Vertigo at the Guggenheim

A few days ago I stopped into Maurizio Cattelan’s … er, retrospective … at the Guggenheim. Roberta Smith described the effect of the exhibition, in which all of the artist’s works are strung up in the rotunda of the museum, as “initially startling, but ultimately disrespectful and perverse.” With Smith’s review in mind, and having already seen numerous images of the exhibition, I wasn’t particularly startled. I also wasn’t offended by this most unconventional career retrospective (Cattelan has said that this exhibition marks his retirement, a pronouncement which nobody seems to be taking seriously). More than anything, I was scared—not of the taxidermied animals, nor of the creepy wax effigies—but of the vertigo which this exhibition, more than any other I’ve seen at the Guggenheim, threatens with every turn.

When you first step onto the rotunda floor and look up, as you always must at the Guggenheim, you see the works dangling above you in several tiers. This is somewhat threatening, especially when you consider the heft of certain of Cattelan’s better-known works, like All (2007), a group of life-size marble sculptures which read as shrouded corpses. The current exhibition shares its name with this work, and as the wall text notes, the exhibition's installation, which is evocative of gallows, underscores “the undertone of death that pervades the artist’s work.”

I have always been struck by the low railings that line the Guggenheim’s spiral walkways. They just seem so … low, for a building so vertiginous. Never have they seemed lower than they do at Cattelan’s exhibition. Ordinarily, visitors to the Guggenheim hug the walls, which is, after all, where most of the art is found. Here, however, the walls are bare; all of the art is in the rotunda, driving the museumgoers toward the railings, where they gaze upwards and downwards, paying scant attention to the other museumgoers who are engaged in the same risky (am I the only one who sees this?!) behavior. I confess to having been very nervous at times, so much so that I backed away from the railings, sacrificing optimal views for a feeling of safety.

I doubt that Cattelan considered this effect when he proposed this peculiar installation, but it seems appropriate to his morbidly absurdist ethos to draw attention to the scarier side of this high church of art. Or maybe he’s trying a bit too hard to conjure the kind of vertigo that wonderful works of art can sometimes induce in a susceptible viewer.

Some Musings on the Market

Paul McCarthy, Tomato Head (Green), 1994

One of the many pleasures of living in New York City is the presence of major auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, whose previews provide free and relatively unconstrained access to impressive artworks. This week I spent some time at Christie’s, where Paul McCarthy’s larger than life take on Mr. Potato Head, Tomato Head (1994), one of an edition of three, was on view before being auctioned off with other works from the Peter Norton collection.

Viewers are permitted to get close—sometimes perilously so—to the works. I had to maneuver awkwardly around the scattered pieces of Tomato Head—including parts never imagined by the makers (or consumers) of Mr. Potato Head—to get a good look at Christian Marclay’s Guitar Neck (1992), an assemblage of seven record album covers hung one above the other to form an elongated … you guessed it … guitar neck. Guitar Neck is the kind of art a fourteen year old would think was cool, and would probably make, if fourteen year olds still owned records. Estimated at $60-80,000, it took in a whopping $266,500, further evidence, in case anyone needed it, that the art market is doing just fine. In fact, Tomato Head, which was estimated at $1-1.5 million, sold for just over $4.5 million (gulp). Installed on the wall beside Tomato Head was a concave, stainless steel disk by Anish Kapoor. These are strange bedfellows, these two works, and Kapoor’s austere minimalist mirror turned Tomato Head on its head, as if to rebuke McCarthy for his intransigence.

The atmosphere at a preview is charged in a way that a museum visit never is—these things are for sale! Overhearing snippets of conversations and filling in the blanks imaginatively is part of the fun. A collector suggests the mantle as a good location for a sumptuous wall-mounted sculpture by Josiah McElheny; her art advisor (perhaps?) suggests the work would be better hung at eye level, as it was at Christie’s. One smartly dressed woman gives another a lesson on Glenn Ligon—potential buyers or art tourists, like me? A small group of people gathered in the center of a gallery—investors discussing an opportunity, or tourist-tourists? (The latter, as it turned out; next stop, Times Square!)

This is a place of commerce, which can scarcely be forgotten amid the price tags and frenetic staff; but the outrageousness of the prices neutralizes the atmosphere somewhat, at least for me. I’ve sometimes wondered how the experience might differ if I were acquisitive and capable of satisfying that impulse. Just this week while in Savannah, I was put to the test, albeit under rather different circumstances. The Savannah School of Art and Design has a wonderful gift shop, filled with interesting objects designed by its students and faculty. I found myself drawn to a beautiful little print; its price—under $100. And just like that, appreciation turned into acquisitiveness. Maybe it would look good above my desk.

The PST Blues

A very wise man I know taught me the acronym FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out. As an art historian who researches West Coast art and lives on the East Coast, this is my autumn of FOMO. Google alerts and various e-newsletters daily remind me that dozens of “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions—some of them reportedly wonderful, others just okay—are currently on view in Southern California. The cynic in me (I am a New Yorker, after all) takes comfort in the odd bad review—perhaps I’m not missing that much after all, and there are always the catalogues. But the realist in me knows that it’s dreadful to be so far away from so much bounty and plots my return to that sunny place on a calendar marked with closing dates. (Note that I didn’t equate cynicism with realism—there’s hope for me yet.)

Sarah Jessica Parker Must Have a Lot of Clout

Bravo’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist” is back for its second season. The formula and prizes have changed not at all. Best of all, “mentor” Simon de Pury is back, delightfully awkward as ever. I worried that viewings of last season’s episodes would have rendered him stiltedly self-conscious, but lucky for us, this has not come to pass. The sound of Simon saying “The Sucklord”—the preferred name of one of the artists on the show—in that sing-songy, guttural way of his is worth the price of admission. And the price is high.

The work produced on this show is, with a few exceptions, awful. In a previous post, I surmised that the failure of “Work of Art” to catch on in the manner of “Project Runway” or "Top Chef” might have something to do with our inability to be satisfied by a work of art which is put together well, and only that. The show’s formula, which demands that its artists produce works very quickly and according to a given theme, all but guarantees that the end results will be little more than well constructed, if that.

The first episode asked the artists to take kitschy works of art—a painting of a clown, a hideous collage—and to remake them according to their own styles. This challenge underscores the fundamental contradiction of “Work of Art.” It is a direct result and manifestation of our willingness to consider “lower” artforms (television shows, for instance) alongside the kind of art that is typically found in a Chelsea gallery. Yet, “Work of Art” stubbornly insists on clinging to antiquated ideas about the status of “art”—that it is inherently better than other kinds of visual expression (folk art, for instance); that one can create a “true work of art” (this is the compliment bestowed on each week’s winner); and that good art appeals primarily to the emotions. Michelle, the winner of the first challenge, seems to have risen in the judges’ estimation when she told them the sad story behind her work. Little has changed, it seems, since the days of “Queen for a Day”—the saddest story still wins.

The second episode of the season split the artists into two teams and asked them to draw inspiration from the idea of “movement.” The winning team’s banal response (after being pressured by Simon to abandon a more promising direction involving digestion) was to create a “playground” filled with kinetic art which was not actually kinetic (sure, the pieces could move, once you pushed them).

As with all reality television, however, the real object of fun is not the bad work, but the personalities which create them. In this case, Kathryn came in for a drubbing for producing a piece which was, as Simon rightly noted, the twin to her work of the previous week. It was fun to watch Kathryn get defensive with Simon; it was also kinda great when she went to the roof to chant; but the paydirt—the moment promo’d in all the commercials—was when she cried the most uninhibited adult cry I’ve ever seen, and just like that, we viewers became the mean kids on the playground.

“Work of Art” might work better if it gave up its highfalutin pretenses and embraced the kitsch. If “the only rule in art is what works”—as host and “subject, muse, and connector” China Chow tells us every week—then this show needs to be working a little harder. Will I continue to watch it even if it doesn't? Sadly, yes, but it engages me at roughly the same level that all Bravo fare does, despite its aspirations to something better.

Get Your Metrocard Here! Or, More Ways to Spend Money at MoMA

 









I refilled my Metrocard today … at MoMA.

A Metrocard vending machine is included in the exhibition Talk to Me, MoMA’s meditation on interactive design. Despite the exhibition’s theme, many of the objects on view can’t actually be handled; my 1990s brain prevented me from successfully engaging some of those that could. (Thankfully, the Menstruation Machine, 2010, is for display only … can the phrase ‘too much information’ apply to inanimate, if not inert, objects?) Signs tell viewers that they can enhance their experience of the exhibition by logging onto MoMA’s wifi with their phones; even my 2010 phone refused to cooperate. Then, I saw the Metrocard vending machine.

Once I determined that it was fully operational (if slightly modified—see the photos above), I took the opportunity, not to purchase one of the special-issue cards it dispenses, but to refill the card I’m currently using. Like most New Yorkers, I already have about six Metrocards in my wallet, each with $1.80 on it, or some other useless sum.

The experience was actually sort of great. I was lucky enough to be in the museum before it opened—a first, and a huge advantage (see The Museumgoer is, Against All Odds, Present). In fact, aside from the guards, I was alone at Talk to Me. I had only ever bought a Metrocard surrounded by harried commuters and clueless tourists. This was the cleanest machine I’d ever seen—none of the fingerprint-and-mystery-goo of your typical Metrocard vending machine. My credit card swipe was successful on the first try—another first. Mostly, though, it was a pleasure to interact with the machine without feeling rushed, without worrying about missing the next train. It gave me an opportunity to notice just how well-designed it is; it’s colorful and whimsical, like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43, in MoMA’s collection).

It’s also communicative, like the electronic billboard in the 1991 movie “L.A. Story," which dispensed life lessons along with the traffic conditions. If this object existed, it would have fit perfectly into Talk to Me. “L.A. Story” is an urban fairytale, however, and while many of the objects in the show are supremely innovative, they didn’t speak to me on an emotional level, as MoMA’s curators suggested they might.

Postscript:

I was a little disappointed that Edward Kienholz’s The Friendly Grey Computer—Star Gauge Model #54 (1965) wasn’t included in the show. This kinetic sculpture, which is owned by MoMA, purports to interact with viewers by answering their questions—yellow flashing lights indicate yes, blue lights indicate no. Of course, Kienholz’s attitude toward technology was ambivalent—the “machine” sits in a rocking chair and a text tells viewers that “Computers sometimes get fatigued and have nervous breakdowns, hence the chair for it to rest in.” This may more accurately reflect most people’s feelings about technology than the organizers of Talk to Me realize.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Art Critic Invokes Undergraduate Textbook

Holland Cotter's front-page story in this week's New York Times Sunday Styles, "Male Models at the Line of Beauty," is ostensibly about the men's fashion shows at New York Fashion Week. Ill-equipped for this assignment (he writes that he was "learning on the job"), Cotter "pulled out [his] old H. W. Janson survey book" in the hopes of ... I'm not sure, exactly. As if taking his cues from the encyclopedic range and limited depth of the Janson book, Cotter jumps from one tenuous, superficial observation to the next: male models are beautiful like Greek statues; models line up on the runway like figures in a Byzantine mosaic (hmmm); utilitarian clothes are like Constructivist garment designs.

Cotter's take on the fashions are also head-scratchingly banal: "Tommy Hilfiger went sort of nuts with nautical stripes at his show" but "the men still looked dressed-down-drab." The article is filled with disclaimers like, "don’t listen to me, an art geek who wandered into a strange new world, about what men’s fashion should do," which makes you wonder how Cotter got stuck with this assignment in the first place.

"I’m deeply skeptical of the fashion-as-art talk of recent years," Cotter writes. His glib treatment of artistic sources here suggest that he may be skeptical of the appeal of fashion journalism to art-lovers as well. Regular readers of the Sunday Styles, of which I am one, might be insulted by this clunker (and our expectations aren't terribly high to begin with). But let's not. Mr. Cotter was probably just having a bad day, and we can always amuse ourselves with the wedding announcements.

The Museumgoer is, Against All Odds, Present

Artinfo reported today on a video game created by one Pippin Barr, a “Copenhagen-based game creator and scholar.” The game, which has the look of something you might have played on your Atari, begins when your avatar enters the doors of MoMA; he pays the $25 admission fee (yes, it’s gone up), passes through a sparsely hung gallery, and arrives at the line for The Artist is Present, the much-talked about Marina Abramovic performance which took place in the museum’s atrium last year. For those who could not attend the performance, it was streamed live on MoMA’s website. For those who missed that as well, there is Barr’s version.

Regular reader(s) of this blog may recall from a previous post that I am a bit squeamish about art that threatens to put me, the viewer, on display. It therefore never crossed my mind to sit across from Abramovic and stare awkwardly into her eyes for an indeterminate amount of time in front of scores of onlookers. Braver museumgoers than I, however, happily queued up for this opportunity. This is the experience that the player of Barr’s game endures. When I played the game, there were twenty-four people ahead of me. If you leave the game to do other things, thinking that when you return it will be your turn to face Abramovic, you are mistaken. Aggressive museumgoers who come in behind you will take your place if you don’t move forward when the line does.

Barr’s version of The Artist is Present is hardly an accurate record of the performance, but it perfectly captures the frustration which often accompanies a trip to the always-crowded Museum of Modern Art. The crowds were especially thick during Abramovic’s retrospective, which received more than its fare share of press coverage for its inclusion of nude performers and for Abramovic’s incredible feat of endurance—she sat at that table in the atrium every day, all day, for the entire duration of the show (with rare exceptions).

Barr’s game draws our attention to the endurance of the other participants in The Artist is Present. More forcefully, perhaps, it illuminates the much more banal, and certainly less celebrated, acts of endurance performed by visitors to MoMA and other popular museums every day. Ordinary people show up, pay their $25 fees, and patiently—because it requires so much patience—wait their turns to see some of the greatest art ever created; and sometimes, even, some not-so-great art.

Lady Gaga Before the Mirror

Many a time the mirror imprisons them and holds them firmly. Fascinated they stand in front. They are absorbed, separated from reality and alone with their dearest vice, vanity.

—Rrose Sélavy (aka Marcel Duchamp), “Men Before the Mirror”

Though I’ve long since stopped tuning into MTV’s Video Music Awards, when someone told me that Lady Gaga opened this year’s show with the introduction of a male alter-ego named Jo, I was curious enough to call up the clip on the internet. Sure enough, there (s)he was, sporting a black pompadour and a bound chest. Jo’s eight-minute performance included a five-minute monologue about—who else?—Lady Gaga; Jo played the part of the spurned lover, smoking furiously and beating his chest.

In her recent MTV promo, Lady Gaga (née Stefani Germanotta) says: “I really believe that art is this huge lie … we sing it and we dance and we dress it every day, and me and my friends all hope that someday we tell it enough that it becomes true.” With its black-and-white palette and close-ups of musicians, one can almost be forgiven for forgetting that the spot is an advertisement for something so crude and commercial as the Video Music Awards. Lady Gaga would like to be more than just a pop star; she sees herself and has encouraged others to see her as something of a performance artist. (By invoking her “friends” in the MTV spot, she even suggests the existence of an avant-garde coterie à la the New York School.) By donning the mantle of Art (note the capital 'A'), she has gained permission to do things and to say things that other popular performers would not do or say—their careers could not survive it. Though her audiences often appear embarrassed for her—this was surely the case at Sunday’s VMA’s—she survives to sing another song because she is vested with the authority of the Artist.

This is a clever trick, and she is not alone in deploying it. In the name of Art, James Franco has deigned to educate the masses about the distinction between high and low cultures: how wonderfully postmodern it is to see a “serious” actor play an artist on “General Hospital”! Lady Gaga and James Franco are not content to be mere artists; that is, talented performers in their respective fields. Their narcissism compels them to seek—and if they don’t find, to invent—ever more and elaborate ways to display themselves. It is fitting that Lady Gaga’s most recent incarnation (after all, Lady Gaga is herself an invention) is the lover of Lady Gaga.

For all of their supposed melding of high and low, art and life, what saves these performers is precisely the persistence of these distinctions. Lady Gaga says that she longs for the dissolution of boundaries between art and life, but her career depends on that boundary remaining fixed.

East Coast, West Coast

In the course of my research here in Los Angeles, I came across a recorded interview of the California-based artist Craig Kauffman. He and the interviewer discussed cultural differences between the East and West Coasts. They agreed, having each spent time in New York, that Los Angeles has more of a "body culture;" New Yorkers put more emphasis on intellect, and, moreover, New Yorkers are suspicious of the West Coast’s failure to do so. Kauffman noted that some conceptual artists of the Eastern persuasion who taught in LA even considered health consciousness fascistic. These kinds of New York vs. Los Angeles conversations are inevitably reductive. (In 1969, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt made a video called "East Coast, West Coast," which played off precisely these stereotypes.) It’s also likely that New Yorkers have themselves become more attuned to health in the twenty-five years that have elapsed between that interview and the present.

Nevertheless, I have been impressed by the seriousness with which UCLA students attack their workouts at the campus gym, which I have been visiting with, perhaps, insufficient regularity. They do things like jump extremely high to clear boxes in the gym’s open-air courtyard; climb on a rock wall; play volleyball in volleyball-playing gear (like the kind of stuff Gabrielle Reece used to wear); and lift very, very heavy weights. It seems to be paying off, as some of these kids look like they stepped straight out of a tabloid "Best Beach Bodies" issue (not that I’ve ever seen one of those; not even in a waiting room). When I was in college in Philadelphia, almost everyone I knew went to the gym sometimes, but it was really a chore and it seemed clear that they weren’t aiming for the kinds of results I’ve seen here. Still, I won’t extrapolate from my limited experience. Instead, I’ve compiled a list of fairly random Los Angeles anecdotes and observations; you can draw your own conclusions:

•  Angelenos are very friendly. But one nice lady I spoke to on my daily trip to the local frozen yogurt place was surprised to learn from me that when someone falls on the street in New York, people immediately come to their aid. She surmised that in LA people would be too concerned about lawsuits.

•  People ride their bikes on the sidewalks.

•  There’s a movie theater that has couches instead of chairs. And a real live person introduces the film.

•  The buses function fairly well and are populated by mostly normal people. Even so, people here are embarrassed to catch the bus, a bus driver informed me.

 •  Almost every Coffee Bean has outdoor seating.

•  This weekend, I watched one person after another arrive for a party in an apartment building, pass right by the conspicuous buzzer box, try the door, and upon discovering that it was locked, throw their proverbial hands in the air.

•  The police will shut down a relatively tame party at 11:30pm on a Friday night if they get a noise complaint; and if they can figure out how to get into the building.

What if Starbucks Were Art?

At the last Whitney Biennial, my friend and I were approached by a security guard in a curtained gallery where photos and a film by Babette Mangolte were on view. The encounter—which involved the heavily accented guard telling us about his family and requesting that a man with a professional-looking camera take our picture together—had us convinced that we had been involved in some kind of relational art; so much so that when we found out from someone with inside knowledge of the biennial that this was not the case, we were astonished. "Relational aesthetics," like Happenings in the late 1950s and '60s, aren't content to let viewers peruse art at their leisure, but rather draw them into interactive situations. I skipped Tino Sehgal’s already-legendary exhibition at the Guggenheim last year for precisely this reason. I don’t like to perform, and I didn’t want to engage in conversations with strangers in an emptied museum. I considered going on several occasions, but the idea filled me with dread. To me, this is like the adult version of being picked as a "volunteer" at a magic show. Despite my aversion to this kind of art (Just leave me alone with my thoughts!), this morning, as I was picking up my grande nonfat chai latte, it seemed to offer one possible answer to the question (and don't ask me where this came from): If Starbucks were art, what kind of art would it be?

It is a plain, stucco and glass structure whose only distinguishing characteristic is a large, green, lettered sign reading “Starbucks Coffee.” Upon entering the environment, the viewer first encounters a soundtrack of bossa nova and the hissing sound of milk being steamed vigorously. Olfactory sensations soon follow and the viewer realizes that she is in a convincing simulation of a coffee shop. The décor contributes to the verisimilitude of the installation: round café tables with wooden chairs; taupe walls with dark wood wainscoting; artwork about coffee; and plush armchairs clustered in a corner.

Most of the approximately twelve to fifteen tables are occupied by lone patrons on laptop computers. A line has formed at the long counter on the far side of the room. The counter is festooned with seemingly random found objects: granola bars, CDs, breath mints, and the like. With this nod to the impulse purchase, the quaint coffee shop betrays its affinities with such emporia of mass consumption as the supermarket and the gas station. The illusion slowly begins to unravel.

The viewer notices a television monitor with an image of one of the CDs she has seen on the counter. It is preceded by the words, “You are listening to …”. Perhaps this is not a coffee shop after all, but one of those old timey record stores. Could this explain why the patrons are all wearing headphones? If at first she thought the headphones were a commentary on the alienation wrought by personal computers and social media, now she begins to wonder whether this is not, in fact, one of those relational art situations. Is the monitor a prompt? Is she meant to ask one of the customers wearing headphones what he is listening to?

Emboldened by years of museum and gallery visits, she decides to take the risk. She approaches a young man at a corner table who is in the process of tagging himself in a photo. 

“Excuse me,” she says. “What are you listening to?”

“I’m so glad someone finally asked,” he responds, removing his headphones. He invites her to sit down and a conversation ensues.

Dispatch from LA: Getty and LACMA and Brenda, Oh My!

For the past few days, I’ve been commuting to the Getty Center—by bus, of course, since I’m a real New Yorker (yeah, I know that Houston isn’t pronounced like the city in Texas; and I never tell a cab driver where I’m going until I’m inside the cab*—of course, he’ll still kick me out if I say I’m going to Brooklyn). The route passes the west gate of Bel Air, which looks exactly as you would expect if you’ve ever watched any of the gazillion TV shows or movies about wealthy people (or lucky hookers) in Los Angeles. Being … the age that I am … the first show that comes to my mind is one that was set only a few miles away—Beverly Hills, 90210—the original, of course.

I distinctly recall sneaking a few of those early, Brenda-era episodes in, since no responsible parent would allow their eleven or twelve year-old to watch that smut. The episode I remember best is when Kelly’s mother MC’s the mother-daughter fashion show high on cocaine. When I discovered about a year ago that SOAPnet (a television channel you’ve probably never heard of) re-runs episodes of 90210 in the afternoons, it seemed appropriate that the first episode I should catch was that very one.

I’ve watched a few episodes since then and what surprises me isn’t how tame the show is by today’s standards—though this is true—nor how dated the clothing and hairstyles are—and you know they are!—but how earnest it is. Almost every episode has a lesson, like a children’s book that teaches kids to share. Remember when Donna bombed the SAT’s? That was when we discovered that she had a learning disability (lesson: people with learning disabilities are not stupid). Or when we found out that Andrea lied about her residence so that she could attend West Beverly High (lesson: poor people don’t have equal access to good schools)? How about Brenda’s breast cancer scare (monthly breast exams, ladies)? Or when Scott accidentally killed himself with his father’s gun (guns aren't toys; and for god's sake, parents, put them where your kids won't find them)? And of course, Kelly’s mom, high on cocaine, ruining the mother-daughter fashion show, and Kelly’s life (don’t do drugs, especially if you’re old).

I’ve never seen the new 90210, and I surprised myself by not becoming addicted to Gossip Girl, but I’ll surmise that morality plays don’t feature prominently in their story arcs. In fact, twenty years on, such things seem positively quaint. We don’t like our shows pedantic. Viewers are much savvier today than they were twenty, and certainly thirty or forty years ago. I find it difficult to sit through any television show that still uses a laugh track, and the pseudo-documentary style of The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Modern Family is quickly becoming formulaic. Then it will be on to the next thing. Beverly Hills, 90210 is like a time capsule—and the most surprising discovery inside is that kids once allowed their mindless entertainment to teach them things (or to try to).

* If you got this reference, you're a real New Yorker.

The Wonderful World of Art

Recently, I visited the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle. (You may remember the museum's controversial transformation of Edward Durell Stone’s 1964 “Lollipop Building” a few years back.) I admit with some shame that this was my first time at the museum. The impetus for my visit was an exhibit called Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities. The show is fantastic—literally. Michael McMillen’s The Studio (2004), Charles Matton’s Bibliotheque avec un souvenir d’Anna (2004), and Matt Collishaw’s zoetrope, Garden of Unearthly Delights (2009), are pure magic, while other artists let the viewer peek behind the curtain, so to speak, by juxtaposing models with the photos taken from them. Notable among the latter are Frank Kunert’s hilarious and disturbing Office Nap (2010) and Menu à Deux (2009).

Part of the enjoyment of these objects is the wonder of it all—wonder not only at the optical tricks that they play, but also at the ingenuity, patience, and skill demanded by works of such tiny perfection. We are in the world of the artisan, and there is satisfaction in a thing well-made.

It seems to me that it is, at least in part, this satisfaction that has made television shows like “Project Runway” and “Top Chef” immensely popular. The interpersonal drama is there, of course, but the real drama is in the process of designing and cooking, conceptualizing something and executing it successfully. Interestingly, Bravo’s foray into the art world with “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” has been far less successful. The show, which premiered in June 2010 and supposedly has been renewed for a second season, is, like its fashion and food forebears, task- and deadline-oriented.

This blog suggests that the boundary between art and entertainment is blurring, and yet, I was taken aback by “Work of Art” and its glib treatment of artistic discourse. Romantic notions of the isolated artist working in his (always his) studio have been passé since the 1960s, but a televised art competition was too much for me. To be sure, some of the artists possessed formidable skills, and there was some fun in watching them fabricate their works, but the enjoyment ended there. (Tellingly, the show relied heavily on interpersonal conflict to generate interest.) Though art and fashion circulate in the same luxury marketplace, art is distinguished by a certain kind of excess, something above and beyond its materials ... isn't it?

Postscript, 7/22:

What is art, anyway? The Oakland Museum of California's art gallery asks precisely this in something called the "Is It Art? Lounge." Viewers are asked to choose on a touch screen which of three cups is art. The best (and bravest) part of this exercise is that the screen tells you whether you're right, as determined by the staff of the museum. Elsewhere in the lounge you can vote by ballot (see image at right). This is the kind of populist thing (featured throughout the Oakland Museum's galleries) that you either love or hate. Me, I'm still deciding; the execution is pretty winning.

Aleph, Bet, Gimmel, Daled, Hey!

Natalie Portman may be a glamorous, Oscar-winning movie star, but to a certain group of people, she represents a different ideal. I’m referring of course to Jewish men, for whom Portman is the Holy Grail (an imperfect analogy, I know): a Jewish woman beautiful enough to put the Scandinavian shiksas of their dreams to shame; smart enough to challenge the prodigious intelligence their mothers have always told them they possess; and seemingly accessible despite all of this, at least until recently.

Edward Hopper, Wallace Berman, 1964

News has surfaced from no less reliable a source than “reports from Israel” that Portman has named her newborn son Aleph. The name, which is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and has vaguely mystical overtones, is just about what we have come to expect from celebrity parents. I have always been confounded by the arrogance—or perhaps it’s insecurity—that compels famous people to saddle their children with names that will garner them more attention than they can already expect to attract. Nevertheless, it has never really bothered me. Until now.

I’m not a Jewish man, but Portman is letting me down. First, “No Strings Attached,” now this. In an effort to reconcile my idealized version of Natalie Portman with the conventional celebrity she is turning out to be, I have decided to treat her gesture as an homage to the late, great California assemblage artist Wallace Berman, who wore a motorcycle helmet emblazoned with an aleph, as captured by Dennis Hopper. Berman, who didn’t necessarily understand Hebrew but was drawn to the Kabbalah, included Hebrew letters, especially the aleph, in much of his work.

Hats off to Natalie Portman for being as cool as Jewish men the world over have always known her to be.

Wallace Berman, Untitled, 1964

Something Ventured, Something Lost—The Whitney's Next Move

The windows at the Whitney Museum of American Art on 75^th and Madison Avenue are spectacular. Glimpsed only rarely amid the largely uninterrupted surfaces of Marcel Breuer’s forty-five year old building, they sometimes strike me as more interesting than the art itself.

This is not the case at the current Lyonel Feininger exhibition, which tracks the American Bauhaus master’s work from his cartooning days at the Chicago Sunday Tribune to the Manhattan streetscapes he painted following his long European sojourn. Feininger is best known as the creator of the woodcut print that graced the cover of the Bauhaus’s founding manifesto. His choice of a Gothic cathedral communicated the school's desire to integrate "fine" and "applied" arts. To this end, each student was taught by both an artist and a master craftsman. By the time the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, a new generation of teachers, expert in both artistry and craftsmanship, had been trained.

Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral of Socialism, 1919

Among the new generation of Bauhaus masters in Dessau was Marcel Breuer, who was in charge of the furniture workshop. (Seeing Feininger’s work in Breuer’s galleries feels like a reunion of the two Bauhaus masters, each of whom eventually settled in New York.) The move to Dessau was accompanied by the construction of a new campus, designed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and a shift to a more modern aesthetic. This is especially apparent in the Bauhaus publications, with their advertising-inspired typography and layouts, and in the designs and paintings of the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus as a teacher in 1923, following a period in Berlin during which he encountered the brand of (politically watered-down) Constructivism imported from Soviet Russia by El Lissitzky. Moholy-Nagy’s Glass Architecture paintings, with their overlapping planes of color and interplay of transparency and opacity, owe a heavy debt to Lissitzky’s Proun paintings, which were well-known in the early 1920s. (Lest anyone doubt El's utopian bona fides, Proun is an acronym which translates as “Project for the Affirmation of the New”.)

El Lissitzky, Proun GK, 1922-23

Marcel Breuer’s windows at the Whitney resemble nothing so much as a Proun painting come to life. Even more than Lissitzky’s famed Proun Room of 1923, which projected the Proun into three-dimensions, Breuer’s windows exploit the architectural potential of these works and the utopian ideas they illustrated. Trapezoids set into the walls at angles, they seem to move simultaneously toward and away from you, acting as dynamic counterpoints to the artworks that surround them. When a window is covered with a white scrim, as is often the case (to mitigate the impact of sunlight on the art, one presumes), the effect is even more startling. The trapezoid glows like something out of James Turrell’s playbook. When blacked out to facilitate the exhibition of video works, the effect is very different, looking for all the world like Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square made flesh. (Malevich’s work and teachings prompted Lissitzky’s Prouns.)

The Whitney will be leaving its Breuer building in 2015 for more spacious, Renzo Piano-designed digs in the meatpacking district. The groundbreaking ceremony took place in May. This will come as a relief to those—and there are many of them—who dislike the Whitney’s current home. In November 2010, the New York Times’s Christopher Gray called it “ornery and menacing,” saying “it may be New York’s most bellicose work of architecture.” It would be premature to say that I will miss Breuer’s building—even after the museum moves its collection, it is unlikely that they will unload it. The fact remains, however, that I enjoy it. The Whitney is a pleasant place to visit, despite—or maybe because of—its too-small size (far too small for the Whitney’s collection and ambitions).

At the groundbreaking ceremony, the museum’s director, Adam Weinberg, described the new Whitney as “aspirational.” Like the tourists drawn to the neighborhood’s luxury retailers, perhaps? According to a video posted on the Whitney’s website featuring detailed renderings of Piano’s building as it will appear in 2015, the new Whitney, situated at the southern entrance to the High Line park, will invite the neighborhood in. This is a far cry from Breuer’s fortress-like building, located in an equally wealthy, though decidedly less “hip” enclave. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I have always liked Breuer’s building—it feels placeless. While this is an often-heard criticism of postwar modernist architecture, I have to admit to rather enjoying it in this case. The Upper East Side can be a forbidding place, and the Whitney feels like an oasis. By contrast, the new Whitney will blend seamlessly with the shiny glass storefronts and towers that are coming to define the meatpacking district and adjacent Chelsea. To be sure, it will be a treat to see more of the Whitney’s collection, but something wonderful will be lost in the process.

Postscript:

Cory Arcangel convinced the Whitney to suspend its prohibition of photography for viewers of his current “Pro Tools” exhibition. I thought I would take advantage by photographing the windows for this blog entry. After taking the picture seen here, I was informed (rather abruptly) by a security guard that photography of the windows is prohibited. Confused, I approached another, less agitated guard, to inquire about this strange policy which would allow me to take pictures of the art, but not the windows. People try to take pictures of the windows all the time, he told me, and it is not permitted—he couldn't tell me why (for more on the fraught position of museum and art gallery security guards, see Security Check). Disappointed, and a little embarrassed, I slinked away, wondering whether Arcangel realized how partial his victory had been.









 Sign at the entrance to Cory Arcangel's exhibition

People—America's Favorite Program

NCIS is America’s favorite television show—of all time! This alarming “fact” is brought to us by something called The Harris Poll. Those of you who have seen the results of this questionable survey may have noticed that the truly awful Two & A Half Men holds tight at fourth place, sandwiched between M*A*S*H and Seinfeld—seriously. Two & A Half Men is apparently the favorite among Democrats. No, really, I’m serious.

Even if NCIS’s claim to all-time favorite status is dubious, it really does garner consistently high ratings for CBS. The show, which the network describes as “more than just an action drama,” follows “the sometimes complex and always amusing dynamics of a team forced to work together in high-stress situations.”

In NCIS, mundane office politics act as a ground against which all manner of life-and-death scenarios play out. The show’s producers and writers seem to have gotten the message that cutesy characters soften the impact of lazy storytelling. The characters are all talented and brilliant, we are told, so their conclusions—however commonsensical—are presented as evidence not only of their genius, but of that of the writers as well. Plot points, however, are spoon-fed to an audience apparently too stupid to pick up on nuance (what little there is). Most irritating of all, several strokes of a keyboard can bring up precisely the information sought, however obscure, with nifty graphics to boot. This allows the writers to sidestep actual procedure in favor of hi-tech show-and-tell. We know something cool is about to happen when the house music is pumped up and we’re in Abby’s lab. Her coolness is announced by her personal style—she’s goth!

NCIS is hardly the only show to hide terrible writing behind ostensibly lovable characters. In fact, it’s easier to come up with examples of shows that don’t do this—Law and Order, Seinfeld, 30 Rock—than to list the ones that do. Perhaps the most egregious offender was Lost, which seemed for six seasons to be advancing the plot to end all plots. Its (inevitably) disappointing conclusion made it clear that it had been about the characters and their relationships all along.

Some of you out there (mom, dad, anyone?) may be wondering why I bother to complain. After all, it’s just TV, and people enjoy what they enjoy. I, too, have been known to sail the smooth waters of mindless television from time to time (from 9pm to 11pm, actually). My concern, if it can be called that, is this: people and relationships are things that most of us have, or can seek out, in our own lives. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is not. So why, in our television-watching, do we accept flimsy, one-dimensional versions of the former as compensation for the deficiencies of the latter?

The Poetry of Images: A Weinergate Debriefing

It’s been nearly a week since Anthony Weiner announced his resignation from the House of Representatives, and we—twenty-four hour news cycle drones that we are—have almost forgotten what all the fuss was about. And so, stumbling upon these once-ubiquitous, but now nearly lost photographs, I have taken upon myself the difficult task of cataloguing and analyzing them. The full weight of historical distance supports me in this important endeavor.

Work type: Digital photograph 
Title: Composition in Gray and Peach 
Date: 2011 
Dimensions: Variable 
Creator: Weiner, Anthony David 
Creator dates: 1964 – 
Creator Nationality: Brooklyn

Jasper Johns, Weeping Women, 1975

The figure-ground relationship in this self-portrait is ambiguous. The image is emphatically flat, underscoring the flatness of the photographic medium itself. At the same time, the conflation of figure and ground together with the diagonal thrust of the composition destabilize the viewer, conjuring the immateriality of the digital realm in which this image circulates. While the overall color palette is muted, contributing to the shallowness of the image, there is some tension between the cool grays that dominate the composition and the warmer peach color that defines the ex-Congressman’s leg. The variety of textures and patterns calls to mind Jasper Johns’s monumental Weeping Women of 1975. It cannot be said with certitude, however, whether this was in the artist’s mind when he created this work.

Work type: Digital photograph

Title: Nude Athlete

Date: 2011

Dimensions: Variable

Creator: Weiner, Anthony David

Creator dates: 1964 –

Creator Nationality: Brooklyn

Donatello, David, 1420-60s

Like a Chinese painting bearing the seals of its owners, this photograph proudly proclaims its provenance—TMZ, and date of acquisition—2011. The figure of the nearly nude artist bisects the composition vertically and is echoed in the edges of the mirror in which the image is captured; in the lockers which stand behind its subject; and in the towel which functions both to conceal and to elongate that which it conceals. The ex-Congressman’s pose combines the bravado of Donatello’s David with the false modesty of the “Venus pudica” (modest Venus). Reflection, however, is the central motif of this self-portrait, with the artist performing the role of the doomed Narcissus, so enthralled by his own reflection that he fails to see its destructive potential.

 

Francois Lemoyne, Narcissus, 1728

Security Check

Last spring at the New Museum, I saw a man walk right into Janine Antoni’s Saddle, a sculpture that was created by fitting a cowhide around a mold of the artist’s body. The artist has said that the removal of the mold—the subsequent hollowing out of the cowhide—is an important element of the piece; this hollowness was palpable in the ease with which the piece shifted on the floor. Those of us who witnessed this gaffe—and who among us hasn’t had a near miss at some point?—cringed first, and then looked immediately to the guard who stood not fifteen feet away. I don’t know what we expected—swift action of some sort, I suppose. Would the guard reprimand the museumgoer for his clumsiness? Would she fashion a makeshift barrier to protect the sculpture from further incursions? Would she radio her superiors to alert them to the imminent need for conservation (or at least a good lookover)? The guard in question did none of these things. At first I was surprised, but her inaction actually makes a lot of sense. First, the damage was done; the sculpture could not be un-kicked. Second, why should she be expected to incriminate herself by reporting the accident or drawing further attention to it? 

I remembered this incident after a recent visit to the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea where a group of 1989 Donald Judd sculptures are being shown. The group comprises twelve open boxes, each of which is unique in its interior configuration and color scheme. From a distance, the colors, which reflect off the interior walls of the aluminum boxes, seem to take on a weight of their own, but what you really want to do is get close and look inside. The first time I tried to do this I was warned by a security guard not to get too close. I was hardly about to climb into the box, but I backed off. In the adjacent gallery, I got about as close as I had before—close enough to see the interiors of the boxes but not so close that I came into contact with them. The friendly guard in this gallery offered suggestions for viewing the sculptures—from a distance, of course. He also pointed out one box with black scuff marks made by a woman whose bag had brushed against it. This was going to be an extremely expensive repair, he said, and the guards had caught some flack for allowing it to happen. This explained their extra vigilance, but no amount of vigilance—short of physical barriers—can forestall what happened at the New Museum or at the David Zwirner Gallery. Nonetheless, the security guard, who seems to be a greater presence as contemporary art galleries take on ever-more ambitious shows, is charged with this difficult task.

The museum or art gallery guard’s role is a strange one—fraught, even. In museums in particular the guard is tasked with keeping viewers in line, but also with giving directions and even answering questions about works on view. Some guards—and I have seen this frequently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—are eager to volunteer knowledge or observations about a particular work of art. I have seen guards draw closer to tour groups to gather information. I remember being charmed and surprised when I first learned that Brice Marden and Mel Bochner worked as guards at the Jewish Museum in the 1960s. In fact, this is perfectly understandable; guards are among the individuals who spend the most time with a given group of artworks. It should hardly be surprising, then, that they have something to offer. It is generally understood that their primary contribution is surveillance, and the self-imposed decorum that comes with it. It’s nice to be reminded, as I was by the friendly and engaged guard at David Zwirner, that guards are uniquely positioned to watch not only the visitors, but the works themselves.