Links – a roundup

(Note: The image after the jump is not safe for work.)

Some things are certain. Night follows day, summer gives way to fall and Tyler Green will disapprove of art collections owned by banks on view at art museums. (New York Times’ story, And Now, An Exhibition From Our Sponsor, here. Green’s well-reasoned enlargements on the theme here.)

Green also disapproves of museum’s hosting exhibitions featuring work from a single private collector, arguing that such displays give too much of a market boost to their owner as well as undercutting curators on staff. (How about if curators select work from a single collector, which is nearly always the case?)

In any event, with big budget cuts in virtually all art museums, curators are likely to appreciate the breathing room a packaged exhibit provides. Even where curators remain in full force, their support staff is a shadow of what it was. The work load increases as resources erode.

Ideally, curators would be able to borrow important art from banks just as they do from individuals without ceding control to either. But given a choice between empty galleries and first-rate work presented by Bank of America, I’ll take the latter.

Anyone out there who still thinks the Brooklyn Museum shouldn’t have taken Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection?

Yes, museum authentication boosted Saatchi’s bottom line. And yes, if anyone deserves disapproval for his ethics, it’s him. Talk to artists whose work he has bought and sold. He’s not Santa.

And yet Sensation was an important exhibit to bring to the U.S. Exhibitions are about art. Where it comes matters less than what it is.

When art exhibits are little more than a pretext for trustees or favored patrons to pad their bottom line, it’s great that watchdogs like Green are on the job. Before I get interested in writing those stories, wrong-doing has to stink like a corpse in a closet.

Moral judgments continued: From Art Fag City:

Good morning misogyny! This week in poorly executed photography projects, Chad States discusses his series Men at Their Most Masculine at the Morning News.
The project is simple. The photographer places an ad on Craigslist
reading, “I am doing a photography project on masculinity. If you
identify as being masculine, please get back to me.” Then he
photographs selected respondents in their homes, and places a quote
from the session alongside the work.
The results from the banal solicitation are pretty much exactly what
you’d expect–a cross section of various misogynistic statements,
peppered with a few other predictable interpretations of masculinity.

Why the attitude? Because some of States’ models are dicks. Dear Art Fag City: They’re not people you’re sorry to have invited to dinner. They’re part of an art project.

And your point about States’ project being simple, and its initial contact with subjects a “banal solicitation”? To paraphrase Robert Morris, simplicity of design does not equate with simplicity of result.

Besides selecting themselves, States’ subjects posed themselves in the attire and setting of their choice. They are strangers who dispensed with the conventions of their anonymity to tell all to an artist with a camera and recording device, the 21st century’s version of a priest’s confessional. 

I saw a portion of Men at Their Most Masculine earlier this year and was fascinated by its deadpan Surrealism.

You can leave your hat on. (Or, in his case, socks.) Below, what came out of his mouth when he spoke:

I
am masculine because I abandon women after taking their love. Because
when you study Freud you don’t let him study you. Because I study
philosophy not literature.

Almost as good as,

 A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Getting Fired at at the Seattle Art Museum: Artist (and security guard) Amanda Mae was fired for picking off pieces of paper left by the audience on Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail. Story here.
Museum spokesperson Nicole Griffin is right in saying that Ono’s piece
invites adding on, not taking away. Plus, employees owe the museum the
courtesy of at least asking before changing an artwork in its
galleries. I like Amanda Mae as an artist.
As an employee, she falls short. Firing her might seem harsh until you
know that she’d already resigned. Both museum and artist chose this
occasion to make a statement.

Christopher Knight knocks the competition:  In a piece about Los Angeles County Art Museum director Michael Govan, Knight wrote,

Govan
was hired to make the museum distinctive. The plan, still unfolding, is
to make LACMA the only encyclopedic art museum in the nation with a
premier contemporary art program.

The only one, and it
exists only as a goal? Michael Darling was hired at the Seattle Art
Museum to make its contemporary art program premier. He is the only modern/contemporary senior curator at SAM since the late 1980s who did not have the additional administrative burden of being head of curatorial affairs. So far, so good with Darling.
SAM’s moving up on the outside rail. Below, what he had to say about
the issue.

My take on SAM
is that we also are in the process of developing a “full service”
contemporary art program that is based on a world class collection but also
includes regular exhibition opportunities on large and small scales. Recent examples
of this would be the SAM Next program, Target Practice, Su Mei Tse at the
Seattle Asian Art Museum, and Geoff McFetridge at the Olympic Sculpture Park
(thus active contemporary art programming at all three sites).

I do look to
peer institutions with general collections such as LACMA, Dallas Museum of Art
and others who have been able to build reputations as central players in the
interpretation and presentation of contemporary art and hope that SAM will be
viewed in the same light as we continue to build a track record in this field.
LACMA has definitely increased their focus and ambition when it comes to contemporary
art, which is great as far as I am concerned (as a contemporary art lover!).
Does that help?

Always.