February 28, 2007 1:17
The Worst Buildings in New York
Three weeks after the American Institute of Architects published its survey of America's best loved buildings, monuments and bridges, the website gridskipper has come up with its own rundown of the ugliest buildings in New York. There are some choices, like Norman Foster's Hearst Tower, that I disagree with completely. But most of the list strikes me as exactly right. In my dreams I, too, frequently speed around the city with a wrecking ball, cheerfully pulverizing the Pan Am building, Philip Johnson's pompous Museum of Television and Radio -- a post-modern castle keep for a museum of 20th century media; go figure -- and anything that says Trump.
February 27, 2007 12:05
I Got the Music in Me
Over the weekend I made it to Rose Hall at the Time Warner Center, home of the Wynton Marsalis fiefdom known as Jazz at Lincoln Center, in search of an answer to the musical question -- what's the connection, if any, between art and music? The occasion was the premiere of Portrait in Seven Shades, a jazz composition by Ted Nash that was based on his responses to seven modern artists: Monet, Dali, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Chagall and Pollock. All through the performance examples of their work were projected, mostly in close up details, on three giant screens behind the musicians.
People are always trying to find musical equivalents for the forms of art. (The philosopher Susan Langer devoted a good part of her career to the problem.) It tends to breed confusion. Debussy hated it when people called his music Impressionist. But the impulse to do it is just about impossible to resist.
So what happened at the concert I went to Saturday? The music was great, but it took the safe way out. Instead of trying to draw parallels between musical structure and the forms of art, Nash was mostly satisfied to produce superior mood music -- sometimes very superior -- or to take his cues from the artist's life story. So for Dali, something kooky/spooky, with a fade out of synchronized hand clapping that was both flamenco-flavored and a bit eerie. Pollock? Easy one -- hectic be-bop. Van Gogh got a bluesy segment to correlate with his depression and the deep blue of his Irises and Starry Night. Given the ocassionally manic side of Van Gogh's mental state, and the cyclones of yellow and white in that same Starry Night, he could just as easily have been represented by something more jagged and anxious, but maybe it's just nicer to think of him being more like Laura Nyro than Iggy Pop.
With Chagall Nash also went biographical, with shtetl-flavored strings, accordion and klezmerish clarinet. A wonderful piece, but more like the soundtrack music for a Chagall biopic then an attempt to come to grips with what made Chagall's work formally interesting. Then again, what exactly would be the musical equivalent of Chagall's adapted softening of cubist space? For that matter, what would be the musical equivalent of cubism? Abrupt changes in time signature? Nash tried a bit of that with Picasso, but in the end his piece had no more to do with Picasso than the wonderful Coleman Hawkin's sax improvisation, also called Picasso, that he played to open the program.
Maybe the thing to do would have been for Nash to choose more artists who were abstractionists. At least some of them provide a clear statement of their formal underpinnings in their work, which could be matched to the formal progression of the music. With that in mind, I found myself playing a mix and match game in my head all weekend. What would be a musical equivalent for Mark Rothko? How about those grand ascending triads in Henryk Gorecki's Third Symphony? For the vibrating woof and warp of Agnes Martin? Steve Reich'sMusic for 18 Musicians, for the way it creates the impression of constant, thrumming movement within a realm of absolute stillness and order. And for Ellsworth Kelly's monochromatic color field paintings? I nominate Neil Young's heroic one note guitar solo at the end of Cinnamon Girl.
Also because it's the only guitar solo I was ever able to play.
February 26, 2007 1:21
More about MoMA and Money
Lee Rosenbaum, who blogs under the name Culturegrrl, has an interesting post about her experience last weekend at a symposium of museum professionals. During a question period she asked MoMA Director Glenn Lowry about the fund financed by a few MoMA trustees that quietly paid him several million dollars in addition to his salary over a period of years. (It was the subject ten days ago of a front page New York Times story.) Specifically, Rosenbaum asked whether that fund produced a potential for conflicts of interest, for instance, by leading people to wonder whether the museum might favor gifts or acquisitions from the collections of the trustees who paid into it. Lowry eventually replied that no individual curator "and certainly not the director" has the authority to accept a gift or to buy a work of art.
That's a useful answer as far as the question of gifts and acquisitions go. But there are other ways that a museum director might favor the handful of trustees who are supplementing his base pay. And even if he had no such intention, the very existence of the trustee fund could leave the museum's actions under a cloud. One example: when the greatly expanded MoMA re-opened its doors in October 2004, many people were surprised that the first gallery of the permanent collection now featured on a prominent free standing wall what seemed like a relatively minor canvas -- Paul Signac's portrait of Felix Feneon.
When the late William Rubin had been chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, he had reserved the equivalent of that first position (the layout of the galleries was somewhat different in the old building) for Cezanne's The Bather. Rubin's intention was to make the point right from the start that modern art as MoMA defined it descended crucially from Cezanne. When a reporter told Rubin about the prominent positioning of the Signac, he expressed himself as very surprised, calling it a "candy box" painting.
When MoMA elevates a painting to a place of importance it matters, because MoMA plays such a unique role in determining what's crucial and what's secondary to the history of modern art. As it happens, the Signac, which no longer hangs on that prominent wall, was a "fractional gift" of Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller, the same David Rockefeller who is one of the chief contributors to the fund that supplemented Lowry's pay. Fractional gifts, which have been reined in recently by Congress, allow donors to give a museum a partial and gradually increasing interest in a work of art -- say 10% at first. Over a period of years that percentage can rise in increments until the work has been donated in its entirety. Meanwhile the donors can keep the work at home for a portion of each year while enjoying a tax deduction on whatever percentage they have bequeathed so far. The deduction depends on the appraised value of the painting. It increases if the value increases.
The re-hanging of MoMA's permanent collection was largely the work John Elderfield, the museum's new chief curator of painting and sculpture, along with his curatorial staff. All the same, Lowry holds ultimate authority what what hangs in his museum -- as I was reminded by the always gracious people in the MoMA press office after I wrote about the MoMA re-opening in Time and described Elderfield's role in the re-hanging in a way that they thought failed to give Lowry due credit. Was the decision to put the Signac there Lowry's or Elderfield's? If it was Lowry's, should we now suppose that Lowry's gratitude to Rockefeller as his personal benefactor could have played a role in elevating to a very visible place a painting in which Rockefeller maintained an interest? Even if that seems unlikely, it demonstrates how the payments to Lowry might very well create the appearance of a conflict of interest.
And that would be a pity, because MoMA, for all that people snipe at it, remains far and away our most important institution of modern art. It's authority as the arbiter of what matters in the history of that art depends on our belief that its curatorial judgments are not bent to the interests of its trustees. This question has already come up recently in connection with the current and somewhat surprising show of work by Armando Reveron, a Venezuelan painter who is heavily collected by another of MoMA's trustees. We want MoMA to surprise us, but lately some of the surprises have been the wrong kind.
February 23, 2007 11:54
Playing Hooky
Or is it hookie? Either way, I have today off -- my magazine has some strange ideas about when to celebrate President's Day weekend. I had thought of doing a brief blogpost anyway about my visit yesterday to preview the Armory Show at Pier 94 on the West Side of Manhattan, one of seven -- count 'em, seven -- art fairs going on simultaneously around town this weekend. Then I thought about what I would write, the usual lament about the rising domination of the artworld by market values, the bone bruising mosh pits that the shows can turn into, the impossibility of focusing on anything among the 150 galleries that have taken space inside the huge facility that is Pier 94, an immense basilica of lemonade stands. And then I thought....naaah, who needs to hear that again?
Meanwhile, if you still feel like reading something lengthier today on an unrelated topic, I can direct you to the new issue of Time, where I talk about staged photography and the Jeff Wall retrospective at MoMA in New York.
February 21, 2007 5:47
Andy Warhol: 8/6/28 - 2/22/87
It was twenty years ago today -- apologies to the Beatles -- that Andy Warhol died in his sleep of a heart attack following gall bladder surgery. Taking his cues from the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, Warhol's chief intuition was that art could do more than merely describe and satirize the banality of the 20th century. It could embody it, internalize it, cast it back to us as surely as a Hindu temple statue emanates the godhead. Art could be indistinguishable from everything that was duplicated, reduced and inert. Put this way, this may not sound like a good thing, but very little else of its time elucidated the modern world in such unsentimental terms.
And as a gay Catholic, raised to cherish spectacle and to detest himself for loving what he loved, Warhol was also the perfect person to exemplify everybody's mixed feelings about the phosphorescent splendors of pop culture. Situated just so, between desire and disgust, how could he fail to be the champion of everybody trapped in the here and now? His repeated expressions of love for everything cheesy -- "I think Pop was about liking stuff" -- were both sincere and central to the paradox he constructed around himself, that the artist could be as vacant as his art, the better to be filled by the precious vacuum of his time and reconciled to its triviality.
For all his bad wigs, for all the flakes and losers and sleaze balls that surrounded him at the Factory -- actually, maybe because of them, too -- he was the last word in ordinary Joes. Warhol, the guy who loved The Love Boat, was the sharpest customer to play the common man since Will Rogers twirled his lariat. He was more than democratic. His lesson was that even mediocrity was holy. You can only wonder what Walt Whitman would have made of him.
The Warhol-industrial complex is still working hard to convince us that Warhol's output after 1970 or so — the skulls, the shadows, the Rorschach blots, the scores of candy box society portraits, the threadbare collaborations with Basquiat -- is as important as what he did in the 60s. Don't buy it. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Orson Welles, Warhol had one of those ten-year American flight paths. By the '80s he started to remind you of Mae West in old age, still trying to play the bosomy femme fatale, still vamping as a vampire. Even within the terms of the shrewdly debased currency that Warhol offered us in the '60s, what he did after that felt like a fraudulent transfer. There's a difference between brilliant merchandise and whatever you happen to have for sale.
But I love the lessons he taught during the years that he was fully alive, in his deadpan oracular way. ("There was no profound reason for doing a death series, no 'victims of their time'; there was no reason for doing it at all, just a surface reason.") Though I never met him, I saw him tottering down the street in Soho one afternoon in the '80s with John Cage. I hope they were both drunk and happy. I will never forget finding out about his death on the day he died. If I could I would take a picture of his grave with my cell phone and post it on Flickr.com.
February 21, 2007 1:29
The Rape of the Sabine Women
Eve Sussman's 80-minute video The Rape of the Sabine Women has its New York premiere tonight. Three years ago Sussman had everybody's favorite piece at an otherwise negligible Whitney Biennial, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, a kind of "making of" video for the Velazquez canvas Las Meninas. For 12 murmurous minutes, we spy on members of the Spanish royal household just before and after they assume their poses within that painting's webwork of psychological and optical intricacies. By showing us ordinary mortals as they prepare--without realizing it--to take their places in eternity, Sussman not only made good on the claim that every picture tells a story, she also offered a poignant reflection on time itself.
The Sabine Women video (actually a combination of video and film) is a more ambitious piece that links five of what Sussman calls "implied narrratives", all having something to do with the birth traumas of civilization and the false promises of utopia, all filtered loosely through the story of the Sabine women who were abducted and raped by ancient Romans who had unusual ideas about what constitutes acceptable party behavior.
From The Rape of the Sabine Women/Eve Sussman/The Rufus Corporation -- Photo: Ricoh Gerbl
I visited Sussman at her Brooklyn studio last fall, where she showed me a nearly completed cut. As I wrote at the time:
Sussman's point of departure is a 1799 canvas by Jacques-Louis David. It shows us the moment when the Sabine women attempt to intervene in a battle between their Roman abductors and the Sabine men. But this time Sussman, who works with a creative collective called the Rufus Corporation, uses the painting as the very loosest framework for meditations on loneliness, longing and the failure of Modernist utopian schemes. Men in dark suits wander enigmatically among Greek statuary in Berlin. Women in dresses from the 1960s arrive by subway. There's no dialogue, though there is a cocktail party at a sleek International Style house and a climactic free-for-all in a Greek amphitheater.
I'm expecting to get to the premier tonight for a second look. For now I'll just note my initial reaction, which is that long form video is moving ever faster away from its sources in conceptual art and converging with the psychologically charged stage pictures of Robert Wilson and Pina Bausch -- and let's also add the very idiosyncratic Canadian film maker Guy Maddin -- to make something new, a hybrid of painting, theater, film and dance and of the ways that each of them operate to convey meaning and feeling. I can't say that everything in the Sabine Women came together for me, but as I watched it I felt as though Sussman was creating not just a work of art but a genre.
(And if her images are less obsessive and ferocious than some in Matthew Barney's Cremaster series, the Ring Cycle of personal cosmologies, they're also less obscure and -- dare I say it? -- less monotonous.
I did! I said it! I feel free!)
February 20, 2007 2:13
Brand New Dia?
The Dia Art Foundation has finally chosen a new director. He's Jeffrey Weiss, head of the department of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The appointment comes not a moment too soon. The Dia, which operates the immense Dia:Beacon museum on the Hudson River north of New York City and superintends site specific works like Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field" in New Mexico, has been rudderless for a year, since its previous director, Michael Govan, decamped for LA to run the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
In that time the Dia seemed to lose its way for a while. It closed both of its pioneering Manhattan exhibition spaces and backed off on an announced plan to open a new space in the city's booming meat packing district, at the base of the forthcoming High Line elevated park. When Dia bailed, the Whitney Museum jumped at the chance to take the same site for its planned new satellite facility. To make matters worse, Leonard Riggio, the Barnes & Noble CEO who was Dia's chairman — the kind of guy who could write checks to cover Dia's budget shortfalls if the need arose -- stepped down as chairman last May and left the foundation altogether in October.
Now Nathalie de Gunzburg, the new Dia board chairwoman, says that finding a new home for Dia in New York will be the foundation's first priority. Good idea, assuming they can afford it. The New York that Dia will eventually return to will be one with a lot more new spaces for modern and contemporary art, including that new Whitney offshoot, the upcoming New Museum of Contemporary Art in the Bowery and yet another addition being built to the Museum of Modern Art. But the Dia is a unique institution, dedicated to collecting in depth a short list of favored artists, including some, like Michael Heizer and De Maria, whose earthworks and installations would probably never have happened without Dia's support. Though the foundation collects deeply in Warhol and John Chamberlain, its taste runs more often to the austere, cerebral and minimalist and it has thrown its weight behind that kind of art in ways no one else can afford to do. It also does a type of exhibit nobody else attempts, allowing works to remain on view for a year or more. Whatever the merits of establishing a footprint on the leafy banks of the Hudson, Dia needs to be back in Manhattan.
At the same time it needs to be doing more to promote Dia:Beacon. Attendance there has been running about 75,000 annually, somewhat below the 100,000 that Dia officials were projecting to me when I stopped by just before it opened four years ago. Weiss says he's not ready yet to talk about specific ideas for Dia, but that he has quite a few. When he's ready to air them, we're all ears.
February 19, 2007 11:45
Makes You Wanna Holler, Throw Up Both Your Hands
A couple of oddments on a holiday weekend.
The British paper The Guardian has a piece about the 1994 theft of Edvard Munch's The Scream from the Munch Museum in Oslo. It's somewhat overlong but fascinating all the same for it's two main points.
To begin with, the painting may have been stolen not for its own sake, but to draw off Norwegian police resources from an investigation into a notorious robbery and killing that had taken place earlier that year. Two years ago, before the picture was recovered, I reviewed a book about the Munch theft that summarized the various knuckleheaded reasons that lead thieves to make off with great works of art. Fencing them on the black market -- very hard to do -- is the least of them. Motives like holding them as collateral for drug deals are just as likely. So stealing a painting to divert the cops from investigating a different crime -- why not?
Point two -- damage to the painting is worse than we thought. This has been suggested in earlier press accounts but the Guardian's is the most complete I've seen. "A huge watery stain, like a watermark on a teabag, seeps over the bottom left-hand corner, on the walkway and even on the lower part of the figure. Pigment has dissolved or been washed away." In 2004, right after The Scream was snatched, I wrote about how easy it is to take very valuable works from very lightly defended museums. Ten months after the robbery the Munch Museum re-opened with all of its pictures behind glass and bolted to the wall, a precaution that might have occurred to museum officials in 1994, when a different version of The Scream -- there are four altogether -- was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo. But never mind.
On another depressing topic, the re-building of the World Trade Center site, which I vented about last week, it took me until the weekend to get around to Friday's papers, but when I did I found this Op-Ed piece by the well known structural engineer Guy Nordenson to be an indispensable summing up of nearly everything that's gone wrong.
Coming soon -- some upbeat cultural news and commentary. If I can think of any.
The Scream/Edvard Munch -- Munch Museum
February 16, 2007 10:51
Uh Oh
The New York Times has a front page story today that's going to rock New York's Museum of Modern Art for some time to come. It appears that MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry, who is already one of the best paid museum officials in the U.S., was even better paid than we knew. For more than eight years he was also getting compensation from a fund created by two of the museum's trustees, David Rockefeller and Agnes Gund, and supported by them, by another trustee, Ronald Lauder and by David's late brother Laurance.
According to the Times, the fund, which paid Lowry a total of $5.5 million betwen 1995 and 2003, was described by MoMA in its IRS filings in ways that obscured its main purpose, which was, well, to quietly funnel money to the museum's director. Lowry's acknowledged salary, bonus and benefits for the year that ended June 30, 2005 was already $1.28 million.
It takes money to tempt museum directors into the high cost world of Manhattan. (Lowry came to MoMA from Toronto, where he had been director of the Art Gallery of Ontario.) The question involved here is not so much about whether the museum was right to sweeten Lowry's compensation package. It's about whether they structured the payout in ways meant to conceal it. For one thing, that would raise questions about whether Lowry was quietly beholden to museum trustees who are also major collectors. Which in turn could raise other questions, for instance, about decisions the museum makes about which works to highlight in its exhibitions or permanent collection, especially works or artists that might be important to those collectors.
According to the Times, the trust, which was given the innocuous name the New York Fine Arts Support Trust, filed tax forms describing its purpose as support for "charitable and fine arts organizations in the New York City metropolitan area." Hmmm.
We can expect to hear more from MoMA and Lowry in the days to come about all this. We had better.
February 15, 2007 11:30
Georgia on My Mind
Tyler Green's blog has a posting this morning about the impending (and depressing) sale by Fisk University of two important canvases from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which Stieglitz's widow Georgia O'Keeffe donated to the school in 1949, three years after his death. You can also read more about the complicated case here.
One of the paintings is an important O'Keeffe, Radiator Building — Night, New York. Under a deal approved by the Tennessee state attorney general, it will be purchased by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe for $7 million unless Fisk is able to come up within 30 days with a plan for keeping it on campus, perhaps by having donors buy the painting from Fisk but then lend it back permanently to the school. The other canvas, Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 3, would go on the open market.
Radiator Building — Night, New York/Georgia O'Keeffe -- Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Fisk University.
Fisk says it must do the sales to raise money to replenish its depleted endowment, and also to renovate the Carl Van Vechten Gallery where the collection is displayed. (Years after depositing the Stieglitz collection with Fisk, O'Keeffe herself regretted that she had not included a fund for upkeep and restoration.) I sympathize with Fisk's financial problems but for universities to treat their art collections as piggy banks is a bad idea, especially schools like Fisk that offer art history degrees and need real, tangible works of art on campus.
This isn't going to be the last of this kind of story. In this case it was Fisk that took it upon itself to offer the two paintings for sale, but in this very hot market small college and university collections are especially vulnerable to being sounded out by wealthy institutions on shopping sprees. How much would you bet that Alice Walton has people on her payroll whose only job is to do web searches all day with the phrase "financially strapped college"?
February 14, 2007 11:30
Rose How'd You Get So Red?
The Gray Fort, Jim Dine — Karolyn Sherwood Gallery
Here it is Valentine's Day, which inevitably got me thinking about the color red and the pictures that were burned into the collective memory by way of that color. (Love being what it is sometimes, maybe it's appropriate that cadmium red, the richest variety, is classified in chemical terms as a toxic heavy metal.) I started to flip back through my internal image bank to call up pictures that deploy red to maximum effect..
Once you start moving down this road, you can go on pretty much forever, which is why I decided to limit myself here to ten examples. So this is a Valentine's Day shout out to my partner Jeff and an all purpose appreciation of red's redness and of all things red, including Prince's Little Red Corvette the third and best part of Krzysztof Kieslowski's great film trilogy and my good old alma mater, Big Red.
Let's start with van Eyck. While it's not true, as they once sometimes taught in art history classes, that he invented oil painting, he brought it to its first great fulfillment by learning how to build up thin layers of oil glaze that gave his colors the power of deep saturation. That's why the red of this turban, when you see the actual picture, imprints itself so powerfully into your sense memory.
Man in a Red Turban, Jan van Eyck — National Gallery, London
The techniques of oil glazing were brought to Italy by the Italian painter Antonello da Messina, who learned them from van Eyck. That catalyzed the move from tempera to oil among Italians, who needed heavy supplies of red to paint all those ecclesiastical garments.
Cardinal Pietro Bembo, Titian — National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Samuel Kress Collection
Caravaggio sometimes used the device of an abstract image in the upper part of his canvas as a counterweight to the drama below. (Think of the huge shadowy window in the upper half of The Calling of St. Matthew.) In this canvas, he turned a flourish of red drapery into one of the greatest dramatic gestures in the history of painting.
Death of the Virgin, Caravaggio — Louvre, Paris
Eighteenth century British portraiture is full of redcoats. According to Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, an indispensable book by Philip Ball that I refer to all the time, Reynolds never entirely mastered the art of mixing pigments. As a consequence his reds often faded quickly. For whatever reason that wasn't the fate of Capt. Orne's Coldstream Guard uniform in this unforgettable portrait. And it's a good thing for him it didn't. That coat is the only thing that lets him hold his ground in the picture against the magnificent presence of his horse.
Captain Robert Orne, Joshua Reynolds — National Gallery, London
I include the Manet here because the intensity of those red pants have always made them seem like a color field painting all on their own.
Fifer, Edouard Manet — Musee D'Orsay, Paris
The Italian Futurists were introduced to the divisionist color theories of Seurat by way of the writings of a painter named Gaetano Previati. Boccioni then adapted those to his own more muscular purposes, for which the energies of red were perfectly suited.
The City Rises, Umberto Boccioni — The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Matisse inherited the use of intense cadmium red, a 19th century invention, from the Impressionists. The critic John Rusell was right when he called this canvas "a crucial moment in the history of painting. Color is on top, and making the most of it."
The Red Studio, Henri Matisse — Museum of Modern Art, New York
With the beginning of color field painting in the 1950s, the subordination of form to color begun by Matisse was complete. Newman's immense canvas, which engulfs any viewer, is a complete immersion into the experience of red.
Vir Heroicus Sublimus, Barnett Newman — Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller
Howard Hodgkin's paintings are frequently about the tension between intimate spaces and explosive feeling. Here the feeling spills beyond its confines and turns the whole space into a powerful red chamber.
Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, Howard Hodgkin — Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
I'll go out with this one, a 1981 sculpture by Anish Kapoor that uses pure red pigment. It doesn't get much redder than this.
As If to Celebrate, I Discovered a Mountain Blooming with Red Flowers, Anish Kapoor — Tate Collection
February 13, 2007 4:12
Tower of No Power
Over the last few weeks it was possible -- just possible -- to hope that the misbegotten Freedom Tower going up on the site of the World Trade Center might be put on hold. When he came to office in January New York's new governor Eliot Spitzer had put the project "under review" because he suspected it was going to be unrentable. (Tempting terrorist target + weak real estate market = white elephant.) But today the New York Times reports that with the market for office real estate in Manhattan improving rapidly, Spitzer has changed his mind. Too bad -- his short lived misgivings probably represented the last chance to rethink a building so big, bland and bunkered it could have been ordered over the telephone by Stalin.
And if the Freedom Tower had been put on hold, who knows, that might even have thrown a wrench in plans for the three oversize towers that the developer Larry Silverstein intends to raise along the border of the 9/11 memorial. To give his misconceived palisade of towers cachet, Silverstein recruited three international architecture stars -- Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki. But at its heart the problem those buildings represent is one that mere architecture cannot solve. It's a question of urbanism, or rather the abadonment of urbanist principles when they get in the way of maximizing floor space.
Daniel Libeskind's master plan for the WTC site, which has been pretty much swept aside, had envisioned a forcefield of large and small buildings, a mixed scale ensemble like Rockefeller Center, though shot through with a very different, more irregular design sensibility. What has evolved in its place is a developer's paradise of profit multipliers, four surplus-floorplate booster rockets looming over dwarfed streets. Remember five years ago, when everyone agreed that the idea behind the rebuilding of the WTC site was supposed to be renewal? You probably thought that meant renewing life. Turns out it was just about renewing leases.
February 12, 2007 11:56
The Wholesale Collapse of the Art Market
Only kidding. All the same, don't look for big headlines from this week's impressionist and modern art auctions at Christie's and Sotheby's. Last November's impressionist/modern sale at Christie's was the richest art auction in history, bringing in $491 million. At the pre-sale viewing the galleries were thick with major canvases by Gauguin, Kirchner, Modigliani, Picasso. Even if you think of the current art market as a tragicomic episode in the history of shopping -- I do -- there was no denying that it was major work that was being squashed into merchandise last year. There's a reason they talk about "bringing down the hammer".
But at both houses the February auctions in New York tend to be more modest affairs. Last year Christie's February sale brought in just about $2.3 million. Sotheby's eked out just under $3.4 million. Having visited Christie's Friday to catch the viewing for their Feb. 14 sale, I can tell you that this year will be no exception. There were some major names on the walls. Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, Cezanne, Arp, Dali, etc. Nearly all of them were represented by minor work. Sketches, gouaches, studies, tiny watercolors. If you want a large canvas, you have your choice of lesser names -- Marcel Gromaire, Andre Brasilier, etc. And lots of shrill, confectionary color. February auction viewings offer a rare chance to see work by painters like Jos Pauwels and Yvonne Canu, crucial figures in the transition between the School of Paris and the School of Wal Mart.
The story over at Sotheby's, where the sale starts Feb. 15, is not very different. Among recognizable names they have a Modigliani drawing and two bronze reliefs by Renoir. But their major offering is a 1965 oil by Jean-Pierre Cassigneul -- not exactly a staple of the art history books -- with a high estimate of $70,000.
Don't assume from any of this that the comically over heated art market is slowing down. The London auctions of post war and contemporary art set records again just last week. But those had nothing to do with Yvonne Canu.
February 9, 2007 12:12
Brits Behaving Badly
They take their art seriously in Britain. The critic Johann Hari, who writes for the British daily The Independent, has done a no-holds-barred takedown of Jake and Dinos Chapman, aging YBA's -- that's Young British Artists to you --and early Saatchi collection favorites, who have a major show at Tate Liverpool.
Hari's point is chiefly that the Chapman brothers, who are famous for their loathing of bourgeoise ethics and the Enlightenment itself, are on a path that leads easily to a squalid and dangerous nihilism. At one point Hari quotes from a 2003 interview that Jake Chapman gave to a small scholarly journal in which he reflected, in a grammatically tortured passage, on the idea that the art made by him and his brother might be seen as a transgressive service to society, a kind of salutary shock. Or as he put it: "a good social service like the children who killed Jamie Bulger." For Americans who may not recognize the name, Bulger was a three-year old who was led away and murdered by two ten-year olds, a 1993 crime that was for some time a British obsession.
I would ask Jake what he thinks about Columbine, but on second thought I don't want to know.
The Hari piece inspired a serene, considered reply from Jake, two fisted post modernist and former Kylie Minogue boy toy. "Thoughtcrimes"? Gosh, Jake, didn't Orwell put that term in bad odor?
Could it be he's just in a bad mood lately because the Chapman brothers' retrospective is in faraway Liverpool, but Kylie has a big, fabulous show all her own at the Victoria and Albert? A show, the V&A promises us, that's been painstakingly curated "...to reflect the many aspects of Kylie's career."
What did I tell you? They take their art seriously in Britain.
February 8, 2007 12:36
Latin Lesson
I bundled up last night and made it to a preview of the upcoming show at the Museum of Modern Art devoted to Armando Reveron, a Venezuelan painter who died in 1954. It was odd weather for looking at work produced mostly in a Caribbean resort village. And for good measure it was almost all in wintry white. But I knew to expect that on the way in. With this retrospective MOMA signs on seriously to the accelerating effort to rewrite the history of modern art to admit the work of Latin American artists beyond the ones we already know, the Mexican muralists and the beset, uni-browed Frida Kahlo. The point is also to disarm stereotypes about Latin art as something that's always warm, party colored and folkloric. In that vein the Houston Museum of Fine Arts is also hosting a retrospective of work by the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, which moves soon to the Tate Modern in London. No mojitos in that one either.
Reveron is a peculiar case. Born in 1889, the son of well to do but feckless parents -- his father was a drug addict -- he trained as an artist in Caracas, Barcelona, Madrid and Paris. (In Barcelona one of his teachers was Picasso’s father.) By 1915 he was back in Venezuela, struggling to reconcile the conflicting influences of Impressionism, Symbolism and the fantastic elements of Caribbean culture.
Six years later he made a crucial move with his companion Juanita Rios from Caracas to the coastal resort of Macuto. There he would create a walled compound called El Castillete and settle into the role of artist and local eccentric. More than eccentric, actually. Beginning in 1917 and continuing into the '40s he suffered a series of mental breakdowns. Eventually he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was even institutionalized for a few months in 1945.
All the same, in Macuto Reveron arrived at an astringent style that could be both delicate and powerful. In the scores of landscapes that he painted in the 1920s, and in a series of ghostly nudes, he drained his canvas of nearly all color, as though his surroundings had dematerialized under the intense Caribbean sunlight. His scenes dissolve into shimmer, like Bonnards, but without Bonnard's jewel box pallette.
Light Behind My Arbor/Armando Reveron -- Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas/Photo: Francisco Kochen
In many of his pictures Reveron also reduced his marks on the canvas to a minimum, which shifts attention in the good modernist way from the things depicted to the surface of the painting itself, even the warp and weave of the fabric. With so little information about what it is we’re looking at, his pictures achieve a kind of bright light obscurity. In the most radically reduced, every brushstroke equivocates on the central question we expect a brushstroke to answer -- just what it is from the visible world that it’s supposed to be representing.
Reveron became a tourist attraction of sorts in Macuto, where well to do visitors from Caracas would drop by his compound for the thrill of watching him paint with a lot of strenuous theatrics, the madman-artist, the local Salvador Dali. For good measure, some time in the 1930s Reveron began to make the elaborate and grotesque life sized dolls, munecas, that he not only used a models in some of his paintings but began to treat them almost as living persons around his compound. Reveron never showed the munecas in galleries. He may not have thought of them as art. But they turn out to be some of the high points of the show. You find yourself thinking of Hans Bellmer, the German artist who made and then photographed surreal, sexually charged puppets. And also of Norman Bates' mother in Psycho.
Muneca/Armando Reveron -- Collection Fondacion Museos Nacionales, Caracas
This is a show that could have been shorter. There are canvases that step right up to the border of tourist shop kitsch. You leave persuaded that Reveron is a wrongly neglected figure, but not a major one. So why not have a show before too much longer devoted to a Latin artist of more consequence? One who was infinitely inventive and who for some reason hasn't had a major retrospective in a while. I vote for this one.
February 7, 2007 11:24
150 Works of Architecture You Love to Love
As part of its 150th anniversary celebration, the American Institute of Architects released a poll this morning that purports to identify America’s 150 favorite works of American architecture. Being as list obsessed as any other red blooded American -- actually, I said that just to get the word American into this paragraph some more -- I’ve been combing through it.
I was surprised at first to see that so many of the people polled knew about architects' favorites who are less than household names, men like Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, he of the Nebraska State Capitol (67) and the Los Angeles Central Library (120). I understood better when I looked into how the list was drawn up. First the AIA interviewed around 2500 of its own members to get their choices, then whittled those nominees down to 248 buildings, bridges and monuments. After that, nearly 1800 randomly selected "civilians" were asked on line to choose from that list. They were shown pictures of the buildings they were being asked about, many of which they were probably seeing for the first time.
This is called aesthetic crowd control. Having architecture professionals make the initial cut keeps out the riff raff, like gas stations, diners shaped like decoy ducks and Colonial Williamsburg. Otherwise who knows? The Golden Arches (they don’t appear) might have been up there with the Golden Gate. (Number 5). As it is the masses still ranked the Bellagio Hotel and Casino (22) ahead of Monticello (27) and Falling Water (29). But Falling Water doesn’t have Dancing Fountains. And Monticello doesn’t have all night slots. At least not yet.
All the same, this is a very interesting list, a mix of “look good” and “feel good”. (Lots of churches, hotels and ball parks, places that give people warm feelings. The Pentagon didn't make it.) You will not be surprised to hear that New York is the crown jewel. Thirty-two of the choices are there. Those include Number One, the beloved Empire State Building, big, romantic and beautiful, the original hunk. Plus there are two Manhattan buildings that are no longer with us, the World Trade Center (19) and Penn Station (143), both mourned but for different reasons. And one that isn’t completed, Renzo Piano’s New York Times headquarters (68). And also, for some reason, both of Manhattan’s Apple Stores, including the nothing-in-particular one in Soho (141), which somehow ranks ahead of Penn Station. Insert your theory here for that one.
Among individual architects, Frank Lloyd Wright, also no surprise, is the most frequently cited name, with eight buildings. Boston’s Henry Hobson Richardson, the 19th century master of Romanesque revival, is tied for second with six. I love his work, too, but I also suspect it’s rock solid character, those reassuringly thick walls, appeals to something in our post 9/11, it’s-all-coming-apart mentality. The man he’s tied with is another Chicagoan, Daniel Burnham, alone in in collaboration with other architects.
The ranking of work by contemporary architects is all over the place. Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, the masterpiece of post-2000 American architecture, just barely breaks the top 100. (It’s 99) His no less brilliant M.I.T. Stata Center in Boston must have been too much for our voters to digest. Herzog and de Meuron are singled out for their addition to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (117) but not for their far superior De Young Museum in San Francisco. And Zaha Hadid’s Cincinnati Arts Center? Not there.
The worst omission? Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Denver Art Museum, like Gehry’s Disney Hall a building we’ll be coming to grips with for the rest of the century. As for the late Louis Kahn, the architect’s architect, he’s included for his Phillips Exeter Academy Library, a magnificent exercise, but not for his greatest work, the Salk Institute in La Jolla, maybe because it’s hard to grasp the simple solar glory of that place in a photo, which is what our voters saw.
But the most telling detail about this list? Very little of classic post-war Modernism turns up, unless it’s by Richard Meier, the fourth most frequently cited name, whose penchant for white might make him appealing even to people who don't like severe glass and steel. But there’s nothing by Mies van der Rohe. (No Seagram Building? No Lake Shore Drive apartments?) There’s no Glass House by Philip Johnson. No Lever House either.
The message I’m getting here is that Americans are open to the new, but they still favor warm over pure, inviting over challenging. I’m a card carrying art critic, and I love the Seagram Building, but I get it. I lived in Chicago for a while. I don’t even care much about baseball, but you touch Wrigley Field (31) and I kill you. It’s as simple as that.
Here's the top 20 choices, with locations and architects:
1. Empire State Building - New York City - William Lamb, Shreve, Lamb and Harmon
2. The White House - Washington, D.C. - James Hoban
3. Washington National Cathedral - Washington, D.C. - George F. Bodley and Henry Vaughan
4. Thomas Jefferson Memorial - Washington, D.C. - John Russell Pope
5. Golden Gate Bridge - San Francisco - Irving F. Morrow and Gertrude C. Morrow
6. U.S. Capitol - Washington, D.C. - William Thornton, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch, Thomas U. Walter, Montgomery C. Meigs
7. Lincoln Memorial - Washington, D.C. - Henry Bacon
8. Biltmore Estate (Vanderbilt Residence) - Asheville, N.C. - Richard Morris Hunt
9. Chrysler Building - New York City - William Van Alen
10. Vietnam Veterans Memorial - Washington, D.C. - Maya Lin with Cooper-Lecky Partnership
11. St. Patrick’s Cathedral - New York City - James Renwick
12. Washington Monument - Washington, D.C. - Robert Mills
13. Grand Central Station - New York City - Reed and Stern; Warren and Wetmore
14. The Gateway Arch - St. Louis - Eero Saarinen
15. Supreme Court of the United States - Washington, D.C. - Cass Gilbert
16. St. Regis Hotel - New York City - Trowbridge & Livingston
17. Metropolitan Museum of Art - New York City - Calvert Vaux, McKim, Mead & White, Richard Morris Hunt, Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo
18. Hotel Del Coronado - San Diego - James Reid
19. World Trade Center - New York City - Minoru Yamasaki; Antonio Brittiochi; Emery Roth & Sons
20. Brooklyn Bridge - New York City - John Augustus Roebling
February 6, 2007 1:53
I Hear That Train A'Comin'
A number of papers have been reporting that Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has agreed to give a home to an unrealized Jeff Koons project -- a replica of a 1940s locomotive that would hang nose down from a 161-foot tall crane. As Koons envisions it, every so often the thing will chug, turn its wheels and belch some smoke.
Photo: Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Koons' locomotive to nowhere is an ingenious artprank and I hope it happens. I first wrote about it in Time two years ago in a piece about artists who emerged in the 1980s. At the time Koons was hoping to have the thing constructed in Paris. Now Govan plans to put it in front of LACMA. But I find it strange that Govan, who thinks it could provide LA with a new icon, compared it to the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was iron symbol of a confident new industrial age. It exudes strength and stability. It's an arrow of progress pointed towards the sky.
The Eiffel Tower -- Photo: Standblog.org
Koons' hapless engine, pointed at the ground and making periodic outbursts of pointless effort, looks more to me like a symbol of thwarted energies and cultural exhaustion, a metaphor for frustration, like Duchamp's Large Glass. Koons swears he doesn't see it that way, but he long ago perfected that Warhol vacancy that hides any critical intentions behind a benign facade. Govan should certainly pursue his plans to build that train. But forget about offering it as a new icon for LA -- unless the city wants to see itself reflected in what could just as well be a giant monument to erectile dysfunction.
February 5, 2007 1:35
Pop: The Question
Over the freezing cold weekend I curled up with The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts by Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It's largely a meditation on fiction, its meanings and methods, but some of what he says applies to the arts generally. That would describe his passage about why it would have been pointless for Czech writers after the fall of the Berlin Wall to produce a cycle of dense novels about the new post-Communist social fabric, a cycle modeled after Balzac's Human Comedy, which also described a society -- 19th century France -- that was adjusting to the failure of an earlier revolution.
It would be ridiculous to write another Human Comedy. While History (mankind's History) might have the poor taste to repeat itself, the history of an art will not stand for repetitions.
Maybe the history of an art won't, but the market sure will. I've thought about that while watching the market explosion in Chinese contemporary art, so much of which relies on recycled Pop Art gestures. How many more new Chinese artists do we need working variations on Warhol's portrait of Chairman Mao?
One example among many. The best known work of Wang Guangyi, one of the major names in Chinese contemporary, consists of obvious pop satires of Cultural Revolution iconography.
Great Criticism -- Pop Art/Wang Guangyi -- Sotheby's
And Zhang Xiaogang, the auction price leader of the pack, is famous for his Bloodline series -- cartoonish (meaning Pop) family portraits that owe something to Christian Boltanski's (non-Pop) blurred album pictures of Holocaust victims.
Bloodline Series:Comrade No. 120/Zhang Xiaogang -- Sotheby's
It's not that there's any mystery as to why Chinese artists would turn to the language of Pop. It allows them to give the finger simultaneously both to the dwindling Communist order and to the rising power of the vulgar market, including the one that buys up their paintings as soon as they make them. Militant ideology is trumped by militant triviality -- Pop lets Chinese artists formulate their misgivings about the past, the present and the future all in one gesture.
But to a Westerner who lived through the first explosion of Pop in the 1960s, the closer Chinese art is tied to Pop Art precedents, the weaker, more rear guard and even provincial it looks. Is it possible to describe a nation of over a billion people as provincial? It is when so many of their artists are content simply to offer variations on a Western art movement that's nearly half a century old.
Maybe the Pop Moment is just something that will become a standard rite of passage for any society making the transition from Marx to Coca Cola. In that case, brace yourself for the coming tide of Cuban Warhols.
February 2, 2007 1:06
Barnes Storming
A reader offered a quick comment to my post about museums recombining work from their permanent collections. What he said, in its entirety, was: "Sounds like a trip to the Barnes Foundation is in your future..." Two responses from me:
1 - Weirdly, there is a trip to the Barnes in my future. I'm awaiting confirmation on a March 2 reservation request. Look soon for my separate comment folder for psychic readers.
2 - I was aware when I did my earlier post that the Barnes mixes everything. Where else can you see a Seurat in the same room as a Matisse lunette and a whole lot of Pennsylvania Dutch hardware? But the Barnes is sui generis. It's not a place that occasionally departs from the general run of museum practices. It's one that disregards them to begin with. Idiosyncrasy was built in to the Barnes philosophy. I didn't want to drag a short post down that long line of digression, but point taken.
I'll have more to say on Barnes-style eclecticism, and on the Foundation's impending move to Philadelphia, when I get back from there. Psychic readers are invited to predict my reactions.
February 1, 2007 2:20
Don't I Know You From Somewhere?
I'm surprised that none of the coverage of yesterday's invasion of Boston by little light men, or at least none of the coverage that I've seen, mentions what looks plain to me -- that the ad campaign that backfired was modeled after street art, meaning graffiti, wheat paste sheets, decals, etc. Ad shops that think of themselves as guerilla marketers try to plug into street art all the time on the assumption that can gain their products some street cred with kids. Sure enough, last night Boston police arrested -- what else? -- an art school student who they say conceived the campaign for an ad agency called InterferenceInc.com
So it makes senses that those little light men were mounted under bridges and at overpasses and so forth. Those are the kind of rag end city locations where a lot of street art gets placed. A couple of years ago I descended from my sumptuous wood paneled offices at Time to the simmering mean streets of America to write about it.
It looks to me like the ad campaign might even have drawn from at least two specific street art inspirations. One would be the perforated light box covers of the street artist who calls himself Thundercut.
Hip Hop Walker/Thundercut
The other source looks to be "throwies" -- a cluster of LEDS (that's Light Emiting Diodes for my low-tech readers) that are attached to a battery and a small magnet. Throwies were developed by Evan Roth and James Powderly, who operate under the name Graffiti Research Lab. They can be tossed against any metal surface to make street art without harming public space, since they can also be removed. A couple of my alert colleagues at Time wrote about them last summer.
The GRL website even has a disclaimer on it now assuring people that the Boston campaign wasn't their work. It also announces their latest project, a collaboration with a group called the Anti-Advertising Agency, to subvert those video ad screens that are turning up everywhere these days.
Be afraid, Madison Ave. Be very afraid.
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
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