Gopnik on Rembrandt

The Washington Post's Chief Art Critic, Blake Gopnik, has a superb and interesting review of "Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits," opening today at the National Gallery of Art.

Critical Alignment (Is this the beginning of the U-turn?)

Witless, forgettable and silly Brit critics (and fools like me who take the hook), still debate why painting is King of the Hill, or is it? Or is it dying again?

Yawn... read it here.

The height of traditional, academic, old-fashioned, typical, elitist Artspeak writing is reflected in these words about Damien Hirst's overrated "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (... you know... that shark in formadelhyde that's now rotting and that, as Kriston points out, is heading to NYC):

To think of the shark gone makes me feel oddly uneasy. Lord knows, we British have had enough opportunities to see it, especially since it was the main attraction at County Hall until only a few moments ago. But it still seems a bathetic end for the old death threat, to be installed in Manhattan's Moma [sic] and inspected as an English eccentricity by the lizards of Fifth Avenue between a spot of brunch and some light shopping at Barney's.

Lizards! Fifth Avenue Lizards! Do they look like that GEICO Lizard?

Ooops! I mean Gecko; not Lizard.

I assumed that a Gecko is a Lizard, with apologies to all Lizard-Americans and Gecko-Americans... in case that I am wrong.

Geez...

Opportunities for Artists

The Whitney Museum of American Art has announced the two curators of the forthcoming "2006 Whitney Biennial Exhibition," considered by many to one one the nation's leading shows of contemporary American art.

The 2006 exhibition is being organized by Philippe Vergne, the French-born senior curator at the Walker Art Center and who has been named director of the new François Pinault Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, and the other curator is the Whitney's own Chrissie Iles, curator of Film and Video for the museum.

As originally discussed by ANABA, and according to the museum's website , artists who wish to submit materials for the show should send proposals to:

Biennial Coordinator
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave.
New York, N.Y. 10021

All submissions to be considered for exhibition in the Biennial should include the artist's biography or resume, a brief description of the proposed work, and between six and eight images. Recommended formats for images include slides, computer printouts, digital images on a CD_ROM, audio CDs, or VHS videotapes. They do not accept original artworks in the submission package.

A word of warning: The forementioned website page appears to be a leftover from 2004, but I suspect that it would be all the same for 2006. Deadline is unclear, but for the 2004 Biennial it was August of 2003, so assume that the deadline for the 2006 Biennial will be August of 2005.

I join Martin in calling for everyone to submit a package. With a foreign curator from the wilderness of Minnesota, there may just be a crack in the "New York only" filter this coming year.

I suggest that everyone also send their home movies to Iles. Who knows what great undiscovered art may be found in your kid's birthday party celebration? And if you've got any kinky sex home videos, even better - look how far it got Andrea Fraser!

P.S. I'll gladly (cough, cough) review any of the latter type home videos, in case you want an artsy opinion before you ship them to Iles.

Lucelia Artist Award Nominees for 2005 Announced

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has announced the nominees for the museum's 2005 Lucelia Artist Award. According to the press release, "nominated artists show a sustained commitment to distinctive work that challenges conventional thinking and expectations about the nature of art. This award is part of the museum's continued commitment to contemporary art and artists through awards and acquisitions."

The 15 artists nominated for the award this year are Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney, Andrea Fraser, Tom Friedman, Ellen Gallagher, Roni Horn, Byron Kim, Maya Lin, Jennifer Pastor, William Pope.L, Fabian Marcaccio, James Siena, Catherine Sullivan, Lisa Yuskavage and Andrea Zittel. Nominated artists work in a diverse range of media including architecture, film, installation, mixed media, painting, photography, sculpture and video.

"The Smithsonian American Art Museum is pleased to acknowledge the significantc ontributions by these selected artists to the vibrant conversation taking place in the contemporary art world today," said Elizabeth Broun, the museum's Director.

The Lucelia Artist Award, established in 2001, annually recognizes an American artist under the age of 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity. Jurors nominate artists who will be recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of his or her time.

The $25,000 award is intended to encourage the artist's future development and experimentation. Previous winners were Kara Walker (2004), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2003), Liz Larner (2002) and Jorge Pardo (2001).

The award winner is determined each year by a panel of five distinguished jurors elected from across the United States, each with a wide knowledge of contemporary American art. Jurors determine the award winner in a day of discussion and review and remain anonymous until the winner is announced. Past jurors have included John Baldessari, Dan Cameron, Lynne Cooke, Richard Flood, Gary Garrels, Elizabeth Murray, Jerry Saltz and Robert Storr. The jurors remain anonymous until after the award is announced.

Sidra Stich, executive director for the Lucelia Artist Award, and not the SAAM, is the one who invites jurors to participate and she coordinates the nomination and jurying process. Since the 1970s, she has specialized in contemporary and modern art as a curator, teacher and writer. Stich is also the director of "art SITES," a series of contemporary art, architecture and design handbooks published in San Francisco. Applications are not accepted for this award. The 2005 winner will be announced in April.

The New York-based Lucelia Foundation, which funds the award, supports the visual arts, specifically 19th-century American and contemporary art.

By the way, SAAM is scheduled to reopen on July 4, 2006.

I'm not a mossback... I'm a crackpot!

I thought that I was a "mossback,", but the LA Weekly's Doug Harvey has now convinced me that I am a crackpot!

When critics, gallerists, curators or artists get their knickers in a knot over the need to promote traditional - generally figurative - art as an antidote to the rising tide of decadent, superficial, sensationalist hucksterism, they are relegating themselves to crackpot status. The issue isn't so much the viability of figurative work, as the mainstream art world easily embraces a handful of token figure painters like Elizabeth Peyton or John Curran [sic] every few years. Nor is it merely the fact that they are swimming against the tide of Modernism with its utopian sense of inevitability and its flagship aesthetic of reductive minimalism. What truly isolates them is the siege mentality with which they declare their dedication to representational craftsmanship, a passionate testifying that is out of place in the convivial social whirl of the art marketplace.

Harvey rants against "sixty-something New York based art critic Donald Kuspit" here, as if Kuspit's age has anything to do with his views.

It's all supposed to be a review of a show curated by Kuspit called "California New Masters" at Gallery C in Hermosa Beach, but ends up being somewhat a tirade against Kuspit and Kuspit's opinions on modern art and it even crosses into diminishing the exhibition space and showing a crack in California'a art armor and inferiority complex with NYC:

Kuspit can hardly be described as an art-world outsider, though. A contributing editor to Artforum and several other major art magazines, professor of art history and philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook, and the author of a score of books as well as the official Encyclopedia Britannica entry on art criticism, Kuspit is more of an insider than most Duchamp scholars will ever be. In Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Program's 2002 survey of visual-arts critics, he ranked as the 33rd most influential art theorist in all of history. Still, when the opportunity came for Kuspit to curate an exhibition demonstrating the kind of work he believes offers "the possibility of making a new aesthetic harmony out of the tragedy of life, without falsifying it," that opportunity was nowhere in or around Manhattan, but in the unlikely community of Hermosa Beach in a clean, well-funded space called Gallery C.

Does that mean that it can only make an art statement in Manhattan?

Probably.

Harvey doesn't like Kuspit's views on modern art and uses the unfair broad brush of generalizing, which is his right as a writer and critic, as as he clearly submits that he's partially in the right side of the argument because he is an artist: "it has been my impression from my own study of art history, my experience as an artist (I myself am a Master of the Fine Arts)..." blah, blah, blah...

People on either side of this "argument" are not crackpots; they are people with opinions, just like Harvey. The "argument," by the way, doesn't really exist other than in the words of puerile writing like Harvey's (in this case - I've never read Harvey's writing before, do not know it, nor him and will not paint all of his writing with one adjective) and fools like me who bite this kind of hook every time.

Me? Mossback and Crackpot and proud of it! And I guess I'll miss the "convivial social whirl of the art marketplace."

The Thursday Reviews

Jonathan Padget looks at Pyramid Atlantic in the WaPo and Jeffry Cudlin is eloquently descriptive but somehow leaves me somewhat wondering what he really wants to say (as far as a final opinion) with the last line in the dual shows at Numark Gallery in the WCP.

Last line: "His work manages to be attractive without actually being desirable."

Printmaker Jenny Freestone tells me that this coming Saturday January 29th and Sunday January 30th, from 12 Noon until 6pm, a group of Washington area printmakers will he having a sale of their works in aid of Union Printmakers Atelier, Inc.

Sale is at 926 Blagden Alley, NW (926 N St. Rear) in Washington, DC (Mt. Vernon Square Metro stop).

Artists include: David Chung, Scip Barnhart, Jody Mussof, Jenny Freestone, Andrew Kreiger, Robert Nelson, George O'Connel, Fred Folsom, Bill Woodward, Hi Gates, Kevin MacDonald, Wonsook Kim, and many more. Call Jenny Freestone at 301.655.4910 for more details.