Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Dave Hickey lists his ten favorite works of art in the new Believer magazine, says The Stranger’s Jen Graves.
Everyone who admired the Monet poster above their fourth grade teacher’s desk has a similar list in mind. I know I do, but I’ve never committed it to pixels. Honestly? I didn’t know you could — the whole idea seems unserious, irreverent in the wrong way. After all, a silly, Letterman-like top ten list makes a mockery out of hundreds — nay, thousands — of years of art history. It elevates a few arbitrary pieces over the sanctity of the whole. It abolishes respect for the timeline of achievement. It diminishes artistic practice and progress.
Which is why Dave Hickey kicks serious ass. Consider, for a moment, the critical and curatorial problem of the moment (a problem that inflicts other adjectives as well): The apparent passing of judgment — that is the death of judgment, oh that it were the other kind! — a widespread, systemwide acquiescence to mere popularity. Right now everyone wants to be invited to the right party, the right scene event, to be liked rather than respected. As a result, there’s too much going along to get along.
This trend brings to mind two Peter Schjeldahl stories. One is from about 2002, when in a Brice Marden review (I think) Schjeldahl pined for the days when art lovers had a favorite abstract painter to which they were committed. You were a Kline guy, a Hassel Smith woman, and so on. Schjeldhal noted that this was no longer the case, that people now tend to line up by medium: He’s a paintings curator, she’s a fan of installation art, and so on. That trend has accelerated, leading to more validation of media and less judgment.
The second Schjeldahl story that comes to mind is a story about an experience. Somehow, about four years ago, I found myself across a Hollywood dinner table from Schjeldahl. When Dean Schjeldahl asked me to — and I quote — “Please pass the bread,” I worried that I might do it wrong. (I spent the meal with my mouth shut and my hands busy funneling baked goods toward the distinguished ex-sportswriter from North Dakota.)
Something Schjeldahl said that night has stuck with me ever since: When discussing a minimalist gone south, Schjeldahl sniffed, “He is not an artist,” and then asked for the butter. My dining companion and I nodded. The dean’s speech was plain, it came with conviction, and it concluded just in time for him to discover that he needed the butter. It was as fair a place to begin a discussion of said artist as any. Where can I go to hear a conversation about Richard Prince started that same way?
Back to Dave Hickey. Top ten lists force judgment upon you. In some ways they’re a pretty good exercise because they make you pick and choose. They force you to think about what you like, what you really, really like, and why. They force you away from the ever-so-safe ‘This is what’s important’ to the much riskier, ‘This is important but it doesn’t touch me in an affecting way.’ To commit to a list is to commit to judgment. (I’m guessing that they don’t do this at SVA’s much-advertised grad program in art criticism.) So I look forward to seeing what Hickey includes in his top ten. And I’m going to make my own. And I hope a few other people do too.
Update: Ronald Bladen’s The X is not a hint. Of any kind.

Over at his Exhibitionist blog, the Boston Globe’s Geoff Edgers says that MFA Boston director Malcolm Rogers would face some “challenges” if he left Beantown for the London’s National Gallery. Among them: That the National Gallery has only $82 million a year in acquisitions money to spend. Given that in the last two years for which I have tax filings the MFAB has spent roughly $16M and $8M on acquisitions, $82M doesn’t seem so bad. (By comparison, the Met has averaged spending $67.5M per annum on art acquisitions in the last couple years.) Given my thoughts on King Malcolm, I’d prefer it if Edgers emphasized how attractive the London job is.

Yes, there is a rivalry. Remember: The Hammer landed some ex-MOCA board members. So is it on? Will the Hammer respond to MOCA by booking 50 Cent?

Earlier this month Emily Jacir won the Golden Lion for artists under 40 at the Venice Biennale. I’ve been fascinated by the subversiveness and the urgency of Jacir’s work since I first saw it at NYC’s Debs & Co. a number of years ago. My friend Choire Sicha was half of that gallery, so on the occasion of Jacir’s Venice award I asked him to share his favorite Jacir story.
Choire Sicha: “Working with Emily was crazy-difficult — and not because she was a diva like some artists, though she was immensely thoughtful about the display and context of her work. [My partner] Nick Debs booked her first New York show with us for May 2003 and we were planning it during 2002, during some of which she was teaching and living in Palestine.
That year the Israeli army, having already bombed Ramallah by air, came into [the] town and raided houses, attacked people on the streets, cut off the electricity, and took over the local media. The emails we got from Emily (when she could!) were unbelievable. Mostly I remember us being in New York and our concerns were like, ‘We need to get prints for collectors who want them delivered before their next dinner party’ and she was like, ‘Okay, I’ll get back to you in a couple of days, we’re not able to really leave the house and we’re staying out of bullet range of the windows.’
I may have never seen a piece of art as remarkable as the secret video recordings she made of her daily commute through the checkpoints just to get to work. [Shown here is a still from that piece: 2002's Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work).]I remember her emailing us about how the soldiers had seized her passport and harassed her on her way to work. That she produced such clear conceptual work under those conditions is hard to believe. (And to think I used to complain about how there was no good public transportation to the West Chelsea gallery district!) She was such a compulsive traveler — having grown up stateless, in a sense, it was almost like she was more comfortable in transit. Some days I wouldn’t know what country she was in. She’s amazing.”
Related: Jacir’s current NYC gallery, Alexander and Bonin, has lots of images of her work.

First on MAN: The MCA Chicago’s new director will be Madeleine Grynsztejn, SFMOMA’s senior curator. Grynsztejn has curated a number of major shows, including the 1999 Carnegie International, a Richard Tuttle retrospective and the Olafur Eliasson extravaganza on view now at SFMOMA.
Grynsztejn replaces Robert Fitzpatrick, 66, who had led the MCA for a decade. MCA Chicago has a roughly $13 million operating budget.

Background on what I’m doing. I added more Denver blogs today. Next: Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Eyeteeth and Off Center are already on the lead list. Please leave suggestions in the comments.
Also: I just discovered that some ‘good’ comments were being diverted into a ’spam’ folder. Sorry about that. I’ll keep a closer eye on the ’spam.’

Today the Chronicle of Philanthropy came out with its annual Philanthropy 400, a look at what 400 American charities received the most in private giving in 2006. If you work in the non-profit sector, want to, give to it, and so on… it’s a must-read.
The key line for art-lovers is this: “Among the Philanthropy 400, arts and culture organizations achieved the biggest fund-raising gains last year. Their donations grew by nearly 51 percent, as they mounted capital campaigns or other special appeals.” However the Chronicle counts ‘arts and culture organizations’ separately from museums. Only these art museums made the list: MFA Houston (at No. 87), MoMA (125), the Smithsonian (128), MFA Boston (129), the Met (171), the Art Institute of Chicago (217), the Philly Museum (227), and the Nelson-Atkins (269). (The NYPL came in at 344. The Huntington Library was included in the ‘arts and culture’ list and came in at 345.) Building projects obviously have a major impact on who makes the list and who doesn’t.
A couple of observations:

At right, Lari Pittman’s 2003 Untitled #16.
From Doug Harvey’s review of Pittman’s 2003 Regen Projects show for LA Weekly: “At times over the last decade, it has seemed as if Pittman was struggling to find a vocabulary that could resolve his sense of personal and political isolation. Perhaps he discovered the obvious: Sometimes you just have to wait until everyone is as paranoid as you.”
From today’s Paul Krugman column in the New York Times:

Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up — perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base’s older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general.
And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear.
Just to be clear, Al Qaeda is a real threat, and so is the Iranian nuclear program. But neither of these threats frightens me as much as fear itself — the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America’s two great political parties.

Related: I have a couple more Pittman-related posts coming in the next few weeks. Pittman is featured in the current season of Art21. ‘His’ episode ran last night in most markets. I don’t keep a list of my ten favorite works of the decade, but if I did this Pittman would be on it.