Want to ask Charles Saatchi a question?

To coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Saatchi gallery, the advertising genius turned art collector, Charles Saatchi has agreed to answer The Art Newspaper’s questions as well as your own in their January 2005 issue. Email a question to Saatchi here.

Deadline for questions is December 6, 2004.

Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post: The DC City Museum will close its exhibit galleries to the general public next spring.

Tomorrow, Sunday October 10, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. is the Bethesda Artists' Market, with 25-35 area artists (some are coming from as far north as New York now) selling their artwork.

The market is on Bethesda Plaza, right outside and around the Fraser Gallery Bethesda, one and a half blocks north of the Bethesda Metro stop on the Red Line.

See you there!

"Funky Furniture" Controversy making worldwide news

The "Funky Furniture" controversy, first discussed here a few days ago, and subsequently in the Washington Post has made worldwide news and even the BBC has picked up the story!

One of the show's curators (Chad Alan) told me yesterday that a protest outside the City Museum was being organized for next week - I will let you know as soon as details are available.

This is a PERFECT opportunity for an area exhibition venue to step up and offer up space to host this exhibition. It is sort of a replay of the "Mapplethorpe at the Corcoran" controversy of the past. Except that this time, of course, it is the perfect opportunity for the Corcoran to step up to the plate and offer up its empty ground floor space (the empty space to the right when you first enter the museum) to host "Funky Furniture."

The exhibit is designed to look like a "living room," and so it would be a perfect fit into that Corcoran ground floor empty space.

And you can't buy publicity like this controversy has generated. So the ball is in the Corcoran's court, I think.

The Post's "Geek" art critic Michael O'Sullivan reviews Dan Flavin at the NGA.

The Washington Posts's Jacqueline Trescott today has a story on the "Funky Furniture Controversy" at the DC City Museum that was first posted here and by Jesse Cohen at ArtDC and discussed on the air yesterday at the Kojo Nmandi show.

I am told that the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities is actively looking for a place to hold the exhibit and may have an alternative space lined up!

The Vampire Keeps on Rising

(Thanks AJ).

This article in the Christian Science Monitor discusses an exhibition opening at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles titled "The Undiscovered Country."

The show examines the role of representational painting in a post-photographic world by looking at 65 works by 23 painters from the United States and abroad over the past four decades.

"This is not the straightforward landscape and formal portrait that dominated art for so many centuries. Instead, it's a concentrated effort by artists to come to terms with a world suffused with real-world imagery - and find a new role for realistic painting within it."

This all simply means that for years a lot of influential people in the art world have been trying and insisting on denigrating painting, especially representational painting - but in the end, as it has happened several times in the vicious circle, painting refuses to die and suddenly it is back in vogue and trendy curators are scampering all over the place to find the painters they've been ignoring for so many years.

Not too mention some art critics who have made a career and name by pushing the "painting is dead" slogan.

I call this "Contemporary Realism." That is: realism with a bite.

And (shameless plug coming) if you want to see an artist whose works have been called "the leading edge of the new urban realists" by the New York Times, come see David FeBland's fourth solo with us at Fraser Bethesda. Opening reception is tonight from 6-9 PM as part of the Bethesda Art Walk.