Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

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The Toronto Star’s Peter Goddard says that Richard Serra’s landmark earthwork Shift (1970-72) is possibly threatened by development. (Don’t miss that link — Serra’s story of how he got permission to use the land is fantastic.) Art lovers are hoping that the site will become protected by the Ontario Heritage Act, perhaps as soon as Feb. 11.
Shift is located in King City, Ontario, just north of Toronto. (You can see it via Google Satellite.) The piece was made from concrete, but Serra would now like to replace the concrete with steel.
“To me it was a breakthrough piece,” Serra told Goddard. “You can find many pieces (by others) which came after Shift. They have direct links back to that piece.”
Related: Serra talks about how he and Joan Jonas found and walked the site in the summer of 1970. Neat story by King councillor Cleve Mortelliti about how he found Shift as a kid… and then again years later.

The Menil recently acquired Goode’s Torn Cloud Painting 60 (1971-76), a gift of the artist in honor of Walter Hopps.
One way to think of Joe Goode’s work is this: How can an artist destroy the picture plane while remaining true to it? There are his milk-bottle paintings of the 1960s, in which Goode plays pop off of trompe l’oeil — here’s a consumer object in front of the canvas, here’s a (painted) shadow, here’s a (non-painted) shadow… what is ‘real’ and what isn’t? (MOCA recently acquired one of these Goodes in as part of a gift from Michael Asher.)
And then there are the cloud paintings of the 1970s, in which Goode tears into the picture plane, revealing a painted surface below. In this series Goode mixes in references to Magritte, an artist whose influence on Los Angeles-based artists in the 1960s and 1970s was a subject of LACMA’s recent ‘Treachery of Images’ show.
“I like those particular paintings,” Goode said of Magritte’s cloud-heavy paintings in a series of interviews with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. “[They] did look surreal, but, to me this idea of looking through something was more important than the image itself. And the idea of seeing – when I did the milk bottle paintings, I would take the milk bottle and I’d set it in front on the step, and then I would have a line that went back into perspective to show that this milk bottle painting came out of this environment, at this very specific place in this painting.
“So I was totally unconscious in thinking about this but at the time I didn’t understand that I was trying to show this idea of perception, that you see through something.”
Related: The Portland Art Museum acquired a nice Goode last year.

In 1969 Ellsworth Kelly made Spectrum V (left), which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In that same year Kelly wrote “Notes of 1969,” a meandering tract of attached sentences about his work, his inspiration, and the lineage in which he considered himself. (He edited some of the notes in 1993.)
“My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved or square,” Kelly wrote. “I am less interested in marks on the panels than the ‘presence’ of the panels themselves.” And later: “I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a very personal handwriting, putting marks on canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something which has a different use.”
Kelly’s Spectrum works, especially the horizontal ones, are where presence meets color. When they were painted, mostly in the 1960s, they must have seemed preposterously huge. (Today, when we’re well-accustomed to big paintings, it takes architecture to equal the same kind of presence. The Baltimore Ravens’ very purple football stadium is my favorite example.) If you stand in front of one of the Spectrum paintings and look from the left to the right realfast, you understand what Kelly means by paintings that have a different use. They aren’t ephemeral or phenomenological like Light & Space work, but they are Presence & Color. That’s in the same league, just in a different division. (This one is SLAM’s Spectrum II.)
Which brings us to Olafur Eliasson and his 360-degree room for all colours (2002). The piece is a giant, circular room in which the colors of the walls gradually change. The effect is both soothing and creepy — I actually felt my eyes adjusting to the different colors and to the varying brightness of the light.
Eliasson’s room isn’t anywhere near as totemic as Kelly’s canvases, but they share some chromatic effects. The subtle variations in color pulls the eye through Kelly’s canvases, and when I’m standing in Eliasson’s room my eyes want to race around his wall the way a hamster races around its wheel. As in Kelly’s work there are no marks in 360 indicate that an artist was here, Eliasson is trying to create the same kind of “presence” that Kelly did. And he succeeds.
Previously: Related: Olafur Eliasson meets… art history. Pieter de Hooch. Richard Serra. Vija Celmins.

Lots of good blogs just added to the MAN blogroll under “New York City.” Scroll down, look right.

Yesterday I talked about how a confluence of factors has led to a situation in which art museums ought be concerned about the future of their audiences, and why. Today I want to suggest some ways art museums could address this.
I’m surprised how little art museums — especially contemporary museums — do to communicate with their audiences. Most do some kind of monthly or quarterly newsletter, a lame affair that mentions upcoming exhibits and upcoming items in the store. The Hammer’s includes paparazzi-style photos of their famous supporters. MOCA members receive Dwell magazine, which is lovely but has nothing to do with contemporary art. I’m on the press/something list for about 25 museum publications and there isn’t one that rises above useless. (The exception is an annual: Chinati’s newsletter. And in a non-contemporary way, the Met’s Bulletin is useful too.)
So where’s the innovation in how museums spread the word, where’s the spirit of progressive non-profits that make earning and motivating audiences a key part of their mission? Why hasn’t an art museum partnered with an NPR station on local/regional programming, or with NPR itself on a national podcast? Why haven’t art museums studied how aggressive progressive non-profits reach and build and inform/educate their target audiences? (Have they? I haven’t seen any evidence…)
I’m a writer, so my biggest suggestion will involve writing. It stems from an idea Christopher Knight had a couple years ago regarding the possible expenditure of the Getty billions.
I’d like to see 6-12 art museums partner to create a smart monthly magazine about art and artists of the last century. The magazine would launch with a circulation of a couple hundred thousand affluent urban types, the precise audience that advertisers love to reach. Think of it as The Atlantic, Believer, Harper’s or Dwell for the visual culture set. The project would probably require venture philanthropy from someone such as the Getty or another large foundation, and a commitment from at least half a dozen museums. (That’s even a really good fit: Most parts of the Getty are trying to find a way to be more involved in contemporary art.) A big museum, such as MoMA or SFMOMA, would have to sign up first. Eventually the magazine would be available on newsstands.
As journalism has gotten out of the business of cultural coverage, it’s become increasingly clear that if cultural writing matters to the art world (and stuffed-to-the-gills museum press offices are an indication that museums want coverage), art institutions are going to have to become involved in supporting cultural journalism.
The magazine I have in mind would include long-format feature stories and profiles about architects, artists, curators, and other important players in contemporary art. It would feature reviews of major shows, a big-ideas back-of-the-book that is more New Yorker or Atlantic than Art in America. The magazine would be about art, but it would use art as a lens through which it looks at the world: It would feature Wangechi Mutu talking about Kenya, Julie Mehretu on diaspora, Spencer Finch on light, and so on. It would focus on how art exists in the world, not on how a market for art exists. The magazine would be a bridge between the impenetrable museum exhibition catalogue intended for scholars, and the exhibition brochure intended for lunchtime conversation.
Almost as important, the magazine would provide a place for young writers to demonstrate their chops. When I read national magazines these days I’m almost embarrassed about some of the arts/artists-related features and profiles I see. There needs to be a bench behind Calvin Tomkins.
Sure, there are some issues here. It would be important for the magazine to have editorial independence. It would important for it to do issues-oriented journalism regarding museums, federal and state arts policies, and all kinds of informed reporting instead of just puff-pieces. It will have to pay freelance writers competitive rates, north of $2/word. The magazine cannot be the only way contemporary art museums work together to spread the word.
But it would be a place to start.

Every single time I’m in an art museum, I hear a variation on this conversation:

“What a painting.”
“Yes, it’s a Warhol. And this one is by Wayne Thiebaud.”
“I wonder what they’re worth?”
“Millions. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in a museum.”

It’s hard to imagine a greater indictment of the current art world than that kind of exchange. I’ve been going to art museums since I was knee-high to a Gris and I’ve not heard those conversations as much as I have in the last year or two.
I think we all know why people see art and think money: In the press, art is all about the market, $140 million sales here, and auction records there. Even New York’s top contemporary art critic, Jerry Saltz, has given in and apparently considers an artist’s retail prices a guiding barometer of worthiness. (If NYC’s top contemporary art critic won’t assert the power of his pulpit to steer us toward deserving artists, who will?) The news media, which has responded to shrinking circulation and ad revenue by cutting staff and coverage — especially arts coverage — understands the market story and writes the heck out of it. The result has been an under-considered change in American arts journalism, a devolution that has major ramifications for art institutions.
Consider: Only a handful of newspapers treat art and arts institutions as a journalistic rather than hagiographic subject. The trend in American journalism is to treat art and visual culture as a fussy little features area, the kind of thing that belongs in its own Sunday section so that it doesn’t contaminate the rest of the paper. The only exception is when something gets sold. Money is something editors understand.
In recent months even the best art-covering newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, has been hit with staff cuts. For the first time in recent memory it has ignored major institutional stories in its own backyard, such as the continuing budget and endowment trouble at MOCA, and the unconscionable fluffing of private collectors by the Hammer and LACMA.
It’s not just the LAT: The Dallas Morning News had no idea how to cover the announcement that King Tut was coming to town, and made a drooling ass of itself. The San Francisco Chronicle has only the faintest inkling of how to report the disastrous tenure of John Buchanan at FAMSF. The Miami Herald writes about art for a week every December, and that’s about it. And coverage of actual artists? Forget about it.
It may come as a surprise to most MAN readers that these changes don’t much bother managers at newspapers and magazines. Their businesses are changing far too dramatically, their balance sheets changing too alarmingly, for them to be worried about specific areas of coverage. So as journalism increasingly treats art as nothing but a business story, who is most impacted?
Art museums. Instead of hanging art to which people respond, museums now find themselves increasingly hanging objects that are the subject of dollars-related curiosity. It’s not just the near-death of arts journalism that’s caused this condition — and that’s why arts institutions should be paying attention. The slow death of arts journalism should be the event that causes art museums to take notice of some recent trends.
Art museums are now operating in an environment that has depleted their audiences of much of their oxygen: Mainstream art journalism is almost gone. Arts education has been nearly entirely removed from the public schools. The notion that a collegiate education should be grounded in the liberal arts is a relic of our parents’ generation. (Many museums have built up excellent schools-focused education programs, efforts that benefit from government grant money. One of the most under-covered education stories of the last decade or two is how as states have eliminated art education in schools, they have funded art education through museum at mere pennies on the prior dollars.)
Museums, desperate to maintain their audiences in the face of diminishing public attraction to actual art objects have launched singles’ nights, sewing circles, bingo games, podcasts that feature museum patrons vapidly saying vacuous things about art, fashion shows, lame education ‘exhibits’ (my all-time favorite is in the Matisse show at the Baltimore Museum of Art: “How to Look at Sculpture”) and so on. Too few museums engage their audiences in the broad area between scholarly, unreadable catalogues available for $75 at the end of an exhibition, and a sewing circle. (If ever a catalogue had an opportunity to be a fun read, it’s SFMOMA’s Olafur Eliasson catalogue. And, well, the pictures are good.)
Museums need to realize that they must engage their public in ways that journalism and schools used to do for them. In no way is it in the medium-to-long-term interest of art museums for people to walk up to a Pollock and have their first reaction be, “What’s it worth?” Art museums exist in their current form because of the far-sightedness of the American people, as evidenced by a tax code that encourages cultural philanthropy. If art museums are ever seen by the American public as mere trophy houses for the accumulated baubles of the wealthy, you can bet that the education-related tax exemptions that allow museums to be museums won’t last any longer than Robert Mapplethorpe did at the Corcoran. (Witness the hostility of powerful Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), whose distaste for museums is barely concealed.) In addition to their tax exemptions, many art museums rely on local and state governments for financial support. One, the St. Louis Art Museum, even relies more directly on the citizenry — on local property taxes — for much of its budget.
Therefore it is intensely in the interest of arts institutions — especially museums — to ensure that their audiences see more than dollar-signs-in-acrylic on their walls. Obviously it is asking too much of, say, a $25 million museum to make up for the banishment of art from schools, from core curricula, and for the business problems in American journalism. But within the spirit of their missions — what MoMA calls “the encouragement of an ever deeper understanding and enjoyment of modern and contemporary art,” I think that art institutions can and should be more innovative in how they wean their audiences off of the compulsion to see dollar-signs first, and art second.
Tomorrow: Kicking around some ideas on ways to do that…