Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

A week from today High director Michael Shapiro will be lecturing at the Clark on:

“[A] relatively new and widening gulf that has developed between the practices and values of larger, collection-rich art museums and those of a more nimble, aspirational breed of museums. Shapiro… will highlight the High Museum as a case study of the rewards and risks of the new entrepreneurial art museum.”

I find Shaprio’s topic amusing because the High refused to make Shapiro available to me a few months ago when I wanted to discuss these very issues as they related to his Renzo Piano-designed expansion. I guess lecturing is safer than conversing.

(And I’ll leave alone the assertion that collection-poor museums are always ‘more nimble’ than collection-rich museums. Several of Shapiro’s peers, such as Kathy Halbreich, Marla Price, Jeremy Strick, and Hugh Davies are in a position to disagree.)

After talking with some Clyfford Still experts and after looking through some auction records, I don’t think there’s any doubt: 1947-R No. 1 (at left) is the best Still painting to come to auction. Available at Christie’s on Nov. 15, the auction house’s estimate is $5-7 million. I believe that the Still auction record is $3.1 million, for 1960-F.

Given how few Still paintings are in private hands, this is one of the the last opportunities for collectors or museums to own a great Still. Of Stills that have been publicly exhibited in the last couple decades, only three paintings are comparable. (That would be 1948-G, 1949-F, and a grey painting known as ‘1948-1949,’ aka PH-99 in the Albright’s photo archive of Still’s work.) 

There are two things were noting about this painting. One: Still ‘cloned’ it. Still periodically (possibly regularly) made multliple versions of his paintings. This one has a brother, privately-owned 1947-R No. 2, which was included in the Hirshhorn’s Jim Demetrion-curated 2001 Still show. The Christie’s painting is far superior.

Potentially more serious, especially if you’re considering buying the painting: There’s reason to believe that some of Clyfford Still’s reds are not stable. I learned this last year when I talked about Still with Bob Buck, the former director of the Still-rich Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The first Still that the Albright acquired, a 1954 painting donated to the museum by Seymour Knox, has faded badly.

“It has a strange thing happening,” Buck told me. “The white under-ground is affecting the red. The red is no longer blood-red, it now has creamy white mixed in.” Buck added that it was undercracking. “It’s sort of like an aging actress… in the face it’s changed a lot.”

I almost didn’t include the JPEG of the A-K’s painting here because I don’t want to suggest that the A-K’s painting once had the same rich red as the Christie’s painting. I have not personally seen the Christie’s painting. (There is, obviously, some white in the painting, which is what got me thinking.) But if I were going to bid on the Christie’s Still, I’d definitely look into this before bidding.

I’m a sucker for art-related parlor games such as this one: Help Jonathan Jones & The Guardian compile the “definitive list of the 50 works of art to see before you die.” [via]

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• In the Washington Post, Blake Gopnik writes smartly on the Hirshhorn’s first contemporary group show since, uh, ever. (Yes, really. UPDATE: This is wrong. I used bad data. Bad writer.)
• New Art + Auctions editor Ted Loos hangs out with globetrotter Brice Marden for the NYT.
• Philip Kennicott wonders why Maya Lin has become a caricature of herself. (OK, somehow I forgot to add this one last week. I meant to link to it when Greg Allen piled on.)
• Doesn’t the Houston Chronicle know that this blog name is taken!?
• The Walker & the MIA are teaming up on an Eero Saarinen exhibit. (Sweet.) And later on in the story: The MIA is hiring a contemporary curator, I think.
• There are two really good round-ups on Glasstire, the webzine about art in Texas. First: Various TX art luminaries banter about the state of the state. And Houston is the latest city to notice that New York has gotten boring.
• A strange Martin Filler Getty story in the NY Review of Books. Somehow it completely ignores the LAT’s reporting on the topic while dithering on about, well, ancient history.

From Friday: Dallas Museum of Art director Jack Lane, the Frisco kids, their teacher and — gasp — nakedidity: With his museum was in the spotlight, should Lane have been more visible?

A few days ago I was web-surfing this season’s political advertisements when I heard a radio ad that included this: “In this time of war, Larry Grant wants more spending on the arts…” FYI: Larry Grant is a Democrat running for Congress from Idaho’s first district; Bill Sali is the Republican candidate who placed the ad. The race is unexpectedly close.

How odd. Nothing about the arts has been a national political issue in at least a decade. So why now!?

I suppose it could be that Sali genuinely believes that spending on the arts imperils America’s ability to fund the so-called war on terrorism or the Iraq War. If that’s the case, Sali needs a math lesson: The National Endowment for the Arts received about $125 million in funding last year; America has already spent $340 billion on Iraq, with about $500 billion appropriated through FY 2007. If Sali thinks the problems in Iraq are arts-funding-related, he’s an idiot.

My puzzlement continued: Art is not necessarily unpopular among Idahoans, not even among Republicans. According to the Idaho Commission for the Arts, a state government agency, Republican Sen. Larry Craig was “one of the leaders involved in getting Congress to agree to additional arts spending this year.” I guess Craig, a bonafide right-winger, didn’t consider art spending likely to cause America to lose the wars it is fighting. The Republican-dominated Idaho Commission for the Arts even sent out a mailing trumpeting Craig’s role.

So what was Sali’s campaign talking about? I listened to the ad again and noticed that the announcer made a distinct pause after the word ‘arts.’ A telling pause. A conspiratorial pause. I realized what the Sali was getting at.

In the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, when Republicans were reminded that they could no longer pretend that gay people were not a part of their party, “arts” is the new way of insinuating ‘gay.’ Sure, not all arts people are gay. But people who like art probably know people who are gay. That means that they tolerate gay people and thus, in Sali’s campaign’s parlance, Grant’s support of arts funding is not a “traditional Idaho value.” The district Sali is running to reprsent is one of the most anti-gay districts in America. Infamous gay basher Helen Chenoweth once loudly represented Idaho’s First. (And as we just read: Larry Craig, widely known to be gay but little-reported until now, supports the arts. Ahem.)

Sali had to use an indirect smear: He couldn’t say that his opponent supports gay equality because, well, he doesn’t. Not a single national gay group support Grant’s candidacy. So what did Sali try in an effort to demonize his opponent: He made ‘art’ a dirty word.

I’ve written pretty regularly here about the importance of cultural diplomacy, about how the arts should be an important way of how America reaches out to the world. In the last decade these programs have been few and far between, and American power often seems more interested in destroying cultural heritage (Iraq) than in protecting it.

I wanted to point out two recent stories about this: In yesterday’s NYT, Erika Kinetz writes about an American-funded cultural program in Cambodia. (Complete with a quote about how the US spends very, very little money on this, alas.) And on Think Progress, Brian Katulis rips the Bush Administration for developing cultural outreach in Iraq. Yes, the Bushies are pathetically late to this issue and that tardiness has certainly hurt American interests in Iraq. And yes, we’re talking about drop-in-the-bucket programs. But at least it’s the right direction. The proper progressive response here isn’t to club the Bushies, it’s to say that more is needed in this area.

http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2006/10/pica_artist_in.html

By now we all now the story: In Frisco, Texas, a teacher was attacked for taking students to the Dallas Museum of Art. Apparently the students saw works of art that weren’t wearing clothes. A parent complained; the teacher was fired. The school district claimed that the two were unrelated. Newspaper stories at the time made it pretty clear that the firing was about what Radar O’Reilly called ‘nakedidity.’ A settlement that the teacher recently reached with the school district made it even clearer that the school district knew it was on shaky ground.

Throughout the entire month-long process, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, Jack Lane, said very little. I can only find one quote from him on the matter, in the NYT, and a museum spokesman told me he did no television or radio interviews. The DMA told me that Lane didn’t speak up about the art/morality issue because it wasn’t clear why the teacher in question was fired.

Lane’s silence was a mistake and the museum’s reason for why he stayed quiet are poor. For the last month the DMA and its role in its community have been widely discussed in the media. Lane had an unprecedented opportunity to talk with Texans (and because the case has received national attention, with America) about what is in art museums, why it is collected there, and what school children can gain from encounters with art. But instead Lane, who was in New York City for at least some of the controversy, was invisible.

I’m not suggesting that Lane should have commented on the firing issue or that he should have campaigned for the teacher to keep her job. But when Lane had a rare opportunity to speak to regional and national audiences about the role of art museums in America, he disappeared. The museum should have offered Lane up to local radio stations, to television stations, to Texas arts reporters. Lane could have written an op-ed or two or initiated a series of events at the museum where the issue was discussed. Lane and the DMA did none of this. It was an opportunity missed.

(Several weeks ago a DMA spokesperson suggested I talk to Lane about this, and in two separate emails I accepted the museum’s offer. However, Lane was never made available to me.)

There’s a broader issue here, and one that we’ll discuss soon: What role should art museum directors have in their communities?

Related: Greg Allen shows us what the offending art object may have been.

Quite possibly, says The Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey. [via] Unmentioned: This is not new. The MFA Boston has done it for years.