Bailey's Top 10 Art Shows

Ahhh... one of the cool things that I can do with Mid Atlantic Art News is to solicit input and opinions and "lists" from anyone and thus provide an open forum for anyone interested in the arts.

Whenever the responder is the WORDprocessing madman known as Bailey, one always knows that the response will be long, very long, and full of controversy, and stories, and stuff that makes you go Uh?. This is the third year in a row that Bailey has set a new word record for Top 10 lists.

Here's Bailey, uncensored and unedited:

Do You Know What It Means To Miss The Dead, Missing And Exiled Painters From New Orleans

Or,

If Painting Is Really Dead,

Then I Guess That Must Mean That The Only Good Painter Is A Dead Painter

by The Right Reverend James W. Bailey

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“Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today. So I'm asking Congress please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top, give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot." - Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish President

“Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental, but this is only because the nation as a whole has no contact with reality.” - `Ignatius J. Reilly' in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces

“I rode out the storm. I never considered leaving. I’m not a coward. I don’t run. I’d wake up, scavenge for food [and] water for me and [the] old people in the neighborhood, then I’d paint for the day on Magazine Street. We didn’t know anything. The media came by – Fox, CNN, L.A. Times, telling us levees broke. I rode down on my bike towards the flooded area, but the cops kept pulling out guns on me, so I went back home. A woman yesterday called me an ‘angry Black man’ – she couldn’t be more wrong. I’m an angry man. They don’t see me trying to champion the rights of the underdog. My work is political and society based. My work is [created] to make sure we don’t forget.” – New Orleans artist, Terrance Sanders

“I pledge allegiance to the anti-overt-political-messages-in-art consensus critical opinions of the white ivory tower art elite critic masses (as well as to the lame ass suck-up wannabe blue chip artists who attempt to please them), and to the subtle and minimal political messages in art for which they stand, one American MFA-Chelsea-produced art over God (and way the fuck over the head of the average critically abused major museum collection-denied ‘uneducated’, ‘self-taught’ black Southern ‘Folk’ artist), postmodern, with mass deconstruction and class-sanctioned segregated aesthetic values upper class liberty for all who understand what the hell they are saying.” – New Orleans artist/photographer, The Right Reverend James W. Bailey

“Jesus says buy more folk art.” – New Orleans artist, Albert “Big Al” Taplet

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Christmas in New Orleans

As I stood at the site of my destroyed home in New Orleans on Christmas day of 2006 (an early 2005 Christmas present given to me in late August of that year by the United States Army Corps of Mass-Murdering Engineers), I found myself standing amidst the bombed-out mess of the Big Easy postmodern Katrina debris field thanking God for the fact that we New Orleanians are blessed with a courageous and powerful sense of humor that has allowed us to laugh our way through this government-at-all-levels-created hell on earth.

Maybe it’s a Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder-seeing-85-per-cent-of-your-city-destroyed-and-hundreds-of-your-fellow-New-Orleanians-drown thing, but international art and blue-chip New York City artists haven’t really helped very many of us too much in our efforts to work our way through the havoc that evil and sadistic bitch of a storm named Katrina wrecked upon our city and our lives.

As a matter of fact, allow me an opportunity to be crudely blunt about it: Fuck the Bush-bashing rhetoric of the 1st-class-seat-jet-flying “I don’t do the ‘political’ thing with my work” artists who hold gold passports to the Chinese-Google® government/corporate-approved global art market.

The global art market in New Orleans, as we know it, is this: New Orleanians were saved from the emotional drowning waters of Katrina by being pulled to safety by local painters/jokers who knew how to float a poorly drawn image of a pirogue on a Salvation Army-purchased reusable canvass down Canal Street. And what will continue to save the collective sanity of the (Re)New Orleans as we fight the impossible 3rd Battle of New Orleans to save our city are our local artists/comedians.

And, as God as my witness, I’m telling you the straight up Gospel truth, my gentle elitist modern art receptive readers, as well as all the rest of you semi-art-literate lazy-ass-couch-potato-bound-blog-news-reading-sub-intellectual-yahoo-flyover-red-state-ground-level-NEA-hating-New-Orleans-deserved-it-because-who-in-the-hell-in-their-right-mind-would-ever-choose-to-live-below-fucking-sea-level American citizens who are so despised by the art intelligentsia, [and, not forgetting, of course, the preferred servant class of the art intelligentsia, which includes all of you hard-working Virgin Mary-worshipping predominately Catholic illegal immigrants from Central America who support your hard-working families by cleaning the V.I.P.-reserved major donors-only restrooms of the nation’s leading cultural institutions that receive mass quantities of the aesthetic excremental waste byproducts of the let’s-get-our-art-collecting-gorge-on-with-all-this-big-ass-expensive-art–so-we-can-bing-it-and-purge-it-down-the-critical-hedge-fund-investment-paid-for toilet ivory tower American art elite (an American art elite whose “deep and profound” concern about what happened in New Orleans came quickly loaded with a temperamental (and expedient) Republican-hating political agenda, an agenda whose compassion for New Orleans terminated at the Democratic Party congressional majority ballot box faster than a dinosaur-era holdover Louisiana mosquito hyped on crack can say “boo”)], that every damn one of you ought to get down on your knees and thank God Almighty as well that we New Orleanians have the sense of humor that we do have that we hold so dear to our hearts. The only reason you’re alive and reading this (especially if you live within a 1,000 mile nuclear bomb blast radius – I understand a dude named Putin in Russia has some real bargain basement deals he can offer on these weapons of mass Katrina instruction - of F.E.M.A’s Washington, D.C. office) is because we New Orleanians have such a remarkable sense of humor.

Yeah, you right! You had better believe that if it weren’t for our collective legendary sense of humor that has mentally protected us during almost 300 years of one catastrophic natural disaster after another, combined with one Republican Party/Democratic Party bipartisan political induced bullshit levee-funded catastrophe after another, we very likely woulda, coulda, shoulda converted en masse after Katrina to a radical form of Cajun Islam (a seriously fun religion backed up by an all-volunteer AK-47-armed I-got-my-extra-shotguns-in-the-back-of-my-Rebel-Flag-emblazoned-pickup-truck enemy combatant militia(all the members of whom just also happen to be exceptionally talented zydeco musicians – our spiritual leader, by the way, is Stanley “Buckwheat Zydeco” Dural, Jr.), aligned ourselves with Muqtada al-Sadr (I’ve never personally met the man, but goddamit I’m willing to bet my muffuletta-from-Central-Grocery-in-the-French-Quarter-eating life that even after everything the good ole U.S.A. has done to win the minds and hearts of the citizens of his home country that he cares more about New Orleans than the 537 New Orleans-in-denial-till-we-“solve”-the-problem-of-the-surge-in-troops-in-Iraq assholes sitting on top of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.(minus St. Senator Mary Landrieu, of course), and proceeded to press our cause for a God-Jesus-Allah-Mohammed coalition sanctioned revenge and retribution Holy War on Washington, D.C. that would envelope the City of War in a blood-bath fashion that would make the violence of Sin City look like one of the Care Bears had accidentally tripped over his left front paw and fallen down with a painless laugh onto a bed of roses.

Yeah, modern American “I pledge allegiance to the anti-overt-political-messages-in-art consensus critical opinions of the white ivory tower art elite critic masses (as well as to the lame ass suck-up wannabe blue chip artists who attempt to please them), and to the subtle and minimal political messages in art for which they stand, one American MFA-Chelsea-produced art over God (and way the fuck over the head of the average critically abused major museum collection-denied ‘uneducated’, ‘self-taught’ black Southern ‘Folk’ artist), postmodern, with mass deconstruction and class-sanctioned segregated aesthetic values upper class liberty for all who understand what the hell they are saying” artists hawking their hot and trendy art wares in Chelsea and at Art Basel in Miami didn’t save me and many of my fellow New Orleanians from becoming a post-Saddam-Hussein-trial-15-minute-kitchen-timer-F.E.M.A.-employee-hanging Shiite cleric after Katrina, 300 hundred years of the ART OF NEW ORLEANS HUMOR DID!

And from Michael "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" Brown, to George W. “Roe versus Wade? I don’t really give a shit how those poor blacks in New Orleans get the hell out of Dodge. Hell, man, I’ve got billions of American (d)Ex(press)(ed) Unbridled Capitalist ATM-Debit Card For Your Every Stupid Need® hungry Muslims around the world to convert to a trilateral Haliburton-Wal-Mart-McDonald’s Democracy™ to worry about!” Bush, to C. Ray “Chocolate City” Nagin, to William J. “90 Thousand Corrupt Lobbyist Crawfish Stuffed In My Freezer ‘Dollar Bill’” Jefferson, the bipartisan joke smokers that conspired (and keep conspiring) by acts of commission or omission to destroy our beloved New Orleans keep coming.

The thing the rest of America needs to understand about the New Orleans sense of dead serious humor (in case you didn’t learn it from Ignatius Reilly) is that some of our funniest comedians act in a very intense manner and never crack a discernable smile.

Years ago I met one such unsmiling artist/comedian from New Orleans.

I was having coffee at a delightful neighborhood coffee shop in the Mid-City area of New Orleans (near City Park and the New Orleans Museum of Art) when I suddenly noticed through the window a small thin white man standing in front of a cab parked on the side of the road with the hood raised.

As I exited the coffee shop, I joked with the man and asked him if he needed me to call him a cab.

The cabdriver didn’t laugh at the irony of my question.

Instead, he stared right at me with unblinking eyes and said in a very serious tone, “Come here, chief, I want to show you something.”

I walked over to his cab, leaned under the hood of the car to take a look (being that at the time New Orleans was the “Murder Capital” of the country, I cautiously peered around underneath the hood of the car, with one eye on the man, and with my shooting hand at the ready on my M9 Beretta that I always carried with me under my Don Johnson-Miami Vice-era silk jacket, in the protective effort to make sure he wasn’t about to rob, kidnap or kill me – even though the dude was small, thin and white and looked perfectly harmless, it’s important for you to understand that way back in the old school murder capital days of New Orleans that one could never really be too sure who the next major street gangsta might be, especially with most of the major white ganstas of public notice being recruited from the ranks of death-row eligible members of the New Orleans Police Department), didn’t see anything unusual, so I asked him what I was supposed to be looking at.

"There,” he said, as he dramatically motioned with his left hand. “You see that piece of orange tape wrapped around the solenoid?”

“Yes,” I replied, after I saw what he was pointing to.

“Well, that damn orange piece of tape wasn’t there this morning. That’s how they let me know they can kill me anytime they want,” he intoned with the most serious look you could imagine upon his face, with the greatest drama of speech reserved for the work “they.” “They place color-coded tape on my engine when I’m sleeping at night. They want me to know that they could install a car bomb if they wanted to.”

“They?” I asked, as I did a slow 360 survey of the neighborhood looking for hidden cameras, wondering if I was being secretly filmed for a cameo appearance on The X-Files.

“Who’s they, podnuh?” I asked the paranoid Mulder man, barely able to control my Scully smirk.

“The C.I.A. and N.S.A., of course,” he replied in a most unflinching deadpan voice.

Scully wouldn’t have been proud of me. I couldn’t control it any longer. I broke out laughing…and hysterically so.

And the small thin white man? Well, he just continued to stare at me with those unblinking eyes as I laughed my ass off during one of the best laughs I’ve ever had.

It turned out that the cabdriver that I was talking to was Perry Raymond Russo. Yes, that Perry Raymond Russo, the same Perry Raymond Russo who had his 15-minutes of infamy as a witness during the Jim Garrison/Clay Shaw/John F. Kennedy assassination trial staged in New Orleans. The same Perry Raymond Russo who was a technical adviser on Oliver Stone’s film, J.F.K. (Russo appears briefly in the film playing the role of an angry bar patron.)

Perry Raymond Russo and I became friends that day. Perry Russo was a real New Orleanian. Perry Russo definitely had the hard-core New Orleans sense of humor. I believe that Perry Russo would have been one of the survivors of Katrina as well, had he still been alive at the time.

Perry Raymond Russo died of a heart attack in New Orleans on August 15, 1995, ten years before Katrina.

Perry Russo was also an artist. I own one of his paintings (pictured above.)

Yeah. When you’re from New Orleans it’s hard to be impressed with a lot of art you see and with most artists you meet when you’ve had the privilege of living in such an unearthly city where every damn native-born soul IS a work of art. A lot of artists in this world try so hard to fake a personality (or, worse, fake that they have NO personality – if you’ve ever met one of those blank face angry white male minimalist artists that walk around like they’ve got a Donald Judd box stuffed up their anal-retentive butt, then you no doubt know what I’m talking about!)

I know I’m getting a little off subject with this comment, but I don’t know what it is about people born and raised in New Orleans. Even those New Orleanians who hate modern art and progressive culture have the heart and soul of a real artist. I’ve long been convinced that this strange paradox has something to do with folks who live in hot, steamy and swampy environs who eat a lot of red beans and rice. Maybe that, or maybe it’s just the fact that people who live below sea level don’t give a shit about what the rest of the world thinks about them. So much of cultural and art criticism, being the hot air bullshit that it is, tends to rise toward the heavens, which means New Orleans, being below sea level) has always been immune to that crap. God bless those poor monks in Tibet and Nepal. One can only imagine how much art critical nonsense they’ve had to listen to floating around, among and above their mountains since the days of Clement Greenberg.

Anyway…back to the blood, guts, tears, mud and muck of Katrina and this story about some of what was lost and found from my destroyed New Orleans home and studio…

Once upon a time, long before the world outside of New Orleans ever heard of the 17th Street Canal, I had a massive collection of art created by some of my favorite artists from New Orleans. Many pieces from my collection were lost or destroyed in the floodwaters of Katrina. Fortunately, other pieces survived and now (safely, do I dare believe safely, especially since I presently live so close to the corporate offices of U.S. Department of Homeland Security?) hang on the walls of my home in Northern Virginia.

The running line among many survivors of Katrina is that during the first year after the disaster those New Orleanians left alive could proudly claim to have (just barely) survived it. However, sometime shortly after the 1st anniversary of the levees collapsing is when most of us from New Orleans realized that we had in fact (and quite unknown to us) actually died.

In 2006, I installed a New Orleans-inspired home-gallery-away-from-home exhibition in Reston, Virginia. This exhibit functioned as a place of refuge for me, a place where I could contemplate the future of the Katrina-DNA-altered particle of life left in my dead body and soul and whether or not I would be favored by God for some type of a miraculous emotional resurrection.

During 2006 I spent endless hours roaming through this exhibition in my home gallery, meditating upon the works by artist friends from New Orleans whose lives and art have long touched my heart and mind, some of whom died as a direct result of Katrina or its related emotional stresses, several of whom to this very day I still do not know their status or whereabouts.

Life and art endure.

New Orleans endures.

New Orleanians endure…as we always have…as we always will.

My Top Ten List of painters/friends from New Orleans who were featured in my 2006 home-based gallery exhibition, Do You Know What It Means To Miss The Dead, Missing Or Exiled Painters From New Orleans?, include the following:

1. Ronnie Boudreaux - painter (exiled from New Orleans to Florida)

2. Joe Bruno – painter (suffered a heart attack and died within weeks of losing his home and all he owned to the floodwaters of Katrina)

3. De Ma Jean - painter (drowned in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans during Katrina)

4. Charles Gillam – painter (survived Katrina and still lives in New Orleans)

5. Addie Hall – painter (survived Katrina, along with her boyfriend, but was brutally murdered by the same boyfriend in New Orleans in late 2006)

6. Gregory Hawkins – painter (status and location unknown to me)

7. David Rex Joyner – painter (status and location unknown to me)

8. Elizabeth Fox - painter (survived Katrina and still lives in New Orleans)

9. Terrance Sanders – painter (survived Katrina and still lives in New Orleans)

10. Alfred “Big Al” Taplet – painter (exiled from New Orleans to Texas)

The Final Four Paragraphs from A Confederacy of Dunces:

Now that Fortuna had saved him from one cycle, where would she spin him now? The new cycle would be so different from anything he had ever known.

Myrna prodded and shifted the Renault through the city traffic masterfully, weaving in and out of impossibly narrow lanes until they were clear of the last twinkling streetlight of the last swampy suburb. Then they were in darkness in the center of the salt marshes. Ignatius looked out at the highway marker that reflected their headlights. U.S. 11. The marker flew past. He rolled down the window an inch or two and breathed the salt air blowing in over the marshes from the Gulf.

As if the air were a purgative, his valve opened. He breathed again, this time more deeply. The dull headache was lifting.

He stared gratefully at the back of Myrna’s head, at the pigtail that swung innocently at his knee. Gratefully. How ironic, Ignatius thought. Taking the pigtail in one of his paws, he pressed it warmly to his wet moustache.

It’s almost 17 months after Katrina and my dull headache caused by this greatest of American tragedies is just now starting to lift. Maybe in January of 2008 I’ll have the desire and energy to review some works by living painters from the metro D.C. area (there are so many great painters in this area of the country who have incredible talent and vision) who impressed me during their 2007 exhibitions.

But in the meantime, at least for just a little while longer, I hope that you’ll understand that I need to continue to seek some comfort, and humorous inspiration, by viewing and thinking about my painting by Perry Raymond Russo, one of many great paintings I own by a damn great dead painter from New Orleans.

Even all the way up here in the Washington, D.C. area, as I close my eyes and think about the several painters from New Orleans I know who are dead, missing, or permanently exiled from New Orleans, I too can smell salt air blowing in over the marshes from the Gulf.

That salt air smell from the Gulf makes me sad.

But sad is good.

Sad means I’m feeling something.

And feeling something, which means I’m no longer feeling the numb of nothing, must mean I’m getting better.

From the film, Sideways:


-
-

Miles Raymond: Well, the world doesn't give a shit what I have to say. I'm not necessary. Had. I'm so insignificant I can't even kill myself.

Jack: Miles, what the hell is that supposed to mean?

Miles Raymond: Come on, man. You know. Hemingway, Sexton, Plath, Woolf. You can't kill yourself before you're even published.

Jack: What about the guy who wrote Confederacy of Dunces? He killed himself before he was published. Look how famous he is.

Miles Raymond: Thanks.

Jack: Just don't give up, alright? You're gonna make it.

Miles Raymond: Half my life is over and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. I'm a thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper. I'm a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.

Jack: See? Right there. Just what you just said. That is beautiful. 'A smudge of excrement... surging out to sea.'

Miles Raymond: Yeah.

Jack: I could never write that.

Miles Raymond: Neither could I, actually. I think it's Bukowski.

Charles Bukowski said the following: "The most important thing for the creation of art is cheap rent."

Charles Bukowski once lived in New Orleans back in the days when the rent was really dirt cheap. Bukowski, more than most, understood the art of economics: When the dirt cheap rent goes, so go the artists.

Brother and Sisters, one of the saddest things that I can personally report concerning the cultural future of New Orleans is that the dirt cheap rent in that magical city is in very real danger of flying away forever.

Every great Pentecostal preacher from my home state of Mississippi ends the Sunday sermon, after first scaring the hell-fire bound shit out of you, with a positive thought and an important question for you to think about on the road home from church.

The positive thought…

Forget what a lot of damn so-called art critic experts in the art world might try and tell you – paintin’ ain’t dead. Oh, no, cher, don’t ya even dare thunk dat thought! Listen to me, cher, when I tell you that our painters from New Orleans may be dead, missing or exiled across the country, but their paintings are very much alive, doing quite well and will live on forever.

The important question…

The question that has no answer at this point is this: Will many of New Orleans’s great living artists ever be able to come back home?

Let’s all pray for the power of art to do what it can to breathe more life filled with peace into this crazy messed-up and sometimes astonishingly beautiful world, a world where far too many live in unimaginable circumstances.

Please keep New Orleans in your thoughts and prayers as well.

New Orleans…it catches my heart in its hands.

God bless.

The Right Reverend James W. Bailey

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Read my 2004 review published on Lenny's blog:

2004 – The Year a Small Army of Mississippi Rebel(lious) Artists Invaded Washington, D.C.

Read my 2005 review published on Lenny's blog:

The Right Reverend James W. Bailey's Top Ten Metro Washington, D.C. Area Friendly Fire Art Attacks

Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s Artists & Communities Program

DC area artists are now eligible to participate in the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s Artists & Communities program and they want to make you aware of a free marketing tool available to community artists and have emailed me some info:

The recently re-launched Mid Atlantic website includes a searchable database feature that includes information on community artists. Potential residency host sites can search for a community artist by discipline, sub-discipline, state, and name.

Returned records include contact information, availability, and artist notes. The online data is kept updated through downloads from the main Foundation database. This process keeps information current and useful. You can check out the database at maaf.artsnet.org or the Artists & Communities program at this website.

Currently, no DC-based artists are listed in the database – and they need you to join! If you would like to be included in their online searchable database, please fill out the form on their website and return it to the Foundation at:

Online Database
Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation
201 N. Charles Street
Suite 401, Baltimore, MD 21201.

You can also fax to 410.837.5517 or email to info@midatlanticarts.org. You must opt-in to the via hard copy of the form to be included. This service is open to any artists from the Mid Atlantic area.

Interview

Contemporary Art Gallery magazine has published an interview with me in their most current issue.

Read the interview online here.

Jerry Cullum on Kretz's Jollie Painting

Curator and Senior Editor of Art Papers Jerry Cullum adds some insight into the issue of the Kate Kretz painting of Jollie as the Virgin Mary. Read it here.

Deborah McLeod's Top 10 DC Area Show

Deborah McLeod, who used to run (and did an excellent job) the McLean Project for the Arts in Virginia before relocating to Baltimore, where she now reviews art shows for the City Paper says:

I haven't seen most of the D.C. shows that were presented in 2006, but one I did see that I thought deserved mention was the "Sculpture Unbound" juried exhibition at PEPCO's Edison Gallery last Jan-Mar.

It was juried by Glenn Harper, and as you might imagine, he did an acute job of selecting and arguing it. It was a rich, inventive, and satisfying show for the strange object lover.

"Sculpture Unbound" was a joint Washington Sculptors Group and WPA/Corcoran project.

artDC

artDC is next April in Washington, DC and I've yet to hear squat about it from anyone. But I am getting emails from both artists and collectors and a few gallerists asking me what I know about it.

Zip!

Best Salad Bar in PA

I know that this has nothing to do with the visual arts, but the salad bar at Lancer's Diner, 858 Easton Road, Horsham, PA, telephone 215-674-5088, is a work of art!

For an amazingly affordable price, one has a choice of all you can eat supplies of a delicious cold calamari, Greek dolmas, two or three different tomato offerings, garbanzo salad, a couple of bean salads, a couple of potato salads, Greek olives, plus the usual assortment of salady things.

There's also plenty of fresh fruit and a killer bread pudding.

And, if you get a window seat, you can also enjoy the ferocious looking A-10's land and take-off across the street at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station.

Artomatic Events – Bethesda

This January and February, a number of galleries in Bethesda, Maryland will host group exhibitions showcasing works they have selected from artists who responded to a call for entries by uploading their images to the Artomatic virtual gallery at Artdc.org.

These Bethesda venues, with leadership from Catriona Fraser of Fraser Gallery, have worked with the Bethesda Urban Partnership's Arts and Entertainment District members and Artomatic to establish and implement this inaugural Artomatic Associated Events project.

Participating venues are: Creative Partners Gallery, Fraser Gallery, Gallery Neptune, Heineman Myers Contemporary Art, Joy of Motion Dance Center, Round House Theatre, Washington School of Photography/Capitol Arts Network, and The Writer’s Center.

In addition to these group exhibitions (which incorporate the work of 30 painters, printmakers, photographers and sculptors), the January and February events will also cover a vibrant range of performance offerings, including open dance rehearsals and free Salsa lessons, artist talks, "assembly line" portrait sittings, poetry readings, and live music sessions, as well as networking opportunities and portfolio workshops for Metro area creative professionals.

Artomatic Associated Events - Bethesda will kick off with an Artswalk and a variety of opening-related events on Friday, January 12th from 6 – 9 pm.

Further details on the roster of events throughout the month will be available at both Artomatic.org and ArtDC.org. More information about the ArtsWalk may be found at this website.

Cudlin on Gopnikosities

My good friend Jeffry Cudlin, the award winning art critic for the Washington City Paper, offers an intelligent and readable counterpoint to my dissection of Blake Gopnik's comments on the Kate Kretz "Jollie as Madonna" painting.

Read Jeffry's good points here.

I think that the line between illustration and fine art is sometimes real and a lot of times blurred, and many times erased by history, and sometimes entire cultures could be wrong, otherwise we'd still be considering Ukiyo-e as illustrations and manuals, and packing materials for tea vases to be shipped to Europe.

We're both making exagerated claims in a sense... Duchampian followers have a great time spending time deciphering the many stories and angles and intricate issues in Velazquez's "Las Meninas," but the opposite and immediate reaction is delivered equally well and without much deciphering in Goya's "3rd of May."

So the answer is that both can fit into our appreciation of art. And if it wasn't for Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," we'd have a very little footprint in contemporary 60's paintings of the Civil Rights struggle.



In some Rockwellian works like this one there's an example of an illustrator whose work crossed over and now - at least that piece and all the works from his civil rights imagery - crosses into fine art. It happened in the 1800s as well - Honore Daumier being the best-known example.



Were Gericault's "Medusa" to be painted today - say with the subject being Abu Ghraib, would that be art or an illustration? Oh wait - it has been done - Botero has done it and it's considered important political art!

In my opinion, and of course I'm opinionated and not necessarily right, Cudlin and many other writers are sometimes too wrapped up in theory and often resistant to just open up and enjoy the possibility of the simplicity of art for the sense of "just because..."

When I first started exploring, creating and writing about art 30 years ago, I too was all wrapped up in theory, and straining to find the meaning, the struggle, the clues, the angst, and the message in all the art that I was seeing. Without a message, the art was useless, I had been taught; if it stands on the shoulders of another artist, it cannot be good.

Among many other events that slowly changed my appreciation of art, somewhere along the lines I stumbled across a book titled: Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture.

And all of a sudden, the vapid, sickly sweet, saccharine Romantic art of the Victorians became a whole new world of clues, deciphering images that had secret meanings to the Victorians, etc.

It was a triumph for what Duchampians believe should be good in art. Yet it was a Duchampian triumph wrapped up in a visual eye candy that looked more like parlor room art than fine art; And it made me realize that both camps could be accepted.

And now I refuse to believe that art has to do this or do that, or delay our reactions, of give us clues, etc. in order to be accepted as high art. Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of hacks out there producing paintings that sometimes astonish in their vapidity and waste of canvas, but to take the galvanized, one-track train of thought that it's either a Duchampian success or it can't be real art, is a sure way to eliminate a lot of good art which simply may offer nothing but viewing pleasure.

Henri Matisse once said that "there is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted." I think most painters almost subconsciously do this. In painting anything, unless one is outright copying an existing work (as it is taught in many art schools to teach painting techniques), a good artist is always creating something new. Something that until that moment, when the loaded brush is applied to the canvas and allowed to deliver its content, has never been done in that exact stroke, or manner, or hue, or shape, in the entire history of mankind.

Take a look at the book... it's by Bram Dijkstra, who was a professor of English literature at the University of California.

Pat Goslee's Top 10 DC area art show

Talented DC area artist Pat Goslee is one of the area's most active artists and exhibits widely around the city. She says:

I don't have a top 10 list. I say the ultimate BEST show of 2006 was:

Swarm at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 3 December 2005–18 March 2006.

The husband and wife curatorial team of Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller embraced the theme of swarm in an exemplary fashion — presenting a global ecosystem of contemporary art. The BEST example I have EVER seen of a COMPLETE curatorial effort, Lupton and Miller executed every detail with intelligence and precision... down to the t shirt in the gift shop.

Pat at Swarm under the piece called Long Division by Siebren Versteeg - a digital program output to projection on floor

Lou Stovall "Origin and the Landscape"

By Rosetta DeBerardinis

The Washington Printmakers Gallery selected master printmaker, Lou Stovall for its fifth annual invitational exhibit honoring his life and artistic achievements.

Stovall is a local DC area artist with international and national credentials. His array of spring floral prints "Origin and the Landscape" nicely coincides with Washington's current warm weather - thanks to global warming.

Stovall stood attired in fashionable gallery black on Friday night, at the first of his artist receptions, before his vibrant abstract floral prints that popped off the pristine Payne's gray walls. Several guests made references to Pollock, but anyone who knows art or Stovall saw no similarity.

Marguerite, Silkscreen Monoprint by Lou Stovall
The monoprint, "Finale, Alla Breve," has gestural black and green strokes that hop and skip across the surface. Each of its strokes has a beginning and an ending. "Marguerite," named for the character in a Faust opera, is composed of small colorful dots and circles with tiny arcs.

If you look closely at Stovall's work you see control. His arcs and gestural strokes unlike Pollock's, are intentional and he leaves nothing to chance. This show exemplifies the work of a true master technician.

The triumph of the human spirit is to rise above limitations to create a sense of order, a place of well-being, an attitude of possibilities, a desire for accomplishment.

Lou Stovall

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Origin and Landscape
Jan. 3 - Jan. 28, 2007
Artists Reception: Sunday, January 7, 2007, 2-5 p.m.
Brown Bag Lunch Presentation: Thursday, January 11, 2007, 12 noon.
Washington Printmakers Gallery
1732 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
www.washingtonprintmakers.com
202-332-7757

Fred Ognibene's Top Ten DC Area Art Shows

Ubercollector Fred Ognibene is not only one of the DC area's best-known art collectors, but also a very generous donor to our area's museums. Herewith his list of the Top 10 11 DC area art shows, in alphabetical order:

1. Barlow Curates at Addison-Ripley, especially the amazing sculptures of Elizabeth-Lundberg Morrisette (actually an artist I discovered at the last Art-o-Matic).

2. Bellini-Giorgione-Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting at the National Gallery of Art-one of the most beautiful shows I have ever seen.

3. Christopher French: New Paintings: Contradictory Resemblances at Marsha Mateyka Gallery - a very complex show of color families painted on Braille paper with hypnotic results.

4. Kevin Kepple at Addison-Ripley - Kevin’s works have matured and are more complex; the new palette he is using resulted in beautiful paintings.

5. Dean Kessman: Plastic on Paper at Conner Contemporary - plastic shopping bags as art - beautiful and unexpected renderings from some horribly ugly satchels.

6. Jim Lambie: Directions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden -thanks for showing his work.

7. Maggie Michael: Open End at G Fine Art - her paintings keep getting better and stronger and more complex.

8. Ledelle Moe: Congregation at G Fine Art and storefront installation on 14th Street - a sculptor willing to push the limits and with a very strong future.

9. Vesna Pavlovic: Collections/Kolekcija at Fusebox-a wonderful collection of images from an artist now in the Columbia MFA program... I am glad I bought her work early!

10. Erik Sandberg: Contrary at Conner Contemporary -h e is/will be significant competition for John Currin!

11. Ian Whitmore: Little Lies at Fusebox - a VERY talented artist with a guaranteed successful future.

Gopnikosities

I really, really try to stay away from constantly poking fun at the Washington Post's erudite Chief Art Critic, Blake Gopnik's curiously academic and outdated views on contemporary art, which are still somehow stuck somewhere in the 1960s - I think - but the man is a never-ending source of astounding agendart verbosity.

So here's the latest:

According to this AP story a "North Carolina artist intrigued by the public obsession with celebrity has found herself feeding that obsession with a painting of actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary hovering over a Wal-Mart check-out line.

Kate Kretz has painted for 20 years but none of her previous work has garnered the attention given 'Blessed Art Thou,' showing this weekend at Art Miami, an annual exposition of modern and contemporary art."

And so, this WaPo blogger asked Blake Gopnik for his opinion on the painting, and the Gopnikmeister delivered this brilliant Gopnikism:

"Kate Kretz's painting comes closer to magazine illustration than to the subtle fine art you'd expect to see in a major museum of contemporary art. It gets its messages across, alright. It presents Angelina Jolie as our nation's Madonna of Consumption. In a glory of siliconed breasts, collagened lips and foreign-adopted cherubs, Angelina reigns over Wal-Mart's banality -- its all-American brands, its all-American flag, it's all-American obesity. The problem with the picture, art-wise, is that its messages are way TOO clear. It's more like a puzzle-picture than a probing work of art: Once you've deciphered it, there's not much chance of giving it a second look. Its van-art technique, especially, is so generic that it hardly has a thing to say that hasn't been said a thousand times before -- often, much better. The crucial question, in our busy age: Why spend time with this work, when a 500-word Op Ed would do a better job expressing its opinions, and any number of Old Master paintings would mean more to an art-loving eye."

Let me decipher this a-la-Bailey; Gopnik is affirming that:

1. "Real" art must be subtle in order to be of museum quality.

2. "Real" art should never be TOO clear in its message (otherwise who'd need critics to interpret it for us?).

3. "Real" art should "say" something, but not too clearly, and that something shouldn't have been said too many times before.

4. Old Master paintings, because they're done by dead Old Masters, can say something in a heavy-handed way, and really clearly, but that's OK, because they're Old Masters and not some new painter who's clearly never gotten the memo that painting is dead.

More Congratulations...

To DC area artist Matt Sesow, who will be exhibiting in New York City as well. His work opens next week at the van der Plass Gallery (South Street Seaport, pier 17). The exhibition runs from January 12 thru February 28th, 2007.

Sesow is already having a spectacular 2007:

January: Group show at van der Plas Gallery in New York City. Group show in Bethesda at Creative Partners (part of the Artomatic show).

March: Solo show in San Diego (Oceanside) at D Gallery

April: Two-person show in Atlanta

May: Solo in Rockland Maine (coinciding with the Basquiat/Warhol/Wyeth)

June: Solo in Sacramento (Pamela Skinner Gallery)

July: 31 days in July..

August: Solo show in Denver, Colorado

September: Adams Morgan Day and Arts on Foot in DC

October: Show at Alcove in Atlanta

December: Possible self-taught group show in Miami (part of Art Basel extravanganza weekend).

Is that a hard-working artist or what?

Gross Clinic Goes on View

Thomas Eakins’1875 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, goes on public view at 4 p.m. today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in early March will hang at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It is on loan to the Museum from Thomas Jefferson University until it is sold later this month by the University to the Museum and the Academy, which have joined in an extraordinary ongoing fundraising effort and have managed to keep the painting in Philly.

Congratulations too...

To Tim Tate, whose work will be included in "The Next Tortured Genius" exhibition in Chelsea's MonkDogz Urban Art Gallery, which opened amid much hoopla last year at 547 West 27th Street in NYC.

Congratulations

To DC area artist Elena Maza, whose work graces the cover of this month's Art Calendar magazine.

Walt Whitman, a kosmos

The National Portrait Gallery is holding a conference on Walt Whitman to coincide with the exhibition “Walt Whitman, a kosmos” on January 26th from 9 to 12.

They will have a stellar array of speakers: Jorie Graham, Pulitzer Prize winning poet; Alexander Nemerov, Yale University Art Historian; Sean Wilentz, Princeton University Historian and winner of the Bancroft Prize in History; and Michael Schmidt, Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow and managing editor of Carcanet Press, the leading poetry publisher in the United Kingdom.

For further information on the conference go to this website and click on the Events and Program link.

DC Area Blogger Summit

The Washington Post is hosting the first ever "DC Area Blogger Summit" next week, and although I've been invited, I will be unable to attend. I hope to have someone represent Mid Atlantic Art News and I'll let you know what took place.

Peter Panse Update

Remember the case of the High School art professor suspended for the nude model issue? (Read this if you don't).

According to this website:

The Hearing Officer's decision in the case of Pete Panse - the New York art teacher suspended more than a year ago for having suggested that his advanced students should be allowed to enter figure drawing classes - is "imminent."