Charles Saatchi takes on Blake Gopnik

The father of YBA art and one of the world's best-known art collectors is Charles Saatchi.

And the Art Newspaper has recently interviewed Saatchi with questions submitted via email by people from all over the world.

From what DC Art News readers info'd me as they sent emails to the Art Newspaper a few weeks ago through the announcement in this posting, at least two of the questions that Saatchi chose to answer came from DC Art News readers. They are:

Question: Did you personally burn, or did you contract with a professional arsonist to burn, your warehouse filled with your art?

Saatchi: It wasn’t terrifically amusing the first time dull people came up with this. Now it’s the 100th time.

Question: Blake Gopnik, the Chief Art Critic for the Washington Post has stated that "painting is dead and has been dead for 40 years. If you want to be considered a serious contemporary artist, the only thing that you should be doing is video or manipulated photography." Do you agree or disagree and why?

Saatchi: It’s true that contemporary painting responds to the work of video makers and photographers. But it's also true that contemporary painting is influenced by music, writing, MTV, Picasso, Hollywood, newspapers, Old Masters.

But, unlike many of the art world heavy hitters and deep thinkers, I don’t believe painting is middle-class and bourgeois, incapable of saying anything meaningful anymore, too impotent to hold much sway. For me, and for people with good eyes who actually enjoy looking at art, nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

Ouch! Read all of the questions and answers here.

The Thursday Art Review Starts Tomorrow

Since the Washington Post has decided to reduce its gallery coverage by 50%, starting tomorrow DC Art News will start a weekly Thursday review, in an BLOGish attempt to fill part of the void left by the Post's [we hope] temporary decision to publish the "Galleries" column only twice a month (instead of weekly, as it has been for years).

Thus, I am opening DC Art News to anyone who'd like to email me a review of a visual art show in our area. I reserve full editorial rights.

Art critics, opinionated art fans and art-critic-wannabes: Email me your review!

Tomorrow I will have my review (at last!) of Artomartic 2004.

Philip Barlow's Top 10 Artomatic List

Philip Barlow is a well-known DC art collector, arts activist, a great supporter of our area artists and art scene, and nearly a curator. He is one of the most vocal supporters of Art-O-Matic and after many trips to AOM, he sends in his top 10 list. Barlow passes that he did not consider artists whose work he has collected and most of the artists on his list are artist who are unfamiliar to him (prior to AOM)

1. Elizabeth Lundberg Morrisette
2. Kathryn Cornelius
3. Dylan Scholinski
4. Mary Beth Ramsey
5. Mona El Bayoumi
6. Nader Hadjebi
7. Robert Redding
8. Megan Rains
9. Jeff Wolfram
10. Darren Smith

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.