Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Two of America’s most prominent nationally-focused art critics have been beating the drum for The Art of the Steal, the Barnes Foundation documentary that one of them, Time’s Richard Lacayo calls “the surprise hit” of the Toronto film festival. (Christopher Knight has also been blogging and tweeting up a storm about the doc.)

Over the last few days Lacayo has posted four times about the documentary. The posts are more important than anything I could type here this morning, so don’t miss them: Part one, two, three, four, five.

And oh yeah, I’m still waiting for the Philadelphia Museum of Art to announce it’s hosting an Art of the Steal screening…

This week PBS is airing a Ken Burns documentary on the history of America’s National Parks system. I haven’t seen the series yet, but I hope the documentary makes this point: Artists were a key motivating force behind the creation of what Burns calls America’s “best idea.” If you need an example of how and why the arts matter to a society and to the United States in particular, the founding moment of our national park system is a good place to start. [Image: Grizzly Giant, Carleton Watkins, New York Public Library.]

Throughout the middle of the 19thC artists were on the vanguard of making Americans aware of the grandeur of the land. (Writers, including John Muir and John Wesley Powell, were influential too.) None were more important than Carleton Watkins, America’s first great artist. Watkins’ photos of the American West, and his 1861 pictures of Yosemite in particular, were a revelation to Easterners who had little context for the scale and majesty of the West.

In 1862 Goupil’s Art Gallery, an important New York space, showed Watkins’ pictures of California to great acclaim. Among the visitors was Albert Bierstadt, who promptly made plans to go west to paint. Magazines such as North Pacific Review and Atlantic Monthly reviewed the work favorably. Influential opinion leaders such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes saw Watkins’ work and were moved to advocate for not just the westward movement of Easterners, but for the land itself. Frederick Law Olmsted, who had apparently seen Watkins’ pictures even before the Goupil’s show, urged Congress not to privatize great natural places, but to instead hold them in public trust.

But that’s not all: Watkins’ interest in Yosemite lands also provides an unusually direct example of how art can impact public policy. In February, 1864, a representative of a steamship company proposed to California Sen. John Conness that the federal government set aside Yosemite valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove as protected areas. The representative included in his correspondence with Sen. Conness a portfolio of Watkins’ photos of Yosemite.

Conness was likely already familiar with Watkins’ work — Olmsted and scientist Josiah Whitney had shared Watkins’ stereoscopic photographs with Conness, who showed the portfolio and the stereoscopes to his fellow senators as he lobbied for passage of his bill. Watkins’ work was a hit, the bill passed and President Abraham Lincoln promptly signed it into law. The 1864 legislation addressing the preservation of the Yosemite valley and Mariposa Grove was the precursor to the 1872 legislation that created the nation’s (and the world’s) first true national park.

(Watkins’ role didn’t end there: Olmsted became an appointed commissioner of Yosemite and promptly enlisted the photographer to consult with him as to the best ways to preserve and use the park.)

Related: I wonder if Georgia O’Keeffe saw Watkins’ Grizzly Giant? Key sources and books to read on Watkins, the West and American environmentalism: Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception edited by Douglas R. Nickel, Richard Grusin’s Culture, Technology and the Creation of America’s National Parks, and Aaron Sachs’ The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism.

This would have run yesterday morning had it not been for AJ’s server hiccup. Most of these links have stayed fresh though…

• Two San Franciscans died over the weekend: RIP Donald Fisher, Gap founder, art collector and SFMOMA patron. RIP Emile Norman, artist (my uncle restored this piece).
• The LAT’s Mike Boehm excerpts Michelle Obama telling the G-20 why the arts are important to a free society. 
• Christopher Knight puts the GOP-driven NEA faux-kerfuffle in context.
  
• Brandeis president and wanna-be Larry Gagosian Jehuda Reinharz is resigning. The Globe’s Peter Schworm has the story. Reinharz does not cite the Rose Art Museum problems as a factor. Ohhhh-kay.
• In the LA Weekly, Christopher Miles says that Kevin Appel is doing his best work.
• Jerry Saltz on Georgia O’Keeffe at the Whitney.
• In the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Gaile Robinson looks at an Amon Carter exhibition that looks at America’s exploitation of the West — and how Americans liked to see that use, er, masked via art.
• SFMOMA gave Carol Vogel a preview of the Fisher gift and she gave them 175 words. (Worth it or embarrassing?) Kenneth Baker has the (also leaked) story you should read.

Nota bene: MAN and other ArtsJournal-hosted blogs had some database issues between sun-up and 3:15pm EDT today. Apologies for the lack of posting. Normal content will resume tomorrow, complete with a delayed ‘weekend roundup’ post.

First on MAN: As I first reported via Twitter, the Smithsonian Institution has offered its staff a buyout/early retirement package. The email cites “budget challenges.” The full email from the castle to staff is in the jump.

(more…)

I’m traveling. Blog content is back on Monday, tweeting will be as usual. Meanwhile, in case you were away this past summer here are some links to some posts you may have missed. I think that the series on the NGA’s Titian/Giorgione may be especially entertaining…

Each year I do a roundup post of substantial posts you may have
missed while vacationing this past summer. This is the 2009 version. As
always, you can read months in their totality by using the pull-down
menu at right.

June

• The National Gallery of Art’s so-called America.
• ‘Cezanne and Beyond’ in Philadelphia: Part one, two, three.

July

• Examining the latest industrial threat to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.
• The next steps at the Great Salt Lake.
• Critiquing deaccessioning by making art.
• Remembering Robert Hilferty.

August

• Addressing the future of art journalism — if there is one (a September follow-up).
• The mystery of the Venetian gentleman: Is a National Gallery of Art portrait a Titian? A Giorgione? Or something else? Part one, two, three, four.
• Reading Ovid with Ellsworth and Jerome (at the Pulitzer Foundation).

Posts on torture and national responsibility on MAN (January through summer)

• An inaugural presentation as America transitions from Bush to Obama: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn;
• The Abu Ghraib photos and the national collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress: part one, part two;
• The Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler’s The Gray Drape;
• Bruce Nauman at the Venice Biennale: Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America’s torture of Abu Zubaydeh; with a look at Nauman’s hanging chair sculptures in Chicago and Washington: part one, part two; and
• Gerhard Richter’s Uncle Rudi: A foundational painting. As discussed by Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Gallery (UK), as discussed by Art of Two Germanys at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. MAN analyzes: Uncle Rudi and quiet confrontation, Uncle Rudi and the response to torture.

Over the summer I spent a couple days sitting on art:21’s advisory panel. I was there to talk about web-related stuff, but I was surprised to find myself most fascinated by art:21’s schools-focused programs. Before the panel sessions I didn’t know anything about art:21’s education-focused offerings, educational uses of the program, any of that. (My excuse: I don’t have kids, most of my friends don’t have kids and with the possible exception of NHL-draft-eligible, major-junior hockey players, I’m just not that plugged into the under-18 set.)

So over the course of several days I heard schoolteachers and the art:21 staff talk about how art:21 was used in America’s schools to inject art and artists into conversations that students are already having about insert subject here. This did not exist when I was in school. In the whole of my elementary and secondary school career the closest I came to discussing art in the classroom was about 75 minutes on Renaissance painting when I was a sophomore in high school. (Thanks Mr. Holubar!) Given the increasing American focus on preparing students for standardized tests instead of preparing them for the world, my experience was, sadly, on the vanguard of American education.

Yesterday art:21 released the education materials that go along with its fifth-season program. They’re smart. They don’t shy away from challenging subjects. The first question on the education guide for Doris Salcedo is: “What are the different ways in which our society remembers current and historic events? In what ways do monuments, textbooks, or works of art convey history and historic events?” Right next to the question is a picture of Salcedo’s installation at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial. Nothing watered-down about that.

Take a quick look at art:21’s materials. Or better yet, pass the link on to your kids’ teachers or to a teacher you know.

Related: Season Five education guide. More resources, events for educators.

In 1975 the Baltimore Museum of Art included a number of Anne Truitt’s Arundel paintings in an exhibition. The works are white, starkly white, with a little white paint on top, and some marks in graphite. I’ve never seen one, so that’s all I know about them.

When they were exhibited at the BMA they caused something of a fuss. Truitt told the story in Daybook, her now-legendary journal:

… I encountered the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. He told me that there  has been something of a clamor in Baltimore to the effect that the public’s money is being misspent placing on display in the city museum such meaningless works as the Arundel paintings. So vitriolic were these comments that the mayor of Baltimore telephoned to assure him that he stood behind the museum’s decisions.

Truitt was taken aback by this reaction. Later she found out that a Baltimore newspaperman had written a sarcastic review and that over the course of several successive Sundays the newspaper had piled on and on. In the final anti-Truitt, anti-abstract-art installment, the paper had vaguely suggested that the museum should lose municipal funding. That’s when the mayor of Baltimore called the BMA director, Tom Freudenheim, to express his support.

Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about Truitt’s experience in
1975 and about the response to abstraction now. Those of us who live in the art world
think nothing of abstraction. We’ve had 100 years to get used to it. Still, earlier in my lifetime it prompted mass civic agita in a then-major Eastern city.

And now! There are two ways of demonstrating how the public response to abstraction has changed. First, the fancy-pants way: This season northeastern museums are all about abstract painting. These shows are among the most anticipated of the year, both by critics (ahem) and by Joe and Jane from Islip.

The exhibitions include two painters beloved by the public for their representational work: Georgia O’Keeffe at the Whitney, and Claude Monet at MoMA. At the Guggenheim, a Wassily Kandinsky retrospective completes the rare opportunity to consider Monet’s late abstractions with Kandinsky’s experiments. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has never been shy about presenting smart, audience-challenging shows (see Newman, Barnett) and this season the museum brings us an Arshile Gorky retro. And here in Washington, the Hirshhorn launches the first Truitt retrospective since Walter Hopps’ Corcoran show in 1974. (It’s not just the northeast, either: Across the country even SFMOMA, the ’safest’ modern/contemporary museum around, is trumpeting its relationship with abstractionists in a fall show.) None of these museums are niche, hip contemporary art spaces. They’re all big museums with broad audiences. All these shows will draw big crowds.

That’s nice. But the best indication of how thoroughly abstract art has gone over is that the biggest, best-known National Football League team has used it to decorate and to gussy-up the ultimate mainstream-American, Joe Suburb, macho-man site imaginable: the ginormous new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The stadium features 14 works of contemporary abstraction by Olafur Eliasson, Franz Ackermann, Teresita Fernandez and more. (Here’s a complete list. At left: Mel Bochner.)

How thoroughly has abstract art won over middle-America? NBC’s Today show sent out the uber-bland everyman Al Roker for a tour of Cowboys Stadium art. A football fan who had been to the stadium-opening George Strait concert was so taken with a Gary Simmons mural that he Flickred how much he dug it. (Just as interesting is how thoroughly artists have been won over by the opportunity to present abstraction to the masses: Read Dave Muller’s comments on making a piece for Cowboys Stadium.)

In a way, a football arena is the ultimate test. Throughout the biggest stadium ever built in America, abstract art competes for fan attention with installations by Ford, Dr. Pepper, Mitsubishi and Pepsi. It’s as if abstraction has become a brand that can compete with anything.

Can technology help art museums avoid or resolve cultural heritage snafus?

The Indianapolis Museum of Art’s tech team has helped the Association of Art Museum Directors launch a new site: The AAMD Object Registry. The site will help present new acquisitions of certain archeological materials and works of ancient art as well as document the resolution of claims of Nazi-era cultural objects.

Could Pennsylvania be the first state to tax art museum admissions? The Philly Inky’s Stephan Salisbury says yes, and explains the state’s rationale. [Image]

Nevermind that this is a regressive idea, at odds with the spirit of non-profithood and the state’s other policy goals (such as education) and nevermind the policy implications; this tax proposal raises practical issues for Pennsylvania arts organizations. It’s a difficult tax for even the state’s major art institutions to lobby against: The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s most recent IRS filing indicates that the tax as applied to PMA visitors in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008 would have netted the state about $300,000. That figure is small enough that it may not be cost-effective for an individual institution such as the PMA to lobby over.

(Regarding lobbying: the kindness and connectedness of a plugged-in board goes only so far. The PMA knows it — in that same tax filing the museum reveals it spent almost $83,000 on lobbying that year. Besides, why should the PMA be opposed to this tax? If it goes through imagine what a boon it would be to upper-middle-class-targeted museum membership programs. There’s are certainly reasons for an art museum to not arduously oppose this tax.)

Not all cultural institutions work the way art museums do. Here’s hoping arts groups in Pennsylvania have built strong, Harrisburg-effective coalitions. Art museums in other states should take this as a lesson to make sure they’ve built the same.

Next, the real question is: Why are Pennsylvania institutions facing this now? It’s hard to miss the confluence of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s outrageous ‘Cezanne and Beyond’ ticket fees and this tax proposal. Extortionately high exhibition charges — the PMA asked a family of four for $88, over $100 with parking — helped create this problem.

Those fees have done two things: First, they say that the museum (and the arts in general) is a place for mostly the wealthy, so why not soak the rich with a sneaky tax no one else will notice or pay? And secondly, if a museum looks like an opportunistic business and if it acts like a greedy price-gouger, how can it be surprised when a local government wants to treat it the way it’s been acting?

• Some newspaper critics spend most of their so-called reviews on Art 101-style biographical re-hash. In discussing Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, Peter Plagens tries something different, something more critically engaged: He starts with Kandinsky and then skates through a dozen or so painters — both famous and not — who carry on after Kandinsky’s pioneering abstractions. 
• Sometimes it reads like a critic wants to like a work whether he does or not, like when Sebastian Smee types up Damian Ortega at the Boston ICA.
• I think Katharina Grosse is one of the most underrated abstract painters out there, and the Denver Art Museum provides her with a potentially fantastic mix of canvas and painter. Kyle MacMillan follows Grosse as she creates. (The story includes an unusual assertion from a curator: “She knows what she’s doing…”)
• Jen Graves cringes. You will too.
• The Buffalo News’ Colin Dabkowski notices a surge in art about decay and entropy.
• Richard Lacayo visits Jerry Jones Stadium. Gasp.

On Sunday, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter spent 1,400 words telling us that he wants the museo-blockbuster to be over, that tight, little shows should become the new norm. “I want to see our big museums seriously rethink the blockbuster phenomenon,” he said. “It started decades ago as a publicity stunt and quickly became an addiction for audiences and museums alike… as a default exhibition mode, supersizers can be killers. They divert attention from everything else in the museum and cost a bundle.”

I expressed an opposing view. Christopher Knight did too, tweeting, “Art museum blockbusters are only lame if their motive if financial or they’re badly done; otherwise, on with the show.” Yesterday Richard Lacayo wrote in praise of blockbusters: “As [art] historical education goes, museums are just about the only real schoolrooms we have anymore,” he said. “Museums that don’t regularly revisit the “familiar” chapters of that history are letting us down.”

Cotter was silent.

Today, Cotter reviewed a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at the Whitney. Nowhere in the write-up does Cotter reference his Sunday think-piece. Instead he raved about the show, describing it as a “vivid and surprisingly surprising show of more than 130 paintings and drawings.”

One hundred and thirty paintings? Of the most popular American painter of the last century? In a season-headlining show at a big New York museum? Wouldn’t that be… a blockbuster?!