Modern Kicks

a borrower, if not a lender, be

I'm not sure how many people are really interested in this topic, but since it's nagging at me a bit, I'm going to follow up: all I can tell from the recent flutter of posts regarding museum exhibitions drawn from private collections is that people's feelings regarding them are conflicted, perhaps more than they admit.  Culturegrrl, for instance, laid out some facts that she sees in retrospect as warning signs for MFA and its jade exhibition (that one of the collectors involved had worked as a dealer, they had auctioned off other areas of their collection, and the jades themselves had been previously displayed at Christie's, for instance.)  Lee suggested that museums should display individual loans from private collections (unless they are headed to market soon) but avoid exhibitions from a single private lender unless the works are pledged to the museum.  If one feels that such a guideline is needed, this probably isn't a bad one, though it's somewhat arbitrary and might still rule out some perfectly worthy shows.  Even Lee acknowledges that serious people might not agree, as she today devotes a post to dissenting opinions, including a kind link here and a suggestion that small museums be exempted from any such rule.

Meanwhile, Richard Lacayo smiled at the MFA's predicament, but Tyler asked a good question in the comments: "A few weeks ago you pooh-poohed the National Gallery of Art's near-identical enterprise. Surely it's as bad for the NGA to do it as it is for the MFAB?"  It deserves a response, though Tyler's suggestion that exhibiting private collections might be illegal goes way over the top.  I'm not going to criticize the MFA's exhibit, which I didn't see, nor have I seen the National Gallery's snapshot show, though I have the catalog and have looked it over.  From that experience I can say that the NGA's display appears to be a serious one that has resulted in a significant piece of original scholarship, certainly one of the top goals one should have for any exhibition.  It's also the case that it only features 200 or so of the lender's photographs out of a total of (if I remember correctly) over 8,000.  That's far different from putting an entire collection on display and indicates the curatorial judgment and control exercised by the museum.

Remember as well that though the NGA won't get the entire collection, around half of the objects displayed have been donated to the museum.  That doesn't meet the standard Lee sets, and Tyler has pooh-poohed the fact in the past, but it's a significant gift.  Today Tyler seemed to step back from his criticism of SFMOMA, in fact, because instead of a forthcoming exhibition displaying a private collection it will instead include "works from SFMOMA's collection (fractional and promised gifts from the Logans) as well as works that are strictly in the Logan Collection (some are on loan from the Denver Art Museum)."  Aside from the fact that promised gifts are not actually part of a museum's collection (they are promised, nothing more, and promises can be undone), it seems we have here an exhibition that will show a mix of donated and privately owned work ultimately from a single collector--yet that doesn't seem to be a problem.  So perhaps the questions should be asked: what separated SFMOMA's exhibit from the NGA's?  Why withdraw criticism of one and not the other?

While Lee draws the pragmatic distinction between loans of individual objects and entire groups of them, furthermore, I don't believe I've ever seen Tyler do the same.  But most of the criticisms he makes of private collections in museums can be made of single loans, or small groups of them, just on a smaller scale.  The Martin Puryear exhibition in New York that's he's been writing so well about this week, for instance, has by my count loans from over a dozen different private collection, in some cases of multiple objects.  And let's not forget the biggest loan of all--that from the artist himself, who contributed over 10 works.  Many people won't mind if the artist, seen as a deserving creator, benefits, as opposed to icky collectors, but the principle of private gain from public display remains the same (Puryear's auction high is in the mid-700,000's somewhere; think he'll top one million after MoMA's done?).  That the artist and other lenders stand to potentially reap financial rewards does not, in my mind, mean that the exhibition should be considered ethically verboten.  Indeed, if it was, we might as well tell 90% of the museums of contemporary art in the country to go out of business--the overwhelming number of exhibitions they do are drawn from private loans, most prominently from artists and their galleries.

So rather than attack institutions for acting improperly when they do what's been common practice in the field for time immemorial, let's keep it in perspective.  A broad rule isn't the solution; rather, the key is how a particular loan or exhibition is handled.  Does display of the work offer something of value to the public?  Does having the object(s) available add to the institution's ability to pursue scholarship?  Is the manner of presentation done according to museum standards and in a way that does credit to the institution?  Can the museum feel with a high degree of certainty that the lender will respect the honor of a museum display and not rush the work to market?  These are the kinds of questions one should ask.  Ultimately, no matter what museums do, their actions will have some consequences in the broader world; better to realize that, take into account how some might try to use the institution for their own benefit, and do one's best to serve the public.  That will always be a balancing act.

jaded

While some of us were wondering when would be the best time to make a move on the last piece of pumpkin pie, Geoff Edgers was working:

The Chinese jades created little buzz in the art world when they were shown at the Museum of Fine Arts a few years ago. But a decision by the New York collectors who own the pieces to sell them through Christie's is now turning heads - and drawing unwanted attention - outside the MFA.

Alan and Simone Hartman, the latter of whom is on the MFA's board of overseers, auctioned off half of their collection of carved jade pieces last November, bringing in $15 million. The second half of the collection will be auctioned on Tuesday in Hong Kong, and the sale is expected to garner in excess of $10 million.

A large collection of objects not exhibited at any other museum, it seems, moved from display at the MFA to auction with haste that struck some as unseemly.  The museum finds itself embarrassed by collectors it has embraced and now is forced to put the best face on it possible.  Since I've written about appropriate and inappropriate ways to display private collections or works therefrom, I feel like I should offer a few comments.  Obviously this was a gamble that didn't quite pay off, to say the least.  I do agree with the MFA that there can be value in displaying work from private collections that can outweigh the negatives--the public does benefit from seeing, even if briefly, privately owned work that is of lasting significance.  And it may be that, as MFA director Malcolm Rogers argues in the article, the museum's exhibition had no real affect on the price the objects have fetched at auction, although this doesn't quite seem to jibe with his statement that they represented an "unfashionable" (and thus presumably cheaper) area of jade work.  Besides, if the show didn't affect the market price, can it really be that it didn't have an effect on the very decision to sell?  It can't be coincidence that Christie's approached the collectors shortly after the close of the exhibition.  One can't fault the auction house for trying to bring work to market, but it seems obvious that the MFA's display helped them sniff out the opportunity.

One recurring suggestion in the article from various museum professionals and ethics types is that the MFA should have secured an agreement from the lenders that they would not sell the collection in close proximity to the exhibition, whatever "close" means in this case.  I'm not sure what good that would have done.  The article indicates that the museum did have some sort of assurance that the owners weren't planning to sell, but, well, plans change, don't they?  I'm not sure what sort of force any agreement would have beyond the capacity to shame the lender, and $25 million can assuage a lot of guilty feelings.  So sure, the MFA would be smart to get some sort of agreement in place for future loans; but don't expect it to help.

The sale must burn the museum on a number of levels, not least of which is that it had made one of the two collectors into an overseer of the institution.  No one has an obligation to donate art or money to an institution against one's own desires or interests, but with the honor of any sort of position of governance or advice come certain obligations.  The MFA had a right to expect that their interests would be taken into account, even if the desired donation wasn't forthcoming; in this case, not only did the institution lose out, it was put in a difficult position and had to accept it.  I still think there's value in displaying privately owned work, but it's good to remember these cautionary tales: you hold your exhibition and you takes your chances.

it's (not) all in the game

(I started this post about a month ago, wrote about half of it, then abandoned it.  I'm always taken aback when people link back to stuff I wrote in the past, so apologies for doing the same here.  Anyway, I'm not sure how interesting the topic is but here goes.)

A little over a year ago, somewhere on these internets, I got into a very foolish argument about whether video games could be considered art.  Foolish because I didn't (and don't) really care either way, because arguments about what is and isn't art are a waste of time, and even if in some time and place they weren't a waste of time, blog comment threads aren't one of those places.  If video games as a genre or a few games in particular come to be considered art, it will have little to do with anything I--or, for that matter, most gaming enthusiasts--have to say about it, but rather what various art and artworld gatekeepers do.  To the extent that one is talking about moving a particular practice from one discourse into another, those who make the latter one, in various ways, will have to sign on.  One can easily imagine, for instance, a gallery displaying video games to be seen as not creating a Brillo Box kind of moment, when something considered not-art was perceived as having made the leap into art, but rather earning respectful attention (and yet slightly lower status) for offering examples of good design.

I mention all this because I'm delving back into Greg Cook's archives to make note of a couple of posts he did back in September on the topic of video games as art.  The earlier of the two items links to a Washington Post blogger who asked that paper's literary critic to evaluate a highly regarded game for its artistic qualities (verdict: interesting, but not there yet.)

My own opinion comes down to three points: one, too often people use words like "art" and "poetry" as superlatives, which means that if one denies that object x actually is a work of art or a poem, it sounds as if one's saying that's it no good.  But excellence comes in many forms, and if a great apple pie is not actually the work of art I enthusiastically claim it to be while eating it, I esteem it no less, nor do I want to live in a world without it.  Point number two arises from the first: skill, originality, good design, and other characteristics which we may think of as in various ways different aspects of art (though with none of them either necessary or sufficient to establish something as art), may be found in all lines of work.  We admire them there, but they don't necessarily make something art--even as artworks lacking many of these virtues stand with their status undisputed.

The third point is the largest one, and I have to emphasize that it's not offered as part of a definition of art, which as I wrote doesn't bear arguing about, but instead as a tendency in how we view and interact with art and games (of all kinds) respectively.  This tendency could be reversed, of course, but I don't think it would be all that easy, at least at the level involved here, and I definitely don't think it has been so far.  One of the articles that Greg cites gets right at the problem: "If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay — giving players challenges to work through and choices to make — in entirely new ways."  The failure to do so, as the writer of the article points out, has instead created a situation where the "art" part of many ambitious video games--narrative scenes relying done in a cinematic style--stands awkwardly next to the play element without truly being part of it.

When thinking about such topics, I always turn to my main man and his great book on the subject of, as he put it, "how far culture itself bears the character of play."  It's always surprising to watch Huizinga tease out the play element in law, war, poetry, and so on, and then find that he's muted on the topic when it comes to the visual arts.  The performing arts are another matter--dance, for Huizinga, stands as a perfect form of play, with music and other arts that involve a mastery of performance not far behind.  One could see how this sort of art as play might apply to video games, but that's not what advocates of seeing games as art mean, and would come closer to classifying them as a type of sport that involved a very limited range of motion.

While not denying some degree of relationship between visual art and play, Huizinga largely views it as existing in the spur toward creation provided by artistic competition, citing the contest for the commission to design the cathedral dome of Florence won by Brunelleschi and the (now discredited) story of five Amazons.  The artworks themselves don't tend to exhibit the some play element as in the performing arts, nor do we typically watch the process of artistic creation as we do a performance.  Huizinga's discussion of music examines Aristotle's views of it and focuses on how he believed it contributed to διαγωγή, diagoge, the cultivation of the mind as an end it itself.  While Huizinga doesn't make this argument, I think it could be said that our conception of art continues to be colored in very strong ways by the idea of it as diagogic--one could imagine tracing this through the influence of classical thought on Romantic aesthetics, the ideas of Kultur and Bildung, the spread of similar ideas throughout the nineteenth century and how they've continued in various ways since.  Obviously we're not in exactly the same intellectual position, and few today would accept the moralizing element frequently found in old-fashioned calls to cultivation--if nothing else, we're too aware that well-developed aesthetic sensibilities do not necessarily a decent person make.  And as I also said before, this is a tendency and not a definition; one can imagine games, like music for Aristotle, becoming a sort of performance that served a diagogic function (or the contemporary equivalent) and thereby overcame our attitudes toward viewing it as art (the article quoted above that Greg provided essentially is arguing for just that); but it cuts against the current grain, and I don't think we're headed that way.  Games, after all, are inherently agonistic, and that creates a basic conflict with our real if vestigial conception of art as diagoge.

Another line to take here would be to look at Huizinga's discussion of visual art as a form of work and see how it matched up with Hannah Arendt's discussion of it in her chapter on "The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art" in The Human Condition.  Any more b.s. theorizin' will have to wait until another day, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that both of them would have a hard time thinking of a game as a form of art if only because for them, Homo Ludens plays the former while Homo Faber makes the latter.

rainy day posting

Links:

- Gary Schwartz on the "Cotswolds Rembrandt," its attribution and significance: "For the first time in decades, a serious sum was paid for a Rembrandt that did not come with the imprimatur of the RRP. Indeed, it was paid for a painting whose attribution to Rembrandt went against the grain of RRP attributions."  Schwartz, whose opinion is not to be taken lightly, believes the painting is an authentic Rembrandt, and provides a detailed analysis and comparanda.  My opinion is to be taken lightly, but I agree with his assessment.  A must read.

- The New Yorker: "The New Museum may have left SoHo, but it is powerless to prevent SoHo from following it to the Bowery."

- David Cohen considers the late R.B. Kitaj.

- First Fridays in Boston: the thrill is gone, at least for the moment, and perhaps a reason why.

- British art and collecting, then and now.

- The making of Paper Monument.

- Now booking!  And it'll make the reception dinner so easy.

two brief notes

I've been away for the past several days and am just now starting to catch up.  So two quick notes:

First, this is exactly correct, and it's not just in the galleries.  Reading the late Kirk Varnedoe's Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, I was struck by how much that subtitle was meant not to function temporally, indicating the path of abstraction since 1950 give or take, but as a sign of lineage.  Without getting the book out I can't completely confirm this, but my recollection is that Varnedoe tied virtually every major figure discussed in his lectures back to Pollock, examining the later artists' work as a direct response to or evolution out of his breakthroughs.  Not always indefensibly so, of course, but it indicates the same dominant narrative that one finds at MoMA.

On a more mundane technical note, though one of interest to me, I'd gradually become aware that the books displayed in the sidebar at right courtesy of LibraryThing's widget seemed to draw only from a limited, and repetitive, subgroup of those I've cataloged.  So I looked into it, and it seems I hadn't configured the widget as I intended.  I've tweaked it, and it now seems to be drawing on a fuller group, though I'm not sure it's getting everything.  I've extended the number of books displayed, because looking at those little covers warms my heart.  I also tried the search feature for the first time, and pronounce it awesome.  Now only if I had more books . . .

art writing with goofus and gallant

Good Hickey:

[Art and money] exist in parallel universes of value at comparable levels of cultural generalization: Art does nothing to money but translate it.  Money does nothing to art but facilitate its dissemination and buy the occasional bowl of Wheaties for an artist or art dealer.  Thus, when you trade a piece of green paper with a picture on it, signed by a bureaucrat, for a piece of white paper with a picture on it, signed by an artist, you haven't bought anything, since neither piece of paper is worth anything.  You have translated your investment and your faith from one universe of value to another.

If you can't tell one universe from the other, that's your problem, but not an unusual one, since art and money are very much alike, in both embodiment and conception.  To put it simply: Art and money are cultural fictions with no intrinsic value.  They acquire exchange value through the fiduciary investment of complex constituencies--through over demonstrations of trust (or acts of faith, if you will) of the sort we all perform when we accept paper currency (or even more trustingly, a check) for goods or services.  This is the act of faith that I performed when I traded the Kenny Price for the John Baldessari--but with a difference, since even though I sold the Baldessari for more than I paid for the Kenny Price, I still want both of them back, because I prefer the universe of art to the universe of money.

Bad Hickey:

So this is my idea: The historical confluence of accident, insight, commerce, and iconography in postwar America created the nineteen sixties as America's transcendent Mediterranean moment--gave birth to the big, beautiful art market as an embodied discourse of democratic values that partook, in equal parts, of the Eucharist and the stock exchange.  Thus, the United States emerged from the sixties as the only nation in the history of the world with a freely-elected, fully-embodied iconography of promise--and we might have one yet, I suspect, if the sages of puritan New England had chosen that moment to do what they desperately wished to do: secede from a Union they saw sinking into the mire of idolatry and democracy--vices they might just tolerate in politics, but never in culture.  Never.

So what we got was a secular Reformation--a return of the Word at the expense of the flesh and a new jihad against idolaters, now guilty of "commodification."  The old quarrel between "grace" and "works" was reconstituted as a new quarrel between "theory" and "practice."  Once again, we drove the money-changers from the Temple of Art, which was not a temple, nor ever had been, not in America, where it had always been a secular discourse in the form of a market.  Even so, academic civil servants of the Word, horrified by the image and scandalized by looking, mounted an attack on them both on behalf of their own practice--"a critique of representation," which, at its heart, is a critique of representative government--bald advocacy for a new civil service of cultural police.

Two quotes from two different essays in Air Guitar, both relating to themes Hickey treats often, the anxieties over art and money, treated analytically in the first selection, and as part of a narrative in the second.  The difference?  One is witty and pragmatic, the other a slightly hysterical rant built on straw men.  Like all classic straw men, one can recognize elements of what he's writing about--we've all at one time or another read or heard someone complaining about commodification, we've all had that sinking feeling on picking up a new Artforum and seeing a feature essay by Douglas Crimp--but Hickey doesn't actually supply specifics.  To do so would only slow down his riffing on extended metaphors and force him to acknowledge that to the extent there's any basis to his account at all, it's a highly tendentious one.  Who are these sages of New England who wanted to secede?  Where, exactly, did anyone argue for anything of the kind, even metaphorically?  And note that it's not all metaphor--Hickey builds in an equivalence between developments in art and politics.  So somehow these secessionist New Englanders of the mind are responsible for the twin evils of conceptual art and Ronald Reagan, or something.  Sure, that's just how it happened.  On the other hand, perhaps I should be thankful; in yet another essay, he implies that the same crowd of killjoys he's criticizing here are the equivalent of Weimar Republic white supremacists.  It's a hallmark of Hickey's essays here that his addiction to straw man arguments means that he neither really hits his targets, blowing by them as he does, nor grapples sympathetically with them.  Instead we get flashy writing and self-satisfied reminisces. 

The latter of which supplies not the least tiresome aspect of the second quote: Hickey's ceaseless sixties nostalgia, his repetitive insistence that the period from roughly 1965 to 1975 was the best time ever and everything since then has been one long slow slide into crap.  I sympathize, of course--we all know that no greater cultural moment existed than when we were younger, slimmer, and had more hair--but I believe I've heard that tale a time or two before, and it does get old.  The good Hickey does show up regularly through the book--the first passage above comes as part of a far more compelling account of how change happens in the art world that the fantasies he spins in the second account--but often carrying too much baggage.

Anyway, I was going to end this post with an equation to express Dave Hickey, but it got a little away from me, and so a recipe seems more appropriate:  Take Robert Venturi and carefully remove the architecture, being sure to leave Las Vegas and Main Street intact.  Reduce the irony by two-thirds, add in a spoonful of Hunter S. Thompson's prose style and stir well.  Whip in Dick Cavett's name-dropping and heat through.  Serves an art world.

all there is?

Dave Hickey's been receiving some discussion due to the talk he gave last month at the Frieze Art Fair entitled "Schoolyard Art: Playing Fair Without the Referee" (text of it here, podcast here, Callen Bair wrote on it just after it happened, while Ed was on it  last week.)  I don't have much to say about it, and haven't ever had much to say about Hickey, as I must confess that until last, week, I had never knowingly read anything by him.  I had heard a great deal, of course, enough so that when I found myself in late October out in Williamstown to see the Clark's new Fragonard exhibition (about which more to come), I took the opportunity to pick up his well-known and, I gather, highly regarded collection of essays, Air Guitar from the museum's excellent bookstore.  I haven't finished it, so no final discussion from me, and I won't deny I've found some things of interest.  Hickey certainly writes well, if in a style that's a bit dated.  He has a taste for the audacious that, while not as charming as he seems to think it is, does lead him to some fresh takes, as in his essay on Liberace and his museum.  But man . . . the endless namedropping, the straw men, the conflation of culture and society, the tiresome populist posturing--are people impressed by all this, or just willing to overlook it?  Because while I'm not going to say the book's totally worthless, it's not really grabbing me.  I know the essays are a decade or more old now, but c'mon: embracing Las Vegas as a way to kid on the squares was tired even then.  I do give him some credit for acknowledging in the book's title essay that it's all basically wanking, but still: please try to be less of a wanker.

I admit that I might feel differently if I picked up something else by Hickey (I'd like to see his essays on beauty in The Invisible Dragon, for instance.)  And maybe I'll change my mind by the time I finish the book.  We shall see.  I should note that anyone who has a chance to get to the Clark in the coming week should do so, as they seem to have extended the run of the exhibition of their large recent gift of British art to November 11.  I was a little tired by the time I got to it--I've decided for the future that Williamstown is definitely not a day trip--but there's a number of wonderful things, including several Constable cloud studies and other sketches, plus some excellent watercolors by lesser known (at least by me) artists from the same time.  I have to say, however, that viewing the exhibition only edged me along further in the view that the only Turner I like to look at is early Turner.  All those lurid marshmallow smears of later years move me less and less.  Anyway, I should probably listen to the Hickey podcast; hearing his tone might give me a better sense of him . . . or not.

message

Fuck, yeah.

That is all.

a little self-indulgence

Because otherwise, what's a blog for?  Kriston Capps decided to answer Peter Plagens' questions himself, to add to the conversation, and kicked it out to others to do the same.  The idea to do so had already occurred to me, and I had chosen not to; but Kriston not only included two links here in his post as well as a flattering comment, so what the hell, I'm easily bought.  I'm putting the rest under the fold to not bother those who'd rather not be bothered.  And while I won't kick it out to specific others as Kriston does, I do join him in encouraging anyone else who'd like to take part.  Anyway, moving on,