David Hickey on Selling Out

"The question of how to sell without selling out is especially relevant in the contemporary art world and there are few people better qualified to grapple with this thorny topic than Dave Hickey.

Not only is he Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Hickey is also one of America’s best known art and cultural critics, admired for his aversion to academicism and his robust analysis of the effects on art of the rough and tumble of the free market.

Last month he delivered a keynote speech at Frieze: 'Schoolyard art: playing fair without the referee.'"

The Art Newspaper has an edited transcript here or the lecture is available as a podcast here.

Fake Banksys on Ebay

"Unauthorised prints by the anonymous graffiti artist Banksy have been sold on eBay as limited edition, signed works, by employees of the company which publishes and authenticates the artist's works on paper, Pictures on Walls (POW).

These have been stamped with a replica of the POW blindstamp and some of them carry forged signatures.

The prices for the prints have then been raised by an illegal practice known as shill bidding in which sellers or their associates make offers for goods to inflate the price artificially."

Read the story here.

First Fridays in Baltimore too!

Tonight is First Fridays in Fell's Point in Baltimore too... and Lisa Egeli, one of Maryland's master painters has a solo show opening at Diliberto Gallery; make sure to check that show!

Corcoran News

The recent opening of the Ansel Adams exhibition at the Corcoran also saw the unveiling of the Photography Exploration Gallery. The multimedia room includes a camera obscura constructed by two BFA photography students, Natalie Cheung and Chris Gibson; a pictorial timeline of the history of photography designed by Adjunct Graphic Design Professor Antonio Álcala with student involvement; and an interactive digital photo booth that allows visitors to create and display self-portraits on the gallery’s walls. Be sure to stop by and add your photo to the digital album.

Go to jail card

Brit artist Michael Dickinson, who lives in Turkey, will be on trial next week accused of insulting the Turkish Prime Minister's dignity. Dickison was arrested for displaying a poster of his work entitled Good Boy.

It shows Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a dog on a leash made from the American flag.


Read the whole story here.

The Blogger Show opens in NYC



The first part of the Blogger Show opens at Agni Gallery (170 East 2nd Street, New York, NY 10009 412-389-0288) in New York City with an opening reception this coming Saturday, November 3, 6-9PM.

See the work online here.

Banksy Exposed?

So claims the BBC - check out the well-known street artist here.

Looks like Mark Jenkins to me.

Sometimes a good notion show

I am one of those annoying persons who's always complaining about anything and anyone that focuses on just and only on bad news, and yet it seems that I also spend a lot of words trying to discuss bad art news myself.

Feh! My bad.

Good news: Remember the Manon Cleary show at DCAC that I mentioned a while back?

Cleary is a DC artist collected worldwide and yet strangely semi-ignored by the DC area arts press (other than a fantastic multi page article in the CP a couple of years ago that seems to be unavailable online).

And her worldwide collectors came through in the DCAC show; all 34 works in the show sold, delivering a rarity for the Greater DC region art world: a sold out show.

Blogger Interrupted

The current issue of Art in America has an interesting roundtable on art blogs by Peter Plagens - It's not available online, but Capps has a good post on it here.

Mental Masturbation

A few years ago, a friend of mine who works with new experimental supercomputers told me about an exercise that they had done with some of the neural networks supercomputers that they were training.

They asked the computer to predict what events from the 20th century would be taught in history classes 5,000 years into the future. They expected a variety of historical points such as WWI, WWII, etc.

According to my friend, only two words came out of the computer's predictive cognition as to what would be the only marker for the 20th century:

Neil Armstrong.

And so...

Jeff Koons, whose collectors include billionaire Eli Broad, and Damien Hirst, whose shark is owned by hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen, failed to draw a vote from museum curators nominating artists who'll be famous in 105 years' time for U.S. magazine ARTnews.

Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Yoko Ono were chosen as some of 2112's renowned artists. ARTnews, now 105 years old, said it surveyed experts as a guide to which contemporary artists would be "embraced" by museums at its 210th anniversary, as part of a look at the art scene of the future.

Read the Bloomberg article by Linda Sandler here.

First Fridays

If you wanna do openings and gallery crawls, first Fridays is one of your key days in Philly and DC.

There are a lot of gallery openings tonight in Philadelphia, a city known for "legendary stinginess toward the arts" according to the Daily News' Tom DiNardo.

Details on the Philly area gallery openings here.

In DC, as usual, the Dupont Circle area galleries have their gallery crawl starting at 8PM. Check out Which Came First? Drawing Conclusions: Kilnformed Glass by Kari Minnick at Hillyer Art Space.

Viral Post

While I was away the WaPo did this viral piece on my good friend, the very talented Judy Jashinsky.

Read it here.

What Matters

Flying back home



Heading home after a couple of very fruitful days in Miami delivering artwork to a local power ubercollector couple; establishing some Miami area presence for a few DC area artists and some other work. Still unable to log in to my email account due to some "*.dll file corruption" which will have to wait until I get home for attention.

So, I am not ignoring your emails; I just can't get to them for now.

Finch peck

Artnet's art critic Charlie Finch takes a massive peck at the art blogsphere with an odd article in Artnet magazine.

More on that later, but do read the article here.

Dawson on Bethesda

Even while I was in gorgeous Niagara Falls, the anguished cries from DC's not-Brooklyn have followed me via emails from people emailing me "have you seen what Dawson wrote about Bethesda's galleries?"

Hey, it's her opinion and her style. She has a right to express it and an editor to guide it.

In my opinion, Dawson has developed over the years into a naturally snarky writer, and never too deep in her writing to explain away her snarkyness - mostly I suspect because of lack of proper newsprint space to address such a subject as a wander through Bethesda's art scene.

Dawson's anti-comparison of Bethesda to Brooklyn is just odd. I was raised in Brooklyn, and knew it well, so it's a waste of space to open up a article by taking a dig at the Bethesda Urban Partnership's efforts to create a gallery scene in Bethesda with an anti-comparison to Brooklyn.

Why does everything and everyone in the art world have to be compared to New York's art world?

It doesn't.

She seems baffled when she states that "declaring an arts district is a rare move in a post-gallery art world." It isn't - there are several art districts in Maryland alone; in fact I think that Silver Spring is also a recent arts district. Dawson declaration that we're already living in a "post-gallery art world," meaning that as fairs and and Internet grow, galleries are in a death spiral, may be the reason for the WaPo's tiny and ever reducing art gallery coverage - now we know: the WaPo's freelance art critic tasked with reviewing local area galleries thinks that we're in a "post-gallery art world."

I'm not so sure... and by the way, Peter Schjeldahl has already predicted the end of art fairs as well; let's see who time will prove right. So soon we will be in a "post art fair world."

But if Dawson says that we're already in a post-gallery world, and Schjeldahl predicts the end of art fairs - what do we have left for an art scene? The Internet only?

Campello does not think so. In fact it should be clear to the most casual observer of any art scene that the future is probably a combination of the three ingredients. Like it is now.

But getting back to Bethesda, what Dawson does not tell you, is how successful the Bethesda Urban Partnership has been in accomplishing their goals; that would somehow destroy her thesis - but I will try to tell you.

Around 2002, when the whole move started to have the county or state declare Bethesda as an official "arts district" (a move that brings special dispensations for cultural organizations and tax breaks for developers, etc.), there were but a couple of "real" art galleries and cultural spaces in restaurant-rich Bethesda.

To clarify: there were plenty of stores that sold pretty wall decor and had the word "gallery" in their business name, but other than Creative Partners, Marin-Price, and Sally Hansen's Glass Gallery (unless my memory here in airportland fails me) there were no other "real" galleries in the area.

Osuna earlier on had a space in the area, but this seasoned DC area "other Cuban" art dealer had closed up shop around that time frame and departed the area. He has done that a couple of times during his long illustrious gallerist career.

Since those seminal efforts began, Fraser Gallery, Neptune Gallery, Heineman-Myers Contemporary, the Washington Photography School, Orchard Gallery, the Imagination Stage, St. Elmo's Gallery, Landmark Theatre, Round House Theatre, Bethesda Theatre and others that I am surely forgetting have all opened up in Bethesda; and Osuna came back. Also in those years, a couple of other galleries opened and failed and one moved to NYC.

And the Bethesda Fine Arts Festival brings around 120 artists from all over the nation, and 40,000 people to the streets of Bethesda each May. And the very generous Carol Trawick has institutionalized the Trawick Prize and the Bethesda Painting Awards.

So it would appear to me that some sort of "art scene" is very successfully developing there, in spite of the article's announcement about the end of galleries.

And I leave you with this line from the freelance art critic to the world's second most influential newspaper, as she describes Bethesda's Neptune Gallery on her first and only visit there:

The gallery shows local glass artists, figurative sculpture and painting -- art that means well but rarely matters.

A lesson that Ms. Dawson should have picked up from her art history classes on the history of Ukiyo-e: Art always matters.

Airborne again



And heading to Miami this time... unable to log in to my email account due to some "*.dll file corruption" which will have to wait until I get home for attention. More from flower land later...

Celestine Accent

Niagara Falls is absolutely spectacular, and the millions of tourists who have flocked through here over the decades get their money's worth at the awesome spectacle of nature's raw power.

The tourists are a spectacle on their own! More on that later when I get home with some pictures.

On the flight here, I tried to read The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, a book which spent countless weeks on the bestseller list and has spawned a whole industry and armies of followers.

A friend gave it to me and insisted that I should read it and learn from it.

Count me in the disillusioned. The book is badly written, and in dire needs of good editing. On page 53, the main character is by himself in a garden in the Peruvian mountains. He sees a stranger approach down the path.

When he was within ten feet he saw me with a start, which made me flinch also.
"Oh, hello," he said in a rich Brooklyn accent."

Uh?

Can a "rich Brooklyn accent" be detected from "Oh, hello"?

Any accent? I can only think of Russian, maybe Japanese.

And the book's good news story just escapes me, while the "Romancing the Stone" plot is just not interesting enough.

Airborne today

Gilbert Munger, Niagara Falls showing the Canadian and American Views,
1903, oil on canvas 72" x 120"
Collection of the Tweed Museum of Art.
Heading to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls! Coming back Saturday... more later.

Motion filed

If you haven't been following the whole mess with the trustees of Lynchburg’s Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, then read this first. Below is the latest news release:

In an effort to prevent the trustees of Lynchburg’s Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (R-MWC) — known as Randolph College since July — from auctioning four irreplaceable paintings to increase an already generous $153 million endowment, a motion for temporary injunction and a complaint requesting a temporary and permanent injunction has been filed before the Lynchburg Circuit Court, Preserve Educational Choice announced today.

“Judging by how hastily and secretively Randolph College officials took away the art, it is clear that the college fears a ruling from the Supreme Court against their actions and is moving to sell the pieces of art as quickly as possible,” said Anne Yastremski, Executive Director of Preserve Educational Choice, the alumnae group supporting the lawsuits.

“This motion for injunction seeks to stop the College from irreparably harming their reputation and their world-class American art collection until these lawsuits against Randolph College have been cleared by the Commonwealth of Virginia’s court system. We’ve been waiting for Attorney General Bob McDonnell to take action to stop the College, but since we know of no action thus far, the plaintiffs in this injunction suit and thousands of other alumnae, donors to the College and the Maier, and citizens of Lynchburg felt they needed to take action themselves.”

The plaintiffs that have filed the request for an injunction include all of the students, alumnae and donors of R-MWC involved in the charitable trust and breach of contract lawsuits that currently are being considered on appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia, as well as the eleven potential "intervenors" who have asked the Lynchburg Circuit Court to stop Randolph College's attempt to sell off the art purchased with funds from the Trust of Louise Jordan Smith.

Just last month, the Supreme Court of Virginia decided to hear appeals of two lawsuits challenging the College’s fall 2006 decision to become co-educational. The first suit, which involves “donor intent,” challenges the college on charitable trust grounds, arguing that the college should have to prove it cannot continue as a woman’s college before it can use the assets accumulated under the original charitable purpose – to “educate women in the liberal arts” – for the benefit of a coed college. The second suit, filed by a group of students, alleges breach of contract, saying that they had been promised four years of single-sex education. Both suits pending before the Supreme Court of Virginia include allegations that the protection of the art collection is vital to providing the relief sought by the student and donor plaintiffs.

In the Circuit Court case filed by the College, the College asked the courts for permission to break the Trust of Louise Jordan Smith. Relatives of Louise Jordan Smith, students, alumnae, former faculty and Maier Museum directors, donors, and Lynchburg citizens filed a Motion for Leave to Intervene in the suit, alleging that the money from Smith’s trust was used to purchase a large number of the most valuable paintings in Randolph’s Maier Museum collection. The intervenors contend that the entire art collection must be protected in order to honor the intentions of Smith, both through her trust and her efforts during her lifetime. A hearing on that motion to intervene is scheduled for November 15.

“The Court’s decisions in these cases could affect whether or not the College can or needs to sell the paintings now at Christie’s,” says Yastremski. “If the College is allowed to go forward with the Christie’s auction before our cases are finalized, the art—pieces like George Wesley Bellow’s 1912 “Men of the Docks” which constitute the cornerstone of the Maier—will be lost forever.”

Yastremski, pointing to the college’s $153 million endowment (one of the largest in Virginia), believes the College’s efforts to sell these paintings are “due to greed, not need.”

While the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) has put the College on financial warning, it was not due to the size of the endowment. The specific issues that SACS cited the college for – astronomical tuition discounting (nearly twice the national average), excessive deferred maintenance, and operating deficits – are all signs of fiscal mismanagement, not a too-small endowment.

“Randolph College officials will do anything to mask the real problems: out-of-control spending and poor management, neither of which will be fixed by selling portions of the school’s treasured art collection,” said Yastremski. “This collection was not assembled as a financial investment for future ‘hard times,’ but rather from public donations and funds allocated to benefit the college’s educational mission and to create a cultural resource for the community. Two of the four paintings in question were donations from private individuals to the permanent collection, one was purchased with fees paid by students (at their request) specifically for the purpose of buying art and supporting artistic events on campus, and the most valuable one – “Men of the Docks” – was purchased by a Lynchburg-based community group with the express purpose of forming a permanent collection for the benefit of the students and the citizens of Lynchburg.”

Even if an infusion of capital was necessary, which thousands of alumnae and donors don’t believe, the national art community has strict standards against the sale of art for general fund purposes. Nearly every major Virginia and national art association has condemned the College’s plans to sell the four paintings, including the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Association of Art Museum Curators, the College Art Association, the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries and the Virginia Association of Museums.

“It is obvious that the current Randolph officials and Trustees care nothing for ethics or their donor’s wishes. Hopefully the Attorney General and the Commonwealth’s Courts will realize this, and act accordingly,” said Yastremski. “If not, donors may need to think twice about investing their hard earned resources with the state’s many nonprofits.”