Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

First on MAN: The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts has sold what may have been its best Thomas Eakins: The Cello Player. The painting was sold to a private collector, a museum spokesman confirmed.
Proceeds from the deaccessioning will be applied toward PAFA’s co-purchase of Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, which PAFA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are co-purchasing from Thomas Jefferson University.
According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s website (taken before The Cello Player sale) the two institutions have raised less than half of the painting’s $68 million purchase price.
Eakins painted The Cello Player in 1896. It portrays celebrated cellist Rudolph Hennig, a Leipzig Conservatory product who moved to Philadelphia. PAFA purchased the painting for $500 in early 1897. It was Eakins’ first museum sale since 1879 — and he split the fee with Hennig. The painting was included in the Met’s just-closed Americans in Paris 1860-1900 show. (Explanation: The painting helped Eakins earn an ‘honorable mention’ at the 1900 Exposition Universelle).
PAFA board vice-chair Herbert Riband recently told the Philly Inky that deaccessioning to raise money for The Gross Clinic was a possibility. No word yet from PAFA on whether this will be its only deaccessioning, the sale price, or the identity of the buyer. I have a phone call into the PMA to see if they will be deaccessioning as well.
UPDATE, 11:40 pm: The Philly Inky follows MAN, goofs on the name of Eakins’ cellist. NYTer Carol Vogel follows MAN too. Gee, I wonder why “PAFA announced…”

Peter Plagens sent me a long, thoughtful note about yesterday’s post. He OK’d quoting some of it here. Here are a couple of choice morsels:

[A]lthough what [Michael] Kimmelman writes in the way of a review of a retro at MoMA may turn out to be hagiography, it’s still his “considered judgment,” i.e., a longish piece of prose in polite language in which he sets out his case with some clarity. Which is to say, “considered judgments” are often wrong…
I didn’t compare “a blog–which is a medium–to art criticism.” I merely said that some art writers have gone into blogging. If I’d said that some art writers have started writing for daily newspapers, I wouldn’t be comparing daily newspapers–a medium–to art criticism, would I? And as for art criticism being a “format”: I’d be pressed to find format a whole lot of similarities in, say, Holland Cotter’s stuff and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s. Wouldn’t you? …
Snark may be only a tiny fraction of what you do in MAN (in terms of number of words, perhaps–but one clever little phrase, as you well know, can snarkify a whole blog item), but it’s what I read you for… (Hell, I even regularly read Charlie Finch–who thinks I’m a piece of sh*t–because he’s so good at it.) The art world is besotted with press-release thinking and — in guises ranging from breaking news to theory snooze-hagiography. (Yes, I’ve written some [hagiography] myself.) So many balloons, so few pins.

If you’re an art-lover it’s a good night to stay home and watch TV. Or internet-TV. Or both. Here’s the lineup (all times ET):

Sorry for the AM sloth: AJ had some server issues…

1. I think that the de Young does this in their American art galleries — and to fine effect.

2. I think I can’t get into this Pollock story but Exhibitionist has all the links.
3. I think this is a fun exchange from a Michael Auping-Hiroshi Sugimoto podcast:
   

   Auping: There are so many interesting contradictions about you as a person, I think, but also about your work. You were basically a marxist art dealer.
   Sugimoto: The NYT titled me once the ‘zen marxist.’

4. I think that the Miami Art Museum’s Herzog & de Meuron building will be pretty, er, cool. Can you find the hints about their design plans in the Miami lecture Jacques Herzog gave last week?
5. I think that the two big new American sculpture parks wanna throw down! The Hirshhorn has been hosting a semi-regular series of panel discussions on public art… so here’s hoping the Hirsh builds a ring for a rollicking public program.
   

I think one of the most masturbatory discussions in the art world is about whether art criticism is dead. (Translation: Is anyone reading me?)
In this month’s Art in America, former Newsweek critic Peter Plagens broadens that discussion by looking at what’s up in the newspaper and magazine worlds. Most of his analysis seemed pretty in-touch, but I respectfully disagree with him on this paragraph:

“Exceptions [to reader disinterest in art critics] exist — as with the lead critics for a few of the major dailies — but they don’t abound. More and more people in the audience for contemporary art would rather read Tyler Green snark somebody in his blog, Modern Art Notes, than ponder the considered judgment of Michael Kimmelman on a MoMA retrospective. Many art writers have either added unpaid blogging to their activities or been squeezed into it from want of other, traditional outlets — for which many bloggers don’t have enough writerly inclination or discipline, anyway. Each of those art bloggers has a following of fans and other bloggers, and each of those bloggers has… and so on. A growing form of art criticism consists of posting links to other people’s criticism, which consists of posting links… and so on.”

Comparing a blog — which is a medium — to art criticism — which is a writerly, often journalistic format — is like comparing film to a Henny Youngman one-liner. Some blogs claim to be repositories of criticism, many make no such pretense.
And to the extent that critics such as Kimmelman have lost their audiences, they have only themselves to blame. (Plagens’ choice of Kimmelman is odd — when it comes to retros Kimmelman has nearly completely ditched “considered judgment” for mini-biography, usually hagiography. He is not so much the NYT’s ‘chief art critic’ as the NYT’s chief art-features writer.)
Why have bloggers found an audience — and a growing one at that? Bloggers are writerly entrepeneurs. Instead of expecting an audience to come to us in the musty art magazines, we work to earn readers, to build audiences, to be a writerly ‘brand.’ Many bloggers, myself included, have consciously rejected the ‘traditional’ art criticism model because it’s confining and appropriate only for dino-media.
And on MAN: Snark is about two percent of what I do here, and most of the snark here is short-hand for years-old, oft-repeated positions (such as virtually anything I type about Malcolm Rogers). I’d like to think that there’s plenty of art criticism on MAN, a lot of considered judgment, plenty of only-on-MAN news, information, and hopefully some fresh ways of thinking about art and about issues in the art world. If the site isn’t that, I’ll have to work harder to get it there.

The Judd Foundation’s mission is to “promote a wider appreciation and understanding of Judd’s artistic legacy by facilitating public access to these spaces and resources (in NYC and Texas) and developing scholarly and educational programs. How’s it doing?

Among the most-expensive house-tours in America: The Judd Foundation is now offering tours of Donald Judd’s 101 Spring Street residence at 11am on Fridays. The cost: $30. [via] The first once-a-week groups of eight went through the house last Friday.
(As of this typing, the Judd Foundation has yet to formally announce the opening of the property. A press release is supposed to go out today. I only heard because the Foundation leaked first-word to a lifestyle mag. Preventing sticker-shock by hiding the sticker?)
I’m hardly an expert on house tours, but here are some points of admissions-price comparison: The Biltmore Estate, which weighs in at 250 rooms and is thus somewhat bigger than 101 Spring, charges $25-44 for entry. Hearst Castle, which is also a bit larger than 101 Spring, has a complicated ticket pricing system with prices (I think) between $20 and $30. Early American decorative arts mecca Winterthur charges $20. The $30 fee is 50 percent more than New York’s two most-expensive regular museum admissions ($20 at MoMA and $20 suggested at the Met). Judd will offer student and senior tickets for $15.
I’m glad that 101 Spring Street is open to the public, but the price is exclusionary rather than inclusionary. I’m not sure how this furthers Judd’s legacy or makes his work more accessible to anyone except those already enamored of it — and wealthy enough to get in.
Chinati is still $10.
Related: The Judd Foundation sale part one, part two.

Jasper Johns is one of the co-stars of the Magritte & Pals exhibition at LACMA. “Of all the artists of the post-war generation who absorbed the spirit of Magritte,” writes Stephanie Barron in the show’s catalog, “it is Johns who displays the closest links.” The proximity of several Johnses in Barron’s installation (including LACMA’s own Figure 7 at right and the Broad Art Foundation’s White Flag) makes a killer case.
Meanwhile, yesterday a Jeffrey Weiss-curated exhibit about Jasper Johns’ 1955-1965 output opened at the National Gallery of Art. Rene Magritte is mentioned nowhere in the catalogue.
So how is it one major curator thinks that Magritte is central to Johns’ work, while another apparently doesn’t? Answer: For reasons not immediately clear to me, Weiss has excluded Johns’ flags and numbers and so on from his show, allowing only four Johnsian motifs: targets, the stenciled names of colors, the imprint of the body, and handprints. Weiss knew that the exclusion of those works would be questioned, and addresses it in his catalogue essay:

“Isolating the structure of the linkage from the rest of Johns’ production is a heuristic conceit, but the pattern it represents cuts through the center of Johns’ activity, establishing terms by which process divulges itself to be the primary source for a poetics of the work.”

Or, to put it in English: ‘I have an argument I want to make, and because I can eliminate a couple of key bodies of work, I will.’ Fine. Curator’s prerogative. But the result is an oddly incomplete look at Johns’ best decade; too much argument and not enough The Way it Was.
Back in LA, Barron’s Johnses make her thesis sing: Certainly no artist in Barron’s show owes more to LACMA’s seminal Magritte. With his flag paintings Johns was saying “This is not a flag,” but he was also saying, “Can this be a painting?” and then, “Can it be both a painting and a flag?” Like Magritte with his pipe, Johns is happy to leave his questions sitting there, unanswered. (In 1991 Robert Gober took Magritte’s question, did something with it, and then by tackling Johns’ questions did something else to it.)
I don’t mean to imply that tying Johns to Magritte would improve the NGA show, just that the banishment of key works (works so effectively used 3,000 miles away) make up a befuddling omission. (More on this next week, I think.) I can’t imagine that a curator would launch a show of mid-1960sThiebauds and leave out all paintings of pies, or that a curator would put together a Flavin show that included no diagonal lights — only verticals or horizontals. I’m not sure what would be gained or learned from those exclusions. And I can’t figure out what we learn about Johns’ first decade by excluding some of his best works.
Previously: Magritte & Ruscha I,and a dream juxtaposition.

Last year I was the low-light on a panel of fairly distinguished arts journos. (The panel discussion was held at a National Arts Journalism Program conference.) Our ranks included Bloomberg’s Jeff Weinstein, NYT arts editor Sam Sifton, PRI’s Kurt Andersen, and others. At one point Sifton said something about his staff and blogging and I replied that I thought that the MSM should probably hire bloggers to blog because to that point I hadn’t seen a lot of daily journos really figure out the whole blogging thing.
Now, eight months later, a bunch of print journos are active in the art-blogging realm: There’s Geoff Edgers at the Boston Globe, Richard Lacayo at Time, Regina Hackett at the Seattle P-I, the Washington City Paper’s Jeffry Cudlin, Jen Graves at The Stranger, and so on.
It has become obvious that I was wrong, that many daily journos eventually figured it out. Sure, many daily journos who blog write endlessly long, character-lacking posts (see many of the ‘blogs’ at washingtonpost.com, for example), but in the arts realm all of the writers I just mentioned maintain entertaining sites. All of them interact with the rest of the blogosphere. Few of them attempt to drive an agenda via blog the way experienced bloggers do (the political blogs excel at this), but in time…
Anyway, I was wrong. And I’m really enjoying being wrong on this one well into the future. I’d love it if Doug Harvey started blogging. And Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Robert Hughes, Alan Riding, Ren Weschler, Kenneth Baker…
UPDATE: My wrongness continues: Doug Harvey’s new-ish blog is here.