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Half a dozen drunk Santas staggering down the street in front of Ambach & Rice looked in the window and decided to join the opening celebration for Grant Barnhart’s exhibit. When one grabbed the hips of a fiberglass figure and began to simulate a sex act, gallery co-owner Amanda Kitchings pointed at the front door.

“Out,” she said.

“Come on, lady,” he said.

“You have to leave,” she told him. “Do I go into your home and dry hump your cyclops?”

They left. Barnhart’s Beg For It continues through Jan. 24. Review to follow.

From Walter Kirn’s Up In The Air:

Through the moving windows of the tram I view this month’s art installation: foil-propellers stuck to  the walls of the tunnel. Hundreds of them. They shiver and whirl as the trains gain speed past them. How much was the artist paid for this? Who paid him? Is this where the airport’s per-ticket surcharge goes? Last month’s masterpiece was a row of masks with progressively wider mouths and eyes that seemed to open as the viewer rode by, climaxing in a howl, a staring scream.

Art. It always makes me feel diminished. There’s something smug about it. Cocky, cold. Public works commissioners just love this stuff. It eases their bad consciousnesses, I suspect, for hiring their nephews and steaming open sealed bids. Behind every sculpture garden, a great crime.

In time for the holidays, Kirn’s sky-high hero of therapeutic capitalism has hit the screen in the body of George Clooney.

Via

Winter view, via

Young mother alone in the snow with her children pauses as snow leaks into her party shoes, head upturned, stop sign behind her. The image is a protest sign that pushes past the literal to lodge itself deeper into consciousness: Stop the wars.

Cotter, husband, army, 2009.

Fullerton is part of a members exhibition at Photographic Center Northwest curated by Western Bridge’s Eric Fredericksen, reception tonight, 6-9.

Storm Tharp and Jessica Jackson Hutchins will represent the Northwest in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Excellent choices. New York Times story here. Complete list here. Out of 55 artists, 18 are painters. Two Coats of Paint celebrates with links for the 18.

Tharp

Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Lange

Nes

Thomas Hoving was a one-of-a-kind museum director. After him, directors split into two camps: the populists primarily concerned with what plays at the gate and the gatekeepers, determined to preserve their idea of aesthetic standards.

He died today at age 78. (Randy Kennedy obit here.)
 
He invented the blockbuster but was most proud of his ability to spot a fake. He’d freely admit that he sympathized more with forgers than with the collectors and museum professionals they fooled.  In False Impressions: The Hunt for Big Time Art Fakes, he wrote about a favorite, Frank X. Kelly, whom Hoving met while an
undergraduate. A painting restorer, Kelly played the horses, knew
baseball like the beating of his own heart, smoked constantly, ate
badly and made art fakes.

Hoving found some unfinished Monets in the stacks and
confronted him. The old man promised to teach Hoving his trade secrets
if the young man kept quiet. Hoving learned that a good fake looks
juicier, more appealing, than the original. The surface only mattered,
as deeper analysis produced conflicting information. Cooking up a
complicated provenance for the piece was unnecessary and often made the
deal more suspicious.

On tour for the book in Seattle, he took care to be quotable. Choice samples from a 1996 interview here.

On museum directors:

They’re muddled progressives, staunch conservatives or the petrified. Especially the petrified. I don’t think they have any idea what they’re doing. I was director (at the Met) from 1967 to 1978. That’s too long. Directors should get out after seven years. After that, they’re either too tired or too gutless to do the job.

On fakes:

Everybody wants to believe they’ll find a Ming vase at a flea market, pay $1.89 for it and sell it for $1 million. There are serious collectors who’ve fallen for Degas pastels painted in oils. They can’t tell. And when they find out, they cover it up.

On his contribution:

I’m a popularizer. I opened the place up. I wanted to see John Travolta pick up girls on the steps of the Met. I tried to make the Met a subway stop. I was the first to hang big banners outside. Our audience was old and the audience at the Museum of Modern Art was young. I wanted to steal Modern’s audience.

Here’s a 2008 video of Hoving lavishing praise on Dale Chihuly.

Fuse Eva Hesse with Richard Tuttle and you’ve in Heide Hinrichs territory. She has Hesse’s love of the ungainly protuberance and the heavy edit of Tuttle’s subtlety. In my mother’s darker moments, she liked to say, “I wish they’d drop the bomb so we could go underground.” Hinrichs is an artist of the solitary’s apocalypse. Those who stagger back into the light after losing everything would be lucky to find her sculptures on the floor, the flayed skin of soccer ball bladders hung on a wire or deflated inner tubes curled as if smoked in a fire.

Born in Germany and currently living in Seattle, she is the subject of a solo exhibit curated by Marisa Sanchez at the Seattle Art Museum, part of a series titled SAM NEXT, whose focus is alternatively regional and international.

The objects in this show, both found and fabricated, collectively create a kind of landscape. There is solace in its silence, a quiet that enfolded the viewer who walks inside it. A few weeks ago, I saw a small group of rowdy middle-schoolers enter and respond, their hush a tribute.

Through June 13.

In Gold Rush, Charlie Chaplin dined on the sole of a shoe. Not to be outdone, contemporary artists offer a range of similarly dubious treats. (We’re a long way from Dutch still lifes.)

Jesse Bernstein:

I sneak a cream of wheat sandwich and stale sweet roll, wash it down with juice squeezed from a leather belt.

For the fast food crowd who can overlook an indictment as long as it comes with ketchup, there’s Jack Daws’ memorial for the World Trade Center.

TWO TOWERS, 2003
Chromogenic print of artist-made construction from McDonald’s French fries and Heinz ketchup
photographed by Richard Nichol
50 x 40 inches, Ed/10

For those whose culinary standards are a little higher, Dan Webb provides a Feast.

For dessert, Greely Myatt has the cake. (More on Myatt from Nicole Griffin on SOAP.)