Titus O.

Hmm, this Tyler Green vs. Voice critic thing is veddy interesting. First of all, I think Viveros-Faune was entirely too casual, even flippant, in his responses to Green, and in his thinking about the whole issue. Who did he think he was talking to? His BFF? Learned his lesson, I guess. But it’s possible, even probable, that his involvement co-directing those two fairs really does have (excuse; had) very little impact on his day-to-day functioning as a critic, as ugly as it ostensibly appears. Charlie Finch attacks Green’s attack on Artnet, and makes a good point about critics having historically been fellow artists/lovers/enemies/friends/whathaveyou’s of the folks they review. In fact, that used to go without saying: critics loudly championed particular causes, artists, and institutions. But now, with all the money at stake, there’s a lot more attention being paid to what the handful of visible critics have to say, how and from where they say it. The papers are dying slow ugly deaths, and certainly don’t want to risk readership to any apparent conflicts of interest in this era, post-pc revolution.

 

It also points to how criticism has changed, how much less rigorous the thinking surrounding new art is now, and how little that matters – mainly art writing is pure reportage: “art description.” Frankly, I think ideas have simply lost, period, and art has become pure spectacle on one end, and pure fetishistic commerce on the other (not that there aren’t plenty of solid artists hard at work). Much of the middle ground is held by non-profits (and the academics who fill and depend upon them) who think that art should be an ennobling educational experience, regurgitating it back up, predigested for the school kids, retirees, and those “young trustees” looking for the ticket to buy in to Culture.

 

Writing about art reflects all this. There is no critical center from which to position oneself, no points to argue really, everything’s fair game. With hundreds of galleries in Chelsea alone (with thousands more pining to be there), art fairs acting to decentralize the very nature of the system, and tsunamis of MFA’s flooding the scene all struggling to carve a saleable niche with more and more generally negligible product, what else can we comment on but the phenomena? Bloggers just add to the noise. Though this is a real demonstration of how powerful they can become. Green just cost a critic his job. Fine. But who’s watching the watcher?

 

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On a related note, I guess people are talking about an editorial in D Magazine declaring contemporary art a big con, and the people who buy it suckers (gasp! No! What a novel thesis! Bust out the pitchforks and torches!) I can’t find the offending article online, but that’s basically an impossible argument to defend against. Time was this kind of thing wouldn’t have mattered much to the people producing or pushing art, or even the people buying it – more likely, it would’ve simply been fuel for the fire. D Mag hoists its own petard even bothering to tread out this toothless old saw. But you have to have your head way up the art world’s ass to not see the basic absurdity of the whole catastrophy – the prices, the frenzy, the fact that Ryan Trecartin has a successful art career…

Show me the money!

I have a confession. Uh – sometimes, I really enjoy an issue Vanity Fair. Occasionally I have to pick it up, like a fix or something. But I only read it for the articles, I swear. It’s really just like People, but with harder hitting gossip, nauseating ads for obscenely expensive crap, and features on architects. It’s virtually an art rag now, have you noticed? (Not that this really grants points in its favor.) I bought one in the airport on my way to Miami last month that had articles on Richard Prince, contemporary Chinese art, and young Picasso. January had a (not very enlightening) article on Jeremy Blake ’s pointless crazy tragic Scientologists-killed-my-girlfriend suicide. Anyway, they have that “on my nightstand” reading column thing, and I sometimes wish they’d ask some nobodies like us, because I think that my bedtime reading (and I bet yours) is more interesting than Henry Kissinger’s, or Tommy Hilfiger’s, or Michelle Pfeiffer’s. Most are so predictable, so canned; some premeditated choice as statement to appear intelligent, balanced, or current. Look everyone, I’m reading The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, War and Peace, or a new translation of the Iliad: or it’s flavor of the month stuff like David Sedaris (anyone else find him insufferably cute? oh “This American Life,” how I both love and despise you!) something about tipping points or blinking, or another tome decrying the evils of Bush (though I do appreciate the raging anti-Bush slant of VF).

 

But hell, it’s all good; books at bedtime are an intrinsically noble thing. I’ve been taking particular solace in them lately since I’ve been hiding from art (please, stop calling me! I just need some time alone right now. It’s not you; it’s me…), and watching too much TV. Our neighborhood got fiber-optic internet/cable recently, and they gave us every station free for 3 months, plus the DVR. Every single one — though we probably really only ever watch about 8. Especially loving Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC (sometimes I really wish I could get away with yelling at a lazy student “you fucking donkey!” a la Gordon; tough love baby, its tough love), and not having to wait a year to see the last season of The Wire when it comes out on Netflix…

 

Book time has become a sort of special, rarified alternative time, a take-it-at-your-own-pace balm for the speed of internet/cable life, by nature more personal than the spectacle at the heart of art watching these days: scheduling the visits, assessing the contexts, jostling with the crowds, wrestling with inherent need to analyse and posit.

 

To me, curling up on my right side late night in bed with a good book is really almost a form of prayer, a ritual established in childhood and carried on with only occasional lapses since. I’m sure my mother had something to do with it. A chronic insomniac and workaholic, over my lifetime she’s probably averaged about 1000 pages per week. After a trip home for Christmas, she sent us back with a box of her recent cast-offs, and we now have a four foot stack of award-winning literature at the foot of our bed to last us through the year.

 

I just wanted to sing praises of some favorites read in the last few months. Please take advantage of the comments thing to share your current or recent faves. I’d like to know what everybody’s been digging, virtual book-club style…

 

1) “Courbet”- Linda Nochlin ’s collected essays on her favorite topic. Courbet just stays perpetually fascinating, enigmatic, and Nochlin digs deep.

 

2) “A Life of Picasso, volume 1: 1881-1906” the lauded first volume of three by Picasso friend and expert John Richardson. I admit I got stuck half-way through, but plan to revisit soon. You can feel bogged down in the fine-tooth minutiae, and Pablo truly just wasn’t ever very likable. Deftly written; like the way it jumps forward and back.

 

3) “The World of Jeeves,” PG Wodehouse. Sure, I’d read a story here or there, and seen some “Masterpiece Theater” episodes, but when my uncle died last year, I found this 700 pager hidden in one of the piles of junk that made just getting in the apartment tough (Yeah, just like on one of those TV shows. We filled six, 20-foot dumpsters. 6!) Anyway, I would read a single Bertie Wooster melodrama each night before I slept. Crushed when it ended. Recommended to combat bouts of melancholia, or fits of Anglophilia.

 

4) “The Buddhist Priest Myoe: A Life in Dreams ,” by Hayao Kawai. Living in 12th century Japan, contemporaneous with a number of revolutionary Buddhist teachers, Myoe was the first human to consistently record his dreams over an entire lifetime, from teens to death at 59. He showed a relatively modern, psychologically astute capacity to interpret his dreams, neither mistaking them for prophetic directives from the gods, nor as errant aberrations of the psyche to be dismissed. Riveting reading, written by “Japan‘s foremost Jungian psychoanalyst.” (I was inspired to do the drawing, seen here in a detail, from a statue of the monk.)

 

5) Jim Harrison’s memoir “Off to the Side.” I simply love the way this man writes; he’s probably my favorite prose stylist of the last 50 years or so. His language feels built by a sure hand, unpretentious, natural, solid, with an awareness of what it is to suffer and love and ache for things, people, places. “The Road Home” may be my favorite novel of all time. Nothing is omitted, nothing is out of bounds. A failed artist himself, he writes about art with affection and sympathy, as he does of birds, animals, and the earth. And in this autobio, sex, strippers, booze, France, hunting, Michigan, dogs, etc. Doesn’t much care for Texas, though. Can’t say I hold that against him, or much blame him.

 

6) Last and by no means least (my favorite book of 2007 actually): “The Maytrees,” Annie Dillard’s latest novel, 10 years in the writing. Interviewed, I heard her say that it was upwards of 2000 pages, that she boiled down to an essential, bony 215, creating more the effect of hard-hitting, crystalline poetry. Here’s a nice passage, opened to at random (they’re easy to find): “She shipwrecked on the sheets. She surfaced like a dynamited bass. She opened her eyes and discovered where on their bed she had fetched up. She lay spread as a film and as fragile. Linked lights wavered on the wall. The linked lights looked like chain mail. They moved blindly over the wall’s thumbtacked Klee print of Sinbad. The tide rising on sand outside bore these linked lights as if on a platter.” I also read her first novel recently, “The Living”. It documents the lives of coastal settlers north of Seattle from about 1850 to 1890. I particularly remember three pages where she lists all the brutal ways people died in that time just before nearly everything we generally understand as basic safety, medicine, and communication were even considerations. Despite obvious gains, what we’ve lost sometimes makes the cost of the trade seem steep.

 

Happy reading, perusers of Glasstire and other fine literature!

Finally got over to Goss-Michael Foundation for the Hirst thing. I seem to only go there with pal Stephen Lapthisophon , when we need an excuse to prolong our lunch date chat. It was somewhat distressing. I’m really hating art lately, and it’s probably Damien Hirst’s fault.

 

 

That’s hyperbole of course. He can’t be blamed for what he naturally is, or the state of art today. Hirst is more symptom than cause. He’s been doing the same sort of self-aggrandizing, look-at-me shenanigans since he was a kid, and that’s fine. I can respect that, and him really. He’s won. But he is the most notorious producer of an art sucked dry of living moisture by the market run amok, and whatever other cultural forces can be held accountable. He exists much better as this idea in the popular imagination, as a brand name, than as a maker of rigorous objet d’art.

 

The work is so adolescent, really; you can almost hear it chuckling to itself, like a stoned teenager amused by its own banal, flat-footed, self-referencing ideas – only this stoner is king of the world. It gives off no radiant light or heat, just a sort of pathetic demand for attention, no matter the sort. It’s some morbid, cold-ass shit, brother – a black-laced missive from the setting sun world. What does it mean when a culture fetishizes objects like this that have so little animating spirit, that function on such paltry ideation?

 

What bugs me is that it all goes absolutely nowhere – it just smugly sits there, exponentially increasing in value. But it doesn’t apparently know that it goes nowhere (contrasted, say, with Richard Prince, a much better artist, who’s nowhere ideas actually do go somewhere, because they don’t pretend to try. Bruce Nauman is another artist doing it better, but my parenthetical runs on…) Hirst’s pieces apparently aspire to be about “big ideas.” How can they not with so many billions of dollars propping them up, sitting as they do on top of the art auction bone pile? The money (which, in today’s post-capitalist world, is sine qua non of cultural value) demands worthy meaning, manufacturing it in the absence of the real thing. I personally find little enough in a canvas covered three lumpy inches deep in flies (though you’d be hard-pressed to figure that out without knowing. It looks more like charred oatmeal.) Yes, I know that sounds clever, like a rotting, anti-Klein monochrome of doom, but the actual experience is just another empty 20 seconds before the next cute idea. Is this Duchamp’s doing, or maybe Jeff Koons’: art reduced to nothing more than wink-wink gestures and market manipulation as performance art? I guess somebody has to do it. We get the art we deserve and desire…

 

There are a couple of those spin paintings, a so-so move from 15 years ago, now with gratuitous (essentially invisible) diamond dust mixed in and some broken mirrors, scalpel and razor blades, and Christmas lights glued on to make the surface zippy, fun, and punk rock!, alluding to otherwise fugitive content. You know, like surgery, cash,corpses, and drugs — in case you needed to be reminded of Hirst’s sole themes.They’re indistinguishable from the products of any intermediate painting class- spilled paint and broken glass: you know you’ve seen it, if not done it. Blandly likable, the butterfly “paintings” look better in pictures, like everything else he makes. There’re some critters in tanks, Hirst now faithlessly toying with Christian imagery – definite Dali-esque indication of him having totally jumped the shark (haha). He does have more money than God now, I guess. I don’t know, I just find it all such a bummer. The Goss space is such a mess, too; next door to thehigh-end optical boutique, weirdly angled and choppy, (much like the Denver Art Museum) it reduces objects displayed to a series of doo-dads and goo-gaws, which issort of what their collection so far has appeared to be.

 

Because of the prices, maybe we just expect too much. Taken out of the context of swingin’ 90’s London, and his role as agent provocateur and ring leader of that scene, maybe the work is doomed to fall flat. Is art’s ultimate expression of our age really to act only as nostalgic document of a fashionable moment 10 years ago and recedeing? Or worse, just testament to the utter decadence of a handful of super-rich marketeers on an absurdist spending spree while the world comes undone? 

 

I hate art lately. Don’t we all sometimes; don’t we all…

 

Ahhh. I feel better now to just let all that out. A big ranting art fart. I should excuse myself, letting it fly in public like this. Fuck it, Damien Hirst is fine. Go, Damien Hirst!

 

oh, I just found Charissa Terranova’s review of the show in the DMN. Her synopsis? “In this exhibition, the former Goss Gallery hews to a new highstandard of work and intellectually nuanced exhibitions.” Well, there you go. As usual, I missed the gist entirely. Never mind.

 

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I actually went out to a bar last night. I guess I’m lame, old married guy now and rarely seem to get out. I’ve been locking myself in the house for the last two weeks, trying to force myself to write syllabi and assignment descriptions using the 10 pages of new guidelines we’ve been saddled with, which is an experience on par with root canal surgery or bamboo under fingernails. Anyway, a few folks favorably mentioned Ali Fitzgerald’s blog “rant” re: Glasstire (you’re famous, Ali, at least among 5 people in Dallas). She’s effortlessly funny, in that way the best bloggers are. And right in some ways. Everyone I know is saying kinda the same thing. I know I’d vote for more serious criticism again someday on GT, and maybe a more objective stance regards pure information dissemination, though I haven’t noticed it to be that bitch-y. Maybe I just haven’t read the Houston/Austin listings enough. Lord knows we bitch enough on these blogs – isn’t that kinda our job? Let GT know your opinion…

I wanted to follow up on my Denver museum day musings (disheartened as I was with the new DAM building) with something positive about the new Museum of Contemporary Art . It just opened in October, and was designed by David Adjaye, who some of us may have seen speak in Marfa, also this past October. I was impressed with him and his work, in particular his attentiveness to context and subtlety – the two qualities so woefully absent in Libeskind’s effort on the other side of Downtown.

I grew up in Littleton , just south of Denver, a stone’s throw from the South Park guys, and not too far from Columbine High School. I moved away for college, but over the years have ended up living in Denver off and on, including a stint in the lower downtown district (called LoDo ) that Kerouac documented in its skid row days, and where the MCA has found its home amidst a crowded, recent condo explosion. Over the last few years, the “Museum” existed in name only, taking up temporary digs in a few different locations while cultivating a donor base, I guess, to fund a permanent site. They’ve done it right, leaving Denver singularly poised to be an actual destination for decent contemporary art. Contrasted with similar operations in other cities between coasts, including some in Texas, well…there’s really no comparison.

Their inaugural show is a truly international effort, and I found it totally impressive, even if I can’t really say I was excited by anything in particular in it. I suppose if I wanted to I could dissect individual works and explicate why they left me as cold as the 12” of fresh powder piled up outside, but I was generally so impressed with the building and the seriousness of the effort, and frankly sort of envious that it was happening there and not here, that I just don’t have the heart for critique.

The show is called “Star Power: Museum as Body Electric” and maybe that explains the vibe that’s keeping me uncharacteristically mum about any qualms. It felt very alive, and serious without being dour or pretentious. There’s an interesting tie-in with Marfa, with Adjaye having just spoken there, and a number of artists in the current show with connections to him and Marfa, too. I don’t care enough to find out why myself, but please post if you have a neat explanation.

Artists in Star Power live up to the name – Chris Ofili, David Altmejd, Wangechi Mutu, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Candice Breitz and Collier Schorr. Carlos Amorales and New Zealander Rangi Kipa were less familiar to me, but in any case, it’s a heavy line-up and an impressive first show. No pictures from me, as even the gallery has some copyright issues with all the galleries involved, but they sent me a few shots of the building, that you see here.

Denver generally sort of sucked when I was growing up. Millions more people have moved there since, and if the onslaught has ruined the vistas and horse pastures of my youth, at least the city is much more happening than it used to be. I’m excited to see how the MCA unfolds in the coming years, what kind of ripples it sends out into cultural waters, especially in a city that (unless I’m just missing it on my occasional gallery hunts visiting) doesn’t have anything resembling a contemporary art scene. I’m almost ready to move back to find out. Damn, I do miss those Rockies (no, not the baseball team.)

Holy baby Jesus, the new Daniel Libeskind–designed building of the Denver Art Museum is worse than I thought. It’s a full-fledged disaster, a monstrosity, a crime against the art it houses as much as the city that its sci-fi prow points threateningly toward. If it could only just fire off at warp-speed, as it looks ready to, leaving without trace or word back…maybe taking a good measure of the DAM’s crappier newer art with it, and a few of those Clyfford Stills . But no – Denver, making its play to be a world-class cultural city, is now stuck with this hulking hunk of arrogant Euro-trash space junk into the foreseeable future.

What an opportunity lost. Just contrast it with good examples, like say, Fort Worth’s Modern, or the Kimbell, both powerful architectural statements in their own right, but ones that frame the work they were created to house without willfully asserting their own identities to the detriment of function. As with all good architecture, you experience a developed material sense, the idea that everything down the smallest detail is considered in relation to the whole. I mean, essentially, what else is architecture supposed to do and be than just these things?

The DAM’s new building infamously has no right angles. They play this up, right down to the bathroom signs, that instead of being rectangular are some kind of polygon. As you can imagine, this bold architectural statement largely results in a lot of wasted space, and disconcerting physical sensations. There are all these dark useless corners, and paintings hung from trapeze wires, only their bases touching walls that fall away at 60 degree angles. Other corners are crammed with objects and paintings that dizzyingly shove you off in a twirling ricochet only to confront other crowded objects. I’ve never seen such a senselessly crowded miasma of art, outside of a fair. Paintings are hung inches apart, on walls that overlap each other visually so that you get immediate visual overload, and nothing is allowed to shine. There are ridiculous floating walls, haphazardly arranged (with angled tops and sides of course,) some on curving train tracks in the floor, as if they might start moving around in some sort of Happening.

Everything seems oddly cheap. I’ve heard a number of people say that the whole place seems to be made out of cardboard, that it looks temporary, like a maquette or stage set. I consider bathrooms something of a litmus test for buildings like this, and DAMs’ look cheap and plastic, built of bargain materials from Home Depot.

They’ve had some complaints apparently about the building seeming harsh, austere – so they have chosen to counteract this by numbers of children’s play stations, lots of random leather couches and oddly-placed desks with books on, and a boombox, stuck behind a couch in one of those oblique corners in the central atrium, blaring samba music. I shit you not. It echoes eerily through the whole museum, bouncing off all those stupid angles. I asked the front desk about it – was it part of a piece or something? “Oh, no. We’ve just been doing that the last couple months.” Huh?

That’s how much of the experience feels: just senseless, as if the stupidity of the architecture is influencing the decision-making capabilities of the staff. I could tell watching this building go up in trips here over the last couple years, that there was no way it was going to work. As bad as the experience of the museum itself it, it might be worse that it has such poor relationships to the other quite wonderful buildings around it. These include Michael Graves’ Denver Public Library (a building that quite carefully was constructed to incorporate its 50-year-old art deco predecessor) and the original museum. Built in 1971 and designed by Gio Ponti, I grew up loving its Logan’s Run-meets-King Arthur turrets, and as I’ve gotten older have continued to appreciate its humor, and its decent galleries. It’s held up great. I doubt the new building will. Hell, I’ve heard it already leaks from snow melt it failed to factor in. Snow. In Denver. 

Much better was David Adjaye’s just opened effort on behalf of the Denver Museum of Contemporary art. I’ll talk about that next time.