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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Friday filler
It's Friday, it's summer, so we'll see you on Monday. Some of next week's content will include thoughts on my recent visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, a recent acquisition or two at the Guggenheim, and what it looks like when an old fave does business under a new name... In the meantime, a podcast: From MOCA, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Schimmel, and Calvin Tomkins talk about, gosh, I can't imagine what.
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Degeneration everywhere
Earlier this month one of the Walker Art Center's websites, mnartists.org, asked me to answer 10 questions submitted by site users. My answers are up now. (And unlike MAN, mnartists.org is a message board so you can publicly respond.) The broadest question was: What is the single non-art-world factor that is the greatest influence on art made today? I said:
Degeneration, particularly of societies, cultures, and political systems. Regardless of whether I’m in New York, LA or in between, I see artists making art about things falling apart. Look at last year’s top news stories: Iraq, Katrina, the London bombing, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the BTK serial killer, the continuing struggles of the Bush presidency, even the death of Terri Schiavo. They’re all about degeneration.
Some art examples: We see it in the work of Jason Middlebrook's works-on-paper of societies 'advancing' to a point of environmental collapse, or in Ed Burtynsky's photos of what we are doing to the planet. Hans Haacke and Raymond Pettibon looked at the American political system, in their recent solo shows at Paula Cooper and Regen Projects respectively. Artists such as Enrique Metinides go back into their old work to present violent images, installing them recently to remind us how fascinated Americans are with destruction. (Metinides recently exhibited at Blum & Poe.)
I'm surprised that no contemporary art curator has seized on this and created a big group show about it. It could be a great example of an artist-driven show that mixes contemporary art with contemporary life. (Good example of a successful realization of that kind of show: Paul Schimmel's Ecstasy, recently at MOCA.)
Related: See Chelsea in fall, 2006, Paul Kennedy at ABMB, and Chelsea in winter, 2006.
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It's ZahIndiana Jones!
 Gotta love this hilarious, carefully posted/staged photograph on the front of NYT.com this afternoon: It's blunderbuss Zahi Hawass, aka ZahIndiana Jones. The NYT describes him as "Egypt's chief Egyptologist," which probably suites ZahIndiana just fine.
If you've missed the exploits of Zahi Hawass you've missed: Zahi answering (many) questions about the Anschutz King Tut show by (repeatedly) plugging his own memoir, Zahi threatening the Field Museum's sponsors and donors when Tut was at the Field Museum, and Zahi promising the St. Louis Art Museum that he would "make their life hell" if they don't return an Egyptian mask to Egypt.
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Great moments in GawkerForum: June
Last month I thought that GawkerForum was sane enough that I couldn't pull out anything particularly hilarious. No such obstacles this month:
Tran Duc Van does Basel. Kind of. This one is too goofy to merely quote, so instead I'll point out some highlights:
- The post swings into form by spending much of its second paragraph complaining about the lack of seating placecards at a dinner.
- Name-drop tally for said paragraph: Six.
- Number of unsupported MoMA-related ass-kisses in the post: I can't count that high.
- Best preposterously pointless MoMA platitude: "[D]isarmingly original thinker."
- Best line in entire post: "I have not given [Tacita] Dean's work the attention it deserves..." (Then how does he know Dean's work deserves attention?)
- Best line not in said post: "I was too busy noticing the lack of placecards at dinner to look at -- let alone think about -- any actual art."
Yet more proof that GawkerForum isn't about art: "[Takashi Murakami's] stock will no doubt rise when all hear that he has left Marianne Boesky to work with Larry Gagosian in New York." A dealer change will make Murakami's art better? Really?!
Don't ask, I can't explain: "Someone remarks that the woods in the vicinity of the Cloisters are a haven for crackheads. 'Does crack make you want to have sex?' Carol inquires. 'No, it just drives you into a bottomless black pit and makes you want to kill yourself,' Hanna answers. Several hours later, and still a considerable distance from our destination, someone remarks that maybe we should have scored some crack for the road; the beers and pretzels we bought at a gas station just aren't giving us much of a lift." -- David Rimanelli.
Also from Rimanelli: We love it when an alleged critic (in this case: cheerleader) goes to write about a show... and bunks at the house of show's curator. And then boasts of playing dress-up in the clothes of the curator's son. Yeah, whatever he writes about that show is just going to be loaded with credibility.
Why do GF writers seem to only go to openings? Then they inevitably complain that they can't see the art. Doh! "Given the crowd, it's rather hard to see Klara's three videos, slideshow projection, and site-specific construction." -- David Rimanelli.
Nicolas Trembley on LISTE: "I couldn't see everything, though, as I had to run to the Swiss Awards ceremony."
"I took in the glam white tents, carpeted poufs to cushion dressed-up derrieres, a dance floor where the art patrons boogied near modern icons by Matisse, Maillol, and Henry Moore, and wondered if there ever had been a bar mitzvah at MoMA? A Modern bar mitzvah with Frank Stella centerpieces, music by Philip Glass, Barbara Kruger invites, a Koons in chopped liver, the whole simcha documented by, say, Tina Barney. Fabulous. If done tastefully, of course." -- Rhonda Lieberman.
Related: April.
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Back in the saddle
I'm back from attending a wedding in rural central California. (Email replies later today, I promise.) I took time away from festivities to do some museum visiting: the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, LACMA, MOCA, the Gettys, the Norton Simon, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, OCMA, and maybe one or two that I'm forgetting. Lots of stuff worth seeing out there right now: Rauschenberg, Hockney, Opie, Greek vases, Eliot Porter...
(And pens and pencils, oh my! Nearly five years of this website and I still can't anticipate what will drive reader mail. In short: Readers hate the pencils-only policy.)
... But the item that caught my eye this morning is Christopher Knight's LAT review of Dada. Knight saw as much response-to-WWI as I did in the show, but he had some major problems with the MoMA installation. The last six paragraphs of his review bring the show into the present and are not to be missed. Next week I'll try to post a mini-wrap-up of critical response to the show.
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Museums: Fix this
So I'm still traveling... Last week I had two encounters with one of the worst and silliest museum policies in America. Two museums, MOCA and the Orange County Museum of Art, do not allow people to take notes in their galleries in pen. (Notes taken in pencil last about two days before becoming a blurry mess.)
It's a goofy policy. More art has been damaged in the last year by children chewing gum than by art-loving, zealous note-takers. (Besides: At OCMA, Cathy Opie's photos were all behind glass or Plexi!) It's a crazy policy and MOCA, OCMA and SFMOMA should do away with it.
In a related story: Don't expect much here on the Opie show at OCMA. How can I when I can't take notes!?
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The trifecta
I think this is becoming Around the Blogosphere again (and I may add to this post through the morning, so check back), but here we go...
- So you're at an art museum to look at the stuff on the walls. And the museum gives you an iPod with... video of the art?
- Real GawkerForum? Or not? (It's so hard to tell!)
- Speaking of which, PORT held a pretentious art writing contest and we have a winner!
- The world's best Andy Warhol exhibition promotion? With photo, of course. (Hint: The show is called Andy Warhol Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962-64.)
- LA museums love MySpace.
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I'm not sure any museum has improved its web presence as much in the last few months as has LACMA. Sure, the museum had a way to go and sure, we tease about their construction webcam, but LACMA.org has gotten good.
First, there's the Flash animation for its current Hockney show. The show's subtitle is "Friends, family, lovers." The image that goes with 'lovers' is one of Hockney's most famous, but I haven't seen it in any newspaper coverage of the show. It's right there on LACMA's front page.
But LACMA is also doing a good job of providing web-extras related to its exhibitions. There's a Lawrence Weschler essay about Hockney, a Q&A about the show with curator Stephanie Barron, and a long narrative about the show, complete with images. And like more and more museums, LACMA has a pretty good chunk of its permanent collection online.
Sure, there's a ways to go: The pages on LACMA's building project are full of words, not images. There's not a whole lot of interactivity: No blogs, no podcasts. But it's better.
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NYT admits error on Glueck/Clark
The New York Times has admitted it erred in allowing Grace Glueck to sit on the Clark Art Institute board, Leon Neyfakh reported in the New York Sun this morning:
"When we revised the ethics policy and restated it as the code of ethical journalism in 2003, somebody should have seen that this situation was not consistent with the policy, but they didn't," [NYT standards editor Craig Whitney] said.
Mr. Whitney said the inconsistency came to his attention when Mr. Green made the [Modern Art Notes] post on the matter on June 7th. "When we saw what he'd written, Grace's first reaction was to resign from the board," Mr. Whitney said.
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Acquisitions: Dallas Museum of Art
 It's hard to imagine a louder set of gifts than the Dallas Museum of Art received last year. The Rachofskys, Hoffmans and Roses bequested the DMA 800 pieces of contemporary art, plus the Rachofskys' Richard Meier-designed house. (The house should fill a significant Meier hole in the DMA collection. The museum already owned a Meier salad set.) That's not all the DMA added to its collection last year -- the museum added scores of other objects, including other gifts from the Rachofskys.
Dallas' collecting ran the gamut in 2005, from photo to video to installation art; from a modest Corot painting to a massive Laura Owens. Acquisitions paid special attention to Texas (Rackstraw Downes and Ant Farm) and to American art in general. The museum's collection is encyclopedic, so the list also includes an oyster tureen with stand, from Rhode Island around 1883, to a late classic Mayan cylindrical vessel.
With the full list of the tri-family bequest not yet available, we'll focus on the rest of the DMA's 2005 haul, including:
- Two architectural photographs by recent Artforum cover boy Christopher Williams;
- A 1979 version of Dorothea Tanning's Pincushion to Serve as Fetish. A 1965 version was purchased by the Tate in 2003;
- For a remote town of 4,100 people, Presidio, Texas sure shows up in art a lot. Stephen Shore shot Presidio in 1975. And DMA purchased Rackstraw Downes' Water-flow Monitoring Installations on the Rio Grande near Presidio, TX, Part 4: Facing North, The Cableway and Retaining Wall, 9AM. A link to the series is here;
- Laura Owens remains popular with museums: DMA acquired a giant 11x9x3 feet Owens painting from 2004;
- Ten Bruce Conner films on two DVDs, including: Crossroads, Looking for Mushrooms, Mea Culpa, Breakaway, Vivian, The White Rose (featuring Jay DeFeo), Marilyn Times Five, Report, Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, and Valse Triste.
- Four of David Wojnarowicz's Arthur Rimbaud photographs;
- Five photographs by Gordon Parks, including Langston Hughes, Chicago and American Gothic, Washington, DC;
- I have yet to see a Jim Lambie installation that is -- at best -- more than pleasant Design Within Reach-enhancing decoration, but the DMA didn't check with me before buying The Doors (Morrison Hotel). The piece was part of a Suzanne Weaver-curated show at the DMA;
- Speaking of DWR, the store gave the DMA Frank Gehry's Superlight chair.
- Bay Area photographer Bill Owens is best-known for his images of 1970s suburbia. The DMA purchased four 1971 photos;
- Last year Christopher French reviewed Robyn O'Neil's most recent show at Houston's Inman Gallery. Included in that show was As my heart quiets... which was acquired by the DMA.
- Speaking of Houston, one of the best shows I've seen in the last few years was the Menil's presentation of Olafur Eliasson's photo grids. The DMA bought Eliasson's 2004 Jokla Series;
- Suzanne and Maurice Vanderwoude gave the museum two Robert Smithson drawings from the early 1960s. (Here and here.) The DMA owns a dozen Smithsons, including the last major floor piece that was in the Smithson estate.
- A natural for a Texas museum: Ant Farm's Media Burn (and above)/The Cadillac Ranch Show; and
- Helen Torr is one of my favorite American moderns. The DMA added an undated surrealist still life by her.
Related: The Dallas Museum of Art's collections website is here.
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FAMSF acquires 135 Crown Point prints
 Last week we told you about the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's new Courbet. We didn't mention this: FAMSF also acquired 135 Crown Point Press prints by various artists. The list includes Chris Burden, Peter Doig, Sol LeWitt, Robert Bechtle, Julie Mehretu, Nathan Oliveira, Laura Owens, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Tuttle and Fred Wilson. The de Young has a small Crown Point show up now.
The lot also includes the 16 prints that make up Anne Appleby's Verona Variations series. Appleby is one of those artists about whom I never hear on the East Coast (her last NYC show was in 1996), but with whom lots of Westerners are plenty familiar. She's a wonderful colorist, mixing shade and depth the way Anne Truitt did. When people ask me about my favorite lesser-known artists, Appleby is always on the list.
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Was Adele a record sale?
I won't have much to say on the Adele sale here because I'm writing about it for a print publication, but I'll point this out: Carol Vogel repeatedly refers to the $135 million sale price as the "highest sum ever paid for a painting." Or "a record amount." The word "record" is in the print headline and in the jump headline.
Fact is: There is no way to know if the sale of Adele set a record for the most expensive painting ever sold. If Adele had been sold at auction for $135M it would have shattered the auction record. But it wasn't. Private painting deals happen all the time. There's no way of knowing if a painting has sold through the private market for $135M. (The LAT went with, "Lauder paid the highest known price for a painting.")
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Charles Sheeler @ the NGA
 In a MoMA hallway -- a kind of ante-room really -- and on the other side of a sliding glass door from The Great March Through Our History of Modern Art, you can usually find MoMA's great Charles Sheeler painting, American Landscape. The placement of the painting irks me: Sheeler has been excluded from the MoMA March, cast into the kind of nether-place MoMA puts American moderns with whom it knows not what to do. (In another nearby hallway are Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis and Georgia O'Keeffe.)
Woe are the American moderns: Sheeler, O'Keeffe, Murphy, Davis, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and more. The conventional wisdom is that they didn't do anything new enough to join the Euro-centric canon, but they did enough to be, well, ackowledgable. A new exhibition at the National Gallery, Charles Sheeler: Across Media, demonstrates the greatness of one American modern, and makes the argument for Sheeler's canonization: He was a pioneering multi-media artist before there was such a thing.
The show, curated by Charles Brock, shows Sheeler's photographs, drawings, paintings and one film collaboration with Paul Strand to demonstrate how all of Sheeler's output contributed to all of his other output. (The complete Manhatta is viewable here.) Brock's exhibition shows that Sheeler's paintings would not have been possible without Sheeler's photography.
And that is where Sheeler did something new. Several French moderns experimented with photographs. Degas took pictures of his bathers, Bonnard snapped his wife posing coyly in their garden. But for them photographs were merely experimentation. They took photographs to check out the new medium and then sometimes made painterly paintings strictly derived from them, paintings focused on composition, light, form, and other elements that had concerned painters for centuries. (Furthermore, it's not clear if Bonnard ever really saw prints of all the pictures he took.)
Sheeler didn't do that. In works such as New England Irrelevancies (above) Sheeler used photographs to do something different with painting. Instead of basing a painting on a photograph the way, say, Degas did, Sheeler used multiple photographs to build a painting that challenged the medium's history. He toys with color. He plays with multiple perspectives. Light sources are solid shafts that exist not to illuminate anything, but just to be light.
Other American moderns took photography-based lessons further than their European counterparts. The way O'Keeffe cropped her compositions in ways that were influenced by Alfred Stieglitz and their photographer friends has been well-chronicled. (Especially in Hunter Drohojowska-Philp's Full Bloom.) In her book The Great American Thing, art historian Wanda Corn suggested that Charles Demuth's portrait of William Carlos Williams, The Figure 5 in Gold, seems influenced by photography too: The fives, "much like a zoom lens, push and pull our eyes in and out of the center of the painting." (And in keeping with the American moderns' focus on things American, the zoom lens was an American invention.)
Brock's exhibition is a walk through Sheeler's process. It is not a full retrospective, but it points to the approach the next Sheeler retrospective should pursue.
Related: Exhibition catalogue.
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Other media on the Glueck resignation
The best write-up I've read so far of Grace Glueck's resignation from the Clark comes from The Stranger's Jen Graves. Also:
- Jim Romenesko on Poynter.
- The Boston Globe's/Geoff Edgers' Exhibitionist.
- Lee Rosenbaum says that Glueck was a pioneering journo and that should be taken into account when considering her transgression. (Rosenbaum also writes that my coverage "doesn't give even a hint of the other side of the story: the fact that her board membership, while inappropriate, caused no discernible slant in Times coverage." True. But: I didn't say it did cause a discernible slant and I didn't say that it didn't. I merely pointed out that Glueck's relationship with the Clark opened the door to questions from which ethical journalists and newspapers are immune. And I posed several of those questions. Rosenbaum says that Glueck gets a "bum rap" but also says that her conduct was "inappropriate." (Sounds like a fair rap!)
- Gawker and I wonder about the same things.
- Added as I see them.
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Glueck resigns from the Clark
The Transcript ("Voice of the Northern Berkshires") has the story: Grace Glueck has resigned from the board of the Clark Art Institute:
"New York Times art critic Gloria Glueck [sic] resigned from the board of the Clark Art Institute last week after an Internet blogger questioned her relationship with the museum."
That blogger would be me. There are a few things that Glueck says in the story that need straightening out. Huberdeau quoted Glueck as writing:
"One example of the many inaccuracies and distortions in the blogger's screed is his inference that I had influence in The Times' coverage of the Clark over the years..."
That sounds wonderful... except that I did not write that Glueck had influence in the Times' coverage of the Clark. In fact, I wrote that Glueck's seat on the Clark's board "raises questions about the Times' coverage of the Clark." Which it did. (And I listed some of the questions.)
And even though Glueck twice charged me with posting inaccuracies, she failed to cite even one error in my post. No one at the Times has claimed I posted any errors either. (In fact the silence from the NYT on all of this speaks volumes. There's no defense for the situation and they know it.)
Clark communications director Lisa Green (to whom I'm not related) took a swipe at me too. Her anger is misplaced: In my original post I went out of my way to say that this wasn't the Clark's problem, it was Glueck's problem and the Times' problem.
The unanswered questions: This quote from the Clark's Green caught my eye: "[E]veryone who needed to know at the paper knew of our relationship. It was never an issue on non-disclosure." So who at the NYT knew? And why wasn't it flagged as an obvious conflict of interest?
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Three afternoon notes
 Three afternoon notes: The last-ditch effort, complete with a congressman and an ex-Smithsonian expert, to save the Barnes for Merion.
Bill Viola's Tristan will not be seen at the Seventh Regiment Armory, writes Daniel Wakin in the NYT.
Sculptor Luis Jimenez is dead, killed working on Mustang, a commission for the Denver International Airport. A piece of the sculpture came loose as Jimenez was working on it. It struck him and pinned him to a steel support. The City of Denver expressed condolences and said that the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs and the Denver airport "will work together with the local art community to determine how Mustang can be finished." (I hope they mean Jimenez's art community, assistants, and the like.)
Jimenez is best-known in the Southwest, but this week his best-known work on the East Coast is being re-installed: Vaquero, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (Man on Fire, at left, is also at SAAM and will be on view when the museum re-opens on July 1.) Patricia Johnson wrote the obituary in the Houston Chronicle. Also: Claire Martin in the Denver Post. SAAM's EyeLevel too.
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MAN Q&A: Leah Dickerman, Part Two
Don't miss: FAMSF's new Courbet, here.
The National Gallery of Art's Dada show opens at MoMA this weekend. I talked with curator Leah Dickerman about the show. Part one is here.
 MAN: How was the show different in Paris?
LD: It was framed very differently in Paris. I actually think the two installations were very cool both in their own sense, but they were very, very different. At the Pompidou it filled the 20,000-square-foot sixth floor space, the entire space. We installed it on a chessboard-like grid, with little mini-squares, each of which was a mini exhibition. There were 42 squares, and once you were in you could wander through. There’s something very Dadaist about the logic of that in the sense that it’s this strict structure, but by being so strict, it produces a liberating play. They added 1,000 works to the exhibit through two key loans Jacque Doucet Bibliotecque, and a private collection of documentary materials. It added this huge amount of paper to the show.
MAN: Was the show received differently there than here?
LD: When you read reviews of the Paris show they were very positive, but they tended not to talk about history as much because in some ways history wasn’t as evident. It wasn’t as clear as who was talking to whom in what city and what the topography of these conversations was. There wasn’t the framing of the World War I film, which I wanted in an effort to place the exhibition at the intersection of war and the birth of a media culture. I noticed in the reviews that there were these lines that dada is an intellectual movement meaning not about art… and I Think that all that paper [that was in the Paris show] took away from how radical dada was in terms of artistic practice.
MAN: One of the real great things about the show for me was its treatment of Max Ernst. In the Met’s recent Ernst retro his Dadaist accomplishments were almost skipped over; we almost went right from Ernst the young man to Ernst the surrealist.
LD: Yes… When you separate Ernst’s dada career, you see this fascination with print culture that ties him to other Dadaists and the way he’s playing with this diverse print field. The whole debasement of his material comes through.
MAN: So one of the differences between Washington and Paris was the World War I film with which the show opened?
LD: I did feel like I was making a show for Washington in many ways. In France you can assume an audience understands WWI because they lived it. In the United States, World War Two fills our consciousness. The moral lines were clear and with WWI the pathos of it has been forgotten in the U.S. Partly because we were speaking to an American audience and partly because it was Washington, I Felt like we needed to inform viewers with the WWI opening.
I think the art is tough, and I wanted people to be engaged with it. I wanted people to understand the sense of urgency that these artists felt. I was also struck by how tough the images in this film footage were. This was film footage that was largely designed to be shown in newsreels and the images we get of war today are so sanitized. They’re even hesitant to show us images of flag-draped coffins!
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Acquisition: Courbet @ FAMSF
 Not in the SF Chronicle, nor in the SF Examiner. Only on MAN: Ever since I saw Mary Morton and Charlotte Eyerman's Courbet and the Modern Landscape show at the Getty, I've been thinking about Courbet. (Part of that thinking was a post I did here on Courbet and Gerhard Richter: The squeegee and the knife.) I've also been reading Ross King's excellent new book The Judgment of Paris, in which Courbet is a prominent boozer. It's this year's top summer art-book read.
So when a list of the most recent Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco acquisitions came across my desk last week, one purchase jumped out at me: One of Courbet's 1860s Wave paintings (left). Don't look for it at the de Young -- FAMSF's pre-contemporary European paintings are at the Legion of Honor.
At the Getty show, Eyerman and Morton lined up a dozen or so Courbet waves along a wall, nearly lining up their horizon lines. (Had the frames been removed from each painting the installation probably would have worked even better; As it was, the paintings themselves were nearly overwhelmed by a cavalcade of bad frames.) The wall of waves got me thinking about the Philly Museum's 2004 Manet and the Sea show, a perfect Philly Museum show in that it was completely overwhelmed by its atrocious, gimmicky gift shop.
Lots of impressionists fled Paris for the coast to paint seascapes. In Philly Renoir's waves looked dainty and churning, effete. Monet's looked like popcorn trickling in from Brighton. Courbet's waves look pissed-off, churning, menacing, comin'-to-get-you. FAMSF's new Courbet is one of those mean waves.
FAMSF dates the painting to 'circa 1869.' It's possible that Courbet painted the FAMSF painting in 1867, during the run up to Napoleon III's Exposition Universelle, a kind of forerunner to the World's Fairs.
Courbet, like many painters, wanted to make a big impression during the show. His arch-rival Ernest Meissonier would use the Exposition to seal his coronation as Europe's Greatest Living Painter. Courbet (like Manet) built a personal 'pavilion' near the fair grounds, a place where he could show scores of his own paintings and, hopefully, steal some of Meissonier's glory. Throughout the 1860s, Parisian critics had responded best to Courbet's wave paintings, so Courbet decided that he would give them more waves. Courbet holed himself up in Trouville and in Deauville, on the Normandy coast. While there Courbet did three things: He drank, he painted waves, and he drank. His self-built pavilion in 1867 was full of them. It's possible that FAMSF's painting is from that 1867 show.
Related: Ross King's The Judgment of Paris; Morton and Eyerman's catalogue for Courbet and the Modern Landcape. That show opens at the MFA Houston this weekend.
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In which readers dig GMM
Over the last week or so MAN has received email at quite unusual levels. Email on the Grace Glueck/NYT conflict-of-interest is running about 10-to-1 against the Times. And to my surprise, y'all are plenty fascinated by Grace McCann Morley.
SFMOMA's Peter Samis emailed in to tell us that Morley was involved in the repatriation of loot stolen by the Nazis; and
Kristy Phillips, who just finished her PhD at the University of Minnesota, wrote a doctoral dissertation that, in part, explores Morley's post-SFMA career. Phillips' email effectively picked up where my Q&A with Kara Kirk left off, and Phillips allowed me to post some of it here:
Morley spent the remainder of her life (until 1985) in New Delhi, India. As a South Asian art historian, I have looked closely at her work at the National Museum of India. This was the first major museum built in India following Independence in 1947, and Morley worked with Nehru and his government closely to bring some of the ideals of modernism, and American modernity, to its corridors and internal practices. She went on to serve as a government consultant for all Indian museums and then later founded the ICOM Regional Agency in Asia, based out of her home in Delhi.
Through this agency, she had an enormous impact on the development of museums throughout Asia in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. She organized vast training programs for museologists throughout the continent, and helped to lobby their governments for funds to attend and present at regional conferences. In India, Morley is today considered the "mother" of modern museology. I'm sure that in Indonesia and Thailand particularly, she has a similar status.
After being forced to leave SF in 1958, she cut off ties with most of her friends and colleagues in the Bay Area, which is one reason why (I feel) her memory has been somewhat buried. She felt betrayed here by the museum and its trustees and at one point declared that she wanted to forget SF completely.
When she died in 1985, her ashes were scattered into the Ganges River by several of her self-described Indian "sons", who were curators from the National Museum of India. At her funeral they also preformed the rites of biological sons, attesting to the impact and lasting presence that she had there.
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MAN Q&A: Leah Dickerman on Dada
Dada opens at MoMA on Sunday. I talked with exhibition curator Leah Dickerman during the final days of the show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Part two to follow.
 MAN: Dada is a strikingly political exhibit. Given the current political climate and the context in which the show was seen in Washington, I found myself wondering when you got interested in doing Dada.
LD: I had already sort of talked about it before 9/11 for sure. The reason I came to it was there had been these two surrealism exhibits: The one at the Tate and the Revolution Surrealiste [at the Pompidou]. Both had great works, and conceptually there were lots of things that were interesting about them but that didn’t seem as relevant. I was going through those two shows and thinking dada is what was relevant.
In terms of a watershed moment, this is when the age-old idea of art as a picture is fully exploded. Practice for the 20th century was laid out. That relationship to new media, and the ‘media/cultural explosion,’ and their relationship to technology, all these thing seemed to have such relevance with dada. And as events turned it became only more relevant.
MAN: That's different: It's a dada as dada show, and nothing else.
LD: I just thought dada hadn’t been well historicized. People talked about dada with surrealism which means it lost its boundaries. Then you had these shows like Bill Rubin's [in 1968] which were very smart, but which were about defining avant garde and neo-garde and about appropriating dada into another context. So these boundaries were blurred. Dada is about these key issues of modernity that are relevant for us today: media, mass media, technology, public culture, public speech and all of these things are on the table. I wanted to do the show in which you tried to historicize dada and tried to frame it, map it, and that made it clearer what the issues were.
MAN: In a way your show presents a re-invention of dada, wherein the art object is once again central to dada. Artists making objects, not just artists walking around in pink pajamas.
LD: In some other shows and in how some people think about dada today, strangely, art got left out of the equation. A lot of the language about dada is about being anti-art and nihilistic and that stops writers from going further. I wanted to focus on what was this relationship through art though [Dadaists] shared ideas through journalism, and letters, and art.
MAN: Did you have a concern that the NGA wouldn't do the show because it was so political, that there is such a strong anti-war element that it would make people at the NGA pull back from it?
LD: I would say that there was some of that. But I think that I should say that this is actually one of the strengths of the NGA, that the director really did recognize the historical significance of being able to look at dada as a movement. He did latch onto that quickly. Once they do say yes to a project –- not hat that's always easy -– they let you do it in a way in which you’ve got the money and the institutional support to put together the kind of catalog and exhibition and to get the loans that you want.
I think there was some internal worry -- especially from that general willingness to do it -- that dada would be scrappy and too much about words. I wouldn't say that dada is beautiful, but I would say that it's more visually engaging than people expected.
MAN: Is it going too far to say that Dada is a show about war?
LD: They were all deeply profoundly affected by their experiences during war. But that was an important experience because... it sounds maybe too simple to say that, but at a moment in which you have to feign insanity in order to behave rationally, then insanity takes on such a different valence. You often find that there's a tremendous empathy in dada for those who have been wounded or hurt, psychically or otherwise. What's missing in dada -- and you see it again and again -- is images of authoritative males or warrior males. Instead you see broken-down bodies or men in drag, everything but that sort of tradtional male portrait.
Related: MAN on Dada: Contextualizing dada, Zurich, Berlin, Hannover & Cologne, New York, and Paris. The exhibition catalogue, still 40% off.
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Getty - Munitz = Biggs
The Los Angeles Times has run many stories about Munitzian problems at the top of the Getty Trust. Forget the blood oranges, the first-class travel and the self-serving grants. Today's story is the most stunning. The first two paragraphs of Ralph Frammolino and Jason Felch's story doesn't use a word that rhymes with 'tribe' but...
Former J. Paul Getty Trust chief Barry Munitz agreed to pay retired Getty board Chairman David Gardner nearly $300,000 to write a coffee-table book after Gardner left the foundation's board in 2004.
Gardner was hired to write the book just months after he intervened on Munitz's behalf to help the chief executive secure a five-year contract rather than the one-year extension some board members favored.
Believe it or not, it gets worse for Munitz and Gardner from there. And then there's this line from John Biggs, who is still the Getty's board chair: "I think it's the most honorable relationship that I can imagine," said Biggs, adding that the amount paid to Gardner was 'peanuts.'"
Oh my. If Biggs thinks that's "honorable," it's time for a completely new leadership team at the Getty.
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Museum directors: More outtakes
More outtakes from my Sunday LAT piece on women museum directors.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum director Lisa Dennison on the changes in the profession over the last 30 years and what's happening now: "I think that in the '70s and '80s -- or even in the '80s and '90s -- there was this sense of museums becoming different kinds of institutions. You moved away form the old-guard notion of the museum as the elite institution that was bent on scholarship and the pursuit of collection-building and this huge sense of elitism. As they became more public institutions and the blockbuster phenomenon happened and began to matter... I think there was this real experimentation with looking for museum directors from fields that weren't necessarily art-related or driven. We started to see even the the dual position of president and director, where you had financial acumen or even Andrea Rich from a university situation.
I think that model pretty much failed, and there is a turning back to bringing museum directors up through the ranks of museums. Essentially even old school guys like Philippe de Montebello talked to curators about how we need to find directorships filled, about how the ranks are thin and more of you curators should consider becoming museum directors. Max Anderson was very vociferous about that. That was message even coming through the AMMD ranks... that curators should consider that as a profession."
New Museum director Lisa Phillips on women and contemporary art: "In contemporary art, women artists have almost achieved parity with men. That's been an astonishing development over the last 25 years. I said almost parity."
Phillips on how women museum directors owe something to their own networks, but also to society: "[It's] partly because of the culture in general continuing to change -- we can now contemplate women candidates for president, say. Women have historically been very, very active in our field and have had leading roles as patrons and curators and founders of museums."
MAMFW director Marla Price on how while there many women directors, there could be even more: "You also have an awful lot of very talented people in their 30-50s who went into the promotional side of the art world, in galleries and in auction houses. They would otherwise be top candidates."
Hirshhorn director Olga Viso on how peer networks are a part of why women tend to end up running contemporary museums: "There definitely is a reaching-out of women to one another, recognizing that the jobs are hard and challenging enough as is: Balancing family life, children and the profession. But in general, contemporary art people click together. When you get people working from general interest museums and from contemporary museums, there’s an understanding that the contemporary people tend to cluster together."
Mentors/leaders in the field mentioned by multiple directors: Kathy Halbreich, Linda Nochlin, Marcia Tucker.
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MAN Q&A: Mia Fineman on Sontag
It's apparently Q&A week at MAN. Yesterday: Kara Kirk on Grace McCann Morley. (That Q&A is generating lots of email, more on GMM tomorrow.) Also later today: More on the latest (!) Getty revelation. (!!)
It's no surprise that a writer would find this interesting: The Met is launching a show that mixes Susan Sontag's thoughts on photography with photographs from the Met's collection. I'll let the show's curator, Mia Fineman, take it from there:
 MAN: From where did the idea for the show come?
MF: I've always been a huge fan of Sontag, especially her writing on photography. But I think the idea for the show first came to me when I was reading a piece by David Denby on Sontag's film criticism in the New Yorker about a year ago.
At the time, we were trying to come up with ideas for shows in the Gilman Gallery, a two-room gallery that’s great for focused shows of works from the museum’s collection. After reading the Denby piece, I thought, 'Why not do a kind of tribute to her writing on photography,' which was never illustrated -- except for the essay, "Regarding the Pain of Others," when it was published in the New Yorker in 2002. None of her books ever had pictures.
MAN: Why didn't they?
MF: I'm not really sure why she made that decision. It may have been financial considerations or wanting to market them not as 'art books' but as 'criticism.' So I thought why not use her words for the text on the walls, rather than the museum’s usual institutional voice, and pair her words with pictures from the collection that she wrote about specifically, or that relate to her writing in a more general, oblique way.
MAN: So did you start by re-reading Sontag’s text, or with the photographs, or…?
MF: I started out by re-reading all the essays on photography and pulling out quotes that I felt conveyed an idea very clearly and concisely, in just a few sentences. Then I began looking for pictures. I started with the easier part -– finding specific photographs she had written about that were in the Met's collection. And there turned out to be quite a few, like Capa's Falling Soldier, or iconic works by photographers she wrote about extensively like Arbus, Sander, or Evans. The next stage was harder. What I tried to do was find pictures that illustrated her ideas about photography in a more interpretive way, using works from the collection that Sontag may or may not have known herself.
MAN: And how did you decide what passages of text to use, how long they would be and all. I mean, given the concept, there was the risk of endless wall-text.
MF: I wanted to quotes to be short – just a few sentences each – because I didn't want people to have to read huge paragraphs of text while they’re standing in the gallery. Fortunately, her writing is so aphoristic and concise that it was easy to do that. Sontag once said in an interview that she wanted to have a new idea in every sentence and she very nearly succeeded. It took her five years to write On Photography, she put so much sweat and blood into these essays. You can tell there's been a tremendous amount of thinking distilled into each one.
So I had this list of quotes and then I started thinking about what we have in the collection and how these pictures would work with the quotes. Sometimes I'd have a quote where I couldn’t figure out what picture would work with it, but for most of them I'd find some good things after a few false starts. Then there was the question of how these pictures would work together on the wall. It's kind of a backwards way of curating a show, and it looks different. It's not as classically balanced as a Met show would normally be because it has a particular didactic purpose, which is to respond to this writing. I ended up with some interesting walls and some pictures that we never would have put together -- going back and forth from the 19th century to the 1970s.
MAN: Is Sontag herself in the show?
MF: There is one portrait of Sontag in the show by Peter Hujar (above), which I consider to be the most beautiful and iconic portrait of her. She was a celebrity -- and very beautiful and photogenic – and there are hundreds of portraits of her, but I didn't want to emphasize her physical appearance in the show. It's really about her thinking and writing.
MAN: This is definitely an untraditional show, especially for a place like the Met, which is not known for experimentation. Was it a hard show to get approved, to get on the schedule?
MF: It turned out to be a surprisingly easy show to get approved. It's pretty uncharacteristic for the Met -– or for any museum -- to do a show that deals with art criticism, but there's room for experimentation, even here. Besides it's Susan Sontag. She's really important to New York intellectual life, and she spent a lot of time at the Met, looking at the art here.
MAN: Did she hang out in the photography study room or anything like that?
MF: Not that I know of. She saw photographs in exhibitions and in permanent installations both at the Met and at the Modern, but she wasn’t a historian of photography -- and she never represented herself that way -- though she obviously knew a lot about it. She was learning as she went along, thinking about the medium very seriously, probably also working from books and reproductions.
Sontag also didn't revere the vintage print the way the photo world does today. Some people in the photography world -- people who are photographic historians who were doing the primary research when she was writing these essays -– disagree with her position and believe that she was simply wrong about a lot of things. One prominent photo-historian told me a story about interrupting Sontag during a lecture when she was talking about Atget and asking her if she had ever actually held a vintage Atget print in her hands. She admitted that she hadn't. And that's one way of evaluating what she said. But I think her ideas are important and thought-provoking whether or not she held an Atget in her hands.
One of her most important contributions to the field was in thinking about photography not only as art, but as more than art. News photography, travel photography, photojournalism: She treated all these forms with as much seriousness and intellectual rigor as the work of great photographic artists.
MAN: Have other museums expressed interest in taking the show?
MF: Not yet. Since it’s a collection-based show, chances are it won't travel.
Related: On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others.
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Museum directors: Outtakes
Some outtakes (more to come) from yesterday's LA Times story on museum directors. Also: Kara Kirk tells us about Grace McCann Morley and the San Francisco Museum of Art.
The Walker Art Center's Kathy Halbreich on whether the playing field is level: "Boards still matter. People tend to select people who look like them. I know that there was certainly when I came up through the head-hunter ranks... I don't think that's a cynical statement -- I don't intend it that way. That's the human condition."
The Blaffer Gallery's Terrie Sultan on the same question: "I don't think [the preference for male directors is] all gone. I think that may be another clue to the reason why there are so many strong women in contemporary art museums as opposed to the more encyclopedic ones: There may be a sense from the boards that run the contemporaries that either way is fine. Where as the grey eminence museums are still lagging behind in their belief that there needs to be a patrician at the helm of the Queen Mary."
Halbreich on why women are 19 times more likely to run a mid-sized-to-major art museum than a Fortune 1000 company: "I think people do, at some level, think non-profits are the soft side of business. If you look at corporate America where women are and where they rise the highest levels, it's often in communications. And marketing and a director's job is somewhat [similar]... I do think that women have, for whatever reason, found visibility in those two areas: creating vision and communicating vision. I've heard -- I don’t know if it's true -- in the PR world the communication heads often are women because the general public tends to trust them more."
Halbreich on why women so many run modern and contemporary art museums, while men tend to reign at encyclopedic museums: "If I was cynical I'd say don't let us handle your old masters -- but we can make the new masters."
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MAN Q&A: Kara Kirk on Grace McCann Morley
In yesterday's Los Angeles Times, I looked at the recent increase in the number of women who run prominent art museums. In the course of reporting the piece, Hirshhorn director Olga Viso asked me how much I knew about Grace McCann Morley, who ran the San Francisco Museum of Art from its founding in 1934 until 1958. (The museum is now called the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.) I stuttered for a moment and replied that I didn't know anything about Morley.
Morley is a key figure, both in art history and in the history of SF's GLBT community: She was a woman who ran an art museum for 24 years during a period when women didn't run art museums. She was also one of San Francisco's pre-California Hall lesbian pioneers. I grew up in the Bay Area and I don't remember hearing her name once, not at SFMOMA, and not as a part of the city's rich GLBT history. While establishing SFMA as a major American museum, Morley chaired the Museum Division of UNESCO, helped create the International Council of Museums, served as the founding editor of ICOM's journal Museum, and she eventually moved to India to become director of the National Museum of New Delhi.
I started calling around and discovered that MoMA associate publisher (and ex-Gettyite) Kara Kirk wrote her master's thesis at Stanford about Morley. Kirk's thesis is the only Morley scholarship about which I know. (Dear funders: It should be a full biography. Here's hoping SFMOMA prioritizes finding funding for some institutional history-related scholarship such as this.) Here's my Q&A with Kirk about Morley:
 MAN: The SFMA hiring her to run the museum is in actuality an interesting twist on the paradigm established in New York. In New York women created MoMA, for example, but hired a man to run the museum. In San Francisco, it was men who were willing to put their money toward the foundation of a modern art museum, yet they opted to put a woman in charge.
KK: I think that for one thing there perhaps were not as many constraints in the West. I just don't think it was as odd to people there as it might have been in New York. And there was a dearth of people who knew about modern art and she did. She had experience. So for them it was a logical step. I did a fair amount of research in San Francisco, and no one made any comments in the press about her being a woman. I did quote one newspaper piece that noted she was from out of town when she wasn’t really. She was a local who had been away.
On the East Coast what is interesting is that you find that a lot of the biggest museum boards comprised men and women were wanting to get involved as well, and modern art was a place for them to step in. The other distinction is that the women on the East Coast who were involved in modern art tended to be wealthy themselves, or at least well-connected: Gertrude Whitney, Juliana Force, Hilla Rebay are examples, where as the women on the West Coast had small galleries, were journalists, were working stiffs who supported modern art.
I should mention that Women were involved in the founding of two other museums in the Bay Area, though neither exhibited modern art at the time. There was Alma Spreckles, a wealthy philanthropist, who founded the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and Jane Stanford, wife of Leland, who founded the Stanford University Museum of Art.
MAN: Before she took the SFMA job Walter Siple, the museum director in Cincinnati, hired her to be his deputy. Was that unusual, to be No. 2 in command as a woman? To be essentially the chief curator?
KK: I don't think that was completely unusual… It was definitely a bit of cronyism because it was her teacher who hired her. I think what could have been more criticized might have been the fact that she'd never been a curator before, though I didn’t find any evidence of this.
MAN: How did what Grace McCann Morley was paid compare to what her male peers were paid?
KK: Her starting salary was $2,400 a year, just under half of the sum being paid at the time to the director of the Minneapolis Museum of Art -- and a fraction of Alfred Barr's $9,000 starting salary at MoMA.
MAN: Was she what we would now call 'out?' Was she openly gay?
KK: People knew she was gay but nobody talked about it. From what I could gather she was very private about it. I never saw anything at all in what I researched. Once in a while she would mention friends in her correspondence —female companions who would travel with her, for instance—but that was about it. However some of the coded language that was used in the press to describe her was pretty unbelievable.
MAN: How important was it to MoMA that she took their shows? And did it matter that a woman ran MoMA’s traveling shows office?
KK: I think they recognized the import, but they didn't feel any kind of competition. I think MoMA appreciated what she was trying to do. I found a letter from Alfred Barr to her concerning the loan of a Cezanne work that he was trying to help her secure from another museum. Barr said that SFMA had done a lot for MoMA by taking their traveling shows, and so he wanted to help get this loan for them.
MAN: Were MoMA shows the mainstay of SFMA's programming in those early years?
KK: They took many but it certainly wasn’t the majority of their programming. The SFMA organized many of their own shows and in fact circulated a lot of these shows too.
MAN: Why is she so little known?
KK: I think it's partly a California thing. Women on the East Coast who did things that weren’t nearly as important, there are huge biographies about them, whereas the history of the West Coast has not been explored to the same extent. But some of it falls at the feet of SFMOMA, which has unfortunately never had the funding to do anything with its archive. Recently they've been making an effort to get funding specifically to remedy this.
MAN: In San Francisco Douglas MacAgy is known as The Modernist Leader.
KK: He completely eclipsed her. There's even a biography on him (albeit a short one), and Morley was the one who first brought him to San Francisco to work for her at the SFMA!
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Missing: hirshhorn.si.edu
 For months now we've been telling you how bad the Hirshhorn's guards are, how few of them there are, and how the museum needs to address the problem. Children wander the museum, touching everything in sight, and last week a near-acquisition was damaged and has now been removed from view. Well, maybe this will finally shock the Hirshhorn management into finally doing something: Apparently security at the Hirsh is so lax that sometime on Saturday afternoon, someone stole the museum's webpage.
UPDATE: The site was only down for a couple hours. It was back up Saturday night.
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Five dream art trips
Matisse's Riviera, France
The Farm, New Zealand
The Hermitage, Russia
Lightning Field, USA
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The Clark & Glueck: An obvious NYT conflict
Why is New York Times art critic Grace Glueck on the board of trustees of an art museum, the Clark Art Institute? Glueck's role at the Clark seems to be a direct violation of the Times' own ethics policies.
 "[Times staff] may not join boards of trustees, advisory committees or similar groups except those serving journalistic organizations or otherwise promoting journalism education," the Times' own ethics handbook says. It adds that it doesn't matter that Glueck, who has 62 bylines so far this year, is technically a free-lancer: "Freelance contributors to the Times, while not its employees, will be held to the same standards as staff members when they are on Times assignments."
The Glueck conflict is obvious and embarrassing, and should not be dismissed as one of those things that is for some reason permissible at the culture desk. Would the Times allow its labor reporter to serve on the board of a labor union? Or could a Times science reporter sit on the board of the American Lung Association? What about its religion columnist: Would it allow him to serve on the board of a church, even if, say, he didn't write about that church? (Glueck last wrote about the Clark in 1991.) The answer is to all of those questions is: No. It should not be OK for a Times art critic to be a trustee of an art museum.
Sadly, Glueck's unethical fence-straddling raises questions about the Times' coverage of the Clark:
- Did Glueck's role at the museum in any way influence this past Sunday's Times story on the Clark?
- In June, 2005, the Times reviewed a Jacques-Louis David show at the Clark instead of at the originating institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum. Did the Times skip the Getty presentation in deference to a colleague's institution? The Times ran two stories on David at the Clark -- and none on David at the Getty.
- Why are there so many more stories in the NYT's arts section about the Clark than about virtually any other museum outside New York City that has a comparable (~$11 million per year) budget?
In none of the Times' recent stories about the Clark did the paper reveal the relationship between a Times critic and the museum. Nor is Glueck's relationship with the Clark mentioned in any of her writing. How do we know that the artist that Glueck is reviewing this Friday hasn't been chosen for a Clark installation or show?
There are plenty of other less obvious ways in which Glueck's relationship with the Clark raises questions. Think about what trustees do: One of their primary responsibilities is to raise money to fund organizations. Has Glueck raised money from people the Times covers, either inside or outside the arts? Might they be motivated to donate in the hopes that Glueck might advocate for them inside the Times? (You bet.)
Might Glueck's Clark-related ties impact the Times' non-Clark coverage, too? The director of the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, sits with Glueck on the Clark board. And what about the future: Will Glueck's dual role impact the Times' coverage of the Clark's Tadao Ando-designed expansion?
The Times and Glueck shouldn't be in a position to have these questions asked. Glueck's trusteeship of the Clark creates an easily avoidable appearance of conflict, the kind of thing that newspapers almost always work hard to avoid.
This isn't the Clark's problem. This is a Glueck-Times problem. One of two relationships should end immediately: Glueck's with the Times, or Glueck's with the Clark. (And if Glueck leaves the Clark but stays at the Times, NYT readers deserve an explanation as to why the paper put up with the conflict for so many years.)
Related: Gawker says, "This could be a problem — and these sticky ethical missteps really do make one cringe." Also picked up by Romenesko. Edward Winkleman, a gallerist, thought about whether he wanted to say anything about this given that the Times reviews shows at his gallery... and then blogged in agreement with my post. The Stranger's excellent blog chimes in: "As if the Times needs another Jayson Blair/Judith Miller."
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DaDA in the NYT?
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a tiny (but fabulous) ad in the 'A' section of today's New York Times:
"What is DADA?" -- Theo Van Doesburg
The ad is for the upcoming Dada show at MoMA, hereafter to be referred to as DaDA. It was MoMA's first DaDA ad. (MAN shorthand: Dada = NGA show; DaDA = MoMA show.)
Related: A few weeks ago, while Dada was up at the National Gallery of Art, I did a Q&A with curator Leah Dickerman. I'll have that for you on MAN next week.
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Public art in LA: Bye-bye.
If you're an artist and you're thinking about making public art in Los Angeles, don't.
In the last year at least three bits of public art have been destroyed in LA. LACMA destroyed the Margaret Kilgallens and Barry McGees that it commissioned for its parking garage, installations made by the French artist Invader -- including private commissions -- were destroyed, and now Kent Twitchell's giant downtown mural of Ed Ruscha has been painted over by persons unknown.
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Acquisition: Jeff Koons @ AIC
 My favorite Jeff Koons is 1985's Lifeboat, an iconic bronze sculpture from Koons' East Village days. It's one of five Koonses in the collection of the MCA Chicago. Lifeboat is a half-scale, true-to-reality lifeboat, complete with oars. As I wrote in my review of the New Museum's East Village USA show: Lifeboat is emblematic of the struggle for many East Village artists. Art was a way out, a way to move up to, say, the Upper East Side (where Koons now lives). Lifeboat helped Koons escape. Many other artists simply sank.
Now the Art Institute of Chicago has its own iconic Koons: Woman in Tub, a 1988 sculpture from the same Koons series that brought us Michael Jackson and Bubbles. (Question for AIC: Koons attended your school and you're just now getting around to owning a Koons? Better late than never.)
Critical thought on Koons has vacillated wildly over the years. Jerry Saltz has been Koons' strongest defender. Saltz closes that piece by pointing out that Koons' best pieces are full of mystery, a certain what on gawd's green earth is going on THERE? Why is that man hanging out with a chimp? Why is that rabbit so big and so shiny?
 Woman in Tub has plenty of that. Why is the woman grabbing her breasts? Why is there snorkel ... And come to think of it, what is going on down there?
I can't decide if it's risky for an art museum to own (and show) a Koons like this or not. On one hand it's a piece that requires a certain level of parent-to-child explanation. On the other, it, uh, doesn't. That's another quality that's typical of the best Koonses: They're caught between a pre-adolescence and adulthood. (Think Puppy. And think about why the porno Koonses don't.) There's something just goofy enough about a good Koons to appeal to a nine-year old -- and there's something just adult enough to appeal to his dad.
Related: Jeff Koons' website. (Kinda.) MOCA adds Roxy Paine.
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2006 AltWeekly Awards finalists (minus two)
Congrats to Washington City Paper art critic Jeffry Cudlin, who is one of eight finalists for two 2006 AltWeekly Awards for art criticism. Complete list here. Totally befuddling: The best alt-weekly art critics in America are recent Pulitzer finalist and Village Voicer Jerry Saltz, and LA Weekly scribe Doug Harvey. Third place is a long way back. How are those two not finalists?!
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News & notes
A thought on the relationship between museums and bloggers: Museums would do well to take note of this: John Kerry included a sitdown with local bloggers as a part of a recent trip to California. Politicans routinely meet with bloggers or even blog themselves.
How do art museums compare? Bettter and better. Only one museum director has turned down a MAN Q&A or similar get-together with me. Indianapolis blog On the Cusp broke the news of who would direct the Indy Museum of Art, and Lee Rosenbaum has noticed that museums pay attention to what blogs say. Museums are doing better and better.
Good piece: Michael Kimmelman checked in today with a nice, personal piece on Harrell Fletcher's White Columns show in today's NYT. This is the kind of art criticism I wish Kimmelman did more often -- bring a show into the present and tell us why it matters. (Furthermore: It would have been nice if the NYT had given the write-up some space on the front page of its www.)
This month in GawkerForum: Would you believe that there weren't two lines bad enough in May's GawkerForum 'posts' to make into a blog post like April's? That's not to say that GawkerForum is getting any better, just that it isn't reaching the depths as frequently.
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A three-museum check-up
The LA Times checks in on three of America's biggest museums over the weekend: LACMA, the Getty, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Not many other newspapers run these kinds of stories -- when did you last read the NYT taking a look at Lisa Dennison's tenure at the Gugg the way the LAT examined Michael Govan's LACMA this weekend?
At the de Young, LATer Lee Romney examines the Friede/Papua New Guinea culutural heritage story more deeply than even the hometown Chronicle has. Conclusion: This is a stickier case than the Met or Getty face, in part because people have "been shot on the grounds of the museum" to which the semi-disputed objects might go. The story does not go on to say that the de Young should get that di Suvero out of one of its contemporary paintings galleries, but it should.
At LACMA, LATer Christopher Reynolds gets Michael Govan's base salary into the paper, and other things.
 Finally, at the Getty, LATer Christopher Reynolds (yes, again) takes a squizz at Getty Museum boss Michael Brand. Reynolds chronicles Brand's many ventures O.S., including Brand's recent stewardship of the Virginia MFA, and tells us what's next for the Getty. (If you read MAN you know most of this stuff already because I'm a stickybeak. MAN posted about the Getty's broadening its exhibition program and Brand's interest in contemporary art back in August 2005, and about his interest in bringing contemporary art to the Villa in December. And the LAT reported this governance tidbit yesterday; we told you about it back on May 10.)
Brand rocked up at the Getty in January, and he's been flat out like a lizard drinking ever since. Brand is fair dinkum, but to read Reynolds write it, he's also a bit of a wet blanket. (Perhaps Brand should have taken Reynolds out to hit the turps.)
That's ok with me: After the adventures of the Munitz years, a quiet ridgy didge is probably what the Getty Museum needs. I remain impressed with Brand's interest in contemporary art, but I wonder why the Getty hasn't hired a contemporary art curator? And Brand's pending installation of the much-derided (and, ahem, bolt-inclusive) Stark sculpture collection -- an acquisition that remains deeply unpopular among Getty art-folk -- is a minor cause for concern. (We here at MAN hope that this criticism doesn't come off as tall poppy syndrome. We can be a bit of a figjam sometimes.) But good onya Michael: You're showing no signs of bringing the Ekka to Brentwood. Phew.
And finally, a new MAN policy: As long as Brand runs the Getty Museum, MAN will refer to the Getty's gleaming Brentwood HQ (with irony) as "Meier's humpy." (Aside to Getty staff: Ask someone from the Lucky Country to translate this for you.)
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The sleeper Klimt
 Of the five Gustav Klimt paintings on view at LACMA until June 30, the golden Adele Bloch-Bauer I has received most of the attention. Understandable.
But the sleeper is Beech Woods (Birch Woods), a 43-inch-square painting of painterly cleverness. As with Adele, reproductions don’t communicate the handsiness of the painting, the witty way Klimt built his autumn forest.
Beech Woods is more than just a landscape. Klimt painted it in 1903, when Matisse was on the cusp of fauvism and years before Picasso and Braque created cubism. During the next decade the flattening of perspectival space, the race to the picture plane, would drive the three Parisian trifecta (and an army of mimickers) to greater and greater paintings.
Klimt got pretty close in 1903. There is no horizon line here as there is in Klimt's other, earlier, forest paintings. The denseness of the woods and the burnt oranges of the of fallen leaves come together to form a smoky mass somewhere near the top of the painting, where the horizon line might be. Or might not. The effect is to dramatically press the forest toward the picture plane, to make dense the forest. As I look at the bottom of the painting, then up toward the top, it feels like the top of the painting is falling down on me.
Klimt's brushstrokes reinforce that feeling. In the foreground each fallen leaf is made up of one brushstroke, flicked into place. The paint is thick where Klimt's brush meets the canvas and where it leaves it. Klimts technique puts edges on the leaves, as if the tip and the stem of each leaf was sticking up off of the forest floor, held down by the damp mass of the middle. Some naked canvas pokes through the carpet of brush-flicks in the near-ground. As your eye works into the background of the painting, the leaves blur into clumpiness, eventually joining as mass of trees as a dark netherland. And there are no more spots of empty canvas.
The way Klimt has built his beech trees also plays with how the eye sees the lack of depth. While the leaves are quickly brushed into place, the dominant beech trees in the center and on the right of the canvas are built in tight horizontal bands of paint, one on top of the other, until the tree leaves the top of the painting. The other tree trunks in the painting are made with a simple rule: large brushstrokes in the foreground, tiny dabs for the smaller trees in the background.
And in the foreground little blue autumn flowers, possibly crocuses, bloom. Where did those come from?
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More on free days
Earlier this morning we discovered that the Baltimore Museum and the Walters are going $0 on Oct. 1. The Art Institute of Chicago wants in on this thing too in a more limited way: Starting this Saturday all kids under 12 are free. (Every museum in America should have this policy.) And on Thursday and Friday evenings during the summer, the AIC will be open until 9 and free from 5-9 pm. The UCLA Hammer Museum is free this summer too -- and not just their permanent collection but the riveting Societe Anonyme show, too. (More on it next week, I think.)
Late hours are the In Thing in the museo-world. They've been a huge attendance hit at the Hirshhorn and in Philadelphia, to name two near-to-me examples.
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BMA, Walters to charge $0
The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Gallery are repealing their admissions charges. Starting Oct. 1, they'll both be free to visit. Bravo.
The museums did it with public money, both from the city and from at least one surrounding suburban county. The Glenn McNatt/Linell Smith Baltimore Sun story makes the case that the 'burbs should kick in even more.
Both museums are underappreciated gems. The Baltimore Museum is one of my 10 favorite museums in America. It's home to one of the world's greatest Matisse collections (both paintings and sculpture), and few regional museums devote more gallery space to contemporary art. Next year Balmer is originating Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, sure to be one of the hits of 2007.
(Given that Clyfford Still lived 35 miles away, would it be nice if the museum had more than one good Still? Sure. But it is Still about whom we're talking here. He must have visited the BMA, but in my going through what was available to researchers last year, I never saw evidence of it.)
Strange confluence: The Washington Post story and the Baltimore Sun story just happen to mention the exact same museo points-of-comparison: Cincy and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Just happen to. They both just happen to mention context-free museum attendance numbers. Just happen to. (At least the Sun story has a little more depth.) Ya don't think there was some museo-generated paper off of which they were both reading? If just one of them had mentioned, say, the St. Louis Art Museum I'd be inclined to believe that the writers did some reporting on that instead of just some transcribing.
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