Heading back to the District. Flights and shuttles won't leave me much time to mess around on the webs, so keep yourself occupied with this Artnet year-end market report. Wow:
. . . 2,800 new auction records were set in the fine-art auctions of October and November 2006. Of these new records, 72 were over $1 million. In May 2006, 45 of the new record prices were for $1 million or more.It might yet take an act of god to curb the art market; of course, the catastrophic crashes of the dollar and global climate are both nigh, so we may yet see the day. It will be known that twilight of Western civilization featured a strong arts bubble, at least. Some artists are even prepared for it.
Anyway, the Artnet writer alleges that a weak dollar draws buyers from Europe even as the imbalanced domestic economy continues to create extravagant wealth (and new collectors). I'm curious about the dollar's role in the focus on American artists today. Project for the new year: Systematize art history (a la Moretti) by plotting plastic-arts trends against regional affluences and global currency dynamics. If other projects don't take precedence.
Jackie Trescott writes that confusion reigns over Smithsonian on Demand, the joint project by which Showtime pays the Smithsonian for rights of refusal to archival materials. Curiously, the her editors gave her story the headline, "Smithsonian Deal With Showtime Passes Muster." But as far as I can tell, "The Smithsonian Institution's controversial partnership with Showtime Networks has not hampered researchers' access to Smithsonian materials" so far.
Here's the kicker:
[T]he GAO found the Smithsonian received 117 requests for filming after the contract was in place and rejected only two.That doesn't sound like a clear bill of health to me, but it's all hard to say, since details of the contract haven't been made public. We're able to gloss some details from Trescott's report:GAO said its evaluation of the contract's impact was hampered by the "incomplete data and oversimplified criteria" provided by the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian says its paperwork was created for a different purpose.
Some details of the contract were made public by Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small at a congressional oversight hearing in May. Small said the Smithsonian signed a rare 30-year contract with Showtime and that it would receive $500,000 a year if the deal is successful. The contract allowed the Smithsonian to create six shows a year with non-Showtime filmmakers.What are the metrics of success for subscription-cable documentaries? What are the implications of success on documentaries? The fact that the infant agreement has not yet hampered a non-Showtime documentarian does not seem like much of a recommendation for the program. Especially since greater visibility to Smithsonian documentaries will mean more requests, and if I understand correctly, more rejections.
I'm considering several degrees of outrage. I don't yet understand the commitment that the Smithsonian has to Showtime, so I don't know what's appropriate. The documentary on the cloudy leopard sounds cool, so I'm slightly outraged about not having Showtime.
Gelato-lovin' Blake Gopnik is not the man I'd turn to for notes on breakfast dives (brunch, maybe). But he does right by the Waffle Shop, a downtown diner and an example of American Moderne design that's well preserved and, more impressively yet, still functioning. The Waffle Shop is exactly the sort of historic vernacular architecture that a city needs to fight to keep, lest the perpetual nip and tuck of industry eventually make that city over into a Dallas, Texas.
And the critic has his place in championing significant works: putting architecture in the public eye, clarifying its context, and suggesting ways to preserve a visual legacy without hampering the city or its business. Doing his part for architectural activism, Gopnik writes:
Though the restaurant has been allowed to go a bit to seed -- there's dirt everywhere, the ceiling is a mess, and the facade's original plate glass is patched and seamed -- its great bones survive unchanged. With not much more than a splash of paint, some elbow grease and a modestly tweaked menu, one of the city's more artistic restaurateurs could restore the Waffle Shop to its former glory.Okay, so he wants to turn it into a brunch spot. Fair enough. He writes that the store only lacks for exposure—the Moderne style sells itself, after all.
No doubt, the Waffle Shop deserves the advocacy. But c'mon—it's softball. Gopik should be swinging for the Mies-designed MLK Library, a real knuckleball of an advocacy project. It's not only the most significant modern building in the city—erected by one of the most distinguished architects of the 20th century—it's a highly politicized building, one whose fate hung more than once on a single vote during the District's 2006 legislative session. Getting into the thick of it is just good journalism. The excellent opinion piece by outgoing architecture critic Ben Forgey notwithstanding, there hasn't been much of that out of the WaPo on the library.
And furthermore, the Mies case involves tricky, inside baseball. Library supporters seem like jerks when they oppose compromises like painting the exterior, altering the floorplate, and draping the windows. But a critical backgrounder from the paper of record could establish in the debate that ornament is crime (or so they used to say): even superficial tweaks add up to a thorough repudiation of the design. Or that none of the compromises address the city's stated problems, unless the city really means to say that the library's fugly. And a backgrounder with a little teeth might address head on the fact that people who complain about the Mies, complain about the homeless people at the Mies and the books that it doesn't have.
Mies Van der Rohe, MLK Memorial Library, a great while back. Photo courtesy Rob Goodspeed.
Forgey rattled off those points and, most importantly, declared that the building is totally beautiful. And it is: severe, stately, handsome. It should be said every time a city bureaucrat complains that it's ugly, since that debate is neither here nor there.
Gopnik's the guy who bats cleanup in this town, critically speaking. Right now, the city doesn't have a plan for the building. It's a good time for a critic to outline a progressive, rather than a defensive, agenda. So, what would Gopnik do?
Vince Young just became the first NFL quarterback in the modern era to gain more than 500 yards rushing in the regular season.
UPDATE: I catastrophically misheard the commentary, but I swear that's what he said. Young set a clubhouse record, narrowly construed, but I know that's not what he said, either. Mm. Merry Christmas! Look over here!
Stocking stuffers!
New York's Yancey Richardson gallery recently announced that Nazraeli Press will release a monograph of Don Donaghy's work in fall 2007. Though this photographer is associated with the New York School, his work has been neglected (in part due to the relatively short span of his professional career). This monograph will be the photographer's first.
I was introduced to Donaghy and his work at Hemphill some time ago. Looking forward to seeing new images—as I understand it, there are still pictures from the 60s, his active period, that he's never printed—by this hard-scrapple photographer.
Michael Paglia wrote a comprehensive account of the photog in a review in the Denver Westworld some years back. Click-click.
In brightest day, in blackest night, no straight thing was ever made: John Quiggin considers Yglesias's Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, that is, the notion that the U.S. military "can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force," so long as there is the willpower to do so.
The theory explains how we find ourselves presently in Iraq, where U.S. officials are considering
one last push. (Ostensibly to secure Baghdad—though who knows? One U.S. official says, "There has not been a full articulation of what we would want the surge to accomplish." Just something to try, the ramifications or troops themselves be damned in the eyes of the Bush administration.) Quiggin writes that, not only is today's war party pretty much the Green Lantern Corps, but we can expect GL supporters to retcon any American retreat from Iraq as the result of liberal posturing. It's the Green Lantern Provisio for Revision and Rehabilitation—goes hand in hand with the Theory for Geopolitics (and the Parallax Fear Anomaly).
Kevin Drum figures that One Last Push is the only way by which liberals will be able to resist the eventual, inevitable charge that liberal footdragging is the reason America lost Iraq. But this assumes some rational limit to the GL theory—that, given their "surge" (even put in terms of a "last push," if that stands), war lanterns will accept whatever happens as the final say on Iraq. But the last push will never be enough, and liberals will always have lacked the resolve to see Baghdad through. The best liberals can do, in the political arena, is hope that war lanterns discredit themselves so thoroughly that the public in revulsion turns a deaf ear to the revisionist take on Iraq, Viet Nam, and the Cold War.
Quiggin goes over the archives and finds other examples (beyond Viet Nam) to illustrate an empirical Green Lantern effect: the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, and the Korean War—in addition to Viet Nam—with Iraq embodying the lessons we failed to learn from all of them. Yet he still finds in America's might justification for its global police work: "[T]he US has a unique capacity to enforce the global law that makes wars of aggression a crime against humanity."
Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer proves himself to be the Hal Jordan-drunk-with-Parallax-power of the Green Lantern set (which will mean something to the geeks in the audience). Krauthammer says we should stop short of dominating the world in, say, the Winter Olympics—lest we be perceived as arrogant. Take that, Sinestro!
Did I mention that I'm in Texas? Far from the District, and its swirling media scandals.
Today, someone rang the doorbell. I'd expect that unsolicited visitors don't come frequently through Post Oak Bend (pop. 432), but there stood at the door a woman bearing packages. Not gifts, but the mail. The town is so small (the town is so small, it's not in fact a town), the U.S. Postal Service won't service it—the lady was a vendor whom POB residents pay to deliver letters. I assume no one here pays any taxes or has much use for services they can't themselves provide; what they could use (and I speak from personal need) is a saloon.
RIA Novosti reports that Jean-Léon Gérôme's Piscine du harem, which disappeared from the Hermitage in 2001, resurfaced in Moscow after a stranger presented the work to Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov. The painting has been confirmed as authentic—and ripped into pieces—according to the wires:
Experts have confirmed the authenticity of a painting stolen from St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum five years ago and presented Wednesday morning to Russia's Communist leader, the cultural watchdog said. A stranger presented the 19th century painting by Jean Leon Gerome to Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov in his office, the party said earlier. Anatoly Vilkov, the deputy head of the federal media and cultural heritage agency, said agency experts had "established the authenticity of the painting. As well as the genuine brushwork of the artist, there were signs that enabled them to identify it." The Communist leader said earlier that the painting had been sliced up, and was in terrible condition. Vilkov said the work of art had probably been handed in by a Communist Party sympathizer. "It was probably a spontaneous theft, and then the painting went from hand to hand," he said. Leon Gerome's 'Piscine du Harem' (Harem Pool), painted in 1878 and measuring 73.2 x 62 cm, was bought into Russia by Emperor Alexander III. Its value is estimated at $1 million. The Communist leader identified the painting after finding an official statement by the Hermitage administration saying an unidentified person had cut the picture out of its frame and stolen it on March 22, 2001. Specialists from the agency have put the painting in special storage where they are continuing to work on the canvas. Despite severe damage, the work can still be restored, Zyuganov said.I find the image of Zyuganov playing art historian for a day to be charming, and even more so the poor sap who thought he could turn to no one else but the Party with this critical object he had been given.
Courtesy of Artforum.
Brad Plumer reads boring reports so you don't have to, filling you on new data that show that suburban poverty rates are rising faster than urban poverty rates and, furthermore, suburban poor now outnumber urban poor. Poverty rates rose in the Midwest and the South but held steady in the West and Northeast. After reading today's WaPo notes on regional population shifts—people are leaving the Northeast and the Midwest by the millions and moving into the South by even more—I'm interested in what sorts of people and jobs the Midwest is hemorrhaging.
Give a read, but if you'd rather, you can, in fact, watch the paint peel.
Charles Downey writes up the December concert series by the Folger Consort:
Most of the program was anchored around the reign of King Henry VIII (1509-1547), a monarch who loved music, who composed and sang as well as being a patron. Of the three selections credited to Henry in this concert, the lovely carol Green Groweth the Holly stood out from the others. The best instrumental selections were arranged for three recorders, like the anonymous Ave rex angelorum and the arrangement of Christ Church Bells, with its opening repeated note motif meant to evoke tintinnabulation. Fa la sol, arranged for two recorders and violin, was also charming, the work of William Cornysh, one of Henry VIII's best chapel musicians.Plus, the Folger Consort revives older music for new-to-you carols. Price wise, it's a more reasonable candidate than the Kennedy Center's Nutcracker Suite for an annual holiday music tradition, and I've been in the market for one of those. No threat of black snowflakes, either.
The holidays are the perfect time to reflect on the contours of one's navel. Courtesy of Sommer, five things you might not know about me:
5. I was a Death Eater. I was more than grouchy about all my friends toting around these tomes about student wizards . . . those delightful, wonderful wizards. I don't remember how I got sucked in, but I do recall chiding my smartie friends about their kid-lit obsessions. (I'm not a tolerant guy, but you knew that already.)
4. I am oboerageous. I play the oboe, the saxophone, and to a much lesser extent, the clarinet. An aggressive summer band camp schedule in my youth even gave me an opportunity to learn the bassoon, but it didn't take. The first thing I'll do with my lotto millions is buy a sportscar. After that, an oboe and a bass clarinet.
3. I voted Green. Only once, and in Texas where it doesn't matter, but I felt awful about it. Tony Sanchez, the Democratic candidate for governor, played a role in my alma mater's decision to pass on a museum design by Herzog and de Mueron, and he needed to be punished.
[Shoot, I mentioned that before.]
3. I am your glorious leader. Christmas is hereby revised to celebrate the birth of the DCeiver.
2. I am prone to seizures. For some time I identified as a card-carrying epileptic, though the cause of my seizures is not traditional. It's under control nowadaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa*
1. I was nearly named Alex.
I'll pass this on to Scuppered and Josie.
If there's justice in taste, this photograph will be recorded and remembered in perpetuity.
By Christopher Morris. (Courtesy of Paul Schmelzer.)
From "Art Critics in Extremis," an essay* published by Hal Foster in 2002 or so:
Tom Wolfe notoriously trashed all late-modernist art as a critical scam, a "painted word" contrived in "Cultureberg" (his anti-Semitic slam against [Clem] Greenberg, [Harold] Rosenberg, and [Leo] Steinberg).Hasn't Wolfe been saying that about all of New York Jewry and culture for at least two decades? I didn't realize that Minimalism was at the kernel of the disagreement. Anyway, though Wolfe might point to his Jewish wife as evidence against his being an anti-Semite ("My best friend is Jewish!"), that phrase has always bugged me as textbook racism. It's a simple enough rule, and one that any satirist is smart enough to realize: If you're disagreeing with a group of Jews, don't phrase that disagreement in terms of your opponents' religion. Why will no one sit him down, explain this to him, and ask him politely to stop already? Good satire doesn't mean license to be a total idiot about commonsensical stuff.
Nevertheless, all credit goes to Wolfe for coining "fuck patois" in I Am Charlotte Simmons (an otherwise intolerable book).
* The same essay was more previously published as "Art Agonistes", but my copy appears to be an updated one.
That's the title of the nightmare-inducing seventh and final chapter. Apologies if you were to this point being productive.
UPDATE: "Hallows" doesn't seem to mean anything, even according to real-live British people online. It will be translated to "hollows" for right-speaking American audiences, but I can't confirm that "hallows" means something like "small valley".
MORE: Courtesy Ben, the OED has:
In pl. applied to the shrines or relics of saints; the gods of the heathen or their shrines.In that case, "hollows" is a very poor translation.In the phrase to seek hallows, to visit the shrines or relics of saints; orig. as in sense 1, the saints themselves being thought of as present at their shrines.
I did nothing to provoke it one way or the either, but the site's back up. May it always be.
With the caveat that my enthusiasm for my vlogging toy isn't shouldn't be mistaken for enthusiasm for all things installation, here's another one from Miami. Zilvinas Kempinas's work belongs with the "Wal-Martist" brand of sculptors that District audiences are definitely familiar with.
Gallerists from Spencer Brownstone assured that the tape never falls, except when it does. The reason it fell at the fair? Convection—currents caused by so many people walking around. This may very well be true, but c'mon, like they know. A less lame thing to say would have been: rarely.
By the time I came across this booth, I was the walking dead. This piece was a jolt of pure visual stimulation. Seeing so much art can be zombifying, and I'd failed to take a proper beach break to reset the palette. My life's hard, people.
Paddy Johnson is right: Gavin Brown's decision to use its entire Art Basel Miami exhibition space to show one installation was risky. When I turned the corner to find the empty space, I was sure that someone had lost his job for not chartering every square inch of floorprint.
Johnson describes the piece, but I figured I'd try out the video on my point and click:
Johnson writes: "Urs Fischer's motorized crane rotates far above the gallery booth, dragging a box of camel cigarettes in a circle across the floor, speaks to how the ravages of addiction will make even the best of us chase a soiled and ragged vice across the floor if it means we will have a small moment of release. I suppose you could say that the gallery's decision to empty out their space for one piece illustrates how addictions can make us take all kinds of risks we wouldn;t normally, but this thought has the feel of confusing ballsy business decisions with the art itself."
That second thought—pardon me while I light up here—seems like the appropriate caveat. There's no problem in saying that a site lends context and significance to a piece, in particular for an installation that develops the space (sweeping out a perimeter, toying with the viewer who stands outside it). But the site itself is unsettling. Nobody wants to think about how the sausage is made, or let that consideration intrude into a reading of the piece.
Advice: I don't know how other writers wrestled with the many-tentacled beast that is Miami Art Basel, but here's my approach, for what it's worth: I carried around a digital point-and-click and dictaphone. (My pass permitted me to take photos. But it seemed that plenty of people were snapping away, so it must not have been all that difficult to sneak a camera through the doors.) Today I'm faced with the irritating prospect of reconciling images with memos, but that's a hell of a lot easier than taking and transcribing notes and then hunting down images by professional photogs. And we're getting closer to the tricorder everyday.
Ice: A friend of a friend gave me passes to an exclusive gala held by Maxim. The lad magazine—not exactly name number one in cultural commentary, right? We skipped it in favor of a ludicrous Vanity Fair bash (at which, I swear to/at god, I paid $30 for two drinks). Much to K.'s chagrin, we learned too late that Maxim was hosting a Balenciaga runway retrospective. These $100K leggings might be the only accoutrement in Miami priced to compete with (complement?) the art. Unrelated: More robot dresses, please (fastforward to 4:23).
Vice: It turns out, I'm a celebrity pessimist—I need concrete proof before I'll buy that someone loping around is in fact Someone—so I missed out on my chance to (speak to? take pictures with? bask in the glow of? cut?) Chuck Close, Leonard Nimoy, and Kanye West. And the Sartorialist, whom I mistook for Matthew Barney, then Lance Armstrong, and finally just some guy.
I'm spending the day writing and putting things back in orbit, but over the course of the week I'll post about the fairs here. No tan, but Miami was outstanding nevertheless. The fairs were more conservative than I'd been led to expect, and the high-profile galleries brought as much blue-chip 60s art as new work by younger artists. I saw more Albers and Rauschenberg than I've seen anywhere. I'll also note here for the record that Artforum has the best brownies, period.
When the going gets snowy, I get going—to Miami. Moderate weather, drinks whose names cause me anxiety to pronounce, and the Atlantic Ocean: all that and more awaits me if I can break away from the Miami Art Machine. On the art fair front, I hope to catch the five major fairs (Basel, NADA, Pulse, Aqua, and Scope), which is something like nearly 500 gallery booths, which means I'm really just briskly walking along and occasionally scribbling down words that aren't "hungry," "feet hurt," or "Ibuprofen". It might sound like a masochistic and not especially art-appreciative agenda, but those are just 5 of 12 fairs and god only knows how many guerrilla/terroristic interventions taking place in town.
I'm in a hotel on Miami Beach proper that advertises wicker chairs and a Deco aesthetic (concurrently—I know). And though I don't think she intends to leave the beach for even a moment during the day, K. will be joining me for the flights there and back and the afterparties in between. Pictures, notes, and (with any luck) a magical December sun tan by next week.
With 98 percent of precincts reporting, the City Paper has elected its top 20 music releases of 2006. I can safely report that three from my own top 10 list made the cut. If I had known that instrumental post-rock music had such a fan following at the alternative weekly—indeed, who could have guessed?—I'd've allocated those points to Cox & Combes, driving them from the hinterlands of YouTube hyperphenomena to the megalopolis that is free newsprint.
The arts writers' selections were all strong (those that were known to me), and I'll say more after that issue's released. Another thing: One very deserving local band made the cut.
. . . Iran and Syria are standing, coyly, at the border of Iraq—heads down, nervously running foot over foot—just waiting for the Bush administration to ask them to dance?
No?
But that's my impression, given the way the issue has been framed: So staunchly opposed is Bush to changing his policy toward Iraq, questions about seeking assistance from Iraq's neighbors are posed as should we or could we, never how will we or is it even possible. Since it's taken as granted that Bush won't pursue this policy, not much time is dedicated to examining its features (what shape will this assistance take? what will Iran and Syria ask for in return? and so on).
The media is doing the public a disservice: There won't be a moment, even if Bush does go to Iran and Syria for help, in which Bush Goes to Iran and Syria for Help (a change in course you recognize from the major headline font). Any diplomatic overtures would be called that after the fact—surely negotiation between America and Iran is something neither country is going to crow about—so it would be a great boon to understand what options are or are not being explored today, and what the advantages, costs, and drawbacks of these options are.
I understand that we aren't talking to Iran and Syria because Cheney would rather expand the war to include those nations. But surely Baker, Hamilton, et al. have considered them, and I would like to read informed commentary about these options. Of course, it's possible that it's out there and I'm just not reading closely enough. (Hell, I could just go to the living room and ask Spencer.) But I'm concerned about the sense of the public, y'all. Then again, maybe it's just the case that our diplomacy apparatus is dead, and there's nothing to report—that's a depressing, but plausible, thought.
From National Review's The Corner:
There the kids are, nestling snuggly, coaxed into Dreamland by mom or dad or grammie or grandpa reading some delightful selections from The National Review Treasury of Classic Bedtime Stories. The 360-page original 2003 hardcover volume . . . is now available.This handsome tome contains every cherished tale that National Review's conservative pundits have been telling themselves about Iraq for the last 4 years.
Elsewhere on the Corner today: Rich Lowry cherrypicks favorite paragraphs (mocking those he disfavors) from the Iraq Study Group report—arguably earning his keep. Meanwhile,
* Santa Claus will visit children, but not the British children.
Excerpted from the Iraq Study Group's highly anticipated exercise in prognostication:
If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences could be severe. A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe. Neighboring countries could intervene. Sunni-Shia clashes could spread. Al-Qaida could win a propaganda victory and expand its base of operations. The global standing of the United States could be diminished. Americans could become more polarized.If the Bush administration doesn't change course, this could be the state of affairs in as few as two years. The view from 2003 looks grim, indeed.
WaPo:
In its last item of business yesterday, the D.C. Council rejected a frantic attempt to move forward with the construction of a $275 million downtown central library, which has been seen as Williams's legacy to the city.But what is a "discharge"? For what kinds of unhygienic acts is this maneuver usually reserved?The Council Committee on Education, Libraries and Recreation voted 3 to 2 last month to keep the legislation in committee for more study. Opposing council members said they had questions about the cost of the project and whether the flagship Martin Luther King Jr. Library could be renovated.
But Patterson, who is the committee chairman and a library supporter, tried to force the legislation onto the agenda, a rarely used maneuver known as a "discharge."
Fenty, who is the Ward 4 council member and a library supporter, said the city had exhausted numerous studies and public hearings to conclude that it needs a new downtown library. He said Williams's plan was a "good jumpstart" for improving the library system as a whole.
But some opposing council members described the city's neighborhood libraries as "shameful" and "disgraceful" while questioning why the city would pour millions of dollars into a new central library when other libraries are closed or in disrepair.
Brown said residents go to the MLK library because it is in better shape than the facilities in their communities. "I can no longer sit here and listen to this foolishness," he said.
Patterson had the support of seven council members, but library ally Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6) had to leave the council session early because of illness. Library supporters offered to send a car to get Ambrose, but they said she was too sick to return for the vote.
The effort failed in a 6 to 6 vote.
I'm willing to buy that Williams's plan is a good one to "jumpstart" the city, insofar as he's released a 370-page blue ribbon taskforce report that the community has had little time to digest. There are other considerations that were never discussed—in particular, the city's official cost estimate and plan for renovating the MLK Library—and those should come next.
I haven't blogged about every one of Mayor Williams's herky-jerky moves to push forward the library legislation, but suffice it to say that today's rumor that sympathetic outgoing Council chair Kathy Patterson is plating an 11th hour library bill—after the last one got tabled—should be no surprise.
Except that I don't think she's able to do this in the way the Friends of the Library describe. I'm pretty sure any bill brought forward at this point can only be considered as emergency legislation. Of course, no one knows how this process works—it was a subject that perplexed everyone after the legislation was tabled. If I recall from a discussion of the Councilmaster's guide (for it has not come into my hands), Patterson will need to tap two mana, convince nine Councilors to vote to consider the bill as emergency legislation, and hope she has the HP to endure the counter in the following move.
