Talk about stirring the pot. Universal museums and contemporary museums are often rivals, and this month, in The ArtNewspaper, Madeleine Grynsztejn — director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art — comes up with an unforgettable quote on the subject.

In an article about the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing, which will soon house its contemporary collection and provide new space for photography, design and media works, Grynsztejn manages to imply the opposite even as she says the two museums are complemetary rather than competitive:

The MCA creates art history and the Art Institute summarizes it.

Wonder what Jim Cuno, director of the Art Institute, thinks about that!

Aside from being a great statesman and a writer and a painter, Winston Churchill, whom I mentioned in my last post, was a boozer. So were dozens of famous writers and artists. Among them are Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning (right), Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon.

How did they manage to produce under the influence? Did alcohol grease the wheels of their creativity?

An intriguing article in the current issue of Prospect Magazine (published in Britain) sheds some light on the questions –first quoting Churchill saying that drinking was critical to his writing of “The World Crisis,” his six-volume memoir: “Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.”

The article describes what it calls the “Churchill gene,” which allows those who have it “to remain healthy and brilliant despite consumption [of alcohol] that would kill others.” 

Then it cites a scientific study, conducted at the University of Colorado, that tested the presence of a “G-variant” in some people in relation to alcohol. In those that have the variant, alcohol created stronger feelings of elation and happiness, followed by a longer period of relaxation, than it did in those who don’t have it. About 15 percent of Caucasians have the G-variant, and are presumably like Churchill.

The Colorado study did not address causation. That is left for future studies. But it may explain why so many creative people are able to drink heavily and still produce.

You can read the article here.

UPDATE: It’s 1 p.m., and two readers have written comments — using “Contact Me.” They are posted there. If they would post the comments again on this item, I’d publish them here so that they are connected to this post.

This week being the start of the spring bellwether auctions in New York, there’s a lot in the art press about the art market. In one entry from WSJ, The Wall Street Journal’s quarterly magazine, which arrived with my paper on Saturday, David Zwirner had several interesting things to say. Calling him “the art world’s go-to gallerist right now” — a title others would no doubt contest — the magazine promised his “unvarnished opinion on a market in free fall.” Kelly Crow did the interview. A few choice excerpts:

Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami are going to get tested, and the jury is out. Andy Warhol’s market collapsed completely in the early 1990s. He withstood his test. Hirst and Murakami–I’ll be curious to see where their careers are in five years.

And:

 

I’d like a 25-year moratorium on selling living artists’ work at auction. It would give artists time to develop their work without worrying about auction prices. Auction houses got greedy and wanted in on selling new work–right up to the infamous Hirst sale when they stepped in and played art gallery. I don’t like it, and my artists don’t like it. When a piece they’ve sold is flipped for $1.5 million at auction, they don’t get anything out of it–and they’re left standing in front of blank canvases worrying about money when that should be the last thing on their minds.

And:

 

If you have deep, deep pockets, go buy Early Modernists. They’re the closest thing we have to a blue-chip market. It’s going to be difficult to get a Titian or a Rembrandt because the good ones are already in museums. We’re not quite there yet with Cézanne and Monet.

 

Some of this is self-serving, certainly — rival Gagosian has exhibited both Hirst and Murakami, for example, and what primary dealer wouldn’t like a moratorium on auction sales? — but revealing nonetheless. 

 

Here’s a link to the published interview and here’s a link to the additional Q&A on the web. In the second part, he talks about the undervalued Alice Neel, a sentiment with which I heartily
agree. Zwirner is opening an exhibition of her works on May 14, and Zwirner + Wirth, an affiliate, is opening a show of her nudes on May 6. Neel’s estate has now has a website, on which you may view many samples
of her work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At left is an image from the upcoming Zwirner show: Cindy, 1960. At right is Winifred Mesmer, 1940, from the Zwirner + Wirth show.

 

Credits: Â© the Estate of Alice Neel (Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery).  

  

 

“My hobbie (one of them anyway) is using a lot of scotch tape… My hobbie is to pick out different things during what I read and piece them together and make a little story of my own.”

Louis Armstrong said that, in a 1953 letter to a friend. You can now see the collages he made
in an exhibit at Jazz At Lincoln Center that opened on Saturday. It carries the wonderful title The Collage Aesthetic of Louis Armstrong: “In the Cause of Happiness.”  (One of the works is at right.) Harry N. Abrams has just published a book of the creations called Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong. And the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens, is mounting its own show of his collages called A Little Story of My Own: Louis Armstrong’s Collages.

Truth is, I haven’t seen the shows or the book yet. I’m calling attention to them because Armstrong seems to be one of those lucky people who are twice-talented, and I’m glad it’s being recognized.

There are other twice-talented people who’ve been drawn to visual arts. E.E. Cummings, for example, considered himself just as talented a painter as he was a poet. (I wrote about that, and the sad fate of some of his works, for The Wall Street Journal in 2007; you can read the article here.)  

The one who comes
most to mind now, for me, is Winston Churchill. His “Chartwell: Landscape With Sheep” (left) sold at auction in 2007 for £1 million, a record for him.

It’s his joy in painting that is relevant here. Churchill didn’t start until he was 41, but he used it as a remedy for “mental overstrain” and as a relief from his intense responsibilities. He once said he couldn’t live without painting. As he wrote in Painting As A Pastime: “Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and color, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end, or almost to the end, of the day.”

Such sentiment sounds schmaltzy nowadays. But Louis Armstrong was expressing something similar; he too seemed to have taken great joy in the creation of art.

Kudos to Jazz at Lincoln Center, in particular, for putting on the show: cross-disciplinary overtures — here, getting people interested in music to think about the visual arts — are always a good thing, and so is highlighting Pops’s other talent.

Photo credits: Jazz at Lincoln Center (top), Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum; Sotheby’s (bottom).  

As I mentioned two posts ago when I wrote about the New Museum’s UnGala, which was mightily aided by the auction of a commissioned portrait by Karen Kilimnik, arts institutions in New York have been telling me, anecdotally, that donations are not down as much as might be expected. So far, I’ve not run across a single case where they are down as steeply as the stock market decline. 

But many are suffering from another fundraising problem, which I outline in an article in
today’s New York Times. Many — even as important as Carnegie Hall (right) — can’t find honoress from the business world for their benefits, and honorees are key to reaching new constituencies and to luring corporate donations. Executives who once sought out honors are now saying no. Or they are agreeing to be honored only if they don’t have to pressure their business contacts into buying tables.

It’s a problem many expect to get worse in the next year, partly because many organizations extended invitations to this spring’s honorees before the worst hit last year. And, as one fundraiser told me, “people are gala’d out — they don’t want to be seen having a good time now.”

Not everyone, though: rumor has it that tomorrow’s annual Costume Institute benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is again set to be a titanic success.

Here’s a link to my Times article.