Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Delighted to see NYTer Nicolai Ouroussoff take a look at MOCA Detroit, or MOCAD, this morning. Of all the NYT arts crue, it’s Ouroussoff and Roberta Smith who write most intelligently about art museums and institutional issues. (Michael Kimmelman tends to suggest wackiness, such as that the Getty absorb/merge with the best museum in LA. Groan.) Today Ouroussoff gives us this to ponder:

Mocad creates a casual and intimate relationship between art and viewer, shrugging off the weighty air of authority and privilege that is typical of so many museums. It takes us back to a time when making art and architecture could be a act of dissent.

I like this idea. I don’t know what it’s future is; will more museums think about building this way in the future? I kind of doubt it — donor$ like polish because it advertises their sophistication. But there’s something about the grittiness of the Baltimore Contemporary that challenges a viewer as much as the art on the walls does. Same with the CCA’s Wattis galleries. 

• The Baer Faxt reports that LTB Media will “either be buying or taking over” The Armory Show in NYC. Anyone else notice that Armory sent out a glitzy mailing this week, reminding us all to think of them in Miami?
• Also in the Baer Faxt: Hopper’s Hotel Window, which went for ~$25 million at Sotheby’s last night was likely snapped up by Crystal Bridges-builder Alice Walton.
• In the Seattle Times: The Seattle Art Museum sold six of its eight paintings for $1 million. The Marin we spotlighted here went for ~$650K. Now we wanna know what they’re using the money for.
• Pix of Thom Mayne’s new federal courthouse in Eugene, complete with assists from Matthew Ritchie and more: Wow.

One of the thiefs of Munch’s The Scream is believed to be dead, of a heroin overdose. I think this may be ironic, but I’m not quite sure how.

In an unrelated, unironic story, find out who dropped ~$30 million on Andy Warhol’s Montauk estate.

First on MAN: The Walker Art Center has mined New York for three new pieces: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Abstract Resistance, Pierre Huyghe’s A Journey That Wasn’t, and Katharina Fritsch’s Pistol.

The Hirschhorn was part of the artist’s shockingly awful, derivative (of Sontag) early 2006 installation at Barbara Gladstone. The Walker likes Hirschhorn, a curator’s darling-of-the-moment, more than I do: It recently showed Hirschhorn’s Cavemanman installation (and took a funny picture of him) and recorded a podcastable interview with him here. There are photos of Abstract Resisitance here, at the Artnet version of Jerry Saltz’s review of the show. The Walker also owns a number of smaller Hirschhorns.

Walker chief curator Philippe Vergne was half-responsible for the 2006 Whitney Biennial in which Huyghe’s A Journey That Wasn’t was a highlight. (The film was also recently on view at the Tate Modern.) I wish there was a link to at least part of the 22-minute film online, but there doesn’t seem to be. This is the first Huyghe to enter the Walker’s collection.

Katharina Fritsch’s precious little Pistol was recently on view at Matthew Marks as part of a show called Small Sculpture. (At just five-by-eight inches, the paint-n-polyester gun is certainly that.) The Walker has been collecting Fritsch in depth since 1991.

Personally, I’m perpetually delighted by Fritsch and perpetually bored by Hirschhorn. But I think it’s fetchingly neat-and-tidy (and geopolitically appropriate) that the Walker has just scored two works that are about violence and how we perceive implements that cause it.

Miami is upon us. A week from today the doors of Art Basel Miami Beach will swing open to the VIP set, and the art world equivalent of a tax-free-shopping weekend will begin. Over the next five days collectors will spend somewhere between $100-300 million on art, writers and curators will stroll through 13 fairs and 600 galleries worth of presentations, Linda Yablonsky will confuse Miami with Iraq, and we’ll all pledge to wear only comfy shoes — next year.

A recent post on Edward Winkleman’s excellent blog has me re-pondering my favorite ABMB-related question: What is the proper historical point-of-comparison for Miami fairs week? I’ve written this before but I haven’t dwelled on it: I think that the Miami fairs are the American, 21st-century equivalent of the 19th-century Parisian salons. I think we’ll discuss this more over the next few days, but for now some points of comparison:

• The intent of the salons was to sell art. The intent of the fairs is to sell art. The difference: In the late 19thC the French government was the preferred patron. In 21stC America major private collectors are the preferred patrons, a natural evolution given that the state is much less involved in art and in the econmy here and now than it was there and then.
• Artists were juried in by a panel appointed by the entity that put on the salon. At the fairs, galleries are juried in by a panel appointed by the entity that puts on the salon. I’d argue that this is also a 21st-century updating of the old concept: Artists are less directly involved in selling themselves and their work than they were way-back-when. 
• Those who didn’t get into the main salon created their own satellite salons. Ditto Miami: This year there will be 13 satellite fairs that will host two-thirds of the galleries showing.
• In Paris, some artists who didn’t get into the main fair found ways of showing around town. (Courbet famously set up a tent outside the Parisian salon. Fortunately for him, Eik Kahng had not yet been born.) Every year there are more artist-created installations that pop up magically around Miami. I couldn’t link to them all if I tried.
• The French public viewed the salon as a grand spectacle. Access Hollywood covers Art Basel Miami Beach.
• If readers have contributions to or digressions from this list — or if you’d like to suggest a different historical construct – I’m all ears…

I’m pretty sure that the next Miami-related, gallery-sent press release I receive will make my PC explode. Daddy loves you. He has 600 children. He loves you all the same. That is a lie. (I’m trapped in this metaphor and I can’t get out.) What I’m trying to say is: Yes, we all know that there will be a lot of galleries in Miami. You don’t all need to tell us that you’ll be there. No one goes to Miami looking for just one in 600.

For some reason this reminds me: How good a time is this to have a career in art/museum communications? Four biggies are all looking for a new top communications staffer: the Hirshhorn, MOCA, the Guggenheim, and — this just in — MoMA.

• At Western Bridge in Seattle: Into Black, starring Eliasson, Finch, Macdonald, etc. [via]
• At Haus der Kunst in Munich: Black Paintings, starring Rothko, Motherwell, Pollock, etc. [via MAN reader TF]

Forgive our skepticism, but when it comes to the Whitney and building projects: We’ll believe it when they break ground. They’ve hired architects, made noise… and then not built too many times before. But elements of the announcement are worth noting:

This is not another MoMA. That is to say there’s some hope that the Whitney project won’t end up as a safe underbuild. According to Carol Vogel — whom we can probably trust on this one because she’s not sourcing her info to Snuffleupagus-like “experts” — the Whitney is planning on building a 100,000-150,000 square feet of gallery space. That’s serious: Dia Colon Beacon has 240,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Taniguchi MoMA checks in at ~125,000. The Whitney Breuer has only about 30,000 and an addition wouldn’t have added more than another 20,000, max.

In other words: The Whitney is showing some ambition. And that’s what Manhattan’s museums have to do if they want to catch up to the building boom that’s been going on around the country. As the collections in Minneapolis, San Francisco, etc. have grown, so too have their museums. Meanwhile in New York… not so much. New York’s museums show relatively little of their (larger) collections.

Maybe — hopefully — the maybe-new Whitney will begin to change that. But until the Whitney breaks ground, lots of us will wonder if we’re just watching a Whitney rerun.

• You may vote: “Is Tyler Green really an asshole?”;
• A week before the NYT did the story: Starchitects have been flocking to China in recent years; is Russia next (complete with pix)?
• I wonder how many museums have staffers who come up with this kind of funky-cool fun? (And is it mere coincidence that the Walker has a big Sherrie Levine collection?)
• Chuck Close’s Keith, Keith Hollingworth, and the secret behind Kieth’s expression;
• If I were an artist I’d give my left palette to have my work installed at MAMFW. I bet Tony Oursler’s pleased with this;
• I’ve been meaning to do a big CLUI/Coolidge post since August. I’m not the only one thinking about what exactly CLUI is (incidentally: Matthew Langley’s blog is underrated);
• I’m not the only one interested in the Ruth Asawa show at the de Young. (If you enjoyed Betty Woodman at the Met, you may too);
• Phaidon has really figured out how to do (and sell) books about specific contemporary art media. (You remember Vitamin P, right?) Here’s the latest: Vitamin…;
• Art theft is so cool that this guy wrote a book about it;
• Photoblogging (mostly) the project that Maya Lin did immediately after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and
• Frank Gehry loves fish.

First: Don’t miss this morning’s Around the Blogosphere. Lots of fun stuff there.

• Michael Brand takes to the LAT’s op-ed page to tell the Getty’s side of the Getty v. Italy story. It’s written by the director of the Getty Museum so it has a Getty spin… but it’s hard to disagree with much (anything?) Brand says about where the case is now.
• Not online: Tom Freudenheim opined on the Walters version of the Courbet show in the WSJ. He agrees with me on the unfortunate, artist-insulting installation.
• My ex-AJ and ex-Bloomberg colleague Jim Russell examines the (architectural) state of NYC museo-expansion. (Russell also quotes a Dia official hinting at a major, major shift in Dia programming.)