Ross Douthat writes for the New York Times a response to last week's Sunday Book Review feature by Katie Roiphe, in which she laments the loss of the literary lions of yesteryear—"the Roths and Updikes, Mailers and Bellows," per Douthat—and the virility and libido that defined their letters. Douthat writes down Roiphe's main complaint about their successors, today's authors, which is that they are possessed by a "puritanical" streak. Douthat make a compelling case for the notion that it is not an outward pressure, an imposition of an external or religious nature, so much as it as a hard-won "exhaustion of the transgressive impulse." I think that's an elegant phrasing and perhaps captures something about an accelerated sexual coming of age. But his argument comes off the rails with his illustrations. So when he says that Lady Gaga . . .
. . . um, that . . .
oh hell. I can't think straight. Y'all know what day it is here at G.p headquarters. It is time to THROW THEM HORNS UP. Just as soon as I get a couple calls back from Los Angeles I am on my way to the first of several six-packs of Shiner Bock. Here is the day's mandatory reading. I am also enjoying this and this right now. And for your further consideration.
Some of those links courtesy of the cast of villains I call my friends back home. We're all pretty much in agreement: The more yards Colt has running and the higher the scores go, the better our chances will be. Ingram? That's some kind of Scientology thing, right?
TEXAS!
FIGHT!
This panel I moderated turned out to be a success, of a sort. Hatchets says that 138 people were in attendance. Of a sort, because at times it felt like a health-care townhall, a riot-turned-deliberation: 138 Angry Men. But a success, given it was the first Monday following the holidays, and freezing winds did their best to keep people away. On my way to the hotel I didn't want to be there.
I'm grateful so many people showed. Greg Allen attended and wrote a faithful account that you should read. Some of what he says kind of rankles me, but yeah, that's how that panel went.
In retrospect I have to wonder whether the kerfuffle truly follows from the power of the Washington Post or rather from the idiosyncratic personalities of the District's art community. If Jane Black had written her survey of new food on 14th Street with a negative slant—if she'd described it as, or reported it to be, an "island of misfit toys"—would food bloggers and restaurateurs have organized in upset? I don't know. But I know that many of the 138 people who showed for the art panel have deep ties in this city. This scene, sucky or scrappy, weathered a lot before money came to Northwest and Obama brought news crews. It has an attitude.
What a great Internet this morning. I hopped on early and started chatting with my friend about Ruskin and Turner and received in a flash an essay by Ruskin, one that draws heavily from his journals; in it he mentions watching sunsets with Turner. This I mention maybe followed the end of the Napoleonic wars, after which Turner, for one, taking advantage of the newly restored freedom to travel abroad, ventured widely—studying and painting in Tuscany in particular. They say it was Ruskin who coined the phrase "soapsuds and whitewash" that got attached to Turner's Snowstorm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author Was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich (1842)—though Ruskin only meant to lampoon Turner's critics.
Blah blah, sunsets and storms, and then this catches my attention (via @cmonstah):
It's a seven-minute video by artist Marie Lorenz, recorded as she swims back to shore in Ostia (in Rome) after being shipwrecked. It's enthralling. Something about the project—she has the presence of mind to stick her camera in her mouth as she escapes from her damaged boat; somehow "project" isn't the right word here—reminds me of Bruce Nauman's Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), a resemblance that is confirmed by the jarring flash of hands near the end. Don't miss it; read the whole thing; digg and RT.
Barring a third snowpocalypse, I'll be boarding a red-eye flight back to the DMV and making quick time home to share Christmas with Wrecky and pick up the Flophouse before Keri gets here. The plan is to close out 2009 with art shows: Anne Truitt, Terri Weifenbach and Carole Wagner Greenwood, the chicken coop thing. Also Thai X-ing and Nouveau Riche and Eden Center since we'll have a car and, hell, maybe a jog over to Spa World to wash off 2009. I'm pretty thrilled about the way the year is winding down.
Merry Christmas! This is where I am right now.
Now I hasten to note that Keri Oldham is one of my best and oldest friends. She's visiting for a few days after Christmas and if I hope she'll stay through New Year's. Anything I say to you about her work will carry the slant of my extraordinary bias for her as a friend for more than a decade and going. So take someone else's word for it! Lanie Delay talked to her for KERA Public Media and the Q&A examines some of the best aspects of her practice, which includes criticism and theater, too.
Pivoting from her work specifically, let me pick up on something she says in the interview: "Galleries closing doesn't mean that there can't be shows." It's interesting to me the way that geography informs this attitude.
As recently as spring this year—when the nation was firmly in the grip of the Great Recession—people back home were still telling me that Dallas (and Houston, and Austin) was recession proof, that home prices were stable and the market was still growing. That may even still be the case today in Houston—I don't know.
But it's a bad scene now in Dallas, where a lot of galleries are being forced to close. In my (admittedly limited) experience living in DFW and writing some reviews when I visit for the Dallas Morning News, the few devoted dealers and artists in Dallas have enjoyed strong support from collectors and the luxury of Chelsea-sized white cube spaces along Dragon Street and elsewhere. This is not to say that the Dallas art market was ever pampered, but it was never forced to rely upon a strong DIY scene to survive. A stable white cube scene has been destabilized and I don't think there's a back burner guerrilla scene in place where artists can rough it out and find support. (At least, not to my knowledge.)
Now, in the District, the extraordinary growth over the last decade has attracted a number of people—or better put, retained those people—who come not for jobs in political journalism or the federal government but for jobs in culture and entertainment or with the sort of squishy nonprofit work that allows them to devote a lot of time to do those things. While the District enjoyed the sort of boom that saw white cubes springing up on 14th Street NW, a dedicated collector class—like the kind that well-to-do Dallas has or had—never totally materialized. So even though a few galleries in the District have been forced to close (if only to re-open elsewhere) the Great Recession has not taken a huge psychic toll on D.C. artists—who are all too familiar with the struggle. Game's the same, just got more fierce.
In Philly, to take another example, it seemed as though artists were never able to totally capitalize on the boom. I don't know why. A curator explained to me at a meeting with someone from the National Endowment for the Arts that a lot of our discussion didn't much matter for Philadelphia, because Philadelphia isn't run by grant-requesting arts nonprofits—but rather loose collectives, revolving-door fun-scene kids. I would totally guess that's the same for Baltimore. I don't know whether money didn't coalesce into a certain sort of professionalization here because of something attitudinal about the city or because the money was never there. Either way, Philly's art scene looks from all appearances unchanged. Same with Baltimore.
That's maybe wrong in the case of Philadelphia, but put another way, there is an infrastructure to help artists survive the Recession that is more developed in Philly and Baltimore than in D.C. and much more so than in DFW.
Jessica Dawson follows up on the 16 artists Mera Rubell selected for the 12 slots she was tasked to fill. I'm nodding my head to this comment: "A few on the list come as a surprise, given her comments during the tour." Rubell had it in mind to recognize some artists and to push others. Which just goes that much further to show: She wasn't here handing out power rings forged in the flames of the Venice Biennale. Rubell is merely one curator picking work for the Washington Project for the Arts auction and she's made her decisions based on a variety of factors. (Next up: Chiara Sartori.)
It is significant that Rubell is expanding her footprint in the District, buying art here, hosting BYT pool parties and so on. But this project wasn't an art audit of the city. Say that it were: It isn't as if she only found 7 artists when she was asked to pick 12. She liked enough of what she saw to pick 12 and add 4 more.
Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1977–79. From a projection in Singapore. Photo by Darren Soh.
Sometimes I doubt the anger I feel toward Naomi Klein. Isn't this merely my way of throwing a progressive under the bus to burnish my centrist credentials? Except that no one cares about my centrist credentials, not even me. Didn't I read No Logo when I was a sophomore in college? Yes but I was a lot smarter when I was a sophomore at UT. Haven't her views and mine progressed since then? Maybe hers, but the last serious book I read was Green Lantern: Blackest Night.
Then I read an account like Natasha Chart's, describing an argument in passing she has with Klein at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen. In which Klein argues with a straight face that U.S. President Barack Obama should throw his support fully behind climate "reparations" and that American progressive types should get over whatever queasiness this phrasing makes them feel. It's then I think: but damn does it suck that Big Monkey Comics closed.
The image comes from the Guardian story on the petty thieves who allegedly pilfered the Arbeit Macht Frei sign from Auschwitz. There is a detail to that story that drives at the widespread and totally wrong misapprehension about how art theft happens:
[Polish police commander Andrzej Rokita] refused to be drawn on reports in the Polish press that an unnamed "crazed" collector of Nazi memorabilia could have been behind the crime.If it was, it would be the first time in the history of art theft. The black market for art commands billions of dollars, but never on the bequest of any mysterious Dr. No looking to appreciate it in his loft hidden inside a volcano in Midtown. I would be shocked, shocked, if an artwork has ever been pilfered for the private satisfaction of any individual. Even if there were one such case—and there isn't—that would hardly justify the Evil Mastermind who is always cited as the first suspect in any notable art theft case. I do appreciate that this villain is distinguished for being an Evil Neo-Nazi Mastermind: Usually the rogue is merely of the ludicrously gentried class."Robbery and material gain are considered one of the main possible motives, but whether that was done on someone's order will be determined in the process of the investigation," the deputy investigator, Marek Wozniczka, said.
The reality, however, is exciting! When an artwork is stolen and a reward—or more likely, an insurance adjustment—is named, that artwork has a fixed value against commodities on the markets for arms and drugs. See Ulrich Boser's convincing thesis connecting the Gardner heist to the Winter Hill Gang. If you ask me, the old chestnut that art theft fits into a plot lifted from James Bond is tired. David Simon would have been doing the art and criminal worlds a lot of good had he portrayed just one scene with the Greek carrying some Utrecht painting mailing tubes.
Anyway, no one knows why these suspects may have taken the Aushwitz sign. I bet it was for prize money, not for Hitler. What a grim job to reassemble and reinstall it.
So the storm that recently rocked the DMV—I'm talking about Mera Rubell's 36-hour studio-visit whirlwind through town—has been the subject of a whole lot of ink. On Isabel Manalo's (aptly named) Studio Visit page on Facebook, artists have been debating specifically some of the conclusions that Jessica Dawson arrived at in the Washington Post.
I had my own embed with Rubell and wrote down my impressions for Art in America, and you can read that here. It's not possible for me to compare my experience with Dawson's since we went at different times, saw different artists, and so on, and I don't mean to try. It's clear enough from the response that artists, some of whom didn't participate in Rubell's studio crawl, were frustrated by Dawson's comments—I imagine, specifically, these:
Yet by the end of her trip, Mera came away with some stark impressions, impressions Washington art insiders already know but are loath to discuss.Dawson's conclusions are backed up by her reporting, which is, I think, important to note: She's a galleries critics and afforded a personal editorial voice, but in this regard she's writing as a reporter observing an assignment. And really, when you think about it, the assignment at the heart of the story is a cynical exercise. Here is a powerful art collector touring the city in what is being billed as an exceptional enterprise, as if she were an auditor trying to determine what's wrong with the books or a laparoscopic instrument being used to suss out a cyst in the body.[ . . . ]
Mera's troll through Washington's art warrens was akin to Santa visiting the Island of Misfit Toys.
[ . . . ]
Not so in Washington, where no one knows who's on top and everyone is on the defensive. . . . There's a reason artists move to New York.
That's one way to consider it. Another way is to consider that visiting 36 randomly selected studios can't possibly give Rubell, or anybody else, an insight into the city's art scene. Thirty-six studios of some 200 applicants—of some vastly larger total number of artists and studios in the DMV area—is not a significant sample size. So if 36 randomly selected artists demonstrate some deflating combination of cynicism, introversion, and incompetence, it doesn't prove anything about the city's art scene.
If Dawson and I reported what we saw and experienced, bringing no prejudices one way or another to bear on Rubell's visits, then what we've done is report this event and its significance—and that's pretty much it. Reporting this event is not the same as writing up the result of an audit of the city's art scene, which is worth remembering in a conversation about whether a reporter brought an ax to grind for this story. A slanted judgment one way or another about Mera Rubell's experience does not say much about the city's art scene because the sample size in this case is relatively tiny.
