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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
WSJ's Gibson on the Bloch-Bauer heirs
Last Friday NYTer Michael Kimmelman left readers slack-jawed by oh-so-carefully not using the word "greedy" in describing the Bloch-Bauer heirs' disposition of the Gustav Klimt paintings that Austria recently returned to their family. I found his essay to be both shaky on the facts of the case (the NYT, rather pathetically, ran only one correction), and presumptuous.
This morning the Wall Street Journal's Eric Gibson kindly quotes MAN and piles on, pointing out that Kimmelman was out of touch with financial reality, at least:
Long-denied heirs like Ms. Altmann should be allowed to do as they please with their property once they have recovered it. Isn't that, so to speak, the whole point? The "story about justice and redemption after the Holocaust," to borrow Mr. Kimmelman's phrase, surely includes the right of the descendants of Nazi-era victims to exercise the freedom their families were denied.
Also, here's my Fortune magazine story on how Ronald Lauder and the Neue Galerie pulled off the Adele.
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The art world loves Project Runway
Because we're not just about deaccessioning, strippers at the Nelson-Atkins, Polidori, endowments, Diebenkorn, and other seriousness... The art world's favorite television show is Project Runway. In the last month I've, sigh, come out about my addiction to the show. Curators, critics, and artists have laughed at me... and then have copped to their own PR obsession. (Don't think I haven't noticed the way my email stays oh-so-quiet on Wednesday nights about 10 ET.) I think we dig it because it's every bit as art world as the art world -- and here are five things that prove it:
- PR represents the creative process fairly accurately. BS'ing in the studio, Tim's crits, creative types editing other creative types, jealousy and sniping. Familiar.
- The way a timeline can drive or force creativity. The judges are waiting, a show opens Friday, etc.
- The way the judges push the designers to take risks -- but not so many risks that their work stops being their work.
- The thinness that separates creative success from middling mediocrity. (Also known as: How quickly you can go from the high-creative world to the Asheville-craft-show-world.)
- We know the characters: Laura's fatalism (She'll just "throw another kid on the pile"), Jeffrey's fear of failure (as manifested by the middle fingers he flashes when he succeeds), Michael's comfy suavity (he mixes the kind of phrases you figure he learned at his grandmother's house with teaching the Oklahoma-drag-queen-designer how to walk), and Uli's laid back hedonism (let's get vasted). We all know artists like this.
posted by tylergreendc @ Thursday, September 28, 2006 | Permanent
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Acquisition: Courbet @ Wadsworth Atheneum
 You've read this before: A prominent American museum has acquired a Gustave Courbet seascape. Back in June, MAN broke the news that the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco had purchased a magnificent Courbet wave painting. Over the summer the Wadsworth Atheneum also scored a Courbet: The Shore at Trouville: Sunset Effect, the largest seascape Courbet painted during is 1865-66 trip to Trouville.
This is no wave painting. The sea is calm. A beach is covered by rocks. In the distance the sun falls into the ocean. Birds chase it. The sunset has caused the sky to go pyrotechnic pink. To the right of the painting a sailboat approaches the horizon. Courbet made this painting in 1876, and died the next year.
I've not yet seen this one in person, but in the 3000x3000-pixel JPEG of the painting, Courbet's knife-work looks particularly alive in the rocks, especially to the right of the painting. (I've particularly enjoyed having Courbet's palette knife on the brain of late.)
So two big American museums picked up Courbets at about the same time. (I'm pretty sure there's a third, but it escapes me -- readers?) Coincidence? I tend to think not...
Related: Coming up at the Walters: Courbet and the Modern Landscape.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 27, 2006 | Permanent
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The Nelson-Atkins, Shuttlecocks -- and a stripper
 On Monday I talked with Marc Wilson, the director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. (The occasion ws a series of Q&As I'll be running next week about museums and admissions charges.) It's a busy time at the Nelson-Atkins: the Kansas City Sculpture Park is re-opening, and next year the museum's new Steven Holl-designed Bloch addition will open to the public. (Don't miss the great links about this at the bottom of the post.)
Talking with Wilson reminded me of a long-forgotten story from my childhood. I was probably eight or nine years old, and my family was visiting Kansas City on our way to a camp in the Ozarks. One morning I asked my parents what we'd be doing that day, and my mother replied that we were going to the museum. I didn't like that so much. "But mom," I said, "We have museums at home. You can see the art there, can't you?"
So I have kind of a soft-spot for the Nelson-Atkins. Oh, and I love Shuttlecocks too. (The OldenBruggens were installed while I was in college, at the University of Missouri.) They're probably the most famous public artwork in America. "We've had weddings under the shuttlecocks," Wilson told me. "And a stripper was photogrpahed next to one. In the buff."
So I've particularly enjoyed watching the new Bloch Building go up, especially because the N-A scored a major coup/gift during construction: Hallmark gave the museum one of the nation's best private photography collections. It will anchor the museum's new 5,000-square-foot photo galleries.
All of this is a long way toward getting that Marc Wilson/stripper quote onto the blog. Oh -- and to steer you toward the KC Star's Sunday section on the new Nelson-Atkins (you may need BugMeNot):
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 27, 2006 | Permanent
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On cultural diplomacy
Regular readers have grown fairly accustomed to my occasional rants about the United States' failure to engage in cultural diplomacy, particularly between the eastern Mediterranean and, say, Indonesia. (Which would be about half the globe.)
Two stories caught my eye today: The Washington Post showed up to a press conference and wrote the story fed to it by the feds: Cultural diplomacy gets a new worldview. In short: Laura Bush held a White House event and announced that the U.S. government would be spending $4.5 million on a Global Cultural Initiative. Are you kidding me? $4.5 million? Quick comparison: The U.S. has spent $317 billion on the war in Iraq, a war that has contributed mightily and negatively to perceptions of the U.S. abroad. And the White House is acting like a $4.5 million cultural exchange program is something worth being excited about? (Yes, it's a simplistic comparison, but you get the gist.)
The related story: Also on the Post's website: Want to begin to understand how some Islamic governments treat the visual arts? Read Bashir Goth's take on PostGlobal.
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Top ten art museum endowments
UPDATE: Several readers have written in to point out that the number that matters more to the health of an institution is its ratio of endowment to operating costs. (But that this list is still good, clean fun.)
One of the nice things about running this website is that people often read things here and promptly offer up fascinating info. Thanks to a kind source, here are the top ten art museum endowments as of June 2006, with totals rounded to the nearest $5M (excluding the Getty, which is a different thing):
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, uncertain
- MFA Houston, $760 million
- National Gallery of Art, $600 million
- Art Institute of Chicago, $565 million
- MoMA, $495 million
- Harvard University Art Museums, $470 million
- MFA Boston, $440 million
- Cleveland Museum of Art, $385 million
- Indianapolis Museum of Art, $345 million
- Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, $330 million
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Securing museums' futures
During the course of writing a long magazine story, a writer accumulates lots of good info and detail that he can't use. So over the course of the next week or so MAN will be the beneficiary of what I found while working on the Lauder/Adele/Neue Galerie story.
One of the things I explored in reporting the piece was the persistent art world buzz/unsubstantiated-cocktail-party-chatter that Ronald Lauder planned to some day fold the Neue Galerie into MoMA. Not only could I not find anything to support the rumors, but everything I heard, including discussion of how Lauder would provide for the Neue Galerie's long-term (read: independent) future, indicated the place would be around for a while. The last line of the story makes clear Lauder's ambitions for the place. He's also considered a Neue Galerie Downtown.
During our second (I think) conversation Lauder told me that he was personally endowing the museum.
 "If that was the request [the heirs] made of Lauder, it was wise," said Anne Poulet, the director of The Frick Collection, a museum a few blocks from the Neue Galerie on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. "To have these institutions exist in perpetuity and be healthy, they really need to have a good solid foundation in an endowment."
Since the early days of the Neue Galerie, Lauder has held the Frick as one of the models for his museum. Like the Neue, the Frick was founded by a single wealthy donor: Henry Clay Frick. In 1919 Frick endowed his museum with $15 million, $185 million in today’s money. Frick also enlisted a dream team of industrialists to oversee his museum's endowment, including John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, and Henry O. Havemeyer. Today that endowment is worth $240 million and last year it provided for half of the Frick's operating budget.
Given Lauder's ties to the family business (Estee Lauder cosmetics), asset diversification will be especially important to the future of the Neue Galerie. Many of the late Estee Lauder's and Ronald Lauder's gifts and loans to Neue Galerie have been in Estee Lauder stock, but Ronald Lauder told me that his museum's endowment will not be dependent on a single company. Houston's Menil Foundation has benefitted from this kind of planning. The Menil was created and eventually endowed by Dominique de Menil, whose family fortune also came almost entirely from one company: oil services giant Schlumberger. By the time de Menil died in 1999, her estate's contribution to the Menil's endowment was $90 million, with less than $4.5 million in Schlumberger stock.
Lauder won't specifically say that hes selling Estee Lauder stock with Neue Galerie's future in mind. "It's totally secure," he says.
Wondering about the endowment of your favorite museum? Here are a few numbers, pretty much randomly selected and ~-hedged because the data I have on file may be a year or so old. Chances are that I'll update this as the day goes on and as my mind wanders from the work I should be doing, so check back later:
- Walker Art Center: ~$195 million
- Indianapolis Museum of Art: ~$350 million (And you wondered why Max Anderson went to Indy...)
- Modern Art Museum Fort Worth: ~$25 million
- Baltimore Museum of Art: ~$65 million
- SFMOMA: ~$170 million
- Metropolitan Museum of Art: $2.2 billion (Met-only, there are various other funds on which the museum draws)
- My educated guess as to the top six museum endowments, in no particular order (a guess because some museums haven't fully folded recent gifts into their endowments, and one of these is a trust that operates a museum): Cleveland, Getty, MFA Houston, the Met, NGA, MoMA. UPDATE: I was five for six (more or less). I'll post the top ten later today.
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In Fortune magazine: Buying Adele
 This week's Fortune magazine features my story on how Ronald Lauder pulled off what may be the biggest art deal in history: His purchase of Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for the Neue Galerie. It's not online so if you're curious you'll have to visit a newsstand. The seven-page story details how the deal got done, the impact of major acquisitions on art museums, and how famous paintings become crossover hits.
I've got lots of interesting outtakes from conversations with museum directors, and other art world professionals and I'll be posting them here as the week goes on. And if the story does end up on Fortune's website (I don't think it will, but you never know) I'll be sure to post a link.
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Q&A with Robert Polidori
Last week, just before Robert Polidori spoke at the Corcoran, he and I sat down for a Q&A. His new book, After the Flood, is just out, and works in the book are currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Fun facts about the project are here.)
Polidori's talk wasn't the usual dispassionate artist's lecture. He repeatedly talked out his post-Katrina emotions in front of the audience, as if he was still coming to grips with what he'd seen in New Orleans. A few times during the give-and-take with the audience, Polidori became almost exasperated as he tried to explain to someone who hadn't been to post-Katrina New Orleans what it was like. (He sounded like an Army vet trying to explain Vietnam to someone who wasn't there.) The book, with its hundreds of pictures of houses, neighborhoods, water, and ruins, has the same vibe. "I wanted it to be sort of tedious," Polidori said. "But not boring."
 MAN: I've read you say over and over again that you like to take pictures of habitats. How does post-Katrina New Orleans, a city that in places is no longer a habitat, fit into that vision?
It's not about architecture, it's about the way that people use architecture as the exteriorization of internal or social values.
You could take a portrait of somebody, and maybe you have some feelings about them or some hunches about what they’re like. I bet you that you're wrong. However from a person's interior space you have indices of their personal values, or what Jung would call their superego. As far as New Orleans is concerned what we are looking like here are kind of cadavers of people's lives. Most of the people are still alive. But they no longer have that life which they previously had.
The sort of going buzz-phrase in New Orleans is I lost all my stuff. I don't want new stuff. They have a sense of loss because the rhythm, the fiber of the life they had previously is no longer theirs, so these images are kind of last rites of the life they used to have.
MAN: You've also photographed Chernobyl. How do these two disasters compare?
They're different. The circumstances of the catastrophe is different. You could say, 'Do we call Katrina an act of nature or an act of god?' It's flooding. Flooding is really -- as far as habitat is concerned -- is pretty much a devastation. Maybe tornadoes do a pretty good job. But I don't think it's like this. New Orleans stinks so bad. Its not as rotting in a tornado. Then stuff is just blown apart, where here it rots. It's like a decomposing body.
In Chernobyl, it was a recent town, really. The town the workers lived in was Pripyat. It was a smaller town. It was built in the early '70s at the same time the plant was built. Yes, there were one-story houses in the area [like in much of New Orleans], but the devastation was of another kind. Many of the inhabitants were allowed to go and take their personal belongings out of their apartments, which was the cause of secondary and tertiary contamination in many cases. So there was nothing left in those apartments. What was left was public spaces, which I photographed. Kindergartens, high schools, hospitals... Since they're public spaces, they're no one's in particular. Whereas in New Orleans its lots of individuals' stuff.
 MAN: So in some ways New Orleans was a much more sudden, faster, more immediate tragedy.
It was a major metro area and many of the houses were quite individualized. Nobody took their stuff out because whatever stuff was left was rotting, so no one's going to use it. You can sort of see this in the book. When people went back to their places unless they had jewlery and stuff like that what they really went for was their photographs. A lot of that was laid out, trying to dry up. You’re not going to use those wet clothes, your bed, your furniture anymore. Your CD and DVD collection is ruined; you can buy that back if you have the money. But your photos you're never going to get back.
MAN: During the flurry of news media coverage that greeted the first anniversary question of Katrina one of the most-asked questions was: Will Americans stay interested, will government stay interested, will philanthropy stay interested. Will artists, will you stay interested in what happened in New Orleans?
I don't know. I can't speak for others. I thought originally that I was going to do a book that was about the end of this, or the drying out from the flood. I knew that there was bound to be some demolition that was involved and I thought there would be some re-construction. I was wrong about the reconstruction part because I didn't think it through.
By the second trip I thought it through. Those people are gone, those jobs are gone, and there's no industry to feed that reconstruction. So there's no reason for it. The demolition is going slow. For a lot of people when they lost all their stuff it's hard for them to admit that they lost their house.
[As far as what happens in the future with reconstruction] I don't want to get into the politics of it. I don't like Bush, but what, the evil god punished him because he didn't sign the Kyoto accord? I don't think that can be proven... It's not quite his fault. But at the same time I don’t think it's [New Orleans mayor Ray] Nagin's fault either. Is he going to say, 'I'm sorry people of the Ninth Ward, I'm bulldozing all this shit down?' Isn't it supposed to be a democracy? People are going to have to want to it tear it down. It's going to take some time for people in their hearts to want to do that.
I mean, I used to wear a size 29 pants. Now I'm a size 34 and I still buy size 30s. I can’t face that I'm fat now to give away those old pants. If you can't do it with pants, you're not going to do it with your house.
Related: Hey pretty.
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Art world top five
Five things we'd like to change about the art world:
- An end to macro-biennials as they currently exist. All of them. They're little more than curatorial masturbation. I still like regional-ennials (such as the Oregon Biennial) because I think that they have a role. But sprawling shows like the last WhiBi are a total waste of time, energy and resources.
- What Jerry Saltz says here this week. Here's hoping someone in LA runs the same numbers on LA galleries. Paging Tom Christie and Doug Harvey...
- Museums should give anyone who is a student, be it high school students, college students or grad students, free admission. More on this in early October when MAN will run a week's worth of interviews with museum directors about their admissions policies.
- The institution of a truce between the art market and critics. What is wrong with private collectors buying art? And so what if they spend a lot of money for it, especially when that money goes to the artists themselves? Now I realize that we're all supposed to be good lefties in the art world, but there's a kind of jealous anti-capitalism in some of the rants I read.
- We've seen some of this in the last couple years but not enough: That museums become more experimental in how they present (and sell) their permanent collections to their communities.
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Yikes.
When we struck Lee Rosenbaum from our blogroll yesterday, we didn't anticipate this. (I mean, who could have, right?) So while I think it's important for bloggers to be correct on their facts and to do standard, journalistic reporting (and most art bloggers do), I'm not trying to start a fight.
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Major museums and podcasting
In doing this morning's Robert Polidori post I noticed that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has released a Polidori podcast. (It's apparently the Met's first podcast since May. Hopefully they'll podcast their lectures/etc. the way museums such as the Hirshhorn do.)
Two other major American museums are working on building out podcast programming: the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art.
posted by tylergreendc @ Thursday, September 21, 2006 | Permanent
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Robert Polidori in post-Katrina New Orleans
 Between September, 2005 and March, 2006 New Yorker staff photographer and former New Orleans resident Robert Polidori visited New Orleans four times. (I believe that President Bush has been twice.)
On those trips Polidori shot 3,000 sheets of film and took 4,000 digital pictures. At the end of a day of shooting his stomach was often sore from having repeatedly kept himself from vomiting.
New Orleans presented other unusual challenges. The city was so waterlogged that many of Polidori's first pictures came out blurry: The soggy ground or floors on which he placed his tripod was so squishy that the tripod and camera shook. (He fixed the problem by placing 150-200 pounds of weights on his tripod.)
Polidori's post-Katrina body of work has just been published in a fantastic, exhausting, numbing book called After the Flood. (40% off there.) An exhibit at the Met, New Orleans after the Flood opened on Tuesday. (From that link you can reach the Met's podcasts about the show.) Last night, before Polidori spoke at the Corcoran, he and I sat down for a Q&A. I'll run it here on Monday, the day on which the New Orleans Superdome reopens.
In a related story: Last year we pointed readers to a post-Katrina artists fund created by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The effort raised over $200,000, including a sizeable check from the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
posted by tylergreendc @ Thursday, September 21, 2006 | Permanent
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NYT: One down, four to go
This morning the NYT corrected one of the errors in Michael Kimmelman's Klimts-sale essay. I still think they have a ways to go. (To say nothing of the substance of the matter, of course.)
Related: Lee Rosenbaum is accusing me of being in "big error" and of "legal confusion," but my facts are correct, and I checked them with prominent attorneys who are experts in the field and with other relevant parties.
I understand Donn Zaretsky's musing, but if the IRS were to assert anything of that nature they'd surely have to go to court on that issue -- and it's not at all clear that they'd win. (Which is why Zaretsky hedges on the point on his excellent blog: "...the IRS could perhaps argue...") Furthermore, that's not the case Kimmelman was making regarding the tax issues here. I guess I'm just confused by Rosenbaum's post. And I think basic facts published in the NYT are a pretty "substantive issue."
posted by tylergreendc @ Thursday, September 21, 2006 | Permanent
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What -- and who -- is next for the Getty?
The Getty rolled into New York yesterday, exchanging a four-star lunch for (it hopes) plenty of positive coverage of Getty goings-on. (There's no truth to the rumor that the Getty brass were mostly anxious to have a quiet day or two away from the LAT tag-team of Felch & Frammolino.) We here at MAN understand why organizations do NYC dog-and-pony shows, but we think that they're kind of manipulative, even sad. The Getty's attitude should be this: Wanna write about the Getty? Wanna know what's really going on? Get on a plane and come see us in LA. After all, there's plenty of interesting stuff coming to the Getty this fall: All this, plus the opening of the Getty's new, enormous photo galleries and Icons from Sinai.
Besides, the big news about the Getty is this: On Sept. 24 and 25, this upcoming Sunday and Monday, the Getty's trustees will meet. It is possible that the Trust could hire a new president/CEO at that conclave. (A Getty spokesman wouldn't say whether or not to expect an announcement to come out of the upcoming meeting, or whether the Getty would use the millenia-old black smoke/white smoke method of announcing the hire.)
The Getty trustees have strived much harder to overcome Munitz's mistakes than they worked to oversee the his leadership of the Trust. The Trust has been unquestionably tarnished by their lack of leadership.
But at least over the last few months Getty trustees have essentially forced Munitz to pay to leave, eliminated Munitz cronies from the executive suite, and cleaned out trustees who looked the other way while Munitz ran (and spent) amok. The Meier-on-the-hill has cleaned house enough that a new boss won't have to sweep out more dirt; s/he can come in and move forward.
No one seems to know how the Getty's search will end. I haven't heard a single leak. I still hope the Getty hires a new boss with the qualifications I outlined in a February LA Times op-ed. After the Getty makes that hire, expect it to add board members. Maybe even -- gasp -- art people! (How do I know all this? I go to LA.)
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 20, 2006 | Permanent
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The WashPost's new architecture critic
Washington Post arts editor John Pancake tells me that Philip Kennicott is the newspaper's new architecture critic. (He replaces Benjamin Forgey, who accepted a recent buyout offer.) Kennicott has written several recent architecture reviews, but the paper hadn't made any kind of announcement about the job.
For years Kennicott has been the paper's culture critic, untied to any specific discipline. He's one of the few writers in Style who ranks as a must-read. (Think of Style as the Washington version of a culture section.) For my four bits he's the most thoughtful writer in the entire Post. While it remains to be seen for how long Kennicott will hold the architecture chair, I'm just happy that we'll be seeing him in the paper regularly and prominently.
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Kimmelman goes off -- in the wrong direction
How bizarre was this morning's Michael Kimmelman take on the long-ongoing sale of four Gustav Klimt paintings owned by the Bloch-Bauer heirs? Never mind the string of flat-out errors in the story: Attorney Randol Schoenberg appeared as "Randall"; there were six Bloch-Bauer Klimts, not five (Austria kept one); Adele I was commissioned sometime between 1899 and 1903, not in 1907; it is not clear that Adele wanted all five or six paintings to go to Austria and even if that was what she wanted there is no legally binding documentation to that effect... and at this point isn't Kimmelman's credibility on this issue pretty much shot?
Here's the real problem with Kimmelman's essay: He views the Bloch-Bauer heirs selling of four Klimts as emblematic of greed, as sad examples of what happens in a booming art market. He thinks it's too bad the paintings could go into private collections.
Let me get this right: The Austrian government takes advantage of the darkest moment in the long history of their country -- their complicity with Nazi wrongdoing -- to keep five paintings stolen by the Nazis and to which the Austrian government had no right. The Bloch-Bauer heirs, upon recovering a major part of their family's legacy (financial and otherwise), are blameworthy for doing whatever they want with something that had been kept from them for 60 years? No. They are the aggrieved party. The Nazis took their property: jewels, estates, art. Maria Altmann's husband was imprisoned and sent to Dachau. (The family ransomed him out.) The Bloch-Bauer heirs are under no obligation to do any particular anything with the paintings.
Furthermore, if you want to be angry at someone for not ensuring that the Klimts ended up in private collections, what about the wealthy trustees at major museums?
So perhaps it's fitting that Kimmelman wrapped up his essay with one final error: Kimmelman writes that if the Bloch-Bauer heirs had given the paintings away "...they would even have gotten a tax break."
The heirs have to pay no tax on the sale. This isn't exactly a secret either -- Forbes wrote it up thus: "As part of the 2001 tax-cut legislation, Nazi victims and their heirs don't have to pay federal income taxes on restitution payments or assets they recover through settlements with foreign governments."
If you're flummoxed by the state of the art market there are better ways to express indignation. Maybe that's what Kimmelman meant this essay to be about. Unfortunately it ended up as an almost-angry rant at a family whose rightful property was denied them for decades by a country that was happy to bask in art looted by the Nazis. And if you're a writer and you want that ethically shaky argument to have any integrity whatsoever, you should at least get your facts right.
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Richard Diebenkorn and Ocean Park
 A few weeks ago I was chatting with a chief curator about a Richard Diebenkorn painting in one of his galleries. "You know," I said. "It's remarkable that there's never been a full, comprehensive Ocean Park survey exhibit."
The curator paused. "Are you sure about that?" he said, less asking than implying I should double-check Diebenkorn's exhibition history.
"Completely sure," I said. "There's never been a Berkeley show either. It's bizarre. It's probably the contemporary art show most in need of being done."
The curator was still disbelieving, but allowed me my fervor. It's true. There's never been a museum (or gallery, for that matter) exhibit surveying the paintings, the drawings, the paintings-on-paper, or the three together. (Paging John Elderfield...) There hasn't been a Berkeley show either. Next year Taos' Harwood Museum will launch (and travel) a show about Diebenkorn's Albuquerque series, made from 1950-52. Maybe Urbana is next.
The highlight of my recent Bay Area trip was seeing 14 Diebenkorns at the de Young, Stanford's Cantor Arts Center, and at SFMOMA. (Well, kinda. I still don't understand how SFMOMA had only one Diebenkorn on view. That would be like MoMA showing one Pollock. Then again I don't understand much about SFMOMA's relationship to contemporary art made in California, except that it seems to barely want one.)
The de Young is the best place in America to see Diebenkorn right now. Not only did the museum have on view seven paintings and three prints when I was there last month, but the way it shows them is sublime.
The day I was at the de Young Golden Gate Park was swaddled in a thick fog, giving 10 am a more intense version of the light you might get at dusk. The light coming into the de Young's modern and contemporary galleries was already gentle, and it was further softened by the opaque sunlights sat the top of the gallery. A couple of bulbs 25 feet above the floor didn't add much light. I sat down on the floor in front of Ocean Park #116 (above) and soaked it in. (Benches people, benches.)
 The most mature Diebenkorn Ocean Park paintings -- this one was painted in 1979 -- tend toward Mondrian in terms of both color and in the relationships between color and space. (You can also see it in MOCA's #131, at right.) In #116 a strip of Heinz 57 red at the top of the painting blances the slate blue that dominates the bottom half of the painting. The red band goes all the way across the painting; The slate blue is cut in from the left and right edges of the painting. Because in Diebenkorn you can often see what he thought about doing but didn't: He was going to stop the blue even further away from the right-hand side of the painting, but changed his mind and extended it.
In between the red and the blue are yellowish oranges and washed-out greens. Some black curving lines suggest how light might might bounce around inside the painting. One of the parlor games I play with Ocean Parks is to wonder where or what in Santa Monica Diebenkorn was painting. With this one I picture the slate blue as the fog over the Pacific Ocean, the red band as the sun rising toward the east.
I enjoyed another Diebenkorn Ocean Park painting at Stanford. None of SFMOMA's were on view, which is more the pity because this is one of the greats. (The reproduction here is, uh, awful.) Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for that Ocean Park show. Curators?
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Doesn't this guy ever shut up?!
UPDATE: Ezra Klein has noticed the same thing.
Lee Siegel must enjoy basking in his own humiliation. Why else would he continue to subject himself to interviews and print appearances in which he comes off as vengeful, angry, and completely clueless? Doesn't he have someone close to him who can tell him that it's well past time for him to go into hiding for a while? From his NYT Q&A with Deborah Solomon:
[Solomon asks:] But beyond the breach of your journalistic compact, don’t you think it’s intellectually lame to express one’s opinions anonymously?
[Siegel replies:] I do indeed. Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities that come from being who you are. I think that is why the blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self.
As usual, Siegel argues that the blogosphere is a pit of clueless, mentally masturbating, Star Trek-obsessed escapists. While the blogosphere drove Siegel to develop a fantasy self, most bloggers write because we enjoy sharing our ideas with others and we enjoy the conversation that ensues.
[Siegel:] [P]utting a polemicist like myself in the blogosphere is like putting someone with an obesity problem in a chocolate factory.
[Solomon:] What are you talking about?
[Siegel:] How dare you question my authority! Seriously, the blogosphere strips argument of logic and rhetoric down to the naked emotion behind it.
Again, Siegel speaks only of himself, and his own reactions. In the case of his many nasty, borderline-unhinged emails to me, Siegel repeatedly refused to address logic or rhetoric and fell back on spewing naked emotion at me. (And from what I hear, ditto his emails to pretty much everyone else who dared criticize his ideas.)
I could keep going like this through the rest of the Q&A. But why, when all of Siegel's rantings come down to this: Why is it Siegel repeatedly rips the blogosphere in the aggregate, when he's mostly talking about his own sad, pathetic behavior?
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More on SAM's deaccessioning
At The Stranger's Slog: Former Whitney and SFMOMA director David Ross makes some good points [via] at the bottom of the comments board. I think Ross is right -- I think that advance public notice of deaccessioning is difficult and may even be problematic. (And I like what he says about thoughtful museum trustees. For example I've tried to go out of my way to praise museum boards that rejected deaccessioning when it was the 'easy way' out of a problem. See Corcoran, The.)
But, on the other hand, as we've seen at the Metropolitan recently, when a rogue curator or asleep-at-the-switch administrator is violating the museum's own policies, discolsure can rouse a museum board/etc. out of a stupor and into acting. One nice thing about this public, national conversation: People who love art and museums (including bloggers and writers) are showing that collections are important to them.
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Newspaper: We're prudish morons.
This notice ran on the front page of today's Raleigh News and Observer, North Carolina's second-largest newspaper and a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner. [via] Here is the story behind the penis that threatened Raleigh, and here is (pretty much) the image about which they 'had' to warn their readers.
UPDATE: Ed Winkleman nails it.
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Herzog + de Meuron returns to the USA
 Herzog and de Meuron, architects of the last two best art museums to be built in America (the de Young and the Walker), will build the $200 million Miami Art Museum at Bicentennial Park (left). Remarkably, the Miami Herald seems to have completely missed the story, even after advancing the 'public conversation' at which the architects were picked. The news is in the NYT.
(As of this writing it's not on the MAM website either. Oops.)
Miami is the most fascinating museum city in America. The city's art-poor museum (collection: ~300 works) has hired a nationally-known director and has hired internationally-known architects in an effort to create a traditional museum presence. Meanwhile half a dozen private collectors have opened their contemporary collections to the public (and have set up traveling exhibitions from their collections, museo-style). How will this play out over the next decade? Who knows. But if I'm a major contemporary collector, a museum trustee, or an arts educator (or arts education administrator) I'm paying close attention.
Related: JPEGS of the plans for Bicentennial Park, planned home of the Miami Art Museum.
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Jerry Saltz waxes wise on art
In his most recent Village Voice column, Jerry Saltz takes on a big topic: Why do we like art? And is art as critical to societies as is science or religion? Saltz concludes that art changes the world by osmosis. And that we shouldn't stop trying to understand that because such a subtle, millenia-long impact is hard to quantify.
A couple of thoughts from here about how the arts fit in with other disciplines: What are the things that societies and civilizations produce that have lasted and advanced through the centuries? Scientific progress. The progression of human rights. Art and other creative production such as literature. I may be forgetting one or two, but it's a pretty short list. That's the simplest argument for the support of the arts. (It's also the fastest way to outrage when governments, such as ours, allow the destruction and dismantling of millenia of cultural history in places like Baghdad.)
(Another example of how leaders find art and other forms of cultural heritage powerful enough that they think that they have to destroy it to maintain legitimacy: From Saturday's NYT: "There is mounting concern among scholars that the appointment of religiously conservative Shiite Muslims throughout Iraq's traditionally secular archaeological institutions could threaten the preservation of the country's pre-Islamic history.")
There's no reason that artists' influence has to be as quiet and as subtle as it is. From time to time here on MAN I've complained that the media often talks with Iranian novelists, Egyptian poets, or Southern writers for persepctive on global events or issues. Artists get left out. So I'm going to try to start to change that in my tiny way. Expect more artist Q&As about world events here on MAN in the months ahead.
My one gripe with the VV piece: As usual, Saltz takes a wide swing at theorists and theory-obsessed writers. Also as usual he doesn't name names, which prevents his criticism from reaching full voice.
posted by tylergreendc @ Thursday, September 14, 2006 | Permanent
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Architects, artists agree
Nicolai Ouroussoff on the Venice Biennale (the architecture version): "What the show provides, in place of inspired architecture, is a window on a dystopian future."
Interesting to see big-picture creative types agreeing on something. I've written (a lot) about how this same focus is equally central to the visual arts of late. (See the answer to #2.)
posted by tylergreendc @ Thursday, September 14, 2006 | Permanent
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Just wondering...
If LACMA changes its name, will Ed Ruscha have to retitle The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire?
Reminder: LACMA's survey is accessible online via something called Survey Monkey. Click the link and tell LACMA what you think its new name should be. If readers send in their funniest, snarkiest ideas, I'll try to post them here soon, very soon. Make it good: The Anschutz Museum, Inc. might be spot-on, but I've told that tired joke for about a year now. (And to be fair, the museum director who made that deal is long gone.)
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 13, 2006 | Permanent
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Changes at LACMA
 No, no, not what you're thinking: The people responsible for that contemporary glass show still have jobs. (As of last check. Seriously, LA is one of the four art-making capitals of the world and they give us that?!)
The old LACMA logo is, apparently, dead. How do we say this delicately.... The old logo, which doubled as the 'C' in LACMA, most closely resembeled, well, a certain sex toy. It was a notable laughingstock, which is pretty impressive considering all that LACMA has done in the last few years. (A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the end of the old logo but said that it had been in discussion. And the logo has completely vanished from LACMA's website.)
Also: Curbed LA reports that LACMA is considering changing its name. The museum is phone-testing several possibilities, including The Museum of Art Los Angeles County. [via] Dennis Christie loves the idea and links it to CHiPS, Kiss and Happy Days. Really.
UPDATE: LACMA's survey is accessible online via something called Survey Monkey. Click the link and tell LACMA what you think its new name should be. If readers send in their funniest, snarkiest ideas, I'll try to post them here soon, very soon.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 13, 2006 | Permanent
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Sun Tunnels, Part Two
 When we pulled up to Sun Tunnels, I thought about how unusual it was to find something round in the middle of the high desert. In nature, objects are made spherical by water erosion. None of that going on here: This plain receives under five inches of rain a year, making it one of the driest places in the United States. Everything around us, 10 miles in any direction, was as flat as it gets -- except for the Tunnels.
I didn't love the Tunnels right away. When I'd seen other works of land art for the first time something about that immediate visual snapped something into place in my mind. That didn't happen with Sun Tunnels. I walked around them and through them, sat in them and on them, and finally walked a distance away from them just to stand and look.
They never came to life, they never became exciting. They seemed too self-consciously monumental, too interested in being pagan totems to artisnal existence. Sun Tunnels is too much a post-industrial Stonehenge-like gesture to succeed as an engaging artwork.
While the greatest pieces of land art exist within nature and bring their environment into the artwork -- think how the Jetty and the Great Salt Lake co-exist or how Lightning Field is placed within its space -- Sun Tunnels rejects its own landscape. Each tunnel looks like it had started to erode (Sun Tunnels was built in 1976) and was later patched so as to maintain its shape. While the Jetty basks in its location, Sun Tunnels seems to fight its off. The Tunnels' roundness is just too jarring, too inappropriate for this landscape.
Sun Tunnels is funky cool in an I-was-there kind of way. But that's as far as they get.
Related: Sun Tunnels, Part One. Polaroid by Kathleen Shafer.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 13, 2006 | Permanent
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The oh-so-popular art critic
If you think I was tough on the Washington Post's Blake Gopnik this morning, check out Kriston Capps. At Grammar.police he calls Gopnik's meandering "a Style section piece written for Sesame Street's audience." And the JPEG that illustrates the piece is hilarious. (Capps' commenters, one of whom is an artist about whom Gopnik has written, also make excellent points.)
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Video of the guerilla wedding at the Met
 A couple of weeks ago MAN told you about the 'guerilla wedding' of Sarah Chuldenko and her beau Stephen Reynolds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today we have Sarah and Stephen's two-minute QuickTime wedding video.
Neat details: No one threw rice at the couple as they left the museum. Wedding guests used birdseed instead. And the bride and groom being artists paid $1 for museum admission. "We were prepared to say our 'I dos' while being escorted by guards," Sarah told me in an email. "It was really spectacular. We couldn't believe how great everything turned out."
(In case you missed them the first time around, the wedding pictures are here.)
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Weekend wrap-up
Lots of interesting stuff this weekend: Critics at two major newspapers examined recent goings-on in the nation's capital. Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin complained that Washington, DC looks like a security-crazed bunker city -- and that the madness is spreading. In the LAT Christopher Knight ripped into the 82 commissions, panels, committees and who-knows-whats who have allowed the National Mall to become overgrown with monuments and memorials and visitors centers and on and on. From Knight:
The National Mall is a modern representation of the landscape of republican democracy, and it is reverting to its 19th century Gilded Age condition — a fouled field where the malarial winds of opportunism blow. With the stately civic space converted into a political tract, the National Mall is doomed.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post's Blake Gopnik welcomes a professor to town by walking through the Corcoran with him and publishing their conversation. Uh, why?! Sigh. Back to the stuff you should read...
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Alec Soth starts a blog
 I think I was first attracted to Alec Soth's photographs because they seemed midwestern. I went to college in Missouri and traveled extensively through the flat, open, empty country during my four (well, four-plus) years there. Soth's pictures, whether portraits, photographs of two or three friends, or just landscapes capture the emptiness, isolation and tired, muted colors of the rural midwest that I remember.
When I was in Minneapolis in 2005 I particularly enjoyed Soth's show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Several of those portraits are in Soth's book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, which featured this instantly iconic image.
All of this is a long way of saying that Soth has just started a blog, and I'm enjoying the heck out of it too. It's now on the blogroll. (In today's post, Soth tells us about how all the children in Minnesota are named August.)
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Sun Tunnels, Part One
Before my girlfriend and I left Wendover, Nevada to try to find Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, we printed two sets of directions. Problem was: They seemed not to agree on key points, on things like turns (left? right?), roads (whether they existed), and distances (miles, feet, whatever). I was so sure we'd get lost that we bought extra snacks, extra water, and a detailed topographic map of Utah.
On one hand it seemed like a lot of rigmarole to go through to see what is widely considered to be a second-rate bit of land art. Sun Tunnels merits only a paragraph or two in Suzaan Boettger's Earthworks, the major work on land and earth art. But I'd never seen it before and when would I be in Wendover or Salt Lake City again? Besides, I'm a bit of a completist. I once wandered through 30-year-old subdivisions in the hills above Oakland, Calif., trying to find the very first piece of land art, made by Dennis Oppenheim.
So I wasn't too worried about getting lost. No trip to earth art would be complete without a little geographic confusion. I'm good with this: For Chelsea we have Hal Foster/Artforum-generated confusion. For earth art it's how-to-get-there confusion. Give me earth art any day.
We started out fine. First: Interstate 80 west out of Wendover, 80 mph through bare desert. When we made it to Oasis, Nevada we turned north on Highway 233 and drove through Cobre, Loray, Montello on one side and massive desert mountains on the other. So far so good. Beautiful desert mountain scenery, lots of colors in various stages of burnt: faded greens, sun-baked browns, washed-out yellows.
Then it got tricky. We entered Utah and started to look for our turnoff. "Go south on the dirt road four miles to Lucin," said one set of directions. Another set suggested a different direction and distance. Even more problematic: There wasn't one road to Lucin, there were two. We picked the one on the right. Oops.
Seven miles later we realized our mistake. To our right were some modest hills that rose maybe 300 feet above the flats. To our left was wide-open semi-alkaline flatness, probably land that had once been under the Great Salt Lake.
We tried to match the nearby hills to the contours on the map. We decided to keep going straight (one factor in that decision was the lack of anywhere to turn). Eventually, finally, a sign promised us that Lucin was a mile ahead. We even thought if Lucin consisted of a thicket of trees and an abandoned building that we could see it off in the distance.
Turns out it was: An official state of Utah sign said that Lucin had been abandoned about 30 years prior. One set of directions said to go south from Lucin for a couple of miles and then to turn left, which, when combined with our map's view of the matter seemed logical. The directions said that we should be able to see the Sun Tunnels off to the left, our east. Sure enough, just outside Lucin a broad, flat basin opened up to the east.
This may be a unique experience in earth art. You don't see Lightning Field, Spiral Jetty or even (to stretch the definition) Chinati until you're on top of them. They are dramatically revealed. Still, when we saw something off in the distance, four or five miles across the scruffy desert, we guessed it was Sun Tunnels. Twenty minutes later we were proven right.
Related: Center for Land Use Interpretation's Sun Tunnels page. Photo: Kathleen Shafer.
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William Garnett, dead at 89
I woke up this morning to find that one of America's most underappreciated artists, William Garnett, died in late August. His work came before the western landscape photography of the New Topographers, and his interest in the seriality of post-war tract developments such as Lakewood, Calif. (above) anticipated the the interest in seriality that was such a prominent part of art in the 1960s and '70s.
The LA Times ran a quite nice Garnett obituary on Sept. 5 (which I obviously missed), the SF Chronicle, the NY Times today. A few Garnett links: William Garnett in the Getty's collection (the 1950 photograph above is one of the Getty's), from MAN: Google meets Garnett.
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Kimmelman at the US Open: I like it.
Post below this one: Around the blogosphere.
This week's No. 1 email-to-MAN question has been: What do you think of that NYT tennis guy, Michael Kimmelman? I suspect that most of the questioners expect me to say something dismissive and mean. (Let's face it, I frequently find fault with things Kimmelman.) But, except, except, but...
Well, I like that MK is blogging the Open. (Here's an author-link to Kimmelman's posts.) It's not like there's much going on in the art world the last week or two of August anyway. (This is why the NYT is reviewing a minor show in Portland, Maine. Speaking of that: How lame. There are much, much more deserving shows in San Francisco, and San Diego, for example. Oops. I mean, they are a national paper, aren't they? Or does that only sometimes apply to art? And what was with that half-page blog excerpt today? Space-filler! And The Art of Tennis? Art? Art? Silly.)
Sure, if I were Roberta Smith or Holland Cotter I'd be wondering if Kimmelman was bored. But here's what I like about it: Art world people are often too insular, too focused on climate-controlled spaces. It's good for us to get out of our bubble, to stretch a bit. (And the tennis world, what with its internationalism, gobs of cash and all, isn't that dissimilar from the art world. Unlike gelato coverage, it's a stretch that makes sense.)
You see some of this in Kimmelman's postings. The rhythms of tennis aren't so different from the rhythms of gallery-going. I like that Kimmelman reminds us that art isn't just shown, it's made. That the experience matters. Atmosphere too. And that steadiness doesn't get you as much attention as flashiness.
I would bet that Kimmelman is finding the semi-sabbatical rather useful. You'd be amazed how many art writing/blog ideas I get when I'm sitting at Washington Capitals games.
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Around the blogosphere
It's nice to be posting on Fridays again. (Later today: Kimmelman on "The Art of Tennis.")
Half of the NYC-based arts blogosphere has been in a cold panic about the sheer number openings in Chelsea last night. (We liked Ed Winkleman's JPEG best.) Well, here at MAN we found a solution: We went to none of them. We're pretty sure the shows will still be there in a few days and that we'll be able to actually see the art! And if we want to pseudo experience the mobs, we can read GawkerForum, which will doubtless run it's 118th piece in which their gossip mavens complain complain about crowds and openings.
- Funniest headline ever, and sure to be cited by someone as proof of tulip-mania in the art world: Dana Schutz Creates Carpets, Too!;
- Ah, we know her well: LACMA good, LACMA bad;
- The latest on the Miami Art Museum's hunt for an architect. The buzz I hear is: Expect museum director Terry Riley to hire Nicolai Ouroussoff (ahem);
- I wanna find a Caravaggio in my dingy parlor too;
- "I knew pretty much what to expect. I was told a horde of clowns would be descending onto a subway platform in Union Square at 5 o'clock this afternoon where they would squeeze into the L train heading into Williamsburg.";
- Of course: Larry Gagosian + Ric Burns = Andy Warhol. Here's how. And yikes, this too. And in a related story, in a closely, closely related story, guess what's next at Gagosian?
- The DC metroplex's top art award (monetarily anyway) is called the Trawick Prize. This year it was won by James Rieck, a semi-realist painter. Strange, because Rieck wouldn't make my -- or almost anyone else's list of ten or fifteen most interesting artists in the region. Well, at least we have all those museums.
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ABMB '06 run-up has begun
Like ever other arts writer in America, my email overfloweth with press releases this week. (I'm probably getting about 75 a day right now.) Many of them are about Art Basel Miami Beach: The planned Lawrence Weiner installation at the Wolfsonian, the lineup for the Aqua fair. And we're still three months away...
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Seattle Art Museum goes wobbly
This story ran at the end of last month, but I held it from MAN because I wanted to wait until y'all were back from summer: The Stranger's Jen Graves reports that the Seattle Art Museum is, apparently, deaccessioning. And for reasons known only to museum director Mimi Gates, it won't tell anyone what it's selling off:
To make a bad deaccessioning decision is "to diminish the institution, to lessen its worth to the community, and to violate the public trust," Gates wrote [in 1993]. So why should they be undertaken secretly?
They shouldn't, says AAMD executive director Millicent Gaudieri: "The objects are in a public institution. The public has the right to know what's being deaccessioned, and the reason why."
What the Seattle Art Museum seems to be doing isn't only wrong, it diminishes the public trust in and the public faith in the institution. It is a blunder of the first order. The museum should be ashamed.
If the Association of Art Museum Directors was a useful organization and not a wimpy invertebrate, this would be the kind of offense that gets Gates publicly reprimanded by her peers, at least. Of course that won't happen -- AAMD has all the teeth of a wet mop. Time to start explaining Ms. Gates. After all, do you really want to be the new Malcolm Rogers?
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Doug Harvey on CLUI
 A few weeks ago I visited the Center for Land Use Interpretation outpost in Wendover, Utah. (I'd already been to CLUI Los Angeles.) I'll be posting on it soon, and I'll have more on CLUI's creator, recent Lucelia Award-winner Matt Coolidge. But until then, don't miss Doug Harvey's thoughts on CLUI -- and this being Harvey he ADDs his way to other topics -- in the most recent LA Weekly.
Aside: We don't want to tell Village Voice Media how to run is alt-weeklies, but how cool would it be if Jerry Saltz and Doug Harvey were featured in every VVM publicaton (in addition to the local critic, of course)?
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 6, 2006 | Permanent
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Something nice: Georges de La Tour
  MAN seems awfully dour this morning, so I thought I'd brighten it up with a little art-love. Last week I was chatting with a friend of mine about underappreciated art, good ol' art comfort food such as Dutch genre painting. So I thought I'd share this:
Last month, when I was at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco (it's one of two museums under the FAMSF umbrella -- the de Young is the other), I spent a lot of time with two fantastic little Georges de La Tour paintings. Here's the old man, here's the old woman. They hang side-by-side at the Legion.
How modern these paintings are! If you didn't know better (and if you were standing at a distance) you'd peg these as mid-19th century canvases, perhaps early Manets. After all, Manet often painted models in costume, posed against neutral backgrounds, animated by specks of color. But these La Tours pre-date Manet by plenty, by 240 years.
Both paintings are only 36 inches tall, and that diminutiveness encourages close viewing. You can't see it in these JPEGs (you kind of can via zoom here and here), but the woman's flowing silk apron creates an unusually rich contrast with her coarse white cotton blouse. The shadows in the background and the theatric play of lgiht against dark creates a stage-like effect. The posture of each figure holds its own narrative.
The two San Francisco La Tours are unlike any others in America, almost Dutch in their treatment of fabric. Elsewhere: The NGA's de La Tour is a visitor favorite, especially among children. LACMA's is related to the NGA's, right down to the light and the skull. The Met's is kind of comical. The Getty's is messier, almost chaotic (kind of like a stage-fight). The Frick's (which I think has sometimes been attributed to a de la Tour assistant) is softer, like the NGA's. And just for fun: I loved this FAMSF Tintoretto too.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 6, 2006 | Permanent
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Siegel still doesn't get it
LINKS FIXED: Lee Siegel, quoted in the New York Observer (Sheelah Kolhatkar got the timeline of Siegel's net-related indiscretions wrong and her piece is thin, but oh well):
"I made a dumb mistake, and I'm very sorry I did it. I took the blogosphere’s bait, and I stooped to the level of these people who were commenting on my pieces, and I shouldn't have."
Siegel still believes that no one with a blog or a keyboard has the right to criticize anything that he, The Great Man, writes. Sad. Delusional. Terry Teachout gets it right, Leon Wieseltier goes simplistic. Dan Hopewell goes in-depth.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 6, 2006 | Permanent
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Great moments in GawkerForum
"As I walked into the ICA's summer show in London last Tuesday, I was relieved to find that not every arts institution wants to lead its audience around by the hand as if it were an infirm patient in a mental hospital." -- Laura K. Jones.
 Yes, because why should art institutions lead us around by the hand as if we were infirm... when GawkerForum does it so much better? Seriously, I'm pretty sure then when the GawkerForum editorial team saw this one come over the transom they knew, just knew, that it would be leading this month's update. I mean, the only other real competition was Linda Yablonsky, but hey, the Cardinals don't let Albert Pujols bat lead-off, do they?
"Beer, set out at precise twenty-minute intervals, was quickly rationed to the anxious crowd. 'It's gone in one or two minutes,' warned the gallery assistant; it seemed more like seconds." -- Michael Wang. Beer? At an art opening? If we hadn't read about it in GawkerForum, we wouldn't have known. (Next month: GF examines the Chelsea-based distribution of warm white wine.)
"'We've got everyone from Dina Merrill to Debbie Harry," Anne Livet was saying, and what do you know if it wasn't the truth, and not just a proud PR rep's quip." -- Linda Yablonsky, revealing what matters most to her: Names! I counted roughly 64 names in this month's FabYab spectacular. names made up ~128 words of Yablonsky's 929-word total, or one out of every seven words. (And that's almost twice last month's total of 36 names, which seemed like a huge number. You may recall such FabYab hits as "What's more, I hardly knew anyone there," and "I don't know anyone here!") Here is the GawkerForum model at its most ridiculous: Who needs content? Just name everyone in sight. A reminder, dear friends: This isn't art writing; it's numbers and a few hyphens away from being the NYC phone book.
***NEWSFLASH*** We interrupt your regularly-scheduled update with this news: Artforum will bring us Hal Foster on a regular basis. In a related story, when last at the Mandrake I heard this joke: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, it makes no sound. So if Hal Foster writes for Artforum and on one reads it, is he still writing for October?
"I did, however, have the chance to renew my acquaintance with the charming Piotr Nathan, whose work from 1993 — in which urinal doors are made into a Japanese screen, supporting photographs by David Armstrong — is one of the show's highlights." -- Mark Sladen. This is GawkerForum's version of art criticism: A work of art is a "highlight" if you personally know the artist.
"'No one's wearing a bathing suit in this weather,' groaned Julie Atlas Muz, the miraculously upbeat MC of last Saturday night's benefit for Sens Production at Williamsburg's McCarren Park Pool. Gray skies and a broken L train may have foiled the kickoff swimwear competition, but the evening ahead still promised musical performances by Worange Drexler and DJ Spooky, along with sneak previews of Agora II, a site-specific 'choreographic game for one thousand bodies' orchestrated by Sens Production director and 2004 Whitney Biennial participant Noémie Lafrance." -- David Velsaco. Apparently anything that involves -- however tangentially -- a Whitney Biennial participant is GawkerForum material. Coming next month: A detailed account of Paul Chan ordering lamb vindaloo from his neighborhood takeout joint.
***NEWSFLASH***I just received an email from GawkerForum announcing their latest hire: Someone named Sprezzatura. Apparently his first piece will be on a Dan Graham, Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, and Laurent Berger show of sockpuppetry.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, September 6, 2006 | Permanent
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Oh behave, Barry!
 Until now, the Barry Munitz case has resemebled a Perry Mason case: Lots of scandal, but not a lot of sex appeal. Sure, the Munitz affair was occasionally funny, but mostly in the I-lost-a-$100-bill-between-the-seats-of-the-Porsche kind of way.
On Friday the Los Angeles Times tag-team duo of Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino changed all that. We already knew that the Getty board of trustees belatedly dumped Munitz for a variety of reasons that apparently had to do with the expenditure of Getty Trust funds. Late last week F&F revealed Munitz's apparent motivation, and it's groovy, baby.
"[A]ttorneys spent a substantial amount of time investigating Munitz's previously unreported use of Getty funds to advance the career of a German art student whom he hired as a "senior advisor" and sponsored as an intern at another museum. They also reviewed his expenditures linked to a Russian researcher whose museum received a Getty grant."
That is the tame version. The LAT goes on and on like this for 1,800 words. The story goes on for so long, and through so many expenditures, that one wonders where the Getty trustees were while Munitz was spending the Trust's money. (Presumably the trustees were not in Palm Springs, Germany, London, Fiji, Cuba, Greece, Croatia, Albania, Australia, Hawaii or Italy -- all places where Munitz vacationed or 'worked' on the Getty dime.)
So as riveting as the F&F 1,800 words were, their account is too long for our purposes. As a result, MAN has taken a cleaver to F&F's prose -- and we've applied a conceptual twist. Here's what the story would look like if it had run in Penthouse Forum, edited for them by the Los Angeles Times copy desk (or vice versa, I suppose)...
The most sensitive part of the investigation centered around the two women Munitz said he mentored... One, Iris Mickein, a German art student, was an intern at the Getty Research Institute in 2002. Munitz repeatedly used Mickein as the business justification for trips, including an $11,000 excursion in August 2002 to Kassel, Germany, where his sole business purpose was to view an art exhibit with her. On a later trip to New York, Munitz billed the Getty for room service breakfast with Mickein, records and interviews show.
Munger Tolles attorneys spent hours researching Munitz's interactions with Nana Zhvitiashvili, a curator for the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg who specialized in art therapy for children with limited abilities.
[Munitz] arranged to meet Zhvitiashvili on a business trip to London, where he was forging a partnership between the Getty and the Courtauld Institute of Art, records show.
Munitz cleared hours off his schedule so he could be available as she rushed to put the finishing touches on a conference at the Tate on "Russian Modern Art in the Age of Globalization," records show.
"I have put aside the evening to attend your meetings and provide sustenance and comfort," he dictated in a series of e-mails before the event, adding in another: "If at 4 in the morning any of those nights you need just a quiet moment to exchange thoughts or to escape, that refuge is available."
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Considering the AICA awards
Admin: If you're looking for the Lee Siegel post, it's here.
The International Association of Art Critics' US chapter has an annual awards ceremony, at which AICA gives awards to curators and dealers who create the exhibits of the year across a range of (arbitrary) categories. The nominations for the 2007 awards, given out in February, were announced last week. (They're not online. Disclosure: I'm an AICA member.)
I suppose the AICA awards concept is OK. I'm not sure it's terribly necessary but it doesn't directly cause the death of cute puppies or the casting out of Chillidas. However, there are problems with the enterprise. The root of them is this: Everyone but me (and a handful of other critics, mostly newspaper/alt-weekly types) seems resigned to the fact that art writers and critics are obligated, possibly even required, to have an incestuous relationship with dealers, auction houses, and museums. The AICA awards encourage that conflict. (As Todd Gibson has noted, AICA loves the incestual broth.) Art critics nominate curators and gallerists who will be recognized and elevated. That's a little more commercial/promotional than I'm willing to be, so I sit out the nominations. (When I see shows that deserve attention, I review them here or elsewhere. That's what critics do.) FWIW, the NYT's and LAT's critics sit out nominations and voting too. House rules.
Beyond the concept, there are big flaws in the process. Case in point: Amy Sillman's recent solo show at NYC's Sikkema Jenkins received rave reviews. Jerry Saltz liked it (his second Sillman write-up -- has Saltz reviewed any other artist twice? This just in: Barney, Gordon, Sze, Goldin, Walker.), I loved it, Ken Johnson liked it, bloggers seemed to particularly love it (Artists Unite, for one), the Brooklyn Rail spotlighted it, and on and on. So even though the Sillman show might have been the most critically praised NYC spring show, it wasn't nominated for an AICA award. That's a problem with the AICA process: It fails to recognize the actual reviews and related good work done by AICA members, instead valuing the rolodex-enabling nominations of the AICA members who aren't working critics or even writers (which is the over-over-overwhelming majority).
But I also sit out the voting, and here's why: There is no rule that a voter has to see an exhibition to vote for it. Think about that for a second. That makes the AICA awards either a popularity contest, or awards for museum catalogs. That's a real blow to the credibility of the whole idea. (Yes, I realize that not everyone can travel to see every show in the United States. But the best -- again: working -- critics in the US manage to get to see most of the shows that would make anyone's top five list.)
Tomorrow: Some thoughts on what we learn about the current museum climate from the AICA nominations.
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On Lee Siegel's fall
UPDATE: Modern Kicks makes many excellent points, including this one: Art writers were the first to gripe about Siegel.
In case you missed it: The New Republic has terminated Lee Siegel's blog and is reviewing whether or not he will remain with the magazine. I think Grammar.police was first with the news.
More than once I've called Siegel one of America's worst art critics, a guy who was in over his head writing about something he didn't seem to know much about. (For a publication, Slate, that has the ethical compass of a noodle and the arts-related editorial judgment of a wet noodle. It'll be interesting to see what they do with Siegel -- if he's still with them.) As I've said plenty of times before, I think his review of the 2005 Whitney Twombly show is one of the most ignorant, cliched, uninformed, and almost bigoted reviews I've ever read of a major art exhibition. Had I thought Siegel was worth the energy I could have written similar takedowns of his Basquiat review or plenty of others.
Siegel's self-implosion isn't being celebrated in the blogosphere because he was a clueless critic. Blogs such as Ezra Klein's, Kriston Capps', DailyKos, Obsidian Wings, and, well this clever creation, are reacting because of the way Siegel treated people who dared to challenge his ideas. Lots of bloggers -- including me -- knew that if we disagreed with something Siegel wrote that we'd be in for a nasty, threatening email from the great man himself. I have an entire file of Siegel emails. Sounds like Malcolm Gladwell does too. (I'm also pretty sure that several pseudonymous/anonymous emails I've received in the last year or so were from Siegel.) In not one email to me did Siegel take on points I made in disagreeing with his ideas. He simply spewed invective. (For the record: For 15 months I've offered him space on MAN to refute what I wrote about his Twombly piece. He hasn't responded, let alone accepted.)
TNR's reason for dumping Siegel's blog isn't a surprise given Siegel's previous behavior: He couldn't handle the comments on his blog so he created an alter ego behind which he attacked and sniped at people who dared to disagree with him. That same how-dare-you 'tude is in pretty much the tone of every email he's ever sent me, too.
Siegel failed to appreciate -- let alone remember -- that critics place their thoughts and arguments in the marketplace of ideas. Chances are that someone's going to challenge those ideas. Lee Siegel has no respect for the ideas of anyone not named Lee Siegel. Here's what I'll take from Siegel's self-destruction: I hope that when people say or write intelligent, thoughtful things in disagreement with my opinions that I treat them respectfully. I wouldn't want anyone to compare me to Siegel.
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