The Other Side

By Charles Kessler

I've been paying attention to the backs of sculptures since my “Day at the Met” post last month. I’m especially fascinated with the backs that are beautifully finished even though the work was intended to be seen from the front, or primarily from the front — work made for niches, alcoves, or shelves, or made to be placed against a wall.

I suspect what might be going on is the artist was dealing with objects believed to be magical or holy or have some other power beyond ordinary objects. As a result, special care must be taken in the making (and possession) of them. Of course all art is experienced as different from ordinary objects, even Duchamp's Readymades. But this work was believed to be so important, so special that even the back had to be given proper respect. They may be simpler and more abstract than the fronts, but they are often more powerful because of it.

Here are my favorites, in chronological order, taken from the Met’s excellent website. Accession numbers are included in the captions to make it easy to find more information about the work. Just type the number into the Met's search window.

Enjoy!

Baby figure, 12th - 9th century B.C., Mexico, Olmec, ceramic, cinnabar, red ocher, 13 ⅜ x 12 ½ x 5 ¾ inches (1979.206.1134).

Ritual figure, Late Period or early Ptolemaic, 380 - 246 B.C., Egypt, wood, 8 ¼ inches high (2003.154).

Dionysos leaning on a female figure, Roman, 27 B.C. - A.D. 68, marble, 82 ¾ inches high (1990.247).

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, Seated in Royal Ease, Angkor period, Cambodia or Thailand, 10th - 11th century, bronze with silver inlay (1992.336).

Virgin and Child in Majestry, Reliquary, c.1150-1200, walnut with paint, gesso and linen,  31 5/16 x 12 ½ x 11 ½ inches (16.32.194).

Saint Margaret of Antioch, c.1475, alabaster, 15 ⅜ x 9 ⅝ x 6 9/16 inches (2000,641).

Prestige Stool, Female Caryatid, Buli Master, ca. 1810-1870, wood and metal studs, 24 inches high (1979.290).

Chelsea Gallery Roundup

By Charles Kessler

Doug Wheeler, "Infinity Environment," SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012), David Zwirner Gallery

I was in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies so I saw a lot of "Light and Space" art. I didn't like it then and I still don't. I think it's easy and cheap (Robert Irwin's floating disk paintings —  soooo miraculous and Zen. Awesome, man!), but I didn't expect to find Doug Wheeler's "Infinity Environment" at David Zwirner (through February 25th) ridiculous and pretentious in addition to cheap.

First you have to wait your turn in an outer room, then you're required to take off your shoes and put white booties on your feet as if you're going into some kind of holy clean room.

Waiting area for Dour Wheeler's "Infinity Environment." The two people on the left requested anonymity.

Then someone instructs you on what you can and cannot do, where you're allowed to stand and what's the best way to experience the work. All this for the psychedelic experience of seeing nothing but white space (and maybe some floaters depending on your age). Oh please.

There were a lot of good things happening in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies -- Ron Davis, John McLaughlin, Charles Garabedian, Frank Gehry, Abstract Expressionist Ceramics, performance art -- just to name some. It's a shame that "Light and Space" art and the "Cool School" are getting the most attention now.

But Chelsea has a lot of work I love, and -- I never thought I'd say this -- most of it is video art. Although it's become a joke that now every exhibition of painting or sculpture has to have a video component, the video is usually pretty lame and the sculpture and paintings are really the main thing.

John Miller, "Suburban Past Time," installation view, 20112.

These exhibitions are the opposite; the real interest of these artists seems to be the videos and their other work seems secondary or peripheral:

John Miller's installations at Metro Pictures (through March 10th) are simple, strange and beautiful, but his videos (made in collaboration with Takuji Kogo) are more powerful. The text for the soundtrack was taken from personal ads, animated and set to manipulated voice recordings, which might not seem like much, but the result is poetic and deeply moving.

Paul Kasmin, in an additional new space around the corner on 27th Street, presents James Nares "Pendulum" films from 1976 (through February 11th) along with photographs and related work from the films. The films, shots of various objects swinging on a wire hung from a footbridge over a gritty Manhattan street, are claustrophobic and disorienting, and beautiful and haunting; the related work is just related work -- not much without the films.

Monica Cook at the always cutting-edge Postmasters gallery (through February 11th), is an interesting case similar to Allison Schulnik except not quite as extreme. The sculptures on display were used to make the animations and they struck me as heavy-handed and so disgusting they border on silly. But they work great in the animations. What is it about video that allows us to accept more pathos and melodrama than we'll tolerate in painting or sculpture?

Monica Cook, installation view, Postmasters, detail view of the character Oriana.

I was disappointed in Shirin Neshat's video at Gladstone Gallery (through February 11th). It doesn't have the stark dramatic impact of her past work; but it's a lot better than the photos on view which seem very cranked out.

One pet peeve regarding presentation of video: why the f*** can't galleries provide a proper viewing experience. Presenting video in a room without seats and expecting people to stand for twenty minutes or more is just rude and inconsiderate. Even worse, as was the case with John Miller’s videos at Metro Pictures, is showing them in a room where people have to pass in front of the video. Kudos to Postmasters and Gladstone for providing a proper theater.

Okay, since I'm all worked up, here's my rant on Damien Hirst's "Spot Paintings." I like Hirst’s work, I really do. I like its ambitiousness, boldness, humor and inventiveness. But this is cynically corporate work that at best is mildly interesting for the variety he can achieve with such limited means. Moreover, I suspect his hype has finally caught up with him -- these shows have been poorly attended (I asked several of the guards, and they all agreed). I experienced it myself because Gagosian has a ridiculous rule about only allowing photographs that include people, and I had to wait a long time to find these two women.

But there's a lot of other abstract painting and relief worth checking out: Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read;  Richard Kalina at Lennon, Weinberg (especially his water colors); Martha Clippinger at Elizabeth Harris; and at the Howard Scott Gallery, David Goerk who, just when I thought minimal abstraction was finished, managed to do something interesting with it.

David Goerk, 6.13.2009, 2009, 15.2 x 15.2 x 5.1 cm, encaustic on wood.

Art News

By Charles Kessler

David Hockney, Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29, November 2006, Oil on 6 canvases, about 72 x 144 inches (Courtesy of the Artist. © David Hockney. Photo credit - Richard Schmidt).

From Jonathan Jones at the Guardian on the popularity of David Hockney’s exhibition at the Royal Academy: “From Hockney to Downton Abbey: have our cultural tastes gone conservative?”

Via Hyperallergic: The Guggenheim has made 65 of its past exhibition catalogs available free online.

From the Los Angeles Times, an interview with Matthew Marks on the occasion of the opening of a  gallery in L.A.:  “Matthew Marks on lure -- and challenges -- of showing art in L.A.”

Agnes Gund, the classy art patron and former president of the Museum of Modern Art, writes about some potentially hopeful trends for artists: Three movements in particular may provide some relief to our sprawled and underserved population of artists: 1) The growth of local or hometown opportunities for artists; 2) The rise of unexpected exhibition places; and 3) Artist-to-artist initiatives.

And finally, there's this depressing article on our visual environment by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times: There are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States. …  One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.” 

Kimmelman goes on to describe ways architects and city planners are beginning to deal with this blight.

A Parking Lot in Disney World,  Orlando Florida

Panel on the Bushwick Art Scene

Standing room only.

By Charles Kessler

Last night The Bogart Salon, one of seven (!) galleries now at 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick, held a packed panel discussion on the "Nature and Future of the Bushwick Art Scene." It was expertly moderated by Hrag Vartanian, the founder and editor of Hyperallergic, and the panelists were Deborah Brown, director of the Storefront Bushwick Gallery; Burr Dodd of Brooklyn Fire Proof; writer-journalist for WNYC and Artnews, Carolina A. Miranda; and Marco Antonini, director of NURTUREart. You can find a pretty good summary at #bushwickarts (how can Paddy Johnson tweet so fast?).

One thing that surprised me was the carping about building codes. In the first place, compared to Jersey City they have it great, but more important, the reason why Bushwick is still relatively cheap is a lot of the activities (concerts, parties, live-work spaces, etc.) are not officially sanctioned.  Everyone knows (or should know) that fire codes are important, but sometimes minor violations for what seem like trivial violations (Burr Dodd complained about being busted for fruit flies in his restaurant) can be frustrating. But they should keep in mind that when something is officially approved it becomes a lot more expensive.

Peter Hopkins, director of The Bogart Salon, took a great deal of care with the seating at the event, even going so far as putting names on the seats. He said he wanted to get people together whom he felt should know each other. I thought that was a terrific idea and typical of the way networking (in a good way) is encouraged in Bushwick and the way people are so helpful there.

Some Art News

By Charles Kessler

Museum and Gallery News:

• The Lower East Side gallery Feature Inc. has a museum-quality exhibition of Tantra Paintings (until February 12th). They are small abstract paintings in tempera, gouache, and watercolor on salvaged paper made by practitioners of Tantrism as a guide for their private meditation. The sophistication and  subtlety of this work is astounding — equal to the best of work by Richard Tuttle or Tom Nozkowski. For more information see the Santa Monica Museum of Art  and siglioblog websites. Here are some high-quality photos that illustrate how sensitive the work is:

ANONYMOUS, tantric painting;  Legend: The eternal race of the feminine principle towards its masculine homologue; Jodphur, Rajasthan, 2008; unspecified paint on found paper; 13.625 x 8.875” (Courtesy of Feature, Inc.).
(Click to enlarge.) 

ANONYMOUS, tantric painting;  Legend: The illustrious fish; Jaipur, Rajasthan, 1993; unspecified paint on found paper; 9.125 x 7”  (Courtesy of Feature, Inc.). (Click to enlarge.)

ANONYMOUS, tantric painting; Legend: The universal manifestation, always in evolution; Bikaner, Rajasthan, 1989; unspecified paint on found paper; 9.25 x 13.375” (Courtesy of Feature, Inc.). (Click to enlarge.) 

• L Magazine reports the blue-chip Chelsea gallery Luhring Augustine will finally open their Bushwick space.
• Christopher D’Amelio explains why they will be closing the D’Amelio Terras Gallery in Chelsea. 
• The Times reports that the Met is getting serious about contemporary art -- they hired Sheena Wagstaff, chief curator of Tate Modern, to be in charge of their new department of 20th and 21st century art.
• And it’s hard to believe, but with the addition of their glassed-in Portico Gallery, the Frick has become even better. It’s a pleasure to walk along the portico in the middle of winter and look out at their grounds and Fifth Avenue. 

Jean-Antonio Houdon, Diana the Huntress, 1776-95, terracotta, 75 ½ inches tall (photo, Michael Bodycomb).

Other Art News:

• T J Clark recently wrote two typically brilliant reviews for the London Review of Books, one on Gerhard Richter and another on the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London.
• Via Hyperallergic is this article on a building in Taiwan that almost disappears.

Sou Fujimoto’s ’21st-Century Oasis’ (All images by Sou Fujimoto via Architizer)

• Here's a good read from The Morning News about the experience Christopher R. Graham, a music critic, had conducting a professional orchestra. He found it terrifying, and he felt completely over his head. 
• Slate has a series of articles by Tony Perrottet on Vatican City including secret areas of the City such as a bathroom within the Papal Apartments decorated with erotic frescos by Raphael in 1516, and the newly-restored Vatican Library.
• Yvonne Rainer criticized Marina Abramovic's MoCA performance/gala for economically exploiting her performers. Now Abramovic adds fuel to the fire in a MoCA video about the gala. A clueless Abramovic talks about how much she appreciates the wisdom of the free market and/or the virtues of the pre-modern system of rule by kings. 
• Finally, The New Scientist reports on the discovery in Nigeria of a rare 2000-year-old Nok terracotta.

(Image: Nicole Rupp/Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Goethe-University Frankfurt )

Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures

By Charles Kessler

Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures (until January 29, 2012) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a show of African art that took my breath away. The exhibition is a little hard to find. It’s in gallery 199 where some of the museum's changing exhibitions take place, just off of the barrel-vaulted hallway south of the main entrance where the large-scale Greek and Roman sculpture is on display. This is a major international exhibition that gathers more than one hundred rare works from many museums in the United States as well as collections in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Portugal and France. The show is a big deal and not to be missed.

The sculptures, the embodiment of an ephemeral oral history and tradition, evoke and idealize important people from Africa’s past. In addition to the art, there are about twenty documentary photographs, mostly postcards from the early 20th century, of tribal leaders, kings and their retinue, and other important people.

Chief Kétounou of Bonou Village, Early 20th century French Dahomey, Republic of Benin,
(Holly W. Ross Postcard Collection)

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any good reproductions of the dramatic highlight of the show — an astounding twenty-two full-sized figures made in the nineteenth century by Hemba masters in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Go see them in person if you can.

A Day at the Met

By Charles Kessler

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was especially crowded Wednesday so I spent most of my time in the less popular galleries — the English and French Period Rooms and the galleries containing medieval and ancient sculpture. I don’t know why these galleries aren’t popular, but it’s fine with me.

I recently wrote that when I look at art I often notice that many works I'm looking at share some visual characteristic or a theme or subject. In Washington, for example, a lot of work struck me as funny, and at the Met I noticed that a lot of art from different cultures and periods was abstract. Not abstract in the sense of non-representational, but abstract in the old sense of the word — abstracted or simplified nature. These two heads from Graeco-Phoenician sarcophagi of the 5th century B.C struck me as très Art Deco.

And this and other 5000-year old Cycladic figures could have been made by Brancusi:

The Bastis Master, female figure, early Cycladic II, 2600 - 2400 B.C., marble, 25 inches high (#66.148)

There were even several small wrought iron Medieval sculptures that fell into the abstract theme:

And I noticed that the backs of a lot of sculptures were not only abstract, but were also funny.

(I apologize for the poor photos -- I couldn't find them on the Met's site so I had to use the ones I took with my iPhone.) 

The other common theme that kept coming up was what I call the  "awww, how charming motif" -- these sculptures for example:

And then there were the English and French Period Rooms located on either side of the Medieval Sculpture Hall where the Met's famous Christmas tree is located. (BTW, no photographs of the tree are allowed because, a guard explained to me, the tree is copyrighted! You can find a good photo here if you want.)

You're not going to find many good paintings in the Period Rooms, but the rooms themselves are appealing and pleasant, especially when they simulate light coming through the windows. And the galleries are practically empty so you have them to yourself for long periods. 

And on the way out, don't miss the Crypt Gallery of Byzantine Egypt under the Great Stairway.

All and all, an agreeable day at the Met.

Next post: a show at the Met that took my breath away, Heroic Africans, Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures (until January 29, 2012).

Art News, etc.

By Charles Kessler

Art News

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in 1922 in their apartment in Paris.

Laura Gilbert’s site, Art Unwashed, has become a go-to site for insider museum news. The Metropolitan Museum has reported future exhibitions only until June 2012, but Gilbert managed to uncover their plans until June of 2013. Here are some of the exhibition highlights from her site:

Rembrandt and Degas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, February 23 to May 20, 2012.  Highlights:  two early Rembrandt self-portraits on loan from Europe.

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, February 28 to June 3, 2012.  About 100 works collected by expatriates Gertrude Stein and her brothers.

Regarding Warhol: Fifty Artists, Fifty Years, September 2012 to January 2013.  Warhol and his influence, thematically arranged.  A Met rarity – a group show of contemporary art.

Bernini Models in Clay, October 2012 to January 2013.  50 models and several sculptures by the Roman Baroque master.

***

Typically museum websites are only about the museum itself — their collection, exhibitions, hours, etc., but the Walker's new site contains links and articles about the wider art world and hopefully will be an inspiration for other art museums.

***

More Bushwick Gallery News:

Storefront Gallery’s co-founder Jason Andrew informed me that Deborah Brown, Storefront’s other founder, has renewed the lease at its current location, and a new gallery will re-open there on December 18th with essentially the same name: Storefront Bushwick. The resourceful Jason Andrew will not be involved with the new gallery but will maintain his association with the Norte Maar Gallery.

Via L Magazine comes the news that Soho gallery Christina Ray will open a project space in Bushwick at the beginning of the year, and they will be changing their name to the Kesting/Ray Gallery to reflect the addition of David Kesting, Ray's husband, as co-director.

***

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company website has a complete series of videos documenting many aspects of the company. It’s called “Mondays With Merce” and includes 19 interviews with Cunningham that were filmed two years before he died. There are also forty-two interviews with Cunningham’s colleagues and dancers, and footage of 15 technique classes taught by Cunningham and rehearsal sessions of more than 30 works with him in charge. If you never saw Merce Cunningham or his dance company, this is the next best thing.

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Warning: political commentary next — just skip it if you want.

Mr. Montgomery Burns

My first love was economics, and I still spend a lot of time reading the literature -- especially Paul Krugman's blog. Very occasionally I come across an article that's not well known, a least not known in the art world, but is so clear and compelling I want to call attention to it here.

A few months ago, billionaire Warren Buffett wrote a New York Times Op-Ed entitled Stop Coddling the Super-Rich. It was mainly about the fairness of taxing the rich; now Nick Hanauer, another billionaire, writes about the economic benefits of taxing the super rich: Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators. 

Hanauer is a famous venture capitalist who helped launch more than 20 companies, including aQuantive Inc. and Amazon.com; nevertheless in bloomberg.com he wrote:

...I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate. 

...The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. 

...So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business.

***

Urban Planning:


“Why should people get to see plans? This isn't a public project.”
     --Bruce Ratner, the developer of the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, quoted in Crain’s, November 8, 2009

I'm a bit soured on Urban Planning lately after my bad experience with Jersey City's Powerhouse Arts District but, like looking at a horrific accident, I continue to read the literature. (I highly recommend the very readable, even entertaining, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. It’s still the definitive book on urban planning but heartbreaking to read because, after 42 years, city planners still don’t get it.)

The New York Times had an article recently on how the Dutch, when they undertake big new development projects, put together what they call “structure plans.” Urban designers are called in to work out the best way to organize the site for the public good. They plan parks, squares, the street-scape, access to public transportation, and generally create a pedestrian-friendly environment. (This is the kind of thing the BMW Guggenheim Lab was concerned with.) The thing is, this is done BEFORE a developer submits a plan for the site. You might think "duh", but, except for Rockefeller Center and a few other notable places, that isn’t the way we do things here, e.g., Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and the re-zoning of neighborhoods like Lower Manhattan, Williamsburg and of course Jersey City (see our blog title photo above).

Barnett Newman -- It's Complicated!

The Craig F. Starr Gallery, 5 E. 73rd Street (just east of Fifth), has yet another terrific exhibition of relatively small work: Barnett Newman Paintings (until December 17th).

Barnett Newman, Untitled 3. 1949, oil on canvas, 23 ½ x 6 ¼ inches (private collection).

I complimented the dealer on the show, and on my way out, two nicely dressed middle-aged women asked me why I thought it was a good exhibition. I thought the show was a good one because the work was hard to assemble and it was installed sensitively, without over-lighting it. But of course they were really asking (and I think sincerely): “Why do you like this art?” I tried to help them by pointing out things about the work they may not have seen, but I knew that wouldn’t really satisfy them for a reason concisely put forward in a recent New York Times Opinionator post, Art and the Limits of Neuroscience:

Just as getting a joke requires sensitivity to a whole background context, to presuppositions and intended as well as unintended meanings, so “getting” a work of art requires an attunement to problems, questions, attitudes and expectations; it requires an engagement with the context in which the work of art has work to do.

I was also reminded of the famous exchange between Franz Kline and a collector irate about Barnett Newman's first exhibition. The longer the version of this story the better, and I found a good long one here:

Franz Kline and Elaine De Kooning were sitting at the Cedar Bar when a collector Franz knew came up to them in a state of fury.  He had just come from Newman’s first one-man show. ‘How simple can an artist be and get away with it?’ he spluttered.  ‘There was nothing, absolutely nothing there!’
‘Nothing?’ asked Franz, beaming.  ‘How many canvases were in the show?’
‘Oh maybe ten or twelve - but all exactly the same - just one stripe down the centre, that’s all!’
'All the same size?’  Franz asked.
‘Well no; there were different sizes; you know, from about 3 to 7 feet.’
‘Oh, 3 to 7 feet, I see; and all the same colour?’  Franz went on.
‘No, different colours, you know; red and yellow and green… but each picture painted one flat colour - you know, like a house painter would do it, and then this stripe down the centre.’
‘All the stripes the same colour?’
‘No’
‘Were they all the same width?’
The man began to think a little.  ‘Let’s see.  No. I guess not.  Some were maybe an inch wide and some maybe four inches, and some in between.’
‘And all upright pictures?’
‘Oh, no, there were some horizontals.’
‘With vertical stripes?’
‘Oh, no, I think there were some horizontal stripes, maybe.’
‘And were the stripes darker or lighter than the background?
‘Well I guess they were darker, but there was one white stripe, or maybe more…’
'Was the stripe painted on top of the background colour or was the background colour painted around the stripe?’
The man began to get a bit uneasy.  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘I think it may have been done either way, or both ways, maybe…’
‘Well I don’t know,’ said Franz. ‘It all sounds damned complicated to me.’

Thinking it might be easier to get, I sent the women to see the Matisse and the Model exhibition (through December 10th - hurry) at Eykyn Maclean, 23 East 67th Street (just west of Madison). It's definitely worth seeing but, unlike the Barnett Newman show, this one is way over-produced with multi-colored walls and pretentious extra-large wall texts. There's some good work though -- and even the not-so-good work is interesting to see.

November Art News

By Charles Kessler

There’s been a lot of big news in the art world this month including yet another Leonardo da Vinci find. Last month I reported on art historian Martin Kemp’s extraordinary rediscovery of Leonardo’s La Bella Principessa, a portrait in ink and colored chalks on vellum. Artinfo interviews Kemp here about an even more important find, Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi.

Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, c. 1500, oil on walnut panel, 25 13/16 X 17 7/8 inches  

Due to the blockbuster Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery, London, there’s been more than usual  written about Leonardo. One of the most interesting is this post by Jonathan Jones, a Renaissance man himself, on Leonardo as an animal rights activist and a vegetarian. All this has added so much to the already wildly popular Leonardo exhibition that the National Galley had to crack down on ticket scalping — tickets were going for up to £800 ($1242) on eBay.


Then there’s the Met’s new Islamic wing.

Damascus Room, 1119 A.D., Syria, Damascus, 22 ft. 1/2 in. x 16 ft. 8 1/2 in.
(Gift of The Hagop Kevorkian Fund, 1970 #1970.170).

The Met’s website once again does an excellent job of providing visual and art historical information including several videos showing the installation and conservation process. Holland Cotter has an enthusiastic review of the new galleries in the Times.

And finally, there’s been more on Pacific Standard Time — the encyclopedic series of exhibitions about the history of Los Angeles art. Two reviews I'd recommend are by Roberta Smith and Peter Plagens.

Hard Edge group exhibition with works by Ronald Davis and Judy Chicago at Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles,
May 1964. The Getty Research Institute, Gift of Rolf G. Nelson, 2010.M.38.2.

Plagens also wrote my favorite article on another big art event, the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

The Clyfford Still Museum's center exhibition gallery.

Other Art News:
Paddy Johnson reports that even more galleries are moving into 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick. And to help you keep track, Pernod, the company that sells Absinthe liqueur, and WAGMAG, the online Brooklyn gallery guide, have teamed up to create an app that’s a guide to Brooklyn galleries and to nearby bars that serve Absinthe. It’s doesn’t have nearly the number of galleries as our Bushwick guide, and it doesn’t provide an efficient route to take, but like ours it’s free; and if they ever include a lot more of the galleries, it will be useful.

Bryan Appleyard on the website MoreIntelligentLife.com reports that in 2010 Andy Warhol’s work sold for a total of $313m and accounted for an astounding 17% of all contemporary auction sales. Appleyard does a good job of putting this in context. And on the topic of Warhol and Pop Art, here is an excellent interview with Art Historian Hal Foster.

Also from MoreIntelligentLife.com is this entertaining piece about an exchange of letters between Groucho Marx and, of all people, T. S. Eliot. The exchange was initiated by Eliot, a great fan of the Marx Brothers movies. One of my favorite of Groucho’s letters to the famously buttoned-down and anti-semitic poet includes this: “The name Tom fits many things. There was once a famous Jewish actor named Thomashevsky. All male cats are named Tom—unless they have been fixed. I would be interested in reading your views on sex, so don’t hesitate. Confide in me.”

Damien Hirst is one of those artists I hate to love. Jonathan Jones doesn't have this problem. In advance of Hirst’s upcoming exhibition at the Tate Modern next year, he wrote this appreciation:

Hirst stands far above his British contemporaries. The depth of his early work is extraordinary and dazzling. The intensity of his imaginative grasp of reality is unique. He makes art that is about life, and death, and money too, which is another absolute truth of our world – unfortunately. The whole of recent British art is a footnote to his brilliance.

Richard Prince, on the other hand, is an artist I love to hate — Laura Gilbert uncovered documents filed with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on October 26 that show what a phony the guy is.

The Daily Beast/Newsweek has an excellent profile on the art dealer Marian Goodman. It corresponds nicely with a 1992 profile of Betty Parsons from the archives of the New York Times that’s been tweeted around (is that a term?).

Finally, there are two informative posts by Jonah Lehrer about creativity:
Need to Create? Get a Constraint:
"It’s not until we encounter an unexpected hindrance – a challenge we can’t easily resolve – that the chains of cognition are loosened, giving us newfound access to the weird connections simmering in the unconscious."
And The Importance of Mind-Wandering:
"...not all daydreams are equally effective at inspiring new ideas. ...According to Schooler’s data, individuals who are unaware of their mind-wandering don’t exhibit increased creativity."