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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

MIT Promises To Put More Arts In ITS DNA

Leaving aside the List Visual Arts Center, we don’t usually think of the arts as foremost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But today it announced a forward-thinking inititative — a new Center for Art, Science & Technology — intended to propel MIT’s goal of integrating the arts into its curriculum and research. CAST, as it will be known, is “A joint initiative of the office of the Provost and the schools of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.” Evan Ziporyn, a music professor of Music, has been names as CAST’s inaugural director.

The Mellon Foundation provided $1.5 million in funds over four years for the center, which will be used to give

awards to faculty, researchers and curators seeking to develop cross-disciplinary courses, new research or exhibitions that span the arts, science and technology….supplement[s to]  MIT’s existing Visiting Artists program…to embed artists’ residencies in the curriculum and create a platform for collaboration with faculty, students and research staff in the development, display and performance of new and experimental artwork or technologies for artistic expression.  In addition, the grant will support the participation of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the activities of the Center. 

MIT, meanwhile, has pledged to mount “a major, bi-annual international symposium on art, science and technology,” with the first set for the 2013-14 academic year.   CAST will be part of the Office of the Provost, which signals it as a priority, I think.

A year ago, MIT held “FAST, the Festival of Art, Science and Technology” as part of its 150th anniversary celebration, and published a report called “The Arts at MIT.” CAST builds on that. (There’s more in the press release here.)

All of this is great; my only worry is that $1.5 million may not go that far.

Other art things are happening at MIT, too. On May 3, the MIT Museum will open the1,650 sq. ft. Kurtz Gallery for Photography, whose first exhibition will show 75 photographs by Berenice Abbott, plus letters and documents — Photography and Science: An Essential Unity.

And on May 10, MIT plans to dedicate Ring Stone by Cai Guo-Qiang — a monumental white granite sculpture and his first public work for a university. (There’s another picture here.)

Consisting of twelve “individual, but indivisible links cut from a 39 1/2-foot-long single block of white granite” — and weighing about 14 metric tons — the piece will be accompanied by seven Japanese Black Pine trees, planted inside the rings and nearby. It will be positioned on the lawn of the MIT Sloan School of Management, observing the principles of Feng Shui. Cai Guo-Qiang will give the keynote speech at MIT’s China Forum the same day as the dedication.

I’m sure there’s much else going on at the List Center, too, under its new director, Paul Ha.

Photograph: Courtesy of MIT

 

A Critical View: The Artist We Love To Hate

The Tate Modern’s exhibition of Damien Hirst’s work opened last week, and I thought I was time to check in on the reaction. It is, the Tate says:

the first substantial survey of his work in a British institution and will bring together key works from over twenty years. The exhibition will include iconic sculptures from his Natural History series, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991, in which he suspended a shark in formaldehyde. Also included will be vitrines such as A Thousand Years from 1990, medicine cabinets, pill cabinets and instrument cabinets in addition to seminal paintings made throughout his career using butterflies and flies as well as spots and spins. The two-part installation In and Out of Love, not shown in its entirety since its creation in 1991 and Pharmacy 1992 will be among the highlights of the exhibition.

The Tate advises, on its website, “We are currently experiencing a very high demand for tickets. We strongly advise booking in advance to avoid disappointment.”

When I looked for reviews, I discovered that my friend Helen Stoilas at The Art Newspaper had already compiled some quotes from the reviews, published on the web — “Thumbs down (bar one) for Damien Hirst at Tate Modern.”  That one, I guess, is Richard Dorment at the “conservative” Daily Telegraph, who is quoted saying:

“For reasons that I don’t understand, he insists on presenting himself as a fraud who is somehow pulling the wool over the eyes of the public. And that’s a pity, because in Tate Modern’s full-scale retrospective he comes across as a serious—if wildly uneven—artist.” Dorment ends his review saying: “In many ways this is a difficult show, but I left it with a sense of Hirst as an artist whose moral stature can no longer be questioned.”

Less kind were critics at the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Times, and independent critic (former director of Kelvingrove in Glasgow) Julian Spalding, whose new book, Con Art–Why you ought to sell your Damien Hirsts while you can, apparently disqualified him, in the Tate’s view, from attending the press preview to do interviews for the BBC. Shame on the Tate Modern, if that’s the whole story. Here’s an account in the Independent, hat-tip to TAN.

To TAN’s roundup article, let me add a few:

  • The Toronto Globe and Mail sat on the fence, concluding “The local reviews are in and most of them are reservedly damning – there is a sense among the press in London that Hirst should have made more of his talent, and this show is evidence of a once-starry reputation in decline.”
  • The Daily Mail called Hirst a fraud.

Presumably, the Tate has its man and is sticking with him, charging £14.00 for adults,  and warning visitors to expect an hour of wait time before buying tickets. The exhibit was, btw, sponsored by the Qatar Museums Authority

Photo Credit: Hirst and his “I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds,” Oli Scarff/Getty Images via The Art Newspaper

 

 

Art21 Reveals A New Group of Artists: A Test — UPDATED

Art21 is in the news today, and not in a good way — according to various reports, the National Endowment for the Arts is planning to cut the funding it has supplied to this self-described “chronicler of contemporary art and artists.”

I was going to blog about it sometime soon anyway, because Season Six of “Art in the Twenty-First Century” makes its debut on PBS on Friday at 9 p.m. (although, as they always say “check your local listings”).  Season Six

includes 13 profiles of artists from five continents gathered into four, one-hour thematic episodes: Change, Balance, History and Boundaries. Spanning the globe from Nigeria to New York City, from Beijing to Brazil, the programs reveal the artists at work and speaking in their own words as they demonstrate the power of art to alter perception, challenge convention, and change how we see the world around us.

That’s a tall order. The artists vary widely, from Sarah Sze to Ai Weiwei, from Marina Abramovic to Robert Mangold, from El Anatsui to Mary Reid Kelley, from Rackshaw Downes to Glenn Ligon. And more. There’s a short clip for each of the shows here, plus  lots of other images/background material. And the press release.

I watched only the four-minute trailer for the season, with excerpts from each artist. Can you guess which one said, and I’m sometimes paraphrasing slightly:

  1. My work is about change, regeneration, bringing about new.
  2. I get very possessive about my places and I don’t want any other artists coming around here to paint them.
  3. People prefer to be positive about history and they always want something from it.
  4. It’s important for an artist to fnd the right tool.
  5. Art is about new possibilities.
  6. I really like the idea that natural wildlife survives in this intense metropolis.
  7. I try to build an object complex enough to start feeling like it’s alive.
  8. What I’m committed to is not love of painting but love of the idea of making ideas.
  9. Rather than my influence coming from nature, it comes from culture, the history of art and the culture of our times. 

I’ll update with the answers sometime soon — but feel free to leave your answers in the comments section below.

Meantime, I suspect Art21 could use more public support — watching and, if you like what you see, giving.

UPDATE — THE ANSWERS:

  1. El Anatsui
  2. Rackshaw Downes
  3. Mary Reid Kelley
  4. Marina Abramovic
  5. Ai Weiwei
  6. Sarah Sze
  7. David Altmejd
  8. Glenn Ligon
  9. Robert Mangold

Photo Credits: David Altmejd’s “The Eye” (top), El Anatsui making “Change,” bottom; Courtesy of Art21

 

Thomas Hart Benton Gets A New Look/Book

Like last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, this weekend’s paper brought a book review worth noting here. (I’m not the only one, btw, who appreciate’s the WSJ’s Saturday Review section — last month, Peter Osnos, founder of Public Affairs Books, published an essay praising the section in The Atlantic.)

This time, Henry Allen has reviewed Thomas Hart Benton: A Life by Justin Wolff, a book I heard about in the making, because gossip had it that Wolff would change people’s minds about the man and possibly the art. The book is 400 pages long, so maybe it does, but Allen’s review doesn’t make that case.

Allen describes Benton accurately as someone for whom the public bore distaste “ for his own loud rancor toward museums, Modernism, Europe, curators, capitalism, Marxism, homosexuals, on and on.”  And, of course, his realist kind of art was overtaken by the Abstract Expressionists, including his own pupil Jackson Pollock.

But let’s go back further, as Allen does:

It’s hard to believe, but my old book from 1940 began: “America today is developing a School of Painting which promises to be the most important movement in the world of art since the days of the Italian Renaissance.” Time magazine had put Benton’s self-portrait on its cover in 1934. He’d published his autobiography in 1937. His work was both praised and reviled with passions that no art arouses now, except a Super Bowl halftime show.

Despite his vigorous reading and colorful writing, Benton was no finely sliced aesthete. Instead, he was an angry, hard-drinking, harmonica-playing, well-read little backwoods aristocrat from a small town in southwestern Missouri, a man given to the sad pugnaciousness called a little-man complex. He was called “virile” back when that was a compliment.

Benton was contradictory. He celebrated the American spirit while being a Marxist. He was an American nationalist accused of defaming America by showing its ugliness along with its beauty. He was a good enough politician to get hired to paint historical murals in public buildings. He was fired from his job at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1941 after saying that the typical museum was “run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait.”

Is it any wonder then, that as Allen notes, Benton did not survive later critics the way Edward Hopper and Grant Wood did? Some artitsts are lucky enough to escape the personal (say, Caravaggio, Picasso, etc.), but not Benton. He stirs animosity still. I appreciate his talent, but find much of his work, like Persephone (above), creepy.

Allen, though, is a believer in Benton. He ends his review with this: “If only Mr. Wolff could be 9, lying on the floor on a rainy day, looking at the beauty, vulgarity, dark passions and bright fields of “Persephone.” Open your eyes, ignore cultivated tastes, and it explains itself.”

 

New Book: Charting Michelangelo’s Rise to Fame

James Hall –  a freelance art critic and historian who has written two books about Michelangelo – ends his review of Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal with this note: “…biographers will undoubtedly be redrawing Michelangelo for many centuries to come.”

Nonetheless, the book in question, by Michael Hirst, a London-based Michelangelo scholar, is long-awaited and does seem to have its virtues. I enjoyed several of Hall’s observations and anecdotes, presumably drawn from Hirst. The review tells us, for example, that Michelangelo’s magnificent David (1501-04) was made from marble that “had been lying around in the cathedral workshops since the 1460s after a previous attempt to carve a statue.” Michelangelo recycled the abandoned block.

And who knew that Michelangelo was as busy writing letters in his day as people using Twitter today? Hall writes:

There are around 1,400 surviving letters to and from the artist (Saturday was his letter-writing day), as well as memorandums, contracts, bank-account details, poems—even the odd shopping list. He is easily the best documented Renaissance artist. Most of the letters and memorandums were given to the city of Florence in 1858 by Michelangelo’s last descendant, but on condition that they not be copied. It was only in 1964 that this stipulation was lifted. The material has now been published in eight big scholarly volumes, the last of which appeared in 2005. The restoration of the Sistine Chapel from 1980 to 1994, and of many other works, has also furnished masses of new information.

This book deals with Michelangelo’s career up to 1534, when he moves permanently to Rome at the age of 59 to paint “The Last Judgment.” Known for his crankiness, Michelangelo had to help support his brothers and fathers, although he falsely claimed noble heritage. “Michelangelo preferred to think of himself as a self-made genius,” but while “we still don’t know who taught him how to carve,” Hirst shows that the artist learned a lot in the studio of Ghirlandaio, which he entered at age 13, and — says Hall in the review — “The younger artist was hugely indebted to Ghirlandaio’s painting methods and his workshop organization, with its careful division of labor. When painting the Sistine Ceiling, Michelangelo initially had six assistants, virtually the same number as Ghirlandaio used for his major fresco cycles. ”

We also learn that Michelangelo’s “first sculpture, “Bacchus,” was rejected by the cardinal who had commissioned it—no doubt because this god of wine really does look very tipsy” and that “It was the St. Peter’s Pietà (1498-9), made for the tomb of a French cardinal, that made his name. It is the only work that Michelangelo signed, and he did so with a lover’s boldness, on the strap that passes between the Virgin’s breasts. From then on, he was never seriously short of commissions or money. His perennial problem was making realistic proposals, completing work and knowing when to say no.”

Hall’s review of the book is lukewarm, saying it lacks “passion and vision.” Hence, the first sentence of this post. But if you’re curious about the artist’s life, the “day-to-day detail,” Hirst’s 438 pages, published by Yale University Press, are for you. And a second volume is planned.

 

 

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About Judith H. Dobrzynski

Now an independent journalist, I've worked as a reporter in the culture and business sections of The New York Times, and been the editor of the Sunday business section and deputy business editor there as well as a senior editor of Business Week and the managing editor of CNBC, the cable TV

About Real Clear Arts

This blog is about culture in America as seen through my lens, which is informed and colored by years of reporting not only on the arts and humanities, but also on business, philanthropy, science, government and other subjects. I may break news, but more likely I will comment, provide

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