Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Somehow I hadn’t noticed this before: The UCLA Hammer Museum is pandering to the lowest Angeleno denominator: Access Hollywood culture. Next to about a dozen pieces from the Hammer’s permanent collection are wall texts by LA stars/celebrities/Red Roof Inn pitchmen telling us what to think about art. Because if museum wall texts suck, slap a celeb’s name onto them and maybe they’ll be better? Heck, why look at the art when we can read Diane Keaton telling us about it, right?

(Much more on LA tomorrow. For now, here’s the 411 on the panel I sat on with Doug Harvey and Christopher Miles.)

Last year, MOCA’s trustees threw themselves a party to celebrate their museum’s 25th anniversary. At the party they were surrounded by works from the museum’s permanent collection, works that are rarely on view at the museum. (MOCA, despite having two buildings and an outlet at the Pacific Design Center seems not to have a really good place to display a broad range of work from its excellent permanent collection.)

In conversations at that party and afterward, MOCA trustees decided that was a problem that needed to be addressed. Expect MOCA to announce a solution this year, probably some form of a building project. And don’t be surprised if Eli Broad, who was the founding chairman of MOCA but who hasn’t been active at the museum in recent years (his allegiance seems to have shifted toward LACMA), is a part of that building project. 

Speaking of building, the Boston Globe and Harvard museums boss Thomas Lentz make it clear that Harvard will be doing some museum building in the near future. MOCA and Harvard plan to do the same thing: make their permanent collections more accessible (see MAMFW). But other than that, the two museums are completely different: the scopes of their collections, their missions, their geography.

MAN’s on a jet-plane today, so we’ll try something new: When I’m on travel, we’ll just post an excerpt from GawkerForum so that our loyal readers can enjoy a good laugh:

“Jerry and Roberta hate me and Artforum doesn’t know I exist,” Cecily Brown was saying to playwright Tom Stoppard and Artforum editor Scott Rothkopf. The three were sharing a rear banquette on the third floor of 5 Ninth, where—despite the winter’s first major snowstorm—Larry Gagosian had brought out the troops to toast Brown’s opening at his Chelsea gallery.

(And in case you missed it, in the space of a couple dozen words a magazine that people look at but that no one reads managed to show Cecily that they’re with her, all while elevating the ‘zine to Saltz & Smith & Stoppard status. Seriously, these GawkerForum posts are like crack. They’re way too easy.)

Speaking of Cecily: Scroll down to 3.17.2003.

And there’s a new blog on the blogroll: Glowlab. (It’s under NYC but I’ll probably move it next week.)

Ess Eff arts blogger Anna L. Conti posts about SFMOMA’s SECA award exhibit. Good read with lots of images.

A new to me art blog, hazel commentary, also has a SECA post.

(Hmmm, look at this buzz. Jerry was on to something…)

I haven’t posted my last couple of Bloomberg reviews here because I try to keep the blog post-1900 or so. I’m posting some thoughts on Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence because I discussed (the lack of) portraiture now.

(I’ve long wanted to write more about this and in more depth — the ideas here are pretty simple and easy. Kirk Varnedoe said that as he was considering his Mellon Lectures — the last work he did before he died — that he considered two ideas. The series of lectures that he chose not to give was about portraiture in contemporary art.)

Today, wealthy elites don’t commission portraits of themselves as a way of crafting their image. Collecting art is certainly a component of modern-day social posturing, but nowadays collecting paintings of yourself is considered a bit over the top. In recent decades, portraiture has been dominated by down-market photography, and as such it no longer sends a message of prestige. After all, nearly every Wal-Mart and Kmart has a portrait studio. (The exception to the death of portrait painting is government officials, who may be the last major commissioners of painted portraiture.)

The few painted portraits that we see end up looking silly, and include indirect nods to painters such as Pontormo and Bronzino. A few weeks ago I was in a Marriott hotel. Behind the check-in desk, as at so many Marriotts, was a copy of a painting of two generations of Marriott hoteliers. Just as Pontormo sent a message by showing Alessandro sketching a beautiful woman, whoever painted the Marriotts included an image-crafting touch as well: one of the Marriotts held blueprints meant to encourage us to consider him as a builder and as a visionary. Viewed today, 350 years after the height of Italian mannerism, the Marriott portrait reads as high corporate camp.

In a way, that’s a tribute to how thoroughly Pontormo, Bronzino, and their contemporaries conceived and executed portraits of the privileged. The Florentines just couldn’t be improved upon.

• Because somehow last week we got sucked into playing where’s-the-curator, we’ll note that Anne Ellegood is leaving NYC for the Hirshhorn. Ellegood was most recently the NYC curator for the Norton Family Foundation and before that she was a curator at the New Museum. Are there any curators left in NYC? (Uh, yes.);
• Speaking of curators, there’s that chief curator of drawings job open at MoMA…;
• ArtsJournal has a new book review blog;
• We’ll be doing a MAN/abLA adult beverage gathering on Saturday night. Watch abLA for details;
• I updated yesterday’s Jerry Saltz post with several links; and
• With that I’m off to go look at some Cy Twombly.

Regular MAN readers are plenty well acquainted with some of my ideas on how to fix what’s wrong at MoMA. (MoMA apparently listens enough that they don’t return my calls anymore.)

Last week, Jerry Saltz wrote a VV column about how he’d fix MoMA. The column itself — independent of its content — is a good thing, a sign that critics are over the Yay MoMA Moment, and are over the What a Nice Building and What Great Art Moment. Having beeen to the new building a few times, critics are beginning to assess the experience.

I’m not going to summarize Saltz’ ideas (ah the beauty of links), but I think he raises some important points. MoMA’s insistence on creating Hallway Bastards (Philip Guston, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe and the like) only highlights how limited some of their institutional thinking is. “We don’t know what to do with these people,” the hallway installations say. “So we’ll just throw ‘em up on the hallway walls and that way you can’t say they’re not here.” Saltz’ idea addresses that thinking.

(MoMA must also try to figure out why it is so clueless when it comes to the art of the present. Lots of museums do a good job with the art of the last 20 years so there’s no reason MoMA can’t.)

Each of Saltz’ nine ideas makes a lot of sense to me. (Though if you create a real Projects space, do you still need an annual young artist’s exhibit? Why not one or the other?) With only one or two exceptions they wouldn’t be that hard (or expensive) for MoMA to implement. I’d suggest that they start with a panel of artists and/or critics that they don’t like, a group of non-sycophants who will sit in their building and tell them what’s wrong with it, tough-love style. In the wake of the damaged Truitt, MoMA has wasted no time in re-acquired a reputation as a stonewalling monolith that detests outside examination. (I’ve received email from MoMA’ites who are afraid of Getty-style retribution even.) And that’s one of the last things an art museum should be.

UPDATE: Forward Retreat, Grammar.police, Modern Kicks.

If you’re in LA this coming weekend, please stop by artLA on Sunday morning to hear Doug Harvey, Christopher Miles and me discuss art and art writing. (Also, expect some type of MAN/art.blogging.la beverage event during the weekend sometime. Watch abLA for details.)

If you’ve heard anything about the weather here in the northeast, you can guess what a strange art weekend it was here. Snow and high winds mixed to make galleries empty and museums emptier. Two examples:

I don’t go to a lot of gallery openings — they’re a lousy way to see art and I feel like I have to be ‘on,’ to be engaging, witty and intelligent. I prefer to be alcoholically incoherent on Saturday nights at seven, so no openings for me. (And god forbid I’d accidentally slip into GawkerForum mode.)

But this past Saturday was an opening to which I had been looking forward. I’ve written about LA-based painter Robert Olsen a few times — both here and for Artnet — and his newest work just went on view at G Fine Art (which still has a Nov/Dec show on its website, hence the link to Olsen’s site). The show is excellent, the best of many strong shows in DC galleries right now.

If you’re going to paint artificial light, you have to paint night, or at least the darkness that makes artificial light stand out — and Olsen paints the inkiest black imaginable. In a white cube gallery (which G is), his paintings are like black holes that suck the light out of the space, releasing only the manmade light on which Olsen wants us to focus.

Stranger was my experience at the Philly Museum (Dali!) on Sunday. As a result of a Bloomberg assignment, I had to zip up to the PMA ($2.6 million reasons to remember: Dali!) to take in a show, and I had to do it on Sunday. And I had to do it in a taxi-free city, with 15 inches of snow piled up around Philadelphia (Dali!), with temperatures in the low teens, and with wind gusts up around 40 mph. Then when I arrived at the museum, they told me that only parts of the 20th century galleries were open — they didn’t have enough guards to open anything else because the roads were still a mess.

I had a darn good time in the 20thC galleries until some of the rest of the place opened. Philly has a fine Jasper Johns room, one of the greatest Matisse portraits, and a fine Rothko and two Newmans on loan from private collections. (And oh yeah, a painting by some Vermeer guy.)

But just as the PMA got under my skin with their ridiculous Manet and the Sea shopping experience (with accompanying mediocre exhibit), they’re already under my skin leading into their big Dali show in three weeks. The advertising banners in Philly’s train station are about 20 yards long and cover three gates. Every train platform ad is for Dali. It’s exhibit as marketing opportunity first, art second.

Also: It’s harder to link directly to, but I wrote about Olsen when I first saw his work (in Sept. 2003). Scroll down about half the page to 9/18/2003, or just do a search on “Olsen.”  

Read Jerry Saltz on MoMA. Discuss tomorrow and Wednesday. (Here, and hopefully on many other blogs.)