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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
In which I am amused by Michael Shapiro
A week from today High director Michael Shapiro will be lecturing at the Clark on:
"[A] relatively new and widening gulf that has developed between the practices and values of larger, collection-rich art museums and those of a more nimble, aspirational breed of museums. Shapiro... will highlight the High Museum as a case study of the rewards and risks of the new entrepreneurial art museum."
I find Shaprio's topic amusing because the High refused to make Shapiro available to me a few months ago when I wanted to discuss these very issues as they related to his Renzo Piano-designed expansion. I guess lecturing is safer than conversing.
(And I'll leave alone the assertion that collection-poor museums are always 'more nimble' than collection-rich museums. Several of Shapiro's peers, such as Kathy Halbreich, Marla Price, Jeremy Strick, and Hugh Davies are in a position to disagree.)
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The greatest Still ever auctioned, but...
 After talking with some Clyfford Still experts and after looking through some auction records, I don't think there's any doubt: 1947-R No. 1 (at left) is the best Still painting to come to auction. Available at Christie's on Nov. 15, the auction house's estimate is $5-7 million. I believe that the Still auction record is $3.1 million, for 1960-F.
Given how few Still paintings are in private hands, this is one of the the last opportunities for collectors or museums to own a great Still. Of Stills that have been publicly exhibited in the last couple decades, only three paintings are comparable. (That would be 1948-G, 1949-F, and a grey painting known as '1948-1949,' aka PH-99 in the Albright's photo archive of Still's work.)
There are two things were noting about this painting. One: Still 'cloned' it. Still periodically (possibly regularly) made multliple versions of his paintings. This one has a brother, privately-owned 1947-R No. 2, which was included in the Hirshhorn's Jim Demetrion-curated 2001 Still show. The Christie's painting is far superior.
Potentially more serious, especially if you're considering buying the painting: There's reason to believe that some of Clyfford Still's reds are not stable. I learned this last year when I talked about Still with Bob Buck, the former director of the Still-rich Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The first Still that the Albright acquired, a 1954 painting donated to the museum by Seymour Knox, has faded badly.
 "It has a strange thing happening," Buck told me. "The white under-ground is affecting the red. The red is no longer blood-red, it now has creamy white mixed in." Buck added that it was undercracking. "It's sort of like an aging actress... in the face it's changed a lot."
I almost didn't include the JPEG of the A-K's painting here because I don't want to suggest that the A-K's painting once had the same rich red as the Christie's painting. I have not personally seen the Christie's painting. (There is, obviously, some white in the painting, which is what got me thinking.) But if I were going to bid on the Christie's Still, I'd definitely look into this before bidding.
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Cultural diplomacy is back -- barely
I've written pretty regularly here about the importance of cultural diplomacy, about how the arts should be an important way of how America reaches out to the world. In the last decade these programs have been few and far between, and American power often seems more interested in destroying cultural heritage (Iraq) than in protecting it.
I wanted to point out two recent stories about this: In yesterday's NYT, Erika Kinetz writes about an American-funded cultural program in Cambodia. (Complete with a quote about how the US spends very, very little money on this, alas.) And on Think Progress, Brian Katulis rips the Bush Administration for developing cultural outreach in Iraq. Yes, the Bushies are pathetically late to this issue and that tardiness has certainly hurt American interests in Iraq. And yes, we're talking about drop-in-the-bucket programs. But at least it's the right direction. The proper progressive response here isn't to club the Bushies, it's to say that more is needed in this area.
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Art surfaces in the midterm elections
From Friday: Dallas Museum of Art director Jack Lane, the Frisco kids, their teacher and -- gasp -- nakedidity: With his museum was in the spotlight, should Lane have been more visible?
 A few days ago I was web-surfing this season's political advertisements when I heard a radio ad that included this: "In this time of war, Larry Grant wants more spending on the arts…" FYI: Larry Grant is a Democrat running for Congress from Idaho's first district; Bill Sali is the Republican candidate who placed the ad. The race is unexpectedly close.
How odd. Nothing about the arts has been a national political issue in at least a decade. So why now!?
I suppose it could be that Sali genuinely believes that spending on the arts imperils America's ability to fund the so-called war on terrorism or the Iraq War. If that's the case, Sali needs a math lesson: The National Endowment for the Arts received about $125 million in funding last year; America has already spent $340 billion on Iraq, with about $500 billion appropriated through FY 2007. If Sali thinks the problems in Iraq are arts-funding-related, he's an idiot.
My puzzlement continued: Art is not necessarily unpopular among Idahoans, not even among Republicans. According to the Idaho Commission for the Arts, a state government agency, Republican Sen. Larry Craig was "one of the leaders involved in getting Congress to agree to additional arts spending this year." I guess Craig, a bonafide right-winger, didn’t consider art spending likely to cause America to lose the wars it is fighting. The Republican-dominated Idaho Commission for the Arts even sent out a mailing trumpeting Craig's role.
So what was Sali's campaign talking about? I listened to the ad again and noticed that the announcer made a distinct pause after the word 'arts.' A telling pause. A conspiratorial pause. I realized what the Sali was getting at.
In the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, when Republicans were reminded that they could no longer pretend that gay people were not a part of their party, "arts" is the new way of insinuating 'gay.' Sure, not all arts people are gay. But people who like art probably know people who are gay. That means that they tolerate gay people and thus, in Sali's campaign’s parlance, Grant's support of arts funding is not a "traditional Idaho value." The district Sali is running to reprsent is one of the most anti-gay districts in America. Infamous gay basher Helen Chenoweth once loudly represented Idaho's First. (And as we just read: Larry Craig, widely known to be gay but little-reported until now, supports the arts. Ahem.)
Sali had to use an indirect smear: He couldn't say that his opponent supports gay equality because, well, he doesn't. Not a single national gay group support Grant's candidacy. So what did Sali try in an effort to demonize his opponent: He made 'art' a dirty word.
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The Dallas Museum and the Frisco kid(s)
By now we all now the story: In Frisco, Texas, a teacher was attacked for taking students to the Dallas Museum of Art. Apparently the students saw works of art that weren't wearing clothes. A parent complained; the teacher was fired. The school district claimed that the two were unrelated. Newspaper stories at the time made it pretty clear that the firing was about what Radar O'Reilly called 'nakedidity.' A settlement that the teacher recently reached with the school district made it even clearer that the school district knew it was on shaky ground.
 Throughout the entire month-long process, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, Jack Lane, said very little. I can only find one quote from him on the matter, in the NYT, and a museum spokesman told me he did no television or radio interviews. The DMA told me that Lane didn't speak up about the art/morality issue because it wasn't clear why the teacher in question was fired.
Lane's silence was a mistake and the museum's reason for why he stayed quiet are poor. For the last month the DMA and its role in its community have been widely discussed in the media. Lane had an unprecedented opportunity to talk with Texans (and because the case has received national attention, with America) about what is in art museums, why it is collected there, and what school children can gain from encounters with art. But instead Lane, who was in New York City for at least some of the controversy, was invisible.
I'm not suggesting that Lane should have commented on the firing issue or that he should have campaigned for the teacher to keep her job. But when Lane had a rare opportunity to speak to regional and national audiences about the role of art museums in America, he disappeared. The museum should have offered Lane up to local radio stations, to television stations, to Texas arts reporters. Lane could have written an op-ed or two or initiated a series of events at the museum where the issue was discussed. Lane and the DMA did none of this. It was an opportunity missed.
(Several weeks ago a DMA spokesperson suggested I talk to Lane about this, and in two separate emails I accepted the museum's offer. However, Lane was never made available to me.)
There's a broader issue here, and one that we'll discuss soon: What role should art museum directors have in their communities?
Related: Greg Allen shows us what the offending art object may have been.
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Dia and Whitney dosi do
I'm probably supposed to say something about the demise of Dia Colon Meatpacking and the possibility of the Whitney turning Pastis into its downtown cafeteria, but I don't have anything. No one was surprised that Dia Colon Meatpacking didn't work.
The better question is this: Will Dia return to Chelsea?
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Wednesday critics
(That might be the worst title I've ever written for a post here.) There are two reviews that I wanted to make sure to plug today:
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Prometheus and Sky Mirror, part two
 Yesterday I wrote that understanding why Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror so wonderfully matches its setting and its time, first requires a look at Paul Manship's Prometheus.
Sky Mirror is installed up against Fifth Avenue, directly facing 30 Rockefeller Center. (Take a look at Flickr for a few hundred shots of Sky Mirror and its surroundings.) If you stand in front of the mirror, where the person in the red sweater to the right of the mirror is, you'll see Prometheus hovering above the Rock Center ice rink. Behind Prometheus is a plaza and the entrance to 30 Rock. The two works are installed as if they're in an art historical showdown. And they are.
Kapoor's mirrored pieces, such as Chicago's Cloud Gate, are a further abstraction of mirrored surfaces explored by Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter and, especially Jeff Koons.
While artists in the 1960s used mirrors and reflection to raise questions about perception, Koons took the same materials and used them to squint at conspicuous consumption. Made in 1986, when it was morning in America's highest tax brackets, Koons' Rabbit is a witty take on a materialistic culture. Rabbit points out that a consumer's purchases often glorify the purchaser, who can see himself in his new possession.
 Sky Mirror, in its current location, takes Koons' commentary on materialism and adapts it for an globalist era defined by increasing corporate power. Sky Mirror doesn't reflect the sky, it reflects one of America's most prominent corporate towers, the GE Building. In fact, as the photo here plainly shows, Sky Mirror is 'pointed' directly at 30 Rock.
When Prometheus was made it glorified the builder/creator of Rockefeller Center with a common art historical trope of its day: allegory. By reflecting its host, Sky Mirror does the exact same thing, using the slick abstraction of ours.
Did Kapoor intend this reading? Who knows. Works of art often live in the world in ways their creator didn't quite intend. (But Kapoor certainly consented to have the piece installed in Rock Center, where it is now.) When a previous, smaller version of Sky Mirror was installed at Nottingham Playhouse, it was pointed at the client, a theater.
Related: Kapoor is currently showing at the UK's Lisson Gallery. Simon Hattenstone profiles Kapoor in The Guardian.
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Museo-linkage
Some links to some new features on museum websites...
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Prometheus and Sky Mirror, part one
 Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror, on view at Rockefeller Center until the end of this week, couldn't be more perfect. It's not Kapoor's best work, but the combination of art object, the time, and the place makes a perfect art historical rhyme. To understand why, let's first go back to 1915.
Influenced by the Widener family (whose Old Masters, European decorative arts, and so on fill the National Gallery), John D. Rockefeller, Jr. hired John Singer Sargent to paint his father's portrait. The two men got along better than anyone expected, and when Sargent suggested that Rockefeller sit for a bust by a sculptor named Paul Manship, Rockefeller assented.
Manship had a pedigree that Rockefeller was likely to appreciate. He had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Students League and he learned to infuse his work with classical references after he won the coveted Prix de Rome. In between-the-wars America, Manship's mixture of allegory, neo-classicism and softened modern lines was mighty popular: It tied America's new wealth and broadened ambition, as demonstrated on an international scale by America's involvement in World War I, with past empires. The two busts Manship made of Rockefeller were a great hit and a relationship between sculptor and patrons was forged.
A decade later, in the middle of the Great Depression, Junior would build Rockefeller Center. The project was, from beginning to end, a great challenge. Junior started the project just before the stock market crashed in 1929, and no one expected it to succeed. After all, who needed millions of new square feet of office space at a time of economic catastrophe?
But, obviously, Junior pushed forward. He even stuffed Rockefeller Center with art, including work by Isamu Noguchi, Margaret Bourke-White, and Lee Lawrie. The most famous work at Rock Center was created by an artist with whom Junior had a prior relationship: Paul Manship.
Manship's Prometheus is one of the most famous sculptures in America. It presents Prometheus in the heavens, just after he has acquired fire. He has not yet brought it back to earth. He hovers above the signs of the zodiac, more floating with the gods than falling back to earth. The sculpture is a faithful, selective representation of the Prometheus myth: Prometheus created man out of clay figures that came to life when Athena breathed life into them. Later on, Prometheus nobly stole fire from the hearth of the gods and brought it down to man, only to be punished by Zeus, who sent an eagle peck at his liver for eternity.
Manship's sculpture, installed near the base of Rock Center's tallest building, is an allegorical glorification of Junior and the Rockefeller Center story. Rockefeller created a major urban development at a time of national crisis; He breathed fire into the city. And because of the aggressive way Rockefeller pursued tenants and other business dealings perceived to be monopolistic, he was excoriated by the press and the public. Manship had known the Rockefellers for years -- he knew how mixing the Prometheus myth with the Rockefeller story would appeal to his patrons. The result is a sculpture that stands in for the story of the Rockefellers, their development, and America, all joined by Manship's aesthetic. Seventy years later, it still works.
Related (and corrected): Manship was last surveyed in a 1989 retrospective at what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (Thanks NW.) Studies for Prometheus in SAAM's collection. Daniel Okrent's history of Rockefeller Center, at 72 percent off.
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Museum wish-list: Hirshhorn, part two
Background here, part one here.
 Conceptual, performance art, and minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The Hirshhorn's holdings in these areas are thin, a collection gap that the museum started to address with its recent acquisition of four early John Baldessari works.
- In 2009 Hirshhorn chief curator Kerry Brougher and Walker chief curator Philippe Vergne will launch an Yves Klein retrospective. Wish-list: A Klein monochrome painting.
- Conceptual art first-generationers. Wish-list: Lawrence Weiner, Maria Nordman, Hanne Darboven.
- Light & Space. Wish-list: Doug Wheeler, who to me is one of the most underrated American artists of the post-war era. I see his work from time-to-time in California, but the only recent East Coast installation of his work that I know of was in the Guggenheim's marvelous 2004 mostly-collection show Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated). The image above is Wheeler's RM 669 (1969), from MOCA's collection. According to LACMA's excellent online collection database, not even they have a Wheeler. UPDATE: They do now.
- Even more Baldessari. The four Baldessaris the Hirsh acquired late last year were from the 60s and 70s. "We now have the basis of being to develop a full holding of his work," Brougher says. "We're in a position to bring things in from the 80s and 90s." Wish-list: A film-still work.
- The Hirshhorn doesn't have a super-strong collection of minimalism but what little it has is top-notch. Witness this 1963 Judd, a 1985 LeWitt, or Smithson's Gyrostasis from 1968. Wish-list: The Hirshhorn has one Dan Flavin and wants more. Also an early Brice Marden painting.
Latin American contemporary art. Brougher points out that the Smithsonian has museums of American art, Asian art and African art. If the Hirshhorn doesn't focus on Latin American art, who in the Smithsonian will? This has been a particular focus of Hirsh director Olga Viso, who spearheaded the museum's 2004 purcahse of Miguel Angel Rios' video installation A Morir.
- Wish-list: Helio Oiticica. The Hirshhorn owns nothing by this Brazilian master. (Unrelated, but... I hope I get to see this Oiticica show at the MFAH.)
- Wish-list: Cildo Meireles. Ditto.
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Museum wish-list: Hirshhorn
For the background to this new MAN series, click here.
Last week I talked with Hirshhorn chief curator Kerry Brougher. He outlined four ways that the Hirshhorn tries to think about collecting. I'll list each of his categories, and then some of the works and/or artists Brougher mentioned that fit under that heading. (Naturally some of them overlap.)
Continue Joseph Hirshhorn's interest in developing in-depth collections of individual artists. (For example, Joe Hirshhorn developed rich collections of de Kooning, Miro and Dubuffet.)
- The Hirsh has four Warhols, including the wonderful Marilyn Monroe's Lips which has been traveling in Douglas Fogle's Supernova show. Wish-list: A death-and-disaster canvas. Given that one of the best of the bunch, 1963's Mustard Race Riot (above) recently sold for $15 million, Brougher knows that the museum will have to find an angel donor.
- The Hirshhorn has been purchasing Gerhard Richter paintings since 1988 and has four excellent examples. (My favorite is Sanctuary, a massive squeegee painting.) Wish-list: An early '60s Richter, say one of his more pop-like paintings.
- Earlier this year Brougher co-curated a Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective. The Hirsh owns six of his photographs: Five movie screens and 1997's World Trade Center. Wish-list: Sugimoto seascapes, and possibly a Sugimoto of the Hirshhorn's Gordon Bunshaft-designed building.
Film, video and photography. Up until a few years ago the Hirshhorn didn't collect any work from these areas, save for one lonely Cindy Sherman (and some assorted mish-mash). Under ex-director Ned Rifkin the museum began to move into the area, sometimes smartly (Sugimoto), sometimes not (Nikki S. Lee).
- Photography. Wish-list: Jeff Wall (the Hirsh has one already), Wolfgang Tillmans, William Eggleston, and more Sherman.
- Film and video. Brougher recently co-curated Visual Music, an exhibition which examined the shared history of video and abstract art. Wish-list: Early film/video work such as Peter Kubelka's flicker-films, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and James Coleman. Also Michael Snow.
Coming this afternoon: Conceptual and performance art, minimalism, and the Hirshhorn's focus on Latin American art.
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New on MAN: Museum wish lists
 As I talk with curators at museums not called 'MoMA' about their collections, they usually start with some variation of this: We can't afford to collect comprehensively. We can't build a 'complete' collection of contemporary art. We have to pick a few foci and collect richly in those areas. We can't have everything the way that museum can.
This has turned out to be a blessing for contemporary art. Here's why: MoMA's Cezanne-to-WWII timeline dominates the history of modern art. (Nevermind that it is French modernism-centric, that it ignores American modernism and that it pays short shrift to Latin America and Central Europe.) But because there are so many museums and private collectors around the world who are committed to building major contemporary collections, there will not be a single institution that dominates the history of contemporary art the way MoMA does in modern art. This means that more artistic voices will be heard and more varied histories will be formed.
That's all the more important because MoMA, the modern/contemporary art world's richest institution, is struggling with contemporary art. As nearly every critic with a keyboard has noted, the current contemporary installation at MoMA is a mess. An unfortunate Wangechi Mutu competes with Mona Hatoum competes with David Hammons. And from the other side of a silly Martin Creed, the soundtrack of a Pipilotti Rist encrocahces on everything.
Yes: In a way, we're all too hard on MoMA. When the biggest and richest err they err loudly. Sure, buried in that jumble of a contemporary show are some legitimately terrific pieces: Rist's Ever is Over All, a Sarah Morris (2005's Creative Artists Agency (Los Angeles), above) that demonstrates the colorful energy she brings to the rich history of geometric abstraction, Andy Warhol's Empire. But after two years of installations in MoMA's contemporary galleries the museum has yet to get it right. (Suggestion: End the allegedly themed shows and do what -- for better or worse -- MoMA does best: Canonize. Hang masterpieces. Start with the 1960s and move forward decade by decade, four months at a time. Install what curators think is the best of the best. Let's see what sticks... and what doesn't.)
As I've argued here plenty of times before, much of the smartest institutional energy focuesd on contemporary art is outside of New York. It's important for writers, critics, and historians to pay attention to the Walker, the MCA San Diego, MOCA, the Hirshhorn, etc. As it turns out, it's probably impossible for one institution to be a catch-all when the contemporary art landscape is so international, so huge and so richly diverse. The inadvertent wiki-collecting Walker/SFMOMA/MCASD/etc.-style pulls together a better picture of contemporary art's recent past and present than anything we've seen at any single institution.
So as part of my effort to reflect that here, I'm starting a new feature here on MAN: I'll be talking with chief curators (and comparable types) to see what they most want to add to their museums' collections. I'll start in a few hours with the Hirshhorn and its chief curator, Kerry Brougher.
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Museum masterpieces
Five great works from the Hirshhorn's collection:
Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles County Museum on Fire
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Tom Crow to leave the Getty?
Yes. MAN hears that Getty Research Institute director Tom Crow is leaving Los Angeles. He is expected to move to NYU's Institute of Fine Arts in New York. There has been an open spot for a professor of modern art at the IFA since Rob Storr departed for Venice, Philadelphia, New Haven... and several other cities I'm probably forgetting. (The Getty had no comment, Crow did not reply to an email, and NYU says that they won't have anything to say until Tuesday.)
Some of the Getty programs that I find most interesting are at the GRI. Earlier this year I wrote for the LA Times about how the GRI acquired the Long Beach Museum's video art archive and about how the GRI is working to conserve and catalog it. The GRI is also half of the home for the "On the Record: Art in LA 1945-80" program which is documenting the history of modern art in Los Angeles. (The Getty Foundation also funds the project at non-Getty places, such as UCLA.) And I've long been a fan of the GRI's small exhibition gallery, which is the home to some of the smartest art historical exhibits anywhere in the USA.
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Bravo and back in a bit
Because I was so stunned to see Mrs. Michael Govan on the Project Runway finale: I'm going back on the road. See ya Friday.
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Philly Inky = Sgt. Schultz?
The Philly Inky's Barnes coverage has long been a little bit, er, selective. So how strange is it that a day after it gets crazy-scooped by the LA Times on a major Barnes issue -- one that seems likely to involve some degree of political/civic/museum chicanery -- that the Inky has nothing pushing the story. Nothing following the story. Simply nothing at all.
UPDATE: Lee Rosenbaum weighs in on this. It is either a strange or normal post, depending on how accustomed you are to Rosenbaum's tendency to mix self-promotion ("CultureGrrl had gotten word about this issue at the end of last month") with error. In short: Christopher Knight's information is fresh and correct, and his points are salient. Rosenbaum: Not so much.
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DAM: Only comment if you like our building
From The Guardian:
Early critics of the building have latched on to this disjunction. The Los Angeles Times dismissed it as "an array of the least congenial galleries for art that I've seen in 20 years". But as Dan Kohl, the museum's director of design, points out, we should leave such verdicts to the public. "The obvious question of how you would be able to hang and show art in the space will be answered by people coming and walking through the building," he says.
Oh. So apparently newspaper writers, bloggers, magazine writers -- you know, anyone with an opinion and a forum -- isn't a part of "people coming and walking through the building." Perhaps Dan Kohl must approve of commenters and their opinions before they comment.
And strangely: The question of how to hang and show art in what by many accounts is an art-torturing enviroment will be answered by people coming to the building?! Uh, isn't that why DAM hired an architect and then why it had to hire someone to design the galleries?!
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What did the Barnes know and when?
LATer Christopher Knight tells us that years before the Barnes Foundation was legally allowed to move to Philadelphia, the state of Pennsylvania appropriated $107 million for the move. Appropriations like that don't just pop into state budgets out of thin air. So the question is: Who got it put in? Who among the Barnes movers and the Barnes board knew it was there? And if the state was willing to pony up $107 million, why wouldn't it do it to dramatically modernize the Barnes where it is now? There's something fishy here....
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Andreas Gursky at Niagara Falls
 The temptation is not to post anything today so that readers can enjoy that fabulous new VMFA Bonnard below...
Here's the last of our week-long look at Niagara Falls in American art. (Except for today we're giving you a German, kind of shooting the rubric all to hell.) It's an Andreas Gursky photograph from 1989. It is not one of the mondo-huge Gurskys we're accustomed to seeing of late -- it's 41-by-34 inches.
Unlike most other artists we've discussed this week, Gursky injects contemporary commerce into his photograph of the Falls. That thingy in the foreground is a tourist boat, getting as close to the power of the Falls as it can.
Related: Niagara Falls in contemporary New York politics. This JPEG of the same Gursky is a little less blue. Des Moines Art Center buys two Alec Soths. Church v. Soth. Gordon Matta-Clark and Niagara Falls. And don't forget Yosemite's place in American art. It's the subject of a show in California. Adam Cvijanovic at the University of Buffalo.
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Acquisition: VMFA's new Bonnard
 The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has just acquired seven Bonnard paintings from the estate of Paul Mellon. Pictured here is the best of the bunch: The Dining Room from ca. 1940-46. I am almost certain that this is the largest single Bonnard paintings acquisition ever by an American museum.
(Today the VMFA announced the acquisition of 23 French objects from the Mellon estate, including works by Delacroix, Gericault, and Redon. The museum has also just acquired a sculpture by Robert Lazzarini and a 1996 gouache by Sol LeWitt.)
Judging from the JPEG -- the work will go on view in Richmond in the spring -- the VMFA's new Bonnard is exceptional. It has everything that makes Bonnard the second-greatest French painter of the 20th-century: action on the edges which gives the painting a film-still-like quality, rich color, unusual perspective, and a hint of nature outside. I can't wait to see it.
Suggestion: The museo-corridor between Richmond and Baltimore holds the richest trove of Bonnards in America. The VMFA, NGA, Phillips and Baltimore all have wonderful Bonnards -- and lots of them. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the four museums hung all their Bonnard paintings at the same time, creating a temporary Bonnard Trail? (Extend it a bit to Philly and NYC and there are more, of course. Just not as many per institution.)
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Niagara Falls: Cvijanovic at UB
 I'm not always an Adam Cvijanovic fan. I've found some of his installations a bit sloppy. (Art should not peel off of a wall, for example.) But I think they're interesting and, well, they have a certain neat-o component. Here's one I wish I'd seen in person: At the University of Buffalo's art gallery, Cvijanovic created Niagara Falls, which puts the viewer at the base of the Falls. (UB does some awfully good shows -- it's on the most underrated spots around.)
Related: Des Moines Art Center buys two Alec Soths. Church v. Soth. Gordon Matta-Clark and Niagara Falls. And don't forget Yosemite's place in American art. It's the subject of a show in California.
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Art in New Orleans
Two New Orleans items of note today: The Getty has given $1 million in grants to seven New Orleans arts groups: the Ogden, the New Orleans Museum, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Foundation, the Contemporary Arts Center, Louisiana State Museums, Longue Vue House and Garden, and the Ashe Cultural Arts Center.
More immediately, at the Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane is what I think is the first post-Katrina exhibit of contemporary art to travel to New Orleans: Breathing Time: Works from the Debra & Dennis Scholl collection.
Related: Robert Polidori talks about being in New Orleans.
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It's art fair season
It's fair season. In the next two months London, Miami, Turin, Paris, Cologne, and even Shanghai all host major art fairs. (I'll be at two of those: Miami and Turin, where Artissima has invited me to moderate a panel discussion. Artnet keeps a fairs list here.)
I'll be especially interested to see how art critics treat the fairs. For several years I've argued here on MAN that art fairs are a better place to see new art than biennials. (One advantage for the fairs: Every art fair has less wall-text than just one room of the most overrated museum rubric going: the Whitney Biennial.) While biennials trace their family trees back to Parisian salons, the lineage from art fairs back to the salons is even more direct. To over-simplify it a bit: At the salons the French government was the buyer. The 21st-century art fairs are a triumph of the free-market over government-centric patronage.
One of the biggest changes in museumdom in the last half-decade is how contemporary art curators use the fairs. Nearly every contemporary art curator I know has 'discovered' artists in Miami or at another fair. Nearly every contemporary art curator I know has included fair discoveries in group shows or has given fair discoveries small solo shows. (SFMOMA's Joshua Shirkey 'found' Marilyn Minter at the Armory Show, for example. And many museums -- even the stodgy Philadelphia Museum of Art -- buy work out of fairs.) Given that curators find the fairs useful (and their institutions find them cost-effective), I'm surprised that critics don't too. I remember that NYTer Roberta Smith filed from Miami last year (and of course MAN has been writing about and from Miami since 2002), but as far as I can remember that was about it.
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Puryear: Ask and ye shall receive
The Martin Puryear retro is coming in 2007 -- and it will be at MoMA. (I 'suggested' this earlier today.) The John Elderfield-curated show will open next Nov. 4. Bonus: It won't just be in the museum's special exhibition galleries on the sixth floor; there will be a Puryear installation in the museum's atrium. (Which raises the question: Whither Broken Obelisk? MoMA says there's no word on that yet...)
And a Vija Celmins drawings retrospective, put together by the Pompidou, will open at the Hammer in January.
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Gordon Matta-Clark and Niagara Falls
 
The Niagara Falls economy fell apart in the 1970s. Manufacturing jobs disappeared as industry found cheaper ways to get things made. Nearby Love Canal became two-word short-hand for industrial environmental contamination -- and it was one of just dozens of polluted sites in the Niagara region.
It was the perfect place for Gordon Matta-Clark to mine for an entropy-inspired creation. One of his masterpieces, Bingo, was made with (and out of) a Niagara Falls house.
Related: I reported last year that , despite its apparent fragility, would be part of the Whitney's forthcoming Matta-Clark retrospective. Alec Soth and Frederic Edwin Church do Niagara Falls. The Des Moines Art Center acquires two Soths.
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Museum exhibits we want to see
Several years ago MAN used to regularly dream up ideas for museum shows and 'assign' them to various curators or museums. It was fun. I don't know why I stopped doing it. So here are ten shows we'd love to see, and where. Surely other bloggers have other ideas...
- Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series. The show would include paintings, works on paper, and cigar-box pieces, at least. (As mentioned here.) Assigned to: LACMA. What better exhibit to open Renzo's light-filled Broad Contemporary?
- Donald Judd retrospective. It amazes me that there's never been a complete Judd retro in an American museum. Assigned to: Somewhere that fetishizes installation, which rules out MoMA. Therefore: The NGA or MAMFW.
- Diane Arbus. Last year, at about the same time I reviewed the Met's Arbus presentation, I suggested three Arbus shows. But given how tightly her work is controlled by her heirs, they're probably pretty unlikely. (In a related story, the Nicole Kidman-as-Arbus-ish movie comes out -- in limited release -- next month.)
- Martin Puryear. We know, we know. He wants one only if MoMA does it.
- Clyfford Still retrospective. One that includes the pre-1943 paintings, and one that examines whether Still's push into abstraction coincided with the beginning of American involvement in WWII. (I think it probably did. If Still started making giant, abstract, almost scary canvases in response to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, that would would change some of the early history of abex.) Assigned to: SFMOMA (likelihood: nil) or the Albright-Knox, in association with the Clyfford Still Museum.
- Millard Sheets retrospective. Sheets was an important WPA-era painter and muralist in both Washington, DC and Los Angeles. Maybe there's not much post-Chouinard Sheets worth seeing, but maybe there is. Assigned to: Smithsonian American Art Museum.
- Morandi retrospective. Assigned to (as it has been for years): The Phillips Collection.
- Theo van Doesburg retrospective. Yes, I know there there was a U.S. van Doesburg retro -- almost 60 years ago. In the last decade or so contemporary artists have embraced the grid (as dozens of group shows have demonstrated), so why not go back and look at a pioneer? Assigned to: The Guggenheim.
- Anne Truitt retrospective. I'm guessing that this will be the first show on this list to happen. Assigned to: The museum a few miles from where Truitt lived most of her life, the Hirshhorn.
- Vija Celmins. (Speaking of whom, there's a gallery of her work up now at the NGA.) Assigned to: Not sure.
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Church v. Soth: A Niagara Falls smackdown
See Monday for why I'm talking about Niagara Falls this week.
I was also interested in this Soth photograph, Falls 26. It's the most painterly of all Soth's photographs of Niagara Falls. (You can see a larger version here.) The water in the foreground look more like ribbons of oil paint than like flowing water.
Many of Soth's shots of the Falls seem indebted to painters, Hudson River school types or others. Falls 17 is a photographer's version of a Whistler Nocturne painting. Falls 11 recalls Luminism.
Of Soth's photographs of he Falls, only Falls 08 explicitly rejects art historical references: it shows Niagara Falls' hotel-dominated skyline through mist kicked up by the falling water. That's strangely appropriate too. When I think of casinos I think of the western frontier, Las Vegas. In the mid-19thC western New York was part of the western frontier... and now the Canadian side of Niagara Falls is a casino town.
Falls 26 doesn't just refer to painters in the way Soth captures water. To take this photograph he had to be standing on the Canadian side of the Falls, just a few feet from where Frederic Edwin Church painted his thundering Niagara, now in the Corcoran's collection.
 Soth's picture is hardly a direct crib from Church. The painting was made in the late afternoon or in the early evening. The photograph was taken earlier in the day. In the foreground of the painting Church emphasizes the Falls' drop, while Soth prefers to emphasize the milky blueness of the water. Church builds in some Luminist tricks, like the treacly rainbow that cuts through the dark clouds and into the white light that bounces off of the crashing Falls.
(One other differences: Soth does not charge twenty-five cents a head to see his photograph as Church did his painting.)
Related: Check out Bierstadt's 1869 Niagara and compare it to the Soth that the Des Moines Art Center bought.
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Culture and Travel magazine arrives
 Culture & Travel is the first new art-ish magazine in years. It is just out this month, launched by LTB Media (the folks who bring you the perpetually sluggish artinfo.com, Art + Auction, and Modern Painters). So is it any good?
The first issue, dated Sept/Oct, is close. It's always dangerous to render a verdict based on one issue of a magazine -- it will likely evolve and it will probably improve -- but based on the first Culture & Travel there's reason for optimism.
First, it's not Artforum. There is no dense, unreadable text on subjects about which no one gives two snits. That's a plus. C&T is printed on woefully cheap paper and the text of some stories is so blurry it's hard to read. That's a minus.
C&T's raison d'etre is pretty simple: Explore the intersection of art and tourism. Sometimes it works. The front-of-the-book sections on museum collections and current goings-on in books, performance, architecture and exhibitions are excellent. But after that we run into C&T's biggest problem. Why are some of these stories here, and why now?
There's a story here about ruins in Ireland. Why? Is there a current events peg? No. Ditto a story on Rome. This kind of randomness works if you have top-notch writers writing about specific experiences, but C&T's writing is, uh, uneven at best. A Peter Feibleman story about Java is muddled and confusing. William Zinsser is one of the great writing teachers, but his essay suffers from a lack of purpose or energy. (I can imagine an editor calling Zinsser and asking, "Wanna write something for us? Twenty-five hundred words, anythging you like, just kind of an essay about where you've traveled to and how it had something to do with culture? OK? Thanks, bye.")
Jamie O'Neill's story on Irish ruins is impenetrable. And why is every story surrounded by mediocre, over-sized photography? (Was Lisa Yuskavage photographed sitting in a crypt? Why is so much text set into so many blurry pictures?) In short: there's too much emphasis on tourism here and not enough emphasis on art and travel writing.
But there are a few excellent stories in the debut issue that give me hope: Herbert Muschamp's essay on Chicago crackles with clever phrases and thoughtful contextualizations. A story on Brice Marden's explorations of Hyrdra should have been the highlight of the issue, but instead it's a short, poorly-sourced, one-page throw-away. (At least it comes with a news peg: The forthcoming Marden retro at MoMA.) A story about architecture in Jinhua, a Chinese city, shows signs of intelligent art direction.
Culture & Travel isn't yet a good magazine, but with some tightening up of the concept and with a major injection of better writing it could become one.
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Acquisition: Alec Soth @ Des Moines
 In the history of American art, no natural landscape is as prominent as Niagara Falls. Nineteenth-century painters flocked to the Falls, wanting to capture its power -- and wanting to compete with each other. Birch, Catlin, Church, Hicks, Peale, Moran, Bierstadt, Twachtman, Cole, Hale, Kensett, Trumbull and others all trekked to western New York.
After that glut of 19thC attention, artists apparently felt that the Falls had been done. When, for example, Margaret Bourke-White visited Niagara, she ignored the Falls and photographed its power plant. John Pfahl photographed the falls in the mid-1990s, but he focused on abstractions, not vistas. Painters? Fuhgeddaboutit. Not even art history-obsessed painters such as Sandow Birk have bothered with the Falls.
Enter Alec Soth, whose recent series "NIAGARA" is a photographic survey of both sides of the Falls. He doesn't completely ignore nature itself, but it's almost tangential to his focus on the melancholy, depressing wedding industry that has sprung up around the area. (Some local boosters claim that the term "honeymoon" was invented by Niagara Falls businesses.) The series is full of sad portraits, harsh motels, and lots of cloudy light. Optimism is absent.
 The Des Moines Art Center just purchased two images from Soth's Niagara series, Terrace Court (above) and Falls 34 (right). I think that the motel pictures and the Falls pictures are the highlights of Soth's series. The motels are colorful architectural failures in which Soth finds rhymes and little pockets of optimism. (Above: What a dumpy motel, what an awesome sky. What a cookie-cutter Best Western, the flowers are a nice touch.) The DMAC passed on the Soth's NIAGARA portraits. Perhaps, like me, they found the subjects too uniformly empty.
For the rest of this week I'll feature a daily post on Niagara Falls and contemporary art. I'll try to point out how the Falls and the American and Canadian towns on either side have been mined by artists as metaphor, source material, and who know's what else.
Related: Soth talks about his series in a slideshow on the Magnum website. Soth's blog. The Des Moines Art Center's recent acquisitions page. Soth's 2005 portraits show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
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Great moments in GawkerForum
To no one's surprise, GawkerForum's September was a frenzy of ass-kissing and name-dropping. Throughout the month GF made its usual contribution to propogating the myth that the art world is full of self-obsessed, out-of-touch, social-climbing talent-free hacks. In case you're new to this monthly feature, we'll lead off by letting the GawkerForum crue remind us what GF is all about:
- "Here, too, I didn't recognize anyone." -- Rhonda Lieberman.
- "I don’t see anyone I know." -- Mark Bradford, quoted by Andrew Berardini.
- "I'm always amazed by how many familiar faces one encounters on these trips." -- Nicolas Trembley.
- "'You know, it’s strange,' said Matthew Barney, sitting on the sidelines between McEwen and Neville Wakefield. 'There are an awful lot of people here and I hardly know a soul.'" -- Matthew Barney, quoted by Linda Yablonsky.
On to the greatest hits:
 "[T]he famously flattering [Francesco] Vezzoli delivered this gem: 'In terms of the way the art world functions today, 'Scene & Herd' is the new October.'" -- Sarah Thornton. Yes: In that no one reads GawkerForum or October, no one takes either seriously, and that we all think they're both pretty much self-perpetuating jokes.
"Chris Kraus wrote in Video Green that nobody talks about art in LA, but [Kelly] Barrie does." -- Andrew Berardini, proving that GawkerForum won't talk about art in LA, either. Meanwhile, perhaps GF might hire this Barrie person.
"I recalled that Aleksandr Petrovsky, Carrie Bradshaw's superserious artist paramour (played by Baryshnikov), was perhaps the only character ever to read Artforum on TV." -- Rhonda Lieberman. Well, to pretend to read it. I mean, it's safe to assume that he was just looking at the ads, right?
"For thirty years, I've heard the art world described as small. Small in its incestuous relationships, personal and professional; small as to who and what matter at any given time." -- Linda Yablonsky, who is apparently dedicated to reinforcing this notion by documenting -- you guessed it -- the smallness of it all.
"At the top of the season, everyone just wants to see everyone else." -- Linda Yablonsky.
"This was a weekend when art was merely the backdrop to the mapping of a community that has to stay whole against long odds: war, disease, fashion, real estate -- even art school." -- Linda Yablonsky. Huh? Didn't she just say that the art season was the backdrop to seeing everyone else?!!? And how is it that Yablonsky always manages to find triumphalism in merely being present? Art writing shouldn't be about being there, it should be about... art. (Of course, if Yablonsky is that happy to be there, it explains why she names or quotes her PR agent enablers in seemingly every post...)
"In this day and age, everyone must be friends for fifteen minutes." -- Linda Yablonsky. As I read a month's worth of GawkerForum writers valorizing vacuousness, I prayed to the good Lord above that Yablonsky is wrong.
This just in: Andrew Hultkrans would love it if McSweeney's would buy his pitches. (I mean, why else would this be there?!)
Previously: April, June, July, August, September.
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Clyfford Still and Niagara Falls
"Clyfford Still always went to Niagara Falls when he went to Buffalo," Bob Buck told me. Buck should know -- he succeeded Gordon Smith as the director of what is now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Smith had exhibited and carefully wooed Still, earning the gallery dozens of great Still paintings. Until he imagined that the Albright was storing his paintings haphazardly, on the ground of a water-filled basement, Still made regular trips from his home in Carroll County, Maryland to western New York. "That was the idea of it," Buck said. "They liked to come see how the children were doing."
I asked Buck how he knew that Still visited the Falls. Clyfford Still wasn't exactly the socializing type. I couldn't imagine him walking into the Albright and asking a museum director to join him in an excursion into nature. Oh no, Buck said, Still never told us that he liked the Falls. We found out from a guard.
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Around the blogosphere, part I
I've got a lot of AtB stuff today, so I'll break it into two posts...
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Free museums: SLAM's Brent Benjamin
The final directorin our series of conversations with directors of free museums is Brent Benjamin, the director of the St. Louis Art Museum.
 MAN: As I recall, the St. Louis Art Museum has been free since not long after the 1904 World's Fair, right?
Brent Benjamin: We've been free for a long, long time, since 1909, when we became a city museum. That certainly has had a dramatic attitude on people's attitudes about the museum and it's certainly had an impact on attendance levels here, which are extraordinary. Our audience is incredibly varied in terms of age, race, economic background, educational background. It's an amazing cross-section of the metro area.
MAN: Have you done visitor surveys on that or do you just see it in the building?
BB: You can see it in the galleries. I was in the galleries here a few weeks ago and three pre-teen boys came trouping through with their skateboards. They checked them and then they went down to look at the collection of arms and armor. That's a museum director's dream, it's what you want to see. Free is an important aspect of that. An admissions fee at the door is hard for a kid to deal with.
We're also here in the midst of this urban park, which means that people's experience with this museum tends to be more casual and informal in a way. They're here flying kites, picnicking, skateboarding, sledding on the hill in front of the museum in the winter -- and then they come in.
MAN: Along with four other St. Louis cultural institutions, SLAM is substantially funded by a St. Louis City-County partnership called the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District. What percentage of your operating budget do they kick in?
BB: About two-thirds. And it's a property tax-based formula, so it's pretty steady. I would say that the operating situation here is remarkably stable in comparison to many of our peers.
MAN: I've noticed that an unusually high percentage of America's free major museums are in the Midwest. Why?
BB: That's a really good question. I think that if you were to really tear it apart you'd find that though all these organizations share the same mission, that they’re operating structures vary quite dramatically. Toledo has a vast endowment. Cleveland has a vast endowment. St. Louis has vast public support. You have to go back to the genesis and the history of when each these museums came into being for the answers, I think. I don't think it’s so much regional as it is the individual histories.
MAN: I've asked everyone this question this week: What impact does being free have on your membership program?
BB: It's a bit of a double-edged sword. When you don't offer the primary benefit of membership -- which is free admission -- there's a disincentive to be a member. That's the negative side. On the positive side, many of our members are deeply dedicated to the idea of a free museum and we know that one of the incentives of their being a member is supporting the museum being free.
MAN: SLAM is free, the new Kemper at Washington University is free, the Pulitzer is free, and the Contemporary has so many free days and afternoons that you almost have to bend over backwards to give them a fiver. Why is there such a cluster of free-ness in St. Louis?
BB: There are certainly competitive pressures at work here. If you have to choose where you're taking your family of four on a Saturday afternoon, you can go to the art museum for free or to an organization that's charging. You're going to go one of the free organizations. There's an indication in our surveys that families do us one weekend, then the Zoo, and so on, that families here make the rounds over various weekends, which is terrific.
MAN: Like the Nelson-Atkins, you’re building. I’m guessing that charging for admission never entered into the funding equation when you had discussions about increased operating costs.
BB: The global answer is never. But that's only half the issue. We're certainly very conscious of the fact that incremental space brings incremental costs. We've never considered charging admission as a part of meeting those costs. But in our fundraising initiative there's a significant endowment component which is there to defray the cost of operating that new space. [Pre-campaign, SLAM's endowment stood at ~$85 million.]
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Free museum notes
Check back for St. Louis Art Museum director Brent Benjamin this afternoon. But first some notes:
- Several readers have written in to remind us that while it's great fun to gawk at endowments, it's worth remembering two things: Many endowments are restricted and certain parts of endowments can often only be used for certain things: 19th century American paintings acquisitions or educational programming, for example. And as we pointed out last week, it's worth remembering that total endowment is less important than the endowment-to-operating-costs ratio.
- And on museums that are free: Blaffer director Terrie Sultan points out that university art museums are quite likely to be free. Witness the Blaffer, Yale, Stanford's Cantor, NYU's Grey, Princeton, Krannart. And the Hammer, the Henry and the Penn ICA are all free to students.
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"Adele" outtakes
Some good stuff that didn't make it into my Fortune magazine story on the Neue Galerie's Adele purchase:
 MoMA director Glenn Lowry on Ronald Lauder's involvement in enabling MoMA's purchase of Robert Rauschenberg's Rebus: "To me what was really remarkable is that he was willing to stretch to buy something that didn't fit his own taste."
Former FAMSF director Harry Parker on one of the differences between raising money for a building and raising money for an acquisition: "The museum was willing to borrow to build the building. I don't think I ever could have persuaded the board to borrow to make an acquisition."
Walker director Kathy Halbreich on whether museum donors are becoming more and more interested in acquisitions: "I think this is changing a little bit, maybe. I think younger people are living more international lives. And I think that consequently there is increased interest in how the museum stacks up."
Halbreich on a painted that she wanted for the Walker early in her tenure -- even though she was nervous about the price tag: "Gary Garrels and I had seen a Sigmar Polke painting. I was desparate to buy it, but it was more money than the Walker Art Center had ever spent on an acquisition. So I took a group to see it. I remember going to see [Walker mega-benefactors] Judy and Ken Dayton. I really went not to ask for money, but to ask for advice. The question I asked was, 'Given that I'm still a newish director, do you think it's wise for me to push forward on an acquisition that's this ambitious?' And Ken said to me, 'If it's a great painting no one will ever remember what you spent for it.' That was such good advice."
Kimbell director Timothy Potts on how his museum (I wouldn't be surprised if they end up with a Klimt) makes acquisition dec | | |
OK, we can't stop with the Niagara Falls thing. 
It's not just art exhibitions that arrive in the fall, it's smart new books. This season is rich in biographies of the men who were insturmental in the creation of America's greatest museums.
Next up is 
