Fred Ognibene's Top Ten DC Area Art Shows

Ubercollector Fred Ognibene is not only one of the DC area's best-known art collectors, but also a very generous donor to our area's museums. Herewith his list of the Top 10 11 DC area art shows, in alphabetical order:

1. Barlow Curates at Addison-Ripley, especially the amazing sculptures of Elizabeth-Lundberg Morrisette (actually an artist I discovered at the last Art-o-Matic).

2. Bellini-Giorgione-Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting at the National Gallery of Art-one of the most beautiful shows I have ever seen.

3. Christopher French: New Paintings: Contradictory Resemblances at Marsha Mateyka Gallery - a very complex show of color families painted on Braille paper with hypnotic results.

4. Kevin Kepple at Addison-Ripley - Kevin’s works have matured and are more complex; the new palette he is using resulted in beautiful paintings.

5. Dean Kessman: Plastic on Paper at Conner Contemporary - plastic shopping bags as art - beautiful and unexpected renderings from some horribly ugly satchels.

6. Jim Lambie: Directions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden -thanks for showing his work.

7. Maggie Michael: Open End at G Fine Art - her paintings keep getting better and stronger and more complex.

8. Ledelle Moe: Congregation at G Fine Art and storefront installation on 14th Street - a sculptor willing to push the limits and with a very strong future.

9. Vesna Pavlovic: Collections/Kolekcija at Fusebox-a wonderful collection of images from an artist now in the Columbia MFA program... I am glad I bought her work early!

10. Erik Sandberg: Contrary at Conner Contemporary -h e is/will be significant competition for John Currin!

11. Ian Whitmore: Little Lies at Fusebox - a VERY talented artist with a guaranteed successful future.

Gopnikosities

I really, really try to stay away from constantly poking fun at the Washington Post's erudite Chief Art Critic, Blake Gopnik's curiously academic and outdated views on contemporary art, which are still somehow stuck somewhere in the 1960s - I think - but the man is a never-ending source of astounding agendart verbosity.

So here's the latest:

According to this AP story a "North Carolina artist intrigued by the public obsession with celebrity has found herself feeding that obsession with a painting of actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary hovering over a Wal-Mart check-out line.

Kate Kretz has painted for 20 years but none of her previous work has garnered the attention given 'Blessed Art Thou,' showing this weekend at Art Miami, an annual exposition of modern and contemporary art."

And so, this WaPo blogger asked Blake Gopnik for his opinion on the painting, and the Gopnikmeister delivered this brilliant Gopnikism:

"Kate Kretz's painting comes closer to magazine illustration than to the subtle fine art you'd expect to see in a major museum of contemporary art. It gets its messages across, alright. It presents Angelina Jolie as our nation's Madonna of Consumption. In a glory of siliconed breasts, collagened lips and foreign-adopted cherubs, Angelina reigns over Wal-Mart's banality -- its all-American brands, its all-American flag, it's all-American obesity. The problem with the picture, art-wise, is that its messages are way TOO clear. It's more like a puzzle-picture than a probing work of art: Once you've deciphered it, there's not much chance of giving it a second look. Its van-art technique, especially, is so generic that it hardly has a thing to say that hasn't been said a thousand times before -- often, much better. The crucial question, in our busy age: Why spend time with this work, when a 500-word Op Ed would do a better job expressing its opinions, and any number of Old Master paintings would mean more to an art-loving eye."

Let me decipher this a-la-Bailey; Gopnik is affirming that:

1. "Real" art must be subtle in order to be of museum quality.

2. "Real" art should never be TOO clear in its message (otherwise who'd need critics to interpret it for us?).

3. "Real" art should "say" something, but not too clearly, and that something shouldn't have been said too many times before.

4. Old Master paintings, because they're done by dead Old Masters, can say something in a heavy-handed way, and really clearly, but that's OK, because they're Old Masters and not some new painter who's clearly never gotten the memo that painting is dead.

More Congratulations...

To DC area artist Matt Sesow, who will be exhibiting in New York City as well. His work opens next week at the van der Plass Gallery (South Street Seaport, pier 17). The exhibition runs from January 12 thru February 28th, 2007.

Sesow is already having a spectacular 2007:

January: Group show at van der Plas Gallery in New York City. Group show in Bethesda at Creative Partners (part of the Artomatic show).

March: Solo show in San Diego (Oceanside) at D Gallery

April: Two-person show in Atlanta

May: Solo in Rockland Maine (coinciding with the Basquiat/Warhol/Wyeth)

June: Solo in Sacramento (Pamela Skinner Gallery)

July: 31 days in July..

August: Solo show in Denver, Colorado

September: Adams Morgan Day and Arts on Foot in DC

October: Show at Alcove in Atlanta

December: Possible self-taught group show in Miami (part of Art Basel extravanganza weekend).

Is that a hard-working artist or what?

Gross Clinic Goes on View

Thomas Eakins’1875 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, goes on public view at 4 p.m. today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in early March will hang at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It is on loan to the Museum from Thomas Jefferson University until it is sold later this month by the University to the Museum and the Academy, which have joined in an extraordinary ongoing fundraising effort and have managed to keep the painting in Philly.

Congratulations too...

To Tim Tate, whose work will be included in "The Next Tortured Genius" exhibition in Chelsea's MonkDogz Urban Art Gallery, which opened amid much hoopla last year at 547 West 27th Street in NYC.

Congratulations

To DC area artist Elena Maza, whose work graces the cover of this month's Art Calendar magazine.

Walt Whitman, a kosmos

The National Portrait Gallery is holding a conference on Walt Whitman to coincide with the exhibition “Walt Whitman, a kosmos” on January 26th from 9 to 12.

They will have a stellar array of speakers: Jorie Graham, Pulitzer Prize winning poet; Alexander Nemerov, Yale University Art Historian; Sean Wilentz, Princeton University Historian and winner of the Bancroft Prize in History; and Michael Schmidt, Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow and managing editor of Carcanet Press, the leading poetry publisher in the United Kingdom.

For further information on the conference go to this website and click on the Events and Program link.