Museum Minutes

• Thomas Krens is out at the Gugg, exiled to the desert of Abu Dhabi, where he'll oversee the completion of the museum's latest brand extension. Longtime Krens critic Jerry Saltz writes that "Over the last two decades Krens changed museum culture in the West. He made museums corporate and ran the Guggenheim like a business – even if that business often careened like an out-of-control savings and loan." Linda Yablonsky writes for Bloomberg that "the museum is now in a position to shake off its reputation as a schizoid institution that can be filled with art by Kandinsky one minute and the next pretend to be an Armani showroom or a nightclub in Brazil." Carol Vogel notes that "the move comes three years after Mr. Krens triumphed in a him-or-me showdown with the foundation’s biggest benefactor, the Cleveland philanthropist Peter B. Lewis." Richard Lacayo: "Krens, who had an M.B.A. from Yale ... pushed the Guggenheim into the world of brand name spinoffs, talking all the while about 'brand awareness.' Except for the huge success of the Guggenheim Bilbao, an indisputable achievement and one of the greatest buildings in the world, most of them didn't spin off the way he hoped. Las Vegas — tanked. Mexico — didn't happen. Brazil — ditto." We learn from Paul Lieberman in the L.A. Times that Krens, age 61, is 6' 5" and rides a motorcycle.

• Also out is Dia's Jeffrey Weiss. With the exclusive scoop is MAN, who notes that "three New York museums/foundations are seeking leaders: Dia, the Guggenheim, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

• Good news for the Tate and the National Gallery. Gallerist Anthony d'Offay is donating his collection for the discounted price of £28m, the price he originally paid for the art. The mother lode of 725 works by 25 artists will plug up what's said to be the museums' major holes in contemporary art with art by notables like Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus, Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joseph Beuys, Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha. The Guardian's Jonathan Jones wonders, is the MoMA jealous? Lee Rosenbaum compares d'Offay's approach to that of Eli Broad, finding the former preferable for a number of reasons, including that "private stewardship is often not as professionally responsible as public stewardship."

• Christopher Knight says let's combine the L.A. MOCA and the BCAM like chocolate and peanut butter. The MOCA's chock full of art, and the BCAM has plenty of room. Carol Vogel has more.
  

• The 74th Whitney Biennial opens this week with art overflow in the Armory on 67th Street. Lots of ephemeral, site-specific and "choose your own adventure" performative works this go-round, including a dance marathon, therapy sessions, a bar and a zoo. Thirty-seven artists are represented, including Spike Lee. More from Carol Vogel. New York Magazine's Carly Berwick hails it the "Facebook Biennial" -- a clannish group whose "connections and conversations have become the art itself" in an update on 90s relational aesthetics. According to co-curator Henriette Huldisch, this crop of creatives favor "smaller, more localized gestures, a modesty of material in approach and scale." If the '06 Biennial "felt unremittingly dark," this one "has a wryly self-aware neo-hippie outlook." The magazine offers a guide to the Armory installations. The Whitney goes Web 2.0 with a Flickr pool.
  

• More on the still-bitter feelings following last year's Christopher Büchel/MassMOCA imbroglio by Randy Kennedy in the New York Times. The irony is that the mess has been a financial boon for both museum and artist.

• The Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts is showing an exhibit called "Cover Me" that calls on the media to up their coverage of Western Mass artists. The Boston Globe answers their challenge.
  

• The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) has responded to a story in the Daily News calling work in their Dread Scott retrospective "cop-bashing" on the grounds of free speech. Some of the art deals with police brutality. Not mentioned by the Daily News are other works dealing with Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and this country's prison problem.

• An expanded Brooklyn Children's Museum is set to reopen in May. Located in Crown Heights, the Times' Robin Pogrebin says the building resembles "a yellow submarine surfacing from a slate-gray sea."

• The Guardian's Andrew Dickson and Jonathan Jones ponder blockbuster fatigue with the National Gallery's decision to substitute splash for more scholarly shows.

• The British Museum and the British armed forces are teaming up to salvage cultural artifacts at major archaeological sites in Iraq. The hope is to " leave a positive 'legacy' after the withdrawal of British troops."
  

• The renovation of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, home to some of the greatest works by Rembrandt and other Dutch masters, has been delayed again and is not likely to be completed before 2013.

• Finally, Greg Allen tells us about the secret museum on the Moon, installed during the 1969 Apollo 12 mission. Work by Warhol (a penis drawing), Rauschenberg, Oldenburg and others were purposely and semi-secretly left behind on the lunar surface. NASA denies.

Review Roundup

• This week's big opening is Gustave Courbet at the Met (Feb. 27 – May 18, 2008). Roberta Smith calls it a "majestic installation" of "sublime strangeness," focusing on an artist who "virtually wrote the definition of the modern artist as a bohemian, narcissistic loner and political radical who shunned the academy." While he was known as a Realist, Smith writes that Courbet was a kind of proto-postmodernist in that his paintings used irony and "inborn dissonance," even addressing the subject of painting itself. She nails it, describing his "The Desperate Man" (1844-45) as "Johnny Depp’s pirate rendered by Caravaggio." A review by Ariella Budick in Newsday notes that the artist used "ugliness as a creative strategy." The New York Sun's Kate Taylor looks at how he used photography, such as a guide for his anatomic-pornographic "L'Origine du Monde" (1866). Dan Bischoff in the Newark Star Ledger finds the paintings "a bit too rubbery for modern tastes," and discusses the artist's antagonistic relationship to Napoleon III, touching on his role in the Paris Commune.

• Over at the Whitney, Ken Johnson checks out the new Charles Demuth show “Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster” (Feb. 23 - April 27, 2008). Johnson speculates that Demuth switched from watercolors to oils because that latter was more "serious," but also more hetero. Demuth was gay, and he may have felt his feminine watercolors made him an outsider. Johnson, who loves the watercolors, points out the phallic structures (chimneys and towers) in the oils, which are a "kind of hymn to the United States."
  

• Charlie Finch plays pit bull with the the MoMA design show "Design and the Elastic Mind." Calling the show "nerdvana," he writes that it "resembles a trade show for security firms and would-be secret agents at your local convention center."
  

• Writing in the Voice, Leslie Camhi calls the P.S. 1 "WACK!" show "unwieldy, at times didactic, yet wildly inspiring." She notes that "one of feminism's most profound legacies is the erosion of the boundaries between art and life, which remains with us today in the confessional art of Tracey Emin or Sophie Calle, or even the performances of Matthew Barney." Also looking at "WACK!" is John Perreault, who opines that "much of the art by women in this ancient period [60s/70s] was superior to dead-end formalist painting and many of the largely male prerogatives of the time." Yet: "After so many successful feminist actions by feminist pioneers, the slippage has been appalling. Art history may be cruel, but commerce-driven art is merciless."

• Lee Rosenbaum says of Gugg's Cai Guo-Qiang show, "never have the [museum's] ramps and rotunda been put to such compelling use." Although she wonders whether Frank Lloyd Wright's building will hold all of those suspended automobiles given the problems with Fallingwater.

• Holland Cotter pays a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for their newly opened Frida Kahlo (Feb. 20 - May 18, 2008) show. "Modest and compact," he writes that the show demonstrates Kahlo's ability to "[enter] your system, fast, with a jolt, an effect as unnerving, and even repellent, as it is pleasurable." Regina Medina notes in the Philadelphia Daily News that one of the show's curators, Hayden Herrera, wrote the 1983 biography of the Mexican artist that was the basis for the 2002 movie "Frida." Included in the show are four works that have never been seen in the U.S.
  

• In Washington, D.C, the National Portrait Gallery is showing "Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture" (Feb. 8 - Oct. 26, 2008). NPR notes that the show features photos and portraits of hip hop performers, including Kehinde Wiley's portrait of LL Cool J.

• Nancy Durrant in London Times reviews "The Listening Post" by artist Ben Rubin at the city's Science Museum, which now owns the piece. The high-tech multimedia installation, once showed at the Whitney, allows the viewer to eavesdrop on Internet chat rooms. She writes that it is the "first work of art to communicate effectively the scope and nebulous nature of the Internet."

• Matti Friedman at the AP writes up the "Looking for Owners" show at the Israel Museum, featuring paintings, including by Matisse, Monet and Seurat, stolen by the Nazis. Visitors who recognize a painting as their own and can prove it can file a claim. It's estimated that as many as 600,000 art works from this period have never been returned to their pre=WWII owners. One of a few in the show that wasn't looted is Courbet's "The Bathers" (1858), purchased from a Parisian dealer by von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister.
  

Feminist Art Is Contemporary Art

"Abakan Red" (1969) by Magdalena Abakanowicz at P.S. 1

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
P.S. 1
Feb. 17 - May 12, 2008

Beth Campbell "Following Room"
Whitney
Dec. 7, 2007 - Feb. 27, 2008

We stopped by P.S. 1 for their must-see feminist show. Unlike last year's "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum, which focused on contemporary feminist art, "WACK!," which first showed at the L.A. MOCA, looks at the fertile period of the late 60s and 70s during which women artists asserted themselves, combining the personal and the political using myriad creative strategies to redefine themselves and reinvent the practice of art.

With 120 artists, including many from outside the U.S., this sprawling and celebratory show gives a wealth of evidence that women and feminist art are central to the the story of contemporary art, with subjects like the body and identity and strategies like media critique, autobiography, video and performance all figuring prominently.

The furthest thing from the equivalent of a nostalgic tie-die and bell bottoms time capsule, this work feels more alive and relevant than most contemporary art today.

In an autobiographical body-focused mode, Adrian Piper's "Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece" (1970). Equally bold and vulnerable, the 22-year-old artist obsessively details her daily health routine, including her vegetarian diet, yoga poses and bowel movements. Each diary entry is accompanied by a black and white self-portrait, sometimes topless. Similar work by the artist is currently showing at the MoMA's "Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now."

Also employing successive self-portraits are Friedl Kubelka, whose "Das erste Jahresportrait" (1972-73) arranges photos on a calendar, and Eleanor Antin, whose "Carving: A Traditional Sculpture" (1972) depicts the transformation of the artist's body during a diet.

Using video and performance are Yoko Ono, whose brilliant and before-its-time "Cut Piece" (1965) famously shows the artist sitting as members of her audience snip away pieces of her clothing. With a room of her own, Anna Mendieta's spooky and symbolic videos depict her preoccupation with death, blood and the body. A more life-affirmative take on blood is Barbara Hammer's video "Menses" (1974).

Particularly enjoyable are the more interactive installations. In "Feed Me" by Barbara T. Smith, you are invited to sit on an oriental carpet with pillows and listen on headphones as the artist recounts a 1973 performance during which she encamped overnight in the women's bathroom of Tom Marioni's Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, inviting men and women to join her on the rug (there's also fruit, massage oil and marijuana). The artist recalls that "people thought I was here to make love to every man like a power trip..." In fact, she does admit to having sex with one or more visitors, keeping true to the liberated freewheeling spirit of the times.

When your eyeballs are tired out, check out "Soft Gallery" on the second floor. Originally created by Marta Minujin and Richard Squires (a man!) in 1974, this giant womb room made of mattresses bound by rope is designed for jumping around in. So kick off your shoes and bounce off the walls.

In media-critique mode is Martha Rosler, whose "Body Beautiful" series of collage pieces (1966-72) reassembles mainstream media images of women. Her "Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain: Cargo Cult" splices fashion magazine images of women and shipping containers, evoking the commoditification of women as part of the beauty industry.

Since feminism is about gender difference it's natural that images of nekkid laddies are everywhere. But this isn't meant to titillate. An extreme example is the artist Cosey Fanni Tutti, whose one-room installation has a warning in the entryway. The work tells the story of a 1976 exhibition at the London ICA called "Prostitution" in which Tutti sold hard-core pornographic images of herself that she modeled for X-rated magazines (so much more crotch hair back then). We see these images alongside correspondence with the porno rags and press clips from the exhibition's ensuing tabloid firestorm.

Addressing prostitution in a less controversial way is Suzanne Lacy. Her "Prostitution Notes" of 1975 maps a project to learn about the lives of prostitutes.

Another feminist strategy is elevating so-called women's work to high art. A great example is Faith Wilding's "Crocheted Environment" (1972), a cave-like space with spidery stalactite-like formations made of yarn.

There is also some art by women that isn't obviously feminist. This includes a few small drawings by Eva Hesse, painted photos by Helena Almeida and a gorgeous colorful canvas ("Stark Strokes Hope," 1971) by Joan Snyder.

Overall there isn't much in the way of exposition. P.S. 1 lets the the art speak for itself. I like this. Wall text is for lazy people.

The museum sets aside part of the 3rd floor for a performance and lecture space. The day we were there, a group of young women called the Pink Bloque were doing a slide show. It was pretty unrehearsed, and M. and I grew weary quickly. Instead, we paid a visit to our favorite room, James Turrell's "Meeting" and froze our asses off waiting for the sun to go down.

A few days prior, I stopped by the Whitney for a last-chance visit to see Beth Campbell's "Following Room." Arranged in the first-floor space, the installation featured 12 exact copies of a room arranged so that when you look at it you think you're looking at a series of reflections -- an "infinity mirror." Experiencing this space gives you a mega dose of cognitive dissonance, like a 3-D version of op-art. Trompe your mind. You end up looking for difference between the rooms. Lamp, shelf, framed photos, chair, red pillow, open book ("The Other Side of Me"), eyeglasses, bunched sock and cat's toy on carpeted rug. All exactly the same. What does it mean? Multiple realities? In any case, it's not pleasant, nor is it meant to be. Curiously, the artist also does autobiographical flowcharts that project multiple futures showing how life takes cruel, but sometimes happy turns. While it wasn't on display, Campbell created one of these diagrams for the Whitney show and it can be seen in the exhibit's accompanying brochure. Entitled "My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances (10/1/07)," the flowchart begins "I've been invited to do a project at the Whitney..." I wish the original had been on display. I prefer this warmer, vulnerable autobiographical work to her clinical and cold installation. In a way it's more in the spirit of "WACK."

Museum Minutes

• On the repatriation front, news this week that the New Acropolis Museum in Athens will open in September -- with space reserved for the Elgin marbles, most of which are tucked away in the British Museum in London. The Greek museum is designed by Bernard Tschumi, who did those fugly Blue condos on the Lower East Side. Richard Lacayo has a long piece in Time Magazine on repatriation, taking a "farewell tour" of objects like the Euphronios krater that are leaving the U.S. for their native lands. The krater was bought by the Met in 1972 for $1 million. It's now on display in Rome in a show called "Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces" (nostoi means homecomings). Lacayo quotes Philippe de Montebello who wonders if Italy needs a dose of its own medicine, returning bronze horses of San Marco in Venice that were looted from Constantinople in 1204. For that matter, Montebello asks "at what point is Turkey going to return the Alexander Sarcophagus to Lebanon? ... In the 19th century, it was brought from there when Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire. Where do you stop?" On the other side of the issue is Dimitrios Pandermalis, president of the organization behind the Acropolis Museum, who says the idea of museums like the Met serving as a "universal museum" for all is "a translation of the imperialism of the 19th century to the globalization of the 20th century."
  

• Two op-eds in the New York Times look at two other fronts in the debate over rightful ownership. Allan Gerson, an official in the State and Justice Department, takes issue with Britain for passing special legislation the gives immunity to Russia for Impressionist and Modern paintings now on display at the Royal Academy of Arts. The objects it seems were liberated from their original owners by the Soviets. According to Gerson, "the sad truth is that the British government and the Royal Academy are now complicit in the theft of private property." Gershon likes the model of a current French-Israeli exhibit up in Jerusalem titled "Looking for Owners: Custody, Research and Restitution of Art Stolen in France During World War II." And taking aim at Yale is Eliane Karp-Toledo, the former first lady of Peru, who says a recent agreement regarding the return of 350 artifacts from Machu Picchu is bunk: "[the university] continues to deny Peru the right to its cultural patrimony, something Peru has demanded since 1920. ... The agreement reflects a colonial way of thinking not expected from a modern academic institution."
  

• The Museum of the City of New York is closing the doors on its Rockefeller rooms, in the museums collection for 70 years, to make way for an ongoing modernization. The bedroom and dressing room may go the Met, which is redoing its American period rooms.
  

• Lee Rosenbaum reports that the Brooklyn Museum has not yet decided if it will include a Louis Vuitton shop as part of the Takashi Murakami show, opening April 5. The controversial shop was part of the exhibit as displayed at the L.A. MOCA.

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- the folks behind the Oscars -- want to open a museum to be "the public’s main portal to the film world."

• The MoMA gives special "touch tours" to let blind and partially sighted visitors, such as a recent visit by a group of young Tibetans, get a feel for the art.
  

• Half of the recently stolen stuff from Switzerland -- including the Monet and Van Gogh -- has been recovered from a parked car.
  

• The Brits are in a bunch about their government's decision to mandate that all children get at least five hours of high culture a week. One result of this cultural food pyramid will be an uptick in museum visits by school groups. Railing against kid-friendly interactive exhibits, Guardian's Nicholas Blincoe says he prefers his museums "Victorian, cranky and encyclopedic." D.J. Taylor notes in the Independent that, ironically, the mandate follows a round of arts cuts.
  

• What the Art Institute decides to stuff in its new modern wing (designed by Renzo Piano, natch) will move markets. According to Portfolio, look for upticks in prices for Charles Ray, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, not in Latin American contemporary art.

• The Cleveland Museum of Art is nearing the end of a three-year redo. The big reveal is set for the end of June. Up now is a visiting show of arms and armor from Imperial Austria.

• Remember Christopher Buchel, the artist whose over-budget installation was killed by the Mass MoCA last year? Now, Buchel's rep, Michele Maccarone (who I recently noted stars in a charming video now up at the ICA Boston), is urging a group of artists in a project called the LA25 -- including John Baldessari, Kris Kuramitsu, Weston Naef and Cathy Opie -- to quit since it's bankrolled by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, the law firm of, you guessed it, Mass MoCA. Maccarone 's already send another letter telling artists and collectors not to deal with the museum. Given that it's maybe the biggest U.S. contemporary art museum, doesn't this seem a bit like tilting at windmills?
  

Review Roundup

• Off to a bang is the Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective at the Guggenheim (Feb. 22 - May 28). The artist, whose name is pronounced "sigh gwo chee-yang," is profiled at length in the New York Times Magazine. The story looks at "the duality of Cai’s nature," including his complex attitudes towards his native China; while his work has been critical of the government there, he is overseeing the opening ceremonies for this summer's Beijing Olympics. Cathleen McGuigan at Newsweek points out that "it might seem easy to pigeonhole Cai as a Chinese artist. But he's really an avatar of cultural globalization." Peter Schjeldahl writes that "a whiff of eccentric passion complicates the character of his art, which is strenuously theatrical and weirdly political (with ambiguous stands on Mao Zedong and terrorism)." Roberta Smith echoes the global theme, writing that the show presents, "a United Nations’ worth of cultural sources and artistic strategies into crowd-pleasing, easily deciphered if not terribly original art."

• Over at the Met, Smith deems the Jasper Johns monochromatic "Gray" show (Feb. 5 - May 4) "moody, opulent and eloquent"; husband Jerry Saltz finds it "ravishing... [but] too big."

• Also at the Met was Holland Cotter, who contemplates the dialectics of Classicism and Romanticism while enjoying Nicolas Poussin's painted "Aracdian Visions" (Feb. 12 - May 11), calling it "the quietest, most intimate-feeling major exhibition in town. ...also one of the moodiest."

• This week Mr. Cotter ogles another Old Master -- Parmigianino’s "Antea," a single-painting show at the Frick (Jan. 29 - April 27), finding the work to be "the embodiment of an ideal, in this case an ideal of desirability, in which the sensual and the spiritual merge."

• Ken Johnson reviews "WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution" at P.S. 1 (Feb. 17 - May 12), calling it a "big, messy, fascinating scrapbook of a show." Mira Schor in the Brooklyn Rail is troubled that "feminism continues to be perceived as a controversial and dangerous identification."

• Nicolai Ouroussoff likes "Design and the Elastic Mind" at the MoMA (Feb. 24 - May 12), writing that "the exhibition is packed with individual works of sublime beauty."

• Also at the MoMA was Daniel Kunitz, who thinks the Jan De Cock Crows installation (Jan. 23 - April 14) is "over-thought and under-felt."

• Edward Rothstein reviews two museums -- Abraham Lincoln's Cottage at the Soldier's Home in Washington, D.C. ("idiosyncratic and intriguing") and Chicago's Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum (he loves the original 1913 Atwood Sphere and finds the newer high-tech displays "uninspired and unfocused.")

• Finally, Christopher Knight discovers something to love at the LACMA -- monumental sculptures by Tony Smith and Richard Serra -- a pairing he describes as "perfection."
  

Play (ICA Boston)

"The World as a Stage" at the ICA, Boston

The World as a Stage
ICA Boston
Feb. 1 - April 27, 2008

We were up in Boston this past week and stopped in to see the ICA and its snazzy new building. Barely a year old, this example of destination architecture is a dramatically cantilevered over Boston Bay in the city's gentrifying Seaport District. The building is designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the brains behind the ongoing redo of Lincoln Center and the High Line, and the subject of a rare architectural retrospective at the Whitney in 2003. Their designs are cerebral, but also playful. Case in point is their "Blur Building," a conceptual structure made of mist -- done for the Swiss Expo in 2002.

It's tempting to compare the ICA to that other recently opened contemporary art mecca -- the New Museum, which also happens to resemble a stack of boxes. But the differences are telling. The ICA's more than twice as old as the New Museum and has more than three times the gallery space. It's not difficult to presume that the ICA also has deeper pockets and a bigger permanent collection.

But at half the size of P.S. 1, the ICA's not huge either. It's possible to see everything in about two hours. Nearly all of the art's on the fourth floor, with the other levels housing a theater and multimedia studio, as well as the typical store and cafe.

Up now is "World as a Stage," a show organized by the Tate Modern with work by 16 artists dealing with performance, theater and other issues of the spectator and spectacle. A few highlights: "Self-portrait as a businessman" (2002-2004) by Pawel Althamer -- a pile of clothes, briefcase and cell phone that are the remains of a performance in which the artist lived as a businessman for several days before fully disrobing in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz; "Falha" (2003) by Brazilian artist Renata Lucas -- a series of hinged plywood sheets that the viewer can rearrange; and, best of all, "Little Frank and His Carp" (2001) by the awesome Andrea Fraser -- a video of the artist as she takes instructions from the pretentious and over-wrought audio guide in the Guggenheim Bilbao, culminating with her simulating sex with the "sensuous" curves of the Gehry architecture.

I enjoyed playfulness of this show, and found myself responding to a few humorous pieces in a second exhibit -- "Accumulations" (July 25, 2007 - July 6, 2008), a show highlighting some of the museum's recent acquisitions. The funny stuff included "Karaoke Wrong Number" by Rachael Perry Welty (2001-2004) -- a video of the artist lip-synching to answering machine messages of strangers; and two videos by German artist Christian Jankowski. In "The Hunt" (1992/1997), he shops for food in a supermarket with a bow and arrow. And in "Point of Sale," a three-screen video shows gallerist Michelle Maccarone and her retail neighbor, an electronics exporter named George Kunst, as they get small business advice from a consultant -- interesting material with the amusing twist that Kunst's lines are spoken by Maccarone and vice versa.

A smaller show of sculpture and prints by Louise Bourgeois -- "Bourgeois in Boston" (March 28, 2007 and March 2, 2008) -- was uninspired. Tellingly, the bulk of the art was on loan from one of the museum's trustees, also a major donor.

All together, I thought the ICA was refreshing and fun. I look forward to visiting again.

Museum Minutes

• Roberta Smith reviews the BCAM's inaugural show, noting the "embarrassing" fact that 21 of the 30 artists currently on display are New Yorkers "at a point when Los Angeles has one of the liveliest art scenes on the planet." She also narrates a slide show. Looking at the architecture, the Times finds the museum's Renzo Piano-designed building lacking in LA pizazz. Coagula's Mat Gleason notes that the museum's version of contemporary art ends in the 1980s. Charlie Finch wonders, "How many spineless curatorial suck-ups have hitched ride after ride on Eli Broad's private jet for all-expenses-paid trips to the pleasure spots of the world?" David Byrne and girlfriend Cindy Sherman were at the museum's opening; Byrne blogs "...Lionel Ritchie, Nicole’s 'father,' takes the stage and sings about being easy like Sunday morning. I head to the restrooms..." C-MONSTER has photos.

• The MAN blog, which sounded the alarm bells about the Spiral Jetty, asks if the Trans-Texas Corridor, a massive highway project, threatens Marfa, Texas, the Chianti Foundation museum and all things Judd.

• The big news this week was a $163 million art theft in Zurich. Snatched from the E. G. Bührle Collection were works by Monet, Cézanne, Degas and Van Gogh. The robbery may be linked to a heist -- also in Switzerland -- of two Picassos a week earlier. Of all the stolen masterpieces, maybe the most valuable is the Cézanne painting, "Boy in the Red Waistcoat." The now-defunct Figure Painting blog found that there are three other versions of the painting, safely ensconced in the collections of the Barnes Foundation, MoMA and the National Gallery. The NYTimes looks a famous art heists, including worst-ever, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in 1990. The Independent tells us that art theft is big business: "After drugs and weapons, it is the third most lucrative international criminal operation..."

• Indie-rock-elders Sonic Youth, fresh off playing a Marc Jacobs runway show, are putting together a traveling exhibit of works by artists they know, some of whom --like Raymond Pettibone, Gerhard Richter and Richard Prince -- have been featured in the band's album art. NY Mag's Vulture blog reports that the band's hoping the Whitney will host the exhibit in New York. This might work as the museum's no stranger to indie rock. After all, Dan Deacon recently did a show there.

• CultureGrrl reports that a judge has blocked a proposed sale by Fisk Museum of its Stieglitz Collection to Alice Walton for $30 million. The Nashville-based Fisk University was hoping the Wal-Mart dollars would prop up its sagging fortunes. But a judge ruled that Georgia O'Keeffe gave the collection of 101 painting and photos, stipulating that they not be sold off. The collection may now go to the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

• C-MONSTER asks of the Met's first-ever piece of African contemporary art, a tapestry by Ghanaian-born El Anatsui, why is it not being shown with the rest of the museum's contemporary art? "Can someone please tell me why we can’t seem to move beyond this geographic provincialism?" Time Magazine's Richard Lacayo gives some more background on the artist.

• The Met is one of a number of museums with looted artifacts of the four thousand year-old Ban Chiang culture of Thailand.
  

• The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany, has discovered that one of its Monets is a forgery.

• The Gaston County museum in Dallas is hosting an art trading card event. "The history of Art Trading Cards dates back to the 16th century when they were mainly portraits, used as 'wallet photos.'"

• The 260,000 objects in the British Museum are now available for your online perusal.

Pattern Recognition (Sample Books at the Cooper-Hewitt)

Multiple Choice: From Sample to Product
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
Nov. 9, 2007 - April, 6 2008

We headed back uptown for a small and somewhat sterile show in the Cooper-Hewitt basement about sample books. You know sample books. They're those pattern books you might find in furniture store or party rental place with pages of different fabric designs.

Here's what I learned. Sample books have been around for more than 300 years, beginning in Europe, and contain a wide variety of intricate, colorful and often beautiful print patterns for textiles, ceramics and wallpaper.

The show starts with a case of wallpaper samples, including a couple by designers I've heard of. One is an 1887 book by William Morris, an artist-writer-activist (as the display text put it) responsible for the anti-industrialist Arts & Crafts movement. Also on display are a 1929 book of "radically minimalist" designs by the Bauhaus, and a 1959 book by Le Corbusier, who advocated for washable wallpapers. A name not familiar to me was Blue River, whose screen-printed vinyl and mylar patterns were of the eye-popping 60s psychedelic variety.

One obvious drawback to a show about books is that you aren't able to hold the books and look through them. To address this deficiency, there's a continuous projected video of someone flipping through pages of patterns. But since there are dozens of books exhibited, it's not practical to wait around for one you're interested in. Better would have been something interactive. Type in the book's name and bingo.

The exhibit text attempts to tie things together with some historic highlights meant to show how the sample book mirrors the history of commercialization and industrialization of design. However, the viewer's left with a few too many loose threads, as it were.

We do get a few tidbits. The show mentions the influence of Islamic design in 15th Century European household textiles and the late-19th-Century popularity of the paisley, which was borrowed from Kashmir. Intriguingly, we learned that 18th Century France enacted perhaps the first anti-piracy legislation. (Knockoffs are nothing new.) And that facing competition stemming for a huge demand for Indian printed textiles, Britain built factories for domestic production -- an important moment in the start of the Industrial Revolution.

On whole, the show was a snooze. We brought along our friend who has a design degree and creates print patterns professionally, and it didn't rock her world either.

What would have improved things? Perhaps with one or two illustrative examples using historic documents. Such as a contract showing how one English merchant ordered 2,000 paisley waistcoats in 1873 for the such-and-such department store. And second, including a few more names of famous designers or design houses, as well as images of people wearing, living with or eating off of these patterns. In summary, the show could have used some humanizing.

Even if you don't go in person, there's good, but not comprehensive, Web site. In addition, the Cooper-Hewitt blog has a behind-the-scenes look at the show's installation.

Museum Minutes

The big news this week is the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in L.A. Part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the $56 million Renzo Piano-designed building was paid for by finance and real estate billionaire Eli Broad. Good for them. Except for one small problem -- the BCAM doesn't have much in the way of art and they were counting on a big donation from Mr. Broad. But their benefactor changed his mind, saying there isn't enough room in the museum to show all of it. (Here's a fun fact -- according to his his Wiki page, Eli Broad once paid $2.5 million to Sotheby's for a Lichtenstein painting using his American Express card in order to get the frequent flyer miles.)

Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times has another problem -- the museum's over-reliance on a single collector. His fiery article is worth quoting:

In deciding what to exhibit, art museums everywhere now strongly favor wealthy collectors over artists and art professionals, and slashed government spending at every level (except defense) keeps contemporary cultural institutions hostage to private interests. Ours is an era of supply-side aesthetics, trickling down on the public. ... As an exhibition, it's incoherent -- a counterfeit permanent collection that is actually a temporary loan, on view for a year.

[LA Times, NYTimes]

Somewhat apropos, here's another good quote from the New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, who visited the Met's revamped European galleries and contemplated the state of museums:

Museology is in moral crisis after a spate of manic construction that has exalted edifices over their contents, and institutional narcissism over the romance of art lovers and art works.

[New Yorker]

On the antiquities issue, the New York Times found that while looting devastates archaeological efforts, the recent West Coast busts could be more about cheating on taxes in a scheme by which stolen items are appraised at inflated values then donated for a write-off. Time Magazine's Richard Lacayo chats with the James Cuno, director of Chicago's Art Institute, about the issue and whether the old practice of partage should be restored. In this system, countries share the loot with sponsoring universities or museums that finance the digs. Another question -- Does a market for antiquities threaten archeology? No, says Cuno, "More is lost to national disaster, economic development and war than is lost to the art market." [NYTimes, Looking Around]

Art theft was all over the news. The Russians revealed a hoard of 46,000 art treasures stolen by the Nazis, a U.S. Army helicopter pilot was charged with selling stolen Egyptian artifacts, Greece returned two stolen marble statues to Albania, and some Picassos were swiped from a Swiss museum. [Bloomberg, Aero-News, Bloomberg, Bloomberg]

According to the New York Times, after hours parties at museums are hip and happening. No better example of this than PS1's summer "Warm Up" series. Speaking of which, the museum just announced the winner of its annual contest to re-imagine its courtyard for the popular festivities. This year we can look forward to an eco-hip urban farm by Dan Wood and Amale Andraosthe, a husband-and-wife duo. And on the subject of food, the Tenement Museum is now showing "a glimpse into America's multi-ethnic pantry." [NYTimes, NYTimes, Newsday]

Finally, the Chicago Trib's Alan G. Artner (nice name) previews the Gordon Matta Clark show, which is coming to the MCA, and takes time to diss "solipsistic" art bloggers. Here's another stinker: the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh is showing "The Scoop on Poop!," a show to inform us about animal feces. Lovely. [Chicago Tribune, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review]

Keeping It Real (The Ash Can School at the New York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York)

"Arch Conspirators" by John Sloan, 1917

Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists' Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925
New York Historical Society
Nov. 28, 2007 - Feb. 10, 2008

John Sloan's New York

Museum of the City of New York

Nov. 15, 2007 - March 23, 2008

On either side of Central Park, two institutions devoted to New York City history are showing work by the Ashcan School. Appropriately enough, these early 20th Century realists loved the City -- even its garbage cans.

The two shows nicely coincide with the centenary of a gallery show called "The Eight" that put these artists on the map. A few of the paintings from that exhibit are among the 80 or so oils on display at the New York Historical Society (one stop on a tour organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts).

Through contemporary eyes it's hard to believe it, but the paintings were once controversial. To some extent, "The Eight" was the "Sensation" of its day. Most shocking was George Bellows' depiction of a gang of boys swimming nude in the East River ("Forty-Two Kids," 1907). It wasn't that they were without clothing -- but because they were rough and tumble immigrants.

While the Ash Can artists did receive formal training, this "school" was really set in opposition to the established academic art world. At the turn of the century, this establishment was embodied by the National Academy of Design -- founded by major figures in that previous American painting collective -- the Hudson River School. So, instead of romantic un-peopled vistas, the Ashcan painters give you 42 ragamuffins splashing in the East River. Decidedly downriver.

Four of the Eight -- John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn and William Glackens -- were newspaper illustrators, an outlook that informed their in-the-streets brand of realism. And, along with the group's father figure, Robert Henri, they all came to New York from Philadelphia -- inspiring a clannishness and outsider's enthusiasm for their new home.

Their paintings weren't all grit. And, despite their sympathy for radical politics, they weren't polemical. In fact, the Ash Can moniker stemmed from an negative review by the radical newspaper The Masses which felt their art too vulgar, or not politically serious enough. (Although Sloan for one did illustrations for the paper.)

The Ashcan outlook was more Walt Whitman than Karl Marx. Henri, who organized "The Eight," gave Sloan a copy of "Leaves of Grass" soon after the two first met.

In fact, much of paintings in "Life's Pleasures," as the title would suggest, are prosaic, even bourgeois. In fact, the main thrust of the show is to depict the rise of leisure and the middle class in early 20th Century -- dining, entertainment, parks, beaches and sports. Woo fun!

It's a nice slice of historic New York City -- from Sloan's depictions of McSorley's ale house (these guys liked to eat and drink) to Madison Park (with the recently constructed Flatiron building in the background) to Luk's Highbridge Park to, one of my favorites, Glackens' "Skating Rink, New York City," which shows rollerskating circa 1906 -- who knew?

Supporting this historic narrative, there are a few small displays of historical materials such as a musical score with an cover illustrating Coney Island and a Thomas Edison film depicting a Tenderloin district restaurant. But for the most part, the paintings speak for themselves.

Intriguingly, there are several paintings that depict one very central important leisure activity -- art. Well, leisure for some and work for others. And it's this exact tension that's on display in Luks' "Artist and His Patron" (1905), a dark canvas that evinces angst in a way that prefigures German Expressionism. There's also Guy Pène Du Bois' "Chanticleer" (1922), which pokes fun at a foppish museum visitor making the rounds. And best of all is Pène Du Bois' "Juliana Force at the Whitney Studio Club" (1922) a reverse portrait of an elegantly attired Ms. Force as she examines a painting that is signed by the artist. (Originally the social secretary for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Juliana Force largely created and served as the first director of the Whitney Museum, which was founded in 1930, a year after the MoMA.)

Not a few of the paintings have a strong Impressionist influence (Henri trained in France). Glackens, especially, can be seen as a very skillful Manet imitator. Degas and Frans Hals are other acknowledged influences. I wouldn't be surprised if Bellows was familiar with the work of the French-trained American realist Thomas Eakins, especially his "The Swimming Hole" (1884-5).

A small exhibit of Sloan's etchings at Museum of the City of New York (organized by the Delaware Art Museum) shows various intimate, and sometimes sentimental, city scenes. Evident is the artist's humor and lusty appreciation for the female form. Clearly he enjoyed sketching working-class women, whether gathered under the 6th Ave. El in Greenwich Village or observed mid-undress through a tenement window.

Maybe the coolest image in either show is Sloan's etching "Arch Conspirators" (1917), which depicts a famous mid-winter party held on the roof the Washington Square Arch involving, among others, Sloan and Marcel Duchamp. According to accounts, the group drew up a document for Greenwich Village to succeed from the United States. Perhaps, given the year, they were thinking of certain events in Russia.

Another revolution happened three years prior to the party as Duchamp's abstract "Nude Descending a Staircase" was the sensation of the famous Armory Show, ushering in modernism to the U.S.

While the Armory Show was certainly more radical than "The Eight," the latter paved the way, leading to the formation of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which, in turn, organized the Armory Show.

In Sloan's "Arch Conspirators" we see that these artists were kindred spirits -- in opposition to orthodoxy and embracing life in all its forms (even its ashcans, or urinals).

As long as these shows are up, for the price of admission at one museum, you can get into the other for free (and it's not even necessary to go on the same day). You'll save a dollar if you head do the East Side first.

Notes:
Exhibit Web content: John Sloan's New York.

The New York Times: "...the Ashcan spirit returned in Abstract Expressionism, a movement that favored visceral action over aesthetic refinement."

The Guardian: "...they were supposed to be manly first and artists second. They were hard-living fellows."

Walk Off the Big Apple's Ashcan walking tour: "I've pulled together a self-guided stroll that stops at some of the important places for the Ashcan artists. The main purpose, however, is to wind up at the ancient McSorley's Old Ale House at 15 East 7th Street."

Museum Minutes

• Kurt Andersen interviews Thomas Hoving, former Met museum director, about the antiquities shakedown in California: "This could be the steroids of art museums." [Studio 360]

• Rem Koolhaas is tapped to redo the Hermitage's displays. The starchitect designed the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Vegas in 2001. [Bloomberg]

• The Air and Space Museum lands $15 million for a new wing, seeks lift. [Washington Post]

• The Schuylerville, NY, Museum of Irons is forced to close. Outsider collection by "Iron Man" George DeMers included washboards, washing machines and other unique items. [Anaba]

• Also down the tubes is the American Sanitary Plumbing Museum in Worcester, Mass. The family-owned collection had interest from the Smithsonian, but has gone to the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors of Greater Boston instead. [Worcester Telegram]

• Closer to home, the Chelsea Art Museum fights to stay alive, and the former Dia Chelsea goes condo. [NY Post, NY Observer]

• Lastly, while not exactly museum-related, Harper's looks at G.W. Bush's favorite painting, a Western oil called "A Charge to Keep," and the amusing and illuminating difference between the President's interpretation and the painter's original intent. [Harper's]