Voices

One of the cornerstones in the edifice of my criticism of art criticism is how much better the writing and public is served when difference voices opine on the same subject.

Case in point: the current Foon Sham’s solo joint exhibits at GRACE in Reston and Heineman-Myers in Bethesda.

- Dr. Claudia Rousseau’s excellent review appeared on Wednesday, October 31 in the The Gazette. Read it here.

- A typical piece by Jessica Dawson in The Washington Post's Galleries column on Friday, October, 26. Read it here.

- Joanna Shaw-Eagle’s feature article was published on the front page of the “Arts and Culture” section on Saturday, October 20 in the The Washington Times. Read it here.

- Eileen River’s fascinating profile on Foon Sham’s dialogue work was published on Tuesday, October 16 in the The Washington Post on the front page of the “Style” section, with great photos of the installation at GRACE. Read it here.

Why isn't anybody writing about art anymore?

Peter Plagens on "Why isn't anybody writing about art anymore?"

Today's art world is bigger and wealthier than it was half a century ago, a generation ago, or even a decade ago. In 2002, more than a quarter of the adult population in the U.S. visited an art gallery or museum, a rate of what the federal government calls "cultural participation" (movies are not included) behind only the number of people reading books and visiting historic sites, and ahead of attendance at concerts by double...

...Judging by the newspapers of many major American cities and some national magazines, the more straightforwardly journalistic popular press appears to be covering art with some thoroughness. Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter and Michael Kimmelman at the New York Times, Peter Schjeldahl at the New Yorker, Mark Stevens at New York magazine, Jerry Saltz at the Village Voice, Jed Perl at the New Republic, Arthur Danto at the Nation, Ken Johnson (now) at the Boston Globe, Edward Sozanski and Edith Newhall at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Christopher Knight and David Pagel at the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Baker at the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert L. Pincus at the San Diego Union-Tribune and several others produce a veritable mountain of words about art every month. And most if not all of their publications also print additional art writing by freelancers and stringers [my note: notice that the Washington newspapers are conspicuously absent from this list]...

...Nationwide, though, newspaper coverage of art is down... the trend, over the last five or 10 years, is downward everywhere except perhaps at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times...

...The Greensboro News & Record's Robinson, however, sets a standard for candor regarding the matter of art coverage:

There are a variety of reasons we don't give art more respect. We perceive that the audience for such coverage is small. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy--we don't write about it because it's not that much in demand, but it's not in demand because we don't write about it.... Advertising has nothing to do with these decisions. I suppose that if a gallery said it would purchase a premium-priced ad along the bottom of a page focusing on the world of art, we would leap at the opportunity to expand our coverage. To my knowledge that hasn't happened, and theaters and symphonies aren't big newspaper advertisers, but we find the money to write about their productions regularly.... Contemporary art is often hard to understand. I dare say that, if asked, most of the readers I know would subscribe to the Tom Wolfe school of [opinions about] contemporary art...

While noting that almost all newspapers have made cutbacks in the coverage of "the arts" at the same time coverage of the effluvia of popular culture has "exploded," the Monitor's Thomas says that visual art might have some specific drawbacks. First, there's what he calls "the snoot factor"--the perception that modern and contemporary art is intelligible only to a rich, initiated elite. Second, he says, "there's no Picasso," no dominant figure around to pique the general public's interest. The same might be said for critics...

Read this fascinating article, first published a while back in Art in America here.

1992 Redux?

In the early nineties, more than 70 New York galleries went out of business.

Could it happen again? No, say many observers—today’s art market is too global, too rich, even too smart to suffer such a wrenching setback. All the same, one shouldn’t forget that the art market’s biggest climb ever has been based in part on a growing pile of dealer debt. Dealers have borrowed against inventory to fuel bigger shows, art-fair exhibits, and satellite galleries all over the world...

There are now 360 galleries in Chelsea, up from 124 eight years ago. Already, Craigslist has seen a slight bump in its rental listings for gallery spaces in the area. A couple of them even read “Currently an art gallery.”

Read this very interesting piece by Alexandra Peers in New York Magazine here.

Seeing Double

El Greco painted several versions of "Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple," and in the process set the OK standards for generations of artists to re-visit the same theme or image over and over in their work.

"You are not seeing double. Sotheby’s and Christie’s both have mystical gray-and-black paintings by Mark Rothko, executed the same year and painted on the same size (60 by 68 inches) canvas. The sellers of Sotheby’s version, the Iowa collectors John and Mary Pappajohn, bought it at Christie’s for $800,000 in 1996. Christie’s Rothko was purchased from the John Weber Gallery by an unidentified collector. Why Sotheby’s Rothko is supposedly worth $2 million to $3 million more is anyone’s guess."

NYT's Carol Vogel discusses the fall auction season's star offerings as the millions continue to pour into the secondary art market. Read it here.

Good News

Last August, The Washington City Paper added a new writer to the DC area art scene, and Maura Judkis has been a refreshing new voice to the region's critical dialogue.

Thanks to the art gods that the CP understands the critical importance of having different voices delivering art criticism to a region. It amazes me that the CP understands and can afford to do this, but the WaPo doesn't and won't - neither the "new" Style nor the "Weekend" section editors!

If you don't get it, you don't get it.

Much Ado About Oil and Water

The Smithies have to return a $5M donation because of mixing oil and water. Read it here.

Feh!

Use the money to do some roof repairs instead.

Don't give it back.

Botero Opens Tuesday

"Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib" opens Tuesday at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in DC.



Tomorrow's WaPo will have this article on the works by Erica Jong.

This will be one of the major exhibitions of 2007 for the entire Mid Atlantic and I bet that it will set new attendance records for the Katzen.

My own thoughts on Botero and his torture paintings are here.

AAC Survey

The Arlington Arts Center has an online survey here to help them fine tune their programming.

It only takes a few minutes; take it here.

Saturday Openings in DC

Loads of good shows are opening in DC tomorrow: Kathryn Cornelius at Curator's Office, Linn Meyers at G Fine Art, and James Huckenpahler & David Byrne at Hemphill. The openings are from 6pm-8pm.

Also catch Nicholas Khan & Richard Selesnick at Irvine Contemporary (till 8PM) and Lori Nix & Dane Picard at Randall Scott (till 7:30PM).

Trinity College

I am honored to announce that some of my Pictish Nation drawings are now part of the permanent collection of The University of Dublin's Trinity College in Ireland.

Below is "Minotaur Waiting for Theseus" my most recent drawing. It's about 17" x 14." Anyone interested in acquiring it, send me an email and I'll email you back details Sold!

Minotaur Waiting for Theseus
By F. Lennox Campello
circa 2007 - Charcoal and Conte on Paper

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.”

Open Portfolios in Philly

The Print Center along with Philagrafika, InLiquid.com and the Philadelphia Center for the Book will host an Open Portfolio event with more than 40 printmakers and photographers as part of Philadelphia Open Studio Tours.

Free and open to the public - Saturday, October 27 & Sunday, October 28, 12:00 – 6:00pm at Philagrafika - 728 S. Broad Street in Philadelphia.

New Arlington gallery

Duality Contemporary Art is a new art gallery in Arlington, Virginia.

Coming November 10, 2007 they have "Natural Selection — Art Inspired By Nature," which is a group show featuring the work of several Washington D.C. area artists such as Lynden Cline, Joy Every, Sharon Fishel, Dirk Herrman, Lucy Herrman, Nancy Sausser, Jeff Smith and Paula Wachsstock

The Artists’ Reception is Saturday, November 10, 2007 from 5-7 pm.

Wanna go to a Virginia opening this Friday?

It's a new gallery to me, but it has been around for alomost 15 years, which in gallery years is a superb accomplishment by itself, and the Hermitage Design Gallery in McLean, Virginia has Estrella Dannon opening this coming Friday, October 26, 2007, with a reception from 6 PM to 9 PM.

Artists' Condos

Three condos available for purchase by artists only. The condos are located at 915 E St NW in DC's Penn Quarter, and are listed at $289,900 with the developer prepared to offer $15,000 in down payment assistance or other incentives. These 574 sq ft apartments include large open kitchens with gas cooking stainless steal appliances, maple cabinets and granite countertops. There is bamboo flooring over the whole studio space, large closet and roomy full bath.

Space also includes washer and dryer in each unit, 24/7 concierge, fitness room, and rooftop deck. Condo fee of $280/month includes gas, water, trash removal, snow removal, and building management and maintenance. Floorplans are available at www.artisancondo.com – Floorplan A1.

For more information, or to schedule a visit, please contact Kathy Olmstead at 202.253.2502 or kolmstead@mcwilliamsballard.com.

International Caribbean Art Fair

The first annual International Caribbean Art Fair will take place at The Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street, in New York this coming November 1 - 4, 2007.

Miami's Cernuda Arte will be in Booths 18 through 21 showcasing a selection of over 45 Cuban artworks by established and emerging artists. Participating artists include: Wifredo Lam, Víctor Manuel García, Amelia Peláez, Mario Carreño, Roberto Diago, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodríguez, Agustín Cárdenas, Agustín Fernández, Manuel Mendive, Tomás Sánchez, Flora Fong, Clara Morera, Vicente Hernández, Ismael Gómez Peralta, Miguel Florido, Ramón Vázquez, David Rodríguez, Gabriel Sánchez, Li Domínguez Fong, Giosvany Echevarría, Juan Miguel Suárez, Reynier Ferrer, César Santos, and Irina Elén González.

Other than some of the satellite fairs for Art Basel Miami Beach, this may become the key art fair for collectors and galleries showcasing Latin American art.

Fabbri on Mancini

There's a gorgeous exhibition at the PMA on Neapolitan artist Antonio Mancini (1852-1930).

This is the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to an artist considered by many to be one of the most prominent Italian painters of the late nineteenth century.

And the Broad Street Review's Anne Fabbri has an equally interesting and intelligent review here.

Re-name?

As early readers know, this visual art blog started in October 2003 as "DC Art News." When I moved to the Philly area last year I re-named it "Mid Atlantic Art News."

A review of the site's stats reveals that I am now gathering regular readers from all over the nation and a significant number from overseas. Daily visits float between 1800 to 3000 a day - no idea why such wild stat swings.

And as I expand my own lifestyle to possibly include (in the future) some physical presence in the Southwest, I'm toying with the idea of one last name change for the blog.

The URL is dcartnews.blogspot.com - and so I'd like something to work with the "dc" part. So far I've come up with:

- Don Campello's Art News

- Da Campello Art News

- Drawing Campello Art News

- Direct Campello Art News

See my drift? Anyway, I need some ideas along this vein or some other catchy, creative name. Email me your ideas here.

Wanna go to an opening in DC Saturday?

Brooklyn photographer Lori Nix "creates meticulous dioramas handcrafted from plaster, cardboard, and styrofoam and detailed with found objects, such as, fur, plants, and cat whiskers. These scale models, which take upwards of 4 months to produce, are carefully photographed using an 8x10" large format camera. Eventually the models are broken apart and stuffed into garbage bags to be hauled away."

Her exhibition at the Randall Scott Gallery in DC opens this coming Saturday, Oct. 27 with a reception from 7-9PM. The show goes through Dec. 8, 2007.

Medal of Honor

A day of silence here in honor of Lt Michael Murphy, US Navy, who was awarded (posthumously) the Medal of Honor today for his extraordinary valor in Afghanistan.

Fair winds and following seas mate.

Blog B'day

October 16, 2003 was my first ever blog post as I began to learn the nuances of Blogger.com and began to gather readers for this effort.

The blog's anniversary passed and I forgot all about it until someone emailed me today to wish me a blogaversary - it's been four fruitful years and well over a million readers!

Loads more to come in the next forty years!

Two Princes

Two influential art critics review Richard Prince's retro at the Guggenheim and, as if often happens, come away with wildly different opinions.

Read the WaPo's Blake Gopnik here.

Read the New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl here.

Guess Who?

Just back from the weekend fair and not only did I sell around 40 drawings, but also was awarded a nice four-figure Helen G. Gifford Foundation Best of Show award.

More later; I haven't checked email in three days and Hotmail seems to be having log-in issues this morning!

Heading South

Travelling today for an art fair this weekend. I'll try to post throughout, so keep coming back.

Deadline Approaching

The deadline for receiving applications for the 2008 Bethesda Fine Arts Festival is December 15, 2007. This festival draws around 30,000 to 40,000 people to the streets of Bethesda and has rapidly become one of the top fine arts outdoor festivals in the Mid Atlantic.

For more information and to download an application form, visit this website.

New Spaces

"The Metropolitan Center for the Visual Arts, formerly Rockville Arts Place and now known as VisArts, has moved into its flashy new quarters in Rockville Town Center. The new galleries are spread across the second floor, including a large but divided main space, and two smaller spaces along the corridor. Filling these at the moment is the inaugural exhibit 'Zapp! Comic Books and the Arts,' created and curated by gallery director Harriet Lesser."

Read the entire review by Dr. Claudia Rousseau here.

John Blee & Marie Ringwald

Cowboys, the rich, and buying artwork

I was listening to the radio today and heard some amazing statistics from a recently released report on who pays what taxes on this country. A Wall Street Journal writer was discussing the stats from the latest release of Internal Revenue Service data on individual income taxes and (I think) a WSJ article will discuss them tomorrow in an editorial.

One of my pet peeves is the fact that in super wealthy areas such as Bethesda, Reston, Potomac, and generally most of the Greater DC area, it still takes a lot of work to get the same people who don't think twice about dropping a few grand for a sofa, to spend a couple of hundred bucks for a fine arts photograph.

There are nine million people in the United States who are classified as millionaires. If memory serves me right, there are around 125,000 of them living within the Greater Washington, DC area.

Don't believe everything that politicians tell you - from neither party! According to the WSJ reporter summarizing from the IRS report, the top 1% income earners in this nation pay 39.4% of all income taxes - an all-time high.

And they're not all the uberrich getting away with tax murder via offshore investments, blah, blah, blah, that politicians from both parties are always so fond of discussing.

The dirty little secret is that most of this 1% are folks who make $350K a year or higher and 2/3 of them are small business owners.

The top 5% (people who make $175K or higher) pay 59.5% of all income taxes. The bottom 50% of Americans, or half of all income tax payers below the median, pay 3% of all income taxes in this nation.

Those are hard, cold facts - not party-colored slogans burying the truth in search for votes.

And here's an idea for that top five percent of Americans carrying almost 60% of the American tax burden; specifically to the business owners in the bunch: support your local galleries and local artists! There's a tax benefit in there for you.

Instead of hanging motivational posters and pretty reproductions in your offices and factories and workplaces, buy original artwork from your local galleries and artists and that expense is not only a tax write-off, but also helps to kindle the local arts in your hometowns and neighborhoods.

Willie Nelson sings "Mama don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys; Don't let 'em pick guitars and drive them old trucks; Make 'em be doctors and lawyers and such..."

And then let them use their doctorin' and lawyerin' dough to buy some local artwork for their offices and support their local artists.

And cowboys can buy Western art.

WPA Membership Meeting

On Monday, October 29th at 6:30 PM the Washington Project for the Arts is having an important meeting - open and free to the public. The details are here. RSVP to info@wpadc.org.

The event will focus on membership, Art File Online, the WPA\C's separation from the CGA, and their new website.

Missa Pro Pace Forum

A forum discussion accompanying Prof. Chawky Frenn's solo show "Missa Pro Pace" exhibition at the Arlington Arts Center will take place tomorrow, Oct. 18th from 7 to 9 PM at the Arlington Art Center.

If you have not seen Frenn's brutal socio-political works, this is a good chance to see them and also listen to the GMU professor discuss them.

The forum also has uberprintmaker Rosemary Covey discussing her amazing "0 Project," the interactive cross-disciplinary project that she debuted at the AAC this month. Robert Parrish (Hoppervideo.net) will also screen his video documentary of Bosma Dance performing in front of what is undoubtedly The 0 Project’s most visible component: the 300 foot long, 15 foot high banner currently encircling the AAC’s historic Maury school building.

Impressionists by the Sea

On Saturday, The Phillips Collection' newest exhibition, Impressionists by the Sea, opens to the public. The exhibition explores the impact of the newly fashionable French seaside on the Impressionists, and traces the progression of the way the seaside is portrayed throughout the 1800s. It is a chance to see how masterpieces by Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir and others chartered the dramatic change in the French seaside as it became more and more popular to go the the beach. Through January 13, 2008.