. . . 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!

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.

Blah blah, sunsets and storms, and then this catches my attention (via @cmonstah):

Marie Lorenz, Capsize, 2009

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.)

Keri Oldham, SHL, 2009.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

[ . . . ]

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.

When I spoke with Kerry Brougher about the new positions that this would open for the Hirshhorn, he told me that the museum would immediately start looking for an associate a contemporary curator and think later about an assistant curator. So there's a demotion happening there. I asked him whether they would hire locally for the assistant curator, and he said that they'd be doing a global search for the associate curator and a national search for the assistant curator. So there's a demotion, and the stakes are higher!

Now, if you listen to new Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek tell it, the museum's about to get a lot more curators. From Tyler Green's April Q&A with Koshalek:

Koshalek: The other thing about research is that I see us having two curatorial staffs: The people who are here -- there are some extraordinary people here, they're the primary curatorial staff for the institution. The other I think is the curators that exist in the larger world that do extraordinary things, curators who are scaring me because they're breaking new ground. I have a list of people who are re-thinking the world we live in. We see them as our second curatorial staff. We're going to use them to bring in more of a comprehensive look at what this institution can be.

Green: So you anticipate the Hirshhorn having more adjunct relationships?

Koshalek: Exactly. And from different institutions -- not just museums of modern and contemporary art, but also from broader, historical institutions.

UPDATE: I caused some confusion with my gloss of my own conversations for this story. Per the AiA story: The Hirshhorn will hire a contemporary curator to replace Anne Ellegood, and then an assistant curator to replace departing associate curator Kristen Hileman.

It is to ask the painter of a watercolour hue:
'why owe you twice what a sheep is or a tree,
if the fee you double has to hew you a puzzle?'

An enigma, like a game in E, its jigsaw zigzag
never fits the excess void left behind by X,
the exit on the way from 'why' to what is said.

If you glean an anagram from each angle, do you
dabble with your double view of what you hate:
a swastika that awaits your Olympiad of riddles?

Is this letter a residuum of what troubles you?
If you slice it down the middle, does it not
hereafter indicate a twofold victory over life?

If it maps the rise and fall of fortune, like a yo-yo,
why oh, why oh, must you find four palm trees
in a park, if not to make of them your symbol?

It is the name for an X whose V does not view
the surface of a lake but the mirror on a wall,
where U and you become a tautonym, a continuum.

—Christian Bök

The Baltimore Development Cooperative, Pavilion, 2009.

If I'm a Sondheim Prize finalist in 2010, I'm thinking that I need to put a Baltimore Zip code on my resume and highlight my teaching experience and spend a few hundred hours volunteering in the city from the semifinalist round forward. As you say, the winners of the Sondheim Prize since its inception could all point to their civic work in Baltimore—though none of the winners, except for the Baltimore Development Cooperative, would point to their civic work as their submission for consideration.

That's a critical point that distinguishes the BDC from past winners. There are, after all, other commonalities between past winners that are clearly not cause for concern. All the winners are also MICA alumni, for example, yet I don't think—at the very least I haven't heard anyone express it seriously—that only an artist with a degree from MICA stands to take home gold.

So when I reported my story about the Sondheim, I spoke to Gary Kachadourian at length about this issue. I asked, specifically, what instructions or other guidelines the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts gives to the jury. He was unequivocal about it: none. No fix for social justice or community activism or what have you. He said that he asks jurors to consider the work. He noted that the BDC didn't make it through the first round for the 2008 prize, to give an example of how mercurial the jurying process can potentially be. So social activism, or the benefit to Baltimore, is not being considered as a qualification for this prize—Kachadourian was very clear on this point.

However, there is an interview segment to the award. I think you could argue that the interview benefits artists whose practice is conceptual, off site, untethered to an object, and so on. Artists like Leslie Furlong, Jessie Lehson, Molly Springfield and the others in the finalists' circle are given an opportunity to clarify the work that they've put up for consideration. On the other hand, the BDC has an opportunity to expand upon the work they put up: They're able to tell the jurors that the work is much more than what's on display there at the BMA. It's maybe a structural advantage for artists who engage in a more conceptual practice—maybe.

CO: Well, we could argue a lot of things, in terms of potential strategies and also conspiracy theories. There is ample ambiguity in the process, and you can’t help but to see patterns. I can see your argument that DC-based artists are seen less favorably in this process, which is an idea I hadn't bother to consider. When the Trawick Prize is given, there's no interview process, and there seems to be no bias in terms of choosing Baltimore or DC artists for the top prize.

That said, I do not believe that community activism is a necessary component in an artist’s resume in order to win the Sondheim Prize in Baltimore. Most, if not all, artists volunteer their time, donate their work, and give back to the larger communities. However, I think that AFTER the jurors choose their favorites, the interview process can’t help but to give an advantage to the artists whose projects are most expansive and inclusive.

Every year the jurors are different, which seems to guarantee objectivity and fairness, a fresh start for each new competition. However, upon closer inspection, the national and international art world is small. Many of these jurors have studied under the same teachers, have exhibited in the same museums, and read the same theorists and critics. Despite the differences in jurors from year to year, there is a surprising degree of sameness in their choices. The Sondheim has only existed for four years, yet we see the many of the same finalists year after year. In a pool of several hundred artists, this seems odd. If we look at the CV's of Karen Yasinsky, Molly Springfield, Geoff Grace, Baby Martinez, and the BDC (as Camp Baltimore), what similarities emerge? Are there certain experiences—residencies or exhibitions, not just the work—which mark these candidates, year after year, as heavyweights? And if this is the case, how can we expect jurors to choose ‘fairly’? Building on this, is it wrong to expect a degree of fairness and impartiality from a juror?

Like any other competitive sport, certain athletes and teams are always in the playoffs. Not to say that they always win—that's always a surprise, but the finalists mostly are not. The interview process, conducted the day the awards are given out, seems to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

If the exhibit is the proof, why is an interview necessary? The interview process may actually be counter-productive, in terms of choosing the strongest body of work as the winner. There’s no interview in choosing the semi-finalists, so why should there be one for the winner? Why can’t the works speak for themselves? The BDC had three individuals to answer questions, as opposed to just one of each of the individual artists. Doesn’t that give them an advantage?

KC: Last week, someone sent me a link to a blog post by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson that expresses something that could be material, given the interview process. She writes, "The intent of the BDC, on paper, seems admirable enough. Get through the chewy curatorial jargon and hyper-politicized prose explaining Participation Park and you learn that their stated intent is to gather the community around a vacant plot of land in order to foster democratic public space and a dialogue about development."

Now, Dickinson brings up a lot of concerns about the work that are valid—I recommend reading them and would echo a lot of those points. They are concerns that ought to have come up to a jury, but even she expresses caution about voicing them out loud because she doesn't know the work very well. But she's able to speak in an informed way about some issues surrounding Participation Park—issues about Baltimore's history and politics that a jury just is not going to know.

I'm a fan of Bravo's Top Chef. I watch at home with friends and we bitch and moan about an episode's winner when it seems like the better contestant was snubbed. But at the end of the day, this is sort of absurd: As an armchair food critic, I can't taste the food, so how can I judge?

Would the Sondheim Prize lose something if the work up for consideration were restricted to the objects on display—the stuff that jurors can taste firsthand? Or would that eliminate performance art, activism, and other conceptual, post-object practices from consideration altogether?

CO: I don’t think the prize would lose anything if the work on display is the sole factor in picking the winner. I think the Sondheim Prize would actually become more equitable and less frustrating for everyone who does not get to participate in the final interview process. What is the point of having the exhibition if a half hour conversation can tip the scales? Each artist has a written statement on the wall in the museum and submits other written materials. This should be adequate. The more I think about it, the interview process seems skewed and unnecessary, and downright disadvantageous to the artists who aren’t smooth talkers, magnetic personalities, or pious souls.