Archives for September 2009

St. Louis Post-Dispatch art critic David Bonetti kissed off his job at the paper and the city of its origin, where he lived for what sounds like six hard years. (Story here, link via Douglas Britt.)

I’m impressed that the Dispatch posted his remarkable essay and left it up on its site. I don’t think the newspaper where I toiled till it ceased production would have done the same. Hell, I’m sure of it.

Bonetti:

As some of you might have heard, I am leaving the Post-Dispatch. Today is my last day and this will be my last Culture Club post. Although some of the Cherokee Street clique would like to think that I was fired by an enlightened management that wants reviews of inept artists showing their woeful attempts at self-expression in vanity galleries, that is not the case. I took advantage of advanced age and a benefits package and decided to retire…

I would be the first to admit that St. Louis and I were not a match made in heaven. Indeed, my editor Christy Bertelson for the past unhappy year and a half accused me of hating St. Louis. I do hate things about St. Louis: the willed ignorance, the racism, the smugness of the self-appointed social and cultural elite, the stupidity of the political class, etc. But it is hard to hate a city where you’ve lived for more than six years. Affection grows in spite of yourself.

He goes on to list 5 things he’ll miss. Lots of drinking is one. There’s not a single artist on his list, a single gallery, nonprofit space or art museum. He won’t miss the Beckmanns at the St. Louis Art Museum? That can’t be true. Obviously, he wrote this piece in a scorched-earth mood. Bonetti plans to move to Boston. I hope he keeps writing, because he’s good.

First post here on slashed funding for B.C. arts nonprofits.

Jonathan Middleton, director of the Or Gallery, said today that government funding cuts are “devastating” the Vancouver arts scene.

The liberal party has had a reasonably good history of supporting art in the past. During the last election, it promised to keep the deficit to $400 million. It’s currently $3 billion. The government is cutting wherever it can. Arts funding came for a gaming tax, which is not out of the general fund. There was the idea that the social cost of gambling might be offset with charitable contributions, including to the arts.

Nonprofits have relied on this money for years and had no prior notice of cancellation. Instead, we were told we could continue to count on it. It wasn’t a cut could could have contemplated.

Or Gallery lost $30,000, which is 15.6 percent of its annual budget. (The gallery canceled its November/December exhibit, which was to be on the theme of humor in art.) Helen Pitt Gallery lost 40 percent of its funding. Helen Pitt is going to lose its space. I don’t know if it can continue to pay a director or continue programming. The irony is, the government has talked for years about the benefits of arts to the economy, that arts bring in $1.39 for every dollar spent.

BC Arts Council defends the cuts, which it says it regrets. The opposition is organizing, including here.

With the old delivery systems for arts journalism in rocky shape, the National Arts Journalism Program sent out a Web-wide request for new models. A whooping 108 came in. Five were selected to present at a conference in LA Oct. 2 (identities released then), and five more ideas to enlarge the discussion. (NAJP Release here.) The enlarging five are:

Sophie: A new authoring tool for multimedia developed by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy that suggests new possibilities for presenting critical response.

Indianapolis Museum of Art: With its Art Babble and Dashboard, the IMA is an example of a cultural institution extending its reach into areas that have traditionally been the province of journalism.

 InstantEncore.com: An example of an aggregator attempting to gather up everything about an art form (in this case classical music) and making it accessible in one place.

NPR Music: An example of a traditional big media company that is reinventing itself across platforms. NPR Music blurs the lines between journalism, curation, presenting and producing. 

Gazette Communications, Cedar Rapids Iowa: An example of a local media company trying to reinvent the idea of what it considers news and how it might be gathered and presented to a local community.

Taken together, I found the proposals heartening, even though few are financially robust. At best, they point the way towards a future that might achieve real jobs but are far from doing so now.

The Brookyn Rail does not pay its contributors. Living on air gets thin. Other favorites from the visual art category include:

Art Fag City, Triple Canopy, Departures, Big, RED & Shiny, Bad At Sports, Dinosaurs & Robots, Idaho Arts Quarterly, Glasstire, Of Note, Kung Fu Art Critic and a site under construction, East of Borneo, which will be edited by Thomas Lawson.

There are flashier sites on the list, most prominently, FLYP Media, which is gorgeous and technically inventive. Good luck to FLYP, which seems to be aiming for an undifferentiated audience, one that will be impressed by the site’s click power and not put off by soft, feature-style arts writing.

People already in the game, on the other hand, aren’t likely to want to read what they already know, even though production values are stellar. As a bridge builder between the art audience and everybody else, FLYP serves the purpose. Its texts are elementary, but its mainstream taste is reliable. If you’ve never heard of John Baldessari, this site’s for you.

The problem with government funding is, government policies change. An enlightened policy can morph into a reactionary one. The art scene in Vancouver, B.C., is heavily dependent on government subsidy. Aside from a few bright spots, such as Catriona Jeffries, strong galleries are thin on the ground.

Nonprofits carry enormous weight, such as Or Gallery, Presentation House, Helen Pitt, Artspeak, the Contemporary Art Gallery and of course, the Vancouver Art Gallery.

According to BC’s Alliance for Arts and Culture, 80 percent of public arts funding in the province has disappeared from the budget. If this money is not restored, the effect could be catastrophic.  Story here. More to come.

Amid all the cutting back and going lean news, it’s good to report on potential curatorial advancements, even small ones.

Yoko Ott, freelance curator and laid-off member of the Frye curatorial team (heading a terrific program she originated for children’s art engagement at the Frye) is going to be director of exhibitions at Open Satellite. (Review of current show here.) The founding director, Abigail Guay, is moving to the Henry to reopen  a collections study center, which closed at the Henry more than a decade ago.

Guay will make artwork in the Henry collection available to students, scholars, critics and researchers. While it’s good news about the reopening of the center, the job at first hearing doesn’t sound as if it will be a good enough platform for Guay’s talents. What shows will she curate?

Ott will get a real chance to shine at Open Satellite, which functions as a kind of Peace Corps for contemporary art in Bellevue. It’s a go-forth-and-share-with-suburbanites aesthetic imperative. Funded chiefly by developer John Su, OS is applying for nonprofit status, which is reasonable. The profits reaped there are not financial.

No word yet on whether Ott will also continue to curate the lobby space at the Lee Center, or her job at 826 Seattle. Ott likes to do a lot of things at once, but even for her, handling all three assignments might be a stretch.

Walking down a forest road on Sunday afternoon, I saw a dead skunk plowed flat. (Song here.) Wherever you look in art right now, there are a lot of squashed hopes and dreams brought back to robust life through direct confrontation. A small survey follows.

David Shrigley

Dan Webb – Real Disguise, detail

Eakins & Dombrosky

Dave Ellis

Karen Ganz (at Howard House till Sept. 26)

Will Ryman

Nayland Blake– The Big One

Jon Haddock– The Activist

Tom Friedman

Sean Duffy

Ruth Wallen
Fred Muram

Finally, for kicking the stuffing out of an advertising slogan, there’s Chrissie White, a high school sophomore in the Seattle area. Her Flickr page here.

No artists get credit for an installation titled Solar Seating Power at Westlake Park.

The coy blooms came to town to promote the launch of the 2010 Prius. Seattle park administrators carefully scrutinize any projects artists want to install in a city park. Did a car company receive the same scrutiny?  The good news is, the dippy flowers have a short shelf life. Jen Graves called them terrible, which just about covers it.

Looking at the YouTube video below, however, featuring the Michael Clark Company, I know one thing that could have saved the day. Dancers. Check the stage set. It’s a Solar Seating Power twin.

(Thanks for the video link to Tim Marsden, who described the piece as “Beckett meets German Expressionism via the unlikely route of Post Punk and classical ballet.”)

Large forest fires have occurred more frequently in the western United
States since the mid-1980s as spring temperatures increased, mountain
snows melted earlier and summers got hotter, according to new research.

Michael Brophy

Almost seven times more forested federal land burned during the 1987-2003 period than during the prior 17 years. In addition, large fires occurred about four times more often during the latter period. (more)

Brophy again:

Via

(Via)