Faculty Show at the Art League

I dropped by the Torpedo Factory last weekend to check a couple of shows going on in two of the galleries inside the building. As it happened, the Art League Gallery had an exhibition showcasing their faculty's work and I also dropped by to see it.

One of the interesting "secrets" of the DMV region is how many graduates from some of our area's best known art schools also take classes at the Art League. I once asked a couple of them as to why and the answer was simple: to learn the technical part of the craft of being an artist.

"After four years at ______________ I came away with a good BFA which will help me get into a good MFA program," related Daniel (not his real name). "But I still need to learn how to mix oil paints to make the colors that I really want; that's why I am taking painting classes here," he confessed.

Some standouts include the work of Rosemary Feit Covey, in my opinion the best printmaker in the DC region. In the below example from one of her classes, we see the etching process being delivered by Rosemary. First we see the etching "Astrocytes" and then the etching "David" and then the combined piece "David with Astrocytes."






That covers printmaking.

The Art League also boasts some really good painting instructors, and the one that I hear most students praise, and whose work I've been admiring over the years is Danni Dawson. Danni Dawson received her BA and MFA degrees from George Washington University and has been a professional artist and teacher for over 25 years. That's her gorgeous nude below.

Dawson on the City Hall Art Collection

The Washington Post's Jessica Dawson proves me wrong whan I predicted that she would dismiss the new City Hall Art Collection and writes a really good and insightful review on the subject.

Over the years, in my opinion due to her youth and insecurity over being the WaPo's sole gallery reviewer, Dawson has often resorted to being nasty on a semi-personal level, and even preachy and incendiary, in a cheap attempt to be "noticed."

In the past, she also has made huge mistakes in her writing, and DC area gallery owners and artists have laughed about it publicly, and in many letters to her hard-working, but benign editor, they have complained about her writing and art history ignorance consistently and brutally, and because she bruises easily, she has taken the negative feedback about her writing personally, while at the same time dishing out loads of negative writing in return.

And maybe it is maturity in this young critic, or perhaps the result of her taking Art History classes to solidify her writing background, but in any event, after years of reading her writing, I'm detecting a maturity (and security) level as a writer that now allows her to give a positive review without doing it as a back-handed compliment.

My kudos to Jessica for an excellent review. Read it here.

Bravo Jessica!

Styling

Today's WP has a really good piece by Jessica Dawson on the Ledelle Moe's heads installed at the 14th and Church streets NW empty storefront. Dawson writes:

This street-level exhibition is the blessing of a sluggish economy. Metropolis Development Corp., owner of the storefront and the condo building encasing it, awaits a retail tenant for the space. Until then, Moe's installation, certainly one of her most effective to date, serves the Metropolis brand.

A signal of aspiration and good taste, art provides Metropolis -- the firm behind a handful of brand-new, loft-style condominium buildings around the intersection of 14th and P streets NW -- with a strategic dose of cachet. John Grimberg, a consultant to Metropolis and the man who suggested installing art in the storefront, says the impromptu exhibition helps Metropolis remain on the neighborhood radar. Grimberg says the company's aim was "to use the space to create a presence" for the firm's brand. As Grimberg phrased it, showing art is "in keeping with the Metropolis aesthetic."

More than just a review, this piece is more like a really good art column on this installation, the artist and the landlord.

Read the column here.

P.S. to Dawson: What "sluggish economy?" Read the financial section once in a while.

Elsewhere in Style, Lavanya Ramanathan, who likes to use the imperial "we" in writing (and I sorta, kinda like that)... ah, writes:

The sentiment behind all the exhibitions of recent grads' work this summer is not lost on us: Forward-looking, progressive galleries that recognize fresh viewpoints and encourage local artists make up the bedrock of the arts.

But we have to admit, we've been nearly glassy-eyed trying to make sense of the wide range of voices -- and talent -- represented.

From some shows, including Irvine Contemporary's "Introductions 2" (bachelor's and master's grads), we've been able to embrace only a piece or two. Is it that the rest weren't any good? Not at all. It's just that few were able to rise above the yard-sale curation.

Lavanya Ramanathan!

Yard-sale curation! Harsh words to use in describing a show by one of our top area galleries.

At first I was a little shocked at the description (and I haven't seen this show yet, but I will next week), and then I realized that we should applaud Lavanya Ramanathan for using tough, passionate opinion in writing about art instead of the usual wishy-washy art writing that we've all become used to. I do however, also hope that Lavanya Ramanathan will use equally strong positive adjectives and passion when the artwork or show in question deserves it from Lavanya Ramanathan's perspective and opinion.

Lavanya Ramanathan also reviews "15 Minutes" at Project 4 in the column. For a different perspective on "Introductions 2," read Jeffry Cudlin's review in the CP here.

And it is a good thing to see a different WaPo writer writing about our galleries once in a while.

PS #2 - The other current show of students and recent grads, Academy 2006 at Conner Contemporary, also gets pommeled by Kriston Capps in the CP. Read that review here.

Patronizing

Few things make me madder than someone patronizing me. Here's the Assistant Style Section editor's answer to my question:

Question: By the time that one adds up commercial art galleries, non-profit art galleries, alternative art spaces, embassy galleries, and cultural art center galleries, there are over 100 new art shows every month in the Greater Washington, D.C. area, making it one of the largest and most active visual art scenes in the nation.

And yet the Style section has diminished its already dismal gallery art coverage to a twice a month schedule by Jessica Dawson. And The Post's Chief Art Critic (Blake Gopnik) focuses exclusively on museum shows, and does not review local art galleries. By comparison, his colleagues at the NY Times and LA Times (for example) review both museums and their cities' local galleries. The Arts Beat column also focuses on arts news events and rarely on local galleries.

What can the Style section do to improve local gallery coverage, say to the same (or even 50%) of the level as local theatre coverage (which is covered in Style on a nearly daily basis)?

Steve Reiss: I understand that no one likes to hear that their gallery show isn't going to get reviewed. But while we've got a lot of talented critics and reporters in the Style section (Thank you, Don Graham!), we don't have enough people or money to cover everything we would like to and we have to make choices. Some of those choices are based on quality, some are based on popularity, some are based on the interests of the individual critics. A while back, we reconfigured one of Jessica Dawson's monthly columns so it would feature a half-dozen galleries instead of just one or two. As for Blake Gopnik, he is a prolific writer and I find it hard to argue that we should be giving up reviews of major museum shows so he can write more about galleries that have a much smaller audience.

Now, do you see why this is a losing battle for our area's art galleries and our visual artists, when these sort of answers are being given?

By the way, the Jessica Dawson "reconfiguration" so that it would "feature a half-dozen galleries instead of just one or two:"

(a) predates Style reducing her coverage from weekly to twice-a-month, and

(b) I suspect was made by the WaPo following a suggestion that I discussed with their Arts Editor (a really nice guy and a very hardworking editor named John Pancake) when Ferd Protzman left the Galleries column... as a means to review more galleries.

New Timeout

The current Timeout 2004 guide for Washington, DC has really good coverage of DMV art galleries; in fact it is the only DC guide that offers any decent "guiding" to Washington area galleries.

It is written by Jessica Dawson, who also pens the "Galleries" column for the Washington Post.

Read her introduction (you'll need an Amazon password) here and her favorites here under "Names of the Game."

Jessica nails it when she recognizes in her intro that a new "optimism" is kindling a really good art scene in our region.

Throughout the pages dedicated to the galleries, and as it is to be expected, there are quite a few comparisons to New York this, New York that all over the place.

And reading through Jessica's descriptions of the various galleries also offers an honest and rare insight as to how this critic evaluates and views (she seems to have something about "safe art," whatever that is) most of our region's art galleries. For example Dawson praises Zenith Gallery's Margery Goldberg for her "tireless activism," but describes the gallery as "while influential in the neon art scene, consistently shows mediocre painting and craft."

Addison/Ripley is praised for selling "high-calibre paintings, photography and prints," but "their selections, while lovely, are awfully safe."

Cheryl Numark is "Washington's power dealer", while Leigh Conner shows work by the "kind of cutting-edge artists that Washingtonians usually travel to New York to see."

MOCA is "DC's answer to the hip, alternative galleries of New York."

We "concentrate on photography, but occasionally shows innovative sculpture and work in other media," while our Bethesda outpost is a "bright, glass-walled gallery [that] exhibits realist painting and photography."

Hemphill Fine Arts "plays host to many of Washington's strongest artists," but "the art here tends towards the decorative."

Fusebox is "sharp and savvy," and has "raised the bar for visual art in Washington," and their openings are "events to see and be seen at."

Does anyone know why Jessica has never reviewed Fusebox in her "Galleries" column? Fusebox is easily one of our top area galleries, and I'm curious as to why it is so nicely praised in Timeout, but (so far) avoided in Dawson's bi-weekly column at the WaPo.

Anyway... Bravo Timeout!

Thursday WaPo reviews

Jessica Dawson reviews Hemphill Fine Arts' new floorplan in George's new beautiful space on 14th Street and is also disturbed by Chan Chao's nude photographs currently on at Numark.

I wasn't too surprised that when Jessica first stepped into Chao's exhibition, she "wanted to step right back out" [because]... "Twenty just-over-life-size portraits of naked women ring the gallery's walls. Yet the mood isn't sexy. Or playful. It's utterly vulnerable and uncomfortable. For you and me, for sure, and even more so for Chao's subjects."

I write that I wasn't too surprised because both Dawson and her predecessor in the "Galleries" column appear to me to be rather uncomfortable with nudity. I could be wrong, I guess, but it is something that I've noticed in their demeanor and their writing over the years.

I was also surprised that Jessica writes that Chao "has applied the same clinical, pseudo-journalistic approach he used on the pro-democracy guerrillas of Burma -- those pictures were a hit at the 2002 Whitney Biennial -- to naked women, many of whom are the artist's friends or associates. Despite Chao's attempts at evenhandedness, or perhaps because of them, the results feel exploitative and manipulative."

This is in fact backwards! Those familiar with Chao's photographs before he turned his camera to the pro-democracy guerrillas of Burma, know that prior to that he used to focus on the nude figure, and in fact applied the "same clinical, pseudo-journalistic approach" that he used with his earlier nudes to the pro-democracy guerrillas of Burma, not the other way around.

Chao abandoned the nude for a few years, returned to his native Burma and photographed the pro-democracy guerrillas of Burma. It was a big hit with curators all over the nation, landed him a spot on the 2002 Whitney Biennial and national acclaim. I personally thought those photographs were boring and repetitive; I have, on the other hand, always liked and admired his nude portraits and I think that his current Numark show is spectacular!

Chao has just returned to the nude now; that's all. And I think that Dawson is just uncomfortable around nudes.

I could be wrong. For a different (male) perspective on this show, read Louis Jacobson at the WCP.

P.S. Blake Gopnik also reviews Iraq and China: Ceramics, Trade and Innovation at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art.

What Dan Zak did

Over the years, decades really, I've been complaining about the way in which the Washington Post treats its own visual arts backyard. If you go back to the very beginnings of this blog, well over a decade ago, you'll find it hard to see a week's worth of postings where I'm not complaining or bitching about something that the WaPo did, or most often didn't do, about our visual arts scene, galleries and artists.

When I first came to the DMV in the late 1980s (1987-1989) it was as a young Lieutenant in the Navy, and in those years I spent most of my summers sailing in the Arctic off the then Soviet mainland at the top of the world, I started reading the WaPo regularly. Back then, the WaPo had a daily section titled The Arts, which covered art galleries, museums, regional visual artists, etc., in addition to all the other genres of the arts.

I left the area for a few years, and lived in Scotland, and then in Sonoma, CA. I returned to the DC area in late 1993, and by then the precipitous decline in the WaPo's coverage of its city's visual art scene was just beginning.

I then began writing about the DMV visual arts scene for a lot of local, regional and national magazines, in the process becoming deeply immersed in the scene itself. In those latter years of the 1990s, the WaPo's Arts Editor was a nice, kind man named John Pancake. I developed a professional relationship with him, and every once in a while we'd meet for coffee and discuss the area's visual arts. It was he who once described deciding to open an art gallery as a "heroic undertaking."

In those years the paper still had multiple columns covering the visual arts, which included the usual Wednesday Galleries column, then authored by Ferdinand Protzman, as well as other ad hoc gallery and museum reviews by Paul Richards. It also included a weekly Wednesday column titled Arts Beat, then authored by Michael O'Sullivan, who as I recall held the title of Assistant Arts Editor. Arts Beat reflected the interests of its author, and essentially augmented the paper's coverage of the DC area visual arts scene.

By the end of the 90s, things began to unravel.

Almost against the will of the WaPo's leadership (as related to me back then by one of the editors of the WaPo Online), the newspaper went on a major expansion of its online presence and also an associated expansion of its printed paper coverage. This included the visual arts, and I was hired, along with Jessica Dawson and others, as freelancers to cover gallery shows for the paper's online site (I wonder where all those reviews are now - have they ever been archived and preserved by the WaPo?).

I can't remember exactly when Richards retired, but his retirement (to Scotland I think) caused all kinds of minor waves for the DC art scene. First, Protzman quit, some say because he was upset that he didn't get "promoted" to Richards' job. Instead, the WaPo began a hiring process and eventually brought Blake Gopnik from his Canadian newspaper to take over as the paper's chief art critic (my titling).

Protzman's departure also brought a need for a regular freelancer to do the Galleries column, and several of those of us who were doing online reviews about Galleries were interviewed. I declined the position once we got deep into it - at the time, as some of you may recall, I was also part of the Fraser Gallery, and didn't think that being a gallery co-owner and a regular Wednesday critic for the paper would pass the smell test with some; but the real victims would be the gallery's artists, as clearly they could never get at WaPo reviews.

Around 2000, Dawson (who had been writing art reviews for the Washington City Paper) was then hired as the freelancer to cover galleries and subsequently Gopnik was hired to cover all the visual arts. 

A few years later Pancake retired, and by the mid 2000s the Wednesday coverage shrunk significantly when Arts Beat was demoted to a twice-monthly column, refocused to cover all the arts, and then eventually terminated. Most of the damage to the visual arts coverage was started by then Style Section editor Eugene Robinson.

It was Robinson who began the process to let Blake Gopnik get away with only reviewing (with one or two very rare exceptions) museums, thus having the nation's only art critic too good to review his city's artists and art galleries. On July 6, 2006, Steve Reiss (the Style section's Asst. Editor) stated online: "As for Blake Gopnik, he is a prolific writer and I find it hard to argue that we should be giving up reviews of major museum shows so he can write more about galleries that have a much smaller audience."

When Robinson left, under the new editor Deborah Heard, the coverage got even worse, with Galleries being reduced to twice a month. That added up to around 25 columns a year to review the thousand or so gallery shows that the DC area gallery art scene had to offer in those days.

A few years ago, when Dawson quit the WaPo (2011) to go to work for the Hirshhorn and in the interim, the WaPo experimented with using a couple more freelancers, but both experiments ended badly from both sides. Eventually they hired Mark Jenkins, who is their current Galleries critic, and who (in my opinion) is the best from all the names mentioned here so far.

What is a constant over all these years and memories, is the miserly coverage of DMV artists and galleries by the world's second most influential newspaper.

And then this past weekend, WaPo writer Dan Zak showed us a brilliant glint of what this coverage could be, if the WaPo "got it."

Zak's The Polaroids of the Cowboy Poet is perhaps the best article that I have ever read on an artist.

Chris Earnshaw is an odd and brilliant and sloppy man who vibrates with great joy and grand melancholy. For decades he has ambled through bandstands, major motion pictures and demolition sites, searching for prestige and permanence, all while being ignored on the gray streets of a humdrum capital.

This work has Pulitzer written all over it, but more importantly, this article is exactly the sort of coverage of the DMV visual artists and galleries, that we've always clamored from the WaPo to do 2-3 times a year - as they do when some celebrity visits the city.

Dan Zak: Well Done! You've not only delivered a brilliant article, but also shown the WaPo and Washington, DC, and the DMV visual arts scene, how it is done.

WaPo is seeking works by local artists

"Jessica Dawson is hitting the studios to uncover Washington talent.
It's all part of Real Art D.C., the Washington Post's exciting new platform for contemporary art in the Washington region. There's also a related competition open to all area artists.

What is Real Art D.C.? An online virtual gallery of works by local artists that will allow Post readers to discover and connect with Washington's newest talents. Artists themselves will post their own work -- and so will dealers and teachers on their behalf -- and anyone can click through and see the spectrum of local creativity."

Read all about this interesting new venture by the WaPo here.

As part of the effort, Dawson will select "a new artist-finalist every few weeks and visit the artist's studio, reporting about what she finds on the Real Art D.C. site."

I like it!

Here is where you upload your images to be considered.

Before you do that, I recommend that you read the Terms and Conditions and pay very careful attention to rule number 8 which states:

8. Submitted Entry Materials will be posted on WashingtonPost.com, and may be included in both print and online features and promotions. In addition, by entering you grant Sponsor a license to publish, reproduce, use, transfer, and otherwise display your Entry Materials in any medium and for any purpose in Sponsor's sole discretion.

I'm having a little trouble digesting that condition, which essentially all but gives the copyright of the image to the Washington Post and I am not sure why the WaPo would want to "use" the artists' entry in "any medium and for any purpose", unless they're planning to put some images on T-shirts and sell them at the next Crafty Bastards fair (not a book though, as rule 20 clarifies).

I want you readers to comment on that condition (number 8) and let me know what you think.

Anderson on Dawson's Real Art DC

The CP's John Anderson has some really good observations and issues with The Washington Post's Real Art D.C. contest.

By the way, a belated congrats to contest winner Steven Silburg. As I've noted before, I will invite all of Dawson's picks for the next volume of the 100 Washington Artists trilogy (so it's really 300 isn't it?).

Anderson's article gave me an idea and I am toying with the concept of going through all the entries to see if I can find my own top ten that I like and invite one of those to be in the next volume as well.

Read Anderson's article here.

Dawson on Hernandez

The WaPo's freelance galleries' critic, Jessica Dawson, checks in with a small review of my good friend Nestor Hernandez's show at International Visions Gallery in DC.

One of a handful of Cuban-Americans in the DC area, a brilliant street photographer and a soft-spoken, amazing human being, Nestor passed away unexpectedly last year.

We all miss you Nestor.

Goodbye Book World

In another sign that literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers, The Washington Post has decided to shutter the print version of Book World, its Sunday stand-alone book review section, and shift reviews to space inside two other sections of the paper.

Where will they shift the book reviews and articles and discussions to?

“I think it’s going to be a great disappointment to a lot of readers,” said Marie Arana, who edited Book World for a decade before taking a buy-out from The Washington Post in December. “I just hope that there’s enough coverage and emphasis and attention given on the pages where Book World will now appear in print in Outlook and Style and Arts to satisfy those readers.”

Good luck with that Ms. Arana; it has been clear to the most casual observer that those sections of the WaPo are not really interested too much on "satisfying" their readers; at least those readers with niche interests such as book, visual arts, etc.

Think more celebrity focus and you've got the Style section. A few years ago the decay of the Style section's coverage of the visual arts in the Post started under then Style's editor Eugene Robinson, and this blog is a historical record of the decay of that section in covering the arts, as well as some outright lies by its editors over the years about some of the issues raised over the years.

In 2004 the Style section used to have one column a week to review DC area art galleries. 52 articles a year to review from a potential field of over 1,500 or so gallery shows. But 52 is better than nothing. The columns were shared by freelancers Jessica Dawson and Glenn Dixon, both ex-Washington City Paper writers. Then Dixon quit over some dispute with the Post and the art review column was reduced to twice a month.

But we were told on Monday, December 27, 2004 that the Post had "decided to hire a second freelance writer to augment Jessica Dawson's 'Galleries' reviews."

We're still waiting for that second additional freelance art critic. Instead, since then the Post has reduced its galleries' coverage even further. And it's not like we don't understand the economical reasons for this. With newspapers all over the nation slowly bleeding away readers each month, the end of the line is near for these major, once dominant moribund giants of the printed media. But what fires me up is when they still try to tell us that nothing will change and that they still "get it" as the Post's annoying radio ads proclaim.

In a phone interview with the NYT, Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of The Post said that “Our intention is to have nearly as many reviews as we’ve had in the past, though clearly there will be somewhat less room.”

Goodbye Book World.

Dawson on local shows

Jessica Dawson has some good mini-reviews of some top DC area shows here.

Dawson reviews

The WaPo's Jessica Dawson with two very cool reviews on Jason Horowitz at Curator's Office and Titouan Lamazou at Adamson.

Dawson leaving the WaPo

The WaPo's Galleries critic Jessica Dawson, who for about 10 years has freelanced the Galleries column for the Washington Post (and who prior to that used to freelance art reviews for the Washington City Paper) will be departing the Washington Post as that newspaper's visual art critics' bleeding continues and Jessica is heading to a new gig at the Hirshhorn Museum, where she will join the museum's staff working on the Hirshhorn's Bubble.

We wish Jessica the best at her new job.

More later...

Worth noting

Back when the WaPo announced the Real Art D.C. thing where the WaPo's Galleries critic Jessica Dawson reviews online entries and selects work that she liked, there was a good discussion about the rules of the entries, which seemed particularly one-WaPo-sided towards image copyright issues.

Not sure if that was a lot of wasted words worrying about copyright. I think.

Jessica's first pick was Joel D'Orazio, and she really liked his chairs but didn't seem so hot on his paintings. By the way, I'm the opposite: I like his paintings better.

Anyway, score is Jessica one, Lenny zip as Joel's chairs are featured in Dwell Magazine.

And by the way, all of Jessica Dawson's picks will be automatically invited for the next volume of 100 Washington Artists, tentatively titled 100 More Washington Artists.

Dawson on Miner

The WaPo's Jessica Dawson has a really cool review of A.B. Miner's show at G Fine Art:

Artist A.B. Miner, 32, bade farewell to his breasts forever in January 2007, electing for a double mastectomy with reconstruction, as that element of female-to-male gender reassignment surgery is called. By then he had been on hormone therapy for two years. He had changed his name. Now it was time for the next step in realizing a dream he'd had since he was a teenage girl: to be a man.

The procedure's effects must have fascinated Miner, because he photographed himself at regular intervals post-surgery. Working from those photographs, he painted a 12-panel work about the contortions of his flesh. "From There to Here" is the centerpiece of Miner's modestly sized solo show inaugurating G Fine Art's new location.

Read it here.

Dawson on One Hour Photo

The Post's Jessica Dawson has a really good article on the One Hour Photo exhibition project at the Katzen.

Read it here.

I have a pic in that novel show.

Dawson on the Washington Body School

The WaPo's Jessica Dawson comes through with a really good review, in fact one of the better ones that she's ever delivered, of Meg Mitchell and Jeffry Cudlin's Ian and Jan: The Washington Body School at District of Columbia Arts Center.

Read Jessica's review here.

Liz Spayd for WaPo.com

Liz Spayd, an assistant managing editor in charge of national news for The Washington Post, has been named editor of washingtonpost.com.

Spayd's upcoming editorialship has been called in an official WaPo statement as "another sign that our Web site is a journalistic force that will play a large part in shaping The Post's future."

Spayd joined the WaPo in 1988.

A little history:

When the washingtonpost.com first got started, one of the first things that it did was to augment the galleries and visual arts coverage by adding a group of freelance writers who would write reviews and profiles to augment the print version's scant coverage of the DC area's galleries and artists.

This is how Jessica Dawson first connected with the Washington Post bosses. Previous to that, she used to write for the Washington City Paper as a freelancer working for then WCP Arts Editor Glenn Dixon Brad McKee.

At the washingtonpost.com, under editor John Poole (who was then the site's online Arts Editor), the arts coverage by the WaPo online flourished and there were dozens and dozens of gallery reviews, which have unfortunately mostly disappeared from the WaPo's online presence, as well as many gallery profiles, most of which have also vanished, although a few still remain.

At once point, even the print version critics, such as Jessica Dawson's predecessor for the Galleries column (Ferdinand Protzman) and Michael O'Sullivan, authored online articles and reviews for washingtonpost.com which were only available online.

And for a short period of time, there was happiness in the air, as the WaPo finally appeared to be delivering gallery coverage, if just through its expanded online presence.

And then John Poole got promoted and went on to bigger and better things.

And then it took a looooong time to find a replacement online Arts editor. And by the time she was hired, she had a tight budget and no allowance for online art critics, and a bare bones coverage of the art scene.

And then the WaPo's Chief Art Critic (Paul Richard) retired, and Ferd Protzman got pissed that he didn't get promoted to that job and quit, and Jessica got hired as a freelancer to replace Protzman and back then the Galleries column was a weekly column.

And then Gopnik got hired from some Canadian newspaper where he used to write for after the Post's first choice (a New York Times critic) turned the job offer down and recommended Blake, who apparently was outside the Post's radar at that time.

And the "augmented" online visual arts coverage ended, other than the random Gopnik video here and there.

Liz Spayd, if you read this: can you bring back some other critical voices to the DC art scene and renew the online art reviews?

The Mystery of Twittering Machine

As I have been traveling so much lately (and I'm heading off to the Poconos this weekend), I have been trying to catch up with some of the art reviews that the WaPo has done in the last couple of weeks.

And I have noticed an interesting mystery in a recent review.

On Sunday, June 18, 2006, Jessica Dawson reviewed the Paul Klee show at the Phillips Collection.

It always bugs me somewhat when Jessica "uses" the Galleries column to review a museum show that will most likely be reviewed by Gopnik or O'Sullivan anyway - to me she's wasting the precious "Galleries" print space, which I believe its supposed to be focused on galleries, on a museum show.

However, in this review she was writing it for Sunday Arts, I guess subbing in place for the WaPo's Chief Art Critic, who as we all know, only writes about museums, and not galleries.

Read that review here. She writes:

At the Phillips, the Duchampian "Twittering Machine" is on view, as is the anxiously Freudian "Girl With Doll's Pram," where the little girl's breasts are the size of Hindenburgs.

Then, later on I read Michael O'Sullivan's review of the same show, published at few days later on Friday, June 23, 2006. Read O'Sullivan's review here, and he writes:

Oddly enough, one of my favorite paintings, MOMA's "The Twittering Machine," is not on view at the Phillips, although you'll find it in the accompanying catalogue.

Uh?

Is the painting there or not?

And so I call the Phillips, and the nice PR lady tells me that O'Sullivan is right, and that "The Twittering Machine," although published in the catalog, did not make it to the exhibition. And she's cracking up because it was highlighted in the Dawson review, and although published in the catalog, it is not listed in the checklist for the exhibition.

"Did she actually ---," I begin to ask.

"Come to the exhibition?" interrupts the nice Phillips lady, "Yes, she did... and that's what makes the mention of a piece not in the exhibition even odder."

Sigh...

Update: As usual, Bailey is crazy.