Everytime that I start thinking that I am too harsh on the Post, they do something to prove to me that they (the corporate they or editorial they who makes decisions as to what is to be covered by their writers) haven't got the foggiest sense of what place they hold in the cultural tapestry of our city and how they manage to mismanage it when it comes to the visual arts.

Read this waste of printspace and weep with me for a newspaper that has some of the smallest art coverage of any major daily in the US and yet devotes the time and effort and space to cover mass produced garbage and use the word "art" in describing it.

Perhaps if more people knew that they could buy original art by emerging artists at the same prices as the "wall decor," they would not waste their time and money buying expensive posters.

"... a growing trend of consumers who buy art -- known in the industry as "wall decor" -- that is made and marketed to coordinate with prevailing trends in home furnishings...

... "People are absolutely buying more art. In the last two or three years, our art sales have doubled," said Becky Weber, Crate & Barrel's accessories buyer, who declined to give specific sales figures.

None of this is lost on artists -- whose royalties are tied to sales -- as they create images of quaint Parisian cafes, jammin' jazz combos, monochrome geometrics and ye olde hunting scenes."

Makes my head hurt.

Elsewhere in the Post, Jessica Dawson, who generally is supposed to review Washington area galleries (I think), treks to Annapolis to review Louise Nevelson: Selections From the Farnsworth Art Museum at the Mitchell Gallery, St. John's College.

I now eagerly await for the Annapolis Capital to send their art critic to DC to review one of our shows.

Oh wait...

City Museum Censors "Funky Furniture" Show.

Area artists Chad Alan and Maggie O'Neill have been organizing an interesting exhibition for the City Museum of Washington, DC titled "Funky Furniture."

Several area artists are involved and have been working for the last few months for this exhibition. I have been made aware by several people of a developing controversy now rapidly revolving around this show.

I am told that entries for the show were brought in over this past weekend, and when viewed a couple of days ago, there were at least six adjudged by the museum management to be "not acceptable" because of sexual and/or offensive content. One of the objectionable ones was an end table with "The bitch set me up" carved with on the surface with a razor blade.

The entire show has been removed from the main floor, and some may be allowed in smaller spaces elsewhere, but the offending six will not appear.

There are apparently ongoing negotiations with the museum management, but this has the smell of art censorship.

In a paradoxical way, this brewing controversy could be exactly what the museum needs to increase its visibility and maybe even get some people to visit it.

Look for Washington Post and Washington City Paper stories in the next few days, but you read it here first.

Target Gallery has a Call for Artists

Deadline December 31, 2004.

Open Call for 2005 Exhibition Proposals at the Target Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia. Open to all individual artists and groups in all media in North America.

Jurors: Richard Dana, a well-known and talented Washington, D.C. based artist and arts activist; Millie Shott, Exhibitions Director, Strathmore Hall, Bethesda, MD; and Virginia McGehee Friend, Washington area collector of contemporary Fine Craft.

Deadline for Proposals: December 31, 2004. Exhibition Dates: October 26-December 4, 2005

Fee: $35 for 20 images (slides or JPEG CD) and proposal. For Applications: email them here, or call 703/838-4565 ext. 4, or send SASE to:
Open 2005
Target Gallery
105 N. Union Street
Alexandria, VA 22314

Grammar.police has a really good pre-review preview (police that!) on the Dan Flavin retrospective at the NGA.

Sarah Tanguy is the new head of the Department of State's Art in Embassies program.

Established by the United States Department of State in 1964, the Art In Embassies Program is a global museum that exhibits original works of art by U.S. citizens in the public rooms of approximately 180 American diplomatic residences worldwide. To submit images to their staff for consideration in upcoming exhibitions please e-mail .jpg or .gif images of your works no larger than 50k in size, to this email address.

Pilfered from AJ:

Carmel, the famous little seaside town in California has decided that they have too many galleries and has imposed a moratorium on licensing new art galleries in the city. You can read the story here. This is the same silly town that passed a law in the 80s forbidding eating ice cream in public and then elected Clint as mayor.

61 galleries have opened in Carmel since 2000, bringing the total to about 120. Of the city's roughly 300 retail shops, approximately four out of 10 are art galleries.

When I lived there in the late 80s (I used to review books for the newspaper publishing this story), and I used to exhibit my artwork in a Carmel gallery that has since closed, and during my last visit in the late 90s, one thing was clear: A lot of them were and are crap galleries - that is, they are the type of galleries that sell a lot of reproductions, decorative art, gyclees by the millions, etc. Many others show the work of just one artist, or do not change shows regularly.

Because Carmel's main business is tourism, the galleries aim to tourists. And tourists come to Carmel because of its beauty, to play golf, see the Spanish mission, stroll around the beach, and because of... galleries.

Still, seems silly to pass regulations forbidding what obviously is the town's main attraction.

Locally, we have the same flavor of an issue around Dupont Circle, where the locals have decided that no more "new" galleries can be opened. As a gallery closes (such as Elizabeth Roberts will soon), it can be replaced by a new gallery in the same building, but no new galleries can open in a building that hasn't been a gallery prior to the sale.

And so we're all hoping that Elizabeth Roberts will be able to find a buyer for her building that wants to open a new gallery in that building. I've spoken to Elizabeth and she would prefer for that to happen as well.

A while back I posted a bit about a fiery DC area artist (Marsha Stein), who decided that the reported woes of the City Museum of Washington, DC deserved some hands on action.

So she's taking some action.

Stein has come up with a project to revitalize what the City Museum of Washington, DC does to leave a significant footprint on our city.

Here it is, in her own words:

This project will bring together artists from the Washington, DC area to form "artistic teams" and create collaborative pieces that convey ideas about Washington, DC.

The works of art created by the teams will be displayed in a feature exhibition at The City Museum of Washington, DC.

Visitors will be invited to vote on their favorite piece, as well as describe why they made this choice. The artists will be documented on film while they are in the creative process for educational purposes. These pieces will be auctioned at the close of the exhibit.

The goals of the project are to:

1. Bring the artistic community together
2. Empower DC artists to create an artistic movement
3. Integrate artists with the community

A jury panel will select the teams. The call will invite individuals as well as those who can form teams of two or three to send slides as well as describe why they want to do "team art."

All artists, newspeople and visual art lovers who are interested to participate, learn more, or put in their two cents are invited to:
Karma Restaurant
1919 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
(19th and I, NW)
On Monday, October 18, 2004 from 6 - 8 PM
I'm curious as to what can develop; So.... see you there.

Good week in Washington if you are a lover of the visual arts.

This Friday is the second Friday of the month and thus time for the Bethesda Art Walk with all these art venues participating from 6-9 PM.

We will host the fourth solo show by David FeBland, who has become our best selling artist (and whose solo debut in Europe a few months ago sold out in Germany).

FeBland paints what the New York Times dubs "urban realism" (the Times called him "the leading edge of the new urban realists") and the Washington Post has called "a revival of the Ashcan School."

And Calder Miró, which opens at the Phillips Collection on October 9, 2004, showcases the emergence of a new type of abstraction in the work of these two giants of modern art as seen in the context of their five-decade friendship. That same day, at 11:00 AM, the eminent Spanish art historian Victoria Combalía, will discuss Alexander Calder’s art in the context of Calder's travels to Spain in the early 1930s when he was Miró’s guest in Catalonia. Contact Mary Ann Bader (202) 387-2151 x4235 or Mela Kirkpatrick (202) 387-2151 x4220 for tickets to the lecture.

I have been astonished by the re-emergence of Catalonia and the Catalan language in the last few years. The last time that I was in Barcelona, there wasn't a single ad or street sign in Spanish! Everything was in the native language (again)!

That same day, the Corcoran opens "Inventions: Recent Paintings by Caio Fonseca", which will run until February 14, 2005.

The LA Times discusses"Reporting the Arts II," a study conducted for Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Program and released Saturday at a conference of newspaper editors in New Orleans. The report looked at arts journalism in 13 American cities in October 2003 and compared the findings with a similar analysis that had been done five years earlier.

The findings: "In all the cities our researchers visited, they found evidence of growing vitality in the arts. But when it comes to journalism, the opposite is true."

DC was not included in this study, but doesn't this paragraph describe the Washington Post's coverage:

"Our findings reveal an alarming trend: During the last five years, none of the papers we looked at increased the amount of their arts criticism and reporting. Editors at many dailies are filling smaller news holes with more and therefore shorter stories. Pieces on "high" arts, as well as those with hard reporting about cultural institutions, continue to take a backseat to soft-focus features on the latest movie star, CD or rock concert... Now many art sections have become viewer guides, devoting the bulk of their efforts to calendars, the daily TV grid and tiny thumbnail reviews."

In DC, under the leadership of its Arts Editor Leonard Roberge, the Washington City Paper continues to take over the void created by the Post's tiny visual arts coverage. This trend is apparently also common in other cities, as the piece discusses that:

"The alternative press, once derided by mainline news outlets, has also proved so successful at covering local arts events that media giants such as Tribune Co. and Gannett have started publications that mimic those brash competitors."

And the article closes with a key prediction:

"The greatest hope of quality arts journalism is the Internet. By going online, a reader can gain access to what seems like the work of every news organization and blogger on the planet. But there's a problem with the Web: The information is there, but you have to go looking for it. Articles and ideas are not placed at the reader's front door or local newsstand. The Internet cannot form the kind of connective tissue for our cultural life that newspapers offer.

We don't know where the talented cultural writers of tomorrow will come from and what type of art they will champion. They may choose to ply their trade outside newspapers, feeling too hemmed in by old routines and space constraints."

You can order the actual report here.

Thanks AJ!

Tyler Green does a tiny DC gallery walk-through.

DCARTNEWS reader Shark chimes in with a very funny comment on the Flavin Retro at the NGA:

"I've always wondered: Have museums and collectors stocked up on replacement bulbs for their Flavin works?

What happens in a hundred years or so (a decade, even?) -- when nobody can find a flourescent tube?

PS: Shark's Prediction: Flavin won't even be a minor blip on the art history landscape. He and the likes of Donald Judd will be lucky to be footnotes.

(But Marfa [Santa Fe without the scenery] is nice this time of year!)"

The power of the Internet surfaces again...

I received a studio email (I think) thanking me for pointing out to the world that the movie trailers for the new Motorcycles Diaries movie were mispronouncing Ernesto "Che" Guevara de La Serna Lynch's name, and Lo and Behold: there's a new voice over the same movie trailer.

Now... Che's name is not mentioned at all!

GE-varah, GE-varah, GE-varah (soft "G"... like in "get").

Blake Gopnik at the Washington Post with an excellent video review of Dan Flavin at the NGA.

Poor Flavin's show will soon come down in history as the exhibition that everyone loved but that was cursed with the cheesiest headlines in art history.

Gopnik's is "Glowing Review" while Kimmelman was "To Be Enlightened, You Pull the Switch."

By the way, in case you missed it, a few days ago Gopnik dissed "imperious art critic Clement Greenberg." Read it here.

The pot calling the kettle black?

Last night I went gallery hopping around Dupont Circle and managed to catch a few shows, drink some free cheap white wine and nibble on some cookies.

I started at Gallery 10, a terrific cooperative, artist-run gallery. The current exhibit is by Judith Richelieu, a former librarian at the Library of Congress.

She has 25 portraits of women artists, writers, etc. as part of a series called "Eligy." Richelieu complements them with carved wood saints that accompany the portraits. I overheard the artist discuss the fact that she "wasn't a portrait artist," which I found a little odd in terms of her current exhibition.

I'm not really sure what to think of the portraits. Richeliu obviously works from published photographs (nothing wrong with that), but every single one of her portraits is done in the same odd, unsual grayish skin tone for all the women, as if they all share a shark somewhere in their family tree.

It is a bit disorienting, but perhaps Richelieu wants to use the common gray skin color as a unifying force. My favorite piece was the portrait of Spanish artist Remedios Varos. The works are on exhibition until October 30.

Up the street, Kathleen Ewing Gallery has photographs by contemporary Native American artists Zig Jackson, Victor Masayesva, Jr. and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie. Michael O'Sullivan wrote about this exhibition:

"For Indian art with a bit of an edge (something you won't find at the new museum, by the way), try Kathleen Ewing Gallery's "Contemporary Native American Art." Along with the photographs of Victor Masayesva Jr. and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, the show includes several selections from some of photographer Zig Jackson's more pointed black-and-white pictures, including his shots of tourists taking snapshots of Indians in full regalia, which turn the exploitative gaze back on the exploiter, and his conceptual series featuring the artist in feathered headdress and sunglasses posing in front of a customized sign demarking "Zig's Indian Reservation," which happens to be wherever the artist sees fit to stand."

The exhibition closes October 9.

Marsha Mateyka yet again has an exhibition from the Gene Davis estate. See them here, and you can see some recent results of Gene Davis' auctions at Sotheby's here.

Elizabeth Roberts Gallery is having its farewell show, as the gallery is closing at the end of this show as ELizabeth is moving to the Bay Area. On exhibition are works by Alice Oh. Her paintings are derived from the behavior and morphology of infected blood cells as seen under the microscope and are fascinating to study how nature and art align to deliver some very interesting results. I am sure that Ms. Roberts is hoping NOT to get the same sort of cosa nostra goodbye review that Jessica Dawson gave the Sally Troyer gallery when it closed.

Below the Elizabeth Roberts Gallery things were going gangbusters for The Studio Gallery; several sales took place in the few minutes that I was there. The current exhibition is "Works on Paper" by Phyllis Jayne Evans.

The Studio Gallery is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year - this is a spectacular achievement and in "gallery years" something rare and noteworthy, as most galleries close within a year of opening and a hardy few survive past four or five years.

I then visited Fondo del Sol, fully aware that once I said hello to Marc Zuver it could possibly be another week before I'd leave. Fondo del Sol is one of the cultural jewels of our city, and the current exhibition(s) do not disappoint. Zuver has curated a fascinating grouping of works under a exhibit titled "In Search of Lost Iberia," where he submits a theory that the peoples of ancient Iberia and ancient Georgia (the former Soviet republic, not the Southern state) share a common name, bloodlines and history in a distant past. There are some striking works of art by Alejandro Arostegui, Rogelio Lopez Marin ("Gory"), Vladimir Kandelaki and Mumumka Mikeladze.

Of these, Kandelaki's works stand out by their sheer complexity and by the powerful ant-Soviet and pro-Georgian messages they delivered when first created in the 1980s. They are courageous works that represented the brutal Soviet repression of the Georgian people and the decay of Soviet Communism.

And if you want to see one of the most powerful exhibitions around the theme of Native Americans (in fact so powerful that you'll never see anything like it in the new National Museum of the American Indian), then go see Michael Auld's installation "Surviving Genocide: Remembering Anacaona."

For the last several years Michael Auld has been researching and documenting the indigenous people of the Caribbean; some, such as the Tainos, were thought to be extinct, until "discovered" by Auld, in small mountain pockets of people.

When I first saw Auld's works a few years ago, what stuck in my mind was an extraordinary wooden sculpture of Itiba Cahubaba, the legendary Earth mother of Taino legend. This stunning piece depicted the Earth mother giving birth simultaneously to two sets of twins, who became the fathers of mankind. This was a gripping piece not only because of its artistic value, but more importantly because it marked the rebirth of Taino culture after nearly 500 years of being nearly forgotten, erased and virtually destroyed.

Auld's current exhibition adds another powerful installation based on a sculpture of Anacaona, the famous Taino queen who was the wife of one of the five caciques of Hispaniola and one of the first recorded Native American characters met by the Spaniards when they first landed on that unfortunate island. She was subsequently murdered by the Conquistadors, whom she had invited to her village.

In Auld's installation, a life-sized cherry wood sculpture of Anacaona sits in a cohoba trance in a traditional bohio (house) made from sixteen carved large lizards and snakes. The queen is adorned with conch jewelry and feathers, and delivers a stern message to contemporary viewers. It left me feeling uncomfortable and thinking that at one point Father Bartolome de las Casas estimated that there were six million Tainos in the Caribbean when the Spaniards first arrived.

When I managed to escape Zuver's animated discussion I headed over to Irvine Contemporary Art, which has a spectacular exhibition by one of the most talented young painters that I have seen in years: Bruno Perillo.

The Brooklyn-based Perillo brings a superbly talented brush to the revived genre of painting. He was recently reviewed by Michael O'Sullivan in the Post who wrote that Perillo has "witty, conceptual works that allude to both highbrow and lowbrow culture." O'Sullivan nailed it, and the show has nearly sold out, reviving my hope that Washingtonians are discovering that they can actually buy art here in the city!

Next I went to the Washington Printmaker's Gallery, where Jen Watson gave me a quick tour of the main show (monoprints by Christine Giammichele) and the always strong group show in the back gallery by the gallery's member artists.

My last stop was at Conner Contemporary where Avish Khebrehzadeh's show has also sold very well. The show was reviewed by Dawson here and by Cudlin here, but I think that it was this article on art collectors Tony and Heather Podesta that drove the collectors to one of the best galleries in the city.

Keep coming back.

I know, I know... I keep bashing the Post on their miserably tiny coverage of our area's art galleries and artists, but I must admit that at least Michael O'Sullivan, who covers the museums and sometimes galleries for the Post's Weekend section, does a pretty good job of keeping a finger on the pulse of DC's visual arts.

Today he covers five separate shows in Indian Art Beyond the Museum.

He also reviews "The Dream of Earth: 21st-Century Tendencies in Mexican Sculpture." at the Cultural Institute of Mexico. That is one show that I do not want to miss.

If you haven't been to the Cultural Institute of Mexico, please do so; it is one of the most beautiful buildings and most attractive gallery spaces in DC.

Other than the really cheesy headline, this is a pretty eloquent review by the New York Times' Michael Kimmelman of the Dan Flavin traveling retrospective exhibition now at the East Building of the National Gallery.

Even some humor: In discussing Flavin's impact, Kimmelman writes that ... "It also helped to open the way for installation art, but you can't blame only Flavin for that."

Who else do we blame? We want names!

Tonite is the Dupont Circle Art Galleries' crawl... from 6-8 PM. Most galleries will have wine and food as well as the artists will be there to meet the public.

Go and buy some art.

In a major new visual arts initiative for the Northern Virginia region, the League of Reston Artists (LRA) announces its first Call for Curated and Solo Art Exhibition Proposals for exhibits to be presented during its 2005 season at its sponsoring venue, The University of Phoenix Northern Virginia Campus, in Reston, Virginia.

LRA Board Member and spokesperson, James W. Bailey, says that individual artists, groups of artists, artist collectives, and independent emerging curators are invited to submit proposals for a curated exhibition by the postmarked deadline of Monday, January 17, 2005. Bailey also says proposals for solo artist exhibitions will be considered and are strongly encouraged from regional artists as part of this call.

"Those interested in submitting proposals are encouraged to visit the site at the University of Phoenix first to see how the space would work with their ideas," says Bailey. "Interested curators and artists can download the proposal application form from our web site."

Proposals should include a brief narrative exhibition statement, artist statements from key participants, a proposed budget, a proposed timeframe for the exhibition and relevant support materials, including representational slides, photographs, CD’s or videos. The LRA Board will select shows based on a representation of the proposed works included in the proposal.

Congratulations to Tyler Green, Washington, DC's first art BLOGger, who has been designated as the art critic for Bloomberg News.

The Vampire Rises Again

"A group of works by Damien Hirst, including his famous tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde and "Hymn," his monumental bronze anatomical model, as well as pieces by fellow British artists Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marc Quinn, and Chris Ofili, among many others, are to be removed from display at the Saatchi Gallery. In their place comes an exhibition, "The triumph of painting" which opens in January 2005 to mark the 20th anniversary of the gallery."

The new show is devoted to the work of five painters, Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans, Marlene Dumas, Jörg Immendorf, and Martin Kippenberger, described by Charles Saatchi as "key European artists."

If you are one of those critics or curators who have been trumpeting the "death of painting" for the last four decades: your flag-bearer just went to the other side.

Read the entire Art Newspaper story here. (Thanks AJ).

The Washington City Paper continues to take over the vacuum created by the continuous Washington Post's poor coverage of the area's galleries and artists with several interesting reviews in the current issue.

Louis Jacobson reviews our current show of Hugh Shurley's DC debut of his photographs at our Georgetown gallery. He also reviews Kristi Mathews at Flashpoint.

And Jeffry Cudlin has a very good and interesting review of Avish Khebrehzadeh at Conner Contemporary Art.

Todd Gibson at From The Floor has a very interesting survey about art and BLOGS. You can (and should) take it here.

By the way, don't miss Gibson's funny comments on Gopnik and Chelsea galleries!

At the risk of sounding pedantic...

I find it incredible that the voice over for the movie trailers for the new Che Guevara movie The Motorcycle Diaries mispronounces Guevara's last name!

The "u" in Guevara is silent - It is not GUeh-varah; it is GE-varah (soft "G").

And I haven't seen the movie yet, but I bet that Hollywood glosses over one of the key aspects of Che's motorcycle trek: His (then) racist attitude towards Indians and Blacks.

In 1952, together with his friend Alberto Granado, Che took a wandering trip through South America, begging, drinking and borrowing their way through Argentina's northern neighbors. The book "Motorcycle Diaries" is about this trek, and the movie is based on this book.

Peru, with its largely pure Indian population had a profound effect on Guevara, and he refers to the Andean Indians as the "beaten race" in his diary. Since Argentina's own Indians had long been destroyed and overwhelmed by the millions of white immigrants from Spain, Germany and Italy which populated his homeland, it was in Peru where Che first met an oppressed people, and he notes in his writing that although he and Granado were usually broke, they were able to get by on "favors and concessions" based on their white skin.

South America's Caribbean coast provided him with his first exposure to black people, and oddly enough, the man who was later to fight alongside Africans in the Congo made some harsh observations, deeply fragmented with stereotypical Argentinean white racism:

"The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: The Portugese.... the black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead."

In his defense, as Che grew, his native racism towards people of color was discarded, and eventually he even married a mestiza.

But I suspect that the movie misses this area of this fascinating and iconic man's life.

I'll let you know when I see it.

The 48th Corcoran Biennial

Another sign that some sort of sanity may be returning to contemporary art can be read between the lines in the focus of the coming 48th Corcoran Biennial.

The 48th Corcoran Biennial: Closer to Home apparently takes as its focus contemporary artists making use of "traditional arts methods" (their words).

This coming Biennial also marks somewhat a return to the exhibition’s origins (it was America's only painting Biennial at one point) and "considers the familiar territories of traditional media – such as canvas, paint and wood – while giving prominence to the work of Washington, DC-based artists."

And I like that! And a well-deserved thank you to curators Dr. Jonathan Binstock and Stacey Schmidt for finally taking the lead and looking in their own backgarden for a major "local" museum exhibition. The previous Biennial (and Binstock's first) only had one area artist: the Corcoran's own Susan Smith-Pinelo (represented locally by Fusebox).

Per Corcoran Associate Curator of Contemporary Art and exhibition co-organizer Stacey Schmidt: "As the first museum in the nation’s capital, the Corcoran is especially committed to supporting the work of DC-based artists."

We've been noticing this change from Binstock and Schmidt's predecessor and saying under our breath: "About time!"

Area artists included in the Biennial are James Huckenpahler (represented locally by Fusebox Gallery and who got reviewed today in the Post), Colby Caldwell (represented locally by Hemphill Fine Arts), and Baltimore-based photographer John Lehr.

Both Lehr and Huckenpahler were also finalists in the 2003 Trawick Prize, which was also juried by Binstock (one of three jurors).

All together, Closer to Home showcases the following artists: Rev. Ethan Acres (represented locally by Conner Contemporary), Chakaia Booker, Matthew Buckingham, Colby Caldwell, George Condo, Adam Fuss, James Huckenpahler, John Lehr, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Rezac, Dana Schutz, Kathryn Spence, Austin Thomas and Monique van Genderen.

At the Corcoran Gallery of Art from March 19 – June 27, 2005.

I'll be damned if Glenn Dixon didn't surprise me today with his reviews in the "Galleries" column at the Post.

We've all been waiting for Dixon to review Fusebox, which for whatever reason, has never been reviewed by Jessica Dawson, even though we all know that Fusebox is one of our city's top galleries and certainly one of the hardest working galleries. And we also know that Dixon is a well-published Fusebox enthusiast. So it's no surprise that Fusebox and Dixon would come together.

And yet, surprisingly enough (to me), in today's review, Dixon throws a well-deserved wet-blanket upon James Huckenpahler's photographs, which may have gone to the same well once too often. Bravo Glenn!

Dixon is a bit more positive about Maggie Michael at G Fine Art:

"Maggie Michael keeps it new for us by keeping it new for herself. A couple of years ago she was an American University graduate with a passable gimmick. Since then her work has developed at a rate that is little short of astonishing. Right now she is one of the best painters in town."

From gimmick to astonishing in a couple of years... at least we are getting a positive review about a painter (and a good one) in our town.

There’s such a dichotomy in this name; such a contradiction of stereotypes: Lucy, soft, feminine and flowing.

Hogg: heavy, masculine and powerful. And once you discover her artwork, you'll realize that seldom has a person been so aptly named.

Hogg is a tiny person, almost elfin-like; a complete reverse of what pops into the mind when it tries to visualize someone named Lucy Hogg. My mind came up with two characters: The first was as a sister or close kin of that big, fat, greasy character (Boss J.D. Hogg) in the Dukes of Hazzard TV series.

Because Hogg is Canadian, the other image was that of a secondary character in Robertson Davies’ fictitious small Canadian village of Deptford. A village that he creates superbly in The Fifth Business (part one of the Deptford Trilogy).

And this dichotomy, this Ying Yang of words and mental imageries, translates well to Hogg’s American solo debut currently on exhibition until October 30 at Georgetown’s Strand on Volta Gallery.

Hogg recently moved to Washington from her native Canada. She has exhibited widely in Canada, Asia and Europe, and in a town [DC] where most critics and curators continue to preach the death of painting as a viable contemporary art form, she brings something new and refreshing, pumping some new energy to the ancient medium.

Let me explain.

Salvador Dali once said that "those that do not want to imitate anything produce nothing." This is the Ying of Hogg’s exhibition.

And George Carlin added that "the future will soon be a thing of the past." This is the Yang of her show.

Titled "Sliding Landscapes," the exhibition consists of nearly twenty paintings segregated into two different canvas shapes: oval shapes on the gallery’s left main wall and rectangular shapes on the right wall. Each set of paintings deliver individual ideas, and although tied together by the subject matter, they nonetheless express superbly two sets of thoughts and impressions that I think Hogg wants us to see.

Hogg’s imagery are copies of Old Master paintings, "sampled" (a new word introduced into art jargon from rap music’s habit of using other people’s music or someone else’s lyrics in your music) from a series of capriccios, or fantasy landscapes by 18th century Venetian painters Canaletto, Francesco Guardi and Marco Ricci.

"Fantasy" in the sense that the landscapes only existed in the artists’ minds until created by them and re-invented two centuries later by Hogg.

I must clarify from the very beginning that these paintings are not "copies" in the same sense that you see people sitting in front of paintings in museums all over the world, meticulously copying an Old Master’s work, stroke by stroke.

Therein lies another dichotomy in this exhibition: Reading a description of Hogg’s subject matter brings that image to mind; seeing them destroys it. This is one show where the most erudite of news release spinmeisters will be challenged to separate the two visions.

So what are they?

Hogg starts with a capriccio painting that she likes. I suspect that she works from a reproduction, even a small one, or from an art history book or catalog, and thus cleverly avoids the pitfall of becoming a true copier rather than a sampler.

She then re-creates the capriccios in their original format (rectangular), but completely replaces the color of the original with a simple tint or combination of tints.

Simple enough... Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

It isn’t simple at all.

What Hogg has cleverly done again is to offer us two visual main courses. Sure, she's recreating the original painting, overly-simplified and yet still complex with the seed of great painting and composition planted by the original Masters. But she has also provided herself with a radical new vehicle to flex some very powerful painting and creative skills of her own.

The overly simplified paintings offer her ample room and opportunities to bring a 21st century perspective to these works. Not just her very modern colors (cleverly incorporated into the titles such as "Fantasy Landscape (pthalo green/chrome oxide green) 2004"). Her scrubby, energetic brushwork is everywhere, especially the open skies of some of the works, and where 18th century masters would have reacted in horror, a modern audience takes their middle age glasses off so that we can better try to absorb the quality of the brushwork and peer at the under layers, often left exposed, that reveal the virtuosity of being able to deliver an exciting painting with a very limited palette.

Even within these rectangular recreations, Hogg has a Ying Yang thing going. A group of the pieces are truly monochromatic, using only ultramarine blue or yellow ochre.

In these, the simple associations of cool and warm colors mapping to respective emotions is what anchors our responses to them. But there are some pieces where she has ventured into two distinct colors (such as violet and burnt sienna orange). In these, the opposite position of these hues on the color wheel, and their well-known association with eye-brain responses in creating tension and movement, position these works as a very successful venture into the exploration of color, never mind the landscape that is the vehicle.

Vision two of the exhibition are the oval paintings. Here we again see the same explorations in color and painting that Hogg offered us in the rectangular pieces. But then she opens a new door for us; perhaps even a new door for contemporary painting.

I would have dared to write that she has opened the lid in the coffin of painting, but that would lend tacit approval to the claim that painting is like a "vampire that refuses to die." So I won’t.

In the oval paintings Hogg introduces us to a combination of two (again with the two) elements: the re-visualization within a limited, psychological palette plus a new methodological visual cropping and angling of compositional elements within the original paintings, placed in a new format (oval) and haphazardly hung at crazy angles on the gallery’s left wall. By the way, at the risk of becoming too pedantic, I didn’t like the tilted, askew, haphazard hanging of these pieces. It was a bit heavy handed and went too far to push the fact that they are indeed "sliding" landscapes.

Suddenly we discover two effects (i.e. she has another duality thing going here for the dimwits in the audience): Combine the psychological effect of color with a reorganization of the actual image's presentation and you have suddenly changed the entire character and effect of the painting!

This is the punch to the solar plexus that every artist hopes to accomplish in any exhibition. It is the moment when you stand in front of a piece of artwork, riveted to a sudden discovery that this, whatever "this" may be, has never been done, at least not this well, before.

Here is what I mean.

In the oval pieces, Hogg repeats the paintings from different perspectives or angles; suddenly her choice of colors is not the main driving force; but the relationship between the choice and the subject and the perspective and angle is the new driving force(s).

For example, in one oval piece she offers a calm, cool agrarian view, somewhat disorienting us by the angle and crop, especially when we try to find her source on the left wall's rectangular paintings. Within this painting, a horseman rides up an incline. He is deftly rendered in cool, quick brushstrokes to deliver a placid Sancho Panza character before he had the misfortune of meeting Don Quixote.

Slightly above and to the right of that painting there's another painting, which although it is exactly the same scene, and because it is offered from a slightly different perspective and in a completely different palette, it takes us a minute or two to realize that it is the same scene.

But what a different scene it is! The sky is now a turbulent hellish nightmare of cadmium red and quinachrodne red exaggerated so that the clouds have almost become flames, and the happy farmers of the companion piece are now haggard, beaten figures toiling in a new Dantasque level of hell, where the Sancho Panza horseman is now tired, beaten and barely staying atop his poor horse.

And this is all happening in our mind. Because all that this gifted painter has done is change the perspective and offer us colors that complete different neural paths that create different reactions in our brain.

And the best thing of all is that she didn’t need a video, or an installation, or dioramas of two-dimensional works, or ten pages of wall text to explain the concept. And in these pieces, the finished works are as interesting and successful as the concept itself; not a trivial accomplishment by the way.

All she needed were superbly honed painting skills, a deep understanding of the relationship between color and emotions, an intelligent perspective on composition, and a grab at art history to offer us (yet again) something new and refreshing from that never ending source of surprises: the dusty coffin of painting.

Bravo Lucy! ... Well Done Hogg!

Those of you who have met me know that I sport a Dali-type moustache (most of the time).

And although I met Dali several times when I lived in Spain (once he asked me if I could help him fix his phone); and I curated the Homage to Dali exhibition in 1999; and I am a great, unapologizing fan of the great Catalan, my moustache is not because of Dali - if you want to know, next time you see me, buy me a beer and I'll tell you about the Druze.

Anyway, Alan Riding has a terrific article in the New York Times that discusses Dali's powerful impact as perhaps the 20th century's second most important artist (Picasso being the first) and two ongoing exhibitions on the centenary of his birth: "Dalí and Mass Culture," which tracks his impact on today's visual language, was shown in Barcelona this spring and Madrid this summer and will be at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., from Oct. 1, 2004 through Jan. 30, 2005. And "Dalí," which focuses on his paintings, is at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice through Jan. 16 and will be presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Feb. 16 through May 15, 2005.

DCist tips us that WTOP has a contest to re-name the Montreal Expos baseball team once they move here next year.

Enter your suggestion here.

My suggestion? The Washington Ex-Expos.

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline October 15, 2004 and April 15, 2005

Exhibition opportunities at Howard County Center for the Arts, a 27,000 sq.ft. facility located in Ellicott City, MD.

They are seeking proposals from artists and curators nationwide for solo and group exhibits for the 2006-2007 gallery season. All original artwork in any media, including installations, will be considered. The Arts Council is also accepting slide submissions for two specific upcoming exhibits: Illuminations, a juried exhibit of artworks with light/illumination as the primary medium, and an untitled exhibit of book arts.

Work previously shown will not be accepted, nor will work previously submitted. No fee to apply. Artists must be at least 18 years old. Submit up to 20 slides with an accompanying slide list, an artist/curator statement, resume and application to exhibit, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope with sufficient postage for the return of materials.

Call 410-313-2787 for an application. Deadlines in the next two reviews are October 15, 2004 and April 15, 2005. A calendar of upcoming HCCA exhibits can be found on their website. Or email Amy Poff at amy@hocoarts.org if you have questions.

Curated by Alexandra Olin, the WPA\C has a group exhibition titled CORE 13, from September 7 - October 29, 2004, and they're hosting a reception this coming Tuesday, October 5, from 5-7pm.

Artists included in the show are: Joseph Barbaccia, Jonathan Bucci, James Calder, Deborah Ellis, Mike Fitts, Adam Fowler, Karen Graziani, Ryan Hackett, Mimi Herbert, Miriam Horrom, Scott Hunter, Flora Kanter, Rogelio Maxwell and Chris Saah.

CORE is located at 1010 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Suite 405 in Washington, DC 20007 (Georgetown).

As part of "Gyroscope" (the Hirshhorn's on-going experimental display of the collection), nine of Washington, DC-born sculptor Martin Puryear's sculptures and works on paper are on view on the third floor, along with the sculpture "Bower" on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

And on September 30 at 7:30 p.m. in the Baird Auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History (across the Mall from the Hirshhorn), the Hirshhorn presents "Meet the Artist: Martin Puryear."

Washington, DC, native Puryear and Hirshhorn Director Ned Rifkin will engage in a dialogue about art and ideas that place the artist's work in context.

DCARTNEWS reader and fellow artist Michelle Banks brings this New York Times story about a four-year-old artist to my attention.

"In all, Marla has sold 24 paintings totaling nearly $40,000, with the prices going up. Her latest paintings are selling for $6,000. Some customers are on a waiting list."

I now share it with you. Read it and weep.

I've been thinking about taking this class:

The Washington Glass School offers a class titled "Beginner Glass Lovers' Weekend."

This class is for those of us who damned near flunked glass in art school or are just starting out or who just want to make some cool stuff out of glass. You learn all the basic stuff over a weekend, and this weekend is the Beginners Glass Lovers' Weekend and the class is being offered.

Not only do students learn several ways to work with glass, but they also will make four glass pieces (bowls, etc.) while learning at the same time. For more info or schedule of other classes, contact the school at 202/744-8222 or via email at WashGlassSchool@aol.com.

Jacqueline Trescott, writing in the Washington Post, reveals that the National Gallery of Art is finally dedicating permanent galleries to photography, giving prominence to the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Man Ray, Paul Strand and Ansel Adams.

I hope some women photographers also find their way to the permanent galleries.

Sarah Greenough, is the curator and director of the department of photographs at NGA, and three shows a year are planned for the new galleries. The coming shows are by Roger Fenton, Andre Kertesz and Irving Penn.

Photography is certainly very hot, and at least 50% of our sales are photographs from the fifteen photographers that we represent.

And next November 13, beginner collectors have a great opportunity to start or add to a collection through the Annual "Auction in the Park" being held by PHOTOWORKS At Glen Echo Park.

All tickets include one entry in an art raffle, entitling every guest to a work of art from the raffle collection. In addition, a silent auction will feature photographs by well-known contemporary photographers, on-location shooting with respected commercial photographers, funky photo equipment, and trips and workshops with photography-related themes.

For more info, contact Alexandra Walsh at 301/523-3318 or Emily Whiting at 301/213-7763.

The George Carlin quote for September:

"I'm desperately trying to figure out why Kamikaze pilots wore helmets."

OK... ready for some info about some openings to go and see over the next few days?

On Wednesday, Sept. 29, from 5-8 PM, Zenith Gallery's space at 901 E Street, NW, showcases The Reflection Series, a recent collection of stunning photo-realistic oil paintings by Washington DC artist Joey Manlapaz. I am familiar with Manlapaz's works and she has refined her skill to a level where I consider her amongst the best photo-realistic painters that I've seen in the last few years and certainly around here.

This coming Friday is the first Friday of the month. So boys and girls: what does that mean?

Answer: The Galleries of Dupont Circle are having their opening receptions or extended hours. It all happens from 6-8 PM this coming Friday. I'll be there! Come and say hello if you see me.

On Sunday, October 3, from 3-5 PM, four very good area artists are having an open studio (for the grubs in the audience: they will have Champagne and Hors d'Oeuvres).

They are Rosalind Burns, Susan Hostetler, Michele Montalbano and Jeneen Piccuirro. Their studio is at 411 New York Avenue, NE and you should RSVP to 202/546-9584.

Later that day, Lucy Hogg has an artist's talk at Strand on Volta on Sunday, Oct. 3rd from 7-9 PM. I've seen this show and it is well worth a visit. I am now finishing a review of the show and will be pimping it to the various newspapers and magazines that sometimes publish my reviews. Once it is picked up and published I will also have it here.

The WCP's Bidisha Banerjee profiles artist Candace Keegan, whose current show at Wohlfarth Galleries runs until October 10, 2004.

I got the feeling (in reading between the lines) that Banerjee was a little uncomfortable with the visual content of the work, and it translated into the profile.

This show is on my list to try and see and discuss this coming week. It has been extended to October 10.

Keegan is currently an MFA candidate at Catholic University.

Remember the whole debate about pandas as public art?

New York had apples, Los Angeles had angels, Norfolk has mermaids, Baltimore has fish - or it is crabs? and a bunch of cities around the world have had cows. And now San Francisco has hearts!

Regardless of how you feel about the pandas being "art," I think that our pandas will soon go on auction and proceeds will help fund grants to DC artists. More info here.

Today's Sunday Arts in the Washington Post gives me yet another opportunity to vent two of my primary pet peeves against the world's second largest newspaper.

The first is why their Chief Art Critic is identified as "Washington Post Staff Writer" instead of "Washington Post Chief Art Critic." I know, I know... it's a Virgo thing, but I think Gopnik deserves to be separated in title from the guy who writes the obituaries, or stories for the Kid's Post. I betcha it has something to do with some silly union rule about all writers being equal.

The second peeve is why The Washington Post's Chief Art Critic seldom if ever writes about Washington, DC galleries. Today he does a magnificent job of writing about New York galleries.

Hey! The New York Times already does a great job of doing that, and I am glad that Blake is affording us to chance to get a view of what's going on around New York galleries.

But.

How about a quarterly article like this one about Washington, DC galleries?

Dupont Circle, Georgetown and downtown DC are a lot closer than Chelsea, and I seriously doubt that the New York Times will send their Chief Art Critic to DC to do a round-up of DC galleries.

Darth Vader Grotesque in the National Cathedral

I kid you not.

Grammar.police has a really funny posting discovering that there's a grotesque of Darth Vader in the National Cathedral!

I didn't know this!

It was sculpted by our own Jay Hall Carpenter (who is a damned good sculptor by the way), carved by Takoma Park's Patrick J. Plunkett and placed high upon the northwest tower of the Cathedral.

Makes my head hurt.

I have to eat some crow in reference to some of the issues raised in my earlier posting defending Art-O-Matic; I've since corrected those particular issues. My recollections as to the sequence of events and causes involving Glenn Dixon's on-air comments on the Kojo Nmandi show and the reasons for his subsequent review of the show in the WCP were incorrect, and Dixon pointed this out to me.

I have apologized to Dixon, corrected the posting, and below now publish Dixon's email to me in order to clarify the issue:

Dear Mr. Campello:

I'm writing regarding your posting yesterday about Art-O-Matic. Although you didn't identify me by name, it is no secret that I was the Washington City Paper critic who spoke about the 2002 exhibition on the Kojo Nnamdi Show in November of that year.

You are guilty of misrepresenting my comments and distorting the facts.

That I had not yet attended that year's Art-O-Matic was not something I hid from listeners. In fact, I prefaced my comments with a disclaimer:

"I've gotta say, I have not seen the current Art-O-Matic yet, but I've been to the first one, and it nearly killed me. There is a serious quality issue. It's not a very kind show to viewers. You have to wade through a lot of dross to get a few gems. The first year there were maybe two or three artists out of all of them that I really cared about."

I hadn't intended to weigh in on Art-O-Matic, but found myself in a situation where to keep mum would have been to offer tacit approval to the rather boosterish comments of my fellow guests, Joe Barber and Peter Fay.

By the time my 2002 wrap-up appeared in City Paper in late December, I had seen Art-O-Matic--not at the urging of my editor or because of some supposed scandal, but because I wanted to know if my misgivings were justified. What I wrote was this:

"After dragging myself through Art-O-Matic the first year, I vowed I'd never repeat the experience. But I went again, largely because I felt a little guilty about warning Kojo Nnamdi Show listeners off it sight unseen (although I was upfront about not having visited the exhibition at that point). I needn't have been so scrupulous. If anything, Art-O-Matic, as a visual-art event, had gotten even worse, more sprawling and more amateurish."

Again, note that I was completely forthcoming about the fact that I hadn't seen the show at the time of the broadcast.

The fact that streams and tapes of the Kojo Nnamdi Show and full texts of my writing for City Paper can easily be accessed or ordered online suggests that you made no attempt to check your mistaken recollections against the facts.

This little flap is indeed the result of an ethical lapse, but it is yours alone. You owe your readers a retraction and me an apology.

Sincerely,

Glenn Dixon

Want to go to an opening tonight?

Curated by Faith Flanagan and Allison Cohen, and opening tonight at Dot Projects & Artwork (501 Ninth Street - NE, Washington, DC Phone: 202-546-0334) Saturday, September 25, 6:00pm to 9:00pm is a preview of the exhibition Hot Damn - Fresh Art featuring work by:

Noah Angell, Virginia Arrisueno, Ken Ashton, Lisa Bertnick, Christine Carr, Franck Cordes, Kathryn Cornelius (performance at 7:30 p.m.), Mary Early, Djakarta, Kevin Kepple, Peter Loge, Jayme McLellan, Dylan Scholinski, Trish Tillman, Kelly Towles, Leigh Van Duzer, and Joan Van Sledright.

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And next Saturday, the Museum of Modern ARF in Arlington has an opening reception on October 2 from 6-9 PM for "Breaking the Silence II: Questioning Power Now More Than Ever."

The show, which runs until November 14, includes work by Martyn Turner, Claudia Olivos, Helen Zughaib, Scott Brooks, Steve Lewis, Kathleen Stevenson, Negar Assari Samimi, Richard Notkin, Jim Magner, Ruth Trevarrow, Mark Planisek, Tara Campbell, Joroko, Roger Cutler, Ruth Kling, Chris Britt, Chad Allan, John Aaron, Eliza Brewster, Daniel Penaloza, and Young Artists from Palestine and Israel.

The Museum of Modern ARF is located at 1116 N. Hudson St. Arlington, VA 22201 and can be reached at 703/528-4800.

Ionarts has a terrific recap of the Peter Schjeldahl (art critic for The New Yorker) lecture at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium as part of this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art.

Downey writes:

"One of Schjeldahl's major points on the topic he chose ("What Art Is For Now") was that the snob appeal of art is one of the "underestimated engines of culture," that for now he has "no desire to swell the size of the tent" of those who love art. In his view, there is no reason to bring art to the masses. Those who want it will find it, and "if somebody doesn't want art, bully for them." However, as Schjeldahl also noted, the audience for art worldwide may be larger now than it ever has been, and the art market is a booming business. This may help explain the gulf that can be observed between major art critics and the art-going public, in the case of the J. Seward Johnson sculptures at the Corcoran, for example (see [his]post from September 14, 2003)."

Defending Art-O-Matic

I've been mulling Christ Schott's Sept 3, 2004 "Show and Tell" column in the WCP titled The Artsy Thing That Swallowed DC on the subject of Art-O-Matic.

Two letters in the current issue (one by Judy Jashinsky and one by Philip Barlow) express their disagreement with Schott's view of Art-O-Matic.

Let me start by saying that I am not very objective when it comes to Art-O-Matic. I think that it is the best thing that happens to the Washington visual art scene every couple of years; whatever is in second place is a distant second.

I am also rather sick and tired of the way (because of its size, energy and open attitude towards hanging any and all artwork as long as the artist is willing to help run the show) that it gets bashed by some in the lamestream media, the alternative media and even the BLOGosphere.

Such as when a WCP writer cruelly bashed the 2002 Art-O-Matic on the Kojo Nmandi Show. He admitted that he had not actually been to that year's exhibition (and thus pre-formed an opinion about that year's Art-O-Matic based on his dislike of the previous one). In his defense, he then felt guilty and actually visited the show, which he then brutalized again on paper.

And much like the current CBS Rathergate, some of the past Art-O-Matic bashing didn't really pass the journalistic ethics test.

Such as when a Washington Post art critic wrote a dismissive small pre-opening review, again without actually ever setting foot in the place.

So, I think that it is not just the bad art that they dislike; I believe that they also resent the democraticization of the art process, the joyfulness and uniqueness of the event, the huge public success that it enjoys and the fact that it takes place in our own backyard.

And they miss the key ingredient that the event adds to our cultural tapestry: an incredible amount of artistic energy and a vast amount of attention to the visual arts. Anytime that you get over 1,000 artists to organize something of this magnitude, the footprint and its impact will be vast.

And, as far as I know, there's nothing like it anywhere else in the nation, possibly the world. And here's where the key to Art-O-Matic bashing lies: If the event took place in London, or New York, or Madrid, or LA or San Francisco or even Chicago, it would be lauded as a good thing for contemporary art and artists. I can see the headlines now: "Los Angeles' Art-O-Matic is The Place to Discover the Next Generation of LA's Artists."

So what if it is growing? The 2002 version brought out 40,000 visitors; can we envision a future Art-O-Matic where it is an international open show, where artists from all over the world can participate and a quarter of a million visitors from all over the planet converge on DC to see the exhibition? I can.

So what if it is non juried? That way it allows people like me to go and see work by artists and artist-wannabes that otherwise I would never see because they are way off the radar of our curators and galleries. Granted, a lot of the work in past Art-O-Matics I have found amateurish, bland and forgettable. This puts Art-O-Matic in the same company as many recent shows in the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran and the last few Venice Biennales and Whitney Biennials.

And unlike those exhibitions, and as Barlow eloquently points out in his letter, many of today's top DC artists have Art-O-Matic in their resume: Manon Cleary, Dan Steinhilber, Adam Bradley, Scott Hutchison, the Dumbacher brothers, Renee Stout, Tim Tate, Michael Clark, Allison Miner, Jordan Tierney, Richard Dana, Graham Cladwell,Judy Jashinsky, Richard Chartier, and many, many others.

I am looking forward to Art-O-Matic 2004, and 2006, and 2008...

Louis Jacobson reviews Antonia Macedo at Touchstone Gallery in the current issue of the WCP.

The same issue has picked up my bit about the grubs and has it in their Letters to the Editor.

Just found a great new BLOG: Grammar.police - please go visit often.

One of the most eloquent and qualified art critics in our region, Dr. Claudia Rousseau, delivers a third review of our current exhibition of paintings by controversial GMU Professor Chawky Frenn.

Read the earlier Washington Post review here and the Washington City Paper profile of Frenn here.

AJ points to a story in The Guardian that reveals that Dinos and Jake Chapman are about to rebuild one of their dioramas that was destroyed in the Momart storage unit fire in London last May.

That makes an analysis I made a while back about the infuriating "high art" double standards (applied not only to artists, but also to processes and art). These double standards are even more infuriating as one discovers more and more variations upon the same theme. Here it is again:

The Theme:
J. Seward Johnson is a very rich man and his "art" has been brutalized by the press everywhere. I don't like Mr. Seward's work, but the main reason given in the reviewing of his work is not that Seward is a bad guy (he's very generous with his wealth towards the art world) or even a bad sculptor, but that his concept of taking someone else's two-dimensional art works - in Seward's latest case the Impressionists - and making them into a three dimensional "new" work is both kitschy and reprehensible.

The Hypocrisy:
1. As I whined about it before, the British artist brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman's best known works are based on the famous Goya etchings Disasters of War. Initially they used plastic figures to re-create Goya in a miniature three-dimensional form, and like Johnson (later on), one of these 83 scenes became a life-sized version using mannequins. Yet the Chapmans are darlings of the art world and were favorites in the last Tate show.

2. Whitney Biennial selectee Eve Sussman's "art" is to take Velasquez's Las Meninas and turn it into "ten minutes of a costume-drama feature film." It was actually quite good by the way.

3. Jane Simpson is one of Artnet.com's Artists to Watch for 2004. Her stellar reputation in the artworld has been acquired partially by her creation of sculptures based on Giorgio Morandi paintings.

Am I the only one who sees that all of these people are essentially working the same generic concept as J. Seward Johnson - but unlike Johnson, they are being lauded and praised?

What am I missing here?

Take the Encarta Art Quiz here.

Today's Washington Post has a really.... uh... odd Roxanne-Roberts-type article by "Galleries" critic Jessica Dawson about "Tony and Heather Podesta [being] a Study in Power Collecting."

"But the Podestas' stock of artists know well the benefits of securing such politically connected patronage. Uniquely capable of advocating for their artists using the lobbying skills of their day jobs, Tony and Heather can secure access, lend advice and connect artists to curators and coveted museum shows. It's backing more valuable, at times, than dollars.

...To keep themselves in pictures, Tony and Heather jet to art fairs and biennials from Sao Paolo to San Sebastian -- often just for the weekend. Theirs is a life led breathlessly, moving from airport to dinner party. The art is an extravagance that occasionally gives Heather pause.

... During last year's Venice Biennale, they threw parties night after night, renting out their favorite restaurant and packing it with artists and a gallerist or two. Here in Washington, they've hosted art parties with Patricia Puccini, Cathy de Monchaux, Anna Gaskell, Frank Thiel, Annee Olofsson, Nikki Lee and others. Curators from the Hirshhorn Museum and Corcoran Gallery of Art, top Washington collectors and the city's best dealers regularly show up. Podesta parties are where connections are made."

So that's where those Hirshhorn and Corcoran curators are hanging out!

Anyway... inside the Style section, Jessica then delivers a surprisingly bland[ish] review of Avish Khebrehzadeh's show at Conner Contemporary Art, calling it "sweet and bracingly sentimental" with a weird tie-in to her Podesta article.

The review left me thoroughly confused. I've seen this show and to me it simply reflects the sudden discovery by the upper crust "high art" world of world-class artists that can actually draw.

Curators and critics here seem to be still trying to catch up to the fact that drawing is hot!

Pilfered from DCist:

The Washington Post seems to be having a comic strip racial controversy!

Gene Weingarten's online chat at the Post's website discusses that:

"The Washington Post has decided not to run this week's episode of Boondocks, instead substituting an old sequence. Moreover, when this chat requested permission to LINK to the censored material, which is available to any and all on the Boondocks website, permission was denied.

The Washington Post has decided that it is inappropriate to disseminate this material in any way. Personally, this chat takes no position, pro or con, on this ruling, inasmuch as taking a position would amount to insubordination, a quality abhorrent to this chat."

You can view the controversial comics here. The censored series started on Sept. 20 and goes throughout this week, so after viewing the first set of strips, click on "next date" to see the others.

It is not the first time that the Post has decided to cancel Boondocks because of perceived offensive content.

Call for Public Art

Deadline: October 4, 2004

Kansas City Convention Center. Kansas City, Missouri's One-Percent-for-Art program is seeking artists or artist collaborations to develop innovative, original artwork for the Kansas City Convention Center renovation and expansion. The Convention Center spans eight city blocks in downtown Kansas City.

Interested artists should submit qualifications by Monday, October 4, 2004, at 5:00pm Central Daylight Time. For more information related to this project and to download the complete Request for Qualifications, please go to this website.

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Opportunity for Artists - $44,000 in awards

Deadline: December 15, 2004

The Art Renewal Center seeks applicants for its 2nd Annual International Salon Competition. Over $44,000 in cash awards; $10,000 Best in Show, and featured online gallery.

Send #10 SASE for prospectus to: Karen McCormack, Art Renewal Center, Box 837, Glenham NY 12527; E-mail: arcprogram@aol.com

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Design Competition - $2,500 Prize

Deadline: OCtober 15, 2004.

The National Symphony Orchestra is seeking an artist or graphic designer to create original visual art to commemorate its 75th Anniversary Season in 2005-2006. The NSO is coordinating this competition in partnership with the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

The competition is open to all artists and graphic designers; however, preference will be given to residents of the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

The winner will receive an honorarium of $2,500. Applications and additional information are available at this website. For additional information call: Jennifer Leed, Special Projects Manager: 202-416-8112.

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Grants for Painters

Deadline: October 15, 2004

The George and Helen Segal Foundation is accepting applications for grants ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 for painters only. Applications may be found on the Foundation's website or you may contact the Segal Foundation, 136 Davidson's Mill Rd., N Brunswick, NJ 08902.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has a very interesting exhibition of "casta" paintings detailing racial mixing among eighteenth-century Mexico’s native Indian, European, and African populations.

The exhibition reflects what many upper-class Spaniards thought about race, class and skin color during the 1700s, when Mexico was a colony of Spain.

Another sign that some sanity may be returning to contemporary art:

The 2004 Jerwood Drawing Prize actually went to... a drawing!

An actual, real drawing won, despite "the judges declaring that they were prepared to stretch the definition to breaking point."

Past shortlisted entries have included drawings in dust, string, and moving light recorded by a video camera.

But this year, the first prize of £5,000 went to a real drawing by Sarah Woodfine.

See all the prizewinners here.

For Women Photographers

The next Secondsight meeting will be held this coming Thursday, September 23 at 6.30pm in Bethesda, MD. The guest speaker will be Amy Lamb, a very successful fine arts photographer and highly respected scientist. For more information, visit www.secondsightdc.com or call Catriona Fraser at (301) 718-9651. Meetings are free for members - $10 for guests.

Secondsight is an organization dedicated to the advancement of women photographers through support, communication and sharing of ideas and opportunities. Secondsight is committed to supporting photographers at every stage of their careers, from students to professionals. Each bi-monthly meeting includes an introductory session, a guest speaker, portfolio sharing and discussion groups. Each photographer will have the opportunity to present their work within a small group of other photographers, ask for constructive criticism, gain knowledge or simply share their artistic vision and techniques.

Tonight, Annie Adjchavanich, Executive Director of WPA\Corcoran, will present an overview of the Artist Directory and Artfile, the organization's most recent publication, the "2004-2005 Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran Artist Directory," the 540-page, full-color publication lists 500 artists living and working in the DC, Maryland and Virginia region. Its usefulness as an invaluable resource for finding art, locating artists to create commissioned work will be addressed. Some artists included in the directory will be available to talk about their artwork (bringing a sample with them) and share success stories with the WPA\C and the Artist Directory.

September 21, 2004 6:30pm-9:00pm
Design Within Reach Georgetown Studio
3307 Cady's Alley, Washington, DC 20007
(Near Hemphill Fine Arts) - FREE
RSVP: wpainfo@corcoran.org