J. W. Mahoney's Open Letter to Blake Gopnik

J. W. Mahoney is well-known to anyone in the DMV who knows anything about Washington art and artists. James recently retired from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and is a widely respected and published art critic, teacher and artist.

Mahoney is also the regional arts editor for Art in America magazine. He is also a well-known artist, arts juror, curator, art professor, and one of the most influential visual arts voices in our area; his installation at the current Artomatic has already been the subject of tremendous (and violent) viewer reaction (go see it).

And James sends the following Open Letter to Blake Gopnik:

Aw Blake, why not a little amateur dentistry every once in a while? Someone might drill a hole in your head and a little light might shine in. Yeah, violently spiteful language, but "five floors of mediocrity jammed into shabby rooms in an indiscriminate show that does nothing to advance the cause of serious art?" What's the "cause of serious art," Blake? You've never been a real artist, so that would have to be a guess on your part. Unless you're a "failed" artist, which I'm not - nor is any artist here. I'm an art critic, too, and I know what "untrained" art looks like, and Art-o-matic is loaded with all kinds of such madness, openness, and awfulness. And sometimes, if you look, real grace.

In 1978, Walter Hopps, then adjunct curator at the National Collection of Fine Arts, "curated" a show at Washington's now-defunct Museum of Temporary Art entitled "36 Hours," during which artists could bring in anything (of a certain size) during a 36-hour period and Walter would find a place to hang it. Good, bad, or ugly. I was proud to have been in that show, as I am to be in this one. Why? Look at how "indiscriminate" it all is, how generally free of the kinds of comfortably gifted, commercially sensitive, critically "savvy" (your word, never mine) art that most galleries and museums necessarily have to exhibit in order to maintain their identities - work I often respect and write about, as you do. Alternative spaces, as creatively as they operate, can show only a few dozen artists a year. Art-o-matic circumvents every aesthetic filter, respects no critical power, and opens its doors anyway.

What final virtue exists in a circus like Art-o-matic? Art is made in order to make concrete the deep abstraction that is the self. Each artist here, regardless of the depths of their relation to the discourse of art history, has a story and a unique identity that emerges on these walls. In enormous vulnerability. To be able to stand alongside the occasionally talentless courage, manic generosity, and raw eccentricity of my fellow artists is a real honor. Because what art is about isn't safe.

What you write is journalism, Blake, not art criticism. Your writing is quite often toxic, and maybe Washington’s just not your town. Think about it. You say Ter Borch is better than Vermeer? Don't make me laugh.

J. W. Mahoney

Bravo Mr. Mahoney! Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!!!

Teaser for tomorrow's DCARTNEWS

Tomorrow I will publish an open letter from a nationally published and respected art critic in response to Blake Gopnik's rootcanalization of Artomatic.

Y'all come back now...

Elyse Harrison's Top 10 Artomatic List

Elyse Harrison is the owner of Gallery Neptune in Bethesda and one of the area's hardest working artists and arts activists. Harrison not only walked Artomatic and sends in her top 10 list, but she has further decided to offer three of the artists (and possibly a fourth) in her list a show at her gallery. She will feature Jean Sheckler Beebe and Joyce Zipperer during October of next year and Scott Brooks will also be showing at Neptune in September 2005.

Scott Brooks
Joyce Zipperer
Jean Sheckler Beebe
Mat Sesow
Linda Hesh
Bridget Vath
Christopher Edmunds
Robert Weiner
Kirk Waldroff
Michael Ross

New Style editor at the WaPo

The "Galleries" column that is being reduced to twice a month is published in the Style section of the Washington Post. The Assistant Managing Editor for the Style section is Gene Robinson (who by the way is also the author of this terrific book).

Today it was announced by the Post that Deborah Heard will become Assistant Managing Editor for Style, succeeding Gene Robinson, on January 1, 2005. She has been with the Post for twenty years and a Deputy Assistant Managing Editor at Style since 1995.

DC Art News sends our congratulations to Ms. Heard.

I suspect that once John Pancake, the Post's Arts Editor returns in mid-January 2005, it will be Heard and Pancake making the decision as to what will happen to the "Galleries" column.

We should all immediately let Heard hear our voices (nice pun uh?) demanding that "Galleries" return to a weekly column status and that the Post further expand its anemic gallery coverage. Email her here.

Want an art job at Art Basel Miami Beach?

One of the Cuban artists whom we represent and hope to bring to a Washington, DC area audience in the near future is Cuban artist Tania Bruguera.

And the coming Art Basel Miami Beach brings a performance opportunity to work with Tania.

Eight to ten individuals are needed to perform during Art Basel for a performance piece by this renowned Cuban artist. The role involves walking around Art Basel in Miami Beach selling a Cuban newspaper. Individuals should speak Spanish. There will be an informational meeting held on Tuesday, November 30th at 6pm by the Miami Beach Convention Center, Entrance C. A small honorarium will be offered per day. If you are interested, call 773-230-7263 to get more details. If you cannot attend the meeting, please call for more information.

Dates
Wednesday, December 1st – 5pm-10pm
Thursday, December 2nd – 5pm-10pm
Friday, December 3rd –5pm-10pm
Saturday, December 4th – 5pm-10pm

You do not have to be available for each session, but for a minimum of two sessions.

As a pioneer installation and performance artist, Tania Bruguera exemplifies the alternative voices in Cuba who work from the artistic edge. Born in 1968, she earned her undergraduate degree at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1998, Bruguera was selected as a Guggenheim fellow and in 2000, she received the Prince Claus Award.

Bruguera has participated in numerous international exhibitions and biennials. Her work has been exhibited in several museums and collections around the world. Recently, she founded the Arte de Conducta (behavior art) department at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, the first performance art program at the university level in Latin America.

The book that saved my [art] life

Tom Wolfe, author, man-in-white, and social observer, as DCist points out, is in town to lecture and sign copies of his latest book.

It is however, Wolfe's 1975 book The Painted Word, the one that I consider the most influential book on art, nepotism, networking, manipulation and 20th century art history (OK, OK art observations), that I have ever read.

If you want to understand the true beginnings of what we now call "contemporary art" and the seminal birth of the elitist attitudes of many intelligent members of the high art apparatnik, then read this book.

"The painter," Wolfe writes, "had to dedicate himself to the quirky god Avant-Garde. He had to keep one devout eye peeled for the new edge on the blade of the wedge of the head on the latest pick thrust of the newest exploratory probe of this fall's avant-garde Breakthrough of the Century.... At the same time he had to keep his other eye cocked to see if anyone in le monde was watching."

I read it when I first started Art School and it saved my Art Life and it cemented the foundations of what has become my opinions, judgements and attitudes towards art.

Learn a lesson from NY Times readers

A while back I reported that the WaPo has decided to cut its galleries coverage by half - at least until January 2005, when a final decision will be made. I also suggested that readers write letters to the paper's editor asking Downie to cancel that decision (if he is even aware of it).

A while back, the New York Times decided to end its cultural listings section; not end or reduce their arts coverage, but just their cultural listings.

Daniel Okrent writes in the NY Times:

It landed on my desk a few weeks ago with an echoing thump that could have awakened Brooks Atkinson. On the cover it said "Save the Listings: Restore the 'Arts & Leisure Guide' to the Sunday New York Times." Inside, 615 pages carried 5,000 Internet-gathered signatures, many of them accompanied by bits of testimony variously beseeching, enraged or tearful.

Just a few weeks earlier, The Times had tossed the venerable columns of agate type that had filled so many pages of the Arts & Leisure section for so long, with as many as 300 cultural events acknowledged, however briefly, in a single edition.

Okrent then admits that:

Editors reacted to the petition, I soon learned, the way editors almost always react when readers rise against a long-planned, well-intended innovation: a little dumbfounded, a little defensive, a little dismissive.

And Okrent discusses editorial surprise at how upset readers were:

In this case, the editors had helped more than enough to earn the readers' disapproval. At a time when most American newspapers are slashing arts coverage (according to a study conducted by the National Arts Journalism Project at Columbia, from 1998 to 2003 the space given to cultural coverage in major American papers dropped by roughly 25 percent), The Times had gone in the opposite direction. The revamped cultural report now included more than seven additional pages per week. Twenty staff positions were created to produce the new content and improve the old. Full-time reporters had been put on the architecture, classical music and theater beats, and additional reporters will soon supplement the art, movie and television groups. Critics have been newly assigned to experimental arts, the Internet, and "nonart museums and exhibitions" (there must be a better phrase than that), and some lustrous new hires - notably Manohla Dargis on movies and Charles Isherwood on theater - have brought an added gleam to existing positions.

But he notes that still "all that the readers seemed to notice was what was gone." He adds:

There's an unfortunate tendency in the newspaper business to disparage a petition like this one as an "organized" effort, as if only random, disconnected cries of pain from despairing readers should be heeded. I've also heard this particular protest dismissed as "commercially inspired" by self-interested arts presenters and promoters who are worried that the box office will suffer, and have disingenuously conspired to rouse the masses.

I guess that would be me...

Result of the complaints:

Here's the good news, Listings Protesters of America: uncharacteristically for an institution that is slow to change and usually inflexible once it has done so, the editors are prepared to alter their course.

Read the whole NYT article here, and then read this and write the WaPo a letter.