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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
My 2006 top ten list
1.) Dada at the National Gallery. The most important American museum exhibition in many years. An intensely anti-war show at the foot of the U.S. Capitol. When no one raised a stink about it we should have known it was going to be an anti-war year at the polls.
 2.) Robert Rauschenberg's Combines at MOCA. Forget the Met's airport-conveyer-belt presentation (which opened a week before the end of 2005), MOCA's installation of Paul Schimmel's show was superb; the work as fresh as ever.
3.) Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins. The best contemporary painting show of the year. If Sillman were a younger male, then museums would be falling over themselves to show her work. (Similarly: Marilyn Minter.) Sillman should have already had a Hirshhorn Directions-level show somewhere.
4.) Courbet and the Modern Landcape at the Getty. It was a banner year for Courbet in the US as the Wadsworth and FAMSF both acquired major canvases. (Both purchases were first reported on MAN.) If you saw only the Walters presentation of this show, you missed the show.
5.) The Bloch-Bauer Klimts at LACMA. With a building project underway the museum could put together "just" $150 million (likely a museum-record offer) and lost out on adding these great works to its collection. Still, the Stephanie Barron installation out-did the Neue Galerie's show.
 6.) Robert Adams at the Getty. How strange is it that NYTer Michael Kimmelman complains about mad money in the art market... but then reviews (and end-of-the-year-lists) a commercial gallery's Robert Adams show instead of the Getty's wonderful, more comprehensive exhibit? Adams' photographs expose the contradictions that we've placed built into the American West.
7.) Societie Anonyme at the Hammer. A year after MoMA opened, this show was a welcome reminder that art history doesn't follow a single timeline. Wonderfully installed, too.
8.) The freebies: Indianapolis, Baltimore, the Walters, and more. In a year that saw $24 tickets for (legit, non-Tut) museum shows, many museums became free and many more re-dedicated themselves to staying that way.
9.) Robert Polidori's After the Flood. Painful and powerful. Best in book form, where the sheer weight of it all is stunning.
10.) Steven Cantor's What Remains. This documentary about Sally Mann is a moving portrait of an artist's life and challenges.
(Note: I reserve the right to go wobbly by adding to this list after I see several current NYC shows. And I could have linked to lots of MAN coverage of these 10 shows/etc. but I thought that would get a little dense. There's plenty in the archives via the search feature though.)
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Xmas begins now (plus some blog plugs)
We could see it in our site stats: Christmas in the art world started yesterday at about 3pm. So we're off too, back on Tuesday, Dec. 26 with MAN's 2006 top ten list. (If something really big happens we'll probably pop back on.) Next week we'll also feature a Q&A with an artist who had a show make that list, and news of Menil Collection acquisitions. Until then, some blogosphere plugs:
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Flavin tour to include LACMA
This morning's LAT has the news that the Michael Govan-co-curated Dan Flavin retrospective that opened at the National Gallery will make a stop at LACMA next May. Govan helped put the show together when he was at Dia; now he's LACMA's director. (At LACMA Govan has watched a new Renzo Piano building go up, mandated a major change in Piano's expansion plan, and has avoided talking to MAN.)
From our wish-list of retros: How about a Govan-and-Ann Temkin-curated Donald Judd retro for 2008 or 2009? It could start its US tour at LACMA, then to MoMA, then to...?
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 20, 2006 | Permanent
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To the NGA: 23 works from Paul Mellon
 Last month MAN was first to tell you about Paul Mellon's Bonnard-heavy bequest to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Today we're first to reveal that the Mellon estate also gifted (at least) 23 works to the National Gallery of Art. The works recently entered the museum's collection. (As you likely know, Mellon's father Andrew created the NGA. Odd: He picked his son-in-law David Bruce to be a founding trustee -- not Paul.)
Included in the Paul Mellon gift:
- Four Morandi still lifes;
- Seven Bonnard oil paintings (I haven't seen any JPEGs, but from scanning the list it appears that Mellon's best Bonnard went to VMFA);
- Two Delacroix studies;
- Two Bonheur bronzes;
- Two Barye bronzes; and
- Single works by Manet, Jongkind, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne, Sargent and Braque.
Some notes: The Manet is a portrait of novelist George Moore, likely unfinished. (According to the Met, the only complete Manet portrait of Moore is in the Met's collection.) The Sargent, an 1882 portrait of Beatrice Townsend, is pictured above. Oops: I had written that a Hopper was in the Mellon gift. It wasn't. This Hopper print was an NGA purchase.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 20, 2006 | Permanent
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Art in Miami: Abstract painting
Don't miss: Yesterday's Anne Truitt news.
 Stan Kaplan at Mary Goldman Gallery: Kaplan's abstract paintings were as good as any abstract painting I saw in Miami this year. He understands color, how to use it, and how to play color against color. (He is, after all, a California artist. Except, apparently, to the Rubells.) His colors are as Diebenkornian as ever, but now I see bits of Kandinsky. But what I mostly noticed in his recent work is a firmer understanding of how to build a painting, how to move the eye through an abstraction. In the painting here the two verticals on the right-hand side emphasize the frenzy of color on the left. Rigidity meets creative chaos.
Sarah Morris at Jay Jopling, Hetzler: Morris is the queen of archibstractionists, artists who mine modern and contemporary architecture for source material. (It's one of the hottest memes in contemporary painting -- I counted no fewer than two dozen painterly archibstractionists in Miami.) Morris' fantastic paintings, with their strong lines, their shiny, light-repelling colors are as impenetrable as the coldest modernist architecture. But once you get past the glare of her household gloss everything in her paintings makes sense. Has Morris been making the same paintings for five or six years? Yes. I wonder what's next...
Frank Nitsche at Max Hetzler: Nitsche may be my favorite mid-career German painter. In recent years he's built tightly compressed, flat, abstract paintings that weren't much bigger than a couple feet by a couple feet. At Hetzler's booth he showed a painting that was much larger, maybe five feet by three or three-and-a-half. And it still worked.
 Hugo Markl at Andre Schlechtriem: Markl's four-rectangle, marker pen-on-paper grids recall Sol LeWitt's ubiquitous colorful squares. But instead of lock-stepping into LeWitt's rigid systems, Markl begins to reject them, questioning order, classification and rigidity. The result is colorful bursts of vaguely ordered disorder. The hint of an underlying system remains, but its being interrupted by wavy lines, seemingly random black horizontals, the inability of lines to remain parallel to each other. A subtle metaphor for a world watching systems -- from Enron to global climate -- collapse?
Lari Pittman at Regen Projects: I don't know if Pittman belongs in this post, but oh well. It seemed like everybody in the main fair had a Pittman, but the best of the bunch was at his hometown Regen Projects. Like so much of Pittman's post-9/11 work it was a scary painting, one that seemed to question torture's role in contemporary society by juxtaposing a torturee against a tranquil, domestic scene. I've said this before and I'll say it again: Pittman is the painter of contemporary American issues.
Some other favorites: At Lelong, Kate Shepherd isn't a light-and-space painter, but she's certainly a color-and-space painter; John McLaughlin was plenty popular in the main fair with at least three galleries showing wonderful hard-edge works (earth to curators...); at Gregory Lind Sarah Bostwick showed an interesting take on the archibstraction trend: sculptural relief; at Elastic, Per Martensson's paintings took interior space in a Morandi-esque direction.
Related: Art in Miami: Riffing on earthworks (complete with a just-added Ian Burns photo).
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Anne Truitt gets her retrospective
 Back in October I listed 10 overdue museum shows. Right away I found out that one of them was indeed being planned: A Martin Puryear retro at MoMA. Today I learned that another Washington-based artist who was on my list is getting her due: Hirshhorn curator Kristen Hileman is organizing an Anne Truitt retrospective. Expect it to open in October, 2008. The Hirsh presentation will also feature the first major monograph on Truitt.
As I've said here plenty of times before, no minimalist sculptor was more overdue for a retrospective. (Second place: Larry Bell?) I bet that James Meyer, whose scholarship has helped to ensure Truitt's place in art history, thinks so too. Meyer places Truitt prominently in the narrative of his book Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties.
The tour has yet to be announced, but I hope that the Hammer, MOCA, MCA Chicago and the Whitney all get on the phone to the Hirsh first thing on Tuesday.
Related: In July I wrote about Truitt and Maryland's Eastern Shore. She passed away in 2004. Carolyn Zick posts a few passages from Prospect.
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Weekend wrap-up
Really good stuff this week:
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The NYT revisits reflexiveness
 
From the everything-old-is-new-again file: At left is a detail from Friday's NYT Arts & Leisure front page featuring Turkish artist Serkan Ozkaya's section-front-as-art-as-section-front. You can see the PDF of the entire page here. The Ozkaya/NYT collaboration is essentially Singin' In the Rain-style reflexiveness, updated for, well, last Friday.
In the same paper (and, of course, in Ozkaya's drawing) NYTer Randy Kennedy crisply explains how Ozkaya's drawing came to be. Kennedy writes with appropriate suspicion, slyly noting that Ozkaya regularly appropriates other artists' appropriations.
Add another one to the list: I'd guess that neither Kennedy nor Ozkaya knew about the Los Angeles Times' Calendar section front from Sunday, May 18, 1997 (back when newspapers were just beginning to use the 'net). The LAT section-front is a drawing by then-little-known painter Dave Muller. Like Ozkaya's piece, Muller's drawing was tied to the opening of an exhibition: Sunshine & Noir, Art in LA, 1960-1997 at the Louisiana Museum near Copenhagen. The LAT image is wider because back then the Sunday Calendar section was printed in tabloid form.
The process that Muller and the LAT used sounds extremely similar to the Ozkaya/NYT process: An LAT page designer did the layout, which was then sent to Muller who used it as a model for a pencil drawing with gouache. Muller sent the finished drawing to the LAT, which dropped in the photograph at left (Ruben Ortiz-Torres' 1991 Santo Nino Holy Kid, Guanajuato, Mexico), and which filled in some subheds at the extreme top of the page. The result was the Sunday section-front reproduced above. (The crease is not Muller-created -- it's part of the two-day-old photo of the nearly ten-year-old page.)
Related: Time magazine digs the trend too. Check out F. Scott Schafer's photo of Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert in this week's issue. The PS1 show referenced in Kennedy's story. Speaking of Muller, he has a show up now at Blum & Poe.
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Miami Art Museum gets engaged
 Related: Art at the fairs, part one.
The evolution of the Miami art museum scene continues ahead at breakneck speed. In just the last year the city has attracted a well-respected museum director and chosen the hottest starchitects to build that museum. During the most recent ABMB/fairs week Miami's private 'museums' showed new ambition, most clearly at the Rubell Family Collection which tried to present a museum-style, tightly-curated show. (Their heart was in the right place, I suppose, but the show was one of the worst I've seen all year.)
Today comes news that Terry Riley's Miami Art Museum and Miami Art Central, a private kunsthalle founded and funded by Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, have joined in a six-month-long partnership. (Fontanals-Cisneros is one of a relatively small number of big Miami collectors to sit on MAM's board.) After the engagement, the two institutions may formally marry. During the partnership MAM and MAC will develop exhibitions and other programming together. MAM will keep its Herzog + de Meuron building on track and MAC will continue to host shows in its (quite excellent) south Miami space.
So what does this all mean? The MAM-MAC partnership is the latest sign that Miami's much-vaunted collectors are buying into MAM as it transforms itself from a sub-regional museum into (it hopes) a museum of national import. (Earlier, Dennis Scholl started MAM's 'Collectors Council' in an effort to help boost MAM's tiny collection.)
MAC may have Miami's best exhibition program -- it's at least as good as MAM's. (Lorna Simpson?! Groan.) In the last two years MAC has hosted an excellent William Kentridge survey and a video show from the Pompidou. Last month I wrote that the video show "won't be a huge ABMB hit because it requires people to sit, watch, shut up and enjoy. Art fair visitors are not known for shutting up. A good thing, a sign of maturity: It's a show intended for a Miami audience."
All this said, I think that the Miami Herald went a little over the top in its coverage. Gugg Museum boss Lisa Dennison always gives great quote, but there's nothing Gugg-like about this semi-merger. And Fontanals-Cisneros is hardly going all-in -- her Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation will continue to operate from its own (excellent) space just north of downtown Miami.
I'll be interested to see what happens with CiFo: Of all the private spaces in Miami, the Cisneros-Fontanals kunsthalles are the most curatorially rigorous, the most museum-like. During ABMB/fairs week CiFO hosted two interesting shows: One of Latin American modernism from the Cisneros-Fontanals collection and a show about classification, also from the Cisneros-Fontanals collection. Just before the Miami shows opened CiFO hosted an exhibition of art made by 10 participants in its residency program. (That's right, TEN. I don't know if there are 10 residencies available in all of Washington, fer chrissakes.)
If Los Angeles doesn't watch out (and pony up), Miami's going to pass it as America's next museum capital.
Related: The Next Few Hours looks inside MAC to explain more.
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Who needs Project Runway when we have...
(OK, I don't believe my own headline. I want Season Four now!)
Surely you remember that the art world loves Project Runway. (Watching Mrs. Michael Govan on PR is the closest I've come to a real, live Govan.) The spawn of Runway is a show called Top Designer. It starts on Bravo in January. One of the contestants is NYC-based artist Ryan Humphrey [via], who shows with the MANpals at DCKT Contemporary. (Apparently the Top Designer web team hates the art world -- the misspellings in Humphrey's bio are kind of sad.)
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Art in Miami, part one
I have no idea how many posts I'll do on art I saw in Miami. Probably about half a dozen over the next few weeks. I've still got two Artissima/Turin-related posts to publish too. And hopefully I'll have a Burns photo any minute...
 Lead Pencil Studio @ Lawrimore Projects. Lead Pencil Studio, aka Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, describes itself as "a new voice in the emerging field created from the interdisciplinary overlap of architecture and site-specific art." (I'm tempted to call them "the art world's biggest over-consumer of adjectives.")
Earlier this year, near the Oregon/Washington border, LPS built Maryhill Double, a scaffolding-and-construction-netting piece of earth art. The piece challenged the monumentality of earth art, by setting aside a void in a massive landscape. I'd have given my left lobe to have been there. The piece reminds me of Rachel Whiteread's language, Robert Irwin's relationship to light, James Turrell's interest in volume, and a California impressionist's sense of color. I wanted to see much, much more than just the video that Lawrimore showed in Miami. Related: The Maryhill Double project page at Creative Capital, MhD on Flickr, John Motley visited for the Portland Mercury, Jen Graves interviewed the duo and wrote about them for The Believer, more links at Hankblog.
 Ian Burns at Spencer Brownstone: After seeing Burns' first solo show at NYC's Spencer Brownstone I asked: "Can you have more fun at a gallery show?" After Art Basel Miami Beach I could ask the same question about seeing Burns in a convention center.
Burns presented three works. Each was a puzzling homemade, wood, nails, and construction-paper-built Rube Goldberg-machine topped by a flat-screen TV. The Goldberg-cum-Burnses were in constant motion, herking here, jerking there. On the TV screen something seemed to be happening, but it wasn't immediately obvious exactly what. Eventually, after 15 or 20 seconds, I figured out that a little Goldberg-cum-Sony video camera was relaying visuals from the contraptions up to the TVs. Then, finally, I realized what Burns had built: One work was a miniature stand-in for Lightning Field, and the same for Tilted Arc and for Spiral Jetty. (That one was broken when I was there. And I'm not sure if it took me so long to figure this all out because I'd seen umpteen thousand artists in four days or if it was because that process of realization is part of what makes the pieces good.)
Somehow, in a contraption the size of a big shoebox, Burns captured all the childish glee I feel visiting earth art in Utah or New Mexico. Burns also cleverly critiques earth art, pointing out that you don't need machismo, scale, acreage, basalt and stainless steel to captivate. All you need is a Home Depot card and some imagination.
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Tony Feher at Chinati, on Bad at Sports
 Last year, when I was visiting the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, the staff told me to wander down to yonder building to see what Tony Feher was up to. Feher wasn't on site, but he was building an installation, step-by-step, over a period of months.
So one morning I strolled down to Feher's building. Just as I was about to walk through the doorway, into the installation, I noticed a rather large rattlesnake sitting in the weeds in front of the door. I suddenly decided that I should be somewhere else. The next day: Same thing. I gave up.
The Feher installation is all done. I'll have to go back to see the whole thing -- three buildings in all. Check out the Feher-in-Marfa pictures on Flickr.
Feher, a Wal-Martist, discussed how he ended up in Marfa and how he made his Chinati installation on the art podcast Bad at Sports, to which I would have linked ages ago if I'd figured out how. (I'm a non-iTuneser. You can subscribe to Bad at Sports here or visit their blog here. The iTunes-enabled link to the podcast is on the blog.) The BaS crue gets super guests: recent shows have featured Francesco Bonami, Kerry James Marshall, and Rhona Hoffman. Check it out.
(Sidenote: BaS is based in Chicago, which reminds me that so much of the best art-focused new media is based outside of NYC.)
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A few more bloggers on ABMB
Tomorrow I'll start posting about the art I saw in Miami. In the meantime, more bloggers have been posting about the fair. (Side note: Even though most of has had to fly 1,000 miles to Miami, isn't it interesting how many more people are blogging ABMB than blogged the disaster that was the 2006 Whitney Biennial? I'm only linking to a tiny part of what's out there.)
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 | Permanent
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The ICA Boston opens
It has been submitted to this blog's management (by about a dozen of you) that we were a bit flip in our treatment of the ICA Boston's opening. That's probably true. Of course, if the museum wanted outside-of-Massachusetts attention, it couldn't have picked a worse weekend to open. (The contemporary art world was in Miami, of course.) And I was rather dismissive of the Boston Globe's web feature of the opening because, well, it looks like an advertorial and the Globe's website is so confusing that the only part of it I bother reading is Geoff Edgers' entertaining blog.
So the ICA: It's the first new museum built in Boston since before antibiotics were invented. The best thing is this: If you're money and you're in Boston, there's a shiny new building to tempt you away from the Mess that Malcolm (Routinely) Makes over at the MFA. Digital camera-owners love it: There are already ~500 ICAB photos on Flickr. Steve Garfield's blog has a groovy video of the ICAB's new glass elevator.
As for the ICA itself, I can't tell you anything; I've not been (I was in Miami) and I'm not planning any Boston visits in the near future. The ICAB's website is so laden with Flash and pop-ups that don't seem to work that it's pretty useless to a blogger, so no links beyond this one to the front page.
Highlights from the Globe's coverage include Geoff Edgers' 3,000-word look at how the ICA was conceived and built, and Edgers' questions about whether the thing will work. Missing from the Globe's coverage was a big-think piece from art critic Ken Johnson, but he's new to Boston so...
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 | Permanent
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The new pitch for K-12 arts education
In today's NYT, columnist Thomas Friedman makes an interesting backdoor pitch for arts education funding for grades K-12. It's not online for free (the world in which M. Kimmelman is free and T. Friedman is not is warped, possibly even cruel), so here's the relevant section:
Tomorrow, Mr. [Marc] Tucker’s organization is coming out with a report titled "Tough Choices or Tough Times," which proposes a radical overhaul of the U.S. education system, with one goal in mind: producing more workers — from the U.P.S. driver to the software engineer — who can think creatively.
"One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other," said Mr. Tucker. Thus, his report focuses on "how to make that kind of thinking integral to every level of education."
That means, he adds, revamping an education system designed in the 1900s for people to do "routine work," and refocusing it on producing people who can imagine things that have never been available before, who can create ingenious marketing and sales campaigns, write books, build furniture, make movies and design software "that will capture people’s imaginations and become indispensable for millions."
That can't be done without higher levels of reading, writing, speaking, math, science, literature and the arts. We have no choice, argues Mr. Tucker, because we have entered an era in which "comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to the good life" and in which the constant ability to learn how to learn will be the only security you have.
Anecdotally, what I've seen happen is this: Arts education in the public schools has been slashed in recent decades while state/local governments have increased education-related funding that is available to museums. This redistribution has resulted in arts education overall having been cut to 2006 pennies on the, say, 1980 dollar. Museums now try to do what schools did.
I haven't seen any research on this, whether I'm right, whether this funding shift works, whether a Phoenix Central School District field trip to the Heard Museum does anyone any good. I suspect it doesn't work but that it makes a lot of people feel warm and fuzzy. But if there's research out there, I'd love to see it.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 | Permanent
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In Miami: Borders dissolve
 Everywhere I looked in Miami I saw the art world evolving. Lines between gallery shows, fair displays, and museum shows dissolved as everyone embraced the effluvia. While it's always dangerous to proclaim that the art world turned at this moment, I felt like I was watching something change. Galleries and private collectors both tried to act like museums. Museums tried to be tour guides. Old media didn't know what to do with the whole thing and lost out to blogs. Sure, this has all been happening for a while -- but this year there was a difference: In Miami borders blurred -- and everyone has stopped trying to pretend that they aren't.
To start: For years every contemporary curator I know has denied that their museum bought work in Miami. I'd always point to them something that they had indeed bought there and they'd sheepishly back off: "Well, yeah, but..."
This year the institutional posing ended -- and at all levels. A contemporary art museum momentarily forgot about its $4 million budget deficit and rented a plush bus in which it ferried its trustees from the Rubells to Pulse and so on. (Here's hoping that each trustee paid $250K for their bus pass.) Time and time again as I walked through ABMB I bumped into curators I knew and tried to say hi. "Can't talk now," they'd say. "Gotta find my director." One collector/trustee told me that his museum's director hit the fair with two cell phones: One for curators, one for board members. And four curators have already emailed me to tell what they scored in Miami.
Meanwhile, while museums were shrugging off institutional cachet for the weekend, collectors were trying to shrug into the imprimatur of authority. The Rubells presented an installation called "Red Eye: L.A. Artists from the Rubell Family Collection," an atrocious show that said far more about the collectors (and their plenty-apparent lack of taste) than it did about what's going on in the specific geography billed in the show's title. (Heck, that title also said more about the collectors than the art: The exhibit was named after the flights the Rubells allegedly took to or from California.) While I was asking curators what they bought, curators were asking me what I thought of the Rubells' show. I'd tell them I thought it was a disaster and several looked relieved, apparently feeling that collectors still weren't curators.
But maybe dealers are. Richard Serra's Corner Diamond (in Nordenhake's ABMB booth) couldn't have been better displayed at a museum. (And knowing it was leaning up against a temporary, rickety bit of drywall even made it more impactful.) A 1957 John McLaughlin painting at Michael Kohn rhymed with a Carsten Nicolai across the aisle at Eigen+Art. How often do you see two works 50 years playing off of each other in such proximity at contemporary museums?
 Meanwhile, at NADA, I found myself thinking that one recent contemporary art museum group show could have been a NADA booth. At the press opening of that museo-exhibit, the curator had said that she'd long liked the artists in her show and she'd created a construct so that she could work with them. How's that different from what a dealer does? Galleries, even young ones on the third floors of decrepit buildings overlooking taxi repair shops, have done enough fairs that they know how to put together tight, coherent installations. And dozens did.
If anything, festivalism-hedge-fund-style forces curators to really think through what they put together. They've gotta find the memes, a la Artificial Light, the consensus curated hit-of-the-fair. There were plenty of memes to be found: Lots of art about masks. And societal degeneration. And highly intricate, but ultimately Seinfeldian drawing. And artists doodling on photographs, trying to return the artist's hand to an over-Photoshopped-'n'-c-printed medium. And art about architecture, be it painters making 'archibstractions' or sculptors riffing on Gordon Matta-Clark (whose influence was everywhere). Come to think of it: Why should curators be ashamed about buying in Miami? Everyone brought their best stuff.
Except for the media, who, understandably, still don't know how to cover an art fair. (Is it a commercial event? A party? A scoting trip? Something else? The week before the fair the NYT Sunday Magazine smartly covered its bases by presenting Frieze as all three.) In Miami, the NYT's Guy Trebay focused on the party, so much so that he rebirthed Kenyan-born Wangechi Mutu as a Chinese artist. The Art Newspaper was stuffed with pointless party news and with millionaires whining about their dumpy hotels. NYTer Roberta Smith was typically thoughtful, and Google News counts hundreds of ABMB stories on everything from Jay-Z dropping $40K on a chair to a Bloomberg story that sourcelessly claims that up to $400 million was spent on art in Miami. But the absences were as notable as the presences; The media that skipped the fair -- the LAT, NPR -- inexplicably missed America's Venice, our contemporary survey capitalist-style.
I'm still processing individual works -- unlike curators or collectors, I can let things germinate a bit. Over the next week or two MAN will feature specific artists and works that I saw and liked. I'm sure other blogs will too (see below).
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Beginning the recaps
Before I weigh in with some kind of macro-Miami post, I want to spotlight a bunch of bloggers who did a good job of seeing and posting. In general I thought the blogged coverage of the fairs has been at least on part with the dead-tree coverage: More interested in the art, more informed about it, more curious in seeking it out, less random assignation of artists to even more random countries. (Now you really want to see my next post, don't you?)
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Weekend wrap-up
Between openings in Boston, at Yale and the usual stuff, we missed a lot while we were in Miami.
- MOCAD(etroit): Missing ten things;
- The Boston Globe has a special (online) section about the new Boston ICA. At least I think it does -- it rather closely resembles an advertorial. And somehow there's no Ken Johnson review there. This is why I hate, hate, hate the Globe's website: Can. Never. Find. Anything.
- NYTer Nicolai Ouroussoff reviewed the ICA Boston and Louis Kahn's renovated Yale Art Gallery. LATer Christopher Hawthorne did Boston too.
- I like the idea of Doris Salcedo being in a show about portraiture; so does David Bonetti.
- TimeOut NY ranked the NYC art critics and Jerry Saltz came out on top. But: What a pointless exercise! First, who reads the media from only one city anymore?! Next, all of the people on the voting panel are cultural insiders. The measure of a general-interest-pub critic's import should be whom outside his field he influences, not how many Whitney curators read him.
- Remember all those Case Study Houses made pretty by California architectural photographers such as Julius Shulman? Made for the middle class, now they'll cost you millions, says Christopher Hawthorne.
- Call me old-fashioned, but: If you want to give, give. If you want to keep, keep.
- Grace Glueck on the passing of Robert Rosenblum.
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Museum acquisitions sidenotes
On the Cusp, the darn-fine Indy-based art blog, has additional news about the IMA's transparency with regard to museum acquisitions -- especially purchases. You'll be stunned; Gallerists may not be pleased
We've done three museum acquisition wish-lists so far on MAN (links to the other two are at the bottom of the post below this one) and between those and shoot-the-breeze convos with curator friends a couple things have stood out to me:
- Museums want to expand their collections of minimalism and photography. Early Robert Morris is on everyone's list;
- Even as museums want to add photo, beyond early Cindy Sherman there's not much agreement on whom;
- Museums want early video art, say 1950s-early; and
- Julie Mehretu is everyone's favorite contemporary/young painter.
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Museum wish-list: Indianapolis
MAN is back. I'm going to take a day to digest and to process the Miami fairs, so we'll start today by firmly grounding ourself in bricks-and-mortar...
 In September I posted a list of the top ten art museum endowments. The Indianapolis Museum of Art clocked in at No. 9, with $345 million. That surprised me -- and more than a few MAN readers who emailed to ask if I'd made a mistake.
Maybe we shouldn't be surprised: The IMA has some fine collections, particularly of post-impressionist painting. But its modern and contemporary collection is a work-in-progress: The IMA has some high points: a nice Turrell, a good Judd progression piece, and more recently excellent Irwin and Sandback. After that it gets a little hit-and-miss. (The IMA didn't have a contemporary curator until 1985.) But the IMA's contemporary acquisitions expenditures are on an upswing -- to around $1 million last year. Now seemed a good time to ask IMA contemporary curator Lisa Freiman what she wants.
Art & Nature Park: The $30 million project will introduce contemporary art installations into a 100-acre park (complete with a 30-acre lake) that is adjacent to the IMA. The first phase, installed by 2009, will include works by 10 artists. The list will be released in February.
Sculpture: Freiman said that the museum wants to beef up its minimalist holdings, especially because many of the pioneering figures are underrated (and therefore undervalued). Freiman wants some Anne Truitt (her Truitt mention was unprompted by me, I swear) and added that Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and early Robert Morris are on the wishlist too. The museum has a 1990 LeWitt wall drawing in its foyer and Freiman would like an early sculptural piece so that Indy can see LeWitt in 3-D. The museum also wants an Oldenburg soft sculpture from 1963 or 1964.
Freiman is also looking for Petah Coyne, Roni Horn, Tony Oursler, Diana Thater, Tara Donovan, Spencer Finch, and an edition-of-one Teresita Fernandez.
Painting: Freiman wants to add some of the "eccentric abstraction artists" such as Yayoi Kusama, early Lucas Samaras, and Louise Bourgeois. ("Not a spider.") She'd love some ab-ex, but acknowledges that it's out of the museum's price range. Right now the IMA's holdings from that period consist of David Smith, George Rickey, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell.
 Like many museums, the IMA tries to buy out of exhibits it creates. Last year the IMA hosted an Amy Cutler show and purchased one of the four paintings Cutler made in 2005 (above: Dwelling). Next October the museum will host Ingrid Calame, who is basing a body of work on tracings of skidmarks at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Freiman wants one of the paintings that will be in that show.
Freiman also wants Ellen Gallagher, Shirazeh Houshiary, and, more optimistically, Gerhard Richter and Julie Mehretu.
Photography: As with many museums, the IMA is looking to substantially upgrade its photography holdings. The IMA recently bought two Joel Sternfelds, a Crewdson, and work by Jeremy Hobbs, a Chicago-based photographer whose work Freiman says has been especially popular in the IMA's galleries. The wish-list includes Zoe Leonard, Gabriel Orozco, Alec Soth, Gillian Wearing, Wolfgang Tillmans, Julie Moos (at right), Laura Letinsky, and vintage Rosler, Antin, Piper, Sekula, and Baldessari.
And first on MAN: The IMA is looking to expand its contemporary program into design. The museum is looking to hire a design curator.
Related: Prior wish-lists: MCA San Diego, Hirshhorn (with part two). Indy has an excellent art blog: On the Cusp.
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Helpful ABMB links
 I'm bumping this up because I'm off to Miami. All the Getty news is immediately below. No time to tell you about Eli Broad's collection hanging, the Seattle Art Museum's new painted justification for deacecssioning, or more. Sorry. But I wanted to bump up these links.
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MAN Q&A: New Getty Trust boss James Wood
 First on MAN: Earlier this afternoon (EST) I talked with new Getty Trust president and CEO James Wood. Our conversation touched on some major issues, such as the Getty Museum's dispute with Italy, as well as some more abstract ideas about what the Getty Trust should be.
(See here for a quick post on the hire, and see here for the Getty's press release. LATer Christopher Reynolds has an early write-up. For some goofy reason it's under the banner "Entertainment News.")
MAN: Over the last ten months the Getty Trust has cleaned house of much senior staff and its board chair left too. Is it done? Do you think there’s more to do in that respect?
JW: I think they have accomplished most of what needed to be done. At the same time the Getty, any big not-for-profit institution in today’s world, [must demonstrate] eternal vigilance. I think that what I am going to do… If I was to take two words, what I want to do is focus on the mission, defining what its essence is; and integrity.
MAN: As the third largest foundation in America (after Gates and Ford), it seems to me that the Getty Trust should provide a bully pulpit from which the Trust's president can address important issues. However over the last number of years the leader of the Trust did not – and probably could not – do that. Do you agree that your new position should provide you with a bully pulpit, and if so, how do you plan to use it?
JW: I can certainly agree with the first — yes, the opportunity is there. Exactly how to use it — I would want to go slowly until I know more. The very fact that the pulpit is this high leaves me feeling an added need to really understand both the opportunities here and the people. There are so many people here I want to hear first-hand from. This search [that resulted in my being hired] has been very confidential. If there's any frustration it's that there are so many people here I haven't had a chance to talk to yet.
But there is one word in the Getty mission statement, talking about the visual arts and their capacity to build a more civil society. If the Getty can't contribute on that sort of level, then I don't think it is providing the leadership that it ought to and really must. Our society is, I think, in need of the kind of civility that the arts can bring. That doesn't mean that the arts aren't outrageous or rambunctious and all that, but the arts are concerned with truth, and that's really the nub of all this.
MAN: You may be brand new at the Getty, but certainly you've thought about the ongoing dispute with Italy. What, if any, role will you have in that, and will you jump into that right away?
JW: Certainly not right away. I haven't had the chance to sit down with [Getty Museum director Michael Brand] yet. He's the point person on all this. I think he's doing a very good job in an understandably difficult situation. I want to learn about it as fast as possible. He's going to be the lead negotiator with Italy. As with so many of us, Italy has been central to my own artistic and aesthetic development. I'm confident that we’re going to find a fair and equitable way to move ahead.
MAN: And the same with Greece and Turkey (which is saber-rattling on antiquities issues, though not at the Getty)?
JW: Yes.
MAN: One of the issues that the Getty has faced for years is that the Meier in Brentwood, and the Villa in Malibu are physically disconnected from Los Angeles. The Getty has never felt like a part of the fabric of the city. I know you don't have any Los Angeles ties, but is this something you've thought about and is it something that you need to address?
JW: It's certainly something I've thought about. Specific answers… No, that would be presumptuous. But one of the attractions of coming here in the abstract sense is that there's no question that Los Angeles and New York, in 30 different ways in my opinion, are the two most dynamic incubators of contemporary art and the visual arts and how they deal with the rest of the country.
Another tremendous plus in my mind is that the visual arts institutions in this city are led by an absolutely terrific group of people that I’ve known for a long time. Look at the institutions here. One of the things that quite excites me is that you've got the whole spectrum, from the Hammer, to MOCA; from historic moments in time, to institutions that do it all. How the Getty fits in — I haven't got the answer yet, but the dialogue that is possible is one that the Getty can learn a lot from.
MAN: In recent years, in the Munitz years really, the Museum's pace of acquisitions has slowed. You've written a great deal (most recently in Whose Muse?) about how important it is for museums to actively collect. Do you want the Museum to return to its previous acquisitive ways?
JW: I'm not going to get too specific because I need to know more about the priorities of the different collecting areas. Collecting is absolutely essential to the metabolism of an institution like this. And that's not just collecting art, but collecting collections, and to go beyond that to collecting people. You need to keep growing.
The whole question is to focus on what's going to be the most intelligent way to use the means this institution has to make Los Angeles more cosmopolitan. One of the very appealing things about the Getty to me is that its collecting opportunities are really quite open. We were not left with an iron-clad restriction, so the opportunity is there to make the most of changing times — both in terms of the legality of acquisitions and in the cost and the importance of different cultures for both Los Angeles and the nation.
MAN: Given that Los Angeles is one of the two big producers of contemporary art in the United States and one of the four biggest producers in the world (to say nothing of LA's other creative industries), what should the Getty Trust’s relationship to contemporary art be?
JW: Contemporary art, contemporary culture is the water we swim in. The Getty needs to be very sensitive to that. Does that automatically mean we start competing with these other institutions in town that are collecting contemporary so brilliantly? I would argue not at all. I would say that the icons from St. Catherine's is the kind of thing that is essential to have happen in a metropolitan area where young artists are figuring out how to express their own culture. Show me any great artist and usually they will say, 'Here are the moments in the past I used to, in effect, learn how to deal with the present.' History doesn't have to be revoked from the contemporary. To me it's quite the opposite.
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New Getty President and CEO: James Wood
UPDATE: A MAN Q&A with James Wood should be online by 2:45pm ET.
We had an inkling... First on MAN: The new president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust is James Wood. He'll start work in Los Angeles in February. UPDATE: Read MAN's Q&A with James Wood here.
Wood, 65, ran the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly a quarter of a century, from 1980-2004. Prior to directing the AIC, Wood was the director of the St. Louis Art Museum for five years. He has maintained his St. Louis ties by chairing the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.
Interim president/CEO Deborah Marrow will return to running the Getty Foundation in February.
What we think: Wood is a first-class choice. I wrote back in February that it was important for the Getty to hire an art person to run the Trust, and Wood has strong art world credentials.
I also wrote that I hoped that the Getty would hire someone with Los Angeles ties. Wood has none. He sits on the boards of the Clark Art Institute, the IFA at NYU, HUAM, and the RISD museum. Oh well. There's no question it's more important that the Getty be run by an art guy.
In addition to the issues discussed here ad absurdem for several years, one of the Getty's biggest problems in recent years has been a brain drain, an exodus of top-notch talent. Expect Wood to be a stabilizing force. I think the staff would have loved anybody with an art background, but Wood's background should be especially appealing.
Finally: The flow of Easterners heading to Los Angeles continues. New Yorkers Annie Philbin and Gary Garrels went to the Hammer. New Yorker Michael Govan runs LACMA. Michael Brand went from Virginia to the Getty Museum. And now Wood to the Getty Trust. (And who could forget: MOCA's Jeremy Strick is an ex-AICer. So with Wood at the Meier-on-the-hill, maybe we're one step closer to Michael Kimmelman's fantasy of the Getty buying MOCA, ha ha.)
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Getty: Could this be the week?
MAN hears buzzing in Brentwood about the possibility that there will be a major Getty announcement this week, perhaps as soon as today. (In case you've been in a cave: The Getty has lacked a permanent president/CEO since Barry Munitz bought a get-out-of-Meier-free card for $250,000 almost 10 months ago. MAN broke the story of Munitz's resignation here. And as I've previously noted, the Getty has been cleaning house in an effort to attract top prez/CEO candidates.)
To the surprise of most Getty observers, the Getty's search for a boss has been conducted in near-perfect secrecy, with no word of candidates or finalists leaking out to, well, people such as me. (Dammit!) But in addition to the sudden uptick in chatter, MAN hears that the Getty's web team has been told to be ready to move quickly on a significant update as soon as today...
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Great moments in GawkerForum: November
On Frieze's fair: "Jan Verwoert—ever the optimist—came out for the magazine/fair. Never mind conflicting interests or divisive exclusions, Frieze is an 'independent project'—and economically self-sufficient to boot." -- Jennifer Allen. I think I just died. There may not be a magazine in the world more thick with conflicts of interest than Artforum/GawkerForum. Heck, the magazine even sometimes tries to hide its abundant conflicts with flimsy pseudonyms. And it still has the stones to rip on Frieze? HAHAHAHAHAHA.
 "Hans-Ulrich Obrist 'tries to read a book a day and interview a person every day,' marveled [Massimilio] Gioni by way of introduction. Clearly revved up, and talking ridiculously fast in a barrage of Swiss-accented word pellets (does he read a book a day aloud?), Obrist enthused about his curatorial activities with the zeal of an Asperger’s case perorating about train schedules. My notes from his flyby discourse are goulash: something about 'polyphony... a less homogenized idea of globalization... exhibition as a time line... I would like to talk to students in China... Agamben.' He showed a 'speech bubble pavilion' where he’d staged a series of conversations. He’s passionate, OK? Perhaps more about gobbling and spewing discourse than digesting it. -- Rhonda Lieberman. Uh. Wait. That's a completely tight, super-smart, awesome paragraph, a spot-on takedown of Obrist.
"Attempting to avoid the promised crowds at the PR extravaganza, I arrived early to get a good look at the galleries." -- Andrew Berardini. "I will now fail to tell you about the art at any of them," he might have added. "But I will tell you what beer people drank at each and every one."
In keeping with tradition, I'd love to make fun of what Linda Yablonsky wrote but I don't understand a word of it. But I'm pretty sure that Yablonksy should read this bit of gobbledygook about Freud (I think?) from Rhonda Lieberman. (I giveth, I taketh away.)
"...at the invitation of Michael Govan, the museum’s universally admired new director..." -- Andrew Berardini. In the midst of a bizarrely uninformed, mind-numbingly dumb wander through Los Angeles, Berardini drops this ass-kiss. Aside to Andrew: I don't know that I admire Govan, which shoots your whole brown-nosing sentence to heck. (I'd consider 'admiring' Govan, but I don't know what I think of him. Strangely, LACMA won't let me talk to him.)
"When it was time for the Le Baron DJs to take control of the night, I decided to head home so as to save up a little energy for the rest of the week. There would be so much fun to choose from, including a very St.-Germain-des-Prés dinner held by Almine Rech at the Café de Flore in honor of Joseph Kosuth and the Ruinart party organized by Praz-Delavallade on Avenue Foch. Or why not go to Kamel Mennour’s "Destricted" party, celebrating the X-rated work of Larry Clark, Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, et al.?" -- Nicolas Trembley. Nyah-nyah nyah nyah-nyah. I'm cooler than you are.
Previously: April, June, July, August, September, October.
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Brashear v. Wheelock
 I'm pretty sure the folks at the National Gallery of Art put this together just for me: On Dec. 3 the NGA and the Washington Capitals are participating in an event together. The NGA is opening its skating rink for the season and Caps tough guy Donald Brashear and penalty-killing ace Boyd Gordon will be there to show the kiddies how to deliver a clean check. (The NGA is also using the occasion to remind us that they own the best Gilbert Stuart on the planet: The Skater.)
But the real news is this: MAN hears that there is some bad blood boiling between one of the Caps and National Gallery curator Arthur Wheelock. NGA sources tell us that Wheelock thinks Brashear is a chump, a goon, and an overrated pugilist. "A real man would have kicked Darryl Sydor's ass last night," Wheelock was overheard saying at the NGA, a refrence to how Brashear appeared to skate away from a confrontation with Sydor, a Dallas Stars defenseman, last night.
My Caps sources (I'm a season-ticket holder) have told me that Brashear thinks that his mother paints satin gowns better than Gerard ter Borch did. "Gerard?!? Didn't he sing that lame "Rico Suave" song?" Brashear said when asked for comment. "Please. If you're all into 17th-century Dutch painting, Judith Leyster is way more deserving of a retrospective than ter Borch. Think of all the culturally ingrained sexism she faced!" (Snap! Brash did not just go there!) Our prediction: Wheelock and Brashear drop the gloves on Sunday.
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Miami preview?
For a few days I've been considering whether or not I should offer any sort of ABMB preview. I decided against it: You'll all be there and you've all been there before. (MAN's traffic during ABMB is about the same as MAN's traffic over Christmas, for Serrano's sake.) My one thought would be not to forget about the curated shows, particularly Artificial Light at MOCA North Miami's Goldman Warehouse. A list of several is here. Dining recs from a local are here.
So just two quick thoughts: First, the one I offered on Wednesday about trying to place ABMB in the right historical construct.
Also: Every year I see more artists in Miami. ABMB is not just a commercial event, it's the contemporary art industry's annual convention. What does it mean that more artists seem to go every year? I'm not sure. Maybe I'll ask a few next week.
Which reminds me: MAN will publish on Monday next week, and then I'll be off from Tuesday through Friday. (I may stick my head above the palm trees to link to a piece of mine that'll probably run in the Los Angeles Times next wek.)
Later today: When hockey and art come together. Really.
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