Contemporary art collector Mickey Cartin has a beef — well, many beefs — with Chelsea galleries nowadays, and the art that’s in them. It has turned him from an omnivorous art collector, who until recently spent many hours prowling those galleries, into an art curmudgeon.

Listen to a few of the things he said in an article on ArtNet, all direct quotes:

• [Having just spent four hours in Chelsea, two looking at good shows], during the other two hours I felt the same disappointment and frustration that I have been experiencing over the last few years.
• …it made me angry and also made me wonder if it is a good thing that so many young artists seem to be selling things for so much money.
• I do not think that artists should starve — it would be great if they made a good living. It would also be better if merit and quality had something to do with that. 
• …if you consider the kind of people that become Hollywood stars, you will know why the proliferation of wealth and fame at the exclusion of quality poses a grave motivational problem for young artists. Movie-goers keep buying tickets, and consumers of “art” keep buying meaningless things.
• …Someone should help this ever-increasing stable of uninspired artists to realize that they would be better off going to dental school.
• …can we blame the art dealers for their indiscretion and for their insistence on showing so much work that fails to inspire? …it is not their fault that they are able to sell such vacant garbage for such high prices….even the greatest, most inspiring art dealers are, in the end, merchants.
• It must be the consumers. In the art world, they are for some reason called “collectors.”
• Chelsea has evolved into a place that discourages art collectors from visiting it. The market supports the ongoing existence of these consumer-driven galleries. Art collectors don’t want to sift through 200 worthless venues to find one or two inspiring, challenging exhibitions, or one or two exciting objects. 

Cartin has been collecting for a long time, and in 2006 he sold the electrical company his grandfather founded and he once headed, and opened up a temporary exhibition space for his collection in downtown Hartford (his hometown). I am not sure whether it’s still open, or what is on the walls now. Its website is “undergoing renovation,” and Cartin’s curator, Steven Holmes, was recently appointed to be adjunct curator at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach.

Now I agree that a lot of contemporary art isn’t worthy of the appelation “art.” Twas ever thus, wasn’t it?

But the funny thing about Cartin’s whole piece is that he admits, in his third paragragh, that “Now I live less than a mile from Chelsea and I rarely get over there.”

So how, precisely, does he know? Is he judging by what he sees at, say, art fairs? Going on hearsay? Looking at websites?

Inquiring minds would like to know.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of ArtInfo

  

If you live in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis or Los Angeles, you may know that Zahi Hawass is traveling around the United States, trying to drum up Egyptian tourism — not to mention himself and his interests. Why Cincinnati, after all, except that it’s currently the home of Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt (more about which in a minute), a show he stars in.

Today, Hawass got the news he has been predicting: In the case that charged him with corruption at the bookshop at the Egyptian museum, he was acquitted by a criminal court, according to Al Ahram, reversing an administrative court’s decision that may have sent him to jail for a year. (On his website, Hawass said he has been declared innocent.)

Just over the past weekend, rumors were flying that he was in jail already (denied, accurately).

All of this seems to leave Hawass free to pick up his life’s work as it was before the revolution, and maybe add to it. Tourism to the land of the pharoahs is down, according to recent tourism statistics, because of the January 25 Revolution and the resulting instability. (The State Dept. has lifted its “travel warning” for Egypt, but replaced it with a “travel alert” advising citizens to respect curfews, avoid demonstrations, and otherwise be cautious.) This trip can’t hurt his stature with the new government (he was, you’ll recall, promoted by the former regime of Mubarak, then fired, rehired and installed again as Minister of State for Antiquities). 

Today, Hawass is out in the West, visiting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and soon the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, and the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

Hawass also recently updated the world on the status of looted objects in Egypt. He says the losses were exaggerated and that many objects have been recovered.

To judge from the Cleopatra exhibit, Hawass is sure he is on the trail of her tomb — his next conquest. The show, which I saw recently in Cincinnati, is a shocker, and not in a good way. True, it is not a museum show; it was organized by for-profit groups that include Arts and Exhibitions International and the National Geographic. But there are so many things wrong with it, it’s hard to enumerate.

Here are a few: the show contradicts itself (e.g., calling Cleopatra a beauty in one place and acknowledging that she wasn’t in another), an animation explaining the Isis myth is worse than the worst Disneyfied cartoon you can imagine, the music is awful, the audioguide has nothing to do with the objects on view, most of the objects predate Cleopatra, often by centuries, on and on.

I was surprised to read a positive review last summer in The New York Times, in all honesty.

This is a perfect example of why many for-profit shows are not museum-worthy. But the exhibit is seeking more venues. I hope no art museums succumb.

 

Why do journalists create lists? They work — they attract attention. Readers like them. So it’s not surprising that art critic Blake Gopnik, who recently moved from the Washington Post to Tina Brown’s Newsweek – which she is trying hard to revive — recently offered his list of “The Ten Most Important Artists of Today.” Take a look; here’s the link.

Clearly, though, the list is meant to be a provocation, because it can’t really be taken seriously. On the list: Marjetica Potrc, Gillian Wearing, Tacita Dean and Artur Zmijewski, along with standbys Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. I’m not berating the work of any of these artists. I like much of it, but I’m just saying…  

But Gopnik’s list gives me an opportunity to look at a two other lists. A new magazine called The Art Economist has been offering a new list of the “top 300 leading, living contemporary artists based on their highest auction results achieved since 2008.” In the latest issue, #5 — which includes prices to May 1, 2011, and thus does not include the May New York auctions, the top ten are:

1. Lucian Freud
2. Jasper Johns
3. Jeff Koons
4. Damien Hirst
5. Gerhard Richter
6. Takashi Murakami
7. Zhang Xiaogang
8. Peter Doig
9. Zeng Fanzhi
10. Brice Marden

Is the market any better at deciding who the best artists are? Which brings me to the cautionary tale part of this post: It’s way too early to tell which, if any of these artists — especially those on Gopnik’s list – will stand the test of time, not to mention changing fashions in the near term. On May 31, The New York Times revisited some hot artists of recent years, like Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl and Larry Rivers, and discovered that their prices have been flat in a soaring contemporary market.

For even more perspective, take a gander at a list made in 1949, when Look magazine printed its list of the “Ten Best Artists,” as determined by a poll of museum directors and art critics. The results:

1. John Marin
2. Max Weber
3. Yasuo Kuniyoski
4. Stuart Davis
5. Ben Shahn
6. Charles Burchfield
7. George Grosz
8. Franklin Watkins
9. a tie between Lyonel Feininger and Jack Levine

Where are they now, in price, reputation and art historical importance?

Photo Credit: “Crowhurst” by Tacita Dean, courtesy of Newsweek/The Daily Beast

 

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith is at the Venice Biennale this week, and the paper has launched an interactive web feature for the trip called, not surprisingly, “Everyone’s a Critic.”

It’s rather fun to see, even if it doesn’t quite work as well as it should — at least not on my computer. (It’s organized as a book, and you turn pages by clicking on the arrow below the book.)

The deal is this: Smith is posting a picture and short commentary about works in Venice “that stuck with me.” Then, she challenges readers, “take a look, see what you think, and add your own impression” in, here’s the catch, “six words.” Readers can click on words in her commentary or add their own. For example, so far 495 readers (as of Monday night) have left comments on Maurizio Cattelan’s We (left). You can either read all the comments, or take a look at the most common words — which in this case include “bed, dead, death, looking, beautiful, enigmatic, paralyzed, crisis…” etc.

Smith has chosen six works so far, and it looks as if there will be four more.

I’m not sure what this proves — I didn’t find the commenters’ word choices enlightening — but it’s all part of the trend to engage people with interactivity, an attempt to get more people to view contemporary art, and try to understand it. Smith’s choices, so far, haven’t made the task easy. But who knows, it may “work.” And as an aside, it may well prove how difficult it is to write about contemporary art in an intelligent way.

 

The Museum of Modern Art did a major deal the other day, but oddly enough there’s no press release on it — at MoMA. Its partner, on the other hand, issued a big press release, accompanied by a statement from the culture minister, John Day. It’s all received excellent press — in Australia.

I wonder why…

Maybe it’s because the deal will send works from MoMA’s permanent collection to the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, in six shows that begin in June 2012 and continue for three years.

The first show is Picasso to Warhol: Twelve Modern Masters, which will include more than 100 works of art from MoMA by Mondrian, Matisse, Brancusi, Pollock, Johns, and others. The five other shows will include photography and design works.

For this, MoMA might be receiving on the order of $6 million. Minister Day used that figure in his release, saying “…$6million funding, announced in the recent 2011-12 State Budget, would allow the Art Gallery of Western Australia to become the only Australian venue to host these MoMA exhibitions.” That would be Australian dollars, which converts to about $6.3 million U.S. dollars, but it’s unclear how much of the funds will go to MoMA. (AGWA also has a principal corporate sponsor — Ernst & Young — for this series, which is called “Great Collections of the World.”

This all was reported in an article in The Australian on June 9, last Wednesday. On Sunday night, there’s still nothing posted at MoMA’s press site.

Why is MoMA so shy about this at home? In the AGWA’s press release, MoMA director Glenn Lowry said he was “thrilled to be entering into this partnership.” I’m guessing that MoMA fears it will be accused of renting out its collection and/or of subjecting precious works to the conservation issues that traveling always present — not to mention absenting these works from MoMA’s own visitors (The 1966 Warhol self portrait, used in the Australian press release and above, is currently not on view.) And, of course, there’s the fee: museums aren’t supposed to profit from lending their collections; they’re just supposed to cover their costs.

But, honestly, that idea went by the wayside a long time ago, and MoMA has lent big before, notably to the High Museum in Atlanta. Lots of other museums are also lending entire shows, from the Louvre and the Picasso Museum in France, to the National Galleries of Scotland and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Maybe it’s time to let this all out in the open, instead of doing it on the sly.

Museums have to raise money, and whatever they do — name galleries for donors, raise admission prices, deaccession art, you name it — yields criticism nowadays. I find many of these tactics to be acceptable, depending on the terms. But the terms — and the deals — have to be disclosed, at least in part, for the public to understand exactly what’s happening.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of MoMA