From the Floor

The Smell of Moth Balls

2006-08-28T20:52:00.000-04:00

From the Floor is no longer being updated. The archives remain available for searching or browsing.

July Hiatus

2006-07-19T11:30:00.000-04:00

Over the last couple days, I’ve received a few emails containing interesting conjectures as to where I’ve been lately. None have been right—or even close to right. But it is nice to know that you care.

I'll just say this: I’m on the road for the month and will be back in New York (and back to blogging) in early August. Until then, enjoy the summer.

West Side Stories

2006-06-26T18:03:00.000-04:00

I managed to spend a little time in Chelsea on Saturday. Between it officially being summer now, the on-and-off rain that afternoon, and the recent art world binge in Basel, the neighborhood was the most quiet I have ever seen it on a weekend.

I did, though, make a few sightings of note:

I'm betting that it's only a matter of time until Charlie Finch starts to slobber all over work by Mayumi Lake (at right). Her show, My Idol, which closed Saturday at M.Y. Art Prospects featured several photographs of an attractive, unclothed young Asian woman and an inflatable doll whiling away an afternoon in a love hotel.
Justin Lowe's installation, Helter Swelter, at Oliver Kamm 5BE takes the prize for least likely gallery installation of the summer. It's also one of the most fun.
Overheard in an otherwise empty gallery (they all were on Saturday): an artist dropping off work and a gallerist discussing how the materials should be described on the price list. The dilemma centered on whether to mention specifically that the piece contained Shrinky Dinks or whether they should go with the more generic, but somewhat more dignified "mixed media." I weighed in with a preference for touting the Shrinky Dinks. They lend a retro, kitch vibe to the work, and that vibe is certainly selling these days.

Changing Light at the Pulitzer

2006-06-23T11:52:00.000-04:00

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. For my money no one does exhibition brochures, guides, and websites better than the Pulitzer Foundation.

For the current exhibition of Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs of its own Richard Serra torqued ellipse, the Pulizter has included a great time lapse QuickTime video of the exhibition space. (Follow this link into the Flash-heavy site and click on the icon for "time lapse photography.")

What makes a day in the life of an empty gallery so engaging? It's the light.

The video shows something that visitors to the space don't typically notice in the course of an hour spent there. The light moving through Tadao Ando's space brings out different characteristics in the art over the course of the day. Notice, especially, the change in character of the permanently installed Ellsworth Kelly piece behind the stairwell.

Count Them

2006-06-22T15:02:00.000-04:00

Seen recently: a small slip of yellow paper, of the kind used for credit card receipts, lying on the floor in the middle of a gallery. The paper's edges curled gently toward the ceiling as it rocked back and forth in response to air currents passing through the room. On the walls were a Richard Tuttle dyed canvas and a wire drawing.

Question: how many Tuttles in that room, two or three?

Do We Really Need Video Tours?

2006-06-16T23:59:00.000-04:00

I spent the week in St. Louis. This evening I managed to find an extra hour in the schedule before my flight home, so on the way to the airport I made a quick stop at the St. Louis Art Museum.

I didn't have any plans for the visit, but when I arrived I managed to sweet talk my way into a preview of SLAM's new installation of the Whitney's traveling exhibition, Remote Viewing (Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing). The show opens to the public tomorrow.

I noticed that almost everyone at the preview was walking around staring at the screen of an iPod, watching the video tour that SLAM has produced for the show. It's similar to the one that Christie's commissioned for the Donald Judd sale, and it could be the first of its kind for a museum. (SLAM has made the video content available on a special exhibition website.)

I am always an advocate for innovative educational and outreach offerings, but I can't help but question whether it's really such a good idea to encourage people to wander through galleries looking at a tiny video screen. I noticed as many eyes focused on the iPods as I did on the art that the iPods were supposed to be illuminating.

Update: I totally missed the delicious irony here: video tours for an exhibition called Remote Viewing. I'm glad someone's more on the ball than I am.

Setting Expectations, Then Bailing Out

2006-06-14T19:15:00.000-04:00

Warning: this is one of those blogging-about-blogging posts. Stop reading now if navel gazing isn't your thing. (But before you do, I need to ask. Why are you reading blogs if it's not?)

OK, so is there anyone still looking at this page? Yes? No? My site stats tells me that there is, but I don't know if I would bother coming back to see what's new when there hasn't been anything new in weeks, and weeks, and weeks, and....

Anyway, on Sunday I said that I may have some interesting things to say this week. Maybe I still do, but I don't know that they'll show up here after all. I'm a wee bit overextended right now and don't seem to have the excess mental energy needed to finish a few of the things I want to write. I've been focusing on other things lately, and they're starting to pay off. My Gold status in the American Airlines frequent flyer program came through this week, for instance.

So, let me take the really easy way out and throw all my current opinions out here as bullet points rather than writing them up as thoughtful, reasoned pieces:

The permanent collection rehang at the Tate Modern: underwhelming (the whole sort-of-historical, sort-of-thematic curatorial concept didn't really work for me)
The Barnes Foundation: overwhelming (the number of Renoirs, that is)
The Renzo Piano addition to the Pierpont Morgan: underwhelming (and let's all hope he does much better for the Whitney)

I've still got something I want to write up in depth about wall texts based on my recent visits to Tate Modern and the Barnes Foundation, but seeing as there are probably only three people in the world who care about that topic, I'm going to let it sit for a while.

Thanks for checking in. I'll be back when I'm back. See you then.

No Longer AWOL

2006-06-11T23:14:00.000-04:00

I'm still here, but it's been a long, hectic few weeks. I'm actually back state-side this week and may have a little something to say here for the first time in eons.

A Shark, Jumped

2006-05-25T17:47:00.000-04:00

Where can you go from here? Nowhere good.

Institutional Blogs

2006-05-25T17:41:00.000-04:00

Walker
Eye Level
Pulitzer

On narrative

2006-05-25T16:18:00.000-04:00

I cut my critical teeth years ago on narrative-based work and came to realize that the human mind needs narrative or narrative-like structure to help it move through time-based work. Most artists who say they are removing narrative are removing the master narrative, but they retain elements of narrative in the components they assemble to create their whole. This disjunction between narrative-driven elements and a lack of a master narrative to tie the components together almost ensures that viewers will not be able to engage fully with the work.

For time based work, need narrative to understand--even the deliberate disruption of narrative as in modernism is a form of it. But when rely on images that retain aspects of narrative but that ignores narrative things fall apart. Could, instead, create series of images--like a psycholdelic show. Move the focus toward formal aspects.

What I Won't be Seeing this Week

2006-05-22T09:04:00.000-04:00

Another Monday morning, the start of another hectic week.

Whenever I can, I try to slip in a little art viewing as I travel around for work. This week is an especially flight-filled one, but it looks like I'm going to have to drive right on past all of these shows that I'm interested in seeing:

Monday: Against the Grain: Contemporary Art from the Edward R. Broida Collection at MoMA
Tuesday: Elemental at the Walker
Wednesday: Realism and Abstraction: Six Degrees of Separation at the Nelson-Atkins
Thursday: E.V. Day's Bride Fight back in New York at Lever House

But the week isn't going to be a total write-off. Chances are good that on Friday I'll be able to see the second half of the new permanent collection installation at Tate Modern. I tried to get a sneak peek at the first half when I was there last December but didn't have any luck. I'm especially curious to see if these new thematic installations work as well as those in the last hanging did.

Lunch with the Boaters

2006-05-18T20:11:00.000-04:00

The only thing worse than marketing the heck out of Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party? Recreating the darn thing lifesize, in painted bronze. (And, yes, there are more where this one came from.)

News around New York

2006-05-17T14:12:00.000-04:00

Carol Vogel gets busy for the Times today with two pieces of note.

Dia's Chairman, Leonard Riggio, is resigning his post--and perhaps leaving the board. With no director, no board chair, no vice chair, no Manhattan home, a projected operating deficit for next year (an operating deficit even after closing its Manhattan locations?!?), and a capital campaign underway that needs to raise up to $40M, Dia is facing some serious challenges. Serious challenges. Dia has always relied on the largesse of a single patron. Here's to hoping another one emerges quickly.

On a more positive note, Tishman Speyer and the Public Art Fund have announced this fall's selection for the now annual Rockefeller Center commission: Anish Kapoor. I'm really hoping that his giant curved mirror won't be reflecting sunlight off the building across the street and into my office window. I'm not sure that my life insurance policy covers being burned to death by reflected sunlight.

Why Art Isn’t a Great Long Term Investment: A Case Study, Part 2 of 2

2006-05-17T09:07:00.000-04:00

The Joan Mitchell painting I have been writing about could be used to illustrate the opinion of many managing art investments today. Art, they claim, is an alternate investment class that keeps pace with or outperforms the market.

Most of these claims are backed up with reference to the Mei/Moses Fine Art Index, an index of the art market’s performance developed and maintained by two professors at NYU’s Stern School of Business. The index calculates the performance of the art market by comparing prices of works sold more than once on the secondary market over the last century.

The problem with this methodology is that it only looks at the winners. The major auction houses, the source of the data used to calculate the index, do not typically take work by artists who don’t have an established reputation. The index also does not account for work that goes on the block but does not sell.

The Joan Mitchell painting with its return of 11.9% CAGR is the sort of art market winner that serves as the basis for the Mei/Moses Index. The piece was bought early at a low price, was held for a period of time over which it appreciated significantly, and was sold at auction for a substantial profit. (This piece won’t, though, go into the index unless it is sold at auction a second time.)

That painting was purchased for very little money when Mitchell was a young, emerging artist and didn’t have the reputation she has now. What are the odds that a purchase like this is going to provide the return that this painting did? Probably very small: one or two times out of ten—if the collector has a great eye and is lucky.

I started this series of posts by referring to Dorothy Miller’s collection, and that’s where I’ll end. Miller had one of the best eyes for the art of her age of anyone collecting at the middle of the last century. She wasn’t, I’m sure, collecting as an investment. She bought early and held pieces for her whole life. Only after she passed away was her collection sold.

The collection contained small works by big name artists, and she definitely had her share of financial winners: Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Alexander Calder, and Lee Bontecou, among others. But Miller also had pieces by other artists who have been forgotten by art history.

There was one piece in her collection that caught my eye and my imagination back in the fall of 2003 when the work was shown at Christie’s. It was a small ab ex painting, about the same size as the Mitchell piece, and it was every bit as good. The painting was by an artist about whom I had never heard. I did some digging at the time and discovered that he was a painter who had lived in New England for most of his life and had never developed more than a local reputation as an artist. All I could find about him was an obituary in a small town newspaper.

The piece was estimated, I believe, to sell for less than $1000. It ended up selling for slightly more than that. Assuming that Miller bought the piece in the mid-1950s for around $125, the painting as an investment barely kept pace with inflation and under-performed the stock market.

But what a little jewel of a painting it was.

Even MoMA curator Dorothy Miller, with her great eye and access to work by artists whose reputation she had a hand in making, was not able to consistently pick investment quality art for her personal collection. But she did consistently pick great art that she must have loved living with.

That’s what collecting ought to be about—picking pieces because you love them, and living with them over the long haul. About the best you can do is claim that art is a venture capital-type investment. A few pieces, if you know how to pick them, may provide outsized returns. Many more may mirror the market. The majority, though, will barely keep pace with inflation—if even that.

Why Art Isn’t a Great Long Term Investment: A Case Study, Part 1 of 2

2006-05-12T17:04:00.000-04:00

Almost every new collector asks the question at least once. “Is this piece of art I’m considering going to increase in value?” And almost any decent art advisor or dealer is going to answer in the same way. “It might. But don’t buy art as an investment. Buy it because you love it.”

The financial performance of the small Joan Mitchell painting (at right) that I mentioned in my last post provides an interesting case in point. The piece sold for $51,000 (including buyer’s premium) this week—just about at the mid-point of its presale estimate.

I wanted to determine how well the painting did as an investment for its owner, and I started with the Inflation Calculator. It told me that $125 in 1955 dollars (the year the owner bought the piece from Mitchell’s gallery) is the equivalent of $859 in 2005 dollars. So this lucky early supporter of Mitchell’s work beat inflation (which averaged 3.9% per year over that period) significantly with his or her investment. By how much, though?

To figure that out, I calculated the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the investment. Of the $51,000 purchase price, the seller took home a bit over $38,600 after the buyer’s premium and seller’s fee were subtracted. That means that this investment appreciated on average 11.9% per year over the period that the owner held the painting.

(As an interesting aside, the work was put up for sale at Christie’s in the fall of 1997 with a pre-sale estimate of $30,000-$35,000. It didn’t sell. If it would have gone at the mid-point of its estimate, it would have returned 13.4% CAGR—a much better return than it realized this week, even though Mitchell’s market is significantly more active now than it was then. Christie’s, it seemed, seriously overestimated the work’s value nine years ago.)

Over the time period that the owner held this painting, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has posted a CAGR of 6.3% and the S&P500 has shown a CAGR of 6.7%. Since its inception in 1971, the NASDAQ has performed better (9.4% CAGR) but still not as well as this Mitchell piece. (These index returns do not account for the reinvestment of dividends which really should be included to make this an apples-to-apples comparison. I would be happy to update the post if any financial types can provide me with the data to rerun the numbers.)

While the painting has outperformed these benchmark indices, it hasn’t shown a truly stupendous return. Well managed hedge funds will return 15-20% CAGR over a lengthy period. While the return on this little Joan Mitchell painting has been about as good (on a pure percentage basis) as could possibly be, when time is taken into consideration by looking at CAGR the return isn’t amazing. It did beat the market by a wide margin, but a smart asset manager can do significantly better.

Related: CAGR analyses of the secondary art market seem to be in the air this week.

Next: what this painting (and a similar one) tell us about recent theories of art as a viable investment vehicle.

Fantasy Shopping for a Joan Mitchell

2006-05-09T22:41:00.000-04:00

Every auction season I go fantasy shopping—looking for things that I would love to own but that are far beyond my reach. I typically look for strong examples of favorite artists’ work that is scaled to my small New York apartment. It’s harder than you might imagine to find pieces that fit this bill. The Judd I mentioned recently is one example.

Another example is the Lee Bontecou wall relief that Christie’s sold in the fall of 2003 (right). The piece was part of MoMA curator Dorothy Miller’s personal collection, and it had hung in her New York apartment for years. Several works, actually, in Miller’s collection meet my criteria. She had what I think was a perfect Franz Kline—just big enough to give a sense for the majesty of his grand paintings, but small enough to fit comfortably in a living room with eight-foot ceilings.

Since her traveling retrospective a few years ago, Joan Mitchell’s work is coming up for auction more frequently than it used to. Mitchell’s small work doesn’t usually fit the criteria I have for a great apartment piece because Mitchell didn’t always scale her work down very well. (Not many artists who work large do it well, actually.) Most of the small Mitchell paintings that I have seen feel different than her large canvases because she used the same sized brushes on the diminutive work that she used on her more sizable paintings. As a result, the relationship between the individual brushstroke and the whole canvas has a completely different feel in the small pieces than it does in the large.

I haven’t liked most of the small Mitchell work that has come to market in recent seasons, but Sotheby’s has an early piece of hers going on the block this week that is just about perfect (at right). For this 19 x 16 inch canvas, Mitchell sized down her brushstrokes to retain the same scale relationship to the canvas that her larger paintings have. It’s that adjustment that makes the piece work so well. It doesn’t just feel like Joan Mitchell working on a small canvas. It feels like a small Joan Mitchell canvas.

I was intrigued enough by the piece to ask one of Sotheby’s art handlers to show me the back of the canvas at the preview last weekend because I was surprised that Sotheby’s was listing the year of execution as 1953. The piece appeared to me to be in a style that Mitchell didn’t really perfect until a few years later. I wondered if there were any markings on the inverse side that would confirm or deny my suspicious.

When I got a peek at the back (below left), I immediately saw what I was looking for—what appears to be an original label from the Stable Gallery confirming that the piece was painted in 1953 (below right). I also noted that the gallery label listed the original asking price for the work: $125. My immediate thought was that with a current auction estimate of $40,000-$60,000 someone had done very well with that investment.

When I returned home after the preview, I decided to figure out just how well the piece had actually performed for its single owner over the last 50-odd years. I was surprised by what I found when I ran some numbers.

Next: why art isn't a great long term investment, even when it appreciates significantly.

Excuses, Excuses

2006-05-04T21:35:00.000-04:00

This could be the longest I have ever gone without posting anything to the blog. But I’ve been busy. Real busy.

So here’s what I’ve been up to. I lead two lives. I write about one-half of them here. If you’re curious about the other half, read this. (And, yes, I was there and watched him eat a heaping plate full of pig’s snout. Even tried some myself. I’ll say only this: one snout was enough for me.) The thing is, that representation is really only a quarter of my life of late, not a half. The other quarter has been spent in the Caribbean—and not in the way that you’re thinking. Hotel, office, airplane; hotel, office, airplane. No sun, no fun, no glamour.

Yeah, yeah. Excuses, excuses. I know. How about some good stuff?

I managed to squeeze in two workdays this week back in New York. Today over lunch I stopped by the Judd preview at Christie’s for what will probably be my final visit--and for what's probably my last chance to see the most perfect apartment-sized Judd piece ever (at right). I still can’t get over the pristine condition of the work on display. The thing about pieces by Judd is that even though they don’t look it, they are so, so, so fragile. One little fingerprint, and the work is seriously scarred.

A few of the pieces on display at Christie’s have picked up a stray fingerprint or two in the last month, but on the whole the work is remarkably clean. The last time I visited, MoMA had four Judd pieces up in the hallway to the cafeteria. The difference in condition between those pieces and the pristine pieces at Christie’s is immediately noticeable. If you haven’t seen the show yet, by all means make a point of seeing it this weekend before the work gets dispersed to various private collections strewn between the Upper East Side and Greenwich, CT.

I was also home last weekend and managed to sneak in a couple hours in Chelsea. I decided to do a north-to-south gallery crawl and didn’t make it any farther than 26th Street before I ran out of time and energy. There’s a lot worth seeing right now. Here’s a list of my current picks:

Joseph Marioni at Peter Blum Chelsea
Helen Verhoeven at Wallspace
Tracy Nakayama at ATM
David Rathman at Clementine
Joe Fig at Plus Ultra

No blurbs on these shows, sorry. Check the websites. Or, better yet, make some time to see them for yourself.

The Week That Wasn’t (and a Visit to the Pulitzer Foundation)

2006-04-23T22:56:00.000-04:00

Last week passed with absolutely no activity around these parts. That’s the start of a trend that’s probably going to continue through this week. An unholy alliance of new projects, new clients, and travel is sucking away excess time and energy typically used for blogging.

That’s not to say that the radio silence means it’s a completely art-empty period for me. I spent last week in Saint Louis and managed to slip in a quick visit to the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts to see Minimalism and Beyond.

If I had to summarize the show with one word, it would be this: stunning. Not a detail has been missed in the selection or installation. The exhibition focuses on the core groups of minimalist and post-minimalist artists (think Judd, Flavin, and Serra), but it also looks back to the work of Barnet Newman and forward to trace minimalism’s legacy into the 1990s and 2000s with several pieces by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn. The combinations selected for the installation are engaging. Dan Flavin and Roni Horn are brilliantly paired in one small gallery (above right) and a large Judd with a blue Plexi interior is paired with the Pulitzer’s permanently installed blue and black Ellsworth Kelly (below right).

I can’t think of a more perfect space to host this show than the Pulitzer’s Tadao Ando galleries. One of my top picks for 2004 was the Guggenheim’s stab at minimalism and beyond, Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated). I didn’t realize until visiting the Pulitzer last week how much more I would have liked that great Guggenheim show if the work hadn’t been forced to compete with Wright’s space. I hadn’t even realized the conflict between the work and the exhibition space until I saw how effortlessly Ando’s building harmonized with the work in this show. It’s not often that the work, the installation, and the gallery space resonate to create a perfect environment. One of those environments exists for a few more days in Saint Louis.

I mentioned that even the details of the installation are perfect. Here’s a case in point: there is no wall text. None. Think about that. I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a museum exhibition with absolutely no text on the walls. Instead, the Pulitzer Foundation distributes a gorgeous little booklet at the entrance desk (more a mini catalogue than an exhibition brochure) filled with beautiful installation photographs with numbers superimposed next to each artwork. The numbers correspond in the book to factual information about the piece and a brief description or discussion of the work.

I typically take exhibition brochures with me and discard them after I’ve written something on the show. This one will go onto the bookcase with my collection of catalogues when I finally arrive back home. It’s the sort of exhibition brochure that would probably break the budget for most museum shows, but there’s a lesson to be learned from it for museum curatorial and education departments. It is possible to do a show without wall text that does not abdicate the pedagogical responsibility to provide interpretive context. Consider this approach as an alternative to text-heavy wall cards. Please.

That will probably have to do it for the blogging this week. But I do hope to make one little field trip. I’m in Port of Spain, Trinidad for the next few days, and I have plans to attend Peter Doig’s Studio Film Club this Thursday night. I’m not sure what’s being screened this week, but I’m sure I’ll have a report next weekend.

Another Way of Looking at Seventeen Ways of Looking

2006-04-13T20:35:00.000-04:00

Back in the day (way back in the day), I learned an important lesson from a college professor. It's one I haven't forgotten, but it's one that hasn't been learned by everyone in MoMA's curatorial department.

In my junior year of college, I came down to the last couple weeks of class without having found a suitable term paper topic for a course in seventeenth-century British poetry. In a last ditch effort to find inspiration, I started skimming through the course's textbook, looking at work by poets we hadn't been assigned to read for the course. As I did so, I started to notice something. Many of them had written about death. Hmmm, I thought, that would make an interesting paper topic: representations of death in seventeenth-century poetry.

So I wrote my essay and was surprised when I got an unacceptable grade. The mark came with an explanation. You can't select a topic with a scope that large and expect to do it justice by dipping into a little bit of this and a little bit of that, the professor noted. If you define a project's scope to be so ambitious, you need to deliver by doing much more extensive reading and research. The support offered for the thesis, she taught me, had to match in scale the ambition that was stated for the project.

It was a timely lesson for me to learn, and it's one that has served me well through the years.

A show on exhibition now at MoMA suffers from the same problem as my undergraduate essay. Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking has taken a good deal of heat since it went up. Tyler Green justifiably eviscerated the show on MAN and in The New York Observer for its lack of political content. But the problems with the show are more fundamental than this. It's missing so much more than just political content.

The problem is highlighted by the explanatory text written to contextualize the show. The website spins the show one way, the gallery brochure another, and the gallery wall text yet a third. It's actually a paragraph from the wall text that I think explains the curator's intentions for the show most clearly:

This exhibition addresses the application of the unexamined rubric "Islamic" to contemporary artists and emphasizes individuality rather than a collective identity. Without Boundary approaches the subject from a variety of perspectives. It looks for links as well as ruptures with the classic traditions of Islamic art, such as calligraphy, miniature painting, and carpet design. In addition, the exhibition tunes in to what the artists themselves have to say about identify and spirituality. In the complex expressions that draw inspiration from different traditions and defy simplistic categorizations, these artists belie the mentality of division and the binary oppositions of present-day politics.

If you can get beyond the jargon ("unexamined rubric," "collective identity," "ruptures," "binary oppositions") to parse what's actually said in this statement, you see some big claims for the show. This is an ambitious curatorial project--a very ambitious project. This is the kind of project, actually, that needs the treatment that only the Centre Pompidou seems to give to thematic shows today. It's a curatorial project that needs to be supported by the inclusion of about 400 works by around fifty artists from over a dozen countries.

But the MoMA show doesn't do this. Instead, the exhibition fills a small gallery space on the third floor and the video gallery on the second floor with a limited selection of works by seventeen artists. Some pieces contain calligraphy. Others make use of carpets and miniature painting. But nowhere do we get an exploration of these formal concerns or a dialogue between a number of artists using them in different ways to different ends as they address contemporary issues.

The show, as a result, comes off as a jumble of work by artists who have nothing in common other than the fact that they hail from countries where many people practice the Islamic faith.

But even that connecting thread isn't absolute. A piece by Mike Kelley and another by Bill Viola have been included. Kelley riffs on carpet design. Viola reflects "spirituality without necessarily rooting it in a specific faith," according to the exhibition brochure. Why this work in this show? I have no idea. I wonder if Kelley and Viola were included as afterthoughts in response to comments or pressure from some administrator. (Here's why I wonder: Click here to view the webpage for the show. Look at the URL that appears in your browser's address box, and you'll see that at some point very close to its opening this show was being called Fifteen Ways of Looking instead of Seventeen Ways of Looking.)

All in all, it's a problematic show, and not just because it lacks political content. It's a problematic show because MoMA has allowed its curator to make a fundamental mistake--to define a hugely ambitious project and then attempt to realize it by mounting a small-scale exhibition.

By significantly limiting the scope of what the show attempted to do (say, by focusing on how a select group of artists is using traditional Islamic calligraphy and carpet design to explore issues in contemporary society), MoMA could have fielded a much more focused and engaging show. The fact that no one in MoMA's curatorial department called a time-out as this show was being prepared makes me wonder if there are organizational issues there that will have negative impacts far beyond the failures of this particular exhibition.

Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, at the Museum of Modern Art through May 22, 2006

Art in the Corporate Space

2006-04-11T10:51:00.000-04:00

Midtown corporate lobbies host some of the most overlooked exhibition spaces in the city. On a walk that took me almost straight across town last weekend, I passed six spaces showing notable work. Four feature rotating exhibitions. The other two are permanent installations of important pieces.

UBS Gallery, 1285 Avenue of the Americas (between 51st and 52nd): Art loving UBS has created a large gallery space in its lobby that often features unusual exhibitions. I’ve seen interesting work by emerging artists, ab ex painting, and art from the subway system featured in the space. Currently on view is Great Pots: The Vessel as Art 1900-2000, Twentieth-Century Ceramics from the Newark Museum.

AXA, 1290 Avenue of the Americas (between 51st and 52nd): Across the street from UBS, the international insurance firm AXA permanently displays Thomas Hart Benton’s mural America Today from 1930-31 (detail at right). Originally commissioned by the New School for Social Research, the piece was sold in 1982 when the school realized it could not care for it as needed. The Equitable (a company purchased some years ago by AXA) bought the piece for its lobby in 1984.

Gallery W52, 31 W. 52nd St. (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues): Dinaburg Arts curates this space located near MoMA. Often showing work by emerging artists, the gallery currently has on display an exhibition entitled Beyond Pastoral featuring work by seven contemporary artists who use landscape to address cultural or psychological states. Interpretative essays for shows in this space are often written by the best-dressed member of the art blogosphere.

Lever House, 390 Park Avenue (between 53rd and 54th): What’s probably my favorite building in midtown is a work of art in itself. In recent years, though, building owner and mega-collector Aby Rosen has turned the lobby into a showcase for work by contemporary artists. Currently on display is an army of 96 inflatable Incredible Hulks; some red, white, blue, and green fluorescent stars; beach toys; ladders; fencing; paintings; and popcorn in lit vitrines. Jeff Koons is responsible for this disaster of an installation.

St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Avenue (entrance on 54th St. between Lexington and Third Avenues): Long known for its support of contemporary art and performance, this church tucked into the Citigroup Center boasts one of the most sublime spaces in midtown. In 1977 the church commissioned Louise Nevelson to design The Erol Beker Chapel of the Good Shepherd (at right). Her white on white room is only large enough for 28 seats, but the environment creates a psychic space that rivals the great cathedrals. Sadly, the installation is in need of restoration.

The Lipstick Building, 885 Third Avenue (between 53rd and 54th): I only stumbled across the art in this space on my way to a meeting last week. I’m not sure if the building has created a regular art program, but the exhibition on view now of work by Phoebe Washburn, Olav Westphalen, and Taylor McKinen is worth seeing. I liked Washburn's piece, 2 BLT's (bought and lovely towns), better than her 2004 installation at LFL which garnered so much critical praise.

Readers' Favorite Corporate Art Spaces in Midtown (feel free to e-mail with others that I missed in the post above):

The AXA Gallery, 787 Seventh Ave. (at 51st St.)
The Whitney at Altria, 120 Park Ave. (at 42nd St.)

Portrait of a Relationship

2006-04-09T09:53:00.000-04:00

From the conclusion of Randy Kennedy's piece in today's NY Times entitled "The Bjork-Barney Enigma Machine":

On the simplest level, Bjork said, she sees this as a nod to a debate she and Mr. Barney have had for years on the nature of creativity.

"Matthew is obsessed with restraint," she said, describing his love of Manhattan as an example. "The idea that you're stuck between all these gigantic skyscrapers is a restraint. And he finds it's a turn-on for him, it excites him."

"I find that really fascinating, because I'm the other way around," she said. "I'm like, put me on the top of a mountain with deer licking my fingers or something, and that's creative to me. That's like heaven."

And you think your relationship is tough to sustain. Imagine how hard it must be for the two of them to find compromises. "OK, I think I can manage to sneak two deer up to the observation deck at Rockefeller Center. Your job is to get a small jar of peanut butter to cover our fingers with. Or do you think deer prefer almond butter?"

Nothing's the Matter with Kansas

2006-04-04T16:23:00.000-04:00

What the world needs more of: municipalities recognizing the importance of the arts and politicians demonstrating a sense of humor. Thanks, Lawrence, Kansas (via).

Judd at Christie's

2006-04-03T16:45:00.000-04:00

Today Christie's opens its preview of work from the Judd Foundation.

The exhibition will run through May 9 when the 36 pieces will be sold. Two large works are installed in Christie's showroom, in a specially constructed environment near the central stair. The remainder are being shown around the corner, on the 20th floor of 1230 Avenue of the Americas.

The sale is controversial (see MAN's first and second posts on the issues involved), and to this point Christie's has been somewhat coy about what is being included. But now that the preview has opened, the auction house is providing a two-page sale list to exhibition visitors. As far as I can tell, Christie's has not made this information available on-line yet, so I have posted page 1 of the list here and page 2 here. (Apologies for the poor quality of the scans.)

The preview really should not be missed. Christie's has put a $23.5M high estimate on the sale. But judging from the resources put into marketing it, I would guess that they expect the final result to substantially top that estimate. Not only have they created a uniquely fitting installation environment for the work (whitewashed brick walls and no drop ceiling in the space) but they have also put together what may be a first--an iPod exhibition tour. The program includes images of each work, specialist audio commentary on every piece, and a few video segments--one of which is a 24-minute-long look at Marfa.

Parody, Sweet Parody

2006-04-03T00:01:00.000-04:00

Someone has been busy over the last few weeks taking on the College Art Association and the infamous Artforum Diary. It's too bad, though, that it's impossible to parody something that's already a parody of itself. (From the latest installment: "MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach stepped up to the podium and delivered a brief introduction, noting wryly that despite having invited only four hundred members of 'the inner, inner circle,' more than eight hundred had RSVPed.")

Topics of the Week

2006-03-31T16:30:00.000-05:00

Two topics have been driving discussion around the blogosphere this week: the premier of Matthew Barney's new thing, Drawing Restraint 9, and Marc Spiegler's piece in New York Magazine on the coming collapse of the art market. Some blogger blather of note:

AFC on Barney: "Barney's latest movie which premiered yesterday at MoMA, is by far the worst film he has ever made."
Grammar.police on Barney: "without having even seen DR9 I know I can emphatically agree with AFC's Johnson that Barney should employ neither CGI nor Björk."
MAO on Spiegler: "While I agree there may be some froth in the modern and contemporary art market, I disagree a crash is coming anytime soon."
The OC Art Blog on MAO on Spiegler: "MAO is probably a great financial whiz but I think he's wrong on this one. The market is going to crash. I thought it would happen sooner but what do I know....other than it is going to happen. How many more spaces can open in Culver City??"
And In Search gracefully brings the two threads together: "In discussing the paparazzo cage and photo-op line at last night's screening of Drawing Restraint 9 at MoMA, I mentioned to an office colleague that I occasionally hear that the last time the contemporary art world was covered this extensively by general-interest magazines was right before the early-'90s market crash."

My two cents on both topics:

I'm already on record as believing that an art market correction will occur. It's not a matter of "if" but "when." So I'm predisposed to agree with several of the things that Spiegler writes. With apologies to regular readers in Greenwich (and especially those at SAC Capital Advisors--because everyone loves Damien's shark and can't wait to see it at MoMA), I took special delight at the line that Spiegler says is making the rounds among art consultants today: "The hedge-fund guys are the new Japanese."
Will future art historians look back and see Matthew Barney as the Julian Schnabel of the late 1990s--grand ambition, work based on spectacle, but not much that actually continues to engage viewers once the initial impression begins to age? I wouldn't be surprised. Over the last week I've been dipping into Doug Aitken's new book Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative. The text collects interviews Aitken has conducted with 26 artists (including Barney) who are creating in a non-narrative manner. The discussions are interesting to follow, but I don't completely buy the concept. Why not? It's a long story. Maybe I'll save it for a post next week. Or maybe not. I'm afraid that if I start spouting theory here I'll bore all the new Japanese.

With World Enough and Time

2006-03-29T21:22:00.000-05:00

If I had time and funding, I would design and run an empirical study to test the hypothesis of this interesting Artinfo piece by João Ribas.

Is the art being created by emerging artists changing over time in response to the increased cost of living in New York? The anecdotes indicate that it is. I wonder what hard data would say.

Is there anyone out there working on a cross-disciplinary PhD in macro economics and art history who is searching for a dissertation topic? Here's a great one for you.

When the Boundaries Collapse

2006-03-28T12:33:00.000-05:00

The typical division of responsibilities in the art world is fairly clear.

Artists create. Dealers make the market. Collectors acquire. Curators contextualize work and present it for public display. Publications staff create printed and web material to extend the reach and impact of the show.

What happens, though, when the boundaries between these functions become elided? When an individual plays more than one role along this spectrum of responsibilities, conflicts of interest emerge. Think of the heat that Charles Saatchi takes regularly for displaying, promoting, and then trading the work that he collects.

But what if one person were to exercise control over every link in the chain from creating to dealing to curating to publishing and educating? How rife for abuse would that situation be?

In his new book The Last Folk Hero: A True Story of Race and Art, Power and Profit, Atlanta based writer Andrew Dietz tells just such a story. But rather than flattening and simplifying his characters’ motivations into a easy good vs. bad dichotomy, Dietz provides a neutral presentation that allows the complexity and ambiguity of this unique situation to emerge.

Dietz tells the tale of Bill Arnett—patron, collector, dealer, curator, publisher, and primary promoter of Southern, African-American folk art. Arnett is the genius behind the critically successful and wildly popular Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition that has made stops at the MFA Houston, the Whitney, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and eight other venues to date. (The exhibition opened last week at the High Museum in Atlanta.)

While Arnett has assembled work for the exhibition, he isn’t the typical freelance curator. Arnett owns many of the quilts in the show. He could well be making a market in Gee’s Bend quilts in his role as one of the most prolific dealers of Southern vernacular art. Through his company Tinwood Media, he has also published the critically acclaimed catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.

If Larry Gagosian was operating in a similar manner, the art world would cry “foul.” But in Arnett’s case, the situation is different because Arnett, for all his idiosyncrasies (the high strung personality, the constantly updated enemies list, the practice of storing his inventory of art in a leaky warehouse that lacks climate control), is bringing much deserved recognition to artists who have been neglected and/or taken advantage of by other collectors and dealers in the past.

Arnett (a white man) has made a name for himself and has built his business on the work of poor African-Americans, but in Dietz’s presentation Arnett’s activities are undertaken with the best interest of his artists in mind. Without Arnett, it’s probable that Gee’s Bend would still be a town so small and remote that even Google Maps could not locate it. But because of Arnett’s work, the town, the quilters, and their work is now known and appreciated across the country and around the world. And, yes, it’s probably safe to assume that Arnett has made (or will make) a profit on his investment in the quilts, the quilters, and the community as a result.

Dietz doesn’t shy away from the ethical ambiguities that exist in the intersection of roles that Arnett has played in promoting, dealing, and publicizing his artists’ work. And that ambiguity makes for an interesting read. While the book lacks the clear dramatic arc and the easily identifiable heroes and villains of the best non-fiction narratives, the more complex picture he give of his main characters’ intentions is a credit to Dietz’s fairness and balance as a writer.

Graciously Admitting Defeat

2006-03-26T15:34:00.000-05:00

At the conclusion my gallery talk at the Whitney today, a couple approached me with a question.

"Can you tell us where they put that room that's filled with speakers?" the man asked. I knew right away what he was talking about, but I hesitated for a moment while I contemplated the most diplomatic way to answer the question. His wife must have taken my pause for confusion because she jumped in to clarify. "It plays a choir piece, I think. A friend told us we had to see it while we were in New York this week."

I did the right thing.

"That's Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet. It's not here. It's at MoMA," I told them. "You really ought to go down there to experience it," I added. "It's the best thing you'll see today."

Update: If you haven't seen the piece yet, you're now out of luck. MoMA has closed its second floor galleries for a reinstallation.

And Today That Will Get You?

2006-03-23T13:15:00.000-05:00

Maybe a closet in the neighborhood. And that's if you're lucky.

Today's NY Times Homes section takes us to Donald Judd's former residence at 101 Spring St. in SoHo (photo at right; link via). The piece mentions an interesting fact about the building that I didn't know. Judd bought it in 1968 for $70,000. Those were the years when SoHo was an ugly, industrial neighborhood and artists were just realizing that they could acquire live-work loft space there at reasonable prices.

But just how reasonable was $70,000 in 1968? Pretty darn reasonable.

Plugging the numbers into The Inflation Calculator tells us that $70,000 in 1968 is the equivalent of $387,308 in 2005.

If he had just under $400,000 and he were shopping in that neighborhood today, Judd would be able to afford a closet. Maybe. But I'm sure he would be able to turn it into the sleekest, most functional closet anyone has ever seen.

Related: Frank Stella cashes out his East Village real estate investment.

The Value of the Auctions

2006-03-22T17:22:00.000-05:00

Despite what I wrote yesterday, I'm not totally opposed to the bi-annual New York contemporary art auctions. As flawed and disturbing as the scene around them can become, they do serve several useful purposes for collectors.

The previews for the sales give a brief glimpse of important work that is moving from one private collection to another, often providing a chance to see early work by living (and recently deceased) artists.

But more importantly, they provide a workout for the eye. It's always good to exercise the critical eye, and the previews provide a great opportunity to do it. I typically find myself walking quickly through the day sale preview saying to myself, "junk, crap, junk, awful, horrid, junk" when I'm stopped in my tracks by something that surprises me with a presence that's strong enough to rise above the garage sale ethos that these events have. Knowing that there is always going to be one, the previews offer a great opportunity to try to spot the needle in the haystack, the kernel of wheat among all the chaff, the diamond in the rough, or [insert your cliche of choice here].

Sure, as Jerry Saltz complains, the whole auction scene has its tribal aspects that have nothing to do with the art. But let's not forget that the auction houses do put on extensive exhibitions of contemporary art twice a year. It's all what you choose to make of it.

Collecting as a Competitive Sport

2006-03-21T19:37:00.000-05:00

I've been surprised by the response to John Colapinto's March 20 New Yorker profile of Sotheby's Tobias Meyer.

Everyone's favorite critic Jerry Saltz got himself all worked up over the piece in a letter posted on MAN yesterday, and Edward Winkleman used it as an occasion to work through the conflicts he feels about being a market maker.

Saltz's main beef (that the piece neglected to critique the auction scene in its glossy presentation of Meyer's work and lifestyle) misses the point. The critique is there. You just need to read between the lines to find it.

Colapinto goes to great length to set Meyer up as the ultimate connoisseur. In addition to contemporary art, Colapinto tells us, Meyer can pontificate on medieval painting, and "he is also an authority on Renaissance and rococo art, gilt bronzes, antique French furniture, German porcelain, French illuminated manuscripts, and countless other man-made objects."

But then we get a chance to enter Meyer's home. What have he and his partner, the well connected art consultant and WPS1 personality Mark Fletcher, installed in their living room on the sixty-sixth floor of the Time Warner Center? Pieces by Tim Noble and Sue Webster (a dollar sign), Andy Warhol, and assume vivid astro focus.

My antennae start to twitch (and not in a good way) whenever I hear of a collector who owns a piece by any one of these artists. To have scored the trifecta makes a strong statement.

To be fair, this bit of information is really too small to use to make a judgment on the collection as a whole, but let me say this anyway. It appears that Meyer and Fletcher aren't collecting quality. They're collecting names--the most recognizable names of the past half century and the hottest names of the moment. This doesn't make them the ultimate connoisseurs of today's art. What it makes them is very successful consumers in today's white hot market.

And that's what Saltz despises about the auction scene. The dropping of names and the showy display. The conspicuous preening and the games related to building prestige. Collecting as competition, not collecting for love of the work.

Colapinto drives the point home by quoting Meyer extensively in the closing paragraph of the piece. Here's Meyer wrestling with his career demons:

"I was laughing with Mark yesterday, because I was having my anxious moment. I was saying, 'I'm not doing enough of this, I have to do more of that, and what's going on, and blah-blah-blah.' And he said, 'Baby, will you relax? Tobias, you just sold the most expensive work of art ever'--meaning Picasso's Boy with Pipe two years ago. "And I said, 'I know, but that was then!'"

So at the end of the day, what Meyer has is not the love of the object, the satisfaction of scholarship, the intellectual rewards of intelligent connoisseurship, or the delight he could find being in the presence of great art on a daily basis. What he has is the mega-huge sale. It's subtle, but that's a pretty damning critique.

You Get What You Pay For

2006-03-17T12:49:00.000-05:00

Since I don't pay anything to host this site with Blogger, it shouldn't really be a surprise that it goes down every so often. But 16 consecutive hours of down time seems a little extreme.

Anyway, welcome back. And, yes, a new vanity URL and Movable Type are looking pretty good right now.

Why We Go to Art Fairs

2006-03-16T09:43:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned the other day, for me fairs aren’t about purchasing. They’re about finding galleries with innovative programs in cities that I don’t regularly visit. This year’s Scope introduced me to three European galleries showing interesting work.

London-based Chinese Contemporary features Chinese work in all media created since 1989. The gallery has the strongest and most clearly enunciated program that I have ever seen. (You think this is hyperbole? Check this out. See. I’m not kidding.)

If I were to allow myself to dream, here’s what I would imagine. Some hugely moneyed person with an interest in art asks me to assemble an important collection. Money and time are not issues. The sole focus is on building a historically significant collection with a well defined scope that represents our age.

If this were my brief, I would start going after contemporary Chinese art. I know next to nothing about contemporary China, and I don’t speak the language. But China today is rapidly undergoing a transition that is more fundamental than any other cultural transformation that I can think of.

Mass migration, rapid urbanization, accumulation of wealth in urban centers, loosening of cultural and political restrictions (but not complete loosening) on artistic creation, conflict between history and contemporaneity. If this all sounds familiar it’s because this same dynamic was at work in America at the turn into the twentieth century. If, as the Whitney so strongly posited with its two 1999 exhibitions, the twentieth century belonged to American art, the twenty-first will belong to Chinese art.

Chinese Contemporary is already there, boots on the ground in Beijing, bringing interesting, charged work to the West. While I saw much of interest at their booth, I was especially taken with work they were showing by Chen Quilin which combines tradition, contemporary capitalism, and urbanization in elaborate staged photographs. (Unfortunately, I can't find any images from this series to post here.)

Galeria Jorge Alcocela from Madrid was showing four face-mounted, digitally manipulated photographs by Inigo Navarro that I found delightful. Each of the pieces features multiple images of the artist, his grandmother, his girlfriend, or his dog (Tica, above right). Each piece is lighthearted and shows a real tenderness for its subject. I don’t see enough work these days that has been created with such a palpable sense of joy.

Bonelli Arte Contemporanea from Mantua was featuring watercolor portraits by Federico Lombardo. At first glance, the pieces reminded me of Kim McCarty’s work—but with slightly older subjects (one example at right). On a more detailed look, though, I began to see that Lombardo’s paintings have much more presence and depth than McCarty’s. They have the same sense of dissipation as her work, but because of the different paper and slightly different technique he uses, the subjects retain more presence than McCarty’s children do. I actually saw a few of McCarty’s pieces the next day at LA Art. Frankly, after seeing Lombardo’s more nuanced work, McCarty’s didn’t impress me as much as it has in the past. An artist who is able to change the way a viewer looks at another artist’s work is doing something powerful.

Seen and Scene at Scope

2006-03-13T20:43:00.000-05:00

Let me start by saying this: I trust Barry and James. So when both of them posted on Friday (here and here) about how much they enjoyed Scope, I changed my Saturday plans and opened up the full day to spend there. I’m glad I did.

Overall, the work on display was about what I expected from galleries exhibiting at the fair—lots of small figurative work on paper, with a good smattering of edgy stuff thrown in. (The subject matter of most work at Scope in six words: breasts and blood, striptease and sex.)

But the fair organizers did an admirable job of creating a strong buzz of excitement about the fair that turned it from a mere marketplace into an event. Not all (not any?) of the non-gallery, non-New Museum programming actually stood on its own as interesting installation or performance, but that didn’t really matter. The energy dissipated throughout the space by so much non-sales activity was infectious. I imagine that Scope, as a fair this year, had the same ludic energy that the great medieval religious festivals had. (And, no, I’m not going to explain that reference any further.) It’s an energy that Pulse didn’t have and that the Armory Show never has had.

When I go to art fairs, I don’t really go to buy. That’s not to say that I haven’t ever bought at a fair, but it’s not my primary objective. Collectors who swoop in before the shows open to the public to binge purchase, dropping thousands upon thousands of dollars in the art world version of the bacchanal, make my stomach turn. (Doing it is bad enough, but there has to be a special place in purgatory for those who do it and then publish a detailed account of their activity.) I use fairs to find new artists and new galleries that I’m interested in following.

In that respect, this year’s Scope was the best yet—especially with its stronger international representation. I was introduced to three European galleries featuring interesting work (some of which was new to me), and I saw a few things at galleries closer to home that piqued my interest.

Details to follow.

Pulse Picks, or Good Things Come in Threes

2006-03-12T21:48:00.000-05:00

If Pulse is going to grow in the future, it needs to define a more clear niche for itself.

The Armory Show is, well, the gold standard of the New York fairs. (And it knows it.) Scope, while growing and featuring pricier work every year, has kept its funky vibe by pushing its focus on emerging artists. Pulse suffered this year from not looking different enough from the Armory Show and from not generating the buzz on-site that Scope did.

But an afternoon spent there wasn't a complete loss. Pulse provided a chance to catch up with three blogging gallerists (one, two, three), and it gave me a look at work by three interesting artists.

Inman Gallery of Houston was featuring two pieces by native Texan Dario Robleto. I first started following Robleto's work a few years ago and regret that I didn't purchase a piece back then because he's pretty much moved out of my price range since appearing in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

I especially liked his small piece (at right) from 2003 entitled Fatalism Sutures to a Memory (A Melody). What has always attracted me to Robleto's practice is the way he works as an alchemist--selecting and transforming charged materials in a way that gives them further power. The gallery lists the materials of this piece--a violin string in a box--as follows:

Box: Cast and carved bone dust from every bone in the body, carbon, sulfur, dirt from battlefields, diatomaceous earth, typeset

Violin string: Cast from re-melted bullet lead salvaged from battlefields of every American war, cold cast zinc, nickel and steel, water extendable resin, wax paper, typeset

It makes me wonder what, exactly, the string would sound like if it were strung and plucked.

Robleto will be featured in a New York solo show at D'Amelio Terras when they open their new space in May. The work he's preparing for this show is supposed to be more "feminine." I'm curious to see what, exactly, that means.

DCKT was showing a small piece by Isidro Blasco that caught my eye. The sculpted photo collage of an urban plaza felt right in its combination of form, scale, and subject matter. When I mentioned that I thought it was a piece I could see myself living with, I was told that I was out of luck. It had already been sold.

Fiedler Contemporary from Cologne was showing work of Cologne resident Frank Breuer. Conceptually, Breuer's work is completely derivative of what Bernd and Hilla Becher have spent decades doing, but for some reason that doesn't seem to be a detriment.

Breuer's small, diasec-mounted color images of telephone poles (one untitled example at right) are compelling. The milky, washed out sky behind each of these elements of the suburban landscape gives a dignity to the objects--granting remarkable presence to pieces of infrastructure that appear as nothing but ugly when glimpsed in passing from a moving automobile.

Fair Weekend Weirdness

2006-03-11T19:46:00.000-05:00

Three strange but true experiences so far this weekend:

Watching Andrea Fraser undress herself on a large flatscreen Sony in one room of a collector's home during a cocktail reception. Then walking out of the room and running into a fully-clothed, live-in-the-flesh Andrea Fraser standing in the hallway.
I never did get a press credential for the Armory Show, but my 12-month-old kid certainly did score. She ended up bringing Rosalee Goldberg's Armory Show VIP card home with her from Scope today. (Rosalee, if you want the card back, drop me a note.)
Seeing a price listed on a piece that I loaned (at the artist's request) to a gallery showing his work at one of the fairs.

Fair recaps next week.

Scope: 0, FDNY: 100 Pissed Off Writers

2006-03-09T20:34:00.000-05:00

And fair weekend is off to a smoking start.

Scope's pre-opening, press-only preview was scheduled for 5:00 PM tonight, but the fire department had something else in mind--something about carbon monoxide levels being too high in the hall after three days of exhibitors driving fork lifts around the unventilated space.

So after being forced to stand around on the street for an hour (breathing in more carbon monoxide from five idling FDNY vehicles than they would have in the hall) people with invites for the event were kindly asked to come back on another day.

Very, very VIPs didn't have the same problem, though. Spotted: uber-collector and John Currin model Dianne Wallace leaving the premises at 4:40 PM carrying a painting that she quickly placed in the trunk of a black Town Car waiting for her in front of the building.

Art Fair Overload?

2006-03-08T18:42:00.000-05:00

I've been somewhat surprised this week as I've spoken with more than one art world insidery type about this weekend's fairs in New York. People don't seem to be as excited about the upcoming binge as I would have guessed.

Are we seeing the first signs of art world overindulgence? Or have I just been talking with an over-traveled, jaded subset of people? We'll find out tomorrow when all the fun begins.

Biennial Haiku

2006-03-03T16:12:00.000-05:00

Storm clouds gathered. Day
Becomes night. Howling winds. No
Redemption, no grace.

Related: prose and damning prose.

I Guess They Didn't Read Yesterday's Post

2006-03-02T10:49:00.000-05:00

From a press release sent out this morning by the Sheldon in Lincoln, NE.

Subject: Come to Sheldon's Martini Madness and Exhibition Opening Friday

"Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection, 1980 to Present" will focus on artworks that have recently entered the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery collection. Please plan to join us for the exhibition opening and the Second Annual Martini Madness reception, Friday, March 3, 5-7 p.m. Great art, free admission, delicious appetizers, stimulating conversation, drawings for dinners at downtown restaurants and a cash bar. Bring a friend, and we’ll see you there.

Let's hope they keep their Gaston Laichaise, Floating Figure (above right), very well cordoned off during the event. The combination of museums, martinis, and Midwestern men doesn't tend to produce positive results.

Bad Behavior All Around

2006-03-01T10:54:00.000-05:00

Mia Fineman profiles Charlie Finch in this week's New York Observer. I've said more than my share already on the recent Finch affair, but I'm going to hit one more point before I drop the topic for good.

It seems that Fineman (writing for the dead-tree media) may have missed what a dozen bloggers didn't. Although she calls Finch's piece on Natalie Frank "mildly lewd," Fineman only mentions Finch's t-shirt comment. None of the bloggers she quotes would have gotten all worked up over Finch mentioning someone working away while wearing a wife beater--even if he did include a little sheen of sweat in his description.

I hadn't wanted to spell out what caused my outrage earlier, but I guess I need to. The offense comes in the combination of the piece's title, "The Seduction of Natalie Frank," and the last paragraph where Finch metaphorically undresses Frank--or, rather, has her undress herself for his pleasure--as he describes a self-portrait she has painted:

The piece shows a quizzical, confused, alarmed Natalie, a naked expose of the artist's ambition and insecurity. It is a masterpiece of self-exposure and a harbinger that, perhaps in the future, Ms. Frank will strip away the kitschey veneer and show herself in all her flawed, ambitious glory.

Combine the career promotion, the paternalistic tone, and the fantasized sexualization of the relationship this way and you've got one creepy, exploitative piece.

Fineman's working around the crux of the issue like this raises an interesting question, actually. Did she really miss the point that got the blogosphere all lathered up, or were editors at the Observer too offended by Finch's piece to even allow Fineman to summarize its most gratuitous aspects?

I did find it interesting, though, to learn about the context for the fight that I saw between Finch and Artnet editor Walter Robinson at the MoMA opening press preview. (The fight actually happened in November, 2004, not last January as Fineman writes.)

Switching gears, now, in other news of bad behavior, ArtsJournal pulled out all the stops yesterday, giving us the following:

Come on, people. Let's respect one another and treat the art well. Is that too much to ask?

Museum Ink

2006-02-27T22:59:00.000-05:00

Paul Werner's new book, Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World, is going to make some people at the Guggenheim very unhappy. Staff there become a little tetchy when the infamous motorcycle and Armani shows are dragged up and used as cheap shots. But occasional blog snark is child's play next to Werner's more sustained critique.

Museum, Inc. takes its share of cheap shots (many of which are spot on and quite funny), but it also makes a serious case for why these two notorious shows stand for something important that shouldn't be forgotten. Of them and former director Thomas Krens, Werner writes:

Krens imagined that circulating new objects (bikes or blouses) through auratic channels (museums) would automatically confer an aura on them and authority on the museum.... His critics were wrong to claim Krens was trying to commodify culture: he was trying to culturificate commodities, and he failed.

The failure wasn't total, though. Werner, a former lecturer at the Guggenheim, writes about engaging with his groups and about those groups engaging with the bikes in unusually intense ways. The Guggenheim's failure was not in hosting these shows. It was in not challenging the current paradigm of how a museum could and should interact with its visitors.

The Guggenheim dramatically expanded its reach during the Krens years, but it never looked beyond the admissions numbers at the quality of its visitors' experiences. The numbers, and the numbers alone, mattered. Of the first (and only) Krens expansion that was an unqualified success, Werner writes:

Bilbao was supposed to demonstrate that the Guggenheim had amassed a certain experience in attracting audiences, and the Guggenheim was saying it could sell that intangible experience.... The Guggenheim's stated mission was no longer making art available to an audience, it was delivering "its" audience to a new sponsor.

"Get them in the door first," management seemed to be saying. "We'll worry about what happens once we've got them." But no one at the Guggenheim ever worried much about what happened when people showed up. That's where Werner becomes most vocal. Working on the front lines--where curatorial outputs meet admissions desk inputs--Werner found the museum's worst failure.

He decided to step into the gap by making institutional critique a standard part of his lectures. If the exhibition is weak and if the institution is condescending to the people coming to see it, why not enlighten them on both points? The people loved it, Werner says, and no one at the museum ever knew that he was lifting the curtain to show visitors the little man pulling the levers. Why? Because museum management never bothered to spend time on the floor during opening hours.

Like other titles in the Prickly Paradigm Press line, this short work (a thin 76 pages that can be digested in a single sitting) is lively and passionate--sometimes so much so that the rigor of argument and exposition gets short changed. But for those interested in the current state of the art in museum management, Werner leads an interesting tour through the museum that has embraced corporate models for growth more openly than any other. And he's got plenty of good stories to tell along the way.

News Flash: Curators Are Not Artists

2006-02-24T08:49:00.000-05:00

Everyone knows the old line, "Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach phys ed."

There's plenty of opportunity to edit that syntactical construction for use in the artworld. Let me try it this way: "Those who can't paint-sculpt-draw-make prints-take photographs-assemble installations-perform-film-conceptualize-or otherwise create art objects or environments, curate. Those who can't curate, curate art blogs."

So now that I've taken a dig at myself, let me give a well deserved poke to the curatorial class.

Everyone wants to assume that his or her job is important. The smarter the people are who tend to hold a job, the more important the job tends to become in their own eyes. (I've seen this at its worst; I used to be an academic.)

I don't know why it's happening all of a sudden, but lately I'm starting to get tired of curators who become so enamored of their own process that they stop thinking about the art they are presenting for display and viewers' engagement with it.

I'm sure lots of you have stories about cases where this has happened, but the most visible manifestation of this tendency is the press release. At least one annoying one arrives in my inbox every day. You can tell that the release has been written by a striving curator when it spends paragraph after paragraph explaining the lofty theme behind the show but never quite gets around to describing the work that's going to be shown.

But the one case of curatorial self-aggrandizement that has caused me to raise my eyebrows especially high recently is the Wrong Gallery's contribution to this year's Whitney Biennial. The trio of Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick were given the Gilman gallery on the museum's mezzanine level. For the space, these three have selected works from the Whitney's collection (with a few outside additions) that show representations of the outlaw in American culture.

OK, you get what's going on here, don't you? With this installation, the Biennial's curators have defined curating to be an artistic activity.

Sure, curating is creative work. No question about it. The best curators are incredibly creative people. But the act of curating is fundamentally different than the act of creating a work of art. I'm all for expanding the bounds of what constitutes artistic practice, but this goes too far. Call me old school if you want, but I'll stick by my guns on this point.

I shouldn't be so surprised, though, by the decision to self-justify in this way. This year's Biennial curators, Chrissie Iles of the Whitney and Philippe Vergne of the Walker, pretty much completely embarrassed themselves by admitting to Artforum that they've invented an imaginary friend to validate their labor while they've been working on the show. She even gets a catalogue credit. (But she's now got more than just a catalogue credit. Their admission has given rise to a spritely blog where the jokes made at their expense tend to be so esoteric that even I don't get most of them. But I do dig the site's soundtrack.)

Fortunately, though, I sense that there's a backlash developing. SITE Santa Fe announced the line up for its biennial this week, and curator Klaus Ottmann made sure to be quoted in the first paragraph of the press release with a very sensible statement, "I want this Biennial to be about the artists, not about the curator." That he felt the need to do this says something about the state of the curatorial profession today.

Current Chelsea Picks

2006-02-23T09:38:00.000-05:00

Two shows in Chelsea have caught my attention over the last couple weeks.

At Alona Kagan Gallery, Pawel Wojtasik is screening his latest video project, The Aquarium. Filmed mainly at the Sea Life Center in Seward, AK, the work juxtaposes the unbounded expanse of Alaska's Resurrection Bay with the close confinement experienced by sea mammals held in captivity at the aquarium.

Much like Wojtasik's earlier work Dark Sun Squeeze, the long gaze and rhythmic flow of the piece force viewers into a meditative state while calling attention to a deeper issue--in this case, the aquarium as simulacrum of a natural environment that is rapidly disappearing. When I visited Seward in 2003, I was standing at the edge of the bay right next to the Sea Life Center when I spotted a large sea mammal swimming in the waters just off shore. Why, I wondered, would anyone choose to visit a re-creation of this breathtaking natural environment when the real thing existed right there? Wojtasik raises that question, along with others about humans' treatment of the environment and the ethics of animal captivity, in this transfixing piece.

I've had Andrea Zittel's show at the New Museum, Critical Space, listed in the sidebar for a few weeks now, but I haven't posted anything about it. I'm still not completely decided about the exhibition, but the fact that I keep returning to think about it tells me that there's something of interest there.

Typically when we think of the design process, we think of the end product being a mass-produced item. Zittel works very much in the design tradition, and I find that I'm intrigued by her embrace of design practices for her projects. Her creation of one-offs and functional (but not mass-marketable) objects somehow elevates the outputs she produces to being contemplative objects that still retain their full functionality.

Not all her work is of the same quality, though. Many of the small paintings and the conceptual project documented in a large photo-based installation fall flat. But Zittel's clothing and live/work spaces force viewers to rethink their own relation to the products with which they surround themselves every day.

Pawel Wojtasik, The Aquarium, at Alona Kagan Gallery through March 4, 2006.

Andrea Zittel, Critical Space, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art through May 27, 2006.

Why This Is the Only Post I'll be Publishing on This Year's Armory Show

2006-02-22T00:01:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I decided to go all mainstream, so I requested press credentials for next month's Armory Show. I even mentally checked off several of the requirements as I was completing the form: art press, international audience, an assignment from my editor (moi). I even had the application in way before the deadline.

So I was surprised, sort of, to get notification yesterday that I could not be "accommodated." Thinking that this was an opportunity to educate another PR flack about this blogosphere thingie, I fired back a note, listed some of my bona fides, dropped the number of unique visitors the site receives annually, mentioned who these readers (you) are, and implied how it would be to the fair's benefit to have me attend.

Here's the response I received in return:

No, it's not about blogs. Every request is reviewed on a case by case basis.

We reviewed your coverage of last year's show and we do not find that it meets our criteria for a press pass.

Warm Regards,

Pamela Doan
Communications Director
The Armory Show, Inc.

So it's not that they don't understand the blogosphere. It's that they don't understand me!

As I didn't attend last year's fair on a press pass and as the silly piece I wrote wasn't really even about the fair, I figure that the folks at the Armory Show just don't have a sense of humor. Or that they're total control freaks who carry grudges. Or maybe both.

Update: I don't feel quite so all alone now.

Rauschenberg and the Art of Collaboration

2006-02-21T11:20:00.000-05:00

In between viewings of the Rauschenberg show at the Met, I've been reading Calvin Tomkins's recently reissued book, Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg.

Throughout the book Rauschenberg emerges as an anti-Romantic hero. There are plenty of scenes that show him working away in obscurity in his New York version of a garret. But rather than presenting him as an isolated, solitary genius whose vision changes the world around him, Tomkins shows Rauschenberg to be at his best when he's working in collaboration with others.

Throughout the book, Rauschenberg comes across as a catalyst, rather than a solitary creator. In his presence, objects, ideas, and the work of other artists engage and combine in ways that would not have been possible without him. Rauschenberg, meanwhile, loses none of his own creative power through the reaction.

This notion, artist as catalyst rather than creator, is the most interesting thing to emerge from Tomkins's work, but he stops a few steps short of completing the picture. Because, I believe, he and Rauschenberg have a long standing friendship and because Rauschenberg has always been reserved (if not secretive) about his personal life and his sexuality, Tomkins avoids going into detail on what could well be the most important story to be told about twentieth-century American art history--Rauschenberg's relationship with Jasper Johns.

Granted, there are several scenes in the book of these two as young men working in their studios a floor apart, critiquing each others' work, and sharing ideas. But this relationship coming as it did at such a crucial point in both artists' development really ought to be examined in more depth. Of their eventual falling out, Tomkins has only this to say:

They both went up to Connecticut College in the summer of 1962, to work with Merce Cunningham, who was there under the college's dance residency program. By the time the summer ended they were no longer together. The break was bitter and excruciatingly painful, not only for them but for their closest associates--Cage and Cunningham and a few others--who felt that they, too, had lost something of great value.

And of the lifelong animosity that has remained between the two after their split, we get only this from Tomkins:

Rauschenberg came to Johns's opening [for his 1977 Whitney retrospective], and at one point in the evening he even tried to tell Johns how he felt about seeing the paintings all together, but it was no use, they could not talk to each other any more on that level.

I would love to read a more detailed version of how these two worked together during the early-1960s as their individual styles developed and as they supported each other emotionally in the years before they began receiving market acceptance for their work. A detailed portrait of the relationship in these years would provide incredible new insight into the work of both artists and might even provide new thoughts on the nature of collaboration itself.

Sadly, though, there are only two people who could provide the detail necessary to write this account. And they're still not really speaking to (or about) each other.

Playing It Straight, Or Not

2006-02-16T10:56:00.000-05:00

When I give gallery talks, I always play it straight. It's not that I've never been tempted to lead a group of earnest museum goers into conceptual limbo by deliberately feeding them misinformation, but I guess I'm just too diligent of a little soldier to present museum infrastructure as objects of art.

All that may change, though, when the Biennial opens next month. I'm taking this, from a press release issued today by the Whitney, as permission to play a little fast and loose with the truth this time around.

The Biennial features an ongoing performance throughout the run of the exhibition. The artist Momus will appear at random times, in random locations, to offer improvisational tours. Wearing a costume and equipped with a portable sound system, Momus leads visitors into the realm of the imagination with freely invented "unreliable" tours that open up new possibilities for experiencing the Biennial.

I don't have my costume (a costume!) designed yet, but the little details like that will take care of themselves when the time arrives.

So Who's Supporting This Stuff?

2006-02-14T09:52:00.000-05:00

Charlie Finch's latest piece of sexploitation has been stirring the pot all around the interweb. See MAN for links to several blog posts on the topic, but don't think that's all. I've had several other links emailed to me that aren't included in the list.

Earlier today Greg Allen posted a dismissive response that Artnet editor Walter Robinson sent him after receiving Allen's letter of complaint about Finch's most recent piece. Robinson, it seems, has no issue with using Artnet's name, credibility, and 2M monthly page views to support Finch's predatory work.

I wonder, though, if Artnet's advertisers feel the same way. On one recent page load of the Finch piece, the following organizations' ads appeared in the right-hand sidebar:

You have to wonder if these organizations know that it's their advertising dollars that are enabling Finch's lurid studio visits--and what they would do if they did know. All of a suddent ArtInfo is looking more attractive, isn't it?

Monday Morning Linkage

2006-02-13T09:42:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I've done a links post. So off we go for a whirl around the blogosphere:

I once overheard a couple standing in front of a Jackson Pollock painting having a serious discussion about what it was a painting of. The man insisted that he saw a horse in the painting. The woman couldn't make it out. With a little help from Photoshop, Edward Winkleman makes the case for one Pollock work as a self-portrait. You determine how persuasive the argument is.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last week, you know by now what's happened at the Getty. Given the terms of Munitz's departure, I predict that the story isn't over.
Planning to make a purchase on the secondary art market? Be sure to do your homework first.
It's been, what, four or five years now that art blogs have been around? It's hard to believe that some people still don't get it.
All hail the well conceived hoax.
I've always wondered what happened when pieces donated for charity auctions don't sell. (Updated.)
And, finally, what do I have to do to get a dinner invitation?

Calling All Guerrilla Girls

2006-02-09T22:35:00.000-05:00

What's it going to take to get the Guerrilla Girls to finally go after Artnet and Charlie Finch? If this disaster isn't enough to do it, I don't know what is.

At first Finch's studio visit peccadilloes were sort of funny--in an incorrect kind of way. Then they started to become troubling. Now, with the sense of exploitation that is creeping in, they're just plain disturbing. Seriously disturbing.

Update: This post has generated more email than anything else published here recently. For a taste of how sentiment is running, see other posts on the topic by Brian Sholis and Edna V. Harris.

But Seriously, Folks

2006-02-09T17:42:00.000-05:00

OK, so seriously now. What to do what that atrium?

There are only two things MoMA can do with it: nothing or site specific installations.

The museum's design, frequent visitors have realized, is stultifyingly "corporate," for lack of a better word. To a certain extent, that's what the board asked for when it made the choice to go with Yoshio Taniguchi over an architect known for creating new ways of thinking about and using space.

Taniguchi built the museum around this gigantic, non-functional space, co-opting a 1980s corporate move designed to display institutional power and prestige. Dedicating so much space to nothing more than enabling oblique sight lines between galleries says something--especially when it's in a building situated on a block that has what must be some of the most expensive real estate per square foot of any place in the country. MoMA's got dough, it proclaims. Dough enough to burn. No other institution can burn as much dough as MoMA.

The purpose of the space, then, is to display the power, dominance, and prestige of the institution. With that being the case, there's no incentive to actually use the space for anything. Sitting empty--displaying a few pretty pictures that get lost on the walls and a massive sculpture so large that it really ought to be shown outdoors--the space accomplishes the function it is supposed to serve. So, by doing nothing with it, MoMA is allowing the space to do exactly what it is supposed to do.

But it does seem to be a shame to waste that much real estate. Since the space itself is about spectacle (the spectacle of MoMA's largesse), the only suitable use for it (if a function has to be imposed on it) is as a container for spectacle. Used in any other way, the space itself will always overpower whatever it houses.

So MoMA could take a page from the Tate Modern's playbook and commission site-specific installations for the atrium. Artists forced to wrestle with massive, ungainly spaces like the Turbine Hall or like MoMA's atrium can come up with brilliant works. Think of Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project and Bruce Nauman's Raw Materials. There's always the chance, though, that an individual work (like Rachel Whiteread's Embankment) won't quite rise to the occasion.

What to Do with That Atrium?

2006-02-08T20:41:00.000-05:00

MAN asks; FtF answers: Guggenheim MoMA.

Lease the atrium space to Thomas Krens for 99 years, commission Zaha Hadid to design a building within the building, and then rent the space out to (I mean "partner with") corporations to show exhibitions of their products (I mean "work;" no, I mean "cutting edge design;" no, I mean "products").

Since he's already done fashion and transportation, Krens could even open with a film company. A company like, maybe, Pixar.

Oh wait. Scratch that. The Pixar part. But keep the Guggenheim MoMA part. That hasn't been done yet.

Bingeing on Museum Mile

2006-02-06T00:01:00.000-05:00

For some reason, there's a serious glut of great shows open right now on upper Fifth Avenue. Most of them have made their way into the Discussion Fodder section in the right-hand sidebar. Here are a few highlights:

Rauschenberg at the Met: Each time I go back to see this show, I like it more, although I still feel somewhat like Alfred Barr did about Rauschenberg's work from this period: I respect it, but I just can't make myself get completely passionate about it. Barr passed up the opportunity to purchase several of the pieces in this show for MoMA back when the getting was good--and cheap. It's a treat to see all of these great combines reunited back here in the city of their creation: both halves of Factum, Canyon (at right), Monogram, the bed, etc. (OK, so two of these pieces are owned by MoMA, but just think what could have been if Barr hadn't been so worried about vermin nesting in the goat's hair.) What a shame, though, to have several of the works on display boxed up behind half-inch thick Plexi. Seeing the infamous angora goat caged like this is almost no better than not seeing the beast at all. Best conversation I've overheard in the galleries: a father saying to his young son, "See that chicken up there. It was lucky. Most chickens end up getting eaten, not shown in museums." There's something interesting about that comment. Rauschenberg's best combines all have taxidermied animals--or parts of animals--in them. And I'm not the only person I know who has come to this conclusion after seeing the show.
David Smith at the Guggenheim: Finally, a serious, scholarly exhibition that has been wonderfully installed at the Guggenheim. It's enough to make the largest spiral ramp in the city look like it's a museum again instead of a trade show hall for rent. While this exhibition made me realize that I actually appreciate Smith's work more in smaller quantities, the show has made the Guggenheim look better than it has looked in ages. All the disadvantages of Wright's awkward bays and uneven floors disappear in the presence of Smith's airy, massless metal sculptures. If you go to see the show, pay special attention to the pedestals on which the sculptures sit. Each has had to be created with an uneven bottom to provide a horizontal surface on which to display the work.
Egon Schiele at the Neue Galerie: This small exhibition of exquisitely troubling drawings shows Schiele to be the father of just about every artist making drawings today. Perhaps "the unconscious" would be a better metaphor since most young turks probably don't even know who Schiele was. If they did, though, his work would blow their minds.
And coming later this week to the neighborhood: The Hudson River School gets tossed across the Park as the New-York Historical Society closes its impressive permanent collection show and the National Academy Museum opens two new ones: a selection of works from Frederic Church's own collection and an exhibition of Hudson River School works from the Henry and Sharon Martin Collection.

I Can't Believe My Spam Filter Let This One Through

2006-02-01T16:20:00.000-05:00

I could hardly believe my eyes when I started reading this blast email sent out today by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Remember those long stemmed roses from a "secret admirer" that were whisked into your office last February 14? We know you ordered them for yourself. It's cool -- we've all been there. And as sexy as self-love is, we also know that you might be looking to meet a real, live admirer who understands the hotness that is you this Valentine's Day. That's why we made some plans for you this Friday night.

Sexplicit plans, no less.

Hook up with us on February 3 for our Sexplicit First Fridays. Get it on to the soulful sounds of DJ Squeeze, satisfy your desire for drink with an Absolut Ladykiller Cosmo or Maneater Martini, find that special someone at our Love Post Office, and enjoy daring insights from the sexperts at Early to Bed. The latest 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work exhibition will debut, featuring the work of Dianna Frid.

While this come on doesn't really turn my crank, the hotness that is me predicts that the MCA will see a full house (but very little interest in the art) this coming Friday.

Making Spiral Jetty Even More Tourist Friendly

2006-01-30T12:35:00.000-05:00

It's not enough that they had to sign the road out to the shore of the Great Salt Lake. Now, Greg reports, the State of Utah has performed a little clean up activity along the final stretch of the one lane dirt track that leads to Spiral Jetty.

Gone is all the detritus formerly located just around the bend from Smithson's earthwork. I've written (here and here) that these decaying remnants of past industrial activity at the site actually contribute to Smithson's work. I guess the State of Utah didn't agree.

The trailer, amphibious transport, and other assorted rust buckets are gone. But they aren't forgotten. Here's a panoramic shot I took of the site back in August of 2004.

With the art market as frothy as it is right now, I bet Utah could have padded its coffers by auctioning this stuff once it had been pulled off the site. There has to be a market for art world memorabilia like this, doesn't there?

With Special Thanks to Me, Myself, and I

2006-01-27T12:38:00.000-05:00

The United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) has announced the winners of its 2005 honors. The awards ceremony will be held Feb. 2 at the Jewish Museum in New York.

I always chuckle when I see the categories for this competition. I love the fact that the organization offers awards for the best shows in New York City and the best shows nationally (i.e., not New York City). (And I couldn't help but notice that this year both first and second place winners in the "best monographic museum show nationally" appeared in New York at the Whitney. So much for the not-New York City angle.) I'm all for New York art world snobbishness, but it seems to me that institutionalizing it like this isn't exactly the most politic thing to do for an organization with national reach.

And, speaking of embarrassing political decisions, this year's list of awardees contains a huge gaffe that ought to raise eyebrows--if not call into question the whole process used for selecting the winners.

In the category of "best art-related programming in a broadcast medium," this year's winner is The Yay/Nay Show's episode from Art Basel Miami Beach. For those not familiar with it, The Yay/Nay Show is a WPS1 production co-hosted by Artforum Scene & Herd contributor Linda "Fabyab" Yablonsky and Carey Lovelace.

This little off-the-cuff piece of gossipy, ephemeral, art-world cronyism beat out all other art-related broadcast programs from the past year, including programs that were actually broadcast and not just streamed over the Internet to 60 people. That includes programs like, say, Art21's season 3 which was shown nationally on PBS, was watched by several million viewers, and which will have an extended impact in classrooms around the country thanks to DVD distribution and a series of innovative educator's guides. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have provided professional services to Art21.)

So, you agree that the award winner in this category was a bad choice and you want to make your opinion known? The best thing to do would be to voice your dissatisfaction to AICA co-president and member of the awards ceremony committee, Carey Lovelace.

Oh, yes, in case you're wondering, that's the same Carey Lovelace who is receiving the award.

I can almost hear her acceptance speech now: "I would like to thank the AICA's stellar leadership team and the hard working members of the awards committee for honoring me in this way...."

Sending Me Secret (or Not So Secret) Messages

2006-01-25T07:40:00.000-05:00

I've always listed an email address in the right hand column of the site for people who want to contact me. This week, after deciding that email is so 1990s and that it's time for From the Floor to join the twenty-first century, I have added a new method for users to pass information and feedback along to me.

Taking inspiration from what the British have been doing in Russia, I've embedded a wireless receiver in one of Dia's basalt columns on West 22nd Street in Chelsea. (I figured Joseph Beuys would get a strange kind of kick out of the idea that his work was being used in this manner.)

Now if you want to send From the Floor a press release about the show you are opening next weekend or if you have feedback on a piece published on the site, you can put the message on your wireless handheld device, set the device to transmit, and wander back and forth along 22nd Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues until your PDA tells you that your message has been sent.

I'll be picking up my fake rock column and replacing it with a new one every Thursday morning between 2AM and 3AM so that I'm sure to get info on all the openings for the upcoming weekend. Feel free to use the new contact method. Just don't tell the Russians about it.

Visiting the Homeless Museum's Home

2006-01-24T08:38:00.000-05:00

I'm a sucker for pieces of institutional critique. Maybe it's the peek behind the curatorial and education department curtains that I regularly get, but I always enjoy art that sends up contemporary museum practices.

Last Sunday I paid a visit to the first of two open houses to be hosted by The Homeless Museum. The museum, housed in the fifth floor walkup of the museum's director, boasts its own education department, audio tour, gift shop, cafe (which was serving complimentary mussels, boiled eggs, and whole milk during my visit), and membership program.

I've posted here before about the organization's most recent acquisition, MoMA HMLSS, and it was nice to have a chance to spend some up close and personal time peeking into this museum in a valise.

HoMu will be hosting the second of its two planned open houses next Sunday, January 29, from 11AM - 5PM. Free reservations and location details can be obtained by emailing info@homelessmuseum.org. And if you go, be sure not to miss the sign next to the sink in the curatorial office (a.k.a., the bathroom). There ought to be one of these posted in every museum's staff-only restroom.

Photography Monday

2006-01-23T00:01:00.000-05:00

For some reason, I’ve seen a lot of interesting photography and photography-related items in the last few days.

Daylight Magazine, the journal of documentary photography published by the Daylight Community Arts Foundation, is recently out with its fourth issue which focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Featuring work by nine photographers and a short topical essay, the issue provides an unvarnished take on a complex situation with no easy answers.

The View from the Edge of the Universe explains why photography is the most rational (and predictable) segment of the art market.

Michael Rips had an interesting piece in yesterday's Times on the photography of Seydou Keïta (above left) that addresses the issues of posthumous prints, artistic intentionality, contemporary practices of interpretation, and the art market—an unholy quartet if I've ever seen one.

I wandered into Jen Bekman the other day and had a hard time walking out without a couple prints by one of Beckman’s latest finds, the New York-based British photographer James Deavin. Deavin’s face-mounted photographs of empty sports venues—an ice hockey rink, an indoor cricket pitch, a climbing wall, and a velodrome—are unnervingly seductive. (These low resolution reproductions simply don’t do the work justice.) It’s impossible not to fall in love with the milky surface of his abstracted ice rink, broken in its corners by an empty net and a section of Plexiglas safety board (at right). The romance of the wooden track and play of colors in Deavin’s velodrome (at left) provide visual patterns and harmonies that make me want to walk right into the pictorial space and wander through this magical place.

Available in sizes of both 30x38 (an edition of 8) and 16x19 (an edition of 10), these pieces are almost irresistible. I did find myself wondering, though, if I would respect them as much after the infatuation wears off as I did on our first encounter. Not sure that I would be able to answer “yes,” I left without taking the credit card out of my wallet.

And speaking of impulse buys, I just about did it a second time over the weekend when I stopped into my neighborhood branch library to return a few books. Seeing signs posted for an artist’s self-hung exhibition in the library’s basement, I decided to take the stairs down to have a look. Was I ever stunned. I hadn’t expected to see such a large body of interesting work so sensitively installed in a library basement. (Who would have?) But what a pleasant surprise.

Billy Parrott’s exhibition, Objects Like Memories, presents works from at least three different series that all somehow relate to the formation of memory. Using such interesting materials as obsolete children’s encyclopedias, pocket watch casings, found photographs, and layers of photographs printed on glass plates, Parrott’s work creates a nostalgia for an age that passed away before most people living today were born. Of special interest to me was a series of works that sat somewhat outside the emotional tenor of most pieces on display. Six disturbing photographic portrait collages of dolls prove to be simultaneously attractive and repulsive—creating a charged dynamic that the original objects never could.

Update: One late addition comes in this morning—MAN on a private series of photographs that Sally Mann has been creating in recent years.

Daylight Magazine, issue 4, is available for $10 from the foundation’s website.

James Deavin’s work is on view at Jen Bekman (6 Spring Street) through February 4, 2006.

Billy Parrott’s exhibition Objects Like Memories is open Wednesday, Saturdays, and by appointment at the Tompkins Square Library (331 E. 10th St.) through January 28, 2006.

Notes on Richard Tuttle at the Whitney

2006-01-17T00:01:00.000-05:00

Some random observations on the Richard Tuttle exhibition now at the Whitney:

If you've already seen the exhibition once, you've haven't seen it yet. This is the exhibition that just won't stand still. There are a couple reasons for this. First, the show was organized by SFMOMA which had more space to give to it than the Whitney does. And, second, for his 1975 show at the Whitney, Tuttle and curator Marcia Tucker designed multiple installations. The exhibition was actually hung and then re-hung three times over the course of its run. As an homage to that exhibition and to give more work a showing in New York, the Whitney made plans to swap certain pieces in and out of this exhibition. The Whitney's own work, Fountain (at right) for example, was recently removed from the show.
Now that the show has been up and open for a while, this installing and re-installing seems to have taken on a life of its own. Every time I've seen the show over the last month there have been changes. On Sunday when I arrived to give a gallery talk, I noticed that a series of pieces that played a pivotal role in my lecture had disappeared during the previous week. I had five minutes to look for something else that I could call "a surreal Mensa test" because I thought the phrase was cute and didn't want to drop it from my talk. Guess what? I found another surreal Mensa test without any difficulty. Most of Tuttle's series from the mid-1980s, actually, can be called surreal Mensa tests.
I'm almost expecting, one of these weekends, to walk onto the museum's third floor to find all the temporary walls removed and a single, small work installed on the floor in the middle of an otherwise empty gallery. Won't it be a challenge to try to talk about that for 45 minutes?
On Sunday I watched a guy walk right into the middle of Tuttle's floor piece Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself which was installed two weeks ago for the first time since (I've been told) 1975. The trespasser finally realized that the guards and I were shouting at him after he had miraculously stepped over several of the string drawings without kicking into any of them. His response: "Sorry. I didn't see anything there." That's always a danger with Tuttle's work, isn't it?
I recently read Hilton Kramer's famously nasty review of the 1975 show that appeared in the Times when he was art critic for the paper of record, and I'm deeply conflicted about it. (Sorry, I can't find a copy on-line, and I'm not about to retype it here.) On the one hand, it's an incredibly witty, muscular piece of prose that expresses a firm opinion on the show--things we almost never see in art writing today. On the other hand, it's typical Kramer in its writing off of a whole body of work without expending an iota of energy to try to understand something that questions his critical assumptions. I think this is the piece that Saint Peter will pull out some day when Kramer arrives at the Pearly Gates: "Hilton, I've got to tell you. You were given a lot of talent, much more than your share actually, but just look at how you chose to use it...."
The exhibition has the most beautifully produced catalogue I have seen in recent years. But don't just take my word for it. Find and browse a copy for yourself. You won't be disappointed.
Update: Browsing the WPS1 archives, I came across this interview (Real Player required) with the show's curator David Kiehl. Jump forward to 21:25 of the stream to hear Kiehl discuss the installation.

The Art of Richard Tuttle is on view at the Whitney through February 5, 2006.

Two Chelsea Picks

2006-01-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

I spent a good portion of a day recently zigzagging up Chelsea's cross streets, wandering back and forth and back and forth between Tenth and Eleventh Avenue, and I only came across two shows of work that I found interesting enough to want to comment on here.

At Caren Golden Fine Art, the Dutch/French artist Serge Onnen is showing a group of drawings and drawing-inspired pieces that comment on consumer culture. His large works on paper of massed, disembodied arms holding various objects (Forks & Cameras, at right) reminds one of the clumps of writhing, mating frogs seen every so often on television nature shows about the rain forest.

Rather than getting off on members of the opposite sex, though, these appendages are holding, stroking, and fondling cameras, cell phones, and other miscellaneous products--giving a new twist to the eroticism with which so many of these items are pitched to the consuming public. Onnen's hand-drawn, low-tech cell animations of hands performing various surreal actions also charm.

At Stux, recent Columbia MFA graduate Miki Carmi presents a show of very unflattering but totally compelling portraits. Working from photographs of family members, but not reproducing them slavishly, Carmi has created a series of similar yet distinct portraits. All his subjects (Grandpa, at left) are painted in three-quarters view and are rendered without hair--all the better to show Carmi's masterful rendering of aged skin. Each vein, every age spot, each wrinkle all take on a texture and transparency that is unlike any renderings of human skin I have seen recently. What Currin and Yuskavage did for figurative painting in the 1990s, Carmi is doing for the portrait today.

This, his first solo show, is already sold out. If it weren't I would have mortgaged the cat, if need be, to purchase one of his paintings. (No matter that I would have a hard time finding a place to hang one of these large pieces in my small apartment.) I haven't been that charitable in the past to MFA students a year out of school who have been given solo shows (with good reason, I still hold), but Carmi is an exception. While I still have a hard time getting what all the hype is around Dana Schutz's work, Carmi's is the real thing. He's young, talented, producing mature work and definitely one to watch.

A Big Surprise, Duly Noted

2006-01-10T19:10:00.000-05:00

I'm not a big fan of Ed Ruscha's work. Never have been. I even wrote something snarky back in 2004 when it was rumored that Ruscha was the leading contender to represent America at the last Venice Biennale.

So it's come as a surprise to me how much I've been enjoying the current installation of his Biennale contribution, Course of Empire, which is on view at the Whitney through January 29.

Part of my interest in the work is due to the multiple layers of allusion the series carries (between the black and white works from the early 1990s and the more recent color pieces and between this series and the original by Thomas Cole that I have always liked). Another part is due to the installation itself. I don't have an installation view to share, but maybe that's a good thing as it won't ruin the surprise for you if you haven't seen the show yet. I'll just say that I've never seen a Whitney installation that uses Marcel Breuer's architecture in such an interesting way.

Update: Up to the minute with the zeitgeist, I guess. No sooner do I post this and start poking around the web for the first time today than I come across this, and this, and this. The Ruscha installation, I guess, is the topic du jour.

Blinding Insight into the Turner Prize Jury's Decision Making Process

2006-01-05T11:57:00.000-05:00

In this month's issue of The Art Newspaper, Turner Prize panelist Louisa Buck spills all the juicy details about how the jury reached its final decision.

Picking a winner was, therefore no picnic.... Again there were no fireworks behind the closed jury doors, but no easy agreements either and although I believe that we were all comfortable with the final outcome, I for one am glad that you only judge the Turner Prize once in your career.

No, wait. Where's the insight?

Catalogue of the Week

2006-01-03T19:34:00.000-05:00

One of the side effects of the day job is that I have to spend time--sometimes a lot of time--in unusual places. Once in a while that's a perk; more often, though, it's a pain.

A few years ago I spent the better portion of nine months camped out in Lincoln, NE. While I was there, I got to know the collection of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska. The Sheldon played no small part in the affection I came to feel for a small city that I never guessed I could like so much.

Housed in a Philip Johnson-designed building, the Sheldon has what is among the best public university collections in America. But the collection isn't bounded by Johnson's walls. Over the years, the museum has annexed the whole campus as outdoor sculptures by Mark di Suvero, Richard Serra, Michael Heizer, Claes Oldenburg, and others have been commissioned and installed around the university grounds.

The University of Nebraska Press has recently published a catalogue of the Sheldon's sculpture collection, and it's been a pleasure to browse through it recently--revisiting old friends from the collection and remembering cool summer evenings spent strolling around the campus.

Edited by the Sheldon's curator of education Karen Janovy, Sculpture from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery tells how the Sheldon developed its sculpture collection and illustrates many highlights with color photos and short descriptive essays. Presenting work both intimate and monumental, this catalogue shows what a small institution with a single major benefactor and a dedicated curatorial staff can do over time.

Turner Prize Finalists, 2005

2006-01-02T21:47:00.000-05:00

I have been meaning to post something on the Turner Prize finalist show at the Tate for a few weeks, but until now I haven't found the time to turn the notes I took into something coherent. Maybe it's better, though, that I don't say too much about the exhibition.

Like last year, what impressed me most about the show was the pedagogical and PR packaging with which the Tate has wrapped up the finalists' work. While I liked some of this year's work better than what I saw in 2004, the show as a whole underwhelmed me.

Maybe that shouldn't be too much of a surprise. The Turner Prize is awarded each year to a British artist under 50. The numbers work out this way. You start with the island that has a population of 60M people. You can assume that only one in 10,000 people is a professional visual artist. You figure 1/4 of those artists are over 50, so you exclude them. Then you figure that of the remaining group, only one in 100 is doing work that's of international caliber. That leaves you with a pool of 45 British artists with an international reputation who might be candidates for the award.

The prize has been given 21 times now, and it's never a good thing to nominate an artist a second or third time for the prize if she didn't win it when she was up the first time. So, basically, the Tate has to pull new nominees out of a barrel that holds fewer and fewer potential recipients for the prize each year. I hesitate to say it, but if you stick with my metaphor here you find that before too long you're scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Work by this year's prize recipient, Simon Starling (an installation view of his contribution to the finalists' show is at right), left me feeling cold. Starling identifies and exploits systems of transformation to produce various objects that illustrate the systems used for their own generation--five platinum prints of a platinum mine from which one ton of earth was removed to generate enough metal to make the prints, a shed he disassembled to turn into a boat to float down a river to turn back into a shed in a museum, a homemade hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered moped used to cross a Spanish desert and a watercolor painting of a cactus seen on the trip that was created with the water generated as a waste product by the moped's engine.

I found if interesting, though, that this year's panel went the same direction in their pick as last year's. They didn't give the nod to the video installation or the sculptural environment. Instead, like last year's pick of Jeremy Deller, they went with the artist whose work creates and then explores the nature of systems. I'm wondering if this says something about the nature of contemporary British art as opposed to contemporary American art. Over there, the work getting all the praise and attention is that which is neat, orderly, and systematic. Over here it's the work that's dirty, messy, and unabashedly DIY.

I much preferred the work on display by Darren Almond (a video installation that contains the sweet whiff of nostalgia but that needs interpretative material to fully open up for appreciation) and the young painter Gillian Carnegie. Her painterly undercutting of the illusion of representation (one example, at left) reminds me of what Gerhard Richter was doing in the 1960s. But far from being derivative, Carnegie's work feels fresh and challenging. It's a shame the panel didn't feel as strongly about her work as I did. She would have been a good pick for this year's award. (Installation artist Jim Lambie rounded out this year's short list.)

I hesitate to damn the show with such faint praise because the prize is actually awarded to an artist for a show held elsewhere during the year. This exhibition is intended simply to present select pieces by each finalist. That said, the prize would be more relevant and generate more excitement if the number of potential recipients weren't shrinking so dramatically each year. It might be time, now that the prize is established and the PR machinations are so well refined, to broaden the potential pool of recipients.

Britain used to be good at conquering the world. Why not attempt to own the art world today by turning the Turner into the world's preeminent international art prize--the Nobel of the visual arts? It could work. And it would produce a much more interesting finalists' exhibition, I'm sure.

The Turner Prize Finalist show is on view at Tate Britain through January 22, 2006.

Spectacle, But Not Much Else, in the Turbine Hall

2005-12-27T21:19:00.000-05:00

For many artists, the chance to do a work for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall must be the commission of a lifetime. It also has to be a challenge unlike any they have ever faced. That’s what makes it so interesting to see the resulting works.

The scale of the space almost ensures that anything commissioned for it will partake of spectacle. Anish Kapoor’s 2002 installation Marsyas and Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project from 2003 certainly did. Bruce Nauman’s soundscape Raw Materials from last year, on the other hand, did what Nauman does so well by taking a contradictory stance—negating the assumption of visual spectacle to leave viewers with a pure audio experience.

Rachel Whiteread’s current installation in the space, Embankment (at right), achieves a moderate level of success. The element of spectacle is at play in the work to a degree sufficient to make the installation interesting. But Whiteread’s concept and use of materials do not rise to a level that would make the work truly memorable.

Whiteread has filled the Hall with casts of boxes—thousands of them. The installation has the requisite conceptual framework for a major piece of contemporary art. Whiteread has spoken about finding inspiration for the installation in an old box that once belonged to her mother. She layers on top of this personal memory a pop cultural reference by talking about the impression made on her by the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Ark of the Covenant is boxed up and placed in a generic warehouse somewhere. She also talks about the process of casting and making a negative and then a positive image of her mother’s old box and the philosophical implications thereof.

It’s all the right talk for a major commission like this, but none of it really matters. The power of the piece comes from the massive assemblage of items Whiteread has created. It doesn’t matter that the stacks she has created are made of casts of casts of objects. It doesn’t matter that the items cast were boxes. The work is all about the stacking—the massing of objects—and the viewer’s experience of walking through them.

If you enter the building from the Thames side, you come in one level above the installation and have the opportunity to view it from a balcony. Seeing it from this vantage point provides a completely different experience than going down to the ground floor and walking through the labyrinth that the Whiteread has made.

When you walk among the piles (at right), you begin to feel vulnerable. Your body, in comparison to these massive towering piles, feels small. You feel a sense of endangerment as you pass between the stacks.

The piece, in this way, partakes of the what Michael Fried called the theatrical nature of minimalism. It does so, though, to a much greater degree than any piece of minimalist work I know. In a way, walking through this installation feels like walking through one of Richard Serra’s torqued ellipse. You feel like your life could be threatened at any moment by a strong gust of wind or a small tremor of the ground.

Whiteread’s installations takes a shortcut this way. The piece is all show (a great experience) but no tell as it lacks an instigating concept as interesting as the “wow!” experience of walking through the piece. She has tried to provide one, but the concept is weak. It can’t stand up to the impression made by the objects.

Seeing Whiteread’s installation in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall brought back to mind her piece that was installed in the Guggenheim’s rotunda as part of the Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) show in 2004. This untitled piece (at left), 100 colored resin casts of the space beneath chairs, is much more subtle and meditative than the Turbine Hall installation. It doesn’t create spectacle in any manner. But to me it it’s the more interesting of the two works.

The meditative feel of the untitled work forces contemplation of the concept in a way that the Turbine Hall installation doesn’t, and the colored resin used for the casts provides more visual interest. The work stands on its own—it speaks for itself—in a way that the Turbine Hall installation doesn’t. The piece doesn’t rely on the shock of spectacle to make its impression.

For this more recent commission, Whiteread has taken the easy way out by falling back on the crutch of spectacle that the massive space provides to her, and she allows spectacle to carry the work rather than creating a piece that uses the space in an interesting way that integrates with and supports the concept and materials she has chosen for the installation.

That said, I would still jump at the chance to spend a half hour walking among Whiteread's boxes if the opportunity presented itself again.

Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment is on display in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall through April 2, 2006.

Martin Parr on the Street in Cambridge

2005-12-21T08:06:00.000-05:00

Just about everywhere you look in New York, construction barriers become a magnet for posters. The first poster gets pasted up over the standard "Post No Bills" stencil, and from then on the site is free game for anyone with paper and some wheat paste. If the site is below Houston St., there's a chance that what goes up overnight will be interesting street art. If the site is above 23rd St., it's probably going to be advertising (if it's not advertising masquerading as street art).

When I stopped in Cambridge last week, I came across an interesting approach to institutionalizing the activity of posting bills on construction barricades.

A large building is now going up on a heavily trafficked street (above left) in the center of the city. For some reason (interest in art? civic pride? an attempt to keep graffiti and advertising off their barricade?), the developers have launched an interesting project by commissioning native Brit and Magnum photographer Martin Parr to take "portraits" of the city during the three years that this site will be under development. Over that period they will continually post Parr's work on the fence surrounding the job site.

The project isn't as easy as one might guess for a photographer like Parr who specializes in documenting the real (and unaesthetic) look of contemporary suburban life. Parr writes about the project:

I had not been to Cambridge for many years and was eagerly anticipating rediscovering the city. I was almost overwhelmed by how beautiful the city was and this is almost a disadvantage for a photographer. Everywhere you look you are in danger of photographing a cliche that could become a picture post card.

The first several photographs posted (at right) do a fine job of avoiding cliche as they force city residents and visitors to stop for a moment and contemplate scenes that don't present the typical view of this picturesque city.

In upcoming months Parr will continue to visit and document the city, showing new work at this site until the building is complete and the barricades come down in 2008.

Related: Martin Parr's "Mobile Phones" project. (Warning: turn your speakers down before clicking.)

Seen and Not Seen

2005-12-19T21:42:00.000-05:00

I'm back on the right (i.e., the left) side of the Atlantic again. After a 16 hour stay at New York's prestigious Hotel Gibson yesterday, I was off again before sunrise this morning for a week in the Midwest.

While part of me wishes I had been able to spend more than a few hours at home over the weekend, I was able to squeeze in viewing of a few shows in England during the time away. Work commitments permitting, I'll have something later this week on the Turner Prize finalist show at the Tate, on the Rachel Whiteread installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and on an interesting approach to institutionalizing street art that I came across in Cambridge.

I won't, though, have something on the new installation of the Tate Modern's permanent collection--half of which opens tomorrow--as I had hoped. But that's not for lack of trying. It seems the Tate's press office doesn't quite have this whole blog thing figured out yet. Some museum press offices (the Carnegie, the Whitney) get it. Others (MoMA, the Tate) don't.

On Hiatus This Week

2005-12-11T12:07:00.000-05:00

Due to day job deadlines and extensive travel, From the Floor will be taking a break this week. Back next week (I hope) with some impressions from London.

Elsewhere Today

2005-12-08T10:38:00.000-05:00

A couple pieces worth reviewing around the blogosphere today:

MAN has a good take on Fisk University's deaccessioning of an O'Keeffe and a Hartley. While I'm never in favor, philosophically, of the practice, I'm much more open than Tyler is to using it strategically. This seems to be a case where it is justified. I'm glad to see that Tyler recognizes the difference between this instance and other recent, high profile cases.
Interesting thoughts on The View from the Edge of the Universe on artists and their self-defined programs for making art or the "beautiful calculation." Robust conceptual practice or a strategy of building a whole career for a one hit wonder? You decide.

Turner (Yawn) Prize Winner Announced

2005-12-06T21:28:00.000-05:00

In all the hubbub of Miami post-game analysis and wrap up, the American arts media and blogosphere have overlooked the fact that this year's Turner Prize winner has been announced.

The only reason I know this is that I was in Montreal this morning (Anyone know exactly how cold it is in Montreal right now? It's damn cold.) and I happened to be browsing through The Globe and Mail over breakfast.

Simon Starling has won this year's prize.

As Canada's paper of record, The Globe and Mail did a fine job of not denigrating his work too directly. But the backhanded analysis was all too clear. The story was told with one large photo and a photo caption (that isn't available on line) which I should have saved but didn't. If memory serves me correctly, it went something like this:

Artist Simon Starling has been awarded this year's Turner Prize. Starling is pictured with his work Shedboatshed. For this work Starling disassembled a shed, turned it into a boat, and then rebuilt it as a shed.

Um, sounds trés compelling, right?

OK, so I shouldn't judge until I've seen the work. I didn't think much of last year's Turner Prize nominees, and I don't think I'll think much more of this year's work based on what I've seen on line. But I'll give the work the benefit of the doubt. I've managed to arrange my travel schedule so that I'll get to see the show of nominees' work at the Tate next weekend. I'll have more to say about it then, I'm sure.

Art, American Style

2005-11-30T09:52:00.000-05:00

A few news and notes this week, specifically American in nature:

The Whitney has announced the line up for the 2006 Biennial. For the first time, the exhibition has received a subtitle, "Day for Night." According to curator Chrissie Iles, the exhibition "explores the artifice of American culture in what could be described as a pre-Enlightenment moment, in which culture is preoccupied with the irrational, the religious, the dark, the erotic, and the violent, filtered through a sense of flawed beauty. This reflective, restless mood is not unique to the United States; its presence across both America and Europe suggests a shift in the accepted values that have formed the basis of 20th-century Western culture." Philippe Vergne of the Walker has co-curated the show. A list of artists selected for the exhibition is available via the link above.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has launched a new blog, Eye Level. Written by Kriston Capps of Grammar.police fame, the site looks like it's going to quickly become a daily read and the model for what an institution-affiliated blog can do.
And, speaking of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I recently came across its fabulous Ask Joan of Art service. (OK, the service is great but the name may leave a little to be desired.) Through this website, Smithsonian researchers offer a no cost research service for questions related to American art and artists.

Why I’m Not Going to Miami

2005-11-29T13:57:00.000-05:00

For some reason, people have a hard time believing that I don’t make the annual pilgrimage to Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach. The fact of the matter is that I just don’t have a lot of interest in spending the weekend that deep in the belly of the art market beast.

I’m more into the art than into the art scene. I get the sense that early December in Miami has rapidly become more about the scene than about the art.

But there is a host of secondary reasons why I don’t make the trip. Here’s a partial list:

I like having Chelsea all to myself for one weekend a year.
ABMB is not that interested in credentialing bloggers, so why bother giving the fair the publicity. (Side note to any arts publicists not yet convinced that blogs are as important as traditional print media: Back in the day, I used to work on a small but credible print publication. This site gets more than thirty-five times more unique visits each month than that magazine had subscribers.)
NetJets gets all maxed out during this week and can’t provide me with a plane to get into Miami at exactly the time I want to go (um, as if...).
If a huge crowd of people is all looking in the same direction, I tend to think that there’s probably something more interesting going on in another direction where nobody else is looking.
I do so much travel for work that I’ve developed a philosophical aversion to paying my own way to go anywhere; I haven’t yet found anyone willing to cover my expenses for a trip to ABMB.
Speaking of work, I can’t afford the time off right now.
Not speaking of work, I really can’t stand the feeling of having sand stuck in a wet bathing suit while I’m looking at art.
Finally, I’ve become so fed up with it that I’m sort of boycotting the art market these days. My last several purchases have been commissions directly from artists. I find this a much, much more rewarding way to purchase art than buying from gallery booths at fairs.

I don't want to underestimate the value of being able to see so much art in so little time in one place, but I just can't get myself excited enough about ABMB to actually make the time to go. Heretical, I know.

It's Good to be the Wizard

2005-11-27T09:14:00.000-05:00

Being the Wizard means never having to say you're sorry. Even when you run over things with that chair of yours.

Like when you flatten Dorothy's little dog Toto in that wacky Annie Leibovitz multi-page, artist-filled Wizard of Oz spread in the December Vogue. (See the Wizard crunching his furry victim at right and the penultimate item here for a full description of the spread.)

Or like when you run into the back of Mrs. FtF's seat and then roll over the kid's diaper bag at Sarabeth's at the Whitney on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

We love you Chuck. We really do. But we would love you even more if you wheeled around a bit more courteously.

What Do You Think?

2005-11-23T05:45:00.000-05:00

What would happen if I put the baby into this?

What Can You Do with All That Sublimation?

2005-11-22T09:10:00.000-05:00

I'm supposed to be giving gallery talks on the Richard Tuttle exhibition at the Whitney, but I've been on the road so much lately that I haven't even seen the show yet. (I figured out yesterday that excluding time spent at airports and in cabs, I've had a grand total of 24 hours and 45 minutes in New York over the last two and a half weeks.)

I have, though, been doing some reading on Tuttle in preparation for the show. One of the things that has struck me is Tuttle's continual emphasis on not asserting meaning through his work. Here's a quote from Tuttle that appears in the catalogue for season 3 of Art:21:

There's a division left over from the twentieth century where certain people might think that art is something that is made outside of any personal expression (Josef Albers or the Bauhaus), that it's really coolly detached. And then there's the other side, where art is full of personal expression. I guess the personal expression side is great, but then you can get an art which is just an expression of some twisted personal idiosyncrasy. In order to get over those polarities between no personal expression and personal expression, the only possible expression is one of some sort of sublimation.

I'm curious to see how that sublimation takes shape in the work selected for the show and in the gallery installations. And I'm really curious about how the heck I'm going to put together a coherent talk about work that is so purposely indirect.

Why Do I Bother?

2005-11-21T00:01:00.000-05:00

Another year of blogging, and I still didn’t make The List.

Actually, no art writers did. None. Not that Carol Vogel is known for deep, investigative journalism, but you would think that the list makers would have given her a little love here for the way New York museums bow, scrape, and hold back info to give her those press-release friendly exclusives.

Mistakes Were Made

2005-11-17T05:14:00.000-05:00

I’ve heard the same thing said in a couple different contexts lately. Art students in top programs today are facing too much pressure to produce quality product too quickly. The stakes are too high for them to use their school years to experiment and make mistakes.

Charlie Finch visited the Columbia MFA studios recently and returned with an interesting report about how the young painters there are dealing with the pressures of not having enough quiet time to focus on their work.

Paul Schimmel made a similar point last weekend at the panel discussion I attended. Students, he said, are working to make gallery shows, not art. “If you can’t do something awful when you’re a student,” he asked rhetorically, “when can you?”

At the National Museum of Catalunian Art on Sunday, I happened to stumble across a show of video work by eight recent Yale graduates. (The screening was part of the Loop Festival of video art running this month in Barcelona.) I’m happy to report that the video division of this venerable art program hasn’t caved one inch to market pressure. It’s still turning ’em out old school style in a way that would make Schimmel happy. All eight of these Yale grads, I have to say, have made truly awful things.

I don’t mean to slag the artists whose work was included in the screening, so I won't name names (other than that of professor John Pilson who selected the work). But, man, the pieces chosen to showcase Yale at this international event give student work the world over a bad name. And Yale a very bad name.

I can’t help but feel sorry for these recent grads. I mean, imagining paying Ivy League rates for a professional training program that only enables you to produce output like this. Now I understand where the term "starving artist" comes from. Having massive loans to repay and making work that no one would ever be interested in buying (let alone actually watching--even once) must make it pretty darn hard to put food on the table.

Groaners, All of Them

2005-11-15T01:23:00.000-05:00

The art blogosphere is suffering from a lack of really lame jokes. Let me do my part to correct that problem.

How many curators does it take to change a light bulb?
That’s not a curatorial task. You’ll have to call maintenance.

How many educators does it take to change a light bulb?
That’s a very important question and many artists have addressed it, each in his or her own individual way, since the turn of the last century.

How many development staff does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one. But if we had the funding, we could put two or three people on it, ensuring a much higher quality outcome. Would you be interested in supporting that effort?

How many publications employees does it take to change a light bulb?
Wait a minute. Are you sure you have all the permissions nailed down to do that?

How many communications staff does it take to change a light bulb?
I’m not sure. Let me follow up on that. Can I give you a call back later today?

How many security officers does it take to change a light bulb?
Excuse me. Stand back from that bulb, please.

How many art handlers does it take to change a light bulb?
That’s not really in the job description, but what the hell. Where’s the fresh bulb?

One the Kid Won't Be Seeing

2005-11-12T09:12:00.000-05:00

I took a bit of a drubbing recently in comments at the parenting blog Daddy Types. It seems that some people don't approve of taking children to see work by Shirin Neshat. My favorite cheap shot over there was this one:

Now I can't decide who's worse - moms who force their kids to potty train at 6 months, or dads who make their 8-month olds watch films about self-mutilating hookers.

Well, when you put it that way....

So I'm glad to say that one of the shows I saw today was one that I saw sans la fille. Günter Brus: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon at MACBA is a career retrospective of work by the Viennese Actionist. One interesting outcome of having so much of Brus's work from the 1960s and '70s assembled is the ability it gives to see the lines of influence running from him to American artists such as Paul McCarthy and Ana Mendieta who emerged during those years.

But, whoa. What a tough show to look at. Take, for example, this description (lifted from the gallery brochure) of Brus's 1970 performance piece Zerreissprobe (Breaking Test) which is documented in the exhibition in stills and on film:

In it Brus, totally shaved, injured himself in the style of the historical and pictorial tradition of the martyr. The action focused on the vulnerability of the individual, pain and "pure" madness, and marked the climactic and final moment of the period.

That, I think, pretty much describes the ethos of the whole show. Brus's work makes McCarthy's gross out nastiness stuff look like the child's play it really is. Oh, and I almost forgot. There's another film in the exhibition showing Brus wetting himself. Nice, I suppose, if you're into that kind of stuff.

Dirty Dealing?

2005-11-10T08:23:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday afternoon, a group of museum administrators and curators assembled in the Dahesh Museum’s auditorium for a panel discussion on collecting contemporary art in this overheated market.

The panel, part of a larger conference on museum acquisitions and deaccessioning organized by the American Federation of Arts, featured Raymond Learsy (collector and Whitney Museum trustee), the artist Jeff Koons, Paul Schimmel (chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), and gallerist Marianne Boesky.

Insights by panel members ranged from the obvious (Learsy: the art market isn’t the insular little world it used to be) to the sound (Schimmel: explore more affordable work by underappreciated, mid-career artists) to the surreal (Koons: “This machine, this market, is showing how people love each other.”)

What intrigued me most, though, was a statement that Marianne Boesky let slip.

Boesky has made no secret about the process she uses for determining who gets to buy work by her very in-demand artists: identify a museum where she wants to place a work, find a collector affiliated with the organization, sell the collector a piece with the requirement that it be given as a partial gift to the institution.

Reiterating these well documented points for the museum staffers last weekend, Boesky added, “I work for the artist. We pick and choose who gets access [to work] for strategic reasons, for careers to grow,” adding generously that Whitney trustee Learsy could walk into her gallery and buy anything he wanted.

Not everyone is so fortunate. Boesky clearly has scorn for the new hedge fund collectors who think they can buy access to work by desirable artists. “Waiting lists are not linear things,” she said. “It’s not who gets there first.” Or who arrives with the most money.

None of this is news—surprising as it might be to those who think markets do, or should, operate efficiently. A Google search on Boesky’s name turns up several articles that quote her describing this strategy. What was new, though, was a piece of information that Boesky dropped almost in passing.

She mentioned that a few years ago Takashi Murakami paintings were selling at galleries that represent him for $60,000 while they were fetching $600,000 at auction. Murakami’s dealers from around the world, Boesky told the audience, got together to “do something” in response to this large price differential. (I assumed she was implying that they decided to either raise Murakami’s primary market prices or influence secondary market pricing, but she did not say this directly.)

That’s a fairly innocuous comment taken in the context of the whole of what Boesky does to manage the market for her artists’ works. But it’s one that may indicate that her market practices have crossed a line.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division makes available on its website a pamphlet entitled “Antitrust Enforcement and the Consumer.” The purpose of the document is to help the general public identify antitrust activities. It contains the following advice:

How Can You Know if the Antitrust Laws Are Being Violated?

If any person knows or suspects that competitors, suppliers or even an employer are violating the antitrust laws, that person should alert the antitrust authorities so that they can determine whether to investigate.

Price-fixing, bid-rigging and customer-allocation conspiracies are most likely to occur where there are relatively few sellers who have to get together to agree. The larger the group of sellers, the more difficult it is to come to an agreement and enforce it.
Keep an eye out for telltale signs, including, for example:
any evidence that two or more competing sellers of similar products have agreed to price their products a certain way, to sell only a certain amount of their product or to sell only in certain areas or to certain customers

That bullet point (the first of several which I haven’t quoted) summarizes many aspects of Boesky’s market practices—especially the practice of meeting with competing sellers of the same product to “do something” about how that product is priced (if that is indeed what the discussion was about).

I’m not an attorney, and I don’t claim detailed knowledge of U.S. antitrust law. But as a consumer of products offered for sale on the art market, it seems to me that antitrust authorities would be justified in investigating whether Boesky has violated the law.

Boesky is a very bright woman and, I believe, an attorney herself. She has also had ample, first-hand exposure to the penalties faced by individuals who do not play by the market’s rules. (Her father, Ivan Boesky, famously plead guilty to involvement in a massive insider trading scandal in the mid-1980s. He eventually served jail time and paid a whopping $100M fine.)

All this would lead me to believe that Marianne Boesky would want to stay on the right side of the law as she makes markets in the work of the artists she represents. But listening to her talk about her activities makes me wonder if she is doing otherwise.

Related: Felix Salmon from last March on the irrationality of the art market.

Getting His Show on the Road

2005-11-09T00:01:00.000-05:00

The blogosphere's favorite institutional rabble-rouser, Homeless Museum director Filip Noterdaeme, will be setting up an admission-free alternate MoMA in front of $20 MoMA on November 21 to mark the one year anniversary of the museum's reopening. His museum in a suitcase (dubbed MoMA HMLSS) contains over 100 miniaturized pieces from the full-sized MoMA's collection.

A major benefit of housing a museum in a suitcase? It travels well. MoMA HMLSS has already been on display in France, Belgium, and Kansas City, MO. The next stop after Manhattan is Madrid.

On the Universal in Art, or Another Post about Crying

2005-11-08T08:06:00.000-05:00

The concept of universalism has long been out of fashion in the art world. It’s common belief today that the meaning and value carried by an artwork are culturally and temporally based. The criteria by which people evaluate art, the argument goes, are woven so deeply into the tapestry of the viewer’s place and time that they feel fundamental to human experience when in reality they are constructed by society.

All well and good in theory, but I had an experience last weekend that has caused me to start questioning this belief.

Saturday afternoon the kid and I stopped by Gladstone Gallery to see the new Shirin Neshat video, Zarin. The kid is always happy to see art and, believe it or not, at eight months she’s even starting to express a preference for video. Most of the time she’s got an attention span measured in seconds. But put her in front of a large screen of moving light and she’s transfixed. At the Whitney recently she actually sat through the whole 30 minute Robert Smithson film on the making of Spiral Jetty. Given that, I figured we would be good for 15 minutes of Neshat.

When we walked in, the gallery was packed. All the benches were full, so we made our way to the front of the room to sit down on the floor. I took her out of her carrier and set her on the floor next to me. She immediately turned to face the screen and started watching.

We arrived just at the point in the narrative where Zarin, the emotionally disturbed title character, enters a public bath. Everything was fine with us until Zarin’s covering fell away and her washing crossed the line into self-mutilation. (A still from this scene is at right.) All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the kid started wailing. She wouldn’t stop. I had to walk her out of the gallery to calm her down.

I found the point at which she became upset to be curious. It’s exactly the same point at which Edward Winkleman reported that he and others watching the film began sobbing.

Winkleman situates his emotional reaction to this scene in a cultural understanding of the mores that it transgresses:

Now I know just enough about Muslim culture (but not enough about Persian subtlties) to be rather wobbly informed about this, but it's my understanding that total adult nudity is highly inappropriate in the public baths. It certainly is for men, and so this scene was particularly confusing and thereby even more powerful for me.

What the other 15 or so folks watching at the same time I was thought it symbolized, I'll never know, but I do know I was not the only one sobbing at this point in the film. (Sniffles carry.)

My kid couldn’t possibly know this, yet she reacted in the same way at exactly the same point in the film.

This makes me wonder if there isn’t something hard coded into humans, something existing deep in the preconscious portion of our brains, that recognizes when certain, basic assumptions about human behavior are challenged.

When Zarin begins scrubbing her skin raw, Neshat shows a person violating something fundamental to human nature—a will to self-preservation, a preference for pleasure over pain.

Witnessing these assumptions being transgressed, I am starting to think, creates an involuntary response in any viewer. Distributing feelings of shock, horror, pity, and perhaps fear arise unbidden. It’s as if we can’t help but feel these emotions if we are human. It’s instinctual.

My daughter’s reaction to Neshat’s work has to have been made at the level of instinct. She’s too young for it to have been anything else. She responded by vocalizing the distress that the video made her feel. I didn’t cry during the scene, but that doesn’t mean that I too didn’t have a strong emotional response. Perhaps it was my ability to dissociate representation from reality (something she is not yet capable of doing) that allowed me to retain my composure.

Could it be that in this work Neshat goes to a place in every viewer’s biological makeup and flips a switch causing an involuntary emotional response to occur? If that is indeed what happens here, that fact should be enough to open up for discussion again the notion that art can carry a universal meaning.

Teaser

2005-11-07T13:24:00.000-05:00

I've got a couple things in the hopper for this week. I just need to find the time to write them. So stop back over the next few days to find out 1) why Marianne Boesky ought to be afraid of Eliot Spitzer and 2) who else has been crying in Chelsea lately.

Excuses, Whining, and Moaning

2005-11-03T15:22:00.000-05:00

Not much posting of late, and it's going to stay that way for another few weeks. The day job is using up all my excess mental capacity (and free time) these days, so there hasn't been any mind space (or hours) left over for blogging--much less thinking--about art.

I'm heading back home today, and I have a full weekend of art-type stuff planned (gallery walk with a museum group, auction previews, panel discussion on collecting in the current market environment). So maybe, if time and other paying commitments allow, there will be a few notes of interest showing up here next week.

Where the Power REALLY Lies

2005-11-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

Last Saturday afternoon we walk into P.S.1 at 3:45. The sign at the admission desk says the Turrell room will be open at 4:45.

We wander for a while, looking at the new shows. Mrs. FtF (usually pretty charitable in her opinions) says of one group exhibition, "This is horrible." She's right. It is.

By 4:30 we've seen enough. But I want to see the Turrell. So we sit down in the hallway outside the room to wait. Soon a crowd starts to form. At 4:45 it's me, the wife and kid, and a group of 20 German tourists. I can understand exactly three words of what they are saying among themselves: "Turrell," "Roden," and "Crater."

At 4:55 the door still isn't open. The Germans are getting restless. One of them starts making paper hats for the kid out of the floor plans they are all carrying. Security staff members are pacing the hallway. Mrs. FtF overhears them discussing the problem. They've lost the key to the door. Brilliant. You put a major piece of contemporary art behind a locked door, and you don't keep a spare key around?

I'm about ready to pack it in when along comes one of the art handlers. He's been installing a show in another gallery on the floor. He sizes up the situation, pulls a Five-in-One painter's tool out of his pocket, sticks it between the door and the jamb, gives a little pull, and pops the door open for us.

Now I know who really holds the keys to the art world kingdom. It's that anonymous guy who nobody trusts with a key but who's always got the right tool in his back pocket.

Cautionary Tales

2005-10-29T19:44:00.000-04:00

The Internets are good for more than just spreading rumors. They're also good for spreading advice. So take some:

If an artist offers to swap you new work for old, do it.
If the Guggenheim asks you to lend it work, don't do it (via).
If you're thinking about inviting that OC Art Blog guy to your Halloween party, think again. Ewww.

Those Weak, Weepy Bloggers

2005-10-25T09:46:00.000-04:00

What's going on here? Is it something in the rarefied air of the blogosphere?

First, I admit to getting all teared up by Janet Cardiff's Forty-Part Motet, and then Edward admits to the same while watching the new Shirin Neshat video.

Start by reading his excellent piece. Then select one or more options from the following list.

I think that all these sissy-boy art bloggers ought to toughen up and:

Spend their free time watching football instead of hanging out in museums and galleries
Quit ordering cosmos and start drinking Bud
Realize that everyone belches; go ahead and do it with gusto when the need arises
Accept the fact that NASCAR isn't just for Southerners anymore
Give up that subscription to Artforum and start reading Maxim instead

Update: Amy Watson is getting all weepy over at The Artery this week too. Geesh. After seeing this data set, you might think that there's something to this book afterall.

Editing the Subtitles

2005-10-23T16:15:00.000-04:00

Museum exhibitions often get their subtitles when someone in the marketing department realizes she has to sell the show. Don't you think critics ought to give the subtitles instead? That way the public would have a better idea of what they'll really get for a $20 admission.

In that spirit, here are more appropriate subtitles for two stinkers that I saw today.

At the Whitney, "Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Red Buildings"
At MoMA, "Elizabeth Murray: Prelude to Pixar"

The Church and Contemporary Art

2005-10-20T07:18:00.000-04:00

Last weekend’s Financial Times Magazine ran quite an interesting piece (not available on-line) by Rachel Spence on how Italy’s Roman Catholic Church is positioning itself in relation to contemporary art.

The church, of course, was the greatest of arts patrons for much of the second millennium. That changed, though, during the nineteenth century. Spence quotes Monsignor Timothy Verdon, director of the Office for Evangelization Through Art in the Florence Archdiocese, on why this is. “The Church found itself patronizing artists who were opposed to the avant-garde,” Verdon says. “The image it projected between the 1830s and 1940s was backward-looking in an age that increasingly felt the past was irrelevant.”

As part of Vatican II, Pope Paul VI attempted to change this situation with an affirmation of contemporary art’s place in the liturgy, but local clergy did not embrace the new. What emerged, according to Verdon, was “a sad parody of contemporaneity in the vestigial echoes of Fra Agelico style.”

The most interesting part of Spence’s piece, though is the discussion of the church’s strong preference for figuration over abstraction. The church’s official position is that artwork must “express the liturgy,” and as a result those charged with commissioning art for church spaces tend to default to figurative work.

Spence quotes a priest from an Italian parish explaining why liturgical art should be figurative. “The Church, in general,” he says, “is for simple people and they must be able to understand.” (This patronizing of parishioners might help explain why regular church attendance across Italy declined from 70% of the population to 40% over the second half of the last century.)

But it’s not only the Italian church that struggles with how to integrate art into the liturgy to create a suitable worship experience. Closer to home, New York artist Gwyneth Leech has received criticism recently over a cycle of figurative paintings representing the stations of the cross. Commissioned by an Episcopal church, Saint Paul’s on the Green, in Norwalk, CT, Leech chose not only to set the paintings in the present day (a tradition that goes back to the middle ages), but also to situate the narrative in the context of war. (Station 1: Jesus is Condemned to Death is at right.)

Of her choices, Leech says, “I was asked to combine the traditional stations iconography with elements of the world we live in. This brief eventually led to my vision of Christ as a prisoner of war, and as a hostage tortured by insurgents. The crowds are refugees. The people weeping at the foot of the cross are grieving Iraqis and Americans who have lost family members to bombs and to violence.”

The question of how well Leech’s contemporary iconography integrates with the historical narrative remains open. There is no question, though, that Leech’s paintings have caused controversy in Norwalk. The reason for this, I believe, is similar to the reason that the Italian priest gave for restricting liturgical art to figuration: certain people are not able to see an object, understand metaphor, and make the leap to the concept that stands behind the object at hand.

Corporate curators made a realization half a century ago. By replacing figuration with abstraction in the art they commissioned for public buildings, they were able to remove the possibility that conflict would arise about the art’s subject matter. It might be time for the church to examine that strategy now—and to rethink whether the liturgy must be supported with representational art.

But there would be a secondary benefit as well. In her FT piece Spence quotes Danilo Eccher, director of Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art on the applicability of figuration for today’s religious art. “Medieval man needed frescoed churches because at home he had nothing, but we are bombarded daily by images. Contemporary man therefore has need of a space for secret emotion, in silence more than in image.” What better way to create a meditative space suitable for worship than to remove all reference to the stresses of the everyday world?

The Forty-Part Motet

2005-10-18T07:42:00.000-04:00

With its recent installation of Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part Motet MoMA has created what has to be one of the most sublimely beautiful spaces in Midtown Manhattan. (An installation view is at right.) It's not fashionable these days to use words like "sublime" and "beautiful" without scare quotes, but I'm simply at a loss for how to describe the work without them.

Cardiff's piece, for those not familiar with this well-traveled sound installation, is a recording of Thomas Tallis's polyphonic choral work from 1575, Spem in alium. Tallis's Latin text translates this way:

I have never put my hope in any other but in you God of Israel who will be angry and yet become again gracious and who forgives all the sins of suffering man. Lord God Creator of Heaven and Earth look upon our lowliness.

For this piece, Cardiff recorded each of the forty unique vocal parts individually. The installation consists of forty speakers arranged in an oval, each speaker playing back a voice of one member of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir. Cardiff's advanced recording and playback technology creates the experience of a live performance that typical two-channel playback cannot. The elliptical installation gives visitors the ability to move around and through the sound in a way that is not possible when the piece is performed by a live choir.

Simply put, the recording stuns. If, as the choir crescendos, you don't feel a shiver rise somewhere inside you, you have to be emotionally tone deaf. Both times I've visited the piece in the last few weeks, I've fought to hold back an involuntary display of emotion. As I struggled to keep my eyes dry, I looked around the gallery space and saw others furtively wiping their eyes, hoping that no one else was noticing.

I've already decided that while this piece is installed over the next year it will become a regular lunch hour stop when I am working in New York. I'll be curious to see, though, just how my reaction to the piece will change the more that I experience it because in trying to determine what about the piece gives it such emotional power, I've realized that it's not anything in Cardiff's work.

The Forty-Part Motet takes all of its emotional punch from the choir's performance of Tallis's piece. Most serious singers include Spem in alium on the short list of works they want to perform some day because the piece creates a sound environment that is unique and that (prior to Cardiff's work) could not be adequately reproduced using recording technology.

In her piece Cardiff has harnessed the power of a live performance by using the skills of a master recording technician. She does not add to the effect of a live performance of Spem in alium; rather, she optimizes the recording of the performance to recreate the effect of a live event better than any recording engineer has been able to do to date. Unlike her other work where she creates original sound environments, here Cardiff has recreated a sound environment originally developed over 400 years ago.

Filtered through Cardiff's technology, the music sounds good enough to make listeners choke up. I can't help but wonder, though, if I will continue to have that experience over repeated visits. I still become emotional every time I hear the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony performed live. But that only happens for me a couple times a decade. I wonder if listening to Cardiff's recording of Spem in alium once a week over the next year in this walk-in sound chamber will dull my sensibilities to the work. I question whether the technological mediation of my experience of the piece of music will get in the way of my continued appreciation for the performance that has been recorded.

The magic of a live performance (recreated so well here) may be just that--magic created by real people in a passing moment in time. When that performance repeats exactly every fourteen minutes all day every day, the magic may dissipate. Only time will tell if Cardiff's piece has the staying power of the original, unmediated Spem in alium. I hope that it does, but I'm not sure that it will.

Current Chelsea Picks

2005-10-17T06:50:00.000-04:00

A few hours wandering around Chelsea Saturday afternoon, and I was only able to come up with two and a half exhibitions worth recommending.

Adam Cvijanovic’s latest show at Bellwether, Love Poem (10 Minutes After the End of Gravity), has received ample coverage since it opened. There’s good reason for that. His 14 x 75 foot painting on Tyvek (at right) feels like a reimagined, apocalyptic version of an early-1970s realist piece. The staples of suburban America (tract homes, cars, and consumer products ranging from bottles of Diet Coke to Pop Tart boxes to Glad trash bags) become weightless detritus as they float off into space, unmoored after the suspension of the law of gravity. This feels like a painting that would never have been done if it weren’t for the events of September 2001 when we realized that disasters did not have to be solely of the predictable, natural type.

Jeremy Blake’s newest film, Sodium Fox, is showing at Feigen Contemporary, and it shouldn’t be missed. Don’t bother with the static works in the front gallery, though. Head straight to the rear room where the film is being screened. Blake’s video work is all about mood, atmosphere, and the movement of color over time. The stills for sale out front do not, and cannot, do justice to the mesmerizing experience of watching his contemporary consumeristic landscape emerge and morph.

I also liked several things in the inaugural group exhibition, Set It Off, at the new James Nicholson Gallery. But since I already wrote about half the pieces in the show, I’m not going to plug them again. I’ll just say that it looks like someone took the advice in my final paragraph, cherry-picked the best work from last summer’s Artists In the Marketplace (AIM 25) exhibition, and stuck price tags on the pieces. That’s proof, I guess, that the Bronx Museum program works.

Slow Week

2005-10-10T08:19:00.000-04:00

I've drawn the travel straw again this week which means that posting will be light. I do, though, have something in the works on MoMA's new installation of the contemporary galleries that I will finish off as time (and jet lag) allows.

Update: No sooner do I post the above than MAN goes ahead and runs my piece. Well, it's not exactly my piece because I hadn't actually written it yet. But Tyler says almost exactly what I had intended to say about MoMA's new installation in this post from this morning. So follow the link and read him. I do, though, have more in-depth thoughts on Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part Motet that I will run later this week.

Two Worth Reading

2005-10-07T13:45:00.000-04:00

NYFA Current is out with a special issue this week that contains an interview with gallerists Don Carroll of Jack the Pelican Presents and Christian Haye of Projectile. The piece offers excellent advice for artists looking to establish gallery representation.

Greg gets all righteously indignant (and justifiably so) over the destruction of a landmark piece of modernist residential architecture--Gordon Bunshaft's Travertine House. Martha deserves another trip to the pokey for her role in this one.

BCN Notes

2005-10-06T07:26:00.000-04:00

Last week I promised notes on a few Barcelona art spots. Here are sound bites on three.

Parc Güell: Antonio Gaudí's work fascinates me because of its utter originality. His slightly warped melding of natural and man-made forms into built spaces (the park's gatehouse is at right) is unlike anything anyone had done before or since. His work on this park opens a dialogue between landscape and structural architecture that is conducted in Gaudí's own private language. I'm not sure I understand everything he says, but it sure is fun to listen.

The Picasso Museum: If you want to see Picasso qua Picasso, you're better off going to MoMA. But walking through the extensive collection of pre-Blue Period work here (donated by Picasso himself in 1970) allows you to see Picasso becoming Picasso in a way that you can't anywhere else.

National Museum of Catalunian Art: I'm prone to be suspect of collections that are assembled and curated for nationalistic purposes. So I was pleasantly surprised by the incredible quality, richness, and depth of work at MNAC. With pieces spanning the 12th to the mid-20th century, the museum's collection can really stand on its own against any historical collection worldwide--which is probably just what the Catalunian government wants me to say about it.

Gettygate

2005-10-05T07:42:00.000-04:00

I've been staying away from posting about current events at the Getty because the situation is being covered so exhaustively by the LA Times and on Modern Art Notes (see here, for example, for yesterday's brief). But there's one more reason I haven't touched the topic: it pains me to think about just what a f--ed up mess Barry Munitz has created of that venerable institution.

As the revelations keep coming, though, I can't help but think that we've heard this whole story before. A low-level operative gets busted for committing a crime. Some diligent, sleuthing local reporters continue to chase the story, following it all the way to the top. Eventually the leader steps aside as criminal prosecution appears imminent.

If you're interested in drama and suspense here, you might as well change the channel. We all know how this one is going to end, thanks to Woodward and Bernstein's playbook. Let's just hope the journalists at the LA Times stick to the game plan: 1) follow the money and 2) keep asking, "What did the president know and when did he know it?" The sooner they can press Nixon to step onto Marine One to fly off into the sunset, the better. And this time there's not going to be a crony waiting at the ready with a Get out of Jail Free card.

A Lesson to Learn from Boston's Mistake

2005-10-04T09:45:00.000-04:00

Unlike a few of us around the blogosphere who had an immediate, reactionary response to the MFA Boston's new show "Things I Love," Modern Kicks decided to give the show a chance and actually see it before weighing in with commentary.

Don't miss the review that has been posted there. The author raises several interesting and valid points that those of us who haven't seen the show wouldn't have been able to make. He weighs in with this final comment, "But the problem isn't one of ethics, as it sometimes is portrayed, at least not at the root: rather, it's a one of judgment and taste."

Museums can take away an important lesson from JL's commentary: pick your potential donors carefully. It sounds like the MFA hasn't done an especially good job of that in this case.

World Weary and Wondering

2005-10-03T14:33:00.000-04:00

I'm back home in New York this week after three weeks away. During that time I had very limited access to the Internet and no access to English-language broadcast journalism. Apart from a couple issues of The International Herald Tribune, I didn't have access to English-language daily print media either.

Three weeks isn't really a long time, but during that period I came to feel horribly out of the art world loop: no Artnet or ArtInfo, only the briefest of moments to skim the Arts section of The New York Times on-line, and (aside from one or two of my favorites) no blogs. I missed the whole fall opening season in Chelsea, and I'm still grumbling about not being able to see Floating Island.

I had wanted to get out to see a few shows last Saturday in Williamsburg and Chelsea, but I wasn't able to make that happen. I did, though, have a chance to open my blog aggregator for the first time in weeks and spent some time trolling through the hundreds of posts I didn't see as they were published last month. I don't yet feel caught up with all that I missed last month, and I don't quite feel like I will be able to catch up fully.

It didn't used to be that way. I'm not thinking about the situation at some point in the distant past here. I'm remembering only as far back as the spring and summer of 2004.

Just a little more than a year ago, when I started this blog, there were probably less than 20 art blogs being published. Using an aggregator it was possible to read through the universe of art blogs once a week in a 30 minute sitting. Now, I hear, there are over 400 art-related blogs being published. I have a hard time keeping up with the good ones every week--let alone with the other 380 out there. Artnet is publishing must-read content just as frequently as ever--if not more so. ArtInfo now provides pointers to many additional items every day, doubling or tripling the number that ArtsJournal already highlights. And then there are the monthly glossies to skim through. It feels like there is an order of magnitude more information that needs to be managed on a daily basis today to remain an insider than there was only a year ago.

A similar explosion has happened on the gallery scene in Chelsea. Before I started the blog, I could pretty much cover Chelsea in a part of a day. (Granted, when I do a comprehensive gallery run through it really is that. I'm in and out of a gallery in less than a minute if I don't see something that interests me.) I can't do that any more. With new spaces and new buildings on whole new streets, I can't cover the neighborhood thoroughly in a day anymore.

All this makes me wonder two things. First, if I will ever get back ahead of the curve--especially with more overseas travel on the calendar. And, second, if there is really enough interest in contemporary art today to support all the galleries and sources of commentary that have emerged in just the last year.

I think the answer to the first is "yes," with time. I'm not so sure that the answer to the second is the same.

Checking in, Checking out

2005-09-28T02:32:00.000-04:00

Not much new content around here lately, huh? Unfortunately, that's the way it's going to be for a little while yet.

It's not that I don't have much to say. I have some thoughts sketched out on several Barcelona art spots I've managed to see--the Picasso Museum, the National Museum of Catalunyan Art, and Antoni Gaudi's Parc Güell--but I haven't had the time to do any writing. And I won't for the near future.

Until I'm back in blogging action, check out some of the other art blogs listed in the right hand navigation bar.