Modern Kicks

selling out

For my part, I find it hard to get worked up over which section of a newspaper in which a particular story belongs.  To be sure, the story in question is indeed a business story; but the business in question happens to be the art business, and opinions can differ as to whether its likely audience is best served by placing it in one section or another.  Almost any sort of art news, after all, can be ruled out of the arts press along the same lines of reasoning: the wrangling over the Barnes is a legal story, not an art one, the coming and going of museum directors belongs in the employment pages, not the arts section, interviews with artists belong with the human interest stories.  An arts section consisting of nothing but reviews, pretty much the only items strictly about the art, would be a welcome development if it meant more of them, but I don't see anything wrong with bundling other arts-related coverage into a section with them to make them easy to find for those of us less likely to consult the financial pages, etc.

I'd focus rather on two complaints: one, we need more arts coverage, especially reviews, overall, and two, the problem with much of the writing about the art market isn't which section it appears in, it's that it stinks.  Unlike Tyler, I admire a wider range of writers on the market than Ed Winkleman (though he's very good, and a cultural icon to boot.)  The writers at Artworld Salon and Tyler's own guest blogger, the much-missed Todd Gibson, come to mind (Todd had a pithy piece of market analysis up during his time at MAN, in fact, that made the case for an art market correction well before the Times did, and it read far better, too.)  The problem with a lot of other writing on the art market lies in the fact that it comes from art critics and the like, who have not been known for their economic expertise.  Everyone has a good word for Jerry Saltz, but I can't think of a single one of his periodic discussions of the business of art that amounts to more than a bunch of rueful head shaking.  Not that I could do better, mind you, or that I do; but the lesson might be that it's not so much where the article appears as the expertise of the person writing it.

(On a final note, Tyler also points to this very enjoyable post by urban planner Elizabeth Currid over at Gawker.  Currid has this new book out, about which perhaps more later; for now let me just say, regarding her post, while I don't disagree at all with her criticisms of those who attack the artworks of others or the possible motivations for doing so, I don't think I've read such a bald statement of market determinism in quite a while.  It's one especially tenuous given that it relies on current, ever fluctuating, market values as an indicator not only of current status but implicitly as an argument for lasting value, monetary and otherwise.  More, I hope, later.  UPDATE: Also, Tyler may not care for the blog, but this item truly is funny.  You really always want to have a good relationship with your art handlers.)

The Big RED and Shiny Annual est arrivé!

Or it will arrivé soon, at least.  The details:

Packed with essays by Jane Hudson, James Nadeau, Marrikka Trotter, Meg Rotzel, Heidi Aishman, Matthew Gamber, Steve Aishman and Matthew Nash, our new book brings all of the great writing about art and culture you have come to expect from our website to your coffee table. And, it's a steal at only $12.

There are two ways you can get your hands on your very own copy:

The most enjoyable is to join us on September 7th, from 6-9, at Axiom Gallery in Jamaica Plain for our release party. Books will be on sale, and you can meet the writers, talk about the great art you've seen over the summer, and check out the Collision Collective exhibition.

-or-

You can order yours online by going to our books page. We're taking pre-orders now, and books will be available after our release party on the 7th.

12 bucks is cheap.  Even I can afford that.  And it should be good reading, with lots of stuff of interest to readers in Boston and beyond.  So go on and order a copy; I just did.  And then you can go check out the new issue.

quote of the day

It's late, but I think we have a winner: "her portrait represents a logistical triumph if not a technical one, a technical triumph if not an artistic one, and, without a doubt, an artistic triumph among life-size portraits of rhinos in profile."  Good to have Franklin back, as it was Todd, however briefly.

not dead yet

Coming Home to New York When It Was Said To Be Going Down the Drain

Descending over The Narrows and across
The great lady carrying her torch for whom,
We flew up river past the bankrupt town
Down to its last Almighty Dollar, turned
On a Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street, letting down
The wheels and flaps, a pretty tense moment--
Maybe the runways had been repossessed
And towed up Pelham Bay?  No, we got down,
And an hour later there we were again
Right in the middle of the biggest damn dream
Everybody ever dreamed at once, Manhattan,
Beautiful recipe for disaster, gone for broke
With half the money in the world in its pocket
And a hole in the pocket, the Port of Entry
And Zone of Interior for the lot of us,
The rejects the retreads the Four-Fs of every last
Country in Europe, our lot that grew up here
And sailed from here to knock the noggins off
Hitler and Mussolini and that mortal god
The Japs adored; and here it is, dead broke,
With lawyers from Albany to Washington
Screaming their parsimonious pieties
Against the wasteful ways of this Great Fact
That in the immortal words of Lazarus
Standing out there in the harbor, said
"Give me your garbage, send me whatever can walk,"
And made good every word, and, dying day by day,
Throwing the money away, making ruin renew.

--Howard Nemerov

"a massive quagmire"

I'm a little behind the times, but Sergio Muñoz-Sarmiento has posted the news that MASS MoCA has lost in its effort to keep materials it provided during the discovery process of the lawsuit its involved in with Christoph Büchel.  When I first heard of the museum's efforts, I had two thoughts: one, that it seemed to me that it would not be too difficult to keep confidential the documents or information that one could reasonably see that the museum had a compelling reason to keep confidential (the names of anonymous donors, for instance), and two, that whether or not the rest should be public would depend in part on whether MASS MoCA had a reasonable expectation of confidentiality for items produced under the circumstances.  It looks like the judge agreed with the first and thought the answer to the second was "not so much."

I'm glad that the institution was able to keep some limited information quiet, presuming it does apply to things like anonymous donor identities--while there may not be a legal reason to require that sort of information be under wraps, the promises museums make to donors under those circumstances are an important part of how gifts happen and thereby benefit the public.  On the other hand, one can easily understand why MASS MoCA wanted to keep everything locked up: the potential for embarrassment is huge.  When I last wrote on this topic, I fretted that the museum's losses might be just beginning; here's another one for the L column.  While Büchel hasn't said if he plans to follow through on the idea of making artwork(s) out of the materials, MASS MoCA should hope he doesn't decide to let his inner Hans Haacke out.  The filing by the artist's lawyers, link via Sergio, contains a few excerpts from the museum's emails that alternate between hilarious and damning.  "If it's reviewed as a Büchel, we're in deep shit," one staff member is quoted as writing of the exhibition at one point.  The museum's director comes across as almost blithely discussing the idea of opening the show as it stands, without the artist's consent, noting only, "Many ramifications of that, obviously."  Yes, yes, quite so.  We're just beginning to find out how many.

quantify Cornell (but don't understand him)

Geoff Edgers makes it to Salem to see the Cornell show and says, "Believe the hype."  I do, and have tentative plans to go see it this weekend.  If I don't make it, I'll have to make do with the interactive feature the museum put up and the catalog, because this is pretty much my last chance.  Geoff also has the attendance numbers on the Cornell and Hopper at the MFA--it's what you'd probably expect, but good to see nonetheless, and not bad at all in either instance.

Hm, on a related note, I was googling around on Cornell's name and came across this article, which contains as fey a little bit of faux Foucault as you'll ever see:

Even with the diaries to assist us, we shouldn't think we understand Cornell. To understand is to pathologize. Let's not place a value, a prescriptive term on him--because it will necessarily be the brand of the nostalgic eccentric. Let's consider him, instead, a harbinger, a wily assembler whose radicalism we haven't caught up with yet, even if he now seems domesticated, a mini-titan of a bygone moment.

Leave aside the fact that the author immediately turns to placing values and prescriptive terms on Cornell after telling us not to do so.  "To understand is to pathologize"?  That is as silly a piece of pseudo-profundity as I've seen put forward in some time, one that in its manifest lack of seriousness calls to mind Lionel Trilling's remark that "it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence."  No surprise that the article first appeared in Artforum.

follow-up: Theresa Duncan

Kate Coe, author of the LA Weekly article linked to below, sent an email disavowing my characterization of it.  In her own words (quoted with permission):

It's a bit harsh to say Theresa Duncan lied--she did write some wonderful things that could have been or should have been true. I think she knew that fiddling around with her resume and age--rude facts--would bite her in the butt. But she did admire the poetic and the theatrical, and I think, at least at first, she wrote about the wonders in the world, not the horrors.

I didn't hear much about the stalking and the conspiracies from her, and until I started on the story, I really didn't know how much was true and how much was embellished. Quite a bit was embellished, but she was a very good writer. Her blog inspired many people.

It's true that while Kate's article quotes people describing Duncan as a liar, she herself doesn't make the same characterization.  I apologize for the imprecision.  I also appreciate that to baldly state that someone, especially a person who in retrospect seems to have suffered from some sort of mental duress, is a liar can come across as too harsh.  Some of the untrue statements that Coe documents, for that matter, are small stuff--shaving a few years off of one's age, for instance.  The others do cross over into professional misrepresentations, but in the end, whatever falsehoods Duncan uttered for whatever reason, in the bigger picture little damage was done to anyone aside from herself, her partner, and those close to them.  It's not really for me to comment any further.

dial it down, please

I haven't paid much attention to the suicides of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, but the links that Geoff Edgers has been posting have sucked me in.  My only knowledge of the couple prior to their had come from her website, which I had come across at some point in the past, though I didn't read it regularly.  Obviously their deaths must be deeply upsetting to their friends, family, and admirers, and one can only sympathize with them.  But without speaking ill of the dead, what are we to make of some of the media coverage?  Consider these two quotes from the LA Times:

"'They were both extremely bright and knowledgeable. You could talk to them about the history of electricity or politics. Both were really scholarly in a pop sense.'"

And

Duncan is most frequently identified with her blog the Wit of the Staircase (from the French phrase "esprit d'escalier" -- the perfect witty response one thinks up after the conversation is over), which showcased her far-ranging cultural obsessions, including supermodel Kate Moss and discontinued perfumes.

Is it too much to suggest that the writer of the article is perhaps a bit too impressed with an interest in models and perfume--that these are not quite the markers of a wide cultural reach that he thinks?  Or that the friend offering praise in the first quote doesn't have quite the proper grasp of the word "scholarly"?  It would be wrong to hold Duncan and Blake responsible for how they've been described, but perhaps a little sense of proportion is in order.

UPDATE: Huh.  I don't know how accurate it is, but Kate Coe, who describes herself as a friend of Duncan, wants everyone to dial it down even further: she says that Duncan lied a lot about her life (via.)

2ND UPDATE: Kate Coe disagrees with my description of her article and how it reflects on Duncan.  I apologize for the imprecision.