Links – critics send funeral wreath to opening

One of the better dustups in recent memory took place in L.A., after David Pagel unfavorably reviewed Diane Thater in the L.A. Times. The comments rocked the house and spread to blogs, most impressively, on The Hairy Prone Companion.

I respect Pagel, but this review sounds as if he wrote it from his lizard brain. There’s a big group of artists (“fourth and fifth generation Conceptualists,” in Pagel’s condescending phrase) he can’t abide. Why go to their shows, then? Every single time out, as Marat told de Sade in another context, critics have to pick themselves up by their own hair, turn themselves inside out and prepare to see the world with fresh eyes. If they can’t entertain the possibility that an artist they don’t admire will surprise them, they need to stay home.

Diana Thater: Between Science and Magic

Pagel is King Solmon compared to Thater, however, who logged into the comments section to fight back:

Ahhhhhh this is all SO interesting! But …would you like to know why David Pagel actually wrote this incredibly personal, mean-spirited and low so-called “review” of my show?
I’ve posted a factual account of my 13-year history with David Pagel and Christopher Knight on my website. Read it and ask yourself why these people actually have jobs at a major newspaper if this is how they use their positions and the power they’ve been accorded.
Thanks to those of you who have defended me and my work against the rabid anti-intellectuals. (And will anyone ever tell me what a 4th-generation conceptualist is?????) (I’d be satisfied just to know what everyone thinks they’re talking about when the use the word “conceptual”). And is everyone who is not dumb an intellectual by default or is there an IQ minimum? Didn’t Pol Pot make a point of putting the “intellectuals” to death? Hmmmm seems like a bad road to be going down…but if that’s what Pagel is about – let’s just be glad he doesn’t have an army.

Pagel is not against intellectuals. He’s one himself. And to compare him to Pol Pot in Los Angeles, where people who survived Pot comprise a large community …I’m speechless. 

On her blog, Thater recounts the time that Pagel and Dave Hickey sent a funeral wreath to the opening of a group show featuring artists whom Christopher Knight, Pagel and Hickey had all panned. That was the point of the show, that these critics wrote them off.

The wreaths were on stands and had wide ribbons draped across them. Both said; “With Deepest Sympathy” and the cards were signed by David Pagel and Dave Hickey.
The message? These two art critics didn’t just hate us and our work – they wished we were DEAD.

Note to Thater: I wasn’t there, but I don’t have to be a weather man to know which way this wind blew. Sending a funeral wreath didn’t mean Pagel and Hickey wished you were dead. It was a theatrical gesture, intended to provoke a response. They don’t like your work, but they like you and the artists in this show enough to engage. In the future, think Dada, not death threat. And leave Pol Pot out of this. You want to compare a critic to a killer, go with Attila the Hun. No one alive has a stake in his story.

Back to Pagel: It’s interesting that he wrote the review without any mention of a back story. This is not the first time he has come down from the mountain with this set of injunctions. He owes his readers the context for his comments. Once he sent the wreath, it’s part of his story. He’s now a participant on stage, not a member of the audience. To pretend otherwise is dishonest.

I understand how tricky this is. An artist once threatened to sue me. It didn’t get far, but lawyers were involved. I wondered ever after how I was going to write another review of his work. After he had filed papers in court attacking me, he gave me a reason to be way past grumpy. Fortunately for me, the occasion for a second review did not arise. Big history needs to be acknowledged, especially big negative history.

Other news:

From Slate – Michelangelo did not whistle while he worked.

My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s.

Justice is done – Christoph Büchel prevailed against Mass MoCA on appeal. From John Silberman’s The Art Law Blog:

Today the First Circuit reversed
his decision, holding that “the record permits the inference that …
Museum staff members were disregarding [Büchel’s] instructions and
intentionally modifying ‘Training Ground’ in a manner that he did not
approve.” (more)

And justice is not done – From Culture Monster, Shepard Fairey will face a  criminal investigation in the AP case. When did the Associated Press begin to stink of sulfur? Surely in a country brimming over with criminal conduct in high places, there are better people to investigate than Fairey.