Links – let soldiers in free

From Tyler Green:

Effective immediately, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is extending free admission (and parking) to all active-duty United States and Canadian military members and their families, including Guard and Reserves. Good for them. (more)

Excellent idea. The small cost to the bottom line would reap a big harvest in good will. In the Northwest, only the Seattle Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum offer a military discount, and it’s just for the the person serving, not families. With the military engaged in two wars, their families are serving too. In the new year, art museums need to honor this effort with a free ticket for all concerned. (The Frye can’t rise to this occasion because it has already surpassed it, being free admission for everybody all of the time.)

Related: Sympathy for soldiers photo essay here. Jon Stewart on the government’s  shameful efforts to avoid paying for war-related health care injuries, here. Finally, bringing the war home: Owen Mundy through projections and Remi Gaillard through an invasion of a vacation beach:

U.S. News & World Report claims that the jobs for museum curators are poised to go boom, making it one of the top 50 career choices in 2010, here via Henry curator Sara Krajewski. She noted that she’d like to see their back-up research. Given the starved state of the profession in the past decade, this promise of prominence is hard to believe.

The mind is a terrible thing to waste on new-age platitudes. This one is 40 years old, proving once again that belief needs no evidence to stay afloat.

Who’s missing from the art audience? Real Clear Arts has the answer, or at least, an exploration of the question.

From the department of still good: Allan McCollum’s 2005 interview with Harrell Fletcher.

From John Lopez in the L.A. Times: What it means to be an artist now. The subtitle could be, Stop the world, I (might) want to get off.

From Christopher Knight:

In an October lecture at the Smithsonian, critic Dave Hickey noted that, in the Internet’s vast territory, niches are the equivalent of villages. And art does poorly in the homogenized, provincial ether of a village.
To thrive art needs cities, where cosmopolitan diversity, conflict and sheer accident are the norm. (more)

Uh, no. Tell that to Cezanne, who preferred Provence to Paris. Some artists want to be alone. (From William Carlos Williams, who liked New Jersey better than New York, “I am lonely, lonely./ I was born to be lonely./ I am best so!”).  Where doesn’t count next to what, and not all whats need an urban setting to flourish.

Also from Christopher Knight:

One of the funniest essays at the tail end of 2009 was Knight’s response to Jerry Saltz. In his homage to Jeff Koons, here, Saltz could have been clearer about the time-line of the many appearances of Koons’ flower-filled Puppy. Fair enough. But here’s the thing about Knight, one of the best critics in the world. He tends to be all or nothing. In the powerful sweep of his argument, the thing that actually occurred can get lost.

Saltz is straight-up factual in saying that Koons’ career took a nose-dive after his bizarre 1991 Made in Heaven
exhibit, featuring life-sized depictions of Koons and his wife at the
time, La Cicciolina. Koons wasn’t shunned only in New York, as Knight
claims. Koons was in disgrace everywhere. His Puppy was his come-back kid, and it gathered strength from repeat installations, bringing Koons back to the top.

Knight’s real gripe is what he perceives as a slight to LA.

Note
to Knight: The war’s over, and you won. LA is a recognized powerhouse.
Maybe it’s time to step away from your big-gun response. There is no
one firing back at you.

From Roberta Smith, reviewing 30 Seconds Off an Inch at the Studio Museum Harlem:

The
show’s opaque title comes from an old interview with (David) Hammons in
which he said that objects and structures built by white people have a
telltale “neatness.” In those built by blacks, he said, “everything is
a 32nd of an inch off.” It’s a preposterous generalization, and not
just because the measurement in question is so minute. (more)

Preposterous?
Hammons’ idea is only preposterous when understood as a specific. As a
generalization, it’s irrefutable. (For instance, this quilt
was not made by a white woman.) Plus, Hammons brought up fractions with
their historical meaning trailing underneath his text. Remember the Three-Fifths Compromise
that made the Union possible? Slaves were counted as 3/5’s a person.
Just because Roberta Smith wasn’t thinking about history doesn’t mean
Hammons wasn’t. With Hammons, it’s safe to assume that he has thought
of everything.

From Sharon L. Butler:

In Time Out New York this week Howard Halle begins his Gerhard Richter review
with this tired declaration: “It’s a widely held belief in the art
world that painting is dead…” Why, I wonder, do artists and critics
insist on dragging out this simpleminded proclamation when painting is
clearly alive and well? Is it just an easy trope for the doubtful
painter and /or lazy writer? It’s certainly a disingenuous way for
painters, especially those who have been painting as long as Richter,
to position their practice not as painting per se, but as a more
fashionably conceptual undertaking. (more)

Hear,
hear. I’m with her all the way, but it’s worth remembering that the
first to utter this challenge to the medium were painters. (See Michael
Darling’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1948-79.)

From Robert Storr, via Two Coats of Paint:

The
most dependable but generally least lucrative art world gig is as a
‘visiting artist/critic’. It usually involves showing up in a place
starved of information and contact with the wider world, giving a
public slide presentation, a seminar and studio critiques – interrupted
by breakfast, lunch and dinner – with local faculty, patrons and eager
young artists. It can be fun if one savours the eccentricities of
people and places as I do, but it is gruelling nevertheless. If one
does not enjoy being ‘out there’ and, worse, if one is inclined to
condescend to audiences assumed to be less sophisticated than those in
big cities, then things can go very wrong. (more)

It’s Up In The Air for art critics. Maybe George Clooney can star, as a kind of sequel.