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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Munchian irony?
One of the thiefs of Munch's The Scream is believed to be dead, of a heroin overdose. I think this may be ironic, but I'm not quite sure how.
In an unrelated, unironic story, find out who dropped ~$30 million on Andy Warhol's Montauk estate.
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Ouroussoff goes to Detroit
Delighted to see NYTer Nicolai Ouroussoff take a look at MOCA Detroit, or MOCAD, this morning. Of all the NYT arts crue, it's Ouroussoff and Roberta Smith who write most intelligently about art museums and institutional issues. (Michael Kimmelman tends to suggest wackiness, such as that the Getty absorb/merge with the best museum in LA. Groan.) Today Ouroussoff gives us this to ponder:
Mocad creates a casual and intimate relationship between art and viewer, shrugging off the weighty air of authority and privilege that is typical of so many museums. It takes us back to a time when making art and architecture could be a act of dissent.
I like this idea. I don't know what it's future is; will more museums think about building this way in the future? I kind of doubt it -- donor$ like polish because it advertises their sophistication. But there's something about the grittiness of the Baltimore Contemporary that challenges a viewer as much as the art on the walls does. Same with the CCA's Wattis galleries.
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My inbox is about to explode
I'm pretty sure that the next Miami-related, gallery-sent press release I receive will make my PC explode. Daddy loves you. He has 600 children. He loves you all the same. That is a lie. (I'm trapped in this metaphor and I can't get out.) What I'm trying to say is: Yes, we all know that there will be a lot of galleries in Miami. You don't all need to tell us that you'll be there. No one goes to Miami looking for just one in 600.
For some reason this reminds me: How good a time is this to have a career in art/museum communications? Four biggies are all looking for a new top communications staffer: the Hirshhorn, MOCA, the Guggenheim, and -- this just in -- MoMA.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006 | Permanent
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Acquisitions: Walker Art Center trifecta
 First on MAN: The Walker Art Center has mined New York for three new pieces: Thomas Hirschhorn's Abstract Resistance, Pierre Huyghe's A Journey That Wasn't, and Katharina Fritsch's Pistol.
The Hirschhorn was part of the artist's shockingly awful, derivative (of Sontag) early 2006 installation at Barbara Gladstone. The Walker likes Hirschhorn, a curator's darling-of-the-moment, more than I do: It recently showed Hirschhorn's Cavemanman installation (and took a funny picture of him) and recorded a podcastable interview with him here. There are photos of Abstract Resisitance here, at the Artnet version of Jerry Saltz's review of the show. The Walker also owns a number of smaller Hirschhorns.
Walker chief curator Philippe Vergne was half-responsible for the 2006 Whitney Biennial in which Huyghe's A Journey That Wasn't was a highlight. (The film was also recently on view at the Tate Modern.) I wish there was a link to at least part of the 22-minute film online, but there doesn't seem to be. This is the first Huyghe to enter the Walker's collection.
 Katharina Fritsch's precious little Pistol was recently on view at Matthew Marks as part of a show called Small Sculpture. (At just five-by-eight inches, the paint-n-polyester gun is certainly that.) The Walker has been collecting Fritsch in depth since 1991.
Personally, I'm perpetually delighted by Fritsch and perpetually bored by Hirschhorn. But I think it's fetchingly neat-and-tidy (and geopolitically appropriate) that the Walker has just scored two works that are about violence and how we perceive implements that cause it.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006 | Permanent
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Finding an historical construct for ABMB
 Miami is upon us. A week from today the doors of Art Basel Miami Beach will swing open to the VIP set, and the art world equivalent of a tax-free-shopping weekend will begin. Over the next five days collectors will spend somewhere between $100-300 million on art, writers and curators will stroll through 13 fairs and 600 galleries worth of presentations, Linda Yablonsky will confuse Miami with Iraq, and we'll all pledge to wear only comfy shoes -- next year.
A recent post on Edward Winkleman's excellent blog has me re-pondering my favorite ABMB-related question: What is the proper historical point-of-comparison for Miami fairs week? I've written this before but I haven't dwelled on it: I think that the Miami fairs are the American, 21st-century equivalent of the 19th-century Parisian salons. I think we'll discuss this more over the next few days, but for now some points of comparison:
- The intent of the salons was to sell art. The intent of the fairs is to sell art. The difference: In the late 19thC the French government was the preferred patron. In 21stC America major private collectors are the preferred patrons, a natural evolution given that the state is much less involved in art and in the econmy here and now than it was there and then.
- Artists were juried in by a panel appointed by the entity that put on the salon. At the fairs, galleries are juried in by a panel appointed by the entity that puts on the salon. I'd argue that this is also a 21st-century updating of the old concept: Artists are less directly involved in selling themselves and their work than they were way-back-when.
- Those who didn't get into the main salon created their own satellite salons. Ditto Miami: This year there will be 13 satellite fairs that will host two-thirds of the galleries showing.
- In Paris, some artists who didn't get into the main fair found ways of showing around town. (Courbet famously set up a tent outside the Parisian salon. Fortunately for him, Eik Kahng had not yet been born.) Every year there are more artist-created installations that pop up magically around Miami. I couldn't link to them all if I tried.
- The French public viewed the salon as a grand spectacle. Access Hollywood covers Art Basel Miami Beach.
- If readers have contributions to or digressions from this list -- or if you'd like to suggest a different historical construct -- I'm all ears...
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006 | Permanent
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Whitney announces -- again
 Forgive our skepticism, but when it comes to the Whitney and building projects: We'll believe it when they break ground. They've hired architects, made noise... and then not built too many times before. But elements of the announcement are worth noting:
This is not another MoMA. That is to say there's some hope that the Whitney project won't end up as a safe underbuild. According to Carol Vogel -- whom we can probably trust on this one because she's not sourcing her info to Snuffleupagus-like "experts" -- the Whitney is planning on building a 100,000-150,000 square feet of gallery space. That's serious: Dia Colon Beacon has 240,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Taniguchi MoMA checks in at ~125,000. The Whitney Breuer has only about 30,000 and an addition wouldn't have added more than another 20,000, max.
In other words: The Whitney is showing some ambition. And that's what Manhattan's museums have to do if they want to catch up to the building boom that's been going on around the country. As the collections in Minneapolis, San Francisco, etc. have grown, so too have their museums. Meanwhile in New York... not so much. New York's museums show relatively little of their (larger) collections.
Maybe -- hopefully -- the maybe-new Whitney will begin to change that. But until the Whitney breaks ground, lots of us will wonder if we're just watching a Whitney rerun.
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Still Museum pick, weekend roundup
A holiday weekend makes for a thin roundup, I guess...
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Courbet insulted
 The exhibition Courbet and the Modern Landscape will probably be on my year-end top-ten list. (I first saw it at the Getty.) It's painting-show-as-treasure-hunt: How did Courbet get that effect? What tool did he use to put oil paint there? And thanks probably in some measure to the show, it's been a good year for Courbet in the US: In the last few months both the FAMSF and the Wadsworth Atheneum have acquired superb Courbets. So I was delighted that Courbet and the Modern Landscape was coming near my home, to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Then I saw it. I was disappointed and stunned. It is probably the worst-installed show I've ever seen. The Walters and curator Eik Kahng should be embarrassed.
First, the show is installed with a soundtrack, a mix of orchestral accompaniment and, allegedly, sounds of wind and water. It sounds like one of those noise machines you can buy to help yourself sleep.
Then Kahng and the Walters hired a "lighting and environmental arts studio" to design the exhibit. That 'studio' spot-lit each painting -- and attached each light to a dimmer. As a result, the light level on each painting goes up and down, from dim to BRIGHT and back to dim over the course of 15 seconds or so. The effect is nauseating; it forces the viewer on how his retinas adjust to the light changes instead of on the paintings. Kahng seems to believe that the paintings themselves aren't good enough to attract attention without a gimmick.
When I looked away from a painting, the bizarreness continued. Patterened light that would have been just more appropriate in the staging of a John Guare play bounced around the gallery. It too appeared to be on a dimmer.
Finally I reached the gallery of Courbet's winterscapes. They were lit with super-intense halogen light, lumination so strong that it made the paintings look have a ridiculous glow. The high-powered halogens turn them into the equivalent of Thomas Kinkade posters in a tourist tchotchke shop. The lighting was an intrusion on the art.
The Walters' problem is simple: Kahng didn't trust the art. Kahng created a preposterous spectacle, an intervention that put the focus on the curator and the curator's 'innovation' instead of on the artist, his innovation, and his art. As for Kahng... this is the kind of train wreck that should force a curator into an obscure academic posting. Or maybe David Blaine needs another flunky.
Related: The Washington Post's Paul Richard was similarly flabbergasted.
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Visiting an old favorite
 Ever since my first visit back in 1996, the Baltimore Museum of Art has been one of my favorites. The BMA is unabashedly a place for painting lovers: There's almost no sculpture indoors here, and even less photography. The BMA is so all-about-painting that native daughter Anne Truitt remains in storage even though the BMA owns some of her best work. The place is stuffed with Matisse, Bonnard, German expressionism, and top-notch 20th-century painting. (Outside the fine arts there are some excellent collections, including American decorative arts.) Some thoughts from a holiday weekend stroll through the BMA:
The highlight of the visit was a new installation by Dan Steinhilber. It's been a pretty huge year for (the unrepresented) Steinhilber: He's had solo presentations at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and here in Baltimore, he's in a group show at the Des Moines Art Center and he had a residency at Pittsburgh's Mattress Factory. The Baltimore installation, an untitled mixture of styrofoam peanuts, robots, leaf-blowers, and floor dryers, may be the best thing Steinhilber has ever made.
The main installation is installed in a rectangular gallery diagonally broken into two by a place for visitors to walk and observe. On one side (above), blowers push a Felix Gonzalez-Torres-style corner-stack of styrofoam peanuts into the air. The peanuts go flying 5-15 feet into the air and stay there until the blowers shut off. Then the peanuts fall, to rest, pretty much back where they started. Steinhilber gets one heckuva lot of action, turbulence and finally calm out of a dollar or two of foam peanuts.
On the other side of the gallery, on a sheet of black nylon or plastic, mounds of styrofoam peanuts are pushed around by other bursts of air, these from leaf-blower hoses attached to a Rube Goldberg-cum-garage-door-opener contraption, and by Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners. The installation swings into action less often than the corner piece, but to every bit as dramatic effect: Every half-hour or so the winds come alive, pushing and blowing peanuts every which way. The result is a landscape of peanuts, complete with dark gaps that resemble the ocean and mounds of peanuts that resemble hills coming to the water's edge.
I don't think of Steinhilber as being terribly interested in metaphor, but the larger piece is a pretty spot-on consumerist take on global climate -- and change. (Curator Darsie Alexander put together a nice essay brochure on Steinhilber, but for some reason the BMA hasn't put a PDF online.)
- Remember last month we talked about Clyfford Still paintings on which the color red had faded to the point of translucence? The BMA has an awfully good Still that would be a top-two-percenter if the rich burgundy pigment which covers 60-70 percent of its surface hadn't faded over the years. I have a pet, unprovable theory that Still gave this burgundy red canvas to the BMA because he knew that the BMA was going to receive a certain burgundy red Mark Rothko from a donor, that he wanted them to match up against each other. (Still lived in nearby Carroll County for the last several decades of his life.) The Still has faded into ephemera; the Rothko is a classic.
- The BMA should move its James Lee Byars. It's at the intersection of a door, a parking lot and a staircase.
- Theodoros Stamos is one of the more, er, moderately remembered abexers. That's fine -- he tended to borrow far more from Still than he should have. (Ahem.) But his 1958 Swamp Forest here is a superb painting, a subtle progression of whites, magentas and forest greens. Unfortunately it's not online. (The BMA's web presence is thin. I can't show you the museum's fantastic Mel Bochners, either.)
- Two recent acquisitions caught my eye: Longtime MANfave Tracy Snelling's El Mirador and Jean-Pierre Gauthier with a smarter-than-Barney mix of performance, mechanization and art-making titled Marks of Uncertainty #3.
Later today: A disaster at the Walters Art Museum.
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Artissima artists, part two
 Yesterday I started telling you about artists whose work particularly impressed me at Artissima, in Turin. Today four more:
Hannes van Severen @ Hoet Bekaert (Gent): With sculptures that are familiar but not-quite-right, Van Severen makes surrealist sculptures of familiar objects. Van Severen's objects tweak familiar tropes: a chest of drawers, a VW Golf, but in a vaguely minimal way that challenges our ideas about how objects are used (and designed). It seems like we could use van Severen's objects -- or at least part of them.
Britta Huttenlochere @ Paul Andreiesse (Amsterdam): Fantastic abstract paintings. Huttenlochere plainly understands color and composition. Her paintings seem to be based on a map-like system, perhaps a subway system gone amok. Then again maybe not, maybe these are leaves falling before us. Think Joan Mitchell, only more minimal, more exact. (I'm still interested in the following idea but I'm not sure what it means: So many of my favorite contemporary abstract painters are women: Von Heyl, Klein, Shepherd, Sillman...)
 Tatsuya Higuchi @ Murata and friends (Berlin): I've written about how so much of contemporary art of late deals with degeneration and decadence. Not Higuchi. He seems an endless optimist, bringing cheeriness into even the most neglected nooks and crannies. At Artissima I saw Higuchi's photographs of bright green, flowering plants tucked into bleak parts of the urban infrastructure, such as freeway overpasses. And his boxes of sky, color positive film folded or pressed into tiny, tiny boxes, promises more than Prozac ever could.
 Bruno Muzzolini @ Fabio Paris (Brescia, Italy): First, Muzzolini built a translucent garden house. Then he (apparently) threw in some firecrackers and chronicled (with video and photographs, both of which were on view in Fabio Paris' booth) the explosions inside the confined space. As smoke filled the structure, it became opaque. The smoke forced its way out of any available cracks in the house. Muzzolini's work serves as an apt metaphor for so many common experiences: contained rage, America in Iraq, the pain of dreams going unrealized. (The openness of Muzzolini's work to interpretation reminds me of Miguel Angel Rios' work.) When The Firework House is shown in a gallery setting, Muzzolini presents the scarred house as a sculptural object. According to his biography Muzzolini has shown outside Italy only once in the last six years. He's ready for more.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 22, 2006 | Permanent
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Oops, Malcolm does it again
 Until Monday, I hadn't given much thought to Malcolm Rogers' silly MFA Boston Fashion Show. It's typical King Malcolm: Set up the pole; anything for a buck. In case you're late to the story, the MFA is showing an exhibition of fashions from 10 Parisian collections. 2006 collections. No context, no historicization, just glitz meant to appeal to the Project Runway crowd and to the wanna-be haute. (That'll be $23, please.) It's the exact kind of Malcolmism that makes the MFA Boston both an eye-roller and a laughingstock. What next, yachts on the lawn? (Oh, wait...)
Then I started thinking about it this way: I wonder how donors to the MFA's recent acquisitions show (or the curators who scored good work, such as the fantastic Amy Sillman painting at left) feel about their gifts being overshadowed by such tomfoolery? Or the curator of a show of Indian painting? Or the curator of a show of Japanese art from 1860-1940? Their shows are being deprived of institutional oxygen by Malcolm's latest circus, shown at left as Malcolm apparently intends it. This is what happens when your museum has a director who respects turnstiles more than art.
Related: I have previously posted about how Malcolm's Follies have little impact on the MFA's revenue stream. Sillman's fabulous Birdwatcher (unobstructed) is here. I'll make this up to Sillman in a week or two -- but will Malcolm?
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 22, 2006 | Permanent
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Artificial Light, part two
Before leaving for Miami and Turin I told you about the VMFA/VCU exhibition Artificial Light. The show will be on view at MOCA North Miami's Goldman Warehouse during Art Basel Miami Beach. The travel interrupted my posting on the show, so here it continues...
Ivan Navarro makes neon black light appear to be modernist furniture. (A photo of his work accompanied my first post.) Of all the work in this show, Navarro's comes closest to traditional light-and-space illusionism. Navarro's Black Electric Chairs appear to be the real deal; instead they're just tubes that would come crashing down if you tried to sit in them. There's a fear component at play too -- even now walking into a Turrell scares me a little bit because I don't know the limits of the space. Navarro's work has that same seductive mystery.
At the other end of the spectrum, as far from illusionism as you can get, is Nathaniel Rackowe. In much of his work Rackowe buries light in an object and allows it to spill or leak out. The effect is a kind of industrial optimism in which light seems to be a metaphor for emergence. Yeah, well... Rackowe's VCU installation is nothing like that. He has filled a room with a giant, diagonal construction, through which a garage door-like track moves a solitary light bulb. Rackowe's object is enormous, clunky, and thoroughly DIY, all of which somehow focuses a viewer's attention on the meditative movement of the light.
None of these artists is more indebted to first-generation light artists than Spencer Finch, who studies the light in various locales (including Niagara Falls) and then translates it into art. He owes a debt to LA's Laddie John Dill, who also turned light into luminous sculpture.
 The Puerto Rican tag-team of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla -- 2006 Hugo Boss prize finalists -- make work that is clever, but not cleverer-than-thou. Their Artifical Light installation includes a Jenny Holzer installation that provides (artifical) light that sustains a growing plant. The work is both relentlessly smart (I couldn't help but think that long-ago decayed plant matter was powering the Holzer that was nourishing the Allora & Calzadilla plant) and a twisting of post-industrial assumptions. Can artificially-lit structures save their own environment?
The last object in the show that I found amusing wasn't exactly an object, it was sculptural object as projected ephemera. Ceal Floyer's Overhead Projection is a remarkably simple installation: the placement of a clear light bulb on an overhead projector, the kind you probably remember from your high school biology class. Is Floyer's gesture a little precious, a bit of a one-note? Sure. But I couldn't stop looking at it. And something about the projection reminded me of Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror.)
Artificial Light isn't a comprehensive look at artists mixing light and sculpture: Olafur Eliasson isn't here, nor is Paul Chan, Mark Handforth, Carsten Holler, Erwin Redl, and so on. But that's OK -- it reminds us how many good light-based exhibits remain to be done.
Related light exhibits: Light/Art: Mystic Crystal Revelation at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. And at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Valerie Cassel Oliver is working on a show called Black Light/White Noise, about African-American artists making work with light. Nadine Robinson, Camille Norment, Kianga Ford, Satch Hoyt, Kira Lynn Harris, Karyn Olivier, Arthur Jafa, Yvette Mattern, and Kambui Obijimi make up the roster.
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Artissima artists, part one
 Last week I returned from Artissima, the giant contemporary art fair in Turin, Italy. (The fair asked me to moderate a panel discussion, paid me a speaker's fee, and covered my travel expenses.)
The overall quality of work at the fair was high -- comparable to NADA, only bigger and more mature. The setting couldn't be beat -- natural light poured down into the space. The 192 galleries were mostly from Italy and central Europe, though there were a smattering of British and American galleries too. Today and tomorrow I'll spotlight some of what I saw at the fair. Next week I'll focus on Turin's museums. (MAN will not publish on Thursday and Friday this week)
Steven Aalders @ Slewe (Amsterdam): Spare, minimal but intensely colorful paintings of strong verticals and horizontals that reference Mondrian's palette and the beginning of his (and Van Doesburg's) journey into abstraction, as well as Gene Davis' stripes and Tom Downing's opticality. There's even a little Barnett Newman in how Aalders moves the viewer's eye around the canvas. Aside: The designer of Slewe's website should have his computer permanently confiscated. So here's Aalders at Italy's Galleria del Tasso.
 Hans Peter Kuhn @ e/static (Turin): Kuhn is one of my favorite Euro-based artists, but unlike his perceptualist peer Olafur Eliasson, we don't see much of him here in the States. (Last in 2001, I bleev.) Like Eliasson, Kuhn is influenced by the light-and-space artists, but Kuhn often incorporates sound, vibration, and other tricks that appeal to multiple senses. At e/static Kuhn showed one of his pieces that mix speakers with sound, with something beans-like that bounces up off of the floor with each vibration of the speakers. The mix was meditative and transfixing.
Christiane Lohr @ Ala (Milan): Lohr makes small, delicate sculptures exclusively from organic materials (above). The colors in Lohr's sculptures are faded, and tired, merely the tincture that remains after life has left. (Think Wolfgang Laib, only more fleeting.) Lohr's sculptures are an apt metaphor for our planet and its own fragility. (StL P-D critic David Bonetti digs Lohr too.)
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Hank Willis Thomas and advertising
Yesterday we pointed out how an LA-based ad firm seems to have borrowed from artist Matt Johnson. Today I wanted to point out that the advertising-art street goes both ways: Here's a 2004 Hank Willis Thomas piece titled Priceless. (Thomas is currently showing in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.) Of course the difference is that Thomas' work is a pointedly satirical modest proposal. It apes the medium to tweak the message machine. It's an editorial cartoon for the Chelsea set. TBWA apparently simply took.
Related: Eyeteeth found some other examples. And world of coincidences: Paul Schmelzer was working on a HWT post just as I was. Later today: A dispatch from Artissima, in Turin, and more on Artificial Light.
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Weekend roundup
We start this week's roundup in a familiar place: On Saturday Carol Vogel wanted us to know that she speaks with experts. And that these experts tell her that David Martinez bought the Geffen Pollock. This marks three times Vogel/the NYT has told us that experts said Martinez bought the painting. There's a simple reason she has to keep telling us this: There's no particular reason to believe her, so she keeps hammering away, citing her experts. Other outlets -- including the Baer Faxt and Bloomberg -- have reported Martinez didn't buy it. Still Vogel won't name a source; she just refers us to her experts. I don't have any idea who bought the painting, but I know this: The NYT is supposed to be in the information biz, and the way they're reporting this story does nothing but obfuscate what happened -- or didn't.
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Museum wish-list: MCASD
 In January the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego opens a new Richard Gluckman-designed facility in downtown San Diego, complete with new commissions by Jenny Holzer, Richard Serra, and Robert Irwin (three of them, actually). With the new space on the brain, I asked MCASD curator Stephanie Hanor what the museum wants next. (The museum doesn't have a 'chief curator' title, just two top curators.) I'll present her wishlist in roughly the way we talked about it:
Unaffordable desirables (Aka: Dear donors...):
- Robert Morris felt piece
- Barnett Newman
- Ad Reinhardt
- An early abex Robert Irwin
- Laura Owens
- Julie Mehretu
- Sigmar Polke
- Gerhard Richter
- Elizabeth Murray
With the new 16,000-square feet building in mind:
- Hanor said that the new building would be especially installation and new-media friendly -- in fact it will have a dedicated new-media space. The museum would particularly like to increase its holdings of single-channel works from the late 1950s. (Trendspotter: that echoes something that Hirshhorn chief curator Kerry Brougher told MAN last month.)
- In terms of individual artists, MCASD is hoping to add Elisa-Liisa Ahtila, Jeremy Blake, Barbara Kruger, Jessica Bronson, and Joan Jonas. Sean Duffy is a new-media installation artist on MCASD's radar -- particularly a 'turntable piece.' (See above.)
- And while this isn't an acquisition, Hanor said that MCASD is particularly interested in working with early video artists to conserve works already in the museum's collection. At the moment MCASD is working with Bill Viola's studio to figure out how to keep old-media-dependent Heaven and Earth technologically up-to-date.
Photography
- The museum is intently buying Brian Ulrich (who has his own blog) and would like to add Glenn Kaino and Amy Adler. The museum recently purchased an Uta Barth triptych and would like more Barth. Same deal, different artist: Yvonne Venegas, who was featured in the MCASD's Strange New World, Art and Design from Tijuana show. Hanor said that MCASD is light on German photography, but would love to add Ruff, Hofer and their peers.
Painting
- In addition to Mehretu and Owens, the museum would like a recent Monique Prieto (it has an early one), and Matthew Ritchie.
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Did Nissan rip off Matt Johnson?
 
Ahem: At left is Matt Johnson's 2004 sculpture Breadface, which graced a thousand banners (maybe more) as the promotional image for the UCLA Hammer Museum's 2005 Thing show. Johnson is a hot property -- in a review of Johnson's recent LA debut at Blum & Poe, LATer Christopher Knight proclaimed him the love child of John Frederick Peto and David Smith. (Picture that.)
At the right is a still from a recent Nissan commerical for the new Nissan Sentra. The still is from Day 3, one of seven Sentra ads that presents some dude living out of his car for a week. (How hipster! How clever! Becuase gosh, who wouldn't want to live out of a mid-level Japanese car?) I'd guess that Nissan's ad firm TBWA\Chiat\Day -- which, wouldn't ya know it, is based in Los Angeles -- was plenty familiar with Breadface, wouldn't you?
Related: Marc Horowitz, the "star" of the commercial, blogs (barely) about this. Adweek's Richard Williamson reports on the campaign.
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Hirshhorn wish-list: Check.
 Last month, in the first installment of MAN's museum wish-list feature (continued here), Hirshhorn chief curator Kerry Brougher told MAN that he wants Sugimotos. Lots of Sugimotos. Acres and acres of Sugimotos.
He got 'em. As the Hirshhorn told Carol Vogel and the NYT, Mitch Rales just gave the museum 13 Sugimoto seascapes. (Note to the Hirsh and to other museums who feed items like this to NYC media and not to the home crowd: If you don't care about your hometown media, why should they care about you? For example: Everyone in DC rightly complains about the Post's arts coverage. Well, why should the Post improve when a local museum gives the good stuff to an NYC paper?)
Coming Monday: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego's wish-list.
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GawkerForum for November (not really)
Full disclosure: Between mag deadlines and travel, I'm two weeks late on this month's swing through GawkerForum. So I tried to catch up, I really, really did. But halfway down the October 'diaries' I fell asleep. You try it. Just try reading the same 800-word essay over and over and over again. It will shave years off your life. So here's one reminder of what GawkerForum is all about... and we'll be back with an Art Basel-fueled double-dip in December.
The only criticism I heard (if you can call this criticism): Why were the drawings (most of which were installed on the third floor, apart from the paintings on the sixth) hung so low? -- David Rimanelli. That's GawkerForum: The only coverage of art is what the writers overhear.
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Acquisition: MCASD's new Ruscha (and more)
 Last night the MCA San Diego formally accepted the gift of the collection of trustee Murray "Mickey" Gribin and his late wife Ruth. The gift includes Ed Ruscha's 1938, the first painting in Ruscha's catalogue raisonne.
Related: Robert Pincus wrote about the Gribins' collection/gift in the San Diego Union-Tribune in January. That was when the MCASD showed some of the collection in the exhibition La Dolce Vita. Ed Ruscha's online catalogue raisonne is here.
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Clyfford Still slobberknocker
 The Clyfford Still about which we told you a couple weeks ago, the one we said was a superb painting and the best Still ever to come to auction, destroyed the Still auction record last night at Christies. Final hammer for 1947-R No. 1: $19 million. The estimate had been $5-7M. (I'm guessing the red was deep and rich.)
In the International Herald Tribune, Souren Melikian called it a "big surprise." In the New York Times, Carol "Judi" Vogel misidentified the painting as "1047-R-No.1," apparently indicating that Still painted it 900 years earlier than previously believed. (Perhaps Vogel will next report/guess that William the Conqueror also bought the Geffen Pollock.)
UPDATE, 11:51 AM: The online version of Vogel's story now has the correct Still title edited into it. I'm guessing the Times couldn't do that as easiliy with the print version. UPDATE, 1:46 PM: Nope, it's still wrong. ("1947-R-No.,")Thanks to reader BL for catching it.
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Another take on the A-K sale
For the NYT-Pollock post, click here.
Yesterday I wrote that I approve of the Albright-Knox's deaccessioning of pre-19th century works. For several decades now the A-K has been a museum of modern and contemporary art. And budgetarily it's a small museum: In FY 2005 the A-K's budget was about $9 million (the same as, for example, Art Basel Miami Beach's budget). It's natural that a museum that size would want to focus on its mission as closely as possible:
The mission of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy/Albright-Knox Art Gallery is to acquire, exhibit, and preserve both modern and contemporary art with an active commitment to taking a global and multidisciplinary approach to the presentation, interpretation, and collection of the artistic expressions of our times.
Tom Freudenheim, writing in today's WSJ, disagrees with me. It's an excellent read and I agree with a lot of what he says -- but not the main issue at hand. (Plus, the WSJ gave him the comical byline of "By by Tom..." which is just too funny!)
One other point: Some critics suggest that the A-K make sure that the objects stay in public collections, perhaps by giving them to the Met or something. If the A-K's trustees approved that, they wouldn't be doing what was in the best interest of the institution they're in charge of guiding. The A-K has an endowment of about $65 million. It's one of our most highly-respected museums -- but hardly our wealthiest.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 15, 2006 | Permanent
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The NYT, a $140M Pollock, and confusion
 What happened? Did David Geffen sell a Jackson Pollock painting for $140 million? Did a Mexico City businessman buy it? If you read the New York Times you probably don't know what to think. The paper has completely bungled the story.
The timeline: On November 2, Carol Vogel reported that Geffen had sold the Pollock for $140M to David Martinez. In the story Vogel said that Martinez did not return calls seeking comment. (The story is available behind the NYT PPV wall.)
Then word began to filter out that the NYT had made a big mistake. On Nov. 7 The Baer Faxt (an insider e-newsletter) reported that the NYT was wrong, that Martinez was not the buyer.
Josh Baer talked to Martinez himself and told me the following story: "As I said to Mr. Martinez, and he agreed, for him to go on the record as not buying the painting -- and be lying would be very strange. Wouldn't people in the financial community find it hard to do serious business with a liar? In that world your word is everything - why risk it?"
Two days later, Bloomberg's Linda Sandler also reported that Martinez made no such purchase. "Martinez is not the buyer of a painting by Jackson Pollock, entitled 'Number 5, 1948,' " a spokesman at Martinez's attorneys' office told Bloomberg.
Sandler also gave us a look at Vogel's reporting methods: "I left several phone messages for Martinez and he never responded." Vogel told Sandler. "If he didn't buy [the Pollock], why didn't he call and tell me?"
Then on Nov. 10, Kate Taylor of the New York Sun floated another theory: "Some speculated this week that Mr. Martinez, upset at being outed, pulled out of a deal to buy the painting." (However the same Sun story has Geffen's office confirming that the painting was indeed sold.)
The New York Times still had not run a correction. Instead, in a Nov. 11 "Arts, Briefly" roundup compiled by Ben Sisario, the NYT reported that Bloomberg was reporting that the NYT had goofed. (Somehow the NYT must have missed the original Baer Faxt item.) In an unusual, remarkable 303-word paragraph, the NYT both stood by its story ("experts reaffirmed yesterday that the transaction had taken place"), and refuted it by quoting a spokeswoman at Martinez's attorneys' office ("Mr. Martinez did not buy the painting. Nobody associated with Mr. Martinez bought the painting.")
The New York Times still has not run a correction. It is not clear if the NYT stands by its Nov. 2 story, or by its Nov. 11 story. Or both. Or neither. Yesterday I emailed NYT culture editor Sam Sifton to ask for an explanation. Sifton replied and "declined to comment on an ongoing story." That leads me to believe that the NYT is planning a third story on all this. Will the third time be the charm? Or will we all be as confused as ever?
For years it has appeared as though the arts desk has different standards than the news desk. The culture crew, for example, tolerated Grace Glueck's unethical relationship with a Massachusetts museum until MAN exposed it. I can think of only one point of comparison for the NYT's duplicity on the Pollock story: Judith Miller's reporting on WMD in Iraq and the paper's subsequent handling of Miller's errors.
Related: Geffen's collection, as teased out by LATer Christopher Reynolds. Key quote: "Piece for piece, work for work, there's no collection that has a better representation of postwar American art than David Geffen's. Period." -- MOCA's Paul Schimmel. Gawker thinks this whole thing is weird.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 15, 2006 | Permanent
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The stupefying case of the $140M Pollock
It's not quite a story right out of the New York Times/Judith Miller file, but it's close. On Nov. 2, NYTer Carol Vogel
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In which we compliment the Albright
It's always a pleasure to compliment an arts institution for doing something right, especially when it comes to the ever-thorny issue of deaccessioning. But I can't imagine how the Albright-Knox could have handed itself any better last week.
In case you missed it: The Albright will auction off $10-15 million worth of antiquities and pre-modern paintings and sculptures. Some of the pieces the A-K is selling are best-ever examples to come on the market, says Sotheby's.
The reason for the sale couldn't be much more simple: The A-K is a modern and contemporary art museum and the older stuff doesn't fit its mission. The A-K isn't going about it furtively: It's doing it loudly and transparently. (SFMOMA made a similar decision a year or two ago: Its collection effectively starts when modern Ess Eff did, after the 1906 earthquake. So it traded a 19thC Monet for a Morandi. Awesome.)
After having spent years sniping at MoMA and LACMA -- and more recently the Seattle Art Museum -- for their furtiveness and for deaccessioning major works, it's nice to see the A-K establish what should be considered an industry standard. The Seattle Art Museum, for one, could learn a lot from how openly the A-K is discussing what it's doing and why.
Related: A-K press release.
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Did I miss anything?
 Hello from Turin, where I was the moderator of a panel at Artissima (the link is to a Flickr stream), a ~200-gallery-strong contemporary art fair. Before that I was in Miami for a couple days. While there I heard about something called Art Basel Miami Beach. Apparently it's an event -- and it's next month.
I feel like the political pundit who traveled to Europe on election day. In short:
Carol Vogel (who had been on quite a roll, breaking several big stories) said that a Mexican bizman bought a $140 million Pollock -- then the BaerFaxt and Bloomberg ran stories saying that CV got it wrong. The NYT apparently stands by its story because it didn't run a correction -- well, not exactly. The Times instead published a small story on how pretty much everyone had done it for them.
The National Gallery made it's first semi-big semi-acquisition in what seems like forever -- and as part of the deal the East Building will now be known as the "Sam's Club." The Albright-Knox waved its mission statement in front of the art world and pointed out that it doesn't say anything about Old Masters. (Pix of some of the works to be auctioned are at that link.) And I've already mentioned that the Neue Galerie scored a fab Kirchner. So we'll have a lot to cover this week when I resume regular posting. (That will be on Tuesday.) In the meantime, enjoy another VMFA Bonnard, one that appealed to Paul Mellon for fairly obvious reasons. This one is 1911ish oil titled Under Starter's Orders. (Which seems a bit much for a Bonnard title, but no one asked me.)
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The VMFA Bonnards: Day 2
 More from the Mellon/VMFA Bonnards: This is Barques au Bord de l'Océan, Arcachon, a watercolor and gouache from 1930.
For more on the Bonnard series, see below.
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The VMFA Bonnards: Day 1A
 Last month MAN was first to tell you that the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts had received seven Bonnard paintings from the estate of Paul Mellon. Also in that post was a JPEG of the best of the Bonnards that the VMFA received.
Each day this week MAN will feature another new VMFA Bonnard. Sure, I do this because I love Bonnard -- but also because I'll be spending a lot of time on travel this week. Here's the first one: The Pont de Grenelle and the Eiffel Tower, from circa 1912.
Related: The VMFA press release.
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Light and space and objecthood
 One of the neat things about the explosion of abstract art in the 20th century is that there's an abstract art history for everyone. Want abstraction built on systems and pared-down forms? You probably liked LACMA's Beyond Geometry show. Or what about the interplay between music, film and abstraction? The recent MOCA/Hirshhorn extravaganza Visual Music is for you. And for the more traditional there's the New York school. My favorite, from Flavin to Turrell and beyond, is light-based abstraction.
Fortunately for me, it's back. From Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project at the Tate Modern to Paul Chan's Turrell turn at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, contemporary artists are again exploring light as medium. A smart, engaging new show titled Artifical Light presents six works by seven artists, all of whom have integrated light into their work. The exhibition was recently on view at VCU's Anderson Gallery and will tour to MOCA North Miami's Goldman Warehouse, where it will be on view during Miami Fairs Week. The show was curated by the VMFA's John Ravenal (whose own museum is in the middle of a massive expansion.) Included in the show are Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Spencer Finch, Ceal Floyer, Ivan Navarro, Nathaniel Rackowe, and Douglas Ross.
While the work of some of the first-generation light artists made objects a part of the work -- Flavin's lights, Irwin's discs or scrims -- the art was first about color, perceptualism and/or illusion. Turrell, Nordman, and sometimes Wheeler went a step further by trying to hide whatever they could: lights, projectors, walls -- even space itself.
As we see in Artifical Light, many contemporary artists aren't interested in any of that. Ravenal's artists mix light with sculpture and respond to the luminous minimalism of Turrell or Nordman by bringing objecthood back. In fact, for each of the six artists here objects are more important than effect. Continued tomorrow.
Related: See images of each installation here.
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The week that was
It's been a busy week here. We've told you about:
That's a full week. See you Monday.
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Acquisition: Hirshhorn trades with Kelly
 MAN excloo: The Hirshhorn has a new Ellsworth Kelly: Red Yellow Blue #5 from 1968. The painting is on view now on the museum's third floor. (And hasn't been photographed yet, sorry.) Until a few days ago it was listed as "proposed exchange," a wall-text I'd never seen in a museum before.
The Hirsh's new painting is one of a number of Red Yellow Blues Kelly painted in the late 1960s. For example the Walker owns Red, Yellow, Blue III and the Milwaukee Art Museum owns R,Y,B II. The Hirshhorn's new painting is both particularly good and particularly huge: 89 inches by 166.5 inches.
Stranger is the story of how the Hirshhorn got its new Kelly: The artist called the museum and essentially offered to trade RYB#5 for a 1958 painting, Jersey, a 1972 Joseph Hirshhorn gift. As best as readers and I can remember, the Hirshhorn hasn't had Jersey on view since 2004 or so. (The painting and its exhibition history are off of the Hirsh's website.) The Guggenheim included Jersey in its 1996 Kelly retrospective.
The Hirshhorn also has a Kelly from roughly the same period and the same body of work from which Jersey came: Red White, from 1961.
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City Beautiful: It's back!
 I enjoyed this morning's Nicolai Ouroussoff NYT piece about the Whitney and it's era of architectural uncertainty. (I'd say 20 years qualifies as an 'era.') Ouroussoff's piece reminded me that parks and museums still go together.
For art museum planners, the City Beautiful movement is back. Back at the turn of the 20th-century, the City Beautiful folks advocated bringing big, lush, planned public parks into American cities as a kind of counter-weight to the grit of industrial urbanity. Quite often, as in Buffalo, New York, and St. Louis, an art museum was part of the park.
A hundred years later, we're seeing more and more museums find ways to be in parks. When MAMFW built its Ando, it surrounded itself with a mini-park, even a lake. FAMSF could have taken the de Young out of Golden Gate Park, but it stayed. In Arkansas, Crystal Bridges is building a park to surround the Waltons' museum of American art. The Miami Art Museum will be a part of that city's Bicentennial Park.
And now in New York: The High Line is not a massive park along the lines of Philly's Fairmount or St. Louis' Forest. The time to build new, big, urban park projects in America's older cities is probably long-past. But the High Line is a park, a small, new one, and apparently it will begin/end at an art museum.
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Go west, old museums, and grow with the city
 Interesting confluence of stories in the last week: In yesterday morning's NYT, it was Groundhog Day as The Gray Lady ran a second story on Whitney: Meatpacking. Last week, VVer Jerry Saltz advocated a Whitney expansion somewhere other than the Upper East Side. And today NYTer Roberta Smith writes the NYT's strongest criticism of MoMA, pointing out that the Tate Modern built better than MoMA did.
Now that you've read those three stories (you have, haven't you?) here's an idea: With the West Side football stadium plan dead, why not involve a couple of Manhattan museums in the next development plan? Make them the area's cultural anchors. (Here's a quick update on post-stadium development progress.)
The consensus (most loudly trumpeted by the tag-team duo of Saltz & Smith) is that MoMA under-built, so how about a MoMA Contemporary on the West Side? (Before MoMA built on 53rd Street it explored the idea.) It's become clear that MoMA has no interest in mixing the histories of 'modern art' and 'contemporary art' on 53rd Street, so if they're segregated there, why not give the contemporary work a home of its own, a place where the museum's curators can figure out what to do with it?
Neither the Guggenheim nor the Whitney has much room to show permanent collection works on the UES, so how about West Side museums that address that, as well as provide a place to show ambitious contemporary work? Dia says it will stay in NYC somewhere, but if not Chelsea where? And it'd be A-OK with me if the Asia Society had more exhibit space.
The fact is Manhattan's museums have fallen way, way behind their peers in San Francisco, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Detroit, Minneapolis, etc. in developing their facilities. NYC museum collections have grown as their space to show them has not. Saltz is right: New York's museums should think big. With a West Side plan they could catch up -- and maybe move ahead.
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MAN is officially back. Regular posting resumes today. I'll kick off the week by sharing another VMFA Bonnard: This is La Phare Bleu, a gouache and watercolor from 1935.
Ya think Bonnard and Matisse knew each other? And ya think they may have visited each other's studios in Nice? This is Bonnard's The Open Window from around 1919. (As with all the other Bonnards this week, it's a VMFA/Mellon painting.)
Jen Graves at The Stranger really got this one rolling, and now 
All eyes on Christie's tonight for the most-anticipated auction in several years. Here's 
LATer Suzanne Muchnic 
