Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

The Corcoran is running the white flag about halfway up the flagpole. With today’s announcement, the Corcoran is in effect saying, “If we can’t get government help, the Gehry addition is dead.”

In case you missed it, today the Washington Post and the Washington Business Journal (thanks AJ) reported that the Corcoran has asked the District of Columbia for $40 million in the form of a loan that would be paid back out of property tax and sales tax revenue from downtown businesses. Anthony Williams, DC’s mayor, supports the plan.

The request is as close to a tacit admission as the Corcoran will make that its Gehry plan is in dire trouble, that it is having major problems raising the necessary funds to build the new wing. It is no sure thing that the DC City Council will go along with the mayor’s plan.

Especially interesting here is the way the project would be funded and what it says about the recent present and possible future of the Corcoran. The $40 million in funding would be “repaid” to the city in the form of expected increased sales tax revenue and expected increased property tax revenue from businesses within one mile of the Corcoran. In effect, the plan anticipates that an expanded Corcoran will bring more money-spending folks to the area around the Corcoran, and the money those folks spend will, over time, pay off the $40M.

First off, it’s a heckuvan assumption that the Gehry in and of itself will draw more people to the Corcoran and that those people will spend that much money in the area and that property taxes will go up as a result. The plan expresses remarkable faith in destination architecture.

The plan, if implemented, would also put pressure on the Corcoran to schedule shows that bring in visitors. Unfortunately, this is not likely to be a problem for the Corcoran, an institution that has repeatedly shown that its credibility as an art museum is of secondary importance. Over and over again the Corcoran has scheduled exhibits designed for just one purpose: to turn the turnstiles. (Think J. Seward Johnson, Judith Leiber and the dresses of a certain First Lady.) If the city buys into the $40M plan, I think we could safely assume that the quality and merit of exhibits at the Corcoran will continue to decline. If that’s not reason enough to oppose the governmental handout, what is?

First, thanks so much to everyone who wrote in about MoMA’s new $20 entrance charge. I probably got about 40 responses, which is more than most posts generate. Obviously I’ve been on travel (and I have more coming up), so I’ll be emailing people for permission to quote them on Tuesday and I’ll try to have a post up on Wednesday or, more likely, Thursday. BTW, not a single email approved of MoMA’s asking price.

Also, check back later today for my thoughts on today’s Corcoran news. (ajreader, access)

On to the blogosphere:

• Greg Allen has two must-check-out posts about listening to art stuff on the internet. One is about WPS1 and the other is about audio streamed from the Walker Art Center’s site;
• Ionarts has a fun story from a German artothek, the German lending libraries of art;
• How cool is Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof’s Philly artblog? They find art in random airports. Like Anchorage. And in SF, Wayne Thiebaud paintings. And read everything else they write too;
• The Miami Art Exchange has a bunch of good posts that I won’t link to individually because that’s confusing. From the top, they cover a panel discussion about art criticism, the Miami Art Museum’s new website, and a continuation discussion of whether or not dealers need galleries;
• Dangerous Chunky hates summer and John Currin. MAN loves Dangerous Chunky;
• Zeke’s Gallery finds Hilton Kramer to be lazy… and did the research to back it up!;
• Joseph Clarke on the paucity of black architects;
• Photography from the ’70s, at Coincidences;
• A new DC-based art blog, Thinking About Art, discusses two shows that are up at the Corcoran: Anil Revri and Sally Mann; and
• In Chicago, Robots in Love discusses what’s going on at MCA Chicago.

I’d like to thank the New York galleries that were closed this past weekend. It’s reasonable to assume that their level of offerings would have been about the same as the level of offerings served up by the galleries that were open. And holy cow was that work uninteresting.

In all the years I’ve been going up to New York, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen such thin June shows. I frequently write here about how Los Angeles’ galleries scene is more interesting than New York’s is right now. This past weekend was a good example — I literally cannot name a gallery about whose entire show I can say good things. Team and Jeff Bailey came closest.

The best reasons to be in New York right now are the Brancusi semi-survey at the Gugg and the Agnes Martin semi-10-year-survey at Dia:Beacon. The Gugg has created a new kind of show: it’s not a retrospective, it’s not a coherent group show (see Primary Objects, Structures, Forms, Repeated, Staccato or whatever the heck that last show was called), it’s not anything in particular. It’s a thrown together jumble of good art. The Gugg says that the Brancusi show “seeks to capture the essential character of Brancusi’s sculpture.” Translation: We took what we could get and put it on the ramp. Still, what they got is darn good. In the coming days I’ll come up with a shorthand term for these Gugg shows.

Agnes Martin at Dia. Just go. It’s a wonderful little three-gallery installation.

I’m back from a weekend of art in New York. (Take Chelsea… please.) More on NYC later. For now, I’ve updated the top five on the right…

We started talking about this on MAN quite a while ago, but the migration from the LAT cultural beats to the NYT is picking up mainstream media attention. LA Weekly discusses it here. I love how the LAT bosses say that the lure of the NYT is just too strong, and that they did everything they could to keep them in LA.

Bunk. When you hide a critic’s work from his/her peers by hiding it behind a bizarre pay-for-view setup, you deny your critics that which they love most: involvement in the international cultural dialogue. Time to junk the system, LAT.

As most of you know by now, ArtsJournal is the place to go for arts news from around the world. Occasionally figuring in that news is… ArtsJournal.

Today’s Seattle P-I writes about how a Seattle theater has set up a blog with AJ where audience members can comment on shows, discuss them or review them. It’s called Blog the Boards and you can find it here. Sounds like a cool idea that could work for visual arts institutions too.

One ticket into the new MoMA.

No, really, I’m not kidding. When MoMA reopens, it will cost $20 to get in. Glenn Lowry told Carol Vogel (this was a few weeks back — I’m slow) that this is in line with other entertainment expenses. If your idea of entertainment is a glass of 25-year old single malt scotch, then maybe. But if your idea of entertainment is a few beers while watching the Yankees game, well… no.

$20! If readers would like to email me over the next few days with what $20 will buy in entertainment where they live, I think I see a Monday post materializing…

What will it take to get the Warhol Museum to stop announcing new exhibs?

At the left is the image of the OldenBruggen sculpture that will go up in front of Disney Hall in LA sometime next year. It’s hideous. It must be stopped. (This just in: Obviously, ideas do not work at any scale.)

(Letter from MAN to Eli Broad, going out in the morning post: Dear Eli, Congrats on figuring out a way to destroy Frank Gehry’s greatest creation. I know you’re not listed as a donor for the OldenBruggen, but c’mon. Who are you kidding? Anonymous donations are wonderful, aren’t they? Hey, your secret is safe with me. Clearly you had a master plan to destroy Gehry’s masterpiece. You are Dr. Evil himself. Yours in your success, T.)

The exit profile. Uh, Muschamp is almost out the door. Takes a lot of guts to take him on when he’s on his way out, Clay Risen.

Non-existent art. He said it, not me: “I don’t do anything,” Maurizio Cattelan on his own art, which is occasionally non-existent. (Literally.)

How many American arts organizations launch a fundraising drive and pull in 10,000 donors? The St. Louis Symphony did and that’s mighty impressive for a metro area that probably ranks around twentieth or so. (In other words, this is nothing like an NYC organization pulling in 10,000 donors. It’s more like a NYC organization pulling in 100,000 donors.) Do art museums focus too much on high-dollar donors at the expense of broader campaigns? Perhaps my AJmates Andrew Taylor and Drew McManus will weigh in…

The Danish government has talked MoMA into using Danish furnishings almost exclusively throughout the new 53rd Street building. And you thought museums made decisions based on curatorial judgments! What next? The Canadian government talking MoMA into letting Janet Cardiff do the audio tour? The Mexican government talking MoMA into letting Gabriel Orozco put cans of cat food everywhere?