You don't want to be the one holding the scissors when there's little or nothing left. That's one idea in Yoko Ono's Cut, or so I'd always assumed: that the performance would proceed like Zeno's paradox, with viewer-participants scissoring less and less material from the artist's garments as she is denuded, as the burden of awkwardness passes snip by snip from artist to viewer. That was my assumption, anyway, but that's not what actually happens in the 1965 performance at Carnegie Hall.
The piece begins in a predictable way. Spectators mumble occasionally, appraising how each one of their tribe takes from the artist's sacrifice. They snip gingerly, until one viewer—wanting no small souvenir, or perhaps no share of the artist's shame—surgically removes the artist's blouse in a confident intervention. He defies the established interaction with the artist, and the audience—now passive in relation to the artist and this former compatriot—titters over his arrogance ("He's getting carried away").
When he has completed his operation, the young man then trains the scissors on the shoulder straps of the artist's bra. With a flash, revealing roll of her eyes, Ono gives away the game: This wasn't how she intended the performance to go. The audience's protest to this second transaction is less mute. One male voice can be heard interjecting something like, "Why don't you leave some for somebody else to do something," while a woman snaps, "Stop being such a dweeb!" There's something dark in that he said/she said exchange. Something more revealing than the piece Ono planned, which is undone.
Yoko Ono, Cut, 1965.
Ono is in the District this weekend; she's planting peace trees around.
Of course Dolce & Gabbana knows that the depiction of a rape scene will sell clothes—nothing new there. Presumably D&G wagers the benefit of sexual violence & humiliation narratives against the risk of winding up as grist in Jean Kilbourne's mill.
Yet there is a line even ruthless ad men won't cross, and that's televising ads that depict graphically violence against women. (At least, I've never seen a snuff commercial.) That's what distinguishes ANTM's gristly editorial spread from the rest. Substantively, it's just this ad run through the Grindhouse. But ANTM being a television show in which the editorial process is (or purports to be) transparent, you get a live forum in which tastemakers say things like "[Y]ou don't look dead to me. You look like you're dying," and "Death becomes you, young lady."
Young women of the District! Find out for yourself, um, how the sausage gets made at the ANTM auditions on Saturday night.
Gore Design, Erosion Sink.
(Courtesy the Governess)
This sink is eco friendly and handsome . . . but wouldn't it be perfect if it were made of something other than erosion-resistant concrete? I want to see it fall apart very slowly. Ideally a sink with this design would have a lifespan of 12 years before it completely eroded—long enough to measure out a span of time, not so long that a buyer will complain about (um) washing his money down the drain, but still a sink that would need replacing once or twice or maybe three times during the life of a home. This design, or my idea about this design, brought to mind Félix González-Torres's paper stacks, from which viewers are encouraged to draw pages even as the stack is continually replenished. Also, a conversation I had recently about Christian Boltanski while walking around the National Mall; the latest issue of Art on Paper reprints a conversation in which Boltanski discusses his concept for a Holocaust memorial, a fragile monument that would require a community to periodically repair and replace the thing. I haven't read what Boltanski has to say about it, but to my mind 12 years would again be an appropriate interval for that cycle.
This site favors things that fall apart, centers that cannot hold, memories without referents.
UPDATE: Here's the snippet from that Art on Paper article:
Leslie Camhi: Have you ever been asked to design a public monument?
Christian Boltanski: I was asked twice to design Holocaust monuments in Germany. I didn't want to do them, though I liked my idea. If you make a monument in stone, everyone will soon forget what you have commemorated. The city will pay for the monument in order to forget it. What I wanted to do was to make a monument that would have to be remade each month, using very fragile materials, like the little prayer houses that observant Jews construct for Sukkoth. Of course, the monument would fall down and have to be continually reconstructed. If at any time it disappeared, it would mean that times had changed, and the reasons for its existence were forgotten. The only possible monuments are those that must be continually re-made, that require a continuous engagement, so that people will remember.
So Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa really did have that big fight.
This is funny. Lee Rosenbaum writes that the Pritzker Prize Web site revealed this year's winner yesterday with a note saying, "Embargoed For Release 29 March 2007". The world wide web is a dumb place to stash your secret news. Not something bloggers, even Time bloggers, are likely to hold to—hell, even the Washington Post ran Philip Kennicott's take yesterday.
It's a good thing, though, that traditional media outlets are taking their cues from bloggers about whether they should adhere to news embargoes. They don't make much sense within a virally driven media.
UPDATE: Richard Lacayo says it was a Spanish newspaper that broke the embargo, which prompted the Pritzker people to permit people to post publicly.
Last night Catherine and I attended a "spring drink preview", one of these amusing boho conventions that marks life on the eastern seaboard. The bartender, or mixologist, blathered on a bit, but he made decent drinks, even if he soiled a delicious Patrón and cilantro margarita by adding Blue Curaçao. (The market selects for DayGlo blue drinks, so he claims.) A rose-infused gin concoction made me wish for a Hendrick's over rocks. But the evening gave me a buzz and two ideas!
One: In trying to communicate to Catherine the name of the tequila, I whispered "Patrón, as in Patronus". At this intersection, readers in the know will have already begun spinning off madly with their own themed drinks (and should leave ideas in comments). The Shot That Shall Not Be Named? A beer for every house (but which beer for which house?) Expect our Harry Potter and the Adult Beverages party to coincide with the release of Deathly Hallows.
Two: After all the Dada shows last year and having just seen the Modernism exhibit at the Corc, mixology inevitably brought to mind Marinetti's La cuisina futurista. Years ago, there was a superb article in the New Yorker about Lacerba, a restaurant in Milan that features a selection of Futurist dishes—I thought about that, too. Hence, the Marinettini:
2 oz gin
1 tbsp dry vermouth
2 tbsp motor oil
2 steel ball bearings
Though I considered olives in place of the ball bearings, my concerns were that olives would be too traditionally Italian for Marinetti's taste—the man rejected pasta, after all—and that the motor oil might have some deleterious effect on the texture of the olive. I'll try it both ways and report back. To be served with a small bowl of chrome hex nuts.
Spencer "Too Hot for Ramadi" Ackerman is home, safe and sound. He's sitting across from me at the office* as if he hadn't been gone a day. Look for him to be sounding off about his month in Iraq in a media outlet near you.
* Dining room
. . . Richard Rogers. It was news to me that he didn't have a few of these puppies on the mantle already.
Richard Rogers, Lloyd's of London, 1986.
You're a smart art reader—you eschew the idea that New York is the end-all and be-all of the art world, much less that the New York Times is its only or best herald. You look to outlets from across the nation for your daily dose of art criticism. At the same time, you're irritated by the sheer volume of entries that overtakes your RSS reader when you subscribe to feeds by media outlets. You appreciate, for example, anything Dan Savage writes, you read about that Zoo documentary that Charles Mudede wrote—but you're reading Slog for Jen Graves's posts. Twenty-nine out of the 30 or so posts that the Seattle Stranger writers put out in a day are of no use to you.
Enter Yahoo Pipes, one very neat new media tool. Last night I created a pipe that feeds to me only Graves's entries, and I think I can jigger it to deliver online versions of her print articles, too. Same for the Boston Globe and Exhibitionist. So easy, I can do it: this walkthrough video will tell you just about everything you need to know.
In a Boston Globe piece on "Training Ground for Democracy", an imminent Christoph Büchel exhibit, Geoff Edgers quotes Mass MoCA director Joseph C. Thompson:
"Did we get the 727 fuselage, blown up, burned, and suspended in the gallery as he had asked?" he said. "Well, that one we couldn't come up with. But we looked into it."In a followup on the Exhibitionist blog, Edgers quotes one bullet from a seven-page ultimatum, penned by Büchel to outline his frustrations and demands for satisfaction:
There is NO negotiation about the scope of the project. It will be realized as proposed.Yikes. Based on the article, the directors at MASS MoCA are handling this cavlierly, saying things like "the show must go on" but not explaining how they plan to cater to the artist—or, more importantly, whether they feel that they are obligated to. Installation is 9/10 of the show, right? Büchel could raise a holy stink about the show, but could he force MASS MoCA to not show the work they've installed to date? You'd think that a contract for such a materially ambitious show would offer some guidance . . . but then you'd expect the same contract to include an agreed-upon, itemized costing for such elements as disassembling a two-story house and reassembling it within the show.
How about that MASS MoCA space? When I was in Miami in December, I saw John Bock's Zero Hero at the 7,500-square-foot Moore Loft space. I couldn't think of a place in the District that could host that show, but since then I've heard loose talk about creating a contemporary art center in the District. Now, you'd have to go well beyond the city far from the suburbs past the exurbs to find 13 acres for a campus like MASS MoCA—perhaps farther than North Adams is from Boston. But a more modest space is within the Red Line's reach. Having plans that brought me to the area anyway, I took a walking tour of the vast, gentrifying warehouse district near the NewYoFlo Metro station—an ideal setting for a contemporary art space of this magnitude. (This trip led to a hilarious exchange with police, who took me for a very lost tourist. "Excuse me, mister, are you from Europe?")
Mims's "This Is Why I'm Hot," explained graphically. I do so love a good Venn diagram.
It's about time for a redesign around here, no?
When I say that museums and nonprofits need to cultivate a corporate sensibility, I'm thinking specifically in terms of—for example—compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, which establishes guidelines for boards for assuring the independence of their auditors. S-O applies only to publicly traded companies, but Independent Sector has published about ways in which 1) nonprofit organizations have voluntarily adopted S-O best practices (smart!) and 2) state lawmakers have drafted S-O-ish legislation for nonprofits (smarter!). The Independent Sector produced a report on the subject last year (PDF and HTML), and the report's advice is straightforward:
It is good practice for nonprofit organizations to take steps to ensure the independence of the audit committee. While most nonprofit board members serve as volunteers without any compensation and staff members do not participate as voting members, all nonprofit organizations should review their practices to ensure the independence of the audit committee.The Smithsonian is a thorny case, being a public-private hybrid created by Congress. (Consider that FOIA requests don't apply to the Institution.) But Congress is ideally suited to mandate Smithsonian-specific reforms. I agree with Tyler Green's prescription, for example, that
Acting Secretary Cristian Samper should immediately move to establish the Smithsonian inspector general's independence from his office. The IG should report to the regents (SI lingo for the board of directors) and should have its investigations funded by non-Secretary-controlled funds. Samper could institute this change almost immediately.however, this is a job for Congress, not Samper. If Sen. Grassley (R-Iowa) et al. are serious about mandating reforms within the Smithsonian, they should abandon the pointless, punitive redresses—like capping the director's pay at a truly noncompetitive rate and freezing a $17 million funding increase.* Small's abuses were heinous, but far worse for the Smithsonian in the long run were the Board's efforts to disguise or exculpate his offenses before they came to light.
DISCLOSURE: I contribute to Eye Level, the blog by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
UPDATE: It was brought to my attention that Inspector General A. Sprightley Ryan does not and has never reported to the Office of the Secretary; this post might have inadvertently muddied the point, but the IG reports to the Board. More information about the position here.
* According to the WaPo, Sen. Grassley will withdraw the amendment that docked the Smithsonian increase.
Tyler writes in response to my argument for corporate accountability at cultural institutions:
Oh dear no. Those are precisely the wrong lessons to take from what has happened. One of the biggest stories in the c3/nonprofit-etc. sector in the last 10 years is the failure of biz leaders as non-profit CEOs. Small is the last one of many fashionable biz-world-to-c3ish hires to fall by the roadside.One crucial nugget in the story about the fashionable migration of leaders from private to public (and profit to nonprofit) sectors shouldn't go overlooked. From the WaPo:
Small raised more money for the Smithsonian in his seven-year tenure than had been raised in the previous history of the institution.That doesn't sound like failure, exactly. Rather, the failure was on the part of the Board of Regents, first for maintaining an incredibly lax administrative regime with regard to Small's behavior: read WaPo writer James Grimaldi's online chat, which tells that while Small was required to file all sorts of documentation of his spending, he stopped doing so for "administrative ease". But the Board truly shirked its oversight obligation by changing the rules for Small:
After the IG issued her report finding that Mr. Small charged unauthorized travel for his wife, Sandra, (Small's wife's spent $5,700 in Smithsonian money to travel to Cambodia), the regents changed Small's employment agreement to waive preapproval, which is required for other Smithsonian employees.Whether the director was a suit or a scholar doesn't explain these abuses. The lesson to take away here is that abuses are difficult to prevent, perhaps even bound to happen, when the oversight branch abandons the watch tower.
Grimaldi raises an important point today about Small: How much credit can he take for the notable fundraising achievements under his tenure?
On the Senate floor, Grassley said it was "insulting" to give Small credit for every dollar raised under his watch. After all, there are 18 museum directors and their No. 1 job is fundraising. There also is an extensive development office -- hardworking people who deserve credit for trying to raise money for the institution. And each of the 18 museums -- and a 19th in development -- has fundraisers.It's difficult to suss out the information you'd need to evaluate any claim, pro or con, since the Smithsonian is opaque—it resists FOIA requests based on a DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Smithsonian is a creation of Congress (which is itself exempt from FOIA). This is the information that the Board will weigh heavily in appointing its next director; notwithstanding Small's eminent shortcomings, a candidate who can do as much—assuming he did do much—is going to be an attractive candidate. I don't think that's a negligible criterion for selecting a director. But it won't do the Smithsonian much good if the Board doesn't adopt best practices, aggressively.
DISCLOSURE: I contribute to Eye Level, the blog by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
One Volokh conspirator writes about the community morals that he thinks are most subject to change in coming years—animal rights, capital punishment, and forced labor—and includes oddly quantitative measures for the likelihood of change. ("I suspect that the chance of major movement in this direction is at least 50%.") I'm agnostic about animal rights, though insofar as regulations that "humanize" animal slaughter and farming support better ecological and labor practices, I'm all for them (so long as I can continue eating delicious, delicious meat.) I'm opposed to the death penalty and am delighted to read that "continued substantial increase in moral stigmatization of the death penalty" is predicted at 60 percent. ("[A]nd 70-80% if there is no major crime wave.")
I don't cotton to mandatory national service, though I wasn't always so opposed to the notion. In fact I don't remember developing a grudge agaisnt "giving back"—only when that post and thought, "No fucking way am I serving this country on the executive say-so," did it occur to me. My family has a long history with the military, stretching back to every war the nation's ever been in; I have great respect for military service. Much less for the United States as a nation, though. I'm not sure I would go so far as to help my child to shirk national service (I'm too old to be any use to my country, of course), but it would be a major deterrent to having a family in the States. Who knew? I'm radicalized.
Larry Small resigns as Smithsonian chief. In a reversion to form, a scientist will act as secretary: Cristian Samper, biologist and director of the National Museum of Natural History. (Small was a banker.) Scientists from across the system, who complained loudly during Small's tenure, are no doubt breathing a sigh of relief to have a research man back at the helm again. You can almost hear the celebratory clink of test tubes!
But is Small's resignation the best thing for the Smithsonian? Look at the numbers: "Small raised more money for the Smithsonian in his seven-year tenure than had been raised in the previous history of the institution." Of course, Small's extravagant personal indulgences were inappropriate, a gross abuse. Nevertheless they were a small price to pay for the kind of fundraising mechanism that Small brought to the Smithsonian. The board of regents will rally around his resignation—that's base camp before the long, hard, PR slog back to respectability—but there will be more than a few wistful, nostalgic sighs for the heyday (the somewhat corrupt heyday, albeit!) that Small's tenure represented.
Samper might be some sort of philosopher-king, able to match Small's business acumen while restoring public faith in the Smithsonian's dedication to pure research and cultural heritage. (In this regard—the real business of the Smithsonian—Small fell far short of the mark.) But I have my doubts. The latter work is crucial, of course, especially right now, but it's the former that concerns me. Small's resignation means that Larry Small will no longer be sipping champagne and sampling caviar on the taxpayer's dime. The resignation alone, however, doesn't signal that the Smithsonian is erecting safeguards and oversight mechanisms to prevent this kind of abuse from happening in the first place.
My worry is that, in the zealous spirit of reconstruction, officials will be tempted to make sure that the Smithsonian never hires another Larry Small. This is the wrong lesson to take away. I don't know Samper from Adam, but if his selection amounts to deprecating the significance of finance and fundraising in the job description of the secretary, then Samper is not a safe choice. In an era where public support for the nation's treasury is eroding—not just the $17 M in funding that the Senate voted to withhold, but the congressional support of a systemwide pay admissions architecture—you can't afford milquetoast financial leadership. You want to hire another Larry Small—and then you want to hire a board of accountants to watch him like hawks.
I say this in greater length in The Guardian: museums should act like corporations—ones with real oversight.
DISCLOSURE: I contribute to Eye Level, the blog by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
A day in which there are sheep in the news is a day wasted spent e-mailing friends and family in Texas in the hopes of coming up with the best Aggie joke. Human–sheep chimeras? Good lord, at least make it a challenge.
Related: What passes for 'cue in College Station.
What's the benefit to WPA\C membership? Apparently, card-carrying members don't get free entry into the Corcoran's Modernism exhibit, or any other ticketed show. This came as a shock to me, but it's all outlined here. Of the other advantages, the 40-percent price kickback at Capitol Art and Framing in Fairfax seems to be a real boon (however, I don't know their work and I doubt that every WPA\C–listed artist frames through them).
Then there's entry in the ArtFile slide and media registry, which is listed as the big kicker. The ArtFile isn't (yet) an online directory. Now, I have some nostalgia for my college days, when I'd load a tray of slides about some era or genre and click the day away. But that's not how I or most people browse art today. Same can be said about the hefty white-pages directory: It's fine for looking up a phone number, but not for discovering new artists. It's a reference source. When people go looking for artists, they turn to Firefox.
But all that will change when the WPA\C digitizes its directory, right? Here's the deal: While the online directory will make it much easier for users to access the information, it won't make the information more useful. Back when I used to sift through slides, I had already done a significant part of the sorting process by the time I'd turned on the projector—loading works by so-and-so, works in such-and-such style, and so on. And I never loaded, you know, 60,000 slides. The iArtFile might be easier to browse than the organization's book or slides, but will it replace artists' Web sites, or just replicate the information that's already available?
Then there are the shows. Some artists' works are only ever shown at WPA\C member shows, and these artists draw an enormous benefit from these programs. The viewer does not. There are, of course, decent WPA\C–programmed shows, like Kelly Towles's "Wall Snatchers" and the new media series curated by Djakarta and Kathryn Cornelius. But in at least one of those shows, the curator had to resist efforts to make it a members-only free for all.
For the many Sunday-painters-club-type artists, this is A Good Deal. But there's a broad category of artists that no area nonprofit (not just the WPA\C) services: emerging artists, post MFA but pre representation, who are competing to be shown by commercial galleries. The WPA\C exhibits that draw the most critical applause are those featuring this category of artists—but, by design, there's more chaff showing than wheat.
. . . is that, for reasons that passeth understanding, she runs her hairdryer every 20 minutes or so.
Back from Texas, feeling better after food poisoning (!), still reeling from the brackets-breaking loss to the dread Trojans, but ready to return these weathered, leathery hands to the soily business of writing about art.
Albert Pinkham Ryder, Dead Bird, 1890s. Phillips Collection.
Ian Whitmore, Death From Above, 2004. G Fine Art.
Jason Zimmerman, Untitled, 2007. Civilian Art Projects.
In an e-mail and in comments to this post, Marc Spiegler and Edward_ assure me that Art Salon isn't what I'm saying it is. They're merely moderating comments to keep the place on topic and spam free, that's all. That's fine—I'm not sure why I was so cranky about it in the first place. So I'm putting on new eyes and giving it a second glance.
So keep up with that site while I'm gone. G.p will go black for a week while I travel around Texas. ¡Hasta luego!
Jen Graves writes a fascinating piece for The Stranger about Matthew Kangas, a prominent freelance Seattle critic who allegedly asked for and received artworks from artists after writing reviews about them. Graves got the story after several artists went public with tentative accusations in response to this post, in which Graves questioned Kangas's ethical standing in promoting a show that featured art he owned and has written about previously. One by one, accusations about Kangas's requests for gifts contributed to a predatory portrait of the critic. The article suggests, however, that he hasn't profited much or at all from the works. He might have been motivated by selfishness alone—there isn't evidence of quid pro quo. But that's hardly the point. Graves writes, "Whether artists feel compromised by requests for art is not the only issue; readers and editors assume that critics are not being paid twice, both by the publications and the subjects of their stories."
Over the course of the article she considers the function of "embedded" and "remote" critics:
If the accusations are true, how did Kangas get away with it for so long? The answer to that may be many-pronged, but it in part lies in artists' belief that he is almost one of them, an embedded critic, for lack of a better phrase—someone who is an art lover and expert first, and a journalist second.Kangas exploited information asymmetries in order to put together a collection. He exploited the fact that artists would be embarrassed by their response to his demands for expensive meals and artworks, whatever the response was, and wouldn't discuss it with one another. He exploited the fact that critics are few and artists are many. He behaved like a predator—this sort or that sort of critic, nothing doing.In the last 20 years, daily-newspaper editors have lost interest in critical reviews, asking writers for more trend pieces, profiles, and investigative reports. Last year, when Kangas wrote 20 reviews of regional exhibitions in the Seattle Times, the staff art critic Sheila Farr wrote only five, according to the paper's online archives—she wrote other kinds of stories, such as a three-day series about Dale Chihuly, which she worked on with another reporter and a team of researchers. Given this disparity, Kangas can be seen as a friend to the art community in Seattle.
The emphasis on reporting instead of criticism, or in addition to criticism, has dragged critics into the same spotlight reporters work under, where lapses of judgment are firing offenses. Today, being embedded is looked at with suspicion, and being detached is more in vogue. Each position certainly has its merits. But the industry is still struggling to combine the two approaches in a way that keeps critics passionate, engaged, and knowledgeable, without allowing their biases to be, or to appear to be, personal or financial.
In case you missed them at the end of last week, here are three pieces, submitted for your approval: Too much drama in the MAC (City Paper); September 11 art, or the lack thereof (Campus Progress); and oversight at the MoMA and Smithsonian (Guardian Unlimited).
Edward_ points to a new blog to which he and others are contributing, Artworld Salon. At first glance, it's less about art than about movers & shakers—a breathless post about a public spat between dealers serves as an introduction. That's fine, but I find distasteful the disdain for readers that the authors have built into the site: Comments are enabled—but only for invited commenters. Commenters, in fact, aren't described as commenters at all, but "panelists." Pinkies up, everyone? Come, now.
Now, there's nothing wrong with engineering your site so that, say, only those people whose last names being with C may comment. But it misses the point, and so does this site's policy. Again, it's a valid gesture, dispensing with the comments option—just don't confuse your comment-restrictive blog with an "open-source think tank."
From one of Spencer's recent dispatches from Iraq:
For some reason, there's a bunch of kids who are able to run around the outskirts of the Camp Liberty grounds. It's pretty crummy for them, as there's not much to play with but dust and sticks, but they seem to like it. Excitedly, they jump to attention when the Humvees pass by . . . and deliver the devil's horns to the soldiers. I had no idea what to make of this. Are they cursing the troops with smiles on their faces? Is this how Iraqis deliver the v-for-victory? The gunner today set me straight: a Texan in the previously deployed MP company made it his mission to teach the kids how to throw up the Hook Em Horns.Yeah, we're all like this.
The Hirshhorn After Hours party? Kind of dope. Nothing like browsing the galleries with an Old Dominion Pale Ale in hand: that adolescent high that comes from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place never goes stale. Now, the notion of paying to get inside a museum doesn't sit well with National Mallrats—ten dollars is an outrage! even when music and mingling is involved. But plenty got over it last night, and the museum was apparently 300+ over capacity, with many people turned away at the door. Ian Svenonius is an able DJ (he's indirectly responsible for introducing me to Stereo Total), and the Lite Brites were a hit (even if HH ran with the hussied-up new Lite Brite design). Obviously the light works show is going to be a fun one to see at night.
Here's a piece I wrote for the Center for American Progress's Campus Progress brand. Teaser:
As far as anyone can tell, five years after the fact, Sept. 11, 2001, changed visual art in only one significant way: It prompted artists and critics to ask, "Where's the 9/11 art?" Their cousins in the literature game, after all, have recently pumped out novel after 9/11 novel: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus, and Terrorist by John Updike are just a few titles from the shelf. . . . And while the war in Iraq in particular, and the Bush presidency in general, have become irresistible punching bags for visual artists—a scowling Cheney effigy is as likely as any portrait you'll find in a contemporary gallery—the art establishment, while outspoken on Iraq, has been largely silent on the attacks of 9/11.In the rest (and do read the rest) I hazard why artists deal with the subject so infrequently—and why those who do fail so spectacularly. (And I take more than a few shots at The New Criterion, to boot.)
I have an opinion piece in the Guardian online about executive salary scandals at MoMA and the Smithsonian Institution. Watch me go all Sarbanes-Oxley on their asses. Note that in the profile picture, I'm beardless; my IRL friends should expect to see that clean-shaven mug again in the near future.
In today's City Paper, I've got a piece that's graduated from the arts section to the plush city front pages. It's a story about a handshake deal gone awry, and the artists who got screwed when the people who did the handshaking split. Click-click.
Another architectural head on the chopping block: this time, Paul Rudolph's. The NYT:
A plan to demolish a 1960 office tower by the influential architect Paul Rudolph threatens to pit a prominent developer backed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino against preservationists who see the building as a seminal example of midcentury Modernism.Richard Lacayo writes that the developers want to demolish the Rudolph to make room for a public plaza to be built under the Piano building, but catches Piano saying in the NYTthat the developers are pressuring him to widen the building's footprint. Now that's brutal: it's not just a half-cocked bait-and-switch to make way for a massive skyscraper, it's a massive skyscraper that the architect doesn't want to build.If the developer, Steve Belkin, prevails, Mr. Rudolph's 13-story structure will be supplanted by an 80-story skyscraper designed by one of today's biggest names, the Italian architect Renzo Piano.
[ . . . ]
Several groups, including Docomomo, an international organization devoted to preserving Modernist buildings, plan to submit statements at the hearing urging the commission to recommend that the city delay issuing the permit by 90 days.
Mayor Thomas Menino seems to have some crazy ideas about the city. His request for proposals for a design for a 1,000-foot downtown tower prompted exactly one entry. That's a humble response to a major architectural RFP in a world-class city—don't you think?—and the developer and the architect don't seem to see eye to eye on the project. Yet this is pretense for tearing down an existing architectural landmark. Does this design improve Boston's skyline?
Then there's Mayor Nazarbayev's plan to sell City Hall and move the city's business from downtown, where civic and business leaders and citizens congregate (that's what makes it downtown), to the waterfront—property that just absolutely could not be developed otherwise, I'm sure. No one wants anywhere near that Institute of Contemporary Art.
The mayor says the next City Hall building will be a piece on par with the Sydney Opera House. Maybe so, but . . . well, why?
Now, Boston City Hall is not a beloved building by any stretch of the imagination.* Walt Lockley says there aren't enough Red Sox fans in the city to swing it down with sledgehammers. (Agreed, Bandwagon Nation is for wusses.) For what it's worth, the AIA has called it the sixth-greatest building in American history. I don't know about that; and from what I recall City Hall Plaza really is as terrible as everyone says it is—an astonishing failure. But the city risks revising too much of its history, sweeping away the bad old days as if they never happened, by replacing City Hall. "New Boston" is built into City Hall, an historical monument, set in concrete. Energy problems be damned, I'll continue to admire it from a safe distance.
Gerhard M. Kallmann, Noel M. McKinnell, and Edward F. Knowles, City Hall. Boston: 1968. Click for interior.
Cities that bear witness to architectural contiguities—to their unfolding physical history—are fortunate. Take Chicago: It's not a great city because they host the world's last best cursed baseball team, or because they try to sell you on the concept of hot dogs with all the toppings on at once. It's the skyline, stupid—bejeweled by so many Modernist gems, as if the Chicago River has washed them ashore like so much magic silt. Magic silt, that solidified into architectural gems. You may never do anything so cheezy as take the Chicago architectural boat tour (thanks, C!), but having done so helps me to understood why, exactly, Chicagoans aren't happy about the Chicago Spire, much less the incoming Trump Tower. (Why? Why, you ask? Sarah B., Chicago correspondent, explains it all in comments.)
So Docomomo pegs it (in the NYT piece): a Rudolph would sit well next to a Piano. It tells us something about Boston's growth but also about architectural progress. Piano's organic, pluralistic style traces back naturally to Miesian rationalism. The city might well need a plaza, but the Rudolph is too high a price to pay.
* Two first reactions on seeing Boston's City Hall when it was unveiled in 1968.
Critic Ada Louise Huxtable: "What has been gained is a notable achievement in the creation and control of urban space, and in the uses of monumentality and humanity in the best pattern of great city building. Old and New Boston are joined through an act of urban design that relates directly to the quality of the city and its life."
Then-mayor John Collins: "What the hell is that?"
THE BANANA: Creationists call its pop-top design an "athiest's nightmare"; Darwinists who disprefer peeling from the stem side mourn the "ignoble, instinctive knowledge, innate and undistinguished by having been won through effort" of our foremonkeys. This world can truly make a soul feel as though he has no place.
Via Felix and Ben, respectively.
Germaine Greer for the Guardian: "Surrealism's women thought they were celebrating sexual emancipation. But were they just fulfilling men's erotic fantasies?"
God, it's just in the air, isn't it?
Holy crow is Belle on point.
Eugene Volokh takes me to task for ellipsizing in a post about "hook upping". He writes that I excluded some critical nuance in LSS's metaphor. Maybe so: I didn't want to get tied down in the mechanics of the thing, and gave it short shrift to dispatch it in short order. Look, here it is, simply put. It is wrong to analogize women's bodies to property to make any sort of point. It's unfeeling to write something so historically insensitive. It's nonsensical because women are not extricable from their bodies the way a real-estate agent is from a home—this denies women agency, desires, &c., the motivations that things do not have. It's also hurtful to men—who, in LSS's metaphor, lurk unseen as sinister prowlers and cat burglars (ahem). Here it is, also simply put: I don't want to rape women. I don't think of consent as the down payment I reluctantly make in exchange for sex. Finally, the entire metaphor is simply a rehash of "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free"—the operation between the source and target domains is congruent. Only, LSS's update is a little longer and more confused and registers a salacious hint of violence.
None of this clarifies "hook-ups"—it's only a more urgent plea for the chastity belt.
Reminder that tomorrow, I'll be speaking on a panel about visual art and the media. It's from 6:30 to 8 at Provisions Library at Connecticut and Q Ave. More info and discussion, voici.
Martin Kettle, writing up Tony Blair's speech at the Tate Modern:
The pity is that Blair's most important speech on the arts as prime minister should have been given a few weeks before he steps down, not in New Labour's salad days.Cry, the besmirchèd country. Seriously? I offer up my silent praise, frankly, that President Bush won't ever give such a speech. Not sure I could bear it.
Now, I'm no injured Culture War veteran. (For one thing, I was 10 in 1990.) I believe the government can do important work in the arts that the market doesn't do as well, such as preserving vernacular art forms, and that it's worth resisting the mechanism by which the far right smears any legitimate public function in the arts in order to confirm its constituency's preconceived notions about art, to satisfy the martyrdom complex&mdahs;to feed the Fox, if you will.
Of course, the NEA plays it safe and surely nothing kills a burgeoning interest in the arts quicker than an endless stream of Shakespeares in the park; and Republicans' refusal to admit program directors who are qualified, conservative, and gay doesn't help. Still, federal subsidy is A Good Thing for every state but New York and California—even if it's currently not at its historical best.
About that martyrdom thing: At the time other culture fronts were more pressing, and anyway her work wasn't publicly financed, but my first thought when I read in 2003 about Andrea Fraser's Untitled ? That a so-con would run wild with it. Isn't that an odd thing to think about? On a related note, Karen Finley is in the news and on the blogs.
Last night, roommate and gal-about-town Catherine A. and I were batting around the notion of pitching a gotcha! piece on scumbags scalping tickets to the Dismemberment Plan benefit show. Nothing doing, says one diligent craigslister: The Black Cat and Ticketmaster are distributing tix only via will call to buyers with ID and credit card in hand. Sure enough, every post on the page is an ISO plea.
But check it, y'all. Ticketmaster didn't cap the number of tickets per transaction, so ostensibly, some hieroglyph-fluent prospector might have snagged 50 tickets under the assumption that he could make his heartless fortune the old-fashioned way: ripping off math-rock nerds. Fans seem to believe that more than one speculator lost his membership card to the human race—despite the fact that no such villain has yet played his hand. I wonder what happens when a mob willing to go to great lengths to acquire tickets but hell bent on preserving a price well below the intersection of the supply and demand curves spots someone outside the club pocketing bonus tickets. Wouldn't they, you know, render apart the physical person of anyone who's holding?
The Black Cat should have charged $45 for these tickets. Maximize the charity benefit, weed out the scalper, and dissuade the casual listener who bought tickets on a lark and will sell them after asking D-Plan fans to jump through silly hoops to prove their fanhood.
I have a ticket and the luxury it affords. I assure, I can assess the question with academic remove. Other narrators, however, seem less reliable:
catherine: you HAVE a ticket, don't you?
kriston: yes
catherine: i'm going to dismember you
Friends, I give you: Julian Sanchez. He is a man of marvel, and his performance as Chairman on Iron Chef Blogger is absolutely not to be missed. As the resident liberal judges, Kate and I apologize that we failed to deliver a sympathetic verdict to Iron Chef Liberal. Believe you me, before the contest started, we demanded a slew of regulations to increase kitchen size while curbing kitchen efficiency. So close, so tasty, but in the end Iron Chef Libertarian was not to be denied (as we judges explain).
To peak into the lives, or at least the kitchens, of the Casa de Libertarios and the Florida Flophouse, Mac users will need to download Real Player 10 and fire up the application before loading the page in Firefox.
Cache-Cache and Lexie Mountain tonight. Beach House tomorrow night. There's a lot to love about you, District of mine, and I'm determined to make this thing between us work, but my attraction to Baltimore is really sometimes quite overwhelming.
Curator Chris Gilbert, in a 2006 letter of resignation to the Berkeley Art Museum, submitted after the museum challenged his use of "solidarity" in a label he sued for an exhibition of Venezuelan film ("a project in solidarity with the revolutionary process in contemporary Venezuela"):
The class interests represented by the museum, which are above all the interests of the bourgeoisie that funds it, have two (related) things to fear from a project like mine: (1) of course, revolutionary Venezuela is a symbolic threat to the US government and the capitalist class that benefits from that government's policies, just as Cuba is a symbolic threat, just as Nicaragua was, and just as is any country that tries to set its house in order in a way that is different from the ideas of Washington and London—which is primarily to say Washington and London's insistence that there is no alternative to capitalism.If you read through to the end of the sentence, congratulations: you have a high threshold for pain. I don't know why a museum would hire on a curator who put himself so far in front of the art work. (Gilbert threatened to throw the show over a description of it, after Management asked him to change "in solidarity with" to "concerning".) Nor did it make much sense for Gilbert to suffer the daily indignities and compromises of work in a museum—though I suppose he did, up to that point. After all, "until capitalism and imperialism are brought down, cultural institutions will go on being, in their primary role, lapdogs of a system that spreads misery and death to people everywhere on the planet"—and even a lapdog of misery and death has his breaking point (i.e., wall text). But I couldn't choke down Gilbert's resignation letter the first time it circulated, so I never really understood what was going on in the first place.
Now we know that there's another institution that Gilbert won't work for: the NCAA. The capitalist dogs behind the LeisureArts Curatorial Championship note Gilbert's objections to participating in "part of a deeply corrupt bourgeois representational context." Mind you, we're talking about brackets for art nerds. Four conferences of 16 seeded curators: probably not pinned up in every corner suite office in Manhattan. And while college ball certainly takes over my life in March, unfortunately, its imperial potential has yet to be fully realized.
Gilbert has distinguished himself as one of the planet's more intolerable pricks. Nevertheless, the occasion gives us a good chance to check up on him. And according to comments on one blog (rather appropriately named "anti-factory"), Gilbert and his partner have moved to Venezuela, where Gilbert . . . teaches English. Of course he does. Sometimes I just love the way the universe works. I hope, no, I bet he even uses this as a textbook.
Give your best to Spencer, who leaves on Saturday to embed in Baghdad for a month. He tells me that he should have fairly regular Internet access for some Iraq'd-esque escalation of his regular blog content—but I know I'll be worried when I don't see a daily update. He's taking my camera with him; I look forward to the pictures of all the painted schools. Go get that story, and come home safe.
