as it is in Dutch art.
- Matthew Marks: An 'off' button.
- Spiral Jetty: A new access road.
- Tom LaDuke and Dmitri Kozyrev: Californians, especially Californians who are painting the way the West feels now, who deserve New York (or DC, or Boston) shows.
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"Pixar" to tour... says PIXR
Pixar announces (on its corporate web site) that MoMA's Pixar show will tour. According to Pixar's press release: "Barbican Art Gallery is proud to work in partnership with Pixar on the tour of this highly significant and astonishing exhibition."
But I thought it was MoMA's show and not a complete corporate front job? (I mean, if it's Pixar that is marketing/pushing/partnering with UK institutions...) It sure makes one think the Times might have dug a little deeper on corporate ties in this morning's review, yes?
Related: Lance Esplund, writing in the New York Sun, gets it right -- especially in the last half of his review. (Except for that part about museums being businesses. Uh, time for an explanation of non-profits and the role of non-profit boards, etc., perhaps?)
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Roberta Smith on Pixar at MoMA
Roberta Smith is one of my three favorite working art critics. That's why her review of Pixar @ MoMA this morning is so disappointing.
Smith hands MoMA a quite mild rebuke for turning itself from Alfred Barr's museum, a place that show art "still too controversial for universal acceptance" into a corporate gallery for MoMA's well-heeled pals:
Given the immense popularity of Pixar films, the Modern would seem to have a hit on its hands, and despite the sometimes dismayingly corporate posture of the museum, in this case those hands seem to be relatively clean. In contrast to the Guggenheim's Armani exhibition, the Pixar show does not coincide with a monetary gift to the museum by its subject (the show's sponsors are Intel and Porsche). And in contrast to many museums, the Modern does not have a single Pixar-related toy or object for sale in its bookstore, only a rather meager catalog. There is definitely an element of convenience in focusing on the work of one studio when the field of animation is so immense, and also in the almost complete dearth of writing in the catalog, which has been published by Chronicle Books, rather than the Modern.
Smith implies that the only circumstance under which an institution can be called to account for a questionable show is an Armani-Guggenheim-pay-per-view type situation. That's ceding a lot of ground.
How is MoMA "relatively clean" (Smith's word) for doing a show that betrays its raison d'etre? How is MoMA "clean" for choosing to spotlight a corporation instead of artists? No one's implying that Pixar is slipping Glenn Lowry a motorcycle a la BMW and Tom Krens, but the show is unquestionably seven weeks of free advertising for a commercial business, a major film studio. Pixar is another example (remember UBS' ubiquitous we'-re-tight-with MoMA ads) of MoMA cozying up to one of America's most-recognized corporate entities for programmatic purposes (as opposed to fundraising or sponsorship purposes) at the expense of artists.
While Pixar isn't funding the show, a quick look at the show's sponsors (Intel and Porsche) reveal corporate co-existence that should have been mentioned in Smith's review: Pixar's films are built by Intel-fueled super-computing clusters. Pixar's next film is Cars, and one of the main characters is a Porsche (with the voice of Bonnie Hunt). Pixar naturally has a 3,613-word press release promoting itself/the show on its website. (Pixar's corporate site promises an international tour, too.) Interests all around.
For the sake of comparison, some passages from Smith's review of the UBS show at MoMA:
"[The UBS show] is just one more symptom of the increasingly corporate culture of America, in which museums - MoMA not excluded - behave more like large companies, paying close attention to the bottom line and every retail opportunity."
and
"[The UBS show] certainly deflates the heightened commitment to cutting-edge art that the Modern so emphatically telegraphed with its new design and distribution of display space..."
Pixar obviously deflates it further. So why didn't Smith say so?
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Miami: Ones I Liked, Part Three
I gotta admit: I'm getting tired of the headline on these posts. Who's the idiot who came up with it? (Oh wait...)
 Chris Dorland at Wendy Cooper (and Plus Ultra): Dorland's paintings of a decayed, dystopic future seem post-apocalyptic -- but there are trees here, not to mention functioning systems such as streets and urban grids. People populate these environments too. The after-the-world feel comes from the viewer's perspective as we look at totalitarian or heroic architecture and spaces in Dorland's paintings.
His public spaces seem to be modeled on Communist-style public squares, and from the tones of Dorland's palette. He applies colors we associate with nature (such as green) to buildings, and streets, and colors we associate with artificiality (red) to trees. In one painting, the sky is a post-ozone layer green -- and so is everything else. Maybe Dorland's colors are a little bit too Neo Rauch, and maybe his paintings flirt a bit too much with sci-fi plup fiction of the past. Then again, just when I'm sure of that, I wonder if this is Lincoln Center, today.
Ken Weaver at Schroeder Romero: I'm trying really hard not to say that Schroeder Romero had the best booth I saw anywhere in Miami because that's not a fair critical baseline, so I won't. (I discussed Jaq Chartier here.) Continuing the decadence-of-our-present-will-do-us-in meme (tax cuts for the wealthy! at wars time!), Weaver presented large red-and-white pastels-on-paper of extravagance run amok, all with nods to the Court of Versailles: We see a close-up of a Marie Antoinette-style babe with a bouffant 'do and bounteous cleavage, and blood is trickling out of her mouth. An impossibly ornate chandelier has been lowered to the ground -- why the ground? An orgy looks like fun, but... (Related: Barry Hoggard, with pix.)
Brian McKee at Stefan Ropke: I'm generally not an appreciator of Big Germanism color photos because they're just a little bit too sweet and safe and typical for my taste. Only occasionally can I see past my plexi-reflection to the image itself. McKee's pictures of Afghani and Uzbek religious and historic sites feel like what I should be looking at right now.
Felix Schramm at Grimm | Rosenfeld (with pix here via James Wagner): The end-of-the-world-as-we-know it meme, coming right into your living room. Gordon Matta-Clark is plainly too tidy for Schramm.
Nathaniel Rackowe (annoying Flash alert) at Start: Rackowe explores space and light with mostly wooden sculptures and found-'em-at-CVS light bulbs. The result recalls Olafur Eliasson, but Rackowe isn't interested in as-big-as-the-weather natural processes. Rackowe's scale is more domestic, his aesthetic more Ikean.
 Liset Castillo at Black and White: Castillo's Monopoly-style houses, installed on a plexi grid demonstrate Castillo's interest in the suburban, artifical environments we create for ourselves. The colors are fake, the grid is fake, the tidyness of the installation is unrealistic. (The title of Castillo's photographs of this environment is "Lakewoodism," which drives home the point.) In a previous series Castillo built roads and interchanges out of wet sand and photographed them, transforming infrastructure into a temporal construction. Someday: The suburban grid too?
Not-on-the-web: Charles Cohan's prints of airport terminals (Curator's Office), Ronald Baker's battle between red-state and blue-state America (General Store), and Zane Lewis' bleeding-paint boxes (Finesilver).
Previously: Part One, Part Two.
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The busy, busy WSJ
More Miami later today, but first... One of the nice things about having a Starbucks as my place of semi-employment is that I get free access to the WSJ via wifi. Couple recent pieces that have caught my eye in recent days:
DC's Tom Freudenheim on a show from the Brooklyn Museum's permanent collection: "[P]erhaps we should be most grateful to the Brooklyn Museum for reminding us, with this highly important centenary exhibition, that it's worth keeping museum collections out of the marketplace." Freudenheim is right -- and shame on LACMA and MoMA for making deaccessioning so routine that a museum not selling major works is worthy of a compliment.
Melik Kaylan's ideas about what the Getty should do to fix its antiquities problems are strange at best:
The Getty should flaunt its courage [in returning/sharing objects] with a grand public change of heart. It should offer to build Getty museums abroad in the Guggenheim Bilbao manner to house its antiquities in style and to create a system of permanently shared collections. It should fund Getty centers of training for local archaeologists and conservators, who can excavate and protect their own national patrimony and help circulate the exhibitions that the Getty will share with their countries. The Getty would fill its Malibu Villa with undreamed of counter-loans.
Those are Italy, Greece, and Turkey's responsibilities, not the Getty's. But he's right about this:
"[I]t's hard to gloat over the current public humiliation of American museums. Could there be a worse time for the U.S. to be depicted as an imperial bullyboy looting the patrimony of poorer lands? In the current climate, that so many American institutions have done so much to preserve the world's heritage will be instantly eclipsed."
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Deaccessioning: When it's OK
I've received a lot of email on deaccessioning in the last few weeks. Much of it asks when I would consider deaccessioning to be OK. Here's my list:
- Damage. Example: Many years ago the Hirshhorn decided that a Clyfford Still painting it owned was damaged and couldn't be conserved to the point where it could be called a Still. So the H of H deaccessioned it.
- Duplicates. Example: When the Met scored the Gilman Paper Company photography collection it found itself with many duplicates. So they kept the best example and sold (or is selling) the duplicates.
- Fakes. Example: Uh, well, I can't think of one. But this one is pretty clear anyway, yes?
- Care for the work. If a museum, over time, withers to the point where its security systems are practically non-existent or if it can't take care of sensitive work (a Janine Antoni, say), then it should move it to someone/someplace who can preserve it. Example: The Fisk sales, maybe.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 14, 2005 | Permanent
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Around DC
Just before leaving for Miami, I enjoyed a DC gallery crawl. Highlights included:
 Sean Scully at the Phillips Collection: Best museum show in DC right now. Scully's abstractions are Morandi-made-large, painterly, rich, and vaguely vibrational. (Curator Stephen Bennett Phillips makes the same Scully-Morandi connection in the show's excellent catalogue.)
Morandi used variations in shapes to move the viewer's eye around a painting, Scully tweaks that: His shapes are similar but not identical, so it's his colors that move the eye around. The Phillips show, mostly of Scully's Wall of Light series, includes some examples of his photography (which is mostly part of the process-toward-painting) and his prints, which are as rich as the paintings.
There are a few problems with the Phillips show, none of them the fault of the artist or curator. It is stupefying that the Phililps could undergo a major building project and not re-design the lighting in the Goh Annex. The lighting of this show is a problem, in part because many canvases are too big for the Phillips space.
Note: This show will travel to the Met next year. The Met will empty out its contemporary galleries to install Scully. Related: Scully interview at Artinfo.
Linn Meyers at G Fine Art: Meyers' process-intensive ink-on-mylar drawings are hypnotic. If Meyers had a lesser sense of form or color, her pieces would be re-hashes of visually cute op-art, with a nod at trompe l'oeil. (Are those folds in the paper or...) Meyers' work reminds me more of Bob Irwin's early paintings, which abstracted California light with patterned dots on canvas. Or maybe Eva Hesse's 1966 sculpture Metronomic Irregularity III. (Related: Margaret Thatcher Projects -- warning, annoying Flash site -- published a catalogue of Meyers' work for her last show there.)
 Jason Gubbiotti at Fusebox: His best show yet. (Alas: You'd never know it by web-surfing because there's nary an image on the web except for anonymous tantra on the right.) Gubbiotti's abstract paintings flirt with recognizable systems: maps, photos of archipelagos, maybe even diagrams of computer network systems. It's never quite clear exactly what they're based on, except that they feel like something in daily life that we should recognize. We never quite do, and that's the point.
Christine Kesler at Irvine Contemporary: Kesler's collages are scraps-of-life as autobiogrpahy. Sometiems the collages are built into near-figurative shapes, sometimes not. Sometimes the collage items are identifiable and come together to tell a story, usually a travelogue, sometimes not. Kesler may still be leaning on Rauschenberg a bit, but I look forward to seeing where she goes.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 14, 2005 | Permanent
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No, not quite...
Over at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Eye Level blog, Kriston Capps is telling us what Glenn Lowry told us at the Hirshhorn a while back. This passage on M$20MA's admissions fee stopped my eyes in their tracks:
Nevertheless, [Lowry] covered all the bases: Unlike many of our fair institutions in Washington, MoMA is not publicly funded, and Manhattan real estate isn't exactly cheap; the Target Corporation picks up the tab on Friday nights; tickets for seniors and students are discounted. And, of course, that everything is expensive in New York.
Hogwash. Capps is letting Lowry off more easily than even MoMA's flacks would expect -- and that's saying a lot. See here for what Lowry's franker-than-you'd-expect answer on the admissions charge.
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NEA grants for 2006
Some upcoming exhibits, most of which I didn't know about until reading the list of 2006 NEA grants:
- AFA is launching a Lorna Simpson survey;
- The Dallas and Baltimore museums are teaming up on a show called Matisse: The Painter as Sculptor. Because I haven't mentioned it here in a year or two: the Baltimore Museum of Art has one of the three best Matisse collections in the US (M$20MA, the Barnes), an absolute delight just an hour from my home;
- The Drawing Center is touring a show of Robert Ryman drawings. The NEA blurb says it will feature 25 works?;
- HUAM (that's Harvard) will create and travel Frank Stella 1958, about, well, yeah;
- Speaking of one-year shows, the Jewish Museum will bring us Eva Hesse: Sculpture 1968;
- The Met, whose Islamic art galleries have been closed for renovation, will open Moments of Vision: Venice and the Islamic World ca. 1300-1700. Of course, only the Met would create a show with "circa" in the title;
- Obviously colons in exhibit titles are in this year;
- This could end up as a horrid gimmick: Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, a show that pairs 60 Magrittes with 60 works by "major artists influenced by his work." It'll be at LACMA, which seems about right;
- The Orange County Museum of Art will go SoCal group show with Birth of the Cool about the arts in SoCal from the end of WWII to the mid-1960s;
- The San Jose (Calif.) Museum of Art will survey art about the suburbs in Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl;
- The Scottsdale (Ariz.) Museum of Contemporary Art will host a Pae White survey;
- I'm hoping MANfave Alma Thomas is in the Studio Museum's over-titled energy x experitmentation: African American Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980. Speaking of Baltimore, the Thomas in the BMA's collection is my favorite anywhere; and
- Color Pictures: Visual Representation and the Struggle for Civil Rights will examine how visual images helped shaped the drive for civil rights. The grant goes to the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
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Miami: Ones I Liked, Part Two
Some more quick hits on artists who caught my eye in Miami. Not reviews or anything of the sort -- just my open-to-the-public notebook of what I saw. Part One was here.
 Bojan Sarcevic at Carlier | Gebauer and BQ: Sarcevic's sculptures, on view in a couple of ABMB booths. was sparse and absorbing, as if minimalist needed to be more minimal. Sarcevic reminded me of Martin Puryear, only with post-industrial materials and different forms. In other words, uh, he's not like Puryear not at all. So why was I thinking that? Elegance, I guess. Sarcevic's sculptures never seemed to be trying very hard and were the better for it.
Alois Kronschlager at Plus Ultra: Kronschlager is one of a number of artists whose recent work pokes at some of the apparent tidyness of minimalism. The work on view in Miami started with Frank Stella's palette, his pinstripes, and then crinkled them up, as if to say that Stella's early work is now irrelevant. Is the work a little bit too obviously Stellan? Yes. But as a starting point...
Dannielle Tegeder at Bodybuilder & Sportsman and others: What are these networks and why are they abstracted? Are they maps? Traffic patterns of the future? The law of interconnected monkey-business in visual form? Some of the fun in Tegder's Mark Lombardi-goes-abstract works on paper is their mysteriousness. They seem vaguely familiar, like they come from some kind of grid or system that impacts our daily lives. But do they?
 Beate Gutschow at Produzentengalerie: Despite showing at a gallery with a completely annoying website, Gutschow's Photoshopped images of unliekly modernist urbascapes, often strewn with some kind of post-chaos debris, are eerie in a way that seems both distant and possible.
Kees Goudzwaard at Zeno X: There's some kind of fragmentary structure in Goudzwaard's paintings and I can't tell if those pieces are falling apart or coming together. The paintings are slightly disorienting, like a painted Barry Le Va after a few martinis.
Jeffrey Milstein at Paul Kopeikin: Planes, perfectly centered on white backgrounds. Flying above. Right above. Seeming to be frozen. Hovering. Not moving. Both documentary record of types of planes and paint schemes, and scary.
Johnna Arnold at Traywick Contemporary: Architectural photographs are sexy. Great architectural photography, like Julius Shulman's or Ezra Stoller's, is mildly pornographic. Engineering photography is none of those things. Structural engineering photography, which made up most of Arnold's work at Traywick, is usually so deathly dull that it doesn't make it out of textbooks. That's why I liked Arnold's photographs: They made the dullness of the infrastructure (roads, bridges, and the like) interesting.
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Monday catch-up
We're back: Something was wrong with AJ this morning, and posting was down too. Sorry about that.
Because of the goofiness of holiday travel (three flights, two train trips, none even close to on-time), no splashy Monday morning post today, just nuts-and-bolts. More from Miami later today.
- Has a columnist or art critic of a major daily newspaper ever more quietly sorta called for the sorta ouster of the head of the nation's third largest foundation and its largest arts non-profit? Michael Kimmelman kinda called for Barry Munitz's head on Thursday, but buried it in the fourth paragraph from the bottom of an essay that was about, uh, well, I'm not sure: "That the whole Getty needs a thorough housecleaning and reorganization, and not just its current in-house review, should be obvious by now even to the beleaguered people who run the place," Kimmelman wrote. OK, that's nice, but what does it mean?
- The most recent New York Review of Bookshas two interesting pieces: a Martin Filler essay that pits Santiago Calatrava against Frank Gehry (Filler could have strengthened his argument by remembering that Gehry "won" the Corcoran commission over Calatrava), and a Christopher de Bellaigue essay on the Persia show at the British Museum that I wish I could see. (Regular readers know I'm especially interested in Persian/Iranian art, right up to the present.)
- Speaking of the NYT, on Saturday Hugh Eakin and Randy Kennedy ably wrote about how museums effectively get around some antiquities ethics questions by showing the works of private collectors, in this case Shelby White and her late husband Leon Levy. The LAT has been writing about this angle for weeks in the context of the Fleischman collection.
- A Mapplethorpe show in Cuba? Yup. (Thanks Andy.)
- Newsiest story of the day: This is new to me, and every museum in America should be paying attention. Antiquities looting/theft could leave a long legal trail indeed. (Thanks Modern Kicks.)
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Miami: Ones I Liked, Part One
This is the first of what will probably be three or four posts on art I saw in Miami. This one will cover artists who were substantially new to me. The artists are listed in no particular order (OK, there is a particular order: making the images fit onto the page nice and purty-like.)
 Paul Kennedy at Grimm Rosenfeld: As I've noted in several recent posts, there is a the-world-is-falling-apart/ being-destroyed meme running through much recent art. (Which reminds me of the 1970s, but that's another story.) Kennedy's photographs of a Tennessee home being destroyed to make room for a chain motel not only fits the trend, but does so with an elegance that you won't find in, say, Adam Cvijanovic's paintings. I feel like Kennedy respects the building and its past in these photographs, and something about that embrace of history -- even as it is being demolished -- is touching. Kennedy's work was the best photography I saw in any of the fairs.
Dan Holdsworth at Store (UK): Just as some of David Maisel's work brings color to William Garnett's pioneering aerial photography, Dan Holdsworth's photographs reminded me of colorful Lewis Baltzes. Sure, there are differences, but click here. The series of photographs of California scenes that Store had in Miami reminded me how much the Golden State is perpetually interested in how it presents itself.
Jaq Chartier at, well, about five different galleries: Chartier's paintings of slightly curving, vibrating, repeated lines on a white background look like painted DNA sequences.
Leandro Erlich at Nogueras Blanchard: Erlich's photographs of people above what appeared to be a swimming pool looking down at people looking up from what appeared to be under a swimming pool, while the people under the swimming pool were looking up at the people above the swimming pool, was as wonderfully disorienting as it sounds. How do we see things, how do people see us? And is that process factual? Or honest?
 David Hamill at Bank: Mixing graphite and watercolor on paper, Hammil makes what feel like architectural abstractions. Except I can't find any real architectural references in any of the drawings. And I think there's landscape there too.
Ann Diener at Bank: Diener's drawings seem like they're about to spiral out of control, right off the page, but a mysterious tension holds them together. I wonder what lies inside the Bontecou-like holes in the drawings.
Mark Danielson at Howard House: Lots of artists appear to be reading Dwell magazine and playing with modernist architectural forms, including Danielson. In his paintings, modernist structures hover on flat planes of color, on top of or surrounded by simple references to the natural world. In one painting a home hovers above what looks like magma emerging through the earth's crust.
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Me on Burtynsky in Brooklyn
If you're in New York and if you need something to do on Sunday at, oh, say 3pm, come on over to the Brooklyn Museum's Edward Burtynsky exhibit. I'll be giving an hour-long talk/Q&A on how Burtynsky's work is rooted in his biography.
Related: Lots of China images up at Burtynsky's website.
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Fisk's sale of American moderns
 It's really easy to criticize LACMA and MoMA for their recent deaccessioning. (Especially MoMA, whose collection increasingly seems to be a conveyer belt for auction houses to pick through. At least LACMA hasn't reached that level.)
I'm a near-absolutist on the evils of deaccessioning at art museums. I have a harder time condemning tiny (850 students) and financially-challenged Fisk University for deciding to sell the two greatest works in its collection, an O'Keeffe and a Hartley. Yes, I disapprove of what Fisk is doing, absolutely, but I can't quite muster condemnation.
Fisk's gallery is almost an afterthought -- it is not accredited by the American Association of Museums, for example -- and the school's $12 million endowment is startlingly small. When Georgia O'Keeffe gave Fisk over 100 works of art she attached stringent conditions on what the school could do with them. Sending them on a money-raising tour of museums is not an option.
The Tennessean says that "leading American art dealers" think the two works could fetch $16-20 million, but when you combine the two artists auction records the total is under $9 million. Of course, that would be 3/4 of Fisk's current endowment.
And comments by Fisk officials indicate a certain cluelessness: "It was a very difficult decision to come to," Fisk prez Hazel O'Leary told The Tennessean. "But I've been here 18 months now and in that time I've come to understand the challenges of the 21st century as a business person."
Uh, Hazel, you're a university president, not a business person.
To address the obvious recent comparsion: This is not a case of Harvard, with a $23 billion endowment and plenty of major fundraising avenues, selling a Cassatt. Harvard has significant, internationally recognized museums and collections which are central to its mission. Fisk has none of those things and in recent years it has been drawing down its endowment to meet operating costs.
There's a difference in how the two universities are talking about their actions too. Fisk is answering questions about the sale and explaining itself. When I uncovered the Cassatt sale, Harvard's museum press office didn't return my calls and neither did its American art curator. (Gotta hate it when people uncover your secrets, eh? When MoMA sells at auction the works are listed as ex-MoMA works. Harvard listed the Cassatt as property of "a university art museum.")
It seems to me that this sale is closer to the recent New York Public Library sales than an art museum deaccessioning. Not only is the collection, display and preservation of art not central to Fisk's mission, but the school doesn't have the money to safely hang and conserve the art it has (the school's gallery is apparently in such bad shape that it has sent its art collections to the Frist Center for safe storage). A compromise that would ensure the work is taken care of would be a long-term loan to the Frist, but Fisk is obviously more interested in the dollars than in the work. It's too bad, really, really too bad. But it's hard not to understand Fisk's commodification strategy a little bit.
Related: From the WP, black-oriented museums lack black donors.
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The (real) GawkerForum does the fairs
Regular MAN readers know that I've long been amused by GawkerForum, the I-was-there-at-the-hot-party-and-you-weren't portion of ArtForum's website. GawkerForum is all about access and the bubble -- not the alleged bubble of the art market, but the love of living inside the art world, pretending nothing else exists. The site has pretty much nothing to do with art. The Miami fairs provided an opportunity for GawkerForum to be it's most outrageous, and it didn't let us down. Some highlights:
"Attending these art fairs is a bit like combat reporting, where you keep hopping on whatever helicopter is heading out to the next battlefield." -- Linda Yablonsky. (Except for the bullets, the suicide bombers, and the land mines... yes, exactly!)
"An old friend from New York came last, showing up almost two hours late. 'I went to four parties last night, and the last one wasn't even really a party. Someone gave me a Vicodin at some point. It seemed like a good idea at the time,' she recounted. I looked at her with a fair amount of concern and asked how business was going. 'Oh god, it's great! Are you kidding?' " -- William Pym. (Party, CVS, same thing.)
"I was happy where I was, listening to Todd Eberle and David Tieger describe the G-5 jet on which Larry Gagosian spirited them to the German foundry where the stainless steel elephant that Tieger had purchased from Jeff Koons's "Celebration" series was belatedly reaching its final stage. "I mean, it had been so many years, I didn't dare even think about it," Tieger said, "So this was a fantastic experience." As was uncrating it on his front lawn in New Jersey, where the staff, which includes a few Muslims, apparently draped the elephant's head in a chador, turning the whole scene into a kind of crèche." -- Linda Yablonsky.
"Then it was back to the same old same old: go upstairs to the Penthouse party that hotelier André Balazs and Nadine Johnson were giving for Bruce Weber and Sofia Coppola? Or retire so I could get to the breakfast at Dennis Scholl's art-crammed Dilido Island home before the Debra Singer-led tour of it ended and the Art Basel Conversations "Philanthropy" panel began?" -- Linda Yablonsky. ("Or should I just quietly read the new Harry Potter book in my hotel room?" Yablonksy did not go on to write.)
"It was art-world speed dating, the perfect spot for dealer-on-collector, collector-on-collector, collector-on-dealer, and dealer-on-dealer action: I spied Barbara Gladstone with the Rubells, the Rubells with Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, the Eisenbergs with Pascal Spengemann, and Spengemann's business partner Kelly Taxter with Andrea Rosen, all within ten minutes." -- Michael Wang. (This is well-written, especially because I'm pretty sure Wang wins the GawkerForum prize for the highest number of names dropped in one sentence (8).)
"With little food and an interminable wait to see the William Kentridge survey inside, many of us longed for the manse on Key Biscayne. I ducked into a taxi and headed back to Miami Beach: $47. I haven't paid so much for transportation (without leaving the ground) since . . . well, last month in London." -- Brian Sholis. (Ever noticed how GawkerForum types only go to things when they're guaranteed to be crowded, when seeing art will be impossible? When I was at Kentridge there were about a dozen people there. Even W.K. himself was able to stroll quietly through the galleries.)
"Later, huddled around the fireplace at the fabulous apartment of Mr. Hans Rasmus Astrup (Fearnley is his mother's name), Trisha Donnelly let slip what she called a "rectum-ification" while Adam Putnam denied us all a "de-abstractification" of his budding oeuvre. Both terms reminded me that I forgot to ask Halperin what exactly she meant by the phrase "coincidental erogeny" earlier that afternoon. -- April Elizabeth Lamm. (OK, I admit, that one was from a GawkerForum entry about Oslo. But admit it: It was too fantabulous not to include, wasn't it?)
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Tidying up
From time to time we here at MAN (that would be me) say things that we intend one way and that get read another way. This is known as "erring." It is a concept familiar to blogs. This post clarifies some previous posts:
- In this post on artists and 30-year careers, I should have been clearer: Lots of artists make work for 30 years. Few make consistently strong work.
- In this post on Carol Vogel's treatment of the Hugo Boss Prize, I should have been clearer: My complaint was that Vogel gives certain prizes big treatment and certain prizes (SFMOMA's SECA or the Smithsonian's Lucelia, for example) much smaller treatment. It is never explained to us in print why some prizes merit greater attention than others.
- In this post on my favorite cities for art, I was stupid for leaving Miami out of the top ten. All those collectors opening contemporary art spaces... unique.
- In this post adding Joao Ribas to the blogroll, a techno-glitch messed up Ribas' URL. It's now correct.
- I didn't link to the Butterstick blog. I don't think the Smithsonian's National Zoo launched this one. But they should have.
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Breaking through into GawkerForum!!
I know this will come as a surprise to you, dear readers, but GawkerForum, the gossipy, I-was-there, nevermind-the-art portion of ArtForum's website, asked me to file from Miami. When I sent them my copy they rejected it. (I even tried to take my own GawkerForum party pics, but it didn't work so well.) So here it is:
 Just after I landed back in Washington, the capital of the free world, not to mention Eli Broad and Steven Cohen's least favorite place to be during the fall auctions (sorry Weschler's!), Larry Gagosian emailed me to say that I should have skipped Marty Margulies' party in honor of Kota Ezawa and Mike Kelley (I didn't even know they were dating!) in Miami's swinging-but-slummy fashion district and instead gone to Donatella Versace's dinner for Wolfgang Tillmans, Bruce Weber and Helmut Newton over at Gloria Estefan's Luis Pons-designed manse, where some new, unrepresented Leipzig painters were said to be frolicking in the hot tub. I didn't have the heart to put GoGo on hold so that I could phone Donatella to tell her that Helmut was dead (the things you miss while in rehab -- I know Dona, I know!), so I played along.
"But Larry, Yvonne Force said she wanted to me to see Todd Purdum light Graydon Carter's cigarettes all night long because Todd has this totally fabulous butane torch that he received as a gift from Muccia when he visted Milan after having dinner with Jeff Koons in Venice in the summer," I said. "So I followed Yvonne -- she looked so fabulous in that orange Guicci number how could you not follow her -- and we bumped into Julian Schnabel and Lisa Dennison. And after we left Marty's we traipsed over to see the new Jasper Johns paintings at Jason Rubell's house."
"Oh, how were they?" Larry, eager for my insight, asked.
"Too much red in the upper left-hand corner," I said.
I signed off with Larry and turned to Olga Viso, who just happened to be standing on my left, looking fantastic in a deep blue pantsuit. Before I could say anything to Olga I remembered that I was due at Paul Allen's yacht party near the Mandarin Oriental (Mary Boone said that James Trainor, Sean Combs and Andrea Fraser would be there), so I made tracks back to the airport, where Michael Govan had promised to give me a ride on his plane. Once I buckled myself in to my seat, I closed my eyes and counted red dots as they jumped over temporary white walls.
OK, so I lied. I just can't write that way. (Or maybe I just don't want to...) Later today: MAN's Cliff's Notes to GawkerForum's Miami coverage.
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New to the blogroll
First: If you haven't checked out the changes to the main ArtsJournal page, you should. Construction ongoing. Next: I will be doing a top ten list for 2005, but not until the first week of 2006. (This is because I'm seeing MAMFW's Kiefer show on Dec. 30.) If bloggers do top tens and make me aware of them, I'll start building a top tens post for sometime between Xmas and New Year's. And new here: three new blogs:
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The fairs in boldface
I got through about half of the artists on whom I took notes in Miami, so I think that tomorrow I can begin some posts on who/what I saw. Today, some wrap-up notes:
Most tired concept: The containers, or whatever the heck the ABMB people call them. A highlight of the three previous fairs, this year the containers were uniformly flat. (OK, one was actually flat, for the rest apply the metaphor.) Creative galleries have demonstrated that they can overcome the space limitations of a shipping container, so maybe the concept shouldn't be totally abandoned. What about pairing each gallery with an up-and-coming (st)architect or with a university architecture program?
Page Six fairs style: Artinfo.com and The Art Newspaper published daily in Miami, by email and tabloid, respectively. The idea was a good one but the execution was often embarrassing. Both publications ran breathless items about sales with no apparent confirmation of the excited pronouncements of dealers (who have every incentive to make the market look hot and overheated -- and to make it sound like collectors must buy now or risk missing out).
Artinfo's dispatches were especially problematic -- they named artists sold, gallerists and price, but never indicated whether any efforts had been made at checking the information they were being fed. Gallerist propoganda is not news.
Equal time: GawkerForum, in a feverish bid to maintain its title as the most laughable pseudo-art-related site on the internet, worked hard to catch up: "Beaming and attentive, [David] LaChapelle's female PR attachés swooped in, emitting cute noises usually reserved for especially endearing infants and promising extra sets of towels, while the wait staff lowered platters of hors d'oeuvres to within the reach of wet fingers." Or: "...2004 Whitney Biennial participant Terence Koh greeted just-announced '06 pick Dash Snow in a trans-Biennial embrace."
(And I'm actually leaving out the line that made me laugh hardest because it's in GawkerForum's E-Flux promo email and not on the site yet.)
Quote of the fair: Thelma Golden, from Artinfo's daily email: "I became a museum director because I could no longer be a curator who works for one." Thelma is still our hero.
(Regular readers remember that Golden's 2003 Artforum top ten list is one of the most ridiculous bits of writing ever submitted to a magazine. Golden's submission included NYC's 2003 blackout ("The blackout worked us. Like nothing in the art world has in a long, long time.") and Dia: Beacon -- but only because Golden found the excloo opening party just too fabulous.
Best trip, best show, best installation: Out to somewhere beyond I-95 for the William Kentridge retrospective at the Miami Art Central. It's there until March. Lots of art museums could take a tip from the way the MAC (an Ella Fontanals Cisneros project) installed the show, especially the black box rooms.
Best emergence: Lots of bloggers did an outstanding job of blogging the fairs. Blog coverage at many the sites I linked to before the fair was better than any of the rumor-mongering in Artinfo or TAN. Those and many blogs on my blogroll are still cranking out fair-o-rama content.
Biggest relief: The security/police presence around NADA, which would be hard-pressed to find a dumpier neighborhood.
Charlie Finch moment: Also from Artinfo: "... Dealer Mary Boone, who may not have a booth in the fair... was spotted on the terrace of the ultra-swanky Delano Hotel, dressed to kill in a daffodil yellow dress and clutching a shiny red cell phone that matched her bright red heels."
Exercise that should end Dec. 5: Ranking the fairs. It's a useful practice in Miami because time allotment is an issue. But afterward... not so much.
Strangest moment: Upon asking about an artist at Scope, a gallery staffer proceeded to tell me about an artist, including his recent residencies. When he asked me if I'd heard of a certain residency, I said no. He expressed shock. "You haven't heard of that one? It's a very big residency. You should have heard of it." Oh really.
Reason No. 1 that ABMB is better than MoMA: The ABMB folks were serious about keeping cameras out of the fair. This made viewing art, in a convention center, on fake walls and with semi-professional lighting, nicer than looking at art in Studio 53rd, aka the strobe-a-torium that is MoMA.
Reason No. 2 that ABMB is better than MoMA: No Pixar.
Reason No. 3 that ABMB is better than MoMA: No Elizabeth Murray. (I'm beginning to convince myself here...)
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David Schnell, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Frank Nitsche, Scott Peterman
Best of best: Brian McKee, Constance DeJong, Charles Cohan, Chris Dorland, Nathaniel Rackowe, Ken Weaver, Matt Bryans (Kate MacGarry), Ronald Baker (General Store), Ken Weaver (Schroeder Romero), Matthew Cusick (Lisa Dent), Melanie Smith (Kilchmann), Zane Lewis (Finesilver)
Decay: Pablo Bronstein, Adam Ross
Web-free: ,
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The Miami Fairs: An overview
As I was settling into my flight to Miami on Wednesday morning, I checked my email on my phone. "ARTISTS NAMED FOR WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2006," screamed the first subject line on the screen. The next 5,000 words introduced next March's show. Wednesday's New York Times also had the story (well, it just regurgitated the press release) and The Art Newspaper had it too.
 Coming on the first day of the biggest annual art event in North America, the Whitney's news was a desperate stab at relevance. For several years I've written here that art fairs are the 'new' biennials, that they return the survey exhibition to its festivalist, commercial roots. Biennials are dead. Most are aimless group shows of who-knows-what. The art world is so big and so sprawling that there's no such thing as summing up contemporary practice in a biennial exhibition any more (except at the extreme local level). On Wednesday the Whitney inadvertently sent out the confirmation announcement.
I suppose the idea was to generate some buzz for the biennial, but it worked the other way. This scene played itself out over and over again during the weekend: A dealer would point out to me the work of an artist. "He's in the Whitney next year. We're very excited about it," the dealer would say... in an I-lost-my-puppy tone of voice. Being in the biennial was nice, but it was not The Important Thing to anyone in Miami. At fairs the market is king, and the timing of the Whitney's announcement positioned the biennial (and the museum) as servicers of the king.
I'm happy to see biennials shrink into irrelevance. The Whitney will have 100 or so artists in a show that sounds Seinfeldian, like it will be about nothing. At the Miami fairs 460+ galleries showed the work of at least 2,000 artists, maybe twice that many. I know what the fairs were about: selling and getting work seen by smart directors, curators and critics. Dealers have told me that in the week or two after the fairs traffic to their websites is up pretty substantially as all those people follow-up and look for more information on newly-found artists who caught their attention. (My follow-up list consists of 80 artists.)
The non-Whitney-aided storyline of the fair was that in 2005 the satellites eclipsed the Art Basel-produced fair. ABMB showed 195 galleries, which includes the unusually lackluster containers. The side fairs combined to show about 265 galleries, including fresher, smart work from young artists showing their best work in a bid to get noticed. A significant amount of work at the main fair was from mid-career artists cranking out something for sale -- the seemingly ubiquitous giant Anish Kapoor auto-body-paint-finished discs on view were the best example of this. I like Kapoor's work a lot, but zzzzzzzzzz. The exception: Olafur Eliasson, who looked great every time I saw his work. (Click, then scroll down about four screens.)
A common knock on fairs, and Miami's fairs in particular, is that they are just commercial grabfests. This year's extravaganza exposed that criticism as uninformed: The storylines of this year's fairs extend well beyond sales figures (though you'd never know it to read the inadvertently hilarious daily dispatches from artinfo.com and The Art Newspaper) and include:
- The way the Miami Six (the de la Cruzes, the Rubells, the Scholls, Robins, Margulies, and Fontanals Cisneros) are re-creating what an art-showing 'institution' can and might be;
- Art-making memes. When, in five days, you see many thousands of works by a couple thousand artists, macro memes become clear. The two most prevalent: artists using maps in their work usually in fragmented ways, a metaphor for globalization and the unimportance of borders; and destruction and mayhem in the world, discussed here last week as something I've been noticing in Chelsea, too.
- More confirmation that critics and curators who want to see what's new and what's edgiest have to make sure they keep an eye on what's going on in non-NYC galleries. Aqua, Pulse, and NADA provided plenty of confirmation of this (NADA was still a little thick with NYC mediocrity, but they did a better job than they'd been doing of including galleries from outsize the L-train axis.)
More all week.
Related: Artinfo.com interview with Ella Fontanals Cisneros.
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Reviewed: Nicholas Nixon at, er, everywhere
With Miami's fair-o-rama over for the next 360 days, expect fairs-related posts and a few catch-up-on-news posts on MAN this week. Post-fairs blogging won't start until mid-Monday morning. (I'm also way behind on email; I'll try to catch up on Monday.)
First: With Nicholas Nixon's you-know-what on view in Rochester, DC, and NYC, I reviewed the series (specifically the National Gallery installation) for the Boston Globe:
Despite [much] recent attention, ''The Brown Sisters" is not a great photographic achievement. It is a simple idea repeated into prominence. Virtually none of the individual photographs qualifies as an exceptional or revealing portrait. A couple are poorly composed, clunky.
Nor is it particularly original. Many of Nixon's contemporaries, including Sally Mann and Emmet Gowin, have focused on family portraiture...
"The Brown Sisters" may not provide an intellectual thrill, but if it doesn't hit you in the heart, you're dead.
Related: The ubiquitous Browns.
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